Madame Koska & the Imperial Brooch, by Ilil Arbel. Open Window, 2015

This is a mystery set in the years after the first World War; it is the first in a series. Madame Koska, supposedly Russian royalty who has fled from the revolution, is opening a couture house. She seems to have money, or money behind her. In the middle of opening the shop and creating a whole new line to display, she gets involved in solving the theft of a brooch that belonged to the Romanovs. No one seems to be who they claim to be, so who is telling the truth, and who has the jewels?



It wasn’t bad for a first in a series; it was short and fluffy but the plot seemed sound. Being a fashion/beading/sewing/vintage nut, I loved the descriptions of the clothing and the work the seamstresses and beaders were doing. There were a lot of characters, though, and they were very lightly touched on and I found myself getting confused as to who was who. I assume that Koska and her crew will get some character development as the series goes on. Most ‘origin stories’ are rather clumsy, being short of depth and an interesting plot, and this book does better than average.

Gatsby’s Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904-1929, by Christopher A. Snyder. Pegasus Books, 2019

This book loosely- very loosely- ties the fictional Jay Gatsby to Oxford. The author posits that being an ‘Oxford man’ is very important to Gatsby’s image and ability to enter high society; he would not be able to pursue Daisy without this in his background. The author then carries this to show that, were Gatsby a real person (and if the character had really gone to Oxford, which is dubious given some clues in the story) he would have seen certain places, met certain people, and examined certain ideas. Given that, the author then tells us about those people, places, and ideas in detail.



He tells us about the various castes that inhabit Oxford: the athletes, idealists, poets, and enlisted men. He tells us about the medievalism and romanticism of Oxford of the time. And he tells us about Tolkein, Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, Huxley, and Churchill, among many others.



The text wanders and goes into great detail. The author seemed intent on showing us every single influence that might have touched Fitzgerald (who was at Oxford with his wife, Zelda, for a few months) and Gatsby, the history of that influence, and possibly the influences brother-in-law. We get how Princeton was set up to be like Oxford, how race was dealt with, the Jazz Age, and even what businesses were run later by Oxford men. It really seemed like he was carrying things a bit far at times.



Because of this, I found some parts of the book very interesting and some, well, less so. The chapter on Tolkein & Lewis I loved, as well as the one on the Jazz age. The one on American Rhodes scholars really lost me a few times, as did the one on Princeton. I suspect many people will wish to pick and choose which chapters to read- although there is so much wandering even inside chapters one risks either missing something really interesting or being bored to tears. Four stars.

Tiffany Blues, by M.J. Rose. Simon & Schuster, 2018

While the narration starts in 1957, after the destruction by fire of the former home of Louis Comfort Tiffany, much of the action takes place in 1924 and even earlier. Painter Jenny Bell tells the story of the summer she and her best friend, rich socialite artist Mix Deering, spent in Laurelton Hall as part of a young artist’s intensive. During this eight week period, eight young artists have total artistic freedom, and at the end, the piece judged the best earns them a show at the Tiffany store.  

Jenny has a hidden past and a big secret, but she doesn’t realize that she’s not the only one at the intensive with those. As she blossoms personally, so does her palette. A love affair, and the friendship of Louis Comfort Tiffany himself, make her feel that maybe, just maybe, all could be well. It soon becomes obvious, though, that someone is out to drive Jenny away, or worse

The author has a way with description. The Laurelton Hall was a gorgeous place, decorated within an inch of its life, with multiple water features inside and out, stained glass windows everywhere, Art Nouveau trim, and stunning gardens around it. Rose paints this setting for us in glowing detail, as well as the wonderful clothing and jewelry the women wore. It almost made me cry that this building (it was real, as was the summer artist retreat) is gone and that these descriptions are the only way I have to see it. It’s a suspenseful story, and I enjoyed the characters. The story does have a very slow place, though, I think because of the focus on the descriptions. But I was quite willing to move slowly through the world of wealth and art in 1924! Four and a half stars.

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The Mitford Murders, by Jessica Fellowes. Minotaur Books, 2017

“The Mitford Murders” is a little bit of a misnomer for this book; no Mitfords were harmed in the making of this book. The Mitford family is fairly central to the book, but not in a direct way, except for Nancy Mitford, the oldest of the girls.

The two main characters- other than Nancy- are Louisa Cannon, daughter of a washerwoman, desperate to escape her Fagin of an uncle who has moved in since her father died; and Guy Sullivan, a railway policeman. Louisa and Guy meet when she jumps off a train on her way to apply for the job of under governess for the wealthy Mitford family. At the about the same moment, there is a murder on the train. Florence Nightingale Shore, recently retired military nurse, is headed to visit a friend when she is found beaten and dying in her seat. When no murderer is found and the case is dropped, Guy finds himself obsessed with figuring out who did it. Fifteen year old Nancy Mitford shares this obsession and Louisa, as Nancy’s chaperone, finds herself deep into it also. Nancy also lives in fear that her uncle will catch up with her, or that her employers will find out that she used to pickpocket for him as a child.

The amateur investigation goes slowly- as a live in servant, Louisa has little time off. Guy also has little time on his own to follow things up. Louisa, however, has the advantage that Nancy can tell her parents that she needs Louisa to go with her to this place or that, thus getting them out of the house. The investigation threads (the author alternates between Louisa and Guy’s points of view) weave in and around the daily life of living in a manor house with lots of kids and servants, chaperoning Nancy to dress makers and a dance; and Guy being bullied at home by his numerous older and larger brothers.

The murder of F.N. Shore was a real event; her murder was never solved. Obviously that won’t do for a novel, so we are provided with a killer, as well as several red herrings. I enjoyed the way the author set the story well in the period with details. Most of the story is set in the below-stairs milieu rather than upstairs- Nancy’s parents don’t make many appearances. Sadly, some of the things that made the Mitford clan unique make no appearance; the kids had their own language that they made up, for instance. Perhaps that will appear in later volumes. (I understand that there *will* be further volumes, one with each of the Mitford girls as the star. I am not sure how she will make Hitler-loving Unity a sympathetic character…) I enjoyed the book, but don’t consider it stellar- 4 stars out of 5. 

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1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age, by Frederick Turner. Counterpoint, 2003

Jazz and the 1920s are subjects I love, so I was happy to come across this book. It had lots of wonderful reviews, too, so I jumped right into it. But it took quite a while for me to feel the story; it’s a fictionalized biography of jazz coronetist Bix Beiderbecke but in the beginning it focuses just as much on the gang activity in Chicago, largely as experienced by Henry Wise (not his original name), former mechanic and driver for Al Capone, and his sister Helen/Hellie/Lulu, who is the girlfriend of Machine Gun Jack McGurn (the Wise siblings are fictional). In fact, the book starts in modern days, at the annual celebration of Beiderbecke, the Bix Fest, with Wise reminiscing at Bix’s grave. As Wise remembers, Bix moves from peripheral character to main, then the narrative viewpoint leaves Wise behind completely and becomes all Bix- but never from Bix’s actual point of view. He always remains viewed from the outside; we never get to see more than he shares with other people. And he shared very, very little. The people around him can never figure him out, can never make a real connection with him. He’s a (mostly) gentle person, and quiet a lot of the time, but he has a totally flat affect. Despite my respect for his work, I had trouble caring about him as a character in this book. But it’s not just him; the other characters don’t fare much better. We get celebrities- Bing Crosby, Clara Bow, Maurice Ravel (I never knew he liked jazz), bandleader Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong and others- but only Clara comes to life at all.

Bix was a mainly self-taught player; he couldn’t read music very well but had an incredible ear. Along with horn, he played piano. Sadly, he was an alcoholic and during Prohibition what was sold wasn’t always safe to drink. He was known to drink some stuff (alcohol with a poisonous denaturant) that ended up killing thousands of people, and it was likely that which caused his short life as much as drinking regular booze. He was only 28 when he died, having been sent to ‘dry out’ a few times by his family but always going back to booze when he got out. He was sad example of ‘live fast, die young’ and the world lost a great talent when he died.

The prose is fast paced and jerky; it barely stops for a breath. It’s like the words are doing the Charleston. While I get that this was to make the reader feel like they were in that fast paced decade, it got tiring to read. There is no real plot; it’s a telling of “and then so and so did this; then that”. I can understand why; a person’s life rarely has a plot like fiction does. I have conflicting feelings about this book; I didn’t really enjoy reading it (and thought at times of not finishing it) but I don’t feel it was a waste of time. I’m not sure if it’s the book or if I’m missing something.

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My First Time in Hollywood, by Cari Beauchamp. Wasashina & Wallace, 2015

This is a collection of short memoirs from some forty people who were in the film industry when it first started in Hollywood. It ranges from famous actors- Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Gloria Swanson-to producers and directors (lots of them), to writers, and people who furnished the sets. It even includes the infamous Will Hayes, who was brought to Hollywood to institute censorship.

These first person pieces are gleaned from various sources- magazine articles, autobiographies, oral history, letters, and lectures. They are all about the very first time each of these people set foot in Hollywood, back when Hollywood was not even really Hollywood. The dates range from 1909 to the 1929, during the time in which Los Angeles and Hollywood exploded and grew exponentially, going from deserted semi-desert to built-up phenomenon.

All but one person entered Hollywood via rail. All remember the vast, boring plains they had to travel through. All remember being rather bemused by the lack of buildings in Hollywood. It’s as much a history of the town and the industry as it is memoirs, and I found it fascinating because of that (I grew up in Los Angeles). It includes lots of  photographs, too. 

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Neither of these things influenced my review.