A lady sleuth in high dudgeon (Jacqueline Winspear)

From Toronto Star --

A lady sleuth in high dudgeon --

Apr 19, 2009 --
By Jack Batten --

In the wake of World War I, investigator Maisie Dobbs can't ignore the neglected plight of Britain's shell-shocked warrior veterans.

Among the Mad -- by Jacqueline Winspear --

For a woman not much past 30, making her way in London a dozen years after the end of World War I, Maisie Dobbs leads a more vivid life than 99 per cent of the English population. Even the title she gives her professional activities – Psychologist and Investigator – sounds exotic for the time.

Maisie is the sleuth figure in Jacqueline Winspear's series of crime novels, now up to five books with the new Among the Mad. From the beginning of the series, Winspear has taken elaborate care in dressing up Maisie's biography with uncommon experiences and generous touches of the outré.

As a child, little Maisie absorbed the legacies of her gypsy maternal grandmother and her costermonger father. In her early teenage years, she worked as a lowly servant in a viscount's Belgravia mansion. The bountiful lady of the house, discovering Maisie's intellectual brilliance, saw to the girl's education and did a Pygmalion on her working-class accent.

Still very young, Maisie served as a nurse on the Western Front in the First War. A German attack left her severely wounded. Even worse, the attack knocked her beloved, an army doctor, into a coma. The poor fellow never came back to consciousness, living in a clinic on tubes and respirators until his death 12 years later in the series' fourth book, An Incomplete Revenge (2008).

Maisie, in perpetual mourning, pushed on with her education after the war, studying at Cambridge. She also picked up valuable lessons from a colourful group of mentors. An instructor named Basil Khan, a chap with mystical inclinations, gave her lessons in "the stilling of the mind." (Today we'd probably label it meditation). An aged Roma taught her how to douse for gold and silver (a handy talent in tracing the loot from burglaries). Maurice Blanche, a philosopher, psychologist and man of many secrets, kept her up to date on the new forensic sciences.

Maisie's single flaw is that, in the transition from working class to upper crust, she hasn't got the speech thing quite right. Sometimes her phrasing makes her sound like a twit. Instead of just saying, "I'm doing a good job," she announces, "I'm executing my duties effectively." Where "finish my assignment" would be perfectly OK, she says, "secure an end to my work."

Winspear writes her books in the antique phrasing of someone under an Agatha Christie misapprehension. "Suffice it to say" is how characters in the Dobbs books often begin their comments. People are "taken aback" and work themselves into "a high dudgeon." Men are "chappies" and women are "lasses." The words "cleave" and "garner" and "garb" turn up as verbs.

Despite the tin-eared phrasing, Winspear takes on a serious purpose in her books, and it's this successfully realized ambition that gives the series its appeal. Though far from a professional historian, Winspear has a few things to say about the First War. She's concerned with reminding us about the horrors of that singularly horrible event, but her focus is much more on the cruelties that many British soldiers suffered long after the shooting ended.

The neglect these men endured occurs as an implicit theme throughout the Dobbs series, but it becomes explicit in Among the Mad. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers came out of the war suffering from what was called shell shock. The shelling, death and suffering on the battlefields left them half mad, but when they returned home, their country offered them a hearty handshake and little else.

The government pressured army doctors to discharge these men swiftly. Soldiers with physical wounds received small pensions, but shell-shock victims with no marks on their bodies received nothing from their government. Many of them, homeless, were left to the streets. It appears to be one of these abandoned souls who lies at the heart of Maisie's case in Among the Mad.

Somebody is threatening harm to Britain's Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his fellow cabinet members. The unknown person, who backs up his words with actions that show he means business, makes it clear he's operating in the interests of shell-shock victims around the country.

Since Maisie has begun to establish a reputation as a forensic whiz, the cops ask her to lend her expertise to the investigation. The book settles into a nice little whodunit of the cozy school, but the matters of the shell-shocked soldiers and Maisie's sympathy for them add special resonance to the story.

A couple of subplots involving regular characters in the series work the same area of tragedies lingering from the war. Maisie's friend Priscilla, despite her status of wealth and privilege, still faces mental problems brought on by the deaths in battle of her three brothers. Maisie's assistant Billy Beale, a London east ender and former soldier, is facing depression issues in his own family.

But it's the narrative of Maisie's case that makes the book so moving for its glimpses of a grim piece of British history, even if parts of the story are told in twit-speak.

Jack Batten is a Toronto novelist, author and freelance writer. His Whodunit appears every two weeks