2024 Reads – Simpler Pastimes

A bit of Christmas Murder

An English Murder
Cyril Hare
England (1951)

A Christmas Party [aka Envious Casca]
Georgette Heyer
England (1951)

It seems to have become a bit of a personal December tradition that I find a Christmas mystery to read over the holiday season–apparently there’s nothing quite like an isolated estate, winter snowfall, and murder to set the holiday mood! This year, searching out possible titles, I found that I couldn’t pick between two options that both popped up on several “top Christmas mysteries” type lists, so rather than decide, I read both.

An English Murder, adapted by author and judge Cyril Hare from his earlier radio play Murder at Warbeck Hall is set in post WWII Britain, and reflects the tensions between the old/tradition (represented by Viscount Warbeck and his son Robert) and change/new social order (socialism/nationalism represented by Sir Julius Warbeck, the viscount’s cousin). Knowing he is dying (of natural causes), the Viscount has gathered his remaining family and close friends for one last Christmas, but he cannot anticipate the deadly consequences that his nostalgia will precipitate. Although in many ways a typical country-house murder–a gathering of suspects, most, if not all, with motive to kill the victim who are isolated by a timely snow-storm–An English Murder is very well grounded in its era. There are references not only to the politics of some characters but to the political changes afoot that will likely mean Viscount Warbeck is the last Warbeck to inhabit Warbeck Hall as well as references to Nazi Concentration Camps and Stalinist Russia. One element that struck me was the marked antisemitism of one character: so often reading old books one encounters antisemitism and is sent into reflection on whether it was just a mark of its era or if the author was actually antisemitic, but here it is not only clear that the antisemitism is that of the character, not the author, but that it was probably intended to (further) mark out the character as a Bad Person.

Georgette Heyer’s A Christmas Party, in contrast, while containing many of the same elements–a family/close friends gathering of a motley cast who do not like each other, isolated country estate, snow storm–does not have quite as solid grounding in time. Published in the early years (in Britain) of WWII, I suspect that it was intended to be a diversion, not a reminder of the wider conflicts. Although there is a reference to the (Second) Sino-Japanese War and a hint that the economy is not what it once was, it lacks the same depth of presence of a specific time (which I don’t find unusual for detective fiction of the era) and certainly does not represent the great societal upheaval of the war years. This is not to take away from the mystery, however, as there is plenty of upheaval there. In fact, the tensions between the relatives are so unpleasant that one wonders why on earth Uncle Joseph thought it was a good idea to bring all these people together or why Uncle Nat agreed or why anyone showed up–other than for base monetary desires, of course. As with An English Murder, the motives abound,the tensions are high, and red herrings are not infrequent. However, there is also a touch of romance (perhaps unsurprising for a Heyer novel–I’ve not read any of her other mysteries yet, but she’s best known today for her Regency romances) and whimsy that isn’t really present in Hare’s mystery.

I thoroughly enjoyed both mysteries as, uh, “light” holiday reading, although if I would only pick just one, I preferred An English Murder as the better mystery. I was able to work out the Heyer about half-way through and so spent the rest of the novel picking out clues to see if was right (I was) – perhaps Envious Casca is too much of a giveaway in an age when one can Google “Casca.” An English Murder, on the other hand, provided more of a challenge, even while all the clues were there in plain sight. The perfect diversion for cold December evenings, with or without distant relations.

Sweet Danger – Margery Allingham

Sweet Danger
Margery Allingham
England, 1933
aka in the US as Kingdom of Death or The Fear Sign

Although a fan of “Golden Age” detective novels, I haven’t really read much outside of Agatha Christie, just some short stories in the British Library Crime Classics series. So earlier this year when I saw that knit designer/writer Kate Davies was hosting a combination knitalong/readalong inspired by and themed around some of the mysteries of Margery Allingham, I jumped right in.

The first up on the recommended list, Sweet Danger, is not the first to feature her gentleman detective Albert Campion, nor does it confirm to what the reader might perhaps expect of a Golden Age detective novel.

The scene opens in France, when Guffy Randall arrives at a hotel and is surprised to be approached by the manager: there are some mysterious guests and the manager isn’t sure–are they nobility or con men? Should he ask them to leave or leave them be? Randell takes a look, only to discover that these guests are all known to him, including his friend Campion. He is taken into their confidence–they are on a mission for the government, and they have enemies afoot. Discovery of a new piece of information, helpfully supplied by Campion’s manservant, a ex-thief called Lugg, soon sends the young men on a wild romp across the English countryside, searching out mysteries both past and present.

The plot is fast-paced and Allingham requires the reader to pay close attention. At times she withholds information, keeping you just enough in the dark to provoke interest and force close attention to the plot, without keeping everything so close as to frustrate. The cast of characters–Campion, his friends, and the Fitton family they stay with in the small English town of Pontisbright–are engagingly drawn. There are side diversions and subplots, complexities and dangers and even hints of romance. At times it reminded me of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles or even an early James Bond film–and doubtless other books I’ve yet to read as well. A pure delight from front to back!

Moominsummer Madness – Tove Jansson

Moominsummer Madness [Farlig midsommar]
Tove Jansoon
Finland, 1954

It’s been too long since I last – and first – read one of the Moomin tales by Tove Jansson, but inspired by the MoominWeek hosted by Calmgrove and Mallika, I decided that it was time to remedy that with a new visit to the delightful Moominvalley. Given the season, Moominsummer Madness was the logical choice, if logic is ever truly allowed to apply to the adventures and mishaps of Jansson’s cast of characters.

In this, the fifth of the series (though I don’t think reading order matters), a great flood has been triggered by the local volcano. Moominvalley and its surroundings are submerged so the Moomintroll family and an assorted cast of friends take refuge in a strange floating house. They are soon swept away on a series of strange adventures that sometimes separate, but finally reunite (but of course!) the family and their friends, both old and new. Intermixed with the Moomintroll family’s adventures are those of their friend Snufkin, late to return to the valley from his winter’s travels.

It is a delightful mishmash of oddities and a diverse group of character personalities: happy, angry, discontent, serene, depressed, adventurous, rebellious, timid, nostalgic. There is also the contrast between naive and wordly: it appears that even Moominmamma and Moominpappa are somewhat innocent of the wider world, quite unlike Snufkin or some of the new friends they meet along the way. This provides the reader with the delight of at times knowing more than the Moomintrolls—or at least the adult reader; I suppose that some of hidden knowledge may not be picked up by all children.

There’s the sense I had, though, that perhaps I wasn’t reading this one as well as I ought—that perhaps my sense of disbelief wasn’t properly suspended or my childlike wonder had wandered off. I suppose I just need another Moomin story to remedy this problem!

10 Books of Summer 2024, Wrapped

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s August already, much less the end of it. Which means that summer reading comes to an end, and time to reflect on what I accomplished.

In one measure, there has been a lot of reading this summer: I finished eleven books in total and am currently partway through three others. This is a fair representation of my typical reading rate, so on that count I am satisfied.

On the other hand, three of those books were started in May and I didn’t really write up anything about any of the books, nor did I manage to read Othello before book club went to see it, so I’m not completely satisfied with my participation in 10 Books of Summer. But at least I can provide a wrap up of what I did accomplish the last two months. (See my earlier post for what was finished in June.)

Books Finished in July

Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare

One of my favorite Shakespearean plays, it was fun both to revisit the play in written form and see it live in-person for the first time, in a beautiful outdoor venue. (I only got two mosquito bites!) To the read vs see argument I continue to maintain that the correct answer is “both,” especially for the comedies: reading beforehand helps one catch the rapid barrage of puns and wordplay; actors on stage play up the comedy in a way that my solo reading never can. It’s also fun to watch different versions to see how the directors choose to approach. In this case, a song from later in the play was moved to the beginning to allow the musicians of the pre-play “Green Show” to accompany and the intermission was moved mid-act to permit Beatrice to fall into a fountain when she is trying to avoid discovery eavesdropping on her cousin and maids. The fun of outdoor theater!

Although I didn’t manage to read Othello, I saw it a few weeks after attending Much Ado and was struck by some of the similarities between the two: Much Ado has the potential to turn tragedy when the vengeful Don John smears Hero’s reputation to get back at his brother Don Pedro and Don Pedro’s friend Claudio, who is to marry Hero. The plot is moved forward by characters planting false trails, from the accusations against Hero to the misdirections by their friends to convince Beatrice and Benedick that each loves the other. Othello is similarly propelled forward by jealousy, misdirection, and deceit. The contrast is striking, especially the thought of how little has to change to turn a comedy to a tragedy, and I can’t help but suspect that Ohio Shakespeare Festival chose this pairing carefully.

Dancers in Mourning – Margery Allingham

Of the Allingham I’ve read so far, this might be my least favorite, but this is a minor charge. Allingham always seems to find a different approach with every novel, and while I at first thought it was going to be set entirely in London amongst the theatre-set, it instead turned out to be a country-house mystery – albeit with the theatre-set intact. Turns out even actors and producers need a break in the country. It was a fun variation on a common Golden Age mystery theme, with lots of twists and complications that make solving the mystery difficult not just for the reader but for Albert Campion as well.

West with the Night – Beryl Markham

My book club’s July selection, this memoir of Markham’s early life in British East Africa (primarily today’s Kenya), from childhood adventures with local children through her time flying as a bush pilot, finally ending with her flight west across the Atlantic from England to Canada – the first pilot to do so non-stop. Much like my experience with Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop earlier this year, I was transported to a completely different time and place. Well worth the read.

Traitor’s Purse – Margery Allingham

Published in 1941, Allingham chose to set the novel firmly in the times in which it is written while keeping things just vague enough that knowledge of the real history is necessary – and perhaps kept vague enough to survive what was then the war’s unknown outcome. It can be a disorienting novel as our hero, Albert Campion, awakes in a country hospital to realize he cannot remember anything about what he is doing except that it is of vital importance to the country. Campion thus spends the novel rediscovering what he should already know in a dramatic race against time. Despite the specific time period of the setting, I thought it held up well and was happy to see some old friends from previous novels appear as well.

Books Finished in August

Saint Joan – Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s 1923 play about the life of the French heroine, later Saint, was a surprise to me. It was the book club read for August and I wasn’t really looking forward to it (I couldn’t say why, maybe I was expecting it to be dry?), but I found it unexpectedly moving, especially the final scenes, and seemingly even-handed. Shaw somehow manages to allow for both miracles and rational explanations depending on your personal preference, without diminishing either.

Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief – Maurice Leblanc

Alas, I only managed to finish half of this “best-of” collection before the end of July, and so didn’t get anything written up for the Paris in July event. But I did find the adventures of the “gentleman thief” delightful, especially the earlier stories involving his more criminal escapades. I was reminded of the character of Hercule Flambeau in the BBC series Father Brown (2013). (I’ve not read the original Chesterton mysteries, so don’t know how the characters compare on page.) Lupin seems that he would be a perfect foil to Sherlock Holmes, applying the same sorts of mental prowess to a life of crime—primarily stealing from or defrauding the rich—and indeed, Leblanc seems to have thought so as well, including a version of the famous detective (in a copyright violation at the time) in the story “Sherlock Holmes Arrives too Late.” However, one suspects that Holmes would not have been adverse to Lupin’s habit of defending the poor or helpless from dastardly schemes of the rich and powerful—though perhaps Lupin’s motives were not always entirely altruistic. This proved a perfect story collection for summer reading. Many thanks to Emma at Words and Peace for the inspiration to find some Parisian-themed reading!

Moominsummer Madness – Tove Jansson

The final finish of the summer, I read this delightful adventure for MoominWeek—if I’m on my game, I’ll get a proper post written up tomorrow.

Started, Not Finished

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

Uprooted – Naomi Novik

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (book club for September)

All-in-all a lot of good reading, just not as much as hoped. Thanks to Cathy at 746 Books for hosting 20 Books of Summer as always!

I’m looking forward as ever to cooler autumn weather, as well as the sights and smells and tastes (apple season!), and have been thinking about what I might read. Other than book club, I don’t have any specific commitments, but I like trying to find something suitably seasonal – maybe something in a school setting for September, maybe some ghost stories for October. Of course, I may also wander off in an entirely different direction. One never knows what the library might turn up.

How was your summer reading? Any seasonal plans for the coming months?

Cahokia Jazz – Francis Spufford

Cahokia Jazz
Francis Spufford
England, 2023

“…the reason you keep being in time is that you are in time, this week, in the musical sense. The city is playing a song, and you have a part in it.” (“Friday”)

The title alone caught my eye. Alan Jacobs’s (author of Breaking Bread with the Dead and How to Think, both of which I’ve read) effusive praise for his friend’s novel only further piqued my interest.

To back up, a few years ago, my parents and I took a short trip through central and southern Ohio, visiting various ancient mound sites (most of which were recently invested as the United State’s newest UNESCO world heritage sites, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks). In some of the reading I did surrounding the trip, I learned of another site, in modern-day Illinois, that had once been the center of a thriving population, but which had largely died off by the time the earliest white settlers arrived: Cahokia.

Spufford takes this real history and adds a “what if?” What if, when 18^th and 19^th century explorers arrived, instead of a depopulated center, they had found a thriving civilization, converted to Catholicism by the French Jesuits, and fully able and willing to push back on American expansionism? How would that change the history and map of the United States? What would stay the same?

It is against this alternate history that Spufford sets his 1920s noir, a mix of history, mystery, and jazz. Prohibition is in place, corrupt police accept moonshiner’s bribes, jazz reigns in the nightclubs, the KKK is resurgent following the release of Birth of a Nation, and Harding is in office. But Cahokia is not merely a thriving city, but a state; Native politicians are sent to Congress; and a Native language remains the lingua franca for the center of the country. So much the same, so much changed. It is a wonderful feat of world-building; it is what drew me in to the novel, set over five days following a racially-charged murder of a white man found draped over the top of a glass pyramid-shaped skylight on top of the Land Trust building.

It is a crime that puts a city on edge, only further inflaming tensions between the native, Catholic Cahokians and more recent white protestant migrants from the eastern states. The police are tasked with solving the murder before the tensions spill over and additional blood is shed.

On the surface, Cahokia Jazz sounds as if it should be a police procedural, one that happens to be set in an alternate past. And perhaps in a sense, that is what it is. But while I found the mystery to be solid and satisfying, that was not the element that kept me reading (in fact, I found it slow to start and early on, wanted to shake some sense into the protagonist, Joe Barrow) or that made me reluctant to finish the novel. It is the world building, infused not just with the alternate history, but an alternate culture, the 1920s mood of prohibition and speakeasys and jazz, the fictional, though reality-based, Anopa language scattered throughout, the city of Cahokia itself, the varying residents Barrow meets.

In the end I’m not sure if it’s a really good book, or just one I really enjoyed reading—the two are not necessarily synonymous. In fact, the ending had such a ring of familiarity to it as to almost suggest something selected off the shelf. But I found it so satisfying to read that I would gladly go back, and my biggest regret is that the jazz recordings Spufford teases us with do not exist in our reality.