Non-Cozy Mystery #6: Ruth Dudley Edwards's "Corridors of Death" (Robert Amiss #1), 5/5

[cimorene]

After my previous disillusioned post, I had the idea of digging into the early history of Golden Age mysteries and ended up link-surfing from Wikipedia to this book's page on Goodreads.


The line that sold me on reading it was:

"This is the first of Ruth Dudley Edwards' witty, iconoclastic but warm-hearted satires about the British Establishment."

It wasn't as personally enchanting to me as the Dandy Gilver mysteries (male protagonists, no historical setting and fewer of my narrative kinks), but it was a funny satire, extremely vividly and skillfully written, with a light-ish tone of black humor. It was a contemporary novel in 1982 so I don't know who edited the writer into the Wikipedia list of Golden Age authors, as she is obviously well after it, though one can see the resemblance. Still, grateful that they did and all that. Will happily read the sequels.

Comments

[stranger]

I seem to recall Ruth Dudley Edwards' books including several mysteries starring Baroness Troutbeck, for whom the word "outrageous" might be employed as a pale description. She's in the 3rd or 4th onward. The satire and black humor remain very much in evidence. I wasn't always impressed by the plots as such, but everything else was good Swiftian fun.