In Hannah Hendy’s novel, The Dinner Lady Detectives, we are introduced to a zany cast of “dinner ladies” (lunch ladies in America) at a small British school who are suddenly without their fearless leader, Caroline Hughes, who is found brutally murdered in the walk-in freezer in the school kitchen. Disturbed by Caroline’s death, her elderly coworker Clementine Butcher decides to investigate and badgers her long-suffering long-term partner, Margery Baker, to help her. However, this cozy mystery doesn’t stay cozy for long when they realize Caroline wasn’t dead when she was put into the freezer and desperately fought to get out before she died.
To find clues to who might have wanted to kill Caroline, they begin digging into her life, starting with the people she left bequests to at her will reading. They rather ineptly investigate their fellow workmates and are suspicious of Seren, who has been acting increasingly erratic since Caroline’s death. Several false leads around the school lead nowhere, and Clementine and Margery are increasingly convinced that Caroline has a secret lover. This theory is bolstered by the fact that Caroline’s house is burglarized. After an unsuccessful pursuit, Clementine and Margery are back to square one.
As more leads lead to dead ends and the police brush off Clementine and Margery’s suspicions, these dinner ladies have only a few clues: an ugly feather earring, mysterious notes being hand-delivered to their house, and a box of old puzzles by Caroline. These two pensioners may be over their heads, but they aren’t giving up.
The Review
The Dinner Lady Detectives by Hannah Hendy is a frustrating mystery. Hendy is going for a cozy mystery with elderly protagonists, like The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman or The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood. Still, her duo is not nearly as charming and funny as the author intends. Clementine is incredibly passive and aggressive toward Margery and bullies her constantly. I’m curious why Margery believed she was in love with Clementine for most of the book and felt any softening of Clementine’s railroading behavior towards the end of the novel was too late.
Their dynamic is disappointing because there aren’t many mysteries where the leading duo is in a same-sex relationship. I wanted an excellent book to recommend to people interested in reading books with LGBT protagonists since there are so few books with this theme hitting mainstream shelves.
One of the major pitfalls of this series so far is how implausible everything is- the police are so disinterested in the case and don’t perform fundamental forensic analysis on very bloody (for a cozy) crime scene or follow up on any leads. Clementine’s abrasive attitude also bungles cooperation between the police and the older ladies, so Clementine and Margery are left to their own devices. This leads us to the main problem with The Dinner Lady Detectives…..
Margery and Clementine are terrible sleuths. At first, the bumbling pratfall nature is comical and enjoyable. Even those of us who have read every mystery book in our local library would not necessarily be good investigators, but they cannot work out the most clues. These ladies are not Jessica Fletcher, observant, witty, and charming. They are inept, scatterbrained, lose evidence, and follow suspects on the nearest conjecture, and this scattershot “method” really makes the book’s second half a slog. There isn’t an investigation or an accumulation of facts but rather a series of pratfalls and Three’s Company-style situational comedy.
The author had a good premise and no genuine interest in writing a mystery. Instead, she focused on writing broader and broader hijinks until there was an over-the-top ending, complete with the kidnapping and miraculous escape of Clementine and Margery.
I’m not sure that the reader could really discover the motive and then work out how the murder happened based on what was written, and I’ll be honest, it’s not a satisfying ending for me, but I think it’s in keeping with the no-hold-barred approach Hendy has adopted. The Dinner Lady Detectives wasn’t for me. Still, it can and will find an audience interested in broad, funny, outrageous characters and not so invested in the mystery aspect. That being said, I picked up the whole series, so I’ll return to it eventually. I want to see if some rough edges will be smoothed and if the next book will be a tighter mystery.
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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