What’s the story?

Tags

Mobile phones, Padlocks, Prague, True love

What prompts a story in your imagination?

The vogue for fixing padlocks to a bridge as a token of your affection has reached Prague: here are some on a bridge on Kampa Island, a romantic spot favoured by lovers.

On a visit earlier this year we saw this gentleman, in long conference with someone by mobile phone, trying to identify a particular padlock.

What on earth is the story here?  A broken romance, so painful that not even the padlock must remain on the bridge?  A padlock made of gold?  A vital message scratched on one?  And why delegate the finding of this lock to someone else?

Any ideas?

 

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Christmas murder stories

Tags

Adam Dalgliesh, Agatha Christie, Camden Town, Christmas, country house murder, Hercule Poirot, P D James, Suffolk, whodunits

Each year I try to write a Christmas short story, usually with a murder in it. With varying success. I find I have contradictory emotions on just having finished The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by the great PD James. On the one hand I realise that what I produce comes nowhere near the quality of these stories. On the other, I’m spurred to greater effort.

These four stories aren’t festive tales.  And at the same time they are so atmospheric. PD teases us about what we’re reading: in one she says that the butler and his wife, the cook, are “indispensable small-part characters in any country-house murder”; and in another Adam Dalgliesh is flagged down on a country road on Christmas Eve, when “… his first thought was that he had somehow become involved in one of those Christmas short stories written to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers on an upmarket weekly magazine.”

The Mistletoe Murder (1995) is set in wartime, at a Christmas house-party in a practically empty country house. The period is well evoked, as is a pervading sadness. A gruesome killing takes place and there are very few suspects. The clues are there for us, but I didn’t manage to work it out. The ending was beautifully unexpected. A story told with real atmosphere.

A Very Commonplace Murder (1969) is a sordid story set in Camden Town, involving a voyeur who spies on lovers in a house opposite his place of work. The scene of adultery becomes a scene of murder.

The Boxdale Inheritance (1979) is an Adam Dalgliesh story.   He is asked by an elderly Canon (his godfather) to investigate a murder that happened in 1902. An inheritance depends on it. That ancient crime took place in another gloomy large house, with a family assembled for Christmas, a family riven (as is de rigueur in such a setting) by jealousy and greed. Unbreakable alibis abound. The principal clue to the solution is presented to the reader but in such a way that I sailed straight past it.

The Twelve Clues of Christmas (1996) also features Adam Dalgliesh. One Christmas Eve he finds himself at an unwelcoming Harkerville Hall, deep in Suffolk, faced with a bizarre apparent suicide. Again, members of a divided family are in attendance. Our hero solves the mystery by spotting the twelve clues of the title.

He concludes that story by observing, ”My dear Aunt Jane, I don’t think I’ll ever have another case like it. It was pure Agatha Christie.’” You’re too modest, Lady James.

Talking of Agatha Christie – one of the few whodunits I’ve read a second time is Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which I reread in order to see where the clues to the solution were. And yes, the main clue is there: as clear as day when you know its significance, but when read the first time it’s hidden in plain sight as just a piece of description. Similar to that in The Boxdale Inheritance.

So: if at this early stage you’re looking for a seasonal stocking-filler for a whodunit-lover, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories would fit the bill. And if you’re yourself a writer of Christmas short stories, here’s a standard to aim for!

The British Library’s Crime Classics continue to delight

Tags

Belsize Park, British Library, Christmas, College bursars, Cornish coast, J Jefferson Farjeon, John Bude, John Rowland, Kent, London Underground, Mavis Doriel Hay, Oxford, River Cherwell, Sussex Downs, whodunits

Another hurrah for the British Library Crime Classics series!  It reissues whodunits from the Golden Age by authors who have dropped from general sight but who still can give much pleasure.

I found Mystery in White – A Christmas Crime Story, by J Jefferson Farjeon (1937), a most atmospheric piece.   A group of strangers are trapped by heavy snow on Christmas Eve in a country house, which mysteriously has fires burning and food ready, but no-one is home … Then murder is done. I could almost feel the cold, see the snow on the ground outside. A great gift for Christmas for an aficionado of the genre.

The Sussex Downs Murder (1936) is set north of Worthing, in real Sussex countryside, based on the village of Washington near Chanctonbury Ring. Written by John Bude. The Rother brothers run a quarry. Soon after John Rother’s disappearance bones turn up in the quarry, and then in loads of lime sent to local customers. The plot includes delights such as a mysterious runner in a broad-brimmed hat, an anomaly in the amount of petrol in an abandoned car, a false telegram sent to lure one of the protagonists away, etc. Superintendent Meredith is the sleuth on the case.

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay (1935) is in the sub-genre of Oxbridge murders.   A group of students at the all-female Persephone College in Oxford meet one wintry afternoon on top of the boathouse to form a secret society dedicated to the cursing of the unpopular College bursar: and what should float down the River Cherwell, right past their meeting place, but a canoe containing the said bursar’s corpse ….   Here the traditional detective sent from Scotland Yard is Inspector Braydon. The cast of suspects includes exotic types such as Draga Czernak, a Montenegrin student at Persephone who feels insulted by the bursar; Ezekiel Lond, a misogynist old man who lives in a ramshackle house next to Persephone, and who much resents the sale by his father of the land on which the College stands; and James Lidgett, a farmer-cum-builder who wishes to develop land next to Persephone. Great stuff. For once, I guessed the villain early on.

Those are the three in the series I’ve read so far. Three pleasures still to come are:

Calamity in Kent (1950), by John Rowland, in which a corpse is found locked inside the carriage of a cliff railway at the seaside resort of Broadgate – given me by a ninevoices friend who knew of my liking for this stuff (thanks, Val).

Murder Underground (1934), by Mavis Doriel Hay (she of the Cherwell): the rich but unpopular Miss Pongleton is killed on the stairs of Belsize Park tube station.  I’ve given this to my Londoner daughter as a present. She commutes to work on the Metropolitan Line but as Belsize Park is on the Northern Line she might not hold it against me. I hope she’ll lend it back to me to read in due course.

The Cornish Coast Murder (1935), by John Bude (he of the Sussex Downs): a local magistrate is found shot dead in the house of the local vicar (not in his library, surely?). Looking for something else, I found this in a place my dear wife might be using for storing this year’s Christmas presents, so I have high hopes for Christmas morning! I must put it back secretly.

Thanks, BL. Go to http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/crime-classics-booklet.pdf for the complete list.

Criminal Activities in Tunbridge Wells

Tags

Antonia Hodgson, City of Masks, Death at Fountains Abbey, J D Sykes, Plague Land, The Butcher Bird, Waterstones

On Wednesday, 14 September, two successfully published authors of historical crime will be at Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells to talk about their latest books and the journey to their publication.

S D Sykes (see our post of July 7 about her Bloomsbury Press workshop : How to Write Historical Fiction and Get Published) will be discussing the latest adventure of her hero, Oswald, who was sent to a monastery at the age of seven, only to be called home at eighteen when his father and brothers succumbed to the Black Death. Finding himself the reluctant Lord of Somershill Manor – and wrestling with the aftermath of the plague, peasant unrest, and some infuriatingly troublesome female relatives – he discovers a talent for solving gruesome murders, in Plague Land and The Butcher Bird.

City of Masks is Oswald’s third adventure, which takes place when a pilgrimage to Venice finds him trapped under seige by the Hungarians. I have yet to read it, but look forward to following this endearingly diffident young man’s journey towards maturity.

The magnificent cover, I’m told, is The Relic of the True Cross by Gentile Bellini, which can be seen in Venice and is apparently HUGE.

 

As a complete contrast, Antonia Hodgson’s latest book, Death at Fountains Abbey, features a rakish Georgian antihero, Thomas Hawkins, who is employed secretly by Queen Caroline to uncover the blackmailing activities of a previous Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Let’s hope George Osborne doesn’t read it and get any ideas…) Hawkins, previously featured in The Devil in the Marshalsea and The Last Confessions of Thomas Hawkins, has a host of enemies and a long-lost daughter returning from the dead to ramp up the pace and atmosphere.

Tickets for what should be an enjoyable and informative evening are available now from Waterstones for the very reasonable sum of £3, which can be redeemed against the price of the books, if purchased.  I have mine already…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor’

Tags

autism, butterflies, Clevedon, Cotswolds, Melanie Dobson

In the posting in April https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/2000-words-a-day/ I told of my chance meeting with the author Melanie Dobson and what I had learned of her writing discipline. I’ve now had a chance to read one of her books, Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor.   As you can see from Melanie’s website (http://melaniedobson.com/books/shadows-of-ladenbrooke-manor/) it’s a romantic historical mystery.

It opens dramatically in 1954 with a great storm in the Bristol Channel, that smashes into the town of Clevedon and sweeps young Maggie out to sea. She is pregnant by a handsome French seaman who has promised to return, but hasn’t. She feels that drowning might be the answer – but she is rescued by dependable local journalist Walter Doyle.

It is difficult to summarise the storyline without giving away too much. It’s a story of generations and of patterns that recur down the generations – patterns like forbidden love. The story of Maggie and Walter and their family in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s alternates with happenings in the present day, as Heather Toulson arrives from America to sort out her late father’s cottage. This is in the Cotswold village of Bibury, next to Ladenbrooke Manor. The Manor belongs to the Croft family, but has been deserted by them since the mysterious death in 1970 of Lord Croft’s heir Oliver, found dead in the River Coln.   Heather finds herself seeking out the truth about his death, and she also has shadows from her own past to cope with.

At first I had thought this type of story wasn’t really for me. But as I read it I found that I cared for the characters and I wanted to know what happened to them. This is especially true of Libby, Maggie’s daughter, a girl who grows up wholly absorbed in her own world, a world of colour and pictures, and who is never happier than when she is roaming the gardens of Ladenbrooke Manor, dancing with her friends the butterflies. Her portrayal, and that of her parents’ concerns for her and the problems she faces and causes, is beautiful and moving. I also came to admire the portrait of Walter Doyle, whose roles of husband and father are under unwanted strain.

The stories are cleverly interleaved, and the appearance and reappearance of secondary characters in the different stories shows careful plotting. I liked it. The author’s demanding writing discipline paid off!

The book is published in the US by Simon & Shuster. I’m not sure that Melanie Dobson’s books are published in Britain, but they are available on Amazon. ISBN 978-1-4767-4614-2