Random Jottings

British Library Classic Crime - John Bude

I am doing a lot of crime reading during the lockdown and by the time freedom beckons I reckon I will have a pretty good idea how to forge bank notes, bash somebody over the head with an axe and get away with it. Not that I am planning to do so of course...

I have been reading a lot of Christie, of which more another time, but over the last week I have been reading more of those delights from the British Library Classic Crime series which now are becoming part of the publishing landscape and have a huge army of fans.

This week I read Death in White Pyjamas and Death knows no Calendar by John Bude. This is a bonus as two books in one volume and all for £8.99 which is a pretty good bargain. I was slightly wary of reading this particular author as I had tried one of his earlier and failed with it, finding it stodgy and a bit dogmatic.  But the blurb sounded interesting:

"A theatre owner, a slightly sinister producer, a buregoning playwright and a cast of ego drive actors have gathered at a country house to read through a promising script...."

The words 'a country house' are enough to pique the interest of any seasoned crimfic reader as we know country houses are deadly places to be and that sooner or later a dead body will turn up. And it does. The set designer, a rather nasty piece of work who seems to be blackmailing various members of the cast turns up in the lake wearing her white pyjamas and it is clear she was not just out for a midnight stroll.  She was eminently dislikeable so the list of suspects is long.

I found this book so much more amusing and written in a lighter touch than the one I had failed with earlier (I cannot remember the title now) and it fairly zapped along.

Sam Richardson, a wealthy biscuit manufacturer, wanted a new hobby and he decided to put his money into a theatre. He was tired of Petit Beurre, Butter Fingers and Thin Lunch and left them behind. He met Basil Barnes at a party and a partnership was born .

"Sam was short, fat bald and benign. Basil was tall, slender, sleekhaired and slightly sinister. Sam, apart from business in all its aspects, was a child. His simple faith in everybody was delightful for he could never listen to a hard up story without putting his hand in his pocket. If Basil put his hand in his pocket you expected him to produce a revoler. Actually he produced plays"

I found it quite easy to guess the identity of the murderer and the reason why as it is flagged up fairly obviously - well I thought so anyway - but how the culprit managed it is another matter altogether.

Really enjoyed this and the characterisation of each member of the cast was spot on.

It is partnered with Death Knows no Calendar.  A locked studio, no way in and yet somebody has been murdered. How was it done? A classic locked room mystery and if you have read many of these, as I have, once again I worked out how the killing took place and who had done it, though really there is no effort made to throw suspicion of anybody but the one person tracked down. The others are merely side shows. But one again it was the tracking down of the murderer, how it was carried out and the steps taken to add layer of layer of proof. At times it reminded me very much of the Inspector French novels of Freeman Wills Croft who does the same thing - plodding along and finding the small details that will nail the offender.

In this case the victim was a glamorous, flamboyant artist who was a bit of a femme fatale. Her husband was an actor who seemed to be permanently 'resting' and who she held in contempt; a local farmer has been in love with her for years and she even tortures the vicar's conscience as she tempts him.  

We do not have a detective as such in this title but we have Major Boddy who has read every detective book going and decides to take the investigation in hand when a verdict of suicide is given. Well we all know that when this happens it is precisely the opposite - murder. We are told that "there were few detective writers in the country hwo had not, at one time or another received a letter from Major Boddy beginning:

Dear Sir

Much as I appreciated your really capable novel, Title so and so, I should like to point out that on Page so and so you have made a regrettable slip which you might care to correct in later editions etc"

There is no doubt that he will solve the mystery but it is a bit more difficult that he imagined.....

Both great stories and, as I said, two books in one and a bargain.

Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life - Laura Thompson

It is one hundred years since the first Agatha Christie was published “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”.  This biography by Laura Thompson was first published in 2007 and has been updated and revised with a new introduction to celebrate this occasion.

I read this when it came out and I am wondering whether I found it as irritating as I did this time around but it seems I did not review it on Random.  The book is brilliantly written but veers wildly between flights of fancy and fact. The author relies enormously on interpreting the books Agatha wrote under the name Mary Westmacott and, yes I agree they are very autobiographical in nature, but they cannot be used as a basis for verisimilitude.  I have read all of these titles and they are very revealing and give a glimpse into Dame A’s thoughts and psyche but they ARE novels and I do not believe that they should be treated as authentic resources. 

Everyone knows that Agatha Christie vanished for ten days and caused a huge upheaval. Theories abound why she did it.  My take on this is that she went away for a few days to a “spa” in the hope that Archie her errant husband would worry, come and find her and they would be reunited. She actually sent a letter to her brother in law informing him of this so that he would pass on the information to Archie but for some reason this did not happen.  He was suspected of doing away with her, the entire thing got out of hand and when he finally found her he was furious at the damage that had been done and a reconciliation was out of the question. She ran away to teach him a lesson and then had to have recourse to the amnesia excuse to cover it up.  I think she felt humiliated and distraught at what had happened and that is why she would never discuss it and refused to do so for the rest of her life. 

What is clear is that hearing that her husband was in love with another woman (he told her just after her beloved mother had died with huge insensitivity) brought her close to a breakdown which would explain why she embarked on this disastrous course of action.

The section of the book dealing with this episode is called The Quarry and it is pure fantasy.  We are told that on the evening she disappeared she had dinner and was hoping to hear Archie’s car and would constantly check through a chink in the curtains to see if he was coming. “She smiled at the maid Lily who cleared the plates and looked concerned at how much was left on them....the clock ticked heavily........the fire was dying in the grate. She sat on and on” and so it continues more fiction rather than fact.

Throughout this biography Laura Thompson points us in the direction of quotes and settings from her books that reveal that she never got over Archie, her attitude to husbands, elliptic references which could be to this disappearance and on and on and on.   It is the kind of biography which I find acutely irritating. I call it the Surely she Must have Felt and it is Clear she must have Thought style and it is all supposition.

But then we come to her later life when she marries Max Malllowan and the whimsicality vanishes and we have good solid biographical writing of great verve and huge interest full of detail and colour.  She uses sections of Agatha’s own autobiography and her letters which show how satisfying this part of her life was with the travelling to the archeological digs and how much she enjoyed it all. Her books set in this part of the world are among her best (Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Murder in Mesopotamia) and it is clear she felt happy and comfortable there.

Her relationship with her daughter Rosalind seems to have been a difficult one and it is clear that she was not a devoted maternal person.  She found Rosalind “tricky”, very matter of fact and cool (Hastings daughter in Curtain is said to be based on her) and though they were clearly fond of each other it was never easy.

I suppose the conclusion as to whether one has enjoyed a book or not is how one reads it and this proved, despite all I have said above, to be a fascinating biography and one I could not put down. I read it solidly over two days and by the end of those two days it was bristling with stick it notes as I marked up things I wanted to mention. Well I simply cannot as there are too many but I have checked one which I wanted to refer to.

There is a masterly section on English Murder which is worth reading on its own in which she discusses Agatha’s place among the pantheon of Sayers, Marsh, Allingham et al and I was delighted when she used the word “simplicity” to describe her writing as it is the way I have always viewed it.

”Simplicity sets Agatha apart. It was hard won as her notebooks make clear but she knew that it was the desired end. The finished product had to be impregnable. Its geometry had to be capable of being turned this way and that like a jewel in the sunlight. It had to be constructed so that it could be satisfyingly dismantled. Then everything had to be hidden from view”.

Because of this her books are quite often misunderstood and dismissed which I think it totally wrong. After reading Laura Thompson’s biography I have re-read several of her books - some Poirot, some Miss Marple and some stand alone, and I have admired them all over again for this very characteristic - there is no feeling, as we sometimes get with Sayers and Marsh, that the author’s private feelings and prejudices (or love of their detective) are intruding. The story is the thing and that is that.

Yes I found aspects of this book irritating but I also found it totally fascinating and obviously a labour of love for the author.  Well worth reading.

Moray Dalton - more discoveries

Last year Dean Street Press, who are rapidly becoming one of my favourite publishing houses, issued four titles by Moray Dalton. This is the pseudonym of Katherine Dalton Renoir who wrote 29 mysteries, the last in 1951. I know very little about her and it seems she lived on the South Coast of England for most of her life following her marriage. She died in Worthing in 1963. Now, call me flippant, but a mystery writer who dies in Worthing is just perfect - it fits in with the Miss Marple trope and Miss Silver (though these two characters never married), and the contrast between a, presumably, middle class married lady turning out death and destruction is irresistable.

I read the original four in 2019 and was delighted to see that there were more to come (and I do hope that Dean Street Press continue to publish them ALL) and have had a happy time reading them during lockdown, (I am also galloping through a huge re-read of Agatha Christie at the moment, of which more later) and feel perhaps in future years somebody might write a dissertation on why reading about murder and mayhem was so relaxing at this time. Of course, it might just be me...

OK off we go.

The Condamine Case.  Stephen Latimer, a rather arrogant and over sensitive film director, learns of a gentrified family in Somerset with an old history of witchcraft and haunting. Thinking this might be an excellent subject for his next film he goes on a visit. Mr Condamine, who is rather a sweetie, is very exciited at the thought of a film being made featuring his family and is eager to help. His wife, who obviously married him for money and status, is a different kettle of fish entirely:

"Mrs Condamine had not uttered a word for some time and sat smoking her cigarette and looking into the fire, indifferent and aloof. Or was she? Evan wondered. He was sensitive to atmosphere and it seemed to him that someone in the room was in a state of suppressed fury. He glaced doubtfully at her. There might be more in that young woman that met the eye"...

The Case of Alan Copeland.  An unhappy marriage, the death of the wife, the younger husband remarries quickly.  It is all innocent. But after a while the word "murder" rears its ugly head and the obvious suspect is arrested. The evidence is overwhelming.  Now at this stage you start pondering well yes it cannot be him as it is so obvious. But then we might be tricked into thinking this way and he/she really did do it.  And I am not going to tell you what the answer is in this one.  I did guess who the culprit was but then I have read a lot of Agatha Christie and this character reminded me of one in a Christie novel in a slight way and so I plumped on this person as the murderer.  Shades of Miss Marple....

The Art School Murders.  Glamorous but slightly over the hill femme fatal is posing as a model at an art school as she needs the money.  Her body is found and, as happens frequently in crime, somebody who saw something and decides not to say anything and to be terribly mysterious and clever about it, also turns up dead.   They never learn these clever ones.

The Belgrave Manor Murder. This is my least favourite of all that I have read by Moray Dalton. I found it vaguely fantastical and not at all convincing. It involves weird practices, witchcraft and I have to say, a ludicrous ending (and again I guessed what was coming). However, this is just my view point and I would not like to deter anybody from reading any of the above just because I disliked this one.

All these books feature Inspector Hugh Collier of Scotland Yard, a charming, cultured man but not as elegant or as fastidious at Roderick Alleyn or Wimsey which, quite frankly, does come as a bit of a relief. Much though I love Ngaio Marsh and Sayers and adore their detectives, sometimes the snobbish element and its feeling that a character might say any moment Gor blimey govnor you're a toff is always lurking.

To sum up - well written, well plotted and no dull bits at all, these are a great read. I now have eight of these on my shelves and am looking forward to More Please.

At the moment the Kindle editions are available at £1.99. A total bargain. Go buy.