Martin Fone's Blog, page 14

Dr Priestley Lays A Trap

A review of Dr Priestley Lays a Trap by John Rhode – 250501

For a book that centres around a fatal motor crash that occurs during a motor rally Dr Priestly Lays a Trap, the American title, otherwise known as The Motor Rally Mystery, the fifteenth in Rhode’s Dr Priestley series originally published in 1933, is a rather pedestrian affair. There are rather too few suspects to make it a riveting mystery and the storyline is set up to demonstrate the brilliance of the amateur sleuth, Launcelot Priestley, and the naïve approach of the investigating policeman, Inspector Hanslet of the Yard. It only livens up, and then only a tad, when Priestley sets a trap to make the culprit reveal their identity, almost killing himself and his colleagues in the process.

The story is not without its moments of interest, not least the setting which is the first motor rally to be staged by the Royal Automobile Club, which took place in 1932. It was not a rally as we would know it today but the competitors were required to complete a course of approximately 1,000 miles, at a nowadays stately and incomprehensible average speed of twenty-five miles per hour. The course finished at Torquay and competitors had a choice of nine starting points with a starting time allocated to them. Their cars were allocated unique numbers.

Along the way there were control points strategically placed at various towns where the competitors were required to produce their route books, sign them, and have them stamped. Bob Holden, with Richard Gateman on board as second driver and Priestley’s secretary, Harold Merewether as navigator, entered his Armstrong Siddeley, was allocated a race number of 513 and a start time of 8.45pm on May 1st from Bath. The shortest route he could take was via Norwich, Kendal, Droitwich and Moorchester and his scheduled arrival time was 12.57pm on the 3rd.

Having been delayed by fog, Holden and crew came across a fellow competitor who, along with his companion, had been involved in a fatal accident. The car bore the number 514 and had set off fifteen minutes ahead of Holden. The number makes the identity of the casualties easy and the route books allow for a Freeman Wills Croft-like reconstruction of the route travelled and likely stopping points and times where Lessingham’s car could have been substituted and a vital pin tampered with.

Having initially thought that the case was pretty open and shut Hanslet’s eyes are opened to the possibility that Lessingham and Purvis were the victims of murder but by whom and why? Lessingham had died intestate and Purvis was his next of kin, a moot point that interests the family solicitor, Farrant, and becomes potentially more germane when a distant relative emerges whose husband is in financial difficulties. That Lessingham’s real car is found within a mile of their property is sufficient to satisfy Hanslet who the culprit is. Priestley, though, begs to disagree.

It is a case of a jealous husband out for revenge and hangs on an injudicious set of letters and a missing map book. The trap is amusingly ingenious, requiring Gateman to dress in drag and fight off the unwanted advances of a local, but for all his brilliance Priestley almost fatally underestimates the reaction of the person caught in his trap. However, all works out well in the end and Priestley is able to chalk up another victory over the unfortunate Hanslet.

This is all routine stuff and makes the book one for the completist rather than a must read. The insights into motoring at (ahem) high speed offers some mild interest, though.

A Quid

We are moving inexorably towards a cashless society, with around 39% of adults in the UK living without cash in 2023 and just 12% of all payments made with cash. According to UK Finance one third of UK adults now use mobile contact payments at least once a month. That said, a recent KPMG survey revealed that 77% of respondents would be concerned if the UK went completely cashless and 53% revealed that they still used cash at least once a week.

The reasons for the flight from cash are fairly clear: the closure of banks, the reduction in the numbers of Automatic Teller Machines, the increase in online shopping, the ease and convenience of digital payments, post-Covid concerns about the cleanliness of cash and the move by many businesses to a card first approach. Some, if not all, of these reasons feed into a vicious circle which will inevitably lead to the further marginalization of cash.

For some of us, though, there is something nostalgic and reassuring about a pocketful of change. A piece of plastic 85.6mm wide and 53.98mm tall might be light and convenient but it will never endear itself like our quids, bobs, and tanners. I came across a tin of pre-decimalisation coins and notes the other day and was immediately overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia and curiosity, suddenly realizing that I had no idea how they had earned their nicknames.

Take a quid, the slang term for a pound, which has been in use in English since at least 1661. The first pounds were known as Sovereigns and then Guineas, the latter later being used to denote twenty-one shillings. Where quid was derived form remains shrouded in mystery. Some, including Brewster’s, think that its origins lie in the Latin phrase, quid pro quo, where something is given in exchange for something else, in this context a good or service for the proffering of a note. A variant theory is that it came from the notation “quid”, from the Latin for something, used by London Goldsmiths to mark on receipts and promissory notes they issued in lieu of their deposited gold.

Continuing the Italian theme, others think that the term was brought over by Italian immigrants and was a corruption of the term “scudo”, the term used to denote gold and silver coins in Italy from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Alternatively, it might have come from the Gaelic cuid which is a portmanteau word to describe a thing, a piece, a possession, a thingummybob. It is said that Irish soldiers in the British Army referred to their pay as “mo chuid” and that the native English-speaking soldiers bastardised it to quid to mean a pound.

Another theory is that it is an abbreviation of the Wiltshire village of Quidhampton where was sited a paper mill that produced the paper upon which notes were printed when Britain adopted the promissory note system in 1797. This has sparked a lively debate, the consensus being that while the Quidhampton Paper Mill did exist and did produce paper for banknotes for several centuries, it was later known as Overton Paper Mill and lay between the villages of Quidhampton and Overton, west of Basingstoke in Hampshire. It was established by the Portal family who also owned and operated the Laverstoke mill, another mill producing paper for notes and now the site of the Bombay Sapphire gin distillery.    

Take your pick.

Evil Under The Sun

A review of Evil Under The Sun by Agatha Christie – 250427

Some Agatha Christie plot lines are so well known from TV and film adaptations that it takes the fun out of spotting the whodunit when you come to read the book. Take Evil Under the Sun, the twenty-third in her Poirot series originally published in 1941. I had recently watched the 1982 film starring Peter Ustinov and so the general drift of the plot was familiar, although the book was somewhat more nuanced.

The setting is the fictional Smugglers Island near Leathercombe Bay in Devon, where Poirot has chosen to spend a holiday. A holiday resort allows the author to assemble a motley collection of guests that would not normally have been together, one of whom is a femme fatale, the beautiful former actress, Arlena Marshall. The latest man to have fallen under her spell is Patrick Redfern, much to the chagrin and disgust of his wife, Christine. Arlena’s husband, Kenneth, is a taciturn but proud man who has much to put up with and his daughter from a previous marriage, Linda, cannot abide her.

The book starts off with a meditation on the ever presence of evil, the title comes from a gloss of a quotation from Ecclesiastes, and a couple of observations that are telling as the story unfolds, that bodied of sunbathers stretched out on their loungers look very similar and that a holiday place offers an ideal spot for murder as guests mingle and have to account for themselves in ways they could not in the workplace or at home.

Of course, it is not long before Arlena’s body is found in the remote Pixy Cove by Patrick Redfern and Emily Brewster. She had been strangled and the presumption of the police and perhaps Poirot is that the culprit is a man because of the size of the marks left on the victim’s neck. Needless to say, though, there are females amongst the guests who have suspiciously large hands, as Poirot notes.

What is notable about this story is that Christie sets up red herring after red herring, designed to distract the reader from what is really a fairly elementary plot. Christine, for example, is said to be afraid of heights and cannot sunbathe and while the initial portrayal of Arlena is that of a home wrecker but the truth in this instance is far from that and what are we to make of Rosamund Darnley’s resuscitated crush for Kenneth, motive enough, perhaps, to do with the wife in the way of her ambitions?

There is also drug running, a fanatical priest who had a spell in a mental institution and regards Arlena as the manifestation of pure evil, and some unexplained murders of women in Surrey by strangulation to throw into the mix, but it is the little troubling things, the pieces that do not seem to fit into a jigsaw, that Poirot exercises his little grey cells on; a pair of scissors, a broken pipe stem, a bottle carelessly discarded from a window, a green calendar, a packet of candles, a mirror and typewriter, a skein of wool, a wristwatch, the whiff of a distinctive perfume, Arlena’s diminished bank account, and a midday bather who will not come clean.

Poirot, with his habit of being at the right place at the right time and with no shame in unobtrusively overhearing other people’s conversations, eventually puts the disparate pieces into a credible whole and unmasks the culprits of Arlena’s murder and solves the Surrey cases too. His suggestion that his group of suspects go on a picnic provides a vital clue as well as offering a change from his usual tactic of confronting them in a room.

The ending is a bit lame, a tragedy averted and the rekindling of a love affair, but overall it is an enjoyable, easy read and one of Christie’s better novels.

Website Of The Week (6)

One of the defining characteristics of a human being is their innate nosiness, always keen to know what other people are doing. Totalitarian governments thrive on it. WhaTheHellArePplDoing is a website that panders to this need, albeit with a global perspective.

Providing what it calls “live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics & simulated day/night cycles”, as well as providing a rolling total of the global population figure with a calculated birth rate and death rate per second, it then provides an estimate of the number of people engaged in various broadbrush activities. These include sleeping, family care, paid work, leisure, education, nutrition and being intimate. It even tells you how many people are frittering their time by clicking on to their website.

Who thought the world needed this?

Snails Of The Week

I hesitate to write about snails, an earlier piece attracting the attention of a journalist from The Washington Post and causing a bit of a furore. Nevertheless, this is a story that I could not resist.

Business rates in Britain are paid by the tenant when the building is occupied and by the owner when the premises lie vacant. If the owner runs what is termed an “agricultural facility”, then neither party has to pay. With occupation rates on office space still recovering from the post-Covid working from home epidemic, some enterprising owners are turning to hiring out their space to “snail farms”.

Heliciculture is a relatively quick business to set up, requiring little capital and running costs are low and has a low environmental impact. A study by Scotland’s Rural College estimated that one person working full-time could cultivaste around 200,00 snails. Many UK snail farms concentrate on producing edible snails, especially the Helix Aspersa Escargot, also known as the Petit Gris.

However, snail farms are also being used solely for tax efficiency reasons, often consisting of a few sealed boxes containing a handful of the gastropods which are then reared, enough for the owners to claim an exemption from business rates, the ultimatr in shell companies, you might say.

The practice is becoming so rife that Westminster Council have calculated that the ruse has cost them more than £280,000 in lost revenue. Where there is a tax, someone will always find a loop hole.

The Case Of The Russian Cross

A review of The Case of the Russian Cross by Christopher Bush – 250425

To use a cricketing analogy, apt as some of the action takes place in the environs of Lord’s, when a batsman approach a landmark, they like to do it with style. In The Case of the Russian Cross, the fiftieth in his long-running Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1957 and reissued by Dean Street Press, Bush hits the ball out of the ground for a six.

Those familiar with the works of Bush will be unsurprised to find him introducing three seemingly unconnected themes, following the Sibelian practice of introducing various short themes which may seem wholly unconnected but which by the end have been fused together into a satisfying whole, as he quotes from some programme notes in his preface. The strands are a blackmail attempt, the theft of some jewels including diamonds from the eponymous Russian Cross, and a murder.

In addition there are some familiar leitmotifs, a body badly charred found in the remains of a bonfire, see The Case of the Burnt Bohemian, Bush’s ongoing fascination with the fact that women change their hair colouring, see The Case of the Housekeeper’s Hair and others, and a clue that has lain staring in Travers’ face which had it been recognised at the time would have foreshortened the case considerably. The elements may be familiar and well-tested but like a master architect it is what he does with the same materials that shows his skills.

A change at the top at the Yard with the appointment of Forlin as the new Commander Crime sees Ludovic Travers out in the cold, a stickler for the proper and the conventional having no truck with the efforts of a dilettante amateur. Wharton is still in situ but plays a much reduced role in the story although he finesses a pleasing result at the end. The source of the three short themes is Travers’ other role, that of owner and Chairman of the Broad Street Detective Agency.

The first case is ultimately not pursued as Travers has reservations about his two clients, a Mrs Penford and a famous artist, Brian Sigott. The second comes from the Agency’s relationship with the United Assurance insurance company to look into the theft of some jewels that belong to a game old woman, Alyssia Rimmell, who later becomes the second murder victim. There is an unusual feature in the case in that an early photograph of the Russian Cross which Rimmell wore at a ball 60 years ago seems to show the diamonds missing while the wearer is adamant that they were there, a conundrum which is neatly and ingeniously explained as the case moves to its denouement.

The third is a request by Lilli North, a blonde Danish woman or so she says, to follow James Hover following his release from prison and advise her where he is staying that night. After a chase around London visiting places that have associations with other strands of the plot, the charred body Hover is ultimately found. This brings the Yard into the story in the form of Chief Inspector Jewle. Travers’ relationship with him is not as competitive as that with Wharton but, nevertheless, Travers treads a fine line between obstructing the police in their enquiries by withholding elements of what he knows to maintain the Agency’s advantage in resolving the mystery.

In his own measured way Bush moves with the times. There is a darker edge to the story. We no longer inhabit the corridors of the country house, hobnobbing with the leisured classes. We are now immersed into a world of con artists, pornographers, and blackmailers and Travers himself seems to have evolved into a more worldly wise character. It was good to see his wife, Bernice, play a more active role, even if her role is to play a part that conventionally would be assigned to a woman.

An impressive book which shows that even at the age of 72, there is still plenty of life left in Bush yet!

Why Pink For Girls And Blue For Boys?

Gender is a hot topic at the moment but one of the earliest form of gender stereotyping that a newborn or young child experiences is the colour of the clothing we dress them in. Why is pink deemed appropriate for girls and blue for boys and when did this convention first start?

Looking at photographs of young children from the 19th century one of the striking things is the clothing they are dressed. Invariably, irrespective of sex, they are clothed in white dresses, usually made of linen. There were practical reasons for this practice: firstly, the freedom of movement offered by a dress made it easier for the parents to deal with the messy business of urination and excretion before the child was toilet trained and, secondly, at a time when clothing was expensive, it offered considerably more room for growth.

At some point in the boy’s development, certainly after they had been successfully toilet trained and often considerably later than that, when they had attained the age of reason, considered to be about seven, they graduated into trousers, a process known as breeching. To mark the boy’s transition into adult garb, in the 19th century he would be photographed standing with his father and often he would receive small gifts and be paraded to friends, neighbours, and relatives to show off their new trousers. For many working class children, though, the donning of trousers marked the start of a working life.   

That the timing of the transition was arbitrary and solely down to the judgment of the parents is graphically illustrated in a passage in Book 6 of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1761). The eponymous hero’s father, Walter, decides that it is time to dress him in breeches, a decision only reached after a long debate on the pros and cons with his wife.

By the early 20th century, though, in most western countries infants were being dressed along gender lines, dresses for girls and trousers for boys, but there was little differentiation in colour. This all changed when the marketeers realized that by associating a particular colour with a certain sex they could increase the amount of clothing they could sell. A colour convention would make it difficult for parents to use the same clothing between sexes. But which colours?

The debate on the subject began with an article in 1890 in Ladies’ Home Journal which claimed that “pure white is used for all babies. Blue is for girls, and pink is for boys when a colour is wished”. This reversal of what we consider to be the norm was picked up by  the trade journal Earnshaw’s Infant Department which noted that “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”.

In 1927 Time magazine published a chart showing the colours appropriate to each sex according to major American department stores. Filene’s in Boston, Best & Co in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland, and Marshall Field in Chicago all told parents to dress boys in pink. But this was by no means a national standard. In Los Angeles pink was preferred for boys but in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Manhattan the preference was for blue.

We will examine what is really going on here next time.

Footsteps In The Dark

A review of Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer – 250422

When I download a book on to my Kindle I take it on trust that what has been delivered is the novel that I was anticipating. While I was reading Footsteps in the Dark, the first in Georgette Heyer’s country house mysteries originally published in 1932, the thought struck me whether it was really by Heyer and not an errant copy of an Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. It is full of blundering amateurs on an adventure trying to unmask the identity of the Monk, a ghost who is making their life in their new home a misery.

For fans of ghost stories there is much to like in this tale. Who can resist an old house which has lain empty for some time until its new residents take residence after inheriting it from a late uncle with its own live-in ghost, a warren of secret passages, a priest hole complete with a skeleton and a skull that bounces down the stairs? Into this maelstrom of spooky happenings step the plucky Margaret, the epitome of the British spirited woman, her sister, Celia, and brother, Peter. The quintet is completed by Celia’s husband, Charles, and the redoubtable, no-nonsense Aunt Lilian.

While not aristocrats our protagonists are upper middle class and are portrayed as being a cut above the representatives of the lower classes, the butler Bowers and his wife, and the bumbling slow-witted village bobby, Flinders. Social life consists of evening soirees and games of bridge with some of the local bigwigs including Colonel Ackerley, the vicar and his wife, and the eccentric entomologist, Ernest Titmarsh.

The grounds of the Priory seem to be a thoroughfare at night and someone who seems to be at the centre of much of the action is the shadowy Michael Strange whom all, with the exception of Margaret, view with suspicion. Add into the mix a local pub with an unfeasibly large electricity plant and a busy clientele, a part-time vacuum salesman with a criminal background, and an eccentric French painter, M Duval, shake vigorously and see what transpires. The production of counterfeit money, the 1930s equivalent of a cannabis factory prhaps.

As a mystery it is rather disappointing. The identity of the Monk who murders Duval is easy to spot, a rather massive clue given fairly on in the narrative, and one of the notable features of Heyer’s approach to detective fiction is her willingness to sprinkle very heavy hints at various points in the narrative rather than to hold her cards close to her chest. A sign of inexperience or a deliberate strategy, who knows?

Equally, it is easy to work out who Strange really is and what his role is. He is portrayed as a rather blinkered individual, eyes set rigidly on the chase to the exclusion of pretty much, but not quite everything, else. He does find time to sweep Margaret off her feet in the strangest and most English of engagement scenes. Heyer, the doyenne of romantic historical novels, cannot resist adding a spot of romance although to modern eyes it does seem a little quirky. Had Strange been more open with the Famous Five his task might have been made easier.

The book also adopts a rather leisurely pace and a sharper focus could easily have reduced the number of pages by a third or so. That said, if you are looking for an undemanding, mildly entertaining page turner, then this fits the bill. It is very much of its time, but none the worse for that.

Tickling – Its Serious Side

In On The Parts of Animals, Aristotle considered tickling to be one of the defining and unique qualities of a human being. “When people are tickled”, he wrote, “they quickly burst into laughter, and this is because the motion quickly penetrates to this part, and even though it is only gently warmed, still it produces an independent movement in the intelligence which is recognisable”. Other animals might have more advanced senses of smell or hearing, but due to the delicate nature of our skin man’s sense of touch is the most fine-tuned, he argued.

Later scientific research has demonstrated that Aristotle rather exaggerated the uniqueness of homo sapiens’ response to tickling. Monkeys have been found to be ticklish, rats make a laughter-like, ultra-sonic chirping when tickled, and many pet owners are gratified by the response of their cats or dogs to time spent tickling them. Famously, the trout falls into a trance-like state when their underbelly is lightly rubbed making it easier to catch, something Maria remarked upon while preparing to trick Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c1601); “lie thou there; for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling”.

The paradox of tickling, a delightful sensation that can soon turn into something excruciating, offered some philosophers a way to differentiate between different forms of pleasure. In the 17th century Spinoza, for example, drew a distinction between hilaritas, an overall sense of joy and well-being, and titillatio, which was localised to a specific part of the body. Tickling a sensitive part of the body sends a dopamine rush to the brain, offering the sensation of excitement and titillation, even sexual excitement.

The use of tickling as a prelude to sexual arousal was taken to extremes in the Muscovite palaces where many of the Czarinas employed eunuchs and women as full-time foot ticklers. Anna Leopoldovna (1718 – 1746) is reputed to have had at least six ticklers attending to her feet, telling bawdy tales and singing obscene songs as they went about their duties. Seeming strange to modern sensibilities, nevertheless like the English monarchs’ Groom of the Stool, it was a prestigious and influential role.

Tickling has its darker side, though. The idiom “tickled to death” first appears in English in the early 19th century, a fate which Nietzsche, perhaps ironically, considered to be “the best life”, echoing a sentiment expressed a couple of centuries earlier by John Selden in Table-Talk (1689). “To him that dies”, he wrote, “it is all one whether it be by a penny halter, or a silk garter; yet I confess the silk garter pleases more; and like trouts, we love to be tickled to death”.

In Innuit folklore the Mahaha is a thin sinewy creature, ice-blue in colour, cold to the touch, with white eyes protruding through long stringy hair. Always smiling and giggling it wanders around the Arctic regions taking delight in tickling its victims to death. The faces of its victims all have a twisted, frozen smile on their faces.

Tickling was used as a form of torture in the courts of the Chinese Han Dynasty. It was a punishment reserved for the nobility as it left no marks and the victim would recover relatively quickly. In Japan one of the punishments that could be inflicted on those found guilty of a crime that fell outside of the criminal code was kusuguri-zeme, merciless tickling.

Amongst the indignities that those consigned to a spell in the stocks suffered, according to an article entitled England in Old Times published in the New York Times on November 13, 1887, was an assault by “small but fiendish boys”, who would remove the miscreants’ shoes and tickle “the soles of their defenceless feet”.

The Illustrated Police News carried the strange story of Michael Puckridge in its edition of December 11, 1869. Claiming to have found a cure for his wife’s varicose veins, strapped her to a plank and proceeded to tickle her to the point of insanity. The poor woman spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum, varicose veins and all. The French physician Laurent Joubert reported in Traité du Ris (1579) that a young man was so enthusiastically tickled by two young girls that he seemed to swoon and rendered incapable of speech. To their horror they found that he had died of asphyxiation.

While the examples of people being tickled to death are mercifully rare, the areas of the body that are most sensitive to tickling, such as the stomach, under the ribs, armpits, neck, and feet, are also the most vulnerable in combat. This observation led the psychiatrist Donald Black to opine that children, when engaging in tickle fights or responding to someone tickling them, are actually learning to protect those parts, a vestige of a survival technique.

Scandalize My Name

A review of Scandalize My Name by Fiona Sinclair – 250417

Fiona Sinclair was an actress married to a doctor and Scandalize My Name, originally published in 1960 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is her one and only shot at crime fiction. Sadly, she died a year after its publication and we will never know how proficient a writer she could have been. Although no classic, this book shows considerable promise.

The opening chapter left me bewildered, too many characters to get my head around introduced at too fast a pace, but once the narrative settled down they began to fall into place and their respective importance and relevance to the development of the plot became clearer. It is the story of the murder of a blackmailer, Ivan Sweet, found dead in the bath, having been poisoned, the toxin introduced into his pot of cream he routinely had on a Saturday morning and which was, conveniently, left as usual in a communal but discreet place.

Blackmailers are hard to sympathise with and Ivan is a particularly unpleasant piece of work who winkles out dark secrets and uses his knowledge to feather his own nest. With a private income of his own, his blackmailing is as muc for pleasure as it is out of financial necessity. A tenant occupying the basement of the Southey’s house, Magnolia House, in the north London suburbs, his death occurs on the eve of Elaine Southey’s 21st birthday.

Most of the other occupants of the house, including the tenant of the attic, Naomi Moore, and the other attendees of the party have reason enough to hate Sweet and possibly even to kill him. Just for good measure, there is his impoverished brother living a hand-to-mouth with a wife and small children in tow, the beneficiary if anything happens to Sweet.

The task of establishing who killed Sweet and why falls to Superintendent Paul Grainger of the Yard, an urbane, empathetic policeman who takes his time to establish a rapport with witnesses and suspects alike. No lover of blackmailers, he shows a great deal of sympathy for Sweet’s victims as he painfully confronts them with their secrets and there is no doubting whose side he is on. However, as custodians of the law he and his able if rudely hewn Scottish assistant, Sergeant McGregor, have their duty to do, no matter how distasteful.

Fortunately, the culprit is the least likeable, and I am afraid to say, the most obvious of the suspects and has the grace to do away with themselves in the dramatic finale, saving Grainger the distasteful task of bringing them to book. Talking of which, it is a set of expensively bound books found among Sweet’s possessions that puts Grainger on the track of the killer and raises the delicious prospect of the blackmailer himself being the victim of another blackmailer for an indiscretion that led to his possessing his comfortable private income.

There is a little too much of the important investigations performed off camera for my liking, meaning that the motivation, other than the broad brush of blackmail, is difficult to fathom. What I found interesting was that Sinclair allowed herself space in her novel to indulge in some florid prose and explore some byways.

We are treated to a powerfully graphic and gruesome postmortem, drawing upon her insider knowledge courtesy of hubby, some fascinating ruminations on Stonehenge and some glowing descriptions of the countryside. Along the way we visit a mental institution, ponder on how a change in the law came too late to save William Southey from his awful marital dilemma, and a disturbed young woman with previous.

Detective fiction is not all procedure and process, a conveyor belt of suspects to interview. A good read.