Martin Fone's Blog, page 83

Lost Word Of The Day (46)

As someone who has assumed the role of grandparent, I am fighting hard to avoid being consumed by tecnolatry, a noun now fallen into obscurity which was used to describe the worship or idolising of children and not, as might seem at first blush, an addiction to modern technology.

A sure-fire way of keeping in their good books, now rather frowned upon because of concerns about the consumption of sugar and dental health, was a trip to the tragematopolist, an obsolete word used to describe a seller of sweets. Sad, but specialist tragematopolists seem to be a thing of the past. O tempora, o mores.  

Lost Word Of The Day (45)

For the disputatious at heart, if you accept a major tenet in your belief system, then there are only the minutiae left to argue about. Take the crucifixion of Christ. If you accept it and its significance, you can give some thought to the thorny question of how many nails were used to fix him to the cross, a subject, I must confess, I have never given any thought to.

The received wisdom is four, which, given the position that he was forced to adopt, makes sense. However, a splinter group, principally made up of the Albigenses and Waldensians, believed that just three were used, symbolising the Holy Trinity, and that his body was pierced from the left side rather than from the right, a belief controversial enough to be deemed heretical by Pope Innocent III apparently.

This alternative view gave rise to the noun triclavianism, clavus being Latin for a nail and tri meaning three. I am pretty certain it is not a word I shall ever use again.

The Golden Dagger

A review of The Golden Dagger by E R Punshon – 250528

E R Punshon took a bit of a risk in setting the twenty-ninth in his Bobby Owen series at Cobblers. Originally published in 1951 and reissued by Dean Street Press, it is not exactly a load of cobblers but, in my view as a fan of Punshon’s work, it is one of his weakest. It reads like a wheezy old car gamely ascending a steep hill, barely able to get out of second gear, only picking up speed as the summit heaves into view.

The mystery starts with a phone call telling the police that the valuable Cellini dagger, one of the most valuable items in Lord Rune’s art collection at his home at Cobblers, is to be found in a nearby phone box and that a murder has been committed. The dagger is found covered in blood but there is no sign of a body. Armed with this scanty information Bobby Owen, Punshon’s go-to detective who is now an Assistant Commissioner at the Yard with a floating brief, sets out to find out what has been going on. Naturally, he succeeds, but even though he is convinced of the culprit’s identity – after all, if the hat fits, especially a black homburg size six and seven-eighths – but is short of evidence that would convince a jury to pass a guilty sentence. Owen’s difficulties are solved when the culprit takes justice in their own hands.

My principal problem is that much of the book is irrelevant to the actual case, a series of red herrings that are as much about padding the book out as putting the reader off the scent. The identity of the culprit, who in terms of page count plays a relatively minor part in the story, is pretty obvious. There are a couple of significant clues that a seasoned reader of the genre in general and Punshon in particular will not fail to spot which, with over a hundred pages to go, make it all clear.

Nevertheless, Punshon embeds a fairly straightforward case of blackmail and the thwarting of marital infidelity in a cocoon of a world made up of eccentric peers and members of the literary and theatrical world. There are suggestions that Rune is selling off the prize treasures of his collection and replacing them with copies to fund a lifestyle that is hard to sustain on the maximum income of £6,000 allowed at the time and to spite his heir whom he despises. His secretary seems to be part of a plot to steal stamp collections, an author, going by the unlikely pseudonym of Tudor King, has disappeared, his housekeeper strikes a Clytemnestra-like figure as she keeps an axe handy, and Rune’s new servant seems to be up to no good, making frequent nocturnal visits to a nearby house.

The stand out character is Rune’s daughter, Maureen, who is both independent and strong-willed with a misplaced sense of family loyalty that persuades her to be economical with the actualité and not to have any qualms about destroying crucial evidence. She is also a man magnet, attracting not necessarily the most desirable sorts but ones who might help her fulfil her ambition of making it in the theatre. She is a handful and the battle of wills between her and Owen is one of the highlights of the book.

The other highlight is the obligatory Punshon set piece, set in a mist-shrouded wood where Owen is desperately trying to rescue a wounded woman and at the same time rescue a hat and apprehend someone blundering about who is wearing a mask and has a scratched face. Ludicrously, three turn up who could fit the bill, but the truth will out.                

Although the plot is disappointing, Punshon’s writing is still a delight, his dialogue convincing and laced with humour and social observations. By his standards it is far from his best, but it is enjoyable, nonetheless.

Corpse Of The Week

As I approach my eighth decade my thoughts increasingly turn to whether to be buried or cremated. How can we be certain that the ashes presented to our family are really ours and what really happens to us when we are buried six feet under? On the other hand, if I am truly dead, do I really care? Some light might have been shed on one of my burning questions by a discovery that has sent the Catholic world atwitter.     

The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles order, exhumed the body of one of their founders, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who had died in 2019, in preparation for reinterring it in a brand-new shrine. She had been buried in a plain coffin in her habit and had not been embalmed, but the nunnery was astonished to find that there was barely any sign of decay. Incorruptibility is a sign of holiness amongst those of the Catholic faith.

News of the discovery in Gower, Missouri spread like wildfire, prompting hundreds of pilgrims to visit the site, somewhat mawkishly paw the remains of Sister Wilhelmina, and take away a teaspoon full of earth from the grave. In the new shrine she will be on display in a glass case.

Some scientists have cast doubt on whether the Sister Wilhelmina phenomenon is as rare as all that. Coffins and clothing do help to preserve bodies and corpses are rarely ever exhumed, other than shortly after burial or centuries afterwards, so we never know the rate of decay.

Thou Shell Of Death

A review of Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake – 230525

What a wonderful book. I do not know why it has taken me so long to discover Nicholas Blake, the nom de plume of future Poet Laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, but once discovered, I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. Originally published in 1936, and going by the alternative title of Shell of Death, it uses two hackneyed tropes of the genre – a motley collection of guests invited to a party at a country house and a locked room murder – to set the stage for an engrossing battle of wits to establish the identity of the culprit who sets in motion a chain of events that results in two murders, a suicide, and the butler receiving a serious blow to the back of the head.

Fergus O’Brien, who had an illustrious record as a dare-devil pilot in the First World War and has now retired to develop a new type of plane, has received death threats, suggesting that he will be murdered on Boxing Day. To establish who is threatening him and to head off the attempt to kill him, O’Brien invited those whom he suspects of having some animus against him to a Christmas gathering. Having alerted the police, Nigel Strangeways, Blake’s go-to amateur sleuth, is sent down by his uncle, who happens to be the Assistant Commissioner, to ensure that O’Brien comes to no harm.

Strangeways fails spectacularly in his mission as O’Brien is found dead in a hut in the grounds, where he had intended to sleep to put his would-be assassin off the scent. There had been a dusting of snow and there is one set of footprints, leading to the hut but no sets showing someone leaving, a reprise, to the delight of fans of Greek mythology, of Cacus’ stratagem to confound Hercules. Who killed O’Brien?

It is a mystery that ultimately seems to have two solutions. One which satisfies the rather bumptious Inspector from the Yard, Blount, seems on the face of it to fit all the clues – Blake in a trip to the distinctly third world Irish countryside discovers a backstory of love thwarted and a lover lost, enough to engender a thirst for revenge – and the unprovoked flight of the suspect and their dramatic Icarus-like plunge into the sea seems to confirm the theory.

However, Strangeways is not convinced as the facts as reconstructed by Blount do not, in the modern jargon, sit easily with the psychological profile of the supposed culprit. Instead, his solution is a much cleverer, darker plot designed to not only wreak revenge for a cruel act of betrayal that drove his lover to kill herself avenge but to implicate others who have incurred the culprit’s displeasure.

Rather like Edmund Crispin’s later Frequent Hearses, the plot is drawn from literature, in Blake’s case a piece of Jacobean Tragedy. Strangeways is put on to the link with the play by a guest remembering O’Brien attributing a quotation from it to Webster rather than Tourneau. Under Strangeway’s reconstruction the slip was deliberate rather than careless but like with cracking a code once a key element has been discovered, unravelling the rest becomes much easier. His knowledge of the play and the knowledge he gains in Ireland leads him to an altogether different conclusion as to what happened.        

The book is by no means perfect. Blake writes with humour, but his dialogue can be hard going, especially with his insistence in using dialect which might be for comic effect but do not fit well with the more erudite style of the rest of his prose. Blake is well-read and does not mind showing it, the text peppered liberally with quotations and literary allusions. He pays less attention to characterisation than he might and while we know enough about each of the suspects to assess their likelihood of being involved, this is a book where the cleverness of the plot is its sole raison d’être. I loved it.

Perhaps Blake’s most intriguing character is the eccentric explorer, Georgia Cavendish, with whom O’Brien was having a fling and for whom Strangeways begins to shine a light. His emotions are perturbed because it was her prussic acid that laced the peanut used in the second murder and, logically, she does not have a convincing alibi for either murder. However, not only does Strangeways’ reconstruction absolve her, although she could have been charged with obstruction, but, by the time we next meet Strangeways in There’s Trouble Brewing, he has only gone and married her.    

Death Has Deep Roots

A review of Death Has Deep Roots by Michael Gilbert – 230523

Although sub-titles “A Second World War Mystery”, Death Has Deep Roots, the fifth novel written by Michael Gilbert and originally published in 1951 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is actually set about three years after the end of the war. The roots of the murder mystery, though, are to be found in an event that occurred in occupied France during the war. The structure of the book is interesting, part court room drama, part investigation with the jeopardy of only having a short period of time to find the evidence that could prevent a grievous miscarriage of justice.

Taxonomically included in Gilbert’s Inspector Hazlerigg series, the doughty officer of the Yard only appears on a couple of occasions, once near the beginning and the other at the end. Much of the investigative work is carries out by the son of Victoria Lamartine’s newly appointed lawyer, Nap Rumbold, and Major Angus McCann, Nap taking the French leg and McCann rooting around in England. Both, in their different ways, help to put the pieces together to solve what boils down to a very logical and straightforward crime, where the underlying motivation is to keep one’s enemies close to you and strike to obliterate any possibility of a dastardly war crime being discovered.  

Victoria Lamartine is on trial for her life, accused of killing Major Eric Thoseby, who was staying as a guest at The Family Hotel near Euston, where she was working as a chambermaid, a job that had been found for her by the authorities as part of the resettlement of members of the French resistance. Thoseby was found stabbed to death in his room, the style of killing straight out of the resistance’s textbook and with Lamartine found on the scene and her fingerprints on the knife. She sacks her legal advisers who want her to plead guilty and the reader is left with the sense that she is probably the victim of a set up. However, will the grinding wheels of justice be stopped in time to reprieve her?

The best part of the book is Rumbold’s investigations in the Angers region of France. Gilbert does a good job in recreating the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that prevailed at the time, everyone having a secret from their past, either wanting to exaggerate or hide their actions during the occupation, people disappearing, no one quite sure who anyone is, who was on the right side and who was a collaborator. Rumbold, somewhat of an innocent abroad, blunders into this web of suspicion and is lucky to escape with his life. Nevertheless, he begins to realise that Lamartine, who was captured by the Germans, had been set up by the same people not just once in France but for a second time in London.

McCann’s investigations are more prosaic, but he manages to unearth the missing link that proves to be the key to the mystery. Much also hangs on why there was a delay in calling for a doctor after the Thoseby’s body was discovered, the positioning of the fingerprints relative to the grip required to strike the fatal blow, and the precise timings of the movements of the key individuals.  

Gilbert writes with some humour and the court scenes, drawing on his legal background, are light and capture the repartee that often exists between the counsels so that they are not as dry as they could be. The three strands of the book interweave well – it reads a bit like a TV programme with constant flashbacks – but I got the sense that it was a mechanism to hide the fact that the mystery was rather bland and not very complex.

Another Visit To Ally Pally

Before a sod was cut and a foundation stone laid, the park and its putative palace at Tottenham Wood were renamed in honour of Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who in March 1863 had married Albert Edward, Victoria’s eldest son and heir to the throne. Enormously popular, she was destined to become the longest serving Princess of Wales. In a curious instance of ironic circularity, the Palace of the People was renamed after a Princess of Wales while a later titleholder was to be dubbed the Princess of the People.

The Alexandra Palace was a roaring success, attracting thousands of visitors, many of whom travelled directly there on the Muswell Hill Railway’s newly constructed line. However, just sixteen days after the grand opening, tragedy struck; the Palace was burnt to the ground in a fire which cost the lives of three staff members and destroyed much of the interior, including a valuable collection of 4,700 pieces of historic and valuable English pottery and porcelain. Only the outer walls remained, which became an unanticipated visitor attraction with crowds flocking to the site to see them.

The concept proven, a new Palace was quickly built, opening its doors to the public on May 1, 1875. Designed by Meeson’s partner, John Johnson, and occupying seven and a half acres, it featured a Great Hall which seated 14,000, a Henry Willis organ, one of the largest in Europe at the time, a Palm Court, a 3,000-seater theatre modelled on Drury Lane, a concert hall seating 3,000, which later became a roller-skating rink, several museums, and various banqueting suites and refreshment facilities.

The park was redeveloped too, with a trotting rink and cycle track built within the racecourse’s perimeter. Amongst the park’s other attractions were a cricket ground, ornamental lakes, a Japanese village, tennis courts, a permanent fun fair, and, adjacent to the New River Reservoir, an open-air swimming pool.

As well as its permanent attractions, Alexandra Palace and its Park hosted temporary exhibitions and stage acts, some of which were epic, ground-breaking, or simply bizarre. In 1880 the lake was illuminated as the Palace’s choir performed as Singing Gondolas, an event so popular that the park was dangerously overcrowded, and extra performances had to be arranged, while in 1888, visitors were treated to the largest panorama picture in London, The Siege of Sevastopol, fresh from the Champs Elysée.

For fans of the outré, in 1888 Miss Alice Webb performed “underwater feats in a crystal tank”, which seemed to have consisted of eating, drinking, sewing, peeling an apple, smoking, and writing. For the more adventurous at heart a switchback railway was installed in 1895.

Alexandra Palace’s financial fortunes were always a rollercoaster ride, losses forcing it to close for two years in 1889, and part of the land to the north of the palace was sold for housing development. To guard against further encroachments, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1900 placing it in public ownership and from 1967 it was granted charitable status.

Ally Pally, as Gracie Fields who performed there regularly dubbed it, saw its fair share of technological innovation. In 1882 Cecil Shadbolt took the UK’s first aerial photograph over Alexandra Palace, curiously omitting, though, to take one of the Palace itself. It was from there that the BBC launched the world’s first full television service on November 2, 1936.

But disaster was never far away. The Willis organ was vandalised in 1918 and not restored and reopened until 1929, while on July 10, 1980 a major fire engulfed the Palace with only the outer walls and the eastern parts of the building surviving. Although the cost of the rebuild exceeded estimate and caused Haringey Council financial embarrassment, it has risen again phoenix-like from the ashes to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

Perhaps it has now laid to rest the spirit of Tottenham Wood.

Lost Word Of The Day (44)

Sleuths, as aficionados of Golden Age detective fiction will recognise, are always anxious to get to the scene of the crime as quickly as possible to ensure that the changeable British weather does not destroy any vital clues that the culprit has left. One that regularly excites their interest is a well-preserved footprint in the mud and out comes the plaster to take a cast.

What they are producing is a stibogram, a word I have not come across in the thousands of pages I have read but was used in the last decade of the 19th century to mean a graphic or physical record of footprints. The noun derives from the Greek stibos meaning a track.

If anyone finds a trace of it, let me know! 

Lost Word Of The Day (43)

Spirits, one of the three generic categories of alcoholic drink, the other two being ales and wine, are produced by the distillation of grains, fruits, vegetables, or sugar, that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation. In the 18th and 19th centuries any distilled liquor was known as stagma, a noun which has sadly slipped out of fashion.

I will raise my glass if it ever returns.

The Murder On The Links

A review of The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie – 230504

It is hard to believe that this book, the second in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, was published a hundred years ago (1923). Narrated by Captain Hastings, Poirot’s faithful Watson, it is the book in which the none too bright but loyal friend meets his future wife, a romantic dalliance that will cause him to break his alliance with the Belgian sleuth and move to Argentina. Although Hastings narrates most of the Poirot short stories, he only appears in eight of the full-length novels.

The book has been reviewed so many times and has been adapted for radio and television that there seems little point in going through the plot in any detail, but rather I will pick out the main features that struck me about a book that is both enjoyable and entertaining, ideal holiday reading fare, and yet for its time one that does not overly offend modern readers who are sensitive to views and opinions that were commonly held at the time Christie wrote but are less so these days.

In essence, the resolution of the crime – the murder of Monsieur Renaud who is found in a shallow grave on the links of a golf course with a knife in his back, an eventually of which he had a premonition, summoning Poirot for help, only too late – is a clash between two policing methods. The officer formally in charge of the investigation is Giraud, the darling of the Parisian Sûreté, who sets about his task with Holmesian thoroughness, employing modern scientific methods to crack this ticklish problem. His earnest approach wins the admiration of Hastings who thinks that his friend, Poirot, is taking too much of a laissez-faire approach.

Poirot and Giraud have previous, and the Belgian is determined to show the superiority of his methods, allowing a combination of quietude and supercharged little grey cells to do his leg work. Whereas Giraud eavesdrops behind bushes, Poirot simply observes and listens to what people tell him, allowing time for the inconsistencies to surface and lead him to the truth. Of course, Poirot’s method prevails, and he sinks his put to take the game.

The book seemed fairly clued to me, there was enough for the reader, if so inclined, to pit their wits against Poirot, but there was a little too much coincidence for my liking. It was only through re-reading some of her books that I have come to realise why I was not her greatest fan. The dialogue is often quite unbelievable, and the characterisation is woefully thin. Even her main man, Poirot, seems to have changed from the first outing in The Strange Affair at Styles, and Hawkins is the archetypal male chauvinist. There are much better crime writers than her.

Despite the title, there is not much golf in the book, the links being just a different place to locate a body. After all, libraries get terribly crowded.

An unchallenging whodunit, neither too dreadful nor first rate, one for the beach with a drink as an accompaniment.