20 Monday Dec 2021
Posted in Maggie
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Would Barbara Pym have approved of the local knitted embellishments for our Kentish post boxes? I suspect that she and her characters would have found them ‘not quite the thing’, but in these dark days anything that raises a smile is to be encouraged.
Happy Christmas from all ninevoices!
12 Tuesday Dec 2017
Posted in Classics, Ed, Fiction, Writercraft
In my previous post giving the Second Sentence Christmas Quiz questions (https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/the-second-sentence-christmas-quiz/) I promised to reveal the answers today.
I now know that some people wish to tackle the quiz later and so would prefer me not to put the answers in public view before then. Accordingly, the answers are hidden in the Comment to this post.
Preparing the answers has shown me an egregious mistake, in question 14, caused by my imperfect editing. I’m so sorry! Grovel grovel.
09 Saturday Dec 2017
Posted in Classics, Ed, Fiction, Writercraft
We all know the importance of the first sentence of your novel. But I’ve never seen the experts talking about the second sentence. If you’re meeting up with your writing or literary friends this festive season, you could try this quiz on them. Answers on Tuesday.
Of what novels are the following the second sentences?
2 We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning, but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
3 Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
4 Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
5 The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o’clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist.
6 Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?———Good G__! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
7 Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, – or from one of our elder poets, – in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.
8 With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicking off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.
9 Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
10 Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee.
11 However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
12 They [the moon’s silver rays] shone on turret and battlement; peeped respectfully in upon Lord Emsworth’s sister, Lady Hermione Wedge, as she creamed her face in the Blue Room; and stole through the open window of the Red Room next door, where there was something really worth looking at – Veronica Wedge, to wit, Lady Hermione’s outstandingly beautiful daughter, who was lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wishing she had some decent jewellery to wear at the forthcoming County Ball. [Author and series of books sufficient here for the usual mark – extra marks if you can name the actual novel!]
13 A black servant, who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton’s shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell, at least a score of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately old brick house.
14 It couldn’t have anything to do with him, he’d been flying for days without sleep.
15 My father got the dog drunk on cherry brandy at the party last night.
16 I remember him as if it were yesterday as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.
17 Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
22 Friday Sep 2017
Posted in Crime, Ed, Mystery, Read Lately, Short stories, Writing
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!
16 Sunday Oct 2016
Posted in Crime, Ed, Mystery, Read Lately
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.
31 Sunday Jan 2016
Posted in Books, Crime, Ed, Read Lately
If you are so well-organised that you buy presents now for next Christmas, and there’s an aficionado of whodunits in your family, then how about Murder for Christmas, by Francis Duncan?
My daughter bought this for me this year and I’m very glad she did. A snowbound country mansion; a mixed assortment of guests (with dark secrets) invited to spend Christmas in traditional manner by the genial owner of the house; mysterious footprints in the snow; a malevolent stranger standing outside the gate; and yes, the house has a secret passage! Then, Father Christmas is found murdered at the foot of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. What could be better?
Written in 1949, it features the amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine, a retired tobacconist who likes romance novels. (Why not? Why should a love of opera or of playing the violin be superior?) Just like Poirot in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, he has been invited to join the Christmas house party (by the host’s secretary) because it is feared that something nasty is afoot. The guests include star-crossed lovers, a self-important politician, an irascible alcoholic, an angry scientist who dislikes Christmas, two femmes fatales, an alarmed niece, and an apparently nondescript married couple.
The clues are there, and theoretically the reader could work out the solution before Mordecai explains it. That clever reader would have to exert some powers of imagination, but I think it could be done. I didn’t manage it.
Francis Duncan wrote over 20 crime novels between 1937 and 1959. This is the first one I’ve read.
It’s published in the Vintage Murder Mysteries series. ISBN 978-1-784-70345-5 RRP £8-99
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Books, Crime, Ed, Read Lately
Tags
British Library, Christmas, crime fiction, Ed found this, Hog's Back, Northern Line, Oxford, Piccadilly, snow
Thanks to that excellent institution the British Library, for publishing its Crime Classics series. These are a selection of novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction. Aficionados will have been aware of it for some time, but I’ve just come across it and was fortunate enough to be given two of them for Christmas. I’m currently much enjoying Mystery in White – A Christmas Crime Story, by J Jefferson Farjeon (originally published in 1937): a group of strangers find themselves trapped by heavy snow on Christmas Eve in a country house, which mysteriously has fires burning and food ready, but no-one is home … Great suspense.
My other gift was The Sussex Downs Murder, by John Bude (1936), a delight I have in store. Others in the series have settings such as the London Underground’s Northern Line (Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay), an Oxford college (Death on the Cherwell by the same author), the very centre of London (Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston), and the Hog’s Back beauty spot in Surrey (The Hog’s Back Mystery by the great Freeman Wills Crofts).
For details on some of these see http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/publications-catalogue-spring-2015.pdf (scroll down to pages 6 to 11) or http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/publications-catalogue-spring-2014.pdf (pages 10 to 13).
15 Tuesday Oct 2013
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 has been awarded to Alice Munro, “master of the contemporary short story”. Good to see the short story getting recognised. I’ve not read Alice Munro – any thoughts from people who have? Would this be a suitable hint to drop in family ears for Christmas?
ninevoices 