The tenth Veronica Speedwell mystery comes out on Tuesday next week and so I thought I’d mark it with a post about other Edwardian-set mysteries. The first decade or so of the twentieth century isn’t as popular with authors as the period between the two wars and while nothing is quite like Veronica – in terms of the humour of Deanna Raybourn’s writing mostly – there are still a fair few books for those who want them.
The most obvious books for me to mention here are the two Gabriel Ward books which made my best books of the year posts for 2025. There is a third book coming apparently, but I’m/we’re going to have to wait a while for that – although it’s up for pre-order (and believe me I have pre-ordered it) it doesn’t have a title yet and the release date is currently late January 2027.
M C Beaton was a prolific writer under many pseudonyms and one of her lesser known series (from the pre-Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raison era) are the Harry Cartwright books, which Goodreads helpfully calls “Edwardian Mystery series”. Harry is a Boer War veteran who now helps society fix or solve difficult situations. There are four books in the series and like a lot of Beaton’s books if you read them too close together you begin to spot the formula a bit too much for comfort, but if you space them out more they’re much more fun.
I’ve only just finished The Housekeepers by Alex Hay* but I wanted to throw it in because it’s sort of tangentially related even though it’s not a mystery story per se. This is a heist story set in 1905 when Mrs King has just been dismissed from her position as housekeeper at a grand mansion in Mayfair. She decides to take her revenge, and because of her background in a shady world of con artists and thieves, she’s got the connections to do it. So she gathers a group of women around her to help her carry out an audacious plan to rob the house of all its contents during a costume ball. But as they work to carry out their plan, they discover that the house may be hiding even more secrets than they thought. This was a bit slower paced than I liked, and the comeuppance at the end happened pretty quickly, but I do like a story set in a big house – and the upstairs downstairs of this was good too. I’ve had this on the pile for ages – so long in fact that Hay’s third book is out later this year and I have been picking up the second (another crime caper) and being tempted by it only to remember that I hadn’t read the one I already had!
Lets end with the series that I’ve already written about – there’s the Lady Hardcastle books by T E Kinsey about the widow of a diplomat who makes her home in the Costwolds with her faithful maid and keeps stumbling across mysteries. Then there’s Edward Marston’s Ocean Liner series about George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Mansfield, who meet in the first book when they are on board the same ship and it all goes from there. And if you read middle grade or young adult books, there are the two connected Katherine Woodfine series – the Sinclair Mysteries and the Taylor and Rose mysteries
Happy Humpday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 