The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

18 August 2011 22:53

School for Love cover

This book was first published in 1929 and it’s another Inspector Alan Grant mystery. I read Tey’s Daughter of Time recently and I thought that it was really good but I liked this one even more. It just absolutely hit the right spot for me at the moment. It’s also far better than The Franchise Affair which always seems to be the one which people are recommended to read.

It’s set in London to begin with and a man has been knifed in the back whilst he was standing in a theatre queue. There’s such a crush that he is dead for some time before he falls down as the crowd had kept his body upright. Nobody else in the queue had noticed anything unusual and the body has nothing on it which would help to identify it.

Bit by bit Inspector Grant uncovers his identity and the action switches to the Highlands of Scotland and a man-hunt which is every bit as good as any written by John Buchan.

This kept me guessing all the way to the end and I can’t say that about all mysteries. So if you enjoy vintage crime books you should definitely give this one a go.

The only other thing that I have to say is that the word Dago is used prolifically throughout The Man in the Queue – describing a man of dark Mediterranean appearance. In 1929 this was regarded as normal I suppose but its definitely un-PC now. Mind you I did read somewhere that Spanish/Italian people didn’t regard the word Dago as derogatory as it’s a corruption of the name Diego and so as far as they are concerned it’s just the same as being called Jimmy. I don’t know if that’s true or not though.

Josephine Tey was of course a Scottish writer and not English as I read recently on another blog. She was born in Inverness and taught in various schools in Scotland and England but moved back to the Highlands to look after her father and continued to write there.

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The Duke’s Daughter by Angela Thirkell

7 August 2011 22:54

After watching all the horrible things which have been happening in the news from all corners of the world, I was in dire need of some light-hearted reading to take my mind off it all. This book fitted the bill perfectly and although I sometimes had a bit of difficulty keeping all the characters straight in my mind, especially when people who featured in earlier books are mentioned, I still found it really enjoyable.

This book was first published in 1951 and the upper class inhabitants of the county of Barsetshire are still grumbling about Them – by which is meant the Labour government of the day which seemed to be spending all of its time thinking up ways to tax the supposedly wealthier members of the poulation. Death Duties are a big worry to those who have money and the rest of them would no doubt like to have the luxury of having so much money that they had to worry about how much was going to be paid over to the government on their death!

As ever Angela Thirkell has purloined bits from various classic authors, most notably Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen and set it in her own time.

In this one there are quite a few characters being paired up at the end, to everybody’s satisfaction, and some of the more ghastly characters are nicely snubbed. I’m reading these books as I find them so not always in the correct order which is a wee bit annoying but I intend to read them again when I get the full set. No doubt the news won’t be any better then, whenever that may be.

I found this book in an antique centre, very reasonably priced and it’s a first edition, not that I’m ever bothered with that, but it does have the original dust jacket, a bit tatty, but it has comments on the back from luminaries of the time, a couple of them I haven’t heard of but here are a few of the comments.

‘Grace, wit, equanimity and engaging narrative power… if the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer’s novels, he will not know his business.’ – Elizabeth Bowen.

‘Mrs Thirkell possesses to a high degree the gift of making characters spring to life. She is often both witty and shrewd… she has a most observant, and often an attractively wicked, eye.’- C.P. Snow

I’ll just add – Angela Thirkell is well worth reading!

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The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

26 July 2011 22:51

I’m trying to work my way through all of the Scottish writer Josephine Tey’s books and this is one which I’d been looking forward to getting a hold of as so many people seem to have enjoyed it. And I’m another one.

Detective Alan Grant is going mad with boredom, stuck in a hospital bed flat on his back with only the cracks in the ceiling to scrutinise. Embarrassingly, he had fallen through a trapdoor whilst chasing a criminal and had badly broken his leg.

When his actress friend Marta tries to think of ways which he can entertain himself she suggests that he could try to solve a historical mystery and she later brings him a sheaf of prints of historical portraits to whet his appetite. Grant thinks that he is good at ‘reading’ people’s personalities from their faces and it’s the portrait of Richard III which intrigues him. It doesn’t look like the face of a man who would have his small nephews murdered.

Grant decides that that is the mystery which he is going to look into and after he exhausts the text books which he is given it’s his young American visitor, a student called Brent Carradine who helps him to get further with his research.

As I said, I enjoyed this one which was quite different from her other books and considering that Grant is immobilised throughout the book he still manages to be an interesting character.

It is obvious to us all that history is written by the winners so any historical accounts have to be taken bearing that in mind. Tey gives quite a few examples of this and in particular she complains that the Scottish covenanters have been given a bit of a white-wash job over the years. She says that none of them were put to death despite the fact that everyone thinks that they were. She says that they were guilty of sedition as if that is something really heinous. But sedition is just talking against the government! Hands up anyone who has done that in the past – yes all of us, if we have half a brain!

Tey also glosses over the fact that being transported (sent to the penal colonies in Australia) was more or less a death sentence. Many of the prisoners died on the voyage and most of the others died of fevers shortly after getting to Australia.

One of my ancestors was transported to Australia for- yes you guessed it – sedition, and he only survived 7 months there. So it’s just as well that he and his wife exchanged mourning rings before he left. They knew that they would never see each other again.

Anyway, if you like vintage crime, you’ll probably enjoy The Daughter of Time which was first published in 1951.

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The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

13 July 2011 00:02

This is just the third book by Spark which I’ve read and I liked it better than the last one which was Memento Mori but I don’t think it was as good as The Girls of Slender Means. The Finishing School was first published in 2004 and it was her last published book, she died in 2004.

Nina Parker and Rowland Mahler are a young married couple who set up a finishing school for both sexes and any nationality. College Sunrise, as it’s called, was originally started in Brussels but in an effort to make it more successfull and pay more they’ve started moving the school to a different country each year. It’s put forward as being an exciting experiment and it seems to go down well with the parents.

The main reason for running the school is to give Rowland time to concentrate on his own writing and he hopes to become a novelist. The only work which he does is teaching the creative writing class and everything else is done by poor Nina.

One of the students is a 17 year old boy called Chris Wiley and he is writing a novel too and when Rowland reads the beginning of it he is shocked at how good it is and is consumed with jealousy. Rowland isn’t able to write anything at all and he is obsessed by Chris and his novel.

Chris’s novel is about the murders of Mary Queen of Scots musician, Rizzio, and her husband Darnley. Jealousy was supposedly the reason for Rizzio’s murder but Chris has a new theory about Darnley’s murder and the small community in the school sort of mirrors his idea of the atmosphere of the court of Mary Stuart, with jealousy, lust and obsession playing their part.

Meanwhile Nina carries on with the teaching and it’s this part of the book which gives the humour as Nina imparts supposedly important pieces of information to her students like: If you get a job with the UN and you are chased by a large python, run away in a zig-zag movement, as a python can’t coordinate its head with its tail. and even dafter advice.

Anyway, it was a fairly enjoyable and quick read at just 155 pages.

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The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

6 June 2011 00:39

The Wicked Day cover

I went through a Mary Stewart phase as a teenager and I read the first three books of this series way back in the 1970s and I absolutely loved them. The Merlin trilogy comprises of The Hollow Hills, The Crystal Cave and The Last Enchantment and The Wicked Day is the fourth and I didn’t even realise until recently that there was a fouth and fifth book. I sort of wish that I had gone back to the beginning and read them all in order but I didn’t really think it was necessary because I remembered the books so well. The trouble is that although I enjoyed the book I wasn’t as into it as I was with the others in the 1970s. I don’t know if it’s an age thing because I’m certainly not a teenager anymore but then again even as a teenager I was never one of those daft romantic girls, it was more than just King Arthur which appealed to me. The 1970s serial ‘Arthur of the Britons’ was on TV when I got home from school and I have to admit that I loved it and the actor playing Arthur Oliver Tobias was a big PLUS!

Anyway, back to the book, I did enjoy it but at some point when I don’t have such a big backlog of books still to be read in the house I’m going to go back to the beginning of the series again. Will that day ever come, I ask myself?

You might remember that Arthur was duped into sleeping with Morgause who unbeknown to him is his half-sister and when Morgause gives birth to the resulting son Mordred she farms him out to be brought up by an old couple who are fisher-folk on an Orkney island in the North of Scotland. Merlin had prophesied that Mordred would be Arthur’s doom and as Morgause hates Arthur she hopes that Merlin is right.

Eventually Mordred is taken from his foster parents and goes to live with Morgause and her sons by her dead husband King Lot. King Arthur hears about this and takes Mordred to live with him at Camelot, and although the half-brothers go too, they aren’t happy about Mordred being given special treatment by Arthur, Mordred’s paternity is a secret, even to him.

Mordred’s half-brothers are a wild bunch and mayhem ensues. If you’re at all interested in Arthurian legend then this is a book for you. There have been plenty of stories throughout the centuries and Mary Stewart has taken some of them and come up with a good storyline.

There is a map on the end papers of the book and it has various places of importance on it. One of them is Dumbarton and I was agog the whole way through to find out what part the place was going to play in the story as it is the town which I grew up in. However it wasn’t mentioned until near the end of the book and it was only that Mordred’s youngest son was born there. If you look to the top left hand of my header you will see Dumbarton Castle Rock and this is where his son was supposed to be. Another name for Dumbarton Castle is Arthur’s Castle as it is in the west and Arthur was supposedly King of the West. The name Dumbarton is a corruption of Dunbritton, meaning fort of the Britons.

That’s your Scottish history lesson for the day! I’m now looking for the last book in the series The Prince and the Pilgrim, but I’m not in a hurry to get it as I’ll need to seriously get stuck into my TBR pile first.

If you want to know what Oliver Tobias looked like wayback in the 1970s have a look here.

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Peter West by D. E. Stevenson

23 May 2011 23:23

School for Love cover

I borrowed this one from my local library, I wasn’t looking for it but I just saw it on the end of a shelf, in the wrong place and thought that I might as well see what it was like.

First published in 1923, this is the first book which DE Stevenson had published and it’s entirely different from the other two which I’ve read. To begin with it’s quite religious and it reminded me of the writing of another female Scottish writer, O. Douglas. But as the story rolled on the similarity disappeared.

It’s set in Scotland and it’s really about people who have made hasty marriages and quickly lived to regret it. Beth Kerr’s mother had fallen in love with the boatman who lived in her village of Kintoul and against her parent’s wishes she married him, but she soon realised that she didn’t know him at all and after having three children she died at a young age.

When Beth was still a teenager her father told her that a neighbour wanted to marry her and she ends up making the same mistake as her mother. Her much older friend Peter West also gets married to a woman that he barely knows.

This book is much more serious than her others but I believe that it wasn’t very popular. I can see why because I think it’s very far ahead of the time it was written in. The subjects are alcoholism, domestic violence and mental problems, all dealt with in a delicate way, but I know that in Scotland right up until the 1960s the attitude for men and women was that ‘you’ve made your bed and now you can sleep in it’, so this was a really radical storyline. In the end there’s really nothing to upset the strait-laced folk of 1923 but it dealt with taboo subjects of the day.

I must admit that I didn’t enjoy it as much as Mrs Tim of the Regiment or Miss Buncle’s Book both of which are really light-hearted and humorous, but I’m glad that I read it.

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D.E. Stevenson – two new books!

9 May 2011 23:43

Emily Dennistoun cover
The Fair Miss Fortune cover

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.

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Penny Plain by O Douglas (Anna Buchan)

3 April 2011 00:00

I wanted to read something by O. Douglas, or Anna Buchan as was her real name, and I came across Penny Plain recently in a second-hand book shop. It’s the easiest to find and also the cheapest by far, but I’ve just discovered that I could have downloaded it for free, such is life!

Anna Buchan was John Buchan’s sister but she didn’t write thrillers. I think she would be best described as a romance writer and Penny Plain comes under that category ‘kailyard’ which was so popular in the early years of the 20th century.

The novel was first published in 1920. My edition was published in 1922 and it is the 12th edition which gives you an idea of how popular the book was in its day.

It’s set in the Scottish border country in a small town called Priorsford and is the story of Jean Jardine whose parents have died and she has to bring up her two younger brothers and a very small boy who is no blood relation at all, but as he is an orphan she feels obliged to look after him. They all live in a small cottage by the banks of the River Tweed which they rent from a man who lives in London, and Mrs McCosh from Glasgow helps with the housework.

The next-door neighbour, Bella Bathgate, takes in lodgers and Pamela Reston who is an ‘honourable’, a lord’s daughter from London, takes up residence as her guest and becomes great friends with the Jardines, which leads to big changes for all concerned.

There are times when the book gets just a wee bit too religious and Presbyterian, but I suppose that was to be expected from the daughter of a Wee Free minister. The Free Church of Scotland is the strictest form of Presbyterianism, no singing, no music, no dancing, do nothing on a Sunday except go to church and read the bible, don’t even cook a meal!! But then again her brother John never felt the need to bring it into his books.

Having said that the book is full of great characters who all ring true to me as typical Scots, especially Mrs McCosh the Glaswegian and even the dog Peter is a ‘card’. There’s plenty of humour as well as sentimentality.

If you do take a look at this book you might like to know that the wee boy is nicknamed ‘the Mhor’ which is Gaelic for ‘the great one’ and in Gaelic ‘mh’ together is pronounced as a v.

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The Island of Sheep by John Buchan

2 April 2011 00:12

The Island of Sheep cover

I hope to work my way through all of Buchan’s books so when I saw this one for sale in the library I snapped it up. It’s a continuation of Richard Hannay’s adventures, a good few years on from The Thirty-Nine Steps, and the now Sir Richard Hannay is married to Mary and they have a 14 year old son called Peter John.

He’s in a very comfortable rut and living a pleasant country- gentleman’s existence when the past pops up and Hannay finds himself embroiled in another adventure with his old friend Sandy, now Lord Clanroyden. Years before whilst on another jaunt in South Africa they had taken an oath to protect the explorer and prospector Haraldsen and his descendants, they hadn’t really taken it seriously at the time but when they discovered that Haraldsen’s son was being hunted down by a nasty set of characters, they feel obliged to go to his aid.

The action moves from Buchan’s beloved Scottish border country to the Norlands and The Island of Sheep (The Faroe Islands). Another enjoyable ‘Boys Own Storybook’ sort of a romp ensues.

I enjoyed this one even more than The Thirty-Nine Steps although towards the end it does feature a whaling ship and its crew, it was a surprise to me that it was sort of frowned upon, even in 1936 when the book was published.

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Miss Buncle’s Book by D E Stevenson

29 March 2011 23:43

A lot of people have been reading and writing about this book recently, so when I saw it sitting next to ‘Mrs Tim’ the other day in my local library I just had to borrow it. I was only supposed to be taking books back and NOT LOOKING – but you know what it’s like.

It’s set in England during the 1930s and people like Barbara Buncle are finding things very hard indeed. Like many genteel people of that time she is living off the small amount of money that the dividends from her inherited investments pay out. Times are hard and consequently the dividends are poor. Paid employment is out of the question, buying hens as an investment is considered and rejected. So Miss Buncle decides to try her hand at writing a book and she uses her own village of Silverstream and most of its inhabitants as ‘copy’.

She sends the resulting book Disturber of the Peace off to the publisher, Abbott and Spicer and Arthur Abbott decides to go ahead and publish. Miss Buncle has been a bit too faithful with her copy, in fact her fictional village Copperfield and its inhabitants are almost a carbon copy of Silverstream and so it isn’t long before the village folks are revolting!

In the second part of Disturber of the Peace, Barbara Buncle decides to (write) right all wrongs by having a ‘golden boy’ walking through the village playing a reed pipe, and when people hear him it makes them do things that they wouldn’t have dreamt of doing before.

In that way Miss Buncle herself takes the part of the golden boy of her book. But the villagers are still clueless as to who the author is and some of them are determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The storyline is really clever and the whole thing is very funny, it’s a great comfort read. It was her most successful book although I really liked Mrs Tim too.

D E Stevenson was a cousin of Robert Louis S. and so was part of that famous family of lighthouse builders/engineers. Dorothy called her books her ‘lighthouses’ and I think that they really must have been like that as she was so popular during the dark days of World War II she probably saved quite a lot of people their sanity.

Had she been born a boy she almost certainly would have been a lighthouse engineer/designer, as I believe that R.L. was deemed to be a bit of a failure when he didn’t go into the family business.

Although Miss Buncle’s Book is set in an English village, it wasn’t part of Dorothy’s experience as she lived in Scotland her whole life, moving from Edinburgh to Glasgow when she married and then eventually settling in the Border town of Moffat, where she is buried.

Moffat is certainly a nice wee town, it’s a while since I’ve been there but as I recall it has a statue of a sheep in the middle of it and a shop which sells lovely freshly made vanilla ice-cream.

Next time I go there I’m going to take some photos of the town and look for her grave. I hope the good ice-cream shop is still in business!

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