Category: Mystery

Two more Nicholas Blake mysteries: Head of a Traveller and The Dreadful Hollow

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After reading my first Nicholas Blake novel last year, I knew I wanted to read more. Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis and the name under which his series of Nigel Strangeways mysteries was published. With plenty to choose from (sixteen in the series in total) I found myself picking up two in quick succession, so I am writing about both of them here.

Head of a Traveller (published in 1949) is the ninth in the series. At the beginning of the book, private investigator Nigel Strangeways is staying with a friend in Oxfordshire and is introduced to the poet Robert Seaton, who lives at the nearby estate of Plash Meadows with his wife and two children. Nigel is enchanted by their beautiful house and intrigued to hear the history of how it came to be in Robert’s possession. A few months later he is summoned back to Plash Meadows under less happy circumstances: a headless body has been found in the river just upstream from the Seatons’ house. Superintendent Blount has been called in to investigate and Nigel, who has worked with Blount before, decides to make some unofficial enquiries of his own.

This is a complex mystery with a surprisingly simple solution. My first assumptions proved to be right, but I was misled by discussions of alibis and timescales, mistaken identities and who could be protecting whom. I enjoyed following the investigations of Nigel and Blount, who have a great partnership and complement each other perfectly, but they were certainly making things more complicated than they needed to be!

Bearing in mind that this is a book from the 1940s, there are some attitudes which could be offensive to modern day readers, particularly surrounding the character of Finny Black, who is a dwarf, and also regarding the rape of another character ten years earlier. These views are not at all uncommon in books from this era, but are still a little bit uncomfortable to read. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book – not as much as The Corpse in the Snowman, but it still kept me entertained for a while. And as a poet himself, Nicholas Blake writes convincingly about Robert Seaton and his work, and has some interesting thoughts to share.

Now, The Dreadful Hollow, which was first published in 1953. I’ve had a terrible time with that title…I keep wanting to call it The Deathly Hallows, although there’s nothing remotely Harry Potter-ish about the book! The title is actually taken from a poem by Tennyson (“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”). Anyway, this is the tenth book in the Nigel Strangeways series and in this one, Nigel is commissioned by the financier Sir Archibald Blick to investigate a number of anonymous letters received by the residents of Prior’s Umborne, a small village in Dorset. On his arrival, Nigel is quickly able to identify some possible suspects: Blick’s two sons, the eccentric, reclusive Stanford and the serious, hardworking Charles; Rosebay Chantmerle and her sister Celandine, who has been confined to a wheelchair for many years; and the sinister, religiously obsessed Daniel Durdle.

It doesn’t take Nigel long to solve the mystery of the poison pen letters – or to think that he has, anyway – but everything is thrown into doubt again when a man’s dead body is found in the quarry. Are the murderer and the letter writer the same person or are these two separate crimes?

Again, this is a very complicated mystery and I needed to concentrate to follow Nigel’s deductions and to keep the sequence of events straight in my mind. I thought it was easy to spot the culprit (or culprits, as I’m not saying whether there were one, two or more of them) but the interest is in watching Nigel – and Blount, who arrives in Prior’s Umborne after the murder is committed – try to gather the evidence to prove it. This is my least favourite of the Strangeways novels I’ve read so far, though, and that’s partly because I found the characters in this one so unlikeable. It’s quite normal for a crime novel to have some unlikeable characters, of course, but I really did think the Blicks, the Chantmerles and the Durdles were all particularly unpleasant!

The final chapter is excellent with the tension building as the story moves towards a dramatic conclusion and this helps to make up for the novel’s weaker points. Although I didn’t like either of these books as much as the first Strangeways mystery I read, I think I’ll probably read more of them at some point.

Death in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye

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I read this novel from 1956, the third in M.M. Kaye’s Death In… series, in the final days of February and it provided some welcome respite from the freezing temperatures and heavy snow we were experiencing in my part of the country. Lovely, evocative passages like this one took me away from the cold for a while and into the warmth and beauty of Cyprus:

Olive groves, the tree trunks so gnarled and twisted with age that some of them must surely have seen the Crusaders come and go, stood dark against the glittering expanse of blue, and below them the little town of Kyrenia lay basking in the noonday sun like a handful of pearls and white pebbles washed up by the sea.

The setting is not as idyllic as it seems, however: there appears to be a murderer on the loose – someone has already killed once and could kill again. The first death occurs on board the S.S. Orantares on which twenty-one-year-old Amanda Derington is a passenger. Amanda has accompanied her uncle on a business trip to North Africa and has suggested that she could visit Cyprus while he continues his tour of the various offices of the Derington empire. Horrified at the thought of his niece travelling alone, Uncle Oswin arranges for her to be chaperoned on the journey and to stay at the home of one of his managers on her arrival.

Setting sail from Egypt to Cyprus, Amanda gets to know Alistair Blaine and his wife Julia, an unhappy, bitter woman who accuses every other female on the ship of trying to steal her husband. When Julia collapses and dies in Amanda’s cabin after drinking a glass of her favourite lemon water, only Amanda knows that it was not suicide. Taking the advice of her fellow passenger Steve Howard, Amanda keeps her thoughts to herself, and when she finds a bottle of poison hidden behind her pillow she conceals the evidence from the police. After all, she herself would be the prime suspect and could find it difficult to prove her innocence. Unfortunately, this decision puts her in danger of a different kind when they reach Cyprus, where her knowledge of the crime could make her the killer’s next target…

Death in Cyprus is a great murder mystery with plenty of possible suspects. Apart from Amanda herself, I could imagine every one of them being the murderer and my suspicion fell on one, then another, then another, then switched back to the first. Could it be Persis Halliday, the American romantic novelist who has come to Cyprus to look for inspiration? What about Glenn Barton, the Derington employee who was supposed to be Amanda’s host in Nicosia but had to cancel because his wife had left him? Claire Norman, who seems to know far too much about everyone else’s business? Or Lumley Potter, the spiritual, bohemian artist who is Glenn’s wife’s new lover? The eventual solution to the mystery is quite logical and I feel as though I should have worked it out, but I had allowed myself to get too distracted by red herrings!

As this is a book from the 1950s, some of the attitudes are a bit dated, particularly regarding a romance which develops between Amanda and one of the group she travels to Cyprus with (I won’t tell you who he is, even though it’s very obvious from early in the book). There’s a definite sense that he views Amanda as a helpless woman who needs the protection of a man – although, to be fair, she gives that impression herself with her habit of repeatedly putting herself into dangerous situations from which she needs to be rescued, wandering off on her own in lonely places and venturing into strangers’ houses late at night! Of course, Amanda’s reckless actions do have a purpose because they are the reason for most of the suspense in the story.

I love the Death In… novels. I’ve read three so far and enjoyed them all, especially this one and Death in Kashmir. The books all stand alone – they have different settings and different characters – but I have been reading them in publication order anyway, which means Death in Kenya will be next for me.

There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes

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Having enjoyed two of Michael Innes’ Inspector Appleby novels last year – Hamlet, Revenge! and Lament for a Maker – I was drawn to this one next, because I liked the title and thought it would be appropriate as we’ve had some snowy weather here recently. Actually, although the novel is set during the Christmas period and there are a few mentions of snow, it doesn’t have a particularly wintry feel and could be read at any time of year.

It begins with our narrator, Arthur Ferryman, arriving at a family gathering at Belrive Priory, the home of his cousin, Basil Roper. The priory has been in the family for generations and nobody feels a closer affinity with its ancient stone walls, formal gardens and soot-blackened ruins than Arthur does. It comes as a shock, then, when he hears that Basil is planning to sell the estate to finance an expedition. As more members of the Roper family descend, along with various cousins and friends, it becomes clear that Arthur is not the only one unhappy with Basil’s decision. When one of the party is found shot while sitting at the desk in the study, there are plenty of suspects and plenty of motives. With perfect timing, Inspector Appleby arrives at the door just as the body is discovered, having received an invitation from Basil. Can Appleby find the culprit before someone else is hurt?

There Came Both Mist and Snow is my least favourite of the three Innes novels I’ve read so far. The mystery itself was well-constructed; Appleby seems to play a bigger role than in the other two books (certainly than in Lament for a Maker, where he only appeared near the end) and I enjoyed following the course of his investigations, with Arthur Ferryman as a sort of Watson character. There are several possible theories which are put forward by various members of the party and all of them seem plausible, which means the reader is constantly being led in the wrong direction. I would never have guessed the eventual solution; the clues aren’t concealed from the reader, exactly, but it’s definitely not something that is easy to deduce for yourself.

My problem with the book was due mainly to the length of time it took to get started. In the opening chapters we are given a lot of information on the Roper family background, the history of Belrive Priory and the changes that have come to the surrounding area as the neon lights of breweries and factories begin to shine into the priory’s ancient grounds. This information wasn’t completely insignificant, but I felt that it could have been woven more gradually into the story so that we could have reached the crime itself more quickly.

I think I would also have found the book more enjoyable if the characters had not been such an unpleasant and uninteresting group of people! I did like one of them – Arthur’s cousin Lucy Chigwidden, who happens to be a crime novelist, which gives Innes a chance to poke fun at his own profession – but none of the others were what I would consider strong or memorable characters.

I was a bit disappointed by this one, especially after enjoying the others so much, but I will continue to read the Appleby mysteries. I have The Daffodil Affair and Appleby’s End to choose from next.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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I can’t even begin to imagine how much time and effort must have gone into the writing of this novel! I’ve never read anything like it before and I hardly know how to begin to describe it. It has all the elements of a classic murder mystery – but there’s a clue in the title: the same murder happens not just once but seven times.

The novel opens with a man waking up in a forest with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. He has the name ‘Anna’ in his mind, although he has no idea who Anna might be. Hearing a woman scream, he rushes to help but is stopped by a stranger who pushes a compass into his pocket and whispers ‘East’. Following these instructions, he finds his way out of the woods and into the grounds of nearby Blackheath House, where the situation becomes even more bizarre. He discovers that he is a doctor called Sebastian Bell and that he is a guest at Blackheath where the Hardcastle family are throwing a party to mark the nineteenth anniversary of their son’s death.

All through the long and bewildering day which follows, Bell tries to make sense of what is happening, only to end up more confused than ever. Eventually, he is approached by a man wearing the costume of a Plague Doctor, who appears to have some of the answers. It seems that the Hardcastles’ daughter, Evelyn, is going to be murdered later that night and Bell’s task is to solve the murder. Should he fail, he will have the chance to live through the day again…but this time he will be someone else. Eight days and eight different ‘host bodies’; if at the end of that time he can provide a solution, he will be allowed to leave Blackheath. If not, he will go back to day one and the whole sequence will begin again…as it already has, many times before.

Everything I’ve said so far is explained to our narrator early in the novel. Once he begins waking up as the other hosts, however, things quickly become very complicated, with new clues and pieces of information coming to light on almost every page. I won’t say any more about the story itself, then, other than in general terms. I won’t even tell you who the other hosts are, as part of the fun is in wondering who the narrator is going to be next. Each host, though, has different strengths and weaknesses and is connected to the murder in a different way. It’s fascinating to see how each of them alone sees only a small part of the picture, and the truth only begins to emerge when all of their collective experiences and observations are taken into account.

This is an incredibly clever novel and so intricately plotted I have no idea how Stuart Turton managed to keep track of it all. Although it’s a long book, my recommendation is to read it in as few sittings as possible so you can try to hold on to all the threads of the story in your head. If your experience is anything like mine you’ll quickly become so engrossed that you won’t want to stop anyway. And experience is the right word for it. This doesn’t feel like a normal novel at all. It reminded me in some ways of one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books I loved as a child where you could make choices that led to different routes through the story. That’s how I felt as the narrator lived through the same events again and again, trying to decide what he did wrong last time.

The novel is written in the first person present tense – a style I usually dislike but which is used very effectively here. It gives the reader a sense of being dropped directly into the middle of the action and sharing the narrator’s panic and disorientation. I don’t think it would have worked had it been written any other way. I thoroughly enjoyed this unusual and wonderfully imaginative novel!

Thanks to Raven Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes

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After reading Hamlet, Revenge! recently, I have been wanting to read more by Michael Innes, so I was pleased to find his next Inspector Appleby mystery, Lament for a Maker, available through NetGalley. Having read the previous book in the series I thought I knew what to expect from this one, but I was wrong – this book has a very different feel and structure and despite being published in 1938, it’s not a typical Golden Age mystery novel at all.

The title is taken from a 16th century Scottish poem by William Dunbar (the word maker, also spelled makar, means a poet or court poet). The Latin refrain Timor mortis conturbat me – fear of death disturbs me – is repeated throughout the poem and sets the tone for Innes’ novel.

This is such a complex, convoluted mystery it’s difficult to know where to begin, but the best place to start is probably with the crime itself – assuming that a crime has actually been committed, of course! Ranald Guthrie, the miserly laird of Erchany Castle has been killed falling from the ramparts of his own tower on a cold winter night, but was he pushed, was it an accident or could it have been a suicide attempt? If it was murder, then the culprit seems obvious: Neil Lindsay, the young man who wants to marry Ranald’s niece and whose family have been feuding with the Guthries for generations. There is much more to the situation than meets the eye, however, and as the story unfolds more suspects and possible scenarios begin to emerge.

The novel is written from the perspectives of five different characters who each take it in turns to narrate their part of the story. My favourite was the first, Ewan Bell, a shoemaker who lives in Kinkeig in Scotland. It is Ewan who sets the scene, introduces us to the other main characters in the novel and describes the events leading up to Guthrie’s death – all in his own distinctive voice, complete with plenty of Scots dialect!

“If an unco silence had fallen upon nature with the snow those weeks there were plenty of human tongues in Kinkeig to make good the deficiency. The less work always the more gossip, and there must have been even more claiking than usual about the meikle house.”

The second narrator is Noel Gylby, a young Englishman who appeared in Hamlet, Revenge! He is visiting Erchany Castle with his American girlfriend and immediately his narration (which takes the form of letters) has a very different feel from Ewan Bell’s:

“Diana darling: Leaves – as Queen Victoria said – from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands. Or possibly of my Death in the Lowlands. For I don’t at all know if I’m going to survive and I don’t know – I’m kind of guessing, as my girl-friend here says – where I am.”

And there are several more! Lots of authors have written books with multiple narrators but I haven’t come across many (apart from Wilkie Collins) who actually succeed in giving each narrator a unique voice of their own. This is one of the best attempts I’ve read for a while. It’s not just the style and structure which make this such an enjoyable novel, though; the mystery itself is also a good one, with twist following upon twist as the end of the book approaches.

As for Inspector Appleby himself, he doesn’t appear until two thirds of the way through the book when the mystery is already half solved and theories have been suggested. Although the novel is clearly set in the 1930s, there are times when both the story and the book itself feel as though they belong to a much earlier period (it reminded me very strongly of The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson and it seems I’m not the only one to make that connection). This makes me wonder whether Innes may really have wanted to write a historical mystery but couldn’t as he needed to make it part of the Appleby series. That would explain why Appleby makes such a late appearance, almost as an afterthought.

Anyway, I loved this one. Thanks to Ipso Books for the review copy.

The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake

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Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis under which he wrote a series of mystery novels featuring the private investigator Nigel Strangeways. It seems there are sixteen in the series, published between 1935 and 1966, which is good news for me as The Corpse in the Snowman is my first and I enjoyed it so much I will certainly be reading more of them!

This book is set in winter, as you will have guessed from the title – and yes, there is a snowman and yes, there’s a dead body hidden inside it. We know this from the very first chapter, but what we don’t know is whose body it is and how it has come to be in such a strange and macabre hiding place. To find out what is going on, we have to go back several weeks to the moment earlier in the winter when Nigel and Georgia Strangeways arrive at Easterham Manor in Essex, home of the Restorick family. They have been invited by Clarissa Cavendish, an elderly cousin of Georgia’s who lives on the estate and who has become convinced that there is something badly wrong at the Manor.

Clarissa’s fears are proved correct when, the day after the Strangeways’ arrival, the beautiful Elizabeth Restorick is found dead in her bedroom. It looks like a suicide, but Nigel is sure it is murder – and with a large party of guests gathered at Easterham for the festive season, there are plenty of suspects to choose from.

All the elements of a classic mystery novel are here – a country house cut off by snow; a locked room murder; an amateur detective working alongside the local police; family secrets, clues and red herrings – but a lot of attention is also given to themes such as drugs and drug addiction (with some interesting insights into the attitudes of the time). Published in 1941, the war is in the background but doesn’t really have any influence on the story; it’s set in those early days of the war when not much seemed to be happening and apart from a reference to blackout curtains and Nigel’s complaint at having to travel to Essex in wartime on an old woman’s whim, it is barely mentioned at all.

Although Nigel Strangeways is very ordinary as far as literary detectives go (there’s nothing to make him stand out amongst the Poirots, Campions and Wimseys of the genre), I did like him and will be happy to spend more time in his company. I was intrigued by mentions of his wife Georgia’s past career as an explorer; she doesn’t have a very big part to play in the novel, but I enjoyed what we do see of her. As for the other characters, there are a good variety of them within the Restorick household, ranging from an author who is in love with Elizabeth to a doctor whose speciality is ‘nervous disorders’ in women. I particularly loved Clarissa Cavendish, who is obsessed with the Georgian period and speaks of it as ‘in my day’ as if she had actually been alive at the time.

I am so pleased to have discovered Nicholas Blake and I’m sure I’ll be trying another of his books soon!

Note: This book has also been published as The Case of the Abominable Snowman.

Thanks to Ipso Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Rum Affair by Dorothy Dunnett – #1968Club

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I am, after all, the only really photogenic coloratura soprano alive. My only problem, just about then, was in staying alive.

It’s been a while since I read my first of Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson mysteries and this week’s 1968 Club (hosted by Simon and Karen) seemed the perfect opportunity to read another one. Rum Affair – originally titled Dolly and the Singing Bird and then The Photogenic Soprano – was the first in the series to be published (in 1968 obviously), although Tropical Issue, the other one I’ve read, was the first chronologically.

Dunnett is better known for her historical novels, some of which have recently been reissued, but the seven books in her mystery series have contemporary settings. They are each narrated by a different young woman and all feature the portrait painter Johnson Johnson and his yacht Dolly.

Rum Affair opens with Tina Rossi, a Polish-Italian opera singer, arriving in Scotland where she is due to give two performances at the Edinburgh Festival. During a break in her schedule, she has arranged to meet her lover, Kenneth Holmes, at his friend’s Rose Street flat. However, there’s no sign of Kenneth – just a card with the three handwritten words, “Darling, I’m sorry”. Searching for clues to explain his absence, Tina opens a wardrobe door to reveal the body of a man, a stranger, who has been shot in the chest. When the police unexpectedly arrive, making enquiries about a robbery in the neighbourhood, she quickly makes the decision to conceal what has happened – to try to save her own reputation, she tells us, and Kenneth’s.

Instinct is a marvellous thing, I dare say; but I prefer to use my good sense. You, perhaps, with a strange man lying dead at your feet would have welcomed the police with an exhibition of nervous relief. I, on the other hand, kept my head.

On the same night, Tina’s path crosses for the first time with that of Johnson, who is staying nearby. Tina is immediately intrigued by Johnson, a mysterious man who wears bifocals and introduces himself as “thirty-eight. Painter. London. On holiday.” When Johnson invites her to join him on a yacht race to the Isle of Rum, she is quick to accept. Rum is where Kenneth is currently based, working on a highly sensitive project for his employers, although she doesn’t admit this to Johnson. However, it seems that Johnson has a reason of his own for wanting Tina to sail with him on board Dolly – and it’s not just so that he can paint her portrait!

I won’t go into any more detail regarding the plot because I wouldn’t like to inadvertently give too much away and spoil the mystery – and I don’t want to say much more about Tina Rossi either as I’m finding that part of the fun of reading the Johnson novels is in getting to know the woman who is narrating the story. What I will say is that Tina is very different from Rita Geddes of Tropical Issue and that their narrative voices reflect their different personalities and backgrounds (while I liked Rita immediately, I never connected with Tina at all, but I suppose you can’t like every character in every book). As for Johnson himself, even though I have now read two books in this series, he is still very much an enigma to me. Of course, we only see him through the eyes of the narrators so we only know what they choose to tell us and are reliant on their observations and interpretations of his character, which may not always be correct or true.

I also found the setting interesting; the race in which Johnson and Tina are participating takes them around the west coast of Scotland, visiting several islands of the Inner Hebrides, of which Rum is one.

In the summer night, the Inner Hebrides lay all about us, black on the indigo sea. Above us, the uninterrupted sky stretched, a light, dense ultramarine, its ghostly clouds and small, sharp white stars suspended over the bright winking lights, near and far, of a constellation of lighthouses, and the grey, dimly voyaging waves here below.

I particularly enjoyed the scenes set at Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa!

Although I don’t think these books come close to the brilliance of Dunnett’s Lymond or Niccolò series, or King Hereafter, they are still quite enjoyable in a different way. I am looking forward to reading the rest and meeting the other five narrators.