Tag: England

Day 811: Linnet

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Cover for LinnetLinnet is another sprightly Sally Watson novel for tweens and younger teens set in the Elizabethan era. We first meet Linnet Seymour on the road to London. She has run away from her aunt’s house because she never has any adventure, planning to visit some cousins in London whom she doesn’t really know.

Unfortunately, she meets a rascal on the road, calling himself Sir Colin Collyngewood. He offers her a ride to her cousin’s house. A naive girl, she accepts. Instead of taking her to the Seymours, though, he delivers her to a filthy thieving ken to live with a bunch of child pickpockets and cutpurses.

Linnet has a tendency not to learn from experience, so when Colley tells her he wants to use her to trap some Papists in a plot against the Queen, she believes him. In the meantime, Linnet’s cousin Giles is the only person who believes she is missing. His parents think she returned home. Giles goes to London to look for her.

Like some other of Watson’s books, this one is a bit far-fetched and also has some lessons for Linnet about treatment of the poor. Still, it is an enjoyable romp.

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Day 797: Dissolution

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Cover for DissolutionIt is shortly after the death of Queen Jane in Henry VIII’s reign. Matthew Shardlake is a lawyer employed by Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s vicar general. Like Cromwell, Shardlake believes in reforming the Catholic church to abolish its abuses.

Cromwell has already dissolved the smaller abbeys and is now ready to start on the large ones. His commissioner Singleton has traveled out to investigate an abbey in southern England, Scarnsea, to find an excuse to dissolve it. Cromwell has received a letter from Singleton’s assistant saying that Singleton was murdered. Cromwell dispatches Shardlake to investigate the murder and find an excuse to close the abbey.

Shardlake has just returned from Sussex, and his disability as a hunchback makes him dread another journey in the winter cold. He takes along his own assistant, Mark Poer, who has recently been demoted for becoming involved with a lady in waiting.

When Shardlake arrives at the abbey, he finds that Singleton was decapitated, possibly with a sword. Sometime the same night that Singleton was murdered in the kitchen, someone sacrificed a chicken on the church altar and stole a holy relic.

Shardlake finds a complex environment with many possible suspects, particularly the five senior monks who have access to the keys. He also finds himself unfortunately attracted to Alice, a serving woman employed in the infirmary, as does his assistant Mark.

This is a complicated mystery not just set in a historical time but close to and involving the important events of the time. Shardlake is an interesting character whose faith in his master Cromwell is disturbed by what he learns in his investigation.

Although I picked up on key clues when they appeared and did guess the murderer of Singleton, a lot more happens in the novel that is harder to figure out. I’ve read good things about this series and think it is certainly worth continuing. This book is the first in the series, for those who are interested.

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Day 792: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

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Cover for Cheerful WeatherBest Book of the Week!
The house is in chaos on this morning of the wedding of Mrs. Thatcham’s daughter Dolly. Her two sons are arguing about the socks Robert has on and Kitty, the younger daughter, is screaming at the top of her lungs for her maid to find her brooch.

Breakfast has not been served after Mrs. Thatcham’s contradictory commands, and Mrs. Thatcham has just come in from a bitterly cold gale. Still, she thinks the weather is cheerful, as we find that her only criterion for cheerful weather is visibility.

Upstairs, Dolly is putting on her bridal garb with a bottle of rum in her hand. Downstairs, one of the guests, Joseph, has been asking if he can see the bride before the wedding.

At a little more than 100 pages, this novel by Julia Strachey (Lytton Strachey’s niece) is astonishingly rich. Upon its publication in 1932, it was regarded as nearly perfect. And so I find it.

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Day 777: Barchester Towers

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Cover for Barchester TowersBest Book of the Week!
As Trollope’s first book in his Chronicles of Barchester was about gentle Mr. Harding’s position as warden, it seems hardly possible that a good portion of Barchester Towers, the next in the series, would be about exactly the same subject. Yet, that is the case, and Trollope finds it to provide more food for satire and social commentary.

Several years have passed since the events of The Warden. The kindly old bishop, Dr. Grantly, is dying, attended by his son, the archdeacon, and his old friend Mr. Harding. Although the younger Dr. Grantly is certainly devoted to his father, he has hopes that he will be appointed to his father’s office, as he has been doing the work for years. However, just before his father dies, a new government comes in, and Dr. Proudie is appointed bishop.

The quarrels in this novel pit low church against high church, which is about all I understand about the religious issues. But all of the clergy in Barchester are high church, and Bishop Proudie is low. Bishop Proudie himself, a meek man, is not so much a problem, but he arrives with a wife who is determined to sit in on every meeting and meddle in diocese business, much to the shock of everyone else. In this she is assisted by Mr. Slope, the bishop’s own chaplain, selected by Mrs. Proudie. And an insinuating, unlikable Uriah Heepish character he is.

One of the first issues to come up for the bishop is the wardenship of the hospital for old men, which has sat vacant since Mr. Harding resigned. Bishop Proudie knows he must offer the position at its lowered salary to Mr. Harding, and Mr. Harding would enjoy returning to the house that was his home for so many years and taking up his old duties. But Mrs. Proudie wants anyone except the entrenched Barchester clergy, so she selects Mr. Quiverful, an impoverished curate with 14 children.

Under instruction from the bishop to offer the position to Mr. Harding, Mr. Slope does so by adding conditions to the position that he knows Mr. Harding will not accept and that Mr. Slope himself, or even the bishop, has no authority to request. Although Mr. Harding does not turn down the job outright, Mrs. Proudie then promises it to Mrs. Quiverful.

But Mr. Slope decides that he can run the bishopric himself if he can cut out Mrs. Proudie, so he and the bishop soon have a silent agreement to throw off the feminine yoke. They do so by offering the wardenship to Mr. Harding again. Mr. Slope has also found out that the beautiful widow, Mrs. Bold, is wealthy. He decides to marry her and feels that he won’t help his chances unless he assists her father, Mr. Harding, back into his position.

In the meantime, Mr. Slope is infatuated with Madeline Neroni, the crippled but beautiful married daughter of Dr. Stanhope. She herself is frankly toying with him and several other men, but she turns out to have some sympathy with Eleanor Bold. However, Madeline’s sister Charlotte Stanhope has decided that her impecunious brother Bertie must marry Eleanor for her money.

Barchester Towers affords another entertaining look at the political and social maneuvers underpinning this mostly religious community. It offers lifelike, engaging characters, plenty of humor, and an empathetic and perceptive view of Trollope’s own time. I enjoyed The Warden particularly because I sympathized with the upright Mr. Harding, but Barchester Towers offers more for our consideration and is an altogether more significant work.

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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 763: The Vet’s Daughter

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Cover for The Vet's DaughterIt was several days before the doctor came. It was my father who sent for him. Even he noticed something was wrong with Mother. When he saw her all doubled up over the dining room sideboard, he suddenly bellowed, “For Christ’s sake, woman, send for the doctor, and if he can’t put you right, keep out of my sight!”

Best Book of the Week!
Alice and her mother live in terror of her father, the vet, in this novel written in 1959. He ignores Alice and treats his wife with brutality and contempt. Alice is in her teens, living in a dreary house in a London suburb with only one friend, a deaf girl, when her mother becomes ill. The one bright light for Alice is it brings vulgar but kindly Mrs. Churchill to help.

Mrs. Churchill continues to come after Alice’s mother dies, but within weeks Alice’s father has brought his lover home to live there, so Mrs. Churchill leaves. Rosa Fisher moves into Alice’s mother’s room and stays until she tries to pimp Alice out to an acquaintance.

Alice occasionally seems to have what first appears to be some kind of fits. But they are actually the slow development of an uncanny ability.

As with Sisters by a River, the simple, innocent manner in which this novel is narrated gives it a distinctive tone. Alice is a naive and unsophisticated girl whose isolation from society means she doesn’t always understand very common things. The plot is impossible to predict, as it takes us to some unusual places. The Vet’s Daughter is another strange and vivid novel from Barbara Comyns.

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Day 760: The Z Murders

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Cover for The Z MurdersIn general, serial killer mysteries are a more modern invention, but that does not mean none were written in the Golden Age. Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke is one example, although that killer’s victims are not as arbitrarily chosen as those in The Z Murders.

The main character of this novel is Richard Temperley, who has been traveling all night on a train when we meet him. His companion in the compartment, an elderly man, has been annoying him by snoring for hours. His train arrives at Euston Station at 5 AM, and he is perplexed about what to do with himself until a decent hour when the porter recommends the smoking room at a hotel across from the station.

When Richard arrives at the hotel, he is dismayed to pass his elderly railway companion in the hallway. In the room, he notices a beautiful young woman by the fire and thinks he will sit by the window. However, first he has an impulse to check on his baggage. When he returns, he finds the young woman emerging from the room looking upset. The elderly man is now sitting by the window, so he takes the woman’s seat by the fire. He is dozing off when he realizes the old man isn’t snoring. Sure enough, he is dead.

While Temperley is being quesioned by the police, he finds himself omitting information about the woman, particularly that he has found her purse in the seat of the chair he’s sitting on. The elderly man has been shot by a silenced pistol from the open window, the seat Temperley originally chose until he decided to check his baggage. A metal Z is next to the victim on the window sill.

Although Detective Inspector James doesn’t believe Temperley was involved in the crime, he thinks he knows more than he is saying. So, he puts a tail on Temperley. Temperley has found a card in the woman’s purse identifying her as Sylvia Wynne. He goes directly to her house and, finding no one there, is able to get in with a latch key. Richard finds a metal Z in the front hallway under the letter slot. A moment later, Sylvia comes through the window.

Of course, Richard has been smitten at first sight, but he is only able to speak with Sylvia briefly and give her his sister’s phone number before Inspector James is at the door. When he turns around, she is gone again.

link to NetgalleyThe resulting adventure/mystery involves a cross-country chase that reminds me a little bit of The 39 Steps without the espionage. The novel has a complicated plot, but the characters of Temperley and a cab driver named Diggs are nicely drawn. Although Sylvia is pretty much reduced to a damsel in distress, of the Golden Age mysteries I’ve been reading lately, I think I like Farjeon best.

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Day 757: Thirteen Guests

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Cover for Thirteen GuestsJohn Foss is a young man running away from London at the end of a failed love affair when he injures his foot jumping off the train at a small station. Guests bound for the house of Lord Aveling take him to the doctor’s house only to find that the doctor is away treating Mrs. Morris, Lord Aveling’s mother-in-law. Nadine Leveridge, a beautiful widow, insists on bringing John along to Lord Aveling’s, the unwitting thirteenth guest at a house party.

Lord Aveling’s guests feature a cricket player, an actress, a member of Parliament, a society painter, a gossip columnist, and a novelist, but there are also some more unusual guests, a vulgar sausage king and his family and a shady couple, the Chaters. Some odd things happen almost immediately. Someone throws paint on Leicester Pratt’s painting of Lord Aveling’s daughter Anne, and an odd confrontation takes place between Zena Wilding, the actress, and a strange man at the train station. Mr. Chater seems to be around sticking his nose into everything.

After John’s foot is treated, he is parked on a sofa in an anteroom. Late that night, he hears a dog barking outside, several exchanges in the hallway, and some glass breaking. The next morning it is obvious that someone broke out of the studio that Pratt locked after he discovered his ruined painting, and the dog has been stabbed to death. Later, the strange man from the station is discovered dead at the bottom of a nearby quarry.

Of course, when Detective-Inspector Kendall arrives, he finds that many of the house’s inhabitants have something to hide. And the man no one seems to know is not the only one to die.

link to NetgalleyAlthough this Golden Age mystery involves time tables, the solution is fairly straightforward but hard to guess. Agatha Christie was a great admirer of Farjeon, who I think gives a good sense of his characters, enough to help me distinguish one from the other when there were so many of them.

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Day 755: The Woman Who Had Imagination

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Cover for The Woman Who Had ImaginationFor some reason, I have always associated HE Bates with such comic writers as PG Wodehouse and EF Benson. This notion was without having read him, mind. But the stories in The Woman Who Had Imagination are not at all what I expected.

Most of the stories in this collection are set in rural localities and are about ordinary country people. Many of them are closer to character sketches than plotted stories. “The Lily,” for example, describes Great-Uncle Silas, a lively, vulgar old man who likes his jokes and his “mouthful of wine.” A later story describes the circumstances of his death.

Many of the stories depict characters caught in their environments, such as “The Story Without an End,” which describes the life of a boy working in a restaurant who is terrified of his boss, or the title story about a bored young man on a church choir expedition who meets a young woman unhappy in her marriage.

link to NetgalleyAlthough the descriptions of rural settings are beautifully written, many of the stories in this collection depict the lives of people who are depressed by the limitations of their lives. However, that is not always the case. In “Sally Go Round the Moon,” a man helps his niece by marriage escape the life she hates in London and then decides to leave himself.

To give you a flavor of the lushness of these stories, here is part of the description of great-uncle Silas’ house from “The Lily”:

On summer days after rain the air was sweetly saturated with the fragrance of the pines, which mingled subtly with the exquisite honeysuckle scent, the strange vanilla heaviness from the creamy elderflowers in the garden hedge and the perfume of old pink and white crimped-double roses of forgotten names. It was very quiet there except for the soft, water-whispering sound of leaves and boughs, and the squabbling and singing of birds in the house-thatch and the trees.

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