Review: Death on a Silver Tray by Rosemary Stevens

Genre: Historical detective fiction, murder mystery, cosy mystery.
Themes: Murder, social reputations, unhappy marriages,

I originally chose the third book in the Beau Brummell mysteries as the book with an item of clothing in the title for the What's in a Name Challenge. However, I prefer, whenever possible, to read series books in the correct reading order, so I decided to read this, the first book in the series, as a preliminary to The Bloodied Cravat. I read this one through, but The Bloodied Cravat was a DNF for me (see the glossary)and I ended up with another book for the challenge.

This is quite a frothy mystery in the historical/cosy sub-genre. A loathsome old aristocratic woman is murdered by adding poison to her nightly drink of warm milk and the prime suspect is her lady's companion, a young gentlewoman recommended to her by the Duchess of York. Brummell is in love with the Duchess and will do just about anything she asks of him, but as she is married to a member of the royal family and a scandal could destroy them both, they keep it on a platonic level. However, a scandal is looming because if the young lady is found guilty, it will have dire social consequences for the Duchess, and when Brummell declares his conviction of the young woman's innocence in public, he puts his own reputation - a much flimsier affair than that of the Duchess - on the line as well, so there is no backing out of his promise to the Duchess to find the real killer. And so he does, aided by his faithful valet, Robinson, with occasional input from a Bow Street detective, Mr. Lavender.

Brummell makes any number of mistakes one would expect from a novice detective, something I heartily approve of. It would have been very wrong to have him do brilliant deductions right off the bat while investigating his first case, and as a matter of fact, it's a couple of comments dropped by people in conversation that advance the case towards its solution.

I think I prefer this cover to the other one.

I have written elsewhere about how I loathe it when real people are commandeered by authors and made into characters in novels, especially when they are made to behave in ways that would be out of character for them. It's one of the reasons I have never read any of the Jane Austen mysteries, for example. But here we have a very famous historical gentleman being made into a sleuth.To my surprise I found I didn't really mind, perhaps because I know quite little about Beau Brummell other than that he was a celebrity in the modern sense, famous for his dress sense and good taste, and for his friendship with the Prince of Wales. I am also used to seeing him as a supporting character in any number of historical novels written about the era, so I suppose I see him more as a fictional character than a real one.

The character seems to be based, as far as personality goes, on Hercule Poirot. Both are conceited and self-assured dandies, but the difference is that we only ever really get to see Poirot from the outside, as seen by either a partially omniscient third person narrator, or by Hastings, who isn't exactly a reliable narrator. The Beau Brummell books, on the other hand, are narrated in the first person by the Beau himself, and so we get to see his self-doubt and insecurities, which makes him a more likeable and human character.

And then there's the cat. I hope this isn't going to turn into a series with a cat as the Watson.

The story is, as I stated above, frothy and light, but does touch on serious subjects apart from murder, e.g. the social conditions of servants and the problems faced by servant girls who find themselves in the family way, something that would generally result in them being let go from their positions without a reference - often by the very men who impregnated them - a terrible thing in those days.

This was an entertaining read, but I don't think I'll be keeping the book. In the cull box it goes, and then to the charity shop for someone else to buy and enjoy.

Readers: Have you read the other books in the series and would you recommend any title in particular?Although I didn't finish the other book, I am still not ready to give up on the series.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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