Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

[purplecat]

`The British counterpart to Alexander McCall Smith's' The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency said the pull quote on the front cover of my copy of Maisie Dobbs. This was a little too reminiscent to `Comparable to Tolkien at his best' to fill me with a great deal of confidence.

Maisie Dobbs is the first in what I assume will rapidly become a series of detective novels starring the eponymous Maisie and set in the late 1920s.

The book isn't really a detective novel, as such. It falls into three parts. The middle part gives us Maisie's backstory, a very unlikely Cinderella tale of her rise from below-stairs via tutoring by a friend of the mistress of the house, to a place at Cambridge and, from there, to nursing during the Great War. This is sandwiched between two linked mysteries; a wife who goes out every day and will not tell her husband where she is going, and the death of a disfigured former soldier at retreat for the war wounded. Even in the later stages of the book it's never really a case of who dunnit (which is fairly obvious) more of why, and how, and where will the proof be found. Nor does Maisie do a great deal of detecting beyond, to be honest, being wise and meditating a bit.

I found Maisie rather smug, which isn't necessarily a problem, since fictional detectives all have their flaws, but I wasn't convinced the author saw it that way. I felt there was a bad case of the narrative bending itself around Maisie's perfection as she dispensed wisdom, soothed troubled brows, and impressed the upper and lower classes alike.

That's not to say the book is without merit. I was sufficiently interested in how Maisie's personal story would resolve, that I kept turning the pages. In a lot of ways I feel Jacqueline Winspear is emulating Conan-Doyle. We have the detective story that is interrupted in the middle in order to tell a romance, and a detective whose abilities are unlikely in the extreme. Sadly the mystery wasn't really good enough to carry that aspect, and I think Winspear is considerably fonder of Maisie Dobbs than Conan-Doyle ever was of Holmes which robs the character of the kinds of flaws that make Holmes interesting.


The book passes the time, but I don't think I'll be reading any others in the series.

Comments

[magister]

Not a fan of the Thomas Covenant books then?

[purplecat]

I suspect I never really gave them a fair chance. I picked up the second one when I was about 13/14, having just finished Lord of the Rings, read three chapters, didn't like it and never picked it up again. No one in Tolksoc liked them much which didn't motivate me to give them another go.

However, I think its also fair to say that, over the years, its become fairly clear that with the exception of Lord of the Rings, epic fantasy isn't really my thing.

[magister]

I read them about thirty-five years ago. Looking back, these days I see them as far more problematic, given that 60 pages into the first volume, the protagonist rapes someone in a fit of pique and we are then supposed to empathise with his pain and regret for this. At the age of 7, all this really went over my head.

[purplecat]

I remember not seeing why I should like Thomas Covenant being something of a factor in why I dropped the book. I think I was a bit too young to be gripped by "oh the angst!" though I suspect a year or two later I would have lapped it up.

[magister]

Increasingly, I'm less likely to start anything like these, simply because of the lack of time I have and the number of other things I haven't read yet.

[purplecat]

It distresses me slightly how little I read these days, certainly compared to how much I used to read, and even in comparison to a number of friends... and a good proportion of what I do read is fanfic which tends to be short form. That said my fiction to read pile is looking more manageable than it has for a while and I've been eying up my Amazon wish list speculatively.

However, I'm certainly wary of anything multi-volume.

[magister]

Me too generally, although I was motivated to read the Game of Thrones series by watching the TV series, which was probably a mistake - there's still two volumes to come and by the time they're published, I will have forgotten entirely what's happened. Sad really, I used to read absolutely vast amounts, but these days I just don't have the energy.

[purplecat]

I started reading A Song of Ice an Fire ooooh, about a decade ago, on a recommendation. I really liked the first book and then read the next two or three in short order at which point I decided padding was taking over. I haven't read `A Dance of Dragons' and don't really intend to until the sequence is complete. We've not watched the telly series, B. doesn't like programs about "nasty people being unpleasant to each other" and I rather suspect A Game of Thrones falls into this category (for the same reason we've not watched The Wire or the new BSG).