WINIFRED DUKE, Funeral March of a Marionette (1945)

A close resemblance between two characters is a plot device that Agatha Christie used more than once—usually as part of the surprise outcome of one of her seemingly impenetrable mysteries. But in Funeral March of a Marionette, Winifred Duke—rapidly becoming one of my favorite thoroughly obscure authors, though it's always quite a challenge tracking down her books—twists things around (or turns the screw, as Henry James might have put it) and makes such a resemblance the starting point of her tale. Where she takes things from there is both completely daft and enormously entertaining.

The sad and decrepit copy of Funeral March I read
(and was lucky to get hold of, courtesy of Brigham Young University)

I've discussed both of my previous experiences in reading Winifred Duke's novels here—The Dancing of the Fox, a sort of historical crime drama, and Dirge for a Dead Witch, an eery historical tale about a witchhunt and its repercussions. Funeral March is the first book I've read of hers that seems to have been set more or less in the present, though perhaps that is relative since it was published in 1945 but contains nary a mention of World War II, and perhaps it's the contemporary setting, taking away the need for her to get all of her historical details exactly correct, that makes Duke feel a bit friskier, freeing her up to be funnier and more irreverent. Because, much to my surprise after my previous Duke experiences, Funeral March is ultimately as much a comedy of errors as a whodunit. Its premise—two cousins who resemble one another so much that they were frequently mistaken for one another as children, and who moreover have both been in Australia and New Guinea for many years—is surely intended to be humorous in itself, but she complicates the situation to the point of farce.

The cousins—Archie Garnett, who has made his fortune farming in Australia, and Gilbert Garnett, who is now the Bishop of Wurrumpoopa, New Guinea—switch places (as one so frequently does) on the boat back to England, purportedly because Gilbert feels that he could be in danger from an unnamed source. And indeed, the cousins have barely arrived in their home town before Gilbert, disguised as Archie, gets himself killed. The trouble is, it's unclear which of them was the intended victim—did the killer realize the victim was Gilbert in disguise, or was the intention in fact to kill Archie? As a result of which, the survivor must (according to the unique logic of the tale) remain in character until the killer is identified, sharing his identity only with his former sweetheart, Peggy, sister-in-law of the local vicar, with whom he has only recently been reunited after years of estrangement due to the vicious lies of Archie's stepmother, Mrs. Garnett.

Among the unexpected complications of the impersonation, however, is the discovery that the victim happens to have been a best-selling author of potboilers, by the incomparable name of Aubrey Pouncebox (not to be confused with Horace Purplepatches, a fellow author of bestsellers), whose publishers are growing ever more impatient for his next book. Duke has considerable fun with the publishing industry in this novel—Pouncebox's publishers are known as Garbage and Gush, Ltd., not to be confused with their arch rivals, Sewage and Slush, or even with Graball and Graball, who have occasionally lured away G&G's clients.

Archie pleads a nervous breakdown in order to explain the delay in producing a manuscript, and then hires Stephen Teal, a foppish, alcoholic, but apparently breathtakingly handsome ghost writer ("Groups of giggling school-girls followed him, worshipping him with their clear eyes. Elderly women, who should have had more sense, turned to stare at him. Middle-aged ones gazed rapturously.") to attempt to put together a novel worthy of Aubrey Pouncebox, but has some difficulty in communicating exactly what he needs without giving away his own secret:

"Aubrey Pouncebox mayn't like you poaching on his preserves, Bishop."

The Bishop, too much occupied with endeavouring to reconcile his recent recollections of his cousin Gilbert, the celibate, the bestseller, with "a married man who's had some," incautiously blurted out his private thoughts. Unconsciously he thereby confirmed Mr. Teal's own suspicions.

"He won't mind. He's dead."

"Dead!" exclaimed Mr. Teal excitedly.

Too late, the Bishop realized his error.

"I—I heard in town the other day that he was dead," he stammered. He gazed wildly about him. "At least— No, it wasn't Aubrey Pouncebox. It was—er—er—Horace Purplepatches."

"Horace Purplepatches dead!" screamed Mr. Teal, aghast.

"I—I understood so. Is it a great loss to literature? Of course, since my—my breakdown I confuse things, and my memory isn't what it was, but I certainly seem to have heard somebody mention that Horace Purplepatches had died recently."

"It must have been very recently." Mr. Teal looked so vindictive as to appear almost plain. "Because I was dining with him on Thursday—the night before you came to see me."

"My mistake," moaned the Bishop.

And really, that's just the beginning of the mounting complications and the ever more intricate deceptions required to keep up the impersonation. There are, for instance, a surprising number of sudden reappearances from abandoned, secret spouses, and each new character who appears seems to determine that they will be the one to solve the mystery, adding layer upon layer of new deceptions to the original one. And then there's the matter of the bishop's missing ring...

But the efforts of all the characters to work out who committed the murder are quite entertainingly interwoven with the web of lies. I sometimes get a bit bored with the speculations and possible sequences of events postulated in mystery novels. It's usually my least favorite part of the story. But one big advantage of an utterly daft plot is that it's impossible to know where it's going, and that's a large part of what made this novel such a rollicking good time.

I have to admit, however, that fans of strictly traditional, methodical whodunits (or of mysteries that retain even the remotest trace of plausibility) might find Funeral March rather too eccentric. A proper detective—in this case a nondescript local called Inspector James—only finally appears on page 129 of this 192-page novel, and even then he soon vanishes again like a skittish rabbit. I also have to admit that the ending is a disappointment (no clever puzzle here) and is, sadly, also fraught with brief but virulent racism—a weak point in such an otherwise entertaining tale.

But despite that, Funeral March has only made me more determined than before to track down more of Duke's virtually nonexistent mysteries. There were a fair number of them, at least some of which were apparently quite popular and successful in their time, and the versatility she has displayed in the three books I've read makes me wonder what else she may have up her sleeve. So, next up is one of the bestsellers, Death and Her Sweetheart, first published in 1938. I've just paid a bit too much for a tiny, cheap paperback copy of Sweetheart, complete with microscopic print and tissue-thin paper. But it was apparently one of the most successful of her books, and this was the one and only copy listed on Abe Books, and verily how could I resist?

So, more on Winifred Duke still to come…

Reading diary: HELEN ASHTON, WINIFRED DUKE

HELEN ASHTON, The Half-Crown House (1956)

Image courtesy of Jerri Chase

I've had this book lying around for a year or more, the remains of one of my earlier Big Book Sale excursions. I don't know why I hadn't picked it up before, as it clearly had loads of potential, but somehow I kept pushing it aside for something else.

I'm glad I finally got round to it, however, as I found it completely addictive. It takes place all in the course of one day, which happens to be the final Saturday of the year on which the house and gardens of a once-prestigious family, the Hornbeams, are open to the public. These visits have been a last-ditch effort to raise enough money to keep the crumbling house functioning for one more year. It's also the day on which an American military man steps up his efforts to win the heart of Henrietta Hornbeam, the only survivor of the family's current generation, and on which Henrietta has promised to entertain some family friends to tea. And, it's the day on which her nephew, son of her dead twin brother and the heir to the estate, is brought by her brother's widow to make his home with the family and be sent to a public school.

Quite an eventful day. But the contemporary action—such as it is—takes a definite backseat to the history and furnishings of the house itself. I don't even think of myself as particularly fascinated by home décor, but I found myself absolutely gobbling up the extended descriptions of the rooms and the ruins of the Hornbeams' once-lavish possessions. And the stories told by Henrietta and her cousin Charles—who lost an eye and one arm in the war but is still more useful than most of the family's remaining staff—along with the imperious and now bedridden Lady Hornbeam's class-conscious secretary, as they show visitors around the rooms, stories which include a queen's visit and numerous family tragedies, are great fun as well. The family is basically required to live submerged in the past, and the sense of decay and claustrophobia is palpable (but also entertaining).

Image courtesy of
Jerri Chase

I was pretty sure, by the time I got to the following description on page 17—about the elderly nanny perusing the nursery before the young heir's arrival—that I was going to quite enjoy The Half-Crown House:

Generations of Hornbeam children had used the room in the nursery tower. The faded roses and figures of a Kate Greenaway wallpaper scarcely showed any longer between the framed Christmas supplements which covered the walls, Bubbles, Cherry Ripe and Miss Muffet. The dappled tail-less rocking horse, which his father and grandfather had ridden upon, waited for Victor by the window; the intricate fantasies of the faded scrap-screen, which his great-aunt had made in the seventies, kept off the draught from an ill-fitting door. His great-grandmother's dolls' house stood by the wall, foursquare and Palladian, with pediment and portico, made by the estate carpenter in imitation of Wilchester Castle, demolished these ten years. All its bright windows glittered; Nanny had rubbed them up faithfully, because even a boy ought to be amused by this copy of an ancestral house. The mantelpiece held children's treasures, brought back from seaside holidays, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago; the glass lighthouse striped with coloured sand from Alum Bay, the paper-weight with the view of the Brighton Pavilion underneath, the glass ball waiting for Victor to shake up the snowstorm inside, the ship-in-a-bottle made by Nanny's sailor brother, the cracked Staffordshire jug with the heads of Admiral Nelson and Captain Hardy on its bulging sides. In the big toy-cupboard the child would find his father's toy fort and boxes of soldiers, the model theatre, the red-and-white bricks, the maps and puzzles with the pieces missing, the boats, spades and buckets, the small bats and cricket-stumps, the toy tricycle with one pedal gone. Nanny did hope that some of this junk would please him.

It's possible that some readers who don't fetishize old houses with rich, odd histories might find that Ashton's novel is focused a bit too much on the house and a bit too little on the characters. Fair warning of that. But for fans of, for example, Ruby Ferguson's Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, also about a house that's seen better days, then The Half-Crown House is likely not to be missed.

And one more element that I found wonderful about the book is the way it grounds itself solidly in the postwar world. Although published eleven years after the end of World War II, The Half-Crown House is permeated with the after-effects of the war—class shifts, food difficulties, taxation, and, most significant of all, the injuries and losses still felt by those left behind. For those interested in that postwar austerity mood in their novels, this is also a great choice.

Image courtesy of Jerri Chase

I have to give an enthusiastic thank you to Jerri Chase, who provided images of her copy of this book, complete with a lovely dustjacket, and granted her permission for me to use them here. (She may have nearly forgotten that she provided them now, as it's taken me nearly a year to use them, but my thanks is no less warm for that.) The dustjacket also includes a charming photo of Ashton and two paragraphs of author bio. Ashton joins the expanding group of women on my Overwhelming List who studied medicine, which one might have suspected from the fact that several of her books—including Doctor Serocold (1930), Hornets' Nest (1935), and Yeoman's Hospital (1944)—center around the medical profession. 

I also note that the author bio says only that the apartment she and her husband lived in was "destroyed by fire" in 1941. According to Persephone's Helen Ashton page, however, it was destroyed in the Blitz. Both statements may be true, of course, but it's interesting that the publishers of The Half-Crown House chose to mention the destruction but not its direct cause.

Now it's high time I get around to Ashton's one Persephone reprint, Bricks and Mortar, which undoubtedly many of you have already read. It just moved quite a bit further up my TBR list. And then there's her novel about the early years of World War II, Tadpole Hall... 

WINIFRED DUKE, Dirge for a Dead Witch (1949)

I wrote about my first encounter with Winifred Duke a little over a year and a half ago, after happening upon a copy of The Dancing of the Fox in a Victoria second-hand bookshop. It was one of my best and most intriguing unexpected book finds of recent years, and I vowed at the time to explore Duke's fiction a bit further. In view of the usual amount of time it takes me to get around to doing anything I say I'm going to do, for me to have read a second Duke title in just over a year and a half is not all that bad…

So little information about Duke or her books is available online that I wound up, a few months ago, just grabbing the most affordable book I could find on Abe Books with an intriguing title and an intact dustjacket. I had no idea what I was getting. While Dancing was a sort of crime novel—but not so much a who-done-it as a what-were-the-aftereffects-of-its-having-been-done—Dirge for a Dead Witch is historical drama, though certainly still with a crime element in the form of a witchhunt and its long-lingering repercussions.

The present day of the novel is the late 18th century, with a long middle section flashing back to more than a century before. In the present day, Mr. Raeburn, a new clergyman in the village of Drumbannock is writing a book on folklore, including witches, and takes an interest in the tale of Anne Chalmers, who was hounded by the villagers a century before and who then mysteriously vanished without a trace. The flashback tells Anne's story, though it is only when we return to the novel's present, that we discover its final ending.

As I would have expected from my earlier experience of Duke's work, Dirge is highly atmospheric and eminently readable. Here's a snippet from page 12, telling of Mr. Raeburn's mother's reactions to their new abode:

Mrs. Raeburn followed. Her teeth were chattering. Ridiculous! The evening was so close, so enervating, that she had felt compelled to loosen her cloak, and her bonnet pressed heavily on her moist temples. Yet here a chill, dank atmosphere enwrapped everything and seeped to her very bones. She trod past the kirk, towering, sinister and forbidding, amongst its neighbouring gravestones. It was not an agreeable reflection that she must look out upon it every day. Behind the bald solid block it made she discerned a house. There was no garden, no approach, except a little narrow path of earth, and beyond—Those great trees looked highly unwholesome. What a dark, awe-inspiring place! Hers was a comfortable, unimaginative mind happed in a healthy body, but the mere proximity of the den caused her to think of ghosts and bogles, of old, blood-curdling superstitions and eerie tales once heard and easily forgotten. Never, never, even in the daytime, she told herself wildly, could she summon up courage to enter the uncanny place. Would it be possible to have those rank, evil-looking trees cut down? If they proved to be on glebeland and under the jurisdiction of the minister this must be done. In their ugly closeness might breed fevers, dark, malignant things. Already she saw in this spot menace, fear, the unknown. Her heart yearned for Dumfries, its lights, its kindly folk, its security and certainty. Here she felt threatened by she knew not what.

Pretty effective stuff (unless you happen to live alone between a cemetery and a dark forest, I suppose). And there are also fascinating characters who have real depth and seem—even when they're completely unpleasant—to live and breathe. As would also be expected, the scenes portraying the villagers' growing suspicions of witchcraft and the eventual arrest and trial of Anne—who seems to have nothing against her except her beauty and her status as a stranger in the village—are harrowing and sad, and Duke dissects the villagers' suspicions and fears quite convincingly.

Ultimately, I might have to admit that the outcome of the novel felt a bit anti-climactic, but I think this is because it was all done so well that it seemed to be leading up to something bigger and more dramatic. Though the fact that it remains understated and suggestive rather than over-the-top and obvious seems to be in keeping with Duke's style, and there are so many ways in which over-the-top eerie stories can go awry and so many ways that merely suggested horror can be more effective, that some readers might see this as a strength in itself.

I also have to note that much of the dialogue—of which there is a lot—is in Scots dialect. This was interesting, and I have to admit I was surprised at the extent to which I got used to it after a while—rather like reading Shakespeare—but it did slow the flow of the novel a bit. But again, some readers might particularly enjoy this.

But those minor quibbles aside, Duke's writing and her perspective on these events made Dirge well worth reading, and I do recommend it for fans of historical fiction and of things that go bump in the night. I'm glad I've now sampled one of Duke's non-mysteries, and I'm hoping also to sample one or two more of her books in the near future, if the Interlibrary Loan team at the SF Public Library is able to manage it. She is simply too interesting to be as completely obscure as she is. Perhaps one should be The Needful Journey, described on the back flap of Dirge?

It's odd that virtually none of Duke's books seem to have ever been reprinted, despite the fact that, according to the cover of Dirge, her earlier novel Death and His Sweetheart had apparently been a veritable bestseller (being, at the time Dirge appeared, in its "38th thousand"), and despite the fact that crime fiction seems to be one of the most eagerly collected and reprinted genres of fiction from the early to mid 20th century.

I shall have to do what I can to rectify that. Hopefully in less than another year and a half…

[And of course, I couldn't resist sharing the dustjacket with you, especially since no one else ever talks about this author. You know, too, how much I enjoy publishers' book lists on the backs of books, and this one is no exception. Alas, I didn't find any new authors for my Overwhelming List, but there were new names for my phantom Overwhelming List US. Theda Kenyon (1894-1997) was an American novelist and poet who apparently once shared the stage at a speaking gig with Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, though she appears to be primarily remembered now for a book called Witches Still Live: A Study of the Black Art Today (1929), which makes her a slightly ironic presence on the back of Duke's book. Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was an Edgar Award-winning American mystery novelist who, incidentally, lived on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and Ann Chidester was also American, though information about her and her books is sparse. Ethel Mannin, Eileen Bigland, and Margaret Archer are all already represented on my list.]

WINIFRED DUKE, The Dancing of the Fox (1956)

A few days ago, I wrote about finding this book at Russell Books in Victoria during our post-Christmas excursion. I'm always a little torn when I come across a book like this by an author I don't know, which looks interesting but really could go either way. But I was intrigued by the jacket description of this one, and when I read the opening paragraph, my seduction was complete:

The four sisters sat at breakfast on this October morning of the year 1930. They were all elderly, and as was frequently the case with women of their era and environment, looked as though they had never been young. The house they occupied was a quiet, old-fashioned residence, set in a London suburb originally regarded as fashionable, but now decaying and obsolete. All of them had been born in the same house, lived their whole lives in it, and alike seemed destined to die there when the time came. Papa had brought Mamma to it after they married. The family had never known any other home. Everybody called them the Ross girls, later the Ross sisters, and now, Louise, the second one, wryly supposed, they were known as the Ross old ladies, or even as the Ross old maids.

I'm so pleased that I did find this book irresistible, because I read it obsessively in our hotel room and on our flight home (to Andy's slight annoyance), and while it's not necessarily one of my all-time favorites, it proved to be very compelling, rather unusual, and quite striking in its exploration of some of the themes I'm most interested in.

It turns out that Duke was a crime writer of sorts, but not a traditional mystery writer.  Rather, she seems to have been more focused on the effects of crime, and on characters' varying perceptions and feelings about guilt and punishment.  Judging from a few reviews I found of earlier novels, she seems to have been particularly concerned with the Scottish legal system's possible verdict of "Not Proven."  This verdict was apparently similar, originally, to the U.S. and England's "Not Guilty" verdict, but gradually evolved into something like a middle ground, in which a jury has the option of acquitting the accused for lack of proof but nevertheless asserting that it remains unconvinced of his or her innocence.  I found this fascinating, and if you do too you can read the Wikipedia entry about it here.

Duke hasn't been added to my Overwhelming List yet, though she will be in a future update.  And I have to thank a relatively new friend of this blog for the information that she was born in Liverpool but spent most of her life in Edinburgh, which explains the vivid portrayal of Scotland and Scottish characters in many of her novels, including this one.  She was the daughter of a clergyman and apparently also wrote historical works and biographical fiction.  Thank you, John, for providing this information.  

(By the way, John has also provided me with a wonderful revelation about a certain mysterious author discussed here previously, which I'll be posting about soon…)

The Dancing of the Fox is admittedly a bit on the bleak side, but I found it fascinating.  As is apparently true of some of Duke's other novels, it's not so much a who-done-it as a what-happened-after.  Although Duke was apparently praised for the surprise endings in some of her works, there is no surprise here, plot-wise. We learn early on of the murder, the perpetrator and his victim, and even—because the novel begins in 1930 and flashes back to 1889—the fates of many of the other principal characters. This might make the novel a bit less satisfying for some readers, but also perhaps more interesting for those interested in character studies. Here, the study concerns the lingering effects on the Reeds, a conservative Victorian family (one very much after Ivy Compton-Burnett's heart, actually—dictatorial patriarch and all) of the murder of its youngest son, Edward, while on vacation in Scotland.

The structure of the novel is somewhat unusual, I think.  It begins, as quoted above, in 1930 with the four surviving Reed sisters, before flashing back to Edward's departure for and failure to return from his holiday on an unnamed Scottish island and eldest brother James's departure to search for him.  The news of Edward's death reaches to the family, and then we flash back to James's actual trip and the search for and discovery of Edward's body at the base of a cliff. Then we flash back yet again to witness Edward's trip and to enter the perspective of his killer—though, interestingly, the murder itself is never presented, so we are intriguingly left uncertain of some of the details.  Several family members, including two of the sisters, are required to travel to Scotland for the trial, after which the reader is presented with the effects of the entire experience on various family members.

It's a somewhat peculiar way of telling the story, but I found it surprisingly effective.  It even seemed to me to build up a kind of suspense, in spite of the fact that I already knew most of the salient details of the plot. Perhaps Duke used this unusual structure to highlight some of the other themes that are important in the novel.

I've written several times before of what I call "maleficent malingerers"—those figures which seem to have become a sort of stock character in middlebrow women's novels and which most often seem to be mothers who manipulate their children using their poor emotional or physical health as a weapon.  Here, however, the malingerer is the Compton-Burnett-esque Victorian father, a widower who is so selfish, whiny, snide, manipulative, and gleefully martyred at every turn that in the end many readers may feel as I did—that the real tragedy of the novel is that the wrong member of the family was murdered.

Unlike in a Compton-Burnett novel, however, wherein other characters (most entertainingly even the younger offspring of her domineering patriarchs) are often armed with intellect and subversive wit with which to defend themselves, Duke portrays Mr. Reed's offspring as intelligent and thoughtful, but also as fully cowed and beaten-down.  She seems particularly interested in the four spinster daughters whose lives are blighted by either (depending on your perspective) Edward's murder or their father's domination.  The novel both begins and ends with them in later years—alone together, eccentric, isolated, left behind by the world and culture around them.

I have an ongoing fascination—for whatever peculiar, deep-seated reason—with literary portrayals of spinsters (I doubt if that comes as a shock to any regular readers of this blog). So I was particularly intrigued by Duke's characterization of the sisters and their tragic limitations.  For example, when Mary, the oldest daughter—calmly efficient and capable in managing her father's household—is forced to travel to Scotland to attend the trial, her utter lack of any real world experience is made poignantly explicit:

The hotel, situated in a quiet street, was not large, but the rooms were lofty as compared with London standards, and the entrance-hall sufficiently opulent to awe the strangers. How could Edward have gone so gaily and confidently to that dreadful hydropathic, actually enjoying, as evidenced by his letters home, the crowds, the new faces, the unfamiliar routine? Mary fought back a sob. James was coming towards them after a parley with the manager, asking whether they would like a meal, or prefer to go straight upstairs.

Similarly, left at home with their father, we see how helpless Mary's sisters Lilian and Alice are as they anxiously await word of the verdict but are unable to even obtain a newspaper:

"Can't we get a paper?"

Lilian offered the suggestion in a dubious tone. At Wisteria Lodge evening papers were considered to be slightly ungenteel, an unnecessary pandering to an unsuitable craving for news, and wholly unfitted for their sex.

…

"I wish James or Frederick were here. They'd know, or one of them would get a paper himself and say nothing about it to Papa."

There are even indications of hysteria in the two sisters who are fully developed as characters, Mary and Alice (the others are barely seen or heard, apart from Louise's musing in the opening paragraph). This is appropriate for a tale set in 1889, when Freud was just beginning his studies of neurotic symptoms and, rather radically, concluding that the root cause was his upper class female patients' stultifying lives as overprotected hothouse flowers. Undoubtedly the sisters would have made fascinating case studies. Later, too, when Mary becomes engaged to a friend of Edward's, whom she meets during the trial, and is trying to convince herself that her father can be made to approve, the reader can imagine her blushing to herself at the merest approach to a thought of the acts required to produce offspring:

It ought to mean a fresh interest for him, the wedding, Mary's new prospects, and perhaps in time the desired grand-children. This last thought hardly formed itself in Mary's mind. It savoured of immodesty to imagine such a possibility.

We know from the beginning that her attempt to find happiness is doomed to fail, but Duke handles the tragedy elegantly, and Mary's position is summed up succinctly:

What was she to do? The prospect of defying Papa was unthinkable. Even with Mr. Goodwin's support she knew that she would never have the courage. Her whole life had ill prepared her for this crisis.

Although Duke seems to have a particular interest in the sisters, however, I should note that they are not always the central focus. Edward and his brothers are also well-developed characters, and there are some particularly strong passages set in Scotland—before Edward's murder and during James's search for him, as well as during the trial. Mrs. Wallace, James's landlady during the search, is a lively and entertaining character, as is her "strong silent type" of a husband, "Wullie."

Duke does make liberal use of Scottish dialect throughout these scenes, something which normally irritates me no end, but which didn't trouble me here and was even somewhat entertaining. This is obviously highly subjective though, so fair warning. And she offers rather vivid descriptions of Edinburgh, including this one from just after the murderer's trial has ended on a Saturday night and the siblings are unable to head home until Monday because their father has forbidden travel on the Sabbath:

In the cold November morning the city, sunk in haar, resembled the drawings illustrating that region in an old book which had enlivened her childhood. There was the same grey atmosphere, the same smoke, the same ugliness. The Scottish capital in 1889 was indeed a dour, joyless place. Bells rang out, jangling, discordant, contradicting one another, and crowds hurried to the various churches with a flat purpose which seemed to denote that they went from duty, and no other motive. The four Rosses went too, it never occurring to them to do anything else. Frederick sat rigid during the sermon in case some reference might be made to the trial, in which event James was thoroughly capable of rising and stalking out of the building. Mercifully there was none, and the murderer's victim's family emerged at the conclusion uncomforted and at a loose end for the rest of the day.

Among a fair number of new vocabulary terms I got from this novel was "haar," meaning fog I believe, and the Scots' apparent tendency to refer to hot water bottles as "pigs"?  You see, it's an educational reading experience as well as an entertaining one!

I never did quite determine the meaning of the novel's title in relation to its plot.  The full quote from Yeats, used as the epigraph, is: "When men are very bitter, death and ruin draw them on as a rabbit is / Supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox." A lovely quote, and I assume it's meant to refer to the murder victim, but it could conceivably refer to the ways in which Duke's characters allow their lives to ruined—by the murder, by the domineering father, or by their own weaknesses.  You know how I love a double meaning!

I know I have a frightful tendency to write about books that are practically unobtainable. (Oddly, this one isn't even listed on Amazon US, as far as I can see, but Bookfinder does bring up some fairly reasonably priced results.) But I will make amends in the next week or two—next up are a Persephone title, readily available in a beautiful little grey edition, and an old Virago title still readily available (though unforgivably out of print).  Stay tuned!