Golden Age Mystery Fiction
26 Feb 2025 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI posted a while ago about Harriet Rutland, a writer who published three GA detective stories around 1940 and then no more. She generated great buzz on both sides of the Atlantic, according to the book introductions. She published her third novel shortly after divorcing a husband who may have been abusive, giving birth to a son, and, obviously, the beginning of WW2, which the third novel is set during. She remarried shortly afterwards, and I hope she was simply too busy or happy to manage more, but it does seem likely that she burned out from the simultaneous pressures. Relatable!
It took me a while to get around to it, but I ordered paper copies of all three of her books, which were reprinted in the last ten years after being out of print for over seventy. And then I read the two I hadn't read yet in one day, lol.
They are about as good as the first one, in general terms. The second novel, Bleeding Hooks, is set at a fishing hotel and the cast and mystery touch on aspects of this hobby in a way that is comprehensible and readable when you hate fishing and have never done it, like me. The setting and cast of characters are a real strength, as in the first one, with the collection of middle class British people providing the stuff of comedy of manners and satirical character portraits. The second novel does not feature child harm, but there is off screen animal harm in the loss of a pet. The solution was not as entertaining as that of her first novel, but it seemed slightly more believable perhaps.
The third book, Blue Murder, aroused my curiosity by the things said about its darkness in the introduction. I mean, her first two books have a lighter, parody sort of quality, which is not uncommon in the genre, but it is still murder. But in short, book three has a cast of almost nothing but reprehensible characters, the narrator included, although he seems to be a pettily sexist and selfish figure, not thoroughly horrible like the country family he is boarding with due to the evacuation of London, who are all callous, snobbish, racist, and awful to the German Jewish refugee they hire as a maid. Also child harm is back with what should've been a big warning! And also animal harm, but that was actually less horrible than in the last two books, because the animal is hurt accidentally. One of the victims (a brutal spousal abuser) in this one was so deserving of death that I had to pause in the first chapter to make sure he was going to die. Don't get the idea that the good guys all win, though: this book has the extremely rare GAD ending where the mystery is solved but justice isn't done - quite the opposite.
I also got the other English translation of a Japanese GAM by Akimitsu Takagi, The Tattoo Murder, but I am making only slow progress, not finding it as readable and gripping as the author's later The Noh Mask Murder.
It took me a while to get around to it, but I ordered paper copies of all three of her books, which were reprinted in the last ten years after being out of print for over seventy. And then I read the two I hadn't read yet in one day, lol.
They are about as good as the first one, in general terms. The second novel, Bleeding Hooks, is set at a fishing hotel and the cast and mystery touch on aspects of this hobby in a way that is comprehensible and readable when you hate fishing and have never done it, like me. The setting and cast of characters are a real strength, as in the first one, with the collection of middle class British people providing the stuff of comedy of manners and satirical character portraits. The second novel does not feature child harm, but there is off screen animal harm in the loss of a pet. The solution was not as entertaining as that of her first novel, but it seemed slightly more believable perhaps.
The third book, Blue Murder, aroused my curiosity by the things said about its darkness in the introduction. I mean, her first two books have a lighter, parody sort of quality, which is not uncommon in the genre, but it is still murder. But in short, book three has a cast of almost nothing but reprehensible characters, the narrator included, although he seems to be a pettily sexist and selfish figure, not thoroughly horrible like the country family he is boarding with due to the evacuation of London, who are all callous, snobbish, racist, and awful to the German Jewish refugee they hire as a maid. Also child harm is back with what should've been a big warning! And also animal harm, but that was actually less horrible than in the last two books, because the animal is hurt accidentally. One of the victims (a brutal spousal abuser) in this one was so deserving of death that I had to pause in the first chapter to make sure he was going to die. Don't get the idea that the good guys all win, though: this book has the extremely rare GAD ending where the mystery is solved but justice isn't done - quite the opposite.
I also got the other English translation of a Japanese GAM by Akimitsu Takagi, The Tattoo Murder, but I am making only slow progress, not finding it as readable and gripping as the author's later The Noh Mask Murder.
