Martin Fone's Blog, page 84

Job Of The Week (6)

A fish supper is a British seaside tradition, but so aggressive and determined are seagulls that having enough time to eat them is becoming a challenge. With the cost of fish and chips rocketing, by around 19% for the year ending in March 2023, according to the Office of National Statistics, the largest increase amongst takeaway meals, it is fast becoming an expensive luxury, too costly to share with some marauding birds.

Alex Boyd, owner of Mister Chips in Whitby, has come up with an innovative solution to dealing with the seagull pest. He has employed 18-year-old Corey Grieveson at a rate of £200 a day to don a giant, inflatable eagle’s costume and patrol up and down the harbour, charging at any groups of seagulls that have the audacity to make their presence known. He also is on the look out for any gulls that are near people and runs at them to scare the gulls off. People seem to love the service, even, inevitably, asking to take photos of Corey.   

However, the seagulls seem to have the last laugh. Corey is forever having to clear their droppings from his car.

Still, there could be worse jobs.

They Never Came Back

A review of They Never Came Back by Brian Flynn – 230520

Considering that it was originally published in 1940 and the fortunes of the Allied forces in the Second World War at the time, They Never Came Back, the twenty-sixth in Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst series and now reissued by Dean Street Press, is a poignant title. Anyone picking it up thinking that it would tell a story of heroic derring-do, of men making the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the security of their homeland, would have been in for a surprise. Instead, this is a slightly bonkers murder mystery-cum-thriller from a writer who is never content to stick to a tried and tested winning formula, but twists and bends the detective genre to extract every ounce from it.

If the title was a cynical ploy to tap into the zeitgeist, it failed as the book fell out of print and languished in obscurity for decades. All credit goes to Steve Barge and Dean Street Press for fighting its corner and getting it back on its feet again. Set in the world of boxing, the men who never come back are three promising boxers who receive offers that are too good to be true, promptly disappear and their bodies are found washed up on the Sussex shoreline.

The book begins with Bathurst in full Holmesian mode, receiving a late-night visit from a drenched and distressed woman, Flora Donovan, who implores him to use all his powers to locate her husband, “Lefty”, who having received a letter a week earlier went out and has not been seen since. Bathurst accepts the challenge and has some remarkable luck in getting some early clues, even at the cost of a blow to the jaw.

Liaising with Inspector MacMorran of the Yard and fearing the worst for Donovan’s safety, he discovers that another boxer had disappeared in similar circumstances and that the body had deep and unusual lacerations to the upper body, but not the hands and wrists – an important point as it turns out – and enormous bird-like footprints by the body. At one point Bathurst suggests that the attacker might have been a Pteranodon. It is that kind of book, populated with picaresque characters from the demi-monde, conveniently bearing easily identifiable physical traits, laced with the odd sporting toff like Sir Cloudesley Slade, and veering from the conventional murder mystery to a pastiche of a penny dreadful at the drop of a hat.

As well as setting up the plot the first half of the book is concerned with a forthcoming bout for high stakes. Slade’s nominated champions, first Donovan and then Jago, disappear and are killed and his son, Godfrey, steps into the breach. The book’s set piece is a description of the fight which is thrilling and worth a read. In a break with the previous pattern Godfrey disappears after the bout and the second half of the book sees Bathurst and MacMorran on the hunt to find him as well as to determine who was responsible for the disappearance and brutal murders of the three boxers.

It is a story of mania, sadism, and the Sporting Life. I quickly realised it was going to be one of the stories where you would need an enormous slice of Bathurstian luck to have a chance of working out the whodunit and whydunit and so just sat back to enjoy the ride. It was great fun and while the resolution was even more bizarre than the setup, it all sort of made sense. I can imagine that it was the escapist literature that the times demanded and when it is done well, there is nothing wrong with that. Perhaps not a book to start with if you are new to Flynn, but fans will not be disappointed.

Through The Wall

A review of Through The Wall by Patricia Wentworth – 230517

In the nineteenth of her Miss Silver series, which was originally published in 1950, Through the Wall, has created a shared house in which a dangerous cocktail of “hatred, jealousy, spite, wounded affection, and deep unhappiness” in the words of the amateur sleuth is allowed to brew with disastrous consequences. In a book which is as much a demure romantic novel as a murder mystery, the result is two murders, an attempted murder, a suicide, and an attempted suicide as the emotions generated by a strange will bubble to the surface. Fortunately, Miss Silver, with a combination of deductive sleuthing and a deep understanding of human nature as well as an uncanny ability through her innocent, dowdy image to worm her way into households and blend into the background, is on hand to solve the case.

Wentworth’s principal strength is her ability to tell a story and hold her reader’s attention and, boy, she is put to the test with this one. To say it is a slow burner is an understatement and it does not really pick up any sort of pace until the last third. In her defence she does have a lot of background to cover for the plot to make sense but, true to style, she must include some romantic interest, ignited in the unlikely setting of being trapped under a carriage after a train crash, and develop at least one weak and feeble female character, which makes the story meander and divert from the straight and narrow of the central storyline. It is overlong and could have benefited from a judicious pruning. Nevertheless, Wentworth’s narrative style does engage the reader and it is an easy, undemanding read.

The cause of the trouble is a will. Martin Brand, a wealthy man, has collected a motley crew of relatives and others who live in his house and at his expense, none of whom he likes nor is he inclined to leave his estate to any of them. After what can only be described as a piece of due diligence, he decides to give his money to a niece, Maria Brand, whom he has never formally met because of a family estrangement. Of course, Brand dies soon afterwards, of natural causes – note, if you want to live a long time, never make a will, an act that will be sure to accelerate your death either through natural or unnatural means – and Maria Brand inherits, much to the disgust of the resident relatives.

Being a soft-hearted old thing Maria is reluctant to evict the disappointed relatives and the house she inherits reverts to its old design where it is split into two with dividing doors bolted on one side and locked another, an arrangement that becomes key to the unravelling of the mystery. Her sentimentality persuades Maria to continue to accommodate her weak and sickly sister, Ida Felton, and her indolent husband, Cyril, who drinks and gambles what money he has and disappears intermittently in pursuit of success on the stage.

Add to the mix the outrage of Brand’s relatives at being cut from the will, a singer, Helen Adrian, staying at the house who is convinced she is being blackmailed by Cyril, a grasping Cyril who believes that Ida has been done out of what is rightfully hers, and a houseful of relatives who would gain materially if Maria died, and there is no surprise that there is murder most foul. However, it is not Maria who is murdered.

The local Inspector quickly identifies the culprit, but as usual has rushed to a hasty conclusion. As with The Brading Collection Miss Silver initially rejects a commission but an appeal from Richard Cunningham, Maria’s beau, brings her riding to the rescue and teams up with her charge from her days as a governess, Randall March, to sift through the clues which, sprinkled through the text, lead her to conclude that the acuity of hearing and mistaking one thing for another are the keys to unravelling the identity of the culprit who, having murdered once, has no compunction about murdering again to cover their tracks. There are subplots and red herrings galore to keep the reader on their toes, alibis, and movements to be checked, and while Wentworth does her best to divert the reader’s attention from the culprit, a bit of calm reflection makes their identity fairly obvious.

This is another book written after the euphoria of the victory has dissipated and the grim reality of post-war reconstruction has sunk in where there is a heavy whiff of nostalgia, a yearning for the good old days, a return to the status quo. In Wentworth’s hands it leads to murder but is perhaps reflective of a prevailing sentiment that the brave new world was not all that it was cracked up to be.

Ally Pally

Dominating the north west London skyline, Alexandra Palace and its Park stands on ground that once was Tottenham Wood, a vestige of the Great Forest of Middlesex whose deforestation began in earnest in the early thirteenth century. One of the last refuges for boars, stags, and wild bulls in the area, by the time it was enclosed to allow King James I to indulge his passion for hunting, its 4,666 trees covered 388 acres, according to the Earl of Dudley’s survey in 1619.

Unable to withstand the pincer attack from the growing demand for fertile, agricultural land and timber for construction, when it was auctioned as a manorial estate in 1769, 367 acres had been cleared and cultivated and by 1843 just thirty-nine perches of the original Wood remained. The land, now known as Tottenham Wood Farm, was put up for sale in 1856 when its owner, Thomas Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes’ great uncle, died.

One person who had grand designs for the area was designer and architect, Owen Jones. As a Superintendent of Works at the Great Exhibition of 1851, he had responsibility for decorating Paxton’s cast iron and glass palace and for arranging the exhibits inside. He went on to design its décor and layout when it was moved to Sydenham.

There is an old proverb “you shall as easily remove Tottenham Wood”, meaning that something was unachievable, which seems remarkably apposite when considering the early attempts to redevelop the area. Fired by the success of the Crystal Palace south of the river, Owen’s dream was to construct a “Palace of the People” for the enjoyment of north Londoners. Tottenham Wood Farm seemed an ideal location, but despite submitting detailed plans in 1858, his initiative failed to attract support. The North London Park & Land Co’s attempt four years later to create a park and a housing development on the land also came to naught.

The Alexandra Park Company Ltd did, though, succeed in acquiring around 220 acres to build sports and recreational facilities for the area’s burgeoning population. A Tudor-style banqueting hall, later known as The Blandford Hall, was the first major structure to be built there, in 1864, and from 1868 the Park was the home of what for over a century was London’s only racecourse. It was deeply unpopular with jockeys because its layout required horses to run around a tight circle known as “The Frying Pan” and then along a sloping straight. Many riders and horses were injured.

Nevertheless, it was a hit with the public, meetings regularly attracting crowds of up to 30,000. Some visitors were less than savoury. The Scotsman on April 4, 1921, reported on a Peaky Blinders style clash on the course, the latest in a “feud between a Midland gang and another set of men”, with two hospitalised and one arrest. The last meeting was held on September 8, 1970, in front of 2,749 spectators, the course being unable to meet the stiffer safety requirements prevailing at the time. 

Work started on “The Palace of the People”, the centrepiece of the park and the manifestation of Jones’ vision, in 1864. Designed by Alfred Meeson, its construction recycled much of the material used to build the International Exhibition held in Kensington in 1862. Even so, financial difficulties blighted the project, and it took nine years to complete the Palace. Its long-anticipated opening, on May 24, 1873, Queen Victoria’s 54th birthday, was celebrated with concerts, recitals, and fireworks.

Lost Word Of The Day (42)

There are eighty-eight officially recognised constellations, groups of stars that look like a particular shape such as an object, animal, or person, if you have a vivid imagination, after which they have been named. Of course, the stars in a constellation have no connection with each other and may be close to or far away from other members of the theoretical group.

Some stars obdurately remain outside even the most fanciful of geometric imaginings or have come late to the constellation party, having only recently been discovered. An adjective coined in the late 19th century to describe a star outside a constellation was sparsile. The most commonly seen sparsile star is the sun.

Lost Word Of The Day (41)

An uncle once advised me to become an undertaker, not because I had a suitably dour demeanour, but because you could be certain never to be out of work. Being too squeamish, I never fancied being a pollinctor, a person who prepared a dead body for burning, embalming, by washing and anointing, a direct import from the Latin noun. It was used by William Birnie in his The Blame of Kirk-buriall tending to perswade Cemeteriall Civilitie published in 1606. Whether it was a peculiarly Scottish usage, Ah dinnae ken.

Instead, I contented myself with laying out financial statements and insurance policies.

The Case Of The Running Mouse

A review of The Case of the Running Mouse by Christopher Bush – 230514

I have been reading Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers in chronological order and the transformation in his amateur sleuth has been fascinating to observe. In this twenty-seventh outing, originally published in 1944 and reissued by Dean Street Press, Travers’ role and attitude have undergone another transformation. The story, though, is one of his less successful ones, running out of steam in the middle after a promising start and needing a bolt almost out of the blue to get it back on track. Nevertheless, Bush rarely fails to produce an intriguing plot and there are plenty of red herrings and misdirections to work before reaching the rather rushed and abrupt ending.

Travers, in the army and on 14-days leave, is at a loose end as his wife, Bernice, serving as a nurse cannot get leave. Nevertheless, it is through her that Travers is approached by Worrack who wants him to help track down a missing woman, Georgina Morbent. Hitherto, Travers had been brought in by Scotland Yard on a consultancy basis to help out with a tricky case but here, for the first time, he is assuming, albeit unintentionally, the role of an independent investigator working solo rather than in cahoots with the police.       

This subtle change of role marks a change in his relationship with George Wharton with whom he had worked on many of his earlier cases. Previously they had worked well together, each playing to their strengths, sometimes being a little fractious with each other, often chiding each other for their foibles. In the Running Mouse, though, Travers is playing a more dangerous game, running alongside and sometimes counter to Wharton’s investigation, sometimes withholding vital evidence that might have made “The General’s” life easier. It also feels as if the scales have fallen from Travers’ eyes as he realises, rightly or wrongly, that Wharton is quick to assume the credit for the deeds of others and deflect criticism for mistakes. Their relationship has not soured but it has been set at a different level.

The story explores the darker, seamier of wartime London life. It centres around a discreet gambling den in the centre of the capital, run by Worrack and Morbent, where some of the more raffish of the city’s toffs and the odd officer on leave pass through, the rules designed to ensure no one quite loses their shirt, even though there are large IOUs in circulation. Travers makes little progress in discovering the whereabouts of Morbent, but the case and, frankly, comes to life when Morbent’s decapitated head is found and Worrack collapses dramatically in his club just as a mouse runs through the room and dies having ingested poison. It is at this point that Wharton enters the story.

As well as the obligatory blackmail the issue of abortion and its consequences feature strongly in the case. The loosening of sexual mores since the First World War and exacerbated by the strains and stresses of the Second had meant that the issue of backstreet abortionists was looming large, a subject Bush had treated more en passant in The Case of the Magic Mirror. Bush treats Morbent’s predicament with sympathy reserving, through Wharton, his ire for the abortionists who charge a fortune and place the woman’s life in peril. The book has a similar darker feel to it as The Magic Mirror.

The war only appears in the background. There is the blackout which makes getting around at night difficult, Travers has downsized to reduce expenses, characters have been injured in various theatres of conflict, but for those with money and influence it is still possible to avoid the grim fare of rationing and dine and drink reasonably well.

Wharton preens himself for wrapping the case up under his own steam, Travers only playing a bit part, but has he really?  

Sadly, though, I was more interested in the changes in travers and his relationship with Wharton to care too much whodunit. With more than half the series of books to go, I am sure Travers’ development as a character will continue.

Dog Of The Week

A dog is man’s best friend, they say, a sentiment with which David Lindsay from Cambridge would certainly endorse. Napping on his sofa he was oblivious to the fact that his seven-month-old bulldog had been nibbling on his foot, so much so that his big toe had been fractured and was covered in blood, until his wife’s screams stirred him.

His wife wrapped up his toe and rushed him to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he was told by doctors that had lost the feeling in his feet due to two blocked arteries in his legs, and but for the puppy’s actions he would have had to have them amputated. Instead, they are likely to be saved.

Mind you, another hour of napping and the dog might have removed them for him.

Scales Of Justice

A review of Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh – 230513

I have struggled at times to see why Ngaio Marsh has earned the reputation as a crime writer that she has but Scales of Justice, the eighteenth in her Roderick Alleyn series and originally published in 1955, is really rather good. It plunders some of the more hackneyed themes of the genre, a picturesque English village, beautiful on the outside but a seething pit of emotions on the inside, a close knit community of the upper classes, a guilty secret or two and something which will rip the cosy community apart.

To this Marsh brings her own stamp, a brutal murder inflicted by a combination of a piece of sporting equipment and the ferrule of a leisure item. She is nothing if not inventive in the way her victims die. This one is Colonel Cartarette who was fishing for trout by the local stream and he had the remains of the river’s largest trout and the source of much (un)healthy rivalry amongst the piscatorial types of the village of Swevenings by his side.

Days earlier, the head of another local family, Sir Harold Lacklander, had on his death bed entrusted Cartarette with overseeing the publication of his memoirs. The rest of the Lacklanders seem less than keen for the memoirs to see the light of day. Was there some revelation in Chapter Seven that would ruin reputations, put another interpretation upon a tragic wartime suicide, and shake the community apart? Were the memoirs the reason that Cartarette was killed?

The early part of the book is delightful, Marsh using Nurse Kettle’s slow peregrination around the village to introduce her principal characters, all eccentric in their own ways. I particularly liked Octavius Danberry-Phinn who lives alone with his cats who have extraordinary names including the delightful Edie Puss. His son, Ludovic, served under Sir Harold in the army and was driven to commit suicide when allegations of collaboration with the Germans emerged.

Another wonderful character is the alcoholic Commander Syce who recklessly practices with his bow and arrows when three sheets to the wind and feigns attacks of lumbago to receive regular visits from the nurse. He too has wartime links with the Lacklander and George Cartarette, to whom he inadvertently introduced Kitty who was to become George’s second wife.

Not only are the families neighbours but they are linked through their military service. To add to the web of connections, Alleyn also served under Lacklander and was there when the Danberry-Phinn scandal blew up. He was specifically called in by Lady Lacklander to solve her husband’s murder because he was one of them. Surprisingly, Scotland Yard agree to put him on the case.

Alleyn with the dutiful Fox in tow works his way through the case, taking a rather unexpected interest in the fish that was by Cartarette’s side and one of Phinn’s cats that seemed from the smell emanating from its mouth to have enjoyed a good meal. There is a touch of the Freeman Wills Crofts as Alleyn works out how the killer blow was administered and once that has been achieved and he understands the significance of fish scales, which allows Marsh to make a clever pun out of the book’s title, the identity of the culprit amongst the several people who were near the river at the time in question becomes clearer.

There is much humour in the book and there are enough red herrings, or should that be trout, to keep the armchair sleuth on their toes. Despite being written in the mid-1950s there is a surprisingly pre-war feel about the story, a sense of nostalgia and wistfulness for a world now lost. One of her better books.

Death In The Dark

A review of Death in the Dark by Moray Dalton – 230509

Published originally in 1938 and one of the latest batch of Dalton reissues from Dean Street Press, Death in the Dark is as much a thriller as a murder mystery. There are murders, two rather unusual ones, but the culprit is fairly obvious. What gives the plot its tension and excitement is the sense of jeopardy as Dalton’s go-to sleuth, the urbane and empathetic Hugh Collier, whose eighth outing this is, is racing against time to save someone whom he believes to be innocent from the gallows, even though he has been convicted of murder and had his appeal turned down.   

As an author Dalton seems to be attracted to the fringes of society and this story is no exception featuring a troupe of acrobats, a remote gothic house which has a run-down and struggling private zoo in its grounds, a drug-addicted woman, an eccentric who invites performers home for a meal on a Monday night, and a thirteen-year-old would-be detective.

David Merle, one part of the Flying Merles, is invited back to his house by Joshua Fallowes for a meal. Fallowes’ behaviour is odd, remaining muffled throughout the encounter, encouraging David to finger things and before they depart, asks him to help unjam a window in a room upstairs. When David enters the room, the door is locked and he finds a dead body on the bed, treading in blood as he makes his escape using his acrobatic skills through the window. For the police with David’s fingerprints all over the place, blood on his shoes and an unconvincing story, this is an open and shut case and Merle is duly convicted.

His sister, Judy Merle, is convinced of his innocence and is fortunate to find an unlikely and influential ally in Toby, whom we met first met in The Case of the Kneeling Woman, since when Hugh Collier has married his mother, and the boy is now his step-son. It is through Toby’s insistence that Merle has been set up that Collier is persuaded to look into the case. As in the previous encounter, Toby’s mother’s sense of child care is unusual by modern standards. Having previously left the boy alone overnight, prey to a band of international desperadoes, she now seems comfortable to let him meet a stranger alone in the lion house of London Zoo. Children did have more latitude in those days than their mollycoddled modern versions but, while the encounter is necessary for the development of the plot, it does seem odd.

As Curtis Evans points out in his informative introduction, Dalton’s treatment of the kindly and sympathetic Ben Levy, the only Jew in the village, is unusual by for the times when antisemitism, overt or implied, was rife in literature. Levy has a soft spot for Judy, and she is encouraging. However, in what seems to be an oversight in the structuring of the book, Levy disappears halfway through, and Judy gets spliced to someone else at the end without any thought of the man who held a torch for her in her dark days of despair. Odd.

The private menagerie at Sard Manor had already claimed one victim by the time Collier enters the fray, the death of the head keeper, seemingly mauled by a tiger, giving him the entrée into the case. The denouement, tense and thrilling, is somewhat telegraphed by the information that the Chief Constable is a crack shot and that he was a big game hunter, the halls of his house bedecked with the heads of his victims. The occupants of Sard Manor are held hostage by an unusual group of assailants when the animals are let out of their cages and the telephone line cut by the culprit. Will Collier survive to give the evidence to absolve Merle?

There is an air of inevitability about a gung-ho Chief Constable, reliving his days in India, gunning down the tiger. Moray, through Collier, expresses more modern sentiments when lamenting the need to kill such a magnificent creature. Tranquilisers were never an option.

Dalton shows her sense of humour when nicknaming Judy’s aunt, Mrs Sturmer, Auntie Apples, a Sturmer pippin was a popular type of apple at the time. The motivation for the crime seemed to me to be a little far-fetched. Even if the culprit had succeeded, there needed to be at least two other occurrences before they could get their hands on the prize, which, whilst still a large sum at the time, was still only a third of the overall inheritance.

It was an enjoyable story with much to admire, but I did not feel that it was Moray at her very best. Detectives seem to rely on members of their family to be a magnet to attract crime, Agatha Troy and Olive Owen being just two I could mention. In Toby, Hugh Collier might just have found his.