Martin Fone's Blog, page 136

Christmas Crackers (9)

To get you into the festive mood, here are some jokes with a topical twist.

Why are people cutting back on Brussels sprouts this year? The cost of gas is too high

Why can Netflix afford calamari this year? They’re Squids in

Which vaccine did Father Christmas get? Mince Pfizer

Why did Rudolph’s nose have to self-isolate? It failed a lateral glow test

Which vaccine did the Three Wise Men have? The Wiser jab

Why does it take so long to play a game of Scrabble with Boris Johnson? He keeps going back on his word

Why will Keir Starmer be sad on Christmas morning? He will still have no presence

What pantomime are the government performing this year? Chris Whittington

How do you know the December heating bill is too high this year? We can’t even open the Advent calendar windows

Festive greetings to you all.

The Cheltenham Square Murder

A review of The Cheltenham Square Murder by John Bude

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a fictional police detective goes on holiday, murder will seek him out. Even if you seek solace in a genteel square in Cheltenham, the grim reaper will call you into action. This is what happens to Inspector Meredith in John Bude’s entertaining The Cheltenham Square Murder, originally published in 1937 and now reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series.

Bude has a fine sense of place and geography, helped immeasurably from having lived in the spa town for a while. The square seems to be the epitome of middle-class tranquillity, stocked by characters such a doctor by the name of Pratt, three spinsters, the formidable Miss Boon and sisters, Nancy and Emmeline Watt, a vicar and his sister, a retired stockbroker, Edward Buller, and the raffish Captain Cotton. And then there is Arthur West who leads the campaign for a tree in the square to be cut down, a controversial move. Misfortune dogs him; his wife, who has been seduced by Cotton, leaves him and he plunges into such a financial mess that he is forced to sell up and move into cheaper accommodation. There are rumours that Buller had swindled him.

The tranquil calm of the square is shattered when Captain Cotton, enjoying a post prandial drink in Buller’s house, is shot through the back of the head with a barbed arrow. An unusual way to kill a victim for sure, until you realise that several of the residents, including West, are keen toxophilites, including West. The arrow appears to have been fired from West’s empty house, to which only he and the estate agent have the key, and a feat only possible since the felling of the tree. Buller, too, is murdered, again with a barbed arrow, and as the two residents against whom West had a grievance have been murdered, he is the obvious suspect.

The local police in the shape of Inspector Long are called in to investigate but as Meredith is staying adjacent to the murder scene he is invited to help, an invitation he readily accepts. Meredith is a strange sleuth. He misses two fairly obvious avenues of enquiry – whether the first murder was a case of mistaken identity and whether the second murder was actually committed in the way that it seemed at first blush. Had he twigged either or both, then the inquiry and the book would have been shortened considerably. On the other hand, he seems to have amazing flashes of insight brought on by the most trivial of clues.

Naturally, the case is not as straightforward as first appears. Along the way to resolving the mystery Meredith uncovers gambling debts, a clock that has been tampered with – always essential for establishing what seems a watertight alibi – and a penchant among some of the residents for scrambling across roofs and climbing in and out of skylights at night. Both the whodunit and whydunit elements are well done, although I am not sure Bude plays entirely fairly with his reader.

Albeit stereotypical, Bude’s characterisation is strong, and his narrative style and plotting drives the book along, even if the method by which the murders are committed seems contrived. What I like about Bude, though, is that he does not take things too seriously, happy to inject some humour to leaven the heavy police procedural aspects. I loved the two spinster sisters discussing what the correct social etiquette was when involved in a murder investigation, an image that encapsulates murder coming to middle England to a T.

Lonesome Road

A review of Lonesome Road by Patricia Wentworth

Originally published in 1939, this is the third outing of Wentworth’s amateur sleuth and fiendish knitter, Miss Silver. I have been a bit sniffy about Camberley’s finest in the past, but this was quite a good story. Patricia Wentworth is an excellent storyteller, and the plot was almost believable.

Unlike the previous two Miss Silver books I have read, the sleuth appears from the start and is almost Holmesian, receiving a client in her quarters, knitting needles flying, desperate for her assistance.

Rachel Treherne is convinced that someone is trying to kill her. She has been saddled with an enormous responsibility, her father bequeathing her control over the family’s fortunes and requiring her, at the start of each year, to rewrite her will, ostensibly to keep the family members on their toes. And there are a lot of family members, who spend an inordinate amount of time at the family home, airing their sense of grievance.

Rachel’s elder sister, Mabel Wadlow, is particularly aggrieved that she has not had her share of the family’s money and is forever, with her husband, Ernest, badgering Rachel for money, some of which is to stop son Maurice from going off to Russia and some to set up daughter, Cherry, a frivolous young thing. Cosmo, who has eyes for Rachel, and Ella, a do-gooder extraordinaire, are also on the hunt for cash. Even the cousins to whom Rachel is most attracted and hopes that they marry, Richard and Caroline, are not immune from the family affliction. They all have reason enough to want her demise in order to get their hands on what theu believe to be their rightful inheritance.

The series of mishaps that prompt Rachel to seek assistance seem fairly mundane, anonymous letters, a highly polished step, a curtain that catches on fire, but the sense of danger increases once Miss Silver arrives. Adders are found in Rachel’s bed and then she is pushed over the edge of a coastal path, the lonesome road, only to be saved at the last minute by Gale Brandon.

Brandon, or is it Brent, is the most interesting character in the book. It would not be a Wentworth story if there was not some love interest, and the rough-hewn American is clearly in love with Rachel. There is a backstory though, Rachel’s father and Gale’s father having been in business together. Brent/Brandon senior fell out with Wadlow, just before the latter struck oil and made his fortune. Does Gale have an ulterior motive for getting close to Rachel? Did he push Rachel over the cliff and only rescued her because someone else was approaching?

Wentworth handles this aspect of the story well. There is much about Gale to make the reader suspicious, but equally he seems a nice guy. The ambiguity around his character and his motives is sustained right until the very end of the story.

Despite her unwillingness to believe that any member of her extended family could wish her ill and her devotion to her maid, Miss Silver succeeds in opening Rachel’s eyes as to how the land really lies. By the standards of many of her contemporaries writing murder mysteries, Wentworth’s plot is rather simple and unconvoluted. Sometimes it is pleasurable to read a well-written piece of entertainment without requiring the little grey cells to whirl around in ever decreasing circles. It might even be the perfect antidote to a family Christmas!

The Case Of The Three Strange Faces

A review of The Case of the Three Strange Faces by Christopher Bush

It is a curious thing, but when you are an amateur sleuth, death has a habit of following you around, as this tenth outing for Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers, first published in 1933 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, amply demonstrates. Having spent some time in the south of France recuperating, as you do, Travers is making his way back from Toulon to Marignac en route to London by train. He decides to travel second-class, as you meet a more interesting type of people.

Trains in general and railway carriages in particular are a favourite of murder mystery writers and it is easy to see why. They bring together a motley collection of characters into a confined space and compartment-style carriages limit the number of suspects and open up the opportunity for a locked room mystery. This is what we have here.

Amongst his travelling companions in his carriage, Travers finds that there are three who have distinctive and peculiar faces. One, Hunt, seems to be suffering from an outbreak of red spots necessitating his butler to come into the carriage to administer a lotion. Another, going by the name of Smith, always suspicious in these circumstances, seems very well sun tanned, although closer inspection shows that his tan is not the result of over exposure to the rays of la belle France but has come out of a bottle.

There are some rum goings-on in the carriage. A man, described as a Provencal, has parked himself outside the compartment door and seems to be on watch. During the night Smith passes out a Frenchman’s walking stick to the man. There is an unseemly scuffle involving the only woman in the carriage. Travers, when walking through the train, keeps bumping into another Englishman. Inevitably, two of Travers’ immediate travelling companions die, one stabbed through the heart with a hat pin, and the other poisoned.

How were the murders carried out and by whom? Were they connected or entirely separate incidents? What were Smith and the Provencal up to? Why was Hunt’s house burgled shortly after his butler and Travers had arrived back in England?

Travers finds himself under suspicion of the murders but his trump card is that his uncle is Commissioner of Police in Blighty and so he could not possibly have committed the foul deeds. It turns out that the Provencal is a senior French policeman and that the French couple were drug runners. But that still leaves the death of Hunt.

Inspector Wharton takes up the investigation of the case and Travers’ role is reduced to that of his faithful companion, adding a few pieces of sage advice from time to time. The plot is complicated, overly complicated it seemed to me, and after a bright opening the book seems to lose a lot of its impetus, descending into a rather ordinary tale of earnest investigation, a few red herrings, unearthing secrets from the past, before all the facts are pieced together to make a coherent whole.

Bush’s style is workmanlike and unpretentious, he keeps the story moving, he plays fair with the reader and there are moments of humour to be enjoyed. However, it is not one of his best as there are too many spinning plates, some of which could have profitably been left to crash to the ground and not compromised the integrity of what is a very strange, convoluted, and forced tale.

If you are not determined to read the whole series, it may be best to park this one in the sidings.

A Second Slice Of Turkey

The rough rule of thumb is if you are feeding up to nine people, you should allow a pound of turkey per person, while for ten or more an allowance of 0.8lbs should suffice. Whether there would be enough meat to go around was not a concern for Philip Cook of Leacroft Turkeys Ltd in Peterborough who reared a turkey which, on December 12, 1989, tipped the scales at a whopping 86-pounds, claiming the crown for the world’s heaviest turkey. Named Tyson it was auctioned for charity raising £4,400. I wonder how long it took to carve it.

A man who knows a thing or two about carving is Paul Kelly. On June 3, 2009, at Little Claydon Farm in Essex he took just 3 minutes and 19.47 seconds to carve fourteen portions of breast meat, each weighing at least 150 grams, and place them on to 14 separate plates. His technique, which he claims is fool proof, is to cut along the breastbone to remove the breast meat before cutting it into slices.

Paul is also the world’s fastest turkey plucker, holding the record for plucking three sixteen-pound birds ready for the oven in eleven and a half minutes. The record for plucking a single turkey was set by Vincent Pilkington from County Cavan on November 17, 1980. It took him just one minute thirty seconds. When the two battled it out by plucking two turkeys each in April 2014, it was the Irishman who prevailed.

And why is it called a turkey? To add to the confusion why is it known in Turkish as hindi, meaning Indian, while in French it is dinde, from India, and in Dutch kalkoen, a Calicut hen?

Before turkeys arrived on the scene, guinea fowls were imported through Constantinople and known as Turkey coqs or Turkiye hennes. Traders from Constantinople were also involved in the importation of what we know as turkeys into England. One theory goes that the naming the bird after the Turks was an indication of its exoticism and non-indigenous status.

For mainland Europeans, though, perhaps Turkey was too close to home and the more distant India provided a better representation of the exotic. Or was it just a hangover from Columbus’ misconception that he was sailing to the Indies rather than America? Or did the English name derive from the Turkish military uniform of a red fez and a dark cloak? No one knows for sure.

If you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions, available now.

Christmas Tree Of The Week

The problem with using a real Christmas tree which is planted in the ground as the focal point of your communal festive is that it grows between years, a conundrum which faced operatives from Calderdale Council who came to dress the tree at Bailiff Bridge in Yorkshire.

Due to the tree growing significantly larger, ‘elf and safety concerns, and accessibility problems, a Council spokesperson explained, those who had been sent to spruce up the spruce could only decorate the lower third of the tree. The result is that it looks a bit naff and has caused a local storm in a strong cup of Yorkshire tea.

In what might be seen as a metaphor of the current state of England, the lights are on but shining dimly and all the authorities can do is promise that things will be better next year, when the Council will provide the villagers with a new tree. Jam tomorrow, indeed.

Air Travel Tip Of The Week (2)

There are some things that are just worth knowing and storing in the deeper recesses of your mind until you need it. What do you do when you are on an aeroplane and drop your phone down the side of the seat?

The temptation is to start fishing around for it, although in many tightly packed cabins it requires the skill of a contortionist to retrieve it. There is a hidden danger if you try this in that if you move the seat’s mechanism, the phone and, more importantly, its lithium battery could be damaged and start overheating and cause a fire.

This happens more times than you care to think with potentially disastrous consequences. In 2018 on a Qantas flight to Melbourne a man dropped his phone down the side of his seat and tried to retrieve it, damaging it in the process and causing it to smoulder. The fire developed and the pilot had to divert to Sydney where the crew used extinguishers to put it out.

Again in 2018 a similar incident on a Ryanair flight led to passengers having to make a speedy evacuation via the emergency chutes and in August 2021 a mobile phone fire lead to the evacuation of an Air Alaska flight.

The advice is if you lose your phone down the side of the seat, call the air stewards, by using the call button, obviously. We live and learn.

Nine Of The Gang

A tailor’s balloon was a week’s enforced absence because there was no work to do. It is thought to have come from the French noun bilan, which meant a balance sheet but was used more figuratively to describe a sentence or condemnation.

Balloon-juice, in the context of a public house, was soda-water, its name presumably a reference to its gaseous properties. By extension a balloon-juice lowerer was one who abstained from beer and spirits.

A biscuit and beer bet was slang for a swindle. The set up was that the victim is challenged to eat a penny biscuit before the other party had finished their glass of beer without spilling it, having to ladle it into their mouth using a teaspoon. The trick was that the biscuit was so dry and the victim had crammed his mouth so full with it, that he could not swallow, allowing the other party to take their time to complete their side of the bargain and scoop the money.

Traffic congestion is not just a modern phenomenon. In the mid-19th century pedestrians would wait on the pavement in the vain hope of finding a bit o’ prairie. This was the term given to a momentary lull in the traffic, allowing the pedestrian to cross from one side to the other, the bare expense of street looking like the prairies.

A bit o’ tripe was slang for a wife, a lamentably weak piece of rhyming slang. If she was not available to play mother and dispense cups of tea to the assembled party, the cry would go up for someone to bitch the pot, a request for someone to pour.    

A blessing was Irish slang for a gratuity, while in Devon it meant a handful thrown in over and above the weighed measure. Count that as your blessing.

The Gutenberg Murders

A review of The Gutenberg Murders by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning

Published originally in 1931, this is the second murder mystery that Bristow and Manning wrote and Dean Street Press, who kindly sent me a review copy, should be congratulated for rescuing it from obscurity. It struck me as a much more mature and confident piece of work, better written and with more rounded characterisation than is to be found in The Invisible Host.

It also has a great, if somewhat gruesome, method of dispatching the victim. This duo is not content with a common or garden shooting or stabbing or poisoning. Instead, they plumb the pages of Greek mythology and provide us with a modern take of the fate of Creusa of Corinth at the hands of Medea in Euripides’ tragedy. As someone who as both a schoolboy and student had grappled with the play in its original, I spotted the reference and had a feeling of smug satisfaction as the solution was revealed. When next I am asked what value there is in having a knowledge of the Classics, I can now say that it helped me solve the Gutenberg Murders.      

A mode of murder drawn from the depths of Greek mythology is appropriate for a story that is set in the world of academics who run the Sheldon Library in New Orleans and have a penchant for collecting and restoring antiquarian books. Pride of place in the collection, at least in the mind of the head librarian, Dr Prentiss, are the nine leaves from the Gutenberg bible that he has recently acquired. However, not everyone is convinced of their provenance, notably his arch-rival and head trustee of the library, Alfredo Gonzales.  

The story starts with the discovery that the pages from the bible have been stolen and that the body of the deputy librarian, Quentin Ulman, has been found charred almost beyond recognition, save for a cigarette case, on an island where he bound books. Later, Gonzales’ wife suffers a similar fate as she drives home from a party. Sculptor, Terry Sheldon, nephew of the library’s founder, also is burned to death. Who is behind the murders, why and how were they carried out?

District Attorney Farrell takes the unusual step of involving a journalist, Wade, in the investigations which hit a brick wall as the principal suspects either have cast-iron alibis or are murdered themselves. The investigations reveal a complex web of relationships between the principal characters, Wade himself allowing the charms of medical student, Marie Camillo, to cloud his judgment, and a will coupled with an untimely marriage which provides a clue to the deep seated rivalry between Prentiss and Gonzales.

Wade is on the verge of giving up in despair when he picks up a copy of the plays of Euripides for one more time and an obscure French investigation into how mythological and historical murders could have been pulled off. The scales fall from his eyes, and he sets a trap for the suspects, which they fall for, even though Wade almost suffers the same fate as the other victims. The mystery is resolved in a glowing finale, although the culprit evades the hangman’s noose by taking his own life, sadly in a rather conventional fashion.

The characters are believable, and the dialogue is crisp and realistic. Bristow and Manning, write with humour and there is a pace to the book which keeps the reader interested, even when the investigations appear to be going nowhere. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. One of life’s many mysteries is why it has fallen out of favour for so long.

Crossword Mystery

A review of Crossword Mystery by E R Punshon

You get value for your money in this, the third in E R Punshon’s Bobby Owen series, originally published in 1934 and now reissued by Dean Street Press. It also goes by the name of Crossword Murder. Not only do you have a riveting puzzle to digest but there is also a crossword puzzle, framework and clues around a third of the way through the book and the completed puzzle later on, and a gruesome ending that would not have been out of place in Game of Thrones.

One of the things I like about Punshon is that his socialist colours do peep out in his stories from time to time. Unusually for a British writer at the time he seems alive to the threat caused by the Fascist movement, particularly that which was emerging in Germany, and is sympathetic to the plight of those who stand up against or get in the way of a seemingly unstoppable machine. The German refugee, who to his horror discovers his Semitic ancestry and his attempts to escape with a semblance of his wealth and goods is sympathetically handled.

Although a Bobby Owen novel, this is as much an Inspector Mitchell story. Owen is still a junior making his way up the ranks. Mitchell is his father figure, his mentor and does his best to encourage Owen’s initiative and ability to understand problems that is rarely exhibited in officers of such junior rank. Owen’s mission is to go to a peaceful seaside village, Suffby Cove, to protect a retired businessman, George Winterton, who fears for his life and, having friends in high places, has asked for police protection. Winterton gives no clue as to why he feels he is in peril other than his insistence that his brother, Archibald, was murdered rather than drowning at sea in placid conditions, despite being a strong swimmer.

Owen, too, suspects there is more to Archibald’s death than meets the eye, a suspicion compounded when, objectively, he fails in his mission. George is murdered. There are two aspects about George’s character that hold the key to his and his brother’s demise, his fixation with gold as the only safe haven for one’s wealth and crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles were a fairly new craze at the time that Punshon wrote this book, the first in the UK was published in Pearson’s Magazine in February 1922 and the first British newspaper to publish one was the Sunday Express on November 2, 1924.

George is a crossword addict and is engaged in compiling his own puzzle. It is odd in design and Owen quickly works out that solving it will assist enormously in unravelling the mystery. Readers can, if they so desire although it is difficult if you are reading the e-book version, and will soon discover, as Owen did, that it is more a cryptogram than a conventional puzzle.

Alongside the secrets of the puzzle there is a plan to turn Suffley Cove into a glorified theme park and casino complex. The Wintertons were resistant to the developers’ plans. Was this a factor in their demise. In a nod to Sherlock Holmes there is a dog that did not bark when the first crime was committed and which was done away with before George was murdered. What did this tell about the identity of the culprits? And what role did Warburton’s housekeeper play in it all? She seems to exert influence on all aspects of life at Suffley Cove, far more so than you would expect from a woman in her position.

As usual in a Punshon novel, he plays fair with his readers, and it is a relatively simple task to spot whodunit even if the why is a little more opaque. The story ends with one of Punshon’s famed set pieces, which is dramatic, perhaps a tad melodramatic, and certainly gory. It seems almost out of place in a genre that deals with murder and death but in a gentler, less vivid fashion.

I enjoyed the book immensely, but then I am a Punshon addict. For those wishing to dip their toes into his works, a trip to Suffley Cove makes an ideal starting point.