The Saturday Morning Post (133)

  

This week we have another Georgette Heyer book, however, this time, as I teased in an earlier post, we have one of her mystery stories.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer  C+ 

This is a typical 1933 English country house murder mystery. Our amateur detective is Frank Amberly, a barrister, who is said to be the rudest man in London, and not without reason. One evening Amberly gets lost on his way to his uncle's country estate and discovers a young lady standing next to a parked car. A car with a bullet hole in it, and inside, a butler with a bullet hole in him. The lady, Shirley Brown, has a automatic in her pocket, but it does not seem to have been fired. She proclaims her innocent of the deed. Amberly believes that... but what was she doing just standing there? In any event, he leaves her presence out of his report to police, and begins to investigate just what happened and why. And so begins a rather long and elaborate murder mystery story.

The story was fine enough for what it was; a classic English murder mystery with plenty of twists and turns. Perhaps too many, and too long for my taste. And it also cheats, as we are never told what Amberly is up to in his investigation, nor what he is thinking. We are left, along with the poor police sergeant, trying to figure out what Amberly is up to. It also has, what I consider, the great failing of murder mysteries in general; a series of connected murders. Three in total in this outing. If you have to keep tossing in a new murder to keep the story ticking, you haven't constructed a compelling murder mystery. But there you go; as I said a typical classic murder mystery. While it is well written with some amusing dialog, the characters are all just off the shelf, and Amberly, is indeed, rude and unlikable, and so it lacks some of the charm of the best of these classic stories. Still, it's better than any of the modern attempts to recreate this type of story. Perhaps simply because it is a product of the time, a contemporary story that the author didn't need to research Wikipedia to write. It gets the period right.

Bottom line; it was fine, but I could put it down at any time. I'll only add that I'm not much of a murder mystery fan, so you might want to factor that into my conclusion. If you are a fan of classic whodunits, you will probably not be disappointed by this story.

I might try one more of her mysteries. We'll see.