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(re)Discovering Annika Norlin: from Hello Saferide to ‘Colony’

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The first time I heard (of) Annika Norlin was way back in 2005 when a Swedish friend included the track ‘Highschool Stalker’ on a mix tape. Well, okay, a mix CD, the format I guess being an analogue stepping stone to digital playlists which, as fine as those might be, nevertheless lack the charm of physical objects coming though the letterbox: The cover a picture scissored out of a magazine, or maybe if you were lucky a hand assembled collage. Hand written tracklists with spelling errors and crossings out. The charm of her handwriting.

Anyway, I thought ‘Highschool Stalker’ was marvellous. All handclaps and yummy strummy guitars, teeming with teenage hormones (even though Norlin would have been at the tail end of her twenties when she wrote and recorded the song). Listening again now, twenty years on, it still sounds terrific, with a period charm enhanced by references to being “on the Altavista” and “twice on the Yahoo”. Norlin was going by the performing name of Hello Saferide in those days (was this a band? An alter-ego? I never was quite sure and I’m not at all sure that it matters…) and the ‘Introducing…’ album that ‘Highschool Stalker’ closed off was, and remains, a tremendous slice of IndieFolkPop. That album was certainly part of what was for me and many others something of a period of Swedish obsession. All that Scandi-Noir and the insanely addictive sweet Pop that gave it such a great contrast. Too many artists to mention here, but Annika Norlin was pretty much, if not front and centre, certainly hanging around in close proximity, at least for me. The other two albums she made as Hello Saferide (2008’s ‘More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide’ and ‘The Fox, The Hunter and Hello Saferide’ from 2014) were every bit as good as the debut, whilst I found the songs sung in Swedish under the Säkert! moniker to be equally seductive, even if (or perhaps especially because) I could not understand a word of what Norlin was singing. A version of the second Säkert! album (2010’s ‘Facit’) was released in 2011 as ‘På Engelska’ with the songs translated to English and is another exceptionally charming record.

An appearance on one of Jens Lekman’s ‘Postcards’ songs from 2015 (October 5th 2015, Postcard number 40 if you want to track it down) led to their collaborative ‘Correspondence’ LP of 2019. I consider this album to be a something of a modern classic, particularly the album closing ‘Silent Night’ which is certainly one damn song that is guaranteed to make me break down and cry. Then 2022’s ‘Mentor’, a ‘double album’ with a mix of Swedish and English lyrics and 2024’s ‘En Tid Att Riva Sönder’ which she made with Jonas Teglund who had been in the band Park Hotell, whose 2006 album ‘The Guest Who Stayed Forever’ was another of those Swedish records that struck a chord, in particular the tingling track ‘Size of Spain’. So I have been enjoying both of these most recent albums these past few days as they had passed under my radar until now. Indeed I only stumbled on them thanks to one of those little quirks of connection, again through Jens Lekman, whose recent ‘Songs For Other People’s Weddings’ LP has been playing a lot and is one of my very favourites of this year. So yes, listening to Jens got me thinking about ‘Correspondence’ again so I had a look to see if there were any Annika Norlin records I had missed, and there they were.

Something else that I discovered was a novel called ‘Colony’ which, the advertising assured me, is a ‘Swedish bestseller’. Well, despite being not much interested in contemporary fiction I just had to give it a twirl and am so glad to have done so, for it is a very fine book indeed. It is quite easy to see why the book should be a best seller, for it feels as though it addresses 21st century issues, fears, concerns, whatever. So, of the characters who populate the novel and through whose lenses we see the story unravel, all of them “had anxiety.” Well of course they did and of course they do, for ‘anxiety’ is the contagion of our age. A cover-all excuse behind which to hide and/or a stick with which to beat the flimsy hearted. I say this with a tongue at least approaching my cheek, incidentally, for whilst I am mistrustful of a single word being used to explain away a multitude of issues I equally dislike the fact that doing so often feels like an excuse for avoiding an examination of the reasons for such feelings/responses. From both sides of the fence.

Whatever. The characters, as well as all suffering from ‘anxiety’ are further described as being “all strange… all flawed” and so if not quite the “alcoholics, child-molesters, nervous wrecks and prima donnas” from Dexys’ ‘I’ll Show You’, then they are at least to an extent the wild hearted outsiders. Certainly the misfits, the square pegs, the ones who find modern life to be, at least in part, confusing and challenging, something of a battle. These are characters who to various degrees try to flex in response to the requirements of the society and the systems we all of us find ourselves within. Norlin seems too though to be making the observation that whilst individuals necessarily attempt to bend in order to function/survive within what often feel like alien systems, those systems and societies are in turn almost entirely inflexible and unforgiving. The contest feels rigged, defeat inevitable, at least for some. And so they opt out. They run away.

Such tales of running away to hide in the hinterland inevitably conjure notions of hippy communes and cult retreats. Inevitably too one cannot help but think of the ‘Colony’ as something approaching Manson’s Family (though admittedly without the extremism of murders in the Hollywood hills and dune buggy attack battalions in Death Valley), something that Norlin acknowledges with a reference dropped towards the end of the novel. As such, the novel is also, inevitably, a rumination on how systems and structural hierarchies themselves may be ‘natural’. Much is made of the analogy of the ant colony and it is an interesting one. “Everyone is needed. No one has to know everything” is something of a mantra. Eventually though this gives way to “Everyone is needed… Except maybe humans. We are the only ones who take more than we give.” Well, quite.

This thread of the relationship between humankind and the broader natural realm is central to ‘Colony’ and whilst it would be tempting to suggest that it is a tale that dwells on the urban versus rural question, it is actually more like urban versus nowhere. For the lives of the characters in ‘Colony’ seem to exist not just on the edges of civilisation but on the edge of humanity. There is a sense of humans seeking the point at which they blend into nature, become at one with their elements. As such the novel does feel both deeply rooted to the 21st century and also oddly cyclical. By this I mean that, whilst many of us consider that the threats of climate change and humankind’s (irrational? Certainly unsustainable) obsession with growth and the accumulation/protection of capital is by turns bewildering, disastrous and To Be Challenged, we are certainly not the first to think this way. Younger generations tend to fall into the trap of thinking they are unique in their challenges to established worldviews, but I do not say this pejoratively. After all, each of us belongs at some point to both ‘younger’ and ‘older’ generations, just at different points on the arc of time. One gets a sense from ‘Colony’ that Norlin acknowledges this. Being born in 1977 she is not quite ‘my’ generation but as noted, as we age time erases its barriers and generation gaps blur so the biggest distinctions become the Pop culture references we make. Are these often indecipherable references peculiarly significant or utterly irrelevant? Possibly both. Or neither.

‘Colony’ ultimately feels something of the same. It is certainly a novel that asks questions but, perhaps more importantly, Norlin seems to recognise that the process of asking questions is more valuable than the seeking of answers, which are illusory and transitory. It is a novel where notions of love, belonging, attachment, community and nature weave together in a tapestry that depicts a scene that by turns appeals and repels. In the darkness there is light and in the shadows we might find hope. Maybe this is enough.

A Hundred Years Hence – The Spell of Sarnia

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Did you know that the Roman name for the island of Guernsey was Sarnia? It was certainly new knowledge for me and for this snippet alone I would have been happy to have read Mrs Baillie Reynolds’ 1925 novel ‘The Spell of Sarnia’. There is a great deal more to take from the book though, for this is a thoroughly engaging story of romance, mystery, folklore and witchcraft. It might be overthinking things to suggest that the book is also a reflection on the erosion of ancient traditions in the face of the capitalist obsession with ‘growth’, but if you perhaps squint just a little then the traces of such threads can surely be seen. Odd, perhaps, in a book written by a woman who married a stockbroker, but then again it can certainly be unfair to suggest that every person intimately engaged in the realms of commerce and the pursuit of capital must be tainted by wickedness. Sorely tempting, but unfair.

In terms of plot, the novel is fairly straightforward. A relatively impoverished descendent of Guernsey aristocracy returns to the island to find his ancestral home turned into a Country Club run by someone who seems to be a rather shady character. Returnee connects with an aunt who recounts the tale of the mythical ‘lost’ perfume ‘Sarnian Bouquet’ which was concocted by her brother, a perfumier turned to the demon drink by lost love. The ‘mystery’ element of the book then concerns the search for the lost ‘prescription’ for the perfume and this in turn introduces the threads of folklore, witchcraft and ultimately romance, all of which combine nicely in a very pleasing tapestry.

This narrative tapestry seems to be a blend of truth and fiction, fittingly so for a story that revolves around the idea of a ‘lost’ perfume that is itself a magical blend of secret ingredients. My 1949 reissue of the novel further muddies these waters by including advertisements encouraging one to “Build up and herd of Golden Guernseys” complete with photograph of an impressive looking beast, alongside ones for ‘Perfumes of Guernsey’ by C.Stonelake and Co., a pharmacist business that professes to be operated by the descendants of the ‘Pierre Dulac’ character in the novel. There is also a reproduction of a note, dated October 1925 and apparently signed from Baillie Reynolds, to one W. (Or possibly JW) Stonelake who apparently told her the story of the lost ‘Sarnian Bouquet’ perfume from which her tale sprung. And oddly enough (or perhaps not), ‘C.Stonelake and Co.’ Is also the publisher of the 1949 edition… A Stonelake Pharmacy does appear to still operate on the island. All intriguing little connections if one cares for such things.

For someone who was not a native or long term inhabitant of the island, Baillie Reynolds’ nevertheless infuses the book with what feels like a convincing sense of place. True ‘donkeys’ (or ‘ânes’), as the Guernsey inhabitants are traditionally called, might disagree, but for an idle tourist like me there are plenty of references to real places that once can locate on maps (the Pleinmont headland, the causeway to Lihou) to get a sense that the writer has a genuine warmth for the place.

Similarly, the folklore elements (including the tale of how the Guernsey Lily came into being, which naturally involves fairies) feel convincing but never overpowering. The involvement of witchcraft also strikes me as being admirably balanced. There are visions in crystal balls, mesmeric trances, pentagrams drawn on rocks and an amusing confusion of a goat as a satanic presence, but none of it feels either sensationally tokenistic nor wearisomely involved and detailed. Anyone looking for a darker supernatural thriller type affair might feel disappointed, but for someone like me who finds such things rather trying, ‘The Spell of Sarnia’ hits something of a sweet spot.

It might be just a shade too populist to appeal to true aficionados of the weird (or indeed of the Wyrd) but nevertheless I can just about imagine someone in the 21st Century making a soundtrack album for an imaginary film of ‘The Spell of Sarnia’. Someone like Drew Mulholland perhaps, or Alison Cotton, whose marvellous ‘The House of the Famous Poet’ features in the new Riz Ahmed movie ‘Relay’. I would certainly listen to such a thing, just as I would certainly recommend tracking down a copy of ‘The Spell of Sarnia’.

A Hundred Years Hence – The School At The Chalet

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‘The School At The Chalet’ by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer has been on my ‘to be read’ list for a few years now and what better time to finally get around to it than with this centenary reissue by the Girls Gone By imprint. In many respects I am very, very far from the target audience for a one hundred year old children’s book about a fee-paying girls’ school in the idyllic Austrian mountains, not least because after a thirty year professional career working in state education, the very idea of private schooling can still make me prickle. So yes, the fact that the characters are for the most part upper middle class and ‘privileged’ can occasionally be an irritant but it is also true to say that as with, for example, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine adventures (whose reissued books brought me to Girls Gone By in the first place) this ought not to out one off investigating. Besides, it would be churlish to judge (and/or dismiss) such fictional worlds according to one’s contemporary standards for to do so would be to miss opportunities to learn about historical contexts. In terms of education for example it can be very easy for those of my own generation to really grasp the idea that education should NOT be provided free of charge by the State for all young people, or that girls should not (at least notionally) have learning opportunities equal to boys. One could of course argue long and hard about the ways in which UK (and perhaps specifically English) education policy in the past fifty years has made things better (or indeed worse) for those from backgrounds of reduced capital (financial and, increasingly perhaps more relevant, cultural) but this is hardly the time or place. Instead, whilst one perhaps does need to park a sense of class consciousness in order to enjoy a book like ‘The School At The Chalet’ equally one can also use it as an opportunity to consider people as characters defined by qualities other than social class.

Indeed, using the context of a school and characters who are for the most part children can be an excellent means of questioning the very rigidity of the social class structures prevalent in 1925. The realm of the Girls’ School novel is largely alien to me, but I do think that for example Mabel Esther Allan’s ’School on Skye’ books from the 1950s certainly seek to challenge such notions even whilst operating within their constraints. One thing that certainly strikes me about ‘The School At The Chalet’ is the way in which the school grows so rapidly immediately upon its opening. It feels like this reflects an appetite, at least within some of the middle classes, for girls’ educational opportunities previously lacking.
Having said that, it must also be admitted that the curriculum at The Chalet School does seem to be lacking in mathematics and the sciences, with much time given over to the ‘Finishing School’ staple of languages, music and sewing. Still, small steps and perhaps later books in the extensive series see the curriculum expand to embrace more ‘boyish’ subjects?

Structurally, ‘The School At The Chalet’ is episodic with each chapter or small cluster of chapters covering a series of events throughout the school’s first year. Sometimes these are Grand Adventures, such as getting caught in the mountains during a thunderstorm and having to spend the night in a herdsman’s hut. Oftentimes, however, the ‘episodes’ are relatively everyday events that allow the many individual characters to develop. A somewhat myriad cast of characters threatens at times to overwhelm things, but the focus just about stays on the few with whom the story begins, these being the school’s ‘owner’/principle Madge Bettany, her young sister Jo and her friend from Cornwall (where they set off from) Grizel Cochrane. In many respects the book is about Grizel coming to terms with the fact that she is rejected by her father and step-mother (Madge and Jo appear to have been orphaned at quite a young age although it is not explored in detail in this book), neither of whom seem to want Grizel spoiling their opportunities for fun and this exploration of behaviour does add a layer of interest to the book that might otherwise be lacking. Indeed Brent-Dyer revisits this theme with the introduction of another character, Juliet, who is even more brutally abandoned into the Chalet School’s care by her parents. There is surely an element here about not judging children based on their parents’ social class and/or financial status and something also about emotional states being blind to material ‘worth’. Equally, I am willing to concede that this is a ridiculously intellectual reading of something intended solely as escapist fantasy for children, something which is surely borne out by the somewhat rushed ending to the book in which Madge, Jo and Grizel each find themselves in comically thrilling situations that tumble to a conclusion without barely a pause for breath much like this sentence in fact.

The real star of ‘The School At The Chalet’ however is the landscape of the Northern Tyrolean Alps and specifically the area around the Achensee. Indeed, it was apparently a holiday to the lakeside village of Pertisau in 1922 that inspired Brent-Dyor to begin her Chalet School odyssey and her love of the landscape and people of the area are certainly marvellously captured. There is a small degree of negativity about foreigners, but this seems specifically targeted at Germans, and ‘Prussians’ in particular in the form of the ‘Frau Berlin’ character who pops up a couple of times in the story. Given the proximity of the book’s writing to the First World War, however, any anti-German feeling is lightweight and pretty much restricted to ‘Frau Berlin’ which makes one think that perhaps this is more of an urban/rural observation than anything rooted in geographical borders. Incidentally, ’Frau Berlin’ for some reason reminds me of The Bellinger in Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine stories and it is perhaps worth remarking that Saville’s outing to Austria in his 1950 ‘Jillies’ adventure ‘The Sign Of The Alpine Rose’ displays significantly more xenophobic attitudes in its English characters than those in ’The School At The Chalet’.

I understand that Brent-Dyer once acknowledged the fact that she was “no ‘great’ writer” and certainly ‘The School At The Chalet’ would seem to bear this out. Its appeal, however, would seem to lie (as with Enid Blyton, perhaps) not in any sense of literary excellence but in an intuitive knack for understanding what girls wanted (or arguably what a patriarchal society encouraged them to want) from fiction. As much as those on the ultra-conservative leaning edges of society today might welcome a wholesale return of the kind of educational focus seen in the early 20th Century, it is very doubtful indeed that many teenage girls would find much of interest in ‘The School At The Chalet’ in 2025. Indeed, for some time now (at a rough guess, the last 30 years?) the readership of the book, which has never been out of print, must assuredly be in the category of ’heritage readership’. That readership must surely too be passing from those who discovered books like this in their own childhood and who read them now for purposes of nostalgia and comfort into an audience who have no such connection of emotional memory. For them, amongst whom I certainly count myself, the appeal is… well, what exactly? A peek into social and historical contexts from Before Our Time and an opportunity to spot the things that time and history do not touch (or at least just lightly kiss)? Or perhaps something simpler and in fact more in tune with their avowed intent: fantasy escapism into fictional realms devoid of connection to the harsh realities of the present day. Either way, whilst I do not feel the need to obsessively start reading the entire (and extensive) ‘Chalet School’ series, I do certainly see myself dipping a toe into Brent-Dyer’s pleasurably sketched waters of the Achensee in the future.

A Hundred Years Hence – part 2

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For my second instalment of the ‘Hundred Years Hence’ challenge I could have re-read ‘The Great Gatsby’. I certainly know I’d have enjoyed it, but what is there to say about it that hasn’t already been said? Similarly I was tempted by ‘Carry On, Jeeves’ but I know if I did so I’d instantly want to re-read the entire collection of Jeeves books and then crack open the DVD boxset of ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ for the umpteenth time. I mean, that’s hardly burdensome, but truth be told we watched all those episodes earlier this year already, so…

I also considered digging out Earl Derr Bigger’s ‘The House Without A Key’ in which Charlie Chan makes his debut. Again though, I know that as with Wodehouse I’d be sorely tempted to go on a Charlie Chan spree. Guilty pleasures (but only slightly guilty)and all that.

If I were being worthy I might try ‘Mrs Dalloway’ again to see if I might finally find Virginia Woolf’s writing to be even the slightest bit enjoyable rather than a wearisome chore. Or I might finally have a go at John Dos Passos’ ‘Manhattan Transfer’ which has been on a shelf here for I don’t know how long.

In the end though I opted for Edgar Wallace’s ‘The Three Just Men’ and do you know what? I rather wish I hadn’t. The penultimate instalment of Wallace’s series of six novels that started with ‘The Four Just Men’ of 1905, ‘The Three Just Men’ reads, in 2025, as something of a flimsy, disjointed thriller that is going through the motions. It gives off the odour of a Marvel Universe movie where the rot has well and truly set in, dissolving any sense of recognisable plot and leaving only a seemingly never ending series of action sequences, each more preposterous than the last. The book begins with a young woman (Mirabelle) being enticed from a farm in an unspecified area of rural England (but probably somewhere in The Home Counties) up to That London to take up a post as a laboratory secretary. It’s quickly obvious that she’s been tempted there For Nefarious Reasons although it seems to take forever before we get any real inkling as to the motivation behind what is effectively her kidnapping. The opening of the book also prepares us for the involvement of The Snake as some kind of murderous weapon (a black mamba, recently escaped from London Zoo, is Chief Suspect). These two themes (Mirabelle’s capture and The Snake) continue to, ahem, wriggle through the rest of the book but they do feel hastily sketched and ultimately disappointingly explained. They feel instead like weak canes supporting sunflowers that end up dropping towards the earth, the blooms in this metaphor being those previously mentioned Action Sequences that we are meant to enjoy but instead look a little withered and tame, as if the seed packet promised multi-coloured hues and all we get are bog standard yellow.

Wallace in his time was hailed by publisher Hodder and Stoughton as ‘The King Of Thrillers’ and whilst this was certainly the publicity machine in full effect, the public certainly seemed to like it and Wallace’s books were enormously popular. By the nineteen twenties a distinction between Mystery and Thriller was beginning to come into focus, with the two distinct vines becoming a little more untangled, and whilst my personal preference is certainly for the Mystery branch, I do still enjoy a rattling good John Buchan or Dornford Yates tale of derring do. Both those authors perhaps owe a nod of acknowledgment to Edgar Wallace, but everything I have read by them has been immeasurably more enjoyable (though frequently no less preposterous) than ‘The Three Just Men’. Despite inhabiting a post-WW1 world, Wallace’s fiction here still retains the distinct whiff of Edwardian melodrama. There is some acknowledgment of the scars of war on one or two characters, but for the most part the book feels like a harkening back to something of the pre-war world. Criminals are dastardly and heroes are stout hearted. Women are for the most part decorative and To Be Protected/Saved (the Damsel In Distress meme). Official law enforcers (London’s doughty Police force) applaud the rather freely dispatched ‘justice’ of the vigilantes in way that rather suggests a certain, ah, moral flexibility. And whilst Wallace’s Just Men act as judge, jury and executioner in a way that feels, in the 21st Century, uncomfortably relevant, one feels that rather than being a warning about the dangers inherent in allowing members of the wealthy elite to act in such a way, Wallace instead is suggesting that it is something to be applauded.

‘The Three Just Men’ then for me feels disappointingly distasteful as well as rather hastily constructed. If jerry-built thrillers are your thing then you might get some pleasure from it, but me? I’m wishing I’d gone with ‘Carry On, Jeeves’.

A Hundred Years Hence – part 1

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I’ve been enjoying browsing the ‘hot cup of pleasure’ blog recently and was quite taken with the idea of the ‘Hundred Years Hence’ reading challenge, whose premise is pretty much what it says on the tin. Obviously I’m a little late to be participating in the party but I thought I would slot a few new books into my ‘to be ride’ shelf this month just for the fun of it all. The first of these, then, is Ronald Arbuthnott Knox’s ‘The Aqueduct Murder’ and it has been enjoyable primarily for the reason that it is a light hearted poke at the crime/detective fiction genre that would have been all the rage in the UK (and elsewhere) a hundred years ago.

Knox, an English catholic priest and theologian, had an impressive catalogue of published books on a variety of subjects by the time of his death in 1957 but he did seem to have a particular thing for satire and parody. Amongst these we find: “A satire in the manner of Dryden on the latitudinarianism of the authors of Foundations”; “a satire on the readiness of certain Anglicans to sink doctrinal differences with the Nonconformist sects in the interests of Christian good fellowship”; “a parody of the current autobiographies of women of fashion with a gentle satire on current whims—educational, medical, political and theological”; “a satirical tale about a hoax played on a circle of spiritualists”; and “A satire on the religious opinions of some of the chief popular writers of the day (including Arnold Bennett and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)”. Against such a backdrop then ‘The Aqueduct Murder’ makes a lot of sense as Knox’s first foray into the genre.

The narrative revolves around a group of golfers (naturally all male they are a clergyman, a retired don, a former clerical assistant in the War Office who refers at every opportunity to his time “in Military Intelligence” and one largely unremarkable ‘dogs body’ type figure) who, following a clubhouse discussion on their relative skills at solving the fictional crimes found in books, discover a dead body at the base of a railway viaduct whilst searching for a lost ball. As one does.

The knowing preposterousness of such a situation could easily be overplayed, but Knox has, if not exactly a deftness of touch at least a lack of heavy handedness that is quite appealing. True, the tendency to use the technique of lengthy extrapolations of the amateur detective’s deductive processes can be as tedious in satirical form as in the serious, but this tricky balancing act is just about carried off and I only found myself skimming such interminable passages a couple of times in the book.


The story, whilst ridiculous in many respects, is well stage managed and progresses nicely according to the unwritten rules of detective fiction of the time. That said, as one the founders of The Detection Club Knox in 1930, Knox seems to have been unable to resist devising ‘Ten Rules for Detective Fiction’, around which no doubt his ‘serious’ attempts at the genre (five novels from 1927 to ’37 featuring series detective Miles Bredon) were constructed. I thought then that it might be fun to see how ‘The Viaduct Murder’ measures up against these rules:

“1: The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.” Check. Not really much to say about this, except that as per the rule the names and descriptions of most key players in the story are all present and correct in Chapter One.

“2: All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Amusingly there is a reference to ghosts in the denouement of the book, with hilarious consequences. Okay, mildly amusing consequences.

“3: Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.” Knox makes the most of this one by ensuring that there is indeed one of each in the story.

“4: No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.” Pleasingly, Knox does not fall into the trap of attempting some kind of wearisome parody of this rule by incorporating a device such as the adjustable golf club utilised by one Bertram Wooster. Full marks.

“5: No Chinaman must figure in the story.” Of all Knox’s rules this is surely the most bizarre. It refers to the fairly short-lived fashion for stereotypical Asian figures in thriller/detective stories of the period. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Knox that one might use Asian (or other non-white male) characters in a way that would avoid stereotypes altogether.

“6: No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.” It’s really hardly a spoiler to say that there are lots of intuitions at play in the book, none of which prove to be correct.

“7: The detective himself must not commit the crime.” Again, it is not really a spoiler to say that this rule passes muster, although amusingly one of the four ‘detectives’ is accused of being so by one of the others.

“8: The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.” This rule is strictly adhered to throughout, with the occasionally tedious result of extended postulations, mostly by Reeves, the ‘Military Intelligence’ chappie.

“9: The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.” Of the four amateur sleuths investigating the crime, Reeves is probably the parodical Holmes character, and the other three all to some extent the Watson, but it is hazy ground to be honest. Indeed I thought all of the characters to be rather less intelligent than the average mystery reader, but this may have been because they all play golf.

“10: Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Twins and doubles do not appear, although the first wild attempt to explain the crime does indeed make a play on this theme.

Further rules that Knox might well have included in his list, and which he also adheres to in ‘The Viaduct Murder’ might be:

11: Make repeated reference to Sherlock Holmes and/or Arthur Conan Doyle. 
Knox enthusiastically ascribes to this ‘rule’ throughout ‘The Aqueduct Murder’, even including a chapter entitled ‘The Holmes Method’. Not being a very great fan of the Holmes stories, I admit that I find this ‘rule’ of the Golden Age to be perhaps the most tiresome.

12: Make repeated reference to Shakespeare and include quotes at every opportunity. 
Of course Knox follows this rule. It might be done satirically, but if so then only just.

13: Include a mysterious female character whose honour must be defended. 
Like so much Golden Age detective fiction there are few female characters in ‘The Viaduct Murder’ and the one who does appear is, as per this imagined rule, vaguely and rather stereotypically sketched. I admit I rather thought that the final chapter in the book was going to drop a bomb and cheekily invert this rule, but I was disappointed that this proves not to be the case.

Indeed, Knox kindly suggests that the final chapter “may be omitted if the book be thought too long”, which to my mind shows a perceptive awareness of the difficulty in pulling a detective novel to a successful conclusion. Not for Knox the unbearably detailed explanations of the clues we ought to have spotted in the text but were too stupid to notice. Not for Knox the eye-rolling temptation to show, through his characters’ ‘intelligence’ how smart the author thinks he is. The inversion of this approach might be entirely what one would expect of a gently satirical text, but it is nevertheless very welcome, particularly as in the closing chapters Knox also outlines a deconstruction of sorts of the genre. This section of the book, indeed, is perhaps where I found most pleasure, for the jabs and pokes at psychotherapy as well as literary and historical criticism are deftly placed. Lines like “A man with a documentary hypothesis can defy the rudest assaults of common sense” and “All documents which don’t happen to support your point of view thereby give themselves away as being untrustworthy” reverberate with eerie contemporary resonance.

‘The Viaduct Murder’ then may for the most part show every one of its one hundred years age, but even amongst its preposterous pages relevance can still be found.

The Odd Flamingo

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It’s been a while since I gave any attention to the British Library Crime Classics series. Blame the summer recess when another collection of short stories hit the shelves (‘Cyanide In The Sun’), followed by yet another John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr title (‘The Judas Window’), both of which finally managed to break my habit of buying/reading every release simply because it was on the label, as it were. I’ve known for a long, long time that the short story form is not for me, and that with very few exceptions I have found every John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr book I have ever read (and it’s an embarrassingly large number) to be insufferably dull and smug. So, with the habit broken I have since managed to sell off all my previous BLCC short story compilations and also avoided the latest ‘Locked Room and Other Miraculous Crimes’ entry. I did, however, enjoy the reissue of Christianna Brand’s ‘Cat and Mouse’ (it had just arrived in the mail when I last wrote about a BLCC title back in May). There is no Inspector Cockrill in the book, which is a shame, but it’s nonetheless a cracking kind of psychological thriller type mystery full of deceit, deception, mis-direction and identity confusion all wrapped up in or around Welsh folklore, or at least local here-say. More proof that Brand’s books are, for me, as reliably fine as John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s are frustrating.

A more recent entry in the BLCC catalogue that I’ve picked up has been Nina Bawden’s ‘The Odd Flamingo’. First published in 1954, it is one of two crime novels written by the author much more famously known for her children’s books ‘Carrie’s War’ and ‘The Peppermint Pig’ (cue The Cocteau Twins…). Written when Bawden was in her late twenties, the book does perhaps suffer slightly from a youthful preoccupation with Darkness and Gloom, but in its defence does capture the seedy side of post-war London with aplomb. I’ve read other reviews of the book where readers bemoan the lack of any particularly ‘likeable’ characters, and whilst this is a pretty accurate observation I personally do not see it as a weakness. Certainly the fairly unrelenting unveiling of the negative aspects of human nature might seem a little much, but arguably this was something that those who grew up with war and its aftermath needed to get out of their systems, in Bawden’s case perhaps through writing this book. There are some interesting themes at work here around the impact of familial fragmentation caused by war, as well as the enduring idealisation of feminine ‘innocence’ in the male gaze. The story concerns for the most part the ‘amateur’ investigations carried out by a solicitor but is certainly not in the lawyer-mystery field inhabited by, say, Sara Woods, and the character of Will here is no Anthony Maitland. Rather he comes across as rather a starched shirt, seeing his illusions of ‘propriety’ progressively dismantled as the story progresses. It’s easy to read Will as the embodiment of conservative attitudes, wildly hoping to re-establish some kind of pre-war status quo but being wholly ineffectual in doing so against the tide of change wrought by conflict. Not that Bawden is suggesting that any kind of positive ideal might be replacing that status-quo. There is none of the underlying hopefulness of, say, Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ here, and even when the face of authority in the form of police presence appears it feels decidedly downbeat, with an air of resignation even. The fatigue of post-war Britain here feels deeply ingrained, and it is not pretty.

‘The Odd Flamingo’ in the book’s title refers, as the attractive cover illustration of this reissue suggests, to a night club in the heart of London. It, and its habituées are well sketched by Bawden and there is certainly something of post-war desperation starting to segue into the beginnings of the beatnik coffee-house generation. There is an air of Robert Frank or Sergio Larrain’s photographs in Bawden’s words, particularly Larrain’s evocative nightclub images from 1959, though Bawden’s characters (particularly her young female ones) lack a degree of optimism visible in Larrain’s photographs from five years in the future. They may be beautiful but they are utterly damned.

‘The Odd Flamingo’ then is arguably one of the most depressing entries in the BLCC series but it is also perhaps one of the most peculiarly enjoyable. For sure anyone looking for a locked room or otherwise ‘miraculous’ mystery should stick to their John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s for they will find nothing to puzzle over here, except perhaps the endlessly enduring facility for human beings to be unfailingly vile to one another. I’m certainly glad that it’s been dusted off and given a new lease of life and hope that a reissue of Bawden’s other crime novel, ‘Who Calls The Tune’ might follow before too long. Fingers crossed.

Exploring the Calleshire Chronicles

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The fourth and final book in Leslie Thomas’ ‘Dangerous Davies’ series (1998’s ‘Dangerous Davies and the Lonely Heart’) ends with the titular character grimly asking his trusty sidekick Mod if he think’s he’s Inspector Morse. It feels like a suitable tone on which to end because it captures a lot of what seems to me to be at the heart of the books, by which I mean that it is mildly amusing and thoroughly mainstream/populist. This is not an observation as pejorative as I might once have meant it, for these days I quite like the idea of sticking two fingers up at the younger version of myself who would have steered wildly clear of ‘mainstream’ or ‘popular’ on a rather simplistic principle. Don’t get me wrong though. I still tend to veer towards the, ahem, Unpopular, and there is certainly a larger part of me that, despite hugely enjoying both Colin Dexter’s books and John Thaw’s depiction in the TV show, would have much preferred Davie’s quip to have gone along the lines of: ‘Who do you think I am? Inspector Charlton?’ Perhaps Inspector Macdonald, Knollis, Littlejohn or Purbright. Or what about Inspector Sloan?

The good Inspector Sloan stars in Catherine Aird’s ‘Calleshire Chronicles’ books that, as with Leslie Thomas’, have been something of an outlier for me in that the first of the 28 book series was published in 1966 and the last in 2023 just a year before her death at the grand age of 94. For the sake of argument then Aird is about as contemporary in terms of detective fiction writing as I’m likely to get, and whilst I’ll hold back on offering up any opinions on the Calleshire books from the 21st Century until I finally (hopefully, eventually) get to them, I must say that the first nine (published 1966 to 1980) have gone down a treat. Unusually, perhaps, for I now see that Aird is commonly described as being in the accursed ‘cozy’ style and compared to the likes of Caroline Graham and M.C. Beaton. The Graham comparison holds water, I think, for the combination of Inspector Sloan and his somewhat hapless sidekick Detective Constable Crosby are similar in many respects to Inspector Barnaby and Sergeant Troy. Neither, however, seem to me to be particularly ‘cozy’ except in so far as both are good to curl up with in front of the fire on an autumnal evening. And yes, yes, I know that in some respects this is the very definition of ‘cozy’, but if that were truly the case then we might as well describe Georges Simenon as ‘cozy’. Or Dostoyevsky.

M.C. Beaton on the other hand has always seemed to me to be of the calculatedly ‘cozy’ school, perhaps even its originator. I know the Agatha Raisin books have a multitude of fans and that is fine, but I have tried and singularly failed to find much of interest there. Certainly Beaton is better than every other determinedly ‘cozy’ crime writer published this century, immeasurably so in many cases, but her books are not for me. Catherine Aird’s on the other hand have found me eagerly picking up the next in the series, with the first six rattling off my ‘to be read’ pile in rapid succession and the next three doing similarly after a pause for the ‘Dangerous Davies’ books and a stylistic detour into Lettice Coopers epic ‘National Provincial’. Indeed it was Aird’s books that led me to Thomas’ thanks to some reference in an article about the Calleshire Chronicles, the details of which escape me for the moment, but that might well have been along the lines of how Detective Constable Crosby might easily be described as ‘The Last Detective’. Certainly in the first few books much is made of Inspector Sloan finding himself in the position of being unable to have his preferred colleagues supporting him on his cases and how Crosby is, literally, the last detective available. It’s all gently humorous and even as the series progresses and Crosby begins to show small signs of intelligent detective process (by the ninth book he is starting to show a few faint shoots of promise though these are still vastly overshadowed by his ability and propensity to drive cars very fast) there are still asides along the lines of his being a bit of a bumbling Watson to Sloan’s Holmes.

The fictional county of Calleshire is apparently based on Kent, but I suspect anyone familiar with the area might struggle to really recognise the landscape in the books. Regular Unpopular readers will know I am a big fan of detective novels that successfully conjure real landscapes (George Bellairs’ evocations of the Isle of Man and Caroline Rivett’s depictions of the Lunesdale landscapes especially spring to mind) but it equally doesn’t particularly bother me when this is not the case. Aird instead is skilled in using the Kentish environs to conjure a sense of place that feels almost universal, one that exists somewhere in the liminal imaginative space between county town, suburban sprawl and rural (relative) solitude. As often with such imaginative landscapes, city existence rears its head in the reality of London as an entity that defies fictionalisation. If ‘Calleshire’ then might translate as ‘Anywhere’ then the historical context of the books also rather escapes the gravity of reality. Despite being first published at the height of Swinging London when Britannia’s Popular Culture ruled the waves, there is little if anything in Aird’s debut ‘The Religious Body’ that evokes the era. Indeed the popular image of that particular point in time is neatly sidestepped by having the book set in a convent, where language and customs might be seen to be intentionally obfuscating as a means not only of aligning with a set of religious beliefs but also as a way of rejecting those of the secular world. It’s the navigation of these two parallel worlds that makes the book so appealing, I think, and Aird echoes most readers’ difficulties in this with Inspector Sloan’s own struggles to not only solve the crime but also to make sense of convent life. It’s a fine debut novel and really does set the tone and formula for the following books, all of which feel similarly rootless in terms of time and place whilst also putting out just enough tendrils to reality to feel grounded and entirely relatable. Aird does this best through her sketching of character, which she does with an assured lightness of touch, and the dialogue between them which is deftly drawn. There are elements of the locked room mystery and the book is certainly a fine example of the ‘play fair’ approach which should find favour with the puzzle solving addicts, but thankfully none of this overpowers the nicely paced narrative. The denouement is well constructed and although fans of police procedurals (of which the Calleshire Chronicles are arguably also an example) might find it all a little flimsy in terms of deductive processes, Aird strikes an excellent balance.

The second book of the series, ‘Henrietta Who?’, followed in 1968 and for me is by a nose the best of the first nine. Like the other eight it very much follows the formula set down in ‘The Religious Body’ in terms of the relationships between the police characters (notably Sloan and Crosby of course, but also the amusingly bumptious Superintendent Leeyes) and the general structure of the mystery. All good genre novels to some extent follow formulas of course and this is one of their strengths (or weaknesses if you want to be foolishly critical). In both ‘The Religious Body’ and ‘Henrietta Who?’ Aird perhaps takes a step too far in this direction when she has Inspector Sloan employ the same strategy of setting up a trap to ensnare the murderer. The plotting trick works well in both cases but Aird wisely backs away from making it A Thing (as I suspect she may initially have been tempted to do) and does not continue to utilise it. What she does continue to do is to create a space that is at once recognisable and yet also comfortably and obviously fictional.

Aird’s writing is certainly in the conservative tradition (which perhaps translates in more modern idiom as that dreaded epithet ‘cozy’) but this ought not to be something that one automatically aligns to those of an, ahem, ‘reforming’ ideology in the present. If anything the reading of what might be seen as traditionally conservative texts from the mid to later 20th Century (Aird’s third book ‘The Stately Home Mystery’ makes this explicit connection in a quietly provocative manner) can often show just how polarised the 21st Century has become in many (all?) ways. Certainly in the first nine books of the ‘Calleshire Chronicles’ we find Aird softly interrogating themes like identity, class, age and religion without ever taking either a Populist, Revisionist or Revolutionary stance. Not that Aird can help making little digs and many of these have made me, if not laugh out loud then at least chuckle inwardly. In ‘His Burial Too’ Sloan reflects that “He had once been on a Management Course and had returned permanently confused about aims and objects”, whilst with respect to two female characters she notes that “each felt superior to the other—Mrs Turvey because she had been married; Miss Holroyd because she had been educated.” Meanwhile, in ‘Slight Mourning’ Sloan considers that “The trouble with people who said what they thought was that they didn’t always think a lot”, an observation that is, sadly, eternally true.

I admit that I am intrigued to see what Aird (and/or Inspector Sloan) makes of the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries as the Calleshire Chronicles continue to unfold. Will the ‘reality’ of history contemporaneous to each book’s date of publication continue to hover just outside the field of visual perception or will it impinge more as time goes on? In 1979’s ‘Some Die Eloquent’, with the spectre of Thatcher’s neo-liberal economic experiment looming on the horizon Aird has the Deputy Head of a school (Private, girls of course) suggest that Economics is merely “an ill-defined grey area which [knows] no morality, somewhere between geography and history” whilst Sloan and his trusted Police Surgeon Dr Dabbe acknowledge the beginnings (in the context of the removal of the property qualification for jury service in 1974) of a mistrust of ‘experts’. The space that Aird paints in her Chronicles then might certainly be conservative, but it is arguably far from Conservative. I’m certainly looking forward to exploring it more in the coming months.

Dangerous Davies

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Back in 1983 or so I said to myself that summer was the time for doing things and winter the time for writing about them. More than four decades later I still seem to be living pretty much by the same excuse, except that in 2025 it is less writing about what I did in the summer months and more about what I read. On her entertaining ‘Adventures in reading, running and working from home’ blog Liz Dexter has had a decade long series of posts covering ’20 books of summer’. This year was a theme of ‘get those hardbacks off the shelves’ and covered an intriguingly diverse range of titles, some of which I have already read and some which I’ve since added to my own ’to be read’ shelves/piles/digital libraries. It would be a good exercise to try and do next summer, although I dare say that when May 2026 comes around I shall be too focused on getting out on my bicycle and visiting the beach to actually do anything about it. Not that I stopped reading during the months of May, June, July, August and September of course, just that from around the middle of June I stopped writing about most of them.

Did I read much in the summer of 1983? Cycling Weekly and Autosport magazines perhaps. Books? Not so much that I can remember. I do however have a vague recollection that some of my friends were enjoying Leslie Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books from the 1960s and ‘70s and that I rather turned my nose up at them (the books, not the friends). I just read a synopsis of the titular 1966 novel and nothing about it appeals to me in the slightest now either, although I can see why the themes of sex, war and male camaraderie conveyed in a supposedly comedic style might have appealed to some. The very idea still makes me shudder, however.

What I had not realised until now was that the the naughties TV show ‘The Last Detective’ starring Peter Davidson and Sean Hughes was based on another series of books by Leslie Thomas, this time the ‘Dangerous Davies’ stories. Have I ever watched the show? No. Will I ever watch the show? Perhaps. I have a DVD boxset that might provide some light entertainment on gloomy winter days when I tire of old episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders’ and Zooey our ageing cat requires her afternoon cuddle in front of the fire. I have however, now read the ‘Dangerous Davies’ novels and these four books, originally published between 1976 and 1998, were the last four completed in what might have been my own ’40 or so books of summer’ programme.

Regular Unpopular readers, if such a thing exists, will likely have already noted that the books are to a degree anomalies in terms of my reading tastes in that, whilst they certainly seem to be examples of detective fiction they are remarkably ‘modern’ (for which read ‘written after the mid 20th Century’). Certainly they are somewhat unusual in having been written and published within my own lifetime and are set within a timeframe that I remember. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons that I struggled with them to an extent. On the level of light entertainment, which arguably is the only level on which to judge them, they are fine. Good, even. They rattle along at a decent pace and the characters are pretty well drawn. They are, as they say, ‘page turners’. The comedic style is of a much lighter touch than I expected given the cover blurbs’ insistence that the books are ‘richly humorous’ and that is certainly a point in their favour, particularly for those who, like me, rarely find comedy funny. There is too a degree of Thomas disguising darkness with lightness, particularly with respect to the crime at the core of the first book. Agatha Christie does this so well in her Miss Marple stories, often obscuring deeply disturbing themes with the patina of comfortable old age and middle class environs. Thomas attempts a similar trick, this time with an air of world-weary bonhomie and gentle cynicism, though the settings are much more resolutely urban and working class (all the books are set predominantly in the London borough of Willesden). The books are certainly pungently evocative of their times and do rather read like period sitcoms, which is not altogether a ringing endorsement, it should be said. For whilst many pieces of period fiction (detective or otherwise) from the early to mid 20th Century necessarily contain aspects of the deeply rooted sexism and racism of their contexts, it very seldom seems to permeate their entirety. These ‘Dangerous Davies’ books, by comparison, feel much more obviously coloured by such social contexts and if Thomas tackles some of the themes of class, race and gender expectations with admirable intent, it often comes over as a little cringeworthy. One gets the feeling that Thomas is trying too hard, or not trying hard enough. It’s hard to decide which.

This is perhaps a little harsh because, as I say, I kept turning the pages and kept picking up the next book. Would I have continued if there were more than four books in the series? Maybe, maybe not, although it is of course a moot point. And have they made me want to read Thomas’ ‘Virgin Soldiers’ books some forty five years after snootily dismissing them as mainstream airport paperback rubbish? Of course not. Because whilst one of the most enjoyable aspects of getting older is to gleefully flick the finger to one’s younger self, paradoxically another pleasure is to be found in fiercely upholding some of those increasingly ancient opinions.

In Search of David Ackles

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For many years David Ackles was a name I would occasionally hear whispered reverently by music aficionados but whose actual music I never seemed to come across. Others from broadly the same time period and singer-songwriter oeuvre such as David Blue, Fred Neil, Tom Rush and the two Tims (Hardin and Buckley) would crop up fairly regularly on compilation tapes sent by friends, but never any Ackles. Why not? It’s a question that author and musician Mark Brend seeks in part to answer in his newly published book ‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles’ whilst simultaneously providing an in-depth exploration of Ackles’ life and recording career.

A devout fan since stumbling on a copy of Ackles’ 1968 debut ‘Down River’ LP in a second hand record shop whilst in his twenties back in 1985, Brend has previously championed the obscure American singer-songwriter in magazine articles. With this book he has built significantly on those foundations to deliver something that, whilst certainly standing strongly within the myriad ranks of other music biographies, nevertheless also steps sideways outside the pack. There is an inevitability about this, for just as Ackles’ records struggled to be neatly slotted into one easily marketable genre, so his story refuses to conform to the expected Rock norms. There are no great conflicts to explore here, no real grapplings with demons nor scandalous liaisons. No mental health trauma or addiction issues overcome. Instead there is decency, respectability, quiet faith and hard work, related in a sympathetic voice.

Each of Ackles’ four albums released between 1968 and 1973 is dealt with in detail and Brend outlines the writing processes, recording sessions and the individual songs with a well balanced blend of technical objectivity and subjective opinion. The book is well researched and includes detailed notes and appendices with transcripts/descriptions of various unreleased tapes which will, no doubt, please the most dedicated of fans. It is interesting that measured objectivity is to the fore in Brend’s writing, for it perhaps partially explains why Ackles’ music remains as relatively obscure as it does. He is very much a musician’s musician, after all. A writer’s writer. It is telling, I think, that in spite of the likes of Phil Collins, Elton John, Bernie Taupin (who produced what is arguably Ackles’ masterpiece, 1972’s ‘American Gothic’ LP) and Elvis Costello vocally lauding Ackles’ work, their support seems to have had negligible impact. It seems like those who knew already knew, and most of them were musicians and songwriters themselves anyway.

Will this book then raise the profile of David Ackles where the support of Pop/Rock stars failed? I certainly hope so, for the records most assuredly deserve a wider audience. Sadly, however, I suspect that it will not. This is not the fault of Ackles’ story nor of Mark Brend’s telling of it, but a rather a reflection of what is valued in our current cultural climate (and arguably has been since the onset of the age of Pop Culture). There is little that panders to the lowest common denominator in Ackles’ songs and instead there is a quiet belief in the intelligence of his audience. The songs are literary. Theatrical. Full of inventive narrative, character and situational studies as opposed to the ‘confessional’. The songs might be sung in the first person, but they are not about the singer. As with his life, the message seems to be that there are more valuable and important things than the individual and it is hard to think of anything more out of kilter with the prevailing winds, then or now.

Hard to think too of any greater reason for investigating both Ackles’ work and Brend’s book.

‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles’ by Mark Brend is published on August 1st 2025 by Jawbone Press. http://jawbonepress.com/down-river/

Requiem for a Wren

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I suspect that many of my generation were denied the possibility of much interest in the books of Nevil Shute by being forced to read ‘A Town Like Alice’ in high school. I remember very little of the book now of course but nevertheless can recall finding it insufferably dull at the time. It is almost certain that our English teacher would have tried to sell it to us boys as being partially set in WW2, and no doubt to the girls in the class as being a romance. To someone who was otherwise devouring ‘Commando’ comic books, however, the war angle in ‘A Town Called Alice’ was, I am quite sure, something of a disappointment. As for romance? Well, I mean to say…

It seems fairly certain that ‘A Town Like Alice’ (again, my particular age means I keep typing ‘CALLED’ rather than ‘Like’) would have fallen off the curriculum not long after we were made to read it at the tail end of the 1970s, but in retrospect I rather wonder if I was not rather fortunate that such books and authors were still being taught in Scottish high schools at all. For whilst there was, as I have noted previously, something of a tendency towards snootiness at many books being ‘An English Thing’, at least we still studied Shakespeare and I will forever be grateful to my English teacher for introducing me to Salinger and Golding, even if I did not investigate either author further until several years afterwards. These days I am given to understand (through admittedly anecdotal evidence) that the ‘English’ curriculum in Scotland is entirely given over to native writers. Certainly there are many Scottish authors whose work would be as worthy of pushing on reluctant teenagers as Nevil Shute once was, but still…

Some forty five years after that enforced reading of ‘A Town Like Alice’ my ignorance of Shute’s work would no doubt have continued were it not for the intervention of Mark Brend, who incidentally has a book about David Ackles coming out soon that I am looking forward to reading. Shute, he suggests, is a great ‘forgotten’ writer of the post-war period, one of those authors whose books were enormously successful in their time but have since rather fallen out of fashion. Now as you may be aware I find this kind of thing intriguing, for there is something about exploring the forgotten mainstream that feels much more appealing than continuing to scrabble around for the forgotten fragments of the peripheries. Sometimes I suspect it is just my present self being pointedly dismissive about the ghosts of my younger selves, for whom the very thought of the Popular or Mainstream would be abhorrent. This would, I think, be quite an amusing attitude to take in itself, yet there is also, I suspect, something stronger at work, which is an attempt in some way to see if one’s received perception of the mainstream from any given time period is correct. Are there surprises to be found? Can one’s prejudices towards eras be challenged?

Nevil Shute’s 1955 novel ‘Requiem for a Wren’, as recommended by Mark, is certainly a surprise and, read some seventy years later, does indeed perhaps puncture some of one’s perceptions of the era. It is in some respects a kind of multi-modal text, blending as it does straightforward first person narrative with extracts from letters, diary entries, and documented interviews/conversations. Early in the book Shute makes a delightful nod to mystery writing when the novel’s primary narrator Alan Duncan reflects on the apparent suicide of his parents’ housekeeper, saying that “The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the most unlikely trains of thought.” This feels a little like Shute both taking a light dig at the detective story genre yet also setting us up for the fact that in many ways ‘Requiem for a Wren’ is exactly that; a detective story. The mystery in this case is not so much solving any ‘crime’, but the painstaking work involved in uncovering backstories. Looking for motive. Seeking out meaning. Searching for solace.

In some respects ‘A Requiem for a Wren’ feels like a thoroughly modern book with some themes that ought to reverberate in 2025. There is much about mental health, with the beginnings of an exploration into what we would now recognise as PTSD, and there is much that is timeless such as the exploration of loss, guilt, love and loneliness. Shute does not shy from these themes, but there is none of what I feel is too often the self-obsessed hyperbolic drama approach to such themes that one finds in the 21st Century. Instead Shute typically explores the issues in a manner which is quite pragmatic (as perhaps befits an engineer) yet also oddly sensitive. It could be suggested that such an approach is itself informed by those qualities instilled by living through and being involved in war, and whilst this kind of feeling permeates much immediate post-war writing and on into the 1950s, rarely have I seen the lasting effects of the trauma expressed so bluntly. This comes across most strongly in a set-piece where Alan Duncan has a conversation/interview with Viola Dawson, another former Wren, in her early ‘50s London flat (“such a place as any working girl in a good job might live in, decent but not affluent.”) Dawson is, in modern parlance, working out her PTSD in paintings of motor torpedo boats and the like. “I’m beginning to get it out of my system now.” She says, before admitting that “It seemed so much the normal way of life after the war that one didn’t do anything about it. And then one day I woke up—we all woke up—and had to realise that it had all been quite unusual; it would never come again. Not for us, not in our lifetime. We should be too old, or married—out of it. And then I felt I had to work and work and put it all down on canvas, everything I’d seen, before I forgot what it was like.” Dawson pauses for a moment at this point but continues her painting before adding that “It’s very hard to realise that it will never come again. To realise we’ve had it.” (My emphasis).

This almost fond nostalgia for the upheaval of war feels like quite a startling admission to 21st Century eyes and I imagine it might have felt a little uncomfortable to many even in 1955, perhaps because it dared to admit something that would have been encouraged to keep hidden. Certainly Shute nods towards this when he has her add, later in the conversation that “Until we’re dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We’ll none of us come out into the open and admit it.” (Again my emphasis). Dawson is clearly quite a damaged character, and Shute sketches her with a sensitivity that captures both her strength and vulnerability. She’s a remarkably perceptive character too, reflecting that “For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we’d have those happy, carefree years all over again.”

This conversation between Viola Dawson and Alan Duncan does feel like the most significant point in the book, one around which things pivot and in which the most painful truths begin to be laid bare. From this point ‘Requiem for a Wren’ begins to rely more heavily on letters and diary entries, pulling the past of wartime England into the early 1950s present of a farming estate in Victoria, Australia. On reading these Shute has Duncan reflect that “even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus”, that “Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”

This might make ‘Requiem for a Wren’ sound rather gloomy and depressing. In some respects of course it is, but there is too ultimately a sense of emerging out of darkness into light. For even as the ghosts of lost loves emerge from the wartime narrative they present not just sorrow but also possibility. At the novel’s conclusion, as the dawn both physically and metaphorically creeps into the room in which he has been reading and reflecting, Alan Duncan notes that “Only cowards run away because they are afraid of ghosts.”