The Picture House Murders
It’s 1929, and Clara Vale is a child of privilege who has turned her back on her father’s money and rejected marriage as a career option. Instead, she earned a chemistry degree from Oxford, but cannot find employment commensurate with her qualifications because she is a woman, and stuck in a lowly job as a librarian.
Word arrives from Newcastle that her Uncle Bob, another family outsider, has died. He has left her his estate, which unexpectedly includes a detective agency. While Clara is debating what to do with her newfound fortune, she becomes embroiled in his latest case, a fire in a cinema, put down to negligence but which he suspected to be arson. The stakes are raised when another cinema fire claims a life. Will Clara be able to take up her uncle’s legacy as a detective?
It’s a promising premise, but unfortunately not a new one. There are several literary and even TV series based around independently minded women taking up sleuthing in this general period. This tale avoids the trap of overstating the feminism, although the social attitudes depicted do seem more in tune with the 2020s than the 1920s. It’s very refreshing to have a story set in Tynemouth, and Clara is a well-drawn and engaging character. The problem is that the secondary characters are not as well developed, particularly the villains. This makes it hard to generate a sense of threat to the heroine, and even harder to create mystery about the identity of the guilty parties.
