Short Form: Designs on Life (1980), by Elizabeth Ferrars

Designs on Life, an  interesting collection of short stories by the prolific British crime writer Elizabeth Ferrars (1907-1995), appeared a little over three decades ago.  Last year, a second collection of Ferrars short stories was published by that fine short crime fiction publisher Crippen & Landru.  Before reviewing the Crippen & Landru volume, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries, I thought I would go back and reread Designs on Life and review it here.

In this 1980 collection, Elizabeth Ferrars gathered nine stories, most of them substantial, written between 1940 and 1980.  Ferrars had used the title Designs on Life before as the name of a suspense play by one of the fictional characters in her 1971 mystery A Stranger and Afraid.  Apparently she liked the title so much that she used it again nine years later for her short story collection!

 nine clever criminal designs

The longest tale, The Dreadful Bell, also is the most recent one, having appeared for the first time in Designs on Life (it was reprinted in 1999, in the anthology Murder Most Scottish).  By my loose estimate, it's probably around 13,000 words, making it a novelette.

The next longest piece is After Death the Deluge (1940), apparently Ferrars' first published criminous work.  These two tales are, in my opinion, the cream of the collection, and I say more about them below.

I also highly recommend Scattter His Ashes, a 1970 story that appeared in the second volume of that excellent English short story anthology series Winter's Crimes, and The Truthful Witness, a 1958 tale of marital disharmony.  

Scatter His Ashes involves the classic situation of the unhappy "spinster" daughter of a moneyed, imperious father who takes a husband whom Daddy insists is just a conniving fortune hunter--is he right?  A powerfully bleak tale, with a nice bit of deduction and a splendid last line.   

The only Ferrars work adapted for radio, The Truthful Witness offers an effective depiction of marital discord resulting in murder, poignantly seen though the eyes of a child.  It rather reminded me of such Ruth Rendell short works as The Vinegar Mother.

Now on to the two chief selections!  With Scatter His Ashes and The Truthful Witness, they make up over half the volume.

It Tolls for Thee....

 
"You won't ring the bell, will you?...If you ring it, she comes, but she doesn't like it.  Remember that."

The Dreadful Bell tells of Helen and Colin Benson, a couple just moved into a third-floor flat in an old Georgian tenement in Edinburgh.  Helen is recovering from a car accident that occurred when the brakes in her vehicle went out, sending it "went slap into a lorry" (charming but feckless Colin, it seems, had neglected to get the second-hand car checked like he promised).

Now Helen is stumbling around on crutches, making that steep stairway in the house Colin found for them most inconvenient.  Fortunately there's old Mrs. Lambie, the owner of the house, in the adjacent flat, to help Helen.  And she has all those interesting stories to tell too, like the one about the past murder, by a husband of his inconvenient wife, that took place in the house....

This is a cracker of a suspense tale, like something that Alfred Hitchcock might have filmed for his television series.  The atmosphere of the old Scottish house is first-rate and the closing paragraph in particular is splendidly done.  There also is an echo--I'm sure deliberate--of Edith Wharton's classic ghost tale The Lady's Maid's Bell (1902).  However, I won't say more!  The Dreadful Bell is one of the best suspense stories I have read and one of the best works, I believe, in Ferrars' output.

Though she was born in Burma, Ferrars (whose real name was Morna MacTaggart) came of a Scottish family and lived with her husband between 1957 and 1977 in Edinburgh.  In her books she rarely used Edinburgh as a setting, however, and surely never better than in The Dreadful Bell.  Give this one a ring--if you dare!

Water, Water, Everywhere....

But that particular moment, when her potato-peeler was ripping down the side of the second potato and her humming was sounding tunelessly in the small kitchen, was the last moment that evening when thoughts that grew out of her normal life had any room in Margaret's mind.

The long 1940 short story After Death the Delgue (about 8000 words by my loose count) tells of Margaret Haddow's night to remember, when the London flat she shares with her husband is flooded.  Indeed, water floods all over the block of flats, down to the basement lodging of Ferdinand Shew, borough councillor (Chairman of the Baths and Cemeteries Committee, don't you know).  Exploring the wreckage, the pair discover a battered body in a stairway cupboard.  Now a policeman is needed, as well as a plumber!

Deluge is a far less grim tale than Bell--and, for that matter, Scatter His Ashes and The Truthful Witness--but is has in common with Bell an atmospheric flats setting (the whole situation in Deluge is unique as far as I know).

There is also a good English policeman, Superintendent Cust, rather an appealing Inspector French type who appears in at least one of Ferrars' Toby Dyke detective novels (Your Neck in a Noose, 1942).  However, the crucial murder-solving piece of ratiocination belongs to the observant Margaret Haddow.  Deluge is a fine detective story, told in the best manner of the Golden Age Crime Queens.

Designs on Life was published in 1980 in both Britain and the United States and was recently reprinted by Langtail Press, a publishing concern directed by James Prichard, a great grandson of Agatha Christie.  It is worth your perusal.

Two by Barnard: Robert Barnard's A Cry from the Dark (2003) and Last Post (2008)

I've been reading some Robert Barnard works from the last decade and quite enjoying them.  A Cry from the Dark and Last Post, the two under consideration here today, have something in common with Death of an Old Goat, the debut Robert Barnard mystery I reviewed last week, namely the use of Australia as a setting--though this setting is far more important in A Cry from the Dark than in Last Post.

However, Australia aside, there is not a great deal in common between the earlier book and the later ones.  Highly satirical, Death of an Old Goat is an entertaining tale (at least if one is not Australian), yet still a 'prentice effort.  The later works, Last Post in particular, represent Robert Barnard at mature talent.  In fact, Last Post is the best modern-day, classical-style English detective novel that I have read in some time.

 

No Dingoes

Much of A Cry from the Dark--as its title, which borrows rather obviously from the Oscar-nominated 1988 Meryl Streep film A Cry in the Dark, suggests (though no dingoes are involved)--is set in Australia, but only in the past, in the Australia of 1938.  Half the novel takes place in the then present day of 2003, in Britain.

A Cry from the Dark tells the story of Bettina Whitelaw, an esteemed octogenarian grande dame of British literature writing the memoirs (or a fictionalized novel) of her earlier life in the outback Australian town of Bundaroo.  The narrative intercuts from modern-day events in Britain to Bettina's past life in Bundaroo in 1938, when a shocking act of violence occurred that forever altered the course of her life.

Now in 2003 it seems that Bettina is again threatened with violence.  Who is the source of this new threat?

Barnard's American publisher, Scribner, insists on calling Barnard's crime novels "novels of suspense," which I find rather an anachronistic term that fails to do them justice.  Some suspense-hungry modern day readers may find them, in fact, too slow-moving, with their emphasis on elderly characters, lack of overt sex and violence, explorations of events in the past and deliberate conversations.  Personally, I find many of Barnard's books fascinating. 

Especially interesting in A Cry from the Dark is Barnard's portrayal of Bundaroo, such a backward place that it makes the New South Wales city of Armidale--also mentioned in Cry and ridiculed by Barnard in Death of an Old Goat--look positively sophisticated by comparison.

Much of A Cry from the Dark succeeds as a sort of coming-of-age novel (indeed, I couldn't help wondering whether Barnard might not have been better off setting the entire book in the past).  In contrast with Death of an Old Goat, Barnard's portrayal of Australia in A Cry from the Dark is rather nuanced--and all the more convincing for that.

The final explanation of the twin mysteries is the sort that is bound to generate debate and disagreement, I would think, though I feel Barnard sets up the psychological path that he follows (whether one buys it or not).

Thumbs Up

Only a small section of Last Post takes place in Australia, yet like A Cry from the Dark, Last Post concerns events in the past and has a large cast of elderly characters.

After the death of her recently retired school headmistress mother, Eve McNabb, at her mother's home settling affairs, gets a letter in the post that unsettles everything she thought she knew about her parents.

Eve begins an investigation into her past, with the help of an Omkar Rani, an English cop of Indian origin.  What they find results in murder in the present day....

Last Post is one of the most "Christie-esque" novels by Robert Barnard, a modern crime writer who, in contrast with some of the big names in the field today, greatly respects Christie's contributions to the crime genre.

However, in his "Appreciation of Agatha Christie," A Talent to Deceive (recommended, by the way), Barnard writes rather dismissively of some of Christie's late novels, including By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968):

Begins rather well, with a vicious old aunt of [Tommey Beresford's] in a genteel old people's home, but declines rapidly into a welter of half-realized plots and a plethora of those conversations, all too familiar in late Christie, which meander on through irrelevancies, repetitions and inconsequentialities to end nowhere (as if she had sat at the feet of Samuel Beckett).

something wicked this way comes....

Certainly By the Pricking of My Thumbs meanders, but I find it rather an enjoyable book nonetheless. And, indeed, it would seem that Robert Barnard himself really does so as well, because Last Post is quite obviously influenced by Thumbs (I won't say it's "all Thumbs," so to speak, but it is partially so).

Besides the basic plot pattern of the investigation of mysteries from the past (which is a recurrent pattern in Barnard's work as well as Christie's), there is a vicious old lady named Aunt Ada in Barnard's book--obviously an homage--and there also is a garrulous old lady named Mrs. Lancaster (any reader of Thumbs will remember Mrs. Lancaster).  Probably not coincidentally, Last Post was published in 2008, forty years to the dot after By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

Another thing Last Post has in common with Christie's work is the uncommon finesse of the plotting.  I don't want to go into detail, but there are a couple twists--one on the last page--that show Christie-like genius in conception and execution.  Fair play and psychologically acute clueing of this order is a rare and precious thing and Barnard in my view has not been sufficiently praised for it.   

Last Post is a book that deserved more recognition, in my opinion.  I believe that it is superior to the novels P. D. James and Ruth Rendell have been writing for the last dozen years or so.  It also is the best book by Robert Barnard that I have read since his A Scandal in Belgravia (1991).

Robert Barnard

If there is a flaw in Last Post, it is in the romance that blooms all too quickly between Eve and Omkar.  I admire Barnard's verbal economy--all too rare in these days of self-important crime novels--but perhaps here he needed a bit more spaciousness for full believability.  Still, love at first sight is a classic convention of fiction, after all, and it certainly was common enough in Golden Age mysteries.

This nitpick aside, however, I found Last Post a superb crime novel.  Reviews of Barnard's last novel, A Charitable Body (2012), were not great--indeed, this work has been compared, ironically, to late Christie for being meandering and confusing--and it seems that Robert Barnard may now have retired from writing fiction.  If he has indeed done so, at least Last Post should stand as a last testament to the work of a genre master.   

Last Post delivers.

Detecting Todd Downing: A Conversation with Professor James H. Cox

James H. Cox

James H. Cox is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is the author of Muting White Noise: Native American and European Novel Traditions (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) and The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

In two chapters of the latter work, The Red Land to the South, Professor Cox discusses the writing of Todd Downing (1902-1974), the Oklahoma Choctaw Golden Age detective novelist who published nine mysteries of his own between 1933 and 1941, in addition to reviewing several hundred mysteries in the 1930s.

Todd Downing is the subject of my own Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (Coachwhip, 2013).  Moreover, eight of Todd Downing's nine detective novels (including his highly praised The Cat Screams, 1934, and Vultures in the Sky, 1935) were reprinted by Coachwhip in 2012, and the remaining title, Murder on Tour (1933), will be reprinted this March.

For previous posts discussing Todd Downing and another Oklahoma crime writer, Jim Thompson, see A Tale of Two Citizens, Part One and Part Two.

Professor Cox was kind enough sit down with The Passing Tramp for an interview about Todd Downing.  I hope you enjoy it!

Todd Downing

Curt Evans: In The Red Land to the South, you call Todd Downing “one of the most prolific and most neglected American Indian writers of the twentieth century.”

Three questions: Why do you think he is important, why do you think he has  been neglected and how did you become interested in him and his work?

James Cox: From my position as a scholar of American Indian literature, Downing is important as a writer who depicts contemporary Indigenous American people in a popular genre.

As anyone who watches television or regularly goes to the movies knows, nineteenth century American Indians are far more prevalent in popular and mass culture than contemporary Native people--particularly urban Indigenous people like the ones Downing sometimes represents. Downing's novels, though, show Indigenous people living in the modern world. It is much easier to ignore the civil and human rights of Indigenous people if you believe, (1) that they have disappeared, and/or, (2) that once they are modern they are no longer really Indigenous.

Downing's neglect in part has to do with the fact that his books went out of print so quickly. Research has become much easier now with the presence of on-line book dealers!

Downing's neglect in American Indian literary studies is curious, though. He was fairly well-known in Oklahoma. He lived into the 1970s, too, and scholars have had at least a little familiarity with him since then.

However, literary scholars have only recently--say in the last twenty years--started to think critically about popular genres like detective fiction or science fiction. Downing also didn't write about the kinds of American Indians that were interesting to many scholars: not the nineteenth century Plains Indians of so many Hollywood movies, but the activists and otherwise politically engaged Native people of the civil rights era. Downing was working against the grain of multiple trends, both popular and academic.

I became interested in his work when I started writing my second book. I had read several works by American Indian writers about Mexico and Indigenous Mexican people. I ran across a reference to The Mexican Earth, bought a copy, and read it in one sitting. 

I confess to appreciating the politics of the book, that is, his passionate defense of Indigenous Mexicans. It is a great book in other ways, though. Downing writes in a clear style. He is clever and funny and often just this side of scandalous. He is very good at depicting the Mexican landscape as well. I bought his novels, then, whenever I could find an inexpensive copy. I read Vultures in the Sky first and was completely hooked.

I enjoyed Downing's mastery of the conventions of detective fiction--classical British rather than hard-boiled American--but particularly liked the Mexican settings and, of course, the presence of Indigenous peoples and Downing's consideration of the social and political issues that shaped in part their mid-twentieth century lives (manual labor; health; the theft of remains and artifacts).

Finally, Downing is simply a fascinating person: the Indian Territory-born, fluent Choctaw speaking son of a Choctaw politician who was a Professor of Spanish, a tour guide, an employee of several East Coast advertising agencies, and a novelist.

Atoka, Oklahoma county officials and courthouse employees, c. 1910.
County Treasurer Henry Bond, a full-blood Choctaw and friend of
Sam Downing, Todd Downing's father, is seen in the center of the photograph.

Curt Evans: Downing’s sense of humor comes out in his book reviews as well.  I agree, it’s very appealing.

The Mexican settings of most of Downing’s detective novels seem to me his signature contribution to Golden Age detective fiction.  In his day especially, such intensive exploration of the culture of a foreign country—England excepted, of course!--in an American detective novel seems remarkable. 

Although many people still seem disinclined to embrace mystery literature as a serious art form, as you point out, I know you would agree with me that Downing, despite his sense of humor and modesty, felt strongly about a number of important issues and intentionally used the mystery form to explore these issues, just as writers did in mainstream literature. 

In The Red Land to the South you discuss Downing’s second published and path-breaking detective novel, The Cat Screams, at considerable length.  You argue that in this book “Downing disguises a story of indigenous resistance and revolutionary promise within a conventional story of detection.”  I think that’s very well-put.  In fact, I quote it in my own book!  Could you expand on this idea a bit here?  Without spoilers, of course!

James Cox: There is a funny but also serious scene in The Mexican Earth during which Downing stops to give a ride to two Indigenous Mexican farm workers. He describes other cars with U.S. license plates driving by the farm workers at high speeds. Inside the cars he sees startled faces. The next day at a hotel, another American says he thought Downing had been accosted by Communist agitators. Downing humanizes Indigenous Mexicans and the working class while suggesting that many Americans do not understand either Mexico or Indigenous Mexicans.

Thank you very much for the kind words about my reading of The Cat Screams! Downing does such a wonderful job in the novel describing the American colony in Taxco.

To avoid spoilers, I'll just say that the novel contains two overlapping mysteries. The first is the conventional mystery that Rennert investigates. The second is not a conventional mystery but a political, cultural, and historical mystery about Indigenous Mexican people in the modern world. The reference to a revival of Native practices and curanderas in the opening newspaper article begins this part of the narrative. The meaning of a word in Nahuatl -- or what I recently learned speakers of the language usually call Mexicanoh (thank you, Adam Coon) -- is also important. There is a jade mask of an Aztec god that is important, too.

All the references to Indigenous Mexican people form a set of clues. I propose one reading of these clues, but I'm sure other readers will have better ones!

Curt Evans: Well, I personally think you show how The Cat Screams is really an exceptionally sophisticated Golden Age detective novel. 

I found the depth of the novel quite fascinating on rereading it.  There are these two worlds, this outer one of these American tourists and expatriates and Mexicans of European lineage and then this inner world of indigenous people that eludes so many of the other characters, who are either hostile to it or simply indifferent and superior.  Hugh Rennert, of course, is interested in it, because, like Downing he is fascinated with Mexican culture and believes it has something to tell him about life.

It’s a cliché to talk about mystery novels that “transcend the genre” but I think in The Cat Screams Downing does show how you can combine a complex mystery plot with thematic depth.  Do you feel he was able to do this in other detective novels as well?  Personally, I find the one he published after The Cat Screams, Vultures in the Sky, another really fascinating story in its depiction of Mexico, not to mention that’s it’s simply a thrilling book, one of the most tense mysteries I have read!

James Cox: Yes, I agree, The Cat Screams is a rewarding mystery that also encourages readers to think about the colonial history of the Americas and the conflict between Europeans and Indigenous people. I can't emphasize enough, too, how unusual and important it is that Downing represents Indigenous people as maintaining their sense of who they are as Indigenous while they are also fully participating in the modern world.

the 2012 Coachwhip edition

This last observation is a good segue into Vultures in the Sky [note: see my review of this novel here--TPT], in which an Indigenous man plays a small but important part as a porter on a Pullman. Downing creates another complex -- and, yes, an exciting and tense! -- plot involving a kidnapping, rumors of a Pullman strike, and the Cristero Rebellion. 

Downing is attentive to the labor of the working classes (waitresses, cooks, and servants as well as the porter and Indigenous people selling food and small items at train stations or by the side of the road), and the Cristero Rebellion is a horrifying but in the U.S. not very well-known part of Mexican history--I don't know  how much the recent Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria film helped!

Yes, then, I would say that he writes very clever mysteries in which he embeds observations about the social and cultural worlds produced by Spanish colonialism, U.S. interventions in Mexico, and the general economic climate of the 1930s.

Murder on the Tropic is also one of my favorite Downing mysteries. Like Vultures in the Sky, Murder on the Tropic has a wonderful and diverse cast of characters, and Downing situates the plot in a precise historical moment: during the construction of the Pan American Highway in Mexico.

Downing is also almost always thinking about the U.S./Mexico border -- especially in The Last Trumpet -- in a way that resonates today. In fact, we should remember that there were mass deportations of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, when Downing was publishing these novels. His apparent sympathy for Mexico and Mexican people can be understood in that historical context.

Murder on the Tropic includes a reference to the murder of two young Mexican men in Ardmore, Oklahoma on June 8, 1931.  Downing chose not to take a tour group to Mexico that summer and, apparently, stayed home and started writing Murder on Tour. His career as an author of mystery novels, therefore, appears to have its origins in a real act of fatal racial profiling. This dark side of racial conflict within the U.S. and Mexico and between the two countries is a sub-text that runs throughout his novels.

Ardmore, Oklahoma today

Curt Evans: Yes, I think Downing was rather conflicted about Oklahoma.  In some ways he had a conservative, small-town upbringing and I think some of this “stuck”; yet he was repelled by the Ardmore killings, as you point out, and more generally by the parochialism and anti-intellectualism of Oklahoma in the 1930s.

For a while he did relocate to the Northeast, like his sister had before him, but, as you know, he came back to Atoka and spent the last twenty years of his life there, teaching at Atoka high school and later Southeastern Oklahoma University.  And he was buried beside his parents and maternal grandmother in Atoka, though today there’s no special recognition of him there, which seems a shame.

I too found Vultures in the Sky so evocative of a time and place.  When I was young, my family made several trips—not by train, sadly, but by car—to Mexico City, along a similar route to that described in Vultures.  Reading the novel really took me back.  The way Downing describes those lonely little train stations in the heat and those Indigenous street vendors (I remember the latter so well too), it’s extremely effective.

Edward Powys Mathers ("Torquemada")

All the Rennert novels were published in England and it’s interesting to see that Downing's books got excellent reviews not only in the United States but England as well, with comments from reviewers about how well-written and atmospheric they are.  The critic Edward Powys Mathers, known as “Torquemada” for his fiendish crossword puzzles, wrote that Todd Downing was “a born detective story writer” and compared him to Matthew Arnold, in terms of his technique for revealing hidden aspects of his characters’ personalities.

I’m looking right now at a review of another Downing novel that you praise—and I definitely agree with your praise--Murder on the Tropic.

This review is from a newspaper in Tasmania. 

I think everyone will agree that Mr. Downing is a good writer of good detective stories,” the reviewer starts out, then: “As a well-told crime and detective story I regard this as one of the really masterly ones.  But, as well as the plot and its unraveling, there is a remarkably vivid description of the Mexican landscape.

There’s the double praise again, for the plotting and the purely literary quality.  Yet by the late 1940s, Downing’s novels all are out of print.  They would stay out of print for some sixty years.  Now eight of them are back in print and the ninth will soon follow.

Do you think there’s a chance now that, with the reprinting of Downing’s books and reviews and your own book, Downing's name will become more familiar to people as a writer well worth reading, an entertainer who also has notable things to say in his entertainments?

Dutch edition of The Cat Screams

James Cox: I'm so glad to see you emphasize that Downing had an international reputation. His books were translated into Dutch, Finnish, Italian, and Spanish, at least. An edition of Murder on the Tropic (La Luce Gialla) was in print in Italy as late as 1958, and an edition of Vultures in the Sky (Il Terribile Viaggio) was in print in Italy, too, as late as 1977. So the Italians appear to have appreciated him more than we have!

I once found a copy of Vultures in the Sky in Spanish (Buitres in el Cielo) in Brazil. He made it to Tasmania, apparently, too. I would love to know if his reputation in these other countries endures into the early twenty-first century.

I'm optimistic that Downing will become more well-known. I sure hope so. A major problem was that his books were inaccessible, and the new editions thankfully remedy that issue and make it possible for teachers to assign his books.

Downing's novels have the potential to interest a broad audience that includes general readers as well as scholars of American literature. There is a little something (literary, cultural, historical, borderlands, transnational, American Indian, Mexican, Indigenous Mexican) for everyone in the novels.

Curt Evans: I like your optimistic assessment.  Thank you so much for the interview, Jim. By the way, this blog has a few Italian readers who have read Todd Downing, which bears out your comments.  Let's hope his readership expands all round!

James Cox: Thank you so much again for this chance to talk about Downing!

Dropped Down Under: Death of an Old Goat (1974), by Robert Barnard

In "Avoiding Academia," an article he contributed for a themed issue (Academic Mysteries) of Mystery Readers Journal in Winter 1997/97, mystery writer Robert Barnard noted that:

I taught in universities for twenty-two years, from 1961 to 1983....There's nothing that irritates me more than people who condemn whole professions....Still, I have to say that I have not greatly liked the academics I have come in contact with in the course of my life...they have seemed the most sniveling, self-important scraps of humanity you can imagine, and as windy and as whiny a bunch as ever demanded special privileges without doing anything to deserve them.

my favorite cover illustration for
Death of an Old Goat

This attitude to academia certainly comes snarling forth in Robert Barnard's first detective novel, Death of an Old Goat (1974), which is based on his experiences as a teacher from 1961 to 1966 at the University of New England, located in Armidale, Australia.  In contrast with some of Barnard's early work, Goat has been out of print for thirty years, but it is still worth reading.

Goat is the seventeenth Robert Barnard novel I have read--his books were a staple of my recreational literature diet back in the 1990s--and I would without hesitation characterize it as Barnard's most bitingly satirical fictional work.

Barnard doesn't rest content with ridiculing Australian collegiate education, he ridicules Australian...everything.

Judging by the blurbs on the 1983 Penguin edition of Goat, the novel was much praised.  "Perhaps the best academic mystery in a decade," says New Republic.  "The perfect gem, one you wouldn't want to change a word of," pronounces the Los Angeles Times.

On the other hand,academics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in A Catalogue of Crime, dissented from this judgment (as was their wont), despite the fact that Robert Barnard is one of the most commended modern authors in their mammoth tome.  "This early effort is thoroughly bad," pronounces ACOC.  "R. B. intended satire but it fails by excess."

the American hardcover edition

I tend to agree with B & T that the satire in Goat is excessive--and I'm not even Australian!.  After a while, one gets wearied by Barnard's contempt for all things Australian: the schools, the liquor, the teachers, the liquor, the graziers, the liquor, the police, the liquor, the railroads, the liquor, the hotels, the liquor, the restaurants, the liquor, the literature, the liq--well, you get the point!

Sometimes too Barnard has the subtlety of a cricket bat to the head ("Their clothes were well-cut, and almost hid the fact that they were fat.  Nothing could hide the fact that they were stupid.").

However, there is a lot of genuinely funny stuff in Goat, especially the first academic cocktail party:

"What I can't understand [says Mervyn Raines, Drummondale University professor of Australian literature] is why all the universities in England do American literature, and nobody seems to know that Australian literature exists."

"Yes," said Professor Belville-Smith, his eyes focused on the ceiling, his mind infinitely further off.

"But was there ever a more over-rated book than Moby Dick?  All that fuss about a bloody whale..."

"Yes..."

"And yet there'll be a lot of people in England who've never heard of Henry Handel Richardson," said Merv.

"About ninety-nine point nine per cent," said Bill Bascomb, who was standing by the sofa.

"Yes," said Professor Belville-Smith.

Henry Handel Richardson
Hey, I was surprised as you

Bill Bascomb is a young professor just out from Oxford, who hates his job in Australia and everything else about Australia for that matter.

By Robert Barnard's own admission, Bill Bascomb is his alter ego in Goat.  Bascomb eventually solves the case himself, the Australian police inspector being, naturally enough, a gross incompetent.  Bascomb has a sort of sidekick as well, one Alice O'Brien, who is the only sympathetically portrayed Australian in the book (well, sort of).

Just who is the old goat who dies in the novel, you may be asking.  Well, that would be poor Professor Belville-Smith (see above), a doddering old visiting English professor from Oxford.

I loved this character, who seemed like he had wandered out of a Michael Innes novel, especially when he mixes up his lecture notes (unaltered since the 1930s) on Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen.

Later, at the cocktail party after too many drinks, Professor Belville-Smith starts to recount the time when he actually met Jane Austen: "Charming woman, charming.  Sick, you know, very sick, but brave.  Quite what you would expect from novels, and most witty...."

shades of Innes

The next day Belville-Smith is found dead in his hotel room, his throat slashed (there's no logical reason for this manner of murder having been chosen by the murderer, as one character observes, but apparently Barnard wanted the chance to include some Macbeth references, which are funny, admittedly).

Detection definitely takes a back seat to satire, and I spotted the culprit immediately upon this person's appearance; yet the motive, though insufficient for the crime, is well-hidden (at least if you're not British!).  Also, the last line is a real corker.

Interestingly, Barnard himself says he didn't know who the murderer would be until he was well into writing the novel, so apparently I, a mere reader, know Robert Barnard better than Robert Barnard!  Of course I have the advantage of having read so many of his books.  But I won't say anything more, so as not to spoil the book.  Except this, to reassure the Janeites:

Jane didn't do it.

It was X in the Bedroom with the Candlestick: Written in Blood (1994), by Caroline Graham

Who dotted Gerald with the candlestick?

Actually, they don't have bedrooms in Clue/Cluedo, do they?  Or bathrooms?

I suppose they must all be on the upper floor (surely the Boddy mansion has an upper floor).

Anyway!  In the book under consideration here today, Caroline Graham's Written in Blood, the victim, Gerald Hadleigh, indeed is murdered with a candlestick--at his home, Plover's Rest, not long after a meeting of the Midsomer Worthy Writers' Circle, to which he belonged.

That's about where the similarity to the game Clue ends, however.

Although Written in Blood triumphs as a puzzle (see near the end of this review), much of the interest in it lies with Graham's amusing, satirical writing and well-conveyed characters.

Written in Blood centers on the members of the aforementioned Midsomer Worthy Writers' Circle, a group of would-be (some more likely never-to-be) authors in one of those classic English villages that make such enticing settings for horrible murders.

Besides Gerald Hadleigh, the group consists of Amy Lyddiard, her sister-in-law Honoria Lyddiard, Sue Clapton, her husband Brian Clapton, Laura Hutton and Rex St. John.

These people are, along with Max Jennings, the bestselling novelist they somehow managed to get to come and speak to them, and Graham's series characters Chief Inspector Barnarby and Sergeant Troy, the key figures in the novel.
  
Some fans of the long-running Midsomer Murders series, which originally was directly based on Graham's short series of detective novels, have complained that Barnaby and Troy (particularly Troy) are not as likeable in the books as on television.

Midsomer Murders Barnaby and Troy

I can well see this in the case of Troy--though I've never actually seen an episode of Midsomer Murders, bar The Killings at Badger's Drift many years ago--since Troy is a boorish, sexist homophobe who cheats (or tries to) on his wife.

Does Graham endow Troy with any virtues at all?  Well, he likes his two-year-old daughter--though that doesn't stop him from cheating on her mother--and he likes dogs.  That's about it, I think!

Yet there are times when Troy actually is funny, or I think so (but then I like Joyce Porter's Dover mysteries).

Here he is with Barnaby during the questioning of a suspect:

Troy was taking advantage of the lull to despatch as many Garibaldis as he was able without appearing to push them non-stop into his mouth.  He was starving.  Parched too (down went the tea), plus, needless to say, desperate for a fag.  He caught the chief's eye and replaced morsel number five on the plate.

Garibaldi ("squashed fly") biscuits

Then there's this, when the suspect is about to suggest that Gerald Hadleigh must have been killed by a burglar:

Here we go, thought Troy, pinching the final biscuit.  Altogether now, one, two, three: break-in, break-in.  Wasn't it a break-in?

In the books, Barnaby and Troy really don't like each other much at all, and their antagonism/indifference can be kind of amusing.

I liked this terse exchange between the duo, which takes place when Barnaby and Troy visit the law firm Jocelyne, Tibbles And Delaney.  While waiting for the murdered man's lawyer finally to appear, they encounter a striped cat curled up, fast asleep, on a chair (note that one of the novel's plot strands involves Barnaby and his wife having to take care of their daughter's rambunctious kitten, Kilmowzki):

Troy nodded in [the cat's] direction.
"Must be Tibbles."
"Don't mention cats to me."
"D'you think I've got time for a ciggie?"
"No."

another classic male police duo

Graham's team of Barnaby and Troy rather reminds me television's Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis and Ruth Rendell's Wexford and Burden (granted, a less personable version, especially in the case of the underlings).

Like Wexford, Barnaby is happily married and having to diet on account of his health (though unlike Wexford, he can understand computers).

Troy also partakes, methinks, of Reginald Hill's Dalziel, although there of course the roles are reversed, Dalziel being the man in the superior position.

Although Written in Blood was published in 1994, it already seems like an eternity ago!  I was struck by the fact that in the book women are virtually non-factors in the police force.  Indeed, part of the interest of this novel, I found (somewhat to my mortification), is that it already feels like a piece of social history.

Fortunately, there are interesting women characters among the suspects: Amy and Honoria Lyddiard, Sue Clapton and Laura Hutton.  In fact Graham grants three of these women character arcs.  We read Written in Blood not just for the puzzle, but because we become concerned about what will happen to these characters.

Laura was madly in love with the murder victim and joined the writing group just to get closer to him.  She's a sensible, successful woman (an antique shop owner), who was, however, becoming an obsessed stalker.

Amy Lyddiard and Sue Clapton are saddled with horrible household burdens: Amy, her repellent sister-in-law Honoria, and Sue, her repulsive husband Brian.

Graham is at her most scathing with Honoria Lyddiard and Brian Clapton, both of whom make Sergeant Troy look like a candidate for Mr. Congeniality.  Both are unbearable class snobs, Brian of the inverted variety.

some comprehensively devastating satire

Honoria is of the old gentry, and obsessed with her lineage (she's compiling a book on the subject).  Brian is a radical leftist, ashamed of his bourgeois upbringing.  He teaches avant-garde--and absolutely hopeless--drama to toughs at a local comprehensive school.  At times, this sub-plot starts to feel like it's running away with this long (435 pages) novel, but it's very funny and, at times, rather pathetically sad (incidentally, the way Graham portrays British comprehensive education is devastating, if anywhere close to the truth).

Brian is so self-deluding ("Brian, now so relaxed he had put his slippers on, was explaining [to Barnaby and Troy] how he had rejected Cambridge as too elitist choosing instead Teacher Training College in Uttoxeter") that one is tempted to feel sorry for him, but Graham gives Brian not a single reed of redeeming personal virtue for the would-be sympathetic reader to grasp.  Instead, all one's sympathies go to his long-suffering (and genuinely talented) wife, Sue.

There's pungent satirical lines scattered all through Written in Blood.  I feel I must quote some of them:

Barnaby could imagine [Honoria] on the seashore forbidding waves their approach.

The sergeant had no time for neurotic women.  To be fair he had no time for neurotic men either.

Expensive cut-glass misery was apparently fashionable everywhere.

And the net-curtain brigade, those invariable peepers at life's rich pageant.

There was a permanent obstruction in her throat that only liquids over forty per cent proof seemed able to bypass.

On top of all this, the puzzle in Written in Blood is excellent.  There's one aspect to it that I quickly grasped, but the bigger picture eluded me.  Realistically, I think the reader should be able to pare the suspect list down to three individuals, but the true motive is splendidly, though fairly, hidden, I think.  One might quibble about the way a couple characters behaved, but overall I was really pleased with the mystery's resolution.

My one real complaint is that there is a confrontation at the end that struck me as overly melodramatic (perhaps it played better on television).  I think that as a novel Written in Blood would have been stronger if this confrontation had been dialed down several notches.

Oddly enough, in some ways Written in Blood reminded me a bit of Freeman Wills Crofts' Golden Age police detective novel, Sudden Death (1932).  Its ending went over-the-top as well, in my view.

Also, as a matter of personal taste, there are a few instances of scurrility I could have done without (a couple images I'm still having trouble getting out of my mind, ugh!).

For me, then, Written in Blood may just miss the very top mystery drawer, but it's very good indeed and heartily recommended to fans of classic satirical English village mysteries, a noble line descended from some true Golden Age classics by Agatha Christie

Five of Graham's mysteries have been reprinted by Felony & Mayhem, so check them out, if you haven't!

Is It Comfy or Cosy? M. C. Beaton (Marion Chesney) on the Craft of Crime

I enjoyed this interview in the Daily Record with Marion Chesney, aka M. C. Beaton, creator of sleuths Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin.

Scotland's Secret Literary Sensation Marion Chesney

I had no idea Chesney was that popular, at least in terms of library borrowings.

I'm currently reading a Caroline Graham mystery novel for a blog piece (though at 400+ pages it's been taking me longer to finish than I thought!) and I see that Graham's books often are referred to as cosies.

Sit down and make yourself comfy!  Or cosy.

On this matter Chesney says:

"Reviewers call what I do cosy crime, a description I dislike. I prefer comfy crime."

"I pack in plenty of murders, I just don’t do blood and gore."

What do you think of this distinction between comfy and cosy?

I must confess that I never heard of this one before!  Is comfy less cosy than cosy?

And is Caroline Graham cosy (or comfy)?  The book by her that I'm reading has a blurb from Publisher's Weekly comparing her to P. D. James and Ruth Rendell and no one calls them cosy (or do they?)!

Personally, I'm rather reminded by the wickedly sardonic Graham of those Class of '36 boys, Peter Lovesey and (especially) Robert Barnard (also early Reginald Hill, who was Class of '36 too).

P. D. James: Fifty Shades of Cosy?

Read the article for yourself, but I have to quote this jewel from Chesney:

"I don’t do explicit sex scenes. I was horrified when I purchased EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, mistaking it for a PD James novel because I was wearing the wrong glasses."

Whoops!  Don't you hate it when that happens?

I must admit I only ever started one Beaton, Death of a Witch I think it was called.  I got rather bored with it and laid it aside and never got back to it.  But I have a number of Beaton books, they have such lovely, um, cosy covers.  This article reminds me I need to actually read one someday!  Any recommendations?

Dark Death: Night Walk (1947), by Elizabeth Daly

In a prolific burst of creativity between 1940 and 1951 Elizabeth Daly (1878-1967) published sixteen detective novels--all with her series detective, the erudite and gentlemanly New York bibliophile Henry Gamadge--that were quite well received in her day and have maintained a loyal and not insignificant following over the decades since.

this 1963 paperback edition
updates the 1940s look of
the character Rose Jenner

Of late even paperback reprints of Daly's novels have become rather hard-to-find and pricey--there are just a handful of second-hand copies of Night Walk available on Abebooks, for example, all expensive--but fortunately over the last few years that fine press Felony and Mayhem has been reprinting her work.

The twelfth Elizabeth Daly detective novel, Night Walk (1947), is not yet back in print, but should be by this year or the next.

It is, I think, one of Daly's best efforts.  Even Jacques Barzun, who thought Daly had about a 50/50 batting average, so to speak, was an admirer of this tale.

The first four chapters of Night Walk tensely detail the sinister nocturnal perambulations of a prowler afoot in the upstate New York village of Frazer's Mills.

The prowler rattles doors and frightens people, but it seems to go no farther than that--until one longtime resident of the village is found dead, his head bloodily smashed by a log.

One of the guests at the Wakefield Inn--a transient, people in this little village keep terming him--happens to be a family friend of Henry Gamadge, the author's amateur detective, so Gamdage soon is on the scene to clear up matters.

Gamadge eventually succeeds in doing so, but not before the prowler strikes again, committing another horrid bludgeoning murder.

I found Night Walk an engrossing tale, both for its problem and for its setting.  It's often stated that Elizabeth Daly was Agatha Christie's favorite American writer, and it's easy to see why from a book like Night Walk!  Surely one can't get much more classically English in setting in an American mystery novel than Frazer's Mills.  One almost has to remind oneself that one is not, in fact, reading a Golden Age English detective novel.

Frazer's Mills is an isolated, enclosed and highly stratified village (the mills shut down long ago), dominated by a traditional squirearchy (durbars is Daly's term for these exalted personages).

"Mighty few livings earned anymore, they're all fading out on little pensions or their savings or what they're relations send 'em," explains the sheriff to Gamadge concerning the bulk of the population of Frazer's Mills.  "Scotch, English, old American stock.  Not a foreigner, not a stranger."

"It sounds rather a paradise to me," comments the well-born, old-stock Gamadge.

But the serpent of murder has invaded this lovely, rural Eden, and Gamadge must stamp it out and restore order.  This he does, on the strength of some bright intuitions that certainly passed by me.  The puzzle is thinly clued, though I think it is fair enough.  The identity of the prowler becomes, I think, pretty definitely indicated in the last third or so of the book, but the motive is what should elude many readers.

Characterization is quite good.  I particularly liked the imperious librarian and the sardonic, precocious teenager staying with his parents at the Wakefield Inn.  "She embodies in her own person the whole meaning of the theory of Conspicuous Waste," this lad pronounces of another character.  Now that's a high-toned burn!

Don't despair of getting an affordable copy of Night Walk.  Felony & Mayhem should soon come to the rescue!