Random Jottings

Freeman Wills Croft - Three great reads

No surprise to see that I am writing about the British Library Crime Classics series yet again - and no, I am not paid by them - and here are another three which were sent to me at my request after I read one title by Freeman Wills Croft and grovelled for some more.

I will start off with Mystery in the Channel. The Chichester is making a routine journey across the English channel when the crew notice something amiss. A yacht, bobbing about in the water ahead of them, appears to have been abandoned and, on closer inspection, a dark red stain is spotted on the deck.......

Inspector French is called in to deal with the case and the two bodies discovered on board are soon identified as the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the firm of Moxon Securities, one of the largest financial houses in the country. It is suspected that the two men may be heading for France knowing full well that the firm is on the verge of collapse and they are trying to get away with as much money as possible before the final crash.

A number of the firm's partners were Figureheads. At least that is the excuse. 'Knew nothing about what was going on. It's a lovely system! They were got in because they had handles to their names, to create public confidence. Public confidence!'.....innocent people are going to suffer through these dirty scoundrels'.....

The part of the book that I enjoyed the most was the chapter in which French, in consultation with an Ancient Mariner, discusses the tides, the ebbs, the flows and the fact that another yacht was to rendezvous with the fatal vessel (the person on board claiming innocence of the whole affair) and testing his alibi by working out the timeline to test his story.  I do like this kind of detection, it is neat, it is tidy and it is fascinating to see how the author's mind works and I am always lost in admiration at the care taken in getting these details just right.

The same attention to detail is apparent in The 12.30 from Croydon.   Andrew Crowther, a wealthy retired manufacturer, is found dead in his seat on this plane when it arrives in Paris. He was old and in ill health and his death perhaps not unexpected, but it is soon discovered that foul play has taken place. He has been poisoned. But how? He had the same food as everyone else on the flight. Perhaps it is a poison which can be administered some time before it is effective, again how was it given to the victim?

Inspector French, of whom I am growing rather fond, is once more on the case. But in this book, instead of following his though processes we follow those of the murderer whose identity we know right from the start.  In a position when he, yes it is a he, needs money to save his firm and having applied to his uncle unsuccessfully, he begins to think how wonderful it would be if his uncle died as he knows he is a beneficiary of the Will.

At first dismissing the idea, it gradually gets hold of him and he starts to plan how to do it. And the reader follows him through his plans, how he carries them out and, though I should not say this, by the end I was almost hoping he would get away with it. Well he doesn't.

'One glance at the jury's faces told Charles the truth. He was lost!......they were going to hang him. Nothing he could say could matter...he heard the sentence. It was over. the warders were pointing to the staircase. they were supporting him. Half unconscious he was helped down'

I must admit I felt a chill run up my spine at this final paragraph.

And, finally, The Hog's Back Mystery.  Dr James Earle and his wife live in comfortable seclusion near the Hog's Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside.  Friends of Mrs Earle come to stay and it pretty clear to one of them that the marriage is not a happy one and that she is involved with another man.  A chance encounter espied by the same friend seems to point to the doctor also being involved with someone. Then the doctor, and his friend, who is a nurse, both vanish. The doctor went to sit in his library after dinner one night and is never seen again. He was only wearing his slippers, he has no money, his keys and wallet are not taken, so where has he gone?   Later on one of the house guests also disappears and it all begins to get rather tortuous.

Once again by Inspector French's meticulous approach to the mystery he gradually unravels the solution to the disappearance of these three victims and deduces where their bodies are to be found.  Half way through the story I guessed what was going on, why the doctor had gone to town to meet the nurse, and from then on did manage to work out who the likely murderer was. I felt very pleased with myself as it is seldom I do this.

In the introduction to this title, by Martin Edwards, who knows Everything About the Golden Age, we hear that Freeman Wills Croft wrote an essay on the Writing of a Detective Novel. His method was first to prepare a synopsis 'of the actual facts that are supposed to have happened' including a chronology, character biographies and sketch maps of the important localities, and then a summary of how these facts became revealed to the detective' He also provides maps of the area.

Now I love maps or illustrations in a detective story. Dame Agatha did it, Ngaio Marsh did it and I love looking at them and murmuring to myself Now the Library is there, the kitchen there, so just how did the murderer get hold of the carving knife and get upstairs without being spotted.....ditto maps. Gosh the murderer must have come round the back of the house by the lane, then cut through the wood and ....well you get my drift. Wonderful.

Three excellent titles and highly recommended. Gorgeous covers as always and I understand that this hugely successful publishing idea has engendered a large following of aficionados who are collecting every title as they appear.  I have not got all of them, do not have room for a start and, to be honest, some of them are not for me, but those I do like are being kept.  I had new bookcases this year as many of you know and have to report, sadly, that double stacking has already started......

Collins Crime Club - three titles

The Golden Age of Crime continues to fascinate and, along with the British Library Classic Crimes, we have a plethora of reprints being placed before the public and they are proving very popular. I have recently been reading David Baldacci, Lee Child and others of that ilk and, though, they cannot be called 'detective' stories as such, they are great fun and very entertaining to read. However, and I know this is just my personal opinion, they cannot hold a candle to the stores of the 1930s. I am not saying that all the stories of that era were brilliantly written and some of them are not exactly subtle, but they have a unique style and charm. Some I like, some I do not. This week I have read these three titles:

The Nursing Home Murder by Ngaio Marsh with which I am already familiar first.  I gather that this is the book widely considered, and I quote,  with which she 'transformed the detective story from a mere puzzle into a full-blown and fascinating novel' (The Times, 1935)'. Her third Inspector Alleyn novel - of 32 - it became her all-time bestseller and helped cement Marsh's reputation as one of the Golden Age 'Crime Queens' alongside Sayers, Allingham and Christie.

I will be honest and say it is not one of my favourites of Ngaio Marsh, good though it is. One aspect of her books featuring Inspector Alleyn is this constant harping on about him being a 'gentleman'. We know this and we also know that it was important to emphasis this at the time they were written and in the milieu in which he mixed, ie a lot of upper class nobs, but it can get tiresome.

Inspector Fox is requested to visit Lady O'Callaghan whose husband, the Home Secretary, had died on the operating table under suspicious circumstances and his widow is determined that he was murdered.

'Inspector Fox got rather ponderously to his feet. "If you will allow me I would like to talk it over with my superior Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn".  "Alleyn? I think I have heard of him. Isn't he - she paused. Cicely O'Callaghan had nearly dropped a brick. She had been about to say 'Isn't he a gentleman?" she must have been really perturbed to come within hail of such a gaffe.

Inspector Fox answered her very simply 'Yes he is rather well known. He is a very highly educated man. Quite a different type from me you might say"

Much though I adore Marsh's writing this aspect of her work does irritate as she does tend to lay this aspect on with a trowel. Cockney characters pop up now and then in the stories and though we don't find anybody saying ''swelp me guv you're a toff" she gets perilously close to it at times.

Introduced by Stella Duffy the book includes three never-before-seen chapters from Marsh’s abandoned Inspector Alleyn novel MONEY IN THE MORGUE, which Duffy is in the process of completing for publication next year.

Stella Duffy was previously rather sniffy about Marsh and her posh detective and his condescending attitude to the Maoris in NZ. I thought just the opposite – Alleyn understood and had great respect for them. But she has agreed to write this book – I leave you to wonder why, she is a fellow NZ and has acting experience and at the Bodies from the Library conference last year she gave a talk on theatricality in Marsh' books which was fascinating. Looking forward to reading it and the three chapters given here are very tantalising.

I already have a copy of this title but simply could not resist this edition.

The Case of the Gilded Fly - Edmund Crispin. The blurb tells us that a "pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men's lives is found dead in a college room just yards from the office of the unconventional Oxford Don, Gervase Finn". I will substitute the word unconventional for two - profoundly irritating. I have previously read the Moving Toyshop by this author on the recommendation of crime aficionados but found it left me cold. However, on further urgings I decided to read this one, again who can resist this simply splendid cover, but have to say that my reaction to Gervase Fin was the same. I have an overwhelming desire to thump him and view him as a superior smart arse. Do not ask my why. I just do.

I also found the resolution unconvincing and we end up with a series of marriage proposals between all the protagonists, one pair of which have known each other for one week and spend the entire story calling each other Darling and Dearest which I find slightly odd after their limited knowledge of each other.

I have tried Crispin and though others will disagree I really do not think I will be trying any more.

The third read The Crime Club is a collection of short stories by Frank Froest and George Dilnot and I am really loving these. Some of them are a bit over the top, the murderer having a fit or a heart attack when confronted by the police and crashing to the ground (George Bellairs is rather fond of this trick as well) but somehow there is an honesty to these stories and a lack of pretension which can pop up in Marsh and certainly does in the smart arsery of Gervase Finn.

Fun stories featuring characters with names like Red Jimmie, a pickpocket, Creeping Jimmie, a thief after a haul of diamonds, wicked villains with mustaches and a lot of young ladies called Elsie for some reason.  They are all utterly delightful and I am enjoying every word.

Next post will be on three titles recently read by Freeman Wills Croft another master of the Golden Age.

 

Current reading and recently received

Had. a trip to Cambridge this week. Collected some shoes which the shop would not post to me or let me purchase over the phone. This was something to do with 'data protection' I gather. Don't ask.   Still, I never mind going to Cam even if only for a few hours so I collected my shoes, went to EAST whose clothes I love and bought some stuff for my upcoming cruise - I have never bought so many clothes in my life as I have in the last few months - they will last me for yonks afterwards, and then hied me off to Waterstones where I had a coffee. And looked at some books. And bought a couple. Natch.

When I came back my lovely postman had left a note for me that he had left packages in my cupboard which harbours my electricity meter and he often leaves stuff in there for me. Knows me well now with all the parcels he delivers. So I collected them and decided to post today about the books I have awaiting my attention. I like to do this as I am not sure when I will get round to reading all of them and feel that as they have been sent to me, I should flag them up.

Here we go.

The Red Ribbon by Lucy Adlington. I have started reading this and know that I am going to find it difficult. Not because it is badly written, au contraire, but because of its setting. Fourteen year old Ella is a prisoner at Auschwitz and she is a dressmaker. No ordinary workshop for her. Every day is a fight for survival as she tries to forget the horrors surrounding her as she works amongst fabrics, silks and sewing thread.

Published 21 September

Train to Nowhere by Anita Leslie, a war memoir. Anita was the daughter and cousin on WInston Churchill and the joined the Transport Corp as a fully trained mechanic and ambulance driver during WWII. She served in Libya, Syria, Palestine, Italy France and Germany.

First published in 1948 and now republished by Bloomsbury 24 August. looking forward to reading this.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell sounds a tad creepy featuring a locked room containing a 200 year old diary hinting and the house's dark past.   Got to get stuck into this one as Laura, who I discover, lives in Colchester is giving a chat at our Waterstones in a week or so and I would like to turn up and ask intelligent questions.

No comments at the back please....

Publication date 5 October 2017

Land of Plenty by Charlie Pye-Smith is flagged as a Journey through the Fields & Foods of Modern Britain. The author has travelled around the UK visiting indoor dairy units producing millions of litres (what is wrong with pints I ask myself??) to small old fashioned farms making cheese with twenty or thirty cows. I have been dipping into this with great enjoyment as apart from being really interesting, it is a rather lovely book, with that smooth paper that makes you want to stroke it and packed full of photographs. This is already published on 27 July and I think you will love it.

John Suchet - Verdi. Another gorgeous book which is eminently strokeable with stacks of great pictures and illustrations. I adore Verdi's music, my neighbours have, over the years, had to listen to me singing O Patria Mia from Aida in the bath and the Drinking Song from Act one of La Traviata amongst other gems. They are very forgiving as they also have to listen to me yelling and shrieking when Wimbledon is on and last Saturday when the John Wilson Prom of Oklahoma was on telly, had to suffer my rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning.

I digress. Last year I read John's book on the Strauss family, another lavishly illustrated (love that word lavish) tome and just so interesting and so easy to read. I always listen to John on Classic FM, he is one of their best presenters and he loves Beethoven as well so no further recommendation is needed.  Publication date 5 September

The Mistresses of Cliveden - Natalie Livingstone. I have already read this but did not have a copy but now have courtesy of the Literary Festival at Cliveden committee. You will remember if you have read my post here that I recently attended a superb tea and visit to discuss the book festival and we all came away with this book. A wonderful read and I highly recommend it. It led me on to reading more about Nancy Astor, not a lady I am sure I would like to share a cup of tea with, but fascinating and formidable. Now available in paperback.

I am not discussing every single book in this heap but simply have to mention this one which I have already gloated over. A Week on the Broads - Four Victorian gents at sail on a Norfolk gaffer in 1889 by S K Baker. The author was a keen diarist and artist and recorded their travels in watercolour. Just look at this delightful book, I mean just look at it. How can you resist? Already published and available

This is published as a facsimile and I shall be reviewing in more detail later as I know I am going to love it.

So a few for you and me to be getting on with.

Go on and buy and order

You know it makes sense....

The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley

I think that most readers of Random will know by now that I am a pretty conventional reader. Crime, biography, history, romance, Victorian literature are all grist to my mill, but my reading of modern novels and literature is pretty poor. The Booker list, the Costa list, any other list which proliferate among the book world, tend to be passed by. I have tried, believe me I have, and I once went through the entire Booker website marking up those titles I had read just to prove it to myself. But it is no good, most of it is not for me and while I freely admit I may be missing out, life is too short and I have reached an age where I now read because I want to and not because the litterati tell me to.

So why all this preamble you may ask. Well, last year I was sent a book by Bloomsbury, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley which, on the face of it, was not my kind of book at all. I freely admit that what caught my eye was the beautiful cover. Yes I am that shallow, but covers will only make you look at a book and open it. Whether you carry on or not is then down to the writer. So I opened and read and loved and I reviewed it here.

And now another one by Natasha Pulley - the Bedlam Stacks. A title to catch the imagination.The story is set in the late 19th century and  Bedlam is the name of New Bethlehem, a town in Peru whence our chief protagonist, Merrick Tremayne, badly injured in an earlier foray as an opium smuggler and unsure whether he can manage the journey, is persuaded by his friend Clem to go with him in search of the quineo trees and to bring back cuttings to England for medicinal purposes, ie the making of quinine. The quinine plantations are guarded and controlled by cartels so the travellers pretend they are there in search of coffee though this flimsy premise fools nobody.

The journey is fraught with difficulties all the way but eventually arrive safely and here meet the enigmatic Raphael who acts as their guide:

"He was Indian but from a different nation to Quispe and Hernandez and the boys. He didn't have the Incan nose and his hair was cut short and he was far taller.....he stopped when he saw me, just before reaching his chair.  His expression opened as if he knew me, but then he saw he was wrong and sat down"

It seems that Raphael knew Merrick's grandfather on his previous visit but how on earth can he possibly know him when he's not nearly old enough?

 Merrick, Clem and Raphael at The Bedlam Stacks, the description of which really captured my imagination:

"Where there had been a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks....I couldn't see the tops of them properly but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs j to a table of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiraling gantries....the light was shining through translucent parts in the stacks which were not rock but glass....when I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but not quickly enough. Where the boom swung into the light the grass sail caught fire......near the wharves the smooth glass turned pebbly and greeny blue shells lay heaped everywhere.... the rocks were all either obsidian entirely or half vitrified, great chunks of glass and rock all twisted together"

I immediately conjured up a picture of these stacks, Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree came to mind which is not so silly as it sounds, you may disagree, and then I imagined a Heath Robinson structure. But that was not good enough, so I then thought of Gustave Dore, again not quite right and then finally thought Arthur Rackham, that is the illustrator who could do this fantastical image justice.

The Bedlam Stacks also features the Markayak statues, worshipped by the locals and which seem to move around though there is a suggestion that when they are visited pressure points on the ground make their movements. Apparently these are not in the author's imagination but are real - they are still dotted around the landscape in Peru but they were treated, historically, as feeling things. They are distinctly creepy and rather scary and they can appear threatening to Merrick.

I kept whipping out my ipad and googling throughout my reading of this book as there was reference throughout to 'string writing' a form of communication used by the people of the Bedlam Stacks to communicate with the Markayak. These strings, called Khipus, are made of a series of cotton or wool strings hanging from a main cord. The colour of the strands used to make the string and the way the strands are twisted together may also be part of the system of storing and relaying information.  if you want to read more about this, and I did, then do click on this link to Wikipedia - I find it fascinating.

This is an extraordinary book and one which I find rather difficult to review in a coherent fashion as I find my thoughts keep hopping backwards and forwards to the many strands of the story, all of which are fascinating. However, in the end, it seems to me to come down to friendship and the relationship between Merrick and Raphael, the mysterious priest who vanished for days, months even years at a time and always returns.

Merrick returns to Peru and the Bedlam Stacks many years later when . He receives a letter telling him that Raphael is awakening from a long sleep and returning to the present

"At last they let me go up to his room. It was just the same....I watched the coal burn through a glass window in the front until I saw Raphael shift, as if he had just come out of a daydream, made two cups of coffee .....Raphael looked at me sidelong, starting to smile then stopped. He watched me for almost half a minute......I gave him his cup.

You like it black don't you?

He laughed"

As with the Watchmaker of Filigree Street who, incidentally makes a fleeting appearance in the Bedlam Stacks, it was not until I was almost half way through the book that I realised just how much I was engrossed into the narrative and the story. The mystical, magical setting, the use of Peru as a background, the characters and the idea of the title are, on the face of it, not the kind of story I would seek out. And yet here I am. Writing about it and finding it difficult to put into words what a marvellous book I think this is. The writing is clean, and by that I mean no extraneous adjectives or verbs or flowery phrases, it is to the point, it is elegant and it is a joy to read.

And, once again, the cover is quite beautiful. I was, in the end, enchanted by it.

Cream on my iPad - Tea at Cliveden

A few weeks ago I received an email.  Would you like to come to visit Cliveden House, meet the butler of 25 years who will tell you all about its history, have a tour and then tea courtesy of the Cliveden Literary Festival?  It took me all of five seconds to hit the Yes Please button and so this week found me sipping tea and chatting with fellow Booktubers and bloggers and discussing all things Cliveden and literary.

We were given a copy of The Mistresses of Cliveden by Natalie Livingstone which I read last year. It is a truly fascinating story and just the kind of history I like - social rather than political - though the last chatelaine of Cliveden, Nancy Astor, was involved in both.  She held salons of the great and good, not just literary though I gather George Bernard Shaw was a visitor, but also the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Churchill and even Ghandi came to tea (hope he wore something warm). The very first Cliveden LIterary Festival will, and I quote: "evoke the spirit of the great writers and potentates who stayed here and continue the tradition of the house as a sanctuary for lovers of literature".

The festival has a pretty stellar line up. Naturally. The name alone would attract anybody and I am pretty sure that acceptances were pretty quick in coming. If you want information then please do log onto their website http://clivedenliteraryfestival.org/programme/ and see those speaking.

As you can see with names like Lady Antonia Fraser, Robert Service, Amanda Foreman and Daisy Goodwin, the emphasis is very much on history and politics though there is an interview with Tina Brown who is about to publish her Vanity Fair diaries and Ruth Rogers talking about Thirty Years of the River Cafe so there is something of interest for everybody. I rather fancy the chat about the Russian Revolution and then spotted that it is on the same time as Lady Antonia Fraser - so what to choose I ask myself. I need one of those time thingies that Hermione had in Harry Potter which enabled her to do two things at once.....

Cliveden has a pretty mixed history and it was rather lowering to find out that I remembered the Profumo Scandal as it was called, very well. All other attendees at the tea when this was being discussed, were probably not even born when it happened.  It does linger on so it would be rather good if when Cliveden is mentioned in future the first reaction is not Oh Yes that is where the scandal started, but rather oh don't they have a rather splendid literary festival there?  Let us hope that this inaugural event is the first of many and brings that result.

Oh and in case you are wondering about the title of my post, during discussion at tea when I was becoming rather animated, as is my wont, I gesticulated with my knife with which I was attempting to deal with a cream scone and splodge, a dollop of clotted cream splattered onto my ipad. Seemed a rather nice mixture I thought and a good name for my post. You will have to forgive my whimsicality.

My grateful thanks to all involved in the wonderful day which I so enjoyed and the friendliness and courtesy of the staff at Cliveden who looked after us so well, particularly at the tea - I barely emptied my cup before it was ushered away and refilled before I could blink an eye.  And oh the tea - just check out the pictures.

And of course, if anybody at the festival at Cliveden would like a  blogger in residence for the weekend, well you know where to find me.....

Recently received

OK I am David Baldicci'd out. Motored through about fifteen of his books over the last fortnight and need to take a break. So time to look at a some books which have been lurking in a corner for a few weeks.

First up, the short stories of Roald Dahl which have just been reissued in a lovely new edition. I well remember my old battered orange Penguins which I had for years and which I only ditched a while back when moving. I knew the chances of re-reading them were slim with so much else to check out, the pages were badly spotted and foxed and,  in some cases, loose pages were coming out so in the bin they went, although with a heavy heart as I hate chucking out books.

Anyway up pops an email from Penguin, would I like to receive this new edition and, natch, I said yes and they duly arrived. OK, I feel I need to give a warning here as on receipt it came back to me why I had got rid of my old copies. It was because I remembered reading all these stories way back in the sixties and seventies and finding them seriously disturbing. I cannot really put my finger on it but remember feeling a bit uncomfortable when I closed them up. There is a nasty core to nearly all of them, not hit you in the face nasty, but it is just there.  They are brilliantly written which you would expect but having read various articles and reviews of Roald Dahl you do realise that really he was not a very nice man and this shows. Even in his children's books there is an underlying creepy feeling. I know children love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but come on the man is seriously weird and his punishment of the children who come to visit, while you might agree is justified as apart from Charlie they are all ghastly, is a tad over the top. Gene Wilder with his musical Oompah Loompahs just about made it passably fun but the later version with Johnny Depp.... let us just say I will not be watching that again.

 OK so in my opinion he is not a nice guy, but let's face it, if we only read books by 'nice' people our reading would probably come to a grinding halt.  The books are reissued in subjects Trickery, Fear, Innocence and War and that just about sums them up. I have started dipping into them and they are as brilliantly written as I remember. I just wonder if they will have the same effect on me this time?

And now for something completely different. Those lovely peeps at Hodder responded to my usual I want I want email and sent me two of their new editions of D L Sayers.  Now wanting these is pure greed as I have a set of DLS already but honestly who would not grab these? Do check out the Hodder website here for all the lovely covers.

Gaudy Night, which I promptly sat down and read for the umpteenth time, has an introduction by Dame Harriet Walter who played Harriet Vane in the wonderful ITV adaptations with the divine Edward Petheridge as Lord Peter and these two actors are now firmly ensconced in my mind as the ONLY two who could possible play them. I do wonder if a new series was ever made who would now be cast and, if such a series was done, if they would stick with the story-lines. Doubtful.

I was rather surprised to see Dame Harriet had written the intro as in an interview she got quite sarcastic about being constantly asked about her role. Why do actors do this?  A great opportunity arises and makes their careers and then they moan. Daniel Craig is another example. Said he would rather have pins in his eyes than play James Bond again, and belittles the role that gave him stardom and untold of riches. Now of course he is going to do it again, and is being paid millions to do so. Quelle surprise...

Sorry I am wittering as per. What I loved about this intro is the part when Dame Harriet says "we filmed for a month or so in Oxford, and when Edward Petheridge aka Lord Peter finally turned up for filming with us he had an instant energising effect on the lot of us women which paralleled that of Lord Peter on the University women. We clustered and clucked about him in an only slightly less embarrassing way than our dramatic counterparts, whose defences collapse under his spell"

I had a meeting, purely by chance, with Edward Petheridge which I posted about here, and I freely admit my reaction was the same. My dears, I gushed. I became positively skittish and girlish. He just had that effect.

I am currently reading The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley whose first book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Steet I read an enjoyed. More of than anon.

But in the meantime, as you can see I have enough to be getting on with.