Eden Phillpotts' 'Bred in the Bone' 1933

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 26 - 1936?

Unlike the last few Crime-Book Society books I have read, this felt like a 'proper' novel, as opposed to a well-knit story. As much a psychological study as a thriller or detective yarn, it needs the reader to concentrate far more. The first five chapters have as their titles the names of the main participants. The first deals with Peter Bryden - the face of Peter Bryden presented a clash of qualities, so that any student of character, observing obvious traits tending to exclude each other, was concerned with the question of what sap and kernel remained, the process of elimination ended. He was handsome, with the old-fashioned, large-moulded distinction of an earlier age than our own - the solid and massive dignity that stares from the faces of early Georgian portraits...purpose marked Bryden's square features, and the countenance as a whole spoke of a self-controlled and continent but very strong-willed man. He now runs North Wood farm on the edge of Dartmoor. His father has been dead ten years and his elder brother, Lawrence, after making a poor show of running the steading, has handed over everything and left for Canada. More than that, Peter has also 'inherited' Lawrence's girl, Avis Ullathorne (sounds like a Hardy or Trollope surname!). Peter had triumphed, and the love of the woman was responsible for all that he had done since he first met her.

Then had come the woman, upset all his values and challenged his quality. She had probed unsuspected depths and revealed possibilities that Peter himself never guessed at..."'Till I met you, Avis, I just calculated the chances and didn't feel no very tremendous pull to living; and I certainly never guessed that love of a woman could turn the scales so sharp."...a contract existed between Avis and Peter Bryden: that they should never speak of incidents concerned with the past, either to other people or themselves. It soon becomes clear why this is so.

Into this seemingly idyllic position comes the sound of a motor-car... There appeared a man of forty years old, who looked younger He was neat and trim, rather under-sized and thin, but firmly knit. He is looking for Lawrence Bryden and his name is Midwinter. Greatly surprised to hear the latter has sailed for Canada, he is slightly rebuffed when he asks for more details; but Peter suggests he goes on to the nearby little hamlet of Little Silver and talk to a friend of the Brydens, a publican John White who runs the Woolpack Inn. So, off Midwinter goes and learns far more detail about Noah Bryden, the father, and his two very different sons. "Neither boy was quite the man their father was, yet both had character...but, though a likeable enough chap, Lawrence always had a screw loose on the matter of farming." Silly mistakes were made and Peter left in despair. He only returned when Lawrence sent a frantic message that, if he didn't come home, all was lost. When he returned, it was to find Avis and her widowed mother ensconced in a cottage on the farm land. "And then a fearful thing fell out, for Peter found himself struck to the heart with Avis Ullathorne". After initially deciding he would help Peter go to Canada, Lawrence changes his mind and decides to emigrate himself. So, that's the official story Midwinter hears down at the pub.

Then all hell breaks loose. Billy Archer, who resembled a large and shabby, but acute and active rat, had been about to steal watercress on the other side of the Moor to sell in Plymouth. From the midst of the growing stuff an unexpected object confronted him. It was a solitary human hand...a strong male hand, lacerated from some cause, but still intact. I immediately guessed it would be Lawrence on the end of the hand. And so it proved to be. The local lord, then the police (Inspector Budlake etc.) sprang into action. And so did Vincent Midwinter. And that is why he has visited Peter and Avis - telling them of Lawrence's demise only after listening to their tale of his departure for Canada -  and set up base at the Woolpack. It soon becomes obvious that Midwinter increasingly suspects the two of them. At one stage, I thought it was beginning to read like a typical Lieutenant Columbo - "Just one more thing..." - as Midwinter knew they had done the murder and they knew he knew etc. However, although he gets close, he can't actually pin anything on them and Chapter XIV is headed Exit Midwinter. The detective returns to London, admitting failure.

However, the 'meat' of a compelling story is just about to begin. Not for nothing is the next chapter entitled The Rift. Over the next ninety-odd pages the two very different characters of Peter and Avis ensure an unravelling of their seeming success. The rational, atheistic wife is simply unable to stem her husband's growing unease and feelings of guilt. Page after page deals with the disintegration of the man's character, even his soul. He starts to attend church with her mother and the awfulness of what he has done (he had, with Avis, poisoned his brother) sinks in, deeper and deeper. Avis, on a very different character and mental plane, realises she cannot stop this. Chapter XXI Death of Peter, however, shows how he has retained enough sense to ensure his end looks like a horrific accident. Avis has long realised his death would be best for both of them; even for their yet-to-be-born child. The final chapter, The Fisherman, sees Midwinter return (I hadn't seen that coming) to fish and meet up with Avis, who confesses the whole story. She leaves her fate in his hands. Two months after the day on which Vincent Midwinter left Avis Bryden, a more vital problem than she challenged him, and there opened the Great War. He fell in France before the year was ended.

Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

Edgar Wallace's 'The Coat of Arms' 1931

 

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 25 - 1936?

Good old Edgar. After two Crime-Book Society novels without one, at last a murder - admittedly, not until page 166 (of 256); but it was immensely satisfying, although 'flagged up' from quite early on. The book takes its title from the hostelry situated in the village of Sketchley. The pub is run by Mr. John Lorney, newly come to Sketchley [who] received and returned the antagonism proper to a foreigner...he was a large man, broad-shouldered, bald, stern of face, harsh-voiced, a driver of men. He had no enthusiasm, little sense of public interest. One to watch, then. Nearby, is Arranways Hall, where Lord Eddie Arranway, middle-aged, irascible, is living with his newly-wed second wife, Marie. His first marriage had ended in a messy divorce in India, when his good-looking A.D.C. was found in his pyjamas in the Residency garden with a bullet through his shoulder; the first Lady Arranways had fled in her night things to the house of his military secretary. Unfortunately, the second marriage is not going well, either. On their honeymoon in Egypt, the Arranways meet a very agreeable young man, Mr. Keith Keller, the son of a very rich Australian. He comes with them to England. In Berlin, on their way home, Marie loses a diamond bracelet, one of her wedding gifts. Fact to squirrel away for later. Lord Arranway is not happy, but Keller consoles her. For a while all is well. Keller ingratiates himself with his lordship, whilst appearing to take little notice of the latter's wife. Aha, you think; and you would be right. It's an action replay of his lordship's first marriage.

Meanwhile, young Anna Jeans descends on The Coat of Arms. She is the niece of a friend of John Lorney's and had been to stay last year. An intelligent girl, she is on vacation from studying at a pension in Switzerland. Staying with the Arranways is Richard Mayford, the brother of Marie. Anna played tennis most proficiently; she played golf; she rode; she played the piano rather well. Richard is smitten. He spends rather a lot of time at the pub.  Then Arranway Hall burns down and they all have to move temporarily to The Coat of Arms. It is now that the real mischief takes place. Not only is Keller clearly having an affair with Marie Arranway, but he is also setting his eye and hands on the younger Anna. The man is an absolute bounder. Moreover, is he really who he says he is? Hence the involvement of sometime American police captain, Carl Rennett, and Chief Inspector T.B. Collett, officially liaison officer between Scotland Yard and foreign police forces. Clearly, something, or someone, has attracted their attention and presence.

Wallace keeps tight control of all these characters, bringing them into the foreground when necessary and keeping the reader guessing. What is clear by the aforementioned page 166, is that several of the characters could have killed Keller - Arranway and his wife; Anna Jeans or Richard Mayford; the surly, ex-con Charles Green, who John Lorney had employed as general factotum at the pub; and Lorney himself. I guessed which of these was the murderer well before the end but, no matter, it was a compelling yarn. And, as with the burglars who got away with it in Wolf-Net, so did the murderer this time, thanks to Rennett and Collett. The author also had good, if mildly malicious, fun poking at the local P.C. Plod - Superintendent Blagdon, who managed to chase every wild goose available. I also liked the unveiling of Anna Jeans' antecedent; and the uncovering of the various aliases of Keller, including Boy Barton.

Winifred Graham's 'Wolf-Net' 1931

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 23 - 1936?

Good. Back to a more pleasurable experience with a Crime-Book Society 'thriller'. The tale was quite what I would call a 'gentle' one. No murders or awful 'baddies', just a couple of thieves planning an audacious robbery and then getting away with it. Louisa Woolfe is a cat burglar, who had already featured in two previous novels of Winifred Graham - A Wolf of the Evenings and The Last Laugh. I haven't read either, so I come to Miss Woolfe afresh. She has recently returned from Russia (her deceased mother was Russian) and her cousin, Augustus Woolfe, receiver of stolen goods, retired yet unrepentant rogue of fortune, already has a potential 'job' lined up for her. It means travelling from Norfolk, via London, to Home Park House, near Hampton Court, where an old client/friend - the great art critic, perhaps the greatest in the world - Maurice Twyford lives. On their way there, 'Gus' fills Lou in about Maurice - he is the brain, but not always the limb, of big sensations. He knows who to employ and he seldom backs a losing horse. So far, it has been his boast that he never trusts a woman. Women, he said, may have iron nerves, but sometimes iron is apt to melt, if the furnace is too hot.

Undoubtedly a challenge for Miss Woolfe! Her first impression of this man, with the sharply pointed thin-cheeked face, was one of surprise, for that face had a sort of glacial purity about it remarkably deceptive. She saw at once that under his short moustache the mouth was resolute, while the apparently gentle eyes looked to be capable of lightning-flashes. You are ahead of me - of course, they fall for each other. What's the big plan? No less to steal a painting from Hampton Court Palace. It is Margaret by Rubens: Lou studied the head so perfectly poised upon its young shoulders - every point appealed. She noted the subtle gradations of colour, the pure arch of the eyebrows, not put in with the usual sweep of a brush, but with separate cross touches in their line of growth. And Maurice desperately wants it; it is to be concealed behind a panel in his bedroom. Can Lou purloin it for him? Of course she can. The subsequent descriptions of her hiding behind the hangings of Queen Charlotte's bed; of her escape across the park in a fog; of its concealment; of Maurice's ecstasy; and, then, his realisation that the longed-for painting was no match for his growing adoration of Lou herself. The author skilfully charts the changes, including Lou's own growing realisation that she would like to forsake her life of crime for a settled domestic bliss. No more Louisa Woolfe stories, then.

Early on in the tale, Maurice catches a night-time burglar (ironic!) in his house. Lou is there too and thought she had never seen anything so thin  or pitiful - bones protruded from the emaciated cheeks. Not only do the two let Horace Brown go, but he departs with a basket full of cold food and a bottle of wine. Noblesse oblige? Certainly, but the upshot is a vital part of the denouement two hundred pages later.

The fly in the ointment is Violet Tracey, Maurice Twyford's ward; her face was oval and silky-skinned, a type to melt the heart of any man to sudden tenderness, if only the eyes had not been so uncompromisingly hard. To Violet, Maurice is "sort of God. Sometimes, when he's very nice, I call him God." Oh dear, not only is she in love with her guardian but she discovers the two thieves and where the painting has been hidden. Her declaration of love for her guardian is firmly rebuffed and off she goes to drown herself in the nearby Thames. Although Lou plunges in and rescues her, Violet then experiences a mini breakdown. The author cleverly uses this to ensure Maurice and Lou are not reported to the police and Violet ends up realising Maurice is not for her. All live happily ever after - apart from tubby Augustus, who is on an enforced teetotal diet back home in Norfolk.

I thought the narrative pace was sustained throughout; the characters were alive and realistic; and the scenes in Hampton Court Palace were well done.  

Winifred Graham (1873-1950)

Winifred Graham is another in the Crime-Book Society list who was a prolific author -  of some eighty-eight books. She began in the 1890s, with a short story Through the Multitude of Business (1894) in the Belgravia magazine. Her first book-length novel, On the Down Grade, was published in 1896. Thrillers and romantic novels followed, as well as a three-volume autobiography and a critical popular history of Mormonism. Apparently, recurring themes included the perils of romantic love entangled with class hierarchies and infidelity, often resolving in tragic loss or redemption. In addition, to her criticisms of Mormonism, she published works critical of Zionism, Christian Science, Roman Catholicism  and the Women's Suffrage Movement. She was some stuff!

Talbot Mundy's 'C.I.D.' 1932

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 22 - 1936?

I must admit this is the first Crime-Book Society paperback I have really struggled to finish. Set in India, in the last decades of the British Raj, it was a lumbering (rather like the elephants involved) tale. I felt no sympathy, let alone empathy, with any of the characters - there was no hero and no out-and-out villain. Apparently, the author produced a series of short stories and novels about the Criminal Investigation Division of India, which featured Chullunder Ghose in many of them as their protagonist. Certainly not as a hero - this babu (often a highly placed government officer, usually addressed as 'Sir'), when we first meet him, is a dark-skinned man in a blue European suit, a raincoat, and a turban, who introduced himself to Dr. Stanley Copeland, an American specialist from the neck up - eye, throat, nose, and ear -  as a reprehensible and graceless babu. Ghose is also obese. 

Copeland wants to get into the state of Kutchdullub, to shoot a tiger. The state is ruled by a Rajah, who spends most of his time drinking and wenching. The Rajah has a cousin, a Prince, who wishes to overthrow him. Linked up with this is a ruined temple, where a group of Kali's priests appear under the thumb of a mad woman Soonya, who has adopted the terrible creed of Kali, which served death, not life; and at least one tiger who has slain six women, four men, five children, six-and-fifty goats and nineteen head of cattle.  The Raja, desperately short of cash, employs a servant, Syed-Suraj, a shifty, self-seeking man, to get a money-lender Ram Dass to provide more wherewithal. Others in the story include Major Eustace Smith, the representative of the British Ray, who is suffering from painful neck boils and desperate to leave India for a little cottage in Madeira; Hawkes, a retired infantry sergeant eking out his pension by staying in India and getting employment in a Native State.   If it all sounds confusing, then it is because that's what it is! The story plods along and I increasingly lost the will to follow it. I have been to India and felt no affinity for the countryside, the weather or the buildings. Our tiger foray produced no animals of any sort. I don't usually give away endings but, spoiler alert,  Syed-Suraj is killed by the Rajah who, in turn dies in the tiger pit - as do Soonya, the priests and the tigers. The cousin succeeds to the throne.  When the babu says in the final paragraph of the novel - "Oh, my karma! let us drink annihilation to the C.I.D., and politics, and tigers, and to every other dam' thing!" - I couldn't concur more. I do hope the next Crime-Book Society novel returns to their usual level - this one had no detection or thriller aspects at all.

Talbot Mundy (1879-1940)

Far more interesting was reading about Talbot Mundy. Born William Lancaster Gribbon in Hammersmith, London, and educated at Rugby School, he left with no qualifications and moved to British India, to work as an administrator and then as a journalist. After a sojourn in East Africa, where he became an ivory poacher and then a town clerk!, he moved to New York City in 1909. He began selling non-fiction articles and short stories to pulp magazines, such as Argosy and Adventure. (I have several of these pulp magazines, but none with his material). He became a Christian Scientist and embraced Theosophy. He was married five times, was a heavy cigarette smoker throughout his life, suffered from diabetes, eventually dying of complications.

 One of his biographers described Mundy as a strange, enigmatic personality, noting that in his early life he was known for being a wastrel, confidence-trickster, barefaced liar and a womanizer. Well, at least that was more interesting than this novel. He had strong political views, being contemptuous of the British establishment and opposing imperialism. He supported the move for Indian independence. This can be deduced from this novel. Chullunder Ghose, commenting on the boil on the back of Eustace Smith's neck, describes it as an officially dignified and economically useless, ethically hypocritical anachronism's neck. He also chides Copeland with being afraid of moss-back majors with a mid-Victorian morality that makes them fit this epoch as a pig fits an automobile. Although Mundy's work was often compared with that of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, he disliked the comparison. Finally, Munday was perhaps best known for his King of the Kyber Rifles. It was published in 1916, the same year as John Buchan's Greenmantle, which has a similar theme. It was adapted for a film in 1929, starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy; a second version came out in 1953, starring Tyrone Power, Michael Rennie and Terry Moore. It had little in common with Mundy's novel.  

Sydney Horler's 'S.O.S' 1934

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 21 - 1936?

This the second Sydney Horler thriller I have read (see my Blog of 20th July 2025 on his Tiger Standish) and, taking into account the fact that critics  have called his plots unbelievable and among the worst of British thriller writer, I must admit I quite enjoyed this yarn. In fact, the paperback comprises three stories, of very different lengths. S.O.S. is the main tale (pages 9-160); this is followed by the shorter The Dealer in Death (163-237); and the brief Jungle Law (241-256).

Sydney Horler (1888-1954)

S.O.S. is a typical Horler tale. A young man, James Thorp, is sent to a Harley Street specialist, 'burnt out' due to his work with the Secret Service (the particular sub-department is known as "X.2.") Advised to  take three months off work - reiterated by his boss Sir Rimington Blade - he takes up the offer of a friend's cottage in Kent for six weeks. So off he goes. On his first evening, an S.O.S. comes over the radio - Missing from home...Venetia Delvey, age twenty-three, 5 feet 7 inches in height, slim build, clear complexion, good teeth, brown eyes. Well, what red-blooded male (even an exhausted one) wouldn't be interested. Twenty minutes later, the very same Venetia appears on the doorstep, in desperate need of a decent red-blooded male. She explains a twisted ankle as the result of leaping out of a car to escape from two 'baddies'. Scarcely had she explained this, when the door knocker sounds again. Can it be the baddies? Of course. It is the 'Bishop of Wadborough' apparently. Thorp observed that, in his prime, the Bishop must have been something of an athlete, for the gaiters could not hide the muscular development of the calves. Add to this a veritable barrel of a chest, and he decided that here was a member of the Church who, if occasion demanded, might be very militant indeed. 

Well, both Thorp and the reader twig almost immediately.  The Bishop is joined by his daughter, Stella, who rather gives the game way by a "God knows" response to a question about the chauffeur who has seemingly gone looking for a garage to deal with a problem with their car. Thorp tries to stop Stella going to the bathroom (next to the bedroom where his 'wife' is lying ill - i.e. Venetia). The 'Bishop' produces a gun!... However, anyone in "X.2." can match Bond any day. The Bishop is summarily disarmed and sent packing with his 'daughter'. Soon after he shoots her dead! The above is the long Introduction to the main Act. viz. is there a Mr. (or Mrs.) Big behind the Bishop and if so, who are they and what's their game?

It's a Mrs Big and she is "Ma" Lake, once world-famous as a show girl in Zeidler's Burlesques of twenty years ago, she had moved lock, stock and barrel, from Broadway to Windmill Street, Piccadilly Circus. Not only is she now running a sleazy joint but is trafficking well-born young girls. A 'bent' copper, Detective-Sergeant Durrant from Scotland Yard, keeps her informed of any trouble ahead. It transpires that Venetia (under the false name of Millie Clark) had joined Ma. Lake's outfit simply to track down a 'disappeared' friend, Lady Denise Hart. The story is essentially how Thorp inveigles his way into Ma. Lake's shenanigans, is then caught and imprisoned in a dungeon in her house on Hampstead Heath. Thanks to Venetia, who has managed to get to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Ronald Brent, and explain the entire foul proceedings (including the shooting of Stella, which she had seen through a window of the Bishop's house), the Yard spring into action. Detective Durant is forced to confess; Thorp is rescued; he reunites with Venetia, kisses her and marries her. Job done. 

The author's racism occasionally surfaces: the caller was a negro of some indeterminate breed, for his skin was of the palest chocolate, and, although his hair was of the usual woolly type, his nose was almost Roman, and his lips were not abnormal.

The Dealer in Death is not a bad short story. A seedy, down-and-out young man, calling himself Harry Mason, is accosted in Pascal's Bar, Soho by a 'butler person' who offers him a job on behalf of his employer. A specially designed Rolls-Royce whisks them off to the South Bank, near Waterloo Station. Here he meets Mr. Big, who he nick-names 'The Grand Duke'. He is given the role of an agent of the Grand Duke - to travel to the famous Glenrobin in Scotland to "watch a man named Reuben Glass. He is a wealthy American, and he is plotting mischief - such mischief as may plunge the world into wholesale chaos. Unless he is prevented. It is my intention to prevent him - through you."

Off Mason goes to Glenrobin, the name of this famous Scottish resort is daily broadcast to the far corners of the earth. Not only does he meet Glass and two supporters - a German Herr Schroder and a Frenchman M. Clement Viviani (one of them is a typical Horler 'baddie') - but also Mason's niece, Helen Simpson. Mason dances with her and, of course in true Horler style, they fall for each other.  Mason finds out that Glass (masquerading as Mr Robert Martin) is in fact a genuine philanthropist, determined to banish war from the world! To cut a mildly convoluted story short. Mason is ordered to capture Glass and deliver him to be killed. He doesn't do this. Moreover, it is revealed that his name isn't Mason after all, but Harry Stevenson in the British Secret Service Q.I; the Grand Duke is a crook named Charles Volpin; all the baddies are rounded up; and Mason/Stevenson is able to return hot haste to Scotland to see "Glass, and - er - someone else!"

Jungle Law, is quite an endearing short tale of two erstwhile blackmailers - Francis Leadley, a week out of Dartmoor after a two-year stretch and Jane Lessing, now lying dangerously ill in a house in one of those arid streets which make up the dreary desert of North Kensington. Francis believes it was Jane who had shopped him. Between them they had blackmailed many a rich man by the simple expedient of Francis pretending to be the outraged husband catching his wife in flagrante. He has now come to kill her. There is a neat twist at the end, another man known to both, Anthony Dakers, turns up. The hypodermic needle Francis had brought with him, filled with a palish liquid which, when delivered, would mean the cleverest pathologist could not give any other opinion that one had died from genuine heart disease. Francis uses it. Two beings only leave the house - Jungle Law.

Collin Brooks' 'Account Paid' 1930

 

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 20 - 1936?

One of the pleasures of reading these crime books, is that I look up information about authors I have never heard of. Collin Brooks is a typical example.

Collin Brooks as a young man

Brooks (1893-1959), often known as "CB", was a broadcaster and journalist as well as a writer, with over fifty books to his name. In 1915 he joined the Army, served in the Machine Gun Corps and was awarded the Military Cross as a 2nd Lieutenant. From 1921 to 1953, he worked for many newspapers, such as The Yorkshire Post, eventually becoming editor of the Sunday Dispatch. He then moved into broadcasting and took part in Any Questions and The Brains Trust on the BBC Radio. He was a member of the Savage Club, The Carlton, the Royal Thames Yacht Club, the Reform and the Press. His detective stories - he called them his "shockers" (very Buchan-like!) - introduced readers to such memorable characters such as the eccentric amateur sleuth Lord Tweed, who plays an important role in Account Paid. He died on 6th April 1959 and his friend, T.S. Eliot, gave an address at his memorial service at St. Bride's Church, Fleet Street.

Account Paid is quite a clever novel, perhaps a little too convoluted. The last two chapters, totalling fifteen pages, are essentially a long explanation of the hows and whys of the preceding murder-detection story. A suicide, or murder?, takes place by the second page. This story begins, where so many of the best stories have begun, at an English fireside. Friends Drayton and Peter Galliard had just popped out for a brief stroll, before returning to Drayton's wife Helen. She was seemingly sound asleep in one of the two great arm-chairs in front of a coal fire.  The three had dined well at the nearby Capuchin Restaurant, returned for a chat in front of the fire and left Helen with a volume of verses to amuse her. Now she was dead, aged only twenty-three, a woman who had combined all the rare freshness of girlishness with the wise sophistication and appealing comradeship of maturity. (Sounds like my wife at that age.) Drayton goes speedily for a local doctor. He returns with Dr. Stephen Blackstone, a man somewhere in the late thirties of life...tall, and spare of frame, with an indescribable air of assurance and command in his carriage...[with] a head that seemed small and a little serpentine...an aquiline nose jutted from beneath two hard eyes of the blueness and strength of cold steel. The mouth was thin and wide, a grim line...Hmm. Needs watching, surely?

Blackstone confirms Helen's death - by poison, from a little glass phial which he had prised from her clenched hand. The doctor returns to his home and tells his nurse-attendant (whose face in repose was a little hard. Again, hmm.) to go with a Mrs. Noblet, a laying-out woman, to deal with the corpse.  The doctor also pops upstairs to see another man - whose face was impish in an empty way; the sharp-pointed nose, the prominent rabbit-teeth and the light-coloured eyes, under very fair brows and lashes, combining with the flaxen hair, scrupulously parted down the exact mathematical centre of his egg-shaped head, to give him an aspect of idiotic and supercilious vacuity. A potentially fascinating character, but I never saw the point of him throughout the story.  Did the author tire of him half-way through? Blackstone, the nurse and Mrs. Noblet arrive at Drayton's house to lay-out the body.  During a discussion, the finger is pointed at a possible murderer (Drayton is convinced his wife has been murdered), one Black Ben Weir - one of the most loathly men in the whole history of modern crime. Wow!

On to the scene comes Detective-Inspector Debenham and his high-ranking chum Hon. Arthur Arkwright, third Earl of Tweed, and the latter's factotum, Stimpson. The ensuing tale is how these three very different men - the heavy-featured, clumsy-bodied Debenham, nicknamed 'Doleful' by one and all, the parchment-faced Stimpson and the willowy graceful Tweed - track down the real villains of the piece. It's not until the end - played out in a dank, narrow underground passage linking The Three Jolly Stevedores public house with a Thames-side wharf - that the reader realises he has been pointed in the wrong direction. It's almost a Gothic ending, which is just within the bounds of the possible. Whatever. The true baddies - Ben Weir is unmasked - are not only caught but killed, buried under the debris after an explosion leads to a ramshackle building collapsing on them. Unfortunately, the two innocent men are also killed along with five of Debenham's police colleagues. The final chat between Debenham and Tweed may have unravelled the truth but they seemed very cavalier about the loss of life of seven individuals who were not scoundrels! It makes you wonder who are the 'shockers'.

Andrew Soutar's 'Kharduni' 1934

 

Crime-Book Society paperback edition No. 19 - 1936?

Having bought another ten Crime-Book Society paperbacks over the last couple of months, I have decided to read some of them during January, starting with No. 19 - Andrew Soutar's Kharduni.

This is the second Soutar novel I have read, the first being Night of Horror, No. 8 in The Crime-Book Society's stories (Blog 22 July 2025). A reminder that Andrew Soutar (1879-1941) was born Edward Andrew Stagg in Swindon. He married Elspeth Soutar Swinton in 1907, adopting her second Christian name as his authorial surname.  He wrote pulp adventure stories for magazines and at least 24 of his novels were used as bases for movies - nearly all in the silent era.  His novel writing spanned from 1910 until his death in St. Austell, Cornwall in November 1941. Also a reminder that a Reviewer of his The Hanging Sword quoted Soutar as saying that he wrote mystery novels as a relaxation from the strain of writing long and serious novels. He regarded this mystery work as a tonic! 

Kharduni is certainly a 'mystery work' - very strange and highly improbable! Its very first sentence - The drama began in the lonely house of the mysterious Kharduni - is typical of thriller/mystery writers, but is but a traditional curtain call to a most unusual play. Mrs Sophia Brent, a very beautiful  brunette of about thirty-five, had been widowed two years' earlier, when her husband had been shot by - apparently - a young officer, Harold Stratford, who had been acquainted with the Brents for some considerable time. Found guilty of manslaughter, he was sentenced to fifteen years and was presently in Dartmoor. He had been defended by one of the most promising barristers of the day, Mr. Sydney Setch.  Both Sophia and Setch had been invited down to Kharduni's house on the south Devon coast. They were accompanied by two 'bodyguards',  Mellersh and Bradman.  Arriving at the house, they find sixteen other guests there.

They settle in and are summoned for the first meal. The dining room is at the end of a very long corridor: the oblong dining-room was not large, and the ceiling was rather low-pitched (take note readers)...there was only one door - that by which the guests had entered. Mellersh and Bradman are sent to the car to get a crate of drink.  On their return, they find the corridor in pitch darkness; moreover, instead of a door at the end of it there is a blank wall. Accosting the butler, the latter states that there is no-one in the dining-room, which has been closed for a fortnight and that he has never heard of or seen a Mrs. Brent of Mr. Setch. A great start to a mystery story! Mellersh and Bradman, unable to solve the mystery, return to London - to be shown into the private room of one of the most brilliant servants of the Government. 

He is Mr. Ambrose Cruxton, seemingly just a very clever, astute financier as well as being of more importance to the War Office than all the Members of Parliament put together. So, he is a top notch in the Secret Service; moreover, Mrs. Brent has worked for him as a spy for several years. He makes neither head nor tail of the two men's story but, as [improbable] luck would have it, Kharduni himself is about to pay him a visit. Kharduni was indeed a handsome man...it was easy to see that he was possessed of phenomenal physical strength...his hair was as black as the back of a crow; the complexion was that of the Italian; the large eyes held the lustre one finds in those of a Malay woman, than whom there is no more beautiful woman in the world, despite the darkness of her skin (hang on Soutar, old bean, is that a touch of racism there?) As an aside, as the story unfolded, I kept thinking there was a element of John Buchan's Dominic Medina (The Three Hostages) about him.

The two clever men spar cleverly; the upshot is that Cruxton agrees to go with Kharduni for a little ride and finds himself being driven to the South West, passing Dartmoor, to the latter's eerie home. Here he is kept almost under-house arrest. The pages fly past as the reader is drawn into an increasingly unlikely plot but with an unexpected denouement. It becomes clear that not only is Kharduni determined to get Stratford released from Dartmoor, legally or otherwise, but that he is intent on unmasking the real killer of Sophia Brent's husband. We find out the mystery of how Sophia and Setch 'disappeared', how Cruxton finds himself in their position too, and how tables are turned on the usual who is the hero and who is the villain.

Kharduni's character just strays on the side of believability; Cruxton rarely appears to justify the title of being top-notch; and the finale - at sea in the English Channel - needs to be read with a large Scotch or G & T. to hand. We have sympathy with old Cruxton when, near the end, he says to Kharduni: I shall always regard you as an amazing man... It's a wonder he didn't try to recruit him for the Secret Service.

Joseph O'Connor's 'My Father's House' 2023

 

Vintage first paperback edition - 2024

Hugh Monsignor O'Flaherty (28.2.1898-30.10.1963) may not be a well-known name, even in his native Ireland - although he was the subject of a film starring Gregory Peck called The Scarlet and the Black; a book by the same name by J.P. Gallagher (2013); and another book, The Vatican Pimpernel: The Wartime Exploits of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty (2014) by Brian Fleming. He is also commemorated by a grove of Italian trees planted in Killarney National Park in 1994 and a statue there unveiled in 2013 on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. O'Flaherty was rather like an Irish Oskar Schindler, saving over 6,500 lives during the Nazi occupation of Rome in the Second World War. With a group of equally brave friends, he led an escape organisation not just for Jews but Allied PoWs and other civilians, whether they were communists, atheists or religious. Having read about Pope Pius XII's vacillations (to put it mildly) during the war, it came as a pleasing relief to read about this Roman Catholic priest's never wavering dedication.

Hugh Monsignor O'Flaherty

Nicknamed The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican, O'Flaherty had toured PoW camps in Italy in the early years of the war to find out about prisoners who had been reported missing in action. If he tracked them down, he tried to reassure their families via Radio Vatican. When Mussolini was dethroned by King Victor Emmanuel in 1943, thousands of these PoWs were released or escaped, some reaching Rome. The subsequent German occupation of Italy meant their lives were again in danger. Some went to the Irish Embassy, the only English-speaking embassy to remain open during the war (I wonder why?!) Here they met Delia Murphy Kiernan (1902-1971). A well-known Irish singer, she was married to Dr. Thomas Kiernan who had been appointed Irish Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See in 1941. 

Delia Murphy

When German troops arrive, Delia smuggled ex PoWs and others out of Rome by hiding them beneath rugs in the back of the legation's car. She was one of the tightly-knit group, going by the name of The Choir, who worked with O'Flaherty. Other important members included a British Major Sam Derry and the British Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See (1936-1947) Francis D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne (1884-1964), later Duke of Leeds (1963-4). The latter's butler, John May, whom O'Flaherty described as a genius...the most magnificent scrounger, was also a major figure in the group.

                 

                                     D'Arcy Osborne                                              John May

The escapees were hidden in convents, flats and houses, farms and in the Vatican City itself. Apparently the secretly anti-Nazi German Ambassador to the Holy See, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, illegally informed O'Flaherty that he could not be arrested inside the Vatican, so the latter began to meet his contacts outside St. Peter's Basilica. Try as they might, the Gestapo failed on numerous occasions to capture or assassinate O'Flaherty.

Joseph O'Connor melds this naturally thrilling factual story with an equally exciting tale of derring-do. In addition to O'Flaherty, whom he labels as the Conductor of 'The Choir', Delia (Soprano), D'Arcy and Derry (Tenors), and May (Bass), he brings in Marianna de Vries (Soprano), The Countess Giovanna Landini (Alto) and Enzo Angelucci (Tenor). He concentrates on the period September to Christmas Eve 1943, the latter date being the Rendimento ('Performance' - i.e. of the Choir), when there was to be three major drops of cash around Rome. The author skilfully builds up the tension and the characters of each choir member. In addition, he introduces (a fictitious?) the Nazi Paul Hauptmann, who is determined not only to 'deal with' O'Flaherty but destroy the choir's operations. The section entitled The Huntsman successfully explores Hauptmann's character. by studying his relationship with his family, his interests - night fishing was a particular pleasure...the fish would be watching through the water. Light made them scatter. You needed to learn how to listen. A fairly obvious metaphor for the Choir.

O'Connor uses a slightly strange structure for relating the events of those few months. Side by side with actual descriptions of the choir meetings and the planning and the superbly created atmosphere of the Rendimento night itself, are a series of chapters which are the transcripts of BBC research interviews between November 1962 and September 1963 for a This Is Your Life programme, hosted by Eamon Andrews (remember him?!) for Sam Derry (changed from O'Flaherty as they thought his health would not stand the shock). I haven't found out whether it is just a novelist's device or it actually happened. Anyway, The Voice of Enzo Angelucci [7th/8th November 1962]; Written Statement in Lieu of an Interview by Marianna de Vries [November 1962];  The Voice of Sir D'Arcy Osborne [14th December 1962]; The Voice of Delia Kiernan [7th January 1963]; The Voice of John May [20th September 1963]; The Voice of Sam Derry [27th September 1963]. In addition, there are sections from An unpublished, undated memoir written after the war  by The Contessa Giovanna Landini. Does this structure work? Its strength is that it allows the events to be viewed from all the participants; it also informs the reader what they thought of each other! It is a well-rounded approach. Of course, what it also does is to tell the reader they had all survived the war! So, no unfortunate deaths in the Choir! O'Connor's strength of narrative, of scene setting and character portrayal makes this a fine piece of 'faction'. Well worth reading.

I now find that O'Connor has written a second novel (part of a trilogy it seems)  - The Ghosts of Rome, which concentrates on the Contessa Giovanna Landini and carries the story on from February 1944. It was proclaimed Irish Book of the Year in 2025. I wonder whether my daughter will buy me this one as well?!

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's 'The Old School Tie' 1978

The Viking Press first edition - 1978

 It's been over a fortnight since my last Blog. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the small matter of Christmas and New Year festivities took precedence; secondly, Gathorne-Hardy's fascinating account of the 'phenomenon' of the English Public School could not be read at pace. It was so packed with information, and analysis of that information, that a slow and intermittent reading was inevitable.  

The Chapter headings set out clearly the author's approach: e.g. Early History to 1820: The Brutal and Permissive Ages; Public School Reform and the Victorian Moral Climate: The New Sexual Traditions; Games and Sex; The Progressive School Movement; and 1945-1977: The Academic Revolution and the Influence of the Public Schools Today. The latter chapter proved of great interest to me, as it was during that period that I attended what appears to be a very typical institution for its time.

But first, the pre-Victorian schools. The author highlights the fact that their major purpose was to provide recruits for the Anglican church and the main subject was Latin. (As an aside, I had great empathy with Peter Cook's regret that he could've been a judge, but I never had the Latin. I had six years studying Latin, but still made a mess of it in my interview for Oxford). Even if it was dog Latin, the language was the single avenue by which ambitious men could enter the two careers open to them - the law and the Church. Gathorne-Hardy rightly (I think) states that for the majority of boys studying Latin - grammar, parsing, construing, learning by heart was sheer drudgery. It was not made legal for grammar schools to teach other subjects until 1840! Moreover, it was a brutal age. The power of masters to beat their charges was absolute. Gill of St. Paul's (1608-35) seemed to believe in a sort of divine right of beating. Once, when a stone came through a window, he rushed in a fury out into the street, seized the nearest passer-by, a Sir John D., and beat him so severely he never dared go near the school again without an armed guard. There is a whole section on Dr. Keate, Headmaster of Eton  ((1809-1834), five-foot tall, strong as a bull, and equipped, under a high cocked hat like Napoleon, with enormous shaggy red eyebrows, great angry tufts...his temper was terrifying...quacking, foaming, snarling, he tried to thrash Eton into submission. Gathorne-Hardy points out that in a school where there is a lot of beating there is also a lot of bullying. "The bigs hit me, so I hit the smalls; that's fair." Lack of privacy, bad food and games played purely for pleasure, not to instill "virtues" like team spirit, sum up the period. Sadly, the one reference to my own school, John Wesley's Kingswood, does not come out of it well: total control, no games, getting up at 4.00 in the morning, winter and summer, living almost entirely on a diet of porridge and water gruel... - no wonder there were mass outbreaks of weeping, howling and shrieking! There were changes by my day!!

The reaction to the brutality, inefficiency, corruption and immorality was a long time coming. Thomas Arnold may not have been the great innovator of legend, but he typified the movement towards prefects, organised games and the importance of religion and 'character'. Religion and the Church would unify (and pacify against mob violence) the country. All of Arnold's successors were devout clergymen (two, Tait and Temple, became Archbishops of Canterbury). School as a place to train character - a totally new concept so far - was what came to distinguish the English public school from all other Western school systems.

This is a Blog, not a thesis, on Gathorne-Hardy's excellent book, so one must skip over the vast majority of its content. He deals with the new foundations in the mid to late 19th century - Marlborough in 1843, Lancing in 1848, Epsom in 1855 and, later, Bloxham, Denstone, for example. He focuses on the great Marlborough Rebellion of 1851, where - after 'revolutionary' committees were set up - a rocket shooting up from the central court started a week-long chaotic revolt: the college reeked of gunpowder and smoke drifted through the smashed windows and broken doors. All privileges lost in the last four years were returned to the boys and the rebellion petered out. However, it was no wonder that the headmaster, the Reverend Mr. Wilkinson, quiet, scholarly, gentle, resigned a few months later. Prefects, beatings, poor food continued but there was an increasing concentration on games. I have skimmed over two aspects of the book - the ever-present importance of class and the ever-present problem of sex, and what to do about the latter. Chapter 7 is simply headed Games and Sex. You can always purchase the book! Later chapters turn their attention to Girls' public schools and the importance of figures such as Penelope Lawrence a co-founder of Roedean; the rule of Miss Dorothea Beale (1831-1906) at Cheltenham from 1858; and Miss Buss (1827-94), who founded the North London Collegiate School for Ladies.  

Chapter 12, on The Progressive School Movement, is good at placing into context the importance of Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Pestalozzi writings in establishing schools such as William Gilpin's Cheam in 1752; the Hills' Hazelwood from 1819; Cecil Reddie's Abbotsholme, established in Derbyshire in 1889. The curriculum was English based, not classical, and wide - science, art, music, French, German - there were no prizes and lessons were only in the mornings. Games madness was condemned. J.H. Badley taught at Abbotsholme, but left after Reddie said he couldn't get married! In 1893 he started Bedales. A wide curriculum maybe, but cold baths were the rule, even though we had to break  the ice on the goose cans. There were runs before breakfast, the last two being swished in by a prefect with a cane. Stoicism and bullying ruled.

The 1900-1940/50 period sees boys' schools often resisting change. It is always easier and more reassuring to establish and maintain an authoritative regime than to relax it. The bravery (and deaths) shown in the Great War suggested why change when the system had produced such heroes? The OTC and ATC were strengthened, Armistice Day was religiously celebrated. The Games mystique returned to most schools. The whole edifice of privileges, colours, and hierarchies remained almost unchanged Of course, there were forces for change. At Gresham's, Rugby and Rendcomb and, particularly, at Oundle, change including a more individual approach to students, a lessening of the fixation with games. Corporal punishment was often done away with. Sanderson at Oundle (appointed in 1892) introduced engineering into the school; then agricultural chemistry, horse-shoeing, biochemistry; he built an observatory, a meteorological station, botanical gardens, metal and woodshops. The curriculum became more 'pupil-centred'. No wonder the author's chapter 15 is headed The Monolith Starts to Crumble. A.S. Neill's  Summerhill and W.B. Curry's Dartington may have been outliers, but what had been seen as 'progressive' fifty years earlier, was now increasingly embedded in the 'mainstream'. The author also studied Kurt Hahn's Gordonstoun and J.F. Roxburgh's Stowe. He rightly says that the period from around 1914 to 1940 is in some ways the most difficult so far because it is the most diverse.

Chapter 17, 1945-1977: The Academic Revolution... covers a period I am personally familiar with - well, the later part! After the immediate post-war years of gloom (the Labour Government etc.), the 50s and 60s marked the change. Gradually, an unprecedented prosperity rolled over the country, benefiting mainly the middle and upper classes, and therefore the public schools. Laboratories were built, science masters engaged, workshops and lathes and model furnaces became common. The needs of the middle classes and industry, the enthusiasm engendered by exciting curricular developments, generated an immense academic thrust. The standard of teachers rose - as did their salaries. Examination successes also rose. 

It is interesting that Gathorne-Hardy also posits a question: Will the public schools survive? Remember, he is writing in 1977, nearly 50 years' ago. But what he writes rings true in 2026. Inflation has attacked them even more viciously than it has attacked everything else...as the costs continue soaring their fees become astronomical...the policy of the present Labour Government has been to allow the public schools to wither away...a further twist will come when they are deprived of charitable status... Taking on more and more day pupils; going co-educational; have both helped, but the author talks about the public schools operating in a hostile world, keeping, as the darkness closes around them...a few glimmers of the sacred fire alight until the barbarian age has passed. That was written in 1977. Well, in 2025-6, the barbarian age has returned with a vengeance. Perhaps only the wealthiest schools will survive, as we watch more and more close down.