Marlowe Benn

1924 and Julia Kidd has arrived in Manhatten to claim her inheritance which is due on her 25th birthday which is in a few weeks. But the death of her friend's sister Naomi Rankin changes events. Julia agrees to prove the death was murder and then she can keep her disputed inheritance.
For me there was not enough mystery in the story, but too much historical fiction. I also didn't like any of the characters, except the slight possibility of Julia's brother Philip Kidd, and then only near the end of the story
A NetGalley Book… (more)

Harlem Renaissance Detection
Review of the Lake Union Publishing hardcover (2020)

The fiction of the post-World War I era of the 1920-30's has been a long time favourite of mine. It has some of my most loved works by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It includes the "Golden Age of Crime" by writers such as Christie and Sayers. So a lost generation/jazz-age detection series combined with a love of books and publishing is like catnip to me.

The second of the series, Passing Fancies, carries on with amateur sleuth Julia Kydd investigating a murder at a Harlem nightclub where a new friend of hers is the main suspect. Singer Eva Pruitt has written a book called Harlem Angel which has been the subject of a bidding war among New York publishers. The book's manuscript is held hostage by shady nightclub owner and the retrieval of the book seems to be the motive for the crime.

As previously, Marlowe Benn adds fictionalized versions of real-life publishing characters into her historical fiction. The main examples of this were Carl Van Vechten fictionalized as Pablo Duveen and Bennett Cerf fictionalized as Austen Hurd. Publisher Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright appears as himself.

I thoroughly enjoyed this second work of what is expected to be a continuing series. The first book was Relative Fortunes (2019). It involved a mystery centred around the suspicious death of an American suffragette.

I discovered the Julia Kydd series through the excellent selection at Toronto's mystery book store Sleuth of Baker Street.

Trivia
Marlowe Benn is actually a pseudonym of writer Margaret L. Benton.… (more)