Showing posts with label British Library Crime Classics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Library Crime Classics. Show all posts

20240211

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

No Oxford degree for author but she found a good setting for a crime novel

The murder at the heart of this mystery occurs on the River Cherwell, stick popular with students today
The murder at the heart of this mystery occurs on the
River Cherwell, still popular with students today
Death on the Cherwell, a classic Golden Age detective story by Mavis Doriel Hay published in 1935, is set in a fictitious women’s college in Oxford. The novel appeared during the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, which was also set in a women’s college in Oxford. Both settings were loosely based on the colleges the authors had attended themselves.

Mavis writes at the beginning of the first chapter: ‘Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult.’ The students featured in this novel come across as very young indeed, more like the girls in boarding school stories than intelligent students. Nevertheless, they make good amateur sleuths, who are as entertaining as they are industrious.

A group of first year girls, who have formed a secret society that meets on the roof of the Persephone College boathouse, come across the dead body of the college bursar lying in her canoe. She is later discovered to have drowned in the river but it is a mystery how her body ended up back in her own boat.

The police are called in but to begin with they assume it is a student prank that has got out of hand. However, the group of young ladies who found the body immediately suspect foul play and take the investigation into their own hands. 

Led by Sally Watson, whose older sister, Beryl, appeared in Murder Underground, the first crime novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, the undergraduates uncover the tangled secrets that led to the bursar’s death and follow up clues that point in the direction of a fellow student.

The British Library Crime Classics edition of Death on the Cherwell
The British Library Crime Classics
edition of Death on the Cherwell
Mavis Doriel Hay, who was born on either 12 or 13 February 1894, 130 years ago, in Potters Bar in Middlesex, attended St Hilda’s College in Oxford between 1913 and 1916. She published three mystery novels within just three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell, and the Santa Klaus Murder. 

After Murder Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times saying: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most feckless, exasperating, and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’

That exasperating literary man, Basil Pongleton makes an appearance in the author’s second novel, Death on the Cherwell, when he and his wife, Beryl, are visiting Beryl’s sister, Sally, in Oxford. But Sally doesn’t need any help from him to uncover the truth about the bursar’s death and her sleuthing efforts even earn her the respect of the investigating officer in the case, Detective Inspector Braydon.

Like Dorothy L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford when women were allowed into the university to study, but were not allowed to graduate, and so she left the university empty handed. But because she was interested in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain, she was later sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University to collaborate with another writer, Helen Fitzrandolph, on a series of works surveying rural industries

She went on to marry Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. Sadly, he was killed in a flying accident during World War II. 

Mavis, who was also interested in quilting, went on to publish several books on crafts during her life. She died in 1979 at the age of 85.

Nearly 90 years after it was first published, Death on the Cherwell was republished by British Library Crime Classics. In his introduction to the novel in 2014, crime writer Stephen Booth regrets that Mavis Doriel Hay had such a short literary career and published just three detective novels. He says it is ‘even sadder’ that she was almost forgotten by crime fiction readers for so many years after her death and he was delighted that the British Library editions of her books were finally remedying that oversight.

I am sure lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get to know this author and will be fascinated by her portrayal of life inside a women’s college in Oxford, in the days when female students weren’t even considered worthy of being awarded degrees by the university they attended. 

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(River Cherwell pic by Steve Daniels via Wikimedia Commons)


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20230929

Thirteen Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon

An intriguing mystery told with humour and well-drawn characters

The British Library edition of Farjeon's Thirteen Guests
The British Library edition of
Farjeon's Thirteen Guests 
Thirteen Guests is a traditional country house mystery, the type of story popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, are still famous for their Golden Age novels and their books remain in print. However, many other good writers of the detective novel from this period have now been forgotten.

One crime writer the novelist Dorothy L Sayers particularly admired from the Golden Age was J Jefferson Farjeon, who she praised for his ‘creepy skill.’

She may have read Thirteen Guests, when it was first published in 1936, but few copies of the original book had remained in existence for the modern reader to enjoy until 2015, when, happily, the novel was rescued and republished by the British Library.

The story begins at a railway station where a young man, John Foss, falls from a train when leaving it and injures his foot.

He is recued by an attractive widow, Nadine Leveridge, who is on her way to a country house party. She takes the young man with her in the car that has been sent to pick her up by her host, Lord Aveling, to try to get medical help for him.

When they arrive at her destination, Bragley Court, the hospitable Lord Aveling welcomes Foss and offers him the chance to stay for the weekend while he recovers.

Lord Aveling is hosting a weekend house party for 12 people and therefore Foss is his 13th guest.

But because they arrive before two of the other guests, Mr and Mrs Chater, it is Mr Chater who is the last to enter the house and who becomes, technically, the 13th guest.

J Jefferson Farjeon worked for the Amalgamated Press before becoming a freelance writer
J Jefferson Farjeon worked for the Amalgamated
Press before becoming a freelance writer
Foss is not superstitious and he has been reassured by a fellow guest that the bad luck will come to the 13th guest who enters the house.

During the weekend a serious of bizarre things happen. A painting is damaged, a dog is killed, a stranger’s body is found in a quarry on Lord Aveling’s land and then one of the guests is found dead.

Foss observes all the comings and goings during the weekend and overhears snatches of people’s conversations as he lies, sometimes forgotten, recuperating on a settee in a side room. He is visited from time to time by Nadine and together they try to work out what is going on in the house, as the relationship between them blossoms.

Farjeon does not write cardboard characters and therefore the guests, who are also the suspects, are all interesting and depicted well. In one scene, an artist, and a journalist, who are sharing a bedroom, give as good as they get in an entertaining conversation with the investigating detective, Inspector Kendall, who is by no means cast as a plodding policeman.

We learn that the Detective Inspector moves from place to place when a district needs ‘gingering up.’ When he is introduced, he is having some amusing exchanges with his new subordinates as they make their way to Bragley Court to investigate.

The weekend guests include an MP, an actress, a cricketer, and a writer of mystery novels. They all have their own secrets and peculiarities, which Detective Inspector Kendall uncovers as he tries to get to the truth about what has happened.

Farjeon was a crime and mystery novelist, playwright, and screen writer. Born in 1883, he worked for ten years for Amalgamated Press in London before going freelance. He went on to become the author of more than 60 crime and mystery novels, short story collections and plays.

He  was named after his maternal grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, who was an American actor. His father, Benjamin Farjeon, was a successful novelist, one of his brothers was a composer, another a drama critic and director, and his sister, Eleanor Farjeon, wrote poems, including the words for the hymn, Morning Has Broken.

Although the plot of Thirteen Guests is far from straight forward, Farjeon plays fair with the reader and a credible solution to the mystery is unveiled at the end.

I enjoyed Thirteen Guests and would recommend it to other fans of country house mysteries.

So far, not all of Farjeon’s many novels have been republished, but I hope more of this author’s forgotten work will be rescued and made available for contemporary crime fiction fans to relish.  

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20230509

Death of a Busybody by George Bellairs

A murky tale of murder with an eccentric cast of suspects 


Death of a Busybody is the third Inspector Littlejohn mystery
Death of a Busybody is the third
Inspector Littlejohn mystery
The writer of Death of a Busybody, George Bellairs, was bank manager Harold Blundell  by day.
 

Blundell must have been a keen student of human nature while working at his bank in Manchester because many of the characters he depicts in this story display unusual quirks and idiosyncrasies.

The busybody referred to in the title of the book is Miss Ethel Tither, who has made herself deeply unpopular in the quaint English village of Hilary Magna, by going out of her way to snoop on people and interfere with their lives.

When Miss Tither is found floating in the vicar’s cesspool, having been bludgeoned by an attacker before being left to drown in the drainage water, the local police quickly feel they are out of their depth and call in Scotland Yard.

Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, the author’s series detective, arrives by train and finds there is no shortage of suspects in the case. He must piece together the clues quickly in order to find out who was responsible for the murder of the busybody and restore order and calm in the village.

This is the third Littlejohn novel by George Bellairs, who was born Harold Blundell in 1902 near Rochdale in Lancashire. He wrote more than 50 novels, most of them featuring Littlejohn, starting with Littlejohn on Leave, published in 1941 and finishing with An Old Man Dies, published just before his own death in 1982.

Death of a Busybody was published in 1942. While he was writing it, Bellairs was working in a bank during the day and acting as an air raid warden at night, having been exempted from military service because he was blind in one eye. He had discovered that writing a detective novel helped to pass the time during the blackout.

Bellairs was bank manager Harold Blundell in his day job
Bellairs was bank manager
Harold Blundell in his day job
Bellairs wrote amusing stories that gave his readers welcome light relief during the war years and in the difficult decades that followed. For example, in Death of a Busybody, one of the detectives assisting Littlejohn goes to interview a retired accountant whose hobby is bird watching and who writes about his ornithological studies. The two becomes friends and the detective also becomes a bird enthusiast. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that they have subsequently published a joint treatise about birds and have presented a copy to Inspector Littlejohn. This is an example of the author’s mischievous sense of humour revealing itself in what is essentially a classic mystery novel.

Another delightful aspect of the novel is the way Bellairs depicts rural life at the beginning of the 1940s. He reveals some of the eccentricities of the local population with great humour, in a similar way to Gladys Mitchell in her Mrs Bradley mystery, The Devil at Saxon Wall, which was published in 1935.

Although his books were also published in the US and translated into other languages, Bellairs regarded crime writing as a hobby and he continued to write for pleasure rather than profit. After his death, his books became largely forgotten by the wider public, which was a great pity

First editions in dust jackets of early books by Bellairs are now quite rare and therefore collectable and fetch high prices. But now some of his books are available to new readers thanks to the British Library Crime Classics series, enabling 21st century detective story fans to enjoy his mysteries and find pleasure once again in his gentle humour.

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20230220

Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay

A classic mystery novel set in and around the Northern Line

The British Library Crime Classics edition of Murder Underground
The British Library Crime Classics
edition of Murder Underground 

Murder Underground, the first detective novel by Mavis Doriel Hay, is underpinned by a very clever plot. It has a satisfying ending and enjoyable resolution scenes that wrap up the individual stories of the characters and I found it to be a very good read.

First published in 1934, during the Golden Age of British crime fiction, the setting for this classic mystery novel is the Northern Line of the underground in London.

When Miss Pongleton, who is considered by others to be a tiresome old spinster, is found murdered on the stairs at Belsize Park Station, her fellow boarders at the Frampton Hotel are not exactly overwhelmed by grief, but they all have their theories about the identity of her murderer.

They help to unravel the mystery of who killed ‘Pongle’ with the help of Tuppy the terrier, the victim’s dog, and each play their part in the events that lead to the dramatic conclusion.

There is of course an official police investigation, led by Inspector Caird, but he is in the background for most of the story and it is the amateur sleuths at the Frampton Hotel who unearth the clues and finally make sense of the different pieces of the puzzle.

Hay was born in February 1894 in Potters Bar in Middlesex. She attended St Hilda’s College in Oxford from 1913 to 1916. She published three mystery novels within three years in the 1930s, Murder Underground, Death on the Cherwell and The Santa Klaus Murder. Her second novel, Death on the Cherwell, appeared during the same year as Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers and coincidentally both novels were set in women’s colleges in Oxford.

After Murder Underground was published, Dorothy L Sayers wrote a review in the Sunday Times in 1934, saying: ‘This detective novel is much more than interesting. The numerous characters are well differentiated, and include one of the most feckless, exasperating, and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail.’

Like Dorothy L Sayers, Mavis attended Oxford before women were allowed to graduate. She was interested in the industries and handicrafts of rural Britain and, after leaving university, she was sponsored by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University to collaborate with Helen Fitzrandolph on a series of works surveying the rural industries. Mavis was also interested in quilting and published several books on crafts.

She married Helen Fitzrandolph’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, in 1929. He was killed in a flying accident during World War II. Mavis Doriel Hay died in 1979 at the age of 85.

Eighty years after it was first published, Murder Underground was republished by British Library Crime Classics in 2014. In his introduction to the new edition of the novel, crime writer Stephen Booth said that Mavis Doriel Hay had been ‘unjustifiably overlooked.’ He also bemoaned the fact that her third detective novel, The Santa Klaus Murder, published in 1936, was sadly her last, and wondered whether the approach of World War II was the reason for this.

I am sure that lovers of classic crime novels will be glad to have the opportunity to get to know this author now. I have to admit that I found Murder Underground to be a slow starter, but I kept in mind the fact that it was Mavis’s first novel.

I thought she was better at portraying the female characters, such as Beryl, Betty and Cissie, than the leading males, such as the hapless Basil, who was referred to by Dorothy L Sayers in her review, or Beryl’s amiable, but ineffectual, fiancĂ©, Gerry.

Nevertheless, I would recommend Murder Underground to other readers as an excellent example of a whodunit.

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