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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the 1963 Poirot novel ‘The Clocks’, as we have seen, Agatha Christie uses one of the rare appearances of her little Belgian detective to engage in an amusing and informative exposition on the history of detective fiction. For the most part this focuses on some key French authors, a smattering of English (it would not do, one assumes, for Christie to be seen to throw either stones or bouquets in her own glass house) and a rogue appearance by the overrated American Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr. When the subject of the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ of detective fiction comes up, however, Poirot dismisses it “much as he would have waved [away] an intruding fly or mosquito.” “‘Violence for violence’ sake?” he continues. “Since when has that been interesting?”
It is a cutting riposte that, in the context of what he has just said about other authors and schools of thought, is perhaps a cute play on Christie’s part to show Poirot as being somewhat old fashioned and out of touch. In 1963, after all, the literary value of the hard-boiled school was surely well established whilst the publicity-seeking fencing between the protagonists on opposite sides of the Atlantic would be largely a thing of the past. Indeed, after a pause for breath and thought, Hercules Christie admits that they rate “American crime fiction on the whole” in “a pretty high place” and considers it “more ingenious, more imaginative than English writing.” One does of course rather wonder just what American crime fiction Agatha Poirot is thinking of here, if not any of the ‘tough school’. Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr? One sincerely hopes not. Ellery Queen then?
When talking about American detective fiction it is likely that the name Ellery Queen was amongst the first I became aware of. Not the novels or short stories, you understand, but the character played by Jim Hutton in the American TV series. Screened in the UK by the BBC in 1976, it is one of the few television shows I can recall watching with the rest of my family. Seeing it again in 2024 is something of a shock of nostalgia, the layers of time travel being overlaid with mis-remembrance. Do I remember the show as being set in the late 1940s? What would that have even meant to a ten year old in 1976? Did I confuse or conflate Jim Rockford’s 1970s California with Jim Hutton’s 1940s New York? When Hutton/Ellery turned to camera, broke the fourth wall and suggested that I was probably way ahead of him and had spotted the murderer, did I ever nod and smugly announce that I was and that I had? As if. What was the fourth wall anyway? And at what point did I realise that there were actual Ellery Queen novels other than the imaginary ones Jim Hutton was writing in the show? History is obscure on the answer to the last one, although I can at least say with some certainty that it was not until 2021 that I finally read some real Ellery Queen books. ‘The French Powder Mystery’, ‘The Spanish Cape Mystery’ and ‘The Greek Coffin Mystery’ all struck me as much more rooted in English detective fiction than the raw rough and tumble of the Black Mask school and whilst they struck me as adequate period pieces they did little to really thrill me. I’m sure that the more puzzle-orientated aspect of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee’s writing as Ellery Queen would have appealed to Poirot and Christie much more than they have done to me, and that is fine of course.
In terms of The Americans though, I am fairly certain that before the Ellery Queen TV show came into my orbit, there would have been a few books on my childhood bookshelf bearing the names of Carolyn Keen and Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike the Famous Five and Agatha Christie paperbacks, none of these Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys titles survived the occasional purges of personal history that I would have scowled through in my teens and twenties, but they are certainly worth thinking about again now, particularly as my rudimentary research about the Ellery Queen TV series suggests that the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew TV show of 1977-79 was screened by the BBC during 1979. Oddly (or not) I have no recollection of this at all. Archive ‘Radio Times’ listings show that it was broadcast on a late Saturday afternoon, after the Sport and Regional News (‘Scoreboard’ in Scotland ) and before a Rolf Harris show. Has some strange subliminal cancellation process seeped from the Harris reference and erased my Nancy Drew memories? Is memory in fact like ferric cassette or video tape, breaking up over time? Well, mine has clearly unravelled from the case and no amount of rewinding with a pencil is going to help.
Looking online at the covers of the Drew and Hardy Boys titles published in the UK throughout the 1970s as Armada paperbacks brings slightly more of a flicker of recognition, particularly those yellow box Nancy Drew covers with the Peter Arthur illustrations. These may not be particularly memorable from a design perspective, but I admit that the sight of a red headed Nancy glancing over her shoulder in an anxious manner stirs the ancient memory of a ten year old’s crush. This is another piece of evidence for my not having seen the TV series, for I feel sure that my thirteen year old self could not have failed to have found Pamela Sue Martin incredibly crush-worthy. Then again, at that age I would have struggled to see further than a girl called Veronica who sat beside me in Chemistry classes. This, of course, decades before she would find fame on British television screens as Ronni Ancona and surprise me by cropping up as Steve Coogan’s PA in the tremendous second series of ‘The Trip’. Seeing her there on screen oddly transported me back to 1979, sitting at the bottom of the stairs for hours trying to summon the courage to phone her number and ask her out. The anti-climax of finally hearing her say ‘no’ was, of course, savagely dispiriting. The following week she had moved tables in Chemistry and to say I missed hearing her passionate raving about Dustin Hoffman in my ear would be an understatement. I wonder if she ever read Nancy Drew stories? Wonder too if she was ever famous enough to get to meet Hoffman in person. I hope so.
I did re-read some Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories recently and found it an interesting experience. The first few Drew novels, ghostwritten in the early 1930s by Mildred Wirt Benson still read as thoroughly enjoyable mystery adventures. Wholesome fun, fired through with the kind of old-fashioned conservative American family values that knee-jerk jerks of a right leaning proclivity might suggest they are fighting to protect today. Nonsense, of course, for what comes over in these early Drew stories is a fundamental sense of decency and fairness that would seem to be anathema to much of 21st Century America. Shame.
Have The Hardy Boys aged as handsomely? Well, not to my eyes, although this is admittedly based on a very small selection of Leslie McFarlane penned books from the late 1920s and early 1930s. These, such as the 1928 title ‘Hunting For Hidden Gold’, read now as ridiculously robust action adventures that are fuelled more by testosterone and machismo than by anything so subtle as a mystery to be solved. Did I enjoy this kind of nonsense as a ten year old? I like to think not so much, and see this is a reason for their exclusion from those bookshelves where Enid Blyton was allowed to stay. Nancy Drew should certainly have been given a reprieve though.
Then there would be the Three Investigators books. Or, more accurately, ‘Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators’. In truth these would have been my brother’s paperbacks and I know there are at least a couple still surviving in our childhood home. Indeed, we were discussing them just recently, me in the midst of some re-reading and him going through the tortuous process of remembering The Past. It is interesting how some very clear specific memories can become ensnared by other flickers of recollection, a process which itself transforms that specific reality into something different. For example, my brother vividly recalls something about how ultra-low frequency sounds, whilst being inaudible to our ears, can nevertheless generate feelings of unease and terror. He remembers reading that when he was a young boy and credits this with being the start of a lifetime’s interest in science. The thing is, he has for many years put that memory together with Enid Bylton’s Secret Seven books (he was Secret Seven, I was Famous Five), whilst in fact it is something that is key to the solution of the first Three Investigators book, ‘The Secret of Terror Castle’. Now whilst I know I also read ‘Terror Castle’ as a youngster that fact about low-frequencies made little or no impact, and it was only my recent re-reading that allowed me to reposition the ‘truth’ in my brother’s memory. Part of me feels guilty about this, a sadness at fracturing a decades old connection for him between Blyton and the mysteries of science. Part of me too wonders what ‘truth’ will stick in, say, another ten or twenty years time. Will the neural connections long established in my brother’s brain between The Secret Seven and low frequency oscillation reestablish themselves and once again triumph over the ‘reality’? There’s a science experiment for him to ponder.
So there is certainly something interesting about the pursuit of cold scientific proof in The Three Investigators. It’s all very ‘Scooby Doo’, particularly in the first few books, in that the mysteries of haunted houses, spectral apparitions and whispering Egyptian mummies can be debunked by the application of cool deduction and scientific process. And yes, the adult criminals would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the pesky kids…
There is also something interesting about the Three Investigators books being in many ways promotional materials for The American Dream. Start a business! Get a celebrity endorsement! Design a memorable logo and branding! Promote yourselves at every opportunity! Run another job on the side! Work all the hours under the sun! It’s all there. Of course the capitalist propagandising of those themes was way over my head as a ten year old but they stand out strongly when reading them again in 2024. Yet what also comes over in at least the early books is something about the triumph of the nerdy outsider. The Three Investigators may not be wacky Out There weirdoes, but neither are they the kind of archetypal privileged Californian kid that we were encouraged to despise in, say, John Hughes’ films of the 1980s. That kind of young adult is embodied by the Skinny Norris character in The Three Investigators, and although his is at best a bit part, he does remind us what Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are not. What they are is irregular regular kids, characters who inhabit a strange kind of mediated middle ground in society, strangely untouched by the weird Pop Sub-Cultural happenings that would have been exploding around them in their contemporary mid to late 1960s California. These early books penned by Robert Arthur at least seem to exist in a strange pre-Pop realm, one that casts back to a pre-war Hollywood, which is apt given that by 1964 Alfred Hitchcock had the vast majority of his film-making career behind him. The preponderance of Egyptian mummies, movie stars of the silent screen and the abandoned mansions and estates of dubious 19th Century merchants makes The Three Investigators seem like conduits for conservative nostalgia. Again, this would have been lost on a ten year old in 1976 as it likely would have been on a ten year old in 1966. Yet this layering of nostalgia, where multiple coats of mediated memory have built up over the space of many decades now lend these books a peculiar patina. They belong elsewhere, or at least elsewhen, and part of their charm now is that they no longer seem to know what that might be themselves.
What is the first book that you can remember reading? For me, as with many of my age/generation, it would probably be something by Enid Blyton. Or, more specifically, a Famous Five adventure/mystery. ‘Five Go Down To The Sea’, perhaps, or ‘Five Go To Smugglers Top’. Possibly even ‘Five On A Treasure Island’, although I doubt that personally I would have been so lucky as to have started reading the series at the first instalment. What I do know for certain is that it was not until my later years that I read all the books in their published order, such things being so much more difficult when one is a child with limited pocket money and libraries have gaps in their inventories. It is tempting however to put a degree of certainty on ‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’ (ironically their penultimate outing), for its 1971 Green Knight cover illustration by Betty Maxey is the one that reverberates most, although whether that is down to the ghostly garden sculpture appearing through a break in the greenery or to the lustrous blonde of Anne’s hair I could not say for sure. It is a great adventure regardless, with an alluring island, stolen treasure, secret passages and Unpleasant Characters to be defeated. All the essential ingredients, in other words.
Yet whilst there is some uncertainty about which of their books I read first, even less clear to me now is how I came across The Famous Five at all. Was one of their books a present from my parents or a relative? Did a friend lend me a copy? Was it a librarian’s recommendation? This latter seems unlikely, for although the boycotting of Blyton by the UK’s librarians in the 1960s had eased somewhat by the early 1970s when I had reached an age to be interested, I am sure that a certain sniffiness remained. Still, at least we were fortunate to have libraries at all, and I do have a deeply ingrained memory of visiting the old sandstone library building on Troon’s Templehill, although the details of the books I borrowed have long since evaporated of course. Years later, with the ‘new’ library already matured into its setting opposite the town hall, I revisited that sandstone building to make benefit claims, this being something that university students could still do outside of term time in the 1980s. The past is a foreign country sure enough.
As for a book being borrowed from a friend, well, that is possible. I do recall wandering out across the fields (long since built over) behind our house with a couple of friends, exploring abandoned farm houses and imagining that we were on the trail of some unidentified adventure. The abandoned cottages were haunted, of course, and the barns used by smugglers. One evening we ran away from these smugglers and hid in a field of barley. The smugglers were farmers and they shouted at us to get out of their fields and to stay away from their barn. Being a fragile and largely obedient soul I did as I was told.
A colleague at the school I ended up teaching at for 30 years (and who I am sure was much less fragile as a child) told me once that reading Famous Five books as a youngster set the seeds for a lifetime’s fascination with the outdoors. A straight line from ‘Five On A Hike Together’ to Ten Tors Expedition Co-Ordinator. Me? I ended up as an art teacher, as perhaps all sensitive children inevitably do.
Finally then, were the Famous Five books gifts from my parents? I asked my mother and she told me that she honestly cannot remember. I do recall that books were common Christmas gifts in my younger years, but that they tended to be the typical Annuals (a Basil Brush one stand out), or non-fiction things like the ‘Usborne Book of Ghosts’ that everyone of A Certain Age seems to remember so vividly. Indeed, non-fiction books are the thing I remember seeing most around the house in my childhood. I certainly do not recall ever seeing my father look at books that were not mostly filled with diagrams and photographs. As I grew older I also became aware of the fact that he avoided writing too, although it was not until I trained as a teacher that it dawned on me that he very probably struggled with dyslexia. Books, then, and certainly the idea of reading fiction for pleasure, were not high on his agenda. As for my mother, well I do not recall seeing her reading much either, although I suspect she must have read some fiction. I asked her recently what she read in her younger years and she was, perhaps understandably (she is 91) a little vague. Neville Shute stood out, and the romance stories in ‘The People’s Friend’ magazine. These days she, like me, thoroughly enjoys the post-war romantic fiction of D.E. Stevenson and Molly Clavering. She would likely have been unknowingly familiar with Clavering in the past too, for she had more than 20 works serialised in the aforementioned ‘People’s Friend.’ (Clavering, not my mum). Funny how things cycle around.
Reading then was encouraged to a point by my parents, but not visibly reinforced by their own practice, and all of the books we owned were easily contained in a small wooden bookcase holding around 50 books in total, amongst those the collection of ubiquitous Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopaedias. These days I would fill that bookcase in six months, which perhaps says as much about levels of disposable income and the culture of consumption and accumulation than it does about anything else. Still, research by the National Literacy Trust in 2021 suggests that 6% of children and young people in the UK do not have a book of their own at home so perhaps things have not progressed as much as some of us would like to imagine.
However I happened to come across The Famous Five, then, I am eternally grateful, for I suspect that reading Blyton’s stories at the very least planted a seed of reading pleasure. Did these tales of mystery solving and daring adventure colour my later immersion in crime and detective fiction as an adult? Perhaps. Certainly, thinking back, it is interesting to see how strongly childhood threads feed into early adulthood and beyond. For example I recall how, at age eighteen, I spent several summer weekends with friends camping out in a woodland gorge outside Mauchline in Ayrshire. Even though our evenings around the campfire were fuelled more by Tennents Special than ginger beer, a shared attachment to a Blyton-esque idyll prevailed. Around this same time The Comic Strip were making their own spiky vision of Blyton with their ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ comedy routine. Was it supposed to be a Left Wing satirical take-down of Middle Class escapism? I think it was, but watching it again now, it all strikes me as being a bit lazy, picking on easy targets and not nearly as funny as I thought it was.
On reflection, ‘Five Go Mad In Dorset’ is probably just an example of how Blyton and The Famous Five have long been perfectly positioned to be an effective weapon in Culture Wars, with The Comic Strip’s use of parody and satire itself, in hindsight, a rather quaint 1980s raspberry blowing in the wind. These days, with their roots firmly set in the Middle Class milieu of an historically more conservative England, the Famous Five books are perhaps doomed to be interpreted as either examples of archaic values in desperate need of the more extreme action of ‘cancellation’ or amber-encased evocations of A Better Time that must be preserved at all costs. Inevitably, of course, the intended audience of children for the most part have never cared much about such things. Having always been open to influence and inspiration from fiction, they are rarely quite as gullible or ignorant as many adults imagine. This has always seemed remarkable to me. Perhaps there is something peculiarly blinding about parenthood? Thirty years of working in an English High School suggest that this may be so. In all that time I found parents much more difficult to deal with and understand than their children, but this likely says as much about me as anything. Emotionally blocked, or something.
Certainly Blyton seems to have suffered from a degree of arrested development due to the childhood trauma of not only a breakdown in the family structure between her parents, but also in the manner in which her mother pretended it had not happened. This kind of ‘for appearances sake’ approach would not have been particularly unusual (especially within the upper middle classes) in the Edwardian age but it does seem to have had both a profound physiological and psychological effect on Blyton. In a 2004 biopic filmed by the BBC, Helena Bonham Carter gave a typically marvellous depiction of Enid. The actor said she “was attracted to the role because she was bonkers. She was an emotional mess and quite barking mad.” I suppose one could get away with saying such things in 2004, especially if one was Helena Bonham Carter, but I think it is a tremendous quote. The actor also points out that Blyton was “unbelievably modern. She was a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman. She knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature.”
Attempts to make the books, characters and narratives more ‘relevant’ to contemporary audiences are doomed to be divisive of course. Yet commerce demands that such attempts at ‘modernisation’ continue. The Past must be exploited, after all. Stakeholders/shareholders must be paid and there are mortgages on second or third homes to service. A ‘reimagining’ of The Famous Five by the BBC in 2023/24 has predictably sparked fevered accusations of ‘wokeism’ on Social Media. Even those arguing against such allegations cannot help but distance themselves from actually ever enjoying the books at any point in the(ir) past. Finding anyone willing to tread a middle ground in these times is an almost impossible task. Moderation, after all, does not sell.
Personally, I rather enjoyed the BBC show for its balancing act of projecting contemporary 21st Century anxieties onto a mediated fictional 1930s tableau. In this it owes far more to the Indiana Jones films than to Enid Blyton’s books, but that is how media works after all. Most Children, I suspect, will care nothing for this and will focus their attentions on the fun and frenzy of being a child. Fancying the actors/characters and their escapist universe, as all children (or, if you insist, ‘young people’) have done since the invention of television or the printed word (and possibly since hearing stories around campfires in caves). Goodness knows ‘reality’ is grim enough. Nor do I have any particular issue with, for example, English Heritage alerting audiences to strains of racism, sexism and xenophobia in Blyton’s work. These are after all, to a large degree, objective observations, albeit themselves somewhat (but not entirely) directed by the historical context in which they are made. Adding a negative reference (as English Heritage has also done) to the literary merit of Blyton’s work does, however, feel a mite subjective. It seems to me that making such critical assertions misses a crucial element, which is in the challenge of making something so ‘simple’ and apparently ‘lacking in literary merit’ so massively successful. We do need to remind ourselves sometimes that ‘simple’ does not equate to ‘easy’, just as ‘successful’ does not automatically translate as ‘critically lacking’.
It might be argued that the best way in which to avoid Culture War weaponisation in the present is to simply not have been the most successful artist operating at any period in the past. Well, that and to not have reflected any racism, sexism or xenophobia inherent to the particular point in history during which they worked, which is a tough ask. I suppose one might simply ignore everything that was created before any arbitrary date one might care to come up with. Belle And Sebastian and Bob Dylan suggested that we ‘Don’t Look Back’, after all, but I am not sure they meant it in this manner. Nor, really, did the ‘Punk Rock’ year zero pose, although I admit that I was ignorant enough at that time to take it on board as a model for living for a while. I rather think that many generations do a similar thing. In other words, whenever one is in that range of teens to twenties (and often beyond), one sees oneself as being Right and True and Pure, and that not only is anyone older automatically Wrong, they will also Never Understand. This is the blessing and the curse of being that age.
All of which is a rather meandering way of introducing Malcolm Saville. Saville was a contemporary of Blyton, and indeed was instrumental in getting her established with the Newnes publishing house in the late 1930s. Yet whilst his output was almost as prodigious and his books very successful in their time, they have, unlike Blyton’s Famous Five, never been constantly in print. Abridged paperback editions of his Lone Pine Club series appeared in the late 1960s and early 70s but thereafter there was a thirty to forty year gap until the small Girls Gone By imprint started republishing the series in their original form. In the past year or two I have been devouring this Lone Pine Club series and enjoying them enormously.
I have wondered previously about why no-one ever told me about Malcolm Saville when I was younger. At that time I suggested it may have been because Malcolm Saville is very certainly An English Thing, like donning fancy dress at any opportunity and being sniffy about the French. I stand by that suggestion and still strongly suspect that the librarians of my day would have turned their noses up and pointed mine towards Good Scottish Authors like Stevenson (Robert Louis, not D.E.) and Scott. Both of whom I found dull beyond belief, incidentally.
Would I have enjoyed the Lone Pine Club books if I had read them as a youngster? It is a moot point, certainly, for by the time I might have progressed from The Famous Five to their slightly more grown up narratives (there are some marvellous elements of romantic tension between characters completely lacking in Blyton, for example) I rather think I had developed (if that is the right word) into a Typical Boy with a predilection for Non Fiction. If memory serves correctly (and it probably doesn’t) by the time I was entering my teens, time in the local library was spent almost exclusively looking for books about cars, motor sport, tanks and WW2 aircraft.
It is entirely possible too that as a Scottish youngster I might have agreed with my imaginary librarians about the books being Too English. For whilst the Lone Pine Club adventures are remarkably fine at capturing real landscapes, they never head north of the border (Yorkshire seems to about as far as they are willing to venture). Nor, for that matter, do they consider treading into the realm of Wales, which is a little more peculiar given that so many of the books are set in and around the border countryside of The Long Mynd in Shropshire. Yet why should this be a criticism? Saville seems certainly to have been interested in the idea of what Englishness meant, at a time when it did not seem to be fully encumbered with negative images of rampant xenophobia, regardless of what Enid Blyton’s books might have suggested. There is certainly an argument to be made that Saville lamented what he saw as the passing of a traditional, rural English way of life, and that his stories were at least in part a way of capturing that. Indeed his own favourite amongst his books was ‘Jane’s Country Year’ which I wrote about here.
A love of nature and landscape is central to ‘Jane’s Country Year’ and this passion is crucial to almost the entirety of Malcolm Saville’s output. Indeed, he is rightly celebrated for setting his children’s adventure stories in real places (often, delightfully, with accompanying maps in the end papers). In contrast, Blyton instead veered more to the imagined and generic landscape. True, Kirrin Castle (but not the island) is supposedly inspired by Corfe Castle, and ‘Whispering Island’ (‘Five Have A Mystery To Solve’) modelled on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, but without that knowledge one would struggle to recognise Blyton’s love of Dorset in her writing. Even when the books are set in a named place such as Cornwall (‘Five Go Down To The Sea’) it is difficult to read the landscape as anything other than an imaginary ideal. The un-named Rye that features in ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ is, of all her landscapes and places, perhaps the most accurately sketched, although perhaps one needs to have at least been to Rye to realise this. Either that or to have read the third book in the Lone Pine Club series. Malcolm Saville’s ‘The Gay Dolphin’ is filled with real places and is hugely evocative of the area around Rye. Look, here is Winchelsea (where Saville himself lived for a period, perhaps as a neighbour of Spike Milligan?) and over there is Dungeness. This is Camber Castle and this the military canal. Over there beyond the dunes is the golf course where Mr Morton will at one point go for a round and, eventually, this space will fill with a holiday camp and the sounds of fey indie bands. Naturally too there is hidden treasure and a secret passage through the walls of Rye. Indeed, in many respects ‘The Gay Dolphin’ and ‘Five Go To Smuggler’s Top’ share remarkably similar DNA, and with both being published in 1945 it is intriguing to conjecture about who borrowed from whom. Ask any Lone Pine Club fan and they will no doubt suggest that Blyton must have, at the very least, taken on board Saville’s ideas following a conversation at the publishing house. Blyton fans on the other hand will likely point to coincidence…
The question of Rye aside, there does certainly seem to be a degree of mutual mistrust between fans of Blyton and Saville and I suspect that this distancing is rooted in those kinds of tribal allegiances that many of us naturally make in our youth. I can never quite decide if these impulses are entirely natural and simply exaggerated by the manipulation of Capitalism or if they are in fact constructs of materialist exploitation. Either way, the divisions seem real and also to be very much opened up along those lines of class distinctions and snobbery. Perversely, perhaps, it is most likely within the ‘educated middle classes’ to whom the fictional Famous Five characters and their parents belong that one finds criticism of Blyton and affection for Saville. This kind of inverted snobbery is intriguing. It is certainly the kind of thing I have practised with regards to music throughout most of my adult life. You know the kind of thing: “What sort of music do you like?”, “Oh, obscure things that you’ll never have heard of, and even then I prefer the unreleased demos. I have a copy of those you know, because I interviewed the singer for my fanzine when he was in his first band when he was twelve and I was eleven. We bonded over a mutual love of The Velvet Underground.”
To continue that musical theme, then, Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended. I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book. In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.
In this imagined realm of Children’s Authors as 1960s Pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps? Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness. Nostalgia is baked in.
Such notional connections are entirely personal ones, of course, attachments to (and rejections of) cultural streams being entirely subjective after all. Both Blyton and Saville would doubtless have been at best bemused and at worst horrified by such comparisons. Which is part of the fun of making them.
That notion of nostalgia is certainly critical in considering Blyton or Saville in the 21st Century, although I think too there are ways of defining what one means by nostalgia. For the most part I’m in agreement with musician and author John Darnielle in so much as I consider nostalgia as “an emotional attachment to the past but not a preoccupation or fixation on it”. In my ‘Young and Foolish’ book I posited a vague theory that our lives (specifically in terms of musical consumption, but also in a much broader way) move in orbits around a central point. The suggestion, which I largely stand by still, is that whilst we head off on a variety of new trajectories (some lengthy, others intensely brief) we are always drawn back to this centre, where we might recharge before embarking on our next journey. That centre is, at some basic level, rooted in a sense of loss, or absence, these being what I still regard as the essential qualities of great Pop. I did not then, and do not now, see that as being necessarily a place of sadness or sorrow. Perhaps, though, that centre of nostalgia does drain something of our souls even as it recharges us. A vampiric deal with the devil, or something similar. Perhaps we reach a point when the trade is no longer in our favour and, lacking the energy to break free on a new trajectory, we sink deeper into the mire of The Past. Which is not even ‘our’ past, but instead one painted for us by media controllers with vested interests in maintaining status quos. A space that echoes to the bewildered mutterings of ‘much better in my day’ curmudgeons.
The audience for Malcolm Saville’s books in the 21st Century then is most assuredly the more, ahem, ‘aged’ generations who are enjoying both the nostalgic element of books from their own youth or, like myself, finding pleasure in writing rooted in landscapes that remain largely unchanged even after more than three quarters of a century. Landscapes that can still be visited, paths that can still be walked, towns and villages that would still seem seem largely familiar to the books’ young protagonists.
As for children of the 21st Century? Well despite, or because of the best part of three decades spent teaching teenagers, I am in no position to make any informed judgement on that. Friends With Children suggest that Blyton holds no great interest and Saville is naturally invisible, except where those parents themselves might have old Lone Pine adventures on their shelves. Even here I suspect there would be an instinctive mistrust of anything ‘old’. One friend told me that whilst his daughter expressed an affection for ‘Mystery At Witchend’, she actually much preferred Robin Stevens’ ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series.
I can see why Stevens’ stories would appeal, for they are, like Alan Bradley’s ‘Flavia De Luce’ books, of which they remind me, great fun. They are, of course, fired through with contemporary issues projected onto the kind of fictionalised comic-book vision of 1930s England that perhaps only an American (or a Malta dwelling Canadian) can conjure. This is a compliment, incidentally.
It could be argued that both these series of books are rooted in the adventure and mystery genres of The Famous Five or The Lone Pine Club, but both also unashamedly play the game of putting the individual at the heart of the narrative. The notion of the identity obsessed individual living a progressively liberal existence in opposition to a conservative society in Stevens’ books seems particularly On Point for the 21st Century, and is something one might alternately admire or abhor. An anti-Blyton for the 2020s, perhaps.
Will Steven’s ‘Detective Club’ mysteries be The Famous Five of their age, doomed forever to remain in print and to plague future (further) enlightened generations with as yet unforeseen problematic depictions of identity and/or history? Or will they be The Lone Pine Club, destined to occasionally flourish in one or two bursts of nostalgia over the forthcoming half century, adored and ignored in almost equal measure? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile the actual Blyton brand will, I am sure, prevail for some time to come yet. Commerce, after all, insists upon it.
