The Division Bell Mystery, Ellen Wilkinson

This is the sort of Golden Age mystery that presents an excellent puzzle (you know something is wrong but you cannot work out how it is wrong). It was written by an MP, one of the early women elected to Parliament, but like so many books of this genre it is appallingly badly written. There is very little sense of what the Commons must have been like, and not heightening of reality to make you feel the truth of parody or pastiche. I got a third of the way in this evening and I'll finish it because the puzzle is nagging away at me, but it would be nice if more of them could have written like Margery Allingham. There is a decent introduction about politics in Golden Age fiction by Martin Edwards, but most of it is familiar from his book The Golden Age of Murder which I will blog about soon.