I watched the Scottish news at lunch time as usual and was quite amazed to see that there was a report about D.E. Stevenson on it. Apparently two new manuscripts had been found in her attic by her grandaughters. The cynic in me thought Oh aye, sure! but it’s true.
Shirley Neilson of Greyladies publisher got a phone call from one of D.E.’s grandaughters about it and the upshot is that The Fair Miss Fortune and Emily Dennistoun have been published by them. The first one was rejected by a publisher in 1938 and they think that Emily Dennistoun was written sometime in the 1920s. It’ll be very interesting to find out what they’re like.
So Judith, Reader in the Wilderness – I know that your mother is a big fan and I hope you can get a hold of the books for her somehow, for some reason D.E. is much better known in America now than she is at home. I’m sure the libraries there will be ordering them in.
I still haven’t managed to pay a visit to the town of Moffat yet, where she is buried.
It was Susanne who recommended this one for the CPR Book Group which is a place for neglected authors or books. The only books by Arnold Bennett which I had previously read were all set in The Potteries and this one is completely different from them, as far as I can remember anyway because I think I was a teenager when I read them, which wasn’t yesterday! I don’t know how widely read his books are nowadays, I certainly haven’t come across many people reading them but this one is certainly worth reading.
I really enjoyed this book which was first published in 1902 but my copy is a 1954 Penguin, orange. It could just as well have been in their green vintage crime livery because that is what it is.
The Grand Babylon Hotel in London is the sort of discreet but oppulent place that if you have to ask the price – you can’t afford it. The American multi millionaire Theodore Racksole is staying there with his daughter Nella and he isn’t pleased by the way the head waiter, Jules is looking down his nose at them. On the spur of the moment Theodore decides to buy the prestigious hotel, at least then he’ll be able to get the steak and bottle of Bass which he wants.
Things aren’t what they seem to be and it isn’t long before Theodore and Nella realise that there are nefarious goings on behind the facade of quiet classiness.
This was originally published as a serial and Bennett wrote the 15 installments in 15 days and sold it for £100. It was described as the most original, amusing and thrilling serial written in a decade.
Arnold Bennett lived at the Savoy Hotel in London and it was the chef there who came up with the dish which became known as Omelette Arnold Bennett because he was so fond of it. You can see Sophie Dahl whipping one up if you’re interested.
There aren’t many people who have had dishes named after them. The only others that I can think of at the moment are Peach Melba and Melba toast, named after the opera singer Dame Nelly Melba and Pavlova after Anna. Eggs Benedict too, Lemuel Benedict was an American stockbroker. There must be others though.
It’s time for a wee musical interlude and as Donovan was given a lifetime achievement award in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards earlier in the week, I thought it would be nice to hear my favourite song of his, Jennifer Juniper, a lovely tune.
I’ve been catching up with the new Just William adaptation on the iplayer. Although the programme is on Children’s BBC I think it probably has a large amount of middle-aged viewers. Set in the 1950s the whole thing has a very nostalgic attraction for people of a certain age, even without the entertaining and well acted stories.
The Brown family home has been so well kitted out. They even have the same antimacassars (chair back covers) still in the 1960s, but for some reason I really love the low tech 1950s kitchen. All of the characters have been well cast, including Jumble the dog.
Sadly Violet Elizabeth Bott doesn’t have red hair but otherwise I think she was very good and seemed to enjoy being covered in mud. At that time kids tended to be skinny due to rationing which continued well into the 1950s and the fact that they were allowed to run wild all over the place and use up their excess energy and burning off calories all the way. Unfortunately Daniel Roche who plays the part of William doesn’t quite fit the bill because his bones are quite well upholstered and he would definitely have had the nickname of Fatty or Podge or something similar and un-PC – in those days. But I can see why they wanted to have him playing William Brown after his success in Outnumbered. Douglas, another of The Outlaws, is even tubbier but I don’t suppose they could put them on a starvation diet just to make things look even more authentic.
They seem to have made just 4 episodes but I’m hopeful that they have more planned for the future. Martin Jarvis is the narrator, he seems to have cornered the market on Just William stories, amongst other things, but he does have a lovely voice.
Niranjana, I know that you won’t have much time to watch tv but I really hope that you’ll be able to see this new series of Just William on Canadian TV at some point in the future.
Late last night I watched Reichenbach Falls which had apparently been on before but I had missed it. At first I thought this was going to be another Rebus investigation but it was far more convoluted than anything in the Rebus series. I really enjoyed it and it wasn’t just a bog-standard crime investigation. I suppose it is a dark tale, but it also shows the beautiful architecture and scenery around Edinburgh, and the film can be enjoyed for that aspect alone. I think it will be of interest to anyone thinking of going there for a visit.
The film maker has really shown what I think of as the hidden Edinburgh at the Water of Leith and St Bernard’s Well, which I didn’t even know existed until recently. At times it was like an advert for Tourism Scotland and was very easy on the eyes. It did go from ‘the sublime to the cor blimey’ but that’s the old Scottish split personality, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde thing.
Rankin threw in plenty of other Scottish writers one way or another and Richard Wilson played the part of Arthur Conan Doyle.
I’m hoping that the above link is available for people outside the UK to view. Otherwise it might be available on Netflix.
Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies are probably better known as Fortunes of War as that is what the BBC serialisation was named. The first three books were published separately between 1960 and 1965 as :
1. The Great Fortune
2. The Spoilt City
3. Friends and Heroes
and later published in one big volume as The Balkan Trilogy.
As you can see an audio version is available.
The sequel is The Levant Trilogy which was published in three volumes between 1977 and 1980 as:
1. The Danger Tree
2. The Battle Lost and Won
3. The Sum of Things.
If you’re at all interested in World War II you’ll love these books. I read them all in 2008, just before I started blogging and I don’t even have any notes on them but I thoroughly enjoyed the books and they’re written so well I was finished them in no time at all, which was the only disappointing thing really.The writer Anthony Burgess said that they were, “The finest record of the war produced by a British writer.”
Can’t say fairer than that can you?
I remember that I loved watching the BBC serialisation but for some reason it’s never been re-shown, unless I’ve just missed it somehow. It starred a very young Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. I think it was only the second thing that I’d ever seen Emma Thompson in, the first programme was by the BBC again and it was called Tutti Frutti. It was ages ago now and again it doesn’t seem to have been re-shown. But at last, it’s out in DVD.
It was set in Scotland and also had Robbie Coltrane and Richard Wilson in it. I remember it was very funny and is just the sort of thing that they should have on now in these dark and gloomy days. Emma Thompson was able to do a very good Scottish accent. Her mother is the Scottish actress Phyllida Law.
I think I might just put the DVDs on my Christmas list, if my husband’s looking for any ideas!
It was the last antiques fair before Christmas at the Highland Showground at Ingliston near Edinburgh yesterday. We went along, not really with the intention of buying anything for ourselves because we’ve got enough ‘stuff’ really. But I thought it might be an opportunity to get some Christmas shopping done. Yes, I think that’s the first mention of that dreaded ‘Ch’ word here.
The BBC happened to be filming a Bargain Hunt programme at the time, unfortunately by the time I realised I could take some photographs of the proceedings – Tim Wonnacott had disappeared. But here are a couple of photographs of the blue team and their ‘expert’.
I ended up buying some books which I will get around to reading some time but I really bought them because of their bindings, and also they were really cheap. Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed book-bindings for Blackie and Son and I’m sure these are some of his.
I think they’re lovely anyway and I didn’t get around to reading Carlyle’s Heroes before I had to take it back to the library. This edition cost me a whole 1 of our Earth pounds!
I also bought some more old prints of Dumbarton Castle, Loch Lomond and one of Ravenscraig Castle. One Christmas present was bought, which I can’t say anything about because I want it to be a surprise. Thankfully we are sensible at that time of the year and really just stick with giving presents to close family members otherwise it just gets too silly and expensive.
So anyway, a good day out was had by all at Ingliston Antiques Fair.
I love Radio 7 but we’re so spoiled for choice at the moment with all the great books that are on the go there. It such a damn shame that there are blocks on the BBC iplayer which mean that people outside the U.K. can’t listen in.
The banned season has just started and they are having dramatizations and readings of:
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Madame Bovary
Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451
A Clockwork Orange
Brave New World
But the one that I really have to get around to listening to on the iplayer isn’t part of the banned season at all. It’s vintage crime – The Murder of the Maharajah by H.R.F. Keating. I haven’t read it and it’ll be interesting to see what it’s like.
There’s scary stuff scheduled for around Hallowe’en too. The Turn of the Screw, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula.
On a more personal note, the builder has finally finished all the work and we’re pleased with the results, now I just have to sort out my devastated garden before the ground freezes up.
We were stuck in the house the whole first week of the school holidays, but today we managed to have a lovely day out in Edinburgh. All going well, my post tomorrow should have some nice photographs of the Water of Leith, the castle and Rose Street.
This book was much better than the last Margery Allingham which I read. It’s the first book which she wrote featuring Albert Campion as a character, and it really annoys me that she has written him with a ‘silly falsetto voice.’ There’s nothing more guaranteed to put you off a man, so I try to pretend that she didn’t write that.
This is the well-loved country house weekend sort of crime thriller/ adventure story and I’m not going to say much more about it other than that I really enjoyed it. I know that at least one other blogger (Danielle) has it on her nightstand waiting to be read.
There is an engaged couple in this book and at one point the man decided that he wouldn’t allow his fiancee to participate in the action on the grounds that it would be dangerous. It just about had me bouncing my head off the wall, but the book was written in 1929 and to be honest, men got off with behaving like that a lot more recently too.
Apparently she wrote Campion as a parody of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. I wonder how well that went down with Sayers? They lived very close to each other in Essex in the 1930s. Sayers in Witham and Allingham was near White Notley, with just one train station in between them.
They were well known to the station staff and would often be on the same train going to nearby London, but according to one biography which I read years ago they didn’t pay much attention to each other.
In the 1970s I lived in Braintree, the next station along and at that time they were still using the 1930s carriages, just exactly as they are im Miss Marple. On my way to work in Witham I used to wonder if I was sitting in a seat which they had sat in, but on second thoughts, they would probably have been in the First Class section.
I seem to remember that Peter Davison was quite good in the role of Campion in the tv series.
This book is a murder mystery and I must say that I prefer these ones to Heyer’s romances, but I’m not a huge fan of romances anyway. I didn’t read the blurb on the back of this book until I had finished it, and I’m thankful that I didn’t as it gives away part of the mystery. Why do they do that? The main detective in this book is Inspector Hemingway but as he doesn’t really have a huge personality I found that he didn’t contribute much to the flavour of the whole thing.
Heyer manages to combine murder mysteries and humour successfully which is a nice dimension to her books and I can’t think of any other crime novelist who attempts comedy. Well, I suppose Dorothy Sayers did but not to the same extent.
At 348 pages this is quite a thick book as vintage crime goes, and I had put off reading it for a while for this reason. But it was actually a really quick read and enjoyable. It was first published in 1939.
I wouldn’t call the first paragraph an interest grabber: “The Prince is coming by the one-forty-five. That means he’ll be here in time for tea. Well, I do call that nice.”
This is a classic country house mystery, usually a good start for any thriller. The house, called Palings, is owned by Mrs Ermyntrude Carter who had been a chorus girl in her day, and she has a husband who spends his time squandering his wife’s money and is a general liability. His cousin Mary is also part of the household.
The rest of the characters consist of the neighbours, the local doctor
and Vicky who is Mrs Carter’s daughter and fancies herself as a bit of an actress.
The crime doesn’t occur until about a third of the way through the book so part of the mystery is figuring out who the victim is going to be, as well as who is the culprit.
Georgette Heyer seems to be unable to write anything which doesn’t have a dollop of romance in it but it doesn’t descend into the gloopy, schmalzy sort.
Dorothy L. Sayers said Miss Heyer’s characters and dialogue are an abiding delight to me… I have seldom met people to whom I have taken so violent a fancy from the word “Go”.
One thing I must mention is that the only other Ermintrude that I have ever come across before is of course the cow in The Magic Roundabout. O.K. the spelling is different. But at the beginning I couldn’t help thinking of Ermintrude the cow whenever the character of Ermyntrude Carter was speaking.
If you want a reminder of that iconic BBC programme for children of all ages, have a look here.
![](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1906147205.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX200.jpg"alt="Fortunes)
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