Tag: 1930s

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

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Since reading The Help, which was published in 2009, it’s been a very long wait for Kathryn Stockett’s second novel. The Calamity Club finally arrived earlier this year, after a seventeen year gap, and I put it on my list for the 20 Books of Summer challenge – which maybe wasn’t a great idea as it was so long I could probably have read two or three other books for the challenge in the same length of time! Anyway, I loved it so it was time well spent.

The book is set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933. Many families are struggling financially as the Great Depression tightens its grip and Birdie Calhoun’s mother and grandmother have sent her to Oxford to ask her wealthy sister Frances to lend them some money. However, Birdie quickly discovers that her sister’s life isn’t as perfect as she would like everyone to believe and she and her husband are having difficulties of their own.

Meanwhile, in Oxford’s Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur is still hoping that her mother will come to reclaim her. Abandoned on Christmas Eve, Meg has been living at the orphanage for two years and is now one of the ‘big girls’, considered almost unadoptable as most people would prefer a baby or toddler. For some reason, she has also become the main target of Garnett Pittman, the cruel and abusive woman in charge of the orphanage. Miserable and isolated, Meg is given a glimmer of hope when she meets Birdie, who has taken a temporary job as bookkeeper at the orphanage.

The novel is narrated by both Birdie and Meg and each has her own narrative voice (Meg’s is particularly distinctive). As the book has more than 600 pages, there’s obviously a lot more to the plot than the brief summary I’ve given above, but I don’t want to spoil things by going into too much detail. The way in which Birdie sets out to make the money she and her family need, while also trying to help Meg, is unexpected and daring, so I’ll leave you to find out what it is for yourself if you decide to read the book. What I can tell you is that it’s a book which touches on lots of interesting but serious topics including prostitution and what drives a woman to it, views on homosexuality at a time when it was considered an illness that could be cured, alcoholism and how it can break up a family, and of course dealing with poverty and everything that comes with it. However, it’s not as depressing as it sounds and there’s plenty of humour to lighten the mood, mostly provided by the unusual group of women who form the Calamity Club of the title.

I liked Birdie, who is outspoken, loyal and courageous, but it was Meg who really won me over. I thought Stockett perfectly captured her vulnerability, her longing to feel loved and wanted and her desperation to get away from the orphanage and never be sent back. She’s also intelligent, resourceful and, due to her circumstances, often seems older than her years, so she’s a child character with a lot of depth and complexity. There are other characters who, although much less sympathetic, are equally memorable: Garnett Pittman is a truly horrifying villain, while Birdie’s shallow, self-absorbed sister Frances is a constant source of frustration for both Birdie and the reader!

So, does the book feel too long? I think at times, yes, it does, and could probably have been condensed a little bit, but on the other hand it means there was plenty of time to become fully drawn into the story and the world Stockett was building. I loved the insight this book gives us into life in 1930s Mississippi and I’m hoping we won’t have to wait another seventeen years for Kathryn Stockett’s next book!

Book 18/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Forever Summer by Lulu Taylor

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The first thing to say about this book is that it’s definitely not the light summer read you would probably expect from the cover and title. It’s actually a tale of lies, betrayal and treason set during the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. It’s the first Lulu Taylor book I’ve read and I really enjoyed it.

The novel opens with a brief section set in the modern day, introducing us to Lottie Conway, a young woman who has grown up under the shadow of a family scandal – one linked with the actions of two women at the start of the Second World War. The Conway name has become tarnished by association, although the details have always been vague. When a new blockbuster film is made about the incident, Lottie decides it’s time to speak to the one person who knows exactly what happened: her grandmother, Dinah.

Dinah’s story begins in 1931 when her wealthy friend, Marina, invites her to a dinner party. Here she meets Marina’s cousin, William Conway, whom she hasn’t seen since they were children and they quickly fall in love and decide to marry. The marriage isn’t welcomed by everyone – William’s mother refuses to even speak to Dinah, which she assumes is due to her poor background – but the two are blissfully happy and head to Germany on their honeymoon. They’re planning to visit Rosemary, another of William’s cousins, at her school in Munich, but first William wants to visit the site of the Battle of Blenheim. However, they are not the only British tourists in the area that day…Winston Churchill is also visiting the battlefield, having some time on his hands after resigning from the Conservative shadow cabinet.

The Conways’ lives are changed forever by that chance meeting with Churchill, who believes that William, who works for the Foreign Office, can be of use to him in providing information on activity in Germany and the British government’s response to it. But they also make another new acquaintance in Munich who will have an equally big influence on their future fates: Ernst Hanfstaengl, known as Putzi, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, leader of the increasingly powerful Nazi Party.

The Forever Summer is quite a long book but was a faster read than I expected as I was so gripped by it. I loved the way the author obscures the true intentions of the characters from us, leaving us questioning who can and cannot be trusted. A good example of this is Victoria Gauntlett, one of the women who brought shame on the Conway family; it’s never quite clear whether Victoria is spying for Britain, spying for Germany, a double agent or just an innocent young woman. We only see her through Dinah’s eyes and Dinah is hardly an unbiased observer, as she is jealous of Victoria’s close friendship with William. By the time we reach the end of the book, then, there are lots of secrets to be revealed and some surprising twists to look out for along the way.

What I found most interesting, though, was the portrayal of the mood in Munich during the build to the war. When Dinah first visits for her honeymoon in 1932, she can sense a tension in the air even then; there are already men on the streets wearing brown uniforms with the swastika insignia and disturbing rumours of their plans for Jews. When she returns just three years later, the atmosphere has become much more oppressive; there’s a stronger military presence and Nazi flags line the boulevards and hang from shops and houses. I was also fascinated by the depiction of Putzi Hanfstaengl, a real person although I don’t think I’ve come across him in fiction before. Most poignantly of all, the book explores the question of whether another war was inevitable or if anything could have been done differently during that period that may have prevented it.

I’ll have to investigate some of Lulu Taylor’s other books; I had previously dismissed them as probably not being for me, but I’m interested in trying more of them now.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 12/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Lost Château by Dinah Jefferies

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Last year I read and enjoyed Dinah Jefferies’ The Greek House. The Lost Château is a sequel of sorts, but it’s not necessary to have read the previous book first.

Most of the novel is set in 1936 and follows one of the characters from The Greek House, Thirza Caruthers, who is now living with her Italian husband, Emilio Bellini, at Merchant’s House in Corfu with their five-year-old daughter Romi and Emilio’s two twin daughters from his first marriage, Lucia and Valentina. When nineteen-year-old Lucia becomes a supporter of Mussolini’s Fascist movement and runs away to Spain to get involved in the Civil War, Emilio insists on going after her to bring her home, much to Thirza’s horror. However, Thirza will be kept busy during Emilio’s absence, because her great-aunt Berenice has been in hospital and needs someone to care for her when she returns home.

Berenice lives in France, in an old château in the Dordogne, leading a solitary existence since the death of her daughter, Sophie, and the disappearance of her husband many years earlier. Accompanied by Valentina and Romi, Thirza goes to stay with Berenice, where she continues to worry about Emilio but finds distractions in trying to keep the crumbling, neglected château clean and tidy and in delving into the mystery of Berenice’s past. Why is Berenice so hostile and withdrawn? Who is the mysterious Géraldine who once lived in a cottage on the estate? And what really happened to Sophie all those years ago?

I’m counting The Lost Château towards Paris in July hosted by Emma of Words and Peace as most of the book is set in France, mainly in the Dordogne region near Sarlat-la-Canéda. As usual with Dinah Jefferies, everything is beautifully described from the 17th century stone château surrounded by forest to the cobbled streets and busy shops of Sarlat. We also briefly see Paris when Thirza and Valentina are invited to visit Jean-Paul, a widower whose mother is hoping to buy Berenice’s château. Thirza is immediately attracted to Jean-Paul and spends the whole book battling with her feelings for him, a storyline which annoyed me as Thirza claims to love her husband but makes no attempt to understand why he’s prepared to enter a dangerous warzone to rescue his daughter and accuses him of being selfish. Thirza herself was the one who seemed selfish to me – although to give her some credit, she does start to think differently about things by the end of the book.

Although I loved the French setting, Lucia’s story sounded fascinating and I was sorry that we only hear about it from a distance as news from Spain reaches Thirza. I would have liked some chapters from Lucia’s point of view to see the Spanish Civil War unfold at first hand and to understand what drives a vulnerable young woman towards radical politics. I suppose that would have made the book too long! We do, however, get some chapters from Berenice’s perspective, set several decades earlier when she first comes to live at the château as a young wife and mother. Berenice’s story is sad and shocking and explains why she has become the unhappy, prickly person we meet in the 1930s timeline.

This isn’t my favourite book by Dinah Jefferies but I did find it interesting. I wonder if there will be a third novel about these characters; the way this one ended made me think that there could be, as various family members are now positioned in different places around Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War approaching.

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

Book 6/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Strawberry House by Rachel Burton

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It’s February 1952 and journalist Henry Aldridge is planning an article on the recent death of King George VI when his editor approaches him with a completely different assignment. He wants Henry to report on the restoration of Montagu Manor, a country house near Oxford that was partially destroyed by fire in the summer of 1938 and later requisitioned by the army after the outbreak of war. Henry reluctantly accepts the job, but doesn’t admit that he himself had been a guest at the house during that fateful summer.

In 1938, Montagu Manor was home to Sir Philip Kerrigan, his wife and four children. It was the son, Anthony, who invited Henry to spend the summer with them, relaxing, fishing in the river and contemplating their next steps, having both recently graduated from Oxford University. Henry, the son of a factory owner, is expected to go into the family business, but what he really wants to do is become a newspaper reporter, something he knows his father will never agree to. When he meets Anthony’s sister, Camilla, he discovers that she is in a similar position – she desperately wants to attend Oxford and study for a degree like her brother, but Sir Philip has refused, believing a woman’s duty is to marry and have children. Camilla is determined that she will never marry, but when she and Henry fall in love she begins to reconsider.

The 1952 thread of the novel tells us that something went wrong between Henry and Camilla and they haven’t seen each other since the year of the fire, but we won’t find out what happened until much later in the book. And there are other questions to be answered too. What caused the fire and what was the significance of the unfinished painting that went missing during it? Who exactly were the Kensington Circle, the group of artists staying at the house at the same time as Henry? By moving backwards and forwards between 1952 and 1938, the answers begin to emerge.

I really enjoyed The Strawberry House. I seem to have read a lot of historical novels about English country houses with secrets and at first I thought this one was going to be very similar. What set it apart, though, is how much I liked and cared about the characters, particularly Henry, who seemed like a genuinely nice person torn between following his own heart and trying to keep everyone else happy. I was also fond of his photographer friend, Frank, and Camilla’s little sister, Cassie, who has a talent for writing. Because I was so invested in the characters and their lives, it made me more eager to see how everything would unfold as the truth about the summer of 1938 started to become clear.

In case you’re wondering, the title of the book is inspired by Strawberry Thief, a beautiful design by William Morris. Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement are referenced throughout the book and the fictional Montagu Manor is located close to Morris’s home, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Although this is the first Rachel Burton novel I’ve read, many of her others seem to have a house at the heart of the story and I’ll look forward to exploring more of them.

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

The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead

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This is the fourth book in Tom Mead’s Joseph Spector mystery series, but if you haven’t read any of them, don’t worry – they all stand alone and if you wanted to start here, that wouldn’t be a problem. The books are set in the 1930s and are written in the style of Golden Age ‘locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ novels, with the influence of John Dickson Carr being particularly strong. The series features two detectives: a professional one – Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard – and an amateur one – Joseph Spector, a retired magician.

The House at Devil’s Neck begins in August 1939 with a group of people boarding a coach, ready for a trip to Devil’s Neck, a supposedly haunted house. The house, which can be reached by a causeway at low tide, has a long and dramatic history, but was most recently used as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers during the Great War. The current owner has now opened up the house to tourists and the first party is about to arrive. The guests include Madame la Motte, a medium, and her companion Imogen; a ‘ghost hunter’, Francis Tulp; and a magician – Joseph Spector. No sooner have they reached Devil’s Neck and settled into their rooms, however, than one of the party is found dead.

Back in London meanwhile, Inspector Flint is investigating what appears to be a suicide. The victim is Rodney Edgecomb, a man who, many years earlier, was involved in a high-profile inheritance dispute following the sinking of the Titanic. The circumstances of his death lead Flint to believe this is murder rather than suicide. When he eventually discovers links between Edgecomb and the house at Devil’s Neck, Flint and Spector are able to team up once again to solve the mystery.

I won’t go into the plot in any more detail because it’s such a complex one with so many twists I’m impressed that Tom Mead managed to keep track of it all himself! The murder methods are also very complicated, but the solutions do make sense once Spector explains them. As with his other books, Mead inserts a brief chapter towards the end to warn us that the solution is coming in case we want a chance to try to solve the mystery for ourselves. I think the average reader would find that very difficult – I certainly had no chance at all of solving it! – but the clues are all there and there are references at the end linking back to where you can find them in the text.

What interested me more than the mystery itself was the setting. The descriptions of the house at Devil’s Neck – ‘a hulking shape, a creature waiting at the valley’s nadir’ – are very atmospheric, as the guests arrive in pouring rain and the house quickly becomes cut off from the mainland by the rising water. The house’s history is also fascinating and allows Mead to explore the fate of wounded soldiers and how those left with permanent disabilities struggled to integrate back into society. Spiritualism, the tricks used by mediums and methods of ghost hunting are also subjects touched on in the book.

I loved most of this novel, until I started to feel lost near the end as it became more and more complex! I think the first and third books – Death and the Conjuror and Cabaret Macabre – are still my favourites.

Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 17/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White

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Originally published as Some Must Watch in 1933, this is a reissue by Pushkin Vertigo under the title The Spiral Staircase – the name of the 1946 film adaptation. I’ve previously read two other novels by Ethel Lina White – The Wheel Spins and Fear Stalks the Village – and enjoyed both, although I found the former slightly disappointing in comparison with Alfred Hitchock’s wonderful The Lady Vanishes, which is based on it. This book has turned out to be my favourite of the three!

Almost the entire novel is set within the walls of the Summit, a lonely country house near the Welsh/English border. Adding to the sense of tension and claustrophobia, the main events of the story also take place over the course of a single evening. As the novel opens, we learn that four murders have recently been committed – the first two in the nearest town, which is over twenty miles away, the next slightly closer, and the fourth in another country house just five miles from the Summit. All four victims were young women and their deaths are on Helen Capel’s mind as she returns to the Summit after her afternoon off and is convinced that she sees a man hiding behind a tree in the dark.

Helen has just started a new job as ‘help’ to the Warren family – Miss Warren and her brother, known as the Professor, and their elderly, bedridden stepmother, Lady Warren. At the start of the novel, the Professor’s son and his wife are staying at the house, as is a student of the Professor’s, Stephen Rice. The rest of the household is made up of two more domestic servants, Mr and Mrs Oates, and the newly arrived Nurse Barker, who has been employed to look after Lady Warren.

When news of another murder, closer than ever this time, reaches the family, the Professor orders that all the doors are locked and everyone stays inside until morning. These should be easy enough instructions to follow, yet for a variety of reasons, one person after another leaves the house or becomes otherwise incapacitated. As a storm rages outside and the tension builds inside, Helen is forced to confront the idea that one of the remaining people in the house could be the murderer.

This book is good fun, but you do need to be able to suspend disbelief now and then (Helen is one of those heroines typical of this genre of book, who, despite knowing there’s a murderer on the loose, tries to open the front door every time someone knocks and spends most of the night wandering around the house on her own, along dark passageways and up and down dimly-lit staircases). Still, Ethel Lina White does a great job of creating an atmosphere of foreboding and fear, not just through stormy weather and shadows, but also through hints that various characters may not be as they seem. Is Lady Warren really unable to walk – and why does she have a gun in her room? And what if Nurse Barker isn’t really a nurse?

I found this a quick, entertaining read, let down slightly by the ending because the killer’s identity wasn’t particularly surprising and their motive was unconvincing. If you’re looking for a cleverly plotted mystery, I think you’ll be disappointed as I would describe this as much more of a psychological horror/suspense novel than a crime novel. It reminded me a lot of Benighted by J.B. Priestley and I think if you enjoyed one there’s a good chance you would enjoy the other. After finishing this book, I watched the film for the first time (it’s currently available on YouTube) and while it’s worth watching in its own right, I didn’t feel that it had much in common with the book!

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 8/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Four Days’ Wonder by A.A. Milne

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A.A. Milne is, of course, best known for his Winnie the Pooh stories, but he also wrote a wide variety of works aimed at adults, ranging from novels and plays to essays and poetry. I read and loved his detective novel, The Red House Mystery, a few years ago and was disappointed that he hadn’t written more of them, so when I came across Four Days’ Wonder, described as a ‘spoof on the detective novel’, I thought it might be the next best thing.

Eighteen-year-old Jenny Windell has been raised by her Aunt Caroline at Auburn Lodge, having been orphaned as a child. Now Caroline has died as well and Jenny has moved in with another guardian, the family lawyer, so that Auburn Lodge can be rented out. However, she still has a key and absentmindedly lets herself into the house one day, forgetting that she no longer lives there. To her surprise, she is confronted by the body of her other aunt, Jane Latour, an actress whom she hasn’t seen for several years, lying dead on the drawing room floor.

It seems obvious that Aunt Jane has slipped on the polished floor and hit her head on a brass door stop, but when Jenny hears the new tenants returning to the house, she panics and escapes through a window. It immediately occurs to her that she has left her monogrammed handkerchief beside the body and that her footprints are now visible under the window. Worse still, she had wiped the blood off the door stop (with the handkerchief) and placed it on top of the piano, thereby concealing the evidence. Jenny, who has read a lot of murder mysteries and has an active imagination, is convinced that she has made herself the number one suspect. Her solution is to go on the run, disappearing into the countryside and sleeping on haystacks. What could go wrong?

Four Days’ Wonder is not a book you can take too seriously and Milne clearly didn’t intend it to be. It’s a comic novel, with a similar kind of humour to P.G. Wodehouse or Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence series, where the characters keep getting themselves into ridiculous, farcical situations. The book was published in 1933 and you can see that Milne is parodying various tropes of the Golden Age crime novels that were so popular at that time – dead bodies found in drawing rooms, mistaken identities, messages written in code, and so on. What you won’t find is any real detective work or, in fact, any real mystery. There are policeman (who, naturally, get everything wrong) but as we know from the beginning that Jenny didn’t kill Aunt Jane and that it was almost certainly an accident, there’s not much suspense in terms of wondering what the solution will be.

Jenny is a very likeable heroine, as is her friend Nancy Fairbrother, whom she enlists to help her with her escape. There’s also a love interest for Jenny in the form of Derek Fenton, a young man she meets while on the run, who just happens to be the brother of the crime writer Archibald Fenton, Nancy’s employer. This leads to yet more misunderstandings and comedy moments – such as when, unaware of who Archibald is, Jenny shoots him with her trusty Watson Combination Watch Dog and Water Pistol! Four Days’ Wonder is a lot of fun and I kept thinking that it would make an entertaining adaptation for TV or film – so I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that there is already one, from 1936, although it doesn’t seem to stick very closely to the book and I can’t find it available anywhere either to buy or stream.

My edition of this book is published by Farrago, an imprint of independent publisher Duckworth Books. It’s one of five Milne books for adults available to buy through Farrago’s website, the others being Mr Pim, Two People, Chloe Marr and The Rabbits. I must try more of them at some point!