Elizabeth Ferrars and others...

One of the hazards of reading any sort of 'older' fiction - and especially something like detective fiction where there may be recurring and quite interesting characters, but the books themselves are written not as a series but a set of nice neat packages with defined beginnings and endings - is that you can find an author you like, republished or epublished, read two or three books, get interested in how things are developing, and then find the next in the series is, for whatever reason, not available from the same source. 

This recently happened to me with Elizabeth (otherwise E X) Ferrars. Intrigued by the odd dynamic between separated-but-never-got-round-to-the-divorce couple Virginia and Felix Freer, who clearly still care a lot about each other, I found that number three was not available as an ebook and have had to order a secondhand hardback for about four times the price - at least it's available as a hardback though. It would be maddening to not be able to get my hands on it. 

Of course I'm also in the fortunate position of access to the British Library if I were really desperate, but I've actually not been into the reading rooms since the cyber attack (for those who don't know: the BL was the victim of an attack late last year and has since put a number of measures in place, but the advice is still to ring up to check whether materials are available). I don't have a pressing need for anything specific, so am happy to wait for now. 

Elizabeth Ferrars had a good long career in writing - roughly 60 years, starting in what would later be called the Golden Age of detective fiction, and finishing up in the 90s. Virginia and Felix come into the late 70s, having separated because (and when) Virginia realised Felix was a crook - a light fingered compulsive liar with a lot of charm and a plausible face who genuinely doesn't understand why it upset Virginia so much to realise all the nice presents he got her were almost certainly stolen. 

On the other hand his moral code around such things as murder and blackmail is pretty strong. What is fascinating about the books I've read so far (which are written from Virginia's point of view) is you can see why Virginia was absolutely right to leave him, and not go back to him - and at the same time why she still cares about him enough not to sling him out when he turns up, and he still cares enough about her that when things turn nasty, it's the impact on her he focusses on.

The mysteries on the the other hand are interesting enough to hang a book on but would probably be quite disappointing to a purist. The puzzling and cluing is not precisely absent but... it definitely feels like Felix is more of the 'because I know how people's minds work' detective than the 'rock solid case' one. 

Anyway I'm enjoying them. 

Other recent secondhand purchases are Ellis Peters' Death Mask and Holiday with Violence. Death Mask I don't think I ever read before - despite binging Ellis Peters in the 90s. She has a tendency, in my opinion, to sometimes have characters read each other's motives so accurately it amounts to telepathy. She does that here, and it shakes my belief a little. No-one is that perceptive about someone they just met.  

Whereas Holiday with Violence is set on a backpacking holiday in Italy and was probably my favourite Ellis Peters when I first read it, which is why I absolutely read my copy to bits. I'm very glad to get a nice intact paperback that I'll hang onto - and the descriptions of place have made me want to go to Italy all over again, which luckily I am doing in October.  

I also read London Particular by Christianna Brand, and Shroud for a Nightingale by P D James. In the latter I kept thinking 'does Adam Dalgleish not know he can call for back-up?' Although he does feel moved at one point to suggest a member of his team should quit the job if he ever finds he enjoys being cruel, so perhaps you don't want back-up from people like that. It's very '70s, in the best of ways - realistic about the fallout of murder and how life goes on for some people while others never recover. 

London Particular was good - Brand is consistently so - but there's an unpleasant flavour of internalised misogyny that I don't remember in Green for Danger or Death in High Heels, although Death of Jezebel which I read last year had a bit of it too. Men in these books are apparently allowed to do all kinds of stupid things and be forgiven or at least sympathised with, but let a woman (or in this case little more than a girl) be a bit unpleasant or 'loose' and she gets what she deserves, apparently.  The use of the fog was excellent though. Very atmospheric, and the slightly mad household the story revolves around definitely kept me guessing to the end. 

Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson was, I'm sorry, rather more dry. It begins and ends well but the middle bit dragged. Perhaps I was expecting too much - the idea of a murder in a Charing Cross bookshop sounded so enticing. I was also infuriated by incorrect information about concussion - which I've had and can confirm absolutely does mean losing a period before and after the event and having perfectly normal recall outside it, which even in the 30s I'm sure was known. 

To Be Read - Leap Day Eve 2020

As I’ve mentioned before there are a lot of unread books already on my shelves and given that and my long history of library fines I normally try to keep the flow of books going out as well as in and not let more stack up.

At the moment however I am the proud possessor of what can only be described as two (count ‘em) TBR piles. So I thought I’d share them while I have them.

On the bottom of that first pile is The Five by Haillie Rubenhold, which I've been keen to read ever since I knew it existed and was lucky enough to get for Christmas. I’ve already dipped in and been instantly intrigued by the two versions of history described. One of course was the glitz of the jubilee, the other a homelessness crisis that has now been largely forgotten. (As an ex history student I can tell you this happens a lot with the past, especially with visual evidence. Almost no-one photographs scaffolding, roadworks, abandoned sleeping bags where someone is clearly sleeping, piles of horse manure, old cola cans and the like. Similarly most fiction and quite a lot of non-fiction is about (and generally by) the comfortably off, so unless you read old newspaper reports, death stats and the literature written by people eager to change what was actually a very hard world you can get a horribly distorted idea of times past).

Next up is the Virago Writers as Readers, which I bought with a Waterstones voucher I got for Christmas. The extremely beautiful cover pulled me in and the first chapter kept me in those toils. It’s not a book I feel I can carry about though, because that cover will get ruined in my bag, and it’s quite heavy to hold in one hand while hanging onto a yellow tube pole with the other. So here it sits, waiting for the next really wet weekend I decide I’d rather stay in. Which I don’t imagine will be far away.  

Above that is My American – Stella Gibbons. This is one I am actually reading already, and although I have started others I will get back to it. Stella Gibbons is famous of course for her cheerfully satirical fantasy Cold Comfort Farm, but this is far more of a straight novel. The story introduces two main characters (Amy and Bob) who meet once, briefly, as children, and then follows their growing up in London and America separately.

So far (I’m 303 pages into a 460 page book) it’s the London story that is grabbing me. It feels as much a portrait of a place and time as of a person. Whereas the American town Gibbons describes feels a bit like Burnet in What Katy Did, only – for a long stretch at least - without the more realised characters and serious illness that sometimes struck the Carrs.

Most noticeable of all is the way everyone keeps mentioning the depression, but there are no symptoms of a depression. No-one who wants a job seems to be struggling to get one. No-one is hungry.  The other troubling thing that’s going on is the rise of the mob, but although his cousin Helen tries to burst Bob’s bubble when he insists his old childhood friend who has been running speakeasies in Detroit and Chicago had never killed anyone, it still feels like it’s not really happening. It's all off stage. 

It’s the same with the two main characters– Amy feels more real. We see her interior world and her worries and her school and the people she lives with. Bob is seen from the outside, and when it starts to go wrong is the first time he seemed interesting to me.

Then there are my Wimbledon library reads:

The Invoice - Jonas Karlsson. This looks like a darkly funny and quirky (I hate that word but it’s the most appropriate I can think of) read.  

Deep Water – Patricia Highsmith. I don’t think I’ve read any Highsmith, but can’t be 100% sure. I read a lot of books in in my teens - detective and science fiction mostly - and completely failed to take note of most of the titles or authors’ names, so every so often I read a plot summary or a first chapter and realise I already know it.

All Passion Spent – Vita Sackville West. Not sure this needs an introduction. I love Sackville-West’s garden writing, was a bit infuriated by her in Portrait of a Marriage (mostly because I felt horribly and inexorably sorry for poor pretty, selfish Violet Trefusis who everyone wanted to protect but nobody wanted to be honest with). I haven’t actually read any of her fiction so I'm curious to see what it's like.

Duplicate Death – Georgette Heyer. I’ve read a few of Heyer’s crime novels and they’re always witty, amusing reads. I haven’t read the regency romances for which she's more famous, although I did start some previously. Both a colleague at work and blogs I enjoy recommended them, and I seem to remember Stephen Fry is a fan, but despite my best efforts something just hasn’t clicked yet.

And on top of this pile is The Language of Cities – Dedjan Sudjic. This is a very easy one for the tube (which is why it’s on top – it was actually in my bag), and was also a voucher purchase from the new Waterstones in Kensington High Street, which I notice has moved closer to the station. I don’t know if the rent is less or they were refurbing anyway and think they’ll get more foot traffic. 

Kensington High Street does seem to be condensing down, and the council have been exploring other things to draw people there besides shops. So there are some quite nice benches with planters, some crossings with Bauhaus names (near the Design museum) and Japanese art (near Japan House), although as with most urban high streets it can never be truly pleasant given that it is, ultimately, a road from one busy place to another busy place.

The second pile is mostly comprised of all these Dark Tower Stephen Kings – I’ve had them ages, and they don’t actually belong to me. I did offer to return them last year when I started my course again and stalled on book 3, and was told it was fine - but they really do need to be read and go back to my brother, who is also meant to be reading them (and has also stalled) and then giving them back to someone at work.

And on top of SK we have Umberto Eco’s Five Moral Pieces which I picked up today from Kensington Central Library. This book of essays was an impulse borrow. I first picked up Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know – a book of essays in response to George Orwell’s Why I Write, and Eco was sitting back to back with it and caught my eye. 

Unfortunately I didn’t get to take the Levy because an alert popped up when I was checking it out and I had to bring it to the desk as someone in Pimlico had reserved it.

And on top of Eco is Allingham's Dancers in Mourning and Ben Aaronovitch’s The October Man, both from Paddington Library. I’m actually not sure if I’ve read the novella or not but I want to make sure before I read False Value - the next full book in the series, which has just come out. 

Arguably that means that False Value is technically on my TBR pile too, even though I don’t have a physical copy yet. And so it goes on..  

A Ship of Knowledge

A domani, mañana, we will be looking at 1988, but for today lets talk about the BL.

I was a reader at the British Library for a year last year while I was doing my half-an-MA and made very little use of it for a number of reasons - some sensible (Kensington Central Library could be practically fallen into after work, getting to Bloomsbury was a slight palaver at the weekend) and some really quite ridiculous (not being sure of the rules around what I could take into reading rooms, how to use the lockers, and so on).

Currently I'm a 'friend' of the BL, which means I should be able to get a 3 year ticket next year.

Hopefully I'll make much better use of it in my second half-of-an-MA, and then perhaps some research on the archaeology of Pompeii, a subject I find utterly fascinating.

My BA dissertation was on Pompeii, but I was more enthralled by the politics and archaeology and rivalry around the process of digging it up than the place itself.

Don't get me wrong, Pompeii and Herculaneum are also fascinating, but they've been pored over already. I was sparked off by some of the very critical commentary about earlier archaeologists, and there's a great story to be told about the evolution of archaeology, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, taking in Napoleon and Emma Hamilton and Spanish monarchs and Mussolini, that I'd like to let simmer and pull into something coherent one day.  

But that's an aside. Being a friend of the BL I get free entry to exhibitions, and four free tickets to events a year.

So today I went on the tour. And it was great.

Besides being taken behind the scenes I learnt, in rapid succession:  that the current site was chosen because it meant that books could be walked from their old accommodation at the British Museum, since they're basically so valuable it was too risky to ship them any distance. That Prince Charles had hated the building plans, and in particular criticised the new library for being shaped like a ship, since the architect was not asked for a monument (in this he had my sympathy, the current building being more functional and less show offy, although apparently Charles still hates it, which I don't agree with).

That the Queen loved it and donated a largish wodge of cash towards it.

That the lost river of the Fleet runs through the site, and since they could not build up (as this would obscure important views) they built down and have the second lowest basement after the Bank of England, and a pump to get the water out to the canal.

That the site is lower than the tube in parts (and we heard the tube again and again while going round the archives).

That the book rests are made from rejects from a medical pillow maker.

That the chairs are made from american oak and £400 a pop (and very comfortable).

That the man who invented the enigma machine was shot so he couldn't sell his secret on.

We also took in: Alan Turing and the apple and Steve Jobs naming his company after him, Jane Austen and the possibility she was deliberately poisoned (people in the US are genuinely CSI-ing her desk to find this out. As a popular female author, she had enemies. Other explanations for her early death are Parkinson’s, or accidental poisoning with arsenic.) King James, that Magna Carta exhibition, early printing, stamps, the bible in Ancient Greek, how long it takes to catalogue a book, the shortage of people who can do this in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, the East India company, wills, opium sales, a celestial globe provided to Isaac Newton which had been pulled up for the Harry Potter exhibition and not yet returned to storage, card catalogues, the Gutenberg bible, Henry VIII..

And these are just the bits I can remember from a tour of not more than an hour and a half.

Highly recommended.

On Bookswaps and Letting Go (and somehow, inevitably, libraries and London boroughs again)

Technically I still belong to Bookmooch, and for a while I did a bit of Bookcrossing, but really the most effective way for books to find new readers is a bookswap. A physical shelf or set of shelves where patrons or passers-by can both take and leave books.

The difficulty is deciding what to let go to the swap. However loose my sense of ownership – and it is loose, perhaps because most of my books originally belonged to someone else and will again, or perhaps because I agree with the concept that everything you own is another thing to be cleaned and housed and managed and it’s got to the point where I’m putting over half my plates and cups and cutlery in a separate cupboard just to keep the washing up to manageable levels – culling and making a decision to dispose of books is difficult. Books span that gap between physical object and experience. Unread books are books I might read one day, read books are books I remember enjoying.

But I now have a more painless system for the books I’ve read at least. At the heart of said system is a paper LRB (London Review of Books) carrier bag. When I finish a book I either make a decision to keep it and put it (back) on the shelf, or I put it straight in the bag. Once the bag is full (LRB do a nice sturdy carrier) I take it to the bookswap at Wimbledon station.

It’s a reasonably flexible system, and if I change my mind about one or more of the books while I decant them that’s fine. The idea is simply to break the default of putting books I may never read again back on the shelf when I’ve already got so many not-even-read-once books on there, and access to several very good lending libraries and lots of smaller ones. 

My home borough of Merton for example, which has 7 libraries, is also in a shared-service arrangement with Kingston, Luton, Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Bexley..  – in fact 17 other boroughs in total. While Kensington (which I belong to because I work in the borough) is cosied up with Hammersmith and Westminster, which sandwich it between them (a map of the London Boroughs shows how exactly like a sandwich it is, all three with small footprints on the river, and then the lengths of them snugly running parallel, like countries which need access to an inland sea, although in fact it’s because the 1963 London Government act merged the smaller boroughs to the north and south of each other. Hence what I just incorrectly called Kensington is actually the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and what I just called Hammersmith is the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (LBHF), but I’m wandering, and you can find it all on Wikipedia).

What has made all this possible of course is electronic systems. The same thing which has allowed the amount of books I can borrow to balloon from 3 or 6 back in the 80s to 15 (RBKC) and 20 (Merton) here in the twenty-teens. 

But I was talking about bookswaps. At the moment my bookswap bag is about half full. So what am a throwing out? Lets see: 

First out of the bag is Antigone in the Diane J Rayor translation from the Cambridge University Press, which was bought in error for my MA when I was actually meant to buy the previous translation. Having read both I have to say I agree with whoever structured my course. The sentences in the latest version seem broken up in a way that strips out emotion instead of strengthening it, which surely misses the point of the play.

Coriolanus, Shakespeare – this is another Cambridge University Press book bought for my MA. It’s actually a very good and useful edition, but I already have a huge volume of Shakespeare plays and sonnets and I’m unlikely to want to read the lengthy introduction or textual analysis again. Out it goes.

Browse, The World in Bookshops, edited by Henry Hitchings. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and imagine any bibliophile would. Each chapter is a different writer telling us about their relationship with a bookshop, or bookshops; Ali Smith about the things found in the books that come into the charity bookshop where she volunteers, Ian Sansom about his time at Foyles, Elif Shafak talks about her childhood and the bookshops of Istanbul, Iain Sinclair about the closure of a shop that was a landmark – as indeed everything I’ve read by Sinclair seems to be about closure and change for the worse. And many other writers besides. I’m glad I found this book, but I couldn't be sure I'd ever read it again when there are so many other books to read, so under the new system it went straight in the bag. Let's see if I still feel the same when I come to empty the bag out.

Music Night at the Apollo – Lilian Pizzichini. I never finished this book. It’s subtitled 'A Memoir of Drifting', and despite the interesting facts about boats and old factories and the sense of trying to find a present through finding a past I felt it drifted away too much, I also felt that even during her time spent with what papers call the underclass Pizzichini always knew she had a way out, which was not the case for the people she was writing about. It made me feel uncomfortable and vicarious reading it.

Joy in the Morning – P G Wodehouse. I’ve got quite a lot of Wodehouse and there’s a lot in the libraries and frankly, this isn’t my favourite and I need shelf space. It’s going.

Don Among the Dead Men. C E Vuillamy. This is a green penguin and less a ‘whodunnit’ than ‘whydunnit’ Doctor Kerris Bowles-Ottery invents a drug that causes euphoria and painless death. Recording his findings as any good scientist would we can see him slowly shift from theorising about the drugs use, to changing his ideas about when it might be used, to using it on people. It’s subtitled ‘a satirical thriller’ and although some of the humour is more wry smile than laugh out loud, it’s quite an amusing book. Something different.

Metroland Julian Barnes. I wrote about this in my 1980 wrap up. 

Misogynies – Joan Smith. Like Browse, although for different reasons, I’m glad I found and read this book. It was a good reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. The chapter about the Yorkshire ripper, the assumptions that were made, and the attitude of the men investigating these crimes and the press towards women in the sex trade will definitely stick with me. (As distinct from the trade itself I mean. It is possible to think prostitution is a horrible business without, as is the case here, actually hating the women involved, just as it’s possible to think bare knuckle boxing should be banned without hating the men involved.)

The other joy of bookswaps is of course not knowing what you might find to take home. Sometimes it can be a bit lacklustre and samey (50 shades anyone?) and usually the Wimbledon station ones go so fast that the direction of books is generally out rather than in, which suits me. But the small bookswap at work has recently yielded Get Carter by Ted Lewis in a very nice paperback, and since that was apparently the start of the ‘noir school of British crime writing’ (which I think of more as ‘gritty’) and it wasn’t a book I’d have thought to look for otherwise, I’m more than pleased.    

Library Books..

As you can see my reading at present is quite crime heavy. This isn't even all of it, there was the aforementioned Patrick Butler for the Defence by John Dickson Carr, which was a green penguin, The Black Stage by Anthony Gilbert, also a green penguin, and then Grave Mistake, Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie all on Kindle and by Ngaio Marsh.

Eventually I expect I'll get a kind of literary indigestion and have to ease off the crime for a while, but there is a kind of historical interest in reading mysteries (or any period 'genre') this way. The Black Stage for example is written just after the war, and family members are coming together as a group for the first time since peace was declared, some of them embracing or at least accepting the changes in themselves and society, while others want to turn the clock back because nostalgia is how they’ve got through the last six years, and it's a fantasy they can't let go of.

On the other hand White Tie (which I’ve read before) is set before the war, in the glittering world of high society, debs and chaperones and the London Season. And what it makes explicit, which had never struck me before reading it, was how very young the debs being launched on the marriage market were. 17 or 18 years old, and presumably most of them with no prospect (unlike their male counterparts) of an alternative, such as further study. 

It is also relatively rare in having one of the most likable murder victims I've ever met. Generally in whodunnits, victims either tend to be the kind of people no-one mourns (a fact Christie satirises through her crime writer character Ariadne Oliver in, I think The Pale Horse) or succumb to their fate within the first few pages (in extreme cases, as in Patrick Butler, all they ever do is rock up and die). This enables the reader not to care very much and treat the whole thing as a kind of intellectual puzzle or amusing farce.

But in White Tie we have someone who will be genuinely missed. Someone flawed and privileged, old fashioned and eminently mockable, but generous, human and well meaning as well.  

Returning to the Library pile though, I'm still finding the British Library reprints quite varied. John Bude's Death Makes a Prophet was well written, but again it was more the time and the setting - a kind of well-heeled and respectable cult of a kind I wouldn't have thought existed in the 40s - that was interesting to me.  

Death of Anton by Alan Melville was great fun though. Tigers! Acrobats! Accidents that aren't really accidents! Possibly my second favourite of these reprints after The Poisoned Chocolates Case. 

I did have one tiny quibble though. The investigating officer has a brother who is a Catholic priest, and at one point the murderer confesses to the priest, which creates a quandary, because he can't betray that confidence but can't let an innocent man be arrested either. 

And of course this makes for a strong and interesting literary device, and highlights the respect the brothers have for each other’s respective vocations – but I’m not sure it’s really possible.  After all it is called an act of contrition because you’re meant to renounce your sins and mend your ways. Just conveniently offloading them and then carrying on as before isn't enough, and if a lapsed Catholic like me knows that then any priest worth his salt would surely point it out and refuse absolution as well.  

But this is like quibbling over the fact that Alleyn is investigating his friend’s death in White Tie, which I’m equally sure would never be allowed, even in high society in the 30s.  You do need, with murder mysteries, to suspend your disbelief at least a little if you expect to be entertained.

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.

OU – first impressions.

I've now done a substantial part of the reading for the first bit of this course, so it seems a good time to put some impressions down.

Firstly the set texts for the module, the first of which is the latest Cambridge University Press translation of Sophocles' Antigone, about which I can’t improve on my comment elsewhere, so apologies for the cut and paste:

‘I'm sure it's highly accurate and great for study, but for general reading - reading for pleasure - I would advise anyone to avoid. You'd barely know it was meant to be poetry and little emotion is coming through.’

I’m sure I read a Penguin translation before which was much more lively, but perhaps I shouldn't confuse things by reading it again; although there’s a fascinating line of study there I’m sure – different translations for different purposes and the tension between accuracy of meaning and accuracy of (for want of a better word) rhythm and effect.

The second text for the course is also Antigone, this time by Jean Anouilh, which has some substantial differences from Sophocles' version. The same things happen but the intentions and motivations are different. It’s also much more readable, the speech unstilted and the characters rounded.

From what I can glean from my secondary reading the idea of studying both versions is to explore something called intertextuality, which as a concept used to be called influence but isn’t anymore because that implies intention on the part of the first author, who wouldn’t actually have known about the later works and couldn’t have been trying to influence them.

Incidentally it has just taken me about a sentence to explain what it takes three pages for my textbook to tell me. I can't work out if it's showing off or just natural long-windedness, but sometimes the language makes me feel like I've accidentally wandered into a campus novel. Something from David Lodge’s early oeuvre, before he hit the 80s and started sending people into steelworks.  

Anouilh was good though (by which I mean I enjoyed reading it) and interesting in the historical context. I read it as a defence of pragmatism at first, but I’ve since learnt it was first performed in 1944 when France was occupied and now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s more about however pragmatic you are the sky still falls, and you’ve lost all respect as well.

It also struck me that unless the Sophocles I read fell (or is destined to fall) through a wormhole back to 1943 there is no way it can be the version Jean Anouilh actually read before writing his own play. Even leaving aside the fact he would be far more likely to have read it in French or Greek.

Perhaps these are all the things I’m meant to be thinking about, but it still tickles me that I’m starting an English lit qualification with two books in translation.  

I also missed the first group tutorial (it’s fine, they’re not compulsory) because the email regarding it said Franklin-Wilkes building, Kings College, and it turned out to be at the LSE. Still there’s a good chip shop at Waterloo and I spent the intervening hour after work in Kensington library reading Post War World, so it wasn’t wasted (what do people who don’t read do with these inadvertent gaps and delays? Shop? Fret? Go for a coffee and rinse the wifi?).

I will go to at least one lecture or tutorial though. I want a nosy at the LSE if nothing else. I also have good reason for joining the British Library now, which is very tempting, although I think Kensington Reference will be my go to place for actual study. There’s something about the atmosphere of a proper library that slows the pulse and seeps into the pores and lends me focus. Also their desks are bigger than mine.

And now for some completely unrelated pictures from my trip to Greece.

Athens

Patra

fourteen reasons I'm going get a library fine again..

From left to right:

John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, which I got from Mitcham library after reading Rumpole at Christmas. I meant to wait for colder weather before reading any more Rumpole - it's an winter sort of pleasure - but I've just rediscovered him and I'm impatient. To be enjoyed with a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment (in this case Montepulciano) in my Hello Kitty glass to the right there. That's my travelling glass, a useful size for fanta, wine or water for painting. Thick enough to be tough, and not likely to tip up. I brought it in Florence.
I haven't read the book yet,

Bill Bryson's African Diary - another not yet read, this time from Wimbledon Library, and next to it Dolly by Susan Hill. I like Hill very much and she delivers reliable chills, but I don't think she's got whatever it is that makes a book a classic. She's very much of the here, now, and sturdily middle class.

The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, Jerome Ferrari (in translation) another I've not read yet but the reviews promise amazing things, and I wanted to read more work in translation.

Thirst by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, again in translation. I normally avoid fiction about war, especially recent conflicts, but I think this appealed because it promises to show both sides, not just one. I also avoid books about writers trying to write, but here I'm hoping it will leaven the bleakness of conflict. I got this from Mitcham library, which has a homely between-war facade and core with a square 1970s build wrapped around three sides of it, like one of those neck cushions people are meant to use on aeroplanes.

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz. I read Horowitz' The House of Silk some years ago, and although I felt the sensibilities of Holmes and Watson were slightly anachronistic it was a good yarn. I've only recently started to appreciate how many 'new' Sherlock Holmes spin-off stories there have been. From Julien Symons' Sherlock obsessed actor in the 70s, to the recent TV series, to The Seven Percent Solution (a retelling in which Sherlock begins to succumb to the cocaine and have delusions about Moriarty) to the film Young Sherlock Holmes. Neil Gaiman has written Holmes and Watson into an alternate universe, and Disney has made him a cartoon mouse. With all that going on it's impossible to be precious about the canon. And it may be good.

Mathematics with Love - the Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis. This is a very odd book, and a very odd correspondence. Wallis is in love with a young student at London University, and offers to help her with her studies. It's clear that if they weren't cousins he probably wouldn't be allowed to write to her at all, but as they are her father allows some flexibility. So they write the normal things you write in letters (or did, when people wrote letters), that a bee has landed on her pen because it is sticky with nougat, that he  went to the theatre, and then she lays out the mathematical puzzles that bother her because her lecturer goes too fast, and he writes back with diagrams, and she responds with formulae, and I got very lost but didn't mind.
What I did mind was the sentimental narrator who can't restrict herself to facts and says things like 'and the knight had won his lady' or 'a flood of emotion had been released in Barnes'. The book would be very much better if she kept quiet and let her readers judge for themselves.

The Green Man - Kingsley Amis. A quite short book which I should have read by now. I had an Amis binge a year or so back, but have read nothing of his before or since. I always think Amis is writing with a male reader in mind, but the fact he's not writing for me doesn't make me not want to read him. His humour is darkly amusing.

Nehru's Letters to His Sister. Kensington Library seems to have a lot of these books of letters - the above Barnes Wallis one came from them. This one was in a small display in the Central Library - they have these small frequently changed displays where things not normally on the shelves are trawled from archive and offered up, and there's almost always something interesting.
The loose connection between the books this time seems to be sibling relationships.

The next book, Cook's Tours, is a case in point. I should have returned this already since I've finished it, but I haven't yet. It's a series of letters (again) as published in the Times and temperance newspapers, sent back by Thomas Cook as he builds and promotes his fledgling company, making contacts in hotels and explaining the difference in British and American railways, and telling people what they can expect to see.
He isn't as tolerant of other cultures as you might expect from someone so widely travelled - and particularly dismissive of anything which offends his Victorian morality - but he's certainly not backward for his time, and it's completely fascinating seeing how people travelled then, and the wonderful months-on-end-long tours that were offered to those who could afford them.
The temperance side is also interesting, because it not only gives you an idea of how much people did drink, daily, but how they were expected to drink, even if they didn't want to.
This still happens of course, but it's not socially acceptable in the way it clearly was.

And Then There Were None. I've been rereading Agatha Christie for some time now and I'm getting into my less favourite ones. This is a very clever book - in many ways her cleverest book, but it's more thriller than proper puzzle.
This was also, of course, the book with the offensive name and nursery rhyme, which is why they've changed the title. A very minor change, since the play was always called this.
They've also changed the rhyme inside though and I'm less sure that's a good move. There is a point where in trying not to give offence you disguise past attitudes and pretend there never was a problem. And ultimately that serves the current crop of bigots who'd like to kid themselves that women's lib and race relations are just politically correct hysteria and there was never any real need for them.
But having said that I was considering buying a copy of Kipling's Just So Stories at Christmas for my cousin's little boy, and I checked some of the language had been changed before I added it to the 'maybe' pile - so I can't claim to be consistent about this.

A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie. One of my favourites, and one I didn't even come close to solving the first time I read it.
There are an awful lot of people pretending to be who they're not in this book, but that's kind of the point. That the war has shaken out all the odd certainties, and you have to believe what people tell you of themselves.
Oddly the TV Marple I preferred for this one was Geraldine McEwan. It isn't usually, mostly because the changes that were made to a lot of the stories for that series didn't feel like they worked to me, but in this one she was engaged in a way Hickson simply wasn't, and it felt real.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie. This is, or was, another favourite. The paperback my mother owned had a terrifying picture of a doll with a cracked head and a dead bird (actually all those old covers were frightening. The giant wasp and the diddy little aeroplane, the apple that is actually a skull, splashes of blood and staring eyes).
Hopefully it's still a favourite, but rereading the earlier Tommy and Tuppence books (and the Bundle Brents and all) I found I didn't like them as much as I had when I was young. They're too silver screen and wisecracky.
Incidentally, this was also one of the Geraldine McEwan Marples I couldn't stand. What was Marple even doing there? Why did Tuppence have to be completely rewritten as this flaky drunk whose children patronised her as a result?

Anyway, last one..

Endless Night - Agatha Christie. As I said earlier, I'm getting into my less favourite ones now, and this is definitely one of those. I remember feeling cheated when I read it.
I was babysitting, so must have been in my teens, and I haven't read it again until now (or rather until a week ago). It's cleverly done, more cleverly that I could appreciate at the time I think, but it still leaves me cold.

So that's the library haul. I'm lucky that I live and work in places with good libraries, I can't imagine what I'd have to spend on books if I didn't.

Evening Walk

Beautiful evening walk down to the river at Chelsea and Battersea yesterday after work (and a slightly odd Wordpress session where the reference librarian at Kensington kept talking down books but the website guy from Wordpress seemed quite neutral.)

Tates, Old and New.

The picture below is the Tate and Lyle factory as seen from London Airport DLR station. There has been a sugar factory on this site for over a hundred years, owned originally by Henry Tate & Sons until the company merged in the 1920s (20 years after Henry's death). Incidentally the 'save our sugar' banner on the front is to do with EU regulations about importing sugar cane and you can read more here if curious. 

Henry Tate, of course, was the Victorian philanthropist who built the Tate Gallery in Pimlico which bears his name, and now has baby and stroppy teenage Tates at St Ives, Liverpool and in the old power station at Bankside.

The members room of the Tate at Bankside (theTate Modern) has some great views. You can get a particularly good picture of St Paul's - but there are a hundred and one copies of that on the internet and there's no point in me adding to them. Instead you can have towards Cheapside and the City:

Or over Blackfriars Bridge in the other direction: 

Tate actually lived at Streatham and funded libraries more locally to home at Streatham, Brixton and West Norwood. In fact it was wandering through Streatham today with a camera that triggered my sudden recollection of Tate and all his works. 

I didn't take a picture of the library though. I took a pic of this opposite Streatham station:

Artwork by Emma Harrison. It turns out Peter Davison was born in Streatham in the 50s. Which raises a question in my mind. Has there ever been an episode where the Doctor met Henry Tate? And if not, why not?

Dear Reader by Paul Fournel

This week's library read was Dear Reader, by Paul Fournel with translation by David Bellos. 

Bellos' name didn’t register at the time, but I realised later that I've read his book on translation (Is that a Fish in Your Ear) which was fascinating. Highly recommended.

I'll start with my very favourite thing about Dear Reader, which is that it's nice to see a book about publishing that isn’t all doom and gloom, and it's nice to see a middle aged male protagonist who does something to cope with the way the world is changing instead of sitting and whining about his actually quite comfortable existence (Disclaimer: It's probable that the latter comment has more to do with the kind of books I’ve read in the last year than books – or indeed middle aged men – in general). 

Cons: I nearly didn't read it at all purely because it's a novel about a publisher. In my experience novels about publishers are second only to novels about aspiring writers in the navel-gazing-please-move-out-of-your-comfort-zone-stakes. In this case I would have been wrong, Fournel's publisher focusses outwards not inwards; on books and other people, the future of publishing, dinners with his authors, getting a present for his wife.   

I liked the narrator, I cared what happened to him, the story jogged along nicely and yet.. Yet there was something about the way he put things, some feeling of constraint that I was constantly conscious of but couldn’t identify and which never quite allowed me to forget that I was reading a book rather than entering someone’s mind.

I should add at this point that I had not read anything about the book except what was in the book as I've been spoilered so many times before. 

And if you also want to go into the book cold you should look away now.... 

 Not gone yet? Ok then...

Of course I couldn’t stop trying to work out what it was that was bothering me. Perhaps something about the way it translated from the French? The choice of words or syntax did occasionally seem odd, not quite as fluid as expected, but definitely not incorrect. Why should that be a distraction? 

Perhaps it was stilted because the translator was American and trying to sound English? (No. Bellos is English).

Was the translation too complete? Did it perhaps just not feel French enough anymore? 

...and so on. 

Then I read the blurb at the end. Ah. Apparently the book conforms to a rhythmic pattern where the same words are repeated at intervals, like a poem (or literally a poem perhaps, if read aloud). 

A clever trick to perform once, let alone twice in separate languages, but to me a constant subconscious irritation. I admired this book rather than enjoyed it.