Harriet Devine's Blog

A Shilling for Candles

Josephine Tey is one of those so-called Queens of Crime who flourished in the middle years of the twentieth century. Why this period should have seen such an explosion of talented women writing crime novels I do not know, though I'm sure there are theories to explain it. But you only have to think of Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and my own favourite Margery Allingham , to get the idea. Anyway, Josephine Tey was not in fact called Josephine Tey at all -- her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, though she never used this name for publication. She also sometimes wrote as Gordon Daviot, and it was this name she used for her massively successful play, Richard of Bordeaux, in 1932. But she is best remembered now as a crime writer, and her best novels, The Franchise Affair (which Sarah Waters has said was part of her inspiration for The Little Stranger) and the wonderful Daughter of Time, which, if you have not read, you really should. A Shilling for Candles, first published in 1936, begins with the discovery of a body, that of a young and famous film actress, Christine Clay. The chief suspect is a young man, Robin Tisdall, who has spent the past week with Clay in a remote cottage close to the beach where her body is discovered. Various other possibilities present themselves: Clay's husband Edward Champneis ("pronounced Chins"), a wealthy English aristocrat is one, and an American songwriter another. But Inspector Grant puts his money on Tisdall, who manages to escape and go on the run, aided by Erica Burgoyne, the young and sparky daughter of the local Chief Constable. Needless to say the final denouement is a surprise, and some might say not a wholly convincing one. But this hardly spoils the enjoyment, or it didn't spoil mine, anyway.

Generally speaking when you read these classic detective novels you are called upon to suspend all thoughts of what is so hideously called political correctness. So I was rather pleasantly surprised to find the following expostulation in the mouth of Jason Harmer:

"Oh yes, you don't have to say it all again. England's a country of complete tolerance. She makes no difference between races. It doesn't matter to an Englishman what creed you believe in or what the shade of your skin is....Did it ever occur to you, Inspector, that you're the only people who've really kept us out? Kept us in our place. That's your pet expression and that describes it. No mixing. No marrying. Infra dig to marry a Jew if he has less than a hundred thousand. And not so hot then. You're the only country in the world where a Jew is unmistakable. A German Jew looks like a German as often as not, a Russian Jew looks like a Russian. The countries have taken them into themselves. But an English Jew looks like a Jew. And you call it tolerance".

Hmmm. Interesting, don't you think?

It turns out Hitchcock made a film supposedly based on this novel. It was called Young and Innocent and you can, amazingly enough, watch it for free on The Internet Archive, a website I had no idea existed until this morning. However the plot was hacked about so much that it bears little resemblance to the novel. I wonder what Tey thought about that.

Woman Reading

It's a while since I put up a painting -- here is one I like a lot. It was painted by an artist from Czechoslovakia by the name of Tavik Frantisek Simon (1877-1942). I think the composition is realy interesting -- the figure of Vilma (for that is her name) is actually confined to quite a small part of the whole canvas and yet your eye is drawn to her first -- or mine was, anyway. Then you start looking round the rest of the room -- her little bookshelf, nicely placed so she can just reach up for another book, the comfortable cushions and the lovely wallpaper, the vase of peonies, the view through the open window. I also like the fact that she has been writing a letter but has decided she would rather read a book -- or that is how I'm interpreting it -- a woman after my own heart.

Unloveable Narrators

Last month, thanks to Simon of Stuck in a Book, I joined a reading group. We met last night and this was the book we discussed. Written by a distinguished academic and well-known novelist, this is the story of Olivia, who, while still a teenager, has to deal with the death of her committed Quaker mother. Her mother has expressed the wish to be buried in the garden of the house where she and her family have lived for hundreds of years (and yes, if you are wondering, this is legal, as this article explains). While digging her mother's grave, Olivia uncovers a female skeleton, apparently several hundreds of years old, and wearing a cruel metal bridle around her jaw. Olivia grows up to become an academic, and discovers the identity of this woman through her research -- she turns out to be a 17th century Quaker mystic, whose high profile public preaching has made her a threat to the Quaker establishment. The more Olivia explores the history and background to these events the further she gets drawn in to the story, and she finally discovers unexpected links with her own family history.

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it. Certainly it was a nice idea -- in 1999, when Stevie Davies wrote this novel, she had recently finished a non-fictional study, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution 1640 - 1660, which clearly formed the basis for Impassioned Clay, written the following year. Sad to report, then, that the novel was not much liked by anyone in the group. I'm not in the business of rubbishing books on this blog and I am not going to do so now, but the discussion did raise an interesting and important point. Primary among peoples' objections to the novel was that everyone intensely disliked the central character, who is also the narrator. Now obviously we must assume that Stevie Davies knew that Olivia was not an attractive personality -- she is intense, angry, frustrated and bitter,  and remains so throughout the novel. But should this have spoiled our enjoyment? Surely there must be lots of books we have all liked and admired in which the central character is unpleasant in one way or another. This is bothering me a lot as in fact I can't think of any off the top of my head though I feel sure that this is a literary device which has been used and is probably well-known to everyone but me. I can of course think of characters who have bad points, but usually they either have redeeming features, or we are invited to feel sorry for them, or they develop in some way as the work progresses -- think of Scrooge, or Emma, to name but two. None of these get-outs really apply to Olivia, though. Can you think of any books you have liked in which the central character/narrator remains resolutely unloveable? If so please put me out of my misery.

Would you give 10% of your earnings?

This man is Dr Toby Ord and he has set up an organisation called Giving What We Can. Maybe you read about him this weekend? Essentially he has pledged to give as much as a third of his income for the rest of his life to help fight poverty in the developing world. As a teacher of Ethics at Oxford University he expects to earn quite a lot of money, and reckons he might be able to give away as much as £1 million. One thing he said that really made me think was that most people would feel they had done something pretty special if they managed to save one person's life -- but he hopes to save the lives of hundreds. Now he is asking others to pledge to do the same, or to give at least 10% of their lifetime earnings.

Of course many people are sceptical about the value of giving to charity, and argue that little of the money reaches the people it is intended for.  Toby Ord's website suggests several charities which offer the best use of donations, and deals with many of the possible objections to foreign aidin a section called Myths About Aid:

• Myth 1.   ‘We already spend a vast amount on foreign aid’
• Myth 2.   ‘We have already spent so much and it has had no effect’
• Myth 3.   ‘Because it leads to overpopulation, aid only increases the problems’
• Myth 4.   ‘Aid is useless due to corruption in the governments who receive it’
• Myth 5.   ‘Aid just makes developing countries dependent on handouts’
• Myth 6.   ‘The problem is so large, my giving can make no real difference’
• Myth 7.   ‘Charity begins at home: we should solve our own problems first’
• Myth 8.   ‘We don't need charity; we need political action’

You can read more about Toby Ord and his plans here and here, but don't judge him and his plans simply on the basis of newspaper articles -- take a look at the website. I'm impressed, but I wonder what others think? And, you may be thinking, am I going to join in? In fact I already give to a charity in India which I know passes all the money that is donated straight to the various causes it is intended for.

The Sweet Dove Died

I've read many, perhaps most, of Barbara Pym's novels, some of them twice at least. But I had never read this one until a couple of days ago. As you may know, Barbara Pym wrote six wonderful novels in the 1950s, each one an absolute gem, funny, touching, and perceptive. Though she was not recognised as the exceptional talent she is now seen as, she had some success. Then she wrote another, An Unsuitable Attachment, and it was turned down by no less than twenty publishers. There's little doubt that this was absolutely devastating for her. And it was in the wake of this great disappointment that, in 1970, she wrote The Sweet Dove Died. Supposedly based partly on a relationship she had with a much younger antique dealer, this is the story of Leonora Eyre, a fading beauty. Wealthy, self-centred, somewhat lacking in intelligence, Leonora has always traded on her looks and charm and enjoyed the many ageing admirers who come and take her out for delightful little dinners and make her presents of flowers, books, and small Victorian antiques. As the novel begins she has just met two antique dealers, 60-ish widower Humphrey and his beautiful 20-something nephew James. Humphrey, predictably, falls for Leonora but Leonora falls for James. So begins a curious triangular relationship -- all, of course, perfectly celibate though not entirely so by the wshes of some of those involved. Things become increasingly complicated when Leonora discovers that James has a girlfriend of sorts, the rather shabbily dressed Phoebe. She is just about able to deal with this development, but is entirely defeated when James comes back from a holiday in Spain having formed a relationship with Ned, a ruthlessly attractive American academic.

Although all this will sound fairly familiar to lovers of Barbara Pym, it is the saddest Pym novel I have ever read. At her best, and here I suppose I must mean in the earlier novels, she can make me laugh aloud and I have often done so in public places, much to my own embarrassment. Here I smiled sometimes, but the mood is much darker. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but I enjoyed it less than I had hoped, I suppose. She is a wonderful writer, but I wouldn't recommend this to someone who was new to her novels, as I think they would get a false impression. I shall have to re-read one of the early ones to cheer myself up.

A very nice tea

It's strange to think of now, but there was a time when I really didn't like the sound of this new-fangled thing called a blog. It was an ugly sounding word and I didn't think I wanted to read about other peoples' lives online. I have no idea now what it was that changed my mind, or at least interested me enough to make me want to have a look. What I do remember was that the first blog I ever read was dovegreyreader scribbles. Corny though it may sound, I was hooked immediately. I started writing some comments, and when, some time later, I very nervously decided to venture into the blogging waters on my own, it was Lynne of dgr who encouraged me to have a go and to keep on going. I now read quite a few other blogs, many of them excellent, entertaining and informative, but I've kept on reading dgr and would say without question that it has to be top of my own list of favorites. Today for the first time I met Lynne in person, here in Oxford. We had tea in Brown's Restaurant, a very choice venue, though honestly I think we'd have enjoyed ourselves just as much in Brown's Cafe, a rather more modest establishment in the Covered Market. We chattered away for a good couple hours, about books, and her new job, and my new job, and writers, and health, and more besides. It was fun. And I came away with a book, about which more soon.

Baroness James

  "The reader can expect to find a central mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects each with credible motive, means and opportunity for the crime, a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it, and a solution at the end of the book which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented by the writer with deceptive cunning but essential fairness".

So says this remarkable woman, whose portrait here, if you gaze at it for a moment, conveys something of her extraordinary intelligence, confidence and humanity. This is Baroness James of Holland Park, better known to her devoted readers for the past forty seven years as PD James. She is not, in the quotation above, writing specifically about her own fiction, though obviously she might well be. Born in 1920, she is the author of twenty books, the last one of which, The Private Patient, was published at the end of last year. If you do the maths you will see that she was 88 years old. I wonder how many other writers continued to produce fiction of this quality at such an age? Not many, I'm guessing.

So what is her secret? Of course this is a completely unanswerable question. She does give some indications of her own writing practice on her website where there is a page called Mystery Writing Lessons.   Here you can learn some things, such as the fact that she always does her own research, which can take months; that she always makes sure that the information available to the detective is also available to the reader; that she always knows the end of a story before she begins to write. She emphasises the importance, for a writer, of reading "good prose", and likes Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. And she describes her writing schedule:

"I get up early, make tea and settle down to about two hours writing. I have no special room, require only a comfortable chair, table or desk at the right height, and sufficient space for my dictionary and research material. I do, however, need to be completely alone. When my secretary arrives I dictate to her what I have written. She puts it on the computer and prints it out for editing and correcting."

But you and I could follow her directions to the last tiny detail and it is unlikely that we would produce anything approaching the quality of her novels. Over the years I have probably read most of them, and I finished The Private Patient a couple of days ago.

Although it may not be her finest novel, I enjoyed it a great deal more than many a novel by many a younger writer. It is, I think, a deliberate evocation of the "country house" murder mystery of the 1930s, only here the country house has been turned into a hugely expensive private clinic where the rich can come and have plastic surgery. One such, the private patient of the title, is Rhoda Gladwyn, a very successful and much feared journalist, who comes to have an operation to remove a facial scar she has had since childhood. The morning after the operation she is found strangled in her room, and it is clear that the only possible suspects are the small number of inhabitants of the house. Adam Dalgleish, the poetry-writing detective, is called down from London to investigate. Needless to say almost everyone in the house proves to have a slightly dodgy past, some considerably dodgier than others, and Adam and his team follow a number of leads to put together a credible picture of what really happened.

Will this be the last of PDJ's novels? I would hope not. Long may she continue.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

I wandered into my little local library the other day and there was this on a shelf. Everyone but me seemed to be reading it a while ago but, though I am a great admirer of the work of this most excellent novelist, I had not felt particularly impelled to get hold of it. Partly I think this was because I'd read so many reviews, all of which made much of the book's supposedly startling revelation -- that ET, apparently a contented suburban housewife, had a love affair which lasted throughout the first twelve years of her marriage -- that I thought it would hold no surprises. In a sense that was true, but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of this very impressively researched biography.

I fairly recently re-read ET's Angel, thought by many people to be her masterpiece. This brilliant, funny, disturbing novel is about a young girl from a suburban home who has a passionate desire to write. She churns out novel after novel, all pretty ghastly, but becomes a huge success for a time though she is quite unable to see that her work is viewed as trashy and absurd. Angel is a tragic figure, with no self-knowledge and no irony, so quite unlike her creator in that way. Nevertheless, her childhood obsession with writing, and her endless production of novels and stories, clearly owes a lot to ET herself, who wrote and wrote and wrote, stories and novels, for over ten years before getting anything accepted for publication. This in itself makes really remarkable reading -- to be so completely driven, so sure that you had something to say, that you were able to persist in the face of endless rejection, is a most extraordinary trait. Why and how ET came by it is anybody's guess -- nothing in her family background would seem to have prepared her for it. Add to that her early and long-standing membership of the communist party, and her long and passionate affair with Ray Russell, both carried on while she was, on the surface, living the life of a totally conventional small town wife and mother, and you have a most intriguing story. In the end I thought it was rather sad. Though ET did finally get published and was recognised after a fashion in her own day, she was certainly a victim of the male-dominated literary establishment who viewed her books as low-brow women's fiction. In fact, as Nicola Beauman points out, ET was a ground-breaker both in style and content, a true modernist following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf.

Reading this I realised there are a number of ET's novels I have not yet read, something I mean to put right as soon as possible. So watch this space!

Corduroy Mansions

Being not very well -- happily, a situation now mostly in the past -- I've had more time than usual to read books. This is one of the great unsung benefits of having flu, though of course when it's at its height you can't read much. The last few days, though, I've been slowly on the mend and have been doing a good deal of reading, including starting, and finishing, this novel in the last twenty-four hours. I've been reading the sequel, The Dog Who Came in From the Cold which, as I'm sure you know , is being serialised online in the Daily Telegraph. So I thought this would be a good opportunity of catching up with what I suppose in my case I'd have to call the prequel. Having done so I can absolutely see why some people, though not usually myself, insist on reading books in the order in which they were written. It's strange, really, as I have been enjoying the second one enormously, but reading the first one has given a sort of extra depth to the whole thing, if depth is the right word the use in relation to something so fundamentally light-hearted.

Corduroy Mansions, the location of both books, is in Pimlico. For those readers to whom this means less than nothing, I can tell you that this is a rather well-heeled area of west London, bordering on Chelsea, Westminster and Belgravia. Knowing this, you will expect the characters in the novels to be generally of the well-heeled variety, and so they are. William, who I suppose is really the central character, is a wine-merchant; Caroline is doing an MA in Art History at Sotheby's and has had her photo in a posh magazine, Rural Living; Berthea Snark is a psychologist; Marcia has her own catering company. If this all sounds rather elitist, well, I suppose it is. William thinks nothing of spending £175 on a pair of Belgian shoes, and when they are chewed up by his dog, Freddie de la Hay, admits to having another pair that cost over £2000. When Berthea's unworldly brother Terence acquires a Porsche (having nearly died after attempting to charge the battery of his thirty-year-old Morris Minor by plugging it directly into the mains) he is able to pay for it in cash out of his current account. But though people like this do inhabit the real world, and we may envy or despise them depending on our perspective, it is impossible not to warm to these fictional ones. Why is this? I suppose because everyone here, with one or two exceptions, lives in a sort of rather innocent dream. Problems of course crop up for all of them from time to time. William is desperate to get rid of his grown-up son Eddie, who refuses to fly the coop and treats his father with contempt; Caroline has fallen in love with her fellow student James but fears that he doesn't really care for girls despite his protestations to the contrary; the successful publisher Barbara Ragg is involved in a miserable relationship with the horrible Oedipus Snark (Berthea's son, and the only unpleasant Liberal Democrat MP in the country); Marcia loves William but fears he does not love her back; and so on. But this is comedy and so, one way or another, all these problems get resolved, at least to an extent, though of course now that I am reading the second book I can see that some of them do not have neat conclusions.

So how would we describe this genre? Is there a term for gentle comedy, a little social observation, a little mild philosophy, psychology and art criticism, an almost soap-opera-ish fascination with the lives of others? McCall Smith describes the books as "upbeat and affirmative" and so indeed they are, and that's a great part of their charm. As for the style, I find I am sometimes reminded of the great Barbara Pym, one of the few writers who makes me laugh aloud. Incidentally, she too lived in Pimlico. Corduroy Mansions has made me smile a lot and that must be good.