The best books about amateur sleuths – with a difference

An Edwardian lady with a mysterious past… a Welsh maidservant with attitude… plus a body in the woods and a whole host of suspects—what more could you want from a cosy crime? I love this first book in T E Kinsey’s Lady Hardcastle series as the eponymous Emily, as seen through the eyes of her devoted maid Flo, is not your average high society lady. With a murky and secret past that gives her all the skills she needs to solve murders, Lady Hardcastle is not only clever but downright hilarious, too. Definitely one for those who like a bit of cheek with their cyanide and a whole heap of humour with their hemlock!

Arthur Bryant and John May might not be ‘amateur’ sleuths, but they are oddballs, assigned to the Peculiar Crimes Unit, an offshoot of the Metropolitan Police set up to deal with crimes of a sensitive and possibly inflammatory nature. In this first book, Bryant and May are young men and the Blitz of London’s West End is the setting, but in subsequent books in the series the pair are in their 80s and still using all the tricks they know to solve their cases, be it consulting mediums and white witches, perusing the most obscure of books or delving into the very bowels of the great city they call home. 

Unlike anything that I’d read before, this book sucked me in with its distressingly intriguing premise; that the amateur detective will inhabit the body of a different character in the book, waking up each morning to the same day in which Evelyn Hardcastle will die, unless the detective can solve the murder. Whether he’s the butler, the doctor or his Lordship himself, all the detective can do is piece together the mystery while the sinister plague doctor who lurks in the corners of his mind offers scant advice. Chilling and thrilling in equal measure with a good dose of supernatural suspense thrown in.

Amateur sleuths tend to be drawn from the professional or upper classes—Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, even my own Hon Cressida Fawcett—so it’s refreshing to solve cases with Lena Szarka, a Hungarian cleaner who has a clear moral compass and a way of finding out exactly what’s lurking in the dirty laundry—both literal and metaphorical. Headstrong, big of heart, and desperate to solve the death of her friend, Lena can spot a smudgy fingerprint at fifty paces. This book is the first in a limited series and well worth settling down with—just put a coaster under your mug and pick up your own biscuit crumbs, else Lena might have a word…

I have to admit I saw the cover of this book and was smitten… then I discovered what makes this crime novel and its amateur sleuth a little bit different. Josephine Tey revisits the scene of a death at Charleston Farmhouse in 1915, and now, twenty years later, she realises that it might have been more sinister than ‘just’ an accident—and she, who was there at the time, might be implicated in the murder herself. Josephine Tey, as well as being the book’s protagonist, was also the real-life pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh, who wrote eight murder mysteries as Tey. That Upson has so cleverly fictionalised the real-life Tey is what makes this book, and the others in the series, so different—brilliantly so, in my opinion.