Mon 22 Feb 2016
SARA WOODS – My Life Is Done. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1976. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1976.
Barrister Antony Maitland is asked to investigate a case of blackmail — a stolen letter could embarrass a member of parliament who opposes a reservoir development in his home region.
There’s little action. It’s a classic case of parlor detection that still manages to result in two murders. Conversational nuances are cleverly used in the place of tangible evidence, but I suppose that many an armchair detective will feel disappointed with the degeneration into a courtroom confessional scene not unlike television’s Perry Mason.
Rating: C plus.
February 22nd, 2016 at 2:37 pm
Basically Maitland was the British Perry Mason. I know people got tired of some of the staples of the series like his wife and uncle, but I always found it an amusing outing, not great, but usually reliable.
My favorite, and the name escapes me, came fairly early when Maitland must deal with an enemy from his days in intelligence in the war (no wonder we won what with Maitland, HM, Desmond Merrion, the Toff, and others all in the intelligence service. — there is a good article to be written on how most of the heroes in the inter war period had been in combat like Lord Peter, Richard Hannay, and Bulldog Drummond in WWI even if they did intelligence work while in the Post War era most were in intelligence alone).
This title, and all Sara Woods titles, is from Shakespeare, sometimes only stage directions, but all Shakespearian in origin.
I will confess though that Maitland’s stuttering did get a bit tiresome at times when his version of Hamilton Burger started to get to him in the courtroom.
February 22nd, 2016 at 8:48 pm
“…I always found it an amusing outing, not great, but usually reliable.”
I don’t know about you, David, but this sounds like a “C plus” to me.
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s when I was one of the first book dealers to specialize in selling mystery paperbacks by mail through printed catalogs (the old fashioned way), Sara Woods’s books were very popular, those that did come in paperback. I don’t think she has much name recognition any more.
All of the ones I read were solid middle of the range books like this one.