Martin Fone's Blog, page 91

Never Never Southern Strength Gin

I am often asked which is my favourite gin, a question I find incredibly difficult to answer. My response often depends on mood, what I am looking for from a gin at a particular time and the type of flavour profile that suits the occasion that I am drinking. It is much easier to give the characteristics of gins I do not like. Still as I trawl through the wonders of the ginaissance I travel in hope that I will find the Holy Grail, a gin that knocks my socks off and its virtues are such that it will suit any mood or occasion. I might just have found it in Never Never Distilling Co’s Southern Strength Gin.

I have written about and raved about this distillery based in South Australian distillery when I reviewed their Triple Juniper Gin some while ago and so I will not repeat their backstory. Suffice it to say that the trio behind the distillery, George Georgiadis, Tim Boast, and Sean Baxter, are taking the gin world by storm. They regularly win awards and in 2019 their Southern Strength Gin won the award for best Classic-style Gin in the world. It is not for the faint-hearted with a ferocious ABV of 52%, strong enough to throw its weight around in either a cocktail or with a tonic, although its strength puts it a tad under the Navy Strength classification.

There is something of the MasterChef about their approach to juniper which they rightly consider to be the kingpin of any self-respecting gin. They use the juniper in three ways, initially steeping it in the base spirit for twenty-four hours, then adding further fresh juniper when the spirit is redistilled, and, finally, adding juniper to the vapour basket in the still as well. If you like your juniper forward, front and central, then this will set your juices flowing.

They use eight other botanicals in the mix, including angelica root, coriander seed, lemon, Australian pepper berry, and cinnamon. So heavy is it in flavoursome botanicals that it louches with the addition of a premium tonic, making it a cloudy, misty spirit in which a taste bomb lurks. In the mouth the juniper is ever-present but the other botanicals, particularly the tarty citric elements, give it a very rich and round taste before signing off with spice and warmth in a long and lingering aftertaste.

Wonderful tastes and flavours rebound around the mouth as it is a spirit that does not retire discretely. Definitely a gin to sip and savour, a little old-school in style but with an approach that squeezes the potential of the botanicals to their maximum, a gin to sip and savour and allow the flavours to do their work.

Never Never let their gin do their talking which means that their bottle design with its clear glass does not quite stand out as it might. The Southern Strength Gin uses a blue background to its labelling as opposed to the orange deployed on the Triple Strength. I enjoyed the warnings on the back label, particularly the notice that “no ingredients in this bottle were hand foraged (by us, anyway)” and “to wear sunscreen”. As I was drinking on a cold March evening in the northern hemisphere, I dispensed with the blocker. You have to live dangerously!

One note of caution. I bought my Never Never through Master of Malt. I found their service very good until my package got into the hands of their delivery partners, Evri, when it disappeared into the never never. After a week when, according to the online tracker, the package had not moved and an automated bot cheerfully told me that it was somewhere in the system, I got back to Master of Malt. They were superb and within 24 hours I had a replacement package, delivered this time by DPD. The original package never appeared. What a waste of superb gin.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Case Of The Fighting Soldier

A review of The Case of the Fighting Soldier by Christopher Bush – 230308

One of the few positives to come out of armed conflict is the quality of literature that it generates. Usually the finest literature emerges after a period of reflection once peace has been restored, but Christopher Bush’s wartime trilogy of detective fiction was written and published while the war was in progress and the outcome was far from certain. Individually and as a trio they are impressive pieces of work and rank amongst the finest that Bush wrote and perhaps amongst military crime fiction as a whole. The Fighting Soldier, originally published in 1942 and reissued by Dean Street Press, completes the set.

Once more Ludovic Travers, Bush’s series amateur sleuth, has a change of role, this time transferred to become second in command at a camp established to train officers from the Home Guard. As with his previous two assignments, murder follows him as does his old mucker from the Yard, George “The General” Wharton. The two combine to solve a tricky incident which results in two deaths and once more Travers plays a more subdued and subordinate role confined by the responsibilities of his role, allowing Wharton to steal the show. However, at least in this case Travers makes the breakthrough, having his moment of inspiration while cracking his brains in solving a crossword in one of the illustrated weeklies.

The transformation in Travers’ character is still a shock to anyone who has dutifully followed the series in chronological order, but I am getting used to it as I am with the first party narrative. The book reads like a yarn told in front of a roaring fire to a group of friends who have no particular place to go and all of the time in the world to get there. Travers’ approach is leisurely, allowing the reader to assimilate themselves into the way of life at the camp and its layout – map included – as well as to understand the various characters who are involved in the story. There is a smattering of military technicalities that gives a sense of verisimilitude to the story and allows the reader to become familiar with various pieces of equipment that have an important part to play as the plot moves to its crescendo.

It soon becomes apparent that there is some considerable tension in the camp amongst the officers who loosely break into two groups, the regulars, who have followed Army careers, and the not-so-regulars, some like Travers who have joined from civvy street and others like Mortar who have served as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War and during the Irish campaign for independence after the First World War. Mortar is particularly aggressive, claiming that he is a “fighting soldier”, one who has seen action rather than pushing paper, and he has a wealth of blood-curdling stories to regale his fellow officers and the trainees with. One proves to be his undoing.

After the camp has suffered a couple of near misses with bombs, Mortar is blown to smithereens in his room – there is little of him left – and then a little later Feeder, who might have some vital information and has just been assigned as Travers’ batman, goes missing, his body later found a mile away from the camp. It initially looks like suicide.

Strings are pulled and Wharton arrives to lead the investigation. The combination of his nose for detail and Travers’ inside knowledge of the camp prove a winning combination in what is a well-thought out and ingenious plot with some nice touches, particularly the way the device was detonated. The motivation is compelling, and the way Wharton brings matters to a head is masterful. It makes for an entertaining finale to an impressive trilogy.

Spinsters In Jeopardy

A review of Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh – 230307

I still cannot make my mind up about Ngaio Marsh. She wrote some superb murder mysteries and was particularly inventive in the way that her victims met her end, but there are too many mediocre books in her canon. Spinsters in Jeopardy, which also goes by the title of The Bride of Death, originally published in 1953, falls fairly and squarely into the latter category.

It is entertaining enough, but it relies far too much on coincidence for my taste. The Alleyns are travelling en famille, including their precocious six-year-old son, Ricky, whose proficiency in French belies his tender years, for a holiday in France, partly as cover for series detective Roderick’s undercover mission in conjunction with the French police to penetrate a fiendish drug gang led by Mr Oberon who also dabble in spiritual rituals and outlandish sexual practices. They are travelling to see one of Agatha Troy’s distant relatives by the name of Garbel, whom they have never met and whom they mistakenly believe to be a man.

Garbel just happens to be working at the drug factory and is an intimate within Oberon’s circle. On the train journey, both Roderick and Agatha just happen to look out of the train window as it is about to enter a tunnel and see what they believe to be a man about to stab a woman in an adjacent chateau, Chevre d’Argent. On board the train is a spinster, Miss Truebody, who suffers a severe ruptured appendix and needs urgent medical attention. Of course, all the doctors in the vicinity are away at a conference and the only medic in the area is Dr Baradi, an associate of Oberon’s and staying at Chevre d’Argent. Alleyn nobly offers to accompany her, giving him a perfect excuse to penetrate the den of iniquity and even helps by being Baradi’s anaesthetist.

Alleyn’s cover is almost blown because amongst those in Oberon’s circle are the artist Carbury Glande who knows Agatha but, unbelievably, does not know she is married to one of Britain’s foremost policeman and a drug-addled, alcoholic actress who met Alleyn on a transatlantic voyage but surprisingly agrees to keep quiet about his identity. Even Ricky plays his part, nobly being kidnapped, waving from a balcony just at the moment his parents were gazing in that direction, and providing his father and his French counterpart with an excuse to raid the drug factory. And so it goes on.

Oberon and his cronies engage in almost every conceivable form of nefarious activities from murder to childnapping, from drug production, pushing and taking to deviant sexual practices and fraud. Although coy in her narrative, Marsh is more explicit in her descriptions of the sort of sexual hanky panky the cult gets up to, more so than some of her contemporaries.

Frankly, there is little dramatic tension in the plot and no mystery as we know who the culprits are and we are pretty certain that what the Alleyns saw was a murder. Thematically, it is a reworking of Death in Ecstasy which also features a sinister cult but does not reach its heights. The book ambles along and is enthralling enough but cannot rise above the welter of coincidences that make the plot so unbelievable. Perhaps Marsh was having a creative holiday herself when she wrote this.

Big Mac

The adage “muck and money go together”, recorded by John Ray in A collection of English proverbs (1678), might well have served as the Macintosh family motto. Father George, a dye manufacturer, sent round collectors to pay the poorer denizens of Glasgow for their urine, from which he extracted ammonia. This he used in the manufacture of cudbear, a valuable violet-reddish dye obtained from lichens, which his son, Charles, supplied from Europe.

By 1786 when he was twenty, Charles had branched out on his own, opening a factory in Glasgow producing ammonium chloride and Prussian blue dye. A chip off the old block, he would collect soot and urine, from which he extracted salt. His ability to extract alum from waste shale from the area’s coal mines led him to establish Scotland’s first alum works at Hurlet in Renfrewshire in 1797, introducing the manufacture of lead and aluminium acetates to Britain.

It was his collaboration with Charles Tennant, the owner of a chemical works at St Rollox, just outside Glasgow, that made his fortune. Hitherto, bleaching textiles involved boiling them in a weak alkali solution and then exposing them to sunlight for months, a process that was both time-consuming and expensive. In 1799, with the assistance of Macintosh, Tennant created a bleaching powder from the chemical reaction between chlorine and dry slaked lime.

The powder, effective, relatively cheap, and easily transportable, was commercially successful, transforming the textile industry and, by the 1830s, making the St Rollox chemical works the largest in Europe. Bleaching powder was used industrially to bleach cloth and paper well until the 1920s.

Macintosh soon spotted another opportunity from another seemingly unwanted waste material, the tar sludge created from the manufacture of coal gas used to power the new-fangled gas lighting that lit up public thoroughfares and the homes of the well-to-do in the early 19th century. In 1819 he contracted with the Glasgow Gas Company to buy all their waste product. They were only too happy to oblige.

Charles discovered that he could distil the tar to produce a volatile, oily liquid hydrocarbon mixture known as naphtha. While it could be used for flares, Charles continued to experiment to see whether naphtha could be used for even more useful and profitable purposes. His light-bulb moment came when he discovered that it could dissolve India-rubber.

By pressing a solution of India-rubber dissolved in naphtha between two layers of fabric rather like a sandwich, Charles found that the rubber interior formed a barrier that was almost completely water resistant and yet left the fabric flexible enough to be used in a garment. It did not take long for a man with his finely attuned commercial acumen to realise that for those exposed to the vagaries of the British weather a coat that was truly waterproof was manna from heaven.

On June 17, 1823, Charles received a patent (No 4804) for a process “for rendering the texture of hemp, flax, wool, cotton, silk, and also leather, paper and other substances impervious to water and air”. Reports suggest that the first coat made from Charles’ material was sold in Glasgow on October 12, 1823, less than four months after he had received his patent.

Lost Word Of The Day (22)

With the hour going forward an hour overnight, there was less chance of stumbling around murklins, one of the many beautiful and evocative words and phrases we have lost along the way as the English language continues to shape itself and evolve. Used as an adverb, it meant “in the dark”. Time to shine a light on it, methinks.

Lost Word Of The Day (21)

There is a lot to be said for having a placid, easy-going nature. It makes life so much easier. Up until well into the 19th century someone who was easy to appease might have been described as being mulcible. It was derived from the Latin verb mulcere meaning to soothe by way of the adjective mulcibilis.

An example of its usage comes from Memoirs of Robert Easton, Comedian 1774 – 1810 by George Raymond (1844). “But now, partly through the ineffable quality of rich comedy. Which was so much the constitution of Elliston, and partly from Miss Warren’s mulcible nature, which, to do her justice, was unrivalled, and all of this aided by the pacific disposition of the clerk of the “long-room”, peace was restored”.

Good for Miss Warren!

Death Of Jezebel

A review of Death of Jezebel by Christianna Barand – 230303

There is so much to talk about Death of Jezebel, the fourth in Brand’s Inspector Cockrill series, originally published in 1948 and now reissued as part of the inestimable British Library Crime Classics series, that a simple 700 or so word review cannot possibly do the book justice. It is a compelling read, a complex plot involving impossible murders in a variation of a locked room, misdirection galore, and two detectives trying to get the better of each other.

Brand takes the unusual step right at the outset of listing her principal characters, noting that three will receive death threats and one will be the murderer. She then, in a prologue, expounds the casus belli, the suicide out in Malaya of Johnny Wise, driven to distraction when he finds his fiancé, the flighty Perpetua Kirk, in a compromising position, have been intoxicated and set up by Isabel Drew and Earl Anderson. The three implicated in Johnny’s suicide each receive death threats and, assuming that the prospective murderer did not send one to themselves, the culprit, if there are any murders, can only be one of Edgar Port aka Sugar-Daddy, Brian Bryan from Sumatra, Susan Betchley aka Bitchley, and George Exmouth.

The action takes place at the Elysian Hall, venue for the Homes for Heroes Exhibition, the centre piece of which is a pageant, masterminded by Port and in which all seven protagonists are involved. The set is a castle tower and a courtyard. The rear to the stage is locked during the performance and everything that happens at the front is witnessed by the audience which includes Inspecter Cockrill, up to London from Kent ostensibly for a conference but who has been contacted by a frightened Perpetua.

The first death in the book is that of Isabel, who falls out of the tower having been strangled. I like a good fenestration. It seems impossible to see who murdered her, never mind how it was achieved. To add to the sense of mystery both Earl and Perpetua are missing, Perpetua found later by Brian Bryan locked in an outer room, and Earl later found to have been murdered too, when his head is delivered to the unfortunate Perpetua in a parcel.

Elysian Hall is not on Cockrill’s patch and the lead investigator is Inspector Charlesworth of the Yard, another of Brand’s series detectives. The two are chalk and cheese and while Charlesworth magnanimously allows Cockrill to lend a hand, there is an undercurrent of faint animosity between the two, each vying to prove that their methodology, Charlesworth representing the new school and Cockrill the old, is superior and the former never letting the latter forget that he made a mess of an earlier case. This adds some humour to the investigation and it is gratifying to see that Cockrill comes through with flying colours, even if he seemed to have made a potentially fatal error at the end.

Much of the investigation centres, naturally, upon how Isabel was defenestrated and theories are banded backwards and forwards, some more convincing than others and each, for a moment at least, shining guilt on one of the four suspects. At times it appears that they might have acted in collusion and at one point all four decide to confess separately to both murders. With such a small suspect list it is to Brand’s credit that she can keep the dramatic tension going for so long.

I did work out the culprit, thanks to a clever bit of wordplay, but it took me much longer than it normally does to get to the whodunit. As to the howdunit, even having reread the relevant passages several times, I am not convinced that there would have been enough time for the culprit to pull off Isabel’s murder in the way described, but that is a mere quibble.

The Far East campaign has often been described as the forgotten theatre of war and Brand’s text brings home the horrors of the Japanese invasion, wiping out families, records and causing untold psychological horrors. Pont’s wife is in a home after a nervous breakdown suffered as a result of the traumas of the invasion and the protagonists are each in their own way scarred by their experiences there, not just by the suicide of Wise. This is just another fascinating insight in a fabulous book.

For me, it had just the right mix of absurdity, clever plotting, and complex mystery. My only serious criticism is that her characterisation is not strong, with perhaps only Cockrill coming alive on the page. Still, you cannot have everything.

Scone Of The Week

Belated congratulations to Sarah Merker from Isleworth who recently completed her mission of tasting a scone at each of the UK’s 244 National trust sites that have catering facilities. Having become a member in 2013 she set herself a goal to ensure that she got full value from her membership fee. She reviewed and rated each on a blog[1]

She certainly got her teeth stuck into the task, an odyssey that took on special poignancy after her husband, Peter, died of cancer in 2018. The final scone was tasted in Northern Ireland, at the Giant’s Causeway, one she described as “fresh, warm and absolutely delicious”.

The contentious question with scones is jam first or cream first. From the illustrations, it looks as though she puts the jam on first and then the cream, the Cornish way. Good to know!

[1] https://www.nationaltrustscones.com/

Death And The Maiden

A review of Death and the Maiden by Gladys Mitchell – 230301

Not all of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley series are available in a format priced at a level to ensure that the kids’ inheritance is not seriously depleted. Perhaps it is a ruse by the publishers to ensure that the reader’s patience and sanity is not too sorely tested as Mitchell, to be charitable, can be a perplexing writer, one willing to bend the conventions of detective fiction to a point when they creak at the seams. Nevertheless, I am trying to read what are available in chronological order, but found to my horror a little while ago that I had overlooked her twentieth, originally published in 1947. Poor sleuthing on my part but the error has now been rectified.

In many ways Death and the Maiden epitomises Mitchell’s approach to crime fiction. There is no doubting that it is beautifully and elegantly written with no little wit, some memorable scenes and many a pithy sentence that stick long in the memory. It is an active book with Mrs Bradley and her accomplices – the book sees a reunion of the Three Musketeers, Laura, Kitty, and Alice, whom we met in Laurels are Poison – shuttling back and forth between London and Winchester and the south coast. And then there is the Naiad, reports of the sighting of whom brings the four suspects to Winchester in the first place.

The book is undoubtedly a love poem to the beautiful city of Winchester and the River Itchen, Mitchell’s descriptions especially of the water meadows hitting a level of lyricism that confirm her at her best as a fine, technical writer. They are a delight to read. However, she also imbues her books with a somewhat, at least by modern standards, a wonky moral compass. When this book is boiled down it is about the brutal and senseless murder of two youths, but the horror associated with the deaths seems undercooked, playing a distinctive second fiddle to the more labyrinthine enquiries into what was the grand plan behind deaths of two from the lower order begotten of feckless parents that were seen as little more than dress rehearsals for the real thing.

Avarice, sheer hatred, and an overpowering protectiveness are tried and tested motives for murder, but vanity, an unattractive quality for sure, or, at least, its pricking, is hard to imagine as something which would drive someone to commit murder most foul. The determination of one of the protagonists to pin the blame on one of the other suspects leads to the case against them being fatally undermined but justice of sorts is served offstage when the two are gripped in a fatal and titanic struggle. Among the clues are a pair of sandals, each found in separate locations, a Panama hat, a hole used by tramps, and a pair of gloves, while a large geranium plant leads to the clearing of the suspect whom the police have charged with the first boy’s murder.

The suspects are Edris Tidson, who has left Tenerife where he grew bananas so seriously financially embarrassed that he has to live off his cousin, Priscilla Carmody, but he has high hopes of coming into an inheritance, his wife, Crete, and to complete the foursome who come to stay in Winchester as Tidson hunts the Naiad, Miss Carmody’s sulky niece, Connie. Only one can have murdered the boys and whilst it is fairly obvious whodunnit, Mitchell does her best to hide the clues with a shoal of, given the book’s freshwater fishing leitmotif, red trout.

While the mystery itself might not live long in the memory, the episode of the four black eyes will. There is a dead dog, dunkings in the river, the redoubtable Laura, who snares a fiancé in the shape of Inspector Gavin, skinny dipping, secret passages and priest holes, a ghost dressed as a nun who squeaks, escapades on rooftops and much more. It is great fun and Mitchell is on form. For all its oddities and imperfections, it is almost the perfect Mitchell story.

Buried For Pleasure

A review of Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin – 230227

If you enjoy your murders laced with humour and not a little farce, as I do, then Robert Bruce Montgomery, who wrote under the pseudonym of Edmund Crispin is an author not to be missed. Buried for Pleasure, which takes its rather incongruous title from a line of a traditional refrain, “Buried on Thursday, buried for pleasure”, is the sixth in his series featuring amateur sleuth and Oxford professor of English Literature and Language, Gervase Fen. It was originally published in 1948 and is a riot. The good news is that the final three novels in the series have just been reissued.

I got the sense that Fen was eager to give vent to his comedic and absurdist spirit and that the murder mystery, which is well worked and satisfying in itself, is but one of the delights to be savoured in the book. No po-faced, scrupulously litany of every avenue pursued by the sleuth à la Freeman Wills Crofts here. Fen’s investigative style is as impressionistic as is his approach to life in general and to politics. Astonishingly, as a break from writing a definitive volume about Langland he puts himself forward as an independent candidate at a by-election in Norfolk. His approach to electioneering under the direction of his agent, the raffish Captain Watkyns, is suitably eccentric and when it looks as though victory is there for him to take he tries to sabotage his chances with a speech that epitomises the attitudes of politicians and their electorate in terms that are as true today as they were, presumably, then. It is one of the highlights of the book.

But there is so much more. Fen stays at the local pub, The Fish Inn, whose landlord is systematically demolishing it, although he thinks he is making improvements. Inevitably, the pub falls down at the end of the book. Amongst its delights is a large painting which the locals spend hours discussing and arguing over its nautical subject matter. Then there is the non-doing pig, one of the funniest of Crispin’s animal creations, a pig that eats everything but steadfastly refuses to put weight on. The rector is haunted by a poltergeist who assaults him and there is an inmate from the local mental asylum on the loose whose penchants include exhibitionism, a glove fetish, and thinking he is Woodrow Wilson. Glorious stuff.

As to the murder mystery, Mrs Lambert, she of a racy past, was being blackmailed. She paid the first demand but upon receipt of the second, goes to the police. Within twelve hours she receives a box of chocolates which have been poisoned. Fen bumps into an old Scotland Yard acquaintance, Busy, masquerading as Captain Crawley. He informs the Oxford sleuth that he is investigating the circumstances of Mrs Lambert’s death undercover as something in the circumstances does not quite gell.

Within short order, a young woman also staying at the pub has stepped out in front of a noisy lorry and is seriously injured. When it appears she is about to regain consciousness, someone breaks into the hospital and tries to give her a shot of insulin, although the attack is foiled. Bussy, who believes he is on to something, asks Fen to meet him at a hut on the golf course at midnight. When Fen gets there, he finds that Busy has been murdered.

Fen is assisted in his investigations by Wolfe from the local police and Humbleby from the Yard. The clues are all there and the plot is not complex but Crispin’s art is to immerse the reader in a wealth of comedic episodes that it is difficult to keep the wood firmly in view for all the trees. The ending is a little abrupt and the culprit, if you have been lulled by the ludicrousness of the scenarios Crispin has conjured up, might come as a surprise, but it is there for all to see.

Even the car chase and the eventual demise of the culprit is hilarious, but Crispin has not done with his reader yet. Fen’s electoral blushes are spared thanks to a technicality in the accounting of election expenses. At least the sanctity of the ballot box and the electoral process was respected in those days.

This is the perfect antidote to a police procedural. The other three in the series are already on my TBR file.