Agatha Christie’s ‘Death on the Nile’

Published in 1937, Death on the Nile is one of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels, known for its intricate plot and exotic setting. Murder takes place aboard the Karnak, a luxurious Nile steamer on a week’s round-trip, sailing to Wâdi Halfa and the Second Cataract, with excursions en route to the spectacular temples of Abu Simbel.

Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers, escaping from the fogs, the greyness, the monotony of the constantly falling rain of a London winter. As always, he is dressed immaculately to suit the occasion.

He wore a white silk suit, carefully pressed, and a panama hat, and carried a highly ornamental fly whisk with a sham amber handle.

During an excursion, Poirot sports a white suit, pink shirt, large black bow tie and a white topee.

The first part of the novel introduces us to most of the passengers in a series of vividly-drawn vignettes. Some scenes are quite brief, though Agatha Christie makes every word tell with her usual economy of style. The lynch-pin of the Nile journey will be Linnet Ridgeway, a young heiress and society beauty, soon to be married and visiting Egypt on her honeymoon.

Readers can be fairly sure from the start that Linnet is going to be the murder victim. We’re shown an overwhelming reason for one character to hate her and given tantalising hints that others have a strong motive to remove her. It’s interesting that the original jacket copy on the Collins facsimile edition only implies that Linnet Ridgeway will be the victim. Much better than today’s blurbs which frequently give away too much of the plot.

When the passengers are gathered at their hotel, Poirot is aware of a feeling of inexorable danger, an inevitability about what lies ahead. There are indications throughout Agatha Christie’s writing that she was intrigued by the notion of fate – perhaps due to her extensive travels in the Middle East. Her titles Appointment With Death, The Moving Finger and Postern of Fate hark back to this theme.

Christie builds the growing tension skilfully for 130 pages until the murder finally takes place. These days I seem to see a lot of reviews that complain of a slow pace in detective novels. Writing guides deem it essential to hook the reader with instant compelling action. Must be my age, because I like crime fiction where the author takes all the space they wish to show characters and setting. I really enjoy a lengthy build-up – a trademark of superb crime writers such as P.D James – and think currently fashionable style ‘rules’ are a kind of dumbing down, symptomatic of our sound-bite society.

The suspects being trapped together on the steamer, makes an interesting variation on the classic enclosed country house setting. The Karnak is large enough to have an evocative thirties’ glamour with dressing cabins, an observation saloon and smoking room, yet compact enough to feel claustrophobic. The descriptions of temple visits, the heat and passing scenery feel authentic, based as they must have been on the author’s memories.

At the half-way point, an old friend of Poirot joins the steamer for the return journey. Colonel Race assisted Poirot in Cards on the Table, published a year earlier and aids him again in the investigation. Race, a senior British agent, is on board on his own mission. A foreshadowing of the growing awareness of the coming war and the addition of enemy agents into Agatha Christie’s novels. (This reaches its height in N or M? Published in 1941).

The plot is unusually complex for Christie, with several small mysteries for Poirot to unravel along the way. Despite the tense atmosphere, Christie manages to include some quiet humour and more than one romance. Her liking for romance and happiness for young people shines through, as it does in many of her novels. It’s evident that Christie had great sympathy for youth, particularly the awkward and the over-looked.

The break-up of her marriage to Archie Christie and her life-long shyness are widely known. Even when happily settled with Max Mallowan, it’s easy to imagine Agatha Christie being the quiet people-watcher in the corner. Noticing what others miss, full of compassion and kindness, very like Hercule Poirot.

The central murder plot stands or falls, more than most, on its believable psychology. It succeeds magnificently, this is Christie’s understanding of human nature at its most acute. A brilliantly cunning plot device is one that she used in another novel – which of course, I won’t mention! Nothing wrong with authors doing a spot of recycling, especially when they trail-blazed the twists in the first place.

Death on the Nile is acclaimed as one of Agatha Christie’s greatest triumphs. I hadn’t read it since my teens and had a job to put it down. A deeply satisfying read.

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The Limehouse Golem

Last week, we went to see the film The Limehouse Golem, based on Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, which I blogged about a couple of years ago. (I’ve put my original blog on the novel below to save you searching.) 

It’s a terrific take on the novel, with some great acting, a literate script by Jane Goldman, and some excellent sets that take you right back into Victorian London. The photography is superb.

I’m not going to say much about the plot, because I’ve mentioned the salient parts in the book blog below. Jane Goldman has made a few minor alterations to the plot for film purposes, but these make no difference to the story.

I’m always wary of filmed Victorian crime stories, because the slightest error jars. But there are no errors here. I was completely absorbed by the telling of the tale. Rarely have I seen a crime novel set in this period so well done.

This film stars Bill Nighy as Inspector Kildare, his role slightly expanded from the novel. The part was to have been played by Alan Rickman – one of our favourite actors – who sadly died early in the project. But Nighy makes an excellent Kildare, every inch the Victorian policeman. And how good to see Nighy get a lead credit.

There’s a great deal of British acting talent here – familiar faces such as Daniel Mays, Clive Russell, Eddie Marsan and Henry Goodman. All looking as though they’ve emerged from the streets of Limehouse.

But the film rises with the talents of two newcomers to me. Douglas Booth is quite stunning in the role of Dan Leno, totally believable as perhaps the greatest of music hall showmen. I’ve always had a great interest in Leno, a fascinating individual who forged the way we perceive popular entertainment of this kind, from straight entertainment, jests and songs, pantomime to burlesque, Leno was the grand master. His relatively early death in 1904 shocked the nation.

The tragedy of music hall before this period is that we have only scratchy recordings of some of the best acts (we’ve got just such a recording of Leno). Not being able to see these stars visually makes it hard to grasp how good they might have been. I’m old enough to have seen some of the early twentieth century stars live on the stage. They were good indeed – we’ll not see their likes again. But few of the Victorians were filmed, then only silently.

But Douglas Booth surely captures a great deal of Leno’s magic. Here’s an actor to watch out for in the future.

The key role of Elizabeth Cree goes to Olivia Cooke. Cooke is as good as Booth in portraying the growing confidence of a music hall singer, caught up in the murderous twists of the tale.

Try and see it at the cinema if you can with an audience around you – more like a music hall atmosphere than watching it at home on DVD.

Though we’ll be adding it to our DVD collection when it’s out.

Here’s my blog on the original novel…

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem has now been out for over twenty years. Given my interests in Victorian crime and the history of the music hall I’ve always been meaning to read it.

Now I’ve finally got round to it and I can say that it’s a terrific read, evoking a real feel of the Victorian underworld in Ackroyd’s usual and very vivid writing style.

As a writer Ackroyd is well-known not just as a novelist but as an historian and biographer. If you haven’t read it I commend to you his London – A biography – perhaps the best of all recent histories of the city.

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is not your usual crime read. It’s a deeply literary novel which happens to be about crime and the low-life and middle-class existence of Victorian London. And there’s a lot more to it than that. Ackroyd has a way of plunging you deep into this imagined vision of a past age.

For those who don’t know, Dan Leno was perhaps the greatest star of Victorian music hall. But he is not the only real-life character encountered in this book. We also see the struggling writer George Gissing and a glimpse of Karl Marx during his London exile.

This is a book which begins with a hanging and works backwards. We see how his key character Elizabeth Cree progresses as a music hall turn, the murders of a serial killer, the legend of the Jewish golem, a trial at the Old Bailey and pages from the diary of John Cree delineating many aspects of Victorian life – for this is a novel of multiple viewpoints.

Ackroyd is so very good at exploring the sinister hinterlands of the Victorian underworld. The author’s great knowledge of London shines through on every page. Terrible secrets are revealed and the ending is just stunning.

A novel you’ll want to read more than once – thoroughly recommended!

The Third William Quest Novel

I’m now writing the third book featuring my series character William Quest, which hopefully will be out at the end of the year. Quest will find himself a long way from London fighting against new enemies and even greater dangers in York, one of England’s oldest cities.

York Minster which plays a significant part in the new Quest novel

In the London novels (see below) Quest had the advantage over his enemies of knowing every street and alley. But York is new to him, so he’s disadvantaged from the start. And it is in York’s winding medieval streets and snickets that he faces a particular and menacing foe.

As York is one of our favourite places, I’m very much enjoying setting a book there. It’s a wonderful setting for a mystery adventure.

If you haven’t read the first two books in the series, do please click on the links. They’re both out in paperback and on the Kindle eBook reader for your smartphone, Kindle or laptop – just download the free app when you order the books. And if you have read the books and enjoyed them, I’d really appreciate it if you would leave a quick review on the Amazon sales pages.

Leaving reviews helps all Indie Authors stay in business and keep writing. 

Please do tell your friends and fellow readers. Word of mouth is the very best form of advertising.

 

 

‘The Spy’s Wife’ by Reginald Hill

The empty avenue curved away between green-hedged villas, quiet and sinister as an old film set. Then a dog padded purposefully out of a gateway, and a milk-float whined along the gutter.

The Spy’s Wife was published in 1980 as one of Reginald Hill’s stand-alones. Much as I love his acclaimed Dalziel and Pascoe police procedural series, this is one of my favourites among his canon. Throughout his writing career, begun in 1970, Hill was writing stand-alones alongside his series, usually thrillers. In the ’70s and ‘8os, these were often brought out under his pen-name Patrick Ruell, though latterly they’ve been repackaged.

Reginald Hill was a very interesting thriller-writer and if you’ve only read Dalziel and Pascoe, it’s well-worth seeking out these other titles. I think it’s fair to say his early thrillers are less well-known than his detective fiction and later standalones such as his final novel, The Woodcutter. As far as I know, The Spy’s Wife was always published under his real name.

The Spy’s Wife isn’t an easy novel to describe as there’s a great deal to uncover. The title is a conundrum in itself, being both apt and misleading. Set in the 1970s, this is the story of Molly Keatley, a happily-married housewife in her thirties. Her cosy life in Westcliff-on-Sea collapses like a house of cards one morning when her husband Sam returns home for a few minutes and dashes off again. Her next caller informs her that Sam is a Soviet spy and traitor. No spoiler – this comes on the first page.

This is a character-driven narrative and despite a compelling plot, it’s far from your average thriller. Neither can it truly be described as an espionage novel, although an investigator from a shadowy government department – never named as M.I.5 – plays a major role. There’s no tradecraft here. This is about the nature of lies, truth and illusion. The human cost of spying as seen by an outsider.

Molly is a Yorkshire lass who, like many young girls in the Swinging Sixties, left her home town to work amid the beckoning lights of London. In the novel she returns to her ageing parents in Doncaster, where Reginald Hill taught for many years as a college lecturer. His affection for Yorkshire folk with their no nonsense attitude and core of pragmatic, understated stoicism shines through the novel. At times, Molly’s stock of pithy, common sense is reminiscent of a certain Fat Man, beloved of Hill’s fans.

There’s a great deal of reflection, wisdom and humour in this novel. It’s concerned with the accommodations we all must make as we navigate the pot-holes and craters on our path. The choices we make as we try to find the best way to get by in this baffling business we call life. Molly gets to revisit the road not taken and rediscovers an inner strength as she determines to take control of events. A profound and thought-provoking read, within a page-turner of a story that’s tense and unpredictable.

Re-reading The Spy’s Wife after many years, I was so impressed with how well Reginald Hill could write about women. All the more so, as I’ve never enjoyed Ellie Pascoe in the Dalziel and Pascoe novels. My heart always sank when she made an entrance and the titles where she played a major part, such as Arms and the Women were the ones I enjoyed least. To be fair, I think she was all too familiar, just not my type!

Molly Keatley’s ‘voice’ is completely believable. She springs off the page, as do all the characters, particularly Molly’s parents. As I read, I kept thinking what a good television drama this would make. Didn’t get as far as imagining casting. My fantasy casting – a game we often play – mostly involves actors long gone or retired.

The novel’s sense of place is wonderful. When written, of course, Reginald Hill was looking back only a few years and he captured life in the 1970s, over-hung by the Cold War, in evocative detail. I loved every page and despite recalling the main plot points, found it hard to put down.

Fans of Dalziel and Pascoe know Reginald Hill’s writing was intelligent and compassionate. Throughout The Spy’s Wife, there’s an underlying sense of his wisdom and humanity. This is the quality of writing that makes the prejudice against ‘genre’ novels, as opposed to ‘literary’ novels, look ridiculous.

At the time of posting, The Spy’s Wife isn’t out as an ebook and – as far as I know – is only available new from American publishers Felony & Mayhem. I’m greatly indebted to them for several much-wanted British titles which should still be in print in the U.K. (Though I wish they wouldn’t update Golden Age novels to politically correct language). And this time, their jacket copy is a little misleading. The Keatleys live in a suburb of Southend-on-Sea, not London.

 Be prepared to go in a different direction from thriller/espionage labels and The Spy’s Wife is a superb read. Highly recommended.

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A Dark Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine

Published in 1986, A Dark-Adapted Eye was the first novel legendary crime writer Ruth Rendell wrote under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. The name comes from her middle name and her great-grandmother’s maiden name. In interviews, Rendell said that she wanted to differentiate these novels from her other work. They would explore the psychological motives behind crime in greater depth, particularly the secrets among families.

In the introduction to a new edition, Val McDermid calls this the novel that changed the thriller landscape. A Dark-Adapted Eye is a whydunit, its structure unconventional, even among novels of psychological suspense. A compelling, enigmatic mystery that explores an old crime and a deadly accurate study of British mores in the mid-twentieth century.

The opening chapter is a master-class in fine writing. We know from the first paragraph that the narrator’s aunt is being hanged that morning. The reader is immersed in the tiny details of a home in the early 1950s as the clock ticks inexorably towards eight – the time at which British judicial hangings took place.

The layers of a rich and complex plot begin peeling back and it takes much of the novel to know who was murdered. (Or rather, that was clearly Ruth Rendell’s intention but I note new editions give away too much on the jacket copy). Readers were meant to surmise, even be fairly sure though not entirely so.

Faith Severn is contacted by a biographer who is writing a book about her aunt Vera Hillyard. This sets her on a quest of remembering, over a third of a century later, the childhood visits she made to the cottage in rural Essex. Home of her two devoted aunts, over-thin, nervy, scolding Vera and Eden, fifteen years her junior. Eden, only six years older than Faith, lovely to look at and domestically accomplished, became the young Faith’s role model.

The narrative deftly weaves between past and present as Faith reexamines her memories through adult eyes in an attempt to work out what was really going on. Her insights take us beneath the surface of a conventional English family through the War and into the early 1950s. A life of rationing and thriftiness, when respectability and conformity meant everything. No one ‘washed their dirty linen in public’, keeping up appearances mattered and few suspected what went on behind the starched net curtains. Ruth Rendell was superb at evoking that time, still within living memory, but a vanished way of life.

It seems to be hard for some people today to relate to how vastly attitudes have changed in Britain since the mid-twentieth century. Based on reviews I’ve seen, some readers view the plots of vintage detective fiction with today’s liberal attitudes and can’t understand how the strait-jacket of convention affected people’s lives.

The social history is part of my love for vintage crime novels and one reason I write historical detective fiction. I’m fascinated by a long-gone Britain with its plethora of motives for murder which no longer apply. Novels – perhaps especially crime stories – are as important as non-fiction at recording social history.

The narrative of A Dark-Adapted Eye is brilliantly constructed, often cryptic, gradually filling in the gaps in the reader’s knowledge. The story makes the reader question the nature of memory and interpretation. Memory itself is an unreliable narrator and can our understanding of events only ever be partial?

This is a novel on a slow fuse – which won’t appeal to everyone. Throughout a slow build-up, there’s a feeling of claustrophobic tension as Faith’s recall nears the crime. The characterisation is masterly and the ending ambivalent. Two alternatives are set out, almost as they would be in a courtroom and the reader is left to decide. Frustrating to readers who want a clear feeling of closure but much more true to life. A Dark-Adapted Eye is a novel for grown-ups and one that lingers in the mind.

I’ll leave the last word to another legendary crime novelist and old friend of Ruth Rendell. Couldn’t agree more.

This is a rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel, which combines excitement with psychological subtlety. I salute a deeply satisfying achievement – P.D. James

The Murder in Romney Marsh by Edgar Jepson

Edgar Jepson (1863-1938) was a popular detective novelist of the Golden Age. He translated Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and also wrote supernatural tales. Jepson was the grandfather of novelist and scriptwriter, Fay Weldon.

The Murder in Romney Marsh was first published in 1929. The chapters have cryptic titles, a popular device at the time. A businessman named Robert Garfield has been murdered in the village of St Joseph on Romney Marsh. Garfield lived in London and used his country home, Applecross Farm, as a shooting-box. James Carthew, a young inspector is sent from Scotland Yard to assist the local police, who are -in time-honoured fashion – baffled.

Inspector Carthew has a jaunty air about him. He’s been waiting for a chance to prove himself and feels this case may be it. At first, he passes himself off as a young gentleman who wished to amuse himself on a holiday. When he first examines the murder scene, he pretends he’s out rough shooting, looking for spent cartridges.

I stuck my eyeglass in my eye – nothing gives a man an air of greater simplicity than an eyeglass properly used. Has he been reading Dorothy L. Sayers?

Superintendent Goad, Carthew’s boss dislikes him because:

He preferred men of his own kind, men who had put in from seven to twelve years as ordinary police constables before they passed into C.I.D., whereas, after being demobilized and spending my gratuity, I had only spent two years as an ordinary constable before I passed into it. Also he did not like in me what I once heard a business man call ‘The Public School Taint’ in me.

Inspector Carthew has a conceited manner, full of confidence, though he is astute. He doesn’t want to share his findings with Collins, the local policeman. He’s a bit of a user and very keen to get full credit at the Yard for his work.

He narrates the story in first person, not the most common choice for detective novels. It gives an immediacy as the reader knows all his thoughts on deduction but we lose a more rounded view of what’s happening. The structure has to stay completely linear. I noticed how everything goes Carthew’s way. From the moment he arrives on the Marsh, he finds one clue leads to another. The jigsaw fits in place without setbacks.

Carthew is an interesting character. For a Scotland Yard inspector, he isn’t wholly moral. Once he falls for a suspect, he’s prepared to bend the rules, holding back facts from Collins and obliquely steering the lady out of trouble. We’re left to wonder whether Superintendent Goad dislikes Carthew for being ‘cocky’ and not one of the lads. He’d never stand for rule-bending so he can’t know about that.

Or is Goad prejudiced about a personable young chap with an old school tie and fast promotion? For there’s something likable about Carthew and he is on the side of justice – if not the letter of the law. Jepson’s characterisation makes Inspector Carthew very believable and way above a stock detective.

All the village characters are well-drawn, although a couple of foreign villains with exaggerated accents seemed strangely familiar. There are some interesting glimpses of class attitudes of the time. The local vicar is an old comrade of Carthew’s from the War. Here he discusses the vicar’s step-daughters who are hard up, have nothing useful to do and rarely meet anyone new:

Wouldn’t it be better for them to get a job – shorthand and typewriting or something of that kind?

No, such jobs lead to nothing. And then it would mean their living alone in a big town and long hours and poor pay and associating with people of a lower class.

The novel has a convincing atmosphere of Romney Marsh – in Kent, on the border with Sussex. There are some lovely descriptions of the haunting, flat landscape with its autumn mists seeping over the sea wall, plank-bridged dykes, warm-tiled cottages and fine, ancient churches. The Marsh is sheep country and its shepherds are known as lookers. A sinister name, harking back to the area’s smuggling history. This is a fascinating area, for ever associated with Russell Thorndike’s wonderful Doctor Syn stories.

There’s much to enjoy in The Murder in Romney Marsh, especially if you want to get a feel for what rural England was like between the wars. This is a good, escapist, detective yarn. A typical example of the kind so popular with readers trying to forget the horrors of the Great War and blot out the shadow of the war to come. It isn’t too hard to get the murderer though the conclusion is very well-reasoned and the outcome for Inspector Carthew is surprising. Well worth a read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Holy Disorders’ by Edmund Crispin

Holy Disorders, published in 1946, is the second Gervase Fen mystery by Bruce Montgomery (1921-78), writing under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin. Montgomery is considered to be one of the last of the great Golden Age novelists. He was much admired by his friend Agatha Christie.

Edmund Crispin stands out among his peers for the sparkling humour he brought to his work. His amateur sleuth Gervase Fen – a Professor of English at Oxford – was partly based on Montgomery’s Oxford tutor, W.G. Moore. Fen is eccentric, mercurial, by turns charming or pithy. At one point, Fen spends some time running through suspects’ alibis with his friend, Geoffrey Vintner.

‘Do you get it?’ He asked.
‘No’, said Geoffrey.
‘Nincompoop,’ said Fen.

Fen has the wit of Peter Wimsey, the facetiousness of Rory Alleyn and the capacity for getting in a mess of Bertie Wooster. He takes up enthusiasms rather like Toad from The Wind in the Willows and he frequently quotes the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Gervase Fen is as idiosyncratic as Sherlock Holmes, as brilliant a detective and just as lovable to the reader.

Holy Disorders is set in the hot summer of 1940 with the Battle of Britain dominating the headlines. Beginning in London, we follow Geoffrey Vintner, a confirmed bachelor, organist and composer, on an eventful journey down to the Devon cathedral town of Tolnbridge. He’s perhaps something of a self-portrait as Bruce Montgomery was a bachelor for most of his life and a composer of church music. (He was also well-known for his film scores, composing the music for several Carry On comedies).

Vintner is summoned by Fen to be a temporary replacement for the cathedral organist, who’s been attacked and put out of action. Along with this breakfast telegram, Vintner receives an anonymous letter, warning him not to go to Tolnbridge.

He felt as unhappy as any man without pretension to the spirit of adventure might feel who has received a threatening letter, accompanied by sufficient evidence to suggest that the threats contained in it will probably be carried out.

Before leaving London, Vintner is waylaid while purchasing a butterfly net for Fen – insects of several kinds play a significant part in the novel. His journey manages to be both farcical and menacing. He’s saved from attack by Henry Fielding, a young man who is heir to an earldom and straight out of Wodehouse. He’s looking for adventure and inveigles himself into this one, accompanying Vintner to Tolnbridge. Fielding explains why he hasn’t joined up:

They won’t have me. I volunteered last November but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket.
Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight…I want to do something active about this war – something romantic. I tried to join the Secret Service but it was no good.

Crispin was an extremely accomplished writer, a real all-rounder. His sense of atmosphere is beautifully written. Settings such as Paddington Station and the journey by steam train, summer evenings in the gardens of Tolnbridge and its surrounding countryside are lyrically described. The author settled in South Devon and was obviously thinking of that coast’s estuaries when he described Tolnbridge. Its topography bears some resemblance to Exeter at the head of the Exe estuary, though only partial. Too much is imagined to be a thinly-disguised version.

When Vintner arrives in Tolnbridge, there’s an M.R. Jamesian feel to the narrative. His hostess at the clergy-house explains that the organist has been rendered insane:

An empty cathedral isn’t a good place to be in all night– even for the unimaginative.

Athough Holy Disorders has a lively, humorous tone, there’s constantly a much darker atmosphere lurking beneath. It reminds me of the way Agatha Christie creates a sense of evil in many of her plots. I wonder if this is a trick they ever discussed? Beneath the larky fun – the feeling that P.G Wodehouse has tried his hand at a murder mystery set in a Trollopian Cathedral Close – there’s an undercurrent of cruelty and malice.

Along the way the narrative is a delight, in places laugh-out-loud funny. Gervase Fen doesn’t appear for seventy-odd pages. His entrance is built up, pantomine fashion, the reader constantly hearing about his latest exploits and reading his messages. When he does burst in, he soon breaks the famous fourth wall, stepping out of the action a moment to address the readers, as though we’re in on the joke. Rarely seen at the time, though Leslie Charteris does this engagingly in his Simon Templar stories.

The novel is full of word-play and literary allusions in a way that reminds me of the much-missed Reginald Hill’s work. You feel that Edmund Crispin was having fun as he wrote, treating his readers as intellectual equals and thoroughly enjoying himself.

Another instance of Crispin having fun and breaking the rules is when he describes the reading matter lying about the clergy-house – John Dickson Carr (whom he admired), Nicholas Blake, Margery Allingham and Gladys Mitchell.

He also has the local inspector say:

The Chief Constable got on to the Yard. I believe they were going to send down one of their best men – fellow called Appleby.

Much to Fen’s indignation. (Sir John Appleby, Michael Innes’s famous detective). Fen, being competitive, determines to solve the case before the Yard – that well-known trope – with all the enthusiasm Morse might show for a free pint of real ale and a fiendish cryptic crossword.

Holy Disorders is hard to describe or categorise. A glorious romp, an adventure yarn, a Golden Age thriller, it’s also an intriguing whodunit with a final gathering and a chilling ‘reveal’ worthy of Poirot.

That probably sounds like too much in the pot but trust me, you’re in the hands of a master. Edmund Crispin’s mysteries are a dazzling treat, as fresh and enjoyable now as the day they were first published.

  

‘A True and Faithful Brother’ by Linda Stratmann

I always like Linda Stratmann’s Victorian-set Frances Doughty Mysteries and very much enjoyed her latest novel, A True and Faithful Brother, published in 2017.

They’re excellent murder mysteries enjoyed at random, though – as in most detective series – readers will gain a greater understanding of Frances and her world if they’re taken in order. A True and Faithful Brother provides answers to an intriguing sub-plot which begins with the first entry in the series, The Poisonous Seed, published in 2011. It’s been a long wait but all the better for it.

The series is based in the West London district of Bayswater in the early 1880s. An interesting, fresh choice of setting and an area of London I haven’t seen used in other Victorian-set detective novels. Bayswater is described as a small town-like community within the capital. Linda Stratmann’s impeccable research gives a vividly authentic sense of what the area would have been like at that time.

By the late Victorian age, many of the defining features of twentieth century Bayswater were in place, including the shops of prosperous Westbourne Grove and William Whiteley’s famous, ever-expanding department store. Real buildings and personalities are often mentioned – such as the local coroner – and there’s always an interesting author’s note on the historical background.

A True and Faithful Brother gets off to a flying start with a twist on the classic locked-room mystery. A retired businessman and philanthropist has vanished from a darkened room during a Freemason’s Lodge meeting. The exits were locked, bolted and guarded, leaving a perplexing puzzle.

Miss Frances Doughty, a young lady detective, is asked by a former client to investigate and find the missing man. Frances is a very likable character, intelligent, determined and lives up to her name. At this stage in the seventh book in the series, she’s well-known to the Bayswater community, local police and press as a successful private detective.

However, events in her last case – detailed in Death In Bayswater – have caused her to lose her confidence somewhat. As the novel opens, she’s decided to give up criminal work and stick to servant problems, long-lost relatives, missing pets and other safe domestic cases. When a body is discovered, Frances has a very personal reason for once again getting involved with a case of murder.

Series’ readers come to know an endearing bunch of recurring characters, led by Sarah, Frances’s loyal assistant and companion. I like the local police inspector and the network of enterprising errand boys who act as Frances’s ‘eyes and ears,’ rather like the Baker Street irregulars.

A theme runs throughout the novels, of the difficulties faced by single women making their way in later Victorian society. Frances, young, with little security, is striving be taken seriously in a male-dominated world. She and Sarah are surviving on hard work and initiative in a society where many think their profession is unsuitable for women.

We learn a lot about the changing times. Frances and Sarah support the emerging women’s suffrage movement and take exercise classes with self-defence in mind. Linda Stratmann describes this fascinating background in a light, engaging style, weaving seamlessly with the murder plot.

The narrative is gripping and Frances has to face great danger – of more than one kind – before a satisfying conclusion. The Frances Doughty Mysteries are a very enjoyable blend of Victorian setting, rich in authentic detail with intelligent, complex plots, well-rounded characters and a most engaging heroine. I look forward to her next adventure.

 

Guest Post by T.G. Campbell, Author of the Bow Street Society Mysteries

We’re delighted to have a guest post this week by crime novelist T.G. Campbell, author of the wonderful Bow Street Society mysteries.

We love the two books in the series so far, The Case of The Curious Client and The Case of The Lonesome Lushington. They bring an engagingly fresh approach to historical detective novels with a collaborative sleuthing team of vividly-drawn, lovable characters. The cases are intriguing page-turners with Conan Doyle-style twists and the rich setting of 1890s Victorian London is lovingly evoked –

MURDER OF THE LONE DETECTIVE

Admirers of the World’s Greatest Detective would agree there is only one Sherlock Holmes. Purveyors of the English Golden Age of Crime Fiction would admit there can be only one Belgian solving crime with his “little grey cells”. Skip over the pond to the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles and the likelihood is you’ll think of Humphrey Bogart’s Phillip Marlowe. What do all these detectives have in common? They stand alone in their respective worlds as the pinnacle of deductive reasoning. They also have the tendency to keep their thoughts to themselves while the readers, like Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings, scramble to make any sense of things. Yes, we, as readers, are shown precisely what Holmes, Poirot, and Marlowe see & hear but we are often left awestruck by not only a mystery’s solution but also the ingenuity of the Detective’s deductive reasoning.

Whenever we read a mystery featuring any of these Detectives we bring to it the subconscious expectation that it will be they who will lift the veil of confusion and resolve the conflict caused by the murder. They, and Detectives like them, may be assisted by others along the way but, generally, the sidekick doesn’t step in at the last moment to announce the correct identity of the murderer. This rule applies even in novels where the Detective openly airs his internal musings to a trusted colleague or friend. In short, these lone Detectives are put on a plinth as masters of their craft by us as readers – and there isn’t anything wrong with that. In fact, it is this consistent element within these stories which serves to reassure us that all will be well in the end. We have seen the Detective work his/her magic previously which makes us confident he/she will do so again.

What if there was more than one Detective, though? Furthermore, what if there were several Detectives who stepped into a mystery series only when they were required? No longer would you have this omnipotent Detective who always kept his cards close to his chest. Instead you would have a collective whose very success relied on their relying upon one another’s abilities. The Detective’s plinth would be lowered and we, as readers, would feel equal to the Detectives we were reading about rather than to their bumbling sidekick.

This is the idea I wanted to explore when I created the Bow Street Society. Every one of its members has been recruited, from the public, because they hold a great deal of knowledge in a particular field and/or are adept at a specific skill. For example, the first book, The Case of The Curious Client, features a Magician, Architect, and Veterinary Surgeon among the Detectives investigating the central mystery. They are not hard-boiled Private Detectives, retired police officers, or incredibly scientifically minded. They are, in short, average. Yet it is their averageness, and passion for their chosen occupation, which makes them perfect for solving crime. For example, an autopsy performed by the Veterinary Surgeon on a dead cat in The Case of The Curious Client helps the collective reach the final solution. I consciously made the decision that there wouldn’t be one, lone member of the Society who would deduce the solution. That is why, when it is given, they have all played a part in reaching the truth.

When it came to the Society’s next book, The Case of The Lonesome Lushington, I wanted to go one step further. The Architect, Lawyer, and Veterinary Surgeon who’d appeared in the first mystery were not included or even mentioned in the second. For the plain and simple reason their skills were not applicable to the case so they weren’t asked to investigate it. In the first book I’d stepped away from the idea of the lone, omnipotent Detective but in the second I’d stepped away from the idea of a static, rigid collective of Detectives, too.

One could argue that connections with characters can’t be formed if they’re not included in every book. I would beg to differ. Who is assigned to a case is decided upon by the Society’s Clerk, Miss Rebecca Trent. The reader doesn’t know who she’ll choose until the case has been accepted. Therefore part of the intrigue is discovering if your favourite character will be selected or not – this time. I fully intend to have reappearances of the Lawyer, Architect, and Veterinary Surgeon in future Bow Street Society books. Any connection the reader makes with particular characters would therefore never be in vain.

There are, within this fluid collective, core characters that’ll always be featured to safeguard the reassurance of order, however. Miss Trent is one (she being the only person who knows the name of every Society member) and Mr Samuel Snyder, the Society’s Driver, is another. It must be pointed out that, though Miss Trent is the Society’s Clerk, she isn’t a Detective. Instead she organises and disciplines the members whenever necessary but otherwise keeps to the side-lines. Mr Snyder, on the other hand, is a Detective who works with the other members in addition to driving them around.

The Bow Street Society is designed as a reflection of us all. Within its universe the mundane becomes pivotal and we discover we all have the potential to solve the most baffling of crimes. The lone detective, or rather the idea of it, is murdered and we are all, quite simply, the ones whodunnit. Not because we despise the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Phillip Marlowe but because we all, deep down, want to be as brilliant as they are. In the 1896 London of the Bow Street Society, you now can be. The only question that remains therefore is this: what would be your field of expertise as a Bow Street Society member?

Biography

T.G. Campbell (short for Tahnee Georgina) wrote her first crime fiction story at the age of sixteen as a gift for her best friend. At only 40 pages long it fell considerably short of a “novel” but it marked the beginning of a creative journey that would eventually spawn the first of the Bow Street Society mystery novels; The Case of the Curious Client.

In April 2017 The Case of The Curious Client won a Book Award with Fresh Lifestyle Magazine (http://www.freshlifestylemag.com/book-award-the-case-of-the-curious-client-a-bow-street-society-mystery.html ).

Website: www.bowstreetsociety.com

 

Peter Lovesey’s ‘The Reaper’

Peter Lovesey’s superb stand-alone, The Reaper, is an unusual take on ‘clerical crime’. It’s a novel I absolutely love and cannot recommend too highly. Although it was only published seventeen years ago, in 2000, The Reaper has much in common with certain Golden Age novels – it reminds me of Francis Iles’ work – and classic films.

This is the story of a very unusual rector, the Reverend Otis Joy, whose parish is the rural Wiltshire village of Foxford. The novel is prefaced with a revealing quotation from Samuel Butler:

Vouchsafe O Lord, to keep us this day without being found out.

Very apt because this story isn’t a whodunit, it’s a will-they-get-away-with-it? The rector is a serial-killer.

Have faith – we try hard not to reveal spoilers and ruin anyone’s enjoyment of a novel new to them. This information is in the synopsis and we see the rector spring into action as early as page eight.

Otis Joy is young, charming and sets the female hearts aflutter among his congregation. He fills pews, delivers charismatic, actor-style sermons and throws himself into good works. Almost all the villagers think he’s by far the best rector they’ve ever had.

Peter Lovesey has great fun in taking a classic English detective novel setting and turning it on its head. All the usual suspects are here, the vicar/rector himself being a stock character from vintage crime. Only this time, he’s our anti-hero. Love interest is supplied by young, unhappily married parishioner, Rachel and her femme fatale pal, Cynthia, the Chair of the Women’s Institute. Lovesey is wickedly good at female characters, not always the case with male writers.

The plot is played out amid the village year, the summer fête, harvest supper, jumble sales and carol-singing. The villagers are rife with speculation, gossip and a touch of malice. Where does their priest disappear to, on his day off?

The rector ad libs brilliantly through the unexpected scandal of the Bishop’s unfortunate demise. However things get complicated when the parish treasurer gives up his post and an obnoxious young accountant in the confirmation class, fancies taking it on.

The scene is set for a devilishly clever, black comedy, where you really shouldn’t laugh but you do. And you really shouldn’t root for an amoral serial-killer but you do. In the same way we cheer on the marvellous Denis Price in Ealing Studios’ Kind Hearts and Coronets. The rector’s life starts to unravel in a series of Peter Lovesey’s trademark twists, with a rising body count and desperate complications.

The novel unfolds like a deliciously dark Hitchcock. Alfred would have loved this. The Reaper belongs to that very special crime genre where humour meets murder. Hard to pull off and Peter Lovesey makes it look effortless. A genre better known on screen, in a sense, The Reaper belongs with The Ladykillers, Arsenic and Old Lace, Family Plot and even Frenzy. All of them fabulous.

The pace gets ever more frantic and I suspect many writers couldn’t deliver a sufficiently punchy ending. I recall reading an interview with Peter Lovesey where he said, as a child, he wanted to be a conjuror. And in a way, he is. A master of distraction, he’s also an incredible plate-spinner, always revealing the best trick of all at the end. The denouement is dazzling and the ending unexpected, very satisfying and absolutely right. Peter Lovesey always pulls it off.