Catherine Aird (1930–2024)

'The Complete Steel' is a very lighthearted piece, almost cartoonish in its depiction of the English aristocracy. In terms of tone, the word 'droll' comes to mind. No grief, angst or terror here. Just a clever puzzle, and lots of dry, sardonic humour, mostly generated by the vast difference in the lives of aristocrats and just about everyone else.

The opening, which has a coach party visiting a reluctantly open-to-paying-peasants Stately Home, beautifully sets the stage for the gap between show more normality and life at a stately home. Having the coach party find the fresh corpse of a member of the household inside a suit of armour on display in the dungeon was a stroke of brilliance.

'The Complete Steel' is only 200 pages long and the case is solved within forty-eight hours which makes it a quick light read that I found very relaxing.

The plot has more twists than I expected and successfully mislead me about what was going on for most of the book and then delivered an ending that was both completely plausible and worthy of Scooby-Doo.

I think Catherine Aird's tongue was firmly in her cheek as she wrote this but she still delivered a good mystery. She also educated me on who churls are and what is kept in a muniments room. show less

I whizzed through this second Inspector Sloan book in a single car journey and was so immersed in it that I didn't mind being in an almost immobile queue of traffic for large parts of the trip. 'Henrietta Who?' has the same police personnel as 'The Religious Body' and it depends upon a cunning trap at the end to get the villain but otherwise it has little in common in either content or tone.

I was propelled through the book partly by the novelty of the idea: that a violent death reveals that show more Henrietta, a young woman approaching her twenty-first birthday, is not who she has been raised to believe she was. The subsequent investigation is as much about finding out who Henrietta is and why she was given a different identity as it is about investigating the violent death.

The pieces of the puzzle are revealed one at a time and with great dexterity. I enjoyed the view that they gave me of rural England in 1968, when World War II was a childhood memory for the youngest character, while the oldest one served in the Boer War, and when 'murder by motor vehicle' was rare enough to feel novel.

I can see that Catherine Aird is going to become a go-to author for comfort reads. Her ideas are original. Her storytelling has a light touch that keeps the plot moving without making it feel forced. Her humour, which plays upon the many ways in which we misunderstand each other, is mostly kind. Her close observation of people and places grounds her stories, making them easy to relax in.

She has also contrived a clever way to prevent the exposition needed to solve a puzzle from becoming tedious by providing Inspector Sloan with two foils to discuss the case with: his not-stupid but sometimes slow to see inferences and consequences young DC, who needs coaching and his micro-managing, usually impatient boss who is always looking for the quick solution, even when the solutions contradict one another. It seems to me that when Sloan is talking to either of these two, he's the voice of the author tickling the reader to work things out for themselves. Aird softens the edge of this kind tickling by imbuing both relationships with an attitude of long-suffering humour from Sloan.

Aird's novels are bite-size things, almost novellas by modern standards, so, to me, they're like watching an episode of a clever police series where the detective solves a new mystery in a new setting every week.

I'm expecting to consume of alot of them over the coming months. show less

By the time I finished this book, I was enjoying myself and realised that I'd found another series to read (there are currently twenty-seven Inspector Sloan books, so that gives me plenty to add to my TBR).

But I didn't really relax into the book until the second half because I strongly disliked what I saw as the book's attitude towards the nuns at the centre of the story. I kept telling myself that the sneering, dismissive way the nuns were talked about by the police was just a reflection of show more the times (the book was published in 1966). Perhaps it's a result of being raised as a Catholic, but I couldn't reconcile the fact the I was supposed to see Inspector Sloan as an educated, sophisticated man, with a dry wit and yet he seemed to have no respect for a life of prayer and reflection and instead of seeing it as a valid choice driven by spiritual need, he tended to dismiss a nun's life as either unnatural or a waste.

This annoyed me so much that it took me a while to notice the changes in Sloan's attitudes and behaviour as he gained an understanding of the daily lives of the Sisters. By the end of the book, Sloan clearly has a lot of respect for the nun running the convent, even if he still struggles to understand why anyone would choose the religious life.

I think Catherine Aird did a good job of displaying the attitudes of the time without necessarily accepting them and that she portrayed the nuns themselves as a diverse set of people who, even when trying to live a life that subjugates the self, remained distinct personalities with their own approach to a life of prayer.

One of the things that helped me relax in the second half of the book was that the plot suddenly took off. There was a second body and a plethora of suspects and motives. The ending was surprising and clever and quite dynamic for a book that had felt a little static at times.

So, although this book showed its age and some of the humour felt more like aggression, I was impressed enough that I'd like to see how the series develops. show less

A cozy mystery that is surprisingly chauvinist for a publication of 2005. But then, it was set on an old-fashioned golf course, with a lot of pompous old guys. I enjoyed how the golf-ignorant Inspector Sloan compared all the rules and traditions with his preferred hobby of growing roses.