Martin Fone's Blog, page 3

The Judas Window

A review of The Judas Window by Carter Dickson – 250814

Also known as The Crossbow Murder and first published in 1938, The Judas Window is widely regarded as being one of the most famous and highly respected locked room mysteries from the pen of the master of the subgenre John Dickson Carr, who also wrote under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson . It is the seventh story featuring Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) and is a welcome addition to the impressive British Library Crime Classics series.

The book falls into three parts, a prologue entitled What Might Have Happened, the much longer section set mainly at the Old Bailey entitled What Seemed To Happen, and an epilogue, What Really Happened. The middle section, narrated by Ken Blake, who with his wife, Evelyn, are friends of HM, is by far the longest and follows broadly the progress of the trial of Jimmy Answell, accused of the murder of Avory Hume. HM, making his first appearance as a silk in fifteen years, seems to have picked a forlorn case to make his return to world of forensic oratory as the facts of the case seem to tell only one story.

After a whirlwind romance Jimmy has become engaged to Mary Hume, Avory’s daughter, and is visiting London to visit his prospective father-in-law at the latter’s house at 12, Grosvenor Street, a house at which also Dr Spencer Hume, Hume’s brother, the housekeeper, Amelia Jordan, and the butler, Dyer, also live. Jimmy is apprehensive and is surprised to find the study in which the interview takes place has its heavy shutters closed. Hume, a keen toxophilist, has a trophy consisting of a triangle constructed from three arrows hanging on the wall.

Answell drinks a glass of whisky, loses consciousness and when he wakes up, he finds that Hume is dead with an arrow protruding from his chest. The door is bolted, the shutters closed, and Answell’s fingerprints are on the arrow that has been used as a murder weapon. Dyer, Spencer Hume, and Mary Hume break into the room and when they summon the police, there can only be one conclusion. No decanter, let alone doctored whisky, is found in the room and Answell has no signs of being poisoned or drugged.

I am not normally a great fan of court room dramas, but Carter Dickson makes this one very engaging. There is real doubt as to the way the verdict will go until almost the very end and in the exchanges between witnesses and counsel and the commentary between Blake and Merrivale as the case proceeds we learn much about the key characters in the story. To spice things up there is a spot of blackmail arising from an indiscretion on the part of Mary Hume, a scheme to exact revenge, the convenient but unfortunate homophony of two key names, a convenient hint of insanity in the family and an absconding witness, all of which help Merrivale to chip away at the mass of circumstantial evidence that points conclusively to Answell’s guilt.

HM seems fixated on trivia such as an ink pad, a golfing suit, a piece of blue feather from the arrow, a suitcase, and, perhaps most importantly of all, a Judas window. The latter, HM avers almost from the start, holds the key to how the murder was committed and of Answell’s innocence. He shocks everyone by stating that every room has a Judas window – you just have to know where to find it. Perhaps the greatest aid the reader has for solving the mystery are the detailed annotated timetables of events that HM produces, a careful study of which leads to the inevitable realization that only one person could have committed the murder in the time available.

With such an intriguing set up, the solution has to be ingenious and, my word, it is, although it is no rabbit pulled out of a hat. Slowly but surely HM assembles all the pieces through his forensic arguments and interrogation of the witnesses until they produce a cogent, coherent and compelling answer to the question if it was not Answell, who was it and how was it pulled off. It is a tour de force and as is often the way the most unlikely is often the likeliest.

Pralines

In Europe we associate a praline with a sweet consisting of a chocolate casing with a soft centre, often made from finely ground nuts. Known as Belgian chocolate, Belgian chocolate fondant or chocolate bonbon, pralines were supposedly introduced by the Belgian chocolatier, Jean Neuhaus II, in 1912. However, the original form of praline was a different form of confectionary with a much earlier origin.

One of the earliest references in English print appeared in 1727 in the form of prawlin, defined as a “confection made of almonds stirred with boiling sugar and water”, and derived from the French word, praline, which in turn was derived from the rather splendidly named 17th century French diplomat, César, duc de Choiseul, comte du Plessis Praslin. It is said that Praslin’s personal chef, Clement Lassagne, was the first creator of the praline.

Quite how Lassagne got the idea is shrouded in mystery. One story goes that he derived the idea from watching children scavenging for scraps in the kitchens and nibbling on the almond and caramel leftovers from one of his desserts. Another story suggests that Lassagne, discovering that children were stealing almonds from his kitchen, was lured by the delicious smell produced as they caramelised the contraband in sugar over the flame of a candle.

Another theory is that Lassagne got the idea when a clumsy apprentice knocked over a container of almonds into a vat of cooking caramel. Yet another theory suggests that du Plessis-Praslin was a lady’s man and asked his chef to produce an irresistible treat that he could give to his latest paramour. Praslin would put the sweet sugary sweets in little parcels bearing his name and after a while people began calling the sweets after him.

Perhaps the most likely version, though, certainly one propagated by Maison Mazet in the French town of Montargis, is that Clément Jaluzot served a dessert consisting almonds coated with vanilla caramelised sugar at a reconciliation dinner between the Jurats of Bordeaux, organised by du Plessis-Pralin in 1636. So enamoured with the dessert was Praslin that he stole the recipe, claiming it as his own.

Jaluzot was furious and sought his revenge by opening La Maison de Praline in Montargis, using his recipe which has been kept secret to this day. The business was bought along with the recipe in 1903 by Léon Mazet and it continues to be the only place producing Montargis pralines in accordance with the original recipe, awarded Living Heritage Company status. They are now sold in some 2,000 outlets around France and exported to around forty countries.

During the 19th century praline was used to describe other items of confectionary including the nut paste encased in a chocolate shell that we associate with the term now.   

The praline was introduced to America from France, where almonds where replaced by the locally sourced pecan nuts to produce a sugary, pecan-laden confection, particularly associated with New Orleans. Pralinières would wander the streets of the French Quarter of the city selling the pralines during the mid to late-19th century, a vital source of income to les gens de couleur libres. Modern day New Orleans pecan pralines are little different from those sold on the streets 150 years ago.

It is fascinating how the usage of the term praline has developed over time.

Crime Prevention Initiative Of The Week

The safety of our streets is a hot and seemingly intractable issue, but the Seoul police seem to have come up with an innovative way of maintaining a police presence on a crime hotspot.

Every evening, between 7pm and 10pm, a uniformed policeman standing over 1.7 metres tall appears in Judong No 3 Park, one of the busier areas in the Judong district of the South Korean capital, a striking reminder to passersby that the police will respond immediately in the event of an emergency and that the area is covered with surveillance cameras.

However, the policeman is no ordinary policeman, but a 3D hologram, created by Hologramica, a tech company specializing in producing holographic content, and is intended to both give reassurance to the public and reduce anti-social and disorderly behaviour.

Since its installation in October 2024 on a trial basis, data shows that it has had a significant impact on reducing crime in Judong No 3 Park.

An idea to keep an eye on but is it able to give directions to where you want to go?

The Case Of The Sapphire Brooch

A review of The Case of the Sapphire Brooch by Christopher Bush – 250811

With The Case of the Sapphire Brooch, the fifty-fourth in Bush’s long-running Ludovic Travers series, reissued by Dean Street Press, we reach the 1960s. Well into his seventies when the book hit the press in 1960, Bush is still capable of producing a complex puzzle that artfully draws several disparate strands into a coherent whole, the solution to which is relatively simple when all the distractions are put to one side.

The book opens with Travers perusing the newspaper and reading of yeat another heist. Then, in his guise as the owner and chairman of the Broad Street Detective Agency, he is contacted by a photographer and film maker, Paul Farrell, who wants his help in sorting out a mess he had got himself into. A former client, Farrell had contacted the agency some three years earlier for help in tracing his wife who had disappeared, a case which Travers passed on to another agency and which then petered out.

When Travers gets to Farrell’s flat he finds that it has been burgled, although little of note had been taken, and what looked suspiciously like traces of blood as well as a discarded sapphire brooch, initially thought to be costume jewelry but which Travers recognizes as the real McCoy. The next day there are reports of a man found dead in the vicinity of Farrell’s flat and Travers believes that he was the man who had entered Farrell’s flat and the traces of whose blood had been found. Armed with what he knows he goes to the Yard where his old mukkers are girding their loins to look into the case.

Time moves on at the Yard and George Wharton is no longer there, Jewle, his reputation buoyed by some of Travers’ latter day successes, is now enjoying an elevated status and the day to day investigations are now in the hands of Matthews, whom we first met as a lowly sergeant. Matthews and Travers have a good working relationship and work well as a team, although the consequence is that the story lacks a little of the dramatic tension that the sparring between Travers and Wharton used to bring.

One of the reason for Bush’s longevity, as well as the continuing high standard and complexity of his mysteries, is that his stories move with the times. Cosy mysteries have been long left behind and we have now entered a world of back street abortions, seedy night clubs, dark secrets, misinformation, blackmail, and robbery. As Matthews and Travers try to work out what is going on, the reader and they meet a bewildering array of people including four doctors, five different women all with likely motives, a disabled night club owner with a former boxer as his nurse and bodyguard, a pseudo-Cuban band leader, a couple of French confidence tricksters and a helpful waiter.

Travers is often at a loose end but he has a happy knack of spending his down time usefully, especially when he decides to take  trip into the countryside and sees an old woman planting bulbs by a graveside of a woman whose identity is similar to one of the women whose movements he is trying to trace.

The subsequent murder of Miss Braid provides a useful lead as does the trip that Matthews and Travers make to Marseille. Bernice, Travers’ wife, absent on one of her many trips when the book opens, returns in time to provide some useful input into what is one of Bush’s enduring themes, women’s hairstyles and colouring. Some footage that Farrell helps explain what really went on and why his flat was broken into. The haul of arrests is impressive by any standard

A constant leitmotif in the book is the weather and the relevance of what seems to be just local colouring and, to be unkind, a bit of padding becomes clear at the end. Slightly more irksome is the section when the sleuths try to wrestle with the problem of the identity of a couple of women but the Gordian knot is soon cut and the narrative is allowed to move on at pace.

Overall, it is an enjoyable read and if it is not exceptional in his canon of work, it is because Bush’s mastery of his art makes him capable of delivering work that is to a consistently high standard.              

The Earliest Crop Circle

They were once forever in the news during the slow months of the summers in the 1980s and 1990s, but you rarely hear of crop circles these days. Perhaps so much of the British arable land in the hands of property developers now that there is just not the canvas for the geometric forms of perfectly crushed patches of cereal. Theories abounded as to their cause: was it the work of alien visitors, the result of a freak weather event, a byproduct of the Earth’s magnetic forces, or just the handiwork of some humans with time on their hands? It was a question that had cereologists scratching their heads.

Crop circles, though, are not a modern phenomenon, the earliest illustration and description of their origin appearing in a five page pamphlet dating to August 22, 1678, entitled The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire. It came complete with an illustration showing a short, rather plump devil stooping with scythe in hand in a field of oats. He is making his way to the centre in concentric circles, leaving a trail of felled stalks in his wake, and he appears to be catching his breath as he works and wagging his tail.

The text tells of how a wealthy farmer approached his poor neighbour to harvest his crop of oats. The neighbour demands a price for “the sweat of his brows and marrow of his bones” which is above the going rate while the farmer counters with a much lower amount and while the neighbour modifies his demands, the farmer stands firm. In the end he declared that “the devil himself should mow his oats” before he had anything more to do with the “sorrowful Yeoman”.

In the view of the pamphlet, the farmer had forgotten his Christian duty to meet the needs of his poorer neighbours and retribution swiftly follows. That night, the oat field is reportedly ablaze and the following morning the farmer finds that while his crop has not been destroyed part of it has been felled in a strange manner. Indeed, it seems “as if the Devil had a mind to shew his dexterity in the art of Husbandry . . . he cut them in round Circles, and plac’t every straw with that exactness”. The pattern was more perfect than any human could produce and exhibited such skill that the farmer could not bear to destroy it by bringing in his crop.

With the devil’s assistance the farmer learned an important lesson to remember his Christian duty, just one of the components, the pamphlet reminds its readers, that go to ensure “the production of one Crop of Corn”, along with “the aptitude of the soyl, the seasonableness of showers, nourishing solstices and salubrious winds”. The pamphlet signed off by reminding its readers that “we should rather welcome maturity with devout acknowledgements than prevent our gathering of it by our profuse wishes.”

I wonder whether it really happened.

A Feather In Your Cap

Feathers have long been a feature of millinery design and for a big, bold, dramatic effect there was nothing better than to stick an ostrich feather or two in your titfer. As well as decorating hats, dyed ostrich feathers were used in boas, dress trimmings, in quilts and for lining parkas, and in funerary art. The hearse of Abraham Lincoln was topped with eight enormous sprays of black ostrich plumes and wealthy Victorians marked the loss of a loved one by displaying a wreath made of black ostrich feathers on their front doors.

Live ostriches began appearing in Britain as curiosities in the eighteenth century. In April 1745 the Derby Mercury encouraged its readers to view two, a cock and hen, which had recently arrived from “Santa Cruz in Barbary”. Of particular note, it stated, were the feathers which have an agreeable Mixture of Black and White, and are of great Value; the feathers on their Wings and Tails are of a beautiful White, and the richest plumes are made thereof.”

By the late 19th century feathers were dyed to whatever colour the milliner or wearer fancied, Alexander Paul’s The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer (1888) providing forty-eight examples on twelve plates of four of clusters of dyed ostrich feathers with explicit instructions on how to reproduce each colour exactly, with notes for adjustments to help the dyer to brighten or dull the hue. However, it was black that proved the most stable and important of all colours”, which “improves with age; and, instead of fading, the black will grow more intense.”

One of the most lamented consignments of goods on board the Titanic when it sank in 1912 was a consignment of ostrich feathers valued at the time at £20,000. The loss of a feather was a major blow, an event that prompted one distraught resident of Fredericktown to post a notice in the Maryland Chronical in 1768 offering a reward of one dollar for the return of a large black ostrich feather, “lost between John McGill’s and this town”.

The predilection for decorating hats with feathers did not come without a cost. Ostriches, egrets, herons, great auks, and many other species were hunted, often to the verge of extinction for their plumes. It is estimated that from the mid-19th century around 300 million birds of various species had been killed to feed the fashion industry, a rate of around five million a year. Evidence of the insatiable demand is provided by one London dealer who submitted an order for 6,000 bird of paradise feathers, 40,000 humming bird feathers, and 360,000 feathers from other species.  

With demand outstripping supply, by 1915 plumes were selling at $32 an ounce, on par with gold. Stocks of raw feathers of all varieties was one of the most prized commodities in the international trading market but the practice of killing to secure the supply of feathers had become both unsustainable and unacceptable, at least in some quarters, as we shall see next time.

Fool’s Gold

From the 4th century AD Zosimos of Panopolis onwards people have been fascinated with the concept of chrysopeia, turning everyday metals into gold. Known as alchemists they believed that base metals were impure stages that would eventually ripen into the purest form of all, gold, but if the process was left to nature alone it might never happen.

The hunt was on for a way to accelerate the transformation, something that attracted even the great minds of the time like Isaac Newton. By the 18th century, though, alchemy was largely discredited, those interested in natural philosophy becoming increasingly attracted to understanding how the universe works through the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics.

One discovery was that the identity of an element was determined by the number of protons it has in its nucleus. Gold, for example, has seventy-nine protons, while lead has 82. The nucleus is held together by the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, making it very difficult to remove a proton or neutron. However, theoretically, if it was possible to rearrange these fundamental components of an atom, then you could transform one element into another.

For the curious of mind the possibility of transforming the theoretical to the reality is too good an opportunity to miss. In 1941 the first successful transmutation of another metal into gold was reported in Physical Review Journal. A team of Harvard scientists, using a particle accelerator, fired lithium and deuterium nuclei into atoms of mercury, which contain one more proton than gold does. What happened was that the particles knocked protons and neutrons from the mercury nuclei, creating three radioactive isotopes of gold. However, they quickly decayed because the high-energy nuclei were unstable.

In 1981 the same journal reported that the same results had been achieved once more, this time by Glenn Seborg and his team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. While investigating the fragmentation of bismuth nuclei in relativistic collisions, they succeeded in converting several thousand atoms of the element into gold by bombarding the sample with carbon and neon nuclei in a particle accelerator.

Since then research teams around the world using particle accelerators have reported the production of gold as a byproduct of their experiments. The head-on collisions that they are able to generate are so intense that usually all the protons and neutrons are completely destroyed. However, where there are lower-energy near misses, where the particles are extremely close but not touching, a powerful electromagnetic field is generated, sufficient to knock protons out of nuclei. In one experiment involving lead nuclei, scientists detected around 29-trillionths of a gram of gold during a three year experimental run.

The production of gold by these means is far from commercially viable, but they show that that the alchemists had a germ of an idea. The proximity of gold and lead in the periodic table means that it is just possible that enough protons, just three, could be knocked out of lead for gold to be produced. Still a distant pipe dream, but not one as bonkers as once seemed.

No Wind Of Blame

A review of No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer – 250809

The first in Heyer’s Inspector Hemingway series and originally published in 1939, No Wind of Blame mixes a murder mystery which like a Victorian novel hinges on an abstruse legal point and an ingenious method of pulling off the crime with some really delightful and memorable characters. Poor Inspector Hemingway has his work cut out when he enters the portals of Ermyntrude Carter’s domain.

Walter, Ermyntrude’s husband, is a poor catch, a spendthrift, always short of money but buoyed by the prospect of a large inheritance from a semi-mythical dotty aunt, Clara, who is locked away in a mental institution. He is alleged to have put a young woman from the area in the family way and makes out that he needs £500 to pay off the family. On his way to a meeting with a couple of other old reprobates, Wally is shot dead in plain sight. Vicky, Ermyntrude’s daughter, is near the scene but saw nothing suspicious and, tellingly, her dog did not bark.

When he investigates the site, Hemingway finds a hairpin, a magnet, and some strange markings around the base of a tree. Eventually, when he sees his way through the distractions and red herrings, he is able to reconstruct the method by which the gun was fired, allowing to break a seemingly cast-iron alibi and bring the culprit to justice.

The motive for the murder is the destination of Aunt Clara’s estate which, if she died before Carter, would go to his cousin, the sensible, level-headed Mary, but if Carter were to die first, the legacy would be subject to the laws of intestacy. Once it is clear what would happen in those circumstances, the motivation for the murder is clear as is the murderer’s identity. That said, frankly, it is difficult for the reader to second guess that until it emerges deus ex machina-like towards the end of the tale.       

If the reader cannot really play sleuth, there is more than enough to enjoy. Heyer has populated her novel with some wonderful and memorable characters and there are many moments of humour. Ermyntrude herself is a larger than life figure, a former actress, highly strung, anxious to make her way in county society but she is topped by the marvellous comic creation that is Vicky. She assumes various roles and characters, playing them with gusto, and really does not care what people think of her, least of all Hemingway, or what the consequences are of her behaviour.

Vicky has a particular down on the latest house guest, the exotic Georgian Prince Varasashvili, who has set his sights on winning Ermyntrude’s hand and, as a foreigner, is an immediate suspect for her husband’s murder. The scene in which she foils the Prince’s plans and makes her mother see him for what he is is the highlight of the book and I shall chuckle over it for some time. We know that the Prince will be a figure of fun as soon as Heyer chooses Prince as the name of the Carter’s dog,

It would not be a Heyer without some romance in the air. As well as Vicky getting her man, a rather suitable catch which is in accord with Ermyntrude’s desire to establish the family into society, but the sensible Mary also finds her man in the local doctor, Maurice Chester. Two marriages and a culprit apprehended, what more do you want?

Hemingway is an engaging and determined sleuth, never quite put off his stride by the characters he encounters and clever enough to reconstruct the methodology of the crime. There is much to admire in this story.

Clapper Stiles

Go for a walk in the countryside along farm land and you are likely to encounter a stile. A wooden structure, it is designed to allow humans to cross from one field to another while maintaining a barrier to prevent livestock from escaping. They are usually positioned in a break in the hedgerow and their distinct advantage over gates, aside from their size, is that they are not reliant upon us to remember to close them.

I have never really given the types of stiles much thought but one I certainly have not encountered before is the clapper stile, also known as the tumble stile, of which, according to the Hungerford Virtual Museum, there are only sixteen surviving examples in the United Kingdom. There is one in Hungerford on the path leading from The Croft to the churchyard of the Parish Church of St Lawrence.

Other examples can be found in Linton in Cambridgeshire, Charlecote Park in Warwickshire and one in the History and Archaeology Society Barn Museum at Kenilworth Abbey. The latter was originally sited in the Abbey Fields in Kenilworth but was moved to the museum after the original had been vandalized and then restored.

A clapper stile is a pleasing combination of ingenuity and simplicity. It consists of horizontal rails, usually three but the Hungerford example has four, that are loosely held in place by a weights, often stones or pieces of wood, at one end and a pivot at the other. To pass through the stile, simply push down the unweighted end of the rails, which will move down to create a space which can be stepped over. Then release them, allowing the weights to swing the rails back into their original position.

The rails make a sound as they move, hence the name of clapper and the stiles must have been a boon to anyone wearing long skirts. They also enabled people to pass through the barrier with the minimum of effort, allowing them to maintain their poise and composure.

It is sad that they have all but disappeared.

Challenge Of The Week (2)

At a shooting party in 1954 Sir Hugh Beaver, then managing director of the Guinness brewery, got into a heated argument as to whether the grouse or the golden plover was the fastest game bird. According to ShootingUK it is the red grouse. Convinced that the world needed an authoritative source to settle such arguments – the internet was not available then – and so with the McWhirter twins, Norris and Ross, he compiled and wrote the first edition of Guinness World Records.

For seventy years now it has provided the official stampof approval on some of humanity’s weirdest stunts including the largest “toast mosaic”, 189.5 square metres made by a high school in West Yorkshire, the longest tongue, proudly belonging to Nick Stoebert and measured at 10.1 cm, and the world’s fastest pram, capable of reaching a speed of 53.46 mph, the brainchild of Colin Furze.

To mark its seventieth anniversary Guinness World Records has announced 70 as yest unclaimed records and is inviting the curious and the foolhardy to peruse the categories and see whether they are up to the challenge. Some of the records begging for a name to be attached to them include most anchovies eaten in a minute, most t-shirts put on in 30 seconds, most kisses by a pair in 30 seconds, most whoopee cushions sat on in one minute by a team of two, fastest 400m sack race, most origami cranes made in three minutes by an under-16, and most water moved by the hands in 30 seconds.

To find out more, follow this link.