Tag: 20th century

Day 995: The Promise

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Cover for The PromiseSeveral years ago, I read Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm, a nonfiction account of the terrible Galveston hurricane and flood of 1900. So, when one of the books on my Walter Scott Prize list turned out to be set in that time and place, I really wanted to read it. It did not disappoint.

Catherine Wainwright has behaved badly, and the result is a scandal that has resulted in her ostracism from her home town of Dayton, Ohio, and cost her livelihood as a performing pianist. In desperation, she writes to an old friend, Oscar Williams, who is a dairy farmer on Galveston Island. Although she has always considered herself his social superior, years ago he proposed to her. She did not accept him, but he is now a widower with a young son. He proposes again and she accepts. She has barely enough money to get to Galveston.

Nan Ogden is a much less sophisticated woman. She was the best friend of Bernadette, Oscar’s wife, and promised her she would take care of Andre, Oscar and Bernadette’s son. Truth be told, she has her own feelings for Oscar. Until Catherine appears, she has hopes that some day she might be Oscar’s wife. Instead, she finds herself a housekeeper for a woman who can barely boil an egg.

We don’t like Catherine at first, but she quickly grows on us as she develops more empathy for other people. As Catherine, Oscar, Andre, and Nan try to sort out their various feelings and relationships, the tension in the novel builds toward the storm. Then the novel becomes truly riveting.

The Promise is especially strong in its sense of place. I’ve been to Galveston when it was so hot I wondered how anyone could live there before air conditioning, let alone wearing corsets and tight clothes. Weisgarber really makes you feel the heat and stickiness.

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Day 987: Murder of a Lady

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Cover for Murder of a LadyMurder of a Lady is a classic locked door mystery set in a castle in Scotland next to a loch. Amateur sleuth Dr. Eustace Hailey is visiting in the area when he hears of the death of Miss Mary Gregor, whom some regard as a saint, the respected sister of Duchlan, the castle owner. She was found dead in her bedroom of a stab would, but the bedroom door was locked. No one could have entered the window, because men were fishing in the loch, and the window was in plain sight of their boats. Miss Gregor is found to have an old wound in her chest that no one admits to knowing about.

When Dr. Hailey goes to investigate, he is not welcomed by Inspector Dundas, who wants to solve the case himself. An oddity of it was that a herring scale was found on the victim, and this and the report of a splash are enough to start rumors of a selkie among the Highland servants. Dundas is able to make no headway in the case at all, though, and finally asks for Dr. Hailey’s help. But shortly after the doctor arrives, Dundas is himself murdered, in similar circumstances to the original murder, within seconds of Hailey and Dr. McDonald leaving his room.

The new policeman, Inspector Barley, is quick to decide that Miss Gregor was murdered by Oonagh, Duchlan’s son’s wife, and Dr. McGregor, whom he thinks are lovers. He and Dr. Hailey have realized that Oonagh was trapped in a horrible situation at the castle, in a rivalry with Miss Gregor, who was not as saintly as people believe. But Dr. Hailey believes that Oonagh loves her husband Eoghan and is not having an affair. And soon there is another murder.

This novel is certainly a characteristic Golden Ager, focusing most of its attention on the locked room puzzle, although some attention also goes to understanding the psychology of the people living in the house. Still, Dr. Hailey is an enigma, and the story is wrapped up so abruptly after the solution of the murder that it is startling. Still, I mildly enjoyed this novel, especially for its Highland background.

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Day 983: The 1947 Club! The Iron Clew

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Cover for The Iron ClewI read The Iron Clew for The 1947 Club and what a blast it was! I was expecting a typical Golden Age mystery—heavy on the puzzle, light on motivation and character. What I got was something completely different!

Leonidas Witherall is blocked. He is the author of a series of adventure novels starring the fiery Lieutenant Haseltine. But now that the war is over, Witherall thinks that his usual villains are passé. The Nazis are beat, and the Russians are our allies, for heaven’s sake!

Mrs. Mullet, his housekeeper, advises him to move from espionage to mysteries. In no time, Witherall has invented a plot involving brown paper packages and a murder of a prominent man.

Witherall has been ignoring his own brown paper package. It is a report from the Dalton Safe Deposit and Trust Company that he is supposed to be reviewing before his dinner meeting with Balderston, the bank manager. But the muse is calling, so Witherall has just enough time to dress for dinner before going down to the hall to pick up the package. But it is gone!

Witherall hears a door closing and realizes that the thief has just left. When he sees no one walking away, he surmises that the thief is hiding in the yews at the front of the house. He tricks the thief into coming out and sees a lady in a mink emerge with a brown paper package in her handbag.

1947 clubAfter he steals the package, he becomes the quarry in a rowdy chase through the neighborhood, to be rescued by Harriman, an old boy from his school-teaching days. This incident sends him on a rollicking adventure involving several brown parcels, a green handbag, a dinosaur footprint, a murder, a kidnapping, and a massive Massachusetts snowstorm. Leonidas is helped along by a plethora of young people and an old flame.

The plot of this novel is ridiculous. The writing is energetic and witty, the characters engaging. What more could you ask? This novel was a lot of fun!

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Day 982: 84, Charing Cross Road

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Cover for 84, Charing Cross RoadIt’s taken me some time to read 84, Charing Cross Road, but I’m glad I did. This very short book, a collection of letters, has been a classic for some time.

The books spans 20 years, beginning in 1949. Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York, writes a letter to Marks & Co., antiquarian booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road. She has become weary of the shoddy books she is able to afford in New York and asks the booksellers to send her inexpensive secondhand copies of several works. She is duly answered by Frank Doel.

This correspondence moves from formal to friendly. Hanff knows that England is still under postwar austerity measures, so she sends the store employees packages of eggs and meat and other goodies. Soon the correspondence is joined by letters from Frank’s wife and other store employees.

This is a delightful book about friendship between people who have never met. Many of the letters are funny, and the book is particularly appropriate for book lovers.

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Day 973: The Lie

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Cover for The LieBest Book of the Week!
Helen Dunmore has this thing she does. I’ll be reading along, moderately interested, and then at the end of the novel she’ll do something that makes me realize the novel is much better than I first supposed. She does this again with The Lie.

Daniel Branwell has returned to his home town in Cornwall from World War I. A dying old lady took him in when he arrived home, and he cared for her until her death. He doesn’t want to mix much with other people, though. He is traumatized from the war and particularly by the death of his friend Frederick, who is haunting him.

As Daniel struggles to make a living, his memories alternate between those of the war and of his childhood friendship with Frederick. Although Daniel was bright and did well in class with an eidetic memory for poetry, he was forced to drop out of school at the age of 11. Frederick, as the son of a wealthy man, was being prepared for better things. Still, even as young men, when Frederick was home they were nearly inseparable.

Daniel meets Frederick’s sister Felicia, now a widow with a young daughter. Their mutual grief brings them together, and they begin spending time with each other, he helping her around the house or both of them visiting the sites of his adventures with Frederick.

But Daniel has told a lie about something. Because of it, he is aware he’s being misunderstood by the village.

This is a powerful novel that I may not have looked for were it not for my Walter Scott Prize project. Although I have not enjoyed all of the short listed books, this one sneaked up on me.

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Day 968: Lost Among the Living

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Cover for Lost Among the LivingIt is three years after World War I. Jo Manders is working as a paid companion to her husband’s aunt, Dottie Forsyth, after her husband Alex disappeared during the war. Jo has been in a limbo of grief and practical concerns. Although he is assumed dead, Alex has not been declared dead, so Jo cannot receive a pension. Penniless, she was forced to take the job with Dottie, who is often unpleasant or rude.

Jo has been traveling with Dottie through Europe buying art from newly impoverished nobility. But now they are on their way to Dottie’s home, Wych Elm House, which has been closed for some time. Dottie’s son Martin is returning home from a hospital where he’s been treated since the war, and Dottie has summoned home her husband with the plan of finding Martin a wife.

On the first day at the house, Jo walks into a room and sees a young girl in gray and pearls. It takes her some time to realize she’s seen a ghost—Dottie’s mentally ill daughter Franny who died during the war by falling off the roof. Franny had hallucinations and claimed that a demon dog named Princer protected her. In the village, Jo hears that children claimed to have met Franny and Princer in the woods. On the same day that Franny died, the body of a man was found in the woods, torn to pieces.

As Franny keeps appearing to Jo, sometimes leaving things for her to find, Jo begins to believe that Franny was murdered. She also wonders about one of Dottie’s clients, a  mysterious Colonel Mabry, who seems to know something about Alex.

St. James just keeps getting better and better at her chosen combination of suspense, the supernatural, and romance. In this case, a little of the mystery was lessened because there was only one plausible romantic partner for Jo, but still, this is a very suspenseful, eerie novel.

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Day 967: The Danish Girl

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Cover for The Danish GirlThe Danish Girl is another example of how untrustworthy book blurbs are for conveying the sense and feel of a novel. The blurb talks about “the glitz and glamour of 1920’s Copenhagen, Paris, and Dresden.” Yes, there is a bit of going about to bistros in Paris, but this novel is not about glitz and glamour. It is mostly about the tender relationship between two people, Greta and her husband Einar, who becomes the first man to undergo a sex change operation. Ebershoff lightly based this fictional book on the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, both artists, but he says the details of their lives are wholly invented.

It is Greta who realizes something first. She is a portrait painter with a deadline. When an opera singer can’t make her sitting, Greta asks Einar to put on a stocking so she can use his leg as a model. Later, she has him put on a dress. Einar is a delicate man who is not self-aware. From the time he begins dressing up as Lily, he becomes more and more abstracted from his painting and his former life. Greta sees him drifting vaguely away from Einar, becoming Lily.

I wondered if Ebershoff’s description of Lily’s state of mind really reflected how a transexual person would feel, as Lily seems barely able to remember anything about Einar and vice versa. It almost seemed more like a description of a person with multiple personalities. But I don’t know much about this subject.

This is not a novel of action or plot. It is more about the states of mind of the people involved. It is sympathetic and touching. I didn’t think it would be my subject matter, but I found it affecting.

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Day 966: Last Post

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Cover for Last PostBest Book of the Week!
This last volume of Ford Madox Ford’s modernist work Parade’s End is unique in that its main character, Christopher Tietjens, barely appears, even though the book continues to be about him. It may be my imagination, but it seems as if he has been less of a presence with each book.

This volume is narrated from the point of view of four characters during a single day. Mark Tietjens, Christopher’s older brother, begins and ends it. Mark has been overcome by a stroke and is not speaking. He and his wife, Marie-Léonie, are living in a country cottage with Christopher and Valentine Wannop. They have built Mark a hut with no walls from which he watches and listens to the events of the countryside.

It is some time after the events of volume 3, but Mark remembers Armistice Day and the days following that brought them to the cottage. The peace of the cottage is about to be disturbed, though, because the vengeance of Christopher’s wife, Sylvia Tietjens, has provoked a number of people to descend upon it.

Sylvia has incited the eccentric tenant of Groby, the Tietjen’s ancestral home, to fell the great tree of Groby, and it has taken part of the house with it. Mrs. de Bray Pape has been egged on by Sylvia to belatedly ask permission from Mark. Accompanied by Christopher’s son, Mark, who keeps trying to draw her away, Mrs. de Bray Pape subjects the older Mark to an inaccurate lecture on history. Since Sylvia has hinted to everyone that Mark is ill from syphilis, they can’t understand why he won’t speak to them.

Subsequent sections of the volume are from the points of view of Marie-Léonie, Valentine, and Sylvia. As the cottage environment descends into chaos with the arrival of more visitors urged on by Sylvia, Sylvia makes a momentous decision.

Although I have not read much about Ford’s life, some of the notes in my annotated edition by Carcanet lead me to believe the novels are at least partially autobiographical, both in the portrayal of the war and in the personal relationships. I have really enjoyed this novel about a man who is completely misunderstood because his name has been blackened by his ex-wife and the wife of a woman whose husband owed him money. Some of the novel deals with the idiocy behind World War I, but it is mainly about the end of an era. Christopher thinks of himself as a man who belongs in the 18th century, and he is a symbol for the destruction of a way of life, with of a kind of outlook that others think must be dragged into modern times. I will be looking for more by Ford.

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Day 961: Rush Oh!

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Cover for Rush Oh!Best Book of the Week!
Perhaps I am harping on this subject, but yet again a distinctive authorial voice has made for an outstanding novel. In this case, the voice is that of Mary Davidson, the 18-year-old daughter of a whaler in 1908, Eden, Australia. Mary is relating the events of the year from a distance of 30 years later.

At that time, some of the whaling in Australia was done from shore, the whalers rowing out to chase the whales. In this activity, the whalers of Eden were assisted by, amazingly, a group of killer whales, who behaved more or less like really rough sheepdogs, herding and battering the other whales. In the novel, the leader of the killer whales, Tom, summons the whalers when whales are in the bay by smacking his tail loudly, and the whalers at times attempt to call the killer whales by smacking their oars.

The story begins with the arrival of a young man hoping for a seat in one of the boats. He is John Beck, reputed to be an ex-Methodist minister. Beck very soon seems to be courting Mary, although he is inconsistent in his attentions. Also, there are some indications that he has not been strictly truthful about his past.

Mary’s father George is short on men and had a very bad whaling season the year before, when they caught not a single whale. Although George “Fearless” Davidson (an actual historical person) is highly esteemed in the region, the financial situation is dire, and he must accept this totally inexperienced man onto his second boat.

The novel is peppered with rampaging whaling scenes and descriptions of the whaling life. It is written in a sprightly, witty, and engaging tone that reflects the personality of naive young Mary. Although it documents a disappearing way of life, it is wonderfully entertaining, and I loved every minute of it.

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Day 960: Silence for the Dead

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Cover for Silence for the DeadKitty Weekes has been living a catch-as-catch-can life ever since she fled from her abusive father four years before. To support herself and hide from her father, she has taken on several different identities the past years. Now she has forged credentials as a nurse to get herself a job at Portis House, an asylum on the coast of England.

When Kitty arrives at the isolated mansion, separated from the village by a bridge, Matron sees through her right away. But the hospital is understaffed, so Matron keeps Kitty on probation. The mansion was once beautiful but now it is forbidding, with sealed off areas that are crumbling. The patients are all ex-servicemen suffering from shell shock, depression, and other conditions related to the war. The routines of the place seem unnecessarily severe and the budget too limited. Then there is the mysterious Patient 16, whom only a few people are allowed to see.

Kitty soon finds herself working harder and longer hours than she was contracted for. But she also feels something is wrong. There are certain places around the house that don’t feel right. One night she sees a bare-chested man walking around when all the patients are accounted for. Another time when she is outside the house, she sees a unknown woman and when she goes to investigate, is knocked down.

Then she meets Patient 16 and is shocked to find he is Jack Yates, a hero of the war. Some information she gains from a previous nurse makes her wonder what happened to the family that owned the house, who simply vanished. When she and Jack begin exchanging information, they realize something strange is going on.

Silence for the Dead is another supernatural suspense novel from Simone St. James. It is quite good at developing an atmosphere of foreboding. Kitty is a plucky heroine, and this is another enjoyable light read from St. James.

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