K.K. Beck’s Iris Cooper Mysteries

Iris Cooper is the unflappable flapper, pretty coed sleuth, and protagonist narrator of three novels by K.K. Beck: Death in a Deck Chair, Murder in a Mummy Case, and Peril Under the Palms. When we first meet Iris, she’s just finished traveling around the world with her Aunt Hermione.

Whatever exotic experiences she had on her trip, however, is nothing compared to the adventure that awaits on the trip home. Cruising back to America, Iris encounters a bevy of characters of all ages, nationalities, and personalities. And, as the title Death in a Deck Chair suggests, not all of these characters survive. What unfolds is a sort of frothy whodunnit reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Murder in a Mummy Case finds Iris back in the US, this time visiting the family of a boyfriend from college—a family that just happens to be rich and live in a California mansion. Every person in that mansion is eccentric, and I found myself mentally casting characters from old noir movies like The Thin Man. Shifty clairvoyants, lounge lizards, Chinese gangsters, and carnival folk all connect into this plot.

In Peril Under the Palms, Iris is on the move again, this time visiting Hawaii with her Aunt Hermione as well as chaperoning her friend Antoinette and Antoinette’s fiancé. Like the unfortunate Poirot and Miss Marple, however, Iris simply can’t go anywhere without stumbling across a dead body. Iris doesn’t just uncover a murder or two during this mystery: she also unearths a decades-old secret that some people would rather keep buried.

I read these novels several years back, and really loved them. They’re not as thematically deep as Christie’s novels, but Iris is a clever, brave, and interesting character whose narration keeps the plot moving along at a jaunty, entertaining pace. Even upon my recent rereading, I didn’t necessarily remember or detect the culprit.

There are a few things I didn’t like about the novels. First, that some of the climaxes seemed to lack the “dramatic reveal” that would have made Iris’ character really come across as a brilliant sleuth. Second, that although many of the secondary characters are given plenty to do, the main characters—Iris and Aunt Hermione included—don’t get much development even over three books. The novels are set in the late 1920s, and it seems at times that space that could have been used in character development was used instead to make historical references to Prohibition and such. Third, the end of Peril Under the Palms seems to stop short of a really satisfying conclusion to the series, leaving several things hanging or unexplored. We never do see Iris in her “natural environment,” or meet any other relatives aside from Hermione. Even Iris’s friends don’t seem like the type of people she would be close to, as they all seem sort of frivolous and not really the type of people she would have befriended enough to visit or travel with in the first place.

Actually, I really wish the books had been longer. Not that I want the pace slowed down necessarily, but I wish that the little side plots that serve as red herrings would actually serve a purpose beyond being merely red herrings. And I also wish that there had been more in the series: the end of the series is rather abrupt and leaves so many questions, and not the sort of “open ended” conclusion where the reader is invited to imagine their own continuations, but rather a sudden stop where you check the back of the book to be sure you’re not missing the last pages. I would have liked to see Iris have more adventures at home and abroad.