Wouldn't It Be Deadly--An Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins Mystery

July 14, 2014
Set in London in 1913, this tongue-in-cheek series kickoff from the pseudonymous Ireland picks up where the musical My Fair Lady left off. Eliza Doolittle has left her irascible mentor, Henry Higgins, to work for a rival elocution teacher, Emil Nepommuck. Nepommuck features her transformation from street flower-seller to someone who passed for a duchess prominently in his advertising, and manages to steal some of Higgins’s students. When someone fatally stabs Nepommuck in the back outside his apartment, Higgins, who confronted the man earlier, becomes Scotland Yard’s prime suspect. Higgins turns out to be hiding a secret, which is out of character with his stage and film personae. Some readers may find character names like Harrison and Shaw a bit heavy-handed, though others may smile when Higgins describes Eliza as a “fair lady” or wonders why anyone would care about the “rain in Spain.” Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune Agency.

October 1, 2014
A flower girl-turned-speech coach stops polishing vowels long enough to solve several murders in a series debut that picks up just short of where Shaw's Pygmalion left off. Eight months after her triumph at the Embassy Ball, Eliza Doolittle has learned enough from world-renowned speech expert Henry Higgins to go into business for herself-or at least as an assistant to Higgins' chief rival, Emil Nepommuck. After a day of giving phonetic lessons to social climbers in London's fashionable Belgrave Square, Eliza hears a noise in the dark as she's leaving her office and is startled by someone rushing past her, leaving behind a gold button. Then, at a grand reception, Eliza witnesses a ruckus at the announcement of Nepommuck's engagement to the Dowager Marchioness of Gresham, who's easily twice the Hungarian count's age. The nuptials, alas, are not to be: Eliza finds Nepommuck stabbed to death in his office and becomes the first suspect herself. Luckily for her, her cousin is the detective inspector on the case, and he releases her. His next suspect, however, is Higgins, who remains stubbornly secretive about where he was the day of the murder. He's not the only one withholding information. Nepommuck was blackmailing people who were hiding secrets, and the list grows as Eliza tries to find the owner of the mysterious button and clear Higgins. Even her pluck, as well as loving descriptions of Edwardian fashion and the presence of Col. Pickering and Freddy Eynsford Hill, can't offset the tale's feeble wit and soppy subplots. Fans of the original may be curious to know what happens next, but true Shaw devotees will wish they could unread this ill-conceived sequel, especially when it descends into slapstick and a denouement so cliched that it's even announced as such. The two authors writing together as Ireland must have known that the tradeoff for a ready-made back story and brand-name characters would be comparisons with the characters' creator-but did they know how short they would fall?

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September 1, 2014

Have you ever wondered what happened to Eliza Doolittle after the Embassy Ball? In this series debut featuring George Bernard Shaw's beloved characters from Pygmalion (the basis for the musical My Fair Lady), Eliza moves out of Prof. Henry Higgins's house at 27A Wimpole and into his mother's palatial mansion and becomes a language instructor. Working with Maestro Emil Nepommuck, Higgins's bitter rival, Eliza helps other ordinary folks learn the elevated vowels of high society. When the maestro's body is found with a knife in it, Higgins becomes the prime suspect because he threatened to sue Nepommuck for fraud. But Eliza knows the late teacher's pupils also had plenty of reasons for murder, including that Nepommuck was really Bela Kardos, an ex-convict and not Hungarian royalty. Then another corpse is reported. VERDICT A charming teaming of Eliza, Professor Higgins, and Major Pickering make for an engaging light historical mystery, as long as one can tolerate the slightly twee affectation of Shaw's literary characters as amateur sleuths.

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