Hasty Death: An Edwardian Murder Mystery (Edwardian Murder Mysteries) [Mass Market Paperback]

This is the second book in Edwardian Murder Mysteries, (the first is Snobbery With Violence). I find these books really easy to read and I love them. Marion Chesney is such a gifted storyteller and there is something so effortless about her writing, though I am mainly familiar with her work under the name MC Beaton, and I think those who like her Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth books would enjoy this. I think its just as good.

This is the second in a series of murder mysteries set in Britain in the first decade of the 20th century featuring Captain Harry Cathcart and Lady Rose Summer.

To date there are four books in the series, which are

Snobbery with Violence
Hasty Death
Sick of Shadows
Our Lady of Pain

The author writes romantic fiction, mostly humorous regency romances plus one or two set in the Edwardian period, under the name Marion Chesney, and mystery/detective stories such as the Agatha Raisin and Hamish MacBeth series under the name M.C. Beaton.

This Edwardian series is a something of a cross-over between the two - part romance and part murder mystery - and the books often have both names on the cover (usually something like "M.C. Beaton writing as Marion Chesney".)

In this second book, Lady Rose Summer gets so fed up with being an ornament to society that she wants to get a job. Captain Cathcart very discreetly arranges for Rose and her maid, Daisy, to work as typists at a bank under false names. While they are working there, Rose discovers by chance that a young gentleman who has just been murdered, Freddy Pomfret, had banked three very large sums of money from other aristocrats.

Had Freddy been blackmailing them, and is that why he was murdered? So Lady Rose goes the police and offers to help find the murderer.

However, her parents have other plans to deal with their wayward daughter - which unbeknown to them are a threat to her life ...

Tha main characters in the series are:

Captain Harry Cathcart, younger son of a Baron, has left the army after being injured in the Boer war. At the start of the first book he carried out a service for Lady Rose's father, the Earl of Hadfield, for which he gained a reputation as a fixer to the aristocracy, and by the time of this book he has formally gone into business as the Edwardian equivalent of a Private Investigator. Some members of "Society" look down on him as being "in trade" because he is earning a living, but as he is often very useful to them most aristocrats tend to overlook this.

Lady Rose Summer is the only surviving child of the Earl and Countess of Hadfield. She is slightly notorious as having briefly been involved with suffragettes, but after each successive scandal dies away she is usually sought after again as a wealthy heiress. Chafes at the fact that society will not allow her to perform a useful role, and constantly looking for something more challenging to do - from working as a typist for a bank to helping the police solve murders.

Beckett - Harry's valet: in love with Daisy

Daisy - Lady Rose's maid. A former chorus girl, but when Captain Cathcart recruited her to play the role of a maid with a contagious disease as one of the escapades in the first book, Lady Rose took Daisy on to do the job of her maid for real. In love with Beckett.

Detective Superintendent Kerridge - a senior policeman of humble origins and carefully supressed radical views, reinforced by the fact that whenever he has to interview an aristocrat they always threaten to report him to the Prime Minister. Plays Inspector Slack to Lady Rose's Miss Marple.

Despite that comparison, this is not in the same league as Agatha Christie as a detective story, and neither is it in the same league as Jane Austen as a romance. However, it is an amusing and entertaining light read.

By Agatha, I mean Raisin rather than Christie. A gentle contemporay sense of the mildly absurd is the keynote of good light bedtime or travel comfort reading. I have enjoyed the modern Cotswold silliness and honesty of MC Beaton's Raisin soapy whodunnits, and when I realised that Chesney was the same author in a different hat, I took on board this golden age style upper crust read. Good fun, period setting but recognisable frailties. Serves me well for some grown up self indulgences, and good enough for my me-time after the family has been fed, watered and tucked in.