These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer

These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1926.

The tale begins on a dark night in Paris in the reign of Louis XV. Justin Alastair – the notorious Duke of Avon who also goes by the nickname of Satanas as he’s a bit devilish – is surprised when a small red-headed boy crashes into him. Justin assumes that he is about to be robbed but the boy assures him that he did not intend robbery, he is being chased by his much older brother a publican who is cruel to him. The lad is called Leon and when the older brother arrives the Duke buys Leon from him. Despite the fact that Leon is absolutely filthy and in rags, the Duke can see a strong resemblance to his great enemy the Comte de St Vire. That gives the Duke an idea, but first Leon will have to be cleaned up. Quelle horreur! It turns out that Leon is actually a Leonie, and the plot thickens.

Leonie has been living as a boy for years as she/he had been working in her brother’s pub, it seemed safest to eschew femininity in that atmosphere, but Leonie was loath to give up her breeches for corsets and dresses as the Duke insists. She comes to enjoy the finer things in life though as she’s taken into high society, including Versailles.

This is an adventure tale but of course there’s romance too. That’s the bit that didn’t feel quite right to me although I’m obviously looking at it from a modern stance. There’s also not much in the way of witty dialogue between characters. I think for many people this is one of their favourite Heyers and I’m glad I read it but I found it slow to begin with and it just didn’t hit the spot for me. With the 19 year old female in the romance seeming more like a ten year old to me and the over 20 year age difference in the couple, the male of which keeps calling her baby, infant and child, it seemed a bit sick to me.

False Colours by Georgette Heyer

False Colours by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1963.

Kit and Evelyn Fancot are identical male twins whose lives have gone in different directions with Kit going into the diplomatic service and Evelyn into the army. Evelyn, the eldest and therefore the inheritor of the family estate is about to announce his engagement to wealthy heiress Cressy Stavely, but Evelyn is missing from home and nowhere to be found, his mother Lady Denham is distraught. She is recently widowed and is mired in debt, and she still can’t stop spending money. It’s important that Evelyn’s marriage goes ahead, but all depends on the elderly Lady Stavely, Cressy’s grandmother, and she’s notoriously difficult.

When Kit arrives home after being away for a few years he feels that something has happened to Evelyn, he’s worried about him too.

Few people are able to tell the difference between the twins, so their mother persuades Kit to pose as Evelyn at the family gathering, he’s not keen to do it but everything goes well, too well in fact!

This Regency romance hit the spot for me, it was just what I needed after reading a few quite bleak books prior to this one. It’s absolutely chock-full of Georgian slang, I looked some of it up in the dictionary as I’m always in doubt as to whether she has just made it all up, but every time I do that the phrase is actually in the dictionary, she certainly did her research!

Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer

Cousin Kate cover

Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1968, so it was the third last of her books and for me it seemed quite different from her other romances. The actual romance part was more or less over by around the middle of the book, and there was a distinct lack of the witty repartee that I enjoy so much about her dialogue.

Kate Malvern has been brought up ‘following the drum’ as her father had been a professional soldier, her mother had died young, so Kate isn’t your average Regency lady. She has had to work as a governess to support herself and when she loses her job she has to move in with Mrs Nidd who was her nursemaid.

Sarah Nidd writes to Lady Broome who is Kate’s Aunt Minerva, asking if she can help her niece and the upshot is that Kate is taken by Lady Broome to stay at Staplewood, her large home. Her husband is Sir Timothy, a much older man and he has more or less withdrawn to his own wing of the house as his wife is an overbearing bully and he just won’t stand up to her. His only friend had been his nephew Philip, but Kate becomes the daughter that he had never had.

Kate realises that her aunt has an ulterior motive for her invitation to Stapleton, she wants Kate to marry her son Torquil. He’s completely in his mother’s control, he’s always had delicate health, but it’s his mental state that worries Kate. He has tantrums and generally behaves like a three year old and his mother employs Dr Delabole to dose him up when he has a turn. His mother is desperate for him to produce an heir, but it needs to be with a wife that would also be under the control of Minerva his mother, she thinks Kate would be the ideal wife. Kate thinks differently.

This book dragged for me a bit although I must admit it got a bit more interesting towards the end, but it isn’t one of her best, mainly because of the lack of humour and wit which I’ve come to expect from Heyer’s writing.

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer

 The Talisman Ring cover

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1936. This book doesn’t feature on my 20 Books of Summer list but I really needed a book to cheer me up. The news pandemical and political is bad enough, but the days and days of constant rain just about pushed me over the edge. I knew that a Georgette Heyer book would hit the spot, accompanied by some chocolate of course. I recalled that someone recently said that The Talisman Ring was her favourite Heyer – and it was sitting unread on my Heyer shelf – such luck! I think it has become my favourite too. More than any others it seemed to be a Regency version of one of Heyer’s crime/mystery books and there was plenty of scope for snappy and witty dialogue between the male and female characters.

The elderly Lord Lavenham is dying and three of his grandchildren have gathered at Lavenham Court. Ludovic the heir to the estate is absent as he has had to skip the country after he was suspected of murdering a fellow gambler. Lord Lavenham makes Tristram promise to marry his much younger cousin Eustacie as there’s no one to look after her, her branch of the family had recently come to grief in the French Revolution, but neither of them are attracted to each other. Basil or Beau as he is nicknamed will inherit the estate in the absence of Ludovic.

Eustacie believes that she would have a more exciting life if she became a governess (maybe French governesses have an exciting life!) so when her grandfather dies she sneaks out of the Court to ride to London, having to ride through a notoriously haunted forest. Instead of meeting the Headless Horseman she bumps into a group of smugglers, one of whom turns out to be Ludovic.

Events lead them to have to put up at a nearby coaching inn and so begins an adventurous romp with Eustacie being enthusiastically aided by Sarah Thane who is staying there while her brother Sir Hugh samples as much of the liquor in the cellar as he can get his hands on.

This book has great characters and a good plot too, it was just what I needed, mind you I’m still fed up with all the rain.

Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times

It’s time for some more Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times which is hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness.

Crime Bookshelves

The first shelf is in a small bookcase which is situated at the top of the stairs, it’s a tight space and I was really happy when we managed to get a wee bookcase to fit in. This shelf is where most of my British Library Crime Classic books reside. I’ve discovered quite a few authors that I hadn’t experienced before through these books and I tend to read them as soon as I get them so these books have all been read. I like this series, they feature covers appropriate to the time they were originally published, often from British Rail posters advertising holiday destinations in the UK. I love those posters too and have quite a few wee repro ones framed and hanging on the staircase walls.

Vintage Crime Bookshelves

More vintage crime, I rarely come across any original Penguin crime paperbacks, but when I do manage to find them I almost always read them straight away, so these ones have all been read too. The books by Jean Potts and Holly Roth were bought when I hadn’t even heard of those authors but I really enjoyed the books. If you are a fan of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances then you will almost certainly like her crime/mystery books. They feature the same witty dialogue that make her historical books such fun.

Book Trough

The last shelf isn’t a shelf at all, it’s a book trough, although at the last antiques fair I went to (remember those heady days when we had the luxury of doing things like that and we took it all completely for granted?!) anyway, I bought another book trough but was amused to see that the label on it described it as being a book troff. The one below is on the floor in the hall at the moment as I have nowhere else to put it. There’s some more vintage crime in it, it’s a mixture of books that are waiting to be read and some I have read already. The big thick book is called The Herries Chronicle and it’s by Hugh Walpole. I think this trilogy was wildly popular when they were first published in the 1930s but I’ve never known anyone who has read them. The books are set in the Lake District, which seems like a plus to me. This volume contains four books – Rogue Herries, Judith Paris, The Fortress and Vanessa. Have any of you read any of Walpole’s books?

Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times

Despite still being in lockdown, or maybe because of it, the time is going so fast and already it’s time for another Bookshelf Travelling in Insane Times which is hosted by Judith Reader in the Wilderness.

Click on the photo to enlarge it.

Top Bookshelf

When we moved house and I grabbed a spare bedroom as a room for some of my books I really thought that I would be able to have them all in alphabetical order but that hasn’t happened. I now realise that I only have some of my Rumer Godden books on these shelves, others are downstairs.

The Talisman Ringcover
The Scent of Water cover

Kingmaker Divided Souls cover

I think I’ve read most of the Georgette Heyer books, but I haven’t read The Talisman Ring yet. I might read that one next as I’ve just finished a Virago book. I have all of Heyer’s crime/mystery books, but they are all in a crime fiction bookcase elsewhere.

Kingmaker Divided Souls by Toby Clements was a gift from a friend who loved reading it, but didn’t want to hold on to it. It’s another Wars of the Roses book.

I totally forgot that I had this copy of The Scent of the Water by Elizabeth Goudge, another possibilty for my next read. I love the rather twee cover.

I’ve been using this meme to find forgotten books on my shelves, I used to keep unread books in piles on floors, but that got too untidy as inevitably they collapsed from time to time causing even more mess. But it did mean that I could see at a glance what was still in my TBR book queues. Have you read any of these books?

Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

Black Sheep cover

Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1966 and my copy seems to be a first edition. If you’re wondering which book to read next from your to be read stacks and you just can’t make up your mind – as I often can’t, then a Georgette Heyer book will always hit the spot – I find.

The setting is Bath where unmarried sisters Abigail and Selina Wendover share the custody of their seventeen year old niece Fanny. Fanny’s parents are dead but have left her very well off when she comes of age, meaning that she’s a prey to all fortune-hunters – a type of beast which haunts the streets of Bath.

Stacy Calverleigh also inherited a large fortune but he has run through it all with his serious gambling habit and in no time at all he’s targetting Fanny for her money, and she very quickly believes she’s in love with him. But her Aunt Abigail knows of Stacy Calverleigh’s reputation and is determined to protect Fanny from him.

This brings Abigail into the society of Stacy’s Uncle Miles. He is the Black Sheep of his family and was sent out of the way to India to find his fortune (or fail) twenty years ago. Miles Calverleigh has just returned from India for good but he isn’t interested in his nephew, he’s enamoured of Abigail. But she believes Miles is a bad lot, she knows that he was expelled from Eton before being packed off to India, so she’s not interested in him.

If you’ve already read Georgette Heyer’s books you’ll know that there’s a lot of witty dialogue involved. The blurb on the inside dustcover says:

Black Sheep is one of Miss Heyer’s lighter-hearted romances, with a charming heroine and a most intriguing hero – mysterious, good humoured, cynical, outrageous and in the end irresistible.

A good read.

2019 European Reading Challenge

Reading Challenge

This is my first year of participating in the 2019 European Reading Challenge which is hosted by Gilion @ Rose City Reader

This is my wrap up post but I never did get around to posting any of these review links at Rose City Reader. I’ve enjoyed doing this challenge although I joined up fairly late in the year, with the aim of getting me out of my usual reading comfort zone. In fact I think I got mixed up between this challenge and something else as I had it in my mind that the books should have been originally written in another language – but I was wrong about that. Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun so – here goes.

FRANCEA Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

VATICAN CITYIn the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant.

RUSSIAThe White Guard by Mikhael Bulgakov.

GERMANYA Woman in Berlin by Marta Hillers.

BELGIUMAn Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer.

ICELANDSnowblind by Ragnor Jonasson.

IRELANDThe Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

ITALYA Nest of Vipers by Andrea Camilleri

FINLANDThe Exploits of Moominpappa by Tove Jansson

SCOTLANDMiss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant.

Holiday book purchases

Autumn Books

I managed to add eight more books to the many waiting in my TBR queue while we were away in Wales and East Sussex a few weeks ago. I bought All the Books of my Life by Sheila Kaye-Smith in a secondhand bookshop in Rye which is owned by a lovely Irish woman – who of course had no problem understanding our accent. I dread to think what trouble she must have had over the forty years or so that she has lived in Rye. I must admit that I had never heard of Sheila Kaye-Smith but she seems to have been local to East Sussex and ‘world famous’ in her neighbourhood.

I already have a few Monica Dickens books to read, I read some in the 1970s but none since then. The Room Upstairs seems to be quite different though – with the setting being America. I’m not going to pass up on a chance to buy a Heyer or even a Persephone which Doreen by Barbara Noble is, and I recall the Raffles series when it was on TV back in the year dot so I thought I’d give The Amateur Cracksman a go. The other three that I bought are Penguin Crimes which seem to be getting more and more thin on the ground.

All the Books of My Life by Sheila Kaye-Smith
The Room Upstairs by Monica Dickens
False Colours by Georgette Heyer
Doreen by Barbara Noble
Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung

and three Penguin Crime books
Poison in Jest by John Dickson Carr
Comes the Blind Fury by Douglas Rutherford
The crimson in the purple by Holly Roth

Have you read any of these ones?

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer

 An Infamous Army cover

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer was first published in 1937, but mine is a modern paperback with an introduction by Rosemary Sutcliff and also an author’s note at the beginning in which Heyer says that she had always wanted to write a book about the Battle of Waterloo but the spectre of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair had loomed over her. Thankfully she got over her reticence. Before beginning to read An Infamous Army I had a squint at the back pages to see if there was a bibliography – and indeed there is. Heyer had done her homework, and it shows. I have to say that Highland brigades feature a lot, which I don’t remember from when I ‘did’ the battle at school, but I have no doubt that she was right and the Scottish regiments were thrown in there first. There’s a lot of battle and a fair amount of gore, but before we get there we meet Lady Barbara Childe.

Lady Barbara is a young widow who had married a man much older than herself, for money no doubt. But now she’s footloose and fancy free and spends her time breaking young men’s hearts, even to the stage of one of them destroying himself. So when Charles Audley becomes smitten by her all of his friends and family warn him against Babs. Of course Charles thinks he can tame her, and for a while he almost does before everything falls apart and he apparently becomes yet another of Lady Barbara’s victims. We all know what’s going to happen, after all, it is a Regency romance.

But An Infamous Army is so much more than that – as you would expect from Heyer. Fashion features for the men as much as for the women but it isn’t all fol-de-rols as there’s a lot about the horror of war and the futility. Wellington is appalled at the loss of so many of his friends and generals at Waterloo at a time when the leaders didn’t sit safely in castles miles behind the front as they did in subsequent wars.

I have read Vanity Fair and was quite surprised that so many people went to the battle as tourists, with wives and would be wives following the army and the whole lead up to the battle being more like a grand holiday which ended with a big bang. I suspect that Heyer might have got closer to the atmosphere of the many pre-battle balls than Thackeray did.

This is a great read.