Our African Winter by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - for the 1929 Club

 Since I ended the last review with mention of those diamonds I’ll start this with them. It really does seem like diamonds were almost lying around for the taking in that part of Africa, and that story in The Mendip Mystery practically plausible.

However, the most striking thing, to the modern reader, is in all the mention of diamond mines and artificial restriction of supply, and gold and platinum and farming and copper and everything else, the thought ‘it doesn’t really belong to us’ never once crosses Conan Doyle’s mind. In fact he thinks more immigration of Brits into Africa is the answer to certain social problems.

The word savage also gets used a lot (and worse) – and yet what the Europeans are described as doing is at least as savage, and Conan Doyle doesn’t sugarcoat or gloss over that, either. Wants some kind of oversight to be established to ensure proper criminal sentences are given to those who abuse or murder the natives and describes several cases and the meagre sentences and small fines that were given, clearly hoping to stir up outrage in his readers and get something done about it.  

He’s just – very complex, I think. The book is a journal of his and his family's trip to Africa for him to lecture about Spiritualism, and he’s clearly clever, and even sceptical in some ways, and yet in others he seems utterly naïve. His faith in the British Empire as a force for good, his faith in the Cottingley fairies and Spiritualism (although as I say he could be highly sceptical of certain practitioners and critical of practices). His pleasure at being greeted by crowds and spreading the message. His faith that during the Boer War the women and children were put into a camp to be fed (this may be true, I have no way of knowing, what I cannot help noticing though is a doubt of it never even crosses his mind) and outrage at a perceived slight on a memorial he’s unable to properly read.

I agree with him very little, but I would hardly expect to, nearly a hundred years later, and with him probably already old fashioned (Conan Doyle was 70). What I do feel is that he was scrupulously honest himself, and struggled to understand that other people could be horribly dishonest, or the world different to the way he’d always known it.

What is also utterly disarming is his endless curiosity – interested in everything: diamonds, the legal system, the friction between Boer farmers and English rule, the workload of the ship porters, what will happen to Johannesburg when the mines are worked out. One moment he’s describing his son collecting specimens with his killing bottle, the next giving lyrical descriptions of scenery and twilight, the next praising his wife’s work to try and ensure captive animals are treated better. 

But of course the main thrust of the book is about Spiritualism, news about which he believes it is his mission to spread. He gives well-attended lectures and seems to have given good value for money, wonders why the church is so resistant when after all the message he’s spreading is the good news of an afterlife, describes cases and particulars, complains that scientists won’t judge the matter scientifically but is scrupulously polite about them as people.

And he writes extremely well. Of course he does. However dated it’s a very, very readable book with a lot of fascinating asides about things I’d like to know more about. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs. 

The Mendip Mystery by Lynn Brock - For the 1929 Club

 Lynn Brock published two books in 1929. The first is the charming but light The Dagwort Coombe Murder, which I’ve also reviewed for the club. The second is The Mendip Mystery.

In this case we are in the hands of a professional detective, Colonel Gore (book five of seven in the series) who has been tasked with trying to trace a long-lost relation of a dapper little furniture merchant, and, in what appears to be an unrelated matter, to meet a possible new client at an unpopular inn to discuss another job. Despite mild annoyance at the venue, made with no thought of his convenience but purely because his prospective client will be hunting out that way, Gore agrees.

The set up is excellent.  High winds and fallen trees and a hunting accident earlier in the day result in several guests being stranded at the inn overnight, much to the proprietor’s dissatisfaction, since he just wants to get (more) drunk in peace and hasn’t enough sheets anyway. Understandably some of those guests decide not to go to bed at all and of course in the morning, one is found dead.

Brock has a great eye for detail, the state of the inn itself, the converted storage building in town and it’s creepiness after dark, the frustrations of a secretary who wants an extra day off for Christmas and is trying to time the asking of it right and go above and beyond in the meantime to earn brownie points, but resentful of the need.

If I had to criticise I would say there’s a lot going on in this book. One subplot about escaped lunatics (whose treatment is very much of the time I’m afraid, kicked back out into the storm and left), and another about diamonds – a long history by one of the characters about how he stumbled across a ditch full of rough diamonds in Namaqualand, which has since been found and worked by the British government, that I was half inclined to think completely made up until I read my last book, a non-fiction work by Arthur Conan Doyle, where he describes that exact place. Clearly Brock incorporated it because it was big news.

It's also often quite a funny book, although not with the obvious humour of Dagwort Coombe, with the odd call back to earlier stories. I’m tempted to go back and start this series from the beginning now. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs. 

The Dagwort Coombe Murder by Lynn Brock – For the 1929 Club

This book starts in sunshine, bit PG Wodehouse, bit Elizabeth von Armin. Our heroine, Sarah (aka Sally), has written a highly successful play that she herself thinks is tripe, and decides her next offering must be something meaningful. In order to concentrate she hires a tiny caravan, hitches it to her car and invites along a friend called Susan Yatt who is twice her age (I assumed as chaperone, but the friend goes back to London shortly after the murder, so presumably not) on a touring holiday.

A short while into this holiday Sally a) realises she doesn’t have a meaningful play in her and would rather have the money anyway and b) backs the caravan into a ditch. Three men, all of different classes and respectability, and seemingly at loggerheads, suspend their various arguments long enough to help her and Susan and By-by (being the name of the caravan) out again. 

It’s our first introduction to the tensions in the village where they’ll be parked up a while, and it’s not the last. 

Still the weather is beautiful, the field they’ve been allowed to park in charming, the gipsies picturesque, and the love interest turns up and is permitted to sleep in a tent and make himself suspect number two when the actual murder happens. 

So Sally decides to jolly well stay on in her caravan, and while summer turns into autumn and everyone else drifts off and drifts back (all of which is written too amusingly to actually drag but does seem to go on a long time) she ferrets. 

Apparently, as well, without causing the slightest anxiety in her friend, her young man, or herself. I mean, she's only riling up murderers and searching for evidence and even at one point surviving a car ‘accident’. Why should anyone be worried about her sleeping in a tiny caravan by herself, presumably still washing in a stream and cooking outdoors, in more or less the enemy camp? 

I'm about the age of her friend Miss Yatt and I would certainly have had Things to Say. As a modern independent 1920s woman she may well have rebuffed me, but at least I would know I had said them. 

My other complaint – and I will repeat before I do complain that this is a very amusing book and I read it in a day – is the pacing. Flurries at the beginning and end and slow and stately in the middle, and also what turned out to be possibly the stupidest plan for catching a killer I can imagine, and which involved several people - again none of whom were troubled, apparently, by the fact it was a likely way to end up with at least two more people dead. 

Signs of the times:

The biggest is surely the absolute disregard for speed limits and road safety. 

The assumption that even an independent young woman like Sally would think marriage the culmination of a woman's life, even to a man 25 years older, as has happened with her friend Pam. (Having now checked out the Wikipedia entry I suppose that could be partly down to our author being male, but I suspect it was simply a convention of the time.) 

A suggestion someone’s forehead is an indication of their temperament or not being a proper gentleman. That surely wouldn’t fly now.

In closing, thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs.