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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast, where we cover mysteries in all of their forms from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. I’m mystery author Sara Rosett, and this is season one, episode ten, and it’s all about Come Hell or Highball by Maia Chance.

So this is such a fun book. You can tell even from the title that it’s going to have a lot of humor in it. It is the first in the Discreet Retrieval series. It was published in 2015 and there are currently four books in the series.

Book Blurb

The blurb is “Society matron, Lola Woodby has survived her loveless marriage with an unholy mixture of highballs, detective novels and chocolate layer cake until her husband dies, leaving her his fortune…or so Lola thought.” Now, I didn’t know anything about Maia Chance; she has written several series. But when this book came out, I read that first line of the description and I was like, “OK, I’m in! That’s pretty much all I needed to know. Detective novels and chocolate layer cake? I’m in.”

Here’s the first line of the book. “In all fairness, my husband was the one who should have been murdered.” That lets you know right off the bat that there is a murder mystery. It’s not the husband who’s been murdered, but he was not a stand up guy. And the mystery will revolve around something else, not his death. And it also gives you a taste of the tone. We’re inside Lola’s head and she has a very funny, irreverent take on some of these things that are pretty serious.

So the book opens in May 1923 at the graveside of her no good philandering husband, Alfie. Lola thinks she’s a rich widow. She says she was “a thirty-one-year-old society matron with life unspooling like a blank ticker tape before me, an apartment on Park Avenue, a rambling oceanfront mansion, and oodles of bucks I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to start spending.” I really like the mention of the life unspooling like a blank ticker tape, because it really brings up the 1920s image and you’ve got the Park Avenue and the mansions. And she seems to have it all; from the outward appearance, she does seem to have it all. But that wasn’t quite the case. Lola says “The good news, it turned out, was that Alfie hadn’t actually written a will, so everything went to me. The bad news was, there wasn’t a nickel to inherit.” Instead of going to live with her disapproving mother or her disapproving in-laws, Lola decides to take on a job, a rather unconventional job. She decides to retrieve a piece of personal property for someone at a friend’s seaside estate.

Story Behind the Story

For our story behind the story/Fun Facts Section, I have a little tidbit from Maia Chance’s bio. It says she writes historical novels that are rife with absurd predicaments and romantic adventure. Her fantastic fiction bio says, “The Discreet Retrieval Agency was born of Maia’s fascination with vintage shoes, automobiles and cocktails, combined with an adoration of P.G. Wodehouse and chocolate.”

Now, here’s something fun that I haven’t seen any other author do for themselves. There’s a website called Criminal Element, and they have a column that runs there. Sometimes it’s a website devoted to mystery fiction, crime fiction, thrillers, that sort of thing. And every once in a while, they’ll have a column called “The Gif Notes.” And the person takes  the blurb of the book and intersperses the blurb with gifs that illustrate the sentences from the blurb. So she must have seen this and decided this was really cool because she has a page on her website with the gif notes on Come Hell or Highball. When I saw that, I thought it was very entertaining and I decided to do one for my book Murder at Archly Manor. So I’ll link to both of those so you can see what they look like. I had big plans. I was going to do a gif notes for every one of my books and that didn’t happen. But I do have the first one done and it’s lots of fun to go look at.

All right. So let’s talk a little bit about Lola. I love the tone of this book. It’s light and funny, but she has some serious issues she has to work through. So it’s not too fluffy. Underneath the lightness and the brightness and the humor, there is some seriousness. Lola describes her background this way. “I’d been nineteen, only a girl, when my parents thrust me into the union with Alfie. My marriage had been a stoke of fortune for father’s wall street endeavors and a windfall for Mother’s social calendar. But Alfie had been a horror of a husband.”

Now, what makes this book a lot of fun is the characters, the supporting characters, especially Berta. Now, Berta was Lola’s cook. And when everyone else sort of deserted Lola and didn’t support her, Berta sticks with her. She bakes divine strudel and cinnamon rolls and other mouthwatering concoctions of yeast based bread based goodies, and she sticks with Lola. She’s loyal and very practical and down to earth.

Another character who is a scene stealer is her Pomeranian; his name is Cedric. And then there’s a mysterious private investigator, Mr. Oliver, who is following Lola. And an annoying reporter who likes to stalk her and print any dirt he can find on her.

Themes and Tropes

All right: themes. So this book deals with, on the highest level I think it deals with, Starting Over, Starting Fresh. That’s a very common theme for cozies and traditional mysteries. Often we’ll have someone whose world is falling apart and they’re at a point where they either have to return home or start completely over. So Lola doesn’t return back to, like her childhood town or village, and she doesn’t go back to live with her parents. But she does have to start over and find her way in this new world that she’s unfamiliar with navigating without a husband and without money.

Moving on to tropes. We have a lot of fun tropes in this book, First up, and probably the one that’s probably like, it’s the inciting incident, I guess, of the book is The Philandering Wayward Cad. And it’s his death that brings about all these issues. And because he’s dead, Lola has to dig into her own resources and find her way out of this problem.

We have another trope of the Stuffy Family of Origin. They just want Lola to conform. They don’t really see her as an individual person or really care about her. Her in-laws are not supportive either. She’s kind of all alone except for Berta.

And then we’ve got the Discreet Sleuth trope. Now, this is getting more and more popular. I’m seeing this this trope used more and more. Lola has to make some money to survive, and she has to take whatever job she can find. The only problem is she’s not really trained for anything. She stumbles into sleuthing. And now this is from the blurb. It explains it very well. “Lola and Berta are ‘hiding out in the secret love nest Alfie kept in New York City. But when rent comes due, Lola and Berta have no choice but to accept an offer made by one of Alfie’s girls-on-the-side: in exchange for a handsome sum of money, the girl wants Lola to retrieve a mysterious reel of film. It sounds like an easy enough way to earn the rent money. But Lola and Berta realize they’re in way over their heads, but before they can retrieve it, the man currently in possession of it is murdered, and the reel disappears.” So we have this mystery and she’s drawn into it and becomes an amateur sleuth. So this is a very common setup for amateur sleuth mysteries. The sleuth is pursuing one goal and then there is a murder. And because they’re involved in the situation, they’re drawn into the mystery.

Another trope that this book turns on its head is the Rags To Riches trope in this book, it’s the riches to rags or the Down And Out trope. So this is the story of how Lola deals with going from having everything to having nothing.

And then the trope that underpins the whole book and the whole series is this Odd Couple of Lola the society matron and Berta the cook. And it’s very interesting because you not only have their differences in personality, where Lola is much less of a practical person than Berta, you also have the differences in their social status. Even though Berta is staying with Lola and helping her through this time, even though she’s not technically her cook or her servant anymore, there is still a disparity in their relationship and also in how society sees them. So that’s really interesting. And Maia Chance has a lot of fun playing these two off of each other. And it’s one of my favorite parts of the books. Their conversations are hilarious.

The bottom line on this one is that it’s a madcap American twist on Downton Abbey. And I like the way it’s structured. It’s very quick paced and it takes some interesting turns. So if you enjoy 1920s books, if you like odd couple pairings, if you like books with lots of humor, then you’ll enjoy this one.

Quotes

All right. So let’s wrap up with a quote. This is a confrontation between Lola and Berta and the private investigator who has been following Lola. Lola says, “I have, Mr. Oliver, a good mind to smack you with my handbag, but seeing as how it’s a genuine Florentine leather, I think it’s rather too good for you.” Berta pipped up. “I could smack him with my handbag, Mrs. Woodby. It is very durable.” So that captures the relationship between them in a nutshell, and it gives you a taste of the novel, the entertaining tone of the novel.

I’d love to hear your favorite odd couple pairings in mysteries. You can comment on the show episode at SaraRosett.com. And let me know what you thought of this and what you thought of season one of the Mystery Books Podcast. I hope this podcast has let you revisit a favorite book or perhaps helped you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I hope you’ll tell a fellow, mystery reader. This is the last episode of this season, and I’m off to focus on writing for a little while. But I’ll be back with more mystery recommendations for you soon. Talk to you next time.

Bloopers:

Then we have Chisum Lovely’s. The man currently in possession of the film reel is murdled. He wasn’t murdled. Murdered, he was murdered.

Links:
Maia Chance’s Website