A review by michelleful
The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell

4.0

Read this for a book club. Written and set in 1930s working-class London, this is a mixture of realistic fiction and police procedural. The beginning is atmospheric and inserts you right into the time and place, but it was hard to appreciate because it introduced a lot of characters and their circumstances without a clue as to what the mystery would be. I found myself going, okay, where's the corpse, over and over until finally the murder happened, quite a ways into the book.

Afterwards, the detection element was relatively dispersed over several sleuth characters - several policemen for the most part, plus a young boy. Because there's no genius sleuth leaping to insightful conclusions, and rather a more standard police investigation written in an omniscient POV, I found myself going

Spoiler

"check the basement of the old woman's house!"

multiple times. But again, it's the realism, the feeling of being transported back in time and place, the insight into the lives of the poor and working class characters that are mostly absent from detective fiction of that era, that really made the book. 4*.