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JEMIMA SHORE INVESTIGATES
by Antonia Fraser
Orion, August 2005
496 pages
12.99GBP
ISBN: 0752872907


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Antonia Fraser's work as a historian, of Tudors, Stuarts, Cromwell and early modern women is amazing. As a fan as much of Fraser's eloquent storytelling as of her research, I found it very exciting to receive for review the first three of the same author's Jemima Shore mysteries.

The heroine of several novels and two collections of stories, Jemima is a television presenter. Her popular show is called Jemima Shore: Investigator, which, as she remarks, is intended to make it seem as if she is a detective. She isn't; not professionally, but her friends' and acquaintances' uncanny knack for turning up dead compels her to turn sleuth.

In the first book, QUIET AS A NUN, the mysterious deaths take place at the convent of the Blessed Eleanor, at whose upscale school Jemima was once educated. The monastic community, which dates to the middle ages and can be read as an allegory of academia at its worst, is cleverly called the Order of the Tower of Ivory.

Jemima's no-nonsense first-person narratorial voice is a perfect counterfoil to the nuns' neo-medievalism, cattiness, and barely veiled, often frustrated, questions and desires. As Jemima tries to determine who was responsible for the death of one of the holy sisters, an old schoolfriend of hers who happens also to be an heiress, another mystery piques her attention and the reader's. It seems that the Blessed Eleanor herself and the convent's earliest financial patroness, Dame Ghislaine, had some secrets that matter to the present-day community.

QUIET AS A NUN is a great read, enriched by Fraser's knowledge of and fascination with the social history of medieval and early modern women. Having read it, I was eager to go on to A TARTAN TRAGEDY. However, that book proved disappointing in comparison.

On what was supposed to be a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, Jemima gets embroiled in a classically (or perhaps stereotypically) Scottish feud of 16th century proportions when her patron Charles Beauregard is found dead on the day of her arrival.

Beauregard and his family has been fighting with his cousins for decades, and what is at stake is the inheritance of not only the Beauregard estate, but also the title of pretender to the throne of Scotland. Yes, the Beauregards claim to be the last of the ill-fated Stuarts, and the fact that his aunt has named her dog Jacobite is an indication of the family's dreams.

I would have cared about the outcome, except that it didn't seem as if they were ever capable or interested in a cataclysmic regime change in the style of their alleged patriarch Bonnie Prince Charlie.

I kept comparing the book, probably unfairly, to Perri O'Shaughnessy's compelling legal thriller UNLUCKY IN LAW, in which the royal pretender is Russian, she's serious, and the instability of the Russian state is considerable enough to make her faction seem genuinely dangerous. In comparison, Elizabeth II's ceremonial crown seems quite secure. Fraser's depiction of the landed gentry's neuroses is interesting, but doesn't rise to the sheer insanity of MK Farrell (Molly Keane) or even Jane Austen's satires.

TARTAN TRAGEDY and A SPLASH OF RED are both told in the third person: from Jemima's point of view, but with less of her voice than the first. This introduces a passivity that seems regrettable in contrast with the stalwart heroine of the first book. The third-person telling of Jemima's seduction by a middle-aged Beauregard scion makes her resemble Jane Eyre more than Nancy Drew. Particularly when she exclaims: "Colonel Henry will soon be here to rescue me! . . . I'm expecting him. What are you going to do about that?"

A SPLASH OF RED is better, infused with Fraser's knowing attacks on the publishing culture and especially the marketing and reception of women writers. Jemima is visiting her friend Chloe, a Bloomsbury-dwelling writer of mysteries who is as famous for her numerous affairs as for her writing, to her frustration and Jemima's.

Now, having thrown out an abusive artist boyfriend whose work is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's, Chloe is looking to settle down with the right man. Then she goes missing. The plot thickens, but mainly with blue blood as Fraser once again ends up chasing up connections with a dangerously seductive aristocratic gentleman. I wish I could recall something about his character beyond that, but there wasn't much.

In the late 1979-82, when these books were first written, it must have seemed revolutionary and scandalous for Jemima to have affairs that never last, especially with married men. She is an embodiment of the sexual revolution, perhaps especially for Fraser, who received a great deal of unfair public castigation for her 20-years-plus affair with the sometime married playwright Harold Pinter.

But somehow, now, when female television presenters are frequently known for their looks rather than brains, Jemima doesn't seem much more heroic than Ulrika Johansson, and far less heroic than the Antonia Fraser whom I imagine I know from QUIET AS A NUN and her truly revolutionary non-fiction.

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, November 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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