Who The Heck Is the “Hon Con?”

 Who The Heck Is the “Hon Con?”

 

The third of Joyce Porter’s series detectives is the “Hon Con,” the nickname of the Honorable Constance Ethel Morrison-Burke, a noblewoman with tons of spare time and disposable income on her hands, though given the high taxation and social upheaval of 1960’s and 1970’s England, she’s constantly pinching pennies (even though she doesn’t need to) and dodging the barbs of hoi polloi who believe it’s their social responsibility to take the aristocracy down a peg or nine.

 

Having boundless amounts of energy and lacking a direction for them, a chance encounter with a distraught mother sends the Hon Con into the private detection business.  Actually, it’s not really a business, as the Hon Con never makes a penny off of her investigations, and often has to pay considerable sums out of pocket, whether it’s covering her own expenses, or paying hefty fines levelled by an unsympathetic (and often unjust and incompetent) court system.

 

The Hon Con stories (five in all) are pure comedy, even when they skewer the hypocrisies, banalities, and insanities of English life and society at a time when everything seems to be crumbling.  Throughout the series, Porter takes shots at corrupt and venal government agencies meant to Serve The Public, crime allowed to run rampant because no one in charge can be bothered to address it, and nastiness and iniquity amongst falsely friendly faces in seemingly quiet villages.  In one adventure, Porter switches to sending up the duplicitous and decrepit nature of life under the Soviets when the Hon Con takes a trip to the USSR.  Even the Queen doesn’t escape a bit of satiric nose-twisting in the final adventure.

 

The Hon Con’s reluctant assistant in her investigations is Miss Jones (better known as “Bones,”) her housekeeper, best friend, and possibly something more, as the village gossips constantly wonder.  The Hon Con is sometimes cited as the first openly lesbian fictional series detective in British fiction, but Miss Jones often is shown with an interest in much younger men, and Porter keeps the exact state of their relationship ambiguous throughout the series.  While the Hon Con is boisterous and fearless, Bones is timid and easily shaken, though she can be roused to fury when the order and cleanliness of her domestic sphere is threatened. 

 

The Hon Con mysteries rank as some of Porter’s funniest works, and illustrate a search for truth in a world gone mad.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.