Review 2703: The Chuckling Fingers

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Ann Gay’s cousin Jacqueline is a young widow with a child when she marries Bill Heaton, a well-off and respected older businessman. They have not been married long when Ann receives a note from Jean Nobbelin, Bill’s business partner, saying it might be best if Ann comes for a visit.

When Ann arrives, she finds the atmosphere strained and Jacqui unwilling to talk to her. Eventually, she learns that some destructive tricks are being played that make it look as if Jacqui is responsible. The incidents began with ruined shoes and a coat burned by acid while they were on their honeymoon with no one else from the household there. Bill has begun to worry about Jacqui’s sanity.

Most of the large Heaton household on the north bank of Lake Superior is distrustful of Jacqui. Some of the family and friends are even offensive, especially Bill’s sulky son Freddie and Phillips Heaton, who has been leeching off the family for years.

The tricks continue, still pointing toward Jacqui, but then Freddie’s body is found out by the Fingers, an outcrop of rocks that looks like a hand, underneath which an underground river creates a perpetual chuckling sound. Freddie has been shot to death with a gun, and Bill’s gun is missing. Soon, someone tries to kill Bill.

With Sheriff Aakonen being forced to suspect Jacqui, Ann begins trying to investigate the crimes herself. She is soon being helped by Jean Hobbelin.

This is a fairly mystifying situation, and Seeley does a good job of laying false trails. A fair amount of action is salted with an unstressed romance. Although I guessed the murderer, it was mostly by instinct. I didn’t figure out the motive before it was revealed. I found this to be a fairly entertaining mystery, published in 1941, and hope to find more by Seeley. I also found it struck some chords with me because I lived for a year in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, not far from Lake Superior, and some of the aspects of the Minnesota setting on the lake remind me of that life.

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Review 2702: Pontoppidan Review-along! A Fortunate Man

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Yes, here it is, time for the Pontoppidan Review-along. Join me and FictionFan and post your own review or leave comments! FictionFan and I decided to read A Fortunate Man, but others of you may have chosen some other work by Pontoppidan.

A Fortunate Man is considered the most important work by Danish Nobelist Henrik Pontoppidan. It is an ambitious work that attempts to capture all the ideas and events affecting Danish life in the mid to late 19th century, and it is also considered to be quite autobiographical. The tensions between the new industrialism and accompanying modern ideas and traditional views of religion is one of the many themes of this novel.

Per Sidenius grows up in rural Jutland in a household dominated by a strict and self-righteous father—a Lutheran vicar. Per is a high-spirited boy, and his father and entire family treat him as if his boyish antics are paving the way to hell. His mother has been bedridden as long as he can remember. Per does not feel as if he belongs there.

This upbringing results in a young man who can’t wait to leave his home and deny all of his father’s religious beliefs. He wants to be an engineer, so his father finds the money—they are poor—to send him to technical school in Copenhagen. But Per is an arrogant youth determined to make his way, and he finds school a waste of time. Instead, he reads voluminously and starts working on a massive project. The growth of Denmark has been stunted since the country lost territory to Germany in the war of 1864. Per feels that Denmark has become a backwater, especially technologically, with its prominent citizens only protecting the status quo. He conceives of a plan to reopen the many waterways that used to cross the Jutland Peninsula, beginning with a freeport in the East, with the idea of revitalizing the entire area. (His dream of lining this waterway with warehouses and factories doesn’t exactly suit our modern sensibilities, but this was the Industrial Revolution.) But he is an unknown very young man with no backing or credentials. Once he finishes his plans, he finds he’s not getting anywhere. And he needs money just to live.

Per falls in with the Salomons, a family of wealthy Jews. He thinks perhaps his problems will be solved by marriage to one of their daughters and is extremely attracted to the younger one, Nanny. However, as he gets to know them, he realizes he cares for the older sister, Jakobe, a much more intelligent and cultured girl. He is also attracted at first by the family’s relaxed and hospitable approach to life. (Later, though, he starts being embarrassed by their outgoing manners and love of show, so beware, this novel contains lots of anti-Semitism. Even Per, engaged to a Jewish girl, tends to stereotype them, as in general, there is a lot of stereotyping of people of various nationalities and groups like Danish farmers, too.)

At first, Jakobe doesn’t like Per, but he is persistent and wins her over so that eventually her parents reluctantly betroth her to Per. Although Jakobe’s brother Ivan works hard to promote Per’s plan and try to line up backers, Per himself is condescending and rude to the money men (they’re a bunch of money-grubbers, he thinks!) and seems to lose interest in the project. Instead, he goes off traveling, supposedly to study but seeming to do little of that (all the while being supported by Mr. Salomon).

Per feels he is never at home anywhere. His father dies, and this death affects him by having him begin to obsess about and eventually re-embrace Christianity, just not the bleak one his father represented. And frankly, he treats Jakobe shamelessly, just before they are supposed to be married.

Pontoppidan is a Realist writer, and I often think that the Realists spend too much time on the negatives of human behavior. Almost up to here, I was rooting for Per, but when he starts delving into religion and we have to read excerpts from religious philosophies and endless ruminations by Per, I lost most of my interest (religion is a black hole to me), and frankly I felt that his behavior from there to the end was even more self-serving than before. In a quest for self-realization, which sounds laudable, I felt as if he would decide what he wanted to do and then find self-justifications for his actions.

Spoilers ahead! There is a scene where he’s basically unloading his family (he feels it would be “best” for them), and first he tells his religious wife that he doesn’t believe in God (is he lying?) and then lies to her that on a business trip to Copenhagen he met another woman, so it will be “easier” for her to split from him. She’ll understand that. (Of course, she’s a simpleton who doesn’t understand anything, at least not according to him.) When she leaves in anger, he looks up to heaven and asks if that was the right sacrifice. Doesn’t believe in God? His sacrifice? He just wants to be free and has found a way to do it. I ended up hating this guy. And then there’s the letter he gets from her years later thanking him for doing the right thing. Sure. I totally buy that.

I really enjoyed Pontoppidan’s The White Bear and about a half to three quarters of this novel. But at some point, I began to feel as if I had been reading it forever. The rest of the novel made me at first bored and then angry. I suspect from reading Pontoppidan’s Wikipedia page that this novel is at least partly biographical. If it is, he wasn’t a very nice man.

A very slight issue. I’m not sure how New York Review Books prepares its reprints and whether machine reading is involved, but usually their editions are immaculate. In this one, though, I spotted three confusions of homonyms in the first 100 or so pages. Interestingly, two of them were the reverse confusion of “bear” and “bare.” That is, in one instance “bare” should have been used but “bear” was, and in the other, the reverse. (One might have been “bear-faced.” I can’t remember.) I couldn’t tell if this was a machine-reading error not detected by an editor, an editing error, or a translation error.

Check out other reviews of Pontoppidan’s books for this event here. I’ll add them as I become aware of them:

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Review 2701: The Little Dinner

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The Little Dinner is sort of a cookbook. But it’s more of a glimpse into the social customs of the late 19th century American middle class (I’m assuming). In that respect, it’s very interesting.

Its premise, by Christine Terhune Herrick, who was a sort of domestic expert (I’m thinking the Martha Stewart of her time), is that many people cannot afford to give huge, splendid dinners anymore. So, her intent is to instruct how to give a “little dinner.” By little dinner, though, she means one of four or five courses, with just one entree which may be preceded by fish and followed by game. Simple, huh?

Other interesting suggestions are that only one vegetable is required for such a dinner or that brocade table coverings are required. Oh, and you only need one maid. Well, that lets me out.

The structure of the book is to have several introductory chapters on such topics as how many guests to invite or how to decorate and set up the table. That is followed by a chapter on each type of food.

I’m not really a domestic person, but the book gave me an idea of the relative lavishness of middle-class life compared to now.

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Book Serendipity

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Following the lead of Bookish Beck, I have been keeping track of instances of book serendipity, where the same subject comes up in more than one place around the same time. My lists aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Beck’s, maybe because I don’t have as much attention to detail. But here are a few I’ve noted in the past few months:

References to Pompey the Great in Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, read on the same day.

A transport with “Gypsy” in its name in Ancestry by Simon Mawer and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, read one after another.

Factions among the faculty of a girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and the short story “The Greek Play” by H. C. Bailey in the British Library “Lessons in Crime,” read one after another.

A son of an important man disappears from school in adjacent stories in the British Library collection Lessons in Crime, “The Adventure of the Priory School” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Missing Undergraduate” by Henry Wade.

In the category of related serendipity, two different blog reviews of books by Robert van Gulik randomly read on the same day.

Review 2700: World of Wonders

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World of Wonders is the third book of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy and the one I least got along with. All three books deal with the repercussions of a malicious act—a snowball with a rock in it that Boy Staunton threw at Dunstan Ramsay when they were boys.

To make any sense of the plot of this one, I have to recap the action of the first book, so if you are planning to read it, you might do better to just read my review of it, Fifth Business. Boy’s snowball hits, not its intended target because Ramsay ducks, but the pregnant wife of the vicar, Mrs. Dempster. Her son Paul is born prematurely, and Mrs. Dempster is not quite right thereafter. Paul disappears as a boy and reappears after years and years as Magnus Eisengrim, the world-famous magician. Fifth Business ends with Boy Staunton’s possible suicide/possible murder with the selfsame stone in his mouth just after Boy meets Magnus. Did Magnus somehow murder Boy?

In World of Wonders, Dunstan Ramsay, now an old man, is living with Magnus and his friend Liesl. Magnus is starring in a film about another magician, French illusionist Robert-Houdin, and three of the film makers are visiting. Magnus has published a largely imaginary biography through Dunstan and now he agrees to tell the true story of his life from the time he disappeared as a boy. It’s quite harrowing at first, because he was kidnapped by a small-time magician in the World of Wonders carnival, held captive, and repeatedly sodomized. That’s just the beginning of an unusual and varied life.

I thought the story of Magnus’s life was interesting, but after each segment, his friends sit around and philosophize about it, maybe the sort of discussion that is exciting and interesting when you’re engaged in it but frankly not very interesting to read, at least not to me. I thought we were leading up to some surprising exploration of Boy Stanton’s death, but that wasn’t exactly how it ended, or at least what was revealed was not surprising.

Of the three books, I really enjoyed Fifth Business. The Manticore, from the point of view of Boy’s son David, was less interesting because of its emphasis on Jungian therapy. And I found this book the least interesting. In fact, I kept putting it down and reading other things, which is not usual for me.

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#ReadingIrelandMonth26! Irish Writers Read in 2025

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Cathy of 746 Books is hosting the 12th year of Reading Ireland Month, and although I usually participate just a bit by reviewing a book or two by an Irish author, I thought I’d take her suggestion this time and make a post about books by Irish authors I’ve read or reviewed during the last year. So here goes, I think in order of the reading! These are all books read in 2025, so there’s some overlap with last year’s event.

Review 2699: The Art School Murders

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In Morosini’s floundering art school, the body of a model, Althea Greville, is found behind the dressing screen. She was apparently murdered just after the life class in which she modeled. Inspector Hugh Collier, brought into the case early on, finds that she had worked for the school the year before, causing some havoc in the hearts of men because of her attractiveness, even though not young. However, now she seemed a little desperate.

Leaving school the day of the murder are two first-year students, Betty and Cherry. Betty runs back to get her scarf and later teases Cherry about something she’s seen but won’t tell her. The next day, Betty skips school to go to the cinema and is found murdered in the balcony.

Finally, after Cherry tells Mr. Kent that Betty may have confided in Emma, her aunt’s servant, Emma is found badly injured. Collier ends up with five suspects, including Mr. Kent, Kent’s sulky nephew Arnold, and Morosini himself.

This book is entertaining and moves along quickly. It isn’t exactly fair to the readers, because there is almost no hint of the motive before the end. However, I still found it fun to read.

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WWW Wednesday!

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

I write up and schedule my reviews about a month ahead, so I am already in April, but I realized I had a book on my nightstand that I got to read for Reading Ireland Month. So, I have started it now, and I’m going to squeeze it into March for the event. It’s The Land of Spices by Kate O’Brien.

What I just finished reading

I just finished another British Library Crime Classics book, Tea on Sunday by Lettice Cooper. The tricky thing about this mystery is that there are a bunch of suspects, all of whom came to the victim’s house for tea, but none of them have an alibi! How can the police sort that out?

What I will read next

A while back I got extravagant and ordered three Folio Society reprints of shabby paperbacks I have owned for years and read over and over. It’s Georgette Heyer! I haven’t picked which one to read, and they will all be re-reviews for me, but what the heck! It’s reading purely for fun. The three books are Arabella, Frederica, and Venetia.

Review 2698: Edenglassie

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I’ve been on the lookout lately for books written by indigenous authors, so when I saw this book reviewed, I was intrigued. It’s set in Brisbane, Australia, in two time periods: 1840-55 and 2024.

In 2024, Eddie Blanket, an elderly Aboriginal woman, falls and injures herself in front of the Maritime Museum. In the hospital, she is treated by Doctor Johnny Newman. When he meets Eddie’s granddaughter, Winona, a feisty activist, he falls instantly in love. But to Winona, he looks too white. Though he claims to have Aboriginal ancestors, to marry her he must establish that they’re not related and also break down her prejudices.

In 1840-55, a young Aboriginal man, Mulanyin, is growing up south of Brisbane and watching its changes, with the incoming of more and more whites, in dismay. He decides he wants to own a whale boat, so he goes to work for Tom Petrie, an unusual young man from a prominent white family who seems to have spent time learning about the Aboriginal culture and learning the language. At the home of Tom’s parents, Mulanyin meets Nita, a servant of Mrs. Petrie who was rescued from traffickers as a little girl by Tom’s father. He falls in love with her.

But the couple live in difficult times, in which the Aboriginal people can be killed with impunity and massacres of whose families take place.

Although I found the subject matter of this novel interesting, especially because I know little of Australian history, I didn’t really get involved with any of these characters. It also took a long time to link the two stories, although the linkage could be partially guessed at. There was frequent use of slang Australian or maybe Aboriginal expressions and words—no glossary—and sometimes the implications of the dialogue weren’t clear to me even if I understood what was said.

That being said, I was very interested in the beliefs and mindset of the people, and I found the ending touching.

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