It’s been a while since I picked a British Library Crime classic, but I’m back with another one this week because it’s really good.
So, four men are due to fly on a plane to Dublin, but only three board. When it goes down in the Irish Sea, there are no bodies and the police have no idea who the man was who didn’t board the plane. And so they turn to the Wade family, who knew the four men due to fly, and question them to find out. Over the course of the book we find out about the dynamics of the household and try to work out who on earth was the man who didn’t fly.
According to the introduction it was the first novel to be nominated for the both the Golden Dagger and its American equivalent – and I can see why. For perspective also nominated for the Golden Dagger (then called the crossed red herring) that year was Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice. The following year it was won by previous BotW pick The Colour of Murder. It is not a conventional murder mystery and I’m going to warn you now: there are a lot of unlikeable characters in this one. But it’s so good. I read it in basically an evening and I didn’t care if it ended up making me go to sleep late. It’s that sort of book.
My copy came from a friend – who left a stack of secondhand BLCC’s with me because her bags were too full – but as with the others in the series it’s also on Kindle and I’m sure sooner or later it will turn up in their KU selection.
Yes, the list last week was huge, with lots of good stuff on it – but I have other plans for some of them. Yes, yes, yes, this is cheating because I finished this on Monday. No, I’m not really bothered that I’m breaking my own rules again because I’m jet lagged and I’ve caught something with a cough from the plane (no it’s not Covid, I did a test). So here we are with a rule breaking BotW pick, you’re welcome.
Roller Skates is a Newberry award winning children’s book, first published in 1936. Set somewhere in the 1890s, it tells the story of a year in the life of a little girl called Lucinda, who moves to New York to stay with two ladies while her parents are away in Europe. Lucinda has a greater degree of freedom while living in New York than she is used to at home, and as a result explores the city on her roller skates and makes a variety of friends along the way. Lucinda clearly comes from a fairly well-to-do background, but many of her friends do not, and she learns a lot about the way of the world from her adventures.
My love of children’s books from the first half of the twentieth century is sufficiently well known at this point – and this was one of my acquisitions from Book Con this year. And as is often the case in books of this age, there’s more death in Lucinda’s life than might be expected in a modern children’s book, but given my grandma’s stories about her childhood, nothing that wasn’t realistic. I haven’t read a lot of children’s books set in late nineteenth century urban America and that made this interesting even beyond the lovely writing. It’s hard to tell whether I would have loved it as a child the way that I did Lottie and Lisa – which was written about ten years later and which I used to borrow from the primary school library on the regular and obviously is the basis for one of my favourite Disney movies – but as an adult with an interest in the genre is an interesting one.
I’m not expecting many (any?!) of you to want to read this, but if you do, you’re going to have to pick it up second hand I’m afraid, but there are a few copies on Abebooks.
Today’s pick is part of the bounty from that Persephone trip I mentioned on Saturday. And I’m quite pleased with my choice!
Guard Your Daughters is the story of a family of five sisters – four of whom are still living at home, whilst the oldest has recently married. It’s the early 1950s and their mother stops the girls from going to school, or making friends – and if she can from leaving the house at all. Their father is a mystery writer and devoted to his wife and to keeping her from being made ill by goings on around d her. Told by Morgan, the middle sister, in some ways it’s a light and fluffy book as you follow the day to day lives of the girls. But under that there is a darker secret.
I remember my mum saying to me once that as a parent it is your job to bring your children up so that they can go out into the world and live independently without you. On that front, Morgan’s parents appear to have failed big style. The elder girls had a governess, but she left some time before the start of the novel and the youngest sister, Theresa, is going without a proper education and is busy trying to make sure no one forces her out of the world that she’s made for herself. And the elder girls seem to being kept in the sort of splendid isolation that a strict Victorian father might have come up with – encouraged to work on accomplishments – despite the fact that the world has changed. How did eldest sister Pandora manage to escape in marriage? Well read it and you’ll find out.
Interestingly Persephone have included a selection of reader reactions to the end of the book – because this is a bit of a polarising one. I can’t say that I liked many of the characters but I was fascinated to see what was actually going on in the household. I’ve seen some people compare it to I Capture the Castle and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, although this is darker than I remember that being. Anyway, I read it in less than a day and it gave me lots of thoughts, so I recommend it!
My copy came from Persephone in Bath – you can order direct from them or you may be able to find it (or order it) in larger bookstores
Yes this is something of a cheat, because I finished this on Monday, but it would have been Sunday night if I hadn’t been so very tired after book conference. So here we are, and let’s hope now that I’m not scuppering myself for next week’s pick!
When an Amy Snowden marries a much younger man, her neighbours are outraged. When she then apparently kills herself a few months later, her husband then disappears. The coroner rules it suicide, but Sergeant Caleb Cluff isn’t convinced. He knows the area and Amy and thinks someone is getting away with murder. So he sets out to find out the truth about what happened to Amy, despite the disapproval of his colleagues.
This was originally published in 1960, but like the Lorac the other week it is another that is really good at conjuring the location and the people and is very atmospheric. It’s also quite creepy – as a reader you’re not in a lot of doubt about whether it was a murder at the start but it builds and builds. Yes there are some slightly dubious attitudes here, but it does all make sense within itself. This is the first in a series and I will look out for more.
This is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so if you don’t read on kindle you may have to buy the paperback or wait for it to cycle out of that for it to pop up on Kobo.
As I said yesterday, a busy week in life and also a fairly busy week in reading. And I’m back with a British Library Crime classic pick today, because this is really good – and also has a beautiful cover.
It’s just after the war and Inspector MacDonald is hunting for a coupon racketeer who has gone missing in London, reported missing by his fiancée. In Lancashire Giles Hoggett, a book dealer turned cow farmer, has found something strange and potentially sinister in his fishing cottage. His wife is sceptical but he writes to a Scotland Yard detective who solved another case locally not that long before. Soon MacDonald is visiting for the weekend and it seems that his coupon case may be connected to the missing items at the cottage.
I really like E C R Lorac. Almost every time I read one her books it’s up there for Book of the Week – and it was a surprise to me that it’s been a year since I picked one. She is so good at writing about Lancashire and the communities there, and this really evokes the tight-knit community in the countryside as well as the immediate aftermath of the war. As the granddaughter of farming families (on both sides!) I really love the way she writes about people who know their land, the rhythms of the seasons and that you have to respect nature. Oh and the mystery is pretty good too!
The Theft of the Iron Dogs is available as a paperback in the British Library Crime Classics range and it is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it’s not on Kobo right now, but as I’ve said before the BLCC titles rotate in and out of that still be back on Kobo at some point.
Yes, this is a thing. Seriously it is and I’ve read an increasing number of them and they start to form into patterns. Yes it’s slightly niche and I’m not expecting many of you to go out and buy these, but I have thoughts to share.
Firstly, lets be clear – my beloved Drina books are not career books. Yes, across the series Drina trains as a ballet dancer – which then becomes her career, but ballerina is not a realistic career for most young women. These are books that were written to give young women ideas of what they might want to do when they left school and what the training and actual job might entail. But the author of the Drina books did write some career books – Jean Estoril aka Mabel Esther Allan wrote Judith Teaches, which is one of a slew of books about becoming a teacher. What makes it interesting is that Judith becomes a teacher at a secondary modern – rather than a grammar school – and that gives a window onto mid twentieth century English society. It’s been reprinted recently, so worth a look if you can get a cheap copy.
Another popular job to get the career novel treatment is nursing – the Cherry Ames and Sue Barton series are the ones you’re most likely to have heard of, and I’ve read a couple of each of those, but I’ve also read Jean Tours a Hospital which is I mentioned in Quick Reviews last summer and is definitely emphatically not a great work of literature, but it is a fascinating look at nursing in the 50s and the attitudes around it.
There are a few with journalist heroines too – which is fun for me given my day job! There’s the Sally Baxter: Girl reporter series but also few weeks back I read A Press Story which has a plucky school leaver securing her first trainee job at the (very) local paper and you follow her as she learns the ropes.
Then there are some with more exotic jobs – I read June Grey: Fashion Student a couple of months back – which follows the titular June as she completes her course at fashion and design college and undertakes some work experience with a view to getting a job. Haute couture designers a plenty – and she gets a love interest (of course). In fact in most of these there is a romantic subplot as well – just to make sure that they all know that if they get a job it’s not going to stop them getting married. June’s is a fellow designer, a year or two ahead of her in career terms but also with some connections to the business which are revealed late on so we know that June won’t be struggling for cash when she bags her bloke.
I think the first career book that I read – way back when I was about 8 or 9 years old – was my mum’s copy of Shirley Flight: Air Hostess, which I blame for my crushing disappointment on my first ever plane flight when I discovered that the cabin crew no longer cooked a four course meal for the passengers in the plane’s galley during the flight. Luckily my disillusionment was assuaged by the fact that my sister and I were taken into the flight deck (I think my dad had told the crew it was our first flight – thanks dad!) and we got to see the Alps poking through the clouds below us. Anyway, at the time I had no idea that this was part of a series but as a grown up I’ve picked up most of the others for cheap at various points. They have all the issues that you might expect when it comes to books written in the 50s and and dealing with far flung parts of the world, so if you do ever pick one up, make it that first one or one of the North American or European set ones to avoid the worst of that.
And finally my most recent discovery is that we also had evangelical career books – last week I read Linda Learns to Type where our heroine wants to be a private secretary to an important man and so throws herself into her secretarial classes at her secondary modern. Linda’s sister passed the eleven plus and goes to grammar school – and Linda is jealous of that, but her sister has also Found God and by the end of the book Linda does too – and a nice boy too, who isn’t the first one you meet in the book for once, because that one doesn’t like Linda’s new interest in the chapel youth group. Linda’s job is at a chocolate factory – most of the chocolate manufacturers in the UK seem to have been Quakers so that scans – and there’s plenty of detail about all the secretarial work that needed doing in the pre-computer era.
Through all of this my guide is Kay Clifford’s Career Novels for Girls – the copy I have is my friends (as to be fair is Press Story!) but I also heard Kay talk at Book Conference a few years back. It’s an encyclopaedic guide to the genre, but written with a sense of humour and an eye to the truly outdated madness that some of these are peddling. But then there’s some really bonkers stuff in a lot of Girls Own books – not for nothing do my sister and I have a running joke about people being sung out of comas after all.
I know I mentioned a BLCC book in last week’s Quick Reviews so it’s two in a week, but I didn’t realise at that point that I was going to read another really good one so soon! Anyway, it is what it is – there were some fun books last week but a lot of rereads or authors I’ve already written about recently, so I’m just going with it…
It’s a cold evening in the winter of 1942. The blackout is in effect and passengers are stumbling their way towards the commuter trains home from London at Euston station. One of the passengers is Councillor Grayling, carrying £120 in cash that will be used to pay staff the next day. But after he gets off the train the cash goes missing and he ends up dead. But who did it? When the police start to investigate they discover that there are dark secrets among the passengers who he shared a train compartment with and that more than one of his fellow passengers might have wanted Grayling out of the way.
This is a really interesting mystery but it’s also a really atmospheric look at life on the Home Front during World War 2. First published in 1943 it’s another one of those war time books where the writers didn’t know who was going to win the war – and you can definitely feel that in the writing. There are lots of books set in the Second World War, but not that many of them (or not that many that I’ve read) where you really feel the uncertainty and fear of the population – that they really didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. There’s no hindsight or picking events because they foreshadow something else or because something is going to happen there (all the authors who send people to the Cafe de Paris I’m looking at you) – it’s just how things happened or felt at the time. The only other one I can think of that does this – although it’s not a murder mystery is Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country – which also has a feeling of uncertainty going through it even more than this because at the end people are going back to the fronts and you don’t know if they’ll make it.
Anyway, that aside there are plenty of people who wanted Grayling dead as he’s not a particularly likeable sort of person and the book takes you around the carriage as Inspector Holly investigates the case and tells you the backstories behind each of them. I found myself having quite strong opinions on who I didn’t want to have done it which is always good I think. Raymond W Postgate didn’t write a lot of mysteries – in the forward to this it suggests that may be his first one, Verdict of Twelve, was so well received that it was hard to follow. I haven’t read Verdict of Twelve (yet) but if this is the less good second novel it must be really blooming good!
I read Somebody at the Door via Kindle Unlimited (which also includes Verdict of Twelve at the moment, so I think you know I’ll be reading that soon!) but as with all the British Library Crime Classics they cycle in and out of KU and when they’re not in they’re also available on Kobo. And they’re all in paperback, which you can buy direct from the British Library’s own online bookshop here. They do often have offers on the BLCC books (like 3 for 2), although they don’t seem to at the moment.
This week we have the latest in my occasionalseries of round-ups of books in the British Library Crime Classics series. I’ve readquite a lot of them now, so we’re a even further into the more recent releases – so even more forgotten section of their books, but there are still some good books to be found there
The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr
Poisoned chocolates are not exactly unknown in detective fiction, but this is a really good example. A young woman is suspected by her village of having planted poisoned chocolates in the village sweet shop. The local landowner stages a memory game to try to prove his own theory about how they could have been poisoned – and ends up dead himself. And it’s all on film. The crime is seemingly impossible, and yet someone has done it and Dr Gideon Fell is going to figure it out. It’s really good and really clever and keeps the level up all the way through. I’ve only read about half a dozen of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries, but this is one of my favourites of them – Til Death Do Us Part was a BotW and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this too.
Suddenly at His Residence by Christianna Brand
I’m working my way through the Christianna Brand books that are available from in the British Library Crime Classics series as they become available in Kindle Unlimited. I think Green for Danger is still my favourite, but I enjoyed this one more than Death of a Jezebel. This features a grandfather with a complicated family life who is found dead the morning after saying he would change his will. There are a lot of people who wanted him dead, and a crime that seems very hard to have committed. It’s set while World War Two is still going on (1944 to be precise) and although it was published in 1046 so it doesn’t quite have the same sense of not knowing what would happen that Green For Danger has, but it still has lots of wartime detail that adds to the mystery and setting. A very easy and interesting mystery.
The Mysterious Mr Badmanby W F Harvey
And finally one from the thriller-y the end of the British Library Crime Classic collection. The Mysterious Mr Badman features a a mystery that starts with the nephew of a blanket manufacturer agreeing to mind the bookshop below his lodgings for an afternoon and three men coming all looking for the same book by John Bunyan. From there, it turns into a murder mystery with political overtones, the morals of which you may or may not agree with, but that will still manage to sweep you along while you’re reading it. I nearly called it a caper, but that’s not is not really the right word when there is murder involved. but think 39 steps, but with a book and a murder at the heart of it. Not bad at all.
I’ve actually named this post for the author of the series because it feels too complicated to do anything else. Today I’m talking about Nancy Spain’s post-WW2 detective (well sort of) novels that feature Natasha DuVivien and Miriam Birdseye – particularly the four that have been republished by Virago in the last couple of years.
Written in the late 1940s and early 1950s the books follow a madcap theatrical duo who stumble across murders in the course of their (more or less) glamorous lives. Miriam is an actress and Natasha is a dancer and as I said in my BotW post about Death Goes on Skis it’s more about the satire and the black humour than it is about solving the actual mysteries. Depending on your reading tastes there’s a lot that she’s satirising here – school stories, mysteries set in theatres, etc. But there’s also a lot of hiding in plain sight queer representation that Nancy Spain snuck in there.
I think they’re going to divide opinion – I enjoyed them, but mum gave up on them I think because they were too much of a mishmash of mystery and also Evelyn Waugh-y satire. And your reaction to that sentence may determine whether these are going to work for you at all!
Virago have done reissues of but there are others in secondhand/collectible only that I haven’t read. You should be able to get hold of the Viragos in bookshops with a reasonable sized fiction section.
This week I’m back with a murder mystery – and another British Library Crime Classic – after a run of more than a month without one! This time it’s an impossible murder in the a Highlands by Anthony Wynne.
The murdered lady of the title is Mary Gregor, the sister of the laird of Duchlan, who is found stabbed to death locked in her bedroom of the family castle. Our amateur sleuth is Dr Eustace Hailey, who is in the grand tradition of the Golden Age mystery, and who happens to be staying nearby when the body is discovered. Despite being told that the victim was a kind and charitable woman, he soon uncovers evidence that suggests the reverse and that the situation at the castle was not a happy one. In fact even after her death, Mary Gregor still seems to loom over the building – and then more deaths happen.
This is definitely one of the more fantastical of the BLCC’s I’ve read, with a strong vein of highland superstition and mysticism. In fact there was a while when I was wondering is the solution was going to involve the supernatural so impossible did it seem for anyone to have carried out the crime. But it does stick to the rules of the detective club – although the solution is quite something, it is just about plausible.
I bought my copy at the Book Conference second hand sale, but this is also available on Kindle and Kobo and is actually pretty bargainous at £1.99 as I write this, although it should be noted that the ebook edition isn’t a BLCC one (there are some of these where the paperback and ebook rights appear to have got separated) so I can’t vouch for the quality of the ebook version. And if you want more impossible/locked room mysteries, I have a post for that too.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 