They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer – #1937Club

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This week, Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings are hosting another of their very popular clubs, where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time it’s 1937 Club and for my first book I’ve turned to a favourite author who can be almost guaranteed to have had at least one title published in any chosen club year. In 1937, she had two and although An Infamous Army, a novel set before and during the Battle of Waterloo, is one I read a few years ago and didn’t particularly enjoy, I’m pleased to say that I had a much better experience with this one.

They Found Him Dead is one of twelve contemporary detective novels written by Heyer. It begins with the family, friends and business associates of Silas Kane assembling at his country house to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. As with many large gatherings, there are various tensions between members of the group, but when Silas is found dead at the bottom of a cliff after going out for his usual evening walk, the police decide that it was just a tragic accident. Only fourteen-year-old Timothy Harte, half-brother of Silas Kane’s nephew Jim, suspects murder – and when Kane’s heir, Clement, is shot in the head several weeks later, it seems that he could have been right.

Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant Hemingway arrive from Scotland Yard to investigate and quickly discover that there’s a large number of suspects including several nephews and nieces in the line of inheritance, some of Kane’s business partners and even his elderly mother, a woman in her eighties. However, they first need to decide whether they really are dealing with two murders or just one – and if there have been two, were they both committed by the same person?

I thought this was an entertaining novel, although I did panic at first due to the huge number of people introduced in the opening chapter. I wished I had drawn a family tree to keep them all straight in my mind, but after a few more chapters everything had settled down anyway and the characters and their relationships became more clearly defined. As a mystery it’s not a very clever or original one – in fact, it’s quite formulaic in many ways, with the country house, family party, motives revolving around inheritances and business deals and the Scotland Yard detectives all being very familiar to anyone who has read a lot of Golden Age crime. The murderer is also quite easy to guess, once you’ve picked up on one very obvious clue.

What I really enjoyed about this book was not the plot but the characters. I particularly loved Timothy, who has an active imagination leading him to see drama and conspiracy in every situation and is nicknamed Terrible Timothy by Sergeant Hemingway. He does actually help to solve the mystery, but not in the way he had expected! There’s also a bit of romance (although it’s quite understated and not a big part of the book), with Timothy’s half-brother, Jim Kane, falling in love with Patricia Allison, companion to Silas Kane’s mother. I liked these two characters as well; in general, the characters in this book are a more pleasant bunch than in the other Heyer mysteries I’ve read! A few of them also appear in her 1951 novel, Duplicate Death, which I read before this one and I’m now wishing I’d read them in the correct order!

I still have a lot of Heyer’s mysteries left to read and am looking forward to them. They don’t really compare to Agatha Christie’s when it comes to plotting a crime, concealing clues and creating red herrings, but they’re still fun to read. This was a great start to the 1937 Club for me and I’m also enjoying my second book, which I’ve almost finished and will be reviewing later in the week.

#1937Club – Some previous reads

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1937 Club, hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, starts on Monday and we will all be reading and writing about books published in that year. It seems to have been another great year for publishing – I have previously read and reviewed nine 1937 books on my blog and thought I would list them here before the week begins. If you haven’t decided what to read yet and are looking for some last minute ideas I can recommend most of these!

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Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie – One of several Christie books published in 1937 and one of her most famous Poirot mysteries, set on a cruise along the Nile.

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp – The first Sharp novel I read and enjoyed, with a heroine I loved.

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell – Orwell’s fascinating non-fiction book about the living conditions of working class people in the North of England.

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer – Not one of my favourite Heyer novels due to the long descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo. I’ll be reviewing her other 1937 book next week.

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie – Another Poirot mystery, starring an adorable dog! Also in 1937 there was a collection of short stories, Murder in the Mews.

Under the Hog by Patrick Carleton – A great novel about Richard III – surprisingly sympathetic for its time!

Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes – This Inspector Appleby mystery is set in a country house during an amateur production of Hamlet.

Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada – A long novel set in Germany during the Weimar Republic (I read an English translation by Philip Owens).

Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson – Published by Persephone, this is an interesting novel exploring the employment opportunities (or lack of them) for women from wealthy families who find themselves in need of work.

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Have you read any of these? Which other 1937 books have you read – and will you be taking part in the club next week?

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

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When I saw this year’s longlist for the Walter Scott Prize, one of the books I was most interested in reading was The Fraud. I haven’t read any of Zadie Smith’s other books, but the subject and setting of this one sounded appealing to me.

At the heart of the novel is a real-life court case in which a man many believe to be Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from London, claims to be Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to a baronetcy thought to have died in a shipwreck in 1854. The ‘Claimant’, as he becomes known, is immediately identified as Roger by his mother, but the rest of the Tichborne family insist that he’s an imposter. The dispute goes on for several years and captures the imagination of the public, with people travelling for miles to come and watch the case play out in court. Two of the people following the proceedings with interest are Sarah Ainsworth and Eliza Touchet, who are central characters in Smith’s novel.

Eliza Touchet is a cousin by marriage of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and has lived with him as his housekeeper – and occasional lover – since the 1830s, while also growing close to his first wife, Frances. By the time of the Tichborne trial several decades later, William has been widowed and married again, this time to Sarah, his former maid. Sarah is obsessed with the Tichbornes and convinced that the Claimant is telling the truth and it is she who persuades Eliza to accompany her to court. Here Eliza finds herself drawn not to the supposed Sir Roger, but to one of the key witnesses – Andrew Bogle, an elderly black man who was Roger’s uncle’s servant and is one of the few people to speak up in support of the Claimant.

The novel moves backwards and forwards in time between the 1830s and 1870s, with the story unfolding through a series of very short chapters, sometimes only a page or two long. I wasn’t really a fan of this structure, as it made it difficult to become fully immersed and keep track of what was happening. And there’s a lot happening! As well as the coverage of the Tichborne trial, there’s a long digression into the early life of Andrew Bogle as a slave on a plantation in Jamaica, discussions of the Victorian literary scene and domestic details of life in the Ainsworth household. There were too many separate storylines for one book and some of them didn’t really seem to lead anywhere or integrate with the others. Having said that, I still found things to enjoy and my overall feelings about the book are probably slightly more positive than negative!

Most of the people who appear in The Fraud really existed, although not necessarily as Zadie Smith describes them. Eliza Touchet, for example, was a real person but died much earlier than she does in the novel and wouldn’t have been around by the time of the Tichborne case, so while there’s a lot to learn from this book it’s worth remembering that it’s not all factually correct. I did find it interesting to read about the life and work of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose books were hugely popular at the time – particularly Jack Sheppard, one of the ‘Newgate novels’ Claire Harman discusses in her true crime book, Murder by the Book – but have largely been forgotten today. Smith explores Ainsworth’s rivalry with Charles Dickens, as well as allegations that he stole some of the ideas for his novels from his illustrator, George Cruikshank. Is it just the Tichborne Claimant who is the ‘fraud’ of the title or could it also be Ainsworth himself?

Although there were parts of The Fraud that I enjoyed, I think there was really enough material here for two or three books and I ended up feeling overwhelmed. Maybe a different Zadie Smith book would have been a better starting point for me after all.

Book 15/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Six Degrees of Separation: From Black Lamb and Grey Falcon to The Map of Lost Memories

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we were told we could begin with any travel guide of our choice. Coincidentally, I have just begun reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s 1941 travel book about her journey through the former Yugoslavia. I’ve wanted to read this for years and have been put off by the length, but I’ve finally decided to just plunge in.

Rebecca West’s epic masterpiece not only provides deep insight into the former country of Yugoslavia; it is a portrait of Europe on the brink of war. A heady cocktail of personal travelogue and historical insight, this product of an implacably inquisitive intelligence remains essential for anyone attempting to understand the history of the Balkan states, and the wider ongoing implications for a fractured Europe.

Girl at War by Sara Nović (1) is set in Croatia in 1991, during the breakup of Yugoslavia. As the country descends into war, we see events unfold through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. I found this a very moving and emotional novel and enjoyed reading it during a trip to Dubrovnik.

A book with a shared word in the title is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (2). It’s a children’s book, but can also be appreciated by adults; I read it in preparation for going to see the Steven Spielberg film version in 2012. The story is narrated by Joey, a young horse who serves in the cavalry on the battlefields of World War I.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (3) is also a book about a horse. It’s the story of fifteen-year-old Charley, who gets a job at the Portland Meadows race track in Oregon and forms a close bond with the racehorse, Lean on Pete.
As well as being an author, Vlautin is currently the guitarist and vocalist with the American country soul band The Delines.

Another author who is also a musician is Mat Osman, the bassist in the band Suede (and brother of author and TV presenter Richard Osman). I have read his second novel, The Ghost Theatre (4), which is set in an alternate history version of Elizabethan London, where one of our protagonists belongs to a community of bird-worshippers known as Aviscultans.

Birds provide the link to my next book, The Bird King by G Willow Wilson (5), in which a mapmaker accused of sorcery and the ability to draw magical maps flees across 15th century Spain in search of the legendary island of Qaf, said to be the home of the King of the Birds. I found this a very unusual novel, combining history, myth and fantasy.

In Kim Fay’s novel, The Map of Lost Memories (6), a woman dreams of making an important historical discovery and establishing her own museum. Setting off on an expedition to Cambodia, she begins a search for ten lost copper scrolls recording the history of the Khmer people. I think this is possibly the only book I’ve read set in Cambodia!

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And that’s my chain for April. My links have included: books set in the former Yugoslavia, books with war in the title, horses, authors who are musicians, birds and maps. Staying with the ‘travel’ theme, my chain this month has taken me to Croatia, France, USA, England, Spain and Cambodia.

In May we’ll be starting with a novel longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize – The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

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Stuart Turton is, in my opinion, one of the most original and imaginative authors writing today; although I know his style doesn’t work for everyone, I loved his first book, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which was unlike anything else I’ve ever read. His second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, a mystery set aboard a 17th century Dutch trading ship, disappointed me, but I recently read his short story, The Master of the House and loved that one too, so I was curious to see what this, his newest novel, would be like.

The Last Murder at the End of the World combines a murder mystery with a post-apocalyptic setting. The world as we know it has been destroyed by a black toxic fog that has swept across the planet, killing everyone it touches. The only place the fog hasn’t reached is a small Greek island, home to the Blackheath scientific research facility. The island is inhabited by one hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists from Blackheath, who have become known as the Elders. While the scientists continue their research into the fog and the security system that is holding it back from the island, the villagers farm the land and obey the rules set out for them by the scientists, while being discouraged from thinking too deeply for themselves.

Disaster strikes when one of the scientists is murdered and the barrier keeping the fog at bay is broken down. If the islanders can solve the murder within ninety-two hours, the barrier will be restored – if not, the fog will envelop the entire island. One of the villagers, Emory, is more resourceful than the others; rather than just accepting the situation and her place in society, she has always been curious and eager to learn. The task of investigating the crime, then, falls mainly to Emory – but to make her job even more difficult, the security system has also wiped the memories of the villagers, so someone could be a murderer without even knowing it.

The Last Murder at the End of the World is a difficult book to write about without spoiling too much. From the beginning, we are faced with lots of intriguing questions. Why do none of the villagers live past the age of sixty? Who or what is ‘Abi’, the omniscient voice who is present in everyone’s mind? Are the three Elders working with the villagers or against them? Everything is explained eventually but I won’t discuss the plot in any more depth here. I think if you’ve read other dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels you’ll already have an idea of the sort of things being explored, such as why some people survived and not others and whether society can be rebuilt to make the new world a better place than the last one.

The murder mystery element is interesting mainly because of the limitations that are placed upon it – the short period of time in which Emory has in which to solve the mystery and the fact that nobody can remember anything they may have done or witnessed on the night of the crime. There are also some surprising plot twists and revelations that meant I was constantly questioning and re-evaluating everything I thought I had figured out. However, this is definitely a book where the characters take second place to the plot; the three scientists are particularly difficult to like and, apart from Emory, the villagers are bland and not easily distinguished from each other. For this reason, The Last Murder at the End of the World is a novel I enjoyed from an intellectual perspective but not from an emotional one.

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

Count Luna by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

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Translated by Jane B. Greene

What a strange book this is! I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I fully understood everything the author was trying to say. It’s the first book I’ve read by Alexander Lernet-Holenia and I’m definitely now interested in reading more.

Count Luna was first published in German in 1955 (Lernet-Holenia was an Austrian author) and appeared in an English translation by Jane B. Greene a year later. It has recently been published in a new edition by Penguin Classics.

The novel begins with Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, entering the Catacombs of Praetextatus in Rome, apparently in search of two French priests believed to have vanished somewhere in the underground passageways. When Jessiersky himself also fails to emerge from the catacombs, his disappearance is reported to the police, who link him with a series of incidents which occurred in Austria and are still under investigation. The rest of the book is presented as an account of Jessiersky’s life leading up to the disappearance, based on reports by the Italian and Austrian authorities.

We learn that at the start of World War II, Jessiersky is the head of a large Viennese transport company. When the company tries to purchase some land belonging to Count Luna, who refuses to sell, the board of directors come up with a plan to confiscate the land and have Luna sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Jessiersky himself is not involved in this, but does nothing to prevent it from happening – and so, when the war is over, he begins to worry that Luna has survived the camp and is coming back to take his revenge.

On one level, Count Luna could be described as a psychological thriller; told mainly from Jessiersky’s perspective, there’s a growing sense of paranoia and fear as he becomes convinced that Count Luna is following him around Vienna, watching from the shadows, breaking into his house and even trying to poison his children. Whether any of these things are true or only exist in Jessiersky’s imagination I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. The atmosphere becomes very dark and the feeling of tension increases as the novel heads towards its conclusion and Jessiersky enters the catacombs – and from this point the story becomes quite bizarre and even more nightmarish.

At 160 pages, Count Luna is a short novel, but took longer than I expected to read as there are some long, detailed digressions into subjects such as the lineage of the Jessiersky family, which need some concentration from the reader (and don’t really add a lot to the story as a whole). Apart from the references to the war, it felt more like a book written in the 19th century than one written in the 1950s. The war is a crucial part of the story, however, and I’ve seen reviews suggesting that Lernet-Holenia was drawing parallels between Jessiersky’s guilt over Luna’s fate and Austria’s own post-war guilt, which does make a lot of sense. I also think the name Luna (the moon) is no coincidence, as Jessiersky discovers that trying to escape from Luna – and therefore from his guilt – is as useless as trying to escape from the moon.

Although I didn’t love this book as much as I thought I was going to at the beginning, I did find it completely fascinating and it left me with a lot to think about.

Thanks to Penguin Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

My Commonplace Book: March 2024

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A selection of quotes and pictures to represent March’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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“If one is young enough one can love anything. I expect that is why people cry when youth confronts them suddenly. It is envy.”

Deadly Duo by Margery Allingham (1949)

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“Everyone always has to have the rational, scientific explanation for something, even if it’s so obviously wrong you could scream.”

Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones (1997)

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‘Aqua Tofana’ poison (by Pierre Méjanel)

There are different kinds of human nature, some approaching good, some bad, just as there are different plants in her garden for different needs. Some plants are healing, some are toxic. So it is with humans.

The Book of Secrets by Anna Mazzola (2024)

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Any woman who has ever tried will know without explanation what an unpalatable task it is to dismiss, even when she does not love him, a man who has all the natural and moral qualities she would desire, and only fails in the social. Would-be lovers are not so numerous, even with the best women, that the sacrifice of one can be felt as other than a good thing wasted, in a world where there are few good things.

The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy (1880)

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Lord Edward Fitzgerald

They could always take lessons, I told him. As could you yourself.

Do you think it would help?

Immeasurably. To live in an ocean of incomprehension is not only terrifying. Dangerous, too.

The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by Neil Jordan (2021)

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It is ridiculous to do a thing merely because others have become the slaves of the idea that one has to be “active”. Are there not a thousand things to be attended to which, though much more important, are left undone?

Count Luna by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1955)

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The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (2023)

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Makoko, Nigeria (photo by Collins okoh)

Of course, I’m always thinking about the future, but without money or guidance, the future isn’t something you choose but rather something that happens.

Water Baby by Chioma Okereke

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“In our job we have to think of everything,” said Welby. “If we miss anything, it’s always the things we miss which matter.”

Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac (1954)

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Favourite books read in March:

Deep Secret and Count Luna

Authors read for the first time in March:

Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Jordan, Chioma Okereke, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Zadie Smith

Places visited in my March reading:

England, the Koryfonic Empire, Italy, USA, Wales, Ireland, Nigeria, Jamaica, Austria

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Reading notes: I’m pleased to have read two books for Reading Wales and one for Reading Ireland, as well as trying Diana Wynne Jones for the first time for the March Magics event! 1937 Club is coming up in April – I’ve started one book already and hope to read more. I would also like to join in with Lory’s Reading the Theatre, but that will depend on whether I can find anything suitable on the TBR and how much time I have. I have several NetGalley review copies with April publication dates as well, which I really need to get to before I start falling behind again.

How was your March? What are you planning to read in April?