lyzard's list: the "100? Ha!" hubris thread - Part 2

  

Topping my new thread is the numbat, an ant-eating marsupial that was once found all over the southern areas areas of Australia, but which was almost completely wiped out following the introduction of the fox, leaving less than 1,000 individuals in two small areas in Western Australia. Intensive conservation efforts since the 1980s have led to successful breeding programs and some reintroduction of the species, including in fenced territories in New South Wales and South Australia, but it is still considered endangered.

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)
21. The Cell Murder Mystery by Donald Bayne Hobart (1931)
22. The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer (1921)
23. A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich (1928)
24. The Detectives' Album: Stories Of Crime And Mystery From Colonial Australia by Mary Fortune (2003)
25. Detective Piggott's Casebook: True Tales Of Murder, Madness And The Rise Of Forensic Science by Kevin Morgan (2012)
26. Q. E. D. by Lee Thayer (1922)
27. The Missing Money-Lender by W. Stanley Sykes (1931)

March:

28. Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope (1858)
29. Sanctuary by William Faulkner (1931)
30. The Murder On the Links by Agatha Christie (1923)
31. The Prisoner In The Opal by A. E. W. Mason (1928)
32. Vandals Of The Void by James Morgan Walsh (1931)
33. About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster by Anthony Abbot (Fulton Oursler) (1930)
34. Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer by Anonymous (1827)
35. The Invention Of Murder: How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders (2011)
36. The Insane Root: A Romance Of A Strange Country by Rosa Praed (1902)
37. Murder In The French Room by Helen Joan Hultman (1931)
38. Pinehurst by John Rhode (Cecil John Street) (1930)
39. The Nine Bears by Edgar Wallace (1910)
40. A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott (1995)

April:

41. Mr Fortune's Practice by H. C. Bailey (1923)
42. The Man Of The Forty Faces by Thomas W. Hanshew (1910)

Books in transit:

On interlibrary loan / storage request:
Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 by Kate Watson

Purchased and shipped:

On loan:
**The Invention Of Murder by Judith Flanders (03/04/2013) NB: Check library of origin
The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe (15/04/2013)
**The Prisoner In The Opal by A. E. W. Mason (15/04/13)
John Lang & The Forger's Wife by Nancy Keesing (15/04/13)
Sanctuary by William Faulkner (15/04/13)
Reading Faulkner: Sanctuary by Edwin T. Arnold and Dawn Trouard (15/04/13)
*A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott (16/04/2013)
Murder And Mayhem by Lyle P. Douglas (16/04/2013)

Track down:
Handfasted by Catherine Helen Spence {interlibrary loan}
Quintus Servinton by Henry Savery (aka The Bitter Bread Of Banishment) {Fisher Library / storage}
The Germ Growers by Robert Easterley {Fisher Library}
The Final War by Louis Tracy {Internet Archive}
Guilty Bonds by William Le Queux {Project Gutenberg}
Bloodhounds Of Heaven by Ian Ousby {Fisher Library - missing?}

Timeline of detective fiction
Memoirs Of Vidocq by Eugene Francois Vidocq {GoogleBooks, 4 volumes} (1827 - 1829)
Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery by Sheridan LeFanu {Internet Archive} (1851)
- Passages In The Secret History Of An Irish Countess, 1838; The Purcell Papers, 1880 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purcell_Papers)
- The Murdered Cousin, 1851
- Uncle Silas
The Murders In The Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales by Edgar Allan Poe {interlibrary loan} (1841, 1842, 1845)
The Mysteries Of Paris (1842 - 1843)
The Mysteries Of London - Paul Feval - 1844 (no translation?)
The Mysteries Of London - George Reynolds - 1844 - 1848
The Mysteries Of The Court Of London - George Reynolds - 1848 - 1856
John Devil by Paul Feval (1861)

Ongoing series and sequels:

(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 - They Wouldn't Be Chessmen (4/5) {AbeBooks}
(1910 - ????) * Edgar Wallace - Inspector Smith - ???? - (2/?)
(1910 - 1930) **Edgar Wallace - Inspector Elk - The Nine Bears aka The Other Man aka The Cheaters (1/6) {Project Gutenberg Australia}
(1910 - ????) *Thomas Hanshew - Cleek - Cleek Of Scotland Yard (2/?) {ManyBooks}
(1911 - 1935) *G. K. Chesterton - Father Brown - The Wisdom Of Father Brown (2/5) {ManyBooks}
(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}
(1914 - 1934) *Ernest Bramah - Max Carrados - Max Carrados (1/5) {ManyBooks}
(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 - The Sinister Mark (5/60) {Amazon}
(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 Trials (3/23) {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 - Poirot Investigates (3/39) {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 - Pinehurst (9/72) {owned}
(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) {ebookbrowse / Arthur's Bookshelf}
(1925 - 1932) *Earl Derr Biggers - Charlie Chan - The House Without A Key 91/6) {Internet Archive}
(1926 - 1968) *Christopher Bush - Ludovic Travers - The Plumley Inheritance (1/63) {Unavailable}
(1926 - 1939) *S. S. Van Dine - Philo Vance - The Benson Murder Case (1/12) {Fisher Library}
(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}
(1929 - 1971) *Ellery Queen - Ellery Queen - The Roman Hat Mystery (1/40) {interlibrary loan}
(1929 - 1966) *Arthur Upfield - Bony - The Barrakee Mystery (1/29) {Fisher Library}
(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 The Clergyman's Mistress (2/8) {owned}
(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}
(1930 - 1968) *Francis Van Wyck Mason - Captain North - Seeds Of Murder (1/41) {rare, expensive}
(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

So what else is going on?

My tutored read of The Trail Of The Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon is continuing.

Next month, there will be a group read of Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope, the third of his Barsetshire novels.

Hi Liz, popping in to tell you how much I like the photos you've had on your threads this year. The parakeets were beautifully awesome and although I've heard numbats exist I never saw what one looks like till today.
Good luck with your goals this year although I believe you'll have noooooo problem. Have a good weekend.

Just grabbing a seat! Lovely new thread, Liz! What a beautiful creature that is up top, so sad that it is endangered. I need to catch up with your last thread- the past week has been a bit crazy, so I am dreadfully behind everywhere, but I am working to correct that situation! Wishing for you a weekend full of fabulous!

How cute! And anything that eats bugs is a good thing!

Hi, Lynda, Mamie and Cindy - thanks for visiting the new digs!

Though I do think numbats are gorgeous, I must confess I was moved to select them as my new thread-headers by finding a picture of a numbat that exactly expresses my current mood and general attitude towards life:

The chunksters cometh...

While I've been enjoying my exploration of early detective fiction, so far my reading has been entirely UK- and US-centric: an approach which unjustly ignores the very significant contribution of the French to the development of crime fiction.

I say "crime fiction" rather than "detective fiction" because for much of the 19th century, and possibly as a reflection of the ongoing social upheaval of the times, the French writers tended to focus upon the criminal rather than the detective, often positing criminal gangs as anti-heroes operating in opposition to corrupt governments. Nevertheless, the French were the instigators of many aspects of crime fiction that would later be adopted, and put to opposite purposes, by the Americans and the British.

Of course, understanding the significance of French fiction is one thing; finding a decent translation is another. Very few of the important French works are available in English, and while I have enough French to get the gist of a piece of writing, that's hardly the same thing as reading it.

Fortunately, a few key works have been translated.

I've spoken before about the evolution of detective fiction out of the sensation novel, which in turn evolved out of the Gothic novel. Here too the French were ahead of the pack, with sensation novels appearing in the first half of the 19th century. One of the most significant authors in this respect was Eugene Sue, who wrote what might be called "socialist sensation novels" and were full of attacks upon the prevailing social conditions as well as the sensation novel staples of murder, fraud and secret identities. Sue's works are also heavily anti-Catholic, which again ties back to the Gothic novel.

Sue's most successful work was The Mysteries Of Paris, a sprawling, convoluted sensation story originally published in 90 episodes in the magazine, Journal des débats, and subsequently reissued in 6 volumes - and is available as such as a free ebook; though in how good a translation, I can't really tell. However, beggars can't be choosers.

The Mysteries Of Paris spawned a host of imitations, the best of them being The Mysteries Of London by Paul Féval, who has been called "The Father Of French Crime Fiction". Although many of Féval's stories deal with criminals and criminal gangs, he also pioneered the concept of the crime-fighter with a secret identity.

Again, only a very few of Féval's works are available in English. However---for the past several months I've been hovering at the website of Black Coat Press, a publishing outfit dedicated specifically to the translation of French mysteries, sensation novels, science fiction and fantasy into English. In particular I've been coveting a copy of Paul Féval's Jean Diable, a critical work of early crime fiction - and a couple of weeks ago, I cracked and ordered one.

So! - time to give the French their due.

...and just to complicate matters further, we have another work called The Mysteries Of London, this one by the incorrigable English pulp writer, George W. M. Reynolds, which like Paul Féval's The Mysteries Of London seems to have been written in imitation of Sue's The Mysteries Of Paris. Reynolds' magnum opus, too, has recently been reissued, and I'll probably get around to it in time; although I understand there's a good chance that Heather will beat me to it... :)

Meanwhile, back in the world of conventional 1930s mysteries...

Finished The "Moth" Murder by Lynton Blow for TIOLI #7.

Now reading The Cell Murder Mystery by Donald Bayne Hobart, for TIOLI #9.

Numbats?! OK, now you Aussies are just pulling our legs aren't you? There can't possibly be a real animal called a numbat! Although that is an impressive tongue on the creature in Message 10 ...

...also called the banded anteater, and the walpurti, if either of those suits you better. :)

The tongue is for chasing down termites, rather than expressing opinions.

Well, out of those three choices, I must say I prefer numbats. :-)

"Numbat" sounds like a slang term for a stupid person. I think I may start using it as such, then if people complain, I can just say, "What? I just compared you to a cute, furry animal!"

Oh, we Australians have any number of animal-related terms of abuse. If numbat won't do, try calling someone a drongo or a galah! :)

Gun In Cheek: A Study Of "Alternative" Crime Fiction - During the 1970s, there was a wave of serious retrospective studies of crime and detective fiction, which sought and found both literary merit and serious social commentary in what previously had often been dismissed as formulaic genre writing. While many people were pleased to see this branch of fiction being treated with respect, others felt that perhaps the critics were taking it all a little too seriously. One of them was Bill Pronzini, a crime writer himself, who responded to the trend with Gun In Cheek, an affectionate tribute to some of the very worst that the genre has to offer.

With so much material to work with, as Bill Pronzini would be the first to tell you, Gun In Cheek is an opinionated, idiosyncratic study that is likely to have the reader toggling between chuckles and nods of agreement, and indignant exclamations of "Oh, hey - !" as one of his or her favourite authors comes in for some rough treatment: Pronzini is no respecter of reputations. Nor, I have to say, does he always "get it": obviously the British sense of humour is sometimes beyond him, which would seem to explain his rather ill-judged criticism of Gladys Mitchell's The Mystery Of A Butcher's Shop. Pronzini does grudgingly admit that the book may be intended satirically, then shrugs off the thought and attacks it as a straight-faced work. (Mitchell is on record as intending her works as an exaggerated - and exasperated - commentary on the British "cosy" in general and the novels of Agatha Christie in particular.)

However, these occasional mis-steps are more than balanced by numerous passages combining good-humour with genuine insight (as, I think, in the passage quoted below, which admirably sums up the attractions of the British "Golden Age" mystery). Gun In Cheek is a lot of fun for those people who can take their crime fiction with a grain of salt. The book is divided into sections addressing particular genre figures and types of writing; its basic premise is that for every successful and honestly talented author in these areas, there were numerous copyists who turned out imitations notable for their absence of logic, their bizarre plotting, and/or their failure to grasp any of the basic rules of composition. Its conclusion, one which I heartily endorse, is that while pretty much anyone can write a mediocre novel, it takes a perverse kind of talent to write one that's genuinely bad.

Topics covered in Gun In Cheek include the amateur detective, the private eye, the police, specialty presses and their output, the British mystery novel, spy stories, "Yellow Peril" fiction, the gentleman-criminal, the thriller, the latter-day Gothic, the paperback original, and the short story. Each chapter offers lengthy synopses and quotations guaranteed to make the reader blink in bewilderment and/or wince in discomfort. For example, we spend quite some time dwelling on the works of Robert Leslie Bellem, an exponent of what was known in the 1950s as the "spicy" detective story, who seems to have devoted an inordinate amount of energy to thinking up profoundly inane ways to describe breasts. (She swayed toward me, a sob swelling her perky pretty-pretties.) The chapter on the Phoenix Press, a publisher of mysteries that specialised in manuscripts rejected by other, more fastidious publishers (which it then snapped up cheap), is particularly hilarious. When this book took me out of my comfort, and even interest, zone, as when dealing with the violent, misanthropic works of Mickey Spillane and his imitators, or the post-Bond spy novel, I was happy enough to read word-for-word; I've always found something hypnotic about really awful writing. However, when Pronzini took on authors in whom I have an interest (whether honest or mean-spirited), like Gaston Leroux, William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer and Sydney Horler, I confess I skimmed the text in the interest of avoiding spoilers. Because I'm going to read ALL the books by those authors some day - right?

There is a certain civilized quality to British mysteries, particularly those published prior to 1960, that makes them a consistent pleasure to read. Murder may strike, all sorts of nefarious things may happen, but the reader knows from the outset that justice and order will prevail in the end... All of which tends to make the reader of English mysteries comfortable, if not downright complacent. Whether a particular book was written in 1900 or half a century or more later, he knows exactly what he holds in his hands. It is predictable without being predictable, which is not a paradoxical statement. If the book is a good mystery, he will sense it before he has read ten pages. If it is a bad mystery, he will also sense it before he has read ten pages, but seldom will it make a whit of difference to him... No one ever cursed a British mystery out loud and hurled it across the room in disgust. Absolutely not. It just isn't done, you know.

The Secret Adversary - During the 1920s, possibly as an expression of post-war malaise, a subgenre of the thriller emerged, stories in which ordinary young people suddenly find themselves plunged into extraordinary adventures. Agatha Christie's second novel, published in 1922, is a perfect example of this not-too-serious form of writing. The Secret Adversary opens with the reunion of life-long friends Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley - known more familiarly as Tommy and Tuppence - and its tone is set immediately by the parenthetical observation of the third-person narrator, after our central characters have greeted each other as "Old thing!" and "Old bean!", that, "Their combined ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five years."

Over an extremely frugal lunch, Tommy and Tuppence bemoan their mutual circumstances: both of them recently demobbed, he from the army and she from the V.A.D., both unemployed and both skint. Having blithely declared her intention of marrying money as soon as an opportunity presents itself, Tuppence impulsively proposes shoring up finances in the meantime by embracing a life of crime. Coaxing the staid Tommy into going along with her scheme, Tuppence drafts an ad in which "The Young Adventurers" declare themselves available for all sorts of dubious activities - "No unreasonable offer refused." But barely have the two parted than Tuppence finds herself being offered a job by a man who overheard the conversation. Asked her name, Tuppence warily gives a false identity, clutching at random at a name mentioned in passing by Tommy, "Jane Finn" - a name which has an extraordinary effect upon her would-be employer... Fifty pounds the richer, Tommy and Tuppence hurriedly advertise for information about the mysterious Jane Finn, and receive two responses. One is from Julius Hersheimmer, an American millionaire who claims to be Jane's cousin, and who is also trying to find her; the other is from a man who calls himself Carter, but who Tommy recognises as someone high up in government intelligence. Mr Carter explains that after the Lusitania was torpedoed, Jane Finn was given some vital documents by their courier, in the hope that she as a woman would make it safely to England. She did - but subsequently disappeared. The documents, also still missing, have become a time-bomb capable of bringing down the British government and unleashing a revolution, should they fall into the wrong hands. A desperate search for them is under way, not just by the government, but by a shadowy organisation devoted to creating unrest across Europe: an organisation headed by a still more shadowy figure known only as "Mr Brown"...

As Tommy and Tuppence lurch from adventure to adventure, from hair's-breadth escape to hair's-breadth escape, it is certainly necessary for the reader to suspend disbelief; but that is true of this subgenre in general, which is more about sheer entertainment than it is about a credible story. On the other hand, "The Young Adventurers" are an oddly believable duo, with Tuppence's intuition blending effectively with Tommy's slow-and-steady approach. But Christie is too good a writer to fall into the trap of simplistic characterisations: Tuppence is quite as capable of analytical thought as Tommy is of giving in to a dangerous impulse. And there are moments, too, of deeper resonance - such as Tommy's emotional outburst when he thinks Tuppence has been killed, which contrasts amusingly with what he later says to her, when the opportunity arises.

It is also worth remembering that although novels such as these were intended predominantly as escapism, they were not without a serious side. During the 'teens, there was deep unrest in England, and many historians believe that only the outbreak of WWI prevented an actual revolution; while the post-war era, too, saw not the hoped-for return to normality, but high unemployment and general discontent. Master criminals like "Mr Brown" might belong to the realm of fiction, but for contemporary readers of The Secret Adversary the social conditions he sought to exploit would have been only too familiar.

"Outwardly, he's an ordinary clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman. Slow in his mental processes. On the other hand, it's quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination. He hasn't got any---so he's difficult to deceive. He worries things out slowly, and once he's got hold of anything he doesn't let go. The little lady's quite different. More intuition and less common sense. They make a pretty pair working together. Pace and stamina."

Numbat pics soooo awesome! Not reading a Christie at the moment, but I started an Ellery Queen.

Hi, Ren! Glad you like them!

I haven't started Ellery Queen yet but I'm expecting to before too long. I'll look forward to your reaction.

I've only read a couple of the Tommy and Tuppence mysteries. How fun to read your review of how it all began.

I never took to the Tommy & Tuppence as much as I liked Miss Marple and Poirot.

And that's a fair reaction as well as the general consensus, though I do think people are sometimes unnecessarily harsh in their criticisms of T&T.

Personally I'm very much looking forward to re-reading Partners In Crime, which (as you may know!) is a collection of short stories, each of which is a pastiche of contemporary detective fiction. I'm far more familiar these days with most of the detectives being parodied than I was the last time I read it, so I expect to get a lot more out of it.

It's funny, isn't it? Same author, but somehow not the same appeal. I enjoy Beaton's Hamish Macbeth mysteries, but, as of yet, haven't made it past the first few pages of an Agatha Raisin. I am a devout fan of Gardner's Perry Mason books, but can't get through a Betha Cool.

I just finished The Secret Adversary a couple days ago. I thought it was great, because it's not entirely like the other Christie novels I've read and because parts seemed like a Wodehouse novel with less money and more adventure. Plus, I love Tommy and Tuppence.

Christie wrote several other books along the same lines in the early days, although not featuring T&T. Some of them are non-series, but there's also The Big Four with Hercule Poirot.

I forgot to mention that in the one T&T book I read, I definitely had the impression they were geezers. I have no idea which book it was, though, so whether they actually were by then or not. I just remember that the plot revolved around the fierce Oxford-Cambridge rowing rivalry and I seem to recall that the Greek myth of Leda and the swan was an important clue. Neither of those things were familiar to me in high school, growing up in West Bumpkinville, Illinois. :-)

That would probably be Postern Of Fate, the last in the series, which I haven't read for an indecent number of years and can't tell you anything about.

I remember By The Pricking Of My Thumbs much better; they're geezers in that, too. :)

Seriously, Liz, I knew if anyone would have the answer it would be you! You have an amazing brain.

I have an amazing brain for trivia, yes; it is of astonishingly little use for anything else. :)

Yes, it's too bad that power can't be converted into, say, remembering where I put my car keys. :-)

Third thread! An ant-eating marsupial seems an appropriate opening creature given your TIOLI challenge this month. The numbat is beautiful (it looks so much more elegant than a fox). How sad to hear it's so endangered.

#11 Uh oh, I think my wishlist is going to explode...

#12 Well, if I don't get to it first I will definitely be jumping in when you do! John Devil is tempting but I'm not sure I'm tempted enough for the current price...

#19 Gun in Cheek wishlisted although I wonder if I've read enough crime fiction yet - but then it would be a good reference to have for when I do read those authors... (heads off to check abebooks)

#25 I'm looking forward to rereading Partners in Crime too. I only recently found out that the stories were a pastiche of detetctive fiction at the time (it was probably somewhere on your thread that I found that out) so I'm looking forward to rereading it with that in mind.

I love Tommy and Tuppence. In fact, I am reading Agatha Christie's oeuvre in publication order, and The Secret Adversary is "on the menu" for this month. But the best Tommy and Tuppence novel (in my opinion) is N or M?.

>>#34

I hesitated for quite a while over John Devil, but then rationalised it with the thought that there are so very few of the important French works in translation that I probably wouldn't end up having to buy anything else. So I could think of it as being equivalent to buying three cheaper books! (And it's long enough to be three books!)

I do still have a few of the Partners In Crime detectives to get through - I'm currently chasing up Max Carrados and Professor Van Dusen, "The Thinking Machine". Anyway, I know The Old Man In The Corner's in there, so that's done. :)

>>#35

Hi, Samantha! Many of us are doing the chronological read. Keep an eye out for appropriate TIOLIs as we're trying to help each other out in that respect. :)

I love the numbat photos!!

Hi, TK! I'm glad. :)

36> Somehow, this year, I haven't had any trouble putting all of my books into the TIOLI challenges.

Shudder! The numbat in full ant grabbing mode made me cringe. How does that long tongue stay in that little head. Ahhh, the wonders of nature.

I've read only one Christie novel to include they dynamic duo of Tommy & Tuppence. I had the impression that they were much younger and the story just didn't sit well with me. I can not remember the title of it but it seemed very juvenile. Perhaps I'll give them another try. Great review BTW

I would happily conduct an experiment in raising and breeding numbats here in Alabama. They'd have lots and lots of food, and I'd fence out/shoot any adversaries.
Just sayin'.

>>#39

Nice when that happens, isn't it? :)

>>#40

Lynda, there are only five Tommy and Tuppence books and they are spread out over the couple's lifetime - two when they are young, one in middle-age, two when they are elderly. It can be a bit disconcerting if you're not prepared for it. If they were young and it was a novel rather than short stories, it would have been The Secret Adversary, which is a thriller / adventure story not a mystery.

>>#41

Gail, I'll pass on your suggestion and see if we can't get an Alabama branch of Project Numbat up and running. :)

Finished The Cell Murder Mystery by Donald Bayne Hobart for TIOLI #9.

Now reading The Black Moth, Georgette Heyer's first novel, for TIOLI #7 (and the associated mini-group read!).

*waves* at Liz!

Hi, Roberta - thanks for stopping by! I'm glad to hear things are looking up for your mother.

Yup:

I love the cat/reading pictures. But that woman doesn't seem to understand that if she keeps moving the book around, it's hard for the cat to concentrate on the text. Humans can be so annoying some times.

Liz, that cat picture is true!

Oh, I KNOW it's true! :)

My own little angel likes to lie right on my chest at night with her face in mine. I can only read by holding the book behind / above her. I always laugh when I hear people tell stories of dozing off while reading in bed and hitting themselves in the face, because in my case I'm not the one at risk from falling books!

I also suffer periodically from tail-up-nose.

Well, TK - we know humans aren't that bright, so we have to make allowances.

# 42 Thanks for clearing up the Tommy and Tuppence books for me. Now, it makes sense.

Hi, Lynda - glad I could help! :)

Finished The Black Moth for TIOLI #7.

Now reading A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich, also for TIOLI #7.

Liz, I wanted to drop by to let you know that I have started reading The Warden and I have bookmarked your tutoring thread for souloftherose. It's already come in handy and I'm only in Chapter 3. I thought you'd like to know that it lives on. :-)

I'm delighted to hear it, Julia! Please do use it to ask more questions if you need to.

I have written a blog post on Horace Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto - here.

#55: I need to read The Castle of Otranto one of these centuries. Of course, I have been saying that for centuries.

ETA: Why does the link to your blog take me to the top of this thread?

249 years? :)

Good question - the link was correct (in edit) but reading wrong!? Now fixed, anyway. (Curse anything that hinders blog visitors!)

Hmm... More mysterious touchstones: Murder In The French Room by Helen Joan Hultman just got me 2nd Chance by James Patterson, even though when you bring up the alternative touchstones, Murder In The French Room is first on the list.

A Modern Mephistopheles - By 1877, Louisa May Alcott was known to all and sundry as "the author of Little Women", as the source of moral and improving tales for the young: a reputation that became increasingly unwelcome and burdensome to her. Although her novels and stories earned her a good income, they were not treated with real respect by the critics; they were, after all, "just" children's fiction. Furthermore, Alcott had never lost her secret love for far more sensational tales, the kind with which she had first eased her family's financial woes - tales of murder and mayhem, of uncontrolled passions, of women with secrets. In the early, anonymous stage of her career, Alcott submitted a full-length manuscript to her publishers, only to have it rejected as "too sensational". She put it away, but she never entirely forgot it. Many years later, under the influence of a reading of Faust and having spotted a rare opportunity to indulge her taste for what she herself called "the lurid style", she resurrected her rejected story and re-worked it into A Modern Mephistopheles. The Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, as a promotional exercise, was releasing what it called the "No Name Series": anonymous works by well-known writers, with the reading public challenged to identify the authors in question. It is not altogether unexpected to learn that the author of A Modern Mephistopheles was not identified; not until, and much to the surprise of even those closest to her, Alcott revealed her secret many years later.

Of all Alcott's secret works, A Modern Mephistopheles is perhaps the most consciously literary - and not just because of its deliberate and explicit echoes of Faust. As it opens, Felix Canaris, young, penniless and starving, having had the book of poetry into which he poured himself ignominiously rejected by a publisher, has decided on suicide - and a suicide of a most poetic nature: in a small, sealed room, he burns his manuscript, sitting down to inhale the stifling fumes. He is interrupted almost at the last by Jasper Helwyze, who has learned of his situation and fears the worst. Though wealthy, Helwyze's health was ruined in an accident some years earlier; he is now a semi-recluse who collects books and objets d'art and lives vicariously through others. Helwyze offers to assist Canaris to get his work published, if he will agree to live with him and act as a secretary for a year. Canaris admits that he hungers for literary success and, even more passionately, for the fame that comes with it. Impulsively, he agrees to bind himself to Helwyze's service for one year - "body and soul".

When we meet Helwyze and Canaris again, the latter has achieved all the success and fame that he craves. However, although the agreed twelve months are up, he does not - cannot - leave Helwyze's service: the two men now have a dark secret between them, one which binds Canaris to Helwyze in spite of his evident desire to break away. Recognising that his hold on Canaris is tenuous, Helwyze brings into the young man's life two women. The older, Olivia, is his own cousin, to whom he was once engaged but who deserted him after his accident. Having suffered through an abusive marriage and widowhood, Olivia's love for Helwyze has revived and deepened. He, however, holds her at arm's length, toying with her emotions but permitting her to serve him---which in this case she does by introducing to Canaris the beautiful, innocent young Gladys, for whom she has assumed responsibility after the girl was orphaned. Gladys falls deeply, worshipfully in love with Canaris, who is flattered by her adoration but fancies himself in love with the sophisticated Olivia. Nevertheless, Helwyze manipulates a marriage between Canaris and Gladys, meaning in this way to tighten his hold on his secretary, and promising himself a new and exciting form of amusement: the shattering of Gladys's innocence, and the corruption of her mind...

As with much of Alcott's sensation literature, within the overtly melodramatic framework of A Modern Mephistopheles we find a deliberate attack upon the 19th century's narrow view of a woman's proper role - in this case, her casting as "the angel in the house", a model of piety and morality whose task is to "save" erring men from themselves. As Alcott's dissection shows, this steroetype rests upon an untenable internal contradiction. Here, Gladys's womanly innocence leaves her unable to recognise, let alone combat, either her idol's feet of clay or Jasper Helwyze's capacity for genuine evil, until it is too late. Caught between Helwyze's psychological manipulation of his companions and Canaris's selfish cowardice, Gladys is unable to "save" anyone, including herself. A Modern Mephistopheles is a horror story of sorts and, while couched in exaggeratedly emotive terms, contains some chilling touches. For the modern reader, the most shocking scene is undoubtedly that in which Helwyze gives the unknowing Gladys hashish, first to unleash some suppressed aspects of her personaility, and later, when she has subsided into a trance-like state, to pry into the hidden recesses of her heart and soul. Helwyze's intimate questioning of the defenceless Gladys is presented in terms of a figurative rape - and perhaps as something more. When soon after this interlude Gladys realises that she is pregnant, the narrative leaves room for some very uneasy doubt...

This was the double life Gladys now began to lead. Heart and mind were divided between the two, who soon absorbed every feeling, every thought. To the younger man she was a teacher, to the elder a pupil; in the one world she ruled, in the other served; unconsciously Canaris stirred emotion to its depths, consciously Helwyze stimulated intellect to its heights; while the soul of the woman, receiving no food from either, seemed to sit apart in the wilderness of its new experience...

Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point; or, Nita The Girl Castaway - After successfully completing her school year at Briarwood Hall, Ruth Fielding receives a bad shock upon her return home to the Red Mill. A reluctant Aunt Alviry must break it to the girl that her Uncle Jabez is a savagely unhappy man following the failure of the silver mine in which he was induced to invest much of his doggedly compiled and guarded savings. The immediate consequence of this financial disaster is that Jabez cannot pay Ruth's school fees any longer, and therefore she will not be returning to Briarwood. This is a shattering blow for Ruth, though she tries to bear up under it. In particular, she determines to wring every possible bit of enjoyment out of her planned summer holiday as a guest of Jennie Stone and her father, who owns a spacious seaside bungalow on a wild stretch of coast dominated by the jutting rock formation known as Lighthouse Point. Although the party consists chiefly of Ruth's closest cronies, an uneasy undercurrent is caused by the presence of Mary Cox, a social leader at Briarwood before the arrival of Ruth, who takes every opportunity to display her feelings of jealous hostility towards the girl she considers her rival.

On the party's very first night on the coast, a wild storm breaks, and a passing cargo ship is driven onto the reef. The young people hurry towards the lighthouse, and watch in mingled terror and admiration as the local volunteers wage a desperate struggle against the elements to rescue the crew of the ship. At length they succeed, and to the surprise of Ruth and her friends one of those saved is a girl of their own age of whom no-one on board seems to know anything. As the girl has nowhere else to go, she is taken in at the Stones' bungalow. She is rough-mannered and suspicious, and refuses to say anything about herself except that her name is Nita - and even this the others doubt. However, observing the newcomer's kindness to the disabled Mercy Curtis, Ruth decides that she has a good heart beneath her prickly exterior and tries to make friends with her. As the young people enjoy summer activities including swimming, boating and fishing, Ruth learns that not only is Nita harbouring a secret, but that it is a secret that might mean a good deal of money to the person who discovers it - or put Nita in danger, should it fall into the wrong hands...

This fourth book in the young adult series by "Alice B. Emerson" offers an engaging story with some serious overtones, including the financial difficulties that strike the families of both Ruth and Mary Cox. It is a pleasing note of realism in this series that Uncle Jabez was never simplistically "cured" of his habitual miserliness. His losses here cause him to revert instantly to his earlier habits, and in spite of his affection for Ruth he does not hesitate to make her school fees the first victim of his retrenchment. On the other hand, although we believe in Ruth's resolve to bear her disappointment as well as she can, when she discovers the golden secret associated with Nita her decision not to give the girl away is reached just a little too easily, under the circumstances. There are a few jolting moments along the way in Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point, including some uncomfortable bits of class and race consciousness, and some characters who verge on stereotype. However, these missteps are balanced by some vivid descriptions of the wild coastal scenes, the excitement of the night-time rescue of the foundering ship's crew, and the climactic rescue of Nita by Ruth and the Cameron twins. In addition, the series continues its quiet campaign for girls and boys to be given equal opportunities, with an emphasis upon the benefits for both sexes of exercise and skills such as swimming. As usual, the resolution of this particular adventure paves the way for the next story in the series, which finds Ruth and her friends heading for the wild, wild west...

    The craft was a schooner, lumber-laden, and the sea had now cast her so far over on her beam-ends that her deck was like a wall confronting the shore. Against this background the crew were visible, clinging desperately to hand-holds, or lashed to the rigging. And then a great cry went up from the crowd ashore. "There's a woman aboard her---poor lost souls!" quavered one old dame who had seen many a terrifying wreck along the coast.
    Ruth Fielding's sharper eyes had discovered that one of the figures clinging to the wreck was too small for a grown person. "It's a child," she murmured. "It's a girl. Oh, Helen! there's a girl---no older than we---on that wreck!"

I still can't wrap my head around the idea that Louisa May Alcott wrote lurid novels. It's just a total disconnect between what you think you know about someone and the reality of their life.

Her didactic fiction is actually more interesting to me for knowing she didn't mean a word of it. :)

I put the first Ruth Fielding on a TBR list. Hoping I can remember to download and read it this summer.

Hi, Lori - I look forward to hearing your reactions!

Finished A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich, for TIOLI #7.

Now reading The Detective's Album, a collection of short stories by the early Australian crime writer, Mary Fortune, for TIOLI #5.

It's been years since I read A Lantern in Her Hand. I have usually enjoyed that type of story.

I very much enjoyed the descriptions of the Nebraska landscapes and the changing seasons. I have A White Bird Flying on the agenda, too.

First, I have to say that I just love the numbats - they are darling. Excellent photos to start your new thread!

As always, I love reading your reviews. I read The Secret Adversary a short while back and have yet to write a review. Now I don't think I will - I'll direct people to you!

Hi, Dejah! Yes, they are gorgeous, aren't they? Aw, thanks for the kind words on The Secret Adversary - much appreciated!

...and back, and back, and back...

I already mentioned my plans to take a look at some important early work of French crime fiction. However, as very often happens with me when I start on a project of this kind, immediately I made up my mind to that I started getting bugged by a feeling that I wasn't going back far enough.

A landmark in French crime writing were the memoirs of the famous first head of the Sûreté, Eugène François Vidocq: memoirs which have been variously accused of being self-serving, fictionalised, and ghost-written, and so don't necessarily represent an anomalous entry in my examination of crime fiction. In any case, this memoir inspired many 19th century writers who were dabbling in crime, including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

However, Vidocq (and/or his ghost-writer) may themselves have been influenced by a work released in English shortly before the memoirs appeared, Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer, which was published in England in 1827 and was later attributed to the prolific British magazine writer, Thomas S. Surr.

So these two have gone onto The List.

They may have to wait, though, because this reassessment has me thinking that it might be time for a re-read of William Godwin's Things As They are; or, The Adventures Of Caleb Williams which, although it was intended as a fictional representation of the ideas expressed in Godwin's Political Justice and an attack upon the abuse of power by the upper-classes, has a plot in which the eponymous Caleb functions as a proto-detective, so that this novel is often included in detective fiction "family trees".

I now learn that in 2009 the Oxford University Press reissued for the first time since 1794 the original manuscript of Things As They Are - or as some people call it, the REALLY ANGRY version. I may have to get hold of that...

Finished The Detective's Album by Mary Fortune for TIOLI #5.

And from early Australian crime fiction to early Australian true crime, now reading Detective Piggott's Casebook by Kevin Morgan, also for TIOLI #5.

A good morning video link for Liz: A bucket of baby sloths!

National Geographic

NOW I KNOW WHAT'S MISSING FROM MY LIFE!!!!

THEY ARE SO CUUUUUUUTE!!!!!! *said in voice normally reserved for prairie dogs*

Are they not the most adorable thing EVER?! Those wet little noses! Those button eyes! Ugh I can't handle the cute.

Prairie dogs are totally cute, too, casvelyn!

Yes they are! I'm thinking that prairie dogs : casvelyn : : sloths : Liz.

Aww, yes, I love prairie dogs, too! (The Prairie Dog Glee Club on the Muppet Show used to kill me!)

Finished Detective Piggott's Casebook for TIOLI #5.

Now reading Q. E. D. by Lee Thayer, the fourth of her Peter Clancy mysteries, and unless it features a character called Liz or has an animal-heavy plot, I'm in big trouble...

Still more mysterious touchstones:

Q. E. D. first brings up Jane Eyre!?

When I visited my brother in St. Louis in December, we went to the zoo (which is free and has really great exhibits); the prairie dogs there were in winter eating mode--some of them were so fat they almost looked spherical. They were adorable.

You mean like this?



Squeeee!! :)

Squee indeed!!! Such fat little cuties.

Finished Q. E. D. by Lee Thayer...and alas, no prominent animals, no characters named Liz, and no last page number with a 7 in it...*sniff*...

Now reading The Missing Money-Lender by W. Stanley Sykes, which seems to have all the same shortcomings as its predecessor.

Tommy and Tuppence fan here! I also like Agatha Raisin better than Hamish Macbeth - a real contrarian.
And I've heard of a walpurti, but I'm probably thinking about a wapiti which is another thing altogether.
I'll be back at some later date to read about Ruth Fielding At Lighthouse Point.

T&T are having a bit of a revival around here!

A wapiti is an elk, isn't it?

Cool - the more visits, the better. :)

The Sign Of The Spider - When I picked up this bit of pulp fiction from 1897 purely because it had the word "spider" in its title, I hardly expected to find myself confronted by a serious challenger to Joan Conquest's The Reckoning for the title of "Most Offensive Read Of 2013"---but sure enough, I spent the whole of Bertram Mitford's The Sign Of The Spider with that telltale slow-burn feeling creeping up the back of my neck. Under the guise of a fairly straightforward adventure tale, what we have here is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the most perverse and disturbing kind. Its central character is one Laurence Stanninghame, who almost redefines the expression "anti-hero". Stannighame's first definitive act in this novel is to abandon his wife and three children, leaving them, as far as the reader knows, literally to starve. It goes downhill from there as, with full authorial approval, Stannighame concludes that nothing in life matters much but money, and pursues a wholly selfish and often brutally violent course of action in order to secure it.

Washing his hands of "civilisation" and its conventions, which he views as a trap designed by the mediocre to drag courageous, talented, imaginative men (i.e. himself) to their destruction, Laurence Stanninghame sets out for the frontier town of Johannesburg, hoping to find there life in the raw and, more importantly, opportunities to make a rapid fortune. On board ship, thanks to the magnetic personality that he just can't help emanating, Stanninghame attracts the hero-worshipful friendship of another young Englishman, Holmes, and causes the beautiful, intelligent and sensitive Lilith Ormskirk to fall desperately in love with him through the simple expedient of remaining aloof while all the "civilised" men are embarrassing themselves by fawning over her.

It speaks volumes for the course taken by The Sign Of The Spider that the relationship that develops between Stanninghame and Lilith is not the most exasperating part of this novel; although it is certainly exasperating enough. Lilith, being that rara avis, a superior woman, is able to see past Stanninghame's embittered cynicism to the {*cough*} limitless depths beneath - prompting regular starry-eyed outbursts of, "Laurence! My love! My ideal!" As for Stanninghame, he is so thrilled to find a woman who can appreciate him as much as he appreciates himself that against his better judgement he allows himself to return her passion. The narrative then asks us to believe that the connection that develops between the two is so profound as to be literally mystical, with Lilith's exalted passion for her "ideal" acting as a kind of spiritual shield that three times saves him from death.

Mind you---never at any point in the course of this "profound" and "mystical" love affair does it occur to Stanninghame to tell Lilith that he's a married man. Nor does it occur to him to do so later on when the beautiful niece of an African chieftan {*sigh*} falls desperately in love with him; although it probably doesn't matter in that case, since she's only "a savage", and since from H. Rider Haggard onwards we've all known what will inevitably happen to any black woman with the temerity to fall in love with a white man. In this case, Lindela meets her manifest destiny when she is bitten by a snake and chooses to sit quietly and die rather than alert Stanninghame, who is sleeping beside her. He needs his rest, you understand.

(This choice, by the way, is supposed to illustrate Lindela's innate superiority to her civilised sisters.)

But all this is far in Stanninghame's future. Upon first arriving in South Africa, Our Hero meets up with an old acquaintance, Rainsford, who guides him through the mires of speculation through which fortunes are being made and lost. Initially Stanninghame is successful in his investments, but he waits just too long to convert them into cash and loses the lot in one of Jo'burg's regular crashes. Left literally penniless, and worse off that he ever was in the "shabby-genteel poverty" that he fled in the first place, Stanninghame decides on suicide, but is stopped at the very instant of pulling the trigger by Lilith's Mystical Intervention #1. Another lodger in Stanninghame's boarding-house, Hazon, then offers him a chance to make a real fortune. Hazon has a black reputation - he often takes people "up country", but none of them ever seem to come back - but he and Stanninghame have forged a friendship of sorts thanks to their mutual contemptuous opinion of civilisation. The two men throw in their lots together and, with Holmes in tow, set out on their dangerous journey to boundless wealth. The narrative skips over the early stages of the venture which, given that it consists of big-game hunting and ivory dealing, I was frankly grateful for. When we meet up with Stanninghame again, he is a man tempered and toughened by his experiences, who has sloughed off the annoying remnants of his civilised upbringing, and who has learned to kill without a qualm. Just as well, too, since the third phase of the expedition - the phase wherein real money can be made - involves heading a party whose business is slavery, and which operates by ambushing native villages, slaughtering as many of the inhabitants as necessary, and capturing all the rest to be sold at auction.

In spite of The Sign Of The Spider's philosophy of egomanical amorality, it doesn't quite have the gall to present slave-trading as a acceptable way of life. Instead, it forges an excuse for Stanninghame and his companions through the breathtakingly dishonest expedient of making every single tribe that they encounter practising cannibals; and not just ceremonially, but on a day-to-day basis: the tribes make constant war upon each other in order to stock up their larders or, failing this, resort to butchering their own elderly. Numerous scenes of the locals' "degenerate savagery" are included, in order to justify the actions of the white men and their followers. "These people, remember, are atrocious brutes, who eat their own fathers and mothers. It is positively an act of charity to enslave them," says Hazon at one point; a position which the narrative applauds and expands upon:

The sufferings of these people were only transitory. They would be much better off when the journey was ended and they were disposed of---better off indeed than many a free person in civilized and Christian lands. Besides, such races as these, low down as they were in the scale of humanity, suffered but little. It needs imagination, refinement, to accentuate suffering. To anything approaching such attributes, these were utter strangers. They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep and cattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why not in these, who were even lower than the higher animals?

Oh, well, if you put it like that---

The exception to the novel's dietary rules are the Zulus and their relatives, including an offshoot called the Ba-gcatya, who worship a spider-god. (You were wondering when spiders were going to come into it, weren't you? So was I!) The Ba-gcatya are committed to the extermination of the cannibal tribes, and the inevitable clash between them and the marauding slavers leads to the slaughter of most of the latter; although the three white men miraculously survive. Stanninghame, via Lilith's Mystical Interventions #2 and #3, manages to ingratiate himself with the tribe's leader. He comes to consider the tribe's way of life superior to anything that civilisation has to offer, and for a time contemplates marrying the smitten Lindela and settling down. However, Holmes' disgusted killing of a spider puts all three white men in danger, and Stanninghame ends up imprisoned within a rift in the nearby mountains, which has unscalable walls, cave formations, and a stretch of open ground scattered with the bleached bones of his predecessors. This enclosure is the haunt of the Ba-gcatya's god, a gigantic, man-eating spider, against which the unarmed Stanninghame must wage a desperate battle for his life...

Need I tell you that this stretch of the story found me cheering enthusiastically for the monstrous spider?

The English-born Bertram Mitford (one of "the" Mitfords, by the way) spent his early adult life in South Africa, and following his return to England became a prolific writer of adventure tales set amongst the scenes of his youth; the one real positive of this particular novel is the obviously first-hand knowledge that shapes its descriptions of Johannesburg in the erratic boom-town days that followed the discovery of gold in the district. As for the rest--- I ploughed doggedly through The Sign Of The Spider on the naive assumption that at some point there would come an epiphany, a breakthrough moment of refutation of the novel's toxic ideology; but no---apparently we're intended to take all this at face value. There's nothing in the least light-hearted about The Sign Of The Spider, no real indication that it is intended as "just a story". It is, consequently, one of the most depressing things I've ever read. The only vague glimmer of amusement offered by this novel - and it certainly wasn't intentional - was its particularly twisted attitude towards relations between the sexes. While it is not all that uncommon an experience for a reader to find out something unpleasant about an author and have that colour his or her future reading, here we have the reverse situation: all the way through The Sign Of The Spider, lodged in the back of my mind was the unanswerable question of what on earth Bertram Mitford's wife and children must have thought of it?

Now, indeed, all stood clear. "The Spider" was no allegorical term, but literal fact. That frightful monster with which he had just come face to face was indeed the demon-god of the Ba-gcatya! It was actually fed with living men, in accordance with some dark and mysterious superstition held by that otherwise fine race... The very sight of the awful thing huddled up, black, within the gloom of the cranny, the horrid tentacles---a hundred-fold more repulsive, more blood-curdling than though they actually were so many serpents---moving and writhing in a great quivering, hairy, intertwined mass---was in itself a sight to haunt his dreams to his dying day, did he live another fifty years. What must it mean, then, to realize that he was shut in---escape impossible---with the deliberate purpose of being devoured by this vampire, this demon, even as all these others had been devoured before him?

Whoa, that sounds absolutely horrific. I would not have been tempted to pick up a book with the word 'spider' in the title as I am scared silly of the critters, but I have to say after reading your description of the plot and characters I probably would have been rooting for the monster spider myself!

Well, I like spiders - arthropods, you know :) - so it wasn't such a stretch for me, but yeah: this is a book to have the most committed arachnophobe cheering on our hairy-legged friend.

Oh YUCK. I'm sorry you had to spend time on that one.
Have you read A Trip to the Stars? It's an entertaining, modern, sort of magical realistic novel that has a lot of spiders in and about. I loved it last year!
(And a wapiti is an elk.)

Yes, this one really blind-sided me. :(

I haven't read A Trip to The Stars - thank you for the heads-up!

The "Moth" Murder - Coastguard William Pope is on night duty at his post near Bournemouth when recognises a passing monoplane as belonging to Dennis Evans, a keen amateur flyer and a friend of the famous aviator, Sir Charles Stafford, who has an estate nearby. Some time later, Pope's attention is caught by a distress flare. He rushes outside and, to his horror, sees a plane on fire overhead; it plunges towards the ground and crashes only some two hundred yards from his cottage. Pope summons the police and the fire-brigade. As the flames are extinguished, it is realised that the wreck is not Evans' monoplane, but the model of biplane known as a Moth. The firemen confirm that there is a body of a man in the plane, burned beyond recognition. At the prompting of Superintendent Walker, Pope makes some phone-calls and learns that Sir Charles Stafford took off in his Moth during the night and, furthermore, had Mrs Evans as a passenger. Inspector Hunt of Scotland Yard, a friend of Walker's who is in Bournemouth visiting his sister, offers his assistance in unravelling the circumstances of the crash. His professional skills are diverted, however, when news breaks of a second tragedy: Constable James, a local young police officer, has been found shot dead in an isolated lane that passes through a farming district nearby. Hunt and Walker are joined at the scene by the Chief Constable, Major Williams. Hunt takes careful note of the vehicle tracks and footprints in the surrounding area, his attention being caught by a set of footprints in a meadow that suddenly stop. The inquest on Constable James reveals nothing new, and is quickly adjourned. That on the victim of the plane-crash, however, stuns those in attendance. On the basis of the few items that survived the fire, including a gold watch, some keys and a dental plate, the body is identified as that of Sir Charles Stafford, as expected. However, the cause of the aviator's death was neither the fire nor the crash, but a gunshot to the head; a shot fired with the same weapon that killed Constable James...

Lynton Blow's 1931 novel is a good idea poorly executed. What ought, on the basis of its cleverly twisting plot, to be a gripping mystery fails to engage the reader thanks to a complete lack of style in the writing. Ultimately, the one word that springs to mind to describe The "Moth" Murder - and this in spite of its bizarre opening double murder, a third death and its attendant circumstances, the mysterious disappearance of Dennis Evans and a completely unexpected (if not wholly credible) plunge into the world of drug trafficking - is dull. The central investigative triumverate of Hunt, Walker and Williams are almost completely indistinguishable as characters, to the extent that it is only too easy to lose track of which of them is present in a scene and/or speaking at any given moment. Furthermore, most of the interaction of these three consists of unnecessarily lengthy recapitulations of the plot in the form of theories being expounded and demolished. The text repeatedly insists upon the "brilliance" of Hunt, and while allusions to his many successes are scattered throughout the novel we see precious little of it in practice. In fact - at least based upon my own experience - when it comes to solving the mystery, Inspector Hunt is so far behind the reader for such a long stretch of the novel that finally each new reference to his "brilliance" begins to provoke a scornful guffaw. However---the real nail in the coffin of The "Moth" Murder is its terrible dialogue, which seems to have been crafted (sic.) by converting third-person narrative into first-person speech. The result is that no-one in this novel speaks naturally, but instead sound like they're giving formal, and highly rehearsed, testimony. Here is a typical example, courtesy of Major Williams:

"We stood in the middle of the road, waving our hats, forcing the car to a standstill, despite its prolonged horn-blowing. We soon discovered, to our surprise, that it was an ambulance on its way on its way to a level-crossing a little farther on, where a car had crashed through the gates, killing the lady driver and badly injuring her companion. When we told the doctor who had given us this information who we were, he immediately offered to drive us to the scene of the disaster..."

And so on...and on.

It seems that in his "other" life, Lynton Blow was a flight instructor and a passionate aviator, which I can't say surprises me. The only time that The "Moth" Murder really comes to life is when the narrative manages to work the various forms of modern transportation into the narrative - as it very frequently does. This really is a case of "planes, trains, and automobiles", with the plot featuring not only the professional Sir Charles and the amateur flyer Dennis Evans, but a third aviator called Pat Lloyd; while two of the most important supporting characters are mechanics. Amusingly, however, in spite of Blow's obvious mechanistic passion, most of the transportation-related scenes in this novel involve danger at best and disaster at worst. Apart from its opening plane crash, The "Moth" Murder offers the reader much reckless driving, the high-speed pursuit of a car by a motorcycle that ends when the car crashes, a collison between a car and train, the Round Scotland Air Race, and a second plane crash; while its climax is set on the Isle of Man and involves the famous "Tourist Trophy" motorcycle race which is still held there every year. Alas---nothing to do with the central murder plot of The "Moth" Murder comes near matching the enthusiasm with which Lynton Blow describes the Tourist Trophy race, and nor are its details worked out anywhere near as obsessively as the speeds attained by the competitors over the various stretches of the track. (Riding like a man possessed, he had crept up to fourth place by the end of it, this time clocking 29 minutes, which equals a speed of 78.1 mph...) Apparently after publishing one more mystery, Lynton Blow gave up on his novelistic aspirations to concentrate on his flying. One feels that this was probably for the best.

    Hunt stood on the pavement, gazing across the road towards the window of a ladies' hairdressing establishment. All of a sudden he started---startled at what he saw there. It was a perfectly normal hairdresser's window as far as one could see---the same kind of wares displayed there as in practically every hairdresser's in the country---and displayed in just the same attractive manner.
    And in that moment he solved "THE 'MOTH' MURDER MYSTERY"---the most baffling crime of the century.

Wow, it's too bad Blow was such a bad writer because I have to say that plot sounds quite promising!

Oh, it's so frustrating! Really, I think what we needed here was a collaboration, with Blow working out the plot but someone else fleshing it out. As it is this is a novel of wasted potential.

The Cell Murder Mystery - Forced, via a dangerous association with a criminal mastermind known to the underworld as The Lizard, to attempt the theft of the famous collection of uncut diamonds held by the millionaire businessman Fosdick Martin, Ted Ames is on the spot to overhear a violent quarrel between Martin and his business partner, Grant Ellery. Then follows a bewilderingly rapid sequence of events: the lights go out; a hoarse, whispery voice utters threats; there is a cry, and the sound of something heavy falling; a woman's voice in the darkness urges Ames to flee... Though the assault on Martin is initially reported as murder, he in fact survives the vicious attack. Chief Kenny of the North City Police Department is in no hurry to correct the misinformation, as it gives him leverage over the two obvious suspects: Grant Ellery, and Martin's obsequious secretary, Perry Fulson, who to the best of his knowledge were the only two people on the scene. Fulson immediately accuses Ellery, and also belatedly reveals that Martin's diamonds were at some point taken from his wall-safe. Ellery protests his innocence on both counts, insisting that someone else was in the house, someone who brushed by him in the dark... Both men are held as material witnesses. Kenny is sure that Ellery at least knows a great deal more than he is telling, while he has little faith in anything said by Fulson. He decides to sweat both of his suspects by keeping them in the cells that lie contingent to the police building, separated by a long corridor and under the surveillance of an experienced turn-key. But this is one time that experience counts for nothing: even as Kenny talks with Dave Heath, the crime reporter of the North City Morning News, Yeager the turn-key bursts in to announce wildly that Grant Ellery has been found murdered in his cell - stabbed in the back, just like Fosdick Martin...

Donald Bayne Hobart's The Cell Murder Mystery is a novel that suffers from a bad dose of "Time Marches On" - that is, it features a plot that turns on police and legal proceedings so completely amateurish as to make the modern crime buff gape in disbelief and/or howl with laughter. In particular, security in this particular police building is apparently so lax that someone has managed to get hold of a copy of the keys to the cells and the door leading to the street. The murder of Ellery is committed while Yeager the turn-key is off chasing Danny Lester, a drug addict, who makes a bolt for it when he discovers that his cell is unlocked - as are they all. On top of this, later on an experienced detective left on guard at the Martin estate allows himself to be baited into deserting his post, against the strict orders of Chief Kenny; while Kenny's right-hand man, Sergeant O'Shay, lets Perry Fulson escape from his custody after the secretary is escorted to the Martin estate to "help the police with their inquiries". However, the staggering lack of professionalism displayed by the NCPD is not only matched but surpassed by that of Dr Blake, the coroner, who is so eager to get away from work and onto a train for Washington that he issues a death certificate for Fosdick Martin before he is actually dead. It is, to say the least, rather difficult in the aftermath of stuff-ups of this magnitude to take North City's Finest very seriously, or even to feel that they deserve to solve the murder committed directly under their noses...

On the other hand, The Cell Murder Mystery redeems itself somewhat with the introduction of the enigmatic Homer Stevens, a private investigator - so he says - hired by someone connected to Fosdick Martin - so he says - but whose ambiguous behaviour attracts the suspicious notice of Chief Kenny. Stevens just happens to be on the scene when someone takes a pot-shot at Dave Heath, and also just happens to be the one to discover the body of Perry Fulson in the summer house of the Martin estate after the cowardly secretary does a runner. The good-humoured, intelligent yet not entirely trustworthy Stevens is easily the best thing about The Cell Murder Mystery, and goes some way towards compensating for some tiresome choices throughout the rest of the novel, including an unnecessary romantic subplot involving Ted Ames and a beautiful young artist called Norma Burton, who turns out to be the mysterious "woman in the dark" from the night Fosdick Martin is stabbed. (The resolution of this subplot is a complete cop-out.) Nor am I particularly fond of stories involving "criminal masterminds"---not even when the criminal mastermind in question happens to be called "The Lizard"---though this Lizard turns out to be something more in the nature of a red herring, repeatedly dangled before the reader as a viable suspect but finally ending up with a knife between his ribs. However, the crowning exasperation of The Cell Murder Mystery is that it climaxes with one of my least favourite novelist / cinematic conventions, having a hitherto perfectly functional individual suddenly turn into a total raving psychotic when s/he is exposed as a murderer. All in all, another disappointing mystery.

    "Before making any direct accusation," said Kenny and he glanced at Doctor Wilson as he spoke, "I shall try to give you all a few further details of the case. Three men have died because they were suspected of knowing who it was that stabbed Fosdick Martin just twenty-four hours ago. Two of those men did know---one did not. That third man was Grant Ellery.
    "To begin with, the murderer was instigated by three motives, and the first and most important of these was greed, and there was also hate, and last, but not least, insanity."

Of course, I suppose some of my dissatisfaction with The Cell Murder Mystery might stem from the fact that I came up with a perfectly sound solution to the mystery - and turned out to be wrong in every respect.

Mind you---my explanation makes a lot more sense than the novel's.

On the other hand, I know that some of my dissatisfaction with The Cell Murder Mystery does stem from its insistence that "The Lizard" is a perfect nickname for the individual in question because he is repulsive just like lizards are repulsive...

{*sniff*}

That unfair stereotyping of reptiles!!! & it doesn't help that the lizard dies and wasn't even guilty (of that particular crime) or so I'm assuming from your review.

& how noir! Light goes out, women's scream (never mind no one knows why a woman should be there) and when the lights come on, voila - (insert Monty Python voice here) I'm not dead yet!

Lizards are not repulsive! They're actually rather adorable. When will reptiles get the respect they deserve?!

On the other hand, Liz, consider that when it comes to groups being unfairly denigrated in older novels, you lizards are in good company with the Africans, the Jews, the Muslims, the Catholics, the Irish ...

Thank you, thank you! You help to soothe my hurt feelings!

>>#96

Katie, it actually reminded me of the "What If" Futurama segment where there's a murder every time the lights go out, and they just keep going out... :)

>>#97

That is very true, Julia! Excellent company, indeed!

More mysteries of LibraryThing:

I searched for "Queensland University of Technology Library" in the 'venue search' function of "Where from?"

I was offered:

MUET Library and Online Infornation Center - Mehran University of Engineering and Technology. Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan

Hmm. Geography isn't my thing — are they not close to each other? :-)

I went to the reptile house today and saw some really beautiful lizards.

>>#100

Closer than Australia and Austria, anyway. :)

>>#101

Thank you, Ren, I feel very vindicated!

Just a reminder for those interested that the group read of Anthony Trollope's Dr Thorne, the third novel in the Barchester series, will be commencing shortly. Heather has intimated that she should be ready to start any time from 1st March, so I will probably set up the thread on Friday night (my time).

Hope to see you all there, whether participating or just lurking!

Finished The Missing Money-Lender by W. Stanley Sykes...and after a couple of duds, what a pleasure to read a really first-class mystery!

And now...{*drumroll*}...I am beginning my re-read of Dr Thorne, to prepare for next month's group read.

ETA: And, oh my...I had forgotten what teeny-weeny print my copy has...

I'll certainly be there Liz. I'm really looking forward to it and will probably be ready to start the book then or slightly before Friday.

You certainly do a lot of interesting reading. I had no idea Alcott's oeuvre was so broad. I always learn something new when I stop by here.

Hi, Bonnie! It will be a pleasure to have you along - I hope you enjoy it!

Nice to know my thread is so educational! Obscure facts are my specialty. :)

Oh dear, I let half a thread slip by... There is no hope. I get sucked into your reviews once I begin. (The Reckoning... How weird, and I guess I would not have expected in 1931, but then what do I know?) So, starting fresh...

46: Yup, here too.
62: Her didactic fiction is actually more interesting to me for knowing she didn't mean a word of it. :)
Hah! Yes.

I'm still plugging away with 'The Warden' so I won't be able to join your read of 'Dr. Thorne' but I will definitely star the thread for future use!

>>#107

Hi, Katherine! Never mind, and no guilt - just drop in whenever you can. Yes, The Reckoning was certainly one of the stranger books that I've come across from this time.

Perhaps "didn't mean a word of it" is a bit harsh: Alcott spent her whole life wracked with guilt because she couldn't be the kind of properly sweet and submissive good girl that the world demanded. Her didactic fiction seems to have been her way of making up for what she considered her personal "failings", but of course she ended up propagating in her books exactly the kinds of stereotypes she spent her life rebelling against - inwardly, anyway.

>>#108

Hi, Julia! I hope "plugging away" doesn't mean "struggling"? We'll have to slow the Trollope reads down so that you can catch us up and join in. :)

Nope, not struggling at all except with finding the time to concentrate on it. I've found myself gobbling up more mindless fare over the last week or so as work is doing its best to parboil my brain and my reading time is getting chopped up into short little segments that don't seem to work as well with 'The Warden' which wants room to breathe in my mind. But I am eager to get back to it.

Just as soon as I polish off *Dance* 2, I'll be diving into Dr Thorne. I'm looking forward to it!

>>#110

Phew! :)

And you're quite right, of course, some books can be picked up and put down without difficulty but others need a little more TLC to be at their best.

Sorry to hear work is being a pain - I can empathise! My commuting time is exasperating but it does lock in two thirty minute reading periods Monday - Friday, so that's some compensation.

>>#111

We'll be glad to have you there, Peggy!

Liz, I have a 20-minute commute each way, but I do it in a "van pool" with anywhere from 7-14 other people. Sometimes they are in an extremely chatty mood and it drives me crazy! I put my earbuds in and crank my iPod up to 11 but some people have the sort of voices that can cut through the loudest noise. This is especially distressing at 7:00 a.m. when I am, to put it mildly, not at my best. :-)

I so sorry, Liz that you had a triple bill of duds - The Sign of the Spider sounds particularly repugnant! I'm glad you've moved on to something better!

Even when the books are bad, the reviews are wonderful.

>>#113

Uh, no, I'm not a morning person either. :)

Sometimes I have to battle shrieking schoolchildren and/or headphones that don't contain, but most of the time I get a decent read in.

>>#114

Hi, Dejah! "Repugnant" is a good word - it wasn't written poorly like the others, but as for the rest, yeesh! Anyway, I guess these things happen when you pick your books blind. :)

Aw, thank you!

So much catching up to do...

#59 A Modern Mephistopheles sounds really interesting and has reminded me that I still haven't read Behind a Mask - I am going to order it from the library next month. Definitely.

#70 I've had my eye on Caleb Williams for a while (although without knowing anything about Political Justice). I hadn't realised the Oxford edition was the first to reprint the original manuscript version either so thanks for the tip! (Really, angry version? Intriguing)

#72 Oooh! I want some!

#86 Wow - sounds like one to avoid.

#91 And avoiding that one too. Sorry you had a couple of clunkers there.

#94 "a criminal mastermind known to the underworld as The Lizard" Do I spot a secret identity there Liz?

#95 "its insistence that "The Lizard" is a perfect nickname for the individual in question because he is repulsive just like lizards are repulsive..." Not true!

Never mind, Heather, I know how it is! :)

Caleb Williams is an angry book all around (and it would probably give Godwin apoplexy if he knew people were focusing on its detective aspects rather than its social criticisms!) so, yeah, I'm interested in what else he could have said. Apparently he changed the ending; this edition has both included. The edition in question is from 2009, and edited by Pamela Clemit. (The Book Depository has it at a reasonable price, hint, hint.)

Yay, more sloth love!

And yay again, more lizard love!!

Hi Liz - What a fascinating thread you have here, the highlights being numbats and a lurid Louisa May Alcott novel (I've actually never read Little Women, if you can believe that). Anyway, I have you starred and look forward to following your wonderful reviews.

Have a lovely Wednesday!

Hi, Kerri - how lovely to have you here! Thank you so much for the kind words. There's more Lurid Louisa on the way, if you're interested. :)

Finished my re-read of Dr Thorne for the group read, and for TIOLI #2 (as I always say at these moments, it's March here!).

Now reading Sanctuary by William Faulkner, for TIOLI #7.

The thread for the group read of Dr Thorne is now up - here.

The Black Moth - Six years after being exiled in disgrace from polite society upon being caught cheating at cards, Lord John Carstares learns that his father has died, and that he is now the Earl of Wyncham. Mr Warburton, the family attorney who meets with the new Earl at the country inn where he is staying under his assumed identity of Sir Anthony Ferndale, tries to persuade him to take his place in the world. When John remains stubborn, Warburton tells him bluntly that he knows the real cheat was Richard, John's younger brother, and that John took the blame to protect him. Though forced to admit the charge, John refuses to give in to Warburton's pleadings, insisting that he has made his bed and must lie on it. He then returns to the life by which he has been ekeing out an erratic existence - that of a highwayman... At Wyncham Court, Richard Carstares waits impatiently to hear of Warburton's meeting with his brother. When he learns of John's refusal to come home, Richard's ever-deepening sense of guilt almost overwhelms him. Though he longs to confess, he knows that to do so would ruin not only himself but his wife, the Lady Lavinia Carstares, who he loves deeply in spite of her selfish extravagance. When Richard begs Lavinia to consent to his confessing, she furiously refuses, throwing it in his face that he only told her the truth after they were married... In Bath, the beautiful young Diana Beauleigh shuns the unwanted attentions of a man who calls himself Mr Everard, but who is in truth the notorious Duke of Andover - a man sometimes known as "the Black Moth", and sometimes simply as "the Devil". As they are journeying home from Bath, the coach carrying Diana and her aunt, Miss Beauleigh, is waylaid. All is not lost however: even as a terrified Diana struggles with her captors, a certain highwayman happens to be passing - and stopping only to tie a mask over his face, he races to the rescue...

Famously written when its author was only nineteen, from a story invented to entertain her brother (to whom it is dedicated) during one of his lengthy bouts of illness, Georgette Heyer's first novel is not an example of the Regency comedy-of-manners with which her name is now synonymous, but a Georgian adventure-romance very heavily influenced by the earlier works of Jeffrey Farnol, who to all intents and purposes invented the historical romance as we now understand it. The Black Moth is a rollicking adventure filled to overflowing with the stock situations of the genre - duels, abductions, highway robbery, secret identities, and love at first sight - and which suffers somewhat from a flaw also found in its immediate models, a surfeit of period jargon which in truth grows a little tiresome. Yet the strengths of The Black Moth outweigh its rookie errors, with the energy and enthusiasm of Heyer's storytelling carrying the reader over the novel's rockier patches, and the numerous action scenes balanced by much sober consideration of the exigent demands of "honour", with John torn between his love for Diana and his commitment to protecting Richard's reputation, and Richard likewise caught between his duty to his brother and his duty to his wife. Meanwhile, the Duke of Andover thoroughly fulfils his role as the novel's Satanas ex machina, his plots bringing him, all unknown, doubly into conflict into John: first through his increasing financial demands upon Richard, his brother-in-law, for which he encouraged Lavinia's marriage in the first place, and second through his determination to get Diana into his power using whatever means necessary...

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Black Moth is the extent to which, even at this embryonic stage of her career, it indicates the future direction of Georgette Heyer's writing and how her skills would develop. Heyer would later achieve a deserved reputation for the scrupulous historical accuracy of even her lightest novels, a talent which she exercises here in her descriptions of mid-18th century fashions and social rituals, including (surely the most bizarre of all to modern readers) the convention that demanded a woman admit a swarm of unrelated men - but not her husband - into her rooms to help her dress. The high-flown nature of The Black Moth's plot does not allow for too large a dose of the humour for which Heyer would in time become much loved, but here also there are glimmerings of future triumphs: in some of the exchanges between Miles and Molly O'Hara, in the kinks put in John's career as a highwayman by his inability to rob women, the elderly, or indeed anyone who puts up a decent show of courage, but most of all in Lavinia's lugubrious acceptance of her would-be lover's offer to elope. (Lady Lavinia's mouth drooped miserably. "Yes," she said, "I shall have to come with you...") But in catching these glimpses of novels yet to come, we should not overlook the inherent virtues of this one, which is a most satisfying read entirely in its own right.

He would not allow himself to look into the gold-flecked eyes... He must remember Dick---his brother Dick!... In his hand he took the tips of her fingers, and bowing, kissed them. Then he turned on his heel and strode swiftly away between the hedges towards the quiet woods, with a heart aflame with passion, and with rebellion and impotent fury. He would go somewhere quite alone and fight the devil that was prompting him to cry the truth aloud and to throw aside his burden for love, forgetting duty...

Seriously---if you've run out of Heyers and are looking for something in a similar vein, you need to go back rather than forward. Though Heyer eventually superseded him, to the point that he is almost now forgotten, Jeffrey Farnol was a hugely popular and successful novelist in his day and invented many of the conventions that we know take for granted in this genre. His novels, as indicated, tend to be Georgian and earlier rather than Regency, and adventure stories rather than comedies, but they are also notable for their historical accuracy and are generally much more satisfying than most of the more recent attempts at writing in this style.

I never got to The Black Moth last month, but maybe in March! Your review is wonderful.

I have never read a Jeffrey Farnol novel - in fact, I don't believe I've ever heard of him before. I'll keep him in reserve....

Hi, Dejah - thank you! And don't worry - we all know all about "not getting to" things... :)

in fact, I don't believe I've ever heard of him before

I'm a little sad, but not surprised.

Me either..........but I have a lot of Heyer yet to read and reread.......

Hi, Peggy! Well, just so long as you keep him in mind... :)

The Detectives' Album: Stories Of Crime And Mystery From Colonial Australia - In The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune, a collection of semi-autobiographical essays, we examined one part of the career of the Australian writer Mary Fortune, who supported herself and her children through poetry, fiction and general journalism submitted to the burgeoning magazine market in Victoria from the 1860s onwards. However, the backbone of Mary Fortune's career was her crime stories: she was not only one of the first, and first female, significant Australian "crime writers" (she published her first short story in 1865 in the Australian Journal, which the same year serialised Ellen Davitt's mystery novel, Force And Fraud: A Tale Of The Bush), but undoubtedly the most prolific. Having found a reliable market for her work, it seems that Mary Fortune submitted a short story a month for nearly forty years - nearly 500 stories in all. The Detectives' Album: Stories Of Crime And Mystery From Colonial Australia collects thirteen of her short works, which were originally published from 1865 - 1893.

Sadly but inevitably, much of Mary Fortune's output has been lost. However, according to Lucy Sussex, the editor of both The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune and The Detectives' Album, the story is more complicated than simple attrition. The Australian Journal had shown an appreciation of crime writing from its earliest inception, and in 1865 it published a story called The Shepherd's Hut by James Skipp Borlase, then a staff writer and editor for the magazine. Mary Fortune's own first short story, The Stolen Specimens, was written in something of the same style, with first person narration by a police detective. These two stories were so well-received that the magazine commissioned Borlase and Fortune to turn them into series - entitled "Memoirs Of An Australian Police Officer" and "The Adventures Of A Mounted Trooper", respectively. The stories themselves were published anonymously - which is where the story gets problematic.

Though, due largely to her use of pseudonyms, Mary Fortune's reputation as a writer did not survive, until she was "rediscovered" only recently, James Skipp Borlase has maintained his position in the pantheon of early Australian writers, and some of his stories are still reprinted from time to time. However, it is the contention of Lucy Sussex that many of the stories attributed to Borlase, including some that are still reprinted as his work, were actually written by Mary Fortune. Sussex and her colleagues have subjected a number of the stories in question to what they call "forensic linguistics", that is, a close analysis of style, grammar and word usage, and have felt sufficiently confident in their results to reclaim a number of stories previously attributed to Borlase and add them to Mary Fortune's growing bibliography. It is their belief that Fortune wrote most of the stories in both crime series, with Borlase acting as her editor - and possibly allowing her to ghost-write the stories he was supposed to be producing himself; Fortune's always precarious financial circumstances may not have allowed her to object to the arrangement. And although we may be drawing unjust inferences from circumstances, it is a fact that James Borlase was eventually dismissed from the Australian Journal for plagiarism - of Walter Scott, of all people!

As we also touched upon with respect to The Fortunes Of Mary Fortune, Fortune used pseudonyms for her writing as a way of protecting her privacy - perhaps because her personal life had some anomalies in it. It seems that she bore an illegitimate child; it also seems that her second marriage may have been bigamous, and that she was the party at fault. Though it is often assumed that Mary Fortune emigrated from Canada after the death of her first husband, this may not have been the case. When she married Percy Rollo Brett in 1858, she did not record the details of her first marriage - or her husband's death - on the certificate, as she was legally bound to do. Moreover, the marriage later ended when Brett deserted his wife. Some time afterwards, with Mary Fortune still alive, he remarried. One marriage or the other was illegal, and the weight of evidence suggests it was the Fortune-Brett union; it is not improbable that Brett left Mary after belatedly learning of her true situation. From the perspective of Mary Fortune's writing career, the significance of this "marriage" was twofold. Percy Brett was a mounted trooper who moved from posting to posting in the years the two were together, and it was clearly this association that allowed Fortune to write so authoritatively about crime and police procedure. More personally, however, it is evident that however Brett felt, Mary Fortune never got over their association: fictionalised portraits of Percy Brett appear time and again in her writing, from the period of their "marriage" to very near the end of her life.

The thirteen stories collected in The Detectives' Album are broken into three sections: "Stories Of The Goldfields", "Bush Stories" and "Stories Of Urban Crime". All of them are told in the first person, from the perspective of a police detective; although a little disconcertingly, not always the same police detective. Issues of style aside, there is a clear indication that in spite of the convincing male "voice" at the centre of these stories, they were the work of a woman: nearly every story is concerned, in one way or another, with the difficult position of women and children in the rough, dangerous world of colonial Australia; women are often the victims of crime, and occasionally the innocent motive for it. The exceptions to this rule are those stories written from the perspective of Mark Sinclair, the detective originated by James Borlase in The Shepherd's Hut. Carrying on the character as established by Borlase, Mary Fortune writes Sinclair as something of a misogynist, always willing to throw in a sneer at women; furthermore, in this subset of stories the criminal is more likely than not to be a woman. Yet we notice, too, that the stories featuring Sinclair involve cases that hardly cover him with glory; if he solves them, it is often through dumb luck, or because of the help of others. Indeed, in The Hart Murder, Sinclair spends the whole story making jeering remarks about a certain young woman - who then solves the case which has him baffled. Mary Fortune may have been compelled to write such a character in order to earn her income, but obviously she wasn't going to allow him to have it all his own way.

The stories in this volume differ markedly from each other in setting, focus and outcome. We spend time in the Victorian goldfields, in the border region of New South Wales, and in Melbourne; while the story Mystery And Murder is not only set in Hobart, but features a former policeman who has quit the force and set himself up as a private investigator - perhaps the first in Australian literature. They paint, collectively, a clear picture of the status of the policeman in late 19th century Australia: a necessary but not always appreciated figure, those men whose duties included "informing" upon the operators of unlicensed grog-shops being particularly unpopular. Many of the cases described involve murder; a few revolve around a theft; while the aptly named Circumstantial Evidence is a cautionary tale about a young woman who is almost convicted of an abhorrant crime that hasn't been committed at all. One of the most fascinating aspects of these stories is the way that they highlight the first glimmerings of forensic investigation, including the gradual understanding of the public in general that crime scenes should not be disturbed, nor bodies touched. In The Stolen Specimens, stolen goods are located and a thief apprehended because the suspect has on his clothes a small bit of greenery broken off a species of plant found only in one particular area. A Dead Man In The Scrub features the capture of a murderer via the matching of a patch of cloth to rags found at the site of the crime; while Traces Of Crime focuses on the slow, dogged pursuit of a rapist and murderer via trace evidence including a broken button and a partially destroyed shoe. While most of the stories in this collection are bluntly realistic in their approach to crime and violence, two of them have supernatural overtones (reluctant as their narrators are to admit it). Mystery And Murder features the ghost of woman who has been murdered helping to solve the crime, while in The Phantom Hearse, an unearthly carriage is seen outside of houses where a death is destined to occur.

In the introduction to The Detectives' Album, Lucy Sussex expresses regret that Mary Fortune never gained the advantages associated with publishing outside of Australia, including greater renumeration for her work and the chance to establish a lasting reputation. However, though crime fiction was increasingly popular worldwide at the time, there is a confronting quality about these stories and their subject matter that is very much a product of their time and place. For example, The Stolen Specimens concludes with a fairly casual reference to a case of infanticide, while A Dead Man In The Scrub includes a quite graphic description of a decomposing body (with an emphasis on the flies). Nor are the other stories reticent about the effects of deadly force. In fact, it is difficult to imagine these stories being warmly received in other territories - where fictional accounts of violent crime often avoided distasteful realities - and still less if they were known to be written by a woman. At the same time, the horrors in these stories are balanced by their vivid descriptions of the Australian landscape, the text expressing a deep appreciation of its many beauties even while emphasising the dangers, natural and man-made, to be found in it. These are stories of a hard life in a hard young country, of relationships forged out of necessity as much as inclination, as a means of simple survival. To modern eyes, one of the most notable things about this volume in toto may be the ubiquitous usage of that most iconic of Australian words, mate, just at the time it was breaking away from its original meaning of someone with whom a man went into partnership in the goldfields and was being used to refer to a partnership of any kind - or, more simply, and as it turned out more lastingly, to a friendship.

    A lovelier day never broke over Australian ground than that on which I took my way in the direction of Yathong... Every green bough of the scattered gum trees was gilded with warm sunlight. Softly and verdant swept the untrodden grass into the flowing creek. Gracefully bent the wattle foliage down into the glassy water; and gladly sang many a bush bird to the sound of the stream...
    What was it that made my heart cease to beat for a moment, and that caused me involuntarily to rein back the horse until several yards lay between me and the creek? "The body of a child, be it dead or alive." So ran the Gazette; and there it was, heaving softly on the sunlit water, the body of the child, dead! Oh, yes, I felt it was the child, even before I had alighted from my horse, and was down, bending over the poor infant, drawing it carefully upon the soft grass...

Fascinating stuff, Liz! As you may well imagine, though, neither of these works is readily available from my library or even amazon.us. Thanks for sharing!

I've often thought it's a darned shame there are so few magazine outlets for fiction these days, and especially crime fiction. I used to subscribe to both Alfred Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's mystery magazines, and I'm not sure either of them are still publishing.

Detective Piggott's Casebook: True Tales Of Murder, Madness And The Rise Of Forensic Science - In 1898, at the age of twenty-four, Frederick John Charles Piggott joined the Victorian Mounted Police. After paying his professional dues in a number of different regional postings across a fourteen-year period, in 1912 Piggott achieved his long-standing ambition by being accepted into the detective division of Melbourne's Central Investigation Branch. Over the next twenty-two years, Piggott became not only markedly successful in his career, but a noted public figure, gaining a reputation with the public because of his success rate in solving high-profile crimes, and earning the respect and gratitude of his fellow officers - if not necessarily the powers-that-be - through his dogged campaign for better pay and conditions for the police, which he pursued as part of his role within the Victoria Police Association, which he himself had helped to establish. Over the course of his career, Piggott kept scrapbooks filled with mementoes from and notes about many of his cases - his occasional failures as well as his triumphs; the cases that continued to haunt him. After his death, Piggott's scrapbooks passed into the hands of the State Library of Victoria; it is these scrapbooks, available for reference under strictly controlled conditions, that Kevin Morgan draws upon in this book, along with official documents including eyewitness statements and coronial depositions, using these sources to recreate the circumstances of some of the detective's most famous cases.

Though Piggott was frequently involved in the broader investigation of crime, as well as in an ongoing battle against the criminal gangs that had established themselves in Melbourne during the post-war era, the cases which are the focus of Detective Piggott's Casebook are the murders - or at least suspicious deaths - that captured the imagination of the public and the press. In a deliberately confronting step, Morgan opens the book with an account of an early case in Piggott's career as a detective, in which he had only a subsidiary role, but learned many important lessons for the future---the gunshot murder and subsequent decapitation of a teenaged boy in the farming district of Wharparilla. Another of Piggott's important early cases, in which he played a far more prominent role, occurred on a farm in Gippsland, with the shotgun-death of a woman that might have been murder, suicide or accident. Most often, however, we find Piggott active on the streets of Melbourne. In "The Yarra Baby Killer", the body of an infant is pulled from the river; its condition indicates that it died of head injuries. In "The Sleeping Man", the discovery of a comatose individual in the Alexandra Gardens unravels a bizarre case of false identity and fraud. In "The Yarra Mystery", a woman's remains lead to an illegal abortion clinic - but what was the cause of death? In "The Tragedy Of The Skull", the investigation of what initially looks like murder reveals a sad story of loneliness, depression and despair.

The two cases that close the book are, each in their own way, the most disturbing. The last case, called simply "Father", opens with the brutal murder of a well-liked and successful businessman. The identity of his killer is obvious, the motive less so - until the young man's history is investigated. As is immediately obvious to the modern reader and recognised if not well-understood at the time, Martin Braby was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, after his service in WWI. Many people tried to help him, and with a degree of success - but contemporary treatment involved compelling patients back into the community as soon as they showed signs of improvement, with the idea that "reintegration" was necessary for full recovery. Instead, Martin Braby got worse - and finally murdered the man who had done more than anyone to assist him. The second case, the lengthiest in the book, was one of Piggott's rare failures: the unsolved murder of eleven-year-old Irene Tuckerman, who in 1924 vanished from the suburban streets of Caulfield, and whose body was found dumped the next morning, only a few blocks from her home. At a time when child abduction and murder was almost unheard of, this case sent shockwaves across the country. Enormous manpower was poured into the investigation, with official suspicion focusing upon a local man with a reputation for "inappropriate" behaviour around children, but he had an alibi of sorts and no case was ultimately made against him - nor against anyone else.

While it is sufficiently interesting purely as a work of "true crime" reporting, the focus of Detective Piggott's Casebook is upon something that set Piggott apart from his contemporaries: his introduction into criminal investigation of forensic techniques. Many of the scientific forms of investigation which today we take for granted were first developed during the late 19th century, first in France and Britain and later in America, where (with greater or lesser degrees of official enthusiasm) they gradually became standard. In the Australia of the early 20th century, few if any of these techniques were employed by the police - except where Frederick Piggott worked. Remarkably, Piggott had a natural talent for forensic investigation; he began introducing such techniques into his work not because they were normal police procedure, but because he instinctively understood that they were important and necessary. Piggott was an enthusiastic amateur photographer; he began taking photographs of crime scenes well before there was an official police photographer in Melbourne. In the Gippsland case, he not only took comprehensive photographs, but carefully recorded the position of the body, the gun and the blood spatter; his subsequent testimony at the inquest was the first blood spatter evidence to be introduced in an Australian criminal case (although as it happened, the court chose to ignore his findings, ruling accident rather than suicide). Other cases involved the collection of trace evidence including hair and fibres, and the effects of weather patterns on an exposed body. Much of Piggott's success can be attributed to his scrupulous preservation of crime scenes and his painstakingly detailed collection of physical evidence. In 1926, the Victorian police force belatedly caught up with its leading detective: Piggott was sent overseas to inquire into police training, duties, conditions and investigative techniques in other countries; he returned home bearing the uses of ultra-violet light in the examination of biological evidence from Scotland Yard, the science of ballistics from France, and the line-up behind a two-way mirror from Chicago.

But while we must marvel at this man so far ahead of his time, there was also a dark side to Frederick Piggott's enthusiasm for forensic evidence. There were times in which far too much was read into far too little - when overinterpretation of the physical evidence led to disaster. One such, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justices in Australia's history, was the so-called "Gun Alley" case, the rape-murder of twelve-year-old Alma Tirtschke. Largely, though not exclusively, on the basis of Piggott's interpretation of hair evidence, Colin Campbell Ross was convicted and executed, protesting his innocence to the last. Many decades later, re-examination of the evidence exonerated Ross, who received that most bitterly useless of judicial apologies, a posthumous pardon. Kevin Morgan touches only briefly upon the Gun Alley case in this book, not to downplay Piggott's role in the tragedy, but because it was the subject of his earlier work, Gun Alley: Murder, Lies And Failure Of Justice.

    The coroner, Mr Grey, disagreed, seeing no motive for suicide in the evidence submitted. Nevertheless, he commended Piggott for the "close investigation" which had cleared McMichael of the suspicion of murder... The investigation at an end, Piggott's photographs were handed back to him. They would not become part of the official file: only the depositions were kept. The idea that photographs were an important record of evidence---and therefore as worthy of preservation as witness statements---was yet to be universally recognised by Australian courts.
    Piggott pasted the images into his scrapbook. Under the photograph showing the blood-stained verandah post, he wrote: "Not murder but suicide" and underlined the word "suicide".

>>#129

No, it's a shame - though oddly, The Detectives' Album had a Canadian publisher, one of my favourite small specialty companies, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

>>#130

We do have a few local ones, but more for science fiction than crime. I suppose the early magazines, apart from being inexpensive and portable, were regarded simply as ephemera; perhaps the loss of the magazines today reflects the loss of that attitude and is in its way a good thing?

#132 by @lyzard> Maybe so. I also think the advent of e-books, and the ability of established authors to sell short stories individually to readers for $1.99 or $2.99 means they no longer need the outlet that those magazines provided. I'm not sure that model works as well for beginning authors, though perhaps it does.

Oh, more recently, certainly; ebooks have changed things enormously in that respect. Yes, it's a bit swings-and-roundabouts for beginners, I imagine - more access to the market, but also more competition.

A Lantern In Her Hand - Bess Streeter Aldrich's 1928 novel about the matriarch of a pioneering family in Nebraska in the days of its settling and early statehood is based largely upon the experiences of her own mother, who like her alter-ego Abbie Mackenzie Deal travelled as a girl to the midwest as part of a covered-wagon train. A Lantern In Her Hand opens with the death of its protagonist at the age of eighty, after a life of stubborn independence and finally self-chosen solitude. The narrative then jumps many years backwards to the childhood of Abbie Mackenzie as she travels in a wagon from the city of Chicago to the farming land of Blackhawk County, Iowa. In the darkness, Abbie absorbs from her older sister details of the family's history: of the blending of her aristocratic Scottish father and her servant-girl Irish mother; of the financial loss that sent the family from the Old World to the New; of the continued difficulties, including the death of Mr Mackenzie, that propelled Maggie Mackenzie and her children further west, to join the sister and aunt already established within a farming community. Abbie dreams of a life of beauty, of lessons in singing and art, and as she grows to womanhood an opportunity to make her dreams come true presents itself in the form of a proposal from Ed Matthews, the son of the local doctor, who intends to establish himself in New York. Though sorely tempted, Abbie's heart has long belonged to Will Deal, who upon his return from the Civil War immediately claims her.

The beginning of the couple's life is spent in the house of Will's parents, the generous, good-natured Mr Deal and Will's pessimistic, fault-finding mother, while Will works on his father's farm. Abbie longs for a home of her own, but finds her wish granted in an unexpected and not wholly welcome manner when Will informs her that he has purchased land in the new territory of Nebraska. The two set out on their long, rough journey, during which Abbey must cope with her first pregnancy; by the time her first child, a boy named Mackenzie, is born, the Deals are established in a sod cottage and part of a tiny community committed to fighting the elements and putting down roots. Over the years that follow, Abbie and Will wage a desperate battle for survival, at length emerging triumphant, settled and permanent, the parents of a family of five and prominent figures in the new city of Cedartown in the new state of Nebraska.

Much of the narrative of A Lantern In Her Hand is given over to the early years of the Deal marriage and the couple's grim struggle against the odds in a world that seems determined to drive the settlers out, fighting the elements in the form of scorching sun, drought, dust storms, snow and locusts, and facing the personal tragedy of the death of a child. Both the beauty and the brutality of the territory that would eventually become "home" to Abbie Deal are presented with stark immediacy. Many of the Deals' fellow settlers give up and leave, but Will refuses to bow to what others regard as the inevitable. As for Abbie, though the list of what she needs and wants is almost limitless, rarely does she have time to give to anything but the present moment and her children: children who must be fed in spite of a scarcity of food, clothed and kept clean in spite of a scarcity of water, and educated in spite of a scarcity of books; children who must be guarded, raised, and loved. It is during these years that Abbie develops strengths and depths that she hardly knew she possessed, becoming the beacon by which her family can always find home; she herself their lantern in the darkness.

I find myself somewhat ambivalent about A Lantern In Her Hand. The early descriptions of life in Iowa and Nebraska are both powerful and authoritative, and the urgency of the writing in the descriptions of the various disasters that strike the Deals' land succeeds in sweeping the reader along unquestioning. (I may say that I have always suspected that I was not cut out to be a pioneer; this novel merely confirmed it.) When the Deals eventually find both peace and prosperity, however, I frequently found myself in a sort of opposition to Abbie and some of her stances. Both of the Deal boys flee the land for which their parents fought so hard as soon as they are able, much to their father's disgust, one for the law and the other for a career in banking. The departure of the girls is viewed more as a matter of course, yet it is her daughters who attract Abbie's criticism: one because she chooses not to have children, the other because she wants a career instead of marriage; in both cases, Abbie feels that these choices make them "lesser" women, "lesser" human beings - incomplete. It is not so much that Abbie feels this way that is the issue, but rather that her position is backed by clear authorial approval. Furthermore, I have my doubts about the novel's insistence that Abbie is fully compensated for what she had to give up, or never had - her talent for singing and painting, her desire to write - by seeing these abilities emerge in her children and grandchildren: this vicarious enjoyment seems a hollow sort of victory, when we look back at the vital, passionate girl who would stand upon a hillside and sing to the world at large, or whose soul was stirred by the creation of art. That Abbie found fulfilment in both the choices she made and those that life made for her, we do not question; that she was finally without regret for what she did without, we might take leave to doubt.

    March was cold, windy, snow-filled,---the land a desolate waste. Grayish-white snow over the low rolling hills,---a grayish-white sky like the pale reflection of those rolling hills in an opaque glass! And into the gray vastness of the sky, three little thin lines of smoke from the stove-pipes through the roff of a dugout, a chink-battened frame and a soddie,---incense ascending to the God of Homes!
    And then, the miracle! Spring came over the prairie,---not softly, shyly, but in great magic strides. It was in the wind,---in the smell of loam and grasses, in the tantalizing odor of wild plums budding and wild violets flowering. Nature, the alchemist, took them all, the faint odors of the loam and the grasses, the willow buds and the little wild flowers, and mixing them in her mortar, threw them over the prairie on the wings of the wind.

#122 I like the old cover of The Black Moth. I thought I noticed a couple of nods towards Samuel Richardson in the book too - Captain Harold Lovelace and Sir Hugh Grandson?

#128 Mary Fortune's work sounds really interesting. Sadly not available in the UK for under £200 but I enjoy reading your reviews!

#135 I may say that I have always suspected that I was not cut out to be a pioneer; this novel merely confirmed it. :-)

Hi, Heather!

Yes, I think that's quite likely. (Same time period, too, for hints about dress and slang.)

Good, because I've got the only other readily available - comparatively readily available - collection of her work coming up, three crime novellas.

Yes, I'm afraid I've decided that a reliable internet connection is one of life's absolute necessities. :)

D'OH!!!!

Talk about misleading! It turns out that Three Murder Mysteries by Mary Fortune is not more of her stories at all, as most descriptions imply, but a selection from The Detectives' Album. :(

I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't end up having to get it on ILL from a university - and those people know how to charge! Grr!!

Oh, that's rotten luck, Liz!

Well - the money aspect is annoying but mostly it's just the disappointment of not having more of her work to read.

Finished Sanctuary by William Faulkner for TIOLI #7.

I seem destined to read one "Ew!" book a month this year. :)

Now cleansing my palette with The Murder On The Links by Agatha Christie, for TIOLI #4. Also for Mystery March.

Oh-ho. Murder on the Links--one of my favorites! I am reliably amazed by how much I can enjoy re-reading Christie, even though I know the plots mostly by heart.

Your reviews remain fascinating; apparently, more so than the books reviewed...

Hi, Gail! Yes, I find Christie a go-to author in that respect, too; some of them I must have read a dozen times, but I can always come back for more.

It could accurately be said that there's been some real variety in my reading lately, yes. :)

Finished The Murder On the Links for TIOLI #4. (Shared read - whoo!)

Now reading The Prisoner In The Opal by A. E. W. Mason, the third in his series featuring Inspector Hanaud.

Finished The Prisoner In the Opal for TIOLI #4.

Now considering whether I feel like another mystery, or a little early science fiction...

ETA:...and science fiction it is: Vandals Of The Void by James Morgan Walsh.

(Not to be confused with the SF novel of the same name by Jack Vance! - despite what the touchstones will try to tell you...)

{vent}

WELL THAT WAS A COMPLETE BITCH OF A WEEK!!!!

{/vent}

Q. E. D. - After an exhausting working year, Peter Clancy joins his friend Harrison Carlisle at his country house in northern New Jersey for a fishing holiday. As the two prepare for an evening's moonlight trout fishing, Carlisle apologises to Peter for the unanticipated presence of a neighbour, Robert Kent, who all but invited himself to join them. Conversely, Carlisle's friend, Louis Hood, does not come to the house as planned. Finally the other three set out, assuming that they will meet Hood on the road, but they reach his estate without seeing him. Moreover, they find the house plunged in darkness. Puzzled, the three men get out of the car; but their steps are suddenly arrested by the sight of a still figure sprawled upon the ground at the back of the house, his head at a strange angle and a dark stain seeping from his neck into the snow. Louis Hood then appears from inside the house. After a horrified moment, he, Carlisle and Kent rush forward, only to be arrested by a sharp order from Peter, who keeps them to one side and stops Hood from touching the body. Almost at a glance, Peter's experienced eye takes in two completely contradictory facts... Taking charge, Peter orders the others to send for the police and a doctor, while he takes accurate sketches of the scene, knowing that the physical evidence currently preserved by the snow will be transient. The doctor confirms what Peter has already concluded: that while the man may have slashed his own throat, his broken neck could only be the result of an assault; yet the snow in which the dead man lies shows no sign of a struggle...

The fourth book in Lee Thayer's series featuring the red-headed former policeman and now private investigator Peter Clancy falls squarely into the realm of "impossible crime" fiction, with a man dead under circumstances that can only mean suicide, of injuries that can only mean murder. Peter himself, though worn out and supposedly on a restful holiday, is drawn into the case almost against his will. The text again emphasises the fact that Peter looks upon his career as a "calling", and feels that he has an unavoidable duty to pursue justice wherever his path leads him. As in the preceeding novel, That Affair At "The Cedars", it is not merely the coincidence of his being on the spot when a crime is committed that compels Peter into action, but his growing belief that the official police investigation is being mishandled. With the inevitable melting of the snow, the only proof of the mysterious footprint evidence is Peter's word and his sketches (it is a reflection of the time of this novel's writing that no-one thinks to try photographing it); and while the young private investigator has won enough of a professional reputation to force people to listen to him with respect, Inspector Winkle has made up his mind about Louis Hood's guilt and does his best to set Peter's testimony aside. It is evident to Harrison Carlisle, who has known Hood all his life, that his friend his is trying to shield someone, even at the cost of his own liberty or, at the very least, his career: Hood is locked in a battle with Robert Kent for a future appointment as District Attorney. Although it was Carlisle who insisted upon the exhausted Peter having a holiday in the first place, as his fears for Hood grow he finally begs Peter to investigate the case himself - standing firm in the face of Peter's quiet warning that if he does investigate, he will follow the evidence wherever it leads...

For there is considerable reason for Inspector Winkle's belief in Louis Hood's guilt, including his profound reluctance to explain his relationship with the dead man, who he claims is a boyhood friend fallen on hard times. Not only does no-one - including Hood's friends - believe him when he says the victim is one "Walter Brown", but his account of their interaction immediately before his death hardly explains two items found on the body: a handgun from which one shot has been fired, and Hood's cheque for $1000. Furthermore, when the snow does melt, found not far from the body is a fishing-knife with the initials "L. H." engraved upon the handle. Peter, however, has already established to his own satisfaction that the case is even more complicated than it appears - and that more people than Louis Hood were on the scene at the time of Brown's death. A local poacher tells a strange story of hearing a woman's terrified scream near the boundary of Hood's estate, an assertion supported by a woman's footprints in the lingering snow beneath the trees. The poacher adds that, shortly afterwards, he also heard a car upon a little-used road at the back of the property. Peter confirms that a woman did catch a train to New York from the small local station the evening before, and discovers to his astonishment that she was Viola Gale, the latest sensation of Broadway, in whose show the daughter of Hood's caretaker and housekeeper has a small part. Questioning the servants, Peter learns that they received tickets for the show in question from an anonymous source - not their daughter, as they had assumed - and so were absent the night before, leaving Louis Hood alone in the house. More curiously still, the caretaker reluctantly reveals that the night before the murder, while Hood was still in New York, he and his wife heard a chilling wailing sound outside the country house: a wail which they insist was the cry of a Banshee, presaging the death to come...

    The moon and the lights along the terrace made it as light as day. In the centre, opposite the house door, where the wall of cedars which sheltered the terrace edge was broken, a few broad shallow steps led down to the smooth, sloping lawn, over whose blank whiteness the moon shed its clear, still radiance.
    Lying almost in the centre of the steps, half upon them, and half upon the smooth snow-carpet of the lawn, lay a sprawling, horrible, inert mass---a something which had once been human, sentient, alive in every pulse of pounding heart and throbbing brain, but which now lay still and awful, with head strangely twisted on one shoulder, with stark white face turned upward, a great blot of crimson beside it, staining the shining snow...

Oooh, sorry you had such a lousy week, Liz. At least the book sounds good. I love those 'impossible crime' plots.

The Missing Money-Lender - So regular in his habits is Israel Levinsky that he is no more than half-an-hour late to work before his clerk, Mr Rosenbaum, begins to panic; within two hours, he has called the police. Inspector Ridley is at first unmoved, but when he hears that Levinsky's bed was not slept in, and that an internal door in his office that he scrupulously locked each evening was found open, he agrees to look into it. Inquiries lead to an isolated road at the edge of town. A constable is sent to door-knock, and at one house the mention of Levinsky's name leads its resident, Mrs Laidlaw, to faint. Recovering, she apologises, explaining that her husband died just that morning and she is worn out after nursing him; a policeman at the door was too much for her nerves. The constable manages to get a look at the dead man, and is satisfied it is not Levinsky. However, a suspicious Ridley puts a watch on Mrs Laidlaw. He also, via some slightly unethical manoeuvring, manages to get a glimpse of the contents of a letter posted by the new widow, but it is only a note of thanks for a letter of condolence. Meanwhile, Levinksy's brother and former partner, Isaac, confirms that an address-book has been stolen from the office safe: he explains the business's practice of issuing loans to parties under assumed names, as a form of professional discretion, with all correspondence conducted using the pseudonym; the address book was the only evidence of the borrowers' true identities. Rosenbaum unearths a promissory note signed by one "Edward Derrington"; later, while cleaning his employer's car, Levinsky's chauffeur finds a letter suggesting that "Derrington" may have been the late Dr Laidlaw. At the request of the Chief Constable, Inspector Ridley is joined in the investigation by Inspector Drury of Scotland Yard. Drury's methodical approach immediately yields an odd clue: he points out that there wasn't time for Mrs Laidlaw to receive the letter of condolence she was supposed to be answering, and that there must be more to her seemingly innocuous note than meets the eye. Her swift claiming of her husband's life-insurance is also suggestive. When Mrs Laidlaw departs Southbourne after her husband's funeral, she is followed by Drury and a young policeman who knew the Laidlaws in their earlier home-town of Barhaven. As Drury expects, Mrs Laidlaw meets, not a female friend, but a man - a man who the astonished constable identifies as the "late" Dr Laidlaw...

William Stanley Sykes was a medical graduate who did the bulk of his training at St Bartholmew's Hospital in London (where Sherlock Holmes used to beat up cadavers), who was active in public health, and whose great medical passion was anaesthesia. He served in both World Wars, spending more than four years as a prisoner of war during WWII, having been captured while serving at an army hospital in Greece. He managed to keep practising while a prisoner, and even to further develop his skills in anaesthesia. After the war, having been awarded an MBE for his services, he retired from hospital work for general practice and devoted his spare time to his magnum opus, a two-volume set called Essays On The First Hundred Years Of Anaesthesia. In spite of his devotion to his career, Sykes also found the time to pen three mysteries, which were published in the early 1930s, and which not surprisingly have strong medical themes. When I recently reviewed the disappointing mystery, The "Moth" Murder, I suggested that its author giving up his writing to concentrate on his career was a good thing; here I say the reverse, that on the basis of The Missing Money-Lender it is a great shame that W. Stanley Sykes's professional commitments allowed him to write only three novels. This is a wonderfully clever and satisfying mystery, one of the best I have read in quite a while.

There are many things to like about The Missing Money-Lender, from the convoluted plot which finds its police inspectors repeatedly taking one step forward and two steps back, to the good-humoured, even slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of the writing itself, which bolsters rather than undermines the story. Sykes has a talent for deft character sketches, and much of the pleasure of this novel is the way that its central mystery is supported by a solid cast of lightly drawn but entirely credible people. Particularly memorable are the local petty crim, James Tomlin, who comes briefly under suspicion in Levinsky's disappearance, much to his indignation, and the irritatingly self-important coroner, Mr Domville, who in spite of his personal failings turns out to be remarkably good at his job. Meanwhile, the brief scene of Inspector Dennis Drury playing with his young daughter and her friend at home tells us almost as much about him as the rigid exercise of his tried and tested methods once on the job. (Though perhaps my favourite bit of characterisation comes when the intimidating Drury has to have an injection: The inspector, who had once or twice tackled armed men without a tremor, closed his eyes and clenched his teeth...) Both Drury and Ridley are likeable figures, intelligent and competent, yet by no means infallible. Their complementary skills make them a formidable combination, though in truth it is ultimately their sheer stubbornness as much as their professional acumen that cracks the case. Indeed, the inspectors' dogged refusal to give up the chase turns out to be the most crucial aspect of an investigation that finds them running up one blind alley after another; and if it is finally a piece of dumb luck that puts the answer to the mystery into their hands, we can only feel that they have thoroughly earned this bit of cosmic kindness.

W. Stanley Sykes' professional background is on display right throughout The Missing Money-Lender, which, its focus upon its central duo of investigators notwithstanding, has a plot which is overflowing with doctors and doctors' offices and hospitals and laboratories - and mortuaries. In a pleasing touch, the locum who has taken over Dr Laidlaw's practice in Barhaven turns out to be a briskly professional (and rather attractive) young woman, which causes the visiting policemen no more than a single blink of surprise; she proceeds to make a significant contribution to the solving of the mystery. Sykes is not only thoroughly at home in this medical milieu, as we would expect, but repeatedly exercises his sense of humour at his colleagues' expense - though never unkindly or unfairly. On the contrary: when an apprehensive Drury must tell the Crown's medical examiner not only that the results of his post-mortem were wrong, but that they are going to dig the body up again and make him do another one, Sir James's reaction is not the expected explosion, but - once the circumstances are fully understood - a chuckle of delighted appreciation.

And in spite of some distinctly gruesome material in The Missing Money-Lender - like the double exhumation, and the attendant discussion of the effects of decomposition - "a chuckle of delighted appreciation" is likely to be the reader's response to this novel, too; though you'll forgive me if I don't tell you why. Suffice it to say that while for a time it seems that Sykes is going to fall back upon the "untraceable poison" so beloved of mystery novelists of this period, he actually has something much more clever up his sleeve; something which modern readers may well appreciate more than those of 1931, though the novel was a deserved success. The handling of this aspect of the plot, and the slow emergence of the truth of what happened at the Laidlaw house, is quite fascinating. Furthermore, when Sykes isn't poking fun at his profession, or rather those who practise it, he is having equal fun with his hobby. To the general enjoyment of this novel is added a regular scattering of literary references ("My name might be Pumblechook, but it isn't," comments Drury at one point, for the benefit of the Dickensians), including some meta-textual reflections on the part of Inspector Ridley on the distance between the detective novel and real life, and the even greater distance between himself and the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown: He was equipped with his full share of brains and imagination, but lacked the omniscience of the detective of fiction, whose creator has the advantage of being able to build up his story backwards...

Highly recommended.

    "As the naked eye appearances gave me no clue whatever to the probable nature of the poison, if any, a very exhaustive examination, both microscopical and chemical, was necessary. Dragendorff's process for the separation of alkaloids and other vegetable poisons yielded no results. Other tests confirmed this. Poisonous metals such as arsenic and lead were entirely absent. Spectroscopic examination of the blood showed no traces of carbon monoxide or coal-gas poisoning... Lastly, " continued the pathologist, "I took cultures to test for the presence of food-poisoning bacteria, but none were present. In short no trace of poison of any kind was found."
    "What then, in your opinion, was the cause of death?" inquired the coroner.
    "Frankly, sir, I have no idea."

>>#148

Oh, it was nothing major, just frustration upon frustration upon frustration. Blech. :(

But yes, I've had the consolation of reading a couple of good ones lately.

So! - I did promise myself that I wouldn't do my February wrap until I'd caught up my February reviews; though i wasn't expecting it to be the second week of March before I did. Anyhoo---

Though a short month, I read twelve books in February, which was satisfying, as was the mixture of works; ten of those twelve fitted into TIOLI. I did not get around to continuing my Agatha Christie re-reading, but did make a start on Georgette Heyer. Mysteries were slightly less prominent than usual - which is to say they "only" made up a third of my reading, not including my 19th century "roots of the genre" reading. My series reading was also distinctly down. The pleasant surprise of the month was The Missing Money-Lender by W. Stanley Sykes, while conversely Bertram Mitford's The Sign Of The Spider was offensive from start to finish.

February stats:

Mysteries / thrillers: 5
Classics: 1
Sensation novels: 1
Young adult: 1
Adventure: 1
Historical romance: 1
Historical fiction: 1
Non-fiction: 1

Series reading: 2
Blog reading: 1

Male : female authors: 7 : 5 (including one male using a female pseudonym)

Oldest work: The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
Newest work: Detective Piggott's Casebook: True Tales Of Murder, Madness And The Rise Of Forensic Science by Kevin Morgan (2012)

(1) I caught up my outstanding reviews.

(2) I had a completely crap week at work.

Curiously, my response to these two quite disparate phenomena is exactly the same:

A SLOTH!!!!

I'm very fond of this particular specimen, who I tend to think of as Oh-You-Sloth.

Oh, you, indeed!

Didn't realize sloths could be seductive, if only to other sloths.

Added The Missing Moneylender to the WL.

I really hope that next week is better than last...

Hi, Julia! Thought I'd get a visit from you. :)

Gail, sloths are not only flirtatious, they are built for cuddling - or at least, apparently if they get a good grip on you, they're almost impossible to dislodge!

Thanks, I really hope so too.

It's like I have a sixth sense that tells me when you post a sloth photo or something. :-D

Your slothy sense was tingling!?

Exactly!

Awesome sloth.

Hi, Ren - glad you like it!

Finished Vandals Of The Void for TIOLI #11.

Now reading About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster by Anthony Abbot (Fulton Oursler), the first in the series featuring New York Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt, for TIOLI #21.

Finished About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster for TIOLI #21.

Now reading Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer, for TIOLI #6.

Sanctuary - In attempting the perhaps impossible task of dealing objectively with William Faulkner's notorious 1931 novel, it is first necessary to cut through the legends surrounding its publication. After his original manuscript was received with the assertion, "Good God, I can't publish this - we'd both be in jail!", Faulkner moved on to other projects and, he later claimed, essentially forgot about Sanctuary until the galleys arrived: "Then I saw that it was so terrible that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it." Faulkner chose the latter path, reworking his text extensively and at his own expense. Later on he would insist that he had written the novel in the first place as a purely commercial enterprise, that he had "invented the most horrific tale I could imagine", that it was "a cheap idea...deliberately conceived to make money." However, it is important to remember that Faulkner said these things after the reworked Sanctuary had already become his first best-seller, and might be more fairly regarded as a shot across the bows of the reading public (which had not embraced either The Sound And The Fury or As I Lay Dying, works close to their author's heart), and as a thumbing of the nose in response to the critical furore that greeted the novel's publication, than as an honest statement of Faulkner's views. Lightly though he spoke at the time, years later Faulkner would refer to the "agony and sweat" of writing Sanctuary, while his preserved papers confirm the extent of his labours.

Furthermore, the eventual publishing of the original text of Sanctuary allows us to see that in reworking his "terrible" draft and its "horrible tale", Faulkner did not alter, let alone soften, his story; on the contrary. What he did do was alter the perspective from which his story is told, chiefly that of the educated and cultured Horace Benbow, whose inability to grapple with the demands of the world he inhabits effectively forms a barrier between the reader and the text. As a result of this stripping away - which is echoed within the novel by the progressive destruction of certain characters' illusions - the "nice" people of the novel lose their privileged status and are placed on the same moral level as its criminal element; which, as we discover, is exactly what they deserve. The result is a work merciless in its confronting brutality.

Sanctuary is one of Faulkner's interconnected novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and describes the escalating consequences of a series of encounters between individuals from the nearby townships and the gang of moonshiners and bootleggers who operate out of "the Old Frenchman place", an abandoned, rotting Southern mansion in an isolated corner of the county. The first of these is with Horace Benbow, a recurrent figure in Faulkner's early writing and one of his failed idealists, who is cruelly but not inaccurately summed by by Ruby Lamar, the common-law wife of the head of the gang as, "Given to much talk and not much else." So ineffectual is Horace, and so self-evidently unimportant, that, having amused themselves with him for a time, the gang not only leaves him unmolested but provides him with transport back to town. The next encounter, that between the gang and Gowan Stevens and his companion, seventeen-year-old Temple Drake, does not end so cleanly.

When it comes to Temple Drake, critics have generally found no difficulty at all in blaming the victim; yet Temple has what no-one else in this novel has: an excuse. Young and inexperienced, knowing nothing but the unreal rituals of her privileged life, a life lived behind the buffer of her father and brothers, Temple is entirely unequipped to deal with the reality that awaits her at the Old Frenchman place. She is barely able to process the nature of the dangers that confront her there, and there are moments that suggest that she has literally been driven mad by their revelation. Temple's eventual courtroom testimony, her account of the events that followed her arrival at the house, upon which Lee Goodwin is condemned for a crime - two crimes - he did not commit, is nothing so straightforward as simple perjury. From her own warped perspective, it may even be said that Temple is speaking a kind of truth. We note in her account to Horace her fixation not upon her rape, but on upon her terrorisation through the night that preceded it; the rape itself seems to figure in her mind only as the inevitable culmination of all that has come before, and for that - and perhaps rightly - she blames Lee Goodwin. Though it is Popeye who commits the rape, it is indeed Lee who makes it possible: Lee who declines to provide the transport for Temple that he did for Horace; Lee who, as Ruby's instant hostility reveals, has a dangerous interest of his own in the girl; Lee who gives her a room for the night, a room without a lock; Lee who encourages the feeble-minded Tommy to sexually interfere with Temple, when his first impulse is to protect her; and Lee whose spying, as Temple vainly seeks a private spot for her bodily functions, drives her back into the barn and to Popeye.

Whatever Lee's true degree of culpability, that Temple's testimony is not her own idea is made clear from the text's repeated references to her "parrotlike" replies, although whether it is Popeye, her family, or the District Attorney who has forced her onto the stand is left for the reader to decide. It is not merely the content, but the nature of her testimony which is suborned. ("Let these good men, these fathers and husbands, hear what you have to say and right your wrong for you...") That the District Attorney has the information about Temple to use in the first place is due to Narcissa Sartorius, Horace's sister, who is so offended at being associated even indirectly with such a shocking criminal case that she sells out her brother, and her brother's client, without hesitation. ("So the quicker he loses, the better it would be, wouldn't it?" she said. "If they hung the man and got it over with.") The dramatically timed appearance of Temple's father - a judge himself, as we are ironically reminded throughout the narrative - puts the seal upon the deliberate perversion of justice.

The text of Sanctuary is almost obsessively concerned with laying bare the code of "the Old South" and exposing it as false and rotten, a hypocritical cloak thrown over selfishness and injustice. In this world, "ideal" is another word for "delusion"; and as an escalating wave of violence sweeps across the narrative, the illusions of the few characters foolish enough to cherish any are relentlessly torn down and made a mock of. Horace Benbow bears the brunt of this. His efforts to behave chivalrously towards Ruby, Lee's common-law wife, raise suspicions of collusion and sexual exploitation (and are, in any event, thrown away on Ruby, who assumes that he is simply waiting for the right moment to demand sexual favours in exchange for his legal services), while his very faith in the legal system leaves him stunned and powerless in the face of Temple's testimony. Yet even though Horace "means well" (damning phrase), he is not guiltless of systematic hypocrisy himself, while it is his inability to stop talking - which is in turn a reflection of his inability to take decisive action - that is ultimately responsible for Lee Goodwin's situation.

The gradual but inexorable stripping away of Horace's faith is a thread that runs through the novel from beginning to end. The process is more abrupt for Gowan Stevens, whose ludicrously misconceived image of himself as a traditional Southern gentleman is shown up for the farce it is it is during his time at the Old Frenchman place. This "gentleman" is so overcome with horror at the thought of being likewise revealed to the world at large that he runs away, abandoning Temple to her fate. Even amongst the bootleggers' there are beliefs to be shattered. Ruby clings to Lee though the association brings her nothing but misery and degradation, while Lee is destroyed by his decision to call the sheriff after Tommy's murder. The text makes it clear that had he simply buried the body in the woods, no-one would have been any the wiser, or indeed cared; his attempt to do the right thing ends with him the victim of an act of mob violence - an act committed by "these good men, these husbands and fathers" - so horrifying that even the truth about Temple's rape almost pales beside it.

It is impossible to read Sanctuary and not be affected by it, whether simply by the brutality of its violence, or more subtly because of the sense of impending disaster which pervades the narrative, and which is not once, but repeatedly, nightmarishly fulfilled. Certainly the writing is powerful; occasionally even beautiful, in a perverse sort of way; with extraordinary passages of transference and transfiguration in which Temple and Horace - twinned in many respects - defend themselves psychically by imagining themselves outside of their own bodies, or other than as they are. Meanwhile, we can only admire the skill with which Faulkner manages to describe things that were, in 1931, literally indescribable.

Yet the bitter cynicism of the work, its relentless quest not merely to expose existing hypocrisy but to tear down any remnants of genuine belief, must beg the question of what we are to take away from such a book? It is all very well to call Sanctuary a study of the nature of evil, as many have, but when the reader is confronted by a world bereft of generosity, bereft of justice, bereft of hope, when the only choice offered is between civilised and uncivilised violence, what reaction is appropriate but despair? While I don't take Faulker's assertions about his "pot-boiler" and his commercial ambitions entirely at face value, I'm not sure I buy into many of the lofty claims made for Sanctuary by numerous scholars, either. This seems to me to be a novel with something significant lacking: at the risk of setting myself up to be torn down like Horace Benbow, call it a soul. The narrative is intent upon lancing and draining the poisons in the system of the world it depicts, but these efforts are not balanced by any healing; in the end, there are only open, seeping wounds as far as the eye can see. At one point in this novel Horace Benbow comments that, "There's a corruption about even looking upon evil"; I'm inclined to say the same thing about reading Sanctuary.

Better for her if she were dead tonight, Horace thought, walking on. For me, too. He thought of her, Popeye, the woman, the child, Goodwin, all put into a single chamber, bare, lethal, immediate, profound: a single blotting instant between the indignation and the surprise. And I too; thinking how that were the only solution. Removed, cauterised out of the old and tragic flank of the world. And I, too, now that we're all isolated; thinking of a gentle dark wind blowing in the long corridors of sleep: of lying beneath a low cozy roof under the long sound of the rain: the evil, the injustice, the tears...

#146 Belated 'bitch of a week' related hugs...

#149 The Missing Moneylender sounds interesting but it's a bit on the pricey side for me at the moment. Wishlisted it though in the hopes that some kind publisher will decide to bring it back into print.

#152 I love the 'Oh-You-Sloth'! :-)

#163 I hadn't heard of William Faulkner at all before LT and I don't think I've come across Sanctuary so far at all. I ca't say Sanctuary is calling to me after having read your review.

"when the reader is confronted by a world bereft of generosity, bereft of justice, bereft of hope, when the only choice offered is between civilised and uncivilised violence, what reaction is appropriate but despair?" Probably not for me.

Hi, Heather.

Not belated at all: the bitchiness rolls on. :(

I was fortunate to be able to get The Missing Money-Lender on ILL; it's not easy to get hold of.

Sloths make everything better. :)

For me with Faulkner it's a case of "I see what you're saying, but---" I don't feel particularly inclined to pursue him either, though I know for many critics he's one of the great novelists.

Hey, you cardinals!---

There *is* only one choice!

Pontifex Slothus!

I really want to read some Faulkner one of these days to find out for myself if he's really all that and a bag of chips, as the kids say (or they used to; I'm probably hopelessly dating myself). 'Sanctuary' sounds rather brutal but compelling in an odd way.

...of course, church reform might be a little slow in happening...

I would never recommend Santuary to anyone - that's a good way to ruin friendships and/or get punched in the nose - but I wouldn't discourage you, either. "Brutal", "compelling" and "odd" are all excellent words to describe it.

Hey Liz - I, too, was hoping to offer belated sympathies on your unpleasant week. I'm sorry to my best wishes for improvement are all to relevant to this week. Give 'em hell - or not - whichever will make your life easier.

The Missing Moneylender sounds great, but doesn't look too easy to get a hold of - I'll keep it in mind. I've never been a huge Faulkner fan, but your review of Sanctuary is brilliant. I will not, however, be reading the book....

#165 Not belated at all: the bitchiness rolls on. :(

:-( Well, I wish it was belated.

#166 That would get my vote :-)

#168 ...of course, church reform might be a little slow in happening...

Ba dum, tish! :-)

I hear the cardinals let me down... :(

what? They fumbled the ball on the goal line? :)

I can't comment on what THOSE cardinals might be guilty of. :)

I was so looking forward to Pontifex Slothus, too!

I would have voted for the sloth, absolutely.

Finished Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer for TIOLI #6.

Now reading The Invention Of Murder: How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders for TIOLI #11.

The Murder On The Links - Having travelled from France to England - encountering on the way an attractive but roguish girl who will only call herself "Cinderella" - Captain Arthur Hastings finds himself travelling back almost at once, when his friend Hercule Poirot is summoned to the villa of the millionaire Paul Renauld. Renauld's letter speaks ominously of a secret from his past, and the possible necessity for Poirot to go to South America. Quickly as Poirot and Hastings obey the urgent summons, however, they are too late to help Renauld, who has been found stabbed to death in a roughly dug grave on the golf course under construction near to his villa. From the local police, Poirot learns that during the night, Mr and Mrs Renauld were attacked in their bedroom by three masked men; the latter was bound and gagged while Renauld was taken away. Questioning the servants, the police learn that Renauld frequently received visits from a Madame Daubreuil, who lives with her beautiful young daughter, Marthe, in a small house nearby. However, the maid insists that the woman who called on Renauld the night before was not Madame Daubreuil but a young Englishwoman. The police find in Renauld's pocket a letter signed "Bella Duveen"; it is full of professions of love, but also offers a warning of what will happen in the event of a betrayal... Poirot initially has his doubts about the story of the masked men, but Mrs Renauld's agonised collapse when she is asked to identify her husband's body is unmistakably genuine. Although he is forced to accept that the depth of Mrs Renauld's love for her husband precludes her involvement in his death, her unguarded remarks when her son, Jack, returns home unexpectedly lead his suspicions in a different direction. It emerges that there was a violent quarrel between Jack and his father not long before Renauld's murder, and that Renauld changed his will afterwards to leave everything to his wife - something Jack did not know. The arrogant Inspector Giraud of the Sûreté takes over the official investigation. Giraud is openly contemptuous of Poirot and his methods, and an intense professional rivalry develops between the two men. However, both of them are puzzled by the significance of Renauld's body being found in a patch of ground marked out as a bunker on the new golf course, where it would inevitably have been discovered. Although they agree that the killer was interrupted before Renauld could be buried, the two detectives draw different conclusions about the grave's location: Giraud, that the killer did not know about the golf course, and therefore was not a local; Poirot, that someone wanted Renauld's body to be found...

The second novel to feature Hercule Poirot is one of Agatha Christie's most complex. The Murder On The Links holds up well to re-reading simply because it is almost impossible to keep all the details straight, thanks to a plot devoted as much to figuring out what crimes have actually been committed as to figuring out who committed them. However, this novel offers to the reader entertainment beyond the fundamental question of "whodunnit". The appearance on the scene of the self-satisfied Giraud - "the human foxfound", as Poirot calls him with gentle mockery - suggests that, following the publication of The Mysterious Affair At Styles, one too many critics may have classified Poirot and Hastings simply as another take upon Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Giraud is clearly intended as a satirical take on the Holmesian school of detection, particularly in his passion for minutiae and his scorn for Poirot's "two-foot long clue", a piece of lead pipe found in Paul Renauld's open grave. The battle between Poirot and Giraud - whom Hastings, of course, cannot help admiring for his "energy", so much in contrast with a reliance upon "the little grey cells" - is amusing for the reader, but far less so for the characters, since in his determination to show up the "old-fashioned" former policeman, Giraud becomes less and less willing to follow the evidence away from the course of his own deductions. It is ultimately Jack Renauld who pays the price for the detective's pig-headedness: yet when he finds himself under arrest for his father's murder, beyond declaring his innocence the young man proves curiously unwilling to defend himself. To Poirot, there is no mystery about his silence: he is trying to shield the person he believes guilty of his father's murder - Bella Duveen...

After his asinine romantic behaviour throughout The Mysterious Affair At Styles, it is hard not to feel that there is a certain cosmic justice about Arthur Hastings' sufferings over the course of this novel; although Fate, having doled out this deserved punishment, finally does relent and smile upon him. The lightly sketched romance between the stuffy ex-officer and the volatile young stage performer is oddly persuasive, in spite of - or perhaps because of - Hastings being almost the last man you might expect to fall in love across the class barrier. What starts out as a fairly light-hearted and casual attraction between Hastings and his "Cinderella" suddenly turns deadly serious, first with the girl's manipulation of Hastings in order to remove evidence from the crime scene, and later with the revelation that the love-letter found on Paul Renauld - a letter mixing passion and threats - was written not to him, but to Jack. Paul Renauld was wearing his son's overcoat at the time of his death, this and the resemblance between the two raising the possibility that Paul was murdered by mistake. Yet another blow for Hastings comes when Poirot discovers that, in spite of his current involvement with Marthe Daubreuil, Jack still keeps a picture of another girl... His instinctive silence when shown the photograph forces Hastings to confront both his true feelings, and the necessity of choosing sides. Though torn, he has no hesitation in trying to defend Cinderella, whatever she may have done: a stance all the more gallant for its very futility. No-one knows better than Hastings that once on the trail, Hercule Poirot cannot be turned aside; least of all in this case, with his escalating feud with Giraud spurring him on...

One of the most interesting things about The Murder On The Links is that, in spite of its all-male investigative squadron and its seeming focus upon the Renaulds, father and son, in the end this is a novel that belongs almost entirely to its women. In the early stages much of the narrative concentrates upon the handsome yet sinister Madame Daubreuil, a "woman with a past" par excellence, and her Madonna-faced daughter, Marthe - "the girl with the anxious eyes", as Poirot calls her; while by the time the complicated mystery has been unravelled, the reader is in a position to appreciate the remarkable character of Mrs Renauld, and to understand exactly what she has suffered - not only since her husband's murder, but over the entirety of their life together. But if Mrs Rebauld is heroic, we can nevertheless get away with dubbing Cinderella the novel's heroine, not least because of the courageous personal role that she plays in its denouement. The conclusion of The Murder On The Links finds Mr and Mrs Hastings on their way to South America, an arrangement that in the future would offer Dame Agatha the convenience of providing Hercule Poirot with a sidekick or not, as her plots might demand...

    For a moment or two I did not answer. To break with my old friend gave me great pain. Yet I must definitely range myself against him. Would he ever forgive me, I wondered? He had been strangely calm so far, but I knew him to possess marvellous self-command. "Poirot," I said, "I'm sorry. I admit I've behaved badly to you over this. But sometimes one has no choice. And in the future I must take my own line."
    Poirot nodded his head several times. "I understand," he said. The mocking light had quite died out of his eyes, and he spoke with a sincerity and kindness that surprised me. "It is that, my friend, is it not? It is love that has come---not as you imagined it, all cock-a-hoop with fine feathers, but sadly, with bleeding feet. Well, well---I warned you. When I realised that this girl must have taken the dagger, I warned you..."

The Prisoner In The Opal - On the eve of his annual holiday amongst the vineyards of France, Mr Julius Ricardo is approached by a lovely young American girl, Joyce Whipple, who confides to him her fears for her friend, Diana Tasborough. Uncomfortable but determined, Joyce explains that her letters from Diana, though commonplace in content, have induced strange terrors in her; a sense of evil. She is convinced that some danger threatens Diana, but being unable to go to her friend herself, she pleads with Mr Ricardo to pay a visit to her home near Bordeaux. In France, Mr Ricardo is reunited with his old friend, Inspector Hanaud, and tells him Joyce's story. To his surprise, Hanaud does not mock, but encourages him to visit the Château Suvlac and keep his eyes open; he, Hanaud, will be nearby in Bordeaux, investigating a series of disappearances. At the Château, Mr Ricardo is introduced to the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol, a neighbouring winemaker; Robyn Webster, Diana's oddly precise estate manager; and Evelyn Devenish, a young widow whom Mr Ricardo has seen if not met before - while viewing the horrors in the notorious "Cave of Mummies" below St Michel's in Bordeaux. He is very surprised to find Joyce there also: she explains that she was able to delay her departure for a short time, but must leave for America in another two days. A guest for dinner is the Abbé Fauriel, who is late because of an incident involving stolen vestments. As the evening progresses, Mr Ricardo becomes aware of a strange, tense atmosphere. A hasty remark from Joyce about "dispensing the cold" causes the Abbé to cross himself, while Joyce in turn is the target for looks of venomous hatred from Mrs Devenish: something Mr Ricardo ascribes to Robyn Webster's evident interest in her. Mr Ricardo does not sleep well that night. Getting up around two o'clock, he sees lights in the villa that is Webster's home and office, and also on the first floor of a house across the valley, which belongs to the Vicomte. Going downstairs for a book, Mr Ricardo sees a shadowy figure run along the terrace past the French windows of the library and slip into the corner room belonging to Diana Tasborough. The next morning, the Château Suvlac is visited by Commissaire Herbesthal and Inspector Hanaud himself, who have come to break the news of a gruesome discovery. A large woven basket has been dragged from the river containing the nude body of a woman: she has been stabbed to death, and her right hand hacked off. It is then realised that two of the Château's guests are missing: Evelyn Devenish, and Joyce Whipple...

The third book in A. E. W. Mason's series featuring Inspector Hanaud of the Sûreté is a strange and quite disturbing work. It is also a work of uncomfortable tone shifts, with the horrors progressively uncovered by Hanaud - and by the end this is almost as much a horror story as it is a conventional mystery - offset, though not in the least dissipated, by a larger dose than usual of Hanaud's peculiar sense of humour. As the case proceeds, a long shadow is thrown across it by the unknown fate of Joyce Whipple, who although not the murder victim is nevertheless missing, and by the grim thought of the disappearances that Hanaud came to Bordeaux to investigate in the first place... Although the murder is eventually solved, this is only one half of the mystery; the rest is elucidated not by Hanaud, but by Joyce, whose escapes a gruesome fate only by a hair's-breadth, and who, after at first looking like its villain, and then like its victim, finally emerges as this story's hero. It is a matter of no small satisfaction that this intelligent, courageous young woman draws her own investigative powers from the fact that she used to be a librarian: her area of expertise being "Section M - O" of a major library in Washington, from which she progressively absorbed all sorts of arcane knowledge - some of which alerted her to the nature of the danger surrounding Diana, and also enabled her to save her friend's life, albeit almost at the cost of her own... Hanaud, meanwhile, is busy absorbing arcane knowledge of his own: "English idioms", on which he prides himself, and which he invariably misapplies. Those of us with kneejerk grammar-correcting tendencies can only sympathise with the agonies suffered by the pedantic Mr Ricardo as a consequence; as indeed we might be tempted to sympathise with his exasperated reaction to Hanaud's various outbreaks of ill-timed buffoonery. Then again, perhaps Mr Ricardo should have kept in mind something that those of us who have followed the Inspector's's career to this point are very well aware of: that Hanaud is never more dangerous than when acting like a clown...

Over the course of The Prisoner In The Opal, the issue increasingly becomes not just the identity of the killer, but the nature of the crime itself: about which Hanaud is put upon the right track almost at once, by a glimpse of something disturbing in Diana Tasborough's room... For reasons of his own, the Inspector asks Mr Ricardo to undertake the grim task of identifying the body pulled from the river. On the way to the mortuary, Mr Ricardo confides in Hanaud his conviction that the victim will turn out to be Joyce Whipple. He describes his first encounter with Evelyn Devenish in the Cave of Mummies, and her evident satisfaction at the sight of one of the long-preserved bodies, that of someone buried alive; he also describes the deep hatred with which Evelyn regarded Joyce, and his fear that Joyce has become its victim. However, to his surprise and somewhat guilty relief, the murdered woman is Evelyn Devenish. What, then, has happened to Joyce?---Joyce, whose gold-and-opal bracelet is found caught in the lining of the basket in which Evelyn's body was discarded...

Inspector Hanaud, meanwhile, is equally interested in the fine linen cloth in which the body was wrapped, which he links to the story of the stolen vestments. At the Château, Hanaud conducts thorough searches of the rooms of Evelyn, Joyce and Diana; Mr Ricardo is on the alert in the latter, but cannot tells what caught Hanaud's eye at the outset. Meanwhile, Evelyn's room is quite untouched, while Joyce's shows signs of a hasty change of clothing, though it was not slept in either. A search of Robin Webster's villa suggests that in spite of the lights, he may have been absent the night before. Hanaud is interested in his books, a collection of the religious and the irreligious, and notes that the fly-leaf has been carefully cut from certain of the volumes. Mr Ricardo suggests a change of name, but Hanaud suspects a change of something else. The two men then call upon the Vicomte, only to find him busy at the unlikely task of repainting the gate at the back of his property - the gate leading to the road which is the most direct route to the Château Suvlac... Mr Ricardo is somewhat relieved to note that Hanaud's attention seems concentrated upon Webster and the Vicomte, which implies that Diana at least is free of guilt---only then Diana makes a jeering remark about his sleepless night, something that Mr Ricardo has confided only to Hanaud and the examining magistrate, M. Tidon...

    "Monsieur Hanaud," said the Abbé, "I spoke too lightly in this house last night. I am ashamed, and I have appointed to myself certain penances in consequence. My vestments were hanging in the sacristy this morning and were worn by me as early as six o'clock, when to a deplorable congregation of two old women, I sought the blessing of St. Matthew upon our vineyards."
    "That won't do," said Hanaud bluntly. The two men were standing face to face, the priest sheltering what knowledge he had behind a stolid face, Hanaud towering over him, like an inquisitor. The fine courtesies of "Monsieur l'Abbé" and "Monsieur Hanaud" were discarded like the last year's frills on a lady's gown. "You did not find all your vestments in your sacristy this morning. For one of them is in the mortuary at Villeblanche stained with the blood of a young woman who dined at the same table with you in this house last night, and was savagely murdered afterwards."

I read a lot of old books. ("No!" they gasped incredulously.) This being the case, I'm generally unbothered by, or even don't notice, the use of words which are generally not used any more, or not used in the same way, because their original meaning has been overtaken by a secondary meaning - for instance, "intercourse".

Nevertheless, every now and then I come across a usage so infelicitous that I'm surprised into a snickering fit; though I usually have the grace to feel ashamed of myself afterwards.

As an example, consider the following from The Prisoner In The Opal:

Joyce Whipple looked a little puzzled, but as Mr Ricardo was delighted to observe, she was too well bred to pass any comment on the unexpected ejaculation.

If only all women were so considerate, hey, fellas?

Ha! Whenever I notice one of those I feel like Beavis or Butthead ("heh heh heh, she said ejaculation, heh")

You read the most interesting books I've never heard of, Liz!

Oh, I know, me too! And most of the time I don't really "notice", but this one kind of leapt out at me. :)

I'm glad you find them interesting!

Vandals Of The Void - James Morgan Walsh was a prolific Australian writer of the early 20th century, who under a variety of names published adventure stories, mysteries and, more unusually, science fiction. Indeed, science fiction seems to have been his passion, though at the time it was clearly less marketable than the other genres, so that Walsh wrote only three novels of this kind. The first was Vandals Of The Void, which was serialised in Wonder Story magazine in America in 1931, before being published in hardcover in England the same year. Twenty years later, it was revived and reprinted as the cover story for the Spring 1951 issue of Fantastic Story magazine, as shown above. (I feel obliged to point out that the skimpily-clad, clearly human female on that cover bears no resemblance whatsoever to the novel's courageous and dignified Martian heroine.) Remarkably, Vandals Of The Void may be the first science fiction novel to feature the now all-too-familiar scenario of a battle in outer space. Though I call it science fiction, it is a work perhaps best described by the term "space opera" - albeit that the novel was written a full decade before that expression was coined.

Set in the far-flung future of the late 21st century, Vandals Of The Void features a time in which space travel is a commonplace, with frequent interaction between the peoples of Earth, Mars and Venus for purposes of both commerce and recreation. Though relations are friendly and the "inner planets" at peace, there was also a terrible time in the past known as the War Of The Planets. The spaceways between the planets, the "void" as it is called, are patrolled by the members of an an elite military organisation, the Interplanetary Guard, which consists of Earthmen and Martians; the gentle Venusians not being cut out for such work. As the story opens, Space Captain Jack Sanders is hoping for a relaxing holiday. Having passed much of his life in space, Sanders has little first-hand knowledge of any planet but his own, and has decided to spend his leave visiting Mars and Venus. However, the interstellar liner Cosmos has barely lifted off before Sanders receives a disturbing communication: two spaceships have been found adrift, their communications paralysed and everyone on board in deep suspended animation due to intense cold. Moreover, space ports on both Mars and Venus are reporting overdue craft and losses of contact. Sanders is ordered to stay on the alert, and to share his information only with Captain Hume of the Cosmos. Trying to resume his holiday, Sanders finds himself strongly attracted to a lovely Martian girl called Jansca Dirka, who is travelling with her father. After a stop at the moon, mostly occupied by people concerned with mining operations, the Cosmos pushes on towards Mars. Shortly after takeoff, Sanders is urgently summoned to the control room: another derelict ship has been spotted. The Cosmos docks with it, and Sanders leads a party on board. The cold is overwhelming, yet slowly begins to recede; while the passengers and crew are found grouped together and comatose. As the temperature rises, they begin to recover. One woman, who remained conscious slightly longer than the others, tells a strange story of invaders some eight-feet tall; people who are mist-like, intangible...

Vandals Of The Void is first and foremost an adventure story, with Earth and Mars teaming up against an invading people who turn out to be from Mercury, and who occupy Venus as their first step towards taking over the Inner Planets. The story leaps from crisis to crisis, barely giving the reader time to catch breath, and is regularly punctuated by futuristic cries like, "By the planets!" and "What in the universe?" The Mercurians - "beings taller even than the Martians, whose most distinctive features were their deep purple eyes and the ridge of horn on each man's head" - have developed the technology to turn themselves and their ships invisible, and under this cloak have been using their ability to create a paralysingly cold atmosphere to conduct informational raids on the ships of Earth and Mars. Their long-term goal is the invasion and colonisation of the inner planets. While Earth and Mars are still trying to deal with the devastating raids on their ships, word comes that a Mercurian force has established itself upon Venus and is enslaving the people. A lucky accident reveals that a Martian drink, a tonic called Oxcta, offers protection against the cold induced by the Mercurians, while the ray tubes with which the Interplanetary Guards are armed are not only effective as weapons, but disrupt the system by which Mercurians maintain invisibility. Armed with this knowledge, a battle fleet is assembled, one capable of fighting the Mercurians on their own terms...

In spite of its focus upon action, Vandals Of The Void is not entirely without political and social commentary. Moreover, for the most part it displays an encouragingly broadminded attitude, far different from what we might expect to find in writing of this era. The people of Earth, Mars and Venus are generally depicted in a spirit of "different but equal", though the Venusians' helplessness in a crisis is bluntly contrasted to the energy and efficiency of the people of Earth and Mars. However, the Venusians do have great abilities, just not for warfare. They are a peaceful, creative people - described rather intriguingly as "reminding one almost equally of a bird and a butterfly" - who have a particular gift for science and exploration. It was, in fact, the Venusians who discovered the deposits of "rolgar" (the novel's equivalent of "unobtanium") on the Earth's moon, and so made long-distance space travel possible. It is amusing to note that upon first developing the capacity for space travel, humankind was so eager to see what was out there that it shot straight past the moon. It took the less ambitious Venusians to show the people of Earth what was (relatively speaking) right under their own noses.

Early on, with one character referred to as "looking like he might have a touch of the Martian", I was worried that Vandals Of The Void might end up in some unpleasant territory, but as it turned out, on the contrary: though the Martians are described as "dark-skinned", it never becomes an issue. Earthmen and Martians live comfortably on one another's planets, and not infrequently intermarry. They less commonly mix with the Venusians (only because they can't tolerate the humidity on Venus), but it does happen: Arenack, the famous scientist who develops the technology that will ultimately defeat the Mercurians, is a mix of Earthman, Martian and Venusian. Jack Sanders, hitherto entirely devoted to his career, falls hard and fast for a Martian woman, and she for him; the two marry - sorry, are mated - quickly, so that Jansca can go into battle at her husband's side, as Martian tradition permits.

As with the mingling of its people, Vandals Of The Void has some interesting ideas on the subject of women; although perhaps the novel doesn't go as far in this respect as we might wish. Captain Hume, born on Mars of human parents and married to a Martian, considers the Martian system superior because women don't work; Sanders considers the Earth system superior because women can work if they want to. Jansca herself not only joins Jack first in hand-to-hand combat against the Mercurians, and then as an officer on board his battleship, but later collaborates with Arenack in the development of the new technology, some of which is her own idea. On the other hand, there seem to be no women - Martian wives aside - in the Interplanetary Guard; while when Jansca, in relief at the arrival of an Earth rescue ship, allows herself to cry, Jack reflects smugly that, "This girl of another world differed little from the rest of her sex." Mind you, Jack is clearly more than a little intimidated by his brilliant Martian bride, so perhaps we should take this face-saver with a grain of salt.

Inevitably, much of the attraction of Vandals Of The Void lies in its concept of what "the future" will bring in the way of technology, which as we might anticipate is a mixture of the genuinely clever and the adorably wrongheaded. Perhaps of most interest is the novel's ideas about reading; I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know that neither reading nor books are dead in "the future". Here, the Martian technology reigns: their "book-machines" are audiobooks with a full cast of voices, and with a further option of having the narration accompanied by a kind of motion picture. (People are more polite in "the future" than the users of technology are these days: the use of book-machines requires "sound insulators", so you don't disturb those around you. If only - !) However, many people - including Jack Sanders - prefer "the old print books", feeling that the book-machines are somehow lacking: "One misses that literary touch." One print book in particular is woven into the narrative in a manner both amusing and pointed: The War Of The Worlds, which we learn is a lingering sore point with the Martians and a subject best avoided. However, this detail is not merely there as a joke: as with Wells' seminal science fiction work, Vandals Of The Void is an examination of what it is like to be, not the expansionists, not the colonisers - use what term you will - but the ones on the receiving end. At a time when the sun was still many years away from setting on the Empire, this is an unexpected and welcome point of view.

    The message that was to change the whole course of my life came through on the General Communicator about 10 P.M. Earth Time, while we were still within the planet's atmospheric envelope. The interstellar liner Cosmos, bound from New York (Earth) to Tlanan (Mars) had lifted from the Madison Landing scarcely an hour before and we were still making altitude when the call came through from Harran.
    This was to have been my first interplanetary trip as a private passenger, my first carefree holiday in years. Not that the journey itself held any attraction for me or that I was new to the outer reaches of space. On the contrary. As an official of the Interplanetary Guard, which is responsible for the smooth running of traffic and the maintenance of law and order in the void between the inner planets, I had seen rather too much of them. Nevertheless I was looking forward to a holiday free from emergency calls, the long restful voyage to the Red Planet and the hope, if time allowed, of a stopover on Venus on the way home...

>179 lyzard: LOL!

heh heh heh, "ejaculation" !
(just had to join in with Beavis & Butthead there).

I didn't realise I was playing to such a lowbrow crowd. :)

We're smart, but we're shallow. :-)

I'll have you know I have a very high forehead, indeed!

On the subject of changing meanings over time, I still remember while reading Rose in Bloom as a kid how shocked I was by a reference to one of Rose's cousins 'making love' to her on the dance floor.....

I think as a kid I knew that meaning well before I knew the other, which shows that I was mostly reading old books even then. :)

Speaking of which, in Dr Thorne we get this:

"Doctor, there have been love-makings, you may take my word for it; love-makings of a very, very, very advanced description."

Gasp!!

Oooh, a very, very, very advanced description! I really need to finish 'The Warden' so I can examine these naughty doings.

#179 *snickers* Thanks for the chuckle!

Thank you for chuckling. :)

Finished The Invention Of Murder for TIOLI #11.

And while I could easily list this also for TIOLI #11 - "Read a book because you like the title" - in fact I dug it out of The List for TIOLI #2 - "Part of a plant" - now reading The Insane Root by Rosa Praed.

("Dug it out"...didn't even mean that...)

I'll add my snickers to the ejaculations and love-making...

Shouldn't that be love-making and ejaculations?

I mean, first things first...

Heh heh heh.

LOL!

Hi Liz!

#128 - I had never heard of her, but this Mary Fortune business is fascinating - possible ghost writing, bigamy, etc. Thank you!

#163 - An amazing piece on Sanctuary. I usually dismiss it as the most well-written trashy novel I've ever read, but your points are excellent. I happen to be a Faulkner enthusiast, but I realize he's not for everyone, and if you start with the wrong book, it can be a disaster.

#179 - Ha!

Hi, Kerri - thank you so much for visiting! It's frustrating to think how many interesting, talented writers may have just slipped through the cracks over the years; at least we have some of Mary Fortune's output.

I appreciate your comments on Faulkner because I'm only a dabbler and was worried my take on Sanctuary was way off base. What would you recommend as the right book to start with?

#198 - My favorites are The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom!, but I know they drive some people crazy. If you want something a bit more straightforward, Light in August is an excellent choice. I'm sort of against starting with As I Lay Dying, as I don't find the characters wildly engaging and it drags a bit, but I know others may disagree. So, Light in August is my answer!

Noted - thank you. :)

About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster (UK & reissue title: The Murder Of Geraldine Foster) - Fulton Oursler was a journalist, playwright and novelist who is perhaps best known these days for his book on Father Edward Flanagan, which was the basis of the film Boy's Town, and as the author of The Greatest Story Ever Told. However, like so many others at the time, Oursler dabbled in crime and detective stories, including writing a mystery series under the pseudonym "Anthony Abbot". I'm not certain what the technical term is for when a character is also a book's putative author (as with the novels written by "Ellery Queen"), but these mysteries are supposedly accounts of real-life cases on which one Anthony Abbot worked in the capacity of secretary to the Police Commissioner of New York City, Mr Thatcher Colt.

About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster is famously dedicated, To the standing army of the City of New York - THE POLICE DEPARTMENT, and opens by pouring scorn upon the amateur detective of fiction, the dilettante with his encyclopaedic knowledge of abstruse subjects and numerous hobbies, of which murder is merely one. And having done so, it then introduces us to Thatcher Colt, an "historian of crime" with "some 15,000 books" on the subject, whose secret passions are music and poetry, and who is known as "the best-dressed man in New York". However, Colt is also "a detective by nature", possessing (for instance) both the knowledge and the eagle eye to tell at a glance that the purple ink in which a note supposedly by the eponymous Geraldine Foster is written is not the same purple ink found in her writing desk.

With this and many other examples of Colt's own encyclopaedic knowledge of abstruse subjects, it's difficult not to take that introduction as a joke; yet it seems to have been intended quite seriously, as does its assertion that the aim of these novels is to demonstrate the capacity and dedication of the NYPD. However, there's still the little detail that the position of Police Commissioner of New York is a political appointment with largely administrative functions, and that the person holding it does not necessarily have police experience. So it is with Thatcher Colt - who is, therefore, looked at squarely, simply an amateur detective with the power to get the police force to do his leg-work for him.

These quibbles (and some far more serious ones to come) aside for the moment, About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster begins with a disappearance: Betty Canfield, Geraldine's roommate, reports that she has not been seen since Christmas Eve, five days earlier. Betty's uncle is a friend of Thatcher Colt, and so the case comes directly to him. Colt learns that Geraldine worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office, and that she was to be married in the New Year. Having set in motion a standard missing person investigation, Colt himself takes a hand, visiting the apartment of the two girls and questioning Betty more closely. He learns that Geraldine argued with her employer, Dr Humphrey Maskell, shortly before her disappearance. A search of the apartment turns up an old-fashioned key which Betty cannot identify, and a fragment of a torn-up letter in Geraldine's handwriting, its brief words suggesting blackmail. Colt sends a man to search the building's waste-paper for the rest of the letter. On his way out, one of Colt's men reports that the janitor heard a heated quarrell between Betty and Geraldine on Christmas Eve morning, something Betty herself did not mention. At Dr Maskell's office, the doctor asserts that he last saw Geraldine at two o'clock on Christmas Eve, and reluctantly explains that they argued over the girl's decision to break her engagement. He insists that he does not know why she made that decision, but Colt does not believe him. Searching Maskell's rooms, he finds Geraldine's coat and purse in a cupboard. Colt's man cannot find the rest of the blackmail letter, but he finds another that mentions an address in an isolated corner of Manhattan. It turns out to be a lonely, ramshackle old house; the key found in Geraldine's apartment fits the door. Inside is a scene of horror, with the walls and floors covered in blood, and a small, double-headed axe lying nearby...

As a mystery, About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster is a success. It is tightly and yet complexly plotted, playing fair with the reader while quite likely leading him or her astray; in this respect, it is a novel that repays re-reading, one full of throw-away details that turn out to be anything but. In the context of the "Golden Age" mystery, it is also startlingly frank in its description of the violence done to Geraldine Foster: no doubt this, too, was a deliberate attack upon the "murder-as-light-entertainment" mindset often associated with stories featuring hobbyist detectives. Less explicitly, yet still in a manner unusual for its era, the novel shows its willingness to bring sex into it. From the beginning, circumstances suggest that Geraldine was having an illicit affair, with this possibility throwing suspicion upon the various outraged men in her life: her father, her brother and her fiancé. Mr Foster's almost obsessive insistence that Geraldine was a good girl raises in Thatcher Colt's mind the thought that this may have been an honour killing, while Bruce Foster, in reaction to his own belief in his sister's immoral conduct, has begun drinking heavily. Harry Armstrong, who is unable to account for his movements after he supposedly left town on 23rd December, finally admits that he had distanced himself from Geraldine after discovering a secret about Bruce: that not only was he adopted, but the child of a convicted axe-murderer. However, official suspicion soon fastens itself upon Dr Maskell, whose alibi for the afternoon of Christmas Eve turns out to be full of holes. Though he insists upon his innocence, when questioned Dr Maskell turns stubborn, refusing to respond beyond a certain point. Of course, the NYPD has ways of dealing with suspects like that...

It is evident that About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster intends the reader to admire the anything-for-the-truth attitude of Thatcher Colt and his police colleagues---but you really, really don't, not when Colt works in conjunction with a District Attorney whose only pleasure in life seems to be sending people to the electric chair (their guilt or innocence apparently doesn't matter much), and not when "anything" turns out to include the third degree. This is a method that Anthony Abbot tells us is (circa 1930) being phased out - he's not happy about it - adding that, anyway, only hardened criminals are beaten up, because that's all they understand. Dr Maskell, being a gentleman, is not physically harmed: he is merely deprived of food and sleep and subjected to shouted questioning and verbal abuse for twelve hours straight.

And it doesn't stop there. Maskell holds up under the - shall I use the word? - torture, so Thatcher Colt presses on, first to the use of a lie detector, and then to an injection of "truth serum" - scopolamine, a sodium pentathol derivative - the latter after the lie detector has cleared Maskell of Geraldine's murder.

And the best part? It turns out that Colt believed all along that Dr Maskell was innocent. He just wanted him to answer his questions, and he wouldn't - so what's a Police Commissioner to do?

The bad taste left by this section of the novel, particularly the shrugging, what's-the-problem? tone of it, tends to distract the reader from what is, in all fairness, a very clever mystery. It is particularly so with respect to the smokescreen that the murderer manages to create around the real motive for Geraldine's death, and the brutality with which it is brought about. There are other pleasures here for the crime buff, including the application of contemporary forensic science to the investigation, and the fact that Thatcher Colt is a walking compendium of famous murders. It is one of his beliefs that criminals tend to repeat, not just themselves, but other criminals; and at various points in the story he points out similarities between the case being investigated and other (real-life) crimes. Given the circumstances of the death of Geraldine Foster, it may strike the reader as curious that the notorious Lizzie Borden never rates a mention. Then again, there may be a reason for that...

    As in a frenzy then we clawed at the earth that lay around that stiff form in the ground. The air was bitter cold, yet the perspiration ran from our foreheads into our eyes. Now that we had found the infernal sepulcre we were seeking. ages seemed to pass before all the earth was taken from it and we could stand up, as we did stand up, panting and gasping, and sick with horror, and look down upon that illuminated trench.
    What we had unearthed was the nude form of a girl, its head covered with a pillow-case stained with earth and blood, the whole body hideously hacked, and most awfully slain. On one slim finger glistened the diamond of an engagement ring. After the first long, appalling scrutiny, we turned away from that eerie sight, as if by common assent. Neil clutched off the headlight. In the dark we stood there, men who had fought in the front line trenches, men accustomed to death, now momentarily shaken and queachy and sick.

Great review as usual, Liz! I can relate to having trouble with older mysteries that treat police brutality as a given. It's sobering to realize how far we've come — or have we? There are so many cases in the news these days about false confessions that are gotten by underhanded police tactics like sleep deprivation and intimidation and everything short of actual beating.

Thanks, Julia! I suppose the progress lies in the fact that we do regard the tactics as underhanded, and view any such confessions as "the fruit of the poisoned tree". (Which reminds me, this book made me want to research when that became part of law.)

Finished The Insane Root for TIOLI #2.

Now reading Murder In The French Room by Helen Joan Hultman, which won't fit TIOLI unless it has a character called Jo----

ETA: HA!! So I open up Murder In The French Room, and its first sentence begins: "Joyce Terry scuttled from the cashier's desk---"

Which is a relief, really, because I've had a ridiculous amount of trouble with Madeline's last few challenges. :)

Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer - Policing as we now understand it developed in fits and starts over the 18th and 19th centuries, as growing populations and their attendant crime rates contended with widespread fears over the loss of civil liberties. In London, the first step towards replacing the antiquated and farcically inadequate system of "the watch" was taken in 1753 by (of all people) Henry Fielding, who had become the Bow Street police magistrate five years earlier. Fielding was not allowed to establish the police force that he wanted, but he did get away with building a small private band of men, a sort of personal secret service, who were given rudimentary training in the law and worked at apprehending criminals. When Fielding was succeeded in 1754 by his blind half-brother, John (later Sir John and now, I understand, the star of his own series of historical mysteries), this service was expanded and backed up by innovations in criminal record-keeping and cooperation between jurisdictions. So successful was Sir John as a crime fighter that much of what he did (a lot of which had been paid for out of his own pocket) received belated official approval, and he was authorised to establish formal street patrols operating out of the Bow Street magistrate's court as well as, more importantly, a squad of officers whose duty was the investigation of crimes. These were the so-called Bow Street Runners, England's first detectives.

The curious thing about the Bow Street Runners, given their prominence in historical fiction set in this period, is how little is actually known about them: for one reason or another, few records pertaining to their formation, recruiting processes and operation have survived. Ironically, most of what we do know is skewed to the negative, since it emanates from various parliamenrary inquiries into the conduct, or misconduct, of the band; opportunities for corruption were rife, and sometimes they were taken. What we do know is that the Runners were few in number, wore plain clothes, had the power to operate anywhere in Great Britain, and occasionally were sent overseas. While London remained their main area of operation, a Runner could be requested by officials in the country in a case of serious crime, as inspectors from Scotland Yard were later on. Though the organisation as a whole was shadowy, a few individual Runners became public figures due to their involvement in notorious criminal cases. Eventually, however, the Bow Street Runners were superseded by the establishment of an official police force under Sir Robert Peel, and in 1839 they were disbanded. Ironically, this had the immediate effect of reducing the number of crimes solved, as in its initial formation Peel's force had only powers for patrolling and the immediate prevention of crime, and no investigative capacity.

Possibly because of the lack of hard information, the Bow Street Runners made only infrequent appearances in the fiction of the 19th century, and rarely in a flattering manner: they were commonly depicted as corrupt or inept. Quite often, the plot would involve a Runner being shown up by a talented amateur: shades of things to come, in the evolution of the British detective story. For the most part, Runners played only minor or supporting roles in this fiction, but one work, perhaps the first to feature them, not only makes them the focus of its story but shows the Runners in a strongly positive light. Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer was published in three volumes in 1827, when the Runners were still England's preeminent criminal investigation unit. The work was published anonymously, and while it has been variously attributed to Thomas Gaspey and Thomas S. Surr, two prolific writers of the early 19th century, as E. F. Bleiler demonstrates in his introduction to the 1987 fascsimile re-release of Richmond, there's no reason either man would have hesitated to publish under his own name. As a work of fiction, Richmond is not wholly successful, being too rambling and unfocused to be satisfying, but in historical terms it could hardly be more important: it is, in all likelihood, the first ever fictional account of a professional detective solving crimes.

In its early stages, Richmond is a struggle, bearing rather too much of a resemblance to the picaresque fiction of the 17th and 18th centuries, and with a protagonist unattractively addicted to practical joking. Threatened by his father with life behind a desk, the restless young Tom Richmond runs away, spending some time as part of a company of strolling players, and rather longer with a band of gypsies. One of the most intriguing things about this novel is its iconoclastic attitude towards the gypsies, which is quite different from anything I've come across over the next one hundred years of fiction---which is to say, it contends that gypsies are neither thieves nor beggars, but live for the most part by receiving goods in exchange for casual labour, and supplement their income by fortune-telling and dancing. It also scorns the notion that they are habitual child-stealers and, intriguingly, there is a tone of authority about these passages that suggests the anonymous author knew what he was talking about, possibly through experiences similar to those he gives his hero. In any event, Richmond's inside knowledge stands him in good stead when he makes his abrupt career change. Although he never loses his fondness for the gypsies, he grows tired of the rambling life, and looks around for a profession that will give him some security while still feeding his love of adventure. With the help of a friend, he becomes a Bow Street Runner.

The text of Richmond is amusingly vague about how exactly its hero becomes a part of this investigative force, suggesting that even at the time little was known about the functioning of the Runners. Be that as it may, Richmond's first case comes to him because of his known association with the gypsies: a child is kidnapped, and suspicion has fallen in the obvious quarter. Richmond starts his investigation with the assumption that the gypsies were not, in fact, to blame, but rather have been set up as the scapegoats---and he is quite right. What he discovers is a complicated plot involving fraud and inheritance. He manages to find and rescue the child, but the main perpetrator, a man called Jones, escapes.

The single most interesting thing about Richmond, particularly given its position in the detective fiction timeline, is the way that gives its hero a recurrent nemesis. While you can hardly class Jones with the likes of Moriarty - for one thing, he doesn't know he is Richmond's nemesis - nevetheless this novel shows an instinctive understanding of the dramatic potential inherent in a series of encounters between a detective and the criminal who eludes his grasp. With Jones escaping the first time, although through no fault of the detective's own, Richmond swears that he will hunt the man down and bring him to justice; the reward offered, though undoubtedly attractive, is not his chief motivation. Richmond then pursues Jones through his varied career as embezzler, kidnapper, "resurrection man", possible murderer, and smuggler. It is, somewhat ironically, the last that brings Jones to grief, as the illegal importation of tea and brandy is taken sufficiently seriously by the government - much more seriously than trivial offences like body-snatching - that Richmond is able to recruit help from the "preventives", that is, the coast guard, and after a serious of clashes between the two armed bands, finally gets his man.

As a whole, Richmond is something like a bell-curve. The middle part of the novel, dealing with Richmond's various cases, maintains a high level of interest. Conversely, the account of its hero's early life that opens it grows a little tiresome, and so too does the story that closes it which, although it does involve another of Richmond's cases, it presented as a cautionary tale about the snares that lurk in London for unwary young men from the country. This story opens with Richmond saving the life of one particular young man, a Mr Percy, after he attempts suicide by jumping into the river; we are then given an account of the circumstances that drove him to this extremity. The problem here is that Mr Percy is so very stupid, it grows increasingly difficult to feel any sympathy for him. One point of interest, however, is that amongst the snares into which Percy falls (literally, I suppose you'd say) is a certain married woman, with whom against his conscience and almost against his will, he begins an affair. It turns out, of course, that she and her husband have blackmail on their minds.

It is a mark of when Richmond was published that it is able to be comparatively frank about such matters. However, if the sexual blackmail of the final story is surprising, still more so is the working out of the subplot involving the discarded mistress of a dissolute young baronet, who is another of the novel's recurring characters. Much to his own astonishment, Richmond finds himself falling in love with the girl, and against his better judgement, he marries her---in spite of his doubts that she can be content with what he can give her, and his more serious (though less openly expressed) fears around her future sexual conduct. As it turns out, he need not have worried: Mrs Richmond's behaviour is exemplary, and the two are perfectly happy together; her past is exactly that, her past. This capacity for forgiveness, this willingness to give second chances, is not something found in the literature of the later 19th century, when an increasingly rigid (and frankly un-Christian) morality would damn such a girl without hesitation. This generosity of spirit is one of Richmond's most pleasant surprises.

    The business of the committals being all satisfactorily settled by Mr M-----d, I had nothing farther to do than transfer my prisoner to the local authorities, to be dealt with according to the laws he had offended. At the ensuing assizes a verdict of guilty was recorded against him upon a single charge, no other being brought forward; and he was sentenced to be transported, though, as the old crone had justly said, "the gallows was too good for him." I never heard, nor wished to hear, more of the miscreant: that he was not sentenced to execution, however, eased my mind of a very disagreeable feeling connected with emoluments arising from the capital conviction of criminals. I would much rather never touch a guinea, than have the reflection of it being the price of life, even though the convict had committed crimes of the deepest dye. Forty pounds would prove but a poor recompense to me for the consciousness of having been the chief instrument in bringing a miserable wretch to the gallows.
    This feeling, I foresee, may subject me to the accusation of inconsistency, since my principal duty as an officer must be to apprehend criminals who have to take their chance of capital conviction. Well, it may be inconsistent; I cannot help it. All I can say is, that I have a very different feeling about a capital punishment and a sentence of transportation.

Liz, your quote from 'Richmond' reminds me of something I've always wondered about older books like this, and maybe you know the answer. Why were they so prone to obscure names and dates and things, like that Mr M------d in the quote? Was it supposed to make people thing it was based on real people who could not be named? Or what?

I think it's a combination of two things. In books such as this it is certainly a way of adding verisimilitude to what is supposed to be a "true story", but overall, given that fiction was very slow in losing its reputation as a slightly disreputable form of writing, it was a way of placing a respectful distance between a novel and real life.

Thanks, Liz. I knew you'd know!

Finished Murder In The French Room for TIOLI #1.

Unfortunately, I've had to skip over the eighth book in John Rhode's "Dr Priestley" series, Peril At Cranbury Hall, as it is rare and ridiculously expensive, and move onto the ninth: Pinehurst (aka Dr Priestley Investigates), for TIOLI #4.

Finished Pinehurst for TIOLI #4.

Now reading The Nine Bears by Edgar Wallace, the first in his series featuring Superintendent (later Inspector) Elk.

More great touchstones: the first choice for The Nine Bears is The World Of Pooh: The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. :)

Well, that sounds similar, Liz! One bear, nine bears, what's the difference really?

What's got me fascinated is that there is no mention of a bear in the title - so how does it know!? :)

#210 Great review of About the Murder of Geraldine Foster Liz. It sounds interesting but I don't know if I would find the police brutality aspects too off-putting.

#205 And another excellent review for a book that sounds very interesting. Given the size of my wishlist and TBR piles I should probably feel greatful that neither of these two books are easily available.

#213 Baffling!

And I finally got round to requesting Louisa M Alcott's Behind a Mask from the library!

The touchstone logic is frequently a mystery to me. I suppose someone understands it....

here is no mention of a bear in the title - so how does it know!?
C'mon. Even the touchstone algorithm (or whatever the heck you call it) knows that Winnie the Pooh is about a bear!

>>#214

Hi, Heather - thank you! I'll be continuing with the Thatcher Colt series, but warily. That whole section makes you sympathise with "the bad guy" which I doubt is what Abbot was going for.

And I finally got round to requesting Louisa M Alcott's Behind a Mask from the library!

Whoo! Coincidentally, I just picked up A Long Fatal Love Chase, the one rejected for being "too sensational". :)

>>#215 & 216

Ah, touchstones! - how can something so clever be so exasperating!? :)

I'm okay when they give me something odd, because I get a giggle out of it. The thing that drives me crazy is when they start giving you authors before all the title possibilities are exhausted - grr!

From The Nine Bears:

    "I should like to smoke," was all that he said. T. B. took his gold case from an inside pocket and opened it.
    "Many thanks," said the sailor, and took the lighted match the gaoler had struck. If he had known the ways of the English police, he would have grown suspicious. Elsewhere, a man might be bullied, browbeaten, frightened into a confession. In France, Juge d'Instruction and detective would combine to wring from his reluctant lips a damaging admission. In America, the Third Degree, most despicable of police methods, would have been similarly employed.
    But the English police do most things by kindness, and do them very well.

I don't know that I buy into that generalisation as deeply as Edgar Wallace, but coming on the back of About The Murder Of Geraldine Foster, this passage made me laugh.

Finished The Nine Bears for TIOLI #2.

Now reading A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott for TIOLI #21.

The Invention Of Murder: How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime - Judith Flanders' 2011 publication uses 19th century Britain's most famous murders as the backbone of a wide-ranging historical and sociological study that encompasses not just the criminal cases themselves, but the evolution of policing and detection, the development of forensic science, the perversion of the law by class and religious bias, the (mis)conduct of the newspapers, and the Victorian habit of converting horrifying real-life events into light entertainment in the form of plays and novels. While it is easy to lose sight of the fact while hopping from case to case to case over the length of this significant work, the whole point of The Invention Of Murder is that in 19th century Britain, murder was in fact a very rare event - much rarer than it is now, as Flanders demonstrates at the outset by quoting murder rates on a population basis for various societies. Precisely because it was such an anomaly, Flanders contends, murder captured the imagination of the Victorian public and provoked a range of bizarre and often disquieting responses. The underlying contention of her study is that these notorious cases forced not only the law but Victorian society inself to respond and to evolve, and finally to emerge into modernity.

A major focus of The Invention Of Murder is the way that the Victorians "processed" murder---that is, coped with it by treating it less as something "real" than as a perverse kind of theatre. Each phase of each murder produced its own form of entertainment. The newspapers fought for details to broadcast and, when there weren't any available, simply made them up. Broadsheets followed cases step-by-step, reporting each phase of the investigation, arrest, trial and (too often) execution; certain writers specialised in "the last words" of convicted murderers, and made comfortable livings inventing elaborate confessions and repentances. The public, men and women alike, attended trials in great numbers, fighting for the best seats and often packing a picnic lunch. Public executions, which theoretically functioned as a deterrent, attracted huge, raucous, drunken crowds; pickpocketing was rife, brawls common. People who owned houses in the vicinity of the gallows rented out their windows and rooftops for the day. Murder tours were common (we hear of a particular church outing that diverted to view a pond from which a body was recovered), and murder souvenirs a growth industry: one of the perks of the hangman's job was receiving the condemned's clothing and the rope used, bits of which sold for tidy sums. Late in the century, part of the attraction of Madame Tussaud's was not just its wax figures of famous criminals (often made using a death mask), but the creation of tableaux featuring their real-life possessions, which became the object of fierce bidding wars between rival exhibitors.

But after the cases were supposedly closed, things became stranger still. Perhaps the most bizarre illustration of the 19th century's fixation on murder was the production of associated children's toys - dolls modelled on murderers and their victims, dollhouses modelled on the scenes of famous crimes. Meanwhile, for adults, there were plays and novels. Of the latter, Flanders demonstrates how novelists including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon not only drew upon real-life cases in their writing, but scattered references to famous crimes throughout their pages, in clear expectation that their readers would recognise and understand the allusions. However, the most consistently popular murder-related form of entertainment, for the lower as well as the upper classes, and from the cities right through the provinces, was dramatised versions of notorious murders. While both the tone and the target audience of these productions varied, a pattern repeated right throughout the century is the "cleaning up" of crimes, with the true stories translated into terms acceptable to the middle-classes - most often by turning ugly reality into stock melodrama. For instance, the 1860 stage version of the "Murder In The Red Barn", the 1827 killing of Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder, turns the casually promiscuous Maria into an innocent village maiden, and the farmer Corder into "the wicked squire", who seduces Maria under a promise of marriage but then murders her to pave the way for his marriage to "Lady Amelia". This version of the story also gives Maria a rejected suitor who becomes a highwayman called Captain Dash, and who confronts the villainous Corder during a "grand masked ball". Maria's fate is discovered via her mother's prophetic dreams, and Corder confesses when Maria's ghost appears to him. This is only one example among many: The Invention Of Murder repeatedly demonstrates how, by transforming it into entertainment, the Victorians robbed murder of its power to disturb their concept of how the world worked.

While this "domestication" of murder is a major narrative thread of Judith Flanders' work, she weaves around it several others of equal significance. Flanders examines the role of the newspapers in 19th century murder cases, and the effect upon circulation of "a good murder". While we are not particularly surprised by the frequent misconduct (if they could have tapped people's wires, they certainly would have done), it is a bit unexpected to discover that the worst transgressor in respect of trial-by-newspaper was The Times. Not only did this "respectable" publication invariably refer to anyone under arrest as "the murderer", but devoted pages to hearsay accusations and spurious accounts of the accused's criminal activities. Often these were picked up and reprinted by other papers countrywide, until the very idea of "a fair trial" became a laughable impossibility. (Apparently Anthony Trollope knew what he was doing when he cast The Times as the villain of the piece in The Warden and Barchester Towers.) More disturbing still is what we learn of the conduct of the courts, all too often overseen by hanging judges with a clear class bias and a profound disinterest in evidence; at least, in evidence presented by the defence, which juries were often directed to disregard in its entirety. The inevitable miscarriages of justice are chilling in their regularity.

Balancing its examination of the commission of murder in the 19th century, The Invention Of Murder offers a parallel account of the evolving means of investigating murder. In 1829, an official police force was belatedly established in London, with a brief restricted to street patrols and intervention in crimes or disturbances in the process of commission. It was 1842 before the government authorised Richard Mayne to head a division of the police dedicated, not to prevention, but to the investigation of crime and the detection of criminals. At first called the "Detective Department", and later the "Criminal Investigation Department", this new, tiny force soon became associated with the address of the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, being referred to familiarly as "Scotland Yard". Throughout the early decades of the century, there was an unspoken - and sometimes spoken - assumption that the main function of the police force was to form a safety barrier between the classes, upper and lower. However, a sudden eruption of middle-class murder during the second half of the century challenged society's prevailing beliefs about crime and brought the police into conflict with the people who loftily considered themselves their "employers". While instances of murder by doctors where shocking, no case rocked Victorian society like that of Madeline Smith, in which a well-brought-up young woman from a respectable family was not only revealed as having (and, according to her own letters, thoroughly enjoying) a secret sexual affair, but accused of disposing of her lover with arsenic when he threatened her potential marriage to a wealthy new suitor. It is hard not to feel that the failure to convict was due to anything other than the fundamental inability of the jury to process so staggering a confutation of Victorian Britain's most cherished beliefs about womanhood. The trial took place in Edinburgh, which allowed Miss Smith to escape with a verdict of "not proven".

On the other hand, the fatal flaws in the legal system of the day, with new policing methods and the traditional legal oversight by "the gentry" still unreconciled, are most dramatically illustrated in the 1860 case addressed by Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher. Expecting an arrest amongst either the servants or the surrounding peasantry, when it became clear that Inspector Whicher's interest was focused upon the family of four-year-old Francis Saville Kent, chiefly his half-sister, Constance, the local reaction was a mixture of outrage and disbelief. From the beginning the powerful Mr Kent had interfered with and dictated the limits of the investigation, and when Constance was arrested he joined forces with the local magistrate to ensure that the charges against her were dismissed. Jack Whicher was sent back to London with his career in tatters, and forced into retirement; Constance's confession five years later came too late to save his professional reputation. (Not that Constance's confession was without its problems, but that's another story.)

The other consequence of this sudden escalation in middle-class crime was the accompanying emergence in the 1860s of the so-called "sensation novel", which in turn gave rise to the detective novel - and then to the creation of the amateur detective, as clear an expression of public dissatisfaction with the police and the law as there could possibly be. These overt expressions of wish-fulfilment operated within a comforting fictional world in which murderers were always caught and miscarriages of justice never occurred. Indeed, the first appearance of literature's most famous amateur, the "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes, was almost coincident with the commission of the crimes that in the century and a half since have come to almost define Victorian Britain: the Jack the Ripper killings. All of a sudden, murder was no longer something vaguely titillating, that happened at a safe distance and so could be safely enjoyed, but the act of a madman who came and went with impunity. There are those who consider this case as the dividing line between "Victorian times" and "the modern world", in spite of the Victorian era having strictly thirteen years yet to run; and while Judith Flanders does not strongly dispute this, she chooses to draw her own line by highlighting a case that seems, in comparison, comically insignificant: the 1902 prosecution of one Harry Jackson, on a charge of stealing billiard balls - the first criminal case in England in which a conviction was secured using fingerprint evidence.

Murder had developed, as de Quincey had prophesied. An apparatus had developed around murder, a scaffolding: there was a police force now; there were detectives. There were stage shows featuring detectives, there were waxworks, puppet shows, songs and sketches; there were, perhaps most importantly of all, detective stories and novels. Crime fiction took this new scaffolding and covered it with an attractive surface. Now it had a shape, and a raison d'être. The detective stands with his back to the fire: "You may be wondering why I've summoned you all together," he pronounces. No one wondered any more. Detection - in fiction, at any rate - made the world safe. The sleuth-hound would track down the murderers and bring them to justice; no longer would people have to look over their shoulders in fear. The cunning of the criminal was matched on stage, on the page, by the wisdom of the hunter. Repeated over and over, this archetype became, in people's minds, reality.

Nice review - and apropos that you got me with a book bullet on that on!

Yes lots of interesting information about Victorians & Crime. You hit me with that book bullet too.

Alright, Liz - that one is fascinating. Thanks!

The Insane Root: A Romance Of A Strange Country - Though unjustly neglected today, Rosa Praed is one of most significant early Australian novelists. Her works, mirroring her own life, are set sometimes in Australia and sometimes in England. Her early novels draw upon the hardships borne by her mother and the isolation of her own early married life, and offer vivid accounts of 19th century Australia; while her later works often reflect the various tragedies of her later life and her growing interest in mysticism. Praed was a popular and somewhat controversial novelist, who often used her writing to examine the position of women in society, and was, for her time, unusually frank about sex. Published in 1902 and set partly in England and partly in Algeria, The Insane Root is one of her strangest works, an almost unclassifiable melding of romance, horror and spiritualism.

The Abarian Ambassador to Britain is an elderly man known as Isàdas Pacha. His household consists only of a girl who, although she is called Mademoiselle Isàdas, occupies no acknowledged place and is generally assumed to be the Pacha's illegitimate daughter. The girl, Rachel, loves and is loved by the Pacha's secretary, Caspar Ruel. Clever and handsome, Caspar is also selfish and ambitious, and while he leads Rachel on, he has no intention of committing himself fully until he is certain of the Pacha's financial intentions towards her. The question of Rachel's standing becomes increasingly urgent as the Pacha's health declines. Ignoring the London specialists, the Pacha chooses as his doctor Lucien Marillier, Caspar's cousin, whose methods embrace both Eastern and Western beliefs and practices. Lucien advises and then carries out a dangerous operation upon the Pacha, who recovers his health in its aftermath - at least for a time. In his trust and gratitude, the Pacha begins to confide in Lucien, revealing that Rachel is in fact the legitimate daughter of his master, the Emperor of Abaria, whose Irish mother fled her husband in the early stages of her pregnancy and died after bearing her child in secrecy. He also tells the strange tale of his finding of a mandrake root, which he contends bestowed him with unusual gifts, and was responsible for the many triumphs, personal and professional, of his later life. However, from this moment on, the Pacha becomes obsessed with the thought of the mandrake, finally convincing himself that he will die on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his tearing it from its home soil; that on that day, his life-force will leave his body and be reabsorbed by the plant. He tells Lucien that he intends to bequeath the mandrake to him and that, if he can fully exercise his will upon it, it will give him power over both life and love. The Pacha dies as he anticipates, and to his fascinated horror Lucien finds that the formerly shrivelled mandrake root is now pulsing with life...

As the embassy prepares for the funeral, Lucien's attention turns to Rachel, with whom he, too, has fallen in love; accepting, however, that she thinks of him only as a dear and trusted friend. In confiding to him the truth of the girl's birth, the Pacha gave Lucien the task of revealing her existance to her father, asking him also to watch over her and protect her until the Emperor makes his wishes known. This becomes a matter of urgency when Lucien discovers that, with Rachel's status left undetermined by the Pacha's will and none of the anticipated fortune coming to her, Caspar is attempting to lure the innocent girl into becoming his mistress rather than his wife. Furious and heartsick, Lucien is unsure how to proceed until fate plays into his hands. On the day of the Pacha's funeral, Caspar is seriously injured when he is knocked down by a frightened horse. Lucien has his cousin taken to his rooms, where he saves Caspar's life with his surgical skill. However, as he gazes down at his cousin, unconscious and helpless, Lucien is gripped by an uncontrollable impulse. Seizing the mandrake, he focuses upon it all of his will-power, as instructed by the Pacha...and wakes from a strange trance to find himself lying on the operating table, and "Lucien" dead on the floor... In the wake of the double shock of his own accident and his cousin's strange death, no-one is surprised to find Caspar Ruel a changed man; though his disinterest in his diplomatic work is worrying. Rachel is profoundly touched by the new depths revealed in Caspar's nature. His love for her as passionate as ever, but all traces of the selfish sensuousness that sometimes frightened and repulsed her have been erased, in their place a new and humble gentleness. Whereas before she instinctively held back from him, Rachel now gives herself without hesitation into Caspar's keeping; the two are privately married. Immediately after the ceremony, however, the two become aware of a strange blight upon them, a disembodied force that manifests as a sense of biting cold. It is the soul of Caspar Ruel which, though expelled from his body and replaced by that of Lucien, has not left the earth: it lingers, determined to prevent Lucien from gaining the love and happiness for which he committed his most desperate act...

One-part a melodramatic love story, one-part a horror story of possession and dominance, and one-part a rumination on the mysteries of God and the universe, The Insane Root is a bizarre and idiosyncratic work that simply refuses ever to go where the reader might expect. While I do apologise for the length of the above synopsis, it seemed necessary if people who have not read this novel were to get any sense of its many peculiarities - which, by the way, that summary by no means exhausts. The Insane Root starts out in familiar romance territory, with a conventional love triangle developing in the foreground, while the revelation of Rachel's true birth seems to offer both an exotic setting for future events and further complications to the working out of the love story. As it turns out, however, Rachel's royal lineage never really becomes relevant to the plot, except that her eventual journey to "Abaria" with her husband is interrupted when the two of them divert to the Algerian stronghold in which Rachel was born and her mother lived out her last days, under the loving and chivalrous care of the future Isàdas Pacha, then the Count Varenzi. The two of them never do reach Abaria.

As for the love story, surely no novel has ever found a more outlandish way of dealing with its romantic triangle. Though deeply emotional, Lucien is introverted and lacking in self-esteem with respect to everything but his profession, and only too well aware of his physical deficiencies, particularly when compared to his brilliant and handsome cousin. The novel's tragedy is that Lucien is quite unable to see what is so clear to the reader: that Rachel's love for Caspar is a girl's infatuation which she is already beginning to outgrow, and that it is only a matter of time before she turns to the man who she already admires and trusts. When fate places a helpless Caspar in his grasp, the temptation for Lucien is overwhelming; he is able to justify his action to himself by focusing upon Rachel's need for protection - above all, protection from Caspar himself. So consumed is he by this thought that it does not immediately occur to Lucien that he has, in truth, murdered his cousin; that realisation dawns upon him much later. The immediate physical shock of the transference and the struggle to control and dominate a vessel in which much of Caspar remains takes all of Lucien's energy and concentration, but his is the stronger will, and he prevails - for a time.

Rosa Praed was, as I have said, unusual in her day not only for her willingness to write about sex, but her view of it as a positive and healthy part of a love relationship. It is true that the situation that develops in The Insane Root could be read simplistically as an allegory of a young woman's fear of sex, with the non-consummation of the marriage becoming the fulcrum of the plot; but Praed takes care to convey to us (not as frankly as when men are under discussion, but still, it's there) that Rachel is capable of loving physically where she loves emotionally - but only there. The malignant force that manifests itself and intrudes between Rachel and "her" Caspar, that is, Lucien, does so whenever the two are physically close, finally frightening Rachel so badly that she spends her wedding-night alone and mildly sedated. Though Lucien soon realises that a vengeful Caspar is doing his best to destroy their happiness, he does not immediately grasp the full implications of the situation. The Insane Root is frank about Caspar's love for Rachel being almost entirely of the flesh, not fit to be compared with Lucien's deep feeling for the girl. But of course, Lucien does desire Rachel - and rightly and naturally so, contends the text. However, it is when he most desires her that he is most like Caspar - and when he is most vulnerable to Caspar's influence - such that, in effect, he becomes Caspar. Again and again at moments of intimacy, Rachel finds herself recoiling as if from a stranger, instinctively terrified without understanding why. Only slowly does it dawn upon her that in these moments, she is with the old, selfish Caspar, and not the man she married. Lucien is still the stronger of the two, and he is able to resume control, albeit at the cost of a dreadful struggle. At last, however, he must confront the terrible reality that he and Rachel can only be truly married if he is prepared to give in to Caspar - and to force Rachel to submit to a man she does not love...

The literally disembodied Caspar, though he certainly haunts Lucien and Rachel, is not a conventional ghost; there is very little at all conventional about The Insane Root, including its views upon life after death. There is a suggestion in this book that religion is man's way of coping with an "other" so vast and profound that it is beyond his comprehension. The God that finally makes His presence felt in this novel is not the one of man's teachings, any more than the novel's mystic afterlife resembles any of the usual interpretations of heaven. Though Rachel is a Catholic, neither Isàdas Pacha nor Lucien professes any standard faith. Both, however, believe in a dominant "Force", while the Pacha speaks confidently of what he calls "the Immensities", the infinity of time and space that exists beyond the narrow boundaries of earthly life. But here on earth, too, there are things beyond our ken - like the mandrake. Here Rosa Praed mixes traditional lore with ideas of her own, positing the mandrake as a kind of missing link between animal and vegetable life, possessing not only consciousness but even a capacity for emotion. Early in the novel we hear of the Pacha's discovery of the strange being that is to influence the rest of his life - and of its terrible (though not fatal) scream as it is torn from its soil and away from its family. Lucien is both repulsed and fascinated as he sees for himself the evidence of the Pacha's claims, how the mandrake grows fresh and young again, and capable of movement, as the Pacha's own life drains away. In the wake of Lucien's psychic attack upon his cousin, however, he finds the object shrivelled and lifeless once again, its power transferred to himself. These scenes with the mandrake, this strange, unearthly thing, are eerie and compelling - and in the end, oddly moving. As he tries to resolve his impossible dilemma, Lucien becomes obsessed with the idea that he must return the mandrake to its own soil. Following the Pacha's vivid descriptions, he finds the place - and finds too his root's mate and offspring, dead and still. He reburies his still-living root, however, and leaves it to discover the bitter truth. As he walks away from the scene, the mandrake's agonised shriek echoes around the valley...

    He staggered and shrank back, for here was confirmation of all that he deemed impossible and but the ravings of a disordered brain. Here was living proof---yes, living proof that there was truth in the old superstitions, and that the Pacha had told him no fairy tale... For the root was certainly alive. When he touched it the soft, fleshy substance of its body stirred and pulsated; the grotesque features were agitated by a sort of infantile and most gruesome spasm. He lifted it from its box, and as he did so, the brown tentacle with its rudimentary hand closed round his finger.
    Marillier was seized with horror, and another wild fancy came into his mind---the notion that in this creature he beheld his own guilty thought which had thus personified itself.

>>#221, 222, 223

WHOO!! Not only have I hit people with book bullets, but for once it's a book that is readily available!! :D

Murder In The French Room - The women's ready-to-wear clothing section of Hollis and Line's department store centres upon the French Room, a salon where imported models are shown. When Joyce Terry, a salesgirl, hurries back to the client she left selecting a dress in one of the six changing cubicles behind the French Room, it is to find the woman sprawled across the fitting stand in the compartment, blood spilling from an ugly wound at the base of her neck... Otis Galway, general manager of Hollis and Line's, calls the police; on the recommendation of Jessica Brooke, the store detective, he asks for Inspector Dan Bratton. Bratton is quick to grasp the peculiar difficulties associated with murder in a department store - and also the significant features of the murder itself. No weapon was found at the scene; the victim's purse is missing, and no-one knows who she is; and while she was trying on dresses, the only one found in the room is her own, crumpled on the floor. Between them, Jessica Brooke and Madame Nordhoff, the head of the department, have managed to detain the other women who were in the changing rooms at the time, all but one who hurried past Joyce as she returned to the scene. None of the others saw anything, although one client reports hearing a thud from the direction of the murder scene. When the scene has been cleared, Bratton invites Jessica to join him in the investigation, appreciating that her knowledge of the store, its people and its processes may be vital. He tells her that the coroner has concluded that the missing weapon is not a knife, but something thicker and blunter. Jessica observes that the murderer could not have avoided getting blood on themselves, even aside from the necessity of disposing of the weapon - and yet, no-one has reported anything of the kind. With a sinking heart, Bratton contemplates the fact that not only were up to a thousand people in Hollis and Line's at the time of the murder, but that there is every chance that the murderer simply walked out the front door...

Murder In The French Room is a clever but exasperating mystery - or at least, I found it so. As I have confessed before, I tend to struggle with "spatial" mysteries, that is, with mysteries whose plots and solutions rely very heavily on the layout of the scene, and the geographic relationship each room or area with all the others. This 1931 novel is a spatial mystery par excellence, requiring the reader to absorb not only the relative locations of the six changing rooms, the stock room, the French Room, the cashier's desk, and the foyer provided for bored and impatient husbands and boyfriends, but to grasp what could have been seen from each position, and who was where, when. On top of this, the reader is asked to keep straight a dizzying range of witnesses and other interviewees, who come and go over the course of the story (Mrs Ludlow Wilkinson? Was she the woman in Room D, or the woman who had lunch with the victim?) The issue is exacerbated by Dan Bratton's investigative style, which relies upon the slow accumulation of detail through repeated questioning. While this is no doubt realistic, the fragmented narrative that results is like two jigsaw puzzles mixed together: sorting the pieces takes even longer than fitting them together.

(That said, I'm pleased to be able to report that amongst this bewildering mass of details, I managed to catch the throwaway remark that wasn't one at all...)

Whatever the stylistic quirks of Murder In The French Room, it does offer to the reader two ideas that I have not encountered in any earlier mysteries: murder committed in a department store, and a new sort of professional female detective. By this time the female amateur was well established, while Kay Cleaver Strahan had introduced literature's first female private investigator in her series featuring Lynn MacDonald; but the presence of Jessica Brooke, store detective, in Murder In The French Room is a new angle. Jessica heads security for Line and Hollis's; her main brief is the prevention of shoplifting, no simple task in a large department store in the days before electronic tagging. It is her work in this area that has brought her into contact with Dan Bratton. We tend to assume at the outset that Jessica might be interested in something more than a professional relationship, but in this, refreshingly, we are most happily mistaken: Bratton is happily married with two children, and what Jessica wants from him is not romance, but respect. She gains it in the long run, but it's a rocky road: Jessica occasionally lets her feelings override her judgement, particularly when it comes to poor Joyce Terry. Vague suspicion swirls around the girl from the outset, simply on the basis of her finding of the body, and being the last to see the victim alive. Jessica is unable to believe that the girl could or would have dealt the fatal blow - even when it turns out that Joyce had a motive, albeit one she did not know she had. The victim is finally identified as Vivian Thayre, a local socialite and a young woman with a rather dubious reputation: she was the co-respondent in her husband's divorce, and rumour says she was stepping out on him, too. When the newspapers get hold of this information, Joyce Terry receives an appalling shock: the man she has been seeing, who she knows as Phil Leonard, is actually Rupert Thayre, the dead woman's husband...

In fact, a surprising number of people with an interest of one sort or another in Vivian Thayer turn out to have been in the vicinity of the crime, including Thayre himself; his resentful first wife, who threatened Vivian's life at the time of the divorce; Ross Ingram, a bootlegger, who Vivian was seeing behind her husband's back; and Ingram's hysterical but devoted girlfriend. Both Bratton and Jessica start out assuming gloomily that the murderer was probably long gone by the time Vivian's body was discovered, but early discoveries in the case call this assumption into question. Hollis and Line's keeps a close eye on its employees. With security on every door, all workers are obliged to clock in and clock out when they come and go, and they are not permitted to carry anything out of the store that has not been inspected; purchases carry a special store tag. A customer might have escaped carrying the murder weapon, but it is highly unlikely an employee could. A search of the store turns up a pair of bloody scissors, wrapped in brown paper and hidden in a stocking display, where on the testimony of both customer and salesgirl they definitely were not the evening before. This discovery focuses attention upon the staff. Bratton turns his eagle eye upon the movements of those with every right to come and go in the environs of the French Room - those people, in other words, whose presence at the scene of the crime may not even have been noticed...

Dan Bratton snatched the interval before the next outside interruption for a thoughtful examination of the various technical reports already on his desk. The photographs of the body slumped in room E, the enlargements of the confused mass of fingerprints---these of no value at all---the transcript of the proceedings of the purely formal inquest, the findings of the medical examiner, the coroner's final report, an analysis of the blood encrusted on the scissors---all were gone over. However fascinating the by-paths of investigation in this affair were proving to be, he peremptorily reminded himself that he must not forget that it dealt primarily with a woman who had been stabbed in a department store fitting room hemmed in by scores of people. It could not be a premeditated crime, he'd be jiggered if it could...

Finished A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott for TIOLI #21, my last book for March and snuck in just under the deadline.

Now reading Mr Fortune's Practice by H. C. Bailey.

Pinehurst (US title: Dr Priestley Investigates) - When Tom Awdrey is pulled over for drunk driving outside the town of Lenhaven, two horrified constables find a dead body crammed into the dickey of his sportscar. They immediately report to Superintendent King, who is being visited by his friend, Inspector Hanslet of Scotland Yard. The dead man is identified as a Mr Coningsworth, the reclusive owner of an estate called Pinehurst. There is a tyre print across the body, and the victim's injuries are consistent with being run over. Awdrey is too drunk to be questioned that night, but the next morning is brought before King. The young man insists he knows nothing about a body: he was transporting a plaster cast of a man's head and shoulders for his guardian, the sculptor Oswald Paradyne, who has a holiday cottage in the area. Awdrey gives an account of his movements, which includes numerous stops for alcohol between Paradyne's studio in Moorcaster and Lenhaven, and the picking up of a hitchhiker, who asked to be dropped on an unfrequented road near the entrance to Pinehurst. There was a pub across the road.. After that, Awdrey's memories are vague, but they do not include killing anyone. In spite of his denials, and Paradyne's confirmation of the story of the plaster cast, Awdrey is remanded in custody on a charge of manslaughter. Inspector Hanslet, who is at a loose end while he waits for news of another case, uses his spare time to look into the circumstances of the fatal accident. He finds the tracks of Awdrey's car, and the patch of oil he drove through before hitting Coningsworth; but there is no sign of the plaster cast, which presumably he threw away prior to putting the body in the car. Then, too, where did the oil come from, on such a lonely road? It is too far away from the pub to have come from a delivery truck... At the Smelter's Arms, Hanslet learns some strange facts about Coningsworth, including that he kept his wife, daughter and sister-in-law in complete isolation, and was notorious for roaming his grounds at night and shooting at intruders, real or imagined. An exaggerated fear of burglars, or something more? Hanslet is bothered by the inconsistencies in what at first seemed a straightforward case, and once back in London he carries the story to his friend, Dr Priestley...

The ninth book in John Rhode's series featuring Dr Lancelot Priestley is a most unusually structured mystery. What starts out looking like a tragic accident turns out to be murder---but not the murder that it seems to be. Instead of the usual circle of suspects, for much of the book the investigators can only guess at the motive for the crime, and have no idea who might be responsible. They do learn that Coningsworth's armed protection of his property was not the result of paranoia, but in response to intruders in the grounds and attacks upon the house, including shots recently fired through the dining-room windows; nor have these ceased with the death of Coningsworth. However, the investigation is hampered by Mrs Coningsworth who, although she pleads ignorance, is clearly aware of the reason for the attacks upon the property and the murder of her husband, and refuses to cooperate with a police investigation that might deprive her of the prize at the heart of the mystery. It slowly becomes apparent that the entire matter - the assaults on the property, the murder, Mrs Coningsworth's behaviour - is tied to a deadly but valuable secret from Coningsworth's past---if, indeed, his name was Coningsworth, which appears increasingly unlikely...

We can only feel sorry for Superintendent King. Once more Lenhaven becomes the site of a complex and baffling crime, and once again he finds himself taking lessons in detection from an elderly academic. However - as in The House On Tollard Ridge - a generous King takes Dr Priestley's intrusion in good part. At first he resists the idea that the death of Coningsworth is not the straightforward vehicular manslaughter it appears to be, chiefly because the police have been unable to verify much of Tom Awdrey's account of his movements. However, an accumulation of peculiar details begins to change his mind: the theft of some lilies of the valley from the Pinehurst gardens; a burglary that nets only a collection of brass door-fittings; and a visit to Miss Coningsworth from a young insurance saleman who turns out not to be attached to any of the local firms, and who manages to smash the bottle of indigestion medicine that Coningsworth was taking at the time of his death. Working with his secretary, Harold Merefield, Dr Priestley demonstrates that the oil in the road - tar oil, not diesel - was spilled deliberately. He also discovers fragments of a smashed plaster cast, not near the road where it was presumed Tom Awdrey discarded the object, but in the nearby grounds of an abandoned ironworks, which show signs of secret habitation. Unbeknownst to her mother, Edna Coningsworth begins to cooperate with the police, smuggling Harold into the house to keep watch after Mrs Coningsworth refuses the police permission to enter. A series of raids and chases finally yields results: Coningsworth's secret is revealed; a secret so dark that Dr Priestley finds himself wondering if apprehending the man's killers is really necessary...

    "I did not wish to say too much in the presence of Chief Inspector Hanslet. He is a policeman, and his attitude when confronted by a problem into which the criminal element enters is naturally biased... In this case, for instance, were he actively engaged in it, his efforts would be confined to securing evidence which would enable him to arrest the attackers of the house, since they had obviously committed an illegal action."
    "Well, yes, sir, I suppose that would be his duty," remarked Harold.
    "Undoubtedly," replied the Professor blandly. "But since I have no duty, in that sense, I should, if given the opportunity, approach the problem from an entirely different direction. My enquiry would be directed into the actions of Mr Coningsworth, not his enemies. For in that man's life, and more particularly his death, lies the explanation of the whole mystery surrounding Pinehurst."

The Nine Bears (US title: The Other Man, UK reissue title: The Cheaters, revised reissue: Silinski, The Master Criminal) - Gerald Grayson, an American financier living in London with his daughter, Doris, and his sister-in-law, Lady Dinsmore, is called away from an opera party by a secret, coded message... He does not return, and the next day his horrified family learns that there are indications he has committed suicide. Cord Van Ingen, a young America diplomat who is in love with Doris, tries his best to offer comfort, but can only look on in helpless jealousy as Doris turns for help to the mysterious Count Ivan Poltavo. The Count is, however, in the best position to offer assistance: as he is well aware, Grayson is part of a criminal syndicate devoted to amassing an enormous fortune through manipulation of the stock market; his "death" has been planned for many months. Count Poltavo, brilliant and cultured but poor, maneouvres himself into a partnership of sorts with the syndicate, which is under the control of George T. Baggin, another American. Baggin is deeply suspicious of Poltavo's offer to serve the cause, but is forced to concede the ingeniousness of his planning. Poltavo has a second interest in the matter: he loves Doris Grayson, whose adoring father has disobeyed orders and secretly sent her word that he is still alive. Poltavo promises Doris that he will find and reunite her with her father; though he does not say so, she knows what he will expect from her in return... Gerald Grayson's case is given to Inspector T. B. Smith of Scotland Yard, who quickly realises that there is a pattern to the deaths and disappearances related to high finance that have been occurring all around the world; and, further, that a series of disasters that have impacted the market are the result of sabotage. It becomes apparent that the next target for the syndicate is the venerable Bronte's Bank, which is backing a major irrigation scheme in Egypt. For one day, between the expiration of the related insurance and the handing over of the project to the Egyptian government, the bank is fully liable - and fatally vulnerable...

Though published in 1910, Edgar Wallace's thriller about a gang of brilliant but unscrupulous financiers who make themselves untold fortunes through the criminal manipulation of the stock market, regardless of the damage inflicted upon the world along the way, seems these days rather horribly prescient. As with his earlier novel, The Four Just Men, there is a curiously amoral tone about much of Wallace's story. Although we are not, by any means, intended to admire the activities of the "bears" - those who thrive on driving the market downwards - Count Poltavo is another matter. Brilliant and unscrupulous, and a cold-blooded killer, Poltavo is nevertheless oddly charming, and certainly more likeable than the priggish young Cord Van Ingen, who is the novel's putative romantic lead, if not exactly its hero. That title belongs to Inspector Smith, to whom falls not only the enormous task of thwarting the Nine Bears, but the still more challenging one of beating Poltavo in a battle of wits. In true master-criminal fashion, Poltavo comes and goes like a shadow, always one step ahead of his pursuers, and at one point defeating Smith with a stroke of supreme audacity---strangely familiar supreme audacity, at least today: in The Nine Bears we may have the first deployment of a situation that some decades later would become a favourite amongst the makers of horror movies, the telephone call that comes from inside the house...only in this case, the "house" is Scotland Yard...

But if Smith loses the battle, he is determined that he will not lose what is rapidly becoming a literal war. Having started out as the investigation of a suspicious suicide, Smith's case rapidly escalates to embrace conspiracy, sabotage and murder as he doggedly pursues the shadowy syndicate known only by the initials "N. H. C." He quickly recognises that, worldwide, there has been a pattern of market slumps occurring apparently without cause, which which invariably precede a significant disaster with an impact upon share prices. For a time, luck seems to be favouring the investigators. On the strength of Smith's gathered intelligence, an attempt to blow up the Wady Selik Barrage just before the official handover is thwarted, and the secret telegraphic network by which the Nine communicate is uncovered. However, these gains are not without a terrible price: two men with knowledge of the Nine Men are murdered, and Smith himself barely survives an attempt on his life. Smith and Van Ingen track the syndicate to its stronghold in Cadiz - Neuf Hommes de Cadix - but a blunder by the local authorities allows all but one of the Nine Men to escape. For a time their seeming disappearance baffles their pursuers, until Smith links it to the apparent loss of a Brazilian warship. In a move of staggering defiance, the remaining members of the syndicate have acquired the ship for themselves: they proceed to declare war upon the whole world, sinking ships regardless of their country of origin and declaring their intention of continuing to do so until granted blanket immunity... The final stages of The Nine Bears, which find Britain, France, Germany and the USA working together for the common good, tend to bring bring a sad smile to the face of the modern reader. Though Wallace could not have known for certain in 1910 what storm clouds were gathering on the international horizon, there is a unmistakeable sense of wish-fulfilment about the conclusion of his novel that at this distance, and with painful hindsight, is rather touching.

    All day long the excitement in the city continued, all day long bareheaded clerks ran aimlessly---to all appearances---from 'Change to pavement, pavement to 'Change, like so many agitated ants... The echoes of the boom came to T. B. Smith in his little room overlooking the Thames Embankment, but brought him little satisfaction. The Nine Men had failed this time. Would they fail on the next occasion?
    Who they were he could guess. From what centre they operated, he neither knew nor guessed. For T. B. they had taken on a new aspect. Hitherto they had been regarded merely as a band of clever swindlers, Napoleonic in their method; now, they were murderers---dangerous, devilish men without remorse or pity.

Hmm... There seems to be a series of books featuring Inspector Smith (just what I need, another series!), but I can't find a full listing of them anywhere.

Observation: it can be mighty hard to track down information when one of your search terms is "Smith"...

Finally, we learn what the mysterious 'Nine Bears' is all about! And you got the touchstone to work, too. How strange that the work page seems to indicate it is a series about Inspector Elk, not Smith.

Inspector (then Superintendent) Elk appears briefly in The Nine Bears and is almost killed by Poltavo; he recovers well enough to eventually have a longer career / series than Smith. :)

#220 Great review of The Invention of Murder Liz and a fascinating quote at the end. I've added it to my library list.

Apparently Anthony Trollope knew what he was doing when he cast The Times as the villain of the piece in The Warden and Barchester Towers This made me laugh :-) The Times is now owned by the Murdoch's, the same people who own News of the World (aka the phone hacking paper).

#224 The Insane Root definitely sounds unusual...

#229 The Nine Bears (US title: The Other Man, UK reissue title: The Cheaters, revised reissue: Silinski, The Master Criminal)

That's far too many different titles!

Yay book bullets!!

Yes, it's strange; there's an instinct to separate The Times from the tabloids, but if it was ever true, it sure ain't true now.

The Insane Root is, well, insane. :)

A lot of Edgar Wallace's stuff got retitled and/or revised - it makes it very difficult to be sure where you stand. There's a constant danger of chasing down something you've already read in mistake for a different book, grr!

Finished Mr Fortune's Practice by H. C. Bailey.

Now reading The Man Of The Forty Faces by Thomas W. Hanshew.

The Man of the Forty Faces sounds wonderfully B-movie-ish. Enjoy!

It is - though it pre-dates actual B-movies. :)

Liz, your endorsement of Nine Bears is tantalizing. Love this: Though published in 1910, Edgar Wallace's thriller about a gang of brilliant but unscrupulous financiers who make themselves untold fortunes through the criminal manipulation of the stock market, regardless of the damage inflicted upon the world along the way, seems these days rather horribly prescient. No kidding!

Hi, Nancy - lovely to see you here!

Also this:

...dangerous, devilish men without remorse or pity.

...dangerous, devilish men without remorse or pity.
I think I worked for that guy once. :-)

Oh, Julia - ouch! :)

Finished The Man Of The Forty Faces.

Now reading Things As They Are; or, The Adventures Of Caleb Williams by William Godwin, who would be furious if he knew I was searching his attack on class privilege and systematic injustice for the roots of the detective novel... :)

More great touchstones! The Purcell Papers, a collection of ghost and mystery stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, gets me The Merchant Of Venice!?

A Long Fatal Love Chase (Alternative title: The Chase) - It now appears that I was misinformed about the relationship between this novel by Louisa May Alcott, unpublished until 1995, and A Modern Mephistopheles, which appeared anonymously in 1877. It is correct that in 1866, when she was supporting her family (and indulging her hidden tastes) by writing thrillers and melodramas, Alcott submitted her manuscript of A Long Fatal Love Chase to her publishers and had it rejected on the grounds that it was "too sensational". It has been suggested that Alcott later reworked the original manuscript into A Modern Mephistopheles, but it is now evident that this is not the case: there are certain thematic similarities between the two stories, but there the similarity ends. Alcott did try rewriting her rejected novel, toning it down in an attempt to make it acceptable for publication, but this version, too, was rejected. The two manuscripts eventually parted ways. The revised version, under its new title "Fair Rosamond", ended up at Harvard, while the original was sold by Alcott's family to a rare book dealer. In 1993, one Kent Bicknell became aware of the unpublished novel and found a backer who allowed him to purchase the manuscript and the copyright. Working from the original and the revised manuscripts, he did his best to restore Alcott's original text, and published the result in 1995.

Eighteen-year-old Rosamond Vivian lives in dreary isolation with her invalid grandfather on a small island off the coast of England. Lonely and unloved, Rosamond longs for excitement and companionship; she gets both when her grandfather is unexpectedly visited by one Phillip Tempest, who arrives unheralded on his yacht and finds himself entranced by the girl's beauty, simplicity, and unexpectedly passionate nature. Tempest has lived a life of selfish indulgence, and ignores the faint promptings of his better nature that tell him he can only do harm to the girl. He stays, taking pleasure in luring the inexperienced Rosamond into falling in love with him and, much to his surprise, discovering genuine feelings for her in himself. Unbeknownst to Rosamond, the connection between Tempest and her grandfather is that they are both compulsive gamblers. Tempest deliberately sets out to draw the old man deeply into his debt, offering to cancel it in exchange for Rosamond. He has no choice but to agree, his guilt over the transaction belatedly awakening his affection for the girl. Tempest has several times taken Rosamond out on his yacht, the Circe, but one day he informs her that they are not going back. His hope is that Rosamond's love for him is so great that she will give herself to him without marriage, but when the furiously indignant girl threatens to throw herself overboard, he gives in and and marries her. For a year the two are happy, but over time Tempest's past begins to catch up with him, and Rosamond is forced to accept not only that he has lived a deeply sinful life, but that he has a frightening capacity for violence and cruelty. Late one night, after Rosamond has retired, Tempest has a visitor---a woman. Her secret fears prompt Rosamond to eavesdrop on their conversation and, to her overwhelming horror, she learns that Tempest was already married when they met; the woman, Marion, is his legitimate wife. Gathering a few possessions, Rosamond vanishes into the night, her one thought being to separate herself from the man who has so unconscionably betrayed her. Immediately upon discovering her absence, however, Tempest sets out in pursuit, Rosamond's determination to free herself from him at all cost matched by his determination never to let her go...

"I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom," declares Rosamond impetuously in A Long Fatal Love Chase's provocative opening paragraph, and of course that's exactly what she does. This is a dark, disturbing novel, one which is probably even more distressing to read today than it was in 1866, when it was declared unpublishable, because of our all-too-thorough understanding of the psychology of "stalking" and the likely outcome of such a situation. The isolation of Rosamond's life has left her to educate herself both intellectually and ethically; the result is a sternly moral nature overlaid by passions and impulses which an ordinary girl's upbringing would have stifled and shamed out of existence. The bored and sated Tempest finds her that great rarity, a new experience. However, much as he desires Rosamond, he has no intention of altering his life or his conduct for her. Unable (as we eventually discover) to marry her even if he was willing to, when his attempt to surprise her into surrender by, in effect, kidnapping her fails he resorts to a faked wedding ceremony. While he expects at this time that his marriage may be kept a secret, he smugly assumes that even should Rosamond discover the truth, ultimately she will surrender her ideas of right and wrong for love of him. Consequently, Rosamond's immediate flight upon discovering his betrayal, and her continued defiance of him as he exerts himself to recover what he considers his property, astonish him even more than they enrage him. The more Rosamond tries to avoid him, the greater grows his fixation upon her, and the more violent and dangerous his conduct. A Long Fatal Love Chase is commonly called "a story of obsessive love", but while Phillip Tempest's attitude towards Rosamond is certainly obsessive, it is questionable whether it could be called "love". Perhaps it is most correct to say that this is a man who expresses love and hate in exactly the same way, through emotional manipulation, dominance and cruelty, and who destroys whatever he cannot control.

Ironically, the aspect of A Long Fatal Love Chase that holds the greatest appeal for the modern reader is almost certainly the same one that made it unpublishable in 1866: Rosamond's refusal to play any of the roles that the rules of 19th century society cast her for. No matter how unknowing her sin, no matter how entirely she has been betrayed, Rosamond is nevertheless a ruined woman, as she knows only too well. "The sin is yours, but the shame and sorrow are mine," she tells Tempest when he tracks her to her first refuge in the backstreets of Paris, where under an assumed name she ekes out a meagre living with her needle. By the standards of her day, there is only one polite thing for Rosamond to do, and that is lie down and die, whether of a broken heart, or "brain fever", or whatever other convenient illness was supposed to strike down women in her situation. But Rosamond has no intention of dying. Ruined she may be, but she has committed no sin; that could only come with conscious wrong. Her own plan for her future is to separate herself from Tempest, to support herself by her own labour, and to cut her betrayor out of her heart. Of course, that last is almost as much of a challenge to 19th century convention as Rosamond's refusal to die of shame. It was a cherished belief at the time that no woman ever entirely got over her first love, no matter how brutally she might have been treated, and that no really "nice" girl ever loved a second time. Tempest himself takes both of these things for granted, assuming that having loved him once, Rosamond must love him always, and that if he continues to woo her she must in time give in to him. Approaching her with smirks and smiles and reproaches for her "cruelty" in running away, he is quite certain what the outcome must be---and entirely taken aback when she stops him short in the middle of his raptures: "Leave sentiment; I'm sick of it."

In the wake of this first, frank rejection, Rosamond manages to elude Tempest's vigilence and escape him a second time---and then the chase is on in earnest, as with increasing fury and violence he hunts her from place to place, and forces her out of refuge after refuge...

It is, in truth, somewhat exasperating that in spite of Rosamond's courage and ingenuity, she must finally rely upon a man's help---although of course, that was exactly Alcott's point: that the world as it stood made it impossible for a woman to defend herself. Tempest is a man, and rich; Rosamond is a woman, and poor. His power over her is effectively limitless; right and wrong are beside the point. Assistance eventually comes from a most unexpected source---and may have been a secondary reason why this novel was not published. During the section of A Long Fatal Love Chase in which Rosamond spends time in a convent, the text expresses the almost habitual anti-Catholicism of the popular 19th century novel: it takes for granted the narrowness and casuistry of convent life, which repels the Protestant Rosamond even as it offers her temporary safety. We are not particularly surpised when two of the girl's supposed guardians, the Mother Superior and the elderly Father Dominic, sell her out to Tempest; the latter literally, for a fat sum of money. On the other hand, it is difficult for the reader to know quite how to react when Rosamond gains both a protector and a lover in the form of a second priest, one Father Ignatius, who finds himself impossibly caught between his vows and his passion... Though their conduct is irreproachable, the distance that Rosamond and her rescuer keep between them, and their determined use of "Father" and "my daughter" fools nobody---least of all Phillip Tempest. To be defied by Rosamond is one thing; to be thrown over for another man is something else, something utterly intolerable; something he will go to any lengths to prevent...

    "Suppose you discovered that I did not love you and wished to be free. How then?"
    "I'd try to win your heart back and be faithful to the end, as I promised when I married you."
    "Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?"
    "Go away and---"
    He interrupted with a triumphant laugh. "Die as heroines always do, tender slaves as they are."
    "No, live and forget you."

Well, hurrah: I'm only a week late wrapping up my March reviews. :)

This month saw 13 books read, keeping me on track for my goal for the year of 150. All 13 found a place in TIOLI, with a little wriggling. Perversely enough, despite the fact that it was "Mystery March" I actually had a lower proportion of mysteries this month than usual...which didn't stop me continuing on with three series, and starting another two, groan. (Three, if you count the fact that The Nine Bears may have been the first entry in two different series!) March was mercifully stinker-free, though I did struggle with Sanctuary; the quality of Faulkner's writing makes the book impossible to dismiss, however problematic its material. The month's highlight was getting reacquainted with Dr Thorne, and the associated group read; while its bolt from the blue was undoubtedly The Insane Root.

March stats:

Mysteries / thrillers / crime: 7
Sensation novels: 1
Science fiction: 1
Classics: 1
Contemporary (i.e. at time of publication) drama: 1
Non-fiction: 1
Unclassifiable: 1

Series reading: 5

Male : female : anonymous authors: 7 : 5 : 1

Oldest work: Richmond: Scenes In The Life Of A Bow Street Officer by Anonymous (1827)
Newest work: The Invention Of Murder: How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders (2011)

Considering the length and depth of your reviews, being only a week "late" seems like nothing! I usually write two paragraphs and I'm a month behind on mine. Hah! That said, I do appreciate your insights as most of these books I would NEVER had stumbled across on my own!

Hi, Faith. Yes, you're quite right: I shouldn't complain about about always having to catch up when the remedy is in my own hands! I do try to write shorter reviews but somehow they just get away from me... :D