The Hog's Back Mystery

This is the first book I've read by Freeman Wills Croft (his real name), an Irish engineer in the daytime and a mystery book writer at night.  Croft was heavily involved in designing train bridges and track layouts, so he was certainly clever. His mechanical mind is apparant in this murder mystery, first published in 1933. In fact, it is so complicated, he included a map of the area of the crimes (the house, the woods, roads, bus routes and byways), a map that shows the actions of the two prime suspects on one night with times plotted out to prove that the unbelievably complicated series of events are in fact humanly possible, a description of each and every clue as it was found by Inspector French in the four weeks he investigated the crimes--including page references to when we first discovered each clue to prove to the reader that, yes, we could have figured it out, too, if we just been paying attention AND a timeline of all events, down to the minute, over the course of four weeks.  Yes, it was a damned complicated mystery. In fact, while I was very interested while I read it, it wasn't an emotionally gripping story as the struts and girders holding the story together were too apparent. Also, I never really got to know any of the characters--aside from the Scotland Yard inspector.  Everyone else is sort of 2 dimensional--I guess this is what happens when almost all events are told from his point of view. Nonetheless, the mystery was mysterious enough.

As mentioned above, the Scotland Yard investigator is Inspector French.  We are meeting French mid-career and he has already had quite a few famous successes solving other murder mysteries (which also involved engineering situations).  Croft wrote 23 French mysteries (he wrote non-French novels, too--all told about 35 novels) and this was was about his 10th or so.  Occasionally French remembers earlier mysteries he solved--conveniently he gives them the same names as the books so we can set out to buy them.  As with other Scotland Yard inspectors of this era, French is a happy man who enjoys smoking a pipe and drinking whiskey in moderation.  He loves his wife and he never works on weekends (unless he gets called in because a body has been found--but that doesn't happen too often) and he spends Sundays traveling around with is wife, picnicking and walking on trails along seasides.  He also likes to sit by the fire and do his heavy thinking when stuck on a case. We don't really meet his wife, but are told that they have been together for too many years to keep track of, and he says that they are perfectly suited to one another.

This book starts with the arrival of Ursula Stone who is visiting university friends she hasn't seen in over 10 years.  She's successfully runs a children's hospital "In Town" (London, I guess) and is taking a few weeks off for the first time in ages.  She arrives at the home of Julia, whose sister Marjorie is also visiting.  Julia recently married Dr. Earle, a semi-retired doctor who is shifting out of practicing medicine to researching medicine.  The marriage was rushed and now, a few years later, they are unhappy together.  They do not dislike each other, they just realize too well that they are too different: he wants to stay home and read and write, and she wants to gad about with young men who play golf, gamble on horses, and drive fancy sports cars.  Nonetheless, both Julia and Earle like Ursula so her visit is a happy one--until Earle vanishes.  The circumstances are inexplicable: Dinner is over, Ursula is visiting another university friend who lives about 10 miles away and Julia and Marjorie and doing the dishes and cleaning up after dinner.  Earle is in the study until he isn't--his body is gone, and there's no sign of violence.  He was wearing indoor clothes and slippers (we are told the nights are cold) and the car is in their garage. He took no papers or his wallet and no money.

It makes no sense but there is no sign of health emergency or murder, so Inspector French decides that it's a "voluntary disappearance" (someone runs away from an unhappy home or life).  Julia insists that Earle just wouldn't do such a thing.  Then it is revealed that weeks earlier he had met up with a nurse he occasionally worked with--and she has disappeared!  (Those who know her also insist that simply leaving without giving word to her employer is also completely out of keeping with her character).  So, that seems to seal it--they ran off together and he must have had other clothes and sources of money that his wife, Julia, didn't know about.

Then two weeks latr ANOTHER body disappears from the Earle home in exactly the same manner as Earle disappearance!  Well, the idea that all three have run off together (or run off in separate directions) is too stupid to believe so now we must presume that missing body 3 must be murder--and if that one is murder, perhaps the others are, too?  This prompts a far more serious body hunt than took place before when people were just looking for evidence of Earle stepping outside and slipping or having a heart attach.  And lo we have it--all three corpses--are found (in VERY grisly circumstances which I will not relate, I'll just say their deaths and decomposition are vividly described).  So now the question is: who could possibly have a motive to kill all three?  Anyone who would want to kill the doctor and nurse would seem to have no motive to kill Dead Person 3.  Anyone who would want to kill #3 would have no reason to kill the others....very mysterious.  And complicated.  I was very happy to have the maps and timelines.

First Hogbacks swim of 2025

 

Power cut follies

Fittingly, it being the official start of Summer, most of the US is now under a heat advisory.  This means high nineties, "feels-like" index in the triple digits (because of the extreme humidity).  This was kicked off for us yesterday morning in the pre-dawn hours when we had a massive thunderstorm - lightning, thunder, flash floods, the whole bit.  And it didn't bring down the temperature at all.  Since then it was in the 90s yesterday, so Frederick and I went for our second swim.  On the way home, Jami (who was at work) called to say that the power company had just texted her that "power had just been restored" - which was news to us, as we hadn't been at home (and power was unaffected at work).  "Phew - dodged a bullet there" we thought, because it's always stressful if the power goes out mid-film.  Then we got home and were relaxing when, at 3:30 there was a sudden loss-then-return-then-loss-then-return-then loss of power (in the space of seconds) and... no power.  Funnily (?) enough I had just joked to my mother over Zoom how terrible it would be if the power went out.  Well, we battened down the hatches and sealed up the house and the temperature stayed below 80.  I went into work with the air fryer trying to get power to run it for Frederick's suppertime potatoes, but the power had gone out there (although emergency power was keeping the air conditioning going, a fact I noted in case of emergencies).  Anyway, the power company, having said power would be restored by 8:30 PM (annoyingly, it was for people just one block away), kicked the deadline back to 4:30 AM, so we had to prepare for a hot night.  (I just saw a video online of somebody complaining that it was a sultry 79 degrees in Edinburgh today - well that was the overnight low for us last night.)  I had a brainwave: we went through a spell of getting refrigerated goods though the mail (ask Jami) and I, being the pack rat that I am, saved them all in the freezer we have in the basement.  So I slapped a few inside pillowcases and they were our bedmates, until the power did indeed come back at 2 AM (and of course, the lights all went on in Frederick's room).  But he was a saint through it all.  And we have blissful A/C again.  (But the power's still out at work.)

 

The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White

This is the first book I've read by White, a Welsh author who starting publishing in 1927 when she was 41 years old.  And, though she got to it fairly late in the game, she was extremely successful, with this being her most successful novel--and the source of one of Alfred Hitchkock's best movies, The Lady Vanishes. While the movie keeps the novel's key points, it does take some liberties: first, the charming pair Charters and Caldicott (who seem to be in every British movie in the 30s) are not in the novel, and , second, while we meet our heroine's love interest (played by Michael Redgrave in the movie) at the hotel at the start of the novel, there is no tussle over rooms. The movie is an unsubtle call to English people to get off their arses, take the political hostilities in Europe seriously, get armed, and start killing people.  The novel mentions the political instabilities of small European countries whose citizens don't have the decency to speak English, there is no hint of a war.  Yet the theme is the same: English people are at their worst when they are more concerned with their own selfish interests (driven by fear of their sins becoming public, loss of social status, and--most pathetic of all--a fear of missing out of key social events--what kids today call FOMO: Fear of Missing Out). But once they actually get off their arses and take a good look at what is right in front of them, they can demonstrate genuine heroism.  

So our story begins at a hotel in a tiny Alpian village in an unspecified country.  All we know is that very few English tourists know the native language (so it isn't French, Italian or German we can infer) and it sounds "harsh and choppy" to their ears.  Our heroine, Iris, has become engaged to someone who will make a suitable husband, the only problem is that she doesn't love him at all--it's not even clear she likes him. So before the big day, she and her gal pals are traveling around Europe, spending a lot of money, drinking a lot, sleeping around (their sexploits are not described explicitly but it's clear that they are having sex with married men as the wives are furious---not so much that their husbands were unfaithful but that they, the wives, cannot find someone to be unfaithful with).  Although Iris has enjoyed her time with her friends up until this last evening, she realizes she cannot stand them: they're noisy, shallow, unpleasant and, worst of all, boring. At the start of the novel, they are discussing their departure the next morning.  Iris suddenly announces that she plans to stay a bit longer.  Her friends are surprised but, perhaps tellingly, don't attempt to dissuade her of that plan. She's hurt and then becomes defiant--she's determined to stay behind and have the best day of her life alone.

Iris awakes to a much emptier hotel since about half the hotel guests are gone (they left on the train with her friends) and many of the hotel workers are packing up to go back to their home towns since it's the end of the tourist season. The remaining few people are all preparing to leave the following day.  Determined to make the most of her last day, Iris tries to enjoy breakfast but finds that all the other guests snub her, tarring her with the same brush they tarred her boistrous friends: no one will sit with her, talk with her, or even smile at her. Gripped with a loneliness she's never felt before, she decides to go on a last hike up the mountain to get one last look at the amazing views.  But, unlike days in the past, the sky is cloudy, the air is cold, and the views are leaden and dull.  Caught up in her own thoughts, she gets hopelessly lost.  Angry with herself for being so incompetant, she slips and scrapes her legs on the stony paths and feels real panic. She then realizes that she never paid attention on the previous walks, she just followed along with everyone else in the group, letting them decide which trail to take and which views to admire.  And here is a pivotal moment which launches the whole novel: she realizes for the first time in her entire life that she's never been alone--really alone. She's always followed "the crowd," letting them pick places to eat, clothes to buy, clubs to visit, echoing their likes and dislikes--her whole life has been defined by a crowd of people that she now finds absolutely loathsome. (We're witnessing a real Kafkaesque moment here.) Right then and there she decides, assuming she doesn't die of exposure on the moutain, she is going to change her ways: she's going to be her own person, assert her own thoughts regardless of what others think. (Cue foreboding music....)

Blessedly, she sees in the distance one of the couples she knows is staying at her hotel.  Legs aching and weak with hunger, she runs toward them, using them as a signpost to find her way back to familiar sights.  Once she's back at the hotel, she sits in the diningroom, alone at her table--no longer hurt from the rejection but adopting an attitude of cautious curiosity balanced with indifference.  

Let's meet the English characters:  

The Misses Flood-Porter: Two spinsters with strong views about everything, particularly how English people should behave.  (Older sister: "We always make a point of wearing evening dress for dinner, when we're on the Continent."  Younger sister: "If we didn't dress, we should feel we were letting England down.") Both are in a hurry to get home as an extremely important church event is coming up and they absolutely MUST be there for it.

Reverand and Mrs. Barnes: He's a boor and she's weak.  He's almost always airsick, trainsick or seasick, which causes his wife to fuss over him, demanding that everyone be absolutely quiet otherwise they will upset her husband and make him worse. Both are infatuated with their son, Brian, who is a few years old and has never been left alone with his grandmother before. Both promised each other to "forget" Brian and enjoy themselves on this special trip, but neither can and both are miserable, longing to pack up and get home.  Mrs. Barnes invents bad dreams about Brian to convince her husband that these are "signs" of terrible things happening to Brian.  He dismisses her claims but, caving to his own desperate desire to see that his son hasn't drown, been hit by a car and incinerated by an exploding toaster all at the same time, agrees that they should take cut their remaining travels short and take the most direct path back home as quickly as possible. Any time the train slows even to go through a tunnel they are gripped with a panic, convinced that the forces of the universe are conspiring to keep them from ever seeing their precious child ever again.

The Todhunters: Two amazingly beautiful, wealthy, well-dressed people tell everyone they are on their honeymoon. They are lying, of course, and both are married to other people. He's a barrister and will only see his mistress ("Mrs. Todhunter") in hotels at least 4 countries over, convinced that if their photos end up in the papers, his career and his wealth (which comes from his wife's family) will wither on the vine. She believes she has finally convinced him to leave his wife for her. That's not going to happen.

Professor and Max Hare: These two share a train car and love to debate everything, but in particular the jury system in English courts.  The Professor is a professor.  He teaches at a university and values scientific evidence above all else.  Max Hare is an engineer who helps small, struggling nations design and build bridges and other bits of infrastructure. He's hardly ever home and his work has put him in some politially precarious situations. He is very serious all while pretending to be silly and, of course, falls head over heels in love with Iris the minute he sees her. She thinks he's silly and isn't interested in him...at least not until page 252 (the last page of the book). The Professor has an obligation the day after the train is set to arrive in London and so he doesn't want any delays but...he could be persuaded to take an interest in a train delaying mystery if he is presented with sufficient empirical evidence. Hare isn't in any hurry but he can't stop thinking about the time he got conked on the head and had hallucinations--so vivid they seemed utterly real--right after and so is pretty certain that anyone who's had a head injury is most likely going to have very vivid hallucinations.  

While waiting on the platform, Iris feels a sudden terrible pain in her head and falls over in a faint.  When she comes to, she is on the ground, dazed, and surrounded by a circle of strange faces, none smiling or speaking to her.  She has no idea what happened. All she knows is that her head hurts and she's about to miss her train.  The people circling her try to stop her, wanting to keep her laying on the ground a bit longer, but she's desperate to leave.  She runs for the train, barely making it before it pulls out of the station.  It's over crowded and, barely able to stand, she stumbles down the corridor (prompting the Misses Flood-Porters to speculate that she is hungover or even worse, drunk mid morning), trying to find a place to sit. Finally--in the very last car--she finds a car with a bit of room.  

The people sharing Iris's train car: 

The Baroness: a short, heavy, older woman wearing all black clothes and a black veil.  She's evil and doesn't make any effort to hide it.

A vaccuous blonde woman who spends all her time adjusting her makeup and staring, blankly, out the train car window.

The small family (father, mother and young girl) who only have eyes for one another. [White's descriptions of these people is amazing: all are wearing only b/w, one all in plaid, one in stripes and one in only polka dots which, like Morse code, thump painfully on Iris's injured brain.]

Mrs. Froy: She's an older lady (the novel doesn't tell us her age but her parents are in their 80s).  She has a motor mouth so we learn ALL about her parents, her dog, her house back home in England, the back yard, the duck pond....and she's wearing an "oatmeal" tweed suit, blue blouse and a blue hat with a feather in it.  

The people in the car right next to Iris's car:

Doctor: This is the guy who can play every evil doctor in every 1930s-1950s movie, particularly if they are German. He's shifty, has a black goatee beard that he strokes when he is scheming, and he plays fast and loose with tablets he claims are "harmless" and will "cure" Iris. And if he cannot convince people to get Iris to drink tea or soup heavily dosed with these "sleeping pills" the only other thing to do is to convince her to get off the train in Trieste where he will have an ambulance waiting to take her to a "nursing home" where she can "get a good night's rest."  

Nurse: A small woman who doesn't talk, but is wearing a nurses cap and cloak the whole time, and sits staring at a "patient." Significantly, later in the novel this nurse is no longer small and youthful, but larger, beefier and has traces of a moustache.

Patient:  This person is wrapped head to toe in white gauze. and is ties to a gurney, which is in the center of the train car.  Only their eyes can be seen and they are closed, having been heavily sedated.  According to the doctor, the poor woman had her face "smashed in" and desperately needs extensive surgery. To unwrap her would be to kill her.  

The train starts and Mrs. Froy lets loose an endless stream of babble about herself, her recent job as a governess, her previous travels, places she has yet to go....she burbles--in the train car, in the corridor as they walk to the restaurant car, in the restaurtant care while they drink tea, back down the corridor and back into to their seats...on and on Mrs. Froy talks. Iris just says "Ah" and "Really?" occasionally and slowly...slowly...falls into a deep and very troubled sleep.  Sometime later the train jerks, Iris snaps awake, and sees everyone in the train car with her exactly as before...except Mrs. Froy.  Initially relieved to be free of her chatter, Iris becomes increasingly worried after a few hours go by--after all, where the hell could she be on an overcrowded train? She asks her cabin mates but none know who she is talking about.  English lady?  No, Iris is the only English lady they know about.  Lady in a hat in the seat across from Iris?  Nope, just the young blonde. Iris gets up to find someone who can corroborate her story.  And this is where her fellow English travelors really let her down: of course they've seen her with Mrs. Froy--the two walked back and forth when they went to have their tea--but each is for their own reasons unwilling to admit to it, as they know that to declare that an English lady has gone missing will cause the train to be searched, everyone questioned, perhaps even held up in the next station to be searched by the police. Nope, no one wants that, so they all insist Iris is delusional or hysterical (according to the Professor), "attention seeking" (that's the Misses Flood-Porters's assertion), confused because of the head injury (Mrs. Barnes and Hare).  Even weirder, when Iris gets back to her seat, there is Mrs Froy--only she doesn't look or act like Mrs. Froy! True, she's wearing the same oatmeal tweed suit, but this Mrs. Froy is sullen and silent and has a cruel face. See!--everyone says. There's your Mrs. Froy--she's been here the whole time! 

And here is the moment where Iris's resolve to think independently is put to the test: She's certain she met a Mrs. Froy--and not the person who is now claiming to be Mrs. Froy. But she knows her story sounds utterly insane--moreover, she also knows that she really did pass out, her head is pounding, and she hasn't eaten in two days. Yet she just can't shake the feeling that something terrible has happened to Mrs. Froy and that being a good person means trying everything in her power to help Mrs. Froy.

And so begins a mystery smothered in a psychological thriller wrapped in political intrigue as Iris not only has to convince everyone she isn't dangerously crazy, but also convince them to let her search the train when they believe letting her do so would only fuel her unhinged mind.

Where is Mrs. Froy? Will Iris get packed off into a "nursing home"?  Will she go home and marry her finace or will she end up traveling into the back and beyond with a secretly intelligent engineer? Is Brian Barnes safe with his grandma?

One last bit of trivia: Apparently White was terrified of being buried alive and so stipulated in her will that her sister would inherit her entire estate but only if she first hired a "qualified surgeon to plunge a knife into [her] heart after death." So she feared being buried alive more than being stabbed while alive? I have no idea if the court actually required her sister to follow through on this, but I hope so.   

First swim of the Summer!

 

A closer view of the frogs

 

Things to see in our back garden

 

Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon

Ok, now this is a creepy story. It was written in 1937 and, although The Wars do not figure directly, the effects of WWI are an important part of the story and the anticipation of England getting involved in a second world war is somberly discussed by the characters.  But, for now, they are war free and Christmas is coming so everyone is eagerly heading out of London to better things.

Our story begins in a stuffy train car late afternoon on December 24.  The train has stopped because of snow on the track and we find six people, each getting increasingly anxious that they will be stuck on that train all through Christmas.  They are:   

David and Lydia Carrington: Brother and sister, both in their early 20s, are headed to a happy Christmas house party.  Both are described as good looking, smart and capable--sort of a sibling jolly hockeysticks pair.

Jessie Noyes: A very young (sort of implied underage) chorus girl.  She looks baby faced and innocent, but has had her share of hard knocks and has a very good idea of how the world actually works.  She's heading to Manchester to meet with a possible employer who is offering a long term contract--if she shows up on time and meets his needs.  She's both worried that it's not what it pretends to be and, if it is and she misses it because of the train delay, she'll lose out on her big break. She keeps a diary and her entries are how we find out about off screen events.  

Robert Thomson:  A nervous clerk with two pinks spots on his cheeks because he's stressed, embarassed, exhausted, or scared. (He's the character prone to fainting--there's always one.) He is a romantic sort who falls in love with every pretty girl he sees but never has the nerve to talk to.  He imagines saving each in increasingly elaborate fantasies  His favorite fantasy is saving a girl after an airplane crash. He's not exactly sure how to save her but he is confident that, once he does, she'll fall in love with him.  He falls instantly in love with Jessie--she's platinum blonde--the real thing! But Lydia is pretty, too, in a more sporty and bold sort of way.  This prompts him to revise his fantasy to have two girls who need rescuing from an airplane crash. He's preocupied with the logistics of this story--would he carry both?--so doesn't talk much in the train car other than to tell everyone that he's "Thomson without a 'p'" and that he's on his way to visit an elderly (and loathed) aunt who dangles wealth but never gives him any because she thinks he's useless. (She's right.)

Edward Maltby: A small, elderly man with white hair.  He plays the part of a dottering old fool, but it turns out he's a lot sharper than he pretends.  He's a book author and researcher of psychic events and all things "other worldly."  The others reagrd him as interesting and silly, but it turns out it's a good thing he's along for this mystery as they have no idea how to handle what they are about to be up against.

"The Bore," Mr. Hopkins: He is an older man, though not old, so I would guess late 50s or early 60s. He's spent his younger years traveling the wild parts of the world and no matter what anyone says, he has a story that tops it based on his first hand experiences in the Yukon, jungles of India or wilds of South America.  He has decided that Jessie is "easy" and so makes lascivious remarks to her every time the conversation lags. She rebuffs him repeatedly and then he claims his feelings are hurt and he demands a kiss from her for an apology. Everyone finds being with him excruciating.

Ok, let's get to the action. Having decided that they'd be better off walking to the next train line which is just a few miles over, across some fields, the four young things start to get up to go. Mr. Hopkins thinks they're foolish but decides he must do something to impress them, so leaves the cabin to hunt down a porter. Mr. Maltby is dithering as to whether he's up for the walk, given how cold it is outside and how quickly the snow is piling up, but he certainly doesn't want to spend all night alone with Mr. Hopkins.  Then five things happen at once: (1) Mr. Hopkins rushes back in, looking like he's running from the devil. He denies having seen anything odd but won't talk about it--the first time he's been quiet since the journey began; (2) A man runs from the car next to them, down the corridor, opens the door to outside, jumps out, and heads across the field. (3) Mr. Maltby jumps up, goes out into the corridor, decides conclusively that he MUST walk with them--and that they must leave immediately. (4) The four young ones grab their bags and coats and are rushed out the door by Mr. Maltby. (5) Mr. Hopkins, still terrified, insults them and pouts in the cabin by himself. 

Our group, now down to five, heads across the fields, blinded by whirling snow which has filled up ravines and gullies. One or another is always misstepping, falling over, and getting turned around.  At one point, they tumble down a steep, wooded hill, landing in a heap at the bottom.  All are fine except Jessie, who has twisted her shapely ankle. This is Thomson's chance!  But rather than swoop her up and carry her so she can fall in love with him, he stands there uselessly so David picks her up and tells him to carry Jessie's small overnight bag.  Having no idea where to go, they try to follow the tracks that that other guy left, the one who ran from the train. Soon, though, they realize that there are two sets of tracks which have intertwined over each other, one going one way, the other set going in another direction.  Now, thoroughly exhausted, frozen stiff and terrified, they wonder what to do.  Should they go to the left?  Go to the right?  Go back to the train?  David decides there is NO WAY he could carry Jessie all the way back to the train, so they head to the right, not very confident that that is the way to go.  But, fortunately (or is it?) they see a light appear in the darkness: it's a house!  Giddy with relief, they go to the door and knock.  No one answers. But someone MUST be home, because they can see lights on and lit candles. They decide they have to go in if only to avoid freezing to death.  In they go, and each calls out to anyone in the house.  No one answers--yet there HAD to be someone there very recently: there is a crackling fire in the fireplace in the livingroom and (they find out later) in one of the bedrooms; the diningroom is all laid out for a big meal; the kitchen has a tea tray prepared and the tea is still steaming hot! Then they notice a bread knife on the floor, the door in the kitchen to behind the house wide open letting snow blow in, and footprints leading out, as if someone ran as fast as they could from the house. Well, isn't that a hell of a thing!

Scared to stay, too cold, exhausted and hungry to leave, they decide to be sensible and ignore all signs of a terrible crime and get warmed up and drink their tea. Just as they are settling in the livingroom they see a terrifying portrait of a strangely old/young man staring down at them--one of those paintings where the eyes seem to follow you wherever you are in the room. Then they hear a terrible commotion at the front door. What are they more afraid of--an angry owner or a knife dropping murderer or that damned painting?  In stumbles a "Mr. Smith" (no one believes this is his real name), a giant thug with a "common" (read: ungrammatical) way of speaking.  He's resentful, fearful and demands a cup of tea. While he slurps his cuppa, he tells them a ridiculous tale of how he got there: he claimed he wasn't on a train, didn't walk from anywhere, and that train ticket that fell out of his coat pocket wasn't his. Fed up with their questions, he flies into a rage and heads out the door. Seconds later they hear terrified shouts and screams, and then in walks The Bore, Mr. Hopkins.  He stumbles in, covered in snow and all full of himself, sees their tea and demands a cup.  Jessie dies a little inside, dreading his lurid suggestions--and she's right to do so, because once he's warmed up, he plops down next to her on the couch and offers to rub her sore ankle.  At that point, she decides she's going to use the bath upstairs and then lie down--and Hopkins offers to join her there, if you can believe it!  Fortunately, Lydia knows how to shut him down and helps Jessie up the stairs. Meanwhile, our flustered clerk (again furious with himself for missing the chance to save Jessie from Hopkins) offers to clean up the dishes in the kitchen. Hopkins' story is that he decided he DID want off the train and he tried to follow them, but got hopelessly muddled when their 5 sets of footprints turned into 7 sets of tracks, all winding around and messing the other tracks.  Only when Mr. Smith opened the door and the firelight spilled out did he see that he was near a house and found his way to the door.

Well, now they wonder what to do: should they leave as quickly as possible? sit quietly by the fire, making sure to not break anything (sounds of the pink cheeked clerk dropping tea cups in the kitchen dispel any hope of that)? help themselves to a full Christmas dinner, a good night's sleep and hope for the best? It's the last plan that Lydia pushes for: she's determined that they have a jolly Christmas eve with presents the next morning. She even announces that she's going to find holly and mistletoe outside! Well, that's not going to happen...

In no particular order: Thomson becomes gravely ill and faints and slips into a fever dream full of angry elephantine aunts and smooth shapely ankles; Jessie lays down in a bed upstairs and enters a strange fugue state where she has visions of people being murdered in the house--one poisoned and another bonked with a hammer; Mr. Maltby finds evidence that the caretaker is named  Mr. Shaw and surmises that he was the one who ran pell-mell out of the house from the kitchen; David heads outside to see where Smith went and finds a corpse half buried in the snow and then two more people in a car crashed into a tree--a Mr. Strange and his daughter, Nora, who are owners of the house yet Nora's never seen it before and her father hasn't been there in almost 25 years--since the mysterious death of his father. (Who literally died in the middle of a sentence that began, "I'm sorry, son, I shouldn't have disowned you.  I want to take care of you and have decided to"----gurgle and then death rattle.)  They explain all the broken cups, used towels and the sweaty clerk sleeping in one of the beds upstaris.  Nora and her father are surprisinly easy going about it. Of course Nora is beautiful and David falls instantly in love with her...   

Ok, by now we are barely through chapter 4.  What else can possibly happen? Well, we need to find out who killed the old man in the portrait, why Mr. Strange is so, well, "strange," who the corpse in the snow is, where Shaw went (did he kill the corpse?) and, who killed the guy in the train car next to them back in chapter 1 (yes, that's the event that set Hopkins off) and then ran out into the snow and made tracks that everyone's been following around and around? Was that Mr Smith--but then who killed Smith?  Or, is there someone else roaming around out there, just waiting for people to be alone so they can pick them off, one by one--and is that Shaw?  But he wasn't on the train, he was in the house making tea....how many murderers are there??? 

It turns out that there are a LOT of murderers circling this house. I won't give anything away, but let's just say that by the time the snow has melted a bit and the police show up, four murders are solved and everyone decides that ghost stories are not just silly things kids make up. At the end of the story Jessie  is sitting next to Mr. Strange as he eats his Christmas dinner so he won't be lonely. She later writes in her diary, "I stayed with him till dinner was over--he wasn't allowed much of it, poor fellow.  And I could see him falling in love with me, it's awful, I get all the wrong people." She sure does.

Seven Dead by J Jefferson Farjeon

 As mentioned in a previous blog, Farjeon is famous for writing "creepy" mysteries yet Thirteen Guests was not at all "creepy," so I figured that either the meaning of "creepy" had changed since the 1930s or I am immune to creeps.  But Seven Dead delivers big heaps of creepiness (but also humor, romance and adventure), starting right on the first few pages. The story begin with a petty thief, Ted, looking for an easy score.  He hasn't eaten in a few days and doesn't have two pennies to rub together so he needs to find something quick.  He's pleased when he sees what he thinks is the perfect place: a decent enough house that is FAR from all other houses, with woods on two sides and a lake on another, so no one can see what's going on, no dog and no chimney smoke.  All signs point to the owners not being home. Fantastic!  Ted walks around, looking for a point of entry. On one side of the house all the window shutters are closed and locked up, but none of the shutters on the other side are closed.  Weird. Then he finds a window ajar and slips in.  He's in the scullery and stands still, listening, to make sure no one heard him, is calling the police or, worse, getting a shotgun. Nope, still quiet.  He heads to the larder and finds exactly what he needs: a big stash of cheese and bread.  He quickly stuffs himself as fast as he can and, feeling much better, he begins his search for booty. Starting with the downstairs, he heads first to an unshuttered front room and finds himself in a diningroom.  He quickly stuffs his pockets with silver spoons and forks. Satisfied with his haul and nervous of being caught, he decides to scamper so he can get to the nearest pawn shop.  But--and this is his mistake--he just can't help giving that shuttered front room a look-i-loo. After all, there must be something really good in there if someone took the time to lock up all the windows and its door. He turns the key, slowly opens the door and takes good, hard look.

Next thing we know Ted is racing out of the house as if chased by Death itself, "his volocity was volcanic".  Then he hears pounding footsteps behind him, running, getting closer, closer! Ted's gasping for air, legs pumping, with no idea where he's going--anywhere but that house! The man behind catches up and grabs him just as Ted runs headlong into a constable, making a Ted "sandwich." He doesn't care if he goes to prison, he's just grateful to be alive and out of that house.

The constable and the man's pursuer--a journalist who happened to be tying his boat to a rotten pier near the house when he heard Ted's garbled screams as he exited the house--can't get an intelligible word out of him. "What's all this?" asks the constable, as every constable in every murder mystery asks when first encountering a crime.  But Ted's too far gone.  He just stares, goggled eyed, screeching with laughter.

Next we cut to Detective-Inspector Kendall who is sitting at a desk in the police department building, talking to the not very bright Sergeant Wade.  Kendall is bemoaning how boring it all is.  He's a  "visiting inspector," sent to this tiny town to train the local police and today it's Wade's turn again--giving him a "gingering up," according to Wade, which he doesn't enjoy and wants to end as Kendall asks too many questions and is never satisfied with Wade's answers.  Then in comes the constable practically carrying a tiny, ragged man with a vaccuous face emitting unintelligble sounds.  "Seems to have gone off his nut," explains the constable. But Kendall isn't satisfied with that dismissive diagnosis and decides that, whatever it was that the little man saw, it's worth checking out.  The constable figures it must have been Haven House where Ted got the spoons, the place Mr. Fenner and his niece, Dora Fenner, live. Kendall tries calling. No answer.  So Kendall approaches Ted, and asks, "It's murder, then?" Ted starts crying and then out comes the cheese and bread. 

To Kendall's regret he learns that our journalist, Thomas Hazeldean, is colleagues with Bultin, the gossip columnist turned serious journalist in Thirteen Guests.  "Are you as bad as him?", he asks.  "Worse!", answers Hazeldean. 

Finally, they get to the house and go in. So what's in that damned roomed?  Seven corpses, of course, which should be obvious from the title.  And they aren't ordinary dead bodies.  These bodies are severely malnourished--as if they haven't had a decent meal in years.  The six men, one very young, the rest older, are unshaven and weather worn.  There is one woman wearing a man's clothing (which I take means pants) that are also tattered and filthy. In fact, all of them are so dirty and grimy, Kendall can't even tell what the original color of any of their clothing was. None are wounded even though there is a revolver in the room that's been fired once.  If they had the gun, why are they dead?  And how did they die? And where the hell are the Fenners?

So begins the mystery, which takes both Kendall and Hazeldean, who are not working together but they are not working against each other, either--they are working side by side, I guess--to Boulogne where the Fenners are staying in a grotty pension which attracts the oddest collection of people: a small man named Gustav who has been following Hazeldean since he arrived in Boulogne and then turns out to be an undercover French cop who ends up a corpse in one of the pension rooms; lecherous Mr. Jones who made some sort of deal with Mr. Fenner so he believes he has the right to access Dora's body and who also ends up dead from a plane crash (but was it an accident?); Madame Paula, the manageress, who seems to hate everyone, except Mr. Fenner, and who skulks in shadows and claims she doesn't know English; and Mr. Fenner who clearly is not as friendly, flustered or paternal as he pretends. When not fainting from getting the frights or losing consciousness because someone has bonked them on the head, our hero and heroine are locked in rooms, locked out of rooms and chased all over town--and then Hazeldean's boat is stolen!  And none of that has anything to do with the seven bodies in the Fenner sitting room!

Before the story is done, we find out "Fenner" [that's not his real name--in fact, nothing he's told anyone since this book began turns out to be true] is one of the most selfish and ruthless persons you can imagine.  And just when seven people who have every right to track him down and beat the living daylights out of him get the chance, he outsmarts them again and they end up dead in his livingroom.  But, just as with Thirteen Guests, the truth will be revealed and, though Kendall thinks justice was served I'm not sure I agree, our hero and heroine fall in love and get married and (it's implied) live happily ever after.

Murder in the Basement by Anthony Berkeley

This book was written in 1932 and is a real corker right from the first paragraph of the prologue--the sort of book that makes you think to yourself, "Gee whiz, I'd give anything to be able to write like that!"  I had never heard the name Anthony Berkeley--real name Anthony Berekley Cox--and then I found out that he wrote under numerous pseudonyms, one of which is Francis Iles, one of the most famous "psychological thriller" authors of the 20th century!  Well, no wonder the writing is good.  I've read two Iles books, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact, about 35 years ago (I purchased used copies at Brand Books in Glendale which closed a few years ago, yet another crime against humanity...)  and remember the mood they caused vividly: gripping and terrifying.  Gripping because the pacing and narrator's voice is perfect--never too much, never too little. Terrifying because Iles feels no obligation to bring the bad guy to justice and he specializes in the sort of bad guy that NO ONE would believe for a minute is really a bad guy--way too smart, easy going and good looking. Before the Fact was the basis of Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Suspicion, one of the best movies ever made, and certainly (in my opinion) Cary Grant's best movie.  (And don't get me started on the fact that he never received an Academy Award...). I can't not do it.... 

(Imagine this when you think about the killing in this story...)

So what's going on in the basement?  The story begins with a giddy newlywed couple (each calls the other "Darling!" as they walk about their new domicile with their arms wrapped around each others' waists) moving into their first (rental) home together.  The moving men are getting ready to leave and they are gripped with anxiety about what a reasonable tip is: they aren't rich, but they don't want to be cheap, but the fact is that the movers didn't put any of the boxes into the correct room and the dining table now has a massive gouge in it that no amount of furniture polish will hide. But too happy to be fair, they give the guy in charge a whole quid (moving man isn't impressed) and, once the men are out of their way, settle into the business of dancing around, whooping and hollering, praising the amazingness of each and every room, not even noticing how lonely the barren "pocket handkerchief -sized front lawn" looks. "I'll make us tea!" chirrups the happy wife as she gets to work in the kitchen, looking for a kettle and cups. She tells her husband that, since it's getting late, he should put up some curtains.  "Curtains!" he snorts, "Remember there's a cellar!  Maybe the previous owner forgot something!....Maybe there's buried treasure down there!" He runs down the rickety stairs into the cellar like a child running for his presents on Christmas morning.  And, while the cellar is empty, there is an intriguing depression in the bricked floor, 5' x 15" in size. "I knew it--treasure!!!" he whoops, and races to find a spade among the boxes tossed higgledy-piggledy around the place.  His wife, only concerned with the fact that his toast is getting cold, doesn't care about "treasure." But there's no stopping "Darling" once he starts digging.  Yep, the soil is loose--surely that's a sign of recent activity...wait a minute, what's that?  Then, female Darling hears male Darling's gurgled, gagging cry, "Darling! Call the police!"

Yes, just as we all suspected from the title of the book, the husband has found a corpse in the basement. The police arrive and haul the Darlings away, escorting them to relatives where they are instructred to stay for a few weeks so the police have time to tear the house apart searching for clues. This really wasn't how they imagined their move-in day going...

Into the tumult of officers inspecting the grounds, tearing through all the boxes, ("They may be all right, but you never know."), behind wallpaper, in the attic, in the cellar, steps our hero, Chief Inspector Moresby.  (This is not his first rodeo. He's solved seven other major crimes, all of which have been given catchy names like The Poisoned Chocolates Case and The Silk Stocking Murder. "Nasty bit of business, that was," he tells us.)  An anti-Sherlock, Moseby is happy, friendly, and not afraid to assign tedious tasks to his junior colleagues. ("Go ask every cabbie in London if they brought a young woman between the ages 20-35 to this address any time last August.")  And discovering the facts takes time: we can't even begin figuring out who the murderer is until we identify the body and get her backstory. To begin, Moseby heads over to meet the neighbors who are dying to learn what is going on in the house next door. We find out that the lady who used to live there was very old and died peacefully. She has two older children, a son who is in the navy and right at that minute on a ship on the other side of the world, and an estranged daughter who died some time ago.  No one else.  A few friends, mostly other older ladies in the neighborhood. Other than that, they don't know anything.  Unsurprisingly, the people who know the most (including remembering a shifty looking "vacuum salesman" that came a while ago and a young woman wearing giant spectacles claiming she reupolstered furniture for suspiciously low prices) are "The Mabels"--the name the inspector gives to all maids as that's the name of the first maid he interviews. ("Find more Mabels to question!", he orders Sergaent Afford.)

After many, many weeks involving many, many interviews, they finally find out (following a lead on the strange war-time metal brace used to repair a femur break) her identity and that she was five months pregnant when she was killed. ("Well, there's our motive," concludes Moseby--and it turns out he's right.).  I say "weird brace" because we are told that, as a result of steel shortages during The War, bone braces had to be made out of an inferior kind of metal--good enough, but not nice to work with and the bone joins didn't heal properly as the metal wasn't soft enough to allow the tissues to grow. This feature of the leg brace actually works in Moseby's favor as, like counting tree rings, experts can tell how long ago a bone break occured by how much bone tissue builds up and, because of the non-standard brace, they could get it down to a time frame of 4-6 months.  See what you learn by reading old books? Moresby's supervisor asks why he's ruling out suicide--she wasn't married, maybe she was ashamed?  "Girls aren't ashamed of being pregnant these days," opines Moresby.  So now that we know who she is and why someone wanted her dead so now we need to learn who wanted her dead--and finding that out takes us to her last place of employment, Roland House, a boy's prep school in a teeny village south of London.  So, off they trot...

Roland House is just wrapping up the end of term and everyone's nerves are frazzled.  Five instructors have announced they intend to hand in their notices to punish instructors they are feuding with over rugby schedules and two, Mr. Duff and Miss Crimp (who suffers from sexual repression, diagnoses Moseby), are gleefully planning how to flex their newly acquired power once their enemies are gone.  

Arriving at Roland House marks the beginning of the "psychological thriller" part of the book which turns into a cat and mouse game between our police inspector and a cold-hearted killer. Each time the inspector learns something (as when he does find a cabbie who remembers our Prime Suspect visiting our Victim at her apartment just a few days before she disappeared), he is more certain that Mr. Smartie (as he calls the murderer) did it--but also the more certain that he has NO material evidence that will get the case into a courtroom.

I won't give anything away other than that, as usual for this author (at least, when he is channeling his 'Iles' self as he has done here), you can't possibly know how this is going to go until you literally get to the second to the last sentence of the book.  And, as usual for Iles, the book leaves one with that greasy feeling of having been exposed to a kind of nastiness that makes one want to get far, far away from humans.

The Theft of the Iron Dogs by E C R Lorac

It's 1946 and Macdonald's friends, The Hoggetts, are up to their eyeballs in end of harvest tasks: fences have to be mended, outbuildings repaired, woodpiles restocked, and fields cleaned up and readied for winter.  These tasks necessitate walking around the whole property, taking stock of one's things and their condition.  While doing this, Mr. Hoggett notices strange things: things missing, a woodpile toppled over, ash and old, burned food cans in the fireplace in their "cottage" [an "outbuilding" next to the river that friends and relations use when visiting in the summer, where kids can play, fish and get out of the city and get into nature], his favorite old coat missing from the barn...all inconsequential events by themselves but taken together, imply someone making themselves too comfortable with their things and on their land. But, aside from the loss of stuff so tatty that even rag and bone men wouldn't take them, nothing seriously criminal has happened. Yet Mr Hoggett--who is featured in earlier Macdonald mysteries, has decided that he's not too bad at the sleuthing business and so decides that something very sinister is happening.  Mrs. Hoggett, being a practical farmer's wife, thinks that the family children who visited in the summer didn't clean up properly, or lost things, or moved things so they could play dress up and so assuming crimes have taken place is ridiculous.  But, she suggests teasingly, perhaps he should call up his Scotland Yard friend who can race out and track down his moldy old coat.  ("It's a really good coat!" Mr. Hoggett laments. "It was MOLDY!" says Mrs. Hoggett.  Mr. Hoggett half wonders if SHE got rid of it when he wasn't looking. She won't even dignify that with an answer.) So, he decides he WILL call up his London policeman pal to find out what he thinks of it all.  And if he gets to sit by the fire and jaw with Macdonald, all the better.  

Conveniently, a petty crook who Scotland Yard had been keeping track of on the theory that a small fish lead to big fish, has slipped his tail and was last seen heading west--all the excuse Macdonald needs to spend more time in his favorite place--where he STILL hasn't purchased farm property!  (Each time he visits he moans about how much land costs-well, it ain't getting cheaper!) Once he shows up and hears Mr. Hoggett's recitation of facts, he sets out to meet with every local who claims that they, too, have had something stolen: a leaky pair of boots, a hat that was on a scarecrow, a few old tins of beans, some really nice fishing line, moth-eaten drapes kids were using for dressup...and this is what perks up Macdonald's 6th sense for evil: a pair of "iron dogs" taken from Hoggett's cottage. [No one explains what "iron dogs" are but I gather from the things the characters say that they are heavy iron things that are usually in a fireplace to keep logs up off the floor. I would call that a chimney grate.] ANYWAY: The reason these iron dogs pique Macdonald's interest is that all the rest can be explained by tramps or travelors crossing the country and taking things they need to keep warm, or eat or sleep comfortably, or kids playing with things and not putting them back, or simply poor memories of what things one owns or where one actually left them. But none of those explanations account for missing iron dogs: a tramp would never schlep a pair of iron dogs around while trekking across country.  And if a travelor wanted to steal things to sell for cash, there were dozens of much more valuable things they could have stolen (tools, say), but didn't.  So why would someone want really heavy not valuable pair of iron dogs?  Hmmm...and then Macdonald has one of those brain waves he's always having and asks if anyone has gone missing recently. Nope, not so's you'd notice. Any strangers been hanging around or passing through?  Just the usual sorts..but wait!  There was that odd city fellow who pretended to be local and who fits the description of the crook who fled London! After weeks spent wandering across fields in the daytime and hanging around pubs getting sloshed at night, he just up and vanished! 

Macdonald quickly realizes that he's too old for the sort of larking about that this mystery is going to require so he calls back to London and asks for Reeves to come up to help out. We last saw Reeves in Checkmate to Murder, the young copper who loves nothing more than leaping over fences, scaling walls, running across rooftops and--best of all--nabbing bad guys and hauling them away.  Of course Reeves is keen and promises to get there as fast as 1946 transportation will allow.  Macdonald is relieved but also concerned: Reeves is a dyed in the wool Cockney.  How is he going to handle this collection of back of the beyond locals who don't take kindly to strangers?

It turns out that Macdonald's fears were completely misplaced and Reeves takes to Lancashire like a sheep to a field of "bent grass". And what about the locals, how do they feel about Reeves?  Well, Reeves does two things to win them over: (1) he incorporates "champion!" into every conversation which makes him friends with the menfolk; and (2) he insists on taking over cooking the "farm breakfasts" for himself and Macdonald and on cleaning up, lightening Mrs. Hoggett's To Do load significantly, which makes her very fond of him. (Breakfasts include: 6 farm eggs, half a loaf of homemade bread, fresh coffee from a giant pot, farm honey, farm butter and one pound bacon each.  This meal is to last them to "tea" (which is served around 5 pm), which features pretty much the same food except tea instead of coffee, cheese instead of bacon, and a fat slice of "seed cake" (whatever that is).  By my calculations at least 4 loaves of homemade bread are eaten every day by just 4 people.  If Macdonald planned to miss tea (because he was going to be out in the fields or in the woods looking for clues), Mrs. Hoggett would pack up a GIANT "snack" for him--an entire meat pie, several apples, boiled eggs, and cheese.

So Macdonald and Reeves set out to examine the river (the Lune), up and down the shore, mile after mile, looking for a suitable place to hide evidence of a crime. Finally they find the perfect spot: right at a bend, under a willow tree that is growing over and within the river, there is a spot that is always at least a few feet under the water, even during the dryest months.  So into the water they go and finally they find it: a human-sized object wrapped in old curtains, tied up with fishing line, and weighted down with iron dogs.  Once reinforcements come out, they can begin the nasty business of pulling the thing out, unwrapping it, and finding the missing London petty thief. But who did it and why?  The local police are convinced this is the work of a big city gang who bumped off someone who double crossed them.  But Macdonald is convinced that it must be someone who lives locally as otherwise how could they know about that spot in the river, or where to find the necessary bits and bobs that were used to conceal the corpse?  And yet...it couldn't have been someone VERY local as they would have known to not mess with a farmer's wood pile or leave a mess of ash and food cans in a fireplace.

And then there is that slightly unhinged artist renting out a farm house so he can find inspiration to paint (but is really hiding from military service).  Macdonald looks through his stunning (but disturbing) portraits stacked all over his place and finds...a painting of the dead man!  Add in a family of "potters" (which is the local term for Gypsies or Travelors) who leave trails through woods and over fields by tying tiny bits of colored fabric--the same fabric that was used to wrap a corpse--to branches, trails that pop up and then disappear just before other crimes are discovered. And then the very nervous wife of the leader of the potters (who, it turns out, is on the run from a wealthy family and using her potter life to hide until she suddenly disappears without a trace) turns out to have borne twins years ago and given them up for adoption and now they're exactly the same age as the London crook and the painter!  Coincidence?  Hardly! And then there's Mr. Shand, the wealthiest landowner in the county, nosing around, always popping up where no one wants him, hell bent on convincing Macdonald that there is nothing to see and that he should just head on back to London where he belongs--what's he hiding?

Thirteen Guests by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Farjeon--his real name--is famous for writing "creepy" thrillers. His most famous was Number 17, which was turned into a fantastic film, Number Seventeen, in 1932 by Alfred Hitchcock. He comes from a very arty family: his grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, was a famous actor; his father, Benjamin Farjean,  and sister, Eleanor Farjeon, were novelists; his brother, Herbert, was a playwright; and the other brother, Harry, was a composer.  Our Farjeon started his writing career by getting a very nice gig at Amalgamated Press (AP Press) where he learned the ropes and then went rogue when he was about 30 years old.  He cranked out 2 or 3 novels a year and all were highly regarded and successful--a great combination.  If you consider the characters in this novel, it's not difficult to imagine them arising from stories his family members told him about their experiences on the stage and in publishing. 

Thirteen Guests features a classic set up: an ordinary guy, John Foss, was just dumped by his girlfriend and so he gets on a train to anywhere, convinced he is going to "do something drastic" when the train gets to the "end of the line."  But, fate intervenes: when the train pulls into a rustic station in the middle of nowhere, John is too wrapped up in his self-pity to notice and just snaps out of it when the train starts reversing out of the station, back to London. Since London chewed him up and spit him out, he bolts off the train, flings himself out the door, and does a stupendous pratfall onto the station platform, snapping his leg. The few people at the station all circle around him. worried, and John assures them he is fine --and then flops over in a dead faint. "Coo, 'e's gorn off!" announces the porter. Then, just when things couldn't get any worse, the most amazing older woman--a real woman, not a mere girl like the one who dumped him--orders a chauffer there to pick her up to load John into the car and off they set to the nearest doctor. This mystery woman, Nadine (very Southern Gothic sort of name and person), intends to leave him at the doctor's but he's in such a sorry state she can't bear to abandon him. So, once the doctor wraps up his leg and tells him to stay off it a few weeks (!--that wouldn't happen now, he'd be forced to do PT and get back to work) she insists he accompany her to a nearby stately home (again with the stately home) owned by Lord Aveling.  Apparently the Lord is having a "do" and it promises to be amusing. Or at the very least, diverting. The fact that John hasn't been invited is no problem--everyone brings friends and relations to Aveling's shindigs.  So they arrive and--ominous music--they learn that, now that John has been added, there will be thirteen guests. "You know what that means!" Nadine says to John who clearly does not. "Whoever is number 13 is going to get killed!"  John assumes she's joking.   

Well, eleven guests arrive and everyone is keen to learn who 12 and 13 are going to be--and which will enter the house first and who will seal their fate by entering after?  Finally, a car pulls up the 50 mile long driveway (it's not that long, but it IS long--everyone comments on it) and out pop a very unpleasant looking couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chater.  She looks spiteful and suspicious and he looks grasping and dangerous.  And, because of a tussle with a suitcase, she enters first and he last.  Yikes, bad news for him.

I now know why closed circle mysteries involve only 5 or 6 people as too many more is just too much to manage. And thirteen is IMPOSSIBLE.  And on top of the 13 guests we have four residents (Lord, Lady and the adult daughter, Miss Anne, Aveling, as well as an ancient, dying grandmother, Mrs. Morris.  And then there is the house staff: the voluptuous Bessie and her insanely jealous and prone to outbursts fiance, Thomas the butler, and a Chinse cook, Leng, who (to everyone's astonishment) makes  standard English food really well.

John is brought into the house and arranged comfortably on a divan in a "front room."  I'm not sure what a front room is, but this one has a fantastic view of the entire front and right side grounds, has a lot of books, and has three doors that are very thin so even if they are closed, one can hear everything going on in the front hall and on the stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms. John is fed, covered with heavy blankets, loaded up with pain pills and a few shots of whiskey, and off he slips into a psychedelic delirium. (What was in those pills the doctor gave him?) The house occupants are fascinated with him and treat him as an exotic creature and one by one they stop in, bring him tidbits to eat and all sorts of drinks, books and magazines--some even sit and get to know him a bit. And then they leave him to have massive meals in the dining hall, dance to wild music, go on hunts, and sneak around at all hours playing musical chairs with their bedrooms and sleeping partners.  John can only see a bit if someone forgets to close one of the sliding doors all the way, and he can only make sense of what he hears if he hasn't taken too many of those pain pills. So he isn't the most reliable narrator but he learns enought to make clear that strange things are going on in that house.

So here are the 12 guests, besides John: 

Mr Chater: The guy who is certain to die and no one cares as he is a blackmailer that it turns out no one invited because he is loathesome and has dirt on half the people in the the house.

Mrs Chater: She talks to no one and vaccilates between being terrifed of her husband and hating him with a passion.

Sir James Earnshaw: An experienced MP whose political perferences are entirely determined by the  most generous donor. He wants to marry Anne Aveling to get the family money and keeps trying to get alone with her in dark corners.

Zena Wilding: A middle aged stage actress who fears that she is becoming irrelevant.  She unwisely married an actor named Ted Turner (who did not go on to create Turner Classics Network), a no goodnik who was actually married to someone else at the time, so their marriage is null and void.  But that doesn't stop him from pestering her for money at awkward moments.  She has managed to find the perfect play to relaunch her career and hopes Lord Aveling will finance it.

Leicester Pratt: An artist who paints attractive portraits for money and paints fantastic abstracts for art's sake.  He has been asked to paint a portrait of Anne Aveling and so has set up his tools of the trade in the large studio, a separate building behind the house. He's decided to go bold and is painting a very arty and very unflattering portrait of her that enrages her "just a friend" boyfriend.

Edith Fermoy-Jones: a "large lady with impressive glasses" who writes silly murder mysteries. No one can stand being with her because she is a know-it-all who steers all coversations to plot points in her books.  No one has read any of her books but they pretend they have to keep her from getting even more annoying.

Mr. and Mrs. Rowe:  The sort of boring couple that show up to these sorts of things because someone invited them to a weekend years ago, and they just keep coming. They like to play bridge, gossip and go to bed early.  Mr. Rowe is particularly worried if the meal schedule gets interupted. He's made his wealth "in the sausage business."

Ruth Rowe: Weak with big shadows under her eyes.  She doesn't say much and is under the controlof her opinionated mother.  

Nadine Leveride: We've already met her. She's in her late 30s (she won't give her age, but assures John that she's "much too old" for him), was married to an extremly wealthy much older man who tolerated her silliness, died, and so she's here, to her surprise, to mend her broken heart that she thought couldn't be broken. 

Taverly: I don't think I ever learned his first name.  He's a "strong, big" guy who loves Anne but (for reasons I'm not clear on) pretends he doesn't.  I think it's one of those things where he's known the family forever and now that he and Anne are finally adults, it's obvious that they should marry and merge their wealth, but neither can be the first to suggest it in case the other laughs.  He likes to talk about cricket and is good at riding horses and hunting. He also always has a cigarette on hand to give to anyone whose nerves have been shattered from finding a corpse. He refuses to dish any gossip and when asked about anyone always says, "He's all right."

Lionel Bultin: Here's an interesting character.  He started his adulthood with dreams of becoming a serious journalist who would expose the rot but one day, ten years ago, he was sitting in his hideous bedsit on the verge of starvation when he made a momentous decision: no longer would he care about truth or justice but instead he would write to make piles of money. And in that instant he transformed himself into a gossip columnist: he spends all his time drifting from one social event to another, writing up juicy bits of conversations he overhears or invents. Everyone who is on the way up or down the social ladder wants to be near him, hoping he'll drop their name into one of his columns so their career gets a boost. He's completely coated his idealism with a thick shell of cynicism. He's miserable and tells everyone that anything but misery is idiocy. All he needs is to get invested in something that really matters and maybe, just maybe, that crust of cynicism will chip off and a real journalist will emerge. Here's hoping!

That's 13. I won't go into the murders or the mysteries (there's all sorts of back stories that get these people into trouble) as it involves too many people, all eavesdropping on each other by hiding behind doors and pressing glasses against walls (does that actually work?) and creeping about in dark hallways at all hours of the night (did anyone actually get any sleep during this weekend?) that results in: four dead bodies (one dead man found at the bottom of a cliff, one dead man in the woods, one dead woman at the side of a road and one dead dog found behind the studio). At one point, they just start stacking up the corpses in the studio. 

Into this fiasco steps Inspector Kendall with a team of young officers whose job is to make sure no one destroys evidence or leaves the property while Kendall questions everyone and pokes around.  Naturally, Ms. Fermoy-Jones has excellent suggestions on how to sleuthe, none of which interest Kendall.  Indignant, she vows to create an "Inspector Kendall" (she tries to think of a last name that rhymes with "Kendall" but can't come up with one) in her next book--and it will NOT be a flattering portrait, she promises herself. Kendall is no nonsense, extremely observant, clever and, though many of the guests are feeding him false clues, Kendall trusts no one and has no qualms about using guests without their knowledge to test out his theories.

Romance, murder, comedy, and farce swirled together with fistfuls of pills and big swigs of iced whiskey and warm brandy result in: one broken engagement, two marriage proposals, one rescued marriage and three resuscitated artistic careers. It's a great story but I really wish I had drawn up a map and time table so I could have kept track of all the people sneaking around the house, the grounds, in and around the studio, in the woods, at the three nearby pubs, and at the top and bottom of a handy cliff. 

Tour de Force by Christianna Brand

It's 1955 and Inspector Cockrill is getting on in years.  Against his better judgment, he is convinced that he needs to have a bit of fun and so allows himself to be pressured into joining one of those tour packages that take a small group of people around European cities, beaches, churches and restaurants that serve strange food and icky alcoholic drinks. (He just wants chips and a beer.) He is cranky and a poor conversationalist and finds his tour group mates--all of whom act way more happy than anyone has a right to be--tedious.  All he wants to do is read his book--a murder mystery, unsurprisingly--in peace.  (But, secretly, he really enjoys watching little dramas play out among the members of the group: one couple's marriage fall apart and not for the first time, two women fall in love--one for the first time and one for the thousandth time, a flamboyant fashion designer's status is far less impressive than he claims, the tour guide's charming Italian accent fades every time he gets bad news from the company he works for...)

Luckily for Cockrill, just a few days in, one of his tour group mates is murdered so he gets to do what he really wants to do, which is investigate a crime. And, as usual for Brand, this murder is both impossible and too possible: our small group is on an island at the seaside and everyone is dozing in the later afternoon sunshine when one claims she has a headache and decides to lay down in her cabin for a while. And then she is found dead, after having been stabbed repeatedly near her cabin door and then (this is the disturbing part) rearranged so that she is laid out on top of a bright red cape on her bed like Snow White in her glass casket. The problem is that all the suspects were in one another's line of sight the whole time, so none of them could possibly have done it. Yet, we also find out that the murder victim wasn't nearly as nice a person as she pretended to be as she got sadistic pleasure from blackmailing people. She had no need of money, she did it simply to yank their chains. And every one  of the suspects has at least one secret they desperately want to keep hidden.  Except for Cockrill, of course...

So how was it managed? As usual, Brand's style is to have Cockrill ask questions and then come up with a hypothesis of how the murder was done by Suspect #1 but then discover one crucial bit of material evidence that doesn't quite fit.  So, he asks more questions and finds Suspect #2 to be the killer, until ANOTHER material clue is found which proves that theory impossible.  And on it goes, through all the suspects, which leaves us with 6 people, all of whom had an excellent motive for killing her, but it being absolutely impossible for any of them to have done it. By this time, the facts and events have been described and redescribed with corrections, edits and deletions that the whole thing is a complete muddle.  Fortunately, Brand supplies a map so we can keep things (and everyone's line of vision) in mind:

The line of windows at the top of the map are cabins that the tour group members use to sleep in.  The murder took place in one of the middle ones. The huts are where people can get towels or change clothes after swimming. "Jasmine Tunnel" is a tunnel completely covered with jasmine vines and flowers--and is the only place where someone could hide completely out of sight of anyone.

NOTE: Cockrill did NOT go swimming but spent the afternoon sitting in a deck chair reading his murder mystery and snorting derisively at the poor plot points. "Nothing like real life," he thinks over and over. As much as he hates the book, he hates it more when the others interupt his reading with their inane comments and questions. You can see him in the upper portion of the map on the left side, next to Louli, a vivacious woman who wears outlandish red wigs and vivid pink lipstick and sparkly orange toenail polish--Cockrill finds her alarming but also strangely sweet and charming--except when she gets self-conscious and turns into a chatterbox.  

The local police have no interest in investigating as they prefer to spend their time inspecting ships coming into port and collecting "tarriffs" (that is, taking fixed percentages of the goods along with hefty bribes). Cockrill is obviously disgusted and laments their lack of Englishness. So he cuts a deal: if he can lead the investigation, he'll identify the culprit. The police (none of whom speak English well) don't understand what he is saying and he tries to explain his plan by comparing his department in Kent to the CID at Scotland Yard. Once they hear the phrase "Scotland Yard" they are ecstatic: they think he's a Scotland Yard detective and are thrilled to be in the company of someone connected to such an esteemed organization. (You can imagine how this makes Cockrill feel if you remember his experiences working with youthful Scotland Yard colleague, Charlesworth, in other novels.) Yet they are itchy to execute someone--anyone--in the town square as, they believe, this will inspire the townsfolk to be lawabiding. So they compromise: Cockrill has three days to solve the murder and if he can't do it, they will grab whomever they want and execute that person at dawn on day 4.  

So with the clock ticking, Cockrill puts his brain to work and...comes up with diddly.  On the eve of day 3, he resorts to drastic measures: he's going to have everyone recreate their actions of the afternoon of the murder (with him adding a secret twist) with the hope that their actions will expose a murderer. I won't spoil the story by revealing the solution--which was completely unexpected by me, at least--but I will say that, at usual, Brand delivers an excellent cast of absurd characters who all desperately try to hold their shit together but ultimately fail. Unsurprisingly, when the dust settles and the culprit is hauled away, they want nothing to do with one another and each heads for home, sadder but wiser.

The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons

This book is really unlike the other books I've reviewed by this publisher so far.  For one, it was published in 1964 and so the world wars are over but in exchange for rationing struggles we get darker mental states and also a blacker sense of humor.  And while it has the requisite drug use we also get explicit homosexual relationships, one even involving a central character--and no one seems to think much of it.

Julian Symons sounds like an interesting, curmudgeonly person: he was born into a very poor family in London in 1912 so by 14 he had to drop out of school and work to bring money in for his family.  That probably wasn't such a terrible thing for him as he had a stutter and so was forced to attend a "school for backward children" (his phrase).  As a result, he had to teach himself to read and write and, basically, everything else he wanted to know.  He started working as a typist and clerk for an engineering firm, but soon was publishing stories and able to make a living doing that.  He self-identified as a communist and hoped that that would allow him to avoid military service in WWII but no luck, and found himself in the Royal Armoured Corps (so he did something with tanks) for two years before being invalided out. Apparently he didn't have much respect for the cozy murder mystery authors like Agatha Christie yet still wrote murder mysteries that were structured pretty much identically to those classics: stately homes filled with hateful family members all fighting tooth and nail for an inheritance with bodies piling up.  Yet there is no way you could confuse this book with, say, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Christie's first stately home mystery and features Hercule Peroit): Symon's characters have an absurd nastiness that makes you hate them all while you are laughing at them.

So, what's going on here?  Well, it starts as they always do with an utterly ordinary child, Christopher--the narrator of the book--who has wonderful parents who both hate the mother's family because they are mean, insane and hurtful.  So, cut off from that family they are also cut off from their wealth and so both have to work.  They are getting by, but only barely.  It's unclear what Christopher's father does for a living. Christopher tells us that his father boasts he is a "filmaker" but never says which films he's made. And what exactly does he do when making these films?  Then, as must happen otherwise we wouldn't have a story, tragedy strikes: both Christopher's parents die in a plane crash and he is an orphan.  He has no idea until a huge Daimler pulls up outside his friend's house and out steps a woman wearing a crushed cobalt blue gown and a black hat with a giant feather stuck into it.  She informs Christopher that she is his grandfather's (mother's side) sister-in-law and the only relative he has willing to take him on--then adding that she is only doing it out of a sense of duty. They are going to live at Belting, which is the name of a ridiculously large "stately home" filled with crap "Lady W" (that is what Christopher calls her) has collected. This crap not only includes the ordinary stuff colonizers collect (masks, animal heads and skins, old weapons) but roomfuls of maps of places where battles were won.  Lady W informs Christopher that he is going to earn his keep by finishing the book Lady W's husband was working on when he died. The book is an ode to Sir Wainwright's glory and immense skill at amassing wealth at the expense of others.

There are six people in the household: 

Stephen Wainwright: The oldest living brother. He doesn't work but acts busy and feels aggrieved.  Christopher hates him on sight.  Stephen thinks he is far more clever than he is, and far better at keeping secrets than he is.  At one point he thinks he's scored a verbal victory over Christopher and Christopher describes him as "tossing his hair like a girl" and smirking as he leaves the room.  He never talks but screeches, or squeals, or whines.  

Clarissa, Stephen's wife: She breeds bulldogs and looks like one, as she is short, thick and her legs are bowed.  She is greedy and has an explosive temper. She considers herself very poorly used for having to "take care of" the old lady for YEARS so she is damned well going to get a big cut of the Wainwright wealth when the old lady finally dies.  She actually does nothing to take care of the old lady or anything helpful at all, really, as she spends all her time in the "stables" with her dogs or at the dining table inhaling enormous plates of food. Clarissa always brays or bays. She is also prone to slapping her own thigh "as if with a riding crop" when frustrated.

Miles Wainwright: The youngest brother: He is short and fat and bald--not thin haired, but bald with a shining head.  He is also inance and could be mistaken for an idiot as he laughs at inappropriate moments and amuses himself with odd spoonerisms and word plays that no one else appreciates.  He used to be married to a wild acress/artist/heavy drinker and was for a brief moment an actor in Paris, but somehow his mother ("Mamma") reeled him home and back under her thumb.  He allows himself one hour a day to secretly place bets on horses. 

Lady Wainwright/Mamma: The formidable elderly lady who controls everything.  She makes no secret that she has no respect for Stephen or Miles. The fact that they are still alive when their older brothers, David and Hugh, both died tragically in the war just proves how pathetic they are.  According to Lady W logic, gods die young, which explains why she worships her dead husband and two oldest (dead) sons.  David was her absolute favorite: the smartest, best looking, funniest--one of those people that is larger than life--well, according to Lady W, that is.  Hugh looks almost exactly like David but just slightly lesser than: not as tall, not as slim, and not as handsome. But he is still sublime...Unless you talk to people outside the family who knew him and then he was an arrogant, lying user who never paid for anything and backrupted all those around them. David was a "writer" (he hadn't actually written anything because he died in the war, but if he had lived...) and Hugh was a "poet" (he, too, had never written any poems because he died in the war but if he had lived...). What about Miles?  Pfft, says Lady W, actors aren't artists. At one point, when Christopher is about 16, he cannily tells Lady W he intends to be a poet and she beams--and tells him she will add him to her will, leaving him 20,000 pounds. (Keep in mind this is the mid-60's.)  She also allows him to take over several rooms on the third floor of the house to read and write in so he can develop his artistry.  (Stephen and Miles do not like that at all and from that point start keeping a very close eye on Christopher.)

Peterson:  An elderly housemaid who takes care of Lady W.  She's cranky and has a moustache.

Thorne: An elderly gardener and chauffer who is kind to Christopher if Lady W isn't looking.

Christopher is sent off to the local private school. The first time he sees it, he is AMAZED at how large and old it is.  He is certain he is going to get an EXCELLENT education there.  Then he discovers that it is no different from the education he was getting at ugly public school in London.  This shift in perspective is a theme throughout the book.  When Christopher finally breaks loose from Lady W's orbit and learns what other people have to say about the Wainwrights and about life in general, he realizes how far less wonderful Wainwrights are and how perverted their values are. He does well in school, gets scholarships and gets accepted into one of the Oxford colleges.  (He doesn't say which, but it's the one all Wainwrights go to, so Lady W approves.)  He finishes school and returns to Belting for the summer holiday before he has to leave for university in Fall...and then all hell breaks loose. 

He's barely stepped through the door and the household is in an absolute panic:  Lady W has received a letter from David!  He's alive!  He wasn't killed but captured by Germans and then traded to the Russians and tortured for years. Somehow he escaped and made his way across Germany and into France, and he's been living in Paris since!  And he's coming home!!!

Well, Lady W is estatic as finally one of her good sons will be with her. Christopher, too, is pleased and intrigued. But Stephen and Miles are NOT happy: in fact, right before Christopher's eyes they transform from fools into scheming vipers hell bent on doing WHATEVER IT TAKES to keep this "interloper" ("Obviously it's not David!" shrieks Stephen....) from getting a cut of their inheritance. Unbelieveably, the first thing Lady W announces at dinner that night--before even seeing the guy claiming to be David--is that she is having her lawyer visit the following day as she has already rewritten her will so that it includes "David" and one of her primary heirs. Well, if Stephen and Miles (and Clarissa, of course) were angry before, now they are incandescent.

And then the man calling himself David arrives.  Lady W recognizes him at once but Stephen and Miles are equally convinced he is a fraud--yes, he can describe perfectly all their shared secret childhood stories and he even has an appendix scar in exactly the same place (along with a lot of other scars that imply the torture stories are true) but he's been gone 20 years!?  It simply can't be!  Peterson thinks he's a fraud.  Thorne thinks he's David.  Who's right?

Then Thorne is killed--a bullet right in the middle of the forehead. What does that mean?  Did he find out "David" was a fraud so "David" killed him?  Or did Miles or Stephen or Clarissa kill him because he allied with David?  

Then, as if things couldn't get any odder, the police show up and drop the real bomb: This isn't the first time the police have investigated this family for murder!  And though they couldn't prove Hugh had killed his "business partner" (because Hugh had double crossed the guy and absconded with all the business profits and the guy wasn't going to stay quiet about it), the police inspector makes clear that this time, the murderer isn't going to buy their way out of the noose! And now the real sleuthing begins.  Christopher follows clues to seaside magic shows, a boat ride to Paris, slummy hotels, alleys fill with drug dealers, art houses, more hotels, empty theatres showing an Ibsen play...you name it, if it's beatnick artsy illegal and dangerous, Christopher blunders through...and during his adventure unwittingly solves both murders, reveals the identity of "David" and falls in love! (Elaine, his sleuthing partner and crush, hates the Wainwrights with all her being as she is convinced that one of them--she doesn't care which one--killed her uncle and so destroyed her father twenty years ago.  She's one of two journalists writing for a tiny "newspaper" in a tiny seaside town and wears glasses when she wants people to take her seriously.  Christopher likes her curvy legs and fails to listen to her brilliant deductions because he is too busy trying to figure out how to softly lay his hand on her hand and then casually, as if by accident, start holding her hand.) 

Epilogue:  Stephen, Clarissa and Miles are feeling smug.  Lady W is dead and they are the primary beneficiaries of the massive estate...but guess what?  Lady W, like her son Miles, is a terrible with money and made many, many "unwise investments".  In fact, there are so many debts, the bank owns everything and they all have to move out of Belting immediately.  So... was that David?  And if not, who was it and how did he know so much about the family? And who killed Elaine's uncle?  And who killed Thorne? And what's going to happen to Miles and Stephen and Clarissa, now that they are penniless? And if Christopher can't go to university now because he can't afford it, what will he do?