Harriet Devine's Blog

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

I don't think I've been reading enough of the Dean Street Press reprints of forgotten mid-twentieth-century books. I did read and very much enjoy their recent Veronica Lake autobiography - review here - but I've been looking at some of their other most recent offerings and have been seized with enthusiasm. In fact what started it all off was Simon's review in Shiny of My Caravaggio Style. I knew that Doris Langley Moore had been, among other things, a Byron specialist, and when I read that the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' poet was central to the plot of this 1959 novel I knew I had to get hold of it at once. So I did.

In Simon's excellent review, he admits to knowing little or nothing about Byron. It's certainly to Langley Moore's credit that she was able to involve a previously uninformed reader. My situation is rather different - I know quite a lot about him from post-grad study and subsequent research. How much difference would that make to my reading of the novel? I can't deny that it added an extra layer of enjoyment that I was able to relate to the various references to his life, personality and work. But as Simon notes, she does a great job of putting in enough information to satisfy the least informed reader.

Essentially this is a highly entertaining psychological study of a very dubious character, the unsuccessful literary biographer Quentin Williams. Quentin is a classic example of an unreliable narrator. He sees himself as a writer, but his biographies of little known literary figures have failed to make any mark - his last royalty statement showed a profit of just over £4. In order to survive he has taken a job in an antiquarian bookshop, but he is really in need of a substantial increase in his income. This is because he is very anxious to marry his beautiful girlfriend Jocasta. Jocasta is a very successful model, and he wants to be able to offer her the kind of life he feels she deserves.

One day Quentin hits upon what seems to him the perfect solution. One of the most tantalising facts that all Byron's admirers know is that he wrote two volumes of memoirs, which he planned to have published after his death. However when he did die, his publisher and a group of other close friends read the text and decided it was too shocking to publish. Hence came one of the greatest scandals in British literary history - John Murray personally fed the memoirs page by page into the fire at his publishing house, watched by a group of men all of whom, it must be said, should have known better. What if, Quentin thinks to himself, he could forge a copy of the memoirs and invent a plausible provenance? 

This is not actually as crazy as it sounds. The memoirs were known to have circulated among Byron's closest friends, and some people actually made copies of them. By chance Quentin shares a surname with one of the known copyists, a man named Dr Williams. No relation, but never mind that - he can say that he was. What if Quentin claimed to have found a mysterious document in his old great-aunt's attic, which careful research had revealed to be Dr Williams' manuscript?

So the forgery begins. Quentin is pleased with his own skill at reproducing what Byron once referred to as his Caravaggio style. But it's important that nobody finds out what he's up to, so he invents a project - a sort of compilation of everything Byron ever said about animals. And to put Jocasta off the scent he asks her to do some research for him. Now Jocasta is not a lover of literature, and at first is a little unwilling. But as she proceeds with her reading she gets more and more involved, to the point where she becomes totally besotted with Byron. Not an uncommon reaction for women readers, I have to say - many of us have a soft spot for bad boys, and Byron was undeniably attractive. But Quentin is appalled, and becomes extremely jealous. Hilarious, but I must say to me totally believable. An additional irony is that Quentin has had a very low opinion of Jocasta's intellect, but she proves to be a lot more bright and perceptive than he's given her credit for. It's not giving too much away to say that in the end things do not turn out well for him.

This is a totally brilliant book. All the detail is cleverly worked out and it's fascinating to watch Quentin as his initial confidence and glee in his own cleverness slowly gets eroded and he discovers that his deception may not go down as well as he'd initially thought. There's a wonderful scene towards the end when a group of well-known Byron scholars meets at the (still existing) John Murray publishing house - among them is Doris Langley Moore herself. A terrific read.

I've already downloaded another of Langley Moore's novels republished by Dean Street and meanwhile am reading one of their new Moray Dalton crime novels, The Art School Murders. Great stuff.

 

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

A couple of years ago I was sent an unsolicited copy of 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster's most recent novel - his first in seven years. I'd heard of Auster before of course, but had never read him. I was initially a bit daunted by the book's 880 pages, but I ended up being completely swept away by its brilliance, and wrote a glowing review of it for Shiny New Books - you can read that here. Of course I thought I must read some more of Auster but time passed and that didn't happen. So when Annabel announced Paul Auster Reading Week on her blog, I jumped at the chance. And where better to start than his first published work, The New York Trilogy. By a happy chance it was selling for only £1.99 on Kindle, so I bought it and jumped straight in.

I knew little about the book when I started reading, beyond the fact that it consisted of three shorter works, originally published separately: City of Glass (1995), Ghosts (1996) and The Locked Room (1996). Though the stories are completely separate, they are linked by certain names and characters who pop up in each one. I have to admit that initially I found the whole thing rather overwhelming, especially City of Glass. This is about a man called Daniel Quinn who writes detective novels under the name William Wilson with a private eye narrator called Max Work:

Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him, Work had increasingly come to life. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. If Wilson was an illusion, he nevertheless justified the lives of the other two. If Wilson did not exist, he nevertheless was the bridge that allowed Quinn to pass from himself into Work. And little by little, Work had become a presence in Quinn’s life, his interior brother.

And as if that wasn't enough, Quinn gets a phone call, which is a wrong number, asking for a private detective called Paul Auster. Quinn becomes involved with Auster, who is investigating a case concerning a man named Peter Stillman, whose unusual upbringing has led him to some very strange habits of speech. When asked about the case, Stillman replies: “If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. . . . Long ago there was mother and father. I remember none of that. They say: mother died.  Who they are I cannot say. . . . No mother, then.  Ha ha. Such is my laughter now, my belly burst of mumbo jumbo.  Ha ha ha". He continues in the same vein for many pages. I have to say it's pretty entertaining - I just hadn't been prepared for it all.

There are obvious links between the three books, including musings on and confusions of identity, and of course the fact that they are all versions of the detective genre. The private eye in the second story, Ghosts, is called Blue. He has a trainer called Brown. Brown has a client called White for whom he is investigating a man called Black who lives on Orange Street. White pays Blue for his written reports, but Blue gets more and more fascinated by Black and his life. I would say this was my least favourite, perhaps because I was slightly irritated by the tricksy naming of the characters.

Of the three, the one I found the most enjoyable was the third story, The Locked Room. Possibly this was because I found it the most accessible. It's the only one of the three that is told in the first person, though the narrator is not named. Could it be Auster himself? Be that as it may, here the narrator is researching the life and work of a longtime friend of his, a man named Fanshawe. Brilliantly talented and happily married to a beautiful woman named Sophie, Fanshawe has disappeared without trace, and is widely believed to be dead. He has left the narrator some writing which he has done in secret, and which the narrator publishes to huge acclaim. He also marries Sophie and adopts her baby, born posthumously after Fanshawe's disappearance. In other words, the narrator - who bears an uncanny physical similarity to Fanshawe - has taken over his friend's life. There's only one problem - Fanshawe is not dead, and the narrator is the only person who knows this. But the pressure of keeping the secret and of living an assumed life becomes increasingly confusing and troubling for the narrator:

Something monstrous was happening, and I had no control over it anymore. The sky was growing dark inside - that much was certain; the ground was trembling. . . . I could no longer make the right distinctions. This can never be that. Apples are not oranges, peaches are not plums. . . . But everything was beginning to have the same taste to me.

Of course the trilogy is celebrated for its influential post-modernism. There's so much here I haven't mentioned - lots of literary allusions and intertextuality - much musing on the theme of identity. I'm certainly not sorry to have read it, but I wasn't blown away as I had been by 4 3 2 1. On her recent blog post about Auster, Annabel points to other novels which are less challenging than this one - The Brooklyn Follies sounds enticing. I'm tempted to give it a go. 

 

Small Woman Big Book

This one is by Giovanni Paolo Bedini (1844-1924), an Italian genre painter. You can see more of his work here.

Death in White Pyjamas and Death Knows No Calendar by John Bude

Back in 2014 I was part of a team that launched Shiny New Books. It's hard to believe it was actually that long ago! Although two of the original editors had to back out of hands-on editing, Annabel and I have kept it going all that time with I would say a fair degree of success. In those early days it used to come up quarterly, but more recently we have gone to the bi-weekly model, with typically two reviews on each of Tuesday and Thursday. I remember when the first issue was looming I was in a bit of a panic, having volunteered to review fifteen books - I think the others did about the same. But we made it. 

One of my reviews in that issue was of two British Library Classic Crime novels by John Bude - you can see that review here.The Classic Crime series was also in its infancy, and has of course gone from strength to strength - I've happily reviewed several titles on here and am always so delighted when I get a package in my mailbox with the latest releases. So it was a good day a few weeks ago when I discovered that one of the new books was a double helping of John Bude. Originally published in 1944 and 1942 respectively, these novels have long been out of print, and have been revived, according to their indefatigable editor Martin Edwards, 'by popular demand'. 

Given the wartime publication dates, you might expect some serious social commentary. But no - these may well be Bude's most comic and entertaining novels. No doubt he wanted to raise his readers' spirits, and if so he certainly succeeded in my case. Bude was a theatre lover, and a keen participant in amateur dramatics, and this interest is reflected in both novels.

Death in White Pyjamas is the most fully theatrical of the two, even though it's set in a typical English country house. But the house belongs to one Sam Richardson, a wealthy inheritor of a fortune made in biscuits, who has become a theatrical promoter and owner of the successful Beaumont Theatre in London. 'Like so many promoters of theatrical entertainment, [he] knew absolutely nothing about the theatre'. His right hand man is the producer Basil Barnes, who he has persuaded to buy an old cottage near his Old Knolle estate. As the novel begins, a collection of actors has turned up, to spend the summer months at Old Knolle, rehearsing a new play. Among them are the 'grand old character actor' Will Farnham, and Angela Walsh, 'a brilliant young ingenue from the provinces'. Also present is the stage designer Deirdre Lehaye, 'tall, dark, icy and so dead sure of herself that the majority of men were scared to approach her'. It's clear from the start that Deirdre is a nasty piece of work, so it's no surprise that she eventually becomes a murder victim, her corpse having been discovered by the lake, wearing a pair of what appear to be someone else's white satin pyjamas. I say eventually as it's a while before the murder takes place (this seems quite typical of Bude's novels), leaving plenty of room beforehand for much confusion and skullduggery. It's up to Inspector Meredith, Bude's series detective, to unravel the complex relationships between the assembled company and finally to arrive at the denouement. Much is made of the fiendishly cunning mechanical arrangements to go into the murder plan, which include some ditch digging and ingenious messing around with plumbing. And of course there's Meredith's long-drawn-out musings as he tries to get to the bottom of it all. 

Published two years earlier, Death Knows No Calendar also takes place in a country house, this time the home of a rather unsuccessful ex-actor, John Arundel, though the house is actually owned by his wildly successful painter wife Lydia, 'flamboyant, dynamic, dark-haired, armoured with her light and mocking laugh against any sense of morality'. Lydia can't resist luring any man she encounters into her wicked toils. Among them is the Rev. Peter Swale-Reid, the local vicar, who is living with the devastating shame of an encounter he had with Lydia some years before. Also smitten is the local farmer Stanley Hawking, whose crush on Lydia nearly ruins his new and blissful relationship with Lady Dingle's foolish young niece Honoria Preece.Then of course there's Major Tom Boddy, who lives locally, looked after by his loyal ex-batman Syd Gammon. The major is a keen reader of detective fiction, so when Lydia is found dead in her studio, he and Syd decide to start invesitiging. The toughest puzzle of the case is that this a a locked room murder. The studio door is locked on the inside and Lydia has been shot with a gun that was found a few feet from her body, so of course the police immediately conclude that this was a suicide. Boddy thinks this is highly unlikely, given Lydia's cheerful state of mind immediately beforehand. It doesn't take long before Boddy manages to work out that this was in fact a murder. There are several obvious suspects in the neighbourhood, but after a while Boddy is pretty sure he knows who was responsible, though the suspect appears to have a cast iron alibi. Even after Boddy has managed to work out the deception here, the main problem remains - how did the murderer manage to shoot Lydia from outside the studio and to arrange for the gun to be found near her body?

One of John Bude's stocks in trade seems to be a focus on the long-drawn-out mental processes the detective has to go through before arriving at the solution, and this novel is no exception. There are some entertaining episodes as Boddy and Syd go haring about the English countryside in search of the culprit. There's another manor house, and a case of cunning disguise and dual identity, before the whole case is satisfactorily solved. The murder method is highly ingenious but Boddy works it out, the police detective in charge is finally convinced, and everything ends up happily.

So yes these two novels both contain Bude's trademarks, but they are certainly none the worse for that. I love his ridiculously ingenious mechanical murder methods - he must have had enormous fun working them out. If you like your suspense laced with not a little comedy, these are definitely for you.

 

Woman with Book and Baby

Here's something really special. As the presence of the angels in the top left suggests, this is the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in his cradle beside her. Rembrandt (because of course this is his) has chosen to set the scene in a typical Dutch interior - it was painted in 1645, and the clothes and the cradle fit this time. So as well as the symbolism, this has become a charming domestic scene, with the young mother interrupting her reading to check on the child. I love it and hope you do too.

Woman Reading

Last week I posted a painting by the German artist Walter Heimig (1880-1955) - you can see that post here. I said he'd done several versions of the same picture and here's another one. Same pose, same skirt, and I've found at least three more. I can't help feeling this is bit cheeky - maybe they were selling well so he couldn't resist cashing in.