Book 2 of the 2026 Read Your Hoard Challenge
If you read older mysteries as I do, you get quite fond of them and their idiosyncrasies. I owned all of Kaye's mysteries in the 1980s, when they were reissued and sold through a mail order book club that I belonged to. I can't remember why I gave them away, but I have managed to reacquire them, a very satisfying accomplishment.
I smile as all the characters casually smoke their cigarettes and swill their drinks. I watch with amazement as they expect their staff to clean up after them, run errands for them, even pack their bags when they go away for a few days. In so many of this generation's mysteries, there is a pattern of insta-love that we 21st century readers tend to sneer at. How could that actually happen? But the author's note at the beginning seems to indicate that Molly Kaye set aside this manuscript on the day she met the man that she eventually married and did not pick it up again until several countries, two children, and (at last) their marriage had occurred. Her Wikipedia page reports that the husband in question proposed on 5 weeks acquaintance (and while he was married to someone else). So, it was not an unknown phenomenon.
I quite liked the espionage angle to this novel. Agatha Christie's spy stories always seem rather OTT to me, but this one of Kaye's felt more real. Yes, there are emeralds involved tangentially, but we never see them. As it happens, Kaye's father was an intelligence officer in the Indian army, probably giving her a more realistic, less romantic view of the espionage business. She knew there was more danger than glamour.
This was a visit with an old friend and a very enjoyable one. I'll be looking for more excuses to reread Kaye's books in the future.
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