There’s magic in opening a book and finding yourself not just in a story but in another era. (I’ve long suspected that the appeal of a trip to St. Mary’s Mead isn’t just Miss Marple but the historical atmosphere of an English village in 1930).
Historical mysteries offer something beyond puzzle-solving—they provide passage to bygone eras. Readers can smell the coal smoke, see the swing of a flapper’s pearls as she dances the Charleston, and feel the weight of social conventions.
What makes a historical mystery special isn’t just accurate research—though that’s essential—but the author’s ability to conjure atmosphere, to drop sly references to real historical figures and events, and yes, to dress their characters in period-perfect clothes (a Worth gown, a loose-fitting jersey dress, shocking wide-leg pants). The best mysteries make the historical details part of the plot. And they give us heroines who challenge historical constraints.
Here are some of my favorites, mysteries that inspired me to write one of my own.
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Catriona McPherson, After the Armistice Ball
After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson drops us into a chilly Scottish winter where the unhealed wounds left by the Great War still color every conversation. The sleuth, Dandy Gilver, is an aristocratic woman finding new purpose as a detective, and McPherson captures both the privilege and the suffocating expectations of Dandy’s class with equal precision.
Dandy doesn’t rail against the bars of her golden cage. Instead, she subversively slips through them. And we love her for it. The mystery itself is clever, but it’s the atmosphere—the tension between old certainties and new possibilities—that keeps readers hooked.
Anna Lee Huber, This Side of Murder
In This Side of Murder, Anna Lee Huber introduces us to Verity Kent, another woman shaped by the Great War—but in radically different ways. Verity worked as a secret agent, and now, in the 1920s, she’s struggling with both her guilt over her wartime actions and society’s assumption that women should simply return to decorative irrelevance.
Verity attends glamorous soirees and elite house parties and can’t help but notice the underlying darkness, the desperate gaiety that barely hides underlying grief. Secrets, lies, betrayal, and vivid historical detail–this mystery has it all.
Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs
Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series offers something most other books on this list don’t: a heroine who isn’t born to privilege. As a child, Maisie works as a maid and gets caught reading in her employer’s library and—in a stroke of luck—finds her education supported rather than her employment terminated. She works her way to Cambridge and then enlists as a nurse when WWI breaks out. When we meet her in 1929, she’s a private investigator.
Where other heroines slip through the bars of their golden cages, Maisie climbs over barriers they never face. The eighteen-book series examines the impact of war on ordinary people, and Maisie—who has lived it—brings a different kind of authority to her investigations.
Kerry Greenwood, Cocaine Blues
In Kerry Greenwood’s Cocaine Blues, we meet the incomparable Phryne Fisher, a wealthy, sexually liberated amateur detective in 1920s Melbourne. Phryne is thoroughly modern—she wears trousers, drives cars, and takes lovers as she pleases—yet she moves through a world where such behavior is genuinely shocking.
Greenwood captures the time and place with vivid specificity: the fashion and slang, the social issues of the day, and the ways that the war’s aftermath shaped Australian society. Greenwood’s obvious love for the Jazz Age and her determination to portray it in all its contradictory glory make this series a favorite.
Rhys Bowen, Her Royal Spyness
Rhys Bowen’s Her Royal Spyness takes a lighter approach to the interwar period, introducing us to Lady Georgiana Rannoch, thirty-fourth in line to the British throne and completely broke. She’s naive. She’s flaky. And she is funny.
Bowen captures the absurdities of the British class system in an era when the old order was visibly crumbling. Georgie is caught between worlds: too aristocratic to work but too poor to adequately support herself, expected to uphold family dignity while sleeping in a house with no heat.
Bowen chronicles 1930s London with affection and detail—the debutante season, the hunting lodges, the terrible food, and the rigid social expectations. The series, which now numbers nineteen books, is cozy and fun, but it’s grounded in real historical tensions around class, politics, and the looming threat of another war.
Tasha Alexander, And Only to Deceive
Tasha Alexander’s And Only to Deceive transports us to Victorian London through the eyes of Lady Emily Ashton, a young woman who discovers her late husband wasn’t the man she thought he was. Emily’s transformation from naive bride to widow to intrepid sleuth made me fall in love with this series.
Alexander captures the claustrophobia of aristocratic Victorian womanhood (the calling cards and social rituals, the art collecting and archaeological pursuits, and the restrictive rules governing a widow’s behavior) while also revealing the era’s intellectual curiosity, particularly around archaeology and classical studies. But it’s Lady Emily’s curiosity that keeps readers coming back.
Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Grave
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn offers another Victorian setting but with a deliciously gothic atmosphere. When Lady Julia Grey’s husband dies suddenly, she initially accepts the doctor’s diagnosis—until the mysterious private investigator Nicholas Brisbane suggests murder.
The book overflows with the sensory richness of Victorian England—prudish yet sensual, rigid yet eccentric, and death-obsessed yet vigorously alive. The romance between Lady Julia (nee March) and the darkly magnetic Brisbane (think Heathcliff without the cruelty or the self-destructive need for revenge) develops slowly, constrained by period conventions, which heightens the tension.
Raybourn also does something wonderful with Julia’s sprawling, eccentric family (“The March family has the reputation of being wild as March hares, but when it comes to murder, they are no fools.”). They feel genuinely Victorian in their peculiarities and add levity to a dark mystery.
Sherry Thomas, A Study in Scarlet Women
A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas offers a subversive twist on Sherlock Holmes by reimagining the detective as Charlotte Holmes, a Victorian woman who has sacrificed her reputation to gain her freedom. Thomas uses the familiar Holmesian framework to explore women’s limited options in Victorian society.
Charlotte’s fall from respectability—necessary for her to work as a detective—is treated with the gravity it would have had in that era. The period detail is awe-inspiring, from the intricacies of Victorian domestic service to the emerging technologies of the era. And the mysteries are head-scratchers.
A good mystery is a pleasure. A good historical mystery is a vacation. And a vacation where smart women triumph? Book me a ticket (lots of tickets).
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