Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.
Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.
Maisie Dodds is a working class gel made good. Having been trained into investigations by her mentor Dr Maurice Blanche, she has taken over his practise and helps the police with their enquiries as well as her individual clients. Maisie is a rather uninspiring creation to follow, an unemotional woman with almost zen-like levels of self-control (at one point a man commits suicide via bomb in front of her and she barely raises an eyebrow). But Winspear puts in enough detail about Maisie’s past life to make this work as a stand-alone read as well as part of a series. The sheen soon comes off this zen once we find out that Maisie worked as nurse with shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, slowly lost her lover to shell shock and suffered a breakdown herself a year before.
This works very well as an inbetween to Pat Barker’s infinitely harsher Regeneration trilogy and to Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson’s excellent biography of that generation of women destined to remain spinsters or build careers after their men were killed, or left mentally gone after the war. Among the Mad is a great idea for a mystery: fed up with the lack of attention given to former soldiers now that memories are healing over, someone is committing murder using the horrific chemicals and methods inflicted on them during the War.
While Winspear’s prose is more workmanlike than I’d ideally like and her characters don’t really leap off the page despite their interesting backstories, her story is efficient. Its focus on the forgotten soldiers of WW1 acts as a welcome counterpoint to the easy, lazy days the 1930s are usually painted as. There is also a bittersweet sideplot in which the wife of Maisie’s male assistant is sent to an asylum after the death of her young daughter, and suffers from what passed for mental health treatment. Luckily, a contact of Maisie’s is a senior physician at a more progressive hospital, and the wife is allowed to move there, but it’s a neat reminder that not everything was Mitfordian sunshine in the 1930s.
It’s a quick read, but one that will leave you thinking afterwards, not least because, in passing, Winspear drops some very interesting names I’d never heard of before: female policemen and a doctor who ran a women-only patrol of doctors in France during the war. Maddeningly, I left this book at my mum’s for her to read, so a bit of Googling is in order before I can remember their names. Not sure I’ll actively seek out Maisie Dodds books again – the storyline is good but there’s not much zing – but those names, definitely.
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