The Gladstone Bag

Kelling & Bittersohn #9

by Charlotte MacLeod

Sarah Kelling's Aunt Emma leaps at the chance to stay at her old friend Adelaide's summer place, enjoying a quiet time repairing some stage jewelry while keeping an eye on the artists and writers who'll be occupying adelaide's six guest cottages. On the ferry, Emma's gladstone bag is temporarily stolen. Could someone have mistaken those junk jewels for real diamonds? She meets her guests-to-be who inform her they plan to dig for Pocapuk's legendary pirate treasure without having bothered to get Adelaide's permission. On the island, her bag is heisted again, a trespassing scuba diver is found dead, and a mysterious stranger is off on a rampage of attempted murders. Emma enlists niece Sarah and her husband, Max Bittersohn, for a spot of long-distance detecting.

Cover Art by Mark Hess.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Cozy Mystery, Cozy, Humor, Audiobook, Crime

246 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1990

About the author

Naturalized US Citizen

Also wrote as Alisa Craig

Charlotte MacLeod, born in New Brunswick, Canada, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was the multi-award-winning author of over thirty acclaimed novels. Her series featuring detective Professor Peter Shandy, America's homegrown Hercule Poirot, delivers "generous dollops of...warmth, wit, and whimsy" (San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle). But fully a dozen novels star her popular husband-and-wife team of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. And her native Canada provides a backdrop for the amusing Grub-and-Stakers cozies written under the pseudonym Alisa Craig and the almost-police procedurals starring Madoc Rhys, RCMP. A cofounder and past president of the American Crime Writers League, she also edited the bestselling anthologies Mistletoe Mysteries and Christmas Stalkings.

Reviews

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another delightful read

MacLeod gives us another wonderful addition to this series.Even with Max and Sarah sidelined, the story is masterfully told. You'll love it.

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This title has Emma as the main character. Sarah and Max are pretty much off stage for this book, just stepping in with suggestions and help here and there. Theonia also paid a pretty big role. The new cast of characters are delightful. Vincent, the loyal caretaker and ferociously loving father, the two girls, Sandy and her friend, and Sandy's brother. As well as Bubbles, the cook. I suppose his character would not be found much any more since a lot of affectionate fun is poked at his speech problem. The guests to the island are not nearly so pleasant. Most of the book is Emma feeling depressed and worried what is next for her in life. She finds her new mission on the last few pages of the book. I rather wonder if the author wasn't having similar problems or had a friend with similar problems since it got a lot of focus in the story. The mystery itself was rather weird in many ways since it was created on the ferry ride to the island where all further events took place. Actually, now that I think about it, the author used the same concept in at least one prior Kelling/Bittersohn mystery, where something was added to the possessions of the main character, rather than stolen. Again, this is more of a 2.5 in many ways, but I do enjoy Emma as a character so I'm willing to give this a break. This is the last title I have owned and is following the others into recycling. I definitely need the space more than I need this series. I've enjoyed whiling away my bad cold with this series, though. Now, back to life....and the library books that are due soon!

[Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early Bird Book Deal | Despite the near-total lack of the series' main characters, this may be my favourite installment | Emma has been a joy since she was introduced, and I just didn't miss Sarah and Max. My only real issue is in the denouement; Emma says simply that she can explain everything, having made no hints or comments that would have suggested she does have the answers, and the culprit immediately whacks her on the head, jumps through a window, and tries to leap onto a badly-constructed raft to escape the police. Why wouldn't they wait a few more seconds to see if she actually knew something? If it were going to be that easy, she could have just bluffed a couple days earlier and all would have been well.

[WhatShouldIRead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not having read any other book in this series, the mentioning of characters related to characters was confusing. I think in order to figure out who the author was talking about these books should probably be read in order.

Some of the dialogue was meandering and, quite frankly, boring. I ended up skipping over some of it in order to get back to the story, which was a pretty good one. The isolated island setting was well done and the characters were vivid. I didn't see the resolution coming, which is always a good thing.

[Whistler's Mom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you really can't judge a book by its cover, or even by the opening paragraphs.

When Charlotte MacLeod retired as Vice-President from the Boston advertising agency, she moved to Maine and fell in love with the coastal area. I was displeased when I realized that this Sarah Kelling-Max Bittersohn mystery was set in Maine instead of Boston. I prefer my detectives to stay on their own territories, dealing with characters I already know. I ended up enjoying this one very much although the Bittersohns play only small roles in it.

Most readers know about Yaddo, the rural New York retreat for writers and artists. The Sabine family has ran a similar retreat on their private Maine island of Pocapuk for many years. Cabins are furnished (free of charge) for aspiring writers and artists to spend the summer working in peace and quiet. Breakfast and supper are served in the house and bag lunches are distributed so that work can continue all day without interruption.

Old age necessitates many changes and vacation homes are usually the first to go on the chopping block. Adelaide Sabine hates to abandon Pocapuk, but now she’s a widow and frail. Her doctor has forbidden her to spend the summer on an isolated island. What to do with the group of creative types who’ve been invited for the summer?

Fans of this series will remember Sarah Kelling Bittersohn’s energetic Aunt Emma Kelling from the book “The Plain Old Man.” Widowed herself, she’s younger and healthier than Mrs Sabine and offers to take over the role of hostess at the island for the summer.. “A Kelling knows his/her duty” is the family motto and encouraging the arts is the responsibility of those with money. In addition, Emma likes the idea of spending the summer on a beautiful island with interesting people. At least one of those people will prove to be more interesting than she was counting on!

She carrying an old Gladstone bag full of costume jewelry that needs to be repaired and refinished for her amateur theatrical group. On the island ferry, she falls asleep and the bag is stolen. When it’s returned, there’s something in it that wasn’t there before.

The island’s caretaker Vincent has everything efficiently arranged. He’s aided by a cook, his teen daughter Sandy, her friend Berniece, his teen son Neil, and a young man he knows little about but who’s willing to spend the summer on the island working for a small salary.

The cabin residents consist of four males and two females. Two are writers and three are artists. One is a middle-aged woman who bills herself as a fortune teller. What’s SHE doing at the retreat? Turns out Mrs Sabine has entrusted one of the writers (a persuasive stranger) with inviting others. He has his own plan for the summer and it involves a search for the pirate treasure supposed to be buried on Pocapuk Island. He’s an obnoxious, entitled sort and it takes the authority of a seasoned committee chairwoman (like Emma) to keep him in check.

Then a man claiming amnesia shows up on the island. Before the ferry arrives to remove him, he’s helped off a cliff and fails to survive the fall. Meanwhile, Emma is trying to figure out what to do with the very REAL piece of jewelry that was inserted into her Gladstone bag while it was missing. Someone knows she has it, judging from the break-ins and searches in the house. Sarah and Max know all about stolen jewelry, but Max is in bed with a broken leg. There’s also the problem of getting the jewelry off the island, which has no access to the mainland but a ferry that runs when weather permits.

Max and Sarah figure out a way and (unable to come themselves) send an able substitute in the form of Cousin Brooks Kelling’s wife Theonia. A middle-aged, but still beautiful Gypsy, she and Emma quickly realize there’s a ruthless thief and murderer on the island, but is it one of the artists-in-residence or one of the staff?

Emma Kelling and Theonia Kelling have the makings of excellent detectives, IF they live long enough to solve the mystery. The guilty party is playing for high stakes and has already killed two people. As Dashiell Hammett said, they can only hang you once. No one more dangerous than a man (or woman) with nothing to lose.

It’s a very good mystery. In common with most older writers, MacLeod's characters reflect her own experiences with ageing, a subject of interest to those of us in the same boat. I think there's plenty here to appeal to mystery lovers of all ages.

It was a lesson to me in not being closed-minded about what I'll enjoy in a book. Old Charlotte can move her mysteries to Maine any time she wants to and I’ll keep reading them.

[PR · Rating 4 out of 5]

What horrible fun! Charlotte Macleod never ceases to puzzle and amaze!

It would be so great to have endless funds to go and do whatever one pleased...so many of her characters have Just so much money...they never have to worry...
So many of her sundry extra characters have just about nothing or do nefarious things to attain funds to get out or get by.
The contrast is always close to stark.
She writes with humor and some compassion, with complexity and some high falutin' language...which is always an education in itself...she writes interesting and amusing and eccentric characters.
I love reading these more than just cozy mysterious. They are a fast read and though complex always make some semblance of sense by the end of the books. Mostly the perpetrators are a surprise, sometimes one knows who done it before the end of the tale and it never seems to 'hurt' the overall book.
These are written with much detail and, as complex as the plots generally are, they are still SO SO MUCH FUN TO READ and one always learns something or in my case, many things, new!
I highly recommend any and all of Charlotte Macleod and Alicia Craig's book series.
They are all full of great, amusing, creative thinking, intelligent, and eccentric characters. I love most of the folks she writes about...all except the bad guys...I do not and neither should you (!!!) Love THEM.

[Alison C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aunt Emma Kelling is happy to take over for an ailing, aging friend when the latter asks her to take her place on the private island of Pocapuk, Maine, where the friend had long hosted summer visitors, usually artists in need of a place to work in peace. This time, however, the invited guests are unknown to the friend and, of course, to Aunt Emma, who is less than pleased when it turns out that they are hoping to find pirate treasure rumored to be hidden on the island; when a stranger appears and in short order turns up dead, Emma knows she must summon help from the family, in this case Aunt Theonia, to nip a potential series of murders in the bud….The ninth (of 12) Sarah Kelling mysteries has very little Sarah Kelling in it; in fact, she and her husband Max Bittersohn only show up as voices on the telephone providing helpful information to Emma as needed. No matter; this book treats us to a longer acquaintance with Emma and Theonia, two delightful elderly ladies whose strengths of character complement each other to great effect. One wishes there was such an island as Pocapuk and that one could be invited to visit these two stalwarts there over a summer, sans the mayhem of course! Recommended.

[Susan Ferguson]

I really enjoy these mysteries. Sarah and Max are not so prominent in this one - the main character is Sarah's Aunt Emma and Theonia plays a part as well. Emma Kelling is filling in at her friend's summer place on Pocacup Island. She takes along some costume jewelry to repair for the playhouse in an old gladstone bag. On the ferry ride over, someone steals the bag, and just before the stop for the island, the last one on the ferry, one of the guests discovers the bag and returns it to her. Later that night, an unknown man claiming amnesia turns up in a battered wetsuit. But Emma, sorting through the jewelry to see if it's still all there, discovers something hidden in the lining - real stones - which she puts in a hidden safe the owner disclosed to her.
There is a lot of stuff going on - several people hit over the head and knocked out - and one of the guests has planned on searching for rumored treasure on the island. He has not informed his hostess or asked her permission, so Emma tries to quash the project as much as she can. But in this ill-assorted bunch, there is much going on.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mad-cap adventures of an elderly Trixie Belden...which was sort of funnish but often crossed the line over into too silly (and unnecessarily so). I got very sick of Bubble's lisp for example, then there is also a psychic who has actual psychic powers, an illustrator with an inexplicable obsession with feet, a completely unlikeable man and a drab female character who is given no agency of her own who follows him around and lets him bully her.

The two teenage girls in the book sound too similar to the elderly protagonist, there are all sorts of unnecessary flourishes- yodelling and puffins and a diver with amnesia. There's an unstated but omnipresent conservative ideology with play with flashes of cruel, classist, dismissal of someone and an unconvincing attempt to portray servants as more powerful than the leisured class.

I didn't hate every second of this, and certainly it was an undemanding read, but it kept falling short of something like Kerry Greenwood's work which is equally silly but done with just enough subtlety to still be fun.

[moxieBK · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Gladstone Bag (#9) — Charlotte MacLeod (26 chapters) Nov. 29-Dec. 1, 2020

In this ninth book in the series, Max is laid up with a broken foot and Sarah is playing nurse to him. Aunt Emma however, is off on an island when murder strikes and other shenanigans transpire.

This all leads to a story where Sarah and Max are only involved in a teensy-tinsey bit of the story and the rest of it is all Aunt Emma.

The story is mostly written in passive, heavy on description, and very little humor (although there is some.)

It was not an enjoyable read. I like my Sarah Kelling stories to have the protagonist front and center, not off sites.

And the reader learns more than it cares to about Aunt Emma. Why? Is she going to be taking over the series?

When there was dialog between characters, it was good and fun. But this is not a traditional Sarah and Max story. If you are curious about Aunt Emma and want to know more about her, you will like this story a lot.

Three stars.

[Margaret A. Altemus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute book in the series

Seeing as this is the ninth book in the Kelling & Bittersohn series, it could have gone in many directions. In this case, Aunt Emma Kelling takes center stage, but off the stage as she was earlier.

Emma agrees to help her friend host artists on her island used as a summer retreat . She takes a ferry to the island along with the strangers with whom she’s been charged. The whole affair gets complicated when her fake jewels are used to hide a stolen necklace, a man gets killed, a woman is drugged, and rooms are ransacked. Sarah sends cousins Theonia to help and, as expected, all is resolved— but not without a little twist at the end.

I have said in the past that characters are hard to keep straight, although this one was better than most. But MacLeod must love challenging my vocabulary with terms such as apocryphal, suzerain, meretricious, suzerain, and pareure to list a few.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny how memory works. I've read this book, several times, years ago, and would have sworn that Sarah Kelling Bittersohn joined her Aunt Emma in this caper involving stolen jewels. Not so: Sarah, and her husband, art detective Max, only appear on the phone, talking Emma through her problems on a remote Maine island, with a few very strange people. Emma is only there as a favor to an old friend, who had invited a group to stay in her guest cottages, but then becomes too ill to entertain them. There's a probably-spurious Russian count, an historian, an artist, an illustrator, a writer, and a psychic, most of whom are looking for pirate treasure. And then there's the staff, including an ex-con who is unwilling to yield his secrets. There's one person on the island, however, that Emma doesn't know about...

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely give 5 stars but Aunt Emma is worth 5 stars. What a character! Indotminable. No nonsense and SMART! Any wrongdoer with an ounce of sense would steer a wide path around her! Of course, the curse of wrongdoers is they always think they are smarter than everyone else! Such arrogance brings its own judgment. And Emma is not the only wonderful character in this book set on a Maine Island. Cousin Theonia comes and a lively bunch of nuts arrive to create as much chaos as they can!
Living as I do in the northwoods amid lakes and Great Lakes, I feel at home in this setting. And am familiar with summer places. Well, Emma volunteers to oversee an aging friend's summer place and voila--summer is no longer dull. Sarah and Max are not available but consulted. Another lively interesting cozy mystery WITHOUT cats, dogs, baking, recipes, B&B's, divorced heroines or magic. Wonderful!

[Michael Morrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a novel idea (pun intended)! A disparate group of individuals isolated together for some mysterious goings-on.
Well, it could have been a good book, starting with the idea, never mind it's so oft-used, of the variety of strangers gathered, for whatever reason, and having even stranger events occur.
And some of the individuals are rather likable, even if not well fleshed out.
Then it's all made silly, even ruined for me, with the mystery's being solved by "clairvoyance" and all kinds of personal information being supplied by telephone from people many miles away.
Maybe this was just written on a bad day. I thought Charlotte MacLeod was a better writer.
Ultimately this was merely a time-waster, maybe OK for a cold or wet day in which a reader had absolutely nothing else to do.

[Cynthia Grove · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly regular re-read. These and the Peter Shandy series are delightful lightweight, escapist and humorous stories.
Emma and Theonia Kelling are women one would love to meet though possibly a bit daunting if faced in real life. Some of the New England characters are a hoot but some of the guests staying on the island are . . . less than likeable.
Definitely OTT if one is looking for a realistic mystery but a perfect book to relax with or as a pick-me-up when things all get a bit much.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is slower paced than the usual MacLeod mystery, perhaps because Sarah & Max are only secondary characters communicating over the phone. The high point, however, is Theonia getting some center stage action as well as Aunt Emma. The characters are less whimsical and the situations almost realistic in this book.

[Moira Shepard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the Kelling & Bittersohn book I like best so far, due entirely to the charms of the splendid Emma Kelling - aunt of our heroine Sarah, and a formidable woman in her own right. Throw in a very cool psychic; another marvelous aunt of Sarah's, Theonia Kelling; and author MacLeod's tongue-in-cheek writing style - and we have a winner, here.

[Kyrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a light simple mystery that really doesn't feature Sarah and Max as much as it does Aunt Emma. I get a kick out of these cozies with ll these New England rich people and their lifestyle of "that's how it's always been done". Kind of a New England version of an Agatha Christie, set 50 years later.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wig wearing widow volunteers to chaperon some artists on a Maine sea island. On the ship there, someone drugs her and steals her gladstone bag, which is recovered in the Men's room, with nothing missing.

Then mysterious happenings and murder happens once they get on the island.

Not bad, but archaic.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up the book because it blonged to my Mom. The story itself was decent. Reminded me of Agatha Christie novels and the Murder She awaited TV series.
My only issue was the constant use of obscure rarely used words that required a dictionary to interpret. Seemed a bit forced and pretensious there. Over all it was decent with a bit of a twist ending.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

When going through the shelves in the library - I like to pick up something that I have never read, never heard of and looks interesting. This was just that. Believe it was written in the 80's - and the author wrote several books. Going try another one.

[Walt Dunn]

Sometimes, a bag may grow trouble, no matter how glad it is!

A charming entry into a twisting puzzle that brings out interesting characters and situations Never discount the intellect of a lady who's been embroiled in dramatics for years!

[Dianne Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun delight. Makes a great rainy day afternoon

go by quickly . Could not put it down. The red herrings are great for egging you on and keeping you guessing

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the author's Prof. Peter Shandy series much better.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the series..this was one of my favorites!

[Ariadne Cares · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a delightful and genuinely different installment in the Kelling/Bittersohn series. Sarah's indomitable Aunt Emma and Cousin Theonia are the primary sleuths in this novel, as Max has broken his leg in multiple places and Sarah has to take care of him, so Max and Sarah can't come to the island where the action mostly unfolds. Aunt Emma and Cousin Theonia are fabulous, as are the varied and very unusual artists staying on the island. Sarah and Max do helpful research by telephone for the grande dames, and there is a fabulous gambit with the costume jewelry for an opera contained in a convenient Gladstone bag. Delightfully madcap mayhem ensues, and justice is eventually served. Hooray for mysterious pirate treasure!

[Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't look for Sarah in this. The viewpoint character is one of her older cousins.

Read 2 times

[Gloria Mccracken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silly, silly, silly. And so much fun.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Screwball mystery" ? Delightfully humorous in a somewhat stilted way.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorites-- I so wish she had lived longer so we could have had more stories.