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Reading: Mistletoe and Murder
Dec. 28th, 2017 11:22 amThe fifth in Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong mystery series is set in Cambridge, where Daisy and Hazel are spending Christmas as guests of Daisy's great-aunt Eustacia (a mathematics don - surely I can't be imagining the Chalet School reference there?) and visiting Daisy's brother Bertie, a first-year undergraduate at Maudlin College. Also in Cambridge for Christmas are Alexander Arcady, who Daisy and Hazel met on the Orient Express, and his best friend George Mukherjee. Alexander and George also have a detective society, the Junior Pinkertons; the two societies begin by competing to see who can identify the perpetrator of a series of increasingly dangerous pranks played in Maudlin, and then find themselves working together when things take a more murderous turn.
Like the other books in the series, this is very much in dialogue with the Golden Age detective fiction it pastiches - in this case, Gaudy Night, which Daisy and Hazel are reading. The beauty and opulence of the men's colleges is contrasted with the modern buildings and general frugality of life in a women's college, and Daisy and Hazel discover that their gender, even more than their age, debars them from entry to many places in Cambridge, including the college where they are trying to carry out their investigation. The series' ongoing consideration of issues of race is also broadened with the introduction of George and Harold Mukherjee, British-born but with an Indian father, who are nonetheless seen as less "British" than the American Alexander, and of another Hong Kong Chinese character, Alfred Cheng. The series continues to go from strength to strength, and this was perfect Christmas-holiday reading, even if the images in the Kindle edition didn't work properly on my rather old basic Kindle, making reading a slightly frustrating experience (I got blank pages instead of whole-page images, and although I could see the images if I clicked to zoom in on them when there were several pages of images purporting to be Hazel's handwritten casenotes it was quite hard to tell where I was and on occasion I had to resort to reading those bits on my phone, which didn't have the same problem).
Like the other books in the series, this is very much in dialogue with the Golden Age detective fiction it pastiches - in this case, Gaudy Night, which Daisy and Hazel are reading. The beauty and opulence of the men's colleges is contrasted with the modern buildings and general frugality of life in a women's college, and Daisy and Hazel discover that their gender, even more than their age, debars them from entry to many places in Cambridge, including the college where they are trying to carry out their investigation. The series' ongoing consideration of issues of race is also broadened with the introduction of George and Harold Mukherjee, British-born but with an Indian father, who are nonetheless seen as less "British" than the American Alexander, and of another Hong Kong Chinese character, Alfred Cheng. The series continues to go from strength to strength, and this was perfect Christmas-holiday reading, even if the images in the Kindle edition didn't work properly on my rather old basic Kindle, making reading a slightly frustrating experience (I got blank pages instead of whole-page images, and although I could see the images if I clicked to zoom in on them when there were several pages of images purporting to be Hazel's handwritten casenotes it was quite hard to tell where I was and on occasion I had to resort to reading those bits on my phone, which didn't have the same problem).
