Martin Fone's Blog, page 11

The Crystal Beads Murder

A review of The Crystal Beads Murder by Annie Haynes – 250604

There is more than a little poignancy about this book, originally published in 1930 and reissued by Dean Street Press, because Haynes was only able to write the first fifteen chapters before her death. Her publishers used another writer to complete the story, Curtis Evans in his perceptive introduction suggests a likely candidate, who, according to the foreword penned by Haynes’ close companion, Ada Heather-Bigg, happened upon the same solution as the original author. The joins are detectable but this does not detract from what is an enjoyable and easy read.

The central premise of the plot is somewhat melodramatic and sensationalist. Harold Courtenay, an inveterate gambler, has lost his fortune and more on a horse which he believed to be a sure fire winner. He not only puts himself in the hands of an unscrupulous money lender and forges a signature but also places his sister Anne under the influence of the unscrupulous Robert Saunderson who is pressurizing her to ditch her fiancé Micheal Burford and marry him instead. Anne asks to see Saunderson at night in the summerhouse of Lord Medchester’s country mansion but is shocked and horrified by what she sees.

Saunderson has been murdered bit who did it and why? The only tangible clue that the police, led by the stolid and indefatigable Inspector Stoddart and assisted by Sergeant Harbord, have are some crystal beads broken off a necklace. Anne has a similar crystal necklace but hers is intact. And what hold has Sybil Stainer over Harold, who by now has inherited an estate and title, that he is willing to entertain an obviously unsuitable marriage and just what did the red-haired tramp see that is so important?

The local Superintendent Mayer finds what he believes is not only the key to the mystery but also the route to his own career advancement and while he keeps the news under his hat, he is killed before he can tell Stoddart what it is. A little knowledge is always a dangerous thing in Golden Age detective fiction.

For those who like to pit their wits against those of the author this book is disappointing as it is far from fairly clued. The owner of the necklace is only identified when Harbord thumbs through an illustrated magazine in a dentist’s waiting room and the motive is only known to the detectives when a piece of paper is retrieved and the reader is kept in the dark until the big reveal. It is best in these circumstances just to go with the flow.

On the plus side there are some marvellous characters. Haynes is not content to have stereotypes instead imbuing her protagonists with characteristics that make them complex and realistic. Despite her natural nervousness and fears, Anne has an inner core of steel, determined enough to do whatever she feels is necessary, irrespective of how distasteful it is and the potential impact on those she loves. Minnie Medchester, his lordship’s wife, has a vindictive streak in her as she tries to stitch Anne up but also a vulnerability which is apparent when she falls under the scheming influence of La Stainer.  

I also thought that the character of Mrs Mayer, the Superintendent’s widow, was well and sympathetically drawn, her desperation to have some keepsake of her dead husband leading her to flout regulations and delay discovery of the killer and their motive for very human and understandable reasons. But the star of the show is Tottie Delauney who wafts perfume, sex appeal and no little menace whenever appears, another one who has her claws out for poor Anne Courtney.

Because of the way the mystery was resolved the ending did seem a little abrupt. One wonders what the book would have been like had Haynes lived long enough to complete it, but we should be grateful that her publishers took the decision to have it completed to add another to her corpus. There is much to be enjoyed in this final Inspector Stoddart mystery.

Holy Smoke

What fascinated me about the recent election of a new pope was how much media time was devoted to pictures of a chimney, waiting for a plume of smoke. Would it be fumata nera, black smoke, indicating that the conclave had failed to come to a two-thirds consensus or would it be fumata bianca, white, proclaiming that a new pope has been elected? The chimney itself, which dates back to the 18th century and seemed popular with seagulls, is specially installed for each conclave, a delicate process given the fact that the roof of the Sistine Chapel is a world heritage site.

To ensure absolute secrecy at the ballot box, ballot papers have been burnt after each round of voting at a conclave since at least the 15th century, but the concept of signaling a successful outcome with a plume of white smoke is a fairly modern development, first used during the 1914 conclave which elected Pope Benedict XV. To create the white smoke, ballot papers were burnt with dry straw and to create black, wet straw was used.

Unfortunately, the resulting plumes sometimes did not produce a message that was unequivocally black or white. This happened in 1958 when after the first ballot the smoke appeared to be white, prompting the crowds assembled in St Peter’s Square to cheer and Vatican Radio to announce that a new pope had been elected. However, the smoke then turned black, the straw in the fire having not taken straight away.

To avoid such embarrassing mix-ups recurring, the cardinals and Vatican officials have resorted to more sophisticated techniques. In the 1960s they used smoke bombs to create the black smoke. They worked, but filled the room with acrid smoke, leaving the cardinals coughing and spluttering. Then they tried Italian army flares while initially producing a clear black colour turned grey colour after a few minutes, again causing some momentary confusion.

In 2005 the Vatican embraced new technology by deploying  an “auxiliary smoke-emitting device” that was fed chemical cartridges that could produce clearly coloured smoke for up to six minutes.

The black smoke is made from a mix of potassium perchlorate (an inorganic salt commonly used as an oxidizer in coloured fireworks and other pyrotechnics), anthracene (a hyrocarbon component of coal tar) and sulphur. The white smoke is produced by mixing potassium chlorate (a similar compound to potassium perchlorate, used in fireworks and smoke bombs), lactose (the sugar found in cow’s milk), and rosin (a conifer resin).

So now we know!

Late, Late In The Evening

A review of Late, Late in the Evening by Gladys Mitchell – 250602

The fiftieth in Gladys Mitchell’s long-running Mrs Bradley series, originally published in 1976, sees this most obtuse of authors make some interesting changes to the format and style of her story. Firstly, she chooses to give her story an epistolary format in which Margaret Clifton and her psychiatrist sleuth, amongst others, provide their recollections of the strange events at the Oxfordshire village of Hill. Secondly, the story explores a case early in Mrs Bradley’s career when she was just plain Mrs Bradley and not her later grandiose incarnation, Dame Beatrice.

One of the distinct benefits of the epistolary format is that it eliminates most of the irksome traits of Mrs Bradley’s character which, usually, Mitchell is at pains to emphasise to the annoyance and frustration of this reader at least. At the time of the murders Margaret, and her younger brother, Kenneth, are aged ten and eight respectively and one of the remarkable features of the book is how the author is able to get into the character of a child and see the world and what is going on around them through the eyes of a child. Getting a fair deal on sweets, the ennui of Sunday school, and the need to pay lip service to the odd demands and strictures of adults feature large in their perspective.

Often novels that take the epistolary form feature short(ish) letters that allow the author not only to develop the story through a range of perspectives but also to move the narrative along at pace. Mitchell’s letters, though, seem over long and while this approach does allow the reader time to settle into the characters and examine the plot line, it does seem to deprive the story of much needed pace. It takes quite a while to get anywhere near the murders and even longer still for Mrs Bradley to roll her sleeves up and solve the mystery.

That all said, for an author whom I approach with no little trepidation this is one of her most accessible and charming novels. In essence, the plot follows a hackneyed path, an estate, an estranged long lost relative, Ward, (or so they say) who turns up out of the blue to lay claim to an estate entailed to the male line of the Kempson but who then allows himself to be bought off for a monthly retainer, somewhere to live, and a lump sum of £30,000 upon Mrs Kempson’s death, and then the increasingly erratic behaviour of Ward which leads to his own murder, amusingly buried in a grave he had dug himself, and that of a flibberty young thing, a guest at a party thrown by Amabel Kempson, while dressed in a dinosaur costume. Her costume was identical to that worn by Lionel, Mrs Kempson’s grandson and the intended main beneficiary of the estate. A case of mistaken identity, perhaps?

Added to the mix is a doctor who has got himself into an amatory muddle and on the night in question his actions are suspicious to say the least. With just two credible suspects Mitchell does well to keep the mystery alive, although the leisurely pace does help. I enjoyed the moments when the photographer’s story crashed into a drunken heap and when neither suspect has a credible alibi, the telling points are the remarkable change in behaviour in one of the protagonists and the thwarted ambitions of another.

The actual resolution seemed to me a little weak and unconvincing, but this was a Mitchell novel that I did not find too taxing and, dare I say it, quite enjoyable.

All Sir Garnet

I am fascinated by idioms that once were common currency but have since slipped into obscurity. Reading Brian Flynn’s Men for Pieces (1949), I came across the phrase “everything was Sir Garnet”, which, from the context, I knew meant everything was OK but it got me wondering who Sir Garnet was and why he was immortalized or at least remembered in this phrase.

It turns out that he was one of Britain’s most famous soldiers of the second half of the 19th century, Sir Garnet Wolseley, who later became Viscount Wolseley. His long and successful military career included campaigns in Crimea, as well as the Indian Mutiny, Canada, the Gold Coast, southern Africa, Egypt, and the Sudan. He was the master of small campaigns, was a reformer who put his men first and won their respect and even was caricatured by W S Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance (1879) as the very model of a modern major-general.  

Such was his reputation and the awe in which he was held that the consensus developed that if Garnet was in charge, everything would go well. From this the phrase developed as illustrated by this quotation from Harmsworth Magazine in 1901; “They’re comin’ along,” he cried to Mackenzie, as the thud of galloping horses was heard in the rear. “If I can only do the Horatius on the bridge business till they gits ’ere, we shall be all Sir Garnet.”

It is said that the expression was so much in use that it was abbreviated into all Sigarneo or all Sigarno, although there is little recorded evidence of this. Inevitably, as soldiers returned to civilian life, they brought the phrase with them. Compton Mackenzie in Sinister Street (1914) records this exchange between two women: “Whatever are you doing, Cook?” said Nurse. “That’s all right, lovey. That’s All Sir Garnet, and don’t you make no mistake”.

That Flynn used it shortly after the Second World War with the assumption that his readers would understand the reference suggests that it did not fall into obscurity until the second half of the 20th century, despite an American publication, The Living Age, declaring it obsolete in 1916.

Curiously, it is the polar opposite of “it’s all gone Pete Tong”. So that’s all Sir Garnet, then!

Lessons In Crime

A review of Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards – 2500601

I have always enjoyed the anthologies of short stories around a theme curated by Martin Edwards and issued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series and Lessons in Crime, fifteen stories with university or school as their theme, is no exception. Spanning a century, the earliest, Holmes of course, from 1904 and the most recent from 2000, there is bound to be something to whet the appetite of even the most hard-hearted of crime fiction fans. Of course, as with any anthology it is a bit hit and miss, some stories better than others, and a mix of the familiar and the new.

Opening the batting is HC Bailey’s The Greek Play from 1932 which cleverly uses the plot of Sophocles’ Antigone to set up a contemporary tragedy and a surprising culprit, although Reggie Fortune is more than up to the challenge. When I had vaguely mastered the mysteries of the grammar of Ancient Greek Antigone was the first play I read in full in the original and it has always held more than its fair share of terrors for me. Bailey just added another layer!

The second story also resonated personally with me. My senior school was called The Priory and I have always had a soft spot for Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Priory School, even if it is a little too obvious. The obligatory Dorothy L Sayers’ story, Murder at Pentecost, is at least full of whimsy if not Wimsey as the sleuth is Montague Egg, a travelling wine salesman, who is on hand to solve a particularly taxing mystery.  

There are a couple of duds. I am not a great fan of Hoffnung’s Raffles and The Field of Philippi , whilst designed to reveal his more sensitive and caring nature, just seems overlong and a tad pointless. The other is Joyce Porter’s Dover Goes To School from 1978. Dover is a boorish character with little to recommend him who has the ability to solve a tricky problem almost in his sleep.

On the plus side there is a wonderful contribution from the vastly underrated Michale Innes, Lesson in Anatomy, which is both clever, nonplussing this reader, and somewhat gruesome. It evoked images that I will remember for some time. I also particularly enjoyed a couple of other stories at the back end of the collection which explored the psychological aspects of the teacher-pupil relationship.

Miriam Sharman’s Battle of Wits is a tense story in which a headmaster who has publicly humiliated a pupil is confronted by an irate parent who is out for revenge, or is he? For a relatively short story, it certainly packs a punch. Children who were different were not treated as sensitively as perhaps they are now and this is a theme Jacqueline Wilson takes up in The Boy Who Couldn’t Read. A battle of wills between a teacher determined to make a point and an obstinate child ends in a surprising but strangely satisfying conclusion.

One of the few stories to explore what children are capable of doing to other children is Colin Watson’s The Harrowing of Henry Pygole, where a prank goes horribly wrong. Any contribution from Edmund Crispin is welcome in my book and the delightfully brief but well-honed Dog in the Night-Time sees Gervase Fen take a leaf out of Sherlock Holmes’ book.

Academic institutions, worlds in their own right within the wider world, breeding grounds for jealousy, thwarted ambition, petty rivalries, and a melting pot of different characters and personality traits, are a perfect breeding ground for crime as this excellent anthology demonstrates.

Eponymous Laws

There is much to admire in those pithy observations and rules of thumb about human behaviour and the human condition that are known as eponymous laws. Perhaps the best known is Murphy’s Law which observes that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

On Secretorum Roger’s Bacon has compiled what he claims to be the most complete list of eponymous laws ever compiled by anyone ever, some 193 in total. Among the gems are Badger’s Law, “any website with the word Truth in the URL has none in the posted content”, Hanlon’s Razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, and Cunningham’s Law, “the best way to get a correct answer to a posed question is to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you”.

There is more than a little truth in the Law of Exclamation, “the more exclamation marks used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters” and the Law of Fakery, “Anything fake which attracts enough attention will have some people vehemently proclaiming it’s real. Anything real which attracts enough attention will have some people vehemently proclaiming it’s fake. (Corollary: If the creator confesses that it was fake, some people will still claim it’s real and call the confession a fake.)”

But perhaps the 21st century’s rival to Murphy’s Law is Munroe’s Law, “you will never change anyone’s opinion on anything by making a post on the Internet. Knowing this will not stop you from trying.”

Great stuff. To see the encyclopaedia in full, follow this link.  

App Of The Week (4)

Ever fancied being a goalkeeper? Want a silly game to while away a minute or two but which has the potential to become addictive? Well, try The Incredible Shrinking Goalie.

The concept is simplicity itself. You are the goalkeeper and you must keep the ball off the ground by clicking where you would like the screen character to jump. The catch, though, is every time the character touches the ball, he gets smaller.

Frustrating and addictive, what’s not to like?

Men For Pieces

A review of Men For Pieces by Brian Flynn – 250530

For me the publishing event of 2025 is the reissue of another batch of Brian Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst novels, five in all, by the rejuvenated Dean Street Press, of which Men For Pieces, the thirty-sixth in the series and originally published in 1949, is the first in chronological order. Taking its title from the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, “’tis all a chequerboard of nights and days, where Destiny with men for pieces plays”, it is a novel that sees Flynn in fine form and one to gladden the hearts of fans of this sadly neglected writer.

There is a distinctly Holmesian feel to the story, the amateur sleuth often forced to sit and analyse the information at his disposal before having a flash of inspiration and dashing off to wherever the lead might take him. Often these forays will lead to a dead end, serving little more than eliminating a possible motive or suspect, and, as he remarks, Bathurst experiences all the highs and lows of the chase in this particular chase. The counterbalance to Bathurst’s restless energy is Chief Inspector MacMorran of the Yard, who resolutely sticks to the obvious explanation of the fate of Peter Oliver, found in his bathroom holding a razor with his throat slit, until the weight of evidence cannot fail to move even this piece of Aberdeen granite.

Flynn is at his most playful when he introduces not two but three possible sets of characters to fit  the mysterious letters in a note found in Oliver’s pocket and I had to smile when his sleuth smokes out the culprit in the Oliver bath case with three Bath Oliver biscuits, hard, cracker-like biscuits ideal for cheese but now, despite the best efforts of the Bath Oliver Preservation Society, desperately hard to find.

And it would not be Flynn without more than a few sporting references, particularly cricket, nice to see Dusty Rhodes get a namecheck, and football, the alibi of Dewhurst, Margaret Oliver’s boyfriend, seeing him take in Fulham v Leicester City at Craven Cottage, or, indeed, a beguiling nightspot, this time The Orange Lizard. I am sure Flynn would have smiled had he realized the sporting connotation as the case reaches its denouement!

As a collector of idioms that have gone out of fashion, I enjoyed “everything went Sir Garnet”, the antithesis of Pete Tong, more on which next week. Aside from the story there is much to savour in a Flynn novel.   

A high degree of improbability runs through the plot. No matter how beguiling the damsel in distress, as surely Stella Forrest is, it is hard to imagine that a hard-boiled officer of the law would drop everything at the behest of his lunch colleague to investigate something which at best seems like the wild imaginings of a hysterical girl – after all, how many girls have suffered the embarrassment of their beau not turning up for a meet? – but that is what MacMorran does.

It almost defies credulity when Oliver père announces that he had been a witness to a case in which the victim’s throat had been slashed just like Peter’s and that he had received threatening letters warning of revenge. Peter was identical in age to the murderer. Peter is a creature of habit and his failure to place a bathplug in its accustomed position is assumed to be telling, even if he might have been distracted by anticipation of his visitor.  And then there is a newspaper headline found carelessly discarded in Stella Forrest’s erstwhile lodgings. Worry not, Bathurst has a contact who can identify not only national but local newspapers from their font and he comes up trumps.

Much of what has gone on before this point is red herring upon red herring but despite all the twists and turns it is quite a simple story involving a love triangle, an obsession, two unfortunate victims, and a physical trait that cannot be masked. Still, it is not the arrival point but how you get there that matters and a few hours in Flynn’s company is not only a pleasurable and rewarding experience but the troubles of the world seem to slip away. Great stuff.

My thanks to Victoria Eade for a review copy.

Wisdom Teeth

Evolution is not a smooth path and leaves in its slipstream vestiges of anatomy that once served a purpose but now are redundant. Take wisdom teeth. In prehistoric times when the diet of Homo sapiens consisted mainly of raw meats, roots, and leaves powerful teeth were required and third molars, which are what we call wisdom teeth, were very much needed.

Sometime, though, between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago the brains of early humans began to grow at a rapid rate to around three times their original size, changing the back part of the skull and its position relative to their rows of teeth, the dental arcade. The dental arcade shortened and suddenly there was no room for the third molars and, anyway, as our diet became more refined with softer and cooked foods preferred they were not needed.

However, as the genes that determine the makeup of our teeth evolve separately from those that control brain development, we are currently stuck with the consequences of a crowded mouth. Wisdom teeth usually make their presence felt or erupt above the jawline in our late teens or early twenties, although, according to Guinness World Records, the oldest male to grow a wisdom tooth was Robert Gray at the grand old age of 94 years and 253 days. The phenomenon of wisdom teeth erupting in the elderly was remarked upon by Aristotle in The History of Animals where he wrote “cases have been known in women upwards of 80 years old where at the very close of life the wisdom-teeth have come up, causing great pain in their coming; and cases have been known of the like phenomenon in men too.”

There is no certainty that you will grow wisdom teeth and if you do, the number. It is rare, but possible, to have more than four, known as supernumerary teeth. The roots are the part that form first, before pushing the bud, the visible part of the tooth in your mouth, through your gums. They typically have between two to three roots but can develop more. If wisdom teeth have to be removed, it is best that the operation is done before the roots start to take a firm hold.  

When wisdom teeth do not have enough room in which to grow normally, they get stuck in the jaw and fail to erupt. These are known as impacted teeth. The earliest know case of an impacted tooth was found in the jaw of the skeleton of a woman aged between twenty-five and 35 and dating back 15,000 years.

On a brighter note, it is highly likely that humans in the medium term will no longer develop wisdom teeth, the gene structures of teeth eventually catching up with the other evolutionary pressures on the skull. In the meantime, one more poit to ponder: why are they called wisdom teeth?

The answer appears to be because they normally develop in late adolescence and early adulthood, they arrive when we are older and wiser. In Korean, though, they are known as love teeth because they arrive when you are experiencing your first love and in Japanese oyashirazu, which translates as “unknown to parents” as, hopefully, their offspring have flown the nest before the teeth arrive.

The Case Of The Treble Twist

A review of The Case of the Treble Twist by Christopher Bush – 2505

This might be the fifty-first in Bush’s 63 book Ludovic Travers series, but Bush is indefatigable and still capable of pulling off an intriguing and entertaining mystery. Originally published in 1958 and reissued by Dean Street Press, he seems to have hit a bit of a purple patch. His concession to the changing times is to dispense with the cosiness of country house mysteries and allowing a darker, grimmer world to intrude. Mind you, he is still moaning about the taxation rates.

Bush is not afraid to ring the changes. Wharton of the Yard, his comrade in arms and with whom he enjoyed a fractious relationship, each always trying to get one over each other with Travers usually prevailing, does not feature in the story, replaced by Inspector Jewle and Sergeant Matthews, Travers’ own role is a little more loosely defined. Although he is still the owner of the Broad Street Detective Agency he decides to take a curious commission off his own bat, only bringing the Agency in the end for tax and expense purposes, of course, and plays fast and loose with what he discloses to the police. He treads on thin ground and does well to avoid an accusation of withholding vital evidence.

Nevertheless, there are still some very distinctive Bushian features to this novel. As is his wont he starts with a seemingly unconnected incident which happens about four years before the action of the main story, although he telegraphs its impact by saying that it provided an opportunity to see all the characters who will later feature in the narrative. It is quite and clever move. And then there are the old leitmotifs of not everyone being who they claim to be, including the couple who set him on the chase to recover some diamonds which may have been stolen in a raid on a dealer, Speer, and will probably be removed from their hiding place when the remaining thief, Conward, is released from jail, and, of course, a badly burnt body, and women changing their hair colouring.

As the title suggests it is a case of double and treble-crossing, you might even argue that there are a couple of sets of treble twists, where there is dishonour amongst thieves, shady secrets and dodgy backgrounds in which a stuffed Sealyham terrier and a roll of Stickwell take centre stage. The cruciverbalist in Travers eventually twigs the connection between Speer, who is known to have been of Italian descent, and the Hope or Band of Hope, believed to be a notorious but uncaught fence for stolen gems. The latter was mentioned by Jewle at the initial meal four years ago at the restaurant owned by Tibball, a jewel thief whose burnt out body is found in a car which crashed shortly after the raid on Speer’s property. Spiro, of course, is the Italian for I hope.

After many twists and turns, Travers manages to piece together what is really going on and who is who, having ultimately the sense to decline to take instructions from the Dawsons. He even manages to bag a handsome reward for the recovery of the jewels, which he distributes to deserving cases and puts the rest in the Agency, for tax purposes, naturally, and the successful resolution earns both Jewle and Matthews a promotion.

The pathos in the story lies in the fate of Kate Howard, a former servant at the Speer establishment and whom Travers has been pumping for information. The blame for her death can be fairly laid at Travers’ door, after persuading her to come to London to divulge some vital information and disclosing her plans to the Dawsons. She never made it, and Travers, who took a shine to her, feels her death, an empathetic side to his character we rarely see.

In summary, this is Bush at his best, a well-worked plot which, while lacking high moments of drama, provides the reader with an ingenious problem that only begins to make sense as the denouement approaches. That is all you can ask for.