Review of The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear

From USA Today --

Jacqueline Winspear's 'Mapping of Love and Death' doesn't disappoint --

By Deirdre Donahue --
04/14/2010 --

Sometimes when you adore a series, you're terrified to crack open the next installment, fearing disappointment. Fortunately, Jacqueline Winspear's fans can rest easy. Her new Maisie Dobbs mystery, The Mapping of Love and Death, the seventh in the series, is excellent.



Begun in 2003, Winspear's series centers on Dobbs both as a character and as a symbol of the seismic upheavals — social, cultural, economic — that World War I caused in Britain. Dobbs, who comes from London slums, starts off as a maid in a great house. Her thirst for knowledge eventually lands her at Cambridge University.

She leaves that haven to volunteer as a battlefront nurse in France. The war exposes her to love and to soul-searing carnage. Marked forever, Dobbs trains as an investigator/psychologist, setting up shop in Depression-era London.

Mapping centers on an American family who have come to London after the remains of their missing soldier son, a trained cartographer, are found in France in 1932, two decades after the war. Also recovered: his diary and love letters from an unknown woman.

As Dobbs unravels the dead soldier's past, her creator brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. But the real pleasure is Winspear's insights into human beings and history.

Most moving is the way Winspear, a Brit living in California, captures the doomed young man's yearning for the sun as he sits in the mud of the Somme.

Review of Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

From The Chronicle-Herald (Canada) --

Veterans’ plight plants seeds of unrest --

By: JoAnn Alberstat --
Feb 21, 2010 --

Maisie Dobbs series brings 1930s London into view

AMONG THE MAD, by Jacqueline Winspear, begins on Christmas Eve of 1931. Londoners have little reason to be merry 13 years after the First World War’s end. The streets are full of people still hurting physically and emotionally, with the Great Depression making matters worse.

Private investigator Maisie Dobbs is reminded how desperate times are when a disabled veteran uses a grenade to blow himself up on a busy street corner as she passes by. The PI, who is also a psychologist, is soon summoned to Scotland Yard, where she learns that a senior politician has received a threatening letter. The author demands that the government come up with a plan to help the unemployed, especially veterans, within 48 hours or acts of terrorism will follow.

The Yard’s special branch team enlists Dobbs’ help, not only because of her expertise, but because she’s mentioned in the letter. The PI has no idea why her name was used but believes the case is linked to the suicide.

As the clock ticks, Dobbs’ probe takes her to veterans’ hospitals and asylums; to 10 Downing St. and Oxford University laboratories.

Despite the weighty subject matter, Winspear keeps the plot simple and moving along as quickly as the female PI. But Winspear takes time to effectively weave details about the period throughout her novel, including the industrial advances, political unrest and burgeoning women’s rights movement.

A few post-First World War mystery series exist but Winspear’s is unique in having a female sleuth. While Dobbs blazes a trail in her profession, the former wartime nurse is acutely aware of her own slow recovery from wartime wounds and losses. Her training as a psychologist also gives her an uncanny insight into the criminal mind long before profilers came along.

Winspear’s interest in the period and soldiers’ mental health is personal. Her grandfather was a Great War veteran who was badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme and suffered from shell shock.

This is Dobbs’ sixth appearance, with the seventh, Mapping of Love and Death, set for release next month.

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

Maisie's world (Jacqueline Winspear)

From The Boston Globe --

Maisie's world --

By Jim Concannon --
Globe Staff / March 3, 2009 --

Author Jacqueline Winspear splits her life between homes in sunny, laid-back California and rainy, buttoned-up England. So it seems somehow appropriate that this Thursday she'll be halfway between both places on a tour through the Boston area. (And just what does the reality of that geographical midpoint make this city? A place with unsettled weather and occasionally tense people? Sounds about right.)

Winspear is the author of a popular six-book mystery series featuring Maisie Dobbs, a British psychologist and investigator during the late 1920s and early '30s. The fictional Dobbs is a woman with institutional clout and influence, a combination that might seem unusual for the times, until you realize that Britain suffered 2 million male casualties in World War I, opening the way for women in myriad professions, often by necessity, since the shortage of men also reduced prospects for a traditional family life. To put it another way, the Rosie the Riveters who took over American factories and other businesses in World War II started flexing their biceps 25 years earlier on the far side of the Atlantic.

"This is a generation of women who came of age in a terrible time, and now they had to go forward alone, responsible for their financial security, nurturing relationships to sustain them as they grew older, and creating a place for themselves in their communities," writes Winspear. "As a storyteller, I wanted the character of Maisie Dobbs to reflect the spirit of that generation, and I wanted to use the years between the wars as a backdrop for the mysteries that my characters [who often include unstable war veterans] are drawn into."

Winspear's latest novel is "Among the Mad," in which Dobbs must race to save London from a terrorist threat. Winspear will read from her book at 7 p.m. Thursday at the First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge. For advance tickets, call 617-661-1515.

Mystery Tales of Terror, Murder and the Surreal (Jacqueline Winspear)

From The Wall Street Journal --

Mystery Tales of Terror, Murder and the Surreal --

BOOKS MARCH 21, 2009, 9:02 P.M. ET --
By TOM NOLAN --

Maisie Dobbs, the "psychologist and investigator" in Jacqueline Winspear's popular mystery series set in England in the first decades of the 20th century, is a person ahead of her time. Dobbs is an independent woman who earns her own living (and insists on being paid well), drives a sporty MG and perceives a victim within each villain. In a Sherlock Holmesian way, she practices the Eastern art of meditation; and like a modern-day profiler, she constructs a "template" of a criminal's personality and behavior as an aid to learning his whereabouts and identity.

A certain modern tinge also attaches to the London of 1931 that we see in the sixth Maisie Dobbs novel, the absorbing and exciting "Among the Mad" (Holt, 303 pages, $25). A terrorist cell stalks the city, committing grotesque acts of violence involving chemical weapons and the murder of a junior government minister. But who are the killers and what do they want? Is it a band of Oswald Mosley's fascists? An Irish Republican Army faction? The angry supporters of shell-shocked World War I veterans who have been denied pensions? Whoever the culprits are, it's clear that they "would kill to be heard."

Miss Dobbs, mentioned by name in a terrorist note, becomes a consultant to the police and to members of military intelligence; she must tread a cautious path between these rival forces in a fast-breaking case that takes her from 10 Downing St. to the meanest of London hovels. The book's puzzle is challenging, but what charms most is Dobbs herself: a woman "not as adept in her personal life as she was in her professional domain," and all the more engaging for that.

Mr. Nolan is the editor of Ross Macdonald's "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator" (Crippen & Landru).

Lady gumshoes are coming out of the woodwork (Jacqueline Winspear)

From San Jose Mercury News --

Lady gumshoes are coming out of the woodwork --

By Roberta Alexander --
Times contributor --
Posted: 03/08/2009 12:01:00 AM PST --



"An Incomplete Revenge" by Jacqueline Winspear. (Picador, $14, 324 pages). --



"Among the Mad" by Jacqueline Winspear. (Henry Holt, $25, 320 pages) --

Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator, plies her trade in England in the years after World War I. Everyone has been marked by the conflict, from villages who lost most of their young men to scarred veterans to ex-nurse Maisie herself, whose lover was left a mute shell of a man.

In "Revenge," Maisie goes into a village in Kent at the behest of a developer interested in buying a local brickworks and finds problems she didn't foresee. The residents appear traumatized, and there are tensions with both the London crew and Gypsy band that have come for the annual hops picking.

The owner of the brickworks, who fancies himself lord of the manor, is clearly not liked, but is that relevant to the other problems?

In "Mad," Maisie witnesses a public suicide, which the police believe is part of a larger plot. She works uneasily with them to seek someone with a dreadful grudge.

Both stories are complex, but Maisie, strong and smart but damaged, is worth the effort.

My Home, My Prison (Jacqueline Winspear)

From The New York Times Sunday Book Review --

My Home, My Prison --

Reviews by MARILYN STASIO --
Published: March 5, 2009 --

Jacqueline Winspear carries on her champion work on behalf of traumatized war veterans, “men who are still waiting for their armistice,” as she puts it, in AMONG THE MAD (Holt, $25), the sixth novel in an outstanding historical series featuring Maisie Dobbs, a battlefield nurse in World War I who has gone into practice as an investigative psychologist in postwar London. By 1931, England has finally begun emptying its mental institutions of the 80,000 men who’ve been given a diagnosis of shell shock, while ignoring those “who are in a cell in their mind.” But when one of these walking wounded detonates a grenade on Christmas Eve, Maisie is tapped for a government investigation into terrorist groups that recruit mentally unstable veterans to carry out their anarchist agendas.

Maisie may have tenuous credentials for serving in such high-powered company, but Winspear uses her visits to hospitals and mental asylums to document the outdated protocols used for treating war-damaged psyches. Like Maisie, the novel’s storytelling style is efficient and humorless, but deeply empathetic.

Maisie's world (Jacqueline Winspear)

From The Boston Globe --

Maisie's world --

By Jim Concannon --
Globe Staff / March 3, 2009 --

Author Jacqueline Winspear splits her life between homes in sunny, laid-back California and rainy, buttoned-up England. So it seems somehow appropriate that this Thursday she'll be halfway between both places on a tour through the Boston area. (And just what does the reality of that geographical midpoint make this city? A place with unsettled weather and occasionally tense people? Sounds about right.)

Winspear is the author of a popular six-book mystery series featuring Maisie Dobbs, a British psychologist and investigator during the late 1920s and early '30s. The fictional Dobbs is a woman with institutional clout and influence, a combination that might seem unusual for the times, until you realize that Britain suffered 2 million male casualties in World War I, opening the way for women in myriad professions, often by necessity, since the shortage of men also reduced prospects for a traditional family life. To put it another way, the Rosie the Riveters who took over American factories and other businesses in World War II started flexing their biceps 25 years earlier on the far side of the Atlantic.

"This is a generation of women who came of age in a terrible time, and now they had to go forward alone, responsible for their financial security, nurturing relationships to sustain them as they grew older, and creating a place for themselves in their communities," writes Winspear. "As a storyteller, I wanted the character of Maisie Dobbs to reflect the spirit of that generation, and I wanted to use the years between the wars as a backdrop for the mysteries that my characters [who often include unstable war veterans] are drawn into."

Winspear's latest novel is "Among the Mad," in which Dobbs must race to save London from a terrorist threat. Winspear will read from her book at 7 p.m. Thursday at the First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge. For advance tickets, call 617-661-1515.