THE QUEENS OF CRIME

Five real-life luminaries from the Golden Age of detective fiction team up to solve a murder.

Five months after nurse May Daniels disappeared during a day trip in October 1930 from a railway station near Boulogne-Sur-Mer, a farmer finds her bloody body strangled to death. The French police, unconcerned about the damage they’re doing to the victim and her family, announce on scant evidence that May—whose companion, nurse Celia McCarthy, last saw her entering a ladies’ room she never emerged from—was a drug addict who deserves few tears. By that point, the title quintet—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Baroness Emma Orczy, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—have already sprung into action. Their original motive for traveling to France, proving themselves the equals of G.K. Chesterton and the rest of their condescending male counterparts in the newly formed Detection Club, has morphed into a deep sense of connection to the dead nurse and “an urgent quest to do right.” Working mostly with the reticent, brainy Christie, Sayers, who serves as narrator, methodically retraces May’s last movements and works backward to figure out what she was doing before she and Celia embarked on their trip. Their most promising leads implicate Louis Williams, the son of Mathers Insurance founder Jimmy Williams, as May’s benefactor, beau, and killer. But no reader who’s spent time with any of these writers’ own books will believe that the actual solution will be as simple as that.

A routine whodunit enlivened by the byplay among the author sleuths and their determination to stand up to the patriarchy.