Day 776: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

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Cover for Patrick Leigh FermorWhile reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s retrospective trilogy about the journey he made in his teens, walking from Holland to Istanbul and then Greece, I was struck by the references to what seemed to be an exciting and unusual subsequent life. So, I soon looked for a biography and found this one, by British writer Artemis Cooper, the granddaughter of Leigh Fermor’s good friends and a woman who knew him from when she was a child.

Cooper goes into a little more detail than Leigh Fermor (known by his friends as Paddy) about his childhood, making clear there was a split between his parents and a good deal of neglect from both. Still, he had a happy childhood growing up in a rural setting, and his problems only began with the regimentation of school. Having failed in an academic setting and with the army, Paddy got the idea to go on his fabled walk.

Cooper summarizes the route of this walk, only she reveals the true names of the people he met (he used pseudonyms) and tells us when the stories are invented or conflated. When I read the trilogy I wasn’t aware that any events were invented or conflated, but I should have known that the level of scholarship reflected in the writing was not that of an eighteen-year-old. (Well, I did know, but he wrote the books much later in his life.)

picture of Princess Balasha
Princess Balasha

After his journey, Paddy settled in Athens and then Rumania with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a fascinating older woman separated from her husband. However, after World War II broke out, he hurried back to England, not realizing how long it would be until he saw her again.

Paddy spent most of the war in Crete working with the resistance. He is famous for kidnapping a German general and removing him to Egypt, an act meant to improve Cretan morale. (A movie, Ill Met by Moonlight starring Dirk Bogarde as Paddy, was made about this feat, but Paddy was unhappy with how far it drifted from the facts.) For the rest of his life, despite the unfortunate political differences that evolved between England and Greece after the war, Paddy was beloved in Crete.

picture of Joan Fermor
Joan

After the war, Paddy lived a gadabout life with many famous friends, only settling down in Greece with his wife Joan in his late middle age. He and Joan had been together 27 years before they married and for many of those years, had an open relationship.

Paddy chose the profession of writer and wrote several books about his travels and adventures. He was a raconteur who demonstrated an impressive range of knowledge and was interested in everything. Apparently very charming and loved by many people, he was not always sensitive to the feelings of others.

This biography is a well written, fascinating, and occasionally funny portrait of a remarkable man. At times, the sheer number of people mentioned made me unsure of who they all were, and there was certainly an assumption that readers would know who was meant. I didn’t always, which made the book a little more difficult to follow, but that was only on occasion.

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Day 775: Mind of Winter

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Cover for Mind of WinterSeveral times I thought I knew what was going on in Mind of Winter, but I have to give the novel credit for having completely fooled me. This chiller is set on Christmas Day during a blizzard.

Holly awakens late on Christmas morning. She vaguely remembers having awakened earlier and looked in on her daughter Tatiana, but then she fell back asleep and the family overslept. Her husband Eric rushes off to pick up his parents at the airport. Holly gets up to begin Christmas dinner for a full house, and then it begins to snow.

But Holly has awakened with a thought—something followed them home from Russia. Russia was where she and Eric adopted Tatiana (called Tatty) 13 years earlier as a baby. Throughout the day, Holly is obsessed with memories of the adoption and of incidents with her daughter as her interactions with Tatty become more bizarre.

The two of them are left alone because Eric’s parents have to be driven to the hospital and friends and family decide to stay home because of the blizzard. Oddly, some of them omit calling Holly to tell her these things directly, so she spends quite a bit of time unnecessarily preparing the dinner and has to call Eric to find out what is going on. But the oddest behavior is going on inside the house. As Holly obsesses about everything Tatty does, Tatty alternates between loving girl and rebellious teenager. This doesn’t sound that odd, but you have to read the novel to understand.

This tale is a carefully constructed psychological drama. The book blurb focuses on Tatty’s behavior, but it is really Holly’s that seems inexplicable at times. At first, she seems to be the most over-protective mother ever. Then, something else seems to be going on. The novel builds quite a bit of suspense as you try to figure out why these characters are behaving so oddly, and I didn’t see the ending coming at all.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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Day 774: Miss Emily

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Cover for Miss EmilyLast year, I read the novel Amherst, which was mostly about Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin but depicted Emily hazily. The excellent biography White Heat, about Emily’s relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, portrayed her more fully but she still seemed hard to grasp. The Irish poet Nuala O’Connor presents a more fully realized character—Emily in her middle age*—through her relationship to a (fictional) Irish maid.

Ada Concannon is a good worker but a bit too much of a free spirit for her Irish employer. She arrives at work one too many times smelling of the River Liffey, in which she has bathed on the way to work. She is demoted to scullery maid, and her mother decides there is nothing to be done but send her to America to find better opportunities.

Ada has good luck at first. She finds a pleasant home with her aunt and uncle in Amherst, and they soon learn that the Dickinsons need a new maid.

Emily Dickinson has insisted that her parents get a new maid after the old one left, because she is spending all her time on housework and none on writing. Although she loves baking, she is not really interested in most of the other chores. Other than poetry, her main interest is in her warm relationship with her sister-in-law, Sue, but Sue is busy with her family. When Ada arrives, Emily becomes fascinated by the small, neat maid.

Ada soon finds she is being courted. Daniel Byrne shows he likes her right away, and she is attracted to him. His boss’s son, Patrick Crohan, is also trying to get her attention, but she dislikes him.

When Ada finds she needs help, she has only Emily to turn to. Emily, in her turn, goes to her brother Austin.

link to NetgalleyThis novel is beautifully written, sometimes poetically, with delightfully old-fashioned chapter titles. It explores the relationship between two women across a class divide. The two main characters are interesting and convincingly developed. Austin is also developed more fully than the others, but is not as likable.

I enjoyed this novel, which made me feel as if I understood O’Connor’s fictional Dickinson as a person. Although Dickinson at 16 was just beginning to develop some of the quirks she becomes well known for, O’Conner her thinking believable.

*I originally said that Emily was 16, but Caroline of Rosemary and Reading Glasses pointed out that I was mistaken. I thought I saw a reference to her age, but perhaps I got the age reference mixed up with one about Ada. My e-copy is expired, so I couldn’t go back and look it up.

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Day 773: We Need New Names

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Cover for We Need New NamesI wanted to like We Need New Names more than I did. It is about an interesting topic and is vividly written, sometimes with striking images. But like some of the commenters on Goodreads, I agree that it seems to be trying to deal with too many issues at once. Somehow, I did not get as involved as I expected.

Darling is a tween girl running with her friends from Paradise, a slum of tin shacks in Zimbabwe. They spend their time playing games and stealing guavas from a richer neighborhood called Budapest. Darling’s father has been away in South Africa for years, trying to find work, but they haven’t heard from him or received any money. While Darling’s mother is traveling to sell things, Darling stays with her grandmother, Mother of Bones.

Eventually we learn that Darling’s family used to live a middle class life in a brick house, but the government knocked down their neighborhood. So, they came to live in Paradise.

Bulawayo’s tale is focused enough until, after a vote against the corrupt government results in retaliation, things become too dangerous and she is sent to live with her aunt in Detroit. Perhaps the last third of the novel reflects Darling’s confusion as a teenager, but it packs in scenes of typical teenage years conflated with growing awareness of issues back home, the disconnected feelings of immigrants, the war in Afghanistan, some sneers at the U.S., and her own homesickness. At some times it feels as if Bulawayo thinks America should be responsible for the welfare of all nations, which it can’t possibly do.

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Day 772: The Haunting of Maddy Clare

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Cover for The Haunting of Maddy ClareBest Book of the Week!
The Haunting of Maddy Clare has been on my reading list for a while. I’ve finally read it, and my first reaction is to immediately look for another book by Simone St. James. It’s not often I encounter a good ghost story. This one is really good.

It’s just after World War I, and Sarah Piper has been living a safe but impoverished and lonely life in London taking temporary secretarial jobs, when her agency sends her to Alastair Gellis. Gellis has an unusual request. He is a wealthy young man who can afford to turn his interests into employment, and his interest is in ghosts.

Alastair’s regular assistant is away, and he has been summoned to the site of a haunting. Sarah’s job is to assist him in recording evidence of a ghost.

Maddy and Alastair travel to Falmouth House and an interview with Mrs. Clare, an elderly woman. She explains that Maddy came to her doorstep years ago as a child. She had been beaten and was barely dressed and covered with mud. She could hardly speak. The Clares took her in and tried to find her people, with no success. She was obviously of the servant class, so they employed her as a maid. She was with them for several years, always frightened and never leaving the house. Then one day she hanged herself in the barn.

Maddy haunts the barn, and Mrs. Clare wants Alastair to get her to leave. She already tried an exorcism, with terrible results. But Mrs. Clare says that Maddy hated men, which is why she asked Alastair to bring a woman.

Sarah learns she is expected to go into the barn accompanied only by a wire recorder and a camera. She finds the experience terrifying. Although she does not see Maddy, Maddy plants images in her mind and asks Sarah to find someone. What she wants is not clear, but Sarah decides to continue.

Shortly thereafter, Alastair’s partner Matthew Ryder arrives. Although he is badly scarred from the war, Sarah is immediately attracted to him. Matthew, on the other hand, thinks Sarah is too fragile for the work and should be dismissed. In the meantime, Sarah has sensed a threatening presence in the village.

This novel drags you in from its first sentences. It also tells a deliciously creepy yet heart-rending story about why Maddy is haunting the barn. If you like ghost stories and enjoy some romance in  your historical fiction as well, you’ll like this novel.

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Day 771: The Santa Klaus Murder

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Cover for The Santa Klaus MurderIt’s Christmas time at the home of the overbearing Sir Osmond Melbury, and the entire family is gathered together for the holidays at his bidding. Sir Osmond is a mean old man who uses the promise of his fortune—or the threat of disinheritance—to keep his family in line.

Sir Osmond has arranged a visit from Santa Klaus and is disappointed when the Santa suit he ordered doesn’t appear on time. But the store sends out another suit and Sir Osmond presses a guest, Oliver Whitcombe, into putting it on and delivering gifts to the children. While the children are playing with Christmas crackers, Sir Osmond is shot to death in his study and Oliver finds the body.

Colonel Halstock, the investigating constable, establishes that Sir Osmond did not commit suicide. He also finds that Sir Osmond planned to rewrite his will, leaving his property in different proportions to his family and his secretary than originally planned. He did not execute the will, so did the murderer kill him to prevent the change, or did he think the new will was already in effect?

Colonel Halstock is left with a house full of suspects who all seem to be hiding something. At the suggestion of Kenneth Stour, a former suitor of Sir Osmond’s daughter Lady Evershot, he asks several of the guests to write up their accounts of the days leading up to Christmas and the event itself. These accounts form the first chapters of the novel.

link to NetgalleyThis is a complex mystery mostly because of the number of people in the house at the time of the murder and the effort of keeping track of where they all were. It is almost completely dependent on opportunity, as all of the characters have the same basic motive. I had a hard time keeping some of the characters straight, and only a few distinct personalities emerge. Still, the tone of this novel is not as distant as that of some of the other Golden Age mysteries I’ve read lately, and I enjoyed it. It will be available October 6 from Poisoned Pen Press.

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Day 770: Captain in Calico

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Cover for Captain in CalicoThe foreword to Captain in Calico, written by George MacDonald Fraser’s daughter, says that it is closely based on the careers of the pirates Captain Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny (Bonney). I would suggest it is more loosely based. With the little I know about the subject, I spotted inaccuracies, and the novel has a completely fabricated ending.

Calico Jack Rackham arrives in the Bahamas full of hope. Although he fell into piracy against his will, he’s kept at it for the past few years, and he and his shipmates have captured a ship full of Spanish silver. But he has heard about a pardon being available, and he hopes to take his pardon so he can marry the girl he left behind, Kate Sampson.

Governor Woodes Rogers isn’t content to simply give his pardon. Jack must betray his shipmates and be captured along with the silver before he gets a pardon. What the governor knows and Jack does not is that his betrayal will be for nothing. Kate Sampson is engaged to be married, to the governor himself.

So, Jack betrays his crew, loses his fortune, and gets his pardon, but he does not get Kate. Afterwards, drunk and angry, he ends up in a duel and is wounded. A voluptuous married woman named Anne Bonney takes him home to heal him and promptly seduces him.

Soon Anne is trying to talk him back into piracy. She has heard the governor is shipping treasure, and she knows the name of the ship. She wants Jack to raise a crew, steal a boat, and stop the ship on the high seas. Jack thinks it’s a risky business, but she talks him into it. In turn, he persuades his friend Major Penner, with whom he had signed on as a privateer, to join him.

George MacDonald Fraser’s novels are marked by more realism and less romanticism than most historical novels, especially from his time. His protagonists are often unsavory types. In this case, Jack starts out by betraying his friends, but I presume we are supposed to be sympathetic with him. I wasn’t. In Fraser’s Flashman novels, in contrast, we are amused by Flashman’s lack of scruples but find his morals abhorrent. Next, Fraser’s novels are usually marked by impeccable research, but this one differs in several respects from the other reading I’ve done on Anne Bonny. For one thing, she ran away to marry Bonny, a poor sailor. In this novel, she was basically sold to Bonney, a rich plantation owner.

link to NetgalleyFinally, this novel falls into a genre that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, wherein a man’s troubles are the fault of a seductive, unprincipled woman. I really don’t like these novels. No matter which sex is leading the other astray, it’s presumed the victims can’t think for themselves. Since a large proportion of the women in American prisons are there for abetting their partners in crime (a statistic I read a while back, so I can’t back it up with a citation), this does seem to happen to women, but in literature it is much more frequently the men who are betrayed. Why do you think that is? (That’s a rhetorical question, but you can answer it if you like.)

So, not one of Fraser’s best, as he frankly admitted. Still, Fraser is a good writer who always manages to keep your attention.

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Day 769: Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

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Cover for Dandy GilverDandy Gilver has only the fondest memories of a summer spent with the Lipscotts when she was a girl, especially of the winsome, creative youngest, whom they all called Darling Fleur. Dandy only met Fleur once as an adult and she had changed. She was then a flirty, noisy, but beautiful flapper.

Dandy is surprised to be contacted by Pearl Lipscott, asking her for help with Fleur. Pearl says Fleur has been teaching at a girls’ school and she’s afraid all is not well. She hints at breakdowns in the past and tells Dandy that she and her sister Aurora are not welcome at the school. She wants Dandy and her partner Alec Osborne to go to the school to see if Fleur is all right.

Alec isn’t pleased to be visiting a girls’ school as it limits his own participation in the investigation, but almost as soon as they arrive in Portpatrick, he finds himself another client, an Italian fish and chips shop owner named Joe Aldo. His wife has left with a lover, and he wants to find her and make sure she’s okay.

When Dandy arrives at St. Columba’s, she is mistaken for the replacement for the French teacher, who has left without notice. Dandy goes along, feeling she can learn more from inside the school. But when she sees Fleur, she is shocked. The beautiful, vibrant girl has been replaced by a pale, beige woman. Moreover, when Fleur recognizes Dandy, she flees. Dandy is only able to get her to say that she’s killed four people before she runs away.

The next day the police arrive because a woman’s body was found on the beach and they want someone to see if it is Jean Beauclerc, the French teacher. Fleur volunteers to go but only if Dandy comes with her. At the dreadful sight of the drowned body, Fleur says it is not Miss Beauclerc but then utters the word “five” and runs away again.

Dandy soon realizes Fleur is missing but also that something odd is going on at the school. Even after Dandy is shown up as a fraud by the arrival of the actual French teacher, the headmistress Miss Shank takes her on as an English mistress. In fact, it turns out that Miss Shank was the housekeeper before she took over as headmistress upon the original headmistress’s death, a situation that is odd in itself. The girls seem to spend a lot of time lolling around, with short school hours and little work, while the teachers work feverishly. Five teachers have either died or left the school, and Dandy wonders if these are the five Fleur mentioned.

Joe has been to see the body and says it is not his wife. A witness saw his wife with a man on a cliff the night she disappeared. So, Dandy and Alec are left with three missing women, a mention of five murders, and some kind of wrong-doing at the school.

The Dandy Gilver series set in post-World War I Scotland is always fun. The dialogue is lively, and Dandy is always ready to leave her dull husband and farm to detect with Alec. In this case I thought it takes Dandy and Alec far too long to figure out what Fleur’s comment means, but there is still plenty I didn’t figure out.

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