The Jazz Files by Fiona Veitch Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars





It’s the summer of 1920. Charlie Chaplin is in London promoting ‘The Kid’. The Jazz Age is just picking up the tempo of its swing. So, put on your shift dress and get ready to do the ‘swirly-armed’ dance: technically not, as the author explains with a satisfying knowledge of historical detail, the Charleston.

It was the year that Agatha Christie’s first published novel ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ introduced readers to Poirot, Japp and Hastings. Read by the character Poppy in ‘The Jazz Files’, it is an important reference point for period and genre, and we are similarly introduced to some of the cast of this series, which continues with the recently published ‘The Kill Fee’.

Poppy Denby arrives from the lesser-known location of Morpeth to England’s capital to stay with her aunt Dot and companion Grace, in some ways the ‘Hinge and Bracket’ of the era’s feminist movement and apparently friends of Dot’s namesake. Having a journalist protagonist was a winner for me, and we begin to see how this Methodist lass works out the ethical challenges of her profession in the grey zones of investigative reporting.

There follows a classic puzzle of working out just who did what to whom and why, and it unfolds intriguingly (as in any Poirot TV episode my wife is guessing correctly fifteen minutes in whilst I am still floundering half an hour after the closing credits). Only in Paris, for personal reasons, did I feel I wanted more of a sense of place, nevertheless, the enjoyment for me was a tour through the social history of the period that was stodge-free and fun. What emerges is a heart-felt homage to pioneers of women’s liberation.

It is a work written, amongst other reasons, to till the soil in the mainstream, where the use of the occasional ‘b’ word will be of less concern to the average MM (Murder Mystery) reader than the average MU (Mothers' Union) member, though indeed there may be considerable overlap. Tight writing, dialogue that drives the plot forward, and some ‘delicious’ writerly phrases take me back to the larger-than-life aunt Dot. She is described as looking like ‘marshmallows on layers of meringue, clothed in voluminous peach silk… squeezed into a wicker basket chair on wheels’. Very entertaining.




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