Literary Ramblings

I've collected a few more literary links & interesting articles to share.

The most exciting news I've heard for ages is that Scott from the blog Furrowed Middlebrow is partnering with Dean Street Press to launch his very own imprint, Furrowed Middlebrow Books. Here's the revelation of the colophon for the new imprint & here's the announcement of the first of three authors to be reprinted - Rachel Ferguson. Scott will be reprinting three of Ferguson's novels - A Footman for the Peacock, Evenfield & A Harp in Lowndes Square - & you'll find more information on all three books plus Scott's enthusiastic reviews on his blog. Dean Street Press have done such a great job of resurrecting unfairly neglected Golden Age crime writers that I'm sure they will be the perfect partners for Scott's new venture. I can't wait to find out who the other two launch authors will be. I have my fingers crossed for more Winifred Peck.

Edited to add : I was right! I can't wait, especially for the mystery novels.

I love articles written by experts (or obsessives) who look at a book & can only see their special subject in it. This article from the Cricket Country website reviews the British Library Crime Classic reprint of Thirteen Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon entirely in terms of the cricket references.


A couple of weeks ago, ABC Classic FM revealed the Top 100 Voice over the Queen's Birthday long weekend. Every year they compile a different Top 100, voted on by listeners & this year it was the voice - opera, choral, folk song. I didn't enjoy it as much as previous years because I don't enjoy opera so a lot of it didn't interest me as much as previous years when they've featured Baroque & Before, the Concerto or Mozart. However, we're also coming to the end of a mammoth eight week election campaign & this little bit of promotion for the countdown made me smile. I don't think you need to know who the politicians are to recognize the species.

I've become aware of the very definite ideas that readers have about translation lately. I'm reading The Tale of Genji in Royall Tyler's translation but I know that there are devoted partisans of other translations. Mirabile Dictu discusses it here. Janet Malcolm has also recently written an article about translations of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The fans of the Constance Garnett or Maude translations are passionate about their choice & I was interested to read more about the dislike of some critics (including Janet Malcolm) for the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations of the Russian classics. All the discussion & discord has made me want to read Anna again.

I read it first in my teens, influenced by the BBC TV series with Nicola Pagett, Eric Porter & Stuart Wilson. I'm still very fond of this adaptation (even though a friend to whom I loaned the DVDs laughed at the fake beards). It was the TV tie-in edition & I think it was the Constance Garnett translation. I also heard Tchaikovsky's Manfred symphony on the radio the other day & that reminded me of the series as well because it was used as the theme music.

The next time I read it was this OUP edition translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude. Now I'm tempted by the new OUP edition translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Here is Bartlett discussing whether a new translation is even needed & here's a review of several of the newer translations.

Finally, I really like Elaine Showalter's idea of celebrating Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway with Dallowday to compete with James Joyce & Bloomsday. Clarissa Dalloway's party took place on June 13th 1923 so why shouldn't it be as celebrated as much as Leopold Bloom's walk around Dublin? Frankly the food would have to be more appealing than kidneys on toast, Gorgonzola sandwiches & Guinness. We might even be offered cucumber sandwiches & a cup of tea - much more to my taste.

Murder of a Lady - Anthony Wynne

The murder of Mary Gregor shocks everyone who knew her. By all accounts she was a kind, gentle elderly lady, sister of the local Laird, Duchlan, & devoted to his son, her nephew, Eoghan.The circumstances of Mary's death are also peculiar. She was found kneeling by her bed in a room with  door & windows locked. There seemed no way for the murderer to have left the room & there's no murder weapon to be seen, just a jagged wound near her neck. The only clue is a silver herring scale found near the fatal wound. There was also the scar of a long-healed wound on the victim's chest. How could Miss Gregor have inspired murderous rage not once but twice in her life?

While waiting for the arrival of the local police, the Procurator Fiscal, Mr McLeod, calls in Dr Eustace Hailey, a well-known amateur detective who happens to be staying nearby. Dr Hailey examines the murder scene & talks to Duchlan who speaks of his sister in glowing terms, of the devotion of her personal maid, Christina, & the piper, Angus, who performed some of the duties of a butler. His daughter-in-law, Oonagh, was also in the house but had retired early. Oonagh's husband, Eoghan, arrived by motor boat that same evening from Ayrshire where his regiment was stationed. When Inspector Dundas arrives, he immediatly takes charge of the investigation & rejects Dr Hailey's offer of help.

It soon becomes clear that Mary Gregor was a deceptively mild character. In reality, she ruled Duchlan Castle with an iron will & brooked no opposition from anyone. Her insinuating ways left her victims with no concrete action or word to complain of but the results of her poisonous tongue were very real. Oonagh had quarreled with her aunt about the care of her son & she had given Eoghan an ultimatum - give me a home of our own or I will leave you. Eoghan was on his way to Duchlan that night to ask his aunt for a loan to pay his gambling debts, a loan that his aunt was likely to refuse as her high moral standards disapproved of gambling. However, Eoghan would benefit greatly from Mary's will as she was the only one of the family with money. Oonagh had become friends with the local doctor, MacDonald, & Mary Gregor believed they were having an affair. She had threatened to tell Eoghan about it, as she had continually sowed discord between Oonagh & Eoghan & interfered with the upbringing of their young son Hamish. As Dr MacDonald was in the house that night, attending Hamish who was prone to fits, he joins Inspector Dundas's list of suspects.

However, the locked room & lack of a weapon baffle the Inspector & he eventually has to climb down & ask for Dr Hailey's help with the investigation. Then, another murder takes place with a similar method to the first & the uncanny circumstances, including the discovery of more fish scales at the scene, lead to whispers about the strange creatures from nearby Loch Fyne that the fishermen believe bring bad luck & evil. Could the answer be supernatural after all?

Murder of a Lady is an ingeniously plotted locked room mystery in an atmospheric Highland setting. I love books set in Scotland & this one has everything - a castle by a loch with tales of a seal-like creature lurking in the depths; a respectable woman who rules her family with insinuating cruelty; a young woman at the end of her tether & an old man who turns his face from the truth & is completely under the sway of a stronger character. The murders are very puzzling & the fish scales (the book was originally published in 1931 as The Silver Scale Mystery) add a distinctive oddness to the investigation. I enjoyed the character of Dr Hailey. He's kind, sympathetic, but determined to pursue the truth, no matter how much sympathy he may feel for the suspects. He prevents several crimes in the course of his investigation, including a suicide, but can't stop the murderer striking again as he desperately tries to put together the clues.

Murder of a Lady is one of the very successful British Library Crime Classics series. I have lots of them on the tbr shelves (& there are more to be published later this year). It's fascinating to have a chance to read these long-forgotten authors. I'd like to read more Anthony Wynne so I hope they choose another of his books to reprint in the future.

Literary Ramblings

I thought I'd do a quick roundup of events to look forward to & new books to anticipate (really old books in new covers, my favourite kind of new book).

Margaret Kennedy Day is only about six weeks away. This is organised by Jane from Beyond Eden Rock & all the details are here. I've enjoyed the Kennedys I've read so far & have several more on the tbr shelves to choose from.

Simon & Karen are planning The 1947 Club after the great success of The 1938 & 1924 Clubs. It's going to be in October but more details to come.

A new batch of British Library Crime Classics are now available for preordering. They include Crimson Snow, an anthology of winter stories edited by Martin Edwards, more titles by Freeman Wills Crofts & John Bude, two books by George Bellairs & two of the Sergeant Cluff novels by Gil North. Publication dates are from July to October in the UK.

More crime from Dean Street Press. I know there are lots of fans of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver novels. I didn't know that Wentworth published many other novels & Dean Street Press are reprinting the lot. The first ten are available now with more to come.

Arnold Bennett is an author I want to read more of. I loved The Old Wives' Tale & now three more of his novels are about to become Penguin Modern Classics. The Card, Anna of the Five Towns & Riceyman Steps will be published from July to September in the UK.

I'm also tempted by this book, mostly because of the gorgeous cover (shallow, I know). I don't know anything about Dutch literature but this volume of short stories might be a good place to start. It's published in September in the UK.

Silent Nights : Christmas mysteries - ed Martin Edwards

I do like to read Christmas books around this time of year. Yesterday I started my annual reread (or relisten) of A Christmas Carol, read so beautifully by Miriam Margolyes. Thankfully the weather has calmed down a little after a few horrible days around 40C. I had to go to work on Friday but Saturday & Sunday were spent inside with all the blinds down & air conditioning on, drinking iced tea, reading & watching Christmas movies, especially the ones set in very cold places.

One of the books I finished reading over the weekend was Silent Nights, an anthology of Christmas mysteries, mostly from the Golden Age, edited by Martin Edwards. This is one of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics, a very successful series of mystery novels & short stories reprinted by the British Library. Silent Nights is a mixture of well-known & newly resurrected stories. The first story features Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, is an old favourite involving the theft of a famous diamond & a Christmas goose. The Necklace of Pearls by Dorothy L Sayers is another favourite, more stolen jewellery & a clever plot that tests the skills of Lord Peter Wimsey.

One of the most interesting & atmospheric stories is Waxwork by Ethel Lina White. A waxworks museum has a reputation for being haunted. Two people have tried to brave the ghosts by staying in the museum overnight & been found dead next morning,. Ambitious young reporter Sonia is determined to succeed where others have failed but can she debunk the stories? The tension is heightened as the night wears on & I was almost looking through my fingers at one point. I haven't read any Edgar Wallace but the story included here, called Stuffing, is beautifully plotted as well as quite funny. Both the good & the bad get their just deserts.

Edmund Crispin is another favourite author. I read all his books one summer many years ago & Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language & Literature at Oxford, is a wonderful character. Reading this story again after so many years that I'd forgotten the solution, I thought that Stephen Fry would be a very good Fen if the books were ever made into a TV series. In The Name on the Window, architect Sir Lucas Welsh is found stabbed in a supposedly haunted pavilion at the home of fellow architect Sir Charles Moberly. Before his death, he had time to write the name of his murderer on the window but all is not as it seems.

This is an excellent anthology of stories. I read one every night over a couple of weeks & I like to read anthologies that way. Reading too many short stories at once can be a little indigestible but one a day is perfect & this collection was just what I needed in the busy & hot days before Christmas.

Rambling towards Christmas

I seem to be jumping from one book to the next at the moment, led by serendipity to a story here, a dip into an old favourite there, but not actually finishing very much. This seems to happen to me more and more these days. I could blame age or the internet for my short attention span but really, I just wish I wasn't interested in so many different subjects, genres & authors. I'm halfway through The English Festivals by Laurence Whistler (brother of Rex, who I wrote about here) just reprinted by Dean Street Press. This is a lovely book about the traditions & customs of the festivals of the English year from Christmas to Candlemas, Plough Sunday & Easter, which is where I'm up to at the moment. I'm just about to start The Octopus by Frank Norris with my 19th century bookgroup which I'll be reading in weekly instalments for about 6 weeks. It's the story of a dispute between wheat farmers & the railroad in California in 1880. I haven't read any Norris so I'm looking forward to that.

I'm listening to Antonia Fraser's childhood memoir, My History, on audio, read by Penelope Wilton. It's wonderful. If you would like a taste of it, the lovely blog, Books as Food, has had some excerpts here. It's not only about Fraser's childhood, her own history, but about how she came to love history as a subject. It's sent me off on some reading & browsing trails as well as wanting to reread some of Antonia Fraser's biographies. She mentions Our Island Story by H E Marshall, which was recently reprinted & which is on the tbr shelves. Reading the chapter about the Princes in the Tower made me wonder if this was the school book that the Amazon loaned to Alan Grant in The Daughter of Time (do I have time to read it again?).

Part of her schooldays were spent at a convent school founded by Mary Ward, a seventeenth century nun who believed passionately in education for girls. Fraser wrote about Mary Ward in her book on seventeenth century women, The Weaker Vessel, which I haven't read since it was published 30 years ago. I picked it up to read about Mary Ward but I'm much more interested in the seventeenth century than I was back then so I'd love to read the whole book again.

The nuns & the convent school also provided the setting for Fraser's first detective novel, Quiet as a Nun, published in 1977. Open Library had the same edition that I read all those years ago so I'm reading it for at least the third or fourth time. I loved the Jemima Shore books & this first one, about the mysterious death of a nun in the tower called Blessed Eleanor's Retreat in the convent grounds, was the best.

Then, I received an email about a conference on the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Among the sessions was a reading group discussion of one of her stories, The Mystery at Fernwood. Braddon is one of my favourite sensation novelists & I had this story in the Delphi collection on my eReader so I dropped everything to read it. Braddon is an early member of the Had I But Known school of mystery writing.
  
If I had but gone with her! It is so difficult to reconcile oneself to the irrevocable decrees of Providence, it is so difficult to bow the head in meek submission to the awful fiat; so difficult not to look back to the careless hours which preceded the falling of the blow, and calculate how it might have been averted.

Isabel is intrigued by the air of mystery at the home of her fiance, Laurence Wendale. There are forebodings of misery & secrets & a mysterious invalid who lives in a separate wing of the house & is never seen. The secret wasn't so very mysterious but Braddon's writing is so atmospheric. She uses the weather so well to suggest a sinister atmosphere & heightened emotion. I loved it. However, Laurence's sister, Lucy, mentions Sir Walter Scott's Demonology & I'd never heard of it so needed to find out what it was. Then, I checked my Delphi edition of Scott, & there it was, so that's another book I want to read.

Christmas is coming so I'm starting to think about some suitable reading, listening & watching for the next few weeks. I've started reading one story each day from Silent Nights, the Christmas mystery anthology edited by Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics series. The first story is an old favourite, The Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, but most of the stories are completely new to me.

I'm also reading poetry. Last year, someone mentioned Janet Morley's anthology, Haphazard by Starlight, a poem a day from Advent to Epiphany. I was too late to get hold of it then but I did buy it & also the Lent anthology, The Heart's Time, which I enjoyed reading. The poems aren't all religious, or not overtly religious, but I'm enjoying concentrating on one poem a day. I've started listening to Christmas carols & I watched Miracle on 34th Street again last weekend. It begins at Thanksgiving so I always seem to watch it at this time of year. The original version only, please. I'm sure I'm not the only one who cries when Kris sings with the little Dutch girl, no matter how many times I see it. I just love 1940s movies, especially set in New York. You'd never have a movie these days where the romantic leads were called Fred & Doris, would you? Such lovely, old-fashioned names. Maureen O'Hara, the last of the main cast members, died recently. She was such a beautiful actress, I remember her in How Green Was My Valley as well.

I'll be listening to Miriam Margolyes reading Dickens's A Christmas Carol, & I've borrowed a couple of Christmas mysteries from work, new reprints of 1930s titles - Crime at Christmas by C H B Kitchin & Murder for Christmas by Francis Duncan. Not the most imaginative titles but they have lovely retro covers (I tried to load a photo but it came out upside down) & the more reprints the better!

I have finished reading a book, Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, which I'll be reviewing soon. My non-book buying has been going well (I obviously don't need to buy books when I have so many on my shelves & eReader to dip into) although I do have a little confession to make but that can wait a couple of days. This post is long enough already.

The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards

The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written during this period, most of them inaccurate & quite lazy. The books were just puzzles, with cutout characters reminiscent of the board game Cluedo. Their authors didn't play fair with the reader, including untraceable poisons & mysterious Chinamen in an effort to bamboozle the reader. In reality, the best books of this period have been read & loved by millions of readers. Their plots, far from being cosy, featured serial killers, sadistic murders, plots based on real crimes of the period & the beginnings of the forensic thriller. The names of the greatest authors of the period - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh - are still well-known today. Their books are still read, we listen to audio books & radio productions & watch the many TV adaptations. Martin Edwards tells the story of the Golden Age through the history of The Detection Club & the authors who founded it & were its members. It's the story of a period of history & a group of writers that have always fascinated me.

The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of writers that included Christie, Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote under the names Anthony Berkeley & Francis Iles. The Club was an exclusive one. Members had to be proposed by a current member & approved by the committee. The initiation ritual, complete with members dressed in ceremonial robes & the swearing of an oath to uphold fair play in the plotting of the detective novel taken while holding a skull known as Eric, was all part of the game. The Club met for dinner & conversation several times a year in London & the meetings provided an opportunity for gossip about publishers, agents, sales, the topics that probably feature in the conversation of any group of writers. For some of the members, the Club provided an escape from the disappointments & problems of their private lives. Writing is a solitary occupation & the opportunity to talk shop with colleagues must have been another attraction.

The Golden Age of Murder focuses principally on three writers - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox. Much has been written about Christie & Sayers but I was especially interested to read more about Berkeley. He was an innovative novelist whose brilliant plotting was a feature of his work. Two of his books written under the pseudonym Francis Iles radically changed the conventions of detective fiction. In Malice Aforethought, the reader is in the confidence of the murderer from the beginning & the opening of Before the Fact tells us that Lina Aysgarth was married to a murderer before taking us back to the beginning of their relationship with this knowledge in our minds. Under the name Anthony Berkeley, he wrote a series of novels featuring Roger Sheringham, an amateur detective who usually gets everything wrong before finally coming up with the correct solution. Berkeley felt adrift after his war service & tried various jobs before becoming a writer. He was a contradictory personality, eccentric, obsessive, difficult. His private life was unconventional & this is something he had in common with other members of the Detection Club.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the private lives of the members. A theory I've heard several times about the Golden Age writers is that their interest & facility in writing detective stories came from the need to hide secrets in their private lives. Just last week, I listened to the latest episode of BBC Radio's Great Lives where Val McDermid discussed P D James, who gave a lecture on this theory. Christie famously disappeared for twelve days in 1926, distressed over the end of her first marriage. Even after her happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie, an intensely shy woman, shunned publicity. Sayers had an illegitimate son, whose existence she kept secret from all her closest friends. Her difficult marriage, to an alcoholic who had suffered from his war experiences, was another reason for her love of the Detection Club's dinners & the gusto with which she entered into the spirit of all the rituals & rules.

Edwards also mentions many other writers, some of them famous in their day but unknown now. Interestingly, as consultant to the very successful British Library Crime Classics series, Edwards has been instrumental in bringing some of these authors back into print. Christopher St John Sprigg, J Jefferson Farjeon & Freeman Wills Croft are just three authors mentioned in this book who have been brought back into print through this series. Another cliche of the Golden Age is that it was dominated by women writers, the Queens of Crime. Martin Edwards features many male authors of the period, some of them undeservedly obscure now. His knowledge of the period is exhaustive & obviously the product of many years reading & research. Martin's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name? bears witness to this interest with regular posts on forgotten books & interesting snippets of information from his ongoing research into this fascinating period of literary history.

It's impossible for me to encompass this book in a brief review. I haven't even mentioned the interest in true crime that led to the anthology, The Anatomy of Murder (recently reprinted), or the collaborative novels published by members of the Club (Ask a Policeman, The Floating Admiral) to replenish their funds & pay the rent on their Soho rooms. I enjoyed reading about the group dynamics of these projects, with Dorothy L Sayers bullying & cajoling members into writing their contributions & submitting their copy. The current members of the Detection Club (including Edwards who is the Archivist of the Club) are working on a group novel of their own called The Sinking Admiral in homage to the earlier book. There are also some fascinating photographs in the book, including one of my favourites of Dorothy L Sayers & Helen Simpson drinking beer & Gladys Mitchell in her other job as a PE teacher, instructing her pupils. The research that has gone into the book is phenomenal as can be seen by the rare illustrations & the detail in the footnotes.

I mentioned the British Library Crime Classics above & I've been reading a recent anthology, Capital Crimes, edited by Edwards, which throws light on a discovery in the book that I found really thrilling. Martin Edwards has discovered a connection between Berkeley & one of my favourite authors, E M Delafield, that has been previously unsuspected. I won't go into detail but the clues are there in Delafield's work if you know where to look. Although best-known today for her delightful Diary of a Provincial Lady & its sequels, Delafield had an interest in true crime & wrote a novel, Messalina of the Suburbs, about the Edith Thompson case (which disturbed & fascinated several of the Detection Club members). The story by Delafield in Capital Crimes, They Don't Wear Labels, is a revelation & just one example of the influence her friendship with Berkeley had on her own work.

The success of the British Library Crime Classics as well as the continuing popularity of adaptations of Golden Age novels attest to our love of this period of detective fiction. I'm just as fascinated by the authors as their books so The Golden Age of Murder has been a real treat for me. I think anyone who has read the novels of this period would find much to enjoy in Martin Edwards' book & the recent reprints by several publishers, including Dean Street Press, Langtail Press, Rue Morgue & Felony & Mayhem (featuring Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case this week) mean that if you've read everything Sayers, Christie & Allingham ever wrote, you have many more authors to discover.

Bookish ramblings

I thought I'd highlight a few bookish links & some news about one of my favourite series. The British Library Crime Classics have been one of the publishing successes of the last couple of years. I love them. I've always enjoyed Golden Age mysteries & these books are so beautifully produced & attractively presented. It's a real treat to be discovering new authors from this period. After all, what do we do when we've read all of Christie, Sayers, Tey, Marsh & Allingham? I've bought nearly all of the Crime Classics & have reviewed several of them here, here & here. Martin Edwards has become the consultant for the series which means that future titles will be interesting, sometimes surprising & always well worth reprinting. I've just started reading Capital Crimes, a collection of short stories set in London & I was very excited to read on Martin's blog that there are another half dozen books in the series to be published before the end of the year. The British Library also have another series of Spy Classics which I haven't investigated as yet.

The latest edition of Shiny New Books is available to read here. I've just finished reading a gorgeous book about the artists Rex Whistler so I was very interested to read the review of A Curious Friendship by Anna Thomasson, about the friendship between Whistler & Edith Olivier. There's also an article by Anna Thomasson about her research for the book, which I always find fascinating. I was also interested to read Desperate Reader's review of George Gissing's The Whirlpool, just reprinted by Penguin. I love Gissing & I've only read a couple of his books. There are lots of other reviews & interviews, including a review of Capital Crimes & an interview with Robert Davies, the publisher of the British Library Crime Classics. There's another interview with Davies here, on a blog I've just discovered, Past Offences.

Margin Notes Books have just reprinted one of my favourite books, Mara Kay's The Youngest Lady In Waiting. This is the book that first interested me in Russian history. It's about a young girl who becomes lady in waiting to Grand Duchess Alexandra, wife of the future Nicholas I. It's set at the time of the Decembrist revolt in 1825. I borrowed it from my school library so often that they should have just let me keep it. I'd never seen a copy since (the cover above is the edition I read) so I was beside myself when I read than it was to be reprinted. I've bought the first book, Masha (also just reprinted by Margin Notes Books) which, funnily enough, I only read once all those years ago

& The Youngest Lady In Waiting arrived yesterday! I've been dipping in & reading bits & pieces & I can't believe it's 35 years since I last read it, it's all so familiar. I have a feeling I'll be dropping everything to read this next.

Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers in the world. I know that's quite a bold statement but he makes me laugh so I'm prepared to go out on a limb. One of my favourite Bryson books was Notes from a Small Island, about the UK. Well, after many years & a diversion into books on science & his childhood, Bill Bryson has written another travel book about Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling which will be published later this year. If I'd been keeping up with reading The Bookseller at work, I'd have known about this weeks ago. I'd also have known that Bryson has sold 8,648,774 books in the UK (exactly). As it is, I read about it on Elaine's blog & this article in The Guardian.

Also in The Guardian was an article celebrating the 200th anniversary of Anthony Trollope's birth. Writers nominated their favourite Trollope novel. I'm currently rereading Miss Mackenzie with my 19th century book group & I started reading Cousin Henry at the weekend after reading about it here as it was the only Trollope in the list I hadn't yet read. Books and Chocolate is celebrating Trollope's anniversary with giveaways & reviews here.

Has anyone read The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu? I enjoyed reading about Japanese history so much in Judith Gautier's The Usurper that I've just ordered this lovely Penguin Deluxe edition on a whim. All 1,216 pages of it... I could have dipped my toe in with the abridged edition but I couldn't resist a Penguin Deluxe. However, I feel completely justified in buying yet another book because I've read this article where Umberto Eco tells us why unread books are more valuable in our lives than read ones. Thank you Rose for sending me the link. Eco calls these books the antilibrary & describes them as the repository of all the knowledge that we don't yet have. So buying a huge novel about 11th century Japan is completely justified because I know absolutely nothing about the subject. This theory may not justify the purchase of my 100th book about Richard III (The Bones of a King by the Greyfriars Research Team, ordered this week) or the 3rd or 4th copy of a favourite book because I love the cover (Testament of Youth, Cold Comfort Farm, The Return of the Soldier...) or it's a Folio Society edition (Possession, Lord Peter Wimsey novels, The Daughter of Time, Excellent Women), but it justifies a lot of my other book buying decisions & I'm adopting it immediately!

Mystery in White : a Christmas Crime Story - J Jefferson Farjeon

Mystery in White is another in the terrific series of Golden Age mysteries that the British Library are reprinting. Appropriately for the time of year, it's set at Christmas & is a very clever variation on the locked room mystery.

A group of travelers are caught on a snowbound train on Christmas Eve. Lydia Carrington & her brother David are on their way to stay with friends, Jessie Noyes is a chorus girl going to Manchester for a job, elderly Mr Edward Maltby is a psychic researcher investigating a possible sighting of the ghost of Charles I. There's also a timid clerk, Thomson, who likes to fantasise about rescuing maidens in distress & a bore (later we discover his name is Hopkins) who has a story for every occasion, always with himself as hero.

As the storm worsens & there seems no likelihood of the train moving, the group discuss their options - to stay put or to try to reach another station & take a train from there. Suddenly Mr Maltby takes off after seeing a man running from the train. eventually, the others, except Hopkins, decide to follow him, concerned for his welfare & also hoping to complete their journeys. After losing their way & Jessie twisting her ankle, they stumble upon a house. The door is unlocked, fires are lit, the kettle's boiling & tea has been set. However, there's no one home.

Hopkins, who brings news of the murder of a man in the next compartment to theirs on the train & Maltby, who has lost sight of the man he was pursuing, soon join the group. They decide to make the best of it & hope the owners of the house will be understanding when they return. However, the empty house has an uncanny atmosphere & the arrival of a menacing Cockney who says his name is Smith, doesn't exactly lighten the mood. Jessie seems to be receptive to the strange atmosphere of the house & is frightened by a chair in the dining room & the bed she is put into. David & Mr Maltby try to find some clue to the disappearance of the owners but everything they discover only deepens the mystery.

"Nothing explains anything! If it were a fine day it might be quite natural to run out of a house for a few moments while a kettle's boiling, but in this weather - can you explain that? Where have they gone? Not to post a letter or to cut a lettuce! Why don't they come back? I didn't tell you, the kettle wasn't boiling in a nice respectable manner, it was boiling over. Oh, and there was a bread-knife on the floor."

Mystery in White is an atmospheric mystery that is very hard to put down once started. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the house with the snow falling & the menace within is exceptionally well done. I don't find it at all hard to believe that it's been a surprise bestseller. The mystery is ingenious, reaching back twenty years into the past & involves several murders & family secrets. The characters are interestingly varied & there are moments of real tension as David & Maltby test their theories about the mystery of the abandoned house.

Books & Cats miscellany - Part 2

Part 2 of the miscellany has to begin with the latest photos of Phoebe, taken last weekend as she lolled on the back steps, one of her favourite spots on warm days. She moves from step to step as the shade moves & then, eventually gives up altogether & comes inside if I'm home & the air conditioner is on.

I've been reading short stories, including these two collections released as ebooks. Trisha Ashley's Footsteps in the Snow and other teatime treats is a collection of 11 stories previously published in magazines as well as the opening chapters of Trisha's new book, Creature Comforts, which will be published next year. These are lovely, romantic stories, just long enough to read in a coffee break or at teatime as the subtitle says. Most of the stories are set around Christmas so they're seasonally appropriate too, even if my Christmas isn't going to involve snow, frost & open fires.

Martin Edwards was the winner of the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham short story competition, sponsored by the Margery Allingham Society. His winning story, Acknowledgments, has been published by Bloomsbury in this ebook which also contains two more stories by Edwards & an appreciation of Margery Allingham as a short story writer. Martin Edwards is an expert on the Golden Age of detective fiction so it's appropriate that he was the winner of the competition with a wicked story about an author of travel guides thanking his friends & family for their help with his career. As the narrator thanks his second wife, his agent & his publicist for their help with By-Ways Around Britain, the tone moves from comic self-satisfaction to something much darker.

Martin Edwards also announced some exciting news on his blog last week. He's been appointed as the Series Consultant for the British Library Crime Classics series I've been enjoying so much this year. The series has been incredibly successful & there are more treats in store next year, including two anthologies of short stories compiled by Martin. All the details are here.

I was very pleased to discover that The English Air by D E Stevenson has been reprinted by Greyladies. If this book & the other DES titles available from Greyladies sell well, hopefully other reprints will follow.

It's also available in the US from Anglophile Books as are lots of books by Georgette Heyer.

Finally, for Georgette Heyer fans, Vulpes Libris featured posts on Heyer's novels all last week. Here's the link. With the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo coming up next year, I feel that I should definitely read An Infamous Army, even if I read nothing else about Waterloo. Or, I may listen to it. I see that Audible has the audio book read by Clare Higgins.

I can't finish this post without a couple more photos of togetherness. On Monday night, I was watching the news on TV & Phoebe was asleep on my lap. Lucky was not impressed & sat on the arm of the chair looking plaintively at me for the whole half hour.

A couple of hours later, all change. Next time I sat down, Lucky was right there. She wasn't going to be usurped again. So, Phoebe sat on the arm of the chair staring alternately at Lucky & me. Every so often she would put her paw on my arm & made me feel as guilty as possible that there wasn't room for her on my lap as well.
Sorry about the terrible angles of these photos. I used the iPad & I could not work out how to fix the angle on the second photo. Actually I'm amazed I managed to get the girls in the frame at all when I was holding the iPad out to my right & hoping for the best!

PS I just noticed that this is my 900th post, not that I'm counting. Almost five years of blogging & 900 posts - I feel exhausted. I think I need to sit down with a cup of tea & a book or maybe listen to a podcast or watch another episode of An Age of Kings...

The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude

One of the most exciting recent publishing ventures for lovers of the Golden Age of crime fiction has been the British Library Crime Classics series of reprints.It's been so popular that titles are being published ahead of schedule. My copy of John Bude's Sussex Downs Mystery arrived last week although it wasn't due to be published until early next year. If I were being frivolous, I'd say it was the beautifully nostalgic cover art that's selling the series but that wouldn't be enough on its own. On the strength of the books I've read so far, it has just as much to do with the content which is a real treat for anyone who's looking for a new Golden Age mystery author.

The Cornish Coast Murder was the first of 30 books by John Bude (the pseudonym of Ernest Carpenter Elmore). It's a traditionally plotted mystery enhanced by the evocative setting & the mix of amateur & professional detectives. The story begins with the Reverend Dodd, Vicar of St Michael's-on-the-cliff, Boscawen, sitting by the fire waiting for his friend, Doctor Pendrill, to arrive for their traditional weekly dinner. Every Monday night, the two friends divide the contents of a box of library books, every one of them mysteries. On this evening, though, a phone call for Doctor Pendrill interrupts the evening. Julius Tregarthan has been found shot dead in his study.

Tregarthan's house, Greylings, is only a short distance away & the doctor & Reverend Dodd arrive on the scene to find Tregarthen's niece, Ruth, who found the body, shocked & upset. Mr & Mrs Cowper, housekeeper & odd job man, are the only servants. None of them seem to have heard anything but a thunderstorm overhead may have masked the sound of the shot or shots as three bullets have been fired, as it seems, from the cliff path outside the study window. Local constable Grouch arrives soon after followed by Inspector Bigswell from the County Police. Tregarthan seemed to have no enemies although he was a secretive man. He didn't get on well with his niece as it seemed he disapproved of her friendship with local writer & war veteran, Ronald Hardy. On the night of the murder, they had quarrelled at dinner & Ruth had left the house, returning some time later to find her uncle dead. Ruth's behaviour since the murder is evasive & suspicious but is she trying to hide something that incriminates herself or is she trying to protect someone else? When Ronald Hardy & his revolver go missing on the very same night & it emerges that Tregarthan had just confronted him about his relationship with Ruth, he becomes the number one suspect. Then there's Ned Salter, local "black sheep", who was seen arguing with Tregarthen on the day of the murder about the eviction of his family while he was in jail.

The Inspector whistled. He couldn't see the wood for the trees. Ruth Tregarthen? Ronald Hardy? Ned Salter? Which? they were all under suspicion. They all had a motive for the murder. They had all quarrelled with Tregarthan a few hours before his death. The puzzle was assuming gargantuan proportions. No sooner had the Inspector assembled a few bits to his satisfaction, when the puzzle altered shape, with all the startling inconsequence of a landscape in Alice in Wonderland.

I loved The Cornish Coast Murder. The Cornish village setting is beautifully drawn &, as it turns out, integral to the solution of the mystery. Reverend Dodd is a clever, intuitive detective who comes up with some vital insights with his practical knowledge as well as his insights into the hearts of his parishioners. I'm not sure a Police Inspector would have taken a parish priest into his confidence quite as readily as Inspector Bigswell does here but it's very well done & he certainly wouldn't have come up with the solution without him. There's plenty of routine police work too which I always enjoy reading about.

Martin Edwards has written an informative Introduction for this edition which gives some background on the writer. A series of mysteries set in the English countryside was very unusual for the 1930s when London was the setting used by most writers. We're used to mysteries set in cities, towns & villages all over the United Kingdom from Ann Cleeves' Shetlands to Edwards's own Lake District series &, of course, the murder capital of England, Midsomer, but it wasn't so common during the Golden Age. I'm so pleased to have had a chance to read John Bude & I have two more of his books on the tbr shelves.

Books & roses

First, the roses. These are the first roses of the summer, picked on Sunday morning. The pink ones are Eglantine & the red, The Squire. My roses are looking beautiful this year, covered in buds so I'm hoping to be able to pick lots of them for the house & to take to work so I have something lovely to look at & to smell when it all gets too much. Of course, ten minutes after I put the flowers on the kitchen bench, Lucky was nibbling away at them. Why does she do this? I often wake up to find that she's very delicately flipped a rose out of the vase or jug & has nibbled all around the edges.

The books are a few new books & preorders I wanted to mention. I thought of Monica Baldwin the other day when a friend said that she once lent a copy of The Letters of Rachel Henning & it was never returned. This reminded me that I once lent a copy of Monica Baldwin's memoir, I Leap Over The Wall, & never saw it again. So, I was pleased to discover that it's being reprinted in January. I'm not sure I like the cover though... Anyway, Monica was the daughter of Stanley Baldwin, & entered a convent when she was 21 in 1914. Twenty-eight years later, she leaves, & this is the story of her life in the convent & what she experiences when she leaves.

Charlotte Riddell is an author I've read about rather than read. I've been reading her Weird Stories this week, reprinted by Victorian Secrets, & another of her novels, A Struggle for Fame, is being reprinted this month by Tramp Press, a new Irish publisher. This is the first in their Recovered Voices series & I can't wait to read it.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir is one of my favourite movies - I watched it again last weekend - & Vintage have reprinted the novel by R A Dick as part of their Movie Classics series which also includes Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington & Show Boat by Edna Ferber.

Persephone in the UK & Sourcebooks in the US have both been reprinting D E Stevenson in recent years. It's a shame that they began by reprinting the same titles (the Miss Buncle series) but Sourcebooks have kept their reprint list going with The Four Graces, The Young Clementina &, in January, The Listening Valley. I listened to this on audio a couple of years ago but will probably need a copy for rereading in the future. I also feel compelled to buy copies of authors like Stevenson & Angela Thirkell when they're reprinted in case they go out of print again, which they probably will.

The British Library Crime Classics series has been very successful in alerting fans of Christie, Sayers & Allingham to other Golden Age mystery writers we'd never heard of. It doesn't hurt that the covers are just gorgeous, often based on railway posters of the period. Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon (brother of Eleanor) (great review by Desperate Reader here) & A Scream in Soho by John G Brandon have just been published & The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude & Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston will be published in January. I enjoyed The Santa Klaus Murder & Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay & I'm looking forward to reading more in the series.

I've also preordered Mark Bostridge's new book, Vera Brittain and the First World War : the story of Testament of Youth. Published to coincide with the new film, I'm hoping it's not just a rehash of his 1995 biography of Vera. I know I'll feel compelled to see this new movie version of Testament of Youth but I don't imagine it will be as affecting as the TV series with Cheryl Campbell.

You can watch the trailer here but it looks too pretty, too clean. I feel a reread of the book & rewatch of the series coming on.

Finally, two books by favourite authors on favourite subjects published next year. The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards published in May & The Lives of Richard III by Chris Skidmore published in August. A history of mystery fiction by one of my favourite contemporary crime writers (who has written Introductions for many of the British Library series) is unmissable & a new biography of Richard III incorporating all the new information since the discovery of his remains in Leicester is a very exciting prospect. I really enjoyed Skidmore's book on Bosworth so I'm looking forward to this one. Two books that will definitely not find their way to the ever-increasing tbr shelves. I will read them as soon as they hit the doormat. Absolutely, I promise.

Death on the Cherwell - Mavis Doriel Hay

Published in 1935, the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, Death on the Cherwell, & its author, Mavis Doriel Hay, have been completely forgotten until this welcome reprint by the British Library. The tradition of college crime - whether based in Oxford or Cambridge - was well-established in the Golden Age of mystery fiction & I enjoy a mystery set in an enclosed community so I was definitely interested in this reprint. Add the gorgeous cover & the fact that the fictional college is called Persephone & I couldn't wait to read it.

Four first-year students at Persephone College - Daphne, Sally, Gwyneth & Nina - meet on the roof of the boathouse near the college on a cold January afternoon. They plan to form their own society, the Lode League, & their purpose is to curse the unpleasant Bursar of the College, Miss Denning. Miss Denning, known as the Burse, is coldly efficient & very strict with the students & is therefore loathed by many. The League has barely concluded their first meeting when they see a canoe drifting down river. They're astonished & a little frightened to discover the dripping wet body of Miss Denning lying in the bottom of the canoe.

The Principal of the College, Miss Cordell, calls the police & it appears that Miss Denning had quite a few enemies & not just among the disgruntled students. She was feuding with a misogynistic local landowner, Mr Lond & a local farmer, Lidgett, over the sale of land to the College. She had also upset a Yugoslav student, Draga Czernak, by insulting her & inspiring the girl to threaten a blood feud against her. She was also very secretive about her private life. She had no family, apart from a niece, Pamela, who was studying at Cambridge. Miss Denning had been determined to keep Pamela away from Oxford but would never explain why.

Miss Denning was a keen swimmer & canoeist & it wasn't unusual to find her on the river in all weathers. Inspector Wythe of the local police soon decides that her death was murder. How could she have drowned accidentally & then got herself, dripping wet, back into the canoe? If she hit her head accidentally, someone must have put her body back in the canoe & set it drifting downstream. Where were the paddles? When the doctor discovers a blow to the back of her head, it seems that murder or manslaughter are the only options. Scotland Yard, in the person of Detective Inspector Braydon, arrives to carry on the investigation, which is being helped & hindered by the meddling of the four members of the Lode League as well as some of the male students of  St Simeon's. Finding the solution of this mystery will mean delving into the past of Miss Denning & disregarding a lot of red herrings along the way.

I enjoyed Death on the Cherwell very much. The college atmosphere was evoked very successfully. I loved the fact that the students of Persephone College were just as irritated at being referred to in the Press as Undergraduettes as the students & Fellows of Sayers's Shrewsbury College. There are some very funny scenes, especially Daphne's conversation with Owen Vellaway, student of St Simeon's & newly published poet. His poem, Dust, is available in Blackwells, in a sealed package to stop people just reading it in the bookshop. What would Owen have thought about pirated books in the days of the ebook? The students are resourceful in their investigations & I do think Inspector Braydon is extraordinarily forbearing with them as they go around picking up evidence & destroying fingerprints. He's definitely in the gentleman sleuth mould of Alleyn & Campion, though, & has impeccable manners & a proper sense of the right way to go about a sensitive investigation so as not to impugn the reputation of the College.

Sally's sister, Betty & her husband, Basil Pongleton, (who made an appearance in Hay's other mystery, Murder Underground) arrive in a wonderful car & have a convenient previous acquaintance with Miss Denning & her niece. This enables them to offer to look after Pamela when she arrives in Oxford & Sally & her friends take advantage of the opportunity to further their investigations. The minor characters are all interesting, from Mr Lond's worried landlady to the absent-minded don, Mr Mort & the unhelpful Farmer Lidgett, who leads Inspector Wyeth on a muddy walk through his fields, recreating the afternoon that Miss Denning died. Death on the Cherwell is my idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon book. It's a shame that Hay only wrote three mysteries but it's lovely to have them now all back in print in this beautifully produced series of British Library Crime Classics.

Bookish things

I always begin the New Year with the intention of not buying any books for a few months. I have so many unread books that it would take me years to read them all that it really shouldn't need a new year's resolution to motivate me to stop for a while. I'm usually quite disciplined &, apart from a few ebooks (which are just too easy to buy - at least they're invisible), I stick to it, at least until autumn & the thought of long winter afternoons send me off to check my wishlists.

I have just bought these four VMCs from World Of Books, a secondhand bookshop in the UK. They were £1 each so even with postage, they only cost $25AU which I thought was very reasonable. They're in lovely condition & I'm looking forward to reading them. I had read a review of The Wild Geese by Bridget Boland somewhere & that's what sent me off to Abebooks in search of a copy. It's the story of an 18th century Irish family, told through letters. The Wild Geese are the young men of the family, rebels who risk their lives by returning from exile. I was also fascinated to read the Bridget Boland was a scriptwriter who had written the screenplays of several well-known films including Anne of the Thousand Days & the 1940 version of Gaslight. I couldn't just buy one book though, could I? So, I found myself looking through the bookstore's listings for VMCs & came across The Misses Mallett by E H Young, Company Parade by Storm Jameson & The Way Things Are by E M Delafield.

Does anyone remember Catherine Gaskin? I loved her novels when I was younger. She was born in Australia, but, like many artists of the mid 20th century, left Australia to live in the UK & US most of her life. She wrote novels of romantic suspense & could be compared with Mary Stewart. I especially enjoyed Sara Dane, set in early 19th century Australia, Falcon for a Queen, set in Scotland & The File on Devlin, a suspense novel. I came across the website dedicated to Gaskin (follow the link) through a link to an interview there with Linda Gillard, author of Cauldstane. I enjoyed my trip down memory lane & was pleased to discover that one of her books has been released as an ebook with hopefully more to come. The Property of a Gentleman is about a young woman working for a London antiques house who is sent to a remote country house in the Lake District, Thirlbeck, to assess the art collection. She finds romance, suspense & family secrets. I don't remember reading this one but it sounded so intriguing that I bought it. Some of the book covers here look very familiar & I would love to read more of her books.

I also have a few books on preorder. I'm looking forward to the British Library Crime Classics. I couldn't resist the gorgeously nostalgic covers of the books by John Bude & Mavis Doriel Hay so I've ordered all four of them. Martin Edwards has written the Introductions to the John Bude titles so that's another reason to look forward to them. So many good things to look forward to!