Common or Garden Crime

A solid late Golden Age murder mystery, which gains some additional interest from the fact that it's set in Ireland. I've read some of this genre/period before by Irish writers, but none to my knowledge ever set the action in Ireland. Here Sheila Pim creates the small community of Clonmeen, which for now is a rural village but which will, I'm sure, within a decade or two become swallowed up by the advancing sprawl of Dublin. The main character, Lucy Bex, is a gently inquisitive spinster from a middle-class Church of Ireland background, as are most of the others. While this is not trying to be a political book with a capital P, I was fascinated by the way that Pim addressed (or mostly gently diverted away from) issues of identity and show more politics, and what seemed to be to her markers of sectarian difference. That kind of sociological interest added some heft to a whodunnit that otherwise unfolds competently. show less

Another Rue Morgue Press title. I'm so grateful to them for bringing these back to print. 1945 mystery in Ireland. I enjoyed.