Classic by a Woman Author: Collected Ghost Stories

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell - Charlotte Eliza L. Riddell

In Victorian times, both Mrs. Riddell’s father and husband suffered business failures so she had to go to work with her pen. A prolific fiction writer, she wrote novels with intriguing titles such as The Nun’s Curse and supernatural novels like Fairy Water and The Uninhabited  House.  This Dover collection from 1977 brought together 14 supernatural stories originally published in Christmas annuals.

"Nut Bush Farm" (1882) -- A skeptical man rents a farm whose nearby peasants are spooked by something which takes a weird form. The skeptical guy finds his disbelief in haints sorely tested.

"The Open Door" (18892) – The old story of guy, fired because he didn’t know his place, who needs. money. He accepts a job in which he is to stay in a creepy old mansion all night long in order to figure out why a door won’t stay shut. The things we do for money are often examined by Mrs. Riddell, who knew the pinch of being busted.

"The Last Squire of Ennismore" (1888) –The take-away from this story is that If a foreigner appears out of nowhere from the sea, don’t invite him in your country house for a drink, if you don’t want to be the last of your line, that is.

"A Strange Christmas Game" (1868) -- A penniless brother and sister think their luck has changed when they inherit an estate from a distant relative. They couldn’t be more wrong.

"The Old House in Vauxhall Walk" (1882) –The old story of a young man who needs bread in the worst way. Homeless and wandering the streets, he meets a former servant who offers to put him up in an old empty house. Spirited hijinks ensue.

"Sandy the Tinker" – (1882) There’s something very creepy about supernatural stories that involve bad dreams.

"Forewarned, Forearmed" (1874) – Another weird dream story. I think I will stay up all night tonight.

"Hertford O'Donnell's Warning" (1867) – Smart people may be very smart but they are also subject to weird fancies. Whenever a poor doctor starts to propose to his lady love, who only happens to be a rich heiress, he and he only begins to hear the howl of the banshee. Mrs. Riddell was Irish, so there you go.

"Walnut Tree House" (1882) –Stories of ghost children are weird.

"Old Mrs. Jones" (1882) –An unforgettable mix of funny, uncanny and scary.

"Why Dr. Cray Left Southam" (1889) – An utterly plausible story about the aftermath of when a doctor who doesn’t suffer hypochondriacs accuses a uxorious husband of doing away with his wife.

"Conn Kilrea" (1899) – A family is cursed by a spirit whose appearance is a harbinger of a death in the family. Doesn’t every family have such a early warning system?

"Diarmid Chittock's Story" (1899) – Very strong Irish interest in this story. Sick of the hurly-burly of London life, a sensitive guy man lets a remote house on Ireland's Atlantic coast. He is fascinated by a young governess who turned down the proposal of one of his friends. Our hero wants to get them together. Beware meddling in other people’s business.

"A Terrible Vengeance" (1889) -- A little town flirt breaks up with her boyfriend during a boating excursion, but then goes missing. Wet footprints begin the follow Somebody. A genuinely creepy story.

Mrs. Riddell (said “riddle” by the bye) is a dab hand for evocative descriptions of landscapes and flora. She also has a sharp though sympathetic wit that we like in Irish writers. Because of her own unhappy experiences of keeping the wolf from the door, she knows people are mainly concerned with the age-old questions “What’s this going to cost me” and “What’s in it for me.”

Mount TBR #28

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Double for Death – Rex Stout

Solid, briskly-paced whodunit from 1939. Stout himself supposedly thought this was one of his best-plotted mysteries.

Millionaire Ridley Thorpe lies in his bungalow, murdered. He was shot dead and PI and bon vivant Tecumseh Fox has to save his friend Andrew Grant, whom the police consider the killer, from the prosecutor's clutches.

It seems almost as if Stout is toying with the current conventions of the whodunit with multiple victims, scads of suspects, forces of motives, pairs of guns. Stout has his hero stick his thumb in the eye of the police and prosecutors, an irreverent tone he always used in the Nero Wolfe books for hero vs. authorities confrontations.

Tec Fox has foibles but they don’t make him distinct from Stout’s other non-Nero experiment with Alphabet Hicks or Doll Bonner or Inspector Kramer. Readers into this one: Stout completists, fans of Golden Era Whodunnits, fans of high society mysteries, seekers of entertainment, and 1930s buffs.

Mount TBR #27

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Thirteen Gun Salute – Patrick O’Brian

This is the thirteenth volume of the internationally successful best-selling series of Royal Navy life in the early 19^th century against Bonaparte. Patrick O'Brian writes with his usual class, humor, and nautical mumbo-jumbo for us landlubbers who read the novels for his great characters.

Captain Jack Aubrey puts his run of bad luck behind him when he is finally reinstated in the Royal Navy. Immediately he takes his extraordinary abilities back to official service.

He and his friend, the ship's surgeon and secret agent Dr. Stephen Maturin, are dispatched on a particularly sensitive mission. While his old ship Surprise is purported to be under Aubrey's command and  after whalers, pirates, United States ships in the China trade, and all French ships crossing its course, Aubrey, in fact, sails under camouflage, so to speak, on Diane, a former French ship cut out previously by Jack. His real mission is to go to the South China Sea to bring a British envoy to Pulo Prabang, an island off present-day Malaysia. The envoy’s mission is to cut a treaty with the local sultan, muscling the French out of the way (recall that at the time the French were still rivals in India).

So instead of the exciting sea battles of the other novels, this one is more a tale of political-strategic jockeying than maritime action. Still, it’s O’Brian’s wit, imaginative scene-setting and incident, and his wonderful cast of characters that are the attractions. Maturin’s journey to the hidden monks of Kumai is adventurous and impressive. The reader whose travelling days over feels almost jealous of the quirky doctor as he hangs out with orangutans and gets chased by two rhinos. And the customs and intrigues of the sultan, his favorite, his family and court are examined at a remove but still fascinating. Exciting are the meetings with the traitors Ledward and Wray, the bastards. This novel – the 13^th  in the series, remember - will appeal more to the people who’ve read the first 12 than a novice or casual reader. Completist fans will hate me for saying so but novices can start on #3 HMS Surprise.

I like these books very much. They are entertaining and highly recommended for fans of serious historical novels. They have more literary heft and philosophy than naval books by Kent or Forester.

Children's Classic: The Magic of Oz

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Magic of Oz – L. Frank Baum

A young Munchkin boy, Kiki Aru, suffers itchy feet. He longs to walk the wider world but is forbidden to by his sorcerer father. Unhappy, Kiki Aru becomes resentful, sullen and withdrawn. Refusing to attend a festival with his parents, he snoops in his father stuff and finds a magic spell. To transform himself and others into anything he chooses, Kiki utters the magic word pyrzqxgl [pɪr ‘kwɪks gəl].

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even try. You can exhaust every pronunciation and still not get it right.

With great power comes great responsibility, which cruel Kiki Aru shirks, unable to control his rotten impulses. When Kiki Aru says, “I hate good people. I’ve always wanted to be wicked but I didn’t know how,” he is overheard by the exiled Nome King, Ruggedo, the arch-villain in numerous Oz books.

Ruggedo and Kiki Aru scheme up an invasion of Oz, changing people to animals and vice versa to get their way.  Later though, Kiki turns on his partner in crime because Kiki is afraid of looking weak: “You acted as if I was your slave, and I wanted to show these forest people that I am more powerful than you." The things bullies, cowards, and sneaks do to look tough, though they are broken and vulnerable inside, are often featured in Baum’s Oz.

Baum is writing mainly for young girls, what with all the birthday parties with cake, confectionery, darling animals, flowers, presents, pretty clothes, and most importantly, nobody left out and everybody getting along. Once a boy reader in the ever more distant past, I can assert with confidence that these things have but scant appeal to boy readers. Though missing what Baum called “bloodcurdling incidents,” such brutes, however, may be willing to tolerate copious cuteness if a quest is involved, as there is in nearly all the Oz books.

The second appeal of Oz books is Baum’s wisdom. I think there are plenty worse messages a kid can draw from a book than feeling gratitude for what you have:

 

"There's lots o' things folks don't 'preciate," replied the sailor-man. "If somethin' would 'most stop your breath, you'd think breathin' easy was the finest thing in life. When a person's well, he don't realize how jolly it is, but when he gets sick he 'members the time he was well, an' wishes that time would come back. Most folks forget to thank God for givin' 'em two good legs, till they lose one o' 'em, like I did; and then it's too late, 'cept to praise God for leavin' one."

And here Dorothy dons her Zen Monk Robe:

"Why, I'm not afraid to go anywhere, if the Cowardly Lion is with me," she said. "I know him pretty well, and so I can trust him. He's always afraid, when we get into trouble, and that's why he's cowardly; but he's a terrible fighter, and that's why he isn't a coward. He doesn't like to fight, you know, but when he HAS to, there isn't any beast living that can conquer him."

In other words, feeling fright is natural in frightening circumstances but we can control that fear with thoughts and actions. We don’t have to behave or respond in a fearful way; we can choose to act bravely even when we are peeing our pants. Call this moral and educational or preachy. It’s also useful.

The third appeal is that Baum is genuinely funny. One wonders if he was genially satirizing Edison, another prolific inventor, and rowdy college students of his day.

But it so happened that Professor Wogglebug (who had invented so much that he had acquired the habit) carelessly invented a Square-Meal Tablet, which was no bigger than your little finger-nail but contained, in condensed form, the equal of a bowl of soup, a portion of fried fish, a roast, a salad and a dessert, all of which gave the same nourishment as a square meal.

The Professor was so proud of these Square-Meal Tablets that he began to feed them to the students at his college, instead of other food, but the boys and girls objected because they wanted food that they could enjoy the taste of. It was no fun at all to swallow a tablet, with a glass of water, and call it a dinner; so they refused to eat the Square-Meal Tablets. Professor Wogglebug insisted, and the result was that the Senior Class seized the learned Professor one day and threw him into the river—clothes and all. Everyone knows that a wogglebug cannot swim, and so the inventor of the wonderful Square-Meal Tablets lay helpless on the bottom of the river for three days before a fisherman caught one of his legs on a fishhook and dragged him out upon the bank.

Like Conan Doyle was trapped by Sherlock Holmes, Baum wanted to leave Oz be after five books. But public demand was such that he felt compelled to serve his fans. The Magic of Oz was the next to last Oz book, published in 1919, but it has no evidence that Baum was going through the motions as Conan Doyle, only a human being, was showing in the later Holmes short stories. I recommend this to general readers; I don’t know enough about fantasy to know if this would measure up to the exacting standards of fantasy readers. For a good evaluation see Martin Gardner and Russell B. Nye’s critical appreciation, a pioneering example of scholars looking a popular literature.

Mount TBR #26

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito – Erle Stanley Gardner

His doc told Banning Clarke to take it easy on account of his iffy heart. But Banning Clarke’s old prospecting pard Salty Bowers urges him to stop babying himself, that old prospectors go downhill in a jiffy if they don’t live under sun and stars and tramp all day looking for precious metals. So Banning Clarke takes to sleeping in the rock garden of his mansion which has been planted with cactus and saltbush.

His doc has insisted that nurse Velma Starler live there 24-7, ever ready with medication and cautions to take it easy. Also living in the mansion are his in-laws the Bradissons (mother and son), the son’s mining broker Hayward Small, and his cook-housekeeper Nell Sims and her con-man husband.

Banning Clarke has retained ace lawyer Perry Mason to represent him in a fraud case. The plot thickens when the Bradissons and then Perry and his assistant Della Street are poisoned with arsenic. After the inevitable murder, an interesting legal question comes up: who is culpable for the killing if the victim is shot after ingesting a big bad dose of arsenic?

This is doubtless one of the best Masons I’ve read, and I’ve read a couple dozen of them. To appeal to the kid in us, he has material about the legendary lost gold mines of California.  The legal twists are so positively serpentine that Mason gets ahead of himself. It’s an illustration too that Gardner respected his readers enough that he trusted their intelligence to follow the complex legal reasoning of the opposing attorneys.

Gardner puts in more comic relief that usual, with PI Paul Drake posing as a drunken prospector and Nell Sims as a known Mrs. Malaprop who mangles maxims and proverbs as in “A stich in time saves a pound of cure.” While Gardner’s nature writing about the austere beauty of the desert is not exactly W.H. Hudson, it enjoyable to read his advocacy of the simple outdoors life and nature’s ascetic lessons of self-reliance and resilience. Finally, as the novel was written in 1942, during WW2, the topical references give us postmoderns a sense of how the rationing of sugar, for example, influenced daily behavior of ordinary people.

Classic Travel: The Station

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men - Robert Byron

Robert Byron was born in England in 1905 into a family distantly related to Lord Byron. He attended Eton and Merton College, Oxford (left without a degree), and wrote several travel books, the most famous of which, The Road to Oxiana, shows up on many lists of best travel narratives. Byron had strong opinions and didn’t shrink from expressing them: “Isn't Robert simply killing,” wrote Nancy Mitford in a letter; “I love it when he talks about poetry & books, he seems to hate everything which ordinary people like!” 

Travel books were extremely popular between the wars. Every major British author of time released one: Peter Fleming, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene,  Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, to name only the best-known (see Paul Fussell’s overview of this great genre Abroad). The Station is basically a travel book, written when Byron was only 22 and released in 1928.

Age is key here because this is very much a young guy’s book. He’s passionately lyrical about the scenery so some passages; especially memorable is the ascent to the summit of Mount Athos, crowned by the Church of the Transfiguration.

We might, had we wished, have put out a hand to pluck the sky, have palmed away a cup of blue. For that broad illimitable space was now reality, possessing an interesting and unsuspecting texture. . .

His fervor to convince us non-experts to appreciate Byzantine buildings, decoration and other art is infectious and persuasive though sometimes the non-expert suspects specialists would quarrel with Byron’s assertions.

His language is often mannered, an unchecked fault of a youth bubbling over with knowledge and excitement about his topic. For instance, because his language is so pretentious and affected, he does not clearly explain the simple distinction of Idiorrhythmic and cenobitic monasticism.

He spares no cutting observation on range of topics. His faux outrage is pretty funny.

The food at lunch, though plentiful, was of a nastiness without precedent. Seeing me unable to swallow, Mark asked me why I did not eat the cheese. "Because I don't like it." "But it's delicious - just the same as we have in Scotland, called Crowdy." Thus the barbarians always reason. The veneer which they have acquired in the centres of the world falls off. Without a tremor they conjure up some filthy habit of their native fastnesses. And, not content with the very shame of the revelation, must needs elevate it to a standard for the universe. "Crowdy!" It has always been apparent to thinking people that some frightful custom, some orgiastic rite that would discredit the aborigines of Papua, has attended the childhood of those grim tribes among whom Albert and Victoria, in the guise of "Lord and Lady Churchill," were the Rosita Forbeses of their day. And now it is plain. "Crowdy!" These rancid, fretid curdles that I needs must eat "because we do in Scotland." Scotland? Where is Scotland?

Rosita Forbes was an explorer and travel writer, by the way.

He’s painfully honest and skeptical with people he meets, questioning them closely when they don’t make any sense:

Gripped by a vinous pentecost, I launched into speech: "We bathe every day, Father Stephen. Are there sharks here ?" "Sharks? They abound." "Have you seen them?" "I? No, I haven't seen them. But there are quantities." "But if you haven't seen them, how do you know?" "How do I know? They ate a deacon two hundred and fifty years ago. A lamb was set as a bait; they caught the shark, and there he was inside." Having long arranged, in case of natural and accessible death, to be buried in a mackintosh and manure the garden, I was appalled by this prospect of leaving my vile body, not even digested, in the stomach of a fish. And resolved, in the contemplative silence that followed, never to bathe again.

Waugh’s Vile Bodies came out in 1930 – I wonder if the expression was current then.

And anybody who’s lived overseas will connect with stories of odd requests from the locals. It really is best to be blunt.

A day or two later he began again: "A few years ago a man died here who had a number of English medals." (Greeks frequently obtained them in the war.) "Medals?" I replied, not wholly understanding the word. "Yes, medals," he repeated, drawing imaginary ribbons on his chest. "When you return to England, will you send me some?" "Send you medals? But how, and for what reason?" "Why not? Can't you go to the Foreign Office in London, and have them sent to me?" "But why? You have done nothing." "No, but I will. I will do great things. I love England." "You must do them first. Besides, the Foreign Office does not distribute medals." "The Foreign Office does not distribute medals? Who does?" "The King." "Have you visited the King?" "No. " "I visited our Kings three times." Pause. "But when you get back, you will send me those medals?" "No." Silence. Each gazes at the sea, breathing hard. "What can I do to be famous? I do want to be famous."

Later in the 1930s, as an in-your-face kind of guy with decided enthusiasms, dislikes and prejudices, at dinner parties he’d ask Nazi sympathizers if they were in German pay.

Unlike Evelyn Waugh whooping for Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Byron the staunch individualist hated fascism and appeasement. In a letter he wrote “I am going to have Warmonger put on my passport. These people are so grotesque, if we go to war it will be like fighting an enormous zoo.”

During World War II, with his cover as a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, he was dispatched on an intelligence mission to the Middle East. The ship he was on was torpedoed and sunk off the northwest coast of Scotland. His body was never found.

Mount TBR October Check-in

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

I've read only 25 out of my goal of 48. The classics challenge has really taken up my reading time: Classic Crimes, Brave New World Revisited, Shakespeare, Mansfield Park, and A Study in Scarlet. 

My favorite character so far has been Bertha Cool in Bats Fly at Dusk, a mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair. I was shocked that a publisher rejected the second Cool/Lam novel, The Knife Slipped, on the grounds that Bertha was too unlikable. In fact, not being a good egg or a toughie with a heart of gold make her a great whodunnit series character.

As for opposites in reading, let's go for city and country. The Trail to Ogallala was about a cattle drive and virtually all the others were set in cities. Curious, I should do something about the urban/rural divide in my reading.

At least the western was the longest one I read; I don't like doorstop mysteries. It was a western I would suggest even to people who think they don't like westerns.

The Trail to Ogallala lead me to Lord Mullion’s Secret about The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde. Her Bats Fly at Dusk over The Power House, pointing out The Corpse in the Snowman, a Freak that teaches The Simple Art of Murder to Women Sleuths who use dangerous knowledge for professional development.

Click the date to go to the review.

The Trail to Ogallala – Benjamin Capps
Posted: July 13

Lord Mullion’s Secret – Michael Innes
Posted: July 25

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner
Posted: July 31

Bats Fly at Dusk – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair
Posted: August 12

The Power House – William Haggard
Posted: August 20

The Corpse in the Snowman – Nicholas Blake
Posted: August 28

Freak - Michael Collings
Posted: September 5

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler
Posted: September 13

Women Sleuths - Various
Posted: September 25

Mount TBR #25

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Night at the Crossroads – Georges Simenon

This 1933 mystery opens with Chief Inspector Maigret and Sgt. Lucas, for seventeen hours, taking turns interrogating a person of interest who, miraculously, can’t be made to talk. The Dane Carl Andersen can stand up under a police grilling like nobody, good or bad, Maigret has ever seen. Given Andersen claims to know nothing about the corpse found in the garage of the house he’s renting and no evidence says otherwise, Maigret releases him.

Andersen has lived outside Paris at the Crossroads of the Three Widows. Only three buildings are here: the mansion Andersen rents where three widows once lived before their grisly ends; the upper-middle-class house of insurance agent Michonnet and his snoopy wife; and the filling station of Mr. Oscar and his crew of mechanics. Maigret’s investigation reveals plenty of odd goings-on within the walls of these three structures .

Carl Andersen and his sister Else have lived in the old manse for five years. She is rarely seen outside and rumor has it he locks her in a bedroom when he has to go out. Else Andersen, every inch the mysterious woman, has everything from a perfect figure to the scar on her right breast that humanizes her to child-like innocence. Neither Mrs. Michonnet, the devoted wife of the insurance broker, nor the submissive Mrs. Oscar, spouse of the hale fellow, can claim to be a femme fatale. Maigret knows the mystery hinges on Else. Clues are there to hear when a person of interest makes a slip, but only one listens closely enough - Maigret.

Tension permeates the story, with a lot more gunplay than in the later Maigrets. In this quiet rural corner, the damnedest things happen to human beings, but Simenon almost always points out the birds keep on twittering, the sun seldom fails to shine, drivers speed by on their way to do business and pursue pleasure in Paris and Orleans and all points in between. He mentions a half-dozen times rear red lights fading and disappearing in the distance. How little the world cares for the crazy business that goes on at a nondescript crossroads with three buildings. Given the world is largely indifferent to and forgetful of tragedies after the usual nine days, how consoling that our own social gaffes, mistakes, embarrassments, and even shames are forgotten, like pebbles sinking to the bottom of a pond.

This translation is from 2014 and is by Linda Coverdale. The translation Maigret and the Crossroads was by Robert Baldick and issued by Penguin in 1963. Penguin in probably right to commission new translations of Simenon’s novels not only for the sake of marketing but quality control – see an interesting discussion here.