Reading 1900-1950

Book Review by Jane V:
‘Perhaps one of the finest novels of our (20th) century’ – Graham Greene
Literary impressionism?
A proto-modernist masterpiece?

‘I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, . . . hearing the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair . . . one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one has recognized that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.’
Ford Madox Ford/Dowell

‘I call this the ‘Saddest Story’, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy’, just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people . . . drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind, and death.’
Ford Madox Ford/Dowell

An unreliable narrator’ ‘ . . . bonding unreliability to describe situations which the unreliable narration ultimately serves to approach the narrator to the work’s envisioned audience, creating a bonding communication between the implied author and this authorial audience.’
James Phelan, Wikipedia

Set just before WW1, the story unfolds through the observations of Dowell, an American living in Europe, who is one of the characters in the ‘saddest story’. It tells of the disintegration of the marriage between Leonora Powys and Edward Ashburnham, a union arranged by their fathers. Leonora comes from a good but penniless Irish Catholic family, and Edward is the Protestant son of Leonora’s father’s army friend. From the start Edward and Leonora are incompatible characters. ‘Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with a agony that was as bitter as the sea.’ Edward is a ‘sentimentalist’, generous to a fault, who needs warmth and compassion from a wife. Leonora is ‘a woman of a strong , cold conscience, like all English Catholics’.* She abhors extravagance and, when she sees that Edward’s excessive generosity to tenants and his tendencies to get into compromising situations with other men’s wives or mistresses, leading to blackmail, she takes over the financial management of Edward’s estate and finances. She successfully turns around their financial fortunes and extracts him from service in India after one of his notorious affairs in the colony.

(*The narrator’s opinion)

Dowell and his wife Florence (‘Florence was a personality of paper’ – Dowell’s assessment after the events at Nauheim spa town come to light). She claims to have a heart condition and therefore to need care and consideration. In truth she is afraid that details of her previous, questionable life might be revealed if they stay in the States so they must live in Europe. The two couples meet at Nauheim in the season and are typical ‘holiday friends’ – familiar, yet ignorant of each other’s private lives. But Maddox Ford observes ‘Was their foursome a minuet? No, by God, it was a prison full of screaming hysterics.’

Leonora is desperately in love with Edward but totally unable to show him warmth. Edward therefore turns elsewhere. Each time he has an affair with a woman he feels he then has a duty towards that woman. He also has no immunity to the wiles of women like Florence. Yet Edward ‘is good at remorse’. Leonora’s strict Catholic values prevent all thought of divorce and demand that appearances be kept up. It is a hopeless situation – two ‘good’ people (as the narrator variously describes them) tormenting each other. Edward has a series of affairs and such is his effect on women – ‘Edward coming into a room snapped up the gaze of every woman in it’ – that, when they suspect he is no longer in love with them, they commit suicide (although Dowell puts forward the theory that Florence dies because she is afraid her pre-marriage affair with an unsavoury man will be discovered by a chance meeting with a man from back home.) In truth the reader does not know what or whom to believe and is cast in the role of judge.

Edward’s sad end is precipitated by his sudden realisation that he is in love with his and Leonora’s ward Nancy Rufford, a young woman that Dowell claims (unconvincingly) to the reader he is also in love with. Leonora wants to throw Nancy and Edward together to keep them in England on the estate. Nancy nurses a desperate love for Edward. ‘The end was perfectly plain to each of them’ (claims Dowell) ‘– it was perfectly manifest at that stage that, if the girl did not . . . belong to Edward, Edward must die, the girl must lose her reason because Edward died – and that after a time, Leonora, who was the coldest and the strongest of the three, would console herself by marrying Rodney Bayham.’ Edward, taking the noble line, sends the girl back to her father, a British officer in Ceylon.

Edward, having invited Dowell back to England, makes clear to Edward that he is about to take his own his life. ‘Edward spoke like a cheap novelist – or like a very good novelist . . . it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly’.

This is a perplexing novel. Who to believe? What really happened? How could Dowell, as a participant in the story, have known the inmost thoughts and emotions of the other characters? It is a conundrum which long after the book is closed, asks many questions of the reader.

[A Granada tv film was made in 1981 starring Robin Ellis, Vickery Turner, Jeremy Brett and Susan Fleetwood.]

Book review by George Simmers: Later the book would be renamed The Saint Plays with Fire. It’s a good example of popular thirties fiction getting stuck into politics. Simon Templar (alias the Saint, the crimefighter who is never afraid of breaking the law himself) had dealt with conspiracies before, but more recntly his dramatic dealings had been with gangsters and so forth. In this adventure he comes up against the political forces that are changing the face of Europe. The adventure begins:

Perhaps the story really began when Simon Templar switched on the radio. At least, before that everything was peaceful; and afterwards, for many memorable days which were to find an unforgettable place in his saga of hairbreadth adventure, there was no peace at all.

What he hears on the radio is a French fascist politician pontificating:

‘. . . to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly pacifists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold . . . Sons of France, I call you to arms.

Immediately he has heard this, the saint, who is driving along a quiet country road with his girlfriens Patricia, sees a large house on fire, and this is where the action begins.

A man is possibly trapped in an upper room of the burning house, and the Saint rushes in to rescue him while lesser men are hesitating. He is too late – the building collapses, the man is not rescued, and Simon Templar only just survives. Various things make him suspicious about the fire, and he is more so when he realises that the people there are members of a potential British fascist group – and also a cross-section of the English Establishment. There is a grim ex-soldier and his unpleasant wife, a scheming ex-cabiney minister and the organiser, the unsubtly named Luker, a financier and arms dealer, who has financial reasons for promoting war:

For instance, he’s one of the directors of the Voix Populaire, a French newspaper that spends most of its time howling about the menace of the Italo-German Fascist entente, and at the same time he’s part owner of the Deutscher Unterricht, which lets off periodical blasts about the French threat to German recovery . . . At home, of course, he’s a staunch patriot.

The Saint, with his infallible instinct, immediately knows that this man is eveil.:

Simon saw Luker’s graven mask slip for a fraction of a second. For that fleeting micron of time, the Saint saw the stark soul of the man to whom murder meant nothing.

There is also an attractive but mercenary young woman called Lady Valerie Woodchester, of whom more later.

The man the Saint tries but failedfailed to rescue was John Kennet, a left-wing journalist who had infiltrated the fascist organisation. In the hope that Kennet had passed on his information about the fascists to his fellow journalist, Ralph Windlay, Templar goes to Notting Hill to talk to him – but discovers him murdered.

At the scene of the crime he meets his old antagonist, Inspector Claude Eustace Teal, still plump, still chewing gum and still desperate to arrest the Saint for something. As ever, the Saint enjoys teasing him.

There is no proof who has committed the murders, but Kennet apparently gave a dossier into the hands of the beautiful Lady Valerie

She had lovely eyes, large and dark and sparkling, shaded by very long lashes. Her dark hair gleamed with a warm autumn richness.

In her Simon Templar meets his match. She has the same lack of respect for authority that he has, and has even fewer principles. She is just looking for ways to monetise her assets, and anything goes. It transpires that she put the dossier at a left-luggage office, and a chase ensues with various people hunting for the ticket. When she is finally persuaded to give the dossier to templar, he finds the key evidence – a photograph that is proof of Luker’s plot to carry out an incident in France that will be like the Reichstag fire in Berlin – an atrocity will be committed by the fascists, and then blamed on the Communists, which will lead to a coup d’etat bringing the french fascist leader, marteau, to power,. This will be good for the arms industry:

Hitler and Marteau will scream insults at each other across the frontier like a couple of fishwives, and pretty soon everything will be lined up for a nice bloody war. Some millions of men, women, and children will be burned, scalded, blistered, gassed, shot, blown up, and starved to death, and the arms ring will sit back on its foul fat haunches and rake in the profits on a turnover of about five thousand pounds per corpse, according to the statistics of the last world war.

Almost as soon as the Saint has discovered this, he and Lady Valerie are captured by the fascists, bundled into an aeroplane and taken to France. The villains make the usual mistake of not killing Templar straight away, thus giving him a chance to turn the tables. (Not to self: George, if you ever capture a charismatic crime-fighter, bump him off very quickly; otherwise the laws of fiction require that he will triumph.)

There is a terrific final section where Templar and Lady Valerie and imprisoned in a cellar, and Luker is desperate to get the incriminating negative. Simon Templar, of course, is unfazed by this. As ever:

“The Saint was as cool as chromium, as accurate and self-contained as a machine.”

But the vile Luker threatens to flog Lady Valerie until he gives in. Being a gentleman, whatever Chief Inspector Teal thinks, Simon can’t have this. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that he gets the better of the fascists in the end. There will, after all, abe another twenty-odd books in the Saint series after this one. There’s a bit of a ‘with-one-bound-he-was-free’ moment – but it’s still a terrific ending.

This is a very exciting thriller, and it makes its politics clear. Simon Templar (and Charteris) are against any kind of brutality. The saint considers one of the brutal sidekicks:

But he was not so much interested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mould.

There are several references to the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which one was not so likely to find in popular fiction of this time. Charteris had his personal feelings about racial prejudice. His father was Chinese, and as a mixed-race boy he had been sent to an English public school, where he had a hard time. Hence perhaps his negative view of English establishment figures. Simon Templar (whose origins are never explained) is always an outsider-figure, following his own rules, not those of any authority. He was willing to use violence (and very good at it)

“You know, there are some people who are vastly improved by death.’”

But he had his rules,and only murdered those who deserved it.

Most earlier Saint books had been compilations of magazine stories. This was a full-length commission, and Charteris allows himself to express fully his delight in elaborate description. His style is a long way from ther hard-boiled monosyllables of the toughest American thrillers. Here is his description of Inspector Teal enjoying his chewing-gum:

He had got his spearmint nicely into condition now – a plastic nugget, malleable and yet resistant, still flavorous, crisp without being crumbly, glutinous without adhesion, obedient to the capricious patterning of his mobile tongue working in conjunction with the clockwork reciprocation of his teeth, polymorphous, ductile.

After the great showdown in France, the book ends with a postscript in which Lady Valerie, who at one point had threatened to blackmail the saint into marriage (because she knew he was very rich) reveals she is going to marry the rich but stupid soldier, and use the dossier for blackmail. She has already got ten thousand pounds out of the ex-cabinet minister. The Saint rather admires her. So do I. The women in our reading group are always in favour of female characters who have agency. Lady V has it in spades.

Book review by George Simmers: I was hooked by the first chapter of Matthew Silverman. It shows us the editor of a provincial weekly paper on press night:

The rotary press was still printing off the weekly edition of the Messenger, and the vitality in its whirling rollers and rods was too much for the machine to hold. The energy escaped in a roaring madness of noise about the printing room and vibrated with quickly lessening force through the offices and works. While the paper spun through the maze of machinery, the whole building hummed the song the press bellowed, and to Matthew in his room the faint noise and the persistent pulse were as much part of him as the beating of his own heart.

But then I’m always a sucker for the romance of the newspaper business.

The Swanbridge Messenger is a family business, the ownership and editorship handed down through the generations. Matthew wants his older son George to follow in his footsteps, but George wants to join the church. A crisis, but it’s solved in the way all crises are in this genial book – with goodwill on all sides. It’s the younger son, Alexander, who joins the paper.

Victor Canning has a good sense of the tone of local newspapers of the period. When a celebrated novelist is visiting Swanbridge, he asks a young job applicant to write a review of his latest book:again. It was a sound piece of work. Matthew approves of the review:

The article, to him, seemed to supply all that was necessary in a review. It told the reader something about the story, but not enough to make the reading of the book a supererogation; it quoted a pleasant passage and left a desire for more, and it was quietly complimentary without being condescending. And the boy, he noticed, had had the good sense to work in a reference to the coming meeting.

When reading novels for this group, I often look up contemporary newspaper reviews on the British Library archive. This description hits exactly the tone of the typical local paper review.

The Swanbridge Messenger stands for a tradition, and the novel imagines many challenges to that tradition. If one accepts Rosa Maria Bracco’s characterisation of the middlebrow novel as one in which the status quo is challenged and complications ensue, but in the end the status quo (slightly modified) is firmly restored, I would be tempted to call this the most middlebrow novel I have ever read. Almost every chapter of the book follows this reasuring pattern: George does not want to join the firm? Never mind, his younger brother does. Tthe younger brother gets involved in revolutionary poitics? Never mind, he makes a fool of himself and gives them up. The paper is losing sales because it is old-fashioned? Never mind, Matthew takes his son’s advice and livens it up, but ot too much.

This is one of those books in which almost all the characters are well-meaning, and a favourite adjective they use about one another is ‘nice’ (‘Alison liked her right away. With some people, she knew, you had to wait for a while until you discovered whether they were nice. She felt at once that Miss Peters was nice…’)

Only one character is not nice – Austin Swing, the visiting romantic novelist who is described as writing in ‘verbose and glittering phrases which had endeared Mr. Swing to a large and susceptible feminine public’. The more intelligent (and male) characters see through him straight away, but some of the women fall for him (‘Mrs. Silverman decided at once that he was a “nice” man.’) and Matthew’s teenage daughter falls for him. Swing is used to this and is even bored of it:

Sometimes he got tired of being Austin Swing. To have your hosts’ daughters falling in love with you was like a recurrent fever … though sometimes the delirium of fever brought pleasure.

When Matthew discovers the man taking liberties with his daughter he boots him out of the house – but not until after breakfast – the appearances of decency must be observed.

Swing’s romantic writing appeals to the readers’ passions, whereas the Messenger appeals to their common sense. He therefore represents the irresponsible middlebrow, and in this is like the London daily papers who trade in sensation. Early in the novel, when Matthew expains that ‘the function of a daily newspaper, to bring you something fresh each day.” his son cheekily replies “And a country newspaper to confirm what everybody already knows!”

It is meant as an insult, but is true and important. When Alexander is being given his tuition in journalism, he finds what it means. A local fire excites people in the vicinity, but fizzles out before doing any damage; the trainee journalist only writes a brief paragraph about it. His experienced father demands a longer article:

‘[T]he facts in this case are that every person in that street who saw the fire-engine rush up will be looking forward to reading this account. They’ve been talking about it for the last two days; the thing’s been growing in their minds until it seems possible to them that it was a lucky thing the whole town wasn’t set on fire. We can’t insult and disappoint them by putting in a squitty little paragraph like this. Our report must make a comfortable parallel to their imagination. That’s where a provincial newspaper differs from a daily. The daily announces news, and by its report sets the extremes of imagination, but a provincial weekly only confirms what is generally already known, and its report has to measure up to what has already been imagined or guessed.’

All ends happily when George finds himself dissatisfied with the church, and wants to return to journalism. He and his father are in agreement that a well-run newspaper can do as much for people as a sermon.

The book could be labelled complacent. Next month we are going to be looking at fiction from 1938 and 1939 that look forward to war. In this book of 1937 Hitler and Mussolini get mentions, but only as jokes, not as threats to England. The novel presents us with a happy, productive community, where problems may arise, but are settled responsibly. The word to describe the book would be ‘nice’.

A recent paperback reprint of this book changes its title from Matthew Silverman to the much clunkier The Uncertain Future of the Silvermans. Why? I hope they’ve not changes anything else.

Book Review by Margaret B: Fountain Inn is one of the old Inns of Chancery in London and now houses a number of small businesses. Grace, a secretary in one of them loses her job but she is immediately re-employed by the Browns who run one of the other businesses in the Inn, providing all sorts of useful services and doing any odd jobs required by their clients.

The Browns are asked to look into one of the other businesses in the Inn – a religious organisation which appears to be a sort of cult and may also be a financial scam. The Browns are not actually detectives but with the help of their new secretary, Grace and her friend, George an architect who also works in Fountains Inn, they eventually find a missing member of the cult and discover the criminals behind the financial scam. They then need to rescue the missing woman and stop the criminals running off with thousands of pounds. This involves kidnapping, car chases, illegally entering houses,  shoot outs in remote Welsh islands, a blossoming romance and much more. 

So it feels to me like a Tintin book with all the expected tropes of a children’s adventure story – an easy to read ripping yarn that gallops along at quite a pace! The characters are well described and their is a lot of humour in their relationships. 

Spoiler alert:

One thing that did strike me as slightly different from many stories of this type is that our protagonists triumph in the end, only because some of the criminals have a strong sense of honour and won’t kill their victims. As a result, the criminal gang members turn against each other.  Without this plot device all our protagonists would have been killed and the criminals would have escaped with the money. This doesn’t work for me and it seems  to be quite a weakness in the plot unless Canning is making a deliberate point about amateurs messing in things they shouldn’t. But I don’t think it is that sort of a book! 

Apparently this was Canning’s first attempt at a thriller so maybe he was still honing his thriller writing plot skills! But it was quite well received at the time and The Guardian review said ” Fountain Inn, which is extremely well written, is the attractive kind of detective story in which the main interest is not “Who?” but “How?””.

A fun if slightly flawed read with some lovely characters! 

Another review of this book can be found here.

Book Review by George Simmers: The Clockwork Man is science fiction 1923-style. It begins at a cricket match in the quintessentially English village of Great Wymering Dr Allingham is batting when a strange figure puts him off his stroke by walking in front of the sheet that is acting as a sight screen. I was reminded of Wodehouse’s Psmith in the city, where uou know from the start that the bank manager is an rank outsider when he walks carelessly behind the bowler’s arm just as Mike Jackson is about to make his century.

The offending person this time is even more alien than the bank manager. It strikes the doctor as ‘certainly abnormal. Its movements were violently ataxic. Its arms revolved like the sails of a windmill. Its legs shot out in all directions, enveloped in dust.’

The figure wears a red wig and a bowler hat, and his ears flap ‘violently backwards and forwards, with an almost inconceivable rapidity.’ He explains to a sympathetic listener that he is a Clockwork man, but there is something wrong with his clock. He is surprised to find himself in 1923.

This strange man is interested in the game and asks the captain (who is a man short, so welcomes the suggestion) if he can play. He begins by hitting the ball way out of the ground, but when told he should run, keeps running until he hits the sight-screen sheet, and gets wrapped up in it. The match ends in confusion and violence.

Piece by piece we learn more about him. He comes from the future, when men like him are all regulated by a clockwork mechanism, but his has gone wrong. He is rather scornful of 1923, which is a primitive age when humanity was only just beginning to understand Einstein’s discoveries about Space and Time. The question is discussed in along conversation between Dr Allingham, whose ideas are very conventional, and Gregg, who has an inkling of the new science, imagines the clockwork as a way of harnessing the new Einsteinian reality:

The clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things. Man had altered the very shape of the universe in order to be able to pursue his aims without frustration…. Time and Space were the obstacles to man’s aspirations, and therefore he had invented this cunning device, which would adjust his faculties to some mightier rhythm of universal forces. It was a logical step forward in the path of material progress.

That was Gregg’s dimly conceived theory about the mystery, although, of course, he read into the interpretation a good deal of his own speculations. His imagination seized upon the clock as the possible symbol of a new counterpoint in human affairs.

The novel shifts between social comedy of an alien mechanical stranger in 1923 and rather windy explorations of Einsteinian possibilities. I take it that Gregg’s wild theories and extrapolations from Einstein are Odle’s own thoughts on the subject. A final chapter gives us the back story that Odle had not managed to integrate into the novel. integrate into the bulk of the novel.

He tells about a catastrophic war:

There was a great deal of fighting and killing and blowing up and poisoning, and then the makers came and they didn’t fight. It was they who invented the clock for us, and after that every man had to have a clock fitted into him, and then he didn’t have to fight any more, because he could move about in a multiform world where there was plenty of room for everybody.

The clock gives the wearer the ability to move through time as as well as space. It seems that women (who are less aggressive, apparently) are not adapted in this way. They stay ‘real’ like the mysterious ‘makers’.

E.V. Odle was a man of letters – a short story writer and editor, on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set, He was Dorothy Richardson’s brother-in-law. During the war he had been manager of a munitions factory – which must have given him food for thought about mechanisation, and about human destructiveness.

The Bloomsbury connection makes me wonder about his ending.

We are told that ‘the makers were very clever, and very mild and gentle’ and that they don’t wear clothes. Are these mysterious ‘makers’ gods or aliens, or what?

Or, given the Bloomsbury connection, are they people of superior civilisation, of the Bloomsbury type, who lobotomise and castrate males of the lower orders who don’t live up to their high ideals? If so, that’s rather a terrifying future.

Book review (Warning – contains spoilers!) by Val H: The Reluctant Widow is hugely enjoyable: well constructed, pacey and funny. The publishers, Heinemann, marketed it as ‘a light and gay romance of Regency days’ (Bookseller, 28 February 1946) and ‘the best of entertainment’ (Edinburgh Evening News, 20 July 1946). But it is not generally reckoned to be one of Heyer’s best novels. Somewhere in the middle ranks perhaps? Is that a fair assessment?

Widow tells how Miss Elinor Rochdale, gently born but obliged through scandal to work as a governess, travels to Sussex to take up a new post, climbs into the wrong coach and is persuaded against her better judgement into marriage. The man doing the persuading is the local aristocrat, Lord Carlyon, and the groom is his cousin, Eustace Cheviot, who is promptly killed in a tavern brawl. Overnight this reluctant bride becomes a reluctant widow. Until the estate is settled, Elinor agrees to stay at Highnoons, Eustace’s dilapidated house. Once there, she finds that widowhood is not at all a restful state.

While most of Heyer’s Regency and Georgian novels are obviously ‘light and gay’, Widow appears to be dark. Elinor is hedged about by fear, mystery and decay. This is Gothic, the reader realises. Take, for example, the opening scenes, when, already uneasy about her new job, Elinor arrives at night in a place she does not know. She expects to be met, and the only carriage waiting does not look quite right, but what is she to do? The coachman is clearly expecting a young woman, so in she gets. The journey then takes much longer than she expects. When she arrives at a darkened house, she meets a ‘gentleman in buckskin breeches and a mulberry coat’ (Widow, p. 6) whose speech is described as ‘measuring’, ‘cool’, ‘indifferent’, ‘grim’ and ‘coldly dispassionate’ (Widow, chapter 1). At one point, his lip even curls, in the classic way. What heroine would not be unnerved?

Highnoons, where most of the novel is set, is all ‘decayed grandeur’ (Widow, p. 4).

They had by this time reached Highnoons, and were driving up the neglected carriage-way, between dense thickets of overgrown shrubs, and trees whose branches almost met over their heads. (Widow, p. 77)

As much of the pleasure gardens as she could see were overgrown with weeds, and she gave them scant attention. The house itself, now that she saw it in the daylight, she found to be a beautiful building, two hundred years old, with chamfered windows, and tall chimneys. (Widow, pp. 77-8)

Once in residence, Elinor hears mysterious noises: ‘A slight sound, as of a creaking stair, made her start.’ (Widow, p. 86). She finds secret places: ‘… Elinor watched … a dark, narrow cavity appear at her feet.’ (Widow, p. 99) There are other disturbances too.

But of course all is not as it seems. In Heyer’s hands, the Gothic is there to be subverted. Elinor then is not scared by what she finds. (Well, perhaps a little, but she is resolute.)

The ‘dark, narrow cavity’ is discovered by Nicky, Carlyon’s younger brother, who has offered to keep Elinor company. He brings along his dog, Bouncer. These two add considerably to the fun. Nicky is always in one scrape or another. He has just been sent down from Oxford for an encounter with a performing bear. Now he interrupts Carlyon’s attempts to persuade Elinor into marriage with a new problem:

His younger brother heaved a large sigh and smiled blindingly at him. ‘Oh Ned, you always make a fellow feel there is nothing so desperately bad after all! But indeed there is! I’m excessively sorry, but I have killed Eustace Cheviot!’ (Widow, p. 28)

Heyer does a good line in lively, charming and thoughtless young men, from Perry in Regency Buck (1935), through Sherry in Friday’s Child (1944) to Hubert in The Grand Sophy (1950). She was in part inspired by her son, Richard, to whom Widow is dedicated, and his friends. Lively, charming and thoughtless dogs also feature in Heyer’s novels: ‘The dog Bouncer accompanied them, hopeful of rats, but presently grew disgusted with the lack of sport, and lay down, yawning cavernously.’ (Widow, p. 97)

Daunting though it is, Highnoons, with its gloomy rooms and overgrown gardens, is no match for its new mistress. Elinor is one of Heyer’s sensible heroines – a sister to Frederica Merriville (Frederica, 1965) and Drusilla Morville (The Quiet Gentleman, 1951). Reluctant wife, reluctant widow, reluctant resident, Elinor does not retire to a chaise longue, vinaigrette in hand, to weep behind drawn blinds. Servants are hired, gardens are tamed, rooms turned out and household linen mended. Elinor recognises the irony of her situation, but rises above it, as in this conversation with Carlyon:

‘Only see how [the ivy] overhangs some of the windows! I daresay one can scarcely see to set a stitch in those rooms on the brightest day! Then, too, consider how the least wind must set the tendrils tapping at the window-panes like ghostly fingers! How can you talk of stripping it away? You are not at all romantic!’

‘No, not at all. Come, you will take cold if you stand any longer in this east wind.’ (Widow, p. 78)

Here by the way is the romance. There can be no doubt that this pair – intelligent, amused and reasonable – are meant for each other. There are no lingering glances but rather barbed exchanges.

‘You alarm me, Mrs Cheviot,’ interposed Carlyon. ‘Are you going to tell me that you have indeed encountered a headless spectre?’

‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘I might have known you would make light of it, sir!’

‘I may do so, perhaps, but I will engage not to until I know what it is that has so much distressed you.’ (Widow, p. 133)

Carlyon is one of Heyer’s most superior heroes. Is he ever not in command? Does he feel any uncertainty? It seems not: he even describes himself as ‘overbearing, self-willed’. (Widow, p. 303)

Romance, Gothic novel, comedy – and thriller. As Carlyon suspects from the beginning, there is mystery at Highnoons. What has Eustace Cheviot been hiding? Read the book to find out, but first come and meet Francis Cheviot, a cousin of Eustace, who may be involved in the mystery. He is one of Heyer’s most intriguing characters.

Francis is his own work of art:

A slim and exquisite figure descended languidly on to the drive, and stood with the utmost patience while the valet straightened the numerous capes of his great-coat, and anxiously passed a handkerchief over the gleaming surface of a pair of well-cut Hessian boots. … From under the brim of his hat, a pair of weary, blue eyes gazed in insufferable boredom at nothing in particular. (Widow, p. 189)

Francis appears indolent, delicate, interested only in his health and his cravat. As the experienced reader will guess, this hides the sharpest of wits. If more proof is needed that Francis is someone to be reckoned with, Bouncer and he dislike each other at first meeting. Francis is as determined as Carlyon to unravel the mystery of Highnoons. But there is more. Francis is explicitly queer-coded: ‘a face decidedly round, with a nose inclined to the retroussé, and an almost womanishly delicate mouth and chin.’ His hands are white and his tone of voice dulcet and he smiles sweetly. Heyer is among many mid-20th century writers to feature queer-coded characters. These are sometimes despised by their creators, or they may be accepted for who they are. In this case, Heyer clearly enjoys this dangerous dandy.

So why is Widow not recognised as one of Heyer’s great novels? It may be that it suffers by association with the 1950 film based on it, which lacks Heyer’s subtlety and humour.

Or perhaps readers feel that the novel is neither one thing nor the other. Is it a comic or a Gothic novel, a thriller or a romance? All of them, of course. All at once. Perhaps that’s the problem but, let’s face it, it is quite a small problem. Heyer’s skill in creating and sustaining this confection is a thing to wonder at. A bravura performance by an author who is having a lot of fun.

Unless otherwise stated, all the quotations are taken from The Reluctant Widow (William Heinemann, 1946).

Book(s) review by George Simmers: A few years ago I read (and reviewed here) Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River (1911), a book of stories set in colonial West Africa, written by someone who had never been there. The stories are a pure expression of the British imperialist fantasy – Sanders, the decent, honest and self-sacrificing colonial administrator brings peace and justice to his territory, settling arguments between the childishly squabbling tribes and working tirelessly for the good of all.

The other crucial character in this is Bosambo, an African, a man with a shady past, on the run from Liberia. Who comes to the territory and becomes chief of one of the tribes. Charismatic, imaginative and not entirely honest, in many ways he is the opposite of the calm, reasonable, law-giving Sanders, but they become allies, and the book conveys the point that to govern the territory, both men are necessary.

When I read Bones in London (1921), a much later book in Wallace’s African series, I was surprised, because it seemed to belong to a different genre altogether from the colonial adventures of Sanders of the River. I looked at some of the earlier books, to try to understand what had happened.

Bones (1915) is number four in the Sanders series (after The People of the River (1912) and The River of Stars (1913). In the first story Sanders goes on leave to England (and to collect a C.M.G.) Responsibility is left with his trusty second-in-command Hamilton, and a newcomer comes from England in support. He is Lieutenant Francis Augustus Tibbetts,

raw to the land, but as cheerful as the devil—a straight stick of a youth, with hair brushed back from his forehead, a sun-peeled nose, a wonderful collection of baggage, and all the gossip of London.

Because he is so tall, thin and bony, Hamilton immediately nicknames him ‘Bones’. He has huge ambition:

If you smile at Bones, you smile at the glorious spirit of enterprise which has created Empire. Out of such dreams as ran criss-cross through the mind of Lieutenant Tibbetts there have arisen nationalities undreamt of and Empires Cæsar never knew.”I

Bones’s inexperience is the main theme of the stories in this volume. He is either too soft on the natives, or too hard on them. He is easily fooled by the devious tribesmen; he accidentally kills a sacred green crocodile and has to replace it. He is clumsy, and there is much physical comedy:

He saluted with the hand that held the lather brush, turned about like an automaton, tripped over the mat, recovered himself with an effort, and preserving what dignity a man can preserve in pink-striped pyjamas and a sun helmet, stalked majestically back to his quarters. Half-way across he remembered something and came doubling back, clattering into Hamilton’s room unceremoniously.

Bosambo is still around, and he is often there to get Bones out of a difficult situation. Gradually Bones learns the arts of Empite, and proves himself in one of the later stories by killing a tribal chief who has broken the law.

There was another series of short stories (The Keepers of the King’s Peace (1917) }between those in Bones and those in Lieutenant Bones (1915). By now Wallace’s African stories had moved upmarket from the penny paper, the Weekly Tale-Teller to the more upmarket glossy, the Windsor Magazine (price 6d). The stories in this collection are different from those in Bones. Sanders is back, and the teritory is more or less settled, Tibbetts is now almost entirely a comic character.

Whereas in earlier book he was working hard learning the complexities of Africa, in thies book he is not presented as a learning character, but as a settled one, and rather an idiot. He has a talent for doing stupid things, but they somehow turn out all right in the end. In the first story, he thinks he is hunting a German ship, but it turns out to be a craft of native rum-smugglers. He opens fire on it, the rum catches fire, and the craft crashes into a lurking German submarine, which is done for. Bones is the accidental hero.

There are reminders that even though all Britons are not as perfect as Sanders, they are better than the other imperial power, and that the worst elements of other countries come to Africa in the hope of profit:

All the bad characters, not only the French of the Belgian Congo, but of the badly-governed German lands—all the tax resisters, the murderers, and the criminals of every kind, but the lawless contingents of every nation, formed a floating nomadic population in the tree-covered hills which lay beyond the country governed by Bosambo.

Even hapless Englishmen like Bones are preferable to such foreigners – and he has the advantage of being lucky. (Edgar EWallace was a great devotee of horse-racing, and luck was a quality he valued.)

In Bones in London (1921, so six years later) the character has changed again. (Once again this comes from a series of stories in the Windsor Magazine.) Bones has won a lottery prize (his hopes for a sweepstake prize had been a running joke in earlier volumes) and is now a millionaire, and in London. He is looking for ways to invest his money, and becomes the prey of every swindler in London. He always triumphs. Hamilton, home on a pension, comes and joins him (rather unrealistically, since in Africa he had always been scornful of Bones – but Edgar Wallace wants Bones to have a straight man, and never seems worried about plausibility.) Bones is now even more of a comic character. His language had always been affected, but now it is ridiculously more so. There is a comic relationship with his secretary, whom he worships.There is comedy about his inability to spell or to write a coherent letter, which had never been mentioned in the earlier books. He is very much an upper-class twit, and there may be an attempt to emulate P.G. Wodehouse in the presentation of him.

The other characters are stereotypes. Africans have complained abut the racial stereotyping in the African stories; the English criminal classes have even more reason to complain abou their presentation in this book. They are consistently inept and stupid; the failure of their schemes is always due to their own stupidity, rather than to Bones’s intelligence – but he is more than ever blessed with amazing luck. Only in the last story does Bones triumph through anything but luck. In this story, some swindlers have persuaded Sanders, now retired, to invest his money in a worthless scheme. Bones actually uses brains and ingenuity to save his ex-boss’s fortune.

These three books show how Wallace used and manipulated a character for his immediate purposes, without worrying too much about consistency. These are stories for the magazine market, to be read on the train, and then vaguely remembered – not for a book where you might check back, reading them as in a novel. Reading these three books togetehr is a frustrating experience -so much repetition of tropes and character types, and somany inconsistencies of continuity. In Bones, Sanders returns from England in one story, only to be still away in England in the next. In one story, Bones has the job of looking after an adopted child – whse presence is unexplained. A few stories later, there is an explanation of how the child came to be in Bones’s care. Wallace obviously wasn’t concerned enough to straighten out any psuch problems when the stories were reprinted in book form. A reminder that the principal income of most popular writers of the time came from magazine publication. Book publication was a less profitable extra. And since Edgar Wallace was publishing anything between ten and eighteen books a year at this time, he would have had small time for scrupulous revision, anyway.

Wallace was the most celebrated thriller writer of his time, and the most professional, a dependable provider of thrills. He typically provided stories and serials that gave immediate reading satisfaction – excitement, surprises, violent action. These stories are a reminder that he could work in other genres – colonial stories and comedy, providing satisfying well-constructed stories. They also remind us that he typically wrote for the immediate market, and didn’t mind changing and manipulating his characters to suit the needs of whatever market or genre he was writing at the time.

Book review by George Simmers:

This is a big thick example of one of my favourite middlebrow genres. It reminded me of South Riding and National Provincial – big books that take it on themselves to describe a whole community. The community in To All the Living is a new one, brought about by the emergencies of war: A huge industrial complex, built from scratch for the purpose of making ammunition – especially filling shells, mines and grenades with explosive.

The factory complex is at Blimpton, ‘so far away from anywhere as to be, for all practical purposes nowhere.’ It is fifteen miles from Dustborough, the county town of Dustshire, places whose names rather hammer home the Midlands dullness of the local environment.

This kind of novel has to include a wide variety of characters, and front of the book has a page-long list of the various people of the novel, in case the reader gets confused about who’s who. It’s a tribute to Monica Felton’s skill as a writer that I never had to consult it in the course of reading. All the chracters are clear and memorably defined. This is her only novel; during the war she was at the Minitry of Supply, and her only other publication seems to be an academic treatise: Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain.

She knew all about the problems of Supply, and about bureaucratic tangles – they feature prominently in the novel. More importantly, though, she has a great eye for people and their idiosyncrasies, and has the most crucial talent for an English novelist, an acute sense of small but crucial class distinctions (I suspect that, despite her left-wing politics, she might have been a bit of a snob. She is very good at socially ‘placing’ people anyway.)

She also has a great sense of how bureaucracies work, and shows us the war effort being undermined by people following their own agendas, whether it is civil servants obsessed by precedence and promotion, or local councillors using the war to further their own financial prospects.

We follow the fortunes of a group of young women who have been recruited to the factory. There is a silly one, a bright and competent one, a frightened one, and a posh one with a secret. At first they are left I limbo, because there is no work for theto do yet. Norah, the bright one, persuades the others that they should go on a deputation to the management and complain.

The book’s hero, Tom Morgan, breaks the rules by talking to them rathr than insisting they go through the usual proper channels. He is an honest man among the bureaucrats, and one with the ability to inspire others. While the Superintendent is incompetent and possibly a crook, and various other bureaucrats are just out for themselves, he models the sprit that will get Britain through the war.

The book has plenty of the standard tropes of war fiction – disparate people coning together, the struggles of a new enterprise; wartime romanes; a war baby, an explosion in the filling factory. The explosion is very well handled; Monica Felton does not over-dramatise it, but clearly shows how it is the result of a perfect combinations of inadequacies, inefficiencies and dishonesties coming together to produce an event that kills two people.

This is a book of 1945, and presumably written before the war was over. The end is indeterminate – but it does have a warning about peacetime. The news comes unexpectedly that this huge public enterprise is set ,as the war is ending, to be sold to a private company. This is Morgan’s final challenge, that he is preparing to fight as the book ends.

This is one of a number of novels reprinted as The Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics series. The series contains books about fighting and books about the Home Front. If all the books are as good as this one, it’s a series worth looking out for.

Book Review by George Simmers: This very funny and sometimes affecting novel is about the Delaneys, a family of three step-siblings. The frame narrative tells the story of the day when Charles (husband of Maria, one of the three) scornfully tells all of them: ‘You’re just parasites!’

The novel flashes back through their lives. The children (variously) of a celebrated singer and a famous dancer, they spent much of their childhood rather neglected, brought up by servants while their parents were touring. They were thrown so much into each other’s company that they became a unit, a clique from which the rest of the world was excluded. Others often found them difficult company:

When people play the game ‘Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island,’ they never choose the Delaneys. They don’t even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests.

That ‘we’ is interesting; the novel gets inside the thoughts of each of the siblings in turn, telling their thoughts in the third person, but every so often, as here, the authorial voice becomes ‘we’, speaking for all three.

All three are artistic, but they have different talents. Maria is an actress, from childhood imitating the gestures of others, sinking herself into characters. Making an effect, wallowing in illusion, though occasionally terrified that there was nothing but illusion. Niall has a musical talent, but it is a flimsy one. Sent to school, he finds the music teachers despairing of him because he will not learn music their way. He plays and composes by ear, and can’t write his melodies down. He becomes obsessed while composing a tune, but one he is made it he is dismissive of it as just a silly tune, not proper music. Celia’s talent is a more private one, for drawing pictures.

Maria goes onto the professional stage without proper training,, and is aware that initially jobs only come easily for her because she is her father’s daughter. (She’s what these days is scornfully called ‘a nepo baby’) She is insecure of her talent, but becomes a great success. She marries Charles, who has seen her in Barrie’s ‘Mary Rose’ and assumes that she must be as ‘ethereal’ as the character she plays. Maria finds real life difficult – especially later in the book, when she has children.

Niall unexpectedly truants from school and goes to live in Paris with an older woman, an ex-flame of his father’s. She is the first person to take a real interest in his music. She writes his tune down, and it becomes a great popular hit – though Niall despises ‘dance music’.

Celia gets no education to speak of. After her mother’s death she accompanies her father on his tours, looking after him, nursing him, and dealing with his increasing alcoholism. She slips past the age when marriage and children are a possibility. Through her father’s influence, a publisher takes an interest in her drawings, but she lets the chance slip.

The novel makes clear the egotism and self-obsession of Maria and Niall especially, but what makes this an excellent novel is that despite this we care for and sympathise with the characters, even when they are at their worst. The treatment of Celia is interesting. She is not an egotistical monster, as Maria and Niall can be, but her motives are anlysed perceptively, too:

Let Maria stand out upon the stage, with the glare upon her. The applause came, but she risked stony silence too; she risked failure. Let Niall write his tunes, and wait for criticism; the tunes might be praised, but they could be damned as well. Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession any more. It was something to be traded, bought, and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market. Always, for ever after, the possessor of the talent must keep a wary eye upon the purchaser. Therefore, if you were sensitive, if you were proud, you turned your back upon the market. You made excuses. Like Celia.

There is acute satire of the egotism and shallowness of artistic types. The character of Pappy (the children’s father) is especially well done. He is an instinctive artist, but one whose least gesture is exactly calculated. He is used to his whims over-riding other people’s wants or needs. The funniest section of the book is after Maria’s marriage, to the son of a stuffy county family, and the Delaneys descend for a weekend, spoiling all the routines and creating chaos. Another very funny scene occurs when Maria has had a baby, and neither she nor Niall has any idea how to cope with its crying. The real world often defeats the Delaneys.

Pappy seems to owe a lot to Daphne du Maurier’s father, Gerald du Maurier, an immensely popular matinee idol, who triumphed in the theatre through instinct and charm. Her grandfather, of course, was George du Maurier, who wrote Trulby, another novel about the strangeness of talent – the heroine’s singing can only work when she is under the hypnotic influence of the mysterious Svengali.

It has been suggested that the three step-siblings are each aspects of Daphne du Maurier’s own personality – and I can believe this. She too is a popular artist, whose great hit, Rebecca,seems more a work of instinct than planning. Each of the three has anxiety about where their talent comes from, what it is worth, and whether it will endure. Daphne du Maurier has made an excellent, utterly absorbing novel out of her own doubts and uncertainties about the nature of talent.

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Book Review by George Simmers: Another General Strike novel. Swan Song is the sixth novel in the Forsyte Saga, and the last of the second trilogy ‘A Modern Chapter’. The first trilogy had been an examination of pre-war England, and the second deals with post-war life. One character’s diagnosis is: ‘what happened to the Age—something broke and it hasn’t yet got its second wind.’

The Forsytes are presented as the absolute embodiment of the Upper Middle classes and in the first books they are heavily satirised – especially Soames Forsyte, the ‘Man of Property’ who marries a beautiful woman and then treats her as his possession, totally failing to understand her. Several books and forty years after the events of The Man of Property, Soames is still recognisably the same man, but England had definitely changed.

The first section of Swan Song deals with the crisis of the General Strike – the biggest challenge since the war to English security. The book presents the Upper Middle class (and the Forsytes in particular) as responding to it brilliantly.

Michael Mont (a forward-looking Conservative M.P. explicitly connects this challenge to that of the War:

In the trenches, of course, […] sentiment and hate, advertisement and moonshine, had been ‘taboo,’ and with a grim humour the Briton had just ‘carried on,’ unornamental and sublime, in the mud and the blood, the stink and the racket, and the endless nightmare of being pitchforked into fire without rhyme or reason! the Briton’s defiant humour that grew better as things grew worse, would—he felt—get its chance again now.

Jon Forsyte comes back from abroad to volunteer as a strike-breaking stoker on the railway, saying : ‘Left his wife and mother in Paris—said he’d missed the war and couldn’t afford to miss this.

Soames Forsyte’s daughter, Fleur, does what women of her class hasd done during the war, and sets about organising a canteen for the volunteers. The strike is actually welcome, as giving these characters a positive purpose in life. Afterwards, Fleur says:“I feel at a bad loose end, Michael, without the canteen.”

There is little discussion of the politics or roots of the strike; even more than in Philip Gibbs’s Young Anarchy, the strike is taken for granted as something that must be defeated for England’s sake. The nearest anyone comes to analysis is:

Excellent fellow, the miner—but unfortunately cursed with leaders. the mine-owners are in the same case. Those precious leaders are going to grind the country’s nose before they’ve done.

Afterwards, the upper classes are very conscious of having won, but the strike remains something of a mystery to them. Soames reflects:

Good old England! We’re a great people when we’re up against it!’ he thought, driving his car slowly on into Trafalgar Square. a group of men, who had obviously been strikers, stood leaning against the parapet. he tried to read their faces. Glad, sorry, ashamed, resentful, relieved? For the life of him he could not tell.

The sense of the English as ‘a great people’ seems to me to link to Soames’s walk (when feeling low) to see the large Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park.

This has statues of gunners by the remarkable sculptor, Charles Sargeant Jagger. They are not symbolic figures, but large, tough competent men, and in Soames instil a sense of the ‘real’:

the Artillery Memorial. a great white thing which he had never yet taken in properly, and didn’t know that he wanted to. Yet somehow it was very real, and suited to his mood—faced things; nothing high-flown about that gun—short, barking brute of a thing; or those dark men—drawn and devoted under their steel hats! Nothing pretty-pretty about that memorial—no angels’ wings there! No Georges and no dragons, nor horses on the prance; no panoply, and no panache! There it ‘sot’—as they used to say—squatted like a great white toad on the nation’s life.

In the time of the Strike, Soames gains comfort from the realism of the Memorial, and its message (the war’s message?) about the the ability of the English to survive.

After the strike collapses, there are occasional references, without sympathy, to the coal-miners who are still carrying on with their fruitless strike, which is causing inconvenience to others.

In the first book of the Forsyte saga, Galsworthy deliberately gives us Soames Forsyte’s marital roubles through his eyes, As he wrote in a preface to the novel:

The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.

In Swan Song, the actual strikers are similarly absent. This is a novel about the impact of the Strike on a small section of the Upper classes – not an investigation into the Strike’s causes.

The strike ends about a third of the way through the book, but it still remains a condition of England novel. The main theme is the change in sexual morality, as Fleur is tempted to desert her husband in favour of her former lover Jon. Back in the 1888 of The Man of Property, the social taboos surrounding divorce were so strong that Irene is defeated, and comes back to her husband. Now things are far less certain

A sequence about horse-racing explores the theme of honesty. An upper-class crook gets away with theft and forgery because of his class connections, and seems a symbol of a less honest world.

Positively. The Conservative M.P. Michael Mond is recruited by his uncle, a vicar, into a slum clearance scheme. This is presented as positive, socially useful work. I’m not sure how aware Galsworthy expects us to be of the fact that this is the Upper Middles doing things for the working class, rather than working with them. It is very much top-down philanthropy. We are told a lot about the satisfaction the Forsytes and others get from doing it – not much about the reactions of those twho are the supposed beneficiaries

In his search for meaning in an unstable modern world, Soames goes in search of his ancestors, and finds a churchyard and parish register packed with yeoman Forsytes going back centuries – which bolsters his sense of permanence.

The novel climaxes with afire in Soames’s picture gallery, where he keeps the most delightful examples of his accumulated ‘property’. Fleur, anguished because of the end of her affair, throws a cigarette butt into a waste paper bin, where it smoulders and causes a fire. Soames fights heroically to save his precious paintings. When a fireman throws from above a Spanish painting of a woman who looks like Fleur, Fleur, suicidally, stands in its way as though welcoming destruction. Soames pushes her aside, and the painting hits and kills him. So he is killed by his property – but it’s an act of love.

He dies and it’s as though the age of the Forsytes is over. There is a huge change between the first novel of the series, where Soames is heavily satirised as the man of Property who loves his works of Art but can not understand human beings. In this novel he is still described as a ‘dry grey spirit’ and finds himans just as hard to understand – he can’t see why Fleur id possibly ruining herself by chasing after Jon – but he is viewed far more sympathetically, as a man – even though a limited man – who has retained his integrity through difficult years. Galsworthy now sees the Forsyte spirit as something able to survive difficulties – such as the General Strike.