Martin Fone's Blog, page 38

He Shot To Kill

A review of He Shot to Kill by Peter Drax – 240909

The second novel by Peter Drax, originally published in 1936 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is another visit to London’s picaresque riparian demi-monde. A thriller rather than a murder mystery as the identity of the killer of the river policeman is fairly evident, it is another tale in which its various characters fall into a web of intrigue and danger more by accident than through design. The catalyst for the series of events is a slip of the tongue, mistaking Germaine for German.

Colonel Meroy is an interesting character, outwardly a pillar of society but in reality an eminence grise in the underworld, who prides himself on his immaculate planning which enables him to carry off audacious raids with the assistance of a small, tightly-knit, hand-picked team of accomplices without exciting the attentions of the police. He did once sail close to the wind in Newcastle many years ago but has learnt from that experience, although it is something that comes to haunt him as the story unfolds.

His neighbour, Ben Lakin, is someone he detests but, unfortunately, his son, Johnny, is becoming romantically attached to Lakin’s daughter, Mary. Lakin is an insurance assessor working for a group of Lloyd’s underwriters but takes a rather cavalier approach to the business of restoring stolen property, salting off the proceeds if he can raise more than they are worth or facilitating their recovery if their value is below par.

Added to the mix is a gang of desperadoes led by Tony Luvello who have their eyes on committing another robbery on the Thames at the same time as Meroy’s attempt on the Germaine, focusing their attention on the German vessel, Holst. A tip off, albeit mangled, excites the interest of the police and in the mayhem, while gold worth around £80,000 is taken from Germaine, a river policeman is shot and killed in the abortive raid on Holst. In the minds of the police and the press the two events are connected which gives Meroy particular cause for concern as he has an uncompromising no guns policy and the Germaine raid was the first time he had involved his son in his plans.

Lakin, using his privileged position as an assessor, obtains information which he believes will enable him to insert himself into the division of the spoils. Mary is initially used as Lakin’s stooge but as her feelings for Johnny grow and she realizes the fix he is in, her loyalties change.

Representing the law is Detective Inspector Thompson of the Yard, famed for always getting his man, and in a way the resolution of this case maintains his record, although the reader knows that he only got part of the answer. His methodology is good solid investigation rather than deductive brilliance, a lot of hard toil and effort rather than a light bulb moment.

Sensibly, Drax does not linger too long on the ins and outs of the police investigation, using it as just one strand in a story of many and shifting perspectives. One of the strengths of the book is that the same events are described from different perspectives and as the reader is invited to keeps tabs with each of the sub-groups of characters there is a heightened sense of competition as the author plays one off against the others in the reader’s mind.

The other strength of the book is Drax’s sense of place and character. He has a wonderful array of minor characters who scrape an existence in the underworld, each memorable and vibrantly portrayed. This is life at its messiest and grisliest, the antithesis of a cosy murder mystery. It might not be great literature but it is entertainingly gripping.

Art Critic Of The Week (10)

All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist, Alexandre Lavet, looks remarkably like two discarded and dented Jupiler beer cans to the untrained eye. The LAM museum in Lisse in western Netherlands likes to challenge and surprise its visitors by displaying art work in unusual places and its curator chose to exhibit Lavet’s meisterwerk on the floor of a lift.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a tidy-minded employee, a mechanic who had just started at the museum, saw what they considered to be a carelessly discarded piece of junk, gathered the cans up, and deposited them into a bin bag. Had they given the exhibit a second glance, they might have seen that the cans had been meticulously hand-painted with acrylics, something which a museum spokesman averred would have taken “a lot of time and effort to create”.

Fortunately, the curator, Elisah van den Bergh, noticed that the artwork was missing from the lift and was able to retrieve it from the rubbish bin. It is now being displayed on a traditional plinth to prevent any further misunderstandings.

Modern art, eh?

Holland’s Terrible Pig

Standing about six feet tall at the shoulder and inhabiting North America roughly 29 to 19 million years ago, Dinohyus hollandi was an entelodont, a type of pig-like, hoofed mammal that ate both plants and meat, although it was not closely related to the modern pig. A complete skeleton of it was found in 1905 by the Carnegie Museum’s field collector, T F Olcott, in the Agate Springs Fossil Quarry in the northwestern corner of Nebraska.

Later that year the Museum’s paleontologist, O A Paterson, designated the fossil as a new species, giving it the scientific name of Dinohyus, meaning “terrible pig” and hollandi after the then Director of the Carnegie Institute, William Jacob Holland. Holland was disliked by the staff as he insisted on being name-checked in all their papers, irrespective of whether he made a contribution or not.

The translation of Paterson’s scientific name would appeal to Holland’s vanity as it read “Holland’s terrible pig”. However, there was a subtle dig as the apostrophe could be read as an elision of is rather than indicating a possessive. Holland is a terrible pig has a completely different connotation!

A Caribbean Mystery

A review of A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie – 240906

The tenth in Christie’s Miss Marple series, originally published in 1964, sees her spinster sleuth taking a holiday in the Caribbean island of St Honoré at her nephew’s insistence after a bout of illness. As usual murder most foul follows her around and although far removed from her normal contacts in England Miss Marple cannot resist the temptation to have a go at solving the mystery.

In detective fiction the murder victim is usually either so obnoxious that there is a queue of people with motive enough to do them in or they are collateral damage because they know too much or are mistaken for someone else. The obligatory three victims in a Miss Marple story fall into the latter categories, Major Palgrave and Victoria for having some information that imperils the murderer and Lucky (or not so as it turns out) Dyson who has the misfortune to resemble someone else, although her hair colouring, the catty old maid, Joan Prescott, observes, comes out of a bottle with roots showing after five or six days.

The problem with being a club bore is that while you might have an almost limitless fund of stories and can be guaranteed to fill the longueurs of a lazy afternoon, at best your auditors have only half an ear on what you are saying. This is the fate that befalls Major Palgrave as he regales Miss Marples with the occasion he came across a murderer with a penchant for bumping off wives. It seems a shaggy dog story but to give some verisimilitude to the tale he rummages in his wallet to pull out a photograph when he stops, gets flustered, stuffs the photograph back, and quickly and volubly changes the subject. Has he seen the murderer and, if so, which of the six people in front of him did he recognize?

The following morning Palgrave is found dead, supposedly having succumbed to his complaint of high blood pressure, and more curiously the photograph is missing from his wallet. Victoria, a maid at the hotel, reports that she had seen a bottle of pills in Palgrave’s room that had no been there before. This tidbit is her death warrant.

For a small hotel there are a number of characters with a shady past, whose partners have suddenly and mysteriously died and Christie in her inimitable style manages to sow enough red herrings for the reader to wonder who the murderer is and by association who the intended victim is. However, there is a massive clue in the first chapter which is reinforced later on by Senora de Caspearo’s remark about Palgrave’s devil eye that prompts Miss Marple to re-evaluate all her assumptions about the case and to recognize that she had overlooked the importance of something when Palgrave saw the murderer, something that would have concluded the case speedily and saved two, if not three, lives.

Having realized her mistake, the race is on to save the life of the intended victim. The cantankerous and wealthy Jason Rafiel lends her his beefcake masseur, Jackson, to provide the muscle and a fourth murder is thwarted and the culprit revealed.      

Miss Marple’s world of reference centres around her village of St Mary Mead where there are characters and behavioural traits to fit all circumstances. Like her sleuthing counterpart, Miss Silver, she is a knitter and is able, chameleon-like, blend into the background and listen and observe. Having made her literary debut in 1930 in The Murder at the Vicarage, it is probably no surprise that she is struggling to come to terms with the racy 1960s, giving Christie the opportunity to make some telling observations. Sadly, though, the location also allows the author the opportunity to use mildly racist language. A leitmotif running through the story is that you never really know who you are on holiday with until the façade slips, an observation that is just as true in other setings.

This is staple Christie fare, a story that is engaging and propels the reader along. An easy read and a mildly interesting puzzle, what more do you want?

The Limerick Craze

One of the attractions of the limerick is that it does not require any poetic genius to come up with a passable version, especially if the first four lines are already provided. This was the concept that made 1907 a golden year for amateur limerick writers, magazines and newspapers offering cash prizes to an entrant who, in the opinion of the judges, provided the best concluding line. The first magazine to launch a competition, in January of that year, was the London Opinion and Truth, which also claimed a place in the nation’s consciousness with its iconic Kitchener poster on the front page of its edition of September 5, 1914.

By September 1907 the limerick craze had swept across the country to such an extent that it was attracting the attention of a bemused foreign press. The New York Times reported that “millions [were] competing for prizes offered by almost every popular paper in England” and that a prize the equivalent to $1,225 was offered for ONE SILLY LINE (their capitals). “Eight weeklies”, it noted, “paid out $61,985 in a single week in their competitions”.

Advertisers soon jumped on the bandwagon, offering even larger prizes, such as a freehold property or a lifetime annuity, for completing the last line of a limerick plugging a certain product. The scale of the mania can be judged from a statement made by the Postmaster-General in 1908 to Parliament in which he reported that the sale of sixpenny postal orders, the usual competition entry fee, had risen in 1907 from less than a million to over eleven million with nearly six million sold in August alone. 

Adherents of the “insidious yet rapid growth of the limerick craze” claimed it to be “the best mental exercise the public could possibly have, and people are becoming smarter in their solutions each day”. Enthusiasts were keen to share their techniques. One would write twenty solutions and then after a good night’s sleep would “mercilessly dissect each one”, while another recommended committing the first four lines to memory and then retiring to the quietest room in the house and letting “his mind wander where it will”. After about an hour’s contemplation, “the suitable line literally jumps into my mental vision. I never try to alter it afterwards, and I never post off more than one solution”.

Some tried a collaborative approach. One correspondent described how the whole family, or at least the male members, assembled around the dining room table and “each member, from the schoolboy to the elder brother in business, essays a solution, which paterfamilias duly takes note of. The concerted solution”, the writer avers, “is generally most satisfactory”.

Completing the limerick puzzle became the Edwardian equivalent of idly surfing the internet in the workplace, one city manager reporting that he constantly detected his clerks “in the act of surreptitiously scribbling on their blotting pads”. Some of his clients appeared so distracted that he was certain that their minds were preoccupied on finding the perfect solution. While the limerick mania might have impacted some forms of commercial activity, for one city bookseller it was a godsend as copies of rhyming dictionaries were flying off the shelf.

Limerick enthusiasts seemed to travel around London oblivious to their surroundings. A bus conductor reported that two gentlemen on the Fleet Street to Marble Arch bus were so absorbed in discussing the merits of a solution that they missed their stop at Charing Cross and blamed him for their oversight. On the railways a ticket collector observed that “quite a number of people every day miss trains and appointments through becoming temporarily lost in the maze of possible solutions”. Fortunately, for the travelling public “our guards and engine drivers do not as yet appear to have fallen victims to the craze”, he wryly observed.

Like the stalwart railway employees, not everybody was swept up in the limerick mania, an editorial in The Sphere on October 9, 1907, denouncing the “craze which must be doing a great deal of harm to large masses of people”. With one newspaper boasting of receiving 169,000 entries, questions began to be asked as to how the competitions could be fairly judged and whether they were really little more than lotteries with the winners selected by chance, putting the competitions into dangerous legal territory.

Some years earlier competitions requiring entrants to supply the missing word in a sentence had been banned as they were viewed as gambling. What saved the limerick competitions from that fate was that it was argued that the completion of a limerick required “the exercise of a certain degree of mental ability”. However, the tide was turning. Punch magazine, that bellwether of public opinion, noted that the address of one winner was the London County Asylum, adding, superfluously, that “comment would be superfluous”.

By the end of 1907 the craze had disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, but to this day the limerick remains one of the nation’s most popular types of poem.

Calamity In Kent

A review of Calamity in Kent by John Rowland – 240906

The sixteenth in Cornish-born John Rowland’s Inspector Shelley series, Calamity in Kent was originally published in 1950 and is reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. Shelley, as is often the way with officers of the Yard who have the audacity to take a holiday, is drawn into investigating an impossible murder in the Kentish seaside resort of Broadgate. He is perceptive enough to allow the convalescing journalist and the story’s narrator, Jimmy London, to help out, recognizing that a member of the Fourth Estate is likely to get to places and hear things that an officer of the law would not and agrees to pool information on the understanding that London will get his much needed scoop.

On a morning walk London bumps into Broadgate’s lift operator, Aloysius Bender, who has found the body of a man with a knife sticking in his back inside the locked lift. While London sends Bender to get the police, he makes a brief examination of the body and discovers that the victim was John Tilsley and that he had a notebook with some notes, codes, and symbols which London pockets. Before the police arrive another man, claiming to be Dr Cyrus Watford and recognizing the victim, appears on the scene but is not anxious to hang around.       

As well as who killed Tilsley, the key points of the case are how did the murderer get the body into the lift, why was the victim killed and what secrets lay in the notebook. London and Shelley set out to crack the mystery, although with London acting as narrator we see the case progress through his eyes. It is always a difficult decision to make an investigator, especially an unofficial sleuth, narrate the story because of necessity they will not be privy to all that goes on and some of the revelations made by the police have to be introduced by way of updates. I am never convinced that this is the best way to tell a story.

The case deepens with a Groundhog Day, another body found with a knife sticking in its back in the self-same locked lift, again found by Bender who again bumps into London. London sends Bender once more to summon the police and while looking at the body discovers that it is that of Dr Watford. What was his connection with Tilsley? The violence does not end there. Bender is attacked but survives the assault, one that took place away from the lift, a key point upon which the story turns and should put the reader on alert as to the culprit’s identity.

Investigations reveal that Tilsley was involved in a shady but extremely lucrative business in supplying motor parts and jewelry in the area, while Scotland Yard are aware that there is a new drug ring active in the Kent area. Is there a connection? Shelley sends London off to a pub in Deal where the drug dealers are believed to operate and predictably the journalist walks into a trap but, equally predictably, Shelley has London tracked and is there to save him from is fate.

As there can only be one possible solution for how the bodies came to be locked in the lift, the big reveal is no great surprise, although Rowland does his best to misdirect with his portrayal of the culprit. What we have is a gang of drug dealers and runners led by a Mr Big who goes by three aliases, which use an ingenious method to bring their contraband into the country and distribute it around the Kent area. The murdered victims had become a security threat to the integrity of the operation, but the failure to remove Tilsley’s notebook and London’s nose for a story brings them down.  

It is an entertaining enough read with a strong narrative style and it is good to see the police, or at least the Yard, work well with an amateur for once, with London and Shelley proving engaging companions. That, of course, is driven by Rowland’s decision to have the tale told by a narrator who, by necessity, has to play a prominent part, especially at the death, than would normally have been expected.

Straddling Two Centuries At Once

On the his 1895 voyage across the Pacific on the SS Warimoo Mark Twain crossed the equator, but for mariners the Holy Grail was to cross the Equator at the 180th meridian, a feat that entitles a sailor in the US Navy to become a Golden Shellback. An even rarer honour is the Emerald Shellback or Royal Diamond Shellback, bestowed on American and Commonwealth sailors respectively who have crossed the Equator at the Prime Meridian.  

Although immortalized by Twain, the SS Warrimoo entered the annals of history in its own right in a most extraordinary way. Initially, there was little unusual aboard ship on the evening of December 31, 1899, the ship was mid-Pacific en route to Sydney and the navigator was observing the stars to calculate its precise position. As usual, he gave the results to the master, Captain John Phillips, but it was the first mate, Symons, who realized the significance of their position, LAT 00 31′ and LON 179 30′. They were just a few miles from the intersection of the Equator and the IDL, presenting the chance to perform a rare nautical feat that would knock golden and even emerald shellbackery into a cocked hat.

Calling his officers together to check and double check the ship’s position, Phillips adjusted the Warrimoo’s position slightly to hit the precise spot, reduced engine speed and, aided by calm weather and clear skies, at midnight the ship lay precisely on the intersection of the Equator with the IDL.

The consequences were positively mind-blowing. Its bow was in the Southern Hemisphere and in the middle of summer, while its stern was in the Northern and in midwinter and, as it was straddling the IDL, it was also in the eastern and western hemispheres. The date at the rear of the ship was December 31, 1899 but at the front it was New Year’s Day, 1900. In other words, the Warrimoo was in two different days, two different months, two different years, two different seasons and two different centuries all at the same time. Just for good measure, it was also in all four hemispheres at once.

The $64,000 question, though, is whether the story is apocryphal. There is no doubt that the Warrimoo was in the area at the time, The Sydney Morning Herald reporting in January 1900 the arrival of the ship after setting out from Vancouver on December 15, 1899, albeit that the equator was crossed on December 30th and without any mention of when the IDL was crossed.

It was not until 1942 that a report emerged that the SS Warrimoo had crossed the equator and IDL on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1899. An article in the Ottawa Journal reported that Captain Phillips, by then long retired and living in Sydney, had produced “the record of a remarkable achievement” after browsing through his old log books. However, there seems to be no other documentation to corroborate his claim.

Sceptics question whether with the navigational techniques used at the time Philips could have with absolute certainty have positioned the Warrimoo at the right place at the right time. And then there is the century question. The common scientific and historic consensus is that a century consists of 100 years and that as there was no year zero, the first century of the Christian Era ran from 1 to 100, the second century beginning in 101 and so on. Rather than entering a new century the bow of the Warrimoo was merely entering the final year of the 19th century.   

The Golden Shellbacks show that crossing the equator at the IDL at sea is rare but not unusual and while passing from one month to another and from one year to the next at the same time is rarer still, the Warrimoo’s story loses even more of its sheen when it is stripped of its century straddling element. However, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

I have stood on the equator (allegedly) and crossed it many times but never the IDL. One for my bucket list!   

The Finding Machine

A review of The Finding Machine by Lucy Lyons – 240902

Lucy Lyons is a Mytchett-based writer and The Finding Machine, published in 2023, is her debut novel. The golden age of the murder mystery and detective fiction is generally acknowledged to have been the inter war period and as a reader I am voraciously working through as much from that era s I can lay my hands on. Sometimes, though, it is instructive to take a look at what modern practitioners are doing with a genre that is more than a little hackneyed. Lyons’ masterstroke is to blend her mystery with elements culled from science fiction, an unusual marriage but one, at least in this instance, which seems to work.

She pays homage to the Golden Age by setting her mystery, the disappearance of a young girl, in the 1920s, and while the investigations are more contemporary, they steadfastly cling on to the 20th century by being based in 1998. For those of use who are long in the tooth the late 90s was the dawn of the new technological age with emails, the internet and even the ability, if you had the patience to wait for the connection and the painful build up of the screen, to surf the internet. Lyons brings all of this vividly to the page as well as all the then familiar but now almost forgotten paraphernalia and products of 90s life. It is a wonderful canter down memory lane.

The eponymous Finding Machine is sent to the narrator, Alex Martin, by her mother in Ireland, the last vestige of her father’s electronic tinkerings, amongst other things he had made the family a television set future-proofed to receive five channels. She gets it working by inserting a photograph of her father, although it cannot cope with group photos, and is rewarded with a string of numbers shown on the display panel which turn out to be co-ordinates. It is a machine that uses a form of what we now know as Global Positioning System.

Alex proves the machine’s worth by using it to identify the location of her father’s grave, the whereabouts of a cow, and then turns it to some profitable use as the means to find and recover lost pets. However, the real nub of the book is the search to discover the backstory of a little girl in a family photograph who seems to have disappeared without trace and been erased from the family’s collective memory. Aided by her housemate, Antony, an escapee from Hackney and an IT specialist, she deploys her father’s machine to go back in time and seek some answers to what is a dark secret and one which threatens to damage relationships.

Rather like the valves on an old-fashioned television, the book takes its time to warm up but Lyons deploys the early chapters to good effect, allowing the reader to get a better understanding of Alex, an independent but uncertain woman, and her life and relationships. The plot is a little thin and the resolution is a tad disappointing but in Alex Lyons has created a warm companion with whom the reader, or at least this reader, is delighted to spend time with.

Lyons writes with verve and no little humour, her text full of acute observations and the result of painstaking research. Bringing detective fiction together with science fiction so successfully is a neat achievement, marking out Lyons as a writer to watch out for.

A Paleontological Spat

To the person on the Clapham omnibus the world of paleontology might seem as dull as ditchwater but two Swedish practitioners livened it up with a curious spat. Elsa Warburg was Jewish while Orvar Isberg had far-right sympathies, joining the pro-Nazi Svensk Opposition during the Second World War.

In 1925 Warburg had the opportunity to name a genus of trilobites, giving it the generic name of Isbergia. There were two species which she called I. parvula and I. planifrons. In Latin parvula means slight or unimportant and planifrons flat-headed. The latter was particularly cutting as the far right believed that broad, flat heads were indicative of mental inferiority, characteristic of “mediocre, inert” races.

It took Isberg nine year to respond but he grabbed the opportunity when naming a genus of extinct mussel Warburgia. There were four species, W. crassa meaning fat, W. lata wide, W. oviformis egg-shaped, and W. injusta evil or unjust. Elsa was a woman of considerable size. To emphasise the point Isberg drew attention to the fact that the distinguishing feature of the genus was the obvious mark left by its anterior abductor muscle, which he called Schliessmuskel. When applied to a human it is a pejorative term meaning anus or sphincter.

What caused the spat is unknown but their personal animus towards each other is clear to see in the scientific records.

The Listening Eye

A review of The Listening Eye by Patricia Wentworth – 240901

The opening chapters of the twenty-eighth novel in Wentworth’s Miss Silver series, originally published in 1955, emphasizes two things: a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and it is sheer folly to ignore Miss Silver’s sage advice. Paulina Paine lost her hearing when she was injured in a bomb blast during the Second World War and to compensate she had learnt to lip read. It gave her a thoughtful expression which artist David Moray captured to a tee in a painting entitled The Listener which she goes to see at an exhibition in a gallery.

While she is there Paulina reads part of a conversation in which two men are discussing a robbery with the distinct possibility that murder will be committed to ensure a safe getaway. She consults Miss Silver who advises her to inform the police of what she has heard but Paulina on reflection believes that what she has learnt is too flimsy to be of use to the authorities. On her way home she is knocked down in a road accident and is killed.

On the same day a valuable necklace belonging to Lucius Bellingdon is stolen and his secretary, who was a last minute substitution to collect the jewels from the bank, is murdered. Believing that there is a tie up with the information that Paulina Paine had given her, Miss Silver sets out to investigate.

One of the keys to Miss Silver’s success as a sleuth is her anonymity which enables her to blend into the background and her ability to be a good listener, a facility which encourages others to open up and say perhaps more than they intended. A student of human nature and psychology, she is able to draw conclusions from remarks and behaviour that the police in the form of Chief Inspector Lamb and Detective Inspector Frank Abbott can never hope to obtain. However, she does seem to operate in a very closed circle and here her cover is blown when someone recognizes her from her involvement in The Brading Collection.

Nevertheless, Miss Silver quickly realizes some key points, namely that the jewels were not the primary focus for the criminals, that there is a plot to kill Bellingdon, and that this was an inside job where one or more are certain to benefit from the demise of the wealthy business man. Her suspicions are borne out when Bellingdon survives a road accident when the nuts on one of the wheels are loosened and the jewels are returned.    

Most of the action in the second half of the book where there is a house party with a motley collection of young men who flutter around Bellingdon’s adopted and recently widowed daughter, Moira Herne, like moths around a flame. Calling upon the brawn of David Moray, Miss Silver foils an overnight murderous attempt on Bellingdon and the culprits are unmasked. One comes as no surprise as their involvement has been heavily telegraphed as the story unfolds but their accomplice is more so. Miss Silver’s sense that there was a strong certainty of gain from the death of Bellingdon is borne out.

Miss Silver has a fixed moral compass. When she investigates, she is determined to find out the truth irrespective of the consequences. She is not prepared to play the part of judge and jury as some sleuths are and this fixed approach puts her in conflict with Bellingdon who prefers to sweep everything under the carpet. The two contrasting positions are somewhat fortuitously squared when the two culprits become victims of the nut twiddler.

It is not one of Wentworth’s strongest efforts but Paulina Payne is portrayed with sensitivity and the author’s page-turning style compensates for a plot that is a little too obvious.