By reading Maisie Dobbs I’m breaking all of my steadfast unwritten rules I have about reading mystery books. The first book begins in 1929 and is set in London, England. Maisie has gone into business for herself as a private investigator. While talking to the caretaker of building that houses her office and interviewing a client, Maisie reflects a little on her past. During the Great War, she used to be a nurse in France. Her first client, she can tell hadn’t been a soldier during the war. He asks her to investigate his wife’s comings and goings because he believes that she’s having an affair.
Maisie didn’t just fall into private investigating like the previously mentioned Molly Murphy, no she apprenticed under Maurice Blanche. He ran his own detective agency and investigated matters for Europe’s crème de la crème. Maurice retired from the business and Maisie is trying to make a go of it with her own independent business. The book is extremely well written and I felt almost as if I were watching an episode of Masterpiece Mystery on PBS instead of reading a mystery novel. Again this is a very slow moving story, but I feel that there’s a reason for the slowness and that’s so the author can build the story.
The story segues after Maisie has completed her first case to delve more into Maisie’s past experiences as a young girl and during WWI. While I found the author’s segue interesting and heart wrenching at times. At different points during this break in the mystery wondered how this had anything to do with the mystery itself and if the author’s other book in the series were the same way. Hopefully, all will be explained at the end. It was odd reading a mystery where for twelve chapters the theme shifted. It was almost as if the author said, “And we interrupt this mystery novel for a dissertation of girlhood and a wartime romance.”
Once leaving the “brief musical interlude,” I was happily thrown back into the mystery where it promptly deepened. The rest of the book ran the course of typically mysteries, which was a relief. The wartime interlude was somewhat explained during Maisie’s investigation into a farm where disfigured WWI vets lived.
It should be interesting to see how this mystery series develops. I don’t immediately read the next book in a series. Instead, I prefer to read another book. Maybe it’s so that I can sort of give my brain a break from the characters; I’m not sure?
My next read is the Molly Murphy mystery, Death of Riley.
