Martin Fone's Blog, page 163

The West Pier

The West Pier – Patrick Hamilton

I first came across Patrick Hamilton some years ago when I read his Hangover Square. He is another writer who has fallen out of fashion, but his legacy lives on through the modern predilection for the term gaslighting which came from his novel, Gaslight. Published in 1951, although set in the period between 1914 and 1921, The West Pier introduces us to Ernest Ralph Gorse and is now regarded as the first of the Gorse Trilogy. Hamilton intended a fourth volume, although his death from alcoholism prevented him finishing the series off.   

The West Pier in the title is the famous structure at Brighton, the town in which the book is set. At the time it had a reputation as a place where young men and women met in the prospect of some romantic attachment. Gorse is what we would now know as a psychopath, although Hamilton makes no attempt to psycho-analyse the monster that he is portraying. Gorse has no redeeming features, the classic anti-hero, a monster who draws the reader in to find out what his devious and sadistic mind will turn to next and whether his hapless victims will eventually have the sense to realise what is happening to them. Hamilton’s commentary does not attempt to rehabilitate Gorse, but to emphasise the downwards trajectory of his behaviour.

In essence, the book focuses on two short periods of Gorse’s early life. The first is when he is at school with two of his friends, Ryan and Bell. Even at an early age Gorse displays an unfeeling attitude towards others and a cruel streak exhibited, initially, in a cruel joke when he puts a boy’s prized torch into another boy’s pocket and stands by to watch the accusation of theft. The second example is more disturbing and a harbinger of what to come when he lures a young girl into a shed and ties her up.

It is tempting to see Hamilton painting the young Gore as a proto fascist. The victim of his torch trick happens to be a Jewish boy. Although far too young to serve in the First World War, he is fascinated by military uniforms and enjoys mindless army drills. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, although by the time Hamilton wrote this, the consequences of fascism were there for all to see.

The second time we see Gorse is when he returns to Brighton on holiday, again with Ryan and Bell. They wander down to the West Pier in the hopes of encountering young girls and soon pick up Esther and Gertrude. Both Ryan and Gorse fancy Esther and while she recognises that Ryan is the better catch, she falls under Gorse’s spell. Gorse engages in a two-pronged attack to break up the Ryan-Esther relationship by sending a series of anonymous notes, planting the seeds of doubt in their minds about the fitness of the other, and to relieve Esther of her life savings which she foolishly boasted about in an early encounter when he treated her to a drink in a posh hotel, the Metropole.

Gorse’s campaign is successful. While the reader is invited to express disgust at Gorse’s behaviour it is difficult to find much sympathy for Esther. How could she be so stupid? But that is the way a confidence trickster works, making their victim seem loved and valued only to destroy their self-worth with a cruel trick. In the scheme of things Gorse’s fraud is small beer, but confidence tricks of this nature are the meat and drink of the fraudster. Hamilton’s insight into the workings of a fraudster are as relevant today as they were then, even if the medium of the fraud has changed.

Easy to read and with flashes of wit, it was an enjoyable and slightly disturbing read. I shall follow Ernest Ralph Gorse into his next adventure.

The Dark Garden

The Dark Garden – E R Punshon

This is the 16th book in Ernest Punshon’s Bobby Owen series, set in June 1940 and published in 1941, and is set in Wychshire, to whose force Bobby Owen has been seconded from Scotland Yard. As there is a war on, we find him short-handed and struggling to keep up with the paperwork that the new wartime regulations bring along with them. He has little time for a local farmer, Osman Ford, who alleges that the local solicitor, Nathaniel Anderson, is refusing to hand over to him the money from his wife’s legacy and believes that it has been misappropriated. Ford gives the impression of being a hasty, intemperate man.

A little later, Anderson is found dead with a bullet lodged in the back of his head. Has Ford taken his revenge, knowing that the other partner would be more sympathetic to releasing the money? What seems, initially, a fairly simple case becomes more complex at every turn. It seems that Anderson was not a popular man, had his own dark secret (he was living in sin with a girl from the office, Anne Earle (gasp!) and there were several in his office who had a grudge against him and a credible motive for doing away with him. Owen has his work cut out to make sense of the web of intrigue and, given his staffing problems, has to do much of the leg work himself. Money, though, is the root of all evil and following it may just hold the key to the mystery.

In truth, I sensed who the killer was fairly early on in the course of the story, despite Punshon’s best efforts to throw unexpected twists into the narrative. From what seemed a fairly unpromising premise, he did manage to hold my interest as Owens investigations threw up more motives and secrets in a community that was full of characters seething with passions, obsessions, and jealousies. It read more as a thriller than a straight-forward piece of detective fiction and was none the worse for that.

There were two features in the book that rescued it from being just an OK novel. The first was the denouement which was a well-written and dramatic set piece in which all the key suspects, including the culprit, were, somewhat improbably, blundering around in the dark in a deserted garden. There were lashings of melodrama and even a little humour, whether intentional or not, as Owen finally pulls all the pieces together and makes sense of it all.

The other was the character of Anne Earle. Her lover had been killed and she was determined to bring his killer to justice, even if she had to do it herself. An intense, spirited woman who, rather like a Fury from Greek myth, will stop at nothing. Her story is more complex, though, than she realises, and its resolution is the sort of material that Sophocles and Euripides would have made a masterpiece of.

Punshon is a sadly neglected writer and his Bobby Owen stories provide the sort of escapism that appeals even to a modern readership. Dean Street Press are to be commended for plucking him out of obscurity with their reissues.

The Mystery Of The Peacock’s Eye

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye – Brian Flynn

Take a pinch of Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, stir in some of Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone, and add a murder in a dentist’s chair, and let settle before cooking. What you get is this humdinger of a book, as good a piece of detective fiction as I have read in a long while. Perhaps the crime of the 20th century is that the inestimable Brian Flynn has languished in obscurity until recently, when thanks the laudable efforts of The Puzzle Doctor and the wonderful Dean Street Press hi novels have been reissued for a modern audience. If you do not read any other of Flynn’s books, read this.

Published in 1928 it is the third novel in the series involving Flynn’s amateur sleuth, Anthony Bathurst. There are three seemingly unconnected strands running through the book; at the Hunt Ball in Westhampton Sheila Delaney dances with a stranger, Mr X, who departs mysteriously; some months later the Crown Prince of Clorania approaches Bathurst as he is being blackmailed ahead of his forthcoming marriage for an indiscretion; Chief Inspector Bannister’s holiday is interrupted as he is required to investigate the death of a young woman, killed in the consulting room after the dentist found himself locked in the storeroom – yes, identical to Thynne’s plotting four years later. Are these events connected?

Of course they are and Bathurst, who attaches himself to the investigation as the representative of the Crown Prince, and Bannister, who is soon to retire, find themselves on the hunt for a ruthless killer. To add a touch of exotica to the proceedings, there is an Indian on the scene hunting down a fabulous jewel, the Peacock’s Eye, which was looted by some young British officer out in the Raj.

Bannister and Bathurst follow separate courses as they carry out their investigations and much of the book is made up with interviews of suspects and/or witnesses. Each serves the purpose of either throwing up a red herring or adding a discreetly hidden clue to the story. This is another one of the books where the clever amateur seems to make more progress than the plodding professional, but in this case their may be more to it than intellectual gravitas.

The ending of the book serves up as big a surprise as you can imagine and it took me by so much surprise that I decided I would re-read the final few chapters to see if I had missed anything. To be fair to Flynn, I had. There was just one imperceptible hint dropped when Flynn was narrating the travel arrangements of the parties on a boat to Amsterdam. It was easy to miss it but it was vitally important. Having missed it first time round, I had the satisfaction of being floored by something that I had not seen coming but on the second reading, I could appreciate the sheer brilliance and audacity of pulling off the stunt.

The book is beautifully written and flawlessly and ingeniously plotted. It stands head and shoulders amongst anything I have read in the last year and it deserves to be known and appreciated by a much wider audience. A first-class book.

The Lost Game Of Suffragetto

These days you can engage in political activism from the comfort of your own armchair by pounding away at social media. A century or so ago the only way was to go out on to the streets and run the risk of arrest or a bump on the head from a policeman’s truncheon. The fight for women’s suffrage was heating up in the first decade of the 20th century and whilst there many women prepared to risk liberty and limb to carry their fight in orthodox ways to the authorities, many others were precluded either by their nature, geographic distance or pressure from their families from following suit. One way to experience the thrills and spills of demonstrating your support for suffragism (or, indeed, your opposition to it) was to play a board game.

One that would suit a budding suffragette was one produced by Sargeant Brother Limited for the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1908 as a novel way to raise funds for the cause. Called Suffragetto, it came in a plain box with red borders, with the game’s name emblazoned in red and the enticing slogans of “the very latest craze” and “an interesting and original game of skill between suffragettes and policemen, for two players” in an olive script.

The game came with a board which represented the streets of Edwardian London around the Houses of Parliament and the Albert Hall, which was the suffragettes’ base. The player representing the suffragettes, you can imagine that this honour was keenly fought over, played with sixteen green (representing the rank and file) and five purple (the leaders) markers while the other player was armed with 16 blue (constables) and 5 white (inspectors) markers representing the forces of male oppression aka the police. Suffragettes start the game on squares marked “S” and

The objective of the game for the suffragettes was to evade the police lines and break through into the Houses of Parliament whilst preventing the police from disrupting their rally at the Albert Hall. The winner was the first to get six of their markers into their opponent’s building. Players took it in turns to reposition a marker, either by moving one square horizontally or diagonally or by hopping over another marker into an unoccupied space.

If the marker you hopped over belonged to your opponent, they were either arrested, if a suffragette, and sent to the prison or injured, if a policeman, and taken to hospital. An inspector or leader could arrest or injure any of their opponent’s markers, but the constables could only arrest the rank and file and vice versa. If, at any point, there were twelve or more inmates in the prison or hospital, then either player could insist on an exchange of six of fewer. Each prisoner or police officer exchanged had to be of equal value, a leader for an Inspector or a member of the rank and file for a constable.

And that seemed to be it. It was a game of strategy with a twist, enabling the players to re-enact the battle of wits that was being played out on the streets. The only known surviving copy of the game is held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If you have a complete set lying about in the attic it will be worth a small fortune. A curious period piece, indeed.

Severance Pay Of The Week

Leaving a job is never easy but when Andreas Flatten left his employment at a car workshop in the American state of Georgia, he had difficulty in getting his final pay cheque.

His employer finally relented and paid the $915 due to him but there was a sting in the tail. It was dumped on his drive, over 90,000 cent piece coins covered in a greasy, oily substance with his payslip and a message which we can assume did not wish him well in his future employment.

As well as leaving a nasty stain on the driveway, it took Andreas hours to clean the coins before he could wheel them to a bank. Looking on the bright side, he had nothing else to do.

Covid-19 Tales (18)

The pandemic may curtail human activities, but animals still do what animals do. The herd of 75 cows at the Citeaux Abbey, just south of Dijon, still keep chomping on the grass and need to be milked. The enterprising Cistercian monks turn the milk into award-winning raw-milk, semi-soft disks of a refined creamy cheese in the Reblochon style. These are then sold on to restaurants or customers who visit their shop on the abbey grounds. It goes well on a tartiflette, I’m told.  

Since the pandemic struck, the monks have found that they had 2.8 tonnes of unwanted cheese on their hands, equating to about 4,000 cheeses. It was a growing and potentially stinky problem.

Calling upon divine inspiration or rather an internet start-up called Divine Box, which aims to help monastic institutions break into the world of internet trading, they have begun marketing the cheese on-line. The minimum order is two wheels of cheese costing €23.

Astonishingly, 2006.9 kilos of cheese were ordered within twenty-four hours, cleaning the monks out. More cheese will be available for sale on April13th, but hurry as they will fly off the virtual shelves.

The Lord truly moves in mysterious ways.

To find out more, follow the link below:

https://divinebox.fr/operation-fromage-abbaye-citeaux/

Cantering Through Cant (25)

If you are in a large crowd, it may be as well to find a Squire of Albatia. Such a worthy, according to Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), is “a weak, profligate spendthrift”. The Squire of the company is one who pays the whole reckoning or treats the company. Such generosity is known as standing squire and too much standing squire may result in a visit to a ten in the hundred, a userer. An interest rate of more than five in the hundred, Grose explains, being considered usurious interest.

Perhaps too long in the company of such reprobates will result in you wearing tears of the tankard, drippings of liquor on your waistcoat, and increase the chances of being a tenant at will, someone whose wife fetches him from the alehouse. It will also almost certainly result in the use of a tea voider, a chamber pot.

Physical characteristics rarely went unremarked upon. A squint-a-piper was a man or woman with a squint, who was said to “be born in the middle of the week, and looking both ways towards Sunday”. Alternatively, they were thought to have been born in a hackney coach, looking out of wither window at the same time. The attribute was ideal for a cook who was then able to have one eye on the pot and the other up the chimney. Another euphemism for a squint was to be “looking nine ways at once”.

Student discounts are nothing new. The practice of thirding was common in Grose’s time, where two-thirds of the original price is allowed by the upholsterers to the students for household goods returned to them within the year. I presume they had to have been returned in good condition.

Wicked Wolf Exmoor Gin

Irony is a well that is deep and never stops giving. Methodism, especially in the 19th century and really until very recently, has been associated with a commitment to total abstinence from drinking alcohol. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the Methodist chapel in the north Devon village of Brendon by the banks of the River Lyn on Exmoor had fallen into disuse and is now the site of the distillery that celebrates a different kind of spirit, Wicked Wolf Exmoor Gin.

The gin is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Pat Patel and Julie Heap who, after two years perfecting their perfect mix, launched the gin onto the crowded marketplace that the ginaissance has spawned in September 2015. There are eleven botanicals which go into the mix, each of which is prepared by hand, infused and distilled separately to produce eleven separate distillates which are then blended and distilled in a copper alembic still. The alembic still has three parts, the cucurbit where the liquid is heated or boiled, the anbik into which the vapour rises and then cools by contact with the walls and condenses before running down the spout into the receiver.

The process allows the distillers to put the exact amount of each botanical’s distillate into the mix leaving no room for a heavy hand or chance to upset the balance. At each stage of the process the gin to produce the finished article. The spirit which has an ABV of 42% is then bottled and labelled by hand in 100-litre batches.

The botanicals Wicked Wolf use are juniper, angelica, cardamom, coriander, cubeb, grains of paradise, hibiscus, Kaffir lime leaves, orange peel, lemon peel, and lemongrass. Their particular twist is to add some Asian notes and by replacing the usual liquorice with hibiscus they have introduced a honey-like sweetness to the drink.

The bottle is dumpy, made of clear, unembossed glass, with a medium sized neck and an artificial stopper. The labelling is rather subdued with a greenish-blue background, a wolf in full flight in white and wording in black. The labelling at the rear of the bottle tells me that it is “the Spirit of Exmoor”, a tag they have trademarked, and that the combination of botanicals used “balance fresh citrus and spicy pepper notes with the unique flavours of juniper and cardamom to produce a classic, premium gin”. If I had one criticism of the bottle, it is that it doesn’t stand out and looks a little shy on a crowded shelf.

The proof of the pudding, though, is in the eating so has this careful thought and preparation paid off? On removing the stopper, the aroma has that distinctive smell of juniper, with citrus notes and hint of floral elements. In the glass the clear spirit the principal notes are of fresh citrus and hibiscus with the earthier and spicier elements content to lurk deep in the background, only to emerge in the aftertaste.  

I much prefer my juniper to be at the fore but Wicked Wolf accentuates the more floral and exotic elements to produce a drink that is decidedly more to the contemporary side of the gin spectrum than a traditional London Dry. It makes for a refreshing, well-balanced drink, one that is smooth and undemanding and enhanced by the addition of a premium tonic. Rather like the bottle it comes in, it is a little reserved, almost self-conscious and there are punchier gins around. If, though, you like a more restrained drink, you will not go too far wrong with this.

Until the next time, cheers!

Death In The Dentist’s Chair

Death In The Dentist’s Chair – Molly Thynne

I hate going to the dentist and this book did nothing to assuage my dread of the experience. As well as the heightened anticipation of what is to befall me as I sit open-mouthed in the chair, I am hit with the realisation that I am at the mercy of the dentist. I have placed my faith implicitly in them. Published in 1932 Thynne’s murder takes place in a dentist’s chair, as the title suggests, and replicated the locus and method used by Brian Flynn in his The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye four years earlier, and, of course, the better-known dentist murder mystery is Agatha Christie’s much later, One Two, Buckle My Shoe from 1940.

The book’s opening tells the story through the eyes of Mr Cattistock who leaves the surgery of society dentist, Humphrey Davenport, having had several of his teeth removed. He is rather groggy, as well he might be. In the waiting room are the wife of a Hatton Garden jeweller, Lottie Miller, Sir Richard Pomfroy and the widow of a theatre owner, Mrs Vallon. Cattistock takes an instant dislike to Mrs Miller who is next to go into the consulting room. Davenport leaves her there to go to his workshop to adjust her dentures, gets locked in there and by the time he is released and returns to the room, Mrs Miller has had her throat slashed with a Chinese dagger.

As Cattistock leaves the premises, Thynne’s amateur sleuth, Dr Constantine, arrives for his own check-up. Naturally, he is a friend of the Scotland Yard officer in charge of investigations, D I Arkwright, and lends a hand. Just to add some further complexity into the case, one of the jewels Mrs Miller was wearing has gone missing and later in the book there is a further murder, again bearing all the hallmarks of being committed with a Chinese dagger. Whodunit and why?

All those on the premises at the time of the murder fall under suspicion either because they have some conceivable motive or their behaviour around the time of the murder seem suspicious. Despite plausibly being a suspect himself as he was on the premises, Constantine is not considered as the likely murderer. What it is to have friends in high places.

In some ways it is tempting to see Constantine, an elderly chess playing sleuth, as a Holmes manque and he does seem to treat the case as an intellectual puzzle. I was concerned as the book seemed to descend into a literary version of a game of Cluedo as each suspect has their alibis challenged, dissected, and accepted. Perhaps Thynne was conscious that the momentum of the book was waning, running the risk of losing the reader’s interest because the book suddenly lurches into action beyond the midway point.

The solution is ingenious and complex as Thynne drip feeds more and more of backstory into the narrative, requiring the reader to re-examine their preconceptions of each of the characters. There are no loose ends, as far as I could tell, and the reader could tell how Constantine reached his conclusions, which is all we can ask for.

What might otherwise would have been a tedious closed room murder mystery was ingeniously rescued and transformed into a riveting read.

Police At The At Funeral

Police at the Funeral – Margery Allingham

This is the fourth book in Allingham’s Albert Campion series, published in 1931, and the usual entertaining read. Here, Campion is not battling international gangs but rather battling to understand an eccentrically dysfunctional extended Cambridge family, the Faradays, and the murder of one of their members, Andrew Seeley.  

The book starts miles away from the dreaming spires of academe in a deserted passage in central London where Inspector Stanislaus Oates of the Yard, one of the Met’s so-called big five, seeks refuge from a man who appears to be stalking him. Coincidence of coincidences, the very place he seeks refuge is the spot where Campion, his old mucker, is meeting a woman who wants his help in solving a mysterious disappearance. To compound the coincidences, the man Oates is seeking to shake off is a Faraday who turns tale when he sees Joyce Blount, another member, the lady who has the assignation with Campion.

Campion accepts the brief but Seeleys’ disappearance takes a sinister turn when his body is fished out of the water, arms and legs bound, and with a gun shot wound administered at close quarters. He stays at the Faraday’s home in the wonderfully named Socrates Close, a name not without a hint of irony as we discover later in the book, which is run with a rod of iron by the formidable grande dame, Caroline Faraday. Also living there are her three grown up children, all in their way weak and content to spend their time quarrelling and bickering, together with Joyce, the niece of her late son-in-law, and Andrew.

The police investigation is headed by Oates and while he and Campion co-operate in the main, Campion is not averse to withholding a vital piece of evidence to give him the edge. As the investigation proceeds, there are two more deaths, Julia and George, both poisoned, and a near miss, bluff William, as there seems to be a concerted plan to eradicate the Faradays. The world would probably not be too bad a place afterwards if that were to happen, but murder is murder.

There are a number of suspects, each with motive aplenty to do away with members of the family, and all with seemingly cast-iron alibis, even the drunken George and his tramp-like companion, Beveridge. The bluff but engaging William was with Andrew at the time of his disappearance, but Campion seems convinced that he did not do it, even though he suffers from blackouts and cannot control his behaviour or remember what he has done.

As you would come to expect and hope, Campion arrives at the solution ahead of Oates, but as far as the reader is concerned, it requires a considerable leap of imagination to arrive at the right conclusion. Some of the clues you need to identify what happened to Seeley and who conducted a rampageous vendetta against the Faradays are there, but not all. Allingham does not play particularly fair with her readership.

I also thought that her characterisations were fairly weak, the Faradays, with the possible exception of the old lady and the entertaining William, are provided with just enough colour to make them interesting but not to invest any emotion in. Also, reflecting the attitudes that prevailed at the time, Allingham is not averse to making remarks that would make the politically correct blanche. On the plus side, though, Campion really comes to the fore in ways that he doesn’t in other books that I have read. He is a charming, suave, debonair, witty individual who can charm and tame old dragons like Caroline and earn their undying gratitude as well as solving the odd murder.

The book was entertaining enough and enjoyable, if you did not want to play sleuth. The title, though, is a mystery. Plenty of deaths and police, but no funerals!