This week, I’m taking a break from the twenty-first century and sinking my imagination into Golden Age Mysteries. The three I’ve picked span three decades from the 1930s to the 1950s. They’re all written by women and they’re all by authors I’m familiar with. Two have been adapted for Television.
I’m looking forward to settling into the storytelling rhythm of the first half of the last century. I’m hoping for intriguing mysteries with incidental insights into how life in England used to be lived.
‘Post After Post-Mortem‘ (1936) by E.C.R. Lorac
I’m grateful to the British Library Crime Classics (BLCC) for making Edith Carnac’s books widely available again. She was a star of the Collins Crime Club in her day but most of her works had been out of print until the BLCC picked them up.
I read her ‘Crossed Skis‘ novel, published in 1951 under her Carol Carnac pseudonym, and loved its energy and its contemporary details.
This time I’m trying one of her between-the-war books ‘Post After Post-Mortem’, the eleventh book in a series of forty-six Chief Inspector MacDonald books that she published between 1932 and 1959.
I bought this one because I loved the cover, I’ve seen some positive reviews and I’m curious to see 1930s England through Carnac’s eyes.
Carol Carnac and ECR Lorac were the nom de plumes for Edith Caroline Rivett-Carnac, an English golden-age mystery writer and member of The Detective Club.
Between 1931 and 1958 she published twenty-three Carol Carnac books and forty-eight ECR Lorac books.
‘The Franchise Affair‘ (1948) by Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey is one of my favourite Golden Age Mystery authors. I’ve enjoyed everything of hers that I’ve read so far. Her range is remarkable. In ‘Miss Pym Disposes‘ she delivered an excellent amateur sleuth story set in a girls’ school. In ‘Brat Farrar‘ we get a thriller around an identity that may or may not be stolen. In ‘The Daughter Of Time‘ we get a detective, confined to a hospital bed, occupying himself by investigating the murders attributed to Richard III. In ‘The Man In The Queue‘, her debut novel, we get a thriller to rival ‘The Thirty-nine Steps’.
I’m hoping that ‘The Franchise Affair‘ will be another unique and distinctive mystery.
Josephine Tey was the pseudonym under which Elizabeth Mackintosh published six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard’s Inspector Alan Grant (the last of which was published posthumously) and five standalone novels.
As Gordon Daviot, she wrote Richard of Bordeaux, an historical drama that became a long-running West End hit and which made a household name of its leading man and director, John Gielgud
‘Mrs McGinty’s Dead’ (1952) by Agatha Christie
I’m part of a community who are reading and discussing all of Agatha Christie’s full-length novels at the rate of one per month, in order of publication. We started in October 2020. ‘Mr McGinty’s Dead’ is our forty-second novel.
This one is a Poirot novel. He’s a man who I found annoying even before I saw him transformed into an even more monstrous ego by Kennet Brannagh. I’m fairly sure that Agatha Christie didn’t like him much either but she did manage to write some great novels around him: ‘The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd‘, ‘The ABC Murders’ and ‘Murder On The Orient Express‘.
I don’t have such high hopes of this one but I am looking forward to meeting Mrs Ariadne Oliver again. Poirot may have gotten old and subdued but Mrs Oliver is always lively.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
Coincidentally, I discovered ECR Lovac just this week when I stumbled across Death of an Author. It intrigued me and is now in my collection waiting to be read. Good to hear that she has a decent catalogue of books should I enjoy it. I look forward to reading your thoughts on Post-After Post Mortem
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