A Medal for Murder by Frances Brody and Flowers for Mrs Harris by Paul Gallico

I’ve been getting quite a lot of reading done recently so I’m just doing this quick post about two of them, as reminders for myself really.

A Medal for Murder is the second book in Frances Brody’s Kate Shackleton series. Kate is still in denial about her husband’s death in the First World War and she’s still hoping to find him somewhere, lying damaged in a hospital perhaps. Meantime she’s working as a private investigator and in this case she’s been asked by the owner of a pawn shop to help track down whoever has broken into his premises and stolen items which clients had pawned, expecting to redeem them when they could afford to do so. His whole business is at stake as nobody will use a pawnbroker if they think they won’t be able to get their goods returned to them.

It’s set in Yorkshire’s Harrogate in the early 1920s and involves murder as well as theft and it’s no time before Kate Shackleton is in the thick of it. There are plenty of twists and turns but I think that these books improve as the series progresses.

Flowers for Mrs Harris by Paul Gallico was first published in 1958 and in the US it was called Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris.

Mrs Harris is a London char lady (cleaner) who is a widow in her 60s. She finds that she needs to supplement her widow’s pension so she cleans the houses of various wealthy people, she’s fussy about who she cleans for, she has to like them and her clients feel lucky that she has deigned to take them on.

In this book Mrs Harris catches sight of some Christian Dior dresses belonging to Lady Dant and she immediately falls in love with them and feels that she must have one of her own. The only problem is that it costs around £450 for a Dior frock, a huge sum of money, but Mrs Harris feels that it’s her destiny to own a Dior frock. After trials and tribulations she does get to Paris and there she wows the whole staff of Dior, including the boss.

This is a feel good book in which you have to suspend your disbelief as the character of Mrs Harris charms absolutely everyone she comes into contact with and she makes good things happen for them although things don’t always go well for Mrs Harris herself.

Dying in the Wool by Frances Brody

Dying in the Wool by Frances Brody was first published in 2009. I was keen to read it as I had really enjoyed Murder in the Afternoon which is the third book in her Kate Shackleton series, yes that’s me reading books out of order – again. The setting is Yorkshire in the 1920s.

Kate Shackleton is a 31 year old First World War widow, but she is in denial about her husband’s fate and is still expecting/hoping to find him alive – somewhere. In trying to track her husband down she has become known as a bit of a sleuth. She receives a letter from Tabitha, an old friend from the days when they were both VADs in the war. Tabitha is about to get married and she wants her father to be at her wedding, but he has been missing for years, Kate decides to take on the case.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the third one in the series so I’m hoping that the series just started off a bit weak and has improved with subsequent books.

There were a few factual mistakes in it which annoyed me, they really should have been picked up by an editor.

There were a lot of mentions of demob suits, and they were a World War II thing. Men being demobbed from the armed services after the war were given a choice of a suit to help them get back into civilian life after six years in uniform. According to my father they were all ghastly but in any case, they didn’t exist for the First World War.

The other thing which annoyed me was when Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife Jean appear and Sir Arthur’s wife Jean is called Lady Jean and Lady Doyle, several times, even within the same paragraph. At first I was thinking – is there a Lady Jean as well as a Lady Doyle, but no, it’s just that the author seems to think that the two titles are interchangeable, which of course they aren’t and as Jean Doyle was not born a ‘Lady’ but got her title as a result of her husband being knighted, then she was definitely Lady Doyle.

I will read the others in the series though.

Murder in the Afternoon by Frances Brody

Murder in the Afternoon cover

I believe that Murder in the Afternoon by Frances Brody is the third Kate Shackleton mystery. It was published in 2011 and I enjoyed it although I really wish I had held off and waited until I got my hands on the first one, Dying in the Wool. But you know what it’s like when you’re in the library, this one just jumped out at me and as neither of the previous ones had been in any of the many libraries that I’ve been frequenting, I just nabbed this one.

The setting is Yorkshire and post World War 1 so it has that vintage feel about it which I prefer. Kate Shackleton is a war widow who has never been able to accept the loss of her husband, she still harbours the hope that he has lost his memory and is languishing in a hospital somewhere.

Meanwhile she has to earn a living and she does so by working as an investigator. Another woman’s husband has gone missing. Ethan Armstrong works in a local quarry and he hasn’t come home from work. His children had gone to the quarry earlier in the day and the eldest, his daughter, claims that she saw her father and he was dead, nobody believes her and there is no sign of his body, or his tools. Did he just take off in high dudgeon, looking for work elsewhere or has something sinister happened to him?

This is an entertaining mystery. It reminded me of Catriona McPherson’s books, without the humour. Kate Shackleton is a likeable character, which always helps but the mystery was good too.

You can read more about the author here.