Martin Fone's Blog, page 139

The Case of The April Fools

A review of The Case of the April Fools by Christopher Bush

Originally published in 1933 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, this is the ninth in Bush’s Ludovic Travers series. While Travers, Bush’s amateur detective, takes a leading part in the drama, there have been some changes to the supporting cast, Wharton has been replaced by Inspector Norris and John Franklin, the head of Private Investigations at Durangos is nowhere to be seen. It is always welcome to see an author freshen up their cast list as it allows for new perspectives, skills, and dynamics to be explored. Travers and Norris work well together in solving what is an unduly complicated case, sprinkled with more clues than you could shake a stick at.

As is often the case with the Bush novels I have read to date, seemingly odd and unconnected events described in the first chapter tend to have a growing importance as the tale unfolds. Travers is intrigued by an extensive advertising campaign featuring a character called Wen Ti and then overhears a conversation in which two of his clients, Courtney Adlard and Charles Crewe, in which he is described as a bit of a fool, but worth involving as a jury would believe his testimony.

Travers, who is negotiating a lease on a theatre for Adlard and Crewe, is duly invited to Adlard’s country house. Crewe has been receiving death threats, but the duo do not seem to be taking them seriously. The following day Crewe’s body is found in his room by Adlard and travers. By the time Travers has summoned assistance, Adlard too is murdered. In a not quite a locked room murder, it is difficult to see how the double murders could have been committed and the murderer have had the time to enter and, more importantly, leave the room undetected.

There are clues galore – a Dutch hoe, a broken vine, a key, a letter, Adlard’s sister rifling through her brother’s desk in a frantic search, an American who went for a walk at the time of the crimes. Four of the guests at the house are thespians, always a source of suspicion, and two of them have skills in lassoing and knife throwing which could have been useful in planning the escape. Although these aspects are given a thorough investigation, the reader soon realizes that the case is much simpler than it seems at first blush and that some of the usual motivations, blackmail and dodgy ancestors, provide the motivations for murder. Bush, though, hardly plays fair by the reader by leaving a lot of the principal information needed until the last minute. Also, having made a big thing of Wen Ti at the outset, that theme quickly becomes a damp squib.    

There are a couple of intriguing aspects to the storyline. It may well be the first murder mystery in novel form to use April Fool’s Day as its hook. It is not an obvious date around which to weave a plot, but it serves Bush’s purpose to take his amateur sleuth a peg or two. Having been characterized as a bit of a fool at the outset, Travers lives up to his billing by missing the trick which showed how the murder was done.

It was left to Inspector Norris to solve the crime, thanks to some advice from a builder and a practical joke played on him at home by his children. It is an unusual, but welcome, twist for an author like Bush to turn the tables on his principal character in this way.   

The best line in the book also puts his hero down and maintains that intrigue about his sexuality; “he knew as little about women as ducks do about dumplings”. They do not write lines like that anymore.

While eminently readable and enjoyable and the plotting clever, it seemed a little over contrived for me. Removing some of the padding to leave a sharper, more focused novel would have improved it immeasurably.

The Case Of The Dead Diplomat

A review of The Case of the Dead Diplomat by Basil Thomson

My overwhelming impression after I had finished this book, the fourth in Basil Thomson’s Inspector Richardson eight book series, published in 1935 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, was of being underwhelmed. It was neither bad nor good, just rather ploddingly average.

It has a rather strange central premise, Richardson, an established and trusted Inspector in the CID, and his colleague, Sergeant Cooper, are sent over to Paris, at the behest of the British Ambassador, to assist the French police investigate the murder of one of the Embassy’s staff. The diplomat has been stabbed in his flat with a dagger which bore the insignia and a motto associated with the Nazis. Given the era in which the book was written, there is a suspicion that there may have been some political motive behind the killing. The Ambassador is keen to avoid a political scandal.

It struck me as I gave the book some thought that at one level the story read like an essay that used to be set when I was a schoolboy studying for my O Levels; compare and contrast the methods of the English and French police forces. It is hard not to think that Thomson, a high-ranking police officer in his day, created this plot simply to demonstrate the superiority of the English police and their methods. Richardson and Cooper are stolid, conscientious, diligent, exasperated by the French police’s attempts to thwart their investigations whereas the French are more concerned about personal ambition, follow where their intuition rather than hard evidence leads them and are susceptible to bribes.

Richardson and Cooper are lucky as well. Getting nowhere fast in solving the diplomat’s death, they spot a couple of people who were wanted in London for fraudulent activities. To lure these criminals in, they have to indulge in a spot of subterfuge, principally involving Cooper posing as a spendthrift millionaire French Canadian. Astonishingly, the criminals take the bait and that element of the story is resolved.

Tangentially, this element of the plot has a tie up with the murder of the diplomat. The scammers were on the hunt for anyone who had recently come into a pot of money through winning the lottery. Who knew that at the time British citizens were precluded from playing the lottery? When they did and won, they had to use a third party to collect the winnings and where there is cash there is temptation. The motivation for the diplomat’s murder was nothing to do with high politics but sheer greed.

The plot has beaucoup de poisons rouges, not least the roll of film found at the murder scene containing photographs taken at the zoo, the investigation of which leaves the bumptious principal French detective with oeuf on his face. In spite of the best efforts of the French other than their friend in court, Charles Verneuil, the only French detective showing any of the professional aptitudes of the British duo, Richardson and Cooper solve the case, a diplomatic incident is avoided and all can carry on as before.

I found the little Englander style too trying to enjoy. I am hoping that the next in the series is better.

Geosmin

Although petrichor was originally used to describe the oil released from rocks, it has become a portmanteau word to describe the smell that accompanies the first rainfall after a dry spell, however it is produced. French biochemists, Bertholet and André, studied the evocative smell of freshly wetted soil in the late 19th century and succeeded in isolating what they called “l’odeur propre de la terre”. However, it was the American duo, Gerber and Lechevelier, who successfully tracked the smell down to a single compound, which they called geosmin, in their paper published in Applied Microbiology in 1965[1], a term they derived from the Ancient Greek words for earth and smell.

The organisms responsible for releasing the geosmin into the air are Streptomyces, threadlike bacteria which play an important part in recycling vegetable matter and are found in the soil of woodlands and our gardens. Thriving in wet conditions, they only produce their spores when it is dry. One of their 8,000 genes, painstakingly identified and isolated by a team of scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich in 2002, is responsible for secreting geosmin during spore production.   

 A large supply of spores builds up during a dry spell and when it first rains, the force of the raindrops landing on the ground sends the spores up into the air and the moist air picks up the aroma. Even humans, who are not known for their olfactory acumen, are able to detect geosmin at concentrations of less than 100 parts per trillion.

While our noses may be attuned to its presence and we find its aroma pleasant, at least in small doses, its taste is another matter. Even though it is not toxic, its presence can make liquids seem off, especially in mineral water and wine. Indeed, detecting the presence of a rather musty sensation developing in their younger wines, French wine growers discovered in 2002 that the culprit was geosmin forming on some rotten grapes. It is also a major contributor to the distinctively earthy taste and smell of beetroot, a vegetable which is not everybody’s cup of tea.

Full of anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, and anti-cancer properties, Streptomyces are used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry, but in industrialised concentrations, the smell of geosmin can be overwhelming and unpleasant. The ability now to isolate the gene responsible for geosmin offers the possibility of making the environs of a pharmaceutical factory less pungent.

For camels, though, geosmin is a lifeline. Their sensitive nostrils are able to detect the chemical in the breeze from miles away, allowing them to detect invaluable sources of water. In return for a refreshing drink, they carry away some of the bacteria’s spores. Our sensitivity to the chemicals generated as humidity increases ahead of a rain shower has led anthropologists to conclude that this was an important evolutionary trait, enabling our ancestors to anticipate the arrival of water which would freshen vegetation and attract prey to water sources. In enjoying that fresh smell after a rain shower, we may just be at one with our primal instincts.

If you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions by following the link below:

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5866039/

Covid-19 Tales (24)

One of the traditional images associated with the tale of the birth of Jesus, which, apparently, is what Christmas is all about, is the three wise men congregating around the newly born baby bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In Naples nativity scenes have developed into an art form since the Baroque period and many families have one on display in their homes over the festive season.

The craftsmen who operate along San Gregorio Armeno in the historical centre of Naples are famous for adapting the traditional nativity scenes to reflect the zeitgeist. Last year the figurines wore masks, but this year the three wise men have been provided with Green Passes. The Green Pass is mandatory in Italy for travel on much of the country’s transport system and to gain entry to many cultural and leisure venues and evidence that the bearer has had at least one dose of the vaccine or has tested negative or has recently recovered from the virus.

“As the wise men have travelled a long way following the star”, explained one of the craftsmen, Marco Ferrigno, “it made sense that they displayed a Green Pass complete with QR code”. Indeed.

Reaction to this novel way of getting an important message across has been generally positive.

Names Of The Week (10)

The ginaissance has spawned so many gins that distillers, aided and abetted by clever marketeers, resort to desperate measures to get their hooch attention. It may be the appearance of the bottle, the name of the spirit or even, heaven forbid, the taste and quality of the drink. Sometimes these efforts can go spectacularly wrong.

In the Causeway Bay district there is a street called Fuk Hing Lane, a name, I am told, which means “fortune and prosper”. In its Anglicised form it would create just the kind of mix of excitement and shock that any self-respecting marketeer would die for, or so the Incognito Group thought.

And so, Fok Hing Gin was born. Sadly, though, the folks at the Independent Complaints upheld a complaint from the public that the name was clearly intended to cause serious or widespread offence, the first ruling of its type.

Despite having changed the u in Fuk to o to differentiate it from the Anglo-Saxon swear word, their marketing which included endearing lines like “those that don’t like the name can FOK OFF” rather weakened their case in front of the adjudication panel. The Incognito Group have agreed to rebrand.

Where that leaves The Fekin Unbelievable Irish Gin with its wonderful hit of juniper and lemon is anybody’s guess.

Five Of The Gang

Slang is often characterized by the mangling of foreign phrases, abbreviating phrases, and dropping aitches, the latter for long periods being associated with a lack of education or belonging to the lower orders. You can imagine that an ‘appy dosser was not too concerned about the sanctity of their aitches, being so poor that they did not have sufficient to rustle up the money for a bed in a common lodging-house.

In the early 1880s someone running for a bus may have been encouraged by their fellow passengers with the cry of “Archer up”. This became a popular form of congratulations and meant that you were sure to win. Its origin, Passing English of the Victorian Era informs us, came from the celebrated exploits of a jockey of that name who rose from nowhere to prominence in 1881. His riding style was considered to be the height of recklessness, a trait he carried on into his private life, shooting himself dead. An abbreviation of Archer’s up on the saddle, it fell out of use, almost immediately after the jockey’s demise.

Arer is a fascinating word, being an emphatic version of the common verb, are. It was used in phrases like “we are, and we couldn’t be any arer”. Time for a revival, methinks.

To have an argol-bargol was to have a row. Argol was derived from argil, used by one of the gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Bargol was a nonsense word, introduced to rhyme with argol and to give the phrase a little more character. It is almost certain that the more modern argie-bargie is a further abbreviation of this Victorian term. One of the wonders of the English language is its ability to change subtly and imperceptibly.

The Saltmarsh Murders

A review of The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell

Gladys Mitchell is one of my finds of 2021. I have a penchant for slightly barmy, left-field comedic crime thrillers with a moral compass somewhat out of kilter and The Saltmarsh Murders, the fourth in Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley series, published in 1932, fits the bill perfectly. My hearty commendation comes with a health warning as there are some, by modern standards, gratuitous racist comments and terms used in the narrative, especially when discussing that rarity in books of this genre and time, an innocent man of African American origin.  

Mitchell has chosen to use a narrator to tell the story through their own eyes, always a challenging strategy as most characters rarely are present at all the salient moments and often have to rely on third-hand information. Still, Wells is a good choice as he always seems to be in the right place at the right time in his role as Mrs Bradley’s Watson.

Saltmarsh is a typical sleepy, English country village where, overtly, nothing seems to happen. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and it is a seething pit of hostility, prejudice, and malice. Most of Mitchell’s characters are drawn with lashings of foibles and quirky habits. Some are quite mad and positively dangerous. Mitchell seems to enjoy herself populating her story with these characters and enjoys poking fun at the small-mindedness and insularity of village life. Even Mrs Bradley is not immune from the atmosphere of the village which seems to accentuate her own grotesqueness, her poor dress sense, and her blunt directness.

Much to the disgust of Mrs Coutts, the vicar’s wife, the young folk of Saltmarsh enjoy an active sex life, but there is an unwritten code that if one of the wenches of the village becomes pregnant, the father will take her hand in marriage. Her servant, Meg Tosstick, falls pregnant and she is dismissed from the Coutts’ service, finding refuge at the local pub under the wing of Mr and Mrs Lowry. The baby is born but neither the Lowrys nor Tosstick will let anyone see it. This sparks rumours around the village that it must bear a strong resemblance to its father – the vicar is under immediate suspicion and a lynch mob attack the vicarage and disrupt a service at the church – or that it is of mixed race.

Meg Tosstick is found murdered, strangled. The baby has disappeared. The obvious suspect for the murder is Meg’s boyfriend, who is arrested, tried, and found guilty, sentenced to hang. Around the same time, Cora, the flirty girlfriend of Edwy Burt, a translator and smuggler of a certain kind of continental novel, disappears. She too is murdered, strangled.

Mrs Bradley takes charge of sorting out what has been going. A psychoanalyst by trade and a keen observer of human nature, she recognises that madness is at work in the village. We are treated to a glorious romp including incest, illicit extramarital affairs, smuggling, secret tunnels, and much more before Mrs Bradley reveals to the massed ranks of the village precisely what happened.

There are too many holes in the story to make the plot satisfy the purist – what happened to the baby is never explained and it was not clear to me how Mrs Bradley knew about Burt’s predilection for a certain sort of novel – but it does not matter. This is a glorious comedic romp stocked with wonderful characters that are a joy to encounter. I could not put it down and when I reached the end, the final chapter contains Mrs Bradley’s notes, I was disappointed it had finished. It is far from perfect, but great fun.

The Ponson Case

A review of The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crofts

It is often with a sense of foreboding that I pick up one of Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels as no matter how expertly the plot is constructed and how intricate the mystery, there will be periods where the narrative gets bogged down and the reader will wonder whether it is worth persevering with. However, The Ponson Case, published in 1921 and the second of four novels Crofts wrote before introducing his signature police sleuth, Inspector French, seems to navigate around more of the aggravating features of the later works of his that I have read.

To give him his due, Crofts is a good storyteller, and he has an unerring knack of constructing seemingly bullet-proof alibis which will withstand even the most painstaking investigation, the timing of journeys by motor car and by foot and the inevitable consultation of Bradshaw’s railway timetables. In a bow to modernity, Inspector tanner, the ‘tec in charge of investigations, even flies to Paris from Croydon Airport, seconds a fast car and with minutes to spare makes his train connection which takes him to Lisbon.

Crofts also plays fair with the reader, one of the advantages of being meticulous in his description of the investigations is that the reader has available to them all the clues that enable to work out whodunit, if not why it was done. He also takes time to delineate his principal characters and they are believable, not the stereotypes that populate many novels of this genre and time. I particularly enjoyed the tobacconist, who certainly knew his tobaccos and filters.  

Inspector Tanner is certainly an honest, hard-working detective for whom no minutiae that the case throws up should go ignored. The storyline centres around the discovery of Sir William Ponson’s body in a river near his home. Ponson is a rich, self-made industrialist. At first glance, it looks as though it was either suicide or a tragic accident in which Ponson lost control of his craft and was swept away by the tricky current in the area, but the discovery of a savage blow to the back of his head, leads Tanner to suspect that he was murdered.

Tanner’s problem is that the principal suspects who stand to gain most from the death of Ponson, son Austin and playboy nephew Cosgrove, both with money problems and both wanting to marry women the pater familias disapproves of, have rock solid alibis, which Tanner spends the first half of the book scrupulously investigating and testing, even travelling up to Montrose to check a single point. For all the signs of the dawning of modern age that appear in the book, the use of a telephone as a means of interrogating a suspect does not appear to be one.

Tanner is struggling to make progress, even if there are only three plausible suspects, the third being a mysterious stranger who left footprints at the boathouse. Satisfied that he can at least make a case against Austin, Tanner arrests him, an action which provokes a change of perspective in the second part of the novel, with the introduction of Austin’s fiancée, Lois Drew and her solicitor cousin, Jimmy Daunt. They try to prove Austin’s innocence and do their own investigations into the pair’s alibis and discover that for all of Tanner’s meticulous work, he has missed a trick.

This together with the discovery of the identity of the mysterious stranger, necessitating a visit by Tanner to Portugal to collar him and affording Crofts to engage in a bit of xenophobia, moves the story along to its denouement. Along the way we discover blackmail and unwitting bigamy. The actions of Ponson and his two relatives all make some sort of sense as the resolution of the mystery is revealed, leaving no loose ends, but the climax is more than a tad disappointing after such an exhaustive investigation.   

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but it could easily have been much shorter.

The Ebony Stag

A review of The Ebony Stag by Brian Flynn

Two bits of good news. First, Dean Street Press have just reissued books 21 to 30 in the Anthony Bathurst, for which any Brian Flynn fan is truly grateful. Secondly, they were kind enough to send me a review copy of the twenty-second in the series, The Ebony Stag, originally published in 1938, for which I am truly grateful. I had been following the series in order but decided to leap in time to read it, to fulfil my part of the Faustian agreement. I had some reservations as you miss the development of character and the author’s style by leaping about and some references to earlier cases such as The Sussex Cuckoo flew over my head. Still, one of Flynn’s hallmarks is that he was never content with following one style or template and was a master of experimentation.

With The Ebony Stag the days of Anthony Bathurst being a rather Wodehousian character are long behind us and here we find his amateur sleuth playing a more conventional role, almost Holmesian, but without the flashes of intuition. Bathurst is still remarkably well connected with the police, his association with Police Commissioner Sir Austin Kemble opening doors which would have been steadfastly closed to others. It is through this connection that he is introduced to the local Chief Constable, Major Merriman, whose principal two detectives are engaged on other cases. Naturally, Bathurst is invited to lead the investigation, which he does under the rather feeble guise of Mr Lotherington, his middle name.

The body of a retired rate collector, Robert Forsyth, has been found in his house, stabbed in the chest with a powerful weapon and his face smashed in with such force that one of his teeth was left hanging from his gum. The tooth proves important as Forsyth’s former colleague, Hatherley, reveals that Forsyth did not have a tooth in his head, but wore dentures. Whose was the body and why had the victim’s supposed niece disappeared?

The other important clue at the murder scene is a figurine of a stag made of ebony which was smashed to smithereens by the intruder as if they were hoping to find something hidden inside. Bathurst suspects that this was not the real ebony stag and when he finds it in an outhouse, he discovers it contains a piece of paper upon which is written some verse containing a riddle. The key to unravelling the mystery lies within the verse.

Bathurst sets up his operations at the local pub, The Tracy Arms, and the locals, especially Forsyth’s cronies, soon attract his suspicions. He is befriended by a Swede and Mr Hatherley and his rather eccentric and priggish boss. Bathurst receives warnings to keep his nose out of something that does not concern him and is attacked, although the Swede helps him out of that difficulty. Discovering a marriage certificate leads Bathurst to the identity of the victim and the riddle, once solved, reveals some buried treasure in the vicinity.

There is another victim, Mrs Bryant who helped out at the pub. Clearly, she knew something that the culprit wanted kept hidden, and this puts Bathurst on the right track. There are red herrings galore and the rather languid pace of the book hots up as we head to the denouement in which Bathurst almost meets his maker, culminating in a clever reveal. Whilst I am not sure that Flynn plays fair with the reader, my theory that the least obvious is the obvious assists enormously here if you want to play sleuth.

This is an entertaining and enjoyable book , even if it does not reach the heights of some of the others that I have read. There is also a pub name to add to the list of Flynn’s exotic establishments, the Lion and Lizard. Great fun!     

Petrichor

“Scent of earth, sweet with the evening rain”, wrote Edith and Saretta Nesbit in All Round The Year (1888). A spell of fine, dry weather was suddenly punctuated by a short, sharp burst of rain. As I walked in the garden, I was conscious of an intensely earthy, fresh, almost sweet aroma, as if the shower had woken the earth and the plants from their slumbers and they were rejoicing by giving off this distinctive fragrance. It is one of the most evocative and invigorating smells of summer and so alluring is it that you can even buy it in a bottle.

For several generations enterprising perfumiers in Kannauj in India’s Uttar Pradesh have captured and absorbed the scent in sandalwood oil in a process which takes around fifteen days to complete. Having baked clay in a kiln, they immerse it in water held in copper cauldrons called degs, sealed with earth. A cow dung fire is lit under the cauldron and the resultant vapour travels through bamboo pipes to condense in receivers, over a base of oil, to form what they call matti ka attar or “earth perfume”, an essence released by the interaction between earth and water. It is used as a perfume, in air fresheners and, because of its soothing properties, in aromatherapy.

Although James Joyce did not seem the sort of chap who would splash a bit of perfume behind his ears, he too recognised that the fresh smell after a shower of rain was due to some reaction with the earth. In 1916, he wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how “the trees in Stephen’s Green were fragrant of rain and the rain-sodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts”. Curiously though, it took scientists until 1964 to understand quite what was going on.

That many dry clays and soils gave off a peculiar and characteristic odour when moistened with water was a phenomenon recognised in all standard mineralogy textbooks at the time, but Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, working for the CSIRO Division of Mineral Chemistry in Melbourne, were intrigued to understand why and how. They set about steam distilling rocks that had been exposed to warm, dry conditions.

What they found, and documented in their ground-breaking paper, Nature of Argillaceous Odour (Nature, March 7, 1964)[1], was a yellowish oil trapped in the rocks. It took an interaction with moisture to release it. For want of a better word, they called the oil petrichor, a compound word made from two Greek words, petra, meaning rock, and ichor, which, in mythology, was used to describe the ethereal fluid which flowed through the veins of the gods instead of blood. 

Even a modest increase in humidity is sufficient to fill the pores in rocks and soil with tiny amounts of water, which flush out the oil and release the petrichor into the air. When it begins to rain, the process is accelerated, and the wind helps to disperse the aroma.

Bear and Thomas may have explained why petrichor is produced, but it not until 2015 that two scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Young Soo Joung and Cullen Buie, explained the mechanics of the process in a paper published in Nature Communications[2] . Using high-speed cameras to film what happened when raindrops hit the ground, they discovered that on impact they started to flatten, trapping tiny air bubbles. These bubbles then shot upwards, rather like in a glass of champagne, pushing through the surface of the droplet, before bursting out into the air in a fizz of aerosols.        

The number of aerosol droplets generated was dependent upon not only the speed at which the droplets hit the surface and on the properties of the surface itself but also the intensity of the rainfall. Perhaps counter-intuitively, they found that light and moderate rain showers generated more aerosol droplets than did prolonged, heavy downpours.

If you enjoyed this, check out More Curious Questions by following the link below:

[1][1] https://www.nature.com/articles/201993a0

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7083