Martin Fone's Blog, page 164

Catt Out Of The Bag

Catt Out Of The Bag – Clifford Witting

If you like your detective novels laced with humour and a smidgeon of social satire, then this 1939 book, the fourth in the Inspector Harry Charlton series and the first of Witting’s I have read, will be right up your alley. It is set in the Yuletide season and so if you are planning what to read in the festive season, then make a note. If like me, you don’t mind reading a good book out of the season, then grab a copy now. There is a cheap, very cheap, edition in Kindle format.

There are some unusual elements to the book. Initially, it sets out as a disappearance, with a presumption that the missing Mr Vavasour has been killed, and then only later on does it become clear that he has been done away with. The focus of the book switches from where is Mr Vavasour to a whodunit.

The second oddity is that there is no central sleuth charged with unravelling the mystery. An engaging but ultimately superfluous character, Raymond Cloud-Glevill, does the initial sleuthing in an enthusiastic and rather amateur way, although he does cover some of the initial groundwork of the case, albeit in a less efficient manner than the constabulary would have done. He is aided and abetted by the narrator, John Rutherford, who then takes over when Raymond exits stage left to only to reappear, unnecessarily, at the end.

Rutherford happens to be the nephew of Inspector Charlton who assumes control of the case when Vavasour’s wife reluctantly reports that her hubby is missing and Charlton and other members of the constabulary who flit in and out, with Rutherford in tow, see the case out to its bitter end. The story is narrated by Rutherford who is allowed to use his imagination to fill in the precise details of events that Charlton and others tell him or which he observed. This is a neat device that does not spoil the flow of the narrative.      

The Rutherfords are guests for the festive period of Sybil and Charles de Frayne in the fictional town of Paulsfield . Sybil de Frayne is a social climber, a busy-body, an organiser and a snob, reminiscent of Hyacinth Bucket, while Charles appears to be a long-suffering husband who has learnt enough ruses to keep his wife at bay. The group, minus Charles, are roped into walking around the town singing carols to raise monies for one of Sybil’s good causes. During the course of the evening one of the party, Mr Vavasour, disappears and two sets of footsteps are heard. It is only the following day that it is realised that Mr Vavasour has disappeared and that his wife is reluctant to involve the police. What has happened to him?

During the course of the investigations, it emerges that Mr Vavasour, whose real name is Thomas Catt, is a polygamist and has used his cod profession as a travelling salesman to visit his paramours. His disappearance and murder have a devastating effect on some of his female victims, leading one to commit suicide.

Sybil’s military planning of the itinerant carol service allows the authorities to be specific as to the time of Vavasour’s disappearance and murder and it narrows the field of suspects considerably. My sense is that Witting was anticipating that the eventual unmasking of the culprit would take the reader by surprise but having read many books of this type I had my suspicions early on as to the murderer’s identity.

Nonetheless, that did not spoil my enjoyment of the book. Witting has clearly enjoyed himself painting a picture of the awful Sybil and pokes fun at her pretensions. She is not a bad person, though, with a heart of gold but would have been a nightmare to know and live with. The Christmas celebrations, including John having to dress up as Father Christmas for a nightmare of a Christmas party for the local children also provides much humour.

I enjoyed the book, a perfect light, undemanding read.

Cherry Of The Week

A Sweet Stephany cherry, grown in an experimental cherry garden in Runco di Portomaggiore, a collaboration between the University of Bologna and Salvi Vivai, has just been crowned the world’s heaviest cherry. Part of their June 2020 it stood out from its peers. When put on the scales, Stefano Tartarini found that it weighed a whopping 0.93 ounces.

Rather like British exporters to the EU, the team had a mountain of paperwork to complete quickly to register it with Guinness World Record as the cherry was not expected to have a long shelf-life. It was the culmination of 10 years of work and, according to Tartarini, showed the relevance of their work.

I suppose it does if you like your cherries big.

Song Of The Week

Pity the Australian Regent Honeyeater, a distinctive black and yellow bird, of which only a few hundred now remain.

According to Dr Ross Crates from the Australian National University the key to their decline is that there are so few males around from whom the chicks can learn their mating songs. Increasingly, they have been reduced to mimicking the songs of friar birds and cuckoo shrikes and, understandably, the females are unimpressed.

Is it, though, a case of the chicken and the egg? Is it the case that there are just too few males anyway or is it there are few role models for the impressionable youngsters to imitate?

One of life’s mysteries, for sure.

Cantering Through Cant (24)

No one likes being taken for a ride in a commercial transaction. According to Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) a Smithfield bargain is one where the purchaser is taken in. It was a term also used to “express matches or marriages contracted solely on the score of interest, on one or both sides, where the fair sex are bought and sold like cattle in Smithfield”.

A sneak was a pilferer giving rise to a morning sneak, who pilfered in the morning before it was light and an evening sneak who pilfered in the evening, maybe because he was a slug-a-bed, unable to rise in the morning. An upright sneak pilfered pewter pots from boys employed by an alehouse to collect them up, while to go on the sneak was to steal into houses whose doors were left carelessly open.

Spanish was ready money, Spanish coin fair words or compliments, and Spanish faggot the sun. A Spanish padlock was a girdle which acted as a chastity belt while a Spanish worm was a nail encountered unexpectedly when a carpenter was sawing a plank of wood. Spanish gout was the pox and a Spanish trumpeter was a braying ass.

A specked wiper was a spotted handkerchief, something likely to be too flashy to be used by a apiritual flesh broker, a parson, but you could imagine used to mop the brow of a spoil iron, a blacksmith. Talking of clerics, best to avoid a spoil pudding, one “who preaches long sermons, keeping his congregation in church till the puddings are overdone“.

That’s my cue to sign off until next time.

Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Smithfield bargain, sneak, morning sneak, evening sneak, upright sneak, to go on the sneak, Spanish coin, Spanish faggot, Spanish padlock,

The Red Lacquer Case

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The Red Lacquer Case – Patricia Wentworth

Camberley-based writer, Patricia Wentworth, was nothing if not prolific, writing 66 books, thirty-two of which featured her most famous detective, Miss Silver. The Red Lacquer Case, published originally in 1924 and now reissued for a modern audience by the wonderful Dean Street Press, is outside of that series and can be best described as a thriller rather than a piece of detective fiction. The problem with prolific writers, I find, thinking immediately of Edgar Wallace and Georges Simenon, is that quality can be variable and plotting somewhat formulaic. Judging by this book the same could be said of Wentworth.

Don’t get me wrong, it is gripping enough and well-paced enough to make the reader want to carry on, but if you were searching for a book that would fit the description of a pot boiler with just enough about it to lift it above pulp fiction, this would be a prime candidate. It has got everything from a formula for a gas which if it fell into the wrong hands would threaten world peace, international spies and gangsters, patriotism, the obligatory love interest, an old, rambling country house to add a Gothic twist, a hand pressed against the window for the horror element, and rustic villagers to add comedic value.     

It is the misfortune of the heroine, Sally Meredith, to have an uncle, Fritzi Lasalle, who has developed the game-changing formula and is now so conscience-stricken that he wants to hand it over to those stalwart guardians of world peace, the British. Yes, really. In the interim, convinced that he is being pursued by agents acting on behalf of the Russians, as he is, he places the formula in the eponymous red lacquer case which has a fiendish opening mechanism. If an attempt to open the case fails, acid is released which destroys the paper with the formula on it. Surprise, surprise, Sally is able to open the case, and Uncle Fritzi rather drops her in it by disappearing, after hiding the case in Sally’s house and telling her where he has put it. Inevitably, when she finds his note and looks in the hiding place, the case has disappeared.

Coincidentally, Bill Armitage, now working in the War Office and Sally’s former fiancé, is also looking for the formula and the charming uncle. A series of fake telegrams put Sally’s life in danger – she is captured, held prisoner but pluckily refuses to imperil her country’s safety by opening the case – while Bill, thinking he was on her trail, is sent on one wild goose chase after another. The action builds up to its inevitable conclusion which I will not spoil. I will only add that the ending has a wry twist to it and the discussion about recipes for jams at the opening of the story is not for nothing.

There are moments of humour in the book, provided by the violinist whose discordant modernist screeches are meant to torture Sally into submission but provide her with an opportunity to effect her plans to escape and the garrulous old bed-ridden woman who is not quite all she seems. An oddity that strikes the modern reader is that the reason why Sally and Bill’s engagement foundered was that he took exception to her falling under the influence of the Suffragettes. Clearly this spirited filly did not know her place.

Great literature this is not, but if you are looking for a harmless way to spend an evening or two, this is no worse than some of the fare served up on television.

The Belgrave Manor Crime

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The Belgrave Manor Crime – Moray Dalton

Moray Dalton, the nom de plume of Katherine Dalton Renoir, is fast becoming one of my favourite crime fiction authors and she did not let me down with this fifth Hugh Collier mystery, a story with a twist. It was first published in 1935 and has now been reissued by the wonderful Dean Street Press. Dalton is not afraid to mine the darker side of life for her stories which, for me, makes her an interesting writer but probably did not do her chances of enduring popularity much good. There is a certain edge to her books which most books of this genre lack, content to provide a cosy read in front of the fire on a winter’s evening.

We are introduced to Cosmo Thor, a psychic investigator, as you can tell from his ludicrous name, a friend of Collier’s, who operates in that demi-monde between the areas that are the domain of the police and that of the alienist, we are told. Although this is his first appearance in a novel Thor did appear in a short story published in 1927. On a train journey back to London, Thor bumps into an acquaintance, a Madame Luna, who has just been released from prison, incarcerated for three weeks at His Majesty’s pleasure for practising palmistry. She is going to collect her daughter, Allie, from landlady.

Thor goes away for a long weekend but on his return is told by his landlady that Madame Luna had turned up on the Friday desperate to see him but had been turned away. Anxious, Thor consults with the earthly powers that are represented by Collier of the Yard who tells him that a woman matching Luna’s description had been found dead from a fall off a cliff in Devon. If it was she, what was she doing in Devon?

Thor’s investigations take him down to Sussex where he learns from father and son estate agents, John and Dennis Garland, that Belgrave Manor, long left empty and with a sinister reputation with the locals, has been recently leased by a Mrs Maulfrey for a year. He also learns that a child is being looked after by an attractive nurse, Celia Kent, with whom Dennis is infatuated. Before he can proceed too far with his enquiries, Thor is involved in a suspicious car crash and is seriously injured.

Eventually, Collier takes up the reins and he methodically gets to the bottom of what is going on at Belgrave Manor. His methods are methodical, but he soon realises that the case has much darker undertones, involving sacrificial victims. It is not difficult to work out who the young sacrificial lamb will be, but in unravelling the case Collier puts himself and Celia in mortal danger. The revelation of the master of ceremonies took me by surprise and fair play to Dalton for that.       

Dalton has an easy style and keeps the plot moving at a pace that engages the reader’s attention. Thor, though, seems to be a bit of a convenience to get the story started. The police would not have been interested in Luna’s initial plight or have the knowledge of her background. The character of Thor is convenient for getting that bit of the book out of the way, but when the book settles down into a more conventional murder mystery/thriller, he is side lined. The reader, confronted with a psychic investigator and a clairvoyant, is left in no doubt that what they have picked up is not the cosy country house murder story the title might suggest, but something darker and more enthralling too.

It is not this unorthodox writer’s best, but it is enjoyable, nonetheless.

The Plumley Inheritance

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The Plumley Inheritance – Christopher Bush

Charlie Christmas “Christopher” Bush is a new writer to me, although as a prolific author of murder mystery stories, he published 63 all featuring Ludovic Travers, his amateur sleuth, and Inspector Wharton, there is more than enough to keep me going for quite a while. Bush did not stop there, penning several mysteries under the noms de plume of Michael Home and Noel Barclay. A schoolteacher by profession, after distinguished service in the First World War rising to the rank of Major, his early novels were written in his spare time before his success convinced him to write full-time. He is another of those writers whose popularity has waned but, thanks to Dean Street Press, his books are being reissued to be discovered by a modern audience.

There is always a difficult choice when picking up a new writer, whether to start with those works that have received particular critical acclaim or to plough through the books in chronological order. I have chosen the latter option and The Plumley Inheritance is his first, published in 1926. Travers is not an ordinary amateur sleuth, preferring to rely upon the sharpness of his brain, honed up into a formidable weapon by completing the crosswords in the Times and Telegraph. In this book, Travers does not even take centre stage, leaving his pal Geoffrey Wrentham to do much of the leg work.

In many ways the plot is straightforward. Henry Plumley is a financier who is facing financial ruin. While making a political speech in a public meeting he commits suicide, choosing to direct some obscure remarks towards his son just before the bitter end. It leads to the theory that Plumley has salted much of his personal fortune away to keep it out of the hands of his creditors, but where is it? And what has a list of eccentric items he had asked Wrentham to assemble some months earlier have to do with it all. Of course, they hold the key to the mystery.

There are different groups plotting to reveal the secret of Plumley’s lolly, leading to the murder of one of Plumely’s secretaries, thwarted plans and aspirations and much nocturnal rummaging in flower beds at Plumley’s country home. Set shortly after the end of the First World War, telephones are in short supply and bicycles are the preferred means of transport. It is a world away from the tech-reliant modern thrillers.

Wrentham is the all-action hero and seems to have stepped out of the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel, his language peppered with the sort of upper-class slang you would expect to hear from Bertie Wooster. While Wrentham leads the charge, Travers lurks in the background but it is clear that he has the brains to match his colleague’s brawn. I assume that as the series progresses, Travers will come into the fore and Wrentham will make a graceful exit stage left.

I enjoyed Bush’s style which keeps the story moving and it has enough excitement and danger to keep the reader on their toes and entertained. Although fairly clued and the number of possible suspects limited, the denouement comes as a bit of a surprise, a letter revealing all. I had not worked it all out by the time the truth was revealed, which added to my enjoyment of the book.

I will look forward to reading the next Travers mystery.

Will The Durian Charge Our Phones?

Looking like a cross between a pineapple and a cantaloupe, with a prickly outer skin that demands careful handling, the durian is highly prized as a delicacy in its native Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There are thirty recognised species of the genus Durio and the tall evergreen trees regularly top one hundred feet. Fruiting once or twice a year, they take three months after pollination to produce a ripe fruit. It is easy to see why as the fruit is no shrinking violet, weighing up  between two and seven pounds and measuring a foot in width, with brown or green husks and pale yellow or red flesh, depending upon the particular species.

Proponents of the durian point out that it is packed with antioxidants and rich in potassium, iron and vitamins B and C, making it ideal for lowering blood pressure, improving skin texture and muscle strength. Containing 23 grams of dietary fibre, a single fruit is sufficient to meet our daily nutritional requirements. Superfruit it may be, but the durian stands out in another respect, the aroma that accompanies it.

Smell is one of the most subjective of senses, curiously there is no commonly accepted metric for describing or rating smells, and the durian is the Marmite of fruits. Some think that it has a pleasantly sweet fragrance while others, the majority, certainly amongst Occidentals, think that it has an overpowering and deeply unpleasant odour that lingers for days. What is known in the Far East as the “king of the fruits” has earned itself the sobriquet of the world’s smelliest fruit. So offensive is the smell to many that it is banned on buses, trains, planes and many public spaces across Singapore, Thailand, Japan, and Hong Kong. Taxi drivers will refuse you entry into their cab if you are carrying one and hotels display signs advising their clientele “No Durian Allowed”. It is, nonetheless, the official Singaporean fruit and has left its mark on the city’s skyscape, the Esplanada building, adjacent to the city’s Marina Bay, resembling a durian cut in half.

Aside from taste and smell, the durian falls foul of those who, in these more environmentally aware times, are concerned with food waste. Around 70% of the fruit is discarded because it is inedible. This shockingly high level of waste led a team of chemical engineers from the University of Sydney, headed by Vincent Gomes, to consider whether the inedible parts could be deployed in another way.

Their principal objective was to find an alternative source to power mobile devices, given that the lithium-ion battery, so favoured by manufacturers, loses its ability to hold a charge over time, is inefficient in extreme weather conditions and the mining activities associated with its production come with a high social and environmental cost. Could the inedible parts of the durian, together with that of another Asiatic favourite, the jackfruit, be turned into a super-capacitor, a type of reservoir that charged and discharged energy?

By heating, freeze-drying, and baking the inedible, spongey core of the fruits in an oven at a temperature of more than 1500C, they produced a black, highly porous, ultra-light structure which they moulded into electrodes for a low-cost super-capacitator. The resulting super-capacitor could be charged up in just thirty seconds and was able to power up a range of electronic devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, in just a few minutes. Gomes and his team may just have found a new and sustainable way to store energy for domestic use.

If it does come to fruition, it is no thanks to Gomes’ wife. Having taken the risky step of using his home freezer to store the fruit, perhaps he should not have been too surprised when she, finding the stench emanating from them too offensive, cleared them out. Being married to an inventor is no bowl of cherries, it would seem.

Model Of The Week

Those ingenious Danish manufacturers of plastic bricks aka The Lego Group have recently launched their latest must-have model. It is no shrinking violet, standing over 10.5 inches tall and 20.5 inches wide and 23.5 inches deep and consists of 9,036 pieces. It has just been recognised by Guinness World Record as the largest commercially available Lego set, smashing the previous record of 7,541 pieces set by their replica of the Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon.

This whopper is based on the Roman Colosseum, although some liberties have been taken by the design team led by Rok Zgalin Kobe to make it look as it would have done when construction of the real thing was completed in 80CE. They have also added extra colour, as the fierce Roman sun has taken its toll on the original, “to show some of the shadow lines and better accentuate some of the details”, Kobe explains.

It retails at $550 and takes around 30 hours to complete. That should keep the little horrors quiet and the good thing is that it doesn’t matter if you lose some pieces. .It just adds verisimilitude to your structure.

For more about the model, follow the link below:

Names Of The Week (9)

It has been some time since I was an assiduous follower of the ins and outs of the corporate world but as a collector of examples of nominative determinism, I could not let the latest example of soft shoe shuffle at Leicestershire based discount shoe retailer, Shoe Zone, pass without comment.

They have just appointed a new Finance Director, Terry Boot. He replaces the last incumbent who lasted just seven months. His name, I kid you not, was Peter Foot.

Let’s hope he is a better fit and does not get the boot.