Martin Fone's Blog, page 177

Book Corner – November 2020 (4)

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Traitor’s Purse – Margery Allingham

I suppose I had better nail my colours to the mast. I am a great fan of Margery Allingham and Traitor’s Purse, published in 1941, has to rate as one of her best. Known by the mouthful of a title of The Sabotage Murder Mystery in the States, this is the eleventh story involving her urbane detective creation, Albert Campion. In style it is as much a thriller as a detective tale and it is this mix of genres that adds to the book’s appeal. It is also a rattling good tale.

The book opens rather unconventionally. Campion finds himself in a hospital bed, suffering from amnesia. He overhears a conversation in which it seems that he has attacked, possibly even killed, a policeman and decides he had better make good his escape. Once out of the hospital he is picked up by Lady Amanda Fitton, his fiancée, although Campion does not recognise her from Eve. With Amanda is an elderly man, Mr Anscombe, secretary of the Masters of Bridge. Shortly after Anscombe is dropped off at his house, he is found dead, presumed murdered.

There is, though, a bigger mystery to solve. Campion vaguely remembers he was on a secret mission, on the success of which the future of England hinges. The trouble is that Campion cannot remember what the danger was or what he was supposed to be doing to thwart it. The reader only realises the import of the task that Campion has been set as the scales slowly fall from the detective’s eyes. This is a very effective device, although Allingham does handle Campion’s realisation of exactly who Amanda is and what he means to her somewhat clumsily.

Amanda, tired of waiting for Campion to recover his old self, seems to have flung herself at the suave, debonair Lee Aubrey, an academic and principal of the Bridge Institute. Bust is he all that he seems? What is the Bridge Institute? What is the significance of the number 15? Slowly, Campion realises that England is under threat from a plot to destabilise its economy by circulating an enormous amount of counterfeit, free money throughout the country in an exercise marked with military precision and planning. Will Campion work out what is going on in time to save his country from its greatest peril and will he regain the heart of Amanda?

To find out the answers to these questions and much more, you will have to read the book. You will be rewarded because it is original, moving and amusing in parts. The writing is taut and sparse and Allingham excels at creating tension and atmosphere. There are creaks in the plotting here and there, the book was written episodically as Allingham was juggling to fulfil other writing commitments, and an annoying trait of hers is to lapse into comedy working class dialogue when someone from the lower orders, particularly Campion’s man servant, Lugg, enters the scene. There is a wonderful scene where the grumpy devoted servant is put out when his master fails to recognise him.

The book can be read as a voyage of discovery as Campion slowly but surely finds out about himself and what is important to him. He is not the confident, somewhat bumptious character in other stories but rather a hesitant, uncertain individual trying to make sense of the predicament in which he finds himself. Allingham has put together a great book which works on several levels, no mean feat in what is, generally, a fairly constricting medium.

Job Of The Week (5)

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The Norwegian company behind an internet browser called Opera (do we need another one?) are looking for someone to browse the world-wide web for two weeks. Duties will include searching for memes, watching animal videos, and researching unusual topics, while livestreaming the experience on Opera’s social media channels.

According to the product director of the Opera desktop browser, Maciej Kocemba, the ideal candidate will be someone who will reveal “the unpolished truth” and “has the guts to share their online experience with the world” or at least those who bother to use their browser.         

The successful candidate will be paid $9,000 for their efforts and to apply, the closing date is November 13th, you need to send a short video in which you “talk about the most relevant browsing moment of [your] life”.

Stumbling upon this, perhaps. Good luck!

Book Corner – November 2020 (3)

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Quick Curtain – Alan Melville

Detective fiction comes in all shapes and forms and Quick Curtain, published in 1934 and reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series, is pretty left field. Whilst it works as a conventional whodunit and howdunit mystery, it is also a gentle send up of the literary genre as well as the theatre industry. It is delightful, quite funny in parts and has an amusing twist at the end.

Melville was a broadcaster, writer and playwright and his theatrical expertise, rather like John Bude’s, comes through loud and clear throughout the book. It looks like a play in prose, starting off with a play bill for Douglas B Douglas’ latest theatrical blockbuster, Blue Music. Each chapter ends on a cliff-hanger, in the way that soaps and melodramas do, and the writing is crisp and sharp, just enough to set up the character or location to allow the plot to move on. No word is wasted.

All the theatrical targets are there, cynical theatre promoters, theatre goers who are prepared to queue for days and pay through the nose to attend the latest sensation, veteran thesps with personal problems and petty jealousies, critics who file their copy before they see the play and spend their time in the bar. You get the picture. Melville is clearly having fun.

The opening night of the dress rehearsals is going well until we get to Act II when the lover and star, played by Brandon Baker, is meant to be shot by the character played by Hilary Foster. A shot rings out at the right moment, but it is a live bullet. Baker has been killed, the curtain is rung down and the performance abandoned. Later Foster is found hung in his dressing room. Did Foster kill his rival or was the scene a blind for another person somehow to murder the actor?

In the audience was Inspector Wilson from Scotland Yard and his journalist son, Derek. Wilson is an unconventional detective, working from home, holding little truck for conventional police procedures. Together with his son they form a comedy duo as they set about unearthing what really went on in the theatre, their conversations are among the highlights of the book. Far from convinced that what happened was what they saw in front of their eyes, they develop increasingly elaborate theories and lines of enquiry. When one leads to a dead end or proves to have been impossible, they simply move on to their next theory and try again. Having two deaths on their hands increases their difficulties in reconciling what went on with their half-baked theories.

In keeping with the theatricality of the book, when they are convinced that they know how the murder was accomplished and who did it, they arrange the arrest of the culprit in the bowels of the theatre using a theatrical trick. Whether they got the right person, I will leave you to discover for yourself.

Dorothy L Sayers, when reviewing the book, took Melville to task for not playing fair with the reader and for playing fast and loose with the clues and detective conventions. She may have had a point, although Sayers was no saint in that regard, but this misses the point of the book. It is a glorious send up of the genre and should be enjoyed as such. A great read.

Burglar Of The Week (2)

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The perfect crime, I’m told, requires a lot of planning, with nothing left to chance. Sometimes, though, you can be a little too thorough as this tale from earlier this year shows.

In late January Robert Shull Goddard broke into a house in Nashville, Tennessee, via the back door and stole a TV set and a gun. A distressing but minor crime, you might think, and it was but for one detail.

In going about his business, Goddard dropped a notebook which contained a list of other targets, including a house that was broken into that day, and, touchingly, a note, complete with address, from his daughter. The police did not require the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to work out who the culprit was and effected the arrest with the minimum of fuss and effort.

In March Goddard was sentenced to 12 years in prison for aggravated burglary, time enough to reflect that planning does not always pay.

Experience Of The Week

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In the gift sector there is, or at least was, a rising market in offering unforgettable and, possibly, life-changing experiences. Dwight Turner paid $150 for what was advertised as a “full contact experience” with a black leopard. Amongst the treats in store was the opportunity to “play with it, rub its belly, and take some pictures”.

Perhaps he should have been on alert as the animal’s keeper, Michael Poggi, claimed to run an “animal sanctuary” for rare and endangered animals from his home in South Florida.

The only rubbing of its belly that was done when Turner entered the leopard’s enclosure was by the creature as it immediately attacked him, leaving him with his scalp hanging off and his right ear torn in half. Turner had to have a number of surgical operations to patch him up.

There will now be a legal catfight as Turner is suing Poggi. What happened to the black leopard is unclear. Let’s hope it was taken somewhere more appropriate and not exploited.

Cantering Through Cant (7)

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Unsurprisingly, Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) has a definition for canting. It is “preaching with a whining, affected tone, perhaps a corruption of chaunting; some derive it from Andrew Cant, a famous Scotch preacher, who used that whining manner of expression”.

Canting also had a broader meaning, “a kind of gibberish used by thieves and gypsies, called likewise pedlars’ French, the slang, etc”. Canters or The Canting Crew were “thieves, beggars, and gypsies, or any others using the canting lingo”.

It may be best, if you encountered any of this disreputable lot, to make them a cap acquaintance. These, according to Grose, are “persons slightly acquainted, or only so far as to mutually salute with the hat on meeting”.  Otherwise, just run a mile.

Statue Of The Week (4)

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Art, as well as appealing to the aesthetic senses, can also have some utilitarian value.

A Dutch metro train travelled past the end of the line on an elevated section at the De Akkers station in Spijkenisse, just outside Rotterdam. Instead of plunging to the ground, the train came to rest in the tail of a whale, a massive sculpture by Maarten Struijs, ironically and presciently entitled “Saved by the Whale”.

The artist expressed surprise that the twenty-year old statue, made of plastic, had withstood the weight of the train.

The train was removed using cranes, but the statue will remain in situ, doubling as an impromptu set of buffers.

Book Corner – November 2020 (2)

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Death in white pyjamas – John Bude

The excellent British Library Crime Classics series is doing a phenomenal job in shining the light on crime writers who have fallen out of favour and books which have long gone out of print. John Bude, the nom de plume of theatre producer and director, Ernest Elmore, and Death in white pyjamas tick both categories.

Published in 1944 the book is an entertaining, light-hearted tale which, though set in the traditional English country house setting, has a distinctive theatrical influence. Sam Richardson is a millionaire businessman who has bought the Beaumont Theatre to stage intellectual plays. Admission prices are low because, as Bude observes, “it is, of course, a notorious fact that intelligent theatre-goers have no money and moneyed theatre-goers have no intelligence”. The book is laced with gentle satire and waspish observations of the state of the British theatre.

Richardson has invited his troupe of actors to his country estate, Old Knolle, described as looking like a castle, modelled on Balmoral but “it had one or two useless towers stuck on corners, like saucy PSs to a highly respectable letter”. Although they are there to plan the next season’s programme, there are undercurrents of tension. An aspiring young playwright and the director, Basil Barnes, who has bought a cottage on the estate, have fallen for the same young actress, Angela Walsh, the old theatrical trooper, Willy Farham, has a drink and gambling problem and is susceptible to blackmail while the designer, Deirdre Lehaye is a nasty piece of work, “tall, dark, icy and so dead sure of herself that the majority of men are scared to approach her”, enjoys stirring the pot in the background.

There is a relaxed pace about this book, Bude enjoying the opportunity to develop the characters of these stock representatives of the theatrical world and to poke fun at them and the milieu in which they move. The plot is full of jealousy, fear, misunderstandings and blackmail, love triangles and the like. You sense that Bude is really enjoying himself.

Suddenly, halfway through the book, Bude seems to remember that he is supposed to be writing a murder tale rather than a gentle satire of the world in which he initially made his living. The murder victim, unsurprisingly Lehaye, is found face down, floating in the pond, wearing someone else’s silk white pyjamas. Most of the characters have reason, if not motive, enough to do away with the interfering woman but who was it and how was it accomplished? And what is it with the white pyjamas.

Inspector Meredith, Bude’s normal detective, arrives on the scene to take charge and proceed to unravel what went on, working his way through the competing motivations of the assembled cast and the many red herrings and coincidences that gave the plot a life of its own, whilst on occasions stretching credulity. In truth, I guessed who the culprit was likely to be fairly early on during the investigations but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment. The way the murder was carried out was ingenious, even if the murderer had to carry their victim’s body an unfeasibly long distance to dump it into the pond.

This was an excellent example of a detective novel that did not take itself too seriously and provided the reader with an excellent few hours of entertainment and the odd chuckle. I will look forward to reading the companion novel, Death Knows No Calendar, in due course.

Match Of The Week

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Keen football fans with deep pockets are reduced to following the fortunes of their favourite team by watching them play on the TV or on video streams. Not only does it get anywhere near the real matchday experience, but it can be fraught with problems as this story from Scotland shows.

Feeling the cold winds of budgetary constraints, Inverness Caledonian Thistle decided to use an AI camera, boasting ball-tracking technology, rather than foot the bill for a human cameraman to shoot footage of their recent game against Ayr United. Unfortunately, one of the referee’s assistants was also feeling the cold winds as he is follicly challenged.

The result was that the AI camera kept following the lino’s bald head rather than the ball on the field, leaving the commentator (human) and the viewers somewhat bemused. Mind you, watching the officials would be more entertaining than some games I have witnessed in the past.

For the record, the match ended in a 1-1 draw, with Inverness earning their first point of the season with a late equaliser. There is no truth in the rumour that they will be offering officials wigs for future fixtures.

Book Corner – November 2020 (1)

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Antidote to Venom – Freeman Wills Crofts

This is another excellent Freeman Wills Crofts classic from the British Library Crime Classics series, originally published in 1938. It is another inverted detective novel where the reader knows the identity of the murderer from the outset and gets the opportunity to understand matters from their point of view, their thoughts, plans, motives and aspirations. Inevitably, though, their brilliance is not all that they thought it was and they will have made one or more fatal errors which the detective, in this case Crofts’s stalwart, Inspector French, discovers and unravels the mystery. What results is more of a howdunit than a whodunit and much of the interest lies in understanding how they messed it up.

Indeed, it is almost three-quarters into the book that French makes an appearance. He is a meticulous, painstaking detective, one who seems to enjoy the intellectual challenge of cracking a case or the thrill of the chase than bringing the felon to justice. Although we know that French will solve the case, there is a little twist at the end, which I did not see coming nor will I spoil for anyone tempted to pick the book up. The other major twist in the book, which I can allude to, is that the victim of the murder is not the person that the protagonist, George Surridge, initially set out to kill.

Surridge is director of Birmington Zoo, which, inter alia, has a noted collection of snakes. Although holding down a well-paid job, he gambles and is trapped in a loveless marriage. He picks himself up a girlfriend who worsens his financial position. All may not be lost, though, because Surridge is the sole beneficiary of the estate of an aged aunt who is keeping poor health. If only her demise could be accelerated, George’s money problems will be over.

By this time the reader expects the aunt to be the murder victim, possibly becoming a retread of Richard Hull’s The Murder of my Aunt, but no, there is a sudden and unexpected twist. She dies of natural causes and Surridge is going to get his hands on the estate without sullying his hands with any dastardly crime. He begins spending in anticipation of his new wealth, committing to buy a house for his girlfriend. The problem is that his aunt’s solicitor, Mr Capper, has misappropriated the funds and more, although he too is expecting a sizeable legacy from an elderly uncle, Professor Burnaby, who studies snakes at the zoo. If only his demise could be hastened.

The couple hatch up an ingenious plan, involving venom from a snake, to kill the uncle in a way that looks like an unfortunate accident and almost get away with it. Through an astonishing coincidence, the plot is riddled with coincidences, Inspector French is a friend of the brother of the head keeper at the zoo and hears of the incident. His interest is piqued and he sets off to Birmington to investigate and inevitably unravels the truth.   

Crofts does a fine job in ratcheting up the tension. Surridge cannot relax throughout the investigation, even though he is convinced that he cannot be implicated in the crime. He is an object of pity and fascination, a man who has lost control of his ability to shape events and his fortune, becoming a person he never thought he would ever be. And French is dogged in his pursuit of the truth, perplexed by how a snake could bite the professor fatally and then end up drowned in a barrel. It all makes for a great, entertaining read.