The Energy of Language

Apr-May 2022
Behold, Here's Poison / The Toll-Gate - Georgette Heyer – House of Stratus, 2001 / Arrow Books, 2005
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Somehow, I have managed to reach my advanced age without having previously read a word of Georgette Heyer. This is odd because both my parents and my grandmother were enormous fans and we had around twenty of her novels sitting on a bookshelf in the house in which I grew up. At the time I probably thought of them as soppy Mills and Boon-style stuff that was not worth bothering with. Anyway, a friend kindly leant me these two as exemplars of the two genres in which she wrote; regency romance and golden-age detective fiction. Both books have a lively set of characters and perfectly adequately structured plots. But The Toll-Gate has an energy of language that easily elevates it above its rival.
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