Elizabeth Ironside: a perfect picture of the 1990s

Death in the Garden (1995)

A Very Private Enterprise (1984)

The Accomplice (1996)

The Art of Deception ( 1999)

  - all by Elizabeth Ironside

This Ralph Lauren advert would make a very good cover for Death in the Garden, with its combination of 20s, 90s and mysterious artefacts and diaries

Here is another woman writer who produced a handful of interesting books and then stopped, and who has been forgotten to some degree. Recently we had Dorothy Bowers (1930s and 40s) and Joan Cockin (late 40s, early 50s): others might be Sarah Caudwell & Elizabeth Daly (Daly better-known in the US than in the UK).

And now I give you Elizabeth Ironside, writing between 1984 and 2000. She has been reprinted a few times, though not recently so far as I can tell. I’ll be interested to hear if anyone else has been reading her.

Her 1995 book  Death in the Garden is her most famous, and was seen as one  of the best mystery books of that year. It has a number of familiar and much-loved features: a murder at a 1920s houseparty in the country (yes, in the elaborate gardens), and then a dual timeline as a modern-day character tries to find out what happened, with the help of some old diaries and letters, and tracks down a few still-living witnesses.

There are Bohemian writers, artists and photographers, and also upmarket lawyers and MPs. Characters float in from Russia (a continuing theme in Ironside’s books), people wander round Paris and meet the likes of Gertrude Stein, & they are dealing with the aftermath of the First World War. The modern strand has a complicated family, some unhappy marriages, and an unexpected will. What more could a reader want? It’s very readable, with an interesting and unusual but not wholly unprecedented explanation. A satisfying book. It reminded me of the works of Peter Dickinson, definitely a compliment. Some of the characters go for a walk to a church where a Last Judgement wall painting has been uncovered – echoing the plot of JL Carr’s 1980 A Month in the Country. Some of the Bohemians dress up dramatically to be photographed by one of their number, using clothes kept in her studio for this purpose – a similar scene features in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series. And an excuse to feature again one of this astonishing series of photos from the 1930s: see this blogpost for more info.

And the woman in the black kimono is Ava Willing Astor.

So I looked again at some of Ironside’s other books. The first was A Very Private Enterprise (1984). It has a young Foreign office man sent out from London to India: an older ‘India hand’ man, working in diplomatic circles, has been murdered. Sinclair has to investigate his death, helped by Janey, an old friend of the victim and someone with a lot of local knowledge. I am prejudiced against books which morph from a steady procedural-type investigation into an action thriller: that’s what this one did, and it is not to my taste, but it was still a good enjoyable read. You wouldn’t have been sure what to expect in that era in regard to the picture painted: India was having a moment in culture, and some of it seems questionable now. Jewel in the Crown was just on TV, the film A Passage to India came out also in 1984, there had been a film about Gandhi in 1982, and Merchant-Ivory had set a number of films there. In the book there is not much questioning of British rule in India, but there is certainly no unthinking racism, and there is a definite attempt to take a nuanced view of the situation, and of the ways of British diplomatic families. I slightly lost interest later on, when it became more of an adventure, but then it picked up again at the end. There was an unlikely romance in it, a couple of pages of description on a different level to the rest, and quite haunting. A good start….

Woman in traditional Tibetan clothing - the clothes feature in the book

Then in 1996 she produced The Accomplice, with an interesting intricate plot: the book is very tied up in the former Soviet Union, which had disintegrated a few years earlier. It’s a wandering story with multiple timelines, and some interesting characters. I liked the immigrant-on-the-make: Xenia had got herself into the UK from Russia, but reminded me of Wendy Deng, the woman who spent 14 years married to Rupert Murdoch in the early 21st century.

The going over of Russian history, from WW2 onwards, is fascinating.

There is a trip to Glyndebourne opera, so I found this picture of picnicking poshos of the era

They didn’t look exceptionally glamorous, so I decided to visit a recent discovery, the Ralph Lauren Adverts tumbler (a site that has me looking for books to match the pics. I discovered it for this post last year and found more pictures I wished I'd used then). I found the collage at the top for the contrast of 20s/90s life, and this, which is a nicely zhushed-up 1990s, and could be linked to various scenes in several of the books.

The Art of Deception (1999) has more Russian connections, but this is the era of the oligarchs, and there is money-laundering, Russian mafia, fur-coat-wearing women, and a lot of art history. Weirdly the book starts very like an Anita Brookner novel of a couple of years earlier – A Private View, 1995 – older man being entranced by attractive young woman in a neighbouring flat in central London. The blocks sound close to identical, along with the concierge, the trips out to nearby restaurants, the question marks over the woman, the awkward attempts to introduce the newcomer to the social circle, the wondering about money. No-one reading either book is in any doubt that the male protagonist is being taken in by someone who may well be rather worthless. However - not a spoiler - the Brookner book does not involve knife crime, Russian pistols and dramatic and elaborate criminal gangs, whereas here the Russian crime features are uptodate. Again I thought it lost its way for a bit, then picked up at the end. There were tense trial scenes to close out the story, but none of it panned out the way that crime readers like: where was the last-minute surprise witness? (Watch My Cousin Vinny, ya dopes)

I read all Ironside’s books in the 2000s, and I know that I did not like the last one, A Good Death (2000), so I didn’t bother to reread it. But the others were very enjoyable, and give an interesting picture of a certain kind of life in the era. And it is interesting to see what was about to change a lot: some people have mobile phones, but there is no widespread use of computers. There is the possibility of DNA testing to check on identity, but this is surprising and has to be explained to everyone. There is still a telephone answering machine with a tape that fills up. Tiramisu isn’t quite the cliché it became.

A great pictures of 80s & 90s life, with hints of the future. Her fans must have hoped for many more books, but no. Elizabeth Ironside was a pseudonym. She is Lady Catherine Manning, the wife of the UK Ambassador to the US from 2003-2007, Sir David Manning. She might still write more books we can hope… I would certainly read them.

The second picture is Summer in Cumberland by James Durden from the Manchester Art Gallery