Two teenagers, Freda and Florence, have run away from home
in the last 1920s to seek fame and fortune as dancers in London. Freda has some talent, but Florence—not so
much. After pocketing an unexpected
inheritance, Gwendolen Kelling dashes off from her Yorkshire home and her job
as a librarian to search for the girls, at the behest of Freda’s
half-sister. Gwendolen and a policeman
named Frobisher find that they can help one another out if Gwendolen will do
some undercover snooping at the Amethyst, a bar owned by the notorious Nellie
Coker, who has recently been released from prison. Gwendolen proves herself to be calm and
capable in an emergency and finds herself managing Nellie’s swankiest watering
hole. Gwendolen may be the heroine of
this novel, but Nellie’s six children—2 men and 4 women—are the colorful
characters here, particularly the men. I
would say that all six are adults, but several of them don’t really fit that
category in terms of their behavior.
London does not come off very well, either, as the police force is
mostly corrupt if not downright dangerous to those it is supposed to protect,
and the city is rife with pickpockets and purse snatchers. The author handles all of the characters,
plots and subplots with her usual deftness, and her way with words always
delights. One of my favorite passages is
on page 147, in a paragraph regarding three of Nellie’s daughters:
“Both Betty and Shirley were excellent dancers, almost
professionally spry, unlike Edith, who had two left feet. (‘Even possible three,’ Betty said.) They had talked about setting up a dance
academy within one of the clubs, where members would pay extra to learn the
latest dances or polish up the old ones. Nellie was ruminating on the
idea. They doubted she would ever digest
it.”
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