(1) Thursday 1st January
The Hobbit
JRR Tolkien
I always forget how different this book is from the LOTR trilogy. It’s
quirky and light-hearted, rather than epic, although there is a tonal/register
shift later on when it becomes less self-consciously a story for children. It’s wonderfully enjoyable, told with wit and
adventure and wisdom and depth. There are echoes and tastes of the later
stories too, with references to the wider perils threatening Middle Earth, the
Necromancer, and the fading of the Elves and the lost glories and great legends
of earlier ages.
(2) Thursday 8th January
Colour Scheme
Ngaio Marsh
We’re in New Zealand for this one, the immediate predecessor to Died In The Wool, but it’s for all
intents and purposes an English country-house murder; all the suspects under
the same roof in a fairly remote part of the world, with the focus on establishing
whereabouts, alibis and possible motives (almost everyone has one, naturally).
Alleyn is in New Zealand hunting Nazi spies – I couldn’t help wondering whether
this was really a big problem in NZ c.1942, but I don’t know – and spends the
entire novel in disguise, his identity kept secret from the reader as well as
from the other characters. There is a clever device at the heart of the story,
viz. the killer’s concealed knowledge of the victim’s colourblindness, and the
tale is well-told, with a smart Shakespeare clue whose significance I ought to
have seen. The murder is more incidental than usual in Marsh books – there is
plenty of genuine human interest quite separate from the question of whodunit.
The setting is beautifully evoked, too, and NM
shows a real knowledge of and respect for Maori culture. But the ending feels
like an anti-climax, despite some neat revisiting of earlier plot points (the
incident on the bridge with the signal), and we’re never given any real insight
into why Herbert Smith is a Nazi spy. Is he a Nazi by conviction? Is it for
money? Blackmail? I also felt it to be slightly implausible that Questing could
have been forced to keep silent by Smith in the manner described. NM’s
resolutions always suffer by comparison to Christie’s, I feel, despite her
equal or perhaps even superior technical ability as a writer. Her power of
character description is certainly superior.
(3) Wednesday 14th January
Overture To Death
Ngaio Marsh
An archetypal English village mystery; so archetypal, in fact, that I
couldn’t help wondering once again whether there was an element of self-satire.
The map on the first page showing the manor house, the church and the rectory;
the squire, the vicar, the young lovers, the gossipy and frustrated spinster
busybodies, the adulterous doctor, the flashy young widow from That London –
all the locations and dramatis personae of a proper old-fashioned no-nonsense
whodunit are present and correct. The elaborate murder method – a pistol rigged
up with pulleys inside a piano to shoot the pianist when the soft pedal is
pressed – adds to the sense that the tongue is never too far from the authorial
cheek.
It’s written with
Marsh’s usual panache and lightness, and is fairly and carefully clued with a
good denouement. A certain snobbery about the “lower orders” bubbles away in
parts, but it’s mostly innocuous, even if there is something of the stock rural
peasant about the poacher who provides some sort-of vital testimony. As usual
the romantic scenes feel a bit much and as usual A Young Man’s Honourable
Refusal To Reveal A Secret turns out to be a bit of a damp squib.
(4) Wednesday 21st January
Surfeit of Lampreys
Ngaio Marsh
A family murder, this time – or so it initially appears. The Lampreys
are impoverished aristocracy, an eccentric and ramshackle bunch, the six
children and wife of a younger son, and their ghastly uncle is gruesomely
murdered in the lift of the block of flats where they live. The background is
well-drawn and the characters entertaining, and the clueing is scrupulously
open-handed (the stuff with the PC on the Embankment is clever), but there’s
not much interest suspense-wise. The reason for this is that, although there
are nominally about a dozen suspects, you get the sense that most of them – the
good-natured Lampreys and their house guest, from whose POV a lot of the novel
is told – are ruled out ab initio in
the Marsh formula. It felt to me that the only credible suspects were Lady
Wutherwood, various servants and (only just) the Lampreys’ nanny, which leaves
a slightly anaemic mystery. At a couple of points I thought we might be being
set up for some smart Christie-esque twists – particularly with the absence of
Lady Kit and the bailiff in the kitchen – but that didn’t happen. I enjoyed the
slightly gothic-inflected finale, which seems fitting given the horror of the
murder.
A somewhat
unsatisfying read overall, perhaps because the Lampreys take up so much of the
story but are essentially irrelevant to the crime, and it’s not always easy to
like them as much as Marsh clearly does (that said, she does put some fair and
quite damning criticism of them into the mouth of the murder victim, but that
said(!), he is a thoroughly unpleasant character).
(5) Wednesday 28th January
The Last Superstition: A
Refutation Of The New Atheism
Ed Feser
A scholarly and knowledgeable polemic in defence of classical
metaphysics, the immortality of the soul, traditional morality and the
existence of God. Enormously enjoyable,
satisfying and convincing. Feser is particularly keen to rehabilitate Aristotelianism
and the pre-modern conception of an ordered, intentional universe.
I do wish,
though, that he had stuck more closely to philosophical argument and resisted
the temptation to take frequent sideswipes at the New Atheists. In a lengthy
preliminary chapter he gives the “Four Horsemen” and their various acolytes and
followers a lengthy kicking, which is fun but much too long. A robustly
conservative politics also intrudes irritatingly at points, with numerous snide
references to “sodomy” and irrelevant derision of people concerned about climate
change, vegetarians, and supporters of what he calls “animal rights”. I never
thought I could get bored of people being rude about Ditchkins et al., but
apparently it is possible. It was especially annoying that so much room is
taken up with invective because some other parts of the book, especially the
section on the problem of evil, felt rushed or underdeveloped, with a lot of “this
argument is developed at more length in such and such a book” or “there’s a lot
more that could be said, but…”
I would love to be
able to wholeheartedly recommend this book to a liberal atheist, because it
states an important case that isn’t often made. The defence of Aquinas’
arguments for God is very valuable, as is the criticism of poor theistic
arguments. It makes clear a lot of things that I don’t think most
atheists/materialists understand about the rationality of religious belief, and
it raises some stern questions about the coherence of atheism and materialism.
But I think the polemical parts are overdone and sometimes mean-spirited, and
risk alienating even an open-minded sceptical reader.
(6) Monday 2nd February
The Hollow Man
John Dickson Carr
Ingenious and satisfying locked-room mystery. Skilfully constructed,
and a good deal of fair clueing; the final solution stretches the suspension of
disbelief, but not quite beyond breaking point. Although it was published in
1935, slap-bang in the Golden Age, the style and atmosphere are much more
reminiscent of Conan Doyle or Chesterton – we are in the world of the old-fashioned
gentleman sleuth, the denizen of oak-panelled rooms and gentleman’s clubs, the
aficionado of good open fires and fine cigars and cosy pubs. Not for nothing
has Dr Gideon Fell been compared to GKC. The only thing that really marks it
out as being set in the inter-war period, apart from the incidental chronology
of the plot, are a few mentions of cars. Otherwise it is set in a vaguely
timeless London, where streets are foggy and alleys are gloomy and the city
feels lonely and uncanny. There is a slightly surreal darkness to the
background that is much more akin to Victorian drama than to the essentially
lighthearted conventions of the Golden Age, but it’s none the worse for that.
There’s also a
playful proto-post-modern interlude, when Fell alludes to their being
characters in a book, and talks the investigators through the many different
kinds of solution to a locked-room mystery. It’s funny to think that even in
1935 the genre was, if not quite exhausted, then clearly approaching a saturation
point. There are some clever clues in this section (as I realised in
retrospect!) and a daring discussion of how audiences are invariably
disappointed by the explanation of an impressive illusion – it’s almost as if
JDC is daring us to feel let down by his own solution!
The only
weaknesses are the not-very-sparkling dialogue and characterisation, and the
sometimes slightly verbose and stodgy prose (as befits a book which seems to
take inspiration from literary Victoriana). Fell is also wrong about the value
of suggestion and understatement in ghost stories, but this is a very minor
point.
(7) Wednesday 11th February
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Gaston Leroux
Apparently this novel has a towering reputation in the annals of
detective stories. Indeed, in his discourse on detective stories in The Hollow Man, Dr Fell calls it the
best of all. It was voted the third best locked-room mystery of all time. I do
not understand this assessment. There is some smart clueing, some likeable
characters (Rouletibaille is a cross between Tintin and Holmes), and the
resolution of the locked room elements is not without a certain cleverness, but
it depends for its credibility on a frankly ludicrous contrivance, viz. that
the victim of the attack knows the identity of the attempted murderer but will
not tell anyone because of our old and not very well-liked friend A Terrible
Shameful (sic) Secret From Long Ago. The motive of the attacker is also
unclear, and his background as a moustache-twirling Moriarty-esque Master
Criminal who has somehow inveigled his way into the Sureté is just, well, a bit
of a let-down. Professional criminals in murder mysteries are profoundly
uninteresting, as well as agin The Rules.
There’s a problem
with Mlle. Stangerson, the intended victim. Her character is all over the
place. She’s supposedly this super-smart scientist, dedicated to her work, the
intellectual equal to her father, but she is portrayed like the worst kind of
swooning, pathetic melodramatic heroine, “losing her reason” at the end purely
for the convenience of the plot.
(8) Sunday 1st March
Off With His Head
Ngaio Marsh
A curious and intermittently eerie village mystery, set in tiny and
isolated South Mardian in a freezing midwinter. It is nominally a decade or so
after the Second World War, and lip service is paid to the march of time, but
like most rural Golden Age mysteries its temporal anchor is loose. It could as
easily be the mid-Twenties as the mid-Fifties.
I’m not sure this
is one of the stronger NM books. It just felt a bit formulaic, despite the
background of pagan-inflected folk-dancing. The set-up is imaginative and
intriguing – it’s the “in plain sight, but no-one saw” type of murder – but the
solution, though not without clever elements (a couple of which I successfully
worked out), creaks dreadfully at the edges. The young lovers are hard work, as
usual, as are the rustics; the former also undermine the suspense of the novel
because Marsh never, ever makes either half of a young couple the killer. And
why don’t they celebrate Christmas in South Mardian? The action of the book
takes place immediately after the winter solstice – i.e. 21st
December – but no-one mentions it! (this may of course be an attempt to
emphasise the peculiar pre-modern culture of the village, Wicker Man-style).
(9) Friday 6th March
Grave Mistake
Ngaio Marsh
Pedestrian cosy whodunit set in a small Kentish village – a Scottish
gardener poisons his employer for an inheritance. Little deviation from the
usual Alleyn formula. A certain amount of interest in the attempt to gently reconcile
the Golden Age to the modern world – Concorde! Jeans! Pop music and TV! – while
retaining its essential form and conventions, but the plot is underpowered.
(10) Sunday 15th March
Photo Finish
Ngaio Marsh
I think I must be on a run of some of the weaker Marsh books. This one
had an intriguing set-up, and a promising start with the Alleyns heading off to
a remote house in the New Zealand wilderness, which is beautifully portrayed. I
like Troy, although the Alleyns’ relationship can be a little too cute at
times. But it seemed to run out of juice well before the end, and the
explanation of the murder’s background stretched the suspension of disbelief
and was not quite in accordance with The Rules. There was one central bit of somewhat
interesting detection, but the story lacked some of the complexity and
cleverness that I prefer, and more might have been made of the setting. Is the
problem perhaps that Alleyn is a bit dull, too much of the Boy Scout and the
perfect gentleman?
(11) Tuesday 24th March
Light Thickens
Ngaio Marsh
Her last book, and probably the last of hers I’ll read for a while. As
usual, it’s well-written and sometimes funny, and as usual the characters are
enjoyable, but as usual the solution lacks a certain something. NM just doesn’t
have Christie’s genius for plot, her wiliness, her ability to pull the rug out from
under you in the last act. And here we have, once again, her recourse to a
murderer who is apparently insane, or at least acting from an insane motive; a
sword told him to do the murder because the victim insulted the sword, or
something. This always strikes me as a bit of a cop-out.
(12) Saturday 28th March
Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and
the Saville Inquiry
Douglas Murray
Fascinating and even-handed look at the Saville Inquiry into Bloody
Sunday. Murray does a good job of explaining what happened on Bloody Sunday, as
far as that can be established with any certainty, and how the Saville Inquiry
reached its conclusions. His moral judgments are clear-eyed; he clearly loathes
brutality and cruelty regardless of the perpetrator’s political background, and
is impatient with excuse-making and double standards. Significantly, it’s not
easy to tell whether he takes a view on the political status of the Six
Counties. Those to blame for Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972, and the villains
of the Troubles more generally, are not so much denounced as allowed to condemn
themselves from their own mouths through their numerous lies and evasions. Murray
follows Saville in laying the blame for the actual killings on the Paras of
Support Company and their immediate superiors like Col Wilford, but is also
rightly damning of the violent Republicans who stoked the atmosphere of
violence and distrust in Derry in the early Seventies, and who used Bloody
Sunday as a propaganda tool in their campaigns. The book closes with an account
of some of those who people who lost loved ones on the day but refused to pay
back evil for evil. The implicit contrast with those who took up Semtex and the
Armalite is striking.
The book is full
of engaging cameos, including the ever more peculiar David Shayler. The
thoughts about the possible identity of INFLICTION, the still-unidentified MI5
agent in the PIRA, are very interesting indeed.
(13) Monday 6thth April
The Secret Life Of Bletchley
Park: The History of the Wartime Codebreaking Centre by the Men and Women Who
Were There
Sinclair McKay
Chatty, entertaining, informative and rather moving social history of
BP, told mostly through the reminiscences of people who actually worked there
but with a good deal of background historical detail to put those stories in
their context. There are enlightening pen portraits of some of the key figures
– including Dilly Knox, Alastair Denniston, Edward Travis, Gordon Welchman,
Tommy Flowers (the mechanical genius and designer of Colossus) and of course
Alan Turing – as well as an interesting focus on everyday life at Bletchley and
the effect on the BP workers themselves of their time at the Park. The vignette
about John Herivel (who worked out a vital crib early in the war, the so-called
Herivelismus) feeling unable to tell
his dying father of his vital work, despite the father having expressed
disappointment at Herivel’s lack of contribution to the war effort, is
heartbreaking.
This isn’t a book
about the actual mechanics and process of codebreaking, about the nitty-gritty
of the work, and there’s not a huge amount of detailed analysis of Bletchley’s
role in the war. But there are other books about those things.
(14) Tuesday 14th April
The Meaning Of Conservatism
Roger Scruton
Closely argued defence of traditionalist political conservatism. First
written in 1979 (this edition 2001), Scruton sketches a vision of a
particularly British conservatism focused on what he calls the “third-person
plural” – the community, not the individual. He dismisses the contractual idea
of the state and society as being too concerned with consciously chosen links
of affection and obligation, when in fact we are born into pre-existing links.
Perhaps surprisingly he does not make a great deal of hostility to the state
per se, arguing instead that the state is a sort of ongoing communal expression
of the national will and character – with conservatism valuing the nation and
continuity above party – and that even civil society cannot be completely
conceptually separate from the state (perhaps I did not fully understand the
point here). Scruton stresses the importance of independent institutions with
“purposes internal to themselves”, using examples as varied as football clubs
and the armed forces, and the importance of property as a way of preserving
private, independent life and reducing the problem of alienation and
atomisation. I really liked the chapter on the importance of “home” and the
family as an example of a place where we find shelter and learn to live within
bonds of love and obligation that we ourselves did not choose (as we must in
the conservative vision of the state). There are reasonably conventional,
though convincing, defences of the monarchy and the hereditary House of Lords
as bulwarks against faction, neophilia, hasty legislation etc., and a
persuasive re-iteration of the Burkean point about society being a contract
between the dead, the living and those yet unborn. He is sceptical about
democracy, questioning its special legitimacy as a source of authority (he has
useful thoughts about power and authority, seeing much of social life and
politics as a way to imbue sources of power with authority in the state, e.g.
trade unions).
Scruton situates
authentic conservatism away from the rhetoric of individual liberty and free
markets, singing the praises of the common law and emphasising the need to
understand all freedoms and rights within the matrix of institutions and
customs that have come down to us. He criticises both Marxism and liberalism,
and his point about liberalism’s acidic scepticism eventually undermining
everything that makes liberalism possible and intelligible is very well made
indeed.
It’s a good book,
though Scruton’s style isn’t always easy and there’s a lot of abstraction and
generalisation. I might perhaps have liked a little more detail, and there are
all sorts of lines of thought that need more fleshing out and unpacking.
(15) Tuesday 21st April
Police At The Funeral
Margery Allingham
A much more enjoyable read than the first Campion novel I read a while
back. An authentic old-school whodunit, somewhere between a country house
mystery and a village mystery (it’s set in Cambridge, but that location is
underused and university towns more or less count as villages for these
purposes); no gangsters or villainous Jews here. It combines the traditional
lightness of the Golden Age, and its comforting and enjoyable conventions, with
a macabre and intriguing puzzle. Campion is a likeable presence, with a
pleasing air of enigma around him, and the situation is well-drawn and
well-clued. On the down side, one always feels a little bit cheated when a
murderer turns out to have done it just because he’s mad. Also, the heroine is
a bit wet, and we have all the usual stuff about women not being able to cope
with difficult situations without their brains melting, plus a particularly
egregious instance of A Terrible Secret From The Past That Isn’t Actually That
Terrible At All – in this case, someone married a woman who was a “bad sort”
and they had a mixed-race baby for some unclear reason.
(16) Thursday 23rd April
The Crime At Black Dudley
Margery Allingham
Didn’t finish this, which is highly unusual for me. Not a whodunit so
much as a rather dated and melodramatic potboiler, with an improbably
well-organised international gang of criminals operating from an English
stately home, secret passages aplenty, and English gentlemen leaping into
book-lined studies to rescue helpless women from the clutches of sinister
Germans levelling revolvers. People act improbably or stupidly in order to move
the plot along, and the final “twist” (I read the last couple of chapters) is
almost entirely unclued and hammy.
(17) Tuesday 28th April
Notes Towards The Definition Of
Culture
TS Eliot
Extended essay defending what you might call “elitism” in culture –
which Eliot defines broadly as all that makes life worth living – and arguing
for the development of a social and educational system that supports and
nurtures traditional high culture (although he is not dismissive of “low”
culture, merely insistent on its being carefully distinguished from high
culture). The style can be a little fussy, but I am very sympathetic to his
overall thesis – that we must defend high culture, that religion is inseparable
from, and vital to, a flourishing culture, that traditional institutions and
families should be defended as bastions of culture, that politics should be
kept away from culture. There are also interesting thoughts about the way in
which developed religions almost inevitably lead to doubt and conscious
reflection, and the fact Europe’s culture can only persist with the support of
Christianity – a prediction vindicated by history since 1948. The thoughts
about the purpose of education are extremely important, unfashionable then and
even more so now. He is very much opposed to the purely instrumental view, or
the attempt to equalise educational institutions and pathways and abolish all
privileges. Eliot was plainly not a reactionary or unthinking traditionalist –
such a person could not have written Four
Quartets – but he seems to have seen the danger of the totalising state
very early.
(18) Sunday 7th June
Henry VIII
JJ Scarisbrick
Superbly readable and enlightening biography of one of our most
consequential monarchs. A good general history of Henry VIII’s reign,
well-balanced between the diplomatic, military, religious, political and
personal aspects of his four decades at the top, although there is particular
focus on three topics: foreign policy, the Henrician Reformation and the King’s
Great Matter. Jack is clearly sympathetic to the old cause, praising Catherine
of Aragon and St John Fisher in particular, but rightly enthusiastic about many
aspects of the early sixteenth century reform movement (e.g. the new learning
of the humanists and the desire for a less worldly church) and clear-eyed about
the need for change in the English Church. Indeed in the Foreword to this 1997
edition, he suggests that pro-Catholic revisionism about the vitality of the
pre-Reformation Church, which only really took off after this book was first
published in 1969, has gone too far. There is a great deal of detail about
diplomatic manoeuvring with France and the Empire – perhaps too much – and the
chapter on the canon law of the divorce is a totally absorbing tour de force.
The sections dealing with Henry’s religious policy are fascinating too. I would
perhaps have liked to see a bit more detail about some other aspects of Henry’s
reign – the final elimination of dynastic competitors like the Poles, the huge
administrative changes, the building projects, the improvements to the Navy
etc. These are discussed, but not always at great length – I
suppose Jack thought they might distract from the central biographical project.
(19) Tuesday 9th June
The Pale Horse
Agatha Christie
One of the better late Christies, based on the clever idea of a
murderer for hire dressing up his crimes in supernatural mumbo-jumbo to throw
people off the scent. Some smart clueing and eerie scenes, albeit there are
echoes of earlier works in which AC uses the supernatural as camouflage for a
firmly naturalist criminal plot (cf. The
Sittaford Mystery, Dumb Witness,
and a few of the short stories). The plotting isn’t as tight as it might be (a
recurrent problem in the later years), and perhaps there are a few too many
coincidences, but a good read overall.
(20) Sunday 14th
June
After The Funeral
Agatha Christie
One of the best Poirot mysteries. Very fine clueing (you notice this
strongly on rereading), good characters and a clever-simple plot, with genuine
emotional resonance and a real sense of immersion in a particular kind of world.
(21) Thursday 25th June
The Cask
Freeman Wills Crofts
Complex and well-constructed mystery, with a more realist tinge than
most Golden Age whodunits (this was written in 1920 and set in 1912) – it’s
really a sort of proto-police procedural, with several POV changes as different
investigators take a hand, rather than a true cosy GA whodunit. There are only
really two suspects in the frame, so it’s fairly clear where the book is going by
about two-thirds of the way through, but the plot is clever enough, and the
tale well-told enough, that you can forgive that. One might quibble with the
numerous scenes of prosperous middle-class men offering each other post-prandial
cigars in front of fires in oak-panelled studies, in the true late Victorian
style, and a good editor might have trimmed it down a bit; the pace is
ponderous in parts, and there seem to be a lot of fairly similar scenes of
investigators asking waiters and clerks what time so-and-so had his breakfast
on the 16th last, or having good dinners in Parisian cafes.
Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable novel, albeit the murderer’s scheme is
almost comically convoluted. I’ll read more FWC.
(22) Monday 29th June
The Monogram Murders
Sophie Hannah
This is the first official Poirot revival that the Christie estate has
ever sanctioned, and Hannah was a good choice. She has managed to capture a
good deal of the classic Christie feel without resorting to pastiche or mere
imitation; there are subtle nods to several AC tropes, notably the mystery in
the past that must be understood and the call for help to Poirot that is not
all it seems. This is a well-clued whodunit in the grand tradition, with a few
minimal modernist touches (the cufflinks in the mouth business feels like something
from the more edgy procedurals that have to some extent replaced the “cosy” in
the affections of the crime-story reading public).
(23) Sunday 12th July
Trent’s Last Case
EC Bentley
Enjoyable if rather dated, marred by some jarring changes of tone,
some rather syrupy romantic melodrama and a completely unbelievable central
plot point (the idea that a wealthy man would kill himself simply to get a man
hanged for his “murder”, on the basis of a barely explained animus, seems
preposterously implausible). There seems to be some disagreement over the
extent to which it should be regarded as a spoof of the detective genre. I’ve
seen it suggested, though without exact citation, that Bentley did not like the
Conan Doyle stories, thinking Holmes humourless, and set out to gently send
them up. But then this book was apparently highly praised by Christie, Sayers,
Chesterton and PD James, and is clearly an ancestor of the Golden Age classics
(even if it keeps one foot in the late Victorian style). The story is well-told
and there is some good clueing, albeit the final solution depends on not one
but two characters finally Sitting Down To Reveal All, meaning that there is no
way that even a conscientious reader could reasonably be expected to puzzle it
out. The final reveal is almost post-modern in its abruptness and humour.
The idea that
this is one of the greats seems to me wrong. It may be an influential book, but
the kind of tropes popularised here were developed and refined to greater
effect by later writers.
(24) Tuesday 14th July
The Red House Mystery
AA Milne
I wonder whether I might have enjoyed this more if I hadn’t first read
Raymond Chandler’s withering criticisms of it in The Simple Art Of Murder. He excoriates it as an example of the
mannered, unrealistic, contrived English whodunit which depends on an intricate
but utterly implausible plot being solved by a facetious but brilliant
gentleman sleuth who outwits dull local flatfoots. Perhaps I would have done,
but this is not a great example of the Golden Age mystery, despite being praised
as such in some quarters. There are clever touches – a good clue about driving
and a nice bit of deduction involving shadows and sounds – but Chandler is
surely right that the plot depends on a series of manifestly implausible events
or actions. It does not live up to its best moments or ideas, and it’s when
reading books like this that you come to admire the plot mastery of someone like
Christie, who trod with great skill the fine line between ingenious complexity
and implausible contrivance.
The central conceit is that it would be possible to
pass off the body of Mark Ablett, a bookish English country gentleman,
well-known in his locality, as that of his brother, Robert, who has supposedly
just returned to England after fifteen years’ riotous living in Australia (in
fact Robert has been dead for three years). No-one seems remotely suspicious
that the body before them looks like Mark, who has “gone missing”. There is no
mention of how a positive identification of the body as Robert is made; the
police make no attempt to trace the movements of the supposed Australian since
his arrival in England, or investigate his background in Australia -this book
is presumably set at the time when it was published, 1922, so effective communication
with Australia is perfectly feasible even if cumbersome.
Then there is the
curious fact of the police simply disappearing from the story, despite there
being a murder and a disappearance to investigate. This is common in stories featuring
amateur detectives, though it is usually explained more carefully. One can overlook
an unconvincing explanation if the rest of the story is sound, but that is not
the case here. I raised an eyebrow at the secret passage, the stupid servants,
and – of course – the ornamental women. The two main amateur detectives, if not
quite ciphers, are far from rounded. Their dialogue has not aged well and
relies heavily on that overdone ironical lightness which features so often in
stories featuring English gentlemen in the first half of the twentieth century.
PG Wodehouse made great comedic hay of it, but in stories that are at least
nominally serious, it can be wearing.
(25) Friday 17th July
The Middle Temple Murder
JS Fletcher
Gripping mystery yarn following the investigation of a murder
committed in the unlikely but atmospheric setting of the Inner Temple. Not,
perhaps, a true Golden Age whodunit – there is little real clueing here and no
limited circle of suspects – but enjoyable nevertheless, with a sprawling plot
involving crime in the past and hidden identities, whose improbability generally
stays within acceptable levels.
Its faults are
largely those of its sub-genre (i.e. books featuring a particular kind of male
investigator, moving in a world of clubs and the Yard and bachelor’s apartments
full of brandy and cigars, with women absent, unimportant or decorative). The
otherwise taut and exciting final act lapses into melodrama; there is a
considerable reliance on coincidence and luck; the female love interests are
perfunctory and hopelessly underwritten. The ending is very abrupt (it seems to
stop rather than end). Also present and correct is the irritating plot device
whereby a character is made, for very flimsy reasons, to conceal information
that would be extremely helpful in resolving the mystery, even at risk to his
own neck, purely to prevent a premature resolution.
(26) Saturday 18th July
1215 & All That: A Very,
Very Short History of Magna Carta and King John
Ed West
Rollicking and highly readable gallop through the story of the Barons’
War and Magna Carta, and the Great Charter’s later importance in English law,
written with Ed’s good sense of narrative, his dry humour and his eye for an
amusing historical detail. A lot of the stuff about the early Plantagenets is
familiar to me from Dan Jones’ book, but there is still some fascinating new
detail here. Learning about the cruelty, violence, caprice and treachery of the
post-Conquest kings and their elites is a strong corrective to romanticism
about the “Age of Chivalry”. The Lionheart in particular was plainly not the preux chevalier of folk memory, while
John appears to have been quite as morally corrupt as his popular image
suggests (although there is of course an element of caveat lector when reading medieval sources, which were often
written with strongly partisan intent). Ed’s view of Magna Carta itself is
moderately Whiggish, though not a simplistic Our Island Story presentation, and tempered by realism about early
modern myth-making and the (frequently cynical) Golden Age-ism that lay behind
royal commitments to freedom and the rule of law. He also stresses – and I
would like to have read a little more on this theme – the input of the Church
into the earliest attempts to limit arbitrary rule.
(27) Saturday 25th July
The Hog’s Back Mystery
Freeman Wills Crofts
Well-crafted, intriguing and involving. A fine blend of Golden Age and
early police procedural, with the same focus on painstaking investigation and
the details of individuals’ movements as The
Cask. I preferred this, I think – the story seems tighter and more focused,
and feels more suspenseful. The final solution is ingenious and satisfying,
albeit it depends on the murderers executing an extremely intricate and
time-critical plan with total precision, and the investigator Inspector French
does have a few big strokes of luck in his detection. I think the setting – in
a part of the world I know reasonably well – helped its appeal for me.
(28) Wednesday 29th July
The Decagon House Murders
Yukito Ayatsuji
One of the earliest mysteries in the Japanese shin honkaku – or “new traditionalist” – movement, published in
1987. Fascinating to see that the Japanese are fond of the orthodox whodunit. Ayatsuji
places himself firmly and self-consciously in the Golden Age tradition, riffing
on the plot and ideas from And Then There
Were None, and naming the central characters – who are members of a mystery
fiction club – after great mystery writers. It’s not post-modern as such,
there’s no breaking of the fourth wall or any real narrative monkey business,
but it has some of the darkness and realism of later detective writing. It’s
enjoyable and unsettling and odd, and is fittingly bookended. However, the
somewhat convoluted final solution, while clever and just about solvable for
the reader with a bit of luck, isn’t much clued and relies almost entirely on a
“Well Inspector, before I’m hanged, let me explain to you how I really did it”-type
device.
I was about to
add that this would make a good film – but it is actually unfilmable as written
without giving away the final twist.
(29) Friday 31st July
The Long Divorce
Edmund Crispin
Enjoyable if unremarkable village mystery, told with wit and wry
humour. Amusingly sketched Swiss teacher, naively preoccupied with
psychoanalysis, bumped off by local religious fanatic and butcher who has
authored a spate of poison pen letters and fears exposure (in a not very
satisfactory subplot one of the village doctors sends an anonymous letter with
the aim – realised – of forcing its recipient into suicide). The setting is well
done, and the sense of time and place cleverly evoked. A well-developed and
interesting professional single woman is always welcome in this kind of tale, albeit
she is married off in the end. The detection is good, and the clueing fair; I
could have done without the melodramatic incident in which a young girl almost
falls under a train, which feels like it’s from another book entirely and does
not add much to the story.
(30) Tuesday 4th August
Black Plumes
Margery Allingham
Pleasingly atmospheric but rather turgid family mystery. Not really a
true detective story – we don’t really follow the investigation as such, but
rather see things from the perspective of one of the suspects. That’s a
strength in one sense, as we get plenty of psychological suspense and some good
characters, including a few wonderful grotesques, but it means that there isn’t
a strong narrative thread, and the young heroine is actually rather fragile and
irritating, lying to the police for reasons that strain credibility and falling
in love with a dramatically convenient but implausible alacrity. The brittle
and forced lightness of her dialogue with her young swain has not aged well.
Her sister is also a typical old-fashioned detective story woman, swooning and
irrational and having mental breakdowns at the drop of a hat.
The solution is guessable, but almost entirely
unclued, and the painstaking phonetic rendering of the Scottish detective’s accented
speech is a minor annoyance.
(31) Tuesday 11th August
Final Curtain
Ngaio Marsh
I think this is one of my favourite Marsh novels. Very entertaining and
atmospheric set-up, with Agatha Troy sent off to a preposterous stately home to
paint the portrait of a dreadful old theatrical baronet, who is then poisoned
after a birthday dinner with his mostly awful family. Jiggery-pokery with
wills, mix-ups with bottles of poison, sinister practical jokes, exhumations in
country churchyards on cold autumn nights; it’s all here. The family are
well-drawn and amusingly grotesque, although if I were Marsh’s editor I might
have suggested one or two of them be cut. The portrayal of Sir Henry Ancred’s
much younger fiancée is admirably nuanced. The reunion between Troy and Alleyn
after the latter’s absence in New Zealand during the war is fairly well done,
although the attempt to set up possible difficulties between them feels a
little half-hearted and contrived.
Plot-wise Marsh doesn’t have the masterly touch of,
say, Agatha Christie. The final reveal is rather abrupt and a little
under-explained, and doesn’t quite feel like it’s emerged organically from the
story in quite the way that AC’s denouements generally do. There’s no real
clueing of the murderer’s identity, no sense that if you went back through the
book you could see how the evidence points a certain way (Marsh sort of
acknowledges this when Fox reassures the death penalty-opposing Troy that the
actual case against the murderer is quite weak). The social attitudes are very
much of their time – there is some pretty grim snobbery from the upper-class
Ancreds and some dubious attitudes towards the “Difficult Children” who share
Ancreton with them, and the stereotypical gayness of Cedric is laid on with a
shovel. But Marsh has some great fun with trendy psychology.
(32) Wednesday 19th August
Death At The Bar
Ngaio Marsh
Enjoyable, tricksy little number set in a small and isolated Devon
village. Very much of its genre, with the Scotland Yard men summoned to an out
of the way country spot (albeit by a pub landlord, rather than the more normal dutiful
but uninspired local superintendent) where a usefully limited number of
suspects must be investigated for an intriguingly improbable crime that appears
to be merely an accident – as usual for Marsh, it’s a grotesque affair, a man
poisoned just after a dart goes through his finger. But it’s bright enough and
puzzling enough to sustain interest, despite a dreary love story, and the
ending is better than usual for Marsh, with a well-drawn cameo by a distinctly
eccentric Chief Constable livening up the proceedings. There’s considerable
dash and authorial confidence in the way she holds the solution right up to our
faces throughout the book, while surrounding it with enough trickery to
distract our attention from the fact that she is doing so. The sort-of subplot
about leftist politics is entertaining in parts but like most lefties in Golden
Age mysteries the Coombe Left Movement is rather caricatured.
Some critics of Marsh think that her mysteries tend
to suffer once Alleyn arrives on the scene; there’s something to this. He’s not
an especially interesting character in and of himself (though the interplay
between him and Fox is often quite fun, in a Wimsey-Bunter sort of way), and
Marsh’s descriptions of investigation can be quite drily forensic.
(33) Thursday 27th August
In The Hour Of Victory: The
Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson
Sam Willis
A fascinating idea for a book: take the recently rediscovered
dispatches from seven key fleet battles of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
wars, compiled in a beautiful single volume by the Admiralty after Napoleon’s
death, and use them as a jumping off point for a sparky narrative history of
what is perhaps the Royal Navy’s greatest ever series of victories: Glorious
First of June (June 1794), Cape St Vincent (February 1797), Camperdown (October
1797), the Nile (August 1798), Copenhagen (April 1801), Trafalgar (October 1805)
and San Domingo (February 1806).
Willis reproduces
and discusses many different documents regarding the various battles – flag
officers’ official dispatches to the Admiralty, boatswain’s reports, a letter
home from a French commissariat officer in Egypt, and always the so-called
“butcher’s bill”, which has an obvious human interest but can also be used as
evidence for the extent, duration and nature of a ship’s involvement in the
action. The potted character studies of the (very different) fleet commanders
and captains are invariably worth reading – in fact, you could wish they were a
little longer and more detailed – and the placing of the action at sea into the
wider context of the war is welcome. There is plenty here that I didn’t know,
for example the striking historical snippet that the Spanish launched no new
warships between 1798 and 1853, and the intricate diplomatic and strategic
background to the Battle of Copenhagen, while I was only dimly aware of
Camperdown having happened at all and had forgotten quite how remarkable a sea
officer William Bligh was. The passages outlining the weaknesses of the French
and Spanish ships – they tended to have thinner and more vulnerable hulls and
poorer handling than King’s ships – were enlightening. The story of HMS Implacable was completely new to me.
She began life as the French Duguay-Trouin, laid down in 1797 and captured at the Battle of Cape
Ortegal (Sir Richard Strachan’s post-Trafalgar mopping-up operation), and subsequently
commissioned into the RN. She performed 40 years’ active service after
Trafalgar, and survived another century as a training ship, before being
scuttled in the Channel in 1949 as a full restoration was judged too
expensive(!) in the post-war world. She remained a commissioned ship, like HMS Victory, for her entire 144-year career
in the Andrew, and was flying both French and British colours as she went down.
Her stern gallery survives in the NMM at Greenwich.
Willis emphasises
the vital role that the RN’s public image, as well as its concrete achievements,
played in maintaining the public support that was essential to the eventual
British victory, and there is some useful, though brief, background about the
workings of the naval bureaucracy and particularly the Secretaries to the
Admiralty.
A splendid
example of well-written popular history, honest about the problems of
reconstructing naval battles, though there a couple of glaring proofing errors
(Nelson was not a Rear-Admiral at Trafalgar!) and there seems to be some
disagreement about whether Sir Edward Berry was removed from the active list
after San Domingo, as Willis asserts – Wikipedia has him taking command of two
further ships and a Royal Yacht before his retirement.
(34) Thursday 27th August
Asabiyyah: What Ibn Khaldun, the
Islamic father of social science, can teach us about the world today
Ed West
Brisk Kindle Mini explaining and developing the sociological theory
first developed by Ibn Khaldun, centring on the idea of asabiyyah, which
translates as something like “fellow feeling” or “group identity” and which
appears to be a prerequisite of successful states. It is distinct from
clannishness, which limits solidarity much more closely to relations. EW argues
that one of the reasons why the Middle East continues to be violently
dysfunctional, and why liberal democracy has not taken root there, is that
there is relatively little asabiyyah – Arabs do not feel strong primary loyalty
to nations, and trust of those from outside the tribe or clan tends to be in
short supply. There are few independent institutions in civil society that
command strong allegiance, in the way that there are in Western democracies.
I’d like to read a longer book on this.
(35) Tuesday 1st September
The Orthodox Way
Kallistos Ware
Well-written and informative introduction to Orthodox Christianity,
with particular reference to Orthodoxy’s distinctive personal devotions and
emphasis on apophatic theology. Orthodox personal piety lays strong emphasis on
the radical unknowability and otherness of God, and the need for total
transformation of the whole person through asceticism, constant prayer and
renunciation. Among the most interesting parts are the explanations of how and
why Orthodox theology diverges from the Latin tradition, notably in its subtly
different view of original sin and the Immaculate Conception. Ware suggests,
presumably in line with Orthodox teaching, that the IC is “superfluous, rather
than erroneous”. I’d like to see a longer and more detailed discussion of this
point, but I think the gist of it is that the Orthodox don’t believe that we
are conceived with the stain of sin already on us, so that there was nothing
from which Mary needed to be preserved.
(36) Wednesday 9th September
Akenfield: Portrait of an
English Village
Ronald Blythe
A wonderful book, documenting the stories of people living in rural
Suffolk in the late 1960s. “Akenfield” is not a real place; the name is a
portmanteau of Akenham and Charsfield, two real-life villages close to Ipswich,
and the stories seem to come from people living in a variety of places in east
Suffolk. The youngest contributors are seventeen; the eldest are in their
eighties, meaning they were well into adulthood by the time of the First World
War. This makes for a wonderful spread of perspectives. All human life is here
– a churchgoing gravedigger who doesn’t believe in Christianity, an Oxonian
incomer and poet seeking to overcome urban alienation, a Scottish farmer who
moved to Suffolk in the 1930s, a lay magistrate reflecting on her 25 years on
the Bench, retired farm workers who can remember the days when the rural
economy was still semi-feudal (this seems to have persisted well into the
interwar years). There is tragedy and joy and humour and pathos and bathos.
Blythe lets people tell their own stories – many of the recollections are given
a brief introduction, but he describes people with humanity and tolerance and
an admirable lack of sentimentality.
All the vignettes
have their own texture and focus, many of them dealing with the details and
routine of particular trades and professions (I very much enjoyed the
blacksmith and the shepherd), but common themes do emerge. These include the
pretty grim life endured by the rural working poor right up until the Second
World War, not least because of their treatment by landowners, and the gradual
improvements in pay and conditions obtained by organisations like the National Union
of Agricultural Workers; changing patterns of social life brought about by car
ownership, greater opportunities, greater prosperity and post-war liberalism;
the massive changes in farming practices during the mid-twentieth century which
altered the physical geography of the villages and significantly reduced demand
for labour, especially unskilled labour; and the abandonment of the land for
the cities by large numbers of young men in the post-war decades of near-full
employment. Many of the contributors allude to the growing numbers of
middle-class incomers settling in the countryside.
One of the most
fascinating aspects of the book is the way in which different people assess
things so differently. In particular, assessments of how the communal life of
villages is changing vary a lot. Some people think community life is in
decline, even terminal decline. Others describe a vibrant local scene, with
clubs and associations and churches thriving. There are also interesting
contrasts in how people view “the Sixties”, the changes in the landscape, and
the changes in livestock farming practices (what we’d now call intensive
farming is the big new thing; several people mention contracts with Birdseye
and the vet ponders the ethics of battery farming).
This was probably
an important book for me to read – a warning about the perils of being too
blindly nostalgic for the pre-modern rural idyll.
(37) Saturday 12th September
Malice Aforethought
Francis Illes (Anthony Berkeley
Cox)
Entertaining and blackly comic spin on the village mystery. One of the
earliest of the “inverted whodunits”, so-called, in which the interest of the
story lies not so much in the identity, method and motive of the murderer, but
in how (and whether) their scheme unravels and they are brought to justice. The
novel also represents an evolutionary stage between the traditional puzzle
whodunit and the modern thriller, focused on psychology, suspense and the
seething hatred and casual adultery below the veneer of civilised village life
as much as – or more than – it is on plot and mystery.
We know from the get-go that Dr Edmund Bickleigh is
planning to murder his wife in the hope of marrying his mistress Madeleine.
What is particularly well done is the gradual revelation of the disconnection
between Bickleigh’s perception of the world and reality, the extent of his own
denial about the darker parts of his nature, and his fundamental sense of
inadequacy and (consequent?) egotism. The novel playfully invites you to pity
and even sympathise with him, without ever downplaying the enormity of his
crimes. The final twist – he is acquitted of the crime of which he is actually
guilty, only to be hanged for a crime he did not commit – has echoes of
Forester’s Payment Deferred and is
fitting and darkly amusing, but didn’t leave me completely satisfied, as I’m
not sure he would have been convicted of the second crime. Are we supposed to
think that Madeleine may have some hand in Denny Bourne’s death?
(38) Friday 18th September
Inspector French and the Starvel
Tragedy
Freeman Wills Crofts
Workmanlike rather than brilliant entry in the Crofts canon. A
secluded house on the Yorkshire Moors burns down, killing three people,
including an immensely rich old miser who kept his considerable fortune on the
premises. French goes north from the Yard to solve the crime, which turns out
to be a sinister (and somewhat convoluted) conspiracy with roots in another
crime years before. I actually worked out the solution to this, although
“worked out” is the wrong phrase – it was, rather, an informed guess based on
the apparent narrative trajectory towards a “twist” rather than a deduction.
It’s not particularly well-clued in the traditional Golden Age sense, but it’s
enjoyable to follow French’s dogged investigations. There is a certain charm in
mysteries which hinge on problems completely obviated by modern science – here,
notably, the impossibility of definitively identifying a badly burned body. The
final chapter, the denouement, falls a little flat. It’s a simple third person
narrative of the murder plot and its execution, supposedly based on the
murderer’s confession, but it reads too much like a separate factual account
rather than being integrated into the story of a novel as a conversation, or
perhaps a Poirot-style “here’s how it was done” lecture. Crofts occasionally
inserts some rather ham-handed and intrusive moralising, as in “French was now
determined to find the monster who did this”-type statements or the
confirmation at the very end that the villain was hanged.
(39) Monday 19th October
God’s Secret Agents
Alice Hogge
Readable and lively account of the Catholic underground in Elizabethan
and early Jacobean England. Very good general introduction to the issue (I read
it with an eye to research for my novel idea), and lots of telling and striking
vignettes about the hidden lives of the priests. The extent of the conflict
between Jesuit and secular priests on the mission was also new to me. However, Hogge
seems somewhat indulgent of the English government, insisting against rather a
lot of evidence to the contrary that Elizabeth and her ministers did not really
want to use violence or torture against Catholics. It is undoubtedly true that we
must judge people at least partly by the standards of their own times, but that
is not the same thing as diminishing their responsibility for what they did.
(40) Wednesday 21st October
Clutch of Constables
Ngaio Marsh
A thriller rather than a whodunit, and not a classic. A distant cousin
of Christie’s Orient Express, the
central idea – a gang of crooks take a cruise together for nefarious purposes
and kill a fellow passenger – is entertaining but stretches the suspension of
disbelief and isn’t very excitingly developed. There’s also a shortage of
clueing, some rather convenient “accomplices did it!” smoothing over of
logistical problems, and the narrative device of telling part of the story
though a lecture that Alleyn is giving some time later doesn’t really add a
huge amount (nor was I quite sure whether a letter posted on the evening of one
day in rural England could have reliably reached San Francisco by the morning
of the day after next). Then there is the problem I always have with
thriller-type murder mysteries, which is that professional criminals just
aren’t very interesting; there is a strong whiff of dated, hammy melodrama
accompanying the figure of the Fiendish Super Criminal Who Has Escaped From The
Police On Every Continent And Is A Master Of Disguise. Having a whole gang of
villains further undermines the appealing dynamic of the traditional detective
story. That said, Troy’s appearance is welcome and the setting is highly
atmospheric and well-described, even if the map in the front doesn’t really
make sense. The racial stuff has dated badly too; although Marsh meant well,
the black character is clumsily handled and made a sort of paragon. And why
were writers back in the day so keen to tell us that dark-skinned characters
have white teeth?
(41) Wednesday 28th October
Last Ditch
Ngaio Marsh
Marsh’s whodunits nearly always start well, and this is no different.
Roderick Alleyn Jr. has come to a small island (unnamed but clearly a
fictionalised version of one of the Channel Islands) to write a book, only for
his retreat to be interrupted by a drug-smuggling conspiracy and the murder of
a local woman. Alleyn pere arrives on the scene to investigate with the loyal
Fox.
But her books
also very often lose their way in the second half, with poor clueing and loose
plot leading to an unsatisfying denouement, and this happens here. Roderick
Jr’s flirtation with the wife of a family friend strikes a very odd and
implausible note. Great swathes of the novel are taken up with the rather
boring heroin-smuggling subplot, which feels like a misguided attempt at
topicality (the book was written in the mid-1970s) and has literally nothing to
do with the murder. The villains are crudely-drawn, almost cartoonish, and the
portrayal of the drug-addicted Jones very hackneyed.
The portrayal of the murder victim as a
one-dimensional, sensual, stupid good-time girl leaves a bad taste in the
mouth. The identity of the murderer is plausible, and guessable, but again
there’s not much sense of the solution being woven into, and emerging from, the
book’s overall narrative. If he hadn’t left a posthumous confession after
killing himself, it’s hard to see how he would have been found out at all,
given the state of the evidence. He is at least a memorable character, a
half-mad religious extremist.
(42) Saturday 7th
November
One Summer: America 1927
Bill Bryson
Bryson has carved out a niche for himself as an engaging and versatile
non-fiction author. He made his name as a travel writer, but actually this
year’s The Road To Little Dribbling
is his first true travel book since Down
Under (2000). In the last fifteen years he has written, inter alia, a short African travelogue
for charity, a volume of quasi-memoirs, a book about Shakespeare, the excellent
popular science explainer A Short History
Of Nearly Everything, and the social history At Home, which examined the development of private life using his
Norfolk Rectory home as a jumping-off point. One Summer adopts a similar conceit, using the world-changing
events of the eventful summer of 1927 to open up a wider examination of the
United States in the 1920s. In fact, come to think of it, The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid did the same thing with
Bryson’s childhood experiences and the 1950s.
Two dominant
themes of the book are aviation and baseball. May of 1927 saw Lindbergh’s
record-breaking transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, which changed everything
for the then small and underdeveloped US aviation industry, and that year’s
baseball season was an astonishingly successful one for the New York Yankees
and in particularly their batters Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who transformed
baseball forever in the 1920s with their powerful hitting. I never knew the
full context of Lindbergh’s flight – the Orteig Prize – and the extraordinary
number of pioneering aviators attempting various feats of daring, often with
fatal consequences.
But there are lots of other strands too – the
growth of the sensationalist press, the crazy and unsustainable economic growth
of the 1920s, Prohibition and crime (especially the Sacco and Vanzetti case,
and the anarchist terror campaigns), the rise of the automotive industry (with
a special focus on Henry Ford, who seems to have quite outstandingly odd), and
the increasing power and influence of Hollywood (1927 was notable for the first
“talkie”). We are also introduced to many of the key political figures of the
time – Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, for example – and some of the
movers and shakers in finance who made the mistakes that helped lead to the
Wall Street Crash, notably Charles Rist, Montagu Norman, Hjalmar Schacht, and
Benjamin Strong, representing the central banks of France, Britain, Germany and
the US respectively, who met on Long Island in summer 1927 and made the
disastrous decision to lower interest rates. Bryson has long had an eye for the
eccentric and memorable character, and there are plenty to choose from here.
Almost everyone of consequence in the US in the 1920s seems to have been at
least a little bit peculiar, unpleasant or monomaniacal.
The over-arching narrative of the book, insofar as
there is one, is the emergence of the United States as the world’s financial,
cultural, and political powerhouse. If the twentieth century was the American
century, then the 1920s were the point at which it became clear that this was
going to be the case. It’s an endlessly interesting book, if perhaps a little
overlong and unfocused. I also found myself wishing for a glossary of baseball
terms at times.
(43) Wednesday 18th November
Sweet Danger
Margery Allingham
This was another frustrating read from Allingham. Not really a mystery
so much as a thriller or adventure story, with a suitably unbelievable set-up, shadowy
financiers pulling the strings of hired toughs, and an extravagantly
implausible McGuffin. The dated Thirties potboiler with vast gangs levelling
revolvers and suchlike just isn’t a genre I particularly enjoy. A rather good
setting – an isolated Suffolk village, site of a demolished manor house – and
some excellent moments, but in general it seemed unfocused and overstaffed (you
could almost feel Allingham trying to keep an eye on all ten members of the
goodies’ team and give them things to do). Campion is constantly on the verge
of being much too irritating to be a good central character. The army turning
up at the end to save the day was like something out of a Famous Five, and the
subplot with the sinister doctor, though entertainingly macabre, felt like
something from another book entirely, and fizzled disappointingly. However,
there is a very good female character, who is mechanically-minded, independent
and courageous.
(44) Thursday 26th November
Blandings Castle and Elsewhere
PG Wodehouse
A dozen short stories, mostly featuring Blandings, but also a single
Bobbie Wickham tale and some Mr Mulliner stories, which I’ve not encountered
before and were highly entertaining, if not quite as wonderful as the Blandings
saga. Sheer escapist bliss, joyously funny and good-natured.
(45) Tuesday 1st December
Galahad at Blandings
PG Wodehouse
An unread Blandings! It’s the usual wonderful nonsense about love
affairs and monstrous aunts and comic misunderstandings. Having read most of
the Blandings novels now, there is a perhaps just a hint of repetitiveness here,
but it barely matters.
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