Martin Fone's Blog, page 75

Death In The Cup

A review of Death in the Cup by Moray Dalton – 230814

Originally published in 1932 and reissued by Dean Street Press, Death in the Cup is the third novel in which Moray Dalton features her rather aloof and unobtrusive private detective, Hermann Glide. As befits its setting, it is superficially a rather mundane tale about a middle-class family, the Armours, who are considered beyond the pale by the upright denizens of Dennybrook. It is a closed-circle detective story with many of the tropes of the genre that were familiar even at the time the book was published; blundering policemen outwitted by brilliant amateur detectives, family secrets, clandestine love affairs, poisoning, the inevitable footprint left in the ground, and a penchant for disguises.

What lifts the book from the ordinary is Dalton’s strong sense of character and her fascination with the psychology of the dramatis personae and how they react to the circumstances in which they find themselves. There are five Armour children. Bertha was bequeathed the family’s money and rules the house with a rod of iron, creating an oppressive and repressive atmosphere, the chief victim of her tyranny being her sister, Winnie, who lives in a fantasy world, believing that she is betrothed to the local doctor, Cardew, and stalks him to distraction. She blames Bertha for keeping them apart while George, who is portrayed as simple, whiles away his time compiling scrap books from newspapers.

There are two step siblings, Claire and Mark, from Mr Armour’s scandalous second marriage to the French governess only weeks after the death of his first wife. Claire will do anything for Mark who has lived the life of gigolo until he damaged his leg in an accident. In a nod to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Claire is in love with the family’s gardener, Tom Lee, a match that Bertha would have disapproved of had she known of it.

Repression, however, is not confined to the Armour family. Lucy Rivers has led a closeted and sheltered life and is forced to conduct her burgeoning love affair with Mark, a match that her father would heartily disapprove of, by sneaking out late at night and meeting in shelters on the beach. It takes all the efforts of Geoffrey Raynham, Lucy’s uncle and a policeman in India, to get Lucy to grow into a character capable of standing on her own two feet.

Bertha is poisoned, Mark’s precarious finances and his suspicious movements on the night in question make him the prime suspect, and in despair Lucy implores Raynham to help. He does so by engaging Hermann Glide. The police investigations are led by Superintendent Brisling who, straight out of central casting, is quick to draw the wrong conclusions from a set of circumstances and finger the wrong suspect. To muddy the waters the cook, who perhaps knew too much, also dies introducing new suspects for Brisling to mull over. It is Glide, though, who realises the implications of the footprint.

In truth, the culprit is not hard to detect, but the denouement, perhaps a little too pat, is thrilling enough to give some added pace to the narrative and Dalton is as much concerned with its implications on the other members of her cast of characters as whether justice has been served. This book did not seem as mature or as confident as her later works, but her interest in those on the fringes of society and their psychological make-up in a narrative that has a distinctly feminist flavour makes for an interesting read.

Glittering Prizes

A review of Glittering Prizes by Brian Flynn – 230812

Considering that Glittering Prizes is the twenty-eighth in Brian Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst series, it is a surprise that he still continues to surprise us. Originally published in 1942 and reissued by Dean Street Press, this is an ingenious murder mystery which, when boiled down to its essence, is less than the sum of its parts. Once more, he succeeds in wrong footing his reader, experimenting with the form and tropes of the detective fiction genre to produce a book that is both entertaining and elicits a sharp breath of astonishment, at least from this reader, as the resolution is revealed.

There are elements of a classic country house murder mystery in that a wealthy American, Mrs Warren Clinton, has invited a motley crew of characters to the hotel she is staying at in Remington for an intriguing soiree. Each of the nine invitees are outstanding in their respective fields, their invitations pander to their egos, and have been invited to participate in a scheme to save the British Empire.

After a dinner, they are set two tasks, to associate another word with a set of nine obscure words, and to undergo a short interrogation about their skill set. The two who are selected by Mrs Clinton following the exercise, Angela Ramage and Wilfred Denver, are found murdered in embarrassing circumstances, having each been shot in the left eye, and Mrs Wilton has disappeared, her body being found later in a trunk in the left luggage office at Waterloo station.

Flynn makes great play of the sense of paranoia and suspicion engendered by the Second World War. Subsequent communications to the remaining seven threaten serious reprisals if they give information about certain obstruse particulars pertaining to the case and sign off with Heil Hitler. There is a mysterious German couple who had rented a flat in Remington which they left around the time of the Remington murders and in whose window they had displayed on occasions a red and on others a blue model of a dachshund, a sign which a retired member of the British Intelligence, Playfair, one of the nine invitees, informs us was used during the rise of the Nazis. In other words, is there a Nazi plot to thwart Wilton’s plans to save the British Empire?        

It being a murder mystery, though, a prudent sleuth would be wrong to rule out basic human emotions. Is there a story of a couple of thwarted lovers looking for a way to get together and who will stop at nothing, no matter how fantastic it might all seem, to be together?

I will not spoil your enjoyment, but Flynn excels in constructing an edifice of fantastic misdirection and red herrings, before sending it crashing to the ground with a sharp prod of logic and cold reality. Bathurst, who works with his regular sidekick from the Yard, McMorran, seemingly get nowhere with their investigations, and it is only when Bathurst takes a fresh look at the motives and movements of certain individuals that the truth is revealed.

Flynn plays fair with his readers, all the necessary clues are in the text, but it requires an attentive and diligent reader to spot them, especially as he chooses to detail the reactions of each of the invitees to Mrs Wilton’s curious request, their responses to the investigator’s questions, and their responses to the subsequent threats. Cleverly Flynn builds layer upon layer of detail, making it difficult to see the wood for the trees. It is a great tour de force and is up there amongst my favourite Flynn novels.

Magpie Lore

So common are magpies (Pica pica), it seems, that it is not so much a case of “one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told” as enough for the first team squad of Newcastle United or Notts County. Little wonder that gazza is the Italian word for a magpie.

The magpie is one of our most distinctive wild birds with its black plumage, interspersed with white flanks, belly, and wing patches, and a long, stiff tail, which accounts for over a third of its forty-five-centimetre length. On closer inspection its ostensibly black feathers take on a purplish-blue hue and the tail has a green gloss to it. Even if it cannot be seen, its loud chattering and repetitive call of “chac-chac-chac-chac” makes it hard to ignore.

In folklore the magpie’s reputation was positively Manichaean. Admired by the Romans for its intelligence and reasoning abilities, for the ancient Greeks it was sacred to Bacchus, god of wine, and associated with intoxication. In China, a singing magpie was thought to bring good fortune and was adopted as a symbol of happiness and luck, for the Koreans it delivered good news, and for the Mongolians it was smart enough to control the weather. A magpie feather was worn as a sign of fearlessness by some native Americans, others believing it to be a messenger of the spirits or imbued with shamanic powers.

The Christian church saw the magpie differently, though, the only bird, they claimed, not to have wept for or comforted Christ during his crucifixion and, because of its pied plumage, not to have observed a proper period of mourning. As a hybrid of the raven and the dove it was the only bird not to be baptised and to eschew the comforts of Noah’s ark, preferring to sit in the pouring rain chattering and swearing. It carried a drop of the Devil’s blood in its tongue which, if released, would render the bird capable of human speech. In captivity, magpies have proven to be excellent mimics.

Often seen scavenging for carrion near battlefields, field hospitals, and gallows, magpies were associated with death, a reputation enhanced by their habit, during the breeding season, of raiding nests. Their inquisitive and mischievous nature led to them, somewhat unfairly, being seen as thieves with a penchant for shiny objects and jewellery, a reputation Puccini exploited to good effect in La Gazza Ladra (1817) with Ninette tried, convicted, and executed for theft, only for the true culprit, the thieving magpie, to be revealed too late.

Tarred with the reputation of being evil, it was but a small step to view a solitary magpie as a harbinger of bad luck. Over the ages several strategies were devised to ward off misfortune including saluting the bird, doffing one’s hat to it, saying “Good morning, General” or “Good morning, Captain”, spitting three times over your shoulder, blinking rapidly to fool yourself into thinking that you have seen two magpies, or flapping your arms about and cawing to mimic the bird’s missing mate. In Somerset, carrying an onion at all times warded off any evil that a magpie might bring but in Yorkshire it was sufficient to make the sign of the cross and shout “Devil, devil, I defy thee” when coming across one.

The sight of a magpie in specific circumstances had particular significance. For the Scots one seen near the window of a house was a sign of an impending death while in Wales the sight of a magpie moving from right to left at the start of a journey meant it was going to be hazardous. In Northamptonshire a group of three together was a sign that a fire would break out and for a fisherman in Devon the sight of the bird early in the morning meant that he would not catch anything that day. In Sussex, though, a magpie perched on the roof of a house indicated that it was solidly built and unlikely to collapse.

Lost Word Of The Day (66)

We are familiar with the expressions “to blow one’s own trumpet” and even “my trumpeter is dead”, a lame excuse for resorting to boasting of one’s achievements, but what do we call such a person? Sir Thomas Urquhart, in his Logopandecteision, published in 1652, provides the answer – a fanfaronade, a characteristic he claimed that typified Italians.

It came from the French word fanfaronade, which meant boastful or arrogant talk, and was derived in turn from fanfaron, a braggart. This also spawned the English term, fanfare, so in a logical full circle, a fanfaronade was someone who blew his own trumpet, in the absence of his trumpeter, of course.

In Sir Walter Scott’s The Surgeon’s Tale (1827) “Dr Gray…was an enemy to everything that approached to fanfaronade”. However, by the time Charles Dickens had penned Somebody’s Luggage in 1862 it was used in a more literal sense to describe the fanfare of trumpets; “And hark! Fanfaronade of trumpets…”.

Now, it is rarely used in either sense which is a shame.

Lost Word Of The Day (65)

It never does to look too eager for something, just hang back, display a feigned lack of interest or perhaps even effect a coy refusal. Such behaviour is a display of accismus, a noun derived from the Greek akkismos, coyness or affectation, prudery, via the Latin accismus.

Of course, too convincing a display of accismus means that you walk away without getting what you really want. A dangerous game to play!

The Case Of The Missing Men

A review of The Case of the Missing Men by Christopher Bush – 230810

Fans of Christopher Bush have come to expect a well-plotted, intriguing mystery, one full of red herrings, seemingly cast-iron alibis but with enough clues that the attentive reader can join in the fun and see whether they can beat his series sleuth, Ludovic Travers, to the answer. Along the way Travers will be sparring with his long-term partner in solving crimes, Superintendent George Wharton of the Yard, each competitive enough to want to be the one to work out whodunit but whose approaches and skills complement each other so that all aspects of the case are covered.

In The Case of the Missing Men, the thirtieth in Bush’s Travers series, originally published in 1946 and reissued by Dean Street Press, we have all these elements in spades, making for an entertaining read and a book that is up there amongst my Bush favourites. As is the norm now the story is narrated by Travers and takes the form of an expanded version of his statements to Inspector Goodman of the local police about what was going on during his visit to Lovelands, the Beechford home of successful crime writer, Austin Chaice.

Travers has three invitations to go down there, two by letter – one from Chaice who wants to discuss some finer points of detection for his proposed manual for crime writers, and the other from his literary agent, Cuthbert Daine, who wants to finalise a contract for the reissue of a couple of Travers’ books – and one by telephone from a confused and distressed Constance Chaice, Austin’s wife, who has premonitions that something is going to happen. Inevitably, where a series sleuth goes, murder will follow.

There are two deaths, first Chaice and then his son, Martin. Martin’s death looks like suicide, but the murderer has made the classic mistake of getting the victim’s fingerprints not quite right on the gun. The method in which the murder was carried out was ingenious, although I am sure I have come across a variant of it before, although the addition of an alibi, amusingly involving a visit to the lavatory, was a nice touch. Initially, Martin seemed to have every reason to hate his father, his literary ambitions were scorned, and he was a beneficiary of the will, but his death seems to rule him out.

One of the curious things about the case is that after each death, someone disappears – the mysterious G H Preston after Austin’s death and Richard Chaice, Austin’s brother who is prone to periods of abstraction, after Martin’s. These two missing men give the book its title, but, frankly, it is a bit of a lame one.     

While Goodman is in charge of the initial investigation, the pace hots up when Wharton arrives on the scene about three-quarters of the way through the book. He recognises the importance of Travers’ failure to recognise that what he thought was a stick of lipstick was actually greasepaint and through a clever piece of deduction solves the G H Preston whereabouts. However, it is Travers who puts all the pieces together to reveal not only who the murderer is but also the motives behind their crimes. He reveals all in the form of an exposition of a plot for a murder mystery, the telling of which puts him in peril of his life and earns him a blow on the head.

Wharton and Travers work well as a team in this story and intriguingly Travers reveals that the pair are considering setting up a detective agency when Wharton retires. I thought it took a little to set up the plot, but once it got going it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Oxford Rye Dry Gin

The Oxford Artisan Distillery, based in Cheney Lane, Oxford, distillers of Oxford Rye Dry Gin, have a fascinating back story, offering the discerning toper the opportunity to step in time and sample the grains of yesteryear, or rather pre-1904, the turning point when the advent of modern farming methods changed the way that crops were sown and grown. By the 1880s Britain’s domestic and historic grains were unable to compete with the cheap, high protein grains imported from Canada and Ukraine and to save the industry, scientists were employed by the government to create hybrid varieties that would flourish in the British climate. The introduction of “Victor” in 1906 transformed (and saved) the British grain industry but to thrive it required the use of artificial fertilisers.

One of the consequences was that the old grain types which had adapted to meet the specific growing conditions and soils of the local area were lost, often their traces only remaining in the thatch of rooves. Archaeobotanist, John Letts, of Heritage harvest Ltd has made it his life’s work to bring back Britain’s long-lost grains and The Oxford Artisan Distillery (TOAD), founded by Tom Nicolson, Cory Mason, and Tagore Ramoutar, in 2017, teamed up with him to select ancient heritage grains, the like of which have not been grown extensively for over a hundred years, using five local organic and regenerative farms on over 300 acres based within a 50 mile radius of Oxford.

As well as being of historical interest, TOAD’s approach allows them to burnish their green and sustainability credentials, they are the first organic “grain to glass” distillery in the UK, as no pesticides, chemical fertilisers or manuring is involved in the growing process. There is little crop rotation, and the crop is undersown with clover. Their sustainability ethos has carried on to their selection of stills. Rejecting the idea of importing them from abroad, they commissioned South Devon Railway Engineering to build Nautilus, their 2,400-litre still, and the 500-litre Nemo, weighing in at 940kg and 380kg respectively, together with two five metre tall, 40-plate copper distillation columns.

There are twelve botanicals in the mix – juniper, coriander, angelica root, orris root, lemon peel, orange peel, bitter orange peel, nutmeg, cubeb, liquorice root, meadowsweet, and angelica seed – and the base spirit is made from rye. With an ABV of 43% it promises an intriguing mix of juniper, citrus and spice. It is housed in a clear glass bottle, square-shaped with rounded corners, a flat shoulder, a medium sized neck, and a glass stopper. The labelling is understated but distinctive using green and gold lettering on a white background to good effect. The image is reflective of its green credentials and has a peaceful, rustic effect.

Of course, recreating the tastes of yesteryear is all very well, but does all the effort produce a gin that stands out amongst the crowd spawned by the ginaissance? Waitrose seem to think so, as they have added it to their “chosen few” and, on balance, I agree. The aroma is immediately inviting, a hit of juniper, some hints of orange, and a touch of aromatic spices. In the glass, the clear spirit, which louches slightly when a premium tonic is added, has a surprisingly peppery, syrupy and peppery feel to it, providing a delightful platform on which the dominant juniper and the citric elements can play. The aftertaste is long and lingering, warming, syrupy, peppery, and citric.

For those of us who like juniper-forward gins, this hits the spot. Whether the use of the ancient grains made a material difference to the taste of the gin to warrant all the time and effort is debatable, my poor battered tastebuds are too jaded to discern a difference, but it does make a talking point which is all to the good and shines the spotlight on the grains that time forgot. Better still, it is a glorious gin, one that I will savour with relish.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Body In The Dumb River

A review of The Body in the Dumb River by George Bellairs – 230808

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a man who worked as a bank manager by day and moonlighted as a writer of crime fiction at night should have been interested by the possibilities offered by a man who leads a double life. The Body in the Dumb River, originally published in 1961 and now reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is the 35th in George Bellairs’ Thomas Littlejohn and also went by the alternative title of Murder Masquerade. Bellairs was Harold Blundell’s nom de plume – he also wrote four novels under the name of Hilary London – and his murder victim, Jim Lane, happens to have led a double life.

The story opens with Littlejohn in Fenland, the weather is dreadful, the police resources are stretched dealing with the aftermath of the floods and Bellairs’ series hero agrees to stay on to lead the investigations into a body found in the swollen river Dumb. The victim is identified as Jim Lane, who ran a hoopla stall in a travelling fair and, as he was generally well liked, it is a mystery as to who and why he should have been stabbed in the back and his body thrown in the river.

Littlejohn is a painstakingly thorough detective, but one who shows surprising empathy with all he meets. It is his ability to gain the confidence of those he talks to that leads him to progress with the case and discover that Lane led a double life. He always returned to Yorkshire at the weekends to his wife, Elvira, where he was known as James Teasdale and gave the impression that he was a travelling salesman. The contrast between his two lives is marked.

As Lane he has taken up with Martha Gomm with whom, it emerges he is to have a child. In Yorkshire Teasdale leads an unhappy life. His family, dominated by his indolent and bibulous father-in-law, Major Scott-Harris, are snobbish and aspiring and he is a bitter disappointment to them. The crisis is brought to a head when Teasdale is spotted running his hoop la stall and news of his double life reaches Scott-Harris. A request for a divorce leads to a bitter row with tragic consequences.

This is less of a complicated murder mystery – there are very few plausible suspects, and the only real source of mystery is what happened to Ryder, Scott-Harris’ butler – and more of a police procedural. Littlejohn’s methodical style of investigation allows the reader to get to know the characters and understand how they are all trapped in the mundanities of their everyday lives and how only a major crisis is going to change things. Although Teasdale is an adulterer, he is treated sympathetically by Bellairs, a contrast to his delight in portraying the grotesque characters and attitudes of those from whom he sought to escape.

Although the body was found in the Fens, the root of the mystery lies in Yorkshire and the action mostly takes place there, as Littlejohn gets to grips with what happened on the fateful night when a family’s cosy existence imploded. Bellairs writes with no little humour and while there is little complexity to the mystery, it is a story well told. There is a fine sense of place and the gritty realities of lower middle-class life are brought to life. Enjoyable.

The Sanfield Scandal

A review of The Sanfield Scandal by Richard Keverne – 230806

Richard Keverne, the pen name of Clifford Hosken, is another new writer to me. The Sanfield Scandal was originally published in 1929 and is more of a thriller than a straightforward piece of crime fiction. It centres around a Suffolk town called Burgrave and, in particular, the house and ruined Norman keep that belongs to the Sanfield family.    

The book opens with a theft, some papers which relate to the Sanfield scandal are taken from the safe of Sir Jeremy Sanfield’s solicitors. This throws Trigg, the family solicitor, into a panic and when he tries to contact the remaining member of the Sanfield family, Jack, to break the news, he learns that he is on a hunting trip in Canada. The scandal involves an attempt to defraud Sir Jeremy Sanfield involving one of his sons, who dies from injuries sustained in a tragic accident in the tower, and a society belle, Josephine Fenning, over a valuable necklace worth £20,000, about £1.6 million in today’s money.

The necklace is believed to be hidden in the Tower and when a tenant takes occupancy of the Sanfield pile, Hilary Borden, he discovers that there are interlopers who are taking a more than passing interest in the tower. Borden, with the help of Nigel Mylor and Faith Stanhope, the sister of the local doctor, seeks to find the necklace and to thwart the activities of what turns out to be an international gang of tricksters and jewel thieves.    

It is a story with concealment at its heart and centre. The tower has a priest hole and a secret staircase, where the necklace is believed to have been hidden. Apart from Faith Stanhope, all the principal characters are either not who they purport to be or whose actions are driven by motives that are not what they appear to be or both. There is an overwhelming desire to keep matters under wraps, which means that Trigg and Borden are loathe to involve the police. What this means is that when some of the culprits are unmasked and the Sanfield papers are recovered – the return of the necklace is almost an afterthought – they are let go to pursue their criminal activities elsewhere.

Only one of the gang is left to face the music, and that is for their part in an altogether different matter. The desire to avoid adverse publicity and to maintain public esteem is allowed to thwart to demands of justice, an attitude that sits rather oddly with modern sensibilities.    

Faith Stanhope is the glue that sticks the various strands of the story together, helping Borden but also establishing a good rapport with the old gardener, Stopher, and the publican, Sam Christy, and his wife, Annie. Both Stopher and Christy know more about the affair than they let on, but they are unable to profit from their knowledge as they are both killed in the tower. In other hands, I would have expected Faith to have fallen in love with Borden and though there are hints, this is not the explicit outcome of the tale.

As a writer, Kaverne is a tad old fashioned, but he can certainly tell a tale, even though he needs to rely upon lengthy explanations at the end to wrap the case up. It was an interesting read, but I was left wondering about the writer’s moral compass.

More Twinkling Stars

Atmospheric scintillation, the scientific term for the twinkling of a star, is, in truth, a form of optical illusion, the consequence of the interaction of its light with the Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere, starting about 10,000 kilometres above its surface, is made of different layers and is affected by winds, varying temperatures, and different densities. Travelling from one medium to another, in this case from outer space through the Earth’s atmosphere, the light from a star bends many times, a phenomenon known as refraction. By the time we see it, the refractions have caused the rays to zigzag, some reaching us directly while others have bent either away from or towards us. So quickly does this happen that the star seems to twinkle.

The degree to which a star will twinkle will depend upon its place in our field of view and weather conditions. Stars near the horizon will appear to twinkle more than those directly overhead because the light has to travel through more of the atmosphere to reach us. Humid nights will also cause the air to be thicker, making stars appear to twinkle more.

Ironically, the conditions which induce the stars to appear to twinkle more and delight the casual observer are an anathema to the astronomer. Thick air which causes more atmospheric scintillation results in what they call “bad seeing”, while conditions where the air is thin, dry, and calm and interference is minimised result in “good seeing”. Astronomers tend to site their observatories in high, dry areas to remove as much as air as possible between the stars and the telescope to minimise interference.

Unlike a star, a planet does not twinkle. While the distances in space seem astronomical to the layperson, planets are significantly closer to the Earth than stars. The furthest planet in the Solar System, Neptune, orbits the Sun at an average distance of 2.794 billion miles and is approximately 4.2 light hours or 0.000475 light years away from Earth. In contrast, the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is over four light years away.

This difference in relative distances affects the way we perceive light. A star appears as a single point of light which dims and brightens as it refracts on its way through the atmosphere. The light from a planet, though, appears to come from more than one point source and the dimming of some of its rays caused by refraction is counteracted by the brightening of others, giving the appearance of a steady, unblinking source of light.

Worryingly, Shakespeare’s night sky “painted with unnumber’d sparks” (Julius Caesar, Act 3; Scene 1) might soon become a thing of the past, a consequence of the light pollution, a phenomenon first recognised in the 1970s, caused by the growing use of ever more powerful artificial outdoor lighting. Based on 50,000 observations made between 2011 and 2022, a recent report in Science reported that the night sky is getting lighter by an average of 9.6% globally each year. If that rate continues, over an eighteen-year period the night sky would get brighter by a factor of four or, to put it more graphically, a child born today where 250 stars might be visible would only see a hundred of the most brilliant by the time they were eighteen.

The rate of increase is not constant throughout the world, though. In Europe, it is increasing at a rate of 6.5% per annum, below the global average, whereas in North America the rate is 10.5% and an estimated 8% in Africa and Asia. Even so, according to the Light Pollution Atlas, the Milky Way is no longer visible to 77% of Britons.   

The problem is now being recognised with National Parks and Councils appointing  Dark Sky officers to maintain and improve the quality of the night sky in their areas. The recently published Ten Dark Sky Policies for the Government, calls for stricter controls on the use of outdoor lighting installations and for greater emphasis to be placed on recognising the impact of light pollution through education, incentivisation, and regulation.

Whether these proposals will see the light of day only time will tell. In the meantime, savour the twinkling stars while you can and switch off any unnecessary outside lights.