One of the 2016 Read Harder challenges is to read a book from the decade of your birth. For me, that would be the 1940s as I was born in the first half of the last century. Frances Parkinson Keyes' novel Dinner at Antoines hit number 3 on the 1948 Best Sellers list as determined by Publishers Weekly, and was number 6 on the same list for 1949. This seemed like a good book to read for the challenge.

My first observation is that readers had a much longer attention span sixty plus years ago. I dare say you'd be hard pressed to find a 366 page murder mystery written recently, and that's 366 pages of relatively small print. As engaging as the story is, this is not an overnight read. I would note that Dan Brown's long novels, e.g. The DaVinci Code, are not really murder mysteries so much as they are adventure/intrigue stories, which is a completely different category. My next observation is that language changes over time, even over the relatively short period of the sixty-seven years of this book's life. What, for example, is an "English Basement," a term Keyes uses to describe the entrance to a New York City restaurant? (I hasten to note that various dictionaries are able to define the term, and indeed it apparently is still in use on the East Coast for what, in my part of the country is called a Garden Apartment.) Still, today's reader may find the language here a bit stilted, and the conversations even more so. The speech of the black nanny (and yes, there are characters in the book who refer to her as a Nigger), is so strongly written as to make Butterfly McQueen's famous line about "birthin'" babies sound positively Shakespearean. If any black person ever spoke the way Tossie Pride speaks, it must be because she thought that that's what white folk expected. At least that's my perspective from 2016.

Make no mistake, this is a novel set among the upper class. Even the "poorest" white folk in the novel have servants, and engaging a private room at a fancy restaurant for a dinner party of 8 or 10 is to be expected, not extraordinary. Three such meals take place in the eight days covered in the story.

Antoine's is a real New Orleans restaurant, open since 1840 which makes it, according to some sources, the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the United States. The restaurant created the dish Oysters Rockefeller, and many of the dishes mentioned in the novel are on the 2016 menu, so as in all things New Orleans, tradition plays an important part--and it certainly does in the story as well.

Keyes (whose name rhymes with Prize or Skies), was born in Virginia, was educated all around Europe, grew up tri-lingual, and at age 18 married a future U.S. Senator from New Hampshire. She knew intimately the kind of life she describes in her novel, and after her husband's death in 1938, she traveled extensively, eventually ending up in New Orleans where she bought and refurbished a mansion on Chartres St. in the French Quarter. She converted to Catholicism, and indeed, most of the characters in this novel are members of the Roman Catholic church. She believed that women should approach the marriage altar as virgins, and that moral code plays a heavy role throughout the novel--another distinguishing feature from many modern tales. And yes, I know that people had sex outside of marriage in 1948 and even before, but that's not what a proper lady would do in a FPKeyes novel.

This is a murder mystery, and Keyes' Catholic faith even plays into that scenario. The question upon finding the corpse is not so much who killed the victim as it is whether the deed was murder or suicide. If the latter, it is very clear that the church will have no part in the victim's funeral, nor will the victim be buried on consecrated ground. And if it is murder, there are plenty of potential suspects to pick from, all of whom had opportunity and most of whom had obvious motives. So which was it, and if murder, who pulled the trigger? That's the question that Keyes takes over three hundred pages to answer.

In a satisfying (to this reader) literary convention, the book ends with an "Envoi," eight sections following the twenty-three chapters, giving us a follow up on the main characters of the novel and what has happened in their lives in the year after the events of January 1948, the month in which all twenty-three chapters are set.

Reading this bit of literary history, I got caught up in the story. I've read a great many murder mysteries set in New Orleans, one of my favorite cities. This one stands out because of the great amount of detail Keyes uses to describe the minutiae of upper class New Orleans life. I look forward to reading more of Keyes books (over 50 published between 1919 and her death in 1970), and I heartily recommend this, her most popular work, to anyone interested in period literature, New Orleans high society, or just plain fun. ( )

Francis Parkinson Keyes is an author whose books I used to read many years ago. I felt like reading something by her so I picked this up. Dinner at Antoine's takes place in New Orleans and the uniqueness of that city is truly felt in this book. The majority of the book takes place in in 8 days at the beginning of January 1948 and the wrap up chapters extend the time out to October 1948. The characters, all introduced in the beginning at a private dinner at Antoine's, an exclusive restaurant are immediately struck with tragedy within 24 hours of the dinner. One of their number is dead. Was it suicide? Murder? The book is extraordinarily long and while I enjoyed it, I do feel it could have benefited from a bit of editing. ( )

series of stories based on the famous Antoine's of New Orleans and life in 1940s New Orleans. humorous yet revealing of local customs.

There is a wonderful sense of life in the old upper-class New Orleans families of the 1940's . Mardi Gras is very interesting. The mystery works (what there is of it) but the book is mostly a soap opera. The romance in the book did not work for me. Keyes was born in 1885 and she married in 1903. Her husband was 40 years old and a prominent politician who served as a governor and a US senator. Her attitude about love and marriage seems to reflect her own life. All the good women seem to strive to be a handmaiden to a good man with important work to do. I like seeing characters play the hand that life has dealt them including the women's social restrictions of the era they lived in. But the women in this book aren't playing their hands, they're just sitting there holding their cards prettily . As incredibly racist as this book is the black woman is actually the best developed female character. The devoted domestic servant is a mainstay in novels. Tossie's devotion actually makes sense. She has found a niche in life that suits her and she is not as humble as she seems. She has found plenty of people to look down on (black-and-white). It is way too long. ( )

A late work by the industrious pop-novelist, journalist, and chronicler of Roman Catholic tradition. An homage to a then-famous New Orleans restaurant and ite manager, it's a mystery of the sort which would probably called "a cozy" if written today. Pretty thin; stuff, to my taste; I read it in mercifully temporary default of anything else to read. ( )