WW I Nurse Smackdown: Maisie or Bess?

Jacqueline Winspear writes an excellent series about former WW I nurse Maisie Dobbs, now (that is, 1929, when the first book takes place) a "Psychologist and Investigator," according to her business card. The first novel in the series, Maisie Dobbs, begins with her current investigation, then flashes back for the middle third to give Maisie's life story, before wrapping up the mystery with a nifty surprise ending. The daughter of a groom, Maisie was in service in a great house. She was given a chance at education by her employer and became the protegee of an eccentric genius, Dr. Maurice Blanche. The ninth book in the series, Elegy for Eddie, will be published in March.

Bess Crawford is the heroine of a relatively new series by Charles Todd, the mother-son authors of the Inspector Rutledge series mentioned in my last post. The three books in the series so far are A Duty to the Dead, An Impartial Witness, and A Bitter Truth. A new Bess Crawford novel, An Unmarked Grave, is due in June. Although born upper class and following in her father's tradition of service to King and country, Bess is a thoroughly modern woman who travels independently between France and England, rooming with a number of other nurses in London whenever on leave. The Bess Crawford books are the only WW  I  mysteries I know that actually take place during and in the war, with scenes set in France, in hospitals at the front. So far, however, the mysteries themselves mostly take place in England while Bess is on leave. [If you are not already a Bess Crawford reader (or even if you are), consider joining an online "Bess Crawford Read Along" at the Book Club Girl site, beginning now.]

So who wins the WW I Sleuthing Nurse Award -- Maisie or Bess? Who's your favorite WW I nurse? Please comment. Or nominate your own favorite sleuthing nurse. (Cherry Ames, anyone?)

I'm going to cheat, and divide this into two categories. As mysteries, I like the Maisie Dobbs series better, both for plot and for the overall reading experience. But for a best friend? I'd choose Bess Crawford in a nano-second.

Let's face it, Maisie Dobbs is an odd duck and a cold fish. She's so annoyingly New Age-y, always conscious of her breathing and her body language. And what exactly did she learn from Maurice, other than to pay attention to her feelings? (Use the force, Luke. Stretch out with your feelings.) To Winspear's credit, some of the elements that seem most anomalous are based on solid research. My favorite example is the time that Maurice recommended that a wounded vet try Pilates exercises, which, come to find out, were designed by a WW I P.O.W. Similarly, most of the metaphysical and even supernatural elements of the stories are rooted in the Twenties, the pre-eminent decade of spiritualism and psychoanalysis.

Nevertheless, Maisie is way too restrained and judicious to be much fun as a dinner companion. I'd much prefer her best friend Phyllis, superficially so frivolous and gossipy, but solid as a rock underneath. Some of this has to be written off to class differences, of course. This is actually another of Winspear's strengths -- the wondefully nuanced way she shows us the dilemmas of a working-class woman who is changing her status, in fact pioneering in the brave new world of professional working women. Maisie's relationships with Billie, her assistant, and her ex-employer, Lady Compton -- even her relationship with her own father, Lady Compton's groom -- are loaded with class-related complications. On the other hand, I often feel that if Maisie weren't such a bossy know-it-all, she wouldn't have a lot of these complications.  At least, she is a professional investigator, which gives her a legitimate outlet for her busybody tendencies. It also makes the mysteries so much more straightforward.

Which brings us to the chief weakness of the Bess Crawford mysteries: the (un)willing suspension of disbelief. In the first book, I was willing to believe that a WW I nurse would go to great lengths to deliver the dying message of a soldier, and to get involved when that message seemed to fall on deaf ears. By the third book, however, I wanted to scream (like Sassy Gay Friend), "What, what, what are you DOING?" Why do you even care about these people and (especially) why are you still a guest in their home?

The good news is that Todd writes sharp, suspenseful disaster sequences (including the brilliant opening sequence of the first book, A Duty to the Dead), which serves this series well. The bad news is that the mysteries all have to be solved mostly in England, mostly on leave -- which seems to happen often and/or be extended indefinitely, and that adds to the disbelief.

As a friend, however, I think Bess would be a gem. Although born an aristocrat, she seems thoroughly modern and open-minded. Bess shares rooms in London with a number of other nurses, who are almost never on leave at the same time, but if they were, you feel they could have jolly times together. Bess is brave, impetuous and even flirtatious, almost Maisie's opposite. Of course, she's backed up solidly by Mom and Dad -- and her father's right-hand man, who is always available as chauffeur, bodyguard, and surrogate big brother. Bess may be modern, but her life is not the process of self-invention that Maisie's is.

So, who do you like better and why? Please comment (or I will be sad).

WW I and Its Fascinations

"You are all a lost generation."
--Gertrude Stein, quoted by Ernest Hemingway in an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises

"The times they are a-changing."
--Bob Dylan, quoted by me


Why does World War I still haunt us?

Currently I am reading a new author, Elizabeth Speller, who has two excellent mysteries in a WW I series, The Return of Captain John Emmett and The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton. I love World War I, not in actuality but as a backdrop for these and the other wonderful period mysteries that are currently flourishing. Mostly, they are not even about the war itself, but rather its aftermath. For sure, the period just after WW I provides masses of melancholy atmosphere for existentially tinged mysteries.

It may be that the real changes of the 20th century did not come with the wars, but after. Certainly that is one way to understand the profound social changes of the Sixties, as well as those of the Twenties. And just as WW II feels essentially American, WW I feels essentially British, and seemingly affected Britain much more than the U.S. With more than 700,000 dead and 1.6 million wounded, about seven times the number of American casualties, England truly did lose most of a generation of young men. The closest I can come to understanding that is living through the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early Eighties and Nineties in New York and Provincetown.

Lawrence Bartram, Elizabeth Speller's hero, is suffering something similar to what many survivors suffered during the AIDS epidemic, the numbing from multiple losses -- a syndrome that surely has its own clinical name, but I don't know what it is. The fictional Bartram has lost not only many brothers in arms, but his wife and infant child. In The Return of Captain John Emmett, Bartram is slowly brought back to life by a mystery. Speller writes, "In years to come, Laurence Bartram would look back and think that the event that really changed everything was ... the return of John Emmett into his life." The titular Captain Emmett, an old but not very close friend, committed suicide while apparently on the mend in a private veterans' hospital. His sister wants to know why.

Why indeed? One might think the question for these men who suffered unimaginable horrors would be: why not? Aye, there's the rub...and that's one thing that makes these WW I mysteries so modern in feeling. They are set at the beginning of the modern age, just after the first modern war, and they raise modern questions -- about living with an absence of belief systerms, about living in the face of not just mortality but unthinkable destruction. These are serious questions worth considering, that have not been fully answered in the nearly 100 years since. They lend the WW I mystery some gravitas that is lacking in, say, the Golden Age country house mystery, even though it's set in the same time period.

As you can tell, The Return of Captain John Emmett is a real novel as well as a fascinating mystery. It's beautifully written and constructed, and it resonates beyond the questions of whodunit or whydunit. Speller also touches on a now-familiar theme: the battlefield executions of men who mutinied or deserted. Probably this is because WW I, like Vietnam, was a remarkably unpopular war at the front. It would seem that trench warfare was an extreme test of devotion to abstract notions such as duty, honor, and courage; and uncounted men opted for the reasonable response of non-compliance.

Charles Todd's series about Inspector Rutledge is brilliant on this issue, as well as the related issue of shell shock, or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. In Todd's series (beginning with A Test of Wills, most recently A Lonely Death), Rutledge is back at work at Scotland Yard, even though he is not exactly cured of shell shock. His main symptom: he hears the voice of fallen comrade Hamish MacLeod in his head, so realistically that he feels the man is with him constantly. This odd form of survivor's guilt makes for great reading, since there is a constant internal dialogue that the reader is privy to. One might almost say that Hamish is Rutledge's Watson.

WW I was the first war in which shell shock was recognized as a real medical disorder, at least in some circles. Since shell shock sometimes took the form of non-compliance, and shell shock victims who were treated in medical hospitals temporarily escaped the fighting, many old-school soldiers and others believed it was a form of malingering, the coward's way out. Thus shell shock is in some ways conflated with the whole issue of cowardice, including the problems of desertion and dereliction that spurred battlefront executions. Veterans themselves struggled with these issues, as well. Psychiatrists, however, learned a huge amount from treating veterans, and WW I proved to be a great leap forward in the understanding of trauma.

More to come on WW I mysteries, including some thoughts on Inspector Rutledge and Siegfried Sassoon; Charles Todd's new series on Bess Crawford; and Maisie Dobbs vs. Bess Crawford for best WW I nurse. What do you think? Leave a comment. Let the voting begin.