Review: The Locked Room

The Locked Room by Holly Hepburn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picked this up on BookBub, and I was glad I did. It's a solid cozy mystery.

The heroine, Harriet/Harry, works for the bank that sits in the part of Baker Street that includes number 221, and it is actually true that there was someone employed there for a while to answer letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, which is Harry's job. Her job doesn't really play much into this book, and indeed she spends hardly any time at work, instead investigating several mysteries that turn out to be connected, based on a notice in the Times personals signed "Moriarty".

It's the third book in the series, and I haven't read the first two, but now I want to. There's clever investigation, daring action, disguise, and a variety of crime, just as in the Holmes stories. In fact, it feels so Holmesian that, despite the cars, telephones and jazz bands, I felt more as if I was in the 1890s (Holmes' heyday) than in the 1930s, when the book is actually set. This is probably partly because, as the granddaughter of a baron whose father is the heir, Harry is still under the same old-fashioned expectations about protecting her reputation and the kind of person she will marry that would have been the case 40 years previously. There's a slow-burn romance that's clearly been under way across all three books, with a worthy fellow, and also (sigh) a bad boy who's clearly wrong for her but thrills her.

It helps that the author is British, which saves us from the Americanisms that inevitably creep in when an American author sets their book in Britain. I didn't spot any obvious anachronisms either, though, having read a lot of fiction written in the period, I didn't get quite the same subtle sense off it of a dark, claustrophobic, rigid and hidebound Britain (where everyone constantly smokes) in the background of the events. I think I would have spotted it as a modern book even if I hadn't known, and even without the scene in which homophobia is brought up and briefly spoken against. Still, a truly authentic 1930s feel is hard to achieve, and maybe not even worth shooting for.

The copy editing is generally good, with just a few minor continuity glitches (such as which of two neighbouring houses is referred to, and briefly the gender of a street urchin), a couple of sentences where the grammar has got slightly mangled, and a single homonym error: loathe for loath, which is an easy mistake for an author to make and an editor to miss.

The characters don't have the depth of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham or even Josephine Tey, but they're adequate for their roles, and there were plenty of early-20th-century mystery books in which the characters were thinner than this. The plot is relatively simple but well handled. All in all, it's competent rather than amazing, but sometimes that's all I'm looking for, and next time I want a pleasant, competent, fun cozy read, Holly Hepburn will be on my list of authors to consider.

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