David Roberts, No More Dying (Soho Press, 2008)
As luck would have it, I read this next-to-last installment in the Lord Edward Corinth-Verity Browne murder mystery series AFTER I read the last one. In doing so, I lost David Roberts' meticulous historical timeline by a few months and encountered a few plot developments that I already knew about. That was quite frankly a small price to pay for the pleasure of culminating my experience of this series with a much stronger and more engaging novel than Sweet Sorrow.
I found in No More Dying many of the features that made the earlier novels in this series so appealing-a thoroughly entertaining blend of historical facts and persons combined with a deftly tuned murder mystery plot and some significant developments in the lives of the two main characters.
All of the action in No More Dying takes place in February and March 1939 (Sweet Sorrow picks up in August). Guy Liddell, Edward's contact in MI5, recruits Edward to foil a rumored plot to assassinate Winston Churchill. The MI5 folks suspect that the would-be assassin, code named Der Adler (the Eagle), is in the employ of the Nazis, and provide Edward with entry into the social world of some of the leaders of the appeasement movement in Britain-the so-called Cliveden Set, led by Lord and Lady Astor, as well as Joseph Kennedy (yes, the father of Jack and Bobby and Teddy, among others), who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Britain.
At the very same time, Edward's investigative collaborator and fiancée Verity Browne receives a directive from her contact in the Communist Party -- her former lover David Griffiths-Jones -- to "get close" to Mr. Kennedy, with the goal of finding ways to discredit the Ambassador and thereby reduce his influence on President Roosevelt with regard to American involvement in the war everyone knows to be imminent.
Much of the tension No More Dying derives from Edward's and Verity's respective struggles with loyalty and honesty. Each of them has sworn to uphold the secrecy of his/her work, yet they are a couple about to be married, and in this case, come to realize fairly quickly that collaboration is essential to their effectiveness in fulfilling the missions they've accepted.
No More Dying would have had a very satisfying story line as a straight political thriller sans any murders whatsoever. But it is a murder mystery, so of course there are murders, three of them, to be precise. All three victims are people close to the Kennedy family -- Joe, Jr., Kathleen and Jack are all in London with their father at this point. Edward and Verity spend nearly the entire novel trying to unravel the tangled threads of these murders. Their work clearly suffers because they fail to trust and confide in each other. A fourth person involved with the case loses his life because of their misunderstandings, prompting Edward to decide at the end of No More Dying to eschew any further sleuthing. That, at least, explains his reluctance to take on the cases that form the plot of Sweet Sorrow.
Roberts' portrayal of the aforementioned members of the Kennedy family is sympathetic to Kathleen and Joe, Jr., terribly unsympathetic to Joe, Sr. and Jack. Churchill appears in a couple of pithy scenes; Roberts gives some nice details to the long weekend Edward and Verity spend at Cliveden, focusing on both the people and the place itself. Also noteworthy are the scenes at St. Moritz, where Edward and Verity enjoy a brief honeymoon, courtesy of Mr. Churchill. In fact, it is in this rather exotic locale that they finally solve the crimes that drive the plot of No More Dying.
In spite of their communication issues, Edward and Verity appear to be more certain of their decision to marry in No More Dying than they are after the fact in Sweet Sorrow. I particularly noticed this in Verity. Confronted with more than one of her former lovers and derided by many of her comrades in the Communist Party for being engaged to a member of the hated aristocracy, she seems quite sure of her love for Edward and thus willing to defend her choice on that basis alone. Although in this novel Edward has difficulty dealing with his jealousy, he is the one who finally sets the date, reserves the place, and makes the other arrangements needed for their small and quiet civil wedding ceremony.
I suppose I should also mention that, although he is portrayed as a middle-aged English gentleman who suffered a leg injury in an earlier novel, Lord Edward has enough sex drive to make a stallion proud. He and Verity (a woman in her 30s still recovering from tuberculosis) make love with remarkable frequency, sometimes multiple times in a single night. Miraculously, too, Verity never gets pregnant. I am not sure what this adds to the series in terms of plot advancement, and Roberts at least refrains from providing the kind of salacious details that might attract readers looking for a turn-on.
Altogether there are ten novels in this series, each running about 225 pages long and covering a period of about five years leading right up to Great Britain's entry into the Second World War. While I think it's entirely possible to read and enjoy one or two or four or five of the novels in this series, there is something to be said for the experience of reading all of them. If that prospect interests you, consider acquiring them sooner rather than later. While Soho Press published the last two titles in the series and seems to have picked up the rights for Sweet Poison (the first title), all the other installments were published by the now defunct Carroll & Graf. Good luck finding them!
