Book review: A Stranger in Mayfair by Charles Finch

The forty-ninth book I read in 2018 was A Stranger in Mayfair, the fourth book in Charles Finch's Charles Lenox mystery series.  Lenox is newly married to Lady Jane Grey and newly elected to Parliament, but despite the wishes of his new wife and new companions, he can't quit his hobby of amateur detecting.  The mystery this time is the case of a murdered footman in the household of a fellow MP.

The mystery isn't quite up to snuff.  As soon as the victim's room was searched in chapter nine, I knew who had done it and why, though it took Lenox all the way to the end of chapter forty-six to reach the same conclusion.  Still, Lenox and his faithful servant/private secretary Graham are pleasant companions to spend the length of a book with, enough that I'm going to forgive the infelicities about to be discussed and snatch up installment five as soon as I can find it in the used book store:

Firstly, that Finch straight-facedly makes the ridiculous claim that whist was invented in London in the early 1860s, when anyone who has ever read Jane Austen knows that it was widely played everywhere in England by the turn of the nineteenth century.  Wikipedia tells me that a book on the rules of whist was published at the club in question in 1862, but the game clearly existed prior to that.

Secondly, Lady Jane Pepper-Pottses it up out of the blue, whining about Lenox's detecting and the risks he runs while indulging the habit.  Turning the new bride into a wet blanket about the very thing that makes the protagonist interesting to the reader is a misogynist stereotype.

Thirdly, Finch tries to be a little too coy and cutesy when Lenox buys a painting in Paris during his honeymoon.

"May I ask who painted it?" Graham asked.
"A chap called Monet," said Lenox.  "Rhymes with bonnet, I think.  I never heard of him myself."

Oh, ha ha, he's a famous painter to the reader but the characters haven't heard of him yet!  Except that A) if you're speaking aloud rather than writing, you don't have to tell the person you're talking to how to pronounce the name you just pronounced;  and, B) Charles Lenox is supposedly well-read, well-educated, and widely traveled so there's no way he wouldn't know how to pronounce a French name.

And, finally, the B-plot in the novel centers around Lenox and Lady Jane's emotional decision whether or not to have children.  As badly as writers of historical fiction want to believe it, people from different eras did not, in fact, under the funny clothes, behave just like modern Westerners.  In the 1860s, conceiving a child was not a decision made by the couple, like buying a house or going on holiday; the only way to ensure that a married couple did not have children was abstinence or, alternatively, some not-terribly-reliable stabs at primitive birth control.  Unless we are to believe that Lenox and Lady Jane have, during their honeymoon and upon their return to their joined homes, newly renovated to share a bedroom, not consummated their marriage, discussion after the fact is rather pointless.  When Lady Jane (*dumb spoiler alert*) gifts Lenox a pair of puppies for them "to practice on" before deciding whether to have a child, it's the most Millennial thing she could possibly have done.