|
Dean Street December is hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. You can find her main post here.
This was a very weird golden age mystery by an author with whom I have very limited familiarity. I read her Christmas mystery, The Night of Fear, back in 2021, and liked it, although I remember only the barest outlines of the plot.
It’s hard to discuss this book without spoiling it, because what makes it weird would be a spoiler. Let’s just say that I wasn’t expecting one of its plot points in a mystery published in 1939. The Forward by Curtis Evans very carefully doesn’t spoil the book, and he continues the Forward into an Afterward, where he does delve into the rather unique plot device that Dalton employs here.
There’s also a fairly long section of the book that occurs outside of England, in “San Rinaldo,” a made up South American country described as “one of the smaller and more backward of the South American republics,” where the main character, Celia, has taken a post as a governess to two young girls. There is an uprising in San Rinaldo, and Celia barely escapes with her life and returns to England.
All in all, I think that the book was just too strange for me and I didn’t really connect with it. I didn’t not like it, but it also wasn’t really my jam.
I have at least one more book by Dalton, One by One They Disappeared, on my kindle, but I’m unlikely to get to it before the end of the month. I’m planning to try to read one more Furrowed Middlebrow book, Murder While You Work, by Susan Scarlett this year.
Sorry that didn’t hit the spot: thank you for contributing it still! I hope you have better luck with the Scarlett, one of hers I haven’t yet read but do want to.