Friday, April 22, 2016

The Bloody Wood by Michael Innes (Penguin, 1977)


The setting is a gross parody.  The house party in the country house with its lawns and terraces ... and the nightingale singing in the copse on the hill.

But the hostess is a dying woman and her guests have expectations; the town is lapping up to the village; you can hear the traffic on the arterial road in between the nightingales' songs.

... And those nightingales.  They provide Appleby with the thread which leads to the heart of perhaps the most unpleasant tangle of events in his whole career.
Spoiler alert: The butler did NOT do it.

And there is a butler.  This is one of those British whodunnits where everyone is frightfully upper-crust--even the detectives.  It is a rather late entry in the genre--The Bloody Wood was first published in 1966.  Nonetheless it has all the traditional ingredients, including a country house party where most of the guests have a motive for murder.

Incidentally, if I'm ever invited to one of these shindigs (not likely, I know!) I'm going to say, "Thanks, but no thanks!"  The death rate at these parties is higher than in most warzones.

Kudos, by the way, to the author, who manages to make a reference to Agatha Christie on page  135:
'I suppose it's nonsense,' he said.  'But--do you know? - I never hear of a tape-recorder without remembering some mystery story or another.  By one of those dashed clever women who concoct such things.  Frightfully good.  Only, of course, I don't remember how it was brought in ... Sorry.'

Sunday, April 17, 2016

The Clue of the Forgotten Murder by Erle Stanley Gardner (WDL Books, 1960)


The story begins when a cop investigated a man and a woman suspected of a gas station stick-up.  The man turned out to be Frank B. Cathay, prominent banker on a binge.  The girl disappeared.

The story deepened when a private eye was shot on a downtown street, presumably by a gangster.

The story got hot when Charles Morden, a reporter from "The Blade" investigating the case, was murdered.

Immediately Dan Bleeker, publisher of "The Blade", called in Griff, the famous criminologist.  Then the story really boiled!
One of Gardner's more confusing stories.  By the end of the book I was not only unsure who the criminal was, but I was also confused about the nature of his crime!   The detective--I mean criminologist--investigating this tangled mess of a case didn't follow up clues so much as as "play human checkers" with the suspects as pieces.

I'm also confused about the dame on the cover of this edition.  I'm pretty sure she didn't actually appear in the book.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

A Tangled Web by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1958)

Another book from my Lifeline Bookfair crime spree:


"... Daisy was conscious of his eyes upon her... something flashed between them, like magnesium, and in that instant he was printed on her memory for ever--the thin, swarthy face, the mouth arrested in a half-smile, the eyes brown, alert, ready to dance, with a sort of wildness asleep behind their steady gaze.  A poacher's face she said to herself ... she might as well have said an angel's ... or a fallen angel's--she was never to care which..."

Daisy and Hugo's love is a tangled web of joy and tragedy, vice and innocence, betrayal and loyalty.  This is a story which cannot be put down.
Who is the tough cookie on the cover of the book?  She certainly isn't Daisy, for Daisy is a true innocent (albeit one with bad taste in boyfriends!)

A Tangled Web is an updated and  fictionalised retelling of the story of John Williams, who was hanged for murder in 1913,  and of his mistress Florence Seymour.

Friday, April 8, 2016

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?

Thursday, April 7, 2016

A History of Courting by E.S. Turner (Pan, 1958)


Down deep in hell there let them dwell
and bundle on that bed
Then turn and roll without control
Till all their lusts are fed.

That was how they did it in America in the 18th century.  Bundling it was called.  Not as naughty as it sounds.

In Moscow in 1952 they courted quite differently.  It went like this: The boy was a collective farmer, and the girl a tractor driver working on the same night-shift.  Sighed the girl: 'How wonderful it is to work on such a beautiful night under the full moon and do one's utmost to save petrol!'  Exclaimed the boy: 'The night inspires me to over-fulfill my quota by a higher and still higher percentage.'  Later he admitted: 'I fell in love with your working achievement from the very first moment.

There's no end to the different methods employed in this enchanting game, practised by nearly all of us some time or another.

You'll love this book.  It's instructive.  It's fascinating!
Here we have a very decorous couple from the 1950s looking at a picture of a not-so-decorous couple from an earlier era.  It all seems a bit too clean-cut and peachy keen to be true: surely the 1950s was the era of making out in drive-ins and in the back seats of cinemas?

The answer is, it was, and this book is happy to record it.  It also discusses--yes!--bundling, along with valentines, chaperones, flappers and a thousand and one other elements of courtship in days gone by.  And of course it also has fun with the thoughts of various "experts" on love, marriage and morals through the centuries.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Timeliner by Charles Eric Maine (Corgi, 1955)



TIMELINER!

The fascinating and provocative story of Hugh Macklin--an alien lost in endless futures--fighting desperately to return to his own era.
 Here we have a late fifties cover adorned with abstract art--the sort of art that doesn't really tell us much about the story inside the book.   There's a man--presumably the protagonist--fractured into six tiny squares.  There's a hazily-rendered back view of a naked woman.  And the background is a mix of random lines and swirls in a fetching shade of grey.  It's all rather bleh.  Give me a science fiction cover depicting rockets, doughty astronauts and scantily clad space amazons in metallic bras any day!

 For the record, the book is about a man whose consciousness travels through time, jumping from host to host like the hero of "Quantum Leap".   It's a well-written, if not particularly great book, with a nice twist at the end.


Tuesday, March 22, 2016

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...