Reading Those Classics #16

Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande. The traditional English village mystery was popularized by Agatha Christie between the wars. After WWII the genre I think was running on fumes until the early Sixties saw published P.D. James’ Cover Her Face (1962) and Ruth Rendell’s From Doon with Death (1964). To revive village mysteries, James and Rendell introduced psychological themes that later writers such as Elizabeth George used to such good effect. Which is a long way to say, this psychological thriller set in a village is a rare bird for the 1950s.

Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy

It’s said Ru-ween, is the first thing to make clear. And the second is that I wish were a better writer to convey how excellent this 1952 mystery is, the first of nine starring Inspector Charles Smith.

The setting is a village breath-taking in its beauty, perhaps in the Lake District because Ireland is across the sea. The citizens of the village make a modest living from sustainable eco-tourism. But we shall soon see both beauty and prosperity are endangered by development.

The book opens in the humble office of a private agent, Lee Vaughn. Lee, the first-person narrator of the story, is a fix-it guy, assisting friends and friends of friends out of jams. He’s a veteran of the recent hostilities but as a smallish and timid guy, he employs violence only when he absolutely must. He is a musician at heart but brings to his fix-it jobs, if not a lot of brains, as he readily admits, then competence, conscientiousness and sympathy for his clients.

And heaven knows his clients need all the understanding they can get. Sheila Fabian, though rich and beautiful and popular with her tenants, is quiet, withdrawn, and unforthcoming with information that would help Vaughn reach their goals. Sheila is on husband Number Two. She inherited landed wealth from her first husband but because of a muddle she found out about her new-found affluence only after her second marriage to Stuart Fabian. Brother Fabian is bad and dangerous to know much less live with.

Sheila wants Lee Vaughn to provide protection for her, her two children, her landed estate, and her tenants. Fabian is hated by her two children for obscure reasons. Out of spite, to dismay her and destroy a beautiful place, Fabian wants to develop the neighborhood around her estate. He wants to turn the area in a twee piece of Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande. This plan raises the ire of the villagers who fear the threat of avaricious mega-tourism to their fiercely guarded livelihoods.

Lee Vaughn is puzzled that Sheila Fabian does not resort to the divorce courts or the police or the National Trust for protection from her husband. But Sheila Fabian is a deep one. So is her seven-year-old son Steven, who is so self-sufficient that he comes and goes as he pleases, often staying out all night. He is also friends with seventy-year-old Isiah Jonquil, who minds a garden out of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Sitr into the mix an eccentric female artist; a forthright doctor; a dodgy houseman. All the characters are as quirky as the types we usually meet in village mysteries, but Fabian and his sins are more darkly evil than we will usually see in a traditional English village mystery. In one upsetting scene a corgi is kicked (he is okay though in the end) and one rousing scene depicts mob violence against the property of the dog kicker.

Simon Troy (a pseudonym of Thurman Warriner 1904-74) also uses red herrings, plot twists, and cliffhangers to keep us readers on the edge of our seats. We hardcore mystery fans were lucky that Harper Collins Perennial Mystery Library editions re-published this novel, along with the equally respected Swift to Its Close in the early 1980s. I think Simon Troy is a writer for discerning readers who like a mystery writer who’s a master of their craft, of a mind to present characters and stories that are really different. 

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon 

Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie

Albert Campion #17

The China Governess – Margery Allingham

Written in her late career in 1962, Allingham presents a suspense novel with elements of the mystery, romance and thriller. Her PI series hero Albert Campion shows up accompanied by his lively Yard counterpart Inspector Luke, but neither rises above bland cameos.

The main focus is on a wealthy family, the Kinnits. In the 19^th century they were embroiled in a scandal involving a murder and then a suicide of the governess accused of the killing. So in 1962 they are bent on protecting themselves from the press when another scandal involving an adopted son threatens to upset their quiet eccentric lives. In contrast to the family with old money, Allingham presents people with origins made obscure due to the bureaucratic muddles and social disruption in the transport and processing of evacuees during WWII. Allingham pulls this off so well that it brings to mind another acclaimed novel of jumbled identities, The Galton Case by Ross Macdonald.

As usual, Allingham is vivid when describing atmosphere and places, especially London houses with rooms last furnished in the mid-Victorian era. But the plot is crowded, with action centered around a character Allingham was having fun with but the reader may respectfully find irksome. Writers in their middle age in the 1960s sometimes groused about These Kids Today and so Allingham gets in digs about the generation gap and the supposedly new kind of vicious evil among young criminals. Like P.D. James a decade later, she also plunks down for nature over nurture, blather which is mildly disappointing however expected in old crotchety conservatives. Family drama and past crimes meet suspense are themes later explored with less baggage by Ruth Rendell. 

Late career novels by mystery writers are often a mix of the off and on. I find it hard to recommend this one because it had trouble keeping my attention. But Allingham was always a good enough writer to be worth reading because her strengths in rendering place and atmosphere never waned. And she loved London as much as Charles Dickens, loved describing it even as it changed because of the damn motor car and dubious youth.

Overview

Like Erle Stanley Gardner in the 1920s, Margery Allingham churned out many short stories and novellas for weekly magazines targeted to readerships that liked adventure and mysteries. She was also a dab hand at gothics and romances (see Deadly Duo a.k.a Take Two at Bedtime).

Her series hero was Albert Campion.  He debuted in 1929 in what is now regarded as a classic Golden Age Mystery The Black Dudley Murder, which features the usual country house, paper-thin characters who are beautiful and stylish, a goofy hero, and romantic angles galore. The short stories have familiar stock plots and characters but are well-written enough to have feeling of timelessness that make collections like Mr. Campion and Others and The Allingham Case Book still worth reading. The insufferable Georgia Wells in The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) is one of the best characters in all Golden Age mysteries.

Allingham published only two crime novels during WWII, perhaps because she had no time to write. She supervised 275 East London evacuees in her small Essex village, an experience that gives The China Governess a genuine feeling in the scenes involving refugees from London slums. More Work for the Undertaker (1948) is less light-hearted than the previous Campion novels but loving in its depiction of London that still has Dickensesque corners and characters. Hide My Eyes a.k.a Tether’s End (1958) and The China Governess also have a keener focus on the psychology of characters similar to Simenon’s existential thrillers.

The Inimitable Boz

Dickens – Peter Ackroyd

Hysterical, overactive, odd child. He was a reader and enjoyed Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield. Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and Tales of the Genii. He was also a watcher, a keen observer that remembered everything and everybody.

He was happy beyond belief until his father moved from Kent to London and ran into money trouble that sent him to debtors prison, ending his son’s happy and stable life. Dickens became a neglected child, in an insecure world of moves and money anxiety. He even for a time worked as a child laborer, an experience that so damaged him he couldn’t tell anybody about it until his secret got out and he fictionalized the ordeal for David Copperfield.

In clear prose, Ackroyd tells how Dickens was obsessive in his approach to writing and had a thing for the order of furniture, books, papers, and pens. He was so prone to expressing big emotions that his family was a little wary of him. Dickens the professional writer was determined to write successful books and methodical in his work habits. He never missed deadlines and as an editor he expected the same, even from writers with less frenetic working styles like Wilkie Collins.

Ackroyd also describes the passionate public readings that made Dickens a legend, but did his blood pressure no good at all. In fact, Ackroyd recounts interesting examples of Dickens’ health problems. For instance, Dickens developed an anal fistula due to sitting too much. The fistula became so severe that in 1841 he underwent surgery in his own house, which involved cutting along the whole length of the fistula to open it up.

Without an anesthetic.

And about five years before his death, Dickens was in a train accident that resulted in some fatalities. The PTSD that he got from this experience plagued him the rest of his life. Though he loved trains because he like moving fast, after the accident, taking trains made him nervous.

A writer himself, Ackroyd gives critical insights into the novels. So, I think this biography could be read with great interest by a reader into the Victorian era, Dickens’ novels and outstanding personalities who happen to be writers. Like the artist in The Moon and Sixpence, Dickens was a genius but hard on the people around him. His personal life was troubled and his kids were ambivalent about their father. He was hard on himself too, especially with overwork, dying of what was probably a stroke at only 58 years old – but he looked in his weary seventies.

Ferocious Characters

The Girl with the Golden Eyes - Honore de Balzac

Even in a novella La Fille aux yeux d'or Balzac feels the necessity for a long setup. He will tax our patience by painstakingly delineating place, time, social class, and a common example of that class. The first dozen pages or so sets teeming Paris as a pressure cooker and describes an amoral class of spongers and hedonists. As an exemplar of such is the decadent libertine, Henri de Marsay.

He's a man about town, good-looking enough to attract all the bored women he can handle. He meets Paquita Valdez who lives in a world of sexual slavery and violence that unnerves even cynical Hank. Strangely - wouldn't he expect she had other arrangements for the sake of short-term pleasure and long-term security? - he is furious when he finds out that he's only the good time boy she uses for exercise when she's not with her real sugar daddy.

Bent on avenging this blow to his honor, such as it is, he visits her house with murder on his mind. I'm not telling more.

Balzac is totally over the top, making us understand and sympathize with parents who tore his novels out of the unsullied hands of their daughters. Balzac constantly horns in to tell us readers things that we assume or can already guess. He detests and decries society’s insatiable yen for more money. His prose is sweaty, his pace puffing. It's all rather endearing.

His novels burn me out but the novellas are a lot of fun for us cheerful vulgarians.

The Ides of Perry Mason 51

Note: On the 15th of every month for about the last three years or so, a review of a Perry Mason-related mystery or episode from the original TV series has been posted. For the hell of it.

In Tribute to Stuart "Stu" Erwin 

Stu Erwin was a familiar face by the time he appeared in four episodes in the early Sixties. Born in 1903 in California, he first got interested in acting at college during the 1920s. After a stint in stock theater, he broke into the movies in 1928 in Mother Knows Best. He put together a solid career as a B-movie staple, on radio and then on television. He put his distinctive voice and his basset hound face to comic use by playing wise working-class guys, small town professionals, office drones, and main chancers on whom you’d better keep an eye. His TV show Trouble with Father, in which he played a mild-mannered high school principal, was among the first family sitcoms and well worth a look on Youtube. 

Clearly, he was ever-ready with the homespun line, saying his favorite hobby was shaving and his great ambition was paying his income tax (at a time $100K earners paid like 60% of that in tax). His roles in the Perryverse ranged from the comic to the devious.  

The Case of the Posthumous Painter (1961) as Austin Durrant 

 Erwin plays an art dealer who teams up with an ethics-free painter to fake the artist’s death and sell his paintings at higher prices, thus taking advantage of the truism that death is the best publicity agent. The producers and writers loved a story about the dark side of the businesses of arts and entertainment so the art dealer is stereotypically sly and slippery. Erwin brings to the role an oily, obsequious manner that makes the stock character of the nervous accomplice come to life. 

The Case of the Double-Entry Mind (1962) as Clem P. 'Sandy' Sandover

In a fine episode Erwin gets a lot of screen time playing a selfish sneaky bookkeeper who embezzles thousands without anybody noticing. In a great noir scene, he’s furtively returning to the bank stolen money that was planted on him. Menacing is the night setting (of course), crazy camera angles, ominous staircases, and the elevator with barred doors like a cell. 

The overwrought tone and an eccentric culprit are as if a Cornell Woolrich story came to life. Sandy’s so proud of his audacious robbery that he can’t resist giving his game away on the stand. Erwin plays this role like he was born to be the narcissistic conniving Sandy Sandover. As an aside, Barbara Hale’s Della appears in moll’s mink stole, platinum blonde wig, and big glamourous sunglasses, an image which reminds us the world is filled with wonderful things to see. 

The Case of the Scandalous Sculptor (1964) as Everett Stanton

Season 8 had many clunkers. The director must have told everybody to overact. The loud voices and frantic gesturing in this one start to grate as the viewer realizes it’s impossible to take the story seriously: archetypal TV mom sensible June Lockhart marrying an out of control artist? No, I can’t believe it. The only believable role is Erwin’s. He plays a publisher of religious and inspirational books. On the stand, he cracks wide open and owns up to horrid deeds we assume typical of sanctimonious people. One wonders if the episode writers were getting their own back against publishers.

The Case of the Impetuous Imp (1965) as Henry Simmons 

Erwin has a great scene in which he storms into Perry’s office to coax and cajole him into helping his niece played by the marvelous Bonnie Jones. He never completes a sentence, speaking in staccato phrases while imperturbable Perry deadpans him with a ‘Who is this guy’ expression on his face (Burr always gave other actors room to do their thing). Erwin speaks as if manically confident that nobody would reject his requests, however incomprehensible or outrageous. His nutty certainty in the soundness of his arguments is strangely persuasive.

Erwin died of a heart attack on December 21, 1967 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California at the age of 64.

Reading Those Classics #15

Classic English Mystery. The last novel by Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate, was such a mess that one morning in the early 1990s waiting for a ride to the since re-named Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, I put it, unfinished, on an end table in the lobby of an annex of the Grand Hotel in Taipei. And just left it. I hope a Chinese learner of English did not blame herself when she found it as incomprehensible as I did. That experience was so off-putting that I did not read another novel of hers for about 30 years. Hey, my grudges make me who I am.

Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie

I swore off Dame Agatha’s novels for some 30 years until circumstances dropped this full-length mystery into my lap. Who am I to argue with a fate when it randomly sends my way the 32^nd Hercule Poirot mystery?

And even though this novel suffers repetition problems, it remains readable, pleasant, understandable and intriguing. Indeed, Poirot still persists in wearing patent leather shoes that are too tight and inappropriate for sauntering about in a village. Familiarity in a series character is comforting.

Another attraction is the Christie gets positively trippy when she has Poirot become entranced in an aesthetic experience in a quarry garden. Indeed, her descriptions of semi-wild gardens, one in Ireland and one in the fictional village, make the reader more determined to make something of their little acre come the spring.

Anyway, the story, you no doubt wonder. Mrs Drake throws a children's party for Halloween which is also attended by the well-known mystery author Ariadne Oliver. During the evening of festivities and games, thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds declares that she saw a murder committed. No one, not a contemporary, not an adult, believes her. When little Joyce is found drowned in a basin full of water and apples, Mrs. Oliver appeals to Poirot for this assistance.

As usual in the cozy mystery – and one of the reasons I’m uneasy with them - I felt a certain discomfort at the reaction of the characters who are respond it as if it were normal to find a corpus in the library, or in this case, a child brutally drowned in a basin of water. Granted, there was some compassion expressed by one character but other characters took malicious pleasure in belittling Joyce, the victim.

And then – another kid  - is murdered. Wow. Christie really testing her readers, though I’m not sure if that is typical since I’ve not read Christie widely.

Another theme that Christie deals with is that of prejudice against foreigners, in particular Olga, an au pair from Eastern Europe, openly considered a gold-digger by the inhabitants of the country who, convinced of her bad faith, do not worry in the least about her fate when the girl mysteriously disappears.

Christie was a popular writer not only due to her characters and surprises but also her simple, homey style. The reader easily takes in the action and she weaves that narrative enchantment that makes the reader want to turn pages until the reveal. Christie has a power that beguiles the reader. Though late in her writing career in 1969, she was still capable of surprising us readers with those prestidigitator tricks of which she is a master, crafting a logical plot that leads to a reasonable solution.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon

The Thief of Time

Do it Now: How to Stop Procrastinating - William J. Knaus

Procrastination is often seen as putting off errands or chores at home or at work shelving assignments and projects until <<fill in your usual contingency>>.

In fact, people procrastinate dealing with what they themselves realize are serious problems. Some lonely people put off making friends. Feeling something is not right with their health, some people postpone getting a test. They hold off till New Year’s Day quitting smoking, eating better food, and starting an exercise program. Others never get around to getting their finances or important documents in order.

Since I read self-help books only by people with credentials, I will note that  Dr. Knaus was a colleague of The Man in cognitive behavioral therapy, Albert Ellis. So, much of the advice Knaus gives in this short book is related to how thoughts influence feelings which in turn give rise to delaying behavior. When procrastination has roots in anxiety and depression, Knaus urges the reader to identify and dispute the irrational ideas that are making us delay getting started.

For instance, Carlos is putting off calling a client to tell him of a delay in shipment. He detests giving bad news to anybody because in the past small-minded people have given him crap for being the bearer of bad news. He’s worried that the customer will react to the bad news by scolding him and calling him incompetent. Carlos needs to get a grip by disputing his own assumptions, “Will he really scold me? And if he does yell at me, will that kill me? The worst that can happen is he takes his business someplace else. That would be unfortunate but not the end of the world.”

Sure, much of the advice in this book is common-sense, but one has to remember that self-help books are written for people that read only if they are facing in the most extreme circumstances, like when they must deal with a serious problem. The language has to be pretty simple and the ideas straight-forward. The style has to be pretty repetitious. God, who would be a therapist, getting people to come up with the same suggestions for the same problems day after day?

Forgotten Classic Stand-Alone

No Tears for Hilda - Andrew Garve

The year 1950 finds Max Easterbrook working in Germany for an organization that re-settles people displaced by the War. He takes a well-deserved vacation in his native London. To his shock, he finds his war buddy, George Lambert, a kind and likeable man, facing trial for the murder of his wife Hilda. Max knows his friend doesn’t have it in him to commit murder most foul. Max puts his skills as an ex-Intelligence officer to work in order to find the actual killer. His interviews with people from Hilda’s past and present reveal that Hilda was poison.

Garve had a genius for writing extremely tight mysteries, thrillers, and adventure stories. His prose, a model of plain English, falls on the right side of the line that marks matter-of-fact from perfunctory. The action moves along at a brisk pace, with little violence.  Usually not one to spend an extra word on characterization, Garve really outdoes himself with portrait of the impossible, exasperating Hilda. She definitely, as they say in Texas, “needed killing.” Near the end crops up a dilemma that brings to mind the scratchy question “Should the killer get away with it,” calling to mind Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes.

Writing fiction on his own time, Garve worked as a journalist for serious publications like The Economist.  Garve did not have a series hero but Inspector Haines pops up in this one as he does in A Press of Suspects. The usual Garvian protagonist, however, is a talented amateur or an off-duty pro such as a journalist or, in this one, an ex-intelligence officer (see Counterstroke). 

Readers looking for a classic mystery ought to read this one.