Book Review: The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict

Lawyer-turned-novelist Marie Benedict has been illuminating the real-life stories of women throughout history for nearly a decade now, melding fact with fiction—and ensuring that they’re not lost to time. Her books have reached both the New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists and two, co-written with Victoria Christopher Murray, have been selected as a Good Morning America Book Club pick (The Personal Librarian) and a Target Book of the Year (The First Ladies), respectively. 2020’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie straddled genre lines, exploring Agatha Christie’s infamous eleven-day disappearance in 1926; Benedict revisits similar territory with her newest, The Queens of Crime.

London 1930: Mystery maven Dorothy L. Sayers—who was on scene to assist in the search after Christie vanished—is a founding member of The Detection Club, a selective (and secretive) group of British writers who’ve banded together in an effort to advance their genre in the eyes of outsiders. And just as mystery novels were/are often viewed as less than their “literary” counterparts, so too were/are women writers of said mystery novels when compared to their male counterparts—even within The Detection Club itself. Determined to quell these inequities, Sayers enlists fellow scribes Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy—collectively knows as “The Queens of Crime”—to join a subgroup of the club whose mission is to solve an actual crime.

The case that draws their attention is the baffling death of a young English nurse, May Daniels, who went missing on an excursion to France; her body was found months later in a wooded area, a syringe in close proximity, leading authorities and reporters—including Sayer’s husband, journalist Oswald Atherton “Mac” Fleming—to suggest the cause was either a drug deal gone wrong or an overdose. Sayers suspects otherwise, and she and the others vow to get justice for May and those she left behind. Following the example of their iconic detective protagonists, they embrace the idea that they key(s) to the present will be found in the past, and so they begin retracing May’s footsteps in days, weeks, and months leading up to her death. Further, calling on their unique insights into the machinations of locked room mysteries, they endeavor to solve her seemingly incomprehensible disappearance from a train station washroom.

While Sayers is the lead here, Benedict makes sure that each member of the ensemble has moments to shine, whether through their actions, intellect, and/or intuition, which is born from both personal and professional experience. Indeed, each character’s background, whether heavily examined or only hinted at, clearly informs their sensibilities. And while the dynamism of their individual personalities (and the potency of the secrets some of them keep) results in inevitable moments of conflict, the idea that they are stronger together is a singularly unifying force, allowing them to see beyond their differences in the pursuit of truth. Consequently, they can appreciate subtleties in the evidence that is lost to their male counterparts’ competitiveness and jocularity, leading to a denouement that would no doubt delight the detectives they’ve so attentively created.

Marie Benedict is at the height of her crossover appeal with The Queens of Crime, which effortlessly blends culture, history, politics, fashion, and occasional romance with the trademark craft and cunning of the mystery novel. While questions of how, who, and why are never far from mind, it’s the poignant friendship between five grande dames of the Golden Age that gives the story its heart and heft—which serves as a timely (and timeless) reminder that only the power of unity can conquer the perils of division.