Tag book-review

The World Turns

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In the words of Ballboy, “Elvis sang that”, and here we are back again with some detective fiction. The British Library Crime Classics Series has continued in recent months with an Anthony Berkeley (‘Not To Be Taken’) that I just about enjoyed and another dreary John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr (‘The Ten Teacups’) that was preposterous and dull. Nothing new there then. Most recently however (well, not quite most because the newly reissued ‘Cat and Mouse’ by Christianna Brand has just landed in the mail) there has been Fiona Sinclair’s 1960 debut ‘Scandalize My Name’ which pretty much hit the spot. There are the flaws one might expect from a debut, notably, as Martin Edwards notes in his typically excellent introduction, her unveiling of a rather large cast of characters very quickly. Being someone who generally prefers to see the key crime occurring in the opening chapters, pages or even lines, this is something that usually irks me. Careful drawing of characters and the teasing out of potential motives for possible crimes? Oh just cut to the chase, let us know what we’re dealing with, no pussy-footing around thankyouverymuch. Yet in Sinclair’s case such frustrations are fairly quickly soothed when one realises the necessity of painting in the characters is not so much about supporting the crime element of the book but rather about capturing something of the nature of London’s post-war boarding house communities. Indeed it is this rather than the crime solving aspect that most appeals about the book, and Sinclair proves pretty adept at portraying the (often secretive, sometimes sordid) relationships that develop within them. There are faint echoes here of Shena Mackay’s ‘Music Upstairs’, or perhaps the near-distant reverberations of angry young men clattering off the walls.

Primarily though Sinclair appears to be interested in what in 21st Century parlance we would call ‘mental health issues’, but that in 1960 was broadly called ‘madness’. There is an interesting exchange at one point between the novel’s sleuth (the well drawn Superintendent Paul Grainger) and a doctor in a Cornish asylum (the drive down from London is delightfully punctuated by traffic lights in Honiton and Exeter and a petrol station in Whimple), who propounds that “madness is much more common than the man in the street could dream of. If you included all the people who are walking about, but very far from what we call normal, the proportion of unbalanced to balanced would be so high that it would frighten you.” When Grainger asks if it is increasing, the doctor suggests that “it’s easy to get that impression, but not so simple to give a reliable opinion. As society gets more tightly organised these people show up more, y’see. You think of those big Victorian families, I wonder how many of their eccentric aunts would be labelled mad, or at least seriously neurotic now? It’s a bit like the cancer figures, they seem to increase, but I wonder how many died in the past and were buried under different labels because it wasn’t picked up?” Grainger repies (with, one suspects, a delightfully raised eyebrow) that “Figures can be deceiving.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this exploration of mental health, Sinclair also uses the novel to explore the idea of ‘nature versus nurture’, though in the context of crime rather than education. “Is the killer-type born and not made?” ponders Grainger, wherein lies much of the solution to the puzzle of the crime. Of course I say ‘puzzle’, but really the book is thankfully not one of those tedious puzzle focused yarns so beloved of the likes of Berkeley and Carter Dickson. Sinclair isn’t using ‘Scandalise My Name’ to show how clever she is but instead to probe at some questions of relevance to society. And thank goodness for that.

One certainly wishes that there were as many Fiona Sinclair titles to discover as there are from the numerous John Carter Dickson Carr stable, but sadly, the reference to cancer in Grainger’s exchange with the doctor proved to be a nod to reality, for in 1956 Sinclair had been diagnosed with breast cancer before undergoing a long period of treatment and operations. She died just a year after ‘Scandalize My Name’ was published, although a further four novels were published posthumously. One can only hope that the British Library Crime Classics Series bumps them up their list of future reissues. Fingers crossed.

One title that I suspect the BLCC will not be publishing anytime soon is D.R. Forbes’ 1941 novel ‘Murder Of An Unpopular Man’, though it would certainly provide the series with an intriguing little entry and I would enjoy seeing what biographical facts Martin Edwards might dig up about the author. All I can find after an admittedly cursory period of ‘research’ is that the author is “Possibly Doris Ruby Pryor who married Reginald Alfred Forbes in 1926 and after his death married Arthur Carsberg in 1953 and died in Bournemouth; if so, her dates are 1902-1983”. Now I may be thoroughly guilty of dealing in stereotypes here, but the idea that ‘Murder Of An Unpopular Man’ should have been written by a woman certainly makes sense, for there is a rather fun romance element threading throughout the book. If the writing were a little more polished one might even suggest that the book has a flavour of being how a detective novel might come out if it were written by D.E. Stevenson, or perhaps Noel Streatfeild with her Susan Scarlett hat on. Indeed it’s the somewhat clunky writing that initially threatens to leave ‘Murder Of An Unpopular Man’ floundering, but the book is rescued somewhat by at least conforming to my personal preference for getting the crime neatly, ahem, executed in the opening pages. In this case it’s with the vegetable knife in the office at a large department store in an English provincial town, with the victim being, as one might surmise from the title, a thoroughly rotten scoundrel.

The book rather picks up on the really appearance of the investigator, one Inspector McLeod of the local constabulary, whereupon it settles into rather an enjoyable if undemanding groove. There is nothing particularly unexpected in the way the story unfolds and in many respects the whole process of McLeod solving the crime is as a means of piecing together the romantic attraction between himself and the young lady who finds the body. The characters are nicely sketched and largely keep on the right side of caricature (in some cases only just). It’s all wrapped up with a denouement that carries with it a flurry of action and a most welcome lack of lengthy expostulation by the detective (he is, perhaps correctly from the perspective of the story, more interested in the young lady). The only thing that really detracts from its fun (apart from those clunky first few pages) are the occasional rather tangential references to war. With the book being published in 1941 one might have expected these to carry more obvious connection to the events that would have been going on in the real world, but they are instead rather vague and generalist. They remind me somewhat of that old Culture Club song where Boy George sang somewhat ineffectually about how “war is stupid” and make me wonder if ‘Murder Of An Unpopular Man’ might have been largely written prior to 1939 with the incidental asides added at the suggestion of an editor at Geoffrey Bles publishing house.


It does not look as though Doris Ruby Prior/Forbes/Carsberg (if it indeed was she) wrote anything after (or indeed before) ‘Murder Of An Unpopular Man’ and so the lack of any series may well mitigate against anyone taking a punt on reissuing it in the 21st Century. This would be a shame, for whilst hardly troubling the ‘greats’ of the genre it makes for a light and entertaining diversion. 

From the Borders to the Islands

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Back in 2023 I took a short mooch around the Scottish Borders town of Moffat, looking for the spirit of authors D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering. I found Stevenson’s old house looking somewhat neglected and sad but the little town felt very pleasant and the surrounding landscape certainly seemed still to glisten with the pleasures of these old writing friends’ books. In the intervening eighteen months or so I’ve passed the motorway signs for Moffat several times and never detoured, but last month I finally returned for a brief stop to stretch my legs and visit the Moffat Bookshop to see what secondhand treats it might have on its shelves.

After a good rummage I came away with two books, the first of which was a lovely 1950 pocket hardback reprint of the 1920 novel ‘Penny Plain’ by O. Douglas. Now I am certainly no expert on early to mid 20th Century British fiction, but I like to think that over the past few years I have become aware of a good number of names to look out for whilst browsing the secondhand shelves. O. Douglas however was entirely new to me and with the book’s jacket promising a tale set in a Scottish Borders town it felt unwise to pass up the opportunity. I’m certainly glad I didn’t, because ‘Penny Plain’ is a charming little book that sets a Cinderella tale within the context of post WW1 Britain, exploring as it does so threads of class and social snobbery. It may suffer slightly from a certain clunky style that is, in my limited and non-academic experience, prevalent in a lot of British fiction from the early 20th Century, but there is enough lightness of touch to carry things off. Again, from a thoroughly non-academic perspective, it seems to me that a lot of popular genre fiction written in this period is still struggling somewhat to find a 20th Century voice. It certainly feels true in the crime and detective genre where the (for me) rather dull and overly wordy 19th Century flavour lingers long into the 1920s and, for some writers, through most of the 1930s. I get the same kind of feeling from what I suppose one would broadly call the romance genre, and there is I think a degree of this in ‘Penny Plain’s otherwise delightful romantic entertainment. As already mentioned however there is a degree of lightness to the book and certainly the way in which Douglas conjures both the landscape of the fictional Borders town of Priorsford and its maze of social connections is done very nicely indeed. Priorsford is by all accounts a lightly fictionalised version of Peebles, and the clues are certainly there to guess that much, even more than a century later. There is a lovely segment late in the book when the little Jardine family on whose fortunes the narrative largely dwells take a motor trip down into England. The first part of this in particular is vividly written and, I dare say, little changed in the past hundred years. Certainly the road that they follow along the Tweed and then descend via the Devil’s Beeftub with its views across Stevenson and Clavering’s beloved Annan Water into Moffat must be essentially still the same.

Speaking of Stevenson, there is in ‘Penny Plain’ a little of the gentle social satire of Stevenson’s 1934 classic ‘Miss Buncle’s Book’ as well as a similar soft conservatism throughout everything. Sometimes this can feel a little disquieting to a 21st Century liberal/progressive viewpoint but on the whole the charm wins us over, whilst Douglas’ rather withering portrayals of the most obnoxiously snobbish and rampantly traditionalist characters sadly ring as true today as they would have done in her time.

The owner of the Moffat Bookshop could not tell me anything about O.Douglas but I have since learned that it was the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, younger sister of John Buchan (’39 Steps’, ‘Greenmantle’ etc) and that she published a number of other novels, including two more to complete a Priorsford trilogy, throughout the 1920s and 30s. I left behind several of these on the shelves of the bookshop, many in a similar 1950 pocket hardback format, and I hope they might still be there next time I am crossing the border.

It would have been remiss of me of course not to have looked for some D.E. Stevenson novels on the shelves of the Moffat Bookshop and, as expected, there were quite a few on offer (though sadly nothing by her friend Molly Clavering), almost all of which I had already read in the excellent reprint editions from Furrowed Middlebrow. I did however pick up a nice first edition of her 1954 novel ‘Charlotte Fairlie’, a novel set for the most part on a fictional island of the Inner Hebrides. However, whilst still being an enjoyable enough piece of romantic fiction, it strikes me that it is far from being Stevenson at her best. The story is essentially one in which Professional Spinsterhood is pitted against Traditional Family Structures with (Not At All A Spoiler Alert) predictably conservative outcomes. It all feels oddly older than its 1954 publication date might suggest and perhaps gives lie to the idea that post-WW2 Britain was entirely in tune with progressively socialist ideals. There is precious little of that here, as the headmistress of a girls’ school (private of course – none of your leftie State School rubbish) finds herself drawn into romance with the parent of one of her charges. Inevitably this parent happens to live in a castle on a Scottish island to which the novels titular character is invited to spend the summer by the child. To the modern (state) educationalist’s eye this is an outrageous suggestion that sets off just about every safeguarding klaxon one could imagine, yet seems entirely normal in the book’s 1950s context. Indeed, for all I know, those working in 21st Century private schools might not bat an eyelid at such a situation, but it is still one of the most jarring pieces of period reference that I’ve come across in my not inconsiderable reading of early to mid 20th Century fiction, ranking alongside Josephine Tey’s ‘Dago’ debacle in her 1929 debut ‘The Man In The Queue’.

Rarely do I find the preposterous nature of scenarios in novels (particularly those broadly within the romantic fiction genre) to be a stumbling block, but I admit that I continued to find the relationships between headteacher, students and parents to be so in ‘Charlotte Fairlie’. Certainly there are interesting threads in the book that explore the role of fathers, and the verve with which Stevenson describes the landscapes of the island of Targ (it feels like an amalgam of the islands of Rùm, Coll and Tiree) and the West Country in which Charlotte Fairlie’s school is set (at one point she contemplates a trip to Sidmouth) is as admirable as one would expect. Others will no doubt struggle much less with these difficulties and will enjoy the book immeasurably more as a result, but for me ‘Charlotte Fairlie’ is distinctly a second or third division Stevenson.

Finally, staying in the environs of the Hebridean isles, I just finished reading Mabel Esther Allan’s lovely 1950 children’s novel ‘Over The Sea To School’. Reissued in 2024 by the marvellous Girls Gone By imprint (who also reprinted Allan’s ‘The Amber House’ which I so enjoyed recently) the book takes us over the sea to Skye and into the somewhat progressive (again private) school of Dundonay House. Jennifer Shelley’s short but informative introduction to this reprint suggests to the uninformed children’s fiction rookie (like me) that 21st Century academia sees such books as belonging to “an unrecognised radical literature for children in the early to middle twentieth century.” I admit that it can be difficult to see much evidence of radical views in a book like ‘Over The Sea To Skye’ for the narrative is crammed full of deeply traditional and conservative attitudes. The crofters of Skye feel rather like caricatures, as does their excitement at welcoming back the traditional Laird to the Castle. It does rather feel like we are in the midst of some Conservative propaganda for A Return To The Old Values of pre-war society rather than imagining an equitable or, dare one say it, socialist utopia. As for the Dundonay House school, there is a distinct air of the middle classes being able to BUY progressive teaching and learning methods as a means of salving their conscience about How Things Ought To Be. It’s not unlike 21st Century progressives convincing themselves they are Saving The Planet by buying enormous new electric 4×4 vehicles every other year and being rampantly authoritarian about individual recycling efforts.

Yet this ought not to discourage one from reading ‘Over The Sea To School’ for it is a marvellous book that does a fine job of capturing the timeless internal conflicts that plague teenagers in whatever era one might choose and that invokes the tremendous thrills of the best children’s mystery and adventure stories. Yes, the adventure thriller angle is rather suddenly thrust into the mix as the novel nears its conclusion and arguably feels a little shoe-horned into place, but then one remembers that it IS a children’s book and that perhaps such boisterous leaping from one episode to the next is entirely to be expected and indeed encouraged. What lingers most strongly from Allan’s writing however is the tremendous sense of place that she conjures in her writing. ‘The Amber House’ with its setting in Rye and Winchelsea suggested to me that this might be the case with her other books, and certainly the beauty of Skye and the surrounding island landscape of Scotland is as well served as in any other text for children or adults. I’m certainly looking forward to the forthcoming reprints of Allan’s sequels, ‘A School in Danger’ and ‘At School in Skye’ with eager anticipation.

Going Back (To Go Forward)

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Last month I wrote about discovering Elizabeth Goudge through her children’s novel ‘Smoky-House’ and made a comment about looking forward to reading more of her books for adults as well as for children. Well, in the six weeks or so that have passed since then I’m pleased to say that I’ve ticked that box to some extent, taking in two of her novels for adults and another of her children’s books. The first of her ‘grown up’ novels that I read was one that doesn’t seem to be talked about much, even amongst Goudge aficionados. First published in 1941 (a year after ‘Smoky-House’), ‘The Castle On The Hill’ is set in 1940 and is, as much as anything, another of those tremendous views into the home front of England during the early years of WW2. I read the book shortly after finishing Betty Miller’s 1945 novel ‘On The Side Of The Angels’ and together these two make for a compelling double act, both being the kind of novel where one cannot help but get busy with the underlining pencil as passages and exchanges ring with remarkable clarity and resonance. Miller’s novel is rather more world weary and brutally frank than Goudge’s but, being written after another four years of wartime, this is perhaps understandable, not to say inevitable. War is a central character in Miller’s book (it could hardly be otherwise) but perhaps of more interest is the way in which she explores notions of identity and faithfulness, particularly in relevance to what kind of world one might hope to emerge from the ruins. Characters chaff against each other, conflicts sparking from physical passions and emotional attractions as much as, if not more than from differing ideologies. Questions of sexual identity are certainly central to Miller’s novel and in some ways might be seen to foreshadow the kinds of obsessions seen in the 21st Century. Crucially though, it feels like Miller is sending us a warning from the past with regard to this Cult Of The Individual. “‘The courage to be yourself. Isn’t that important?’” asks one character, echoing what, in the approaching decades of Pop Cultural Marketing would become the central thrust of both dominant and counter-cultures. The question in Miller’s hands is answered with en empathic No. “’On the contrary. We’ve got to learn how not to be ourselves – to have the courage, the strength to be something else. Otherwise there never will be any progress.’” (My emphasis). There is much to be taken from Miller’s novel, even (especially) at this point in the 21st Century, but this puncturing of the dominant idea of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries feels to me to be the most poignant and perceptive.

Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘The Castle On The Hill’ may be less caustic than Miller’s later novel and may too be a more obviously patriotic and propagandist text, yet this notion of individuality being necessarily subservient to some Greater Power filters powerfully throughout the book. The titular castle on the hill is modelled on Berry Pomeroy in Devon, just a stone’s throw from the village of Marldon whose setting and village pub inspired ‘Smoky-House’. Once again Goudge successfully conjures a sense of place, her feel for both the physical and spiritual essence of landscape marvellously on display. The castle and the landscape inhabit the novel with a vivid presence, but it is the characters with whom Goudge peoples the story that carry the weight. Whilst using the displacement of children from London as a vehicle for the clashing of social class and economic wealth (and lack of), Goudge is nevertheless wary of falling too far into the clutches of stereotypes and cliches. There is necessarily an element of this however: the aged patriarch who would really rather exist in the past; the ideological young aristocratic heir who rails against inequality and the suffering of The Poor; the poor who are quite happy thank you very much with their place in the world and who’ll thank you for not being so condescending; the foreign refugee seeking safety in the arms of England (Queen Elizabeth’s prayer before the Armada is invoked here, something the Jingoistic 21st Century ‘Reformers’ would do well to reflect on); the pacifist grappling with what pacifism means in the context of “no ordinary struggle of rival imperialisms but a fight to save the very things that had been won by man’s integrity.” And of course The Children who see everything through the peculiar lens of fairytales (the Pied Piper references might be a little obvious but are still charmingly done).

If it were not all so marvellously written then the book might indeed feel a little like a parody of itself, for as well as this assortment of characters there are the obvious themes of tragedy, sacrifice, loss and love threading throughout. That it rises above the ordinary is certainly down to Goudge’s talent for telling stories in an entertaining yet intelligent manner, placing observations and insight into the words of her characters with a remarkable lightness of touch. My underlining pencil needed a good deal of sharpening, I can tell you.

Through everything too there ripple the deep waters of Goudge’s faith. It seems like God is never far away in her novels and whilst this might be something that would have guaranteed their rejection by my younger self, these days I find it all rather gratifying. Not so much in the sense of Organised Religion (which still seems to me to be largely an example of humans seeking a means to obtain personal and structural power) but rather in the sense of God as connective glue, if you like. Indeed, as ‘The Castle On The Hill’ nears its conclusion, Goudge seems to acknowledge this by echoing that quote from Betty Miller’s book in saying: “Separateness is only an illusion, a sort of curse on us because of sin. We refused to be children of God, we wouldn’t be brothers of each other, and so there was egotism and the hell of loneliness. But it’s only an imaginary hell. You can break out of it if you break away from yourself.” (again, my emphasis). Or, as Goudge almost immediately puts it more plainly: “life is God and life is love”.

Amen to that.

Unsurprisingly God threads throughout the other Goudge novel for adults that I have recently read, as befits a story that is part of a ‘Cathedral Trilogy’. The 1936 novel ‘A City of Bells’ is the first installment and is another marvellous evocation of place, in this case the Somerset Cathedral town of Wells, where Goudge herself lived with her father the Reverend Henry Leighton Goudge who taught in the cathedral school there. The novel is essentially a piece of Romantic Fiction masquerading as a book of faith and place, or perhaps vice versa. Either way it is both a charming period piece that evokes its late 19th/early 20th Century setting and a source of ageless wisdom, as the best pieces of art always seem to be. Once again Goudge’s feel for place inhabits the pages as the streets and buildings of Wells and its surrounding landscape are captured in deft strokes. Visiting the town even today one would recognise almost all of what Goudge describes, although artisanal cafes and bijou restaurants might sadly have replaced the bookshops and fruit sellers. Certainly the cathedral and the Bishop’s Palace are most likely essentially unchanged in the 90 years since Goudge penned her novel, and I dare say that some of the characteristics of the clergy remain largely intact also. As with ‘The Castle On The Hill’, it is as much the interplay between these characters that lends pleasure to ‘A City Of Bells’ as its delicious sense of place, allowing explorations of ingrained attitudes of class distinction as well as the more mundane (or alternatively more divine) pursuit of love and the sense of belonging.

From my limited knowledge of Goudge’s work these seem to be common themes, ones that she prods and explores in a subtly different manner each time. There is also, as in ‘The Castle On The Hill’, the idea of the neglected/misunderstood (musical) artist who doubles in both instances as a father figure to ‘lost’ children. In the case of ‘A City of Bells’ this child is Henrietta, and if the denouement is ultimately as eye-rollingly obvious as it is unbelievable then this is all to the good, for Goudge is certainly one for operating within the expectations and structures of the fairytale. She does this with a tremendously deft turn of phrase too, as the style of her writing shifts almost imperceptibly as episodes switch focus from adult to child and back again. It is all exquisitely done and lends ‘A City of Bells’ a unique charm as it seems to oscillate magically between two worlds.

If ‘A City of Bells’ inhabits, at times, the liminal space between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, then the 1942 ‘sequel’ of ‘Henrietta’s House’ unashamedly opts entirely for the fairytale form of childrens’ fiction. Set once more in the familiar surroundings of Wells (or the fictional Torminster if you prefer), ‘Henrietta’s House’ is set a few years after ‘A City of Bells’ and reunites us with many of the characters first met there. Inevitably when reading the book as an adult one can feel a degree of irritation at the unflagging ‘innocence’ of the writing style. This is no criticism of the book but rather an acknowledgment of the pleasures of growing up/old. If ‘Henrietta’s House’ feels unrelentingly charming to the extent of being ever so slightly sickly sweet then this in turn is arguably a sign of its success as piece of welcome escapism for children in the midst of WW2. If the idea of characters becoming lost in a fairy netherworld of water filled caverns and flower lined bowers, eventually to (hardly a spoiler alert, but still…) emerge more pleasant and rounded individuals in a Happy Ever After world of optimism makes you shudder then ‘Henrietta’s House’ may not be for you. Or then again, it may be just what you need. It certainly cheered me up, and I admit that I am looking forward to catching up with the ‘sequel’, the Christmas themed ‘Sister of the Angels’ (actually published in 1939, which perhaps makes the idea of it being a sequel a trifle confusing) at the appropriate time of year. As for the other two ‘Cathedral trilogy’ books (‘Towers In The Mist’ and ‘The Dean’s Watch’), well these are certainly on my ‘to be read’ shelves and I look forward to getting to them with eager anticipation.

Towards Zero

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Did you watch the recent BBC drama based on Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’? I am not entirely sure why I persevere with such things, but I admit that I did and that, perhaps predictably, found myself in two minds about it all. On the one hand I thought it was a fine enough entertainment. All the actors were first rate and the whole thing looked quite ravishingly appealing. I’m quite sure that anyone unfamiliar with Christie’s novel would have found it a very enjoyable piece of period drama, whilst some contemporary relevance in terms of its themes might well have found favour with any younger members of the audience. This however is perhaps my major bugbear with recent adaptations of Christie novels: these themes either simply do not exist in the original texts or they are much more subtly suggested. To go into any great detail about this with regards ‘Towards Zero’ would be to inevitably throw multiple spoilers about either book or show into the mix, so let’s just say that calling the television show ‘Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’’ might just be the most egregious example of mis-labelling since, well, the last television adaptation of one of her books. But then something like ‘Very (and when I say very, I mean VERY) loosely based on ‘Agatha Christie’s ‘Towards Zero’’ does not have the same ring to it.

Of course I understand the desire of film makers to tweak existing pieces of fiction in order to meet the very different requirements of visual text media, but watching ‘Towards Zero’ one might as well be watching something written entirely from scratch. The differences between Christie’s book and what appears on screen are numerous and not insignificant. Most obvious, perhaps, is the fact that Christie’s book is part of a short series featuring the Superintendent Battle character, a character notable in the show only by his complete absence. Other figures are largely re-written both in terms of their characterisation and their importance to the narrative. Some, like Battle, are missing in action whilst others are completely new creations entirely. Motives are altered and invented to the point of it all feeling a little like a parody of the Traditional Country House Murder Mystery, but with ‘edgy’ 21st Century character traits and motivations thrust into the mix. This is all very well, but it feels a bit disrespectful to Christie, whose plotting is much tighter than the film might suggest and whose ultimate motivation for murder in the book is, I would suggest, much more ‘modern’ and with contemporary relevance than that which ultimately features in the show. The characters in the film also feel too far removed from the original text, with backstories and traits written into the script that, to some extent feel like an inferred reference to the rather lazy and often raised criticism of Christie being no good at characterisation. All of the people in the book are perfectly reasonably drawn. Christie uses line(s) sparingly in doing this, but I find this a strength rather than a weakness. However, the peculiarly 21st Century obsession with identity and self appears to insist on the need to expose and exaggerate negative traits. We are all damaged and suffering and everyone has to see that, at all times. It all gets rather tiresome, doesn’t it? Well doesn’t it?

Perhaps Agatha Christie would have loved it though. Certainly her estate will love the significant influx of cash into their coffers from licensing her name.

Treasure Hunting

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There can be a lot of unpleasantness on The Social Media these days and I understand why many sensibly minded folks are leaving it behind. I have done so with much of it, but do occasionally find some pleasures in the Facebook universe. The other month one of those ‘recommended’ pages cropped up, this time for ‘Old Torbay’ or suchlike. This particular post showed a ‘then and now’ split photograph of a garage site sitting, as they often did in their infancy, in the corner of a road junction. At the time I only vaguely noted that the garage in question was on the approach to the village of Marldon and that a pub called ‘Ye Olde Smokey House’ was pictured in the middle distance along one of the lanes. So far so unremarkable. However, in some kind of strange reversal of 21st Century normality, in which one’s experiences in the ‘real’ world become mirrored almost immediately with advertisements and ‘suggestions’ in the online one (evidence suggests that it is not paranoia to think that devices are literally listening to us and feeding the algorithms) a few weeks later I found myself reading a children’s book where both the village of Marldon and its pub took centre stage. Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘Smoky House’ was originally published in 1940 but has found itself reissued by the delightful Girls Gone By publishing venture and is a thoroughly charming read. Set in the early 19th Century, ‘Smoky House’ blends historical fiction with mild fantasy, and if the inclusion of fairy folks (‘The Good People’) might test the patience of our more cynical ages then I imagine it being remarkably appealing to youngsters reading it at the onset of WW2. The historical fiction elements involve the free-trading community (don’t call ‘em smugglers) of the fictional village of Faraway in Devon, and the action revolves around the village inn and the Treguddick family. At the time of her writing the book Goudge had recently moved to Marldon, and so the village and its surrounding landscape are as much the stars of the book as anything else. I believe that the inn in question (‘Ye Olde Smokey House’) was an inspiration at least in terms of name, but it was certainly not always called this, a map from the late 19th Century showing it as ‘The Ship Inn’. Perhaps too Goudge, whilst lifting the name from ‘Ye Olde Smokey House’, envisioned her fictional inn as being more like the Church House Inn at the centre of the old Marldon village. It is fun to play these games of reference, and whilst we have been recently enjoying watching Ben Robinson exploring ‘Villages By The Sea’ on the telly, it would be even more fun to see him make a series where he looks at the architectural and cultural history of inns, hotels and pubs around the country. The show might be called ‘Time At The Bar’, and the inns of Marldon would be a good place to start.

Goudge’s story then is certainly in part about the locale of Marldon and is certainly too about the historical context of the free-trading culture of the early 19th Century. As much as these, however, the story is one of values and identity, of the weird wobbly liminal space between childhood and young adulthood where questions of faith and belief are tested. It is an exciting and enormously pleasurable story with a charming innocence that is nevertheless still infused with just enough harsh reality to make the fun fairy presence acceptable. The magical fantasy element is just about at the limit of what I can stomach, but nevertheless I am intrigued by Elizabeth Goudge and there are many more of her books (both children’s and adults) that I would like to explore at some point.

Similarly republished by the Girls Gone By imprint is Mabel Esther Allan’s 1956 young adult novel ‘The Amber House’. Of course no-one used the term ‘Young Adult Fiction’ in 1956 so Allan’s book would have certainly been shelved in the Children’s Fiction section of the local library and bookshop. Like ‘Smoky House’, ‘The Amber House’ is as much about place as anything else, in this case the small town of Rye in Sussex. Anyone who has ever visited must surely have been charmed by its narrow streets and pleasing architecture and it is likely too that a certain number of those visitors would be unable to think of the place without also remembering E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia characters. Benson, as many of you will know, resided in Lamb House whilst writing his stories and the house is Mapp’s ‘Mallards’ to Tilling’s Rye, complete with Garden Room of course. Prior to Benson, Lamb House was perhaps most famous as the dwelling place of Henry James, and it is certainly his association which is celebrated most by the National Trust which now looks after the property. Incidentally, as a slight aside, if you have been watching the recent BBC adaptation ‘Miss Austen’ you might have spotted Rye rather preposterously masquerading as Sidmouth, Jane and Cassandra Austen walking with their parents and Henry Hobday down West St and past Lamb House after attending church. These literary connections (with the exception of the Austen/Sidmouth deceit) are mentioned, along with a great deal more, in Samantha Littles’ introduction to the 2024 reissue of ‘The Amber House’ and her additional contextualisation of Rye’s free-trading past helps set the scene for Mabel Esther Allan’s marvellous piece of fiction.

The story revolves around Helen Brierley, a young woman just about to embark on a career in education (as a secretary, of course) but who is rather suddenly diverted into a job supporting her great aunt. This formidable lady (what great aunts in fiction are not formidable?) is writing a book about her home, the historic (and titular) Amber House. Situated on Mermaid Street in Rye, Amber House is modelled on what was once the Neptune Inn. This black and white timber framed building sits opposite the similarly styled Mermaid Inn, and much is made of the free-traders’ tunnels and hideyholes (existing and conjectured) within the architecture. Indeed it is arguably the architecture that is the real star of the book, for as nicely drawn characters as Helen, her great Aunt, the young, adventurous Derry Brown and the romantic interest of Peter Glynde are, it is the little towns of Rye, Winchelsea and the Amber House itself that steal the show. It must certainly have been a grand advertisement for the area in 1956 and I imagine a generation of youngsters must have grown up yearning to visit after reading ‘The Amber House’, no doubt dreaming of treasure hunts and hidden tunnels. That it still casts such a pull on this rather older reader in the 21st century is certainly testament to Mabel Esther Allan’s skills and I’m keen to try more of her books in the future.

Of course Rye and its environs was a favourite too of Malcolm Saville. Born just along the coast in Hastings, Saville used the area in several of his Lone Pine Club adventure stories, including 1964’s ‘Treasure at Amorys’ and 1969’s ‘Rye Royal’. As noted last year when I was writing about Enid Blyton and Saville, it is possible that Blyton was at least inspired by conversations with Saville when writing ‘Five Go To Smugglers Top’, for that book was published almost simultaneously with Saville’s ‘The Gay Dolphin Adventure’. The third instalment of the Lone Pine Club series, this remains one of my favourites, as does the 1951 outing ‘The Elusive Grasshopper’ which also features what is perhaps my favourite of many marvellous covers to Saville’s books. It is tempting to suggest that one reason the Rye instalments in the Lone Pine Club series are my favourites is to do with the descriptions of the town and surrounding landscape but I suspect too that a bigger reason for the enjoyment is that the terrible (in more ways that one) Morton twins tend to be less prominent in these stories. In ‘Treasure at Amorys’ and ‘Rye Royal’ they are, thankfully, a minor annoyance, and Saville instead focuses more on the development of the relationship between cousins Jon and Penny Warrander. This exploration of blooming romance, including the ones between the other ‘couples’ in the Lone Pine Club does eventually rather pull the later Lone Pine stories down, but in ‘Rye Royal’ it just about works. That said, it is perhaps the first obvious moment where Saville struggles to square contemporary youth cultural trends with his rather more traditional notions. There is a struggle too, I think, with simply resolving the entire thirty five year lifespan of the series, in which the characters age just a few years. In retrospect I wonder if Saville might have been better simply ‘doing a Blyton’ and ignoring the tiresome effects of time’s passing both in terms of the age of his characters and the time period of his books’ setting. Of course he rather digs a hole for himself from the off in this latter respect by pulling in references to the war and soldiers in the series’ 1943 debut ‘Mystery At Witchend’, and utilising the Blytonesque trick of setting everything in a kind of idealised and non-specific era might well have jarred with a desire to use very specific places as his settings. Regardless, the Lone Pine Club series does seem to stagger somewhat resignedly into the 1970s and there does feel like something of a rushed necessity to tie up all of the romantic threads that were so delightfully suggested in the earlier books. It is this desire for some kind of resolution that, to my mind, makes the final few books so relatively disappointing. There are still some moments of excitement and Saville’s flair for capturing place (as opposed to period) remains in place. Yet by acknowledging the aging process and the development of, ahem, ‘feelings’ these books lose some of the charm that made the majority of the preceding instalments so appealing. As in ‘The Smoky House’ and ‘The Amber House’ this appeal was to a large extent to do with conjuring that peculiar liminal space between childhood and adulthood, that fleeting period of delicious uncertainty. So whilst it is all very pleasant to see Jon and Penny, Tom and Jenny and, finally, AT LAST, David and Petronella cementing their devotion to each other as couples it is also peculiarly disappointing. One cannot help but wish they could have stayed in that space of thrilling uncertainty forever. Anticipation is so much better, after all.

This explains perhaps why, on current reflection, I have a preference for Saville’s six book series featuring the Jillion family over the Lone Pine Club books. Published in a six year period between 1948 and 1953, the compact time period sees none of the characters grow up/older, allowing the tremor of romantic suggestion between Mandy Jillion and Guy Standing to stay at just the right level of will they/won’t they throughout. Only the third book, 1950’s ‘The Sign Of The Alpine Rose’ is a minor disappointment, given that Guy and Mark Standing do not appear and that Saville allows a degree of tiresome English exceptionalism to creep into the otherwise exciting Eric Ambler style thriller. The other five books in the series are pretty much all equally enjoyable, although the 1948 season opener ‘Redshank’s Warning’ and the following year’s ‘Strangers at Snowfell’ just edge ahead as favourites. ‘Strangers at Snowfell’ is notable for its excellent depictions of railways and trains as well as its typically evocative capturing of place, in this case the landscape around Shap summit in Westmorland. The snowbound train and the trek cross-country to a farmhouse in the book recall J.Jefferson Farjeon’s 1937 creepy detective novel ‘Mystery In White’ and I wonder if Saville had it in mind when he was writing? Similarly, I wonder if Ian Samson was thinking about either or both these books when writing his tremendous ‘Westmorland Alone’ from 2016? One rather hopes so.

‘Redshank’s Warning’ really must be the pick of the crop, however, not least for its utterly charming cover illustration showing a windswept Mandy Jillion on a blustery Norfolk shore. Once again, watchers of Ben Robinson’s tremendous ‘Villages By The Sea’ show will have seen this landscape during the episode focusing on Cley-next-the-sea, for ‘Redshank’s Warning’ is set in nearby Blakeney, its church’s beacon tower playing a prominent role in the story’s climax. This is another fine example of Malcolm Saville at arguably the peak of his powers and it is no surprise that in a poll of Malcolm Saville Society members it ranked as the third favourite of all his books, with only ‘The Gay Dolphin Adventure’ and ‘Mystery At Witchend’ being rated higher. All six of the ‘Jillies’ books have been reissued by the Girls Gone By imprint, although even now the first three of these are almost as hard (and expensive!) to come by as the first edition hardbacks. All, needless to say, are pieces of treasure more than worth hunting down.

Love After Wartime

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In recent years I have found myself drawn more and more to English fiction written in the aftermath of WW2. A lot of these books have been in the detective fiction genre for sure, but increasingly my interests seem to lie in the ‘middlebrow’ fiction of the age. Margaret Kennedy’s masterful ‘The Feast’ would be the book that started to steer me in this direction, standing as it does with, if not one foot then at least a couple of toes in the ‘mystery’ camp. The Persephone imprint continues to be a rich source for this particular kind of book, as of course does the extensive Virago catalogue. There is so much to explore. In recent weeks though I have turned again to the marvellously named Furrowed Middlebrow imprint (companion to the Dean Street Press) and specifically once more to D.E. Stevenson.

If pressed I might just admit that Stevenson has been my favourite literary discovery of the past few years. Some might bridle at the notion of calling her ‘literary’ of course and I can certainly understand that, for her books do not pretend to be Great Works Of Literature. Yet this, for me, is where the appeal lies, and the skill in writing something that is comforting and charming yet remains mostly clear of a sickly saccharine taste should not be underestimated. In my recent approbation of John Rhode’s detective fiction I bandied about the criticism that his books often feel as though they have come off a mass production conveyor belt, each barely distinguishable from the next. The same criticism could be levelled at Stevenson of course, and one should not really shy away from embracing the idea of formula and identifiable style in any art form. One person’s preferred diet of pleasure is another’s boring repetition, after all.

D.E. Stevenson’s formula is certainly one rooted firmly in the middle of the road. Her books are largely about and for the middle classes, pitched assuredly and unashamedly at the middlebrow audience. They are conservative minded and might cause some 21st Century Progressives to bristle with discomfort, yet I do not think this is altogether a bad thing. There is something valuable, I think, in seeing the cultural and political thoughts of previous generations captured in fiction both as a reminder of what progress might have been made, but also at what might have been lost. The tumultuous period in England in the immediate aftermath of WW2 contains the essence of this tension, I think, and this is to an extent portrayed in the treatment of different characters returning from their disparate war service roles and experiences that populate Stevenson’s 1947 novel ‘Kate Hardy’. It is captured too in the feeling of an urban/rural divide that seems to have been prevalent in this period. In simplistic terms this would appear to be an argument between progress and tradition or more accurately perhaps the challenge to/preservation of land ownership and power. It is an argument that might still be seen to exist in 2025, when mistrust and misrepresentation could be described as being ever more extreme.

Having moved to the small Scottish Border town of Moffat in 1940 there is a sense that Stevenson was, by the end of WW2 certainly leaning towards the more conservative/rural side of this argument. Subsequent books like the Vittoria Cottage trilogy and the Amberwell series certainly root themselves firmly in the Borders landscape whilst her characters in these books often reflect what appears to be a genuine love of local colour and traditional charm. None of Stevenson’s books prior to ‘Kate Hardy’ could be said to be particularly urban themed (suburban, certainly, in the case of the marvellous Miss Buncle books) but this nevertheless feels like a novel where shift begins to happen. With the titular character of ‘Kate Hardy’ (a successful writer of thrillers, under a male pseudonym of course) moving to the rural English village of Old Quinings there may then be something autobiographical both in the setting and in the character. If so then Stevenson is mildly unapologetic for both her character’s and her own success, challenging the prevalent pre-war notion that people ought not to get above their station. At one point Kate responds to a barb by one of the upper middle classes that “It’s a pity when people get too big for their boots” with the charmingly thoughtful riposte that “They can always get new boots”.

This gentle steeliness is perhaps the most appealing attribute of the titular character, whilst the least appealing might be her predilection for what Amanda Craig, in her preface to a Persephone reprint of John Moore’s 1965 ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ called “posh young women taking up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that, in Moore’s case this particular predilection in literature of the period may have been fuelled by the lifting in 1960 of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’, but there is certainly an air of D.H. Lawrence’s taste for a bit of rough in ‘Kate Hardy’ even in this pre-ban period. As one who might identify more with the “civilised” and “slightly effete” character of Richard, about whom Kate felt “there was too little of the cave-man” this causes a degree of irritation that may be irrational but is nevertheless felt and ‘real’. Others will no doubt feel otherwise.

Now having mentioned John Moore, there is surely a delightful little barb aimed at his successful ‘Brensham Trilogy’ (published between 1945 and 1948) when Stevenson notes that “Kate toyed with the idea of a “little book” about Old Quinings (her publishers would be pleased, she knew, for her name would be sufficient to sell it, and “little books” were fashionable at the moment), a “little book” illustrated with woodcuts which would reveal the inner soul of an English village to people who were so unfortunate as to live in towns.” Well, there is room for such books alongside swashbuckling adventure thrillers and clever detective entertainments, just as there is space for intellectually challenging literature and lightly spiced romance.

Having said that, now might be an opportune moment to suggest that there may not be quite so much space for another D.E. Stevenson title that I read recently. ‘The Fair Miss Fortune’ was written in 1938 and rejected by publishers at the time. Given its first airing as late as in 2011, a more recent Furrowed Middlebrow reissue includes correspondence between Stevenson and her agent at the time of its writing, and I have to say that I am firmly on the side of the publishers who rejected it. The book plays on the theme of identical twins who are mistaken for each other with, Stevenson would no doubt have hoped, hilarious consequences. This hoped for humour instead feels forced, however, and the narrative painfully obvious. If anything it makes for a perfect example of how fine the line is between success and failure in this type of book. Here that saccharine silliness overwhelms and spoils the confection.

The book does share some similarities with ‘Kate Hardy’, notably in the part of female characters moving from the thrilling anonymity of city life to the apparently impenetrably insular English Village Life, but it is immeasurably more clumsy and irritatingly naive. An oddity for completists that is best left on the shelf by anyone else, ‘The Fair Miss Fortune’ might perhaps be seen as a failed experimental splurge filled with a pre-war predilection for hiding in a disappearing past. ‘Kate Hardy’ on the other hand feels like a measured step into the post-war unknowns of dismantled social norms and the challenge to the status-quo. Stevenson might be firmly on the conservative side of that social, cultural and political challenge but should not be condemned for that. A marvellously pure love for people, place and the pleasures of the rural landscape and ways of life shine through in her books and transcend any underlying conservatism. In this they are not unlike those books of John Moore’s that her Kate Hardy character so gently pokes fun at and as such can be richly rewarding reading some seventy years after the fact.

One hit, one miss.

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John Rhode is one of those prolific writers of detective fiction from the so-called Golden Age whose work I have dipped into occasionally in the past few decades. I’ve found his books to be, at their best, entertaining enough, but at their worst more of those irritating endeavours in which the author attempts to show how fiendishly clever they are. Dorothy Sayers, who one often thinks ought to have known better, but clearly didn’t, said that “One always embarks on a John Rhode book with a great sense of security. One knows that there will be a sound plot, well-knit process of reasoning, and a solidly satisfying solution with no loose ends or careless errors of fact.” Actually, on re-reading that quote there is a possibility of damnation by faint praise, isn’t there? She might as well have said that Rhodes is ‘workmanlike’ or ‘sound enough if you care for that kind of thing’. ‘Burn’, as I believe younger people have said in recent years.

Well, I admit that occasionally I have rather cared for that kind of thing, but Rhode’s effort ‘Murder At Lilac Cottage’ which I read last week isn’t something I could recommend. It feels like something written much earlier than its 1940 publication date, and there is something of the mass-production line about it as the story unfolds with weary predictability. One of Rhode’s particular fancies is in utilising ridiculously convoluted means of committing murder. He does like his contraptions (one of his books is titled ‘Invisible Weapons’) and this one certainly ticks that box with a suitably Heath Robinson murder machine being rigged up to pull of the crime and give the murderer an alibi. Sorry, does that seem like a spoiler? Well, perhaps so, but I dare say that one would tumble to the ‘mystery’ pretty quickly even if one was not previously aware of Rhodes’ predilections. I am rather useless at working out the puzzles in detective fiction but even I had the general notion nailed pretty early in the book. Even as a 99p Kindle punt I came away thinking I’d been swindled.

Better by far is the latest entry in the British Library Crime Classics series. ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ is another book in the expanding collection of reissued books penned by Edith Caroline Rivett. This effort is one of her titles under the Carol Carnac incarnation, and it has her serial detectives Julian Rivers and Inspector Lansing delving into the obfuscated world of the Civil Service and attempting to navigate the no-less muddy waters of Contemporary Modern Art. Set in the fictional Ministry Of Fine Arts in London, Carnac (or Rivett) does a fairly convincing job of weaving something of the real Arts Council of Great Britain’s history into the narrative. There is more than a hint of suggestion that the fictional first chairman of the Ministry of Fine Arts, one Joyce-Lawrence, is meant to be John Maynard Keynes, whilst the second (“old Higginson”) arguably bears more than a passing resemblance to Sir Ernest Pooley, who held the position of chairman until 1953, the year that ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ was published. It was too the year in which Sir Kenneth Clark ascended to the chair of the entire Arts Council (having previously headed up the Art Panel) and on whom surely the character of Humphry David is based, at least notionally. This playful weaving of the fictional and the real must have felt deliciously wicked at the time and there is certainly an argument to be made for ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ as a tremendous piece of contemporary political and cultural satire.

In many of Rivett’s (or E.C.R. Lorac’s, if you prefer) Inspector MacDonald books there is a great sense of place, and the writer typically uses the early pages of those books to elegantly sketch the landscape with a care to attention that is light yet remarkably evocative. She does the same thing here, only rather than landscape it is the complex structures of the Ministries of Government that are captured with swift , confident lines. It could be easy to get mired in such complications, but the book races along at a fine pace with well drawn characters and a marvellous balance struck between humour and the necessary sowing of clues to solve puzzles of the how, the who and the why of the crime. This is, after all, a murder mystery.

The air of humour is important though, and if one can never quite escape the image of Tony Hancock’s ‘The Rebel’ inhabiting some of the pages that is all to the good. Certainly the satirical quality works well, even at the distance of some seventy years. Some things never change, after all, and the convoluted workings of government ministries and contemporary Art scenes might just be amongst the most intractably difficult to unravel.

Perhaps what sets ‘Murder As A Fine Art’ apart from 21st Century sensibilities, however, is the manner in which partisanship never quite results in polarisation. At one point Inspector Rivers asks his superior officer, Henry Fearon, if he thinks it’s “possible that these contemporary paintings are potent enough to arouse murderous passions?” Fearon replies: “No. I don’t. I hate them as much as anybody does, but I would neither commit murder nor lift a finger nor spend a sixpence for any of them.” One wonders if a senior police officer might have quite so forgiving an attitude in 2025.

Indeed, there is a shift in Rivers’ appreciation of the paintings as the book progresses, eventually suggesting that “by the time I’m through with this job we’re on, I shall want to buy an Abstract. Ben Nicholson for preference.” One rather hopes that he did, for it would certainly have provided an excellent investment to supplement the police pension if nothing else!

In terms of the mechanics of the murder mystery, things are executed in typically fine Rivett style. Suspects are wheeled in front of our eyes with possible motives and potential solutions extrapolated for our convenience. As in ‘Murder at Lilac Cottage’ there is something a little Heath Robinson about the murder method, but the solution of how a massive sculpture might have been manoeuvred in order to fall onto the unfortunate victim’s head is dealt with altogether more elegantly here than in Rhode’s hands, as indeed are all the other necessary components of the murder mystery. In Rivett’s hand these are always entertainingly managed, and if there is a small degree of clumsiness as the book necessarily pivots into its conclusion, it is nevertheless as a Caravaggio compared to the Cecilia Giménez ‘Ecce Homo’ of Rhodes.

One to add to the collection, then, and another to drop in the charity shop box.

In Praise of John Moore

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We are already nearly a month into 2025 (and who shall not be delighted to see the back end of January recede into the distance once again?) and I realise that, for all the words written about books in 2024 I never once mentioned what my favourites were. In truth there were several things vying for the top spot and all three of them, unsurprisingly, were written before I was born. First is Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Saplings’ (1945) which I read in another of those gorgeous Persephone reissues that I have been consuming and collecting over the past few years (their grey and cream/off white spines make a very pleasant decorative element above the bed). I may write more about ‘Saplings’ at some point, just not today. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully written novel that captures much of the disruption and uncertainty of English family lives in the early years of WW2 and provides a piercing critique of class attitudes of the period. I’ve heard it suggested that the novel is a kind of “dark inversion” of Streatfeild’s classic children’s book ‘Ballet Shoes’ but not having read that one, I cannot be sure. ‘Ballet Shoes’ is certainly on my sizeable ‘to be read’ list though, which in turn sits in the shadow of the physical ‘to be read’ piles and the ‘to be read’ Kindle collection. This is how life ought to be, however, so that is fine.

Is ‘The Wind In The Willows’ (1908) a children’s book? My copy says ‘Penguin Classic’ so I am sure that it is admissible for adults to read it, even if they are not necessarily seeking to rekindle the feelings they might have felt on reading it in their childhood. Regardless, I am certain that one reason I never read it in my youth is that it is another of Those English Things that were rather scorned in Scotland. I know that I Make A Lot Of This these days but it is something worth repeating, I think, because of its essential truth. To me, if to no-one else, although I suspect it is also a truth that is, if not universal, at least quite recognisable to those of a similar age and geographical background. Anyway, the point here is that I finally read ‘The Wind In The Willows’ in 2024 and was startled by just how beautiful and ageless it is. Lots of little cultural puzzle pieces fell into place on reading it too, which is always a delightful feeling. Humbling too, for this kind of experience also shows how little one knows, or half knows. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

Just edging these two titles for the dubious prize of being The Unpopular Book Of 2024 however would be John Moore’s ‘The Waters Under The Earth’. Originally published in 1965, this was another of the Persephone reissue titles that had sat on the aforementioned ‘to be read’ pile for a good eighteen months before I finally got round to it, but goodness it was worth the wait! Although written in the early 1960s the novel is set a decade earlier, in the Gloucestershire countryside that Moore knew and loved so well. It is a rural landscape that Moore had written successfully about previously, and his ‘Brensham Trilogy’ books (‘Portrait of Elmbury’, ‘Brensham Village’ and ‘The Blue Field’) published between 1945 and 1948 sold handsomely at the time. So too did his enormously entertaining 1951 novel ‘Dance and Skylark’, whilst ‘September Moon’ (1957) apparently sold half a million copies. All of these are worth reading, and whilst I believe that ‘the Bresnham Trilogy’ have been collected and reprinted within the past decade or so, second hand copies of early editions can be picked up cheaply. In many ways each of these books seem to set the groundwork for ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ and each seems to inform the subsequent instalment. Characters return, sometimes in alternative guises but usually recognisable, whilst through it all the rural landscape and the rhythms of its life emerge as the dominant presence. All of these books are marvellously entertaining reads. Short and comedic, they also explore themes of class and industrial ‘progress’ that lend them a degree of weight. The books are light but never slight.

‘The Waters Under The Earth’ on the other hand stands out in being much longer and by some distance more sombre than any of Moore’s previous books. This is perhaps apt since it was to be his last prior to his death, in 1967, at the youthful age of 59. It also arguably reflects a degree of disillusionment in the post-war Labour government and the Urban/Rural divide apparent in much of the later 1940s and early 1950s. Being unashamedly a ‘countryman’, Moore’s books are necessarily conservative in much of their tone, yet ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ is noticeably more apologetic for the way of life lived by the rural land-owning classes than any of his previous books. Whilst there remains a lingering affection for hunting that might cause a degree of hand-wringing amongst many Waitrose shopping Guardian readers of the 21st Century, this is tempered with a growing awareness that Tradition need not be an excuse for cruelty. What comes across much more strongly is the sense of the landowner as custodian of nature being replaced by exploitative greed. ‘Growth’ and ‘Progress’ at all costs and hang the consequences. Indeed there is arguably a deep seated sorrow at the heart of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’, a recognition that human beings are doomed to destroy themselves by their lack of empathy and understanding not just for nature but for each other. There is a kind of existential ennui suffusing much of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ that feels at odds with the comedic pulse of Moore’s earlier books, yet at the same time the book retains a warmth that is heartening. This is a difficult balancing acts to pull off, but Moore does it admirably. He also pulls off an exploration of class in the post-war period with remarkable even-handedness, escaping a class partisanship which might have otherwise derailed things. Slightly less effective is the theme of romance which suffers somewhat by what Amanda Craig refers to in her excellent preface to the Persephone edition as being an example of the trope where “posh young women take up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that this in turn may be “perhaps not unconnected to the ending of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’” and whilst mildly irritating it also arguably lends ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ an additional degree of historical cultural context.

Like Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’, all of Moore’s novels are to an extent records of a disappearing rural landscape and way of life. What perhaps differentiates between them, however, is the context of the two authors: Blythe being from yeoman stock and a childhood of rural poverty, Moore from a comfortable middle class, growing up in a Tudor townhouse in Tewkesbury (now The Tudor Hotel). This possibly explains too, in part, the different lasting degrees of recognition for their work, ’Akenfield’ never being out of print since 1969 and Moore’s books being only sporadically reprinted in much smaller numbers. After all, when ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ was published four years before ‘Akenfield’ it perhaps already suffered from entering a publishing realm where the fashion was very much for The Voice Of The Working Class. The Angry Young Men in the ascendency and Swinging London getting into its stride. This might explain why Moore seemed so quickly to be forgotten. A voice of The Past when all that mattered was the shiny and new. Or NEW! AND IMPROVED! as the advertising lingo might have put it. Did ‘Akenfield’ then slip neatly into the space between that Swinging London POP explosion and the ‘back to the earth’ Hippie daydream, and was ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ just a little too late and a little too early to gain the traction that it perhaps, in hindsight, deserved? Perhaps.

Whatever the reasons for its sixty odd years of neglect, ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ more than deserves a place on the top shelf of classic rural fiction. It deserves attention too for its apparent prescience of what was, in 1965, The Future and is to us, in 2025, the recent past and the present: The Earth exploited for personal wealth; faceless corporate/syndicate wealth wielding power; the cult of individualism insidiously dismantling notions of community and class. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

A Guiding Spirit

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I came very late to Ronald Blythe, not finally reading ‘Akenfield’ until January 2019, when it felt like the most peculiar ‘Modern’ Classic imaginable, rooted as it was in an all but vanished rural past even when originally published in 1969. Indeed it was only on reading of Blythe’s death in January 2022, at the age of one hundred, that I was spurred to read more, starting with the remarkably zestful and truly ‘modern’ feeling ‘The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties’ and then progressing through most of the ‘Words From Wormingford’ collections. All immediately seemed like friends who had been waiting in the wings of life. The books both reflected back elements of myself that I was happy to embrace and suggested avenues which a future self might willingly explore. That these avenues would be populated themselves with suggestions of intriguing pasts outside of previous experience was perhaps as inevitable as it was seductive.

Seductive too was the sense that although Blythe clearly often wrote from very much a personal perspective he was skilled in keeping much of himself hidden. This balance of being simultaneously illuminating and of holding back just enough such that mysteries are kept caged is very difficult to achieve, and as such I approached Ian Collins’ biography with a degree of trepidation. I need not have worried, however, for Collins, a friend of Blythe’s since 1988 (a meeting delightfully outlined in the book’s prologue) seems to inhabit the spirit of his friend throughout the book. This in itself seems almost as remarkable a feat as Blythe’s own writing, such that at times one can half close one’s eyes and believe it to be autobiography. The trick, if one can call it such, is in Collins letting Blythe’s own words take on much of the pulse of the writing. At the end of the book there is a lovely reference to a visiting nurse tumbling bemusedly to the fact that, when necessary, the near hundred year old Blythe (Collins calls him Ronnie throughout the book, as almost all who knew him did) could dress himself with ease, he had come to enjoy the activity of being dressed by others. There is a sense of this throughout ‘Blythe Spirit’, a notion of Collins lovingly dressing Ronnie, of arranging the clothes, combing the hair, presenting everything just so. Not so much to do, after all. Just let the body be. Easy to say, so difficult to achieve, which is the essence of true Artists in any medium.

‘Blythe Spirit’ then is, as its title suggests, a biography more of a soul than one stoked with endless facts. There are those too, of course, many that I knew already, mostly about John and Christine Nash and their artist circles, casting out to the Benton End group, Cedric Morris, Arthur Lett-Haines and so on. Part of my knowledge has been gleaned from a mid-life (at least one hopes it is mid) interest in the kind of mid-20th Century English Art world that my younger self would have found repellently representational and (literally, in many respects) rooted in the English earth. ‘Bloody old hippies’ is what that younger self would have proclaimed, witheringly. That self was an asshole, obviously.

Much too, about Benjamin Britten and the Aldeburgh Festival, I had come across in Blythe’s ‘Time By The Sea’, and whilst Britten remains something of a musical mystery to me I have at least recently established what I trust will be a Christmas tradition by playing the ‘Ceremony Of Carols’ whilst dressing Christmas trees. Well, it makes a change from The Waitresses, timelessly marvellous as ‘Christmas Rapping’ is. There is certainly space for both.

There are things I had not previously been aware of, however, notably just how much of a Popular Classic ‘Akenfield’ was on its initial publication both in England and the USA, and how that global success reverberated down the decades to still leave traces of influence in the present day and doubtless into the future. Learning that the book had been taught in schools, I wondered then how on earth I could have missed it, before realising that of course it would have been one of those English Things. Like Malcolm Saville’s adventure stories for children, I imagine that ‘Akenfield’ would have received short shrift from educators in the Scotland of my childhood and youth. They may have stopped short of building bonfires of books deemed Not Scottish Enough, but not by far. An exaggeration, of course, but if there is one lingering frustration from a childhood growing up in Ayrshire then it is surely this wildly parochial mistrust of anything English. Not that, in truth, anyone else was to blame for ignorance but myself, and willingness to cast aspersions on The Scottish System is most assuredly a self-defence mechanism. This though is how personal histories roll. Mine, anyway.

The truth too is that had I been exposed to ‘Akenfield’ in school then it is almost a certainty that I should have hated it, this being the default setting of the teenager towards most things forced upon them, particularly at school. I imagine that I should have found ‘Akenfield’ impenetrable and alien. ‘There is no story!’ would have been the most likely response and no amount of teacher coaxing would have made me believe that this may be part of the point. In fact stories are everywhere in ‘Akenfield’, almost to the point of obfuscation. Threads of time and narrative overlay each other to create perplexing patterns of colour, like a fine tweed cascading off a hand pulled loom. Stories are everywhere to the point of being nowhere, their wave forms cancelling each other or amplifying to create crescendoes of quiet. This, indeed, is perhaps the essence of Ronald Blythe’s writing: an almost supernatural ability to tease out threads from multiple points, to craft tangential connectivity between them and to create, ultimately, this astonishing sense of calm. Writing as alchemy.

The supporting cast of characters who populated Ronald Blythe’s life drift in and out of ‘Blythe Spirit’ with the same kind of ease that one gathers they drifted in and out his country cottages, Bottengoms in particular. Certainly Collins makes it seem as such. It feels rather unfair to leave out any of these people, but of particular note is the peculiar appearance of Patricia Highsmith, with whom Blythe had the most naturally odd relationship. The pages in which their, ah, connections are laid bare are some of the most intriguing in the book, with the combination of Blythe and Highsmith seeming to make no sense at all, yet simultaneously all the sense in the world.

Maggi Hambling’s brief appearance meanwhile is a delight, particularly when previously unknown facts are shared with her: “she is astonished by the depths of his early poverty, the lack of formal schooling and the jettisoned peasant burr. Then, after musing in a long silence, in which new pieces are slotting into an old mental image, she says: ‘So, he was a complete invention, like Noël Coward. How amazing.’” How amazing indeed.

Equally wonderful is the way in which Jane Gardam appears towards the end of ‘Blythe Spirit’ and towards the end of Ronnie’s life. It resonates with me I think because Gardam was key to my own drift (back) into fiction in my end of teenage daze when a copy of ‘Bilgewater’ leapt at me from the shelves of an Ayr bookshop. Gardam immediately became something of a brief obsession, as such things that grab our attentions at this age inevitably do, and I devoured her books from the 1970s with relish. She drifted from me, or I from her, or something in between, such that later novels failed to connect in a way that left me saddened. Again though, whether this sadness was about my feelings towards Gardam’s books or towards my own self is unclear. I ought to return to those novels, the ‘Old Filth’ trilogy in particular, to see whether we might have grown into each other. It is Gardam’s exchanges of letters with Blythe which are of interest here, however, with both sides expressing their faith and love with the kind of illuminating strength that only the most gentle of sprits can conjure. Gardam tells of how Blythe’s books of church addresses (‘Talking To The Neighbours’ from 2002 and its prequel ‘The Circling Year’ from the previous year which was in fact dedicated to Gardam) are amongst her regular bedtime reading, resting naturally alongside the gospels and the Common Prayer Book. Blythe in his turn blessed her with what Collins calls a “joy in the present moment – an outgoing buoyancy however the bad incoming news” and the beautiful observation that “There is something satisfying about all things passing, even us.”

This notion of an unflinching faith has perhaps put some off reading Blythe, and Collins notes that his work as a lay preacher and the fact that his ‘Words From Wormingford’ were published in ‘The Church Times’ rather cast a sense in the twenty first century of Blythe as “a Christian writer”. I understand this and would once no doubt have felt a similar mistrust due to ‘religious’ connotations and connections, yet this mistrust would be entirely misplaced and anyway itself informed by the discoloured way in which faith may be portrayed in secular society. Instead, reading Blythe makes one aware, I think, of a simultaneous opaqueness and clarity inherent in faith. I struggle towards this myself, stumbling forwards and backwards in a world that feels ever more discouraging to nature, love and peace. In this struggle Blythe is a constant source of pleasure and balm. His spirit lingers and continues to guide.

More Books and Beverages

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So the year has turned once more and here we are, heads bent to it again, battling the January gloom. A opportunity perhaps to try and flex the mind, scrape off some of those flakes of rust. Books help, of course, as books help with most things. I’m having a dabble with StoryGraph to track my reading this year, currently running alongside Goodreads which I have used for quite a number of years now. I had forgotten that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but frankly I would be massively hypocritical to say this was the main reason I am looking to move. Instead it is the appeal of a more attractive and user friendly UI and hopefully something that’s a bit quicker, at least in the app version. There is also more data analysis available which might be fun, although I know without any technology to help me that the majority of my reading is detective fiction, followed increasingly closely by mid-century middlebrow fiction, often broadly in the romance genre.

In terms of detective fiction then, it’s been something of a mixed bag recently. All of the new-to-me detective novels set in the festive period that I read in 2024 were disappointing. This may say as much about me as it does the books, but I found Brian Flynn’s ‘Exit Sir John’ and Christopher Bush’s ‘Dancing Dead’ to be fairly dull and dreary reads. I persevered, but almost wish I hadn’t for they both rather soured my mood towards the season almost before it began. Both are too puzzle orientated for my tastes, and Bush in particular suffers dreadfully from employing the technique of explaining the thinking processes of his detective (in this case the tedious Ludovic Travers) in excruciating detail. I’ve read other early Bush novels in the Travers series and came away with the same impressions, so why I thought that this one might be different/better eludes me. Later books are, I’m told, better, particularly when Bush switches to the first person narrative. Perhaps a resolution for 2025 ought to be to try one. Or to studiously avoid altogether. Both are options.

Brian Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst is slightly more appealing than Travers, and ‘Exit Sir John’, being a late example of Flynn’s work (book 34 in the series, republished by Dean Street Press) shows a degree more maturity. As a post-WW2 (1947) it manages to retain something of a flavour of pre-war times which can be both a pleasure and a frustration. It feels therefore rather like a book which isn’t quite sure of its place in the firmament and whilst this is understandable for a writer for whom the vast majority of their work was produced in the ‘golden age’ of the interwar years, my preferred late 1940s and early 1950s works are those where the writer embraces at least the possibilities of a more hopeful and equitable society. That said, ‘Exit Sir John’ does touch on the post war turmoil for the upper classes quite nicely, although the personal appeal for me is that the country house setting is one ‘High Fitchet’ in Monfitchet in Essex, this being the English base for the spread of my surname, itself ‘imported’ from Normandy.

Disappointing too is the 2024 Christmas addition to the British Library Crime Classics series. Originally published in 1948, Elizabeth Anthony’s ‘Dramatic Murder’ was ‘lost’ for 75 years and I have to say that on the evidence it might have been better to stay that way. I’m sure that others will find something of pleasure in it, but I am not sure what that might be. Perhaps those interested in the theatrical world might find amusement in the rather two dimensional and stereotypically daubed characters, but in truth I suspect they would find them to be the loathsome caricatures that irritated me during the days when I trudged through the book, regularly putting it down and picking it up again in the vain hope it might get better. Or end soon. I persevered, but could hardly recommend that anyone else should do likewise. My most pleasant memories of the book, by some margin, are the glasses of sherry (a very old Palo Cortado and a delicious Oloroso) I consumed whilst reading.

Better by some considerable distance in terms of my Christmas detective fiction reading were some relatively new-to-me re-reads. Best of all remains Clifford Witting’s delightful ‘Catt Out Of The Bag’. Originally published in 1939, this in the fourth of the peerless Inspector Charlton series, although this time out Witting returns to play with a first person narrative contributed by bookseller John Rutherford, as utilised in his debut ‘Murder In Blue’. It works well, for Rutherford is an eminently likeable character and he act as a nice counterfoil to his wife’s Uncle (Inspector) Harry Charlton. Anyone looking for a top notch piece of classic English detective fiction with a Christmas setting should pop this on their shelf of reliable re-reads and revisit regularly. Elsewhere, Bovey Tracey resident Molly Thynne’s terrific 1931 novel ‘The Crime At The Noah’s Ark’ (which I wrote about at this time last year) also rewards a re-read, as does Moray Dalton’s ‘The Night Of Fear’ from the same year. Pretty much everything I’ve previously written about Dalton (here, here and here) is applicable to this Christmas story of murder and masquerade, and I recommend it heartily.

Similarly recommended, but without the festive setting, is E.C.R. Lorac’s ‘Murder In Vienna’ which was re-published towards the end of 2024 in the British Library Crime Classics series. This again was a re-read for me, though this time thankfully without all the typos of a badly scanned digital edition. It’s not quite from Lorac’s top drawer, for after a wonderful few opening pages where the writer’s gift for capturing landscape is shown in her lines about flying over the Kent coast at Dungeness, the book does rather lurch into something that feels like a tourist leaflet for Vienna. It’s to the writer’s credit that the book recovers from this and manages to configure itself into something that elegantly straddles the murder/spy thriller genre. This is a tricky literary landscape to inhabit as the shadows of Le Carre and Ambler are so strongly cast. Lorac does a fine job and her story of shrouded identities and uncertain motivations is pleasantly entertaining. It is again, however, Lorac’s gift for conjuring a sense of place that is what lingers longest after reading, and if her accounts of Vienna retain something of the sheen of a tourist information guide then the depictions of the suburb of Hietzing and its nearby hills and forests are much more convincing. If they never seem quite as evocatively captured as the Lunesdale landscapes beloved of her Inspector/Superindentent Macdonald then this is hardly a criticism for the Lorac novels set in those hills are as fine as anything in the genre. ‘Murder In Vienna’ then is something of an outlier in the Macdonald series, but no less entertaining and recommended for all that.

Another outlier in terms of the output of the British Library Crime Classics series is the recently re-published 1973 novel ‘Tea On Sunday’ by Lettice Cooper. Cooper’s is a name I know from the wonderful Persephone Books reissue series, but I had not picked up on the fact that she had dabbled in detective fiction. Now, whilst much is made in the publicity for the reissue that it is written in “the vintage mystery style” I’m not convinced that this marketing angle is worth a great deal. The book may follow a ‘traditional’ murder mystery structure (the murder happens early in the book; there is something of the ‘closed room’/country house in that there seems to be a definitive group of suspects; the detective, in this case Inspector Corby of The Yard, explores each suspect in turn) yet one could say as much about many such books from any period. Does this make it ‘vintage’? I am sceptical. Indeed, much of the book feels like a distinctly period piece, being evocative of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or at least evocative of this period as subsequently portrayed in other media. There are references to young men with long hair and (witheringly) to clothing that might be a bed-spread, and there is something of a run-down and rather sordid desperation that is at odds with illusions of glamour and prosperity. There is deceit, corruption, duplicity, mental illness, jealousy and, most troubling of all (spoiler alert/trigger warning), a degree of misogyny that boils into a piece of domestic violence that feels rooted in victim-blaming. That aside, the cast of suspects are mostly very well drawn and the multiple potential motives are interesting and believable enough to keep the reader entertained.

The blend of settings that take in London and Yorkshire is well balanced, with Inspector Corby’s dash to the West Riding of Yorkshire (one assumes that the fictional Hithamroyd is modelled to a degree on Mytholmroyd) making for a necessary change of place and pace. It allows Copper to pull on personal experience of place (her ‘National Provincial’ novel of 1938 is set in the Aire region which would have been, broadly speaking, the landscape of her youth) and she does this admirably. Indeed, ‘admirable’ is a word for ‘Tea On Sunday’ for it is a book that does a fine job of balancing good writing with the necessities of the detective fiction genre. That it never quite reaches the heights of excellence in either realm is no great criticism and certainly no reason not to add it to one’s shelves.