Now we will have to wonder: “What will we do without Maisie?”
The arrival of “Maisie Dobbs,” the first novel in Winspear’s series, felt like an occasion back in 2003. The crime fiction that dominated bestseller lists that year included intricate puzzles from P.D. James, the latest in a long line of police procedurals from Ed McBain and the 10th installment in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels, about a New Jersey bounty hunter. “Maisie Dobbs” was different.
Although the subject matter was serious, the book’s cover, with its vintage poster style, felt breezy and fresh. Independent booksellers supported the book, and that meant something: “Maisie Dobbs” had literary merit. Readers who might have considered the mystery genre a guilty pleasure or a gruesome thrill could expect more from Winspear’s novel. Indeed, the book won several literary honors: the Agatha Award for best first novel, the Macavity Award for best first novel and the Alex Award.
The series setting — the time between the two great wars of the 20th century — might seem like familiar literary territory now, but Maisie Dobbs paved the way for a genre of women-centered wartime historical fiction. Novels like Martha Hall Kelly’s “Lilac Girls,” Kate Quinn’s “The Alice Network” and Jennifer Chiaverini’s “Canary Girls” found eager audiences, thanks in part to readers who were looking for more of what Winspear had to offer.
Winspear has often said in interviews that she never planned “Maisie Dobbs” to be the start of a series and that a question from her editor about the next installment took her entirely by surprise. But for readers who have followed Maisie’s journey from the years leading up to World War I to the aftermath of World War II, the arc of the series seems preordained.
Now, in the final installment, “The Comfort of Ghosts,” Maisie uncovers secrets that date all the way back to her life before the wars, and brings solace and a sense of closure to the friends, family and colleagues who have traveled alongside her since then.
The novel’s opening chapters find Maisie back at the London mansion where, as a teenager, she worked as a maid. The place has been vacant, and squatters have moved in. Because the owners have become family to Maisie over the years, she stops by to take a look — but she doesn’t intend to evict the intruders. Her primary concern is their welfare, and when she manages to speak to one of them through the letterbox flap in the door, she asks first if they are warm and fed. This won’t surprise readers of the series, who know that Maisie has practiced a kind of fierce compassion through two gruesome wars and years between.
Her encounter with the squatters leads Maisie into not one but three secrets in need of unraveling. The four teenagers hiding in the mansion had, she discovers, been part of a clandestine government operation, and they saw something they weren’t supposed to see. Now they’re in hiding to avoid the consequences. Another man who sought refuge in the abandoned home is gravely injured, severely traumatized — and, as it happens, connected to one of Maisie’s closest friends.
It’s up to Maisie — psychologist, investigator and former nurse — to uncover the truth that has placed the teens in such danger and to care for the injured man and reunite him with his loved ones. Along the way, she uncovers another secret from the past concerning her first husband, James Compton, a pilot who died years earlier in a plane crash. This revelation, found in a cache of old letters, gives her one last missing person to track down. But I will leave it at that.
The mysteries in this installment are not so much puzzles to be solved as they are wrongs to be righted, and Maisie undertakes those duties with characteristic aplomb and a clear-eyed sense of justice. In her final appearance, she’s a gatherer of lost souls, playing matchmaker to a cast of bereft and wounded characters who require care and feeding, new homes, and whatever family can be cobbled together for them. In this way, Winspear’s characters might be a microcosm of all British people after the war, struggling to rebuild their lives and looking ahead to what they hope will be a brighter future.
Readers who snapped up every Maisie Dobbs book as it was released will find great satisfaction in seeing long-standing characters achieve some measure of peace at the end of a terrible time. Anyone coming to Winspear’s novels for the first time, or picking up this new volume after reading only a few of them over the years, might miss the emotional resonance of this reckoning and get lost among the many connections to earlier books. “The Comfort of Ghosts” is an apt title: The novel is haunted by so many losses that it sometimes feels as though Maisie is walking more among the dead than the living. But that’s a perfectly good reason to begin with that first novel, published more than 20 years ago, and binge-read the series before arriving at this satisfying conclusion.
Amy Stewart is the author of “Girl Waits With Gun” and the forthcoming “The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession.”
Soho Crime. 360 pp. $29.95
