Bruce Beckham's Blog

Ink well used

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Of course, a masterpiece of writing – and how did Jane Austen do it, in 1814 with just a quill pen and parchment? No spell-check or Grammarly, no instant thesaurus, no cut and paste. The technical task of organising 160,000 words and hanging together a coherent narrative is a minor miracle in itself.

It is a slow-moving story in which little happens, but whose tendrils creep insidiously into your subconscious and draw you into the world of Mansfield Park, leaving you always pleased to return after a day of alternative reality. Before you know it, you are back rooting for Fanny, the poor relation adopted into the wealth and privilege of her uncle’s Northamptonshire estate.

Shy and retiring, a bud the idea of whose ‘coming out’ is overlooked by county society, Fanny blooms into a most desirable rose – though her morals are never in danger of corruption – and her strength of character shines through; not least when she resists an arranged marriage and suffers the almost intolerable disapprobation of the entire household.

The novel is a wonderful exposition of the life and times of the landed gentry of the early 19th Century; it conveys a deep sense of place and of the customs and mores of the upper classes. Though in this latter respect I felt, if not exactly a plot-hole, then at least a bump in the road. I shall avoid a spoiler, but if you have read Mansfield Park, you might agree that the climactic ‘trauma’ comes with too little pitch-rolling, somewhat out of the blue and therefore seemingly out of character.

But read it.




View all my reviews

Disconnected

The Slip-Carriage Mystery by Lynn Brock

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is certainly one of the more challenging Golden Age mysteries that I have come across. Published in 1928 and authored by Irish-born ‘Lynn Brock’ it is the fourth of seven Colonel Wyckham Gore novels. The protagonist sleuth is a partner in a London law firm.

On a foggy winter’s night, a prominent industrialist is found stabbed to death in his first-class compartment of a slip carriage in the siding of a provincial railway yard. A year later, the murder remaining unsolved, Gore is charged by the Government to investigate the crime. So far, so good.

The book comprises two distinct halves. In the first, Gore reads through reams of witness statements; in the second, he gains a position undercover at the late industrialist’s country estate. These might almost be two separate books, and I found the profusion of detail in each difficult to reconcile.

Moreover, in both content and style, the narrative is highly disjointed – and, frankly, I think I would need to read it at least once more to absorb and understand exactly what went on. When I finally reached the denouement, it could have been transplanted from another book, and I would have believed it.

Searching for plus points, like all Golden Age novels, it provides an accidental insight into the customs and mores of its time – and, indeed, on the latter aspect it perhaps surprises, in not shying away from shootings, poisonings, illicit affairs and drug dealing!




View all my reviews

Series has potential

The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I came across The Man in the Queue on the dust jacket of an old Agatha Christie edition, and thought I should give it a try, the author being a contemporary of the ‘Queen of Crime’ – and the novel being published in 1929.

It is generally well written and enjoyable, at least in its account of times and places, largely post-WW1 London and the Scottish Highlands – which as a Caledonian resident and long-time explorer I found accurately depicted.

I understand there are five Inspector Grant mysteries, and here he emerges rather slowly from the shadows. He has a reputation among his colleagues for ‘flair’ – although Sherlock Holmes sets a high bar in this department.

The story features a victim, Albert Sorrell – as per the title – stabbed and left to die unnoticed, whilst still standing, pressed into a packed theatre queue. Fellow bystanders are quickly exonerated, and a hue-and-cry goes up for a man seen arguing with Sorrell, who turns out to be his erstwhile business associate and flatmate, Gerald Lamont.

The closer Grant gets to his quarry, the more his doubts creep in – and these are amplified upon arrest. Lamont protests his innocence. Grant must return to earlier clues overlooked, despite that his superiors regard Lamont as bang to rights.

To say more will reveal the outcome – but I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that the plot does leave a lot to be desired. There are a couple of great leaps where disbelief must be suspended (such as the murder itself), some improbable coincidences (characters with identical initials), and – more substantially – I can’t recall another whodunit that contains such an extensive red herring. It pads out into a novel what is, on reflection, really a novella.

I guess it can take a few attempts to get the hang of the plotting method, and I shall certainly give the next in the series a go, in the hope of a more satisfying mystery.




View all my reviews

'Golden Age' classic

The Mystery at Stowe by Vernon Loder

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I came across the prolific Belfast-born John Haslette Vahey advertised on the dust jacket of an old copy of Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train. As a Golden Age contemporary of Christie, he published 22 crime novels between 1928-1938 under the penname ‘Vernon Loder’. Plenty to get one’s teeth into!

The Mystery at Stowe is the first of these, although as far as I could glean, there is no ‘hero’ detective, and if anything I found it difficult to identify a clear protagonist in this work.

For the most part it is a tidily written, tightly constructed traditional mystery, the archetypal country house murder. A well-intentioned benefactor gathers together an upper-middle-class crowd, and a poison dart from a wall-mounted trophy blowpipe does the ill deed.

The victim is the wife in a rumoured love triangle, and her female explorer rival becomes the chief suspect. Out of the blue from Africa, enter a long-estranged suitor (not universally welcomed), bent on proving the police wrong.

So far, so good. The narrative keeps the locus tight, and the police make steady progress. But … I had forgotten one thing … the ‘rules’ of the Detection Club: anything goes!

Authors were invited to ‘cheat’ by concocting a practically implausible but theoretically possible modus operandi – indeed, it seemed the more contrived the better. In achieving the unfathomable whodunit, no amount of jiggery-pokery was off limits!

All well and good, but a rather unsatisfying climax for the reader who seeks a credible scenario.




View all my reviews

First Class

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think this was my third reading of The Mystery of the Blue Train and, as ever with such Christie revisitations (there being 66 works), I had no recall whatsoever of the perpetrator of the crime.

This made it all the more frustrating, as I tried unsuccessfully to spot the clues – and, frankly, I don’t think Hercule Poirot spotted them either. I reckon the author presented him with some sneaky snippets of inside information; and even he admitted that: “unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective”. I can’t see that washing in a job interview.

Agatha Christie was quoted as saying that she would write most of a novel and then choose the least likely perpetrator. If this were true, then it must have involved a lot of backtracking. And it shows. I bumped over a good half dozen poorly filled plot-holes, and others that became apparent with hindsight. I think she quite simply created workarounds to explain the improbable – for instance, in this book, the unlikely disfigurement of the victim, merely to explain away a minor inconvenient detail. Cumulatively, these little ‘cheats’ undermine the credibility of the storyline.

I have concluded that an ingenuous approach is best; sit back, relax and enjoy the journey. Certainly, this is literally a journey – and it paints a pleasing picture of upper-class life, lived between London, Paris and the French Riveria during the late 1920s. Penned almost a century ago, it is in its way a cosy piece of historical fiction. And there is Poirot in his pomp.

I expect I’ll read it again.



View all my reviews

Not over the moon

Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I devoured the first five William Boyd novels and somehow lost touch; yet I found them variously remarkably authentic and laugh-out-loud funny, and always compelling. As our street book group’s latest choice, therefore, I was pleased to reconnect … until I began reading.

It’s hard to believe this 1960s spy story was written by the same author as A Good Man in Africa or An Ice Cream War. The narrative is riddled with non-sequiturs, major and minor, characters waver in their consistency, and there are plot holes that Agatha Christie would be proud of, as implausible means of sneaking past awkward explanations.

The words on each page read pretty well, so as a group we tried to analyse what was missing from the big picture. The consensus was that, while as a reader you accept you are rooting for the protagonist, this story lacks a clear reason as to WHY you should do so. To what end are you hanging onto Gabriel’s coattails?

Is it the resolution of his childhood trauma, of the book’s title? Or that he will become a competent secret agent? Or that he will pull the beguiling older woman who gives him orders?

We didn’t know.

One member found Gabriel’s continual anticipation of sex with successive females a little disconcerting, and there were one or two toe-curling descriptions.

Another remarked, did we really need to know each time he urinated?

Perhaps enough said.




View all my reviews

Revelations

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I was gifted a superb cloth-bound collector’s edition of this book, and was soon struck by several revelations, the first being that I had never actually read it!

So many screen adaptations are there of ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ that somewhere along the line my subconscious erroneously made up its own mind on this matter, so to speak.

The second was that it is barely a novella, at around the 25,000-word mark. It is considerably larger than life.

Next … it is not set in Edinburgh! Living here in the Scottish capital, five minutes’ walk from the Rest & Be Thankful (featured in Kidnapped), and ten as the crow flies from Stevenson’s former home in the New Town, it came as a surprise to discover that his most celebrated story actually plays out in Victorian London.

Fourth. Jekyll is big and Hyde is small. That said, what the latter lacks in stature he makes up for in malevolence. Indeed, the evil of Hyde, and his shadowy presence, are what feed the plot and make the book a compelling page-turner.

Even in its brevity it succeeds in conveying the progressive agony of Jekyll’s drug-induced transformation to his alter ego, and his horror that he is powerless to resist the creeping tentacles of addiction.

The structure of the narrative is unconventional. There is a protagonist of sorts, Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer who presents the case almost as a documentary, relying in large part on correspondence left under seal should the worst occur.

In some respects, I actually found the climax a little unsatisfying. I shan’t elaborate, in case, like me, it will be fresh to you. And I would have liked more biographical detail; for example, Edward Hyde arrives fully formed, with little reference to a back story, or even the origin of his name.

Regardless, it feels like a great piece of literary heritage, and I enjoyed taking my time, reading just a few pages each night. There cannot be many such abridged works that have so left their mark (perhaps Of Mice and Men, and The Turn of the Screw).

And in the hall of famous epigrams, its walls lined with the likes of a ‘Catch 22 Situation’ or ‘Big Brother is Watching’, arguably the ‘Jekyll & Hyde Personality’ takes pride of place.




View all my reviews

Double jeopardy

Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Billed on the front of the first edition as “A love story with detective interruptions”, Busman’s Honeymoon is the eleventh and final Lord Peter Wimsey novel and was published in 1937.

It charts Wimsey’s marriage to crime novelist Harriet Vane, rescued by him from the gallows (three books previous), and their unconventional honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Harriet’s native Hertfordshire, impetuously purchased as a nostalgic wedding gift by Wimsey.

Fleeing their reception to avoid the paparazzi – and arriving after dark to find Talboys locked and barred – the new couple finally gain entry with the help of mystified neighbours and retire to bed. Next morning they discover former owner William Noakes dead in the cellar with his head bashed in.

Detective interruptions ensue.

The crime proves to be from the Agatha Christie School of Complicated and Improbable Murders. As one contemporary notice stated, if the killer needed that much help from Providence, he was in the wrong business!

The majority of the narrative concerns the relationship between Wimsey and Harriet – both suffer feelings of inadequacy, and the novel charts their troubled journey through their insecurities by the vehicle of the plot.

There is a rather disjointed ending, when the newlyweds travel to the Wimsey country seat in Norfolk, modelled I should say on Holkham Hall. Eccentric characters enter the tale for no obvious reason, and it rather fizzles out with Lord Peter casting doubts over his future as a sleuth.

While I largely enjoyed the book, I felt it suffered from the very claim made on the cover; that is to say, the two quite disparate strands did not comfortably interweave and maybe were stories worthy of independent telling.




View all my reviews

Thought provoking

The Mind Readers by Margery Allingham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is Margery Allingham’s last self-completed novel, number eighteen in the Albert Campion series, released in 1965. The first, The Crime at Black Dudley was published in 1929 and the author held that her gentleman sleuth was the age of the year, which puts him close to retirement in this adventure.

For the most part it was an enjoyable read, though anachronistic in that its Golden Age inter-war style jarred with the subject matter of Cold War espionage and the advent of modern technology.

Indeed, the plot is more of a spy story than a whodunit, as Campion (now officially it seems on the payroll of MI5) battles a mysterious adversary over a top-secret device that harnesses the powers of extra-sensory perception. The gadget works better for children and somehow his two young nephews have become embroiled through their public school. Added jeopardy arrives as one of them goes missing.

There is an excellent scene at a research station on the lonely Essex marshes where Campion finds himself cornered by a ruthless assassin. He quickly realises that at his age he is no longer in any condition to fight his way to safety.

This really ought to be the climax of the novel, but there ensues a lengthy information dump, like the unravelling of a tangle of wool of different colours, that really ought to have been carefully woven throughout the story itself.




View all my reviews

Glasgow's underbelly

Handstands in the Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival by Janey Godley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Our newest street book group read, the late Glaswegian comedienne Janey Godley’s autobiography. I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author, which I would say is the only way to do it.

She recounts her upbringing in Shettleston, a tough district in Glasgow’s East End, her survival of deprivation, discrimination and sexual abuse, her coming of age and marriage into a gangster family, and her life as a young mother running a hard-drinking corner bar with its backcloth of street fighting, hard drugs and prostitution.

On the one hand the tale is a bottomless pit of despair, domestic violence and manipulation, but on the other a beacon of hope, of ephemeral joy found in chronic adversity, and incalculable fortitude.

Janey Godley’s grippingly honest narration is nothing short of brilliant, and her talent for the Glasgow vernacular makes the graphic profanity that peppers the dialogue sound not in the least gratuitous. (But it does contain more swear words than any other book I have read.)




View all my reviews