I’m delighted to have met Mrs Laetita “Letty” Rodd having stumbled upon her by chance. Sadly our acquaintanceship will be shortlived bacause her creator, Kate Saunders (lots of children’s and young adult titles), died in 2023 aged only 62. So there are only three titles in the series.
It’s 1850. Mrs Rodd, who narrates, is the impoverished widow of a clergyman. We feel we know her late husband, Matt, because she thinks about him a lot and theirs was a very happy marriage. Now living simply in Hampstead with her landlady and friend Mrs Mary Bentley (wonderful character) she works occasionally as a sleuth for her lawyer brother, Fred. Mrs Rodd, you see, has Marple-esque powers of perception and Mrs B, who stays at home, is a terrific contributor of sensible suggestions, good food and obliging grown up children. They make a formidable pair.
Now Fred – tiresome wife, lots of children and shared happy childhood memories with Letty – has a case involving a proposed unsuitable marriage between wealthy young Charles Calderstone and Helen Orme. And he wants his sister to go to Wishtide, a grand house in Lincolnshire as governess to Sir James Calderstone’s daughters. This she does, travelling by smutty train, although the disguise doesn’t hold up for long. She meets Helen, and her sister Winifred, who are living nearby and eventually hears the story which renders the marriage out of the question.
What follows at this point is a homage to David Copperfield (as Saunders acknowledges at the end). I recognised it instantly because Little Emily features in a current project of my own so I’ve thought a lot about her lately. Poor Helen, like Emily has succumbed to a glamorous but unscrupulous cad and wrecked her marriage chances for ever. But someone, apparently, needs to shut her up.
Then – no spoilers – we are suddenly in whodunnit country. There are some pretty gruesome deaths and the culprit must be found. The intrepid Mrs Rodd isn’t fazed by dead bodies because she has, in her years as a clergy wife, had to lay so many out.
Eventually, of course, she susses out the truth after a few red herrings. I like Mrs Rodd a lot. She’s feisty and often funny. And Saunders is good at period detail while also making all these people seem a lot more human than they sometimes are in mid nineteenth century novels. I look forward to the other two titles which followed The Secrets of Wishtide (2016) in 2019 and 2021.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Collected Works of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
