Books read Q2 2019

Smallbone Deceased

Michael Gilbert

Gilbert, who also wrote Death In Captivity, is a good find. This is yet another hit for the BLCC stable. I rather fancy the editors might be getting more discerning. A classic Golden Age closed circle set-up, with a murder in a firm of solicitors, which gives it a faint resemblance to Murder Must Advertise. The firm, and its varied inmates, are amusingly and convincingly portrayed, and the story itself is well-constructed, drily funny, and smartly clued. Our point-of-view character, Henry Bohun, is as a very attractive amateur sleuth, and one might wish he had featured in further novels. A slight weakness, perhaps, in the murderer's motive. But in real life people do apparently kill for very odd reasons.

The Loss of The Jane Vosper

Freeman Wills Crofts

Crofts was not, in my view, one of the greats. He could be a ponderous storyteller, and he often ends his stories with a leaden and moralistic tying up of loose ends, presenting a solution with a dutiful but rather dull third-person account of who did what and when and why. His books are also not really fair-play mysteries in any sense. Nevertheless, they generally remain worth reading. They are well-constructed and engrossing, and his focus on the realistic mechanics of detection makes for a good read. This is a pretty solid Crofts. Through patient and dogged police work, Chief Inspector French runs to earth a nasty gang of thieves and murderers, who have conceived a daring but ruthless scheme. The opening chapter, set on board the eponymous Jane Vosper, is genuinely tense, and the climax is pretty exciting too.  

Blood On The Tracks: Railway Mysteries

Various, ed. Martin Edwards

Uneven short story collection. A few real good 'uns – notably R Austin Freeman’s “The Case of Oscar Brodski”, Sayers’ “The Unsolved Puzzle Of The Man With No Face”, and FW Crofts’ dark and clever “The Level Crossing”. The Crofts one uses a plot device which I have never encountered before in any Golden Age story. The collection as a whole confirms my view that writing good short crime fiction is really hard.

Right Ho, Jeeves

PG Wodehouse

There’s a good argument that rating Wodehouse books is a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, if I could only have one of them for the rest of my life, this would be a contender. It is arguably the perfect comic novel, beautifully structured and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The scene with Gussie’s speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School is one of the most brilliantly funny set pieces in all English literature, and Bertie’s 18-mile midnight bike ride is also superb.

Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries

Various, ed. Martin Edwards

Fairly weak anthology of Christmas-related short stories. The limitations of the format and the weaknesses of the era and genre are much in evidence. The Michael Gilbert one starts out very well but peters out into a kind of self-parody. The others are much of a muchness. The ancient, creaky device of a supposedly haunted room used to disguise a murder appears in not one but two of them! The last one in the collection, Josephine Bell’s “The Carol Singers”, is rather interesting, much closer to the modern crime story than it is to the Golden Age yarns that make up the rest of the collection. It combines an attempt at social realism with a sort of macabre surrealism (the murderers are a band of midgets posing as carol-singing children).

Serpents In Eden: Countryside Crimes

Various, ed. Martin Edwards

Hit and miss like most of these anthologies, but enough good stories to make it worthwhile. Chesterton has an entry, “The Fad Of The Fisherman”, which is a decent if not brilliant Horne Fisher story. Anthony Berkeley’s “Direct Evidence” was also diverting and well-told, though predictable. EC Bentley’s “The Genuine Tabard” was fun and had a clever idea; I also enjoyed the Thorndyke story “The Naturalist At Law”. One of the best ones, I thought, was “Inquest”, by PG Wodehouse’s stepdaughter Leonora, a fascinating little curio with a neat twist and a blackly comic edge.

The others were not terrible, just very pedestrian.

Classical Literature: A Very Short Introduction

William Allan

VSIs are truly the dilettante’s friend, and Allan makes a very good job of providing a broad overview of the different genres and eras of Greco-Roman literature, from the early part of the first millennium BC to the first century AD. Tragedy, comedy, satire, poetry, pastoral, history, even early novels; there’s a guide to the key genres and some useful pointers for further reading. I discovered a lot from this book that I feel like I should have known, especially in terms of the sophistication and variation of classical literature.

Murder In The Mill-Race: A Devon Mystery

ECR Lorac

Very good village mystery, a cut above the usual fare. You know the sort of the thing, “Buggins of the Yard goes down to Snoddlesham-on-the-Water to investigate the mysterious death of Squire Blenkinsop”. Lorac surpasses e.g. Bellairs in her avoidance of the worst clichés, her largely successful attempt at nuanced psychology, her careful clueing, and her well-drawn, morally complex murder victim. Equally, however, she does not neglect the satisfying conventions of the sub-genre, e.g. the beautiful but remote location, the unco-operative locals and the faintly Gothic feel. 

The Moon’s A Balloon

David Niven

Niven is great company and tells his life story with a polished, debonair lightness. This is a very funny book in parts, although a little further research suggests – as I suspected while reading – that many of the anecdotes were borrowed or grew somewhat in the telling. Niven had an extraordinary life, including two stints in the army. The second lasted for almost the whole of the Second World War, and seems to have involved some genuinely distinguished service – not that you’d know that from the man himself, who is admirably reticent about his exploits. Niven deserves enormous credit for his hasty return home after the declaration of war when he could quite easily have stayed comfortably in Hollywood. To do so would likely have been enormously profitable for Niven – his career was really starting to take off in 1939, and he was about to turn 30, so was approaching his professional peak.

Still. The problem I have with these tales of roisterers and womanisers and hard-drinking, hard-living men is that they rarely touch on the great misery and sadness and disappointment that is so often left in their wake. The girls who apparently so enlivened Niven’s bachelor days are seldom named, and their lives were obviously of little interest to him or Errol Flynn or any of the others in their set. There are little signs throughout the book that Niven could often be selfish and inconsiderate, and he appears to have been enormously promiscuous – it is glossed over (though hinted at) in this memoir, but he admitted late in life that he was serially unfaithful even to his supposedly beloved Primmie.

I also wonder how seriously we should take Niven’s portrayal of his own early career. We are presented with the image of a man constantly falling on his feet, making useful contacts quite by accident, getting lucky breaks via his wide circle of acquaintances etc etc. Is it unduly cynical to suspect that Niven was perhaps a rather more persistent and assiduous cultivator of useful people, and a more ruthless professional climber, than he would have us believe? Again, there are hints of this, cf. his only mildly regretful admission that he unceremoniously ditched the woman with whom he was staying and who had invited him to the party on board a Royal Navy ship, in favour of drinking with the crew (this escapade led to his having a minor part in the 1935 film Mutiny On The Bounty).     

Can We Trust The Gospels?

Peter J Williams

This is an extremely good introduction to the strong case for the reliability and historicity of the Gospels. I’ve encountered most of these arguments before in one form or another – although some of it is new ground for me, for example the explanation of “undesigned coincidences”, and the exploration of whether the distribution of names among named individuals in the Gospels is what you would expect from a genuine contemporary account. Williams argues pretty convincingly that yes, it is. I was also not aware of the level of familiarity that the Gospel writers showed with the geography and settlements of first century Palestine.  

It is broadly persuasive, although I am perhaps a little biased. However, it is too short, which means that the arguments are under-developed and hence I might hesitate before giving it to a really hard-bitten sceptic (a believer wanting reassurance would be a different matter).  

It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet

James Herriot

Utterly delightful episodic memoir of the life of a junior vet in rural Yorkshire in the late 1930s. Herriot writes with a dry wit and a keen eye for the ridiculous and eccentric, but also with a generous and humanist sensibility. The farmers of the Dales, and the North York Moors, were in many ways difficult and strange, but also very often warm and funny and welcoming. The various ongoing storylines in this and the predecessor volume (see below) – JH’s very gradual courtship of his future wife, the eccentricities and oddities of Siegfried, and the intermittent presence of the unreliable but good-natured Tristan – add a feeling of narrative progression.

If Only They Could Talk

James Herriot

The first in the series, well-observed and heartwarming without sentimentality.

A Willingness To Die

Brian Kingcome

Kingcome was a fighter pilot in the Second World War, one of the Few – not that he had much time for excessive idealisation of the young men who flew in the Battle of Britain, noting that in many ways the fighter pilot’s lot was rather a pleasant one compared with others who fought, or indeed with others who simply endured.

Kingcome died before completing his manuscript, so this is rather unpolished in parts, and the sections dealing with the later war years are underdeveloped – although he was a senior officer by the second half of the war and hence doing less operational flying, and may have felt that this was less interesting to a reader than his days of frequent operations. Nevertheless the direct, humble and honest style works well. He is generous and fair-minded in his assessments of others and reluctant to dwell on his own achievements. These were substantial; he was a confirmed ace with eight confirmed kills, three shared, five probable. He also had a DSO and DFC with Bar, which was barely mentioned in the book as far as I can remember, cf. Edward Young’s One Of Our Submarines.

Just as interesting as the reminiscences of the war are Kingcome’s memories of his early life. He came from an Anglo-Indian family, one of those which took to the – to me unimaginable – step of remaining in India to work and sending their tiny children home to the UK to be raised by relatives and educated at boarding schools. His mother joined him and his two sisters later, but his father spent his entire working life in India, taking six months’ leave every two years.    

Murder In Mesopotamia

Agatha Christie

One of the weakest Poirots, and perhaps my least favourite story from the classic era. The setting and the characters are good, but it suffers from two serious problems. The first of these is the murder method. We are close to the mechanical contrivances so beloved of the “locked room specialists”. The chances of it actually working as planned seem to me rather small. Any number of imaginable hitches would not only have ruined its chances of success, but resulted in the murderer’s exposure.

Then there is the backstory to the crime, perhaps one of the most plausibility-stretching I have ever encountered in classic detective fiction. We are expected to believe that a man could successfully trick a woman to whom he had once been married into marrying him again under a new identity, and that this deception would remain unnoticed throughout the second marriage. For me, this goes far beyond the merely unlikely into the realm of rank impossibility. Even if the Leidners’ first marriage had only lasted a short while, it is inconceivable that she could have so forgotten his appearance, manners, voice and so on that she could enter the second relationship in ignorance of her husband’s true identity. People simply do not forget such things (cf. my problems with Symons’ The Belting Inheritance and, to a lesser extent, Tey’s Brat Farrar).   

Death In The Clouds

Agatha Christie

A complex and somewhat chancy, but believable, murder. Decent clueing, a clever central idea – which Christie had used before and went on to use again – and some excellent interplay between Japp and Poirot make this a fun read. It’s not an absolute personal favourite but it’s a decent example from the classic years.   

The Man In Lower Ten

Mary Roberts Rhinehart

I must say I found this heavy going. The set-up is excellent: a man on a sleeper train wakes up to find that a man has been killed in a neighbouring berth and someone has attempted to frame him for the crime, at which point the train crashes, killing all but a few passengers in the carriage and requiring the hero to clear his name and find the real villain. However, this exciting idea is smothered by a melodramatic and disjointed narrative, with no real clueing and a rather episodic feel. A tiresome love story intrudes, as do many of the conventions of the US crime potboiler. The denouement is overlong and convoluted.  

The Mysterious Affair At Styles

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha wrote better mysteries than this, but not many of her contemporaries did. She really hit the ground running here – this is well-clued, clever, and quite funny in parts, albeit a broadly conventional country house murder. It’s extraordinary to think that it was first published nearly 100 years ago.

Let Sleeping Vets Lie

James Herriot

These books are a continual source of amusement and enjoyment. I am absolutely racing through them at the moment. On one level they are just collections of funny reminiscences, albeit somewhat embroidered reminscences, but that is not all they are. They are snapshots of a vanished world, and are a masterclass in generous and patient judgment.

The Mystery Of Three Quarters

Sophie Hannah

Another success for Hannah; this is definitely up there with Closed Casket. Once again her interest in the sheer oddness of human nature comes to the fore. The long-ago incident upon which the plot ultimately turns involves someone making a terrible decision which seems wildly improbable on first sight, but is not actually so inconceivable. People are, after all, extremely peculiar.

One thread that runs through all Hannah’s Poirot books is the power of the past, and this is no different. The roots of the murder lie far back in time, just as TMM turned on the awful consequences of malicious lying, and CC on the web of relationships around the enigmatic figure of Joseph Scotcher.

Vet In Harness

James Herriot

Vet In A Spin

James Herriot

All Quiet On The Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque

There is an element of cliché now in reading these memoirs by veterans of the First World War. We have the misery and squalor of front-line life, the horrible absurdity of organised violence, and the incompetence of the top brass. We hear too of the social or civilisational consequences, the alienation of the men from the morals and values of the pre-1914 world, and the vast gulf in experience and understanding between the fighting men and the civilians at home.

But the impact of the best memoirs of that time and place can still be enormous. This is deservedly one of the best-known and best-regarded books about the experience of the Great War; gripping and horrific and darkly funny and sad and insightful. There are several key thematic threads but the ones which most affected me were the seemingly irrevocable way in which the experience of war cut off Remarque from home and family, and the emphasis on how the disaster of the war shattered the assumptions and values with which the pre-war generations were raised.