Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Murders. Sphere hb 2017, 419pp. Library copy

When I was researching for my recent post on Mary S. Lovell’s The Mitford Girls, I discovered that Jessica Fellowes (niece of Julian, of ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Gosford Park’ fame) wrote a sequence of six murder mysteries featuring that infamous family of minor provincial aristocrats, some of whom who flirted with fascism, communism (Unity, Diana and Jessica, as well as brother Tom and their mother) and living a life of outward gentility and privilege.

I don’t usually read this genre of fiction, but I was curious to see what JF did with this unlikely backdrop. I wasn’t very impressed.

It’s too long, plodding and formulaic. Yes, there’s a murder early on, and she creates a moderately engaging central character in Louisa, who becomes the main unofficial investigator of the crime. She’s aided by a handsome young railway policeman called Guy, and rather predictably a romance between them develops.

She’s from a very poor London background, and is groomed into crime by her dastardly, brutal uncle. She’s relieved to find an escape from this downward spiral when she lands a job as nursery maid to the growing brood of Mitford siblings in their Oxfordshire mansion.

I’d concede that there’s some quite interesting stuff about class and snobbery, and in the depiction of Nancy Mitford, who becomes a sort of friend to Louisa. As the over-complicated plot develops, Nancy ages from 16 to 18, so is only a couple of years younger than Louisa. She’s shown as a cruel tease to her younger siblings, and very self-centred.

But I didn’t get a clearer picture of the Mitford family than the one derived from Lovell’s gushing biography, which Fellowes cites (in an afterword) in the list of texts she used as source material. The twists in the plot aren’t difficult to see coming, and the characterisation is flimsy and superficial.

The time period is the two or three years after the end of WWI, and Fellowes makes quite good use of the traumatic effect that awful war had on British people who survived it. The Mitford paterfamilias, Lord Redesdale, for example, is an irascible xenophobe whose excesses are clearly a result, at least in part, of his terrible experiences as an officer in the trenches. I’m sure he’d have been a pretty awful specimen anyway, however.

So, as some readers of my Lovell post suggested in their comments, it’s not a particularly rewarding novel, with little special to offer anyone who might have been curious, as I was, to see how Fellowes contrived what I suppose is a pastiche of Golden Age crime fiction with this unlikely USP.

I assume the other five novels in the sequence place each of the other sisters centre stage in turn, as they grow up and become old enough to assist Louisa with her amateur, unlikely, sleuthing. I shan’t be reading them.