Tag: England

Review 2581: Murder at Gulls Nest

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I messed up a bit with this book. What happened was that as soon as I heard about it, I pre-ordered it because I love Jess Kidd’s books. Then a few months later, although I am no longer active on NetGalley, I received an email from a publicist asking if I would like a review copy. I answered, as I have for other books, that I would love to if I could get a paperback rather than an ebook.

As usual when I make this request, I got no reply, so I dismissed it from my mind. Then, when I received a copy quite a bit later, I assumed it was my pre-order, not even noticing that it was a review copy. I put it at the top of my pile, which I have been ignoring while I try to finish A Century of Books (now complete!). I apologize to that publicist, because I have missed the dates. It wasn’t until my pre-order arrived that I realized my mistake, but then I read it immediately. So, here’s my review—better late than never.

It’s the 1950s. Nora Breen, looking disheveled, arrives in a seaside town in winter. She is a middle-aged ex-nun who has renounced her vows, and she has arrived because her friend Frieda, sent from the monastery for her health, has stopped writing. That is unlike Frieda, and Nora is worried about her.

Nora has taken a room at Gulls Nest, a sad rooming house, where she finds she is to occupy Frieda’s room. She learns that Frieda just disappeared one evening, no one apparently being surprised by it.

The occupants of the house are a mixed crew. Helena Wills, a widow, is the owner, but she spends almost all her time in bed and lets Irene Rawlings, the grim housekeeper who has lots of rules, run it. Helena also has a young daughter Dinah, who is all but feral. As she arrives, Nora watches a young couple from afar, Teddy and Stella Atkins, and notices them appearing to quarrel. She also sees another lodger, Karel Ježek, stomp on Teddy’s hat. Other lodgers are Bill Carter, an ex-Navy cook who works as a bartender, and Professor Poppy, an old Punch and Judy puppeteer who is rumored to be an aristocrat.

Although Nora goes immediately to the police, Inspector Rideout thinks there’s nothing unusual about someone who was living at Gulls Nest disappearing without warning. Nora has decided not to reveal to anyone else her friendship with Frieda, hoping she will learn more if no one is aware of it. However, she is feeling frustrated when Teddy is found dead in Poppy’s workshop behind the house, poisoned with cyanide in his coffee. Teddy often had coffee with Poppy before work. Inspector Rideout is thinking suicide, but Stella says not. She has just told him she is pregnant. So, did Teddy commit suicide or was he murdered? If he was murdered, was he the intended victim or was Poppy? Finally, is Teddy’s death related to Frieda’s disappearance?

Like Kidd’s other books, this one has some eccentric characters, although it is perhaps not as unexpected as her others. Still, it has some likable characters and some twists, as Nora begins to blossom out into this new world. A secret about the relationship between two characters was one I guessed fairly quickly, but I was unable to figure out a motive for what turns out to be not just one murder.

Fun stuff!

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2578: Catherine the Ghost

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I took a break from reading A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything to read this novella. After putting it on my list, I had forgotten that it was based on Wuthering Heights. If you’ve read that book, you should be okay, but otherwise Catherine the Ghost may be hard to follow.

Like Wuthering Heights, Catherine the Ghost begins with the arrival to the house of Mr. Lockwood, who is stranded and spends the night in Catherine’s bedroom. The ghost Catherine demands to be let in.

The novella begins there but goes forward with glimpses into the past instead of the other way around. It focuses on Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff and ends at about the same place as the original novel. The ghost is one narrator.

The other narrator is the other Catherine, Catherine the ghost’s daughter, who was tricked into marrying Linton, her cousin, the son of Heathcliff’s enemy, Hindley.

Koja’s style of writing is poetical and unusual, as she frequently uses sentence fragments. However, it is easy to follow. This is a haunting novella. I liked it a lot.

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Review 2577: The Unfinished Clue

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Georgette Heyer can write such likable characters, and I remember that for the first Heyer mystery I read, it was obvious who the murderer was because the person was the only character in the book, besides the victim, that I didn’t like. It didn’t matter, because it was fun to read anyway.

She isn’t so obvious about it in The Unfinished Clue, because there are several characters to dislike or feel neutral about. In fact, the title is more of a giveaway than the characters’ behavior, because it tells you what to focus on. If you can guess what it means, though, you get a gold star.

Dinah Fawcett arrives at her sister’s house to be met with an enraged brother-in-law. General Arthur Billington-Smith is often enraged, and he takes it out on his fragile second wife, Fay. This time, his son, Geoffrey, has become engaged and is bringing home his fiancée Lola de Silva, a cabaret dancer.

The house party consists of these people plus Arthur’s nephew, Captain Francis Billington-Smith, who wants a loan; Camilla Halliday, an attractive young woman who is letting Arthur take liberties in the hope of a generous gift; her jealous husband Basil; and Stephen Guest, a friend who is in love with Fay. Geoffrey turns out to be kind of a wimp and an idiot, and Lola completely self-absorbed.

Arthur rages throughout the weekend, which culminates in a stormy Monday morning. He tells Geoffrey he will cut him off if he marries Lola. Geoffrey goes to Lola vowing eternal love, and she tells him of course she can’t marry him if he doesn’t have any money. He storms off. Fay is lying down from a headache. There is a short visit by Mrs. Chudleigh, the vicar’s wife. Then Mrs. Twinings arrives, an old friend, to try to get Arthur to treat Geoffrey better, and she finds Arthur dead in his office, stabbed in the neck with a dagger from his desk. The crime boils down to where everyone was between 12:30 and 1. Only Dinah, who was on the terrace the whole time, has an alibi.

In most of Heyer’s mysteries, her detective team is Hannasyde and Hemingway, but in this novel the detective is Inspector Hardy. She hasn’t thought up Hannasyde and Heminway yet, I don’t think, but there’s another good reason why this book is different.

I was completely fooled by this mystery. I had some idea of the motive but was mistaken about the identity of the killer.

Georgette Heyer is just as gifted as Christie in creating vivid characters, and her mysteries tend to be a bit funny. In this case, Lola is a hoot. I had lots of fun reading this to take a break from A Century of Books.

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Review 2570: #1952 Club! Excellent Women

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Entry #2 for the 1952 Club!

By “excellent women,” Pym seems to mean a type of English spinsters who occupy themselves with charity events and helping others, dress drably, and are taken for granted by men. That’s what Mildred Lathbury seems to think she is. She’s a clergyman’s daughter of limited means, mild-mannered and religious but observant of others’ characters while not wishing them any harm. In Excellent Women, she gets a surprising amount of attention from men, but then she’s always picking up after them.

Mildred lives upstairs of a vacant flat, and she’s curious about what her new neighbors will be like. She knows they’re named the Napiers by the sign at the doorbell. She meets Helena Napier on page 2, a young, stylish woman, and sees her around with a man, whom she assumes is her husband, Rockingham (known as Rocky). But he is not. He is Everard Bone, an anthropologist, and he and Helena, also an anthropologist, are writing a paper together. Rocky is off serving in Italy.

Mildred is good friends with Julian Malory, the vicar of her rather high church, and his sister Winifred. It is the expectation of several characters in the book that Julian will marry Mildred, but she doesn’t seem to expect it. Or does she? It’s hard to tell. Certainly, he is very friendly with her, but she thinks he is not the marrying kind.

Mildred meets Everard before she meets Rocky. Although he seems not to notice her at first, after a while he begins seeking her out. He is abrupt and serious, and she doesn’t think she likes him. Or does she? It’s hard to tell.

Once he shows up, Rocky is utterly charming and handsome. He is very friendly to Mildred and keeps popping up for tea. Mildred senses friction in the Napier home—well, she can hear them arguing. Rocky does all the cooking and cleaning in their home, because Helena is completely undomesticated. (She sounds like my kind of gal, even though she isn’t depicted particularly positively.) Mildred distrusts Rocky’s charm. She understands from Everard that Helena thinks she’s in love with him (Everard).

It being post-war London, it is still hard to find a place to live, so the Malorys decide to lease their upper floor. Soon, it is taken by Mrs. Gray, a beautiful clergyman’s widow. Mildred finds both Julian and Winifred transfixed by her, so she steers clear. It’s pretty evident what Mrs. Gray thinks Julian’s fate should be.

Mildred isn’t at all liberated. She is constantly cleaning up after men or doing ridiculously involved favors for Rocky and Helena, and all take her for granted. Yet, this is a lively, amusing social comedy. It is also a tale of the rapidly disappearing lives of upper- and middle-class English people.

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Review 2569: #1952Club! Mrs. McGinty’s Dead

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

It’s time for the 1952 Club, for which participants review books written in 1952 on the same week. What would a year club set between the 1930s and the 1960s be without an Agatha Christie? So, this book became one of my choices for the 1952 Club, especially good because I hadn’t read it before.

However, first, as usual, I have a list of the books I’ve reviewed previously that were written in 1952:

And now for my review.

Hercule Poirot is retired, and the days are passing slowly. So, he is happy to look into a case for an old acquaintance, Inspector Spence. An old cleaning lady was apparently murdered for her savings by her lodger. All the evidence points that way, and the lodger was found guilty. But Inspector Spence isn’t satisfied that he did it, and there is little time to investigate before he is hung.

So, Poirot journeys to a small village—only four houses and a post office. He meets a few people and seems to be getting nowhere when a chance remark gives him an idea. Mrs. McGinty had purchased ink at the post office, which meant she intended to write a letter, and she was so unaccustomed to writing letters that she had no ink. Who was she writing to?

Going back to look through some of her things, he finds a newspaper with an article ripped out. When he finds the paper at the archive, he sees the article is a “Where are they now?” piece about females connected with four infamous crimes, with old photos from 20 years before. He reckons that Mrs. McGinty, in her work as a cleaner, saw one of those photos at the home of a regular client. Someone in the village has a relationship with one of those women, but what kind of relationship? The field broadens as he considers. Is it the woman herself? A relative or spouse? With the range in age of the original females, the woman could now be anywhere from her 30s to her 50s.

And that was the problem. There are too many people in this book, many of them suspects, and Christie didn’t do her usual job of making them instantly specific. I couldn’t keep track of them by their names. The only distinctive villager at first is Maureen Summerhayes, Poirot’s incompetent hostess, who can’t cook and is completely disorganized, but I soon thought of her as Maureen, so that by the time there was a reference to Mr. Summerhayes, I had forgotten he was Maureen’s husband.

Fairly early on, Poirot meets his old friend the author, Ariadne Oliver. She is staying with the playwright Robin Upward while they try to adapt one of her books for the theater. Mrs. Upward is another of Mrs. McGinty’s clients, and thus a suspect.

I never thought of the murderer as a suspect, but I also felt I wasn’t given much of a reason to. I just didn’t think this was one of Christie’s best.

I was also struck by how little any of Mrs. McGinty’s clients cared that she was dead. There’s some real classism going on here (including the idea that she had to buy ink because she never wrote any letters; even if it happened to be true; anyone might have to buy ink).

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Review 2563: One by One They Disappeared

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Inspector Collier meets a wealthy American in the lobby of a hotel one evening and begins chatting with him. He is Mr. Pakenham, and he explains that he was a survivor during the war of the sinking of the Coptic. He and eight other men were afloat on a lifeboat for days, and he being ill, the others kept him alive. Ever since then, the men have met once a year to celebrate their survival, and last year, Mr. Pakenham announced that he was leaving his estate to whomever of the group survived him. This year, however, only a couple of men showed up.

In the meantime, Corinna Lacy returns from Europe where she has been working as a companion. She is not well off, but she has a few assets, so she writes her second cousin, who is also her trustee, to ask his advice about selling her property to pay for a secretarial course. She has never met Wilfred Stark, but he invites her to his place to talk about it and turns out to be a friendly, fatherly sort of person. While she is there, she meets his neighbor, Gilbert Freyne, who has a shadow on his past.

Investigating an apparent accident in which a blind man walked into an empty elevator shaft, Inspector Collier recognizes Henry Raymond, a man who was meeting Mr. Pakenham the night of the dinner as one of the prospective heirs. Inspector Collier begins looking into the other heirs. He can’t find some of them, but several of them have died recently, and one of the heirs is Gilbert Freyne, with whom Corinna is falling in love.

Yes, it’s a plot! We find out part of it as early as page 60, but the rest is not clear until the end. I had my suspicions pretty early, though, and they were right. But that didn’t make the book any less fun to read.

True to its 1929 origins, there isn’t a lot of characterization going on here, and Corinna is eventually so much the heroine in peril that she might as well be tied to a railroad track. But there is a bit more of an emphasis on character development than in most mysteries of this time, and at least it’s not a puzzle mystery. It’s more of a mystery/adventure story.

Will innocent lives by saved? Including Mr. Pakenham? Will the murderer or murderers be brought to justice? Has Corinna fallen in love with a villain or victim? And what about Mr. Pakenham’s cat?

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2557: Cousin Rosamund

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Cousin Rosamund is the third book in West’s Aubrey family series, and another was planned. I couldn’t tell when reading it, but apparently West died before finishing the second book, This Real Night, so it was finished from fragments and notes. Cousin Rosamund was assembled the same way, although West’s style was certainly captured.

The novel begins sometime after World War I. The three Aubrey girls, Rose, Mary, and Cordelia, are the only ones left of their immediate family, but they still have Nancy, their old neighbor; their beloved cousin Rosamund; and the folks at the pub on the river. Cordelia, always the odd girl out, has become less hostile since her marriage.

Cousin Rosamund comes to tell Rose and Mary that Nancy is getting married. Mary especially is upset that Nancy didn’t tell her herself, but Rosamund’s intercession, they see later, is needed so that they will not judge Oswald on sight, for he is gauche, awkward, unattractive, and a man-‘splainer. But he loves Nancy and she him, and that is all that counts.

Rose and Mary are now both successful and famous pianists, but neither is interested in marriage. Mary, in fact, seems to find the idea distasteful, although they are glad to see their friends happily married.

Inexplicably, Rosamund, who has been working as a nurse, marries one of her patients. The girls are all hurt not to be invited to the wedding, and once they meet the groom, they are horrified. His name is Nestor Ganymedios, and he is rich, extremely vulgar, ugly, and probably dishonest in his business dealings. Further, they see almost nothing of her after the marriage.

This novel is about marriage, which West examines in several incarnations. Unfortunately, it ends before we learn the explanation for Rosamund’s choice, but at least West’s intentions for the entire series are explained in the Afterword of my Penguin edition.

All of these novels are beautifully written and show a profound knowledge of music. The girls have such pure affection for the small number of people they love, yet the characters are realistically drawn.

One caveat: In this novel some characters express outdated ideas about homosexuality, and some homosexual characters in the book are not depicted positively, but it is not clear when she wrote this. The first book went to the publishers in 1956, at which point she said she planned three more, but though she finished most of the second, she seemed unable to finish this one. It ends about 1929, but her original plans were to encompass World War II.

Although it doesn’t fit the context of what I’ve discussed, I wanted to give just one quote because it’s so lucid and poetically spare. Rose has seemingly been disgusted with her long-time friend Oliver after he told her the story of his first marriage despite its end not being his fault. She is really fighting a battle with herself. She enters a room where he is.

He came toward me and I became rigid with disgust, it seemed certain that I must die when he touched me, but instead, of course, I lived.

Wow.

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Review 2554: #ReadingAusten25! Pride and Prejudice

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For years, I read all of Jane Austen’s novels once every year, but I haven’t done that since I started this blog. Now, Reading Austen 25 has given me an excuse to do it again.

The neighborhood is thrilled, because Netherfield Park, a large estate that has been vacant, has been leased. More importantly, the new occupant is Mr. Bingley, a young, single man of fortune. Foolish Mrs. Bennett, with five single daughters, is certain he will marry one of them.

Mr. Bingley has come with friends, and the first time everyone meets them is at a local ball. Although Mr. Bingley seems attracted to Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Bennett’s beautiful older sister, his friend Mr. Darcy stays aloof from the locals and will only dance with members of his own party. (That may seem okay to modern readers but is really very rude for the time.) When Mr. Bingley tries to get him to dance, suggesting Elizabeth as a suitable partner, Darcy slights her.

Later, Lizzy meets Mr. Wickham, a pleasing young man who grew up with Mr. Darcy. He tells her that Mr. Darcy has treated him wrongly, especially that he withheld a living from him that was promised to him by Darcy’s father. Lizzy is shocked.

Things look good for Jane, though, as Bingley is very attentive. Unfortunately, at a ball hosted by Bingley, all of Lizzy’s family except Jane behave in an embarrassing manner—her mother loudly discussing Jane’s chances with Bingley, her foolish younger sisters making exhibitions of themselves, and her father loudly correcting Mary. The next thing they know, the entire Bingley party has left for London with no intention of returning. Lizzy blames Jane’s disappointment in love on Caroline Bingley—Bingley’s sister—and on Mr. Darcy.

This novel is a domestic drama, a romance, and a witty social satire. Austen is gifted at creating characters whose personalities become obvious almost as soon as they open their mouths. I find it hard to choose my favorite Austen novel, but this one is certainly the funniest, with such characters as Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennett, and Lady Catherine De Bourgh.

Harking back to a discussion last month about Austen’s wobble between sense and sensibility, I see more evidence of it here, when Mr. Darcy takes Jane’s calm demeanor for indifference to Mr. Bingley and when, later, he doesn’t speak to Lizzy because he can’t tell if she cares for him.

Anyway, of course, this novel is great.

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Review 2545: This Real Night

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This Real Night is the second book in West’s Aubrey family trilogy, which starts with The Fountain Overflows. I put The Fountain Overflows on my Top Ten list for last year, and this novel is just as good.

The novel begins just after the girls’ father leaves them. He is beloved by all, but he is a gambling addict who has lost all their money many times, and when he leaves, goes with a collection of jewels he had hidden from their mother. Since he left, their mother has sold some paintings that she pretended were worthless, so they, although nowhere near well off, are comparatively comfortable.

Their mother was once a famous concert pianist, and she has trained the twins, Rose and Mary, to become pianists. Soon they will start music school. Their older sister, Cordelia, who was convinced by a teacher that she was a talented violinist, has finally realized that she is not, but she decides she wants to become an assistant in an art gallery. She begins studying art history. Their brother Richard Quin is still a schoolboy.

Their household is expanded because their Aunt Constance and beloved cousin Rosamund have moved in. Constance’s husband, although wealthy, is so stingy that they can’t support their household, as he only spends money on his spiritualism hobby.

One advantage of their father’s absence is that they can continue their friendship with Mr. Morpurgo. He had been a great supporter of their father, hiring him to be an editor of his paper, for their father was a brilliant political writer. Like all of their father’s past supporters and friends, Mr. Morpurgo broke with him, probably over a series of unpaid debts.

The novel begins with a visit from a strained, ill-looking Mr. Morpurgo, lately returned from a trip abroad. It is Richard Quin and Rosamund who figure out that their father has died, probably a suicide, but they don’t tell anyone. Rose only learns after she overhears them talking sometime later.

The family story continues relating fairly mundane events, but they are made interesting by the vibrant narration and the perceptions of this highly intelligent and gifted family. They are also very loving with each other except for Cordelia, whom Rose thinks hates them all and who definitely processes information differently than the others. For example, they all deeply love Richard Quin, who is attractive, charismatic, and kind, but Cordelia thinks he is going to be a failure.

The family faces difficulties such as the girls’ sense that people, especially men, don’t like them, the problems of Aunt Lily, whose sister is serving time for murder, and the revelation by Rose’s new professor that she has been trained wrongly for her talents. They are a family you fall in love with. The novel ends at the beginning of World War I.

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Review 2540: Elizabeth and Essex

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Years ago, I read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and found it both informative and entertaining—full of scandalous information about some of the Victorian age’s most prominent citizens. I was hoping for something similar from this book, but it is a little more serious, although Strachey gets some zingers in.

The book is the 1928 version of history written for the general public. There are a very few footnotes and a couple of pages of bibliography at the end. It is written in Lytton’s liquid, sometimes sardonic style.

This book is about Queen Elizabeth and her last favorite, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. He was more than 30 years younger than she and the stepson of her earlier favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth’s relationships with her favorites, at least with this one, seemed more like volatile love affairs than anything else, with fulsome compliments expected and fiery spats, which usually resulted in Essex stomping out and being forgiven after an apology. In fact, considering her own temper, I’m surprised that Elizabeth put up with him, because he certainly treated her less respectfully than he would if his sovereign was a man.

You have to get used to Strachey, because he starts out right away by making assertions about Elizabeth’s character without giving examples or showing how he is right, as a modern historian would do. And his depiction seems pretty sexist. Over time, he demonstrates some of these characteristics, though. Still, Elizabeth’s main problem with Essex seemed to be that he didn’t behave as if she was his sovereign. I think he had an inherent assumption that he was superior because he was a man, not surprising in that time.

Without going into all the details of the story, which Strachey labels “tragic,” I’ll say that it boils down to temperaments. Essex was proud and fiery, and he valued his family name. He had poor judgement about who to take advice from and was actually incapable of taking any that involved caution and circumspection. He was brave in battle and pictured himself as a great war commander, but he was not. In fact, he seemed to me like a charismatic, well-liked bear of little brain. But he wrote wonderful letters.

Strachey clearly didn’t like Sir Walter Raleigh, but I don’t know why. He just hinted around about him. According to Strachey, no one liked him.

Essex was a loyal friend to many, among them Francis Bacon. It was Bacon’s Machievellian advice that Essex was unable to follow. Despite Essex having supported him for several positions, Bacon did his best to put the nail in Essex’s coffin when he was tried for treason.

This is an interesting book and even though Essex seemed to me like a spoiled baby most of the time, I saw by the end that indeed it was a tragic story.

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