It’s time again for another book review, and I have a fun one stored up! I recently discovered Sarah Caudwell's mystery stories featuring the character Hilary Tamar, and I fell absolutely in love with the narrative voice, the madcap group of characters, and the fact that the story in the first book resolves around a series of letters sent home by a young lawyer, Julia, to her colleagues. Without further ado, let’s chat about Thus Was Adonis Murdered!
The setup is that Julia is a bit scatterbrained, and approaches the world in her own way. You can be pretty sure that an endeavour Julia sets out on will go wrong, in the most unlikely of ways, and this is why her colleagues follow her letters with some amusement and some anxiety, especially when they learn she’s been arrested. I thought the story might be kind of weird since it’s basically “detection at a distance”: right up to the ending, no action is seen directly, only through Julia’s letters and the discussion of her friends back home. It’s surprising how well it works, though, and it’s pretty much carried by the wry humour in the voices of the characters and the narration.
Here’s a bit of an example, just as a taster:
Julia’s unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.
It’s not “laugh out loud” funny, of course, but funny as an observation of a person, a way of encapsulating a character that’s amusing at the same time—and an attitude that I think I recognise from a couple of people I know. They studied something, and that makes it sort of unreal, like something you read in a book…
This kind of wit makes the whole thing very entertaining, including the letters from Julia which give us almost all the clues for the mystery, if you can pick them out. I did manage to guess what the solution to the mystery was ahead of time, which can sometimes make a mystery novel feel weak (and be completely infuriating), but the strong narrative voice and the affection for this group of characters made it entertaining nonetheless.
On the strength of this book, I quickly got into the others, and I can definitely recommend them. Hilary Tamar is a pretty unconventional sort of detective, but I think that’s part of the charm, and I really appreciated the skill in making the whole thing amusing without ever pushing so hard on the humour that I found it annoying.
I’ll be back with another book review before too long, I’m sure; there are several books still in my queue to try out, but I’m always eager for more suggestions as well. Feel free to drop me a note in the forum topic I created if you have any books in mind about postcards/letters/stamps/the postal service, fiction or non-fiction! (Just bear in mind you may need to browse the forums a little bit to “level up” your account and get access, if you haven’t used the forums before!)
