Martin Fone's Blog, page 73

The Man In The Dark

A review of The Man in the Dark by John Ferguson – 230904

The only other novel by John Ferguson I had read was Death and Mr Dodsley, a later book than The Man in the Dark, the first in his Francis McNab series and originally published in 1928. McNab is a private investigator hired by a newspaper, The Record, in an attempt to increase circulation by beating the police to solving a crime that would pique its readers interests. He has his work cut out in solving what happened to a prominent public figure, Ponsonby Paget, who as well as being a politician publishes a scandal sheet, the Eye Opener.  

The central conceit of the story opens up some fascinating opportunities for Ferguson. The eponymous man in the dark is Sandy Kinloch, a man who was blinded during the First World War and is now very much down on his luck. After an argument with his friend Dunn, he wanders around the streets of Ealing in a peasouper, with only his stick to guide his way. He is approached by Paget and lured by a welcome £5 note accepts the man’s strange request to return with him to his house and sit in an anteroom rustling papers while Paget meets a guest about whose visit he is apprehensive.

Paget’s concerns are well-founded as his unknown guest murders him and on discovering Kinloch’s presence knocks him out and abducts him. Kinloch’s stick is left behind in the turmoil. The irony, of course, is that as Kinloch is blind, he could not have seen what had gone on nor identify who the murderer was. However, the culprits and the police assume that Kinloch was sighted and that he has information that would be crucial to the case.

A blind person’s other senses are heightened and through his acute sense of hearing Kinloch is able to pick up some vital clues as to who his captors are, there seems to be a woman involved, and where he has been taken and held. This information will prove invaluable. To complicate matters, in an early example of Stockholm syndrome, Kinloch begins to develop feelings for his female captor.  

The twist in the story is that Kinloch’s condition is not permanent and through the good offices of Dunn has an operation which restores his sight. McNab, the only person to realise that Kinloch was blind, after a careful and Holmesian inspection of his stick, is on the track of a blind man when, now, the man who can help him piece together what happened is sighted.

The plot is complex, there are many more nuances and twists than this bald synopsis suggests, and the tone of the book is more of a thriller than a straightforward detective story. Much of the information relating to Paget’s murder is provided in the early chapters and there are enough clues in the text for the reader to detect that the underlying reason for the crime is a desperate attempt to forestall damaging details being printed in The Eye Opener. As to the identity of the culprit, that is a different matter, but that is almost irrelevant as the pace of the book hots up to its dramatic conclusion.

McNab is a solid sleuth, a cut above the police who are all at sea on this case, and with a degree of luck mixed with finely attuned deductive powers, is able to crack the mystery. Chance, a journalist on The Record, plays the part of his Watson and, as is the way with the coincidence strewn genre, was the man that Paget was expecting to sit in the anteroom until he was unavoidably detained. Stylistically, Ferguson has chosen to tell the story through three perspectives, an approach that gives greater depth to the telling of the mystery and works well. His ability to create atmosphere and his overall writing style and choice of vocabulary which is not as clunky as many of those writing in the 1920s, makes this a satisfying read.

I expect to read more of McNab’s exploits.

Vending Machines – A History

Although Heron of Alexandria developed the first vending machine over two millennia ago, the idea was slow to take off. One of the earliest “modern” forms was the honour box, a feature of English taverns from the 17th until at least the 19th century. A form of portable tobacco dispenser made of brass, and designed to be passed around, it had a slot to take a penny coin and a plunger which, once the coin had dropped, opened a tobacco compartment. Unlike Heron’s water dispenser the machine did not release a precise quantity of tobacco, instead relying on the customer’s honour to take only a pipeful and shut the container door before passing it on to the next smoker.

A six-year prison sentence for distributing seditious and blasphemous material, such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794), led bookseller, Richard Carlile, to consider how he could automate the sale of such books. His solution, developed in 1822, was a self-service machine which allowed the purchaser to turn a dial to select the publication they wanted, deposit their money, and the book or journal would drop down in front of them. Whether this was an automated process is unclear, but notwithstanding Carlile’s ingenuity, his wife and employees were still harassed and prosecuted by the authorities.

In 1867 Simeon Denham from Wakefield was granted a patent (No 706) for a “Self-Acting Machine for the Delivery of Postage Receipt Stamps”, the first fully automatic selling device. Once a penny had been inserted into the slot, the machine would cut a postage stamp from a strip held inside and shoot it out to the waiting customer. This rather crude device seems to have promised more than it delivered and was quickly forgotten.

It took another twenty years for automatic vending machines to come into their own, Percival Everitt patenting the first commercially successful one, a postcard dispenser, in 1883. Once the design had been improved two years later, Everitt’s machine soon became a common feature in railway stations and post offices, offering envelopes, notepaper, and stamps for a coin of the realm. Such was the demand for vending machines that the first company specifically to deal with their installation and maintenance, the Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company, was formed in England in 1887.

Around the same time the Railway Automatic Electric Light Syndicate Ltd, founded by Dixon Davies and John Tourtel, patented a coin-operated reading lamp for use on trains. Drawing power from batteries, it offered a traveller thirty minutes of light for a penny. Neither it nor Tourtel’s coin-operated gas meter were a commercial success.

Packaged comestibles began to be dispensed from vending machines in the 1890s, the German chocolate manufacturer, Stollwerck, selling its wares from around 15,000 machines by 1893. They extended their range of goods to include cigarettes, matches, chewing gum, and soap products.

Over in America, Minneapolitan W H Fruen patented his “Automatic Drawing (of liquids) Device in 1884 which dispensed liquid in a manner remarkably like that deployed by Heron almost two millennia earlier. It did not prove a success and America had to wait another four years before the Thomas Adams Gum Company developed the country’s first practical vending machine, selling their Tutti-Frutti chewing gum, sited on a New York subway station platform. After a slow start, they have never looked back.

The practicalities associated with storing and delivering products has naturally limited what vending machines can offer, but within those constraints human ingenuity has triumphed. In the late 19th century, a vending machine in Corinne, Utah, offered legal divorce papers for $2.50 while for the same amount travellers at American airports could buy a life insurance policy covering a one-way trip well into the 1960s.

I wonder what Heron would have made of it all.

Lost Word Of The Day (72)

There are some people who seem to find a perverse pleasure in finding fault with anything and everything they encounter. Laurence Sterne created in A Sentimental Journey through France (1768) a character by the name of Smellfungus who was both hypercritical and hypocritical. It is widely acknowledged that Sterne’s Smellfungus was a satirical attack on Tobias Smollett who had published his Travels through France and Italy two years earlier.

Sterne described his character thus; “The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.”

The name became a pejorative term for someone who is excessively critical. If you are unfortunate enough to come across a pair, both Smelfungi and Smelfungeses seem to have been acceptable formations of the plural. I hope no one disagrees.

Lost Word Of The Day (71)

Bernhard Knipperdolling was a prominent Anabaptist who was involved in establishing the short-lived and ill-fated religious kingdom of Munster in 1534. When the rebellion was crushed, he and the other leaders, Jan van Leyden and Bernhard Kretching, were cruelly tortured to death on January 23, 1536.

Anabaptists advocated that, inter alia, baptism and membership of the Church was only the preserve of adults, a point of view that the Church establishment found heretical. Knipperdolling gave his name to a pejorative term for Anabaptists, but over time it morphed into a term of abuse describing any religious fanatic.

A sense of its use can be gleamed from J G’s The Sage Senator Delineated from 1660. “There starts up another Government”, he wrote, “hatch’d by a Committee of Safety; (of slavery, they meant) who were a rude rabble of Factious, Illiterate, Phanatick, Disloyal Rebels; a knot of Knipperdolings; of the same stamp with that German Botcher, Jack-a-Leyden: the very merdaille and excrementitious offscouring of the Nation”.

The Murder Of Eve

A review of The Murder of Eve by Moray Dalton – 230831

Aficionados of Moray Dalton, the nom de plume of Katherine Dalton Renoir, have grown to expect her to explore the darker or seedier side of human existence and she does not disappoint with The Murder of Eve, a story that does not feature her series detective, High Collier, and was originally published in 1945 and recently reissued by Dean Street Press. A cosy murder mystery it is not and it is barely a murder mystery and much more of a thriller which takes as one of its central themes the white slave trade, a subject more associated with sensationalist penny dreadfuls.

According to Curtis Evans’ informative afterword, “throughout the 1920s and 1930s crime thrillers and more respectable detective stories employed white slavery as a plot device, while true crime magazines ran lurid stories about it”. Early 20th century court cases established that the Camorra, a shady Italian criminal network based around Naples, akin to the Sicilian-based Mafia, were involved in the practice of kidnapping young girls and women and sending them as sexual slaves to South America.

Dalton is a late arrival to the subject, but in her hands, she eschews the sensationalist and crafts a tragedy that is both enthralling and profoundly sad. It is rare for me to be moved by a piece of crime fiction, but I was when I had finished this story. There is no happy ever after, no spring of hope to hold on to. Set primarily in the Italy of 1905 and written as the Second World War drew to a close, it is tempting to wonder whether this lyrical love letter to an idyllic Italy that once was owes its darker side to Dalton’s regret that the two countries found themselves on opposing sides as Italy elected to follow the path to Fascism and that the aspirations espoused by some of her characters that Anglo-Italian friendships would endure forever were so quickly and cruelly dashed at great cost.

The other theme that struck me is of lives wasted, not least that of Roger Fordyce, who willingly went to Italy to track down the whereabouts of a young girl he did not know and perished in the process. It is hard not to think that this is a reflection of all the lives, filled with earnest endeavour to fight the evils of Nazism only to die for a greater cause, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that, and leaving relatives to mourn their loss.

The body count is high and the mission to discover what happened to Anne Gale, the daughter of Roger, who disappeared after finding out about her father’s second marriage and was last heard of going to Sant Andrina to find her mother, the artist and eponymous Eve, only to find she is not there, is a poisoned chalice. Both her parents are murdered during the course of the book, Lily Oram, who lived in the block of flats where Roger’s body was found after allegedly falling down a lift shaft, is drugged, abducted, and rescued from the hands of the slavers, and de Sanctis has to move his family from Rome to Leith to escape the revenge of the Camorra. Only Ronald Guthrie, the British vice-consul, escapes the tragedy unscathed.       

To give Dalton her due, her bloodbath also ensnares the baddies with the mastermind behind the operation suffering a gruesome death, symbolically, if a little loosely, at the hands of his virginal daughter. A sketch by Eve, which gives Roger the clue as to where she might be, is poignantly and wastefully lost as the narrative jumps to 1940 for the story’s epilogue.  

The important takeaway from the story is never be a forgetful correspondent, especially if you have some important news to relate. It saves a lot of trouble in the end.

This is an impressive novel that is thought provoking and work on many levels, as well as being gripping and a page turner. Moray Dalton is an impressive writer, and I am grateful to the team at Dean Street Press for rescuing it from unmerited obscurity.

Another Glass Of Absinthe

Known as “the green fairy” to its adherents and “the wicked green witch” to its detractors, absinthe was not for the faint-hearted. “After the first glass” Wilde wrote, “you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world”. Degas’ drinkers portrayed in L’Absinthe (1876), one of around 130 canvases featuring the drink produced by artists such as Manet, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso, stare vacantly and glumly into the distance.

Associated with fits, convulsions, hallucinations, insanity, and even death, absinthe drinkers were popularly described in Paris as buying a one-way ticket to Charenton, the local lunatic asylum. By the early 20th century around 30 per cent of the adult male population of large swathes of France had been hospitalised with what was known as absinthisme.

In the 1870s an influential French psychiatrist, Valentin Magnan, studied the effects of thujone, a neurotoxin found in wormwood which is hallucinogenic in large quantities and lethal in larger quantities still, by force-feeding pure wormwood oil extract to laboratory animals. He discovered that they went into violent convulsions before dying. This convinced him of the deleterious effects of wormwood on the human body, effects which, he believed, could be passed on to the unborn descendants of absinthe addicts.

By the early 20th century, an unlikely alliance of the emerging temperance movement and winegrowers desperate to regain their market share after the phylloxera disaster seized on Magnan’s findings to pressurise the authorities to rid society of absinthe’s menace. Their cause was helped in 1905 by an allegedly absinthe-addled Swiss farmer, Jean Lanfray, murdering his heavily pregnant wife and two daughters, an outrage that shocked Europe.

The Belgians banned absinthe in 1905, and soon other countries followed suit. The Swiss, after a referendum held on July 5, 1908, specifically wrote absinthe’s prohibition into their constitution, a move that drove production underground. It was banned in America in 1912 and in France by Presidential decree on March 16, 1915, where pastis quickly took its place. The Italians banned it after a referendum in 1932.

Magnan’s research has now been discredited, his methods likened to trying to establish the effect of drinking coffee by feeding animals with pure caffeine, and the levels of thujone were unlikely to have been dangerous. More harmful were the inferior and often poisonous ingredients which unscrupulous distillers used to cash in on the demand for a cheap absinthe, such as copper sulphate for colouring and antimony trichloride to produce the clouding effect. In effect, absinthe had become a victim of its own success.

The ban on absinthe was not universal, though. It could be made and consumed legally in Spain, Pernod distilling it in Tarragona until the 1960s, and in what is now the Czech Republic, where the local version was known as absinth. Never a popular drink in Britain, absinthe was not banned outright but, as it had to be imported, supplies had dried up. Nevertheless, drinks entrepreneur, George Rowley, saw an opportunity to bring the Czech absinth into the UK, exploiting the definition of what was an acceptable level of thujone in the EU Council Directive 88/388/EEC.

In the summer of 1998, working with his local Trading Standards Officer, Paul Passi, Rowley demonstrated that the amount of thujone in absinth was well within the limits defined by the EU. His Czech drink was launched with some style in the appropriately louche setting of the Groucho Club in November 1998.

Gradually, the green fairy got the green light and other countries began to legalise the drink, and even the French formally lifted their ban in 2011, after pressure from the Fédération Française des Spriteux. For aficionados, though, the new wave of Bohemian-style absinthes which emerged in the 1990s were inferior substitutes. To recreate the true essence of the 19th century spirit, the French Absinthe Museum collaborated with Rowley and Marie-Claude Delahaye to create La Fée Absinthe in 2000, the first real absinthe to be distilled commercially in France since the ban.

Those now enjoying a taste of la vie bohème owe a lot to George Rowley.

Missing Or Murdered

A review of Missing or Murdered by Robin Forsythe – 230829

A clerk working at Somerset House in London, Robin Forsythe was arrested for theft and fraud in 1928 and sentenced to fifteen months in prison. During his period of confinement at His Majesty’s pleasure, he began to write crime fiction and shortly after his release his first novel, Missing or Murdered, featuring amateur sleuth Algernon Vereker was published in 1929. It has been rescued from obscurity by Dean Street Press.

Forsythe cannot resist the opportunity to share his insights into the workings of the civil service, which one of his characters regards as full of a lot of people who are well paid for doing very little with the temptation of being able to commit fraud. There is nothing like drawing from your own experience to give your novel a sense of realism. Although very much of its time with its language sometimes verging into floridity, it is nonetheless entertaining enough.

As for the murder mystery itself, the person who is either missing or murdered is Lord Bygrave, a cabinet minister, whose executor Vereker is. Indeed, the question of precisely what has happened to the missing peer is one that Forsythe sustains with some skill until the last knockings of the book, the investigators at times thinking that he has gone to meet his Maker and at others he is just missing, possibly even because he himself has committed a crime. For fans of fair clueing, while most of the information needed to get somewhere near the solution is unearthed during the investigations, the resolution of the affair relies upon a revelation from a femme fatale, whose charms captivate the amateur sleuth, and an alliance which appears almost out of the blue.

One of the key features of the story is that most of the characters are not quite who they appear to be and seem to take a perverse delight in telling versions of events that only add to the confusion rather than clarify. As a result, Forsythe can not only maintain the suspense about what happened to his Lordship but also draw in a wide range of suspects, none of whom can be conclusively jettisoned until the end.

The highlight of the book for me was the relationship between Vereker and Inspector Heather of the Yard, who swap notes amiably enough but are both fired with a competitive streak to reach the solution before the other, a liaison that foreshadows the often bumpy partnership of Christopher Bush’s Travers and Wharton. Each time the pair meet to compare notes, Vereker is convinced he has got one over the professional detective, only to find that Heather has come to much the same conclusion. That both are wrong most of the time adds to the intrigue of the mystery and the charm of the book. Ultimately, in good Golden Age detective fiction, the amateur gets there first, but only just, to claim the sovereign that has been staked in a wager.

The book is not without humour. Both Vereker and Heather appear at one of their regular catchups sporting bandages around their heads, both having been assaulted in the same house an hour between each other. Vereker’s attempts at feigning a disguise are comic as are his friend Ricardo’s expensive and almost catastrophic attempts to follow a suspect.  

A body is discovered right at the end of a tale that involves an early, ill-considered marriage, bigamy, and blackmail, and, while the culprits know their game is up, they chose to end their lives. In the process, the world is deprived of a study on the history of etchings, our loss, I’m sure.

I will be interested to see whether Forsythe developed on the promise he showed in this rather impressive debut.

The Watersplash

A review of The Watersplash by Patricia Wentworth – 230827

A watersplash is a ford, a shallow crossing over a river, and while it can be inconvenient and should it have stepping stones, they can be slippery, but it is unlikely to be the locus of a couple of drownings, both inside eight days and both on Friday evenings. The watersplash at Greenings, though, with barely two feet of water, has seen the drownings of, firstly, the local soak and ne’er-do-well, William Jackson, and then Clarice Dean, a young woman who has returned to the village to nurse the hypochondriac Miss Ora Blake. Nevertheless, this is the set up for the twenty-first in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver, originally published in 1951.

Of course, there is more to the deaths. Both the victims sustained blows to the head, and both had important information concerning the will of James Random. Believing that his son, Edward, was dead – he had been missing for five years, having served, we learn later, a prison sentence in Russia – James bequeaths everything to his brother, Arthur. However, just a week before his death James had a vivid dream in which Edward appeared, assuring his father that he was very much alive. Acting on this information, James made a second will in which he left everything to Edward.

However, the second will was either suppressed or misplaced and upon James’ death, Arthur inherits everything. When Edward returns to Greenings, something which rather discomforts his uncle, Arthur does not do the decent thing and share the estate with him. Both Clarice Dean, who had nursed James in his final days, and William Jackson, who was one of the document’s witnesses, knew of the second will’s existence. Indeed, Clarice tried to tell Edward of its existence but her manner, that of a desperate woman throwing her hat at him, made Edward reluctant to talk privately with her.

The situation in which Arthur finds himself leaves him open to blackmail or exposure as a suppressor of a will for his own advantage. With the second witness to the will having conveniently drowned at sea, the removal of the other two with knowledge of it would ease Arthur’s position. He was in the habit of practising on the church organ, which was near the watersplash, on Friday evenings.

However, and inevitably, although all roads lead to Arthur, the case is more complicated than that. Wentworth, in this entertaining page turner, takes us into cosy murder country, with a village stocked with eccentric characters and awash with rumour and tittle-tattle, aided by the ability of all to listen into the village’s party telephone line. I enjoyed her portrayal of the absent-minded cat lover, Emmeline Random, and the Blake sisters, one enjoying her alleged ill health, the other sour and disapproving.

Miss Silver is drawn into the case after a chance meeting with Clarice and an invite to stay in Greenings from the daughter of one of her innumerable school friends, the vicar’s wife, Mrs Ball. Inevitably, the officer leading the investigation for the Yard is Frank Abbott who once more has the opportunity to stand in awe at the perspicacity of the seemingly innocuous old woman.

Her close observation of people’s reactions leads Miss Silver to a somewhat different interpretation of events and a re-enactment of the crimes, at some risk to her safety, leads to the culprit’s arrest. The puzzle is not overly complicated, and Wentworth plays fair with the reader, sprinkling enough clues around, for the identity of the murderer not to come too much of a surprise at the end. As well as recovering his estate, in the inevitable bit of romantic interest, he gets the girl who found the missing will in the library.

Wentworth at her best.

A Killer In Our Midst

A curious statistic, that vending machines kill four times more people than sharks do, piqued my interest. Its source, a 1995 report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, revealed that since 1978 at least thirty-seven Americans had been killed rocking or tilting a faulty vending machine, a death toll of 2.18 per annum. The average annual mortality rate rose to four between 2002 and 2015, according to a later report. A fully laden vending machine, weighing between 180 and four hundred kilograms, is not to be messed with.

With no comparable statistics for the United Kingdom, killer vending machines might be a uniquely American phenomenon, a deadly illustration of the quip that “change is inevitable – except from a vending machine”. At least their gradual conversion to contactless forms of payment is eliminating the usual source of frustration, coin in, nothing out.

Britain has over 420,000 vending machines, roughly one for every fifty-five of us, from which approximately seven billion items are dispensed a year, generating a turnover of around £1.54 billion. Nearly a third (31%) of all sales are drinks, with eight million cups of coffee and two million teas served every single day of the year.

Japan, though, is the nation of the vending machine, with five million or one for every twenty-three citizens. The range of goods dispensed by their machines includes fresh eggs, crepes, batteries, umbrellas, floral arrangements, edible insects, snails-in-a-can, and, recently, to the consternation of animal rights activists, whale and bear meat. In Germany, vending machines offer up to four varieties of sausage and accompanying side dishes, all that is needed to satisfy a wurst craving whenever it strikes.

The trend for imaginative uses of vending machines is reaching these shores. Penguin Books recently installed a book vending machine on Exeter St Davids train station, an innovation that has proven so successful that they held a public consultation to determine where to instal the next one. It is a reprise of an idea prototyped by their founder Allen Lane who attempted to increase the availability of his paperback books by installing the Penguincubator, a vending machine, outside a bookshop at 66, Charing Cross Road in 1937.

It was an apt choice of venue for stirring up the book trade. Previously known as the Bomb Shop, what had been the only socialist bookshop in the West End and a place of refuge for anarchists was a building “timorous women would hurry by, nervously fearful lest something would go off with a bang”, a contemporary source noted. Whether its notoriety thwarted the the Penguincubator’s enduring success is unclear.

The first documented vending machine was created back in the first century AD by Heron of Alexandria. Not content with giving us the windmill, the fire engine, the water fountain, and the syringe, frustrated by how much holy water individual worshippers were helping themselves to in the temples of Alexandria, he devised an automatic dispenser.

The worshipper would put a coin into a slot on the top of the machine which fell onto a metal lever, operating like a balance beam. At the other end of the beam was a piece of string attached to a plug that stopped a container filled with the holy water. The weight of the coin caused the beam to tilt, lifting the plug and dispensing liquid until the coin fell off the beam, at which point the plug would be replaced. This ingenious device ensured that everyone received their fair share of the water.

Lost Word Of The Day (70)

In moments of exasperation I sometimes think that a person or a thing only exists to take up valuable space in the world. I might even call the object of my ire a cumberworld, a term which from the 16th century was used to describe a worthless person or thing, one who cumbers the world.

The root of the term is the verb to cumber, which originally meant to destroy completely, but also conveyed the sense of hindering or burdening. It is the same root as has given rise to cumbersome. Michael Drayton in Idea. The Shepheard’s Garland (1593) used it thus; “a cumber-world, yet in the world am left, a fruitles plot, with brambles ouergrowne”.

Sadly, a word used to describe a waste of space could not find room in the English language and lapsed into obscurity.