Martin Fone's Blog, page 76

Lost Word Of The Day (64)

I am always fascinated how words over time develop meanings which are the polar opposite of their original sense. Take the Scottish dialect word from the 18th century, snool.

As a noun it meant a servile toady who submits tamely, a yes man, an obsequious or sly person, a cringing person, a coward. However, another definition which developed later was a mean, wretched person or a bully leading to it to convey the sense, in verb form, of reducing someone to submission or to bully or lambast harshly. Nevertheless, to snool also retained its original sense of cringing and cowering.

Context was essential, I guess.

Lost Word Of The Day (63)

There is a tendency amongst those interested in etymology and the development of our language with particular reference to those which have fallen into obscurity to indulge in lexiphanicism, a case in point. This is defined as the use of excessively learned and bombastic vocabulary or phraseology in a pretentious and showy fashion.

It owes its origin to the eponymous character in Lucian’s Lexiphanes, whose enthusiasm for Attic diction was equalled by his want of ideas, of schooling, and of taste. The Hellenised Syrian satirist, writing in the 2nd century AD, derived his word from the Greek lexikos, meaning pertaining to words, and phone, having the appearance of. Enough said.

The Man Who Didn’t Fly

A review of The Man who didn’t Fly by Margot Bennett – 230803

Scottish-born Margot Bennett is another new author to me and even if she did not write many works of crime fiction, she developed an impressive reputation, only to fall into obscurity. Like Christopher St John Sprigg she was involved in the Spanish Civil War, serving in a British medical unit, but unlike Sprigg she lived to tell the tale. Originally published in 1955 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, The Man who didn’t Fly is an impressive and unusual piece of fiction.

It is structured rather like one of those fiendish mindbenders you find in the puzzle sections of newspapers, full of conditional clauses giving snippets of information which, if you work your way through them in a logical fashion, lead you to the answer. Aping an aircraft, the story takes off at speed with an intriguing set up. A private plane has crashed into the Irish Sea, killing its pilot and three passengers. However, there were meant to be four passengers and as well as the fourth not coming forward, none of the witnesses who saw the three passengers before they boarded – no passports were needed to travel to Ireland – cannot give definitive evidence as to which three of the four meant to be on the plane boarded it.

Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Young are given the unenviable task of solving the mystery of who was on the flight. Their early attempts to gather information from staff at the airport and from a couple of drinkers in the pub they met at just before boarding seem to be unsatisfactory but as the story progresses to its denouement there are snippets of value in their testimonies. Bennett plays fair with her reader by ensuring that all the information that you need to identify who was on board is contained in the various testimonies if you pay attention.

The main part of the book concerns itself with the evidence of the Wade family, who hosted each of the four passengers in the days leading up to the doomed flight. This section, rather than being in the form of individual testimonies or straightforward answers to questions, takes the form of a reconstruction of the interactions between the Wade family and the four passengers as a form of narrative. This works well, allowing the reader to gain insights not only to the characters of the Wade family, financially hard-pressed and naive, Charles, and his two lively daughters, but also the complex and sometimes fraught relationships between the four passengers, Maurice Reid, something in the City who is suspected of wanting to con Wace out of his remaining money, Morgan, a highly-strung dipsomaniac with something to hide, the ne’er-do-well poet, Harry, and Uncle Joe who runs a chain of failing cinemas and is looking to expand in Ireland.

As well as establishing the identity of the three passengers, there is also the mystery of what happened to the fourth. Add into the mix two mysterious strangers, one with a vendetta against Maurice who had financially ruined his mother and an opportunist thief going by the self-proclaimed name of Jackie Daw and you have another fascinating plot line. Rose petals and a vault in a ruined chapel brings this aspect of the case to a conclusion, although Bennett cleverly leaves some points hanging in the air.   

Bennett’s style was brisk and workmanlike, painting her characters with deft strokes and not some little humour. I enjoyed the exchanges between the two policemen with the sharp and more culturally aware junior, Young, more attuned to the intricacies of the case. This is not your ordinary piece of crime fiction and was all the better for that.

Berkshire Botanical Dry Gin

Always with an eye for a bargain I noticed in mid-July that our local Waitrose store were selling Berkshire Botanical Dry Gin at a knockdown price of £14 for a 50-centilitre bottle. It was too much of a temptation to resist. It is one of a number of gins produced by Jonathan Neill’s Yattendon Distillery which is based in the 9,000-acre Yattendon Estate in West Berkshire.

If Neill’s name sounds familiar, then you would be right as he was the other half of the Whitley Neill brand that launched in 2005 and subsequently Mary-le-Bone Gin. When he decided to seek pastures new, he moved to Frilsham in the estate and set up a new venture with the aim of creating “enduring, sustainable botanical spirits and liqueurs” inspired by and using botanicals grown on the Estate.

At the start in 2019 it was an archetypal cottage industry, their pot still named “Harry” put to work in their orangery and when not in use proudly displayed in The Royal Oak Public House and Hotel in the village of Yattendon. In early 2021, Neill secured a unit in the estate where they house their new 200-litre pot still.

The Christmas trees that surround the distillery provided the inspiration for their Dry Gin, which uses nine botanicals – juniper, angelica root, coriander seeds, orris root, cassia bark, orange peel, lemon peel, pink grapefruit, and Norwegian spruce – which are distilled in a wheat base spirit. The resultant spirit has a fighting weight of 40.3% ABV which makes it ideal for an early evening tipple. On the nose there is a distinctive melange of bright citrus and piney juniper, an invitation that is hard to resist. In the glass, the crystal-clear spirit is crisp, smooth, and dry with the juniper complimented by zesty citric elements. The aftertaste is long and clean and surprisingly peppery.

It had a light feel to it and the combination of zesty citrus, piney juniper, and earthy spiciness worked well, the addition of a premium tonic enhancing the pine elements, making it a refreshing summer tipple.

The bottle is cylindrical and made of brown glass with “Yattendon Distillery” embosed at the base. The shoulders are rounded, the neck short and the wooden cap has an artificial stopper. The labelling is busy in a subdued way, using a pale blue background. At the centre is a suited fox flanked on its lefthand side by an illustration of a Norwegian Spruce branch and cone and on the righthand side by a bunch of juniper berries. Butterflies flutter around and one is at rest on the B of Berkshire, that particular motif also embossed on the bottle’s shoulder, a nod to their collaboration with the Berks, Bucks, and Oxon Wildlife Trust.       

It was an impulse purchase, one driven by the price rather than any deep desire to sample the product, but I was pleasantly surprised by how moreish it was. A sign of the times maybe but Waitrose do seem to be going through a spell of heavily discounting their gins. I could not resist a bottle of Tappers’ Brightside at a knockdown price of £17.99. Every little helps.

Until the next time, cheers!

Clues To Christabel

A review of Clues To Christabel by Mary Fitt – 230802

Our current government (I write this in August 2023) has a curious obsession with the financial value equated as future earnings potential of a degree subject. It seems a rather narrow view of the value of an education and one that puts the humanities at a considerable disadvantage. As someone who read and enjoyed Classics at university and came out with a creditable degree it is hard to see that the knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin offered an immediate and obvious pathway to a career in financial services other than it denoted a certain amount of intellectual nous and an ability to problem solve and apply logic. Nevertheless, the humanities have formed so much of our societal values that it would be scandalous to jettison them as they do not offer an obvious professional qualification.

Perhaps it is because of this that I have become a firm fan of Mary Fitt, the quondam Classics lecturer, who turned to writing fiction that could be loosely classified as crime fiction. Clues to Christabel, originally published in 1944 and now reissued by Moonstone Press, is the ninth in her Inspector Mallett series, although he barely features, an ethereal figure lurking in the background. Instead, what Fitt treats us to is more of a psychological investigation into the psyches of two characters, both thwarted and misunderstood in their own ways, Christabel Strange, a successful writer, and her secretary, Mabel.

The title is well chosen as, as the story progresses mixing the personal testimonies of various characters with a third person narrative, we can piece together what made Christabel tick, revealing an inner self that was at odds with her public persona, and how she came to die, ostensibly somewhat unexpectedly during an illness, cold calculated murder masquerading as manslaughter. To satisfy the body count demanded of the genre, there is a murder by strangulation after the application of chloroform (Isabel Strange), and a suicide.  

Christabel’s bequests have put the cat amongst the pigeons. She has granted the grasping and ambitious Marcia Wentworth the right to use a wing of the house, much to the chagrin of the Strange family, particularly the wonderfully eccentric and wily mater familias, Granny Strange. Having discovered that Marcia has plans to profit from her death by writing her biography, Christabel puts a considerable spoke in the wheels by bequeathing her diaries, 16 completed volumes plus one that detailed her thoughts and feelings running up to her death, to Granny Strange, who is reluctant to pass it on, especially to Marcia whom she loathes. Much of the book concerns itself with attempts to wrest control possession of the diaries, something that costs Isabel her life.

Dr George Cardew, Christabel’s childhood friend and, if he had but known it, the object of her desires is the glue that holds the plot together, an acquaintance of Mallett and Fitzbrown as well as an intimate of the Strange household. It is mainly through his testimony and actions that the riddle of who Christabel really was and how she met her fate is resolved. Despite a stranger who has the habit of turning up in the middle of the night when deaths occur, the culprit is almost impossible to detect until we learn that they have previous. However, it is not that sort of book, more concerned with examining how people tick than being a conventional whodunit.

It is also a love letter to the joys of the Classics. The phrase timor me conturbat me, a leitmotif in Michael Innes’ Lament for a Maker, duly makes an appearance, together with allusions drawn from Greek mythology, although I always thought Sappho was the tenth muse, and why would you not communicate your deepest secret to the one you love in ancient Greek? As Fitt writes, “Greek was the key to all things, human or divine. So Christabel and George and the other boy and girls had learnt their Greek verbs together, and enjoyed them”.        

I found this a thought-provoking and rather beautiful and moving book. I hope that Moonstone Press continue to rescue Mary Fitt’s work from ill-deserved obscurity.

The Beast Must Die

A review of The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake – 230729

Nicholas Blake, the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, has always struck me as a writer who is prepared to challenge the conventions of detective fiction. In this the fourth in his Nigel Strangeways series, originally published in 1938, he mixes elements of an inverted murder mystery with a country house murder and a piece of straightforward detection. The result is a book which was enthralling and one I could not put down.

Blake is not afraid to show his erudition and the text is scattered with literary allusions and Latin phrases. The title is taken from Ecclesiastes by way of Four Serious Songs by Johannes Bach; “One thing befalleth the beasts and the sons of men; the beast must die, the man dieth also, yea, both must die”. The lines pretty much encapsulate the plot with the fine opening paragraph – “I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him” – adds some flesh to the bone. The beast is the man who killed Francis Cairnes’ son, Martie, in a hit and run accident and Cairnes is going to be the killer’s nemesis. But as the quote from Ecclesiastes suggests, it will be life-ending for him too.

Blake also seems to have a bit of a Hamlet obsession. Not content with reinterpreting Hamlet in Hamlet, Revenge!, he draws into this book the themes of a murderer with a conscience and one who makes perhaps a fatal mistake by hesitating. The first and longest part of the book is in diary form in which Cairnes, who is a detective fiction writer himself using the pseudonym of Felix Lane, shows great ingenuity in tracking down the driver of the vehicle, something that the police had conspicuously failed to do, and by cold-bloodedly using Lena Lawson, an aspiring movie actress, manages to insert himself into the household of George Rattery.

As well as being the hit and run killer Rattery is an odious man who treats his wife and son appallingly. Blake does not allow the reader to have a scintilla of sympathy for a man who we know will be a murder victim. In his diary Cairnes goes to great lengths to plan the perfect murder, one that will look like an accident, when he takes Rattery out sailing.

From the beginning of the second part, the book is in the form of a narrative in the third person. In the second part we learn how Cairnes intricately planned plot fails, with the suspicion that Rattery had got wise to his game. Nevertheless, on that very evening, Rattery dies, having been poisoned in what would have looked like a suicide, if only the bottle of tonic in which the poison had been placed had not been cleared away. Realising that he is in a bit of a hole, although he seems to have a cast-iron alibi for not being anywhere near the scene when the poisoning took place, Cairnes engages the amateur sleuth, Nigel Strangeways, to protect his interests.

In the third part, the most conventional section of the book, Strangeways and Inspector Blount of the Yard, whom we met in Thou Shell of Death, investigate Rattery’s murder, coming to radically different conclusions. A bang on the head from a putter, a visit to an old army colleague of Rattrey’s father, and a closer reading of Cairnes’ diary, leads Strangeways to an inevitable conclusion, although he allows the culprit to come to terms with their unmasking in their own way.

The investigations reveal marital infidelity and that everyone in the extended Rattery menage had reasons to do away with him. The most fascinating character is the young son, Phil, who has been so traumatised by his father’s brutality towards him and treatment of his mother, Violet, that he puts himself into a dangerous position, unaware of the potential consequences.

Although the Cheltenham café scene seemed a bit of an unnecessary and clunky outrider, this is an impressive book with a satisfying conclusion. The search for the perfect murder continues.

Twinkling Stars And Constellations

Since time immemorial we have been fascinated by the sight of stars twinkling in a clear night sky. The practised eye of an imaginative onlooker can spot groupings of stars that appear to form a picture, perhaps of a heroic human, a mythical creature, an animal, or an everyday object. Known as constellations and drawing their names from ancient Middle Eastern, Greek, and Roman cultures, forty-eight had been identified by the time the telescope had been invented. They were made up of the brightest stars most easily observed with the naked eye.

From the 16th century improvements in the magnification powers of the telescope coupled with a more structured interest in the world and universe in which we lived and the opening up of the southern hemisphere led to the discovery of another thirty-eight constellations, the so-called modern constellations. Featuring dimmer and more distant stars, they were given names such as the Giraffe, Telescope, and the Peacock.

In 1930 the International Astronomical Union produced a definitive list of eighty-eight constellations, combining the ancient, whose number they augmented by splitting Argo into three, with the modern. Drawing an imaginary line around the space each of the constellations occupied in a two-dimensional representation of the sky, and ensuring that each of the boundary edges met, they created a celestial sphere of eighty-eight segments around the Earth.

This provided a rather neat solution to the problem of developing naming conventions and location descriptors for the billions of stars that did not fit neatly into a constellation, no matter how imaginative the onlooker was. While late 19th century scientists conjured up an adjective, sparsile, to describe these solo stars, one, though, rather like a supernova, which was to shine brightly for a while before rapidly plummeting into obscurity, nowadays, every star, whether sparsile or part of a constellation, is named by its co-ordinates in the celestial sphere.

While stars in the same constellation are unlikely to have any connection with each other, all the stars we observe in the night sky share two characteristics; they are part of the Milky Way, and they twinkle, the latter phenomenon celebrated in one of the very few nursery rhymes I learnt on my mother’s metaphorical knee to have survived our heightened sensitivity to all things racist, imperialist, sectarian, and sexist, Twinkle, twinkle little star. It is a joyous evocation of a child’s wonderment at the shimmering stars they see brightening up the firmament. Perhaps the key to its survival is that by the standards of other nursery rhymes it is relatively modern.

The lyrics are drawn from a poem written by Jane Taylor, The Star, which she included in a collection of verses entitled Rhymes for the Nursery published with her sister, Ann, in 1806. The poem consists of five stanzas of rhyming couplets, but the nursery rhyme generally just uses the opening four lines. The tune to which the words are set is drawn from the melody of a French children’s song, Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman, first published in 1761 and used by Mozart as the basis for his piano composition, Twelve Variations (1781 or 2).

Lost Word Of The Day (62)

It is always a delight to stand in a tunnel or a cave and shout and hear your voice reverberating and echoing around. An adjective that pulls together the sensation of echoing, reverberating, and resounding but which has sadly fallen into obscurity is reboant. The prefix re- in Latin means again or repeatedly and the verb boare, which itself has a Greek root, meant to bellow.  

Is the internet sufficiently reboant for the word’s charms to be appreciated once more?

Lost Word Of The Day (61)

Stuck for a word to describe someone who seemingly stands still for a long time with a long vacant stare? Well, try gongoozler, defined in Bradshaw’s Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales (1904) as “an idle and inquisitive person who stands staring for prolonged periods at anything out of the common”. The word is thought to have been derived from the duplication of two similar verbs from Lincolnshire dialect, to gawn meaning to yawn, gape and to stare vacantly and curiously and to goose meaning to stare aimlessly or gape.

Not all gongoozlers were harmless, though. An article in the Hampshire Advertiser for July 13, 1907, reported that in London “nearly all the bridges are lined with curious idlers, known as gongoozlers, and the habits of these persons are not nice. They insult the bargees or anyone on the boat, throwing stones or sticks and acting in other objectionable ways as the boats pass, knowing no revenge can be taken”.

There was clearly a mean streak in them gongoozlers.

The Mystery Of The Blue Train

A review of The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie – 230726

This, the sixth in Christie’s Hercule Poirot series and originally published in 1928, is a distinct improvement upon The Big Four which almost put me off the series for good. Being such a prolific writer, it is inevitable that there will be variable quality and that there is rather a discernible template that the writer follows.

The Mystery of the Blue Train ticks a lot of the boxes; the murder is foreshadowed in the book’s title – yes, it happens on the Blue Train, an express from London to the French Riviera; money in the form of jewels or an inheritance is the key motivator – tick, the murdered woman, spoilt, rich Ruth Kettering, is relieved of her incredibly valuable ruby necklace which her father, Rufus van Aldin, went to great lengths to secure for her only days earlier. Her husband, Derek, is financially embarrassed and the seed has been put into his head that the accidental death of his wife would solve his monetary problems.

At least one married couple will be cheating on each other – tick, Ruth’s husband, Derek, has been informed that divorce proceedings are to be commenced against him because of his extra-marital affairs, the latest of which is with the exotic dancer, Mirelle. Ruth, though, is no angel and Derek reveals that he will not be afraid to use his knowledge to his advantage. Van Aldin tries to buy him off. The murderer will be the least suspected character and there were enough clues for you to figure who it is – tick, although obviously I will not spoil your enjoyment as to who it is.    

One of the advantages of a murder committed on a train is that there is an opportunity for the writer to involve a motley collection of characters who might not otherwise meet in another social setting. However, Christie’s travellers all know each other, although some are not aware that their acquaintances are on board. Inevitably, Poirot just happens to be travelling on the train and offers his services to the French police led by Commisary Caux, the same surname Gladys Mitchell uses for her psychopathic family in The Echoing Strangers.

Poirot is at his preening best or worst, depending upon your point of view, but even the self-styled greatest detective in the world is seduced by the evidence of motive, opportunity, and the careless dropping of a cigarette case with an initial engraved upon it to concur with the arrest of the principal suspect. However, a chance remark by Lenox Tamplin triggers something off and he uses his little grey cells to great effect to work out what really did happen and who the culprit is.   

The plot is quite involved and perhaps a little over-complicated with the investigations into the murder and the whereabouts of the jewels forming two separate strands that eventually do intertwine. The opening sequence seems, in early Christopher Bush fashion, irrelevant to the main plot, other than to explain how van Aldin got his hands on the ruby in the first place, although even its strands fall into place by the end.  

There is no Hastings, but Poirot receives help from Katherine Grey, an heiress in her own right, who attracts the romantic interest of both Kettering and van Aldin’s secretary, Major Knighton. The case also involves the famed master jewel thief, the Marquis, who for all his prowess makes an elementary mistake which leads to their unmasking.

There were some interesting characters and although the dialogue was a bit forced at times, Christie is a good enough writer to create an entertaining novel that keeps the reader guessing until the end. I was intrigued to discover that the bare bones of the plot appeared in an earlier short story, The Plymouth Express, which she had written in 1924.

Sandwiched between Gladys Mitchell and Nicholas Blake in my TBR pile it made for an entertaining and satisfying amuse bouche.