Tag: 1930s

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!

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

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Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, Rogue Male, was the book selected for me in the recent Classics Club Spin. Not knowing much about it, I had added it to my Classics Club list after seeing it included in The Guardian’s Top 10 novels of the 1930s. It sounded very like The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, which I thought was fun, if a bit repetitive, but while there are definitely some similarities, I found Rogue Male a more satisfying book.

The novel opens in 1938 just after our narrator has been caught aiming a gun at the dictator of an unspecified European country. Despite insisting that he wasn’t planning to pull the trigger and was just enjoying the thrill of ‘hunting the biggest game on earth’, the narrator is tortured and thrown over a cliff, where he is left to die. Somehow, he survives and manages to make his way back to London. On his arrival, he discovers that agents of the dictator he’d tried to shoot have followed him to England. Staying in London is obviously now out of the question, so he heads for the Dorset countryside where he is sure his pursuers will never be able to find him.

The identity of the protagonist’s target is kept carefully hidden, with very few clues throughout the novel, but it’s not difficult to guess who it was supposed to be and Household later confirmed that it was Hitler. As the book was published just before the start of World War II, it’s easy to see why he decided to be vague about it. His reasons for also leaving the narrator unnamed are less clear, but it does add an extra layer of mystery to the novel; while the narrator hides himself from the enemy agents, he also reveals very little of himself to the reader, leaving us wondering who he really is and what his true motives were for carrying out the assassination attempt.

For such a short book (around 200 pages), there’s a lot of plot packed between its covers and the tension builds as we wait to see whether he can continue to evade his pursuers. There’s a sinister villain, Major Quive-Smith who, like everything and everyone else in the book, is shrouded in mystery: we don’t know his nationality, his background or who he represents – all we do know is that he’s determined to force a confession from the narrator that the British government was behind the assassination attempt, something the narrator continues to deny even while his real motives are slow to emerge. Yet although I did enjoy the book, I still felt that there was something missing. The vagueness of it all, and the guarded and secretive nature of the protagonist, made it difficult for me to care what happened to him on an emotional level and this meant I found the story slightly less thrilling than I would have liked.

This book was adapted for film in 1941, under the title Man Hunt, and again as a BBC adaptation, Rogue Male, in 1976. The BBC version stars Peter O’Toole, with Alastair Sim as the Earl (a character who doesn’t appear in the book). It’s on YouTube and definitely worth watching. I’ve also discovered there’s a sequel to this novel called Rogue Justice, published much later in 1982, which is more open about the target being Hitler. I’m not sure if I want to read that one as the reviews aren’t very positive, but it seems Household was quite a prolific author, with more than twenty books published for adults and young adults, so I’ll see if any of his others appeal.

This is book 37/50 read from my second Classics Club list.

The Empty World by D.E. Stevenson

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Did you know that D.E. Stevenson had written a post-apocalyptic novel? I didn’t, until I read the description of this one and was intrigued by how different it sounded from her usual light romances and family sagas. First published in 1936, it’s available in ebook format from independent publisher Lume Books. I’m not sure whether ebooks count towards Karen and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies month, but this book seems to be currently out of print in physical form.

The Empty World begins with historical novelist Jane Forrest and her secretary, Maisie, boarding a flight from New York to London. Jane is prepared for a turbulent journey, but she and the other passengers are alarmed when a particularly violent electrical storm seems to knock them off course and cut off communication with the world below. Finally managing to land in Glasgow, the passengers and crew immediately sense that something is horribly wrong – the airport is eerily deserted and nobody comes to meet the plane. And it’s not just the airport…the city of Glasgow itself also appears to be completely empty of people, animals, birds and any other form of life. Eventually, Jane and her companions are forced to face the possibility that they could be the only human beings left in the whole world.

I don’t want to go into the plot in too much more detail as part of the enjoyment of reading this book was first in wondering what had happened to destroy life on earth and then in wondering how Jane and the other survivors would react. It would be nice to think that if a disaster threw you together with a random group of people you would all work together and cooperate, but of course that’s not what happens here and divisions and tensions within the group are apparent from the start. Some of these are romantic tensions, due to there being seventeen men in the group and only five women. Others arise from different views over how their new society should be run and whether everyone should be allowed to be part of it.

It seemed at first that the whole book would be written from Jane’s perspective and I did find her a likeable heroine, but we also get to know the other people who survived the disaster – thirteen passengers and nine crew members – and some of them go off and have adventures of their own as the novel progresses. As well as Jane and her secretary, these include newspaper proprietor Sir Richard Barton, who becomes the de facto leader of the group, Hollywood actress Iris Bright and her bullying manager, two elderly spinster sisters, and an assortment of pilots and engineers.

A few pages into the book, it began to occur to me that something didn’t feel quite right. I eventually looked back at the first page and discovered that although the book was published in 1936, the story is actually set in 1973, Stevenson’s future. That obviously hadn’t registered with me when I first started reading, although the description of a transatlantic flight only taking twelve hours should have told me it wasn’t the 1930s! To be fair, the setting is only vaguely futuristic and overall it does feel much more like the 30s than the 70s.

I don’t read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, but Stevenson seems to explore most of the issues that are usually raised in this kind of novel. Why did some people survive and not others? How should they go about rebuilding their lives and how will each survivor fit into the new community that begins to emerge from the ruins? Which ideas, inventions and customs of the former civilisation are worth preserving and which should be consigned to history? Money, for example, no longer has any meaning when you can walk into an abandoned shop and take whatever you need.

I loved the eerie atmosphere Stevenson creates as she describes a world without life, with inanimate objects frozen in place exactly as they were when the catastrophe struck. Trying to travel anywhere is an ordeal as the roads are blocked with crashed or stationary vehicles (although I don’t think Stevenson had fully appreciated how much busier the roads would have become between the 1930s and 1970s – and can you imagine how bad this problem would be in 2023!). I found it particularly poignant when three members of the party take a small plane and fly to Europe, only to find that the places they’d always dreamed of visiting – Rome and Venice, for example – have completely lost their magic now they are devoid of life. At least you can have the museums and galleries all to yourself!

It’s sad that The Empty World seems to have been almost forgotten and has never received the attention or acclaim of other dystopian novels. Maybe it was just too different from Stevenson’s other work to appeal to her existing readers while her reputation as an author of gentle, domestic fiction may have led to the book being overlooked by science fiction fans. I loved it anyway and found it a fascinating, thought provoking read. I would definitely recommend trying it if you can get hold of it – if you need it in physical format, used copies seem to be quite rare and expensive but maybe you’ll be lucky. The book has also been published in the US under the title of A World in Spell.