Category: Book Review

Book Review: THIS UNDESIRABLE RESIDENCE (1942) by Miles Burton

1/9/2021

The title is a gloss on an estate agent’s marketing phrase, which is fitting as this story begins in a realtor’s office. Mr. Simeon Apperley enters, concerned to learn that his secretary, Brinklow, has not visited the agent as expected and is now missing, along with Mr. Apperley’s automobile and some cases containing valuable postage stamps from his collection. Man, vehicle, and stamps are soon found, with Brinklow dead in the car parked outside Ash House, a property that had already acquired a slightly shadowy reputation. The victim had received a fatal blow from an iron plate, potentially dropped through the car’s open rooftop from a house window. While Brinklow was familiar with the town of Wraynesford from years past, motive for the man’s death is obscure, especially as the stamps were not taken from the car.

Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is called in to assist local constable Prickett, and suspicion quickly settles on Isaac Napley, the leader of a group of itinerant gypsies. The uneducated laborer may have not recognized the value within the cases and Brinklow’s murder may have been merely a crime of opportunity. But then a second death occurs, with Apperley’s cousin involved in a fatal motor accident on the road leading to Ash House, and Arnold wonders if this is more than a coincidence. He eventually untangles the events, but he might have gotten there much sooner had he consulted his friend Desmond Merrion; this book is Merrion-free, and the reader is also likely ahead of the detective regarding the solution.

Over at Nick Fuller’s great GAD website, The Grandest Game in the World, Nick calls Residence “the most tedious Burton I’ve read so far” and complains, with justification, that “the solution is obvious by the end of Chapter 3.” I wouldn’t describe this book as tedious; it reminds me just how consistent Cecil John Charles Street is as a writer. His plotlines and prose never really mystify or dazzle (at least they don’t for me), but they are usually modestly engaging and keep the investigation reliably moving forward. (There is certainly no inner monologuing or overdescription of setting that other mystery writers might indulge in, and that is modestly admirable.) The criticism of the puzzle being over-obvious is a fair one, and it is not exclusive to this Rhode/Burton title; if the reader has figured out the details, then we are waiting for the author to have his detective catch up, hence the tedium.

I found a few items of interest at this Residence, including the author’s casual references to British wartime circumstances: meat is a scarce commodity, impacting Arnold’s beloved pub lunches; there are few young men around in the village other than Isaac Napley, the gypsy suspect. And it’s sociologically intriguing to hear Arnold and Prickett (via the author) assess the nomadic family, a group that can’t be trusted because it has an almost genetically criminal ethos. Prickett lists littering, disturbing the peace, and avoiding the police among the Napleys’ offenses; paradoxically, they are also the book’s only example of hardworking (and apparently honest and reliable) manual laborers. You can contrast this suspicion-of-the-outsider perspective with Gladys Mitchell’s more anthropological interest in rural gypsy customs in books like Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956).

This Undesirable Residence was published in the U.S. as Death at Ash House (Doubleday, Doran & Co., also 1942). I am grateful for a robust academic interlibrary loan system that lets me sample these desirable properties in a market that would otherwise be well out of my price range.

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Book Review: GRACE BEFORE MEAT (1942) by Winifred Blazey

12/31/2020

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Winifred Blazey’s stories succeed foremost because of the author’s loving attention to details. Having read her fourth and final novel, 1942’s seriocomic Grace Before Meat, I feel that the principal thread that connects all of her books is a careful crafting and presentation of a world in microcosm; it’s a goal that perhaps all novelists should aim for, but many writers don’t seem especially interested in achieving. This ability to conjure and ornament a believable, busy world around one’s protagonist organically engages the reader, while providing assurance that the narrative is (likely) in capable hands.

In short, Winifred Blazey welcomes her readers into the worlds she creates, and she lets us fully understand why all those little details matter to her protagonists, and why those details should in turn matter to her readers. With her début book, Dora Beddoe (1936), it was those specifics of her unhappy antihero’s bleak and monotonous existence that allowed us to understand the character’s desperate murderous mood. In Indian Rain (1938), the author’s most accomplished story, traveler Lovat Cleave absorbs all the kindnesses and cruelties humans are capable of before he begins to understand himself. And even the author’s weakest book, 1941’s The Crouching Hill, is filled with details that bring into sharp relief the group of visiting schoolmistresses, their young charges, and the dreary lodging house where tragedy strikes.

With Barbara Grace, Blazey creates her first fully likeable protagonist; it is 1912, and the newly certified schoolteacher applies for a position she hears about while on a walking tour of the countryside. The village of Candleford Hainault will soon be needing a replacement schoolmistress, and the promised autonomy of the rural post appeals to the independent young woman. Despite warnings from friends and misgivings from family, Barbara sets out on her own and soon clashes with the family of servants she has inherited. This leads to a confrontation with the rector and his cousins when she appeals to eject the unruly Baker clan from her adopted house, and ruffled feathers when Barbara takes her case to Randall Winter, the village squire. Barbara makes progress with the children but her alliance with the suspicious villagers around the headstrong newcomer is uneasy at best. When a late-night walk makes her a potential witness to a grudge-driven murder, Barbara finds herself giving evidence at an inquest.

Grace Before Meat, then, is nothing more nor less than the story of an outsider learning the ways of the community she chooses to invade, while gradually understanding how to align her own progressive ideals with the stubborn but pragmatic code of the locals. For Barbara, it is a story of incremental survival, of tiny battles won, of ground gained or retreated from on a daily basis. And it is in these details that the novel provides much of its engagement, for we want to see Barbara succeed. While the character has a strong work ethic and can stand up for herself, Blazey takes care to balance those admirable qualities with vulnerabilities fitting a woman just out of adolescence: Barbara is also proud and self-assured to the point of vanity on occasion, but usually has the good sense to realize her flaws after the fact.

Candleford Hainault’s population is lively and skillfully sketched in, and certain rural domestic observations resonate more fully than their few paragraphs of description might suggest. A fistfight between a villager and a blacksmith – “The smith’s breathing was fairly noisy, but he seemed less distressed than Toby. The latter was hitting him four times to every one, but the smith, when he landed, landed heavily, all his ox-strength behind the battering blow” – or a queasy assignation between a truant schoolgirl and an older man lingered in my memory days after the story was finished. The book’s final chapters are set, ironically, in the schoolroom, this time to accommodate a public inquest, and although interesting this section feels slightly anticlimactic. After so many pages where Barbara Grace drives the narrative, it is jarring to then yield focus to a fussy coroner, no matter how entertaining his dyspeptic interviews of the plain-spoken villagers might be.

Still, the inquest ends and Barbara has the last word, with chivalrous Toby Rittlestone waiting in the wings should she choose to stay in Candleford Hainault after all. It’s a strong final book from a writer I wish had produced more; in her best moments, her prose is just as engaging and witty as that of Gladys Mitchell, Winifred Blazey’s roommate and companion in the years she was writing these novels.

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Book Review: DEATH OF A BEAUTY QUEEN (1935) by E.R. Punshon

12/27/2020

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Back in the late 1990’s, when discovering authors and book series from the Golden Age of Detection blossomed from a flirtation to an obsession, I first became acquainted with British writer E.R. Punshon and his earnest young career policeman protagonist, Bobby Owen. Tackling them in chronological order over the years, I found the books enjoyable but never singularly remarkable. The result was that, after each read, it took me successively longer to return to the shelf for the next series title, and after the twelfth published Bobby Owen adventure, 1939’s Suspects – Nine, I quietly moved on to other authors and other detectives.

And yet the hiatus isn’t altogether fair to Punshon, a consistent and decently engaging writer whose textual tone Mike Grost describes as “a cross between the Scotland Yard heroes of the Crofts school and the sort of gentlemanly figures found in writers like Christie, Allingham, and Marsh.” In addition, Punshon takes his duty to deliver a fair-play puzzle seriously, and while he sometimes allows his reader to get ahead of the solution, there is craft and wit on display in much of his writing and plotting (at least among the dozen that I have read so far). The Goodreads group Reading the Detectives is currently working through the Bobby Owen series, and I thought this would provide a good excuse to go back to that unjustly neglected bookshelf and revisit a Punshon production.

This month the group has chosen Death of a Beauty Queen from 1935, the fifth in an impressive series of 35 Owen books. The premise is immediate and absorbing: manipulative beauty contestant Carrie Mears is found in a manager’s office during a pageant, dying from a stab wound to the throat. The competitor she has tricked into performing poorly – and whose fingerprint is found on a knife – becomes one suspect, while a puritanical city councilor trying to remove his lovestruck son from the premises become two more. The victim’s fiancé arrives soon thereafter on a motorbike, while the stage manager reports that a stranger asking for Carrie but denied entry may have snuck past him in the chaos of ebbing and flowing visitors.

It is true that Sergeant Bobby Owen arrives with energy at the crime scene, but Beauty Queen’s investigation is conducted by Superintendent Mitchell of Scotland Yard. The latter is a very capable figure of authority, and one of my first surprises upon rereading was realizing that the author’s series detective will be more of an observer than a participant in this story. The role change does not diminish the telling at all, as Owen intellectually tries to assess the clues and testimony to solve the case, and the reader is given access to his thoughts and surmises.

Another surprise was being reminded of the novelistic, almost melodramatic approach that Punshon uses, one that often lingers on details and vivid descriptive moments for mood and characterization. It’s another element that connects Punshon with similar detective fiction mood-setters, evocative authors like Gladys Mitchell and John Dickson Carr. I particularly enjoyed the time taken to set the scene from character perspectives, first from the attention-seeking victim-to-be as she soaks in the adoration on the stage and spontaneously sabotages another participant, and then in the next chapter from the harried cinema manager Mr. Sargent, who regrets offering to stage the pageant in the first place.

As admirable (and, for me, as welcome) as such literary flourishes to expose character psychology might be, Punshon’s prose also runs the danger of being excessive and overheated. I think this is why I need to sample this author in moderation; an oppressively rendered atmosphere can sometimes arrest a scene’s energy. In Beauty Queen, for example, we have the very Gothic image of a pious man (the Puritanical councilor) whose hair turns white and who seems to age overnight due to a heavy burden weighing upon his soul:

For a moment or two, Bobby felt too bewildered to speak, nor could he keep his eyes from the brick Paul Irwin had been holding, or his mind from questioning what use it had been meant to serve. Unutterably changed, also, did the old man seem, as if he had passed, in these last few days, from a hale and sound maturity to an extreme old age. And yet, in spite of his bowed form and silvery hair, there was a still a smouldering fire in his eye that seemed as if it yet had power to turn to momentary flame; there was still a hint of power in his bearing, as though all was not yet decay.

The transformation is a striking detail, to be sure, and it lends the genre story a larger sense of tragedy, something out of Hardy or Hawthorne. But it’s also ultimately a descriptive detail and not truly a clue that gets reader and detective closer to divining a solution. (In contrast, think of what Agatha Christie might do with a character whose appearance and hair color have changed. She likely would not leave it at a literary metaphor, as readers would expect it to be integrated into the mystery plot.)

There are a handful of colorful clues in Beauty Queen, even as many of them prove to be red herrings. Among them, though, is a potential clue so obvious in its introduction by the author that I was astounded it was not activated or commented upon by the eagle-eyed Bobby Owen! There is so much discussion of the murderer likely having blood on their clothes as a result of a stab to the throat in close proximity, and then the fiancé shows up in Chapter Six with his overcoat covered in mud from a fall from his motorcycle… And yet the highly suspicious garment is never referred to again, either by the author or his detective, nor does it function as a clue genuine or false, except to bewilder or frustrate a reader.

Punshon’s sentences can sometimes run on, as evidenced in the quotation above. But it is helpful to remember that the author actually started his crime story career in 1907, when Victorian-era storytelling defined both pacing and description on the page. So while E.R. Punshon’s writing has been compared with a half dozen Golden Age-era mystery writers already in this review, his work also aligns with the sometimes overdescriptive output of Eden Phillpotts or Anna Katherine Green, and also seems influenced by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Good company, to be sure, but the contemporary Punshon reader needs to recognize and be responsive to the denser style. I like the extra flourishes, but find they need to be taken in moderation.

Interestingly, the author had already turned 60 years old when he introduced his young policeman in 1933’s Information Received, so the appearance of artifacts from a previous literary era should not be wholly surprising here. Dean Street Press has returned all of the Bobby Owen books to print and has issued eBook editions, and that is cause for celebration. Some of the titles could not be found in their first editions for love or money, and they are worth discovering and reading for any fan interested in between-the-wars mysteries with a Victorian era flavor.

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Book Review: THE MORNING AFTER DEATH (1966) by Nicholas Blake

11/29/2020

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The final mystery to feature Nigel Strangeways, 1966's The Morning After Death is the very definition of a literary mixed bag, and in the final analysis there is more disappointment than delight. I will start with the point that we have a lackluster mystery presented against an engaging setting: Nigel is visiting Cabot University, a fictional New England ivy league school, and makes the acquaintance of the academic Ahlberg brothers. Mark, a professor of English, has a reputation for puckish practical jokes while Chester, teaching Business, is both pragmatic and dull. But it is their step-brother Josiah whose body is found stuffed into a locker, and it does not appear that much love is lost among the group of people who knew and worked with him. Nigel investigates, and two more murderous attempts are made before the killer is exposed and brought to justice.

Unlike so many other entries in this entertaining series, The Morning After Death is pinned onto a relatively weak and unsurprising puzzle, and although Nicholas Blake's detective does a fair amount of theorizing, neither the characters nor the mystery itself are particularly memorable. It is not an impossible slog, just one that never rises above mediocrity. Near the story's climax, Strangeways presents his accusation and explanation of events in the form of a letter to the murderer, and the reading and reaction by the guilty party provides a very welcome thrill. Blake seems quite interested in character psychology in his later novels, and while Morning strikes some tone-deaf notes in other places, the intellectual failing of the killer, literally spelled out with cruel precision by Nigel’s superior mind, is quite fascinating.

The Massachusetts college setting is also enjoyable, and although Nigel (and his creator, poet Cecil Day-Lewis) is quite at home among the halls of academe, the trip across the pond is a productive one. In part, this is due to the cultural differences between the English detective and the American academics he interacts with. For example, he must remind himself to check for traffic coming from the left and contrasts his own college days with those of the largely joyless students surrounding him:

Policemen stood talking together at each of the two gates that came within Nigel’s vision. Students, released to their normal tasks, brushed past them, carrying their books in canvas bags. They look so young, thought Nigel: can I ever have been as young as that? There is a firm intention in their walk – they neither saunter nor run, as we used to do, enjoying our brief spell of freedom between school and job: they are already seriously committed to the future.

He also tags along on pilgrimages to Walden Woods and Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst. (Indeed, Blake borrows his book's title from the latter's brief but striking poem "The Bustle in a House.") In the final pages, Blake even has Nigel attend a Boston football game, with Yale battling Cabot University... standing in, one inevitably assumes, for Harvard.

But back to that mention of misguided psychology: along with The Worm of Death (1961), this title presents relationships between men and women that are often uncomfortable and chauvinistically facile. Easily the most ill-served is the character of Susannah "Sukie" Tate. (Why the reductive nickname? Answer that, and you can guess where my criticism is going...) Sukie, we are told, was once the target of an attempted rape by one drunken male character, and later, after a discussion about Clare, Nigel’s girlfriend in London, she seduces our intrepid detective, who is all too willing to yield to her charms and vulnerabilities.

It's an odd choice for Blake's detective nearing retirement to get physical with another woman with no guilt or remorse; it is his relationship with Clare Massinger that readers have been following and investing in over the past seven books. But equally troubling is the fact that Sukie is really the only female character of substance in The Morning After Death, and she is both stereotyped and sexualized. There are other women academics introduced, but they are rather interchangeable. For Sukie to be used as both vixen and victim to define the men in the story is troubling, even when one remembers the time (the "liberated" '60's) and place (hedonistic America) in which she appears.

While I don’t want to presume that the detective’s morals and beliefs are completely aligned with the author’s in mouthpiece fashion, I do wonder what the ratio of personal viewpoint and concession to genre expectations might be. That Blake had a consumer readership in mind is rather obvious, so a little sex and vulgarity mixed in to balance (or to make more attractive?) a puzzle’s cerebral aspects is likely intentional. With the same wary caveat of presuming protagonist as author proxy, I end with an early-chapter exchange between Strangeways and a housemaster’s wife on the pitfalls facing both the classic and contemporary mystery writer:

Mrs. Edwardes bent forward and eyed Nigel solemnly. “Considering what I’ve heard of your background,” she said, “tell me, do you read detective fiction?”

“Sometimes,” said Nigel.

“I hope you are sound on it.”

“Sound?” asked Nigel.

“As an art form.”

“It’s not an art form. It’s an entertainment.”

May nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I have no use for those who seek to turn the crime novel into an exercise in morbid psychology. Its chief virtue lies in its consistent flouting of reality: but crime novelists today are trying to write variations on Crime and Punishment without possessing a grain of Dostoevsky’s talent. They’ve lost the courage of their own agreeable fantasies, and want to be accepted as serious writers.” This seemed to annoy her.

[Nigel:] “Still, novels that are all plot – just clever patterns concealing a vacuum – one does get bored with them. I can understand readers getting sick of blood that’s obviously only red ink.”

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Book Review: THIS UNDESIRABLE RESIDENCE (1942) by Miles Burton

Book Review: GRACE BEFORE MEAT (1942) by Winifred Blazey

Book Review: DEATH OF A BEAUTY QUEEN (1935) by E.R. Punshon

Book Review: THE MORNING AFTER DEATH (1966) by Nicholas Blake

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