Reading in May - Short Crime Fiction Reviews Part 2

The House of Green Turf – Ellis Peters

I’m surprised I hadn’t read this one. I thought I’d read all the George Felse mysteries back in the early 90s.  Cadfael was on the TV and I'm fairly sure Peters' other books were republished on the resurgence of popularity that created, and I enjoyed Felse and Bunty and even their son Dominic and his girlfriend with the unfortunate nickname of Tossa.

I’m also not sure why this didn’t make my ‘books I enjoyed this year’ list. It was quite fun and the set up was certainly interesting. A famous singer is in a car crash and wakes up convinced she’s killed someone – if not in the crash then somewhere in the past.

But Peters has an undercurrent of something I can't always quite believe in. I wouldn’t call it magical thinking but it's in that realm. An semi-telepathy or sympathetic communication between strangers and events that sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn’t, snapping my suspension of belief so violently I’m thrown right out. 

Also, if I was with someone bleeding to death and a collapsing enemy were trying to shoot me I definitely, definitely wouldn’t stand and face them down. Try and tackle them possibly, keep pressure on the injured party's wound and hope the enemy collapses before they have a chance to kill us both, also possibly. Freeze with terror and be useless perhaps. Stand and face them down, no. 

Service of All the Dead  – Colin Dexter

This was far more prosaic, always assuming that the people involved are absolute idiots. By the end you can almost hear Morse wondering What the Bloody Hell These Clowns Were Thinking. I never watched much Morse but he's definitely more active in this 70s book than he was the few times I caught the programme. Morse, like Wexford, can be a bit of an berk (it's 79, and the gender politics are fairly standard for the time), but his main strength here is his determination to ferret about until he has an answer. Not a brilliant flash of insight detective, but not a plodder either. Also he gets a love interest, in a low-key 'blink and you'd miss that they were attracted' sort of way. Very 70s. 

The Sailors' Rendezvous - Georges Simenon

Maigret is always understated, even when he gets cross. Even when he decides to stay up all night on a moored board reaching for some kind of flash of intuition or atmospheric revelation. I’ve read three Maigrets and feel I could do with more padding in all of them. That’s a personal preference rather than a fault with the books, though.

Thrones, Dominions – Dorothy L Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

I was surprisingly impressed with this. usually books finished by other authors leave me a bit cold and certainly the one written entirely by Jill Paton Walsh (set after the Second World War) didn't convince me (review here).

This though, which was apparently a continuation of a book Sayers began and never finished, seemed seamless. 

Libraries I Have Known

According to Google this is my hundredth post, and I've decided it's going to be about libraries.

I’m a great fan of libraries, and often surprised by other people's low expectations. My youngest aunt, for example, was surprised that I managed to borrow a great fat hardback copy of A Brief History of Seven Killings from Wimbledon Library while it was still shortlisted for the Booker.

They're also a great way to feed current obsessions, the latest being the Penguin Line books, borrowed one by one from Kensington and Wimbledon and shelved under 820 and 828 respectively.

Kensington, thankfully, labels all it's books. Merton, including Wimbledon, only bothers labelling non fiction, and if an author is better known for crime than sci-fi then their sci-fi will be mis-shelved; but this is a minor annoyance, and mostly due to the Dewey decimal lumping all English fiction in one classification (823).

Fiction, of course, is organised alphabetically by author's surname, but as in book shops, science fiction and crime tend to be separated out. Lately, with the Agatha Christie re-read, I've mostly been raiding the Crime section. I estimate it would have cost somewhere in the region of £400 already if it weren’t for libraries.

At the moment I don't have any Christies though. What I do have are these:

The large duck egg coloured book at the bottom is Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. I actually borrowed this for an essay on Coriolanus, as it's generally agreed to be the main source Shakespeare used to write his play.

North translated from the French translation, not the original Greek, and given he was writing in the mid 1500s, he wasn't as difficult to follow as I expected. Largely because although the sentence construction is sometimes odd, the spelling is more or less as we would spell the same words now.

I haven't returned it yet because I want to read the whole thing. It's a Kensington Central Library book, part of their extensive collection of biographies, which sit like an iceberg 9/10ths beneath the surface in the stacks.

Kensington Central Library has a number of other features I like as well - the large octagonal clock in the middle of the rows of shelves, the wooden alcoves in the windows with built in benches, the reference library upstairs with it's divided desks, and the regularly refreshed 'interest' shelves near the entrance. I also like The Library Time Machine, their blog on local history. Best of all it's very near where I'm working. In fact I haven't worked this close to a library for 15 years.

That was a much smaller library, run by Camden almost under the Archway tower. I remember it as windowless, and involving a walk past a similarly low, dark pub with cardboard in the windows, which I never had the courage to go into but fondly imagined was frequented by vampires. (The discovery of Neil Gaiman and Anne Rice around that time may have fuelled my imaginings.  It was more likely frequented by carers and cleaners coming off shift at the Whittington hospital, or possibly a brothel.) 

Archway is on the Northern line, which had an asylum near the other end at Tooting (now flats) and the public receivership office, child and family court and for a while the benefits office at Archway. It's grimly unsurprising that it’s the line with the heaviest rate of suicide - and probably no coincidence that the Penguin Tube Line book for the Northern line is the bleakest I've read so far.

For myself, I had grandparents living on that line, and as Camden is on it, and Waterloo, and it was my route home for ages, and is still in easy distance, I think of it as familiar and reliable. Unlike the Jubilee line, for example, about which I think nothing at all.

The second book up in the pile is Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley. I've read a number of Allinghams, all of them with Albert Campion, but this is the first she wrote, and she writes him from the outside all through. The 'hero' of the story, the man with the love interest and through who's eyes we mostly experience the story, is Dr Abbershaw. The story is silly, and has perhaps some rather daft stereotypes, but it's also very well done and I lapped it up.

The third, slim book is A Good Parcel of English Soil by Richard Mabey, It's the Metropolitan Line in the aforementioned Penguin Tube Line series. Mabey talks about Metroland and his own childhood, throws in some history. These books are exactly the right length for people to be slightly self indulgent without becoming irritating, and Mabey manages it here.

Next is Music by Andrew Gant, which I've commented on elsewhere but can summarise as: not quite an introduction to the subject as there is some terminology and some written music, but great if you're an amateur like me.

Then we have Resorting to Murder, one of the British Library's crime reprints. I'm actually a member of the British Library now, but so far I've mostly been there for exhibitions, in the evenings.

To be honest I got a little fed up with Resorting to Murder. The anthology has never been my favourite format. I feel like I'm just getting into each story when I'm hustled on to the next. I enjoyed Silent Nights though, maybe because the Christmas theme held together better, maybe because I knew some of the authors and detectives from the first book. As you can see I've also recently taken out Capital Crimes and Crimson Snow too, but I've only read the first so far. At least one of the stories made me wince. Conan Doyle at his coldest. Another, with a lethal box of chocolates, two deadly snakes and five major coincidences all in about 20 pages, I had to grit my teeth to get through.

Of course that's part of the appeal of libraries - I don’t have to own the books. I don't even have to read the books. Whereas once a book has been bought there's a vague sense of obligation to read it (especially if you like it). Library books are much more easy going. 

There may be a class element in that. I wasn’t raised with the idea of a 'canon' set of books everyone should read, or that books are inherently improving as and of themselves – actually a relatively modern attitude anyway - witness the antipathy towards novel reading in Northanger Abbey, which parallels modern concerns about computer games (Wimbledon Library have, or had, a book with a good defence of this, exploring what the attitude might be towards books had computers and games machines been invented first, but annoyingly I can't remember the author), or the moral panic about Jazz in that era (Humphrey Lyttelton's bio is good for information on this, and of course you’ll find that in Kensington Central Library stacks).

Next up in the pile is George Orwell, A Life in Letters, which I can heartily recommend, and then another translation of Plutarch, less interesting and memorable than North, but perhaps more comprehensible to a modern reader, and lastly we have Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton, which is from Victoria Library, where I used to go a lot when I worked at the Passport Office. Victoria Library has a very good sheet music section upstairs, but feels a bit squashed for space downstairs. There's rather a nice balcony running around though, where they keep the foreign language books.

I think I've mentioned before how I used to sit in Chertsey library and read Grafton in my teens. Chertsey was a pre-fab, a supposedly temporary structure that's still there, like a lot of our old classrooms. We had a canteen made out of corrugated iron too. It must have been there years, but it seemed solid enough to us.

The school libraries (we had two ends to the school, so two libraries) had some good books (H V Morton and Gerald Durrell, almost everything Judy Blume had written to that point), but opened completely randomly, which made borrowing books difficult and returning them worse.

Middle school was quite different. I seem to remember it as wood panelled, although in retrospect that's incredibly unlikely, and I used to go in sometimes at lunch time and read Baba Yaga and other disturbing fairy stories.

There are others, too many to do justice to really: The library in the Cobham old school building which never seemed to get any new books in and opened late one night a week when I was coming back from work. At that time the staff outnumbered the customer 2 to 1, but I expect it was livelier during the day when children were about. The mobile library we had before that, which used to park in the same place as the fish van.

Streatham Vale library, strangely well stocked with socio-political books for such a small branch.

Church Street, where I discovered Dorothy L Sayers, was another prefab, larger and more battered, hidden under an arch and a small passage from Church Street Market – another discovery that may have been cleaned up and gentrified now.

Colliers Wood, which had flooded last time I saw it, sandbags piled up outside the doors. Brixton, which was founded, or at least funded, by Henry Tate. Charing Cross, squeezed in near the statue of Edith Cavell. Marylebone, which was under Council House, where confetti and occasionally champagne flutes would be left on the steps outside. 

British Library building 

(St Pancras behind)

I’m sure there are more I could think of (I see I've left University libraries out completely)  .. and of course I don’t rely entirely on libraries. I also have a number of fairly full bookcases. But that’s another story. 

Crime novels... part 1

This is terribly late. It seemed like such a nice project and then.. well it was harder than I thought.

Some time ago I planned (and said) I would write some genre related posts – genre is a thing I’m not too keen on as a concept, largely because while it’s useful for those people looking for something specific, and for bookshops who need to shelve items in a way that lets them find them again, I feel it influences not only the way books are read, but sometimes even how they’re written (I’ve read a few ‘how to write a novel’ type books now and they’re pretty clear that you pick your genre and deliberately shape your writing to it. This may be good marketing, but I’m not sure it makes for great books.) 

But I’m in danger of repeating myself, and anyway crime fiction more than any other is I think written deliberately within genre. No-one puts a dead body in a book by accident. 

Commonly crime books are subdivided even further; into murder mysteries, cosies, golden age, hardboiled, puzzlers, the Ian Rankin sort with unrealistically mad and sadistic serial killers.. and so on. Again I think this is so readers can find the kind of murder they want (I'll admit to avoiding Rankin's after giving one - Knots and Crosses - a go. It was unremittingly grim).  

I also realised, after beginning this post back in the mists of time, that although I’d read a lot of crime fiction it was incredibly heavily weighted towards still published authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Conan Doyle, and was already trying to do something about this, and had begun a reread (and gap-filling exercise) for Agatha Christie too, when I acquired a copy of Martin Edwards’ book about the Detection Club and realised I hadn’t even remotely begun to make a whisper of a scratch on the surface of crime writing in the era. 

This (with apologies for the cut and paste) is what I wrote on the Guardian TLS blog in September last year:  

The Golden Age of Murder – Martin Edwards. Which is all about what you’d expect but more specifically the Detection Club which banded together with Chesterton as president, with Sayers advocating, and with dinners and collaborations. The forerunner of the current club of which Edwards is now President. 

The book is fascinating, just small portraits of the individuals, then references to their work. Sayers comes through particularly clearly, a publicist and advocate for the whole gang, secretary of the club, a bit daunting on occasion. Christie is more elusive, not just here but in the BBC archives and even her own autobiography. All accounts suggest she was shy throughout her life, and spent much of her time daydreaming and travelling. 

 And then, more interesting still, there are the people I’d barely heard of, with their own take on the genre, their own politics, their own private lives.. 

Edwards is upfront that the book doesn’t cover the whole of the genre. There are about 35 author photographs in the front pages of this book, and these are only the members of the Detection Club elected from 1930-49. There were far more actual writers, and a wider culture of radio puzzles, magazine competitions and murder games. We get a flavour of all that, and the wider historical context, and the (to me slightly ghoulish) interest so many members had in real life murder cases. 


I’ve also, now I’m tuned into it, noticed the prevalence and popularity of crime elsewhere. In fact, everywhere. Orwell wrote an essay about the changes in crime fiction titled Raffles to Miss Blandish and when I was at Sissinghurst I noticed that Harold Nicolson’s study contained a copy of The Anatomy of Murder, the Detection Club’s book attempting to analyse and solve real life murders. (Nicolson had it in hardback, but the book is available in a paperback reprint, and more sympathetic that you’d imagine.) 

I actually own The Anatomy of Murder, but Kensington Central Library has furnished me with my recent rash of Gladys Mitchells and two of the other British library reprints. You can find a review of Death on the Cherwell here, and my comment in September 2015 on The Floating Admiral, by Christie, Sayers, Chesterton and other mystery writers now less well known was this (again cut and pasted from elsewhere, sorry): 

It's a book written in the fashion of those paper games you play as a child, where one person draws the head of a person or animal and then folds and passes it along and then the next person draws the shoulders. It gets very involved, which presumably is what would happen in a real case: The Inspector thinks, the Inspector thinks better of it. The Inspector crosses and recrosses the river and drives the long way round again and again and talks to the same people repeatedly. 

It's huge fun – not least when a new chapter starts and the new author proceeds to demolish all the clues in the last chapter – either because they don’t like them or (as Sayers freely admits) struggle to make sense of them. 


Christie doesn’t appear to have taken part in any more of these exercises, but in any case I’m going to leave Christie (as far as possible) to one side for now. As well as her crime novels I’ve been reading the five or six other fictions, some plays, the autobiography and so on, and in fact had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of what I had and hadn’t reread. Christie is a blogpost in herself. 

I will say though that in my own personal reading history Christie came before Sue Grafton, but after Conan Doyle. I was still in my teens when I read the former, but just 10 or 11 when I picked up the Sherlock Holmes stories and puzzled, as I think everyone does, about the way A Study in Scarlet has a story embedded within it in that odd, disjointed fashion that seems almost designed to break the narrative.  

Prior to the Holmes stories we can blame Blyton, whose mysteries aren’t usually considered a part of the crime genre, but do seem to me to be a part of what was happening in more grown up fiction. 
Being books for children however they tended to be about smugglers or secret plans, and the same held for other series such as the Three Investigators (purportedly written by Hitchcock but not really) and Nancy Drew (who I never thought much of). 

Sue Grafton was a find from the age of 13 or 14 when I started bunking off school and haunting the local library. Part of the appeal of the books was – and is - that her heroine so clearly does not have her life sorted out, which married up with my observation of most of the adults around me; however much they all felt the need to pretend they had everything under control and were qualified to give advice. 

Grafton’s heroine, Kinsey, is one of the most engaging characters in any book I’ve read. She has her own ideas about what she likes (small spaces) and her reasons for those things. She probably wouldn’t stand up independent of the narrative – there are precious few detectives who would – but she’s far from 2 dimensional. 

More strangely there are long periods of narration where Kinsey does her laundry or tells you what she ate. These annoyed me enormously when I began reading but they’ve grown on me over the years. There are worse ways of giving you a sense of time passing. 

Later I seem to remember I started reading Ann Granger simply because she was on the shelf next to Grafton. It made it very easy to pick it up and flick through, although that doesn’t marry up with the first book of Granger’s I read being secondhand. And I know it was secondhand because it was a copy that had come free with a magazine at some stage, with ‘not for resale’ on the back where the isbn should have been. 

However I first came across her my opinion of Granger then is my opinion now. Her books have a lot of charm and her detectives, both the amateur and the professional, are extraordinarily incompetent. Fortunately the murderers are even worse, leaving clues to be stumbled upon, giving themselves away by their behaviour and going to strangle the heroine two seconds before the police break in the door. 

It’s necessary to the narrative that they do this because there’s no trail of clues such as Christie or Ellery Queen might leave for detective and reader alike. It’s all reliant on coincidence. 

Perhaps this is why I fell out of love with Granger somewhere in the Fran Varady series. Even if (according to Martin Edwards) The Detection Club’s light-hearted motto about playing fair with the reader was only ever a guideline, I still prefer feeling that the clues are all there and the author is giving me a chance to solve the thing. In fact when I clearly can't I even feel a bit hard done by. 

Probably this is the reason why my favourite, still, is Agatha Christie. About who (and others) there will be more in my next post.

Death on The Cherwell - Mavis Doriel Hay

I was tempted to title this review The Four Marys Find a Body. Our young sleuths - girls in their first year at Persephone College, Oxford - are very much of that mould. Cheery young chapesses who find the body of their dead bursar floating down the river in a canoe and field it into shore and try to revive her. 

Sadly, and despite all having their girl guide badges for reviving dead bursars, they fail, so they decide to form a league to find out who killed her instead. 

I'm being mean. I actually enjoyed this book, and in some ways it's refreshing to see this age group portrayed as naïve – because in real life many teenagers still are, and it’s a thing that you rarely see in books (often even quite young teens are portrayed as all too knowing, if not actively corrupted).

But I don't think they were ever as naïve as all this, were they? Not to the point that they only remember about fingerprints after they've removed and manhandled a possible piece of evidence, and decide to hide in the grounds and spy through the window of the man they consider the main suspect by standing on a stack of flowerpots (I mean really, flowerpots? What could possibly go wrong there?).

Also it never seems to cross the girls’ minds that possibly the male student friend of their fellow scholar could have been in their grounds late at night for *coughs discreetly* reasons that are if not innocent then at least not criminal. Perhaps I grew up in a more wicked age but my mind immediately went to the gutter, and I bet it’s where the Dean’s mind would have gone too. 

The book is one of the reprints under the British Library Crime Classics label and much as I enjoyed it I still think it deserved rediscovery more for historical interest than as a murder mystery. The investigations are fairly absurd on the amateur side and not very interesting on the police side, but the point and place in time is key: the 30s in Oxford, where the women’s colleges are clearly there to stay and the younger generation (of both sexes) take the ‘new’ status quo very much for granted; but also where one character can still say of Cambridge 'why would you want to go somewhere that won’t give you a degree.’

Inevitably, given where and when it is set comparisons are bound to be made with Sayer’s Gaudy Night (which came out in the same year), but in fact there are very few points in common. Both Sayers and Hay pick up (and are understandably irritated by) the way the newspapers describe what they call ‘graduettes’, but Sayers is firmly not from the POV of the students, far more occupied with gender and learning, and much darker. 

This is more of a girl’s own adventure tale, less accomplished and lighter in tone. The setup actually quite original, the characters consistent, and nothing jarringly wrong in the writing. But very, very light, and you can see why the one is still in print more than 80 years later and this (until now) hasn’t been. If it were contemporary it might sell very nicely, make a film (in fact it would make quite a good film with editing) and then be forgotten in a few years, which is presumably exactly what happened in 1931.

Photo taken by the Cherwell, facing Christ Church, Oxford

The Attenbury Emeralds - Jill Paton Walsh

Over the weekend I read The Attenbury Emeralds, Jill Paton-Walsh’s continuation of Sayers' detective fiction. The story itself is implausible but none the worse for that, I’d rather have a good yarn than something sensible. There are shades of The Moonstone, but more a modern riff and riposte to it, all well constructed, and I whizzed through quite happy.

Whizzed through partly, to be honest, because there wasn’t much meat in it to slow me down. The characters lack complexity, compared to their treatment under Sayers’ hand, and sadly there’s also less humour and what I can only describe as less energy. Maybe it’s the rationing (the book is set in the 50s). Everyone is subdued and just a shade too sensible, especially the new boys. I badly missed St George – killed in action in the war, sadly.

Speaking of the war we also get a namecheck on the Café de Paris (note to authors: many, many places across the country were bombed out during the war, why does everyone fixate on the Café de Paris?) where the particular emerald we’re interested in was worn on the fateful night.

Anyway the pace picks up, Wimsey is hot on the trail, the characterisation of the people he interviews along the way is actually very good, you really start to get hooked and then..

And then suddenly the ancestral home burns down and brother Denver keels over, so Wimsey is the new duke and has to rush off to help, abandoning his investigation. Long faces all round, grump grump grump, goodness aren’t the death duties high.. oh well, I suppose his majesty didn’t expect to have to be king and he managed.

Frankly you would think a dukedom were a glass of not-so-sparkling cyanide from the way he and Harriet react.

So that oddly unnecessary and pace-killing interlude over and we’re back in London to continue the main story. Emeralds retrieved, murderer caught, don’t really believe the motive but never mind, it’s that sort of story.

All nicely wrapped up with a letter from the Duchess of Denver at the end which is worth the entry price alone. And yet.. and yet I know I'll never reread it.