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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.


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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: THE CROUCHING HILL (1941) by Winifred Blazey

7/12/2019

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PictureCover of the 2015 print-on-demand edition from Isha Books, India.
Of Winifred Blazey’s four published novels, 1941’s The Crouching Hill is the only one that is overtly structured as detective fiction. The book is dedicated to friend and companion Gladys Mitchell, “who supplied the setting for this book and suggested it should be written as a detective story.” And while the novel may provide all the elements of a traditional whodunit, including the discovery of a body, an investigator, multiple suspects, and a solution in the form of a confession, the sum total adds up to something more peculiar, off-key, and, unfortunately, ultimately disappointing.

I had high hopes for The Crouching Hill not only for its deliberate genre choice but also because the author’s two earlier efforts were compelling and rewarding reads.

Dora Beddoe (1936) was a marvelous first effort, a moody character study of a woman treated unfairly by life and family until she reaches a murderous breaking point. To me, 1938’s Indian Rain was even more impressive, an epic story of a man trying to make sense out of life and find peace in a world filled with misery and injustice. The Crouching Hill, in contrast, never focuses on a single character for which the reader can feel pathos or experience change. Many aspects, from continuously revolving characters being interviewed to the murder victim remaining a cipher through to the final pages, contribute to keep this mystery operating academically and artificially, but never truly organically.

The plot is a strange blend of sordid realism and Golden Age-era whodunit, with neither type landing satisfactorily. Schoolteacher Marion Francis is one of four staff members accompanying a group of girl students to the country, where the girls are to spend their holiday “billeted” with local villagers. After their charges have been paired with their host families, the teachers take rooms at the Rose and Thorn Inn, where Miss Francis and colleague Ursula French drink heavily and mix with the men in the pub. In the morning, Miss Francis is found “suffocated and strangled” in her bed; a post-mortem reveals that she was pregnant. The inspector immediately suspects her roommate Miss French (of the murder, that is), and those suspicions are heightened when a pair of local schoolboys claim to have interacted with the woman earlier that day, then disguised as a male motorcyclist.

While Blazey is quite good at crafting observations of social attitudes and human quirks, the tone of this book never quite settles. The details are too often squalid and grim – a pregnant woman’s death, a hasty tumble in the pub with a travelling salesman, a lecherous, rheumatic old man who relates his eavesdropping to the inspector with a leer and a wet-eyed wink – and the plotline (and certainly the story’s resolution) offers little joy or catharsis.

Taken as a novel of detection, well… It’s a litany of endless interviews, and there is no real fair play at work because the motive remains hypothetical until the killer steps forward to confess and explain. (There’s also an alibi reversal in the final chapter that feels like quite a cheat.) I get the feeling that, although she is using a familiar genre structure, Blazey isn’t interested in presenting a game to challenge the reader. The problem is that no larger theme is allowed to resonate, in part because no character is explored to a depth that makes us feel we understand him or her.

If her earlier, better books are an indication, I think the author is most interested in sending her fictional protagonists through a crucible, coming out either strengthened or defeated on the other side. In The Crouching Hill – even the title’s imagery of a landscape waiting to spring is referenced but never successfully activated in the story – Winifred Blazey’s true protagonist, the fated Marion Francis, is dead on the first page, her motivations and character a muted mystery, and no one, including the author, is quite able to bring her back to life.

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Book Review: DORA BEDDOE (1936) by Winifred Blazey

1/20/2017

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PictureDora Beddoe, the 1937 Tauchnitz paperback edition (Germany)
I wanted to start the New Year by reviewing a novel that is both a relative rarity and – it happily turns out – a very absorbing study of an unassuming woman driven to murder. Dora Beddoe is Winifred Blazey’s début story, and she would publish only three more titles over the coming seven years. The abbreviated output is a pity, as this book, along with Indian Rain (1938), the other Blazey volume I have read to date, shows an assured storyteller whose keen interest in character psychology and universal themes equals the skills on display in the works of prolific mystery writer Gladys Mitchell, her friend and companion.

Like its titular main character, Dora Beddoe is intriguingly flawed. The story occasionally frustrates precisely because the plump spinster at its heart is meant to do so; it is by design that Dora Beddoe transforms from a sympathetic character to a pitiable one.


As the reviewer for the Singapore-based Straits Times noted upon the novel’s release, “Although Dora Beddoe cannot be called a pleasant book, it is undoubtedly interesting and full of promise for the future.” The circumstances Blazey creates for her anti-heroine – partly coincidental, partly fateful – are at once perceptive and intriguing. They also allow for a curious exploration into the flaws and self-interests of the human psyche.

We first find Dora Beddoe in circumstances equally comfortable and limiting. (This state of tension becomes a motif throughout the tale.) She tends the house and organizes the papers for her brother Philip, an amiable and intelligent man who has taken over management of her deceased father’s factory. Dora loves her brother devotedly, and to her – here I apply a little psychology of my own – Philip offers the unremarkable woman a chance to keep her maidenly status without the added burden of acquiring a husband.

It is her mother, a wonderfully drawn complainant of life who never misses an opportunity to find fault with Dora and the world, who makes living in the family home an increasingly exasperating task. When fate and a loose carpet thread conspire to send Mrs. Beddoe tumbling down a flight of stairs, Dora is surprised by the relief she soon feels. The nosey housekeeper Mrs. Pigeon nurses her suspicions against Dora, however, and very quickly rumors circulate that the matriarch’s death wasn’t an accident.

With Philip and Dora relocating – and with Philip continuing to pursue his interest in examining and usually debunking the phenomena manifested by clairvoyants and mediums – Dora is actually happy once more. But again she soon finds irritation in a life that should offer contentment: a foolish young woman named Edna Ponderell remains in the house Philip has bought, and the awkward temporary arrangement offers just enough time for this new obstacle to position herself between Dora and her brother. Wedding plans are discussed (with the potential groom notably indifferent to the prospect) and soon Dora is visiting multiple chemists’ shops, explaining matter-of-factly that she needs to purchase some poison for rats. The events that ensue – creating another interesting tension of binaries, this time of guilt and innocence – leave Dora in a limbo of her own devising, and one that feels surprising, inevitable, and earned.

In some ways, the story here is decidedly sharply focused: it is domestic and “small” in scale. The author is interested in exploring the contrariness of her characters, and her attention to detail helps to free these flawed figures from the potentially confining melodrama of the plot. Philip, for example, alternately finds his sister guilty, innocent, altruistic, and selfish, depending on his own needs and conscience in the moment. Dora displays similar changes in perspective as she acts and is acted upon, particularly when society pronounces judgement, as it very much likes to do. This emotional fluidity feels honest, and it allows for a multi-dimensionality that lifts Dora Beddoe from a genre exercise into the realm of thoughtful literature. Like its main character, the book may be unassuming, but it nevertheless knows what it wants to achieve.

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Book Review: INDIAN RAIN (1938) by Winifred Blazey

5/17/2016

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My interest in the books of author Winifred Blazey (1892-1964) has its roots in her connection to Gladys Mitchell, a prolific British mystery writer for whom I maintain a tribute website at www.gladysmitchell.com . Electoral registers show the two women sharing a house in Brentford in 1928 and throughout the 1930s. A 1950s newspaper profile on Mitchell and her Mrs. Bradley mysteries also references Blazey, and the two writers – Mitchell prolific, Blazey the published author of four titles – attended meetings together as members of The Detection Club.

Winifred Blazey’s books, all published by Michael Joseph, who was also Mitchell’s publisher, include Dora Beddoe (1936), Indian Rain (1938), The Crouching Hill (1941), and Grace Before Meat (1942). While I don’t have copies of her first or last novels, Gyan Books in New Delhi, India, has made available the middle titles as utilitarian, print-on-demand softcover and hardcover books. The pages are essentially scans of the original Michael Joseph texts and typeface, which is readable and affordable. Abebooks currently has listings for these titles. Having just read Indian Rain, my first experience with a Winifred Blazey novel, I can enthusiastically report that the story is well worth the investment of money and reading time.


Indian Rain is dedicated to Stephen Hockaby, the name of Gladys Mitchell’s pseudonym for her series of adventure and history stories published in the mid-1930s. The choice is apt. Blazey’s book contains all the strengths of the best Hockaby titles: an exotic and informative setting (the land travel routes and the many villages of India in the early 18th century); a story that finds its characters caught in an epic and dramatic era of world history; and an intense interest in presenting the traditions and psychologies of everyday people who are defined by the world in which they live.

The book tells the wide-ranging story of Lovat Cleave, an Englishman who, as a very young man, leaves his hometown under a cloud – he returned fire when a groundskeeper shot at him for impetuous poaching, wounding the older man – and travels to coastal Bengal, where he starts work as a clerk for the East India Company near Calcutta. Initially, Lovat is overwhelmed and out of place in his new surroundings:
“The feeling of homesickness grew intense. He went off his food, made some serious mistakes in his accounts, kicked an Indian porter, struck his servant when he did not immediately comprehend an order, insulted two Englishmen of his father’s age, got drunk and was sick, and took his gun into the swamps one day to shoot himself, but came back with some birds instead.”
But he soon becomes fascinated in this land where cruelties and injustices abound, from the intricacies of the caste system to the horrors of human sacrifice and deadly gangs whose robbery and murder of their victims is merely an appeasement to the god Kali. Lovat also witnesses the flip side of this cultural and religious philosophy, as those who are poor and starving still provide what little food and shelter they can to travelers on the roads. This synthesis of kindness and cruelty, barriers and bridges proves a resonant theme of the book.

Another skirmish at the company (essentially a crime of self-defense) sends Lovat into the villages and among the people of regional India, and Indian Rain’s first half feels very episodic and experiential. This is by design, as the protagonist begins to observe and understand this world that is so very different from the order and morality he left behind in England. It is to the author’s great credit that the reader follows much the same learning curve as Lovat does. We cannot help being appalled by a village headman’s suggestion to bury a boy in the sand and start an elephant stampede so Lovat’s fortune can be read in the boy’s remains. Yet the anecdote clearly expresses the dichotomy of savagery and generosity, as well as reminding us – as does nearly every event within the book – that life is viewed much differently here, with death and pain inevitable, commonplace, and part of the cycle of rebirth.

It is the book’s second half where all of Lovat’s experiences begin to have a cumulative effect. At one village he witnesses the act of sati, a self-sacrifice where a widowed woman throws herself onto her husband’s blazing funeral pyre. The woman begins to scream and tries to get up, but relatives hold her down on the fire with staffs. Unable to stand by and watch, Lovat rescues her from the flames and rushes her to the river, but in doing so changes her status from a destined martyr to an untouchable. After the escape, he falls in love with the woman named Parbati, and they have a son, first called Krishna and later Narayan. (She also gives birth to two daughters, but as daughters are worthless in the Hindu caste system, each girl baby manages to die in her mother’s care before she is a year old.)

Once a true emotional connection is created, and Lovat goes from an (often in jeopardy) observer to an invested husband and father, Blazey delivers a story that is powerful and heart-breaking. It is also ambitious in scope, tracing the story of a man’s lifetime and showing how goals and perspectives can change as the decades pass. An interest in money and self-preservation transforms into a need to care and nurture others, which in turn leads to a mature desire to be at peace with nature and the gods.

There is a profound chapter near the end of the book chronicling a pilgrimage by father and son as they search for Parbati. Their path leads them into the snow-capped and potentially deadly mountains of the east, but throughout the described hardships and the brutal conditions – the author’s prose is vividly sensory here – there is also a mystical, fatalistic tone that feels truthful and right. It’s a moment of hard-won, realist transcendence, and when Lovat finally returns to his family estate in England, the reader understands fully why the man’s surroundings are now hollow and unsatisfying to him.

Indian Rain is a book that surprised me and sparked my admiration. It seems to be impeccably researched. There is so much detail and observation about societal customs, from Moslem and Hindi caste rules to the topography of coastal and central India to the expertly told narrative of an outsider becoming integrated into another culture, that the book becomes both easy to recommend and well worth experiencing again for its journey and its themes. I look forward to reading more titles from Winifred Blazey, and I thank Gladys Mitchell for introducing her companion and fellow writer to me.


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