Nancy Atherton (TTMA05)
I once went into a mystery bookstore of the rather snooty variety, and had a brief chat with the owner about Ms. Atherton and her Aunt Dimity series. "Oh," he sniffed, "she's so terribly sentimental and precious, don't you think?"
"Exactly," I said, "and she's very, very good at it, too."
Aunt Dimity is the very English aunt of the transplanted-from-America-to-England protagonist, Lori Shepherd, from whose viewpoint the books are written. They all take place in modern times, generally in a small, English village named Finch. As our protagonist goes through her life and encounters gossips, dark plots, and bodies, she's helped out on occasion by Aunt Dimity. Oh, and Aunt Dimity is dead by the way — has been for some time. Fortunately, we are spared any sort of ghostly apparitions: Aunt Dimity converses with Ms. Shepherd by writing in a diary, a charming conceit that adroitly sidesteps a whole catalog of ghostly silliness.
The series is uniformly good, and the characters progress through time as the series proceeds. These are English-style Cozies (yes, with a capital "C") but with modern characters with modern sensibilities. Indeed, as Mr. Snooty felt, the books are sentimental and precious; they're also very good, charming, and very engaging stories. Ms. Atherton convinces me that writing sentimental and precious is not nearly so easy as she makes it look, at least to do it so well as she does it.
The official website: aunt-dimity.com.
[This post is part of my Top Twenty Mystery Authors 2005 series.]
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on Saturday, 27 August 2005 at 23.20
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I was thinking today, while reading ahead in Aunt Dimity Digs In (I am supposed to wait to read it aloud to my 14-year old daughter, who finds these books as delightful as I do–giggles frequently), that Nancy Atherton truly loves her characters. I just read a bio with FAQs, in which she says many of them are based upon her good friends, so that explains it.
We've read out of order since I did not find a list early enough, and yes, Aunt Dimity and the Duke precedes Aunt Dimity's Death in chronological story order, making us want to go back and reread them in that order, rather than publication date order. A delicious thought. Speaking of which, we plan to bake some of those recipes this winter.