Love, Marry, Murder
By Allison Montclair
July 18, 2023
From the beginning of the Sparks and Bainbridge series, I wanted to play with the idea of two women running a licensed marriage bureau in 1946 London whose own matrimonial prospects were unlikely, to say the least. Gwen Bainbridge is a war widow who was so shattered by her husband’s death that she ended up in an asylum for several months, and is still a ward of the Crown as a result. Iris Sparks, her partner, begins The Right Sort of Man, in the midst of a long-term love affair with a married man whom she met during her stint doing intelligence work. The two women are from different though occasionally overlapping social strata: Gwen grew up in the aristocracy; Iris in the middle class, smart enough to get into Cambridge and protean enough to mingle in any setting, high or low.
When thinking through how they would develop over the course of the series, I naturally wanted their romantic lives to be part of it, but I also wanted to avoid the traps and tropes of cozy mysteries. Lurking under the exteriors of both women was wartime trauma, in Gwen’s case tied up with an ideal, but tragic romance, and in Iris’s a desire to prove herself that led to an unexpectedly violent encounter. They both, as a result, need support, which they find with each other as well as a therapist, Dr. Milford, who is a continuing character in the series. The era they are living in is chaotic, their lives are chaotic, so it seems inevitable that their love lives would be chaotic as well.
They are also women acting as business owners and surprisingly frequent detectives in a world that has hitherto been dominated by men. This makes them unusual—but it takes unusual people to do what they do. Having been through the wars, both literal and romantic, they are no longer ready to settle for the pre-war norm as wives and mothers subsuming their desires and ambitions in those of their (still hypothetical) husbands.
It might be argued that they are ahead of their era in this, to which I would point out that in the post-war period, there were government committees already addressing the questions of equal pay for women (ultimately deciding against it); there were women who had taken up every variety of formerly male occupation while the lads were off fighting; and somewhere nearby a “headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated” young female chemist, a recent graduate from Oxford, was taking an interest in politics, one that would ultimately lead her to become Prime Minister.
So while romance, or at least adventure in Iris’s case, are a part of their lives, they aren’t their ultimate goals. I have found that each of them has been influencing the other in this respect. Iris’s example has slowly brought Gwen out of her depressed shell and allowed her to begin taking chances again, while Gwen’s inherent goodness and her efforts to deal with her traumatic past have led Iris to attempt to match her. Iris’s developing relationship with Archie, a gangster, may seem unconventional to an outsider, but it is, surprising Iris more than anyone, perhaps the most sustainable relationship she’s ever had.
Where will they end up romantically? It remains to be seen. The Lady From Burma, the fifth book in the series, will follow continuing developments on the romantic front for both of them.
But there’s also this murder to be solved…