Bodies from the Library. Georgette Heyer

Чтение книги онлайн.

       GEORGETTE HEYER

      Georgette Heyer, unquestionably one of Britain’s best-loved historical novelists, was born in 1902. She began her career as an author at the age of 19 with the novel The Black Moth, an exciting story about highwaymen set in the eighteenth century, which Heyer had expanded from a short story written to entertain her brother. It was the first of what would eventually be more than fifty novels, the vast majority of which dealt with the Georgian and Regency periods of British history.

      While views differ as to the extent to which her books trod new ground rather than reviving scenarios and ideas from Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer was extremely popular and she remains so today, loved in particular for her lively and compelling characters and for the comedy and humour with which her novels are peppered. As a critic put it in 1929, Heyer’s historical novels ‘are not historical [and] they are not novel, but they are very good fun’.

      The same can be said for the dozen novel-length ‘thrillers’, as she called them. The crimes with which these are concerned were considered by some contemporary critics, among them Dorothy L. Sayers, to be largely unoriginal but, as with her much more popular historical fiction, Heyer’s crime fiction was consistently praised for her rich characterisation, vivid dialogue and warm humour. Her dozen detective mysteries are regularly reprinted and some in particular have real merit, in particular A Blunt Instrument (1933), Death in the Stocks (1935) and Envious Casca (1941), a clever locked room mystery. Unlike her historical novels, Heyer’s detective mysteries did not require extensive research, and they were for the most part based on plot outlines provided by her husband, the eminent lawyer George Rougier. Heyer’s interest lay mainly in the characters and she would routinely seek Rougier’s advice when it came to unravelling the mystery in the final chapters and ensuring she had ‘played fair’ throughout the novel.

      Heyer was a very private person, once saying that her readers would find all they needed to know about her in her books, which she considered as, ‘unquestionably, good escapist literature’. A heavy smoker, she died from lung cancer in 1974.

      Georgette Heyer’s only uncollected detective short story, ‘Linckes’ Great Case’, was first published in the very rare magazine, Detective, on the 2nd of March 1923, and I am very grateful to the bookseller Jamie Sturgeon for providing a copy.