Her Majesty the Queen Investigates #4
I love this series, and with this title its excellence continues. It was originally published in the UK last year, but thanks to a change of publishers, readers in the US have had to wait until now to get their hands on it. While the central premise of Queen Elizabeth having a private secretary who helps her with undercover investigations may sound a bit silly, Bennet pulls it off thanks to her way with smart plots, great characters and humor. The Queen has access to all kinds of things, of course, but there are also topics that the people around her think a royal should not concern herself with. As portrayed by Bennett, Elizabeth loves solving puzzles, and her private secretary becomes her eyes and ears out in the world.
In the contemporary setting of the series her secretary is a London born Nigerian named Rozie Oshodi. The two women share a kind of mind meld bond, thinking the same way and working well together. This new book is a look back to earlier days, returning to the Queen of 1957, when she was a young married woman in need of a confidant who is not an old man with a white mustache. She finds an unlikely confrère in Joan McGraw, a secretary at the palace and a former code breaker who worked at Bletchley Park during the war. After receiving an unexpected promotion thanks to the pregnancy of the woman ahead of her, Joan is grudgingly appointed the Queen’s Private Secretary despite the reservations of the men in the office
Bennett, like many other excellent plotters (Allison Montclair and E.J. Copperman spring to mind), is great at setting the hook that pulls the reader through the book. In this one a prostitute is found murdered in the mews house of a high up clergyman (he uses the house for card games), wearing nothing but a tiara, with her – ahem – client found stabbed and strangled to death on the floor next to her. The tiara proves to be a rarity owned by Lord Seymour who had planned to present it to his wife on her 40th birthday. The mystery is how it appeared instead on the head of a dead prostitute.
The tiara was indeed something special – the Queen Mother (to Princess Margaret’s annoyance) muses about how she wanted to buy the lovely piece for Margaret but decided not to. The tiara may capture the Queen Mother’s interest, but the Queen’s mind is fixed on the location of the murder as well as the oddity of two people being killed without anyone on a densely packed street hearing anything. The Queen has another nagging concern, as Prince Philip had vanished for a time on the same night and in the same general area as the crime.
Among the many reasons I enjoy this series the simplest is probably that I love the Queen and enjoy reading about her. The same is true about stories of any kind about process – from The West Wing to many police procedurals. These books provide a fascinating insight into the complex task of running a huge place like Buckingham Palace. (If you are a fan of The Crown, as I am, some of the incidents in this book are covered in season 2.) I also like Bennett’s presentation of the woman who dutifully served her country for over 70 years. Appearing out of the limelight, she appears intelligent and slightly humble, keeping her sleuthing machinations in the background and letting the men around her take the credit. I’m sad to say things haven’t changed all that much in the books set decades later, though Rozie is able to operate with a bit more freedom than Joan. A royal treat, these books are simply delicious. — Robin Agnew