Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten

In season four of Downton Abbey, Dame Maggie had the pitch-perfect line, "If I were to search for logic, I would not look for it in the English upper class." Lady Pamela Hicks's Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten lends credence to that advice. Pamela's parents, the reader learns in the opening pages, each have lovers who live with the family and take delight in presenting their young daughters with such pets as wallabies, lions, and bears. Her experiences are light years from anything most readers will have experienced: her father, one of Queen Victoria's grandsons, was the last viceroy of India and Lady Pamela herself was one of Queen Elizabeth's bridesmaids - and later served as lady-in-waiting on her tour through the Commonwealth.

As is often the case with memoirs, the book becomes richer and more engaging as the author ages and the memories become clearer and more meaningful. The earliest chapters of Daughter of Empire are the least interesting, except in terms of voyeurism, as I've already mentioned. It begins to gain steam as World War II breaks out and Pamela and her older sister Patricia are sent to New York City, where they live as guests of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. The war also has the affect of making Pamela's mother, the heiress Edwina Ashley, into a serious person, who becomes much more sympathetic and likeable. 

It is the post-war years, though, that are the meat of this memoir. These are the years when the Earl of Mountbatten serves as viceroy and Pamela finds herself in the whirl of history, with Gandhi making regular appearances, for example. These are also the years when Princess Elizabeth marries Pamela's cousin, Philip, when Pamela accompanies the young couple on a tour of Africa, during which Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth, and then when Pamela serves as lady-in-waiting on a the round-the-world royal tour that begins in the Caribbean and ends in Gibraltar. 

Ultimately, I enjoyed this peek into the last years of the great Empire. In that sense, it is similar to Elizabeth the Queen, only much shorter. I wished the epilogue had mentioned the most famous - and most tragic - episode in the Mountbatten family, that of the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and other members of the family by the IRA in 1979. This a very minor quibble, though, and one that is easily overlooked.

Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey is the Countess of Carnarvon's second book chronicling the lives and times of the inhabitants of Highclere, aka Downton Abbey. The family at the center of this book is that of American-born Catherine, who was descended of two of New York's first families, the Wendalls and the Lowells as well as the first family of the south, the Lees, and the sixth earl, known to all as Porchey.

Unlike Prochey's parents, Lady Almina and the fifth earl, Catherine and Porchey seem to have been rather unhappy. This might have had more than a little something to do with his inveterate womanizing. Of course, the years following the Great War were not easy ones for the heirs of the great houses, and what the Roaring Twenties wrought came due in the form of the Great Depression and World War II, the latter of which features especially prominently in this book. (As a side note, the Countess's first book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, covers the reign, if you will, of the fifth earl, which coincided with World War I.)

One of the aspects of Lady Catherine that I really enjoyed was the warts-and-all treatment of the principle characters. The Countess has endeavored to give her readers a true portrait of the family and the events that affected them, rather than creating a glowing and distorted one. Porchey, for example, does not come off particularly well - he is a poor money manager, a questionable judge of character, and a cheating husband (though a generous ex). And one assumes that his image has softened with the passage of time. Catherine struggles with alcohol and loneliness - more than once she escapes the world by entering a monastery - though she can also be quite spunky in a Debs at War kind of way.

Although I preferred Lady Almina to Lady Catherine, this is still an interesting and worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in English great houses and history. Also, the photos are really great.

Death of a Dyer

Will Rees and Nate Bowdith were childhood friends in pre-Revolution Maine until they had a falling out during the war that was never patched. Twenty years late, Nate is dead, his son is suspected of murder, and Will has been asked to investigate. The subplot is Will's relationship with his son and his housekeeper, a former Shaker whom he may or may not wish to marry.

Eleanor Kuhns has constructed a great mystery in Death of a Dyer, which kept me turning the pages far more quickly than I'd intended or expected. (Nate was a dyer, which was an actual craft/profession before you could simply walk into the Gap and come out with every shade of the rainbow in every fabric imaginable. But I digress.) I prefer my mysteries truly mysterious, that is to be unable to guess the killer (because it's almost always a killer) before all is revealed in the last pages, and in that sense Death of a Dyer did not disappoint. I was utterly off the mark, although looking back, I shouldn't have been - another hallmark of great mystery writing.

I will say that I was disappointed with the historical aspect of the novel. I chose this in no small part because of the time period and, while ha'pennies and buggies abound, I didn't feel particularly connected to the time period. More disconcerting, I couldn't ever really figure out the duration of the events in the novel - did all of these things happen in a week? A month? Six weeks? Hmph. And finally, I was confused by the choice of Will Rees to investigate the murder - he has been absent from the little town of Dugard, Maine, for so long that he is unable to recognize many of the people he grew up with (he is a traveling weaver), and yet he's been handpicked for this task. It's all a bit baffling really. (Until I learned that Death of  Dyer is part of the Will Rees series - so he's a bit like Hercule Poirot, I gather, without the obsession with "little gray matter.")

If you can move beyond the issues above, as well as the While this is not the greatest mystery I have ever read, (an honor that still belongs to Dame Christie, with Bury Your Dead not too far behind), I do feel it deserves more than the three-and-a-half stars it currently has (out of five) on Amazon.The mystery, as I said in the beginning, is solid, the characters are generally interesting, and the story beyond the mystery is engaging. Four stars (out of five).

The Lincoln Deception

David O. Stewart's historical mystery is built around the premise, some might say conspiracy theory, that John Wilkes Booth was not simply a madman bent on revenge in the name of Dixie, but was a paid operative in a plan hatched by men at the highest levels of the Confederacy - and the Union. Jamie Fraser, a small town doctor from Ohio, and Speed Cook, a former black professional baseball player turned newspaperman, embark on a journey to prove Booth's motives following a deathbed confession by former congressman John Bingham.

Fraser and Cook are an unlikely pair, and their adventures as The Lincoln Deception unfolds become increasingly unlikely (without giving anything away, I will say that the "realism" score feel off for me entirely around the time of their Baltimore steamer escapades). That said, the book does have at least one strong commonality with another Lincoln fiction, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, in that both are highly readable, if far-fetched. In fact, I read this is a single go, while sitting in an airport late last week waiting for a flight that was delayed some 8 or 10 hours. It has that going for it: you can pick it up, keep turning the pages, and a few hours later discover the story has flown by and you're about to the end of the mystery.

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times

Although focusing on those at the polar opposite end of the spectrum, Servants, in the style of Debs at War, is an anthropological text (for lack of a better term) that delves into the history of service, and more importantly servants, in Britain. Lucy Lethbridge makes extensive use of the many, many memoirs that have been written and interviews given by those who were in service as well as those who employed parlourmaids, charwomen, and the like. Although butlers and chauffeurs make the requisite appearance, those jobs typically done by women are the real focus of the book; Lethbridge explains more than once that although men formed the backbone of service prior to the nineteenth century, after that time, the majority of those in service were women.

The most interesting chapters are those that focus on the experiences of a specific servant (or two or three). The first-hand accounts are certainly the richest. Lethbridge also includes a couple of very readable chapters on service in the Empire, particularly India, and on the experiences of German-Jewish or Austrian-Jewish women who came to Britain on service visas to escape Nazi Germany. Lethbridge's wide use of literature as supporting material was, for me, less meaningful.

Reading this on the heels of The Assassination of the Archduke, I found myself constantly comparing Viennese and British society, the role of servants, and the like. This is an enlightening read, certainly, but a heavy one that often feels more academic in nature than leisurely. The reader with a less academic and more personal interest in service in England should consider Eric Horne's What the Butler Winked At: Being the Life and Adventures of Eric Horne, Butler to be the definitive work in this area. Horne, by the way, was a butler to gentry for 57 years. He knows of what he writes.