Wolf Hall sequel in the pipeline!
You (might have) heard it here first: Hilary Mantel is at work on a sequel to Wolf Hall. The title, at least as of this writing, is The Mirror and the Light. This news gleaned from an interview with Kathryn Hughes in the December/January issue of Literary Review.
I didn’t mention it in my own review, but Wolf Hall’s narrative ends more or less in medias res, so while I’m delighted by the news of a follow-up in progress, I’m not altogether surprised.
Here’s video of the author discussing her Man Booker Prize winning novel:
Dartmoor hill ponies
This photo appears in Beautiful Britain, a magazine to which I happily subscribe. Click on “The Great Moor”, under “Sample articles.” (And isn’t that viewer a felicitous blend of old media and new).
The ponies look like something out of a fairy story; they seem by their very existence to confer a blessing.
‘The harvest is getting in. The nights are violet and the comet shines over the stubble fields. The huntsmen call in the dogs.’ – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
What a feat Hilary Mantel has pulled off with her Man Booker Prize winning novel! In Wolf Hall the author conjures up a world so compelling that once you’re drawn in, it is hard to get out. And you may want to get out at times, because this is a world that is at once dazzling and dangerous, fascinating and forbidding, lavish and cruel – very cruel indeed.
England, early 1500’s. We are at the court of King Henry VIII. The king is trying to rid himself of his current wife Katherine of Aragon, so that he may marry his current love, Anne Boleyn, who might possibly provide him with the male heir he desires. The principal character in this drama is Thomas Cromwell. When we first meet him, he is being beaten mercilessly by his lout of a father. Not to worry – Thomas can take it – and then some. It’s partly his ability to roll with the punches, and even more importantly, to see them coming, that facilitates his rise at court. He begins in the service of the all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey provides the entrée Thomas needs. From there his star continues to ascend.
Cromwell’s home life is as interesting as his life at court. His household is a cacophonous mixture of immediate family, extended family, old retainers and new proteges. As if that were not enough, he is daily besieged by those seeking some kind of preferment:
‘There are artists looking for a subject. There are solemn Dutch scholars with books under their arms, and Lubeck merchants unwinding at length solemn Germanic jokes; there are musicians in transit tuning up strange instruments, and noisy conclaves of agents for the Italian banks; there are alchemists offering recipes and astrologers offering favorable fates, and lonely Polish fur traders who’ve wandered by to see if someone speaks their langauge; there are printers, engravers, translators and cipherers; and poets, garden designers, cabalists and geometricians.
Cromwell lives in a place called Austin Friars, a little world unto itself. It tries to be a bastion of comfort set against the outside world, yet it is nonetheless stalked by death. This was true of every dwelling place, high or low, in that perilous time. Life hung by the slimmest of threads and was easily and arbitrarily cut.
As I was nearing the end of Wolf Hall, a new biography of Thomas Cromwell came to my attention. I was initially pleased at this confluence of subject matter, but upon reading author Robert Hutchinson’s introduction, my pleasure changed to dismay. The author makes his subject out to be the most dreadful man imaginable. No, no, I wanted to cry out, not so! He was a complicated person, made up of diverse elements. True he could be steely and ruthless, but the times called for it. Moreover, he could also be extremely compassionate and generous. So – which is the revisionist portrait? At this point I could not say. I only know that the Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall leaped off the page and became someone I knew and utterly believed to be real. Have I been seduced by an artful fiction? Perhaps…
Much of the sheer wonder of this novel comes from Hilary Mantel’s marvelous writing. Here she describes a world gone suddenly quiet:
‘He remembers one night in summer when the footballers had stood silent, looking up. It was dusk. The note from a single recorder wavered in the air, thin and piercing. A blackbird picked up the note, and sang from a bush by the water gate. A boatman whistled back from the river.
At other times, a riotous celebration – in this case, the Feast of Epiphany:
‘The night is loud with the noise of bone rattles, and alive with the flames of torches. A troop of hobby horses clatter past them, singing, and a party of men wearing antlers, with bells at their heels. As they near home a boy dressed as an orange rolls past, with his friend, a lemon.
Often I hear of people giving thumbs down to a work of fiction because in the course of their reading, they had not encountered a single likeable character. Wolf Hall presents a crowded canvas; its characters act in ways that can variously be described as gracious, gallant, playful, repugnant, cruel. For the most part, no one person behaves the same way all the time. To be blunt, I had the hardest time with the burning of heretics. Incredibly, even more horrific ways of torturing and killing people – on behalf of church and state! – had been devised. I decline to describe them here; so, for the most part, does Mantel. The incidents to which I refer are not all that frequent, but when they do happen, you want to turn away. It made me angry, this unmitigated cruelty, sanctioned cruelty, done in the name of religion. Hilary Mantel is economical, yet pitiless, when she writes of it:
‘At Smithfield Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and hiss beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.
While this horror is being brought to fruition, King Henry is out riding on a favorite mount.
I know that such things happened in that time and place. All the same, at that moment I thoroughly despised Henry, his henchman, his hangers-on – the lot of them! I despised them all. And that includes – most definitely! – that arch manipulator, that ruthless little schemer, Anne Boleyn.
Well. Time to pull back. Wolf Hall was a wild and harrowing ride, but ultimately a fantastic read. There is much to compensate for the burning of John Frith (though it’s something I’ll never forget, or forgive). There are moments of lightheartedness, even of humor, though these tend to have a sinister edge to them. When Cromwell returns to Austin Friars after meeting Anne Boleyn for this first time, the women of his household besiege him with questions. At length one of them, Mercy, asks if Anne has good teeth. An exasperated Cromwell responds “‘For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let you know.’”
In one of my favorite scenes, Cromwell’s son Gregory is brimming with excitement over his current reading matter: the legends of King Arthur and his knights. He can’t wait to share his enthusiasm with his father:
“‘Our king takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later.You will see. There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps on raining I mean to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.’
Well said, young Gregory; well said.
Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall
Of poems, poets – and the Age of Victoria
I like this Ode by Horace; it is translated by John Dryden:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
(Odes, Book 3, Verse 29)
Here is the original Latin:
ille potens sui
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
dixisse “vixi: cras vel atra
nube polum Pater occupatovel sole puro; non tamen irritum,
quodcumque retro est, efficiet neque
diffinget infectumque reddet,
quod fugiens semel hora vexit.
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As I make my (mesmerized) way through Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall, I have encountered, among the throng of characters peopling this fast-paced, harrowing narrative, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt wrote one of my favorite sonnets:
THE LOVER DESPAIRING TO ATTAIN UNTO
HIS LADY’S GRACE RELINQUISHETH THE PURSUIT.Whoso list to hunt ? I know where is an
hind !
But as for me, alas ! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore ;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer ; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow ; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain !
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about ;
‘ Noli me tangere ; for Cæsar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’
I love the concluding couplet. How powerfully it conveys the extreme danger of the poet’s quest! In Wolf Hall, the reader discovers the identity of the object of this anguished expression of subjugated longing.
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In the process of composing this post, I stumbled upon Luminarium. I could spend days – nay, weeks or months exploring this content!
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Up until I began reading Wolf Hall, I was deeply engrossed in the Victorians. This preoccupation came about as a result of listening to Patrick Allitt lecturing on the subject (The Teaching Company: Victorian Britain). In Part One of this series, Professor Allitt begins by discoursing on what he terms “the Victorian paradox.” From there, he moves on to the life and character of Queen Victoria. Next comes fascinating lectures on the industrial revolution and parliamentary reform. These are followed by several even more fascinating lectures on women in the Victorian era. Professor Allitt then moves on to the religious life – and strife – of the Victorians.
Finally, he comes to the subject of poverty and the working conditions in mines, mills, and factories and the diseases endemic to those who toiled there, including children. This section was a veritable catalog of horrors. Although I was listening alone in the car, I nevertheless could not refrain from exclaiming aloud, viz. “What – how atrocious! How could they!”
Photo from the archives of the Shaftsebury-Grooms Society
At that point, I though I had “supped full with horrors” – and then the Professor described the ghastly treatment of the chimney sweeps. (See “Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children’s Fiction” from the incredibly rich site Victorian Web; and “Pity the Poor Chimney Sweeps” from Suite 101. )
So now I am silently begging, no more, no more…and we come to the potato famine in Ireland.
At one point in this appalling litany, Professor Allitt comments to the effect that Victorian Britain was obviously “not all Masterpiece Theatre.” This would be one of the major understatements I have ever heard in my entire life!
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Each of the Teaching Company’s Great Courses comes with a booklet containing, among other resources, an excellent bibliography compiled by the lecturer. As per Professor Allitt’s suggestion, I have so far obtained (though not yet read): 
. Henry Mayhew was a journalist whose descriptions of, and interviews with, the poor of London deeply impressed his contemporaries, among them Charles Dickens. In this poignant excerpt, he describes the life of a young girl who sells watercress on the city’s streets.
Heaven’s Command is the first in a trilogy about the British Empire. I wasn’t really interested in that aspect of nineteenth century Britain – I wanted to read about conditions within the country itself. But reading the first few pages I found Jan Morris’s writing so beautiful that I may have to rethink my reading plan. Morris has just come out with a new book, Contact!: A Book of Encounters, due out here in April of 2010. She is now 83 years old!
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As I was listening spellbound to Victorian Britain, the phrase “the dark Satanic mills” was constantly floating to my mind’s surface. It comes from this poem by William Blake, written in 1808 or thereabouts:
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
This poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 and orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar in 1922. (Wikipedia has an interesting account of how and why this sequence of events came about.)
I saw an exhibit of Blake’s art work at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York earlier this month.
William Blake: artist, poet, visionary
Here is the Hymn, “Jerusalem”:
“‘He trifles with us. Methinks the felon doth trifle.’” – Turning Point, by Peter Turnbull
Early on a Monday afternoon, a disabled youth with the unusual name of Ebenezer Moulton presents himself at the Micklegate Bar Police Station in York. He has come from his father’s funeral – has, in fact, walked the entire way, not an easy feat for one on crutches.
Carmen Pharoah, the duty CID officer, conducts the interview. She has her hands full trying to bring Moulton around to stating the real purpose for his visit. Frustrated with his rambling monologue, she at last demands to know where he is going. At which point he blurts out:
“‘I saw a man killed. Murdered. Done in. That’s where I am going.’”
Carmen Pharoah has finally got her answer, and she is well and truly amazed. But that is just the beginning of a string of bizarre revelations. It seems that the murder Ebenezer Moulton witnessed took place some twenty years ago, during a period of flooding in the Vale of York. Four men were parties to the crime. One of them was none other than Walpole Moulton, the father he has just buried…
Alas for the Vale of York, the floods have come again. Numerous families have been evacuated from their homes and given temporary shelter. All of these vacant domiciles prove irresistible to the fraternity of local housebreakers. When we meet Norman Budde, a member in good standing of this less-than-illustrious cohort, he is filling his hold-all with booty as he sloshes through just such a waterlogged premises. But Norman is in for a rude shock: upon entering one of the upstairs bedrooms, he comes upon the body of a young man, slain execution-style and laid out peaceably as though for a wake. Norman is out of there in a flash, but not being a totally irresponsible citizen, he calls the police and tips them off – anonymously, of course – concerning his “find.”
(Norman has been tenderly trained up in his vocation by his father and a raft of uncles. This family is like something out of Charles Dickens:
“‘Always think there is someone in the house until you know otherwise’ was the good advice one of his uncles had once given him, to which his father, who was present, had said, ‘That’s good advice, Norman’, and his mother who was also present had smiled and said, ‘Can you pass the peas please?’)
So: two floods, and two murders, both separated by a period of twenty years. Suddenly DCI Hennessey and his team have their hands full. Hennessey is, as always, grateful to have such exceptionally dedicated and capable officers to work with. In addition to the aforementioned Carmen Pharoah, there’s his long time second-in-commend Somerled Yellich. Thompson Ventnor and Reginald Webster make up the rest of the team.
Each of these individuals has something in his or her personal life that is distinctive: a tragedy, a weakness, a secret. We know some interesting information of this sort is soon to be imparted by the author when he telegraphs his intentions at the beginning of a chapter, e.g. “…Reginald Webster is at home to the most charitable reader.” I find this antiquated locution quite delightful. A similar mode of expression is occasionally present in the dialog, as for instance in Hennessey’s comment in the title of this post.
To my amazement, I find that this is the fourth book in the Hennessey / Yellich series that I’ve reviewed on this blog. The others are No Stone Unturned, Once a Biker, and Chill Factor. In the first two, I talked about the wonders of York in general, and of its glorious Minster especially. There is a scene in Turning Point that takes place in Ripon, a cathedral city not far from Harrogate, where our 2007 Smithsonian tour tour began. The cathedral itself is ancient and beautiful. (This post has the pictures we took there.) And Ripon works to hold fast to its heritage and its history.
Thompson and Ventnor have come to this city to interview Penny Hill, the widow of one of the murder victims:
“Her home in Ripon was near the market place with its huge stone column and where the horn blower blows his horn, as a horn blower has done so for centuries, once at each corner of the square, announcing the coming of the twenty-first hour, and doing so each day of the year, including Christmas Day and no matter what the weather conditions.
The horn blower of Ripon
I began reading Peter Turnbull’s crime fiction with the series featuring the “P” Division in Glasgow. Toward the end of the 1990’s, Turnbull dropped that series and began the current one. And he turns them out at a good clip: nineteen since 1999! I’ve read about half of them. The latest is Informed Consent (2009), which follows Turning Point (2008). I’ve read about half of them. and I love them. The plots are inventive, the writing is meticulous, the setting, of course, is great, and at this point I am heavily invested in the lives of Hennessey and company. Hennessey himself is inching toward retirement, though he’s reluctant (as am I, on his behalf).
I find the author himself rather mysterious. I’ve searched for a recent picture of him, but I keep coming up with the one I’ve used in previous posts. (It was obtained from the site Tangled Web UK, which does not have updated information on his books.) 
In a brief but informative essay in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, compiled by Mike Ashley (2002), we learn that Peter Turnbull has a nonfiction title to his credit: The Killer Who Never Was (1996). The subject? Jack the Ripper.
Ashley has high praise for the “P” Division novels: “The series is noted not only for its suspenseful atmosphere and realism but also for its tight plotting and portrayal of local colour.”
Scene of the Crime: A Guide to the Landscapes of British Detective Fiction by Julian Earwaker and Kathleen Becker (2002) is one of my favorite mystery references. In this passage, the authors offer some insight on how Turnbull came to the writing of crime fiction:
“Icy rain and freezing winter winds were blowing around Glasgow’s tower blocks and tenements when Peter Turnbull (1950 -) entered the city in 1977 as a young social worker. shocked and angered to learn that the community of Easterhouse had ‘more people living in it than the city of Perth – with just one shopping centre and four pubs,’ Turnbull wrote his atmospheric debut Deep and Crisp and Even (1981).
[Mike Ashley also has high praise for this novel.]
As I often do when I fail to find any reliable information online – no Wikipedia entry! – I tried the Gale Database Biography Resource Center and was gratified to find two short but illuminating entries. From Contemporary Authors Online we glean the following regarding Peter Turnbull’s career:
“Strathclyde Regional Council, Glasgow, Scotland, social worker, 1978-95; full-time writer, 1995–. Worked as steelworker and crematorium assistant in Sheffield and London, and as a social worker in Brooklyn, NY.
Well, that had some surprises in it! I wonder if Turnbull has considered penning a memoir…
Here’s how the entry in the St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers commences: “The crime novels of Peter Turnbull are reassuringly familiar in form, with satisfying surprises and twists in their plotting, and an interesting cast of characters.” I think it’s that quality of being “reassuringly familiar in form” that in large part keeps me coming back to this series in particular, and to the British police procedural in general.
Sequels make me anxious…but White Nights by Ann Cleeves is a winner!
I am happy to report that with the second entry in the Shetland Quartet, Ann Cleeves has put to rest my sequel anxieties. White Nights is as worthy a follow-up to Raven Black as one could hope for. We find ourselves once again in the Shetland Islands, at the height of summer, a time when at this northern latitude, the sun never really sets but lingers, late at night and in the early morning, just at the line of the horizon. The locals call it the “simmer dim,” and the effect is eerie, sometimes producing erratic behavior on the part of natives and visitors alike. And it’s hard to imagine what could be more erratic than the appearance, at the opening of an art exhibition, of a distraught stranger who, without warning, sinks to his knees and bursts into loud and piteous weeping.
Detective Jimmy Perez is among those staring at this singular display in shocked silence. He has come to the opening with Fran Hunter, one of the exhibiting artists. Jimmy first met Fran, a newly single mother, in the course of the investigation that takes place in Raven Black. He is now in love with her. This affair of the heart is described by Cleeves with great restraint and poignancy; the reader is made to share Perez’s urgent desire for its success.
Things proceed in a straight line from the bizarre disruption of the art show to a murder that is discovered soon afterward. Jimmy’s slow, methodical approach to crime solving seems congruent with his milieu, but it drives Roy Taylor , thee senior investigating officer from Inverness, slightly crazy. In fact, for Taylor, Shetland itself is a negative effect:
“Shetland was unnatural, he thought. The spooky half-light which never disappeared really freaked him out. That’s why he’d slept so poorly the night before. Perhaps it was the extreme of the dark winters and sleepless summers that made the people so odd. He could never live there.
But for those who do live there and have a shared history there, Shetland is a magical place. The action in Raven Black culminates at the annual fire festival called Up Helly Aa. This was completely new to me, and fascinating.
Up Helly Aa, 1973: the burning of the galley. Photo by Anne Burgess
Older traditions than this still survive. Kenny Thomson, a farmer in the tiny village of Biddista, is one of my favorite characters in the novel. In this passage, he anticipates a summer ritual:
“He enjoyed the sense of occasion that came with clipping the sheep; it was one of the days that marked midsummer – everyone walking across the hill together in line, pushing the beasts ahead of them until they reached the dyke, then walking them down towards the croft. It took him back to his childhood, when there’d been more communal work. He liked the banter and the edge of competition as everyone tried to get the fleeces off whole, not nicking the flesh, but keeping up the pace so they weren’t at it all day. And then in the evening they”d all come into the house for beer and a few drams, maybe some music.
There is something autumnal in this description; one has the sense of yet another time-honored way of life threatened with extinction.
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In 2007, as a feature of the Smithsonian Tour Mystery Lover’s England and Scotland, we met Ann Cleeves twice. First, she participated in a panel discussion along with Stuart Pawson and Martin Edwards. (Later, all three joined us for dinner – most convivial, and great fun!)
Left to right: Stuart Pawson, Ann Cleeves, and Martin Edwards
Cleeves met us again for lunch in Morpeth, a town in Northumberland. She took this occasion to tell us how the inspiration for the Shetland Quartet came about. If memory serves, it had to do with a bird watching expedition to the islands.
(I had the pleasure of encountering Ann Cleeves yet again, at Bouchercon last October.)
Our group then resumed the journey north, to Edinburgh. As always happens in England, there were many places I wanted to stop, but there wasn’t the time to do so. Bamburgh Castle, Alnwick and its fabulous gardens, the iconic Angel of the North, which we whipped past in the bus.
Angel of the North
I hope to return one day, to see these things up close and at leisure. I hope also to go to Lindisfarne. Gateshead and Newcastle Upon Tyne are also of interest to me. I felt deeply immersed in those regions while reading Jenny Uglow’s biography of Thomas Bewick.
Northumberland itself has many beautiful towns and villages. Ann Cleeves lives there and loves it; it’s easy to see why.
The windswept coast of Northumberland
As often happened, England staged precisely the right weather in order to heighten the drama. That’s Ros, our intrepid Blue Badge guide, in the blue dress.
Here’s some video footage of the Up Helly Aa fire festival:
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I’ve wandered somewhat far afield from the subject of White Nights, so I want to reiterate in closing what a wonderful read this novel is. I suggest you begin with Raven Black, the first volume of the Shetland Quartet. Then read White Nights. Needless to say, I anticipate these two with pleasure:
The Art of the Mystery, Part Three: the Golden Age of British crime fiction
I wish we’d had more time last Thursday to talk about the Golden Age of crime writing in Great Britain. This period is epitomized by the work of these five gifted women, sometimes referred to as “les Grandes Dames:”
Margery Allingham
Agatha Christie
Ngaio Marsh
Dorothy L. Sayers
Josephine Tey
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Only Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie made it onto the “What Do You Know About Mysteries” quiz. Sayers is a long time favorite of mine. I’m especially partial to the three novels that tell the story of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane:
Gaudy Night is a masterful achievement. Lord Peter and Harriet Vane struggle to find a common ground where they can dwell in mutual love and respect; their drama plays out against the backdrop of postwar turmoil. Harriet is still coming to terms with the trauma of being tried, some years ago, for the murder of her lover. In Gaudy Night, she emerges from beneath that cloud for good – and forever.
It has been speculated that Dorothy Sayers created Harriet Vane as a stand-in for herself. Like Sayers, Harriet writes successful crime fiction. And like Sayers, she takes enormous pride in her Oxford degree:
“‘They can’t take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutem est quod Juniores Senioribus debitam et congruam reverentiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence.’
I recommend the film version of Gaudy Night. It provides a vivid picture of the women of Oxford University at the historic moment in which they achieve parity with their male counterparts.
An equally good film was made of the equally brilliant novel, The Nine Tailors. Here’s what Michael Grost has to say about both:
“Sayers attempted to bring more ‘literary’ values to detective fiction, and this began to pay off in her later books, especially the impressive The Nine Tailors (1934). This novel does not have a fair play puzzle plot, strictly speaking, but it does have a plot, and a complex, well designed one at that, something that is all to the good. It also includes a well done ‘background’ look at an English country church and its vicar. It is an impressive literary achievement.
The Nine Tailors was made into a superb four hour film by the BBC in 1974. This is the best of all the BBC TV adaptations of Sayers’ work. The filmmakers have linearized Sayers’ chronology, telling the story in sequence, which is probably a requirement for dramatization. The two central hours, two and three, are probably the richest in the work. The film version rises to its climax at the end of the third hour, with the characters assembled in church and singing the hymn ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’.
Here’s a link to the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. I also recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on Sayers. It includes an evenhanded discussion of Sayers’s alleged anti-Semitism; the story of her tangled love life and its ramifications is likewise intriguing.
Dorothy L Sayers
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Josephine Tey received mention twice at “The Art of the Mystery” program: once in Emma’s introduction and then later when, for illustrative purposes, I brought up the character of Robert Blair in The Franchise Affair. Now Franchise is one of my all time favorite novels. Tey drew her inspiration for it from two actual criminal cases. An adolescent girl levels a bizarre, horrifying accusation against Marion Sharpe and her mother. The Sharpes, who live in genteel poverty in a house called The Franchise, are stunned and bewildered by this turn of events. They have no idea what this girl is talking about and claim never to have seen her before. The clashing versions of reality give momentum to a narrative that is riveting from start to finish. Comic relief is provided by the elder Mrs. Sharpe, whose name fits the action of her tongue perfectly!
I also urge you to read Brat Farrar, a novel whose depiction of rural British life is timeless and filled with a nostalgic longing. The story centers on an audacious impersonation undertaken for purely mercenary reasons; along the way there are a multitude of surprising twists and turns. Ulitmately, the protagonist finds himself face to face with a harrowing moral quandary. This is the kind of first rate storytelling that we crime fiction aficionados continually long for but can’t always find.
Josephine Tey herself is something of a mystery. To begin with, she wrote crime fiction under a pseudonym; her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh. In addition to writing mysteries, she was also a playwright. (For this aspect of her authorial career, she used the name Gordon Daviot.) Her play Richard of Bordeaux, first performed in 1932, featured John Gielgud in the title role. The work, a huge success, propelled Gielgud to a stardom that he enjoyed for the remainder of his long and productive life in the theater and later, in film.
In 1926, Tey’s mother died and she returned home to care for her father, who was an invalid. She never lived anywhere else. Josephine Tey died in 1952 at the age of 55.
Josephine Tey
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I came to Ngaio Marsh by way of audiobooks, specifically those narrated by James Saxon. I’ve enjoyed both reading and listening to several of Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn novels; my favorite among them is Death in a White Tie. Written in 1938, it is as much a novel of manners as a novel of crime. The glittering London “season” comes vividly to life in its pages. And Marsh does something in this book that I’m surprised more crime writers don’t do: she makes the murder victim extremely sympathetic. Because you’ve had a chance to know this person and thereby appreciate his worth, you grieve along with the book’s other characters when he meets a brutal end. And like them, you too yearn for justice.
With the creation of Roderick Alleyn, Marsh almost singlehandedly invented the police procedural. Alleyn was her sole protagonist; she began with him in 1934’s A Man Lay Dead and stayed with him through thirty-two successive entries in the series. The last, Light Thickens, came out in 1982, the year of her death. (I haven’t read Dame Ngaio’s final work, but I love that title. It comes from MacBeth: “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood…”)
Like Peter Wimsey, Alleyn has an older brother who has an inherited title. He must therefore decide what to do with his life, and his decision is to enter the field of law enforcement. Alleyn shares something else with Lord Peter: he is in love with a woman, a portrait painter named Agatha Troy, who may prove unattainable. This matter is resolved in Death in a White Tie.
Although the majority of her novels are set in England, Ngaio Marsh was actually from New Zealand. With the exception of her travels, which frequently took her to Great Britain, she was a life long resident of the island nation where she was born. Her home in Christchurch is now open to the public.
Ngaio Marsh
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Of these five writers, Margery Allingham is the one I know least. I’ve listened to several of her novels, admirably read by Francis Matthews. My favorite is Dancers in Mourning, which paints a delightful picture of theater life in Britian between the wars and features a poignant love story as well. It has been re-issued by the wonderful folks at Felony and Mayhem Press.
Somehow Albert Campion, Allingham’s protagonist, never became a compelling presence for me. I have tended to view him as a rather pale imitation of Lord Peter Wimsey. (Okay, Allingham / Campion fans: feel free to jump in here!)
Here’s a link to the Margery Allingham Society.
Margery Allingham
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Finally we come to Agatha Christie. Much as been written about Christie’s astounding and durable success. Her name has become, in Barry Forshaw’s memorable locution, “a copper-bottomed franchise.” I have no expertise in the area of Christie studies; in fact, as a reader I came late to her oeuvre and still have a lot of catching up to do. But I did have a marvelous travel adventure three years ago that was very much linked to this writer. My husband and I took a Smithsonian tour entitled “Classic Mystery Lover’s England.” Our first port of call was Torquay, Christie’s birthplace. Torquay, on Devon’s South Coast, does not often make it onto the itinerary of UK yours. IMHO, it should. It is a lovely town, with a harbor whose graceful inland curve provides an effective shield from the elements.
Yes - palm trees in England!
At a church in nearby Torbay, where the young Agatha and her family were often in attendance, we encountered a man who told us that he had been a gardener at Greenway House, former home of Agatha Christie. He is pictured here with our Blue Badge Guide Ros Hutchinson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of all things English was leavened with large helpings of inimitable British wit.
This man spoke with a pronounced West Country accent, so much so that we had some trouble understanding him. It was as if a piece of the past had walked right into the present moment, one of those travel experiences that can never be scripted in advance but just happen, if you are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
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Our assigned reading for this first portion of the tour was 
. I loved it from the first gently whimsical paragraph:
“Mrs. Bantry was dreaming. Her sweet peas had just taken a First at the flower show. The vicar, dressed in cassock and surplice, was giving out the prizes in church. Hi wife wandered past, dressed in a bathing suit, but as is the blessed habit of dreams, this fact did not arouse the disapproval of the parish in the way it would assuredly have done in real life.
Carol Kent
The title of Carol Kent’s talk on Christie was entitled Just How Cozy is that Body in the Library? I wish I could hear Kent’s marvelous lectures again! They were brimful of fascinating insights and witty asides.
On the third day of the tour, we traveled via steam train from Paignton to the beautiful town of Dartmouth. We then embarked on a criuse on the River Dart. Our passage afforded us a glimpse of Greenway House. The house is situated on a bluff overlooking the river. In 2006, house and garden were in the process of being renovated. That work has since been completed, and the house and grounds are now open to the public.
No here’s a late breaking bulletin: Classic Mystery Lover’s England has been off the Smithsonian Journeys list of upcoming tours for several years. I’ve been checking periodically to see if it has been reinstated, and when I checked yesterday, lo! It was back, scheduled to run next year. I’ve been there, and I can assure you: this is a terrific trip.
I highly recommend the Miss Marple stories in the collection The Thirteen Problems 
Here, Christie uses the time-honored conceit of a group of friends who propose to entertain one another by telling tales. The group consists of Joyce Lempriere, an artist; Sir Henry Clithering, retired Comissioner of Scotland Yard; Dr. Pender, an elderly clergyman; Mr Petherick, a solicitor; Raymond West, a writer and nephew to Miss Marple; and of course, Miss Marple herself. Group members have agreed among themselves to relate true mysteries of recent vintage which have proved difficult, if not impossible, to solve.
These stories serve to demonstrate Christie’s narrative skills in a distilled, compressed form. In particular, I was struck by her craft in evoking an atmosphere of strangeness, bordering almost on the supernatural. Read “The Idol House of Astarte” and you’ll see what I mean.
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In Women of Mystery: The Life and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists, Martha Hailey Dubose devotes a section entitled “A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers” to the five above mentioned authors. And if you have an interest in the history of crime fiction, I urge you to have a look at Michael Grost’s superb site, A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection.
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Up until recently, Torquay has not capitalized on its association with Agatha Christie. That has begun to change.
In 1990, on the one hundredth anniversary of Christie’s birth, someone had the bright idea of staging, in Torquay, a meeting between David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Until that time, the two had never met. Here is video footage of this memorable occasion:
In 1984, at the age of 78, Joan Hickson made her first appearance as Miss Marple in The Body in the Library. She went on to make eleven more Miss Marple films, culminating with The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side in 1992. Joan Hickson died in 1998 at the age of 92. By that time, she had achieved a lasting fame through her subtly understated, perceptive portrayal of Agatha Christie’s world renowned spinster sleuth.
“‘There’ll be tricks, tonight. I can sense it.’” – The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Rural Britain just after the Second World War…an English country house falling prey to entropy…the Ayres family, consisting of a widowed mother and her two adult children, the last of the line, huddled around a fireplace in a desperate attempt to stay warm…
Dr. Faraday gets drawn into the lives of the Ayreses when he goes to Hundreds Hall, the family’s ancestral home, to treat a maid who has fallen ill. He subsequently offers to help Roderick Ayres, a former RAF pilot, cope with a leg injury sustained in a crash that occurred during combat. (Rod was lucky to have survived the crack-up; his navigator was not so fortunate.)
The struggle to maintain their stately dwelling, its grounds, and its farming operation is driving the Ayres family deeply into debt. Mrs. Ayres, her daughter Caroline, and Roderick all pitch in, but the responsibility for keeping things afloat falls chiefly on Roderick. Having barely recovered from his war injuries and a subsequent breakdown, he is feeling the strain acutely. As for Mrs Ayres, her grande dame ways seem sadly anachronistic, given the family’s severely straitened circumstances.
As part of an effort to maintain their position in local society, the Ayreses marshal their meager resources and throw a party for their friends and other gentry in the village. The evening begins well but ends disastrously. This seems to be the moment when the decline of the family’s fortune become inevitable – and irreversible.
The struggle at Hundreds Hall was being replicated in many country estates in postwar Britain. But there is something else happening at Hundreds…something decidedly sinister.
In The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters has crafted a subtle depiction of the toll that stress and loss of hope can take on the human psyche. She made me care deeply about the Ayres family, all three flawed but fundamentally decent people. I also cared about Dr. Faraaday, an earnest if unimaginitive person, who gets in over his head when he becomes embroiled in the dire situation at Hundreds.
I have one reservation concerning The Little Stranger, and it has to do with the author’s technique. The story is told in the first person by Dr Faraday. At several points in the novel, he recounts events that have occurred when he himself was not present. In these instances, Waters is careful to have Faraday stipulate his source. But in my opinion, he describes these scenes in more detail than anyone who wasn’t there would be able to do. Limited point of view is, of course, one of the chief restrictions that first person narration imposes on a writer. That being the case, why do authors choose this method of storytelling? I think one reason is the sense of immediacy that’s conveyed when the narrator is also an actor in the drama. Despite the problem I noted above, the device works beautifully in this novel.
I have high praise for Sarah Waters’s skill in crafting dialog and creating characters that are idiosyncratic, even eccentric, yet at the same time believable and sympathetic. She also knows how to build suspense. The Little Stranger is 463 pages long. At about the half way point, it became a real page turner for me. I was consumed with curiosity about the ultimate fate of Hundreds Hall and its inhabitants, intertwined as they both were with Dr. Faraday’s own hopeless longing.
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In this video (which contains no spoilers), Sarah Waters talks about the authors who have influenced her writing and the type of research that she did for The Little Stranger:
All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson, with a Yorkshire diversion
Peter Robinson’s “The Price of Love” has been nominated for this year’s CWA Short Story Dagger. I’m pleased to report that I really enjoyed this story, which can be found in this anthology 
. In fact, I’m especially pleased because I recently read All the Colors of Darkness, the latest Alan Banks novel, and, alas, found it in some degree wanting.
Along with my close friend Marge (often referred to in this space as my “partner in crime” – meaning nothing more sinister than a shared enthusiasm for crime fiction), I began reading Robinson’s Alan Banks series at the very beginning. Gallows View came out here in 1987 and was hailed by critics and readers alike to be a worthy addition to the venerable tradition of the British police procedural. Along with Marge, I have read every book in this series and gotten a great deal of enjoyment from the experience. But IMHO, All the Colors of Darkness did not quite a measure up to the high standard that, over the years, Robinson has set for himself.
The novel had its pleasures, for sure. In one scene, Banks’s second-in-command (and erstwhile love interest) Annie Cabot goes to the house of Nicky Haskell, a young punk who may have useful information concerning a case she’s investigating. A surprise awaits her there, but it has nothing to do with her case; instead, it evolves into a rather humorous exchange with Nicky:
“‘Mind if I turn the TV down?’ Annie asked.
‘Knock yourself out.’
‘ Midsomer Murders,’ Annie said as she turned the volume down. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your cup of tea.’
‘It’s soothing, innit? Like watching paint dry.’
Annie quite liked the program. It was so far removed from the real policing she did that she accepted it for what it was and didn’t even find herself looking for mistakes.
I’m a great fan of Midsomer Murders myself, and this exchange made me smile. I only wish the rest of the dialogue in the novel was comparable. But awkward dialogue was not the only problem I had with All the Colors of Darkness. The convoluted plot involves the death of two men, one of whom turns out to have been involved in intelligence work. Nothing wrong with this premise, at least, not initially. But about a third of the way along, Banks comes up with a theory of the crime that seemed to me to have pulled out of left field. He’s gotten this idea – an idee fixe, I would almost call it – as a result of recently attending a performance of Othello. Now I’m all in favor of cultured detectives – I’m a devoted fan of Adam Dalgliesh, Reg Wexford, and, naturally, Morse – but I can’t help feeling that in this instance, it would have been better if Banks had just taken in a movie that night instead. Or perhaps he could have gone to a concert; his passion for music , after all, is one of his more endearing characteristics.
And yet, and yet…as I said before, the novel does succeed in some ways. Robinson excels in descriptive passages; his skill in this area has, I think, been insufficiently appreciated. Of course, the Banks novels have a terrific advantage in regard to setting, since they take place in one of the most magical and beautiful places in the world: Yorkshire.
[These videos were made by Ron from my photographs of my trip to Yorkshire in 2005. Be sure to turn up the sound so that you can hear "The Lark Ascending" by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I'll hold off on the superlatives; the music speaks for itself.]
Alan Banks currently lives in a cottage on the outskirts of a small village. Annie Cabot declares herself surprised by his choice of such an isolated dwelling place, but at this moment in his life, it’s what suits him. Behind the cottage runs a stream, Gratly Beck, and Banks finds peace by sitting on a wall there and taking in the beautiful surroundings:
“It was after sunset, but there was still a glow deep in the cloudless western sky, dark orange and indigo. Banks could smell warm grass and manure mingles with something sweet, perhaps flowers that only opened at night. A horse whinnied in a distant field. The stone he sat on was still warm and he could see the lights of Helmthorpe between the trees, down at the bottom of the dale, the outline of a square church tower with its odd round turret dark and heavy against the sky.
I don’t know about you, but I feel I could be deeply happy in such a place.
Ultimately, reading All the Colors of Darkness was, for me, a frustrating experience, with the novel’s undisputed strengths only serving to magnify its weaknesses. Once again, I warmly commend to crime fiction readers “The Price of Love.” Peter Robinson won the Edgar for Best Short Story in 2001 with “Missing in Action,” a taut tale set during the Second World War. (Robinson has an excellent feel for that era, as he amply demonstrated in novel In a Dry Season.)
“Missing in Action” can be found in 
I note that Peter Robinson has just come out with a story collection: 
I look forward to reading it, as I’ve come to believe that this form is particularly congenial to his talents.
Peter Robinson
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook…” – Death in the Morning by Sheila Radley
In my ongoing fit of enthusiasm for Felony & Mayhem – the Press, not the activities! - I’ve been buying and reading various books from this worthy enterprise’s burgeoning list of offerings. One of them is Death in the Morning by Sheila Radley.
I could find very little background information online about this author. According to the proprietary database Biography Resource Center, “Sheila Radley” is the pen name of Sheila Mary Robinson. Born in 1928 in Northamptonshire,(England), Robinson/Radley obtained her BA degree from Bedford College, University of London. After penning several romance novels, she turned to crime fiction, beginning with Death in the Morning, published in the U.S. in 1979. Eight more novels featuring DCI Douglas Quantrill followed, the last being Fair Game, published 1994.
[ Biography Resource Center and Literature Resource Center are made available by many public and academic libraries via their websites. You will probably be required to enter a library barcode number in order to access these resources. Here is the link to the Howard County Library's List of Databases.]
Death in the Morning opens with an eerie, compelling scene strongly reminiscent of the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet: a beautiful young girl lies face down, unmoving, in shallow water. She is identified in fairly short order as eighteen-year-old Mary Gedge. But other questions prove harder to answer: how did she die, and how did she come to be on the weedy bank of the river Dunnock? Questions beget questions; it is up to Quantrill and his team to find out the truth.
This novel offers many pleasures, chief among them the opportunity to immerse oneself yet again in that beloved classic form, the English village mystery. And Douglas Quantrill, himself country born and bred, makes an appealing protagonist. Having left school at the age of fourteen, he is most definitely not in the mold of the highly educated, highly literate policemen one encounters in the novels of P.D. James and Colin Dexter, among others. In fact, when someone likens the scene of Mary Gedge’s death to that of Ophelia’s, he responds with the query, “Ophelia who?” The nickel drops eventually, but Quantrill is mortified by the gaffe, especially since one of his interlocutors at that moment is Jean Bloomfield, a teacher with whom he is in love.
Everything is not cute and quaint in the villages of Suffolk. Here’s a startling look inside a chicken processing plant, an experience that even a homicide investigator finds almost intolerable:
“Sickened, Tait stood as though his shoes had been cemented to the bloodstained concrete floor. The grotesque chorus line of dead birds dipped and swayed on the hooks across the shed, plunging into tanks of scalding water, entering a plucking machine, and then emerging naked to be slapped down on another conveyor belt for evisceration and packing by a team of women. In a matter of minutes living creatures were being transformed before his eyes into hunks of graded, quality-controlled hygienically packed, inexpensive protein.
Enough to put anyone off his or her grub, right? And Yours Truly had chicken pot pie for dinner last night…
So: excellent writing, evocative atmosphere, appealing characters…What’s not to like? A couple of things, actually: First of all, the Felony & Mayhem edition of this novel is 244 pages long. From the beginning, witness and suspect interviews and various other components of the investigation are reported in great detail. No problem – my interest was thoroughly engaged. But I admit that I was disconcerted by the book’s time frame. Here’s what I mean: throughout the narrative, reference is made to the fact that the investigators are impatiently awaiting the autopsy report on Mary Gedge. On page 156, Sergeant Tait, Quantrill’s second-in-command, announces the arrival of the report. I had been thinking that this crucial information was a long time in coming. So, imagine my astonishment when, having gathered his team for a briefing, Quantrill makes the following statement re Mary Gedge (no spoilers here, I promise):
“‘She was last seen alive, wearing the clothes in which the body was found, at approximately eight forty-five last night in Breckham Market.’
Last night? It felt as though at least a week has gone by since the discovery of the body. Was this a problem with the novel’s structure? a problem with the reader’s attentiveness? Don’t know. I only know that I was completely nonplussed to find that barely twenty-four hours had gone by since the finding of Mary Gedge.
Was this sense of dislocation a showstopper? Not really. I was enjoying the book sufficiently to want to continue with it. As I did, I began to suspect that I knew who the killer was. Knew – but could not suss out the motive. To make a long story short, I was right about the culprit’s identity. But when the motive was revealed, I found it incredible. I mean that in the literal sense of the word: impossible to believe. So yes, I was, once again, frustrated with the novel. Still – not sufficiently frustrated to give it a thumbs down. Ultimately its virtues - strong characters, lovely sense of place, a poignant love story – triumphed over its perceived defects.
One more gripe – and then I’m done! The British title of this novel is Death and the Maiden, a far more apt and evocative one than the rather drab Death in the Morning. I fear that this is yet another instance of “dumbing down” by the publisher. The String Quartet in D minor by Franz Schubert is popularly known as “Death and the Maiden.” It is one of the great masterpieces of chamber music. Here is the first movement, played by the Alban Berg Quartet:
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From The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction (compiled by Mike Ashley, 2002), we learn that Sheila Radley ” believed that most people are not criminally minded but are driven to crime by overwhelming pressures.” The brief entry further informs us that the author was “ideally placed” to observe village life from the vantage point of the village store and post office in Banham, Norfolk. Radley ran this establishment for fourteen years up until 1978, the year that saw the publication of the first Douglas Quantrill novel in Great Brtiain.
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Hamlet is almost painfully filled with brilliance, but the line with which Queen Gertrude begins the sad tale of Ophelia’s death has, for me, always stood out as especially haunting:
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, 1852
There is a willow grows aslant a brook…
