A Death for Adonis / A Death for a Darling

With Adonis and Darling we are delighted to open the Robert Forsyth series, which was written primarily in the 1980s but carries all the flavors (er, flavours) that fans of British Golden Age mystery have come to expect.Forsyth himself—a brilliant young barrister forced to give up the law in response to a dreadful and undisclosed disgrace—is very much in the Wimsey mold, which is to say that solving crimes is his personal passion but by no means his bread and butter. And though Forsyth lacks a Lugg-like manservant, he does have an indispensable and devoted secretary who shares the spotlight as the series develops. Structurally, both Adonis and Darling nod very distinctly in the direction of the classics: Darling, in fact, is set during a country-house weekend! And for all that Giroux (pseudonym of Canadian writer Doris Shannon) was clearly steeped in the genre, the Forsyth series is no museum piece, managing the neat trick of being both charmingly vivid and delightfully well bred.