Tag: 1930s

Death of an Author by E.C.R. Lorac – #ReadIndies

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E.C.R. Lorac’s Death of an Author, first published in 1935, begins with the novelist Michael Ashe persuading his publisher to arrange a dinner party so that he can meet another of their authors, the crime writer Vivian Lestrange. Despite being famously secretive and reclusive, Lestrange accepts the invitation – but to Ashe’s surprise, a young woman arrives at the party rather than the man he had expected. Vivian, of course, could be either a man’s name or a woman’s, and Lestrange seems amused by Ashe’s assumptions. She engages Ashe in a debate on gender equality and whether it’s possible to tell a man’s writing from a woman’s – and naturally, she comes out of the argument on top.

Three months later, the same young woman approaches the police to report a crime and introduces herself as Eleanor Clarke, secretary to the author Vivian Lestrange. She admits that Lestrange really is a man, although she has impersonated him at parties a few times for fun. Her reason for contacting the police is that Mr Lestrange has disappeared along with his housekeeper, Mrs Fife, and Eleanor is unable to gain entry to his house, her place of work. She is concerned about him and wants the police to investigate. Inspector Bond, however, is convinced that Eleanor herself is Vivian Lestrange and that some sort of deception is taking place. His Scotland Yard colleague, Inspector Warner, on the other hand, believes what Eleanor has told them and accepts that she and Lestrange are two separate people. But which of them is correct – and if Eleanor is telling the truth, what has happened to the real Vivian Lestrange?

This is the first book I’ve read by Lorac, although I’ve been intending to try one for a long time as I know she’s one of the most popular authors in the British Library Crime Classics series. It was maybe not the best one to start with (it has just been reprinted in January, and I would imagine the British Library have been publishing her stronger books first), but I found it enjoyable enough, with one or two reservations. It certainly has a fascinating plot, with the police trying to investigate a crime without being sure who the victim is or even whether a crime has been committed at all. It was interesting to watch the two detectives, Warner and Bond, working together to come up with different possible scenarios and trying to decide which was the most likely.

As an author who wrote under her initials (her real name was Edith Caroline Rivett) and other pseudonyms including Carol Carnac (Lorac is Carol backwards), the arguments Eleanor Clarke makes to defend women’s writing and to refute the assumption that only men could write a certain kind of book must have been close to Lorac’s own heart. And yet, the way the story develops after this seems to contradict some of the points that were being made at the beginning and I was left feeling slightly confused as to what Lorac was actually trying to say.

Although I couldn’t quite manage to love this one, it was still an entertaining read and I’m sure I’ll try more of Lorac’s books. I know some of you have read a lot of them, so I would like to hear which ones you would recommend!

I’m counting this towards #ReadIndies, a month celebrating books from independent publishers hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

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A new year means the start of a new Agatha Christie challenge! Read Christie 2023 is hosted by the official Agatha Christie site and this year the focus is on methods and motives. The theme for January is jealousy and the chosen book is Sad Cypress. However, I read that one quite recently so I’ve gone with one of the alternative suggestions for this month, Cards on the Table.

Published in 1936, this is a Poirot novel, but it also features three of Christie’s other recurring characters, all of whom work together to solve the mystery. They are Superintendent Battle, the Scotland Yard detective; former Army officer and intelligence agent, Colonel Race; and Ariadne Oliver, the famous crime author. All three, along with Poirot, are invited to a dinner party hosted by Mr Shaitana, a wealthy man known as a collector of rare objects. He tells Poirot that he will also be inviting a collection of criminals – four people he believes have committed murder but never been caught.

During the party, the eight guests divide into two groups and sit down to play bridge. Several hours later, Mr Shaitana, who wasn’t participating, is found dead in his chair by the fire – stabbed with a small dagger by one of his guests while the others were engrossed in their game. The four sleuths can obviously be ruled out, but any one of the other four could be the murderer. To get to the truth, Poirot and his friends must investigate the background of each suspect to see whether Shaitana was correct and each of them had already killed before.

Cards on the Table begins with a foreword in which Christie explains that unlike most crime novels where the least likely suspect is usually the culprit, this book has four suspects who are all equally likely. They have all (allegedly) committed murder in the past, so all have a motive – fear that Shaitana will expose their previous crimes to the other guests. There’s Dr Roberts, who may or may not have been responsible for the death of at least one of his patients; Major Despard, whose expedition to the Amazon is shrouded in mystery; young Anne Meredith, who tries to cover up her reasons for leaving a previous job; and Mrs Lorrimer, an expert bridge player whose secrets prove particularly difficult to unearth. I suspected all of them at various points, but every time I thought I’d worked it out, Christie threw another twist into the story and I had to think again!

I loved the idea of having four different detectives working together in the same novel (it’s a shame Miss Marple and Tommy and Tuppence hadn’t been invited to the party too!) and each of them has a chance to contribute to the solving of the mystery. Colonel Race has a disappointingly small part, but we see a lot of Battle and Mrs Oliver – who is often described as a self-parody of Christie herself and provides an opportunity to comment on the writing of detective novels. Of course, it’s Poirot who correctly identifies the murderer in the end!

I enjoyed this book, but I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I’d had more knowledge of bridge, which is a game I don’t play and don’t really understand. Part of Poirot’s investigation revolves around the score cards and an analysis of each suspect’s playing style, so this meant very little to me. Luckily, though, it’s not completely essential to be able to follow all of this and there are other clues to piece together as well.

February’s Read Christie theme is ‘a blunt object’ and the group read will be Partners in Crime, which again is a book I’ve already read. I’ll wait until they reveal the alternative choices for the month and see if any appeal to me.

Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell

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Wild Strawberries is the second book in Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire series and the book chosen for me in the last Classics Club Spin. I had mixed feelings about the first book, High Rising, which I read nearly two years ago, but still wanted to try this one as I knew it was about a different set of characters and I thought I might get on better with it.

Published in 1934, this book introduces us to the Leslie family who live at Rushwater, their estate in West Barsetshire. The family consists of Henry Leslie and his absentminded wife, Lady Emily, their two sons John and David, and their daughter Agnes, who is married to Robert Graham and has three young children. There was also another son, the eldest, who died in the Great War, and his sixteen-year-old son Martin is now the heir to Rushwater and lives with his grandparents. As the novel opens, Robert Graham has gone to South America on business so Agnes and the children are spending the summer with the Leslies and so is a niece of Robert’s, Mary Preston.

This probably all sounds straightforward enough to you, but for some reason it took me ages to remember who was who and I wished I had drawn a family tree at the beginning! Anyway, once I started to settle into the story and get to know the characters, I found it quite enjoyable. The plot mainly revolves around Mary Preston and the question of which of the Leslie men she’ll marry – David or John. David, the younger brother, is charming but selfish and thoughtless (he promises to bring Mary the ‘wild strawberries’ of the title, then forgets them), while John is quiet, kind and considerate. I knew which of them I wanted her to choose but Thirkell keeps us in suspense until the end of the book!

There’s also a subplot involving a French family, the Boulles, who move into the vicarage for the summer. Keen for Martin to improve his French, the Leslies arrange for him to study with the Boulles’ children, but instead he becomes involved in a plot to restore the French monarchy. Meanwhile, the lovely but irritating Agnes spends the entire book fussing over her children, and Mr Holt, an acquaintance of Lady Emily’s who talks about nothing but gardens and his titled friends, keeps imposing himself on the family, oblivious to the fact that nobody wants him there.

I enjoyed this book once I got into it; although it doesn’t have much more substance than High Rising, I found it funnier and can see now why people praise Thirkell for her humour and wit. There are also touches of poignancy when the Leslies remember their lost son, killed in the war, and when John, who is a widower, grieves for Gay, his late wife. Some of the characters, such as Mr Holt and the Boulles, are clearly there for comedy purposes, but the family themselves, annoying as some of them were, felt realistic to me. I liked John and Martin, while I found Mary’s infatuation with David, who treats her carelessly, frustrating but all too believable. I should mention, though, that there are a few instances of racism, mainly in the first half of the book, that even though I’m used to it in books of this era, I found more jarring than I normally would.

I still haven’t been completely won over by Angela Thirkell but I liked this better than the first book and will probably continue with the series at some point. However, the third book is about Tony, the teenage boy from High Rising whom I found almost unbearable, so I don’t know what I’ll think of that one!

This is book 35/50 read from my second Classics Club list.

Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp – #DeanStreetDecember

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This month, Liz of Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home is hosting Dean Street Press December. Margery Sharp’s first novel, Rhododendron Pie, had been out of print for years and was notoriously difficult to find before being reprinted by Dean Street Press in 2021. As I’ve previously enjoyed some of her other books I decided to read it for this month’s event.

First published in 1930, Rhododendron Pie is the story of Ann Laventie, who grows up in the Sussex countryside with her parents and two older siblings. The Laventies are a wealthy and accomplished family who consider themselves intellectual, artistic and refined; their neighbours, however, see them as cold and snobbish. Ann herself doesn’t fit in with the rest of the family – unlike her brother Dick, a sculptor, and sister Elizabeth, a writer, she hasn’t yet discovered where her own talents lie and doesn’t believe herself to be special or superior in any way. The more time she spends with the Gayfords, the large, cheerful, down-to-earth family who live nearby, the more she becomes aware of how different her own home life is.

The title of the book refers to the tradition in the Laventie household of presenting the children with birthday pies filled not with fruit but with inedible flowers. Aesthetically beautifully and appreciated by the rest of the family, but not by Ann:

“Every year she has hoped against hope, and every year the lovely inedible petals have cheated her. For she has a fundamental, instinctive conviction that they are out of place. Flowers are beautiful in gardens…and in houses, of course…but in a pie you want fruit. Apples. Hot and fragrant and faintly pink, with lots of juice…and cloves. She wished there had been apples in her pie.”

Although Ann loves her family and admires their intellectual brilliance, it’s her secret longing for the ordinary, conventional things in life that drives the story forward. When Dick and Elizabeth move to London and Ann goes to visit them there, her knowledge and experience of the world widens and she becomes more aware of what she really wants and what will make her happy.

It took me a while to get into this book, but once I did it was very enjoyable. I loved Ann and found it interesting to watch the internal conflict play out between her true nature and the values and prejudices that have been instilled into her as a result of her upbringing. Although there’s some romance in the book – Ann has two very different love interests and it’s quite easy to predict which one she’ll choose! – it never really becomes the main focus and is just one aspect of the story, along with the exploration of intellectual snobbery, the class system and the difficulties of finding your place in the world.

As I’d hoped, this was a good choice for Dean Street December and I’ll see if I have time for another book before the end of the month.

The Mysterious Mr Badman by W.F. Harvey

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The British Library are doing a great job of bringing the work of obscure or long-forgotten authors back into print with their Crime Classics series and William Fryer Harvey is another. Better known for his horror stories such as The Beast with Five Fingers and August Heat, he also wrote a crime novel, The Mysterious Mr Badman, which was originally published in 1934. I was immediately drawn to this book not just by the title, but also the subtitle, A Yorkshire Bibliomystery!

As Martin Edwards points out in the introduction, this must be the only crime novel with a blanket manufacturer as the protagonist. His name is Athelstan Digby and as the novel opens he is visiting his nephew in the Yorkshire village of Keldstone. One day he offers to take charge of the village bookshop so the bookseller and his wife can go to a funeral. Digby is expecting a quiet, uneventful afternoon so he is amazed when three men separately enter the shop within the space of a few hours, all asking for a copy of the same book: Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr Badman. Digby is unable to find this book on the shelves, but when a boy arrives at the shop later that day with a pile of old books to sell – including Mr Badman – he becomes even more suspicious. What is going on – and why is that particular book so important?

This is a short novel, so I won’t go into the plot in much more detail…except to say that it’s great fun. There are murders, incriminating letters, political conspiracies, a touch of romance and a lot of humour! With character names like Athelstan Digby, Euphemia Upstart, Olaf Wake and Kitchener Lilywhite, you can see that it’s not a book to be taken entirely seriously, but at the same time it’s a clever, interesting and well written novel and one of the most enjoyable I’ve read from the British Library Crime Classics series for a while. Just be aware that it’s more of a thriller than a conventional detective novel; the mystery is actually solved quite early in the book and the significance of Mr Badman and the identity of the villain are revealed much sooner than you would expect. The fun is in watching Digby team up with his nephew Jim Pickering and Jim’s love interest Diana Conyers to try to decide what they should do with the information they’ve obtained.

As always when I read mysteries written in this period, I was struck by not only how much more difficult some aspects of crime-solving were in those days (no internet, no DNA testing) but also how much easier other aspects were. It was far simpler to trace a particular car when there were so few of them on the roads and everyone would notice an unfamiliar one driving through their village. I really enjoyed watching Digby, Jim and Diana investigate the mystery using the methods available to them in the 1930s, even if they occasionally walk straight into traps that are quite obvious to anyone who reads a lot of Golden Age crime fiction! I also loved the Yorkshire setting, although not all of the novel is set there.

Although, as I’ve said, Harvey is better known as a horror writer, it seems that the character of Digby previously appeared in a book of short stories, The Misadventures of Athelstan Digby. I hope that one will become available as a BLCC book soon too.

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull

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Richard Hull’s The Murder of My Aunt is one of the best books I’ve read from the British Library Crime Classics series. I’ve since read some of his others, available from a different publisher (Agora Books) and apart from Left-Handed Death, which was quite entertaining, they were disappointing in comparison. I hoped for better things from Excellent Intentions, another BLCC book. If nothing else, it has a lovely autumnal cover!

First published in 1938, Excellent Intentions begins in the courtroom. We know that someone is on trial for murder – but who is it? We will have to wait until the end of the book to find out; it’s a clever and unusual structure, with the details of the crime unfolding through a series of flashbacks as the witnesses provide the evidence and the jurors listen to the cases put forward by prosecution and defence. This format works very well as it allows us to see the story from lots of different angles and look for clues that will help us to guess who it is that has been accused.

We do know that the victim is Henry Cargate, a rude and unpleasant man who has made himself very unpopular since moving into the ‘big house’ in the village of Scotney End. On the day of his death a problem with his car forces him to take a train into town and just as the train leaves the station he is seen by another passenger to take a large pinch of snuff. Seconds later he is dead. As Cargate was known to have a weak heart, it is at first assumed that he has died of natural causes – until his snuff is found to have been laced with potassium cyanide, bought by the victim himself to destroy a wasps’ nest.

Because Cargate is such a horrible man – a man who ‘wanted to do nobody any good’ – there are plenty of people who could have had a reason for wanting him dead. However, there are only four who could have had access to the snuffbox and the poison, both of which were kept in Cargate’s own study. There’s Mr Yockleton, the vicar, whom Cargate had accused of stealing an emerald the day before the murder; Raikes the butler and Miss Knox Forster, the secretary, both members of Cargate’s household; and finally, Andrew Macpherson, a dealer in stamps. Cargate is a keen stamp collector and he and Macpherson had recently had a disagreement over whether some of the stamps in his collection were fakes. I should warn you here that we learn a huge amount about different types of stamps and their colours, markings and perforations, which you may or may not find interesting!

Any of these four people could have committed the murder, but only one has been accused and it’s up to the jury to decide whether this person really is the culprit. As the trial continues, we hear how Inspector Fenby, the detective investigating the crime, has decided who he thinks was responsible – and this is where I started to lose interest a little bit. There’s a lot of focus on alibis, timings, the positions of the snuffbox and the poison on Cargate’s desk, and who could have been in certain rooms during certain periods without being seen. This is never my favourite kind of mystery as I find it difficult to keep all of these things straight in my mind; I tend to prefer books that concentrate more on the motives of the characters and less on the technicalities of the crime.

I loved the ending, though. Even after we find out who it is that’s on trial, there’s another twist to come! This was an entertaining read overall and I would still like to read Keep It Quiet and Murder Isn’t Easy, the only other two Hull novels currently in print that I haven’t read yet.

This is book 16/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

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I first came across a mention of the 1922 Thompson–Bywaters case when I read The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters several years ago and discovered that it was part of the inspiration for the novel. F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow was listed in the acknowledgments and I immediately wanted to read it. However, that was 2014 and it has taken me until 2022 to actually do it! The good thing about waiting this long is that the book has recently been reissued by the British Library as part of their Women Writers series and that’s the edition I read, complete with a very insightful new afterword by Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book.

A Pin to See the Peepshow was first published in 1934 and begins just before the First World War. Julia Almond is sixteen years old and a typical schoolgirl, infatuated with one of her teachers, fiercely protective of her beloved dog, Bobby, and longing for some excitement to brighten up her humdrum existence. Starting work in a fashionable dress shop after leaving school gives her a glimpse of the sort of world she would like to inhabit, but it also makes her situation at home, where she is forced to share a bedroom with a much younger cousin, seem even more unbearable. Rushing into marriage with her parents’ friend, Herbert Starling, in the hope of finding the freedom she craves, Julia quickly discovers that she has made a terrible mistake. She doesn’t love Herbert and knows she never will, but divorce seems to be out of the question and she can see no other way of escape.

Several years into her marriage, Julia meets the much younger Leonard Carr and at last experiences the passion and romance she has always dreamed of. The two begin an affair and soon Leonard – or Leo, as Julia prefers to call him – is putting pressure on her to prove that she loves him and leave her husband. Julia knows that Herbert will never let her go and that she can’t afford to lose the security her marriage provides, but Leo won’t accept this and eventually decides to take matters into his own hands…

I loved this book, although I had expected the crime element to play a bigger part; the section of the novel based on the events of the Thompson-Bywaters case only takes up around 100 pages out of 464. The rest of the book is really a character study of Julia Almond and an exploration of the world in which she lives. Jesse spends a lot of time building this up, but I never felt that a word was wasted – every detail seemed necessary in order for us to understand the circumstances that led to the actions of the characters later in the book. Julia herself is not a particularly likeable character, but it would be difficult not to have at least some sympathy for her as her only ‘crime’ is to be constantly striving towards a happier life for herself and dreaming of things that are always just out of reach. This is illustrated by the metaphor of the toy peepshow she stares into as a schoolgirl and finds herself glimpsing a fantasy land:

The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was as though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.

The events that unfold towards the end of the book are tragic for everyone involved, but are particularly unfair for Julia, who is judged by the standards of the time. Her position in society places her at a disadvantage and as Jesse points out, if Julia had only belonged to either a higher class or a lower one, her situation could have been very different. This is a fascinating novel and now I’ll have to read E.M. Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs, which is based on the same case!

This is book 10/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

This is also book 30/50 from my second Classics Club list.