lyzard's list - hoping for 100 in 2012 - Part 4

After all the stresses of the last thread, I thought I would head this one with something soothing.

This is a stream in the Noah Valley, in the Daintree Rainforest of far north Queensland.

So what goes on here?

1. I have a blog, for which I am undertaking a roughly chronological examination of early English (mostly) literature, tracing the development of the novel from the 1660s onwards. This has had the unanticipated side-effect of forcing me into a crash-course in Restoration politics and the Stuarts.

2. Also for my blog, I read novels published between 1751 - 1930, chosen blindly from my wishlist by means of a random number generator. I am also taking a closer look at the complete works (or as complete as possible) of certain authors who have caught my interest for one reason or another.

3. While most novels published prior to 1931 will be reviewed at my blog, with brief comments and links here, for any novel published 1931 onwards I will post a review on this thread. Lately my off-blog reading has been dominated by Silver and Golden Age mysteries.

4. I also read some non-fiction, mostly books-on-books and history or sociology that supports my blog reading.

In other words - if you're looking for discussion of the latest bestsellers, you probably won't find it here. :)

But if you have an interest in the history of the novel, in 18th and 19th century literature, or in the development of the mystery genre, or if you just like discovering or being reminded of authors and books that have slipped through the cracks, you've come to the right place!

January:

1. The Great Portrait Mystery by R. Austin Freeman (1918)
2. Sick Heart River by John Buchan (1941)
3. The Maxwell Mystery by Carolyn Wells (1913)
4. The Devil And X.Y.Z. by Barum Browne (Hilary St George Saunders and Geoffrey Dennis) (1931)
5. The Voyage Home by Storm Jameson (1930)
6. Susan Spray by Sheila Kaye-Smith (1931)
7. Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)
8. Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien (1931)
9. The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
10. Dr Priestley's Quest by John Rhode (Cecil John Street) (1926)
11. One By One They Disappeared by Moray Dalton (Katherine Mary Dalton Renoir) (1929)

February:

12. Danger Calling by Patricia Wentworth (1931)
13. The Bride Of Anguished English by Richard Lederer (2000)
14. The Novel In Letters: Epistolary Fiction In The Early English Novel 1678-1740 by Natascha Wurzbach (ed.) (1969)
15. The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled by Francis Kirkman (1673)
16. Whigs And Hunters: The Origin Of The Black Act by E. P. Thompson (1975)
17. The Heart Of Midlothian by Walter Scott (1818)
18. The Murders In Praed Street by John Rhode (Cecil John Street) (1928)
19. Mary Lou: A Story Of Divine Corners by Faith Baldwin (1931)
20. Mistress Of The House: Great Ladies And Grand Houses 1670-1830 by Rosemary Baird (2003)
21. Today's Virtue by Faith Baldwin (1931)
22. A Richer Dust by Storm Jameson (1931)

March:

23. The Secret Of High Eldersham by Miles Burton (Cecil John Street) (1930)
24. Helen Vardon's Confession by R. Austin Freeman (1922)
25. Anybody But Anne by Carolyn Wells (1914)
26. Lord Peter Views The Body by Dorothy L. Sayers (1928)
27. The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1767)
28. The House On Tollard Ridge by John Rhode (Cecil John Street) (1929)
29. The Brooklyn Murders by G. D. H. Cole (1923)
30. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy: A Casebook by Thomas Keymer (ed.) (2006)
31. The Mystery Of The Thirteenth Floor by Lee Thayer (1919)
32. The Gothic Flame by Devendra P. Varma (1957)
33. The Path Of Love by Norma Octavia Lorimer (1921)
34. Week-End At Hurtmore by Mary Lutyens (1954)

April:

35. The Gothic Quest: A History Of The Gothic Novel by Montague Summers (1938)
36. The Dead Letter: An American Romance by Metta Fuller Victor (1866)
37. The Figure Eight; or, The Mystery Of Meredith Place by Metta Fuller Victor (1869)
38. The Unpleasantness At The Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers (1928)
39. The Sham Prince Expos'd by Anonymous (1688)
40. The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth (1850)
41. The White Alley by Carolyn Wells (1915)
42. At One-Thirty: A Mystery by Isabel Ostrander (1915)
43. The Beacon Hill Murders by Roger Scarlett (Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page) (1930)
44. The Web Of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction By American Women by Catherine Ross Nickerson (1998)
45. Dr Thorndyke's Casebook by R. Austin Freeman (1923)
46. The Rasp by Philip MacDonald (1924)
47. The Mother by Naomi Royde-Smith (1931)
48. 'Vantage Striker by Helen Simpson (1931)
49. Ruth Fielding Of The Red Mill; or, Jasper Parloe's Secret by Alice B. Emerson (1913)

May:

50. Weston Of The North-West Mounted Police by Trygve Lund (1928)
51. The Curved Blades by Carolyn Wells (1916)
52. The Cat's Eye by R. Austin Freeman (1923)
53. Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott by Louisa May Alcott (1975)
54. The Back Bay Murders by Roger Scarlett (Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page) (1930)
55. Up North: A Tale From Northern Canada by Trygve Lund (1929)
56. A Genius For Letters: Booksellers And Bookselling From The 16th To The 20th Century by Robin Myers and Robin Harris (eds.) (1995)
57. The Silent Bullet by Arthur B. Reeve (1910)
58. The Revenge Of Anguished English: More Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language by Richard Lederer (2005)
59. Ruth Fielding Of Briarwood Hall; or, Solving The Campus Mystery by Alice B. Emerson (1913)
60. The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer's Story by Anna Katharine Green (1878)
61. The Murder Of Dave Brandon by Trygve Lund (1931)
62. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (1930)
63. The Unlatched Door by Lee Thayer (1920)
64. The Underwood Mystery by Charles J. Dutton (1921)

June:

65. Clermont by Regina Maria Roche (1798)
66. Green Talons by Gavin Holt (Charles Rodda) (1930)
67. The Trail Of The Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1860)
68. The Corn King And The Spring Queen by Naomi Mitchison (1931)
69. Rachel Moon by Lorna Rea (1931)
70. Force And Fraud: A Tale Of The Bush by Ellen Davitt (1865)
71. The Pleasantries Of Old Quong by Thomas Burke (1931)
72. At The Villa Rose by A. E. W. Mason (1910)

July:

73. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1865)
74. The Link by Philip MacDonald (1930)
75. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara Reeve (1777)
76. Murder At Marble Arch by Gavin Holt (Charles Rodda) (1931)
77. The Concave Mirror by William Babbington Maxwell (1931)
78. Penhally by Caroline Gordon (1931)
79. The Body In The Road by Moray Dalton (Katherine Mary Dalton Renoir) (1930)
80. The Night Of Fear by Moray Dalton (Katherine Mary Dalton Renoir) (1931)
81. The Mystery Of Angelina Frood by R. Austin Freeman (1924)
82. Cat's Paw by Roger Scarlett (Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page) (1931)
83. The Chinaberry Tree by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1931)
84. Visions And Venturers by Theodore Sturgeon (1978)

August:

85. The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)
86. The Patient In Room 18 by Mignon G. Eberhart (1929)
87. Mad Puppetstown by M. J. Farrell (Molly Keane) (1931)
88. The Harbourmaster by William McFee (1931)
89. Plagued By The Nightingale by Kay Boyle (1931)
90. The Crevice by Isabel Ostrander and William J. Burns (1915)
91. A Strange Disappearance by Anna Katharine Green (1879)
92. Plots And Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott by Madeleine Stern (ed.) (1976)
93. Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers (1931)
94. The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796)

September:

95. The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier (1931)
96. Fruit On The Bough by Ursula Bloom (1931)
97. The Man In Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1909)
98. The Innocence Of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton (1911)
99. The Happy Prisoner by Lorna Rea (1931)
100. Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn (1688)
101. The Fleet Hall Inheritance by Richard Keverne (Clifford James Wheeler Hosken) (1931)

October:

102. The Killer Of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story And The Birth Of Forensic Science by Douglas Starr (2011)
103. Letty Lynton by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1931)
104. The House Of The Arrow by A. E. W. Mason (1924)
105. The Poisoned Pen by Arthur B. Reeve (1911)
106. The Davidson Case by John Rhode (Cecil John Street) (1929)
107. Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine by Mary Meeke (1871)
108. Madeline Clifford's School Life by Mary Meeke (1873)
109. The Mark Of Cain by Carolyn Wells (1917)
110. Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp; or, Lost In The Backwoods by Alice B. Emerson (1913)
111. Bandit Love by Juanita Savage (1931)
112. The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1911)
113. The Man On Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus And The Affair That Divided France by Ruth Harris (2010)
114. When Parents Text...So Much Said, So Little Understood by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli (2011)
115. Death In A Bowl by Raoul Whitfield (1931)

November:

116. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (1857)
117. A Murder Of Some Importance by Bruce Graeme (Graham Montague Jeffries) (1931)
118. The Rembrandt Murder by Henry James Forman (1931)
119. The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan (1928)
120. The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson (1931)
121. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott by Louisa May Alcott (1988)
122. By Saturday by Sydney Fowler (Sydney Fowler Wright) (1931)
123. Put Out The Light by Ethel Lina White (1931)
124. S. S. San Pedro by James Gould Cozzens (1931)
125. Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury by Thomas Leland (1762)
126. Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths And Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern (1997)
127. Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun (2011)
128. The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix (Charles Warren Adams) (1865)
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129. The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda by Aphra Behn (1688)

December:

130. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
131. That Affair At "The Cedars" by Lee Thayer (1921)
132. The Buckled Bag by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1914)
133. Locked Doors by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1914)
134. Patty Fairfield by Carolyn Wells (1901)
135. The Swamp Of Death: A True Tale Of Victorian Lies And Murder by Rebecca Gowers (2004)
136. Call Mr Fortune by H. C. Bailey (1920)
137. The Tragedy Of Ines de Castro by Antonio Ferreira (1587)
138. The Fatal Beauty Of Agnes de Castro; Taken Out Of The History Of Portugal by Jean-Baptiste de Brilhac (translated by Peter Belon) (1688)
139. Agnes de Castro; or, The Force Of Generous Love by Jean-Baptiste de Brilhac (translated by Aphra Behn) (1688)
140. The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason by Melville Davisson Post (1896)
141. The Murder Of Cecily Thane by Harriette Ashbrook (1930)
142. The Puzzle Lock by R. Austin Freeman (1925)
143. The Old Man In The Corner by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1908)

Books in transit:

On interlibrary loan / storage request:

Purchased and shipped:
About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster by Anthony Abbot
The Trail Of The Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
A Queen After Death by William Harman Black

On loan:
*Swamp Of Death by Rebecca Gowers (20/12/2012)
*The Tragedy Of Ines de Castro by Antonio Ferreira (04/01/2013)
A Modern Mephistopheles by Louisa May Alcott (23/01/2013)
The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune by Lucy Sussex (23/01/2013)
*The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason by Melville Post (23/01/2013)
While The Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart (23/01/2013)
The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe (12/02/2013)
The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (12/02/2013)
Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (12/02/2013)
The Passionate Shepherdess by Maureen Duffy (12/02/2013)
Novels Of Everyday Life by Laurie Langbauer (12/02/2013)

Track down:
The Mystery Of The Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux
John Devil by Paul Feval

Ongoing series:

(1878 - 1917) **Anna Katharine Green - Ebenezer Gryce - The Sword Of Damocles (3/12) {ManyBooks}
(1896 - 1909) **Melville Davisson Post - Randolph Mason - The Man Of Last Resort (2/3) {Internet Archive}
(1897 - 1900) **Anna Katharine Green - Amelia Butterworth - That Affair Next Door (1/3) {Fisher Library}
(1901 - 1919) **Carolyn Wells - Patty Fairfield - Patty At Home (2/17) {ManyBooks}
(1905 - 1925) **Baroness Orczy - The Old Man In The Corner - The Case Of Miss Elliott (1/3) {branch transfer} / The Old Man In The Corner (2/3) {ManyBooks}
(1905 - 1928) **Edgar Wallace - The Just Men - The Four Just Men (1/6) {owned}
(1907 - 1912) **Carolyn Wells - Marjorie - Marjorie's Vacation (1/6) {ManyBooks}
(1907 - 1942) *R. Austin Freeman - Dr John Thorndyke - The Puzzle Lock (11/26) {mobileread}
(1908 - 1924) **Margaret Penrose - Dorothy Dale - Dorothy Dale: A Girl Of Today (1/13) {ManyBooks}
(1909 - 1942) *Carolyn Wells - Fleming Stone - Vicky Van (9/49) {ManyBooks}
(1910 - 1936) *Arthur B. Reeve - Craig Kennedy - The Dream Doctor (3/11) {ManyBooks}
(1910 - 1946) *A. E. W. Mason - Inspector Hanaud - The Prisoner In The Opal (3/5) {Fisher Library}
(1911 - 1935) *G. K. Chesterton - Father Brown - The Wisdom Of Father Brown (2/5) {interlibrary loan}
(1911 - 1937) *Mary Roberts Rinehart - Letitia Carberry - Tish (2/5) {ManyBooks}
(1913 - 1934) *Alice B. Emerson - Ruth Fielding - Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point (4/30) {ManyBooks}
(1914 - 1950) Mary Roberts Rinehart - Hilda Adams - Miss Pinkerton (3/5) {Owned}
(1919 - 1966) *Lee Thayer - Peter Clancy - QED (4/60) {Internet Archive}
(1920 - 1939) *E. F. Benson - Mapp And Lucia - Lucia's Progress (5/6) {Fisher Library}
(1920 - 1948) *H. C. Bailey - Reggie Fortune - Mr Fortune's Practice (2/23) {expensive}
(1920 - 1949) *William McFee - Spenlove - Captain Macedoine's Daughter - 1/6) {ManyBooks}
(1921 - 1929) **Charles J. Dutton - John Bartley - Out Of The Darkness (2/9) {Internet Archive}
(1923 - 1937) Dorothy L. Sayers - Lord Peter Wimsey - Have His Carcase (8/15) {Fisher Library}
(1924 - 1959) * / ***Philip MacDonald - Colonel Anthony Gethryn - The Noose (4/24) {AbeBooks}
(1924 - 1957) * Freeman Willis Crofts - Inspector French - Inspector French's Greatest Case (1/30) {interlibrary loan}
(1925 - 1961) * / ***John Rhode - Dr Priestley - Peril At Cranbury Hall (8/72) {unavailable}
(1925 - 1953) *G. D. H. Cole / M. Cole - Superintendent Wilson - The Death Of A Millionaire (2/?) {academic loan}
(1925 - 1937) *Hulbert Footner - Madame Storey - The Under Dogs (1/8) {ePub eBook editions}
(1926 - 1968) *Christopher Bush - Ludovic Travers - The Plumley Inheritance (1/63) {Unavailable}
(1927 - 1933) *Herman Landon - The Picaroon - The Green Shadow (1/7)
(1928 - 1961) Patricia Wentworth - Miss Silver - The Case Is Closed (2/33) {branch transfer}
(1928 - 1936) ***Gavin Holt - Luther Bastion - The Garden Of Silent Beasts (5/17) {academic loan}
(1928 - ????) Trygve Lund - Weston of the Royal North-West Mounted Police - In The Snow: A Romance Of The Canadian Backwoods (4/?) {AbeBooks}
(1928 - 1936) *Kay Cleaver Strahan - Lynn MacDonald - Footprints (2/7) {Amazon}
(1929 - 1947) Margery Allingham - Albert Campion - Sweet Danger (5/35) {Fisher Library}
(1929 - 1984) Gladys Mitchell - Mrs Bradley - The Saltmarsh Murders (4/67) {interlibrary loan}
(1929 - 1937) ***Patricia Wentworth - Benbow Smith - Walk With Care (3/4)
(1929 - ????) *Mignon Eberhart - Nurse Sarah Keate - While The Patient Slept (2/8) {Fisher Library}
(1929 - ????) Moray Dalton - Inspector Collier - ???? (3/?)
(1929 - ????) * / ***Charles Reed Jones - Leighton Swift - The King Murder (1/?) {Unavailable}
(1930 - ????) Moray Dalton - Hermann Glide - ???? (3/?)
(1930 - 1932) Hugh Walpole - The Herries Chronicles - The Fortress (3/4) {Fisher Library}
(1930 - 1932) Faith Baldwin - The Girls Of Divine Corners - Myra: A Story Of Divine Corners (4/4) {owned}
(1930 - 1960) ***Miles Burton - Desmond Merrion - The Milk-Churn Murder (10/61) {Munsey's}
(1930 - 1933) Roger Scarlett - Inspector Kane - Murder Among The Angells (4/5) {online shopping}
(1930 - 1941) *Harriette Ashbrook - Philip "Spike" Tracy - The Murder Of Cecily Thane (1/7) {AbeBooks}
(1930 - 1943) *Anthony Abbot - Thatcher Colt - About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster (1/8) {AbeBooks}
(1930 - ????) * / ***David Sharp - Professor Henry Arthur Fielding - My Particular Murder (2/?) {AbeBooks}
(1930 - 1950) *H. C. Bailey - Josiah Clunk - Garstons (1/11)
(1931 - 1940) Bruce Graeme - Superintendent Stevens and Pierre Allain - An Imperfect Crime (2/8) {AbeBooks}
(1931 - 1951) Phoebe Atwood Taylor - Asey Mayo - Death Lights A Candle (2/24) {interlibrary loan}
(1931 - 1933) ***Martin Porlock - Charles Fox-Browne - Mystery In Kensington Gore (2/3)
(1931 - 1955) Stuart Palmer - Hildegarde Withers - Murder On Wheels (2/18) {AbeBooks}
(1931 - 1951) Olive Higgins Prouty - The Vale Novels - Lisa Vale (2/5) {academic loan}
(1931 - 1933) Sydney Fowler - Inspector Cleveland - Crime &. Co. (2/4) {Book Depository}
(1931 - 1934) J. H. Wallis - Inspector Wilton Jacks - Murder By Formula (1/6) {Amazon}
(1932 - 1954) Sydney Fowler - Inspector Combridge and Mr Jellipot - The Bell Street Murders (1/11) {AbeBooks}

*** Incompletely available series
** Series complete pre-1931
* Present status pre-1931

The thread for the tutored read of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk is here.

And with that, I think we're open for business... :)

Oh, I'm first. Hi Lyz, I'm very slowly trying to catch up on your older threads, as the reviews in them are so fascinating that I don't want to skip through them quickly and miss anything. But that means I'm months behind, so meanwhile I saw this new thread and thought I'd hop on quickly before it gets too long.

I'm following the Monk tutored read with interest, though I have not read it myself, and not sure that it's quite what I'm in the mood for at present. But I do find Madeline's questions and your answers very interesting in themselves!

Amazing organization!!

Hi, Genny and Roni - thanks for dropping in!

Don't worry, Genny - my threads are snails compared to a lot of people's - I'm sure it won't take you to long to catch up! (I do love you for trying!)

Unfortunately, Roni, it seems as if I put all of my organisation into my thread: there certainly isn't much left over for real life! :)

Whoo-hoo!

Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective, first published in 1864 and featuring (obviously!) one of literature's first woman detectives, is re-released tomorrow!

See the story in the Guardian here.

Thanks to Heather for first letting me know this was in the works!

>14 lyzard: Thanks for passing along the news! I've added it to my wishlist.

Hi, Carrie! British Library releases have been reasonably priced in the past, so hopefully there will be a good deal on offer for this one, too.

That is a very lovely and peaceful picture at the top of your spiffy new thread, Liz, but I have to admit I'm going to miss seeing that sloth's smiling face every time I check in with you!

Yes, I kind of miss him, too! But perhaps there will be more sloths before this thread is done... :)

The Killer Of Little Shepherds - And now for something completely different... I used to read quite a lot of true crime, though I've drifted away from it recently. I have a science background, and my interest in this field is the development and application of forensic science. While there are any number of books out there with this particular focus, amazingly it seems that the story of Alexandre Lacassagne has not previously been told in any detail - perhaps because it took place in France rather than Britain or the US. However, the fact is that any number of investigative techniques that today we take for granted had their origins in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that if any one man could be called "the father of forensics", it would be Dr Lacassagne. Douglas Starr tells the scientist's story in parallel with another: that of Joseph Vacher, "the French Ripper", one of the 19th century's worst serial killers. Though Vacher was officially tried for only one murder, he confessed to eleven; while the authorities suspected that the number of his victims might actually have been twenty-five or even more. "In all of France there could not have been two men more different than Joseph Vacher and Alexandre Lacassagne," comments Starr, before commencing his twin narratives of the events that set these two vastly opposed individuals on a collision course. Both men left behind them significant records of their activities, in the form of scientific papers, public lectures, police reports and newspaper stories, all of which Starr uses to reconstruct events. The result is a compelling story - but not one for the faint-hearted.

Joseph Vacher's early days were full of warning signs, such as acts of violence committed against animals and other children, including his siblings. As a young man he entered a monastery, only to be turned out for misconduct. In the army, Vacher's unpredictable outbreaks of rage frightened even his fellow soldiers. He was eventually discharged, but honourably, on medical grounds; the papers he carried declaring his status as an ex-military man would later facilitate his safe passage from jurisdiction to jurisdiction during his crime spree. In 1893, Vacher became obsessed with a young woman called Louise Barant. When she rejected him, he bought a pistol and shot both her and himself; both survived because the gun-dealer, although he did not refuse the sale, gave the obviously unstable Vacher half-charge bullets. Two stints in mental asylums were next for Vacher: one in the nightmarish conditions of Dole, the other in the advanced and humane environs of Saint-Robert. From the latter, after less than ten months' incarceration, Vacher walked free - "cured". His first murder was committed seven weeks later. For the next three years, Vacher roamed the rural areas of France, killing whenever the urge overtook him. A number of his victims were shepherds, made vulnerable by the isolation of their profession. Though mostly indiscriminate in his choice of victims, Vacher showed a preference for teenaged boys. Invariably his victims were choked and stabbed in the throat, and appallingly mutilated after death; in the case of the boys, there were often signs of post-mortem sexual assault. Over time Vacher perfected his attack technique so that his victims had little chance of defending themselves, but in August 1897 a woman called Marie-Eugenie Heraud managed to wrench free long enough to scream for help. Her enraged husband subdued and restrained Vacher, who was convicted of attempted rape by the local authorities. It would be some time before they learned exactly who they had in custody...

The late 19th century saw enormous strides made in medicine and science - and consequently, in the techniques of criminal investigation. At the vanguard of the latter was Alexandre Lacassagne, head of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Lyon, who took forensic science, then in its infancy, out of the lecture-hall and into the field. Devoted to the application of science to crime, both in the specific sense of the examination of individual crimes and the broader, anthropological sense, Lacassagne and his enthusiastic students developed any number of techniques that today are standard forensic procedures, such as determining cause of death - and, in murders and suicides, the weapon used - from wound patterns, calculating height and age from bones, differentiating between human and animal hair, identification via dental patterns, old injuries or tattoos, the significance of blood spatter, the transfer of fibres and other trace evidence, the matching of bullets to the guns that fired them, and the physiological and temperature changes that help to establish time of death. Lacassagne campaigned vociferously for the standardisation of autopsy techniques - although in an era before refrigeration was widely available, many doctors were understandably reluctant to perform autopsies at all, let alone with the attention to detail demanded by Lacassgne. (Lacassagne was an admirer of Sherlock Holmes, but only up to a point: he deplored Holmes' failure to perform autopsies.)

Over time, Alexandre Lacassagne became one of the first crime scene investigators, and also one of the first expert witnesses, arguing for the superiority of physical evidence over witness testimony, which might (and often was) be false, mistaken, or obtained under police duress. He was also among the first to extensively interview convicted murderers, recording their life histories and the circumstances that led to their criminal activities. Lacassagne was convinced that much crime was socio-economic in origin, demonstrating, for example, how crime was linked with poverty, how crime rates rose and fell with rising and falling unemployment, and how many criminals were survivors of childhood abuse. This was a stance that put Lacassagne at loggerheads with his main professional rival, the Italian Cesare Lombroso, who believed that criminals were born and not made (a theory that paved the way for the eugenicists, and campaigns for the enforced sterilisation and even euthenasia of "sub-standard" people). It was in this context that Lacassagne made his most famous pronouncement - one far more famous than he is - that, "Societies get the criminals they deserve." Lacassagne's fame grew and spread throughout the 1890s, and in October 1897 he was contacted by a regional prosector named Emile Fourquet, who begged for his help in establishing Joseph Vacher's mental state, and his responsibility for his crimes under the law...

The Killer Of Little Shepherds is not a lengthy work. It is, rather, a staggeringly efficient one, covering not only the parallel but diametrically opposed careers of Joseph Vacher and Alexandre Lacassagne but the contribution of others to criminal investigation in this period. Even the much (and rightly) maligned Cesare Lombroso is given his due: in spite of his pernicious eugenic theories, Lombroso expressed some surprisingly enlightened ideas about the humane treatment of individual criminals. Much attention is devoted here to the remarkable work of Alphonse Bertillion, who pioneered criminal identification first via "anthropometry", that is, systematically recording the physical characterisictics of criminals, before ultimately developing the system for recording fingerprints. Another significant figure is the young prosecutor, Emile Fourquet, whose breakthrough recognition of the need for jurisdictions to share information led him to the incarcerated Joseph Vacher. (To put this in context, it was not until after Ted Bundy's three murder sprees in three different territories in the 1960s that American law enforcement accepted the need for cross-jurisdictional communication.) And remarkably, The Killer Of Little Shepherds does not stop even there, but paints a vivid picture of France in the late 19th century, and the vast social, economic and educational differences between its cities and its rural areas, and the primitive nature of policing in the latter, which played so much into Joseph Vacher's hands. The appalling effect of false accusation, at a time when police investigation of a crime often consisted of nothing more than locking someone up until they confessed or incriminated someone else, is also examined. (To illustrate the depth of the legal incompetence against which Lacassagne was striving, Douglas Starr mentions a case in which a woman was imprisoned for having an abortion - then released three months later, after giving birth in jail.) Particular attention is paid to the rise of tabloid journalism at this time, on the back of the realisation that sensational - and sensationalised - crimes sold newspapers. Douglas Starr details how Joseph Vacher tried to use the newspapers to support his plea of insanity, and how willingly the papers played along with a situation that promised them new and gruesome copy on almost a daily basis. It was this exchange that prompted Vacher's string of confessions, which stopped when the authorities cut off the reporters' access to him.

The Killer Of Little Shepherds concludes with an account of Joseph Vacher's trial, which manages to be just as unsettling as the account of his crimes, albeit in a very different way. At its most basic, the problem of Joseph Vacher boiled down to the fact that at this time only Britain had dedicated asylums for the criminally insane, where individuals could be detained "at Her Majesty's pleasure" - that is, indefinitely; in France, the treatment of the mentally ill was predicated upon an assumption of eventual cure and release. It is clear throughout the trial that the mere thought of Joseph Vacher being set free - as he had been once before - was too terrifying to contemplate even for those who harboured serious doubts as to his sanity and his legal culpability. Alexandre Lacassagne himself, after extensive examination of the crimes and of Vacher, had no doubt that he should be held responsible: to him, too many of Vacher's actions - such as wearing two suits of clothes while hunting a victim, so that the outer, bloodstained garments could be quickly discarded - spoke of calculation and premeditation. Yet set against Lacassagne's opinion (which we have certainly learned to respect) we have the impassioned arguments against the death penalty made by Vacher's defence counsel, Charbonnier, which remain unanswerable to this day. Ultimately, in telling the story of Joseph Vacher, The Killer Of Little Shepherds asks many questions to which there are no easy answers: questions about the law and justice, about society's treatment of the mentally ill, about the tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community - the question, in short, of what society does with its Joseph Vachers - that are as imperative and as troubling today as they were in 1897.

On the eve of his entry into the Vacher murder case, Lacassagne felt pulled by competing obligations. As one of the world's foremost interpretors of forensic evidence and examiner of the criminal mind, he saw lawbreakers not as biological "others" but as complex human beings being influenced by their environment. He did not despise them. He believed in the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners: "to support them, direct them, counsel them, and even help them erase the memory of their punishment." Yet as a protector of the social order, he was implacable about the need to punish offenders, especially those who, in full possession of their faculties, had committed murder. "Society has the right to defend itself," he wrote.

Letty Lynton - As with her most famous work, The Lodger, in Letty Lynton Marie Belloc Lowndes builds a work of fiction upon the bones of a famous true crime - this time, the case of Madeleine Smith, who in 1857 was tried in Glasgow for the arsenic poisoning of her lover, and notoriously escaped with the unique Scottish verdict, "Not Proven". The Smith case has proved irresistable to writers of all kinds over the years, forming the basis of novels, plays and films; its indeterminate verdict was the inspiration for Wilkie Collins' The Law And The Lady, which some of us did as a group read early in 2011. In Letty Lynton, published in 1931, Lowndes modernises the story and shifts it into the English countryside - thus removing the possibility of a third outcome besides guilt or innovence - and succeeds in telling a story both compelling and, in its way, disturbing.

The beautiful young Letty Lynton lives a life of wealth and comfort, albeit boredom, in a luxurious house outside of the village of Thark, where the pharmaceutical works upon which her family's fortune was built in situated. To the horror of Mr and Mrs Lynton (later Sir Robert and Lady Lynton), it is revealed that Letty has been secretly meeting Noel Maclean, the manager of the works, an intense Scotsman more than twenty years her senior, who has taken the affair seriously enough to speak of marriage to Letty's parents. Letty has, however, only been toying with Maclean for lack of anything else to do, and has grown bored with him; when she is commanded to break the relationship off, she obeys with alacrity, giving no thought to Maclean's feelings. Shortly afterwards, Letty encounters a handsome young stranger, Axel Ekebon, who is in the country to learn business methods from a relative of his English mother's. Strongly attracted to Ekebon, Letty offers little resistance when he draws her first into a flirtation, then into meeting secretly in the barn behind the Lyntons' house which once functioned as the children's playroom. In the first tide of their passions, when Ekeborn speaks of marriage, Letty does not reject the idea; nor does she hesitate to write letters to him, even giving in to his insistence that she write "more lovingly". But disillusionment is not long in coming. Letty realises that Ekebon has been lying to her about his social status, and when she sees his shabby lodgings - where his landlady's daughter, Kate Roker, with whom he has been toying, insults her in a jealous rage - she is determined to have no more to do with him. A respite comes when Ekebon is called back to Sweden. At this time Letty meets, and becomes engaged to, Lord Tintagel; she does not love him, but is thrilled at the thought of marrying a lord. All goes well until Ekeborn suddenly reappears, demanding that Letty introduce him to her parents, then threatening to show her letters to her father - a threat that drives Letty to desperate action...

I have to admit that I enjoyed Letty Lynton rather more than its literary qualities strictly merit. Marie Belloc Lowndes is a better story-teller than a writer; she holds the interest with her plot rather than her prose. Yet her portrait of Letty is not without some psychological acuteness. Certainly her most daring stroke is how frankly she reveals Letty as a sexual being who knows all about "the facts of life", who reads books like Three Weeks, and who is slow to break it off with Axel Ekebon, even after she has come to despise him, because of how physically attracted to him she is. (That said, Lowndes also makes it clear that the two, in spite of Ekebon's best efforts, go no further than passionate kissing and "caresses".) Over the course of the story Letty emerges as someone who is morally and emotional lacking, incapable of truly loving or even empathising with others, and likewise unable to really grasp how her actions affect others or what their full consequences might be. The novel ponders the question (common enough in criminal contexts) of how far the Lyntons are to blame for their daughter's lack of character. In some ways this is a story of the generation gap, perhaps never wider than during the time between the wars, a situation exacerbated by the Lyntons' late marriage and entry into parenthood. Clearly, neither one of them knows much about Letty. Sir Robert is a distant father who has had little involvement in his children's upbringing; Lady Lynton openly prefers her son to her daughter, and neglects the latter. A mixture of selfishness and snobbery makes the Lyntons keep their neighbours at a distance, and their house free of "young people". Bob Lynton, being a young man, is able to escape and find his own amusement, but Letty is at her parents' mercy. Though for the most part she refrains from editorialisation to an admirable degree, Lowndes is vocal enough on this point: girls will be girls, and if parents don't fulfil their responsibilities by arranging for their daughters to meet some "nice young men", they can be sure they'll find the other kind for themselves.

When Axel Ekebon dies in agony, protesting to the last that he is suffering nothing worse than severe colic, official suspicion is swft to fasten upon Letty Lynton, thanks primarily to the jealousy of Kate Roker, who immediately rifles the young man's belongings and turns Letty's damning letters over to the police. As with the case of Letty's prototype, Madeleine Smith, the subsequent criminal investigation is one rife with assumptions based upon class, nationality and gender. The working classes of Thark are quick to condemn Letty for stealing a poor girl's lover, and believe in her guilt on principle; the gentry are disgusted by the "foreigner" Ekebon's ungentlemanly behaviour, in retaining the letters he promised to burn and using them for blackmail; while everyone struggles with the monstrous suggestion that a girl like Letty, young and beautiful and gently bred, might actually be capable of murder. The investigation culminates in a coronial inquest, at which Letty's relationship with Ekebon is laid bare, and her movements on the day of his death dissected in fine detail. Facing her ordeal, the girl finds herself supported by the experienced legal counsel, Sir Joseph Molloy, who whatever his private thoughts, determines to do everything within his power to see Letty Lynton walk free, and opposed by the coroner, Dr Powell, who has made up his mind about the girl, and sets himself to ensure that she stands trial for her life...

   Though the whole of her physical self, every nerve in her delicately rounded young body, shrank from the thought of dissolution, everything in her that was sentient forbade acceptance of the shameful bargain proposed by Axel Ekebon. Surely there must be a third way open to her?...
   And then, she could not have told you why or how---not if her life which she was now beginning to value so highly depended on it---there crept into Letty Lynton's mind the knowledge that she now possessed, in the envelope she held in her hand, the power, not only to take her own life, but to take that of cruel, ruthless Axel Ekebon.

The House Of The Arrow - The English firm of solicitors Frobisher & Haslitt, which has many dealings in France, receives letters from one Boris Waberski, a relative of their client, Jean-Marie Harlowe, demanding money in anticipation of her expected death. The second letter, indeed, amounts to a threat if Waberski's demands are not met. The firm soon hears of Mrs Harlowe's death, and also of Waberski's accusation of murder against her niece-by-marriage, Betty Harlowe, who has inherited her aunt's estate. The news comes via a letter from Ann Upcott, Betty's paid companion, who begs Jim Frobisher, the firm's junior partner, for help - a detail that Jim cannot explain. Haslitt then receives a telegram from Betty herself, revealing that Inspector Hanaud, France's leading detective, has been asked to look into her case. Haslitt dispatches Jim to France. He travels first to Paris, where he confronts Hanaud. The Inspector is startled to learn that his connection to the Harlowe case is known, but confides to Jim that this is merely a smokescreen for his real business in Dijon, an ongoing case of vicious anonymous letters, occasionally leading to blackmail, with which the local authorities have made no headway. Hanaud and Jim travel separately to Dijon. The latter calls upon Betty, to whom he is immediately attracted; she is frank about the momentary panic that caused her to send the telegram, following severe questioning by the local magistrate. When Hanaud arrives, he tells Betty that Mrs Harlowe's body has been exhumed, and that he is confident that the results will dispose of Boris Waberski's accusations. The two men are then introduced to Ann Upcott, who Jim to his surprise recognises from a brief encounter at a casino in Monte Carlo some time before. Betty tells Hanaud that she learned of his assignment to the case via an anonymous letter, which she subsequently destroyed. A meeting is arranged with Waberski, who repeats his accusation of Betty and insists that he saw her entering the shop of Jean Cladel, a man with convictions for preparing illegal drugs. However, confronted by the negative results of Mrs Harlowe's autopsy, and frightened by the discovery that Hanaud has seen his threatening letters, Waberski slinks away. Betty's relief is, however, short-lived. Hanaud tells her that in spite of the autopsy results, he believes that Mrs Harlowe was murdered - an announcement that shocks Ann into making one of her own: that on the night of Mrs Harlowe's death, there was a stranger in the house...

The House Of The Arrow holds a place of pride on many Golden Age "Best Of" lists (including Julian Symons' "100 Best Crime & Mystery Books"), and it is indeed a satisfyingly twisty mystery - albeit one that suffers somewhat, or seems to, from "science marches on". When Boris Waberski's accusations are exposed for what they are, it seems that Betty Harlowe's ordeal is over; but minutes later she almost collapses in shock in the face of Hanaud's insistence that Mrs Harlowe was in fact murdered. To support his claim he displays a treatise, missing from the shelf upon his first search of the library but now mysteriously returned, which describes the use of an extract of Strophanthus hispidus as an arrow-head poison - a poison both deadly and untraceable. It transpires that Simon Harlowe was a collector of rare objects, among them an arrow-head coated with poison obtained from an African trader, which is now missing from his so-called "treasure-room"...

Much of this now sounds like nonsense - particularly the "untraceable poison" - but in fact it's accurate enough. Extract of Strophanthus hispidus was indeed once used as an African arrow-poison; its active ingredient is digitalin, for which there was at the time no direct chemical test, with criminal cases depending upon observation of the victim's symptoms, and an experimental comparison between the action of digitalin itself and the presumed poison. In the absence of these two things, no case could be made. Mrs Harlowe, suffering advanced heart failure, is the perfect victim, and no suspicion attaches to her death prior to Boris Waberski's accusations.

Ann explains that on the night in question, she heard voices in Mrs Harlowe's bedroom - hers angry, and a whispered reply - but at the time thought little of it. She berates herself for leaving what she now believes to be the scene of the murder, her only consolation being that she simultaneously caught a glimpse of a clock and is thus able to give Betty, who was out of the house at a party, an alibi. Hanaud suggests that Mrs Harlowe was injected with an extract from the arrow-head, prepared for an unidentified individual by the notorious Jean Cladel. Hanaud and Jim make it their business to call upon Cladel, who is woken by their knocking and only grudgingly agrees to admit them. He takes his time about dressing and admitting them, however, and finally the visitors break in - only to find Cladel dead on the floor, stabbed...

Fourteen years elapsed between the publication of At The Villa Rose, A. E. W. Mason's first mystery to feature Inspector Hanaud, and the second, The House Of The Arrow. In spite of this, we find Hanaud unchanged - he is as conceited, as emotional, and as much of a performer as ever - and just as dangerously insightful. This is a novel that plays fair with the reader, although also one that expects him or her to pay as much attention to detail as Hanaud himself, who is in peak form here, both personally and professionally. In my review of At The Villa Rose, I suggested that the reason Hanaud kept his friend Mr Ricardo around was so that he would have someone to show off in front of; The House Of The Arrow explicitly admits it, with Hanaud discovering that his "mountebank" behaviour makes Jim Frobisher acutely uncomfortable, and deriving much amusement from deliberately provoking the proper young Englishman. But as we have already learned, Hanaud's often clownish exterior masks an incisive brain and an unshakable devotion to the truth, and to his duty. As Jim lurches along in the master detective's wake, sometimes bewildered, sometimes sceptical, frequently exasperated, to his horror he sees the evidence begin to point towards Ann - particularly after it is discovered that a pearl necklace of great value has been stolen from among Mrs Harlowe's effects. Betty is fierce in her friend's defence, and begins secretly plotting to get her out of the country - leaving Jim caught between his legal duty, his feelings for Betty, and the implacable Hanaud...

"What happened on that night in the Maison Grenelle?" he asked. "Why was that communicating door thrown open? Who was to be stripped to the skin by that violent woman? Who whispered 'That will do now'? Is Ann Upcott speaking the truth, and was there some terrible scene taking place before she entered so unexpectedly the treasure-room---some terrible scene which ended in that dreadful whisper? Or is Ann Upcott lying from beginning to end? Ah, my friend, you wrote some questions down upon your memorandum this afternoon. But these are the questions I want answered, and where shall I find the answers?"

Fabulous review of The Killer of Little Shepherds, Liz! I'll look for it soon.

I knew I was behind on your last thread but I hadn't realised there was a new thread I was even more behind on! I also like the opening picture :-)

Going back to your last thread, I found your review of The Man in Lower Ten really interesting and would have downloaded it to read... if I hadn't already done so on your recommendation anyway :-)

And I also really enjoyed your review of Lorna Rea's The Happy Prisoner and The Fleet Hall Inheritance.

#14 Woo hoo! I'm trying to convince myself not to buy anymore books this year but...

#19 Fascinating review of The Killer of Little Shepherds Liz (and as Stasia would say, why haven't you posted it to the work page, hmm?).

Also, I've just been reading your blog post on Oronooko and this made me smile:

" So there you have it, folks: men write fiction; women tell lies. If anyone ever asks you to define “gender bias”, you can point them in this direction."

I'm looking forward to the next blog post on Oroonoko.

>>#22

Hi, Darryl - thank you for visiting! I look forward to hearing your own reaction to The Killer Of Little Shepherds.

>>#23

Hi, Heather! It's such a rare event, I always get overly excited when any of my book bullets actually hit a target!

The Book Depository has The Female Detective at what I found to be a very reasonable price...or to put it another way, my copy's in the mail...

Once my reviews creep up past a certain length, I feel uncomfortable about posting them outside the thread. :(

Actually, Heather, I was thinking about you while I was reviewing Letty Lynton and The House Of The Arrow, both of which offer a refreshing spin on "She's beautiful, therefore she is innocent" - particularly Letty Lynton, which has a female author and no intervening male narrative figure. And rightly so, too, since that mindset certainly impacted Madeleine Smith's trial.

>>#24

I'm still reeling from the cosmic stupidity of the Oroonoko story. :)

You also remind me, sigh, that I really need to polish off that piece of blogging. One more review to get done here first, though...

The Poisoned Pen - Published in 1911, this is the second collection of short stories by Arthur B. Reeve featuring Professor Craig Kennedy, scientific detective. Again, the stories are narrated by Kennedy's friend and room-mate, the reporter Walter Jameson, with investigative assistance from First Deputy O'Connor of the New York Police, and Burke of the Secret Service - the prominence of the latter two in this volume highlighting the fact that many of these stories find Kennedy acting less for private individuals, and more often in the realm of politics and big business. Although in creating Kennedy, Arthur Reeve was certainly inspired by the Dr John Thorndyke stories of R. Austin Freeman, once again it is striking how different are the contemporaneous worlds in which the two scientific detectives live and operate. Just as the Thorndyke stories are ineffably British, the Kennedy stories are unmistakably American, in focus and mindset even more than setting. Murder is only rarely the issue here, and usually as collateral damage, in conjunction with another crime. Insurance fraud, industrial sabotage, counterfeiting and smuggling feature prominently; more often than not, what is at stake is expressed in financial terms, rather than in those of life and liberty.

I remarked with respect to The Silent Bullet, in which Kennedy first appeared, that although I enjoyed his stories I preferred the Thorndyke tales, because those tend to have a more "life science" focus, whereas the Kennedy stories often revolve around cutting-edge electronics. Such is the case in The Poisoned Pen, and I admit, I often found myself at sea amongst the lengthy descriptions of Kennedy's set-up and use of the latest technology. (Confession: I sucked at physics.) However, the specific functions of the devices in question are nothing less than fascinating: what we find scattered through these stories are prototype versions of much technology that today we take for granted, including the fax machine and the mobile phone - as well as early equipment for bugging rooms and tapping telephone wires, which Kennedy deploys without a qualm. Other devices employed here, which didn't catch on in quite the same way, include the "telautograph" - for long-distance writing - and the "photophone", also developed by Alexander Graham Bell, a telephone system using light for the transmission of sound. In the midst of all this, however, we also get a story or two tending to the more medical side of things - one involving small-scale biological warfare, another relying on the specific identification of hair samples, and one turning on the question of whether fingerprint evidence can be wrong. In addition (in what is turning into a slightly alarming trend), following on from Walter Jameson's mescaline trip in The Silent Bullet, here we get his account of the effects of hashish: "I seemed to be borne along on a sea of pleasure by currents of voluptuous happiness..."

Overall, the quality of the stories in The Poisoned Pen is a bit uneven. Both the title story and The White Slave are fairly weak, depending too much on luck and long-bow conclusions, even apart from the latter's pernicious "a fate worse than death" attitude; while in spite of its biological interest, the identity of the guilty party in The Germ Of Death is far too obvious. (On the other hand, this story offers without editorialisation opposing takes on the political situation in Russia at the time. "Apparently, he had heard of Kennedy's rather liberal political views," comments Jameson disapprovingly.) The rest of the stories are more satisfying, with the best being those that give the reader an insight into the workings of a world now long gone. The Fire-Bug is about an arsonist targeting the properties owned by a particular company, and offers a glimpse into the operation of the New York Fire Department; as well as revealing that, in 1911, there were "only a score or so" big department-stores in New York (!). The Sand-Hog concerns acts of sabotage committed against an engineering project which is building a tunnel under the Hudson River. The appallingly dangerous nature of the work, the technology used to maintain air-flow so far below ground, and the necessity for long periods of decompression are vividly sketched. Kennedy is called into this case by Jack Orton, its chief engineer, who has been struck down by the bends and left "drawn and contorted".

Best of all, however, is the concluding story, The Campaign Grafter, not least because of its background. Like the Isabel Ostrander / William J. Burns novel, The Crevice, which I read not so long ago, this story is set in a world that takes wide-spread, deep-rooted political corruption absolutely for granted, with the city run by and for "the bosses", and bribery and threats and pork-barrelling the normal way of life. Unlike The Crevice, however, this story offers a note of hope: a reform party headed by Wesley Travis is making headway, enough to worry the incumbent "boss", Billy McLoughlin. On the eve of the election a series of photographs surfaces, showing Travis apparently in cahoots with McLoughlin and his crew, and only a tidy sum of money will bury them again. With no time to fight the damage the photographs will cause if they are published, Travis calls in Kennedy, swearing to him that the pictures are faked. Kennedy advises him to make the purchase, in spite of how it looks - and then offers up a masterclass in how photographs were doctored in the days before PhotoShop. The other positive of this story is the character of Margaret Ashton, a girl from a privileged background who has turned her back on the socialite life in favour of a career in political activism. Too often in The Poisoned Pen, Arthur Reeve shows a tendency to divide women up into "victims" or "villains"; in the character of Margaret Ashton, we have some very welcome balance.

"First, I want you to consider the evidence of the bomb," began Kennedy. "No crime, I firmly believe, is ever perpetrated without leaving some clue. The slightest trace, even a drop of blood no larger than a pin-head, may suffice to convict a murderer. The impression made on a cartridge by the hammer of a pistol, or a single hair found on the clothing of a suspected person, may serve as valid proof of crime. The bomb-thrower is sadly deceived if he believes the bomb leaves no trace for the scientific detective..."

"Syn-chron-i-ci-ty! Syn-chron-i-ci-ty!"

I had barely finished The Killer Of Little Shepherds, which as I mentioned spends some time dwelling on the achievements of Alphonse Bertillon in the field of criminal identification, when I wandered over to Lucy's (sibyx's) thread, where as part of her review of Island Of Vice, she referred to the attempt to introduce "the Bertillon system" into New York policing. Then I picked up The Poisoned Pen, only to find it littered with admiring references to Bertillon and his work.

And from there I went to The Davidson Case by John Rhode, which contains a reference to the fact that the resistance of selenium varies according to the intensity of light falling upon it - something which is explained in detail in The Poisoned Pen, in the story The Forger, with respect to the function of its "fax machine".

I'm just a little freaked. But much more amused.

And with that---I have caught up all my outstanding reviews!! And to celebrate, here are---

SLOTHS!!

Q: Why did the sloth cross the road?
A: No-one could hang around long enough to find out.

Everything is better with sloths...

I got home just in time tonight! Thanks for the sloth fix, Liz. I'm not sure about that one crossing the road — I just want to pick him up before he gets run over! But those two smiley fellas in #28? They are adorable!

Sloths on the lyzard thread — all is once again right with the world. :-)

Love the pictures! They look so happy!

Happy to help you get your sloth fix, guys! Julia, I agree: here's hoping that either that road's in a santuary, or that the photographer gave his subject a helping hand once his pictures were taken!

I have a friend who smiles just like the sloth in 28!

I can understand why you're friends! :)

Ahhh... How nice to be back in something resembling routine!

Finished The Davidson Case by John Rhode for TIOLI #10 - and I can now say this almost without a tremor - REVIEW TO COME.

Now reading Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine by Mary Meeke for TIOLI #3.

Love that sloth in the road. Reminds me of something that my son saw a few years ago while he was away at college. He was just driving along when the blonde coed in the car ahead of him stopped, got out of her car, dashed around in front and grabbed a tortoise off the road, which she promptly deposited on the median. We started laughing about that, until his grandmother broke in and said that she'd seen the same thing - the very same day, in an entirely different town - a gal who got out of her car and picked up a tortoise off the road, again moving it to the median. We couldn't stop laughing! There's two of 'em out there!

I had to double check the photo up top to make sure there was no sloth in it. I am glad to see that you rectified the sloth situation later in the thread!

Hi, Cindy! Hi, Stasia!

So the vibe I'm getting here is that I should be to sloths what Caro is to camels?? :)

which she promptly deposited on the median.

Oh, for heaven's sake!?

Finished Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine by Mary Meeke, for TIOLI #3. Now reading its companion-piece from 1873, Madeline Clifford's School Life, also for TIOLI #3.

I'm suffering agonies at the moment over several series that had more than one book released in the same year, trying to get them - need I say it? - in the right order.

Checking copyright dates, I think I've sorted out both the Dr Priestley mysteries of 1931 (to no practical advantage, since one of the two is way out of my price-range; still, it's the OCD that counts) and the Anthony Gethryn mysteries - of which there were three - of the same year. As I suspected at the time, I read The Link out of order: this is the fourth book in the series, coming after The Noose and not before as is usually listed; while Rynox came later in the year again (April, July, October).

But what's got me flummoxed at the moment is the Inspector Cleveland series by Sydney Fowler aka Sydney Fowler Wright - which I didn't even know was a series until this morning, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. This short set is a jumble of books released in one year, and with variant titles, with one of the entries apparently having no publication date at all. Nor is the recent reissue of this series any help...because, of course, you wouldn't release a series of mystery novels IN ORDER, would you!?

Granting that I'm concerned with details like this to the point of neurosis, I still find it hard to believe that other people don't care at all, which is what some publication histories seem to suggest.

Finished Madeline Clifford's School Life; both this and Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine are short, Christian / didactic works for children by Mary Meeke, who I think is the same Mary Meeke who later wrote for the Minerva Press. It amuses me no end to think that she gave up writing "improving" children's fiction in favour of much better paying sensation novels.

I will be blogging these two.

Now reading The Mark Of Cain, the eighth of Carolyn Wells' Fleming Stone mysteries.

Liz - as requested! One of my absolute favourite threads but not so easy to type when your jaw has dropped to the level of your adam's apple!

Good to see you here! I was afraid I may have been a little too subtle. :)

Hahaha - in any event it was prescient.

See? That's what happens when you don't use the thread continuation... so, Happy New Thread and all that. But to get back to what we were saying on the old thread :-) Yes, it does say somewhere on the book that Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister has been put together from three separate volumes. And yes, I'd definitely be fine with just starting with the first. Would make more sense that way than starting with the second or third, right? (sorry, feeling cheeky tonight). So. Not wanting to jump into it right here right now. Sometime next year?

Alas, I was in such a mess on the last thread that I didn't even make it to 200 posts. :(

We need an emoticon for me wrinkling my nose at you, cheeky! Just pick a time that suits and get back to me - I know the novel well so I won't need to re-read in preparation. The only possible issue is that Barchester Towers might? be moving to January - I'm waiting to hear from Heather - but even that wouldn't be a problem.

Well, I say when January rolls around, or say in December when we're all planning our 2013 reads (those of us who do things at the last minute that is), then we can set a month for it. No big rush, I just picked up this book out of the blue today after all! :-)

wrinkle wrinkle all you like :-b

:-)

:D

Finished The Mark Of Cain by Carolyn Wells, for TIOLI #8 - review to come.

And moving from one neglected series to another: now reading Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp, for TIOLI #9.

#41 I feel your pain - I spent some time going through Margery Allingham's Campion novels (although in this case there was a good bibliography on her official society page to help me) but was starting to get really frustrated with some of the publishers publishing the Campion short stories. Heinemann and Penguin have both published a collection of Campion short stories under the same name, 11 years apart with different stories in each collection. Of course, both were pre-ISBN. Were they trying to confuse people?

#42 "It amuses me no end to think that she gave up writing "improving" children's fiction in favour of much better paying sensation novels." :-) Almost the opposite of Louisa Alcott?

#47 " The only possible issue is that Barchester Towers might? be moving to January - I'm waiting to hear from Heather - but even that wouldn't be a problem." Hopefully we can do BT in November and then I will be eagerly waiting for the Aphra Behn thread in the New Year! (no pressure Ilana) :-)

Oh Ilana, to go back to the question of why your Virago copy looks like it was published by Penguin, I think Penguin published/distributed Virago Modern Classics in the US for a while. Other than a Penguin logo instead of the green apply they should be identical (maybe a different ISBN, not sure).

#41 I feel your pain - I spent some time going through Margery Allingham's Campion novels (although in this case there was a good bibliography on her official society page to help me) but was starting to get really frustrated with some of the publishers publishing the Campion short stories. Heinemann and Penguin have both published a collection of Campion short stories under the same name, 11 years apart with some different stories in each collection. Of course, both were pre-ISBN. Were they trying to confuse people?

#42 "It amuses me no end to think that she gave up writing "improving" children's fiction in favour of much better paying sensation novels." :-) Almost the opposite of Louisa Alcott?

#47 " The only possible issue is that Barchester Towers might? be moving to January - I'm waiting to hear from Heather - but even that wouldn't be a problem." Hopefully we can do BT in November and then I will be eagerly waiting for the Aphra Behn thread in the New Year! (no pressure Ilana) :-)

Oh Ilana, to go back to the question of why your Virago copy looks like it was published by Penguin, I think Penguin published/distributed Virago Modern Classics in the US for a while. Other than a Penguin logo instead of the green apply they should be identical (maybe a different ISBN, not sure).

My two main sources of information are the Library of Congress and the Copyright Renewal Database at Stanford - while US and UK editions don't always have the same dates (or titles), usually the books are released in the same order. The latter does require a book to have been published and have its copyright renewed within particular timeframes to qualify, but for the books that are listed it gives excellent detail.

Short stories, though - those are a bitch, unless you've got a reliable biographer - or bibliographer.

Almost the opposite of Louisa Alcott?

HA! Yes. And much more sensible, if you ask me. :)

Okay!! Some announcements.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, for the benefit of a majority of potential participants that the proposed group / tutored read of A Tale Of Two Cities has been moved from November to December. This read will be led by Heather.

This has in turn required the tutored read of Barchester Towers to be moved from December to November. I will be leading this one, and Heather will be the main tutee.

Finally, early in the New Year (date to be settled), Ilana will be undertaking (at least) the first volume of Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between A Nobleman And His Sister, and I will be giving her a hand with that.

Mark your calendars, and lurkers, start your engines!

And speaking of the chronological difficulties of short stories---

I am looking at the first two collections of the Baroness Orczy's "Old Man In The Corner" series: the stories in the second book, The Old Man In The Corner, were published first, separately, but the collection was published after The Case Of Miss Elliott, also a collection of short stories.

Do I read The Case Of Miss Elliott or The Old Man In The Corner first?? :)

Finished Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp; or, Lost In The Backwoods for TIOLI #9 - and it turned out to be even more appropriate for the "survival" challenge than I had anticipated, which was nice!

Now reading - and just slightly ashamed to admit it - Bandit Love by Juanita Savage.

With a title like that, you should be ashamed Liz! :-D

So I've taken note of all the changes in the tutored/group reads.

Did we say early in the New Year? Did we really?!

Heather - your explanation makes perfect sense. I'm really curious about the ISBNs. I'll look it up soon.

With a title like that, you should be ashamed Liz!

I'm about a quarter in, and now thoroughly ashamed!

Okay, in the New Year, in the New Year; the "early" was just me getting over-excited. :)

Finished Bandit Love by Juanita Savage for TIOLI #8.

Um. Ew.

Now cleansing the palette with The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The Davidson Case (US title: Murder At Bratton Grange) - This is a highly enjoyable mystery, but also the kind where it is impossible to say exactly what was so enjoyable without unforgiveable spoilers. This seventh entry in John Rhode's series about full-time scientist, part-time criminologist Dr Lancelot Priestley is an unusually direct rumination upon the fact that some people just need killing, and whether it's really such a terrible thing if the killing duly happens. The serving up of an awful person as murder victim is a common enough approach in cosy mysteries, of course, not only to make sure that there are plenty of potential suspects to go around, but also to absolve the reader from any guilt over "enjoying a good murder". In this case, however, the implicit becomes explicit. Dr Priestley, too, is frank about "enjoying a good murder", though his perspective is rather different from that of the reader: he views any crime, including murder, as an interesting scientific puzzle that needs solving, but beyond that has no interest in the legal outcome of a case - including whether the guilty party is caught or not. That, he insists, is no business of his. But circumstances alter cases, and Dr Priestley is drawn on a far more personal level into the murder of Sir Hector Davidson when his friend, and Sir Hector's cousin, the scientist Guy Davidson, is arrested and tried.

No-one in The Davidson Case has any doubt that Sir Hector needed killing - and badly. He is revealed to the reader as a serial womaniser, a heavy drinker, a violent, dishonest and selfish individual who is leeching every penny he can out of his family's business without any thought or care to the consequences. Although each of them, in their own way, suffers from Sir Hector's behaviour, it is the latter, the slow but inevitable destruction of Davidson's, a company that designs and produces scientific apparatus, that most concerns Guy Davidson, Philip Lowry and Olga Watkins, the novel's three main identification figures - and suspects. Olga is Sir Hector's private secretary, and has great faith in the potential of the company - which makes her put up with relentless harassment by her employer. Olga is almost-engaged to Philip Lowry, Davidson's head designer - at least until Sir Hector fires him late in his development of a piece of equipment set to mean a fortune to the company, so that he won't have to pay Lowry the royalties that would be due to him. Guy Davidson was raised by his uncle, and is passionately devoted to Davidson's; but as soon as the company came under his control, the violently jealous Sir Hector forced his cousin out of it, as far as he could. Seeing the effect of the looming demise of Davidson's upon Guy gives Sir Hector even more pleasure than wasting the money he extracts from the business. When Sir Hector is found dead under peculiar circumstances, the attention of the police not surprisingly focuses upon these three individuals - with whom the text has openly encouraged the reader to sympathise.

With the discovery of Sir Hector's body, Guy Davidson calls upon Dr Priestley and asks for his help. The inquest reveals that, on the day of his death, Sir Hector packed up the patterns and diagrams associated with Lowry's new invention and placed them into a large wicker case, which he had conveyed to the train-station. He then travelled to Ansford, one of the stations near to his estate of Bratton Grange, drinking heavily the whole journey, abusing the rail staff, and finally dropping into a stuporous sleep. Disembarking unsteadily at Ansford, Sir Hector flew into a rage upon discovering that his driver, Cannon, was not there to meet him. The station-master, with some difficulty, persuaded Sir Hector to hire a local carrier, Tom White, with whom Sir Hector had quarrelled on a previous occasion. The heavy wicker case was lifted into the back of White's rickety truck, and Sir Hector insisted upon climbing in with it, rather than riding in the cabin. The doors of the truck, the lock being broken, were secured rather haphazardly with string. The journey to Bratton Grange was painfully slow, with White's truck struggling to climb the hill leading to the estate. Arriving at the gates, White rang the bell for Cannon, who was surprised to hear of Sir Hector's arrival, insisting he had not been notified. The two men went to the back of the truck to unload the case - and the drunken Sir Hector - only to find the case missing and Sir Hector dead, stabbed through the heart with a thin, stiletto-like blade... The attention of the police soons locks upon the three people with the most to gain from Sir Hector's death - not least because the evidence keeps pointing back to Davidson's: the murder weapon, for instance, was a spike for holding receipts, taken from the main office. Inspector Hanslet's suspicions soon fasten upon Olga, while an unusually silent and unhappy Dr Priestley slowly becomes convinced that, in spite of the fact that he called upon his services in the first place, it was Guy Davidson who murdered Sir Hector...

"I was, not unnaturally, very much interested in the case. Apart from your having consulted me as soon as you learnt of your cousin's death, there were many aspects of the affair which have excited my keenest interest. You know how I regard these matters, Davidson. I regard them as problems, which do not concern me except in the solution. Once they are solved, the fate of the criminal is a matter of complete indifference to me. Unless, of course, the person under suspicion happens to be a friend of mine."

The Mark Of Cain - When businessman and amateur naturalist Rowland Trowbridge is unusually late arriving home, his neice Avice becomes worried. She ignores the placating suggestions of Eleanor Black, the former housekeeper now engaged to Trowbridge, and telephones to her uncle's best friend, Judge Leslie Hoyt, and asks him to come earlier than his planned arrival for dinner. Hoyt, who, in spite of being more than twenty years older than her, is deeply in love with Avice, is willing enough to do anything she asks, although he is certain that she is worrying unnecessarily. Avice's presentiment proves well-founded, however: as a result of an anonymous phone-call from a heavily accented woman, the police find Trowbridge's body in the woods in Van Cortlandt Park; he was stabbed to death with a long, thin blade. The phone-call makes the police suspect that a foreign gang may be responsible, but nothing was taken from the victim's body. The shattered Avice swears that she will not rest until the killer is caught. The inquest on Rowland Trowbridge reveals little until Clem Sandstrom testifies that he came across Trowbridge as he was dying and heard his last words - "Cain killed me! Wilful murder!" - but did not report it as he was scared of being blamed. Trowbridge's words are thought to be a reference to the biblical Cain - until it is revealed that his estranged nephew, Kane Landon, is in town. Questioned, Landon admits frankly that he came back to ask his uncle for money, and that when it was refused, there was a quarrel. He also admits being in Van Cortlandt Park on the afternoon of the murder. Things look even blacker for Landon when Trowbridge's secretary reports overhearing a strange telephone conversation about the setting of a trap, insisting that the two parties called each other "uncle" and "nephew". Landon denies making the call, and the inquest ends with the arrest of Sandstrom after the police find a blood-stained handkerchief at his house - although no-one can suggest a motive. Trowbridge's will holds a shock for Avice: she learns that her inheritance of her uncle's fortune is provisional upon her marriage to Leslie Hoyt; otherwise she will receive only a nominal sum. Avice asks Hoyt scornfully if is prepared to have a wife on such terms; he replies that he loves her enough to take her any terms. However, when further investigation clears Sandstrom, and when Kane Landon is arrested and charged, Avice realises her feelings for him. As the case builds against him, her desperation grows - until, when Hoyt offers to defend Landon, on condition that Avice marry him if Landon is acquitted, she agrees...

At the outset, it must be said, The Mark Of Cain is slightly hard going. This is the eighth of Carolyn Wells' Fleming Stone mysteries, and in it she reverts to her early tactic of leaving the reader for an extended period in the hands of some not particularly likeable characters, including detectives, professional and amateur, who self-evidently are not going to solve the case. Avice Trowbridge is an unsympathetic heroine, in spite of her circumstances; although it is hard not to be amused, and perhaps a bit sneakingly admiring, when (typical for a Carolyn Wells novel!), the conditions of her inheritance having been spelled out to her, instead of indignantly rejecting the situation, she sits down to have a good hard think about marrying Leslie Hoyt. In fact, the central love-triangle is more disturbing than intriguing: Avice is exasperating, Landon arrogant, and Hoyt increasingly stalker-like in his determination to marry Avice no matter what. The police investigation is as incompetent as always, suspicion veering from Sandstrom to Landon to Stryker the butler, whose handkerchief it turns out to be, and then back to Landon; while the detective that Avice hires - or perhaps that should be, "detective", supposedly one of the best in the business - gives new meaning to the word "uninspiring". And then we have one of the traditionally farcical inquest scenes, with people calling out and butting in whenever they feel like it, and the proceedings being all but taken over by an unqualified onlooker.

And then Carolyn Wells pulls her masterstroke, with the arrival on the scene of her novel's hero - and it isn't Fleming Stone. It is in fact Terence McGuire, Rowland Trowbridge's red-headed office boy, who rejoices in - or at least, isn't ashamed of - the nickname "Fibsy", on account of his habitual lying. Young Mr McGuire, as he will tell anyone he can get to listen, has "the detective instinct" - and for once in one of these novels, where that phrase is tossed around with quite unjustified self-confidence, he is neither deluded not exaggerating. A devotee of The Sleuth's Own Magazine, and a great reader of psychology - albeit that he can't pronouce "psychology" - Fibsy was sincerely attached to his late employer, and is no less determined than Avice to see his killer brought to justice - even if he has to do it himself. And although Fibsy does indeed make significant progress in unearthing new evidence in the case, he displays his intelligence most of all by recognising his own limitations: it is he who finally manages to persuade Avice that they are never going to get to the bottom of Rowland Trowbridge's murder unless they send for Fleming Stone...

Now---all this is quite ridiculous, of course, and yet somehow it works; I think because in the world of Carolyn Wells' mysteries, law enforcement generally is so very incompetent that you can actually imagine an impudent sixteen-year-old with a natural talent for sleuthing waltzing into a murder investigation and making far more headway than any of the so-called professionals. Carolyn Wells clearly had a ball writing this outrageous character, whose appalling slang-based patois fills page after page of her novel; her enjoyment transmits itself to the reader, which helps with the necessary suspension of disbelief. At this stage I do not know whether young Mr McGuire reappears in any of Wells' subsequent novels - the end of this one finds him bragging, "He's a hummer, Mr Stone is! An' he's goin' to let me work with him, sometimes!" - but in one sense at least he certainly had a long literary career. Given the conjunction of times and characteristics, it is impossible to think otherwise than that Fibsy was the direct inspiration for Peter Clancy the red-headed office boy in Lee Thayer's first novel, The Mystery Of The Thirteenth Floor, who as policeman and private detective would appear in some sixty mysteries over more than forty years.

Of course, for Avice, the problem with sending for Fleming Stone is---she isn't entirely sure she wants the case solved: she can't help seeing how strong the case is against Kane Landon, although she won't allow herself to think he might be guilty. Indeed, Leslie Hoyt has told her bluntly that it may not be possible to win Landon an acquittal with anything but perjured evidence - and that he is prepared to go even to those lengths, if it means that Avice will marry him afterwards. Avice, however, has won an escape clause, with the sceptical Hoyt agreeing that if she manages to prove Landon's innocence without his help, it frees her from their bargain; and on this basis, she listens to Fibsy's counsel. When Fleming Stone appears, it is in the guise of "Mr Green", a friend of Landon's: having been prepared to respond to Avice's letter begging for his help, he then received a telegram declining his services - a telegram that Avice did not send. Meanwhile, it is Fibsy, not the police, who finds significant physical evidence at the scene of the murder and carefully preserves it; it is also Fibsy who works out the meaning of the peculiar phone conversation that preceded Trowbridge's death, which referred not only to "setting a trap" but to the Caribbean Sea and "Stephonitis" (a popular perfume at the time, the mention of which bewilders everyone but the amateur sleuth). The trouble is, though---when you're known to one and all as "Fibsy" because of your well-deserved reputation for telling lies, it can be hard to get anyone to take you seriously, and in the end only two people are really willing to listen to what young Terence McGuire has to say. One of them is Fleming Stone; the other is the murderer...

"Now, Miss Avice, don't you make no mistake. I ain't buttin' in here out o' freshness or impidence. There's the devil's own doin' goin' on, an' nobody knows it but me. It's too big for me to handle, an' it's too big for that Duane donkey to handle. An' they ain't no one as can 'tend to it but F. Stone. An' gee! you come mighty near losin' him! Why, Miss Avice, when you heard somebuddy wired him in your name not to come here, don't that tell you nothing?"

#56 - 59 I'm intrigued by how bad Bandit Love can be given its publication date.

#60 "some people just need killing" Yeah, I have days like that at work too...

I also wanted to stop by to say that I saw Valancourt Books have just released a new edition of George W. M. Reynolds The Mysteries of London and I've been really tempted to make it my next project after Clarissa. It's apparently nearly 1,200 pages long.

"The government feared him. Rival authors like Charles Dickens, whom he outsold, despised him. The literary establishment did its best to write him out of literary history."

I'm intrigued by how bad Bandit Love can be

Stick around - you may find out. (Short answer - very.)

Ah, dear old George Reynolds, king of the penny dreadfuls! - and the author of Wagner The Wehr-Wolf, lest we forget! :) But yes, the government did fear him: when he wasn't writing pulp fiction, he was a leader of the Chartist Movement - an odd and fascinating man.

I've been really tempted to make it my next project

Oh, hell, yes!!

I think it's brilliant that these old serials are finally being collected and reissued. They're the great missing element of Victorian fiction - and, like the sensation novels, throw a whole new light on popular entertainment at that time.

Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp - This third installment in the series finds Ruth and her friends, Helen and Tom Cameron, home from school for the winter holidays. They are due to set out for Snow Camp, a cabin in the far north woods, but their adventures begin even earlier than that, with a narrow escape from an enraged bull. The animal slams instead into a large, hollow tree-stump, hurtling it into the river. To their horror, the friends hear someone cry out, and manage to rescue from the river a young runaway who had been sheltering in the stump. The three manage to convey the boy to Red Mill, where Aunt Alvirey puts him to bed. While hanging up his clothes to dry, Ruth finds a wallet marked with the name "Jonas Hatfield". It is empty except for a clipping from a Scarboro paper, which suggests that the boy may have a shocking secret...

After being, as he sees it, tricked into admitting that his name is Fred Hatfield, the boy remains stubbornly silent. Mr Cameron decides to take him to Scarboro and find out his story there. The party, which includes a group of the children's schoolfriends, travels north by train. When it stops at a crossing short of Scarboro, Fred Hatfield bolts, and Ruth goes after him - only for the train to pull out. The desperate boy steals a mule-wagon that is tied up before a store, and Ruth manages to jump on. A perilous ride follows, first when the mules bolt of their own volition, secondly when the wagon is attacked by a starving "catamount" - a cougar. The wild ride ends at a remote cabin occupied by an eccentric known only as "the Rattlesnake Man", who proudly displays his "babies" to Ruth. Giving both children snowshoes, the hermit walks them unerringly through the woods to Snow Camp, only for Fred Hatfield to slip away again at the last moment. Ruth, however, is reunited with her friends. The holiday at Snow Camp brings both pleasures and perils - including, for Ruth, a second terrifying encounter with the catamount. But when a practical joke taken too far divides the girls and the boys into warring camps, the results are nearly fatal. The boys go off on their own to skate, the girls to collect pine-needles and balsam to make pillows as gifts; neither group is aware that a deadly blizzard is heading straight for the cabin...

As opposed to the realism of Ruth Fielding At Briarwood Hall, with its focus on the joys and miseries of everyday school life, this entry finds its young heroine whipping through a series of adventures that strain credibility, to say the least. However, we can forgive the improbable action in view of its moral, with the text quietly insisting that girls should be taught the same life-skills that boys are as a matter of course. When disaster strikes, Ruth's level-headedness makes her a natural leader, but this can only carry her so far; it is because she has paid attention to, and acted upon, Tom Cameron's occasional remarks on woodsmanship that she is able to save her own life and that of her friends. Around the scenes of Ruth in danger, Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp offers some vivid word-pictures of winter fun - skating, tobogganing, snowshoeing, popcorn in front of an open fire - and also returns to its more customary realism with the resolution of the story of Fred Hatfield who, if he isn't quite so bad as it initially seems, isn't particularly good, either. But as Mr Cameron says, upon giving Fred a chance to redeem himself, "If we only helped those people in the world who really deserved helping, we wouldn't boost many folks." This story concludes with a promise of the next, a contrasting tale of fun in the sun.

The six girls cowered together under the overhanging rock. The snow blew in a thick cloud over their heads and they heard it sifting down through the trees below them... But although they were out of the storm, they grew no warmer. More than Madge Steele complained of the cold within the next few minutes. Ruth, indeed, felt her extremities growing numb. The terrible, biting frost was gradually overcoming them, now that they were no longer fighting the blast. Exertion had fought this deadly coldness off; but Ruth Fielding knew that their present inaction was beckoning the approach of unconsciousness...

Bandit Love - Though I am only an occasional reader of romances, I have nothing against the genre, and no desire at all to suggest that there is anything inherently wrong with it. I say that at the outset because I find the knee-jerk sneering that romances tend to attract unfair and rather silly, as is the contention that "they're all the same". They certainly are not: like any other school of writing, a romance can be well done or poorly done; and if the former, they are more than capable of providing a satisfying read. On the other hand---done badly, a romance can be painful in a way only challenged by unfunny comedy, and in 1931's Bandit Love we have, in my opinion, an example of the kind of romance that gives the genre a bad name. I knew I was in trouble with this one as early as page 3, when an onlooker comments of its heroine as he watches her control her horse:

"There's a spice of devil in her expression, and I see she has red hair. I guess the man who marries her will sure need a bearing rein and a special bit and snaffle to keep that young beauty in order."

Ah, yes, indeed: Bandit Love is one of those stories where a "spirited" girl learns that she wants to be "conquered" by a "masterful" man---my favourite. And in fact, this thing has the fingerprints of The Sheik all over it, although it stops short of making a romantic hero out of a rapist---just. Instead, it settles for a leading-man who thinks that the way to win a woman is to become her stalker---and who is proved right.

But Bandit Love has bigger problems even than its dubious philosophy. There's something - off - about this entire novel. It feels like it wants to be a Regency romance, but at the same time it wants a modern heroine, too. The result is a story that seems to be taking place in a kind of historical Never Never Land somewhere between 1810 and 1930, where life is all about the London season and horse-riding in Rotten Row and "taking the air" in Hyde Park and girls "setting their caps" at wealthy men, but everyone travels in luxurious cars and women smoke. Even the initial situation of our heroine, the (sigh) "uniquely beautiful and charming" Myra Rostrevor, is peculiar: she has given in to her guardian-aunt's insistence and engaged herself to one of her infinite number of suitors because, "I am dependent on her for practically everything." My suggestion for Myra would be to move out, get an apartment with a couple of friends, and find a job...but the pages of Bandit Love barely acknowledge that such tawdry things as "apartments" and "jobs" even exist (though of course, there's no shortage of servants). Nor indeed does Myra seem to have friends in the usual sense, just men who are desperately in love with her.

Now, we know that in spite of his hundred thousand pounds a year, Antony Standish is not the man for Myra from the moment we hear that "he had rather a weak chin". Masterful men don't have those. Besides, Standish is "a cold-blooded Englishman", while Myra is "as wild a madcap as ever came out of the Emerald Isle". Not to worry: shortly afterwards, Myra is introduced to Don Carlos de Ruiz, and when he kisses her finger-tips, she is "conscious of an unusual thrill".

{*cough*}

As for Don Carlos, he has fallen in love with Myra at first sight, and proceeds to tell her so---at length:

"But you are not of the cold-blooded English. I have heard that the Irish are as warm-blooded as the Latins, and can love and hate with the same passionate intensity. You, I feel sure, dear lady, would be capable of loving wonderfully were your heart really awakened. And some instinct tells me it is I who will awaken your heart and kindle the fires of passion dormant within you... I am quite prepared to fight for you, believe me. As for making love, dear lady, I have not yet begun to make love to you in earnest. My love is a raging torrent which will overwhelm you and sweep you off your feet, a raging fire which will set your heart aflame in sympathy... You must let me teach you Spanish, Myra. It is an ideal language in which to make love. Let me tell you in Spanish that I love you, that you are the most beautiful, adorable, fascinating and seductive girl I have ever met, the loveliest and most enticing creature ever created, the woman of my dreams, my ideal, and my predestined mate... I want ten thousand kisses from the woman who has entranced me and enraptured my heart. I want to hold you in my arms, Myra mine, clasped close to my breast, to set your darling heart afire with burning kisses, to kiss the heart out of you then kiss it back again all aflame with love and longing."

And he keeps that up pretty much non-stop for the next 200 pages as he sets about making himself a permanent fixture in Myra's life, following her from house to house, party to party, dance to dance, badgering her the whole time over why she won't admit she's in love with him when he knows perfectly well she must be.

And of course, she is---but is also too "proud" to be "conquered" (at least just yet) by a man she fears is only playing with her because she is safely engaged. So she decides to punish him for his presumption by making him fall in love with her and then laughing at him, and in pursuit of her end she starts blowing hot and cold on him, as well as tormenting him by enacting in front of him passionate love scenes with Tony, who otherwise she barely lets touch her - egging him on, when he hesitates in understandable bewilderment, with a series of charming little speeches about how "no" means "yes".

So on it goes, from a hunting-lodge in Scotland, to Tony's yacht on the ocean, to "El Castillo de Ruiz" in the Sierra Morena. Unsurprisingly, Bandit Love declines utterly to acknowledge the actual political situation in Spain at this time, instead serving up "El Diablo Cojuelo", a Robin Hood-like figure who roams the mountains defending the local poor against their various oppressors. A few days after the arrival of Don Carlos's guests at El Castillo de Ruiz, Myra is captured and carried off by a party of masked men, and finds herself a prisoner in the rather absurdly comfortable mountain stronghold of their leader:

He waved his hand invitingly towards the couch which was drawn up close to the electric heater...

It is doubtful, I think, that the reader will have quite so much difficulty in penetrating El Diablo Cojuelo's secret identity as does the "brilliant" Miss Rostrevor.

Anyway. It is necessary, of course, for Bandit Love to dispose of Antony Standish, and it does this via the time-honoured technique for the resolution of romantic triangles, exposing the third wheel as somehow despicable in order to justify the rotten behaviour of the other two demonstrate that he isn't the right man for the heroine. Here, Tony initially accepts El Diablo Cojuelo's offer to exchange Myra for his own freedom, and then, when threatened with torture, breaks down in abject terror and begs for mercy in spite of Myra's pleading: "Oh, Tony, don't fail me! Don't be a coward! Be brave! Be British!"

So that takes care of him. As for the other two, they start out like this:

   "Only confess that you love me, Myra darling, and I will do anything you ask," Don Carlos replied, his deep voice vibrant with passion, his dark eyes aglow with ardour. "Only confess yourself conquered."
   "I won't! I won't! I'd rather die! I hate you, hate you!" stormed Myra gaspingly, still struggling. "Let me go, you brute. You are hurting me."

...but they end, of course, like this:

He crushed Myra to him and kissed her until his kisses seemed to be burning her very soul and her senses were reeling. All power of resistance had gone from her. She felt dazedly as if she were encompassed by flames and no hope of escape. She was conquered.

Ew.

That Ruth Fielding series looks quite interesting. It might be a good candidate for my "Captain Kangaroo" category in the 2013 challenge.

ETA: Oh, good. The first one (at least) is free for Kindle. I suspect more in the series are as well.

Hi, Lori! The Ruth Fielding stories are best described as short and sweet - but not too sweet, thankfully. Ruth is unique amongst the Stratemeyer Syndicate characters because she was allowed to grow up over the course of her stories; all the others who came after her ended up trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence. There are dozens upon dozens of them, and I'm not sure yet how many are available. I've been getting mine through ManyBooks / Project Gutenberg.

Finished The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry for TIOLI #3 - review to come.

Now reading The Man On Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus And The Affair That Divided France by Ruth Harris, for TIOLI #10.

I think most of the Amazon free ones are probably Project Gutenberg books. I haven't really checked, but they do have that generic cover. Short & sweet is just the kind of read one needs from time to time.

Quite the review for Bandit Love! Enjoyed the laugh!

I never quite understand how this sharing of freebies works, Lori - I just know I'm glad to have them. I suppose the free lunch will stop eventually but in the meantime I can tell you that the first four Ruth Fielding stories, at least, are available.

Hi, Cindy! Yes, there was plenty to laugh at, along with all the creepiness. :)

#63 "Oh, hell, yes!!" Ok then!

#65 "There's a spice of devil in her expression, and I see she has red hair." People still make that connection today. I used to work in a local shop and I lost count of the number of times people would come in and make comments to imply I must 'have a temper'.

"Ah, yes, indeed: Bandit Love is one of those stories where a "spirited" girl learns that she wants to be "conquered" by a "masterful" man---my favourite." *snort*

Very much enjoyed your review of Bandit Love :-) Are you going to put yourself through Juanita Savage's other books?

I lost count of the number of times people would come in and make comments to imply I must 'have a temper'.

Yes, I thought you'd enjoy that.

There are others on The List, but Bandit Love seems to be the only one that's easily available - and perhaps more to the point, free - so I may be spared the rest. :)

Finished The Man On Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus And The Affair That Divided France by Ruth Harris, for TIOLI #10.

Now resting my brain with When Parents Text...So Much Said, So Little Understood by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Frailoli, for TIOLI #6.

(And it just made me force the touchstone... Boy, haven't had that happen for a while!)

Now THAT is freaking scary...

Just popped out to my academic library to pick up a couple of books. Their due date?---

2nd January 2013.

Where did it go!?

Finished When Parents Text, and looking forward to writing a review that should only take ten minutes...

Now reading Death In A Bowl by Raoul Whitfield for TIOLI #11; evidently an entry in the "hard-boiled" school and, coming on the back of a clutch of genteel cosies, a bit of a shock to the system. :)

VICTORY IS MINE!!

For once I found out about a book fair BEFORE it was on, as opposed to two days afterwards.

Book fairs here aren't like some people's: no "$5.00 for a box of books" or "fill a bag for a dollar"; books are (comparatively) pricey even when donated. (And yes, yes - I know it's for charity. Also, I picked up The Raj Quartet for $6.00, so I should probably stop bitching.) The prices do force you to make choices, which is always psychologically revealing - particularly in respect of what got left behind and why. Picked up four green-cover Viragos, barely glancing at the titles; left behind The Story Of An African Farm because it was a Penguin.

I generally despise "adaptation tie-in" covers on classic novels, but for a strange moment there I almost picked up a third copy of Barchester Towers because it had a tie-in cover...which tells you how brilliant an adaptation that is.

Also, had to go by bus, with weekend timetabling meaning I was restricted to 30 minutes of focused, head-down browsing, rather than indefinite aimless rambling, which was probably for the best. Headed straight for the "classic literature" table and stayed there, and came away with a good haul - even though I got behind someone in the queue who was practically working with a vacuum cleaner. Lucky for him I already own a copy of The Memoirs Of Emma Courtney, or there might have been blood spilled. ("But---it's a once popular but now forgotten 18th century novel! It's mine by right! MINE! MINE!")

So anyway---for $37.00, came away with the following:

Alton Locke by Charles Kingsley
The Autobiography Of Mark Rutherford by William Hale White
Mr Scarborough's Family by Anthony Trollope
The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins
The House Of The Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Camilla by Fanny Burney
For The Term Of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford (Virago)
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes (Virago, hard cover)
Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Virago, "Full Uncensored Text")
The Return Of The Soldier by Rebecca West (Virago)
The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott

May go back tomorrow, when the buses allow me an hour... :)

While I was waiting at the bus stop on the way home, an elderly couple got off a bus, calling to someone inside, "We might see you on the way back!" Noticing that they were both carrying tote bags, I said, "Book fair?" "Yes, are you going?" replied the elderly lady.

Me: "I've been - I'm going home."
She: "WHAT!? What time did it start?"
Me: "9.30."
She: "THE RATS!! They told me 10.00!! It didn't start last night, did it!?"
Me: "No, this morning."
She: {*noise somewhere between relief and disgust*}

And with that, the two of them beat feet at surprising speed...

even though I got behind someone in the queue who was practically working with a vacuum cleaner. Lucky for him I already own a copy of The Memoirs Of Emma Courtney, or there might have been blood spilled

LOL!

Congrats on a great haul. Most of the titles are unfamiliar to me, though The Return of the Soldier is a book I read (actually—listened to) and loved last year and will be reading again now that I got a Virago omnibus editions in which it is included (along with another book I loved, All Passion Spent and a Molly Keane story). I'd probably do the same and grab without looking at the titles if I spotted those Virago green covers anywhere as they are practically nonexistent here. In fact, I sort of DID that when I found the Aphra Behn book which you were the first to hear about. Sadly, it was actually published by Penguin, but I didn't quibble as it had all the Virago markings.

eta: heh! just read about your little encounter today. Funny!

All Passion Spent plus The Return Of The Soldier!? Wow...that combination could almost kill you with its sheer awesomeness...

Indeed! The third story is Two Days in Aragon by M. J. Farrell (Molly Keane) which I have not read yet. Have you by any chance?

No, I haven't. I only started Molly Keane recently, with Mad Puppetstown.

VICTORY IS MINE!! (Part 2)

So having missed it so many times, I decided to go back for Day 2 of the book fair. Another good haul, and most importantly I plugged a couple of significant gaps in my collection. I also had a couple of those awful "Do I own this? I must own this! I'm not sure that I own this!" moments, though thankfully I haven't so far spotted either of the works in question at home. (Not that that is conclusive: oh, the shame of incomplete cataloguing!)

So this time, for $33.00, we have:

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope
The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope
Dr Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope
Castle Rackrent and The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth
The Mysteries Of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli
Frost In May by Antonia White (Virago, black cover)
Friends And Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
"Selected Novels" by Edgar Wallace, containing The Four Just Men, Sanders Of The River, The Angel Of Terror, The Dark Eyes Of London, The Ringer, The Avenger, The Gunner, On The Spot and The Devil Man.

...and something else I'm ashamed to mention in the same breath as the rest of these works, so I'll give it its own post.

All but the Edgar Wallace (oh, man, and you should see the tiny font in that volume!) were from the Classics table. With a bit more time on my hands, I did scan the others today. Regarding the Crime section, I must say I was particularly struck by the almost total absence of Agatha Christie - which supports the idea that she constitutes a favourite "comfort read" for many people, and so they hang on to her novels. Likewise Georgette Heyer over at the General Fiction table.

On the other hand, you probably don't need me to tell you what authors were particularly well-represented...

Ahem.

I also picked up the novelisation of Orca, one of my favourite bad movies.

However, the fact that it cost me the same as Elizabeth Bowen's Friends And Relations is offensive in ways that I can't even give a name to.

Also, the thread for the tutored read of Barchester Towers is up - here - although the read itself probably won't be starting for a few days.

Finished Death In A Bowl by Raoul Whitfield for TIOLI #11 - this will be my last book for October.

Now re-reading Barchester Towers for the tutored read.

Liz - Great haul at the book fair! Congratulations! And thanks for all the fun reading as I feel like I'm finally close to catching up after months away.
TK

Hi, TK! Good to have you back in book-town! Yes, it was a good weekend's work - now I just have to figure out where I'm going to put them all... :)

The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry - As well as being a novelist, Mary Roberts Rinehart was an indefatigable writer of short stories and novellas for the magazines. In 1910, she used the Saturday Evening Post as a forum to launch what would prove to be one of her most enduringly popular series, the improbable adventures of Letitia 'Tish' Carberry and her friends, three spinster ladies who simply refuse to act their age - whatever it is. (Rinehart is coy about this at the outset, more explicit later on.) The various 'Tish' stories were subsequently republished in book form, the first such collection appearing in 1911 as The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry, which gathers together the first three 'Tish' tales. Though Tish herself is the forceful - not to say overbearing - guiding spirit of the triumverate, the stories are narrated by her level-headed and occasionally sardonic friend, Lizzie (whose surname is not revealed at this early stage), with the nervous, fluttery, hay fever-prone Agnes Pilkington often reluctantly along for the ride.

Mary Roberts Rinehart was a trained nurse before she took up writing, and while a number of her subsequent stories, including her series featuring the mystery genre's first nurse-detective, Hilda Adams, would exploit her professional knowledge, the first of her stories to have a hospital setting was The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry. When the body of a dead patient disappears from the morgue, to be found subsequently hanging from the light fitting in an empty room by a roller towel, it is only the beginning of a series of strange and violent events that grip one wing of a certain metropolitan hospital. Fortunately for all concerned, however, as a result of an encounter between her car and a potato wagon that same hospital wing has Tish Carberry as an inmate; and with a mystery unfolding right under her nose, it would take more than an injured knee to keep Tish down...

In Three Pirates Of Penzance, the ladies are on holiday when Tish's appalling driving strands them too far from civilisation either to walk or get help. In time another car does come along, but instead of the rescue they were expecting, Tish and her friends find themselves caught up in an adventure featuring romance across the political divide, graft and corruption, the wiles of reporters, the unwise consumption of martinis and an unplanned dip - car and all - in Lake Penzance itself. In That Awful Night, an attempt to remove a displaced dog from a small island of holiday camps leads to the "borrowing" of a boat, the rescue of an almost-naked young man, an encounter with an outraged, shotgun-toting father, and finally a primitive conflict of two men over a woman that sets the spinsters' hearts fluttering...

The latter two stories in this volume are fairly straightforward comic efforts, which gain their effect by, on one hand, starting with the ladies in an embarrassing and improbable situation and then backtracking to show us how they got there, and on the other by the simple refusal of the three to behave as society dictates that people of their age and gender ought to... and this in spite of their own occasional doubts on the subject. The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry, however, is something else again: a detective story of sorts that mixes horror and comedy, with much of the humour lying in the disconnect between the ghoulish events described and the inconsequential tone of the narrative. The bonus here for modern readers, as is true of Rinehart's Hilda Adams stories and the Sarah Keate mysteries of Mignon Eberhart, is what we glean of the way in which hospitals were run at the time of the stories' publication, which is so entirely different from how they run today that it is almost as if we were hearing of an alien world. (For example, one subplot features a patient who deals morphine and cocaine to the other inmates of his ward, to no particular consequence.) While personally I enjoyed these stories, I have to say that I found the recurrence of moments where something bad happens to an animal a rather worrying motif, which I hope does not persist into the later stories. In any event, the consensus seems to be that the Tish stories get better as they go along. They also, I gather, become increasingly feminist, inasmuch as they are predicated upon Tish's staunch refusal to allow her gender to dictate what she may and may not do. The ever-growing popularity of this strong-minded and independent woman suggests that many readers were getting a vicarious kick out of her adventures.

...we took a little time to go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many ways as a porcupine---Johnson, with his raps and his talk about coming back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel marked S.P.T.; the coincidence of Johnson's wife murdered a few years before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wandering around at night with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and coming out of the excitement with a bite instead of a fracture! And then there were smaller things, though strange enough---the twisted pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where Johnson's body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie's room and her story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the darkish bundle. It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory...

When Parents Text...So Much Said, So Little Understood - Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli's online tribute to the unfortunate (yet often hilarious) conjunction between parents and text-messaging has been successfully transferred to book form chiefly because, unlike some blog-to-page efforts, it makes no effort to tamper with or expand the premise, but simply lets the contents speak for themselves. The book is divided into chapters, with gems from the very early days of texting, messages from over-excited parents agog with this new way of communicating, texts on certain recurrent topics (meals, pets, meals, dreams, meals, birthdays, meals), utterly impenetrable texts, mystifying word associations, and the final, horrifying realisation that with some parents, the mastering of texting means THEY JUST WON'T STOP. It makes for an amusing, occasionally LOL read.

A few excerpts:

MOM: i learned 2 txt!
(three hours later)
MOM: dickstain

MOM: Stop at dollar store on way home and get lunch maggots.
MOM: Baffles.
MOM: Baggies.
MOM: Ziplock lunch Baggies.
MOM: Spell check is not helping me.
MOM: This is dad by the way.

DAD: hello son. I need you to call me as soon as you get this. I am using good grammar because your mom said it bugs you when I dont. Sorry I didnt use an apostrophe I don't know how. I also dont know how to do a zero. I still use capital O. Actually you dont have to call me anymore.

DAD: I'm not sure but I think I just accidentally divorced your mom on facebook... I'll keep you updated.
MOM: why is your father married to his sister on facebook?

ME: Hey mom what's for dinner?
MOM: We are having *7)80)*(*(980*)*(*(&89&(*&987(&*&

DAD: WHATS A CONTESSA AND WHY IS SHE BAREFOOT

DAD: Sorry for the bad genes.

Liz, thanks for sharing those text messages, they had me really laughing out loud! I know that's 'LOL', but spelling it out makes it seem more like... well it wasn't just in my head, you know?

I rarely text because... well mostly I guess I don't keep in daily contact with anyone except for my dad, who doesn't have a mobile phone. But when I do, my texts tend to be rather wordy because I use the dictation feature on my phone which allows me to say in three seconds what would probably take 10 minutes to type!

I've starred the BT thread.

So, what authors were OVERrepresented then? Inquiring minds want to know. I'm guessing lots of Stephen King and Michael Connelly and what's her name there... Nora Roberts. Just because their output is just so ridiculously over the top, I mean... do they have ghostwriters in their employ?

Hi, Ilana. I'm not much of a phone-user at all, which makes me a bit of a freak these days I guess! But I found this book good for giggling an hour away. (And they do in fact stop to explain that 'LOL' means neither 'Little Old Lady' nor 'Lots Of Love'.)

All parents should apologise for the bad genes. :)

Over-represented authors? Dan Brown Number 1, I would say - far more than Stephanie Meyer, which surprised me, although she was certainly there. And E. L. James, obviously.

And yes, Stephen King, Michael Connolly and Nora Roberts, but probably not disproportionately, considering their output. The others that leapt out at me were Patricia Cornwall and James Patterson, particularly the later career novels.

I've starred the BT thread.

Excellent!

The only one of those authors I've read is Dan Brown. I think I may have read 3 or 4 of his books even. I consider all of that gang's output as "airport books", because that's where I would typically purchase that kind of book for mindless airplane distraction. I'm always jumping on the Audible sales, as you may know from my thread, but they've been having a 3 for 2 Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb sale and believe it or not, I'm not so very tempted... not that I judge anyone who does read her stuff. I'd just rather not.

#77 Hooray for making the book fair :-)

"Picked up four green-cover Viragos, barely glancing at the titles; left behind The Story Of An African Farm because it was a Penguin." Did you leave the Penguin because it was a Penguin or because it wasn't a Virago?

"I generally despise "adaptation tie-in" covers on classic novels, but for a strange moment there I almost picked up a third copy of Barchester Towers because it had a tie-in cover...which tells you how brilliant an adaptation that is." I'm exactly the same so I know that's quite a recommendation for the Barchester Towers adaptation. I will watch it but after I've read the book.

"Lucky for him I already own a copy of The Memoirs Of Emma Courtney, or there might have been blood spilled." :-D

And I'm proud to say that I recognise over half of your acquisitions - is Burney's Camilla the almost Clarissa sized one?

#78 Brilliant!

#80 "All Passion Spent plus The Return Of The Soldier!? Wow...that combination could almost kill you with its sheer awesomeness..."

I own but haven't read either of those - I guess I should push them to the top of the teetering TBR towers?

#83 You mean you didn't already have a copy of Udolpho?!?

Congrtulations on a second haul - well worth going back for the second day. You're buying lots of books I want to read (Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Wilkie Collins and, of course, the Anthony Trollope's - I don't think I've let myself realise quite how many books he wrote in case it scares me...)

#89 "the improbable adventures of Letitia 'Tish' Carberry and her friends, three spinster ladies who simply refuse to act their age" That on its own is enough to make me want to read the book!

#90 Also actually laughing out loud at the text messages. :-)

>>#93

That's exactly my point - it's not a judgement, just a recognition that some works are more for immediate consumption rather than the long haul.

>>#94

Hi, Heather! Yes, it was a good weekend.

I left The Story Of An African Farm behind because it was not the Virago edition - but certainly nothing against Penguin!

that's quite a recommendation for the Barchester Towers adaptation. I will watch it but after I've read the book.

You WILL. In fact, I was already planning on insisting on it...even though watching that adaptation puts you in the disturbing position of having a crush on Mr Slope! :)

C'mon - nothing is Clarissa-sized! Camilla is a pretty hefty work, longer than Cecilia, and that's long enough!

Actually I had a hilarious moment at the book fair when I came across a single hard-cover volume of Clarissa - no sign of the rest. What happened to the other eight volumes? I wondered. Why would someone donate just one?

I guess I should push them to the top of the teetering TBR towers?

As I seem to keep saying to you - HELL, YES!! :)

You mean you didn't already have a copy of Udolpho?!?

That was one of my "But I must own this!" moments. But actually I think I kept not buying it on the assumption that I did, when I didn't! (But now I do!)

Trollope is a long-term commitment, that's for sure! There are still some of his novels I haven't read, and I've been working at it for many, many years. (Though since he's one of my re-read comfort authors, I'm sure I'm finished numerically, if not individually.)

I understand that some of Tish's later stories find her doing stunt work in silent movies, and driving an ambulance in France. I'm rather looking forward to those.

LOL. :)

Death In A Bowl - Born in America in the late 1920s, the "hard-boiled" school of crime-writing set itself up in deliberate opposition to the "cosy" tradition that until that point had dominated the mystery genre in the US as well as in Britain. Reacting angrily to the prevailing tendency to depict murder in a polite and bloodless way, the hard-boiled writers not only insisted upon but almost wallowed in the ugliness of crime and the moral lack of the world at large. For many years the main vehicle for stories of this nature was the pulp magazines, with the most successful example being H. L. Mencken and George Nathan's Black Mask, which helped to launch the careers of the most famous exponents of this style of crime writing, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Another hard-boiled denizen of Black Mask, one who at the time many critics - including Dashiell Hammett himself - ranked right alongside his more famous competitors, was Raoul Whitfield, who published a handful of novels in the early 1930s that helped to propagate the concept of the private eye as the one honest man in a corrupt and violent world.

In Death In A Bowl, published in 1931, the P.I. in question is Ben Jardinn, who operates on the fringe of Hollywood, and whose success in a case involving a prominent actress has won him both trust in the movie community, and some welcome financial solvency. When an ugly incident occurs on the set of Death Dance, with a verbal altercation between screenwriter Howard Frey and director Ernst Reiner ending with the former knocking the latter down and being fired for his pains, both men seek out Jardinn. Ernst Reiner wants him to take his statement on the incident, and to make note of Frey's final words to him - "I could have killed him - for that" - in case something happens to him; Frey wants his own version of events recorded, and Jardinn to bear witness to his innocence if anything does happen to Reiner. Jardinn accepts both commissions, but reads into Frey's conduct an attempt to build an alibi he knows he's going to need. In the event, however, it is not Ernst Reiner who becomes the victim. Various rumblings lead Jardinn to the Hollywood Bowl, where Reiner's beloved brother, Hans, a celebrated composer, is to conduct. Ernst is there with a party, including his leading lady, the actress Maya Rand; Frey is also in attendance. As the concert starts, a plane buzzes the Bowl, drowning out the music - and under the cover of the noise, two shots are fired, and Hans Reiner slumps to the floor. As Jardinn struggles forward through the panicked crowd, he is struck down by an unseen assailant... Both Reiner and Frey demand Jardinn's help, Reiner wanting Frey destroyed, Frey protesting his innocence. Jardinn takes the case, but does so in a dark frame of mind, as events suggest that someone in his office has been bought off: either his partner, Max Cohn, or his secretary, Carol Towney - with whom Jardinn just might be falling in love...

Death In A Bowl is a text-book example of hard-boiled fiction, with events seen through the eyes of a sardonic private eye who tells his tale in bursts of machine-gun prose, and who operates in a dog-eat-dog world where violence is a way of life, where everyone is a potential killer, and where a man who trusts another is a dead man in waiting. While I can appreciate this style of writing intellectually, I can't say that it has ever appealed to me. No doubt these novelists had a point with regard to the "cosies", but to my way of think the unrelenting ugliness of the hard-boiled school is no less a distortion of reality, while the evident pleasure taken in dwelling upon acts of violence in these stories is disturbing to a degree surpassed only by their misogyny. Death In A Bowl is, as I say, representative of the genre, and prominently features both of these tendencies. It also features a couple of verbal tics that I found increasingly distracting: the characters' habit of saying "human" instead of "person", and Raoul Whitfield toughening up his text, in spite of not being allowed to use the actual words, by repeatedly telling us that "So-and-so swore". The latter, indeed, recurs so frequently that you could make a drinking game out of it---in which case you'd end up rivalling the alcohol consumption of the characters, in those strangely booze-soaked Prohibition days. However, Death In A Bowl is not without attractions of a slightly more civilised nature. The novel offers a fascinating glimpse into the workings of Hollywood just after the transition from silent films to talkies; a reference to "hearing Greta Garbo talk" places the action early in 1930, after the release of Anna Christie. The narrative takes the reader into the studio, to the luxurious homes of the stars, and above all into the depths of the Hollywood Bowl, where the music-loving Jardinn (who is, it almost goes without saying, somewhat ashamed of his "high-brow" taste) reveals a perfect understanding of acoustics and the functioning of orchestras - an understanding that paves the way for his eventual unmasking of Hans Reiner's murderer...

"To hell with publicity. It won't break either of you, anyway. Maya Rand's younger sister took too much veronal---and your brother was playing around with her. A few months later your brother comes over here and gets murdered. A select group, connected with both deaths, has a lot of bright ideas. You want something. Maya Rand wants something. Frey wants something. Well, I want something, too. I want your brother's murderer, and the one who knifed out Irish. Publicity won't stop me."

The Man On Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus And The Affair That Divided France (US title: Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, And The Scandal Of The Century) - Banal consolations are not what I want to offer; there are none in your situation, but tell yourself that the contempt and shame that attach themselves to your name, to our name, for a crime you have not committed, must not make you bow your head. You must be alive, amongst us, on the day of reparation. Light shall be shed and it will be blinding, I promise you. I have taken upon myself the task of solving the enigma of this frightful story, and I will never give up, no matter what happens. And I have the certainty, the complete and absolute belief, that I will succeed. But you must live; you must fight against discouragement...
---Mathieu Dreyfus to his brother, Alfred, May 1895.

On 5th January 1895, as a crowd of some 20,000 people screamed, "Death to Judas! Death to the Jew!", Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish-Alsatian officer in the French army who had been convicted of spying for Germany, underwent the ritual humiliation of having his epaulettes torn off and his sword broken before being transported to the infamous prison colony of Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South America, where he remained in solitary confinement for the next four years. Throughout his imprisonment, Dreyfus suffered physical and verbal abuse from his guards, as well as - in a deliberate move - being fed on little other than scraps of rancid pork.

In March 1896, an intercepted document proved that in spite of the conviction of Dreyfus, the leaking of military secrets to Germany had not stopped. The handwriting on this paper exposed the guilt of Commandant Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a French-born officer who nevertheless identified with his noble Hungarian ancestors, and who in private expressed contempt and loathing of his superiors and the French people generally. Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the "Statistical Bureau", the military department dealing with espionage, matched the writing on this second document to that on the one supposedly written by Alfred Dreyfus. He then looked into the evidence upon which Dreyfus had been convicted, and found it horrifying in its insufficiency. Convinced both of Esterhazy's guilt and Dreyfus's innocence, Picquart took the papers to his superior officer, General Gonse, demanding immediate action on this obvious miscarriage of justice. "What can it matter to you whether this Jew remains on Devil's Island?" responded the unmoved Gonse.

In The Man On Devil's Island, historian Ruth Harris offers a comprehensive account of one of history's most notorious injustices, the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on charges of espionage and the subsequent twelve-year battle to overturn his conviction. This lengthy telling of the sorry tale focuses upon the bewildering and often contradictory alliances that formed in the wake of Dreyfus's initial conviction, amongst both the "Dreyfusards" and the "anti-Dreyfusards", and uses a wealth of documentation including private letters not previously examined to dissect apart the motives behind what became known both to France and the world simply as "the Affair". The result is an astonishingly in-depth examination of the personalities involved on both sides of the divide.

It is an old truism that "politics makes strange bedfellows", but it is doubtful whether stranger bedfellows were ever found than during the Affair, with the explosive mixture of politics, religion and emotion forging partnerships that can hardly be imagined under any other circumstances. The alliances, as Harris demonstrates in detail, were neither clean-cut nor simplistic. Individuals of all beliefs were found in both camps, and a great deal of Harris's attention is given to examining who ended up where, and why, when they were forced to come down off the fence. Anarchists whose anti-capitalism manifested as anti-Semitism sided with the anti-Dreyfusards; while others supported the Drefusards in what they viewed as a simultaneous attack upon the state, the church and the military. There were Catholics on both sides and, most peculiarly of all, perhaps, anti-Semites, too. In fact, one of the heroes of this story - as far as it has any heroes - Georges Picquart, who perhaps was the single individual most responsible for the belated rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, was himself strongly anti-Semitic, and resented being compelled into what he viewed as an alliance with the Jews. Picquart was also a part of the military complex that from the earliest moments of the Affair banded together in an unshakeable if oxymoronic determination to defend "the honour of France" via perjury, forgery, repeated cover-ups and false imprisonment.

While there is no disputing that The Man On Devil's Island is a remarkable work, I must confess that I found myself somewhat discomforted by Ruth Harris's approach to the story of Alfred Dreyfus---although that said, I hasten to add that I fully understand her reasons for adopting it. Harris's contention, one with which it is hard to argue, is that most if not all earlier accounts of the Dreyfus Affair have fallen into the trap of presenting it simplistically as a battle between "good" and "evil" (something she blames chiefly upon Emile Zola, as we shall see), and idealising the motives and actions of the Dreyfusards - an tendency that, as she asserts, results in "bad history". While this is undoubtedly true, it seems to me that in readdressing the situation, Harris goes a little too far in the other direction. The problem is not so much that she spends so much time on the doubts and vacillations of the anti-Dreyfusards, demonstrating that they were, in most cases, anything but simply "the bad guys", but that when it comes to "the good guys", the Dreyfusards, she goes out of her way to dwell upon the negative and unflattering, while downplaying the courage and commitment of those who fought on that side. For example, she frequently gives more weight to angry words spoken in haste during the darkest hours of the battle, than to the measured words committed to paper by the various parties, in private letters which were certainly not written to maintain a public reputation. In particular, Harris seems determined to cut down to size Georges Picquart, whose actions are lauded in many of the earlier accounts of the Affair, and Emile Zola, whose publication of J'Accuse!, an open letter addressed to President Félix Faure, in the radical journal L'Aurore is probably the single most famous incident in the whole ugly business.

Of Emile Zola, Harris has little positive to say, chalking up his belated involvement in the Affair chiefly to self-interest and publicity seeking, even though he ultimately gained nothing personally from it, but on the contrary was convicted of libel, stripped of his Legion of Honour, and suffered bitter condemnation and exile as a consequence. (She also dwells on his dual households, which really have nothing to do with anything.) According to Harris, it was Zola's choice to cast the Dreyfus Affair in terms of good and evil, to insist that the Dreyfusards had on their side "Truth" and "Justice", that made it impossible for the situation ever to be properly resolved. But whatever J'Accuse! was or was not, there is no question that it ripped the mask of civilisation from the Dreyfus Affair, which with deliberate falsity had until that moment masqueraded as a purely internal, purely military matter. When J'Accuse! hit the streets, its immediate consequence - much to the horror of its author - was an explosion of anti-Semitic violence all across France, which exposed with horrifying clarity the vicious hatred and prejudice that had lurked beneath the surface of the Affair from the very beginning.

Though this was certainly not the outcome that Zola intended, the violent and often hysterical response to J'Accuse! highlights something that struck me repeatedly throughout the reading of The Man On Devil's Island: that this is a story of the great and terrible power of the written word. From the original bordereau that exposed the espionage, to the forged papers that sealed Dreyfus's second conviction, to the letters from Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus, Alfred's brother and wife, that sustained and supported him through his shame and imprisonment, to the clever, witty, emotional epistles of Joseph Reinach, the journalist-leader of the Dreyfusards, whose gift for a well-chosen phrase as much as the justice of their cause held the uncertain alliance together, through to the ideological war waged in the newspapers, through to J'Accuse! itself - sometimes called "the greatest newspaper article of all time" - this is the story of a battle fought predominantly upon paper, of the ability of the written word to sway a multitude. Perhaps most striking in these documents as a whole, and a most significant pointer towards the true nature of the Affair, is the ubiquitous use of religious imagery by both sides of the struggle, with constant references to betrayal and martyrdom that manage to cast the unfortunate Alfred Dreyfus simultaneously as Judas and as Christ.

In The Man On Devil's Island, Ruth Harris presents the Dreyfus Affair as a story with plenty of villains, but no heroes---just angry, frightened, bewildered human beings, who made mistakes, and who contradicted themselves, and who in the wake of their inability to secure a clean victory at the second court-martial in spite of the overwhelming evidence in their favour - and in spite of the fact that they were completely and self-evidently right - finally turned upon each other and tore the alliance apart. But is this really where we should be dwelling? The fact that these people were not saints doesn't mean they were not heroes. Take Georges Picquart: here was a man who had every excuse to side with the anti-Dreyfusards - he was a career officer, a Catholic, and an anti-Semite - a man who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by refusing to look the other way, and who did for a time lose everything, being sequentially removed from the Statistical Bureau, exiled to North Africa and finally jailed for exposing military secrets (the "secret" in question being that some of the anti-Dreyfus documents were forgeries) - but who in spite of everything would not back down from what he believed to be right. That seems like heroism to me, even if Picquart's involvement in the Affair did nothing to alter his anti-Semitic views, and even if in its aftermath he was easily absorbed back into the military complex he had defied.

But there are other admirable stories here, not least that of Lucie Dreyfus, who shook off the 19th century's view of what was "proper" for a woman to do to wage a dogged twelve-year fight for her husband, and of course that of Alfred Dreyfus himself who, if he couldn't be the figurehead that some of his supporters wanted, certainly displayed extraordinary courage and endurance and finally generosity of spirit: in 1914, at the age of fifty-four, Dreyfus re-enlisted and served what he still considered "his country" in the trenches of World War I. While I understand Ruth Harris's impulse to provide a revisionist account of the Dreyfus Affair, in the end I find myself sympathising with those earlier writers who presented a sanitised, even idealised version of these events---because if we don't look for heroes in the story of Alfred Dreyfus, all we are left with is yet another of the many passages in history that make you despair of the human race.

Despite all his efforts to keep focused on survival, Dreyfus came close to losing his reason in early autumn 1896. This was not surprising, as the terms of his detention were changed on 6 September after rumours of an escape plan... Dreyfus's guard was strengthened and a palisade built around his enclosure, so that his view of the world was restricted to the sky above him. At night he was manacled to his bed and awoke painfully swollen. Through all this, he knew nothing of the efforts being made on his behalf. The letters from Lucie, moreover, arrived only sporadically. Sometimes they came in batches; at others he endured a disquieting silence. He did not know that his proclamations of innocence had moved a small group of supporters to begin working on his behalf. He was completely unaware of Zola's interventions in 1897 and 1898, as well as of the riots and demonstrations that his case had triggered across France and its colonies; he heard nothing of the petitions and the vicious polemics; and he was ignorant of Henry's fateful suicide when his forgeries were exposed. Dreyfus, in fact, was one of the few French alive who knew nothing of the Dreyfus Affair.

Liz, the depth of your reviews are always so awe-inspiring to me! If anything it tells me just how much thought you put into actually reading your books! No mind numbing passing of time for you I guess?? ;) Thanks always for all the effort and time you put into your reviews!

#95 A crush on Mr Slope? That is a little disturbing.

"Actually I had a hilarious moment at the book fair when I came across a single hard-cover volume of Clarissa - no sign of the rest. What happened to the other eight volumes? I wondered. Why would someone donate just one?" And what if some poor soul picked it up thinking that was the complete book?

#97 The Man on Devil's Island sounds interesting but frustrating (and probably upsetting). Any particular reason why you read it? (I'm assuming it ties into one of your many reading projects somehow...)

>>#98

Hi, Valerie - thank you for visiting, and for your very kind comments! As for "mind numbing passing of time", please see Bandit Love, a bit further back up the thread. :)

>>#99

A crush on Mr Slope? That is a little disturbing.

It is EXTREMELY disturbing...but trust me, it will happen.

The volume of Clarissa did have VOLUME 2 emblazoned on its cover, so hopefully no-one fell into that trap.

The Man On Devil's Island was terribly upsetting, yes. I have been drifting back to reading about various famous crimes, or rather their investigations, from a scientific point of view, and though the Dreyfus case doesn't exactly fit my usual profile it was one of those stories where I kind of knew what happened but not really. Now I'm wiser, if not exactly happier. It was odd to think that all that was going on at the same time as the events in The Killer Of Little Shepherds, though. It's as if someone said of fin de siècle France, "May you live in interesting times."

And with that, I can move to my October wrap! - only a couple of days late.

After the miseries of September, October was a much smoother ride, with 14 books completed and all of them TIOLI - whoo!

#1; Madeline Clifford's School Life by Mary Meeke
#3: The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry by Mary Roberts Rinehart
#3: Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine by Mary Meeke
#6: When Parents Text...So Much Said, So Little Understood by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli
#7: The Poisoned Pen by Arthur B. Reeve
#8: Bandit Love by Juanita Savage
#8: The House Of The Arrow by A. E. W. Mason
#8: Letty Lynton by Marie Belloc Lowndes
#8: The Mark Of Cain by Carolyn Wells
#9: Ruth Fielding At Snow Camp; or, Lost In The Backwoods by Alice B. Emerson
#10: The Davidson Case by John Rhode
#10: The Killer Of Little Shepherds by Douglas P. Starr
#10: The Man On Devil's Island by Ruth Harris
#11: Death In A Bowl by Raoul Whitfield

Made a concerted effort to get back to some non-fiction this month; now thoroughly depressed as a consequence. The series reading continues unabated (and, from look of things, will do so in perpetuity), and I did an unusual amount of "young adult" reading, though none of it post-dated 1913; some of this was for my blog. I also encountered one real stinker one work which I found philosophically objectionable.

Three books from the 21st century in the one month must be some kind of record.

The breakdown:

Non-fiction: 3
Young adult: 3
Mysteries / thrillers: 6
Humour: 1
Romance: 1

Series reading: 6
Blog reading: 2

Male : female authors: 6 : 9 (including one instance of joint female authors, and one male using a female pseudonym)

Oldest work: Marion's Path: Through Shadow To Sunshine by Mary Meeke (1871)
Newest work: The Killer Of Little Shepherds by Douglas P. Starr / When Parents Text...So Much Said, So Little Understood by Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli (2011)

It's a new month, I've caught up my LT reviews, and I have an open day to get some blogging done!

So to celebrate, here we have---

A SLOTH WITH A BAD BEATLES HAIR-CUT!

If I were better at PhotoShop, I'd have a pair of John Lennon glasses on this guy so fast...

Love that photo!

Oh, Liz! That is just ... I have no words. I had no idea sloths could look like that! The Lennon glasses would be the perfect touch.

Hi, guys! Yes. he's a bit sad, isn't he? Sad but adorable. :)

Finished my re-read of Barchester Towers for TIOLI #10 and the tutored read...ahhh... :)

Now reading A Murder Of Some Importance by Bruce Graeme for TIOLI #8.

Finished A Murder Of Some Importance, which I think is the start of another series...sigh.

Now reading The Rembrandt Murder by Henry James Forman for TIOLI #8, which I don't think is part of a series, which is a pity, because I'm enjoying the central character.

Finished The Rembrandt Murder for TIOLI #8; now reading The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan for TIOLI #9...and I think it is also the start of a series...

I'm reading Life of Pi right now and in the first couple of pages, the author refers to sloths quite a bit and so naturally, I thought of you. :)

Aww...I LOVE that you do that!! :)

Liz, that's a great review of The Man On Devil's Island, by way of which I also finally read your review of The Killer Of Little Shepherds, equally excellent.

I've of course often heard and seen references made to the Dreyfus Affair, and might have known some of the details at some point, but your review certainly helped me understand what exactly had taken place and why certain individuals might have chosen to be for or against him. The only thing I'd truly retained about the affair until today was that it was a case with had a lot to do with anti-semitism, which was of course rampant in France. The book must have been hard going for all the reasons you explain, but your interpretation of how the author went about presenting her material was fascinating. Good stuff!

Love that Beatles sloth! What a cutie!

Hi, Ilana - thank you very much. Both of those books were hard going in very different ways, though in the end The Man On Devil's Island was much the more so. I was like you, "sort of" knew what had happened but not the details. But honestly, the fact that TEN YEARS passed between the time the proof of Dreyfus's innocence was found and when his name was cleared is just unbearable to think of. Ugh! Makes you want to shut out the world and curl up with your pets! :)

Glad you're enjoying the sloths. I'll have to keep them coming - the tribe has spoken!

Makes you want to shut out the world and curl up with your pets!

Well, yes. That's basically how I live my life!

Me, too - or I would if I could!

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.---Colette

#102 "A SLOTH WITH A BAD BEATLES HAIR-CUT!"

Wow! Actually, quite cute.

We love him, yeah, yeah, yeah... :)

Finished The Desert Moon Mystery for TIOLI #9, which had a couple of very interesting aspects to it, so that I'm almost looking forward to reviewing it. Almost.

Now reading The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, for TIOLI #13.

I need to read me some Colette, I really do.

All you have to do to have my lifestyle Liz is be diagnosed for a major mental health disorder and have a major breakdown which prevents you from functioning in normal society and... voilà! ;-)

Don't think I haven't thought about it! :P

I find that I pass through normal society, rather than "function" in it.

Right. If you find the right psychiatrist, you'll get a diagnosis. Everyone is dysfunctional in one way or another. And I wonder how many people really feel they DO 'function' in society?? I come off as highly functioning. Go figure. :-S

I just find I'm getting more and more comfortable spending more and more time alone. I still work fulltime so technically I'm still "out there", but even then I'm inside my own head much of the time. Mostly this doesn't bother me but every now and then I get a twinge and feel I should be making "an effort"...even though I know perfectly well I'll be happier not, and probably regret it if I do. :)

So I presume this has been exposed as a joke by now? - because it's certainly too good to be true:

Finished The Brontes Went To Woolworths for TIOLI #13.

Now reading A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott, the third collection of Alcott's "sensation stories", for TIOLI #6.

A Murder Of Some Importance - Graham Montague Jeffries was a prolific writer who worked under a number of different pseudonyms. He first gained fame as "Bruce Graeme", through the creation of the gentleman-crook Blackshirt, whose adventures he recounted in short stories and novels from the early 1920s into the 1940s. Also as "Bruce Graeme", in the late 1920s Jeffries began writing mystery novels. Ironically considering the anti-social activities of the character who made his reputation as a writer, Graeme's novels were a deliberate attack upon the predominance of the amateur detective in contemporary mysteries, particularly those that simultaneously presented the police as unimaginative plodders at best, bunglers at worst. His works made heroes out of the police, and soon became known for their detailed and accurate depictions of Scotland Yard and its methods. Not surprisingly, Graeme's novels were very popular with the police themselves, and his 1931 mystery A Murder Of Some Importance carries a foreword by Sir Basil Thompson, a former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

Sir Basil's foreword is, in fact, an amusingly snooty and jingoistic bit of writing, all about the superiority of the English police, which makes you wonder if he'd actually read the novel it was attached to. The framing story of A Murder Of Some Importance has a small gathering of friends arguing over whose methods are best, the English, French or German police. One of the group, Mitchell, who is attached in a legal capacity to Scotland Yard, tells of a case in which the three forces were compelled to work together, with the combination of the three different approaches to crime investigation required to solve the mystery.

The case in question concerns the murder of the French Ambassador to Britain, the Comte de Chauvrincourt, who is stabbed to death in the back seat of his own car, as his chauffeur is driving him from Victoria Station to the embassy. It later comes to light that some critical papers relating to the possibility of a political treaty (and the modern reader can only sigh upon hearing that this treaty would have "negatived the possibility for all time of another war between France and Germany") were stolen at the same time. The case therefore takes on an international dimension, with Scotland Yard forced to report to the governments concerned, and to enter into a joint investigation with Inspector Pierre Allain of the Sûreté, and Herr Engel of the Berlin police.

Throughout A Murder Of Some Importance, Bruce Graeme strives for a sense of "different-but-equal" in his presentation of the various policing methods, separately depicting and praising the painstaking doggedness of the English, the insight into human nature of the French and the scientific approach of the Germans, all of which are needed to solve the murder. The underlying argument, that no one method is sufficient, is clear enough. Even so, Graeme never quite manages to keep his own prejudices from seeping through, so that we end up with a sort of sliding scale of opinion (inevitably, England > France > Germany): Inspector Stevens of Scotland Yard disapproves profoundly of both of his enforced colleagues, but sometimes finds himself siding with Allain against Engel, who is quite aware of their hostility and longs to put them in their place. (It is only when it emerges that the Russians may have been behind the murder that the three of them find something they can agree on.) And even when Graeme means to criticise the English and their methods, it comes out sounding like a twisted compliment. It is, we understand, so much harder to be an English policeman: the Germans have their Razzia, the regular inspection of identity papers that makes the rounding up of suspicious characters such a simple matter; while the French, aside from having no habeas corpus, are allowed to pull dirty tricks like forcing a witness to talk by arresting his girlfriend on trumped-up charges. The English, meanwhile, are swamped by red tape and restrictions, and under constant journalistic and political scrutiny. Their successes, therefore, are all the more meritorious.

To modern crime fans, the novel's presentation of the Germans may hold the greatest interest. Herr Engel is mocked when he turns up with a "team of experts" - a photographer, a fingerprint man, a chemist - but for all that, it is the scrupulous scientific examination of the physical evidence that provides the first real break in the case, much to the annoyance of the others. (They may be right, reads the subtext here, but we don't have to like it.) Of course, these days this approach to crime investigation is so much what we are accustomed to, in novels and TV dramas alike, that the reader is likely to respond to the mixture of hostility and contempt expressed by Stevens and Allain with a wry, "Your point being?" Nevertheless, Graeme's overriding contention - even if he does have to struggle with himself to make it - is an entirely valid one; while when it comes to the solving of the case, the means are ultimately more interesting than the end.

Only four names now remained unaccounted for. There was the possibility of any one of the four being in England, but Steuben was a commercial traveller, and a strict teetotaller: Kurtz was an engineer: Bernstoff was a confidence trickster, an infamous work-shy---the last card was that of Carl Schmidt. As he read Schmidt's card Engel swelled with triumph. Carl Schmidt, notorious Communist, heavy drinker, ex-carpenter---a deep burst of laughter rumbled from his broad, square chest. This was a score indeed. He pictured the pained expression on Stevens's face: heard Allain's staccato fury---so he laughed again, with every good reason.

The Rembrandt Murder - Henry James Forman is best known today, as far as he is known, as the author of Our Movie Made Children, an alarmist work published in 1935 decrying the effect of motion pictures upon the youth of America, which notoriously skewed the data of the study it was based upon in order to stress its negative outcomes and express the author's own prejudices. (Ironically, the "youth" depicted would grow up to be the generation that decried the effect of comic books on the youth of America, but that's another story.) Forman was a journalist, and also taught creative writing at the university level; far be it from me to suggest which of these trades more influenced his most famous work. He published a number of works of fiction, among them a handful of mysteries, of which 1931's The Rembrandt Murder seems to have been the last.

James Harding Goold is one of the wealthiest men in New York, famous for his philanthropy and his art collection, which he houses in a lengthy gallery that doubles as his study. In spite of his wealth and position, Goold's home life is not a happy one: the marriage is childless and Mrs Goold is an invalid, struck down by paralysis and in need of constant nursing. Though he is unflagging in his attentions to her, Goold is rumoured not just to have found consolation elsewhere, but to be scandalously involved with a married woman---much to the disgust of Nurse Baker, who is forced to bite her tongue hard when Mrs Goold rhapsodises over her husband's kindness and unselfishness. Roland Ross, Professor of Criminology at King's College, is drawn into the world of the Goolds when an old friend, Sheila Forbes, begs him to retrieve a parcel of letters written by her to Goold at the height of their affair. Following a falling out between the two, Sheila married Goold's business rival, Cullen Forbes, provoking the infuriated Goold to threaten the exposure of her letters to her husband. Ross is deeply reluctant to get involved, but having known Sheila since childhood, is unable to deny her frantic request for assistance, and makes an appointment with Goold accordingly. When Ross arrives at the gallery entrance to the house, he finds both the external and the internal doors open. Entering, he further discovers Goold slumped in his chair, dead---shot in the back of the head. Realising the dangers of his own position, Ross summons the newly appointed Commissioner Wells, who hired him as a consultant a short time earlier. When Goold's butler, Cross, points out that one of the gallery's paintings, a Rembrandt, is missing, the police conclude that the case is one of robbery-homicide. However, obtaining the services of two "Watsons", as he dubs them, in the form of two of his students - Lorna Storey, Goold's niece and heiress, and Jimmie Trumbull - Ross starts an investigation of his own, partly to clear himself, partly to shield Sheila Forbes, but mostly because he thinks the police are making a terrible mistake...

The Rembrandt Murder is an engaging mystery which manages to make a mostly credible story out of some fairly outré material. It soon becomes evident to Roland Ross, if not to the police, that the investigators have two separate mysteries on their hands, and that finding the party who stole the Rembrandt will not necessarily reveal also James Goold's murderer. Divorcing the two acts in his own mind, Ross draws upon his anthropological background to locate the art thief, discovering that this particular crime has its roots in the murder of Rasputin - and that one of those responsible has been pursued from Russia to America... Meanwhile, with the pragmatic motive of financial gain removed from the equation of Goold's violent death, Ross finds himself picking his way through a dangerous tangle of jealousy, hatred and fear...

The solution to the mystery of Goold's death offers a few moments of inadvertent amusement to the modern reader. The explanation given is psychological in nature, and thus (we are solemnly told) quite beyond the professional capacity of the New York police, who are scolded by Ross for not taking more interest in the teachings of this most modern science - which the Goolds' old-fashioned doctor dismisses as "filth". Of course, by "modern", what this novel means is "Freudian"---and it is likely that the sexual underpinnings of the killer's motivation will strike many readers as rather dubious, to say the least.

(That said--- One does wonder what readers in another hundred years will make of early 21st century writings?)

The main strength of The Rembrandt Murder is Roland Ross himself, who is an interesting and likeable protagonist. After a varied and exciting life in pursuit of his first passion, anthropology, Ross finds himself increasingly drawn to the study of the sociological and psychological aspects of crime, in which he is joined by Lorna Storey and Jimmie Trumbull---or by Lorna, at least: as Ross swiftly realises, Jimmie's interest in anthropology runs a poor second to his interest in Lorna. Nevertheless, the two young people prove to be able assistants, with Lorna's genuine abilities fired by her determination to see her uncle's killer caught, and Jimmie making up in courage and reliability what he lacks in brains. Their eager support and willingness to follow orders to the letter enable Ross to follow his own paths of investigation even when his own actions are hampered by the scrutiny of the police. Although he cannot reconcile his involvement in the case with the theft of the Rembrandt, which he is certain was the motive for Goold's murder, Inspector Callahan is unable to let go of his suspicions of Ross, which were engendered in the first place by the simple fact of him being the one to discover the body. Those suspicions are kept alive by the manoeuvring and elusiveness to which Ross is driven by his chivalrous resolve to protect Sheila Forbes: a task made somewhat easier by Ross's conviction that Sheila herself is innocent. This leaves the puzzle of Cullen Forbes' behaviour. Is his erratic and antagonistic conduct driven by his own guilt? - or does he know something about Sheila that no-one else does, and that he is determined to conceal at all cost...?

"I cannot say enough for the cleverness of Inspector Callahan and his men in discovering the taxi driver who carried Forbes---the empty house, and so on. I am immensely impressed," and for all his quietness of demeanor Ross seemed to be dominating the conference, handing out badges, as it were, for good conduct. "But," he went on, "it will all prove to be irrelevant. The murderer of Goold will prove to be not Forbes, but someone so entirely different that you will be amazed."

On the whole I enjoyed The Rembrandt Murder, in spite of its excesses, but it let me down badly in one respect---and since it doesn't really constitute a spoiler, I'm inclined to complain about it out loud. I have a long and unhappy record, while reading or watching films, of being drawn to the third wheel in any given romantic triangle, and it so happens that I've done it again here...as I discovered only during the last couple of pages.

In fact, the novel ends in a very disappointing bait-and-switch. After an adventurous but solitary life, Roland Ross finds himself falling in love with the much younger Lorna, and his slow realisation of the fact is gently and sympathetically handled. In spite of the disparity in their ages, the two connect strongly on an intellectual level, discovering a myriad of shared tastes and interests, until it is clear to the reader (though the story is told through the prism of Ross's point of view) that Ross's feelings are returned. We fully expect the novel to conclude with their coming together; instead, we get Ross, reflecting upon Lorna's age and inherited wealth, not merely renouncing her, but literally handing her over to Jimmie Trumbull. Now, Jimmie is a nice guy, but he's about as mentally sharp as a billiard ball; and in fact, he and Lorna have nothing in common but their youth. Nevertheless, Ross pushes Lorna at him---without bothering to ask Lorna what she feels or what she wants---and this is presented as noble, rather than a staggering mixture of stupidity and selfishness; an odd sort of selfishness, perhaps, but selfishness just the same.

Realising what is happening, the dismayed Lorna asks desperately, "What difference do years and money make, if two people are---fond of each other?"

"We'll always be fond of one another," Ross stone-walls, and then starts going on about Jimmie Trumbull's "heart of gold" while, we are told, he looks at her with almost paternal kindness.

Paternal, hey? I wonder what Freud would make of that?

The Desert Moon Mystery - This 1928 mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan is a significant work for two very distinct reasons. In the first place, prior to this, and in contrast to the British mysteries of the same era which might be city-based or country-based, set anywhere from London to the smallest village, all the American mysteries I have read so far have been entirely urban. Most of them are set in New York or its environs, some in Chicago, and a few in Los Angeles. The Desert Moon Mystery, however, is the first genuinely regional mystery I have discovered, being set on the Desert Moon ranch in the isolated expanses of Nevada.

Secondly, and to my way of thinking even more importantly, this is the earliest mystery series I have come across to feature a professional woman detective---a private investigator, of necessity, since female police detectives were still some decades away in most countries. In the wake of two murders and a suicide, with which the local police make no headway (a point we shall return to), ranch owner Sam Stanley receives a telegram from a San Francisco-based investigator who offers to solve the mystery for a substantial fee, but asks no more than expenses in the event of a failure. That sounds like a good deal to Sam, who is reassured by learning that the individual in question is called Lynn MacDonald, commenting that, "An honest Scotchman comes pretty close to being the noblest work of God." Dismayed is hardly the word for it, when Sam subsequently discovers that "he" is a "she".

The Desert Moon Mystery is narrated by Mary Magin, Sam Stanley's housekeeper for many years after coming to Desert Moon as (we are fleetingly informed) a deserted wife. Sam has no immediate family, but has built himself a rather complicated household. Childless, many years before Sam adopted a boy and a girl. The former, John, is his heir and the apple of his eye; the latter, Martha, proved to be developmentally disabled, and although now an adult, still requires the care of the nurse, Mrs Ricker, who first brought her and John to Desert Moon. In addition, there is Hubert Hand, who came once to open a creamery but stayed to play chess in perpetuity, and Chadwick Caulfield, a friend of John, who, alone in the world and with nowhere else to go, simply never left after coming for a visit. Now, to Mary's exasperation, Sam has extended an invitation to Danielle and Gabrielle Canneziano, the twin daughters of Sam's ex-wife and the man she left him for. Margarita has been dead for many years, while Daniel Canneziano - once a cowpuncher on Desert Moon - is in jail, although not for much longer.

From the moment of their arrival, the twins change the atmosphere of Desert Moon. Though alike in appearance, they are different in temperament and outlook. Danielle, quiet and retiring, is glad of the refuge offered by the ranch; while the volatile Gabrielle longs for the excitements of civilisation. It is not long before her discontent begs the question of why she came in the first place; and a suspicious Mary discovers that the twins have a secret to do with something hidden on the ranch---and with revenge. John and Danielle fall in love, and become engaged; while Gabrielle carelessly divides her favours between Hubert, Chad and John, who resents her attentions as insulting to Danielle, and her open hostility towards Sam. Then Mary overhears a violent quarrel between the normally silent and reserved Mrs Ricker and Hubert Hand, which suggests both long knowledge of one another, and yet another dangerous secret. Matters come to a head on the fourth of July, when Gabrielle, dressed for the city, announces that she is "going for a walk" and leaves the ranch---and is next seen, cold and stiff, on the stairs to the attic at Desert Moon, the marks of strangulation on her throat. In the wake of this tragedy comes another: Chad Caulfield shoots himself, leaving behind a note confessing to the murder---which no-one believes. Mary herself finds evidence pointing to Sam's guilt, which she impulsively destroys; while as Sam realises with growing horror, the lack of urgency shown by the local police means that they suspect someone they don't want to arrest---namely, one or other of the Stanley men. As tensions grow, accusations are exchanged---and then a second murder is committed...

It is better than two-thirds through The Desert Moon Mystery before Lynn MacDonald steps off the train from 'Frisco at Rattail, the nearest station to Desert Moon - and not so very near at that. The difficulty for the reader in the meantime is that in its determination to spread potential guilt evenly amongst the other characters, it shows everyone's worst side and gives the reader plenty of reason to dislike them all. As for their actual guilt, only Mary Magin is more or less exonerated, by virtue of her status as narrator, and her frank admittance of her own shifting suspicions and blunders; and yet the promptness with which she conceals the pipe ash found near Gabrielle's body, which she does in full belief of Sam's innocence, makes us wonder what she might do if she thought that he was guilty. The problem for the household is that, much as they would prefer to believe otherwise, an outsider simply could not have committed the murders. Furthermore, it being the fourth of July, all the ranch hands are off at a local celebration ("local" meaning some sixty miles away). No plane could approach the Desert Moon without being heard and seen; and while someone could have parked a car and made their way cross-country to the ranch, this argues a knowledge of the terrain which points back to the family. Sam himself is desperate to believe that Daniel Canneziano, ex-Desert Moon, murdered his daughter for some reason, but Canneziano has the best of all possible alibis: he was not released from San Quentin in time to have committed it.

When Lynn MacDonald arrives at Desert Moon, she finds that her employer is not only expecting her to fail, but in a perverse sort of way, almost hoping that she does. Sam is an old-fashioned chauvinist, who can say the word women and make it sound like "the blackest oath he had used that day", who has a "shrill, silly voice...for talking when he is trying to mock a woman, any woman", and who repeatedly threatens to dismiss Lynn and send for, not just for another detective, but a "he-man detective" - whatever that is. Mary, on the other hand, offended by the very thought of a female detective, silently condemns Lynn as hard, cold, unfeeling---"unwomanly". You can't win. Ironically, the only person to show Lynn any real respect is the despised Daniel Canneziano, who has shown up in the wake of Gabrielle's death, and who knows of her professional reputation: "You should hear some of the San Quentin boys compliment her---in their way," he remarks drily to the sceptical Sam. Hampered both by the attitudes of the householders toward her and their skewing of their testimony (consciously or unconsciously), Lynn neverthess works her way through a maze of misapprehensions, suspicions and resentments to a solution to the mystery---only to be left with a case entirely circumstantial, lacking any concrete proof at all: a situation that forces her to recruit Mary Magin as a reluctant co-conspirator, and stage a dangerous charade to flush out the killer...

For all the text's insistence upon Lynn MacDonald's professional acumen, and its rightful exasperation with the disapproval of the onlookers, there is a sense in The Desert Moon Mystery that Kay Cleaver Strahan herself wasn't quite sure she hadn't gone too far in creating a private investigator who just happened to be a woman. Meddling spinsters might be all very well, but a woman who chose the solving of crime as a career - ! In fact, I'm not so certain that Strahan didn't secretly agree with Mary Magin about Lynn's "unwomanliness", or at least worry a bit too much that others might think her so. To this, I think, we can attribute several annoying little scenes that seem to have been included to reassure readers that, after all, Lynn is a "real woman"---such as her getting teary rather than angry under provocation. (I do not include Lynn's demonstration of her domestic skills in this category since, having no talent whatsoever in that direction myself, I don't consider excelling at housework a gender thing.) These irritations aside, Lynn MacDonald - who describes herself as a "criminal analyst", by the way - is a refreshing character: clever but not infallible, determined but never careless of the consequences of her actions. The end of this novel hints at a romance for Lynn, but since she subsequently reappears in six more mysteries, and since the next of them is apparently set in Oregon, we can only assume that (possibly as a result of the success of The Desert Moon Mystery) Kay Strahan thought the better of proving her detective's "womanliness" by marrying her off prematurely. Thank goodness!

"Mrs Magin," she said, "until we have evidence of guilt we have no criminal to arrest. Incredible as it seems, we might still be wrong concerning every bit of this. I once made a horrible mistake. It was on my third case---that is, after I began to work for myself. I don't talk about it. I can't think about it. But I made myself a promise then, a promise that I have never broken, and which I will never break. Except in extreme necessity, proof, positive, and perfect, must come before any accusation or arrest in a case of mine."

Fun fact: The Desert Moon Mystery was the very first novel released under the "Crime Club" label, an arm of Doubleday publishing that ran from 1928 until 1991.

Crime Club novels were, for some reason, often quickly reissued by other publishers, which accounts for the scarcity of first editions; their desirability, on the other hand, often has as much to do with their jacket art as with the novel inside. The Crime Club artists seem to have had a thing for skulls: the cover posted above is a good example of their work.

The Desert Moon Mystery was re-released by Grosset & Dunlap, whose artists took the motif even further---producing a cover that would mislead you into thinking you'd picked up a horror story: cool, if not entirely appropriate.

Also, do my eyes deceive me, or is there a mis-used apostrophe in that blurb??

And still on The Desert Moon Mystery---

Pondering the possibility of Lynn MacDonald being in fact literature's first professional female detective, rather than just the first I happened to come across, it occurred to me to wonder who was the the first female detective to appear in a series by a male author...and do you know, I'm trouble thinking of any, besides Alexander McCall Smith's "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series? There must be others, but I've gone blank - as well as being, admittedly, far more au fait with Golden Age (and earlier) mysteries than contemporary ones.

Help me out here, people! Who have I forgotten?

Do you mean a female detective who is the main character in the story? Rex Stout introduced several female detectives in his Nero Wolfe novels, most memorably Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner and Sally Colt in "If Death Ever Slept" (they also appear in a couple of other books), but of course they are not the main characters.

Stout did write a standalone book in 1937 with Dol Bonner as the main character, but it never developed into a series.

Yes, I did mean series in which a female detective is the main character. I'm still coming up empty, which is bit worrying.

What a fascinating triumvirate of recent mystery novels you have introduced Liz in your own inimitable style. Not surprisingly I haven't read any of the three but I WILL track them down eventually I'm sure. Simply love your comments on the preface by the retired Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard - it would have captured the feel of pomposity and faux-superiority perfectly I'm sure.
Have a lovely weekend.

Hi, Paul - thank you!! :)

I believe the Strahan novels are reasonably easy to get hold of - comparatively easy, perhaps I should say - but it took some hunting to find the other two. It's a shame so many of these Golden Agers have dropped out of sight, they're so often so very interesting.

Liz - there are a few series that keep writers, albeit slightly later than those you list, in print. Christianna Brand, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles are quite easy to find still but some of yours do need a little more work - but it is fun tracking down the detectives when a certain amount of book sleuthing is required.

eta Forman and Strahan both have work available for purchase on Book Depository albeit not at knock down prices but for Graeme I have to look a little further to Abe Books.

Good to know, thanks!

#124 I love the cover of A Murder of Some Importance!

so that we end up with a sort of sliding scale of opinion (inevitably, England > France > Germany) Well, of course.

#128 Also, do my eyes deceive me, or is there a mis-used apostrophe in that blurb??

Ooh good spot!

Enjoyed your reviews of the three crime novels above, none of which are very easily available for me to read but given the number of crime series I'm trying to read I can live with that.

#129 I missed the 'series' qualification and was about to suggest Forrester's The Female Detective but I don't think that was a series although I think it's a short story collection.

This doesn't answer your question but I came across this article from a google search and thought it might be of some interest. Lots of female detectives mentioned, not sure if any were series written by a male author.

Some of the Nancy Drew novels were written by men, although I'm not sure that counts toward the tally of female detective series written by male authors.

I can't think of too many male mystery/detective writers who have female main characters. I've read one or two of Simon Brett's Mrs. Pargeter mysteries, and I've just finished the most recent book in Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce series. Alexander McCall Smith also writes the Isabel Dalhousie series.

>>#136

It was a wonderful time for jacket art. I think that's supposed to be the chauffeur discovering that his employer managed to get stabbed in the back of a moving car. :)

Good luck on managing your series - not only are two of those three new series for me, I've just started another! (see below)

Yes, there were many female detectives by male authors in the short stories that proliferated in the late 19th century, but I'm struggling to find too many in novel series. Thank you very much for that link, I'll go through it see what I can find.

>>#137

Hi - thanks for visiting! That's an excellent point: quite a number of the Stratemeyer Syndicate series had male authors working under female pseudonyms, and vice-versa.

>>#138

No, a little sadly it seems my first impression was right, and there aren't many male-penned female detectives after all. Thank you very much for adding those three recent series to my list; modern detective fiction, as you would know, is not my area of expertise! :)

Finished A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott for TIOLI #6.

Now reading By Saturday by Sydney Fowler for TIOLI #19...the first book in a series.

Sigh.

> 90

ME: Hey mom what's for dinner?
MOM: We are having *7)80)*(*(980*)*(*(&89&(*&987(&*&

LOL!! That is really funny!

I just think I might need to get that book. I depend on texting quite a bit because I don't hear well on the phone. I always feel compelled to type correct grammar. :D

Hi, Madeline!

I always feel compelled to type correct grammar. :D

Oh, so do I! My sister, who has young adult children, text-speaks with the best but I always write full grammatical sentences. :)

My husband just had me ROFL. I told him about the book. He told me that he still feels uncomfortable texting. He added that he still feels weird when someone texts him "LOL". I cracked up!!!!

I don't mind the occasional LOL but what drives me crazy are a couple of people I know who use it like a fullstop - they add it to the end of everything they email or text even if what they've said isn't remotely funny and could never possibly be mistaken for a joke. It drives me crazy, so tell your husband I sympathise!

Will do. :)

Finished By Saturday for TIOLI #19.

Now reading Put Out The Light by Ethel Lina White; reading it very carefully, in a fragile old Penguin.

Hmm. I may have been hoist on my own petard with this one, as I can find no evidence that the bookseller I bought it from has a brick-and-mortar existence...

ETA: Yup. Unless it has a culinary fruit in it, I am definitely in trouble...

Honestly! I've never seen so much misinformation in my life as seems to surround the "Inspector Cleveland" mysteries of Sydney Fowler...if indeed they are the "Inspector Cleveland" mysteries of Sydney Fowler, and I'm beginning to doubt even that. (One listing has one of these novels as a "Kingsley Starr" mystery; as far as I can gather, Kingsley Starr is the main suspect.)

Even the people who run the Sydney Fowler website have their facts wrong, as they have By Saturday listed as being first published in 1933, when my library copy was dated 1931.

Some of the books were published in Britain first, others in America; they had their titles altered, and then altered back; one of them seems to have no copyright date at all.

I'm beginning to think that some sadist with a hatred of people suffering OCD was behind it all...

...anyway, I've just ordered a copy of what I think is the second book in the Inspector Cleveland series (although frankly, your guess is as good as mine), and it has---an ampersand in the title! Will it arrive in time to be read for this month's TIOLI? The pressure is on, postal service!

Will it arrive in time to be read for this month's TIOLI?

Heh!

The Brontes Went To Woolworths - Rachel Ferguson's second novel is a deceptive work, a seeming whimsical comedy that hides behind its surface game-playing some dark and disconcerting elements. The all female Carne family, a widowed mother and her three daughters, plus the youngest's governess, live an economically straitened existence enlivened by elaborate games of make-believe, in which dolls and pets have complex lives of their own and complete strangers are treated as intimate friends. Meanwhile, the oldest daughter, Deidre, an aspiring novelist, supports the family by working as a journalist; the second, Katrine, is studying to be actress; while the youngest, Sheil, has lessons from her governess, Miss Martin, who struggles unavailingly to pick her way through the bewildering maze of the Carnes' imaginery world. Matters reached a crisis when Deidre has the opportunity to make the acquaintance of two of the people most prominently featured in the Carnes' parallel world, Sir Herbert and Lady Toddington, a judge and his wife---or "Toddy" and "Mildred", as the family prefers to call them. Will this intrusion of reality add a whole new dimension to the Carnes' existence - or will it make the labyrithine but delicate structure of their imaginery lives come crashing down about them...?

The Brontes Went To Woolworths is one of those rare novels that defies classification. Reportedly, while writing it, Rachel Ferguson commented that, "It's so odd that I'm rather frightened of it." I don't doubt it: it's a book that gives every indication of having taken on a life of its own, rather like the Carnes' imaginery friends, and which will probably most appeal to those people who can say of themselves that they like to "lose themselves" in a novel, and who understand how a fictional world can sometimes be so much more vividly alive than the real one. (This specific appeal is, indeed, made explicit on the very first page, when the Carne girls are asked, "Do you like reading?" How could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread, ponders narrator-Deidre, absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation...) It is a novel that requires the reader to see beyond Deidre's way of telling the story: she deliberately raises barriers between her family and the reader quite as much as she does between her family and their reality. We come to understand that the death of their husband and father has left the Carne women in greatly reduced circumstances; that Deidre has been forced to find a job to support them; and that the elders have entered into a conspiracy to protect the much-younger Sheil from the attendant unpleasantness as long as possible. Their games function for the Carnes as a kind of compensation for the luxuries and comforts they have had to give up. Deidre tells us at one point that she once rejected a proposal of marriage because she was, at the time, in love with Sherlock Holmes; and while this possibly has a measure of truth about it, the girl's pressing financial responsibilities are a more likely explanation.

But there is a darker side to this game-playing, as Rachel Ferguson makes plain through the characters of the Carnes' unfortunate governesses, Miss Martin and Miss Ainslie, the former of whom has no grasp of her employers' games, the latter of whom makes the fatal mistake of thinking that she does - and of trying to join in. Some of the novel's most jolting scenes occur when Ferguson, having lured us into the Carnes' imaginarium, suddenly shows us the family from the other perspective, the calculated cruelty with which they shun the "outsiders" who share the house with them but who do not - who are not permitted - to "understand". Still more jolting to the modern reader is the Carnes' class snobbery. While we see that this is an attempt to hold onto the social sphere from which economic necessity has ejected them, the family's treatment of anyone they consider "not one of us" is repellant. Particularly distasteful is their mockery of the speech patterns of the stage performer Freddie Pipson, whose kindness and generosity apparently count for nothing beside his lack of formal education. It is the governesses who bear the brunt of the Carnes' class-consciousness, however, and we do not in the least blame Miss Martin for her abrupt abandonment of her position - nor, for that matter, for the attempt to slap Deidre's face that proceeds it.

And then there's the Brontes.

The most unexpected aspect of The Brontes Went To Woolworths is the novel's sudden dip in the genuinely supernatural. We think little of it when Deidre tells us of her encounter with her dead father, because what's one more imaginary friend among so many?---but the gradual intrusion of Charlotte and Emily into the narrative is something else again. At first these intrusions are merely incidental - a portrait of Emily, a re-reading of Jane Eyre, a consideration of Gaskell's Life Of Charlotte Bronte - so that we rather expect the ladies to take their place in the ranks of the Carnes' celebrity visitors; but a holiday on the Yorkshire moors and an episode of table-turning results in something far more unnerving... And yes, by the end, the Brontes have been to Woolworths. Charlotte buys a hair-net; Emily misbehaves.

Agatha poised her pen over the paper. Should she conclude by dropping a hint to Mrs Carne that the maid had been shockingly negligent about that Miss Bell? She had been waiting in the library... A weird sort of woman, Miss Bell. Very downright. Her reply to one's apology: "Miss Martin, in my experience the governess is little more than an upper servant." Evidently a friend of of Deidre's. She had admitted that she wrote, a little. Agatha had had, at last, to ask her name, and she hadn't liked that...

Hi Liz,
What a wonderful review! I don't know this book at all but you've made me want to seek it out. Thanks a million!

Hi, TK! It's a very strange book... Not at all easy to find in the Virago edition, but Bloomsbury publishing reissued it a couple of years ago, and that edition seems fairlt readily available. I'd be interested in hearing your opinion!

Finished Put Out The Light, and managed to fit it into TIOLI #1 thanks to the strawberries on pg 101.

Now reading S. S. San Pedro by James Gould Cozzens for TIOLI #8.

Finished S. S. San Pedro.

I have now reached a mini-milestone (#125), and as usual I'm marking it with a blog read: Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury by Thomas Leland, from 1762, which many people believe to be the first true historical novel.

At the moment I'm not seeing a TIOLI option, but I'm hoping an adolescent might wander along...

...no adolescent, but if I include the novel's original subtitle, "An Historical Romance", it fits the Scrabble challenge!

So---finished Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury: An Historical Romance by Thomas Leland for TIOLI #9; I will be blogging this.

Now reading Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths And Their Shared Passion by Madeleine Stern and Leona Rostenberg, for TIOLI #5.

Hi Liz, I have set up the thread for the December Group Read.

A Tale of Two Cities

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Thanks, Judy - already spotted and starred! :)

Observation:

Few things are more annoying than "histories" of detective fiction that jump from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot without batting an eyelid.

Sigh.

Although a lot happened in the development of the detective story between the Victorian Era and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Holmes and Poirot did briefly "coexist." Conan Doyle's last Holmes book, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1927, as was the fifth Poirot book, The Big Four.

(I know this only because I recently organized all the fiction I've ever read by original publication date. It's so interesting to see what books were published in the same year or the same decade, and it's fascinating to see that Arthur Conan Doyle was still publishing Holmes stories at the same time Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were publishing Poirot and Lord Peter novels, respectively.)

Oh, yes, that's perfectly true - and very strange to think about, as you say.

I do get annoyed, though, by "histories" that tell you you only need to bother with a tiny minority of writers and effectively dismiss the rest as irrelevant or uninteresting. I have the same issue with my blog project, where I'm looking at the development of the novel. Not only do I have historians telling me the novel started with Daniel Defoe, and ignoring at least fifty years' worth of earlier experimentation and development, most of them jump straight from Defoe to Samuel Richardson and ignore the twenty years in between. Grr!!

I know this only because I recently organized all the fiction I've ever read by original publication date.

I am obsessed with "in order", so I understand perfectly! :)

...and to answer my own earlier question, I think the first (and quite possibly for a very long time, the only) male mystery writer to feature a female detective in a series was Stuart Palmer, who published his first Hildegarde Withers novel, The Penguin Pool Murder, in 1931. Turning it into a series may have been an afterthought, though; the ending doesn't really lend itself to serialisation. Also, Hildegarde is the very model of a meddling amateur.

Belated congrats Liz for reaching 125 books read!! That is amazing and that's on top of the thoughtful reviews you share with us. :)

Thank you, Valerie, that's much appreciated! :)

Finished Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, for TIOLI #5.

As to what I am reading next, that depends what lurks behind the "item waiting for collection" notice I just received...

ETA: Now reading Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun, for TIOLI #14.

Hi Liz,
Just wanted to second what Valerie said in 162! Most impressive!

Thank you, TK! It's been a good reading year. A bit rough in some other respects, but thankfully, there's always books. :)

A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott - Released in 1988, this is the third anthology of Louisa May Alcott's sensation stories identified and collected by the indefatigible Madeleine Stern, this time in collaboration with Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy.

A Pair Of Eyes; or, Modern Magic (1863): - The artist Max Erdmann searches for a model with striking eyes, who will allow him to complete his picture of Lady Macbeth, and finds her in the beautiful but notoriously cold Agatha Eure. Realising at length that Agatha is in love with him, Erdmann marries her for her position and wealth, but to Agatha's bitter disappointment remains devoted primarily to his art. In the wake of a violent quarrel, Erdmann begins to find himself strangely drawn to Agatha, seeking her company with no desire to do so and unable to leave the house for any length of time. Chance reveals to Erdmann that he is the victim of a form of mesmerism and, outraged, he swears to dominate Agatha's will and control her actions as she has done his...

The Fate Of The Forrests (1865): - The mysterious Felix Stahl offers to fulfil Kate Heath's laughing wish "to hear my fate - to have my heart read". He speaks a few soft words to each of the four young people present - and changes their lives forever... Evan Forrest, who learns that he will never have his heart's desire, is stunned by his cousin Ursula's subsequent announcement that she intends to marry Stahl. Bewildered but loyal, Evan alone stands by Ursula after her ill-fated marriage culminates in violence and tragedy...

A Double Tragedy. An Actor's Story (1865): - Paul Lamar and Clothilde Varian, the leading actor and actress of a Parisian company, fall in love, their passion adding new depth to their performances. Their happiness is short-lived, however, when Clothilde's husband, whom she thought and hoped dead, reappears to claim her. In the struggle that follows, life begins to imitiate art, as both Lamar and St John learn to their cost that they have drastically misjudged what Clothilde in her desperation is capable of...

Ariel. A Legend Of The Lighthouse (1865): - Aspiring poet Philip Southesk is amused and intrigued when he hears a tale of a mermaid who lives about the rocky shores of the small island on which the local lighthouse stands. Setting out to investigate, he discovers something almost as wonderful: a girl called Ariel, raised in isolation by her father who has withdrawn from the world after being betrayed in his youth. A summer idyll follows, with the two young people falling in love over poetry and Shakespeare - but their joking comparison of their situation to The Tempest is more true than they realise: their island holds a dangerous Caliban...

Taming A Tartar (1867): - Sybil Varna is hired as companion to the young Russian widow, the Princess Nadja Tcherinski, presently living in Paris but dreading the effect upon her health of an imminent return to St Petersburg. The Princess lives with her brother, the Prince Alexis Demidoff, who is notorious for his violent temper and his domineering ways. Circumstances throw Sybil into conflict with the Prince, who is taken aback by the young Englishwoman's frank speech and her refusal to be cowed by him. Sybil soon realises that she has become the unlikely object of the Prince's affections and, although conscious of her own changing feelings, maintains an icy demeanor, determined that, come what may, she will never be just one more of the Prince's possessions...

As with all of these collections of sensation stories, much of the pleasure of A Double Life derives from the profound disconnect between Louisa May Alcott's prevailing public image and the insight that these secret tales give the reader into aspects of her personality that she chose to keep hidden. Though in the correspondence that finally betrayed her secret Alcott often spoke dismissively of these short works, the enjoyment that she took in their creation, with their outrageous plot devices and their exotic settings, is self-evident. Moreover, these particular stories allowed Alcott to express her love of the arts, with poetry and literature, painting and the stage woven into deeply into their fabric.

However, the theme that connects the stories of A Double Life is, overwhelmingly, the power struggle between the sexes, with the five tales arranged (intentionally or otherwise) according to how well their female protagonists' fare. Again and again in this collection, we find a man underestimating the passions and strengths of a woman. In a number of the stories, in particular A Double Tragedy, this failure of the masculine imagination leads to death and disaster; in the others, the woman's unexpected capacity paves the way for happiness. It is in the first three of these stories that Alcott really lets her hair down, rioting in violent emotions, thwarted love, revenge, suicide and murder. In contrast, both Ariel and Taming A Tartar are more conventional romances, which allowed her to experiment with an intertwining of setting and theme. However, the term "conventional" remains relative: Taming A Tartar is, to all intents and purposes, a feminist reworking of The Taming Of The Shrew, and it is difficult to imagine a modern reader not getting a kick out the conclusion of this story - written in 1867, remember - which finds its strong-willed heroine promising her new husband that she will love, honour and not obey him.

That night I was like one in a terrible dream; every thing looked unreal, and like an automaton I played my part, for always before me I seemed to see that shattered body and to hear again that loved voice confessing a black crime... Clothilde's unnatural composure would have been a marvel to me had I not been past surprise at any demonstration on her part. A wide gulf now lay between us, and it seemed impossible for me to cross it. The generous, tender woman whom I first loved, was still as beautiful and dear to me as ever, but as much lost as if death had parted us. The desperate, despairing creature I had learned to know within an hour, seemed like an embodiment of the murderous spirit which had haunted me that day...

By Saturday (reissue title: Dead By Saturday) - Sydney Fowler Wright was a prolific author who experimented with a wide range of genres, writing screenplays and poetry as well as fiction and non-fiction. During the 1930s, working under the pseudo-pseudonym "Sydney Fowler", he produced a string of mysteries and thrillers in very rapid succession, including two short series. Published in 1931, By Saturday was the first to feature Inspector Cleveland of Scotland Yard, although he is not the novel's focus. Instead, the story is told chiefly from the point of view of Basil Thornford, a feckless and rather immature young man who accidentally gets himself mixed up in the affairs of an American gang hiding out in London, and who over the course of a hair-raising week thwarts the criminals, wins the girl he loves, and does an awful lot of growing up...

Having walked out of his dull, low-paying job at his elder brother's firm, Basil Thornford begins to contemplate his future, and sees certain attractions in a swashbuckling life of crime. He has not gotten any further than some rather pleasing if not particularly realistic imaginings, however, when circumstances put him in possession of a wallet containing several thousand pounds and a number of papers that tie the American gangster Buddy Callaghan and his associates, now establishing themselves in London, to a series of crimes committed in New York. Another happy accident introduces Basil to Ethelfleda Collingwood - Fleda to her friends - who with his usual impulsiveness he decides he's going to marry - not immediately, of course, but soon - say, by Saturday. With marriage on his mind, Basil is less inclined than ever to surrender the contents of the wallet to the person he suspects is not their lawful owner at all. Fortunately, Fleda is employed at the legal firm of Bletchworth & Morrison, whose exhorbitant fees reflect their willingness to do business with almost anyone. Mr Morrison begins a negotiation with Callaghan on Basil's behalf, but circumstances are against him: Scotland Yard has gotten wind of those incriminating papers, and is just as eager to get hold of them as Callaghan himself. With the law closing in on him, Callaghan loses his head, and Basil and Fleda find themselves fighting a battle of wit and courage against a criminal gang known for its ruthlessness and its willingness to kill to achieve its ends...

This is a novel that took me by surprise. My only previous exposure to Sydney Fowler Wright's writing was the science fiction novel Deluge, which finds its author, apparently in all seriousness, celebrating the destruction of "degenerate" modern civilisation in a world-wide catastrophe, and exulting in the vicious struggle to survive of the few remaining pockets of humanity. (And believe me, you don't want to know what happens to the women in this new world.) It is an understatement to say that I was not expecting to discover that By Saturday is a fairly light-hearted comedy, part-thriller, part-Bildungsroman. In some ways this novel put me in mind of the "Benbow Smith" stories of Patricia Wentworth, in which ordinary people suddenly find themselves caught up in extraordinary events; although By Saturday is much more overtly humorous than Wentworth's novels. As for Basil himself, I confess I found him a rather exasperating hero, but that might be a gender response: he somehow manages to win the sensible, intelligent Fleda in spite of a romantic approach culled (in the absence of any real-life experience) from a toxic melding of 19th century poetry and contemporary Hollywood. Be that as it may, Basil's dazzling vision of life with Fleda proves an amusingly effective weapon. Callaghan and his goons are used to people quaking before their threats, and find themselves at a loss to know how to deal with an adversary who always seems to have his mind on something else, and who does disconcerting things like responding to an order to put up his hands with an impatient exclamation of, "Don't be a fool!" and a complaint that his attacker didn't knock.

Although an entertaining read throughout, the most successful, and funniest, aspect of By Saturday is its slow shift to the perpective of Buddy Callaghan and his goons, who have come to London with every intention of conquering it through violence and blackmail, as they have done New York, but soon find themselves floundering in an unfamiliar and even frightening land, where the people are so reckless that they don't even carry guns, where the police don't seem to understand how bribery works, and where hotel managers, far from being slavishly grateful for the custom of celebrities like Mr Callaghan, send in prompt bills for broken furniture. As the gang's misery and bewilderment grows, Callaghan finds himself losing his grip on his subordinates, until at last he can only control them by promising that they will chuck the whole idea of London and head back to New York just as soon as possible - say, by Saturday. In achieving this goal, Callaghan finds himself with a wholly unexpected ally: Inspector Cleveland of Scotland Yard, who in the realisation that the Callaghan gang has done nothing criminal since arriving in England - or at least, nothing he can prove - is quite prepared to settle for helping them onto a boat back to the States. This puts the two of them at loggerheads with Basil, whose castles in the air require every penny in Mr Callaghan's bulging wallet, and tests the negotiatory skills of Mr Morrison to the utmost...

Mr Devlin felt a natural anger. He had not been told to kill this objectionable young Britisher, but to fetch him to Mr Callaghan's room. He had carried out his instructions in the most exemplary manner, crossing the softly-carpeted passage and opening the door noiselessly, and surprising his victim with his hands harmlessly employed at the writing-table. What more would you have? He had spoken the magic words in the right tone, and, surely as the sun sets in the west over God's Own Country, the young fool should have raised his hands. He felt that he was confronted with a different technique, and was without instructions or experience for dealing with such an emergency.

Shortly after its initial release, and again only a few years ago, By Saturday was reissued under the alternative title, Dead By Saturday, which personally I find inappropriate and misleading. For one thing, this title gives no hint of the humorous tone of the novel, but makes it sound much more grim than it is. For another, although by the end quite a number of different things are supposed to happen "by Saturday", someone dying isn't amongst them.

Which is not to say that no-one does die by Saturday. Merely that it was incidental...

Oops! Forgot to mention that I finally wrapped up my blogging of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, which was my 100th book for the year. Somehow, despite the novella being only 67 pages long, I managed to drag this out to four separate posts - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Finished Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder for TIOLI #14.

Now reading The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams, for TIOLI #9.

Belated congratulations on reading 125 books and puzzling out the first male writer to write a female series detective. I'm now more tempted by The Penguin Pool Murder...

I still haven't caught up with your fourth blog post on Oroonoko (which is a word I never put enough o's in on my first attempt) but I'm looking forward to Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury particularly based on the main cover on the work page (although sadly I find that the book with this cover would set me back £25):



#167 I really want to read the Louisa M. Alcott thrillers (I guess this will be next year now) - they sound fascinating.

#168 Why does every mystery series you start sound so intriguing?

#171 Now reading The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams Oooh - then I'll read my copy too!

Hi, Heather! Hope you've been okay with the terrible weather.

The Penguin Pool Murder is quite a lot of fun. Kudos to Stuart Palmer for breaking the mold! :)

Having now read Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury I can solemnly warn you against investing in that cover - it's completely inappropriate! In fact, so much so that I wasted a ridiculous amount of time searching for an alternative image to use. (For reading, I settled for a PDF!)

I believe I have two collections of the Alcott stories to go, before they started shuffling them around and reissuing them in "themed" volumes. Hoping to get to them in the New Year; I've also picked up her novel A Modern Mephistopheles, which I gather has a peculiar publication history.

Why does every mystery series you start sound so intriguing?

The question is, why have so many intriguing series slipped through the cracks??

Starting The Notting Hill Mystery was a late-month impulse. So far I think the editor has a nerve making such a distinction between this and The Trail Of The Serpent - it's structured differently, but the bad guy is just as obvious (even if the question of "how" is fudged), and to my mind it's just as much a sensation novel as the Braddon.

Apropos, it looks like I'll be doing The Trail Of The Serpent with Madeline in January, so February for The Octoroon?? (Another word with too many 'o'-s!)

(ETA: Thank you for tactfully not mentioning that in #170 I originally spelled blogging "blooging"! Oh, those 'o'-s!)

I've got the Alcott "Thrillers" on my TBR list now! Thanks for bringing them to our attention!

Karen O.

Hi, Karen - thanks for visiting! I hope you enjoy the Alcotts. :)

Finished The Notting Hill Mystery for TIOLI #9.

And with that I have hit another mini-milestone: The Notting Hill Mystery was my 128th book for the year, equal with my total for last year, and a month earlier - whoo!

To celebrate (in my own peculiar way), #129 will be another blog read - The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda by Aphra Behn, from 1688. This is for TIOLI #8.

Finished The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda for TIOLI #8. To be blogged. Which I seem to be saying a lot lately.

And that is November done. Fourteen books and all TIOLI; not too shabby. A lot of unwritten reviews and blog posts, though...

Now re-reading A Tale Of Two Cities for the group read, and hoping that someone will be so kind as to provide an appropriate challenge.

#173 Starting The Notting Hill Mystery was a late-month impulse. So far I think the editor has a nerve making such a distinction between this and The Trail Of The Serpent - it's structured differently, but the bad guy is just as obvious (even if the question of "how" is fudged), and to my mind it's just as much a sensation novel as the Braddon.

Agreed. I've really enjoyed it, I think it's a very interesting example of an early detective story and I'm very grateful to the British Library for publishing it but I'm completely baffled by their statement that it's the first English language detective novel and the introduction was really unclear as to exactly why they thought that was the case. I wondered if it might be the structure of the book but then remembered that The Woman in White had a similar structure and was published 3 years earlier.

I've picked up TWiW for a reread and in John Sutherland's introduction he says:

'it remains a gripping tale, and with hindsight we can enjoy it with an enhanced sense of the genre - detective fiction - an impressive number of whose conventions it pioneered.'

If The Notting Hill Mystery is a contender for the first English language detective novel because of it's structure then surely The Woman in White should also be a contender?

Anyway, rant over. February sounds great for The Octoroon (your mentioning the O's puts me in mind for a good TIOLI challenge)

Thank you for tactfully not mentioning that in #170 I originally spelled blogging "blooging"! Oh, those 'o'-s!

Yes, it was tact and good manners, not at all that I didn't notice....

#176 The Notting Hill Mystery was my 128th book for the year, equal with my total for last year, and a month earlier - whoo!

Whoo! :-)

The Woman In White does have the piecing-it-together structure, in a context where the reader doesn't know what the truth is, which I think is its most significant bit of "pioneering" - but its "detectives" don't really fit the profile. The other two novels have a stronger claim on that basis.

(You are, however, making me want to re-read The Woman In White!)

The thing I found most interesting about The Notting Hill Mystery is that it's a sensation novel that undermines its own sensationalism. If you took the plot elements out of context you'd have no hesitation in categorising it as a sensation novel, but then its narrator constantly downplays or disbelieves those elements. The other fascinating touch is the ending, which isn't very detective fiction-y.

There are arguments to be made, but I'm sticking with Mary Elizabeth! :)

Put Out The Light (US title: Sinister Light) - Ethel Lina White is a novelist that many people know better than they realise - because, while a number of her works are the basis of popular films, for some reason they always had their titles changed: for example, Alfred Hitchcock took her 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins, and turned it into The Lady Vanishes. Published in 1931, Put Out The Light was not White's first novel, but it was her first in the genre upon which her reputation primarily rests, the psychological thriller. This is an intriguing yet disconcerting book, set up like a standard cosy mystery - unlikeable victim, country estate, long roster of suspects - but with the inevitable delayed and delayed until the reader is drawn into a guiltily complicit mindset, inclined to wonder impatiently why someone just doesn't hurry up and murder her?

"Her" is Anthea Vine, wealthy spinster matriarch of the village of Oldtown, whose estate, Jamaica Court, looms over the lives of her neighbours both literally and figuratively: the whole of Oldtown sets its clocks by Anthea's nightly rituals, with the lights in her room going on at exactly eleven, and out at exactly midnight; between, Anthea undergoes an almost brutal ritual of exercise and beauty treatment, by which she tries to hold off the ravages of time. Never married, Anthea has adopted and raised three children, the cousins Charles and Francis Ford and the unrelated Iris Pomeroy, all of whom she keeps in a state of complete financial dependence. Also under her financial sway are her secretary, Sally Morgan, with whom Charles is in love, and the young Dr Lawrence, who is in debt to Anthea and so unable to resist her demands upon his time, which are rapidly costing him the rest of his practice. Anthea is an anomalous figure, dressing in a style completely unsuited to her years and trying to convince herself that the young men who visit her house, which she throws open each evening, come because of her attractions and not those of Iris. Anthea also demands the constant attendance of Charles and Francis, flirting with both and playing them off against one another. While they themselves with a distant vision of Anthea's death and their own freedom, the young people are also well aware that she has not made a will, and that should she die intestate, her fortune and property would go to her estranged brother. A fit of illness, and Iris's prompt, sympathetic response, induce a briefly softened mood in Anthea, and she does make her will, letting Charles, Francis and Iris know of her intention to divide her estate between them. Shortly afterwards, however, Anthea suffers a near-fatal accident which she wrongly interprets as attempted murder - and that changes everything...

Anthea Vine dominates the narrative of Put Out The Light, the grotesque combination of ruthlessness and self-infantilisation making her simultaneously monstrous and pathetic. So far as it devotes itself to a psychological dissection of Anthea's motives and impulses, Put Out The Light is very much a novel of its time; uncomfortably so, in what it has to say about the sexual underpinnings of her behaviour. Indeed, there is slightly exasperating tendency here to tie all female behaviour to marital status and, therefore, to sexual frustration or otherwise - although that said, the novel does end on a note that humorously undermines its apparent stance, and suggests that much of what has come before may be safely taken with a grain of salt. Be that as it may, the reader can only squirm when Anthea, having concluded that her success in business means nothing beside missing the "great experience" of marriage, decides to buy herself a young husband---and then has only to choose between the three candidates at her disposal. Meanwhile, Dr Lawrence, although drawn to Iris, dares not act upon his feelings; Sally Morgan holds Charles at arms'-length, knowing that to do otherwise would only prompt Anthea to use her as a weapon against him; and Francis begins making Iris suggestions of a profitable "merger"... Surrounded by an atmosphere of hatred and frustration and smothered rebellion, it is perhaps not surprising that Anthea begins to suffer frightful nightmares - including one that shows her with merciless clarity what, in the event of her death, the reactions of her household would be...

   For a minute or two she hesitated. A partnership with youth might be better than this eternal underground mutiny. She could relax in consultation and shelve some part of her burden of responsibility. And it would please Francis. She had never seen him before so propitiatory, or so anxious for a boon. In him she might find a friend.
   "Friend." At that tepid word her coquetry woke. To gain a friend, she would lose a courtier---a slave. It was this conflict and surrender which reminded her that she was a woman, with power to foment and to soothe. "No, thank you, Francis," she said. "I made my money and I intend to keep it. You can reopen the question when you've something tangible to offer me."
   "That will be too late," said Francis quietly. "For you will be dead."

S. S. San Pedro - In spite of career in which he won a range of literary prizes including the Pulitzer, the relationship between James Gould Cozzens and the critics was a difficult and contentious one, with his novels attracting both harsh criticism and fulsome praise. Perhaps the only one of Cozzens' works upon which the critics managed to agree was S. S. San Pedro, a short, tautly-written fictionalisation of an infamous maritime disaster, the sinking in 1928 off the coast of Virginia of the S. S. Vestris, with the loss of well over 100 lives including all of the children and most of the women on board, who were placed in a lifeboat so late that it was sucked under when the Vestris went down. Subsequent inquiry determined that the disaster had been preventable, and the ship's captain was censured for putting potential financial loss by his employers ahead of the safety of his passengers and crew. The investigation into the actual handling of the disaster, or rather into the complete failure of procedure, was the basis of subsequent significant changes for the better with respect to maritime safety.

It is extremely doubtful that, in 1931, there was anyone reading S. S. San Pedro who did not recognise James Gould Cozzens' doomed ship for what it was, a stand-in for the notorious Vestris. Nevertheless, Cozzens' novel is not a straight re-telling of the disaster. Rather, it uses those well-known events as a framework for a story both urgent and philosophical. The author is, in a way, somewhat kinder to his captain than the facts demand: at the outset, Captain Clendening is informed that the illness he has been fighting is terminal, and that this will - one way or the other - be his last voyage. The news is broken by a Dr Percival, a disturbingly cadaverous-looking individual who unnerves everyone who sees him. Clendening summons to his cabin his senior second officer, Anthony Bradell, and asks him to show Dr Percival around the ship, which Bradell does while fighting his feelings of revulsion. It is, ominously, Percival who first detects that something is wrong with the San Pedro: that it has a list for which no-one can account, but which in combination with the ship's heavy load of cargo spells danger. Bradell is only too glad when Dr Percival announces that he is ready to leave, and when he has seen him ashore; and he is entirely unable to explain the fact that, after the San Pedro sails, more than one person claims to have seen the doctor's cadaverous form somewhere on the ship...

Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of this novel is the way it uses language to convey a growing sense of confusion. The story is told with immediacy, so that the reader, like those on board, has only an imperfect understanding and remains uncertain of exactly what is happening and how imminent the worst might be. Curiously, perhaps, Cozzens gives little time or thought to the passengers on the San Pedro: his narrative stays almost entirely with the crew; we know only what they know, knowledge fragmented by their attempts go go on doing their duty and performing only their own assigned actions, even as the situation goes from bad to worse. Our identification figure, as far as the novel has one, is Anthony Bradell, and it is through his eyes that the reader first becomes aware of impending tragedy. As panic spreads, Bradell is seemingly the one point of order in an increasingly disordered world, and the reader tends to cling to him as a consequence - right up to the point when he reveals himself as every bit as irrational as the rest, and in a particularly distasteful way: by reacting with savage anger and disgust when confronted by the understandable terror of the San Pedro's third-class passengers - all of whom are black. Indeed, the attitude of this novel to its non-white characters, conveyed chiefly through Bradell, is joltingly ugly; so much so, that the reader may not feel inclined to blame some of them for eventually commandeering one of the lifeboats and saving themselves, and never mind the white people---an action that adds an ironic edge to the very conclusion of the tale.

Among other things, S. S. San Pedro is a rumination upon the functioning of the chain of command, and the consequences when it breaks down. The news of his illness leaves Captain Clendening almost stupified - slow to respond to his officers even under normal conditions, strangely fixated upon determining his position relative to other ships in his vicinity and, when disaster strikes, quite unable to give the orders required. Although it is evident to the entire crew of the San Pedro that Clendening is too ill to take control of the situation, still they hesitate to act without his orders as the crisis unfolds - and hesitate - and hesitate again - until at last it is too late. The inability of the officers to take independent action, to break the code under which they have all trained and served, dooms nearly everyone onboard; yet in saying that, we recognise clearly and can even sympathise with the intangible barriers that hold them inactive, unable to see, let alone grasp, the psychological moment. As for Clendening himself, he can barely grasp the reality of the looming disaster, yet he seizes with outraged clarity upon the fact that a member of his crew, a mere quartermaster, has apparently dared to suggest to him a course of action. It takes an immediate shock to bring him back to something like reality, and then all that he can see is the bitter duty before him - that his men, having followed their own duty to the point of destruction, expect him to so follow his, and go down with his ship...

   Now someone else had appeared at the wheelhouse door. Captain Clendening tightened his jaw and said: "You have your orders, Mr Fenton. Be good enough to carry them out." The quartermaster was still gazing at him, so he added, enraged at last by the implacable sadness of the eyes: "Get that man out of here, Mr Fenton. I'll have him in irons if he leaves his post again."
   He heard Mr Fenton's voice: "...get some of them away, sir?" and it occurred to him that he might not have spoken aloud in reference to the quartermaster. He saw no use in repeating it... Still a third man appeared. He recognized this one from the wireless-room. He had in his hand several papers. His voice awoke in an animated drawl. "Yes, yes," said Captain Clendening sharply. He did not want to listen to this, so he took the scribbled reports from the young man. "Carry on," he nodded, anxious to get rid of them.

> 180, 181. Two more wonderful reviews, Liz. You write so well about your reading!

#179 The thing I found most interesting about The Notting Hill Mystery is that it's a sensation novel that undermines its own sensationalism Yes, that was really interesting and I thought quite clever too.

#180 Ethel Lina White is a novelist that many people know better than they realise - because, while a number of her works are the basis of popular films, for some reason they always had their titles changed: for example, Alfred Hitchcock took her 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins, and turned it into The Lady Vanishes.

I had no idea The Lady Vanishes had been based on a book! I loved the film - will have a look for the book in the library.

#182 Hear hear!

Delurking to say that I am a huge Hitchcock fan, and I also had no idea that The Lady Vanishes was based on the novel The Wheel Spins - now I must track that down.

Seconding TomKitten's statement that you write so well about what you read - always so very interesting, and I am learning a lot! I'll delurk more so that you know I am here! Have a lovely weekend!

Yay, visitors!! :)

Hi, TK - thank you so much!

The other "unknown-famous" novel by Ethel Lina White is Some Must Watch, which is the basis of The Spiral Staircase.

Lovely to have you delurk, Mamie!

Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths And Their Shared Passion - This joint autobiography is an account of the life-long partnership, both personal and professional, of the bibliophiles, rare book dealers and "literary sleuths" Leona Rostenberg and Madeline Stern. I came to this book, as do most people, I suspect, by way of Louisa May Alcott: it was Rostenberg who, in the 1940s, "outed" Alcott as the anonymous and pseudonymous author of sensation stories that were as far away in tone and content from the didactic fiction on which her reputation largely rests as they well could be; and it was Stern who, as well as writing a ground-breaking biography of Alcott, tracked down the sensation stories themselves by following the scattered, oblique clues to authorship in her preserved correspondence. However, the ladies' dealings with Louisa May Alcott represent only one aspect of a long and happy life jointly devoted to reading, writing, researching, preserving and pursuing books.

In alternating short chapters, Rostenberg and Stern first describe their early years, growing up in New York as the children of German-Jewish immigrants: the first, unsuccessful meeting at the Sabbath School attached to the Temple Emanu-El; the friendship belatedly forged at Columbia; the separate struggles with academia and the Depression; and Rostenberg's fateful embarkation upon a career as a rare book dealer, an enterprise in which she was joined by her friend in 1945. The story then becomes one of the hunt, through bookshops, barns, and auction houses - anywhere that a rare and forgotten gem may be unexpectedly brought to light. The joys of seeking, finding, discovering are conveyed through the use of the marvellous expression Finger-Spitzengefuhl - a tingling of the fingers experienced when instinct says that something wondrous has been unearthed - a term to evoke a sympathetic thrill in even the amateur bibliophile. The only discordant note in the story is struck when the partners embark upon their first post-war book-buying trip to Europe, where they evince a slightly myopic tendency to view the devastation chiefly as a personal inconvenience. Though conceding that they were "spoiled Americans", the ladies seem insufficiently aware of the inconguity of complaining about the food in a severely rationed England, while carrying $2000 to spend on rare books. (On the other hand, they do fleetingly stop in at 84 Charing Cross Road.) But on the whole this is a very happy book, the story of two people who managed not just to turn their hobby into their career, but who discovered in themselves a passion so absorbing, it largely negated the need for more conventional relationships. (And perhaps I should mention here, as the ladies themselves feel compelled to do with a mixture of amusement and exasperation, that their friendship is just friendship, and nothing more intimate.)

The final section of Old Books, Rare Friends deals predominantly with the partners' growing involvement with the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, their efforts to encourage cooperation and mutually beneficial ventures amongst antiquarians both locally and internationally, and Leona Rostenberg's election to the presidency of the ABAA. Meanwhile, as always, the hunt went on. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the professional partnership of Rostenberg and Stern brought them attention from the newspapers, and that in turn led to an offer from Doubleday for their autobiography. As various reviewers have commented, this account of a life devoted to books is one that becomes ever more imperative as electronic communication increasingly dominates human interaction. This is a story about the power of the printed word; of the ability of books to speak across the centuries, and also to capture the essence of the people who wrote, printed and sold them. It is also, more simply although no less profoundly, a story about friendship.

   Together we examined and assessed our stock. Catalogue One...would present a history of the book as a physical object and as a medium of expression. It would encompass the art of printing and the great printers; the collectors of books; even the forgers of books. "But isn't it terribly limited?" I asked. "There's no literature, no history, no science, no art. Will there be enough interest in such a specialized subject?"
   Leona reassured me, "To librarians, booksellers, and collectors, there is nothing limited in the subject of Books about Books."

Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder (US title: Murder In The First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing) - At 9.45pm on the 9th July, 1864, banker Thomas Briggs boarded a first-class carriage on a local train departing from Fenchurch Street Station. At 10.10pm, a commotion occurred at Hackney Wick Station: two clerks, entering a first-class carriage, found it empty but covered in blood. Meanwhile, the driver of another train spotted a dark form lying near the tracks between the two stations. It was Thomas Briggs, alive but suffering massive head injuries, some from his fall but some evidently from a blow with a blunt object. He died twenty-four hours later, without ever fully regaining consciousness. His gold watch and the chain that held it were missing, wrenched away from his waistcoat. Investigators concluded that Briggs had been assaulted and robbed while the train was in motion, and then thrown out onto the tracks; his attacker must have escaped by jumping out after his victim. Though various incidents of violence had occurred since the railway's establishment earlier in the century, this was the first murder ever committed on a British train.

Kate Colquhoun uses the word "sensational" in her subtitle in a deliberate echo of the newspapers of the day, which repeatedly described the murder of Thomas Briggs as a sensation. However, although the story it tells is never less than compelling, Colquhoun's account of "Britain's first railway murder" is not entirely successful. It seems to me a bit unsure of what audience it is talking to, whether experienced Victorianists who might not need so much scene-setting, or modern crime buffs to whom the arrangements and conventions of 19th century London may be baffling; there is a distinct uncertainty in the text about how much detail to provide. On the other hand, the nature of the case itself would present difficulties for any author: the contradictory, imperfect nature of the evidence and the constant re-examination of witnesses in a variety of contexts make it essentially impossible for anyone telling this story to avoid going over and over the same ground. But behind these stylistic difficulties lurks a deeply disturbing story. The police and the courts may have gotten the right man when they captured and convicted Franz Muller---and in spite of Muller's last-minute, last-second, confession, the narrative leaves room for doubt---but if they did, it was more through good luck than good judgement. This is a story less of a murder and its solution, than it is of the horrifying journey in between: of trial by newspaper, of the dangers of circumstantial evidence, and of a legal system chilling its its inadequacy.

The police investigation into Thomas Briggs' murder turned on the fact that during the violent assault, an accidental exchange of hats had apparently been made: Briggs' own silk top hat was missing, presumably taken by the murderer; left behind was a second-hand curly-brimmed beaver with a distinctive lining, which seemed to have been crushed in the struggle. No weapon was found at the scene, and indeed, no weapon was ever identified. Pursuing the stolen watch and chain, the police learned of a transaction at a pawnshop operated by one John Death. After advertising the details - and offering a reward - the police were eventually contacted by Jonathan and Eliza Matthews. The latter showed them a small cardboard box given to their children by a friend of theirs, a young German journeyman tailor named Franz Muller, which bore a label from Death's shop; while the former attested that he had bought for Muller a hat fitting the description of the one left on the train. When Inspector Richard Tanner went looking for Muller, he discovered that he was too late: the young German had purchased the cheapest possible ticket on a boat bound for New York, and left England five days earlier. Though at first this looked like an obvious flight from justice, it was soon revealed that Muller had talked of his proposed departure for weeks before it happened; nor had he made a secret of his possession of the gold chain later identified as belonging to Thomas Briggs. Nevertheless, certain that they were now on the right track, the police responded by sending Tanner, Matthews and Death to New York after Muller on a steamship almost guaranteed to overtake the slow, near-obsolete sailing-vessel on which their quarry was travelling. When Muller arrived, he found himself under arrest for murder; a search of his meagre possessions discovered the missing gold watch in the lining of his hat.

The perverse - and, let's be honest, grossly unfair - thing about this story is that the further it goes, the harder it becomes not to think of Franz Muller, rather than Thomas Briggs, as "the victim". Quite early on, the issue stops being that of Muller's guilt or innocence, and becomes instead the handling of the case and the conduct of the trial, which at every turn reveals something that makes the blood run cold. Though Victorian society paid lip-service to the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", Franz Muller was tried and convicted in the newspapers before he got anywhere near a courtroom: every detail of the witnesses' statements had been published and argued over, and there was no-one in England who didn't have an opinion on the matter. Amongst the police, the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence against Muller was privately admitted. No-one had managed to place Muller at the scene; no blood had been found on any of his clothing. No-one had even managed to explain what he might have been doing at Fenchurch Street Station in the first place, given that he lived on a far more convenient bus-route. The disproportionate nature of the crime was also troubling: why beat a man to death and then steal only his watch, leaving behind a valuable snuff-box and five pounds in loose cash? - five pounds, when the ticket to New York for which the murder was presumably committed cost only four pounds? Jonathan Matthews was an obviously unreliable witness; more worrying still was the testimony of Thomas Lee, who insisted that he saw two other men in the carriage with Briggs before it left the station. Lee, who had been in the area visiting his girlfriend behind his wife's back, was reluctant to get involved and late making his statement; consequently, his evidence was largely disregarded. However, at least three other people had also made statements about seeing two men with Thomas Briggs just before his train pulled out. The police were, at the time, under no obligation to reveal exculpatory evidence, and so they kept these facts to themselves. Furthermore, when Briggs' daughter, Caroline, attested that her father had been threatened by a disgruntled bank client, the police warned her not to speak of it again, and never to mention the person's name.

Upon his arrest, Franz Muller told the police that he bought Thomas Briggs' watch and chain from a peddlar at the docks. He never said so in court, however, because in 1864, the accused was not permitted to testify on his own behalf, but had to rely upon his defence counsel to tell his story. A further complication was that the defence was allowed no summation at the conclusion of the rebuttal testimony, but only an opening statement, given before all the evidence had been presented. While these restrictions no doubt increased the difficulty of his task, it is a sad fact that Muller's counsel, John Parry, botched his defence, failing to pursue certain obvious lines of cross-examination and interpretation of the evidence, and not even calling all the witnesses for the defence that he might have done, to bolster Muller's own account of his movements on the 9th July. Add to this a judge who had clearly made up his mind before stepping into the court, who at the end gave his opinion rather than summing up the evidence (a common occurrence at the time, which was put a stop to in the wake of this case), and who instructed the jury not to worry too much about "reasonable doubt", and the practice of denying juries food, water and bathroom breaks in order to speed up verdicts, and it is clear that Franz Muller never stood a chance. His jury returned a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes flat - a sickly appropriate outcome to a story that begins with the police being criticised and hounded for taking "much too long" to resolve serious crimes. From the time of Thomas Briggs' murder to Franz Muller's conviction, only thirteen weeks passed; from Muller's conviction to his execution, a mere three more.

The story of murder of Thomas Briggs and the trial of Franz Muller is one that manages to capture and crystallise a number of the anxieties that lurked beneath Victorian England's pride in itself: about the railways, which seemed to represent simultaneously modernity and progress, and the loss of individual autonomy and control; about the police, who were after all just hard-working, ordinary individuals rather than the infallible detectives becoming more popular in the literature of the day; and about the legal system, which spoke of protecting the rights of the accused but offered every advantage to the prosecution. There is some reassurance in the fact that the progression of this case was accompanied by an overwhelming shift in public opinion, with the very people who had started out baying for Franz Muller's blood finally expressing their discomfort with the insufficiency of the evidence and hurried verdict, and finally pleading for his life. Changes in legal process were made as a result of this case and others like it, although it was not for another 100 years that the biggest change of all, the abolition of the death penalty, occurred, in the wake of the hanging of an innocent man on the testimony of the actual murderer. That we today find Mr Briggs' Hat so disturbing is in itself a measure of how far we have travelled in terms of the protection of the individual within the framework implemented to protect society. This is story that gives the 21st century reader a sharp reminder never to take his or her hard-gained legal rights and privileges for granted.

After the rush to judgement that had characterised most newspaper reports prior to Muller's trial, printed pamphlets now questioned his guilt. Several anonymous tracts appeared with titles like Who Murdered Mr Briggs?, The Great NLR Tragedy and Was Mr Briggs' Death A Murder? A traditional element of the paraphernalia surrounding notorious crime, they sold in their hundreds of thousands, and they all fostered uncertainty about Muller's guilt. The same unanswered questions flared. Should Lee's evidence have been discounted? Did Muller's alibi warrant further investigation? Why was there no blood on his clothes? Had he had enough money for his fare prior to the murder? Was Matthews to be believed? Where was the murder weapon? Public blood-thirstiness had led to the prejudgement of Muller's guilt so that the trial had been a farce, its outcome directed by society's demand for the apparent reimposition of security.

Kate Colqhoun deals only briefly with the literature of the day in Mr Briggs' Hat, but she does make an observation or two on the subject that struck me as insightful. As per her subtitle, she draws comparisons between the Briggs case and the "sensation novels" that were so popular at the time, which she suggests struck a nerve by revealing the very uncivilised things that were going on under the veneer of Victorian civilisation. She also points out how rapidly at this time the sensation novel gave way to the detective story as the most popular form of light literature.

This is only a comment in passing, on which Colquhoun does not dwell, but the more I think about it, the more truth I see in it. It makes perfect sense that the atmosphere of public unease with the police and the legal system would have spawned comforting stories in which there is rarely any doubt about guilt or innocence, and no matter how baffling a crime might seem there is always a solution - and a resolution. More particularly, I think we have here an explanation for the predominance of the amateur detective in British crime fiction. It would be many decades before the police would come into their own as dominant figures in the genre; in the meantime, the brilliant amateur would be there, calm and reassuring, free from professional pressures and even the need to earn a living, always ready to defend the innocent and clean up the messes of (mostly) well-meaning but unimaginative officialdom.

Again, great reading and writing, Liz, and much to think about in that last one.

#188 Very interesting thoughts Liz.

(Old Friends, Rare Books is, of course, wishlisted.)

Thank you, TK and Heather!

"To librarians, booksellers, and collectors, there is nothing limited in the subject of Books about Books."

Or readers. Books about Books are like the hydra: you read one, but you end up with another dozen on the wishlist. :)

Mr. Briggs' Hat does sound like an interesting read.

Hi, Lori! Interesting, yes, but also disturbing and rather depressing, which seems to have been the case for most of the non-fiction I've been reading lately. I really need to look out for a story with a happy ending! :)

Finished my re-read of A Tale Of Two Cities for the group read, and for TIOLI #1.

Now reading That Affair At "The Cedars" by Lee Thayer, the third of her Peter Clancy mysteries.

Finished That Affair At "The Cedars" - which won't be a TIOLI unless I can get my timing right on the "CHRISTMAS" challenge - eep!

Now reading the short work, The Buckled Bag, by Mary Roberts Rinehart; this was the first appearance of the mystery genre's first nurse-detective, Hilda Adams.

Finished The Buckled Bag; now reading its companion-piece, also from 1914, Locked Doors.

Also finished Locked Doors; both of these short works were for TIOLI #4.

Now, although I really ought to be reading another lengthy (and potentially depressing) piece of non-fiction, my tired old brain just isn't up to it; so instead I'm embarking on one of Carolyn Wells' series of young adult stories with the first book to feature the titular character, Patty Fairfield.

The Notting Hill Mystery - Upon its reissuing earlier this year by the British Library, this work was promoted as "The First Detective Novel": a bold statement that almost begs to be argued with. In any event, it was enough to get my attention. Regular visitors will know that I have spent some time this year trying to trace the roots of the detective novel in England and America, and to follow its evolution out of the sensation novel. This branch of study led me to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail Of The Serpent, which is my own nomination for "The First Detective Novel" - so I was interested (and somewhat on the defensive) when it transpired that Braddon's novel is one of those specifically excluded from the title in the introduction to The Notting Hill Mystery, written by Mike Ashley. Having considered Ashley's arguments, I have to say I find them rather arbitrary; certainly they did nothing to alter my opinion of the standing of The Trail Of The Serpent. That said, there is no disputing the importance of The Notting Hill Mystery in the timeline of the detective novel: it is indeed a vital transitional work, and one which boasts a startlingly modern approach to its subject matter.

The Notting Hill Mystery was serialised across the latter months of 1862 and the beginning of 1863, before being reissued in novel form in 1865. Upon its first appearance it was positioned as "a true story", a tale put together from case documents by one "Charles Felix", only recently revealed as Charles Warren Adams. The central figure in the narrative is Ralph Henderson, a private enquiry agent who is hired by an insurance company following the strange death of the heavily insured Madame R----, and after the company received a letter from a former fellow-lodger of the husband in the case, Baron R----, questioning the circumstances of Madame R----'s death.

And the circumstances are suspicious indeed. Having suffered long periods of serious ill-health, Madame R---- finally died by her own hand, swallowing acid taken from her husband's home laboratory, apparently while experiencing a bout of somnambulism. Was it an accident, as Baron R---- claims, or was it suicide?---or could it have been murder? Henderson's investigation leads him from the present into the distant past: to the tangled history of Madame R----'s early years and the truth of her identity, and to the relationship between the R----s and a young couple, Mr and Mrs Anderton, both of whom died prematurely. Mrs Anderton's death followed a long illness whose symptoms were identical to those suffered by Madame R----, but for which no explanation was ever found. In the wake of her death, grief-stricken, and having fallen under official suspicion, Mr Anderton took poison obtained from a small medical kit accidentally left behind in his room by Baron R----, the Andertons' devoted friend...

Accepting the assignment to inquire into Madame R----'s death, Ralph Henderson embarks upon a painstaking gathering and cross-checking of witness statements that are anything but easy to obtain. In some cases this is merely reluctance to get involved; in others, an awareness on the part of the witnesses that, at the time in question, they were doing something they shouldn't have been. In an moment to make the modern crime buff give a wry smile, one witness will only give a statement after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. The central narrative constructed from these statements is supported by extracts from private correspondence, from diary entries, and from magazine articles; and by forensic evidence garnered through post-mortem examination and chemical analysis.

So far, we would hardly dispute The Notting Hill Mystery's claims to be regarded as an early detective novel. On the other hand, with a plot featuring murder, suicide, fraud, secret identities, hidden relationships, a fatal duel, somnambulism, mesmerism, sympathetic twins and the kidnapping of a child by gypsies, it would be a brave person who tried to argue that The Notting Hill Mystery was not a sensation novel! But in reality, there is no necessity here for "either / or": the historical importance of this novel is precisely a matter of its blending of the two genres, and in particular in the way the result points forward to the detective novel proper. The issue is not one of content, but of tone; a focus upon the cerebral rather than the emotional. Instead of dwelling upon the sensational aspects of its story, the narrative continually downplays them. No-one is less comfortable with what the investigation into Madame R----'s death uncovers than Ralph Henderson himself, who repeatedly expresses his disbelief of - or his desire to disbelieve - the implications of the evidence he has so carefully gathered. Again and again we find Henderson seeking a rational explanation for events whose obvious interpretation is an affront to his professional judgement and common sense; but in the end he can do no more than lay the facts of the case before his employers, and let them draw their own conclusions.

Three aspects of The Notting Hill Mystery seem to me to require particular consideration. The first is the character of Baron R----, whose psychological manipulation of the people around him is both amusing and unnerving. The modern reader can see in this protean individual the embryo form of the "master criminal" who would later come to prominence in crime fiction of all sorts. Another unexpected feature of this novel is the way in which it concludes, an artistic choice that offers to the reader none of the reassuring finality which would in time become a major feature of detective fiction. Most striking of all, however, is Charles Warren Adams' use of multiple narrative identies. Although Ralph Henderson frames his case by pointing out where the threads of his investigation cross each other, and where the statement of one witness is supported by that of another, for the most part the investigator allows the gathered documentation to speak for itself---and this in turn allows Adams to tell his story in a wide range of voices: men and women, the gentry and the working-classes, educated and uneducated, British and "foreign". It is, indeed, impossible to read this novel and not feel that a far more famous exponent of the transitional sensation / detective novel, Wilkie Collins, was heavily influenced by it. Those critics who celebrate The Moonstone for its shifting perspectives and alternating narrators should look a little further back in time, to this long-forgotten work which is now finally garnering the recognition it deserves.

The chain of evidence on which hangs, as I have so often said, the sole hypothesis by which I can account for the mysterious occurrences that form the subject of our enquiry, is not only of a purely circumstantial character, but also of a nature at once so delicate and so complicated that the failure of a single link would render the remainder altogether worthless. Unless the case can be made to stand out clearly, step by step, in all its details, from the commencement to the end, its isolated portions become at once a chaos of coincidences, singular indeed in many respects, but not necessarily involving any considerable element of suspicion...

A week late, granted, but at least now I can do the November wrap with a clear conscience!

November was a good reading month - 14 books completed, and all of them TIOLI:

#1: Put Out The Light by Ethel Lina White
#5: Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths And Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern
#6: A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott by Louisa May Alcott
#8: The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda by Aphra Behn
#8: A Murder Of Some Importance by Bruce Graeme
#8: The Rembrandt Murder by Henry James Forman
#8: S. S. San Pedro by James Gould Cozzens
#9: The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan
#9: Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury by Thomas Leland
#9: The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams
#10: Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
#13: The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
#14: Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun
#19: By Saturday by Sydney Fowler Wright

The month of November was highlighted by my re-reading of Barchester Towers, and participation in the tutored read. Numerically, it was dominated mysteries and thrillers, and particularly by series reading: in fact, I managed to start no less than four more series, sigh.

A personal milestone reached in November was that I surpassed 128 books for the year, my total for 2011. While this was not a particular ambition, it was a very pleasing result. It also means that December is pure gravy!

The breakdown:

Non-fiction: 2
Classics: 3
Mysteries / thrillers: 7
Contemporary (i.e. at time of publication) drama: 2

Blog reading: 2
Series reading: 4
Virago reading: 1

Male : female authors: 7 : 8 (including one instance of joint female authors)

Oldest work: The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda by Aphra Behn (1688)
Newest work: Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun (2011)

That Affair At "The Cedars" - Some significant retconning took place between the first and second entries in Lee Thayer's series of mysteries featuring the young red-headed Irishman, Peter Clancy, with Peter promoted from a supporting role as office boy in The Mystery Of The Thirteenth Floor to a starring role as rookie police officer in The Unlatched Door. The leap between the second and third books in the series is more significant again. This post-WWI novel finds Peter, having served in the Secret Service during the war, back home and in partnership with his former commanding officer, Captain O'Malley, who has taken the step intimated in the earlier novels and retired from the force to begin a new career as a private investigator. In That Affair At "The Cedars", we find a slightly different Peter Clancy from the one we remember: more mature, more urbane; more comfortable mixing with the upper-classes. Whether this change is due to the passing years and Peter's war experiences, or whether it is simply a matter of narrative convenience, is a matter to be decided by the individual reader. Its immediate consequence is that when the owner of the Long Island estate known as "The Cedars" dies of a gunshot wound while Peter is visiting his old friend and mentor, Mr Gregory, who now lives in the same district, he is fully equipped to undertake an investigation complicated by the evident fervent desire of the surviving household to believe Raymond Austin's death a suicide, and its equally fervent determination to shield the guilty party, once Peter demonstrates that suicide is out of the question...

Certainly Raymond Austin had no shortage of enemies. His harsh treatment of his wife, and the unrelenting sarcasms and insults that he directed at her, not only alienated Betty herself, but outraged and disgusted her friends and relations. Furthermore, Raymond's daredevil brother, Captain John Austin, only recently returned after a long estrangement, had swiftly fallen in love with his lovely young sister-in-law. It was only after receiving notification of the death in action of her fiancé, William Wainwright, that Betty gave in to her mother's pleading and married the wealthy Raymond - only then to have Wainwright return home, shattered by two years of captivity, brutal treatment and amnesia. Meanwhile, family friend Dr Steven Pryor becomes aware of Raymond's secret relationship with a local girl, Alice Hull, when he is called to assist her in her labour. Alice dies, along with her baby, leaving her widowed father, George Hull, literally maddened by grief and rage - her former boyfriend, Frank Baker, no less so...

Dr Pryor, silent and exhausted after his grim duty, returns to The Cedars in time for tea on the terrace. He joins Betty's young cousin, Dorothy White, and two house-guests, the interior designer Paul Elliot and Jane Norman, a close friend with whom Betty has a sisterly relationship. The four watch the sunset in company with John Austin, who remains at the first-floor window of his room, while Betty, shattered by an encounter with Wainwright, rests in her bedroom. The peaceful afternoon is suddenly broken by something that sounds like a shot. There is a rush towards the library, where Raymond Austin is found slumped dead in his chair, a bullet wound on the left side of his head; an automatic is found beneath his chair. John Austin is quick to claim, and Betty to confirm, that Raymond could shoot equally well with both hands; the anomalous situation created by the return of William Wainwright is offered as a reason why an honourable man may have taken his own life. In the wake of the tragedy, Mr Gregory, an old friend, calls upon the family, bringing Peter Clancy with him. While local law enforcement is satisfied with a verdict of suicide, from the first Peter's professional instincts are aroused by the circumstances of Raymond's death---but with no official standing in the matter, and with the victim's family, too, doggedly insisting that he took his own life, where does Peter's duty lie...?

That Affair At "The Cedars" is a satisfying mystery in more ways than one. On one hand, it's an absolutely classic "cosy", with a country estate, a despicable victim, and a long list of suspects. (To put this in context, what we regard now as the cosy formula was still under development at this time.) My only real issue with this novel is that its solution depends upon the geography of the house and grounds, and who could have been where, when, and I always struggle with mysteries like that. (I don't blame the novel for that, though!) However, That Affair At "The Cedars" takes on a deeper interest when Peter is forced to reflect upon his unasked involvement in the case. While most mystery fans are familiar with Dorothy Sayers' ruminations, via Lord Peter Wimsey, of the morality of detective work, we have seen a similar concern expressed in the earlier, American mysteries of Isabel Ostrander, and now here again by Lee Thayer. Peter Clancy has no legal standing, after all, and he is no more than a casual visitor to The Cedars: what right does he have---does he have any right?---to involve himself in the matter? At the inquest into her husband's death, Betty Austin commits perjury to secure a verdict of suicide. Her family and friends know that she is doing it, but no-one interferes - including Peter, who gains permission to investigate by threatening to give Betty away; promising, however, that if he cannot definitely prove who shot Raymond, he will drop the whole matter and make no more trouble. But while Peter considers the solving of the murder to be his overriding duty, he is not without qualms about to the methods he is compelled to use, which raise the unavoidable question of whether the end justifies his means? And if he does find the killer - is he indeed bound to turn that person in...?

   Peter was no fanatic. He respected, deeply respected the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth---in its place. But he had seen so much injustic done even by a perfectly honest attempt to tell it when the revelation, at the time, was injudicious, that he was not an extreme stickler for it.
   He was not shocked, particularly, at what he believed to have been a most inaccurate statement, and he was sorry, truly and honestly sorry, for Mrs Austin, but his whole nature and training made it imperative that he should get to the bottom, the very bottom of a case, once it had been brought to his notice. He had little if any financial reward to gain, in all probability. He did not even think of that... He had undertaken the case, not in an avaricious spirit, but in the pure interests of his particular science---and from an innate and long-practised sense of justice.

Before she met and married Dr Stanley Rinehart, Mary Roberts graduated from the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses. She never practised, however: she and Dr Rinehart had to fight the prevailing regulations about fraternisation to have a relationship in the first place, and once they were married, it was simply assumed by all that the new wife's place was in the home. Having begun submitting short stories to the magazines in her teens, when a stock market crash in 1903 took most of her husband's savings Mary Roberts Rinehart began writing in earnest to supplement her family's income. A number of her early stories were so-called "nurse-romances", and the first of her comic tales featuring Letitia 'Tish' Carberry is set in a hospital and draws upon her professional knowledge. However, though she continued to write in a variety of genres, Rinehart's greatest success was as a mystery writer. In 1914, she created literature's first nurse-detective, Hilda Adams, who appeared that year in two novella-length works serialised in The Saturday Evening Post. Curiously, perhaps, Rinehart then put Hilda aside for nearly twenty years: she reappeared spasmodically in three longer works, Miss Pinkerton, published in 1932, Haunted Lady, from 1942, and The Secret, from 1950. The first four of these works were later collected in a single volume, which confusingly enough was released as Miss Pinkerton: Adventures Of A Nurse Detective; the latter was published in a second collection titled The Episode Of The Wandering Knife.

Nurse Hilda Adams begins her double life in The Buckled Bag, when she is assigned to care for Detective Patton after he is shot in the leg while conducting a raid. Patton is impressed with her intelligence, her professionalism, and her ability to keep a secret. He offers her a new career as a police operative, in which she would use her nursing skills to facilitate the investigation of certain crimes - crimes in which police access to the right people is not possible. Hilda struggles with herself, concerned over the ethics of using her position to gather information; but finally the opportunity to pit her wits against the world is too tempting for her. She reassures herself that she can always quit, if she finds her position morally untenable.

Hilda's first assignment is in the household of the Marches, whose daughter, Clare, has vanished without trace. Living an untroubled home life, Clare was, to all appearances, happy in her engagement and without serious worries. No ransom has been received, so kidnapping does not seem likely; no body is found, so murder does not seem to be the answer either. But if her absence is voluntary, what could be behind it? Settling into the March household, Hilda's official duties consist of looking after Mrs March, who has suffered a nervous collapse, while in her spare time she tries to piece together the days leading up to Clare's disappearance. Before she reaches any conclusion, however, Clare returns---dressed in ragged clothes that are not her own, gaunt with starvation, and telling a story that cannot be the truth...

The outcome of her first venture emboldens Hilda, and when we meet her next in Locked Doors, she is the veteran of half-a-dozen more cases (five successes, one failure - which is to say, her quarry committed suicide before the law could take its course), and has taken to carrying her "kit": a small revolver, a set of skeleton keys, handcuffs, a flashlight and a badge to identify her as being from, if not exactly of, the police. Her newest case is an odd one, quite possibly not criminal at all; yet clearly something is badly wrong in the Reed household. The previous nurse, hired to look after two small children after the servants were collectively dismissed without warning, left after only four days, her nerves in tatters. Taking her place, Hilda finds herself in a most peculiar situation, locked into the nursery upstairs with the two boys while, outside the room, Mr and Mrs Reed prowl sleeplessly at all hours, in a state of undisguised terror of something that lurks in the lower regions of their house...

These two short novellas - long short stories? - are enough to make us regret that Mary Roberts Rinehart did not see fit to share with her readers more of Hilda's adventures; but perhaps the reason for this is not far to seek. Apart from the financial gain, Rinehart was always frank about using her writing as a means to escape unpleasant realities. In contrast, in telling the stories of her nurse-detective she seems rather to be working through some issues left over from her training days. Hilda is frank not just about the physical demands of her job, but the moral ones also; the daily confrontation of nurses with life in the raw, and the exposure to them of aspects of human existence usually hidden away.

A large measure of the interest of these stories lies in Hilda's struggle with herself, her need to reconcile her professional ethics with the demands of the law. Her moral doubts are never fully laid to rest, but by the time of Locked Doors she has essentially accepted Detective Patton's argument that she is serving society by taking on these cases. Clearly, however, a still greater attraction for Hilda is the sense of power and autonomy that comes from this line of work, which allows her to escape both the monotony of routine and the necessity of following "doctor's orders", while giving her the chance to exercise not only her professional skills, but her intelligence and judgement too. Hilda's relationship with Patton might be termed affectionate-adversarial: Patton has come to rely upon Hilda, but he never stops worrying about her. She, in turn, resents the implication that she can't take care of herself - even while Patton's invariable lurking presence in the neighbourhood of her cases gives her a welcome sense of security. These first two glimpses into Hilda's secondary profession are quite different from each other in content and tone. In The Buckled Bag, Hilda, still a rank amateur, is sent in to provide a fresh perspective on a case in which the police have failed to make headway; while in Locked Doors, a more confident Hilda needs all her nerve to uncover the secret of a house in which an evil presence dwells. This seriously creepy story starts out suggesting a supernatural explanation for the horrors of the Reed household - but in the end provides an answer that many people will no doubt find much, much worse...

It was six months since I had solved, to helped to solve, the mystery of the buckled bag for Mr Patton. I had had other cases for him in the interval, cases in which the police could not get close enough... Gradually I had come to see that Mr Patton's point of view was right: that if the criminal uses every means against society, why not society against the criminal? At first I had used this as a flag of truce to my nurse's ethical training; now I flaunted it, a mental and moral banner. The criminal against society, and I against the criminal! And, more than that, against misery, healing pain by augmenting it sometimes, but working like a surgeon, for good.

Hi Liz,

Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths And Their Shared Passion seems very familiar to me. I think I read a Washington Post article about those two women. That was a very nice review (as all of yours usually are). I can't think of that much to say about books when I'm finished reading them. I can usually barely eke out a few sentences in my reviews and have to force my brain to communicate something of consequence! :)

Another thought...

Back when I was reading your review of Put the Light Out, the words "psychological thriller" popped out at me. I love to read psychological thrillers. Just sayin'. :D

Hi, Madeline! - thank you.

Yes, it's not at all unlikely that you might have seen a newspaper article about Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern at some time. Finding things to say is not usually my problem - knowing when to stop blathering on is my problem! I have to do it here because the mean old real world won't put up with it. :)

(I seem to have spent this entire year surrounded by people called Madeline / Madeleine!)

I'm delighted to hear you love to read psychological thrillers! And obviously, you don't need any help with that! :D

Finished Patty Fairfield for TIOLI #19.

Now reading The Swamp Of Death: A True Tale Of Victorian Lies And Murder by Rebecca Gowers for TIOLI #6.

Finished The Swamp Of Death; now reading Call Mr Fortune, the first collection of stories about H. C. Bailey's scientic detective, Reggie Fortune.

Liz, I would be remiss if I did not share this photo with you from NPR's Fresh Air tumblr:




It is, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte if he had been a sloth. The painting is by a fellow named Sebastian Gomez de la Torre. Have a great day!

Oh, Julia, that's hilarious! I don't know how to respond - "If Napoleon had been a sloth, he wouldn't have lost at Waterloo!" or "If Napoleon had been a sloth, Europe would have been a much more peaceful place!" :)

I have no idea what the context for it was — if they were interviewing someone who wrote a book about Napoleon, or maybe a book about sloths? Or if it was just one of those weird things you find on the Internet and you have to share it. It's just too weird to try to explain, I think. We'll just have to stand back and let it all be. :-)

And in the quick of the night, the sloths reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand
But they wind up sleeping
Not actually dead

:D

Sloths like us / Baby, we were born to sleep...

Tonight in Jungleland ... (cue epic sax solo)

Always nice to encounter another Springsteen fan, Stephen!

Finished Call Mr Fortune, which will be for TIOLI #6 if I can catch a 'C', or for #19 if I can't.

I'm now embarking upon a mini-blog project around the historical figure of Ines de Castro, which will start with The Tragedy Of Ines de Castro by António Ferreira; this is for TIOLI #6.

Patty Fairfield - Although so far I have concentrated on the mystery novels of Carolyn Wells, she was a prolific author who wrote in a number of genres, including that which today we would call "young adult". In all likelihood inspired by the early successes of Edward Stratemeyer, whose "Syndicate" would soon dominate children's fiction in America - and whose stories at this early period were written exclusively for boys - in 1901 Wells initiated the Patty Fairfield series, describing the various adventures of the fourteen-year-old Patty as she goes out into the world for the first time.

Although her family was originally from the north-east, Patty Fairfield has been raised in Virginia by her widower father, due to his business interests being based in the south. As the first story opens, Mr Fairfield confides to Patty his plan to move back north and to buy a house for the two of them, which she will keep for him. However, it will take him approximately a year to wind up his businesses. In the meantime, Mr Fairfield proposes, Patty will travel, spending three months with each of the aunts and uncles who have been pressing him to allow her to visit.

Patty is excited by the prospect of new horizons, and of meeting her aunts, uncles and cousins, but dismayed at the thought of being separated from her father for so long as a year, and apprehensive about the underlying premise of these visits: that she should carefully observe the running of each of the four households, and use the experience as a guide for her own future housekeeping. The key to this, indeed the key to everything, asserts Mr Fairfield, is a sense of proportion. With this thought in mind, Patty is alert to the differences she finds in the homes of her relatives: the wealthy St Clairs of Elmbridge, New Jersey, with their focus upon ostentatious display; the literary Flemings of Boston, whose lives run to a timetable; the good-natured but irresponsible Barlows of Long Island, who aptly refer to their summer home as "the Hurly-Burly"; and the Elliotts of Verndale, New Jersey, in whose warm, well-regulated home Patty finds what she has been looking for.

Although there is an obvious didactic streak in Patty Fairfield, Carolyn Wells does a good job of balancing Patty's life-lessons with simple fun. Patty herself, with her unwavering good nature, is perhaps a bit bland, but Wells does not make the mistake of creating a faultless heroine. Confronted by the rigidity of the Flemings, for instance, Patty has a fit of rebellion, and shakes up the entire family via an elaborate practical joke; while the most interesting part of the story is the way that Patty falls under the sway of the haphazard Barlows, not realising how lazy and untidy she has become until her arrival at the Elliotts', when she is shocked by the contrast that now exists between herself and her well-brought-up cousin, Marian. However, it is only the St Clairs, with their garish parade of wealth, whom Wells thoroughly condemns, having Patty recognise and appreciate what is good and kind about the Flemings and the Barlows, in spite of their "lack of proportion". Significantly, it is because of the Barlows' focus upon fun that Patty is later able to save the life of her young cousin, Gilbert Elliott, when he nearly drowns during a picnic: she alone of the party is a strong swimmer, a skill gained over the summer even while her school lessons were being neglected. Much of the popularity of the later Stratemeyer series for girls was due to their tendency to allow their heroines to have the sorts of experiences and adventures that for boys were a matter of course; and if Carolyn Wells was inspired to begin the Patty Fairfield series in response to Edward Stratemeyer's stories for boys, it seems likely that the Syndicate in turn drew more than a little inspiration from her.

   The days flew by and Patty thought she had never known a summer to pass so rapidly. She almost lived out of doors, for Uncle Ted said he was determined to transform the little Boston bluestocking into a wild Indian: and so Patty had become browned by the sun, and her rowing and swimming had developed a fine amount of muscle.
   But as we are always more or less influenced by the character of those about us, Patty had also imbibed much of the spirit of the Hurly-Burly family and lived as if the pleasure of the present moment were the only thing to be considered. "Be careful, my Patty," her father wrote to her, "you do not send me letters as regularly as you used to, and what you tell me sometimes sounds as if you thought it no harm to break a promise or to fail to keep an engagement you have made. You know I want you to learn by your experiences and imitate only the best qualities of those about you."

Although she criticises the Flemings for their rigidly timetabled lives, Carolyn Wells also has a great deal of in-joke fun with the "literary" family of Patty Fairfield. For example, one member of the household, Miss Elizabeth Fleming, is a successful novelist, whose personal quirks inspire the following exchange between a awed Patty and the Flemings' young Irish housemaid:

   "Laws, miss," said Molly, rolling her eyes, "don't make no attempt for to see her. She's writin' a novel, and she's up in her den on the fourth floor. We don't even call her to meals. If she wants to come, she comes: and if she don't, I takes a few things up and sets 'em outside her door."
   "Oh," said Patty, with great interest, "can't you speak to people when they're writing novels?"
   "Indade, no, miss. It spiles the whole thing, and they has to begin all over again if a word is spoken to them."
   "I think that's wonderful," said Patty, much impressed.

Miss Fleming does finally put in an appearance, complaining of the intransigence of her heroine, Geraldine:

"Geraldine has been the hatefullest thing this morning: she just sat down on a blue satin sofa, and she wouldn't move, nor she wouldn't say a word. I declare I've lost all patience with her... She is lovely, but so intractable. You wouldn't believe how sulky and stupid she gets sometimes."

However, the interlude that won my heart was the revelation that amongst the innumerable "causes" for which the various Flemings campaign, they have founded a "Society for the Improvement of Advertisers' English". Although again Wells has fun with this---

"We're going to do away with those atrocious doggeral rhymes in the street cars and substitute real poetry. It will cost a great deal to get it written, but we have funds, and the public taste must be elevated."

---you also get the impression that she was as exasperated by the bad grammar, spelling and punctuation she encountered on a daily basis (writing in 1901, remember!) as some of us are today:

"That club of yours is a good thing," said Mr Fleming meditatively. "I hope you will banish the signs which announce 'Boots Blacked Inside', and those others which always rouse false hopes in the minds of people who have lost their umbrellas, by promising 'Umbrellas recovered while you wait'."

#198 Very good review of The Notting Hill Mystery Liz. I'd encourage anyone who thinks it sounds interesting to try it because it was a really fun read.

"It is, indeed, impossible to read this novel and not feel that a far more famous exponent of the transitional sensation / detective novel, Wilkie Collins, was heavily influenced by it. Those critics who celebrate The Moonstone for its shifting perspectives and alternating narrators should look a little further back in time, to this long-forgotten work which is now finally garnering the recognition it deserves."

Yes, although Wilkie had already experimented with this technique in The Woman in White but I think The Notting Hill Mystery and The Moonstone developed this technique further and perhaps show it to better effect. Rereading both The Moonstone and The Woman in White this year, The Moonstone felt much more confidant when it came to the shifting narrators and the building up of the evidence compared to TWIW, and, as you mentioned above, TWIW doesn't really have the detective element.

#201 Miss Pinkerton sounds interesting - onto the wishlist.

#214 'Umbrellas recovered while you wait' :-D

Hi, Heather!

I think the thing that's different and significant about The Notting Hill Mystery is that it's not just telling a story via its multiple narratives, it's offering testimony - if that's not splitting hairs too much? :)

In other words, it makes explicit what is only implicit in The Woman In White; The Moonstone later does this too. It's the shift in purpose and perspective that strikes me as the important step forward.

By the way, speaking of the Sutherland essays, did you read the one on The Woman In White, and why Laura can't tell her own story? I can't remember which book that's in.

Yes, I found the Hilda Adams stories very interesting and well worth a look.

#216 if that's not splitting hairs too much? Nope, not at all. I think you're right about the testimonial/evidence point becoming explicit in The Notting Hill Mystery and The Moonstone (and it's left me wishing I'd read the three in publication order this year instead of reverse publication order in order to appreciate that more. Oh well, that will have to wait for a future reread.)

Yes, I did read the Sutherland essay on The Woman in White (it's in Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?). Very interesting. Rereading TWIW after reading a couple of Dickens' novels, I was really struck by how (comparatively) sensual Collins was a writer compared to CD (although that's not really difficult). The descriptions of Laura and Walter occasionally touching at the beginning and the description of Marian when Walter first meets her in particular. Of course, my thoughts on that were possibly influenced by Sutherland's essay as I read that first but I think he might have something there.

I think I may have to re-read both The woman In White and the Moonstone in the New Year. Sigh. :)

I'm always telling people that there's tons of sex in Victorian novels if you know where to look - and yes, in that context the desexualised nature of Dickens' writing, as personified by his infantile heroines, is obvious and rather disturbing. Wilkie Collins always stands out from the crowd for me because he so obviously liked women as people, and wasn't afraid of their complexity (or their sexuality).

Finished The Tragedy Of Ines de Castro, a 16th century Portuguese play by Antonio Ferreira, for TIOLI #6.

And now for the reason I was reading that in the first place: duelling translations of Jean-Baptiste de Brilhac's 1688 novella about Ines, Agnes de Castro: Nouvelle Portugaise.

The first, translated by Peter Belon (as "P.G.B."), was published in England as The Fatal Beauty Of Agnes de Castro; Taken Out Of The History Of Portugal.

The second, translated by Aphra Behn, was published as Agnes de Castro; or, The Force Of Generous Love.

Both of these will be for TIOLI #4.

#218 "I think I may have to re-read both The woman In White and the Moonstone in the New Year. Sigh. :)"

Hee hee :-) I'm hoping to get to Hide and Seek in the new year, an 1854 Collins which seems to be not very well thought of but which I am, strangely, looking forward to.

I read a bunch of more obscure Wilkie Collins works a few years ago, including Poor Miss Finch - now, THAT is a weird one! :)

Finished both The Fatal Beauty Of Agnes de Castro and Agnes de Castro; or, The Force Of Generous Love; these, along with The Tragedy Of Ines de Castro, will be blogged.

Now reading The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason by Melville Davidsson Post, for TIOLI #6 if I can snag an 'S' or a 'T', or for #19 otherwise.

Finished The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason - "strange" is right!

Now reading The Murder Of Cecily Thane by Harriette Ashbrook.

Both of these are - say it with me, folks! - the first in a series...

Catching up on this thread! I am a Mary Roberts Rinehart fan--I first read her mystery The Album over 20 years ago, and then I've branched out to several of her other works, but I've never read the Tish stories. I have seen parts of the film version from the 1930's with Marie Dressler as Tish, and it was a fun little film.

The other classic film link here is Letty Lynton. Fans of Joan Crawford have been wanting to see this film for years. It's never been shown on Turner Classic Movies nor is it available on dvd because of a rights issue. I have no idea if the film is any good, but a dress that Crawford wore in the film became a sensation and it was copied and sold in department stores during that time.

Pic of Joan Crawford in the dress designed by Adrian:


Always love visiting your threads. Sorry that I've stayed away so long!

Sandy K

Hi, Sandy - great to see you here! :)

I'm finding Rinehart a better and more interesting writer than I anticipated - she gets very bad press for some reason. I love tracking down film links, too! I didn't know there was a 'Tish' film so thank you for that.

Letty Lynton was a big success at the time and a breakthrough role for Crawford but although it was supposedly based on Belloc Lowndes' novel, it was actually much closer to a play called Dishonored Lady, which also used the Madeleine Smith case as its basis. The playwrights sued for plagiarism and won, so the film was withdrawn and suppressed. It's therefore very hard to see, although (she whispered) you can find grey-market copies if you hunt for them.

That's a great image, thanks!

Ah, I didn't know about the plagiarism case! That makes sense. I do know that there are bootlegs out there, but I just shy away from those. The quality is always crappy. I've just become a Crawford fan in the past couple of years. I love her look in the 1930's.

ETA: I went to the imdb and the Tish film is from 1942, not the 1930's as I had thought!

Sandy K

Really? I should have thought that Marie Dressler would have been a bit old for the part by then. Ah, well - I will keep an eye out anyway.

I confess I occasionally succumb to the lure of the bootleg, but you're right about the dubious quality. Apart from the dubious legality. {*blush*}

Finished The Murder Of Cecily Thane by Harriette Ashbrook, for TIOLI #7.

Now reading The Puzzle Lock by R. Austin Freeman, a collection of short stories featuring Dr John Thorndyke.

Wishing you wonderful holidays Liz, and looking forward to sharing more reading with you in 2013!

Glitterfy.com - Christmas Glitter Graphics

I want to wish you a glorious celebration of that time of year when we all try to unite around a desire for Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward All. Merry Christmas, Liz!

Merry Christmas to you, Liz!

Hi Liz!

Hope your holidays are indeed happy ones.

Thank you for all your work that went into my tutored reads in 2012. I'm much looking forward to our tutored reads for 2013.

And a happy boxing day from the Kitten clan!

> 221

now, THAT is a weird one!

Liz, you know I love "weird"...

Just sayin'.

>>#233

Hi, TK - thank you!!

>>#234

I think we'll see how you get on with Mary Elizabeth Braddon before we try Wilkie Collins, Madeline. :)

Finished The Puzzle Lock, the 11th entry in R. Austin Freeman's Dr John Thorndyke series, for TIOLI #19.

Now reading The Old Man In The Corner by the Baroness Orczy.

> 235

I think we'll see how you get on with Mary Elizabeth Braddon before we try Wilkie Collins, Madeline.

LOL!!

Stopping by on the fourth day of Christmas to wish you a Merry Christmas Liz!

Speaking of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, I was very excited to be given a copy of Henry Dunbar by a kind friend for Christmas :-)

Thanks, Heather!

And ooh, you lucky duck! That's one I haven't read! :)

Finished The Old Man In The Corner for TIOLI #19.

Now reading The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace---which will certainly take me into the New Year.

That means that my tally for 2012 is 143 books (and a bit), an extremely satisfactory outcome - particularly considering that I had a couple of months where an uncooperative real life interfered badly with my reading. It encourages me to think I might indeed achieve my ambition of cracking 150 in 2013.

Of course, the reading isn't really the issue, is it? It's the reviewing. :)

I am currently very much behind with my reviewing, as I have been using my spare time to catch up my blogging - which is also very much behind, sigh. I'm not sure when I will be able to sit down and get some solid reviewing under my belt, and that being the case, I've decided to shift over to my new 2013 thread and just start there fresh - hopefully it will inspire me!

Once the 2012 reviews are caught up, I will be able sit down and think about my statistics for the year past, and my best, worst and most unexpected reads.

Thank you to everyone who dropped in this year for a chat - your visits are very much appreciated!

My new thread is here.

Liz - your thread has invariably helped to illuminate my year. Since the year is all but done I want to take the opportunity of wishing you a wonderful New Year and I look forward to presenting you with more fore-handed and back-handed compliments in 2013.

Hey, don't misunderstand - I'll take any kind of compliments I can get! Thanks for your visits this year, Paul, and a very happy New Year to you and your family. :)

Here's to a great new year ahead, Liz!

Awww... :)

Thank you, Roni - best wishes to you and yours!

Happy New Year, Liz. I'm looking forward to following your book explorations in 2013.

Thank you, Julia - I'm looking forward to your visits! :)