Margery Allingham's 'The White Cottage Mystery' 1928

 

Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback - 1938

It was rather a relief to turn from Ethel Mannin's Crescendo to Margery Allingham's The White Cottage Mystery. Larger text size; more engaging characters; and a narrative which carried you along; all helped. Moreover, it didn't have Albert Campion irritating me on the pages! Instead, Detective Chief Inspector W.T. Challoner of the Yard, incisive but avuncular, after 253 pages manages to clear up the mystery of who shot the nasty Eric Crowther.

The story was serialised in the Daily Express in 1927 and the readers would have waited for the next instalment with bated breath, as it goes at a cracking pace with plenty of twists and turns. Young Jerry Challoner stops his little sporting car in a small Kentish village to offer assistance to a young girl who, just having alighted from a 'bus, was struggling with a heavy basket. He gives her a lift to a pretty little white house set far back from the road, surrounded by a mass of dark shrubbery. They pass by a hideous, grey barrack of a place. The girl clearly dislikes it. Jerry drops her off and meets up with a policeman, red-headed and loquacious. While they are chatting the sound of a shot-gun is heard - it came from the white house.

So begins this spritely tale, where the dead man, the much-despised, hated Eric Crowther, who lived in the neighbouring grey house, could have been killed by any of seven people. Jerry calls his father, who is none other than the Detective Chief Inspector - "Greyhound" Challoner, one of the most brilliant men Scotland Yard had ever known. The suspects? Roger William Christensen, invalid-chair bound; his wife, Eva Grace Christensen, who found the murdered man; her sister, Nora Phyliss Bayliss (the girl Jerry helped home); Estah Phillips, long-time nurse, not only to the five year-old child Joan Alice (who called Crowther Satan), but also to Eva her mother; Kathreen Goody, 17, parlour maid; and Doris James, 40 cook. In addition, there are Crowther's manservant, William Lacy, who is better known to the Chief Inspector as a habitual criminal Clarry Gale; and, finally, an Italian named Latte Cellini, who lived with Crowther, but who has now fled abroad.

There appears to be no shortage of 'evidence', rather a surfeit of it! All the above had a motive for killing the ghastly Crowther. The scene shifts first to Paris and then to Mentone in the South of France as the two Challoners pursue their prime suspect Cellini. Strangely, they encounter Eva and her sister Norah and, then, Lacy/Gale in both places.

A clue to the murderer's identity appears to lie in the fact that - because the gun was found on a table with a scorched tablecloth - the shot that had killed Eric Crowther could only have been fired by a man or woman kneeling...or sitting... It is not until the last few pages, and seven years later, that the reader finds out who the killer was. I only guessed it just before the person was revealed. Clever! I thoroughly enjoyed the fast-paced, twisty storyline. I have now read two of the three Allingham stories in the Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library - The Crime at Black Dudley and The White Cottage Mystery (I preferred the latter) - and just have to track down the third - Look to the Lady - which actually kick-started the paperback series in October 1936.

Ethel Mannin's 'Crescendo' 1928

 

Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition - 1937

Although I have read three other novels of Ethel Mannin's in the 'Jackdaw' Library editions, I must admit I struggled through this one. More than once, I thought I would give up, but ploughed manfully on. The Problem? Quite apart from it being a pretty 'dense' read anyway, I found the main character (one can hardly call him the 'hero') repellant. Gilbert Stroud - whose life began as it ended, with a woman's death - lasted but thirty years; but what three decades of self-centred unpleasantness. His mother died in childbirth, after a mere eight months' of marriage, and his father, John Stroud, married again, within a month. The new bride began her married life in the radiant-bride manner, in the full flush of sensual awakening and satisfaction, and at the end of ten years died worn out physically by a series of futile and too-frequent pregnancies, and mentally by embittering disillusion and regret.  So, not a good start in life for young Gilbert. 

Five years of marriage had reduced his step-mother from a high-spirited, passionate girl to a depressed, neurotic woman, her soul warped and twisted by resentments whose appetites grew with what they fed on until she became both sadist and masochist. It is, therefore, no great surprise that, one day at the dinner-table, she seized a to-hand carving knife and brought it down on Gilbert's fingers The physical scar he bore for the rest of his life; so, too, did the mental scar, graved upon his soul. Gilbert is sent away to boarding school where he hates the matron and develops an almost violent animosity towards women. At sixteen, he goes to university where he walked in arm with young men who also inclined to the misogynist view of women. Then the Great War came; Gilbert went 'over the top' and was grievously wounded. He decides to end it all, but his revolver proves too heavy to use. Instead, he is 'rescued' by the Germans and taken to a PoW camp. After the War ends, he is restless; so, in the summer of 1919, at the age of twenty-five, he sets out for Europe, and there began that dark odyssey to which all the rest had been in the nature of a prelude.

The only character for whom this reader felt any sympathy or liking for was Mary Thane, the girl Gilbert met on the voyage from Canada to England. He saw dark straight hair smoothly parted on either side a high forehead, confused dark eyes, straight nose, mobile unpainted mouth, not beautiful, no; her face was too intelligent for beauty in the accepted sense...but attractive, yes, expressive - definitely interesting - refreshingly interesting; alive. Poor girl; they become lovers, stayed at her flat and sojourned on the East Anglian coast, where Mary had a bungalow (her money comes from her writing). But Gilbert wants to travel in Europe. Before this, he goes to Oxford, where he despises the 'bright young things'. He realised that he was of an in-between generation, neither pre-war nor post-war. More importantly, he catches a brief glimpse of a person who is out punting on the river: He had seen that face before. The white, unforgettable intensity of it; the dark, blazing intensity of those eyes with that look of something that is tortured yet will not surrender, something that cannot forget the passionate bitterness of its resentment, and carries it through torment. Through a 'nightmare' that same evening, he recalled he had seen the man in the German prison camp, striking a German officer.

Gilbert travels through Paris to Marseilles and then Florence. Here Philip Raymore, an American twenty-two years old, five foot high, and clothed in very voluminous knickerbockers of bold design, a blue yachting jacket with brass buttons, and a beret... thrusts himself on Gilbert. The man is a boring pest, but Gilbert cannot shake him off. They travel together to Rome  and there they meet Nicholas Stemway - the Oxford punter and German PoW character. He becomes Raymore's nemesis - regularly tormenting and taunting him until the latter goes off in a fury. it was somehow dreadful to see Stemway sitting back in his chair with his eyes mere slits in his white face his mouth more suggestive of a baring of fangs than a smile the dark lock of hair over his brow, his body taut with a suggestion of every nerve keyed to a concert pitch of concentration, and Raymore floundering helplessly in his clutches. Raymore finally has had enough of the taunts and leaves: "I'm going - I won't intrude. I'll leave you to your precious friend - since you seem to have a taste for - perverts!"

Stemway then attaches himself even more firmly to Gilbert. The latter felt that it was impossible for him not to believe that Stemway was inextricably interwoven in the fabric of his life...by comparison, Mary Thane became a mere minor accident...that day when beside the shell-hole he had chosen life, he had chosen Stem. The two men live together in Rome, then go skiing at St Moritz; but Gilbert's father wants him home to help run the Stroud business - and get a wife (and heir!). Although Gilbert meets up again with the long-suffering Mary, he is soon linked to the Lady Isabel Merrill the beautiful only daughter of the Earl of Tringham, owner of a the run-down Tringham Castle. She is colder than ice - certainly to Gilbert. It is entirely a marriage of convenience - her title and his wealth. It would give too much away to chart the disaster to its tragic conclusion. Suffice it to say, that Lady Isabel has a lover - her cousin Rex Merrill, who has also married an American heiress for her money. Gilbert asks his wife if she is sub-human, so socially frigid is she to him.

The story builds to its 'Crescendo'. A thoroughly unlikeable main character married to an equally unpleasant wife; a long-suffering girlfriend entirely put upon; a repulsive, closet-homosexual, mummy's-boy, who has a disastrous hold on Gilbert; and a dense text moving remorselessly along to a tragic denouement. The Morning Post called Crescendo 'a powerful book' - yes, it is; Bystander wrote it was 'undeniably entertaining' - no, it wasn't. Moreover, I am fast going off the 1930s!

R.D. Blackmore's 'Mary Anerley. A Yorkshire Tale ' 1880

Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington first edition - 1880

My third R.D. Blackmore novel in less than six weeks! In the late Summer of 1877, Blackmore and his ailing wife visited the Whitby area for a holiday. The author was stimulated by the healthy breezes of the bare and jagged coast, and was particularly taken by the wild countryside  behind it, commenting that there were lanes as pretty as may anywhere be found in any other county than that of Devon. Amongst these acres, Blackmore discovered a pleasant farm, not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change - rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breastlands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warrens, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and wild ducks. This example of his writing style shows both its depth of description of nature, for which the author was famous, but also - perhaps - slightly overwrought for modern tastes. 

Here he is again, describing a corner of the farm on a warm day in August: there was not a horse standing down by a pool, with his stiff legs shut up into biped form, nor a cow staring blandly across an old rail, nor a sheep with a pectoral cough behind a hedge, nor a rabbit making rustle at the eyebrow of his hole... Blackmore revels in the changing moods of sky or earth and sea.

The novel is set in 1801, and the French menace is always in the background, heightened by the possibility of involvement in the smuggling activities or 'free trading' along the coast. The tale links the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the Yordas family of Scargate Hall with the Anerley family, some hundred miles away. Twenty years previously, a child had been found washed ashore in a little cove north of Flamborough Head. Raised by devoted foster parents, as Robin Lyth, he carves out a name. and fortune, for himself as a daring and popular leader of the local smugglers. Nearly caught, by a steadfast Excise man,  Captain Carroway, he escapes thanks to Mary Anerley, the nearby farmer's daughter. Inevitably, for the tale is one of romance, they fall in love. Much has to happen before they are united, including a stint for Robin in the Royal Navy under Nelson. Blackmore movingly describes the death of the latter at the Battle of Trafalgar. Here, unbeknown to all historical researchers, it is Robin who saves the Victory's bacon. Nelson is clearly one of the author's heroes, and he returns to England's hero and the famous battle in his later novel Springhaven (1887).

Blackmore is not only strong on descriptive passages of the world around us, but can also produce some memorable characters.

Stephen Anerley, a thrifty and well-to-do Yorkshire farmer of the olden type...Happy alike in the place of his birth, his lot in life, and the wisdom of the powers appointed over him, he looked up, with a substantial faith, yet a solid reserve of judgement, to the Church, the Justices of the Peace, spiritual lords and temporal, and above all His Majesty George the Third. His wife, Mistress Anerley, was five-and-forty years of age, vigorous, clean, and of a very pleasant look, with that richness of colour which settles on fair women, when the fugitive beauty of blushing in past.

Mary Anerley, their daughter, no doubt it would have been hard to find a girl more true and loving, more modest and industrious; but hundreds and hundreds of better girls might be found  perhaps even in Yorkshire. For this maiden had a strong will of her own, which makes against absolute perfection... 

Rev. Turner Upround, such a man generally thrives in the thriving of his flock and does not harry them. He gives them spiritual food enough to support them without daintiness, and he keeps the proper distinction between the Sunday and the poorer days. He clangs no bell of reproach upon a Monday, when the squire is leading the lady into dinner, and the labourer sniffing at his supper-pot, and he lets the world play on a Saturday, while he works his own head to find good words for the morrow.

Mr Jellicorse, the Yordas family solicitor from Middleton in Teesdale, had won golden opinions everywhere. He was an uncommonly honest lawyer, highly incapable of almost any trick, and lofty in his view of things, when his side of them was a legal one - now, he had a problem over who had the legal rights to the Yordas inheritances, where honesty was, perhaps, not the best policy.

Other characters of note are the two daughters of the deceased Sir Philip Yordas, Philippa and Eliza (Carnaby)- the former determined to hang on to their shaky claim to the family estates, the latter desperate to secure everything for her spoiled and unruly son 'Pet'; Jordas, the ever-faithful dogman of the Yordas family; the embryonic detective from York, Mr Mordacks, who achieves his own connubial bliss in Derbyshire, as well as solving at least one mystery.  There is but one unremitting evil one amongst the whole cast - John Cadman, who meets his thoroughly deserved end by a hangman's rope.   

Mary Anerley was first serialised in Fraser's Magazine from July 1879 to September 1880, and then published as a three-decker in 1880.

The Saturday Review called the novel one of the author's happiest productions, stating that it is full of the fine touches of observation and description, whether of people or of places, that have belonged to most of his novels, and there is a strong dramatic interest to be found in it.

The Spectator (7th August 1880) - On the whole, we think Mary Anerley is the best book he has written since Lorna Doone; there are passages in it - the death of Sir Philip Yordas (in 1777) is one of them - the beautifully drawn contrast between his fatal ride and the ramble of Mary Anerley and her delightful pony "Sir Keppel", is another -  which surpass anything in the first book which introduced the writer to the public. Love and the knowledge of Nature are among his chief and most charming characteristics; in none of his works are they displayed more bountifully than in this one.

I am sure this won't be the last R.D. Blackmore novel I shall read. I just hope any future purchase of another of his three-deckers will not be too expensive.