Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

This is 'The Reader' by Franz Dvorak (1862-1927). He was a Czech painter, and lived most of his life in Prague, though Wikipedia tells me he was better known abroad than in his own country.

Death Walks in Eastrepps by Francis Beeding

Recently I had the great pleasure of reading and reviewing Martin Edwards' The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books for Shiny New Books (you can see that review here). In my review I said I'd already ordered a couple of books he recommended, and this was one of them. Apparently it was once described as being one of the ten finest detective stories ever written. Not something I feel in a position to agree or disagree with, but it certainly is a cracker of a novel, highly readable, fascinating, and full of surprises. 

In Martin Edwards' book he discusses this novel, which was published in 1931,  in a chapter called 'Multiple Murders' - serial killers, in other words. There's a body count of no less than six here, innocent-seeming, pleasant, harmless sort of folk who live in the Norfolk village of Eastrepps. Also living in the village is a businessman, Robert Eldridge. As the story begins, we meet him on a train down from London, where he keeps an office and has a hotel room. But Eldridge has a secret - more than one, in fact. What preoccupies him entirely at the moment is his illicit affair with a beautiful married woman, Margaret, who also lives in the village. Margaret can't let her husband divorce her, as she would lose custody of her beloved daughter, so Eldridge has worked out a scheme whereby he returns from London a day early and surreptitiously spends the night with Margaret, making his way to the station next morning and exiting with the incoming commuters from London.

But this is not Eldridge's only secret. He is in fact James Selby, a notoriously crooked financier, whose Anaconda scheme robbed numerous undeserving people of their life savings. He was forced to flee the country, lived in South America for some years, and has only been able to return to England by means of taking on a fake identity. Although he's extremely rich, he's never compensated his victims, several of whom live in Eastrepps, and are, indeed, among the victims of the Eastrepps Evil, as the killer comes to be known.

The local police are out of their depth, or so at least is the plodding Inspector Protheroe - luckily he has a sidekick, sharp-minded Sergeant Ruddock, and Chief Inspector Wilkins comes down from Scotland Yard to join the investigation. Their first conclusion, owing to the apparently arbitrary choice of victims, is that there must be a madman at work, and a likely suspect soon appears. But, though batty as a fruitcake, with some very peculiar habits, the person concerned turns out to be innocent and has to be released. Finally some evidence turns up which seems to point irrevocably at one person, and the law takes its course. But have the police got the right man?

There's so much to love and admire here. There's plenty of misdirection to satisfy people who love that sort of thing (and what reader of crime novels doesn't?), there's police procedure, something many of us enjoy, a satisfying section detailing the court case to please those who love legal thrillers, and of course a very surprising and completely unexpected twist towards the end.The writing is strong and lively, and the characters vivid and believable - I was impressed by how difficult it is to truly despise Robert Eldridge despite the fact that he's an out and out crook. Of course having been written in 1931 the novel has the usual period appeal that lovers of golden age fiction come to expect, but in other ways it reads in an entirely fresh and contemporary way.

If you've never heard of Francis Beeding, it's not really surprising as his novels are no longer in print. He was actually two people - a pseudonym adopted by John Leslie Palmer and Hilary St George Saunders. Their output ('regrettably infrequent' says Martin Edwards) includes one novel that formed the basis for Hitchcock's film Spellbound. You might have to search around for an affordable copy of Death Walks in Eastrepps but it's well worth it.

Woman Reading

One for you dog lovers. This one is by the Belgian artist  Évariste Carpentier, (1845 - 1922). I think it's just called 'Woman Reading Newspaper with Dog'. Fair enough.

The Ready Made Thief by Augustus Rose

‘A kickass debut from start to finish’ screams the cover of this highly readable, somewhat bizarre, debut novel. It’s a book that defies categorisation – perhaps best described as a picaresque coming-of-age novel, it manages to combine urban exploration, the Darknet, secret societies, the exploitation of teenagers, and the life and works of the celebrated artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) in one of the most exciting and fast-moving adventure stories you could ever hope to meet.

The central protagonist here is Lee Cuddy, who is seventeen when the story proper begins. Abandoned by her musician father at seven, she has learned the pleasures of theft at a very young age, and makes a good profit from selling stolen goods at school. By thirteen she has found a new friend, Edie, who has introduced her to the delights of drugs. Caught shoplifting at sixteen, she has a brief period of reform, works hard at school, and her mother and New Age stepfather have high hopes that she will fulfil her potential by going to college, something she finds she’s quite excited about. But she’s betrayed by Edie and ends up in a Juvenile Detention Centre for something she didn’t even do. 

Life in the Centre is predictably miserable, and Lee is ingenious enough to manage to escape. From here on she is on the run, homeless and friendless, sleeping rough and eating from dumpsters. A chance meeting with a girl begging on the street leads her to the headquarters of what turns out to be a very sinister secret society. The place is called the Crystal Castle, and there Lee is given food and shelter, and introduced to a man known as the Station Master, who sends her out begging. He seems kind and caring, but when Lee discovers what goes on at the top of the building, she takes off. Now she’s back on the streets, but she soon meets a young artist called Tomi who shows her how to get into disused buildings, and also works out a system by which she can squat in the properties of people who are away on holiday. He also smuggles her into the art museum and introduces her to the work of Marcel Duchamp.

From this point on – or sooner if you happen to be a connisseur of Duchamp (even the title and the cover design hold a clue) – the life and work of this celebrated artist become inextricably bound up in the story. Lee steals a Duchamp artefact from the museum – she is dressed for some time in a bridal gown, a reference to Duchamp’s celebrated artwork The Bride Stripped Bare by her Batchelors Even – she and Tomi find a secret room in the art museum which seems to hold clues to Duchamp’s highly esoteric philosophy – and the so-called Societé Anonyme, seemingly run by the leaders of the Crystal Castle, appear to be seeking her for some purpose of their own. Meanwhile Lee, sometimes with, sometimes without Tomi, dashes helter skelter through the streets of Phildelphia. She gets trained in the art of lock-picking by a seasoned Mexican fence. She is befriended by the teenage of daughter of a house she’s been squatting in and manages to stay hidden in her room for some time, unknown to her parents. And as she finds out more and more about Duchamp, she realises she is in grave danger – they seem to need her for some mysterious reason, though she can't figure out what that might be. Can she trust Tomi or is he in league with the Societé Anonyme?

There’s never a dull moment here and I enjoyed the fast pace and frequent, unexpected plot developments tremendously. As for the Duchamp elements, which are absolutely crucial to the story, I found them both fascinating and a little odd. I’d heard of Duchamp and seen some reproductions of his work, but knew next to nothing about his philosophy and resorted to looking him up on Wikipedia. Anyone who’s not prepared for some fairly challenging intellectual puzzles might find this aspect of the novel a little hard to take, but in the end I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and just enjoy the fun. Overall this is a tremendously lively, always unexpected story and I’m really glad to have read it.

My Latest Shiny Reviews

I'm always forgetting to tell you about the latest reviews I've posted on Shiny - there have been a couple up there in the past week. Very different but equally enjoyable.

First up we have Separation by Sally Emerson - you may remember I reviewed her first novel, Second Sight, on here recently. I liked that one a lot, but this is even better - another reprint, of course, published in 1992. Here's an extract from what I said about it:

This is a novel of immense subtlety and perceptiveness. The story is told from the multiple points of view of all the characters, including the baby Kate, whose attempts to make sense of the strange new world around her are wonderfully conveyed in short, concise chapters. Emerson’s writing manages to be both beautifully spare and deeply profound. 

Excellent book - do read it!

 

And here's one for all you lovers of classic crime - a British Library publication authored by the indefatigable Martin Edwards, who of course edits all their crime reprints series. This is a real tour de force, a breathtaking survey of the whole of the twentieth century's UK crime writing. Of course it's selective, and eclectic, but it is a must read for anyone who enjoys crime writing of this era. I wrote:

For lovers of the genre, this book delivers in two opposing ways. It’s great to encounter names and novels you recognise, and see if you agree with Edwards’ assessment of them, but also, of course, there’s the delight of the new. I defy you to resist the temptation to start looking for titles or writers that intrigue you – I certainly did and already have two previously unheard of novels on the way to me as I write, with undoubtedly more to come after I seek them out.

Here's a link - do pop over and have a look!

 

Woman Reading

This is 'The Morning Post' by the British artist William Kay Blacklock (1872-1924)

Woman Reading

Something contemporary for you today - this is 'A quick sketch of my friend Lily' by the living artist Michael Sofroniou. 

Crimes of Winter by Philippe Georget

My long standing passion for crime novels seems to have diminished considerably of late, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I've become a lot more selective. I've been quite disappointed by books that have apparently set the world on fire, and that's made me more cautious about following trends. But that's not to say that I'm closed to new discoveries - long may that last. And I was intrigued when I read about this one, which sounded as if it might be a bit different from the run of the mill - and so indeed it is. This is a crime novel where the solution of a murder is no mystery, where other kinds of crime take precedence, a police procedural which concentrates as much on the psychology of the main protagonist as it does on the solution of the crime.

This is the third of Georget's books featuring Inspector Gilles Sebag, who lives and works in the historic French town of Perpignan, not far from the Spanish border. He's been married for twenty years to the beautiful Claire, and they have two children. The marriage has always been a happy one and he's as much in love with his wife as ever. But as the novel starts, he makes a discovery - Claire has been having an affair. To say this is a shock is an understatement: 'He felt something like a rip in his belly, a fissure in his life. The world had collapsed'. Claire promises him that the affair is over, that she still loves him and wants their marriage to continue and be happy. But can he trust her? and even if he can, will he be able to deal with the raging emotions that have been set in motion by the revelation?

One of the obvious ways of taking his mind off the turmoil he's experiencing (apart from drinking too much, which he certainly does) is to lose himself in his work. Ironically, though, the case he finds himself dealing with turns out to revolve around marital infidelity. It all starts when a cuckolded husband waits for his wife's lover to leave the hotel where they have spent the past few hours, goes up to the room where his wife is still quietly smoking, and shoots her with his shotgun. The husband is arrested at once, but what puzzles Sebag is not the motive, which is clear, but the question of how he came to know about the affair and where to find the guilty couple. Then two more incidents take place which are seemingly related: a husband throws himself of a balcony to his death after learning of his wife's infidelity, and another man threatens to burn his own house down with his wife inside to punish her for her affair. After some difficult enquiries, it becomes clear that someone is informing these men about their wives' infidelities. There are leads to follow but they all end up being red herrings. The informer is obviously brilliant and has some means of acquiring these secrets, and of taking the photos which he sends out as proof, but nobody can figure out what that can possibly be. 

Nobody, that is, apart from Sebag, who is blessed with the kind of intuition so useful to police officers. He combines this with great compassion - probably he has this already, but of course it is intensified by the fact that he can empathise with the victims of the informer, and soon realises that it's likely the informer is doing this as a sort of revenge on his own unfaithful wife. Following the course of the investigation is interesting, as is Sebag's relationship with his fellow police, especially the lively and attractive Julie, who confides in him that she has a female partner, who he later gets to meet. But what really makes this novel stand out is the sensitive way in which Georget portrays the agonies of the deceived husband, as he swings between the longing to revert to the status quo of his previously happy marriage and the pain and anger he feels as a result of Claire's affair. 

So there was lots to enjoy here, including of course the setting in the south west of France - it's winter, and temperatures often drop quite a bit, especially when the region's harsh wind, the tramontane,  is blowing. However there are also warm days when the sun blazes down, even in January. Sounds like a nice place to live. So yes, I enjoyed it a lot, though I have to say I had a few problems with the translation - French is a notoriously difficult language to translate well, and I found it a bit clunky in places. This is the third of Georget's Sebag novels, and I'm curious to read the first two now. His prizewinning debut novel, published in 2013, is called Summertime, All the Cats are Bored, which sounds like a good place to start. So many thanks to the publisher for this review copy.

 

 

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