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| first American edition reprinted by Dell |
One thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where she was born in 1916 and after the Great War grew up into adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1967 in the detective novel And Shame the Devil, she introduced to her loyal readers the city of Arkenshaw, "one of the smoke-grimed industrial cities of the West Riding."
Here the author takes on what was then, and is again now, a very topical issue: immigration from Asia to the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, after the partition of India in 1947, Pakistani immigration to the UK increased hugely, as demand for labor in Britain rose. In just the five years between 1961 and 1966, the British Pakistani population nearly quintupled, up to around 120,000.
By no means all of the native British population was pleased with this, despite the fact that Pakistanis provided vital labor in the textile mills, the medical services and transportation industries and other areas. Sara Woods tackles this unease in Devil, where two Antony Maitland defends two British policeman, Sergeant Duckett and Constable Ryder, from the charge of having wrongfully arrested two Pakistani immigrants for burglary. Duckett is known to have nativistic attitudes, but, Antony Maitland decides, as is his wont, that something more complex is going on in his latest case.
Devil is one of Sara Woods' finest criminal concoctions, with strong local color and good characterization (Duckett's astrology enthusiast grandmother is a particular delight) and a strongly plotted mystery that keeps you reading on. The climax, which involves a deadly confrontation during a choral performance of Handel's Messiah, is inspired and makes one long for a television adaptation.
As an aside, I can't help thinking how well the Maitland books would televise. I'm sure fans would love to see screen incarnations of recurring print characters like Maitland himself, his uncle Nicholas Harding, his wife Jenny, his colleague Vera Langhorne, his police friends and adversaries like Inspectors Sykes and Briggs and others. Devil definitely would be one of my recommendations for filming early on.
I have no idea how Sara Woods derived inspiration for the name Arkenshaw. I see he is a character in the card game Magic but that could not have been it.
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| British edition |
Whatever the inspiration, Woods obviously loved this setting she had devised with Arkenshaw. In a 1972 Canadian newspaper interview she proclaimed Devil her favorite among her then fifteen plus books. The year before she had returned Antony to Arkenshaw in another fine tale, Serpent's Tooth, in which Antony defends a seventeen-year-old boy charged with the murder of his foster father.
It's a highly classic murder--the man was violently done in behind a closed door with a poker in the living room--but this is a detective story that never would have been written in the Golden Age of detective fiction. The characters are too humble, for one thing.
The foster parents, a Catholic couple by the name of Baker, are locally famous for having taken in thirteen foster children, now, at the time of Joe's trial, ages 3 to 19. Everyone agrees the Bakers are wonderful people, so the question for Antony becomes, why did Joe--who has confessed his guilt--do it? Joe himself isn't saying. The answer to this mystery is held closely for most of the novel.
Tooth is much shorter than Devil--my estimate is some 50,000 words vs. some 90,000 words)--but sparer as it is, it still makes an impact. Woods brings back some of the characters from Devil and introduces some good new ones, like the mother superior of the local convent school. (Woods, a Catholic, went to one herself.) I know that Antony Maitland had at least two additional cases set in Arkenshaw; I hope they both are as good as these two.
And Shame the Devil is being reprinted this year and Serpent's Tooth in 2027.
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