Agatha Christie’s ‘Sparkling Cyanide’

Published in 1945, Sparkling Cyanide, unusually for a Christie novel, has no dedication. The detective figure is Colonel Race, in his fourth and final outing. He features first in The Man in the Brown Suit, and also in Cards on the Table and Death on the Nile. Race formerly held a senior position in M.I.5 and is a friend of Hercule Poirot. We’re in good hands.

This novel demolishes the widely held view that Agatha Christie wrote two dimensional characters. The first part of the book follows six people thinking over the events of a year ago, when Rosemary Barton, a lovely young heiress, committed suicide.

Christie writes vivid sketches of these fully-realised characters. We learn their innermost thoughts about the dead woman. Not every thought, mind you, for one of them may be a murderer. What is fascinating is the way in which the characters come to understand more about themselves by remembering the victim. As so often, distance brings surprising insights, often disconcerting. The writing is effortlessly natural, no exposition or significant facts shoe-horned in here.

The previous autumn, Rosemary Barton keeled over at a dinner held to celebrate her birthday. The other guests were her husband, young sister, a married couple, a bachelor friend and her husband’s secretary. A confidential secretary, male or female is almost a de rigeur figure in Golden Age ‘household’ mysteries. Each one has a possible motive for murder.

A year later, her widower, George Barton, arranges a dinner at the same restaurant table with the same guests, plus Colonel Race, who had been invited previously but unable to attend. A trap is being set, despite Race strongly advising Barton not to go ahead.

He had known George Barton ever since the latter’s boyhood. Barton’s uncle had been a country neighbour of the Races. Race was over sixty, a tall, erect, military figure, with sunburnt face, closely cropped iron-grey hair, and shrewd dark eyes.

The restaurant, the Luxembourg, is a smart West End establishment with dancing – to soft negro music – and entertainment. A description of the latter gives an interesting glimpse of the times.

Suddenly there was a roll of drums – the lights went down. A stage rose in the room. Chairs were pushed a little back, turned sideways. Three men and three girls took the floor dancing. They were followed by a man who could make noises. Trains, steam rollers, aeroplanes, sewing machines, cows coughing. He was a success. Lenny and Flo followed in an exhibition dance which was more of a trapeze act than a dance. More applause. Then another ensemble by the Luxembourg Six. The lights went up.

Colonel Race dominates the third part of the novel, together with Chief Inspector Kemp of Scotland Yard. Another intelligent, likable character, he worked under Superintendent Battle, another old friend to Agatha Christie fans. (In Cards on the Table, published in 1936, Battle worked with Poirot and Colonel Race).

The denouement is wonderful, yet again. Revealed after a succession of suspects in the frame, deceptively simple, a strong motive is concealed by a dazzling sleight of hand, worthy of a conjuror from the Magic Circle. Highly recommended, as always.

 

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‘The White Cottage Mystery’ by Margery Allingham

The White Cottage Mystery was Margery Allingham’s first detective fiction and her second novel. She began her writing career with Blackerchief Dick, an historical adventure, published in 1923, when she was only nineteen. The White Cottage Mystery was serialised in the Daily Express in 1927 and published as a novel a year later. After Allingham’s death in 1966, her sister Joyce revised the work to remove recaps etc. necessary in a serial.

Margery Allingham’s work is very individual among Golden Age fiction. Unquestionably a great detective novelist when she played it straight, she sometimes blurred the boundaries between detective fiction and rollicking adventure yarns, full of high jinks and eccentric enemies. You see this now and again in Agatha Christie’s earlier novels, such as The Secret Adversary and The Big Four, which also started life as a serial. Great fun, though I prefer Allingham’s more serious cases.

Although I’ve a great affection for Allingham’s work and Mr Campion, she’s my least favourite of the GA ‘big four.’ Someone has to be and that’s only because I love Christie, Sayers and Marsh even more. Margery Allingham was a wonderful writer and in The Tiger in the Smoke, (published in 1952), gave us one of the great London novels.

The White Cottage Mystery begins in Kent before moving to Paris and the South of France. A man described as a ‘mental torturer’ is shot dead in his neighbours’ house. Naturally enough, everyone in both households turns out to have a motive for his murder. As Mr Campion didn’t make his first appearance until the next novel, the detective is Chief Inspector Challoner of the Yard, assisted by his engaging son Jerry.

In a way, both are stock characters but none the worse for that. All humans really fall into one of a few types, however little we like to think so. And pre-war detective characters had to be products of their class and upbringing. So we have the Chief Inspector, keenly observant, wise and avuncular and Jerry, a typically young, enthusiastic, would-be detective, thoroughly decent and in love with one of the suspects. His father says of him:

‘Jerry,’ he said, ‘you have a quick eye, a fertile imagination, and the gift of application, but you’ll never make a detective – you’ve no ground work.’

Although Margery Allingham’s writing invariably had a freshness and vivacity, The White Cottage Mystery feels very much like the work of a young writer. The character of the murder victim is unremittingly black, other characters and plot lack the subtlety of her later work. Even the greats had to learn their craft and there’s an enjoyable liveliness about the narrative, with red herrings galore.

It’s fascinating to read the early work of a much-loved crime writer and see the origin of later ideas. Here we have the idea of a nefarious society – no more details as I don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading – but it’s the idea expanded upon in Look To The Lady, published in 1931. We also get the first appearance of Allingham’s cheery old lags, always so vividly written and culminating in Mr. Campion’s lovable side-kick, Magersfontein Lugg. Chief Inspector Challoner too, is not unlike Inspector Stanislaus Oates of later novels.

The revised novel retains the feeling of a serial. The opening plunges into action, quickly introducing the hero and the murder. There are short, titled chapters, each giving a concise piece of the jigsaw and ending on a cliff-hanger or hook. There’s no room for musing or build-up with the finished work 157 pages. Even so, Margery Allingham inserted some lovely sentences that set the atmosphere in a line or two. This is when the action shifts to Paris:

The car turned suddenly out of a noisy thoroughfare into a quiet old-fashioned avenue where the trees, green and dusty in the heat, nodded together before tall brown houses. They came to a standstill before a house whose windows were hung with old-fashioned looped plush curtains and showed the gleam of polished mahogany in their shadowed depths.

I enjoyed re-reading The White Cottage Mystery. It’s as good as many ‘standard’ inter-war mysteries with a well-reasoned plot and inventive solution. Most impressive for a twenty-three year old author. The foundations are there though a contemporary reader probably wouldn’t have sensed that the author was going to become one of the pre-eminent crime writers of the Golden Age and beyond.

 

 

 

My New Book “Villain” Out Now

As some of you know, when I’m not writing mystery stories, I write historical tales and my new one is now out. Here’s my latest…

Villain – the third in The Chronicles of Robin Hood series – is now available for pre-order on Kindle. Publication date is 30th June. The paperback is already available. Order before the publication date and you get either version discounted – the price goes up on the 30th.

Well, here’s what it’s about:

“AD 1203. Plantagenet England. A gripping historical novel and the third instalment of The Chronicles of Robin Hood. Robin of Loxley is in exile in the dark forests of the north, when a killing and a betrayal drive him back to his old battleground of Sherwood Forest.

A good man is slain and the full terror of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne is unleashed. With the King in Normandy and a people’s champion dead, only warriors outside the law are there to fight for the poor and desperate.

Outnumbered and surrounded by his enemies, Robin Hood is forced into waging a murderous campaign against the forces of evil.

Fighting against overwhelming odds, the outlaws divided and with a vicious warlord attacking the people of Sherwood, can Robin Hood and just a few of his men hold back the forces of oppression?

An exciting new historical novel by the author of Loxley and Wolfshead.”

To order just click on the link to pre-order the Kindle version. Look under “Books” for the paperback.

Please do share and tell your friends. Small publishers taking on the mighty publishing empire of Rupert Murdoch need word of mouth advertising.

For more details about my historical writing do check out my other blog at http://www.johnbainbridgewriter.wordpress.com 

https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_gScOjmIK7Tdn6O&asin=B071GR4N8D&tag=kpembed-20

 

Codename Kyril

Codename Kyril is a British television spy series first broadcast in 1989 and based on the novel A Man Named Kyril by John Trenhaile. I have to admit, I haven’t read the book, so I’m not sure whether the television series is close to the book.

We recently acquired this on DVD. For some reason I missed it on its 1989 transmission. But beware: the TV series was edited down for a TV film after the original transmission, and a great deal cut out. So if you get the DVD, make sure it’s the full version – 209 minutes.

Codename Kyril was probably the last great addition to the canon of Cold War spy dramas, and has the feel of a John Le Carre, though with more action sequences. This is a real edge of the seat programme, so take the phone off the hook and don’t answer the door. It was scripted by John Hopkins, who also co-scripted the TV version of Le Carre’s Smiley’s People.

It has some wonderful actors, notably Edward Woodward, Peter Vaughan, Ian Charleson, Denholm Elliot, Richard E. Grant and Joss Ackland – all perfectly cast and thoroughly believable in their roles.

Unlike a lot of Cold War spy dramas, you get to know who the traitors are early on. But this doesn’t take anything away from the tension. Indeed, it increases the suspense as you wonder when they’ll be found out.

Marshall Stanov, head of the KGB – a mesmerising performance by the late and great Peter Vaughan, discovers that there’s a traitor in the Moscow Centre leaking secrets to MI6. He despatches KGB agent Ivan Bucharensky (Ian Charleson) to London as a supposed defector with the codename Kyril. Stanov fakes a diary, purportedly by Bucharensky, which might suggest who the traitor is. The idea being to lure out the traitor.

The head of MI6 (Joss Ackland) orders his best agent Michael Royston (Edward Woodward) to capture Kyril and prevent the KGB from getting him back, lest he betrays the British mole in Moscow Centre.

In reality, of course, Kyril knows nothing, but his supposed knowledge makes him a target for both sides in this exciting war of nerves. Kyril is hunted both by MI6 and the KGB and his evasion methods and the use of tradecraft makes for gripping viewing.

And is the KGB the only organisation with a traitor in its ranks, or have the Russians penetrated MI6 as well?

Rather like in the best of Le Carre, the Great Game is played out like a game of chess, one move forwards and then another backwards.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot, because this is a programme you really do need to see for yourself.

The production values are excellent, the script literate and the direction by Ian Sharp stunning.

I’m thrilled the Cold War is over (I think!), but how we miss those Cold War spy dramas.

‘Heirs and Assigns’ by Marjorie Eccles

Published in 2015, Heirs and Assigns is an historical detective novel in the best British tradition. I really enjoyed this book, particularly for its clever plotting, evocative sense of place and understanding of its fascinating period, the late 1920s.

I’ve liked Marjorie Eccles’s work for many years – her Gil Mayo police procedurals set in The Black Country (in the English West Midlands) and stand-alones. It was a great shame that she wasn’t well-served by the BBC when they made a series using the Gil Mayo books. As I recall, they went for a quirky approach which was quite different from the novels and didn’t prove popular.

It’s interesting how hit and miss these things are. When Bentley Productions added a tongue-in-cheek spin to Caroline Graham’s excellent Chief Inspector Barnaby novels, they came up with Midsomer Murders… and the rest is history. (It didn’t hurt that the early episodes were adapted from the novels by renowned crime novelist and script-writer, Anthony Horowitz).

But had things gone differently, Marjorie Eccles’s Superintendent Mayo would be a famous name, along with the likes of Barnaby and Vera. Over the years I’ve too rarely seen her work in bookshops, she’s one of many authors whose books I discovered in libraries. These days they’re available as ebooks. I wish an enterprising production company would pick up the Inspector Reardon series. They’d make perfect Sunday night viewing.

Heirs and Assigns takes place in November 1928. Inspector Herbert Reardon and Sergeant Joe Gilmour live and work in Dudley at the heart of The Black Country. An industrial town of cramped, back-to-back terraces, mill chimneys and a permanent pall of gritty smoke. Many people think that The Black Country had its name from the smog but it actually comes from the wide seam of coal that the towns and villages are built upon. John – born and bred in the Black Country – says the coal seam itself used to be known locally as the thick.

The detectives are sent to investigate a suspicious death at Hinton Wyvering. A village close to the remote countryside along the Welsh Border, it’s with a day’s reach of Dudley and a world away in landscape. The owner of Bryn Glas, a Tudor farmhouse, now comfortable family home, died in the night, after his sixtieth birthday dinner. Someone among Pen Llewellyn’s family and friends is a murderer.

Bryn Glas sat on a wide natural plateau, a parcel of land scooped out of the side of the hill, at a point high above the river. Behind the hill the land rose even higher to the moors, the great windy spaces of heathland, where the undulating countryside became wilder, rockier and even dangerous at times, littered with disused quarry workings. A great outcrop to the east was a place of cliffs, caves and precipitous drops down to the river.

Marjorie Eccles vividly portrays life in a quiet, rural corner of England in the late 1920s. The way people lived and their very different attitudes are so well depicted. The house and village are beautifully described and you can picture every scene. Most of the village straggles along a hilltop above a river. Left behind even then, by the main road at its foot, leading to the town.

Inspector Reardon and his sergeant are appealing characters, both happily married. They work well together. Reardon is a compassionate, perceptive detective, carrying scars – in every sense – from his experiences in the Great War.

Ten years later, we see the times are changing. Old family estates have been broken up, village blacksmiths shoe horses and tinker with motor-cars. Inspector Reardon contemplates affording a two-seater Morris for his wife. Yet the consequences of the First World War are still affecting the villagers.

One resident is treated with suspicion as a former Conscientious Objector, women, who had temporary jobs while men were at the Front, resent being put aside in peacetime. Though in the year the novel is set, all women were finally given the vote, they are still struggling to forge careers on equal terms with men. Inspector Reardon’s wife Ellen is a former teacher who had to resign on marriage.

There are several intriguing motives for murder, secrets and old grudges for Reardon and Gilmour to uncover. When the answer is revealed, murderer and motive are very plausible. The plot is extremely well thought-out and psychologically sound.

Heirs and Assigns is the third title in the Inspector Reardon series. I’m looking forward to reading the earlier books and the latest title, The Property of Lies, published in May 2017.