E C R Lorac - Murder on a Monument

I need to start with my standard disclaimer for some of the Loracs: Murder on a Monument is not readily available, and I apologise in advance if you read this review, decide you want to read it yourself, and can’t get hold of a copy.  That said (spoilers) I wasn’t too struck with this one.

The story begins promisingly enough - siblings Nick and Jonet Airdrey are on their way into Rome on the bus from Ciampino Airport. We get some of the background quite early on – Jonet is 8 years older and worried about Nick but trying to be fairly ‘hands off’ as she’s convinced his overbearing uncle (they’re orphans) and horrible school are the reasons he’s a bit of a nervous case and got in with some dodgy friends who may or may not have fleeced him of his inheritance (i.e. did the business legitimately go bust, or did they take his capital under false pretences?).

Also on the bus with the Airdrey’s are an elderly lady and her niece, a couple of English businessmen who identify Jonet as secretary to a powerful business magnate and consider how they can somehow fall in with her for business reasons never fully explained, an American who may or may not be doing the same, a pair of missionaries and an Irishman who does so little up to the point he’s coshed and killed I genuinely forgot he’d ever existed.

Jonet and Nick find his body - next morning - on the simply enormous Vittorio Emanuele monument, a place Nick was recommending back on the bus not for its own sake but because you can see all Rome spread out before you from the top. Unfortunately as the brother and sister have taken different sets of steps up, not quite playing hide and seek but almost, Jonet cannot give her brother an alibi.

Add that to the fact the murdered man is identified as someone from that dodgy business he put money into, and that he’s so desperate to get away he tells a rather silly lie to he police, it all starts to look bad for Nick. Enter Jonet’s boss’s security officer (Belloni), who points out to police that there were other people around at the time, including one who left sharpish when the body was found. If Nick is a suspicious character, then so it he. 

At this point I had to look the Vittorio Emanuele monument up to work out how feasible the whole set up was. Despite having been to Rome at least three times, and the fact it’s not a thing anyone can feasibly not have noticed, it doesn’t seem to have made much impression on me. 

Frankly, having identified it, I don't mind the thing, but I can understand Lorac’s distaste for it (Nick’s verdict is that it’s a good thing to walk up to get a view of Rome, but not to actually look at, and the authorial voice clearly agrees) it's big and bombastic and neo-classical - which seems odd in a city with so many truly ancient things. 

Anyway, back to the story – Nick is arrested and Jonet is terribly worried, and so her employers involve not only Belloni but MacDonald, who is actually in Rome investigating a drug smuggling business, which of course it turns out might possibly be connected…

So the ingredients are good, but somehow it never came together for me. My first issue was with the endless slew of street names and place names we don’t really need to know, as if the book was written with one eye on a map of Rome. I felt a competent editor should have toned that down.

Then there’s Jonet. A minor quibble was that the name gave me problems - my eye kept catching on it as a typo for Janet or Jonette. A larger one is her internal monologue about Nick - although her thoughts make perfect sense they feel strangely superficial and lacking in emotion. There’s no anger at the overbearing uncle or the people who took advantage of her brother, no desire to protect him that is having to be resisted, no irritation with him she's having to tamp down. It seems unnatural.   

I was also a bit disbelieving that literally none of the Brits and Americans in the story feel any inclination to co-operate or tell the truth to the police.  This may have been an accurate reflection of the time for some people (another hangover from a war only 13 years in the past?), but surely not every single normally law-abiding person would take this attitude? 

No wonder the police are happy to have MacDonald and Belloni unofficially on board.  Off they dash on a jolly up into the Roman hills (which I recommend btw. The hills around Rome are lovely) to try and break some alibis, spilling out more place names as they go… and I was left wondering why MacDonald was there. He doesn’t really seem to do much Belloni couldn’t do by himself.

So one only for the completists I think. As I said at the beginning it’s not at all easy to get hold of (I used the British Library again).

The Case of Colonel Marchand - E C R Lorac

Firstly - quick warning - this book is not widely available. I utilised the British Library again to get my paws on a copy. 

It's a shame because I really enjoyed it, even though (perhaps because) there was nothing incredibly innovative or original about it.

Following on directly from A Greenwell Mystery by the same author, I was relieved to get a relatively straightforward murder mystery with a reasonably straightforward cast of characters.

First of those is Colonel Marchand, merry if maturing bachelor of old London town twixt the wars. 

Irritatingly as I read this book a little while back I can't actually remember if we ever see the Colonel alive. What I do know however is that the Colonel has invited a young lady to tea, and the servants are below stairs discussing what a nice young lady she is and how often she has visited him now, and should such a nice young lady really be seeing the Colonel, who at the age of 50 has been attractive to women all his adult life and knows it. 

All this conversation over and around a game of bridge, which passes the time until the bell is rung for the butler to take away the tea things (I admit to being a little surprised by this. I have always associated bridge with little baize card tables and cocktails or sherry up in the drawing room, not servants round a kitchen table). 

At about 6.30 though the butler (Gibbs) starts to think it odd that the bell hasn't been rung, and off he goes upstairs on his own initiative, finding the lady gone and the Colonel dead.  

Then, after some tangles where the secretary and the dead man's nephew go all gentlemanly and refuse to share the name of the Colonel's tea time companion with our old friend MacDonald of the Yard, and he points out they're doing her no favours but they still don't budge, she reads about the case in the paper and very sensibly comes forward of her own accord (making them look even sillier than they already did but, well, early 1930s, lingering Victorian chivalry, you know the drill).

It struck me at this point in the book how hard it would be to get that element right if you set a book in the era. A young woman could live independently (as this one does) travel across the globe (she's Australian) have an occupation (she's a musician) and yet there this lingering sensibility about needing to protect her in this hugely unhelpful way.  

Just as complex as what women themselves understood (or didn't understand) about their relationships with men - also illustrated rather nicely in this case because Karin (her name is Karin) has to explain to MacDonald that she had an on-off friendship with the dead man, refusing and shying away whenever he tried for anything more, but responding when he contacted her again because she really did like him and enjoyed his company and they had things like music in common. 

Again this feels very much of it's time. To a modern mind it's so obvious the Colonel was never going to get over it and be friends, and a Victorian miss would of course be chaperoned, but Karin is kind of caught in the middle of those two cultures and really rather naïve.   

As she tells it to MacDonald she only properly understood Marchand was serious when, on the afternoon of his murder, he proposed to her over the tea things, presenting her with his grandmother's pearls and an engagement ring, and becoming terribly hurt and shocked when she declined him (he being about as good at listening to what the other person is actually saying as she is, apparently, but again it makes perfect sense in it's era - he's been successful with the ladies before, is a good catch financially speaking, and perhaps doesn't get that things have changed and women who say no aren't just holding out for marriage.). 

Anyway, appalled at what she had done and not knowing how to fix it, Karin simply ran out to the hall, grabbed her things and left. 

Thus we have a motive and also a mystery. Marchand was not killed in the tea or cakes, he did not take patent medicines and yet he was poisoned. And although the jewellery boxes are still there the ring and pearls are gone... 

Anyway, really enjoyed this one. Hopefully if not republished it will be available in the public domain fairly shortly as I believe copyright should expire in 2028 in the UK and a little later elsewhere. 

Catch Up Post on Crime Reviews

Anthony Berkeley - Jumping Jenny and Not to be Taken

It's a little while since I read these books now, but my main take away from both was how we are introduced to intelligent characters – not just in their own estimation but by the estimation of those around them, and also borne out in other areas of their lives - and they then proceed to do incredibly stupid things. Monumentally stupid things. Things you can’t imagine anyone doing.

For example, in Jumping Jenny (having decided the victim was thoroughly unlikeable and whoever killed her has done a public service), our sleuth (and he is a sleuth so absolutely should know better) then proceeds to run around covering things up and moving chairs and generally giving the impression either he is guilty or someone else in the household is. 

Actually, the constant dinging in the reader’s ear about how unlikeable the victim was is also an issue. It’s true she is irritating, and I certainly wouldn’t care to be married to her either, but there is really something quite pathetic in her need to be the centre of attention, and drink as much as she does. It all seemed to me more likely due to low self esteem than any of the more judgemental pseudo-psychological reasons given here (incidentally, this reminded me of the modern habit of people who know little about mental health ‘diagnosing’ ADHD or autistic traits in strangers. You can just imagine this scenario in a modern setting, with everyone blaming ADHD or a personality disorder, and not giving a thought to why this woman is so unhappy and attention seeking).  

There is also something very unpleasant about the detective’s eagerness to meet her and then reaction against her, as if it’s her fault she doesn’t live up to the picture he apparently had in his head, and the people at the party who keep on telling him how awful she is, which she surely must be aware is happening, and which must be making it all so much worse. 

Of course, even if she was a monster it would be no excuse for a conspiracy to cover up murder – but I’m letting Berkeley off that one as I think I can detect a kind of macabre humour that just didn’t quite land for me, and became increasingly convoluted and therefore boring. It may work much better for someone else.

Pluses are that the set up is strong – a Halloween party with everyone dressed as famous murderers and a gallows set up on the roof with two male and one female cadaver, and the kind of amicably divorced ex-couple that I assume would be rare at the time (1933) but clearly not non-existent.

 

With Not to be Taken (1938) the book felt a lot tighter, and I found I could forgive a lot because I liked the narrator.

It starts, more or less, with one of those discussions about eugenics that seem to have been in the zeitgeist in the 30s and 40s – there’s one in Curtain, and it comes up in Gladys Mitchell too. I suspect there was a reaction against this sort of thing after WW2 (the TV production of Curtain, while excellent, is set after the war, and this discussion struck a false note for me as it would no longer be a purely speculative discussion and you'd expect some reference to the fact).

I also enjoyed the sibling relationship between the doctor and his sister - although I was a bit boggled that the dispensing was generally done by the sister, who however talented, is not qualified and presumably has taken no oath (and all the neighbours are apparently fine with this and after there is a poisoning, and it's explained in court, the court are all fine with it too).

Impossible to tell, nearly 90 years later, whether that would be realistic. 

I've also been reading a lot of Catherine Aird. She's someone who has been on my radar since I read about her in, I think, one of Martin Edwards' books, but who I didn't get to until after her death in December last year. The series starts with The Religious Body in 1966, which is a really strong start - the murder of a nun in a convent, our police detective out of his comfort zone, the nuns irritatingly determined to neither help nor hinder. I've been dipping in and out of the series after that, and haven't yet found one I didn't like, although I did eventually gorge myself to the point the humour became repetitive. That's a me problem - these books were not meant to be read in quick succession. 

Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand was another early summer read. The only note I've made on this book is that murderers are by nature horrible, but the murderer in this book is particularly nasty. I can't really say much more without spoiling it. A great start, with the agony aunt in a women's magazine going off to visit one of her correspondents essentially on a whim, and then finding, when she gets there, that there's no such person.

Or at least, that's what she's told...

 

Death Under Sail, by C P Snow was apparently his first ever book and only ever murder mystery. Of course he was a very popular writer of both fiction and non fiction (I seem to remember him being one of the authors mentioned in Howards End is on the Landing as not being much read anymore). 

This is a tidy little story, although at first my brain kept defaulting to thinking it was written in the 70s not the 30s, I think partly because of the 'cover' (it's an ebook) and partly because of the set up with two young men and their girlfriends or fiancees and two older chaps all on holiday sharing a boat, and the casual way even the oldest member of the party takes it.

Of course the cabins are segregated – but when the police arrive one young woman is in a cabin on her boyfriend's lap and people are surprised the police officer is a little shocked.

Later, when they all have to move off the boat and into a friend's house, the heavy disapproval of the only servant (and the fact there is a servant) rooted it much more firmly in it's time. 

Other crime reading has included some George Bellairs (Death of a Tin God got a tiny bit involved, lots of moving from France to Ireland and back out to the Isle of Man). Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer and Richard Hull.  I seem to remember all being enjoyable, but none have really stuck. 

The Greenwell Mystery - E C R Lorac

I would normally start a review like this with the mild disclaimer that I’m not a huge fan of thrillers, so I might be missing some of the enjoyment others would find in this book.

That said, I don’t think the issues I had with this one are going to be unique to me. Mostly, frankly, it’s a question of pace. There is so, so much talking, even for a book over 90 years old. Too many cases of men sitting down over a drink or a smoke and describing their activity in far too many words when it would be better for the author to describe the action and leave the conversation as ‘X told X what had happened and the address of the house they had finally followed him to…’

It opens promisingly. A talented young scientist (Campbell) has been working on a way to make fuel more efficient. If successful it will of course be worth a fortune.

The very night Campbell makes a breakthrough he disappears. Supposedly the owner of the business, Blakely, had rung him and invited him to his country place that evening, and all excited to show his mentor his work, Campbell packed up his papers (luckily not quite all of them) and went. 

But that invitation wasn’t from Blakely. 

Blakely believes it’s kidnapping, and calls in Scotland Yard to get MacDonald on the case, but of course all through our sleuths have to consider the possibility that it's a blind, that Campbell always meant to run off to the highest bidder as soon as his work was complete. 

There are good bits – the girlfriend fails to fall into the fairly standard trap of someone pretending to be Campbell’s friend and trying to kidnap her, and turns the tables rather nicely. Campbell’s ingenious use of a cat to get a message out. 

There's no lack of action - stake outs and break ins and a pilot who flies MacDonald across the country to stage an emergency landing on someone’s country estate (as with other earlier Loracs I have read MacDonald still has a bit of gentleman sleuth about him, and has some posh friends).

But still there is so much talking, and often in such a long winded way, that the plot just stagnates. I also felt cross that a very, very significant telephone call happened off the page, which meant that the reader didn’t know what the main sleuths knew.

That call is between MacDonald and Blakely, which leads to my other whinge. Throughout the book Blakely remains one of the main sleuths, and however much he protests he believes in Campbell’s innocence and however avuncular Lorac makes him every time he appears,  I can’t help feeling he has a vested interest and shouldn’t be involved in the investigation at all.  

Finally, as well I think I had a problem with stakes. Frankly, I didn't see enough of Campbell to feel worried about the possible kidnapping. I did feel some engagement with the brother and sister who are his girlfriend and friend, but they seemed to fade out after a bit and only came in again at the end.

As far as the industrial espionage element went I just didn’t care (I mean, so what if one rich person might end up not as rich as he expected, and another rich person might be better off?), and every time it came up in the text I had to resist the urge to skip forward.

I should add that I read this in the British Library reading rooms, as copies of the book are quite rare. It’s not one that’s been republished yet (only 3 years from falling out of copyright in the UK though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fairly shortly) and I can only see a few reviews online.

All are more positive than mine.   

The Affair on Thor's Head - E C R Lorac

 

The Affair on Thor’s Head (1932) is the second of E C R Lorac’s books featuring Scotland Yard’s Robert MacDonald. Called out this time to the coast after a hut burns down and the original  theory – that the old man that lived there came back from drinking and had an accident with his stove - won’t fly.

Instead the charred body appears to be that of a visiting sailor come out of the past to right a wrong. We know this because he got chatting to a local doctor up on Thor's Head earlier that day when both men had stopped to admire the view (incidentally Lorac waxes as lyrical on the fineness of the man as the view, and does a lovely job of both) and told him about his pursuit of a swindler from a voyage he took 25 years or so before, and about an injury that happened to his arm on that trip. 

So when the skeleton is examined the doctor naturally recognises the injury. Hence murder and MacDonald, following up what seem like dead leads from that horrendous sea trip 25 years before; involving alcoholics, con artists, a mad lady (although she may be the same as the alcoholic, I’m a little unclear) a newly married man slowly dying but determined to see St Helens, a doctor who took the post because he thought it would be a rest (hah!), and such atrocious weather that it was believed the ship might never make port.

Just as well that it was such a memorable trip though, as otherwise it seems unlikely that MacDonald would be able to jog the memories of all the various people whose memory he has to jog to get to the bottom of things. This could be very tedious but somehow manages not to be, and while the book is currently out of print (I read it in the British Library) I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was republished in the next few years – it seems a much more polished book than the first (The Murder on the Burrows) and has a great sense of place. 

I do struggle to believe anyone wouldn’t spot the murderer by the halfway point, even with the red herrings and distractions like people wandering around at night despite having rocks heaved at their heads or being shot at. Not to mention local prejudices, liaisons, lifeguard outposts and two young students who want to try their hand at amateur detection – but MacDonald is painstaking and undistracted and I was always sure he was working on the right lines. It becomes not whodunnit but how to prove it. 

Incidentally I’m resolved not to comment again on how often Lorac or one of her characters talks about MacDonald’s Scottishness and the supposed attributes of Scots, but will quote one final paragraph on the matter and for future books (and my own amusement) content myself with a rough tally.

'You forget he's a Scot, and Scotsmen are the least foolhardy race under heaven'. Said, I believe, just before MacDonald was lowered down a cliff face late at night to look for a corpse and not long after someone bunged that rock at him. Just saying. 

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. 

Some more short crime (and spy) fiction reviews

 Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto

This is one of those timetable mysteries. I couldn’t warm to it for that reason, and although I wouldn’t mind getting hold of an earlier translation and seeing if that feels a bit more atmospheric, I probably won’t.

The central theme, that the deaths aren’t investigated as they should be because they look like a ‘love suicide’ (ie a pact) and the idea that a civil servant would commit such a suicide to avoid bringing shame on his employers probably comes over more strongly in the original cultural context (Japan in the early 50s) but it’s very well explained, as is the corruption element, and I did warm to the two police officers most involved and was happy to follow them to the end. 

However I still felt the alibi would be broken and I didn’t much care how. Fans of this kind of transport timetable howdunnit will get a lot more out of it than me. 

 

Game Without Rules – Michael Gilbert

This is a collection of short stories featuring Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, two middle aged agents who vaguely reminded me of those tv shows in the 60s and 70s where a mysterious ‘M’ or ‘Mother’ sends agents out on various jobs. In this case though the boss has a name, and also manages the London and Midland bank as well as being the head of a small extra secret section of the intelligence service.

It’s also not glam like those shows often were, and its not any more dramatic than it needs to be to get the job done. Despite the lack of sexual tension, dry martinis and fast cars though, I was impressed with how diverse these stories were. I’ve read the last one of these before in anthologies but it works much better as part of the series because of course you care more about the characters.

Gilbert also wrote Smallbone Deceased in 1950, which has recently been republished by the British library classics and which I really enjoyed but don’t think I reviewed. That is much more your murder mystery than spy story.

 

The Fashion in Shrouds – Margery Allingham

Campion has a sister called Valentine. Who knew? 

Normally I either really like or really don't like an Allingham, but I'm on the fence about this one.

The relationships are a smidge odd. Lukewarm. There's the least romantic proposal ever (although at least the chap is upfront that he will expect his wife to drop her career when they're married. I'd be interested to know how many men who married in the 30s just assumed this and didn't mention the fact until it was a done deal.)   

Whereas Angela first blindsides Campion by pretending they are engaged (there are reasons) and at the end rejecting ‘cake-love’ - her name for precisely the kind of 'love is blind' mentality of the other couple. Campion is cheered by the fact. 

Lastly the relationship between Campion and his sister is.. analytical. They don't so much relate as theorise about each other, at each other.  What went on in their family I can't imagine, but apparently they only really talk to one another now. It might be better for them both if they stopped doing that as well. 

The mystery felt as messy as the relationships. Skeletons and aeroplanes and blackmail and long lost relations. Too much going on, I never quite believed in the motive. Readable, but already fading.

Murder in Vienna - E C R Lorac

MacDonald is on holiday. Of course this is like Poirot going on holiday, a body is bound to turn up. 

If I'm honest I enjoyed this much more for the setting and the friends Macdonald was joining and and the logistics of taking a plane to Austria in the 50s than I did the actual crime. There was some clever stuff around a head injury, and double crossing, and a photographer who keeps popping up and skirts a nice line between garrulous nuisance and entertaining character. 

Of the four I've reviewed this is the one I will probably read again. 

Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett. For the 1962 club.

I'd never heard of Stephen Prickett before I got this book, but a bit of googling has turned up some information and he seems to have been well thought of in his chosen career in academia, writing many respected works about English literature and religion and romanticism. 

This book however is his one, youthful, punt at fiction and in theory a murder mystery. Spike, the courier of a couple of narrow boats used for holidays on the Shropshire canal, has found a dead body in the dining room. We're told this in retrospect, because the first chapter is Spike's tangled, internal, stream of consciousness as he steers the boats through the locks, deals with someone dropping keys in the river, and wonders when the body will be found. 

The problem is that this style of writing was intended by the modernists to get closer to the way people actually think and make writing less artificial, not more. It doesn't function here for a number of reasons, but mostly because our writer doesn't have the experience or ability to pull it off, and certainly not against genre and while trying to stuff as many literary quotes and allusions into his characters speech as is (un)feasibly possible. 

I feel mean, because he can't have been much past 21 when he wrote the thing, and it's not a terrible first novel - but it is a first novel that should either have had a good trim and suggested rewrite by a competent editor, or been seen as a trial run for a better, tighter book, and slipped quietly in a drawer without publication. 

Also, despite all the lunacy and meandering and the points where it is patently impossible that any group of people would behave as this group of people are behaving (I think Prickett might have been a fan of Edmund Crispin, but without Crispin's talent for maintaining that thin thread of plausibility or the knack of making us care about the characters), the final solution does kind of make sense, the person whose point of view we see the most of does have flashes of something like three-dimensionality, and the shifts between point of view don't jar as much as they could. 

Thanks as ever to Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings for running these clubs every six months. Do check out their blogs for posts linking to other reviews. 

The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac.

I should start by saying that I don't know how available this book actually is. I apologise in advance to anyone who reads this review, fancies judging for themselves (or even just seeing MacDonald's first sally)  and then finds it impossible. It's not one of the books republished by the British Library, and doesn't seem to be available at any of the usual second-hand sources. In fact there is at least one retailer online urgently seeking it. If it does turn up I suspect it will be as gold-dust and priced accordingly.

It is available at the British Library to readers, which is how I got my grubby paws on it, but I realise that's not helpful to most people. 

That said, on with the review:

The Murder on the Burrows was Lorac's first book and as debuts go it's pretty good - it starts with two mismatched holidaymakers who've decided to go for a walk, get caught by the rain, explore a car that's parked up and find a body. Some of the phrases used by the smaller of the two (described as the 'little cockney') seem to belong to wildly different social classes, but that's a minor quibble, and as always Lorac hooks you in quickly. You want to read on. 

The story itself is middling. The main thing that struck me about our sleuth, compared to the later books I've read, is that MacDonald seems posher in this one - more of the gentleman 'tec and less of the police officer, chatting up society ladies but bored by it, complete with a manservant to look after him and an Oxbridge background (the war intervened before he completed his studies, alas!). 

Other characters are, as usual, interesting and varied - the famous pianist and her long suffering neighbours, the dead man himself, a communist who has spent time in Russia and taken a Russian name but was born plain old John or Bob or Fred something, the young lady who was sent down or removed from Oxford because of her relationship with him, and then married a much older man because she was unhappy at home - MacDonald's natural sympathy for people and their circumstances is already firmly established in this book. 

That said there were bits around AA scouts and roads that made me glaze over. Possibly it's me - I'm the same when Wimsey starts playing cricket or if there's anything in a book around railway timetables. There was a mild snob element and of course the gender politics have changed, but nothing odd for the time. If anything more liberal than you'd expect. So I'm slightly surprised it hasn't been republished - it may not be the best, but it's perfectly good, and I think there would be a market. 

Short Reviews from A Brief, Unplanned, Foray into Translated Works

 Pereira Maintains – Antonio Tabucchi (tr: Patrick Creagh)

The last summer of peace before the Second World War. Pereira is a journalist - head of the culture section for The Lisboa, a small unimportant newspaper, with a small scrappy office of his own where it constantly smells of frying food and he suspects the housekeeper of being a police informer. Widowed and having fallen into an unhealthy lifestyle, regretting never having had a son of his own and the younger, fitter self of his youth, he decides to go to a health spa for a week and takes on an assistant – a young man who writes obituaries for him that are too infused with politics to publish.

Despite rejecting all his work Pereira goes on paying and befriending him anyway, buying him dinner and keeping in touch with his girlfriend when he’s out of town. Not quite sure why, still figuring out what his own state of mind is, and the state of Europe too. ‘Pereira maintains’ is a recurrent line in the book, and often it means Pereira maintains that he doesn’t know why he did such and such a thing, but like Pereira himself it gradually evolves from something very passive to an action in itself. That of bearing witness.

This is a book that gains something from historical knowledge – for example Pereira’s doctor is leaving for France, but the reader will know (as of course Tabucchi knew in the 90s when he wrote it) that France wasn’t, at that point in time, going to prove a safe refuge.  

It also has sprinklings of details about Italian and Portuguese literature which I rather enjoyed and may well lead down a rabbit hole of other books. It has certainly made me want to read more Tabucchi, who himself was Italian, and a translator of Fernando Pessoa as well as an author in his own right.

 

Rock Crystal – Adalbert Stifter (tr: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore).

This is a brief Christmas tale that would probably be unpleasantly sentimental if it weren’t for the glorious descriptions of the mountain itself. There’s a real sense of place – a place not untouched by the outside world (artists and mountain climbers are frequent enough visitors, and the local shoemaker’s excellent mountain climbing shoes are a local export) but with it’s own identity and a local unity that can make someone even from the next town a foreigner.

Interesting sidelight – Christmas presents in Germany were supposedly brought by the Christ-child, not St Nicholas.

 

Glimpses of Bengal – Rabindranath Tagore (tr: Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson). 

This really was just a glimpse of glimpses, both of Bangladesh and Tagore himself as a young man, in letters written mostly to his niece. The letters themselves are not complete – there’s a focus on philosophy and the natural world, a smattering of agreeable humour, but little personal detail, and no sense of a day to day progression or who they were written to. I’d like to read the longer book and fill in the gaps.

In the Bookswap Bag

Literature, Money and the Market – Paul Delaney (from Trollope to Amis)

I feel like I’ve gleaned random facts from this book but not much else. For example it led me on to two other books – The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble, and The Information by Martin Amis, which last is mentioned both because it is about writing, but also because of the size of the massive advance Amis got, which I do dimly remember there being a bit of a ‘the end is nigh’ flutter about at the time, even in the national (non-bookish) press, although I couldn’t have told you the name of the book and would have assumed it was London Fields. It’s amusing to me that his real big hitters were not the ones he got the most money for.

That incident is also mentioned by David Lodge in the last read book on this pile. Lodge’s take is that you can’t really blame Amis for taking the money. He also describes Amis (this is in the 90s) as being ‘famous for not winning the Booker’ which sent me off to Wikipedia to check – and astonishingly (and I say this even though he’s not really my cup of tea and I’ve only read 2 of his books) Amis never did.

I’ll let you know what I think of The Information. I'm cat sitting at my Dad's this week, so will take this one along. 

 

The Ice Age – Margaret Drabble

This is the other book mentioned in the Delaney above. Written in the mid 70s, the height of the energy crisis, with the property market having collapsed and inflation running at 25%.

Anthony Keating (described on the back of my 1979 copy and in several places in the text as ‘middle-aged’ despite being in his 30s) has recently had a heart attack. And well he might do, frankly, even at that age. A business associate is in jail for fraud, the country property he bought for a fortune is worth a fraction of the price he paid for it, the London house can’t be offloaded and has squatters in it, and the riverside location he and his friends bought for development is a white elephant. Oh and a friend has recently died in an IRA bombing and his step daughter been arrested behind the iron curtain for a traffic offence.

This book is almost entirely backstory – how did Anthony, his ex-wife, his friend in jail, and everyone else in these pages get where they are now when the 60s looked so bright?

It manages to avoid being a misery though, through humour and an awareness that at least part of the reason it’s hurting so much right now is how spoilt everyone has been up to this point. Drabble has a knack of making the reader empathise with people they might not really agree with, and this is of course a fabulous snapshot of a point in time.

Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

Both the above are covered in my post here: Briefer than Literal Statement: Brand and Lorac. I was in two minds about whether to let Checkmate to Murder go, but I'm determined to get the double shelving down and there are so many books out there. 

Death of an Author – E C R Lorac

This book is reviewed extensively and well on a number of blogs I follow and read. You don’t need my take. Very entertaining, but I won’t read it again.

A Natural Curiosity – Margaret Drabble

I started this after The Ice Age but its not working for me. It was under £1 in a charity shop, so I’m not going to fret about it.

The Practice of Writing – David Lodge

This is a book of essays and reviews over a period rather than a consistent book about writing or a book about how to write. I do find Lodge a tad academic at times (unsurprising since he was a lecturer in Birmingham) but his awareness of it is very disarming. He also sends this up beautifully in his campus novels.

This was most interesting when he was writing about adapting his own novel for tv, and adapting Martin Chuzzlewit, or casting and tweaking and finding a place for his play. 

The Empty Space – Peter Brook

This is about the theatre and different theories, or perhaps it would be true to say different kinds of theatre.  It’s a nice length for this sort of book – short enough that the lay person doesn’t get bogged down. 

Content With What I Have – C Henry Warren

This was a rather charming book of vignettes of rural life in the 60s and concerns about what was being lost. 

Strange Journey – Maid Cairnes

Another from the British Library, this time their Women Writers series. Arguably this book is a fantasy book, given the bodyswap element, but there was also humour and middlebrow is probably as good a genre to file it under as anything. 

I enjoyed it but couldn’t read books like this the time, any more than I could Amis’ oeuvre or constant spy novels (although I’ve read and enjoyed Amis and Buchan occasionally). I do wonder, if I hadn't gone in expecting it to be the kind of book it was, with the nice cover and the genre it's placed in, whether there might have been more tension to it. As it is there's more comedy of manners than any fear something more sinister is going on. 

Lions and Shadows – Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood advises the reader to read this as fiction, which I did my best to do, even though the central character is called Christopher, and has a life not a million miles from the author, starting with his school career, then sabotaging his university years, then trying to write a book while also trying to find something to do for a living. Overshadowed by something he describes as 'the Test' - the expectation boys of his generation had that they'd be growing up into a war, which then ends before they get there, leaving them with a feeling of displacement. 

A Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac

 A Pall for a Painter (published 1936) begins with Richard Carling returning to his old art college 12 years after his father died and he had to drop out and go back to Australia to look after the ranch and support his mother and sister.

Nostalgic for the life he could have had – the smell of turpentine and modelling classes, the quiet of the quad and welcome of old friends – and sensitive to the atmosphere, it doesn’t take him long to detect an uncomfortable undercurrent to the old place.

Is it because it’s an anachronism, no longer relevant in the modern age, and its Masters frustrated by the fact? Is it the squabbling over the young and lovely Antoinette (who is being stalked by the model, amongst other things) or is it that Manette, that stately and impressive old man in charge, son of the founder, has gone distinctly odd?

Before he can figure all this out - or even sort his own feelings for Antoinette out - a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo topples over on someone’s head and the police are not satisfied that it is the accident it first appears…

 

Favourite line: “We shall find ourselves up against the dense stupidity of men who are besotted with the ‘Keep her name out of it’ complex.”

Favourite passing character: the carpenter chap who arrives to rebuild the plinth, is one of the people to find the body, and tells them the police won’t thank them for interfering with it.

 

Despite a slight disappointment over part of the solution (more me than Lorac, I suspect), this one really worked for me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see A Pall for a Painter in print again in the near future.

The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac

 Another E C R Lorac – and this is the point at which it occurs to me that I’m very likely going to end up reading all her books and it would have been neater, for the purpose of this blog, to begin at book one.

That said, a writer’s first book is rarely their best, and I might not have been tempted to carry on. 

The other problem is that I hadn’t even heard of Lorac before I picked up Fire in the Thatch, and later Murder by Matchlight and Bats in the Belfry, all republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. This of course is the point of the BLCCs, and the strand is so successful and vast by now that there must surely be something to suit everyone’s taste, provided they have any taste for crime at all. The trick is finding it.

In my case that has mostly been George Bellairs and E C R Lorac – so far.

Hence my seeking out the not yet published. I read The Devil and the C I D over two sittings in one of the British Library Reading Rooms (Humanities 2), ordered alongside Detective Stories from the Strand, which I haven’t finished yet but mean to blog about here when I do. The intro alone is fascinating. 

But I digress.   

The Devil and the C I D is one of the Macdonald books, and begins with our hero crawling along the embankment in a fog on Armistice Night in the late 30s. 

My first surprise was that unlike Remembrance Day, which I would have assumed it resembled greatly, Armistice Night – twenty years or thereabouts after the end of what was then known as the Great War – was apparently the excuse for a big party. Macdonald is not only contending with the fog and the rest of the traffic but crowds of revellers in fancy dress and a young woman who has lost her sense of direction completely and had her bag snatched. 

I really enjoy these unselfconscious bits of local colour. You get a great sense of how driving a car in those days did not mean being closed in a box away from pedestrians like it would now, and the disorientation where you can’t even see the edge of the kerb.

Eventually of course Macdonald gets to Scotland Yard and parks up with a sigh of relief.

Only to find next morning that during the few minutes he was out of the car assisting the young lady (delivered safely back to her aunt and never mentioned again) someone left a dead body in it, and he has unwittingly driven it all the way to the Yard to be locked in overnight. 

Sheer cheek on the behalf of the murderer? Or did they get the wrong car in the fog?

I’m going to get the obvious out of the way – characters and on occasion author use ‘the language of the time’ repeatedly. The book is an uneasy hodgepodge of conscious rejection of prejudice and repeated stereotyping along the lines of race. The Italian is hysterical. Our half-Chinese heroine Charley is inevitably described as inscrutable (code for not fainting about the place like the British one, I suppose) and it would take too long to enumerate all the rest. But there are also sensible and surprising discussions about the police between Charley and an ex-suffragette, and a nice awareness from Macdonald that he needs to guard against assuming Catholics are less reliable. 

But I'm meant to be talking about the mystery, and unfortunately I can’t do that without spoilers so PLEASE NOTE SPOILERS BELOW. 

Although not for the murderer. I’m not a monster.

 

 

 

 

SPOILERS 

My first and major beef with this book is that I dislike MacGuffins. I particularly dislike ones that turn up within a few chapters of the end and in the form of a diamond that our hysterical Italian ex opera singer once gave to a lady and now wants to buy back because he believes it confers immortality (instead she has given it to our corpse - pre-corpsehood, obviously - to fund Franco’s war in Spain). 

I also didn’t believe in the bit of paper stuck to another car in that fog, which was supposedly there to throw suspicion on the retired opera singer (because the corpse was meant to be left in his car and the killer realised his mistake). 

Firstly, unless the killer is incredibly stupid he would surely realise that’s not at all the same as leaving the dead body in the car, and would only make the police think someone (i.e. the real murderer) wanted to direct their attention that way. Otherwise, who is supposed to have left it? The owner of the car? The chauffeur? the dead man? 

On top of that, why is the note written in such an oblique way – a bit of Milton and a bar or two of Faust?  And lastly, given the fog, where was our killer that he managed to first put the body in the wrong car, then realise, write this note and pin it to the right car afterwards? Would he not have faded out the moment he knew his murder was successful?

So in summary – local colour good, characters an intriguing mix of four and one dimensional, quite a lot of humour - but mystery a no go.

SPOILERS END

 

I do still want to read more Lorac though, so in the spirit of still reading out of order the next one I intend to tackle is A Pall for a Painter, which comes before this one and was also published two years before Marsh’s Artists in Crime, with which I suspect there will be comparisons.

Brand and Lorac

 Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

I really, really enjoyed the background to this book – the ridiculous pageant that is being set up, part of a big exhibition (it sounds something like the ldeal Home Show crossed with a Country Fair) and Brand being very amusing about the daft kitchen gadgets for sale and the out of work actors who have never ridden a horse but are only too pleased to take the work anyway, all with a second, underlying aspect -  that all this pomp and nonsense is largely driven by the desire to get back to normal after the Second World War. 

Similarly there are the semi-humorous love affairs and entanglements, and behind that the memory of a young man who came from the then British Colony of Malaya to fight in the early days of the war, and committed suicide after he found his fiancée drunk and snuggled up with another man.  

Three people had a role in the disillusionment and suicide, but up until now the young man's friends and family have been stranded during the Japanese occupation, and even if they wanted revenge they couldn't have acted. Now, the war over, there are a number of people involved in the pageant from Malaya. People who have lost not only years of their lives and any sense of security, but at least a measure of their sanity too. The death threats start coming in. 

Unfortunately I started to find the behaviour of both suspects and potential victims quite hard to take - we have multiple confessions at one point, and at least one person who has received a death threat going for a walk very late at night because she can’t sleep, and a locked room mystery that.. was fine, as they go (I’m lukewarm on locked room mysteries). 

On the other hand (again) I also really enjoyed the relationship between Inspectors Cockrill and Charlesworth. Cockrill is down from Kent for a conference, Charlesworth is the London man. The antagonism was nicely pitched – present but not so that they let it get in the way of working together.  

 

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

This by contrast is written while the war is going on. The period detail is, again, really enjoyable. I often feel you get more info from these sprinklings through the fiction of the time than you do from the history books, which repeat a lot of already known information around evacuation or gasmasks or rationing but leave out the niceties around accepting a cup of rare lapsang souchong or the actual logistics of digging a trench on London clay or the attitudes there might be to someone who left London because they were scared, and then got bombed in their ‘safe’ country cottage.

The set up is also good. Five people are having a pleasant, if low key, evening – a casserole cooked in the small kitchen/bathroom attached to the run-down studio which is all the Manatons can get. 

Bruce and Rosanne are brother and sister, both artists - and with a war on artists are not exactly in clover.   Still there is beer, and food, and they’ve got the place reasonably warm and blacked out well enough that they won’t be fined £5. They’ve got friends - Rosanne is in the kitchen when the woman who cleans next door pops in with some herring she managed to get for them, and the guests brought the beer as well as some rations for the pot. Her brother is taking a sketch for a painting, one of those guests is posing for him, and the two others playing chess.

The evening is interrupted by a special constable who has just found the old man next door murdered, and a Canadian soldier, supposedly his nephew or great nephew, standing over the body. The special doesn’t exactly get off on the right foot with the group in the studio – even the respectable middle aged chess playing civil servant – but they undertake to watch the young man while the special goes off to call for back up.

Enter MacDonald, Lorac’s series sleuth, who, like the group in the studio, starts to smell a rat...  

Some 'Female Detectives'

In quotes at the top there because the preface or Editor's Note or whatever it is of Mr Bazalgette's Agent by Leonard Merrick provides a very short history and speculation about who got the first Female/Lady/Woman Detective into print, and into a full length book. It seems it depends how you define detective and anyway Leonard Merrick may have been just pipped to the post by an American.

Miriam Lea, our heroine, is not a detective when the book begins. She is twenty eight, and has been a governess and an actress. She is very funny (the book is in the form of a diary) about how she found she was unsuitable for these posts, and manages to be quite stoic about the fact that she has failed to find anything else and soon won't even be able to live in her currently uncongenial surroundings. Then, with much soul searching, since the occupation is even less respectable than acting, she applies for a job at a detective agency. And gets it!

Everything then becomes extraordinarily easy. The man she is pursuing is likely staying in the best hotels, so must she as well, and with the right sort of clothes to carry conviction. Expenses are provided for transport to search in the cities of Europe, a maid/assistant sent along (partly to keep an eye on her, I suspect) and good wages beside. 

The job is very simple -get close to this man and find one of the bonds he stole so they can prove he's the thief.

It's not a book to take too seriously. I had to suspend my disbelief about her keeping a diary while living in the same hotel as the man she's pursuing, and about the resources (money and time) that her employers allow her, and ended up with the conviction that Miss Miriam Lea is absolutely not detective material (I think she'd agree with me there) but keeping company with her a while was rather fun. 

The other book I've recently read is The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson. Stella Darnell is also not a detective when the book begins, but a successful young(ish) woman who owns a cleaning company. 

Then her father, Terry, who was an equally successful police officer but who she's drifted apart a bit from, dies of a heart attack while pursuing a cold case that happened not far from where he lived in Hammersmith. 

It's not easy to see where Stella's coming from at first. She tells herself she doesn't care and remembers the bad times (all the times her dad let her down because the job came first, the negative things her mother said about him when they split up), but she starts to pick up the case her Dad left, and the reader (this reader anyway) eventually started wondering if they were really not at all close or if that's what she told herself. If the anger is because he died rather than what he was like in life. 

There is a detached quality to Stella, an 'I don't want to be involved', even while pursuing the case. She isn't totally upfront with the police, splits up with her ex by text and then finds it backfires. I found myself wondering again if it was grief or she was naturally a bit of a berk on occasion. 

This is the first book in the series and although it jumps around more than I'd like - we also see the killer, and the son of the first victim, and jump back into Terry's earlier thoughts a few times - and is quite long, I found the characters interesting enough I didn't mind seeing them amble about cleaning stuff and sorting through papers and dealing with their won't-take-a-hint ex's. It made me want to read the next one, which is always good. 

Death at Dyke's Corner - E C R Lorac (for the 1940 club)

E C R Lorac has been having a moment in the sun. Quite a few of her books have been republished recently as part of the British Library Crime Classics, and one published by them for the first time (Two-Way Murder). 

Death at Dyke's Corner isn't one of those,  I read the library's copy in Humanities 2 Reading Room in St Pancras in one sitting this morning (with a break for coffee and cake), and enjoyed it. It's an excellent book for a binge read - the set up for the murder was quite ingenious, the scene setting with the pouring rain and dangerous road very well done, and I've met Lorac's series detective MacDonald in previous books and found him unflashy but agreeable. The cast of supporting characters were also mostly good, even though the occasional aside of this sort (about Braid, the chauffeur): 'Like most Irishmen he thrived on controversy' or (about MacDonald himself): 'His rather comminatory - and extremely Scottish - train of thought.' felt not only very much of it's time but also completely superfluous, because Lorac successfully builds these characters by their dialogue and the things they notice, and doesn't need to reinforce them by telling us what we should think.  

Plot-wise the murder victim, Conyers, is a successful builder of department stores, moving into towns and buying up or undercutting the small local traders until he comes out on top, and there's a rather interesting discussion between one young lady and her father (the local squire type person) where 'Daddy' is all for the old ways, and she is pointing out the lack of hygiene in the old shops, and how some of them mercilessly bully and underpay their staff, or refuse to heat the place even in miserable weather, or sell you what they think you ought to want, and not what you do. It seems Mr Conyers' business practices were not solely a force for evil.

But his business practices were not the only possible reason for someone to kill Conyers. He was an adulterer with an eye for girls more his son's age than his own, and a bully at home. Anyone's murder, MacDonald says, and he's right. Much of the book is him clearing away the dead wood, talking to people, being his sensible and almost too considerate self. 

Until, that is, the last few chapters. 

Firstly, because of the treatment of some gypsies who are clearing out because they found something. MacDonald allows White, the gamekeeper, to explicitly threaten the man with a shotgun and enter their caravan uninvited and without sufficient reason and frighten his wife. The language used makes it clear what the gamekeeper thinks of gypsies, but it's MacDonald's complacency about it that grated. It felt out of character, especially contrasted to how reasonable and gentle he is with everyone else (including actual suspects). 

He then, a bit later, does another out of character thing by breaking into a dark house by himself rather than getting help or waiting the murderer out, which I can only think was put in to up the excitement, because even with the explanation that his colleagues are busy it's madly reckless, the kind of thing a completely different detective would do. It reminded me of those Poirot episodes that end in a chase around an airport or someone waving a gun about even though that was never in the original book. 

That said, the solution is clever, and when all was explained in the last chapter there were definite moments where I realised I should have spotted what he spotted. 

Incidentally gas masks and ARPs are mentioned on page 121 and there's a similar reference towards the end, but there's otherwise little or no reference to wider contemporary events in the book. 

As always thanks to Simon and Karen for running the club. You can find lots more reviews of other 1940 books, and previous years they've done, on their blogs. 

Some Short Unseasonal Crime Reviews

Christmas is Murder - Val McDermid

This book of Val McDermid's short stories is a bit of a mix. I had ones I really enjoyed - especially the first, with her series detectives, and The Devil's Share. Others crossed the subtle line between chilling enough and a bit too grim for my taste, so although it's made me want to read more, I'm not committing myself too far yet and have only got one McDermid queued up. 

That said the only one I really struggled with was the Sherlock Holmes one, and that was mostly because Watson informs us early on that he has not only married Mrs Hudson but continued to call her that because he's got used to it, and I just couldn't believe in the narrator as Watson from that point. 

Murder in the Falling Snow - Various

This one is a compendium of short stories by different authors - you can probably guess some of them if you know anything about classic crime at all. They're much more the puzzle type of mystery you'd read for entertainment - blood and trauma almost entirely off the page, and you don't find yourself (as you do with some of the McDermid's) sometimes sympathising with the murderer. The lightness suited me - I picked it up on a trip to my brother's with the full intention of putting it in the bookswap when I'd finished, which I will do this week - but it did feel lightweight. 

Flaxborough Flair

Colin Watson is one of those writers - Jane Austen is another, and so is Agatha Christie - that you could read even if their sense of humour didn't resonate with your own, but you'd lose a good deal of the joy of the books. 

You could also read just one of his stories - and for a long time that was all I had done (as ever, shout out to Kensington Central Library, for Coffin Scarcely Used, in a paperback dating probably from the time before the last that Watson was published).

Then I found three more, in a second hand bookshop in Paignton when I was on holiday last year, recovering from Covid and short of reading material, and discovered that reading in order, one after the other, allowed me to get a real feel for the recurring characters - the police and journalists and population of the fictional town of Flaxborough, and the character of the town itself and how it changes - just a bit at first, in those books. 

By later books - which I read mostly as ebooks on my phone - we are in the world of TV ads and washing powder promotions, although Flaxborough, in its phlegmatic way, carries on carrying on without too much reference to these outside world distractions. 

There is, however, all sorts of naughtiness going on behind respectable front doors within the town itself, and it's the imperturbability of Inspector Purbright and baby-faced Sergeant Love, and in later books, the slightly Machiavellian Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime (arriving in Flaxborough from London and deciding she has found her spiritual home) that had me downloading and reading book after book. 

That said I am a good way through The Naked Nuns and getting a little impatient for an actual crime. I like to think I'm not a bloodthirsty reader, but at some stage surely someone gets done in? There's any number of candidates. 

Colin Watson has been described as bawdy, and although often it's the way he tells it that's really funny, or his observations of snobbery and oneupmanship, there is definite bawdiness here. Very occasionally the gender politics even tip over into 'should this be a subject for humour' - although in his defence Watson hasn't (in the eight books I've read so far) ever made the mistake of suggesting women should just expect this kind of thing, and it's their own fault if they don't. That may sound a low bar, but I've been surprised how many writers of both sexes and many different eras don't manage it. 

It's also quite difficult to suggest naughty old men or dirty minded old ladies should not be a subject for humour if you go into a book thinking murder is. Still if you're the sort of person who wants a good clean puzzle, or finds that kind of humour a distraction, this probably isn't for you. For anyone else I'd say give it a go, Watson is drily funny as well, and his recurring characters likeable and consistent.  

In contrast to his writing style, as a person Colin Watson seems to have been quiet and unremarkable. According to The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards, Watson coined the term Mayhem Parva for the kind of villages that mysteries happen in, and successfully sued Private Eye for their description of one of his books. In The Golden Age of Murder, also by Martin Edwards, the fact Watson invented that Mayhem Parva term is mentioned again in passing in reference to Agatha Christie. If there's any other mention of Watson in the book I don't remember it and it's not in the index. 

Online sources state he was educated in Croydon and provide a brief history of his working life as a journalist. His Wikipedia photo is of a slim rather gentle looking man in glasses that look too big for his face. And that folks, is all I can tell you. 

Except that Snobbery With Violence, Watson's book about books (mostly about crime fiction but also taking in subscription libraries, elitism, and various other concepts) seems to be out of print but was easy enough to get hold of. I read it in hardback. Slightly disappointed because it doesn't have the wit and flair of his fiction (although there are still some nice turns of phrase), I don't think I really did it justice. It's a perfectly good potted history of the genre, but as I've read others, and more up to date ones, it's not a book I'll hold on to. 

Instead I'll be finishing the Flaxborough Chronicles, and perhaps trying to find out more about Colin Watson outside his writing. If I do find anything I'll report back. 

Deadly Company - Ann Granger

I can’t remember if I’ve ever blogged about Ann Granger's Mitchell and Markby books before. In the first one – still my favourite really, although I’ve not reread it in at least 15 years, and suspect I may find it weaker now than I did – Meredith Mitchell, foreign office consul, comes back to England for a visit to her cousin (I think it’s a cousin) former film star Eve (still famous and glam but not quite as famous as she was) whose daughter is getting married to the wrong man, and with whose husband Meredith had an affair years before, justifying it to herself because Eve treated him very badly, and still wondering if he would ever have left his wife for her as he promised to.

Sadly death intervened before that was meant to happen, and all these years later, Meredith still hasn't found closure. 

Alan Markby is brought into the matter when a neighbour is killed, shortly after several very unpleasant ‘gifts’ are left for the bride to be, and between them they unravel the case, both attracted to the other in an incredibly low key ‘is this really happening to me?’ way.

Meredith is actually quite an irritating person, but that's part of what makes her interesting. Her internal ambivalence about Markby, her tendency to judge women more harshly than men - especially in the first book, where there is definitely some baggage and some denial about how young she was when she became a shoulder for her cousin’s husband to cry on (not underage but in my opinion definitely young enough she really shouldn’t have been dragged into their marital troubles) - her trying to figure out why she’s spent so much time living a kind of nomadic existence. 

Once she'd mellowed a bit in later books I found my attention wandering, and got the impression that every book ended with her being rescued from peril because she couldn't keep her nose out of things best left alone (I may be exaggerating slightly here, it was just an impression).

Another slight frustration is that so much of the action seems to happen off the page – in 12 books I don’t think we’ve ever seen Markby and Meredith kiss, and while I’m not a huge fan of gratuitous bleakness and pathology, there is a certain skimming over unpleasant details as well.  

Granger has also written three other series – I liked Fran Varady, couldn’t really get engaged with her Victorian sleuths, felt Campbell and Carter were just Mitchell and Markby mk 2 – but I enjoyed this return to the Cotswolds version of Mayhem Parva more than I expected to. The plotting seemed tighter, and the rationale for the murders horribly, pointlessly, believable. Maybe taking a break from them has breathed fresh life into the characters. 

Or maybe I’ve been missing them. After all, I have read every one – there must be something that keeps me coming back. 

Littlejohn on Leave - George Bellairs

I read this book in three evening sittings at the British Library in a red hardback published in 1941 by John Gifford Ltd of 113 Charing Cross Rd. It's the first book of the Thomas Littlejohn series, now out of print and as far as I can tell impossible to obtain online (25 dollars for a facsimile dustjacket if you’re interested though!). 

Bellairs, whose real name was Harold Blundell, was a prolific and popular author who doesn’t seem to have been particularly well paid for his writing. According to The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, Anthony Berkeley tried to advise Bellairs (real name Harold Blundell) to ‘cash in on the gusto while you’ve got it’ and I’ve seen elsewhere that he had to continue in his job at the bank, although it occurs to me that possibly he liked his job at the bank and liked his publisher and didn’t want to change. From what I've gleaned from online sources and prologues Blundell's writing enabled him to fund holidays to France and retire to the Isle of Man, where he continued to write until his death at the age of 79, leaving a widow, Gladys, to whom he had been married for over 50 years. He also wrote articles for the Manchester Guardian and did charity work - and this first ever book was apparently written while Bellairs/Blundell was an air raid warden. 

Arguably not a jet setting lifestyle, but a full one. 

Regarding the book itself I think it’s fair to say that while it’s not terrible, I can see why it's not one of the ones that have been chosen for republishing. I've read - and enjoyed - five of Bellairs books in recent reprints, and would describe him here as a writer not yet in his stride. The dysfunctional marriages are not as subtle, the character of Littlejohn is less well developed, the mystery more plodding. Information we don’t need – for example the duck eggs tasting of fish or the temperament of the villagers – is repeated multiple times as though he were writing a serial and we might have forgotten, while information we might need repeating around keys is not. The humour doesn’t always land like it does in the later books I’ve read either.

Bellairs likes his descriptions of place too, and where in the later books they will feel natural, arising from the thoughts of those seeing them, here it feels as if the author is dropping into a special literary mode. One particular example that actually made me cringe was: The feathered choir was busy rejoicing with it’s dawn-song, oblivious of the doings of men.   

But probably more annoying to the reader who expects fair play will be how clues are held back.

Consider this line: (Inspector Totridge) told him the news he just received over the telephone. Littlejohn whistled.

And of another phone call in a later chapter: His face grew grave as he listened to the voice excitedly chirping it’s tale from the other end, but there was a look of satisfaction in his eyes.

“Well done.” He said. “Good man.”

And both times the reader doesn't get told what was said. 

That said, it's readable. There is a genuinely believable frame up at the end and it gets a bit more exciting, but in conclusion, Bellairs wrote much better books than this and many of them are readily available. You're probably better off with one of those.