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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast, where you’ll discover new mystery books and authors. I’m USA Today bestselling mystery author, Sara Rosett. I’m also a bookworm who specializes in the mystery genre. I love sharing my favorite mystery discoveries from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. This episode is all about Death in a Deck Chair by KK Beck. Death in a Deck Chair was published in 2011 and is the first book in the Iris Cooper series.

Blurb

Here’s the blurb. It’s 1927, and young Iris Cooper is selling home to America after traveling all around the world with her aunt, in this affectionate homage to the 1920s detective novels.

Aboard the SS Ariana, she encounters an international cast of characters with secrets and solves a murder with a wisecracking newspaperman, Jack Clancy.

Here is the first line. That day in August, when we boarded the Iriana in Southampton for our journey home with damp and miserable.

Setting and Characters

So the setting of this is obviously a shipboard mystery. It’s set in the 1920s, and it features Iris Cooper, who is nineteen. She has cruised around the world with her aunt, who is a very affectionate woman who doesn’t have children, but has sort of stood in place of Iris’ mother who died. And, she’s taken Iris on this cruise around the world, and now they’re returning home to America.

Now we learned in the first couple of lines of the book that Iris has had a wonderful time. She’s enjoyed visiting all these places, but She’s still longing for a little bit of adventure. She is portrayed as a very ordinary girl. She is not spectacular or beautiful. It reminds me, in a way, of the beginning of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where Catherine is described as just kind of average. She’s not a romantic heroine, and Iris is the same way. She had a wonderful time on this trip, but she’s longing for something adventurous to happen. She spent her life being responsible, taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. And this trip has been fun and she’s enjoyed it, but she’s longing for a little bit more.

So some of the other characters in this book that she meets up where the ship are, a professor and his secretary, who is a man, not a woman. Secretary, in my mind, brings to mind a woman for some reason, but this man’s secretary is a man. We have a judge and his wife. We have a British colonel, a piano player who is part of the shipboard crew. Then we have a reporter who’s traveling on the ship, an actress along with a European count.

So this is like the classic setup for, mystery where you have all these, diverse characters coming together in a closed setting, in this case, the ship.

Themes and Tropes

Let’s talk about themes really quickly. We’ve got several themes in this that are pretty common to 1920s mysteries. The more that I read in this time period the more I see this theme coming up. The first is the changing times, the disappearance of the old way of doing things. There’s a modern way that’s coming to be prevalent and things are changing. It’s like the disappearance or the fading in importance of the royal families of Europe is one of the things that’s mentioned in this book. But there’s some friction involved in that because there’s people that Don’t want the old ways to change, and there’s some people still clinging to that. So there’s that’s explored in this book a little bit.

And another theme that’s very common for 1920s fiction is divisions. We have age divisions, we have Iris who’s very young, And then we have her working with, the different people on the ship to solve this mystery once there there is a death. And once that happens, Iris is able to get herself put on the committee to investigate because they want to have this all squared away when they get into port so that nobody has to be detained, or they would rather have it all taken care of. So the captain appoints a panel basically to investigate, and Iris manages to get herself on the panel as the secretary stenographer because she has these, business skills. She’s the only woman on the panel. And on this panel she’s very young and, the professor, the colonel, the captain, they’re all older. So there’s age divisions there.

Also the gender divisions going on, and then there’s class divisions. We have on the ship the wealthiest class. You’ve got the 1st class passengers, and then you have, like, among them, you have the royalty, the count, the, sort of, I guess you’d call it pop culture royalty, what we would think of it now with the actress there, And then you have the people who would be in more the middle class or the lower classes. And so there’s very clearly delineated lines for class aboard the ship and in society at that time as well.

And then you have the divisions in nationality, And that’s something that comes up in this book that people are very aware of which culture and ethnic groups people come from and they keep track of that. And that influences the way they behave towards each other, which is also part of the clues for the mystery.

So the tropes on this, I think you have first the, ordinary Iris Cooper who she is a plucky, average Jane, you might say. She’s smart, but she’s often overlooked. And part of that is because she’s a woman and part of that is because her age. In this book, she sort of comes into her own, and I enjoyed watching her begin to step out more on her own and find where she’s going to fit in the world.

Another trope of this book is the shipboard mystery, one of my favorites. I love these enclosed travel mysteries, basically. Like, you have the train the mystery on the train, the mystery on the ship. Those are two of my favorites.

And then you have, of course, the classic who done it set up with lots of suspects. All of the characters in the book are tropes to some extent, like the actress you have, you know, she seems glamorous and beautiful, but then is there anything else behind that? And you find with many of these characters that they do have an interesting backstory, that they are more than just the stereotype.

And then as I mentioned earlier, with the shipboard mystery, you have automatically the closed circle because nobody can go anywhere and your pool of suspects is already on the ship. It’s already there.

The Story Behind The Story

So as far as the story behind the story and the fun facts, there’s not a lot online available about this story, and I have not read anything in particular about KK Beck, who is the author. That’s two initials, the letter k letter k and then the last name Beck, b e c k.

Her Amazon bio says that she lives in Seattle, Washington and is the author of 17 crime novels. She is an Edgar award nominee and an Agatha award nominee. That’s basically all I could find about her.

Recommendations

So some other read-a-likes for this book, if you enjoyed this, you would probably enjoy another book by K. K. Beck. I’ve read is called The Revenge of Kali-ra. It is a really fun book. It’s a got a modern story line, and it’s a tribute to the 1920s pulp fiction, and it’s sort of that and a mash up of that and mysteries with a little, magical realism elements, I guess you’d say in it, but it’s, it’s very well done. It’s very funny and very entertaining. So if you like KK Beck’s writing style, you’d probably enjoy that.

And, if you like shipboard mysteries, I would, of course, recommend Death on the Nile. That’s like the premier, most well known shipboard mystery by Agatha Christie.

Then, there is a series called the Ocean Liner series, and book 1 in that is called Murder on the Lusitania by Edward Marston.

Then there’s another series. It begins with a shipboard mystery. It’s by Lee Strauss, and it’s called Murder on the SS Rosa, r o s a. Now that Series only the first book is on a ship, but the it’s a, book one in a series.

And then, all of those are historical. If you want a modern day mystery set on a ship, look for A Cruise to Die For by Charlotte Elkins and Aaron Elkins. It’s a husband and wife writing team, and that is a modern day series. It is about a woman who is an art consultant, and she is invited to go on a cruise in the Aegean, And it’s a luxury yacht, so if you liked, The Woman in Cabin 10 and you would like a lot more of a mystery element to it, then this would be a book that you would enjoy, A Cruise to Die For by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins.

If you like average Jane protagonists, just If you’re ordinary woman caught up in an extraordinary adventure, then I would recommend The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth, and I talked about that in season 1 episode 8, and I’ll link to that if you want to look at that. It is set in the 1920s, and that is like one of the original plucky sleuths that inspired me to write my High Society series.

So question of the week, what is your favorite sort of average Jane protagonist mystery? I guess it doesn’t have to be a mystery. If you just have, plain Jane type story and that’s a favorite character of yours, then let me know what your favorite is. I would love to hear. You can send me a message on, Instagram @sararosett. That’s no h on Sarah and no e on rosette, or you can leave a comment on the show notes for this episode, which will be at sararosett.com/deck, like Death in a Deck Chair . 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 this podcast, I hope you tell a fellow mystery reader. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.