Bright Young Dead by Jessica Fellowes

Bright Young Dead: A Mitford Murder Mystery by Jessica Fellowes --- 391 pages, including Historical Note, Sources and Acknowledgements.

Second in the projected mystery series featuring the six Mitford sisters, whom the author calls the "Kardashians" of 1920s English high society. In this second volume, Fellowes introduces us to Pamela Mitford, the second of the sisters, and the one who least enjoyed the media attention that her sisters courted by their behavior, outrageous even by the standards of the "Bright Young Things" of their day.

 During a house party to celebrate Pamela's eighteenth birthday her worldly-wise older sister Nancy invites some of her own friends and proposes a treasure hunt, one of the popular party games of the day. The guests are all scattered about the house following their clues, when a tragedy occurs: one of the guests, Adrian Curtis, falls from the bell tower of the nearby church and is killed.

His body is discovered by Dulcie Long, the maid chaperoning Adrian's sister Charlotte. Dulcie's  screams bring the others out to the scene. Charlotte collapses in shock.

Louisa Cannon, the nursery maid and sometime chaperone for Nancy and Pamela --- who readers met in the first book in the series, The Mitford Murders, has become friendly with Dulcie and can't believe it when Dulcie is arrested on suspicion of committing the murder. She knows Dulcie has a checkered past --- she was once part of a gang of female thieves in London run by the notorious Alice Diamond (a real person), but Louisa is shocked when the police search Dulcie and find she has a pocket full of expensive jewelry taken from the bedroom of the Mitford's Aunt Iris, who is visiting for the party.

Louisa is also afraid because she was the one who let Dulcie into Iris's bedroom so she could have a private meeting with Adrian, and then sent Adrian up to the room.  If the police find out the part Louisa played she will lose her job and might even be arrested as an accessory to murder.

She enlists Pamela and Nancy in her efforts to clear Dulcie and discover who really killed Adrian Curtis and why.

Meanwhile Guy Sullivan, who readers also met in The Mitford Murders, has left the railway police to take a job as a sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police. He's keen to advance, but his poor eyesight is holding him back, and he spends most of his time at the Inquiries Desk , where he meets Constable Mary Moon, one of the new female officers, also keen to succeed but relegated to minor tasks because she is only a woman.

Both Guy and Mary want to be out on the street hunting real criminals like the notorious Alice Diamond and her Forty (female) Thieves (shoplifters mostly) or the male gang from the Elephant & Castle district who fence the goods for Diamond and her girls, when not selling drugs, shaking down storekeepers, and intimidating anyone foolish enough to get in their way.

It's Louisa's knowledge of the connection between Dulcie and the Forty Thieves that convinces Guy to help her once again. But can they get enough hard evidence to convince Guy's boss, Inspector Cornish, to listen to them before Dulcie is tried, convicted and hanged for a crime she didn't commit?

Fellowes writes with familiarity about the class divide and the selfish hedonism of the upper classes during the postwar period, and the desperation that drove poor people into lives of crime.  Unfortunately she has chosen a family who, taken individually and as a whole, were entirely unedifying and morally bankrupt leeches on society, to be the center of her series.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to find out more about the real Pamela Mitford.

To find out more about the real Alice Diamond, read Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: Britain's First Female Crime Syndicate by Brian McDonald, Milo Books Ltd., October 2015.

The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes

The Mitford Murders: A Mystery by Jessica Fellowes --- 421 pages including a Historical Note, Acknowledgements and a brief Bibliography.

The facts are as follows: in January1920, Florence Nightingale Shore, a British nurse, was found murdered on a train travelling between London's Victoria Station and St. Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex. Witnesses saw a man in a brown suit  leaving the train but the police were never able to identify him and the crime remained unsolved.

Enter Jessica Fellowes, journalist and author of the Downton Abbey companion books, who has taken the bare bones of the murder and dressed it up as the first in a projected series of mysteries featuring the notorious Mitford sisters, whom she calls the "Kardashians" of British society in the first half of the 20th century.  In Fellowes re-imagining, it's then 16-year-old Nancy Mitford, eldest of the brood, who becomes obsessed with solving the crime. The (fictional) link in the book is that the Mitford's nanny's sister is a friend of Miss Shore.

An impoverished young woman running away from an abusive home life, equally improbably,  happens to be an old classmate of a girl who is friends with Nancy Mitford, and through this connection lands a job as a nursery maid for the Mitfords, where she becomes the confidante of young Nancy.  There is lots of period detail and nostalgia, but not quite enough to overcome the torturous convolutions of the plot or the stereotyped characters. 

The author's intention is to have each of the six Mitford sisters serve as the heroine of one of the books in the series.  Alas, Downton Abbey this isn't.

If you'd like to read about the real Florence Nightingale Shore, who was the god-daughter and namesake of Florence Nightingale, find a copy of Rosemary Cook's The Nightingale Shore Murder (2nd ed. 2015).

Click HERE to read an interview with the author from British Heritage Magazine.

Click HERE to read a review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read a review from Kirkus Reviews.