A review of A Knife for Harry Dodd by George Bellairs – republished in ebook

A very hard book to review…

I had a hard time figuring out how to review A Knife for Harry Dodd, by George Bellairs.

On the one hand, the writing is sharp and engaging; the plot drew me in and kept me reading; there was a strong sense of place, which I like in a novel; and there was a fair amount of the dry British humor that I like so much.

But…but…but…

I had serious problems with the very “social class-aware” premise of the book – that by running off with his secretary, Dot, the educated company director, Harry Dodd, had put himself beyond the pale. So far beyond the pale, in fact, that he had become a sort of “in-country” remittance man.

To me there may or may not be things wrong with running off with your secretary, depending on the marital status of both, the power/wealth difference, the age difference, or whatever. But violating social class norms is NOT, to me, one of the things wrong with this. And yet the entire plot is based on this premise, and many of the characterizations seem specifically drawn to highlight this.

Furthermore, this was all made worse by the fact that this title was originally published in the 1950s and appears to be more-or-less contemporaneous. If this had been written today, as a historical mystery, I would have been more comfortable with it, since I could have viewed it as the author’s likely-accurate portrayal of attitudes of the period.  However, as I was reading it, I kept thinking that this in fact probably truly represented the author’s views.  Which kept intruding on my enjoyment.  It’s not that other British mystery authors of the period don’t have similar social-class issues that seem awkward to a reader of today – you need only think of the original title of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”.  It was more that in A Knife for Harry Dodd, the social-class issues were so central to the tale that I had trouble compartmentalizing them away while reading.

With that set aside (with difficulty), I did like Knife enough to try at least one or two other Inspector Littlejohn titles, and hope that this is not a recurring theme for the whole series.  I’ll come back and post later on how those went.  In the meantime, I’m giving this book three stars, which means I still think it’s worth reading, but with some major caveats as noted above.

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