Martin Fone's Blog, page 168

The Case Of Alan Copeland

The Case of Alan Copeland – Moray Dalton

I number Moray Dalton as one of my detective fiction finds, a now sadly neglected writer, whose fortunes the excellent Dean Street Press are trying to revive by reissuing her works. Quite why writers fall so dramatically out of fashion has puzzled greater minds than mine. In Dalton’s case, was it her failure to crack the lucrative American market or her subject matter? She has a penchant for diving into the murkier side of life. I have read stories involving drug taking and transvestism and this, her seventeenth, published in 1937, deals with sex out of wedlock and illegitimacy. Not subjects you would want your wife or servants to read about.

The book falls into two parts, the set up and then the court case. Alan Copeland has moved into the quiet English village of Teene, where he is trapped into marriage with an older, richer woman, who resents and frustrates his attempts to earn his own living as a poultry farmer. He falls hopelessly in love with the vicar’s niece, Lydia, who has come to Teene for a few days and she falls pregnant, unbeknown to Alan. She returns to London, the pair correspond and then Alan’s wife dies suddenly. Now freed of the encumbrance that was his wife, Alan goes to London, discovers Lydia’s condition, marries her and they go off travelling.

After a few months, somewhat surprisingly, the couple decide to settle back in Teene. This is when the trouble starts. Anonymous letters are sent to the police, claiming that Alan’s former wife had been poisoned. The body is exhumed and found to be full of arsenic. Alan is arrested and the second half of the book deals with his trial. The evidence against him looks to be conclusive but slowly and surely his defence team unearth some evidence that may just prove his innocence.

It all makes for a gripping and entertaining read. What, I think, helps make a good Dalton book is her characterisation. Most of the villagers we meet have an underlying nasty streak and are willing to stick the knife in and let their feelings be known. There are seething jealousies and a propensity for gossip and malice. The famous English sangfroid you associate with country folk is nowhere to be seen in Teene. Even Lydia’s uncle, the vicar, seems more interested in his books than the fate of his niece. The resolution of the case has some twists and turns along the way as not everything is as it seems. Only quick work avoids a second tragedy at the end of the tale.                

Moray Dalton is an author well worth exploring, if you like your crime novels well-written and well-paced. I know I certainly do.

Sweet Thursday

Sweet Thursday – John Steinbeck

It must be over half a century ago since I read Cannery Row, but I never got round to read Steinbeck’s 1954 sequel, Sweet Thursday. Unlike the first book where Steinbeck’s focus was on the place, here the individuals who scratch out their existence in Cannery Row are centre stage. The structure of the book is more conventional with a narrative and story line that moves in a linear direction. It is also very funny.

Most, but not all, of the characters we met in Cannery Row appear in Sweet Thursday. They are older, although hardly wiser, and some of them have fought in the Second World War. Doc, the central protagonist, has returned an angrier, changed man, probably suffering from what we would now call PTSD, and finds that his business has been run into the ground in his absence. He is obsessed with the idea of writing a paper on the behaviour of octopi but spends most of his time in a battle of wills with a blank pad of paper.

Although the residents of Cannery Row are a rag-bag collection of ne’er do wells, confidence tricksters, pimps, and whores, they are imbued with an indefatigable sense of community and are anxious to help each other. Their mission is to improve Doc’s lot, by fixing a raffle to ensure that he wins the Palace Flophouse, to pair him up with the new woman on the block, Suzy, and to provide him with the best scientific equipment so that he can write his paper.

Inevitably, and hilariously, the best laid plans of mice and men founder through their incompetence. Doc already owns the Flophouse and instead of providing him with the powerful microscope he needs, they get him a telescope instead. Despite their ham-fisted attempts to better Doc’s lot, Cupid’s arrow has a surer aim.

In one sense the book is a simple and charming, light-hearted love story, not only a paean to Doc and Suzy’s developing relationship but to the characters that populate Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s humour verges on the corny and is extremely visual, almost slapstick. But there is a darker seam running through the book. Characters pick fights, break bones and almost strangle each other while Doc, in his darker moments, torments his octopi to such an extent that they almost die. The book seems to veer alarmingly between these two extremes before righting itself by the end.

For all their many faults, it is the endearing humanity of the residents of Cannery Row that shines out. Fauna, the local madame, has a side-line in fortune telling and tells Hazel that his destiny is to be the President of the United States. Harvey is weighed down by the burden of his destiny to such an extent that Fauna has to hold another fortune telling session where she reveals, surprise, surprise, that her previous prophecy was mistaken. Hazel is greatly relieved and can settle back into his humdrum existence.

It is a delightful book, funny, easy to read and whilst it is not one of Steinbeck’s best, it holds its own against the works of his contemporaries. To get the most out of the book, though, you should not leave a gap of half a century between reading Cannery Row and picking up Sweet Thursday.

And the title? It is the name the residents give to Thursdays, sandwiched between Lousy Wednesday and Waiting Friday. As you will see, the definitive action of the book occurs on a Thursday.

The Kiss Of Life

I am fortunate enough, so far at least, never to have been the recipient of the kiss of life or to have been called upon to perform it. Also known as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the person giving it presses their mouth against that of the person being assisted and blows air into their lungs. If you have been fished out of the water, you may be grateful that there is someone on hand who can perform it to such a level that it gets your lungs working again.

If you were rescued the water in the 18th century and required resuscitation, you would almost certainly have been subjected to a different experience. Knowledge of medicine and the workings of the human anatomy, of course, was not as advanced as it is today, but they had worked out that what was needed to treat what they termed an “apparent death” was warmth and stimulation. It was how they applied the stimulation that comes as a shock to us now.

Tobacco, as well as being consumed for “pleasure”, was considered to have medicinal properties, based on its ability to absorb moisture, warm the body, and provide stimulation. It was prescribed as a remedy for a range of ailments including headaches, respiratory failure, colds, hernias, abdominal cramps, typhoid, and cholera. The medics at the time considered that the anus offered a convenient and speedy way to get to vital organs by way of the intestinal tracts. The smoke from burning tobacco was applied by way of an enema or, to use their terminology, a glyster.

In 1686 Thomas Sydenham gave an early and glowing account of the procedure, when extolling the virtues of a strong purging glyster: “I know of none so strong and effectual as the smoke of tobacco, forced up through a large bladder into the bowels by an inverted pipe, which may be repeated after a short interval, if the former, by giving a stool, does not open a passage downwards”. In the early 18th century the Dutch had developed a process of providing rectal infusions of tobacco smoke as a form of respiratory stimulant to revive those who had fallen into their canals and waterways.

It may well have been practised at sea or at least had passed into the folk traditions of seafaring folk. A woman who had been fished out of the water was revived by her husband following the advice of a passing matelot, by inserting the stem of the sailor’s pipe into her rectum, covering the bowl with a piece of perforated paper and blowing hard. I hope the grateful couple bought the sailor a new pipe.

By the 1780s tobacco smoke enemas were so well-established as a means of resuscitation that the Royal Humane Society installed resuscitation kits, including smoke enemas, at various points along the River Thames. The Venetians also installed first-aid kits along their city’s waterways, included within their inventory was some tobacco and an instrument for injecting tobacco smoke into the anus. What this turned out to be in practice was a type of bellows, which had a dual purpose, to inflate the lungs via the mouth and to apply a tobacco smoke enema via the anus. I hope it was cleaned thoroughly after use.

The practice of applying tobacco smoke enemas as a way of reviving patients fell into disrepute during the early part of the 19th century. Benjamin Brodie, after carrying out experiments on animals, demonstrated, in 1811, that the principal active agent in tobacco, nicotine, was a cardiac poison capable of stopping the circulation of the blood. Blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s arse didn’t seem so bright an idea after that.

Testing Service Of The Week

If nothing else over the last year or so we have become used to being tested and enduring an anxious wait for the results to arrive. In Japan offensive body odours seem to be causing a stir amongst workers, many complaining of “smell harassment”. So prevalent is the problem that it is causing a high degree of anxiety amongst the country’s workers, fearful that they may be causing a bit of a stink in the workplace.

Where there is a problem, there is always someone who can sniff out an opportunity and this is where entrepreneur Shota Ishida comes in. He has set up a company called Odorate which offers a scientific analysis to determine whether the client is actually emitting an offensive odour.

For a fee of $150 they are sent a plain white T-shirt impregnated with odour-activated charcoal which they wear for 24 hours and send back to Ishida’s laboratory north of Tokyo. The garment is then analysed using GC-MS technology – sounds impressive, but me neither – and the results are produced. Given there is no commonly accepted metric for the level and type of smell, Ishida will use terms like “onions starting to rot” or “an old-age smell”.

Apparently, over a thousand people have used his service and around half have received the all-clear. To protect himself from the odour, he limits himself to analysing six shirts a session. However, so promising I the business that Ishida is planning to branch out into armpit-only and a halitosis-specific testing.

As a business plan it is not to be sniffed t, but I can’t help thinking that it is a problem that a double application of a deodorant would cure.

Burial Service Of The Week

Death is a fact of life and it pays to give some thought as to what you want done with your earthly remains. A firm from Kent in Washington called Recompose has just launched a human composting service which their appropriately named CEO, Katrina Spade, claims to be an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional burial.

The bodies of the deceased are placed in steel cylinders full of soil and covered with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw and are slowly rotated to allow microbes to break them down. After 30 days there, they are moved to what is known as a “curing bin” to complete the release of carbon dioxide. The remains, which according to Spade resembles a topsoil you could buy at a garden centre, are then either returned to the family, presumably to spread over their garden, or donated to an ecological restoration project in Vancouver.

Spade claims that the process saves more than a tonne of carbon compared with cremation or burial and that it is a very controlled process, completely driven by microbes. The process cots $5,500 with an optional service thrown in.

Over 15,000 have signed up for their newsletter, no doubt comforted by the thought that if anything goes wrong, they can always buy a replacement bag from a nursery.

Cantering Through Cant (18)

Queer has a rather pejorative meaning these days but in Francis Grose’s time, as revealed in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), it was used as an adjective to mean “base, roguish, bad, naught or worthless” and, by extension, “odd, uncommon”. As a verb to queer meant “to puzzle or confound” as in I have queered the full bottom, a slang term for puzzling a judge.

The dictionary is full of queers and here are just a few for your delectation.

Queer birds were “rogues relieved from prison, and returned to their old trade”, while queer bit-makers were coiners and a queer bluffer was “the master of a public house, the resort of rogues and sharpers, a cut-throat inn or alehouse keeper”. I’ve met a few of those in my time. Cole was money and so a queer cole maker was a “maker of bad money” and a queer cole fencer was one who passed off bad coinage. Queer roosters were a particular type of informer who pretended to be asleep but all the while listened to the conversations of thieves.

A queer cove was a rogue, a queer cuffin a justice of the peace, and a queer mort was a “diseased strumpet”. Amongst inanimate objects a queer degen was a brass or iron-hilted sword, a queer nab a felt or other type of poor hat, and queer kicks were an inferior sort of breeches.

The strangest, but perhaps the most ingenious, form of queer was the queer plungers. One of their number would throw himself into the river from which he was “rescued” by his accomplices and taken to the offices of the Humane Society for the recovery of drowned persons. For their bravery and enterprise, they would be each rewarded with a guinea from the coffers of the gullible society. The rescued man would tell a story that he had been driven to such desperate actions by the straitened circumstances in which he found himself and he too would be sent off with a few coins jingling in his soggy pocket.

Vintage Murder

Vintage Murder – Ngaio Marsh

I am struggling with Ngaio Marsh, I admit. Vintage Murder is the fifth in the Inspector Alleyn series and was published in 1937 and, frankly, is the worst of the lot. Marsh’s background was in the theatre, she was an accomplished Shakespearean director and her natural home for a setting for a crime novel, when inspiration fails.

Alleyn is on holiday in New Zealand, recuperating from injuries sustained in his last foray under Marsh’s guidance, and is sharing a carriage with a touring party of British actors who are en route to Middleton for their next performance. There are some odd goings-on on the train with the ditzy Valerie Gaynes losing her money and Alfred Meyer, the head honcho, claiming that someone had tried to push him off the train. Any hopes of a closed room type murder mystery on board the train fly out of the window as the ensemble reach Middleton otherwise unscathed.

Alleyn is invited to the opening night and to the after-show party to celebrate the birthday of the leading lady and wife of Meyer, Carolyn Dacres. Inevitably where Alleyn goes, murder most foul follows. To give her her due, Marsh devises a clever way of dispatching Meyer. As a showman he wanted to make a splash at the party by organising for a large bottle of champagne to be winched down on to the centre of the table. The trick had been practised several times without a hitch. When Dacres finally has made her entrance, naturally she is the last to appear, the bottle of champagne comes down and smashes Meyer on the head, killing him instantly. Someone had moved the settings of the hoist, but who?

Of course, this is a case for the Kiwi police to investigate but they are so in awe that there is not only a representative of the Yard in their presence but also one whose textbook, Principles and Practices of Criminal Investigation, they have studied and adopted as good colonials should. Alleyn, thus, is not only invited to assist with the investigation but is in the uncomfortable position of having witnessed the incident and being a potential suspect.

The investigation reveals the usual tangle of jealousies, rivalries and financial problems. One of the actors, Susan Max, even appeared in the earlier novel, Enter A Murderer. Despite the complexities of the plot, and some unconventional procedures such as taking a prime suspect out for a picnic, Alleyn uncovers the culprit, although, frankly, I had seen it a mile off.

Marsh enjoys herself describing the New Zealand scenery and the distinctive accent. Some local colour is added by the presence of a Maori doctor who adds little to the plot besides allowing Alleyn, and presumably Marsh herself, to tut at some racist comments made by the thespians and the local police.       

One highlight of Alleyn being so far away from home is that Nigel Bathgate’s appearances are limited, although the detective does feel the need to correspond with him and gibe him a commentary on how the case is progressing.  

I found the book a chore to get through, lacking any real zest or sparkle, a story that gave me the sense of a writer going through the motions. The only thing I will remember about is the way Meyer met his death. Now that is a cracker.

The Case Of Sir Adam Braid

The Case of Sir Adam Braid – Molly Thynne

Molly Thynne is another new author to me, kindly brought to my attention by those Golden Age of detective fiction resurrectionists, Dean Street Press. Originally published in 1930, it concerns itself with the murder of Sir Adam Braid, a curmudgeonly old man and successful artist, in his own flat. The murderer has only a short timeframe in which to have committed the foul deed, but there is no shortage of potential culprits. Inspector Fenn of the Yard, assisted by Dr Robert Gilroy who happens, rather conveniently to be a fellow tenant in the block of flats that Braid lived in.

There are a couple of themes in the book which might strike the modern reader as a tad odd. Most notably is the treatment of the character of Jill, the granddaughter of the deceased, with whom she had recently rowed with, resulting in a threat to write her out of the will. She was at the flat when the murder was discovered. This is more than enough to have made her the prime suspect in many a tale and, dare I say it, real life too, but not in this tale. Fenn happened to have known her from when she was a child and cannot possibly believe that such a sweet, pretty, innocent girl would be capable of such a thing. Clearly, the concept of conflict of interest is terra incognita.

Jill’s good fortune is compounded by the fact that Gilroy is steadily and inexorably falling in love with her. Many stories of this era have some love interest and Thynne provides it in spades. Cupid’s arrow means Gilroy, too, cannot believe that Jill did it. The duo spend as much time trying to prove Jill’s innocence as working out whodunit.

The other interesting point is noise. We are so used to the noise emanating from radios and televisions in rooms and houses we pass by that we barely give it any attention. In the late twenties, seemingly, the custom was to listen to the radio using headphones and allowing the radio to play naturally through its own speakers could cause a passer by to think that there were people in a room. Much of the case revolves around the confusion that a radio playing through a speaker can sow.

Thynne has constructed a complex mystery and Flynn’s problem is that there are so many people who visited the flat during the time that the murder happened including a petty thief, an irate woman and a neighbour wanting to borrow a stamp. As the investigation progresses doubts emerge as to how precisely Braid died and exactly when and to muddy the waters Thynne introduces us to confidence tricksters, known and wanted criminals, and a shifty and highly strung butler.

Fenn’s ability to make sense of it all is in part due to tittle-tattle but he takes a rather inconsistent approach to the purveyors of it. Whilst he is impatient with and downright rude to the prattling Miss Webb, he positively encourages Gilroy to pump his charwoman for information. Perhaps behind this dichotomy lies some prejudices of the time. Elderly middle-class spinsters seem to be viewed as unreliable, World War I veterans are assumed to be inherently honest and those operating on the margins of society are assumed to be de facto criminals.

I enjoyed the book and although the plot was a little creaky in parts, it was a good read and shone an interesting light into the mores and attitudes of the time. I will certainly read more of her works.

How Do Starlings Murmurate?

As the light dims on an autumnal or winter’s evening, starlings will rise from their communal roosting site and wheel and swoop as if one body, moving seamlessly and effortlessly out of one geometric pattern into another, seemingly under the command of a great choreographer in the sky. These stunning displays begin at the start of the starlings’ roosting season, as early as September or as late as the end of November, and can last throughout the winter.

The technical name for this phenomenon is a murmuration, which, by extension, has become the collective noun for a group of starlings. Derived from the mediaeval Latin noun murmuratio, meaning murmuring or grumbling, it is thought to be an onomatopoeic representation of the noise the birds make when they are in flight. While murmurations are not unique to starlings, other birds, such as geese, fly in formalised V-formations to assist in navigation, the term is especially associated with them.

What intrigues the curious of mind is how the starlings perform their acrobatics, moving in perfect synchrony, without bumping into each other and landing in an unseemly heap on the ground. Back in 1931 British ornithologist, Edmund Selous, in his book, Thought-transference (or what!) in birds, surmised that starlings used psychic powers to operate in a flock and avoid colliding. More recently Giorgi Parisi, from the University of Rome, has applied his deep knowledge of theoretical physics to give a more rigorous answer to the problem.

2020 might be characterised as the year of the ultracrepidarian with many of us becoming overnight epidemiologists, talking with faux confidence about R numbers and rates of infection. In reality, all that has happened is that we have gained a better understanding of basic statistical concepts, not least how numbers rise exponentially and the compound effect that even a small event, like the flap of a butterfly’s wing in chaos theory, can have on the whole. It is this understanding that we need to make sense of Parisi’s research.

In a paper published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Parisi looked at how the speed at which one starling flew affected the velocity of the rest. He discovered that the behaviour of one animal affects and is affected by that of all the others in the group, no matter how large or small the group is. A starling changing speed will trigger a corresponding change in the speed of the other birds in the group. Acting as a group they have a wider perception range than they would have as individuals. Drawing upon an analogy from ferromagnetism, Parisi observed that a magnet’s particles showed perfect interconnection at a precise, “critical” temperature. Starlings’ murmurations were just such a critical system and were formed when conditions and group dynamics were optimal.

It took a further paper from Parisi and his team, published in 2012, to explain how a single bird could spark a change in movement in a formation that was busily responding to the actions of others and how that reaction could cause such a speedy response within the group. Rather than looking at speed, which was the focus of the earlier paper, they looked at how a bird’s change of direction could affect those around it.

What they found was that one bird’s movement affected those of just seven of its immediate neighbours, but that the movement of each of its neighbours affected a further seven in its immediate vicinity, and so on, producing a compound effect throughout the flock. The result is a twisting, ever-changing formation where some parts move at one speed in one direction and others at different speeds in other directions. When a single starling changes direction or speed, the whole flock responds through the ripple effect of the power of seven, making it appear as if the information or a command has been passed through the flock in real-time.

The result is a fascinating and thrilling spectacle and one that can be performed in relative safety. And why seven? It seems that is one of those numbers that just seems to work in nature, where the balance between individual effort and group cohesiveness is optimised.

When next I see a murmuration of starlings, I will raise my hat to the power of seven.

This is an abridged version of an article that appeared on Country Life’s website. To see the full  article, go to

How do starlings form murmurations?

The Lost Game Of Career Girls

There are some games which have fallen into ill-deserved obscurity but others which have long been discarded into the dustbin of social history. Career Girls or to give it its full title, “What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls”, falls into the latter category. It was sexist, even by the standards of the mid-1960s, although perhaps it is surprising that the old fogies behind the game even considered that a girl should pursue a career.

Launched in 1966 by the manufacturers of Scrabble, Selchow & Righter Company (SRC), it was positioned as an “educational” game suitable for girls aged six or over. Obviously, no self-respecting boy would be seen dead playing it, a curious marketing move which at a stroke eliminated half of SRC’s potential market. The winner was the first player to become a Career Girl. The careers on choice reflected the underlying sexist vibe of the game, model, air hostess, ballet dancer, actress, nurse, and teacher. I’m surprised that hairdresser didn’t feature amongst the jobs that a girl could aspire to.

The game required between two and four players who took it in turn to move around the board. Depending upon where you landed on the board, you were invited to collect a rectangular School Card, a circular Subject Card or a heart-shaped (natch) Personality Card. The winner was the first to collect four School Cards pertaining to one of the six professions, together with two Subject Cards and two Personality Cards which were in tune with the specific career.

As you went round the board collecting Subject and Personality Cards you would quickly find that those with negative characteristics narrowed down your career options considerably. One Personality Card told the recipient that they got too excited and, as a consequence, they were not suited to be an airline hostess or a nurse. Picking up the Personality Card bearing the legend “You are overweight” immediately ruled out a life on the catwalk, the stage or the flying the skies. Being accused of slow thinking was enough to rule out a career as an air hostess or nurse.

Sloppy make-up meant that airline hostess and actress were out of the question but a Subject Card teaching you fashion or hairdressing opened up the possibilities of being an air hostess or model. Some of the cards, though, gave a more positive and even, dare I say it, empowering message. Along with the patronising and sexist “pretty”, “neat”, “friendly”, “graceful” and possessing “a nice smile”, the attributes included “strong”, “quick thinker” and “hard working”.   

It is hard to imagine that this game would survive more than one play, although, as far as the manufacturer was concerned, as long as the purchaser had paid their money, they couldn’t care less whether they had bought a turkey or something designed to further ingrain a woman’s low career aspirations and expectations.

Surprisingly, though, the game was viable enough to warrant a second edition, released in 1976 at the height of the feminist movement. The career options reflected, to a degree, the winds of change.  Now the options were surgeon, jockey, astronaut, news commentator, theatre director, and lawyer. An odd and disparate bunch of careers, to be sure, but at least weight and/or looks and make up were not a serious bar to any. Talking of bars, even some of the characters representing the careers came from a diverse background.   

The game did not survive into the 1980s. Small girls and their parents were no longer prepared to tolerate this sort of nonsense. A good thing too.