The Mask of Dimitrios: Eric Ambler

One of the books I read during the last few weeks of 2015 was The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler which was originally published in 1939. It was the third or fourth time I had read this masterpiece, and because it was about a decade since my previous reading I noticed some interesting features in the novel. There is a blurb on the front cover ‘The source on which we all draw” by John le Carre, and it appeared to me that many of the techniques used by Ambler have been taken up by so many crime writers especially the Swedish school.

The Mask of Dimitrios is the story of how an English crime novelist Charles Latimer becomes fascinated, almost obsessed, by the story of  master criminal Dimitrios, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s steps across Europe hoping to gain material for a new book. The simplicity of this plot device is quite brilliant as it allows the author to include passages about the history of the various locations.

Unable to destroy the Turkish army, the Greeks turned with frantic savagery to the business of destroying the Turkish population in the path of their flight……………….Assisted by the few half-crazed Anatolian peasants who had survived, they took their revenge on the Greeks they were able to overtake……….

But the main Greek army had escaped by sea…… the Turks swept on. On the ninth of September 1922, they occupied Smyrna.

For a fortnight, refugees from the oncoming Turks had been pouring into the city to swell the already large Greek and Armenian populations. They had thought that the Greek army would turn and defend Smyrna. But the Greek army had fled. Now they were caught in a trap. The holocaust began.

We have to remember that this was published in 1939. The destruction of Smyrna, a multicultural community, was a sad prediction of what was to happen to so many communities in Europe between 1939-1945, and what is happening to many in the Middle East today. 

The assassination of politicians arranged by corrupt banks, spies, murders and the activities of criminal drug distributing organisations are contained in a narrative that packs more events and details in a mere 226 pages than many of today’s heavy 600 page doorstops. The very detailed slow paced descriptions of how master spy Grodek, and Dimitrios, while working for Italy entrap a Yugoslav civil servant into getting hold of top secret information, and the activities of Dimitrios’s drug gang in Paris, are almost a blueprint for this detailed approach in later novels for example those by le Carre and Stieg Larsson. 

Any discussion of this novel without mentioning the enigmatic loquacious Mr Peters would be unacceptable. He is one of the great characters of spy/crime fiction, and when a movie of the book was made his part was taken by the portly Sydney Greenstreet. Greenstreet had starred in The Maltese Falcon, as the villainous Gutman, and was an fine choice. He had been accompanied in that movie by Peter Lorre, they made an excellent combination. But someone thought he should play opposite Greenstreet in The Mask of Dimitrios, and so Charles Lambert was changed into Cornelius Leyden to explain Lorre’s central European accent. I thought Peter Lorre was miscast as he was too good a villain to play the hero. But Sydney Greenstreet was the quintessential Mr Peters…..

The fat man spread out large, soft hands on one of which twinkled a rather grubby diamond ring. ‘I am a citizen of the world,’ he said. “To me, all countries, all languages are beautiful. If only men could live as brothers, without hatred, seeing only the beautiful things. But no! There are always Communists, etcetera. It is, no doubt the Great One’s will.”

There is a brooding almosphere of corrupt evil that permeates the narrative, because we are as it states in the introduction in a Europe that is a jungle and its rules set by the Stock Exchange Year Book and Mein Kampf.

Ambler succeeds brilliantly in informing a population that had been fed a diet of cosy country house murders, and village green cricket matches, about the harsh realities of life across the Channel. 

Almost as Ambler finished the book the Nazis marched into Prague in the spring of 1939.     

Lessons will be learned, or perhaps not?

Crime fiction not only can cover today’s important topics, such as immigration [The Defenceless by Kati Hiekkapelto], but also take the reader into the past to discover what went wrong, and why. 

Two very different books  published seventy four years apart both deal with the subject of the methods by which Nazi Germany degraded France’s will to defend itself. Spies, payments for influence, threats of violence, and ruthless exploitation of weakness were the methods used. 

In Eric Ambler’s 1938 classic thriller Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee and language teacher in Paris, is holidaying in a small hotel on the French Riviera. When he takes his holiday photographs to the chemist to be developed he is arrested as a spy, the photographs show Toulon’s naval defences. Vadassy has picked up the wrong camera in his hotel lounge. Beghin, a sweaty individual from the Surete Generale attached to the Department of Naval Intelligence sums up the situation.

“The Commissaire and I agreed”, he said at last, “that you were one of three things-a clever spy, a very stupid one or an innocent man.

I may say that the Commissaire thought you must be the second. I was inclined from the first to think you are innocent. You behaved far too stupidly. No guilty man would be such an imbecile.”

One of the other guests at the hotel, or the owner or his wife, must be the spy. Vadassy is sent back to discover who among the twelve suspects is guilty in an Agatha Christie type, who did it investigation. He is not a master detective or even a passable one and his blunders make for an interesting story as he surreptitiously gathers information about his interestingly varied fellow guests. Each of them has a secret and we learn something about the Europe of the 1930s. One of the guests tells him about post -war German social-democracy…

Its great illusion was its belief in the limitless possibilities of compromise. It thought that it could build Utopia within the Constitution of Weimar……

Worst of all, it thought you could meet force with good will, that the way to deal with a mad dog was to stroke it. In nineteen-thirty-three German social-democracy was bitten and died in agony.

Mission to Paris by Alan Furst, is much more of a modern style political thriller but also set in the corrupt France of 1938.

…but a small bureau in the Reich Foreign Ministry undertook operations to weaken French morale, and degrade France’s will to defend herself…..

Or rather German money. A curious silence, for hundreds of millions of francs-tens of millions of dollars-had been paid to some of the most distinguished citizens of France since Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933.

Frederic Stahl, an emigre from Europe, now an American movie star is sent to Paris to make a film. Frederic had spent the Great War in the Austro-Hungarian legation in Barcelona after having run away to sea at seventeen. The Nazis want to use his Austrian ethnicity as a propaganda weapon, and make various efforts to recruit him. The narrative moves rapidly and Stahl’s love affairs, clashes with German agents ,and meetings with American diplomats lead him to get more involved in very dangerous situations.

‘Excuse me , sir’ she said to Stahl in French, ‘but there is finally good news. Very good news.’

‘Hello, Inga,’ Renate said. ‘Hello, Klaus.’

‘They’ve made a deal with Hitler,’ Inga said, now back in German. ‘He takes the Sudetenland, but promises that’s the end of it, and he signed a paper saying so.’

In another quote from the book, but something that many people thought at the time, 

You appease a thug like Hitler, it just makes him greedy for more, because he smells fear.

Have we learned anything from the past?

I don’t think so our politicians still allow vast amounts of foreign money to enter the country. They “kowtow” to foreign leaders, who run various forms of dictatorships, and appease loud minority groups, while ignoring the silent majority. Recently the Labour Party members and their associates voted in a leader, who advocates a “kinder gentler politics”. His “friends” and those who he has gone the extra mile to support over the years have a somewhat different agenda, and are not kinder gentle people.

My worries about this man becoming Prime Minister are lessened by the fact that he and his crew appear from recent events not to be able to run a bath, yet alone a Gestapo or a Stasi. 

But our present Conservative government can not be trusted to look after my budgie, or even the British steel industry, and I fear for the future. 

Eric Ambler and Alan Furst are always worth reading, and these two books are excellent examples of their work.  

The WH Smith poll: The Best Crime Writers of All Time chosen by you!

I have always considered crime fiction awards and polls very useful for introducing readers to writers and books that they haven’t read.  Even if one doesn’t agree with the choices made by the judges, or general public, the results are usually quite fun. But they do have to adhere to certain basic standards like sanity. If we judge the best crime writers simply on all time sales there is obviously only one winner with Agatha Christie a long way ahead of the number two, and James Patterson back in third place.

Do you know who number two is? 

WH Smith has a list 107 crime fiction authors in order of merit, and I do worry about my ageing eyesight, because I cannot see Colin Dexter’s name anywhere. Some of the voting was quite astonishing with S.J.Watson, who up to date has only published one book, at 65 ahead of Stieg Larsson 68, Lindsey Davis 69, Elizabeth  George 70. That one book may be very very good, but surely S.J. has to produce more than one book to merit a position among the best crime writers of all time.

Television exposure does not seemed to have helped some fine authors with Ann Cleeves at 90, Ellis Peters at 89, Andrea Camilleri at 84. I am ashamed to find that I haven’t even read any of the books by the numero uno on the list, Peter James. His detective Roy Grace works in Brighton, a town I used to know very well, as three of my mother’s sisters lived in Hove, the adjoining seaside resort. I will have to remedy my omission as “he won the crown effortlessly by an incredible number of votes.”

He must be very good to streak ahead of  Agatha Christie at 5, Raymond Chandler at 47, Michael Connelly at 32, Reginald Hill at 48, and Patricia Highsmith at 52. I would suggest that if the poll had asked readers to name their “favourite” five crime fiction authors it might have produced a more interesting result. 

By the way the number two  all time best selling crime fiction author was Georges Simenon. 

 

DEATH IN THE STOCKS [1935]: GEORGETTE HEYER

The front cover of Georgette Heyer’s A Blunt Instrument, a mystery novel published three years after Death in the Stocks, trumpets this recommendation from the San Francisco Chronicle :

“Ranks alongside such whodunnit authors as Christie, Marsh, Tey and Allingham”.

Reading this high praise, and also because Death in the Stocks was on a list of ten of the best Golden Age Crime novels at Crime Fiction Lover was more than enough reason to read this novel. 

My recent reading has raised certain questions in my mind.

Was the Golden Age a high point in crime fiction writing? Were most of the novels merely pure escapism from the harsh realities of the depression, and the difficult political situation during the interwar years, or did they have merit as social commentary about those times? And was Dame Agatha Christie by far the best author from that period, maybe not in literary style, but in the creation of clever plots and memorable characters? 

Georgette Heyer is more famous as a writer of historical romance novels set in Regency England, but between 1932 and 1953 she also wrote twelve detective books.

 Death in the Stocks published in 1935 has many of the classic features of Golden Age detective fiction, a wealthy hated murder victim, a lengthy cast of suspects, a dysfunctional family, a country cottage, faithful servants, and an affable detective. 

Arnold Vereker [the back cover and Crime Fiction Lover refer to Andrew Vereker but this is an error] a very rich man whose hobbies are social climbing and young women is found by Police Constable Dickenson stabbed to death, and put in the stocks at Ashleigh Green. 

‘Don’t seem to know his face.’

‘Well, I daresay you might not, sir. It’s Mr Vereker, of Riverside Cottage.’

‘Oh!’ said the Inspector with a little sniff. ‘One of those week-end people.’

So even back in 1935 wealthy townies bought property in villages, which then remained vacant throughout the week destroying the community, and also increasing house prices beyond the means of the locals. Clearly Ms Heyer foresaw the future of English village life.

When Riverside Cottage is searched Arnold’s half sister Antonia, known as Tony, is found to have spent the night there. She had quarrelled with Arnold, her guardian, over her engagement to company accountant Rudolph Mesurier. Arnold naturally objected to Rudolph borrowing company money, or as it is known among those without cut glass accents, embezzlement. She had come down to Ashleigh Green to have it out with Arnold. Antonia’s brother the supercilious Kenneth, an artist, is engaged to the beautiful Violet Williams, but also has the ordinary looking Leslie Rivers pursuing him. The faithful female servant is called Murgatroyd [first names for the lower classes were only discovered in England around 1963, along with The Beatles, Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice -Davies and Sex] while a cousin Giles Carrington is conveniently a lawyer and executor of Arnold’s will. 

Tony [Antonia] and her brother Kenneth talk to the detectives Superintendent Hannasyde and his assistant Sergeant Hemingway as if they are under footmen, but from my experience that is how the upper and upper middle classes reacted to workers in the 1950s so I am sure it was considerably worse in 1935. I read somewhere that Ms Heyer is able to reproduce accurately the “brittle and ironic conversation of the upper middle class Englishwoman”.

‘You do understand, don’t you darling?’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ replied Antonia. ‘You cooked the accounts and Arnold found out. I’ve often wondered how that’s done, by the way.

How do you do it, Rudolph?’ 

The dialogue in Death in the Stocks, so evocative of the time,  unfortunately to a modern ear makes the characters appear to be just spoilt brats so that one does not really care about them. When a supposedly dead relative arrives from South America to claim his inheritance the whole thing becomes a bit of a frivolous farce. When Death in the Stocks was produced as a play, concentrating on the comedic aspects of the book, in New York in 1937, it ran for 3 nights.

On the evidence of Death in the Stocks Georgette Heyer’s mystery novels are not in the same class as Christie, Marsh, Tey and Allingham, because the characters are stereotypes and the plot lacks complexity. But most of all because the detective Superintendent Hannasyde is not the dominant figure  that a Poirot would be.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Rudolph, but-but Giles wants me to marry him.

And he knows me awfully well, and we get on together, so-so I think I’d better, if you don’t mind very much.’     

TRAGEDY AT LAW [1942]: CYRIL HARE

I decided to read Tragedy At Law firstly because it was recommended by Martin Edwards at his brilliant blog Do You Write Under Your Own Name? Martin gives a whole new meaning to the words ‘encyclopaedic knowledge of crime fiction’ and his blog is always a great read. 

Also I have been reading some Agatha Christie as sheer escapism from more modern crime fiction that deals with such serious subjects as the aftermath of the Algerian War, or racism in the American South, or the current problems of terrorism and kidnapping. Therefore over the next few months, all being well, I shall be reading several books from the period of the Golden Age of the English Detective novel, and investigating whether they have any interest for the modern reader. 

Tragedy At Law was published in 1942, it is set in late 1939 and the action runs into 1940 during the period known in Britain as the Phoney War. There was actually nothing phoney about it if you happened to live in Warsaw, Copenhagen or Oslo, but that is what it is called in history books.

Distinguished lawyer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark wrote Tragedy At Law under the pseudonym Cyril Hare. He was educated at Rugby and Oxford and was a member of the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in 1924. He practised as a barrister up the the Second World War  and therefore had a thorough knowledge of the procedures about which he wrote with such skill.

” No trumpeteers!” said his Lordship in a tome of melancholy and slightly peevish disapproval. …………

War with all its horrors was let loose upon the earth and His Majesty’s Judge must in consequence creep into his car with no more ceremony than an ambassador or an archbishop. Chamberlain had flown to Godesberg and Munich pleaded for them, but in vain. Hitler would have none of them. The trumpeters must go.

The book tells the story of pompous the Honourable Sir William Hereward Barber, a High Court Judge, on his circuit round the Assize Courts in the South of England, a circuit through fictional towns. He is accompanied on his travels by a group of acolytes, Beamish the Judge’s Clerk, the Judge’s Marshal, Derek Marshall, “Marshall by name and marshal by occupation”, the Judge’s Butler and the Marshal’s Man.

And after the Judge receives threatening letters he is joined by his attractive wife, Lady Hilda, whose takes upon herself the task of protecting her husband, aided by Derek. Unfortunately the Judge has already blotted his copybook by driving while inebriated and without a valid licence or insurance, and in the process having a motor accident that involved damaging the hand of a distinguished concert pianist. So he is concerned about both physical, legal and financial threats to his and his wife’s comfortable existence.

Tragedy At Law is a beautifully written portrait of the legal system in wartime England affected at that stage by only minor inconveniences. The quaint Ruritanian world of Britain’s class system is seen to function with all the pomp and circumstance it can muster.  The story has some great characters, biting sarcasm, humour and gradually builds tension to an interesting climax. It is a slow almost pedestrian progress but has charm and even though it appears outdated has a few interesting comments about society and the almost revolutionary concept of State legal aid. The narrative is enhanced by accounts of various legal cases and of the struggling career path of barrister Francis Pettigrew, who plays a small but vital part in the action. 

Tragedy At Law is a pleasant amusing read, but then for the wealthy and the well off middle class England in the Golden Age of the Detective novel was a pleasant place to live.

To Derek Marshall, experiencing his first contact with the criminal law, it was an august, a thrilling moment………….

” Let Horace Sidney Atkins surrender!” piped the Clerk.

A meek, middle-aged man in a grey flannel suit climbed into the dock, blinked nervously at the magnificence that his wrong-doing had somehow collected together, and pleaded guilty to the crime of bigamy.

Markhampton Assizes was under way at last.   

ONE, TWO, BUCKLE MY SHOE: AGATHA CHRISTIE

I have got into the habit of putting aside any long heavyweight book with an exotic foreign setting when we go on our mini-breaks in England. I take a shorter very English book for instance  a Reginald Hill, Colin Dexter and Agatha Christie on our trips taken over the last year. So last week I read Agatha Christie’s One , Two, Buckle My Shoe  published in 1940 in which Hercule Poirot’s dentist Mr Henry Morley is found shot dead in his surgery only hours after treating the famed Belgian detective. 

Chief Inspector Japp believes it is a suicide, a theory that seems to gain justification when one of his patients that morning, Mr Amberiotis, a mysterious character involved in espionage, later that day dies of an overdose of novocaine and adrenaline. Did Mr Morley kill himself in remorse over a professional error? Poirot doubts that and suspects murder. 

Miss Christie introduces the reader to a large cast of suspects. The female grenadier Georgina Morley, the dentist’s sister, Gladys Nevill, his young attractive secretary, Frank Carter, her unsuitable unemployed young man, Reilly, Morley’s business partner, a dentist with a drink problem, Alfred Biggs, the page boy; and Morley’s patients, the dowdy Mabelle Sainsbury Seale, Mr Barnes, a secretive civil servant, Alistair Blunt, a distinguished banker, and Howard Raikes, a young man with revolutionary ideas. We later learn that Raikes hopes to marry Jane Olivera, the daughter of Julia, Blunt’s niece by marriage. We are taken on a journey littered with red herrings, and when a character disappears we suspect a body will turn up soon.

Along the way the Queen of Crime scatters some snippets of social commentary that could have been written yesterday suggesting that her books contain a little bit more than just clever puzzles.

He glanced at the paper and remarked that the Government seemed to be passing from a state of incompetence to one of positive imbecility!

Of course England was a very different country when this book was written, but some things never change.

‘Blunt is the kind of man who in private life would always pay his bills and live within his income-whether he’d got twopence a year or several million makes no difference. He is that type of felllow. And he thinks that there is no reason why a country shouldn’t be the same! No costly experiments.

No frenzied expenditure on possible Utopias.’

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is not in the top drawer of Miss Christie’s books but it is a pleasant enough read, with a very minimum of the attitudes of the time, and with a typical Christie surprise at the end. 

[photos taken at Westonbirt, the National Arboretum in Gloucestershire, where you can imagine you are back in the England of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.] 

 

Summer reading roundup: Part One

During an eventful summer I read six crime fiction books that I haven’t reviewed as yet. I will say a few words about each of them, and possibly expand on that if the more recent books are shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger, or the Petrona Award next year. 

Agatha Christie isn’t the most widely published author of all time for nothing. Reading her books is relaxing and takes you into a different world away from the many worries of 21st Century life. I read two of Agatha’s novels; The Secret of Chimneys from 1925, and Crooked House from 1949.

The Secret of Chimneys [1925] is truly evocative of its age with some politically incorrect xenophobia, and a plot involving jewel thieves, Balkan spies, glamourous seductive flappers, maids, butlers, and amiable young men at the Foreign Office. 

Bill Eversleigh was an extremely nice lad. He was a good cricketer and a scratch golfer, he had pleasant manners, and an amiable disposition, but his position at the Foreign Office had been gained, not by brains, but by good connexions.

If you read between the lines Agatha Christie was a great observer of people, and even as early in her writing career as 1925 some of her commentary on the ruling class is very much to the point.

On the sideboard were half a score of heavy silver dishes, ingeniously kept hot by patent arrangements.

‘Omelet,’ said Lord Caterham, lifting each lid in turn.’ Eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant. I don’t like any of these things, Tredwell. Ask the cook to poach me an egg, will you?

‘Very good , my lord.’

The plot is ridiculous, the thriller element unbelievable, the characters are stereotypes, but above all  it is frivolous fun and escapism so one can almost excuse the references to a dago, and this sort of tosh:

‘Herman Isaacstein. The representative of the syndicate I spoke to you about.’

‘The all-British syndicate?’

‘Yes. Why?’ ‘

Nothing-nothing-I only wondered, that’s all. Curious names these people have.’

That is how it was in 1925 and for many years after. Trying to sanitise historical attitudes by for example removing the n- word from Mark Twain, or taking out the anti-Semitism from many of the Golden Age writers will blind us to far more serious present day problems. 

Crooked House [1949] is a far superior novel, a classic country house mystery with a dysfunctional family, an elderly victim of a poisoning, Aristide Leonides, [how Christie loved her poisons] and some well drawn characters. Aristide, a Greek, originally came from Smyrna and his elderly sister-in-law does on one occasion refer to him as a dago, but otherwise the book won’t offend as much as the earlier work. 

The Crooked House is lived in by Aristide, and his much younger second wife Brenda.

Aristide’s grown up children by his first wife, Philip and his wife Magda, an actress, who have three children, Sophia engaged to our hero Charles Hayward, and the younger Eustace and Josephine. Roger and his wife Clemency, who don’t have any children. Roger runs Aristide’s business now. Aristide had settled large amounts of money on his children, and everyone in the house appears to be financially very comfortable.

The younger children have a tutor Laurence Brown, who may or may not be having an affair with Brenda. There is also Edith de Haviland, sister of the first Mrs Leonides, and Nannie an elderly retainer who looks after Josephine. 

As Chief Inspector Taverner exclaims-

“Everybody in the damned house had a means and opportunity. What I want is a motive.”

The plot is taut with an ending in which Agatha Christie once again does something completely unconventional. A very good read.

The third English crime fiction book I read this summer was by coincidence The Riddle of The Third Mile [1983] by Colin Dexter.

I have to admit that I found this novel a little hard going. I think the author’s plot twists are a bit too clever for me, and I have come to the conclusion that his reputation does owe a lot to the brilliant acting in the TV series by John Thaw as Morse and Kevin Whately as Lewis. The complexity of this plot blending Oxford Dons, an unidentifiable body with no head or hands, exam results, the college vacation, tooth abscesses, strip clubs, prostitutes and removal firms had me slightly confused for a little while, but then so was Morse.

Back in Morse’s office, Lewis launched into his questions: ‘It’s pretty certainly Brown-Smith’s body, don’t you think, sir?’  

‘Don’t know.’

‘But surely-‘

‘I said I don’t bloody know!’ 

The Riddle of The Third Mile was a good read, although the theme of feuding dons seemed a little repetitive, possibly because I have watched too many episodes of the TV series. 

[Summer reading roundup to be continued]     

THE SECRET OF ANNEXE 3: COLIN DEXTER

The Secret of Annexe 3 published in 1983 is the seventh book in the thirteen book series featuring Inspector Morse  authored by Colin Dexter, a former Classics teacher.

If you once understand an author’s character, the comprehension of his writing becomes easy. ( Longfellow ) 

 

Many people are surprised that there are only thirteen novels in the series because Morse [played so superbly by the late John Thaw]and his trusty subordinate Lewis [Kevin Whately] have seemingly been on our TV screens for ever. Thirty three episodes of Morse, were followed after Morse’s and John Thaw’s tragically early deaths by thirty episodes of the popular spin off series Lewis with Kevin Whately joined by Laurence Fox as DS James Hathaway, and later a prequel series Endeavour set in the 1960s with Shaun Evans as the young DC Morse. 

But to me the most surprising and amusing fact about Colin Dexter is that the author, whose detective novels are set in Oxford, and whose detective will be inexorably linked with that city read Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge. 

Colin Dexter, now 83, has won two Silver Daggers and two Gold Daggers, and a Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime achievement so I won’t impertinently classify my post as a review. But  I’ll make just a few comments about the book, and the thought that it would probably be a good series to read in order.

I could have subtitled this post epigraphs and episodes, because each of the forty four chapters is introduced by an epigraph. The reader knows he is in the hands of an intelligent writer, who by changing perspective between the various characters is able to give a slightly different twist on the standard police procedural. 

When Thomas Bowman discovers a letter that proves that his wife Margaret has been unfaithful the scene is set for a series of events centering around festivities at the Haworth Hotel, where after  a fancy dress party a body is discovered in Annexe 3. The relationship between Morse and Lewis is definitely the best aspect of the books and it never fails to amuse.

‘ I know the place, Lewis. And so should you! It’s the street where Jude and Sue Fawley lived!

“Should I know them?’

‘In Jude the Obscure, Lewis! And “Aldbrickham” is Hardy’s name for Reading, as you’ll remember.’ ‘

Yes, I’d forgotten for the moment,’ said Lewis.

Most of the elements of a good police procedural are in The Secret of Annexe 3; great detectives, love affairs, lust, jealousy, the teasing problem of whether to dispose of your husband or your lover, disguises, muddled identities and some rather sad lives. While I don’t think this is Dexter’s best work it was a pleasant holiday read in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, and the epigraphs were a stimulating read. 

Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave. ( Song of Solomon viii,6 )

[ Photos show the 14th century Great Coxwell Barn in Oxfordshire, somewhere I am sure Inspector Morse would have visited on a rare day off. Epigraphs from the Song of Solomon and Longfellow are in the book along with forty two more.]      

The story in the photographs

The photos I posted yesterday tell the story of both a lost generation and a lost way of life. We are very lucky that the National Trust can preserve the houses, gardens and the stories behind some of the sites for future generations. 

From the top left going clockwise the photos are: 

The pond in the garden of Batemans, the house of Rudyard Kipling; Smallhythe Place, home of actress Ellen Terry; the lawn at Batemans;  Batemans, a view of the house; Igtham Mote, locals tell me it is pronounced Eye Tam; View of the house from the white garden at Sissinghurst, home of Vita Sackville -West and Harold Nicholson; A Bentley in the streets of Rye, where a new version of E.L.Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books [1920-1939] are being filmed; Sweet peas at Igtham Mote.

Our visit to Batemans was a moving experience, Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1907, may be considered controversial today, but he was a patriot when patriotism was considered a virtue.

In 2007 the film My Boy Jack starring David Haigh as the author and Daniel Radcliffe as John Kipling told the story of how Kipling obtained a commission in the Irish Guards for his only son, and how Jack was killed in the disastrous Battle of Loos on 27 September 1915. On that same day Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon of the Black Watch was also killed in action, he was the older brother of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen and mother of our present Queen Elizabeth. Exactly three years later my own uncle was killed serving with the Royal West Kents in the assault on the Hindenburg Line.

The wife of Prince Charles, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall’s three great uncles were all killed on the Western Front between September 1916 and March 1918, and the Prime Minister Henry Asquith’s eldest son Raymond was killed on the Somme. Although I very much doubt it was much of a consolation to my mother, whose eldest brother was killed, or my mother- in- law, whose father was killed, the nation was seemingly “all in it together” during those terrible years. 

Later when we visited Igtham Mote, they had a recording playing of Ralph Fiennes, I think, reading the war poetry by Wilfred Owen, alongside a book containing photographs showing the Royal West Kents in training before going off to France. The owner of Igtham at the time Sir Thomas Colyer -Fergusson’s son Captain Thomas Riversdale Colyer-Fergusson aged 21 won a posthumous Victoria Cross in 1917 at the Third Battle of Ypres. 

So much of what those brave men fought and died for has gone, destroyed by lack of thought or neglect that it is very pleasant to wander through the homes of the wealthy elite of a century ago, and realise that for all their many faults they were prepared to make sacrifices for their country.     

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute,

With sixty second’s worth of distance run,

Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,

And -which is more- you’ll be a Man, my son!

From If… by Rudyard Kipling [1910]   

Evocative of The Golden Age of the English Detective Novel