Martin Fone's Blog, page 36

Ban Of The Week (3)

If you are fed up with having to push past people taking prolonged and amorous farewells as you rush to an airport boarding gate, Dunedin airport in New Zealand might just be the place for you. As part of measures to speed up the airport “experience” the airport has imposed since September a three minute maximum time limit for farewell hugs at the drop off zone.

Signage, erected in September, advises passengers of the time limit and recommends that for fonder and more prolonged farewells the car park is used. At least, the first fifteen minutes are free there.

Of course, the limit which seems to have been accepted with little comment by the stolid million or so passengers who use the airport each year but has caused a viral storm when it hit social media, does raise the more profound question of how long should you cuddle to maximise the good vibes. It seems that just a twenty-second hug is enough to release oxytocin and serotonin, the happy hormones that boost well-being, so three minutes should be more than enough.

Well, that’s all right then.

More Scientific Fun

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has some guidelines as to what is acceptable in establishing a scientific name and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the avoidance of foul language is one of them. This, of course, raises a whole host of problems because what is foul language to one person may not make another blanche at all. And then there are the anarchists who are determined to work around the guidelines, albeit with an admirable degree of subtlety.

One such was James Pakaluk who gave an unsuspecting beetle, albeit fossilised, the name of Foadia pakaluk. Those of us who are down with the kids will instantly recognise that FOAD is an acronym for F*** off and die. Apt, as it had. Arnold Menke, perhaps, showed an even more advanced form of subtlety when he named a new species of wasp Pison eu. It might seem innocuous in print but just say it out loud.

Another problem is that a word or a string of words that is perfectly acceptable in one language might cause offence in another. Take the case of an African species of wattled crane. It glories in its scientific name of Bugeranus carunculatus which does not work well for an Anglophone but is made up from two perfectly acceptable and apt Greek words, “bous” meaning ox and “geranus” crane as it is an ox-crane.

The thrush, once a common sight but I last saw one a couple of years ago, is a member of the genus Turdus and its relative, the Tibetan blackbird, revels in the name of Turdus maximus.The tapeworm Aploparaksis turdi, though, no association with the thrush family. Its species name is purely a reference to the material in which it can be found.

Offensive? No. Amusing? Yes.     

The Z Murders

A review of The Z Murders by Jefferson Farjeon – 241010

Originally published in 1932 and reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series, Farjeon’s The Z Murders is very much a classic thriller rather than a murder mystery and lurches very much towards the improbable if not the bonkers. For the purist the backstory which is needed to understand the context of what is going on is only drip fed to the reader in the latter part of the book and there is little in the way of clueing or mystery to the plot. However, if you are just prepared to sit back and let the author take you where he wills, then you are in for an enjoyable treat.

The story starts off with Richard Temperley arriving at Euston having alighted an overnight train at 5am and having endured an uncomfortable night as his carriage companion has snored loudly and incessantly throughout the journey. He goes to a waiting room in a nearby hotel where he encounters the same man and a beautiful woman who rushes past him in a hurry. The man appears to be asleep in a chair but the absence of snores leads him to discover that the man, John Amble, is dead, having been shot by a gun with a silencer. A crimson ceramic Z is found by the corpse while Temperley finds a purse belonging to the woman, Sylvia Wynne, whom he tracks down.

Somewhat improbably, Temperley, convinced that rather than being the perpetrator of the seemingly senseless murder Sylvia is a potential victim, starts pursuing her across the country. The first stop is Bristol or more accurately to its outskirts where an old woman has been killed, apparently frightened by a low-flying aircraft. Detective Inspector James of the Yard, who is leading the police investigation, allows Temperley his head and, together with Sylvia, makes a long-distance taxi journey to Boston, the next leg of the story. Here there is a third victim and then the story lurches off once more, this time in the direction of Whitchurch in Shropshire where the denouement unfolds.

It does not take much to realise that the journey, if drawn on a map, resembles the shape of a Z and that with a ceramic Z placed near each of the victims, there is a definite theme going on here. As the story unfolds, Farjeon begins to allow his assassin to emerge from the shadows, a man who has no arms, wears a hat pushed low over his brow and has a Z cauterized into his forehead. He is on a mission to exact revenge and the pattern of his murders, some random, others of people whose usefulness has been exhausted, is a coded message to strike terror into the heart of his ultimate victim.

Farjeon chooses to only call the man the man with no arms, a title which becomes a bit cumbersome as the frequency with which he has to use it increases as the story rushes to its conclusion. He is an early example of a maniacal serial killer and his assisted by another anonymous man known as the Countryman, who becomes the fourth victim. There is an element of jeopardy in the man with no arms’ mission as he has only a limited supply of his special bullets, a fact that seals his fate and allow Temperley to ride off into the sunshine with his bride. DI James’ faith in Temperley pays off, although a strong police presence is required at the end to bring matters to a head.

The highlight of the book for me was the contrasting fates of tow long-distance journeys from Bristol to Boston. Albert Bowes has the misfortune to have the man with no arms and the Countryman as his fare and ultimately pays for his injudicious choice with his life to become the third victim, while Ted Diggs has the good fortune to convey Temperley and Sylvia and gets to play a part in the later adventures. Farjeon makes great of their contrasting personalities, one venal, the other trying to save to buy a dog, making it clear that the contrasting fortunes were not ill-merited.

Apart from that little piece of moralizing, it is a breathless thriller with cars whizzing along the highways and byways of Merrie England in the middle of the night. It is great fun and quite unlike the other Farjeons I had read. It is good for a writer to let their hair down once in awhile!

The Rear-View Mirror (3)

As affordable as the Ford Model T was, it was also about as basic a motor car as you could imagine, spawning a large and vibrant secondary market of manufacturers offering gizmos and gadgets to improve the comfort of the vehicle. According to Richard Snow’s I Invented the Modern Age, the rise of Henry Ford (2013), one of the 5,000 or so products available was the “Hind View Auto-Reflector”, which went on sale in August 1911, just three months after Harroun’s ground-breaking Indianapolis run.

In October 1914 Chester Weed from Brooklyn was granted a US Patent (US1114559A) for a “mirror attachment for automobiles”, intended to help drivers avoid blind spots, but it was not until the 1920s that the first widely distributed rear-view mirror become available. Like Harroun, Elmer Bergen’s motivation was not safety but speed or, more accurately, avoiding the consequences of speed. An electrical engineer from St Louis, Bergen was obsessed with putting his vehicles through their paces and the bane of his life were traffic police trying to enforce speed limits.

In 1921, he received a patent for a rear view mirror which he marketed as a “Cop-spotter”, designed to help the driver spot tailing police cars. He enjoyed some commercial success selling them as an aftersales device, but the market tailed off in the 1930s when car manufacturers began to include mirrors either as part of their standard offering or as an added extra.       

What Bergen did do, though, was help to popularize the fitting of mirrors to motor cars, opening the way for the more safety-minded rear-view mirrors that we know today. Although they were only made mandatory in the UK in 1978, increasingly car manufacturers had fitted them as standard, gradually adding enhancements such as anti-glare coatings and multi-way adjustability. Now seen as an indispensable safety feature, even the emerging rear-view camera does not seem to pose an existential threat to them. The mantra of “clutch, mirror, signals” will still be the bane of learner drivers for years to come.  

Its story shows how it takes a person with insight to develop what, to future generations, seems blindingly obvious.

Jumping Jenny

A review of Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkeley – 241007

Originally published in 1933 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, Anthony Berkeley’s Jumping Jenny is an interesting take and, ultimately, twist on an inverted murder. If you host a party in a country house where the guests are invited to dress as murderers or their victims and to add some colour you erect a gallows on the roof and have three life-size straw dolls, one woman and two men, hanging from them, what could possibly go wrong?

The book takes its title from the slang name given to a woman who is hung, a Jumping Jenny, the male corollary is a Jumping Jack, and inevitably it is a woman, Ena Stratton, who is found by one of the guests hanging from the makeshift gallows in the place of the straw female doll. Ena Stratton is portrayed as a neurotic exhibitionist of a woman, who openly talks about taking her own life and has been drinking heavily at the party. She has also given several of the party goers reason enough to hate her and possibly killer her, not least the host Roger Stratton, whose prospects of re-marriage she threatens to scupper by passing on information to the King’s Proctor, and his brother and her husband, David, whose life she makes hell. Did Ena kill herself or was she murdered?

The story is an inverted murder in that Berkely reveals relatively early on that not only was Ena the victim of foul but also discloses the identity of her killer. The nub of the story is the reaction of the other guests to the situation and the attempts of the police, which on the whole seem fairly half-hearted, to get to the bottom of the case. One of the guests, inevitably, present is Berkeley’s series sleuth, Roger Sheringham, – this is his eight outing in a book which also went by the typically prosaic American alternative title of Dead Mrs Stratton – and we are treated to the unusual spectacle of a sleuth trying to doctor the evidence to prove that her death was the result of suicide in a misguided attempt to protect the identity of the person he believes to have been the murderer.

One of the features of Sheringham’s attempts at sleuthing is that he frequently gets the wrong end of the stick and part of this book’s appeal to the reader is that for all of his ingenuity he runs the risk of not only diverting suspicion on to himself but also others and making what to the police seems an open and shut case of suicide into something a whole lot more sinister. Much ink is spent on pontificating on the precise position of a chair close to the gallows and whether it was there at the time of the discovery of the body. With their insight, courtesy of Berkeley, the reader can enjoy the irony of what is happening.

The first part of the book sets the scene, the second is a long series of attempts by Sheringham and his would-be Dr Watson, Colin Nicolson, to make cases against some of the principal suspects and then to destroy the case, and the shorter final section unravels events both from the official perspective, in the form of the coroner’s inquest, and then in a series of informative episodes in the final chapter where what really happened is disclosed. Berkeley cleverly punctures the reader’s feeling of superiority by introducing a final and delicious twist right at the death.

An accomplished master of the form, Berkeley cannot resist the temptation to poke fun at the genre and twist and bend it to its limits. There are too many long pieces of unproductive speculation for it to be a classic, but Berkeley’s sense of fun, his humour, and playful inventiveness win through to make it an entertaining enough read.

Battered Fish

Is there a more archetypal British dish than fish and chips? According to the National Federation Of Fish Friers (NFFF), there are around 10,500 specialist fish and chip shops in the UK serving 167 million portions of Britain’s traditional favourite meal a year to Brits who spend £1.2 billion for the pleasure. 80% of us visit a fish and chip shop at least once a year and 22% make the trip every week. Although it can be eaten on the move, 52% of people buy fish and chips to eat at home as a family meal.

However, the future of fish and chips is far from rosy with the NFFF predicting that as many as a third of chippies could close while Sarsons, the malt vinegar manufacturer, are gloomier still, estimating that a half will go out of business. The reason is down to the significant rise in the cost of energy prices and of the principal ingredients, fish and potatoes, which means that fish and chips is no longer a cheap and wholesome option for many family budgets.

While a quintessentially British dish the origins of battered fish can be traced to Jewish culinary traditions. As cooking was not allowed on the Jewish Sabbath, Sephardic Jews in the Iberian peninsula would prepare meals on the Friday afternoon that would stay fresh over the next 24 hours, one of which was a white fish, usually cod or haddock, fried in a thin coat of flour or matzo meal. The batter preserved the fish which could be eaten cold without losing too much of its flavour.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the diaspora resulted in the introduction of some of their customs to other parts of Europe, including Britain. Jewish immigrants to England would sell fish in the streets from trays hung from their necks with leather straps. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1781) discussed “the Jews’ way of preserving all sorts of fish” while in 1824 the Morning Chronicle previwing a fight between Barney “champion of the twelve tribes” Aaron and Peter Warren, which was to last twenty-nine rounds, noted that Aaron’s Jewish supporters came from an “area around Petticoat Lane in East London [that] was occupied with frying fish”.

In Oliver Twist (1837), Charles Dickens refers to “fried fish warehouses” where bread or baked potatoes were served alongside fish, a forerunner of the chippie. In 1845 Alexis Soyer included a recipe for “Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion” in his A Shilling Cooking For The People, which was fish dipped into a batter of flour and water and then fried.

Two technological transformations enabled fried fish to break free from the narrow confines of east London. The advent of industrial-scale trawler fishing and a national rail network enabled fresh and inexpensive fish to be transported to all parts of the country. By 1860 Joseph Malin, an Ashkenazi Jew borrowing Sephardic traditions, had opened what might have been the first fish and chip shop as we know it at 78, Cleveland Way within the sounds of Bow Bells, selling fish “fried in the Jewish way”.

All we now needed was chips!

Death By Two Hands

A review of Death by Two Hands by Peter Drax – 241003

Peter Drax, the nom de plume of Eric Addis, wrote six crime novels , of which Death by Two Hands, originally published in 1937 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is the third. It goes by the alternative title of Crime Within Crime. He was killed in action in 1941 in Egypt and left an unfinished novel, his sixth, which was later completed by his wife and published. It is fascinating to speculate how his literary career would have developed.

His novels are full of gritty realism and inhabit a world where both the police and the criminals are human, warts and all, rather than endowed with superhuman powers. There is more than a little of the Sophoclean tragedy at work where individuals seemingly make choices of their own free will but each choice embeds them deeper into a web of fate from which they cannot escape. The consequences of their actions become inevitable.

In the background is their hum-drum, hand-to-mouth existence, scraping a living but always on the lookout for a chance to make a little extra. When it presents itself, they go for it with gusto but simple choices and twists of fate lead them to the edge of catastrophe. Take Barney Withers, who scratches a living selling wares in the local markets, his signature trade mark a couple of tame mice which run around his hat. When he goes into the countryside to take his niece, Alma Robinson, under his wing, he learns of a consignment of valuable black fox furs which are to be transported to London.

Withers interests the local Mr Big, Mr Rivers, in the idea of a hold up and Rivers recruits Spike Morgan and Len Harmon to carry out the heist and lines up a fence, Hyams, to dispose of the furs. Barney, unwillingly, is roped in as look-out. The robbery is pulled off, the furs are delivered to Hyams, but there are two small problems.

Firstly, too much force is used in dealing with one of the people in the cab and John Brook dies from his injuries. Secondly, in an attempt to impress Alma Spike has a tie made from one of the furs and it has a dodgy tie. Add to this, the understandable caution of Hyams, the inability of Rivers to come up with the promised monies as quickly as Spike would like, and Spike’s volatile temper and there is another murder on our hands. The attempt to cover up Rivers’ death and to dispose of the body stretch their intellectual capacities to their limits.

There is no mystery as to the identity of the killers nor is the book really a thriller. Instead it charts the gradual unravelling of the fates of several characters and the steady, unswerving pursuit of the police led by Inspector Thompson. There is a growing sense of inevitability as the police pick up a clue here, a dark fox hair, and there, a dead brown mouse, and through painstaking observation and investigation begin to assemble enough evidence to reconstruct what has gone on. All the characters are just bit players in a greater tragedy that engulfs them all and the outcome, no matter how hard they kick against it, is inevitable.

Drax’s strength is in his sense of character and of time and place. His characters come to life off the page and the squalor and poverty in which they live is easy to picture. This is crime and poverty at its most realistic and Drax makes a powerful and valuable contribution to the genre of detective fiction. If you are looking for a different perspective on a genre that is often hackneyed and cliched, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Opera Of The Year

I don’t suppose you expect to be on the receiving end of medical treatment on a night out at the opera, but this is what happened to eighteen members of the audience who attended two performances at the Stuttgart State Opera of Sancta, a interpretation of Paul Hindesmith’s original opera, Sancta Susanna, by Austrian choreographer, Florentina Holzinger. The performance featured live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse, and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

When Holzinger brought Sancta to Vienna, bishops from Salzburg and Innsbruck criticised it as being “a disrespectful caricature of the holy mass” but the choreographer insists that far from mocking the church, it explores the parallels between it and the kink communities and BDSM subcultures. Hmm. Mind you, she also said that good technique in dance is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue, which puts a whole different perspective on the judging process deployed by the judges on Strictly.

The prospect of needing medical attention, though, has not impacted ticket sales. All five remaining shows at the Stuttgart state opera, as well as two performances at Berlin’s Volksbühne in November, have since sold out.

A Bit Of A Stink

In 1878 while exploring the jungles of Sumatra Florentine botanist, Odoardo Beccari, came across a plant with the largest unbranched flower. With its spadix, the central structure of the flower, growing up to 12 feet tall the spadix, Beccari called it Amorphiphallus titanum.

The plant and its name might have become just a botanical curiosity but for the fact that its seeds were sent to botanical gardens around the world and flourished. They caused a sensation every time they flowered not only because of the size of the spadix but also because the flower emitted a putrid smell. It was rather akin to the smell of rotting flesh and was intended to attract flies and carrion beetles upon whom the flower relied for pollination. It is also called the corpse plant.

Crowds would gather to view this unusual sight and appreciate the aroma, bringing with it a bit of a problem. The genus name of Amorphiphallus caused another type of stink, being deemed to be a little risqué for the innocent minds of children. Sir David Attenborough rode to the rescue, coining the name Titan Arum, which is now normally used to describe the plant to save the public’s blushes.

Midsummer Murder (Wills)

A review of Midsummer Murder by Cecil Wills – 241003

What do you hope for from a piece of detective fiction? For my part, I am looking for something that is entertaining – a very wide spectrum, I admit, that can encompass a challenging Gladys Mitchell and a fluffy piece of Agatha Christie – and a plot that largely hangs together. It is in the latter respect that Cecil Wills’ 1956 novel, Midsummer Murder, recently reissued by Galileo Publishers and not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Clifford Witting from 1937, also reissued by Galileo, fails.

As with most murders, the precise timings of the events surrounding the victim’s demise are crucial and the reconstruction of the events surrounding the shooting of local journalist, John Adams, just do not work. The principal suspect hears a shot at around a quarter to ten but seems to take at least twenty minutes to leave the scene, picking up a red coat and running into the police who had been summoned by a phone call reporting that a shot had just been heard. What had they been doing? It just does not make sense. I am being circumspect as I do not want to spoil the enjoyment of others but just think about what is supposed to have happened.

The other weakness of the plot is the approach of the police. A feature of the genre is that the stupidity of the police is proportionate to the brilliance of the sleuth, but there is nothing particularly astonishing about the Reverend Selwyn Sneddicombe’s approach to understanding how John Archer met his death and who was responsible for writing the poisoned pen letters that had been circulating around the village and have cause at least one suicide and led to the cataclysmic set of events that resulted in Archer’s death.

Did someone mention poisoned pen letters? The benefit of a localized police force in those days was that they knew everybody in their local community and what was going on, whether criminous or not. It seems astonishing to think that there was not even a scintilla of suspicion in the official mind that the letters that had been doing the rounds were in some way linked with the murder and that the writer might have had something to hide. The police seem grateful that there is enough circumstantial evidence to make a good case against Ashburn and seem to be content to leave it at that and the suspect’s fate is not helped by an adherence to a code of honour which, while laudable, seems somewhat ludicrous in the context.

Seasoned detective fiction readers will recognize that the poisoned pen, rather like a phial of poison, is likely to have been wielded by a feminine hand and will anticipate that there is a darker and more sinister twist to the whole affair, one that is only unearthed by the perseverance of Sneddicombe, building on some solid groundwork laid by Archer for which he paid with his life. It is another case where the individuality of a typewriter carriage leads to conclusive proof of, initially, upon which machine they were written and, eventually, who the author was.

It is a tale of revenge for slights which have been left to ferment for years until they explode. The writer is cold and calculating in their desire for justice, a little mad for sure, and heedless of the consequences. I may have been unusually harsh in my review but I had high hopes for the book when I started it. Wills provides us with an enjoyable account of life in the quiet cathedral city of Storminster, surely a nod to Trollope’s Barchester, where secrets, scandals, and whiffs of corruption are not far below the surface, ready to burst into life at the plop of an envelope through the letter box. The paranoia and the brooding sense of resentment and injustice are well done and there more than a few moments of humour and comedic drama to entertain, especially with the return of the ne’er do well thespian who, in the end, finally does the right thing.              

My disappointment stems from the fact that with a little more rigour in the plotting of the crime Wills would have produced a wonderful book. Instead, we are left with the thought of what might have been. After all, who does not like a clerical sleuth?