Tag: 1930s

Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White

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The village was beautiful. It was enfolded in a hollow of the Downs, and wrapped up snugly — first, in a floral shawl of gardens, and then, in a great green shawl of fields. Lilies and lavender grew in abundance. Bees clustered over sweet-scented herbs with the hum of a myriad spinning-wheels.

With its Tudor cottages and cobbled streets, the village depicted in Ethel Lina White’s 1932 novel seems at first sight to be an idyllic place to live. There’s no poverty or unemployment, an endless round of tea parties and tennis games, and once settled there, people find that they never want to leave. Joan Brook is a relative newcomer to the village, having arrived to take up a position as companion to Lady d’Arcy, and she has already fallen under its spell.

When a novelist friend from London comes to visit, she entertains herself and Joan by imagining the secret scandals taking place behind closed doors. Perhaps the village doctor is poisoning his wife, she says, and the saintly Miss Asprey is bullying her companion; the Rector is leading a double life, and Miss Julia Corner, President of the local Temperance Society, is a secret drinker. The visit is a brief one and the friend soon returns to London, but when the inhabitants of the village begin to receive anonymous poison pen letters, it seems that the scenarios she had imagined were not so far from the truth after all.

Fear Stalks the Village is an unusual crime novel; although there are several deaths, it is not a murder mystery and the plot revolves entirely around finding out who is writing the spiteful letters threatening to expose the private lives of the villagers. Other reviews compare it to The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie, but as I haven’t read that one yet it reminded me most of Henrietta Clandon’s Good by Stealth. There’s lots of witty, satirical humour and a large cast of strongly drawn characters, all of whom appear at first to be happy, well-adjusted people…until the letters begin to arrive. The question the novel raises is whether the cracks have always been there beneath the surface or whether they have been created by the letters and the suspicion and anxiety they cause.

The mystery is quite a clever one, with some red herrings to throw us off the track, and I didn’t guess who was sending the letters. However, it took me a while to get into this book as the pace is quite slow and, despite the title, I didn’t feel that there was any real sense of fear or menace. Still, this is the second book I’ve read by Ethel Lina White, the first being The Wheel Spins (the book on which Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes is based) and I think it’s my favourite of the two – probably because with the other book I couldn’t help comparing it unfavourably to the film, which I love! I would be happy to try more of her books so let me know if there are any you would recommend.

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead

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This is the second book in Tom Mead’s Joseph Spector mystery series, following last year’s wonderful Death and the Conjuror. If you haven’t read the first book yet and want to start with this one it won’t be a problem as the two deal with standalone mysteries.

The Murder Wheel begins in London in 1938 with lawyer Edmund Ibbs visiting a client, Carla Dean, in Holloway Prison. Carla is awaiting trial for the murder of her husband while they were riding on a Ferris Wheel together at the fair. As the only other person in the carriage when a shot was fired at close range – and with her fingerprints all over the alleged murder weapon – suspicion has naturally fallen on Carla. Ibbs’ job is to prove that she is innocent, but it’s going to be a difficult task!

When he’s not investigating crimes, Edmund Ibbs is pursuing a secondary career as an amateur magician and has just received a copy of a highly controversial new book, The Master of Manipulation, which promises to give away all the secrets of the art of magic. After his visit to Carla in prison, Ibbs heads for the Pomegranate Theatre to watch a performance by the great illusionist, Professor Paolini. When another suspicious death occurs during the magic show, Ibbs finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and discovers that he is now a suspect in another murder case! Are the crimes connected? Luckily, retired magician Joseph Spector is on hand to solve the mystery.

The Murder Wheel is another entertaining novel, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first book, mainly because I found it so complicated. There are eventually three separate seemingly impossible crimes to solve and I struggled to keep track of all the different threads of the story. There’s a lot of focus on the murder methods and the intricacies of how each one was committed, and although the solutions do all make sense, I could never have worked them out; I completely failed Mead’s ‘challenge to the reader’ near the end of the book, even though we’re told that the clues have all been provided in the text (and when the solutions are finally revealed, there are footnotes linking back to where each clue first appears).

I do love the partnership between Joseph Spector and Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard; they work together so well because one of them is using traditional methods of detecting such as questioning suspects and searching for evidence, while the other is more concerned with how his knowledge of illusions and sleight of hand can show how the crime was carried out. Magic plays a bigger part in this book than it did in the first one and I enjoyed that aspect of the story; it was interesting to get some insights into the backstage preparations for a magic show and how some of the tricks are performed, although I can see why some of the characters were unhappy with the author of The Master of Manipulation revealing all their secrets!

Tom Mead is a fan of Golden Age detective novels, particularly of the ‘locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ types, and I think he does a good job overall of capturing the feel of a 1930s mystery – although with this book, I never felt that I really was reading a 1930s mystery, the way I did with the first one. I’m not sure exactly what was different, but that’s another reason why I preferred Death and the Conjuror. Still, I will probably read the third book in this series, assuming there’s going to be one!

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

This is book 48/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

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If you’re not lucky enough to be going on a cruise this summer, this 1934 novel by Ursula Bloom is the next best thing! It will give you the opportunity to visit Gibraltar, Marseille, Malta, Naples and Venice, all without leaving your own home. You’ll sail on the Allando in the company of Ann Clements, a thirty-five-year-old single woman who has never been abroad in her life…until now.

At the beginning of the novel, Ann is living in rented rooms in London and working as a secretary, having been left penniless after her father’s death. Her routine rarely changes – long days in a gloomy office, then home to do the ironing and sewing, with only two weeks by the sea with her controlling, bullying older brother Cuthbert to look forward to. She has almost given up hope of having any excitement in her life, until the day she wins a large sum of money in a sweepstake she didn’t even know she had entered. Ignoring Cuthbert’s advice to invest the money in a trust fund for his daughter, Ann decides to spend it on a Mediterranean cruise – and this one decision will change her life forever.

Even while she’s boarding the ship, Ann is having second thoughts. Is she really brave enough to travel alone? Has she brought the right clothes? Surely she’s too old and boring to be having an adventure like this! As the days go by, however, she finds herself doing things she had never imagined herself doing before and for the first time she begins to learn who she really is and what she wants out of life.

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end; Ann is an endearing character and it was lovely to watch her grow in confidence, start to think for herself and leave behind the shy, insecure woman who has grown up under her brother’s thumb. Having been convinced that she would remain a spinster to her dying day, she also meets several men on the cruise who make her wonder whether it’s not too late to fall in love after all. Yet I wouldn’t describe this book as a romance so much as a book about a woman discovering that romance is possible, if that makes sense!

I also loved the descriptions of the places Ann visits, particularly as I’ve been to some of them myself, as well as life on the ship itself, as Ann gets to know her fellow passengers. They are a real mixture of people and although Ann has some preconceived ideas (thanks to Cuthbert’s influence) regarding those who are ‘not her sort’, as part of her transformation she is exposed to new ways of thinking and starts to change her own views.

Wonder Cruise is the first novel I’ve read by Ursula Bloom, but it seems she was very prolific and wrote over 500 books under various pseudonyms, which got her into the Guinness Book of Records in the 1970s! If you’ve read any of them maybe you can help me decide which one I should try next.

This is book 6/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2023

The Cat Saw Murder by Dolores Hitchens

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This week, Mallika of Literary Potpourri is hosting Reading the Meow, a celebration of books featuring cats. When this event was first announced, I wasn’t sure if I had anything suitable; The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by ETA Hoffmann would have been perfect, if I hadn’t just read it last year. Then I came across a whole series of books with cats in them (or in the titles, at least): Dolores Hitchens’ Rachel Murdock mysteries, some of which have now been reissued as part of the American Mystery Classics imprint. The Cat Saw Murder, originally published in 1939, is the first and I hoped it would be a good choice for Reading the Meow.

The novel begins with elderly Miss Rachel Murdock going to stay with her adopted niece, Lily Sticklemann, who lives at Breakers Beach near Los Angeles. Lily has hinted that she’s in trouble and needs advice, so Miss Rachel has packed her case and set off by train to see if she can help. Her less adventurous sister Jennifer has stayed behind, but Miss Rachel is accompanied by Samantha, the black cat who once belonged to their other sister, Agatha. Agatha was an eccentric woman and on her death she left her fortune to the cat, meaning that Samantha is now a wealthy heiress in her own right. After meeting Lily and discovering that she is having financial difficulties, Miss Rachel becomes concerned for Samantha’s safety, suspecting that Lily has her eye on the cat’s inheritance. However, Lily herself is the one who is murdered – and it seems that Samantha may have been a witness.

There are plenty of suspects – Lily lives in a boarding house, Surf House, and is murdered in her bedroom, which means all of the other residents of the building immediately come under suspicion. Several also have a motive for the crime, as Lily owes gambling debts to some of them and is thought to have been romantically involved with another. Although this is not a locked-room mystery exactly (we know that the bedroom door opens and closes more than once during the night of the murder), it does share many elements of that kind of mystery, but thankfully never becomes too concerned with the puzzle-solving aspects at the expense of the characters and motives.

Miss Rachel is a great character; I found her very endearing and quite similar to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in many ways, although she’s more agile and energetic for her age than Miss Marple is and spends a portion of the book searching rooms and crawling around in the attic. She has a good relationship with the detective investigating the murder, Lieutenant Mayhew, and they both contribute, in their different ways, to the solving of the mystery.

The plot feels slightly disjointed at times and there are some confusing shifts between past and present tense (the book seems to be narrated by someone at an unspecified future date looking back on Mayhew and Miss Rachel’s first case), but otherwise I really enjoyed this book and it did turn out to be a good choice for Reading the Meow. Samantha the cat, although not the main focus of the story, does have a substantial part to play and provides some intriguing clues. The second book in the series is The Alarm of the Black Cat and I think I’ll be tempted to read it soon!

This is book 1/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2023

Inquest by Henrietta Clandon

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Inquest is one of four Henrietta Clandon mysteries available from Dean Street Press. Many of you will have heard the sad news earlier this year of DSP publisher Rupert Heath’s death, but it has been confirmed that the titles currently in print will still be available as long they have the copyrights. I loved the first Clandon novel I read, Good by Stealth, so I thought I would read another one while I still had the opportunity.

Henrietta Clandon was a pseudonym of John Haslette Vahey, a Northern Irish author who also wrote under several other names, most often Vernon Loder. Inquest, originally published in 1933, was the first of his books under the Clandon name. I’ve never read anything else he has written, so I don’t know how much difference there is between the various pseudonyms in terms of writing style or topics.

The novel opens six months after the death of William Hoe-Luss, an English businessman believed to have been poisoned by consuming deadly mushrooms during a house party in France. Now his widow, Marie Hoe-Luss, has assembled all of the original guests – with the addition of Dr Soame, William’s physician – for another house party at Hebble Chase, her estate in England, where she plans to hold a sort of informal ‘inquest’ into her late husband’s death. However, when one of the guests breaks their neck falling from a high window, it seems that the killer may have struck again.

Although the police do eventually arrive on the scene, most of the sleuthing in the book is done by Dr Soame, who also narrates the whole novel. He’s an interesting choice of narrator as his medical knowledge and previous experience as a police surgeon means he works alongside the detectives at times, while also being one of the party, mixing with the suspects. Soame already knows some of the guests through his position as the Hoe-Luss family doctor, but others are new to him which allows the reader to get to know them along with Soame.

I enjoyed the first half of the book, which introduces the characters as they arrive at the estate for Marie’s inquest – an assortment of friends, family members, business partners and former lovers, which means there are plenty of tensions, entanglements and motives for murder. They aren’t the most pleasant bunch of people, but that’s common in Golden Age mysteries so not unexpected and not too much of a problem! However, I felt that later in the book, after the second death takes place, the plot became unnecessarily complicated and I began to struggle to keep everything straight in my mind.

I really wanted to love this book, so I’m disappointed that I didn’t. It’s a good, solid mystery novel, apart from getting a bit confusing towards the end, but there’s nothing to make it stand out from other similar books in the genre, unlike Good by Stealth, which was unusual, witty and clever. I’m not sure whether I’ll read the other two Henrietta Clandon books – I suspect I’ve already read the best one – but maybe I’ll try a Vernon Loder at some point.

Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie

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April’s theme for the Read Christie 2023 challenge is poison, but I have read all of the suggested titles on the official challenge page, some quite recently. As I missed taking part last month, I decided to read the book I had planned to read in March instead – Christie’s 1939 novel Murder is Easy. There’s a new BBC adaptation coming later this year and I always prefer to read before watching, if possible!

Murder is Easy is one of the Christie novels that stars neither of her most famous detectives, Poirot or Miss Marple – although it does feature another of her recurring characters, Superintendent Battle. However, even he doesn’t appear until very near the end and plays no part in actually solving the mystery. Instead, almost the entire novel is written from the perspective of Luke Fitzwilliam, a retired police officer and amateur detective.

At the beginning of the novel, Luke has just returned to England from India and is taking a train to London, where he finds himself sharing a carriage with an old lady who introduces herself as Miss Pinkerton. She confides in him that she is on her way to Scotland Yard to report a serial killer in her village. Miss Pinkerton believes that this person – whom she doesn’t name – has murdered at least three people already and has chosen as their next victim the village doctor, Dr Humbleby. Luke assumes she has an overactive imagination, but the next day he reads in the newspaper that a Miss Pinkerton has been hit by a car and killed crossing the road outside Scotland Yard – and when news of the death of Dr Humbleby in the village of Wychwood-under-Ashe follows, he becomes convinced that she was telling the truth after all.

Determined to find out more, Luke heads for Wychwood, where he stays with a friend’s cousin, Bridget Conway, who happens to be engaged to the local lord of the manor. Luke is posing as an author researching a new book on witchcraft and superstition, but Bridget guesses the real reason for his visit and together they begin to investigate the recent deaths.

I really enjoyed this book and for once I correctly identified the murderer, though more through instinct than because I had spotted any particular clue. There are plenty of suspects ranging from the solicitor Mr Abbot and the late Dr Humbleby’s younger partner, Dr Thomas, to the widower Major Horton and the antiques dealer Mr Ellsworthy, who dabbles in black magic. We are told that the village of Wychwood has connections with witchcraft and the occult, but we don’t really explore that in any depth and the setting doesn’t have quite the same eerie atmosphere as the village in Christie’s The Pale Horse.

While Miss Marple doesn’t appear in this book, I found Miss Pinkerton a very Marple-ish character – an old lady with a shrewd mind and sharp observational skills – and was sorry she was killed so early in the story. Luke himself does very little detecting – despite interviewing all of the suspects, he doesn’t arrive at the right solution until somebody else reaches it first – but I still enjoyed following the progress of his investigations. And knowing that Christie often likes to work a nursery rhyme into the text or title of her novels, I was intrigued to come across the lines “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell; The reason why I cannot tell” – the same lines that are quoted in John Dickson Carr’s The Black Spectacles, which I coincidentally read just last week!

Although I didn’t choose Murder is Easy specifically to fit this month’s Read Christie theme, I was pleased to find that poison does feature in the plot, albeit in a small way. The May prompt is ‘betrayal’, if you want to take part.

The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr

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This is only the second book I’ve read by the very prolific John Dickson Carr, who also wrote under several pseudonyms including Carter Dickson. The first one I read was It Walks By Night, one of his Henri Bencolin mysteries, and although I enjoyed it overall, I found the plot too far-fetched and I didn’t much like Bencolin himself. The Black Spectacles, first published in 1939 and recently reissued as a British Library Crime Classic, is from a different series, featuring a different detective – Dr Gideon Fell – so I hoped it would be more to my taste. And it was – I loved it!

The novel is set in the small English village of Sodbury Cross, where a child has died after eating poisoned chocolates. The culprit has not been found, but suspicion has fallen on Marjorie Wells, because she was the one who sent the little boy to the shop to buy chocolates that day. Marjorie’s uncle, Marcus Chesney, believes that most people see the world through ‘black spectacles’, unable to correctly observe what is right in front of their eyes. To prove his point, he decides to stage a performance showing exactly how the real chocolates were substituted with the poisoned ones – and invites Marjorie, her fiancé George Harding and a family friend, Professor Ingram, along to watch. The performance is being filmed with a cine-camera and Marcus has compiled a list of questions to test the observational skills of the three people watching. But when he is found dead, murdered in full view of both the camera and his audience, each of the three witnesses seems to have seen something completely different!

I’ve said that this is a Dr Gideon Fell mystery, but Fell himself doesn’t appear until halfway through the novel. Until that point, the investigations are handled by Inspector Elliot of Scotland Yard, who seems quite competent and thorough…until we discover that he is not being entirely honest with the reader. By the time Fell is brought into the story, most of the clues are in place, but Elliot and the local Sodbury Cross police have failed to interpret them correctly. I’m not surprised they were struggling, because this is a very clever mystery with lots of twists and turns and an ingenious solution. I certainly couldn’t solve it and had to wait for Fell to explain it all, which he does bit by bit as each piece of the puzzle falls into place. I was particularly impressed by a clue involving a clock, which I would never have worked out for myself.

There are so many other things I loved about this book. Carr does an excellent job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of a little English village where the people are trying to come to terms with the discovery that there’s a poisoner in their midst. Some references to real life crimes and poisoning cases are worked into the plot – in particular the case of Christiana Edmunds, who was known as the ‘Chocolate Cream Killer’. I was also fascinated by the descriptions of 1930s film and camera technology, with the recording made of Marcus Chesney’s dramatic scene playing a very important part in the solving of the mystery.

Having enjoyed The Black Spectacles so much, I’m sure I’ll be reading more of the Gideon Fell mysteries soon. You may want to note that this book has also been published in the US as The Problem of the Green Capsule, just in case anyone buys the same book twice!