Sara Sheridan - London Calling

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not quite convincing in period or character

I'm afraid that I didn't get on very well with this book. It did have its attractions - two likeable and engaging heroines and a decent enough plot, for example - but overall it didn't quite work for me.

The story involves Mirabelle Bevan, a reluctant but brilliant and doughty investigator, trying to get to the bottom of a debutante's disappearance and the subsequent death of a friend of her redoubtable sidekick, Vesta Churchill. It's a decently plotted mystery, set in Brighton and London in 1952 - and it is the setting which is a part of the problem for me because it doesn't really ring true. Sara Sheridan gives us quite frequent period details, but they are often very unsubtly signposted. For example, "The receptionist was absorbed in a crime novel - the latest by James Hadley Chase, Mirabelle noticed..." This is utterly irrelevant to any plot or character and these clumsy intrusions disrupted the narrative for me. Despite these garish Period Signposts, Sheridan allows very un-period usages to creep in to the language - "he'd have to up his game" for example - often enough to dispel any period atmosphere, and she describes things like "a black-and-white TV" on a market stall. Specifying black-and-white really jarred (there wasn't any other kind in 1952!) and there were several similar examples.

I also found the storytelling a little clunky at times, with a couple of quite outrageous coincidences and things like Mirabelle spraining her ankle so badly that she wouldn't be able to drive, but shinning up the outside of buildings without difficulty within 12 hours, and the whole thing completely forgotten about two days later - although by then she was nipping around London interviewing people with her collarbone badly shattered and no anaesthetic, which I suppose would have taken her mind off a sprained ankle.

Taken together, these things meant that I never really got into the narrative nor quite believed in the characters or the setting. It wasn't a bad book by any means - portraying racial attitudes of the time while not making them (as they often were) so poisonously offensive to a modern audience as to make the book unreadable is a tricky balance which she deals with very well, for example. It's just that as a whole it didn't convince or involve me, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.