Watching the detectives
Stage Fright by Gillian Linscoft Warner Futura $85 No Laughing Matter by Dorothy Simpson Warner Futura $85 Pieces of Justice by Margaret Yorke Warner Futura $119 Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George Bantam $272 Perfectly Pure and Good by Frances Fyfield Bantam $255 GOOD crime fiction has been compared to eating a special meal: the pleasure of anticipation, the building, course by course, to the main event, followed by the chance to sit back and relax with a satisfied smile. Dull ingredients, inappropriate combinations and inexpert delivery can spoil both and new offerings from five women authors show that, in crime fiction as in cooking, women are as likely to muck it up as men.
Take British journalist and writer Gillian Linscoft. She gives her ninth whodunit Stage Fright, an Edwardian London setting with suffragette sleuth Nell Bray on the trail of a killer. Bray gets dragged into this backstage murder while protecting an actress who, having left her faithless husband and fallen for an actor, is starring in a controversial George Bernard Shaw play about divorce.
It's an original and interesting idea and politically spot-on, with all the ingredients for a tense and juicy read: transvestism, censorship, adultery and violent passions. Unfortunately Linscoft fails to carry it off and the result is plodding. The killer's identity did come as a surprise, but by then I'd lost interest.
Dorothy Simpson's work is the sort some would call traditional and she has many faithful fans. But in these days of riveting psychological thrillers, I'd call it dated.
In No Laughing Matter, a murder is committed - the unpopular wife-beating head of a winery gets what he had coming - and trusty and sensitive Inspector Thanet and his faithful sidekick Sergeant Lineham of Sturrenden CID, Kent, are called to investigate. Along the way they turn up a host of red herrings and as many clues, mostly clearly telegraphed.
It's a formula that served Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and others of the ilk for decades and which still satisfies devotees of the genre: no nasty twists or surprises of the Ruth Rendell variety here. Thanet is a plodder but we know he'll get there in the end. Unfortunately, I got there before he did, in what is basically a mundane read.