Two murders need two motives, I wrote, then I put my elbows on the desk and lowered my head, but stopped in time. It was not even ten o'clock in the morning, and I could not possibly put my head in my hands already. Sherlock, I am sure, never put his head in his hands before luncheon. That should be my rule from now on. No head-holding before luncheon, no putting of one's head on the table and rolling it from side to side before tea, and no audible groaning before dinner. I am very disappointed. I don't know about you, but I expect mysteries to be fun. An entertaining, fun read. This is NOT an entertaining, fun read. "You'll love this book!" my friend told me. "It's like a murder mystery Downton Abbey!"PLOT: Dandy (Dandelion) Gilver is a bored rich lady in 1923. No job (obviously) a husband who is distant and uninterested (they sleep in separate bedrooms) and two sons who are away at boarding school ten months out of the year. She needs a little excitement. When her best friend Daisy calls her about the Duffy Diamonds being stolen - and Daisy and her husband Silas being expected to fork over the cash for them - Dandy is on the case!Why? Is she smart? No. Is she clever? No. Does she think like a detective? No. Daisy specifically hires Dandy because Dandy is considered "stupid" and it is hoped that her bumbling around and faux pas will uncover the truth.Then we have Alec - Dandy's partner in the mystery. He is the fiancé of Cara Duffy. Due to REASONS, he and Dandy team up together to solve a theft-blackmail-murder.WEAKNESSES:Alec: Despite the fact that he's JUST AS DUMB as Dandy, except in a different way, he never fails to condescend to her and talk down to her. I think this is mainly because he is a man and she is a woman and it's 1923. He misses key mystery points just like she does, and he can't piece things together any better than she can."Stop interrupting," said Alec.Fuck you, Alec."Concentrate, Dandy, please," he said.Fuck you, Alec.Number of times I told Alec to go fuck himself after he disrespected Dandy: 8. I found him to be vastly annoying.Dandy: There's no skirting around the fact that she's dumb. She has her brilliant moments, but for the most part you just want to scream out the obvious to her. And her obsession with being "polite" and "hushing things up so there's no gossip" was annoying as heck.And yet, even then, even as late as that, I found myself frowning and felt my face twist into an embarrassed grimace at the thought of Daisy breaking the bounds of convention at my behest, walking away from her hostess's house without her hat or her gloves and not taking her leave. Had Daisy come to the telephone, I wonder still if I should have been able to issue the command, or whether I should have said that of course she might go and say goodbye to ______, even finish her tea. Luckily, I was not put to the test.So, let me get this straight: Your best friend is having tea with a MURDERER and is in mortal danger. And yet, you can't quite bring yourself to tell her to 'get out of the house.' Because leaving in a rush might seem rude. o.O Are you afraid of damaging the sensitive murderer's sense of propriety!?!?!?! Jeez Louise!It's stuff like this that has me shaking my head and unable to get fully behind Dandy. She's also a bit shallow and appearance-focused. And she's NOT the least bit enlightened regarding "the lower class."Dandy and Alec, sitting in a tree... : I think it would have been at that moment, if I were the type to fall in love, that I should have fallen in love with Alec Osborne. It would have been the first and last time in my life (and of course I should not have admitted it to myself) but, despite the presence two feet away of the girl he was to marry, as he teased me so very gently and said my name, that's when it would have happened.This approximately 120 seconds after she's met him, and after he's said 47 words to her. I counted.Okay, it was REALLY making me angry that Dandy was crushing on Alec for the whole book. And lying to her husband, going out with Alec alone, sneaking around with him, having him in her bedroom (!!!) more than once...Of course, none of this was for sex! They were trying to solve a mystery. Okay. But McPherson makes it obvious that Dandy has a 'thing' for Alec. Despite being married, despite him being (I don't know how much) younger than her, despite him being engaged to a young woman, despite her having two children with her husband. I was just faintly ill through the whole book by this kind of almost-cheating-but-not-really vibe from these two. This was a little too close to infidelity for my comfort.Before I reached Alec's door he emerged dressed for dinner but, seeing me, he backed into his room again and drew me after him.And what about this?"Dandy?" Alec whispered, coming right inside and waiting a bit for his eyes to adjust before he moved again. Still groggy and rattled as one is after waking from a dream, I was unable to speak and only blinked and gulped as Alec came to sit on the edge of my bed. He started with a reassurance."I'm sorry to disturb you," he said. "And don't be alarmed: it's not a social call."Her husband's sleeping in the next room, bub! Grrrrrrrrrrr. This is rather baffling when interspersed with moments of almost motherly affection towards Alec:He laughed again, but this time absolutely mirthlessly, and went on in a loud, blustering voice with a small tremble at the back of it that made me want to take him on my lap like one of my sons.AND, not to mention, she just laps him up - despite him oftentimes being a condescending little shit to her - just because he's leaps and bounds ahead of how all other men (1920s men) treat her. I understand that he is an improvement on the norm, but I couldn't help yelling at her to grow a spine every time she simpered under his praise after he just shamed her for being "silly" or "flighty" or some other insult. Fuck him! *flips Alec the bird*The Mystery: The mystery is a convoluted mess. Oftentimes, Alec and Dandy were jumping to conclusions that THEY seemed to think were "obvious," but in reality made no sense. o.OThe evasive language of both the characters and the author: I know this had a lot to do with the time period, but no one can just say stuff outright. It's completely forbidden to talk about abortion, suicide, childbirth, pregnancy, blackmail etc. etc. even if these things are going on right under your nose. So all the characters talk AROUND these messes and just try to communicate to our heroes what is going on. Often unsuccessfully.This wouldn't be so much of an issue if McPherson was able to make Dandy articulate the truth in her head. But instead, Dandy is such a proper lady that she can't even bring herself to think words like "suicide" or "abortion," so instead we readers are tortured with her skirting around issues, and never saying stuff outright - even in her own brain, which the readers are privy to.This is beyond frustrating. I often had to read pages two or three times in order to understand what in the world the characters were talking about. SO ANNOYING!!!! It's vague. The whole book is vague. The ending is especially vague - there is a good, high percentage of readers, who at the end of this book, STILL DON'T KNOW who (view spoiler)[fathered Cara's baby. (hide spoiler)]
Mrs. Dandy Gilver, a sweet young society wife known mostly for her dense cluelessness, is enlisted by her friend Daisy to ask dense, clueless questions of an acquaintance who claims that her legendary diamonds were stolen during a visit to Daisy's house. Daisy hopes that Dandy, while acting under the believable cover of an unsuspecting ditzy gossiper, can uncover truths and facts to what really happened to the infamous Duffy diamonds. Very quickly, Dandy--not as daft as she is oft dismissed to be--discovers that the mystery at hand is much deeper than it first appears, and it's tightly woven with threads of family secrets that best not be tugged.I'm so picky with amateur sleuths, but Dandy won me over quickly, with her frank assessments and her level-headed self-knowledge. She knows she's not the sharpest tool in the shed, and she knows she's not exactly a maternal mother. She owns her faults and flaws, and most intriguingly for me, she's very reflective and thoughtful about the process of investigating a crime. I thought there were believable reasons for this group of characters to not involve police and other officials, and I thought that Dandy's relentless self-examination about what and how she was doing, and why, made this a strong cozy mystery.The prose delighted me. I actually found the first chapter or so a bit of a struggle, with almost impenetrable slang and references to unknown (to me) persons/places/things, but I sat up at this description of a society couple, a melancholy, gruff man and his brittle, snobby wife: "It could be no more than an unsatisfactory marriage, for I am sure that a man of his stamp must be unhappy with such a wife even if her faults are as vague as his virtues." I think I was completely sold, though, by Dandy's pondering of women and marriage: "I was beginning to put her down as one of those ladies who, even when past the age to flirt, cannot rid themselves of the idea that the husband is the head of the household and the valve--do I mean valve?--through which all must flow. I am the other kind; I know very well that husbands have all the money and all the say, really, but somehow I never remember to behave as if it were so. (The very strange thing is that if one lives one's life with this point of view, as though husbands barely exist, they do seem to fade.)"I tend to compare just about anything funny and clever (especially if it's set in the 1920s, like this book) to Wodehouse, but I think that comparison is actually quite apt. I imagine Wodehouse would have been quite delighted by a detente between characters being described as "frosty--no overnight thaw--but at the sorbet rather than the iceberg end of the scale." And who wouldn't be charmed by, on the subject of good dog grooming, the declaration that "it is simply a waste of God's considerable efforts to let a Dalmatian get dirty"? Additionally, Dandy's a member of the fluffy-headed upperclass that Wodehouse loved to skewer, and she's just about as scheming as the terrifying women Wodehouse wrote about, only a lot more sweethearted and willing to do her own dirty work, mostly.The crime at the center of this novel--the diamond theft and a subsequent murder--was dark, and the solution to it wasn't exactly difficult to figure out, but I thought McPherson did a good job with justifying how long it took to unravel (some elements don't come together until the final sentences of the book--it's not actually a cliffhanger, as some reviews attest) and with the process that it took for Dandy to figure it all out.
What do You think about After The Armistice Ball (2005)?
I really enjoyed this book! It was one of those "judge the book by its cover" picks from the library - they had a table out of mysteries and this one caught my eye because I love the 1920's. Dandy is a Scottish society wife. Now that World War I has ended, she's packed her uniform away and gone back to the usual routine as a wife and mother. Eager for an adventure, she agrees to look in to the alleged theft of from diamonds from her friend's annual Armistice anniversary ball. Soon she has more adventure than she bargained for when a young friend is murdered. I can't wait to read the next in the series!
—Catherine
It seems to me that a hallmark of 20th and 21st century literature is that not much gets explained. That is, the sort of talking to the reader to explain things (except as genuine interior monologue) such as is seen in SF, is generally absent. I'm not sure if I'm explaining what I mean very well, but this book had the same sort of feel, especially near the beginning.It also has what I think you might call a bumbling hero. Dandy (short for Dandelion) has hardly any clue what she is doing, and she wanders around awkwardly asking questions. She eventually gets to the bottom of things, but not without a lot of help and having things explained to her. This is not the sort of book where the detecting character solves the problem through sheer brilliance.I liked this book; I have a soft spot for clueless bumbling central characters, apparently. Not everyone does, though. I felt that this captured the life of the period pretty well. There were very few slips into modern diction, which is always nice. And I smiled when one of the rural Scottish characters said "redd up" — the region where I live was heavily settled by people of Scottish ancestry, and this is something that is classic Pittsburghese. (Though apparently "red up" is also Pennsylvania Dutch English. Curious.)
—Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides
Very obviously a first novel, it needed some severe editing. Chatter chatter chatter. I got the feeling the author was trying to make some obscure point about loveless marriages in the upper classes, but surely if one is married for appearances' and economics' sake, particularly, one's husband won't allow one to trot about the country with a handsome single young man for most of the book?This is no substitute for Phryne Fisher in her better moments.Set in the twenties, but some of the details are so wrong--for example, the "huge hat" Dandelion (geh) wears to the funeral. Not in the twenties dear. The cloche was all the rage, and all hats were worn close to the head. She's the mother of young boys, she couldn't be cronely enough to hang onto her old prewar hats.And that name. Dandelion--well I suppose it gives the excuse for the masculine prepschool-type nicknames "Dandy" and "Dan", but--geh, as I said before. Telling it in the first person didn't help, either.I also think the authoress forgot that in the twenties photography was not far out of its infancy; the business with the "glow" wouldn't work so well in black and white plate photography.As writing goes, there's far too much hash and rehash of clues, real and false, in the middle of the book. Round and round it goes, until the reader feels dizzy and sick. By the end of the novel I was ready to throw it across the room with impatience. And yes, I figured out who the Mystery Man was. Click here if you couldn't--and I can't say I blame you if you couldn't. (view spoiler)[Alec's older brother (hide spoiler)]
—Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)
