Tag: England

Day 360: 4:50 from Paddington

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Cover for 4:50 from PaddingtonWhile traveling by train, Miss Marple’s friend Elspeth McGillicuddy witnesses a murder on another train along a parallel track. The police find no trace of a victim, so they are inclined to think Mrs. McGillicuddy imagined the incident. Miss Marple knows her friend, however, and imagination is not her strong suit.

Jane believes the body must have been thrown off the train near an estate called Rutherford Hall. She sends her friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow in as a housekeeper to investigate, and Lucy eventually finds the body, not lying somewhere in the bushes along the track, but hidden away.

The money from the estate will eventually be divided among the grown children of Luther Crackenthorpe, a semi-invalid widower, while the house will go to his eldest surviving son. But does that have anything to do with the murder? All of the children seem to have their secrets. Cedric is a bohemian painter who lives in Ibiza, Harold is an aloof banker, Alfred is engaged in shady business deals, and Emma is a spinster who is in love with Dr. Quimper, Luther’s doctor.

The biggest puzzle is to identify the body. Who is the woman murdered on the train, and why does Lucy find her in a sarcophagus among a bunch of antiques in the stables? Soon Miss Marple is on the scene visiting Lucy at tea time. The solution will soon be divulged, we feel.

Christie is great at drawing convincing characters, and Lucy is one of her most attractive. We wish we could see more of her. 4:50 from Paddington is yet another entertaining mystery from Christie.

Day 359: The Yard

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Cover for The YardThe Yard contains elements that should have made it interesting to me, particularly the period, but it didn’t really grab me.

The novel takes place shortly after the failure of Scotland Yard to capture Jack the Ripper, and the police are dispirited, while the public has grown scornful of them. The body of Detective Little turns up in a trunk at Euston Square Station. Detective Inspector Walter Day is put in charge of the investigation to the surprise of everyone, as he is new to the force.

We are not left in ignorance of the identity of Little’s murderer, as he is watching the case from the sidelines. He didn’t intend to murder anyone, but Little discovered his secret. Soon another officer stumbles onto his secret and also must be killed.

Constable Hammersmith is assigned to the case, but he becomes embroiled in another incident. A thief breaking into a house finds the body of a boy stuck in the chimney and stops Hammersmith on the street to tell him about it. Directed by his superiors to concentrate on the more important case of Detective Little’s murder–the death of a chimney sweep’s boy not being considered a crime–Hammersmith continues to search for the sweep on his own time.

Another case is preoccupying Inspector Blacker. Some men have been found murdered with their beards newly shaven. Blacker thinks it is unlikely that two serial killers are loose in London at the same time, but Day and Dr. Kingsley, the coroner who is interested in new forensics research, do not agree.

This first series book sets the stage for all the recurring characters as well as attempts to recreate the chaos of the Yard. I feel it is spread a bit thin. The writing is capable rather than brilliant, although I encountered enough clichés in the first few pages to irritate me. A technique used several times of flashing back to explain something right in the middle of the action seems very disruptive and only serves to stall the flow.

Some unlikely events disturbed me as well. That two police officers would stumble onto the killer’s secret in the space of two days seems completely far-fetched. A minor incident where a family claims to have made a day trip to Birmingham seems equally absurd. I can’t imagine even in these days that a trip from London to Birmingham and back would be something anyone would want to do in one day, but back then the trains were surely slower. Such a trip may have been possible, but that the police officers receiving this information don’t challenge it seems absurd.

Almost despite myself I found myself beginning to like the major characters, but I still don’t think I’ll be picking up the second book anytime soon.

Day 357: The Dying of the Light

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Cover for The Dying of the LightThis is going to be a fairly short review, because The Dying of the Light was a book I could not finish. I usually enjoy reading Michael Dibdin’s mysteries and I also like dark tales with a macabre sense of humor, but if that is what this is, it is too much.

Rosemary Travis and Dorothy Davenport are two little old ladies who live in a horrible nursing home run by William Anderson and his sister Letitia Davis. The owners are blatantly torturing the residents.

Rosemary and Dorothy react to this environment by turning it into a game, pretending it is some kind of convoluted mystery plot. When Hilary Bryant dies or George Channing is mauled by Anderson’s Doberman when he tries to escape, they fold this into their plot. But when Dorothy dies the night before her departure from the home, Rosemary finds she has a real mystery to solve.

This plot sounds as if it could be darkly humorous, but it is too sickening for me. One reviewer on Amazon says that Dibdin relies on the shock value, and not much else, to carry the novel. That about says it for me, and it doesn’t work.

Day 356: Great Expectations

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Cover for Great ExpectationsGreat Expectations has long been my least favorite of Dickens’ more substantial novels, because I dislike the character of Pip. However, upon my re-reading it after many years, I’ve changed my opinion, because only in this novel does the main character undergo a complete change of his assumptions and values.

The novel begins with Pip as a young boy growing up in a vast and desolate wasteland of marshes. He is cared for by his ambitious and abusive older sister and kindly brother-in-law Joe Gargery. In the opening scene he is in the cemetery looking at his parents’ graves when he meets the escaped convict Magwich.

Under Magwich’s instructions, the terrified boy steals some food from his sister’s pantry and a file from his brother-in-law’s smithy. Magwich might have got away, but Pip tells him he met another convict on the way, so Magwich throws away his chances of escape to fight the other man, his sworn enemy.

After this odd and atmospherically fraught incident, Pip is soon engaged to entertain the wealthy but deranged Miss Havisham, an old woman who was long ago deserted at the altar and has lived the rest of her life in her bride clothes with her wedding cake rotting away on the table. Miss Havisham introduces Pip to her beautiful ward Estella, and from that time he is captured. He fails to understand, however, that Miss Havisham has brought Estella up to enthrall and torture men.

Pip grows old enough to apprentice as blacksmith to Joe, but his association with Miss Havisham and Estella has made him discontented with his lot. Soon, though, he is informed that he has “great expectations,” that an unknown benefactor has chosen him for his or her heir, and he is to become a gentleman. Pip and his associates assume his benefactor is Miss Havisham, and Pip thinks that she intends Estella to be his.

With only a few qualms of guilt, Pip throws off his childhood, including his gentle, loving friend Joe, to become a gentleman and chase after the dream of Estella. It is only through a series of misfortunes that he realizes he must learn to look at his life differently than he understood it and comes to appreciate his true friends.

I am not at all sympathetic to Pip’s desires and think the pursuit of Estella is a worthless one, but Dickens’ strengths are in his characterizations and complex plots. In addition to a cast of unusual, lovable, or repellent characters, he does a masterful job of developing Pip into a wiser and more honest man.

Day 353: Friday’s Child

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Cover for Friday's ChildFriday’s Child is one of Georgette Heyer’s funniest Regency romances. Although some of her novels are a bit closer to being “serious” romances (that is, with the emphasis on the romance, but always with witty dialogue), this novel is endearing in its plethora of foolish characters.

Anthony Verelst, the Viscount Sheringham, is a wild young man who is extravagantly wasting his inheritance on gambling and women, but his estate is left so that he cannot touch the principal unless he marries. He has fancied himself in love with the current reigning beauty, Isabella Milbourne, but he is not tempted to matrimony until he becomes fed up with his mother and her brother, one of his trustees, whom he believes is milking his estate. He proposes to Isabella, plainly expecting an answer in the positive, but piqued by his lack of ceremony, she rebukes him for his dissipated lifestyle. In a rage, he storms off, vowing to marry the first female he meets.

As he is returning to London from his mother’s house in the country, he meets Hero Wantage, a very young lady who is an impoverished orphan and a neighbor. He thinks of her as a little sister, so he has no hesitation in relating the tale of his misfortunes. When he tells her of his vow, she answers, “Silly, that’s me!” So, the heedless viscount throws her up into his curricle and drives her off to London to get married. Since she has long worshipped the Viscount, or Sherry, as he is known to his friends, and has been mistreated by her Bagshot relatives, she is happy to go.

The couple is naturally headed for trouble, for Hero is completely naïve and badly brought up, with no idea of how to behave in society. The heedless Sherry seems to feel that he can go on about his business as always without paying much attention to her, so she begins befriending the wrong people and otherwise falling into scrapes.

This novel features an outstanding cast of secondary characters, especially Sherry’s close friends–Gil Ringwood, a thoughtful young man who vaguely feels there is something wrong with the way Sherry neglects his wife; Ferdy Fakenham, a silly but warm-hearted dunderhead reminiscent of Bertie Wooster; and George, Lord Wrotham, a hot-tempered gentleman who constantly challenges other men to duels and is madly in love with Isabella. As a side comment, I think it is a hallmark of a good Heyer novel that the characters who would be the heroine and hero in a typical romance novel (that is, Isabella and George) provide some of the humor in her own novels, especially the devastatingly handsome George, with his exaggeratedly romantic behavior.

Heyer is one of my favorites for light reading, and Friday’s Child makes me laugh out loud, particularly when Ferdy gets it into his head that he and Gil are being pursued by “that dashed Greek we learned about at Cambridge. Kept lurking about in corners,” in other words, Nemesis. The characters are funny, the dialogue is witty, and the plot is full of twists and turns.

Day 345: The Chalice

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Cover for The ChaliceI am not sure why I found this novel so irritating. Possibly it is because it is a sequel, but nowhere on the cover is that indicated, and this novel is definitely one that requires knowledge of the previous book, which I have not read.

Joanna Stafford is a former Dominican novice after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. At the beginning of the novel she is in Canterbury with some ex-monks about to commit some serious act, but then the action turns back several months.

Joanna is living in Dartford with her young cousin and her friends Brother Edmund and Sister Winifred, a former monk and nun who are sister and brother. Some of the townspeople are suspicious of the former residents of the priory, but Joanna has plans to continue there and set up a loom to weave tapestries.

Soon, however, her cousins Gertrude and Henry Courtenay arrive to invite her and her cousin Arthur for a visit. Little does Joanna know that Gertrude is aware that Joanna is the subject of a prophecy, which a group of Catholics believe will save Catholicism in England. Apparently, in the previous novel she received a prophecy and was told she would learn it in full after she received three prophecies. Since her family was destroyed as the result of a prophecy, however, she has promised never to dabble in it again. She is soon subject to immense pressure from Gertrude Courtenay and others, including the Lady Mary Tudor and the Spanish ambassador Chapuys, to see a seer.

The novel does not seem very coherent. Joanna is told she must hear the prophecies of her own free will, yet all kinds of pressures and threats are applied to make her hear them. She is refusing to hear the prophecy, then she isn’t. Then we go through the same thing with the next prophecy. Some of her decisions seem completely unlikely for a person who is extremely religious and was previously a novice. At one point in the book she throws herself at two different men within the space of weeks.

It takes an incredibly long time to feel certain that we’ve learned of everything revealed in the first book–new facts keep popping up until nearly halfway through the volume. This is not a stand-alone novel by any means. Whether it would be more satisfying for someone who has read the first book I cannot answer.

Day 344: Tuesday’s Gone

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Cover for Tuesday's GoneTuesday’s Gone is the second mystery/thriller featuring psychotherapist Frieda Klein in a series that is turning out to be quite exciting. A social worker calls on a mentally ill client for a first visit at a grimy, squalid hostel. The client, Michelle Doyce, leads her in to her apartment and introduces her to her guest–a naked man who has been long dead.

The police, embattled with cost-cutting measures, are inclined to close the case even though the victim has not been identified, but DCI Karlsson wants to see what Frieda Klein makes of Michelle, who seems to be talking nonsense. Frieda soon concludes that, rather than having strangled the victim, Michelle suffers from a rare disorder that makes her unable to distinguish the animate from the inanimate and was trying to help him.

When the victim is finally identified, he turns out to be Robert Poole, an apparently charismatic and charming con man and identity thief. He seems to have several potential murderers, but none of them appears to bear him any ill will.

In the meantime, Frieda is slowly beginning to realize that the case from the first book, Blue Monday, is not closed, because the murderer is not dead, as believed. Frieda is sure he is lurking somewhere nearby. She is also involved with troubles with her family and among her friends, as well as the return of her ex-lover Sandy from the US.

Frieda is an interesting character–a loner who likes to walk the streets of London at night and prefers to keep her own counsel yet has several close friendships. The mysteries are involving and complex, and although I figured out who the murderer was before the secret was revealed, it was only a bit earlier. Although the married writing team who calls itself Nicci French builds suspense slowly, the final chapters of the novel are quite thrilling.

Day 343: Poor Caroline

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Cover for Poor CarolinePoor Caroline begins with the death of Caroline Denton-Smyth, a do-good spinster who has dreamed of forming the Christian Cinema Company, which will clean up the film industry. This satire of charitable organizations is a little different from the other Winifred Holtby novels I have read, which are about small town Yorkshire.

Caroline, an elderly eccentric, although virtually penniless, forms the film company and manages to put together a board of directors of dubious character. Basil St. Denis is an elegant dilettante who is hoping to use the charity to make some money. Clifton Johnson is a seedy American scammer. Joseph Isenbaum is a wealthy social climber (and not a Christian) who wants St. Denis to sponsor his son at Eton. Charles Guerdon is a Quaker nonentity, Father Mortimer is carrying scars from World War I, and Hugh Macafee is a film inventor who is obsessed with his work. The makeup of the board alone is an object for satire.

Caroline is in some ways admirable, with a buoyant, energetic personality, who devotes herself to one cause or another, only to have it fail or have the rest of the workers desert her. However, she is totally self-absorbed as she pursues her goals.

There are only two completely sympathetic characters in the novel. Caroline’s young cousin, Eleanor de la Roux, wants to learn to be successful in business and break ground for other women. Roger Mortimer, a young Anglican priest, wants to live a life of poverty and service and falls in love with Eleanor.

I am not sure whether I like this novel or what I think about Caroline herself. She is completely blind about her charities, and from the point of view of her relatives has cadged from them shamelessly for years. Certainly she is a believable type, reminiscent of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House, who spends all her time on charities for Africa while her children are uncared for and her house falls to pieces.

Day 342: The Tryst

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Cover for The TrystThe Tryst is an odd book by Michael Dibdin, the author of the Aurelio Zen mysteries. Although billed as a crime novel, it takes some time to get around to the crime. In fact, it misleads us into thinking it is one type of novel when it is actually another.

The novel follows the actions of two characters, a homeless boy and the therapist who is trying to figure out why the boy is pretending to be insane. Gary Dunn has come to the psychiatric hospital where Aileen Macklin works as a psychiatrist requesting institutionalization and insisting that someone is trying to kill him.

We find out that Gary, a glue-sniffing boy who lives with a bunch of junkies, has befriended an old man. Although Gary’s mates would like to rob the man, Gary has become involved in the old man’s long, involved story about a former employer who sees a beautiful woman no one else sees. In the story, the employer follows the woman to his death. This story eventually connects the fates of Aileen and Gary.

Ultimately, the novel doesn’t work that well, because it starts out being a crime thriller and turns into more of a gothic novel/ghost story. It is too much one kind of novel to work successfully as the other kind. Although the novel is well written and interesting, it reads almost as if Dibdin started with an idea and changed his mind in midstream. For a better example of a book that combines a crime story with a ghost story, read Johan Theorin’s fantastic The Darkest Room.

Day 333: Pigeon Pie

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Cover for Pigeon PieThis exceedingly silly book about Britain just before World War II has its amusing moments. Although it is not one of Mitford’s best, it still made me laugh out loud at times. The novel spoofs British high society, spy stories, and religious cults.

The heroine is Lady Sophia Garfield, a stupid, frivolous society matron who lives happily, mutually ignoring her husband, who admires Hitler. As events move toward war, she begins to suspect she has a nest of German spies in her home. Although no one believes her, she eventually manages to foil them.

One of the funniest moments for me has to do with Lady Sophia’s chief social rival, whom she distinctly remembers as the ordinary school girl Baby Bagg but who goes around pretending to be a Russian princess, Olga Golgothsky. Inclined to the theatrical, Olga frequently makes remarks about what would happen to her if she went to Russia–she says she would be handed over to the peasants to do what they please. Our heroine reflects on what Russian peasants must be like, thinking that if she were handed over to British peasants to do what they please, they would put her in the best bedroom and give her a cup of tea.