Book report: Mysteries and the Chalet School

Not "Mysteries at the Chalet School," mind you, which would no doubt be an exciting post (possibly more exciting than this one). This post is, in fact, to rectify my laxness in reporting on some of my recent reading. In truth, I'm not sure it can be called laxness, as it's largely the result of spending much of the past couple of months wearing my new publishing cap and getting to finally announce the titles we're releasing (see here if you missed it). 

I'm behind on writing about several books I've read lately, including one that was rather exciting, but since I focus so much on this blog on really obscure books that many of you may not have a chance to read, I decided that my next non-publishing post should be focused on books many of you may have actually read. Just for a pleasant change of pace. And most of those, lately, have been either mysteries or Chalet School books. Hence the title.

Much of the mystery reading of late was inspired by my loot from the most recent book sale. I recently finished my fourth NGAIO MARSH novel of the past few weeks, and I've made an interesting (well, to me) discovery about my biases. I think because for so long the only mystery author I really read was Agatha Christie, and because there are such differences between early Agatha, middle Agatha, and late Agatha (with the late books pretty definitively her lesser achievements, at least in my opinion), I have tended to assume, for no good reason at all, that the same differences apply to Marsh's work. (There are few mystery writers so prolific over the same decades-long periods, so there aren't many other authors I could apply such assumptions to.)

At any rate, judging from Killer Dolphin (1966) and Dead Water (1963), such assumptions should go out the window. Far from being inferior late works à la Elephants Can Remember or (ugh) Passenger to Frankfurt, these have enormously entertaining casts of characters and highly intriguing situations. I picked up Killer Dolphin just to sample the first page or two, and a couple hours later was halfway through it—Andy thought I must have fallen asleep, I was so intently silent.

Killer Dolphin flaps

In short, Dolphin centers around theatre director and manager Peregrine Jay (who reappears in Marsh's final novel, Light Thickens) salvaging and renovating an old Blitzed-out London theatre, producing a play about Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who famously died tragically young. In the process, he comes across a glove apparently made for Hamnet by Shakespeare's father, which goes on display in the renovated theatre, until a man guarding the exhibit is brutally murdered and the glove stolen. Suffice it to say that the opening, in which Jay explores the run-down theatre and tumbles into a flooded hole in the stage and nearly drowns, will tend to suck you in and make it difficult to stop reading.

Dead Water flaps

Dead Water has a similarly-intriguing situation, set on a tidal island on which a lovely woman in green appears in a vision to a young boy, instructing him to bath his hands in a spring, after which his embarrassing warts are miraculously healed. The quiet island is transformed into a tourist destination for visitors with maladies of all sorts, until the elderly owner of the island dies and her eccentric (but strangely likeable) sister decides to shut down all this rank commercialism. Resentment, infighting, murder, and mayhem follow, and it's all great entertainment.

Of course, if your taste in mysteries lies more in the puzzle and procedure than in the characters and events, then you may not think these two books are any great shakes. You might prefer Vintage Murder (1937) or Enter a Murderer (1935), which I also read recently and which are much more focused on puzzles and investigations. Both are entertaining, both also have theatre settings (one of Marsh's particular interests), but they're also more meticulously focused on the hows and whys and lots of speculation about possible scenarios, which for me is less entertaining than interesting characters. And Vintage Murder contains, for those keeping track, yet another strikingly implausible method of murder…

[I have to add here that, in doing some Google search or other to find information for this post, I came across this site, which consists of a bibliography, made by one Helene Androski, of Golden Age mystery novels, and which I know many of you will enjoy. But I mention it here because it revealed to me that there is in fact a term for the kind of puzzle- and explication-centric mystery novels that tend to put me to sleep. Apparently, Julian Symons, a prominent mystery writer himself, coined the term "humdrum school" to describe "a style where a complicated puzzle plot predominated at the expense of character development, realism, or interesting dialogue." Well, there you have it! And if such a prominent figure found such novels humdrum, I will no longer apologize for my preference of character and dialogue over clever puzzles. Though perhaps I don't prioritize realism as highly as Symons did—see next paragraph...]

Speaking of eccentric characters taking priority over the puzzle and the investigation, my reading of GLADYS MITCHELL's The Twenty-Third Man (1957) reminded me why I love Mitchell and the glorious Dame Bradley so much (and why some mystery fans don't feel the same). It has a daft plot about a Spanish island with a famous cave containing 23 mummified bodies, which during Mrs. Bradley's stay become 24, then 23 again, but maybe 24, or something like that. It's nonsense, and no one would think of committing or concealing a murder in such a way, but Mitchell's novels make such a wonderful mockery of realistic murders (and, for that matter, realistic investigations) that I couldn't have cared less. There's a highly-entertaining example of a monster child who turns out to be quite likeable (after a bit of Mrs. Bradley's tough love), an array of other suspicious folk, a past murder still haunting the present, and the delightfully creepy cave with its sundry corpses. I've already forgotten who did it and why, but I've rarely had such fun turning pages.

I've also recently read three of the mysteries picked up at the recent book sale—The Murders of Richard III (1974) by ELIZABETH PETERS, Johnny Under Ground (1965) by PATRICIA MOYES, and Malice Domestic (1986) by MOLLIE HARDWICK. The Peters, of course, was picked up out of a yearning for something half as good as Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, also concerned with Richard III's status as a murderer or not, and it certainly was half as good (which, by comparison to a Josephine Tey, is really quite good, so perhaps I'll give some of Peters' other books a try). The Hardwick was, as a couple of you warned me, an odd one—all the hallmarks of a cozy mystery but with a surprising darkness around the edges. I picked up three books in the series at the book sale, and I liked this one enough to try a second, but I haven't felt compelled to rush onward with the series quite yet.

Rounding out the mysteries I've read recently, you may already know I'm a fan of Patricia Moyes, and Johnny Under Ground is a particularly entertaining one of her books. My favorite element of this series is really the relationship between series detective Henry Tibbetts and his wife Emmy, who are both realistic, flawed, but completely likeable characters, and a particular strength of this title is that it centers around Emmy's wartime experiences (based on Moyes' own time in the Radar Section of the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force). It's partly a retrospective mystery, dealing with the mysterious apparent suicide of Emmy's old RAF pilot flame, and I sometimes find retrospective mysteries a bit dry. Indeed, the mystery here is not particularly stunning for hardcore puzzle fans (or should I say fans of the humdrum school). But despite that, and partly because of the war interest (I've now added Moyes to my war list on the basis of this title), I found this one quite enjoyable.

Transitioning from murder mysteries to Chalet School books isn't easy (have any of the modern authors writing continuations or connectors of these stories ever thought to write a murder mystery for the Chalet girls to solve, I wonder???), but it's also been a while since I've mentioned any of my reading of school stories and I know that some of you are big fans.

Almost a year ago now (unbelievably), I wrote a post (see here) about reading the first two volumes of ELINOR M. BRENT-DYER's immortal series. You would think that in that year I would have managed to progress at least halfway through all the 60+ volumes, wouldn't you? But alas, you would be underestimating the schizophrenic nature of my reading habits. In fact, I have now progressed through exactly four more of the books, though I am enjoying them no less for averaging only one per quarter.

I have to admit one of the four was read totally out of order. When Girls Gone By reprinted The Chalet School Reunion (1963), in which many of the earliest Chalet girls, now grown-up and with widely-varied lives and adult concerns, gather at Jo's home for a weekend, I knew I could never wait to read it in its proper order. And indeed, its combination of a school connection with a group of grown women chatting and commiserating and (in Grizel's case) recovering from heartbreak and illness (not to mention a couple of harrowing experiences without which it wouldn't be a Chalet School novel) proved irresistible to me, and I gobbled it all up with pleasure. I assume that, as I think Jo continues to figure prominently in these books long after she is grown, the later volumes in the series must all have some degree of more grown-up content, right? Are there (I ask those of you who are experts on the series) other volumes that have a particular focus on Jo's or other former Chalet girls' adult lives?

But I also still love the early books, and I very much enjoyed The Princess of the Chalet School (1927), The Head Girl of the Chalet School (1928), and The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929). Perhaps I'm just particularly fond of Grizel, because my clear favorite of these was Head Girl, which also focuses much of its attention on her. There's also a lot of travel in that book, and I always love vicarious tourism (almost as much as the real thing, and more so when getting lost in a cave is part of the itinerary). I have a feeling that some of those sections were the ones that were cut or edited in the original paperback versions, so I'm glad I managed to get hold of a Girls Gone By edition of it.

In Head Girl, too, we get a glimpse of Jo's beginnings as an author, which is always entertaining for what it suggests about Brent-Dyer's own ideas about fiction-writing:

'I say, Jem, I've nearly finished my story! The only thing I can't decide is what to do about marrying them.'

'Aren't you going to marry them?' asked Madge, who had been privileged to read the first part of this tale. 'Oh, I think I should, Joey. What else do you want to do with them?'

'I could kill "Raymonde" off,' said Jo. 'Then "Adelaide" could—could—'

'Well? Could—what?' demanded Jem.

'Go into a convent?' suggested Grizel.

'Of course not, idiot! She's not a Catholic!'

'Marry them, of course,' said Madge. 'Don't make them unhappy, Jo! Even if it's only a story, let them end up all right.'

'Lots of stories don't,' argued Jo as well as she could for a mouthful of cake. 'Look at A Tale of Two Cities, and The Old Curiosity Shop, and The Mill on the Floss.'

'It requires genius to write a tragedy, Jo,' said her brother-in-law. 'I grant you that Dickens and George Eliot got away with it; but nothing is worse than the mawkish rot that some people write.'

And finally, I don't usually think of the Chalet School books as being particularly uproariously funny, though they may often bring a smile to one's face. But I can't resist sharing this giggle-worthy passage from early in Princess, when Elizaveta is falling asleep while fantasizing about finally getting to go to the Chalet School:

Elisaveta lay very still and watched [Nurse], turning over in her mind all that she had been told and all the splendid time that was coming to her. It seemed too wonderful to be true.

Then she knew that it was; for she was there already, and was assuring a quite serious headmistress that she never went on a lake with other girls unless they had an elephant in the boat.

A great mental image, the elephant seated cheerfully, in an impeccable school uniform, in the boat with Jo and Elizaveta and perhaps the Robin.

So that's all the Chalet School reading I've done for now, but I'm pretty certain there will be more before long. I've been keeping my eyes peeled for affordable copies of the out-of-print Girls Gone By editions of later series titles—especially those that were most egregiously slashed and abridged in the original paperbacks. And I've had a bit of luck…

Plenty to keep me busy for a while!

Reading diary: ELINOR M. BRENT-DYER, RITA COATTS

ELINOR M. BRENT-DYER, The School at the Chalet (1925) & Jo of the Chalet School (1926)

In the past year and a half or so, I've read a handful of Elinor Brent-Dyer's Chalet School books and have enjoyed them very much. But as some Chalet School fans have realized from my occasional passing mentions of the series here, I've been reading them in a rather haphazard order, starting with (naturally for me) The Chalet School in Exile, often considered the best of the series and the one that makes the most dramatic use of World War II. But I know a big part of the appeal of this series to its fans is tracing the characters' development and evolution over time, so I recently decided I would try to start at the beginning and gradually (very gradually, considering how many other authors and books I'm always trying to read at the same time) work my way forward in the series.

Now, this is a bit easier said than done, because although paperbacks of the series are generally pretty readily available, those editions have often been rigorously chopped up and abridged (you can learn a bit about this here—though many of you already know far more about it than I do). Girls Gone By has been reprinting unabridged editions, but understandably it takes a long time for a small publisher to work their way through more than 60 titles. (Less understandable, perhaps, is the bewildering order in which they've been reprinting them, which doesn't seem to prioritize either the series order or—as might also have made sense—the titles that were most abridged in paperback editions, or even for that matter the titles that seem to be the hardest to find. The logic escapes me, but perhaps there is one somewhere, and regardless I am grateful to them for reprinting them at all.)

Add to this, though, that GGB editions tend to go back out-of-print fairly quickly and become collectible and prohibitively expensive themselves, and I realized how much of a challenge I had set myself in trying to approach the books in series order. I quickly adjusted my goal to merely acquiring GGB editions of the books that were most seriously abridged in paperback, resigning myself to the earlier paperback versions of those titles that had only minor edits. And I may not even be able to accomplish that—we shall see.

Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

Naturally enough, the first volume of the series, The School at the Chalet, is one of the most in-demand of the titles, and sadly it was also badly abridged in paperback. The GGB print edition has already gone out of print and become about as costly as one might expect an original manuscript—written in EBD's hand and bearing evidence of her blood, sweat and tears—would be. Happily, GGB has released it (as well as Exile, which was also brutally cut in paperback, and two other Chalet School titles) as an ebook, but only for U.K. customers (as I learned after I eagerly tried to place an order without reading the fine print). But I viewed this setback as a challenge rather than a defeat, and enlisted the help of a kind friend in the U.K. who aided and abetted me in acquiring copies of both. My thanks to this aider-and-abetter shall remain anonymous, out of fear that GGB staff members or an international copyright militia might show up on the doorstep with flaming torches, but he/she knows who he/she is...

At any rate, I was very happy to be able to start back at the beginning of this most famous and probably most beloved school story series. I loved reading about the initial idea for the Chalet School, and the planning and setting up of it, not to mention its exponential growth (had it continued at such a rate of growth for long, the Chalet School would surely have been giving Oxford a run for its money by about Book Five!). It was also great to see the initial introductions of Grizel and Simone and many of the other characters who figure so prominently in later tales. And we see Joey's first exposure to a badly-written school story here (a tome by the name of Denise of the Fourth, by Muriel Bernardine Browne), which will have lasting aftereffects.

The first book is considerably longer than most of the other books in the series, and very focused on character development and making the best possible use of the Austrian countryside Brent-Dyer loved. And while it's not necessarily the most realistic presentation of the theme of a young woman finding a career, it nevertheless enjoyably partakes of that theme, which is one of my favorite sorts of tale. 

I can't resist also noting a scene during Madge and Joey's trip to Paris on their way to set up the school. The girls make a side trip to Versailles, and I have to wonder if Brent-Dyer was self-consciously evoking the "Moberley-Jourdain incident," which I've mentioned here before and which is endlessly fascinating to me:

From there, they went on to the Trianons, with their dainty artificiality, where poor Marie Antoinette and her court ladies had played at being milkmaids and shepherdesses clad in flowered silks, while, less than twenty miles away, the Paris mob was beginning to cry aloud for bread. The whole place was peopled with gay, exquisite ghosts for both Madge and Jo, and even Grizel became infected by them, and half expected to see some hooped and powdered lady, with raised fan and brilliant eyes, beckon to her from behind one of the statues.

Moberly and Jourdain's book, An Adventure, had certainly been popular enough following its publication in 1911, so one wonders if it had entered into the culture thoroughly enough for Brent-Dyer to play off of it and assume that her readers would recognize the reference?

After enjoying The School at the Chalet, I plunged straight ahead into Jo of the Chalet School, which I acquired in a cheapo paperback version reputed to have only minor edits from the original. Now, calling one of the Chalet School books my favorite, when I've only read five or six in all, might not make all that much of an impression—especially on those of you who have read the complete series and know them in depth—but for now, I think that Jo of the Chalet School is my favorite. Cheerful and fun, but relatively low-key (only two or three near-death experiences, and those kept fairly brief), and set—like so many of my favorite novels—amidst the gleam of snow and ice as the school weathers (literally and figuratively) its first Austrian winter, there's also the added excitement of a flood, not to mention, less climactically, Jo's first attempts at writing. I found it hugely enjoyable, and it's one I could see myself happily re-reading on a cold rainy day.

Next up in the series is The Princess of the Chalet School, which is happily already resting on my TBR shelves. So far, so good!

RITA COATTS, School on an Island (1938)

After the two Chalet School books had got me thoroughly back in a girls' school frame of mind, I couldn't resist picking up this book, which I mentioned here a whileago when Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings very kindly gifted it to me after finding it in a thrift shop. (Thanks again, Karen!)

I had already had enough trouble resisting the book because of its adorable dustjacket and the fact that it's one of the oldest school stories in my collection. And for the most part, the seductiveness of the cover paid off. The story—involving two girls' schools (one noble and cheerful and fun-loving and moral, the other standoffish and joyless and distinctly chilly) which go on a round-the-world cruise (sure, why not?!) and get shipwrecked on the proverbial desert island—is thoroughly ridiculous and implausible in every way, and the characters—except for the very noble, brave, charismatic lead—are barely developed at all—but the story is also completely enjoyable and fun, with cheerful high spirits and well-plotted (if unfathomably unlikely) adventures throughout. I had a great time with it and am so happy to have it in my collection.

My only proviso here is that, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly for a novel written in the 1930s, the tale is weakened a bit by somewhat racist portrayals of a black character and a Chinese one. I should add that these are not hateful portrayals—in fact both characters play important roles in the survival of the girls and their teachers—but they are about as stereotypical in speech and character traits as they could be, and they do appear fairly regularly throughout the novel. This didn't seriously hinder my enjoyment of the novel, but it might for some readers.

Now, the question is, what shall my next school story be???