Under the Dragon's Tail

Under the Dragon’s Tail, by Maureen Jennings, 1998, McClelland and Stewart. ISBN 978-0-7710-9597-9

I caught a couple of Murdoch Mysteries TV shows on one of the many digital broadcast channels available these days. I can’t remember on which channel, “Dabl” or “Cozi” or “Heroes and Icons”, but we managed to see the same episode, season 15, episode 18, Patriot Games, twice. Amusing, but it had a few anachronisms, and some of the characters were not introduced at all.

I sought out and read Under the Dragon’s Tail, the second book in the Detective Murdoch Series which is the basis of the “Murdoch Mysteries” shows. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit.

The story takes place in 1895 Toronto, Canada, and it’s very much a period piece, as well as a police procedural murder mystery. The plot was complicated, and had enough British and Canadian cultural references to keep me from guessing the killer. That made reading the book a lot of fun for me.

As with most deeply British detective stories, the characters display a deference to inherited wealth and authority that’s just baffling. Murdoch, for example, doesn’t tell a judge something important about the judge’s family that affects Murdoch’s suspicions and investigation. This sort of deference helps wrap up loose ends in the plot, but the complication also serves as a layer of indirection to keep parochial Americans from figuring the mystery out.

For comparison, the Sherlock Holmes stories are set in about the same period, between 1880 and 1914. A.C. Doyle was roughly a contemporary of Holmes. Jennings was born in 1939, and wrote this book in 1998. Part of the atmosphere Jennings writes into the book derives from subtly pointing out differences between 1895 and 1998. The atmosphere Doyle invokes is totally different, because he was writing about his own present.