My book club loves historical fiction featuring real life people. This month we selected The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict. It features 5 female authors from the Golden Age of Mystery. The novel is written from the first person present tense perspective of Dorothy Sayers. This made the novel feel very personal and the action scenes immediate and intense. The novel is basically a mystery that involved an actual cold case from the era. The 5 Queens set upon solving it to prove their place of importance among the male mystery writers of the time. However, the 5 get much more than they bargained for as they are pulled into the dangers of the case. They also discover a good bit about each other and themselves. It is good to note that while the characters and the cold case were real and many facts are inserted into the book, the book itself is a work of fiction. Their insertion into the police case and their solving of the crime are pure supposition. This does not take a way from enjoyment of the book, but it is good to remember if you are looking for a more biographical perspective.
While the reviews from my group were a bit mixed — no one disliked it, but it was not a favorite either — I would recommend it to those who enjoy the books of Sayers and Christie (and the others) and would like a look at the times in which they lived and wrote.
Recommended.
Audience: Adults.
(I purchased the ebook from Amazon. All opinions expressed are mine alone.)
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie—a thrilling story of the five greatest women writers of the Golden Age of Mystery and their bid to solve a real-life murder.
London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.
May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour? Determined to solve the highly publicized murder, the Queens of Crime embark on their own investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.
Inspired by a true story in Sayers’ own life, New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict brings to life the lengths to which five talented women writers will go to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of letters as they unpuzzle a mystery torn from the pages of their own novels.
Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator at two of the country’s premier law firms, who found her calling unearthing the hidden historical stories of women. Her mission is to excavate from the past the most important, complex and fascinating women of history and bring them into the light of present-day where we can finally perceive the breadth of their contributions as well as the insights they bring to modern day issues.
Critic, author, and debunker extraordinaire, G. K. Chesterton delighted in probing the ambiguities of Christian theology. A number of his most successful attempts at combining first-rate fiction with acute social observation appear in this original selection from his best detective stories featuring the priest-sleuth Father Brown.
(From Wikipedia) Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936), better known as G. K. Chesterton, was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the “prince of paradox. Time magazine has observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.”
Among the towering red cliffs of Petra, like some monstrous swollen Buddha, sits the corpse of Mrs.Boynton. A tiny puncture mark on her wrist is the only sign of the fatal injection that killed her.
Miss Emily was old, rich, and afraid – and now, she’s dead. Her terrified plea to Hercule Poirot came a little too late. All that’s left is a house full of greedy heirs, and a very strange letter that could solve the mystery – or add to it.
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