Martin Fone's Blog, page 4

The End Of Andrew Harrison

A review of The End of Andrew Harrison by Freeman Wills Crofts – 250807

Originally published in 1938, the eighteenth novel in Wills Crofts’ Inspector Joseph French series and going by the alternative title of The Futile Alibi, The End of Andrew Harrison is a locked room murder mystery set on a houseboat. The boat seem unfeasibly large to be pootling around the western reaches of the Thames, but, without a plan of its layout, it might just be my misconception of its size, although it has enough space for two rows of five bedrooms and accommodation for crew and staff.   

We enter the world of high finance and, in particular, the exploits of a prominent financier, Andrew Harrison, who disappears on the way back from a business trip to France, prompting speculation that his company is in financial difficulties and a plunge in its share price, leading to the ruin of many and the suicide of three poor souls. Without any contact from Harrison, the family contact Scotland Yard and Chief Inspector French is detailed to investigate.

Harrison then reappears, leading to a revival of the share prices, initiating speculation that this was a ruse to manipulate the market, an allegation fuelled by evidence that Harrison had been buying shares to feather his nest. Then the financier takes his family including his two secretaries, Entrican who looks after business affairs and Markham Crewe, the social side, on the houseboat to enjoy Henley. After a house party Harrison cannot be roused the next day, his room is locked from the inside, the portholes closed and there is a distinct smell of gas. French, recalled to investigate, despite the circumstantial evidence, doubts that it is suicide.  

The locked room aspect of the story is well done and told with remarkable clarity. French, with his usual dogged determination and minute attention to detail, through a series of experiments and some sound ratiocination develops a plausible explanation for how the murder was committed. He is then free to concentrate upon the culprit.

It is here that the books gets a little bogged down, a long series of investigations, each idea, however remote, tested to destruction, in an attempt to get behind the suspects, to understand their motivations, and to test their movements, and their alibis. And there are a lot of potential suspects, Harrison leading a stormy personal life, at daggers drawn with his wife and thwarting his children’s ambitions, while the field could be open to his enemies in the financial world who have either lost out on the market manipulation or are seeking to put pressure on him.

French is enamoured by the theory that the murderer came from Harrison’s financial background and his extensive investigations seem to have developed a pretty convincing case only to be dashed at the last minute by a key witness identifying in French’s opinion. This forces the sleuth to reevaluate the evidence and to his chagrin he realizes that he had overlooked a couple of key pieces of evidence which, had he realized their importance, would have shortened his investigation considerably.

There are two elements here, a kidnapping from which Harrison seeks to benefit both by market manipulation and blackmail as he realizes who his kidnappers are and a tale of thwarted love and an opportunistic strike to achieve romantic bliss. A Wills Crofts novel is never a page turning thriller. This reads as an elegant exposition of a detailed police investigation of a complex and thorny problem with all the conclusions and ingenious deductions explained with a convincing logic and pleasing clarity. Despite some oversights and many dead ends French is, rightly, pleased with himself.

There is one oddity, though. Our entrée to the Harrison menage comes through Hardwick Crewe who appears extensively in the first part of the book and then completely disappears. Even the final page which explains what happened to some of the characters omits him. Very curious.

Multistorey Car Parks

In 1901 it was estimated that there were between 700 to 800 cars in the UK, a significant increase on the 14 or 15 estimated at the end of 1895, but still a drop in the ocean compared to the 33.97 million registered at the end of 2024. Parking was not such a problem then but the City & Electric Carriage Company, who had a vested interest in promoting car ownership and electric cars at that, had the foresight which way the wind was blowing.

In May 1901 at 6, Denman Street, just north of Picadilly Circus, they opened the first multistorey car park in the UK and probably word. Consisting of seven floors and a floor space of 19,000 square feet, it was able to accommodate up to 100 vehicles with vehicles moved between floors by electric lifts. More than a car park, customers could have their vehicles cleaned, serviced, even insured, and delivered to them on request.

City & Suburban must have been pleased with their car park because they opened another the following year, this time in a converted building in Westminster known as Niagara which held 230 vehicles. Both car parks have long since gone, leaving the crown for the oldest surviving multistorey car park to the one sited at 33-37 Wardour Street in London, opened in 1902-3 by the London Motor Garage Co. Occupying three storeys and with room to accommodate 200 cars, it now houses O’Neill’s pub.

Up in Glasgow a car park, the Botanic Gardens Garage in Vinicombe Street, was built between 1906 and 1911. It has a distinctive art deco façade, a ramped access to the second floor, this category A listed building with Historic Scotland served primarily to offer storage space for cars belonging to local residents.

The “golden age” of the multistory, though, did not dawn until the late 1950s, when the rise in car ownership spawned the development of large brutalist structures. One early such example was the Rupert street car park built in Bristol between December 1959 and October 1960 by the Multidek Development Group, right in the heart of the city’s rebuilt shopping and commercial centre. It had six decks with space for 550 cars and a car showroom, workshop, and petrol station on the forecourt.

A Pathé news report praised its “unbroken curved roadway” and explained that the “idea is that the car goes up the gradient and the driver down again by lift”. The commentary in the programme for the celebration lunch to mark its opening on November 9, 1960 hailed it as the first of its kind to be built in the country. “Cars are parked by customers themselves on either side of a continuous ramp”, it trilled, “which spirals gently from the entrance to the top of the building, which is six decks high. The 24ft wide centre section of the ramp is the roadway between bays of 16ft long and 8ft wide, affording ample room for each car. Having parked and locked his car, the owner proceeds by lift to street level.”

Over in Leicester the Auto-Magic Car Park, later known as Lee Circle, opened in 1961, providing space for 1,050 cars. Among its innovations it was one of the first automated car parks, using coin-operated barriers, and underneath its six storeys was a Tesco supermarket, its first store outside of London. Fully integrated into the car park Tesco staff would carry their customers’ shopping directly to their car. A crowd of 2,000 people assembled to see Sid James open the store and Sir Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco stores, pack groceries into bags at the checkout.

For years it featured in the Guiness Book of Records as the largest store by floor area in Europe and marked the beginning of self-service shopping.

Multistoreys do not seem to be so much fun these days!

Two Ladies And A Rajah

Is it just me or can you also not resist digging into a cultural reference that, presumably, resonated with contemporary readers but fly over the heads of modern readers? I was mulling the point as I looked into a couple of examples taken from Brian Flynn’s Where There Was Smoke.

Mrs Parker is described as having elbows in hands and looking absurdly like the Rajah of Bhong. The Rajah is a character in a two act comic opera, A Country Girl,written by James T Tanner with music by Lionel Monckton and lyrics by Adrian Ross and Paul Rubens. It was first performed at Daly’s theatre in London in 1902 and Rutland Barrington played the part of Quinton Raikes, who adopts the persona of the Rajah in order to win the affections of Princess Melelaneh.

A cartoon, nestling somewhat incongruously between a report headlined “Horror in Hyde Park” and a cure for liver cough, in The Truth, a journal published in Sydney on November 22, 1903,tells us that “the dear old Rajah [of Bhong], with his jolly and fat legs, is the delight of the dress circle ladies, who appear to think that the sweet Country Girl is small potatoes in comparison to the foreign potentate”.

When discussing a particular problem of geography with Andrew MacMorran of the Yard, Anthony Bathurst remarks that Barcross is nice and close to East Burne. “Similar in tastes and tactics”, he goes on. “Like the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady. This is a reference to a poem by Rudyard Kipling from 1890 entitled The Ladies.

It is a poem in which a soldier looks back at the women whose company he has enjoyed over the year. Unlike Larry Tighe in Love o’ Women, he seems to have come through unscathed from these liaisons. After some reminiscences, he becomes a tad more philosophical as the poem draws to its conclusion:

“What did the Colonel’s Lady think? Nobody ever knew./ Somebody asked the Sergeant’s wife,/ An’ she told ‘em true!/ When you get to a man in the case,/ they’re like as a row of pins -/ For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady/ Are sisters under their skins”. In other words, women, irrespective of their social class, are much the same, sisters under their skin.

If anyone can help me with Bathurst’s remark that he might have taken the wrong turning like the young lady of Devizes, I would be very appreciative. The only  reference I can find is to a rather risqué limerick which goes “there was a young girl from Devizes/ with melons of differing sizes/ he went to the fair/ and to her great despair/ the buggers won separate prizes”. Contextually, this does not seem right but who knows!

Truffle Resurgens

With the retirement of Alfred Collins Truffle hunting almost died out in England. There were a number of reasons. It was a hand to mouth existence, hard work with very uncertain rewards, hunters often experiencing blank days and poor seasons, especially in years where there were low amounts of rainfall. Falling demand, especially after the First World War, saw prices plummet and dogs which were taxed were expensive to own.

The migration from the countryside to urban settings contributed to the loss of rural skills, exacerbated by deforestation reducing the natural habitats in which the truffles grew. The move away from coppicing in arboriculture meant the development of denser canopies of taller trees, shading out any undergrowth and the woodland floor, led to a reduction in the number of truffles.

While a combination of these factors led to the decline of truffle hunting in the wild, a scientific development in the 1970s pioneering inoculation techniques in France opened the way for truffles to be grown in managed plantations. In a nursery setting the fungus spore is attached to the roots of a tree and allowed to germinate and create a fungus root known as a mycellum to cover the root of a tree. It is then taken to a field and planted.

During the first few years, the health of the tree is monitored, the soil’s acidity carefully controlled, and water supplied through an irrigation to create the conditions necessary to develop a truffle underground. Eventually, in the spring the primordia or small truffles are generated, red on the outside and white inside, widening in the autumn and ripening in the winter.

The first black truffle to be grown in the United States was harvested in Northern California in 1987, while in 2009 Chile became the third southern hemisphere country after New Zealand and Australia to cultivate truffles. It is estimated that there are as many as 1,000 truffle farms outside of Europe.

Truffle growing in the southern hemisphere has a distinct attraction as the harvest season, the colder months of June, July, and August, are precisely the months when they are not available in Europe. Trufas del Nuevo Mundo in Argentina, which grew its first black truffle, weighing 69 grams, in 2016 now has some 20,000 mycorrhizal trees and does a roaring trade supplying European consumers with their favourite fungus.  

Truffles are back, it seems.

The Milk-Churn Murder

A review of The Milk-Churn Murder by Miles Burton – 250803

Also known as The Clue of the Silver Brush and originally published in 1935, The Milk-Churn Murder is the eleventh in Burton’s Desmond Merrion series and a frustrating story it is too. It starts well enough and the ending, if a tad melodramatic, is action filled. However, it is the rather thick cut of meat in the middle of the two wafer thin slices of bread that begin to stick in the craw. At various points I could not help but echo Inspector Arnold’s exasperated cry, “I’m sick to death of this infernal case”.

We start off with a visit to the wonderfully named Starvesparrow Farm, a working farm run by the cantankerous Mr Hollybud that produces milk for a nearby dairy. The practice is that Hollybud puts the full churns on a stand by the side of the road to be collected by the dairy and empty churns are left so the process can be repeated. One day, though, someone decides that one of Hollybud’s churns would be a good place to hide a body, the process of decomposition stayed by the preservative that it is put in.

The problem for Inspector Arnold of the Yard and his colleague, Desmond Merrion, is not only to discover who committed the murder but also to identify the victim as the torso is headless. There are a number of items in the churn including a wallet with the initials ALS on it, a piece of paper with an address in Oban written on it in indelible ink, and a pair of old fashioned spectacles without lenses made, we later discover, from erinoid, a substance that can be made to imitate horn, something which becomes very important as the case meanders to its conclusion.

Arnold is a little too prone to take things at face value while Merrion’s approach is more considered and he begins to dig more deeply into the artefacts that are in the churn as well as the clue of the initials OMN on a silver hair brush found in a hotel room in Scarborough on one of Arnold’s wild goose chases. Some are designed to mislead while others prove helpful and appear to have been inserted into the churn by a third party who wants to betray the murderer.

Eventually, Merrion is able to identify the victim, a South African businessman, and through the spectacles and the hair brush the name of the culprit. There are a couple of other murders along the way, the culprit having the audacity to murder and leave the naked corpse of a woman in Merrion’s flat, and kill an old lag who looks like him to give the impression that he has committed suicide. When it is all boiled down it is a case of a jealous husband who goes to enormous and bloody lengths to thwart his wife from running off with her paramour.

I think my major criticism of the story is that it is an ingenious problem presented in the abstract with no attempt at characterization or any pretence to give some human colour to the tale. Instead Arnold and Merrion just work their way through a number of clues, follow up some leads and rely upon Merrion’s omniscience and some incredible luck to crack the case. Save for the opening chapters and the denouement there is little in the way of a true story, just heavy duty police procedural stuff.

How the culprit got their hands on the wallet bearing the initials which prove to be a red herring did make me smile, although in reality it is beyond belief, and I did find the chase to apprehend the culprit exciting, although by that time I was desperate for any change of pace. While I can appreciate the ingenuity of the problem and there were some good ideas lurking within the text, the book as a whole left me cold. On to the next one!

Amusement And Theme Parks

There are over five hundred amusement and theme parks in the UK with IBISWorld putting the number of businesses in the sector as 565 in 2005. Many parents will have taken their children to one or more over the summer holidays but is there a difference between the two or are the terms interchangeable to describe a location where a collection of attractions have been built?

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland, his so-called “happy land” in 1955 in Anaheim, California, it marked a distinct departure from the amusement parks that had preceded it. Taking the usual rides found at amusement parks, such as roller coasters, carousels, flat rides etc, he used them to tell stories, incorporating whimsical architecture, employing bold colours, landscaping, and characters, encouraging visitors to become part of the story rather than passive passengers on mechanical rides.

Disney divided his park into themed lands, creating attractions within those lands to tell a larger story and adapting the techniques that had proved so successful in his films, the use of music, lighting, composition, and framing to a three-dimensional space, he was able to immerse his customers in all-encompassing adventures. Disneyland is widely regarded as the first theme park.

Amusement parks, like theme parks, are designed to give their visitors numerous attractions to experience but whereas a theme park is designed to evoke a sense of place and evoke a story, amusement parks just focus on the ride itself. When their visitors get off a ride, they simply move on to the next attraction with little or nothing tying them all together.

The key difference between the two is that of core focus. The focus of an amusement park is to provide thrilling rides and entertainment whereas the theme parks wraps them all up into a unifying theme or story.

Amusement park or theme park? It is important to get your terminology right!

Structure Of The Week

The Romans developed a reputation for building roads in straight lines regardless of the natural obstacles in front of them but even they baulked at mountains. The Chinese, though, have taken an even more ruthless approach.

About 92% of Guizhou, an inland province in south western China, is made up of mountains and cliffs which makes completing infrastructure projects a major challenge. Take the Guizhou Lu’an Expressway which already boasts the world’s highest bridge, the Huajiang Canyon Bridge, which crosses the Beipan river as it passes through the deep Huaijang Canyon and measures 625 metres from the bridge deck to the gorge’s bottom.

However, the section leading up to the bridge is impressive in its own right as a feat of engineering. Instead of drilling towers through mountains or building the road around them, the engineers took the bold step of slicing off the face of the mountain that was in the way. It makes for great pictures but, not unnaturally, many people are rightly upset that the natural landscape has been treated in such a cavalier fashion.

We all want to get from A to B as conveniently as possible but at what cost? Food for thought, indeed.

The Mystery At Orchard House

A review of The Mystery at Orchard House by Joan Coggin – 250801

Occasionally midway through a book I wonder quite where the story is leading to and this was the sense I got with Joan Coggin’s second in her Lady Lupin series, originally published in 1946 and now reissued by the enterprising Galileo Publishers of Cambridge. It is very much a case of much ado about nothing very much. We do have a number of petty thefts and a motoring accident after a car had been tampered with and the usual trail of mayhem and misunderstandings that seem to accompany Lady Lupin Hastings, one of the most unlikely vicar’s wives in English literature and while they are all resolved in the end, this is one of the cosiest of cosy mysteries.

Whilst the book might disappoint those who are looking for a complex well-plotted mystery, there is undoubtedly a strong feel good factor about the book, a great pick me up if, like Lady Lupin, you are recovering from a bout of illness, in her case from a bad case of influenza, and passages that are genuinely and uproariously funny. Scatterbrained and ditzy she might be, always one to grasp the wrong end of the stick or say the injudicious thing at precisely the wrong moment and through good intentions set off a chain of events with unanticipated consequences but underneath all this she is a pretty shrewd reader of character, a gift that serves her in good stead when setting about solving a mystery.

The book opens with Lady Lupin arriving at Orchard House, a guest house cum hotel run by her friend Diana Turner, an author of children’s stories whom we met in Who Killed The Curate? Ostensibly there for a two week rest cure, she soon becomes the Agony Aunt to the other guests and ultimately has to step in to “run” the establishment when Diana is hospitalized after the car she was driving had been tampered with and went off the road. Along the way she sees valuable members of the staff leave, loses guests and even has to deal with a member of staff who kisses one of the guests as well as dealing with not one but three investigators called in to look into the spate of thefts and, oh, a small fire to which the fire brigade have been called out to not once but twice. It is far from the island of tranquility that Lady Lupin imagined when she arrived.

Miss Dyson-Drake, whose manuscript, “her child”, is stolen, the first of a spate of thefts at Orchard House, is a wonderful caricature of an unworldly author wrapped up in her art, an awful driver who does not seem to care that she knocked over and injured a child during a riotous car journey. It is her car that is tempered with, although there is an innocent explanation even though her fortune is destined to be inherited by one of the other residents of the hotel. Other thefts, of some minor pieces of jewelry and Mrs Myddleton’s necklace, and a wallet soon follow, The contraband is later found by Lady Lupin in the summer house making it obvious who the culprit is, but that, in my view, is fairly incidental.

This is not a conventional whodunit mystery, more of a social satire and a comedy of manners, a story in which most of the characters are trying to find themselves and to reset their lives, escape from the lives they are leading to pursue their dreams and to find their own version of happiness. We have a young woman, Grizel, elope to marry the man of her dreams and free herself from the tyranny of her mother, a newly married couple, the Rennies, who, after a rocky start, decide to reconnect and rekindle their love, and Paul Ramsden, Diana’s cousin, whose deep love for Orchard House has been grievously misunderstood. Lady Lupin’s reign of chaos allows them all to find their true purpose in life.

Lady Lupin might be marmite to many but she is the catalyst for a book that is both funny and at times thought provoking. While it might not have been what I was expecting, it proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Tallest Mountain

Courtesy of Nigel Molesworth, as any ful kno Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. Located deep in the Mahālangūr Himāl subrange of the Himalayas it stands 29,031.69 feet above sea level, according to the latest assessment. That is almost 5.5 miles tall, impressive certainly, but the fact raises a couple of questions. Why are mountains measured from sea level and if another metric was used, would Everest still be the tallest?

The sea level used as the base for the measurement of mountains, though, is not the actual sea level. This varies around the world and are changing because of changes of climatic condition. What is used is a mathematically defined geoid of the Earth, a model of global mean sea level that is used to measure precise surface elevations, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This average is used to ascertain the height of mountains, a process often enhanced by having an aeroplane fly back and forth over a mountain in a series of parallel lines to ascertain how much gravity pulls down on its peak. These measurements along with GPS readings produce extremely accurate elevation readings. On this measure Everest is the tallest mountain.

However, if sea level was ignored and mountains were measured from base to peak, then an inactive volcano in Hawaii, Mauna Kea, would take the crown. Although its peak is “just” 13,802 feet above sea level, less than half the height of Everest, the majority of it is below sea level. When measured from base to peak it stands 33,497 feet tall.

If you change the metric by which you judge the height of a mountain, say, to the one with a peak that is the farthest point from Earth’s centre, then Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador comes into the frame. The Earth is an oblate spheroid rather than a perfect sphere and there is a difference of 13.29 miles between its polar radius and its equatorial radius.    

Mount Chimbarazo is 20,548 feet above sea level, not even tall enough to put it in the top 30 peaks of the Andes, but it is just one degree south of the equator, where the Earth’s bulge is most pronounced. This geographical quirk puts the mountain’s peak some 7,113 feet farther away from Earth’s centre than Everest and 3,967 miles from the planet’s core.

If we adopt a universal perspective, these are just chickenfeed compared with Olympus Mons on Mars, the largest known volcano in the solar system, with a height of around sixteen miles, three times that of Everest, and a base which covers 374 miles. Within the impact crater known as Rheasilvia on the asteroid Vesta is a peak that scientists believe to be anywhere between twelve and 15.5 miles in height, making it, probably, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

You pays your money, you takes you choice, it would seem.

Ice Cream Wars

An army marches on its stomach, according to Napoleon Bonaparte, and much of the success of an army comes down to getting the logistics right, not just getting the right number of soldiers in the right place at the right time but also with enough supplies and provisions to maximise their efficiency. The focus on foodstuffs before the Second Worls War was to ensure that the bulk of what was available went to the military, leaving the civilian population with just enough to live on.

In America Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration launched a successful “food will win the war” campaign persuading Americans to sacrifice wheat, sugar, meat, and fat during the First World War, resulting in more than 18 million tons of food staples for the war effort in America’s first full year of war alone. Food sufficient to perform efficiently was one thing, but what about creature comforts?

Unlike the British Navy where a daily tot of rum was de rigueur for ratings and officers alike, the US Navy issued General Order No 99 in 1914 which banned the consumption of alcohol aboard naval vessels, a move that was further strengthened when America moved into the prohibition era. Along with caffeine and nicotine, ice cream became a favoured treat to boost morale amongst sailors.

However, ice cream was not widely available especially in the theatres of war in Europe, a fact that The Ice Cream Review decried in its editorial in May 1918. “If English medical men knew what ours do every hospital would keep ice cream on hand for patients”, it wrote, demanding that the administration in Washington DC subsidise Allied ice-cream throughout Europe. Their campaign came to naught and even proved counterproductive with America facing a sugar shortage and in the summer of 1918 the Food Administration deemed that “ice cream is no longer considered so essential as to justify the free use of sugar in its manufacture.”

A combination of the Depression and the Prohibition which saw brewers turn to the production of sodas and ice cream to survive led to a surge in the fortunes of ice cream with Americans not only consuming more than a million gallons of it a day by the end of the 1920s but also associating it with the comfort and diversion formerly assigned to alcohol.

When the Second World War broke out, ice cream was a prohibited substance once more in Europe, the Brits being advised to make do with a carrot on a stick, but for the Americans it was so much part of their way of life that the military found increasingly ingenious ways to sate the demands for it amongst their troops.

While the U.S.S Lexington was slowly sinking under the barrage of Japanese torpedoes in 1942, the crew abandoned ship but not before they broken into the ship’s freezer and eaten all the ice cream. By 1943 American heavy-bomber crews had worked out that by strapping heavy buckets of mix to the rear gunner’s compartment before a mission, by the time they had landed the custard would have frozen at altitude and been churned smooth by a combination of engine vibrations and turbulence so as to make a passable ice cream. On terra firm soldiers would mix snow with melted chocolate bars to make a chocolate sorbet.

In 1945 the US Navy spent $1m converting a concrete barge into a floating ice cream factory, holding more than 2,000 gallons of the stuff and capable of churning out ten gallons every 7 minutes. It was towed around the Pacific, distributing ice cream to ships without the capacity to make it themselves. Meanwhile the US Army built miniature ice cream factories on the front lines, even delivering individual cartons to foxholes, in addition to manufacturing hundreds of millions of gallons of ice-cream mix annually and shipping more than 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream in a single year.

A fascinating footnote of the Second World War is the part that Ice cream, at least for the American military, played in boosting morale.