Crime fiction set during the 1920s and '30s is a difficult prospect. Anyone attempting it is being jostled by other crime writers, competing against TV and film images of a very photogenic era, and battling the ghosts of literary titans who were actually there at the time, like Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. But Catriona McPherson proves that it's still possible to write compelling crime fiction capable of showing us the Golden Age from a new perspective.

In Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains, the breezy socialite detective Dandy Gilver goes undercover as a maid in the house of a woman convinced that her husband is going to kill her. A typically hokum-filled plot gives McPherson the opportunity to sketch some deft vignettes as her heroine hovers between life below and above stairs. Comparisons with Gosford Park are inevitable, and whilst this isn't such an ambitious work, it's an enjoyable (though milder) dose of "the mixture as before."

The background of the UK's 1926 general strike by industrial workers adds a little more depth to the book, and if Dandy's education in the realities of working-class life has some heavy-handed moments, it never swerves into preaching or smugness. Dandy herself holds the series together with a fluent and likeable narrative voice—it's a pleasure to spend three hundred pages in her company.