Mini reviews #37 - Death on the Nile special

In honour of the newly (and finally) released movie, I thought I’d offer a special double-length set of mini-reviews, dealing with ten incarnations of the classic murder mystery. Others exist but one has to draw the line somewhere!

 

Death on the Nile (1937) by Agatha Christie. An iconic mystery novel for a reason, but not a perfect one, Death on the Nile is a passionate and ingenious tale of love, fame, and the end of opulence. Set aboard a Nile steamer, it concerns a wealthy socialite, famous purely for being beautiful and inheriting her father’s new money, murdered on her honeymoon. The prime suspect Jacqueline de Bellefort, the excellently-drawn ex-best-friend whose fiancée the late Linnet Ridgeway married. But Jacqueline has a very dramatic alibi: she was sedated and monitored after shooting someone else. Hercule Poirot, enjoying ‘the little vacation,’ learns that a holiday is never a holiday and gets to grips with the lengthy list of suspects, all of whom have something to hide. It is escapism at its best, even if some of the logic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I’d recommend checking out the relevant episode of the All About Agatha podcast for a breakdown of the plot holes – because, honestly, I never notice them when I’m reading this book: I just enjoy it too much. An unusual feature of Death on the Nile is that every single character – from the great Christie ‘types’ like the snobbish Miss Van Schuyler to the very minor players who never appear in the films like Mr Fanthorpe – is brilliantly and engagingly depicted. You feel like you’ve met them all. And I can’t go without mentioning Mrs. Otterbourne, the tragic bestselling author of slushy romances whose books no one reads and who insists that she’s being censored. She is rather relevant in this day and age. I believe that she is a comic self-portrait; not of Christie as she became but of Christie as she might have become had she kept writing in her original derivative genre. Thank goodness she turned to crime.

 

Murder on the Nile (1944) by Agatha Christie. Christie’s stage adaptation famously replaces Hercule Poirot with a new character, the worldly Canon Pennyfather (is this the same Canon Pennyfather who will go on to play an unwitting role in the odd goings on At Bertram’s Hotel? Probably not, but it’s fun to imagine). Although the author claimed that Poirot as a character was too bombastic for the stage, it’s highly likely that she didn’t like certain actors claiming ownership of the role and therefore of her creation. Francis L. Sullivan, who had played Poirot a couple of times, starred in the first production of Murder on the Nile. The action takes place on the deck of the Lotus (the Karnak in the novel) and the heavily reduced cast of characters contains amalgamations of those in the book. Ultimately, although Christie recognized correctly the dramatic potential of her own work, I’m not sure this is quite the exploitation of that potential that it could be. For a Christie play, the dialogue is surprisingly flat and unfortunately one or two moments have not aged at all well.

 

‘Hercule Poirot: Rendezvous with Death’ (1945), Mutual Radio Broadcasting. Starring Harold Huber, the Hercule Poirot radio series is typical of the craze for such shows on the American radio waves in the 1940s. Only a handful of episodes survive, as far as we know, and ‘Rendezvous with Death’ is a real curio because it’s the only one we have directly based on a published text – although several of the lost ones were. The scriptwriter does a very good job condensing one key element of Christie’s complex plot into less than half an hour. It was first broadcast on 12^th July 1945 and exploits the novel’s drama for its own purposes admirably. There really are so few characters that it’s easy to spot the murderer, so it’s maybe more of a howdunit than a whodunit. But it works. Compared to the lamentably rushed 30-minute episode of Suspense! based on The ABC Murders, it comes out easily on top.

 

Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin. Peter Ustinov's first and best outing as the eccentric Belgian detective, with a super-starry supporting cast. The scenery is beautiful, Ustinov is entertaining, with his own spin on the character, and the other players have delicious fun hamming up their roles. I feel like a whole generation of homosexuals needs to be told about this film, in which Angela Lansbury plays a drunk and Bette Davis and Maggie Smith have a waspish double act. [Review originally appeared in ‘Mini reviews #9’ in November 2017]

 

Death on the Nile (1996) by Paul Lamond Games. There are a fair few Agatha Christie jigsaws around, with the following format: read a booklet containing a heavily condensed version of the story, up to the point of ‘whodunit’, assemble a jigsaw containing a visual clue, then check you’ve got the answer right by reading the solution in either a sealed envelope or mirror writing at the back of the booklet. Death on the Nile was one of the first. What is interesting is that, inevitably, the puzzle is reduced to just a couple of scenes and there aren’t really many characters or possibilities – although in my edition (the first, from the 1990s), you’re given a deluxe list of suspects and motives from the novel, most of which don’t appear in the booklet at all! As always, the jigsaw aspect is enjoyable; anyone who knows the story fairly well can guess what the visual clue will be, especially when it becomes clear that the image centres on the victim’s cabin.

 

Death on the Nile (1997), BBC Radio 4. Michael Bakewell’s five-part dramatization is the most faithful to the novel’s intricacies and also – perhaps surprisingly – the best paced.  Its episodic nature means there’s always something interesting happening. John Moffatt plays Poirot true to excellent form, and Enyd Williams directs with customary pleasant lightness. There is a definite mix of acting styles here, from the highly accomplished Donald Sinden and Rosemary Leach, to the enjoyable work of the standard Radio 4 players, to one very questionable performance. The only real cock-up is when Linnet Doyle, who has been speaking with an English accent, is referred to as ‘the American lady’. But, overall, a hugely enjoyable adaptation, as we expect in this fabulous series of BBC radio dramas.

 

Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Death on the Nile (2004), directed by Andy Wilson. I remember the day this was broadcast on ITV – 12^thApril 2004. I was fourteen and very, very, very excited. I was a little disappointed, although I’ve grown to like it more over time. Kevin Elyot’s take on the novel is consciously trying to be different to and darker than the 1978 film, but I’m not convinced that anything really underscores that darkness. It does make the most of the Shakespearean heights of passion, and the futility of love in the story and the direction is really superb. A pre-Hollywood Emily Blunt pops up as the doomed Linnet, and there is sufficient scene stealing from Frances de la Tour. But ultimately the pacing is a problem, with a great deal of action and plot crammed into the last 20 minutes.

 

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile (2008) by Dreamcatcher. An ‘i-spy’ hidden object game, of the typical format: cheaply made scenes where you click on prescribed items and clues among a lot of clutter. The story unfolds passively. It’s perfectly diverting, exactly like any other game of this kind. There are a few Christies in this series, including 4.50 from Paddington, Peril at End House, and Dead Man’s Folly.

 

Mystery Match Village X Death on the Nile (2021) by Outplay Entertainment. Mystery Match is one of those ubiquitous mobile phone games where you play Candy Crush-style levels between rounds of a hidden-object crime story. By some coup, the developers were able to get permission from Agatha Christie Limited to include a Death on the Nile themed ‘special event’ – that is, a game within the game where you do the same thing on a more basic level (it essentially co-opts their seasonal ‘awards scheme’ where you play special rounds that encourage you to buy virtual bling with real money). Remarkably, they have endeavoured to tell the whole story of Death on the Nile – although their source is clearly the 2004 screen adaptation, not the novel – and the result is perfectly playable but a bit … weird. It really is evidence that Agatha Christie’s genius lay far beyond plotting: while the plot is intact, the characters and dialogue are frankly nauseating.  It all feels cheap and silly and like one of 30-episodes-per-week daytime TV mysteries.

 

Death on the Nile (2022), directed by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is back in what I suspect will be his last brush with Poirot. I’d like there to be more. But this film has been especially beleaguered, not just by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by some very problematic cast members. However, it’s out now and doing moderately well. I really enjoyed this film, and preferred it to Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. Unlike in that offering, the starry cast gets fair screen time. While Branagh still takes up more screen time than he would if he wasn’t the director (surely young Poirot in flashbacks should have been played by a younger actor?), he doesn’t hog his scenes. It helps that the first hour is spelt ratchetting up the drama before the first inevitable murder. That is of course a feature of the book, too, which has led to criticism over pacing. However, this film doesn’t fall into the trap that both the 1978 and the 2004 versions did: the pace feels beautifully controlled, and the third murder, which feels superfluous in the older films, makes sense here. Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green have made several changes to the book and this is a much lusher, sexier version of the story. As in the stage version, several characters have been amalgamated and some have been completely rewritten, this time to make it more diverse and glamorous – which I think is a very good thing for a big screen film in 2022. It is not something Agatha Christie would have written. But I think it works. And the audience when I dragged my poor spouse to see it was generally younger than us, which was a first. They came for the stars, and clearly enjoyed it.

 

 

I’ll Never Like Friday Again by Stephen Maddock

When my grandfather died in January, I inherited his collection of 1940s and 1950s crime fiction, and am
reading through them. I started with this from Stephen Maddock, an unknown name to me, but my grandfather had three of his books. Maddock was a pseudonym for Australian-born James Morgan Walsh (1897-1952), a prolific author of breezy spy novels. I’ll Never Like Friday Again (1945) features one of his hero-narrators, Terrel of the Secret Service, whom readers are supposed to know, love, and recognize, as he takes a good few chapters to introduce himself.
 
The opening chapter reminded me strongly of Agatha Christie’s The Clocks: the narrator has been summoned to a certain flat, without knowing why. He turns up and finds two things: a dead man and a beautiful woman, who swears she had nothing to do with it. He helps her concoct a story to explain her presence at a crime scene to the police, reminds us several times that he’s very attractive to women, then gets to work throwing the police of his and her tracks while trying to work out what happened and why.
 
This will always be a treasured book for me, because it belonged to my beloved grandfather, but I doubt it’s a title or author I’ll read again. Nonetheless, the descriptions of going about one’s daily business – ordinary or covert – to the backdrop of normalized bombs and air raids is fascinating and worth checking out.

Mini reviews #34

A quick note: I've been trying to respond to comments, but for some reason haven't been able to. I really do appreciate them, and it's nice to think that someone other than me reads this blog!

Laura (1943) by Vera Casparay. Several narrators tell the story of the death and reappearance of the elusive Laura Hunt. Rightly considered a classic of American noir, Laura is an uneven novel but an absorbing one. The first narrator, Waldo Lydecker, is one of the most unlikely and intriguing narrators in the genre. Casparay’s great strength is in characterisation, and she shines showing the effects that one person, or the idea of one person, can have on the individual psyche.

Green for Danger (1946), directed by Sidney Gilliat. A nice old-school whodunit, set in a hospital during the Second World War and starring Alistair Sim. I haven’t read Christianna Brand’s novel (sorry, please don’t exile me) but have been told that this is a great if not entirely faithful adaptation. Adaptations shouldn’t be entirely faithful and, whatever its source, this works well as a classic mystery film.

Dear Murderer (1947), directed by Arthur Crabtree. An example of British noir, based on a play by St. John Legh Clowes. Eric Portman stars as an angry businessman who discovers that his wife (Greta Gynt) is a serial philanderer. He comes up with a plan to get rid of not one but two of her lovers… The film is great fun with a strong albeit reductive plot and no frills or distractions.

The Railway Detective (2004) by Edward Marston. A light read, full but of but not overloaded with information about trains and railways in the 1850s. Although it’s advertised as ‘the first Inspector Colbeck mystery’, it is more a police procedural set in the mid-nineteenth century. There is no question as to who committed the crime(s). It begins with a train robbery and follows through a kidnapping and a criminal conspiracy in the murkier parts of London. No cliché is too tepid for this author, but it works.

Herring in the Smoke (2017) by L.C. Tyler. Reliable fun, as always. Roger Vane, a well-known novelist, missing for twenty years, is officially declared dead. At the memorial service, struggling writer Ethelred Tressider meets a man who introduces himself as Roger Vane. The story ambles along nicely with all the fun and shameless clichés you expect, although I found the ending a bit disappointing. It’s hard to explain why without giving the whole thing away.

Mini reviews #32

Hello from lockdown! Given the gloom and uncertainty of the world around us, I thought that today I'd offer only positive reviews ...

Colour Scheme (1949) by Ngaio Marsh

This enjoyable mystery has all the elements of a good Marsh: waspish characters, colourful setting that bleeds into the plot, a detective in disguise (who really isn’t relevant to the action, but the author hasn’t worked that out), and a really nice concept at its heart. It’s one of those mysteries where everything is relevant, but you only realise that at the end.

An Autobiography (1979) by Agatha Christie

So rich, so funny, so eminently human. Agatha Christie’s autobiography is everything is should be. It’s remarkably candid in so many ways, and if it doesn’t illuminate the writing process, it certainly sheds light on that personal connection an excellent writer cultivates with her readers.

Knives Out (2019) directed by Rhian Johnson

Yes, it is as good as people are saying. How amazing that we can get a blockbuster movie in this day and age directly referencing John Dickson Carr!

Never Have I Ever (2020) by Joshilyn Jackson

A pleasant surprise. Entrancing characters and dialogue meant I read it keenly. This book had been so hyped and offered around so many places for free that I thought it would be … lacking in something. But it’s very, very good. Joshilyn Jackson is not a new author but an established one, turning to crime/suspense for the first time. That probably explains the publicity drive. And the experience pays off. 

The Guest List (2020) by Lucy Foley

The follow up to last year’s The Hunting Party is just as promising. I really enjoyed this, and didn’t guess the ending. The plot revolves around a group of characters and at their heart is Will, a thoroughly horrible person whom all of us can put an irl name (or multiple irl names) to.

Mini reviews #26

The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) by Edmund Crispin. Crispin’s debut is a good place to start. A marvellous meta locked room mystery  featuring the eccentric academic sleuth Gervase Fen and revolving around the death of a promiscuous actress in an Oxford college.

The Mousetrap (1952) by Agatha Christie. There’s a reason Christie’s play is the longest-running in West End (and theatre) history: it’s bloody brilliant. I’m pretty much unique in thinking it is Christie’s best play, but I just think it’s perfect. And it features at least two LGBT characters, which is always a plus. A perfect balance of suspense, humour, familiarity, and fresh, contemporary horror, this story of a snowed-in post-war guest house visited by a murderer out for revenge remains relevant in most contexts. I must have seen at least a dozen productions (the West End cast changes each November) and it never gets old. The current incarnation is the best yet, so go and see it if you’re in London. If not, catch the UK tour or one of the regular amateur productions done in other countries. You won’t regret it.

Lord John and the Private Matter (2003) by Diana Gabaldon. Outlander, the TV series based on Diana Gabaldon’s time travel romances, is one of my guilty pleasures (and pretty much confirms me as a middle-aged woman in a dashing young buck’s body). This historical spy novel takes one of the supporting character from the Outlander universe, the gay-or-possibly-bi Lord John Grey who is a spy. I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction but found this engaging, and the research not too overwhelming or besides the point. It’s a surprisingly fun novel, too. You probably need to care about the characters to enjoy it, though.

The Widow (2016) by Fiona Barton. A stunning debut psychological thriller. Barton seamlessly inhabits a range of different voices, with the most effective being that of the journalist, Kate Waters, determined to solve an old case.

The Child (2017) by Fiona Barton. A very good second novel. Barton’s writing style is as engaging as ever. However, there is a big twist which I saw coming from the midway point, and it became increasingly difficult to believe that none of the characters could see it coming or at least think of it. It was a disappointment to have this twist be the big reveal and the end of the book.

Mini reviews #20

Verdict of Twelve (1940) by Raymond Postgate. An excellent psychological mystery, with two strands: the puzzle of a child's murder, and an exploration of the private lives of the twelve jurors at his aunt's trial. The very first juror we meet has gleefully gotten away with murder in the past, making the whole thing an interesting take on the justice system at an increasingly frantic point in British history. The book is also worth reading for Postgate's ironic self-portrait in the figure of a self-important socialist intellectual, and for his thinly-veiled depiction of his brother-in-law, G.D.H. Cole, as a monstrous gay academic, Dr Holmes. Notwithstanding the presence of three distinct Edwards, it's an engaging and memorable novel.

The Secret Vanguard (1940) by Michael Innes. Unpopularity, I really enjoy Innes' adventure novels. They are so escapist: undeniable page-turners which draw you into a fantasy Britain in which everyone is wonderfully well-read and erudite. The Secret Vanguard is a kind of cross between a detective-mystery and an adventure thriller. There are vaguely-defined German spies and mad scientists who mostly swan around inhabiting John Buchan via the Romantic poets. And Inspector Appleby plays a big role but is, as usual, quite forgettable. The really memorable part is the protagonist, Sheila Grant. Described in the blurb to my edition as 'a most attractive heroine,' she is one of the more interesting, believable, and funny lead figures I've come across in earnest fiction of the late 1930s/early 1940s. I could have done without her love interest, Dick, who doesn't do much but, by virtue of his name alone, leads to some unintentionally hilarious passages.

The Hound of the D'urbervilles (2011) by Kim Newman. Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty and his own sidekick Colonel Sebastian Moran take the lead in this extravagance of seedy Victoriana. Will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman, Tape Five, etc.

The Husband's Secret (2012) by Liane Moriarty. The mixed reviews for this book baffled me initially, until I saw the original book cover and realised that many people had expected it to be a love story. Also, being published in 2012, it was slightly ahead of the 'husband' craze in crime thrillers.  That's my best guess: the narrative itself is utterly compelling and praiseworthy.  Our starting point is a relatively normal Australian wife discovering an envelope, addressed by her husband to her, 'to be opened in the event of my death.' The husband is still alive -- can she resist? What follows is a labyrinthine and very human psychological thriller following three sets of people whose lives and deaths intersect. I can't wait to read more by Moriarty.

Holmes Entangled (2018) by Gordon McAlpine. Gloriously accessible Sherlockian postmodernism. During the Second World War, Jorge Luis Borges visits a private detective with what he claims is a manuscript written by Sherlock Holmes himself. Holmes, we learn, was a well-known detective, occassionally helped by a 'middling scribbler' called Arthur Conan Doyle (who has pretty much gone mad, after becoming obsessed with fairies and speaking to the dead). The manuscript reveals Holmes' investigation of claims by Doyle that he was visited  during a seance by the spirit of the still-living Prime Minister. Cracking the case also involves solving the murder of Edgar Allen Poe. The solution lies in poststructuralism and quantum physics. Oh, and Holmes comes up with Schroedinger's cat all by himself.

The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers

Oxfam in Norwich has a nice selection of old Penguins, and my eye always goes directly to the green ones. You probably don’t need me to tell you that green = crime and mystery. One day, the array was not overly appealing – most of the books were Erle Stanley Gardners. Nothing against that, but I’ve got so many of those, most of which will probably remain unread, that I don’t need to acquire any more. By far the most interesting title on display was The Department of Dead Ends (1949) by Roy Vickers. Flicking through, I saw that it contained short stories, which are always nice to have, so I bought it.

Before reading, I made an effort not to check the blurb or the author bio – so as to come to the text without any baggage. This effort was slightly confounded, in the best possible way, by a surprise introduction from Ellery Queen.

Queen does a good job selling the volume as the next great thing (in 1955, when the Penguin edition was published) in detective fiction. Describing each story as its own ‘miraculously English’ twist on the ‘”inverted” detective story’, Queen insists that, after The Department of Dead Ends, the genre will never be the same again. The book and the author are so little-known that Queen’s prophesy clearly did not come to pass; however, the stories are extremely enjoyable.

As you might have guessed by now, each tale inverts the narrative of a typical crime story (and this is pre-Columbo, remember). So, we start with the identity of the murderer, witness the crime, and then view the gathering of evidence. There had already been a few stories like this of course – notably by R. Austin Freeman, Francis Iles, and Q. Patrick. After reading the first story, ‘The Rubber Trumpet’, I thought there was something interesting about it, setting it apart from the others. Put simply, it didn’t feel like fiction. That is to say, it was sensational and implausible enough, but there was something almost calculated in the telling. I realised that it was the focus on small details; the shape of a button or the exact and inelegant number of rubber trumpets bought from a certain shop on a certain day. It felt more like a well-written example of tasteless true-crime journalism.

This feeling grew and grew as I read through ‘The Lady Who Laughed’ and ‘The Man Who Murdered in Public’. The stories, even the oddly stiff-yet-imaginative dialogue evoked the kinds of fictionalised narratives you’d get in big books from the 1940s onwards: Sensational True Tales of Women Who Kill!!!While this may have been a new type of storytelling under the ‘crime fiction’ banner, as journalism it’s the kind of narrative that’s dominated from the Newgate Calendar to New York Timeop eds. About half-way through my reading, I checked Vickers’ bio and, sure enough, he’d started out as a journalist.

So Queen was right in a way: these stories do feel remarkably novel in the context of detective fiction. In another context, they fit an extremely old form, with just one twist – conscious fictionality. But that’s the nature of innovation. It comes one twist at a time.

Black Burying by Henry Carstairs

I enjoy Henry Carstairs’ mystery novels immensely, although I wouldn’t recommend them to many people. This is because, objectively, there’s not much to recommend them: they feel longer than they are, and are filled with rambling descriptions and internal dialogue. The investigations go round in circles, although the problems are generally very simple, and none of the characters are particularly interesting. Black Burying (1945) is Carstairs’ third novel to feature Lydford Long, and in this there is not even a dead body until the end of Chapter 15! An additional frustration is that several characters have similar names: Inspector Girdley, Sergeant Godfrey, Mr Gilchrist (who looks like Girdley), Sir Arnold Chevely, Mr Chatterton… I can’t imagine many people in the twenty-first century would bother with a book like this, and I can see why Carstairs remains out of print. However, there’s a certain wonderful escapism in spending time with Lydford Long.

Long (or Lyfdford, in the narrative) is a painfully shy man who wants nothing more in life than to be left alone and to sketch. His full-time job seems to be ‘amateur sleuth’ in that wherever he goes, someone dies and he sets around to solving each case without any prompting. In this book, he is helped by his some-time companion, a young boy called Phillip Bradley who puts some things together but mostly pops up to say ‘Gosh!’ And ‘Smashing!’, and by a dog called Spot. I laughed out loud when, in the second chapter, Lydford decided that he was bored so was going to see ‘his boy-friend’. My favourite thing about Lydford, though, is that he talks to himself. About 50% of the dialogue in Black Burying is Lydford working out the case with himself, alone.

Before summarising the plot, I’m going to quote the blurb because I find it loquacious:

Another absorbing mystery in which Lydford Long figures as investigator. When a party of people, of whom he chances to be one, goes for an autumn afternoon’s innocent picnic on the Downs, and one of the party disappears suddenly, completely and mysteriously, what then?

I bet this was written by the author. It just sounds so boring — and as if, midway through the sentence, he gave up. And there’s a sense throughout the novel that the author would rather not be writing a murder mystery. I know nothing about the author but, because he was writing during the war and everyone talks like an Edwardian, and because the obligatory meta-moments all reference Sherlock Holmes rather than anyone more modern, I’d guess he was elderly. The books stopped in the mid-1950s. The name Henry Carstairs sounds so much like a character in one of these novels that I presume it’s a pseudonym. Lydford is clearly a self-portrait because the workings of a shy mind are about the only thing in the book that are palpably authentic; also the author takes care to remind us that Lydford is tall and handsome, which is not uncommon when someone creates a fictional alter-ego on the sly.

So, Lydford is on holiday, staying in a country with people he doesn’t particularly like. Nearby are a little village and several nature walks. On one of this walks, another holiday-goer, Inspector Girdley, vanishes and several chapters later a body turns up. Without any prompting, for no apparent reason, and to nobody’s surprise, Lydford immediately sets about drawing diagrams and interviewing suspects in order to solve the mystery. Luckily for him, Philip, his ‘little invalid boy’ companion in a previous case (Drifting Death) is ‘spending his summer holiday, solitary, on an adjacent farm’, so Lydford and Philip happily pal up to solve the case.

While the set up is ridiculous and the writing is lazy — Carstairs is blatantly trying to fill space when he recounts a whole phone conversation over four pages that could be summarised in two lines (“Hallo! Is that Paget? Lydford here”, “Hello, this is Paget, who’s speaking please? Lydford, is that you?”, “Yes, it’s me,” and so on) — I was never bored reading. I don’t know why, exactly. Part of it is Lydford himself, who is such an excellent portrait of a shy man with a lot of unwanted attention on him. He is furious that solving the previous two cases in the series have given him a kind of notoriety, and he doesn’t like all the young women casting appreciative glances at him: he just wants to paint and sketch. He has no time for sex: ‘all girls were mysteries, and perhaps the only thing to do was to let it go at that.’ Yes, I really want to know about the author now.

Carstairs also turns some wonderful phrases when he wants to. At one point, he describes ‘a little man with darting eyes’ thus: ‘Everything about him was little except his obvious sense of grievance.’ Servants and locals do not get such sophisticated descriptions, however, and they speak in a painful-to-read vernacular. And I learnt some slang. ‘You have put your finger in the mustard!’ one character exclaims when another stumbles upon a hitherto-elusive truth.

There are eleven Lydford Long mysteries and so far I’ve read three. I have one more ready to read and will try to source the others, although I wouldn’t recommend these unless you’re a proper twentieth-century detective fiction geek.

A Toast to Tomorrow by Manning Coles

Today’s blog post is a bit of a departure, as I dip an amateur toe into the pool of spy fiction. Generally, I’m not a discerning critic: I can’t stand Ian Fleming, never got into Eric Ambler (but plan to have another go soon… watch this space), and unapologetically enjoy Agatha Christie’s contributions to the genre. This post covers one of the seminal texts in the emergence of the spy thriller as a distinctly British genre.

‘Manning Coles’ was a pseudonym for two writers, Adelaide (AKO) Manning (1891-1959) and Cyril Coles (1899-1965). They were friends and neighbours, and much of their writing is based on Cyril Coles’ experience in the British secret service. Their first novel featuring the British teacher and con man turned secret agent, Tommy Hambledon, was A Drink to Yesterday, published in 1940. Like Mr Coles, who pretended to be older than he was in order to enlist during the First World War, Hambledon is incredibly patriotic, believing that ‘if a country is worth living in, it’s worth fighting for’, and the Manning Coles novels are interesting because they were started as apparent propaganda during the Second World War, continuing apace — and slowly shedding their realism — into the 1960s, even after the first partner’s death.

A Toast to Tomorrow (1941) is the American title of the second Hambledon novel, which appeared in the UK as Pray Silence. As well as Hambledon and other recurring characters, it contains the then contemporary, and very real, figures of Adolf Hitler among several high-profile fascists. As with most of the books on this blog, I read it because it had been sitting uncaressed on my bookshelf for years. And let's be honest: just looking at the cover, it's clearly about the rise of fascism, which is terrifyingly relevant in this day and age.

The blurb of this one — my edition is the US first — makes it clear that Manning Coles is supposed to be ushering in a new era of spy fiction:

It is as different from the old spy stories as a Hitchcock movie is from silent pictures […] We would like you to forget any ideas you may have about spy stories and approach this as a novel with humor, three-dimensional characters, realistic motivation and breathtaking suspense.

What the blurb doesn’t mention is  the plot, so here it is. We encounter a man in a hospital in Germany in 1918 who has no idea who he is. The nurses name him Hans Lehmann and he starts to wonder what he could possibly have done to lead to such severe memory loss. He is worried that he might have been a murderer — the nurses say he is too nice for this to be true, but he reassures them that ‘some criminals are delightful people.’ They agree, though, that he has probably killed, because he is of military age.

In the next decade or so, Lehmann runs around Germany trying to find his family, and soon encounters a lonely old woman in a small town who is willing to act as a surrogate aunt, without bringing him any closer to his true identity. Scouring military bases, he somehow ends up meeting Hitler and Goebbels, is impressed by their rhetoric, and joins the fledgling Nazi party. He soon rises through the ranks and, in the 1930s, becomes the Nazi chief of police.

While Lehmann conscientiously tows the party line, his ‘aunt’ Ludmilla often puts Hitler and others gently in their places. For instance, when Hitler goes of on one about all the glorious things ‘the Party’ will do when it comes to power, Ludmilla interrupts ‘innocently’ with a question about how they’re going to afford it. Hitler’s attitude to Ludmilla also sews a seed of doubt into Lehmann’s hero-worship, because the leader comes across as a clear misogynist who can’t deviate from the script. After the first family meeting, Klaus and Ludmilla share the most appropriate response to the far-right during peacetime: they ‘looked at each other and burst out laughing.’

Anyway, the Nazis gain power and Lehmann assumes his senior role. Goebbels doesn’t like him, but Hitler does, so he stays in place. In his role, he sends a load of innocent people to concentration camps, and tries not to think about it.  Then he has a revelation: he’s got his memory back, just on the eve of the Second World War.

And guess what? He’s not German at all, but an English government spy called Tommy Hambledon! He later remembers that he was planning to ‘retire to the country and grow pigs’ but such plans are put on hold. Automatically, he switches allegiance and works to undermine the German government from within. This is very carefully explained as perfectly natural. Lehmann/Hambledon has not changed his character at all, the authors assure us, just his allegiance. He’s still intensely patriotic but now, because he’s discovered that he’s English, he’s on the right side. He proceeds to get a bunch of senior Nazis sent to concentration camps which is, I think, supposed to be jolly funny or something. A hundred pages or so are devoted to the various capers surrounding a government going to war, rounding up foreigners, while the head of police is himself a foreign spy.

I find it incredibly telling that Hambledon’s unthinking and violent patriotism is never problematised — the fact that the authors are perfectly happy to make it clear that his allegiance, like our implied judgment of it, is based purely on an accident of birth. When I say Hambledon doesn’t change his character, I mean it: his alarming attitude towards Jewish people remains in place, and the novel takes a weird kind of position of abhorring fascism whilst revelling in anti-semitism. Perhaps this is one of the pitfalls of a war retrospective written when the war was just getting started.

A Toast To Tomorrow is an interesting piece of amateur propaganda, and an intriguing spy thriller. I know that Manning and Coles have been credited with inventing the genre in post-war Britain with its focus on authentic psychological excitement over and above fast-paced codes, ciphers, and women. And I can see how this makes sense in relation to A Toast for Tomorrow. The novel’s flaws are plain for all to see — they’re of their time but not excusable, and the book survives on its own merits as a self-conscious study in allegiance and jingoism.

Poison for Teacher by Nancy Spain

A few years ago, researching for my PhD on Agatha Christie and queer theory, I came across some entertainingly pithy reviews in a 1950s tabloid archive. The byline named Nancy Spain, which was a new name to me at the time, but from the flashy photograph and the fact that the reviewer was clearly supposed to be as big a deal as the reviewee, I decided to Google her.

There was little information online at the time, but over the years the name has stuck and I've garnered a working knowledge of Nancy Spain. A niece and biographer of the Mrs Beeton, she was an early media celebrity: a gossip columnist and a regular on television panel shows such as What's My Line? Spain cultivated a frothy, acerbic, camp persona, and lived relatively openly with another woman (Joan Werner Laurie, a founder of She Magazine). When the couple died in a plane crash in 1964, Spain's close friend Noel Coward said, 'It is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out when so many bores and horrors are left living.'

What I didn't know until recently was that Spain did not simply review detective novels; she wrote about ten. These include Death Goes on Skis (set in a resort called Schizo Phrenia) and books with titles that tell you everything you need to know about the tone: Murder Bless It, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue, Out, Damned Tot...

None of these is in print any more, but one is fairly easy to get hold of. Poison for Teacher (1949) was reissued in 1994 as part of Virago's Lesbian Landmarks series, making second-hand paperbacks easily obtainable. So I bought one for 37p and gave it a go.

Alison Hennegan's introduction makes clear why Spain's work has fallen out of print, and why it was a struggle to get this, her least problematic title, included in the series. Hennegan writes of 'apparently racist and anti-semitic attitudes' which pervade the text. She pulls out the old defence that these attitudes only appear in dialogue and therefore exist as satire above anything else, but I don't find any evidence in the text to support that reading. The well-trodden 'it's ironic' defence is an easy one that people use as a get-out-of-jail-free card when confronting their enjoyment of problematic texts, and I first noticed it when I was a theology student and my lecturers were trying to justify some of the more horrific elements of scripture.

So I'm not going to dwell on the racist, anti-semitic, and, in fact, homophobic character portraits here because they are not pleasant. If we can avoid these -- and there's no reason Spain can't be edited and reissued, as Wheatley has been -- then we can get down to the business of enjoying the campy narrative.

The mystery centres around an exclusive girls' school called Radcliff Hall (ho ho ho... the essence of camp humour is that the codes are easy to break but only 50% of straight people will recognise them as codes). The school's headmistress calls in two detectives, Miriam Birdseye and Natasha du Vivien.

Birdseye is a rather wonderful creation: based on Hermione Gingold, she's a gregarious, thrice-divorced burlesque dancer who 'keeps theatre hours', dispises children, and has a photographic memory. She also gets the best lines:

'I always used to tell my husband he was going mad,' [Miriam] said. 'In the end, he did,' she added triumphantly.

Only one character recognises Birdseye from her career on the stage -- a police sergeant who is sufficiently starstruck upon coming face to face with 'Miss Birdseye of Positively the End and Absolutely the Last or whatever them revues was called' to reveal a load of confidential information.

Natasha is a former-ballerina from Russia and she is just getting bored of her husband, a former wrestler who was the hero of previous novels.  She leaves Johnny du Vivien at the beginning of the book and sets up an agency with Miriam, called Birdseye et Cie. Their first client tells them that something is afoot at Radcliff Hall, and, to cut a long story short, our two heroes enrol as teachers, becoming quickly involved in a school play, with staff and students among the cast. A survey of golden age crime tells us that boarding school plays are lethal, and, sure enough, on opening night, one of the teachers dies on stage.

The investigation that follows centres around a randy doctor, some extremely petty teachers and parents, an utterly mundane detective novelist, and the usual round of irritating children who mostly keep out of things. The mundane detective novelist is rather interesting: he writes gripping, adventurous, puzzling plots but straight out refuses to believe that anything remotely surprising could ever happen in real life. And the doctor  despises him and all he stands for, providing the book's obligatory meta moment: 'I never read detective stories', he says. 'They appear to me to combine all the worst faults of the crossword puzzle and the Grand Guignol, with none of the compensations.'

If Spain is doing one thing, it is avoiding this diagnosis for her own novel.  I enjoyed her brutally laconic way with words. Here is how she introduces one character, Roger, who is blatantly gay and who has appeared in a previous book:

He was dressed as a young American with a white shirt and a hand-painted tie and a very nasty red-plush hat. It was the sort of hat that is left unsold in the shop windows in the Charring Cross Road. He had no socks on. He was staring gloomily at his lean brown ankles, crossed one over the other.

When Natasha decides that she simply has to catch the killer, it is not for orthodox reasons, but for aesthetic ones:

She was sick of enforced confessions and spectacular and unresolved endings. She wanted no more murderers committing suicide [...] Nothing short of the Old Bailey and a darling judge in a black cap would satisfy her. It is quite possible that Natasha hankered after a gracious appearance in the witness-box. Possibly in hyacinth blue. Yes, hyacinth blue would be exactly right for a witness for the Crown.

There is a definite focus on clothes in Poison for Teacher, and I would love to see what Clothes in Books might make of it. As a non-clothes-y reader, I can only say that reducing criminal justice to a 'darling' 'black cap' and a chance to be seen in 'hyacinth blue' adds the the spectacular campiness of the mystery.

And it is a mystery, but I haven't focussed much on that element because the pleasure of reading lies more in the wit than in the plot. In fact, although I read Poison for Teacher just three weeks ago, I had to scan the list of character names which graces the front page to remember who died and which of them dunit. All in all, Poison for Teacher is worth reading, and not taking too seriously, if you like old campiness, and if you happen to come across it. I think that's the best way to put it.

Mini reviews #4

The Saltmarsh Murders (1931) by Gladys Mitchell. An absolutely delightful, waspish parody of village mysteries, most obviously The Murder at the Vicarage, featuring the captivating Mrs Bradley.

The Labours of Hercules (1947) by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot decides to retire with twelve cases, each resembling one of his namesake's labours. These cases prove to be hit-and-miss, but overall an excellent bridge between the carefree early Poirots and the sombre late Poirots. Needless to say, he doesn't retire.

Tim Frazer Again (1964) by Francis Durbridge. The thing I like about Durbridge is his innocence. When he tries to write cynically, with a tough secret agent protagonist, the whole thing falls flat. Tim Frazer is not an impressive creation.

Derailed (2003) by James Siegel. Forgettable, well-plotted and poorly-executed thriller which has, I think, been filmed. Reading it, one gets the impression that the author would rather be writing a treatment for Hollywood. Assuming that all women exist only to annoy men, the twist is quite obvious.

A Talent for Murder (2017) by Andrew Wilson. A thriller in which Agatha Christie herself is blackmailed into a murderous conspiracy. Wilson's page-turner is grounded equally in extensive research and an expansive imagination.

Mini reviews # 1

The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde by Erle Stanley Gardner (1944). Perry Mason is in fine form, in a world of seedy families and glamorous blondes.

News of Paul Temple by Francis Durbridge (1949). Charmingly innocent and retro fun concerning a new super war weapon. The mystery is not at all challenging but the reading experience is sheer escapism.

Poisoned Cherries by Quintin Jardine (2002). A star-studded case for Oz Blackstone, and quite possibly the worst detective novel I have ever read.

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (2014). A competent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's style, giving us a fresh case for Philip Marlowe. It's a good book, although the metaphors ('an Adam's apple like a ping pong ball') have nothing on Chandler's ('A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window'!).

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris (2016). Intensely readable, cinematic thriller that is crying out for a life on the big screen. At nearly 400 pages, I read it in a day. Paris creates a believable middle-class heroine in an utterly incredible and horrific situation.