[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Also set during WWI is Charles Todd's Bess Crawford series, which I think is much more interesting--I gave up on Maisie after the first few books. Bess is also a nurse who becomes involved in solving mysteries.

Another WWI-era mystery series is Elizabeth Speller's Laurence Bartram books. I haven't read these yet.

I just finished Speller's The Return of Captain John Emmett, and was quite impressed with it.

The story is a mystery and is set in London in 1920. It concerns suspicions about the death of a former WWI officer who apparently committed suicide whilst in a veterans hospital.

What may interest people are the books and contributions that Speller used as research.

Those interested in further reading on field courts marshall and executions

Spoiler:

[Speller's] novel is loosely inspired by the executions of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and of Lieutenant Poole of the West Yorkshire Regiment, both shot for desertion.

The novelist A.P. Herbert, who had encountered Dyett while himself a junior officer in the same division, wrote a novel based on the case: The Secret Battle (1919).

Leonard Sellers has produced an account of the Dyett case in Death for Desertion, first published in 1995 as For God's Sake Shoot Straight.

Further reading in this area includes Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by John Hughes-Wilson and Cathryn Corns, and Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act by Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes.

Ernest Thirtle MP published a pamphlet in 1929, Shootings at Dawn: The Army Death Penalty at Work. The terrible effect on families of losing husbands and sons in this way is revealed by surviving letters.

Speller's pre reading on WWI included:

Spoiler:

There are, of course, a great number of excellent books on the Great War. I am particularly indebted to the following: John Keegan, The First World War; Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front; Max Arthur, Last Post: The Final Word from our First World War Soldiers; and Neil Hansen, The Unknown Soldier: The Story of the Missing of the Great War.

Gordon Corrigan has assembled a critical look at some of the myths of the war in Mud, Blood and Poppycock. Dominic Hibberd's biography of Wilfred Owen, Jean Moorcroft Williams' work on Isaac Rosenberg and Nicholas Moseley's book on Julian Grenfell are among many that I have read, as well as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, a vivid account of her experience as a volunteer nurse on the Western Front. A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders, edited by Anne Powell, is superb on the lives and deaths of less famous poets.

Diaries, novels, plays and poetry of the period, as well as some comprehensive websites, have helped my understanding of the varied experiences of those who lived in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Above all, for a wonderful survey of the Great War in the popular imagination, there is Paul Fussell's classic: The Great War and Modern Memory.

Further reading on the subject of shell shock

Spoiler:

For the care and understanding of men with shell-shock, I have used several sources of which the most valuable were the papers of W.H.R. Rivers who treated many of these psychiatric casualties, and the publication in 1917 of Shell-Shock and its Lessons by two doctors, Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear. Daniel Hipp's The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon was invaluable in providing the connection between poetry and mental fragility.

Ben Shephard's War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century and Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam were moving accounts of war and mental illness.