Tag Archives: 1930s setting

Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson

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D. E. Stevenson was regarded as old fashioned when I was a youngster way back in the 1970s and I would never have picked up one of her books then, but I’m really glad that I read this one. This is a combination of two books which were published in 1932 and 34 and the first half of it is written as the diary of a young Army wife, mother of a young son and daughter.

I know it sounds deadly dull but it’s not at all. It’s full of humour and the second part of the book which was originally published separately as ‘Golden Days’ is an account of Mrs. Tim’s experiences in Scotland when her husband is sent there by the army. Lots of Scottish words, there’s no glossary but I think they are all easy to get from the context.

The Times Literary Supplement said : ‘The writer’s unflagging humour, her shrewd wordly wisdom, and her extremely realistic pictures of garrison life make it all good reading’.

D.E. Stevenson was a second cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson and her father was the lighthouse engineer David Alan Stevenson.

Some of Stevenson’s books have been reprinted and luckily my local library has quite a few so I’ll definitely be requesting more of them. I read this as part of The C P R Book Group Ceilidh.

It gets a resounding HEE YOOCH!

An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson

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An Expert in Murder cover

Recently I’ve been buying and reading quite a few books by Josephine Tey so when I saw that Jo at The Book Jotter was reading this book featuring Tey as a character I thought I would see what it was like.

There have been quite a few books published which have been written in the style of 1930s crime novels but I’m not sure if this one was meant to fall into that category.

It begins in a classic vintage crime way with a train journey, the quickest way to get that 1930s ambience. Tey who has had great success with a play in London’s west end is travelling from Scotland to London and falls into conversation with a young woman, Elspeth, who is a big fan of the theatre.

That’s as far as I’m going with the story because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. I think it’s a good read if you’re into crime but I think I would have enjoyed it even more if Nicola Upson hadn’t woven the story around Tey’s life. For me it almosts seems like cheating when it’s a work of fiction which has sort of hi-jacked a real person and I’m not really keen on the idea. I can see why it would appeal to a publisher though as a sort of gimmick. I just didn’t think it was necessary.

I thought the twists and turns of the story were very good and that should have been enough. It reminded me a lot of Dorothy Sayers’s Strong Poison in parts especially her Harriet Vane, which is no bad thing I suppose.

Being a bit of a nit-picker there were a few things which annoyed me which other people probably wouldn’t have picked up on. One was a character’s use of the phrase, ‘Tell me about it,’ in that modern way which I don’t recall ever hearing anyone use before the 1980s. There was quite a bit of use of the F word, which really doesn’t bother me at all but it doesn’t fit in with vintage crime and it jarred with me for that reason. I know it would have been used in reality. Lastly, at one point Elspeth’s mother takes her large hat off and puts it on the floor!! It’s supposed to be the 1930s when women didn’t remove their hats at all unless they were sitting in their own home and they would definitely never put one on the floor. I told you I was nit-picking.