Martin Fone's Blog, page 46

The Ironic Pool Party

At the end of each July the New Orleans Recreation Department held a pool party to mark the end of the season when 14 of the city’s nineteen recreation centres closed. The end of the 1985 season was no different and there was an extra reason to celebrate as it was the first summer in living memory when there had been no drownings in the city’s pools. Indeed, around half the guests at the party were lifeguards, celebrating the feat.

When the party had ended and the four lifeguards on duty were clearing the pool, they found the body of Jerome Moody, one of the party-goers, at the bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool. Moody, who was not one, was fully clothed and had not been swimming. Despite attempts to resuscitate him, a post mortem revealed that he had died by drowning, somehow slipping into the pool unobserved.

The moral of the story is never to count your chickens until they are hatched.  

The Dark Angel

A review of The Dark Angel by James Ronald – 240703

The fifth in the series of reissues of the work of James Ronald from Moonstone Press features as its main course The Dark Angel, originally serialized in the Portsmouth Evening News in 1930. As a consequence it has a very episodic feel about it and is a little too obvious if you work on the principle of always suspect the least likely.

The set up is quite promising. Elderly spinster, Elspeth Brownrigg, has devoted her life to charitable causes, particularly an orphanage, and receives an anonymous letter demanding £5,000 within 48 hours or else she will be killed. The typewritten note is decorated with two black wings, leading the sender to be called the Dark Angel. She calls in her nephew, Norman, who happens to be a detective sergeant at the Yard and he and his boss, Inspector Evans, collaborate to both protect Elspeth and uncover the culprit.

They fail in both respects, Miss Brownrigg being poisoned in front of them with an unusual African poison although she does not ingest enough for it to be fatal, and the culprit seeing through their elaborate subterfuges and running off with the money. The Dark Angel extends their reign of terror by targeting two prominent businessmen, Sir Montgomery Bulger who caves into their demands and the other, Peter Brayd, steadfastly refusing only to be poisoned in front of his dinner guests by greedily eating an orange injected with prussic acid.

One of the unusual aspects of the mystery is that two of the principal police investigators are high up on the list of suspects, Norman Brownrigg because he stands to gain substantially financially from the death of his aunt, and Inspector Evans because his fingerprints are found on a letter which has come straight from the Dark Angel. Amongst the other suspects are Elspeth’s secretary, Sydney Martin, and Miss Waring, both of whom, in different ways, have access to poisons. Miss Waring also provides the story with some obligatory love interest as Norman inevitably falls for her charms.

There are plenty of red herrings in the plot but it does not take the reader long to realise that there is a very small group of people involved in each of the incidents, although they are not precisely identical in each case, but there does seem to be a common denominator. It takes an eminent toxicologist to apply a logical and scientific process to the case, using what can only be described as an elaborate form of Venn diagram to draw his shocking conclusions. He rushes off to confront the culprit who readily confesses but, being the gentleman he is, provides them with the means to avoid the hangman’s rope.

The motivation behind the blackmail scheme and the murder seems a little weak and there is more than a little racism in the portrayal of and attitude shown towards Elspeth’s black manservant. To counterbalance those cavils, there are moments of high comedy, especially in the scene where Norman Brownrigg has to battle through a crowd of women in a department store feverishly trying to secure a bargain and the sequence showing the perils of carrying a rat trap in your handbag. I did not think the story reached the heights of some of the others I have read in this series.

As well as the novel, this edition includes a novella, The Unholy Trio, in which a private detective, Peter Norton, sets out to thwart a desperate gang of criminals who are adept at assuming disguises and rescue a damsel in distress. There is also a short story, A Tired Heart, an amusing tale of how a cash-strapped furrier outwits a cynically suspicious insurance investigator.

My Kindle version had more than its fair share of typos but for all that it was an entertaining enough read.

The Blue Beetle London Dry Gin

To paraphrase Mrs Merton, what else other than the bright blue bottle and the bargain basement price tempted me to select a bottle of Blue Beetle London Dry Gin from the shelves of Drinkfinder UK? Well, the story behind the name I suppose. Blue beetles are supposedly rare, so the blurb goes, and their colour can sometimes change slowly or rapidly from blue to red, especially when they are mating. One of the characteristics, apparently, of this gin is that it changes its colour when skilfully mixed in cocktails, making it ideal for mating.

According to , the Blue Ground Beetle, Carabus intricatus, is native to the UK and is blue but the only unusual characteristic that this source mentions is that it squirts a predator with a jet of acid from its abdomen. Nothing about turning colour. Of course, it might be a different beetle, there are a few of them, but this seems to be a bit of audacious PR puffery.

Nevertheless, the bottle is striking. Very tall, towering over the other bottles on my shelf, it is round, slim, with steep rounded shoulders which lead on to a long, thin neck and a silver screwcap. It is a vibrant blue colour with a large image of a beetle wearing a crown, denoting the fact that the said beetle is the King of beetles, and with a smaller image of the crown-wearing beetle in red superimposed exactly in the centre of the bottle.

The labelling tells me that it is “crafted in a mating season” and that it is produced in small batches o 6,000 bottles. There is a description of the story of the gin on the rear and a note that it is produced and bottled by distillery ATT/12477/10 under the authority of Leomar Ltd. The website suggests that there is a connection with the Cypriot company, Marleo Ltd.

The gin uses nineteen botanicals of which one is a secret ingredient, roasted blue beetle perhaps, to maintain the aura of mystery around the gin. We do know the identity of the other eighteen which are mint, balm, juniper, coriander, liquorice, angelica, lemon peel, orange peel, fresh lemon, orange and grapefruit, cardamom, cinnamon, guinea pepper, cubeb pepper, bergamot, lavender, and geranium.

The distillers claim it to be “an enigmatic, captivating, elegant and sophisticated” and in many ways they are not wrong. It is very citrus heavy as you would expect from the list of botanicals but there is still room for more floral and spicy notes to make their way through. It is a distinctive and unusual taste and with an ABV of 40% the drink is quite moreish. An enigmatic gin, for sure.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Swinging Death

A review of The Swinging Death by Brian Flynn – 240701

Rather like Anthony Bathurst, Flynn’s serial amateur sleuth attached to the Yard, as he pens a final letter to his professional colleague, Chief Detective-Inspector Andrew MacMorran, at the conclusion of this bewildering case, I had a metaphorical tear in my eye as I reached the last page. The Swinging Death, the thirty-fifth in the series, originally published in 1948 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is the last of the reissued books and the end of a voyage of discovery of an author I have enjoyed immensely. He wrote many more, his last published ten years later, and I hope some enterprising publisher will revive some or all of the rest.

One of the features of Flynn’s work that I have enjoyed is his willingness to experiment and to my mind The Swinging Death has a very distinctive old-fashioned feel about it, as if he wanted to turn the clock back to the pre-WWII days. Even the primary motivation for the murder is rooted in the First World War. Perhaps this was a very clear attempt to turn his back on the gritty realism that was pervading detective fiction at the time.

Nevertheless, there is a gruesome twist as the naked body of Dr Julian Field found hanging from the light fixture in the porch of St Mark’s Church. He had been on a home visit to a patient, the wife of Philip Stanhope, and for some reason, after being seen of at the station by Stanhope, had got off at the wrong station and been murdered. There are other puzzling aspects to the case. Some of Field’s clothing was dumped in the font of St Mark’s while the rest were found in the font of another church. Robbery was not the prime motivation as amongst the few things stolen were a set of keys and Mrs Stanhope’s sputum specimen. At around the time of the murder Mrs Field was allegedly lured from her house which was then ransacked. What on earth was going on and why was Field murdered?

This is a case where there are too many clues, if such a thing can be said, most of which lead nowhere and some that seemingly occupy a lot of attention, such as the identity of Mary with whom Field, it is discovered, was due to have an assignation and a lost set of keys, are rather cavalierly jettisoned along the way. The starting point of the investigation is a reconstruction of Field’s last journey but this is done with a light touch, not the forensic dissection that we would have been treated to by Freeman Wills Crofts, but that too seems to lead to no definitive conclusions.

Amongst the welter of clues there are some that do hint at the real motivation for the crime. There are some initials found in Field’s paying in book, Flynn does like a cryptic clue, a war widow, a photograph taken for a magazine which is canned because the subject objects to something within it, and the doctor’s desire to specialize in lung diseases all take on an especial relevance as the case nears its conclusion. It takes a very astute reader to realise the true significance of it all.

Although Bathurst and MacMorran conclude that they are getting nowhere and abandon the case, Bathurst really knows what happened to Field and why, revealing all over a game of billiards when he invites himself to a family Christmas gathering. The reasons why he does not proceed further are twofold: he recognizes that there is not enough evidence to get a conviction but, more importantly, Field in his opinion is the lowest of the low, a blackmailer who deserved all he got and more. That he was on the right track is neatly confirmed by a brief conversation as he leaves which ties in with the events described in the prologue to the story. Bathurst even teases MacMorran with the truth in a PPS in the final missive.

It would not be a Flynn novel without sporting connotations, poor MacMorran, a football man and a Spurs and Rangers supporter as we discovered in Conspiracy at Angel, has to endure a game of rugby and the pair argue the merits of their respective games. His language is also inventive with the resurrection of the term kittle cattle to describe the actions of a jury especially to be savoured.

Flynn has produced an enthralling plot, one that succeeds in perplexing but makes sense when all the pieces come together. More importantly, it is entertaining and great fun and rounded off a fine series from a writer who has been sadly neglected. I for one shall miss spending time in the company of Bathurst and MacMorran. I could always read them again, I suppose.

Edward Weston

The craze for Pedestrianism, a forerunner of race walking, hit the United States in the 1840s and even Mark Twain was not immune to it. In November 1874 he and a friend set out to walk the 100 miles from Hartford to Boston but, sensibly, gave up after ten miles and completing the rest of the journey by train, telling a reporter “there was no intention on our part to excite anybody’s envy or make Mr Weston feel badly for we were not preparing for a big walk so much as for a delightful walk”.

The Mr Weston Twain referred to was America’s leading pedestrian who cleverly combined the public’s fascination with pedestrianism with an equally popular craze, roller skating, which saw purpose-built indoor rinks open up around the country. Weston would perform walking exhibitions, charging up to 50 cents a person to watch him and thousands of people gladly paid up. To relieve the tedium he would hire bands to entertain the crowds, even playing the cornet himself while walking, dressed in his trademark ruffled shirt and riding crop or cane.

Weston had a distinctive walking style, swinging his hips with each step or with “a splendid sweeping stride that carries him over the road like the wind”. A more serious observer noted that he “accentuated each third step, visibly accelerating his speed by so doing. This method brought the extra effort alternately on the left and right foot, with a respite between, since the acceleration fell on the fourth, seventh and tenth step and so on”. He also possessed small, sturdy legs, rather like “two toothpicks stuck in opposite sides of a potato”, which he would switch with his whip.

His exhibitions were usually feats of endurance and against the clock. At a roller rink in Manhattan in 1870 a crowd of 5,000 assembled to see Weston attempt to win a wager of $2,500 by walking a hundred miles in less than 22 hours. He did it with twenty minutes to spare. The following year at the same rink he walked four hundred miles in five days, earning $5,000 in bets and gate receipts. At a rink in Newark, New Jersey, in December 1874 Weston attempted to walk 500 miles in 6 days, completing the feat in 5 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes and 15 seconds, a feat hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable on record”.

Like British pedestrians who had gone before him, Weston experienced attempts to sabotage him by those who had bet against him, one punter pouring a chemical on the track and the National Guard was called out to protect him. And he split opinion, the Spirit of the Times dismissing him as a “humbug” fleecing  gullible public while the New York Sportsman accused him of staging mercenary exhibitions which were no test of real merit and called him a fraud.

Nevertheless, Weston’s derring-do struck a chord with the masses and he was a hero to many an American boy, inspiring many would-be pedestrians to form competitive leagues and seek challenges and competitors. Companies were quick to exploit the commercial opportunity with Tiffany selling a new invention called a pedometer and a cobbler, John Welsher, devising a “walking shoe” with built-in springs. “It seemed as though the muscles of the nation”, wrote Walter Bernstein in the Virginia Quarterly Review”, “were making one final, vast, collective effort before being replaced by the internal combustion machine”.

Weston’s feats also prompted the emergence of his fiercest challenger, as we shall see next time.

The Ginger Cat Mystery

A review of The Ginger Cat Mystery by Robin Forsythe – 240627

The fourth book in Forsythe’s Algernon aka Anthony Vereker series, The Ginger Cat Mystery, which also went under the title of Murder at Marston Manor and was originally published in 1935 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, stalks familiar Golden Age Detective Fiction terrain. It is set in the heart of the English countryside, Marston-Le-Willows in West Suffolk, whose tranquility is shaken by the goings on chez Cornell.  

John had surprised people by marrying a younger woman, Josephine, and then dies suddenly, supposedly of pneumonia, according to the local doctor, Redgrave, who just happens to be romantically entangled with Josephine. Under the terms of the will, the estate passes to Cornell’s son, Frank, but then he is found having suffered a fatal shot between the eyes at his home, Marston Manor, and under the terms of the will the estate now passes to Josephine. This makes her the obvious suspect but seasoned readers of the genre will soon realise that things will not be as simple as that.

It would not be a country house murder without some other suspects to consider, each with a motive, some stronger than others, to hasten Frank’s demise. There is Frank’s longstanding friend, Roland Carstairs, who is appalled by his friend’s treatment of women and especially of Frank’s cousin and former fiancée, Stella Cornell, who was jilted in favour of Valerie Mayo, and David Cornell, Stella’s father who was blinded during the First World War.

The position of Redgrave is fascinating as he perhaps was a little too quick to sign off John’s death certificate, although a subsequent exhumation of the body seems to put to rest the suspicions of poisoning. He also was instrumental in introducing Tapp to the household, an unfortunate Typhoid Mary-like character who carried the germ for cerebro-spinal fever, to which the more mature are susceptible and whose symptoms are not dissimilar to that of pneumococcal meningitis.  

The other intriguing facet of the case is how a blind man could shoot a gun with such unerring accuracy that he hit his intended between the eyes. The answer is ingenious but perhaps a little too pat as is a confession followed by a suicide that seems to wrap the case up. Algernon Vereker, whose involvement in the case is somewhat forced, using his newspaper credentials to interview the family for the press and then almost immediately ditches the journalistic pretence to help Inspector Heather of the Yard solve the case, is not convinced that the solution proffered in the penultimate chapter is the real one, as there are some troubling aspects that do not fit neatly into it, not least a cat’s hair he found on a chair in the music room.

For ailurophiles the book will come as a disappointment as, though the cat’s hair is a leitmotif as the investigations proceed, a moggy, ginger or otherwise, plays the most minor of minor parts in the story. Nevertheless, it leads to an alternative version of what really happened, confirmed by a chance meeting Vereker has with one of the characters. Sensibly, Vereker decides to let sleeping cats lie.

What we have, when the plot is boiled down, is a story of the power of love, both romantic and paternal, and what it drives people to do. Vereker, after his crude shoehorning into the case, is an engaging character and works well with Heather, their repartee brightening up the story and, while I did not think that this story reached the heights of the earlier Vereker tales I had read, it was entertaining enough.     

British Wines

There are now 3,928 hectares under vine and 943 vineyards across the United Kingdom producing 12.2 million bottles of wine in 2022, according to WineGB. While this is a boom time for British wines, it has been a long and frustrating process to get here.

Grapes were probably brought to Britain by the Romans, and by Saxon times the Isle of Ely was noted for its dense vine cultivations. The Domesday Book recorded forty-two vineyards, twelve of which were attached to monasteries. With the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II in 1152 the vineyards of Bordeaux formed part of her dowry and their superior wines rather put the domestic produce into the shade. For the next three centuries English viticulture was mainly a monastic enterprise, which came to an abrupt end with the Reformation.

Aspirations for an English wine industry had not entirely withered on the vine, though. Among the pioneers were Lord Cecil, who, in 1610, asked the botanist John Tradescant to go to Flanders to select some suitable plants for a proposed vineyard at Hatfield House. 20,000 vines were planted the following year and the vineyard, which Samuel Pepys visited twice, in 1661 and 1667, was gradually extended.

The Royal gardener, John Rose, published The English Vineyard Vindicated (1666), in which he wrote about the growing, training, and pruning of vines, while during the following century Charles Hamilton introduced a number of varieties of grape, including Pinot Noir, to his estate at Painshill.

The uncertainties of the weather eventually thwarted many of these efforts and any prospects of a commercially viable industry were dealt an almost mortal blow when Lord Palmerston reduced the tax on imported wines by 83% in 1860, leading to an influx of foreign wines of a quality and at a price with which any English wines could not compete. Tastes had also changed with a preference for sweet, heavy, fortified wines which English vineyards could not produce.

Some still soldiered on, the Marquis of Bute planting three vineyards in Wales in 1887 including Castell Coch and Swanbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan. The demand for agricultural land to boost food production saw them ploughed up in 1916 and the revival came to a grinding halt once more.

It was only after the Second World War that English viticulture had another renaissance, thanks to the efforts of George Ordish and Ray Barrington Brock. Ordish, noting that the similarities in climate between Kent and the Champagne region should allow grapes to ripen, conducted trials, the results of which were detailed in his influential book, Wine Growing in England (1953). Brock, meanwhile, had established the Oxted Viticultural Research Station in 1946 and, after experimenting with over 600 types of table and wine grapes, identified which were suitable for the British climate, varieties which formed the backbone of the next wave of English vineyards.

Following a visit to Oxted, in 1952 Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones selected and planted the Seyval Blanc variety at Hambledon in Hampshire, the first vineyard explicitly created to produce wine on a commercial basis since Castle Coch. The first bottles were produced in 1954 exciting much press interest at the time. A second commercial vineyard was planted by Jack Ward at Heathfield in Sussex in 1955 where he grew Müller-Thurgau and other Germanic varieties.

Others were to follow and by 1964 English commercial wine production had hit the heady heights of 1,500 bottles per annum. Improvements in varieties, technological advances, and changes in the British climate have enabled Britain now to become the fastest developing wine region in the world with grapes, according to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, representing 36% of England’s soft fruit crop.

Hag’s Nook

A review of Hag’s Nook by John Dickson Carr – 240625

Although not the first John Dickson Carr novel, Hag’s Nook, originally published in 1932, is the first of the twenty-three novels that made up his Dr Gideon Fell series. He cannot quite shake off his obsession with all matters Gothic which permeates his four earlier Bencolin novels but he cleverly interweaves scenes of cosy domesticity chez Fell and where the weather is brilliant to relieve the unremitting sense of horror.

The central premise of the book is that the Starbeth family are cursed, living in a gloomy pile built around a former prison where inmates were hung and thrown down a well. On reaching the age of twenty-five the eldest male member of the family has to undergo an ordeal, spending an hour in the Governor’s Room and opening a safe and seeing what is in there. There is an air of mystery as to what it is they will discover and whether it is as terrible as legend would have it.

To add to the sense of jeopardy several of the family have died, plunging to their deaths and breaking their necks by the well. Recently Timothy Starbeth was found near the well mortally wounded and had enough time to write a note which was placed in the safe and utter something about a handkerchief before he dies. Shortly after the new heir, Martin, had undergone the ordeal, his body was found near the well and his cousin, Herbert, had disappeared. Had the curse struck again or was there a more rational explanation?

Fell is an intriguing character, large, wandering around using two sticks, more of a sleuth who uses his intellect rather than any physical prowess. He is intrigued by the story, notes the reference to a handkerchief and the habit of one of his party, discovers a groove worn in the balcony outside the Governor’s Room and ponders the significance of the absence of rainwater by the door. He is able to strip away the Gothic paraphernalia of the original curse to provide a rational explanation of the curse and with the help of his friends, especially Dorothy Starbeth, who provides the love interest as she grows closer to the innocent American abroad coming to grips with the English way, Rampole, cracks the code in a piece of doggerel.

What we are left with is a fairly conventional murder mystery with a hoard of treasure in the form of jewels providing the motivation for the murder and an inconvenient and unexpected arrival of someone from abroad forcing the murderer’s hand. There is the use of time-worn trope, the clock that shows the wrong time to establish an alibi, the tease of an impossible murder which is anything but, and a prime suspect who disappear. After the big reveal at the local railway station, Fell sits down with the culprit who writes their confession. Given the several references to the presence of a gun with just one bullet in the room, the expectation is that the murderer will take the gentleman’s route out. However, Carr has a final twist to his tale, finishing with a sentence that will live long in my memory.

I have always enjoyed Carr’s books and this is certainly an enjoyable read, a fairly conventional murder mystery wrapped up in dollops of horror and while the culprit begins to become obvious as Fell gets to grip with the problem, there are more than enough twists and turns before we get there to satisfy even the most demanding of readers. Recommended.

Shining Cliff Original Gin

Shining Cliff Original Gin is another new gin, to me at least, which I picked up on my recent trip to the spiritual home of Drinkfinder UK, Constantine Stores. It is produced by White Peak Distillery, which operates out of an old wire works on the banks of the river Derwent in Ambergate in Derbyshire, midway between Matlock and Belper. Founded in 2017 by Max and Claire Vaughan, it now produces an impressively extensive range of whiskies, rums, and gins.

The brand name comes from the Shining Cliff Woods, designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, where the Betty Kenny Yew Tree is to be found. Reputed to be around 2,000 years old, the tree is where a charcoal burner, Betty Kenny, is said to have sung the lullaby “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” in the 17th century to her babies as they rested in the boughs, although this charming image is one of a number of stories of the nursery rhyme’s origins. Nevertheless, an image of the tree with a stag standing underneath appears in the top left hand corner of the front label.

While the bottle itself is unremarkable, made of clear glass, round in shape and with a rounded shoulder leading to a medium-sized neck and black cap with artificial cork stopper, the labelling makes the spirit stand out. The choice of script is eye-catching, giving the look a Victorian vibe, said to be reflective of the script on the Griff Pioneers sign at the entrance to the woods at Shining Cliff. Although they use the same label design for each of their gins, they use a distinctive colour, blue for Original, yellow (naturally) for Citrus, white with a pink font for the Bakewell Pudding Gin, and a parchment tone for the Spiced Gin.

The iconography used on the labelling is worth a detailed look. As well as the image of the Yew Tree on the front label, a larger version is printed on the reverse which can be seen through the clear glass from the rear of the bottle. There is a copper-coloured label lower down the bottle, which bears the image of some twisted wire, a reference to the initial use of the building in which the distillery is housed, an image that is repeated on the top of the cap. If you are a sucker for a bit of Latin on your bottle, the legend “virtus patienta veritas” appears at the bottom of the blue label and on the seal to the bottle.

Using traditional copper stills, thirteen botanicals are used in the distillation process, a mix of gin staples and some locally foraged such as rose hip, bilberries, and mayflowers. This gives the gin, clear in the glass, a distinctly floral flavour, although the sweetness of the signature botanicals is balanced by the dry and piney notes of the juniper and a hint of zesty citrus. It is a gin which requires a careful selection of tonic as the balance could easily be upset. With an ABV of 45% it is deceptively strong and makes for quite a warming drink, ideal for sipping while nestled by a roaring fire.

While I am not a great fan of floral gins, this could easily change my mind.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Case Of The Happy Medium

A review of The Case of the Happy Medium by Christopher Bush – 240621

This is another case of a thematic link between two books sitting next to each other in my TBR pile. You might say there is some other force guiding my choice of reading choice. Like Christie’s Dumb Witness, The Case of the Happy Medium, the fortieth in Bush’s long running Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1952 and reissued by Dean Street Press, has a séance as a pivotal moment in the plot.

The eponymous happy medium is Madame Petriff, a spirit guide for those lucky enough to be recommended. Travers’ wife, Bernice, is among the chosen few and she persuades her somewhat reluctant husband to attend a meeting which proves to be an unsettling affair. The plus point is that it enables Bush to get his sleuth to meet all the people who are to feature in the story, which, as one comes to expect from a Bush mystery, is a complicated affair with lots of twists and turns.

There is an air of inevitability about her murder but another of the attendees, Hather, an author who specializes in writing about spiritual matters, is also found dead in his flat. His death looks superficially like suicide, an interpretation of the facts that the local police led by Trage and, later, Wharton, the big cheese at the Yard who uses Travers on a consultancy basis, are willing to accept. Travers, though, is not convinced because there are a number of small and inconvenient facts that do not fit in with that thesis including a Turkish rug that seems to have been exchanged, a suicide note written on a pad rather than on paper in the desk and unsigned, and no acknowledgement of his girlfriend, Phyllis Parting, in the will.

Both Wharton and Travers are ad idem that the two deaths are connected and that there was something fishy going on linked with the spiritualist set up, its magazine run by Corbel and a rather oleaginous importer, Maroulis, a theory reinforced by the discovery of a red notebook with initials and numbers with crosses and ticks against some of the entries. And why did a couple of habitués of the circle had to have stays at nursing homes?

In this case at first blush Travers seems unusually slow-witted and off pace. It is fairly obvious that Maroulis is running a drugs operation using the spiritual set up to recruit gullible customers, a fact that even Wharton quickly picks up. Rather than working together and sparring off each other, Wharton rather sidelines Travers, leaving him to follow specific and seemingly unimportant aspects of the general enquiry and The Old General has the satisfaction of bringing the case to a conclusion without much input from the theorizing amateur.

Travers, though, is nothing if not persistent and believes that Wharton has, as usual, got the wrong end of the stick. He is particularly interested in another writer, Winster, who had accused Hather of plagiarism and was appalled by Hather’s treatment of his wife, Ursula, and develops an alternative and radically different reconstruction of Hather’s demise.

This is another case where grim realism obtrudes into what was once a cosy world of genteel murders. Perhaps as befits a case involving drug traffickers and dealers, there is a greater sense of personal danger running through the tale with Travers tailed after asking to many questions at the séance, is shot and wounded as he has a hand in the arrest of Wharton’s preferred suspect and has a gun pulled on him as he reveals his interpretation of Hather’s death to his suspect. In his self-defence he bring the case to a rather abrupt end.

As often with a Bush murder mystery seemingly disparate bits of information and odd clues are brought together to produce a satisfying whole. There are enough clues to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions as to what really went on. Travers worries away at the details and while no longer a flamboyant sleuth gets there in the end after a slow start.

The séance is the highlight of the book for me and the means by which Maroulis’ office is connected to that of Corbel is ingenious. Bush produces a satisfying, enthralling, occasionally humorous read, a great way to pass a few hours.