Martin Fone's Blog, page 34

Fine Of The Week

Such is the extent of the problem of litter pollution that groups of community-minded individuals take it upon themselves to clear up the mess. Eighty-five year old Alan Davies joins a group of his friends for a walk and a litter pick. On September 6th, after picking litter along Longwood Lane and Hayhead Wood in the Aldridge district of Walsall, in a senior moment he left his walking stick and a bag containing a cushion behind.

Using CCTV and his car’s registration number, Walsall Council tracked Davies down and hit him with a £150 fixed penalty fine. Cue outrage. The Council backed down, rescinded the fine, and issued a profuse apology.

The thought occurs that if they could go to all that effort to track him down, why cannot they show the same zeal in pursuing the litterers in the first place. Low hanging fruit, eh?

Tune To A Corpse

A review of Tune to a Corpse by Peter Drax – 241025

The fourth novel written by Peter Drax, originally published in 1938 and reissued by Dean Street Press, was one of two of his books that were published in the United States, under the alternative title of Crime to Music. More of a seedy thriller than an inverted murder mystery, it is full of gritty realism, almost ahead of its time in its portrayal of the realities of crime, as it explores life in the lower reaches of London’s criminal demi monde.  

It follows the final stages of the career of the soi-disant Captain Eric Macrae, a chancer, always on the look out for easy money, who lives by his wits, and experiences periods of famine interspersed with the occasional, always brief, moments of relative wealth. He cuts a dash and is viewed as a gentleman, a man who speaks well and always has his trousers well pressed.   

With the need to raise some money to pay off a pressing debt, Macrae cannot resist the opportunity to lift some pearls belonging to Mrs Keene, a woman who pays him to act as his dining companion, to pawn. However, before he can retrieve the pearls and replace them before their absence is noticed, he is hit by a couple of pieces of misfortunes. Mrs Keene does notice they are missing and calls in not only the police but also her insurance company. The resulting hue and cry alerts the pawnbroker, Abie Russ, to the value of the jewels and he sets out to double cross Macrae. The only way of cutting this Gordian knot that Macrae can visualize is to commit murder most foul, retrieve the jewels and return them.

And so Macrae sets in motion a chain of events that inevitably and ineluctably lead to his own demise. He is not bright enough to concoct a convincing story to provide him with an alibi, even though the police have at best only circumstantial evidence against him, and in his darkest hours his conscience will not rest as he considers the enormity of his crime. It is a fine study of the tortured psychology of a criminal who has bitten off more than he can chew, of a man who through a series of apparently chance decisions and rash acts becomes more and more tightly enmeshed in a web from which he cannot escape. Although we know what the outcome will be, it is a fascinating read.

Structurally, the book falls into broadly two parts and while the second concentrates on the fall of Captain Macrae, the first gives some context to the world in which he operates. It is one in which rival gangs are engaged in a turf war to control a lucrative bookmaking business, where down and outs are employed as street vendors and musicians to provide an early warning system, of shady night clubs and where unthinking violence is common and random. Drax paints a warts and all picture of a part of society that is rarely taken notice of, where the height of ambition is to get enough money to eat and sleep, where even the music is repetitious and the clocks have stopped. It is as far removed form the world of cosy murders as you can imagine.

Drax populates his world with some marvellous characters, not least Mrs Finch, who does for Macrae, makes a discovery and befuddled with drink makes some damaging allegations, while as a former insurance underwriter, the drily efficient Mr Broderick is just the man I would want to protect my account. The police, led by Inspector Thompson are ruthless in their pursuit of justice but operate with compassion and, in truth, their job is made easier by the inability of their prey to keep quiet. And for light relief, the reader is invited to spare some sympathy for Peggy Nichol, who initially falls for the charms of Macrae only for the scales to fall from her eyes and the stolidity of Bert Finch to become attractive once more.

There is so much in this book to enjoy.

Colombo No 7 Gin

On a recent visit to Constantine Stores, the spiritual home of Drinkfinder UK, I picked up a bottle of Colombo No 7 Gin, which has a fascinating backstory, a tale of Anglo-Sri Lankan collaboration. The story starts in 1924 when Carl de Silva Wijeyeratne founded the Rockland Distillery, the first on the island of Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, to distil the local firewater, Arack, an alcoholic drink made from fermented coconut flower sap. I have tried it and it is delicious, if a bit fiery.

During the Second World War, with shipments of supplies hazardous, the British forces, anxious to maintain their stock of gin, asked the distillery to make gin. However, as the traditional botanicals that go into a distillate were hard to come by, for the same reasons as gin was scarce, a recipe was developed using local botanicals such as Sri Lankan curry leaves, cinnamon, and ginger.

Fast forward to 2004 and the catastrophic tsunami which devastated the littoral regions of the island. Carl’s grandson, Amal, joined the distillery to rebuild the business and decided to recreate the precise wartime gin recipe that his grandfather had developed. However, as regulations relating to the production of alcohol were tightening on the island, he decided to collaborate with Langley Distillery, a wholesale distillers based in Oldbury in the West Midlands which operates on the old Crosswells Brewery site. The result is a gin of distinctly Sri Lankan origin and using Sri Lankan botanicals distilled and bottled in the heart of England’s Black Country.

The No 7 in its name does not refer to it being the seventh iteration of the recipe but the number of botanicals that are used in the distillation. For the record they are juniper, angelica, coriander, liquorice root, Sri Lankan cinnamon bark, curry leaves, and ginger root. What particularly intrigued me was the use of curry leaves and whether they would overpower and dominate the taste of the spirit. I enjoy a curry but I am not sure I would want to drink one.

Needless to say, my fears were ill-founded. Of course, it is there and brings a warm and comforting note to the nose but in the glass this proves to be a well-balanced gin with citrus and more than a hint of ginger working well with the earthier botanicals and leaving a tantalizing spicy tingle on the tongue. Unusual, for sure, but with an ABV of 43.1%, it makes for a complex, light and bright gin.

The bottle is made from clear glass, cylindrical with round shoulders and a long neck leading to a gold cap with artificial stopper. The labelling is primarily white lettering on a dark green background and there is very much a Sri Lankan feel to the artwork. The gold in the centre of the front label stands out and the rear label informs me that ingredients come from the exotic cinnamon gardens of Colombo.

If you like something unusual, this is certainly worth looking out for.

Until the next time, cheers!

Tiddlywinks

At its simplest tiddlywinks is a game for up to four people, played on a flat felt mat. The object is to shoot a wink, a coloured disc, into a pot using a squidger, a larger disc, but there is also a defensive element to the game. This involves “squopping”, landing your disc over an opponent’s so effectively barring them from “squidging” their disc. Amongst aficionados it can be fiercely competitive, with regular tournaments held in Britain and the USA and even a world title.

The rules governing the modern version of the game were established on January 16, 1955 by a group of undergraduates who met at Christ’s College, Cambridge, determined to invent a game at which they could represent the Varsity. Their success attracted the attention of the then Duke of Edinburgh, who, in 1960, commissioned the “Silver Wink” trophy. Standing 15½ inches tall, topped with a ring inside of which is a silver rotating wink, it was presented in January 1961 to the English Tiddlywinks Association to be awarded to the winner of the all-British universities series of competitions. As many as 37 universities competed for the trophy in the 1960s.

However, the antecedents of the modern game of tiddlywinks can be traced back to the late 19th century, the heyday of the British parlour game. A provisional  patent application for “a new and improved game” was delivered to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office on November 8, 1888, by the twenty-five year old, Hampshire born, Joseph Assheton Fincher, by then living at 9, Berners Street in London and describing himself as a “gentleman”.

The game, which Fincher called Tiddledy-Winks, was played with “counters or flippers made of wood, ivory, bone or other substance, and a bowl or vessel of any shape, made of wood, china, glass, ivory or other substance, the object of the said counters or flippers being to press the edge of a smaller set of counters provided for the purpose and so cause them to jump into the bowl or vessel placed in the centre of the table”. The application helpfully included illustrations of the technique required to flip the counters.

What was new about the game, Fincher claimed, was the use of a bowl and counters, the act of flipping the counter, and the use of one counter to flip another. It is not clear how or why he devised the game, but he did have an inventive streak, patenting in 1890 “improvements in Sleeve Links” as cufflinks were known at the time, although later had an application rejected in 1897 for improvements to a Candlestick. Sadly, he died aged 36 on a platform of Waterloo Station on July 14, 1900, having suffered “convulsions from congestion of the brain”.

Fincher engaged the distinguished London games manufacturer, Jaques and Son of Hatton Gardens, to publish the sets, which featured wooden winks cups hand-turned on a lathe by the company’s craftsmen. An early advertisement for the “splendid new game” called Tiddledy Winks appeared in The Evening Standard on March 1, 1889, with sets available for one shilling.

With Fincher’s patent accepted on October 19, 1889, and the trademark approved on March 6, 1890, Tiddledy Winks quickly became an established parlour game. It livened up many an evening, judging from an entry in the 17-year-old Lady Emily Lutyens’ diary for April 24, 1892: “After dinner we all played the most exciting game that ever was invented, called Tiddleywinks…to begin with, everyone begins to scream at the top of their voices and to accuse everyone else of cheating. Even I forgot my shyness and howled with excitement… I assure you no words can picture either the intense excitement or the noise. I almost scream in describing it”.

David Devant

David Devant, the stage name of David Wighton taken from the title of a painting David devant Goliath, was a successful magician, hugely popular with the British public. “The Mascot Moth” is considered to have been his masterpiece, created in 1905. In full view of the audience and in the centre of a fully lit stage, a woman, dressed in a moth-like costume, vanishes out of sight as she folds her wings in and the conjurer tries to grasp her, even though the figure is not concealed in any way during the illusion.

Part of Devant’s appeal was his desire to incorporate his illusions into short magical plays, based upon a deeply held conviction that the magician was “a story teller and should hold the attention of the audience by telling them the most impossible fairy tales, and by persuading them to believe that these stories are true”. By the standards of the day when magicians were often lofty and pretentious, his style was informal, witty and charming.

Devant became the first president of the Magic Circle in 1905 and appeared in the first royal command variety show in 1912. However, he was also no stranger to controversy. One of the golden rules amongst magicians is that the secrets of their trade, the precise mechanics of each trick or illusion, should be a closely guarded secret. Indeed, the Magic Circle had a rule prohibiting its members from “exposing to the public, in any manner whatsoever, any secret of the Art of Magic”.

However, between 1908 and 1909 Devant wrote a series of articles entitled “Tricks for Everyone” which were published in the Royal Magazine. His audacity earned him the disfavour of some of his colleagues and he was forced to resign, but such was his status as a magician that his departure cause a deep division in the ranks which was only healed when he was reinstated as an ordinary member in 1912.

Forced to retire from performing in public in 1919 because of a debilitating progressive palsy, by 1936 Devant was almost totally paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. He courted controversy once more that year by publishing Secrets of My Magic in which he disclosed the secrets of the magic tricks he had invented. The Magic Circle once more demanded his resignation.

In his defence Devant argued in the Sunday Express that “the tricks I had exposed were my own, so I did not think I had broken any rule. I owe it to posterity to give to the world my secrets before I die. I don’t think I shall live much longer. Exposing tricks or illusions—providing they are not someone else’s new invention—is good for the profession. It stimulates public interest in magic and forces magicians to seek new tricks rather than to stagnate with some that are centuries old. The Magic Circle seems to think that it is the mechanics of a trick that are the secrets of its success. In my view, it is only the artistry of the performer that can make it magic.”

The Magic Circle felt that it had no option but to uphold its rule “with the greatest regret” and expel Devant from membership, although in 1937, by which time he had been admitted to the Royal Home for Incurables at Putney, he was offered an Honorary Life Membership, which he graciously accepted.

A statue in his honour was unveiled at the Centre for Magic Arts in Euston in 1998 and his name lives on with the David Devant Award, which, since 1999, has recognised those who have made a significant contribution to the world of magic. The winner this year (2024) was Gay Blackstone.

Mr Pottermack’s Oversight

A review of Mr Pottermack’s Oversight by R Austin Freeman – 241022

It is some time since I have read anything by Richard Austin Freeman but the recent reissue of the nineteenth novel in his Dr Thorndyke series, originally published in 1930, as part of the British Library Crime Classics series seemed a perfect opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the forensic lawyer. Freeman’s prose style is wordy, never using one where ten will do the same job, and precisely detailed, leaving the reader no opportunity to make an assumption. The result is a novel that is probably twice as long as it needed to be.

Nevertheless, it is an entertaining tale and although Marcus Pottermack has been instrumental in causing another man’s death and goes to ingenious and ludicrous lengths to cover up his traces, it is hard not to feel sympathetic towards his plight, not least because much of the narrative is told from his perspective. Indeed, he would have got away with it but for a combination of circumstances, firstly to use Freeman’s delicious turn of phrase, his setting “forth along that perilous track beaten smooth by the feet of those who do not know when to let well alone” and then when the case comes before the scientific curiosity of one Dr John Thorndyke.   

In the prologue to the story we come across an escaped convict who is able to evade the search party by changing into some clothing he finds discarded on a beach by a suicidal bather. A body is washed up some weeks later and it is assumed to be that of the escapee. The story then moves on fifteen years or so later to an unostentatious bachelor, Marcus Pottermack, his surname a play on the name of the ship in which he travelled to America, the Potomac, who decides to buy a sun dial to make a feature in his walled garden. As he makes preparations to install the sun dial he discovers a hidden well.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Pottermack is the escaped convict, but unfortunately for him his secret has been rumbled by a local bank manager, Lewison, who had framed him for his original conviction, and uses his knowledge of Pottermack’s true identity to blackmail him. In a violent altercation following the latest demand for money, Lewison, trips, is killed, and ends up down the well. Pottermack, in the first of a number of disastrous decisions, decides to close up the well and cover up any traces of the fatal encounter. To add a further complication to Pottermack’s situation, he has fallen for Mrs Bellard, who just happens to be Lewison’s estranged wife who is also being blackmailed and to whom, up until his conviction, the youthful Pottermack was engaged.

There is much misplaced ingenuity in Pottermack’s attempts to wipe the slate clean, including laying a trail of false footprints that lead away from his garden to a wood, obtaining a set of clothing that matches Lewison’s to go with the coat left in his summerhouse, and, ludicrously, the purchase of an Egyptian mummy, something that always comes in handy when hiding a murder.

Thorndyke does some consultancy work for the bank where Lewison worked and was interested to study the results of a new camera which took sequential photographs of the footprints that ran from the road to Pottermack’s gate and then to the woods. His trained eye immediately spots a difference – it is all to do with the rotation of heel screws – but his interest is purely academic until it is awakened once more by the discovery of what is assumed to be Lewison’s body and the subsequent inquest. Despite knowing that the body has been wrongly identified, Thorndyke keeps quiet.

The long anticipated encounter between Thorndyke and Pottermack concludes the book, Thorndyke rather drily reconstructing the latter’s actions and pointing out his mistakes, numerous as they are, but the most serious being ignoring a physical blemish and the screws, before making a momentous decision upon which Pottermack’s fate hangs.

An inverted murder mystery which occasionally veers towards the ludicrous, it is an entertaining read.

Art Theft Of The Week

In a scene reminiscent of the 1969 film The Italian Job thieves in blowing off the doors of the MPV Gallery in the Dutch town of Oisterwijk used so much dynamite that they destroyed the entire building and damaged nearby stores. Their target was four works from a 1985 Andy Warhol series called Reigning Queens, portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, Margarethe II of Denmark, Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Ntombi Tfwala of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland).

Their next problem was that the prints were so big that they would not fit into their getaway car. They ripped the prints from their frames, thus damaging them beyond repair, according to the gallery’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, abandoned the portraits of Beatrix and Ntombi Tfwala on the street, and drove off with the other two.

The attack, described as amateurish, was captured on security cameras, but, at the time of writing, the thieves have not been arrested.

Strava Art Of The Week

This is a blog that prides itself in being some way behind the curve when it comes to the latest social media crazes so it is no surprise that it has taken a while to stumble across Strava Art. Named after a gadget that records GPS data during bouts of exercise, it involves cyclists and runners creating elaborate pictures on a map and posting them on social media.

A proficient exponent of the art form is Rebecca Laurel from Leicester who specializes in Halloween-themed bike rides. Having already done rides in the form of a pumpkin, a ghost, and a witch, her chosen theme for 2024 was a skeleton. Over six hours she cycled from Fosse Park in Leicester city centre, around Soar Valley Way to create the skeleton’s hips, before heading south to draw the legs and ending her ride at Braunstone. The complexity of the skeleton’s design meant that she had to cycle parts of the route several times and as much of it involved urban cycling, it was slow going.

On a larger and more eye-catching scale, Terry Rosoman has created a 75-mile GPS image of a penis by walking stretches from Hay-on-Wye to Abergavenny via a double circuitous route taking in Crickhowell and Llangenny to raise money and awareness about men’s mental health issues for Movember.

Seems quite fun.

The Worm Of Death

A review of The Worm of Death by Nicholas Blake – 241017

Originally published in 1961, the fourteenth novel in Blake’s Nigel Strangeways series which, while retaining the elements of a whodunit, is more of a psychological study of members of a troubled and distinctly odd family.

None of the Loudron family are likeable. Paterfamilias, Dr Piers Loudron, has in various ways earned the enmity of his children, James and Rebecca for the treatment of their mother, although it emerges he had some justification, and in Rebecca’s case for also forbidding her relationship with a volatile painter called Walter Barn, Harold, “something in the City”, for refusing to bail him out in his hour of need, and his adopted son, Graham, whom Piers sired but treated his mother, at least in his eyes, abominably. There are motives enough for murder most foul.

Blake, the nom de plume of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, applies his customary elegance to the structure of the novel, opening with an extract of a diary that Piers has penned, indicating that he fears someone is out to kill him and that he will meet his fate willingly but might hasten the end by taking his own life, and ending it with a fuller rendition of the diary, the perfect ring composition. There is more than a tip of the hat to the Roman writer and courtier, Petronius, whose elegant suicide, after writing an account spilling the beans on the reign of the emperor Nero, earned him a place in the pages of history.

Piers Loudron’s body is recovered from the Thames and while his legs are severed, there are two slashes across his wrists of equal depth, making it highly unlikely that he committed suicide. But why was the body dumped into the sea and who killed him and why? Was there a solo killer or did several have a hand in it? His death means that the financial worries of each of the family members are eased. Is this a motive, a strong one in the case of Harold, or is it a question of revenge for Piers’ past indiscretions?

Strangeways, ostensibly brought in to protect the interests of the family, had a brief acquaintance with them, having dined in the company of his long-time girlfriend, the sculptress Clare Massinger whom we first met in The Whisper in the Gloom, shortly before Piers’ death. He is fascinated by the family dynamics and the psychological make-up of each of the principal characters. This is a novel where Clare plays an important part, not only making helpful suggestions as Strangeways’ investigations develop but also playing a major part in preventing Nigel from becoming the murderer’s third victim – they had also done away with Harold’s nymphomaniac and drug addict wife, Sharon, along the way – in a dramatic finale where the tables are turned and the culprit dances an unofficial hemp jig.

Clare also contributes to the book’s title by referring to Strangeways’ modus operandi as worm-like, burrowing and insinuating himself into the confidence of his suspects, the better to understand their actions and motives and, ultimately, to bring one or more to justice. This perfectly describes Strangeways’ behaviour in this novel, in which he is not beyond betraying his position of trust to play tricks to get nearer to the truth.

The plot resembles a Greek Tragedy, as Piers acknowledges in his diary, with his hamartia, his original indiscretion or sin, inexorably sets in train a series of actions and events which lead to disaster. While the culprit is relatively easy to identify, the mechanics of the murder and the disposal of the body are less so.

Blake uses his own house in Greenwich as the setting for the Loudon’s home and exhibits a fine sense of place, with moody, atmospheric passages of the river, the river traffic and the fog. There is also a splash of humour, the grim brutality of Sharon’s murder leavened by the drunken Dutch sailor who falls into the river.     

I always find much to admire in Blake’s work but this is one of his lesser novels.

The Longest Yarn

On Tuesday (November 12, 2024) my wife and I went to the Royal Garrison Church in Aldershot to see an astonishing exhibition of wool art, The Longest Yarn, a series of eighty tableaux depicting in 3D scenes from the D Day landings and the aftermath. Using a mix of knitted and crocheted figures, some designs quite complex, others simpler, each focusing on one minute aspect of the campaign and each a testament to the hours of dedication of the volunteers who made them and their extraordinary skill. The total length of the whole piece is some 80 metres. The eightieth stood away from the main exhibition, a poignant representation of an upturned helmet on a beach.

It took around an hour to snake around the Perspex containers and even though we got there relatively early, around 9.45, we had half an hour’s wait seated on reasonably comfortable pews, before it was our turn to shuffle through the exhibition.

It was all very well organized, although not without incident, a woman deciding to throw her coffee over one of the exhibits. The hot liquid did not penetrate the casing, a case of they shall not pass. The space between the exhibits was relatively narrow, making it a bit of a trial for wheelchair users and anyone in their proximity.

The exhibition was free, although visitors were encouraged to buy their informative book (£10) and to make a donation, both of which we gladly did. The exhibition in Aldershot closes on the 18th but is touring around the country, next stop Stoke Minster from November 21st and is even going to the States, Cape May in New Jersey from April 25th next year.

If you get a chance, pop along to see it. It is truly astonishing.