Martin Fone's Blog, page 18

The Case Of The Flowery Corpse

A review of The Case of the Flowery Corpse by Christopher Bush – 250322

The forty-ninth in Christopher Bush’s long-running Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1956 and reissued by Dean Street Press, sees our sleuthing hero take advantage of his wife Bernice’s absence and pay a visit to an old Varsity friend, Sir Henry Morle, in the Suffolk village of Marstead. Of course, it turns out to be a busman’s holiday as on his way there Travers is run off the road by a speeding driver and then he finds the car a little further on wrecked with the driver dead.

It turns out that the driver, Ranger, a relative newcomer to the village who seems to have gone out of his way to make himself unpopular, had been poisoned, explaining his erratic driving style. Another body turns up, this time, Major Black, a stalwart of the village with a drink problem. He is also poisoned and, curiously, the body smells of chrysanthemums, the flowery corpse, even though Ranger’s car, the obvious means by which the body was conveyed, was plant free.

After some amateur and fairly unproductive investigations, the case is handed over to the Yard. Instead of George Wharton, who only makes a minor appearance in the book, the investigation is handed over to Inspector Jewle, his sidekick, with whom Travers had worked and, inevitably, by both being on the spot and by dint of his consultative role at the Yard, Ludovic’s services are welcomed with open arms.

The nub of the case revolves around the identity of Ranger and his backstory, why he came to Marstead, and how he got his money. Discovering the answer to these questions involves quite a lot of travelling around Eastern England, gradually accumulating bits of information here and there, making a few missteps, making incorrect assumptions and sometimes failing to take advantage of an opportunity by making a statement rather than asking a question.

It does not take a genius to spot that blackmail is involved and the discovery of some newspaper cuttings detailing the Cordage case, a jewelry theft, gives the investigation much needed impetus. The mysterious and perplexing disappearance of Mrs Black whose body is found trapped in a car in a pool, prompts Travers to set an audacious trap to smoke out the culprit. It fails spectacularly, earning Travers a blow on the head but in the process he does learn something that proves vital to resolving the case. It could quite easily have been called The Case of the Rustling Corduroys.

With relatively few suspects Bush does well to maintain the tension and while there are enough clues to point the reader in the right direction the reveal has an element of surprise. It is another case where a physical trait proves crucial in unmasking the culprit. There are some interesting characters, not least the flamboyantly dressed clergyman, and a pair of doctors who are twins, although Bush did not make as much of these characters as I thought he would. The explanation of the smell of chrysanthemums on Black’s corpse is a neat twist, albeit a bit of a red herring.

With a diminished role for George Wharton and the absence of both the Broad Street Detective Agency and Bernice, there is very much a sense of Bush taking his foot off the gas in this book. There is not the tension between the professionals and Travers that we have come to expect, Jewle being too amenable and affable for that, and the story does seem to spend a lot of time going relatively nowhere, but Travers is an engaging companion, the narrative has its moments of wit and, as usual, Bush demonstrates his ability to make a purse, if not quite silk, out of a relatively thin plot.

The Language Of Stamps

Citing a 90% drop in postal volumes since 2000, the Danish state-run postal service, PostNord, announced that it will end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025. Here in the UK letter volumes fell in 2023/24 to 6.6 billion, down 9% from the previous year, and almost a half of the 11.922 billion delivered in 2017. With the advent of the telephone and then email and other forms of near instant communication, the postal service has rather fallen a victim of technological advances, used now to send birthday and Christmas greetings, bulky objects, official documents and little else.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a ritual to sending a letter, not least the positioning of the stamp. Convention and indeed Post Office advice insists that the stamp be positioned in the top right-hand corner of the letter, clearly visible, not bent over and edge, and on the same side as the address. As most stamps these days have barcodes, stamps should be flat to ensure that they are easy to scan.

Within those protocols the precise positioning of the stamp can give the recipient of the letter an insight into the mindset of the sender. A stamp that is skewed can be indicative of someone who is slapdash or in a hurry while one perfectly positioned is suggestive of someone who is precise, calm and collected. However, going back a century or more when social conventions were designed to repress true feelings, the position of a stamp on an envelope could reveal much more.

Rather like the positioning of fans and the choice of flowers in a bouquet to convey a message, so the precise placement of a postage stamp could add hidden meaning to a seemingly innocuous message. One of the earliest references to the practice, giving the reader an insight into what each of the positions meant, appeared in a Hungarian weekly journal, Szarvas és vidéke, on July 13, 1890.

“For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander”, it disclosed, “and similarly to them can only exchange secret signs about the feelings of their hearts, here we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don’t write to me anymore. Top right, thwart: Write to me immediately. Top right, upright: Your love makes me happy. Top left, across: My heart belongs to someone else. Top left, upright: I love you. Bottom left, across: Leave me alone in my grief. In line with the name: Accept my love. Same place, across: I wish to see you. Same place, upside down: I love someone else”.

“We hope”, the article concluded, “that besides the inventor of the “new language” there would be other persons too who would eventually use it”. The writer’s aspirations were not misplaced, and by the turn of the 20th century, with the growth in the use of postcards, there are examples of this form of secret communication being explained and promoted in many European countries, including Britain.

Etiquette manuals began to include chapters on the subject and postcards were printed with a beginner’s guide showing the positions of stamps and the messages they conveyed. Most systems used six positions – the top right or left corner of the envelope, the bottom left or right corner, and centrally to the left or right of the recipient’s surname.

Many examples of those that have survived in the collections of deltiologists have the actual stamp used to post them affixed at a jaunty angle, suggesting that the sender selected this particular form of card to ensure that their message did not escape the attention of the recipient. While this move seemed somewhat self-defeating, it did remove the need to learn by heart the positions as detailed in a manual.

The Baskerville Bible

Considered by many bibliophiles as the most elegant of the versions of the King James Bible ever produced and marking the acme of English Bible printing, the “Baskerville” bible was published in 1763. Particularly revered for the beauty of its type and the spacious layouts of its pages, it was the work of Worcestershire-born John Baskerville who, having gained a reputation for the quality of his editions of the works of Virgil and Milton, was appointed printer for the University of Cambridge in 1758. It took him five years of “hard labour” to complete his commission to produce the bible, of which only 1,250 copies were ever printed.

One of Baskerville’s most radical departures was in the choice of type, preferring one he had developed himself, later to be known at the Baskerville font, instead of using what had hitherto been the standard, the Cassion. With improvements in presses and in the quality of ink, the Baskerville produced a clearer, blacker, rounder, more sharply cut type than his contemporaries.

Some of its distinguishing features are the letter E where the bottom arm projects further than the upper, the letter W which has no centre serif, and the lower case g where the bottom loop is open. The italics are even more distinctive where many of the capitals have flourishes, the J has a centre bar, the p has a tail pointing downwards and to the left, and the w has a clear centre loop and swash on the left.

Beautiful as the print may be, it was not universally well received, especially amongst English printers, some claiming that the type “hurt the eye” and that its widespread use would be “responsible for blinding the nation”. It soon fell out of favour but was revived in the 1920s and is regarded as the peak of Transitional type face design, which bridges the gap between Ols Style and Modern type design.

The other key distinctive feature of Baskerville’s Bible was the type of paper on which it was printed. Normally printers used laid paper which was made by drying it on a form that has vertical and horizontal “chains”. When the paper has dried, the areas where the chains are have not absorbed the paper pulp as completely as other areas and appear lighter if a light is shone through the page. Instead Baskerville used wove paper, made in a form with brass wires woven together, leaving no discernible pattern and producing a surface which enhanced his type.

Born in 1706, Baskerville started life as a master writer in Birmingham but in 1740 established a japanning business. At the time japanning was a popular process for finishing and ornamenting wood, leather, tin, and papier-mâché to imitate the lacquer work of Japanese artefacts. His business was enormously successful, allowing him to use some of the profits to pursue his hobby of developing a new type face. It is though that he had spent six hundred pounds before he had created the first letter to satisfy his aesthetic sensibilities.

As a Johnny-come-lately his success as a printer stuck in the craw of many of his rivals, but there was another reason as we shall see next time.

Fugu

A foodstuff that falls definitely into the highly dangerous if not prepared carefully is the Japanese delicacy of fugu, a puffer-fish based dish, a luxury which can easily command prices of up to $125 in high-end Japanese restaurants. It has a delicious taste, is less fatty than other white fishes and comes packed with umami which is further enhanced if it is allowed to sit overnight.

Fugu can be served as a jellied broth called nikogori or as sashimi and can also be grilled, simmered, or fried. It is filleted, thinly sliced, and then arranged in traditional patterns such as a crane. However, it is not for the faint-hearted.

The problem is that the organs, skin, blood, and bones of several species of puffer fish contain high concentrations of tetrodotoxin, a deadly poison which is estimated to be 1,200 times as toxic as cyanide. Just two or three milligrams are enough to be fatal and ingesting it can cause almost immediate numbness and paralysis and within twenty minutes respiratory failure. As a result, it is banned in most parts of the world, but not Japan.

There, chefs have to be licensed to prepare and serve fugu, a process that can take several years. They must be able to clean the fish and separate its organs and take an examination whose includes them having to eat what they had prepared. It must be fairly easy to determine whether they have passed or failed.  

Those of us whose pockets are not deep enough to afford the real deal can, though, get a sense of what the fuss is all about. The Japanese instant noodle company, Nissin Foods, have recently released a new puffer fish flavour which sells for 298 yen, about $1.90. What they claim to be the “essence” of puffer fish is condensed into a small packet of oil which is to be added to the soup base. However, they do not divulge how the potentially deadly flavouring is prepared.

Perhaps it is as well that Nissin have no plans to sell the fugu flavour outside of Japan.  

Cargo Of Eagles

A review of Cargo of Eagles by Margery Allingham – 250319

There is a distinct feeling of a farewell tour about the nineteenth novel in Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion series, originally published in 1968. That is not surprising as it was published posthumously and was completed by Allingham’s husband, Philip Youngman Carter, who went on to issue a couple of others. The reader is assured that Allingham had mapped out the plot and it is hard to spot any joins, although the finale seemed a tad rushed.

For those of us who have assiduously followed the series there is not only a welcome return to form but also a host of characters that we have grown to know and love. Stanislaus Oates comes out of retirement, Magersfontein Lugg graces his with his lumbering and comedic presence, Campion is his usual mysterious and obtuse self and the only surprise is the absence of Charlie Luke. That said, Allingham is not averse to introducing new characters, much of Campion’s legwork being done for him by a young American academic, Mortimer Kelsey.

But Allingham’s world is not an entirely hermetically sealed version of a time long gone. She allows hints of modernity to percolate through with a female doctor, Dido Jones, a reference to the Korean war, and a band of motor bikers who create mayhem in coastal towns over Bank Holiday weekends. Nevertheless, we are still in a world of members’ clubs and man servants.

The action centres around a remote coastal area in Essex, Saltey, a village that was the “back door to London”, one that was hostile to strangers, where families intermarried, where superstition is still rife, and was the haunt of smugglers. There are two pubs, the Forty Angels and the Demon, the latter much more of the life and soul of the community.

Despite being such a sleepy hollow, there is a lot going on in Saltey. There is some buried treasure, the myth of a demon who creates mayhem and has been spotted recently, the knowledge of who is behind the recent visitations contributing to the murders of Hector Askew and Mossy Ling, a bequest of a house, The Hollies, to Dido which comes out of the blue from a woman who she barely knew, a slew of poison pen letters which are growing increasingly menacing, a silver bullet, the release of an infamous smuggler, Teague, after a twenty year stretch who is back in the area, the re-emergence of his glass-eyed former accomplice, Burrows, with a wickedly accurate throwing arm, and the terrorization of the area by a gang of bikers led by a woman, Doll Jensen.

Alongside all of this, Campion is engaged in a mysterious enterprise for a wing of the secret service, and is somewhat disconcerted by these other extraneous events queering his pitch. It all comes together and we have a lot of fun getting there. In the denouement, in which some excavations are carried out at the Hollies, two discoveries are made, one gruesome and which dashes the plans of the culprit and the other which results in the completion of Campion’s mission. Campion makes a surprising choice at the end, one that does not seem to fit well with the persona carefully cultivated during the series.

The relevance of the cargo of eagles in the book’s title only emerges in the final two chapters. They are double eagles, twenty dollar gold pieces, which were stolen and hidden from the British secret services at the tail end of the Second World War and which are now required to pay a ransom to extricate a spy from a tricky situation in an area almost behind the Iron Curtain.  

Great stuff.

Escalator Of The Week

Not being quite as young as I once was I am now becoming a bit picky about how much energy and effort I want to expend to get to a position to enjoy a view of some site of natural beauty, a sort of mental risk and reward calculation. Increasingly, more and more seem not to be worth the effort.

China is not the first country that would come to mind for inclusivity but they are beginning to cotton on that here are many people like me who would like to enjoy nature’s beauty without the fag of getting there and have come with a novel solution to make it possible.

From May 2025 visitors will be able to ascend a 1,500 metre mountain in the Lingshan Scenic Area using dozens of interlinked escalator. The project was launched in 2022 and is being hailed as a giant step in making the spectacular and sweeping Lingshan vistas with its seventy-two peaks accessible to all. What was a two hour climb up innumerable steps carved into the mountain has now been reduced to an escalator ride of a few minutes.

Lingshan is not the first Chinese landmark to receive this makeover – in 2023 an escalator was installed at Tianyu Mountain in Zhejiang Province up its 350 metre summit and several other sites have since followed suit – but it is certainly the most ambitious.

Opinions are divided. Is it a slippery slope that strips nature of the very challenges that make it rewarding or is a step to making even the most remote outposts available to all to enjoy?

The jury is out but, for what it is worth, as long as it blend sensitively into the environment, it can only be good.

Waste Of The Week (2)

Did you know that there were 96 bags of human waste that have been left on the moon following the Apollo space missions? And for all we know they are still there. With increased space exploration activity and commercial concerns offering space travel, although these seem merely to consist of rich people popping their heads through the Earth’s atmosphere, there are increasing concerns about the threat caused by the problem of disposing of human faeces on celestial orbs.

To try to solve the problem NASA have recently launched (successfully) the LunaRecycle Challenge, wittily dubbed as being for “the crater good” and described as a “two track, two-phase competition focused on the design and development of recycling solutions that can reduce solid waste and improve the sustainability of longer-term lunar missions”.

“There will be a need to consider”, it goes on “how various waste streams, including solid waste, can be minimized—as well as how waste can be stored, processed, and recycled in a space environment so that little or no waste will need to be returned to Earth”.

As well as scooping a $3m prize, the winner will rest content in the knowledge that their solution will be used on long space flights and at long-term outposts. No free trip to see if it works, though.

Towards Zero

A review of Towards Zero by Agatha Christie – 250316

The fifth and final novel in Christie’s Superintendent Battle series, originally published in 1944, has an almost Sophoclean and philosophical feel about it. The central premise, as enunciated by Mr Treves, an elderly lawyer with a dicky heart, is that many detective stories start at the wrong point, murder being the end point rather than the beginning, with “all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day”.

The nexus of this chain of events is Lady Tressilian’s house in Saltcreek in Cornwall, where a group of people assemble to take the air and to work out their complex relationships. Curiously, Neville Strange, a professional tennis player, has chosen to bring his relatively new wife, the rather selfish and jealous Kay, to spend a couple of weeks in the company of his former wife, Audrey, whom he had abandoned and divorced. Naturally it makes for an uncomfortable time with the former couple still manifesting feelings for each other.

There is a brooding atmosphere about the place which Christie stokes up with aplomb. The reader is left anticipating some kind of explosion of emotions as zero hour approaches but she cleverly delays it to almost the midway point when it comes as rather a damp squib. Poor old Mr Treves dies from heart failure having had to walk up three flights of stairs to get to his rooms as the lift has a notice saying that it is out of order. The hotel deny that there was any fault with the machinery.

Any sense of disappointment over the way Treves met his maker is more than made up for by the brutality of Lady Tressilian’s death, brutally hit over the head with a golf club that is done in a way to suggest that the assailant is left-handed. There is more than enough evidence, carelessly discarded about the place, to incriminate either of Neville or Audrey Strange but why would they be so careless over covering their tracks and what was their motive? Neville is right-handed and does not overly need Lady T’s money whereas Audrey, who inherits half the estate, has motive enough and is left-handed. Although the evidence points a certain way, Battle, an industrious if somewhat unimaginative detective, believes there is more to it than meets the eye.

And indeed there is. It is a case of bluff and double bluff marinated in a sauce of long-awaited revenge where scores from long ago are to be settled and the victim of the plot is to suffer a long and torturous death at the hangman’s noose. It is another case where a physical peculiarity proves crucial and Mr Treves’ fate is sealed because of his boast that he can tell the identity of someone involved in a tragic and fatal childhood accident by the mark. Once more too much information is dangerous. Lady T, though, is a sacrificial victim to further the overall plan.

The character of Angus MacWhirter, who appears at the beginning and towards the end of the story, brings another dimension to the story, a discussion of suicide. Angus had tried and failed to commit suicide and while recuperating is told by a nurse that he would never attempt it again but also would bring enormous help to someone simply by being at a certain place at a certain time, another manifestation of the zero factor.

Of course, Angus finds himself down at Stark Head, where he had attempted suicide, and is there in time to stop Audrey from throwing herself off the cliff. He then provides some vital “evidence” which allows Battle to force a confession from the culprit. The denouement also raises a moral dilemma over how sacrosanct truth really is. Is it acceptable to have a bit of leeway if it results in the right outcome?              

Christie novels can be a bit superficial and stereotyped, but I found that this was a deeper and more profound novel, exploring feelings and topics which really meant something to the author.

As for the recent TV adaptation, how can you have a Battle story without Battle and the conflation of Battle and MacWhirter into one made a nonsense of the pivotal role of the latter. Stick to the book!

Furry Tennis Balls

Lawn tennis is a much younger game than golf, dating back to the 1870s, and at first glance the design of ball used seems to not have progressed beyond the “hairy” stage of the golf ball. The tennis ball has a fuzzy covering known as a nap, made from wool, nylon, and cotton, which is cut out into the shape of a dumbbell, two pieces of which are glued on to the ball, giving it its distinctive curvy seams. The nap is the most important part of the ball and is what makes the game playable.

A smooth ball offers little friction between its surface and the surrounding air, allowing it to travel quickly. However, a ball with a rough surface increases the friction between itself and the surrounding air, causing it to slow down, an effect known as skin friction drag.

As the ball cuts through the air, it knocks air out of its way, creating turbulent swirls behind it which, in turn, forms regions of low pressure. The front of the ball, however, is still experiencing a higher pressure and this pressure difference causes the ball to experience drag force in the opposite direction to which it is moving, causing the ball to slow down. The sucking action of the low pressure area curves the ball’s trajectory and imparts spin. A ball spinning clockwise with its bottom surface pushing upwards produces backspin while one spinning in an anti-clockwise direction generates topspin.

Playing tennis with a ball without a nap is almost impossible. The ball travels much more quickly and further, making it difficult to control and keep within the perimeters of the court and gives the opponent so little time to react to react that they run the risk of injury and the game descends into a succession of serves.

The increased drag produced by the nap, though, slows the ball down to around a third of the speed that it left the server’s racket. While the loss of speed, further reduced when it bounces off the grass or clay, increases the likelihood of the opponent returning the serve, it offers the server greater control. Experienced players use the drag force to make the ball spin in different directions using forehand and backhand shots which allows them to send their opponents scampering around the court in an attempt to reach the ball.    

The force with which a racquet hits a tennis ball soon damages the nap, which then impacts its performance and the players’ ability to control it. That is why professional players take an inordinately long time scrutinizing the ball they pull out of their pocket before serving and why the umpire’s call of “new balls please” frequently punctuates a match.

There is a reason for everything, it appears.

Tarquin’s The Seadog Navy Strength Gin

An obvious success story in the world of Cornish artisanal gins is Tarquin Leadbetter’s range of gins. You cannot move in Cornwall without seeing their ubiquitous marketing paraphernalia. While there are undoubtedly some more interesting, unusual, and sustinable gins around from the area, this seems to be a stayer and they have a wide range of flavour ranges. Browsing the DrinkfinderUK website looking for a Navy strength gin, Tarquin’s The Seadog Navy Strength Gin caught my eye.

A couple of things to note straightaway. This is the same as the limited edition that Tarquin made to commemorate the fact that the 771 squadron were stepping down from their role as Search and Rescue providers from So what we have is  base at Culdrose in nearby Helston. It also uses the same botanicals as their Cornish Dry Gin, only with the volume cranked up to eleven and the ABV set to 57%.

So what we have is fresh and slightly floral juniper sourced from Kosovo, Bulgarian lemon sherbet coriander seeds, along with the fresh zest of orange, lemons and grapefruits together with angelica root, orris root, green cardamom, almonds, cinnamon, liquorice root, and last, but not least, Devon violets sourced directly from Tarquin’s garden.

On the nose there is a full hit of fresh juniper with cassia, cardamom, and the orange peel adding to the sense of complexity but also of a spirit that is not straying too far from tradition. In the glass it louches slightly with the addition of a premium tonic and it is quite spicy, the sharp edges, though, taken off as the citric elements get to work. There is then a hint of the floral before the piney juniper, orange, and spices take over. It is a well-constructed gin with different flavour profiles hitting the palate as it moves round the mouth. As to be expected with the alcohol content, there is a long ad warming aftertaste with more than a little hint of orange.

It is an enjoyable addition to the Navy Strength range of gins readily available, although not exceptional, and belies its strength with its smoothness, a note for the unwary or naïve drinker. Quite why it is called Seadog is slightly baffling, obviously a nod to the Cornish maritime tradition, because there is not the hint of saltiness in the flavour or the ingredients that often makes other Cornish gins so distinctive.

The bottle is the standard Tarquin shape, with frosted glass and a red faux-wax-like seal. They are distinctive, stand out from the crowd and, it seems, are likely to be a familiar sight on gin shelves for some time to come.

Until the next time, cheers!