Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Have you ever wanted to be “a fly on the wall” and eavesdrop on the conversations of someone you admire?  If so, Marie Benedict’s The Queens of Crime is perfect for you.

The novel opens in 1931, the year The Detection Club was founded in London.  Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, was the impetus behind the Club, which she decided was needed to bring mysteries and crime novels out of the genre category reviewers put them in and treat them as literature.

G. K. Chesterton of Father Brown fame was installed as president, and he shared with Dorothy a feeling that some members voiced that having an “abundance of women” in its membership might be seen negatively by the more serious reviewers they are trying to reach.  The only two women who are deemed to be appropriate to be members are Dorothy and Agatha Christie.

Needless to say, this roused Dorothy’s ire and now Agatha’s as she learns of it.  Dorothy develops a plan to invite three other female mystery authors to join the two of them and fight for their inclusion in the Detection Club.  Thus there are now five women who are working together:  Dorothy and Agatha; Baroness Emma Orczy, Hungarian-born noblewoman and author of the Scarlet Pimpernel novels; Ngaio Marsh, who hails from New Zealand and writes about Inspector Roderick Allyn; and Margery Allingham, author of the Albert Campion novels.

Telling the three women that individually they cannot breach the walls of the Club or the literary journals they would like to review their novels, Dorothy suggests “banding together in a club of our own making and infiltrating the ranks of the Detection Club as a group.”  Not surprisingly, they all think it’s an excellent idea.

Then all five women authors are admitted to the Detection Club, but they cannot help being aware of the reluctance of some of the male members to their inclusion.  Then Dorothy broaches another idea.  There is an unsolved case, the recent disappearance of a young English woman on an overnight trip to France with a friend.  If the five women can discover what happened to the missing woman, the male authors will have to accept them on equal terms.

May Daniels entered a washroom while she and Celia McCarthy were waiting for the ferry to bring them home, and although Celia waited  for several minutes, she never saw her friend leave the bathroom.  May simply vanished into thin air from a small room with no windows and only one door.  Now, after several months, her body has been found, but neither the Sûreté nor Scotland Yard has any suspects.  This is a perfect opportunity, the five queens agree, to show the men of the Detection Club their worth and importance in the literary world–they will solve the crime.

Marie Benedict has written another outstanding work of historical fiction, following in the footsteps of Her Hidden Genius (scientist Rosalind Franklin), The Other Einstein (Mileva Einstein, Albert’s first wife), and The Only Woman in the Room (Hedy Lamarr).  Ms. Benedict clearly shows the different personalities of the five women authors and brings readers into the literary world of England in the period between the world wars.

You can read more about Marie Benedict at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novel.

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