Series watch: Mrs. Jeffries mysteries by Emily Brightwell

Back when I was working in a bricks-and-mortar full-service bookstore, one of the big challenges was learning where to steer avid fans of one author or another when the customer had read everything by their favorite and couldn’t wait for the next book. The lingo for this is ‘hand-selling’, i.e., you pull a book off the shelf that you think someone might like, and hand it to them, often with a short explanation about why you think they might like it.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that most people who like the Cat Who books tended to also appreciate the Victorian London mystery series starring Mrs. Jeffries and company, by Emily Brightwell. Also, people who liked the Mrs. Pollifax mystery series could usually safely be steered to the Brightwell books. Fans of Jan Karon could…

‘Wait a minute!’ I hear you say. ‘You’re mixing genres!’

Well, yes, but what I found hand-selling is that what matters more to most people (at least when they’re suffering from favorite author deprivation) isn’t the setting, it’s the tone of a book. The niceness and/or decency level, if you will, taken in combination with the humor level. And the Mrs. Jeffries books are light and nice and full of human interactions, not to mention that they are sometimes very funny. Hence, they are in the same class as Pollifax, etc, and (funny as it sounds) the Mitford books by Karon.

Over the last several years, the Brightwell books have quietly caught on. People who get into the series tend to want all of the series, which has driven up the used book prices of the titles no longer in print. For example, today on barnesandnoble.com, the least expensive copy of The Ghost and Mrs. Jeffries is $9.95 – and that’s in ‘fair’ condition! This for a standard mass market paperback about the size of the average Harlequin romance. Amazon, Alibris, abebooks, biblio.com, etc., same thing: the low price is about ten bucks, and the average price is $15 around the web. When there’s a supply drought, it’s not been unheard of for this title to sell for $25. (What happens to used prices when the omnibus "Mrs. Jeffries Learns the Trade" comes out in April is anyone's guess. It contains the first three books in the series, including The Ghost and Mrs. Jeffries.)

Mrs. Jeffries is the head housekeeper for a Scotland Yard inspector. The inspector, once upon a time, had been assigned a homicide investigation. He was in no way, shape or form suited to the task, so his devoted household staff helped him out behind his back. The success was so startling to his superiors that they dubbed him a genius at solving murders, and began to steer all sorts of murder investigations his way. Poor Inspector Witherspoon. He is quite squeamish, and wishes to have nothing to do with dead bodies, but, of course, if he can be of any help he will give it his best shot. Justice must be served, and he will do his duty. The staff, of course, continues to covertly help solve cases for him, sometimes with the help of their friends. The staff is a diverse group of people, each with his or her own talents and shortcomings. Sometimes they cooperate. Sometimes they squabble. Sometimes they get a little too competitive and run around trying to get a great scoop at the expense of the others. You get the picture.

A word to the wise: every once in a while a book in the series suffers from, uhm, something-short-of-world-class editing, shall we say? Just here and there, there is a lapse. This is a quibble. The series overall draws devoted fans, and with reason. There are at last count nineteen books in the series.

File these under British cozies. The mass market paperback publisher is Berkley. Thorndike puts them out in large print.

The author maintains a webpage at http://www.emilybrightwell.com/