Harriet Devine's Blog

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.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Shiny review)

I've been silent on here for so long I'm almost ashamed to show my face. I've started several posts but abandoned them for whatever reason. Anyway I'm breaking my silence to tell you about a book I've just reviewed on Shiny New Books, and which will undoubtedly be on my list of my favourite books of 2021. I've loved Elizabeth Strout since I first discovered her novels back in 2017 and have reviewed three of them on Shiny. This one belongs to what seems to be a trilogy - the first two being My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible. In the unlikely event that you're not familiar with these, Lucy is a writer who lives in New York. That's a long way from her childhood home in Amgash Illinois, where she was brought up in household of terrible poverty, deprivation and abuse. I hasten to say, though, that she never writes bitterly about the conditions, or about her parents, despite the often unnamed horror to which she was subjected. 

In this latest novel, Lucy has reached the age of 63. She's very successful. She has two married daughters who she loves very much, and she has managed to maintain a relationship of sorts with their father, her long-ago ex-husband William Gerhardt. Oh William! tells the story of an episode in their lives -William has discovered he has a half-sister who lives in Maine, and persuades Lucy to accompany him on a sort of road trip.

But the novel does much more than just tell the story of their journey. What it's really about is the relationship between these two people, which has deepened into a profound, if not uncomplicated, friendship. Here's what I said in the review:

As for William, the father of her daughters, to whom she was married for twenty years, she sometimes hates him, sometimes pities him, sometimes loves him. But their relationship is undoubtedly a deep one, probably a better friendship than they had during their marriage, since William was serially unfaithful. Now, however, he confides his frequent night terrors to Lucy, telling her that he gets through them by reminding himself that he can always call her, no matter what the hour. It’s Lucy he calls when his third wife walks out on him without warning, shockingly removing furniture and rugs but leaving behind the expensive vase William had given her for Christmas. And when Lucy’s beloved second husband dies, it’s William who she calls first and who comes round to comfort and sit with her.

This is a beautiful, moving novel, written in Strout's signature simple prose - short sentences, uncomplicated vocabulary, lots of exclamation marks. The prose may be simple, but the feelings it describes are not. If you'd like to read my review, here's the link.

Woman with Book

This is 'October' by the celebrated French artist Jacques Joseph (or James) Tissot (1836-1902). He moved to London in 1871 and became much sought after for his beautiful paintings of society women. His St John's Wood house apparently had 'a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors'.