lyzard's list: the "100? Ha!" hubris thread - Part 1

 

Hello, all - welcome to 2013!

To head this new thread for a new year, some wild budgerigars. Probably better known as a domesticated pet that comes in a variety of colours, these small yellow-green parakeets are native to the interior of Australia, where they gather in flocks about the water holes. When conditions are particularly favourable, these flocks can consist of up to 60,000 individuals.

2013 will be my third full year in the 75 Books Challenge, after I joined LibraryThing to catalogue my books in April 2010 and found the 75ers later the same year. As many others have discovered, the immediate consequence of this was an increase both in the number of books read, and their diversity.

However, there are several main threads within my reading:

Thanks to the deadly combination of obsessive wishlisting and a compulsive need to do things "in order", my general reading is presently fixated upon the novels of the early 1930s.

I also have a great passion for 18th and 19th century literature...and for works of that time that don't really deserve the description "literature".

The main thrust of my blog project is an examination of the development of the English novel, from the 1660s onwards. While this period saw a surge in the publication of fiction for the sake of fiction, it was also a time of highly politicised writing reflecting the rise of political parties as we now understand them and the religious conflict that came with the return of the Stuart monarchy. My reading in this area has encompassed the reign of Charles II, and is now poised at the point of the forced abdication of James II, with William and Mary imminent.

Over the last eighteen months, my old love of Silver and Golden Age mysteries has revived, and a great deal of my current reading is comprised of mysteries and thrillers published between 1860 - 1930. In particular I am investigating novelists who were highly successful in their time, but have since been forgotten.

I am making a conscious effort to read more non-fiction. This tends to include works that support my blog reading, such as history, sociology and politics, true crime, and of course books about books.

Finally - and perhaps a little perversely - I think that this year I may deliberately re-read rather more. I used to be a regular re-reader, but have drifted away from my favourites recently because of the wide open vistas of LibraryThing. In particular, neither of two great comfort read collections, the novels of Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie, are catalogued. What better excuse to work my way through them both once again? - in order, of course.

I have cracked 100 books for each of the last two years, and intend to make a concerted effort to reach 150 in 2013...but I guess we'll see. I also intend to make a concerted effort to STOP writing reviews that are almost as long as the books being reviewed - but, knowing myself, I suspect that this resolution will go about as well as my New Year's resolutions usually do...

I'm always very grateful when people stop by my thread, and I hope that my visitors will find something here to interest them, in spite of (because of?) the obscurity of my reading.

January:

1. The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace (1905)
2. The Sword Of Damocles: A Story Of New York Life by Anna Katharine Green (1881)
3. The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie (1920)
4. The Dream Doctor by Arthur B. Reeve (1914)
5. The Reckoning by Joan Conquest (1931)
6. Vanderlyn's Adventure by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1931)
7. The Case Of Miss Elliott by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1905)
8. Patty At Home by Carolyn Wells (1904)
9. Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (1922)
10. A Queen After Death by William Harman Black (1933)
11. While The Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart (1930)
12. The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune by Mary Fortune; edited by Lucy Sussex (1989)
13. Vicky Van by Carolyn Wells (1918)
14. Gun In Cheek: A Study Of "Alternative" Crime Fiction by Bill Pronzini (1982)
15. The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (1922)

February:

16. A Modern Mephistopheles by Louisa May Alcott (1877)
17. Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point; or, Nita The Girl Castaway by Alice B. Emerson (1913)
18. The Sign Of The Spider by Bertram Mitford (1897)
19. The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
20. The "Moth" Murder by Lynton Blow (1931)

Books in transit:

On interlibrary loan / storage request:
The Detective's Album by Mary Fortune
Three Murder Mysteries by Mary Fortune
The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes

Purchased and shipped:
About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster by Anthony Abbot
Footprints by Kay Cleaver Strahan
Return I Dare Not by Margaret Kennedy
At The Sign Of The Grid by Horace Annesley Vachell
Death Comes To Perigord by John Ferguson

On loan:
*A Modern Mephistopheles by Louisa May Alcott (15/04/2013)
The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe (15/04/2013)
The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (15/04/2013)
Novels Of Everyday Life by Laurie Langbauer (15/04/2013)

Track down:
A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott {branch transfer}
Murder And Mayhem by D. P. Lyle {branch transfer}
Handfasted by Catherine Helen Spence {Fisher Library}

Ongoing series:

(1866 - 1876) **Emile Gaboriau - Monsieur Lecoq - The Widow Lerouge (1/6) {ManyBooks}
(1878 - 1917) **Anna Katharine Green - Ebenezer Gryce - Hand And Ring (4/12) {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 In The City (3/17) {AbeBooks}
(1905 - 1925) **Baroness Orczy - The Old Man In The Corner - Unravelled Knots (3/3) {ebookbrowse / Arthur's Bookshelf}
(1905 - 1928) **Edgar Wallace - The Just Men - The Council Of Justice (2/6) {ManyBooks}
(1907 - 1912) **Carolyn Wells - Marjorie - Marjorie's Vacation (1/6) {ManyBooks}
(1907 - 1942) *R. Austin Freeman - Dr John Thorndyke - The Shadow Of The Wolf (12/26) {Feedbooks}
(1908 - 1924) **Margaret Penrose - Dorothy Dale - Dorothy Dale: A Girl Of Today (1/13) {ManyBooks}
(1909 - 1942) *Carolyn Wells - Fleming Stone - The Diamond Pin (10/49) {ManyBooks}
(1910 - 1936) *Arthur B. Reeve - Craig Kennedy - The War Terror (4/11) {ManyBooks}
(1910 - 1946) *A. E. W. Mason - Inspector Hanaud - The Prisoner In The Opal (3/5) {Fisher Library}
(1910 - 1930) **Edgar Wallace - Inspector Elk - The Nine Bears aka The Other Man aka The Cheaters (1/6) {interlibrary loan}
(1910 - ????) Thomas Hanshew - Cleek - The Man Of The Forty Faces (1/?) {ManyBooks}
(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 Silver Ranch (5/30) {Internet Archive}
(1913 - 1973) *Sax Rohmer - Fu-Manchu - The Mystery Of Dr Fu-Manchu (1/14) {interlibrary loan}
(1914 - 1950) Mary Roberts Rinehart - Hilda Adams - Miss Pinkerton (3/5) {Owned}
(1916 - 1917) **Carolyn Wells - Alan Ford - The Bride Of A Moment (1/2) {Amazon / AbeBooks}
(1918 - 1923) **Carolyn Wells - Pennington Wise - The Room With The Tassels (1/8) {Internet Archive}
(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}
(1920 - 1932) Alice B. Emerson - Betty Gordon - Betty Gordon At Bramble Farm (1/15) {ManyBooks}
(1920 - 1975) *Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot - The Murder On The Links (2/39) {owned}
(1921 - 1929) **Charles J. Dutton - John Bartley - Out Of The Darkness (2/9) {Internet Archive}
(1921 - 1925) **Herman Landon - The Gray Phantom - The Gray Phantom (1/5) {Internet Archive}
(1922 - 1973) *Agatha Christie - Tommy and Tuppence - Partners In Crime (2/5) {owned}
(1923 - 1937) Dorothy L. Sayers - Lord Peter Wimsey - Have His Carcase (8/15) {Fisher Library}
(1923 - 1924) **Carolyn Wells - Lorimer Lane - More Lives Than One (1/2) {Amazon}
(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}
(1924 - 1935) *Francis D. Grierson - Inspector Sims and Professor Wells - The Limping Man (1/13) {AbeBooks / Wonder Book}
(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) {AbeBooks / eBay}
(1927 - 1932) *Anthony Armstrong - Jimmie Rezaire - Jimmie Rezaire aka The Trail Of Fear (1/5) {AbeBooks}
(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}
(1928 - 1960) *Cecil Freeman Gregg - Inspector Higgins - The Murdered Manservant (1/35) {unavailable}
(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) {expensive}
(1929 - ????) *Mignon Eberhart - Nurse Sarah Keate - The Mystery Of Hunting's End (3/8) {interlibrary loan}
(1929 - ????) Moray Dalton - Inspector Collier - ???? (3/?) - Death In The Cup {AbeBooks}, The Wife Of Baal {unavailable}
(1929 - ????) * / ***Charles Reed Jones - Leighton Swift - The King Murder (1/?) {Unavailable}
(1929 - 1931) Carolyn Wells - Kenneth Carlisle - Sleeping Dogs (1/3) {Amazon / eBay}
(1929 - 1967) *George Goodchild - Inspector McLean - McLean Of Scotland Yard (1/65) {AbeBooks}
(1929 - 1979) *Leonard Gribble - Anthony Slade - The Case Of The Marsden Rubies (1/33) {AbeBooks}
(1929 - 1932) *E. R. Punshon - Carter and Bell - The Unexpected Legacy (1/5) {expensive}
(1930 - ????) Moray Dalton - Hermann Glide - ???? (3/?) {see above}
(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 Steven Kester (2/7) {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 aka The Garston Murder Case (1/11) {AbeBooks}
(1931 - 1940) Bruce Graeme - Superintendent Stevens and Pierre Allain - The 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) {unavailable}
(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

2012: A Reading Year In Review:

2012 was a very good but slightly strange reading year. I don't give books star ratings, because I struggle with the necessity of comparing apples and oranges, but if I did, I would describe 2012 as a year spent comfortably between 3 and 4 stars, with little variation in either direction.

In other words, it was lacking those books that leapt out and dazzled me last year, such as All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West, Poor Caroline by Winfred Holtby and Father by Elizabeth von Arnim; but it was also lacking last year's handful of real stinkers.

I think this outcome is largely a reflection of the predominance of genre fiction in my 2012 reading. This was a year when my old love of mysteries came roaring back, which - inevitably - led me into an enjoyable exploration of the roots and evolution of the mystery novel. I ended up unearthing any number of writers who were successful in their day but have since been forgotten, and who deserve to have their works better known.

Another complication was the nature of my Virago reading this year. While on one hand I did discover quite a number of new-to-me Virago authors, the novels I read I found collectively quite difficult, often featuring unlikeable characters and unpleasant situations---albeit beautifully written unlikeable characters and unpleasant situations. The novel that stands out for me here was The Spring Queen And The Corn King by Naomi Mitchison, a long, complex novel mixing history and fantasy which was so far out of my usual comfort zone as to present a real challenge.

Meanwhile, my wander through 1931 continued - and continues. I had real hopes of making it into 1932 this year, but as it turns out 1931 was a pretty fabulous year for mysteries, historical novels and contemporary fiction. Consequently, every time I thought I'd escaped, it kept dragging me back in.

A highlight of the year for me was the introduction of the tutored reads, which not only gave me a great excuse to immerse myself some old favourites, but to share my love of the classics with a new (and often sceptical) audience. While tutoring gave me the chance to re-visit Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, The Castle Of Otranto, The Monk, The Warden and Barchester Towers, the highlight here was definitely Clermont by Regina Maria Roche, a new work to me and one of the famous Northanger Abbey "Horrid Novels".

A heartfelt "Thank you!" to all of my wonderful tutees, but a special thanks to Madeline (SqueakyChu) for her bravery and persistence in venturing into the murky waters of 18th and 19th century English literature.

Anyway, 2012 being what it was, I'm having trouble putting together a meaningful "Best Of" list. Frankly, as I look back, I find myself sorely tempted to declare a most unlikely "Book Of The Year" - The Trail Of The Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which of all the books read was I think the one that most surprised me with just how good it was. Great literature? Hardly. An entertaining and absorbing (and occasionally shocking) read? Absolutely! It may be, besides, the first English detective novel.

The alternative would be another piece of "sensation fiction": Behind A Mask by Louisa May Alcott, part of my exploration of Alcott's secret early career as a writer of thrillers. The title story in this particular anthology is one of the most startling things I've read in a long time.

Anyway, here is my "Best Reads" list, which is really more of a combined Most Enjoyable / Most Unexpected / Most Interesting list (in alphabetical order):

Best Reads Of 2012:

At One-Thirty by Isabel Ostrander (1915)
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (1857) (re-read)
Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott by Louisa May Alcott (anthologised 1975)
The Chinaberry Tree by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1931)
Clermont by Regina Maria Roche (1798)
The Corn King And The Spring Queen by Naomi Mitchison (1931)
The Davidson Case by John Rhode (1929)
The Dead Letter by Metta Fuller Victor (1866)
The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth (1850)
*The Killer Of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr (2011)
*The Man On Devil's Island by Ruth Harris (2010)
The Mark Of Cain by Carolyn Wells (1917)
The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams (1865)
Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn (1688) (re-read)
The Sham Prince Expos'd by Anonymous (1688)
Sick Heart River by John Buchan (1941)
The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason by Melville Davisson Post (1896)
Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (1930)
A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) (re-read)
The Trail Of The Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1860)

(*non-fiction)

2012 Statistics:

Books read: 143
Fiction / non-fiction: 128 / 15
New / re-read: 132 / 11
*Male / female / anonymous author: 66 / 83 / 1
New-to-me authors: 67

(*Pseudonyms counted by actual sex, joint authors counted individually)

NB: There will possibly be more breakdowns added at a later time.

Welcome back!

What, no sloths? There will be sloths, won't there?

I have you starred and I look forward to discovering more forgotten crime classics through your reviews.

Reserving my spot, Liz! I LOVE your thread - I promise to delurk more often. I just finished my first Georgette Heyer, and I absolutely adored it. I hope you do reread your way through Agatha Christie - I am wanting to read through the Hercule Poirot ones in order this year. I also have Jane Austen in my sights as I plan to continue working my way through her novels - I loved following your tutored read for Heather last year. SO fabulous! Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you delight and regale us with this coming year.

I am with Mamie (as usual) in being a devotee Liz. Will be along for the duration in 2013 on the only thread in the group that makes the bulk of my reading seem modern.

speaking of Georgette Heyer, Amazon has a daily kindle special today on These Old Shades.

Thanks for that, Jean, I just snagged it!

You know I'll never read the books you have listed here (unless you advise me to read them!), but I love following along on your thread. I am always amazed at the thoroughness of your reviews and simply stare with wonder at how extensive and brilliant they are. Carry on...and have a great 2013!

Hello, all! Thank you so much for visiting!

>>#7

Thank you, Jim - I'm very glad to be back.

>>#8

Oh, there will be sloths! - but I'm saving them up for special occasion markers...and for when I just need cheering up. :)

>>#9

I'd be the last person to criticise anyone for not delurking more often, Mamie, though I'm always thrilled when you do. It sounds like the two of us will have plenty to chat about this year, though!

>>#10

Ah, Paul, what would I do without your backhanded compliments?? :)

>>#11

Hi, Jean, thank you for stopping by.

>>#13

You shouldn't enable me like that, Madeline, but thank you anyway! I'm very much looking forward to starting our next joint venture - I'll PM you when I have set up the thread.

> 1

I really love seeing the budgerigars in the wild. After owning hamsters myself for a while, I now feel sorry for all caged and bottled (as in aquaria) pets. I once did have a parakeet (budgerigar) that exact color of green pictured above when I was about 11 years old. His name was Pretty Boy. They are so beautiful being free, though.

I knew a parakeet exactly that colour when I was a wee girl. He was best friends with an African Grey Parrot (big talker, that one).

>>#15

I know what you mean: I find myself getting more and more ambivalent about these things, too. On one hand budgies are great companions, so friendly and affectionate, but--- But, but, but...

>>#16

Hi, Paws! They've bred so many different colours into domesticated budgies that sometimes you forget how beautiful their natural markings are.

17. I'm not particularly familiar with budgie colours as I'm not a big bird fan in general (I liked the aformentioned birds mainly because I absolutely adored their owner and she was very fond of them). But it doesn't surprise me that people breed them so you can almost not recognise them. It's the same with most pets, I think. Take cats, there are hundreds of breeds of cats but you'll be hard-pressed to find many "man-made" ones as pretty as a regular old housecat.

Marking my place here.

>>#18

You can get budgies in shades of blue and mauve, pure white, and dominant yellow - but yes, I think their natural colours and markings are best.

>>#19

Hi, Lori - great to see you here!

The cat and I are glad to see you back, Liz!

And I'm glad to see YOU! The cat---- I'll get back to you on that one... :)

Sure you will, lol.

For those interested, up in message #6 I have now added some thoughts on my 2012 reading, as well as a "Best Of" list. Sort of. :)

I own Behind a Mask but it has been a long time since I read it, so it is high time for a re-read - I will have to re-read the Stern & Rostenberg book too. I will have to see if my local library has the others that you compiled in your list (except for the Dickens and Trollope, which I also own and have read.)

Hello, hello! Starred again. Our reading tastes don't tend to overlap much, but I find your commentary interesting and informative all the same! And that's really what LT is about, isn't it? :)

I lurked on your thread in 2012 so I wanted to start off the year by de-lurking to say Hi! Love the pics in your opening post..... and here was me stupidly thinking that only domesticated budgies exist!!!! It must be an amazing sight to see a swarm of wild budgerigars in flight.... and probably not quite as messy as a flock of Canada geese can be!

Anyways, dropping a star off so I can find your thread again and wishing you a Happy New Year!

>>#25

Hi, Stasia! I think the story, Behind A Mask, works best these days for readers familiar with the conventions of 19th century literature, and particularly the restrictions that were often (tacitly or openly) placed upon women writers. This story breaks just about every rule that there was. I have Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles to hand at the moment, and I have two more collections of her thrillers to track down; although I gather these last two are much harder to find.

>>#26

Hi, Faith - yes, likewise: I often lurk on your thread. Thanks for the star!

>>#27

Well, I don't know, Lori: I suspect that budgies make up in numbers what they lack in body mass; it's just that they're polite enough to be messy in mostly uninhabited areas! :)

Thank you for visiting, and the very kind wishes.

Happy New Year, everyone! Wishing you all a safe, peaceful, book-filled 2013!

...and on a sleepy New Year's morning, I have finished my first book for 2013:

The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace, for TIOLI #8

I wish you the best year yet, Liz - and that includes a lot of reading! (And I'll come back to catch up on your thread later!)

Congrats on finishing your first book of the New Year before we have even begun to ring it in over here!! A very Happy New Year to you, Liz! May it be full of old books and new friends and loads of laughter!

Hi, Peggy and Mamie - thank you both very much for your good wishes - all the best to you and yours for 2013!

Hmm...

When you put in the touchstones for The Council Of Justice, the second in Edgar Wallace's "Four Just Men" series, you get directed to Confessions by Saint Augustine.

Hmm...

Hi Liz, I had so much fun with the Trollope tutored reads last year, I'm looking forward to following your thread in 2013. Happy new year!

I'm very glad to hear it, Laura! Best wishes in 2013. :)

Liz - I know you're well into 2013 already but I want to bookend my wishes from the 2012 group threads - Happy New Year.

Happy New Year, Liz. I'll try to follow your well organized thread a little better this year.

Happy New Year Liz - One of my resolutions is to visit new threads. Yours is the first one, and I have starred you; I look forward to following your reading through the year.

I have to ask, because I struggle with this question myself. When you read Agatha Christie in order, do you go by publishing order, or by chronological order where possible - for instance in the Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence books?

Ooh, visitors! Lovely visitors! :)

Hi, Paul, Lynda, Beth and Samantha - thanks you all very much for visiting, and for your good wishes! I hope it's a great 2013 for all of you.

Samantha, my choice these days is always to read by original publication date, even where a series might loop back on itself. I think that gives a better insight into the author's development, both as a writer and with respect to individual characters.

I think I'll do that too with the few series where I have the choice. Even though normally I'm a rather chronological kind of person.

An unoriginal thought, but when I was a kid we had a parakeet that looked just like those in your thread topper. His name was Buddy. He never learned to talk, despite my mom buying a record of phrases for him to learn and playing it over and over and over and over and .... Later we also had a blue budgie, whose name I recall was BJ.

I'm glad to hear the sloths will continue to make strategic appearances!

Some budgies are great talkers, but some never say a word - I don't know why that is.

Yes, I did feel the need to mix it up a bit in the animal kingdom, but there's always room for sloths. :)

I am shockingly behind on my thread reviews, but that's at least partially because I've been devoting my spare time to trying to catch up my blogging. I haven't - but I did at least get as far as I hoped before the end of last year.

I have reviewed Aphra Behn's The Fair Jilt; or, The History Of Prince Tarquin And Miranda, from 1688 - here.

I have also done a very rambling post about the 14th century historical figure of Ines de Castro, and three literary works dealing with her life and death - here. It turned out that there is an extraordinary body of artistic reaction to the story of Ines, and this led me to do a second, mostly image-based post on the subject - here.

A happy and healthy 2013 for you, Liz. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on books this year.

I just caved and downloaded a free ed. of The Trail of the Serpent; it looks so good and she's a new author for me...love the tutored thread.

Thanks, Gail! All the best to you, too!

I just caved and downloaded a free ed. of The Trail of the Serpent

Whee! The more, the merrier! See you over there. :)

Happy New Year, Liz! And thanks for visiting my 2013 thread. I look forward to more inspiring book notes from you.

Hurray! Gail's coming to our thread, Liz!!

The Swamp Of Death: A True Tale Of Victorian Lies And Murder - I'm beginning to think that a sensible resolution for 2013 would be to cut back on the Victorian true crime - it's too depressing! Like Mr Briggs' Hat, this is the story of a murder investigation, a trial and an execution, all so poorly conducted that your blood runs cold as you read.

The Swamp Of Death is the story of a murder that took place in Canada in 1890: that of Frederick Benwell, who was found shot to death in a remote, swampy area outside of Blenheim, Ontario. The background to the story is the practice of farm pupilage, in which young men from England, wishing to start a new life in "the colonies", paid a bond of several hundred pounds in return for being taught the skills necessary to make a go of farming in Canada. Although the scheme was often honestly operated, it was also an easy opportunity for a scam: the pupils often found themselves in the middle of nowhere, poorly treated and fed and worked mercilessly, their only option to run away, forfeiting their bond and being left destitute in a strange land. Even more ominously, some young men who left England for Canada under this scheme were never heard from again...

The success of The Swamp Of Death lies in the way in which it structures its story, almost duplicating the conduct of a legal trial - even though the reader may not recognise just how far this is the case until the conclusion of the story, courtesy of an enlightening afterword by author Rebecca Gowers. The story is initially told from the perspective of a young man called Douglas Pelly, who entered into a pupilage partnership with one J. R. Birchall. In spite of the grandiose description of Birchall's Canadian holdings, the reassuring terms of their contract, and a character reference from Birchall's wealthy father-in-law, almost at once things started to go wrong. Birchall was evasive, reluctant to give details or even to confirm travelling arrangements. Then, at the last moment, he revealed that a second young man, Frederick Benwell, would also be part of the arrangement. Pelly was dismayed by the appearance of this additional "partner" - and even more so by Birchall's evident determination to prevent him having any private conversation with Benwell. Once in Canada, things went from bad to worse, with Birchall dawdling around Niagara Falls and finding excuses not to go immediately to his property. Pelly rightly interpreted this to mean that he had been scammed, and that he would never see his money again - but then he began to fear that more that his money might be at stake. Why, for instance, did Birchall show such interest in whether he carried a gun, and why did he seem so intent upon walks to lonely stretches near the Falls? As Pelly did his best to avoid being alone with his "partner", one day Birchall and Benwell went off to take care of a business matter - and Benwell didn't come back...

The afterword to The Swamp Of Death reveals that Douglas Pelly was Rebecca Gowers' great-grandfather, and that she had access to both some of his correspondence from the time, and also an unpublished autobiography written many years later - which differs revealingly from Pelly's contemporary account of the affair. With this new knowledge, we can see in retrospect how skewed the narrative has been. Douglas Pelly is presented to us as a shy, sensitive, strictly-brought-up young man, horrified at finding himself the star witness in a murder trial, but above all deeply humiliated at having his gullibility with respect to his "partnership" with Birchall exposed to the public. It was, we understand, psychologically necessary for Pelly to build Birchall up into some sort of master-criminal, the head of a conspiracy to rob young men and lure them to their deaths, in order to save his own face. Seen through Pelly's eyes, Birchall is a monster; the truth was rather different, and far less impressive.

As revealed during the second half of the narrative, Birchall was a failed actor who had become a con-artist, a compulsive liar who deceived people and adopted false identities even when there was no necessity for it, whose schemes were facilitated by his natural charm and persuasive manner. He was not, however, a violent man, let alone a murderer; and although his behaviour after Benwell's disappearance was odd, it was not that of a guilty man. On the contrary: it was Birchall who identified Benwell's body, an act that brought him to the attention of the detective in charge, John Murray, an egotistical, self-aggrandising individual who saw the case chiefly as his own road to fame and fortune, and who did not hesitate to break the law himself or give false statements to the newspapers if he thought it would build his reputation. (His autobiography is modestly titled, Memoirs Of A Great Detective; its account of the Benwell case bears little resemblance to the facts.) Murray bought wholeheartedly into the idea of Birchall as the master-criminal in charge of a murderous syndicate, since that would increase his own importance in breaking the case, and repeatedly gave this explanation of the crime to the newspapers in spite of a complete lack of evidence. Indeed, so appalling was Murray's conduct during the investigation that although they relied on the case he built, when Birchall came to trial the prosection did not call Murray as a witness, because they didn't want the defence to have a chance to cross-examine him. However, by that time the damage had been done: Birchall was thoroughly tried and convicted by the press before he ever set foot in the converted theatre in Woodstock, Ontario, that, not inappropriately, functioned as a temporary courthouse. The judge all but instructed the jury to find Birchall guilty, and gave them a deadline for bringing in their verdict; the jury, in turn, agreed on a guilty verdict after scant minutes - although they stayed out the full time "to make it look good".

The perverse thing about the sorry story told in The Swamp Of Death is that in spite of all the lies and scams, in spite of being what he undoubtedly was, 'a d----d scoundrel', once free of the distorting prism of Douglas Pelly's perspective Birchall emerges in the narrative as an oddly sympathetic individual - even a decent one, at least in an "honour amongst thieves" sort of way. Far from being a master-criminal, or the head of a conspiracy, he was no more than one of a loose conglomerate of rogues who supplemented their incomes through theft and fraud. The murder was certainly unpremeditated. Benwell was a man with a temper, and it is likely that, discovering how he had been deceived, he began an altercation that ended in a shooting. Birchall himself was clearly not Benwell's killer, but equally clearly, he knew who must have been - who he had left Benwell with, on that fatal day. Nevertheless, he made no attempt to buy his life by revealing the names of his associates, but instead seemed determined that no-one was going to suffer for his sins - or even their own. He went to his death protesting his innocence, but otherwise silent. It is a measure of the man's strangely attractive personality, so helpful in putting his schemes across, that the police official who was assigned as Birchall's night guard - his suicide watch - became strongly attached to him, and wept uncontrollably when he was executed. Birchall spent his last days writing an account of his misspent life, as a way of providing for his soon-to-be widow. It was published as Birchall: His Life, Trial and Imprisonment; As Told By Himself - and found itself in competition with a lurid, pulp fiction version of the story by John Arthur Fraser called The Swamp Of Death; or, The Benwell Murder, from which Rebecca Gowers took her title.

At the very start of the Niagara inquiry, a pressman reported that 'the impression here may be summarised in the remark of an onlooker at the court to the detective: "If you haven't got a murderer you've got a d----d scoundrel."' In the ensuing days this verdict would come to seem positively charitable. Birchall's press image swiftly deteriorated from that of a mere scoundrel into that of a scheming killer predisposed to inhuman displays of light-heartedness. For a newspaper wishing to exploit a first-rate story it was natural to promote a devilish picture of the debonair young swindler, but serious investigation of the total known circumstances surrounding Benwell's death should have continued to leave ample margin for this being a case where an ill-planned fraud had led to an unplanned killing by person or persons unknown.

So much for writing shorter reviews in 2013...sigh.

I guess that's not one of your shorter ones, Liz, but the story sounds fascinating!

I think you should be paid for your reviews. They are so well thought out and interesting.

This always puzzled me:
...as Birchall's night guard - his suicide watch - became strongly attached to him, and wept uncontrollably when he was executed.
...why a prisoner on death row is put on suicide watch (and I know it happens often). What is feared? That the prisoner will take his own life instead of the state taking his life? That's weird, in a way.

Paid by the word!? Whoo! :)

Yes, it's always called "cheating justice". And then there's the situation where, if a condemned prisoner if sick or injured, they put him in hospital and nurse him back to health, and THEN execute him.

Because it would be no fun otherwise? I don't know - don't ask me to explain the logic of it.

And then there's the situation where, if a condemned prisoner if sick or injured, they put him in hospital and nurse him back to health, and THEN execute him.

Yeah. That's pretty bizarre as well.

Nothing about the death penalty makes any sense whatsoever. The sooner it's abolished in the U.S., the better. *steps off soapbox*

See now, Liz, that's the kind of review I'm talking about when I say you are intimidating! You took a book I've never heard of, summed it up and explained it, and made me want to read it. That's good writing!

Oh, don't worry, I'm on that particular soapbox with you {*shudder*}.

Thanks, Julia, though you really shouldn't encourage me. :)

What's really funny about your reviews here on LT, Liz, is that if I didn't see that you wrote them, I probably wouldn't read them because of their length. No kidding. Usually reviews of the length you write are those I find in the newspapers. That was why I suggested that you write reviews for money. I think your reviews are that good.

On LT's profile page, I usually skim book reviews of such great length. Possible I'll read their first and the last paragraphs. Here, on your thread, if I read a review at all (and I pick and choose those that I want to read), I'll read the whole thing and always be amazed at how well written they are.

Very nice review of The Swamp of Death! Not something I can easily lay my hands on, but all the more reason to spend more time in the various second hand books shops in my town while on the hunt.

Sounds like a fascinating book, Liz, and another great review, too. However long or short they are or may be, your reviews are a delight.
Thanks!

And make room on that soapbox for me, too. That state sponsored murder is allowed to go on in what is supposed to be a civilized society gives the lie to the very idea.

Thanks, Madeline - and don't worry, you're certainly under no obligation to read any more of my deathless prose than you feel like ! :)

Hi, Lori - thank you! It;s ultimately rather depressing book (goes with the territory), but a very interesting one, too.

Aw, thank you, Tom!

Hello, Liz. I'm looking forward to lots more tutored threads from you. I've never (so far) wanted a tutored thread of my own but I've found the ones you (and other tutors) have done for other readers very enjoyable and useful. I never know what questions to ask on my own account but find that someone else will ask just what I want to know, but didn't know I wanted to know.

Hi, Kerry - thanks for visiting! It's certainly the quality of the questions that make a tutored read work. Very happy to have you there in the capacity of "permanent lurker". :)

Call Mr Fortune - Having embarked upon H. C. Bailey's mysteries featuring qualified doctor and amateur detective Reginald Fortune, I find myself in a bit of a quandary. I know that this long-running series broke new ground in several directions, and was an influence upon a range of important mystery authors, from Dorothy Sayers to Ellery Queen. It was also amazingly popular in its time, with Bailey often outselling Agatha Christie when their works were released in competition. In short, it is important enough for me to give it my full attention. The problem is that, at least based upon the first entry in the series, Call Mr Fortune, Reggie Fortune himself is an insufferable jackass. Imagine someone with all the irritating mannerisms of Lord Peter Wimsey, but none of Peter's redeeming features or depth of character, and you'll be in the right ballpark. Reggie's predominant attitude is one of boredom; these short stories find him yawning his way through murder after murder. He even yawns when he's just killed someone in self-defence. Perhaps it's meant to be funny. It isn't.

However, Reggie is certainly not the first detective to be lacking an attractive personality. There are deeper, more organic issues with the mysteries that comprise Call Mr Fortune. Reggie is the kind of person who, conveniently enough, knows something about just about everything, and his solving of his cases often turns on his grasp of some abstruse factoid rather than actual detective work. For example, in The Hottentot Venus, Reggie is put on the right track by his instant recognition of the incredibly rare and valuable title artefact. (The same story requires one of the characters to (i) carry the artefact around in his pocket, and (ii) not notice for a time that he's lost it.) When he does actually "detect", Reggie has a habit of drawing conclusions from very slender evidence, but is invariably right. More problematic still, these stories demand the almost complete incompetence of the police - who, for instance, in The Sleeping Companion can't tell that the body was moved after the murder was committed, and don't think to inspect the victim's bathroom in spite of (apparently) an almost bloodless throat-stabbing. After initially evincing contempt and suspicion of Reggie during his first case, The Archduke's Tea, the police are so impressed by his talents that they afterwards display a worrying tendency to call him in on everything and let him do their job for them. Typical of its time, Call Mr Fortune also has its central characters evince a sneering, condescending manner towards "foreigners", women, the working-classes...anyone, in short, not a white male who attended an English public school. This attitude is most objectionable with regard to the character of the solicitor Donald Gordon who is introduced as "emphatically a Jew" (whatever that means), referred to throughout not by his name but as "the little Jew", and given the stereotypical lisp. I can only shudder in anticipation of how a Jewish character who is not one of the good guys might be treated.

However, there are a few promises of better things in the future to be found in these stories. In particular there are intimations, in spite of Reggie's medical qualifications, which might suggest Dr John Thorndyke-like investigations, of a more psychological approach - both in terms of the motives of particular crimes, and Reggie's methods; this may have been one of the things that appealed to Dorothy Sayers. A number of the stories, including The Nice Girl and The Efficient Assassin, feature deeply dysfunctional families, while the most interesting case in this collection, The Business Partner, which is also the last and longest, centres upon a man willing to destroy himself as long as he can ruin the object of his emnity at the same time; he is described at one point as "an epicure of hate". This story also offers some pointed social commentary, with the police declining to move against a Cabinet Minister on the strength of evidence that would have a lesser man under lock and key. ("I'm not blaming you," says Reggie, having forced his police colleagues to admit the double standard, "I only want to rub it in.") The nature of the crimes committed in this story and the motive behind them provoke an unusually emotional response from the generally detached Reggie - and frankly, it's a change for the better. Here's hoping that it is these interesting, positive qualities that predominate in the later entries in the series.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. That was Dr Reginald Fortune's trouble. He had become a specialist, and, as he told anybody who would listen, thought it an absurd thing to be. For he was interested in everything, but not in anything in particular. And it was just this various versatility of mind and taste which had condemned him to be a specialist. Obviously an absurd world. The Criminal Investigation Department, solicitors, and others dealing with those experiments in social reform which are called crimes, by continually appealing to his multifarous knowledge and his all-observant eye, turned Dr Reginald Fortune, general practitioner at Westhampton, into Mr Fortune of Wimpole Street, specialist in - what shall we say? - the surgery of crime.

There's another mystery series I've never even heard of! As much as I try to make allowances for the "standards of the time" I find the stereotypical treatment of foreigners and minorities quite offputting in early mysteries. For example, I just read the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery and I was appalled at the depiction of the apparently African-American "houseboy" Djuna who works for the Queens. Characters openly compare him to a monkey and he never sits in a chair but instead squats on his haunches on the floor, which the author says he prefers (of course, being an uncivilized beast). Yuck!

Of course, there's also other weirdnesses in that series, like the fact that father and son not only share an apartment but a bedroom and from the implications in this book, a bed. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that one, let me tell you!

Hi, Julia. I have the Ellery Queens on The List but i haven't gotten around to them yet. That does sound like a weird one! I find the rampant predjudices and sexism of the era pretty hard to swallow. Of course, you sit there going, "Well, you have to make allowances..." but frankly there are only so many allowances I'm prepared to make. Yuck indeed! I try to concentrate on the story but it isn't always that easy.

The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason - One of the most interesting aspects of my investigation into the early days of mystery and detective fiction is noting the differences in attitude that exist between British and American fiction of the same era, which are often more significant than the differences in the nature of the stories themselves, or the methods of their detectives. In spite of an obvious preference for the infallible amateur, early British detective stories do tend to take for granted the - how shall I put this? - the good intentions of those responsible for the making and administration of the law, and the investigation of crime. The occasional corrupt and/or incompetant individual emerges in the course of these stories, but often the narrative involves the prevention of damage by that individual and his removal from public life. American detective fiction, in contrast, tends to express a scepticism amounting to outright cynicism about "the system": endemic political corruption is taken for granted and often depicted as spilling over from City Hall into the police force, while private investigators tend to figure as lonely beacons of honesty in a profoundly dark and dishonest world.

But although I've grown accustomed to the figurative curled lip of early American detection fiction, I can't honestly say that I was expecting to encounter anything quite so outrageously cynical - and from 1896! - as The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason. This collection of short stories by Melville Davisson Post revolve around a lawyer whose professional raison d'être is showing his clients how to use loopholes in the law to get away with serious crimes. Their constant theme is the difference between a moral transgression and a legal transgression: time and again we see horrified lawyers and dismayed judges dealing with the unavoidable necessity of releasing an obvious villain who is nevertheless guiltless under the law. Most of the stories are prefaced by brief citations of actual cases settled by reference to the specific laws under discussion. Individuals guilty of fraud, theft, embezzlement, and even murder walk free thanks to Randolph Mason, sometimes with a carefully selected "patsy" bearing the brunt of the consequences. In the foreword to The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason, Melville Post, a qualified lawyer himself (I assume he trained in West Virginia; he seems extremely knowledgeable about, even fixated upon, the operation of the laws of that state) anticipates the obvious criticism of his work, that his book is effectively a "how-to" manual for criminals, and counters that he is simply pointing out where the loopholes are, so that legal reformers can work on closing them.

There is an air of calculated confrontation about the first story in this collection, The Corpus Delicti, which involves Mason instructing a client who is being blackmailed how to commit murder, dispose of the body, and still get away with it in spite of being caught almost red-handed (so to speak); the case turns upon the evidentiary requirements for proving that a murder has been committed. An equally shocking story is The Men Of The Jimmy, which not only features the defrauding of the father of a kidnapped child - whose fate we never do learn - but the funds so raised being used to bribe a prison guard in order to arrange the escape of a (rightly) convicted criminal; all with Mason's knowledge and assistance. On the other hand, some of these stories do provoke an involuntary laugh, along with all the eyebrow-raising. I found The Sheriff Of Gullmore sickly amusing, since it addresses the (to me) peculiar American system of electing public officials rather appointing the best-qualified person. An outgoing county sheriff, who has been embezzling public funds, manages to shift the legal responsibility for his crime onto his successor, an honest, likeable, well-meaning individual, but one sadly uninformed about the law...

But there is a story behind the stories of The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason - including the peculiar relationship between Mason and his clerk, Parks, who seems like the perfect, self-effacing factotum, but who is in fact manipulating his employer in a number of ways. Over time we learn that Randolph Mason, once a respected member of the New York bar, was himself the victim of a legal loophole such as those he now exploits; that he was financially ruined as a consequence; and that in the wake of this shock, he suffered a profound breakdown. After this, we gather, he was different - "not quite right". There are warnings about Mason's physical and mental health scattered through the pages of this volume, which concludes with another collapse and Mason's enforced shipboard departure for a recuperative rest in the south of France. For the ramifications of this second breakdown, we must presumably consult the two subsequent collections of Randolph Mason stories. We are given one last, disturbing glimpse of him here, huddled into a deckchair and muttering feverishly about a plan that has just occurred to him for taking the ocean liner away from its owners - quite legally, of course...

All wrongs are not crimes. Indeed only those wrongs are crimes in which certain technical elements are present. The law provides a Procustean standard for all crimes. Thus a wrong, to become criminal, must fit exactly into the measure laid down by the law, else it is no crime; if it varies never so little from the legal measure, the law must, and will, refuse to regard it as criminal, no matter how injurious a wrong it may be. There is no measure of morality, or equity, or common right that can be applied to the individual case. The gauge of the law is iron-bound. The wrong measured by this gauge is either a crime or it is not. There is no middle ground.

As you all know, I usually try to provide some contemporary cover art with my reviews - but in this case I couldn't resist the cover of a recent paperback reissue of The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason, which captures its essence rather well...

Ohhh, @#$&!!!!

98% of a review written and I hit the wrong @#%&$Ω button.

It really shouldn't be that easy. What ever happened to "Are you sure?"

The Murder Of Cecily Thane - Nebraska-born Harriette Ashbrook was working for a publishing company when she was asked to proofread the manuscript of a mystery novel her employers were planning on releasing. She was unimpressed with what she read. "If this is a detective story," she commented, "then I can write one too." And so she did, producing a successful series of novels featuring that insoucient young man-about-town, Philip "Spike" Tracy, the younger brother of the New York District Attorney and the bane of his long-suffering sibling's life - at least until he solves the murder of Cecily Thane...

In fact, Spike is receiving a tongue-lashing from his brother Richard after being embarrassingly picked up as drunk and disorderly and spending the night in jail when he first hears that the wife of successful jewel dealer Elton Thane has been shot dead in what appears to be a robbery-homicide. After extorting a promise that he will be seen and not heard, Richard allows Spike to tag along when he goes to meet Inspector Herschman at the scene of the crime, where the body of Cecily Thane lies sprawled before her open safe, from which some $200,000 worth of jewellery is missing. It is Spike who notices certain indications that Cecily may have been shot, not while standing by the safe, but while lying on her chaise-longue - which suggests that she knew her killer... The resulting investigation turns up a widening circle of suspects: George Griffis, Cecily's brother, who is found in possession of one of her bracelets; Mortimer Fennel and his daughter, Nina, who both had a contentious relationship with Cecily, and were in in the house on the night of the murder; Tommy Spencer, a professional escort who regularly took Cecily dancing - and who, under a different name, was once a suspect in another robbery-homicide; and the actress Audrey Keating, who for reasons of her own arranged the meeting between Cecily and Tommy. Although he has an alibi, the police are suspicious of Elton Thane's apparent indifference to his wife's association with the young gigolo - while Spike discovers that Thane has a secret of his own...

The Murder Of Cecily Thane is a fair though flawed mystery. Its plot is sound and its twists quite interesting, but the hair's breadth timing needed to commit the murder and the associated manoeuvring do strain credibility somewhat. Perhaps the most notable thing about this novel is its moral greyness, with even the "good" people willing to tamper with evidence, and others guilty of transgressions ranging from blackmail to a secret affair. (Ironically enough, the only person who turns out to be capable of a real, honest love is the gigolo, Tommy Spencer.) There are a number of rookie mistakes in this debut novel, including a police inspector just too unimaginative to be true, but on the other hand, there are also some unmistakable indications that we're not supposed to take it too seriously - including the dedication to Harriette Ashbrook's parents, "who never read detective stories", chapter headings such as "Spike Acts Like A Low Cad", and the character of Audrey Keating, who when calm sounds like "Lady Oxford's drawing-room" but forgets herself when excited and becomes "pure Chillecothe". To my taste, Spike's jokey manner finally becomes a bit tiresome; although I'm sure we're intended to see a serious streak beneath the nonchalant exterior, and it does suit the novel that contains him. I ended up feeling rather sympathetic toward the long-suffering if undeniably stuffy Richard who, alone of all the (fictional) District Attorneys I've ever encountered, is positively dismayed by having to oversee a murder investigation, and far from regarding the case as an opportunity to boost his career, hates publicity and would really rather be sitting quietly in his office working on legal reform. Be that as it may, Richard is not above accepting the kudos that flow after Cecily Thane's murderer is apprehended - nor, we assume, above requesting assistance from his brother in the future...

    The taxi moved on and the three of them leaned back in contemplation of their papers. Spike rustled his with gusto. "As usual," he said after a glance at the front page, "my trusty tabloid's about six hours ahead of yours. Here's the whole story." And there indeed it was. Ninety-six-point headlines. "Diamond Queen Slain." Photographs of Cecily Thane and her husband resurrected from the office morgue. The Thane house decorated with an ominous X. "Police Seek Night-Club Sheik." Emma Bloomstead showing rather too much leg.
    The district attorney gave one brief, pained glance at the gaudy page and heaved a sigh of resignation. "It's begun," he said.

Finished my second book of the year, The Sword Of Damocles: A Story Of New York Life, the third entry in Anna Katharine Green's Ebenezer Gryce series, for TIOLI #14.

Now embarked upon my Agatha Christie re-reads with The Mysterious Affair At Styles, for TIOLI #11 - and a nice little mini-group read we have developing there, too!

Had to take a run into the city yesterday and got a slow train both ways, so I've belted through The Mysterious Affair At Styles.

And, hmm... I can't actually find the book I was intending to read next - it's all a bit of a mess here at the moment - so while I hunt / tidy up, I'll be reading The Dream Doctor by Arthur B. Reeve, the third entry in the Craig Kennedy series.

It's so comforting to hear that someone else cannot find a book they know they have ... somewhere.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that this has happened twice in 2013...that is, in less than five days. :)

What a great review to start the year off with Liz. So much depth even though the books may sometimes be ultimately "flawed". Four already is also good going. Love your choices of book even though it is dangerous to my bank balance as tracking down some of them is going to prove expensive.

Have a great weekend.

It looks like a good start, but unfortunately all four of those books are from 2012. Appreciate the kind words, though! :)

Very remiss of me to have taken 5 days to find your thread - a belated Happy New Year!

Adding my compliments on some more great reviews. The Swamp of Death sounds interesting but I'm undecided about whether I really want to read something that depressing.

#68 Depends how you feel about browser add-ons but there's something called Lazarus Form Recovery which remembers everything you've typed and after a crash (or even accidentally clicking a link and opening a new window) will reinstate the text in its entirety. It's saved me from quite a few @#$& situations on LT.

I felt in the mood for something familiar when I got home from work yesterday so jumped on the shared reread of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and was relieved to find that I still really like Agatha Christie. It's been so many years since I last read one of her books that I was worried my tastes would have changed or that I would find her writing disappointing but happily neither was the case.

Out of interest - when reading chronologically by publication date, what do you do with short stories? Read them individually when published or read them in the book collection they were published in? Quite a lot of the Hercule Poirot stories published in Poirot's Early Cases in the 1970s were first published as individual short stories in the 1920s and I can't decide where to fit them in.

Heather if you want to read them in publication order then here is a link to a list. http://www.agathachristie.com/cms-media/assets/agatha-christie-order-of-publicat... I can't remember where I read that this method is ideal. It may have even been on this thread. I'm a little addled lately. :)

#77 Thanks for that list Roberta. I'll definitely be reading her novels in publication order but I'm also trying to decide whether to read the short stories individually in publication order or in publication order by the date the collection was published. Sometimes there seems to be quite a big difference in dates between the two.

Hi, Heather and Roberta!

Heh! Given that I've spent the last week wrestling with the consequences of an unwary download, and six hours yesterday running scans, restores and clean-ups that do at least seem to have worked (there's one thing here I can't get rid of, but trying seems to cause more problems than putting up with it), I'm presently a tad wary of ANYTHING that wants to find a home on my computer but I will keep that add-on in mind for slightly less paranoid times - thanks!

Short stories are a pain and a bane. Generally I read the collections in publication order rather than reading the individual stories in publication order, then hunt down any "strays" - but there's no hard and fast rule about it.

I read the first two Hilda Adams stories by Mary Roberts Rinehart individually last year because (i) there are only two of them, and (ii) there's an eighteen-year gap between those stories and their follow-up.

After much agonising, I also read the second collection of Baroness Orczy's "Old Man In The Corner" stories before the first: all of those stories were published before The Case Of Miss Elliott but collected afterwards. On internal evidence this was the correct choice (phew!) and I would recommend it if you're thinking of reading those stories.

Oh, ick about the computer clean-up. I've never read those Baroness Orczy titles. I will look for them. Thanks.

Hi, Ren! Happy New Year!

Yes, it's been a bit of a nightmare: whatever got on there was stopping my computer from actually starting up in the morning, so had to resort to "restore files" time after time - and it kept doing it after it looked like it was fixed. The major clean-up seems to have done the trick, though, fingers crossed.

The Old Man In The Corner is fairly easy to find, including as an ebook; The Case Of Miss Elliott less so, although it has been republished fairly recently. Forget what the third collection's called. :)

Hi, Liz ~ I just stopped by to return your visit to my thread and am so glad I did! First of all, I don't care when you read those books, I am beyond impressed by your reviews! I wish I had the patience and talent to write reviews that are half as thoughtful and interesting as yours.

Second, love the pix of the wild parakeets! Here in Pasadena, CA where I live, we have flocks of wild green parrots. Just this morning, as frequently happens, I was awakened to their raucous screams. For some reason, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does to be awakened by, say, a chainsaw or car alarm. :)

Welcome, Mary - lovely to have you here! Thank you for your very kind words about my reviews. I know exactly what you mean about Nature's alarm clock: we're having a particularly abundant year for kookaburras, and a handful of them like to gather and laugh not so far from my windows at about 5.30 am. It's astonishing how un-annoying that is! :)

The Puzzle Lock - I was slightly disappointed in this collection of short stories that make up the 11th entry in R. Austin Freeman's Dr John Thorndyke series; not because there is anything wrong with the stories as stories, but because this particular set of "case histories" is generally lacking the kind of medical / biological slant that is usually so much a feature of this series, and one of the main reasons it appeals to me. Some of these stories are more straightforward tales of crime, while amongst the ones that do have a scientific bent, a physics / engineering focus is evident - which makes me wonder whether, even as Arthur Reeve's stories about the scientific detective, Craig Kennedy, were undoubtedly inspired by the Thorndyke series, R. Austin Freeman here was responding to the Kennedy stories and their "harder" scientific basis.

The other slightly odd thing about this collection is the task of narrating falls variously to Dr Christopher Jervis, Thorndyke's partner and "junior", Robert Anstey, his legal colleague, and Dr Humphrey Jardine, a young general practitioner - yet often there is no direct identification, only internal details such as passing references to earlier cases, to let the reader know who is speaking. Perhaps it's a test to see who was paying attention?

Two of the stories in The Puzzle Lock do have a medical bent. In Rex v. Burnaby, Dr Jardine is called to attend a friend of his, a Mr Burnaby, who is suffering periodic bouts of severe pain. Though Mrs Burnaby is a much younger woman, the Burnabys are known as a devotedly happy couple - so why does Mr Burnaby fall ill whenever his wife prepares his meals? In A Sower Of Pestilence, the discovery of several glass tubes containing fleas and lice, along with a mysteriously annotated map, leads Dr Thorndyke deep into the most poverty-stricken areas of London - to a professional rat-trainer, and to a plot to unleash a wave of death and disease across the city...

In The Puzzle Lock, Thorndyke and Jervis are assisting the police to locate the head of a gang of thieves when they discover a vault with an elaborate code-based lock. Inside are two bodies, one shot, one suffocated after being trapped. As the men are examining this grim find, they inadvertently release a trigger, and the door swings shut behind them... In The Green Check Jacket, the simultaneous disappearance of two men, uncle and nephew, leads to a gruesome discovery in a dene hole in Kent, and the tricky legal question of who died first... Reliable eyewitnesses to the disposal of a body would seem to mean that there is little doubt about the guilt of a woman accused of murder, but in Phyllis Annesley's Peril, Thorndyke isn't so sure... In The Seal Of Nebuchadnezzar, an apparent suicide leads to a complicated case involving murder, forgery, and the seedy world of fake antiquities... A rare seaside holiday for Thorndyke becomes an investigation into blackmail and murder in A Mystery Of The Sand-Hills, when an odd pattern of footprints on the beach leads ultimately to the discovery of a body... A family curse seems to have come home to roost in The Apparition Of Burling Court. Whether the case is one of madness, a genuine haunting, or a cruel plot, Thorndyke must find a way of preventing a man's predestined suicide... In The Mysterious Visitor, the discovery of man's body an indeterminate time after his death initiates a complicated case of timing and inheritance...

This is, all in all, a gruesome collection, full of murder and suicide, corpses discovered well after the event, and exceedingly unpleasant causes of death. The title story might even cause nightmares in a reader who is at all claustrophobic. As a whole, The Puzzle Lock gives us an interesting sense of passing time. One of the attractions of the Thorndyke series is its attention to the geography of London and the details of everyday life over a period of many years. Here, the horse-drawn carriages and gaslight of the early tales have well and truly given way to motor cars and electricity; while one of the stories turns upon an understanding of the mechanics of motion picture projection.

I have occasionally wondered how often Mystery and Romance present themselves to us ordinary men of affairs only to be passed by without recognition. More often, I suspect, than most of us imagine. The uncanny tendency of my talented friend John Thorndyke to become involved in strange, mysterious and abnormal circumstances has almost become a joke against him. But yet, on reflection, I am disposed to think that his experiences have not differed essentially from those of other men, but that his extraordinary powers of observation and rapid inference have enabled him to detect abnormal elements in what, to ordinary men, appeared to be quite commonplace occurrences.

The Old Man In The Corner - Although she is undoubtedly best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Baroness Emmuska Orczy wrote in a variety of genres and invented one of the stranger figures of detection - not actually a detective - in "The Old Man In The Corner". Nothing more than an interested observer, or at least so it seems until the last story in this collection, this eccentric individual's passion is the successful commission of crime, those cases in which the law has been evaded or outwitted; cases which he unravels from the outside, at least theoretically, all the while tying and untying knots in a piece of string...

One of a number of "armchair detectives" to appear in the wake of the success of Sherlock Holmes, The Old Man In The Corner first featured in a series of magazine stories published across 1901 - 1902. Initially, these stories were narrated in the first person by an unnamed young female journalist who becomes the sounding-board for The Old Man's theories of crime. However, when the stories were collected together for re-issue in book form in 1908, they were rewritten in the third person, with the journalist revealed as Miss Polly Burton. This collection was published after the release of The Case Of Miss Elliott in 1905, and therefore technically is the second book in the series. However, the events described are clearly set earlier, and this is one rare case where I recommend reading "out of order".

Miss Mary J. Burton of the Evening Observer - Polly to her friends - is having an economical lunch at "the Norfolk Street branch of the Aerated Bread Company's depots" (better known as an A.B.C. shop, a real franchise and a common feature in London-based writing of this period) when someone sits down at her corner table and, without so much as a by-your-leave, begins to expound his theories of the various cases that have filled the crime columns of England's newspapers. Polly is nettled by his presumption and repelled by his egotism - but finds herself unable to disbelieve his explanations for various mysterious occurrences. She begins to look forward to these strange meetings, and to drop in at the A.B.C. shop more often than she used to: something that puts a kink her relationship with Mr Richard Frobisher of the London Mail - Dickie to his friends - who finds himself being stood up with exasperating frequency, as Polly (in spite of herself) hangs upon the words that drop from this exceedingly odd individual.

The stories in this collection revolve around those two great eternals, love and money. Murder for gain is common, with the stories often turning on how the obvious suspect - and frequently guilty party - managed to produce an alibi, or otherwise convince the law of his or her innocence; often while a third party was wrongfully arrested and tried. However, between newspaper reports of these events, and his own attendance at coroner's courts and criminal trials, The Old Man is able to piece together the truth - which he does not bother to share with the authorities. In fact, for a British mystery series of this period, The Old Man In The Corner is unusually contemptuous of the police, taking the unimaginative incapacity of the law very much for granted, and with The Old Man expressing amused appreciation of the intelligence of the successul criminals. Perhaps Emmuska Orczy's European birth and upbringing are responsible for this; there is, in any case, an extremely sardonic air to the story of The Liverpool Mystery, in which what are presented as typical English prejudices against "foreigners" are responsible for a successful jewel merchant being grossly defrauded twice in one day. Polly Burton listens entranced as the details of murder, theft, fraud and forgery are laid bare for her, wanting (and sometimes trying) to argue or refute, but most often convinced in spite of herself. But Polly does end up getting the last word: the final story in this collection, The Mysterious Death In Percy Street, comes with a distinct sting in the tail...

Polly distinctly felt guilty about the whole thing. She had promised to meet Dickie - that is, Mr Frobisher - at two o'clock sharp outside the Palace Theatre, because she wanted to go to a Maud Allan matinee, and because naturally he wanted to go with her. But at two o'clock sharp she was still in Norfolk Street, Strand, inside an A.B.C. shop, sipping cold coffee opposite a grotesque old man who was fiddling with a bit of string. How could she be expected to remember Maud Allan or the Palace Theatre, or Dickie himself for a matter of that? The man in the corner had begun to talk of that mysterious death on the underground railway, and Polly had lost count of time, of place, and circumstances.

...and with that, I have caught up my 2012 reviews! I think that's cause for celebration...but since 2013 remains to be tackled, only a small celebration.

So here's a small sloth:

A sloth! What a cute little guy (or gal).

The Old Man in the Corner has been on my radar for a while. I keep thinking I'll get the audio version since audio is my favorite format for short stories. I just haven't done it yet.

Such a cute face! And very nice reviews, as usual, Liz. I hope you're having a good weekend.

>>#87

Hi, Carrie! I suspect that these stories would work rather well as an audio, as they are basically just The Old Man and Polly talking over cases.

>>#88

Thought you'd like that, Julia! My weekend is improving, thank you (spent yeterday tearing my hair over computer issues).

I hate computer problems, and it sounds like yours was a doozy. I'm glad you seem to have it straightened out for now (I'll knock on some wood for you).

{*tapping my forehead*}

#50: Adding The Swamp of Death to the BlackHole. I love Victorian true crime although I confess I was not completely enamored of Mr. Briggs' Hat although I liked it well enough.

I'd be enjoying that branch of reading a lot more if i could find a case where I was sure they'd got the right person.

As for Mr Briggs' Hat, I found the book flawed but the story compelling, in a horrifying sort of way.

#86: Well done for the catch up on reviews. Wish I could say the same for those I have yet to get to....never enough time!

Still three to go...but hey, maybe tomorrow? (I seem to say that a lot!) Good luck with yours! :)

Great reviews. I've not read any in the Thorndyke series. on the wish list they go (the Orczy are already there).

My Inner Sloth Name is Tiny The Original Smile-Factory.

I'm afraid *my* Inner Sloth name is a tad more accurate than I'm entirely comfortable with:

Laggard The Procrastinating Goliath...

Haha, my Inner Sloth Name is also accurate: Drowsy The Easy-Going Lounger, except for the "easy going" part. Cute little guy, isn't he (or she). But I'd worry about those claws...

The claws aren't weapons, Mary - that would take far too much effort - they're purely for hanging on. :)

I'm Sleepy the Loitering Leaf-Eater. Makes me feel like I need to go looking for Snow White!

The Four Just Men - Edgar Wallace's ultimate success as a writer tends to throw a smokescreen over a private life marred by unsuccessful relationships, poor professional choices, financial irresponsibility and constant debt. After a checkered early career as a soldier, medic, war correspondent, newspaper editor, freelance journalist and occasional poet, Wallace embarked upon a new phase of his life in 1905 when he wrote his first novel, The Four Just Men. Typically, what might what been a modest success for Wallace turned into a nightmare of spiralling debt. Determined to ensure that his novel, which was serialised in the Daily Mail, was a best-seller, Wallace promoted his work via a "guess the murder method" competition, offering a first prize of £1000 and several minor prizes. Unfortunately, he forgot to add a "one winner only, no correspondence to be entered into" clause, meaning that the campaign intended to boost sales became a money-pit of the first order as more and more winners turned up demanding their prizes. To save its own reputation, the newspaper was forced to cover the debt; but it was an entirely tone-setting start to Wallace's novel-writing career.

The novel itself, which would in time become one of a series, is built around three shadowy individuals who call themselves "The Just Men", and who carry out acts of vigilante justice against prominent people whom the law cannot touch, or who manage to evade or corrupt it. Each of The Just Men has himself been a victim of injustice and carries the emotional scars. To date they have managed to keep a low profile, without their individual acts being tied together by the various law agencies concerned; but when The Just Men target Sir Philip Ramen, the British Foreign Secretary, to prevent the passing of a certain piece of legislation, their campaign brings the activities of this shadowy league into the light of day. Having lost one of their number, who was killed by police but died without revealing anything about his comrades or their mysterious organisation, the three survivors are forced to recruit for their next assignment a professional criminal with certain technical skills. This man, Thery, has no understanding of, nor any sympathy with, the beliefs and aims of his enforced collaborators, and the others must keep him under close guard, to prevent any opportunity of escape and betrayal.

The Four Just Men is an entertaining and suspenseful novel, though not perhaps one to be taken seriously. It is a curiously amoral work, which certainly intends the reader at least to admire the devotion of The Just Men to their cause, their almost superhuman abilities, and their peculiar honesty - even the police come to take them at their word when they say they will do something at a particular time or place, rather than assuming it to be a feint. On the other hand, while it undoubtedly lures its audience into a kind of identification with the vigilante league, the novel simultaneously builds sympathy for the beleaguered Sir Philip, who responds to a series of death threats, including a final one that tells him the exact time of his death, with a stoicism that is part courage, part sheer bullheadedness. As the moment for The Just Men to act upon their warnings draw near, and after several startling demonstrations of their ability to do what they say they will, Sir Philip's colleagues from the Prime Minister down beg him to simply drop his bill, but he will not - because he will not.

The bone of contention in The Four Just Men is one with a certain contemporary resonance: an Act of Parliament that will allow the extradition of political refugees by their country of origin. Specifically, this will result in the enforced return - and, we gather, immediate death - of the man who is organising the resistance movement against a particular corrupt and vicious government. (This novel asks the reader to swallow a great deal, but idea that the death of a single politician could prevent legislation being enacted is somewhere near the top of the list; although, granted, murder might reasonably act as a deterrent for the next politician in line!) The story's events take place in the lead-up to the final reading of Sir Philip's bill, which seems certain to pass in spite of negative feelings towards it nation-wide. Not at first taking the threats of The Just Men seriously, Sir Philip is infuriated by the letters he receives and goes public with them, offering a reward for information. This leads to the revelation that The Just Men are responsible for a whole series of political assassinations worldwide, often by bizarre methods and under seemingly impossible circumstances. When Sir Philip nevertheless refuses to be intimidated, he is placed under a police guard that grows increasingly extensive and intrusive as time grows short, and which by the scheduled reading of the bill has become a phalanx of unprecedented proportion, guarding the way from Sir Philip's rooms in Downing Street to the House of Commons: a human shield so dense and numerous that no-one could possibly penetrate it...surely?

In Trafalgar Square, along the mall as far as the police would allow them, at the lower end of Victoria Street, eight deep along the Albert Embankment, growing in volume every hour, London waited, waited in patience, orderly, content to stare steadfastly at nothing, deriving no satisfaction for their weariness but the sense of being as near as it was humanly possible to be to the scene of a tragedy. A stranger arriving in London, bewildered by the gathering, asked for the cause. A man standing on the outskirts of the Embankment throng pointed across the river with the stem of his pipe. "We're waiting for a man to be murdered," he said simply, as one who describes a familiar function.

Hi Liz, wow, talk about starting 2013 off with a bang! Lovely to have you visit my thread. I HAVE to know your "evil plan." Is it your mission to create an enormous number of Trollope addicts? If so, I think you are right on track!

Liz, you must have been reviewing non-stop except for the computer purge! Gracious!!!!! I read with respect, but I proved to myself last year that I just can't deal with short stories. I tried to read the Lord Peter opus in chronological order including the SSs. I couldn't bear but about five before I let the idea go. I don't think that DLS's SSs are necessarily bad; I felt and feel that I could put the time spent on those ten or twenty or whatever pages into the greater depth of a novel. I'm sorry for what I lose thereby, but I do realize that I'm not going to live long enough to read everything that I really want to anyway. So my hat's off to you!

>>#102

Hi, Nancy - welcome! Yes, that's pretty much it!! Specifically I'm using Heather as my Judas goat, nudging her into requesting tutored and group reads, so that in turn we lure in all sorts of lurkers...and then they're hooked. Mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ha! :)

>>#103

Hi, Peggy! I'm spending more time on the computer than I should, anyway; not a good start to the New Year! Generally I don't read a lot of short stories, either - I prefer the depth of novels, too - but in the early mystery genre they're pretty much inescapable. The interesting thing in that area is that the novel and the short story evolved quite distinct from one another; I'm interested in the different approaches of the writers who chose one form or the other.

I have multiple books by Baroness Orczy in my Amazon wish list. They are free Kindle downloads, but I don't want to download them until I'm ready to read them because I have too many books TBR on my Kindle already.

Hi, Lori. I'm generally a "download when you're ready to read" type, too - I think that puts us in the minority. :)

Finished The Dream Doctor by Arthur B. Reeve, the third in the series about the scientific detective, Craig Kennedy, for TIOLI #7.

Now reading The Reckoning by Joan Conquest for TIOLI #2, which is...really something.

I'm not sure what, exactly, but something.

Liz > I think I learned that the hard way. I will download a limited time book, but I don't really download many of those any more. Most are not things I am wanting to read. Something that is free all the time (or for which I'm paying), I'd rather wait until I'm ready to read it. One of these days, I'll get a bunch of those freebies I downloaded when I first got my Kindle read and off of it!

I had an unpleasant experience recently: I had noted that a book I was interested in was available as one of those (generally suspect, but better than nothing) Google ebooks, but I didn't download it at the time - and then when I went back, they'd taken it down, leaving me to contemplate some rather expensive second-hand print copies.

So there's a case to be made for impulsive immediate downloading.

Just wanted to let you know, Liz, that I'm starring your thread to follow your very interesting reading. And I'm getting closer to reading Barchester Towers (I have the thread starred) and will be ready to start Dr. Thorne in March.

>106 lyzard: I'm generally a "download when you're ready to read" type, too

What? I never knew that was an option;-) Well then what in the world am I doing with hundreds of books downloaded onto my iPad? I thought you were supposed to load up in preparation for the World Wide Book Famine.

Hi, Bonnie - thank you! I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Barchester Towers.

"An option" - meaning that you are at perfect liberty to raise your eyebrows in bemusement and carry on... :)

#101: fascinating info about Wallace's marketing fiasco. That could be a text book case for students......

The Sword Of Damocles: A Story Of New York Life - More proof, if we needed it, of both the evolutionary path of the modern detective novel, and the timeframe of that journey. This 1881 novel by Anna Katharine Green is invariably listed as a mystery, and technically it does form part of her Ebenezer Gryce series. In truth, however, The Sword Of Damocles is a romantic melodrama that turns into a sensation novel; it is a detective story only in the most marginal sense, and that only towards the end of this rather lengthy work. Furthermore, Ebenezer Gryce himself appears only briefly, and has nothing to do with the solving of the crime that occurs late in the story. In other words, this is a novel that requires the reader to shake off their preconceptions.

The Sword Of Damocles revolves around the family of Edward Sylvester, a self-made man who has built a fortune on successful speculation but is now giving up this profitable but slightly disreputable way of life in order to occupy the far more respected position of president of his own bank. Apart from his wealth, Mr Sylvester has a fine personal reputation as an honest man and a philanthropist; but in his private life he is a lonely and disappointed man. His wife, Ona, though beautiful, is selfish and shallow, and the marriage is childless after the early death of the Sylvesters' daughter. The memory of his encounter many years before with an unusual child, a relative of his wife, prompts Mr Sylvester to seek her out in Grotewell, the small town that bred both himself and Ona, even though this return to the scenes of his youth evokes some dark and painful memories.

The girl, Paula Fairchild, is now a beautiful young woman, but still with that strange, almost visionary quality about her. My Sylvester invites her to New York, to make her home with himself and his wife, with a view to an eventual adoption. The girl's Aunt Belinda, who has raised her, is reluctant to agree, in spite of the advantages it would offer, as she has doubts about the suitability of Mr Sylvester and particularly Ona as fit guardians. However, a temporary arrangement is made. With her warmth, compassion and good humour, Paula soon becomes the good genius of the Sylvester household, befriending Mr Sylvester's nephew, Bertram, who has given up music for finance in the hope of making himself a suitable match for the shy young heiress, Cecily Stuyvesant, with whom he has fallen in love, and offering Edward Sylvester himself the companionship and understanding so sorely lacking in his marriage. Even the trivial Ona takes to the girl, amusing herself by organising her new wardrobe, and using Paula's dark beauty as a foil for her own blonde loveliness. But clouds are gathering... At a reception, Cecily overhears a man boasting that he has certain knowledge of Edward Sylvester that would ruin him if made public, while Paula has an encounter with an individual, clearly once a gentleman but now a degraded figure, who speaks enigmatically of prominent men with dishonourable secrets...

A double crisis occurs midway through The Sword Of Damocles, as Edward Sylvester's past finally catches up with him. It gradually becomes clear to the reader that in his youth Sylvester committed an act dishonourable at best, criminal at worst, in order to win Ona: his disappointment in his marriage is therefore a bitterly ironic punishment. Ironic, too, is that the secret long thought buried begins to threaten Sylvester's reputation at the moment when Ona, in the wake of a violent quarrel with her husband, is killed in an accident, and after his shock and grief have passed, Sylvester is for the first time able to contemplate the true nature of his feelings for Paula. In his fear that his secret will be revealed and form an insuperable barrier between himself and the innocent young girl, Sylvester allows himself to be blackmailed... It is then discovered that a robbery has taken place at the bank of which Mr Sylvester is president, involving locked boxes to which only a very few people have access - including Edward Sylvester and his nephew, Bertram, both of whom, for different reasons, were in desperate need of a large sum of money. In the face of these evil appearances, Sylvester steadfastly insists upon a police investigation, and the identification of the guilty party - whatever the consequences...

It is the bank robbery that turns The Sword Of Damocles briefly into a mystery; although Ebernezer Gryce's contribution goes no further than determining that no outsider could have committed it. The guilty party is eventually identified, but this is really only a side-issue to the main narrative of Edward Sylvester's dark secret and its impact upon the people closest to him. This novel is, as I have said, a melodrama verging on a sensation novel, and is written in a style exaggerated even by Anna Katharine Green's usual standards. Though definitely not for all tastes, if the individual can successfully navigate through the excessive verbiage this work does have some rather interesting things to say about sin and repentence and acts of contrition, and the question of how much punishment is "enough". On the other hand, it is likely that the modern reader will find the central relationship between Sylvester and Paula, and their back-and-forthing over whether they are to be father and daughter or husband and wife, just a little creepy. The Sword Of Damocles also illustrates something I've noticed before about American mystery novels of this period, and indeed for the several decades following: a fixation upon money amounting to obsession. In this case we have the world of banking and investment as a backdrop, scenes set amongst New York's social (read: financial) elite, constant discussion of the making and losing of fortunes, and theft, fraud and embezzlement dominating the plot where we might ordinarily expect to find murder. For all this novel's talk about love and honour, from the opening scene of Bertram's need of a fortune in a hurry to its closure with a surprise inheritance for Paula, there is barely a moment in it that does not boil down to an issue of dollars and cents.

    "Mr Sylvester," she suddenly asked, "are there to be found in this city, men occupying honorable positions and as such highly esteemed, who like Damocles of old, may be said to sit under the constant terror of a falling sword in the shape of some possible disclosure, that if made, would ruin their position before the world forever?"
    Mr Sylvester started as if he had been shot. "Paula!" cried he, and instantly was silent again. He did not look at his wife, but if he had, he would have perceived that even her fair skin was capable of blanching to a yet more startling whiteness, and that her sleepy eyes could flash open with something like expression in their lazy depths.

Yes, yes, I know: I've got a nerve accusing anyone else of "excessive verbiage", haven't I?? :)

>>#112

Hi, Karen. Apparently between the marketing incident and libel suits brought against two of his stories, Wallace cost his paper about sixty thousand pounds before it managed to get rid of him. Fiscal responsibility was definitely not his long suit. :)

Finished The Reckoning by Joan Conquest for TIOLI #2.

Dear me.

Now reading Vanderlyn's Adventure aka The House By The Sea by Marie Belloc Lowndes for TIOLI #14.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles - Convalescing after being wounded on the battlefields of 1917, Lt Arthur Hastings is invited to spend some time at Styles Court in Sussex, where he has not been since he was a boy. Styles itself and the family money are controlled by the elderly step-mother of John and Lawrence Cavendish, who has recently dismayed her relatives by marrying a much younger man, Alfred Inglethorp, whom none of them can stand. Hastings finds himself surrounded by tensions. Evelyn Howard, Mrs Inglethorp's secretary, departs after losing her temper and speaking her mind on the subject of Alfred; John Cavendish and his wife, Mary, are estranged; and Mrs Inglethorp has a violent quarrel with someone the others hope rather than know is her husband. That evening, Alfred Inglethorp goes out, which relieves some of the strain. At dawn the next morning, cries are heard from Mrs Inglethorp's room. When the locked door is broken in, the others find her gripped by wracking convulsions. Uttering only her husband's name, she dies... The doctors refuse to issue a death certificate and the legal machinery begins to move, while Hastings takes action of his own. Living in the nearby village, one of Mrs Inglethorp's many charity works, is a group of war refugees from Belgium, including a former police detective by the name of Hercule Poirot...

My 2013 re-visiting of one of my long-standing comfort authors, Agatha Christie, begins naturally enough with her first novel from 1920 - which was also the novel that introduced to the world Hercule Poirot and his spectacular range of personal tics. (Quite a number of which Christie later regretted, if the good-natured self-mockery inherent in the character of Ariadne Oliver is anything to go by.) The Mysterious Affair At Styles represents a remarkably assured debut for Christie, in which she exhibits both her grasp of the demands of the genre and an immediate mastery of the kind of sleight-of-hand necessary to make these novels works. Her talent in this area is the reason why Christie's novels stand up so well to re-reading; her skilful misdirection of the reader, and the smokescreen provided by the narrative of the bumbling and inexplicably self-satisfied Arthur Hastings, are something to be savoured, even when - particularly when - you already know whodunnit. In addition to its detective story, The Mysterious Affair At Styles also offers the modern reader a fascinating glimpse of life in England during WWI, particularly for women, with references to Mary Cavendish's work with "the land army", Cynthia Murdoch's pharmacy position at a hospital run by the Red Cross, and Mrs Inglethorp's endless schemes for war relief and her at-home economies, such as strict recycling.

There is, perhaps, more shock than grief over Mrs Inglethorp's death - but as for whodunnit, no-one at Styles has any doubt about that. Certain that Alfred Inglethorp married Emily Cavendish only for her money, and probably with murder on his mind from the start, the rest of the household waits for the evidence of his guilt to emerge. Hercule Poirot, however, is not so sure. The description of Mrs Inglethorp's final convulsions make him suspect that she was poisoned with strychine, as the autopsy later proves; which raises the question of how and when the strychnine, a fast-acting poison, could have been administered. Poirot also finds evidence that Mrs Inglethorp destroyed her will on the afternoon before her death - and grows increasingly certain that it was not, in fact, her husband with whom she quarrelled on that day. Moreover, it is evident that Mrs Inglethorp's despatch case has been broken into, and a document stolen from it. However, when it is discovered that someone matching Alfred Inglethorp's description purchased strychnine from a local chemist's, and when Inglethorp cannot - or will not - provide an alibi for the time of the purchase, the confusing details of the case are simply swept aside. The police arrive at Styles with a warrant for Inglethorp's arrest, only to be stopped in their tracks by Poirot, who has discovered the slightly disreputable reason that Inglethorp will not account for his whereabouts. This alibi clears Inglethorp of suspicion, and leaves the rest of the household to confront the fact that one of them must be the murderer...

"Oh, yes, mon ami, I would do what I say." Poirot got up and laid his hand upon my shoulder. His physiognomy underwent a complete change. Tears came into his eyes. "In all this, you see, I think of that poor Mrs Inglethorp who is dead. She was not extravagantly loved---no. But she was very good to us Belgians---I owe her a debt. Let me tell you this, Hastings. She would never forgive me if I let Alfred Inglethorp, her husband, be arrested now---when a word from me could save him!"

Nice review. I love Poirot stories.

Thanks, Ren. Me, too! :)

Ahem, I went to thumbs up your reviews and strangely, they are not showing up on the book's pages. Am I going to have to break the cat out already?

Oh, it's not going to happen: my reviews are either too long, or cross-referenced to other stuff in my thread to make sense to "outsiders", or, more rarely, there are enough reviews of a particular book already.

So do your worst!!

Seriously, I appreciate the push but you visiting here occasionally is all the thumb I want. :)

Too long?! Your review are not too long.

OK, I will try and keep up with your thread better this year than I did last. There is always your blog too - which I do read, believe it or not, although I never comment.

Oh, well done with that one, Liz! I read that one many, many years ago. I really need to do some Agatha Christie re-reads this year.

# 117 interesting point that Christie came to dislike some of Poirots characteristics. I wonder if that happens with writers of other serial fiction which have the same central character

I really am going to start the Thorndyke series one day and I've downloaded The Old Man in the Corner.

#86 So cute!

#101 Friends have recommended Edgar Wallace's Four Just Men before but I'd never heard the story about the prize money before. Don't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him, but I suppose we're much more used to small print and legal terms in those sorts of things nowadays. Sounds like an unusual book too.

#104 Bleat! (That's supposed to be a goat)

#113 I spotted the opportunity for a shared read of The Sword of Damocles so I'm hoping to read it this month.

#117 Great review of The Mysterious Affair at Styles Liz and I definitely agree in some ways it was more fun to read knowing the solution.

Great, great reviews as always Liz. Some prolific writers there to go with your prolific reading this year.
Have a lovely weekend and I hope you are able to keep warm in the arctic conditions in Sydney.

124, Mercury57 > I know that Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of writing Sherlock Holmes, which is why he killed of his detective in The Final Problem. However, there was such a public outcry over it that eventually he started writing Sherlock stories again - 1 set before The Final Problem and then actually showing Sherlock wasn't dead in The Adventure of the Empty House, after which he wrote about a dozen more Sherlock stories.

Visitors! Lovely, lovely visitors!

>>#122

That's sweet of you, Stasia, but let's face it: I do go on and on. That's why I prefer to confine my reviews to the 75ers, where people know and understand about my logorrhea. :)

Your visits to both are very much appreciated!

>>#123

Hi, Julia! There's a lot of reading and re-reading of Agatha Christie going on at the moment, so you'd be in good company.

>>#124 & #127

Hi, Karen and Samantha. This is one of the penalties of unanticipated success - having given Poirot his speech patterns and mannerisms and habits at the outset, Agatha was then stuck with them for the next fifty years! I don't know if it was dislike so much as exasperation, some of it at herself. This is why in the Ariadne Oliver novels, there are scenes where we find Ariadne tearing her hair out over her detective, Sven Hjerson, a Finnish vegetarian. "Why did I make him a Finn? I don't know anything about Finland!"

>>#125

Hi, Judas Heather!

I really enjoyed The Four Just Men, although its morality is certainly twisted. Wallace was in financial trouble most of his life, why is one reason he wrote so prolifically, but even for him that was an impressive blunder.

I saw you'd listed The Sword Of Damocles! I'll be interested to hear what you make of it. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting.

I think a good detective novel gives twice: once it fools you, once it entertains you. I know some people think there's nothing left in a mystery novel after you know whodunnit, but I really enjoy the hindsight experience.

It's funny: I must have been twelve or thirteen when I first read Agatha Christie properly (my high school library had a full collection), and I remember when I read The Mysterious Affair At Styles being completely baffled about what "spills" were - fireplace operation not being an area of common knowledge in this corner of the world. No Google in those days, either! :)

>>#126

Thank you, Paul! Oh, what I wouldn't give for some artic conditions just at present! They predicted 45C yesterday, though fortunately it didn't quite eventuate; there's a nasty hot bite in the air early this morning, though. But I really shouldn't complain just about the heat when we've had such dreadful bushfires in some areas. :(

# 128. Loved the comment from Ariadne.
# 127 Ian Rankin has just dine something similar with his John Rebus character - bringing out from retirement.

#128: logorrhea? Is that a real word?

Hmm, I’ve been here before, the birds are striking and memorable, but apparently I didn’t drop a comment.

50: I'm beginning to think that a sensible resolution for 2013 would be to cut back on the Victorian true crime
Ah, yes, we all have that problem...

86: Wha... those were your 2102 reviews? You are noble. I cut my losses and started fresh.

121: Oh, it's not going to happen: my reviews are either too long, or cross-referenced to other stuff in my thread to make sense to "outsiders"
So what? Outsiders can skip over the parts that don’t make sense.

>>#129

It's like the fictional character becomes a slightly annoying member of the family, who the author ends up spending time with whether s/he wants to or not.

>>#130

Logorrhea: "a communication disorder resulting in incoherent talkativeness". So, yeah. :)

>>#131

Hi, Katherine! Thanks for delurking.

I'm afraid I'm too OCD to just cut my losses.

Well...I think posted reviews should be informative, or at least not confusing, and my habit of scattering references and comparisons to other books through my reviews is not exactly helpful to others, even if it does help me get my thoughts in order. :)

Finished Vanderlyn's Adventure by Marie Belloc Lowndes for TIOLI #14.

Now reading The Case Of Miss Elliott by the Baroness Emmuska Orczy, the second of her collections featuring The Old Man In The Corner; this is for TIOLI #8.

132: my habit of scattering references and comparisons to other books through my reviews is not exactly helpful to others
Oh, I think it's actually quite helpful, provides context and suggests other books that might be of interest. No pressure though. :-)

>>#134 I'll keep that in mind. :)

I'm *waving* at you Liz! I have The Mysterious Affair at Styles on track for this month. I will come back and read your review when I'm done.

***WAVING BACK***

Hey, the more visits, the better! :)

Finished The Case Of Miss Elliott for TIOLI #8.

Now reading Patty At Home, the second in Carolyn Wells' Patty Fairfield series, also for TIOLI #8.

Finished Patty At Home for TIOLI #8.

Now reading Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, for TIOLI #3.

I'm reading that too!

Yes, I've been keeping your comments on the narrative style in mind. I see what you mean but it isn't bothering me - perhaps because it's reminiscent of a lot of 19th century writing? I'm quite comfortable with that.

I should be too. I just can't put my finger on why I'm not thrilled will the book. Maybe I had some kind of expectation that it would be more like Stevenson's The Black Arrow.

I'm enjoying it but from a slightly skewed perspective, since it's the novel's background against the Monmouth Rebellion and the reign of James that brought me to it at this time.

Hey Liz. Just stopping by to say The British Library is republishing another rare Victorian crime novel, Revelations of a Lady Detetctive by William Stephens Hayward. Have you heard of it before?



http://publishing.bl.uk/book/revelations-lady-detective

Woot! Sounds like there is a Doctor Thorne read happening in March! I've read it but plan to thoroughly enjoy following along : ).

>>#144

Whoo!! Heard of it, yes, but it's one of the ones that has never been available up until now - thanks!!

I'm actually chasing the British Library over something else at the moment... :)

>>#145

Hi, Nancy! Yes, it sounds like we have a good group gathering. It will be great to have you there!

Well, that was fun: Sydney's hottest ever day - 45.8 C = 114.44 F.

And today it's about 20 C (68 F).

Welcome to the new normality.

But I did finish a book! - Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, for TIOLI #3.

Now reading A Queen After Death by William Harman Black, for TIOLI #12.

oh my goodness. How awful that it is so hot there!

Hi, Jean - how are things in Florida? It's been pretty horrible but I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about dealing with the heat when so many people are battling bushfires and in some cases have lost their homes. :(

Oof, that's hot! I'm glad it's cooled off for you now. And the bushfires are so terrible to hear about. It feels as though the whole universe is mad at us right now.

I'm not sure we can really blame it if it is...

The Dream Doctor - The premise of this third book in Arthur B. Reeve's series about Professor Craig Kennedy is that after much clamour from the public for more information, the journalist Walter Jameson is given the assignment of attaching himself to his friend and roommate and writing a detailed account of a month in the life of the famous "scientific detective". What follows is perhaps the most hectic four weeks of Kennedy's career, with the detective moving from case to case to case with barely time to draw breath in between, and Walter struggling to keep up with him, let alone get his stories written. The punchline finds Walter giving fervent thanks that the month in question has only thirty days, and not thirty-one.

The Dream Doctor is, therefore, a short story collection written like a novel, with Kennedy's cases dovetailing and overlapping and no clear demarcation (or chapter breaks) between them. The cases themselves are wildly various, dealing with everything from murder to suspicious death (often with an insurance company reluctant to pay up in the background) to kleptomania to espionage and military sabotage to drug trafficking to a Tong war to blood-theft to a case of attempted body-snatching. As always, there are scattered references throughout to the work of real doctors, scientists and criminologists, including in this instance "Dr Freud of Vienna" and "Dr Jung of Zurich", as well as Henri Becquerel, Nikola Tesla and Alphonse Bertillon; while much of the volume's interest lies in the appearance of prototype examples of technology that today we take for granted, including blood-pressure monitors, portable recording devices, security cameras and lie-detectors. There is also a ride in an early-model submarine that gives Walter Jameson (and, I confess, this reader) the claustrophobic horrors. The "new science" of ballistics makes an appearance, but we note the strange neglect of fingerprint evidence, even while the other, earlier methods of criminal identification, which by 1914 had largely been abandoned in Britain and Europe, are still being used.

As might be expected with such an extensive collection, the quality of the individual stories in The Dream Doctor does vary. The title story is probably the weakest, turning on simplistic dream interpretation and some very dubious female psychology. On the other hand, the tale that concludes the volume is a powerful story of the false imprisonment and near execution of an innocent man, which explores the contemporary limitations of forensic science, particularly in the hands of non-experts. The grim descriptions of the prevailing conditions in Ossining (Sing Sing) Prison, and of the electric chair to which Kennedy's client has been wrongly condemned, suggest that Arthur B. Reeve harboured severe reservations about this aspect of the judicial process.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this collection overall, published on the eve of WWI, is its glimpse into the American mindset at the time. While one story does deal with the machinations of a certain "secret society", on the whole there is very little interest shown in European affairs, but rather a sense that what goes on "over there" is of no concern to America. Conversely, a wary eye is kept at all times upon "the Orient" and upon the "clever little Orientals" who happen to be operating on American soil. We can probably forgive the stance taken towards "the Japs" in a tale of industrial espionage, but it is harder to swallow in another story, when the relevation that "the Jap" of whom our heroes have been so suspicious is in fact an undercover detective on the side of the angels does nothing to alter their attitude towards him, even when he is killed in the line of duty. Curiously, however, the volume's greatest virulence is directed towards the Chinese, apparently for reasons summed up for us by Walter Jameson: "I have never yet been able to understand what the fascination is that some Orientals have over certain American girls." Given the prevailing tone of this story, the reader is not particularly surprised when the Chinese man in question turns out to be one of the worse villains in the entire collection, nor when the girl ends up dead - and nor, for that matter, when her brother is more intent on keeping her shameful engagement a secret than on bringing her killer to justice.

This same story, by the way, makes it three-for-three in terms of the Kennedy series' peculiar fixation upon recreational drugs. The previous two collections found Our Heroes partaking of peyote and hashish (with graphic descriptions of the drugs' effects from Walter); this one finds them in an opium den, compelled to at least pretend to be sampling its wares - although as it turns out (and to coin a phrase) they "did not inhale"...

    "There is ample evidence, I have found, that conine or a substance possessing most, if not all, of its properties is at times actually produced in animal tissues by decomposition. And the fact is, I believe, that a number of cases have arisen, in which the poisonous alkaloid was at first supposed to have been discovered were really mistakes."
    The idea was startling in the extreme. Here was Kennedy, as it were, overturning what had been considered the last word in science as it had been laid down by the experts for the prosecution, opinions so impregnable that courts and juries had not hesitated to condemn a man to death.

#150 Despite the ravages of Climate Change, this year has been not too bad in Florida, at least not in our part of the state. No fires last year, and a good summer, without soaring temperatures, although around us states did have that. I hope this year isn't too bad either. We are struggling with drought though.

I'm enjoying your reviews.

153: Perhaps the most interesting thing about this collection overall, published on the eve of WWI, is its glimpse into the American mindset at the time.
Yes. Thanks.

#153: Nice review, Liz!

I do not know where the character of Jameson hails from, but if it was California or places on the West Coast, it could explain the animosity toward the Chinese people. There were quite a few laws on the books in the early 20th century regarding Chinese immigration, marriages, etc.

Like the sound of your second day temperature much more than the first. No point breaking records if it is those sorts of records. 68 degrees sounds wonderful though. Good reading weather in fact.

Have a lovely weekend.

#153 Wonderful comments on The Dream Doctor, Liz. I am in awe of both the speed at which you read and the ease with which you record your thoughts on selections.

Hello, all! Thank you for stopping by! :)

>>#154

Hello, Jean - thank you! I suppose we have to be grateful for small mercies when we get them. We've suffered through bad drought here in the past, so I know what you're going through.

>>#155

This is why I like to read novels from a particular period, instead of modern historical novels set in that period. I find it fascinating what authors tell you about themselves and their times, often without even realising they're doing it.

>>#156

Thanks, Stasia! These stories are based in New York; Kennedy teaches at Columbia.

The strange thing here is that the series as a whole is quite open-minded: it's always preaching progressive thought, and collaboration, and international cooperation, and then suddenly BAM! - we get this large dose of genuine racism. It's very jolting in context.

>>#157

It was cool, drizzly and overcast yesterday, Paul - and I'm sure a grey Saturday has never been so enthusiastically welcomed!

>>#158

Hi, Nancy! Thank you, but I certainly wouldn't say "ease": I spend a scary amount of time fiddling with these reviews and trying to get my thoughts in order! :)

The Reckoning - I hardly know where to begin with this peculiar and rather disturbing 1931 novel by Joan Conquest; perhaps by saying that this is one of those instances where we need to tread a careful line between the author's beliefs and the author's conclusions, and not aim criticism in the wrong direction. I don't doubt the sincerity of the feelings that prompted the writing of this novel, but the outcome seems to me disingenuous at best; at worst, dishonest and rather cruel.

Part of the difficulty of dealing fairly with The Reckoning is that it suffers from an advanced case of "science marches on": this novel is, in its entirety, a revolted and furious recoil from the mere idea of scientifically-assisted human reproduction, and was apparently inspired by a report of a piece of contemporary research in this area. If fertility treatments and techniques such as in vitro fertilisation are not exactly a commonplace today, they are at least concepts familiar enough to possibly make it difficult for many contemporary readers to put themselves in the novel's mindset. As it happens, the author mis-imagines how assisted reproduction might work: she envisages not implantation of an embryo conceived outside of the body, followed by natural development and childbirth, but rather full gestation in the laboratory in an artificial womb, following conception via donated ova and sperm. But I doubt whether a grasp of the eventual reality would have altered Miss Conquest's opinions in any way. As it is, she denounces the very idea of a "scientific baby" as the ultimate blasphemy. The novel's opening paragraph, in which the author roundly criticises God for not summoning up a cataclysmic disaster and obliterating the scientists who developed the process and all their works, entirely sets the tone for the next 343 pages, which assert that a child created via scientific intervention must necessarily be born without a soul.

I feel the need to reiterate here that I doubt neither Miss Conquest's religious faith nor her sincerity with respect to this novel. The problem is, she's so sure she's right that she falls into the trap of not caring what tactics she resorts to in order to make her arguments - the end justifies the means. Indeed, the further I read into The Reckoning, the more difficult I found it not to start comparing Joan Conquest to another author not exactly known for the even-handedness of her approach: Ayn Rand; not, obviously, with regard to either this novel's subject matter or its religious underpinnings, but rather with respect to Miss Conquest's relentlessly polemical tone, the narrowness of her vision, her refusal to consider any other viewpoint, and her willingness to use any weapon at hand to attack the people she views as her enemies - which is to say, anyone who disagrees with her in any way. The level of subtlety operating in The Reckoning is best exemplified by our early introduction to two of the novel's putative identification characters, a minister and his wife called John and Mary Steadfast. Mary is heavily pregnant, and the shock of the mere idea of "scientific babies" causes her to go into labour - or, as Miss Conquest prefers to call it, to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death (her capitals) - and give birth to a daughter called Faith. And it gets even more heavy-handed from there. It is not enough for the author to tell us that she considers the process of "scientific birth" a sin, and everyone connected with it a sinner: instead, she repeats those two words almost on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis over several chapters; while, presumably for greater emphasis still, she also uses an annoying writing style. In which she breaks her sentences up. Into several pieces. Like this.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I feel that I should admit to being one of Miss Conquest's "enemies", and the target of many of her attacks. I'm what my sister-in-law calls a CBC - "Childless By Choice" - but since I'm comfortable with that decision and the reasons for it, most of the author's arrows bounced harmlessly off my armour. At the same time, I can easily imagine that people suffering from fertility problems, or who were born via fertility treatments or IVF - or, for that matter, who were adopted - might find this novel extremely hurtful. There is a very slender corridor of "rightness" in this view of the world, and anyone who sits outside it is not only wrong, but quite possibly damned. And that brings us back to my original point about The Reckoning's underlying dishonesty: in pursuit of her thesis Miss Conquest gives us "good" people who want children and "bad" people who do not; conspicuous by their absence are the people who you'd think this novel would actually be about - those who want children but can't have them; the people, in other words, who today do resort to scientific assistance.

Instead, the central figure in this melodrama is Clara Wean, a woman "silly, selfish and shallow" as we are told ad nauseum, who is so fixated upon her own beauty and perfect body that she refuses to bear the child that her baronet-husband desperately wants. (She has convinced him that she's sterile, though I'm not sure why that would mean they never have sex.) The idea of a "scientific baby", created without pregnancy or childbirth, is therefore appealing to Clara, a way of fulfilling society's demands without inconvenience to herself. So far, so good. The novel then takes an utterly bewildering turn which, to my way of thinking, undermines its whole premise. Instead of Clara arranging for a scientific baby and passing it off as her husband's heir, she goes ahead with the process and brings home the child she has "adopted" - even though this in no way solves her marital dilemma, and even though she has no personal desire for a child. Ironically, given the text's endless sneers at Clara's lack of intelligence, her decision to go ahead is presented in terms of intellectual curiosity. (This suggests to me that Joan Conquest didn't know what was involved in harvesting human ova at the time; no way Clara Wean would put herself through that.) But even the selfish, shallow, unintelligent Clara cannot ignore one overriding concern - the first question that comes into the mind of everyone upon their first hearing about scientific birth: "Does a child created this way have a soul?" Throughout the novel, no-one - not the scientists themselves, not the medical or legal professions, not even the church - is able to respond satisfactorily to this momentous question, but the novel itself has no doubt: its answer is a thunderous NO.

The child grown in the laboratory, a girl named Crystal, is beautiful and physically perfect except in two details: she has one pointed ear - which, we are told, is literally "the mark of the devil" - and icy blue eyes that are the window to her lack of a soul. This is, I think, the most distressing part of this disturbing book: with full authorial approval, person after person recoils from the child, knowing "instinctively" that there is "something wrong" with her. No-one wants to spend time with her, or even hold her; she grows up entirely without love; most the adults around her, without any consciousness of their cruelty, refer to this cuckoo in the nest not as "her", but as "it". It never seems to occur to Miss Conquest that what she has here is a self-fulfilling prophecy: that any child, with or without a soul, who is shunned and neglected in this manner will in all likelihood turn out emotionally distant and maladjusted - even "evil".

Towards the end of The Reckoning, when Crystal Wean meets one of her "scientific godfathers" in purgatory (don't ask), we hear that "the biggest sin of all" was "letting you loose on the world". From this we might conclude that Crystal has been responsible for some global catastrophe, some terrible act which has impacted countless innocent lives - but we would be quite wrong.

Honestly---is there anything more tiresomely unimaginative than "evil" in a woman being defined entirely in terms of her sexual (mis)conduct? It is, we are solemnly assured, due to Crystal's lack of a soul that she manifests an early and (in Miss Conquest's opinion) unhealthy interest in sex; that she surrenders her virginity out of curiosity; that she has several casual affairs; that she contemplates marrying for wealth and position instead of love; and that she cheats on her deluded fiancé.

Because no woman with a soul has ever done any of those things---right?

Behind the main story-line of The Reckoning is an ongoing rumination on love, marriage, sex and society - and amazingly enough, this manages to be even more wrongheaded than the story proper, being both self-contradictory and philosophically (and morally) dubious. We are not surprised to find motherhood held up here not merely as a personal choice, but as a sacred and noble calling, nor to hear women criticised for choosing to work; but at the same time there is an odd contempt expressed for women generally in this novel. We are told openly that women rarely have anything more to offer than "youth" and "beauty", and that this being the case, they'd better grab a husband at the first opportunity; while side-by-side with the text's glorification of motherhood and housekeeping sits an sneering attitude of, Poor little things, it's really all they're fit for.

Likewise, when it isn't cooing approvingly at romantic love and marriage, the text is dwelling with equal approval upon "breeding" (in the sense of hereditary and pride in the ancestors, which I suspect is why the novel is largely set in England rather than Miss Conquest's native America) and upon various declarations by "well-bred" persons that they would never dream of marrying this person, or uniting their family with that family. Marriage specifically for the creation of children is held up to the reader as the one right way to live; yet the novel spends an uncomfortable amount of time dwelling upon procreation gone wrong, in the form of deformities and birth defects. It also seriously supports the idea of the mother's state of mind during pregancy as the determining factor in the child's character and mental development. But most bizarre, and most horrifying, of all is that having expressed outrage at the outset at the suggestion that "scientific birth" will allow the gradual elimination of "undesirable" human traits, this novel explicitly supports the idea of enforced sterilisation of the "unfit" - though it never bothers to define "unfit" for us, or suggests who might have the task of making that determination.

Joan Conquest was a successful author in her day, though on the basis of The Reckoning I hardly know whether I want to read any more of her work or not. She was, I gather, famous as an indefatigible traveller, and received much praise for including in her novels vivid scenes of "local colour" drawn from personal experience and observation. We find this in The Reckoning, which spreads its story across England, Central Europe, Morocco and Spain - though unfortunately, its main manifestation of "local colour" is a thirty-page long, nightmarishly detailed description of a bullfight. (And just when I thought this novel couldn't possibly offend me any more, too!)

However, all this - the questionable philosophy, the self-contradiction, the graphically disembowelled horses, all of it - pales into insignificance beside the culmination of the novel's main plot-thread.

While Crystal is busy wreaking havoc on the world {*cough*}, and travelling towards what is, from the very outset, her manifest destiny, God belatedly comes to the author's party by tracking down everyone involved in any capacity in the scientific creation of the soulless young woman, sometimes settling for publicly humiliating and ruining them, but more often killing them off one by one and in a variety of colourfully gruesome ways. (Clara Wean (i) has her beautiful face ruined in a car accident, (ii) goes blind from shock after seeing herself in a mirror, and consequently (iii) falls off a balcony.) All of which serves merely as an appetiser for this novel's mindboggling climax - one which left me torn between genuine anger and helpless, hysterical laughter - its suggestion that a woman's immortal soul manifests itself physically as her uterus.

"Between imbecile and dog where do I stand? Not one of those priests could tell me. I've no charity, either, no kindness, friendship or sweetness. I've nothing, nothing, nothing that men love women for but I'll tell you what I have got." Crystal shook the bed in her rage. "I've cruelty. I'm a liar and I've always been a petty thief but I'm cruel first. I'm afraid of myself sometimes. I could tell you things about myself that'd make you sick. I would tell you if I thought it would really hurt you. You and your vile selfishness! You never worried about me once you'd got me---got me made... And all the time I was lying when I could have told the truth. Stealing when I could have paid for the sweets and the silk stockings and the gloves. Cheating because I wanted to. Nothing but cheating. And why? You can't tell me, you selfish, silly fool. But I can tell you. Because of this." She pulled her hair back roughly. "Look! The devil's mark. Everyone knows that the pointed ear is the devil's ear and I know that the devil made me."

And before anyone says anything...that *is* the short review... :)

#159: BAM! - we get this large dose of genuine racism. It's very jolting in context.

I can see how it would be!

#161: I know that! :)

Actually, three more random things occur to me with respect to The Reckoning (sorry!):

As I say, it seems that this novel was inspired - or provoked - by a report of some real research in this area, but I've been unable to identify anything relevant. I thought it might have been some of the early work of Gregory Pinkus, one of the major players in the development of the oral contraceptive pill; he did conduct some pioneering experiments in in vitro fertilisation, working with rabbits, but that wasn't until 1934. All I know about the research in question is that it was conducted in Cincinnati; if anyone has any idea what it might have been, I'd be fascinated to know.

It struck me while reading that the plot of The Reckoning bears a suspicious similarity to that of Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel, Alraune, in which a scientist likewise creates a soulless woman (funny how they're always female, isn't it?) by impregnating a prostitute with the semen of an executed criminal; a story drawn in turn from legends from the Middle Ages about the origin of the mandrake plant. It's possible that The Reckoning was intended as an updating of Ewers' novel - but the fact that the latter was never widely translated into English makes me wonder whether Miss Conquest's readers were supposed to recognise the similarity between the two...or whether perhaps I should add plagiarism to my various charges against her. (Alraune has been filmed several times; the silent version from 1928 starring Paul Wegener and Brigitte Helm is the best.)

And finally--- The use of an artificial womb in this novel had the unfortunate side-effect of inducing John Cleese's voice constantly in the back of my head while I was reading it: "You can't have a baby, Stan, you haven't got a womb. Where's the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?"

Wow, what a great job of explaining not only that you hated the book but why you hated it. I have to say, I think I'd feel the same way. And yet, I was hanging on every word of your review, a reaction Ms. Conquest could only hope for. Well done, Liz!

>>#162

I know that!

Smarty-pants. :)

>>#164

Thanks, Julia - that was a tough one! I know it's excessive even by my standards, but anything less didn't seem appropriate.

I can imagine it would be tough. On the one hand, you want to make allowances for all the things people didn't know back then about science. On the other hand, you can't help but be appalled at the way an author tries to "rig the game" by being so one-sided with her viewpoint. The best books have some ambiguity even if they eventually come down on one side or the other of a controversial issue.

#147 45.8 C? Yikes! I'm happy to say I don't think I've ever been anywhere that hot. I hope it stays cooler.

Great review of The Dream Doctor. I'm not sure why I hadn't done this before but I've downloaded the first Craig Kennedy book to my kindle. There to join the other mystery series recommended by Liz which I haven't got round to starting yet - oops.

#160 Very good and balanced review of a book I will definitely be avoiding (as someone who's adopted and has blue eyes - who knows what terrible truths I might discover about myself?)

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I forgot my book.

Bloody Monday mornings...

>>#166

I find it tricky to deal with novels like this because I worry about my criticisms coming across as disrespect for the author's religious views. As for the rest, I'm a live-and-let-live kind of person, so this business of telling people "You WILL be happy this way and no other!" is very alien to my way of thinking.

>>#167

Hi, Heather. I hear you're having the opposite weather problems in Britain - keep warm!

Always a pleasure to have you join me for a series. :)

as someone who's adopted and has blue eyes

So it's okay if I call you "it" from now on, then?? {*rolls eyes*}

Liz, don't forget to check for the pointed ear on Heather...

Whoa. What a, well, I'll just let your eloquent review speak for me. I'll be avoiding this one permanently.

OTOH, I completely understand your feelings about The Mysterious Affair at Styles and would add Murder at the Vicarage, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and the Orient Express to a little list I keep of mysteries that are enjoyable long after one knows the outcome, and has even perhaps memorized different passages.

The pointed ear was another one of the many details that just didn't work as intended. I kept thinking that these days, we'd probably assume she was half-Vulcan and like her the better for it. :)

Hmm. I don't mean to be frightening people off books, but... I'll say this for The Reckoning: it was never dull. I couldn't take my eyes off it, if only in a horrifying-train-wreck sort of way.

Most of the Christies are clever enough to stand up to re-reading, IMO. She's often (rather thoughtlessly, I think) criticised for writing stereotypical characters but I actually find that the ones I turn back to again and again are the ones featuring a character that really stays with me - or even a subplot or plot twist that moves me, which happens surprisingly often - The Moving Finger, The Hollow, Sad Cypress, Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, Cat Among The Pigeons, The Pale Horse, Three Act Tragedy*, among others...

(*that one for the closing punchline)

Vanderlyn's Adventure (UK title: The House By The Sea) - John Vanderlyn, an American vacationing in Europe, forms one of a house party on the French Riviera hosted by the Marchesa Frescobaldi, a kind and generous but unhappily married woman who lives separated from her violent husband. One evening, Vanderlyn and the Marchesa, along with two other guests - Colonel Bernard Bruce, the Marchesa's devoted but honourable follower, and Joan Peveral, a rather shallow and self-absorbed young woman - visit Aboul-Hassan, a magician and fortune-teller. Vanderlyn is a reluctant and sceptical participant, but his doubts are swept away when Aboul-Hassan conjures up for each of his visitors a vision of a decisive moment in their past lives: Vanderlyn finds himself re-living a desperate air-battle during WWI. Each of the four then has his or her fortune told, and Vanderlyn learns that he will soon undergo the crisis of his life. Before the next new moon, he will confront danger - and either emerge from it at the beginning of a life of love and happiness, or die like a rat in a trap... In spite of himself, Vanderlyn is impressed; and when, on the way back to the Marchesa's chateau, the party encounters the aftermath of a car accident, and Vanderlyn meets Dina Hitrowo, a lovely young exile from Russia, he knows that Aboul-Hassan's prophecy has begun to come true...

This 1931 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes is a romantic thriller that is rather too heavy on the romance and rather too light on the thrills. Though John Vanderlyn does finally face the very real possibility of "dying like a rat in a trap", on the whole this novel feels like much ado about nothing; perhaps because Lowndes never seems to come to terms with the fact that Vanderlyn may be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does he fall so desperately in love with Dina Hitrowo because he must, or because he's been told that he will? Perhaps this says more about the way my mind works than it does about the novel in question, but I think I would have enjoyed this story more if it were a bit more cynical. As it is, it takes the traditional, and rather humourless, "romantic" stance that a man's love for a woman gives him a special instinct about her, and that the very fact that he does love her means that she must be as "good" and "innocent" as he needs her to be, no matter what the circumstances suggest to the contrary. However--- Both "good" and "innocent" are relative terms, and open to interpretation. Much against his will, Vanderlyn must finally accept the unpalatable fact that Dina Hitrowo has been involved in some extremely dubious, not to say criminal, activities; yet this aspect of the situation is a matter of small significance to John Vanderlyn beside the question of whether Dina really is what she increasingly seems to be - gasp! - A Woman With A Past. To my mingled amusement and exasperation, the ultimate moral of Vanderlyn's Adventure turned out to be one I've been finding on a regular basis in English writing since (literally) 1682: that a man will forgive a woman anything except a sexual transgression.

From the beginning, in spite of their immediate and mutual attraction, John Vanderlyn finds something worryingly elusive about Dina Hitrowo. At the site of the car accident, Dina insists that she was the driver of the car, yet Vanderlyn is certain that someone else has fled the scene. She introduces her sole companion as her aunt and guardian, the Princess Kyazemsky. The older woman is uninjured, and insists upon journeying on to her own villa by the sea; but as Dina has injured her leg slightly, the Princess begs the Marchesa to have her conveyed to the chateau nearby so that she may be treated and rest. It occurs to Vanderlyn that the Princess is intent upon forcing an acquaintance between Dina and the Marchesa, a manoeuvre in which the girl is a reluctant participant. However, the warm-hearted Marchesa immediately issues the desired invitation. Over the next few days, Vanderlyn finds himself increasingly drawn to Dina, caught by her shifting moods and the glimpses she allows him of a depth of character that constrasts strikingly with the brittle shallowness of Joan Peveral. He cannot help seeing, too, that she is profoundly unhappy, although she withdraws proudly from his attempts to offer sympathy, and leaves the chateau at the first opportunity. Vanderlyn soon learns that the Princess Kyazemsky, at least, has a bad reputation in the surrounding neighbourhood; and when he discovers that both she and Dina are part of a professional gambling syndicate, he thinks that he understands the girl's obvious unhappiness. However, when the chateau becomes the site of a daring jewel robbery, Vanderlyn finds himself in possession of a secret that throws into doubt everything he thinks he knows about Dina - and which may well cost him his life...

Again he began seething with a passion of anger against her, and bitter contempt for himself. Also the core of his heart was filled with the sharpest anguish a lover can feel---that induced by the knowledge of love betrayed. He asked himself how it was that no glimmer of the truth had come to him during those days when he had formed what had become, short as the time had been, a singularly close and intimate tie with Dina Hitrowo. He tried, now, to remember certain things the girl had half suggested and half admitted, which ought to have made him suspect what he now knew she had been---and was...

The Case Of Miss Elliott - When this second volume of stories by the Baroness Orczy featuring The Old Man In The Corner and his sounding-board, Miss Polly Burton, opens, we learn that nothing much has changed since the close of its predecessor, The Old Man In The Corner - not even things that really should have. Miss Burton is not only still working for the Evening Observer, she is apparently still "Miss Burton", too, in spite of her last-paragraph wedding to Mr Richard Frobisher - and much as I would love to believe that she kept both her job and her maiden name after her marriage, I doubt that's the explanation. More imperatively, the flash of insight experienced by Polly at the close of the first volume, which severed the connection between herself and the amateur criminal analyst so that, She has never set eyes on the man in the corner from that day to this, evidently never happened at all.

We gather that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not the only writer to struggle with the retconning involved in giving into popular demand and resurrecting a detective thought safely disposed of by his creator.

What all this frantic back-pedalling means to the reader is that this collection of short stories is very much a case of "more of the same" - which isn't such a bad thing. The stories in The Case Of Miss Elliott most often involve an unsolved murder, although they also embrace theft, fraud, treason and even the nobbling of a racehorse. A few of the tales are amusing in their ingenuity, most notably Who Stole The Black Diamonds?, which involves an elaborate fraud committed by the most unlikely people. Others are disturbing and even chilling, most obviously those in which someone gets away with cold-blooded murder - as in the title case, in which the unfortunate Miss Elliott is betrayed and killed by people she trusts, "two good-looking, highly respectable and respected men", as Polly puts it, and The Lisson Grove Mystery, in which a young woman colludes in the murder-for-profit of her invalid father. While occasionally we might feel that the victims only get what they deserve - both The Tremarn Case and The Ayrsham Mystery involve attempted blackmail - other stories end uncomfortably with the guilty party managing to shift suspicion from themselves and onto an innocent person, as in The Tragedy In Dartmoor Terrace. Some of the cases turn on an initial misunderstanding of what has actually happened - in The Tragedy Of Barnsdale Manor, a robbery-homicide is actually a robbery and a homicide - while in others we find The Old Man waving aside the police's choice of "obvious suspect" and reanalysing events to show that, looked at from the correct psychological angle, only one person could possibly be guilty.

The keynote of this collection is a rather un-English cynicism which puts me in mind of The Strange Schemes Of Randolph Mason, particularly when The Old Man speaks scornfully of the police and admiringly of various individuals who have found a way of committing a serious crime and eluding the law. Polly herself, in contrast, tends to be shocked and dismayed by The Old Man's conclusions - but also convinced. By this stage in their strange friendship, Polly's need to sound her eccentric acquaintance upon the most notorious crimes of the day has become something approaching an addiction; an addiction that she feeds by enabling The Old Man's own "habit", and offering him tantalising new pieces of string to play with in exchange for his shedding of light upon mysteries that have baffled the entire country.

    Quite by chance I found myself one morning sitting before a marble-topped table in the A.B.C. shop. I really wondered for the moment what had brought me there, and felt cross with myself for being there at all. Having sampled my tea and roll, I soon buried myself in the capacious folds of my Daily Telegraph.
    "A glass of milk and a cheesecake, please," said a well-known voice. The next moment I was staring into the corner, straight at a pair of mild, watery blue eyes, hidden behind great bone-rimmed spectacles, and at ten long bony fingers, round which a piece of string was provokingly intertwined. There he was as usual, wearing - for it was chilly - a huge tweed ulster, of a pattern too lofty to be described. Smiling, bland, apologetic, he sat before me as the living embodiment of the reason why I had come to the A.B.C. shop that morning.

Here's an odd thing: the local version of the recent re-release of The Case Of Miss Elliott (on the left) has a typo on the cover! Or perhaps it was just a case of the typesetter trying to squeeze the title onto three lines instead of four?

    

Patty At Home - This second entry in Carolyn Wells' series about the young Patty Fairfield picks up where its predecessor left off, and finds Patty and her father in the midst of a momentous decision regarding where to buy a house and settle down. While the thought of New York City is attractive, both in terms of Mr Fairfield's business and what it offers Patty with regard to educational opportunities, in the end the alternative choice is made of Vernondale, New Jersey, where Patty's favourite aunt, uncle and cousins already live. After considering several possibilities, Mr Fairfield selects and renovates a large, rambling house only a few blocks from the Elliotts' own home. Another significant decision to be made is who is to run the household? Having spent the previous year absorbing lessons in what to do - and what not to do - during her visits to her various cousins, Patty is eager to hold her father to his earlier suggestion that when they find their home, she be put in charge of its management. In spite of his natural reservations regarding Patty's youth and inexperience, Mr Fairfield agrees to let her try housekeeping - comforting himself with the reflection that his wise, good-natured sister, Mrs Elliott, who has already taken Patty under her wing in domestic matters, is only a few streets away. With perhaps more enthusiasm than skill, Patty throws herself into the running of the household...

The second of the "Patty" stories is a more overtly humorous, less didactic effort than Patty Fairfield - although there are still plenty of life-lessons for its young heroine to absorb. There is a touch of Pollyanna about the cheerful Patty and her ability to find something to enjoy in any situation, but for all that she is far from faultless; and most of what she learns about housekeeping stems from her own misjudgements and errors. In particular, Patty evinces a taste for useless, elaborate display, both with respect to her decorations and her menus, that causes her father some concern, particularly when it is accompanied by rookie mistakes such as forgetting to order a joint for Sunday: all the more embarrassing when Mr Fairfield brings a guest to dinner. It is one of Patty's strengths, however, that she rarely makes the same error twice. In the meantime, Patty attends school; does charity work; makes an unlikely friend in the angular form of her eccentric spinster-neighbour, Miss Rachel Daggett; spends much time with her fellow-members of "The Tea Club" - and with the Tea Club's "honorary members", that is, the boys who aren't strictly allowed to join; attends parties, picnics and dances; and, as always, has a great deal of fun...

Perhaps the striking thing about Patty At Home to the modern reader is Patty's pleasingly equitable relationship with her two, somewhat unlikely live-in servants. Nor surprisingly, Patty has some initial trouble finding people willing to work for so young a mistress, but finally has the good fortune to discover young Pansy Potts, who knows nothing about domestic service but is intelligent and quick to learn (at least when she can be dragged out of the conservatory, where she spends all her spare time with the flowers and plants that, as her name suggests, she adores), and a black cook called Mancy - or Emancipation Proclamation Jackson, to give the lady her "Sunday name". While Mancy is generally willing to take orders from Patty, she is not afraid to speak her mind to the girl when necessary, which lectures Patty sensibly receives as another valuable lesson. Also notable is a scene in which both Pansy and Mancy reject Patty's offer of expensive gew-gaws with which to decorate their rooms in order to follow their own, very different tastes, and are permitted to do so with no hard feelings.

There is a true sense of passing time in Patty At Home, which eventually finds Patty putting up her hair, buying her first ball-dress, and attending her first formal dance. But perhaps Patty's emotional development lags a little behind the physical: she remains largely oblivious to the fact that she has become an object of great interest to two very different young men. Kenneth Harper, Miss Daggett's nephew and a "college man" (he's nineteen and attends Columbia), quickly becomes one of the gang and equally quickly decides that Patty is the nicest girl he knows. Meanwhile, the artist Mr Hepworth, a friend of Mr Fairfield's and a frequent visitor, nurses feelings of his own for Patty but, in the face of her undisguised liking for Kenneth, little hope. In the end, however, this nebulous and unacknowledged triangle is put into the shade by an unexpected romantic development in quite a different quarter, which propels Patty into the next phase of her life...

Later that evening Patty, completely arrayed for the dance, came to her father for inspection. "You look very sweet, my child," he said after gazing at her long and earnestly: "and with your hair dressed that way you look very much like your mother. I'm sorry you're growing up, my baby, I certainly am: but I suppose it can't be helped unless the world stops turning around. And if it's any satisfaction to you, I'd like to have you know that your father thinks you the prettiest and sweetest girl in all the country round."

You read the most intriguing books of anyone I know. They are so very far off the beaten path as to be unique. Love reading your reviews and learning about these old gems and old paste.

Just finished your blog post on Captain Blood. Great job - and I love the pictures of Errol Flynn you inserted :)

>>#176

Hi, Gail. Thank you, that's much appreciated!

>>#177

Thanks for the visit, Stasia. And of course you do. :)

Finished A Queen After Death for TIOLI #12.

Now reading While The Patient Slept, the second in Mignon Eberhart's series featuring Nurse Sarah Keate, for TIOLI #8.

Oh, groan. I've been enjoying Carolyn Wells' Patty stories, but the third one isn't available free like its predecessors, and I don't really fell like paying ridiculous sums of money for such slender works. (Or rather, it isn't the works, it's the ridiculous shipping charges.)

What to do, what to do...

You keep putting books on my to-read list, but I'm not getting any reading done. :(

Whoo!!

Sorry, that was insensitive of me - but unlike some people, my book bullets rarely hit, and it's always exciting when I hear that one has! :)

The best thing about my work commuting is that it translates into designated thirty-minute reading periods, ten times a week, regardless of what else is going on.

Your book bullets always hit me. I am just not going to say it every time, so there. Besides, most of the time, I do have a chance at all of getting my hands on the book!

Well, whoo!! again, then. :)

LOL

Great review of The Case of Miss Elliott. I'm trying to dodge the bullet!

Hi, Katie - welcome to the 75ers! I guess me hitting three people in a row would be too much to hope for, so I'll allow you to dodge that particular bullet. :)

#169 "
So it's okay if I call you "it" from now on, then??"

How did you guess?



#175 And Patty Fairfield has joined my kindle collection too.

#176 & 177 What Gail and Stasia said!

#180 :-(

Aww...no fun if you don't mind...HEATHER!!!!

I'm not generally a violent person, but - WHOO-HOO!! BOOK BULLETS!!

Yeah, these ebook providers are like drug pushers: they give you a couple of freebies to get you hooked, and then they jack up the price. :(

Finished While The Patient Slept, for TIOLI #8.

Now reading The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune, for TIOLI #21; a collection of memoir-essays by one of the first female Australian writers of crime fiction, Mary Fortune.

> 182

my book bullets rarely hit

It seems that your book bullets are pointed directly at me! Of course, I have been making myself the target... :D

This morning it was 9 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 13 degrees Celcius) when I left for work. :(

That doesn't count - you ASK to be shot!! :)

about minus 13 degrees Celcius

Eep! Perhaps I won't complain about the heat here today, then...

That doesn't count - you ASK to be shot!!

LOL!!

Perhaps we can mix the heat and the cold and see what we come up with. By the way, I was at a party this past weekend where I again saw a guy I know who lives in Sydney. I can't say he was sorry about his missing the heat back home. He came to the U.S. to celebrate his great-aunt's 100th birthday. I met him at her 90th birthday party ten years ago.

Heh! Here's to her 110th! :)

The heat has been freaky, but these days who knows if it's "normal" or not? Last summer was freakishly cool and rainy.

How embarrassing! - we're two-for-two for typos on the covers of local re-releases of classic novels. Following on from "The Case Of Miss Elliot" (sic.), I've also noticed this:





It's RaFael, people, not RaPHael!

You have a good eye for spotting those embarrassing typos!

I shouldn't have to do it!!

It always astonishes me that people who release written material as part of their business don't seem to see any need to proofread.

(Yes, yes...the word you're looking for is "anal"! :) )

Doesn't any publisher use copy editors any longer???? I have a favorite ad for a Latin grammar with the hoc in hic, haec, hoc written with a macron - a really stunning blunder for a first-year Latin student.
Meanwhile, you're making me want to reread a Christie - and most likely, *Styles*. I most recently reread Cat Among the Pigeons and loved it all over again. Of course, I'm lucky to be able to forget whodunnit in most cases as soon as I put the book down.
No wonder you have the only copy of The Reckoning at LT!
Why would I have heard of Carolyn Wells? I'm afraid I'll at least have to try Patty 1. Thanks, Liz!

Oh, Peggy, it drives me crazy! But from the blank looks I get day in and day out, apparently I am the only one that cares.

Okay, me and you. :)

There's a lot of Christie reading / re-reading going on this year, so please do join us! I really enjoy Cat Among The Pigeons - I love the chacters of Julia and her mother. Forgetting whodunnit is a very useful attribute in mystery reading. :)

Ah, The Reckoning! Yes, that's...quite something.

Carolyn Wells was a very prolific author. She wrote three different mystery series, another three series for young adults (including the "Patty" series), and quite a number of stand-alone novels (mysteries, dramas and romances). She also wrote poetry, and published a number of anthology collections of humorous writing. And I gather she was a leading Walt Whitman scholar and donated an impressive collection somewhere-or-other when she died. So...you tell me?? :)

But from the blank looks I get day in and day out, apparently I am the only one that cares.

Okay, me and you. :)

And me! Those sorts of errors often leap off the page at me. I wonder why nobody else notices them. Earlier today my current novel described someone as wanting to "study aboard" and I wondered what form of transportation she planned to use. Ship? Airplane? Train? Automated spell check just doesn't work for those kinds of errors. It takes a human eye to spot it. I just wish it didn't have to be mine!

I can't find them just now but I know there are collections of sentences that are utterly wrong without a single spelling error that would be caught by spellcheck; I've seen them used as teachers' aides.

It seems that we have more and more spelling errors and such. I was quite embarrassed that our media team had misspelled one of our pastor's key points on the overhead screens used to fill in the outline during the sermon on Sunday. They spelled ascended (or another form of the word) without the "s."

*waving* at Liz

Yes, good eye for typos and how did they miss using red type for "Blood." Cat among the pigeons is a great title. I may have to try that one. I read a lot of Christie a long time ago, but except for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I'm pretty sure I've forgotten enough of all the plots to read them again.

>>#202

I'm always stunned when I come across spelling and punctuation errors in things like advertising or (my personal favourite) signwriting. You PAID to have a misplaced apostrophe plastered semi-permanently across the windows of your business!? :)

My pet hate at the moment is the misuse of lose / loose, which is epidemic.

>>#203

*Curtseying* back.

(I'm too much of a klutz to curtsey in reality, so I like to do it online whenever I can.)

>>#204

A tendency to forget the plots of mysteries is a very useful faculty! :)

My pet hate at the moment is the misuse of lose / loose, which is epidemic. And mine is the confusion of then/than, which is epidemic, at least amongst the high school students I'm encountering. Grr ...

#206 mine is assure used instead of ensure.

Just stopping by to say hello, and a happy weekend to you.

I am disconcerted by these errors as well.

Or insure? :)

Hi, Karen and Gail - thanks for stopping by!

While The Patient Slept - Nurse Sarah Keate is sent into the isolated Federie residence to nurse old Mr Federie, who has suffered a stroke. After her taxi breaks down on the road to the house, Sarah walks the rest of the way, cutting through the grounds, and so overhears an unnerving conversation about something that must happen that night... The female party to the conversation is March Federie, Mr Federie's young granddaughter and now nominal head of the household, whom Sarah encounters on the path; Sarah later concludes that the man was March's arrogant cousin, Eustace. The Federie house is old and inconvenient, lacking electricity and inadequately lit by lamps and candles. Sarah finds her patient ensconced in a large, open ground-floor room called the Tower Room in acknowledgement of its connection by a winding staircase to one of the towers that sits at the points of the house. The room is so large that the family continues to use the far end of it as a sitting-room, while it has no doors but only curtains at the wide entrance. Although good hopes are held of Mr Federie's eventual recovery, Sarah finds him unconscious, her immediate duties restricted to monitoring his condition and administering stimulants as required. To Sarah's bemusement, she is ordered by five different people to summon them immediately should Mr Federie wake and be able to talk: March; Eustace; Adolph Federie, the old man's sole surviving son; Elihu Dimuck, a business associate of Mr Federie; and the fussy, middle-aged spinster, Mittie Frisling, a visitor. Joining the family for dinner, Sarah soon realises that she is in a tense and unhappy household, and that not all of the negative emotion is concern for Mr Federie's health. Afterwards, she settles for the night in a large armchair by her patient's bed. Having discharged her necessary duties, Sarah allows herself some sleep - only to be jerked awake by the sound of a shot. To her horror she discovers the body of Adolph Federie sprawled on the winding staircase. He is dead - shot through the heart...

The second book in Mignon Eberhart's series about professional nurse and amateur detective Sarah Keate finds its heroine far from her natural hospital environs and undertaking private service for (as she avers at the conclusion of her narrative) the first and last time. The murder of Adolph Federie naturally brings the police to the scene, and Sarah is reunited with her old partner in crime detection, Lance O'Leary, who has advanced in his profession since the events of The Patient In Room 18. Sarah is more pleased and relieved to see him than she cares to admit, while O'Leary is openly delighted to find the intelligent, observant Sarah already on the spot.

It is in truth stretching a point to call Sarah "a detective": although she cannot help following up her hunches when she finds herself embroiled in crime, and frequently stumbles over a lead, it is only rarely that she draws the correct conclusions from her discoveries, even aside from her tendency to allow her likes and dislikes of people to influence her judgement. Sarah is, in fact, an incurable busy-body - although, being in the privileged position of narrator, she prefers to call it "having an inquiring mind" - and while she does not always grasp the significance of certain details herself, she is a sharp observer whose reports to O'Leary invariably put him on the right track. Much of the fun of this series turns on the interaction of Sarah and O'Leary, which is all the more satisfying because Eberhart goes out of her way to free it of any hint of romance. It is, rather, a partnership built on mutual respect and complimentary talents - albeit one which the reader observes from Sarah's not-unbiased point of view. And as it turns out, it is just as well for Sarah that she has O'Leary's full confidence: she ends up in something of a private war with one of his subordinates, O'Brien, who having observed her curious behaviour during her unofficial "investigation", concludes not unreasonably that she is as likely a suspect as anyone...

As her nursing duties are not onerous, Sarah ends up devoting more and more of her time to uncovering the household secrets - which are not few in number, and indeed stretch back to old Mr Federie's not-entirely law-abiding youth. However, the present, too, is far from an open book. While Elihu Dimuck explains that he was summoned to the house by Mr Federie on an urgent business matter and has stayed hoping for his associate's recovery of his speech, neither Mittie Frisling nor Deke Lonergan, another visitor, seems willing to account for either their original presence nor their insistence upon staying. Mittie's open hostility towards Adolph's widow, Isobel, who after an unhappy and abusive marriage refuses even to pretend to grieve, causes a series of painful scenes - but is Mittie telling the truth when she says she heard Isobel threaten Adolph's life? Having taken a liking to March Federie, Sarah fails to repeat to O'Leary the compromising conversation overheard in the grounds - but grows increasingly doubtful about this decision after it becomes clear that March and the family cook, Kema, are also concealing something from the police. The family's manservant, Grondel, who has been with them since Mr Federie's youth, is asked to keep Sarah company during her nightly vigils by sleeping on a couch in the Tower Room. It is he who is sent to investigate when, in the middle of the night, Sarah hears footsteps in a locked room overhead - a mission from which he does not return... Meanwhile, a series of odd incidents and some increasing agitation on the part of the family make it evident to Sarah that the mystery somehow revolves around a small jade elephant that usually sits on the mantelpiece in the Tower Room, and which begins to disappear and reappear with bewildering regularity...

    "Mr O'Leary, if that murder was done by one of the people right here in the house and going to stay here, I---well, I want to leave. Why, there are only eight of them, nine including me---and I can't believe one of them would---murder!"
    "You've forgotten your patient," said O'Leary gravely. "He make ten. And as for you, Miss Keate---" a faint smile flickered in his grey eyes---"as for you, wild horses couldn't drag you away, and you know it! By the way," he added as if an afterthought, "did you notice a peculiar thing about this affair? Usually the people implicated in murder all have alibis---or at least some of them. And in this business there is not a single alibi. No alibis," he repeated soberly. "It should be an interesting case."

#205: I'm too much of a klutz to curtsey in reality

Boy, can I relate!

Yes, I'm afraid that "graceful" isn't amongst the terms by which I might reasonably be described. :)

The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune - One of the most intriguing figures in early Australian literature, and one of the most unjustly unknown, is Mary Helena Fortune. What reputation Mary Fortune has today rests predominantly upon her numerous short stories and novellas dealing with crime and its detection; this collection of essays and memoirs dealing with life in colonial Victoria, which originally appeared in the Australian Journal across the second half of the 19th century, shows another side to this versatile writer.

A great deal of the elusiveness of Mary Fortune was clearly intentional: though she began her writing career by submitting poems under her initials, "M. H. F.", the bulk of her work was done under the pseudonym "Waif Wander", or simply "W. W."; it was not until 1950 that her identity was definitely established. Born in Ireland, Mary Wilson grew up in Canada, where she married Joseph Fortune while still in her teens. In 1855, she and her young son emigrated to Australia to join her father, who was a shop-keeper in the Victorian gold-fields; it is unclear whether her husband died or the two had separated. Over the next fifty years, Mary Fortune lived a peripatetic existence, during which she supported herself through her prolific writing. What we do know of her, we know through some of her surviving correspondence but chiefly through her semi-autobiographical essays; although that said, she at all times kept a distance between herself and her readers, altering key details in her writing in order to maintain her privacy. For example, her father figures in these essays as "Uncle Barry", while her sons appear as characters but are never named. Behind this carefully maintained veil was a woman who travelled from one side of the world to the other with no companion but her infant son; who bore two children, one of them illegitimate, and lost them both; who was deserted by her second husband; and who for the majority of her long life supported herself entirely through her own labour - and was proud to do so. Sadly, in 1909, a letter records that Mary Fortune was losing her eyesight, and becoming unable to write; in the wake of this final disaster, she became an alcoholic. The Australian Journal, which had profited so much from her work, made her a small annuity, on which she lived for the short remainder of her life.

The essays collected and edited by Lucy Sussex span some twenty years of Mary Fortune's life in Victoria. The volume opens with a linked collection of memoirs jointly titled Twenty-Six Years Ago; or, The Diggings, her account of her adventures following her arrival in Australia as she accompanied her father as he in turn followed those in search of gold. These essays were written and published many years after the event from notes taken at the time for a series of reports that were commissioned but never written. (We gather that the renumeration offered was grossly inadequate to the work.) Mary Fortune was, above all else, a keen observer, and these essays positively bristle with her excitement at finding herself in such a strange and occasionally dangerous new world. She takes the hardships of her new life admirably in stride: living in a tent, travelling long-distances by cart over the roughest of roads, washing in creeks, and dealing with blistering heat and dust storms (all while wearing 19th century women's clothing; dress is a constant fixation throughout this book). The wildly various people with whom she finds herself in company are treated ambivalently; there are tales of courage and camaraderie, but also tales of betrayal, violence and tragedy. The narrative is puncuated with vivid word-pictures of the Australian bushland, an alien environment but one that Mary Fortune clearly took to her heart.

The second half of the collection is comprised of further journalistic memoirs written by an older, rather sadder Mary Fortune. Though as keen an observer of life as always, the years of isolation and enforced self-support have taken a toll. There is a more sardonic tone to these essays, and a greater willingness to criticise as well as observe; although this is not surpring in view of the various hardships that provide fodder for her pen. Fourteen Days On The Road is an account of a journey by bullock-carrier from north-east Victoria to Melbourne, in which, as she soon discovers, she is of far less account to her conveyors than any one of the other items they are paid to pick up and deliver. Looking For Lodgings is, as its title suggests, the tale of a dismal search for rooms to rent in Melbourne, and a series of encounters with potential landladies who are variously judgemental, disreputable, or just plain drunk. Down Bourke Street is a vivid account of window-shopping on a Saturday night, including a visit to the contemporary incarnation of Paddy's Market. Towzer and Co. is one of several essays written by Fortune filled with observations about dogs and their behaviour; this example is notable for her tart remarks about the female of the species - any species - who settles for "willing slavedom" by the male. The closing essay, The Spider And The Fly, is a shocking, albeit politely oblique, account of a man who uses an advertisement for a housekeeper to find himself a mistress.

But perhaps the most significant of these essays is How I Spent Christmas, a detailed account of Christmas Day, 1868. In this piece of writing, Mary Fortune's loneliness and her proud self-sufficiency battle for supremacy, as with nowhere to be and no-one else to be with, she passes the day wandering around Melbourne with her second son, visiting the docks at Sandridge (where Fortune landed thirteen years earlier; she is momentarily overcome with homesickness for Canada) and a waxworks display, and having to deal with a young gentleman who has consumed too much plum-pudding. On one hand we find in this essay a snide side-comment about Mary's journalistic colleagues (with whom, clearly, she never ceased to be an outsider and an interloper), not one of whom so much as bothered to wish her a merry Christmas or inquire how she meant to spend the day; on the other, she reflects with satisfaction upon her independence, insisting that tea bought and paid for with her own labour always tastes better than any other kind. She even finds a certain wry humour in the reflection that her very exclusion from a "normal" Christmas offers grist for her journalistic mill, and thus an addition to her income.

Weary with heat and dust, and cramp and not unfrequently thirst, we women and children 'rolled up' on the tops of high-loaded and crawling drays, and the very bullocks got to know and welcome the sound of the bell that told of unyoking and rest and feed and, above all, water. Pleasant reminiscenes are these 'campings out' when the evenings were cool and pleasant, and the nights still and dewy; but to know and feel all their strange delight one must be suddenly plunged into them from a previous life in the so-called enjoyment of an existence in which the conveniences of life were not valued without its luxuries. To lounge upon rugs under the canopy of a pale heaven, broken only by the spreading branches of rustling trees; to see the gleaming creek or dark waterhole in its denser shadows of bush and bank; to hear the bullock bells 'tinkle tinkling', as the grateful beasts cropped the grass for acres around our temporary shelters; and listen to the sighing or rustle of leaves above us was a pleasant thing, and every puff of sweet night air brings the remembrance to me still.

#212: "Accident prone" is definitely a more apt designation for me - "graceful" is not even in the ball park!

Obviously, I have finished The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune. :) That was for TIOLI #21.

Now reading Vicky Van, the ninth in Carolyn Wells' Fleming Stone series...and gasp! shock! horror!, I cannot fit it into TIOLI. :(

(And why in the name of bibliophilia would "Vicky Van by Carolyn Wells" bring up a touchstone for "The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer"???)

Hey Liz - I'm sorry it's taken me so long to visit your thread! Please take that to mean I regret that I did not seek it out more quickly, not that I regret the time spent looking over the 215 posts.

As always, your reviews are marvelous! I'll be watching for the Heyer in order scheme - I think I'll join in!

Hi, Dejah! No worries - we all know how crazy the beginning of a new year is! Thanks for stopping by. :)

A flurry of late-month activity! I have finished Vicky Van by Carolyn Wells, and also Gun In Cheek: A Study Of "Alternative Crime Fiction by Bill Pronzini. I've now decided to jump on the mini-group-read bandwagon and try to squeeze in The Secret Adversary before the end of January though I'm not sure if I'll make it...

#213 The Fortunes of Mary Fortune sounds really, really interesting. Unfortunate it also seems to be really, really hard to find.

#218 Yay for The Secret Adversary! Go, Liz, go! Or read, Liz, read!

The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune was a limited release through Penguin's Australian Women's Library, and I doubt it got anything but local distribution, sadly.

Started The Secret Adversary on the train this morning. We'll see. :)

Wow Liz, does reading your thread count as reading a book? It should. Anywho, really enjoyed your reviews, especially the Mary Fortune one. I don't know how much luck I will have trying to find it but I will try.

Oh, come on! - compared to chunkster threads like Paul's or Richard's or Joe's, this is a mere magazine! :)

Thanks for that, Bonnie; I'd love to hear that Mary Fortune was available in other countries.

Ha! - made it:

Finished The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie for TIOLI #11.

...and that will be me done for January.

I read fifteen books this month, a good start to the year; although, granted, none of them were exactly heavy going. However, I don't mind that because I have some real chunksters looming up on my horizon.

Genre reading predominated: I continued with six series and started three more, including re-reads of the first entries in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Tommy and Tuppence series.

Of the fifteen books, I managed to fit fourteen into TIOLI - curse you, Vicky Van! - while three of them were shared reads, which has GOT to be a record for me! (Thank you, Agatha!)

I hope to get my outstanding reviews written over the weekend, and then I will - gasp! - start a new thread. I've never had to do that so early before!!

January stats:

Mysteries / thrillers: 9
Historical fiction: 2
Young adult: 1
Science fiction: 1
Memoirs: 1
Non-fiction: 1

Series reading: 9
Blog reading: 2

Male : female authors: 5 : 10

Oldest work: The Sword Of Damocles by Anna Katharine Green (1881)
Newest work: Gun In Cheek: A Study Of "Alternative" Crime Fiction by Bill Pronzini (1982)

NB: The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune is a special case: the anthology was published in 1989, while her essays were originally published from the 1860s - 1880s.

Hooray for another reader of The Secret Adversary! Nice summation of your January reading - as always, I'm looking forward to your reviews!

Thanks, Dejah! I wasn't planning on reading two Christies this month, but what the hey? :)

Delighted that you'll be joining me for The Black Moth!

That's a good start to 2013 for reading, Liz.

Really, Liz, your Challenge is clever - and educational to boot!

>>#227

Hi, Julia! Yes, it's been fun!

>>#228

I was thinking it was a little over-the-top myself, as an excuse for "moth", so thanks! :)

I did an ungulates challenge last year for a book with sheep in the title, so of course I don't think you're over the top!

HA!! That's right, I'd forgotten that!

We're clearly kindred spirits. :)

Mary Fortune sounds like she had quite a life. That one will have to go on the WL.

Hi, Katie! Yay, another book bullet! :)

Now reading Louisa May Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles for TIOLI #5.

Ah! 'Hem:

"Went for some weeks to the Bellevue and wrote A Modern Mephistopheles... It has been simmering since I read Faust last year. Enjoyed doing it, being tired of providing moral pap for the young..."
---Louisa May Alcott

:)

Hi Liz,
Great fun getting caught up here. Thanks for all the stimulating reading.

Hi, TK! Thank you for visiting!

Finished A Modern Mephistopheles by Louisa May Alcott for TIOLI #5.

Hmm. Apparently this novel, which was published anonymously in 1877 (branded by then as "the author of Little Women", that was the only way Alcott could publish it without damaging her reputation), was a complete revision of a manuscript that she wrote early in her career and which was rejected for publication as "too sensational".

The good news is, it seems that the original manuscript was preserved, and has been separately published as A Long Fatal Love Chase. Guess what I'll be hunting down next?

"Too sensational"? - bring it on!

Okay, this is getting out of hand... My posting of the "arthropod" TIOLI challenge was purely an excuse to kick of the Georgette Heyer re-read with The Black Moth. I didn't mean to end up fixated upon spotting arthropods in my shortlist TBR...or doing things like spending an evening downloading old pulp stories with "spider" in the title...

Ahem. Now reading Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point by Alice B. Emerson...because it's by Alice B. Emerson. :)

#224 Speaking of Agatha Christie and shared reads, Murder on the Links is a shared read in the Feb 4 vowels challenge. Just saying.

I'm probably also going to get a copy of The Black Moth this month :-)

#234 I love that quote! And I will be very interested in your thoughts on the too sensational A Long Fatal Love Chase.

I was also stopping by to say The Octoroon? Doesn't have to be this month, I know you're still tutoring The Trail of the Serpent.

#238 Just thinking about the lice in Alice gives me the creeps...

Yes, I might be joining in that shared read, but I wanted to concentrate on Georgette this month, after neglecting her for Agatha last. :)

Please do join us for The Black Moth!

It's fascinating to me how deeply Alcott resented her public image.

Oh, The Octoroon! - I've been meaning to post a challenge suitable for that for several months and it keeps getting bumped for something else! - or I commit to some other group project. (And would you believe I've already thought of a challenge to suit Dr Thorne!?) I would love to do a shared read with you, but I would prefer to leave it until after we're done with The Trail Of The Serpent. Can we touch base again then?

Stay away from Challenge #7 - there are lice EVERYWHERE!! :)

Vicky Van - Chester Calhoun, a young New York Lawyer, finds himself being drawn into the slighty Bohemian circle of the beautiful young Victoria Van Allen - Vicky Van to her friends - who has taken a house down the street from his own. But while Vicky enjoys a life filled with parties and excursions to the theatre, concerts and art galleries, and fills her house with rising artists, Chester notes approvingly that she is a young woman of high standards, whose personal conduct is impeccable in spite of her flighty manners, and who permits no liberties from her many admirers. Eyebrows are therefore raised when one of Vicky's male friends, Norman Steele, brings an uninvited guest to one of her parties: exactly the kind of presumptuous act that Vicky most dislikes. The man, a Mr Somers, is much older than most of Vicky's friends, but is obviously intent upon forcing an acquaintance with the girl. Chester witnesses both their initial introduction, and then an odd little scene in which Somers touches Vicky on the shoulder. Afterwards, Vicky withdraws to see about her arrangements for supper; Somers follows her from the room. A few minutes later, there is a cry of horror from the back of the house. Chester hurries into the dining-room, where Somers lies dead, stabbed to the heart... When the police are summoned, it is discovered that Vicky and her devoted maid, Julie, are both missing. A waiter hired for the party insists that, from the pantry, he briefly saw Vicky stooped over the body, and that there was blood on her dress. The case takes a sensational turn when the police officer on the local beat recognises the dead man as the millionaire Randolph Schuyler, who lived around the corner on Fifth Avenue. Chester's law firm represents Schuyler, and he accompanies the police when they go to break the news to the dead man's young widow, Ruth, and his two elderly sisters. Chester is immediately drawn to the gentle, unhappy Ruth, who was clearly ill-treated by her husband and is shocked but not grieved by his death. Taking for granted both Vicky's guilt and the existence of an illicit relationship between herself and the dead man, the police instigate a full-scale search for the girl - but she has vanished without trace...

After the interesting experimentation of The Curved Blades and The Mark Of Cain, Vicky Van initially seems like a return to the old formula for Carolyn Wells - particularly with respect to the character of Vicky herself, another of the butterfly type that obviously appealed to Wells and appears frequently in her early novels, but which modern readers are unlikely to find anything but exasperating. (Did people ever really think baby-talk was cute and attractive?) But this characterisation simply adds to the mystery and incongruity of the situation: no-one who knows Vicky Van can believe her guilty, any more than they believe that she was involved with a married man; but the waiter's presence only moments after the murder and his glimpse of Vicky fleeing the scene makes it hard to think that anyone else could be guilty - even without the girl's subsequent disappearance. No more than her other friends can Chester accept the thought of Vicky's guilt; yet the more he learns of Randolph Schuyler, the more he fears that the dead man may indeed have offered the girl intolerable provocation.

Given the task of handling the legal matters attendant upon Schuyler's death, Chester grows increasingly indignant about what he learns of his marriage: that Schuyler was violent and controlling towards his wife, and that in spite of his wealth he refused to allow her to gratify her own tastes in any way, or even to have friends her own age; a course of action in which he was wholly supported by his sisters. Chester's sympathy for Ruth soon becomes something warmer, and he finds himself impossibly caught between his loyalty to Vicky and his growing feeling for the young widow. Ruth herself is not eager for Vicky to be found, as she dreads the airing of dirty laundry that must inevitably follow. The Schuyler sisters, however, are out for Vicky's blood; and when the police investigation gets nowhere, they call in Fleming Stone.

Pleasingly, Vicky Van offers the reader the more believably human Fleming Stone of the recent novels, rather than the annoyingly infallible one of the early works in the series. Furthermore, Stone has retained the services of young Terence McGuire, aka "Fibsy", who attached himself to the detective during the events of The Mark Of Cain and proved to have a surprising aptitude for criminal investigation. Initially, Stone is just as baffled by Vicky's disappearance as the the police; although he has no hesitation in saying that the case will never be solved unless she is found. His efforts in this direction dismay Chester, who is keeping a secret: he has discovered by accident that Vicky is occasionally emerging from her hiding-place and revisiting her house during the night, and has promised to help her in spite of her doubts about her innocence. Stone finally deduces the situation, but Vicky manages to escape in spite of his surveillance. Afterwards, Stone and Fibsy take up residence in the deserted house, trying to piece together the events of the night of the murder, and discovering a curious detail: the disappearance of a second knife. A thorough search uncovers a suitcase, in which is found Vicky's bloodstained party-dress, and the missing knife. It is Fibsy, however, who discovers the first real clue to Vicky Van's hiding-place; and he and Fleming Stone set a trap that for all her cleverness the girl cannot elude...

My errand was done, but I felt an impulse to stay. Everything spoke to me of Vicky Van. Where was she now? Making sure that the opaque blinds were drawn, I dared to turn on one tiny electric lamp. The faint light made the shadowed room lovelier than ever. Could a girl of such cultivated tastes and such refinement be a---a wrong-doer? I couldn't say murderer even to myself. Then my common sense flared up, and told me that crime was no respecter of persons. That women who had slain human beings were not necessarily of this or that walk of life... I could not say Vicky was incapable of crime---indeed, her gay, volatile manner might hide a deeply perturbed spirit. She was an enigma, and I---I must solve the riddle.

That sounds like a good one, Liz!

It is; I believe Vicky Van is generally considered one of her stronger novels.

Wells takes a lot of heat from the critics, and certainly she never strayed too far away from her formula or changed her rather old-fashioned, melodramatic way of writing, but I'm finding that she's becoming a reliable comfort read for me.

Actually, there's one other thing worth mentioning about Vicky Van: it's the earliest American crime novel I've come across to treat fingerprint evidence as a routine thing. (It was published in 1918.) The slow real-life acceptance of fingerprinting in America, as compared with Britain and Europe, has always struck me as odd and it's something I keep an eye out for in books of this period. I'm sure that Vicky Van wasn't actually the first American novel to take it for granted - I'm certainly expecting to to show up in the Craig Kennedy series, where I'm up to 1915 - but it's another mark in its favour.

Caught up some of my blogging!

I've now posted considerations of two of my January reads, neither of them reviews as such: I've done a piece on Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, which is chiefly a compare-and-contrast of the novel and its 1935 screen adaptation, with an emphasis on the political content of both (but don't let that bother you, it's mostly just name calling); and another on A Queen After Death by William Harman Black, an historical novel about Ines de Castro, the mistress of King Pedro I of Portugal in the 14th century, which looks primarily at how far the novel tampers with the facts.

They are here and here.

Hey Liz --

Vicky Van sounds like a hoot (and that touchstone thing is weird)! I think I may give that one a try - was it on the January TIOLI or is it February?

I am very fond of Rafael Sabatini books, although I confess it's been years since I read one. I'm looking forward to reading your blog - but not tonight! Tomorrow....

Much to my dismay, I was unable to fit Vicky Van into TIOLI last month: it was my single miss-out. :(

I've seen more movies based on Sabatini's books than read the books themselves. I know he wrote a lot before he finally cracked the big time with Scaramouche and Captain Blood, too. Once more into the Black Hole, dear friends!

Ooh, a potential blog visit, how exciting...

# 237 playing catchup on your thread and saw the comment that Alcott published Mephistopheles anonymously so she didn't taint her reputation from Little Women. Its odd though because she was already writing under a pseudonym so I wonder why she didn't just use that?

There was a sort of competition at the time, the "No Name" series, wherein books by famous authors were published anonymously and readers were challenged to guess who wrote what. Alcott jumped at the chance, of course. Her authorship of A Modern Mephistopheles wasn't guessed and apparently the people close to her were quite shocked when they eventually found out.

A good example of how sometimes the background to a book is more interesting than the book itself......

Well. So much for catching up my reviews and starting a new thread.

Finished Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point for TIOLI #7; now reading The Sign Of The Spider by Bertram Mitford, also for TIOLI #7.

#240 Yes, that's fine. Happy to leave Octoroon until you've finished ToS.

#241 Vicky Van sounds intriguing - I really should get round to reading some Carolyn Wells.

#249 I bet they were shocked if they were more used to Rose in Bloom...

Finished The Sign Of The Spider by Betram Mitford for TIOLI #7; my second "Ew!" book of the year.

Now re-reading The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole, for blogging purposes.

And it because it's got an ANT in it.

I have a few 'ant's I may be adding....

We'll have enough for a picnic!

What's the Castle of Otranto like? I tried reading Udolpho ages ago and couldn't bear it so it put me off early gothic.

I'm tempted to say...wait and read my blog post! :)

Briefly, The Castle Of Otranto is quite different from the Gothic novels that evolved out of it, although it does contain a number of plot details that later became standard Gothic tropes. It's very stiff and old-fashioned in style (intentionally; it's supposed to be a "found manuscript" of centuries earlier). Its main strength is that it takes the supernatural seriously, which very few true Gothic novels do. Also - again unlike most Gothics! - it's short, so it won't take up too much of your time even if you don't care for it. I did a tutored read of The Castle Of Otranto last year with Madeline, and I know she enjoyed it.

...and I have now finished my re-read of The Castle Of Otranto.

Now reading The "Moth" Murder by Lynton Blow.

So instead of writing reviews, I decided to start a new thread.

Procrastinating? Me!?

#257 meanie! I shall pout......