Martin Fone's Blog, page 47

Emma Sharp

Completing the Barclay Match, walking a mile every hour for a thousand hours, first achieved by the eponymous Captain Barclay, was regarded as one of the pinnacles of pedestrianism. Although it demanded remarkable levels of stamina and determination, it was not the preserve of men. Amongst the women inspired to have a go was a Yorkshire woman, Emma Sharp.

Despite the disapproval of her husband who regarded it as unseemly for a woman to attempt and with little, if anything, in the way of training, Emma enlisted the assistance of the landlord of the Quarry Gap Hotel at Laisterdyke to the east of Bradford, who agreed to position the course on his grounds in return for a percentage of the ticket sales and the opportunity to sell refreshments to the spectators.

The course was a roped off piece of land 120 yards long and Emma’s tactics, when she set off on September 17, 1864, was to follow those of Barclay by walking for around 30 minutes, completing a mile in the last quarter of the first hour and the other in the first quarter of the second hour and then resting for 90 minutes. Sensibly, although probably further offending her husband, she dressed like a man, a contemporary account noting that “almost the only indication of her sex being in her large drooping straw hat which was ornamented with a white feather and other feminine adornments”, and carried a stick in her right hand.

Her sex and her appearance helped to draw large crowds, with tens of thousands gathering at times to watch her, and there was considerable press coverage. Much money was bet on whether she would complete the attempt. In the early stages those who had bet against her looked to be on to a winner as she suffered badly from swollen ankles. However, she soldiered on and the problem went away. Her doubters resorted to other tactics, constantly jeering her and around a week before she was due to complete the task, some individuals attacked her with chloroform.

Others threw burning embers in her path, some tried to drug her food while others tried to trip her up. Eventually, eighteen police officers disguised as working men mingled in the crowd for her protection and Emma began to carry a pistol which, during the final two days, she had to fire 27 times to ward off unruly spectators. At around 5.15 am on October 29, 1864 she completed the feat, in front of a crowd of 25,000.

To mark the first successful completion of the Barclay Match by a woman, a band played and an ox was roasted. Missing from the celebrations was Mr Sharp who reportedly hid in the pub, embarrassed by his wife’s antics. He soon changed his tune, though, when he realized how much she had raised from her share of ticket sales, quitting his job at the Bowling Iron Works soon after and opening a rug making business.

It was a man’s world, after all.

Dumb Witness

A review of Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie – 240618

As neither a pet owner nor much of animal lover, I find it hard to relate to the tendency of some to anthropomorphise their pets. In Dumb Witness, the sixteenth in Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, originally published in 1937 and known as Poirot Loses A Client in the States, Bob, Emily Arundell’s dog and modelled on Christie’s own, is far from dumb, given the power of expression which Hastings, at least, seems to understand. To me, it seems slightly odd. The dog also has a leading part to play in the mystery, although it is more of a scapegoat than the supposed cause of its mistress’s near fatal tumble down the stairs.

There are more murder mystery tropes in this book than you can shake a stick at. There is a wealthy but parsimonious old woman, Emily Arundell, a trio of impecunious relatives who would rather like to get their hands on the money, and a down-trodden, somewhat subservient lady’s companion in Wilhelmina Lawson. There is a god old-fashioned one-two as Emily is softened up by a tumble down the stairs, a fall blamed on Bob’s habit of leaving his ball on a step, and then finished off with poison in a way that looks as though her demise was from natural causes. And a suicide to boot, just to increase the body count

Just before her death Emily does two significant things that hasten her end; she changes her will, cutting out her family members and leaving all to Miss Lawson and writes a letter asking Poirot to visit her to deal with some concerns she has but the letter only reaches the Belgian sleuth two months after her death. Nevertheless, he decides to investigate and discovers that her sudden death had more sinister overtones.

There are some clunky aspects to the plot. It seems hardly believable that a would-be murderer would choose the middle of the night to fix a nail in a panel by the stairs, varnish it with all its attendant smell and then affix a wire between the nail and the banister in the hope that Emily Arundell would have one of her sleepwalking episodes and be the first to go down the stairs. And it is more than a little convenient to have two characters with initials that are interchangeable and look identical when viewed as a reflection in a handily placed mirror. And did women wear brooches on their night gowns in the 1930s?

As Poirot arrives on the scene late, accompanied by the ever faithful Hastings whose inability to see beyond the obvious continues to exasperate him, there is the need to set the story up. This Christie does by using a traditional third party narrative in the opening four chapters before handing the baton over to hastings to tell the rest of the tale in his inimitable style.

It is interesting to observe how Christie subtly draws the characters of three of the key protagonists. Miss Lawson seems at times naïve, other worldy, but at others there is a hardness in her character, especially over her unexpected fortune. She has a habit of listening at key holes and clearly knows more than she lets on. In contrast, one of Emily’s nieces, Bella Tanios, is portrayed as the epitome of a good woman, by the standards of the time, a devoted wife and mother, dull but also under the thrall of her seemingly dominating husband, Jacob, who is of Greek descent, to boot. You cannot have Christie without a bit of xenophobia. Nevertheless, there is the feeling that the worm might eventually turn. Theresa Arundell, on the other hand, is a greedy, grasping woman who is desperately in need of money to maintain her extravagant lifestyle.  

In solving the case, which does not involve the police and is dealt with within the family, Poirot realizes the importance of a supposed manifestation at a séance which gives him the key to how Emily was poisoned. I found this one of Christie’s least convincing Poirot tales, but even if the plot is a bit naff, she does know how to tell a tale and hooks her reader in until the end.    

Pitt’s Pictures

The introduction of the new tax on windows led to feverish efforts to identify and exploit loopholes in the legislation, aided and abetted with a little bribery of the local assessors. Some would arrange “a few sacks of corn or a little Lumber” around a room or two in an attempt to convince the assessor that it was not lived in and, therefore, exempt, some, with the connivance of local officials, claimed to be too poor to be liable, and others simply resorted to force, refusing assessors the right to entry and threatening them “at the Peril of their lives if they attempted it”.

Just as blocking up chimneys was seen as a legitimate way to reduce the impact of the Hearth Tax in the 17th century, so blocking up windows became an accepted practice, one so rife that it was described in a 1747 report to Parliament entitled “relating to the Difficulties and Obstructions which have attended the Collection of the Duties on Houses, Windows, and Lights as “the greatest Prejudice to this Revenue”.

Initially, windows were blocked on a temporary basis, “done only”, the report noted, “with Bricks or Boards, which may be removed at Pleasure, or with Mud, Cow-dung, Mortar, and Reeds, on the Outside, which are soon washed off with a Shower of Rain, or with Paper or Plasterboard on the Inside”. As soon as the assessor left the area, the temporary boarding was removed, leaving the resident free to enjoy the light from the window without having paid any tax for the pleasure.

Over time, with the government exacting fines on anyone reopening an unassessed blocked-up window and the development of a more professional and centralized tax collection system, windows were blocked off permanently with bricks, creating blind or dummy windows. New builds were designed with just enough windows to meet the minimum tax thresholds of nine, fourteen, or nineteen. Alternatively, as a group of windows separated by twelve inches or less was counted as one window, some buildings were built with long rows of adjacent windows.

When William Pitt tripled the rate of the window tax in 1797 in response to the need to raise revenues to counter the Napoleonic threat, thousands of windows were bricked or boarded up overnight. The President of the Society of Carpenters told Parliament that almost every homeowner in London’s Compton Street had contacted him to reduce the number of windows in their property as a matter of urgency.

Two statistics graphically show the extent of window blocking. By 1726 the amount of revenue raised by the tax was around £100,000 less than it had been between 1703 and 1709. In 1851, despite the exponential growth of the population and the impact of the Industrial Revolution, glass production was at the same level as it was in 1810.

As an independent country in 1696, Scotland was spared the window tax until William Pitt brought extended its reach in 1784. In response, the Scots became enthusiastic window blockers, many buildings bearing the tell-tale signs of frames infilled with bricks, which came to be known as “Pitt’s pictures”.

During the 19th century there was a growing recognition that damp, overcrowded, and unlit housing was injurious to public health. Charles Dickens weighed in to help the campaign to abolish the tax, telling Parliament in 1850 that “we are obliged to pay for what nature lavishly supplies to us all, at so much per window per year; and the poor who cannot afford the expense are stinted in two of the most urgent necessities of life”.

The campaign was so successful that the tax was abolished on July 24, 1851, a move marked by a cartoon in Punch magazine in which a family welcome the arrival of a smiling sun through their new window. Pitt’s pictures can still be seen, a reminder of a tax that really was daylight robbery.

A Bullet For Rhino

A review of A Bullet for Rhino by Clifford Witting – 240615

I was reading A Bullet for Rhino, originally published in 1950 and reissued by Galileo Publishers, while I was pondering whether to accept an invitation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my matriculation at college. Did I really want to spend an evening in a hall, albeit a splendid one, with a load of senescent men? Any sense of foreboding I might have had was reinforced by Witting’s rather patchy novel.

The Old Mereworthians’ Association are gathering for the school’s Old Boys’ Day, among whose members are Inspector Charlton, Witting’s series detective, and a larger than life character, Colonel Bernard “Rhino” Garstang. Garstang has had an exemplary military career, picking up the VC, MC, and DSO, but is also a dipsomanic, armed, rude, and brusque, and in his career in foreign parts has got himself into scrapes and cultivated enemies.

The first half of the book is spent introducing a range of characters and exploring the relationship between some of them and Garstang. The Charltons are staying with Sir James Hollander whose eldest son, Gordon, is in love with Garstang’s daughter, Diana. Garstang wants his daughter to return with him to Nigeria. Diana is keen but her mother, Muriel, Garstang’s estranged wife, is reluctant to see her go. If she goes, Gordon decides he will go, to the horror of his father who believes that his health will not stand the tropics. Meanwhile, Hollander’s daughter is consorting with Mark Longdon, a character known to Charlton for professional reasons, and about whom Garstang knows some dirt and a couple of shady characters seem more than a little interested in the Colonel’s whereabouts.

Witting shows a distinct reluctance to kill off his principal character, preferring to meander along showing all the facets of his monstrous personality and how others react to him. He also spends time describing domestic scenes chez Hollander that together with a lengthy account of the annual cricket match between the School XI and the Old Boys show the deep bond between Sir James and his youngest son, David, a relationship that could have been tested to the limits as the story reaches its conclusion.

Eventually, about two-thirds into the book, a tanked up Longdon and an equally inebriated Rhino have a tussle, a gun goes off and Garstang is shot dead between the eyes. Amusingly, his Special Branch guard, DC Briggs, is late on the scene after answering a call of nature.

Charlton is more than a little anxious to keep out of the formal investigations, preferring to enjoy his weekend off and leave matters in the hands of the local police headed up by the local Chief Inspector, Prout, and the rather mannered Special Branch officer, Inspector Le Maire. However, he is in possession of some important evidence that is suggestive of another gun and uses Briggs as his means of imparting the information. That the police choose to draw the wrong conclusions from the new facts that emerge, aided by an unfortunate and unnecessary suicide, reinforces Charlton’s decision to put friendship ahead of duty.

Witting has chosen to write a murder mystery while stripping out all the mystery to the murder. Key bits of information are telegraphed in the story and the timeline keeps going back and forth so that even the most inattentive reader cannot fail to grasp the importance of what has just been imparted, a consequence, perhaps, of having too many characters and too many sleuths involved. Nevertheless, there is much to be enjoyed in the book and Witting imbues it with his usual humour and there some delightful observations and turns of phrase.

It has convinced me to join the reunion. After all, there might be a Rhino amongst our ranks!  

KWV Cruxland Gin

As a fan of unusual gin bottles my eye was drawn to a bottle of KWV Cruxland Gin sitting on the shelves of the spiritual headquarters of Drinkfinder UK, Constantine Stores, and in particular a leather hood enclosing the neck looking very much like a hood used on men’s appendages in the more racy clips to found in dubious parts of the internet. Apparently, it is supposed to represent the cracked Kalahari and the N’abba hunters who hunt for the signature botanical of the spirit, Kalahari Truffles. If true, something has got lost in translation or it might be a case of what is obvious in one culture is just plainly baffling in another.

Cruxland Gin is a celebration of South African botanicals, mixing staples such as juniper, cardamom, coriander, lemon, almond, and aniseed with exotica such as rooibos, whose leaves are used to make tea, honeybush, a caffeine-free, anti-oxidant filled botanical also used to make tea, and Kalahari Truffles. The latter is rare and considered to be the treasure of the Kalahari, sought out by the N’abba hunters who are skilled at finding them in the cracks of the parched earth, swollen by the infrequent rains. The bottle suggests that the botanicals are double distilled and that the truffles, which I have never knowingly had, are infused.  

The base spirit is grape, never a favourite of mine as it gives the spirit a certain astringency which the botanicals have to fight hard to overcome and, in truth, it does give the gin a bit of a bitter initial taste. On the nose the juniper is reassuringly prominent with a balance of citric and floral tones. The spirit, which has an ABV of 43%, is clear in the glass and once the shock of the bitterness has dissipated, it is quite spicy with earthy notes and then opening up to sweeter, tea-like sensations. In style it is more a contemporary take of a London Dry and once the palate settles down it is one that reveals an interesting complexity. I am not sure what I was expecting but I failed to detect much in the way of truffle, perhaps being too rare to waste in a gin. While not one of my favourites, although it is growing on me.

The gin is distilled by KWV in Paarl in South Africa, who were established in 1918, and are one of the country’s leading wine and spirits producer. Their site covers nearly 32 hectares, at the heart of which stands KWV’s imposing Cathedral Cellar, built in 1930.

Aside from the sex aid covering the neck, leading up to a screwcap, the bottle is distinctive. Squat, made from brown glass, looking rather more like a brandy bottle than one containing gin, it deploys textured paper for the labelling to good effect. To the left of the front label are illustrations of the botanicals used, the centre has a little about the gin, and the right has some information about the gin. The rear label gives some information about the truffles and the ABV. It is an unusual gin, for sure.

Until the next time, cheers!

Three Quick And Five Dead

A review of Three Quick and Five Dead by Gladys Mitchell – 240614

For anyone who has doggedly followed Gladys Mitchell’s long-running Mrs Bradley series in chronological order, this, the forty-first, originally published in 1968, comes as a bit of a shock. It is an accessible murder mystery, at least by her standards, and the plot follows a linear progression to a logical outcome. Nevertheless, it is a complex mystery with deeply disturbing overtones.

The body count is high – there are five murders plus, as an added extra, another more historic death which after a disinterment turns out to be murder too and is the one that convicts the murderer. Interestingly, the book does not end with the reveal of the culprit’s identity but follows on, briefly, to the trial, where a guilty verdict is reached, despite the evidence being far conclusive, and the head juror’s admission that the verdict was passed because they were convinced that the defendant had killed the first of the five women, Karen Schumann. As a vet he considered that the reaction of Laura Gavin’s new dog, Fergus, to a dog whistle was conclusive, a variation of Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark, reinforcing the suspicions of Dame Beatrice as Mrs Bradley is now known. It is a clever touch.

Each of the five victims are garroted and then finished off with manual strangulation, each has a note pinned on their body bearing the legend “In Memoriam”, followed by a number that seems to be random, each has a connection with a certain school or the Schumanns. Each of the victims have a connection with a foreign country; Karen was of German parentage, Maria Marchado Spanish, the third an Italian maid, the fourth a French language teacher who had links with the French Resistance, and an Irish nanny.

Despite a string of similarities emerging after the first three murders, there is not enough to go on for the local police headed by Superintendent Phillips and the Yard in the form of Maisry and very occasionally Laura’s husband, Gavin, to prevent the fourth and fifth murders.

Mitchell does not hide the fact that there are really only three suspects. The first is Mrs Schumann, a dog breeder, the inheritor of her husband’s library of rare Christian tracts and histories, the mother of the first victim, Karen, and the landlady of the second victim, Maria Machrado. Then there is her hot-headed son, Oscar, a sailor and boyfriend of Maria Marchado. The third is a school teacher, an earnest man studying for a Doctor of Divinity, who uses the Schumann library and is engaged to Karen. One of the suspects, by dint of their occupation, is quickly discounted and we are left with which of the two committed the murders or whether they were working in tandem and why.

The numbers attached to the bodies are significant and a homophonic mistake over Aryan and Arion puts Dame Beatrice on the trail of early Christian heretics and allows her to work out why the heritage of the victims was significant. Although she has no firm evidence, her theory brings her to the identity of the murderer and she, with the assistance of her chauffeur, George, effects the arrest.

The rather irksome Laura Gavin, Mrs Bradley’s secretary, does much of the leg work in the private investigations while Dame Beatrice directs operations, although she is never afraid to get her hands dirty when the occasion demands.

The use of the Christian heretical tradition is a typical Mitchellism which illuminates a tale of developing psychopathic behaviour. The motivation behind the murders might make the reader wonder whether it was all worth while and while, strangely, I missed the eccentricity that permeated many of Mitchell’s books, I found it an enjoyable read, and one, even if it is somewhat atypical, anyone wanting to sample Mitchell’s work should seriously consider reading.

Tree Of The Week (2)

While vandals destroy trees standing in splendid isolation in the UK, in New Zealand they shower them with accolades.

The New Zealand Arboricultural Association recently revealed that the winner of their third Tree of the Year competition with 42% of the votes cast is a 32-metre tall northern Rātā (Metrosideros robusta) which grows near Karamea, on the west coast of the country’s South Island. It is an impressive sight, its structure earning it the moniker of “The Walking Tree” and resembles Tolkien’s Ents.

The Rātā is one of New Zealand’s tallest flowering trees and begins life as an epiphyte, attached to another tree. Eventually its roots reach the ground and it envelops its host. Apparently they can live for 1,000 years and “The Walking Tree” has been in situ since at least 1875.

Let’s hope some English tourists don’t find it.

The Glimpses Of The Moon

A review of The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin – 240612

Originally published in 1977, a year before his death, The Glimpses of the Moon is the ninth and last in Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen series and appeared twenty-six years after his previous Fen novel, The Long Divorce. It is a long, sprawling, Rabelaisian sort of novel that gives the impression that the author had lots of material that he was desperate to use come what may. It is also extremely funny and somewhere hidden inside is a murder mystery of sorts.

There are three murders, the details of the first of which we are drip fed until Fen is intrigued enough to read the newspaper accounts of the slaying of Routh eight weeks earlier. It is a gruesome killing with the head severed and limbs amputated. The police have held a man called Hagberd, who objected to Routh’s bouts of animal cruelty but the consensus of the locals is that he is innocent. Then there is the murder of Mavis Trent and then the discovery of a one-armed headless body in a marquee at the village fete. Add in a larger than life Amazonian called Ortrud Youings, a brother who miraculously arrives out of nowhere, and a peculiar spot of blackmail where the victim of one blackmail plot blackmails another and you have the bare bones of the plot.

Fen is more of an observer than an active sleuth, but he does give a tip off to Inspector Widger, albeit off-stage, that enables him to solve the conundrum of how a severed arm could have been taken out of the marquee unobserved. The answer, of course, lays bare a fundamental misconception, what Fen calls the Chesterton Effect. While the murderers are unmasked, you quickly get the sense as you immerse into Crispin’s world that they are purely incidental and that you should revel in the madness that his fertile imagination conjures up.    

There are so many wonderful images and episodes. In 1991 when I was in Valparaiso I got into conversation with an old man in my pidgin Spanish who was guarding a bulging plastic bag which he told me contained a sheep’s head he was going to boil up. If I had read this book then I might have wondered whether it was really the head of a murder victim which Fen had mistakenly picked up and carried around all day, thinking it was a pig’s head thoughtfully provided by Mrs Clotworthy to make brawn. It later suffered the indignity of adopting the role of a rugby ball as the two investigating officers threw it around as they struggled to get round a car blocking their way.

One of the minor themes of the book is the desecration of the countryside with the erection of a profusion of electric pylons, progress at the expense of beauty, a dubious trade-off. There is an ominous looking pylon known locally as the Pisser which hisses and spits in an alarming fashion and, predictably, wreaks destruction. There is a sense running through the book that country folk are unremittingly odd and eccentric and the portrayal of the women characters, either old and batty or young and sex-mad, is hardly the stuff of political correctness. But this is a riot of humour rather than a serious tome to be pored over with critical scrutiny and laced with a range of vocabulary that will challenge even the most ardent cruciverbalist. I particularly enjoyed his use of ergophobe, a word I shall endeavour to use at every opportunity.

Crispin introduces a wickedly funny self-referential element to the book. The Major asks Fen, while both are up a tree watching the mayhem unfold underneath as huntsmen, saboteurs and police meet, whether he has solved the crime and expresses surprise as they are reaching the end of the book. Later Fen tells the journalist, Padmore, that there is no money to be made in chronicling his, Fen’s, exploits as Crispin has discovered.

This is a marvellous tour de force and Crispin certainly goes out with a bang.

Daylight Robbery

With the nation deciding its next government today and taxation forming part of the parties’ battleground, it is timely to turn the spotlight on a that gave rise to the phrase “daylight robbery” and whose effects can be seen on British buildings to this day, even though it was abolished over 170 years ago.

During the 17th century the intrinsic value of the silver and gold in British coinage was greater than the nominal value of the coin itself, encouraging many to engage in coin clipping, slicing off slithers of coinage to melt down and make counterfeit coins. Despite being a treasonable offence punishable by death, the practice was so rife that according to Lord Macauley, at its peak, only one coin in every two thousand was genuine, destabilizing confidence in the British currency and losing valuable income for the Treasury.

In 1696 William III embarked upon an ambitious programme, known as the Great Recoinage, of issuing £7 million of new coinage and withdrawing the debased coins from circulation. Appointed as Warden of the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton improved the efficiency of the Mint by increasing the number of smelting furnaces and using rolling mills powered by horses. Despite the success of the scheme, there were areas of the country where old coinage was still in circulation, enabling coin clipping gangs to operate well into the 18th century. The exploits of one such, the Cragg Valley Coiners, were recently the subject of a TV adaptation of Ben Myers’ novel, The Gallows Pole (2017)

As well as the Great Recoinage, 1696 saw the passing of the “Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money”, which introduced a tax on windows. In an age when delving into the particulars of a person’s wealth was deemed to be an affront to their liberty, the authorities used visible and tangible assets as the basis of taxation. Given the expense of glass and the difficulty in producing large panes, the number of glazed windows was seen as an indicator of relative wealth.

Levied on occupiers rather than owners, there were two elements to the tax, a flat-rate of two shillings and then an additional charge dependent upon the number of windows. Properties with between ten and twenty windows were charged an additional four shillings and eight shillings was levied on those with more than twenty.

Over the next century the basis for calculating the tax was altered, a top rate of 20 shillings introduced in 1709 for buildings with thirty or more windows and in 1747 the flat-rate was abolished in favour of a variable rate based on the value of the property, a concept that still remains today with Council Tax. Each window on properties with ten or more windows was charged at 6d a window, rising to 9d a window for those with between fifteen and nineteen windows, and one shilling a window for twenty or more. The top rate was increased to three shillings a window in 1758 and in 1766 the threshold for the charge on individual windows was reduced to seven.

All industrial and retail buildings, cottages occupied by those who were too poor to pay poor or church rates, and “service and business premises attached to dwellings” were exempt as were windows to rooms which were not lived in, such as diaries, cheese rooms, and milkhouses. Occupiers often carved the purpose of the room on the lintel of the window to aid identification.

End Of Chapter

A review of End of Chapter by Nicholas Blake – 240608

Nicholas Blake, the alter ego of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, is one of my favourite crime fiction but by his exalted standards End of Chapter, the twelfth in his Nigel Strangeways series and originally published in 1957, is rather disappointing. Part of the trouble for me is that the plot revolves around a rather recherché incident which I found hard to get excited about.

Wenham & Geraldine is an old established publishing firm and is about to bring out a volume of reminiscences by General Thoresby. There are a couple of passages, one at the end of a chapter, which the partners have asked to be deleted and with much reluctance the General has agreed. However, at some point between the final proof and the print run the libelous passages have been reinstated. Nigel Strangeways has been called in to investigate and protect the firm’s reputation.

There are a number of suspects, the General himself although he is quickly ruled out, Stephen Protheroe, a poet, he firm’s reader and the last person known to have handled the manuscript before it went to the printers, Mr Bates, the Production Manager who has rather brusquely been sent into early retirement, Millicent Miles, a romantic novelist who has installed herself in the company’s offices in an attempt to revive her career with her own autobiography, or Bruce Ryle, the circulation manager. Could it even have been one of the partners, but why would they want to sabotage their own firm?

As Strangeways begins his investigations, he soon discovers the tensions running through the firm, particularly the strained relationship between Protheroe and Millicent Miles, leading him to dig deeper into their past. Matters are spiced up when Millicent is found in the office on the Monday morning with her throat cut. The murder must have happened around leaving time on Friday evening.

Blake shows his inventiveness by describing the murder from the murderer’s point of view, not only introducing an unusual and fascinating perspective to the crime but also providing the reader with a mental checklist of how accurately Strangeways reconstructs the crime and the pointers and clues he uses to get there. For me this was the highlight of the book and, once more, text is substituted from the end of a chapter.

The book also revolves around two lost sons, one who was killed in tragic circumstances and the other, Cyprian Gleed, very much alive but a ne’er do well who drifts through life trying to sponge off his mother, Millicent Miles. The sons provide much of the motivational backdrop to the crime.

Millicent is depicted as femme fatale, with a viciously streak who enjoy provoking Protheroe and has Ryle under her spell. As Strangeways suspects, there is a tangled web of connections between her and Protheroe but there is also a dark and unpleasant secret linking Millicent with one of the partners, which explains their tolerance of her presence in the office.

Using a reconstruction of the murder, with his flame, Clare Massinger playing the role of the victim, Strangeways teases out the murderer who evades justice only to make an appointment with an oncoming steam train.

The story seemed rather too bitty for me and there were a number of loose ends, not least why Gleed try to kill Strangeways. The moral is never to leave your sinus spray lying around. As a poet, though, Blake is attuned to power of the Muse, its cathartic properties in times of stress and despair and its ability to suck out every ounce of creativity until there is nothing left. His psychological perspective on the fate of the poet is acute. There are some really fine passages in the book but the plot itself did not really engage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, P D James rewrote the book as Original Sin (1994), using the same setting, murder, and motive. I will; look that up sometime.