Customer Reviews

A summer in the twenties

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It's a shame there are no other reviews here. This is one of Peter Dickinson's best non-series adult 'mysteries.' The quote marks are necessary because he never does just one thing in his books, and the mystery is often framed completely differently than the genre dictates. Here he's really exploring the nature of class differences and giving a skimpy but revealing reinterpretation of Marxism--and also love. But don't get put off by that. The story moves, the characters are interesting and the exploration of them gets to some depths, and some scenes are delights. I think Dickinson is the best, or at least most creative, mystery writer there is, and this book is in his top 10. That puts it a notch above anything by Dick Francis (whom I like a lot), all of Sue Grafton, nearly all of Dorothy Sayers, nearly all of Laurie King (ditto for all of them).... And Dickinson is many orders of magnitude better than hacks like Patterson, Grisham, etc.

I went thru a phase where I was reading everything about the decade of the 1920's, and this ereditely-written mystery novel was one of the better "modern" novels I read. It's British, so it's an interesting look at what was going on across the pond at the time, what with railroad strikes and class-conflicts.

I read Dickinson's lovely, lyrical text alongside a non-fiction book, "That Jazz!: An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties" that I also highly recommend for those who like their fictions in contexts.

I tried to read this, but just couldn't get into it. It was hard to differentiate the characters and there was no tension. I found myself not caring what happened, so I stopped reading at page 50.