In Iona Whishaw's seventh mystery, A Match Made for Murder (Touchwood $16.95), it's November, and Lane Winslow and Inspector Darling have escaped the chilly autumn in the Kootenays for a honeymoon at the posh and romantic Santa Cruz Inn in sunny Tucson, Arizona. But despite her very best intentions to relax, soon after their arrival Lane's plans to spend the holiday poolside with a good mystery are interrupted by gunfire. One of the hotel's wealthy guests has been shot point blank and Lane is second on the scene. Meanwhile, back in Nelson... Sergeant Ames has been left in charge of the department during Darling's absence. As he investigates a case of vandalism at the Van Eyck garage, it seems to lead directly to the death of the suspected vandal himself. Working with Constable Terrell, the new recruit, to piece together what happened in this strange and unsettling murder, Ames finds his romantic interest in mechanic Tina Van Eyck creates complications that are more than awkward; they could be deadly.

In Iona Whishaw's fourth mystery, It Begins in Betrayal (Touchwood $16.95), it's been four years since Flight Lieutenant Darling and his crew were shot out of the sky, crash landing their Lancaster in a field behind enemy lines in occupied France. A British government official comes to King's Cove, near Nelson, B.C., and summons Darling to London for further questioning about the air crash. He's arrested and charged with murder. Whishaw's 1940s sleuth Lane Winslow proceeds to London to save the man she loves.

Iona Whishaw's debut murder mystery, Dead in the Water (Friesen 2015), was republished as A Killer in King's Cove (Touchwood 2016), the first in a series featuring her 1940s heroine Lane Winslow who relocates from England to B.C. in 1946 after her lover, a pilot, was killed during WW II. In a tiny, idyllic community near Nelson, B.C., called King's Cove, populated by older British immigrants from before WW I, the young British ex-secret service agent Lane Winslow looks to put the war and her sorrow behind her, only to be arrested after she and her neighbour discover a corpse in the creek that serves as her water supply. The identified body only carries her name. At first Lane Winslow tries to help Inspector Darling and Constable Ames solve the mystery but Darling becomes suspicious of her as a suspect. Burdened by the requirements of the Official Secrets Act, she is unable to fully clear herself as the real killer remains on the loose.

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Whishaw's grandfather was a spy in both World Wars but her heroine is inspired by her extraordinary mother who was a sophisticated risk-taker. "She cut a swath through life that was completely independent," Whishaw writes on her blog. "It was she who put my father through university, and bought our first houses.

"When we were children she hitchhiked to Alaska with interstate truckers because she was tired of waiting around for my father to come back from geology field trips, and in the same devil-may-care spirit drove me and our German shepherd all the way to Nicaragua to find him, long before the highway through Central America was even complete. She wrote books and spoke six languages, and went off to university to get four Master's degrees after I grew up and left for university. And of course, there was that brief episode of spying during the war in South Africa where my father was a pilot for the RAF."

Former UBC Creative Writing department head Linda Svendsen, author of Marine Life, suggests "Inspector Darling and Lane Winslow join the ranks of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in this exquisitely written, psychologically deft postwar mystery. I couldn't put it down." The publisher compares Lane Winslow to Maisie Dobbs and Bess Crawford.

A former high school principal and a graduate of the Creative Writing Master's program at UBC, Iona Whishaw has also published a children's book, Henry and the Cow Problem.

BOOKS:

Henry and the Cow Problem (Annick Press, 1992, 1995), illustrated by Chum McLeod.

Dead In The Water (Friesen Press, 2015) / Republished as A Killer in King's Cove (Touchwood, 2016) 9781771511988 $16.95

Death in a Darkening Mist

An Old, Cold Grave

It Begins in Betrayal (Touchwood, 2018) $16.95 9781771512619

A Sorrowful Sancturary (Touchwood, 2018) $16.95 978-1-77151-289-3

A Deceptive Devotion: A Lane Winslow Mystery (Touchwood Editions, 2019) $16.95 9781771513005

A Match Made for Murder (Touchwood, 2020) $16.95 9781771513265

Framed in Fire (Touchwood, 2022) $16.95 ‎ 978-1771513807

[BCBW 2022]

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REVIEW

A Match Made for Murder. Iona Whishaw. TouchWood Editions. 2020. 396 pages.

reviewed by John Moore

A Match Made for Murder is the seventh in Iona's Whishaw's Lane Winslow mystery series set mostly in and around Nelson, B.C. during the late 1940s, immediately after the end of WW II.

Like any good mystery author, Whishaw has written them so you don't have to read them in order, but doing so adds deeper levels of complexity and enjoyment. If you haven't been keeping up, stack them all beside your favourite deck chair and self-isolate for a summer well-spent.

In a genre more crowded with quirky characters than a downtown bus, creating one with the charisma to carry a series is tougher than picking a winner in the ninth race. At a glance, Lane Winslow appears to be an attractive but innocuous young Englishwoman who comes to the Kootenays to find peace, as far as possible from five years of stress and privation in wartime London.

There her inherent sleuthing skills are used to complement the work of one member of the Nelson police force in particular, her ongoing love interest, Inspector Frederick Darling.

[In case you’re wondering if the Nelson Police, whose officers are major characters in Whishaw's mystery novels, is actually a real police force, well, not only is this real, the Nelson Police is one of the oldest in British Columbia. You can visit their website at www.nelsonpolice.ca and click on the HISTORY link. You'll discover a remarkably frank and often hilarious account of the rough and tumble early years of the force. Evidently a willingness to share some laughs at your own expense is a recruiting requirement of today's thoroughly professional Nelson Police.]

Under the cool, well-mannered, English reserve, Lane Winslow is as damaged as any veteran who spent too long at what Brits call 'the sharp end' of the war. She is one of many resourceful, young women who worked for the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the New York-based British Security Coordination (BSC) run by eccentric Canadian millionaire William Stephenson, later famous as 'The Man called Intrepid'.

Women also played key roles in what Winston Churchill called his "Red Indian" organizations, like Special Operations Executive (SOE), less formally called the Ministry of Un-Gentlemanly Warfare.         Parachuted or landed by Commandos (another Churchill creation) in Occupied Europe, SOE operatives organized Resistance groups, provided them with radios and weapons, and assisted them in acts of sabotage, assassination and terrorism against their Nazi overlords.

Young women like Lane Winslow were deemed ideal for such work because it was assumed that German men would be culturally pre-disposed to believe them incapable of such acts. Winslow was one of those deceptively 'mere girls' who had a much better chance of passing a Gestapo check-point than any male agent.

Whishaw says she based the character of Lane on her mother, who worked for British intelligence during the war, following in her own father’s footsteps. British SIS often recruited through family connections as a form of pre-emptive 'vetting,' a tendency exploited by espionage writer Len Deighton in two trilogies of Bernard Samson novels.

Spies expect to be hunted and even killed by enemy counter-espionage agents, a fear that supplies dramatic tension in simplistic thrillers of the James Bond ilk. More complex double-agents like Maurice Castle in Graham Greene's The Human Factor are tormented by the guilt of betrayal, magnifying their dread of discovery.

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In her first novel, A Killer in King's Cove, Whishaw explores an even more insidious affliction of the spy; the corrosive suspicion that the agency they have loyally served is spying on them and will do so until they take their secrets to the grave, prematurely if they become 'unreliable'.

Novelists only touch this aspect of the spy trade peripherally. Deighton's Bernard Samson accepts that repeated vetting and demotion by his own service are justified by his SIS wife’s defection to the KGB. In John Le Carre’s Smiley's People, aging George Smiley, promoted to preside over a tottering mole-riddled service, has no difficulty re-activating retired SIS 'assets', creating a personal network to combat the KGB penetration because wherever they are, the Service always knows how to find them.

British novelist William Boyd, not usually a writer of 'spy novels,' explores this state of life-long unease in Restless, (2006), about a woman who discovers her mother was a spy in WW II. Like Boyd, Whishaw subtly conveys how the trained senses of the secret agent, hyper-acute observation and sensitivity to situations, constantly threaten to become paranoia.

Though her skills empower Lane as an amateur detective, releasing some of the internalized tensions of her war experiences, they also make it impossible for her to find the peace she seeks.

After six novels of cautious, mutually investigative foreplay with Inspector Frederick Darling of the Nelson Police, in A Match Made for Murder, Winslow seems to have made a truce with her past and succumbed to the instinctive 'nesting and breeding' frenzy that possessed WW II survivors, resulting in the Baby Boom of the Fifties.

Winslow and her newly-wed Fred are honeymooning in Tucson, Arizona, where Darling’s former boss and mentor is now Chief of Police. Tucson, in the late Forties, is an idyllic Southwestern town where nothing much seems to happen...until one of the fellow hotel guests is murdered.

Lane is first on the scene. Then the sleazy underside of the town, including its police department, and the war-spawned American culture of corporate greed, start to bubble up like a shiny boil festering with poison.

Whishaw often uses the device of having Inspector Darling and his sidekick Sergeant Ames juggle two apparently unrelated cases that gradually prove to be connected. It’s an old trick, but a good one that allows a writer to employ a larger cast of characters and introduce information asymmetrically, avoiding the linear clue-by-clue plod of formulaic mysteries.

But what really makes the Lane Winslow mysteries so compelling is that Whishaw gets the tone and mood of the time and place exactly right. Her eclectic mix of remittance men, Imperial refugees and smalltown Canadians—all suffering from wounds or moral crises as a result of the recent war—should provide her with plots and characters for many novels still to come.

We'll be waiting in our deck chairs. 9781771513265

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John Moore is an ardent gardener, mystery buff, novelist and longtime social distancer in Garibaldi Highlands.