Sat 7 Feb 2015
CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – The Palace Guard. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1981. Avon, paperback, 1983.
If you like mysteries made in Boston, here’s one for you. (Strangely enough, not since radio’s long-running Johnny Dollar series has there been much going on in Hartford. Janice Law’s recent Death Under Par is an exception that comes first to mind.)
I’ve missed the first two books in this series, but apparently Sarah Kellings has lost her husband, a man much older than herself, and as a result she’s been forced to take in boarders. They are a motley lot, taken from many different segments of Bostonian society — none very high.
One of them is an art expert named Max Bittersohn, who combines romancing his landlady with helping her solve the murders of two guards at one of Boston’s lesser-known museums.
Keep your eye on the motive. Many digressions later, cleverly disguised as part of the murder investigation, it turns out to have been the missing essential ingredient. Charlotte MacLeod has a knack for inventive characters and an eye for the humor in a situation, and besides — it also keeps our eye off the shell that’s had the pea tucked safely inside it all along.
Rating: B.
Bibliographic Notes: This was the third of twelve recorded adventures of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, who at one point in the series became married. The leading character in Death Under Par by Janice Law, mentioned in the review, was PI Anna Peters. There nine books in that series, but whether she was based in Hartford for all nine, I do not know. According to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, her cases took her all over the world.
February 7th, 2015 at 2:33 pm
When she was still actively writing, Charlotte MacLeod was extremely popular, both under her own name and as Alisa Craig. She died in 2005, but her last novel appeared in 1994, with one short story collection coming out in 2002.
I imagine she’s all but forgotten by mystery fans today, but I believe she was the forerunner of today’s crop of cozy mysteries, ones in which the focus is on the characters more than the detective work they do, and the tone is not always serious.
I enjoyed the first few in most of her series, but when the comic aspects seemed to become more and more important than the mysteries, or so it seemed to me, that’s when I began to lose interest.
February 7th, 2015 at 8:17 pm
As MacLeod and Craig it soon reached a point similar to what one critic said of the Lone Wolf’s series Eric Blore, the comic relief needed some mystery relief.
When I look back at how enjoyably writers like Dorothy Gilman handled this sort of thing and how innocuous they are today it can lead to a little despair.
Dashiell Hammett once had the Op say when he saw a mob he always had an urge to be on a rooftop with a .50 caliber machinegun, when I read yet another, quilting, antiquing, cat sleuth, aging nosy parker, small town, ‘sweet’ murder mystery I want someone to show up with a .50 caliber machine gun on the roof.
I surprised we haven’t had cozy vampires and zombies yet.
February 7th, 2015 at 9:14 pm
Perhaps we have and haven’t noticed yet. I am sure that I have seen cozy witches and most assuredly cozy mystics and others with paranormal powers. Non-cozy vampire detectives have been around for a while, but of course that’s a whole other matter.
February 8th, 2015 at 9:43 pm
Well. Gilman managed a cozy spy series, but she was much to good a writer and suspense writer to ever let it get the best of the books.
It’s not cats or quilts or whatever per se I am complaining about it’s that the ones I read are about cats, or quilts and not murder or mystery. I have no problem with writing a book like that with a bit of mystery thrown in, its that they have virtually eliminated anything else.
The mystery should not be an afterthought in a mystery. Solving a murder should not be something that comes in a distant third to quilting and cats in a murder mystery.