"Bosh!": The Marvelous Marginalia of Lieutenant-General Coote Synge-Hutchinson (1832-1902)

First, prepare yourself for some Synge-Hutchinson genealogy!

Coote Synge-Hutchinson (1832-1902) was a son of Francis Synge-Hutchinson (1802-1833) and Lady Louisa Frances Synge-Hutchinson.  Coote Synge-Hutchinson's grandfather, Edward Synge-Hutchinson (1756-1846), was an Anglo-Irish baronet. The baronetcy was inherited in 1846 by Coote Synge-Hutchinson's slightly older brother, Edward Synge-Hutchinson (1830-1906).

Coote Synge-Hutchinson went into the British army, a common course for younger brothers not inheriting baronetcies.  This action put him on a path toward momentous events in India in the 1850s.

In his twenties as a Major in the Second Dragoon Guards Coote Synge-Hutchinson was awarded the Indian Mutiny Medal, with Lucknow clasp, for his service with the 2nd Dragoon Guards at the Siege of Lucknow during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (located in northeastern India, Lucknow today is the capital city of the state of Uttar Pradesh).

detail from "The Relief of Lucknow, 1857," (1859)
by Thomas Jones Barker
see here for a interesting webpage
with this illustration and also that of an
Indian Mutiny Medal with Lucknow Clasp

Eventually Coote Synge-Hutchinson was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General.  At the age of 56, long retired from bloody colonial contretemps, Coote Synge Hutchinson married Emily Charlotte Jecks, with whom two years later he produced a daughter, Haidee (1890-?). Haidee married and had a twin son and daughter, Patrick and Jean, in 1910.  Five years ago, in 2007, family members sold Coote Synge-Hutchinson's Indian Mutiny Medal, along with a ribbon bar awarded to his nephew Major Edward Douglas Brown, at auction for 2128 pounds.

In 1885, a few years before Coote Synge-Hutchinson achieved the state of matrimony, a contemporary, the prolific author Benjamin Leopold Farjeon (1838-1903), published Great Porter Square: A Mystery, one of his most popular books.  Farjeon himself called the novel "my first great success in sensational fiction."  

Coote Synge-Hutchinson's copy
of Great Porter Square

I am a great admirer of Farjeon's Devlin the Barber (1888) (see my review) and another, lesser-known work by him called The Nine of Hearts (1886), but Great Porter Square is one of those really long Victorian sensation novels--for me too rife with sententious and sentimental utterance--that tends to try my patience.  Farjeon himself reflected that he had no idea where the plot of Great Porter Square was going from day to day: "Each installment of that story ended with a sensation, and I never knew when I wrote it what the sensation was to lead to."  (for Farjeon's comments see Current Literature: A Magazine of Record and Review 26 (July-December 1899), p. 20)

In my view this perhaps is not the greatest recipe for higher artistic success in a murder mystery.

Apparently neither was it for Lieutenant-General Coote Synge-Hutchinson, as we shall most definitely see!

Benjamin Farjeon was described in The Author in 1891 as "below the medium height, with a jolly, round face and small side-whiskers."  Farjeon was a loving, open-hearted family man with a wife, daughter of the American actor Joseph Jefferson, and four delightful, precocious children: Harry, Joe (future Golden Age thriller writer, as readers of this blog will know--see here), Nelly (future children's author) and Bertie.  He also was, one surmises, though a staunch royalist somewhat politically liberal for the day (certainly he was much concerned with the plight of the poor).  All in all, no doubt a wonderful fellow, the best one could expect of a family man at the height of the Victorian age.

Benjamin Farjeon, author of Great Porter Square
Those side whiskers look rather large to me!

Was Coote Synge-Hutchinson more the choleric, conservative, intolerant and imperious ex-Indian army man, so familiar a fictional stereotype to generations of Agatha Christie readers ("Major Porter, late Indian army, rustled his newspaper and cleared his throat. Everyone avoided his eye, but it was no use....")?

I do hope to learn more about Coote Synge-Hutchinson someday; but in the meantime we must judge the man by his fascinating marginalia in his copy of Great Porter Square.  For this, please return for our second installment (coming soon!).

Sensational: Asta's Book (1993), by Barbara Vine

Murder, madness, misalliance, misidentity, missing persons--all these things are the stuff of the classic three-decker Victorian sensation novel so popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century (and currently enjoying a significant revival among fiction readers).

The best of Ruth Rendell's thirteen Barbara Vine novels (a fourteenth will be added this year) in my view all have the richness and depth of works by such great masters of Victorian sensation as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.  And the sixth Barbara Vine novel, the 437-page Asta's Book (1993) (Anna's Book in the United States*), surely is one of the very best Vines--indeed, it is positively sensational! Asta's Book succeeds both as a fascinating, teasing mystery and a sophisticated, immensely moving character study.

Using the device of entries from a set of diaries in modern times turned into bestselling books by the diary writer's daughter, Rendell creates a wonderfully rich and complex mystery in Asta's Book.

The novel opens with entries from the 1905 diary of Asta Westerby, a young Danish wife and recent migrant to England ("When I went out this morning a woman asked me if there were polar bears in the streets of Copenhagen").  Asta has become disenchanted with her business-preoccupied, frequently absent husband, Rasmus, who she has come to believe married her mostly for her dowry ("I suppose I should be thankful Rasmus isn't a Mahometan, otherwise I'm sure he'd be finding another wife...to marry for 5,000 kroner").

Moreover, she is rather indifferent to her two young sons and contemptuous of her illiterate maideservant, Hansine.  Feeling alone and anxious (she is pregnant yet again, this time, she desperately hopes, with a daughter) Asta finds in her diary some solace--and also an outlet for creative art.

In Asta's Book Ruth Rendell combines Asta's story with the modern-day tale of her granddaughter, Ann, who now has charge of the ongoing publication of the diaries, which are worldwide bestsellers.

Ann functions in the novel as a sort of literary investigator attempting to untangle the web of mysteries enmeshing her family over the decades (appropriately she is a professional researcher), although there is a strand of subplot involving her television producer friend Cary that lends a delicious bit of ironic humor to the book.

The third key character is Asta's daughter (the one born back in 1905) and Ann's aunt, Swanhild (Swanny), of great interest in her own right.

In addition to Asta's diary entries and Ann's narrative, there is also an additional section of the book dealing with a famous murder trial.  More about this cannot be said, for so much of the great pleasure of Asta's Book is the page-turning thrill of simply having to find out just what happens (or happened) next.  One has to be careful not to say too much.  Such is the skillful construction of this novel that it functions brilliantly both as a work of suspense and a fair play mystery (the succession of revelations at the end all are genuinely clued).

read those pages closely,
very closely....

Additionally, Asta's Book offers fine character studies, particularly of the central character, Asta Westerby. Not necessarily easy to like, Asta nevertheless is intensely fascinating, from beginning to end.

Like A Dark-Adapted Eye, the Vine that is my second favorite, there is much of interest in Asta's Book about gender and class relations in other times (in Eye, especially during the 1950s; in Book, during the Edwardian era).

Asta's observations about domestic life can be bleak: "Hope is a horrible thing.  I don't know why these church people call it a virtue, it is horrible because it's so often disappointed."  Asta's Book may be a domestic novel, but it is certainly not cozy.

Readers who like the sharp tang of reality in their mysteries get that, as well as a cunningly constructed series of puzzles, in Asta's Book.

American paperback edition

*The reason the title was changed in the United States from Asta's Book to Anna's Book is that Vine's American publisher was concerned the name "Asta" would remind readers of the dog from the Thin Man films!  Did most Vine readers really recall these films in 1993 (let alone today)?

Let us hope a newer edition--of which there certainly should be--will restore the original title (speaking for myself I am over forty and a classic mystery book and film fan and I never once thought of that dog when reading Rendell's masterpiece).

The next installment of The Passing Tramp will explore a genuine Victorian sensation novel, Benjamin Farjeon's Great Porter Square.  

Like Asta's Book the piece will be a double tale, telling about both the book and its owner, who in the book's pages made the most extensive marginal notes that I have ever seen in a novel.  Here is an opportunity to learn not only about a Victorian mystery novel but also a Victorian mystery novel reader!  See you soon!

this dog is not in the book--really!

Victorian Tableaux Vivants #3, The Wench Is Dead (1989), by Colin Dexter

"The curse is come upon me...."

In the quarter-century from 1975 and 1999, Colin Dexter published thirteen detective novels detailing the adventures of Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis.  Most of these novels were filmed as part of the classic British police detective series Inspector Morse, which aired between 1987 and 2000.  The Wench Is Dead was published in 1989 and filmed in 1998, as the penultimate Morse episode in the series.

In contrast with Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings and Peter Lovesey's Waxwork (see previously), The Wench is Dead does not take place in the Victorian era but rather in the present day, 1989.  Morse, in hospital for treatment of a bleeding ulcer, becomes engrossed in a historical mystery: the 1859 murder of Joanna Franks, found floating in the Oxford Canal.  Two men were hanged for the woman's murder and one man transported--all three boatman on the Barbara Bray, on which Joanna Franks had been a passenger. A restless Morse decides the case was mishandled and he investigates it from his hospital bed, with the aid of Sergeant Lewis and Christine Greenaway, a pretty, young librarian from the Bodleian).

The Wench Is Dead surely was inspired by the classic Josephine Tey novel The Daughter of Time (1951), in which Tey's Inspector Grant, in hospital, investigates the famous historical mystery of who murdered the Princes in the Tower.  Like Tey's novel, Dexter's The Wench is Dead is based on a real life mystery.  In the case of the latter novel it is the 1839 murder of Christina Collins, allegedly by canal boatmen when she was travelling on the Trent and Mersey Canal.

Tey's novel explores the more fascinating historical drama, yet Colin Dexter has turned his historical mystery into one of his typically teasing classical murder puzzles, mechanically ingenious in the best style of Dorothy L. Sayers or Freeman Wills Crofts.

Oxford Canal in The Wench is Dead 

The dust jacket blurb for the English edition of The Wench is Dead accurately describes the novel as containing that "which has made [Colin Dexter] and Morse so popular: a superbly crafted puzzle solved by a formidable intellect." Readers who relish a good crime puzzle will enjoy competing with Morse in the attempt to solve it.

One of the delightful things about Wench is the inclusion within the text of so many visualized puzzle pieces.  For example, there's the frontis of the Oxford canal system, scene of the Joanna Franks' fatal boat trip (left).

This reminded me of such splendid Golden Age mystery endpaper maps as this one found in Freeman Wills Crofts' Death on the Way (1932) (below).

Railroad in Death on the Way (1932)

Delightfully, Dexter provides additional visual material, in the way of clues aiding Morse in his deductions: a page of medical testimony; a table of insurance premiums; two tombstones; a marked wall panel.  Great stuff all!  While many modern crime writers tend to loftily disdain this sort of thing as mere mysterymongering showmanship, many of us love it still, not less for its rarity today (Minette Walters is another modern writer who blessedly  indulges us with these sorts of displays).

Trent and Mersey Canal, locale of the actual death

As in many puzzle-focused Golden Age mysteries, character interest in Wench is less pronounced than puzzle interest. Dexter still has young, attractive women falling for the overweight, out-of-shape, ulcerous, over- imbibing, frequently crabby ("Get on with it, Lewis!"), fifty-something Morse. He's just that much more interesting than the men anywhere close to their own age, don't you know.

Time also is spent by the author detailing Morse's alternative bedtime reading, a pornographic item called The Blue Ticket.  In Wench expect the usual references to women's breasts, as well as their knickers (though look closely: the knickers are not mere titillation!).

This aspect of the Morse books is toned down in the television series.  In Wench, the women interested in Morse--a musical academic girlfriend and an American college professor and crime expert--are new characters, within a decade of Morse's age.  Morse spends considerably less fantasy time with the topless, nubile women of blue fiction.  And of course Morse is the late, great John Thaw, whose brilliant performances made Inspector Morse among the most indelible policemen characters in television history

John Thaw as Morse: a classic, like his car

There are some good snippets of dialogue in the book, many of which were wisely picked up for the film adaptation.  The film also does a fine job of visualizing those fascinating old canals, as well as a crucial late trip to Ireland, made after Morse is released from the hospital.

You certainly won't be the loser if you read the book and watch the film.

Colin Dexter

Victorian Tableaux Vivants #2: Waxwork (1978), by Peter Lovesey

Long before the "period mystery" had become a common feature of the genre, distinguished English crime writer Peter Lovesey gave us the Sergeant Cribb series of Victorian detective novels.  Lovesey published eight of these tales between 1970 and 1978.  Not only were they well-received by critics and lay readers alike, they inspired a popular British television detective series, Cribb.  Waxwork, the eighth and last of these books, ended the series on a high note in 1978.  Since then Peter Lovesey has given us the short-lived but much-loved (certainly by this reader) Bertie, Prince of Wales series and the current, long-running, award-winning Peter Diamond series, as well as such praised standalones as The False Inspector Dew, Rough Cider, On the Edge and The Reaper.

Florence Maybrick
accused Victorian poisoner

In a case of coincidence, Lovesey and Julian Symons in 1978 both published notable Victorian mysteries that center around lovely, enigmatic blondes suspected of poisoning murders: respectively Waxwork and The Blackheath Poisonings (see my recent review of The Blackheath Poisonings).

hardcover American edition of
Waxwork (1978)

Both novels are still in print today, Waxwork in an attractive edition from Soho Press.  Since its publication in 1978 Waxwork has been considered one of the best of the Lovesey Sergeant Cribb titles.

Generally, I think, the Cribb mysteries are seen as lighter in tone: charming rather than dark and somber like Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings. Yet Waxwork strikes me as rather dark and somber too. Ruth Rendell praised the novel for its  depiction of what feels like "an account of a real-life crime." "Nothing strikes a false note," she declared. "Nothing seems contrived."  The late novelist Sarah Gainham asserted that in Waxwork a "feeling of authentic horror is produced."  I agree with both assessments. Waxwork is a gripping, fascinating tale.

In short order in Waxwork the beautiful Marian Cromer (see above left) is arrested and confesses to the crime of poisoning (with potassium cyanide) the assistant of the fashionable society photographer to whom she is married.  Her victim, she explains, had been blackmailing her, on account of his knowledge of certain risque photos she had allowed to be taken of herself several years earlier.  Since the crime was coldly premeditated, Marian has been sentenced to death by hanging.

Soho edition (2010)

As Marian's day of execution nears, new evidence arises leading the police to question whether Marian actually had means of access to the locked poison cabinet from which the cyanide was obtained.  Cribb is put on the case to discover how Marian Cromer got to the keys.  But Cribb comes to suspect that Marian Cromer simply could not have gotten to the keys, and that someone else committed the crime....

Despite the small circle of suspects in his novel, Peter Lovesey manages to present a quite interesting crime problem.  He also builds up a considerable level of suspense (of course the "death row convict" plot is not original to Lovesey, going back at least to Philip Macdonald's The Noose, 1930; but Lovesey does an exemplary job all round with it).

As with The Blackheath Poisonings, I would like to say more about a number of the novel's interesting aspects, but I am constrained by the reviewer's sacred obligation to avoid the offense of spoiling.  Hence I will confine myself to a few comments about Lovesey's handling of the matter of class in the Victorian age.

Class is omnipresent in Waxwork, whether in Cribb's relations with his own smug superiors or Marian Cromer's relations with her jailers (Cromer's jail scenes are grim; Lovesey shows how Newgate prison was one place where members of the lower class could turn the tables on their "betters").  In other books I have read in this series, the class satire was amusing; yet here it more feels depressing.  Eight years into the series Cribb still has not attained  a promotion from sergeant to inspector; one begins to despair with Cribb of this ever actually happening.

Newgate cell

There also is, I should add, a subplot concerning the Newgate hangman and Tussaud's Wax Museum (hence the title), which adds its own macabre note.

Is Waxwork the best of Lovesey's Cribb tales?  It may well be.  It certainly feels the closest in spirit to The Blackheath Poisonings, with its uncozy atmosphere of grim anxiety.

I retain a great affection for my first Cribb (and first Lovesey), the brilliantly titled Wobble to Death, with its fantastically original setting of a "wobble" (read the book to find out what that is!); but all the Cribbs make eminently good reading and all, fortunately, are back in print, courtesy of Soho Press.  Don't miss them.

Peter Lovesey

Victorian Tableaux Vivants, #1: The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons

For the next week or so I want to write about Victorian mystery novels.  Not, to be precise, mystery novels written from the Victorian era, but ones written much more recently, and set in the Victorian era.  I have chosen four titles to look at: The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), by Julian Symons; Waxwork (1978), by Peter Lovesey; The Wench is Dead (1989), by Colin Dexter; and Asta's Book (1993), by Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell (I'm cheating a bit with the last one, since the action only really starts in 1905).  Let the tableaux of Victorian crime novels begin!--The Passing Tramp

first edition of Bloody Murder,
Julian Symons' seminal mystery genre survey

I don't suppose it is true that people adept at examining darker emotions in crime novels necessarily experienced great unhappiness in childhood, but certainly it seems to be the case that Julian Symons (1912-1994) in fact did (more on this below).

Although today he receives much less attention than he did even two decades ago, Julian Symons is one of the major figures in English crime fiction from the second half of the twentieth century. Symons was a prolific writer, publishing 28 crime novels in a half-century period (1945 to 1994; a final novel appeared posthumously in 1996), as well as collections of short stories and works of biography, history and literary criticism (a short story collection was published in 2006 by Crippen & Landru).

Julian Symons

In my view, Symons' mystery genre survey, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (originally published in 1972 and reprinted in revised editions in 1985 and 1992) arguably is the single most important critical study of the genre (I say this though I often disagree with it!).

Symons was a key figure in that transition he writes about in Bloody Murder, the movement away from the puzzle-oriented detective story to the crime novel that places greater emphasis on characterization, setting, theme, psychology, the depiction of accurate police procedure, etc. He wanted to shift the mystery genre from its Golden Age preoccupation with puzzles over to the concerns of "realistic" mainstream novels. During his long writing career Symons himself did, however, produce some genuine "fair play" detective novels, including The Blackheath Poisonings, his twentieth crime novel.

Blackheath was published in 1978, when Symons was 66 years old.  It was to be the first of a Symons trilogy of Victorian crime novels, the others being Sweet Adelaide (1980) and The Detling Murders (1982) (in the United States The Detling Secret, a superior title). Symons admitted that he was getting older and losing touch with younger English life, probably as most any older writer to some extent would tend to do, and he thought exploring Victorian life would be an interesting change for him (though he went on to write seven more crime novels after the Victorian ones, all but one set entirely in the present day).

The Blackheath Poisonings (1992)

Of the three novels the best known is The Blackheath Poisonings. Sweet Adelaide is an exploration of a notorious true crime, the Adelaide Bartlett poising case.  The Detling Secret in my view is a superior detective novel to Blackheath, though it lacks emotional force. Blackheath was televised twenty years ago in a British film adaptation with a fine cast, including Judy Parfitt, Ian McNeice, Zoe Wanamaker and Patrick Malahide.  I believe it remains the sole Symons novel ever filmed.

It is hard for me to fairly assess Blackheath as a detective novel, because I encountered the tale through the film adaptation and thus already knew the solution when I first read the book. It seems to me that modern readers may guess the solution ahead of the author's revelation.  Beyond the puzzle aspect, however, The Blackheath Poisonings is quite an enjoyable and suspenseful tale.

The novel deals with multiple arsenic poisonings in a wealthy Victorian family.  There are actually two households involved: that of matriarch Harriet Collard, her spinster daughter Charlotte (who has an importunate suitor) and her nephew Bertie Williams; and that of Roger Vandervant, his wife Beatrice (Harriet Collard's other daughter), Roger Vandervant's son, Paul, and George Collard (Harriet's son) and his wife Isabel.

Roger Vandervant dies, ostensibly of natural gastric trouble, and at the urging of Harriet Collard the pompous family doctor gives a death certificate and an inquest is avoided. Another death occurs several months later and again the doctor gives a death certificate (it's all blamed on the oysters this time).

However when certain indiscreet letters come to the attention of the police, an official investigation begins, arsenic is discovered as the cause of death in both cases, an arrest is made and a trial commences.  A verdict is reached, but is it the right one? Then there is another death....

the Felony & Mayhem edition

Symons does an admirable job of subtly capturing Victorian atmosphere (in some such recreations, the authors are so anxious to parade their knowledge about the period the books resemble encyclopedia entries swallowed whole and regurgitated on the reader) and portraying repressed family antagonisms that may lead to murder.  Not surprisingly he seems more interested in sex and psychology than economic and business detail. The Collards have a family business, toy manufacture (Symons enjoyed playing with toy soldiers as a child). If this were a Golden Age detective novel by John Street or Freeman Wills Crofts there would be much more emphasis on this and less sexual psychology. But Symons is very good at what he deigns to do.

Unfortunately it is difficult to discuss interesting aspects of this novel without spoiling the solution for those who have not read it. And since it has been reprinted in a new edition by Felony & Mayhem, it is easily available for those who want to do so!  However I do want to say more about the characterization and how it draws from Symons' own life.

Julian Symons was quite a good writer, both of fiction and essays, and The Blackheath Poisonings is throughout a well-written novel.  However, most of the characters do not break out of the confines of (well-conveyed) stock.

Judy Parfitt as Harriet Collard

First, there's the iron-willed, "elderly" (about sixty) dowager matriarch, Harriet Collard (memorably played in the film version by Judy Parfitt, born to play such roles).  Harriet is stock, but of the very best grade.  She's the real man of the family, as more than one character thinks, confident and indomitable, though tragically wrongheaded in some of her decisions (I suspect she symbolizes Symons' view of the Victorian age).

Then there's Harriet's frustrated spinster daughter.  There's the daughter's on-the-make suitor.  There's Harriet's smugly pious, evangelical Christian nephew (here Symons really writes beneath himself, I think, giving poor Bertie every last one of the negative stereotypes one can give this sort of character--he even has the young man picking his nose and afflicted with acne). And there's the formal father (Roger Vandervant) and Harriet's wastrel son George. Harriet's other daughter never really emerges as even interesting stock.

Paul Vandervant:
something of an autobiographical portrait?

Yet there are two characters who are really interesting and multi-dimensional, young Paul Vandervant and his beautiful, enigmatic stepmother, Isabel. Without saying whether Isabel did anything she oughtn't to have done, I would suggest that with her Symons surely drew on the gallery of real-life, fascinating, Victorian suspected lady poisoners. She's quite a compellingly presented individual. Paul Vandervant thinks so too and has, indeed, rather fallen in love with her.

At its heart, The Blackheath Poisonings is a moving story of young male adolescent love (I find the epilogue a narrative tour de force).  I don't know whether Symons had a similar youthful passion, but I do know there are quite a few similarities between Paul Vandervant and Julian Symons.

Symons was born in 1912 to a Jewish father of obscure origins who was nearly fifty at the time of Symons' birth.  So his father was only a few years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle--in other words, very much a man of the Victorian era.  Symons' father was very much the stern, formal Victorian father, as Symons portrays him, someone who never failed to address his son as "sir."  The family's economic status was unstable (sometimes they had good money, but more often they didn't). Young Julian, obviously an extremely bright lad, left school at fourteen to find work as a clerk. This was the end of his formal schooling.

Julian had a stammer, which his father could not help but feel was deliberate ("Come on, sir, say what you've got to say, get it out").  "He was short-tempered at home," recalls Symons of his father, "shouting angrily about mistakes made or things left undone, savagely censorious in relation to any friend brought back to the house, prudish in a deep-seated Jewish way about sexual matters."  For example, he often exasperatedly criticized Julian's play or reading choices:

not for play?

If he saw me playing solitary games with soldiers on the bedroom floor he would tell me to get them cleared up and do some work; when I was reading an article about Napoleon's Marshall Lannes in the Encyclopedia Britannica he took the volume from me, turned the  pages until he found the name of Linnaeus and, frantic with irritation, said: "Read that, sir, read something useful."

"As much as I hated anybody at this time of my life," declares Symons bluntly, "I hated my father." When Symons' father died in 1929, when Symons was a  teenager, sixteen or seventeen, the son "was not conscious of deep sorrow, nor of any emotion except ignoble relief, and a feeling that life might be easier now."

Paul Vandervant gets along vastly better with his father than this (and he is sorry when his father dies), but the two do have bitter conflicts, in which his father sounds rather like Symons' father ("Well, sir?...Do you understand what you're saying? I am a liar, that is what you're saying.").  Paul writes poetry, he wants to leave school to write, to become a journalist, and Paul is notably socialistic in political orientation, all like Julian Symons.  Paul's father is frequently obtuse, unable to understand his son's feelings or appreciate his true talents.

In A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun criticized The Blackheath Poisonings, in part because he believed that "some of the attitudes about state, church and society [expressed in the book] are of the 20th century."  I suspect Barzun was thinking to a great extent about the character of Paul, who indeed often sounds more than a bit like Julian Symons.  The novel is set in 1892, twenty years before Symons was born, and perhaps Paul seems more a character of 1912 (there also is an epilogue set in 1930, which I don't think anyone could criticize on Barzun's grounds).  But much of the interest we have in Paul's story in The Blackheath Poisonings derives precisely, I believe, from the power of Symons' self-portraiture.

The Land Endureth, Part 2: John Rhode's Licensed for Murder (1958) and Ruth Rendell's Not in the Flesh (2007) (Then and Now #4)

Ruth Rendell's Not in the Flesh is a novel preoccupied with the earth.  Jim Belbury, his truffle-hunting dog, Honey, and the transitory pickers of the apples, pears and strawberries grown on the fruit farms, all these beings derive sustenance from the land (Jim and the transient fruit-pickers earn cash, Honey chunks of sirloin as rewards for unearthed truffles).  But the earth can yield dead as well as living things, ugly things that people want to stay buried and lost forever.

Sometimes our dead secrets don't stay buried. In the first few pages of Not in the Flesh, the intrepid Honey unearths not merely several truffles, but "the bones of a human hand, flesh, skin, veins, tendons all gone."  Jim Belbury knows what to do:

Jim might be an old countryman, once an agricultural laborer and living in a cottage with no bathroom and no main drainage, but still he would no more have gone without his mobile than would his fifteen-year-old great nephew.  Unaware of the number of Kingsmarkham police station, he dialled 999.

It starts with truffles....

This passage nicely catches a recurrent theme in Rendell's fine 2007 Chief Inspector Wexford novel: the inter-meshing of past and present in rural England. Judging from internet commentary, some readers have found Not in the Flesh digressive and dull.  But I quite enjoyed the "digressions." With this novel Rendell has given us a fine traditional English rural mystery tale, with plenty of her characteristically keen and penetrating social observation.

Admittedly, the formal mystery puzzle in Not in the Flesh is far from Rendell's cleverest (at her best, Rendell is capable of Agatha Christie level sleight-of-hand).  The reader likely will tumble to the truth of who left the body in the trench some time before Wexford (though another body crops up to complicate things), but the getting there makes an enjoyable journey, thanks to Rendell's characteristic skill in conveying setting and character.

Ruth Rendell remains a penetrating social observer

Outside of the Kingsmarkham police force, which, longtime detective duo Reg Wexford and Mike Burden excepted, is young and racially and sexually diverse, much of the cast of characters in the main plot line of Not in the Flesh is superannuated indeed.  Many seem to spend most of their time ensconced at home by their tellies, complaining about the state of things in modern England.  Wexford, who can be rather grumbly himself about modernity (his dislike of computers, grammatical innovations like informal personal address, "political correctness" and the metric system--all of which I suspect he shares with his creator--is intense), pointedly notes that Flagford, the village where these people live and where the bones were discovered, "is locally known as 'the geriatric ward'."  How accurate this appellation is!

Oliver and Audrey Hunter, for example, are 96 and 93, and living with a resident carer.  The thoughts Rendell expresses through a police sergeant character sent to interview them (futilely) are not exactly cozy:

Barry thought of modern medicine and healthier lifestyles keeping everyone alive much longer so that by the time he reached retirement age there wouldn't be thousands, but tens, hundreds, of thousands of people like the Hunters.  Alive but not living, ancient and disabled by time, deprived by the years of memory, hearing, sight and most movement but still alive.  He, too, maybe one day.  The carer, when she told him he needn't look like that, must have referred to his expression of pity mixed with horror.

Then there's the embittered and lonely octogenarian widow Irene McNeil, who had to give up Flagford Hall after her husband died.  "It was my husband's family home," she complains.  "You could call it his ancestral home.  His family had lived there for generations.  The house is perfect Queen Anne, you know, and the gardens are gorgeous--or they were, I don't suppose they are now."

Admittedly, Irene McNiel is hard to sympathize with, as she uses the term "village idiot" to refer to a mentally impaired man and is incredulous when she sees that the policeman sent to interview her is black.  Yet I found her story arc rather interesting (she gets a new lease on life when she gets a new carer, a sprightly and astonishingly giving gay man named Greg).

Then there's the Grimbles, John and Kathleen, who belong "to that category of people who, after about forty, decide consciously or unconsciously to become old." Rendell expounds interestingly on this theme:

While the cult of youth prevails in society, while to be young is to be beautiful, bright and lovable, they [the people like the Grimbles] sink rapidly into middle age and even seem to cultivate the disabilities of the aged.  Wexford's theory was that they do this out of laziness and because of the benefits incident to being elderly.  The old are not expected to take exercise, lift heavy weights or do much for themselves.  They are pitied but they are also ignored.  No one asks them to do anything or, come to that, to stop doing anything they choose to do.

Grimble complains incessantly about the government's denial to him of permission to build bungalows on his land, to his wife's reflexive, tired strain of "Oh, John."

And there's the famous novelist Owen Tredown, dying from cancer, and his two wives (actually the one woman is his ex-wife), Maeve and Claudia Ricardo.  This menage lives in a garishly decorated Victorian villa and tries rather desperately to be Bohemian and shocking ("the wives" in particular seem like they never mentally left the 1960s).

I enjoyed following these characters and others, deftly handled as they are by Rendell.

I also enjoyed following Rendell's chronicle of rural social change and continuity.  Not in the Flesh appeared a half-century after John Rhode's rural detective novel Licensed for Murder (1958), but the agrarian worlds portrayed by the authors are not so different as one might think at first blush.  Rendell's elderly characters really seemed as if they once might have lived in the pages of Rhode's novel, fifty years earlier (it doesn't hurt in this respect that Rendell's village is called Flagford and Rhode's Famford).

Still, there is definite social change.  The fruit-pickers now are Romanians and Bulgarians, the police force is racially and sexually diverse (ultra-feminist detective sergeant Hannah Goldsmith comes in for endless zinging from the author for her zealous, politically correct attitudes) and then there's the matter of the local Somali population. In dealing with this latter group, Rendell introduces a subplot about female genital mutilation that in itself is quite interesting (and certainly topical), though it remains disconnected from the main murder plot.

Despite these changes, however, I was left with a strong impression, after finishing Not in the Flesh, of continuity.

Despite generations passing away and new ones, admittedly differently comprised ones, replacing them, despite changes in technology and sexual and social mores, the land itself endures and to a considerable extent people seem to conform themselves to it.  Though written a half-century apart from each other Licensed for Murder and Not in the Flesh portray what still in many ways are discernibly similar rural Englands.  What will things be like in another fifty years?

Note: for part one of this piece see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/03/land-endureth-john-rhodes-licensed-for.html--The Passing Tramp

The Land Endureth: John Rhode's Licensed for Murder (1958) and Ruth Rendell's Not in the Flesh (2007) (Then and Now #4)

"One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the land endureth forever."

Even the finest longtime prolific mystery and crime writers in their later years may suffer waning inspiration and even capacity.  Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Postern of Fate (1973), the last two novels Agatha Christie wrote, are, in my view, quite dull and meandering (the latter, indeed, approaches incoherence).  When Christie produced these two books, she was in her eighties and had already written over sixty novels (Elephants and Postern were her sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth, respectively).  Christie had been writing mystery novels for over half a century, having produced her first one, The Mysteriousness Affair at Styles, in 1920.

Elephants may remember
but by 1972 Agatha Christie
occasionally forgot

Ruth Rendell, one of the great modern-day British Queens of Crime, will publish her sixty-second and sixty-third crime novels in 2012 (this is the first year since 2008 that she has produced two novels in one year).  Like Christie in the early 1970s, Ruth Rendell is now an octogenarian, having celebrated her eighty-second birthday last month.  She published her first mystery novel, From Doon with Death, nearly fifty years ago, in 1964.

Ruth Rendell (b. 1930)
Modern day Crime Queen

Incredible as this may seem, Cecil John Charles Street, the other mystery writer with whom I am concerned in this piece, published (primarily under two pseudonyms, John Rhode and Miles Burton) more mystery novels than Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell combined: 143 (or 144, depending on how one categorizes The Alarm).  Even more incredible, he produced his 143 mystery novels in a "mere" thirty-eight years, between 1924 and 1961 (making an average of four novels a year, rounding up).  Street probably is the most prolific true detective novelist in the history of the mystery genre (coincidentally, he died, at the age of eighty, the same year Ruth Rendell's first novel was published).

John Street (1884-1964)
Golden Age Crime King

In this two-part piece I look at a pair of novels: Licensed for Murder (1958), by John Rhode (Street's best-known pseudonym) and the more recent Not in the Flesh (2007), by Ruth Rendell.  Though both books come from late in the authors' careers, when both authors were in their seventies (Street 74, Rendell 77), they are, I think, superior to most of Agatha Christie's later efforts.  Moreover, they have surprising elements in common, most strikingly a shared interest in social changes transpiring in rural England (note: I adopt the American spelling for the Rhode novel).

English edition

As "John Rhode" Cecil John Charles Street was a founding member of the Detection Club and one of the most popular English detective novelists in the 1920s and 1930s (after 1926 all his mystery novels were published in the United States as well as Britain, in the former country by Dodd, Mead).  His detective, the acerbic, elderly scientist Dr. Lancelot Priestley, was one of the true Great Detectives of the era, with a positive genius for solving the scientifically and mechanically complex crimes his creator devised in novel after novel.  If Agatha Christie was the era's Mistress of Misdirection, John Rhode was its Master of Murder Means.

American edition (Dodd, Mead)

Licensed for Murder was John Street's seventy-second John Rhode novel (and the sixty-seventh outing for Dr. Priestley).  There would be only five more over the next few years, none of them really recommendable. Yet Licensed for Murder is surprisingly good for this very late date, offering readers a complex plot and a persuasive rural setting.

The noted American mystery critic Anthony Boucher praised Licensed for Murder, writing in the New York Times that the "detection is competent; the murders have novelty and ingenuity to recommend them; and the background details on the management of a village inn are fascinating.  Slow and heavy, but kind of nice."

John Street enjoyed
a stout pipe and a strong pint

Anthony Boucher was discerning in his assessment of Licensed for Murder.  Its murder plot is one of Street's cleverest and the late-1950s declining rural inn setting is done with conviction and authority, reflecting in plain prose the author's over half-century familiarity with public houses and his fascination with geography and landscape (Street had been an artillerist in World War One).

Licensed for Murder opens with the managing director of Hinkley’s Brewery, Mr. Godstow, learning that the elderly tenants of the Knapper’s Arms plan shortly to relinquish the inn's tenancy, which they have held for twenty-nine years.  Godstow fears that finding new tenants will prove a stiff challenge:

The Knapper’s Arms was certainly not an attractive proposition.  A century ago Famford had been a flourishing center of the flint-knapping industry....But the industry had long since...come to an end.  The population of the straggling village had decreased, and now consisted almost entirely of labourers on the surrounding farms....How was a tenant to be found for such a house as the Knapper’s Arms?...[T]he property included six acres of land, enough for a smallholding.  But it wasn’t everybody who would be attracted by the prospect of serving in the bar during opening hours and working on the land for the rest of the day….Electricity had been laid on during the past five years, but water still had to be pumped by hand from a well, and there was no bathroom.  The only available public transport was the bus service along the main road between Maltchester and Whitby.

After nearly thirty years Hinkley's Brewery must find new tenants for the Knapper's Arms
for fascinating information on beer and breweries, see http://beervana.blogspot.com/

Godstow drives to Famford to get a look for himself at the lie of the land, which he finds, as he expected, unpromising:  

From Hall Farm the village of Famford was hidden by an intervening hill.  But when Godstow had driven to the crest of this, the village lay spread out before him: the flint-built church, with its squat tower; the vicarage; a few scattered cottages; and in the centre of all the Knapper’s Arms.  It was large for a village inn and by no means attractive in appearance.  A central block built of brick, with a roof of blue slate.  To this additions had been made from time to time, built of flint or of the local stone.  The whole effect was ugly and without symmetry.  Godstow could imagine a prospective tenant shuddering at first sight of it.

Despite his doubts about the prospects of leasing the Knapper’s Arms, Godstow is able to find an interested couple, the Bilstons.  Surprisingly, the Bilstons are Londoners who want to give up their city jobs and live in the country, confounding Godstow’s prediction that “no Londoner would ever take the Knapper’s Arms.”  After a couple weeks when the Knapper’s Arms is left untenanted, the Bilstons take up occupancy.

Not unexpectedly, however, the locals—such as Mr. Kensal and his wife, the owners of Hall Farm, and the agricultural laborers who work for them--feel the Bilstons don’t quite fit in at Famford.  As Kensal tells his wife after first meeting the Bilstons:

I’m not very greatly taken with him.  He’s got a superior way I don’t like....As for the woman....I can’t believe that her true vocation is to become the landlady of a village pub....If she makes the chaps feel that they are her inferiors, they’ll take to going to the Blue Boar.  They don’t like people who put on airs.

An English village locale reminiscent of fictional Famford

This concern, however, is soon forgotten in the excitement that ensues when Mr. Bilston, taking down sheets of corrugated iron that had been put up over the inn’s great, disused stone fireplace, discovers "a charred and utterly unrecognizable human form."  Cause of death cannot be determined, but murder looks likely and Superintendent James ("Call me Jimmy")Waghorn is called in on the case.  It is assumed that the body was placed in the fireplace and burned during the period between tenancies, but, since the identity of the corpse cannot be definitely established, Jimmy finds his going as rough as the very flint, even after a consultation with his longtime mentor, the by now quite elderly Dr. Priestley.  Only after another death in Famford does truth gradually begin to emerge....

Fancy country houses and posh aristocrats
are absent from Licensed for Murder,
which emphasizes the lives of
workaday farmers and tradespeople

Besides providing a good puzzle, Licensed for Murder offers readers a glimpse of the altered landscape of even traditional English mystery in the 1950s.  Licensed for Murder has no settings of baronets and country houses, only of smallholders and laborers. Even the owners of Hall Farm, the Kensals, are plain, practical people, who concern themselves not with planning house parties for weekending society ladies and men-about-town, but rather with workaday matters like scrubbing eggs and spraying sugar-beets. With Licensed for Murder, then, we are far removed from the glamorous, sophisticated English country house murders of stereotype.

Dr. Priestley on the case!

The rural world of Licensed for Murder is not so different as one might initially think from that of Ruth Rendell's quite interesting 2007 Chief Inspector Wexford novel, Not in the Flesh. To be sure, English society has changed since the 1950s and Rendell does not ignore these changes.  In her novel Rendell demonstrates that she shares John Street's interest in fictionally chronicling social transformation. 


Yet the land endureth, even after the passing of generations. More on Rendell's novel in Part Two! http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/03/land-endureth-part-2-john-rhodes.html