Serial Killer: The White Cottage Mystery

The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham

Penguin

Pp.139

The blurb on the back of the book informs us that, “The White Cottage Mystery was Margery Allingham’s first detective story, published initially as a newspaper serial. Her sister Joyce has now skilfully revised the text to reveal a sharply plotted period piece stamped with the genius of a great and familiar hand.” Mostly this revision is apparently removing some of the repetition which would occur in a serialisation to remind readers of the story from last week rather than the previous page.

It is a country house mystery of the type favoured by the Queens of Crime and follows the formula expertly. The blurb also summarises, “Seven people might have murdered Eric Crowther, the mysterious recluse who lived in the gaunt house whose shadow fell across the White Cottage. Seven people had good cause. It was not lack of evidence that sent Detective Chief Inspector Challenor and his son Jerry half across Europe to unravel a chaos of clues.” The clues involve people trying to cover their secrets, such as blackmail, homosexuality, adultery, class pretence, and other sins. Attitudes may have changed, but the well-plotted drama and general motivation to keep things hidden remains.

On one occasion, W.T. Challenor is exasperated with a woman who doesn’t appear to grasp the sliding scale of the importance of secrets. He tries to explain, “An elephant is large compared with a mouse, but it is ridiculously small compared with Mount Etna. That secret may have been immense six months ago, but now we are faced with a larger and much more terrible secret. Don’t you realise what a murder means?” Women frequently exasperate W.T., and he dismisses them as stereotypes. “Grace Christensen was a woman of the pretty, graceful, feminine type that is not too clever.” Other of-the-era outlooks are reserved for foreigners and ‘abroad’, where father and son head later in the novel to track down a suspect. There is an unwritten code of conduct and honour, which is also familiar from early 20^th century novels. W.T. states plainly, “I am an Englishman, and we like our facts like our food – without subtlety. If you will honour me with your trust you will find that I shall respect your confidence.” Far more serious is the stance towards childhood trauma and the notion that the best way to approach distressing events is to forget them.

As with all Golden Age detective mystery fiction, however, the crime is treated as something of a game. W.T. muses on the suspects, “They all behave as if they were innocent, and yet each one is hiding something. Each has a motive for killing Crowther, and admits it freely. No sane person would dare to do that unless they felt safe.” It is, of course, baffling to the duo attempting to solve it. The White Cottage Mystery is a gripping, short caper, capable of being consumed in a day, and the fine plotting ensures that everything is neatly tied up with a bow after all. This is highly recommended for fans of the genre.

Friday Five: Cast Cross-Stitch

As mentioned before, I like to make cross-stitch for cast members in plays I direct, featuring a quote of theirs. Here are the ones I made for Dead Man's Cell Phone.

The first is spoken by Gordon (played by Bruce Hardie); the second by Jean (Jess Waterhouse); the third by Harriet Gottlieb (Elaine Noon); the fourth by Hermia (Victoria Tyrell Dixon); and the fifth by The Other Woman (Alex McPerson).

Can you pass the acid test? Trout Fishing in America

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Canongate

Pp. 122

The novella immediately announces itself as a surreal work of post-modernism, deconstructing itself as even being a book. It is not really about trout fishing, but it hangs loosely together around that conceit as it spawns ideas and floats off down streams and meandering tributaries.  The chapters are very short – a page or two at most – and the first one explains the purpose of its own cover. The language is hallucinogenic and often touchingly whimsical as the book defies all conventions in an extremely self-aware manner.

First published in 1967, the novella has a strong element of The Machine in the Garden about it, as Brautigan seems to reflect on nature and the destruction of the environment. A child thinks he sees a waterfall, but really it is “just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.” The author remembers how he once mistook an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont. “‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I thought you were a trout stream.’ ‘I’m not,’ she said.” In another chapter, an abandoned shack has a notice nailed to the front door. “NO TRESPASSING 4/17 OF A HAIKU”

It is nostalgic in the way that it captures a moment in time, but then suspends it. The contemporary context may be a poor pretext for the sexism that was prevalent in the era, but it can’t excuse the fact that some passages are misogynist and highly distasteful. Brautigan was a contemporary of Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey and other (always male) beat writers. He usually refers to “the woman I was travelling with” and women are peripheral, mentioned only in relation to their use to men. “The only woman he could find up there was a three-hundred-pound Indian squaw. She had twin fifteen-year-old daughters and he wanted to get into them. But the squaw worked it so that he only got into her. She was clever that way.”

Trout Fishing in America writes letters; it is a slogan written on the backs of first graders in chalk by a gang of sixth graders; it is a pen nib, “with a stroke of cool green trees along the river’s shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper”; it moves to Alaska to escape the heat of New York, leaving a forwarding address; it has Maria Callas for a girlfriend; it is its own autopsy as if “it had been Lord Byron and had died in Missolonghi, Greece, and afterward never saw the shores of Idaho again”; it is an item for sale at The Cleveland Wrecking Yard where it is sold by the foot length, “You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we’ve got left… We’re selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we’re also selling extra. The insects we’re giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream.”

There are oddly specific similes, many of which are fancifully extended. Dead fish “had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff.” Some descriptions are gloriously visual. “The streets were white and dry like a collision at a high rate between a cemetery and a truck loaded with sacks of flour.” Others are nonsensical and absurdist for their own sake, such as when mentioning small wooden markers in a graveyard for the poor. “Eventually the seasons would take care of their wooden names like a sleepy short-order cook cracking eggs over a grill next to a railroad station.”

Sometimes Brautigan falls into a simpler writing that comes close to being a studied imitation of Hemingway’s plain style or even a parody of it. When travelling, the narrator gets picked up by a farmer in a truck. “The farmer did not ruin his audition for the Metropolitan Opera by making a sound. He just nodded his head again. The truck started up. He was the original silent old farmer.” He can deflate situations before they even begin. “The garbage was a problem for a little while and then we discovered a way to get rid of it.” And he can include universal transcendent hallucinogenic passages: “You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were covered with your sperm and her come.”

The book resembles an LSD trip, as if Lewis Carroll were writing it on acid. There’s clearly a time and place for this sort of this – I’m just not sure it’s here and now.

Friday Five: Show Posters

One of the themes of the play I am directing, Dead Man's Cell Phone, is the way people interract through their phones rather than realistically and so their understanding of each other becomes skewed and depersonalised. In devising a poster to advertise the play, I wanted to spotlight the overload of impersonal information and intimate details and the way in which it is easy to become sucked into this heightened but depleted digital world. I didn't want any recognisable faces or features, other than possibly a hand which could belong to any body. These are my suggestions for what I had in mind.

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 

This is what the publicity department gave me.

I was recently listening to an interview with Ridley Scott in which he said that he strongly disliked the poster for Prometheus, because it actually contains a plot spoiler. He asked for it to be changed, but it remained because apparently the marketing department is more powerful than a director. Well, if they won't listen to Ridley, I can't really expect them to listen to me.

In the meantime, at least the poster is bright and should grab the attention, hopefully drawing people to come and see our wonderful production. And it also goes really well with the colours on a can of Bentspoke Crankshaft.

Friday Five: Books Read in May

1. Home Fire by Kamila Shamshie (Riverhead Books) -This modern retelling of Antigone was described by one reviewer as ‘A Greek tragedy for the age of ISIS’. It is formulaic in structure, as befits a Greek tragedy, and each of the five sections highlights a different character who represents one of the figures from the drama. The world of contemporary British politics and the Islamist caliphate stand in for the democracy of Ancient Greece. Readers unfamiliar with Antigone may struggle with the apparently forced milieu and one-dimensional characters.
2. How the Dog Became the Dog by Mark Derr (Scribe) - Subtitled From Wolves to Our Best Friends, this is a very scholarly and academic text that tries to trace the history and links beween the wild animal and the domestic pet. Full of analysis of archaeological fossil details regarding physiological changes to head shape, shortening and broadening of the muzzle, shortening of the nose and jaws, and teeth crowding in the mouth, as well as an overall reduction in size and robustness, it concludes that wolves and dogs share a common ancestor but are different species. Clearly a dog lover, Derr debunks the theory about humans having to be the alpha to control the dog, pointing out that wolves chose to be with humans as part of their evolution perceived mutual benefits rather than being forced into experiments. He also clarifies the distinction between attentive and intelligent compared with biddable and obedient, and contends that the problems many people have with their understanding of dog behaviour is the challenge to their assumption of human exceptionalism. He also has some harsh words to say about breeders, showdogs, and people who limit their dog's natural dog behaviour. 
3. The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor (Harper Collins) - This is the first book in what will become a series of historical detective fiction (there are currently six) featuring James Marwood and Cat Lovett. The setting is 1666, as the Great Fire of London rages through the city. The crime is the body of a man found in the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral stabbed in the neck with his thumbs tied behind his back. Marwood is the son of a traitor ordered by the government to hunt down the killer. Lovett is a determined and (of course) beautiful young woman fighting for her freedom from the many relatives between whom she was passed around after her mother died and her father disappeared. As these characters are clearly going to be revisited, Taylor spends considerable time in setting them up although he doesn't seem to flesh them out and the mystery falls a little flat, sacrificied to the wealth of historical detail. Further installments appear popular so perhaps after all the exposition is out of the way, the pace might pick up in future.  
4. Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley (Hodder & Stoughton) - Agatha Christie wrote her own biography, but there are lots of bits missing, which Lucy Worsley attempts to fill in here. She is helped by the work of Mary Westmacott, Christie's alias, who wrote many novels of a fairly autobiographical nature. The childhood years are a bit bland - probably because nothing was really written about them - but in adulthood the interest increases. Agatha Christie thought of her writing as a profession and a way to make money and so was excluded from her upper-class contemporaries from the Bloomsbury Group. Lucy Worsley has a strong sense of narrative, using clear, defined sentences and injecting just right the amount of context. She explores the years of Christie's disappearance from multiple angles including those that both support and decry her, as well as her archeological pursuits and love of family. Along with the life, Worsley examines the literature, including some of the 'Christie tricks' which flout the agreed set of rules for detective stories, such as hiding an object in plain sight, the 'hidden couple', recycling plots, and the unreliable narrator or witness. Neither does Worsley flinch from addressing the perceived racism and anti-Semitism, while maintaining the greatness of the writer. “In 1959, UNESCO announced that the Bible had been translated into 171 languages, Shakespeare into 90, and Agatha Christie into 103.”
5. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (William Heineman) - Published in 2015, this was actually written before the famous To Kill A Mockingbird, and there was much controversy over its publication due to allegations that 89-year old Lee was taken advantage of by her publishers and pressured into allowing publication against her previously stated intentions. It is not a great novel, containing questionable views and underdeveloped writing. Scout (Jean Louise) returns to Maycombe from New York as an adult to question her father on his racist attitudes and his paternalistic white saviour opposition to the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - a civil rights organisation formed in 1909). Atticus Finch, whom we all know as the heroic progressive father and lawyer, is uncomfortable when Black people want self-determinism and stop acting grateful. The novel appears to preach tolerance but it does so in a pedestrian and didactic manner, with many sexist, violent and misogynistic allusions, which may have been accepted in 1960 but are certainly not now. Although originally published as a recently discovered sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, it makes much more sense when read in its true context as a first draft of the much greater work, which grew out of the flashbacks to Scout's youth contained in this one. 

Friday Five: Cocktails in Spain

Now that we have dealt with the Sangria, Aperol Spritz and Vermouth, there are still some cocktails to highlight from our trip to Spain - yes, it was a while ago, but the memories are lasting.

 A couple of these are instrinsically linked for me with the venue. Cafe Madrid in Valencia is allegedly the 'best cocktail bar in the city and a byword for quality'. Or so it says on the website. It continues that is the 'epicentre of bohemian, artistic and literary life in Valenica' and 'the best place to have an aperitif and relive those artistic moments in an eclectic space with an industrial feel where art continues to play a transcendental role'. The decor is certainly divine combining elegant chandeliers with industrial chic.

Cafe Madrid is also allegedly the birthplace of Agua de Valencia, 'a zingy and tasty cocktail made with freshly-squeezed Valencia oranges, cava and a special twist.' The 'special twist' appears to be either vodka or gin. 

Another place we loved was L'Ascensor in Barcelona. It's a funky bar with access through a lift door and a great range of cocktails. Service is friendly and knowlegable and we made several visits during our stay to chat to the staff, eat, and, of course, drink.

From the outside

From the inside

1. Agua de Valencia

2. French 75 and 3. Sazerac

4. Catalan Martini (Coffee, crema catalana liqueur, ratafia, rum Barcelo) and 5.Penicilin Ascensor

Him Outdoors with Penicilin Ascensor (Laphroaig 10 Years, honey, lemon, ginger beer)

6. Rom Fashion (Flor de Cana 12 Years, bitter orange marmalade, bitters)  and 7. Mediterrani (Vodka, grapefruit juice, fresh orange juice, lime, Olive lemonade, sugar)

How to Survive in Suburbia: Takes One to Know One

Takes One To Know One by Susan Isaacs

Grove Press UK

Pp. 355

Corie has retired from her role as a counter-terrorist agent for the FBI to become a wife to federal judge, Josh, and a mother to his daughter, Eliza. Although she still does some consultation work for the FBI, she ostensibly leads the perfect suburban life complete with a dog called Lulu, a ‘cover’ job recommending Arabic literature to a publishing house, and weekly lunch meetings with fellow freelancers at a French restaurant. And she is bored senseless. So, when she suspects a member of the group of being up to no good – he always picks the same seat to watch his car, changes phones often and makes frequent interstate trips – she imagines that he must have a secret life, and she sets out to investigate. Are her instincts, honed by training at the Bureau, correct, or is she desperately trying to create some excitement, and Pete from packaging really is simply bland?

Corie had approached marriage and suburban life with positivity and enthusiasm, but now she struggles to feign interest in her new environment talking about children’s homework and kitchen renovations. “I had opted for normality and gotten far better than I’d dreamed of. But the trade-off was giving up exciting, sometimes risky work and leaving the exploits to someone else. For family’s sake. Adventure for moms? The dads got that one.” So, she begins to examine Pete and his potential motives more closely. She thinks he may be creating an alter-ego to conceal his nefarious purposes because she recognises behaviour patterns she has displayed – hence the title.

The author includes a lot of research as to the way that agents conduct their business, and, while Cories makes sardonic remarks about some of the training she received – “The bureau had been big on mindfulness, though they called it something more butch back then: staying in the alert zone” – her instincts also lead to valuable insights. Corie confides in her father, who is ex-NYPD and loves watching cosy British crime shows like Father Brown and Death in Paradise. “Like a lot of cops, he was a major mystery fan.” He reads Sherlock Holmes and puts some of the elimination processes to work, casting a net and then narrowing it.

The novel contains some typos and grammatical errors that should have been corrected by a more watchful editor, but these are mitigated by the fact that, as mentioned in the acknowledgement at the end, some people made donations to Long Island charities by bidding to have a character named after them, which is a great idea. This is a very easy-to-read novel, which combines the excitement of law enforcement with the tedium of suburban domesticity. It may hurry to its conclusion, but the characters are warm and engaging, which makes them enjoyable company.