Harriet Devine's Blog

The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes (1940)

This was a re-read - or a re-re-read -or maybe even a re-re-re-read. I never get tired of the erudite, witty crime novels of Micheal Innes, who in real life was J.I.M.Stewart, an Oxford University Professor. The best of them are the ones in which he incorporates his literary interests into the plot, and this one is an example. The novel starts with a poet - one who Inspector Appleby describes as the 'Cow-and-Gate poet' because his poems are as mild and digestible as baby food - meeting an unexpected death. A chapter or two later we are on a train. A young woman called Sheila Grant, travelling to Scotland, is intrigued by a conversation between two men who are sharing her carriage. The conversation turns to poetry, and before long one of them is quoting a verse from a poem by Swinburne - or is it Swinburne? It certainly sounds like the mellifluous verse of that Victorian poet, but Sheila knows the poem in question and remarks that the verse is misquoted. This turns out to have been a mistake, and she is captured and held prisoner as soon as she gets off the train. There was a secret message in the misquoted passage, and now Sheila knows too much. For this is the beginning of WW2 and the men who capture Sheila turn out to be German spies.

In fact this is really a spy thriller rather than a conventional crime novel, and none the worse for that. It has definite shades of The Thirty-nine Steps, John Buchan's 1915 novel of German spies and chases around the Highlands. Appleby is working for Intelligence, and he knows the enemy has a sinister plot to destroy a vital oil refinery. Most of it takes place in the wilds of Scotland, and there are numerous foreign villains lurking about in unexpected places, lots of fake identities, and a  good deal of action in railway trains, rail trucks, and speed boats. Sheila meets up with Appleby to help in the race against time, soon aided by the attractive young man who aided her escape.  It must have been written in 1939 as war is on the horizon but has not yet broken out. The misquoted Swinburne, of course, provides an essential clue to the solution of the mystery.

A fascinating historical read then, and so well and intelligently written. It makes me think that readers in 1940 must have been rather better educated than many people today. Or maybe Innes was read by a rather select audience. Anyway this is a rather brief contribution to Simon and Kaggy's 1940 Club, an event I never miss (unless I do). Here's a link to the reviews page on Simon's blog https://www.stuckinabook.com/1940-club-all-your-reviews-1940club/#comment-111321

 

 

 

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (1940)

This is a contribution to Simon and Kaggsy's 1940s Club. I read the book back in 2007 on Simon's recommendation, so it seemed only right to resurrect my review from those far off days. So here's a version of it.

Written by Frank Baker (of whom I certainly had not heard) in the 1940s, this is described on the cover as 'A Strange and Charming Book'. Strange it certainly is, but charming does not really encompass the effect of this work, which has taken me a long time to read because I didn't find it at all comfortable. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- I kept returning to it and dipping in -- but it was not the sort of book I felt like curling up with in bed of an evening, my preferred time and place for reading.

Narrated by young Norman Huntley, an organist in a cathedral town, it tells the story of the eponymous Miss H, who is, essentially, a creation of Norman's own somewhat bizarre imagination. A creation, though, who lives and breathes and affects Norman's life in a number of ways, many of them far from comfortable. On holiday in Ireland with his friend Henry, Norman has visited a small out-of-the way church and, in conversation with the vicar, claimed to know an elderly lady, Miss Hargreaves, who he has invented on the spot. Egged on by Henry, he endows her with many eccentricities, including a parrot and a hip-bath which she carries everywhere with her. Imagine his surprise, and indeed horror, when, back home, he gets at message to say Miss H is arriving at his local station. Thinking, and hoping, that this is some kind of joke, he turns up and there she is, just as he described her, complete with parrot and bath. There is, certainly, much comedy of a slightly disturbing kind in their early encounters and conversations -- every time Norman invents some new facet of their supposed earlier acquaintance Miss H immediately 'remembers' it, but her memory appears to be extremely vague on subjects Norman has not mentioned himself. Norman is (understandably) appalled by this turn of events, and tries his best to escape Miss H, who is deeply hurt by his rejection of her. His friends and family are shocked by his apparent rudeness to this sweet old lady, who, they believe, he must have had some kind of sinister designs on. Things go from bad to worse, and Norman's state of mind becomes increasingly desperate and unstable. In the end he finds a solution of sorts, but I am not going to say more about this.

This book is really challenging in some ways. Mainly, I think, because it provides no easy answers to what has actually taken place. A stray reference at one point to JW Dunne's 1927 book An Experiment with Time provides a clue, I think. This book, which I remember my parents reading with great excitement, is described by Amazon as a work which "explores the relationship between dreams, time, and reality. It shows how a scientific experiment probes the nature of time and the barrier dividing past and future, and offers a scientific argument for human immortality". I've never read it myself, but think I might now have a go. But of course you don't have to get into all this in order to enjoy Miss H, which is really a remarkable and mind-bending read. A film was apparently made starring Margaret Rutherford, and I couldn't help picturing that wonderful actress as I read of the escapades of this extraordinary fictional character.

Simon's own resurrected review can be seen here https://www.stuckinabook.com/

 

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham (1929 Club)

I'm resurrecting this sadly neglected blog in order to join in Simon and Kaggsy's latest Club. And when I looked for Books Published in 1929 (thank you Wikipedia) there was immediately no contest. As I've probably said many times on here, I have loved Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels since my mother first introduced me to them when I was about twelve and have been reading and re-reading them ever since. If you'd asked me a week ago I'd have told you that I'd read them all, so imagine my surprise when I discovered I'd never read this, the very first of them. And what a revelation it was. 

If you're not familiar with this series of novels, Albert Campion is what would be known today as the series detective. But he's a most unusual kind of detective - a private one, certainly, but one willing to take on any kind of challenge from a wide variety of sources - in this novel he's working for His Majesty's Government, but at other times he may be associated with Scotland Yard, or helping an old family with inheritance problems, and more besides. He has acquaintances in the criminal fraternity too, and his manservant, Magersfontein Lugg, is a reformed burglar. The books are better described as mysteries as murder doesn't always feature in them, and Campion himself is a bit of a mystery - careful reading of the series will reveal certain hints, but all we know for sure is that he's the younger son of an aristocratic family and that his real name is Rudolph. It's also often said that as a character he was originally conceived as being a spoof on Dorothy Sayers' Peter Whimsey. In this novel, his first appearance, this does seem very plausible, as he appears bizarrely effete and foolish, given to making silly jokes and apparent non-sequiturs. Underneath this rather effete exterior, though, he is revealed to have a sharp mind and the capacity to take drastic and effective action when needed.

The biggest surprise here, though, is that Campion is only a minor character in the novel. He does play an important part in one episode, but he disappears before the end and he gives no indication that he will turn into the series detective. That job, it seems, was intended by Allingham to be given to Dr George Abbershaw, Home Office pathologist, whose quick wits and good sense not only extricate the rest of the characters from a very dangerous situation but also solve the final mystery - who killed Colonel Coombe? Abbershaw is an attractive character, but apparently Allingham's publishers were so taken with Campion that they insisted he should be given the leading part in subsequent novels. Good thinking on their part!

So what's this novel about? It's a bit of a romp, set in an isolated country mansion called Black Dudley, where a house party is taking place. The guests are a bunch of young society people, male and female. Campion is among them, but it turns out nobody knows who he is or who invited him, so everyone is highly suspicious of him.  The guests soon discover they have been infiltrated by members of an international criminal gang, run from who knows where by the mysterious arch villain Simister (who will reappear in subsequent novels). The two men who have found their way to Black Dudley are a German calling himself Dawlish but unmasked by Campion as Eberhard Von Faber, a wholly ruthless and all round nasty piece of work, and his sidekick, the shifty Gideon. During an evening party game, Colonel Coombe, Black Dudley's owner, is murdered, and the crooks reveal that they are searching for some vital papers which have somehow been mislaid in the house. The villains will stop at nothing to recover the papers, and that includes violence and enforced imprisonment of the young guests, none of whom appear to know anything about the lost papers. So there are violent physical fights, shootings, secret passages, imprisonments in impenetrable rooms, a deranged religious maniac maid, attempted arson, a car chase, and the intervention of the local hunt. 

I'm not sure whether, if I had read this one first, I'd have been as keen to pursue the rest of the series. It all seems a bit juvenile, and is very firmly a product of its time, though none the worse for that. But as someone so familiar with the later novels, it was fascinating to see Campion in this first incarnation. Over time, of course, he matures, and shows his abilities both as a man of authority and a man of action. I'd be hard pressed to say which of the 20 or so novels was my favourite, but I have a tremendous soft spot for Sweet Danger (1933), partly because it was the first one I ever read, but also because in the novel Campion meets the feisty young Amanda Fitton, who some years later will become his wife. I was also deeply impressed a few years ago by Traitor's Purse (1941), which is more of a psychological thriller and a superb one at that, and often considered the finest book of the series. But I've loved them all, even this rather strange first novel, which I'm delighted to have had the chance to read.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954 Club)

 

This is a rejig of a review I wrote for Shiny New Books last year, when Daunt Books reprinted the novel, which was of course published in 1954. I couldn't resist adding to the splendid list of all the books that have been written about - 1954 was certainly a bumper year.

Who Was Changed and Who was Dead is considered by many to be Barbara Comyms'  best novel. I’m not sure whether this is true – I’d probably have voted for The Vet’s Daughter – but in any case it is a remarkable book, which I was delighted to have the opportunity to re-read.

From its strikingly memorable opening sentence, ‘The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows’, we are immediately pulled into a world which is both strange and wholly believable. It’s the first of June, ‘about seventy years ago’, and the village is flooded. Three dead peacocks float round the garden and the hens are committing suicide, dropping one by one from their perches into the flood water. Angry Grandmother Willoweed is fretting about her roses, and wondering when she will get her lunch. Her son Ebin rows his daughters round the garden:

Strange objects of pitiful aspect floated past: the bloated body of a drowned sheep, the wool withering about in the water, a white bee-hive with the perplexed bees still around; a newborn pig, all pink and dead; and the mournful bodies of the peacocks.

The flood waters disappear, not before Grandmother Willoweed has dragged the children under the dining room table to escape a thunderstorm, while demanding that the maids do their job: ‘those lazy bitches must make cocoa’. She is a monstrous tyrant, bullying her servants, her son and her grandchildren, and refusing to walk on land she doesn’t own – later, she is reluctantly forced to allow herself to be carried to a funeral she can’t get out of attending. The whole household is under her thumb, and the main plot of the novel is concerned with how, or if, they will manage to escape from her iron grip and to forge new and more satisfying lives. We will indeed find out by the end who was changed and who was dead.

Meanwhile, however, the village is struck by another, more mysterious, disaster. People start dying. The first is the wife of Dr Hatt, who dies of a sudden and inexplicable nosebleed. The doctor is devastated, looking round dreamily at the funeral mourners: ‘They looked like bloated, sleepy flies at the end of the season. They were imprisoned by tombstones tumbling in all directions’. The subsequent deaths are even more frightening and inexplicable, and mostly involve madness and suicide. Ebin is actually an unwilling witness to one of them in a terrifying scene in which the butcher leaps around on a bridge, shouting and gesticulating, then sharpening his knife on the stones of the bridge before using it to cut his own throat. Ebin is completely traumatised by what he has seen, but later the same day he sits down to write an account of it (‘Mad Village’) which gets published in the newspaper he used to work for, thereby re-launching a career he thought was over and done with.

All this may sound as if Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead might be a grim or depressing novel, but nothing can be further from the truth. It’s often very funny, especially if you like irony and black humour. And there are some peaceful moments amid the chaos. Ebin’s three children, Emma, Hattie and Dennis, manage to enjoy their lives in the idyllic countryside, where they can row on the river and forget the strange occurrences going on around them: Comyns apparently based the village on Bidford-on-Avon, where she grew up. And, unlike many of her other novels, it does have an upbeat ending. 

So it’s partly her ability to mix the everyday with the gothic and grotesque that makes her novels stand out, but most of all it’s her unique style and perspective. Her narrators, whether first or third person, observe and describe the world around them with a curiously objective naivety, even when what they are seeing is potentially upsetting or frightening. If you’ve read her before, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat.

For many more reviews of 1954 books, check out Simon's blog Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

 

Maigret Goes to School (1954 Club)

I'm having a bit of binge on Maigret at the moment, watching episodes of the 1960s TV series with Rupert Davies as the celebrated police inspector. So it was easy to choose a book to review for Simon and Kaggsy's 1954 Club - you could probably find a Maigret for every year of it, given Simenon's incredible output (75 Maigret novels and 28 short stories). I haven't watched  this one yet - it will interesting to see what the TV adaptation is like. I read it first in 2017, after I'd  rescued it from a terrible fate  - it was headed for the tip. And for such a slim little volume, it gave me the most enormous pleasure, so it's good to revisit it.

It's the first day of spring, and everyone, the police included, is in a holiday mood. The sun is shining and the air feels surprisingly warm. In the police station at the Quai des Orfevres, Maigret notices an unremarkable, slightly unattractive man sitting patiently in the waiting room the police know as Purgatory. He's been there for some time and shows no sign of leaving. Eventually Maigret discovers that he is Gastin, a schoolmaster from the Charente, a seaside region in Western France, who is suspected of having killed an unpleasant old woman, his neighbour. He's come to ask the famous detective for help. There's no evidence that he did the murder, but he and his wife are universally disliked in the village - they are seen as foreigners, having moved from a different area, so they have been seized upon as responsible. Will Maigret come back with him and find the real murderer?

Under normal circumstances the detective would say no, but the springlike weather, and memories of holidays by the sea, eating mussels and drinking the local white wine, are enough to sway the balance, and soon the two are on the train heading for the village. Naturally enough things are not the same as in Maigret's happy memories - mussels are out of season, and the wine is rather coarse and strong (and he drinks far too much of it). Even worse, the sea is not visible from the village. Soon after his arrival, Gastin is arrested, and Maigret is left staying in a seedy old inn and trying to make sense of the complicated relationships between the inhabitants, several of whom seem to be permanently drunk. There are no obvious suspects for the crime, which everyone feels was well deserved and long overdue.

However a young boy, son of the local butcher, has given a statement saying he saw Gastin coming out of his garden shed just at the time the murder was committed. It was done with a .22 rifle, a weapon owned by most of the young boys in the village, which makes things difficult. Maigret interviews people, if they are sober enough, and spends a lot of time talking to the boys, mostly aged around 12. He also enjoys watching the old men in the inn, realising they are quite a bit like children themselves, still interacting in the ways they did when they were at school together. Eventually of course he solves the case, and rings Mme Maigret to say he's catching the afternoon train home. He decides they'll go and see a film together as soon as possible.

This is a totally charming book. Yes, a murder was committed but honestly the woman was asking for it, and neither the other inhabitants nor the reader is going to feel too sorry. Nothing in the village is going to change, but I guess that's French villages in the 1950s for you. I live in a French village myself, and everyone seems pretty friendly and well behaved though no doubt there are the usual animosities under the surface. 

Simenon apparently said Rupert Davies was 'the perfect Maigret', and I certainly prefer him to Michael Gambon, who played him in the 1990s - and the. less said about Rowan Atkinson's recent attempt the better. But for real French style and authenticity, my vote would go to Bruno Cremer, in the French version that ran from 1991 to 2005. But best of all, of course, is to read the books!

Lily by Rose Tremain on Shiny

I was utterly bowled over by this book. If you spotted the cover and had never heard of Rose Tremain, you would probably take it for a 19th-century novel, but of course it's her latest novel, which takes place between 1850 and 1867. However, as a celebrated historical novelist, Tremain has no trouble in taking the reader back in time and plunging them into the sights sounds smells and behaviour of the era. As it happens. her previous book, Angel of Mercy, was also set in the Victorian period, so, as she has said, she had a great deal of research ready made. That's one thing to like and admire, but the plot itself is extraordinarily gripping, or at least it was to me.

Lily is a foundling. Her unknown mother left her by the gate of a park in East London where, by a lucky chance, she was found by a young policeman, Sam Trench. He carries her through the night and deposits her at the London Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields. From there, following the orphanage policy, she is transferred to a farm in Suffolk where she spends her next six years, basking happily in the love of her foster mother. So it's a terrible shock when one day she is taken to London and placed in the harsh and cruel hands of the administrators. Beatings are common, and the children are punished for grieving for their lost foster-mothers. Lily is picked out for special torment by Nurse Maude, whose abuse of her over the years is about as bad as you could possibly imagine. 

All this information is fed to the reader slowly, and interspersed with an account of Lily who, nearly seventeen, has left the orphanage and is employed as a wig maker by the successful Belle Prettywood, a part-time courtesan with a heart of gold. Lily's life should be happy, but, as we learn on the first page, she is wracked with guilt and fear owing to the fact that she has committed a murder. Again it takes time for the circumstances to be revealed, though given the book's subtitle, it's not hard to get an idea. If this wasn't bad enough, Lily has met her rescuer Sam Trench, now a police superintendent, who proves to have been watching over her from a distance all her life. The two draw closer and closer, despite the fact that Sam is married. But worst of all, of course, is that Lily fears that she will one day feel forced to confess her guilt to Sam, with the inevitable result that she will end up on the gallows.

I was so completely caught up in Lily's story that I actually put the book aside for a few days before I could bring myself to read the concluding chapter, in which her final fate is revealed. I'm obviously not going to say what happens, but there' some reason for cautious optimism. What Tremain achieves so brilliantly here is the way she shows Lily's inner life as she struggles with all the conflicting elements in every aspect of her life. Here's what I wrote in my Shiny review, published a few days ago:

With so much poverty and distress and suffering Lily could easily have become a misery memoir., but Lily, despite her childhood trauma and the guilt that is hanging over her manages to retain an innocence, a goodness of spirit and a capacity for joy.

If you want to see what else I said about it, my review is here.

Mice Reading

Chris Dunn is a British watercolorist and book illustrator. I'm guessing from his bio here that he's in his thirties. He's had a great deal of success and recognition since he graduated in 2008. You can see many more of his extraordinarily brilliant paintings and illustrations on his website.

Girl with Book

This mesmerising portrait shows Vera Alexeievna Shevtsova, the future wife of Russian painter Ilya Efimovich Repin  (1844 – 1930). I think this was painted in 1869, when he first met her - she would have been fourteen. They married in 1874 and had four children but sadly his frequent infidelities meant their marriage was not happy. Repin was one of the most celebrated Russian artists in the 19th century.

Which Way by Theordora Benson on Shiny

Just a quick shout out for my newest Shiny review. This is one of the latest batch of the British Library's Women Writers series. It was published in 1931 and is the story of Claudia, a highly intelligent but totally feckless young woman. whose life is spent in gossip and  cocktail parties. Three eligible men loom up in her life: which one will she end up with? This clever, witty novel gives three versions of her future, based on which choice she makes from three competing invitations. 

As I say in my review, 'There’s so much to enjoy in this delightful, thought-provoking book. As always there’s useful introductory material and a helpful Afterword by Shiny co-founder Simon Thomas. A great addition to a great series'. You can read the whole review here - or better yet, read the book!

Woman with Book and Large Cat

This is called 'The Obsequious Persian' - the cat, obviously, rather than the lady - painted by Charles Daniel Ward in 1911. I have a couple of obsequious cats so often find myself in just this position when I'm trying to read.