Ambivalent Recommendation—Masie Dobbs: A book review

I put Jacqueline Winspear’s Masie Dobbs (published in 2003), the first novel in a series featuring psychologist and investigator Masie Dobbs, on my reading list on the strength of a recommendation card at my local bookstore. I am always on the lookout for a good mystery, especially a good mystery series. 

When I read a mystery, I want to relax, and there is nothing more relaxing than being able to just pick up another book in a series, knowing the world, knowing the perimeters, knowing what will be expected of me as I spend some time with a familiar character. So part of the appeal is that Winspear has published a long series. Seeing that someone has published 15 since 2003 however, also fills me with apprehension. Is the writing going to be annoyingly bad? Is the plotting going to be sloppy? Is this book going to be worth reading for me? 

So I started reading Winspear’s first book with some hope but also perfectly ready to set it aside never to be picked up again. What made me commit was the homage to PD James’ Cordelia Grey series. Less well-known than her series featuring detective Adam Dalgliesh, the Cordelia Grey series is a favorite of mine. When Winspeare introduces Maisie Dobbs as she enters her new office and has a discussion about the hanging of her new name plate, the reference to Grey is unmistakable. The parallel extends: Masie and Cordelia are both female investigators just setting off on her own, as the older men who trained them exit the scene. It was enough for me that Winspear clearly admires James, one of my personal favorite mystery writers— one so good that her characterization, scene-setting, and prose over-all transcends the genre to the point that I include her on my list of top writers. 

Winspear is not on that list. At times, as I read her first Masie Dobbs, I thought about stopping. I don’t read much historical fiction and don’t tend to enjoy it all that much, so the substantial elements of historical fiction didn’t work as well for me as they would for some readers.

The particular form that the sentimentality and over-wrought tendencies of historical fiction takes in the Masie Dobbs series may be deduced from the time period (between the wars) and the fact that Masie, as she often points out, was a nurse in France in WWI. This is a mystery set in the golden age of detective fiction, and that means tea and trains, class warfare—of a fictionally smooth variety—and of course the legacy of WWI. Interestingly, while it is the tendency towards historical fiction that almost caused me to put the book aside, the interest in a different time and place (particularly one so central to a certain kind of detective fiction) is what made me finish the book and put number two on my list as well.