1940s

The Far Cry by Emma Smith – #1949Club

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Karen and I are unusually in sync with our club reads this time. Not only did we both visit Beverley Nichols’ All I Could Never Be earlier in the week, we are both finishing with Emma Smith’s The Far Cry. (Here are Karen’s thoughts.) Apparently I bought my copy in February 2012, so it is good to finally get it off the shelf – and it was nothing like I expected.

This isn’t my first dance with Emma Smith. Years ago, I loved her childhood memoir and another memoir about working on the Grand Union Canal. They were written with a curious sort of confident naivety, and I didn’t know how that would translate to fiction – and, indeed, Smith only published two novels: The Far Cry in 1949, and a second in 1978.

The heroine of the novel is Teresa Digby, who is 14 years old but often feels rather younger or rather older. She is a bit spoiled and petulant, but also worldly-wise and manipulative – and yet still an enjoyable, spirited person to be around. Perhaps we like her because she is so clearly better than her relatives: her unaffectionate, domineering Aunt May and her impetuous and selfish father. Her mother has long been absent.

Smith is very amusing about this unconventional, discordant domestic set up. For example…

Aunt May was already at breakafast. She said nothing to Teresa and Teresa said nothing to her, having chosen to play the part of sulky disgrace rather than any of the other parts she might have chosen from a repertoire acquired during nearly fourteen years of being late for breakfast while staying with Aunt May. Her aunt, for her part, preferred this attitude to pertness or pretended dreaminess, though she disliked all of Teresa’s attitudes, and Teresa too, together with most other little girls. So, thinking intensely about their idea of one another, they ate and drank their way through breakfast.

The opening section of The Far Cry reminded me of Rachel Ferguson’s writing: an eccentric family, a drily sardonic narrator, and characters you can’t help enjoying despite their less appealing qualities.

This set-up is suddenly disrupted when Teresa’s absent mother decides that she is coming back to reclaim her. Mr Digby can’t stand the idea, and so he spontaneously decides that he and Teresa will move to India! There is a little method to his madness: this is where his other daughter (and Teresa’s half-sister) Ruth lives with her husband. And so off they go…

Being the 1940s, travel of course is a much more prolonged experience than today, and a significant amount of the novel takes place onboard the ship. It is there that Mr Digby befriends a Mr Littleton, and Teresa finds solace and companionship with a sharp and undemonstrative older lady, Miss Spooner. It is a meeting of minds, or at least of temperaments. I thought this was rather a lovely description:

Two nights before they arrived, Teresa, undressing, said: “It’s so awfull hot. I wish I could sleep outside.” “Why not? said Miss Spooner, “I think it’s a very good idea. I’ll sleep outside as well.”

It was easily done. They pushed their mattresses and sheets through the cabin window and, with some slight feeling of indecorum, tripped down the passage in their nightclothes. Most people had already gone to bed. Except for a few late walkers, the decks were empty. Teresa leaned over the deserted rail, her night-gown blowing round her bare ankles, and watched the huge and deeply orange moon lumber over the rim of the sea, begin to climb, begin almost at once to fade and turn pale as though defeated by too many stars. Then she lay beneath her sheet, drew it up to her chin and tried not to go to sleep. But the sound of a couple a few feet away quietly talking together made her droswy; the ceaseless splash of waves, the round and solitary ring of last footsteps passing close beside her, all these increased her drowsiness and so she slept.

Her writing is often so beautiful, and well-judged between the ornate and the direct. She demonstrates such assurance for a debut novelist. Smith is also excellent at shifting moods and evolving perspectives. Because, at first, Teresa finds India overwhelming and unfriendly. It is a world she never imagined, and she has been flung into it without any real preparation – all to live with a sister whom she barely knows. But there is a moment when she suddenly – with the adaptability of youth – makes her peace with her new world. More than that, relishes it.

With wide eyes and open mouth Teresa drank in the confusion as though she tasted a new wine and could never have enough of it. Her fears were gone, her caution; her former instinct, as old as herself, to repulse externals, gave way to a reckless rush of confidence. She flung down her defences; she threw open her doors. She longed to be occupied by this anonymous turmoil which she felt to be so safe, for in all these crowds not a single face looked at her threatenning, not a hand touched her except by accident, not a soul knew who she was or cared.

There are so many lovely passages in this book, and I shan’t type any more out, but what impresses me is that The Far Cry feels like a character piece. Sometimes, novelists who focus so much on dreamy prose are equally dreamy when it comes to precision in their characters. Smith manages to do both. Teresa is a fascinating, evolving creation.

Along the way, though, the perspective changes. We start to see things from Ruth’s point of view. And it quickly becomes clear that her marriage with Edwin is a lot more troubled and complex than Ruth’s sister or father realise. She is rather horrified by them descending on her, and very torn over the future of her relationship. The jubilant, funny tone of the earlier chapters has gradually changed over the course of The Far Cry, and by now it has become quite a reflective, sombre novel. The transition happens naturally enough, so I think it’s probably deliberate – but it would be hard to discuss the tone of the novel with any consistency.

I shan’t give away any more plot, but the novel definitely kept me interested through to the end – mostly by the delineations of the characters, and the beautiful depictions of their various responses to their environments. It’s worth acknowledging that, like any British writer in the 1940s, it isn’t as sensitive to the Indian characters as it should be. And it is curious that no mention is made of Indian independence, which happened in 1947. I suppose the novel must be set shortly before that, and the political rumblings would have been ignored or entirely foreign to Teresa, Ruth and Mr Digby.

My only other reservation is that the end has rather a rush of dramatic incidents. It is only here that Smith betrays the hand of a debut novelist, who rather overplays the big events. I think a subtler ending would have better befitted the novel’s overall nuance.

But a small quibble to end this review and end the 1949 Club. It’s lovely to pick up a Persephone that has been waiting for me for so long, and find it wonderful.

 

The Innocent Traveller by Ethel Wilson – #1949Club

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When I was in Canada earlier this year, I was keen to add more books by Ethel Wilson to my shelves. I’d enjoyed her writing for a while, but was fully bowled over by how brilliant The Equations of Love was, which I read for another club year. One of the books I bought was her second novel, The Innocent Traveller, which fortuitously fits into the 1949 Club.

The Innocent Traveller covers the lifespan of Topaz, and it is a long life – about a century, from the 1840s through to around the time of writing. And what a wonderful character Topaz is. Barb wrote about this novel and called her ‘irrepressible’, and it is the perfect word. I would add ‘exuberant’. From our first sightings of her – crawling under the table, amidst the familiar knees, while Matthew Arnold is visiting – through to her final hours, Topaz is in love with life and allergic to conventionality. Here, for instance, she meets a young playwright:

Topaz was frightfully excited. She had never before sat on a log with someone who was writing a play. Memories of Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and the Lyceum Theatre in general romped through her mind and she did not know where to begin.
[…]
“What are you calling your play, Eustace?” asked Aunty when she recovered.

“Break, Break, Break,” said the young man. “Who is this uncommonly plain little girl standing in front of us? How very wet she is!”

“That?” said Aunt Topaz, suddenly seeing Rose. “Oh, there you are. How do you do, Rose? That is my great-niece. Yes, she is plain, isn’t she? When wet. When dry she looks better, because her hair curls.”

But I am getting away from myself. Let’s start earlier. Topaz grows up in a properous house in London among many and various relatives. Her mother dies in childbirth when Topaz is still very young, and her father remarries – specifically, he marries his late wife’s sister, Jane.

While Topaz is undeniably the star of the novel, Wilson does tell us about everyone else too – the brothers and sisters, their children, the other relatives. Often she tells us in speedy shorthand, which gives the novel an unpredictable and rather amusing tone – particularly when it is counterpointed by her loquaciousness on vaguer topics. We might hear someone’s entire future in a couple of sentences, and then get something as delightfully and unnecessary lengthy as this chapter-opener, on the topic of time:

Of all the inventions human or divine which have been bestowed upon civilised peoples the one most taken for granted, yet the one most practical, is the division of Eternity – or is it of Time – into seven days of the week. Uncivilized persons, one supposed, do not feel the lack of this arbitrary division. The passage of Time is marked for them by such signs as the seasons if any, by day and night if any, by the lunar and solar changes at all events, and by the occurrence and duration of other physical phenomena such as hunger and gestation. These changes are enough; and to some indolent civilized people that is a very enviable kind of existence which they would willingly exchanged for their own. For our exitence which we call civilized becomes increasingly complex; so that 3pm next Wednesday week has an entity and form and prognosis before ever it arrives; and instead of living in polar time and space like free Eskimos, we make for prisoners of ourselves by appointments which we arrange for ourselves for 10am on Tuesday week and 5pm on Thursday forgnith, and the first two weeks in July, and thus, between us, we murder our peace. The only thing in our changing world that we can now regard as being safe and sure is that next Monday will certainly be Monday, next Tuesday will be Tuesday and nothing else, and that Saturday afternoon will always be Saturday afternoon; and for this much stability we should be thankful.

I loved Wilson’s tone, which combines dryness and whimsy so well. And yet she presents Topaz without even the smallest hint of authorial sneering. We see Topaz fail to find a husband, support her ageing parents fairly inadequately, and become in control of the household – all as joyfully and vaguely and poorly as ever. Nothing can dampen her excitement at the world. Nothing could make her think she had missed life’s adventures by failing to find a husband or have children. She is an eternal optimist – and I like that the title brings out her innocence, because her naivety is really innocence rather than ignorance.

Her family find her eccentric, of course, but there is no real antagonism there. And it is with a makeshift family unit that she starts the next adventure: Topaz moves to Canada, along with her widowed sister Annie and her unmarried cousin Rachel. She is already middle-aged, and has a further 50 years in this new land – which she embraces with enthusiasm.

I’ll be honest – a lot of The Innocent Traveller felt quite spontaneous. You’d struggle to find anything resembling plotting – it is just one person’s life, and the lives of those around her, told jubilantly and eccentrically. And perhaps that is because life is, of course, unpredictable and unplotted, and the novel is apparently based on a real person. The author’s note includes:

This is the story – part truth and part invention – of a lively woman who lived for a hundred years and died triumphant in Vancouver and is nearly forgotten after her small commotion of living.

The metaphors are not mixed. The drop of water, the bird, the water-glider, the dancer, the wind on the canal, and Topaz, are all different and all the same…

And the ‘plain’ Rose referred to in the first quotation? That is Ethel herself, or a version of her, appearing on the scene.

Because Wilson covers a century over the course of the novel, she can also cover the shifting social norms and expectations. She often does this in an amusing way, with a sort of heightened tone aping the language of the historian and amplifying it. For instance…

Great-Grandfather Edgeworth was a kind and just employer, but he accepted without question what he saw, and he saw a world become at last static. His imagination, which flew beyond the bright blue sky to the invisible, did not pierce the squalor of the Poor so near at hand in the grim town. The Poor took their familiar deplorable place in squalor, and it would have seemed a novel and disturbing idea to Great-Grandfather Edgeworth that the Poor should reasonably aspire to eat well, drink well, live well and die well. Not wrong, of course, but chimerical. Each age, like our own, has its large blind spots. The social conscience was stirring but not awake. Great-Grandfather Edgeworth was a product of the ages which preceded the young Victoria. Here he was, sleeping in the garden, ninety years old, an upright old man in a world which he really thought was upright.

Isn’t it delicious? Her writing is always a joy, and ‘joy’ is the right word for this book. I might prefer her more tightly plotted novels, and have a special place in my heart for the dry sharpness of Equations of Love, but you can’t go wrong with The Innocent Traveller – and, above all, spending time with the irrepressible, exhuberant Aunt Topaz.

Parson Austen’s Daughter by Helen Ashton – #1949Club

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Parson Austen's daughter

The cynical part of me wonders whether Helen Ashton had embarked on writing a biography of Jane Austen when she decided it would be easier to make it a novel instead. That’s probably unfair, since she turned her hand to a number of biographical novels for a range of figures – but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite get the thought out of my head throughout my whole time reading Parson Austen’s Daughter.

The ‘novel’ (more on those inverted commas later) follows Jane Austen from before her birth through to her death. Along the way, the majority of the focus is on her personal and romantic life, with a few interventions about her writing – though rather less than I’d have liked.

The positives? I think Ashton does a great job of capturing Jane Austen’s character. You can see where this version of Jane would have found the humour and spiritedness of the people she creates in her novels. She is funny and flippant, often to the chagrin of her more considered, reserved sister Cassandra.

“Oh! I love to watch her at it,” said Jane, tossing her arms in the air. “She has so much French address. To captivate Henry, who knows all her faults, who has made up his mind not to fall in love, that would be a conquest indeed. She is the most finished coquette in England, and I must learn to imitate her.”

“I am afraid she is a bad example for you to copy,” said grave Cassandra, but Jane only laughed. “The men do all they can to make us wretched,” she vowed, “so why should we not take our revenge where we can get it? It is all very well for you, my dear Cassy, you will have no trouble with your Tom. He is devoted to you and you want nobody else; but I am not going to put up with the first comer. I intend to break a few hearts on my own account before I settle down to the stupidity of married bliss, and Cousin Eliza shall teach me how to do it. I owe it to myself,” said Jane, looking in the mirror. She was the nineteen.

I also appreciated how Ashton evolved her character – so that, as the years go by, Jane becomes more mature, more serious and perhaps a little sadder – while retaining enough of her irrepressibility to entertain us. There are moments of genuine pathos throughout, and Ashton makes the most out of what little we know of Austen’s connection with Tom LeFroy and her very brief engagement – as well as the tragedies and triumphs faced by Cassandra and other members of the family.

And the negatives… sort of everything else? That’s not quite fair, because Ashton writes well throughout, and there is never a weak moment in her writing style or characterisation. But the issue is that you can’t – or at least you shouldn’t – simply write a biographical novel as though it were a biography with made-up conversations. The structure of a traditional biography just doesn’t translate well into a novel.

Case in point – we have to wade through various members of the family and how they all interconnect before we even get to Jane. There is no immediacy or urgency, or even focus. And that continues throughout the novel. It is very good when focused on Jane – and quite tedious when the canvas extends further and further. Not only does Ashton insist on telling us everything significant that happens to Austen’s brothers and sister, but she also throws in cousins and neighbours and anybody else she can find research about. And, alongside that, we constantly get updates about Napoleon and other major historical points that would be useful background information in a biography – and totally unhelpful in a novel.

Ashton can be a brilliant novelist, and perhaps she would have been a brilliant biographer, but this half-way house is not a success, in my opinion. If she had written a shorter, much more focused novel that is actually about (and solely about) Jane, or perhaps Jane and Cassandra, then I think it could have been brilliant. But this sprawling, loose, exhausting book is all the more frustrating because you can see the kernel of something brilliant in it.

All I Could Never Be by Beverley Nichols – #1949Club

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When we planned our timings for the 1949 Club, I hadn’t realised there would be a two-day work retreat… which was wonderful, but has put me very behind in amalgamating reviews, let alone reading them or writing my own. I have several more books to write about this week, though they may come in a scramble towards the end of the week…

And today’s is a book by a reliable, much-loved author: dear Beverley Nichols. I’ve been accumulating them rather faster than I’ve been reading them, but turning to All I Could Never Be has reminded me afresh why I love him so much.

As in several of Nichol’s books, the tone of this collection of essays is nostalgia for the 1920s. There are often links between the end of one essay and the start of the next, but other than that they are pretty disparate – covering his various friendships (usually with the great and the good), the genesis of some of his books, and perhaps most surprisingly a few sections on his Christian faith and its evolution.

Along the way, Nichols tries to walk a rather tricky line at times. He is keen to emphasise the humble origins of his career in journalism, suggesting himself as a sort of everyman appearing as an impoverished and curious outsider whenever his path crosses any celebrities or nobilites. But it is an impression that fades rather quickly when he talks about his friendship with (say) Nellie Melba, George Bernard Shaw or the Queen (i.e. the King’s wife – this is 1949, remember). For the truth is that Nichols clearly was never an outsider – except that, unlike the truly inner circle, he is an incorrigible name-dropper. When the names dropped are not famous, they will be at least titled. Somehow, I find it all charming rather than monstrous. And that’s probably because of his evidently unaffected delight in these people – and because he has such a way with words. This, for instance, is from an account of his early days of journalism:

I was dispatched to interview a female centenarian. She, poor dear […] sat staring at me with small red eyes, occasionally muttering, to nobody in particular, the phrase, ‘Boo-boo-la-la’. This, I felt, was an insufficient basis on which to build the sparkling denunciation of ‘the modern girl’ which my editor had requested me to obtain from her, and I returned to the office empty-handed.

That article may not have been sparkling, but Nichols always is in All I Could Never Be. Sometimes it is waspish, not to say bitchy – ‘Doubtless Randolph Churchill has many charms, but on the few occasions that I have met him he has hidden them’; ‘One’s first sight of Gertrude Stein was startling, like seeing Gibraltar at dawn’ – but often it is in delight at his fellow man (or woman). The Baroness who can’t resist buying a chandelier on every shopping trip; the Bright Young Things who jostled about in extraordinary costumes; above all, Nellie Melba. He is clearly in awe of her, and there is a moving account of the effect that hearing her sing as an older woman had on Nichols.

Some of the ‘names’ meant nothing to me, and presumably their star had dimmed since 1949. I have no idea who Emily Borie Sherfesee is, and his clue ‘whom Chicago would perhaps remember as Emily Ryserson’ did not help me out. But, nonetheless, I enjoyed his commentary that she was widely loved, ‘[not] for any of those curious qualities which, for lack of a better phrase, I must call ‘party manners’ – for she did not play the piano, her bridge was atrocious, her backgammon non-existent and – worst of all – she never told malicious stories about her dearest friends’. It is a joke, of course, but I think it reveals more than a kernel of truth about sort of society in which Nichols moved for so long. After all, he is certainly not reticent about revealing everything he can about his dearest friends in this book.

But it is not all gossip. Along the way, he talks us through the background to some of his books. Some, he is unflinchingly critical of – he dismisses his work of pacifism, Cry Havoc!, and explains why he recanted its thesis in the face of the Nazis. Others, he recalls fondly – his autobiography Twenty-Five, say, and particularly Down the Garden Path and its two sequels. All I Could Never Be was published before the Merry Hall trilogy, so his focus is on the first three books about his house and garden – and in these essays we learn what we perhaps suspected: that they are more fabrication than fact. Or, at least, the people in them are. He explains the real-life inspirations for a couple of the figures, and while the rest are fictional, the love he has for this house certainly isn’t. I found it interesting to see how celebrity culture was alive and well all those decades ago, and Nichols had to deal with bibliophile trespassers in his garden.

I’m so glad these more literary things were in the collection, because it’s always fascinating to see how a much-loved author arrived at his ideas – though I don’t think I’ve previously read an author being able to so dispassionately praise or censure his own prior work.

What I did not expect to find in this books was Nichols’ earnest reflection on Christianity. I had no idea that he was a man of faith, and have never read The Fool Hath Said because I’d worried he would just be scathing about faith. But in a chapter towards the end of All I Could Never Be, he writes this beautiful paragraph:

It was after one of these walks that I came home and read again, for the first time in years, the gospel according to St. Mark. As the sublime story unfolded itself, I kept whispering to myself – ‘if only it were true – if only it were true!’ And then, suddenly, I realised that I had never made any serious effort to find out whether it was true or whether it was not. I had based my conviction on a cheap and facile assumption – the assumption that miracles did not happen, although I was at that very moment surrounded by miracles, from the flowers on my desk to the ghostly bouquet of shadows that they cast on the wall. To the historical basis of a story that had held a large part of the civilised world for two thousand years, a story which was for all men a matter of life or death, I had given less attention than to the study of a company report. It was, to say the least of it, not very intelligent.

Over several more chapters, Nichols explores his discovery of faith – and the different groups which he became part of, and then left. I don’t know how that faith developed or changed after 1949, but I really appreciated reading something so thoughtful and sincere in a book that is often deliberately and delightfully flippant.

Perhaps All I Could Never Be has such a vague and unrevealing title because it covers a span far broader than a singular theme. And, gosh, I loved it. I was reminded what a joy it is to spend time with Nichols – with his irrepressible pen, his pithy epithets, and his character which is always a hundred per cent committed to whatever he is exploring – whether that is flowers, celebrities, or Jesus.

The Sound of Music by Maria von Trapp – #1949Club

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Cover of The Sound of Music

Today, I’ll be writing about a story that we all know – though quite a few people I’ve spoken to didn’t realise it was ever a book. As the title of this post has already given away, this is the book that led to the smash-hit musical The Sound of Music – and my 1970 edition shares that title, though it was originally published as The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

So, yes, Maria von Trapp was a real person – and a surprising amount of the film appears to be based on truth. Or, at least, the truth as Maria sets it out in her autobiography. She was an irrepressible novitiate nun who wasn’t very at adhering to rules; she became governess to the children of a widower (though not as many children as in the film – at least until they started having their own); she married him. And that is about the first 80 pages of the book!

When the biography was adapted for screen, it’s perhaps not a shock that they focused on the romantic element of the story. Though, in truth, it isn’t especially romantic on the page. Maria has fallen for the children in her care (one of whom, confusingly, is also called Maria), but seeks God’s and the other nuns’ wisdom on whether or not she should accept his proposal. And that’s setting aside the amusing moment at which she accidentally accepted it, via a garbled message from one of his children. Marrying would, after all, mean giving up what she believed to be her vocation – but she is later persuaded that marriage and (step)motherhood could be her vocation instead. You can see why this scene wasn’t included as a dizzying moment of Hollywoodesque love:

“What does God want of me now, Reverend Mother?”

“He wants you to serve Him well where He needs you most, and serve Him whole-heartedly and cheerfully.”

Slowly I wound my way home. The children must be in bed by now, I thought, when I opened the big house door as quietly as possible to slip in unnoticed. But there stood the Captain.

“Well, and…” was all he said.

Timidly I went over; and all of a sudden there came all the tears I hadn’t found before.

“Th-they s-s-said I have to m-m-m-marry you-u!”

Thankfully, this rather dutiful acceptance turns into real love before very long. The quote also demonstrates something that isn’t particularly prevalent in the film: Maria’s faith. Again, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a woman who was considering becoming a nun would also talk a lot about God and about how her relationship with Him determines much of her life. I appreciated that element of the biography, which felt natural and authentic at all times.

The Sound of Music is also very funny at times. Maria has an eye for absurdity, and the book is packed with anecdotes to make you smile – from the mistakes she made when learning English in America, to horrendous performances, to the usual sort of self-deprecating accounts of misunderstandings that make this sort of book so fun.

So, what happens after the plot of the film is finished? They do, indeed, leave to evade the growing influence of the Nazis – but not so dramatically or dangerously as it is depicted in the film. In a rather more sedate way, they get the paperwork they need and get on a boat to America. There are issues along the way (on one entrance to the country, Maria says she wants to stay forever – which sees her briefly imprisoned for attempting to overstay her visa) but their new country is broadly welcoming. It is also where the bulk of Maria’s story takes place. As the original title – The Story of the Trapp Family Singers – suggests, the book documents the idea of forming a singing group and their gradual evolution into a nationwide success. Much of what she writes about is the pieces they perform and how they go over, and if you have more musical knowledge than I do, then you’ll probably get more out of those.

It’s hard to believe that a family could become this successful just off the back of touring theatres – rather than releasing music, or appearing on radio or TV. It was wryly amusing to read Maria’s rather prescient take on the modern age of entertainment:

Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have got used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do thigns with our mind and our hands – they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

Along the way, Maria shares about her own health issues – including losing several babies to miscarriages, which she attributes to a kidney complaint. We see the growing impact of an inevitable war. And we indubitably grow to love Maria. She becomes older, wiser and a little more earnest than her film counterpart – while the Captain is noticeably gentler. But fans of the movie won’t be disappointed by the reality that you find on the page. And if you’ve never seen the film, then you’ll also enjoy this unexpected, heartwarming, very honest tale of a very unusual family.

A Graveyard To Let by Carter Dickson – #1949Club

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Any club year is a good excuse to read a good, old-fashioned murder mystery. In Keswick a few years ago, I bought a handful of a shop’s wide selection of novels by Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr – who are, of course, the same person. I’m not sure what distinction there might be between the type of novel he wrote under each name, or what makes this book a ‘fast, tough mystery’ in the words of the cover blurb. ‘Tough’ as in hard-to-solve, or hard-boiled, or some third option? No matter, let’s enjoy this ludicrous cover image and get into it!

Cover of A Graveyard to Let, showing a blonde woman looking alarmed next to an overgrown graveyard.

 

Dickson is renowed for variations on the locked room mystery, and this is a curious spin on it. Frederick Manning is a very wealthy American businessman who doesn’t seem particularly fond of any of his three adult children. The novel opens with a meeting between he and they, and his daughter’s all-American boyfriend, in his offices – where he laments the memory fo their long-dead mother, admits to have a mistress, and sets various cats among pigeons. “I was wondering,” he says, for instance, to his daughter’s partner, “why you and I dislike each other so much.” Any practised reader of detective novels will know that, in this misanthropic, selfish gentleman, we have found our probable victim.

Not long later, the family are all gathered at Manning’s palatial home – including Sir Henry Merrivale, also known as ‘H.M.’ He is apparently a series detective figure – loud, eccentric, violently intelligent, and the sort of character who is quite delightful to read about and a nightmare to know. In his initial appearance in this book, for example, he antagonises and exasperates a cop (whom we will meet again later) by apparently being able to get through the metro gates with a magic word. With his wealth and idiosyncracies, he could have been crafted by P.G. Wodehouse – and there is a lot of humour of the ‘fish out of water’ variety, with this very English man thrown into an American context. But there is also an undercurrent of steely determination to solve murders and misdoing.

The reason the family have come together is because Frederick Manning is going to reveal a secret – and H.M. has been told that he will witness a miracle. And he does. Seemingly to evade the sound of police sirens, Manning dives fully-clothed into the swimming pool. He doesn’t emerge, and his body isn’t found. Where has he gone?

It is an exciting premise for a novel, and Dickson/Carr had to find dozens of variants of the ‘locked room’ mystery – for this isn’t quite a locked room, of course, but the idea is the same.

From here, things naturally spiral. H.M. somehow manages to interview and follow all the major characters, and brings energy to the novel that sustains us. And, yes, we do end up at one point in an overgrown graveyard that is on rented land – though I suspect Dickson came up with the excellent title and retro-fitted the scene in question.

Obviously I shan’t spoil anything, but I will say that the solution to the swimming pool mystery was a bit of a let-down – and the murderer was the person I picked in the opening scenes, though that was more by good luck than any deduction. As plots go, it was a bit flimsy – but, for a reading experience, it was enormous fun. Totally silly, totally engaging, and I’d certainly be happy to read more of H.M.’s eccentric sleuthing.

 

A Clear Dawn by Winifred Peck – #1949Club

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The three women of the McWatt family, Honesty, Mary and their niece, Bridie, sat around the interior grate of their little flat in Napier Crescent, Castleburgh, on a cold December evening in 1945, their eyes on the black marble clock on the mantelshelf, tense with anxiety and anticipation.

The opening paragraph of Winifred Peck’s A Clear Dawn made me feel pretty sure I’d picked up something I’d enjoy. We’re in a domestic setting with a group of women and something is happening to shake things up – already I am squarely in the middle of my comfort zone. And, as I read most of A Clear Dawn on a very long train journey to Edinburgh, I quickly realised that ‘Castleburgh’ is a stand-in for that city. It felt apt. And all the more coincidental, given that I’ve had A Clear Dawn on my shelves for more than 20 years.

As that opening tells us, three women live together in a small flat. Two sisters in their 40s – though, as often in novels of this period, they feel rather older – and a niece in her 20s. Honesty is intelligent and sharp – perhaps living up to her name a little too closely at times. Mary is kind and deeply committed to her Christian faith. Bridie is loyal to her aunts but also aware that her youth and vitality deserve a wider canvas than their restricted world.

What has brought ‘anxiety and anticipation’ to the trio? It’s the return of Walter – their brother and uncle, respectively. Not only is he coming back to Scotland after years in the Middle East, he is returning with a fiancé, Lily. The women don’t know anything about her, but are prepared to make her welcome in their lives – well, ‘prepared’ to differing degrees. But the flat truly belongs to Walter, and they plot how best to shift living arrangements and furniture so that the newlyweds will be able to move in with them, once they are, indeed, newly wed. Until then, Lily can stay with a nearby aunt and Walter can stay with them.

During the initial meeting, it quickly becomes clear that this arrangement will not succeed. Whatever the opposite of a ‘meeting of minds’ is, that’s what happens almost as soon as Lily steps over the threshold. As the reader soon learns, she is marrying Walter largely because she is at an age when there are unlikely to be many further options, and because of a misplaced idea that he is wealthy. This modest flat, and the proposed living arrangements, are a horror to her.

“Oh, Wattie darling, such a funny mistake!” The falsity of Lily’s high, sweet voice with its cutting edge was obvious even to gentle Mary. “Your kind, kind sisters thought we were coming to crowd out this dear little flat when we married. I’ve been telling Honesty that of couse, of course, we mean to have a little home of our own!”

I think Winifred Peck is masterful at dialogue. Can’t you just hear her? And what made A Clear Dawn so enjoyable to me is that Lily isn’t some sort of spoiled ogre. You feel almost as much sympathy for her as for the sisters she may end up displacing. This is, after all, not the life she thought she was getting. And that sympathy is indicative of something that runs like a seam through the novel: Peck’s lack of cynicism. Characters are complex, but when they do good, noble things, it is celebrated. There are lines like this, which you’d struggle to find in a novel written today: ‘Perhaps it was true, yes, she supposed it was certainly true, that love and forgiveness must be put in the scales against truth and honour, and weigh them down in the end.’ In this cynical era, such simple, hard-won truth feels refreshing and powerful.

The only note in A Clear Dawn that felt less successful to me was the introduction of Ian. He is the estranged son of the absent-minded couple for whom Honesty is housekeeper. We learn that he was, as a child, possibly responsible for the death of his younger sister – and his parents lament that he has turned out bad. He is, in fact, sociopathic. When he arrives on the scene, causing chaos for various characters – particularly Lily – he doesn’t quite live up to this description. He is selfish, weak, immoral – but I think Peck’s pen drew back from creating anybody as evil as he is initially described. Even so, he is a curious addition to a novel filled with ordinary, flawed, lovable people. For even Lily is lovable, even if it is a love that comes with impatience – and Walter, similarly, you want to shake. But Honesty and Mary are two of the most engaging, enjoyable characters I’ve come across for a long time. I wonder why Peck decided to throw something so dark into the world of striking pastels that she had created.

And the title? It comes from Milton, and is quoted by one of the characters late in the novel: “By this time, like one who had set out on his way through life by night and travelled through a region of smooth and idle dreams, we now arrive on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.” If I’m honest, I don’t truly understand what that means – except perhaps a new start, with the reality of things clarified for us?

There are certainly characters who embark on new starts at the end of this novel, and some who must mourn the ending of what they hoped for. There is a surprising amount of incident in the book. But it is really a novel about character, as all the best novels are, and succeeds brilliantly on that count. Honesty and Mary are particularly wonderful characters, and the family dynamic between the core characters – especially the dissatisfying meeting of new and old women – is done exceptionally well. I loved reading A Clear Dawn and it reminded me why I love domestic, middlebrow novels of this period so much.

It’s good to have that reminder. Quite often, because I am on the hunt for future British Library Women Writers titles, I read novels like this by authors I’ve never heard of. They’re picked from the dusty corners of bookshops, in the hope that I’ll stumble across something brilliant. It has led to some wonderful discoveries in the series – Winifed Boggs, Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Theodora Benson – but, of course, the majority are mediocre. And perhaps it dinted my impression of how much I loved this variety of novel. Thank you, Winifred Peck, for reminding me why it is my favourite thing. Kicking off the 1949 Club with a definite success (and I’m sorry that it is so hard to get of, friends).

Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge – #ReadingTheMeow2026

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I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door!

It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this is the first I’ve managed to get to – and even if it weren’t for Reading the Meow, I might not have been able to resist the stare of the cat on the cover.

This is Smoky – and let me assure you that Smoky survives the book without injury. I’d put money on her to survive a war. Here is how she opens the first paragraph of the book:

Smoky’s eyes shone yellow and green in the rainy darkness, but her body was only a black shadow punctuated by a dot of white at the tip of her tail. She slid around the corner of the building noiselessly and ran up the railing to the porch. Here she stopped abruptly, her ears back, her wet fur beginning to ruffle. A large object lay on the porch floor, dark and unmoving. Smoky spat at it warningly, received no answer, sat down and regarded it patiently. She circled it, sniffing. Finally satisfied as to its harmlessness and lack of interest to her, she walked over it to get to the window sill. She saw no signs within of what she was seeking, so she walked over it again, descended from the porch, and ran up the large maple tree in front of the building. Halfway up she transferred herself to the roof above the porch, crossed it and landed with a quiet plop on the upstairs window sill.

“Mraw!” wailed Smoky. “Mraw! MRAW!”
A sleepy groan from within. “Go away, cat. Scat!”
“MRAWWW!”
“All right, all right. Pipe down. I’m coming.”
“Mraw,” came mildly from Smoky.

For quite a lot of the book, only Smoky knows of the existence of this object – we can probably work out it is a body – but she does trail blood through the house. Smoky’s owner, Killian McBean, assumes that she has killed some prey and doesn’t think much more about it (which is, admittedly, the first of many things in the novel that don’t quite stand up to examination). Killian McBean writes and edits the local newspaper and is a conscientious, if misanthropic, man.

Killian McBean was a man of perhaps forty, whose lean tough body made him seem younger, and whose tired eyes and face made him seem older. There was grey at the temples of his black hair and it was thinning at the sides. His nose was rather prominent, as was a front gold tooth. Even for his five feet ten his arms were disproportionately long, and his hands exceptionally large and powerful.

But it was his eyes that were his most outstanding feature: cold grey eyes, aloof and disbelieving. Occasionally a twinkle came into them, or a momentary softness, but it soon faded into a granite hardness. His smile, too, was sceptical, almost mocking.

You can see he isn’t necessarily a man to warm to. Easily his best trait, in my eyes, is the respect and kindness he shows to Smoky. I loved Smoky, and I loved their relationship – independent of each other, certainly, but McBean will defend Smoky against anybody. Smoky tolerates him with the secret love of a cat. Rutledge obviously understands cats, and Smoky is very believable.

Ok, so what is the murder mystery? After a few dozen pages, McBean comes across the local wealthy man, tyrannical and disliked by all, dead in his hotel room with a kitchen knife in his back. His name is Bennet Farr. Naturally, McBean pretends not to have been there. But who could have offed him? The candidates are Farr’s son, his prospective daughter-in-law, the local librarian, the local schoolteacher, McBean’s printer, his printer’s daughter, and McBean himself. They all have motives, more or less, and they all seem to have processed through the hotel in a matter of minutes shortly before or after the time Farr died. Again, this novel is not strong on believability.

Things are complicated further by a young woman being found unconscious in a car nearby, and evidence that someone else was in the car with her – missing, but having left plenty of blood behind. When this woman wakes up, she has amnesia and can’t remember who she is. Within the space of 24 hours, she and McBean have fallen in love with each other and she is discussing marriage (!)

What to make of Blood on the Cat? It’s an entertaining novel, and McBean is in the noted American tradition of hardboiled men who seek justice while being unpleasant to everyone. Actually, he is mostly unpleasant to other men, while quite a lot of the women seem curiously charmed by him, and he does behave a bit better towards them. It’s often amusing, and Rutledge keeps the tension up well. There are a couple more deaths along the way to keep us amused.

The downside is that the solution to the mystery is both terrible and obvious. While I guessed who probably did it early on, I never really worked out what their motive was – and the solution relies on a plot hole so ludicrous that Agatha Christie is spinning in her grave that anybody could put it to paper and call themselves a mystery novelist.

Appropriately for Reading the Meow, the strongest part of the novel is Smoky – in my eyes, at least. And it’s a rattling good time, with memorable characters, even if it’s very weak in terms of plot. I’m not sure I’d race to read more by Rutledge because the plotting is maddening, but I still had a fun couple of days with this one. If you go in knowing that it won’t quite make sense, you’d probably have a fun time too.

Hush, Gabriel! by Veronica Parker Johns

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I wanted to add a second novel to my #SpinsterSeptember contribution, so went through my shelf of ‘would these make good British Library Women Writers suggestions?’, flicking through them until I saw any indication that they featured spinsters. Since most of the shelf are hardbacks without dustjackets by little-known authors, with minimal info about the titles online, it was mostly a case of keeping an eye out for ‘Miss’.

Well, Hush, Gabriel! (1940) by Veronica Parker Johns is narrated by a self-described ‘respectable spinster’, aged 52, and I was drawn in immediately by the opening paragraph:

I may as well state at the beginning that I am used to being surprised by Clotilda. I was surprised when she was born; somewhat more so than my mother, who had kept the secret from me until the last possible instant. I first became aware of it when Mother, coyly but with determination, refused to come to my graduation exercises at college. When, a few months later, I ceased to be an only child, I found Clotilda surprisingly beautiful, and so she remained, gracefully avoiding the awkward age as I trudged into my late thirties. I was amazed when she married Malcolm Allen, confounded when she moved with him to a quiet, unassuming Virgin Island. Therefore, I scarcely turned a hair when one of her house guests was found, surprisingly to everyone else, murdered.

This is how I learned that I was reading a murder mystery! Agatha (the spinster in question) is visiting her sister ahead of Clotilda’s impending baby. There are a handful of other guests, assembled in a clear ‘one of these is going to be a murderer’ sort of way, with little other reason for them all to come together. It took me a while to disentangle them, as they tend to dart onto the scene and disappear – we have Dolly Woods, a silly, brash woman whom Agatha meets on the journey there, and her older, wealthy husband. There’s likeable Mary and her flirtation with Carl; there’s Clotilda and her fairly absent husband; there’s a local judge, whom Agatha grows swiftly fond of. And there is Agatha’s dog Nell, who has somehow made the journey.

I really enjoyed Parker Johns’ writing from the off. She gives Agatha an ironic turn of phrase and tone of voice that I definitely appreciated – I loved the deft way this paragraph finishes:

I liked Carl, too. He was the only one of the guests I had known before, if you except my shipboard abhorrence of Dolly Woods. He had introduced Clotilda to Malcolm, but I had forgiven him for it long since. Numerous theatre invitations during my winters in town had down down my resistance. When a boy of thirty pays that much attention to a woman scenting fifty, she’s just bound to weaken. Eventually I invited him up to my place in Connecticut for summer weekends, and he not only came but seemed to enjoy himself. It was he who had thrust Nell, my cocker spaniel, upon me, and he had been a loving godfather to her. I was grateful to him for always remembering her birthday and forgetting mine.

The aforementioned murder happens pretty quickly – a doctor is found, shot through the head. The mystery part seems to be pretty short-lived: Clotilda instantly confesses to the murder. This is curiously disregarded by everyone, with the feeling that pregnant women will confess to murder at the drop of the hat because of hormones, or something. But the plot thickens when Agatha establishes that the doctor didn’t die by shooting – he was shot after he was dead.

To be honest, the novel’s very promising opening isn’t lived up to. Parker Johns seems to have put all her stylistic effort into the first chapter or so, and the prose becomes much more plebian as we go on. Agatha remains an interesting character, but without the captivating charm that initially thrusts her on the scene. And, yes, it is novel (especially for 1940) for a 50-something spinster to be given a romantic storyline, and it is satisfying that her romance is also intellectual, rather than abandoning her wisdom on the opportunity for a man. But it doesn’t really make up for the novel’s less able elements.

The main one is structure – it sort of meanders on, but further deaths and crises but it’s hard to be very invested. Alongside that is a lot of padding from characters who seem rather one-note, except for Dolly Woods who makes an extremely unlikely transformation into a very likeable character. The title doesn’t seem to make any sense. We learn that Clotilda says “Hush, Gabriel” at the scene of the murder, and Agatha knows she always said it growing up, but since we already knew from the first chapter that Clotilda was at the scene of the murder, it doesn’t add much.

And then there’s the racism… that’s the key reason that I won’t be rereading (or keeping) this novel. I suppose a 1940 novel set in the Virgin Islands is unlikely to be culturally sensitive, and I wasn’t surprised by the slightly-off depiction of the Black inhabitants – though, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised by one of the characters being a Black doctor, well-respected in his profession. The n-word is used a couple of times, but by a character we are clearly meant to consider awful. BUT – I won’t explain exactly how, in case you ever read this – the solution to the mystery partly involves some horrendous racism. Sigh.

So, I think there is a kernel of something wonderful for Spinster September here – if Agatha had lived up to her initial introduction, she would have been a total delight. And if Veronica Parker Johns has written any novel more consistently and coherently, then I’d be interested to read it – at its best, her writing is wonderful. But, overall, this one ended up being a disappointment.

The House By The Sea by Jon Godden

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My first – and I hope not only – contribution to #SpinsterSeptember! It’s an annual event organised by Nora and is rightly very popular. Because there are so many interesting spinsters in fiction, whether joyful or miserable, deliberate or left on the shelf, adventurer or domestic.

I’ve read a couple of novels by Jon Godden (sister of Rumer Godden), and I thought Told In Winter was especially good – so when my friend Barbara offered me a copy of The House By The Sea (1948), I gratefully took her up on it. The title made me think it would be a cosy story of a beautiful location – and, after all, I had already loved a memoir of the same name by May Sarton.

Well, reader, cosy is not the word for this book.

It does start with slow, coldly beautiful descriptions of the isolated house and its coastal scenery. Edwina is a middle-aged, unmarried woman who has recently moved there, keen to get away from the oppressive friendship of a woman called Madge (though Madge also seems to have a room in this new house). We never meet her, but it’s clear that she has domineered Edwina in the name of protection. It did seem possible that she and Madge had been in a romantic relationship but, if this is the case, Godden only hints at it. It is clear that Edwina is starting to feel free – but it is also clear, even at this stage, that the house is not an uncomplicated idyll.

When Edwina opened the door the hall was full of chalky blue light which came through the staircase window across the white banisters and on to the slate floor. Although she had spent the last three days in the house, unpacking, cleaning, and arranging her furniture, going back across the fields in the evening to her rooms in the village, she now felt as if she were entering the house for the first time. It was, she felt, entirely unaware of her, entirely empty, altogether silent, without life or breath – in spite of the furniture she had arranged, the curtains she had hung, the fire laid ready in the grate, her clothes in the cupboard. She hesitated on the doorstep, almost afraid to go in and break the silence.

Godden’s writing is beautiful, and Edwina is an interesting character. In some ways, she fits some stereotypes of middle-aged, unmarried women in mid-century novels: a certain naivety, a yearning for the domestic. But she is self-aware too, and realises how her life has been lived in the shadow of others. Coming to this new house is a chance, she believes, for transformation.

She thought, “For years I have been filled with Madge and before that there was someone else, who, I can’t remember, and before that another – my father, Jenny my nursemaid. I take on the colour of the person nearest me, just as I have taken on the colour and character of all these clothes in turn. Yes, a change of clothes is enough to change me completely.”

“What shall I do now that I am alone?” she thought. “What shall I become? An empty shell waits for any tide to flow and fill it. That is asking for trouble. That is dangerous.”

One of the things about opening an old hardback you know nothing about, which doesn’t have a dustjacket, means you are entering completely blind. There is no publisher’s blurb to give you clues, or even quotes from other authors to give you a sense of tone. So I did not at all expect the actual trouble and danger that arrive.

Edwina is walking through the empty rooms of her house, as usual, when suddenly she realises there is a man in the kitchen with her. He is hungry, dirty, tired and aggressive. His name is Ross Dennehay, and he quickly takes control of the house.

It is such an unexpected turn for the novel to take, and suddenly the long, slow, perhaps slightly boring, initial 70 pages make sense. We, like Edwina, have been lulled into thinking this is a quiet refuge at the edge of the world. Any unquiet has been in Edwina’s own mind, trying to establish her sense of identity when this has never hitherto been welcomed. And suddenly this scary man appears – threatening violence if he is not obeyed, and effectively keeping her prisoner.

But this shock somehow doesn’t shift the genre of The House By The Sea – it does not become a horror novel, or anything you might expect from the home invasion trope. Instead, Edwina seems to find something that she has missed: a new experience, and new roles. Instead of being the needy one in her friendship with Madge, she becomes cook, housekeeper, companion to Ross. He remains untrusting and angry most of the time, throwing her one kind word for every 20 rebukes, but she doesn’t seem to quashable. Instead, she keeps trying to assure him he can trust her – and there is even a lingering eroticism to the way she behaves.

He isn’t a rough and ready man who is hiding a heart of gold, by any means. In one tense, ruthless scene, he forces Edwina to listen to his story – why he is on the run, and why he ends up there. It involves rape and murder. As I say, this is not a cosy book. The dark edges of Told In Winter are a more present foundation in The House By The Sea.

I almost gave up on The House By The Sea because I was finding it so slow. Even after Ross arrives, Godden doesn’t alter her pace – just the intensity of the narrative. It is still steady, steady, steady – the most langurous thriller you can imagine. Throughout, she makes space for beautiful and evocative descriptions of the natural world around the world, like this:

The wind was up and moving round the house. It came from the sea and with the rain tore inland across the fields, crying and calling as it went. It found the house and beat at the walls and roof and plucked at the windows. The house stood firm. It presented a smooth unbroken surface to the night; the wind streamed like water over and round it and rushed on defeated. In the black spaces of the night the lamplit circle in the sitting-room, where the two armchairs were drawn close to the fire, was an oasis of peace and warmth and strength.

I’m really glad I continued with the book, though I still can’t entirely work out what I thought of it. It has to be read slowly, and it requires a patient reader. Ultimately, I don’t know whether it was a triumph or needed significant restructuring. But I’m sure the characters, the voice, and the feeling of it will stay with me – and that is certainly an achievement. You certainly won’t come across anybody quite like Edwina, or any similar situation, in any other novels this Spinster September.