Mini reviews #36

 ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’ (1923) by Agatha Christie

Christie’s (and Hercule Poirot’s) take on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Like the Sherlock Holmes case, this short story concerns a family curse preventing certain heirs to a baronetcy from living to assume the title. Of course, the solution is different – and more psychologically interesting – and it ends with a very cheeky joke. Highly recommended.

Herewith the Clues! (1939) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links

The fourth and final Links/Wheatley crime dossier is extremely dull and boring. See my reviews of Murder Off Miami and Who Killed Robert Prentice? for overviews of the format and more successful examples.  However, it is fund to see photos of Wheatley and his friends, including many peers and famous writers, posing a scallywags of various ilks.

 

The Crocodile Bird (1993) by Ruth Rendell

In this breathtaking novel, young Liza Beck has lived her whole life cloistered away with her mother, Eve, who is intensely attached to their home. When Eve is arrested for murder, Liza goes to live with her secret boyfriend, their gardener, and tells him, Scheherazade-style, stories of Eve’s many crimes. Unable to see her mother, who has killed several men, as a monster, Liza is able to view with fresh eyes the horrors of patriarchy and the brainwashing that comes, not from a sequestered life, but from a mainstream one. This is Rendell at her misanthropic best.

 

Unsolved Case Files: Banks, Jamie (2019)

A wonderfully thoughtful birthday present from Alan, who has many times been forced to hear all about how much I enjoyed the Usborne Mystery Files as a child. This is a similar thing: pieces of evidence presented as a cold case, which you work through to solve. We both enjoyed it thoroughly. Of course it’s very easy to crack, and the storytelling isn’t exactly stellar – but I assume it’s aimed at children, families, or drunk people house-partying. We loved going through newspaper clippings, photographs, and transcripts with a magnifying glass. Perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t discover this series during lockdown – nothing else would have got done!

 

Five Strangers (2021) by E.V. Adamson

There is a strong Patricia Highsmith influence in Andrew Wilson’s first psychological thriller written as E.V. Adamson. We follow Jen, a likeable but oblivious young professional with an unnaturally attentive best friend, who witnesses a murder-suicide in central London. As she starts to appear more and more paranoid, and we learn more about her past, the secrets behind the deaths she witnessed emerge.

The Secret House of Death by Ruth Rendell

Apologies for the longer and more autobiographical post than usual this time.

Ruth Rendell!

 

I didn’t red Ruth Rendell until I was 19. There was a reason for this. Growing up with a fervent devotion to Agatha Christie, I would often come across critiques from other crime writers (these were very fashionable up to the 2000s, and some of the big names now claiming her as their greatest inspiration started out saying she was awful, or pretending they hadn’t even heard of her). Rendell seemed particularly virulent, and I also read that she never planned her novels. So, child-me figured, if she didn’t understand the master and her own books took that little effort to write, I wouldn’t bother reading them.

 

This is of course a childish and petty attitude to take, and alarmingly some Christie enthusiasts who are adults still take it. Obviously, I had no understanding then about the mechanics of writing, and less still did I understand that the Toryistic fan scholarship I was reading took extra efforts to make Rendell look bad or jealous because she was a left-wing peer. It never occurred to me that P.D. James, for example, said worse, less-informed things about Christie, and managed to share a fan-base – because she was a Tory.

 

I had a few of Rendell’s books lying around from an early age. When I got my first serious romantic partner, who was a big fan of hers, I gifted him a copy of The Rottweiler I’d had since I was fourteen (it was a signed first edition). Before wrapping it up – wrapping up gifts is something that should always be done – I flicked through the first chapter and ended up reading the whole thing in a night. I was annoyed with myself that I loved it, and confused when I went online and read that it was considered one of her worst.

 

A few months later, our wonderful, incredible, fantastic university lecturer Dr Sally West made us read A Dark-Adapted Eye, Rendell’s most famous work as Barbara Vine, which left me speechless. It’s a haunting and bitterly true psychological novel. I went straight to a library and found A Judgement in Stone, the first line of which has been widely quoted in crime fiction studies, and at that point I grew up. I was a fan, and there was no use denying it.

 

Since I seem to have forgotten that this is a review blog, here is another diversion. The University of Chester, where I was an undergraduate, gave me the kind of social education, woven into academic betterment, that is not managed elsewhere. My two departments, Theology & Religious Studies and English, were communities and the staff’s accessibility was a vital part of that. I’ve named Sally West specifically but each lecturer there was a vital part of my personal and professional growth. I’ve been angered to hear about the threats of redundancies in these departments, and the cruel ways these threats are being communicated. For more information, follow the hashtag #NoRedundanciesChester and the University of Chester UCU on social media.

 

On to The Secret House of Death (1968). How I got hold of this book is a long story, the full details of which make it one for a tell-all memoir rather than fodder for a blog post. The short version is that some years ago I had to write a magazine article, under a famous name, about books. The credited author gave me notes including one to the effect that The Secret House of Death contains one of the greatest twists of any novel ever. I dutifully wrote the piece and then bought all the books they/I had recommended because they all sounded so good. I read two, which I thought were awful, and forgot about it, so the rest gathered dust.

 

Fast-forward to April 2021 and I’d just submitted a monstrously long manuscript on Christie which had occupied my every waking (and sleeping) non-day-job hour for some time. I saw The Secret House of Death with its silly Shakespearean title, remembered the warm words I’d had for its twist, and dug in.

 

First things first. There is no twist. Unless you count the revelation that you’ve been seeing things in the wrong light – surely the bare minimum for good crime fiction – as a twist. It is a straightforward, but excellent, psychological mystery. It’s clued, it’s solvable, it’s surprising, and it’s insightful. It does not contain the greatest twist in literature. It does not contain the greatest twist in crime fiction. It does not even contain the greatest twist in Rendell. Check out her short stories for superb examples of what I call the ‘double twist’: the twist you’re kind of expecting followed by an absolute blind-sider, often in the last line.

 

There is a 1980s TV adaptation, which I haven’t seen, and that may well be twisty. The blurb for that sounds more like a domestic noir type thing – think Love from a Stranger – so maybe that’s what this famous person was thinking of. It’s a good reminder that a lot of people who recommend books in magazines etc. haven’t read them and have at best seen the adaptations.

 

But this is about the book. Our main protagonist is Susan Townsend (not Sue Townsend – nowhere near as humorous for one thing). A recently-divorced mother, she tries to keep herself to herself and doesn’t get involved in gossip about the affair going on between her neighbour Louise and Bernard, a handyman/salesman. One day, Susan is forced into the midst of things when she discovers Louise and Bernard in bed together. They are fully clothed but also fully dead. It looks like murder-suicide.

 

The police are not convinced but the narrative oscillates between efforts to unravel what really happened and Susan’s emotional reaction to the scene. She soon becomes close to Bob, Louise’s widower, who asks her to burn Bernard’s romantic letters, which he’s recovered.

 

Since it’s obvious to any crime fiction reader by now that something’s up, I don’t need to tell you to be suspicious of letters which begin ‘My dearest one’ and never mention specific names.

 

Rendell here is on absolutely top form, getting into the sprawling absurdity of human psychology beneath polite interactions. A traumatic event like a murder-suicide makes polite small talk both necessary – for continuity – and impossible, and Rendell captures this brilliantly:

 

‘Were you busy? Am I interrupting something?’

 

‘Of course not.’ His loss made him different from other men, a. pariah, someone you had to treat warily, yet appear to be no different. She wanted to behave both as if the tragedy had never happened and at the same time as if he were deserving of the most solicitous consideration. An odd reflection came to her, that it was impossible to feel much pity for anyone a good-looking as bob. […] If the tragedy hadn’t happened and he had called her like this, she would have felt ill-at ease alone with him.

 

A fantastically complex but concise look at the bizarre, ridiculous mental leaps behind three words.

 

Sometimes, though, Rendell goes a bit O.T.T., tries too hard:

 

‘Well?’ It could be a warm word, a word denoting health or things excellently done, but she made it the coldest in the world. On her lips it was onomatopoeic, a well indeed, a place of deep, dark and icy waters.

 

I don’t know. I think, ‘“Well?” she said coldly’ would have done.

 

The language is more dated that you might expect. Although sixties slang, the kind that Christie or James would never have entertained, is peppered throughout, a rough bartender still cries ‘good gracious!’ and Susan feels sorry for women in their forties because they don’t get catcalled by builders as much as teenaged girls do. Rendell was writing impossibly old-fashioned prose by the 1990s and her fiction has always been fundamentally, though self-awarely, middle class.

 

However, isolating this last incident belies the social commentary in the novel. When read in its totality, and accepting that being the protagonist does not make Susan automatically right or virtuous (Rendell takes ‘think the worst about everyone’ to extremes), the book’s message is a profound one about how ready we are to blame women for men’s shortcomings. How easily we believe narratives about women’s disgrace. How willingly we let men manipulate us and what we see.

 

In homage to child-me, I feel the need to point out, cheekily, that when The Secret House of Death was published, another novel, featuring a similar solution with identical moral commentary, was hiding in a vault to be published after it’s author’s death. That book was Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie.

Mini reviews #17

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) by Arthur Conan Doyle. This collection of short stories was supposed to provide the final word on the great detective – and, of course, it didn’t. For reasons we may never deduce, Arthur Conan Doyle brought back the character who got him paid-by-the-word less than a decade after killing him off. But Holmes dies here, in ‘The Final Problem’, which has an excellent concluding line. There are twelve stories in all, including ‘The Gloria Scott’, in which Holmes recounts his first case in his university days, and ‘The Greek Interpreter’, in which we meet his brother. Rereading in order, I was surprised to remember how socially functional the original Sherlock Holmes was. That charm that Basil Rathbone captured on-screen, so pointedly sublimated in later adaptations, is certainly there in the stories.

4.50 From Paddington (1957) by Agatha Christie.  The buoyant Elspeth McGillicuddy boards a train after a hard day shopping. As the 4.50 rushes past another train, she glances through the woman and sees, in the other train, a woman being strangled! When the police dismiss her as a lonely biddy, she calls on Miss Marple… This is Christie in her element, writing about a fantasy England and a changing world. Characters – from the grandiose patriarch who made his fortune in biscuits to the domestic helper with a triple first from Oxford – are quirkily realised and the plot is silly enough to class as genius.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966) by Patricia Highsmith. Don’t read this as a ‘how-to’ guide, but do read this for the fascinating insights into Highsmith’s own creative routines. Very accessible and very humane.

Dark Corners (2014) by Ruth Rendell. Rendell’s final novel showcases her ambitions and her weaknesses, especially when she tries to be edgy. I wish she had set this novel in the 1960s, as that’s clearly where her imagination has strayed to and the use of ‘the Internet’ (with a very capital ‘I’) at the heart of the plot is slightly awkward. Had all the action taken place in the 1960s, I think this could have been as taut and compelling as vintage Rendell.

Bring Me Back (2018) by B.A. Paris. Paris has a knack of writing compulsively readable prose. You can sit down with her debut, Behind Closed Doors, and not look up until far into the night. She established a formula with that book and largely stuck to it in her second. This is her third and it’s different. For one thing, Paris is trying a male narrator for the first time (there are two narrators here, and a bit of a Gone Girl vibe), and for another the twist is supposed to be unexpected. One thing that made Behind Closed Doors so great is that you know the entire plot, everything that’s going to unfold, more or less from the off – and you know that the author knows that you know. The only person who doesn’t know is the narrator. And that’s compelling. Here, the twist comes right at the end. The problem is that twists are hard to pull off. I saw it coming as soon as the plot had been established, and found myself increasingly frustrated. I turned the pages quickly, but that was to escape some unfortunate writing. The kind of rookie errors I missed – despite their being there – in the first book, and noticed but forgave in the second. B.A. Paris has a genuinely talent but I really, really want her to take more than a year to produce each book, in order to do that talent justice.

No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell

When I purchased No Man's Nightingale (2013) from a 3-for-£5 bin, I had no idea it was the final Inspector Wexford novel. I found myself in Great Yarmouth with a dead phone, three hours early for a rehearsal, so went out looking for something to read.  I have always avoided Inspector Wexford, partly by accident -- it just so happens that all the Rendells I've read have been standalones -- and very slightly by design. The character just sounds so boring to me; a happily-married middle-aged everyman policeman. The idea makes me think of Inspector Barnaby (the screen version), and although I've always hugely respected Rendell's ambitions as a writer, she never quite shed middle-class security, so I always figured that the Reg Wexford novels would highlight her weaknesses rather than her strengths.

Perhaps the final Wexford novel was not the best place to start. It features the man in retirement 'but still involved' in police work. I quite like that Rendell doesn't even try to get round the obstacle she's set herself; she just has Wexford roll up to crime scenes and everyone's fine with it. The police officers even come up with a job title for him: 'Crime Solutions Adviser (unpaid)', which is quite a nice bit of satire.

The crime in question is extraordinarily little-England. This is 2013, but the locals in Wexford's area are not comfortable with the idea of a 'lady vicar'. Rev. Sarah Hussein, who is a convert from Hinduism, upsets so many people by the very fact of her existence that Wexford is hardly surprised when she is found strangled in the vicarage. The police soon uncover a simmering pot of red herrings in the form of racial tensions, misogyny, and, perhaps inevitably, children with complicated parentage. Between investigating the case, Wexford dips in and out of Gibbons' Decline and Fall and reflects on how little has changed in the history of collapsing civilisations. It isn't just the occasional shoe-horned references to The Voice and 'the internet' that show Rendell's aspirations to remain up-to-date; there's also a shrewd alertness to political tensions in microcosm.

Despite the attempts to join the twenty-first century, Rendell is only in her element when she's describing universal and timeless human weakness -- when she's being Patricia Highsmith with a doily -- and that is not what she's doing here. Characters speak archaically ('sex and bodily functions and biology sort of stuff' says one worldly type. It reminded me of PD James's young people in the early 2000s promising to 'summon' one another 'on the telephone'). The internet may exist, nebulous and hardly used (Wexford doesn't understand Google, so that's that taken care of), but smartphones might never have been invented.

What endures is Rendell's canniness in nailing a character in just a few lines. There are some spectacular descriptions ('She was uncompromisingly fat and apparently happy to be so') and some acute ones ('She was a good worker, reliable, punctual and reasonably honest').

As always, the case ceases to matter so much as the character-observation and the grotesqueries of thought after a certain point. The book is not long, but I could have done with it being about 50 pages shorter. Some people say Rendell lost her touch at some point in the 1990s, but her touch stayed until the very end -- my response to No Man's Nightingale is pretty much the same as my response to her very final novel, Dark Corners. Obvious brilliance, with vaseline on the lens.

Mini reviews #14

Tea for Three (1939) by Margery Vosper. Isn't the internet wonderful? The very day I published my review of Murder on the Second Floor, mentioning Vosper's 8-page adaptation of an Agatha Christie short story, not one but two friends very kindly offered to send me a copy. I'm happy to report that this is a wonderful vignette, fully maintaining the spirit of Christie's 'Accident'.  I'd love to see a performance of Vosper's script as part of a larger entertainment event. It's fun and twisty and typical Agatha Christie.

'Lamb to the Slaughter' (1953) by Roald Dahl. If you know any of Dahl's adult short stories, you probably know this one. An exemplum of black comedy, it's the one about a woman who whacks her husband over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. I didn't think of it as crime fiction until, last year, I found myself recommending it to one of my creative writing students who wanted to pen quirky crime. It's definitely useful for authors of crime, comedy, suspense, and psychological fiction to study. And it's bloody good fun to read.

The Secret Seven Short Story Collection (2007) by Enid Blyton. Not my cup of ginger beer.

Gallowglass (2018) by Middle Ground Theatre. Barbara Vine's (Ruth Rendell's) 1990 novel has been newly dramatised by Margaret May Hobbs for this touring production. I thoroughly enjoyed the show, which was largely down to the excellent, fabulously twisty and psychologically nuanced plot, centred on a kidnapping operation. The lead character, a typically Vinean troubled youth, is played flawlessly by Joe Eyre. The other actors vary in quality from outstanding (Paul Opacic) to frustrating, and I wasn't convinced about the direction. I also wasn't sure when it was supposed to be set, as we're in a pre-internet world of landlines and newspapers but the backdrops show contemporary billboards etc. If anything, seeing Gallowglass on stage made me long to read the book.

Money in the Morgue (2018) by Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy. There could be no better choice than Stella Duffy to complete Ngaio Marsh's unfinished Roderick Alleyn novel, and she doesn't disappoint.  It's a shockingly brilliant act of ventriloquism, and Duffy does a better Marsh than Marsh herself. Starting from a less-than-ideal premise (in a military hospital, some money goes missing), Duffy weaves an ingenious plot in entertaining style. The solution bamboozled me but it's totally fair. Alleyn is in fine form, and his adventures are peppered with theatrical allusions and society secrets. New Zealand itself is a living, breathing character, and the absent presence of the Second World War is felt with chilling immediacy. Money in the Morgue is a book to cherish and a masterpiece within its genre.

A Spot of Folly by Ruth Rendell

October 2017 sees the publication of a brand new book by Ruth Rendell, tantalisingly subtitled ‘Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Murder and Mayhem.’  The collection is introduced by one of Rendell’s biggest fans, Sophie Hannah, who is clearly influenced in her own work by Rendell at her peak. It includes previously uncollected short stories by this unquestioned titan of the genre.

When the news of Baroness Rendell’s death broke in 2015, I was working an evening job as a Sandwich Artist™ in order to pay for the un-funded writing-up year of my PhD. I switched off Twitter and put down my phone with a trembling hand. My manager, who was two years younger than me, rotated his baseball cap and asked, ‘What’s up?’

‘Ruth Rendell’s died,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Is that your aunty?’

There followed a mini-lecture from me on Rendell’s contribution to the modern crime novel, and an angry advancement of customers who were not quite convinced that sandwich artistry should take its time. I didn’t stay long in that job.

The ‘quarter’ of a tale is perhaps unfairly described. It opens the volume and it’s very good. Originally published in the Telegraph, ‘Never Sleep in Bed Facing a Mirror’ is three lines long – the length of a joke – but contains a whole, complex story in those very few words. In her introduction, Hannah compares it favourably to Hemmingway’s ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ But it’s more than that: it’s a genre story in three lines, which is kind of incredible.

The other stories, dated from 1974 to 2006, showcase Rendell at her best and her worst. In different ways, each tale collected in A Spot of Folly is quintessentially Rendellian. She always creates extremely plausible characters that we can understand and believe in without particularly liking, and makes brutal actions the natural next step in their thought processes. That is so dark, so pessimistic, and so insightful that it’s terrifying. She has a beautiful grasp of the English language and a healthy scepticism towards the myth of the happy family. People emerge as grim, selfish, and always flawed.

Many of the protagonists are successful married men who are utter douches, and who tend to get their come-uppance. A big theme in this book is marriage, which for Rendell is tied to money and ‘[t]he cumbersome and frightening machinery of the law which keeps many ill-matched couples together.’ Another theme is the compulsion to lie. Every page is clever, suspenseful, and twisty.

There are absolute kickers of opening lines, like:

I murdered Brenda Goring for what I suppose is the most unusual of motives.

And:

You won’t believe this, but last Monday I tried to kill my wife.

There are fantastic one liners like:

Honestly, Hedda treats me the way some men treat their wives. 

And:

No nation had ever perfected a weapon and not used it.

There are overworked one-liners like:

the awful irony that runs through [events] like a sharp, glittering thread.

And:

Sleep [comes] like warm sweet milk pouring into an empty cup.

There are stories written as Barbara Vine, including the weirdest, least interesting one, ‘In the Time of His Prosperity’, and there is a ghost story, ‘The Haunting of Shawley Rectory’, which reminds me (don’t tell Rendell’s ghost) of Agatha Christie’s ‘In A Glass Darkly’, in that it’s actually a psychological thriller in disguise as a ghost story.

There is also a late novella, ‘The Thief’ (2006) which is a character study of Polly, a compulsive liar and thief who takes and destroys things from people who displease her. We follow Polly from childhood to adulthood, as she tries – and inevitably fails – to pursue normal relationships. It ends with her spectacular downfall. I think ‘The Thief’ would make a great film. It showcases Rendell’s razor-sharp skill for plotting (even if she did claim never to plan a piece of writing. I don’t believe her). But it also showcases Rendell’s decline as a prosist: the writing is not pithy or shocking, but sadly repetitive.

In most of the stories collected here, there is a twist that you see coming a mile off, and just as you’re patting yourself on the back for outsmarting the author, there’s a second, more devastating twist that knocks you for six. The final story, ‘Trebuchet’ (1985), is altogether different, and is an absolute gem. It has another intriguing opening line – ‘This is the most important thing in life, she thought on waking – yet we never talk about it’ – and slowly, inevitably, it becomes clear that this story is about nuclear war.

Inevitably, there’s not much cohesion in A Spot of Folly, because the publishers have collected what they could – but they’ve done a great job of arranging the stories in a striking and memorable order. This collection is ultimately satisfying in that it gives you the roundest possible view of Rendell as a writer – brilliant but flawed, inconsistent, profoundly misanthropic, and twistier than a motorway in Wales. An intoxicating helter skelter of a read.