The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge

Mystery reading this week: The puzzle of Blackstone Lodge  by Martin Edwards, first published 2022. Set in the 1930s, this book is crammed with culture and drama — food, wine, fashionable and not fashionable clothing, motor cars, household situations, complicated relationships, unexplained disappearances, and murders of course. It’s a good mystery, more or less in the style of the well-known writers of that era: I’m thinking Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. Like the locked room mysteries of early mystery writers, it’s very complex, with many characters, constantly shifting motives, and vast numbers of clues. The most amazing portrayal is that of a spiritual medium who possesses highly effective methods of seemingly offering contact with the dead to bereaved customers  — and charging them very high prices. The gradual revelation of the reality of this character and the discovery of how she is able to be such an effective medium is masterful.

Finally after several murders and much effort to find the murderers and their motives, there’s a very long denouement in a very unusual setting. Finally, in this scene and one more conversation, the author reveals the perpetrators — both suspected and unsuspected. The young woman amateur detective, Rachel Savernake, masterminds the entire final revelation. Although the novel is complex — even over-complex and maybe a bit too long — it’s a readable tale, and it amuses me that the author, writing in the present time, the 2020s, returned to so many classic mystery novel conventions.

A Bottle of Wine

“Jacob reclined on the settee in the sitting room of Gaunt House. Nell Fagan’s death had ruined his day, but a glass of Château Pavie 1921 provided a touch of solace. He was no wine buff, but it was the most stunning Bordeaux he’d ever tasted. … Jacob washed down Hetty’s shepherd’s pie with more than his fair share of the Château Pavie.” (p. 186-189)

Ah, yes, the pleasure of visiting a grand household that hasn’t lost its money in the Depression. I don’t know what the wine was worth then, but I’m sure it was expensive. (The bottle depicted here is available, believe it or not, for around $3500, though it may have lost some of its flavor in the past century or so.) 

UPDATE: in response to comments — to repeat, the price of a surviving bottle of the 1921 vintage TODAY is very high, but that wouldn’t have been the price in the 1930s when the book is set. Today a recent vintage is around $400.

Quite a few scenes of food and drink contribute to the atmosphere of this novel, and I always love to see how the author employs food details as a way to enhance atmosphere and character development. 

In sum: I found this to be a good read, even if very complicated and drawn-out. Above all, I am highly impressed at the vast number of loose ends that are explained in the final chapters.

Review © 2023 mae sander