An ingenious idea goes a long way in "The Queens of Crime."

It's 1930. We're in London, where popular mystery writer Agatha Christie and not-as-popular mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers (her Lord Peter Wimsey was the star of a PBS series in the 1970s) are miffed that their work is derided in the Detection Club.

Male members of that real-life club (for which both Sayers and Christie would eventually serve as presidents) refuse to admit female mystery writers, including their pals Margery Allingham, Emma Orczy and Ngaio Marsh. To force their hands, Sayers and Christie are looking for a way to prove women are just as good at writing detective fiction as men.

In other words, seven decades before the ridiculous "Are women funny?" "debate," mystery writers were bickering about whether women were as good as men at bumping off fictitious characters with untraceable poisons.

To prove their mettle, the five women tackle the murder of a long-missing English nurse, whose corpse was discovered in a French park (although she had been strangled, she was found in a pool of blood). Sayers and friends didn't actually solve the crime but the nurse, May Daniels,really was murdered in 1927, and the culprit remains a mystery to this day.

"Queens" is mostly for fans of the five writers, whose quirks emerge as they collectively solve the murder. Marie Benedict, whose previous books include speculative fiction about the (real) 11-day disappearance of Christie in the 1920s, "The Mystery of Mrs. Christie," cleverly outlines the differences between the women and the way their fictional detectives work. She notes, for instance, that Christie may not have been great at creating rounded characters but that she and fictional sleuth Hercule Poirot were brilliant at envisioning the world and its mysteries as puzzles to be solved.

The Queens of Crime

Ironically, Benedict isn't adept at creating rounded characters, either. Her portraits of the five protagonists don't go very deep (get ready for the words "dowdy" or "frumpy" to appear every time Christie is mentioned, which is a lot). And, more importantly, we don't get a handle on the nurse whose murder is supposed to engage the five women's emotions — and ours. Yes, Daniels has been dead for months when the book opens, but the first half of "Queens," especially, would be more involving if we knew who she was.

Eventually, as a picture of the victim takes shape for the five mystery writers, we start to learn a bit more about Daniels, too.

"Queens of Crime" is not a traditional whodunit; we're not given enough information to try to solve the crime before the writers do. But Benedict has something special with her quintet. And the fact that they take to branding themselves as "the Queens" — like the Supremes but with motives instead of Motown — suggests there may be sequels in the offing.

The Queens of Crime

By: Marie Benedict.

Publisher: St. Martin's, 310 pages, $29.