Edgar Wallace's ' The Woman from the East' 1934

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.65 - 1939?

This collection of short stories was published in 1934, two years after Edgar Wallace's death. Apart from the first one - the title piece, The Woman from the East-  they are short and usually fast-paced. I know what pseuds' corner (aka the Leavises) think of Wallace - Dorothy L. Sayers, Arnold Bennett and George Orwell were not fans, either - but I quite enjoy relaxing with his books and these brief tales were no exception.

The Hutchinson first edition.

In The Woman of the East, Mr John Covent, a director of the company owning the Frivolity Theatre, summons one of the chorus girls, Isabelle Straker, to dine with him at Penniali's Restaurant in London. He has a proposition for her: marriage to an Indian Rajah, His Highness Dal Likar Bahadur, Rajah of Butilata. £2,000 is the bribe for the unwilling girl. But she goes through with it, and marries the Indian on 14th May, 1909. As an early aside, the author's well-known racism rears its head immediately: it is true that he is an Indian, though he would pass for a European...but against his colour and his race there is the fact that he is enormously wealthy. There is also the fact that Isabelle is his eighth wife - this she did not know.

This occurs in the Prologue. The first chapter is set in  in 1919, a decade later. The old man Covent is dead and his son, Martin, and his nephew, Tom Camberley, are running the business. The former has a scheme to use their clients' money for a speculative purpose in Rumania. Tom demurs. By now, the Rajah has also died and  the Ranee (Isabelle) has returned to England to reside at a country house, Churley Grange, near Newbury. Two more women now make their appearance in the tale: Dora Mead and Grace Drew, P.As respectively to Martin and Tom. Grace deals with the Ranee, who is always appears to the office veiled. Tom, still smarting over his cousin's perfidy, sends Dora down to Churley Grange to check things out; in a darkened room, she is overpowered, a cloth thrown over her head and is deposited back in the train for London. She tackles Grace about the Ranee the following morning. Martin loses his temper with Tom over Grace's expedition. It is agreed that Tom should resign from the firm but get a payout. More mystery occurs when he rushes down to the Ranee's car outside the office and glimpses her hand: it was not the hand of a refined Englishwoman or even of a woman who was not refined..."It was the hand of a native". Then Martin's plans for an economic bonanza  in Rumania backfires; the country's government has collapsed. So Plan B is put into action - Martin collects the firm's money (left after Tom had been paid off), and plans to catch the Italian mail from Genoa to Valparaiso.  Grace, who he had secretly planned to marry, goes with him. Much of the 'money' is the Ranee's. The twist at the end I didn't see coming. All good plotting and well wrapped up in just 40 pages.

There are thirteen other, shorter stories. I think I enjoyed them all, even if the plots were occasionally rather similar. The Chopham Affair, is the tale of Archibald Lenton, the most brilliant of prosecuting attorneys. It is the story of spousal affection come good. The baddy meets a just end and Joe Stackett, who Lenton defended on a murder charge, is cleverly used in a frame up. Lenton was a clever, perhaps not totally upright, man. Love of Devil Hampton was perhaps, a little far-fetched in its ending, but Hampton - known as the most expert of bank robbers, a daring and resourceful man is a likeable rogue. He manages to stay one step ahead of various European police forces and he gets his girl, even if it is on the high seas. The Silver Charm, set in London and West Africa allows the author to make yet more disparaging remarks about other races. King O'fwa of Kantee has insolent eyes and is not respected by Angel of Scotland Yard - the last time I met the King he was dining off a relative who had displeased him. The King is later found knifed to death in the royal hut. The story now switches to Liverpool, where Angel is summoned by Sir Peter Saintsbury, the millionaire controller of the Lagos Coastwise Line. Sir Peter was a short, swarthy man with closely cropped grey hair and black, piercing eyes, the years he lived on the Coast have tinted his face a dusky brown. There are people less charitable who ascribe another cause for his copper-coloured skin, people who point to his thick lips and the curious bluish tint of his fingernails. Again, enough said. Three of his ships have mysteriously been shipwrecked off Sierra Leone - is African magic the cause. It means a trip to the dark continent for Angel and the meeting up with a medicine man. The explanation of it all leads to another of Wallace's skilful endings.

In fact, all the other tales are tightly controlled - whether they describe, in Uncle Faraway, the pathos of an elderly businessman revisiting the haunt of his youth where he had fallen for a young American woman, who he pursued across the Atlantic only to be turned down by her, only to find happiness many years later with - her daughter!; or, in The Future Lady Sheltholme, a social climber is given her comeuppance. The Strangeness of Joab Lashmere, is the story of a servant taking over the persona of his master (who had been killed in a car crash) and who is only caught by the detection work of Jack Stafford. In Jimmy and the Doughnut, the reader meets a speed typist Jane Ida Meagh (J.I.M. - hence nicknamed Jimmy) - smoked; she used, at times, strong language...but, worst vice of all, she was frank. As with the previous story, a body is found buried and an imposter is caught out. Wallace could certain spin a yarn and, although I guessed some of the culprits before the end, once or twice he had be foxed.

Rory Naismith's 'King of the Mercians. Offa' 2026

Yale University Press first edition - 2026

I must admit, I have had a personal link with Offa for nearly 50 years - I walked his Dyke. I sped north from Chepstow, with two friends from Marlborough - alas, both subsequently committed suicide, but this was in no way connected with the experiences on the Dyke. We travelled through beautiful countryside; the English-Welsh borderlands are one of my favourite stretches in Britain. So, when another of Yale's excellent English Monarchs Series came out, my copy arrived straightaway. As I read the book, two thoughts were uppermost in my mind: firstly, I realised how little I knew about Offa and his times. This meant it was virgin and fertile soil for me and I learned much as I went along (how much I will retain, is another matter). Secondly, the author admitted straightaway the major problem with such so-called biographies of these early 'monarchs'. Vanishingly little survives that sheds light on [Offa's] early or private life, and what there is has to be interpreted with significant leaps of faith. It may be possible to attempt a personal biography of Offa's contemporary Charlemagne - indeed, many have - but not of Offa himself...no early medieval ruler is an easy subject for a biography, and Offa is more evasive than most. It recalled my reading of Sarah Foot's biography of Athelstan (2011, also in the excellent Yale University's English Monarch Series) nearly six years ago (see my Blog for 24th December, 2020). I requote her: Athelstan the man remains elusive - stating that structuring a coherent biography of a medieval subject...involves from the outset a greater degree of self-conscious construction and manipulation of material to fit artificial categories than might prove necessary for a better-attested person from a modern age. Thus, the story of both men is constructed around charters, grants of land, other administrative records, minting of coins and diplomatic exchanges with foreign kings and princes.

Notwithstanding the above, Naismith has delivered what Levi Roach the author of a Yale biography - Ǣthelread the Unready (2016, but, strangely, not listed in the English Monarchs Series) - states: in this brilliant piece of historical detective work, Rory Naismith restores Offa to his proper dimensions, revealing a hard-nosed but pious ruler. His first Chapter - A Name to conjure with -  the author suggests Offa is probably the most successful king of what is often called the heptarchy, as he imposed himself as king across all the lands and peoples south of the Humber, with the important exception of the Welsh kingdoms and Wessex. His reign represents the apogee of a long period when Mercia and its kings dominated England south of the Humber. Not only was Offa the leading king in Britain, he was a self-consciously European figure. Naismith then lays out his Sources: historical narratives, such as the Chronicle and the great Anglo-Norman historians, such as William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris; Alcuin's Letters; Charters; Coins; and other Material Sources - especially the great Dyke.

Chapter 2 looks at Offa's close relatives. A useful family tree perhaps perplexes above all else! One branch has Coenwealh, Cundwealh, Centwine, Cynreow, Cuthberht, Ceolwulf, Cuthred, Coenwulf, Cwenthryth and Cynehelm succeeding each other - apart from poor old Bassa somewhere in the middle. Offa's father was Thingfrith, a great name, only surpassed by Cynethryth, Offa's wife. She stands out as one of the most interesting royal women in the whole Anglo-Saxon period. She appears in twenty-five charters and was at the front and centre in the royal entourage in the 770s and 780s. But her exalted position depended on her roles as wife and mother. After Offa's, and her son Ecgfrith's, deaths, she became abbess of Bedford and Cookham in Berkshire. Family was vital to Offa. His children had advantageous marriages to kings in Wessex and Northumbria.

Chapter 3 examines the Midland part of Offa's kingdom, 'old' Mercia. By the time Offa came to power in 757, Mercia had had over a century of on-off supremacy in middle England. A useful map shows the five dioceses of 'Greater Mercia', which stretched from the Humber to Cookham and St. Albans, from Ely to Hereford and Westbury-on-Trym. Lichfield (for a short time a third Archbishopric in Britain), Leicester, Worcester and Hereford were the main religious centres. One of the minsters was Breedon-on-the-Hill, not far from where I am presently typing this. Greater Mercia remained broadly cohesive until it was destroyed by the Viking great army in the 870s. Chapter 4 turns to the king's relationships with other areas of England. What the author calls 'soft hegemony' is applied to Kent, Sussex and parts of East Anglia. The coinage is used in this argument. Wessex was different: it could be battered and subdued, but remained a foe of a different order: one that was never absorbed in the same way as Kent or East Anglia.

The next three Chapters use charters, coins and manuscripts to study how the kingdom worked, how Offa was perceived and understood by his subjects and asses the cultural and early riches of the minsters and the towns. Offa lived on the move, with no fixed capital. Matters of high government took place wherever he and his entourage were. Another map shows the known meeting places of Offa (usually linked to grants of land). They are in two main clusters - what one would now refer to as the West Midlands and London/Kent/Sussex. The former places are a tangible reminder that the Mercian supremacy was grounded there, whilst the London area underlines the importance that that city had taken on - a new power base. After a review of Offa's relationships with the Welsh (especially relating this to the construction of Offa's Dyke, first attributed to the king in the late 9th century by Alfred the Great's biographer Asser, a Welsh monk); Charlemagne and the Pope in Rome; the final chapters look at the end and aftermath of his reign.

Alcuin called Offa the glory of Britain (decus Brittaniae). After reading Professor Naismith's well-researched book, I can concur.

Eden Phillpotts' 'A Close Call' 1936

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.64 - 1939?

 I must admit, once or twice I felt a little uncomfortable as I read this 'mystery' novel. Sometimes, it is best not to know too much about an author. Twenty-five year-old John Norton - possessed of talent, but lacking the ambition and endeavour to develop it - is a wastrel artist based at Wellbrook-on-Sea, a fascinating region where mat-grasses cheval the sand-dunes with horrent green, their billows rolling between the sea beaches to southward and the marshes and saltings, amid which Wellbrook river loiters from the north in its wide estuary. Norton, whose weakness had long ago served to stifle such creative talent as he possessed, has recently been handed the very rare experience of a commission. Crafty, cynical and often dissolute, he had courted 18 year-old Sarah Huntsman. She, although knowing his weaknesses, doubted not, that once wedded, she would swiftly lift him to healthier opinions and better self-control. Was it ever thus?

A major problem arises. Her father, Inspector Thomas Huntsman, strongly disapproves of any such union. A widower, Thomas views Norton with more than a little distaste: everything about the youth, including his method of earning a living, was anathema to Huntsman. Moreover, in Sarah's life-long affection and faithful service her father had found happiness and content...it had come as a very painful shock to him that his devoted daughter could find in such a man any object of affection. Unfortunately, Sarah's infatuation for Norton leads to their elopement, a marriage in a registry office and an eventual return to Norton's lodgings at Wellbrook. Huntsman, bitterly shocked, now passes his daughter in the street without visible consciousness of her presence. Months pass. The marriage (inevitably?) crumbles and Sarah plans a divorce; Norton actually concurs as he is 'playing away from home'. Then he goes 'missing'. In fact, he will be found near where he had been engaged in painting for his commission. His body, with all his artist's paraphernalia, is found among the dunes under several feet of sand. The ensuing tale is that of - not so much a who-dunnit - but a finger-pointing at the irascible father-in-law. 

At the very end of the novel, Huntsman (having escaped the noose at the last minute) is walking out one Sunday evening with Sarah; the last line is spoken by her: "Come home, father."

Adelaide Phillpotts (1896-1993)

So far, just a tightly controlled tale by a master story-teller and skilful plot constructor, who had already written 92 novels.  However, forty years after the publication of A Close Call, in 1976, the author's own daughter, Adelaide, was interviewed by James Dayananda for a book he was writing on her father. Adelaide had remained unmarried until the age of 55; in 1951, much against the wishes of her father, she finally got married. Phillpotts not only cut her off but never met her again before his death in 1960, aged ninety-eight. Worse was revealed in the interview. Adelaide stated that their relationship had been incestuous. Her father's 'love' had been obsessive and controlling. He had sexually abused her as far back as when she was seven, and had kept up an intimate relationship until 1929, when he married his second wife. He remained throughout obsessively jealous of any of her relationships with other men. Many of his letters to Adelaide are addressed to My precious love, My sweet love and My dearest love. Two extracts from his letters should suffice:

"Today I had hoped to welcome my precious girl and have my arms around her again." (1914: Adelaide was 18)

"I was not surprised after your first mention of that Jew and his politeness to hear he wanted you. The damned swine saw you were alone. You must not go to a hotel in future where that sort of vermin harbours for he might have been wickeder that he was and have planned to compromise you in some way." (1929: Adelaide was 32).

Enough said. It certainly puts a different light on the all-important relationship between Thomas Huntsman and his daughter Sarah in the novel, although no such impropriety is suggested.

The story charts a fairly straight line after the discovery of Norton's body. Huntsman, well-known locally for his temper and his intense dislike of his son-in-law, is banged up in gaol. Scotland Yard is drafted in and, although his friends and colleagues and, above all, Sarah can't believe he is guilty, all evidence points to him being the murderer (his spade and his pistol are found next to the body and a damning letter, seemingly written by him, is in the dead man's pocket). And so it comes to trial. Chapter XIII Case for the Prosecution, sees Sir Cato Warrender, K.C., a famous advocate, laying out a damning case against Huntsman. It is powerful and, surely, unanswerable. Charles Girtin, advocate for the defence, tries his best. Chapter XIV is, in fact, for a reader in 1936 more fascinating and novel than it is for the reader of today. Building on Freud (and R.L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), it addresses the psychological 'fact' of the dual consciousness, the 'double life'. The urge from the primitive is ever tempestuous, furious, volcanic, overbearing; but such paroxysms for the time being poison the conscious and for the time being may be said actually to destroy it...Thomas Huntsman has no recollection whatever of the double life into which he was plunged. In other words, he did the murder, but under the influence of his 'other' persona. Well, it didn't wash for the judge or the jury. 

And then comes the clever denouement. Without spoiling anything for a future reader, Huntsman is cleared. AND I had guessed quite early on in the novel who the actual murderer could be. The author played fair. The individual was not sprung on the reader from nowhere. So, in summary: another well-written tale by a master craftsman; but I wish I hadn't known about the latter's own beyond-the-pale behaviour.

Dave Postles' 'Worlds of Framework Knitters in Leicestershire c.1600-c.1850' 2026

 

The author first paperback edition - 2026 

I recall Dave Postles working in Leicester University’s Local History unit in Salisbury Road, when I did my M.A. in the mid-1990s. He was even then highly regarded as a dedicated local historian of the County, always beavering away on projects. This thoroughly researched monograph on a topic that has always captured his interest, is a very useful addition to our knowledge of one of the staple industries of both Leicester City and its adjacent county. 

Chapter 2 ‘The Longest Journey: industrialization and its precedents Prior to the development of framework knitting, handloom weavers were working throughout Leicestershire. Postles suggests a ‘sort of path dependence: from early pastoral conversion to sheep husbandry and long staple wool in the area, through handloom-weaving, to the transition to mechanical knitting of woollen stockings’. He concentrates on Shepshed, where, between 1636 and 1647, a dozen weavers – traced through local records - operated in the parish. 

Framework knitting was introduced into Shepshed by 1710. The earlier concentration of handloom weaving was a precursor to the framework knitting, but the two ‘industries’ overlapped for a considerable period of time. Postles is able to give a fluent account of these developments through a detailed examination of probate materials: inventories, wills and testaments. He has inspected all probate documents between 1712 and 1729 – critical years, as weaving was being displaced by framework knitters. From c.1700 to the mid-19th century, weaving continued but in an attenuated degree and gradually petered out. Postles also uses probate evidence from weavers in Hinckley; and, for example, the inventory of George Worsley of Loughborough in 1636. He charts hosiery production down the Soar Valley north of Leicester and between Hinckley and Leicester. What becomes apparent is that, although there were some very successful weavers, the rural weavers in the areas studied were predominantly poor. This contrasted with the weavers in the borough of Leicester, who not only supplied the local urban market, but those further afield. The most successful weavers invested in real estate during the 18th century. 

The author then concentrates on the development of framework knitting, traditionally introduced into the county in Hinckley in 1640. By the early 18th century, it had spread, in particular, to Shepshed and Loughborough. In the former town, the industry became intense. A chart shows 237 nuclear families engaged in hosiery, 1813-22, in Shepshed, compared with 130 families in Loughborough. Hinckley town was still well out in front with 341 families thus engaged. Postles does point out a problem with probate inventories, as they omitted any interest in real estate, land and buildings. The final section of the chapter concentrates on hosiers and frame smiths. There were two main categories of Hosiers: the urban, commercial hosiers and ‘the bag hosiers who acted as middlemen between the commercial hosiers and the knitters’. Like the successful framework knitters, hosiers diverted some of their capital into acquiring real estate - John Parker, a hosier in Barwell, invested in seven messuages in Hog Lane in Hinckley in the 1850s. Postles concludes this major chapter by reiterating that the transition from handloom weaving to framework knitting was during the early 18th century. However, framework knitting was path-dependent on the concentration of handloom weaving. ‘Stocking-making on frames developed only where there had existed an agglomeration of weavers in the 17th and early 18th centuries’. 

Chapter 3 ‘Human Capital and Industrialization: Leicestershire’s hosiery industry, 1754-1870’, concentrates on four occupational groups at the lower end of the socio-economic scale: male and female framework knitters, labourers and female servants. There is a detailed appraisal of framework knitting in Hinckley. Chapter 4 ‘Mothers of circumstance and illegitimacy in the early nineteenth century’, which is reproduced from the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and History Society 93 (2019), discusses research into the demographic impacts of bastardy. Two further chapters are devoted to a re-investigation of local industrial society in Shepshed, focusing on 1891 and extrapolating from that year’s census returns; and a list of Landholding in Shepshed in 1823. Postles argues that ‘the industrial organization of Shepshed followed on from a cumulative process which enabled transition from domestic production through frame shops to factory production. The entrepreneurs were local and endogenous’. 

 Postles’ Conclusion draws together his findings. He has shown how Leicestershire’s framework-knitting industry progressed from a domestic set-up to a factory-based enterprise, ‘from proto-industry, often located in the countryside, to industrialism in larger units based in urban centres. Framework knitters and stockingers were usually at the lower end of the economic scale, with small investments and frugal lives, although few seem to have ended up in a Workhouse. The knitters continued to have a low level of involvement in formal education (school fees being an issue), particularly amongst the female knitters. Occasionally the complex phraseology means the general reader struggles to follow the argument, but one can only be amazed at the sheer depth and width of Postles’ research. Although he rightly pays tribute to other historians’ work in the field, as shown by his useful Bibliography, it is clear that his personal delving into the records of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (ROLLR) and the National Archives (TNA), for probate files, wills and inventories, as well as the local Leicester newspapers of the time, was immense and time-consuming. Micro history perhaps; but macro research.

Peter Drax's 'Death by two Hands' 1937

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.62 - 1939?

'Peter Drax' was the nom de plume for Eric Elrington Addis (1899-1941). Born in Edinburgh, he attended the city's university and served in the Royal Navy, retiring in 1929. He then studied law and practised as a barrister in the 1930s. When the Second World War broke out, he rejoined the navy, serving on HMS Warspite.. He was killed in action on 31 August 1941, having been mortally wounded in an air rad on the Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt. He left  a wife and two children. He published six crime novels between 1936 and 1939, Death by Two Hands aka Crime within Crime (1937) was the fourth. A further novel, Sing a Song of Murder, unfinished by Drax on his death, was completed by his wife - Hazel Iris (Wilson) Addis, and published in 1944.

While commuting to his office in the 1930s, Addis read thrillers himself, and concluded that most of them had far too many unlikely events and characters in them. His aim was to write thrillers that were 'credible'; as contemporary publicity put it, police who are not endowed with supernatural powers and crooks who are also human, i.e. 'real' people. I feel, in this tale, he achieved just that.

The novel is set mainly in the environs of Chalk Street, Camden Town. (In fact, there is no such thoroughfare as 'Chalk Street' - there is Chalk Farm Road, which runs through Camden Market and is part of Camden High Street). The author quickly sets the scene: Chalk Street was crowded from end to end and from pavement to pavement with a slow-moving jostling crowd. Costers' barrows lined the gutters. One of these petty traders is Mr. Rivers - nearly every stall or barrow had its attendant crowd except his. He never shouted. He never waved his arms about or told the story of an adventurous life, to catch the attention of the crowd, He stood behind his barrow with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tightly buttoned overcoat. He was wearing a flat cloth cap. A cigarette hung limply from his mouth. As well as this 'legal' trade, Rivers engages in petty crime. One of his conduits is Barney - an avid reader of American True Life Romance Magazines - who keeps two pet mice, usually along the brim of his wide black felt hat. One was fawn and white and was called Fanny. The other, her husband, was a portly brown and white gentleman mouse called George. The reader should remember them, as one provides a vital clue to solving a murder. 

Rivers also meets up with twenty-five year-old Spike Morgan - his eyes were a cold blue, and there was a hardness in his face that put ten years on his age. He was wearing a stained raincoat and a light fawn felt hat with a green band. He is a petty criminal and always hard up. A chance to make a financial killing presents itself. Alma Robinson, the 24 year-old orphan niece of Rivers, is coming up to London, as her aunt has just died. Her 'boyfriend' (or at least he likes to think so) Will Dorset, says he will be driving to London with a consignment of expensive fox furs on the forthcoming Friday. Rivers finds out about this and determines on a potentially lucrative theft. 

Alma boards with a friend of her uncle, Mrs. Kemp - a great barrel of a woman clad in a dirty and enveloping overall which fell in straight lines from her bosom to her feet...when she laughed huskily she showed a double row of broken teeth. It comes as no surprise to the reader that she easily slips into nefarious practices. The description of the Kemps' house, Number Three Napier Terrace, absolutely fits the author's determination for credibility. Seedy, dirty, untidy, it fits the sort of abode Mrs. Kemp and her spineless husband, Joe, would doss down in. Whilst Alma is reluctantly settling in, and meeting the seedy lothario Spike, Barney is telling Rivers about the consignment of fox skins due in the Great Wen that Friday. What should have been a simple robbery (the skins are stolen from the van by Spike and an even murkier friend, Len Harmon, while Barney keeps a look-out), degenerates into first one murder at the scene and then another (of Rivers) in London. Len had crowded more crime into the twenty-two years of his life than most of his kind and will be responsible for one of the murders.

The author's descriptions of this string of sordid events is very realistic; as are his portrayals of the various individuals caught up in the caper. Rivers and his pretentious flat over his shop; Izzy Hyams, the Jew who purchases the stolen fox skins and secretes them in his warehouse; the forces of law and order, such as Detective-Sergeant Leith, the local rozzer, who has had both eyes on Rivers, Barney, Spike and others of their ilk for a long time, and his superiors such as Chief-Inspector Thompson; all these incidents, places and people combine to produce an almost 'plodding' tale. But that is what makes the story so 'natural'. The individuals are very real, and the errors on both sides are totally believable. There are no moments of 'clever' detection or unlikely escapes by the petty criminals. The denouement, when it finally comes, is not surprising. The guilty are found guilty, thanks to a mixture of perseverance and luck; as Detective Leith says at the end, "They're a couple of bad eggs all right." And Alma gets the happy, if rather dull, future she deserves. As the Saturday Review of Literature commented, 'Little people in [the] grip of tragic destiny...brilliantly done.'

M.E. Braddon's 'The Infidel. A Story of the Great Revival' 1900

Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. first edition - 1900

This is the first time I have read one of M.E. Braddon's (1835-1915) novels. Opposite the title page is a list of (some?) of her works - they totalled 62 by 1900 - led by her most famous novel, Lady Audley's Secret. In fact, according to the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association (MEBA), a literary organisation founded in 2013 to promote international interest in the life and works of the author and subtitled Sensational Victorian, she wrote over 90 novels, 150 short stories, as well as numerous plays and articles. She takes up 41 pages in Robert Lee Wolff's Nineteenth-Century Fiction; he also wrote Sensational Victorian, The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Garland, 1979). Apart from the usual information about the first edition,  a Note is added: MEB's diaries report that she "planned" this novel on January 17, 1898, and wrote it largely between then and the end of May, revising it at leisure, over the summer. A historical romance introducing Wesley and Whitefield, it deals chiefly with the intertwined themes of sex, money, philanthropy and religion, which preoccupied her during her last fifteen years.

Braddon's own life would make a fascinating novel. Born to a Cornish solicitor and an Irish journalist, she was educated at a private girls' school after her parents split up.  Using a stage name, Mary Seyton she started on an acting career, aged 22, to support her mother and herself. This lasted for three years; once she started writing novels, this change of career took over. In 1860, she met John Maxwell (1824-1895), who published periodicals and moved (with her mother!) in with him in 1861. He was married with five children, but his wife was in a mental institution; only when the latter died in 1874, did Mary and Maxwell get married. By 1864, she had two children with a third shortly expected. They eventually had six children. In 1866, she founded the Belgravia Magazine. She lived finally in Richmond and was buried in the town's cemetery. She has a plaque in the parish church and several local streets are named after characters in her novels.

  

What I enjoyed most about The Infidel was the feeling I could engage with the characters; they became very real to me, whether I had sympathy for them or not. In Chapter I, Grub-Street Scribblers, we are  pitched straight into the lives of William Thornton and his daughter Antonia (the Infidel of the book). They work together at the trade of letters. Father contributed verse as well as prose to periodicals; he wrote sermons - he, the unfrocked priest, the audacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth upon which he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come after the tolling bell, no recompense for sorrow here, no reunion with the beloved dead - only the sexton and the spade, and the forgotten grave. Thornton, as curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshire parish, had eloped with a farmer's daughter - a strapping wench of eighteen - and £200 from her father's cashbox. Caught in London about to sail for Jersey, Thornton did 2 years (of a 5 year sentence), coming out a rank atheist, a scoffer of all things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians...a natural product of that dark age which went before the Great Revival - the age when not to be a Deist and a scoffer was to be out of fashion. This is the milieu in which his daughter Antonia (Tonia) is brought up. Now 20 years-old, she is well educated, a lover of books but a despiser of religion - a hideous superstition of the dark ages. Voltaire and those of his ilk were her gods. The fascinating account of how Antonia has to address an increasing awareness and confrontation with Christian beliefs and its upholders, notably George Whitefield and John Wesley, forms a core of the book.

One of Antonia's few friends is the 29 year-old Patty Lester, a low-ranked and indolent actress at Drury Lane. Thornton tells his daughter, "I don't want you to imitate her", but Patty's companionship is a relief from the monotony of literary toil. Patty persuades Antonia to go with her to Mrs. Mandalay's  dancing-rooms; Thornton gets two tickets from his old friend, and Irish peer Lord Kilrush. Initially horrified - "Oh, father, don't leave me among this rabble. I shall die of disgust if any one speaks to me..." - she is introduced to Kilrush, who looked young at a distance, but old, or at best middle-aged, when he came near her, the man who is destined to affect her life thereafter. His wife had long ago run away with his bosom friend and he was determined not to be entrapped in wedlock again. Both are intellectually stimulated by the other and become fast friends. However, lust must out and Kilrush amazes and repels Antonia by declaring his desires - not for marriage but for a carnal relationship. Disaster. She declines and he retreats - to Tunbridge Wells. Then, back to London and out to Clapham, where we meet the third major figure in the tale.

Twenty-nine year-old George Stobart, late of a famous dragoon regiment, lives with his mother Maria, the widow of a Bristol shipowner. She is Kilrush's first cousin and George is likely to be the heir to the childless peer. However, two years ago in 1749, at an evening service in John Wesley's chapel at the Old Foundery, George had been "convinced of sin". His mother is not happy: "Oh, those Oxford Methodists! You have caught their jargon. I am a good churchwoman, George, and I hate cant". Worse, George is determined to marry a young seamstress, Lucy Foreman, daughter of a journeyman printer, her mother a drunkard and her father an atheist. Her home was a hell upon earth. To Kilrush, she is a pretty bit of plebeian pink-and-white. True to his word, he disinherits George after the young man refuses to give up Lucy. In fact, George marries her.

Kilrush tries once more with Antonia. Saying "Marriage is the gate of hell" is not the way to win her. Suggesting another relationship pours oil on troubled waters: "You are determined to take no second wife; and I am determined to be no man's mistress". So off Kilrush goes again, not to Tunbridge Wells but abroad - but not before giving Thornton an income of £100 a quarter. Two years go by. Then Antonio is summoned to the deathbed of Kilrush. His pride has vanished and he asks her to marry him! "I want your love to follow me in death". And she succumbs. But, there is a caveat: "I have married you to make you mine beyond the grave...you are mine by this bond...swear that you will be true to me, that you will never give yourself to another man." The irony, which pursues Antonia for the rest of her life is how can a Voltarian, a contrarian so far as religion is concerned, believe in immortality, the fairy-tale of faith.

The reader is only on page 93 of a 341 page novel, but the rest of the tale is simply how Antonia first simply delights in the new-found wealth bequeathed to her - she becomes the belle of the London scene - then gets drawn into good works, after meeting George Stobart, and increasingly questions the very beliefs impregnated in her by her father and held for so long. She is clear to Stobart: "I have no religious views. I have no religion except the love of my fellow-creatures. I have never been a believer in Christianity as a creed, though I can admire Jesus of Nazareth as a philanthropist, and grieve for him as a martyr to the cruelty of man." What she does do, is regularly provide sustenance to the poor from Kilrush's legacy. Stobart, who is very much a muscular Christian and no quietist, increasingly works with Antonia and, then, blots his copybook. Although married, with a devoted but simple wife and a young son, he crosses the same boundary that Kilrush did. Whilst Antonia increasingly loves his company, poor Stobart's heart was beating furiously...this man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God...Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's soul - a woman's ineffable beauty. He throws himself upon her, drawing her averted face towards his own with a wild violence, till her brow touched his, and his lips were pressed against her burning cheek. She is angrily aghast: "You devil. You that I took for a saint! I will not breathe the same air with you." Like Kilrush, he flees abroad;  rejoining the army to serve in North America under General Amherst. The distraught  Antonia flung herself with a new zest and eagerness into the modish whirlpool.

Meanwhile, another peer, this time from Scotland, Lord Dunkeld, begins to hover around Antonia. Thankfully for both, the friendship remains just that. Additionally, Antonia meets and comes under the influence of John Wesley (the author is much more positive about him than she is of Whitefield). She doubles down on using her wealth and time to help those in need, whilst withdrawing further from the empty 'society' life she was once drenched in. In many ways, though, she is still 'The Infidel'; not even Wesley can change that. Awakening had been no sudden act, like the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, but a gradual change in her whole nature, the widening of her sympathies, the growth of pity and of love. It was not of Christ the Sacrifice she thought, not of his atoning blood; but of Jesus the Great Exemplar, of Jesus who went about doing good. It was the doctrine of 'good works', to which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit.

I will not disclose the ending, as it would spoil it for anyone deciding to read this thought-provoking, 'deep' novel. It deals with friendship at different levels (Patty Lester is possibly Antonia's truest friend); with religious fervour, its width of compassion but also its narrowmindedness; with philanthropy and hypocrisy; with spiritual and carnal love. The London Quarterly Review (1904) said: Mrs. Braddon reproduces the people, the scenes, the atmosphere, the spirit of the eighteenth century, and she describes the work and the influence of Methodism with insight and sympathy. One feels that, perhaps, Antonia's happiest times were spent with her father in the garret in Grub Street. 

Sarah Hawkswood's 'A Shroud of Snow' 2026

 

Allison and Busby first edition paperback - 2026

Now that Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew (2020), C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake (2019) have well and truly ended; Scott Mariani's Will Bowman is stopping this December, after a mere four books; and I am keeping the eleven volumes of Edward Marston's The Domesday Series for a rainy fortnight; I am having to rely on an annual 'fix' of Sarah Hawkswood's Bradcote and Catchpoll tales for my medieval/early modern historical novels. A Shroud of Snow is her fourteenth outing and we are still in the middle of the Stephen/Matilda Anarchy years. It is December 1145 and we are back in Worcester.

It is bitterly cold, and Hamelin Isenmongere has just visited the local priest, Father Anselm. The Gloucester merchant is a regular giver of money for the poor. On his return to his riverside warehouse, he crosses the path of Godhild, a young prostitute. Initially, she steps in front of him for the obvious reason; but, instead, she receives two silver pennies - to keep indoors and keep fed these next couple o'days. Hamelin is never seen alive again. The following morning, a local fisherman Walter stares at a snowy heap that resolved itself into the body of a man, lying at the water's edge, one arm dangling down so that the hand dipped into the water, except that for two feet out into the river, the surface was frozen, and held the hand in its vice-like grip. For the next 270 pages, the reader follows the usual trio - Undersheriff Hugh Bradecote, Sergeant Catchpoll and Under Sergeant Walkelin - as they doggedly search out the culprit.

By now, after thirteen previous tales stretching back authorially to 2014 (but only to June 1143 with the first story, Servant of Death), I have got to know their quirks of behaviour, their strengths and weaknesses. This is due to Hawkswood's natural story-telling skills, both of character and place. She conjures up the Worcester of the mid-twelfth century compellingly - no artificial cod-medieval speech or silly archaisms - and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrow streets, musty and gloomy warehouses, downbeat houses and brooding castle buildings is well done.

Catchpoll, rarely bested, is outmanoeuvred by Hamelin's riverman, Ragnaill of Duiblinn. The crafty bastard (Catchpoll's words, not mine) invited him on board his boat, to question the crew, and then casts off. So Catchpoll finds himself on his way down river to Gloucester. Meanwhile, Walkelin, assuming unusual authority due to Catchpoll's absence, rides over to Bradecote Manor for Hugh. The forbidding lord Sheriff of Worcester, William de Beauchamp, is absent, so Simon Furnaux, his castellan, is left in command of the castle. Our intrepid trio dislike, in fact loath, Simon. On this occasion, with increasing reason, as it soon becomes apparent that there was a link between the castellan and the dead ironmonger. When Bradecote and Walkelin visit Hamelin's home, not only do they find this evidence but also the body of the latter's widowed housekeeper, Agnes, raped before being murdered.

Catchpoll is not impressed when he meets the newly-widowed Mistress Sybilla Isenmongere - she maybe shocked at his news, but not grief-stricken. She is cold and haughty and wishes to go to Worcester - for her husbands body but, more importantly, to search for any money and artefacts belonging to him. Not only do Catchpoll, Ragnaill and Sybilla (it is soon clear that they are more than just servant and mistress) turn up in Worcester, but so does a bad-tempered William de Beauchamp, demanding an immediate resolution of the murders.

There are other realistic touches - Walkelin is on tenterhooks throughout, as his wife is expecting their first child; the scribes at the castle are definite individuals, not just caricatures; as are the warehouse figures, such as Tostig Thoraldsson and Samson One-Eye. I liked the tetchy relationships and dialogues between de Beauchamp and Furnaux, and Sybilla and Ragnaill; and the increasing telepathic communication between Bradecote, Catchpoll and Walkelin. The overall political scenario was not forgotten, either. Robert of Gloucester's machinations in Worcester were revealed and placed in the context of the conflict between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. All in all, a very pleasant two-evenings' read.

Tim Sullivan's 'The Bookseller' 2025

Head of Zeus paperback edition - 2025

I read this over several sittings, as I couldn't quite get 'gripped' by the story. This is the seventh novel to feature the socially awkward, neurodivergent detective DS George Cross, and, perhaps, I may have enjoyed it more if I had read at least some of the other six. Thus, I came fresh to any character developments - of his family, his colleagues and his priest friend - which would have been charted in the previous books. The eighth book, The Tailor, was published last month. Cross has autism, and I find it hard to relate to that; my failing, not the author's - or the detective's! I did feel, however, that the frequent commentary on social interaction became a little tiresome.

Cross works with Joyce Ottey, who has recently been promoted to Detective Inspector; part of the dynamic in the story is how both colleagues adapt to this. Their superior,  DCI Carson, typifies the individual promoted beyond his skill level - incompetent in policing and social acumen. These three represent officialdom and the case they have to tackle this time relates to the antiquarian and second-hand book trade; a subject dear to my heart and really why I got the book (cheap from a charity stall!). 

Ed Squire runs a bookshop in Berkeley Square, Bristol. In his mid-fifties, he has followed his father, Torquil, into the antiquarian books trade. He, however, is in it as a businessman, not as an afficionado  like his dad. One evening, DCI Ottey and DS Cross are called to the bookshop - Ed has been murdered, the body lay to the side of the desk. The surrounding rug and bare floorboards were stained dark red with blood. There were several narrow puncture wounds to the bookseller's chest. (Spoiler alert - they turn out to have been made by a letter opener. Talk about the Last Post.) So, off the detectives and the reader set on a whodunit. Not Torquil, who had deep disagreements with his son over his management of the bookshop, as he had been in London at the time, but on his return had found his dead son. Was it Persephone Hartwell, Ed's niece? - who had seemingly taken refuge in the bedsit at the top of the building - in her late twenties, early thirties...clearly terrified. She was pale as a ghost and shaking involuntarily. She had long, dark curly hair and was dressed mostly in black with red tights. It would later emerge that, as a teenager, she had been impregnated by Ed and had had an abortion. Was it, therefore her angry mother or father Ian, just back from Spain, or Percy herself? Or, could it be Victoria Squire, Ed's shamed wife?  Or Sam Taylor, in his late thirties, early forties, with his goatee beard, there was something of Hergé's Professor Calculus about him, who had worked for Squire's for 15 years as an assistant and was disgruntled with Ed's lack of interest in the real antiquarian books? 

Another on the suspect list is Denholm Simpson, who ran a much humbler, less grand, establishment. More of an emporium of second-hand books. Originally, both he and Torquil ran this place near the Bristol Royal Infirmary together. Then a wealthy, childless widow, Sumner, a frequent customer of the latter, died and left him the Berkeley Square building - much to Denholm's chagrin and continual resentment. The two men hadn't spoken for twenty years. 

Could it be the de Souceys? Freddie and Francesca had sold their late father's book collection to Ed, which had included, unbeknown to them, a first edition of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Ed had then sold it for a mammoth profit and refused to give them any of the proceeds. Or was it Patrick Gibb, bookseller at Carnegie Books in Bedford Square, London? He and his firm had had a massive dispute with Ed Squire over several issues, mainly over auction rings and author hoarding for monopoly price-fixing. Denholm Simpson's son, Nigel, had worked for Carnegie Books but had left in mysterious circumstances. Was it to do with the Ed Squire feud? Did he harbour a grudge against Ed? Muddying the waters is a Russian connection. One Oleg Dimitriev, who owns the expensive and ostentatious Ashleigh Manor in south Somerset (it has its own helipad), as well as a yacht in the Mediterranean. His henchmen have been staking out Berkeley Square, with menace. Why? Ed had been involved in the sale of a letter by Christopher Columbus, which turned out to have been stolen. Dimitriev had purchased it for £2 million, and Ed pocketed 250,000 commission. Did D wanted his money recouped - at any cost? So, was the murder the result of nefarious book dealing or jealousy of the Squires? Or was it due to familial anger? Thanks mainly to Cross, we find out.

A major subplot involves Cross's father Raymond who, after an operation for cancer, has a stroke and needs fulltime care. His mother Christine, estranged from both father and son, comes up trumps to become that carer. Several chapters, or parts of chapters, deal with this ongoing family crisis. Not having read the previous books, the relationship between Cross and his parents was not particularly interesting to me and I flicked through much of it. What with the autistic protagonist, I found the book mildly flawed. I don't think I'll be reading any more mysteries by Tim Sullivan on George Cross.

Andrew Soutar's 'Justice is Done' 1936 and Anthony Wynne's 'Murder in thin Air' 1936

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.58 - 1938/9?

This is the third Andrew Soutar thriller I have read in the Crime-Book Society series and the second to feature Kharduni (see my Blog for 6th January 2026). I wrote of that story then that it was very strange and highly improbable with the finale in the English Channel needing a large Scotch or G & T to hand. This, too, has its finale in the Channel and borders on the improbable. It might be worth quoting the blurb on the flyleaf of the dust wrapper:  "Kharduni is a wonderful character; there may be some who may regard him as a man with a super-brain. He is, at any rate, a person with a very vivid imagination backed with a weird facility for reading other people's thoughts, and perhaps inspiring them...in this mystery the coroner's jury returned a verdict of suicide, but Kharduni knew, and was able to prove, that it was deliberate and brutal murder. Relentlessly he trailed each of the conspirators.   

The first paragraph certainly backs this image of Kharduni up: Very rich was Kharduni, of whom you shall read in this story; very mysterious, very unforgiving if a wrong were done. Tireless as the wolf in pursuit, cunning as a lynx in subtlety, relentless as the tiger when the chase was ended and pursued and pursuer came face to face. So, when we see that the first Chapter is headed Six Knaves Meet, we know they are doomed. These eminently respected men met in a room in a City office, in a block known as The Pyramids, in order to decide which one of them should murder Sebastian Melrose. Who are they? Amos Sneede, age fifty, slight of stature, partially bald, and alert like a London sparrow. Clever business man; Ernest Tannick, powerfully built man, forty-two or forty-three. Dark complexion; eyes deep-set and piercing...strong, virile hands, the backs of which were rather repulsively covered with hair (clearly needs watching, then); Oliver Brekkan, fifty-five. The least attractive of them all (was he totally covered in repulsive hair?)...he was notorious for his daring plunges in the City and elsewhere; Samuel Kadjer, a man reputed to have made nearly a million in one day by the amalgamation of two vast trusts...lean as Cassius...facial expression rather arrogant and impatient of delay; Dr. Wimpoll, medical man held in considerable esteem in the West End. Middle-aged and obviously vain. Known to be somewhat a philanderer; and Shivada, a slightly built, very dark-complexioned man, who suggested the Portuguese. Black, oily hair...vindictive of eye (N.B. it's the 1930s - all foreigners are suspect). Shivada was the Judas of the party, since he was the junior partner of Samuel Melrose. The six men had been trying to make a corner in Great Ores, buying all they could buy in order to force up the price. But the more they bought, the more Melrose flooded the market (he appeared to have an inexhaustible store), keeping the price down. Clearly, he had to go; but by whom?

It is decided by picking a card and Shivada is the fall guy. The group spread rumours that Melrose is depressed so, when he is found dead in his office with a bullet in his temple and his hand still holding his own revolver, it is clearly a case of suicide. The coroner's court upholds this verdict, particularly as the dead man had penned a letter to Shivada stating he intended to end it all. Case closed - not to Kharduni. He is the legal representative of Melrose's daughter, Maureen, and demands to asks some questions. The coroner was slightly flustered. And well he, and the naughty six, might be. Kharduni confides to his manservant, Bleacher, that I like to see justice done...I think I shall prove to you that there is not one law for the rich and one for the poor...you are going to see these people torture each other until life becomes unbearable...

And so begins an increasingly unlikely tale. Although Shivada is soon found hanging from The Pyramids' roof garden (having also 'written' a suicide note), the other five are somehow persuaded to join a Cruise in the Mediterranean. Luxurious yacht the 'Charon', equipped with every modern invention Peace, tranquillity, health restored by the sapphire seas; minds cleansed by the salt-laden wind....no passports required. Only very few passengers taken. The infamous five have no idea any of the others have booked. Surprise, surprise! Gradually, Kharduni works his way with them. The ship, in fact, never leaves the Channel and ends up anchored off his Devonshire coastal house (Yvonne the black panther also has a chilling part to play again). The psychological nightmare that he imposes on each man is well done. Newspapers report that the Charon had 'sunk with all hands', foundering off the Nor; and then obits on the rogues start appearing. All these are 'leaked' to them and they turn on each other. Tannick is the first to go - overboard. They find that the yacht's name has been changed to The Morning Sun. A screen on the yacht shows Shivada's murder. Dr. Wimpoll also goes overboard; Kadjer is found dead with a knife between his shoulder-blades. And so on. The two remaining realise that for the first time in thirty or forty years, perhaps, the fact had been beaten on their brains that they were defenceless. Money was of no avail to them now. Both are dead before the end of the tale.

 Romance is provided by young Dawlish, who has travelled the world over with Kharduni, and with him passed through a hundred and one adventures. He had also bumped into Maureen and her late father when they had holidayed with Kharduni in Ceylon. Now he is back, and absolutely signed up to K's plan to deal with the dastardly five and succour Maureen. It is he who commands the motor-yacht.

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.60 - 1938/9?

Inevitably, when one is reading so many books by different authors in this series, one come across a tale that doesn't quite gel with you. Not necessarily an actual 'dud', but well below par. I am afraid this story was one of these. Anthony Wynne was the nom de plume for Captain Robert McNair Wilson (1882-1963), a Scottish surgeon, writer, journalist and Liberal party politician. Educated at Glasgow Academy and Glasgow University, he studied medicine and was House Surgeon at Glasgow Western Infirmary. He subsequently moved to London, where he opened a General Practice in 1903. He continued his medical studies and was known as a heart specialist 1920-33. He was Medical Correspondent of The Times 1914-1942. He wrote on European history and economics, but is best known for his detective stories - 27 novels between 1925 and 1950. Many of these feature Dr. Eustace Hailey, a snuff taking nerve specialist and amateur detective. Hailey is not a particularly interesting character and the novels have little or no humour. 

In front of spectators and experts from the Air Ministry at his private aerodrome by the sea in Ayrshire, Sir Malcolm Kintyre's aeroplane crashes. He was found in the wreckage with a bullet wound and a knife through his shoulder. He has clearly been murdered, but how and by whom? From the moment when he took off till the moment he crashed, every one of the five spectators was ready to swear that he or she had the machine in full view the whole time. There was no-one else in the plane (a two-seater). Dr. Hailey's expertise is summoned to the scene by Inspector McColl, who tells Hailey that Kintyre was one of the biggest buyers of wheat in Europe - in the world. Kintyre was known to be as hard as iron and seemingly indifferent to the plight of poor people perhaps starving. The pages dealing with wheat prices, short selling and communist designs on effecting changes left me rather cold. I didn't understand a lot of it either. Kintyre was also experimenting with developing an aeroplane which could hold heavier loads; he felt a major war was inevitable.

Essentially, the story is that of  Hailey tracking down the culprits behind the murder. We follow the doctor to Glasgow, then to a tiny island in the middle of a lake in the far north of Scotland. None of the characters felt sympathetic to this reader. There are Kintyre's daughter, Rose; her boyfriend Bob Cameron - who, being alone by the crashed plane for some time, gets accused of the murder (Kintyre had never thought him monied enough for his daughter); old Miss Mirabel Fortress, whose father had been a soldier in India and who she never stops talking about; Sarah Kennedy, Kintyre's rather anaemic niece; Kintyre's side-kick and Sarah's beau, Blades; and Mrs. Morier, a friend of Kintyre - she has a pilot's certificate too and is rather too 'crisp' with her answers to Hailey. One to watch, then. We also meet Ronald O'Flynn, a Glaswegian bookmaker, and a publican called McTugg, mine host of the Starling's Nest on Gavin Road, Glasgow. All these characters feed into the story, which turns out to be a communist plot after all. The tale plods along efficiently enough, but I simply wasn't gripped by it and I found the explanation of how the murder occurred unsatisfactory.

Hugh Clevely's 'Amateur Crook' 1936 and Sydney Horler's 'The Man who shook the Earth' 1933

 

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.54 - 1938?

I enjoyed this 'rattling good yarn' - mostly sympathetic and believable characters; several twists and car chases; and an excellent, atmospheric ending. Jane Gilman, slim, dark, good-looking is chuntering across the table at Rex Trent: you're reasonably good-looking, you've got heaps of money, and you know all the right people [but] what do you do except ride horses, shoot things, and drive noisy cars at dangerous speeds round Brooklands? It may be quite thrilling, but what good is it? I don't suppose you've ever done a useful day's work in your life. Ouch. However, this is all about to change. Roaring off in his super-charged sports Invicta, Rex is stopped by Chief Inspector Williams, who had once arrested him in mistake for a criminal named John Brownlie. The Inspector orders him to chase a big, grey car with three men on board racing past Hyde Park Corner. A car chase on the third page - Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne, here we come. The rogues are finally stopped in a side street with a blank wall ahead. One of the three crooks had a gun; the other two were holding ugly looking knives. Rex, of course, is a match for them. He went forward with a rush, all the lean, active thirteen stone of him...with the speed of a leaping tiger...[his] hard fist, with all the weight of his body, and all the force of his rush scientifically behind it, landed squarely on the man's jaw, sending him spinning across the roadway to collapse in a heap in the far gutter. Rex then deals in a similar fashion with a second villain. They didn't stand a chance.  No wonder the Chief Inspector remarks, "You're some scrapper, Mr. Trent." 

The admiring copper asks Trent to call at Scotland Yard the following day; and so begins the Big Adventure, where Trent is able to prove to Miss Gilman that he can be useful. He is asked to impersonate his lookalike Brownlie, easily the cleverest safe-opener in the country, who is presently in prison. The aim? To unmask a Mr. Big, leader of criminal outfits such as the Spadoni gang and the  Hoxton Boys. As Trent later says to Jane: "I'm a changed man now. I've given up frivolous things, like motor-racing, and I'm going in seriously for a life of crime." He is successfully 'sprung' from prison (an aircraft drops smoke bombs on the prison farm where he is working), and escapes in a Hispano car, driven by Valerie Lane, young and very attractive...her light-brown silky hair fell in a low fringe over her forehead. Her nose was slightly tip-tilted, adding to her attractiveness. Her eyes, shaded by long lashes, were blue and clear, and perfectly self-possessed. Oh dear, what will Miss Gilman think?

She is a member of Mr. Big's operation, which also includes Barfield, a small sandy-haired man with the sharp features of a rat or a ferret; Wilburton, tall, slim, dark man of about forty, very well dressed. His complexion was sallow, his features were clean-cut and aristocratic...with a set of very white, even teeth; and his voice was the low, well-modulated voice of a man who had been to a public school and a university. What on earth are he and Miss Lane doing mixed up in criminal activities? As the story develops, we find out. A pointer is surely that Valerie's surname is actually McLeod, and is the daughter of a director of Wessex Bank, which had failed disastrously two years' earlier. Her father, Robert McLeod, had been sentence to 14 years imprisonment and had died in jail. The other three directors were Leonard Morris and Marcus Silverstein and, guess what, Sir John Gilman, none other than Jane's father. There is also Murdoch, a big, broad-shouldered, swaggering fellow, dark-haired and dark-complexioned...with an air of truculence about him. An off-the-shelf Crime-Book baddie, then.

Trent/Brownlie's first job is to break into Sir John's home and crack the safe, where a pile of jewels are kept. He manages to forewarn the police and when he opens the safe, there is only a thin box with what turn out to be fake glass jewels. Clearly someone has tipped the authorities off. A second attempt is made - not by grabbing jewels but by kidnapping Jane Gilman. The author keeps the tension going all the while; there are some clever scenes of double-cross (where Jane is rescued by Trent); Jane and Valerie meet up, with the former intensely suspicious of where Trent's affections are going; and we find out who the Mr. Big is quite early on (on page 87, although I guessed it a few pages earlier) - Silverstein. He is known to both his gang and the police as The Angel, due to his drawing one at the bottom of his directives. The tale maintains a rattling pace. We meet Smannel, Silverstein's devoted manservant (all leading characters, whether good or bad, had their Jeeves figures in the 1930s); Murdoch is killed by a terrific right hook from Trent, a punch that would have felled a buffalo (all 1930s heroes knew how to box); Trent also recovers the real jewels in a tightly-written scene set in Harwich; and Dick Dastardly (alias Silverstein) pits his not inconsiderable wits against the forces of law and order. The latter's escape plans, once he realises all is lost, is suitably exciting - taking in cars, a motor launch, a private aeroplane and a small cargo boat off the North Wales coast. Spoiler alert: Silverstein dies in a splendid shoot-out; Miss McLeod marries Wilburton and departs to South Africa to start a fruit farm; and Miss Gilman marries the layabout Rex Trent. Far-fetched? Of course. A well-paced narrative? Absolutely. 

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.55 - 1938?

The Man who shook the Earth is the first of the three short stories that make up the book. I am afraid I was not particularly impressed with any of them. One problem with the shorter novel is that there is less time to develop characters; the novelette is an art form and as often as not it doesn't come off. However, M.R. James and others have proved it deserves a place in the literary pantheon. Any interest in this first tale really lies in the focus on the atom (which apparently is the cause of a minor earthquake near Harrogate). Nuclear fission (splitting the atom) was not achieved until December1938 - by two German chemists who identified barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons, but physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton first artificially split an atom in 1932 by bombarding lithium with protons. Hence, Sydney Horler was very quickly on the scene with his tale of the evil Oscar Schutt  (he's a mixture of many breeds - there's a bit of Dutch, a bit of German, and a whole heap of Mexican in him; knowing the author's racist views, that means Schutt is bound to be a wrong'un) and his plans to use this knowledge for wealth and power. The characters are so lightly sketched that it is difficult to feel much empathy/sympathy for them. There's Harry Dunstan, bred-in-the-bone and dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, a mining engineer on six months' leave from South Africa; Jim Mannering,  a very celebrated writer of fiction, but in the care-free days of the past, he had been almost equally famous as a newspaper special correspondent, and a pal Dunstan had known for ten years; and Julie Farrar, a cousin of Jim, who is her only living relative, who is a junior reporter and has come over from the USA.

Harry is summoned to Yorkshire by Jim, but also takes Julie with him.  The two men meet up with Schutt - whose eyes in the swarthy, sullen face were so malignant that Harry, had he been imaginative, would have construed it as a personal warning. When, later, part of the eerie landscape around the famous Brimham Rocks appears to explode, the two men realise Schutt is up to no good. This is confirmed when a letter is sent to the Prime Minister, which states: chance has placed in my hands a terrific weapon...in short, I can proclaim myself Master of the World...I hold the earth in thrall. Another missive, to the Manager of Barkins Bank, Harrogate contains a similar threat if he does not hand over £500,000 (£461/2 million today). Schutt captures Harry and Julie, but they are saved when another mini earthquake destroys the underground cavern they are being held in. They manage to escape, but Schutt cops it. This brief tale ends with the final Chapter entitled Julie Shows A Dimple. With Harry and Jim, she is feted by the London Commissioner of Police; gets a cable from America  saying she can have a contract of $15,000 a year for five years as a reporter due to her filing the story on Schutt; but decides to go to South Africa instead. Why? To be with Harry, of course.

The second story, Blood Money, starts off with the amateur golfer, John Roslyn, winning the British Open Championship in a fight to the death with the American professional, Worton. The scene switches to a  thatched, ivy-festooned cottage in West Dean, Sussex, where young Jessie Temple, she with the exquisitely shaped leg, is staying with her old nurse Polly Wiffen. Jessie's uncle, Richard Seidler, has just died; down to the cottage from London comes her late uncle's solicitor, Septimus Clive. Startling news - she has been left £200,000 in her uncle's will. Clive urges her to make her own; if she does not, the money will go to the unpleasant younger uncle, Aubrey Seidler. Well, we know what's coming; Aubrey will try and get his hands on the will first. Danger lurks, particularly as there is a suspicion uncle Richard's death might not have been hunky-dory. 

Meanwhile, John Roslyn has put up at a very unsavoury Inn in the same village. His drink is drugged and he is relieved of £25 whilst he slept. On waking, he eavesdrops on a discussion downstairs - certain words emerged clearly: ...quite near...the old fool...two hundred thousand quid...the Temple girl. Well, any red-blooded Englishman, particularly one who had just won the British Open, would be bound to act. In quick succession, Septimus is hijacked outside the cottage; Rosslyn turns up, just in time to rescue Jessie from two thugs, who are then bound and locked in the cellar. The story moves briefly to London, where we first meet naughty Uncle Aubrey; but it is quickly made clear that he is not the real villain. Instead it is Vincent Chaddlerly, a monstrously fat man known to the cognoscenti as The Lurcher, who is owed money by Aubrey. Hearing of the potential £200,00, he decides to instigate the plan to capture Jessie and relieve her of her fortune. Although Roslyn is captured and imprisoned in with Septimus, it's not for long. Luckily Scotland Yard, as ever, get involved. The Lurcher is caught and so is Jessie - in Roslyn's arms.

The last story, The Death of Allan Mandeville, is the shortest, just 56 pages long. The author himself considered it the best piece of fiction he has yet delivered to any publisher. Hmm. Alumni from Oxford University are gathered in an old house near Tintagel in Cornwall. Rev. J.D. Healey, a modern cleric, with an international reputation as a preacher and marked down for a bishopric; Sir Charles Knightley, the most famous pathologist in the country. Home Office expert; Bernard Morton, with a world-wide reputation as a Professor of Physics, and perhaps the most-quoted authority on spiritualism. (It all sounds very Buchanesque - vide The Runagates Club). John Loraine, the host just back from a long spell in Africa, had extended the invitation to Mrs Isabel Mandeville, a woman of early middle age, and her younger sister, Phyllis Daneforth, a girl of twenty. Her philandering husband, Allan Mandeville is the last to arrive. It soon becomes clear that they all, ever since the Oxford days,  intensely dislike and despise him, not least the two women. Isabel Mandeville confides in John Loraine (they were once sweethearts) that for nearly three years, I've lived through hell...I found the man I had married was a beast. Her husband has also been propositioning her sister.

Something has to be done. In fact, it is planned. Mandeville is given the room through which a ghostly lady roams; she strangled her husband in that very room hundreds of years ago, but on the very date in question. Mandeville is found dead the next morning, strangled. The bedroom door had been locked from the inside. The killing is ingeniously effected. The story ends with everyone finding out how it was done, but with all agreeing to keep it from the authorities. So, it was "Death by misadventure" at the Coroner's court.

Frederic A. Kummer's 'Design for Murder' 1936 and Andrew Soutar's ' Sinister River' 1936

 

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.49 - 1938

This appears to be the only novel of Frederic Kummer's to be included in the 85 Crime-Book Society paperback series. Kummer (1873-1943) was an American writer, who produced novels, plays and material for the silver screen. Several of his works were, in fact, made into movies. He was born in Catonsville, Maryland and educated in public schools and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He became a life member of the American Society of Engineers and assistant editor of the Railroad Gazette. He married the playwright Clare Rodman Beecher in 1895 and they had two daughters. His son, who was given the same names as his father, with Jr. attached, was from a second marriage. Kummer died, at his home in Baltimore, in November 1943. Wikipedia lists 21 of his writings (some are novels, but Design for Murder is not included), four short stories and seven works under the heading 'Filmography'. Of some interest is that a Liberty Ship was named after him during the Second World War.

The novel is a mixture of a murder and the ensuing detection, and a slow-burning love story.  Mrs. Kirby is hosting a private luncheon party at her home, Halfway House. She is seemingly addicted to 'bling'. She laughed nervously, shaking her head; it made her jewellery rattle. Too much jewellery... priceless ear-rings, a pearl necklace, bracelets...Senator Tom Kirby, her husband is there, a tall, bony man who looks like a westerner. One of those invited is Stephen Ransom, a budding young playwright. The reader is introduced to others at the party: Count de Zara, a dark, immensely broad man; Judge Tyson, plump and smiling as a well-fed bishop...who looks like Santa Claus; Dr. Badouine, a slender, distinguished looking man, who is a psychoanalyst; Luke Reid, a lobbyist. Smart as a fox. Looks like one too. He is the legal man of all work to the Senator; Jean, the Senator and Mrs Kirby's daughter, who is a smouldering-eyed girl in black, who wants to marry de Zara, but her mother objects; finally, Lawrence Dane a tall good-looking actor presently starring in a local play.  So, as all good detective stories have it, there is an Agatha Christie type starter, with an array of potential murderers - all, as the story develops, revealing motives. 

Ransom links up with Ann Vickery, a slim, well-shaped girl with dark, shining hair and very direct grey-blue eyes...her knitted silk suit fitted her supple body like the skin of an apple. Well, we don't need to wait until page 252 to know what's going to happen. But, before that, there is the little problem of the murder. Mrs. Kirby is found later that night, stone dead slumped across her office desk. Unfortunately for Ransom and Vickery, they were overheard by a waiter at the party discussing a murder scenario which involved Mrs. Kirby and her jewels. Worse, they are first on the scene. Ann had been staying overnight, and came downstairs as a result of hearing a scream and a shout of two words: That nail. Although it takes over 200 pages, this outburst unmasks the murderer.

We now meet Inspector John Duveen, Assistant Superintendent in command of the Detective Bureau, Washington police. Initially, he focuses, quite naturally, on Ransom and Vickery as the likely culprits. Gradually, it becomes apparent to him that it must be someone else, partly because Ransom decides to pursue clues as well (it's his playwright nose). I found the manoeuvrings and red-herrings skilfully done by the author, as, one-by-one, the characters who had attended the luncheon were focused on, then discarded as suspects. I guessed the culprit about twenty pages before he/she was unmasked. The false clues the latter fed Ransom and the Inspector were quite believable. Of course, the novel ends with a kiss. And the nail proved to be the clincher.

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.50 - 1938

This is the fifth Andrew Soutar tale I have read in the Crime-Book Society's paperback series. I have another to read - Justice is Done (no. 58). Sinister River is typical of Soutar's style. Fast-flowing narrative, a few red-herrings, Scotland Yard (this time it is more the Thames River police) and, meandering through, a love story.  As the Catholic Herald of the time stated: The Thames shrouded in mystery, interspersed with bodies and smuggling, is the thread running through this tale by Andrew Soutar, written with his characteristic speed and relish, and with all the qualities of good drama and certain excitement.

The very first paragraph sets the scene and tone: In all the world there is no more alluring or beautiful river than the Thames, tracing from its source on the crest of the oolite escarpment of the Cotswold Hills, and holding in restraint the flow of admiring thoughts when the outlying suburbs of London are reached. From that point down-stream all that is sinister and mysterious blends with the flood. All that is dramatic lurks on the Embankment: all that is tragic lies hidden in the mud of the channel. It reminded me of Charles Kingsley's poem in The Water-Babies (1862), which we learned in those long-ago days at prep school:

Clear and cool, clear and cool,                                                                                                                 By laughing shallow and dreaming pool...                                                                                                  Undefiled, for the undefiled...                                                                                                                Dank and foul, dank and foul,                                                                                                                  By the smoky town in its murky cowl...                                                                                             Darker and darker the farther I go.   

When, the apparently successful businessman, James Grant, found himself face to face with disaster and chose suicide as the way out, he left four young adults behind, their mother having died some years previously. Janet, the eldest in her twenties, was small, delightfully vigorous, appreciative of life and all it had to offer...prudent without being a prude; broad-minded without encouraging liberties. Sounds like my kind of gal. Agnes, was the laughter-loving, care-free modern...she had her sports car, her hack, her friends; she went where she pleased; Muriel was the more demure one; lastly, Robert, was still at college, who could spend as carelessly as any of his friends; he could shake a good cocktail and he knew the difference between a racehorse "platter" and something with "blood" in it. The reader gets the picture: self-made wealth from the father, now all gone bar a splendid house Black Pines on the Thames bank, and four youngsters used to the good life, carefree but not entirely idle. Grant doesn't die until page 93 but, by then, we know there's more to it than a few mistakes by the old man. Janet is affianced to Hubert Braddock, a young man with no poetry in his soul, the son of Sir Claude Braddock, another seemingly wealthy financier in the city and, equally 'seemingly' a friend of James Grant. 

Out of the river by Black Pines come a series of strange events and persons. A half-drowned beautiful, foreign young woman (just like a Madonna), who disappears after being given a bed for the night and later turns up near Piccadilly Circus, apparently street-walking; a strange, uncanny little man, with a huge bald head (he was hatless), and a twisted nose.; and, most importantly, a strong-shouldered, virile, determined, and...poor man, but whom Janet could see in the darkness was clearly gentleman of yesterday. The four orphans band together to change their revered home into a good riverside house...a house run on the best of lines, perfect supervision, perfect entertainment, perfect everything, helped by the little bald-headed man, who turns out to be Gaspard, a historian writing a book about the Thames; and the strong-shouldered Adonis, one Travis, who quickly becomes a mainspring in the Grants' plan to market Black Pines as a top-class entertainment venue - Black Pine Casino! Finest site on the banks of the Thames. Thirty acres of lawn and woodland. Magnificent house. However, capital of around £10,000 is needed. Somewhat mysteriously, this is found (I didn't guess who was behind this largesse until the end).

All goes swimmingly on the surface; however, at the same time, a ruthless group are using the river to ferry barges full of drugs (under coal) and are also engaged in people-trafficking from abroad. We soon realise Travis is far from the respectful major domo he seems. He is clearly involved in finding out who are the rotters leading the drug/people trade. Quite early on, it is revealed that Sir Claude and Hubert are up to their necks in it. Towards the end of the tale, Travers cuts to the quick, addressing Sir Charles: It may be a little difficult for the simple-minded and honest who use the Thames as a pleasure resort and a waterway for traffic to believe that such fouling and polluting exists, but that is part of the subterfuge of scoundrels. And the scoundrels all meet sticky (in some cases, watery) ends. Meanwhile, Travers rows Janet up the Thames. She seductively says - "slide into that heavenly backwater, and we'll tie up and forget the musty part. The future is good enough for me" (even if, she has just found out his Christian name is Raymond). He replies? "And for me. Swing over the rudder, darling". Skulduggery and romance; what more does the 1930s reader want?