cimorene

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen is the first in the series of the same name by a well-established award-winning British writer, starring an invented great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria who solves mysteries in 1930s Britain. The author's confidence in narrating, creating tension and following a fairly intricate plot is evident. The book was engaging and the characters likeable, and I am excited to read the sequels.

I’m a fairly picky lover of period fiction and it didn’t throw me off once, which is a considerable achievement even in professionally published books. The author is not attempting a pastiche of any known Golden Age writers, though, nor does the narration really feel vintage. This is no doubt deliberate to avoid throwing off potential readers, many of them loyal fans of her other series; and it didn’t put me off, but I would have liked more period flavor to the text. (There’s not exactly a limit on rereading the works of dead writers, but it is a bit different when you already know the ending, so it would be nice if a modern pen were going to turn out homages that really felt like the real thing. I know it can be done, because I’ve seen it in fanfiction… just usually with less murder and more gay sex.)

I’m admiring of the author’s skill in plotting - there were multiple suspects and clues and it all got quite exciting at times. The “reading level”, in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure, was definitely more sophisticated (hence more interesting to me) than that in the previously mentioned hat shop mystery.

However, as a long-time mystery reader, I found some of the clues/future plot points were a little transparent. Of course the problem of readers “solving the author” (as opposed to solving the mystery, which is what the characters do) is well-known and it’s a tightrope the author has to walk - how many clues to provide. But personally I find too much dramatic irony to be frequently irritating - there’s a limit to how long I will be patient with a character who’s failed to understand what the reader has put together when it’s the character themselves who has passed along the clue. There are a few free passes, of course, but if a pattern emerges of the POV character noticing things and failing to grasp the obvious significance of them, I get impatient. In a mystery this problem is slightly worse because, well. That’s the point of it. This story had a lot of things going on its plot besides the mystery, fortunately, so it wasn’t a large problem.