"Superladies? They're always trying to tell you their secret identity ... think it will strengthen the relationship or something like that. I say, 'Girl, I don't wanna know about your mild-mannered alter ego or anything like that. I mean, you tell me you're, uh, S-Super, Mega, Ultra Lightning Babe, that's all right with me. I'm good.... I'm good.'" -- Frozone
"Sorry, blondie, I don't do backstory." -- Flynn Rider
Because Tommy bought many of my Lord Peter Wimsey and Precious Ramotswe books as Christmas and birthday presents, Amazon tends to offer him similar books as recommendations. One of these recommendations was Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. He asked if I'd heard of it, I said no, and he decided to order it for me anyway. So it became the twenty-third book I read in 2016.
Published in 2003, Maisie Dobbs is nonetheless set in London between the wars, just like the Peter Wimsey books. We open with the titular heroine opening her office as a professional investigator. In due time, she is hired for her first case, what seems like it may be a routine job following a wife whose husband suspects her of unfaithfulness. Of course, since this is a detective novel, it turns out to be nothing so prosaic. Maisie is competent and inventive, even if her primary schtick of discerning people's moods and emotions by aping their physical posture is a bit out there. We are chugging along blithely for sixty-four pages when we run head on into a leviathan of a flashback.
Granted, the author has to know her protagonist's backstory. But frankly, I was doing fine with it all being a bit vague: Maisie has an aristocratic benefactor and a European mentor; there's reference to a tragic love story as a nurse during the WWI years; she is currently romantically unattached and good at her job. But, no, Winspear has put a lot of thought into Maisie's past, and we're going to get it all, plopped down in the middle of the tracks like a landslide.
It's not terrible. Enid is an arresting character, but she is truly the only part of Maisie's backstory that isn't predictable. Pris, Iris, and Simon are straight out of BBC Central Casting. But they're necessary for the big tear-jerking reveal at the end of the book, if not for the actual mystery they interrupt. The thing is, I respect Maisie less for her by-the-book rags-to-riches story. I can't help but think that Simon and Maisie's tragic romance would have been more affecting if it had been left more to the reader's imagination to fill in: less detailed -- and less stereotypical.
Winspear was, at least, smart enough not to tell her story chronologically and open the book with Maisie-at-thirteen. There's no way I would have made it through those 134 pages of 'Maisie grows up' if she hadn't already hooked me with Maisie grown-up.
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