Bride of Pendorric by Victoria Holt (Fontana, 1974)

Another paperback from the Green Shed.

 

Till Death us do Part...

Favel Farrington and her new husband were almost strangers.  In Capri the dashing young heir to Pendorric had swept the lovely English girl into marriage with the sudden fierceness of a summer storm.

Favel was dazed with happiness--until she discovered that someone was planning a very special place for her in the family--in the vault with the other legendary "Brides of Pendorric" who all dies so mysteriously, and so tragically...

"To Death us do Part" took on a new and ominous meaning.

 On the cover our heroine flees a burning building--but she doesn't seem to be in too much of a hurry, given she took time to don the elaborate whatever-it-is she's wearing and do her makeup.   She has also taken the time to stop and pose dramatically, with one arm flung up to shield her forehead.  (There's something wrong with that arm, by the way, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is!)

The novel itself is much less interesting than its cover--nothing much happens to the heroine in the first two hundred or so pages of the book except suspicions, forebodings and the occasional Grim Warning.  As in most gothic romances, the actual star of the story is "Pendorric", the house in which it takes place.  Here's a question: why do the heroines of gothic romances never find themselves menaced in flats or suburban bungalows, and "swept" into marriage with dashing yet sinister actuaries or accountants?

Skye Cameron by Phyllis Whitney (Coronet, 1974)

One of my "Green Shed" finds!

'No woman could ever be indifferent to such a man'

'A great brute of a man' they called him... 'uncouth, rude'.  They said he had been in prison, that he was a murderer ... and worse.  But the moment Skye Cameron caught her first glimpse of Justin Law, her heart beat uncontrollably.  She knew herself to be irrevocably drawn to the big, intense man with the mysterious past.

Skye Cameron was a redhead, strong-willed and impetuous.  But when she challenged respectable New Orleans society she was forced to defy the world she knew for a love she could not admit.

'A story ripe with the adventures of a flaming-haired heroine who is at leas kissing-kin to Scarlett O'Hara'

New York Times

Well the cover gets one thing right anyway--the heroine's hair is read.  Sort of.

But that is the only thing that appears to be right about the cover.  The novel takes place in genteel New Orleans in the late nineteenth century--the heroine is apparently wandering around a burning plantation looking disheveled and wearing nothing but her shift.  She looks a bit jaundiced, too, with that yellow complexion, and her expression says "Night of the Living Dead" to me more than "defying the world for love".

Also the hero, that "great brute of a man" is missing from the cover.  Make of that what you will...

Swing, Brother, Swing by Ngaio Marsh (Fontana, 1974)

 

Rivera had advanced in the spotlight.  He seemed rapt; at once tormented and exalted.  He swayed and jerked and ogled, a puppet of his own music.  As the performance rocketed up to its climax, he swayed backwards at a preposterous angle.  Then a screaming dissonance abruptly tore loose from the general din as the spotlight switched to the tympani.  Lord Pastern, wearing his sombrero, had risen.  Advancing to within five feet of Rivera, he pointed his revolver at him and fired...

Oh my!  Hot jazz, aristocrats (common people seldom star in Ngaio Marsh's mysteries where even policemen are pedigreed) and murder all mixed up together.  And bound within one of Fontana's better photo-covers.  I love the dramatic foreshortening of the murder victim, lying there with some kind of spike sticking out of his white dress shirt.  The image just draws you in and makes you want to find out what's going on.

Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes (Fontana, 1974)

I bought this in what you might call a charity stall clearance sale--the sellers were losing their storage space and were offering their books at "$10 for all you can carry!" just to get rid of them.  I went around filling a shopping bag with everything and anything that looked remotely interesting.

Von Aschenhausen sat on the edge of a large desk.  His eyes were fixed on the man standing over the girl roped to a chair.  He spoke again: "You fool.  You stupid little fool.  Can't you see I must, I will find out?  Kurt, try some more of your persuasion..."

The girl felt a hand of iron on her aching shoulder.  She tried to turn her face away from the glare of the powerful lamp, but it still pierced her eyelids  with a dull-red burning.  She struggled weakly against the ropes that held her, but they only cut deeper into her breast and thigh...

What is it with cover blurbs and ellipses? 

Above Suspicion was Helen MacInnes' first book and was originally published in 1941.  The villains of this story are (not surprisingly) Nazis.  Interestingly, these fictional Nazis actually seem a bit less evil than their real-life counterparts--probably because in 1941 the full extent of the Nazis' crimes were not known.

There's a sprinkling of propaganda throughout this story (again not surprisingly--1941!)  Most of it is of the "this is what we're fighting for/against" variety as the very English hero and heroine are chased around pre-war Europe:

"You believe you have not changed.  And yet under the leadership which you praise so much you may only read certain books, listen to certain music, look at certain pictures, make friends with certain people.  Isn't that limiting yourself?"

"Oh well, limiting yourself to the good, eliminating the bad--all that is better in the end."

"But who is to say what is good for you or bad for you?  Is it to be your own judgement ... or is it to be some self-appointed leader who can't even speak grammatical German?"

(Page 21) 

There's also a sympathetic American journalist who comes to the aid of our beleaguered heroes--surely a shout out to the United States which in 1941 was not in the War exactly, but certainly coming to the aid of those who were. 

Sadly, Fontana decided to package this book in an ugly seventies photo-cover, with anachronistic models posed in a vaguely dramatic manner.  It's horribly generic, and only gives the loosest idea of what the book is actually about.