Martin Fone's Blog, page 74

Lost Word Of The Day (69)

There is an invisible dividing line between being smart and having an obsessively excessive and affected concern for one’s appearance and clothing. For some the latter is foppery, for others an exhibition of prickmedainty. Used in northern England and Scotland as both a noun and adjective, it described a fop.

It is a compound of three words and can be found as prick-me-dainty. To prick was to dress, specifically in garments that were fastened by pins or bodkins. Dainty originally meant fine or handsome, but also had connotations of fastidiousness. John Jameson defined prickmedainty in his Dictionary of the Scottish language (1818) as “one who is finical in dress or carriage”.  

Esme Stuart, in The Prisoner’s Daughter (1884), used it as a mildly pejorative term; “it was then my mother found me out, and laughed at me a little; she even called me a prick-me-dainty”. The English Dialect Dictionary recorded the term under a variety of spellings, noting that its use was restricted to Cumberland and Scotland. By the mid-20th century, it had flounced into almost total obscurity.

Peril At End House

A review of Peril At End House by Agatha Christie – 230825

Peril at End House, otherwise known as Tether’s End, was originally published in 1932 and is the eighth in her Hercule Poirot series. It is classic Christie, entertaining, a page turner, with a twist at the end. It also has Poirot, who is at his self-preening best, somewhat discomforted as he struggles to make sense of an intriguing mystery until a throwaway remark in a letter puts him on the right track. The faithful Hastings, back in harness after his period in Argentina, acts as his stooge and while, to his friend’s amusement, he often makes the wrong assumptions, he does weigh in with a helpful suggestion.

It is not the usual straightforward murder mystery with a victim and a culprit to identify. As Poirot says himself, for a man of his calibre that would be a fairly simple task. Instead, his brief is to prevent someone from being murdered, a woman, Nick Buckley, who seems to be particularly accident prone. In the last few days. a heavy picture had fallen on to her bed, a rock had fallen from a cliff top and just missed her, the brakes on her car had failed having been tampered with, and while she is talking to Poirot she thinks she has been attacked by a bee but, in fact, a bullet has just passed through her hat. Naturally, she is frightened, and the gallant Belgian sleuth cannot resist helping her, even if, to his chagrin, she volunteers that she has never heard of him.

Poirot, on investigating her background and her set of friends, struggles to find an obvious motive. She is not rich and the property she owns, End House, is mortgaged to the hilt. He makes a list of possible suspects with motives and opportunities which runs from A to J, with J being a person or persons unknown.

For her own safety, Poirot suggests that Nick invites a trusted friend to stay with her and is mortified when Maggie, who comes down from Yorkshire in response to her urgent request, is shot dead when she is mistaken for Nick. Even when Poirot moves her to a nursing home and entreats her not to eat anything that is sent to her, she is poisoned after eating a chocolate from a box seemingly sent by the sleuth himself.

The truth begins to reveal itself when the death of the famous explorer and pilot, Michael Seton, is announced. Seton was a rich man who had inherited a fortune from his recently deceased uncle and had made a will in favour of his fiancée. Money, a powerful motive which had been absent hitherto, and jealousy begin to raise their ugly heads and Poirot begins to see the light, staging Nick’s death and holding a meeting of all the suspects at which Nick’s will is to be read. She enters, dea ex machina, and triggers off a surprising series of events, including an attempted murder, a suicide, the arrest of Maggie’s murderer, and, for good measure, the unmasking of a proficient forger and a cocaine dealer. Not a bad evening’s work.

Much of the case revolves around which version of Nick Buckley the reader chooses to believe in. Is she the persecuted woman who seems destined to end up as a murderer’s victim or is she the fantasist that one of her circle, Frederica Rice, suggests? It is a well-constructed plot and there are enough clues scattered around the text for the diligent reader to begin to make sense of what is going on. The actual solution to Maggie’s murder involves some legerdemain over names which, for the fair play purist, is a little underhand.

This was great fun, entertaining, undemanding and a great holiday read.

A Glass Of Absinthe

It might just be a case of absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. After a century languishing in the doldrums, a victim of the mythology that surrounded it, absinthe is now one of the trendiest spirits in town with over 200 brands to choose from and a global market value worth $142.7 million in 2023. The UK even has its first absinthe distillery, the London-based Devil’s Botany.

Made by distilling a neutral base spirit with macerated herbs and spices, principally wormwood, which, together with anise, gives absinthe its characteristically bitter liquorice flavour. Its electric-green colour comes from an infusion of fresh herbs prior to bottling. With an ABV (alcohol by volume) percentage ranging between 45 and seventy-four per cent, its strength combined with its mix of ingredients has given it its infamous potency.

Absinthe’s spiritual home is the village of Couvet in Switzerland’s Val-de-Travers region, a place of refuge for French loyalists escaping from the terrors of the Revolution. One such was Dr Pierre Ordinaire, a retired physician. Wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, had for centuries been used as a medicinal herb to treat indigestion and stomach disorders, but it was acerbic, a characteristic reflected in its botanical name, derived from the Greek apsinthion, meaning undrinkable.

Ordinaire set about developing a palatable wormwood-based elixir and by 1792, so the story goes, had produced a potion made by macerating fifteen botanicals in grape spirit, which he called Extrait d’Absinthe. On his death he left the recipe and a sum of money to his housekeepers, the Henriod sisters, who sold the drink as Dr Ordinaire’s Absinthe.

However, an advertisement in a Neuchatel newspaper from 1769 for “Bon Extract d’Absinthe” suggests that the Henriod sisters were making a wormwood-based drink well before Ordinaire had arrived in Couvet and, to cloud the waters further, one Abram-Louis Perrenoud had started distilling absinthe commercially as a beverage rather than an elixir in the village sometime around 1794.

What is clear is that an émigré French lacemaker, Major Dubied, commercialised the production of absinthe through a combination of strategic marriage alliances and entrepreneurial acumen, marrying his daughter off to Perrenoud’s son, Henri-Louis, in 1797, and, a year later, establishing Dubied Père at Fils after acquiring the recipe either from Perrenoud or, possibly, the Henriod sisters. In 1805 Henri-Louis, after changing his surname to Pernod, set up his own absinthe distillery under the name of Pernod et Fils, just inside France in Pontarlier, a move that avoided paying taxes at the border with Switzerland.

Absinthe’s distinctive flavour made it a welcome addition to the menus of French cafes and bars. Its popularity was further strengthened in the 1840s when French army doctors prescribed it as a protection against fevers, malaria, and dysentery during the Algerian campaigns. The destruction of the country’s vineyards by phylloxera from 1862 meant that cheap wines and brandies were no longer available, and even more drinkers turned to absinthe. At the height of its popularity, 36 million litres were being produced a year, twenty-six alembics at Pernod et Fils’ distillery accounting for 20,000 litres a day alone.  

But the success story that was absinthe was soon to come to a crashing halt.

Hide My Eyes

A review of Hide My Eyes by Margery Allingham – 230823

Originally published in 1958 and the sixteenth in Allingham’s Abert Campion series, Hide My Eyes, which also goes by the alternative title of Tether’s End, is quite unlike any other of her books that I have read. It is barely a detective story, more a thriller with a bit of an inverted murder story thrown in, Campion is only a peripheral character, and there is little of the eccentricity and humour that feature in her other works. It is an altogether darker book, one in which Allingham explores the manifestation of evil that is embodied in one of her more believable and finely drawn characters, Jeremy Hawker.

By any standard Hawker is a nasty piece of work, and as we follow him around for a day, we see that his every action is calculated not only to bring him an advantage but also to protect him in a cocoon of plausible alibis. He uses people to his advantage, but he is not a top rank criminal with his eye on the main prize. His crimes are grubby, generating enough to keep the wolf from the door for a few months, preying on the weaknesses of others and committed with unconscionable violence. There is nothing to like about him and Allingham goes to great lengths to ensure that her reader despises him. It is a masterpiece of characterisation.

The counterpoint to the evil Hawker is Polly Tassie, an old woman who runs a museum of curiosities in honour of her dead husband, Freddie. Hawker is the nearest thing to a son to her and she loves him with the devotion of a mother. She has been blind to his imperfections, always willing to put a kind and positive spin to his actions and to the way he treats her and others. Hawker’s relationship with Polly is the nearest Allingham allows him to have any kind of human emotion and event then he uses her for his own ends. It is unconditional love pitted against extreme callousness.

One of the book’s fascinations is how the scales slowly fall from Polly’s eyes and, at first, unwillingly and then inevitably she sees him for what he really is. In a moving scene towards the end of the book, she begs him to see the errors of his ways, to save his soul, but her entreaties fail to sway him and there is some satisfaction for the reader that Allingham makes her the architect of his downfall.

This compelling psychological study, a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, is wrapped around a series of seemingly unrelated incidents which have occurred around a relatively small patch of London, Garden Green, including the Goss Place murder involving a coach with an elderly couple on board. Only Charlie Luke, now based at Scotland Yard, thinks that there are links between the incidents, even going to the extent of having a telephone hot line installed at the cost of thirty shillings.

Of course, his instincts are correct and slowly, with the assistance of a shadowy Campion, he gets on to the trail of Hawker. Also involved in the tale are Polly’s niece, Annabelle, and her beau, Richard Waterfield. Waterfield is intrigued when he sees Hawker enter the same building as Annette and spends the day trailing him around, in part becoming enmeshed in one of Hawker’s attempts to create an alibi and in part increasingly convinced that there is something so suspicious about Hawker that he needs to carry out his own investigations. He has an important part to play in the exciting denouement.       

I have sometimes wondered why Allingham is so highly regarded as a writer, but this book has convinced me she is one of the crime classic greats.

He Who Whispers

A review of He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr – 230821

Originally published in 1946 and recently reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, He Who Whispers is the sixteenth in Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell series. While some of the British Library’s excellent programme of reissues can be a tad variable, there is little doubt that this book deserves to be considered a classic. As well as Carr’s trade mark of an impossible locked room murder, it also explores his obsession with the gothic, mixing crime with the supernatural with the very real possibility that a vampire is involved.

After all, how else other than by an intervention from a diabolic agency can a man, Howard Brooke, be murdered on the top of a tower, when at the time of his death no one entered or left the building? This happens six years earlier and is the tale that the eminent academic, Professor Rigaud, was going to regale a meeting of the Murder Club with. However, to his consternation, none of the members show up, the only other attendees being Miles Hammond and Barbara Morrell. Nevertheless, he tells the story and shows his auditors the sword stick, with which the murder was committed. A woman, he tells them, by the name of Fay Seton reacted with horror on seeing the dead man’s body and fled the scene.

Miles and his sister, Marion who is engaged to Stephen Curtis, have just inherited their uncle’s estate, which includes a library that needs cataloguing. To assist in the exercise, he has hired a librarian who by an amazing coincidence that is par for the course for the genre, Fay Seton. Stephen Curtis reacts adversely to the news, telling him that he is bringing trouble to the house. Shortly afterwards, there is a second supernatural encounter where Marion in bed hears someone whispering to her and in her fright fires a shot, presumably at something she has seen. She collapses from the shock of the encounter and almost dies. This is Carr at his chilling best.  

Gideon Fell is intrigued by the chain of events and while superficially there does seem to be a supernatural connection to the crimes, he looks for a more prosaic explanation, believing that understanding the role of Fay Seton in the story and her relationship with Brooke’s son, Harry, might reveal a more believable solution to the riddle. And, of course, he is right, unearthing a story of thwarted ambitions, hidden identities, and a desperate attempt to cover up an earlier crime.

Throughout the narrative there are references to the 18th century Italian adventurer and self-styled magician, Alessandro Cagliostro, about whom Rigaud has just published a book. The relevance of these references becomes apparent when it emerges that the thwarted attempt to murder Marion Brooke followed the template of one of Cagliostro’s tricks.

This is a difficult to write about without giving the game away as each supernatural element of the crime has its more mundane mirror image. Suffice it to say, it is astonishing how much you can accomplish in your death throes and never announce a change to the room arrangements if you are not going to go through with it.

This is a page-turner, a thriller with train and tube chases, full of suspense and spine-chilling moments, and a remarkable denouement, written in an easy style. There are some wonderful images that will stay long in the memory, not least the flashing dentures illuminated as an advertisement in the building opposite the room in which the denouement unfolds as the action transfers to London.

Classic is a term banded around too loosely these days but this fine book merits the accolade. I urge you to read it.

Why Are There So Many Magpies?

Magpies were very common in most parts of Britain until the mid-19th century, their presence encouraged by farmers because they ate the insects and rodents that were injurious to their crops and stores, a case of practicality trumping superstition. However, for the gamekeeper the magpie with its voracious appetite for eggs and young chicks was public enemy number one and a sustained campaign to eradicate them during the latter part of the 19th century and up until the First World War saw their numbers plummet.

While the control of magpie numbers is still legal on many shooting estates, magpies are not subjected to the industrial-scale persecution they once were and, unsurprisingly, since the First World War their numbers have been on the up. Since the mid-1960s, according to data collated by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the British magpie population has risen dramatically.

In the period between 1967 and 2020 numbers have risen by 111% in England and 100% across the United Kingdom as a whole. A more detailed review of the data shows that the main increase in population occurred between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s. Indeed, since then numbers have stabilised, with a 1% reduction in England in the last twenty-five years, although there was a 3% increase between 2010 and 2020. The picture for the United Kingdom shows a drop of 4% over the last twenty-five years and neither an increase nor a decrease in the last ten. At the last count (2016) there were over 610,000 breeding territories.

The BTO posits that an increase in the number of fledglings in each breeding attempt and a lower failure rate at the egg and chick stages probably accounted for the doubling of the magpie population in the thirty years from 1967. These factors have now stabilised, suggesting that magpie numbers have reached their natural ecological equilibrium.

As more of the countryside gives way to urbanisation, magpies have proven to be remarkably resourceful, developing a symbiotic relationship with humans. Urban and suburban magpie populations have increased more rapidly than their rural confrères, partly because in built up areas they are not persecuted, there is a greater availability of food, by nesting close to humans, they have protection from their natural predators, particularly crows, and the warmth generated by our buildings encourages breeding earlier in the year, enhancing survival rates. Only in the wilds of north and north-west Scotland are sightings of magpies rare.

With their brain-to-body mass equivalent to that of the great apes, urban settings also give them greater opportunities to exploit their natural intelligence. Recently and ironically, for example, three magpies in Rotterdam were observed using anti-bird spikes to fortify their nests against predators.

Whilst the scientific data does not support an increase in the magpie population, empirical evidence suggests that there is a marked shift from rural to urban settings. According to The Irish Times, magpies generally mate for life. In the first year after leaving the nest not all are successful in finding partners and so, just like teenagers, they hang around in gangs making a racket. Rather than being irked by their noise, perhaps we should spare some sympathy for these lovelorn birds.

The relative stability of the magpie population compared with the trend of falling numbers experienced by 48% of Britain’s bird species between 2015 and 2020 means that these noisy birds are set to be even more conspicuous in the future.

Lost Word Of The Day (68)

There is no doubt that the introduction of the telegraph and the Morse Code revolutionised the way our forefathers communicated, opening up the possibility of talking to the other side of the world. The only drawback is that the technology at the time was unable to carry speech and each word had to be laboriously broken down to each of its letters and transcribed into the appropriate series of dots and dashes in accordance with the Morse code for that letter. A telegraph operator had to be literate, quick, and accurate as well as being letter perfect in their ability to transcribe messages into and out of code.   

Learning the code was a bit of a fag and to make memorising the format of each letter easier students would call a dot and iddy and a dash an umpty, sounds which roughly replicated the noise made by the telegraph machine emitted when it transmitted them. In the late 1900s iddy-umpty had become an affectionate term for Morse code.

As the telegraph has gone the way of the fax, there is little call to band iddy-umpty about. What a shame.

Lost Word Of The Day (67)

Most of us are familiar with the word jeopardy which entered into the English language in the early 14th century from the French, jeu parti, meaning a game with equal or uncertain odds. The modern meaning of jeopardy, something where the outcome is risky, possibly dangerous, and certainly uncertain, has retained this sense.

There is much metaphorical wringing of hands when someone on the air or in print attempts to formulate a verb from a noun. To weaponise and, in sports reporting, to medal are among my pet hates.

However, it is a long-established practice. In the late 14th century jeopardy was turned into a transitive verb, to jeopard, meaning to expose to risk, to hazard or imperil, to venture, and to stake a bet. Perhaps it is a relief to lean that it quickly fell into obscurity.

The Attending Truth

A review of The Attending Truth by E R Punshon – 230819

Originally published in 1952 when Punshon was eighty and reissued by Dean Street Press, The Attending Truth is the thirtieth in his Bobby Owen series. Called in by the local Chief Constable, Mr Lawson, Bobby is faced with a mysterious murder, that of John Winterspoon, a commercial traveller specialising in groceries, a stranger to the area, Pending Dale, who had only just arrived, had only spoken to two people, and yet had had his stoved in in a copse, which had gained local notoriety for peeping Toms.

With little to go on by way of hard evidence, Owen has to embark upon a painstaking study of the psychological make-up of the key characters, ramping up the pressure on them to see who cracks and what emerges. As he says, when defending his methods, the policeman’s methods might be described as plodding but the truth, the attending truth, is waiting there to be discovered. Of course, Bobby’s tactics work and what he discovers is a tale of black marketeering, bigamy, and revenge.

As Bobby is working for much of the time on his own and he does not have the stalwart Olive to use as a sounding board for his concerns and theories, she is surprisingly absent from the story, much of the narrative consists of his introspective thoughts, reasonings, struggles to make sense of perplexing details or coincidences, and his theories. It can give the impression that the story is going round and round in circles, never seeming to get anywhere conclusive, but this is the nature of police work and the reader is given enough clues to work out how the pieces come together and who the culprit is.

Key to understanding the whodunit aspect of the case are names and the identity of the fourth blunt instrument that Bobby keeps referring to. The whydunit aspects to the case are not as easy for the reader to determine independently, save for the inescapable impression that Winterspoon is not the unknown quantity that he seems at first sight to be and has links with several of the key characters.

There are some strong characters in the book, mainly, as is Punshon’s wont, including the formidable Mrs Holcombe, who has the village in her pocket and discovers the body, her sculptor daughter, Livia who is conducting a clandestine affair, Annie Mars, the all-knowing local beauty whose abduction leads to the denouement and the revelation of the truth, and the archetypal ‘er indoors, the redoubtable and domineering grocer’s wife, Mrs Jones. The male characters, including the other worldly vicar, Duggan, and the outwardly aggressive Yeo-Young, complete with snarling dog, Pompey, and the belligerent Mr Mars are no match for the female quartet.

I enjoyed Punshon’s sympathetic treatment of the tramp, Walker. Usually, they are stereotypical, objects of scorn and obvious scapegoats for any misdemeanour. However, Owen sees that this gentleman of the road could be an asset and, rather to the tramp’s surprise, improves his lot in return for assistance in bringing the case to its conclusion.    

In Poirot style Owen summons all the principal characters to a meeting at Mrs Holcombe’s house and as he slowly reveals his theories and thoughts on the case unleashes a series of events which bring drama to a story that had hitherto been lacking it and the case to its resolution.

Punshon can always be relied upon for a little tongue-in-cheek humour and a sharp observation on life. I enjoyed his observation that it was possible to get first-rate food in England as long as it had not been cooked, prompted by an execrable meal Bobby had to endure at the pub he was staying in.

While the plot is not overly complicated, it was interesting enough to keep this reader entertained. Punshon rarely fails to deliver.

It’s The Way I Tell ‘Em (34)

The best jokes from the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, allegedly.

I started dating a zookeeper – but it turned out he was a cheetah. (Lorna Rose Treen);The most British thing I’ve ever heard? A lady who said, “Well I’m sorry, but I don’t apologise”. (Liz Guterbock);Last year I had a great joke about inflation. But it’s hardly worth it now. (Amos Gill);When women gossip we get called bitchy; but when men do it’s called a podcast. (Sikisa);I thought I’d start off with a joke about The Titanic – just to break the ice. (Masai Graham);How do coeliac Germans greet each other? Gluten tag. (Frank Lavender);My friend got locked in a coffee place overnight. Now he only ever goes into Starbucks, not the rivals. He’s Costa-phobic. (Roger Swift);I entered the “How not to surrender” competition and I won hands down. (Bennett Arron);Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch. (William Stone);My grandma describes herself as being in her “twilight years” which I love because they’re great films. (Daniel Foxx);