Sparks & Bainbridge #7
This is one of the best series going at the moment, and even though it’s the seventh, this installment retains the freshness and originality of the very first. It follows the adventures of Gwen Bainbridge (a widowed socialite) and Iris Sparks (a former WWII spy), who together run The Right Sort, a marriage bureau in central London. It’s now 1947, and as London recovers from the horrors of war it still finds new things to celebrate, like the dawn of a new technological miracle – television. Gwen’s beau Sally, a giant sometime playwright, works at the BBC, and is willing to take Gwen, Iris and Gwen’s son and cousin on a tour of the studio.
And thus Montclair inserts the reader and characters into the BBC, the setting for the crime, with a typically deft hand. When a female corpse is discovered during their tour, things become complicated, because the woman, a French dancer at the BBC in the country for a couple of weeks for a broadcast, had previously appeared at the marriage bureau looking for an instant husband.
Another complication appears in the person of Mike, the police detective investigating the case, who also happens to be Iris’s former beau. They have a rough time working together, but when Sally emerges as the main suspect, they all forget their differences and unite. Iris suffers too, as she’s lost Archie (this is not a spoiler as it’s the first sentence of the book) and is drinking far too much. She’s living alone on a narrowboat in the Thames and grieving as she works her way through Archie’s glorious wine stash.
This book has a typical Montclair set up, and the plot is a complex affair of intersecting characters and coincidences, brought to life by a portrayal of the nascent BBC. Their headquarters was the Alexandra Palace – known to all as the “Ally Pally” – where one of my favorite characters spends his days working methodically through buckets of colored glass shards, reassembling the famously beautiful Palace rose window which was shattered by a wartime bomb. While this book isn’t set during the actual war, there are many reminders, emotional and otherwise, that keep its memory front and center.
While Iris is alone, Gwen has at last established her own household, enjoying her new relationship with Sally and reveling in both her independence from her in-laws and the lunacy court. Over the course of the series, the yin and yang of Iris and Gwen’s friendship has tied things together in a really delightful way.
The mise en scene is all I’ve come to hope for in this wonderful series, overflowing with Nazis, the resistance, undercover work, French can-can dancers and puppets. The denouement, orchestrated by Gwen, is bravura as well as emotional, and this series fires on all cylinders to another winning finish line. — Robin Agnew