Okay,
I’m sure you’ve all heard just about enough our recent trip, but as part of my
segueing back into talking about books and reading I figured I might as well
report on what I was reading during all that time. Particularly since I
obviously didn’t make a lot of notes of my thoughts, so if I don’t talk about
them all now, they’ll be lost to this blog forever.
I
took only a handful of physical books with me (though of course with my Kindle
I had about 50 more, so I was sure to be covered). I had picked up my first
Miss Read Thrush Green book, Battles in
Thrush Green (1975), at the book sale just a couple of weeks before our
trip, and I finished reading it right before we left. Having got a taste for
the charming characters, I had checked the actual shop at our public library
and found four more books in the series, so I carried Return to Thrush Green (1978) with me on the trip, and finished
reading that one just a few days in. I know some of you are also Miss Read
fans, but I wonder if you have a clear preference between the Fairacre series
and the Thrush Green series. Having read only one of the former and now two of
the latter, I have to say I have a preference for the latter—I think because
it’s told in the third person and therefore shifts perspective between all the
characters, while the Fairacre book I read was in the first person and limited
to the schoolteacher’s perspective. But perhaps that’s not the case with all
the other Fairacre books? At any rate, I very much enjoyed both of the Thrush
Green books, but now I have a quandary—should I venture back to the beginning
of the series now, or continue reading forward to the end and then go back to the beginning. Oh the
quandaries that face obsessive readers!
I
had also come across three Amanda Cross mysteries at the book sale, and
finished reading The Players Come Again
(1990) before we left. That was an odd entry in a mystery series, since the
mystery was really a purely literary one. It was rather more a straightforward
academic novel, a less complex version of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, than what would ordinarily be called a mystery, but it
was quite enjoyable for all that. So I took the other two Cross mysteries with
me, and was reading The James Joyce
Murder (1967) during our stay in Rye—perhaps that explains why the ghosts
didn’t bother us, it’s not exactly a suitably moody book for such a setting. I
enjoyed that one very much, but when I proceeded to A Trap for Fools (1989), I got bogged down, and I have to admit I
still haven’t finished it. Perhaps that’s as much because other books started
to find their way into my bag by that point in our trip as it is because the
book was less enticing—it is interesting in its meditations on academia and
female friendships, but it does seem to drag a bit as a mystery (though here at
least there is a proper murder).
This
is all a sort of preface for the best book I read on vacation. In addition to
passing along some of her “extra” books to me, Gil had the brainstorm of
letting me read a Josephine Bell mystery she had just picked up as a gift for
someone else, then I could return it to her by mail before leaving England. I
happily accepted, especially since the mystery in question was Death at Half-Term (1939, later
reprinted as Curtain Call for a Corpse),
one of the Bell books set in a school.
This
mystery centers around Dr. David Wintringham, who has been known on previous
occasions to aid Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard in solving perplexing
cases. David and his wife Jill happen to be at the school for a half-term
performance (Jill’s sister Judith is married to the headmaster). A touring
theatre company is putting on a production of Twelfth Night when the leading man gets himself clobbered over the
head. There are skirmishes between the actors, a mysterious tension between a
temporary master at the school and the leading lady (who is gleefully
melodramatic in mourning the husband she never loved), a group of boys who take
it upon themselves to find the murder weapon (and do), and a simmering romance
between a master and the assistant matron. All of which makes for rollicking
fun along the way.
I'm
certainly going to be on the lookout for more Josephine Bell. Allowing for the
possibility that not all of her books may be as much fun as Death at Half-Term, I’m willing to bet
that many of them are. Happily, it appears that many (but not all) of her books have now been reprinted by Bello Books, but I wonder why she hasn't yet received the attention she deserves. At any rate, thanks to Gil for giving me the chance to read this one!
From
there, amazingly enough, I proceeded to another American mystery (hey, I was on
vacation!)—Helen McCloy’s superbly eerie Through
a Glass, Darkly (1949), which also, as it happens, has a school connection,
though very few of the scenes actually take place at school. It’s an intriguing
tale, part mystery, part thriller, about seemingly supernatural events. It begins
with a young art teacher in a girl's school being dismissed without explanation
because she seems to have inspired unspecified gossip or anxieties among the
girls and staff. To say much more would spoil the elegant unfolding of the
eerie plot, during which one's assumptions and sympathies are likely to shift
several times, but the book is of particular interest because there is, on the
one hand, a perfectly logical explanation of the odd and tragic events, and, on
the other hand, just the slightest possibility left open that the events really
might have been supernatural after all. If you’re a sensitive reader, don’t
read this one right before bedtime! Some readers might feel that all the
theorizing about the supernatural, including historical examples of similar
situations, slow the pace too much, but I enjoyed it anyway, and the situation
of vulnerable women at a slightly ominous girls' school might remind some
readers of the similarly eerie and similarly compelling Ethel Lina White novel
The Third Eye, reprinted a few months ago by Greyladies.
While
I’m talking about mysteries, Mavis Doriel Hay’s Death on the Cherwell (1935) helped me get through the long, dreary
flight home. (And I am reminding myself, as I did so many times on our trip, that it is, according to Google, properly pronounced CHAR-well, as if one were ordering a steak well-done, not CHURR-well. I have quite a list of such pronunciation lessons now!) It’s the second of Hay’s three mysteries, following Murder Underground (1934) and preceding The Santa Klaus Murder (1936), all three
reprinted in the British Library mystery series. As a mystery, Death on the Cherwell seemed like no
great shakes to me, though as usual I made no effort to follow all the ins and
outs of who was where at what time doing what for how long. But as a novel
about young women at Oxford, it’s quite charming and fun in a perky, flapperish
sort of way. It’s a good book to curl up with when you don’t have energy for
anything challenging and just want the pages to turn themselves—for example, on
a transatlantic flight. I was also interested to discover from the introduction
to the book that Hay was, as a novelist, yet another of many, many casualties
of World War II. First the stresses and constraints of the approaching war must
have prevented her from writing, and then the death of her husband, an RAF
pilot, must have thoroughly derailed her from writing such cheerful, energetic
fiction. She did later publish books about arts and crafts, but never seems to
have returned to writing fiction. The war had many casualties off the
battlefield as well…
Also
somewhat in the mystery/thriller category is Joy Packer’s The Man in the Mews (1964), which I read halfheartedly on the trip
and only finished after we’d returned home. I picked up the book because I
thought she might belong on my Overwhelming List, only to discover that she was
from South Africa. It’s part romance, part thriller, and part psychological
drama—the Google Books summary reads, “Widow who visits London after a long
absence when her daughter becomes engaged is recognized by a collector of
newspaper crime stories as the ex-wife of a murderer.”
It’s by no means a great
book, but I did find it modestly interesting in some ways. There's the title
character, an admirer of murderers, who is somewhat intriguing in his very
modern-seeming desire for a dark notoriety. And there's the middle-aged Mrs
Olivier, hiding her dark secret and trying to protect her daughter from it, who
has returned to London for the first time in decades. Sadly, there are also
some rather excruciatingly melodramatic romantic scenes and confrontation scenes,
and a belief in the determinism of genetics that seems strange to modern
readers. A forgettable novel, for sure, but one with a bit more kick than I
expected.
I
mentioned in my last post that amazing Oxfam shop in York, and Doris Pocock’s The Treasure of the Trevellyans (1938)
was one of my acquisitions there. The cover was so charming, I couldn’t resist
reading it right away. It’s a pleasant family adventure tale, about an
impoverished artist who inherits a run-down house and land in Cornwall from an eccentric
uncle, and takes his family there for a long holiday. The trouble is, the house
is so run-down that it amounts more to camping out than living in a house. For
the Trevellyans themselves, this is of little concern, as they are a perky,
adventurous clan and take it all in stride. But when their posh cousin decides
she wants some adventure of her own and stows away with them, she finds it
harder to adapt to the rough conditions. Then the uncovering of a reference to
a family treasure hidden somewhere on the property leads to an exciting and
sometimes harrowing search. (Note to self: When asked to search for treasure by
being lowered into a well in a bucket, decline the opportunity.)
Pocock
has some obvious weaknesses as a storyteller—a bit too formulaic, her prose a
bit awkward and repetitive at times, a tendency to be overly obvious with her
sentimental conclusions (of course, everyone learns valuable lessons in the
end)—but the formula she uses is a pleasant and entertaining one, and the
setting is enticing. It’s nowhere near as strong, for example, as Gwendoline
Courtney's family tales, but certainly worth the four pounds I paid for it
(especially with its lovely dustjacket).
 |
I love the book, but I still think the girl in
yellow looks a bit like a Stepford wife. Perhaps
that explains their love for housekeeping? |
And
speaking of Gwendoline Courtney, I’m going to interject one more pre-holiday
read here, because otherwise I know I’ll never get round to mentioning it. When
I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by life just before our trip, I picked up one
of several Courtney novels sitting on my TBR shelves, The Girls of Friar’s Rise (1952), which proved to be just the
medicine I needed. All the more surprising because it is, apart from being a
lovely family story, basically a tale of how delightful housework is—a theme I
shouldn’t, by rights, enjoy at all. But reading about housekeeping is certainly
better than undertaking it, and so this book, about a troupe of domestically
accomplished girls, inadvertently left to manage on their own when their
parents rush off to Canada and the adult supervision they’d arranged falls
through, turns out to be quite delightful.
The girls befriend a new neighbor
who has taken up residence in a ramshackle old house nearby in hopes that
country life will help him recover from a serious illness. Such a scenario, in
the hands of a modern thriller author, would no doubt lead to the girls being
tortured or made into slave labor or the subjects of science experiments, but
in Courtney’s more idyllic world, the man watches over the girls while they
glory in making the ramshackle house into a home and help to heal him with
their affection and ample produce from their garden.
It’s
really a lovely book. Not quite, for me, to the standard of Courtney’s earlier
book, Sally’s Family, which deals
just a bit more realistically with the realities of postwar life, but it’s
nevertheless wonderful, feel-good fun. It was reprinted by Girls Gone By a few
years ago, but is out-of-print again now. Hopefully they’ll get around to a
reprint one of these days.
And
that’s that. I actually managed to do a fair bit of reading, if you consider how
much ground we were covering every day on the trip! The mark of a true addict…
