Mystery Monday: Killing Cassidy, by Jeanne M. Dams

 Before we even start, I want to announce that we have two winners from the Giveaway! 

Congratulations to Suzie Williams and Cheryl Rahkonen

Emails have been sent; please respond by the end of the week or I will need to choose new winners.

 Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing. . . .


After a long course of kidlit, time for another bit of adult fiction, a cozy mystery.

Killing Cassidy, by Jeanne M. Dams.  Hardcover, 210 pages

Source: library

Summary: This is book 6 in the Dorothy Martin mystery series, and sees Dorothy returning to her old home in Hillsburg, Indiana, with her new husband (retired police chief Alan Nesbitt).  The occasion is the death of an old friend, and Dorothy and Alan are shocked to find he has left a letter indicating that if he is dead, someone has murdered him.  He doesn't know who, doesn't know why, but knows that someone has been trying to kill him, and would she please find out who.  Naturally, they do.

Review:  The Dorothy Martin series definitely falls into the "cozy" category of mystery, as well as the "older women who wear hats" category (I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm getting attracted to books about older women who wear hats, but I think I can guess).  It's a pleasant, easy read with a convincing mystery (to even figure out who killed Kevin Cassidy, they have to solve the almost harder mystery why anyone would want to, not to mention how you commit murder by pneumonia), and enough suspects that I couldn't narrow it down.

The narrator (Dorothy) makes a number of references to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels, especially Gaudy Night, which as a big fan of Sayers I found fun.  I think she also had Busman's Honeymoon in mind during the development of the story, because this was a classic example of what Lord Peter declares in that book, that "when you know how, you know who."  Indeed.  When they know how, they know who, but it took me until well after they'd revealed who to figure out how they knew.  The author does do us the credit of not explaining it in too much detail, leaving it to the reader to either puzzle it out or accept their brilliant leap of intuition.

I prefer the books set in England, in some ways (always fun to have an exotic setting, though I recognize that for English readers, Indiana may be an exotic setting), but this was a very well-constructed and well-written mystery.

Four stars.

S: Dorothy Sayers

First, I want to take a moment to acknowledge a nice (meaningless) threshold, which is that sometime over Saturday night I passed the 10,000 page views mark.  Unfortunately, since Blogger doesn't sift out the robovisits, I think a significant portion were due to Russian sites of dubious virtue checking out that "old-fashioned girl" post.  Still.  Ten thousand views.

And I only need 13 more members to hit the 50 follower mark!




Now for our regularly scheduled Mystery Monday post: Dorothy Sayers and the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

First I want to say that Ms. Sayers was a serious scholar and she herself considered her Lord Peter stories (and other unrelated mysteries) as a sort of sell-out.  But, let's be frank: who reads her theological works today?  A whole lot fewer than read her mysteries, that's for sure (for the record, I have read at least one of her non-fiction works, The Mind of the Maker, and it is an excellent exploration of the relationship between the creativity of God and the creativity of the artist, for those who think in those terms.  The woman could write, whatever her subject matter).

The 12 Lord Peter novels (and 3 collections of short stories) are definitely products of their period (the 1920s and 30s), being more intellectual than action-oriented.  The series is also slightly schizophrenic.  In 8 of those 12 books, Lord Peter appears alone, and the books are classic intellectual puzzles.  In Strong Poison, she introduces Harriet Vane, and (after ignoring her existence in intervening books) develops a complex love interest in Have His Carcase, which erupts into the central place in the last two books, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon.  Gaudy Night in particular stands out because the entire story is from the perspective of Harriet Vane, and we finally truly see Peter through another's eyes.  Busman's Honeymoon shifts perspectives, but her view again predominates, leaving me to wonder what kind of change in the nature of her mysteries, or maybe in the mystery novel, Ms. Sayers was contemplating.

Gaudy Night, in particular, is a great read for a writer, as Harriet is (just by chance, of course!) a writer of mysteries.  In many ways the book (which contains a perplexing mystery but lacks a corpse) is a meditation on marriage and work, for women (and especially the woman artist), as well as on the value of writing as work.  It is a theme that I think Sayers would have further developed had she continued to write, and in fact is developed in Jill Paton Walsh's completion of Sayers' unfinished final novel, Thrones, Dominations.  It is unclear in that work what is Sayers and what is Walsh, but I suspect that the concern with the difficulty Harriet has with her writing was planned by Sayers.

I can heartily recommend any and all of the Lord Peter books, though a couple get a little dense and dry (The Five Red Herrings according to rumor was written to demonstrate the perfect construction of red herrings, and I could believe it).  The books can be read in any order, as they are only very loosely tied, though I think a little sense of development is gained from reading them in the order written.  Other details of Lord Peter's life are added by reading the short stories, though any effort to construct a timeline would, I think, lead to madness and despair.

Oh, and one final reason I like the books?  Lord Peter is addicted to word play.