Elegy for Eddie

This installment is the 9th in the Maisie Dobbs series and the first I read. It will most probably be my last.

The fact that I hadn't read the previous books didn't affect my knowledge of the story, because the author likes to remind us of Maisie's past. That's all well and good, naturally. But then, it happens for the second time. And once more. And when it happened again, I had to drink two mugs of hot coffee to keep on reading. Or watch a thriller. That was the main problem of the narrative. The repetition was out of proportion, actually. I don't need to read about her life in the past more than once, I got it the first time, I'd like to think I am not stupid. I don't need a pack of pages repeating Maisie's doubts over ler love life with the least interesting character in British Literature. Seriously, a paragraph 1/3 into the novel is repeated three times during the 300-plus pages with different words. It was frustrating to say the least. The same problem took over the mystery Maisie Dobbs is called to solve. Although the crime story was plausible and unpredictable enough, I could do with 80-100 pages less, and without the tedious dialogues. Which brings me to the second major fault of
Elegy for Eddie.

The interactions between the characters are written in a wooden, stale way, and I had the feeling I was reading repeated (as in boring) monologues. More often than not, while in discussions with each other, the characters seem to give external voice to their inner thoughts, something that I find unrealistic. The characters themselves are nothing to write home about. Maisie Dobbs is passable at best. She is clever and persistent, and I appreciated the fact that she doesn't like to be patronized by men, especially that boar of a boyfriend of hers, James. Can someone explain the maths of the reason she stays with him, and doesn't leave him once and for all?. He is a total joke. Soapy, patronizing, and completely unsuitable for her, or any other woman for that matter. The only characters I enjoyed were Sandra, Inspector Caldwell and Maisie's father. And that's about it.The only redeeming quality of the novel is its historical context, set a few years before the nightmare with the name Adolf Hitler spread his shadow of death all over he world.

So, all in all, another failed attempt of mine to find a good British cozy mystery. Colour me disappointed and disillusioned with the genre. Let us hope that the Mary Russell series will be better...