Tag detective fiction

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Not John Grisham

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I cannot say I have ever been a huge fan of the courtroom drama although I appreciate that this sub-genre of detective fiction most certainly has its devotees. My suspicion is that these fans are themselves likely also to be in the legal profession in one form or another and find the books to be comforting reinforcements of their extensive educations and rapier sharp wit/intelligence. This may be a rather unkind generalisation/assumption on my part of course, suggesting that my mistrust of the sub-genre may be rooted firmly in a sense of personal inadequacy; a certain begrudgingly accepted awareness that I never was nor will be Quite That Bright. Oh, I get by and I don’t believe myself to be entirely stupid, but, well, you know, perhaps that is not for me to say.

Anyway, if a blog is not a place for personal admissions then I am not sure what is, so let me also say that whilst attempting to refresh my shoddy memory about other courtroom drama stories that I have read over the years I made the rookie error of looking at a Goodreads list of ‘122 Best Legal Thrillers’. That this list appears to be almost entirely populated with John Grisham books perhaps illustrates only the tendency for these kinds of lists to be wildly skewed in favour of whatever happens to be the most popular/best selling items that are roughly contemporaneous with whenever the list is being compiled. One sees this tendency in any chosen media type and it is entirely understandable, if also endlessly frustrating. I should note here, of course, that I have never read a John Grisham novel and that whilst they may be marvellous things of estimable quality, that’s not really my point. Which is? Well, which is that on a blog called Unpopular one ought not to expect much energy being expended on those things that fall easily into what we might term The Mainstream. That one ought to expect, perhaps, a little light being shone under some of the smaller stones; a scratching about in the shadier, more cobwebbed corners of the bookshelves.

What did surprise me a little, however, looking at ‘122 Best Legal Thrillers’ was the complete lack of reference to Earl Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason novels were enormously popular in the 1940s and 50s. And whilst I like Perry Mason well enough, he is not a patch on the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam characters for whom Gardner (writing as A.A. Fair) wrote a lengthy series of magnificently trashy Noir Pulp novels in the same period. No space either on that Goodreads list for Cyril Hare, which perhaps is not surprising as the list appears to be heavily US-centric and Hare’s books from the 1940s and ‘50s featuring lawyer Francis Pettigrew are tastefully, parochially English. Whilst having been fairly regularly reprinted down the years they nevertheless seem to fly just below the radar, and I heartily recommend them all.

Missing from the list too are John Mortimer’s ‘Rumpole’ stories which I have never really got into but are most assuredly ‘good’, or Sarah Caudwell’s peerless Hilary Tamar novels which are not courtroom dramas but make tremendous use of characters from the legal profession and any excuse to remind ourselves of their brilliance ought to be grasped.

Also lacking in the Goodreads list are the novels of Sara Woods although this may not be so surprising since most of her 48 book run featuring serial lawyer/detective Anthony Maitland have been out of print since the latter half of the 1980s when just over a dozen were reissued by US publisher Avon. These editions, pushed out just after Woods’ death in 1986 and coinciding with the posthumous publication of the final few Maitland stories, have cover designs that could scarcely be more redolent of the 1980s, yet simultaneously also cleverly hark back to, when exactly? The 1930s? 1940s? The stylistic visual references are hard to pin down, and this is particularly apt because, at least in my reading of the first five Maitland novels (newly republished by the happily resurgent Dean Street Press imprint), this seductive slipperiness of period is largely inherent in Woods’ writing. For whilst ‘Bloody Instructions’, ‘Malice Domestic’, ‘Error of the Moon’, ‘The Third Encounter’ and ‘Trusted Like the Fox’ were all originally published in the early 1960s, for the most part they manage to come across as being infused marvellously with a spirit that feels older than one might expect.

The estimable Curtis Evans once more turns in tremendous introductions to these reissues and does a fine job of setting Sara Woods within the context of the times, literarily speaking. These notes necessarily reference Christie, Marsh and Sayers whilst also nodding to the more contemporaneous P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, with Evans making a sound case for rating Woods much more highly than the past forty years of invisibility might suggest she warrants. One reason for this slip into relative obscurity might be the fact that Woods, a Yorkshirewoman transplanted to Nova Scotia in 1958 at the age of 42 was ambivalent about self-promotion, allowing her books to speak for themselves rather than, in the parlance of the current age, expending most of her energies on Building The Brand. It is to the immense credit of Dean Street Press, therefore, that a resurrection of her work is underway, and on the evidence of these first five releases Woods and Maitland ought to find a welcoming new readership.

That said, I must say that the first instalment, 1961’s ‘Bloody instructions’, is for me by some distance the weakest of this selection. Perhaps inevitably the book reads as something of a fumbling in the dark, the necessary initial workings out of characters and approach. Being resolutely in the courtroom drama camp seems to fence everything in rather and I found if difficult to warm to any of the characters. In a contemporary review Francis Iles/Anthony Berkeley called it “a most accomplished piece of work“, and whilst this is true up to a point, it also feels that in hindsight the original publisher Collins might have been minded to hold this one back. Anyway, I’m not sure if Berkely-Iles’ recommendation coloured me against it from the off (I’m not for the most part a fan of Francis-Anthony), or if the theatrical angle allowing the (rolls eyes) Shakespeare quotations into the mix pushed my buttons in an irritating manner, but for me it never pulls itself out of the realms of the rather sedate and ordinary.

Better by significantly more than half is 1962’s ‘Malice Domestic’ in which the recurring characters of Anthony Maitland and his famous uncle Sir Nicholas Harding start to become more fleshed out and appealing. Again, there is an odd uncertainty about time period sitting over everything like a fine mist and if one wonders what the audiences of the early 1960s might have made of this, it is perhaps inevitable that our 21st Century reflections are themselves coloured wildly by the intervening 60 odd years of cherry-picked Pop Cultural references. So there’s not much Adam Faith or Billy Fury here, but perhaps there is a hint of Johnny Keating’s ‘Theme from Z-Cars’… In truth though Woods’ novel feels like it reaches back into a pre-war era, with its central trope of ‘inherited madness’ and the classic(al) themes of generational conflict/wilful misunderstandings, jealousy and financial gain all neatly threaded together in a pleasingly coherent manner.

Things continue to develop in the next couple of books in the series, with both ‘Error Of The Moon’ and ‘The Third Encounter’ (originally published in January and June of 1963 respectively) doing a fine job of drawing more detail into Anthony Maitland’s backstory as a WW2 secret service agent. ‘Error Of The Moon’ sketches the first lines of this in the form of a novel that more obviously roots itself in the early 1960s. A narrative around the development of anti-missile systems on the desolate Yorkshire moors allows Woods to use her memories of the dozen years spent farming the landscape to conjure a sense of place with aplomb, whilst also turning a hand to something that has the air of espionage thrillers being popularised at the time by John Le Carré and Eric Ambler. It may be tempting to wrinkle one’s nose at this and suggest Woods might be Jumping On The Bandwagon somewhat, but it is worth pointing out that she in fact wrote all four of these early Maitland books in the period of 1958-61, thus putting her firmly in the context of a Le Carré contemporary. As an espionage thriller ‘Error of The Moon’ may not scale the same heights as ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ but then what does? And anyway, Woods’ novel is much more rooted in the murder mystery tradition than Le Carré’s work, although having said that I would suggest that it compares favourably to ‘Call For The Dead’ in which Le Carré introduces George Smiley in a work that, like ‘Error of The Moon’ also owes as much to classic detective fiction as to thrillers.

If ‘Error of the Moon’ sketches the first lines of Anthony Maitland’s backstory then ‘The Third Encounter’ adds colour and form. A shade of confusion may exist in the book being called ‘The Third Encounter’ whilst being the fourth instalment of the series, but this does perhaps also carries its own mystery. Having written all four books prior to approaching a publisher, might Woods herself have felt opener ‘Bloody Instructions’ in danger of being rejected in favour of ‘Malice Domestic’ as the debut? Might she originally have thought ‘The Third Encounter’ would be published before ‘Error of the Moon’, thereby allowing a more linear unfolding of Maitland’s history? Did Woods, indeed, pen them in that order? Or is the title simply a reference to the narrative of the story, in which the denouement does indeed (spoiler alert? Probably not really….) feature the third encounter between Maitland and his wartime nemesis, with the discord of the ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ inferences being a particularly humorous/cruel dig at the orderly infatuations beloved of so many devotees of the genre? Who knows (and who really cares, yes?), for what really matters is that ‘The Third Encounter’ is a thoroughly entertaining read and that its oscillations in time between the early 1940s and the early 1960s are elegantly carried off. Well executed too are explorations of the themes of identity, loyalty, love and betrayal, making it perhaps my favourite of these early Maitland stories.

Now quite why this batch of Dean Street Press reissues leaps over the fifth book in the series (January 1964’s ‘This Little Measure’) to arrive at ‘Trusted Like The Fox’ (also originally published in January 1964, according to Goodreads) I am not sure. Perhaps there is some disagreement/confusion about publication order (guaranteed to frustrate those aforementioned obsessions with order amongst many of the prospective readers) but regardless, ‘Trusted Like The Fox’ initially feels like it is taking rather a backwards step in being, like ‘Bloody Instructions’ much more firmly positioned within the courtroom drama context. If that might initially feel like a disappointment (and I must say that it was so for me) this is quickly dispelled by the realisation that Woods has apparently already mastered the balance so that the book develops and unfolds in a much more satisfying manner. Here Woods again plays on the theme of identity whilst also once again massaging a narrative that slips between the ‘present’ of the early 1960s and the ‘past’ of the early 1940s, pointing out as it does the threads of connectivity and the manipulation/obfuscation of facts in order to tell preferred stories according to individuals’ needs and desires. As with ‘The Third Encounter’ there are also references to questions of righteousness, loyalty, betrayal, love and self-preservation/narcissism which feel oddly prescient/relevant in 2024, although it is also arguable that those are timeless themes of relevance at any given point in history.

These five books then are (‘Bloody Instructions’ arguably aside) enormously welcome additions to the reissue market and allow the name of Sara Woods to be recognised by fans of detective fiction who might otherwise have been denied the pleasure. I look forward to the next batch with eager anticipation.

‘Bloody Instructions’, ‘Malice Domestic’, ‘Error of the Moon’, ‘The Third Encounter’ and ‘Trusted Like the Fox’ are set to be published on 2nd December 2024 by Dean Street Press.

Reunions can be Murder

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With thoughts of school reunions still lingering in the air I thought I would look for a few more murder mysteries using that particular underpinning theme. From my very rudimentary research it would seem to be a surprisingly small field, especially when one disqualifies college/university reunions or any others that bring together groups that were formed largely in (relative) adulthood. Of those, Dorothy L. Sayers’ ‘Gaudy Night’ is perhaps the most well known and best, yet I admit I am drawn much more to reunions of childhood/teenage ‘friendships’ because these seem to me to be ones fired through with the most profound disconnects that nevertheless do not overpower something altogether more powerful and peculiarly comforting that draws them together.

Anyway, as mentioned last time out, Clifford Witting made a good fist of a school reunion murder mystery back in the 1950s with ‘A Bullet for Rhino’, but typically uses the fee-paying private school as its setting. This does make perfect sense for its use of the ‘alien’ setting (see also the Country House) as a method of necessarily distancing the generations of readers who grew up in the age of the Welfare State and who were schooled in Comprehensives or (whisper it) Secondary Moderns. Yet it must also be remembered that for Witting and his contemporaries the fee-paying private school (boarding or otherwise) would have been the de-facto experience for themselves and the bulk of their readership, so this sense of the reader as historical and cultural tourist would exist to a far lesser degree. Are there, then, some murder mysteries written since that time where the setting is the comprehensive school reunion? As I say, my research is rudimentary at best, but it would appear not. The closest I could find is ‘Maxwell’s Reunion’ by M.J. Trow, but whilst this has the titular character (one Peter Maxwell) as a teacher in a contemporary Local Authority Comp, the reunion in question is still of seven former students of a private school. The 2001 novel is apparently the seventh instalment in what currently appears to be a 21 book run, several of which, if their titles are anything to go by, take aim at some of the easy targets of state education. So we have ‘Maxwell’s Inspection’, ‘Maxwell’s Academy’ and, ahem, ‘Maxwell’s Zoom’. None of which, as a retired state school teacher, I have much desire to read. Indeed I rather wish I had not picked up ‘Maxwell’s Revenge’, for whilst it all trots along at a reasonable pace and is over relatively quickly, there is still an element of ‘skip to the end…’.

It must be admitted at this point that I have my own prejudices about many (most?) ‘modern’ murder/crime mysteries to contend with here, and sadly ‘Maxwell’s Reunion’ presses a lot of those buttons. A predilection for dropping popular cultural references (in this case mostly film)? Check. One dimensional characters who seem to adhere to the lowest common denominator stereotypes? Check. A general air of insufferable smugness around the lead (Peter Maxwell) character? Check. Managing to make the reader care not one jot about the fates of any of said characters? Check again. All of which makes reading the book feel a little like working through a checklist, which usually suggests that the writer may have approached the writing in much the same way. Others will, and indeed have, thought differently of course. I dare say one cannot get to 21 books in a series (as well as innumerable other titles and other series, apparently) without doing something right in the eyes of many, but hey ho. Not for me.

Better by far, for a variety of reasons, is June Wright’s ‘Make Up for Murder’. One of these reasons is most certainly that it was originally published in 1966, which makes it as old as me; another might be that it’s plot and premise is largely one that has been twirling around in my mind since my own high school reunion some weeks back, one that, if I did not find fiction writing to be such an insufferably hard slog, I might one day actually write. Something to do with celebrity, identity, self-(re)invention, secrets and the slippery shape-shifting qualities of truth. Don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, ‘Make Up For Murder’ is actually the last of the seven novels written by “Australia’s answer to Agatha Christie”, an epithet apparently predicated on the fact that her first novel ‘Murder In The Telephone Exchange’ outsold Christie in the Australian market during its publication year of 1948. The book (which gained publication thanks to a competition run by London publisher Hutchinson, and judged by Anthony Berkeley Cox, John Creasey and Dennis Wheatley) is by some distance Wright’s longest and in my eyes weakest book. The local colour lent by its Melbourne setting perhaps explains some of its appeal to the Australian market, and certainly Wright’s own experience of working in a telephone exchange lends it an air of detail that carries the narrative convincingly. Such an approach of ‘write what you know’ is not always good advice however, although perhaps one can only judge this if one has had similar experiences. Had I worked in 1960s telephone exchanges myself then I might be rolling my eyes at Wrights’ depictions in much the same way as I have done to Trow’s depictions of teaching in the naughties. That said, this familiarity with the workings of a telephone exchange is also the novel’s weakness, for it feels like far too much time is spent/wasted describing all the little idiosyncrasies of the exchange, little of which ends up having much input to the solution of the crime(s). It feels too as though Wright felt impelled to add layer upon layer of complication to the plot, in so doing confusing embellishment with quality detailing, though doubtless this would have appealed to Berkeley Cox… As a first piece of detective fiction it is a pleasant enough diversion, but one can’t help but be glad that Wright seemed to learn from the process, implementing the golden rule that Less Is More in her subsequent work, particularly in the three Mother Paul novels.

The first of these, 1958’s ‘Reservation for Murder’, is a fine if slightly odd way to start. Narrated in the first person by Mary Allen, a resident in the Kilcomoden business girls’ hostel in Melbourne, Mother Paul actually rarely features in any significant way. Rather she floats around in the background, flitting into view at opportune moments to ask an oddly probing question or to make an astute observation. Admittedly this does feel rather appropriate given her position as a Reverend Mother so one must assume that it was a conscious decision in style by Wright, but in my eyes it does not quite come off. ‘Reservation for Murder’ then is a fine enough murder mystery that suffers only from that slightly odd first person narrative and, whilst avoiding the excesses of ‘Murder In The Telephone Exchange’, being a touch too lengthy for comfort with Wright still a little guilty of stuffing too much into the one story. 1960’s ‘Faculty of Murder’ is better by far, with Wright having trimmed the fat and arrived at what feels to me like the perfect fighting weight for a murder mystery. There are fewer detours, a sympathetically drawn policeman in Inspector Savage as capable supporting actor, and a neatly crafted mystery that plays on sibling connections, questions of identity (a recurring theme in Wright’s work, it seems), the struggles of youth to grapple with the vagaries of adulthood and the struggles of all ages to deal with the passions of jealousy. Gone is the first person narrative, proof perhaps that Wright acknowledged the difficulties that approach presented in ‘Reservation for Murder’, but Wright continues to write Mother Paul as a figure who moves gently around the book whilst never taking centre stage for very long. Wright instead centres the narrative around a faculty tutor at Melbourne University and the approach works well, allowing Mother Paul to deftly manipulate everyone else into making the moves and uncovering the facts that support her thoughts and theories. And whilst Mother Paul still remains rather too hazy a character to ever rival the confidently drawn Miss Marple, for example, there is something altogether admirable in the way she calmly positions all the parts of the puzzle. Faith and Truth in some delicate dance on the road to enlightenment, perhaps. ‘Faculty of Murder’ certainly feels like a significant step in June Wright’s journey.

Before getting (at last!) to Wright’s 1966 swansong of ‘Make Up For Murder’ it is worth taking a sidestep to consider the posthumously published ‘Duck Season Death’. Written in the mid-1950s but inexplicably rejected by her publisher and remaining unseen for some sixty years, this short novel is a real treasure. For if her other pieces of detective fiction show Wright working competently within the traditional structure of the genre, ‘Duck Season Death’ sees her playfully lifting the curtain and gleefully exposing the workings. The narrative revolves around the murder of what appears to be a particularly unpleasant character within what is effectively a closed-circle of suspects, all of whom would seem to have good motive for the crime. So far so classic Country House murder mystery. What lends it an extra level of pleasure, however, is the fact that the victim’s nephew decides to employ his learning from years reviewing detective fiction to find the killer, whilst himself becoming Prime Suspect for the Police. And is it a spoiler to point out that Wright employs that most irritating of all detective mystery tropes of identifying the real murderer by introducing some facts at the denouement that the reader was not previously privy to? Perhaps so, but in truth it rather feels amusingly appropriate. Perhaps too this knowing sense of self-deconstruction was just a shade ahead of its time, and whilst this would certainly explain the rejection by conservative publishers in mid 1950s Australia, it makes for a thoroughly entertaining read in the 21st Century.

And so finally, yes, to ‘Make Up For Murder’, which continues the approach used in ‘Faculty of Murder’ in having the narrative centred around a character other than Mother Paul, who once again is allowed to slip stealthily around in the background, perceptively solving the crime whilst everyone else pursues the red herrings that Wright still enjoyably throws into the mix. Red herrings are of course the bread and butter of most writers of mystery fiction, and June Wright certainly sprinkles her stories liberally with them. Indeed, this predilection is, as already suggested, perhaps the main stumbling block in enjoying ‘The Telephone Exchange Murder’ because there really are just too many of the things constantly getting in the way of the story. It’s as if Wright wanted to use up all of her ideas in that one book, which is fair enough when one considers she might well have written it thinking it might be her one and only. By the time of ‘Make Up for Murder’ however Wright has something of a handle on this, and the herrings are rather more cautiously dealt into the story. And is that story one of a school reunion? Well yes and no. The murder in question certainly takes place during a reunion for former students of the fictional Maryhill school for girls, a reunion at which TV celebrity Rianne May is the star attraction. The relationships between several of the former classmates is also something of a key theme, although this is not explored in the depth that one might have thought possible. That said, whilst working up the threads of those relationships into something altogether meatier might have added some potential literary interest to the story, it might also have added a bulk that, having learned from the excesses of ‘Murder In The Telephone Exchange’ and to a lesser extent ‘Reservation for Murder’, Wright was keen to avoid. She certainly does avoid bulk, and like ‘Faculty for Murder’, ‘Make Up for Murder’ is a pleasantly trim tome with a pace that clips along nicely. As for the murder in question, the question from the off is always about whether the intended target for the poison in the teacup is Rianne May and how the answer to that might explain her subsequent disappearance. The disappearance of May rather mirrors the continued relative invisibility of Mother Paul in the story and is quite a neat piece of paralleling, particularly in light of the denouement and the idea, perhaps, that Wright was drawing similarities between the realm of traditional organised religion and the then relatively new religion of television. There are some quite delicious little threads of theatrical illusion running through everything (something that The Church has had centuries of practice in) and issues of secret and altered identities abound. The central one of these identities of course is Rianne May herself, or plain old Maisie Ryan as she had been known as a schoolgirl, put upon by some of those classmates who remained in Melbourne whilst she found fame in London, eventually to return home the conquering hero (or heroine as would have still been the case in the 1960s). Television, then, and the multitudinous cast of characters required to produce and maintain the illusions it creates, is the central theme for ‘Make Up for Murder’ and Wright takes great pleasure in sketching those characters with a deftness of touch. Few, if any, come across as altogether pleasant individuals, with perhaps only May’s personal secretary Sue Berry, around whom Wright builds the narrative, emerging relatively unscathed from Wright’s gentle barbs. As noted, the books clips along at a fair pace and although Wright still arguably crams one or two too many narrative arcs into the limited space for true comfort, it is all throughly enjoyable. Enjoyable too is the inevitable thread of romance that Wright often employs in her stories. Does the girl gets the man? What do you think… And although it all comes across a little eye-rolling for 21st Century audiences, the attitudes Wright describes are very much of their time and place and should certainly be enjoyed as such.

Such a notion of time and place is certainly key to enjoying June Wright’s books, and ‘Make Up for Murder’ is as valuable a piece of Pop Cultural documentation as it is an enjoyable murder mystery. Belonging very much to a place and time could also be said about June Wright herself. Certainly one wonders whether in another time and another place she could or would have continued to write and publish novels after ‘Make Up for Murder’. For although Wright was clearly hitting her stride with the Mother Paul stories (the reappearance of Inspector Savage suggests the possibility of a serial double act that would, I think, have been very successful), and a fourth had been planned and plotted, Life, in the form of family and her husband’s mental health rather got in the way. Had things turned out differently would further Mother Paul mysteries have gained the character the affection shown to Miss Marple? Would a larger body of work have established June Wright as more than being something of an antipodean curio? Such questions are moot, of course, and in truth we ought to be thankful her work has resurfaced for our pleasure. She is certainly worth investigation.