Heyer, Georgette. An Infamous Army.

London: Heinemann, 1937.

Heyer is best known for her several dozen light and humorous romances set in Regency England, but she also was capable of far deeper and more complex historical writing. Before Heyer, the best known and most highly regarded fictional account of the Battle of Waterloo was in Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair. (Victor Hugo wrote about the battle, too, in Les Misérables, but he was writing from the French viewpoint.) More recently, Bernard Cornwell, justifiably famous for his rousing and highly accurate battle scenes, did a marvelous grunt’s-eye view of the battle in Sharpe’s Waterloo. So how does this novel fair, compared to those?

Haddon, Mark. A Spot of Bother.

NY: Doubleday, 2006.

I was very impressed with Haddon’s first novel, the award-winning Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This one is about as different as it’s possible to be, and it’s also pretty impressive. George Hall is in his sixties, a retired builder of playground equipment, who has always been a little off-center in his method of dealing with life. Mostly, he tries to ignore things that make him uncomfortable — even more than your typical Englishman. Things like potential jetliner crashes and the possibility of dying of cancer.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison.

NY: HarperCollins, 1995, 1930.

It’s 1930 and mystery novelist Harriet Vane is on trial for murder. She was in love with another writer, Philip Boyes, and wanted to get married, but he refused to have anything to do with such a bourgeois institution, and so they simply shacked up. After a year or two, however, he decided to marry her after all. Except Harriet, deciding that their domestic arrangements — for which she had been willing to brave the censure of society — had just been an egotistical test on Boyes’s part, to see if she was good enough for him. There was a row, naturally, and shortly afterward Boyes died in some agony of arsenic poisoning.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Unnatural Death.

NY: Harper, 1927.

Whatever his undoubted talents as a detective, let’s face it — Lord Peter Wimsey is a busybody. He and his buddy, DI Charles Parker of Scotland Yard, are having tea in a café and idly discussing methods of murder in the medical profession when a stranger at the next table butts in to tell them of his own recent experience with a late patient whom he suspected of being the victim of foul play by a great-niece who was also the old lady’s nurse.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Murder Must Advertise.

NY: HarperCollins, 1961, 1933.

This is a strong contender for being the most thoroughly enjoyable of the author’s mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey — and not only because of the protagonist’s detecting. The principal setting is a large London advertising agency in the early 1930s, and because Sayers herself was a successful copywriter for a period, she knows what she’s talking about.

Graves, Charles. Leather Armchairs: The Book of London Clubs.

NY: Coward-McCann, 1963.

If you read much English fiction, especially that produced in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, or in which the setting is self-consciously “aristocratic,” there are certain background topics that most Brits take for granted but which remain rather a mystery to middle-class Americans — mostly because of the fundamental differences in the American class system. One of these is the culture of the London club, which goes back to the turn of the 18th century, when taverns hadn’t yet been replaced by hotels.

Atkinson, Kate. When Will There Be Good News?

NY: Little, Brown, 2008.

Atkinson is one of the very best authors presently working in the English (or Scots) language, and also one of the most overlooked by the general public, even though she’s won a Whitbread. Of her six previous novels, the two most recent, Case Histories and One Good Turn, are her best, and that’s saying something. And this one is even better.