Name: Maisie Dobbs A Novel
Rating: 3.739130434782609 (46 reviews)
ISBN: 9780142004333

Maisie Dobbs A Novel

Rebecca C Wright

Excellent "historical" mystery. The details and time period are vivid and the mystery is engaging. This is a great start to a wonderful series. Anyone that enjoys mysteries or historical fiction should love this.

Patricia Nelson

I liked this book! I wish I could give half stars because for me it's really more of a 3.5. While I understand why the author gave us the flashbacks to provide background on Maisie, particularly since this is the first book in the series, I felt like it broke up the mystery story and detracted from it. I'm looking forward to reading another in the series to see how the mystery plays out without the interruption of the flashback.

Bryan Alexander

Maisie Dobbs is a historical detective story. It's the first of a series, so much of the plot concerns setting up our title character as a private eye in late 1920s London.

But it's historical on two levels. We get to see Britain in 1929, while reaching back to WWI, which is what brought it to my attention. Dobbs is a very good detective, yet also has a background as a nurse who came under fire in France. The veteran status of most male characters is always a key issue, and the mystery plot concerns the actions of a ground of badly wounded vets (
  gueules cassées
).

So that's a lot of major issues and purposes to balance, and Winspear carries it off well. The novel's first third introduces us to Masie Carr as she sets up her practice and starts investigating. The middle third of the book takes us back to her past, following her from childhood through an unlikely career: in service for aristocrats, taken under the wing of a detective/fixer/oddball, off to university, then to French field hospitals. The conclusion takes us forward, solving the case and pointing into the direction of a series.

Some notes:
-There are touches of fantasy or the supernatural. Masie and her mentor each have intuitions and responses to physical touch that appear somewhere between a detective's hunch and a sensitive's feeling.
-I'm not expert on mysteries, but have read and seen enough to recognize this as an example of the British female detective type. You won't find American-style tough guys or violence. Instead we focus on a woman's experience of sexism, conversations that peel away layers towards truth, a concern about manners, and important female allies. Misogyny appears right from the first page, and Masie bears up under it patiently. There's some of the darkness I associate with Ruth Rendell etc., based entirely on the scarcely spoken Great War's impacts on subsequent life.
-The prose mostly gets out of the way of dialog and scene setting, but does have some moving passages. For example,[S]he noticed in front of her the punk and red blooms of roses that had grown furiously upward on the other side of the wall, and now seemed to be clambering toward her, to freedom. Each bloom nodded up and down in the breeze, and in that moment the wave of roses reminded Maisie of the men who scrambled from a mud-soaked hell of trenches over the top and into battle. (224)-Politically, it's an interesting stretch. We see aristocrats who are clearly very good and helpful people, connected through Masie to noble working people. Masie is born into the working class, but her condition seems worse more by her mother's early death than any material problems. There isn't much in the way of class tension, even though the great General Strike was only three years prior to the novel's present. Similarly there isn't much dissent during the war; there's only a buried numbness and resentment of horror, rather than of the class who directed Britain's role in it. I didn't see any mentions of empire, domestic government, or labor organizing. The police appear only briefly and as standard plot closers, wrapping up the story and disappearing. 
 In this sense Maisie Dobbs is quite conservative.
-The WWI details are narrowly described, focusing mostly on several character's memories without any framing or bigger picture, and are well done.
-The conclusion, which reveals Masie's secret and starts the series, was also well done.

Maisie Dobbs A Novel

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