All posts tagged poison

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (1943)

‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr Poirot, but I think you are interested in—character, shall we say?’
Poirot replied: ‘That, to me, is the principal interest of all my cases.’

Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening…

‘Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race.’

‘You are at least right in this – not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.’

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’

Three points about ‘Five Little Pigs’:

  1. It’s another nursery rhyme story
  2. It’s a cold case
  3. It’s a closed circle mystery

1. Nursery rhyme

Quite obviously this is another of the detective stories Christie concocted from, or constructed in order to parallel, a nursery rhyme (compare ‘Pocket full of Rye’, ‘Crooked House’, ‘Five Little Pigs’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Three Blind Mice’). It has five main suspects who correlate exactly to the five pigs in the rhyme:

This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
And this little piggy had none.
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.

2. Cold case

Poirot is called in to solve a murder which took place sixteen years earlier. Back then beautiful Caroline Crase was convicted of poisoning her husband, the high-living artist Amyas Crale and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end she served just a year before dying in prison.

The motive for the crime was that Amyas was openly having an affair with a beautiful 20-year old woman, Elsa Greer, and just the day before, Elsa had openly taunted Caroline, claiming Amyas was going to divorce her and how soon the family home would be hers (Elsa’s). Various witnesses overheard Caroline saying that would never happen, that she would kill her husband first; and then, later, she was heard having a stand-up row with Amyas, in which she said she would kill him rather than let him run off with another woman.

The means was a poison called coniine, extracted from the plant spotted hemlock. This coniine was the product of a neighbour of the Crales’s, a man named Meredith Blake who had spent years experimenting with herbs, plant extracts and home-brewed medicines. The day before the death, this Meredith, along with his brother Philip, had come over to the Crales’ house for tea, and had delivered quite a monologue about his hobby, and about this poison in particular.

Next day Meredith discovered that his bottle containing coniine (a volatile poisonous compound found in hemlock and other plants) was suddenly half empty. After the death, a bottle with traces of coniine in was found in Caroline’s room. Her story was that, after hearing about its deadly properties, she had stolen some from Meredith’s laboratory, with a view to killing herself if the divorce went ahead. But what clinched her conviction was that this poison was discovered in a bottle of beer she personally brought and served to her husband as he painted a portrait of Elsa in the garden, and which the doctors quickly established as the painter’s cause of death.

Sixteen years later, her daughter, Carla Lemarchant, who was 5 at the time, and was taken away and looked after by relatives in Canada, comes of age (21) whereupon the family solicitor gives her a letter written by her mother claiming that she (Caroline) was innocent, and didn’t murder her father.

Whereupon Carla tracks down Hercule Poirot, meets and hires him to find the identity of the real killer and so clear her mother’s name. As Poirot explains for the umpteenth time, this kind of case suits him because all the forensic clues have long since disappeared and so it is a question almost entirely of psychology, of meeting and questioning the suspects, finding out about their lives and motives, and slowly figuring out who had the character and personality to be the murderer.

Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this’ – he tapped his egg-shaped head – ‘this that
functions!’
(Chapter 1)

And, less obviously, he always needs to know about the personality of the murderee.

‘Have you ever reflected, Mr Blake, that the reason for murder is nearly always to be found by a study of the person murdered?’
‘I hadn’t exactly – yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’
Poirot said:
‘Until you know exactly what sort of a person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of a crime clearly.’
He added:
‘That is what I am seeking for – and what you and your brother have helped to give me – a reconstruction of the man Amyas Crale.’

More about psychology, below.

3. Closed circle

According to Google AI:

A ‘closed circle mystery’ is a subgenre of detective fiction where a crime, usually a murder, occurs within a limited group of suspects who are isolated from the outside world. The core concept is that the perpetrator must be one of the individuals present, and the detective’s task is to identify the killer from this select group.

Thus Poirot quickly finds out that on the day of Amyas Crale’s death, there were five people at the couple’s home (Alderbury) who he proceeds, whimsically, to nickname the five little pigs.

The five little pigs

  1. Philip Blake – the pig who went to market – the younger Blake brother, stockbroker, lives at St. George’s Hill, ‘a prosperous, shrewd, jovial looking man – slightly running to fat’ – ‘a well-fed pig who had gone to market – and fetched the full market price’
  2. Meredith Blake – the pig who stayed at home – the older Blake brother who inherited the estate , a basic huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ squire but who has amused himself with amateur dabbling in herbalism and chemistry – he ‘resembled superficially every other English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes. A shabby old coat of Harris tweed, a weather-beaten, pleasant, middle-aged face with somewhat faded blue eyes, a weak mouth, half hidden by a rather straggly moustache’
  3. Elsa Greer – the pig who ate roast beef, Amyas’s painting model and the woman he was planning to leave his wife for – ‘a superb, slim, straight creature, arrogant, her head turned, her eyes insolent with triumph’ – ‘They’ve fed her meat all right,’ he [Depleach] said. ‘She’s been a go-getter. She’s had three husbands since then. In and out of the divorce court as easy as you please. And every time she makes a change, it’s for the better. Lady Dittisham – that’s who she is now. Open any Tatler and you’re sure to find her.’
  4. Miss Cecilia Williams – the piggy who had none – Angela’s governess, a small, elderly lady in a neat shabby dress, living in very straitened circumstances in a one-room flat, but buoyed up by her Victorian sense of duty and feminist loathing of men
  5. Angela Warren – the piggy who went wee wee wee – Caroline’s younger half-sister who, as a child, she threw a paperweight at and blinded in one eye (!) – has turned out a very distinguished woman: ‘traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical Society’

Schematic

Christie’s early novels are chaotic harum-scarum adventures. In the later 1920s and 1930s they become more structured. Murder on the Orient Express is a classic example of her taste for clarity and logical structure, with a chapter each devoted to the testimony of all the witnesses. ‘Five Little Pigs’ as another of the same type, its contents laid out with the clarity and logic of an official report, feeling almost like an engineer or architect’s schematic design for a novel.

Thus in book one, Poirot goes to interview the key figures form the trial 16 years earlier, the counsel for the defence, for the prosecution, a young solicitor involved in the trial, and the Crase family solicitor. Then he goes to see each of the five key suspects, in the same order as the nursery rhyme. He not only interviews them (with the thin excuse that he is involved in a book which is being written about the murder) but asks each of them to write their own account of what happened and why. And it is the five written statements by the five little pigs which make up part two of the book.

And then in part three, Poirot uses everything he’s learned in order to, as usual, create a detailed reconstruction of the crime which, at various points seems to incriminate every one of the piggies, before, of course, revealing the actual murderer with a flourish!

Book One

  1. Counsel for the Defence
  2. Counsel for the Prosecution
  3. The Young Solicitor
  4. The Old Solicitor
  5. The Police Superintendent
  6. This Little Pig Went to Market [Philip Blake]
  7. This Little Pig Stayed at Home [Meredith Blake]
  8. This Little Pig Had Roast Beef [Elsa Greer]
  9. This Little Pig Had None [Cecilia Williams]
  10. This Little Pig Cried ‘Wee Wee Wee’ [Angela Warren]

Book Two

  • Narrative of Philip Blake
  • Narrative of Meredith Blake
  • Narrative of Lady Dittisham
  • Narrative of Cecilia Williams
  • Narrative of Angela Warren

Book Three

  1. Conclusions
  2. Poirot Asks Five Questions
  3. Reconstruction
  4. Truth
  5. Aftermath

Christie makes it neat by attributing part of the schematic, diagrammatic layout of the text to Poirot’s own, well-known symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Thus towards the end, in part 3 chapter 2, we find Poirot telling himself he doesn’t really need to interview Miss Williams, but…

Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait… No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.

Cast

As well as the five little pigs, additional characters are:

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Carla Lemarchant – daughter of Caroline and Amyas Crale – named Caroline after her mother, her first and last names were changed when she was sent to Montral, Canada, to live with her aunt and uncle when her mother was sent to prison
  • John Rattery – Carla’s fiancé, a ‘ tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes’
  • Sir Montague Depleach – council for the defence i.e. defended Caroline Crase 16 years ago – ‘force, magnetism, an overbearing and slightly bullying personality. He got his effects by a rapid and dramatic change of manner. Handsome, urbane, charming one minute—then an almost magical transformation, lips back, snarling smile—out for your blood’
  • Quentin Fogg, K.C. – ‘thin, pale, singularly lacking in what is called personality. His questions were quiet and unemotional —but steadily persistent. If Depleach was like a rapier, Fogg was like an auger. He bored steadily. He had never reached spectacular fame, but he was known as a first-class man on law. He usually won his cases’
  • George Mayhew – junior solicitor in the firm representing Caroline
  • Edmunds – managing clerk of Mayhew’s firm of solicitors
  • Mr Caleb Jonathan – senior solicitor in the Crale family firm, retired to Essex
  • Ex-Superintendent Hale – leading officer on the Crale murder investigation

Locations

The three main properties are on the south Devon coast.

  • Handcross Manor – home of the Blake family, inherited home of Meredith Blake – just a short row across a creek from…
  • Alderbury – home of Amyas and Caroline Crale
  • Ferriby Grange – home of Lady Tressillian, where Angela is sent after Amyas’s death
  • Montreal, Canada – home of Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise Lemarchant, where 5-year-old Carla was sent to live after her mother went to prison

The psychology book

‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.
‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’

When he sets off to interview the five little pigs, Poirot needs a cover story. Saying he’s actively investigating a 16-year-old crime would raise lots of questions. So he comes up with the more plausible notion that he has been commissioned to write a book about classic crimes. The sales angle is that he’ll give the crimes a modern, psychological interpretation.

‘It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes – from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality.’

As Poirot explains to Philip Blake, in the olden days the interest in crimes often focused on ‘romance’, about love triangles and so on. Nowadays, psychology is in the ascendant, and the reading public want to hear all about complexes and traumas etc. (This, by the way, is flatly disproved by Christie’s own works, which include very occasional references to actual psychology, to Freud, complexes and so on – but are still heavily reliant on love triangles, affairs, adultery, jealousy and so on.)

Obviously this handily chimes with Poirot’s own genuine interest in psychology and in the psychology of the five main suspects, so his cover story fits neatly with his actual interests.

‘My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology – the eternal why? of human behaviour. That, Mr Blake, is what interests the world in crime today.’

Poirot uses his outsiderness

In previous novels we’ve seen Poirot consciously deploy his foreignness, his outsiderness, when it suits him, when it gives him a tactical advantage. In this novel he several times lays it on with a trowel, deliberately playing up his foreignness in order to play to his interviewees’ prejudices and lull them. For example when trying to inveigle himself with hale-fellow-well-met Philip Blake.

‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’ But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.

So:

Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.

Whereas with the other Blake brother, Meredith, the piggy who stayed at home and is a more traditional country squire:

Hercule Poirot prided himself on knowing how to handle an ‘old school tie’. It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really…’

Poirot imagines Meredith Blake’s view of him:

Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes – button boots! – an incredible moustache! Not his – Meredith Blake’s – kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game. A foreigner.

But by playing up to this stereotype, Poirot lulls his interviewees into thinking he is stupid, they are clever, and so gets more information out of them.

Everyday sexism

The case, at least to start with, appears to be entirely about the eternal triangle, a married couple broken up by a young woman seducing the husband, and the murderous jealousy of the wronged wife. Which just triggers, in my mind, the tired conclusion: Humans, and their complete inability to manage their relationships! Why on earth are they called ‘adults’? How on earth do they think they can run a planet when they can’t even run their own relationships?

Anyway, the focus on sexual relationships means the novel lends itself to more than the usual quota of casual generalisations about the sexes, with the majority of them – rather inevitably – being unflattering comments about ‘women’.

Poirot said: ‘With women, love always comes first.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ said Superintendent Hale with feeling.
‘Men,’ continued Poirot, ‘and especially artists—are different.’

FOGG: ‘Very good looking, hard-boiled, modern. To the women in the court she [Elsa] stood for a type – type of the home-breaker. Homes weren’t safe when girls like that were wandering abroad. Girls damn full of sex and contemptuous of the rights of wives and mothers.’

Superintendent Hale said: ‘Oh, you know what women are! Have to get at each other’s throats.’

‘The girl [Elsa] was a good looker, all right,’ said Hale. ‘Lots of make-up and next to no clothes on. It isn’t decent the way these girls go about. And that was sixteen years ago, mind you. Nowadays one wouldn’t think anything of it. But then – well, it shocked me. Trousers and one of those canvas shirts, open at the neck – and not another thing, I should say!’

Philip Blake said: ‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’

‘Women will always see a private detective! Men will tell him to go to the devil.’ (Poirot)

‘There was Mrs Crale, there was Miss Williams, there was a housemaid. It is a woman’s job to pack—not a man’s.’ (Poirot)

And much more in the same vein, scores of casual generalisations about the character of all women, or all men, which have, maybe, become unacceptable in our time…

Countered by feminism

‘She was a great feminist and disliked men.’
(Angela Warren on Miss Williams)

The sweeping generalisations about ‘women’ made by pretty much all the men in the story are given a strong counter in the character of the impoverished old governess, Miss Williams, who is described more than once as a ‘feminist’.

For a brief moment you think Christie is fighting back against these sexist stereotypes. But then you realise that Miss Williams is herself a stereotype, a caricature of the dried-up old spinster, impoverished and bitterly anti-male. Poirot is interviewing her:

‘He was devoted to her as she was to him?’
‘They were a devoted couple. But he, of course, was a man.’
Miss Williams contrived to put into that last word a wholly Victorian significance.
‘Men—’ said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says ‘Bolsheviks’ – as an earnest Communist says ‘Capitalists!’ – as a good housewife says ‘Blackbeetles’ – so did Miss Williams say ‘Men!’
From her spinster’s, governess’s life, there rose up a blast of fierce feminism. Nobody hearing her speak could doubt that to Miss Williams Men were the Enemy!

And Christie shows that feminists are just as capable of stereotyping and judging men as the chauvinist men are of stereotyping women.

‘Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men—’
Poirot interrupted indignantly:
‘I am not a sentimentalist.’

It is of course a woman writing all this. And it’s worth making the point that all the ‘feminists’ in Christie’s novels are liable to be mocked. According to her biographer, Laura Thompson, Christie had no time for feminism. She associated it very much with anti-men i.e. misandrist attitudes (misandrist: ‘a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against men’) and this is precisely the attitude she attributes to Miss Williams. Christie thought it was as absurd for feminists to be anti-men as it was for what she called woman haters (what we nowadays call misogynists) to be anti-women. For her, the two extremes were equally as ridiculous.

Christie and stereotypes

But more broadly, the flagrancy of Miss Williams’ character reminds you all over again that Christie’s novels are made out of stereotypes. Certain ones – the stereotyping of women and, occasionally, of ethnic minorities, in Christie’s works – are what leap out to us because, a hundred years later, they are (still) the hot button topics of our day, drilled as we are at work and in all public spaces with the mantras of diversity and inclusion.

But Christie deploys stereotypical ‘wisdom’ or tropes about pretty much every human type and category. This reliance on stereotypical characters expressing stereotypical views is what makes her novels genre fiction and nowhere near ‘literature’.

Thus characters all make sweeping generalisations not only about men, women and numerous sub-types of men and women, but about servants, butlers, the police, lawyers, the entire criminal justice system, about children and teenagers, and many more…

Artists are usually careless about money matters…

Even Poirot sums up all the suspects as ‘types’ – for a start, describing them as ‘little pigs’ isn’t that flattering, is it? He thinks of Meredith as a typical country squire, of Philip Blake as a typical affluent stockbroker, of Miss Williams as a typical spinster, and so on.

And, of course, Poirot is very fond of making sweeping generalisations about criminals, about ‘the criminal mind’, murderers, and so on.

From one perspective Christie’s texts amount to a kind of battle or conflict between rival generalisations: Superintendent Hale’s generalisations about women or murder being rebutted by Poirot’s countervailing generalisations, all the characters sharing their prejudices about artists and ‘the artistic temperament’. In a sense every single conversation can be seen as a conflict of generalisations.

He looked a bit ashamed of himself. Men do when women pin them down in a corner.
(Philip Blake describing Amyas)

Then he calmed down a little and said women had no sense of proportion.
(Philip on Amyas again)

‘I have to admit that she looked incredibly beautiful that afternoon. Women do when they’ve got what they want.’
(Philip Blake)

‘It made him appear at a disadvantage, and men do not like appearing at a disadvantage. It upsets their vanity.’
(Miss Williams)

A study of Christie’s novels makes you realise just how much human conversation is made up of dodgy generalisations, very often based on a person’s own anecdotal evidence, or ‘someone told me x or y’ – or just picked up from the culture at large.

And realise just how much a person’s character can, in a sense, be defined by the generalisations or mental axioms they operate with. Most people’s generalisations aren’t meant to be taken in a statistically significant, scientific or logical way. They are just ways of expressing character, or mood. In a sense a person’s character is the totality of the generalisations they harbour. When Elsa says the following to Amyas:

‘I think you’re right about Spain. That’s the first place we’ll go to. And you must take me to see a bullfight. It must be wonderful. Only I’d like the bull to kill the man—not the other way about. I understand how Roman women felt when they saw a man die. Men aren’t much, but animals are splendid.’

That final axiom has no meaning or value whatsoever as objective information about the world. It is entirely an expression of her character and attitude, which are young and selfish, thoughtlessly cynical, conventionally rebellious. Meredith Blake, who gives us this quote, draws the correct conclusion:

I suppose she was rather like an animal herself – young and primitive and with nothing yet of man’s sad experience and doubtful wisdom.

But this is because he is a puppet in his creator’s hands. The supposed quote from Elsa, along with its sweeping generalisation, is entirely meant to characterise her, and Meredith’s comment is just an elaboration of the same point: a repetition of it in a different mode.

But since Elsa never existed, in fact none of these people ever existed, these kinds of generalisations should be seen as simply one of the techniques by which Christie creates the distinctions between the characters she’s inventing. Empty of intrinsic value or meaning, they are just rhetorical strategies associated with the textual entities referred to as characters.

Summary

In all my summaries of Christie’s novels I’ve broken off before the final act and never revealed whodunnit. I won’t here, either – except to say that the big reveal and explanation of whodunnit in lots of them, by far the majority, is often ridiculously contrived and complicated and often unbelievable. ‘Five Little Pigs’ has a claim to be one of the best of her novels because the revelation, when it comes, is not only not too preposterously contrived, but psychologically believable and convincingly bleak.

Credit

‘Five Little Pigs’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943.

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Posted by Simon on September 12, 2025

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Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie (1937)

‘Charles wouldn’t kill anybody. He’s a very careful man.’
‘All the same, Mademoiselle, it is the careful men who commit the cleverest murders.’
(Murder in the Mews, chapter 6)

‘You are hopeful of success, M. Poirot?’ Lord Mayfield sounded a trifle incredulous.
The little man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? One has only to reason – to reflect.’
(Poirot emphasising the importance of thinking, reflecting and pondering, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘This affair,’ he said, ‘is more complicated than it appears.’
(The classic statement which someone makes about the murder mystery in every Christie story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Leave it to Hercule Poirot. The lies I invent are always most delicate and most convincing.’
(Poirot’s immense self confidence, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Good-morning, mademoiselle. Yes, it is as you say. You now behold a detective – a great detective, I may say – in the act of detecting!’
(Poirot gently mocking himself in Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 11)

‘Oh la la!’ cried Poirot. ‘I have been a fool, but a fool!’ The other stared at him.
‘I beg your pardon, M. Poirot?’
‘It is that a portion of the puzzle has become clear to me. Something I did not see before. But it all fits in. Yes, it fits in with beautiful precision.’
(The Eureka moment that occurs in every Poirot story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 5)

‘After breakfast,’ he said, ‘I will explain. I should like everyone to assemble in Sir Gervase’s study at ten o’clock.’
(The classic ‘you’re probably all wondering why I called you all together here this evening…’ moment, Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 12)

‘Murder in the Mews’ is a volume of four long short stories, some of them worked up from short stories previously published in magazines into 80-page novellas, long enough to require chapters.

  1. Murder in the Mews
  2. The Incredible Theft
  3. Dead Man’s Mirror
  4. Triangle at Rhodes

Murder in the Mews

It is Fireworks Night as Poirot and Inspector Japp are walking back to Poirot’s house. They take a short cut through a mews (Bardsley Garden Mews) and Japp jokes that it’s a good night for a murder because nobody would hear a shot.

Not to the reader’s complete surprise, next morning Poirot receives a phone call telling him that, guess what, there was a shot in that very same mews the night before, only it appears to have been a suicide.

So Poirot meets Japp at the murder scene and they start their investigation. 14 Bardsley Garden mews was shared by two young women, a Miss Jane Plenderleith and a youngish widow, Mrs Allen. Miss Plenderleith got home after being out of town for a few days (weekend with the Bentincks in Essex), knocked at her housemate’s door, discovered it was locked, called the police who came round, broke down the door and discovered Mrs Allen’s body on the floor, with a fatal gunshot wound to the head and the gun in her hand.

Except that the gun wasn’t really gripped, it had more the appearance of being placed in her hand. And, more tellingly, the shot is to her left temple whereas the gun was placed in her right hand. I.e. it’s an anatomically impossibility.

So Poirot and Japp set out to work in tandem but with their different approaches, interviewing the flatmate, Mrs Allen’s MP fiancé, various neighbours in other houses along the mews etc. The story is by way of being a nice comparison of the styles of the two men (something we have, of course, seen in quite a few of the novels) and so contains a number of familiar tropes e.g. Japp thinking Poirot is going soft / too old, when he dwells on apparent trivia.

‘Eh bien,’ said Poirot. ‘I shall complete my search for the unimportant. There is still the dustbin.’ He skipped nimbly out of the room. Japp looked after him with an air of disgust.
‘Potty,’ he said. ‘Absolutely potty.’
Inspector Jameson preserved a respectful silence. His face said with British superiority: ‘Foreigners!’
Aloud he said: ‘So that’s Mr Hercule Poirot! I’ve heard of him.’
‘Old friend of mine,’ explained Japp. ‘Not half as balmy as he looks, mind you. All the same, he’s getting on now.’
‘Gone a bit gaga as they say, sir,’ suggested Inspector Jameson. ‘Ah well, age will tell…’ (Chapter 4)

Poirot’s foreignness

Note how Japp’s slur on Poirot’s age is combined with Jameson’s smug contempt for Poirot’s foreignness, his outsiderness. But this ‘foreignness’ is very flexible; it has multiple purposes.

Poirot mocks the British A foreignness which comes into play a bit later when Christie has Poirot gently mock the English class system, as he does in quite a few of the novels, especially round ideas of being pukka or playing cricket, the right sort etc. Here’s Poirot interviewing Miss Plenderleith, who tells him that:

‘Charles has got a very good nose for anybody who isn’t well, quite – quite – ‘
‘And Major Eustace was not what you call quite – quite – ?’ asked Poirot.
The girl said dryly: ‘No, he wasn’t. Bit hairy at the heel. Definitely not out of the top drawer.’
‘Alas, I do not know those two expressions. You mean to say he was not the pukka sahib?’
A fleeting smile passed across Jane Plenderleith’s face, but she replied gravely, ‘No.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot deploys his foreignness strategically, playing it up when he sees that it might be a way of getting round an interviewee, buttering them up or making them lower their defences. Here is Japp introducing Poirot to the MP:

‘By the way, let me introduce M. Hercule Poirot. You may have heard of him.’
Mr Laverton-West fastened himself interestedly on the little Belgian.
‘Yes-yes-I have heard the name.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Poirot, his manner suddenly very foreign. ‘Believe me, my heart bleeds for you. Such a loss ! Such agony as you must be enduring! Ah, but I will say no more. How magnificently the English hide their emotions.’ He whipped out his cigarette case. ‘Permit me – Ah, it is empty, Japp?’ (Chapter 7)

The point of this little bit of play-acting is to lull Laverton-West into tendering one of his cigarettes because the brand of cigarette stubs found in the murdered woman’s bedroom turn out to be an important clue.

Xenophobes hate Poirot’s foreignness And in moments of anger, Brits can use his foreignness against Poirot, as when their interviewing makes Major Eustace lose his temper.

‘Who are you, I’d like to know?’ Eustace turned and spat the words at him. ‘Some kind of damned dago! What are you butting in for?’ (Chapter 8)

Plot

It’s a sort of chamber piece because all the clues are at the scene, in the bedroom where the body was found, and the solution is relatively straightfoward, concerning a troublesome man, Major Eustace, who had been calling to see Mrs Allen over the past year or so…

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • George – Poirot’s immaculate man-servant
  • Inspector Japp
  • Inspector Jameson – assisting Japp
  • Dr Brett – police doctor, time of death etc
  • Miss Jane Plenderleith – a dark, efficient-looking young woman of twenty-seven or eight’; drives an Austin Seven; plays golf
  • Mrs Barbara Allen – the dead woman, married young (17) in India; husband, then baby daughter both died; came to England; years later was engaged to be married to…
  • Charles Laverton-West MP – ‘a man of medium height with a very definite personality. He was clean-shaven, with the mobile mouth of an actor, and the slightly prominent eyes that so often go with the gift of oratory. He was good-looking in a quiet, well-bred way’
  • Mrs Hogg – ‘I’m not one to gossip’ style working class neighbour
  • Fred Hogg – small boy and eye witness to a late-night visitor to the house
  • Major Eustace – someone Mrs Allen met in India, ‘ a man of forty-five, military bearing, toothbrush moustache, smartly dressed and driving a Standard Swallow saloon car’; ‘ a tall man, good-looking in a somewhat coarse fashion. There was a puffiness round the eyes small, crafty eyes that belied the good-humoured geniality of his manner’

Poirot’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

Poirot explains why he makes such efforts to solve the mystery of the missing attaché case:

‘My friend, an affair must be rounded off properly. Everything must be explained.’

The police just need enough evidence to secure a conviction; Poirot, driven by his OCD / personal predilections, needs to understand every ramification of a case, and tie off every lose end, as Japp mocks:

‘Though what this attaché-case business has to do with the crime I can’t imagine. I can’t see that it’s got anything at all to do with it.’
‘Precisely, my friend, I agree with you – it has nothing to do with it.’
‘Then why… No, don’t tell me! Order and method and everything nicely rounded off! Oh, well, it’s a fine day.’ (Chapter 9)

Bookish references

‘How long has she been dead?’
‘She was killed at eleven thirty-three yesterday evening,’ said Brett promptly. Then he grinned as he saw Japp’s surprised face.
‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said. ‘Had to do the super doctor of fiction!’ (Chapter 2)

Sherlock Holmes reference

As I’ve pointed out in my reviews of all the novels, Christie felt compelled to make at least one jokey reference to Sherlock Holmes in every one of her stories. Here there are two:

‘Damnation!’ Japp said. ‘I knew there was something. But what the devil is it? I searched that case pretty thoroughly.’
‘My poor Japp – but it is – how do you say, obvious, my dear Watson‘?’ (Chapter 9)

At the climax:

‘It was odd, very odd, that the room should smell – as it did, perfectly fresh.’
‘So that’s what you were getting at!’ Japp sighed. ‘Always have to get at things in such a tortuous way.’
‘Your Sherlock Holmes did the same. He drew attention, remember, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time – and the answer to that was there was no curious incident. The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ (Chapter 10)

Cars

Major Eustace drives a Standard Swallow saloon car, Miss Plenderleith drives a Baby Austin Seven.

Baba and sirrop and chocolate

Poirot’s favourite dessert is a Baba au Rhum i.e. rum baba.

His favourite drink is the non-alcoholic sirop de cassis, ‘syrup of the blackcurrants’ or blackcurrant cordial, not unlike the English cordial, ‘Ribena’.

Poirot always drank chocolate for breakfast – a revolting habit.
(Captain Hastings telling us in ‘Dumb Witness’)

Payoff

‘Not murder disguised as suicide, but suicide made to look like murder!’
‘Yes, and very cleverly done, too. Nothing over-emphasised.’

2. The Incredible Theft

We are among the posh, the ‘top drawer’ of society, at a dinner party given by Lord Mayfield with half a dozen posh guests. The dinner has two purposes. In attendance is Air Marshal Sir George Carrington and he has come to discuss with Lord M ‘a discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’ which was, of course, of burning importance in the troubled mid-1930s as the shades of war deepened. That’s how it’s described initially, but then this morphs into repeated references to ‘the new bomber’, its design and specification.

The second aspect of the evening is the presence of Mrs Vanderlyn. She is a very attractive mature lady who has had no fewer than three husbands, rather comically one each from each of Britain’s possible enemies, Italy, Germany and Russia, is reputed to have ‘contacts’ in each of those countries, and lives a luxury life far beyond her apparent income. In other words, as Lord Mayfield explains to Sir George, she is probably a spy. The thing is no-one’s been able to pin anything on her. And so this dinner is not only the pretext for a chat about the new bomber between the two chaps, but by way of being bait to persuade Mrs V to take a risk, to come out into the open, and to be caught. At which point she can be arrested, interrogated and neutralised.

But all this is hidden behind the gentle manners of a posh dinner party and so, after dinner, the ladies retire, the chaps drink port and smoke cigars, then reconvene in the drawing room to play some hands of bridge. By then it’s late and most of the party retire to bed, while Sir George and Lord M go for a stroll on the terrace outside his office (which has french windows opening onto it).

It’s while during this stroll that they see a shadowy figure nip out of his study and into the night. Moments later they re-enter the study where Lord M’s secretary, Mr Carlile has gathered the technical specifications of the new bomber for the men to discuss.

Except it isn’t there! When Lord M leafs through the papers, he asks where the spec has gone, Carlile insists he just put it there but then himself can’t find it. When quizzed, he says 5 minutes earlier he heard a woman’s scream, and ran into the hall to find Mrs Vanderlyn’s maid standing on the stairs claiming she’d seen a ghost. It took a few minutes to calm here down and send her backstairs to bed, at which point Carlile returned to the study and Lord M and Sir George entered it.

It must have been during those few minutes of his absence that someone darted into the study, stole the specifications, and this was the figure the old chaps saw nipping off into the darkness. Someone has stolen the ‘discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’!!

So guess who Sir George advises Lord Mayfield to call in to solve the mystery and get the plans back? Clue: his name begins with P and ends in oirot.

Cast

  • Lord Mayfield – ‘a big man, square-shouldered, with thick silvery hair, a big straight nose and a slightly prominent chin. It was a face that lent itself easily to caricature’
  • Lady Julia Carrington – ‘a woman of forty, tall, dark and vivacious. She was very thin, but still beautiful. Her hands and feet in particular were exquisite. Her manner was abrupt and restless, that of a woman who lived on her nerves’
  • Air Marshal Sir George Carrington – Lady Julia’s husband, ‘still retained the bluff breeziness of the ex-Naval man’
  • Mrs Vanderlyn – ‘an extremely good-looking blonde. Her voice held a soupçon of American accent, just enough to be pleasant without undue exaggeration’
  • Mrs Macatta MP – ‘a great authority on Housing and Infant Welfare. She barked out short sentences rather than spoke them, and was generally of somewhat alarming aspect’; a feminist
  • Reggie Carrington – 21 and completely uninterested in Housing, Infant Welfare and indeed any political subject – ‘ the weak mouth camouflaged by the rather charming smile, the indecisive chin, the eyes set far apart, the rather narrow head’
  • Mr Carlile – Lord Mayfield’s private secretary, ‘a pale young man with pince-nez and an air of intelligent reserve’, been with his lordship for nine years
  • Mademoiselle Leonie – Mrs Vanderlyn’s attractive young French maid

Foreignness

Once again Poirot’s foreignness is brought up:

Lord Mayfield said slowly: ‘Why drag in a wretched foreigner we know nothing about?’
But I happen to know a lot about him. The man’s a marvel.’

And:

‘By the Lord, George, I thought you were too much of an old John Bull to put your trust in a Frenchman, however clever.’
‘He’s not even a Frenchman, he’s a Belgian,’ said Sir George in a rather shamefaced manner. (Chapter 3)

And:

‘To send for a queer foreigner like this seems very odd to me,’ said Reggie. ‘What has been taken, Father?’

Christie’s comic feminists

The book before this, ‘Cards on the Table’, is notable for the advent of a kind of avatar of Christie, an alter ego, the fictional female author of detective stories Mrs Ariadne Oliver who also happens to be a passionate and outspoken feminist. Well, there’s an echo of her here in the character Mrs Macatta, who is an MP, an ardent advocate of social reform, and a feminist. At least she’s quick to criticise men:

‘Lord Mayfield has brains,’ allowed Mrs Macatta. ‘And he has carved his career out entirely for himself. He owes nothing to hereditary influence. He has a certain lack of vision, perhaps. In that I find all men sadly alike. They lack the breadth of a woman’s imagination. Woman, M. Poirot, is going to be the great force in government in ten years’ time.’ (Chapter 6)

Nearly as critical of men as she is of women who don’t agree with her:

Poirot invited Mrs Macatta’s opinion of Mrs Vanderlyn – and got it.
‘One of those absolutely useless women, M. Poirot. Women that make one despair of one’s own sex! A parasite, first and last a parasite.’
‘Men admired her?’
‘Men!’ Mrs Macatta spoke the word with contempt. ‘Men are always taken in by those very obvious good looks.’

So she despises all men, and all women who don’t share her beliefs, and it all leads up to a call for the entire nation to be subjected to sweeping moral reform:

‘The evils of gambling, M. Poirot, are only slightly less than the evils caused by drink. If I had my way this country should be purified.’
Poirot was forced to listen to a somewhat lengthy discussion on the purification of England’s morals.

Tempting to say that feminists haven’t changed that much in the past 90 years, still the same unquestioning self-confidence, the dismissal of anyone who disagrees as morally deficient, still the same ambition to bring about a sweeping moral transformation, ban porn, overthrow the patriarchy, abolish the male gaze, end domestic abuse – no doubt all eminently worthy aims, and just as achievable as Mrs Macatta’s goals of ending drunkenness and immorality.

That’s my contentious view. What isn’t contentious is that Christie deliberately made her feminist characters figures of fun. She found full-on feminist views good material for humour.

Interviews

For sure there are physical clues to be found and assessed but the core of the stories is Poirot’s lengthy interviews with the other characters / suspects. There’s a deep connection between the way he interrogates the characters and the art of the author herself. In a non-genre novel we get to understand the characters via their interactions in different settings. Whereas the Christie-style detective story, the characters are lined up as in a queue, sometimes literally in a queue, waiting to go one by one into the room where they will be interviewed by the moderator figure. This happens in Murder on the Orient Express, Death in the Clouds and again, here, where, the day after the robbery, Poirot makes his base in the study and then interviews each of the other characters one by one. This, not their interactions with each other, is how we find out about them.

It is very schematic, isn’t it? It’s almost like a diagram of a novel rather than a full, proper novel. In works like this and ‘Orient’ you see the narrative process reduced to its bare bones:

  • mysterious event (murder or theft) occurs
  • all the suspects are interviewed one by one at length
  • the solution and explanation are revealed

Maybe it’s because the essence of the narrative is so samey that Christie was able to knock out such an impressive number of stories. Obviously the settings, characters and details change in every one. And yet, on the deepest level, they’re all the same.

Poirot’s symmetry OCD

Poirot went back to the fireplace and carefully rearranged the ornaments on the mantelpiece. (Chapter 7)

3. Dead Man’s Mirror

This is the longest of the three stories at 108 pages. On the face of it another murder mystery, it is also an extended satire on the foibles and eccentricities of the poshest of the English aristocracy.

Eccentric old Gervase Chevenix-Gore, last male descendant of a family which dates back to the Norman Conquest. The setup is simple. At his flat in London Poirot receives a letter from Gervase asking him to come and see him at the grand family home, as he suspects he is the victim of a fraud but must manage the matter with discretion. But when Poirot (having taken the train from London) arrives at the house, arriving just as the gong for dinner has been sounded to the dozen or so members of family and house guests all assembled there – Gervase doesn’t show up and when they break down the locked door of his study, they find him slumped at his desk, gun in hand, shot through the head, an obvious case of suicide. His desk faced a mirror and the bullet had gone through his skull and shattered this mirror.

However, only Poirot (and the reader) know that Gervase sent the letter inviting him down and so had no reason to commit suicide; the opposite, we would have expected him to be waiting to engage Poirot and explain what he wanted him to do.

So, in the time-honoured style, Poirot and Major Riddle set about interviewing all the family and guests, an entertaining assemblage of florid characters. Who had a motive? Who had the opportunity etc? As you would expect, the more the pair dig, the more cross-currents and motivations they discover, not least in the terms of the dead man’s will, often the first place to start in the murder of a rich old man. As Poirot puts it:

‘Do you not agree, my friend, that the more we learn, the less and less motive we find for suicide? But for murder, we begin to have a surprising collection of motives.’ (Chapter 8)

Surprising to Poirot maybe. Not to anyone who’s read an Agatha Christie story.

The mirror as metaphor

There’s generally very little symbolism in a Christie story. So I was struck when the mirror is used as a metaphor for the complexity of the situation which Poirot and Riddle (inevitably) uncover:

‘What the devil –’ began Major Riddle, and ended rather hopelessly: ‘It gets more and more difficult to keep track of this business.’
Poirot nodded. He had picked up the little piece of earth that had fallen from Ruth’s shoe and was holding it thoughtfully in his hand.
‘It is like the mirror smashed on the wall,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s mirror. Every new fact we come across shows us some different angle of the dead man. He is reflected from every conceivable point of view. We shall have soon a complete picture…’ (Chapter 10)

Cast

Preliminary

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Mr Satterthwaite – expert on the aristocracy, who we’ve met in ‘Three Act Tragedy’

At the house

  • Gervase Chevenix-Gore
  • Vanda Chevenix Gore – his wife, ‘an Arbuthnot, very handsome girl. She’s still quite a handsome
    woman. Frightfully vague, though. Devoted to Gervase. She’s got a leaning towards the occult, I believe. Wears amulets and scarabs and gives out that she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen’ – thinks she’s a reincarnation of Hatshepsut and before that, was a priestess in Atlantis’
  • Ruth Chevenix-Gore – adopted daughter: ‘they’ve no children of their own. Very attractive girl in the modern style’ – ‘a well-chiselled nose, slightly aquiline, and a clear, sharp line of jaw. Her black hair swept back from her face into a mass of little tight curls. Her colouring was of carnation clearness and brilliance, and owed little to make-up. She was, so Hercule Poirot thought, one of the loveliest girls he had seen’ – ‘a devilishly attractive girl. Has played havoc with most of the young fellows round here’
  • Hugo Trent – Gervase’s nephew – ‘Pamela Chevenix-Gore married Reggie Trent and Hugo was their only child’ – in ‘the Blues’ i.e. The Royal Regiment of Horse Guards – ‘ a moustache and an air of modest arrogance’
  • Susan Cardwell – house guest, ‘rather a good-looking girl with red hair’
  • Colonel Bury – an old friend of the family’, ‘almost a tame cat about the house. Kind of A.D.C. to Lady Chevenix-Gore’, ‘follows her about like a dog’
  • Mr Forbes – an old friend and the family lawyer, both devoted to Vanda back in the day – very proper and formal, ‘I never guess’ – wears a pince-nez
  • Godfrey Burrows – Gervase’s secretary, ‘ good-looking, and knows it. Not quite out of the top drawer’ – turns out he thinks Gervase’s attitude was feudal and ridiculous
  • Miss Lingard – ‘little, middle-aged prim woman’, research assistant for the history of his family which Gervase has been writing for the last six months
  • Captain Lake – Sir Gervase’s agent for the estate, ‘a tall, fair-haired man in a lounge suit’
  • Snell – the butler

The investigation

  • Major Riddle – Chief Constable of the fictional county of Westshire, ‘a tall, spruce-looking man’
  • the police surgeon – ‘a lank elderly man with grizzled hair’
  • police inspector – ‘a tall impassive-faced man in plain clothes’
  • Mr Forbes – family lawyer

Bookish references

‘It’s all very well, Poirot. But the evidence is clear enough. Door locked, key in his own pocket. Window closed and fastened. I know these things happen in books – but I’ve never come across them in real life.’ (Chief Constable Riddle, Chapter 5)

Or the movies:

‘You’re getting a bit too sensational, I think, Poirot.’
‘You think what I suggest is too like the pictures? But life, Major Riddle, is often amazingly like the pictures.’ (Chapter 8)

The tribulations of being rich

Christie’s stories testify, now and then, to the impact of the 1930s Depression, pointing out that all wealthy people have taken a hit. The Chevenix-Gore family lawyer in this story, says the family fortune has been impacted. More impactful, though, was some bad investment advice given him by his friend Colonel Bury. When they interview him, Bury justifies himself against his friend’s reproaches:

‘Didn’t seem to realise that the whole world was going through a period of crisis. All stocks and shares bound to be affected.’ (Chapter 8)

While the lawyer draws a general, and amusing, conclusion:

Mr Forbes sighed. ‘Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows and that is saying a good deal.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot is old

We (well I) are hoodwinked into thinking Poirot is a reasonably agile, late-middle-aged man by the image of sprightly dapper David Suchet in the extensive ITV adaptations. And yet the texts themselves often tell a different story, emphasising that Poirot is, quite simply, ‘a small, elderly man’.

The revelation

You can’t help smiling when, at the conclusion of his investigations, Poirot asks the household to convene in the study for his big explanation which he kicks off with the classic phrase:

‘I have asked you all to come here so that you may hear the true facts of Sir Gervase’s suicide.’ (Chapter 12)

It’s as enjoyably, reassuringly formulaic as panto.

4. Triangle at Rhodes

‘Human nature is simply fascinating. Don’t you think so, M. Poirot?’
(posh Miss Lyall accidentally puts her finger on Poirot’s central axiom, Chapter 1)

Improbably, Poirot is on holiday on the Greek island. He is of the old school which believes in completely covering your body in the sun. Beside him sits:

Miss Pamela Lyall, who sat beside him and talked ceaselessly, represented the modern school of thought in that she was wearing the barest minimum of clothing on her sun-browned person.

There’s another nugget of social history, when one of the characters laments that Rhodes is such a long way to travel from England. Yes but just imagine, says, Miss Sarah Blake, if it was easier to get to:

‘Yes, but then it would be awful. Rows and rows of people laid out like fish on a slab. Bodies everywhere!’ (Chapter 1)

Which is exactly what started to happen in the 1970s with the advent of package holidays and has been happening ever since. Fifty years of over-tourism.

Anyway, this Miss Lyall thinks that people watching is the most fascinating hobby. Surprisingly, maybe, Poirot observes that people in the end fall into very obvious types or categories and rarely act out of character. In a downbeat way, he says it becomes, in the end, quite boring. The sea is more varied and interesting.

So Poirot was advised to come to Rhodes in October, out of season, when the hotels would be empty. Instead he is distressed to discover seven or eight English guests and among them two squabbling couples.

Valentine Chantry has been a world famous model for 16 years or so, with a succession of flashy husbands and now proceeds to drive the latest one, a brutish naval commander, Tony, wild with jealousy, by flirting outrageously with gullible young Douglas Gold, much to the disgust of Gold’s wife, Marjorie.

So the two men fancy the same honeypot woman (Valentine) making up one of the oldest relationship stereotypes in the world, the Eternal triangle.

Poirot unhappily observes all this happening but it delights another hotel guest, the catty, humorous Miss Pamela Lyell, the one with no attachments who loves watching people. In conversation with Poirot, she even humorously teases out of him that he fears there might be a murder!

So then the murder actually takes place. The male characters are sitting round. Gold has bought the first round of drinks, including a pink gin for the commander. In come the women who have been off on an outing. Tony Chantry chivalrously offers to buy drinks. When his wife asks for a pink gin, he pushes the one in front of him over to her and goes up to the bar. She drains the glass to the dregs then comes over funny, turns blue and dies. As she cries out the commander comes running back and shouts at Douglas that that drink was intended for him, Tony. When the police are called they indeed find the rest of the poison (‘A form of stropanthin. A heart poison’) in Gold’s jacket pocket.

So it looks like an open and shut case. Gold, twisted any way she wanted him by Valentine, wanted to poison Tony Chantry to get him out of the way so he could marry Valentine, but his plan went disastrously wrong when Tony unexpectedly handed over his (poisoned) drink to Valentine.

Except that that’s not what happened at all. And in the short seven-page final chapter, Poirot explains to an amazed Miss Lyall a completely different and true explanation of what really happened and why.

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Miss Pamela Lyall – ‘whose principal interests in life were the observation of people round her and the sound of her own voice’
  • Miss Sarah Blake – her friend
  • Valentine Chantry – now 39, famous model since she was 16, staggeringly beautiful, had 5 husbands etc
  • Commander Tony Chantry – ‘a commander in the navy… silent, dark, with a pugnacious jaw and a sullen manner. A touch of the primeval ape about him’
  • Mr Douglas Gold – 31, ‘extremely good-looking, in an almost theatrical manner. Very fair, crisply curling hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, narrow hips. He looked more like a young man on the stage than a young man in real life, but the moment he opened his mouth that impression faded. He was quite natural and unaffected, even, perhaps, a little stupid’
  • Mrs Marjorie Gold – 35, ‘ a small woman-rather like a mouse. She was not bad-looking, indeed her features were regular and her complexion good, but she had a certain air of diffidence and dowdiness that made her liable to be overlooked’
  • old General Barnes – ‘a veteran who was usually in the company of the young’

Bookishness

The General chuckled. ‘She’s finding him a little bit difficult! One of the strong, silent men you hear about in books.’ (Chapter 2)

Poirot’s egotism and modesty

And though Hercule Poirot was a conceited little man where his profession was concerned, he was quite modest in his estimate of his personal attractions. (Chapter 2)

‘Every woman adores a fascist’

[Mr Gold] said to Poirot, ‘That man’s a brute!’ And he nodded his head in the direction of the retreating figure of Commander Chantry.
‘It is possible,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, it is quite possible. But les femmes, they like brutes, remember that!’
Douglas muttered: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he ill-treats her!’
‘She probably likes that too.’ (Chapter 2)

5. Language

Poirotisms

I’ve mentioned how Poirot’s foreignness is raised a number of times. It can also be used for pure comic purposes, as when Christie has Poirot mangle an English proverb or common phrase, as he does at least once in every story:

‘For the same reason, when she sets out the following day to get rid of the golf clubs, she continues to use the attaché-case as a – what is it – kippered herring?’
‘Red herring,’ Japp said.
(Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

Poirot held up a hand. ‘I do what you call explore all the avenues.’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘Ah, yes, it is what you call the old gasp – no, pardon, the old wheeze, that – to come back for a book. It is often useful!’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘One has, sometimes, a feeling. Faintly, I seem to smell the fish.’
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 1)

1930s slang

  • bad hat – bad man
  • gasper – basic cheap make of cigarette
  • old cock! – Japp’s Cockney / vulgar term of affection, cruder version of ‘old chap’
  • pukka sahib – literally ‘genuine master’, metaphorically ‘good chap’, approved by the British upper middle-class value system
  • legal wallah – wallah is a Hindi term meaning ‘in charge’ so in British India came to be used in association with a profession or action e.g. ‘rickshaw-wallah’; Major Riddle is asserting his membership of the ruling class of the Empire by consciously using imperial slang, in this case referring to the family lawyer, Mr Forbes

Posh diction

According to Christie, posh people like Lord Maybury use contemporary slang but emphasise their superiority to it by using quotation marks:

  • ‘She’s an American subject. I know that she’s had three husbands, one Italian, one German and one Russian, and that in consequence she has made useful what I think are called “contacts”.’
  • ‘I know,’ Lord Mayfield continued, ‘that in addition to having a seductive type of beauty, Mrs Vanderlyn is also a very good listener, and that she can display a fascinating interest in what we call “shop”.’
  • ‘You see, George, to use the language of the movies, we’ve nothing actually “on” the woman. And we want something!’

Related is:

‘Do you yourself approve of Mr Burrows?’ The colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely, but made Major Riddle smile into his moustache.
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 8)

The same phrase as was used in ‘Murder in the Mews’. Maybe Christie had heard it somewhere and it amused her enough to slip it into the speech of several posh chaps.

Changing definitions of age

In ‘Cards on the Table’ Mrs Lorrimer is considered an old woman at 63.

‘But I am 56, my boy. In another four years I shall probably be a nasty old man continually haunting the society of unwilling debutantes.’
(Lord Mayfield in The Incredible Theft)

Charity

There are lots of reasons for Christie’s runaway bestselling status:

  • the narratives are written with beautiful clarity and zip along at speed
  • the large casts of posh characters appeal to the same audiences who love Downton Abbey and other early 20th century costume dramas i.e. a kind of vicarious snobbery
  • the books (much more than the often clumsy TV and movie adaptations) are always beamingly good humoured, and sometimes very funny
  • although one or two people are ‘murdered’, these alleged murders are totally unlike the sickening, disgusting murders of real life – they are accepted by one and all as ‘tokens’ in an entertainment, conventionalised events designed to deliver all the other psychological / reading pleasures I’ve listed – only very rarely does a murder really upset the story’s characters and cut through to the reader, the most obvious example being the teagirl, Betty Barnard, killed in The ABC  Murders which devastates her poor family

Lastly, there is an air of charity and forgiveness about them. There are lots of other things about it but, in the end, the most notable thing about ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ is that Poirot, understanding their motives, lets all the murderers off, lying to the police so that they can get away.

Same in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. When the murderer is revealed, so is her sad story and the nobility of her motivation. When she piteously begs Poirot not to reveal the truth of her identity, he charitably agrees.

Despite the ostensible subject matter of murder, the tone of the narratives, and the attitude of most of the characters and, above all, of the master character, Poirot, is one of understanding, compassion and forgiveness. I think it’s this quality which makes them somehow such comforting and reassuring reads.

Credit

‘Murder in the Mews’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1937 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related links

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Posted by Simon on August 13, 2025

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Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (1953)

When I’m writing a short story I’m haunted by the thought that I’ve got to hold the reader’s attention for literally every second, otherwise I’m dead.
(Roald Dahl, in the Introduction to the first collection of Tales of the Unexpected)

Someone Like You is a collection of 19 short stories by Roald Dahl, published in 1953. It was only after a bit of poking around that I realised what’s always confused me about Dahl’s short stories is that they a) were mostly published very early on, in the 1940s and 50s b) were subsequently repackaged and published multiple times, in different volumes, with a wide variety of titles, thus muddying the order and leading to a confusing plethora of collections.

Take the volume which I associated with Dahl as a schoolboy, the first volume of Tales of the Unexpected, published in 1979 to tie in with the ITV dramatisations which were very popular, stories I, not unnaturally, assumed must have been written during the 1970s. Except it turns out that all the stories in it had been previously published in either this 1953 collection, Someone Like You, or in Kiss Kiss, published in 1960. Presented in shiny packaging at the very end of the 1970s, all these stories in fact dated from the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, a generation earlier.

  1. Man from the South (September 1948)
  2. Taste (December 1951)
  3. The Sound Machine (September 1949)
  4. Poison (June 1950)
  5. Dip in the Pool (January 1952)
  6. Skin (May 1952)
  7. My Lady Love, My Dove (June 1952)
  8. Lamb to the Slaughter (September 1953)
  9. Nunc Dimittis (September 1953)
  10. Edward the Conqueror (October 1953)
  11. Galloping Foxley (November 1953)
  12. Neck (1953)
  13. The Wish (1953)
  14. The soldier (1953)
  15. The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953)
  16. Claud’s Dog (1953)
    • The Ratcatcher
    • Rummins
    • Mr. Hoddy
    • Mr Feasey

Man from the South (September 1948)

Two things are made perfectly plain in this first story: It is a gruesome story, which raises the central question, whether Dahl realised early on that the gruesome, macabre and sadistic would sell. And it is written with great clarity and limpidness, plain and open.

There are at least two consequences: one is that he places you in the situation, in the mise en scène, with tremendous speed and efficiency. Witness the first sentence:

It was getting on towards six o’clock so I thought I’d buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deckchair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

The story is a first-person narrative told by the male narrator who goes down to the pool, orders a beer and sits on a lounger and is watching the guys and girls playing in the pool when the action begins. The stripped-back style acts as a foil to set off the gruesomeness of the central premise. In this case, a middle-aged fully clothed man comes and sits near the narrator, engages him in conversation speaking with an indeterminate accent, maybe Italian maybe Spanish.

They chat a bit, then one of the fit young men from the pool comes splashing out and sits nearby with his girl. He goes to light a cigarette, the man from the South admires his lighter, yes, the Yank says, It lights every time. Every time? asks the man from the South. And then quickly, with an eerie believability, he escalates the conversation, asking the Yank if he wants to bet: why sure, why not, says the young man.

The man from the south escalates it further, saying he’ll bet his car that the Yank’s cigarette lighter won’t light ten times in a row, and not just any old car but a Cadillac. The American’s eyes light up at the prospect of winning a car, but then the man from the South makes his demand…He insists that he takes from the American something he doesn’t need, something like…his little finger! From this point onwards the story becomes not only macabre but actively gripping.

Obviously the girl the American has picked up, and the sensible narrator, are scandalised by the man’s proposition and tell the Yank not to do it…But the man from the South works on him, telling him that if he’s right about his lighter, then he stands to win a Cadillac, until the young man, in a burst of boyish bravado, agrees! At which point they all go to the man’s hotel room where he tells his servant to go and get: string, a hammer, nails and a hand axe.

With these he proceeds to tie the American’s left hand to a table, splayed open in such a way that the little finger is isolated, all of which the American agrees to, and the narrator watches with horrified fascination. Then he instructs the American to start firing his lighter, whilst holding the small axe poised over the American’s finger. One light works. Then number two. Then three.

The reader is, by now, on the edge of their seat. From nowhere (lounging by the pool) this has developed into a heart-stopping thriller. The count gets up to seven successful fires when…the door opens and…the man from the South’s wife storms in.

She immediately puts a stop to everything, pushing him and the axe away, making him put the axe down, untying the American’s hand, saying the whole thing is null and void. She changes the whole mood and context of events by explaining that her husband has a psychiatric disorder, a compulsion to gamble mixed with sadism, ‘they’ have tried repeatedly to stop him. They eventually managed although at some cost and the narrator suddenly notices, as the woman swiftly unties the American’s hand, that she only has the thumb and one finger remaining on her right hand. Gruesome.

Taste (December 1951)

At a posh dinner party a City broker seeks to impress a famous epicure who he’s invited. This posh fellow ignores his food and the extremely expensive wine put in front of him in order to chat up the host’s 18-year-old daughter. Whereupon the banker-host proposes a bet that the Epicure can’t identify the rare red wine he’s just served. The stakes between the two blowhards escalate until the Epicure says that if he wins, if he identifies the wine correctly, he wants the host’s daughter as his winnings. He’ll stake his house in the country, in fact his town and country houses. The wife intervenes, the daughter screams ‘No’ but the obsessed banker-father insists.

There follow several pages in which the Epicure makes a great show of tasting the wine and forensically deducing which vineyard it came from until he announces the correct vineyard and vintage. The banker turns white and asks if they can go to another room for a private talk. Things threaten to turn nasty when the maid, an old woman nearer 70 than 60, steps forward to hand the Epicure his glasses, quietly pointing out that he left them in the study when he popped in there for a few moments just after arriving. The study where he and the host had agreed was the best place to leave opened bottles of wine to air! In other words, he cheated. The expression on the banker’s face hardens as a vast fury grows inside him, and at that moment the narrative ends, leaving us to imagine the rest. Silly but hugely effective.

The Sound Machine (September 1949)

This story has an amateur inventor, H.G. Wells vibe about it. Klausner is an inventor who works in a shed at the bottom of his garden and is putting the finishing touches to a new device. It’s like a miniature coffin filled with wiring, with knobs on the front – amateur inventor stuff.

In a first passage of exposition, Klausner explains what it’s for to Dr Scott. Humans can only hear a subset of the audible spectrum. It’s well know that dogs, for example, or bats, can hear frequencies we can’t. Therefore, he’s built a device which can detect these higher frequencies and convert them into sounds hearable by human beings.

Next day he goes out into his garden, puts on the headphones, turns it on and the, over the background hum, he suddenly hears an intense piercing scream of a sound. He’s still reeling when he hears another one. Suddenly he realises it’s his next door neighbour, Mrs Saunders, cutting yellow roses in her garden.

Klausner leans over the fence, interrupts her horticulture and asks if she can snip one more. She does so and he hears the ‘scream’ at exactly that moment. He can hear plants scream.

Bright and early next morning Klausner carries the machine over to his local park along with an axe. He sets it up by a tree and takes a swing, embedding his axe in the bark. At that exact moment he hears a deep groaning sound. Trees feel pain and trees express it through sound, in this case a deep powerful moaning. He looks at the gash he’s made in the tree with horror and remorse.

Now it becomes clear why the narrative introduced Dr Scott at the beginning because Klausner rushes home and phones the doctor, hurriedly telling him he must must must come over, despite the good doctor complaining that it’s 6.30 in the morning.

But drive round he does, and Klausner hustles him into the park where he insists that the doctor a) puts on the headphones and b) takes the axe and strikes the tree, and so become a witness of his great scientific breakthrough.

Against his better instinct the doctor hits the tree with the axe but, in the seconds before, Klausner realises that one of the tree’s enormous branches is working loose, it bends and snaps at the exact moment Dr Scott’s axe blow hits the tree. The doctor pushes Klausner to safety and they both watch the branch fall on and crush the sound machine.

Feverishly Klausner asks the doctor whether he heard the tree cry out, did he, did he? No, he didn’t. At which point Klausner topples over into madness and asks the doctor to stitch the axe gash in the tree. When the Dr says that’s ridiculous Klausner brandishes the axe menacingly and orders the doctor to paint the wound with iodine i.e. to sterilise it and prevent it becoming infected.

Poison (June 1950)

First-person narrative told by Timber Woods. We’re in India. It’s evening. Woods drives up to the house he shares with Harry Pope. He finds Pope in bed, sweating, absolutely stationary and whispering. He tells Woods there is a krait, a lethal snake, coiled on his chest; it crawled up his leg and across his body while he was lying on his back reading. Now he daren’t move. He’s been lying in an unmoving rictus of terror for hours.

Woods realises it’s an emergency, makes a couple of not very sensible suggestions, then phones Dr Ganderbai, a small Indian Hindu doctor, who comes right round. He brings some anti-venom serum and, after some thought, gets Woods to drive to his clinic and get some choloroform. Once it’s fetched, he rigs up a funnel and long flexible tube and spends fifteen or more minutes very carefully pushing it under the bedsheet to where Harry whispers that the krait is located. Then he pours the cold liquid down the tube so that it slowly spreads over Harry’s tummy, making the narrator, Woods, feel woozy.

The upshot is that after all the doctor’s scrupulous care, when he and the narrator slowly pull the sheet back, there is no snake! Maybe there never was one. As soon as this is confirmed Pope leaps up and dances with horror on the bed and starts ranting and raving. In his release from terror he abuses Dr Ganderbai in insulting racist language. The narrator tries to shut him up and then accompanies the poor abused doctor to his car and tries to apologise and say how much he appreciates all his efforts.

So there are two focuses of interest; for almost the entire story it’s the very tense situation with the supposed fatal snake which has a kind of horror/melodrama vibe; but right at the end it completely switches to being much more human and literary, as Dahl records Pope’s unforgivable racist rant against the doctor and Wood’s embarrassment and attempts to redress the balance by profusely thanking him. The last page where this happens seems like it comes from a different aesthetic and moral universe to everything which preceded it, and it has tremendous understated power.

Dip in the Pool (January 1952)

A gruesome black comedy. We’re aboard an ocean liner. Apparently, in the old days, they bet on what distance the ship would cover in the next 24 hour period. The captain gives his best guess and then gambling-minded passengers buy, at auction, a range of hours either longer or shorter than the captain’s prediction i.e. bet on whether the ship covers a greater or lesser distance than the captain predicted.

Mr William Bonibot is a small earnest American married to frequently cross and critical Ethel. He wants to impress her by returning from his cruise with a fortune. He wants to win the daily sailing auction so, in the middle of a storm, when the ship is forced to slow down, he buys the slowest speed, paying for it with his entire life savings of £200 (British currency on a British ship). The total pool which he stands to win is £2,100 or about $6,000.

Trouble is, the next day the sea is flat and calm and the ship picks up speed so Bonibot is set to lose his life savings. Into his head pops the mad idea of jumping overboard to delay the ship and win the auction.

When he goes up on deck to put his mad plan into action, there’s only one person on deck, an elderly woman. Good – he mustn’t be seen to be deliberately jumping overboard, but, on the other hand, he needs someone to raise the alarm.

It occurs to him that she might have poor eyesight or be deaf so he calls her, at which she a) turns and b) sees him and c) engages in a little conversation. Good. She can hear and see and talk, so she’ll report man overboard alright. So Bonibot takes his courage in his hands, steps onto the rail, shouts out HELP loudly to catch the woman’s attention, and jumps out and away from the ship.

She watches astonished as she sees a dressed man plummet into the ocean far below, his head reappearing after a few seconds in the ship’s wake. For a few seconds she has a little panic wondering what she’s meant to do, throw a lifebelt, run and fetch help, shout and yell. But it passes and she returns to leaning over the railing watching the tiny head dwindle into the distance and then disappear.

Some time later her minder appears, a hard-looking spinster. The elderly lady begins to explain that she saw a man jump off the ship but the spinster cuts across her, telling her not to talk such nonsense, also telling her she knows she’s not meant to go off alone without supervision, before leading her away by the hand.

Thus, in a few quick strokes, we realise that she is certainly not blind or deaf or mute as Bonibot ascertained. But he hadn’t bargained for a witness who was simple, touched in the head, not all there. And so the old lady and her minder walk away from the rail and both forget about Bonibot as if he’d never existed.

Obviously, considered rationally, the plot is ridiculous and contrived. But the feeling behind it is eminently believable, the sense of the teeth-gnashing frustration, the sense of the universe’s absolute indifference to us and our feeble plans, or, worse, that the universe is actively malevolent, teasing us and torturing us. These are childish feelings, suppressed but lurking beneath the rational adult, which Dahl’s gruesome tales reignite.

(Also, in the first part, the auction for speeds/times, Dahl conveys very well indeed the feverish, sweating excitement of real gambling, the white knuckles and small intense eyes. So these are stories designed to appeal to our irrational obsessive drives…)

Skin (May 1952)

Imagine one of the great modernist painters, living in an attic before he was famous, has a little celebration with his friend the tattooist, whose wife he fancies and paints over and over. Imagine the tattooist adores his work so much that, once they’re plastered, he suggests the artist paints a portrait of his wife on his back. In fact, why stop there? Why not get him to paint the portrait and then show him how to convert it into a tattoo?

That was back in 1913, the Paris atelier years, the early years. Then imagine that two world wars later, the old tattooist, long parted from his wife who died in the second war, is walking the streets of Paris, poor, shabby and hungry. And walks by an art gallery which is having a special private showing of an exhibition by the very same painter whose works are now worth millions. And he not only refuses to leave when politely asked to, but makes a scene, yelling how much he loved the artist and then tears his coat and shirt off and reduces the haute bourgeoisie to stunned silence, when they see the tattoo on his back, unmistakably by the master, and even signed by him.

So the artist is (the real-life artist) Chaim Soutine, the tattooist is named Drioli and now, in the present, he finds two men fighting over the work of art on his back. The gallery owner offers to pay him a fortune in exchange for which he’ll have Paris’s leading plastic surgeon cut the entire tattoo off his back and give him a skin graft to replace it. But standing behind Drioli is a tall suave man wearing lemon-yellow gloves.

This fellow claims to be the owner of the Hotel Bristol in Cannes and offers to keep Drioli in a life of luxury for the rest of his natural life – fancy food, private rooms, tailored suits, young women doing his nails – as long as, at the end of it, Drioli legally gifts him his back.

Yellow gloves wins. His offer to buy the starving old man roast duck and chambertin right now trumps all the old man’s reservations.

The story concludes with the information that just a few weeks later a dramatic new work by Soutine arrives on the market, slightly unusual portrait, stretched and varnished and framed, in Bueno Aires (i.e. far from the gallery incident). The narrator lugubriously comments that he hopes Drioli is safe and sound somewhere, being pampered in expensive suits. But the strong implication is that he isn’t. The implication is that he’s dead, murdered for the work of art on his back.

Regarding Soutine, I wrote a review of an exhibition of his paintings in 2017 at the Courtauld Gallery:

My Lady Love, My Dove (June 1952)

The story rotates around the hen-pecked character of the first-person narrator, Arthur Beauchamp, a short man who is bullied and hectored by his large, domineering wife, Pamela. The catch is he can’t leave or even criticise her because she’s rich, comes from a titled family, and he married her for her money. So he lives the life of Riley in a big house with orchards and full-time gardeners etc, tinkering with his precious butterfly collection, seething with barely suppressed discontent (like so many married couples in Dahl).

They have invited a couple, the Snapes (Henry and Sally), to come and stay although, in the way of the English upper-middle-classes – at least in stories like this – they cordially dislike and despise the couple and are wondering why the devil they invited them. It is, in fact, because the wife in particular is potty about bridge and the couple are the best bridge players they’ve ever met.

Anyway, out of nowhere the overbearing wife suggests, well, orders the husband eavesdrop on the couple by installing a microphone in their room. He makes loads of objections (it’s like spying through a keyhole) but she rather oddly replies that they’re both complete stinkers already and they might as well be honest about it.

So Arthur finds a microphone and a load of wiring (in his workshop), goes into the room where the visiting couple are due to stay, ponders a number of places to hide the microphone and settles on the sofa, slits the undercovering, fixes it in place, and begins laying the wiring under the carpet, to the door and out into the corridor.

As he goes through all these processes I was wondering two things: 1) if you bug a couple’s private room you are liable to hear things you didn’t want to, the obvious one is sexual byplay or actual sex; or, less prurient, people burping, farting or going to the loo; 2) the more likely outcomes, especially if you embed the mic in a sofa, is that it simply doesn’t work, is smothered, and doesn’t pick up anything.

The reason they’d invited this couple they despise is because they play a good game of bridge, which our couple are particularly keen on. There’s a bit of tension/excitement when the couple arrive, knocking on the front door before the narrator has finished laying the wire as unobtrusively as he can along the top of the skirting board from the guest room to the master bedroom, and it crossed my mind that this would be a funny outcome, that the guest couple spot the wire, find the mic, and then play up to the situation, concocting and acting out who knows what outrageous scenario to punish their sneaky hosts.

In the event none of these things happen. The invited couple settle in, unpack, dress for dinner, don’t notice the mystery wire, and they all have a very civilised dinner served by servants. Henry is tall and went to Eton and knows about wine. Arthur is attracted by the bright young wife but after a while begins to sense that she is slightly brow-beaten by her husband. Then they settle down for an evening of bridge, which is described in some detail. Long story short, the guests lose because the wife makes an unwise bid at the contract stage of the game.

Finally the game ends about midnight and everyone retires to bed. The narrator and his bossy wife gather round the loudspeaker connected to the microphone. And what they hear is…the couple transformed. The husband is livid with the wife for making that mistake which cost them making any profit on the evening. It turns out that they are using a complicated system of cheating whereby the precise tone of his voice and position of his fingers indicates precisely what cards he is holding so that the wife’s bidding can be exact. And this is because they make a living by cheating rich people at bridge. He reminds her they are playing different people every night the following week and insists that they stay up for a few hours now practicing till she has it off perfect, despite her tearful refusal.

And the story ends with Arthur’s domineering wife suddenly insisting that they devise a similar form of cheating, too, and drives him off to get a pack of cards, so they can start right now!

Lamb to the Slaughter (September 1953)

Maloney, a big senior policeman comes home to his loving wife, six months pregnant, who’s ready to do anything for him, pours him a Scotch with ice and prepares to make him dinner. That’s when he sits her down and tells her he’s leaving her. She gets up dazed and insists on going down to the freezer in the cellar to get a joint of something to cook for his dinner. The first thing that comes to hand is a leg of lamb frozen solid, which she carries back up from the cellar, walks into the front room where her husband is staring out of the window and brings it down on h is head with the force of an axe. He falls dead.

She wonders what to do then dresses and walks to the local grocer. Here she buys some peas, potatoes and nice cheesecake, making a big deal of describing cooking for her husband. In fact she does such a good job convincing herself of her normality that when she returns to the house and discovers her husband’s body, she is genuinely shocked and distraught.

In this state she calls the police who flock round (given that the dead man is one of them), question her, carry out forensic procedures, interview the neighbours and even the grocer who vouches for Mrs Maloney.

oney’s normality. They come to the conclusion (a bit stupidly) that Maloney was killed by a single blow to the head by person unknown.

Since they’re there, and Mrs Maloney is has cooked the joint and had put the vegetables on…she invites the detectives to eat the roast dinner. They hesitate and say it wouldn’t be respectful but she wins them round by saying it’s what her husband would have wanted. So eventually they all sit down at table and she serves up the very leg of lamb she used to murder her husband and the story ends with some of them wondering where the murder implement can have ended up…Probably right under their noses, one of them jokes, as he raises his fork of lamb to his mouth.

And the story ends with a quietly macabre note as Mary Maloney, in the kitchen, listens to the big strong clever men tucking into the lamb, and starts to giggle…

Nunc Dimittis (September 1953)

An exercise in a style quite different from anything else in the collection, this is a first-person narrative which is deliberately different from the practical, clear, Hemingway tone of ‘the Man from the South’ or ‘Poison’. Here’s the first sentence of ‘Poison’:

It must have been around midnight when I drove home, and as I approached the gates of the bungalow I switched off the headlamps of the car so the beam wouldn’t swing in through the window of the side bedroom and wake Harry Pope.

Quick, direct, to the point. Now here’s the opening of ‘Nunc Dimittis’:

It is nearly midnight, and I can see that if I don’t make a start with writing this story now, I never shall. All evening I have been sitting here trying to force myself to begin, but the more I have thought about it, the more appalled and ashamed and distressed I have become by the whole thing.

We are inside the fevered mind of Lionel Lampson. He is a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, art collector and all round connoisseur (cf the wine connoisseurship evinced by the narrator of ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’), ‘a person of some consequence in society’ (p.385).

One evening after a drinks party he accompanies short gossipy Gladys Ponsonby back to her place and she asks him in for a drink.

Obviously flirting, she starts off by telling him about the portrait hanging in her living room. She’s just had it done by the fashionable painter, John Royden. She explains that Royden has a special technique. He only does portraits of women (Society ladies) and he insists, by way of preparation, of painting them nude, so as to fully understand the frame, the scaffold, the chassis of the dressed person. First he paints them naked, then paints on the underwear, then paints on the final clothing. When Lampson goes up close to Gladys’s painting he sees this is true because the paint of her dress is significantly raised above the surface of the canvas.

Anyway, as she continues to drink freely Gladys becomes a bit malicious and tells Lionel that his (Lionel’s) young girlfriend, Janet de Pelagia is slagging him off behind his back. Specifically, Janet freely refers to him as that ‘crashing bore’ (p.382). Lionel is very upset and goes home crushed and depressed.

Next day he conceives his revenge (on Janet). He rings this painter, John Royden, gets him round and asks him to do an unusual commission. He’ll pay for a portrait of Janet de Pelagia but doesn’t want her to know. He wants Royden to bump into her at a party somewhere and exclaim that she has exactly the figure and face he wants to paint and he’ll do her for free. She’ll be flattered. Royden can do the portrait, exhibit it at the Royal Academy, safe in the knowledge that Lampson will pay full whack and buy it off him. Deal?

Deal. For a 5 foot by 3 foot full-length portrait. Now he has to be patient and, to pass the time, goes off on holiday to Italy for four months. He returns in July just as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is opening. Royden’s portrait of Janet has been much admired but the painter has refused to sell it. When the exhibition closes the portrait is delivered to Lampson’s house.

At this point he reveals the rather contrived fact that he is not only a connoisseur but a picture restorer complete with all the equipment. So now he sets about carefully rubbing the surface layer off to reveal Janet standing in her bra and corset and suspenders, the corset indicating how fat she is, and the surprising revelation that she’s noticeably bow-legged. As the narrator drolly comments, ‘One lives and learns’ (p.392).

This done, he invites a dozen or so of society’s upper crust (‘the most distinguished men, the most brilliant and influential women in the top crust of our society’) to an elite dinner at his place, service by candlelight so in deep gloom. As the meal is ending the candles have guttered right down, Lampson order his servant to turn on the electric lights which reveal… the portrait of Janet in her underwear, trussed and contained in her stays, legs bowed like a jockey’s. Lampson doesn’t loiter to see the effect but is exiting the room as the lights go on, just long enough to hear the uproar as the assembled guests catch sight of the portrait and, above all, the sight of Janet de Pelagia like someone who’s been shot through the heart and freezes for a moment before collapsing.

At that point Lampson flees his London home, getting his chauffeur to drive him to his country house to rejoice in his revenge. After a few days Gladys phones him and gleefully tells him how he is being criticised and ostracised for this beastly treatment of Janet, rejected by his entire social circle. She (Gladys) on the other hand is only too glad to come down to his country house and ‘comfort’ him i.e. sex. But Lampson is too upset and slams the phone down.

And this is where the narrative began, with Lampson fussily aware of having been ostracised by polite society and all his ‘friends’. And here’s where we come to the sting in the tail, though, which is he says he’s had a letter from Janet which completely forgives him, tells him she understands it was a joke, assures him she still loves him. And it was accompanied by a gift, a large jar of caviar, his favourite food which he has just wolfed down. And now…he is starting to feel a bit unwell, really rather ill…

So the story ends with the strong implication that the caviar was poisoned and the narrator is dying. Upper class bitchiness turned fatal.

Edward the Conqueror (October 1953)

Third person story about a middle-aged, middle-class couple, Edward and Louisa, living in a big house without kids. He’s gardening and has made a big fire when she goes out into the garden, calls him to lunch and spots a funny-looking cat by the fire. The cat follows them indoors and she gives it a bowl of milk. After lunch Louisa sits down to play some piano. She’s a fair pianist and goes through classical numbers by Schubert and the like but notices that when she plays a piece by famous Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811 to 1886), the cat suddenly sits up and becomes attentive. Slowly, carefully, Dahl describes a number of further incidents or details which convince Louisa that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt. It sounds bonkers writing it down in black and white which is precisely why you have to read the story and enter into the mindset of Louisa as she plays different pieces and notes the cat’s responses in ever-greater detail. She even pops out to the local library to borrow a book about reincarnation, some of which the story summarises.

Anyway, by the time her husband comes in from an arduous afternoon’s gardening, Louisa has convinced herself that the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt and proceeds to tell her husband that she is going to invite the world’s leading composers to come and meet him! She also says she needs to cook him special food appropriate for such a genius and goes into the kitchen to make the cat her best soufflé.

When she returns to the living room the cat has gone and her husband is just coming back in from the garden, sweating a bit and acting suspiciously. When she looks closely she notices a raw scratch across his hand. He tries to persuade her that it was one of the beastly brambles he’s been clearing, but she, and the reader, know better. Without being told we know he’s done away with the wondercat.

Galloping Foxley (November 1953)

A very charged story with a twist in the very last line.

The narrator is a small-minded punctilious worker in the City of London named Perkins. A big deal is made of how much he loves commuting to work on exactly the same train every morning, the 8.12. He’s been doing it five days a week for 36 years. In fact he had composed a little memo about the pleasures of the day and its predictable routine when everything is disturbed by the arrival of a new man on the station platform, a bounder with oiled hair, a white silk scarf, and twirling a cane. Worst of all, the chap insists in getting into the same train carriage as Perkins and smoking a filthy pipe.

Not just once but several days in a row. And slowly Perkins realises that this fellow was the head of his house at public school, a beast named ‘Galloping’ Foxley, and this releases a flood of memories of how he was relentlessly bullied and beaten by this sadistic, taunting bully. The details of all the trivial transgressions he could beaten for and the experience of the beatings are dwelt on with excruciating vividness.

Eventually Perkins can bear it no longer and decides to confront his old bully, who has shown no flicker of recognition. It takes quite a bit of bravery to nerve himself to confront his old persecutor but one morning he politely leans forward and introduces himself, explaining that he was at Repton in 1907, expecting the bounder to agree that he, also, was at Repton, and then to recognise the poor little boy whose life he made a misery.

By this stage the reader, like the character, is quite wound up and tense and anxious about what will happen. But the twist is that the bounder with the pipe quite simply replies, ‘I’m glad to meet you, Mine’s Fortescue, Jocelyn Fortescue, Eton 1916.’

Perkins is completely, wildly mistaken about the other man’s identity. And all it has done is reveal just how very deeply wounded he was by his schoolboy experiences, and how little it takes to bring them all flooding back.

Neck (1953)

Weird and creepy. A rich bitch gets her come-uppance when she gets head stuck in a Henry Moore sculpture.

The first-person narrator is the writer of a daily column in an evening paper, presumably of society gossip for that is the subject of this story (p.449). It’s about a chap named Basil Turton who, when his father died, inherited the Turton Press which, for the purposes of the story, is a Fleet Street newspaper company. The point is that when he inherited the title and the fortune people like the author, Society gossips and commentators all drolly speculated who the lucky young woman would be who would bag this husband and his fortune. To everyone’s surprise it was a young beauty who swept in from the Continent, Natalia something from Yugoslavia or somewhere, and led young Turton up the altar before he realised what was going on.

Six years go by and Lady Turton now has her husband wrapped round her little finger, is running the newspaper and is a power in the land. The narrator finds himself seated next to her at a dinner and very off-handedly she invites him to come and stay at her country house, anytime. Being a gossip columnist the narrator leaps at the chance and motors down to this worthy pile, a great Tudor mansion with 47 bedrooms and an awesome garden, full of topiary and rather unexpected modern sculptures.

But something is very off. The creepy butler, Jelks, speaks about his own employer with a sneer and explains that instead of a tip (which is usual) he would like a third of the narrator’s winnings, which he thinks is both steep and forward.

At dinner it becomes obvious that the wife despises little Lord Turton, and has the bold dashing Major Haddock sat on one side of her and mannish, horsey Carmen La Rosa on the other. As in previous stories, we are in the world of upper-class bitchiness. When the table is brought to play cards Lady Turton cold shoulders her husband and insists on playing a four with Haddock, Carmen and the narrator. Around 11 she dismisses her husband and the butler and the narrator who goes to be thinking it’s a most unpleasant household.

Next morning the narrator comes down to find the butler serving Sir Basil breakfast, they get chatting, and after eating he takes our man on a grand tour of the amazing gardens. After some time they stop to sit on a bench by a carp pool and have a sensitive conversation about the history of the garden and the art pieces.

Then the narrator becomes aware of two figures some distance away, just about discernible as a man and a woman, presumably unpleasant Lady Turton and her lover Haddock. He and Sir Basil carry on chatting but in reality both are watching the progress of the couple who are gallivanting about the gardens then come to one of the Henry Moore sculptures.

Even from a distance it’s clear that they are mocking it, with the woman adopting ridiculous poses while the man photographs her and they both shriek with laughter, by implication mocking and belittling the taste of much-wronged Sir Basil. Eventually the woman sticks her head through one of the characteristic holes in the sculpture and the man takes a few more snaps before bending forward and obviously kissing her a few times. The narrator feels Sir Basil stiffen next to him. But then something goes wrong. She can’t get her head out of the hole. The man puts down his camera and tries to help her.

The charge of the story doesn’t come from the scenario itself but the uneasy way the narrator, very much an outsider and almost neglected guest, uneasily observes the reaction of Sir Basil to all this, obviously deeply hurt, trying to pass it off.

Eventually he says they probably ought to go down and help. They appear through an arch in the hedging and obviously surprise Natalia and Haddock, who quickly recovers and is all British, saying the lady needs help to get her head out of the hole. Sir Basil very calmly says are you asking me to cut a section out of my Henry Moore and his wife starts flinging filthy insults at him.

Out of nowhere appears the sly repellent butler, Jelks, appears out of nowhere and Sir Basil instructs him to fetch tools. And there follows the pregnant, powerful, disturbing climax of the story. For Jelks returns with an ax and a saw. As the narrator watches he sees Jelks very slightly proffer the axe which Sir Basil takes.

And then Dahl has the narrator very powerfully say that it’s like watching a child run out into the road just as a car rushes along, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, as Sir Basil takes the axe and he sees Lady Turton’s head helplessly caught in the hole of the sculpture and the narrator has such a vivid premonition of what will happen next that he closes his eyes. Obviously he, like all the other participants, suddenly realise that Sir Basil in his cold fury will behead his wife.

This possibility is imprinted in our minds for half a page and then the narrator opens his eyes and sees calm dignified Sir Basil reprimanding Jelks for handing him such a dangerous tool, and instead requesting the saw, before setting about the careful procedure of cutting his wife free.

But the narrator sees Lady Turton’s face has turned grey and she is opening and closing her mouth making a horrible gurgling sound. She had had the same premonition as everyone else, and had died in her imagination. And just visible on Sir Basil’s face the narrator sees two warm red spots on his cheeks at, at his eyes, the tiny wrinkles of a smile.

A fantastically weird and powerful story.

The Wish (1953)

Short hallucinatory story about a boy who has to cross the enormous carpet in the hall of his big country house, just sticking to the yellow parts of the pattern and avoiding like death the dark red and black patches. The way the story is situated entirely inside the mind of the terrified boy reminded me of the more psychotic of J.G. Ballard’s short stories, not the science fiction ones, the ones set in the contemporary world inside the minds of people going mad.

The soldier (1953)

And this is similar, a terrifying depiction of a soldier (as we know from the title) who has obviously been psychologically wrecked by the war and is experiencing extreme psychosis, hallucinating, convinced ‘they’ are changing all the fixtures of his house around when his back is turned, climaxing when he returns from walking the dog and appears in the bedroom of his sleeping wife holding a knife, demanding to know what she’s done with his wife.

Both of these stories depicting mental illness are effective but I think the subject as a whole has dated badly, with hundreds of other stories about psychotics exploding all over the 1960s and 70s till the topic became a cliché.

The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1953)

A gleeful satire on the whole business of writing.

Adolph Knipe is a lanky young fellow who invents a great automatic calculating machine, a computer which can do sums millions of times faster than any human, to the joy of his employer, Mr John Bohlen, head of a firm of electrical engineers.

But one morning he has a brainwave. If most human calculations can be broken down into smaller units which can be calculated automatically, could the same thing be done with language? Could a machine learn to break language down into its smallest components, and then build them up phrase by phrase, into sentences, paragraphs. He sets to work to build one.

His boss is sceptical until Knipe finally delivers it and explains the rationale: it can write stories. He has broken stories down into component parts (plot, setting, characters, excitement, romance etc) which the machine can now put together at the will of the programmer. In other words, it is a machine to automatically generate stories.

Dahl then sets about having gleeful boyish fun fleshing out the details of the machine, the backend fills an entire building with cables and valves and rods and levers and whatnot, and the front end is like an organ with a keyboard. You select the style of one of the popular magazines, an approach or treatment, a theme, the number of character and desired length, press all these buttons then keep your foot on the Passion Pedal and, within a few minutes, a full story is produced.

Knipe and Bohlen send the first few off to magazines and they are soon accepted. They set up a literary agency and cook up names of authors who they attribute the stories to but in reality they’re all being churned out by the machine.

Then they get ambitious and there’s comedy about Mr Bohlen’s first attempt to control the machine long enough to create a novel. He panics and puts the passion pedal to the floor with the result that the first attempt is far too rude to publish. Next time he exercises greater restraint, the novel is run off in fifteen minutes, sold to a publisher the same day, and becomes a runaway bestseller.

It’s sort of on a serious subject but the entire treatment reeks of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In the middle there’s some satire about America, which was undergoing its great postwar boom and had become the world centre of consumer capitalism:

‘Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the handmade article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country you know that. Carpets… chairs… shoes… bricks… crockery… anything you like to mention they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so
long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!’ (p.500)

The fact that is appears in what is more or less a children’s story suggests how inane and clichéd this level of criticism of consumer capitalism was even back in the 1950s.

Claud’s Dog (1953)

This is the umbrella title for four related tales which feature the character Claud Cubbage who lives in a filling station in Buckinghamshire.

The Ratcatcher

This is possibly the best ‘story’ in the book, for a number of reasons. Number one, it is not a ‘story’ at all, more an incident or anecdote. It just describes what happened when a rat-catcher was sent by the local council to the land next to the filling station (or petrol station) where the boy Claud lives and how the creepy rat-catcher proceeds to show them some tricks of the trade.

The power of it really comes from what a repulsive, physically repellent and creepy character the catcher is. For the first time, in these four stories, the physical presence of the characters becomes really central or dominant.

The man was lean and brown with a sharp face and two long sulphur-coloured teeth that protruded from the upper jaw, overlapping the lower lip, pressing it inward. The ears were thin and pointed and set far back on the head, near the nape of the neck. The eyes were almost black, but when they looked at you there was a flash of yellow somewhere inside them.

How they look, and how they sound:

‘Now, where’s them rats?’ The word “rats” came out of his mouth soft and throaty, with a rich fruity relish as though he were gargling with melted butter. ‘Let’s take a look at them rraats.’

And again:

His voice had the soft throaty sound of a croaking frog and he seemed to speak all his words with an immense wet-lipped relish, as though they tasted good on the tongue. The accent was similar to Claud’s, the broad soft accent of the Buckinghamshire countryside, but his voice was more throaty, the words more fruity in his mouth.

This is a child’s point of view. In adult fiction you tend to get one pen portrait of a character’s appearance and then their appearance, their physical presence, is forgotten about, because in adult fiction what counts is what they say and do, the matrix of dialogue and action and relationships which adults operate in. Unencumbered by all this complicated stuff, children notoriously notice first and foremost people’s appearances (and often, smell).

But the ‘grip’ of the story also comes from fantastic amount of information the catcher knows about rats, the creepy way he tells Claud and Gordon all about it, and then the uncanny way he actually produces rats from his pockets and proceeds to demonstrate gruesome tricks with them.

Rummins

Feels like an exercise in a certain aspect of Hemingway but without the logic.

Rummins is a mean dwarfish man who owns the farm opposite the filling station owned by Claud’s friend Gordon, who narrates this story. After the visit of the ratcatcher they mention the number of rats in the big hayrick he made last year to Rummins who, a few days later, turns up with his son, Bert, to dismantle it.

The narrator’s memory goes back to the previous summer, to a sweltering day in June when they’d built the big hayrick, himself, Claud, Rummins and his son Bert, Wilson the soldier and Ole Tommy. There’s a bit of Ole Tommy’s backstory, how he was chosen by the council to supervise the kids’ playground. Now he helps out on this day and when they stop for lunch turns out to have brought no food but six pint bottles of beer which he generously hands round. After a while the narrator goes back to his filling station to serve customers and when he comes back the hayrick is more or less built but Ole Tommy’s disappeared, leaving his bag behind which is unlike him. When asked, stumpy little Rummins shrugs and says he must have gone home.

That was all a flashback to last summer. The story cuts back to the present and the narrator and Claud are helping Rummins and Bert dismantle the hayrick in part to get rid of all the rats it’s hiding. Up on top of the rick, Bert is cutting through the string and then the hay itself to create chunks, like a cake, which he peels away down to his dad who loads them into a cart.

At one point the big knife he’s using encounters an obstruction. This is where things turn very weird. the narrator becomes aware that Rummins is scared. Bert is puzzled at meeting something hard in what’s meant to be a building of straw. It’s at this moment the narrator has his flashback to the hot summer’s day when they built it.

Rummins yells at his son to persist and cut through the obstacle which he does. Then he cuts the other angles of the straw and dislodges a segment to fall to the ground for his dad. But when he steps back he sees what has been revealed by his work. The narrator describes all this in a moment which has become supercharged with horror. He describes Rummins jumping down off the rick and running for his farm, just as Bert starts to scream. That’s it, the end.

Now there’s no denying the intensity of the story and the luminous details Dahl picks out to really make it come alive, all the way through, in all aspects. The only problem is it doesn’t make sense. Is he saying Rummins for some reason murdered Ole Tommy? Why on earth do that, and there would be no opportunity because the soldier Wilson was working on the rick. But anyway, why? Is he saying Rummins murdered Ole Tommy and placed his body high up in the rick? No way he could have done that without anyone noticing, not least his own son. And if Bert was in on it, how come he is staggered to screaming pitch when he’s seen what he’s cut through (presumably Ole Tommy’s corpse). Above all, if Rummy knows the body is there, why on earth does he let his son go up and start slicing up the rick, and why does he tell him to persist when he encounters the obstacle? Maybe I’m missing something but none of it makes any sense. Which doesn’t stop it, nonetheless, being eerie and intense.

Mr. Hoddy

Claud is taken by his girlfriend, Clarice, to meet her father, the self-important village grocer’s assistant, Mr Hoddy, with a view to asking him for her hand in marriage. Mr Hoddy persists in wanting to know what Claud’s plans are. Claud despises Mr Hoddy and all the small-minded men of his ilk, and would really like to come clean and explain that he and and friend are planning to pull a con involving two identical-looking greyhounds, but of course he can’t. Instead he makes up on the spot a ridiculous scheme about setting up a maggot factory, insisting despite Mr Hoddy’s scepticism that there’s a massive market for maggots among anglers and the like, and how his factory would mass produce them in old oil drums full of rotting meat before packing them into glass bottles and posting them to subscribers.

So carried away does Claud become that he doesn’t notice the look on Mr Hoddy’s face until it’s too late, realises he’s gone too far – although I wasn’t sure whether this was because Hoddy, as a greengrocer, was disgusted by the notion of maggots and took it as a sly insult to his trade (i.e. dealing in fresh, unmaggoty fruit and veg); or whether Hoddy at some point realises Claud is making it all up and the realisation makes him furious.

Mr Feasey

A really gripping tale, by far the longest of the lot, in which Claud and his partner Gordon (owner of the filling station) concoct and bring to fruition their plan to fiddle a dog race. Claud has acquired two whippets, both identical in shape and colouring. One is slow, one is fast. The plan is to take the slow one to a country dog race, and enter him there for a string of races in which he will predictably come last then, once his identity is established and the odds are long, to make heavy bets on him (small best across all 17 bookies at the race) at long odds, and then enter the superfast dog for this race, thus winning all the bests at long odds.

The story is so long because it contains an immense amount of lore about how dog owners cheat, a quite staggering range of fixes which make dogs slow or fast, and all the ways to fix the races. The effect of all this lore and the intense anxiousness of Gordon and Claud as they lock up the garage and drive to the pivotal race is to have the reader on absolute tenterhooks as to the outcome.

Thoughts

Vivid

Obviously the core of a story is the plot, the series of events. And the ability to handle dialogue convincingly over long stretches is important. But what makes Dahl’s stories so effective, for me, is the tremendous limpidity and clarity of the prose and the completeness with which he describes the actions he describes. He describes them fully and pedantically so you can feel yourself doing them, whether it’s teetering on the railings of an ocean liner or hurriedly laying a cable along a corridor, you can feel yourself doing it. Amazingly vivid.

Height

How many of Dahl’s rather pathetic male characters are short. He is always very aware of height. The painter John Royden is a small neat man (p.385). The purser is small and fat and red (p.298). The owner of the art gallery is plump and short (p.327). Basil Turton is ‘a little chap’, ‘a small man’ (p.446). Adolph Knipe’s boss, Mr Bohlen, is ‘a fat little man’ (p.510). Rummins is ‘short and squat like a frog’ (p.537). When his big wife leans over him, Arthur Beaufort feels surrounded, almost enveloped by her:

as though she were a great tub of cream and I’d fallen in. (p.341)

Gladys Ponsonby is so short that she gives Lionel Lampson, looming over her:

the comic, wobbly feeling that I am standing on a chair. (p.372)

One imagines that, at 6 foot 6, Dahl had that feeling when standing next to more or less anybody.

Gambling

The intense sweaty thrill of it, as in ‘Man from the South’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Dip in the Pool’, the central subject of his novella ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’, the competitive bridge in ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’, the game of bridge in ‘Nunc Dimittis’. Gambling is a central obsession of Dahl’s.

Class and 50s manners

Some of these characters are very nobby (Arthur Beaufort’s wife from a titled family and their guest was educated at Eton), Lionel Lampson moves in titled circles, the narrator of ‘Neck’ is a High Society gossip columnist. I think there are two aspects of this: 1) There’s an element of voyeurism in witnessing the bitchiness, spite and malevolence of posh, upper class people. It has an extra relish, for some reason. 2) It points to a broader truth which is how very dated all the stories feel.

They’re set in the early to mid-1950s, still very much in the backwash of the war, waaaay before the doors were blown off conventional morality in the 1960s. My point being that several of the scenes only make sense in a milieu of upper-class gentility which has all but vanished today. For example, the eavesdropping on a young couple would surely, nowadays, need something salacious to make it really hit home, whereas for Dahl and his audience, the most shocking thing he could imagine was their being card cheats! Similarly, the society lady who is revealed in her underwear leads to scandal and murder in ‘Nunc Dimittis’ but would barely wake anybody up in the 1990s of paparazzi and Wonderbras, and we’re 30 years beyond even that now, into Naked Attraction and Love Island, a world of plastic surgery and male depilation.

The mating game

Amazing how the simple process of human beings seeking the perfect mate, pairing off, reproducing and then trying to put up with each other for the rest of our lives, is at the heart of so much fiction – as an evolutionary interpretation of literature would expect.

Mind you, having just written that down makes you realise how few of them are actually love stories  at all, in fact most of them are ‘out of love’ stories about the frictions and resentments of long-married couples – ‘Taste’, ‘A Dip in the Pool’, ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, ‘My Lady Love, My Dove’, ‘Edward the Conqueror’, ‘Nunc Dimittis’.

And, oddly for a man who became really famous for his children’s stories, there are no children in any of them, apart from the distinctly unchildish ‘The Wish’. Although, despite the ostensible subjects often being cruel or macabre, there is something profoundly childish about the simple glee and vengefulness of many of them. They’re obviously not children’s stories and yet they’re not quite, totally, for adults either…

Credit

References are to the versions of the stories published in Roald Dahl: The Complete Short Stories Volume Two published by Penguin in 2013.

Related links

Roald Dahl reviews

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Posted by Simon on May 15, 2024

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The Life of Nero by Suetonius

Executive summary

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus in 37 AD. He was the fifth Roman emperor and the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, reigning from 54 AD until his suicide in 68, aged just 33.

He was the son of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the Younger, one of the daughters of Germanicus and sister to the emperor Gaius (Caligula). After Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, Germanicus’ brother Claudius – who was Agrippina’s uncle – took the throne. Claudius took his niece as his fourth wife in 49 AD.

A year later Claudius was persuaded by Agrippina to adopt her son, Lucius Domitius, and make him his heir. Nero was 13 when he was adopted. When Claudius died (in October 54) it was widely believed that Agrippina poisoned him to ensure her son succeeded to the throne before Claudius’s biological son by his third wife, Britannicus, came of age and presented a more natural successor. A year later, Nero had Britannicus murdered to secure his position.

Nero was 17 when he came to the throne. In the early years of his reign Nero was advised and guided by his mother Agrippina, his tutor Seneca the Younger, and his praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus and ruled moderately and well. But he soon sought to rule independently and to rid himself of restraining influences. His power struggle with his mother was eventually resolved when he had her murdered in 59. Both the murder of Britannicus and Agrippina have elements of farcical ineptitude (see below).

Nero was popular with the members of his Praetorian Guard and lower-class commoners in Rome and its provinces. He organised lavish games, he periodically gave money to the people, he carried out modernising building works. But he was deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy.

The historically closest sources we have – Suetonius in his Lives and Tacitus in his Annals – describe Nero as tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched. But then, they were all written under the aegis of the dynasty which succeeded the Julio-Claudians – the Flavians – and so, to some extent, represent propaganda for that dynasty with the aim of rubbishing the emperors which came before.

After his increasingly debauched, spendthrift and reckless rule alienated the aristocracy, Nero was declared a public enemy by the Roman Senate, and forced to flee Rome to a country estate where he committed suicide at the age of 33.

Nero’s death led to chaos as three military commanders vied for supremacy, in what came to be called the Year of Four Emperors, AD 69, the rivals being Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.

I’ve reviewed Suetonius’s biographies of the four emperors who preceded Nero, namely Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula) and Claudius and along the way given several summaries of Suetonius’s approach. This is to give a brisk overview of his subject’s biography before moving on to look at specific areas of the emperor’s person – his appearance, family history and relationships, personality, quotes, the omens which surrounded his birth and death, and much other gossip and scandal.

Suetonius’s life of Nero is 57 (short) chapters long. It can be divided into five sections or parts:

  • the first five chapters describe Nero’s male forebears among the Ahenobarbi family
  • chapters 6 to 19 describe ‘Nero’s less atrocious acts’, many actually deserving praise
  • then, at chapter 20, Suetonius lets rip and commences a lurid account of Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’
  • chapters 40 to 49 give a long drawn-out description of his moral collapse following the revolt in Gaul, his abandonment by servants and friends, his flight from Rome and suicide
  • 50 to 57 describe his funeral and the aftermath

Suetonius’s life of Nero

The first five chapters describe Nero’s make forebears from the Ahenobarbi family:

  • Nero’s great-great-great grandfather, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, when tribune of the commons in 104 BC, was enraged at the priests for choosing someone else as pontifex maximus, so he transferred the right of filling vacancies in the priesthoods from the colleges themselves to the people in the Tribal Assembly (the law was subsequently repealed by Sulla). Having defeated the Allobroges and the Arverni in his consul­ship, he rode through the province on an elephant, attended by a throng of soldiers, in a kind of triumphal procession
  • His son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (98 to 48 BC), when consul in 54 BC, tried to deprive Caesar of the command of the armies in Gaul. The senate appointed him to succeed Caesar as governor of further Gaul and when Caesar invaded Italy in 49, he was the only one of the aristocratic party who showed any energy or courage, organising the defense of Corfinium. When Corfinium was taken Caesar characteristically granted him clemency but he rejoined the aristocratic party. He was killed at the battle of Pharsalus and is mentioned in one of Cicero’s speeches as a principled example of the old Republic.
  • He left a son, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (died 31 BC) who was beyond all question better than the rest of the family. He was condemned among those involved in Caesar’s assassination and so went to join Brutus and Cassius. Upon their defeat he surrendered the republican fleet to Mark Antony. This Ahenobarbus successively held all the highest offices including consul in 32 BC. When the civil war between Augustus and Anthony broke out, he was appointed one of Antony’s lieutenants, but defected to Octavian just a few days before the decisive battle of Actium. Although Antony was upset by this betrayal, he still sent him all his gear, his friends and his attendants. (This incident is described in Plutarch’s Life of Anthony, chapter 63.) He died just a few days later.
  • Gnaeus had a son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (49 BC to 25 AD) who was later well known for being named in Augustus’ will as the purchaser of his goods and chattels. He won the insignia of a triumph in the war in Germany. He gave a gladiatorial games so cruel that Augustus admonished him. He married Antonia the Elder (niece of emperor Augustus) and had a son:
  • This man, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (2 BC to 41 AD) was widely hated: while on the staff of Gaius Caesar out East he murdered one of his own freedmen for refusing to drink as much as he ordered. In a village on the Appian Way, suddenly whipping up his team, he purposely ran over and killed a boy. In the Roman Forum he gouged out the eye​ of a Roman knight for being too outspoken in chiding him. When praetor he defrauded the victors in the chariot races of their prizes. Just before the death of Tiberius he was charged with treason, adultery and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped owing to the change of rulers. Domitius married his first cousin once removed, Agrippina the Younger, Caligula’s sister, after her thirteenth birthday in 28. He was far older than her at the time. Tiberius arranged the marriage. Nine years later his son by Agrippina, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was born.

6. Nero was born at on 15 December 37, nine months after the death of Tiberius. When shown the baby his father is supposed to have remarked that ‘any child born to him and Agrippina was bound to have a detestable nature and become a public danger’. At the age of three Nero’s father died but his fellow heir Gaius seized all the property.

He had a troubled upbringing in this cursed family. First Gaius banished his mother so that young Domitius was brought up in relative poverty in the house of his aunt Lepida, who assigned him as tutors a dancer and a barber. But when Claudius became emperor, in 41, he restored to Nero his father’s legacy added to it, and recalled his mother from exile.

There is a widely attested legend that Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, came to regard the boy Nero as a rival to her own son, Britannicus, and so sent assassins to murder him, and that they were at the cradle when they were scared away by a snake which suddenly appeared from under his pillow. [A clear copy of the legend of Hercules strangling snakes as a baby.]

[After Claudius had Messalina executed, in 48 AD, for bigamously marrying the senator Gaius Silius and plotting against him, he proceeded to take this same Agrippina as his fourth wife, despite her being his niece, marrying her on New year’s Day 49. At this point Domitius became Claudius’s step-son and Agrippina persuaded Claudius to formally adopted him as his son and heir. This was when the boy was given an entirely new name, Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus.]

7. Domitius/Nero was ten years old when he was adopted by Claudius and assigned the senator and writer Annaeus Seneca as tutor. He almost immediately began a campaign to discredit Britannicus and his surviving relatives.

Nero entered public life aged just 14, reviewing march pasts of the army, pleading the cause of towns with cases before Claudius, appearing as a judge. When he turned 16 (in 53), Nero married Claudius’s daughter (i.e. his own step-sister), Claudia Octavia. He gave games and a beast-baiting in the Circus.

8. Nero was just 17 when the death of Claudius was announced. Most commentators think Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina because she was worried Britannicus would soon come of age and Claudius would change his mind and make his biological son heir. Nero was hailed emperor on the steps of the Palace, carried in a litter to the praetorian camp, made a brief address to the soldiers, and proceeded to the Senate House where he was awarded all manner of honours.

9. He started off with displays of filial duty, giving Claudius a magnificent funeral then paying the highest honours to the memory of his father Domitius. He left to his mother the management of all public and private business. He often rode with her through the streets in her litter. He curried favour with the Praetorian Guard, such a key player in Roman politics since it had been consolidated by Sejanus, by establishing a colony for them at Antium and building a harbour there at great expense.

10. Nero proclaimed he would model his rule on Augustus. He was conspicuously generous. He abolished some taxes and lowered others. popularity. He lowered rewards paid to informers. He distributed a largess of 400 sesterces to the commons and granted the poorest senators a salary. Like Augustus he had a good memory and greeted men of all ranks by name. Wise and popular moves.

11. Nero gave many entertainments of different kinds: the Juvenales,​ chariot races in the Circus, stage-plays and a gladiatorial show. He organised races for chariots drawn by four camels. At the Great Festival (Ludi Maximi) he organised a series of plays devoted to the eternity of the Empire.

12. At the gladiatorial show Nero had no one put to death, not even criminals. But he did compel 400 senators and 600 Roman knights, some of whom were well to do and of unblemished reputation, to fight in the arena. Some were forced to fight with the wild beasts or perform various services in the arena. He arranged a huge naval battle in salt water with sea monsters swimming about in it. And numerous dances which were a kind of ballet based on legendary themes (the life of the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus).

He inaugurated the ‘Neronia’, a festival of competitions in music, gymnastics and horsemanship, modelled on the Greek ones. Nero recited his own poetry and was unanimously awarded the prize for oratory. At the gymnastic contest, which he gave in the Saepta he shaved his chin for the first time, to the accompaniment of a great sacrifice of bullocks, and put the wispy hairs in a golden box adorned with pearls of great price, and dedicated it to the Capitoline Jupiter.

13. Suetonius describes the elaborate ceremonial surrounding the entrance of Tiridates, king of Armenia, into Rome and his obeisance before Nero on a sumptuously decorated platform and then again, in the Theatre. After which Nero to great applause closed the doors of the temple of Janus to signify that the whole empire was at peace.

14. Nero held four consul­ships.

15. Nero was secretive about deciding law cases, insisting on being given full written explanations of both sides of a case and retiring to consider them in private. He began to tamper with the constitution. He refused to admit the sons of freedmen to the senate. He began to appoint consuls for six months instead of the customary 12. He conferred the triumphal regalia even on men of the rank of quaestor, as well as on some of the knights, and sometimes for other than military services. When he sent speeches to be read to the senate he did so via consuls instead of the quaestors, as had been customary.

16. Nero introduced a new style of architecture to Rome, building porches out in front of houses and apartment blocks whose flat roofs allowed fires to be fought. He considered extending the city walls as far as the port of Ostia and to bring the sea from there to Rome by a canal.

During his reign many abuses were put down. Sumptuary laws limited private expenditures. Expensive public banquets were replaced by a distribution of grain. Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous superstition. He ended the licence afforded to chariot drivers, of being able to walk down the street cheating and robbing the people. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on were expelled from the city.

17. Nero made many legal reforms including promulgating protection against forgers, preventing will writers from adding clauses benefiting themselves, and that customers should pay a fixed and reasonable fee for the services of their lawyers.

18. Nero showed no interest in extending the bounds of the empire and considered withdrawing the army from Britain and only changed his mind because it would have diminished the memory of his adoptive father, Claudius. Two minor territorial extensions occurred when the kingdom of Pontus was ceded to Rome by its king, Polemon, and when part of the Alps reverted to Roman control on the death of its king, Cottius.

19. Nero planned two foreign tours but cancelled one to Alexandria after bad omens. He went to Greece where he proposed building a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, going so far as to breaking ground with a mattock and to carrying off a basket­ful of earth upon his shoulders before an audience of the Praetorian Guard. He also prepared for an expedition to the Caspian Gates, after enrolling a new legion of raw recruits of Italian birth, each six feet tall, which he grandly called ‘the phalanx of Alexander the Great.’

Chapter 20 marks a dividing point in the biography. Up to this point Suetonius had listed Nero’s respectable and positive achievements, many of which deserved praise. But from this point onwards, Suetonius announces that he will catalogue Nero’s ‘follies and crimes’.

Nero the performer

20. Nero enjoyed music. As soon as he became emperor he sent for Terpnus, the greatest lyre-player of the day, made him perform over successive nights over dinner, and then began to take lessons. And perform the exercises required, namely: lying on his back with a slab of lead on his chest; using enemas and emetics to keep down his weight; refrained from eating apples and other fruits considered damaging to the health (!) Despite all this his voice remained weak and husky.

Nero made his début at Naples, where he did not cease singing until he had finished the number which he had begun, even though the theatre was shaken by a sudden earthquake. He was impressed by the rhythmical clapping of crowds from Alexandria and commissioned some knights and 5,000 commoners to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause. They were divided into ‘the bees’ (who made a loud humming noise), ‘the roof-tiles’ (who clapped with hollow hands) and ‘the bricks’ (who clapped with flat palms). They were ordered to attend all Nero’s performances and applaud loudly after his performance. You could tell them by their thick hair, splendid dress, and the absence of rings on their left hands. The knights who led them were paid 400 gold pieces for each performance.

21. Nero repeated the Neronian games so he could sing at them. ​He arranged it so the crowd clamoured to hear him, dropped his name into the urn to take pot luck along with everyone else, but made sure he was called and then came forward, attended by prefects of the Praetorian Guard carrying his lyre, had an ex-consul announce him and then performed the song of Niobe until late in the afternoon.

He toyed with performing opposite professional actors in public shows. He did actually perform in tragedies, taking the parts of mortals and gods, sometimes even goddesses, wearing masks modelled on his own, or women’s masked based on his lover of the moment. He performed in ‘Canace in Childborth’, ‘Orestes the Matricide’, ‘The Blinding of Oedipus’ and the ‘Frenzy of Hercules’. There’s a story that , the last of these plays, a young recruit, seeing the emperor in rags and fetters, dashed forward to his assistance. [Like so many Roman anecdotes, a bit too good to be true.]

22. Nero was obsessed with horse racing from an early age and played with toys of chariots and horses. Once in power, he attended every race day and made no secret of his wish to have the number of races and prizes increased.

He desperately wanted to drive a chariot himself and, after practicing in the privacy of his own grounds, made a public appearance at the Circus Maximus (when one of his freedmen replaced the magistrate who usually took the job of dropping the napkin to start the race).

He went to Greece because all the cities which held musical competitions had swiftly adopted the sycophantic practice of awarding the emperor top prize. He declared that ‘the Greeks were the only ones who had an ear for music and that they alone were worthy of my efforts.’

So he took ship to Greece and immediately on arriving at Cassiope gave his first recital before the altar of Jupiter Cassius, and then went the round of all the contests.

23. During his visit to Greece Nero used his power to make the Greeks hold competitions between the usual intervals and introduced a musical competition into the Olympic Games. When his advisers told him he was needed back at Rome he angrily told them he had to remain performing in Greece until he had proved himself worthy of Nero.

No one was allowed to leave a theatre when Nero was performing. So Suetonius shares comic stories of women giving birth to children there, some secretly dropping down from the back wall, some even feigning death in order to be carried out. He sucked up to his rivals, praising them to their faces but badmouthing them behind their backs. When they were particularly good performers, he bribed them to sing badly. He addressed the judges in deferential terms but was surprisingly nervous before each performance.

24. Nero took the competitions very seriously, scrupulously observing the rules most scrupulously, never daring to clear his throat nor wipe the sweat from his brow with his arm (both actions which lost the competitor points). To obliterate the memory of all other victors in games​ he had their statues and busts taken down and placed in public lavatories.

Nero drove a chariot in many places. At Olympia he drove a ten-horse team, a novelty. He fell from the chariot, had to be helped back into it and failed to complete the course, but he received the prize just the same. The judges weren’t stupid. On his departure he presented the entire province with freedom​ and gave the judges Roman citizen­ship and money. He announced these gifts in in person during the Isthmian Games, standing in the middle of the stadium.

25. Arriving back at Naples, Nero ordered part of the wall to be razed so he could ride white horses through the gap, as was customary with victors in the sacred games.​ He entered Antium, then Albanum and finally Rome in the same manner. In Rome he rode in the same chariot which Augustus had used in his triumphs and wore a purple robe and a Greek cloak adorned with stars of gold, bearing on his head the Olympic wreath, the Pythian wreath in his right hand. Other wreaths were borne before him with placards describing where he won them, what he sang, who the competition was. He processed through the city to the cheers of the adoring crowd and the accompaniment of lavish sacrifices.

He placed the victor’s wreaths above the couches in his sleeping quarters and set up several statues of himself playing the lyre, and had a coin struck with the same image.

[What an extraordinary travesty and mockery of the military triumphs of the preceding centuries.]

In order to preserve his voice, Nero never addressed the soldiers except by letter or in a speech delivered by others, he never did anything for amusement or in earnest without a voice trainer by his side, to warn him to spare his vocal organs and hold a handkerchief to his mouth. He made friends or enemies according to how enthusiastically they applauded him.

Delinquent behaviour

26. Meanwhile, Nero performed his first acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice and cruelty in secret. Some might say boys will be boys, but this was the true Nero coming out.

When night fell, he took a cap or wig and went from tavern to tavern, roaming the streets performing pranks, but these weren’t harmless. He used to beat men as they came home from dinner, stabbing any who resisted him and throwing them into the sewers. He broke into shops then sold the loot openly in the market. After he was beaten almost to death by a senator whose wife he had maltreated, he thenceforth had a squad of tribunes follow him at a distance and unobserved.

He attended the theatre in the upper part of the proscenium. When fights broke out on stage (fighting with stones and broken benches) Nero himself threw many missiles at the people and even broke a praetor’s head.

Lavish feasts

27. Slowly Nero’s decadent behaviour became more overt and entrenched. His feasts lasted from noon till midnight with breaks for a swim in a warm bath or, if it was summer, into snow-cooled water. Sometimes he drained the artificial lakes in the Campus Martius or the Circus and held banquets there, including prostitutes and dancing girls as guests.

Whenever he cruised down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, he had rows of temporary brothels set up along the shore, where married women, pretending to be inn-keepers, solicited him to come ashore. [This is the kind of story which seems superficially colourful but as soon as you think about the practicalities, seems wildly impractical.]

He forced his friends to hold lavish banquets: one friend spent 4 million sesterces on a banquet where everyone wore turbans were distributed, another spent even more on a rose dinner.

Sex

28. Not satisifed with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin, Rubria. Then he tried to marry the freed-woman Acte by bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves by swearing that she was of royal birth.

He tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castrating him and then went through a marriage ceremony with him, dowry, bridal veil and all, took him back to the palace attended by a huge crowd and lived with him as man and wife. This gave rise to a joke that the world would have been a better place if Nero’s father had taken that kind of wife.

Nero dressed this Sporus in all the finery of an empress and took him everywhere with him in his litter, kissing him openly in public.

It was no secret that he lusted after his mother. it was said that only her enemies held him back, fearing that she would gain such control over him that her power would be absolute. So Nero added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look just like Agrippina. Others said that they had incestuous relations whenever he rode in a litter with his mother; you could tell by the stains when he emerged.

29. Nero ran through every type of obscenity and invented new ones. He devised a game in which he dressed in the skin of wild animals, was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women who were bound to stakes. When he had worked himself up to a frenzy he was ‘finished off’ by his freedman Doryphorus.

In fact he got this Doryphorus to marry him, as he had married Sporus, and on their ‘wedding night’ imitated the screams and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. Like perverts, abusers, wife beaters and misogynists everywhere, he thought all men were secretly just like him, but kept their vices hidden.

Extravagance

30. Nero believed money should be lavished on riotous extravagance. He thought it the mark of a true gentleman to waste and squander. He admired his uncle (his mother Agrippina’s brother, Gaius aka Caligula) because in less than four years he ran through the huge fortune it had taken Tiberius 30 years to amass.

He spent 8,000 gold pieces a day on King Tiridates and on his departure from Rome gave him more than a million. He gave the lyre-player Menecrates and the gladiator Spiculus houses and estates worthy of men who had celebrated triumphs. He was equally generous to the monkey-faced usurer Paneros and later on, had him buried with almost regal splendour.

Nero never wore the same garment twice. He staked 4,000 gold pieces on each throw of the dice. When he went fishing he used a golden net. It was said that he never made a journey with less than a thousand carriages. His mules were shod with silver and their drivers clad in wool from Canusium. He was attended by outriders with jingling bracelets and trappings.

Building works

31. Nero’s wastefulness was most on show in his architectural projects. He built a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called ‘The Passageway’. After it burned down, he had it rebuilt and named it the Golden House.

The entrance hall was large enough to hold a statue of himself 120 feet high. The triple-pillared colonnade ran for a mile. A huge lake was surrounded with buildings designed to represent entire cities and by a landscaped garden containing ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodland, where every type of domestic animal roamed at large.

Parts of the house were inlaid with gold and studded with precious jewels. All the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory. The panels could be drawn back to rain down dried flowers or perfume. The main banqueting hall was circular and its roof revolved day and night in time with the sky.

When this enormous luxury palace was completed he uttered some immortal words which can go down as the motto for every sybarite and decadent ever since: ‘Good. Now at last I can begin to live like a human being!’

He also began a covered bath, surrounded by colonnades, which stretched from Misenum to Lake Avernus. The plan was to divert all the hot springs in the Baiae region to feed it. Another grand project was to build a ship canal from Avernus all the way to Ostia, 160 miles long and wide enough for two quinqueremes to pass. Prisoners from all over the empire were to be brought in to build it.

He was led on to these wild extravagances by the promises of a Roman knight, who declared that the enormous wealth which queen Dido had taken with her in her flight from Tyre was hidden away in huge caves in Africa and could be easily recovered.

32. When this hope, inevitably, proved false, Nero found himself destitute, discovered that he didn’t even have enough money for the soldiers’ pay or veterans benefits. So he found himself forced to resort to false accusations and robbery. He increased taxes and excises. He seized the estates of anyone rich who died without leaving him enough in their will, and fined lawyers who wrote unsatisfactory wills.

Any man whose words or deeds left him exposed to accusation by an informer was accused of treason. He recalled the lavish gifts he had given to the Greek cities. He decoyed marketeers into buying amethystine or Tyrian dyes (both illegal under the sumptuary laws) then closed them all down and seized their goods. Once he spotted an aristocratic lady wearing this illegal colour at one of his recitals and had her dragged off, stripped off her clothes, but also of her estates.

When he appointed magistrates his instructions were simple: ‘You know my needs; let us leave no-one with any possessions.’ In the end he was forced to strip temples of their gifts and melted down the images of gold and silver, among them the household gods of Rome itself. (Galba, soon afterwards, had them all recast and restored).

Murdering Claudius

33. Claudius himself was the first victim of Nero’s murderous career, for even if Nero wasn’t directly involved in his uncle’s poisoning, he knew all about it, as he later admitted. For he used to mockingly praise mushrooms (the dish by which Claudius was poisoned) as ‘the food of the gods’. After the initial phase of filial duty was over, he took to openly insulting Claudius as stupid and cruel. He joked that he hoped Claudius wasn’t still ‘playing the fool’ in heaven. Nero annulled many of Claudius’s edicts on the ground that he was a doddering old idiot.

Murdering Britannicus

Nero attempted to poison Britannicus for two reasons: a) trivially, he was jealous that Britannicus’s voice was better than his b) he worried that, as he grew up, the people would come to prefer the natural son of Claudius to him, the adoptive one. The Suetonius gives what purports to be a detailed account of how Nero commissioned an arch-poisoner named Locusta to kill his half-brother and, when it didn’t work, flogged her with his own hand. He forced her to devise a stronger and stronger poison, which they tried on a goat – it took 5 hours to work, so he had her reduce it further, and try on a pig, which died on the spot.

That night at dinner Nero administered it to Britannicus who dropped dead at the very first taste. Nero assured the horrified guests that Britannicus was having an epileptic fit but the next day had him hastily buried in a pouring rainstorm, without any ceremony. He rewarded Locusta for her services with a large estates in the country, and actually sent her pupils to study the art of poison.

Murdering Agrippina

34. The over-watchful, over-protective eye that his mother, Agrippina the Younger, shone on Nero eventually proved more than he could bear. At first he tried to intimidate her by threatening to retire to Rhodes (as his grandfather Tiberius had done 60 years earlier). He then deprived her of all honours, even of her Roman and German guard. He forbade her to live with him and drove her from the Palace.

He bribed men to annoy her with lawsuits while she remained in the city, and after she had retired to the country, to pass her house by land and sea and break her rest with abuse and mockery. At last, terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept.

When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat, to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. Then he pretended a reconciliation and invited her in a most cordial letter to come to Baiae and celebrate the feast of Minerva​ with him. He then instructed his captains to wreck the galley in which she had come, by running into it as if by accident. So she had to return to Bauli in the craft he offered her. He saw her off in high spirits, then spent the night anxiously waiting for news.

When he learned that the ship had foundered, alright, but Agrippina had escaped by swimming, he had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman who had brought the news, and ordered that he had made an attempt on his life. The freedman was promptly arrested, tortured, admitted being part of a plot to assassinate the emperor, his mother was part of it, and so she too was executed, giving out that she had tried to assassinate him but then committed suicide when she learned the plan had failed. He is said to have travelled to her house and handled her limp limbs, assessing her looks, between swigs of wine.

However, her memory haunted him and gave him bad dreams. He told confidants that he was hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies. He even had rites performed by Persian magicians, in an effort to summon her shade and entreat it for forgiveness.

Then he murdered his aunt, Domitia Lepida. He visited her when she was confined to her bed with constipation and ordered her doctors to poison her, seizing her property before she was cold, suppressing her will, that nothing might escape him.

Nero’s wives

35. Besides Octavia Nero later took two wives, Poppaea Sabina, daughter of an ex-quaestor and married to a Roman knight, and then Statilia Messalina. To take Statilia he had to murder her husband Atticus Vestinus while he held the office of consul.

He soon grew tired of living with Octavia. He made several attempts to strangle her, then divorced her on the ground of barrenness. This was unpopular, so then he banished her. And finally he had her put to death on a charge of adultery that was so shameless and unfounded, that even when her slaves were tortured they refused to validate it.

Nero dearly loved Poppaea, whom he married twelve days after his divorce from Octavia, yet he caused her death by kicking her when she was pregnant and ill, because she had scolded him for coming home late from the races.

There is no kind of relation­ship that he did not violate in his career of crime. He put to death Antonia, daughter of Claudius, for refusing to marry him after Poppaea’s death, charging her with an attempt at revolution. He treated in the same way all others who were in any way connected with him by blood or by marriage.

Among these was the young Aulus Plautius, whom he forcibly defiled before his death, saying ‘Let my mother come now and kiss my successor,’ implying that Agrippina had loved Plautius and that this had roused him to hopes of the throne.

Rufrius Crispinus, a mere boy, his stepson and the child of Poppaea, he ordered to be drowned by the child’s own slaves while he was fishing, because it was said that he used to play at being a general and an emperor.

He banished his nurse’s son Tuscus, because when procurator in Egypt, he had bathed in some baths which were built for a visit of Nero’s.

He drove his tutor Seneca to suicide, although when the old man often pleaded to be allowed to retire and offered to give up his estates, Nero had sworn most solemnly that he was wrong to suspect him and that he would rather die than harm him.

He sent poison to Burrus, prefect of the Guard, in place of a throat medicine which he had promised him. The old and wealthy freedmen who had helped him first to his adoption and later to the throne, and aided him by their advice,​ he killed by poison, administered partly in their food and partly in their drink.

36. Two conspiracies against Nero’s life were uncovered. The earlier and more dangerous of these was that of Piso at Rome; the other was set on foot by Vinicius at Beneventum. The conspirators made their defence in fetters, some voluntarily admitting their guilt, some saying they were doing a favour to man so steeped in evil as Nero. The children of those who were condemned were banished or put to death by poison or starvation: a number are known to have been murdered all together at a single meal along with their tutors and attendants.

37. After this Nero showed neither discrimination nor moderation in putting to death whoever he pleased on any pretext whatever. Salvidienus Orfitus was charged with having let to certain states as headquarters three shops which formed part of his house near the Forum; Cassius Longinus, a blind jurist, with retaining in the old family tree of his house the mask of Gaius Cassius, the assassin of Julius Caesar; Paetus Thrasea with having a sullen expression.

To those ordered to die he never granted more than an hour’s respite, and to avoid any delay, he brought physicians who were ordered to ‘attend to’ such as lingered – that was the phrase he used for killing them by opening their veins.

Puffed up by success, Nero boasted that no prince had ever known the power he, Nero, now enjoyed. He broadly hinted that he would not spare the senate, but would one day blot out the whole order from the State and hand over the rule of the provinces and command of the armies to the Roman knights and his freedmen.

He even made vows ‘for himself and the people of Rome’, leaving the senate out of the traditional formula.

The great fire of Rome

38. Displeased with the ugliness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city. Some granaries near the Golden House, whose location he desired, were demolished and set on fire. For six days and seven nights destruction raged, while the people were driven for shelter to monuments and tombs.

An immense number of common dwellings, houses of great military leaders along with all their treasures and insignia, along with the temples of the gods, and ancient monuments of historical interest, all went up in flames. Nero watched the fire from the tower of Maecenas​, exulting in ‘the beauty of the flames’ and sang the entire ‘Sack of Ilium’ in his regular stage costume.

He set out to profit from the disaster so, while promising the removal of the debris and dead bodies free of cost, he allowed no one to approach the ruins of their own property so he could loot them. And he demanded such exorbitant contributions from the provinces for the rebuilding that he nearly bankrupted them.

39. Disaster was added to disaster. A plague killed 30,000. In Britain two important towns were sacked and great numbers of citizens and allies were butchered. (The towns were Camulodunum [Meldon] and Verulamium [St. Albans]. According to the historian Xiphilinus, 80,000 perished).

A Roman army was defeated in Armenia and Syria was all but lost.

The Gaulish revolt

40. After the world had put up with such a ruler for nearly fourteen years, it at last cast him off, and the first steps began in Gaul. Gaul at that time was governed by Julius Vindex as propraetor who now rose against the emperor, sending him a series of increasingly abusive messages. When he heard of the Gaul rebellion, at first Nero was delighted, thinking this would give him the opportunity to fleece the rebellious provinces. When it escalated, he did his best to ignore it.

41. At last a series of insulting edicts of Vindex prompted him to address the senate (but only by letter) to avenge him and the state. When more urgent despatches reached Antium Nero finally repaired to the capital. But here he didn’t address either the senate (in the House) or the people (in the Forum) but invited some of the leading men to his house where, after a hasty consultation about Gaul, he spent the rest of the day exhibiting a new type of water-organ.

42. But when news arrived that the Roman governor Galba was leading a revolt in Spain, Nero fainted. When he regained consciousness, Nero abandoned hope, tearing his robe, declaring that it was all over with him. But instead of taking active steps to quell the rebellions he continued his luxurious habits and whenever good news arrived from the provinces, he gave lavish feasts and composed comic songs about the leaders of the revolt.

43. At the start of the revolt Nero made wild and characteristically brutal plans. He planned to depose all army commanders and all provincial governors and have them all executed, then massacre all exiles everywhere and kill all the Gauls then present in Rome.

[What this clearly demonstrates is Nero’s inability to manage the subtlety and detail of individual men with individual grievances. Augustus and Tiberius knew their officials, knew their strengths and weaknesses and allegiances, knew how to manage them, play them off against each other, keep their ambition under control. In fact they knew that that’s what being Roman emperor consisted of – unending man management, of army leaders, provincial governors, and the jockeying factions in the Senate. Caligula and Nero didn’t understand this and had no interest in it. If anyone stood in their way they just had them killed. Which explains Nero’s blunt, sweeping and ineffective response to the revolts.]

Maybe Suetonius exaggerates when he said Nero also considered poisoning the entire senate and setting Rome on fire again. You feel the heavy hand of Flavian propaganda in such tales. Or maybe they were popular rumours. But they testify to Nero’s inability to manage specific rebel leaders and situations with anything approaching subtlety or intelligence.

Instead, Nero dismissed the two consuls and appointed himself sole consul. He left a feast leaning on the shoulders of his comrades, and declaring that all he need do was confront the rebellious army and fall to his knees weeping for them to realise they loved him and asking forgiveness. Next day he would be dancing and singing hymns of praise, so he was just off to compose a few in preparation.

44. In preparing for his campaign Nero was mainly concerned with finding enough wagons to carry all his musical instruments, and arranging for all his concubines to have male haircuts and be issued with Amazonian axes and shields.

He issued a general conscription which was largely ignored so compelled every household to contribute a certain number of slaves and part of their incomes. All tenants of private houses and apartments had to pay a year’s rent to the Treasury.

45. This aroused bad feeling against Nero which was compounded when he profited from the high cost of grain. A rumour went round that while the people were starving a ship had arrived from Alexandria, bringing sand for the court wrestlers. Graffiti, slogans and angry jokes at his expense proliferated.

46. Nero was frightened by bad dreams, auspices and omens. He dreamed:

  • that he was steering a ship in his sleep and that the helm was wrenched from his hands
  • that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into thickest darkness
  • that he was covered with a swarm of winged ants
  • that a Spanish horse he was fond of was changed into an ape
  • that the doors of the Mausoleum (built to house the dead of the royal family) flew open and a voice called him to enter
  • on the Kalends of January the city gods toppled over and in front of the assembled people the keys of the Capitol could not be found

In his last public appearance as a singer he performed ‘Oedipus in Exile’ which ends with the line:

Wife, father, mother drive me to my death.

Seeing as how he had murdered his (adoptive) father, Claudius, his own mother (Agrippina the Younger), had his first wife Octavia murdered then kicked to death Poppaea.

47. When word came that the other armies had revolted, Nero tore up the dispatches, pushed over his table, smashing his favourite ‘Homeric’ cups, ordered some poison from the arch-poisoner Locusta, to keep with him, and went into the Servilian gardens, where he tried to induce the tribunes and centurions of the Guard to accompany him in his flight. They refused.

He considered other plans: to go as a suppliant to the Parthians; or to Galba; or to appear to the people on the rostra, dressed in black, and beg for pardon for his past offences. Maybe they would allow him the prefecture of Egypt. Afterwards a speech composed for this purpose was found in his writing desk, but it is thought that he didn’t dare deliver it for fear of being torn to pieces before he could reach the Forum.

Next morning Nero awoke to discover his guard of soldiers had abandoned him. He sent for his friends but no-one replied. He roamed round the palace but doors were bolted, no-one answered his calls. Back at his rooms he found even the caretakers had absconded, taking his bed linen and the box of poison.

He called for the gladiator Spiculus​ or any other trained executioner to put an end to him, but none came and he ran out as if to throw himself into the Tiber.

48. But Nero abandoned that plan and said he needed to go somewhere quiet to gather his thoughts. His freedman Phaon suggested his villa in the suburbs, just four miles away. So Nero pulled on a faded cloak, covered his head, and set off on horseback accompanied by just four attendants, one of whom was Sporus.

The short journey was eventful, with a mild earthquake and a flash of lightning; then shouting from an army camp in favour of Galba. Then his horse took fright at the smell of a corpse which had been thrown out into the road.

They arrived at Phaon’s villa and made their way through brambles to the back door. Nero scooped water from a pool, quipping that this was ‘Nero’s own special brew.’ Once inside the villa he sank down on a couch with a common mattress, over which an old cloak had been thrown. Though suffering from hunger and renewed thirst, he refused some coarse bread which was offered him, but drank a little lukewarm water.

49. At last, as it became clear his enemies were closing in, Nero bad his servants dig a grave and assemble wood for a pyre. As he watched this being done he wept and said again and again: ‘What an artist the world is losing!’

Then a runner brought a letter from Phaon announcing that he had been declared a public enemy by the senate and that, when caught, he would be punished ‘in the ancient style’. When he asked what that meant, his servants told him it meant the criminal was stripped, fastened by the neck in a fork​ and then beaten to death with rods.

Terrified, Nero seized two daggers but couldn’t bring himself to use them. He ordered one of his slaves to set an example by killing himself, but none of them would. He reproached himself for his cowardice, lamenting that this sordid end didn’t become the great artist Nero at all.

Then they heard a troop of cavalry approaching up the road to arrest him and, with the help of his private secretary, Epaphroditus, he stabbed himself in the throat. He was all but dead when a centurion rushed in. As this centurion placed a cloak to the wound, Nero gasped: ‘Tool ate! But what loyalty!’ Then he died.

Burial

50. Nero was buried at a cost of 200,000 sesterces and laid out in white robes embroidered with gold, which he had worn on the Kalends of January. His ashes were deposited by his nurses, Egloge and Alexandria, accompanied by his mistress Acte, in the family tomb of the Domitii on the summit of the Hill of Gardens.

51. Nero was about average height, his body was marked with pimples and smelt bad. His hair was light blond, his features regular rather than attractive, his eyes blue and somewhat weak. His neck was thick and squat, his belly prominent and his legs very slender.

His health was good. For all his riotous excess he was only ill three times during the fourteen years of his reign, and even then not enough to give up wine or any of his usual habits.

He was utterly shameless in the care of his person and in his dress, always having his hair arranged in tiers of curls, and during the trip to Greece let it grow long and hang down behind.

He often gave audiences in an unbelted silk dressing gown and slippers.

52. When a boy he studied the usual liberal arts except philosophy which his mother Agrippina told him was no subject for a future ruler.

His tutor Seneca kept him from reading the early orators in order to make himself appear better to the boy, so Nero turned to poetry. He wrote poetry easily, with great facility. Some people claimed that he passed off other writer’s work as his own but “notebooks and papers have come into my possession which contain some of Nero’s best-known poems in his own handwriting. Many erasures and cancellations as well as words substituted above the lines, prove that he was neither copying nor dictating but are written just as people write when they are thinking and composing.”

[a) what an extraordinary thought, that Suetonius had before him on the table the actual notebooks of Nero; b) Have any of Nero’s poems survived?]

Nero also took more than an amateur’s interest in painting and sculpture.

53. But Nero’s dominant characteristic was his thirst for popularity and his jealousy of anyone who caught the public eye for any achievement whatsoever. Not content with singing, playing the lyre and chariot racing, he studied and practised wrestling constantly, watching contests from right next to the ring.

It is said that he planned to emulate the exploits of Hercules and had had a lion specially trained so he could safely face it naked in the amphitheatre and, in front of the whole population of Rome, kill it with a club or even strangle it with his bare hands.

54. Towards the end of his reign Nero publicly vowed that if he retained his power, he would celebrate his victory by giving a performance on the water-organ, the flute, and the bagpipes, and that on the last day he would appear as an actor and dance ‘Vergil’s Turnus’. Some claim he had the actor Paris put to death because he saw him as a dangerous rival.

55. Nero’s obsession with immortality and undying fame made him name many places and things after himself: he renamed the month of April Neroneus and was tempted to rename Rome Neropolis.

56. Nero despised all cults except that of the Syrian goddess Atagarsis but he eventually changed his mind even about her and urinated on her image. He came instead to have a superstitious belief which he kept to the end: for an unknown commoner sent him the gift of a little image of a girl as a protection against plots. As it happened a plot was revealed immediately afterwards so Nero took to worshipping this little image as if she were a powerful goddess and sacrificed to her three times a day.

57. Nero died at the age of 31, on the anniversary of the murder of Octavia. Such was the public rejoicing that the public ran through the streets wearing liberty caps​ and cheering. Yet for a long time afterwards, some secret admirers garlanded his tomb with spring and summer flowers and had statues made of him which they placed on the rostra wearing his characteristic fringed toga.

Vologaesus, king of the Parthians, when he sent envoys to the senate to renew his alliance, asked that honour be paid to the memory of Nero. In fact, Suetonius tells us that 20 years later, when he was a young man, a person of obscure origin appeared in Parthia claiming to be Nero and such was the power of his name to Parthian ears that they supported him vigorously and surrendered him to the Romans only with great reluctance.

Credit

Robert Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius was published by Penguin in 1957. A revised translation by Classicist Michael Grant, more faithful to the Latin original, was published in 1979. A further revised edition was published in 1989 with an updated bibliography.

Related links

Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Roman reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 12, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/12/the-life-of-nero-by-suetonius/

The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (1589)

‘But I perceive there is no love on earth,
Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks…’
(Abigail, after learning her father conspired to get her true love murdered)

Provenance

First recorded performance: 26 February 1592, by Lord Strange’s acting company.

First published: 1592.

Earliest extant edition, 1633. This was published to coincide with a revival of the play, which included a performance before King Charles and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, for which a new prologue and epilogue were written.

Full title: The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. Note that, although the 1633 quarto divided the play into acts, it wasn’t divided into scenes, there were no indications where scenes were set, or which bit of dialogue were asides to the audience. All of these were added by the Reverend Alexander Dyce in his 1876 edition of the plays, and have been copied by most modern editors.

Like Tamburlaine, the Jew has a large cast of 25 speaking characters, plus numerous unnamed citizens of Malta, Turkish janizaries, guards, attendants and slaves. In other words, it was a theatrical epic, in its day.

Executive summary

The Governor of Malta seizes the wealth of all Jewish citizens to pay the Turks not to invade. In revenge the richest Jew in Malta, Barabas, designs a barrage of retaliation against the governor, helped by his slave, Ithamore.

Barabas’ murderous deeds include:

  • getting the governor’s son killed in a duel
  • terrorising his own daughter, who joins a nunnery for safety but is afterwards poisoned by her father, along with the entire nunnery
  • the strangling of an old friar and the framing of another friar for the murder
  • poisoning his servant Ithamore when he deserts him, along with the prostitute and her pimp, who had threatened to expose him

Finally, Barabas betrays the entire population of Malta by helping the Turks conquer Malta Town, but he is then outwitted when the Christian governor turns the tables on him, leaving him to burn alive in the trap he had set for the Turks, but is led to fall into himself. Subtle, it ain’t.

Historical fact check: Barabas and Ferneze are fictional characters, there never was a Jew of Malta or a governor of that name. Malta never fell to the Turks, and never paid them tribute. The entire storyline is a product of the playwright’s imagination.

The play

Prologue

The ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas, the Jew of Malta. In Marlowe’s time there were only a few hundred Jews in London. They were better known from popular stereotypes of greed or cunning than from personal contact.

It is appropriate, then that one stereotype of cunning is introduced by another. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer best known for The Prince, a handbook of statecraft which eschews any notions of religion or morality in favour of hard-nosed advice about what actually works when it comes to ruling a state. Machiavelli’s attitude is typified by these lines from the prologue:

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Machiavelli’s bluntness and his rejection of Christian morality, in an age drenched in Christian values, caused his name to be associated with complex and unscrupulous scheming – as it has remained, right down to the present day.

Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.

Anyway, the ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas as one of his own – an amoral, cunning schemer.

Act 1

Scene 1

Barabas is counting his wealth. He envies factors for the rich mines of India, and the Moors who (according to legend) simply have to bend down to pick rare stones from the earth. This opening scene establishes Barabas as very rich, very greedy, and the possessor of a Marlowe-sized imagination, rich with exotic and evocative names and visions of boundless riches.

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines,
That trade in metal of the purest mould;
The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diämonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them, indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve, in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity

And of course Barabas’s occupation is a trader in the rarest, most precious jewels, clothes and valuables in the world, so it is an open invitation for reams of Marlovian sensual luxury.

Two merchants come to tell Barabas his ships have arrived from various destinations, including Egypt via Cyprus, bearing rich goods. When they leave he soliloquises on how much more successful the practical Jews are than faithless Christians, name-checking a number of other Jewish millionaires, saying he’d rather be hated as a Jew and be rich, than be accepted as a Christian and be poor.

Three Jews arrive to tell the ominous news that an embassy of Turks has arrived to see the governor and that all the island’s Jews are summoned to the senate house. Barabas assures them they are wrong to have misgivings. When they exit, he continues to tell himself that the Turks and Maltese are at peace, so there will be no trouble. And even if there is, he is only concerned about himself and his daughter.

The scene establishes what will become a format of the play which is the many times Barabas is talking to someone saying one thing – but then makes an aside to the audience in which he reveals he is thinking something quite different.

Scene 3. The senate house

The Turkish leader, the Sultan’s son Selim Calymath, makes it clear to the governor of Malta, Ferneze, that they demand ten years worth of tribute – a hundred thousand crowns. Ferneze begs a month to raise it and Calymath agrees, leaving with his retinue.

The governor calls in the island’s Jews, explains Calymath’s extortion and says he is going to raise the lion’s share of it by mulcting them, demanding half their estates. He is quite venomous about it:

SECOND KNIGHT: Have strangers leave with us to get their wealth?
Then let them with us cóntribute.
BARABAS: How! equally?
GOVERNOR FERNESE: No, Jew, like infidels;
For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursèd in the sight of Heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befall’n,
And therefore thus we are determinèd. −

So the Christians put up with the Jews but not far beneath the surface hate and despise them. The Governor announces he will confiscate half the Jews’ wealth and anyone who hesitates will a) be forced to convert to Christianity and if they still hesitate, b) all their goods will be confiscated. The other Jews immediately say they’ll surrender half their wealth, but Barabas is outraged, criticises them and tries to haggle with the Governor. Who promptly orders all Barabas’s wealth to be confiscated!

When he protests at this, one of the governor’s knights the governor’s entourage consists of members of the Order of the Knights of St John) suggests they confiscate Barabas’s house and turn it into a nunnery, which the Governor immediately accepts and orders.

The governor and his officials exit and Barabas sinks to his knees to call down a world of vengeance upon them. The other Jews tell him to reflect on the story of Job but Barabas dismisses it, saying he was vastly richer than Job, has lost more, is hugely more inconsolable.

Scene 4

Barabas’s daughter Abigail comes to meet him. She is in tears, she has heard the bad news. He reveals a secret – he had hidden quite a lot of wealth away. But Abigail tells him they have already confiscated the house and started to convert it into a nunnery! Barabas laments his lost gold and jewels, pauses, then comes up with a Cunning Plan. Abigail will convert to Christianity, enrol as a nun and, once she’s in, pull up the floorboards under which the loot is hidden, and return with it to her father.

Abigail agrees but doubts whether she can carry it off. Confidence is all, her father tells her. They exit.

Enter Friar Jacomo, Friar Barnardine, Abbess, and a Nun. They have barely made a few remarks about the new nunnery before Abigail re-enters, identifies herself as the daughter of the Jew, and begs forgiveness, penitence and asks to be enrolled in the order. Improbably the friars and abbess agree.

At which point Baraba re-enters and puts up a pretence of being appalled that his daughter is going over to the enemy. He curses and anathematises her as the Christians try to intervene, but interspersed between his curses, Barabas whispers instructions on how to find the floorboard with the secret mark and find the treasure. They all leave the stage.

Enter Mathias, a young man who, we soon learn, is in love with Abigail and dejected to see her going off to a nunnery. His friend Lodowick enters – who just happens to be the governor’s son – and asks Mathias why he’s in the dumps, allowing Mathias to explain at length his love for Abigail. While he does so, he reveals that she is scarce fourteen-years-old. Lodowick says that if she’s as beautiful as his friend claims, it would be good to visit and see her. They exit.

Act 2

Scene 1. Before the House of Barabas, now a Nunnery

Enter Barabas who explains a) that it is night but he can’t sleep, and b) he’s awaiting a signal from Abigail. Enter Abigail, obviously in the balcony of the theatre, where she describes: finding the floorboards, digging up the treasure, coming to the window, whispering to her father waiting below, then throwing him the bags of gold, at which he rejoices and praises her.

Scene 2. The Council House

The Governor interviews the Spanish captain – Martin del Bosco – of a ship recently docked in the harbour who describes how his ship was set upon by Turks, how they fought them off and seized one of their ships, whose crew they have come to Malta to sell as slaves.

The governor initially says no, because he is afraid of the Turks, but some of his advisors encourage del Bosco to shame the governor, to tell him not to submit to the Turks, specially after their recent capture of Rhodes (seized from the order of the Knights of St John in 1523).

Del Bosco succeeds in firing the governor’s fighting zeal. He offers to write to the king of Spain for help. Ferneze appoints him military ruler of the island and challenges the Turks to do their worst. If necessary, like the garrison on Rhodes, they’ll fight and die to the last man.

Scene 3. The market place

Two officers are lining del Bosco’s captured men up to be sold as slaves. Enter Barabas who tells us he has used the gold to buy a house as big as the governor’s and his daughter has left the convent. He tells us he hails from Florence where he learned to bow and fawn and curtsey to faithless Christians and then to spit into their collecting bowls.

Enter Lodowick and he and Barabas engage in a stylised conversation in which Lodowick asks whether Barabas has a diamond, and Barabas replies, yes a pretty one – by which they both mean Abigail – the dialogue being interspersed with Barabas’s bitter vengeful asides to the audience in which he reveals what he’d really like to do to the governor’s son i.e. poison him.

Having mutually agreed to rendezvous later, Lodowick now accompanies Barabas to the slave market, where they size up the merchandise and chat to the selling officers. He rejects one costing 200 crowns, not least because he looks fit and healthy so will cost a fortune to feed, instead buys a leaner one, from Thrace, named Ithamore, for 100 crowns. Aside to the audience Barabas explains that he is buying the slave solely to further his plans of revenge!

Enter young Mathias and his mother to the slave market, and discuss the wares. We now learn that Barabas knows his daughter and Mathias are in love but plans to foil their love. Nonetheless, he enjoys leading Mathias on. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas alone with Ithamore. Barabas tells him, if he is to please his master, he must forget the Christian virtues of ‘Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear’ and lose pity. He goes on to give a magnificent speech describing his own biography.

As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon th’ Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure −
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the gaols with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.

There’s nothing like a good stage villain. You can imagine the actor taunting the Elizabethan audience, who enthusiastically booed him and threw rotten tomatoes. Boo, hiss, villain! And it turns out that Ithamore is a perfect match. When Barabas asks how he has spent his life, Ithamore gleefully replies:

Faith, master,
In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers’ chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneeled,
I strowèd powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.

He was raised in Arabia and has served the Turks till his recent capture, so it appears Ithamore is a Muslim i.e. a) like Barabas, an enemy of Christians and b) circumcised. ‘We are villains both; Both circumcisèd; we hate Christians both.’

Scene 4

Now they are in front of Barabas’s new house and enter Lodowick to keep his appointment. Barabas lets him into the house and orders his daughter to entertain him. (In asides he whispers to Abigail to pretend to Lodowick she is in love with him, to lead him on, she protests it is Mathias she loves, Barabas orders her to do it. He plans to kill them both [Lodowick and Mathias]).

Enter Mathias and Barabas play acts that he supports his suit for his daughter’s hand but is having a hard time fighting off Lodowick. Only recently he snuck into his house to see Abigail. He tells Mathias to hide and watch. They both watch Lodowick come out of the house hand in hand with Abigail, as if in love. Mathias makes to draw his sword and kill him, but Barabas says ‘not in my house; contain your wrath; there will be other occasions’ and Mathias exists, mighty angry.

Lodowick sees him depart, asks Barabas about him, who explains that Mathias is mad with jealousy and plans to kill him (Lodowick). He encourages Lodowick’s suit for Abigail, and tells her to continue pretending to be in love with him, doing so in strongly anti-Christian phraseology, which is designed to play up the Christian audience’s stereotypes of wicked Jews, describing Lodowick as:

This offspring of Cain, this Jebusite,
That never tasted of the Passover,
Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan,
Nor our Messias that is yet to come;
This gentle maggot, Lodowick, I mean

And as to the ‘morality’ of the situation:

It’s no sin to deceive a Christiän;
For they themselves hold it a principle,

Abigail promises herself to Lodowick – then immediately turns to the audience and shares her regret. (This happens throughout the play, it’s one of its leading features – the very high amount of speaking aside, to let the audience hear a character’s true feelings of intentions, as opposed to what they say.)

Lodowick is puzzled why Abigail looks pale and faint. His doubts vanish when he sees that villain Mathias enters and makes as if to attack him. Barabas tells him to hold and leave, while he (Barabas) sorts out the situation. Barabas then tells Mathias that he – Barabas – just saved his life from the incensed rival, Lodowick. He encourages Mathias to attack Lodowick next time he sees him.

Barabas is, as we can see, adopting the role of impresario which emerges clearly as the central role in the city comedies of a decade later, written by Ben Jonson and colleagues – in which the play itself contains a trickster figure who concocts ever-more elaborate scams and schemes to humiliate or punish other characters.

Abigail has witnessed all this and has, of course, played a lying part, deceiving Lodowick. Now she bursts into tears and asks her father why he’s setting the two young men against each other. Barabas orders Ithamore to put her in the house which he does, presumably none too gently. Then Barabas gives Ithamore a letter to deliver to Mathias, as if from Lodowick, challenging him to a duel. Ho ho ho, he rubs his hands with malevolent glee, the audience boos and hisses.

Act 3

Scene 1. The Veranda of the House of Bellamira

Enter Bellamira. Who is Bellamira? A courtesan. She laments that business has dried up since the Turks besieged the island. Enter her ‘bully’, meaning either pimp or associate, Pilia-Borza, who has stolen a bag of silver from Barabas’s house, through the window. At that moment, Ithamore enters, Pilia-Borza drags Bellamira away, but not before Ithamore sees her and falls in love at first sight. In passing, he tells us he’s delivered Barabas’s fake letter to Mathias.

NOTE: Ithamore, as a slave, and Pilia-Borza, as a criminal, both speak in prose, unlike every other character in the play who speak in verse.

Scene 2

Mathias and Lodowick encounter each other in the street and have a swordfight while Barabas watches gleefully from a balcony. They kill each other. Enter their respective parents, governor Ferneze Lodowick’s father and Katherine, Mathias’s widowed mother. After initial antagonism, Ferneze and Katherine lock hands in grief, promising to bury the dead boys in one mausoleum, and to discover what drove the former friends to kill each other. Ooops. Sounds ominous for Barabas.

Scene 3. A room in Barabas’s house

Ithamore is cackling over the two dead Christians when Abigail enters. Ithamore laughingly tells her that her father was responsible for the scam to fool Lodowick and Mathias into killing each other.

Outraged (and not really that upset) Abigail orders him to go fetch a friar from the nunnery. She gives a little speech which is enough time for Ithamore to go and return with Friar Jacomo. Abigail tells him she wants to enter the nunnery. ‘What, again?’ Jacomo asks. She tried it once and almost immediately left. What’s changed? She’s learned more about life, she replies.

ABIGAIL: Then were my thoughts so frail and unconfirmed
And I was chained to follies of the world:
But now experience, purchasèd with grief,
Has made me see the difference of things.
My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,
Far from the Son that gives eternal life!

She is being positioned as the Good Jew, the one who converts to Christianity.

Scene 4

Barabas has heard that Abigail has entered a nunnery. Does she suspect him of murdering her sweetheart? What has made her betray him? Who gave him away? Ironically, at the moment Ithamore enters and, with absurd exaggeration, Barabas now calls him his only hope.

BARABAS: Come near, my love; come near, thy master’s life,
My trusty servant, nay, my second self;
For I have now no hope but even in thee,
And on that hope my happiness is built.

Ithamore begins to explain that it was he who told Abigaill about the murder plot, but Barabas, thinking he is about to defend his daughter, cuts him off and says, henceforth ‘she is hateful to my soul and me.’ Rashly and grotesquely he says he’ll adopt Ithamore as his heir.

But still his servant… He bids Ithamore fetch the pot of rice off the oven. When the servant brings it, Barabas explains that he is going to use it to poison Abigail. Yes, he now shows Ithamore and the audience a vial of ‘precious powder’ that he bought off a bloke in Ancona, which binds, infects and poisons deeply.

He sprinkles the poison powder onto the rice, mixes it in, and tells Ithamore to go and leave it in the dark entrance to the nunnery where people leave offerings when they want to be anonymous. (The reader/audience can immediately foresee unintended consequences i.e. poisonings.)

Ithamore enthusiastically sets off with the pot. As soon as he’s left, Barabas says he will pay Ithamore back, too. Ooh he’s such a bad baddie.

Scene 5. The Council House

Apparently it’s a month after the first scene with the Turks, for now a Turkish envoy has arrived to tell the governor the month is up, so where’s the gold? If you remember, governor Ferneze had been encouraged to break his word to the Turks by some of the Knights and the Spaniard Martin del Bosco, and so now he tells the Turkish basso (pashaw) that he will have no tribute and defies the Turks to do their worst. They will, the basso replies and exits.

Ferneze makes a brief speech summoning the young men of Malta to war.

Scene 6. Interior of the nunnery

Friar Jacomo and Friar Barnardine announce that all the nuns are sick. In fact as they enter the nunnery one appears to say that all the nuns are dead – except for Abigail, who now meets them, herself grievously sick.

Jacomo goes off and Abigail confesses to Barnardine that her greatest sin or regret is knowledge that her father conspired to set Lodowick and Mathias against each other, and she shows them papers to prove it. But she begs them not to reveal this to anyone and, as it was said in confession, they can’t. And then Abigail dies – poisoned by her father.

Jacomo rejoins Barnardine to see Abigail’s body, and confirm that the nuns are all dead. Barnardine asks him to accompany him to confront the Jew.

Act 4

Scene 1. A street

Barabas is malevolently gleeful that all the nuns are dead, poisoned by him! Listen to those Christian bells ha ha ha. There’s a monastery nearby. Ithamore enthusiastically offers to poison all the monks, but Barabas says that won’t be necessary. Since they were all sleeping with the nuns, they’ll all die of grief. Ooooh, you could bottle the malevolent cynicism!

Along come the two monks, to a famous line from Ithamore: ‘ Look, look, master; here come two religious caterpillars.’ There is a clever, stylised dialogue where Bardnardine keeps trying to accuse Barabas of gross sins but Barabas interrupts him to deflect the charges with confessions of more minor sins. The most famous exchange comes at the end , famous because it was used as an epigraph to one of his own poems by T.S. Eliot.:

FRIAR BARNARDINE: Thou hast committed −
BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

But when Barnardine finally manages to mention Mathias and Lodowick, Barabas panics that his daughter confessed everything, he will be hanged for murder, and makes a panic-stricken appeal to convert to Christianity. As part of which he says some notable lines calumniating his own religion:

Is’t not too late now to turn Christiän?
I have been zealous in the Jewish faith,
Hard-hearted to the poor, a covetous wretch,
That would for lucre’s sake have sold my soul;

Which sounds like libelous anti-Semitism, but consider the context. He is sucking up to two Catholic officials, he wants to make the best possible impression. Of course he’ll tell them what they want to hear.

Anyway, Barabas makes asides to Jacomo about how much wealth he’ll give his monastery, if can make the other leave, which he tries to do but the monks end up poking and pushing each other and then break out fighting, egged on, one imagines by the audience who are thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Barabas and Ithamore part the fighting friars, and Barabas continues to promise them, separately, his bounty. Ithamore takes Barnardine into Barabas’s house, Barabas promises Jacomo he’ll have a special meeting with him that evening.

Left alone onstage, Barabas reveals his plan which is – to murder them to stop them talking about the Lodowick-Mathias con:

Now I have such a plot for both their lives,
As never Jew nor Christian knew the like:
One turned my daughter, therefore he shall die;
The other knows enough to have my life,
Therefore ’tis not requisite he should live.

Scene 2. Inside Barabas’ House

Ithamore tells Barabas Father Barnardine has eaten and fallen asleep in a chair. Barabas orders him to take off his girdle and make a noose from it. They pull back the curtain of the stage’s inner room to reveal Barnardine asleep in a chair, startle him awake, slip the noose round his neck and strangle him. Ithamore is pleased that the rope left no mark on the friar’s neck.

He has an idea and they prop the corpse up against a wall holding a staff. He looks large as life. They exit the room.

Scene 3

It’s 1 in the morning. Friar Jacomo has come to keep his appointment. He spots Barnardine, apparently blocking his way, addresses him, is irritated by his silence, eventually gets angry, seizes his staff and strikes him down. At this moment Barabas and Ithamore come out the house and feign horror to discover that Jacomo has murdered his fellow friar. Ithamore makes fun of ‘these Christians’ who murder each other. Jacomo is panic-stricken. Then horrified when Barabas and Ithamore piously make a citizen’s arrest.

Scene 4. Veranda of Bellamira’s house

Haven’t seen much of her, have we? She greets Pilia-Borza who returns from delivering a letter to Ithamore. She asks where he found him? At the public gallows watching the hanging of a friar (presumably Jacomo).

Now Ithamore enters. The other two greet him lavishly. Ithamore is not wrong to think they’re planning some scam. They flatter him and Bellamira feigns sexy love for him, while they try to establish how much money Barabas has, where it is hidden, and whether Ithamore will help them steal it. Yes, is his answer, but the Jew buries it secretly every night.

Ithamore is comically ready to write a letter to Barabas threatening to reveal all unless he sends him a hundred crowns. ‘Two hundred’ says Pilia. Ithamore changes it, signs it and hands it to Pilia, condescendingly, who exits.

Now Bellamira takes Ithamore’s head into her lap and calls her servants for food and to bring rich silks to dress her lover in. It is pure comedy the way Ithamore takes to this role immediately. She tells him she’s not married. He says they’ll get married and go to Greece, and then – strikingly – breaks into verse, producing a variation on Marlowe’s famous lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love.’

Pilia returns and the Jew only gave him ten crowns. Outraged, Ithamore springs up and scribbles another letter demanding at least 500. Pilia departs. Bellamira kisses Ithamore, then takes him inside for a banquet of love i.e. sex.

Scene 5. Barabas’ house

Barabas is outraged at Ithamore’s defection, and almost as much by the skinny, hacked-about appearance of Pilia-Borza, ‘a shag-rag knave’. Whining self-pity:

BARABAS: Was ever Jew tormented as I am?

At which moment Pilia appears with the new demands. More demands! Barabas adopts a wheedling tone and tries to persuade Bilia to share a meal (which he will poison) but Pilia is having none of it and simply wants the money.

Scene 6. Bellamira’s veranda

Bellamira and Pilia get Ithamore drunk and to confess his role in the murder of Lodowick and Mathias, that he carried the poisoned broth which killed an entire nunnery and strangled Friar Barnardine.

Bellamira and Pilia are just agreeing between themselves that they’ll take this intelligence to the governor, when enter Barabas disguised as a French musician with a lute, offering to play love music. He has a conspicuous nosegay in his hat and Bellamira takes a fancy to it. Barabas graciously hands it over and the other three all take a deep smell of it – which is what Barabas planned, because it is poisoned.

They tell Barabas to play his lute and, as he does so, drunken Ithamore regales the other two with a series of scandalous libels on Barabas’s stinginess and personal hygiene – to each of which Barabas-in-disguise responds with angry asides to the audience. Finally Barabas can stand it no more and – still in disguised as the French musician – makes his excuses and departs.

Drunken Ithamore thinks he needs to send for one more lot of money and now dispatches Pilia, without a letter, just with a verbal threat to reveal all – then goes back inside with Bellamira.

Act 5

Scene 1. In the Council House

The governor is just warning the knights that the long-threatened Turkish assault is about to begin, when Bellamira and Pilia-Borza push their way through and blurt out that Barabas is responsible for the death of the governor’s son and the dead nuns and the friar. Ferneze is inclined to dismiss them but they say they have his servant at their place, drunk: he’ll vouch for it.

Ferneze dispatches officers to fetch Barabas and Ithamore and they return approximately ten seconds later. This is theatre, a forum for entertainment not realism or plausibility. Ithamore has belly-ache (from the poison – Barabas kicks himself that he did not administer more, sooner) and readily confesses everything to the governor.

Quick-wittedly, Barabas dismisses the other three as bad witnesses, but Ferneze doesn’t buy it and tells his officers to take all four of them to the cells.

Enter Katherine who wants to know whether it’s true that ‘the Jew’ was responsible for the murder of her son. Yes, the governor tells her. Barely a minute after being taken away, an officer re-enters to say all four of them are dead! Ferneze says bury the other three, get someone to throw the Jew’s body over the wall at the Turks. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas’ corpse lying onstage.

Scene 2

Not exactly to our surprise, Barabas wakes up. He took some kind of fancy sleeping potion (actually explained to be ‘poppy and cold mandrake juice’). Now he is outside the city walls. He gets up and vows vengeance on the city, vows revenge and not in a subtle way:

I’ll be revenged on this accursèd town;
For by my means Calymath shall enter in:
I’ll help to slay their children and their wives,
To fire the churches, pull their houses down,
Take my goods too, and seize upon my lands.
I hope to see the governor a slave,
And, rowing in a galley, whipt to death.

Enter Calymath, Bassoes, and Turks to whom Barabas immediately explains who he is, why he is not a spy, and why he will help them take the town. He explains there’s a secret vault dug under the town to let streams pass under and out. He’ll lead a force of 500 along it and up into the centre of the town, surprise everyone and open the gates. Turkish leader Calyphas says: it’s a deal!

Scene 3

The next scene jumps forward to the city having been stormed by the Turks with Barabas’s help. Enter Calymath, Bassoes, Turks, and Barabas with Ferneze and Knights prisoners. As reward for his help, Calyphas makes Barabas governor of the town and says he can do what he wants with his prisoners – then exits. Barabas orders his new troops, his Janizaries, to throw the governor and his entourage in prison.

Scene 4. Residence of Barabas the governor

Barabas soliloquises that he is not safe while the entire population hates him, He must be wary, ‘circumspect’.

Ferneze is brought in and, after he’s finished shouting at Barabas, Barabas surprises him by saying he plans to ‘save’ Malta. How about a plan to trap Calymath and all his men in an out-house and set it on fire? Ferneze is impressed and interested, says he will give Barabas even more wealth if he keeps his word. Barabas promptly grants Ferneze his freedom, and the shake on the deal.

Ferneze exits and Barabas reflects that he will use anyone to suit his ends. He makes what at first seems an anti-semitic remark i.e. invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes:

Thus, loving neither, will I live with both,
Making a profit of my policy;
And he from whom my most advantage comes,
Shall be my friend.
This is the life we Jews are used to lead;

But then backs it with the crucial addition – after all, this is how Christians behave:

And reason too, for Christians do the like.

So the entire play might be a monstrosity of anti-Semitic stereotyping, but Barabas makes a point of repeating that he is only behaving as the faithless Christians do.

Scene 5

Calymath and his officials have finished a tour of the ruins and the island, and Calymath is just musing on its geographical advantages when a messenger arrives inviting Calymath and his men to a grand feast, the men in a big out-house, Calymath and his officers at his house.

Scene 6

A very short scene in which we see Ferneze briefing Martin del Bosco and the Knights about the signal which will tell them it’s the moment to attack the feasting Turks.

Scene 7

Barabas is in his grand hall with carpenters as they finish some big contraption. He pays them to go and drink. In fact he hopes they drink and die. Barabas has arrived at the extreme limit of misanthropy:

BARABAS: For, so I live, perish may all the world!

A messenger arrives to say Calymath will attend the feast.

Then enter Ferneze who hands over to Barabas the sum agreed for freeing Malta from the Turks, 100,000 pounds. Barabas explains his plan: the monastery where the Turkish troops are to be feasted is mined with gunpowder; at the right moment it will be set off, the whole place blown sky high and all the Turkish soldiers massacred.

Meanwhile – Barabas explains – in this hall the carpenters have fixed it so that, at the height of the feast, at a signal Ferneze will cut a cord and the floor will part throwing Calymath and his generals into a deep pit. The Turks approach, Ferneze hides, and Marlowe makes Barabas directly address the audience. Asides are one thing but Barabas ‘breaks the fourth wall’ to boast of his ingenious evil:

A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns
By treachery, and sell ’em by deceit?
Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun
If greater falsehood ever has been done?

Calymath and his entourage enter and salute Barabas up in the gallery who is guilefully greeting them when…. Ferneze steps forward from his hiding place and says he will show Calymath the trap Barabas had prepared. All this time Barabas has been up in the ‘balcony’ section of the theatre. Now, at the sound of a distant trumpet, Ferneze cuts the cord, the floor opens beneath Barabas and… he falls into the vat of boiling oil.

The amazed Turks watch Barabas writhing and screaming for help. Barabas makes a death-moment confession to all his crimes, admits he was going to massacre the Turks, and dies:

Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!

The Calymath rallies his entourage and says they will fly. They won’t get far, says Ferneze: the trumpet they heard was the signal for the outhouse to be blown up and the entire Turkish army liquidated. Calymath is appalled. Ferneze blames it all on the machinations of the Jew. Now he explains he will hold Calymath hostage, until his father pays the reparations necessary to restore Malta to its former state.

And the play ends on that note: the Christian governor, Ferneze has outwitted both the fiendish ‘Jew’ – seeing him come to a richly deserved end – and the warlike Turk, come out on top and won the day for Christian Malta. Hooray!

Thoughts

Obviously, The Jew of Malta is a garish and extreme entertainment, in some ways not unlike a pantomime where the audience is encouraged to boo and hiss every time the baddie comes onstage. Marlowe’s aim was obviously to create the villainest of villains, as Tamburlaine had been the most megalomaniac of rulers.

Giving him a villainous sidekick was sort of obvious, but the character of the ruthless Muslim, Ithamore, is inspired. They egg each other on to increasingly extreme outrages while the audience hiss and boo them like Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, and Ithamore’s scenes with fellow lowlifes Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, are very much played for pantomime laughs, including Pilia-Borza’s ridiculous sense of himself as tall and knightly when he is – according to Barabas – a gangling piece of war wreckage, and Bellamira’s absurd declarations of love.

Anyway, all this garish and crowd-pleasing comedy is why it’s not worth bothering with the play’s many inconsistencies and illogicalities, let alone considering it as a ‘moral analysis’ of anything.

The most glaring plot fault is the notion that Barabas is motivated entirely by revenge for being reduced to utter poverty… and yet by act 4 he is pretty much restored to his former position of super-wealth, having bought a house bigger than the governor’s and, as he tells the friars, once again having investments in ships bringing goods from round the Mediterranean. I.e. the real engine of his revenge has disappeared. It is a theatrical illusion, a motive which is required to quickly set the plot in motion and then just as quickly dropped.

As for the end, it is a wonderful piece of over-the-top theatrical sadism, a Hammer House of Horror, a London Dungeon level of populist, tub-thumping poetic justice, no doubt cheered to the rooftops by the very groundlings Barabas had been boasting to only minutes before.

Historical footnote: the Knights of St John and the Turkish threat

The Order of the Knights of Malta was founded in 1048, when a group of Christian merchants were given permission by the Egyptians to run a hospital in Jerusalem to care for Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy City. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1098 and the organisation running the hospital, by now called the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, expanded to provide armed escorts for pilgrims, becoming known as the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

When the Holy Land fell to the Saracens in 1291, the Order of St John (popularly known as the Hospitallers) moved their headquarters to the island of Cyprus, from which the order continued to protect pilgrims travelling to Palestine by sea.

The Knights bought the island of Rhodes in 1310. In 1523 the Ottoman Turks laid siege of the island and after six months, the Knights were forced to surrender but were permitted to leave Rhodes with full military honours.

Meanwhile, the island of Malta came into the ownership of the Crown of Aragon in 1282 and passed into the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1530 the Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Knights of St. John who had been forced to abandon Rhodes in 1523. From that point the order took the name by which it is most familiarly known, the Knights of Malta. These are the knights who are advising governor Ferneze in The Jew of Malta.

Malta was repeatedly besieged by the Ottoman Turks but never fell to them (as they repeatedly tried to capture Venice). It had been besieged in 1565, the year after Marlowe was born and 25 or so years before the play was performed. In 1569 the Ottomans captured Crete and in 1570 Cyprus. That said, the Turks’ seemingly unstoppable advance was stalled at the sea Battle of Lepanto, where an alliance of European powers defeated the Ottoman navy.

It’s worth pointing out that some 12,000 Christian slaves – of the 37,000 slaves chained in the Turkish galleys – were liberated during and after the battle. Not all slaves were black.

The Muslim Turkish threat to Europe was still very real during Marlowe’s lifetime. So Marlowe’s depiction of Ithamore isn’t picking on a helpless ‘minority’ but a caricature of a race who were threatening to seize control of the Mediterranean and invade Europe. It was as if, during the Cold War, a comic playwright created a fiendish Russian communist who took every opportunity to criticise and scheme against ‘capitalist running dogs’, ‘reactionary troglodytes’, ‘bourgeois pigs’ and so on.

Different values, ideologies and buzzwords – but the same basic structure that an overwhelming military threat to civilisation from the East was invoked and then neutralised through theatrical representation and, in this case, crude caricature.

Related links

  • The Jew of Malta This excellent website gives you a choice of reading the play script unencumbered by notes, or a very comprehensively annotated text full of fascinating facts.

Marlowe reviews

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

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Posted by Simon on October 23, 2020

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Cars: Accelerating the Modern World @ the Victoria and Albert Museum

The blight of cars

I hate cars.

Pollution

Cars emit vast amounts of toxic fumes, poisoning passersby and making our cities hellholes of pollution.

Due to the increase in the use of private cars, road traffic pollution is considered a major threat to clean air in the UK and other industrialised countries. Traffic fumes contain harmful chemicals that pollute the atmosphere. Road traffic emissions produce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. (Road Traffic and pollution)

Destruction

The post-war obsession with cars led councils and developers to rip the historic hearts out of most English cities and towns, creating inhumane, alienating and polluted labyrinths of urban freeways with urine-drenched concrete subways as an afterthought for the humble pedestrian.

Death

Cars kill people, lots of people.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.25 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, and injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years of age. (Road accident casualties in Britain and the world)

Cars killed childhood

Lastly, the number one concern of most parents of small children isn’t paedophiles or internet porn, it’s that their kids might be run over by traffic. (Play England website) That explains why parents don’t let their kids play in the street as they did in the halcyon past, but prefer to keep them safely inside. Which contributes to lack of exercise and growth of obesity among children, as well as adversely affecting children’s mental health. Car culture, in other words, killed childhood.

Personally, I think cars should be banned, period.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World at the Victoria and Albert Museum

This is a dazzling exhibition celebrating the rise and rise of cars which shows how they are not just machines for getting from A to B but were, right from the start, spurs to all kinds of other industries, helping to create:

  • countless aspects of industrial and commercial design, from instrument panels to ergonomic chairs
  • innovations in industrial production, specifically the assembly line techniques pioneered at the Ford car plant in Detroit
  • entire new areas of engineering relating to roads and then to motorways, the construction of stronger road bridges, flyovers, ring roads etc using the new materials of concrete and tarmac
  • an explosion of consumer accessories from safety hats and goggles to driving coats and gloves all the way up to modern Satnavs
  • as well as providing a mainstay for the advertising industry for over a hundred years
  • and becoming a dominating feature of popular culture in films, novels and much more

The car is, when you stop to consider it, arguably the central product of the twentieth century, the defining artifact of our civilisation (and, in my jaundiced view, a perfect symbol of our society’s relentless drive to excess consumption, ruinous pollution and global destruction.)

They promised us the freedom of the road, instead we got day-long traffic jams on 12-lane highways, toxic air pollution, and over a million dead every year. This photo shows congestion blocking the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway

The car has transformed how we move around, how we design and lay out our cities and towns, it has transformed our psychologies and imaginations. As one of the curators explains:

“The V&A’s mission is to champion the power of design to change the world, and no other design object has impacted the world more than the automobile. This exhibition is about the power of design to effect change, and the unintended consequences that have contributed to our current environmental situation.

Structure of the show

This exhibition is brilliantly laid out. You progress through a labyrinthine serpentine curve of cases displaying over 250 artefacts large and small, and studded by no fewer than 15 actual cars, from one of the first ever built to a ‘popup’ car of the future.

Photo of the Benz patent motor car, model no. 3, 1888. Image courtesy of Daimler

The exhibition is immensely informative, with sections and sub-sections devoted to every aspect of cars, their design, manufacture, the subsidiary industries and crafts they support, the global oil industry, and car cultures around the world, it really is an impressively huge and all-embracing overview.

But the thing that made the impact on me was the films.

I counted no fewer than 35 films running, from little black-and-white documentaries showing on TV-sized monitors, through to clips of Blade Runner and Fifth Element on large screens.

There’s the iconic car chase from Bullitt on a very big screen hanging from the ceiling and then an enormous, long, narrow, gallery-wide screen which was showing three long, slow and beautifully shot films of landscapes which have been impacted by the car – a complicated freeway junction in Japan, oil fields in central California, and the ‘lithium triangle’ in Chile, between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, where lithium is extracted for battery production a vast expanse of flat desert which is being mined to produce lithium and its landscape converted into a colourful patchwork of slag and beautiful blue purification reservoirs.

At both the start and the end of the show are totally immersive films which are projected on screens from floor to ceiling, the first one a speeded-up film of a car journey through London, projected onto three split screens; the final experience in the show is standing in front of a shiny round little Pop-Up Next car around which stretches a curved screen onto which is projected a montage of car disaster imagery, including car crashes, road rage incidents, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, Jimmy Carter telling us about the energy crisis, which gets louder and faster and more intense until it collapses into a high speed blur of colour. And looming over us, the viewers, I realised after a while, is an enormous drone hanging from the ceiling and looking down on us like one of H.G. Wells’s conquering Martians.

Cars Exhibition, 19th November 2019

All very trippy and intense and sense-bombarding. If you fancy a quiet exhibition, this is not it, sound from all the films is playing at once and, given the subject matter, they are almost all dynamic and fast-moving.

The exhibition is divided into three parts although the continuous serpentine journey past the display cases and films isn’t divided, as in a ‘normal’ gallery, into ‘rooms’.

1. ‘Going Fast’

The exhibition with records of all the gee-whizz visions of a perfect techno future which the car has been lined with throughout its history, with lots of illustrations from magazines and sci fi stories, clips from movies predicting flying cars such as Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. On a massive projector screen right at the start is playing Key To the Future, a film made by General Motors for their 1956 Motorama car show.

This was just one of a series of Firebird concept cars produced by General Motors. Interestingly, the design was inspired by the new jet fighter planes which had just started flying, and the cars copied the jets’ fluid silhouettes, cockpit seats and gas turbine engines designed to reach 200mph. they weren’t actually sold but were produced as experiments in function and design. And to thrill the public at motor shows with exciting visions of hands-free driving.

One feature of these designs for future cars was that a number of them were Russian, from Soviet-era drawings of an ideal communist future. It’s worth noting that the curators have made an effort to get outside the Anglosphere. Unavoidably most of the footage and technology is from America, with a healthy amount about the British car industry, and then sections about Fiat in Italy and Citroen in France.

But the V&A have gone out of their way to try and internationalise their coverage and they commissioned a series of films about car culture in five other parts of the world including one on South African ‘spinners’ (who compete to be able to spin cars very fast in as small a circle as possible), California low-riders, Emirati dune racers in the Middle East, and Japanese drivers of highly decorated trucks. As well as a section towards the end about the ‘Paykan’, a popular people’s car heavily promoted in Iran in the early 1970s which became a symbol of modernity and affluence.

Installation view of Cars at the Victoria and Albert Museum showing an Iranian Paykan on the left, a desert-crossing Auto-Chenille by Citroën in the centre, and a funky bubble car on the right. Note the massive projection screen at the back displaying a panoramic film of oil fields in central California

The section continues with the first-ever production car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen 3, introduced to the public in 1888, and the futuristic Tatra T77 from the Czech Republic, which was designed in the 1920s by Paul Jaray, the man who developed the aerodynamics of airships.

French advertisement for the Tatra 77 (1934)

There’s a whole section about the founding and development of car races, from the Daytona track in Florida, to Brooklands race track in Surrey, both accompanied, of course, by vintage film footage. They explain how the British Gordon Bennett Cup prompted the French to invent the Grand Prix in 1906. There’s racing against other cars, but also, of course, the successive attempts to break the land speed record which attracted great publicity from the 1920s, through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Britain First Always – Buy British, UK (1930s) Artwork by R. Granger Barrett

And there’s a feminist section of the show which focuses solely on the great women car drivers who appeared at Brooklands such as Camille du Gast from France and Dorothy Levitt, and Jill Scott Thomas who became an important symbol of the women’s rights movement.

There’s a gruesome life-size sculpture of a man named ‘Graham’, which shows what shape a human being would have to be to withstand a car collision. Graham was commissioned last year by The Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia to demonstrate human vulnerability in traffic accidents, and made by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini in collaboration with leading trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and crash investigation expert Dr David Logan.

Graham: what humans ought to look like to optimise their chances of surviving a car crash

2. ‘Making More’

The second section is devoted to the manufacturing of cars and focuses heavily on the range of innovations in manufacturing pioneered at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit as early as 1913. There are models of the factory, black and white film footage of conveyor belts, unexpected footage of meat processing plants where Ford worked as a young man and which the car plants were to some extent modelled on, photos and sketches of all aspects of the production line along with a list of the very tough rules and regulations Ford imposed on his workers.

Sure, they were paid double what they could earn at other factories (a whopping $5) but the stress of staying in one place performing the same function for 12 hours a day, with no smoking or talking and strictly regulated loo breaks took its tool: many workers developed psychological illnesses, many just quit.

Ford’s factories were designed by the architect Albert Kahn who pioneered an entirely new construction space that allowed for larger, more flexible workspaces, a design which quickly spread around the world, for example at Fiat’s Lingotto factory. There are floorplans, architects’ designs, models and photos of all this twentieth century innovation, plus the animated feature Symphony in F celebrating the complex supply chains Ford had established which was shown at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ Chicago World’s Fair.

By contrast one wall is filled with some immense film projections of a modern, almost totally-automated BMW car assembly plant in Munich, and there’s a Unimate Robotoc Arm, one of the first robot implements used on a production line as early as 1961 at the General Motors plant in New Jersey The principles are the same but human input, effort and endurance have been almost completely eliminated.

Murals were commissioned to celebrate the wonderful new productiveness of human labour, including the wonderful Detroit Murals by Mexican mural maker Diego Rivera

Production line methods were quickly adopted to a wide range of goods including everything from furniture to architecture, and the speed and rhythms of factory life spread into pop culture, influencing music, dance, fashion and the propaganda of the new totalitarian states.

Hitler, the show reminds us, was a big admirer of Henry Ford, who was himself a noted anti-Semite, and consulted Ford about mass production techniques to help improve German efficiency, which resulted in the remarkably enduring design of the Volkswagen and Hitler’s pioneering Autobahns, but also led the Germans to the efficient mass manufacture of other consumer goods like the Volsempfänger or People’s Radio.

At the other end of the cultural scale, the exhibition includes the ‘production line’ video made in 1965 for the Detroit girl group Martha and the Vandellas song Nowhere To Run To. The Motown Sound which they typified was, after all, named after Motor Town, the town that Henry Ford built up into the centre of the American car industry.

There were to (at least) reactions against production line culture. An obvious one was the creation of powerful unions formed to represent assembly line workers. Following the landmark sit-down strike from 1936 to 1937 in Flint, Michigan, membership of the Union of Automotive Workers grew from 30,000 to 500,000 in one year! Thirty years later, and the exhibition includes some of the posters produced by a Marxist art collective in Paris to support striking car workers during the 1968 mass strikes in France.

But another reaction was against mass production, and in favour of luxury. The Model T meant cars for the masses, but what about cars for the better off? In the 1920s luxury car manufacturers returned to creating bespoke, hand-crafted models, and this triggered a growing market for high-end car accessories. The exhibition includes examples of chic hats and lighters and motoring gloves, all associating the idea of motoring with glamour and luxury (‘To drive a Peugeot is to be in fashion’).

A custom-made Hispano-Suiza Type H6B car from 1922 provides a close-up look at the luxurious and meticulously crafted world of early automotive design.

Hispano-Suiza Type HB6 ‘Skiff Torpedo’. Hispano-Suiza (chassis) Henri Labourdette (body) 1922. Photo by Michael Furman © The Mullin Automotive Museum

Thus the development of mascots on car bonnets, a small symbol which allowed consumers to quietly flaunt their wealth and taste. Thus between 1920 and 1931 French designer René Lalique produced a series of car bonnet ornaments made of glass, which are on display here.

There’s a section devoted to the development of colours, shades and tones, and to the science of producing lacquers and paint which would be durable enough to protect cars in all weathers. Even mass market manufacturers took note and in 1927 General Motors was the first producer to set up an entire department devoted to styling, the ‘Art and Colour Section’. As far back as 1921, under chairman Alfred Sloan, General Motors implemented a policy known as ‘annual model renewal’. Taking its lead from the fashion industry, the cars would be restyled and relaunched annually, with a new look and new colours (although the engineering and motors mostly stayed the same).

And hence the development of extravagant car shows like ‘Motorama’ launched in 1949 by General Motors, an annual series which came to involve celebrity performers, original songs, choreography, models in clothes straight off catwalks, and promotional films.

The ever-growing commercialisation of cars and life in general sparked a backlash in the 1960s and the exhibition explains how the humble VolksWagen became a cheap and cheerful symbol of people who dropped out, adopted alternative lifestyles, and often decorated their VW with hippy images and symbols.

The exhibition features a striking example of a car customised by Tomas Vazquez, a member of the lowrider culture that emerged in Latino communities in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.

3. ‘Shaping Space’

The final section of the exhibition explores the vast impact of the car on the world’s landscape, nations, and cities. It looks at how the petrol engine beat early electric and steam-powered competitors by promising the ability to travel the world, transforming drivers into individual explorers.

Displays include the first ever Michelin guide published in 1900, a little red book giving tips about where to drive in France – examples of the tremendous artwork Shell commissioned to encourage drivers to get out and explore Britain (the Shell guides), and a look at the special off-road cars called Auto-Chenille by Citroën and created to undertake a publicised treks across Africa and Asia.

This section looks at the vast ramifications and impact of the oil industry around the world, from the early days when it was celebrated as a miracle resource, through the evolution of oil-based products like Tupperware and nylon. There are fascinating maps of oil reserves, films about oil extraction

And then on to the 1970s oil crisis which helped inspire the new environmental movement. There’s footage of a grim-faced president Carter making a TV broadcast to the American people and telling them they have to be more careful how they use their limited resources, ha ha ha, and a poster for the first ever Earth Day, called by new environmental activists for 22 April 1970.

Poster for the first Earth Day, 22 April 1970, designed by Robert Leydenfrost, photography by Don Brewster

So it’ll be Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in a few months. And how well have we looked after the earth in the past 50 years?

Not too well, I think. Most of us have been too busy buying stuff, consuming stuff, competing to have shinier, newer stuff, and top of the list comes a shiny new car. I was amused to read the recent report that all the world’s efforts to get people to use electric cars have been completely eclipsed by the unstoppable rise of gas-guzzling Sports Utilities Vehicles. These throng the streets of Clapham where I live. In twenty minutes I’m going to have to dodge and weave among these huge, poisonous dinosaurs as I cycle to work.

As a tiny symbol of our ongoing addiction to the internal combustion engine, there’s an animated map showing the spread of motorways across Europe from 1920 to 2020, which contains the mind-boggling fact that plans are well advanced for a motorway which will stretch from Hamburg to Shanghai! More cars, more lorries, more coaches and buses and taxis and motorbikes and scooters, burn it up, baby!

This final room has the most diverse range of cars on display, including early cars from the 1950s that attempted to address fuel scarcity such as the Messerschmitt KR200 bubble car, alongside the Ford Nucleon, a nuclear-powered concept car, and the exhibition closes with the immersive film I mentioned above, streaming around the ‘Pop.Up Next autonomous flying car’ co-designed by Italdesign, Airbus and Audi.

Summary

I think this is a really brilliant exhibition, setting out to document a madly ambitious subject – one of the central subjects of the 20th century – with impressive range and seriousness. It covers not only ‘the car’ itself but touches on loads of other fields and aspects of twentieth century history, with a confident touch and fascinating wall labels. The serpentine layout combines with the clever use of mirrors and gaps between the partition walls to make it seem much bigger than it is, as do the umpteen films showing on screens large, extra-large and ginormous.

It’s a feast for the mind and the senses.

And it’s not at all a hymn of praise: the curators are well aware of the baleful effects of car culture: there’s a digital clock recording the number of people who’ve died in traffic accidents so far in the world, and another one (in the 1970s oil crisis section) giving a countdown till the world’s oil resources are utterly exhausted (how do they know? how can anyone know?).

But there’s also another digital counter showing the number of cars manufactured in the world so far this year and it shows no sign of abating or slowing down. Car, lorry, bus, truck, coach, motorbike production continue to increase all around the world and is often [author puts his head in his hands and sighs with despair] taken as the primary indicator of a country’s economy.

We’re going to burn this planet down, aren’t we?

Promo video

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Brendan Cormier and Lizzie Bisley, with Esme Hawes as Assistant Curator.

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by Simon on February 3, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 3, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/cars-accelerating-the-modern-world-victoria-and-albert-museum/

The Black Mask by E.W. Hornung (1901)

The paperback edition of Raffles stories I picked up in a second-hand bookshop contains the first eight Raffles stories (originally collected in a volume titled The Amateur Cracksman, published in 1899) along with the second eight, which were collected in the next volume, The Black Mask, published in 1901.

The final story in volume one had ended with the failure of Raffles’s most ambitious plan – to steal a priceless pearl which was being taken by courier on a German steamer across the Mediterranean. Caught by his nemesis – Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard – Raffles was given a moment to say goodbye to his ‘fiancée’ – a young Australian woman that he’d actually been using to find out more about the pearl – and takes the opportunity to jump up onto the ship’s railing and, as Mackenzie and the ship’s officers run to stop him, to dive overboard into the sea.

His assistant and the narrator of the Raffles tales, ‘Bunny’ Manders, thinks he catches sight of a head bobbing in the long reflection of the sunset across the waves, before he is himself dragged off to be thrown into the brig, taken back to Britain, tried, found guilty, publicly shamed and humiliated, and sent to prison for his part in Raffles’s various thefts.

There the series appeared to end with Bunny in the nick and Raffles drowned off the Italian coast. But…

The stories

1. No Sinecure

The first story in the new set reveals that… it is not so!!

It is 18 months later, Bunny has served his time in HMP Holloway. A wealthy relation has reluctantly taken pity on him and found him a hovel of a garret to live in while Bunny pursues an unsuccessful career as a freelance writer.

One day Bunny gets a telegram telling him to look at an advert in that day’s Daily Mail. It is an advert for a nurse-cum-gentleman’s assistant to an ailing old man, Mr Maturin. Bunny pawns some belongings to buy a suit and heads off for the interview at an apartment block in Earl’s Court.

He is let into the apartment by a zippy young doctor, Dr Theobald, who is the ageing Mr Maturin’s personal physician, and then ushered into the darkened room where the invalid lies in bed, white-haired and white-faced. As soon as the physician has exited, Bunny realises that the figure in the bed is… RAFFLES, his old mentor and partner in crime!!

Even as bubblegum, popcorn entertainment the stories are not as barbed and gripping as they might be. For example, you might have expected Bunny to be a bit cross with the man who led him into a life of crime, got him banged up for eighteen months, and ruined his life. You might have expected some kind of psychological reckoning. But not a bit of it, he’s just thrilled to see old A.J. again.

Raffles gives the briefest explanation of his escape: it was a hard swim, the reflection of the setting sun dazzled any potential pursuers, and life for a half-naked man wading ashore on Capri was challenging. The peasants gave him clothes, he got odd jobs, he worked his way north along the coast and into France. That’s about it. Then we are swiftly on to this week’s adventure.

Bunny helps Raffles get dressed in formal evening wear and they take a circuitous route across the apartment block roof (This is to avoid awkward questions from the porter in the apartment block’s downstairs lobby). They go down by a separate set of stairs, and head to Kellner’s Restaurant in the West End. Here, Raffles explains, he and Bunny are going to pretend to be rich Americans meeting the head of a famous firm of Regent Street jewellers’.

Over dinner in a private room the jeweller places on the table a series of expensive pieces. Raffles, in his guise as American millionaire, declares he wants them all – can he take them and send round a cheque? As expected, the jeweller laughs in his face, so Raffles makes a suggestion. Why doesn’t he place the pieces in the cigarette carton he happens to be carrying, seal it up, and give it back to the jeweller who can post it round in three days, after he’s received and cashed Raffles’s cheque.

The Regent Street jeweller agrees and they call for string and sealing wax, carefully stow the jewels in the carton, wrap and seal it, stand up and shake hands, then the jeweller departs with the carton which he will, as promised, post.

Leaving Raffles to open his voluminous jacket to reveal… the cigarette carton with the jewels in it!!

While there had been a hiatus of waiters coming in with brown paper, string and whatnot, Raffles had swapped the carton with the jewels in it for an identical but empty one – which is the one they wrapped up and gave to the jeweller!

Quickly they take a cab back to Earl’s Court, climb up the parallel staircase, and over the roofs, back into the sick room, where Raffles changes back into pyjamas and gets into bed. Raffles is back! and Bunny has helped him pull off his first job of the new era!!

Raffles and Bunny on the roof, illustration by F. C. Yohn (1906)

Raffles and Bunny on the roof, illustration by F. C. Yohn (1906)

2. A Jubilee Present

Taking advantage of the absence of Dr Theobald, Raffles takes Bunny along to the Gold Room at the British Museum. It is meant to be just a reconnaissance trip, but Raffles is loudly telling his sidekick how he plans to steal a priceless gold cup when a hidden policemen surprises them both by stepping out of the shadows.

After a few moments of trying to bluff his way out of it, Raffles simply hits the man over the head with a stick and they walk quickly but calmly past the attendants in the other rooms, down the steps, and into a hansom cab which takes them to the nearest tube, and so anonymously and safely back to the Earls Court. Here Raffles shows Bunny that in all the confusion – he pocketed a priceless gold relic.

In the event, the relic is too rare to fence, and too culturally precious to melt down for the gold (Raffles is, after all, a gentleman of taste). So, for fun, he sends it anonymously to Queen Victorian to celebrate her Jubilee!

3. The Fate of Faustina

Some Italian organ grinders in the street outside prompt Raffles to reminisce about the time he spent on the island where he had stumbled ashore, naked and exhausted, having made his getaway from the ship, as described above.

Once taken in and given clothes by kind locals, he got a labouring job and fell in love with a peasant girl, Faustina. But she was the beloved of the creepy Stefano, himself a factor to the big, rich lord, Count Corbucci.

Raffles planned with the girl to flee the island and stole a revolver which he shows her how to use. That night he is creeping down the steep staircase carved in the rock towards the cavern which they have made their secret hideaway when… he hears blundering footsteps coming up the other way.

Raffles crouches into an alcove to let the heavy-breathing big guy wheeze past and then lights a match, to reveal that it is the Count. After some ironical exchanges the count tells Raffles to go and find his beloved and turns round to resume the ascent with a scornful laugh.

Raffles hurtles down the steps and into the cavern to find Faustina dead, stabbed to death. She had been caught by Stefano and the Count, had revealed her plan to escape and drawn the gun on them, but they had wrenched it off her and stabbed her to death. Stefano is still in the cave and Raffles shoots him dead.

Raffles runs back up to the steps and along to Corbucci’s house where he roughly ties up the Count and locks all the doors, half hoping the blackguard will starve to death there. Then Raffles takes a dinghy to the mainland, and quickly skims over the way he stowed away on ships taking him further up the coast, getting small jobs where possible.

But there I had to begin all over again, and at the very bottom of the ladder. I slept in the streets. I begged. I did all manner of terrible things, rather hoping for a bad end, but never coming to one.

One day, catching sight of himself in a mirror, Raffles realises he looks like an exhausted white-haired old wreck and that no-one back in London would now recognise him. And so to London he returns, adopts the character of the old paralytic, hires Dr Theobald to make it all look kosher, and then arranged for Bunny to come calling looking for the job.

However, now he tells Bunny that – they have followed him.

Who, the police? asks Bunny. No, the CAMORRA!

Count Corbucci was a top man in the Italian underworld organisation, the Camorra, and Raffles is not surprised that word has been put out to every Italian in London to track him down. If he’s not much mistaken, that’s exactly what the Italian barrel organ people out the front of their flats have been doing. Tracking him down and staking him out.

4. The Last Laugh

Sure enough it was the Camorra. One night Bunny spots a man in the darkness opposite their block of flats standing and watching. Raffles waits till Bunny has changed into his pyjamas to go to bed, then declares he’s going out to confront these watchers in the dark.

Bunny springs to the window and watches Raffles emerge from the apartment block and the man opposite promptly turn and walk away, with Raffles in hot pursuit. But then Bunny sees a big fat man in a slouch hat amble into the street, pass directly under the window of their flat, and make off after the other two. Something’s up. Quick, he better warn his hero!

Bunny changes into his clothes, runs out into the street, hires a hansom and drives around west London in a fever, but can find no trace of Raffles or the others. Finally, he returns to the flat and remains, looking out the window in an agony of suspense all night.

Suddenly, there’s a frantic knocking at the apartment door and a one-eyed Italian stands there talking very fast Italian and gesturing for Bunny to follow. Out into the street, along Earls Court Road to the cab stand, into the first hansom, then it is a feverish life-or-death drive across London to Bloomsbury, with the cab driver using all his wiles to weave in and out of traffic and take unexpected side streets.

It’s exactly the same mentality as the car chases in James Bond or Jason Bourne movies, the same nail-biting tension building up, only set in 1901 and with hansom cabs.

The one-eyed Italian directs the cab to Bloomsbury Square and makes him pull up outside number 38. Out they leap, run across the pavement, burst through the door, run up the stairs, and into a room where Bunny is horrified to discover Raffles bound to the wall by leather ropes threaded through iron hoops attached in the wall, with a gag thrust in his mouth, covered in blood from a beating.

But the Italian doesn’t falter and continues his run at an old grandfather clock standing dead opposite Raffles, knocking it to the ground just as the revolver attached to the clock face fires, as it had been arranged to do, as the clock struck noon.

Not only had the Count’s men tied Raffles up and beaten him… they had arranged this fiendish death as a psychological torture. For the best part of 12 hours Raffles had had to watch the minute hand slowly creeping round and the apparatus inch towards the point where the clock hand would pull the trigger of the revolver and shoot him through the heart!

Who is the one-eyed man and why was it all left to the last minute? As they undo the straps and set Raffles free, he explains to Bunny that the man is one of the Count’s assistants who Raffles got a few moments alone with and managed to bribe – persuaded him that he (Raffles) would see him set up and safe if he would help.

Why the delay and the wild panic drive? Because the Count and his other assistant didn’t leave to get a train from Victorian until 11am. So 11 was the earliest that the one-eyed man could leave on his life-or-death dash for Bunny, all the time knowing that they had to be back before noon.

But did the Count leave on time? Did he ever leave the building? Cue dramatic music!!

For now Raffles reveals a further twist in the story. He had for some time been walking around with a hip flask filled with spirits, tinctured with — the deadliest poison known to man!!

‘It is cyanide of cacodyl, and I have carried that small flask of it about with me for months. Where I got it matters nothing; the whole point is that a mere sniff reduces flesh to clay. I have never had any opinion of suicide, as you know, but I always felt it worthwhile to be forearmed against the very worst. Well, a bottle of this stuff is calculated to stiffen an ordinary roomful of ordinary people within five minutes; and I remembered my flask when they had me as good as crucified in the small hours of this morning. I asked them to take it out of my pocket. I begged them to give me a drink before they left me. And what do you suppose they did?’

What the Count and his pal did was taunt Raffles with the flask, refuse him a drink, then go downstairs and drink a toast to their wicked scheme. And promptly dropped dead, where our heroes find them, grimly spread across table and floor in positions of agony.

These two stories are quite significantly more blood-thirsty than anything which has gone before in the Raffles canon. It was only half a dozen stories back that Raffles was invited down to a country house weekend on the strength of his cricketing skills, in a story as concerned with satirising vicars and duchesses as with robbery. The tone seems to have darkened considerably. It would be interesting to know from a Raffles scholar if this reflected any change in the tone of fiction, or of popular culture, at around this date – or whether someone had suggested to Hornung that he take Raffles in a new direction.

But murder, torture, suicide and poison introduce a new, more highly-strung mood into the stories.

5. To Catch a Thief

There has been an outbreak of jewellery thefts among the highest of high society. Raffles and Bunny know it is not them for the simple reason that they are still in self-imposed hiding in their Earls Court flat.

This entire second series of stories is rather stifled by this fact, the fact that – even though his appearance has changed considerably for the worse – Raffles is still petrified that someone will identify him, the cops will arrest him and he’ll be sent to prison. They tend to only go out at night, generally in disguise, and even then avoid the fashionable parts of London. A lot of the devil-may-care, man on the town spirit of the first set of stories has thus been sacrificed. They feel more claustrophobic.

Anyway, without much detective work Raffles has identified that the man responsible for this little crime wave is himself a member of the upper classes, one Lord Ernest Belville.

So they drive round to his lordship’s apartment in the swanky new King John’s Mansions. When they announce that Lord Ernest is expecting them, the porter nods them through and the page boy obligingly takes them up in the electric lift (a relative novelty in the stories) and unlocks and shows them into his Lordship’s flat. That wasn’t very difficult, then.

Raffles and Bunny thoroughly search every room in Belville’s flat and, as always happens, it is the last place they look that they stumble upon the hiding place of the jewels.

(That trope, that the thing the heroes are looking for is always in the last place they think of, after everywhere else has been searched, must be a deep narrative truth. It is a profound fixture of this kind of ‘search’ story.)

And then there’s yet another cliché which is that, having emptied the hiding place (which was a set of hollow Indian exercise clubs) of all Lord Ernest’s loot, they have just fitted everything back in place, closed the windows and cupboards, turned all the lights off and are about to make a quiet exit when…. they hear a key being fitted into the lock!

Lord Ernest confronts them whereat Raffles, with his lightning wits, waves a gun and pretends to be the police. He leaves Bunny to tie up his lordship, saying he’ll just go for reinforcements. Inevitably big strong Belville manages to overcome Bunny and knock him cold, escaping down the fire escape.

Raffles comes back in, wakens up the groggy Bunny, and they swiftly depart the flats, walking across St James’s to hop into a hansom cab and so home.

Now, as usual, they decide to avoid the porter in the lobby of their block of flats, and so go up a set of service stairs and then across the rooftops. Raffles is in advance of Bunny who is still slow and groggy from being knocked out. Raffles goes to get a light to help him.

In his absence, however, Belville appears brandishing the revolver he took off Bunny. Turns out he did not escape down the fire escape, but hid in the toilet and listened to Raffles and Bunny’s conversation – then followed them in the darkness across St James’s, then by cab etc.

Now he handcuffs Bunny to the railings of a perilous little iron bridge over a deep drop between two wings of the apartment block. Raffles reappears and there is a confrontation while the two gentleman thieves congratulate each other on their style and then proceed to debate how they’re going to proceed.

A big storm is brewing. There is lightning. A tremendous gust of wind blows out the lamp Raffles was holding and he lunges forward. Ernest tries to block his move but trips and plummets down down into the well between buildings, landing splat on the concrete at the bottom.

Raffles releases Bunny from his handcuffs and helps him along into the safety of their apartment.

Somewhere along the line Raffles has switched from the light and airy comedy of Lord Amersteth’s house party and cricket match to a world of murder and cyanide in what feels like a permanent Gothic night. Jeeves and Wooster have turned into Batman.

6. An Old Flame

Wheeling Raffles along in a bath chair in his character as invalid, Bunny is horrified when the old man sees an open window into a posh Mayfair house too attractive to resist. He clambers up to the first floor balcony and into a room with much silver on show, but is caught by the lady of the house entering.

Bunny pushes the bath chair quickly round the corner and away from this disastrous scene – but is amazed when a few moments later Raffles catches up with him. The woman turns out to be no other than Jacques Saillard, a passionate headstrong Spanish woman who has made a reputation as a painter. They had an affair some years before.

They have barely got home before the doorbell rings and it is her. She has followed them. She insists Raffles dismisses Bunny who is kicked out of the flat while she gives Raffles an earful of complaint.

Next thing Bunny knows is that Raffles asks him to find them a place in the country. Now this woman knows he’s alive she will sooner or later blurt out the secret. Raffles tells Bunny to go and find a nice quiet cottage somewhere like Ham Common west of Richmond. So off Bunny goes and does just that, renting it from a kindly old lady. Raffles had made his dismissal official, getting Dr Theobald to pay him off (it’s easy to forget that for all the stories in this volume Bunny has, supposedly, been an assistant and help to the supposedly confirmed old invalid Mr Maturin.

Bunny waits for news of Raffles’s arrival and, after ten days, pays a visit back to the apartment block in Earls Court. Here he is horrified to learn from Dr Theobald that Mr Maturin has passed away. They are just carrying the coffin downstairs. Bunny watches appalled.

Next day he attends the funeral in an agony of unhappiness, watches Dr Theobald and then Jacques Saillard pay their respects and drive away. An odd-looking fellow had been hanging round and now offers Bunny, the last mourner, a lift in his brougham.

Wwll, no prizes for guessing that this chap turns out to be… Raffles in disguise! Yes, he faked his own death to throw Jacques Saillard off the track and paid Dr Theobald a whopping £1,000 to sign the death certificate and keep quiet.

7. The Wrong House

Freed from their Earls Court base, Raffles and Bunny move in to the cottage on Ham Common and tell the kindly old landlady that Raffles is Bunny’s brother, returned from Australia.

But old habits die hard and this story is about the semi-farcical attempt to burgle a stockbroker’s house near the common and make a quick getaway on the newfangled technology of bicycles!

Unfortunately, it is a dark and foggy night and they end up breaking into the wrong house, which is a private school packed with plucky young students, who grab Bunny, until Raffles manages to free him at which point they are confronted by the head of the school and only just about blag their way out – claiming that they were innocent passersby who saw the burglary taking place.

They run out top the drive where they have stashed their bicycles and set off with the students giving such close pursuit that they actually wrench their handlebars, but our heroes manage to shake them off, and make their escape, going on an immense roundabout route before returning, none the better off, to the little cottage.

8. The Knees of the Gods

The Boer War breaks out on 11 October 1899. Raffles and Bunny read about it and then, as the tide turns against Britain, decide to volunteer. Being a bit old, unable to be conscripted in England, they take ship to South Africa and wangle their way into a regiment there, as privates.

Here a very strange thing happens. Hornung’s style turns into Rudyard Kipling’s. Having read almost all of Kipling’s 120 or so short stories, I can report that, in his later tales, he made a point of revising the stories again and again, to remove extraneous words and phrases, repeatedly paring and chipping away at the stories to make them more and more clipped and allusive, often to the point of obscurity.

To my surprise, that’s what happens to Hornung’s style. It’s as if he’s incapable of broaching on the subject which Kipling’s massive imaginative presence, in poems, short stories and novels, virtually owned – Britain’s imperial wars – without adopting his style.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a corporal in Bunny and Raffles’s platoon who they come to suspect is a Boer spy, and catch in the act of releasing British horses and packing them off to the Boer lines. Raffles impresses an officer in the regiment who, it turns out, he was at school with – presents definitive evidence of the corporal’s guilt – and the corporal is shot as a spy (after Raffles and this officer spent forty or so minutes chatting, inevitably, about cricket, that great social marker of the pukka Englishman).

But it’s the adoption of Kipling’s often puzzlingly clipped and allusive style which dominates the story, for me. For example, this dodgy corporal, Connal, picks on Bunny until Raffles steps in to defend him (in best public school style).

Connal was a hulking ruffian, and in me had ideal game. The brute was offensive to me from the hour I joined. The details are of no importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and finally for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully conventional, for the bully was a bully no more.

That phrase, ‘Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and Raffles was marked’ – the clipped understatement of ‘Raffles was marked’ – is fantastically redolent of the stiff-upper-lip, public schoolboy tone of Kipling’s stories about schoolboy hi-jinks, Stalky and Co.

This obliqueness really comes over as the story builds to a climax. The platoon is tasked with taking a hill held by Boers, and is crawling forwards when Bunny is drilled by a bullet through the thigh. Raffles of course comes to his aid, pulling him into the shelter of a rock and taking it upon himself to try and locate and shoot the sniper who did it. Up and down he pops behind this rock, chatting away merrily to Bunny, commentating on his progress in identifying the blighter’s location, ducking down again to reload, popping up again to take another pot shot.

Until he is shot dead. Raffles proves himself the ultimate good chap by dying for his Queen and Country. This puzzled me because I know there is at least one more set of Raffles short stories, plus an entire novel, so I am intrigued how Hornung got around the difficulty of killing off his hero.

But what impressed me more than Raffles’s death was the extraordinary way it is described. These last few pages consist almost entirely of Raffles’s confidant chat to Bunny, who is by now, in pain and losing consciousness, with each long paragraph of dialogue, just briefly ended by a phase about Raffles reloading from his bandolier.

His entire activity of jumping up to take pot shots, then ducking back down again, is not described, it is only implied, through the couple of references to bandolier, and some of Raffles’s banter about ‘missing the blighter’ and so on.

It took me a page or so of rereading to figure out what was happening and I was really struck by the technique because this is exactly what Kipling’s later short stories are like. In Kipling’s short stories, also, the explanatory text is pruned so far back that it is often difficult to work out exactly what is going on. Only a long quote can give the effect, the way rhythm supersedes sense, and the way concrete detail is omitted and key facts only implied.

It was not a minute before Raffles came to me through the whistling scud, and in another I was on my back behind a shallow rock, with him kneeling over me and unrolling my bandage in the teeth of that murderous fire.

It was on the knees of the gods, he said, when I begged him to bend lower, but for the moment I thought his tone as changed as his face had been earlier in the morning.

To oblige me, however, he took more care; and, when he had done all that one comrade could for another, he did avail himself of the cover he had found for me. So there we lay together on the veldt, under blinding sun and withering fire, and I suppose it is the veldt that I should describe, as it swims and flickers before wounded eyes.

I shut mine to bring it back, but all that comes is the keen brown face of Raffles, still a shade paler than its wont; now bending to sight and fire; now peering to see results, brows raised, eyes widened; anon turning to me with the word to set my tight lips grinning. He was talking all the time, but for my sake, and I knew it. Can you wonder that I could not see an inch beyond him? He was the battle to me then; he is the whole war to me as I look back now.

‘Feel equal to a cigarette? It will buck you up, Bunny. No, that one in the silver paper, I’ve hoarded it for this. Here’s a light; and so Bunny takes the Sullivan! All honour to the sporting rabbit!’

‘At least I went over like one,’ said I, sending the only clouds into the blue, and chiefly wishing for their longer endurance. I was as hot as a cinder from my head to one foot; the other leg was ceasing to belong to me.

‘Wait a bit,’ says Raffles, puckering; ‘there’s a gray felt hat at deep long-on, and I want to add it to the bag for vengeance…. Wait—yes—no, no luck! I must pitch ’em up a bit more. Hallo! Magazine empty. How goes the Sullivan, Bunny? Rum to be smoking one on the veldt with a hole in your leg!’

‘It’s doing me good,’ I said, and I believe it was. But Raffles lay looking at me as he lightened his bandolier.

‘Do you remember,’ he said softly, ‘the day we first began to think about the war? I can see the pink, misty river light, and feel the first bite there was in the air when one stood about; don’t you wish we had either here! ‘Orful slorter, orful slorter;’ that fellow’s face, I see it too; and here we have the thing he cried. Can you believe it’s only six months ago?’

‘Yes,’ I sighed, enjoying the thought of that afternoon less than he did; ‘yes, we were slow to catch fire at first.’

‘Too slow,’ he said quickly.

‘But when we did catch,’ I went on, wishing we never had, ‘we soon burnt up.’

‘And then went out,’ laughed Raffles gayly. He was loaded up again. ‘Another over at the gray felt hat,’ said he; ‘by Jove, though, I believe he’s having an over at me!’

‘I wish you’d be careful,’ I urged. ‘I heard it too.’

‘My dear Bunny, it’s on the knees you wot of. If anything’s down in the specifications surely that is. Besides – that was nearer!

‘To you?’

‘No, to him. Poor devil, he has his specifications too; it’s comforting to think that…. I can’t see where that one pitched; it may have been a wide; and it’s very nearly the end of the over again. Feeling worse, Bunny?”

No, I’ve only closed my eyes. Go on talking.’

‘It was I who let you in for this,’ he said, at his bandolier again.

‘No, I’m glad I came out.’

And I believe I still was, in a way; for it WAS rather fine to be wounded, just then, with the pain growing less; but the sensation was not to last me many minutes, and I can truthfully say that I have never felt it since.

‘Ah, but you haven’t had such a good time as I have!’

‘Perhaps not.’

Had his voice vibrated, or had I imagined it? Pain-waves and loss of blood were playing tricks with my senses; now they were quite dull, and my leg alive and throbbing; now I had no leg at all, but more than all my ordinary senses in every other part of me. And the devil’s orchestra was playing all the time, and all around me, on every class of fiendish instrument, which you have been made to hear for yourselves in every newspaper. Yet all that I heard was Raffles talking.

‘I have had a good time, Bunny.’ Yes, his voice was sad; but that was all; the vibration must have been in me.

‘I know you have, old chap,’ said I.

‘I am grateful to the General for giving me to-day. It may be the last. Then I can only say it’s been the best – by Jove!’

‘What is it?’ And I opened my eyes. His were shining. I can see them now.

‘Got him – got the hat! No, I’m hanged if I have; at least he wasn’t in it. The crafty cuss, he must have stuck it up on purpose. Another over … scoring’s slow…. I wonder if he’s sportsman enough to take a hint? His hat-trick’s foolish. Will he show his face if I show mine?’

I lay with closed ears and eyes. My leg had come to life again, and the rest of me was numb.

‘Bunny!’ His voice sounded higher. He must have been sitting upright.

‘Well?’

But it was not well with me; that was all I thought as my lips made the word.

‘It’s not only been the best time I ever had, old Bunny, but I’m not half sure – ‘

Of what I can but guess; the sentence was not finished, and never could be in this world.

Comments

I’ve just read a few novels by H.G. Wells, who is almost always exact and clear in his imagining of a scene (no matter how preposterous). By contrast, I began to get irritated by Hornung’s lack of sequentiality. I mean that:

  1. His sentences often skip over logical connections so you have to do a bit of work to figure out what he’s talking about.
  2. At the same time, his descriptive abilities are limited. I got little or no sense of the interior of the British Museum which is a sitting duck of a subject for a writer – in fact his descriptions of rooms and places is generally thin.
  3. Obscure phrasing.

Maybe I am just not getting his banter but pretty regularly there are phrases I just don’t understand. At the very end of The Last Laugh he writes:

But the worst did not come to the worst, more power to my unforgotten friend the cabman, who never came forward to say what manner of men he had driven to Bloomsbury Square at top speed on the very day upon which the tragedy was discovered there, or whence he had driven them. To be sure, they had not behaved like murderers, whereas the evidence at the inquest all went to show that the defunct Corbucci was little better. His reputation, which transpired with his identity, was that of a libertine and a renegade, while the infernal apparatus upstairs revealed the fiendish arts of the anarchist to boot. The inquiry resulted eventually in an open verdict, and was chiefly instrumental in killing such compassion as is usually felt for the dead who die in their sins.

But Raffles would not have passed this title for this tale.

I’ve no idea what this final sentence means. It makes you appreciate all the more the lucidity and clarity of Conan Doyle’s prose in his Sherlock Holmes stories of the same period.

In the following example, I think Hornung is straining a simile until it breaks. Bunny is waiting with bated breath for Raffles to return to their flat.

I can give you no conception of the night that I spent. Most of it I hung across the sill, throwing a wide net with my ears, catching every footstep afar off, every hansom bell farther still, only to gather in some alien whom I seldom even landed in our street.

What? By ‘alien’ does he mean alien and so useless fish i.e. he saw and heard things but nothing relevant to his watch for Raffles? Or:

Then one night in the autumn – I shrink from shocking the susceptible for nothing – but there was a certain house in Palace Gardens, and when we got there Raffles would pass on.

I have no idea why he is shocking the susceptible, and no idea what the phrase ‘would pass on’ means. Does it mean ‘and when we got there Raffles made me carry on walking right past it’? Why doesn’t he say so?

Every few pages there are phrases like this, which require a bit of effort to parse or understand, and this lack of fluency rises to a peak in the final story, where Hornung appears to be making a virtue of it, emphasising a clipped and deliberately allusive style in – if I’m right – conscious or unconscious imitation of Kipling.

Pop culture

There are high speed chases, priceless jewels, kidnaps and poisonings. It’s a tell-tale sign that an author knows he is writing popular rubbish using popular stereotypes when he knowingly compares his characters to…er… popular stereotypes.

With his overcoat buttoned up to the chin, his tall hat pressed down to his eyes, and between the two his incisive features and his keen, stern glance, he looked the ideal detective of fiction and the stage.

‘For the moment I did think you were one of these smart detectives jumped to life from some sixpenny magazine; but to preserve the illusion you ought to provide yourself with a worthier lieutenant.’

Overtly acknowledging that you’re using penny shocker clichés doesn’t raise you above them, it just tends to confirm the reader’s perception.

ITV dramatisation

ITV made television dramatisations of the stories in the 1970s, starring the dishy Anthony Valentine.

Related links

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

George du Maurier

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Anthony Hope

E.H. Hornung

Henry James

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

1 Comment
by Simon on November 21, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Detective stories, Short stories, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on November 21, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/the-black-mask-e-w-hornung/