Martin Fone's Blog, page 94

The Fashion In Shrouds

A review of The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham – 230211

My favourite character in Allingham’s Campion series is his gentleman’s gentleman, former burglar Magersfontein Lugg, who in this tenth book in the series, originally published in 1938, is engaged in a course of self-improvement, much to his employer’s amusement and disgust. The tables are turned when Lugg, who is busily compiling a compendium of literary quotations to intersperse into his conversation, brings his attention to an obscure literary reference in a letter written by Laurence Stern. This gives Campion to unlock the mystery which veers too close to home for comfort.

When the book opens Campion is visiting his sister, Valentine Ferris, at her workshop in a leading fashion house, anxious to meet actress, Georgia Wells, for whom Val has designed some clothes and the skeleton of whose fiancé, Richard Portland-Smith, who disappeared three years earlier, Campion has just found. Many of the key characters of the book attend the fashion event, including Georgia’s current husband, Raymond Ramillies, Alan Wells, an aircraft designer and beau of Val’s, and Caroline Adamson, a model. The unveiling of the collection is a disaster as the design has been leaked and the finger is pointed at Adamson, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Georgia,

Georgia soon has her claws into Alan Dell, to Val’s annoyance, and Ramillies takes revenge one evening at a restaurant by arriving with Adamson dressed exactly like Georgia. A tense situation is only defused thanks to the efforts of Georgia’s manager, Ferdie Paul. It will probably come as no surprise that Ramillies with a fear of flying, just about to fly off to darkest Africa in a plane designed by Dell, arrives seemingly drunk at the pre-take-off ceremony and is found dead in the plane. Adamson also has an untimely appointment with her maker after failing to make an appointment with Campion to give him some vital information.

Things look bad for Val when Georgia reveals that Val had given her a painkiller which she then passed on to Ramillies, the inference being that she had tried to kill Georgia because they had fallen out over Alan Dell. Campion, determined to protect his sister’s reputation with the police circling, finally understands that Ramillies had been injected with a fatal poison, that Adamson was a blackmailer and that the deaths of those close to Georgia had been orchestrated by an eminence grise for her advantage. With the assistance of his old police friend, Stanislaus Oates and Lugg’s inspiration, Campion tracks down the culprit, although does not have the satisfaction of being there at the death as he had been kidnapped, his head stuck in a gas oven and only rescued in the nick of time.   

It is all good fun and there is a welcome return for Lady Amanda Fitton, last seen in Sweet Danger (1933), who improbably works as an aircraft engineer with Dell and who, to avert an embarrassing situation, announces her engagement to Campion which the amateur sleuth terminates in spectacular style. It is funny, fast moving and while the plot seems to creak with all its complexities at times, it all makes sense in the end.

The book is not without its controversies, though, at least for modern readers. Many keyboard depressions have been made discussing Allingham’s attitude to women who, whilst championing their presence in the workplace, nevertheless subjects them to the chauvinist attitudes that doubtless prevailed at the time. Even Campion ventures to suggest rape as a cure for uptight women. There are also examples of racist and xenophobic attitudes, which might have been par for the course when the book was written.

Readers who are prepared to hold their noses when they encounter such passages will be rewarded by an entertaining, well-plotted story which ranks as one of Allingham’s best. Let’s hope Lugg continues with his attempts to improve himself.

Juggernaut

A review of Juggernaut by Alice Campbell – 230210

Originally published in 1928 and now reissued by Dean Street Press, Juggernaut was the debut novel of Anglo-American crime writer, Alice Campbell. It was an enormous success either side of the Atlantic on its publication and was made into a film in 1936 with Boris Karloff playing the part of the sinister and menacing society doctor, Dr Santorius, and subsequently in 1949 under the title of The Temptress. It is set in Cannes.

This is the third of Campbell’s books that I have read and there is already a discernible pattern, an ingenue from North America trying to make their way in Europe and at the mercy of more worldly-wise Europeans, the odd murder or two and a romance thrown in. As I have said before, her books are the offspring of an encounter between Henry James and Patricia Wentworth.

There is no getting away from the fact that it starts slowly. Campbell has given herself a lot of work setting up the plot, firstly introducing to Esther Rowe who has just arrived in Cannes and is looking for some paid employment, then the gloomy and brooding society doctor, Santorius, and then the Clifford household. It takes some time to bring these elements together, but the reader should hold their nerve, and exhibit some patience as once the action begins, it is both thrilling and psychologically taut.

Inevitably, Esther accepts a position at the Santorius clinic. Celebrating her success, she goes to a swanky restaurant where she overhears a conversation in which a young man tells his companion that he has accepted a job in Argentina, and she clearly does not want him to go. Little does Esther know that she has been introduced to two of the characters that will put her life in danger, Arthur Halliday and Therese Clifford.

Soon afterwards, Santorius announces that he is temporarily closing his clinic to accept a position as full-time physician in the Clifford household, where the successful and wealthy businessman, Sir Charles Clifford, is unwell, suffering from amongst other complaints a bout of typhoid. Esther agrees to join him as a day nurse.

Soon after joining the Clifford household, Esther begins to notice some odd goings on, not least the regular attendance of Halliday who seems to be courting Therese, Sir Charles’ second wife, and Therese’s insistence, despite not paying attention to her husband, that she gives him his daily milk. Santorius, who is keener on research than being a medical practitioner, has been researching into antidotes for typhoid and tetanus seems more than handy with the syringe. After one injection Sir Charles’ health deteriorates and he dies from tetanus.

Soon Esther put two and two together and realises that Sir Charles has been effectively murdered and that Santorius and Therese are in cahoots. This puts her life in danger and she is drugged and incarcerated, only to escape in a dramatic and, perhaps unlikely fashion, to bring matters to a head. Her blossoming romance with Roger, Charles’ son, gives her both moral courage and an ally in a hostile camp.

Juggernaut is an apt title, a machine that once it gets goings, tramples all before it, an appropriate description of not only Santorius but also the book itself, which once it has obtained momentum, there is no stopping it. However, Campbell could be accused of mixed imagery as often she likens the sinister doctor to a python. A cursory knowledge of French is handy as some of the dialogue, especially involving Therese, is in French without translation, an unnecessary attempt at verisimilitude.

It is easy to see why this book was popular and why it made for gripping cinema. In form it is more of an inverted murder mystery as the culprit is evident, the more pertinent questions being why and whether they would be caught. It is well worth reading.

The Northern Lights

Swirling rivers of greenish-blue light against a clear sky, dancing seemingly with a will of their own, sometimes almost static, the Northern Lights (Aurora borealis) are one of nature’s most spectacular displays. For all their beauty, though, they are the product of a violent event high above us, the clash of charged particles from the Sun with the Earth’s magnetic field. 

Solar winds send energised particles from the Sun’s surface, hitting the Earth’s upper atmosphere at speeds of around 45 million mph. Acting as a defensive shield, the Earth’s magnetic field forces the charged particles to move in spirals along the magnetic field lines towards its magnetic poles. Upon hitting the gas atoms and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, they transfer their energy which is transformed into photons.

The colour of the Northern Lights is dependent upon three factors at the time of the collision: the amount of energy held in the solar wind’s electrons, the type of gas atoms and molecules they collide into, and the altitude at which it occurs. A red light is produced when high-energy electrons interact with oxygen at an altitude in excess of 290 kilometres in the ionosphere while the more familiar green light is the result of the impact of low-energy electrons and oxygen at lower altitudes. A collision with nitrogen can produce a blue or red hue and other colours such as pink or purple are created when there is a mix of gases.

As the solar wind particles are funnelled towards the Earth’s magnetic poles, aurorae are most likely to be seen in a circular area around them, in the northern hemisphere, principally around the northern coast of Siberia, Scandinavia, Iceland, the southern tip of Greenland, northern Canada, and Alaska. When solar activity is particularly intense, as at the end of February 2023, they are visible much further south. The southern hemisphere has its own lights, the zone passing mostly over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and are most likely to be seen from land in Tasmania with occasional sightings in southern Argentina and the Falklands.

Aurorae are not intermittent events but happen all the time, a fact brought vividly to life by The Space Weather Prediction Centre’s fascinating interactive forecast of the location and intensity of an aurora in the world over the next thirty to 90 minutes[1]. Whether we see them or not is dependent upon sky conditions and the level of light pollution.

Named Aurora borealis by Galileo in 1619 and explained scientifically by Norwegian physicist, Kristian Birkelan in 1902/3, the Northern Lights have long fascinated mankind, featuring in cave paintings found in South-western France dating to 30,000 BC, and first recorded by an astronomer in the court of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II on a tablet from 567 BC. Absent a rational explanation for their cause, they inspired many myths and superstitions.

For the Vikings, they were the shimmering reflections of the armour of the Valkyries sent by Odin to collect the bodies of the warriors slain in battle, while in Finland fire foxes travelled through the sky so quickly that their tails produced sparks as they brushed the mountains. In northern Sweden the lights, created by shoals of herrings, were a harbinger of a plentiful catch.

Elsewhere they represented the souls of the dead, in Greenland of children who had died in childbirth and in Norway of old maids, while for the Sámi they were to be feared and respected. Provoking them by waving or whistling in their presence ran the risk of being snatched away. In Scotland, the lights, known as “Merry” or “Pretty Dancers, were created by fallen angels and warriors who battled it out in the skies, their drops of blood creating the distinctive red specks on the green heliotrope known as bloodstone.

[1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast

Lost Word Of The Day (14)

Looking for a new word to describe frost? Why not try gelicide? It was defined as meaning frost by Thomas Blount in his Glossographia (1656-81), handily subtitled as a Dictionary Interpreting such Hard Words as are now used. The etymology is fairly clear, from the Latin noun for frost, gelecidium.

Rather like the frost itself, the word soon disappeared.

Lost Word Of The Day (13)

How much has the English language lost as a result in the decline in the familiarity with the classical literature of Ancient Greece and Rome? I began musing on this when I came across the verb gathonise which was used particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe the actions a toady or someone who excels in the art of flattery.

Gnatho was the name of a character in Eunuchus, a play written by or at least attributed to Publius Terentius Afer in the second century BCE. Gnatho was described as a parasitus, someone who would go out of his way to agree with any benefactor, especially if it was worth his while. Terence almost certainly took the character’s name from the Greek word for a jaw, as the character’s modus operandi was to exploit his gift of the gab.

Such characters abound in popular fiction but one of the most recent usages of gnathonise in adjectival format appears in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) when he writes “that Jack’s is somewhat of a gnathonic and parasitic soul, or stomach, all Bideford apple-women know”.

Time for a revival, methinks.

Swan Song – A Modern Comedy

A review of Swan Song by John Galsworthy

Originally published in 1928, Swan Song is the third in Galsworthy’s A Modern Comedy trilogy. While it, just about, stands on its own merits, to get the most out of the book the reader should read the first two books in the trilogy and, especially, the interlude, Passers-By, which he wrote in 1927. In that, Soames takes his daughter, Fleur, along with her devoted, politician husband, Michael Mont, on a world tour to help her get over her first love, Jon Forsyte, who was forced by family pressure to brutally reject her. To Soames’ horror his party bump into Irene, Soames’ first wife, Jon and his new wife, Ann, and it takes all of the old devil’s scheming to prevent the two star-crossed lovers from meeting.

Swan Song opens with the General Strike of 1926 which the upper and middle classes see as an opportunity to pull together and defeat the (rightful) claims of the workers. Mount encourages Fleur to run a canteen to feed the strike-breakers. It is here that she meets Jon once more, the latter having left America for good and volunteered to work as an engine stoker. The sight of Jon is enough to relight the flames of passion in Fleur’s breast and the news of his return to Blighty to cause Soames considerable anxiety.

Fleur, a spoilt brat who reverts to the character we encountered in To Let (the third book in the Forsyte Saga) loses her head, all too willing to abandon her child, Kit, and husband, who has thrown himself into a scheme to improve slums, in pursuit of her first sweetheart. She does everything in her power to engineer meetings with Jon and her passion for him grows and grows until a tumultuous encounter at a spot they favoured when they were initially courting. Jon seems happy to be swept along in this maelstrom of passion, an indication of a certain weakness that had not previously been evident in his previous characterisation, but nonetheless is torn between his first love and his duty to his wife.

All the relatives on the side lines realise that the reawakening of the tempestuous love affair between Soames’ daughter from his second marriage and the son from his wife’s second marriage is fraught with disaster and, in their own ways, do their best to frustrate Fleur’s plans, none more so than Soames who is wracked with worry and despair. Irene, his first wife, remains a ghostly presence throughout the narrative and we do not find out what her attitude is to this revived love affair which she did so much to stop in the first place. Mont has an air of resigned acceptance.

What brings Jon to his senses is Ann’s announcement that she is pregnant and, rather brutally, he sends a note to Fleur telling her he will never see her again, the 1920s equivalent of dumping by text. This second rejection throws Fleur into paroxysms of despair.

Throughout the book there is a sense of matters moving inexorably to a conclusion. Soames is anxious to ensure there is a succession plan in place for handling the trusteeship of the Forsyte fortunes, given his and his faithful retainer’s respective ages, and visits Dorset to track down where the Forsytes first came from. His first love is his art collection which he adds to and makes arrangements to bequeath to the nation.

There is a fine line between comedy and tragedy which Galsworthy traverses with aplomb at the end of the book. It is fitting that Soames’ two obsessions, his almost suffocating love for Fleur and his pride in his art collection, should in their own way contribute to his demise. It seems a fitting end to a man of strong character, a man increasingly out of tune with the modern world, and a man who could not forget and had much to regret.

Galsworthy seems to have recovered his mojo in this book. It is more entertaining than the first two books in the trilogy and gives his leading man, Soames, a fitting send off.

Toilet Of The Week (36)

For lovers of public toilets with a bit of style last Monday (February 20th) was a red-letter day. The glorious Lavatory of the Madeleine (La Madeleine), nestled at the foot of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris’ Eighth Arrondissement, has opened its doors again after being closed for twelve years. Mind you it will cost you €2 to stick your nose in and point Percy at the porcelain.

It is an underground carsey, one of only six in the city, and was built in 1905, inspired by the London toilets of the 1880s and with the aim of providing the public with toilets that were not only useful and had washbasins but were also a thing of beauty and luxurious. It is a testament to the taste and ambition of the Belle Epoque, all wood of the finest quality, varnished mahogany, stained glass windows with flowers, ornate ceramics, brass faucets, and a magnificent shoe polishing chair looking like a throne.

The toilets fell on hard times in the 1990s when what was initially a ladies only loo was transformed to accommodate men, with several of the cabins modified into urinals. It finally closed in March 2011 when it was listed as a historical monument. Due to problems with the site including poor waterproofing, it has taken twelve years to restore this shining example of the Art Nouveau style. There is still more work to be done. The handrail of the staircase has had to be treated to remove lead and several cracks remain to be repaired and the mosaics will not be restored until next year.  

Sadly, the toilets are not accessible to the disabled because of the narrow winding staircase. Nevertheless, a piece of Parisian history is back with us once more.

Death Of An Author

A review of Death of an Author by E C R Lorac – 230209

A new reissue of one of ECR Lorac’s rarest books is a moment to celebrate, especially as it comes with the imprimatur of quality in production as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series. Originally published in 1935, it has been out of print for decades but given the renaissance in the author’s popularity, it is a timely reissue and one sure to delight her fans and add to her growing band of aficionados.

One of the oddities of the book is that it does not feature her usual go-to detective, Robert Macdonald, and perhaps this is a reason why it dropped off the radar screen. Stand-alone books often seem outliers in the canon of a writer who has steadfastly built up a series character. The other major point of difference from Lorac’s normal output is that it is very much of an urban tale. One of the highlights of her usual narrative style is her profound sense of place and her love and appreciation of the countryside and nature in the raw. Whilst there is a foray into the countryside, I missed this side of her writing. A third aspect to the book that is unusual is a sense of humour that pervades her writing, even to the extent of a limerick.

Nevertheless, there was much to enjoy, not least the portrayal of her feisty and somewhat mysterious character, Eleanor Clarke, who is the secretary to the successful and reclusive author, Vivian Lestrange. At his insistence she impersonates him on a visit to his publisher, Andrew Marriott, and at a dinner party he hosts at the insistence of another of the publisher’s successful authors, Michael Ashe.

When the two authors meet, Ashe is astonished that Lestrange is a woman, especially given the style and subject matter of the book, leading to a long and defiant defence of the woman’s role as a writer from the doughty Clarke that sex is neither a determinant of an author’s style or content. It is a finely argued section of the book and looks back at the long legacy of female writers who deemed it necessary to hide under the persona of a man in order to get published.

Clarke’s troubles begin when she finds that she cannot get into Lestrange’s house nor can she rouse his formidable housekeeper, Mrs Fife. After much deliberation she decides to go to the police to report Lestrange’s possible disappearance, something which the local police treat with scepticism. When they finally enter the building, which entails scaling a high wall, they find everything spic and span, no trace of either Lestrange or Fife, the only thing slightly awry being a small round hole in a window.

Investigative duties are undertaken by Inspector Bond of the local police and Chief Inspector Warner of the Yard. Much depends upon how reliable Clarke is, Lorac maintaining the tension by portraying Bond as deeply sceptical while Warner, a more enlightened character, is inclined to believe that she is an innocent victim enmeshed in something she does not really understand but even he, occasionally, waivers in this view. A charred body is found in a deserted country hut, but who is it?

Warner’s investigations reveal that there is a closer link between Ashe and Lestrange than being just two successful authors. There is a back story, rather similar to Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, where the two have reinvented themselves, one to avoid their comeuppance and the other to wreak revenge, but who is really who?

Lorac has spun such a complex web that it takes the fortuitous discovery of a partially charred notebook identifying the victim for Warner eventually to discover the truth. Although it is not her best, even a fair to middling Lorac is worth reading. Let’s hope sales encourage the British Library Publications team to reissue some more.

Death At The President’s Lodging

A review of Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes – 230208

Edinburgh-born John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was a distinguished academic, spending over twenty years at Christ Church, Oxford and writing well-received books on Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. He also had a prolific and successful second career as a crime novelist, writing under the nom de plume of Michael Innes in a literary career that stretched over fifty years. His go-to police detective, Inspector John Appleby, appeared in the majority of his novels, making his debut in Death at the President’s Lodging, originally published in 1936.

Given his academic background, it is unsurprising that Innes chose to set his first novel in the cloistered calm of the groves of academia, in this instance St Anthony’s, a fictional college midway between Oxford and Cambridge. Innes’ first hand knowledge of the workings of a college allow him to give the reader a very precise and fascinating insight into the world of the academic, the tensions and ambitions, thwarted or aspiring, that lurk within the breasts of the fellows.

For a debut novel it is presented with great confidence and subtly and intricately plotted, keeping the reader guessing as to who the murderer is and why the President of the College, Dr Umpleby, was murdered. It is quite literary in tone – Innes is not afraid to show the breadth of his learning in his text – and while he does not develop many of his characters in the way the reader might have hoped for, he overcompensates in both the complexity of the plot and the care in which he explains the resolution of the mystery.

It is a bit of a slow burner with very little action in the conventional sense but once Innes gets into his stride, he delivers a narrative that builds up in pace and tenaciously holds on to the reader. Even as the novel starts, the murder has been committed and the local police Inspector, Dodd, is awaiting the arrival of Appleby of the Yard.

The set up is a variation of a locked room mystery. Dr Umpleby lived in a part of the college grounds that was locked up at night, restricting access to a very few keyholders. The locks had been changed that day and new keys distributed to the keyholders. Only four other fellows lived within the locked compound, but, as is the way with these things, they have seemingly unimpeachable alibis. However, as Appleby digs into the details, he discovers that each of the fellows were wandering around the grounds at some point in the evening of the murder, as well as late night visits to the President and a web of telephone calls. Appleby’s diligent pursuit of each of these clues leads him nearer to the resolution of the mystery.

A complicating factor in his investigations is the actions of three undergraduates who fancy themselves as amateur sleuths. Despite their interventions, they discover a vital clue, that one of the masters, who was thought to be thousands of miles away on an archaeological dig, is in the country in disguise. An emeritus fellow who uses a secret passage to get into and out of the college grounds also helps Appleby, who receives a blow to the head for his pains, work out how ingress and egress into the locked grounds was achieved. A wheelchair and a laundry basket are amongst the unlikely props.

While the commission of the crime requiring the swiftness of thought and speed of action that is beyond mere mortals but possibly within the compass of the finely tuned academic mind seems a tad unlikely, it all makes sense, even if the most diligent reader is unlikely to have pieced all the parts together. Naturally, Dr Umpleby is disliked by his fellow academics and the heart of the animus against him is his fast and loose interpretation of intellectual property. It is ever thus in academia.

Overall, it was an impressive debut, and I will be following Appleby’s adventures with interest.

Dull Or Shiny?

The date of Charles and Julia Hall’s first production of aluminium by electrolysis, February 23, 1886, was significant because in France, Paul Héroult, using the same process to produce aluminium, was quicker off the mark in applying for a patent. When Hall applied for his patent on July 9, 1896, he was sued by Héroult for infringement of the patent granted him on April 23, 1886. Thanks in part to Julia’s testimony, Hall demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction that he had a prior claim.

With a patented process that produced aluminium cheaply and in large quantities, Hall established the Pittsburgh Aluminum Company, later to become Alcoa, which by 1890 was daily producing 250 kilogrammes of the metal. He bequeathed to Alcoa on his death in December 1914 what they regard as their crown jewels, a chest holding the small aluminium pellets produced from his first successful experiment.

The possibilities offered by this lighter, more flexible metal were quickly recognised by inventors and design pioneers. Le Migron, commissioned by Alfred Nobel in 1891, was the first passenger ship with an aluminium hull, while the Hartford Railway Company produced lightweight railway carriages with aluminium seats in 1894. Karl Benz exhibited the first sports car with an aluminium body in Berlin in 1899 and the Wright brothers finally got off the ground with an engine containing aluminium parts.

Manufacturers of household goods also caught the aluminium bug. In 1893 the first mass-produced aluminium kettles were marketed, soon to be followed by frying pans and saucepans, which were lighter and warmed up and cooled down more quickly than their copper and cast-iron predecessors. Aluminium was also seen as a possible alternative to tin foil which, although it had been used since the 18th century to wrap food in while cooking, was expensive to manufacture, rather stiff, and left a bitter, metallic taste.

Robert Victor Neher’s invention of a continuous rolling process to produce thin strips of aluminium foil encouraged him to open the world’s first aluminium rolling plant in the Swiss town of Kreuzlingen in 1910. Bern-based chocolate manufacturer, Tobler, was an early adopter, wrapping their confectionary, including the distinctive triangular Toblerone, in aluminium foil from 1911. Maggi followed suit, using it the next year to package soups and stock cubes.

Aluminium foil soon demonstrated its superiority. It was a much more effective conductor of heat and electricity than tin foil, able to withstand very high temperatures, thus preventing foodstuffs from drying out in the oven. Once the food had been cooked, foil extended its life by offering an effective barrier against light, oxygen, and moisture.

Outside the kitchen it is used by pharmaceutical companies to package drugs and by food manufacturers to produce aseptic packaging which allows perishable goods to be stored without refrigeration. By the mid-20th century aluminium foil, of which Britain is one the largest consumers in the world, had almost completely replaced tin, although, confusingly, it is sometimes still called tin foil.

One of aluminium foil’s most distinctive visual features is a consequence of its manufacturing process. To meet the standards of ISO 7271:2011, the sheets must be between 0.006 and 0.2 millimetres thick and are milled in layers, a process which involves the application of heat and tension to stretch the foil to the required thickness. As a single strip is likely to break during the process, two layers are milled together and then separated.

Where the sides of the two layers have been in contact with each other they develop a matt or dull finish while the outer layers retain a gloss or shiny appearance. However, the performance of the foil is the same, irrespective of which side forms the outside of the wrapping. It seems it is simply a question of aesthetics. When it comes to non-stick foil, though, only one side is treated with the non-stick coating and food must be placed on the side marked “non-stick”.

In future, I will wrap my food in foil to reflect my disposition; shiny side out if I am happy and dull side out if I am down. You never know, it might catch on.