Martin Fone's Blog, page 87

Three Sisters Flew Home

A review of Three Sisters Flew Home by Mary Fitt – 230419

Kathleen Freeman, who wrote under three pseudonyms including Mary Fitt, takes us into the leftfield world of crime and mystery fiction occupied by Gladys Mitchell with this novel, originally published in 1936 and reissued by Moonstone Press. Published two years before her first in her Superintendent Mallett series, it would be wrong to categorise it as a murder mystery. Yes, there is a murder, right at the end of the story, and yes, there is a little bit of whodunit and whydunit, if only amongst the suspects who are left to potentially carry the can, but it is more of a study in psychology, of jealousies, tensions, and vendettas.

It takes a little while to realise that Fitt is not going to deliver a conventional murder mystery. The usual suspects are all there; a gathering of people in a house for a New Year’s Eve party, a character who, as the story develops, is revealed to be despised if not hated by all that surround them, and a murder, the victim stabbed with a special dagger. Fitt, though, is much more concerned with building up an atmosphere, of suspense and tension, daring the reader to second guess less what is going to happen but more when and by whom. There is an ethereal, unworldly feel about the book, the sense that some of the characters are not really of this world.

In her day job Freeman was a distinguished Greek scholar and it is inevitable that some of her learning seeps into the book. As a former Classics scholar I did not find the references overtly obscure as some modern readers seem to have done, but it is clear that the story is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy, the sense that something awful is going to happen in accordance with a pre-determined plan that no human intervention can alter. Indeed, the characters are just the puppets of a greater force. The presence of three mysterious sisters who fly away at the end to leave the mere mortals to pick up the pieces is reminiscent of the Moirai, the Fates in Greek mythology who determined human destiny and the time allotted on this Earth.

The party is held by a society sculptress, Claribel, and she has scored something of a coup by inviting three mysterious young sisters, about whom and their earlier interaction with their hostess we learn more as the story develops. The elder two each have a valuable dagger, one of which Lucy gives to a fellow guest, Marcus Praed, who promptly loses it when Claribel throws it out of the window during the quarrel. Inevitably, it is this dagger that is the murder weapon.

The sisters’ presence is not the only unusual feature of the party. It emerges that all the male guests are lovers or former lovers of Claribel, and while her husband, Gilbert, seems to have come to terms with her association with the rugged explorer, Marcus Praed, his eyes are opened to his wife’s serial infidelities. Marcus Praed also learns, perhaps for the first time, that he is not the only string to Claribel’s bow. The atmosphere is full of tension with characters realising the truth with love lost and new alliances beginning to be developed.

A point of interest in the book, which Curtis Evans explains in more detail in his introduction, is the game of Murder!, a party game that was all the rage in the 1930s, a game I first encountered in Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dying. The game is so popular that it is played three times at Claribel’s party, and that it is played in darkness and involves the “murder” of a victim selected by lot suits the brooding sense of malevolent tension that Fitt is building up. That the murder is committed during the third game seems nothing if not fitting.

There is no attempt to dissemble the identities of the victim and the culprit and why the murder was committed. It is not that sort of book and is not the poorer for lacking what we anticipate in a book taxonomically condemned to be labelled as a work of crime and mystery. The book has its flaws, for sure, but it is the unconventionality of the approach coupled with Fitt’s beautiful if wordy style that sucks the reader in.

I enjoyed what is a refreshing approach to an even by 1936 a tired genre but recognise that it will not be for every crime afficionado.

Labyrinth Or Maze? (2)

Early and mediaeval Christians adopted two-dimensional labyrinths in their iconography, usually in the form of wall or floor decorations, the oldest known, at the Basilica of Reparatus in Orleansville in Algeria, dating from the 4th century AD. Their purpose is unclear, some suggesting that they depict the twists and turns that beset the Christian life, others that they map out a penitential journey that could be undertaken by genuflecting in one’s own church.

Labyrinths were especially popular features during the church building boom of the 13th century in France and Italy, a fashion not followed in England, the only examples from the period being the tiny labyrinth symbol on the Mappa Mundi and the gilded roof boss at St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol. Most labyrinths found in churches in southern and eastern England date to the late 19th century, although there has been a recent wave of new constructions, for example at Norwich and Wakefield cathedrals, in 1985 and 2013 respectively.

A familiar sight in or just outside late mediaeval British villages was a turf maze. Cut about six inches into the turf and ranging from twenty-five to just over 80 feet in diameter, the path was traditionally a mile long. They had a long legacy, Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis historia warning his readers not to compare the Egyptian labyrinth with “the mazes formed in the fields for the entertainment of children”. Colloquially, they were known as “mizmazes” or “Troy town”, an allusion to the legend that Troy was fortified with seven walls arranged as a maze, or “Shepherd’s Race”, echoing a reference in Theophilus Evans’ Drych y Prif Oesedd (1740) to shepherds cutting turf into the shape of a labyrinth.

Hedge mazes, a natural development from the rustic turf maze, were first constructed in the 16th century. Initially, they were not intended to confuse, consisting simply of a unicursal path that meandered along low hedges made of evergreen herbs or dwarf box. Puzzle hedge mazes with their fiendish multicursal path design, dead ends, and hedges taller than eye-level, were introduced in the late 17th century.  The oldest surviving example is to be found in Hampton Court, planted for William of Orange in 1690 using hornbeam and containing half a mile of paths. Replacing an earlier maze, it was boxed in by pre-existing paths which gives its peculiar trapezoid shape.

Hedge mazes continued to be a feature of the fashionable English garden well into the 18th century, the wonderfully named Batty Langley including several designs for them in his New Principles of Gardening (1728). Over time, though, new gardening styles, not least the trend towards more “naturalistic” designs, coupled with the sheer cost of maintaining them, led to many being rooted out and ploughed over. What remain today are a fraction of the number of mazes in Britain in the early 18th century.

Nevertheless, they are still being constructed. The hedge maze at Longleat in Wiltshire, consisting of more than 16,000 English yew trees and with over a mile and a half of pathways[1], eventually leading to the central observation tower, it is the biggest in Britain. It was only added to the estate in 1978.

Terminological inexactitude bedevils much of the literature surrounding labyrinths and mazes and that is not surprising. Labyrinth is much the older word, first found on a clay tablet from 1400 BC in Knossos which bore the legend “one jar of honey to all the gods, one jar of honey to the Mistress of the Labyrinth”, and passed via Greek and Latin into most European languages. Maze, derived from the Middle English “maes” meaning delirium or delusion, dates from the 13th century and probably emerged to help distinguish multicursal labyrinths from unicursal. Today the two terms, other than amongst the cognoscenti, are used interchangeably, a trend likely to continue as adjectivally labyrinthine is more expressive of intricacy and confusion than the more anodyne mazy.

Whatever we call them, we should celebrate their long historical legacy, their architectural and geometric complexity, and the fun they give. Vivant labyrinths and mazes!

[1] https://youtu.be/SRsErTYsnQo

Lost Word Of The Day (34)

With our rapid transformation into a cashless society and the dearth of coins of the realm whether they bear the new King or old Queen’s head, there does not seem to be much call for rupography.

A composite word formed from the Greek rhupos, meaning sealing wax, and the suffix -ography, meaning the science of or technique of, it refers to the art of taking the impression of a coin in sealing wax, the preliminary act of a counterfeiting operation. This is another “profession” that has probably had its day.

Lost Word Of The Day (33)

Why do we love? Is it to invite that love to be reciprocated, provoking an act of redamancy? Now an obscure noun, used in the 17th century, redamancy is derived from the Latin verb redamo meaning I requite love. It can be defined as meaning a love returned in full, an act of loving the one who loves you, the act of loving in return.

It allows the distinction between a love initiated and a love returned. Perhaps in these more self-centred times we are reluctant to make that distinction in our affections and that it is why it fell into a disuse. Rather a pity, I feel.

The Mystery Of The Kneeling Woman

A review of The Mystery of the Kneeling Woman by Moray Dalton – 230416

One of Rupert Heath’s last acts before his untimely and tragic death was to prepare for the release of five more of Moray Dalton’s murder mysteries, an event I was eagerly anticipating and, if The Mystery of the Kneeling Woman, originally published in 1936, is anything to go by he has left a lasting and enjoyable legacy to followers of Dean Street Press. Moray Dalton, the nom de plume of Katherine Renoir, had always struck me as an interesting writer whose plots gave her readers food for thought over and above the usual whodunit and whydunit.

1936 was in retrospect a turning point in the fortunes of Europe, a time when for many the activities of the Nazis in central Europe and the fascists in Italy and Spain brought a sense of deep foreboding, while for others, scarred by the terrors and brutality of the First World War, vowed never to repeat the same mistake again. Many in Britain were fundamentally opposed to war, the support for the Peace Pledge Union being at its height, but even its politicians were beginning to realise that some form of rearmament might be prudent and some even that another pan-European war was inevitable.

In her plot Dalton reflects this schism in public opinion through two of her principal characters. The local vicar, John Clare, idolizes his son who won the Victoria Cross in the first conflict and died from injuries sustained during a gas attack. Rather like his namesake the romantic poet, devastated by the impact on a once peaceful countryside of mechanization, Clare will do anything to stop the world making the same mistake again.

Misanthropic recluse, Simon Killick, who also has a wartime tragedy which only emerges as the story proceeds, has devoted his later years to developing a poisonous gas that is so lethal that it will kill anyone inside nine seconds. He announces to Clare at their weekly chess game that he is about to sell the formula for the gas to foreign agents. He will not sell to the British because he blames them for what happened to his son.

Shortly afterwards Killick is found murdered, his head bashed in, hours after a stranger, later identified as Michael Constantine, is found in his death throes by a young boy, “Toby” Fleming, muttering enigmatically about a kneeling woman before he dies. By the time the leads have gone cold, Hugh Collier, Dalton’s series detective from the Yard, this is his sixth outing, is called to solve two murders which ostensibly seem to be unrelated but are.

In a further twist, there are two more murders, two sons of a retired businessman by the name of Webber, who were poisoned after ingesting some tampered chocolates. “Toby” Fleming was also at the house at the time but while this is mere coincidence, there is a link with one of the earlier deaths.

Collier is an empathetic investigator in contrast to the local force but in the ledgers of investigative success, this is a thorny set of problems that he fails to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. He never identifies the killer of Constantine and the suspect he arrests for Killick’s murder is acquitted in a trial, the highlights of which make up the penultimate case. Clues include a brass rubbing (the kneeling woman) and an African grey parrot whose mimicry settles in Collier’s mind what really happened to Killick. At least he has the satisfaction of providing the local force with the clue that leads to the resolution of the Webber boys’ murders, even though it was not his case.

Collier is in danger of compromising his professionalism by getting dangerously romantically close to “Toby’s” mother. A single mother herself, Dalton’s portrayal of Mrs Fleming is interesting. By modern standards she is a terrible mother, leaving her son at the moment when he is vulnerable to attack because of the information he has, but she is painted in a sympathetic light, juggling her priorities and doing what she considers best. At heart she is the polar opposite of Lady Webber, an equally terrible mother whose sole concern is for herself.

The ending has a twist to it, raising the imponderable question of whether it is ever right to do a terrible thing in order to prevent an even greater tragedy. As ever Dalton gives much food for thought.

I am looking forward to reading the next and I hope Curtis Evans is successful in finding a publisher to reissue her other books. She is sadly underrated.

Juniper Freak Gin

Gin is juniper or, at the very least, a spirit where juniper is the predominant flavour. A distillery that never lets you forget that is the enterprising Never Never Distilling Co from South Australia, whose products are pure nectar for a juniperphile like me. Juniper Freak Gin is their take on a Navy Strength gin with an ABV of 58%. It is a very clever, sophisticated concoction that manages to belie its strength both on the nose and with its silky smoothness. As they say on the bottle their intention is “to deliver a seriously intense gin because we’re not here to f*** spiders”.

The base to this gin is their flagship Triple Juniper Gin in which juniper goes through three processes in distillation, maceration, boiling, and vapour infusion. Incredibly, that is not enough juniper for Juniper Freak. A pure juniper distillate made from Macedonian juniper goes through the same triple distillation process and is blended with a distilled batch of Triple Juniper Gin, both diluted to 58% ABV. It is a lengthy and complex process, with a touch of the mad scientist about it, but the end result is astonishing. To maintain the consistency of flavours, both the Triple Juniper gin and the juniper distillate are made from the same vintage of junipers.

To add depth and complexity to the spirit eight other botanicals are used – coriander seed, angelica root, orris root, lemon peel, liquorice root, cinnamon, and Australian pepper berry. They all have been especially selected to enhance and promote the juniper rather than to hide it. After all, this is first and foremost a homage to the juniper berry.

On the nose, it does not smell like a strong spirit where the whiff of alcohol obliterates everything else. Instead there is a wonderful overpowering aroma of piney, fresh juniper with a hint of lime and pepper in the background. In the glass the spirit is clear when poured neat but louches to a cloudy consistency with the addition of a premium tonic due to its high concentration of essential oils.

What surprised me is that for an uber-strong gin it is remarkably smooth and silky, inviting itself to be lovingly caressed around the mouth so that the spirit with all its subtleties and complexities can be savoured. Naturally, there is a heavy hit of wonderfully flavoursome juniper, but the flavours of coriander and lime are also detectable.

The aftertaste with a hint of sweetness from the cinnamon and a spicy tingle from the pepper berries is long, probably the longest I have tasted from a gin. It leaves a glorious souvenir in the mouth of a wonderful gin, but also poses something of a dilemma. Do I just enjoy the mellow glow in my mouth or do I take another sip? The answer is obvious, but this is a gin to be savoured rather than rushed, the epitome of the distiller’s craft.

The 50cl bottle uses the same design as Never Never’s other gins, although the dominant background colour is purple, so you do not mix them up. In comparison with other distillers the design is a little underwhelming but when your product is as good as this, anything else seems rather superficial. One to seek out.

Until next time, cheers!

The Case Of The Magic Mirror

A review of The Case of the Magic Mirror by Christopher Bush – 230413

The transformation of Christopher Bush’s amateur sleuth, Ludovic Travers, continues apace. It was shock enough to find that the once aloof and rather ascetic Travers had married, but in this, the twenty-sixth in the series, originally published in 1943 and reissued by those champions of neglected Golden Age crime fiction, Dean Street Press, it emerges he has a skeleton in the cupboard in the form of a three-year fling with the now Charlotte Craigne, née Vallants, during which he possibly fathered a son.

This rather large skeleton comes back to rattle his cage in what is a case that has much more personal jeopardy for him than is usually the case. It was also a situation close to Bush’s own heart as he was rumoured to have fathered a son, albeit from an extra-marital affair, an allegation he was never able to refute not did he ever acknowledge the boy’s paternity.

During the war years there is a distinct change in style and tone in Bush’s work. From the start of his wartime trilogy Travers has started to narrate the stories, as he does here, but there is beginning to emerge a darker, more pragmatic approach to the art of solving a case, perhaps, as the excellent Introduction suggests, as the result of the influence, conscious or unconscious, of the American crime writing fraternity. Certainly, here Travers is prepared to fight like a cornered tiger to preserve his reputation and his marriage, willing to counter blackmail with blackmail and to play his own game without much reference to his old police mucker, The “General” Wharton, who, as usual, eventually gets there but, without Travers’ assistance, takes a more circuitous route.

Travers has a new helpmate in the form of Frank Tarling, a professional private investigator drafted in to help disprove Charlotte’s claim that an illegitimate child was spawned from their affair. However, his role is expanded to encompass the two murders that form the meat of the case. The pair work well together, Tarling prepared to do the hard graft while Travers oversees matters.

The case itself is one of Bush’s better ones, both intriguing and complex. Its origins lie in a betting scam involving back-dated telegrams sent from rural post offices after the race has been run. Ina trial in 1937 at which Wharton shows professional interest and Travers comes along for the ride, the actor, Rupert Craigne, and his associates Sivley and Harper are jailed. The fourth man, a horse trainer, Rogerley, walks free. Sivley, who has received the harsher sentence, shouts as he is being led down that he has scores to settle when he is released. Sure enough, shortly after Sivley’s release Craigne and his father-in-law, Joe Passman, whom Wharton had suspected at the original trial as being implicated in the plot, are murdered within hours of each other and Sivley disappears.

Of course, the case is much more complex than a simple hunt for the obvious suspect, Sivley. It turns upon what the butler, Matthews, saw, in this case reflected in a Queen Anne mirror, the finest of its kind that Travers has ever seen and one on which he has his eye. Matthews pays for his inadvertent knowledge with his life.

The eminence grise in the tale is the marvellous Charlotte Craigne, a true femme fatale and the most formidable female antagonist Travers was ever to encounter, in the sleuth’s own words. He finds himself entangled in her web, used as a pawn to give herself and her seemingly estranged husband a cast-iron alibi. Although Travers has suspicions about what was really behind the murders, the scales only fall from his eyes when he sees a maid’s antics reflected in a mirror. It is another case where a behavioural tic gives an identity away.

The denouement gives the book a fantastic finale with Wharton playing the part of a Belgian to fine effect, although the main culprit escapes their judicial fate with a timely consumption of poison. It was a thoroughly entertaining and gripping case, one of Bush’s better ones, and kept me enthralled to the end.

The Black Spectacles

A review of The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr – 230412

The central conceit behind this book, the tenth in Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell series, is whether a witness’s recall of what they have just seen is ever reliable. Are they just wearing metaphorical black spectacles which clouds and distorts their vision so that their testimony becomes ultimately unreliable? Marcus Chesney believes that this is a case and devises an experiment to prove his thesis. A selected group of guests will watch a tableau unfold before their eyes and then will be asked ten questions about what they have seen. He bets that at least sixty per cent of their answers will be wrong. As further proof the event, to be held at midnight, will be filmed.

The book was originally published in 1939 and has been recently reissued as part of the inestimable British Library Crime Classics series. Carr’s reputation is that of being the master of locked room crimes, but this is more of a closed circle murder mystery, where there are only four suspects. As a consequence the identity of the suspect, which Carr holds back for as long as is humanly possible, is fairly obvious, but the fascination of the book are the sleights of hand and illusions which Chesney employs to prove his case but which ultimately contribute to his demise. Yes, for all his cleverness, Chesney overlooked the possibility that one of his guests would take the opportunity of the atmosphere of illusion and the darkness of the room to force a capsule of poison down his gullet. The man scheduled to play Chesney’s assailant in the tableau is found with a cracked skull in the garden.

The book, which goes by the alternative and more prosaic title of The Problem of the Green Capsule, begins near the House of the Poisoner in Pompeii, which the Chesney entourage are visiting as part of their Mediterranean jaunt and where Inspector Elliot, who leads the investigation of Chesney’s murder, happens to be. He overhears the group discussing Chesney’s theory in relation to a series of poisonings in their village of Sodbury Cross. A poisoner has indiscriminately laced chocolate creams on sale in a local sweet shop with poison and Chesney’s niece, Marjorie Wills, is the local’s prime suspect.

From the second chapter on the focus switches to Sodbury Cross and the aftermath of Chesney’s disastrous experiment. Eliot is one of the lead investigators and Dr Gideon Fell has been called in to add his not inconsiderable intellectual heft to cracking what at first glance seems a mystifying case. Fell quickly realises that some of the ten questions that Chesney had devised for the viewers of his tableau hold the key to the case, particularly the identity and the height of the mysterious visitor.  

The solution to the mysterious goings-on lies in a series of substitutions, a dash of magician’s legerdemain, and an analytical dissection of the evidence that the film presents. Naturally, Fell is the first to spot it, but the scales quickly fall from the eyes of his three co-investigators. The culprit and their motivation is fairly clear with the village poisonings little more than a warm-up act for the main event.

This is a book that is all about plot and the cleverness of the problem and its solution rather than a rounded novel that seeks to bring its principal characters alive. It did strike me as being somewhat overlong and might have been more effective as a novella. A more judicious editing of the book would almost certainly have removed the fascinating, although unnecessary, discourse from Fell on the history, characteristics, and motives of poisoners.

If you like your crime fiction to involve a complex problem and a clever solution, then this is for you. I prefer my crime fiction to have a little more, but I found it enjoyable enough. Perhaps one day I will read a Carr that has a locked room mystery!   

My takeaway is never to fall in love with one of the prime suspects.

Labyrinth Or Maze?

In case it has escaped your notice, Saturday May 6th is World Labyrinth Day, an opportunity to celebrate these complex, often maddening marriages of geometry, architecture, and horticulture. According to Labyrinths in Britain, there are around five hundred labyrinths and mazes around the United Kingdom, each of which they have lovingly recorded on an interactive map[1]. They do not claim the list to be exhaustive and welcome details of any egregious omissions.

The map’s preface makes clear that the distinction between labyrinths and mazes is a sensitive subject for those who care, one into which the unwary wander at their peril. The group agonised over whether their map should include mazes, finally deciding it should because of their similar lineages and many crossovers in design.

To the purist the distinction between the two is perfectly straightforward: a labyrinth is “unicursal”, having just one path that leads you from the entrance to the centre, no matter how windy its passages are. A maze, though, is “multicursal”, with several paths, most of which lead to dead ends and, usually, only one which takes you to the centre. Mazes test the explorer’s ability to solve problems, while a labyrinth lends itself to a slow, contemplative meander.

Labyrinths and mazes have fascinated mankind for millennia, with early examples found throughout Europe, in North Africa, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia, the American southwest and, occasionally, South America. Until the early centuries BC the principal design was a single pathway that looped backwards and forwards to complete seven circuits of diminishing size, bounded by eight walls that guarded the central point or goal.   

One of the greatest labyrinths in the ancient world, the Egyptian labyrinth, situated just above Lake Moeris and opposite Crocodopolis, so impressed Herodotus that he wrote in  was one of the most impressive labyrinths of the ancient world. Herodotus was so taken by the Egyptian labyrinth that he “found it greater than words could tell”, opining that “all the works and buildings of the Greeks put together would certainly be inferior to this labyrinth as regards labour and expense” (Histories Book 2). Little remains now but the foundations, one thousand feet long and 800 wide, bear testimony to the size, if not the splendour, of the structure.

As Geoffrey Chaucer related in The Legend of Good Women, Theseus was able to penetrate the recesses of the labyrinth at Knossos, slay the fearsome Minotaur, and return safely back to the arms of Ariadne by laying down and following “a clewe of twyn as he hath gon/ the same weye he may returne a-non/ ffolwynge alwey the thred as he hath come”. A clew was a ball of yarn, from which the sense of a clue as a figurative unravelling of enigmatic information was derived.

The Theseus myth is not without enigmas of its own: if it was truly a labyrinth, why did Theseus need help to get out and how was the Minotaur kept in the centre? Archaeology is unable to assist as no remains of a labyrinth-like structure have been found in Knossos, even though the city capitalised upon its mythological status by issuing coinage bearing its labyrinthine image in the fourth and third centuries BC.

[1] https://labyrinthsinbritain.uk/map-of-uk-labyrinths-mazes/

Lost Word Of The Day (32)

To quaeritate is a sign of a curious and enquiring mind. A 17th century verb, it was derived from the Latin verbs of quaeritare meaning to search and quaerere meaning to ask or enquire.

An example of its usage, cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, is to be found in Tomlinson’s Renou’s Disp from 1657; “Apothecaryes quaeritated its Medicinall use, which Mithradites knew”.

Who knew that, I quaeritated?