abendgules | More recommended reading

I continue to have a low taste for whodunnits, begun in my yoof - I suspect early exposure to Ellis Peters is to blame for my initially 12th century persona, and my first Society name.

But I've grown pickier of my authors, particularly in historic whodunnits, a genre I think Ms Peters created nearly singlehandedly. There are a handful of writers who predate her, but almost everyone writes in their own time period...and only become period pieces (Poirot, Sherlock, and Lord Peter Wimsey) with passing years.

At any rate, I've grown pickier; if you can simply lift the story and put it in contemporary time period with few changes of clothing, I'm not interested. It's the ones that pick up the period political events, and represent unpopular social opinions convincingly as part of the story that impress me.

So I've really enjoyed Catriona McPhereson's Dandy Gilver stories - I found the first one early this year, when I was headed to Dance Moot in Queensferry. It's set post WWI, when Nothing was Ever the Same Again. And while I don't know much about the period, I'm enjoying her depiction of a gently-bred minor-gentry wife, bored to tears, who uses her slightly clueless society persona to good effect while solving puzzles. Well worth investigating.