Martin Fone's Blog, page 106

Fear For Miss Betony

A review of Fear for Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers

Dorothy Bowers is one of those writers who has sadly and undeservedly slipped into obscurity, because Fear For Miss Betony, her fourth and final novel to feature Dan Pardoe and Tommy Salt of the Yard, is a fantastic book. Originally published in 1941, Moonstone Press must be applauded for reissuing it. It is not a conventional piece of crime fiction and is more of a psychological thriller and character study than anything else, laced with humour and sharp observations. It also has some interesting features.

The first is that there are very few male characters. Other than the two policemen, who only appear during the final three chapters and their role is merely to tidy up the case, and the Great Ambrosio, whose presence looms large but only appears as a living, talking being in one chapter, the other characters are all female. And they are a particular type of female, all unmarried, trying to find their role and purpose in life. As Emma Betony, the eponymous heroine, muses; “she supposed spinsters had their uses, but after living with them for three months it was hard to see what they were”.

Miss Betony is both murder victim and the solver of the mysteries of the gothic-like Makeways School, which has decamped to a mansion deep in the Dorset countryside. The house was originally an old people’s home and the school has inherited two residents, the Misses Wand and Thurloe, the former suffering from angina and the latter is neurotic. The school’s headmistress, Grace Aram, a former student of Miss Betony’s, seems to have bought the property on a whim, having initially rejected it. What did she spot to change her mind? Why is she reluctant for the school and the residents from the old nursing home to mix? Why does she suddenly determine to evict the two old women when the finances of the institution are so dependent upon them?

Bowers’ portrait of Miss Betony illuminates many of the struggles of unmarried women at the time. Others look down on Miss Betony because her family were in trade and after a life of work, she seems condemned to spending her final years in the Toplady Endowed Homes for Decayed Gentlewomen. Almost resigned to this fate, Grace’s third and increasingly desperate appeal to Miss Betony to assist her at Makeways seems a welcome escape. It is not difficult to see an element of autobiographical detail in Bowers’ compelling portrayal of Miss Betony, she too going through life without marrying and her father a confectioner in the small Welsh town of Monmouth.

Grace used to be enthralled by Miss Betony’s stories of her relative and former dancer, Mary Shagreen, the relevance of her fixation with Shagreen becoming apparent as the tale reaches its conclusion. When Miss Betony gets to the school, ostensibly to help Grace get to the bottom of what is happening there, she finds that some of the key characters are under the thrall of a clairvoyant, the Great Ambrosio, who operates in the nearby town, and that there are suspicions that Miss Thurloe, at least, is being systematically poisoned. And why did Miss Betony receive copies of a dating magazine, embarrassingly for one aware of and desperate to preserve her social standing, with a particular advertisement for an eligible bachelor highlighted?

As the story unfolds, Miss Betony realises she is unmeshed in a diabolical plot which is intended to relieve her of any monies she may inherit from her only relative, Mary Shagreen. As she stumbles towards the truth, on a night when Miss Wand dies, she is the victim of an attack, which she barely survives, but she has the presence of mind to escape and relay her strange tale to the Yard before collapsing.

In truth, the plot against poor Miss Betony is a little too complicated to be believable and a little more research would have revealed that it was to no avail, the eminence grise fairly obvious, but the beauty and charm of this book lies in Bowers’ crisp and witty writing, her astute and sympathetic handling of the psychology of a woman enmeshed in a web of horrors, and her ability to deftly depict even the most minor of players.

It is truly an impressive book.

Halloween

Halloween, a corruption of All-Hallows’ Eve, is a glorious gallimaufry of pagan and Christian traditions. Straddling the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, October 31st heralded for the Celts the end of the harvest season and the start of winter, marked by one of their most important festivals, Samhain.

An occasion for much feasting and drinking, and lasting for several days, it was also the time to prepare for the winter ahead. Grains, fruits, and vegetables crops were made safe, animals slaughtered, and their meat preserved. The bones were burnt on large fires, a custom that gave rise to our word “bonfire”.

On a more spiritual level, Samhain was the point at which the dividing line between the living and the dead was at its most nebulous. Ghosts of dead family members would return to make a visit and in anticipation, the living would leave plates of their favourite foods for them to enjoy. However, there was no telling who might visit.

Revellers would wear elaborate costumes and daub their faces with ashes from the fire to reduce the possibility of being recognised by the spirit of someone whose enmity they had earned. It was also a time for pranks and mischief, supposedly attributable to the elves, fairies, and sprites, convenient scapegoats for high-spirited revellers.

The Roman festival of Lemuria was dedicated to placating the angry and restless dead with a form of exorcism in which, according to Ovid, (Fasti V, 422ff), the head of the household walked barefoot around the house at midnight throwing beans over his shoulder and ordering the malevolent spirits to depart. On behalf of the city the Vestal Virgins prepared a salted flour cake, mola salsa, using sacred water and the first ears of the season’s wheat harvest mixed with grounded salt to propitiate the spirits.

The final day of the festival, May 13th, was also the date Pope Boniface IV chose, in the early 7th century, for a feast day to commemorate all the church’s martyrs, All Martyrs’ Day. A century or so later Pope Gregory III expanded it to include all saints. Whether he moved what was now known as All Saints’ Day to November 1st is unclear, but, according to the Venerable Bede, churches in England, Ireland, and Germany were soon celebrating the festival, known as All-Hallows’, on that date.

The following day, November 2nd was dedicated in the liturgical calendar for the commemoration of the souls of the departed, All Souls’ Day. Graves were visited, candles and bonfires lit, parades were held with revellers dressed as saints, angels, and devils, and on the night of All Saints’ Day church bells were rung for the souls in purgatory to enjoy.

The End Of British Summer Time

Did you remember to alter your clocks last night?

The idea of using different time during the summer has a long history, Benjamin Franklin being among those to propose it. But the dual system of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in the winter and British Summer Time (BST) in the summer was first mooted by William Willett, in a pamphlet published in 1907, entitled The Waste of Daylight. Willett wasn’t a scientist, but a builder — and also, as it happens, great-great grandfather of Coldplay’s singer, Chris Martin, not that he would have known it at the time.

He was also a keen golfer, and it was this that prompted his idea: he resented the fact that the early onset of dusk curtailed his game. He was successful in lobbying Liberal MP Robert Pearce to introduce the Daylight Saving Bill in 1908. The bill, though, was rejected by the House of Commons and Willett, who died of influenza in 1915, was to miss out on seeing his dream come true by one year.

Ultimately, daylight saving was introduced in Britain in 1916 to conserve energy and help the war effort rather than to appease frustrated golfers. Taking their lead from the Germans, the British moved their clocks forward by one hour between May 21st and October 1st. The move was so popular that BST has remained to this day, although the start and end dates — the last Sundays in March and October respectively — were only aligned across the European Union from October 22, 1995.

Fart Of The Week (10)

New Zealand and the British seem to be poles apart when it comes to farting. The Kiwi Prime Minister, Jacinda Arden, has recently announced plans to tax farmers for the burps and farts of their livestock, due to the huge contribution they make to climate change. “This is an important step forward in New Zealand’s transition to a low emissions future and delivers on our promise to price agricultural emissions from 2025, she parped.

Over in Britain, however, a recent survey has revealed that one in eight of us want to be able to fart more freely in public without getting glared at by those unfortunate enough to be nearby. Liverpudlians were the most fervent champions of this freedom with 22% claiming that it was “natural” to emit gas and that it should be accepted.

This follows some research conducted in 2020 by The Collective Dairy who found that the average Briton farts 15 times a day with the citizens of Oxford the most flatulent with an average of 23, closely followed (although not too closely) by Leeds with 22 and Norwich with 21. 38% of those polled admitted to trying to hold farts in while 13% covered them up with a cough. It also revealed that the average Brit burps 10 times a day, while only 40% cover their mouth with their hand while doing so.

Whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer is today, perhaps they could consider closing the fiscal gap by taking a leaf out of the New Zealanders’ book by taxing the British flatulence.

Suspects – Nine

A review of Suspects – Nine by E R Punshon

Originally published in 1939 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, Suspects – Nine is the twelfth in Punshon’s Bobby Owen series. Its title and idea, a case where there are (ahem) nine suspects, although one is a bit of a cop-out named just X, can, perhaps, be traced to J J Connington’s A Case with Nine Solutions, published eleven years earlier. At least Pushon delivers us eight potential suspects, even if not a ninth, whereas Connington really only had two or three credible solutions up his sleeve.

There is a distinct change in mood and style about this book. Punshon, who was never afraid to wear his politics lightly on his sleeve, writes with more humour than in many of his books and with a list of characters who occupy the higher echelons of society he has ample opportunity to poke fun at their expense. The threat of war is evident in the narrative and the consequences of a speech by one of the dictators at the time allows Bobby Owen to sort the wheat from the chaff in his mind.

Punshon also has fun with his young police sleuth. Bobby’s engagement with the milliner, Olive Farrar, is still proceeding, but the young detective sergeant is still struggling to understand the female mind and their ways, while Olive finds some of his mannerisms both amusing and irritating, a particular smile eliciting the threat that she would throw her engagement ring at him. Bobby is also frustrated at the lack of opportunities for promotion, having been dubbed as a plodder who succeeds rather than someone mercurial who sometimes fails, not a good look in the Yard, it seems.

Owen does, though, have the knack of being in the right place at the right time, while Olive is a magnet for trouble. It all starts with a hat, which has been custom made for Flora Tamar at Olive’s shop, but which Lady Alice Bedchamber, after coming to look at it, has walked off with. Bobby, as a favour to Olive, goes round to her Ladyship’s in a fruitless attempt to retrieve the hat and while he is there, notices a shady private detective, Bill Martin, lurking in the shadows.            

It emerges that there is a feud between the two ladies, and we soon come across a tangled web of emotional relationships between several of the main characters, jealousies, obsessions, suspicions, and more. Unlike Bobby, the Tamar’s butler is in the wrong place at the wrong time, seemingly lured to Weeton Hill by the prospect of finding £100 hidden under a stone, which an anonymous note asks Michael Tamar to place there. The butler is found having been shot seven times and then, when dead, stabbed by a knife which turns out to be owned by Lady Belchamber, an Amazon of a woman who, in her youth, had a colourful past. Was the butler trying to blackmail someone or was it a case of mistaken identity?

The gun belongs to Renfield who with barely two halfpennies to rub together would inherit from Tamar’s demise. A car belonging to Ernie Maddox (a woman) was seen and photographed in the vicinity and then there is Judy (a man) who appears to be emotionally attached to both Ernie and Flora. The nicknames of these two may have been a joke but it rather palls as they have quite a role to play in the drama.

Bobby’s role is very much that of an outsider. The investigation is conducted by South Essex police Bobby is seconded to them because of his knowledge of and contacts with the principal suspects and even has to suffer the indignity of being assigned as bodyguard to Michael Tamar. Like other observational sleuths, though, he uses his position to advantage to understand the motives of the suspects.

This is a very character-driven story and, in truth, several of the suspects could easily have done it. Punshon gives the impression that he settled on his culprit late on and their fate is sealed by a fatal miscalculation. He also seems to be as interested in exploring human emotions, particularly in affairs of the heart, as much as the mechanics of a crime. It makes for a different, more complex story, often amusing, full of sharp observation, and highly enjoyable. Crime fiction can be more than a whodunit.

Loveday Golden Hour Gin

Falmouth Distilling Company is a small but perfectly formed micro-distillery based in an industrial unit in Penryn, near Falmouth in Cornwall. Created by three women, Daisy Hillier, a cordon bleu chef, Chloe Gillatt, an artist and chef, and Ruth Warfield, a food scientist, when their day jobs had come to a halt thanks to the Covid pandemic, the name of their brand, Loveday, is the English version of the Cornish Leofdag, a name given to the day when peace was brokered between two disputatious factions.

I have written elsewhere about their first offering, Loveday Falmouth Dry[1], which was launched in April 2021 and was so favourably received that they were emboldened to add a second to their range, in the autumn of that year, Loveday Golden Hour Gin. As well as an attempt to spread peace and harmony, it was their paean to the golden hour when the combination of warm light and long shadows makes social occasions all the more rewarding.

They have retained the same elegant, clear cylindrical bottle with a high neck, rounded shoulders, and a short neck leading to a fat lip, a broad wooden top and cork stopper. The elegance is enhanced by the narrow labelling and the decision to allow the writing to run vertically from top to bottom. There is a sort of chemist’s laboratory bottle feel about it.

The typeface at the front is fresh and contemporary, laconically providing the necessary information – ABV of 45%, principal botanicals of grapefruit, pink peppercorn, and cardamom, and that my bottle is from batch no 7 and distilled by Daisy. The rear label lapses more into marketese and apart from the brand name and QR code, the script runs horizontally, making it easier to read.

The spirit itself is a tawny pink colour and if I was taxonomically inclined, I would categorise it as a pink gin. Fortunately, the juniper is strong enough to make its presence felt and is complemented by the warmth of the pink peppercorn, the zestiness of the grapefruit feel and the subtle floral notes. Sensibly, by distilling to an ABV of 45% and resisting the temptation to add extra sweetness, they have allowed their chosen botanicals the opportunity to emerge in their full glory to produce a complex, bitter-sweet, slightly floral spirit that grows on you.

My securing a bottle of this delightful gin began in a pub, the wonderful Trengilly Wartha in Nancenoy in deepest Cornwall. My wife and I met three women there purely by chance, they were sharing my wife’s passion for knitting, and it turned out that they worked at the nearby Potager Garden, where Daisy Hillier was head chef before branching out into distilling. We decided to pay them a visit the following morning.

The site is on an abandoned nursery which is being tamed and turned into a series of delightful small gardens. Greenhouses have been turned into a café, vegetarian and seemingly popular with locals and visitors alike, and a sort of community hub with workshops and where events are held. It was a marvellously tranquil oasis in the middle of nowhere and, as an added attraction, the shop sells Loveday gins. It is the encapsulation of the spirit of Cornwall. What is there not to like?

Until the next time, cheers!

[1] https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2021/09/09/loveday-falmouth-dry-gin/

Spotlight

A review of Spotlight by Patricia Wentworth

Spotlight, also going by the alternative title, Wicked Uncle, in the States, is the twelfth in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series and was originally published in 1947. A country house party, a blackmailer and a game of charades provide the setting, but Wentworth manages to produce an almost silk purse out of what might have been a pig’s ear.

If you have some dirt on a group of people – the usual fare, bigamy, wartime profiteering, hiding an unfavourable will, stealing and selling a valuable bracelet, possibly being a wartime collaborator – what do you think would happen when you invite them to your house for a party and during the course of the evening after an opening round of charades in a room with a convenient display of knives and other weaponry, the lights go out momentarily? Of course, someone is murdered and, naturally, the victim is the blackmailer, Gregory Porlock.

Miss Silver flits in and out of the story, conveniently being on hand when Dorinda, who forms one half of the obligatory love interest and is the newly appointed secretary to the Oakleys, is fitted up for shoplifting, when out to buy a can of luminous paint. The reason for someone to want her out of the way before the party becomes apparent as the story progresses but suffice it to say that Porlock himself is not all he seems to be.

Dorinda’s apprehension allows Miss Silver to telephone Scotland Yard to establish her own credentials with the shop manager and reacquaint herself with her number one fan, Sergeant Abbott, and the long-suffering Inspector Lamb. Dorinda’s brief encounter with the amateur sleuth not only foils that part of the plot but also established a connection between her and the amateur sleuth which is sufficient for Miss Silver to be invited to help protect her interests after the murder. She is ever-present from around the two-thirds mark of the book.  Naturally, Lamb and Abbott are investigating on behalf of the Yard.

The luminous paint plays a key role. It was used during the charade where the theme was “the devil takes the hindmost” and was also deployed to paint a target on the victim’s back so that the murderer could see the spot to aim for when the lights went out. Of course, all the house guests were around the victim at the time the murder took place.

A second murder, which eliminates the prime suspect, helps clarify the situation and Maud Silver, to Abbott’s delight and Lamb’s irritation, is able to reconstruct events and establish the identity of the murderer. A particular nervous tic also helps to establish their identity.

One of the intriguing aspects of the story is the role of the servants. Porlock’s butler, an ex-copper, is there to spy on him while Mrs Oakley’s maid is spying on her for Porlock’s benefit. Both, but the butler in particular who has a penchant to being at the right place to hear conversations and to intercept telephone calls, provide valuable information which brings the case to its conclusion.

Dorinda, having disowned her inheritance accrued by her wicked uncle, gets her man in the end, cousin Justin, but she is a bit of a drip. Unlike many other Golden Age writers, Wentworth portrays her own sex as weak, pliant, and, frankly, irritating.

Hackneyed stuff as the plot may be, Wentworth writes with verve and draws the reader in with a well-paced narrative. The plot may be creaky and there may be inconsistencies in timing, but it is an entertaining read.

A Shilling For Candles

A review of A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

Originally published in 1936, A Shilling for Candles is the second in Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant series. There is one enormous elephant in the room with this book which will affect its popularity amongst modern day readers, a very obvious antisemitic sentiment. I have always believed that books should not be bowdlerised to reflect modern day values and opinions. They are a testament to their times when, sadly and, ultimately, tragically such views were rife. If you are likely to be offended, stay away.

That said, it is a beautifully written book. Tey is a fine writer and has an attention to detail and an understanding of place and time which makes her books in a genre which can be a tad stereotypical a joy to read. She is at her best at the opening of the book where the body of an early morning female swimmer is found on the Kentish shore. She takes time to paint the scene and the reactions of those who find her, giving them character traits or odd ticks, which bring them to life rather than just being a means to an end.

The victim, it turns out, is a successful film star, Christine Clay, who had rented the out of the way cottage for a month to get away from the rate race. Very few knew of her whereabouts. She had recently taken on a lodger, Robert Tisdall, who is down to his last brass farthing, and has a very thin alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, namely coming across her car, stealing it, having a crisis of conscience and returning it. Unsurprisingly, he is the number one suspect but, equally unsurprisingly, there are others, whose behaviour is less obvious who could have done it. These include her husband, a songwriter, her catty stage rivals, or perhaps Clay’s estranged brother.

The book’s unusual title is taken from Clay’s will in which she leaves her brother just a shilling for candles rather than the bulk of her money. The reference becomes clear as the book progresses as the ne’er-do-well brother has seen the evangelical light as the means to enrich himself, one of a number of significant red herrings in the plot which lead Grant to uncovering crimes but not necessarily the case in hand.

Grant leads the police investigation, fixated on a coat with a missing button, but he is not the only one who is interested in discovering precisely what happened to Christine Clay. Shadowing Grant and then taking up his own lines of enquiry is newshound, Jammy Hopkins, who is tolerated by Clay’s crowd and who tries to put himself into the psyche of the killer.

The other line of enquiry is pursued by Erica Burgoyne, a spirited young woman who is confident enough to drive around the countryside in a battered old car and consort with tramps and other picaresque characters. Tey clearly enjoys herself in constructing the character of Erica, a proto-feminist, and revels in the scrapes she ends up in. She just happens to be the Chief Constable’s daughter, and convinced that Tisdall is innocent, aids and abets in keeping him alive after he has given Grant the slip and finds Tindall’s coat upon which his fate hangs.

With so many lines of enquiry you would need a clairvoyant’s crystal ball to sort the wheat out from the chaff. Tey does not play fair with the reader and as she rushes the story to its conclusion, in contrast to the more languid approach she adopts earlier in the book, she plucks relevant clues as if from a magician’s hat to confound the reader. To my mind, the culprit’s motivation for the murder is not as strong as some of the other suspects and the haste with which Tey tidies up the case perhaps suggests that she recognises that too.

For me, this did not spoil the book unduly. Her characters were likeable, it was enjoyable, well written, and kept me engaged enough to want to see whodunit. Alfred Hitchcock saw some potential in it, using it as the base for his 1937 movie, Young and Innocent, which went by the alternative title in the US of The Girl Was Young. Perhaps he shared my sentiments as he changed the identity of the murderer.

Spinning Jennies

The sycamore’s flowers hang in spikes known as racemes, their light green colouring blending in with the tree’s canopy. As the sycamore is monoecius its individual flowers will either be male or female and are pollinated by insects, usually bees. Sometimes a tree will produce only male or female flowers or occasionally one section of the tree will be exclusively male or female. Usually, though, the flowers of either gender will be dispersed randomly throughout the tree.

It is the pollinated female flower which produces the seeds, their two fused carpels which mature into a pair of winged fruits set at acute angles. The seeds are positioned where the two fruits fuse, held in a flattened wing-like structure made of a fibrous paper tissue. Initially they are green in colour, then take on a pinkish hue and when fully developed assume the familiar brownish hue. A mature sycamore can produce thousands of these seeds.

When the samaras are mature and the conditions are right, they detach themselves from the tree, and often from their partner, to be dispersed by the wind, a process known as anemochory. They spin like a helicopter, turning upside-down to allow the heavier seed head to be the first point of contact with the earth. Not all samaras are dispersed at the same time; it is an iterative and pleasingly random process.

The benefit of allowing the wind to disperse the seeds is that they often land some distance from the parent tree, reducing the competition for resources and the risk of infection from pests and disease. Water, birds, animals and, often inadvertently, humans lend a hand in scattering the seeds which are remarkably robust and left to their own devices will germinate in the spring in even the most unlikely of places and in the most unwelcoming of soils. Not for nothing are they known as the weeds of the woodland.

Their distinctive method of travelling through the air has enthralled many through the centuries and earned the seeds nicknames such as helicopter wings, spinning jennies, whirligigs, whirlybirds, and wingnuts. Curiously though, it was not until July 2009, when Science published an article entitled Leading-Edge Vortices Elevate Lift of Autorotating Plant Seeds[1], that the precise mechanics of how the samaras helicopter through the air were finally understood.

A team of scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Caltech in the States built plastic models of the seeds and span them through a large tank of mineral oil. By using light from a powerful laser, they were able to measure the movement of tiny beads of oil as the model seed span through the tank. Studying the images produced the scientists found that the swirling seed generated a tornado-like vortex that sits on top of the front leading edge, which lowered the air pressure over the upper surface of the seed, effectively sucking it upwards to counter the gravitational pull. Sycamore seeds, by creating this vortex, achieve twice the lift that non-swirling seeds can.

In effect, the seeds use an almost identical aerodynamic solution to improving the performance of their flight as do insects, bats, and hummingbirds when they swing their wings back and forwards to hover. To check the vortex theory, the researchers built a wind tunnel at the University of Wageningen and used smoke to highlight the flow of air around the seeds as they span. They found that real seeds behaved as they had modelled, creating a leading-edge vortex to enhance the time they span in the air and to maximise the distance they were from the parent tree before they drift slowly to the ground.

In January 2011 New Scientist[2] was reporting that the autorotation process of spinning samaras had inspired a team of scientists led by Evan Ulrich from the University of Maryland to create a single rotor helicopter, which, they claimed, would be more efficient as standard helicopters use most of their fuel trying to remain stable. Out of this project came another discovery about the flight of a samara; it flies in a fixed circle whose radius is determined by the pitch of the wing, giving it stability and control in the air.

Single-rotor helicopters might not be thin on the ground, but their inspiration, a sycamore seed twizzling through the air, is not only one of nature’s more remarkable autumnal sights but also a masterpiece of aerodynamics.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1174196

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20045-spinning-seeds-inspire-single-bladed-helicopters/

Bird Of The Week (4)

Voting for the eagerly anticipated Bird of the Year competition or Te Manu Rongonui o Te Tau, as they call it in New Zealand, has opened and as usual it has ruffled a few feathers. Having been won by a bat last year, the red-hot favourite, the kākāpō, has been removed from the ballot paper.

The fat, flightless, nocturnal parrot came out on top in 2008 and 2020 but will not be able to solicit votes this year, organisers, Forest and Bird, fearing that its popularity will divert attention from other, less charismatic birds. Indeed, the theme of the competition is aimed at highlighting the more underappreciated and often overlooked members of New Zealand’s bird population.

Voting closes on October 30th and even that has not been without issues. Votes are restricted to New Zealand residents after allegations a couple of years ago that outsiders, mainly from Australia, had flocked to record their support for the kākāpō.

To find out more, follow the link:

https://www.birdoftheyear.org.nz/

I look forward to the result.