Martin Fone's Blog, page 6

Court Case Of The Week (2)

In 2017 a man in the small town of Bragado, about 200 kilometres from Beunos Aires, was pottering about in the garden of his property. It has a wall some 6.5 feet tall and the unnamed man presumably felt that he was not bothering anyone if he wandered around in his birthday suit. Unfortunately for him, this was the precise moment when a Google Street View car passed through the town and took an image of the man’s property complete with him as nature intended him.

Although the man’s face was not shown and all that was on display was his derriere, the very clear street address in the captures made him the laughing stock of the town. Sick of putting up with the mockery, the man took Google to court for violating his privacy.

Initially, the case was rejected, the court taking the view that he only had himself to blame for “walking around in inappropriate conditions in the garden of his home.” Google claimed that the perimeter wall was not high enough.

The man decided to appeal and found more sympathy from the judges who concluded the man’s dignity had been flagrantly violated, and awarded him an amount in Argentine pesos equivalent to about $12,500, payable by Google. “This involves an image of a person that was not captured in a public space but within the confines of their home, behind a fence taller than the average-sized person. The invasion of privacy … is blatant,” they wrote.

The judges said “there is no doubt that in this case there was an arbitrary intrusion into another’s life.”, finding that there was “no justification for (Google) to evade responsibility for this serious error that involved an intrusion into the plaintiff’s house, within his private domain, undermining his dignity. “No one wants to appear exposed to the world as the day they were born”, pointing to Google’s policy of blurring the faces and license plates of people and vehicles photographed for Street View as evidence it was aware of a duty to avoid harm to third parties.

But in this case, “it was not his face that was visible but his entire naked body, an image that should also have been prevented.”

Hear, hear!

Death Of A Heavenly Twin

A review of Death of a Heavenly Twin by Anne Morice – 250719

Morice’s skill is to write engaging crime fiction with the lightest of touch, producing a storyline which involves no little ingenuity but is leavened with some wit and sharp observations. Although I did not find this, the sixth in her Tessa Crichton series, originally published in 1974 and reissued by Dean Street Press, as wry as some of her earlier books, it certainly made for a pleasant few hours and whilst I had my suspicions, I was not entirely certain whodunit until near the end.

A village gala in the grounds of a local bigwig, in this case business tycoon and ambitious would-be politician who is not averse to taking risks and with an eye for detail, Sir Magnus Benson-Jones, is a familiar enough scene in murder mysteries, allowing the writer to assemble a multitude of people together in one place. Tessa Crichton, an actress of some fame, has been invited to open the event which is raising money on behalf of a local conservation society. Of course, Tessa is a magnet for murder most foul and during her short visit there is not one murder but two.

Living with Sir Magnus are two twin daughters, Sarah, beautiful, organized, efficient, and a capable manager of her father, and Julie, who has a physical deformity and very much plays second fiddle. It is Sarah who is found dead at the back of a tent where she had been reading fortunes and while there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that Henry Ngali Mbwala was the culprit – he was seen coming out of the tent shortly after the murder was committed, a dart bearing his fingerprints was found near the body, his burnt overalls were later found in a pottery kiln, and he stands out in a community where racial tensions are brewing – the sleuthing instincts in Tessa tell her otherwise.

There is quite a contemporary feel about the story with politicians who strike a public pose while working behind the scenes to achieve the opposite and wearing their dubiously gained battle scars for great effect. Lurking in the background is the racist Clean Up Britain Crusade who seemingly lob a brick at Sir Magnus and injuring him – the image of a politician ostentatiously wearing a plaster and padding brought a smile to my face – and then affixing a note to the golf club that did for the second victim, Barbara “Babs” Graham, someone who paid for knowing too much with her life.

It is a tale involving a reckless motor cyclist and individuals behaving out of character, dark family secrets and a sense of betrayal and a denouement which sees Tessa in some mortal peril, only to be saved by someone whose character and role in the story she had completely misjudged. Indeed, her normally reliable judgment of character is somewhat out of kilter in this story as she also misjudges the character and motivation of her fellow actor, Christopher “Kit” Cosby. Her cousin, Toby Crichton, and her husband, Toby Price, a rising star of the Yard, make appearances but the thrust of the investigation and the determination to prevent an egregious miscarriage of justice is with our narrator.

An enjoyable short read with enough in it to provoke some thought without disturbing the pleasant sensation that a tasty hors d’oeuvre brings.

More Computer Viruses

With the advent of the 21st century came more seemingly efficient means of transmitting software and data between users than the soon to be obsolete magnetic tapes and floppy disks. The introduction of reliable and speedy broadband networks were certainly a boon to users but also offered a new route for the malicious to introduce viruses and to do it more quickly and impacting a wider audience. New generations of viruses, worms, and Trojans emerged, known collectively as malware.

One of the most serious of the new generation of viruses was the LoveLetter which appeared on May 4, 2000. It came in the form of an email but with a VBS file attachment rather than a Word document. In those more innocent days people were less wary of unsolicited emails and once the VBS file was opened, Onel de Guzman’s worm would overwrite existing files and replace them with copies of itself, which were then used to spread the worm to all the victim’s email contacts. As each of these received an email from someone they knew, they were more likely to open the file and set the process off again.

A different form of worm was used for the Code Red, a file-less worm which existed only in the machine’s memory and made no attempt to infect or corrupt data files. Exploiting a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information Server, the worm manipulated the protocols that allow computers to communicate, wreaking havoc and spreading globally very quickly. It was used to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the White House’s website in the US.

The emergence of Heartbleed in 2014 put servers across the internet at risk by exploiting a vulnerability in OpenSSL, a cryptographic library used by companies worldwide. Periodically, OpenSSL sent out “heartbeats” to ensure that the designated secure endpoints were still connected. Users could send OpenSSL a certain amount of data and request the same amount of data back. If they claimed to be sending the maximum allowed, 64 kilobytes of data, but only sent one byte, OpenSSL would still send the last 64 kilobytes of data in RAM. This often meant that user names, passwords and other sensitive data were compromised.

And the future? What is certain is that malware will get increasingly more sophisticated, difficult to detect and eradicate. Security software is always likely to be a step or two behind the more ingenious and law enforcement agencies several light years away, especially given the global reach of cybercrime and the territorially limited jurisdictions. Perhaps the only advice is to exercise extreme vigilance and if it comes out of the blue, it is probably not for you.

Stay safe. 

Death Of Mr Gantley

A review of Death of Mr Gantley by Miles Burton – 250717

Cecil Street was a prolific English author who knocked out four books a year for thirty-seven years under the pseudonyms of John Rhode, Miles Burton, and Cecil Waye. The standard of the books of such a prolific author can be variable but this, the fourth in Burton’s Desmond Merrion series, originally published in 1932 and once phenomenally rare and expensive until a cheap Kindle edition emerged, is really rather good.

It is a story of two wills and two deaths, both close together, and the precise timing of each death will decide whether the fortunes will go to the Chadwicks if Mr Gantley predeceases his sister-in-law, Lady Gantley, or the Harringtons if the old lady dies first. Lady Gantley dies on the Saturday evening from shock after a chimney fell down while Mr Gantley, a newspaper owner, looks to have been shot on the Sunday evening, while driving home from a weekend on his houseboat. He had unusually stopped off at the local pub to scrounge some petrol, which, incidentally, he did not need, shortly before the incident, thereby establishing in front of witnesses that he was still alive.

One of the habitues of the pub, Fred Trimble, who had cause to resent Gantley, lay in wait for Gantley and threw a stone at the car which shattered the windscreen and caused the vehicle to go into a ditch. When he went to look at what had happened, Trimble swears that a shot was fired at him from the car and he fled the scene, so scared was he that he stowed himself away on a ship bound for Canada. There was a strange line of ash in the car and bicycle tracks and footprints which added to the puzzle of how and when Gantley was killed and then by whom.

Indeed, the how is the main focus of the investigation, at least from the perspective of the local inspector, Driffield, and Arnold of the Yard, as they are convinced that Gantley died on the spot where he was found at the time that the circumstantial evidence suggests. That being the case the only culprit could be Charles Harrington, pressed by debtors, and with his sister the beneficiary of the estate.

Desmond Merrion, though, whom Arnold meets by chance on a railway station and sportingly invites him to bring his expertise to bear on the case, begs to differ and is much more interested in Gantley’s weekend away on his houseboat at Benger’s Creek. Of course, Merrion is right and he is able to demonstrate a rather ingenious plan to mask the timing of Gantley’s death in a way that puts the blame on others and diverts suspicion away from the real culprit. Once the modus operandi is established, there can only be one killer, the irony being that the timing of another death adds an unwarranted and unplanned complication.

While the murder plan is undoubtedly ingenious, there are enough clues for the seasoned reader of the genre to have a pretty good stab of how it was pulled off and the significance of both Gantley’s muffler, his voice a tad gruffer than usual, and the line of ash in his car. There are a couple of major red herrings, the role of Trimble and the emergence of Sir Arthur Urmery, the rather slippery and corrupt head of a consortium negotiating the sale of the Clarion to Gantley, which once disposed of only add credence to Merrion’s theory of what really happened.

With three detectives working on the case, there was no unnecessary rivalry or attempts to do each other down. They all worked in unison towards a common goal, although I did enjoy Merrion scorching Driffield’s carpet and airily putt the expense of replacing it to the ratepayers!       

It is a good piece of old-fashioned entertainment with an ingenious puzzle that taxes the brains of the Yard’s finest to resolve. The key takeaways are that timing is everything and that circumstantial evidence often masks the truth.

Another Taste Of Vanilla

The accidental discovery by a slave boy, Edmond, of an artificial method to pollinate flowers of the vanilla orchid not only broke the Spanish monopoly on the spice but enabled the remote Indian Ocean island of Réunion to become the global leader in its production. Between 1860 and 1890 the island had tripled its vanilla production but with success came problems.

The increased levels of production stoked an increase in demand, exacerbated by the opening up of a huge new market, the United States, whose citizens quickly took to vanilla-based soft drinks such as Coca-Cola, introduced in 1886, and ice-cream cones, invented in New York in1896, which led to land and labour costs rising. To meet the demand the Réunion vanilla producers looked to the nearby French colony of Madagascar as an alternative site for growing their crops.

Vanilla vines took to the humid north-east coast of the island like ducks to water and it was not long before Madagascar to surpass Réunion as the world’s centre of vanilla production, a position it has held since the early 20th century. Today, some 80% of the world’s vanilla is grown there, although most of the products that we consume claiming to have the flavour of vanilla use a laboratory-made artificial flavouring, vanillin, based on vanilla’s main flavour component, first identified in 1858 by the French scientist, Nicolas-Théodore Gobley.

As for Edmond, shortly after his discovery he was paraded around the island by his master, offering demonstrations of his pollination techniques. There are several streets and schools that bear his name to this day and in Sainte-Suzanne, where he grew up, there are two memorials commemorating his contribution to botanical history. Nothing remains of the original plantation, nothing survives save a rudimentary monument by the roadside.

However, Edmond’s personal story was the stuff of tragedy. He never benefited financially from his discovery and although emancipated at the age of nineteen and taking the name of Edmond Albius, he struggled to find employment, finally working in the home of a navy captain for fifteen francs a month and ten pints of rice a week. On August 19, 1851 he was arrested, confessing to stealing “a pair of silver bracelets out of a Chinese casket, a small wallet and a silver chain” from his employer and was sentenced to five years’ hard labour and ordered to pay the costs of the trial.

Bellier-Beaumont did plead for clemency on Edmond’s behalf, pointing out that “the country is indebted to him for a new branch of industry”, but only succeeded in having the sentence reduced to three years.

After his release, Edmond moved back to Sainte-Suzanne drifting in and out of jobs, turning his hand at agriculture, although never with vanilla, working as a stonemason and a cook. In 1871 he married, although within five years he was widowed, and died alone in 1880 at the age of fifty-one. The main Réunion newspaper did mark his death, noting in a perfunctory obituary that “the very man who, at great profit to this colony, discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers has died in the public hospital at Sainte-Suzanne. It was a destitute and miserable end”.

Next time you taste vanilla, whether real or artificial, remember Edmond.

Murder Isn’t Cricket

A review of Murder Isn’t Cricket by Edwin and Mona Radford – 250716

Breathing your last while seated in a deckchair on the boundary watching a fiercely contested game of village cricket is a quintessentially English way to make your maker, although being shot is hardly within the laws of the game. That someone had managed to kill their victim unnoticed while there was a crowd of a thousand or so engrossed in the vicissitudes of the match, the body only being noticed once they had dispersed, sets Dr Harry Manson of the Yard an intriguing puzzle in this the fourth in Edwin and Mona Radford’s series, originally published in 1946 and reissued by Dean Street Press.

The Radford’s sleuth is very much in the Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke mould, a clever forensic scientist who is a master of the latest techniques and always eager to show off his skills to confound and amaze his less able colleagues. The problem with this type of sleuth is that the science and the methodology rules supreme over the more human elements of the story and the reader is “treated” to a detailed exposition of the how an experiment is conducted and the results, not least in the determination in the angle and direction of the shot and the interpretation of finger prints, where a brief overview would suffice in order to get the story moving. These sections are not as dry as Freeman Wills Crofts at his worst, but, in my estimation, do pall.

That said, there is more than a little humour running through the story, especially during the inquest, and the Radfords have some fun in describing the impact on village life of a cricket match and the importance of the result for some whose obsession for the game borders on fanaticism. Another interesting feature of the story is that it is set up as a challenge to the reader to join, if not beat, Manson in cracking the case with the authors breaking in from time to time with notes to the effect that some important clues had been revealed in the preceding chapter and asking whether the reader had spotted them.

There are passages in the book where the authors have been infected by purple prose, not least when they describe the glories of the English countryside. “Nowhere in the world was the countryside more pleasant than in England in the summer months, with its cool, green grass and rippling streams, its vari-green trees reaching up to the dome of heaven…of all England, nowhere is more lovely than a Surrey lane”. Perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with all its attendant horrors, it was timely to remind the reader of the best of this country.

Despite this Anglocentric vein, the story itself as a more global perspective. The victim is identified as  Eliseus Leland, a retired detective from Melbourne in Australia on holiday in England, who according to some notes in his diary, had spotted SF when in Thames Pagnall, presumably during a game of cricket on the green, and had resolved to return the following Saturday, as he did only to be murdered. SF is revealed to be Snowy Freud, a notorious drug peddler. A fire in a Wapping warehouse and the death from a drug overdose of a young woman in a West London flat and the judicious use of radio messages back and forth to Australia enables Mason to piece together a bigger picture, foiling a drug smuggling operation as well as catching Leland’s killer.        

For all the intricacies of the story, there were too few credible suspects for the resolution to be a surprise, but the book did have its moments, more of a stodgy County Championship match with a couple of star performances than a rip roaring edge of the seat Twenty20 game.

Rat Of The Week (2)

A pest controller removed an enormous dead rat from a property in Normanby in North Yorkshire recently. It was twenty-two inches long, longer than five tins of baked beans positioned lengthwise or the average cat without a tail, even larger than the 21-inch Dorset mega rat discovered in 2018.

Big and certainly unwelcome in any home as it is, the Normanby rat is a pale shadow of the Timor giant rat, Corophomys musseri, fossil evidence of which has been found in the Indonesian island. As an adult it weighed about six kilograms and was the size of a small dog. It became extinct some two to one thousand years ago, mainly because of human activity, clearing forest to make way for farm land and being eaten as a delicacy.

Rats, though, are becoming an increasingly major problem globally. A study published in Science Advances in January 2025 showed that rising temperatures and population have led to significant increases in rat numbers in eleven global cities. Numbers have increased by 390% in Washington DC, 300% in San Francisco, and 186% in Toronto. Britain is experiencing the same conditions which allow rats to thrive elsewhere, warmer temperatures, and increasing urban populations creating more waste, and they are becoming an increasing nuisance.

Rats, the study reported, damage infrastructure, consume agricultural produce, and contaminate food supplies, causing an estimated US$27 billion in damage annually in the United States alone. They also harbour and transmit to humans more than fifty zoonotic pathogens and parasites to humans. Highly fertile, theoretically capable of conceiving every 25 days, rats are mobile, adaptable and, if necessary, can survive on as little as an ounce of food a day.

It looks as though, unless we adapt a taste for them like our ancestors in East Timor, rats are going to be with us for a long time. After all, we are never more than six feet away from one, so they say. Let us hope, though, that the Normanby whopper is an outlier.

Scotch Egg Of The Week

One of life’s little mysteries is why a scotch egg which has no obvious associations with Scotland is so called and as with many irritating questions, there seems to be no definitive answer. One theory is that it is a reference to the process of scotching which involved the mincing of meat, an important step in making a scotch egg.

Another theory is that the name references the practice in the 19th century of dipping eggs in a lime powder solution to preserve them ahead of shipping. This was also known as scotching and as the eggs were discoloured it is suggested that wrapping them in meat was a way to disguise their appearance. Alternatively, one of the early suppliers of scotch eggs was William J Scott & Sons of Whitby, although the eggs were originally covered in fish paste rather than sausage meat, It is suggested that the name Scotties eventually evolved into Scotch eggs.

Be that as it may the scotch egg is one of my favourite snacks, although even I would have blanched at the whopper knocked up by Phoenix Ross and Oli Paterson in Enfield on June 17th this year (2025). Weighing 7.81 kg and with a circumference of 79.5 centimetres, some 11.5 cm wide and with a wall of sausage meat 6 cm thick, it has been crowned by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest Scotch egg, a record that had been held for twenty years by a creation weighing a puny 6.2 kg.

 The duo succeeded in creating their monster at the second attempt. Using an ostrich egg as the basis, it was hard boiled, the shell becoming so sturdy that they had to use a hammer to crack it, and then it was wrapped in sausage meat, covered in bread crumbs, and then deep fried. The first one fell apart but once the second attempt came out of the fryer, it was weighed and then cut open with a sword, naturally.

After the obligatory photo shots of the duo sinking their teeth into the egg, both are social media foodies, the rest was cut up and made up into burritos for freezing and later consumption.

Well done!

The Case Of The Careless Thief

A review of The Case of the Careless Thief by Christopher Bush – 250713

Any self-respecting professional thief takes a certain pride in their work and would not make the elementary mistakes that Herbert Davitt seemed to have made when stealing jewels to the value of £18,000 belonging to Mrs Mona Dovell from the safe of the Regency Hotel in the seaside town of Sandbeach. Leaving a torch and his fingerprints immediately alerted the suspicions of Ludovic Travers who, acting as an enquiry agent for John Hill’s United Assurance company, was sent to investigate the theft.

In true Bush style what starts out as a trifling incident, albeit potentially costly to the insurance company, spirals into something bigger and more consequential in this the fifty-third novel in the long-running Ludovic Travers series, originally published in 1959 and reissued by Dean Street Press. It rolls Lord Chief Justice Goddard’s aphorism that “the causes of crime today are the same as they were in the days of the Old Testament – greed, love of easy money, jealousy, lust, and cruelty” into one intriguing and compelling tale.   

Although the framework of a Bush story might remain largely unchanged, there are minor but significant changes. George Wharton, Travers’ erstwhile sparring partner at the Yard, has long since retired and his replacement, Jewle, promoted after his success in The Case of the Treble Twist, only appears at the last knockings to wrap the case up. This vacuum leaves Travers and his Broad Street Detective Agency colleagues the space and freedom to act on their own and the usual tension and interaction with the Yard is replaced with the uneasy relationship with the local police, who seem only too eager to pin the robbery on Davitt and resent Travers’ attempts to poke around more deeply into the circumstances of the theft. Oh, and there is no moaning about tax, womken who change their hair colour or burning bodies.

As Travers doggedly pursues his enquiries, the story gets darker. Quarley, a journalist who has been providing useful information, suddenly disappears and is later found seemingly having fallen to his death off a cliff. Then, Sergeant Blayde, one of the local police whose estranged wife is a receptionist at the hotel where the robbery was staged, is shot and killed at close range when investigating a report of suspicious activity at a nearby factory. Travers, having been his guest at the boxing match, was in the car when Blayde was called to investigate.

There also emerges a tangled web of emotions with both Blayde and his superior, Overson, pursuing the same woman who, through injudicious betting, has got herself deep into debt with the local money lender and is desperate to raise the cash to ease her situation. The results are catastrophic for all concerned.

The story has its roots in a true case, the police corruption scandal in Brighton in 1957, where several members of the local Criminal Investigation Department and the Chief Constable were implicated in bribery, protection rackets, and other illegal activities. The case only came to light during investigations into disturbances at a local club, “The Bucket of Blood”, where it was suspected that the owner was bribing the police to overlook licensing violations.  

Bush’s take on all of this is characteristically quirky, building layer upon layer of intrigue and suspicion until the edifice becomes so unsteady it is bound to topple with a resounding crash. The fall out is spectacular and having done all of the legwork Travers leaves it to Jewle to sweep everything up.

Well written, engaging with a nice pace that does not flag, this book takes us into a world far grittier and real than the cosy country house mysteries of the 1930s. Part of Bush’s skill is his ability to keep himself relevant, reflecting the societal changes in the world around him, which, coupled with his ability to construct intriguing puzzles time after time, makes him a fine and enduring writer.

The Computer Virus

It is that moment of dread for all users of computer software, the realization that your device has somehow become infected by some form of computer virus. Even large organisations with, you would imagine, sophisticated firewall and security devices are not immune to the threat and the reputational and financial repercussions can be significant. Think of the recent problems Marks and Spencer had with their online ordering system.

The concept of a virus is almost as old as computing itself. The idea that a “mechanical” organism such as a piece of computer code could damage machines, copy itself, and infect new hosts, just like a biological virus, was first raised in a paper entitled Theory of Self-Producing Automata by the mathematician, John van Neumann, in 1966, developing upon a concept he had floated in a series of lectures in the late 1940s.     

The first actual computer virus is widely acknowledged to have been the Creeper program, developed in 1971 by Bob Thomas of BBN, although it had no malicious intent, simply designed to establish whether a self-replicating program was possible. As each new hard drive was infected, Creeper would try to remove itself from the previous host and simply displayed the message “I’m the Creeper. Catch me if you can!”.

A malicious computer virus first made it appearance with the Rabbit or Wabbit virus, developed in 1974. Once in a computer, it made multiple versions of itself quickly, hence its name, severely impacting the performance of the system and eventually crashing the machine.

A Trojan virus is something which hides in another program and carries out other actions without the user’s permission. In 1975 “animal programs” in which players were invited to guest the animal a user was thinking of by asking up to twenty questions were wildly popular but sharing versions meant creating and sending magnetic tapes to other users. A programmer, John Walker, solved the problem by creating a piece of software, ANIMAL, but included within it another piece of software, PERVADE, which worked behind the scenes to help its host spread from place to place.

Unlike many modern day Trojan viruses, PERVADE and ANIMAL were not intended to harm anyone. Indeed, PERVADE was carefully designed so that it did not delete or damage any files, did not copy itself to places where it was not allowed, and it stopped working if replicating itself could cause harm. For the other users, if that was the cost of gaining easy access to ANIMAL, so be it. However, a dangerous template had been created.

With the advent of personal computers, my first was almost the size of my desk top, new opportunities to introduce viruses presented themselves. Brain, generally considered the first PC virus, began infecting 5.2 inch floppy disks – remember them? – in 1986. The handiwork of Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who running a computer store in Pakistan were tired of customers making illegal copies of their software. Brain replaced the boot sector of a floppy disk with a virus which contained a hidden copyright message, although it did not corrupt any data, making it also the first stealth virus.