In Fitzgerald's first novel, apparently written to amuse her dying husband, we get international intrigue and a sinister murder mystery, but the book is at its heart a satirical, absurd comedy of manners about a special showing at a British museum. It's hard to describe without giving away key elements; it's short, engaging, and occasionally hilarious. ( )

This was a wild ride that brought me lots of joy. The golden child was Fitzgerald’s first novel, and while it is more ebullient than her later work in terms of plot and the sheer delight of throwing stuff at the reader to see what sticks, it also shows her characteristic restraint in not over-explaining character motivations or the genre tropes she expects readers to be familiar with.

The initial setting is the British Museum, a vast and labyrinthine structure whose institutional organization is incomprehensibly byzantine even to the people who work there. It is home to punch-clock civil servants, a pipe-smoking octogenarian archaeologist of the classical persuasion, bottom-level workers who do the cataloguing and drawing, the unsung heroes of the admin staff, and a multitude of department heads who vie for what little public money is available. When the Museum organizes a much-hyped temporary exhibition on Garamantian funeral practices, everyone needs to work together to manage the endless visitor queues, and the scene is set for a cozy art theft mystery. And that is when the plot really starts.

Also, class issues are not-so-subtly at play, shots are fired at Britain’s post-decolonisation position as a world power, and at one point Fitzgerald includes a puzzle like the one Sherlock-Holmes solved in The adventure of the dancing men. Shameless fun is what it is.

I am so glad I found out about Fitzgerald. Her books are both cozy and cutting, eccentric as well as understated, and she knew exactly what she was doing and how to get away with it. Full marks! ( )

A London museum has installed a priceless exhibit, including a gold-covered mummy of a child, that is drawing thousands of visitors daily. This is a murder mystery laced with satirical humour mocking the eccentric or self-important staff of the museum. Written in 1977, this spoof of the Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum was Fitzgerald's first work of fiction, and very entertaining.

I enjoyed the bit that said they sold 15,000 get-well cards featuring the Golden Tomb! Yes, a picture of a tomb should make the ill get well soon! ( )

Fitzgerald had already produced a couple of biographies when she wrote this first novel: apparently she undertook it chiefly as a way to to amuse her dying husband. Uncharacteristically, in view of the sort of novels she later became known for, it's a satirical crime thriller, set in an unnamed large museum of antiquities in Bloomsbury, which is staging a hugely popular but completely fraudulent Tutankhamen-style exhibition of borrowed treasures. Complex rivalries between the different factions of museum administrators boil over, in the best Civil Service tradition, into violent crime and international espionage.

It's a perfectly respectable crime thriller, with a good mix of jokes, clues, and cliffhangers, but with hindsight we would expect a bit more than that from a Fitzgerald novel, and this one doesn't quite deliver. It seems to have been a bit of a false start for her. The very black comedy and the cynical view of human nature seem to be borrowed from Evelyn Waugh and (more directly) Simon Raven, but Fitzgerald doesn't have the shameless arrogance that allows those writers to get away with their utter contempt for everything and everyone. What is entirely characteristic for her is the extreme compression of the plot, which leaves some threads and some characters rather undeveloped. It would have been nice to see something of Waring Smith's permanently offstage wife, for instance. But everything is over, the mystery solved and the clay tablet decrypted, before we really have time to draw breath. ( )

The "mystery" isn't much — the murders don't occur until halfway through the book and it's fairly obvious who the perp is, though the method of murder is a bit odd — but that's not the point. What's really amusing about this novel novella, Fitzgerald's first and published when she was sixty years old, is its send-up of museum exhibits, museum staff, the Cold War, and just about everything else. ( )