Madness
and witchcraft in a village that seems to be living in the Middle Ages
The Devil at Saxon Wall is the sixth Mrs Bradley mystery
Probably the
most bizarre Mrs Bradley mystery yet, The Devil at Saxon Wall, the sixth novel
about the eccentric psychoanalyst and amateur detective, published in 1935, is
the first of a number of Gladys Mitchell’s books to feature the theme of
witchcraft.
The story was
inspired after Gladys heard a lecture on witchcraft by her friend, the
detective fiction writer Helen Simpson, and she dedicated this book to her.
Mrs Bradley
has advised her best-selling novelist friend, Hannibal Jones, who has had a
breakdown and is suffering from writer’s block, to retreat to a quiet, rustic
village to find rest and inspiration for his work.
Although the
village of Saxon Wall might seem the perfect rural escape to begin with, Jones soon
finds himself intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers and their
pagan beliefs.
He also
finds himself compelled to try to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding
Neot House, a place where a young couple died soon after the birth of their
first child.
It is a hot
summer and the villagers are desperate for rain because they are short of
water. They decide the local vicar is to blame for the lack of water and Jones
has to step in to defend him when their anger drives them to march on the
vicarage armed with weapons.
Gladys Mitchell tells the story with the skill that was her hallmark
Jones makes
some enquiries to try to sort out what happened to two babies who he thinks may
have been swapped at birth, but when a man from the village is found bludgeoned
to death, he decides he must call in Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley to help
him.
The strangely
dressed old lady with her hideous cackle is more than a match for the angry
villagers and she proceeds to root out the devil at Saxon Wall using her own unique
and unorthodox methods.
At the end
of the novel, Mrs Bradley expresses the opinion that the inhabitants of Saxon
Wall are incapable of making straightforward statements. She thinks that this
peculiarity dates back to the days of the Norman conquest when the Saxons of those
parts, too cunning to tell direct lies to their overlords, resorted to
maddening half statements and obscure pronouncements, which made them difficult
to understand.
Although the
characters and situations are bizarre, the novel presents an intriguing mystery
which Mrs Bradley skilfully unravels and the story is well told by Gladys, who
helpfully provides ‘End Papers’ to clarify issues for the reader.
I found The
Devil at Saxon Wall entertaining and enjoyable and well worth reading.
Novel's fascinating format makes for a compelling and ingenious murder mystery
The Documents in the Case is notable for its experimental format
A bundle of letters and statements can be daunting to sort out in real life, but when a reader is presented with the same challenge at the beginning of a detective novel, they might be put off from even starting to read the story.
However, when the author of the novel happens to be Dorothy L Sayers, I think most readers would probably be prepared to make the effort.
In The Documents in the Case,the sixth detective novel by the author, which was published in 1930, there will be a murder to be solved eventually, and two men will join forces to play detective. But that is about all this story has in common with Dorothy’s other detective novels featuring her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, who doesn’t appear in this book at all.
The murder victim is not discovered until page 135. By then Dorothy has introduced us to the main protagonists in the story by presenting us with a succession of letters that they have written to other people, which will eventually become part of a bundle of evidence presented to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
We learn a lot from all the letters about the relationship between an older man and his young wife, information that is destined to be sent to Sir Gilbert Pugh, Director of Public Prosecutions, which will ultimately lead to a murder conviction and a hanging.
Robert Eustace, the pen name for Eustace Robert Burton, a doctor and a writer of crime and mystery novels himself, was credited by Dorothy with supplying her with the plot idea for The Documents in the Case and with also giving her the supporting medical and scientific details to use.
The concept for the book was based on the ingenious idea of giving the reader all the evidence that the DPP will trawl through before deciding whether there is a case to answer.
I think Dorothy makes a success of this because she is a superb writer. Some of the letters written by the spinster, Agatha Milsom, who is working as housekeeper to the married couple, Mr and Mrs Harrison, that she sent regularly to her sister, Olive, reminded me of the letters in Jane Austen’s novels, written by characters to each other that help to move the plot forward without every scene having to be played out. Using the multiple viewpoints of the letter writers not only establishes their own characters with the reader, but also reveals their real opinions of the other characters.
My only, very slight criticism of the book is that the scientific evidence put before the reader at the end of the story was lengthy and hard for a non-scientist, such as myself, to understand completely. But I mention this as just the faintest of criticisms because I still persevered and read through it all and I think I just about understood it.
Sayers was given the idea for The Documents in the Case by a doctor friend
The story is essentially about people and their relationships and reveals how people see things very differently. The fact that there is a murder and therefore a whodunit element to the story was a bonus for me. Without it, there wouldn’t have been much incentive to read all the letters and statements!
Pulling out the essential truth about the case from each character’s version of events is a task that falls to the victim’s son, Paul, with the reader going along for the ride. I found The Documents in the Case to be a compelling story and a real page turner and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
It transpires that the victim died as a result of being poisoned by a substance that could either have been administered deliberately, or that they could have consumed it accidentally. It falls to scientific analysis of the poison to prove whether it was administered to the victim deliberately, or whether it could have been present in food naturally, and it is not easy for the pathologist to find out the truth.
Sadly, Dorothy is said to have been disappointed with the way The Documents in the Case turned out and she confessed to wishing she had done better with the brilliant plot she had been given by her doctor and writer friend, Eustace.
In my opinion she did extremely well with it, but it is up to other readers to pronounce their own, final judgments.
An award
winning masterpiece by the Queen of Crime
The latest HarperCollins reprint of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha
Christies’s sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was voted ‘the best crime
novel ever’ by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 2013.
Published in
1926, the book remains Agatha’s best known and most controversial novel because
of its ingenious final twist, which had a significant impact on the detective
fiction genre and has been imitated by many other writers since.
Agatha, who
died on 12 January, 1976 - 47 years ago today - has become famous for being the supreme
exponent of the old-fashioned English crime novel. Her skill in constructing
complex and puzzling plots and her ability to deceive readers until the very
last page, or paragraph, are unequalled.
But this
third Poirot novel, narrated by the local physician, Doctor Sheppard, in the
absence of Captain Hastings, who has gone to start a new life in the Argentine,
is considered by many readers and critics to be her masterpiece.
Wealthy
businessman turned country squire Roger Ackroyd lives in a charming English
country village, where dark secrets and dangerous emotions lurk beneath the
apparently calm surface.
When Ackroyd
is murdered, stabbed in the neck while sitting in his study after a dinner
party at his home, there are, as usual, plenty of suspects.
Poirot, who
has just come to live in the village, after retiring to grow marrows,
lives next door to Dr Sheppard. He is asked by a member of Ackroyd’s family to
investigate the murder because they are worried the police will get it wrong. Suspicion
has fallen on Ackroyd’s stepson, Ralph, who is a popular young man locally.
Agatha Christie died 47 years ago today at the age of 85
After many
twists and turns, Poirot gathers all the suspects together in his sitting room
after dinner one night and reveals the extraordinary and unexpected identity of
the killer.
According to
The Home of Agatha Christie, the author’s own website, The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd was ‘the book that changed Agatha Christie’s career’. It was the first
of her novels to be published by William Collins, which later became part of
HarperCollins, who remain Agatha’s publishers today and attracted enormous
attention in the media at the time.
Following her death, Agatha Christie's body was buried four days later after a service at St
Mary’s Church in the village of Cholsey in Oxfordshire.
The
inscription on her tombstone is a quotation from Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie
Queen:
‘Sleepe
after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after
war, death after life, does greatly please.’
An early
attempt at detective fiction by a Victorian novelist
A portrait of Wilkie Collins by John Everett Millais
The English
novelist Wilkie Collins is held in great respect by crime fiction fans as one
of the first exponents of the genre.
Although he
is chiefly remembered for his sensation literature, of which his 1860 novel The
Woman in Whiteis a famous example, he also wrote The Moonstone in 1868, which
is often talked of as the first English detective novel, because there is a
crime at the heart of the story, a variety of suspects and an early example of
a detective in the character of Sergeant Cuff.
Collins
became a friend of Charles Dickens and contributed short stories to Household
Words, a publication owned and edited by Dickens. He wrote The Lawyer’s Story
of a Stolen Letter,originally called The Fourth Poor Traveller, for the
Christmas edition of Household Words in 1854.
This is considered
a very early attempt at detective fiction by Collins, as it was 14 years before
he wrote The Moonstone.
The affair of
the stolen letter is related by a lawyer to an artist to pass the time while he
is having his portrait painted.
The lawyer,
Mr Boxsious, tells the artist that he has not always been comfortable
financially, or successful professionally, and that he got his first lucky
break when he earned £500 as a reward for retrieving a stolen letter that was
being used to try to extort money from a young man of his acquaintance.
The man was about
to marry a beautiful young woman when he received a disturbing note in which
the sender claimed he had a letter that would implicate the woman’s dead father
in an attempted forgery. The sender threatened to pass the letter on to a
newspaper unless the man paid him £500.
The lawyer
regales the artist with the story of how he outwitted the man who stole the
letter, a disreputable clerk who used to work for the woman’s father. By clever
detective work the lawyer was able to work out where the letter was hidden and
restore it to the daughter of the man who wrote it.
Some see The Moonstone as the first English detective novel
In just 35
pages, Collins describes the meeting between the lawyer and the artist, brings up
the subject of the lawyer’s opportunity to earn £500 at the start of his career,
and sets the stage for him to tell the artist the story of how he executed an
elaborate search and surveillance plan to gain access to the blackmailer’s
hotel room and steal back the letter.
After a
meticulous search, he uses the only clue he has been able to find, a puzzling
numerical inscription, and applies it to the pattern of the carpet. This
enables him to discover the hiding place of the stolen letter, for which the blackmailer
was demanding £500.
The lawyer then
thinks of ‘a nice irritating little plan’ and replaces the letter with a piece
of paper on which he has written ‘change for a five hundred pound note.’
Wilkie Collins
was born on this day - 8 January - in 1824 in London. He entered Lincoln’s Inn to study Law
and was called to the Bar, but he never practised as a lawyer, preferring to
write for a living instead.
His first
contribution to Household Words was the story, A Terribly Strange Bed, published
in 1852.
His Christmas
story, The Fourth Poor Traveller, was reprinted under the title of The Lawyer’s
Story of a Stolen Letter in the first collection of short stories by Collins,
After Dark, which was published in 1856.
An edition of The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter is available from Amazon.
Dickson's story appears in the collection A Surprise for Christmas
Golden Age
mystery writers wrote many excellent short stories as well as the novels they were
famous for, and they loved to turn their hand to writing short, seasonal detective
stories for the periodicals published over the festive season.
Persons or
Things Unknown was written by one of only two American writers admitted to the
prestigious British Detection Club, Carter Dickson, who was much admired by his
fellow Golden Age writers for his locked room mysteries.
Carter
Dickson was one of the pen names for John Dickson Carr, who lived in England and
wrote most of his novels and short stories with English settings. He wrote
Persons or Things Unknown for The Sketch, a weekly illustrated journal, for
their Christmas edition in 1938.
Dickson
served up a locked room mystery in a spooky setting with a historical
background, which is perfect entertainment for whiling away an afternoon in
December or January in front of a fire as a guest in someone’s unfamiliar, and
not particularly comfortable, house.
Persons or
Things Unknown has the reign of King Charles II as its background. When it was
written, it was far less common to combine mystery with history, particularly
in short story form, than it is now.
John Dickson Carr wrote under a number of pseudonyms
A group of
guests have gathered after dinner in the drawing room of ‘a long, damp,
high-windowed house, hidden behind a hill in Sussex.’ Their host has just bought the property and
the party after Christmas is also meant to be a house warming.
One of the
guests, who narrates the story, tells us that the smell of the past was in the
house and that you could not get over the idea that ‘someone was following you
about.’
The host alarms
the group of guests by saying he wants to know if it is safe for anyone to
sleep in the little room at the top of the stairs. He says he has ‘a bundle of
evidence’ about ‘something queer’ that once happened in the room.
He then
tells them he has been given a diary in which the writer says he once saw a man
hacked to death in the little room at the top of the stairs. The man’s body is
alleged to have had 13 stab wounds caused by ‘a weapon that wasn’t there, which
was wielded by a hand that wasn’t there’.
The diary tells
the story of the beautiful young daughter of the house, who was once engaged to
a local landowner. Then along came a fashionably dressed young man from the
court of the newly restored King Charles II, who fell for her and was determined to win her hand
in marriage. The subsequent dramatic events led to a seemingly impossible
murder in the little room at the top of the stairs, which used to be called The
Ladies’ Withdrawing Room. It was a mystery that no one had ever been able to
solve.
The host
then puts all the facts he has been able to discover before his guests, who
include a policeman and an historian, and invites them to come up with a
solution.
The Hollow Man is regarded as Dickson Carr's masterpiece
John Dickson
Carr was born in Uniontown in Pennsylvania in 1906 and moved to England in the
1930s, where he married an Englishwoman and began writing mysteries. He was
published under the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger
Fairbairn.
Most of his
novels had English settings and English characters and his two best-known
fictional detectives, Dr Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, were both
English. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of Golden Age mysteries.
He was influenced by his enthusiasm for the stories of Gaston Leroux and became
a master of the locked room detective story in which a seemingly impossible
crime is solved. His 1935 Dr Fell mystery, The Hollow Man, is considered his
masterpiece and was selected as the best locked room mystery of all time in
1981 by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers.
Persons or
Things Unknown was republished by the British Library in 2020 in A Surprise For
Christmas, a collection of seasonal mysteries selected by the crime writer Martin
Edwards.
In his
introduction to Persons or Things Unknown, Edwards says the author ‘blends
historical atmosphere with a pleasing locked room mystery in the form of an
inverted detective story of the kind first popularised by R. Austin Freeman.’
In my
opinion, this pleasing locked room mystery by Carter Dickson, which takes up
just 20 pages of the book, would be the perfect post lunch, or post dinner, winter
diversion.
A ‘creepy’ Christmas story with all the classic festive
ingredients
John Jefferson Farjeon was a journalist who went on to be a successful novelist
When a group of passengers trapped on a snowbound train on
Christmas Eve decide to take their chances in the ‘curtain of whirling white’
to try to find shelter, the scene is set for an intriguing seasonal mystery.
No one answers the bell at the first house they find, but
when they try the door handle it turns and they stumble inside with relief. The
fires are lit, the table is set for tea, but surprisingly there is nobody at
home.
It is obvious the occupants would not have ventured out in
such extreme weather conditions unless there had been an emergency and the
house has clearly been prepared for guests, so despite uncomfortable feelings
of guilt, the train travellers warm themselves by the fire, eat the tea that
has been prepared and set out to solve the mystery.
The main sleuthing brain belongs to an elderly gentleman, Mr
Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, who uses a mixture of reasoned
logic and psychic intuition to try to work out what has happened to the
occupants of the house.
He is ably assisted by a bright young man, David Carrington
and his cheerful sister, Lydia, who has practical skills. A chorus girl, Jessie,
who has fallen in the snow and sprained her ankle, a young clerk called Thomson
who succumbs to ‘flu, Hopkins, an elderly bore, and Smith, a rough man who
turns out to be a criminal, complete the Christmas house party.
Mystery in White is published as a British Library Crime Classic
The author of Mystery in White, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, was
a crime and mystery novelist, playwright, and screen writer. Born in 1883,
Farjeon 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 a major figure during the Golden Age of murder
mysteries between the two world wars and Dorothy L Sayers praised him for being
‘quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures.’
Farjeon 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.
Originally published in 1937, Mystery in White was
republished as a British Library Crime Classic in 2014. Like most Golden Age
mysteries, it has a satisfying, logical conclusion, brought about by the deductive
powers of Mr Maltby and the heroics of David.
At the end of the story, the police inspector, who manages to
reach the house on Christmas Day, remarks to his sergeant: “Four murders in a
dozen hours! I reckon I’ve earned my bit of turkey.”
When the owners of the house return they are happy to
forgive the intrusion by the party from the train. As Lydia had said earlier to
the chorus girl, Jessie: “Suppose this house belonged to you and you returned
to it after the world’s worst snowstorm, would you rather find your larder
empty or seven skeletons?"
A Christmas tree in Rome's Piazza Venezia is one of the city's familiar festive sights
If you are a food lover, Italy is one of the best places to visit at Christmas, because the focus is firmly on the feasting, whichever region you choose to stay in.
On la Vigilia di Natale (Christmas Eve), a fish meal is traditionally consumed consisting of several different courses, after which the adults who are still able to move may go to midnight mass.
But Natale (Christmas Day) is the time for the serious feasting to start. While the children open their presents, the adults savour a glass of good prosecco or uncork a special vintage bottle to enjoy while they prepare the festive table.
Friends and relatives who drop in with presents, or to exchange good wishes, will be offered nuts, biscuits and torrone (nougat made in the city of Cremona in Lombardy.)
The antipasto course served at the beginning of the meal is likely to include Parma ham or bresaola - dried, cured beef - with preserved mushrooms, olives, and pickled vegetables.
Stuffed pasta is usually served as a primo piatto, first course, either in the shape of ravioli or tortellini, which originated in Emilia Romagna. This shape of pasta is said to have been inspired by a beautiful woman who was staying at an inn in the region. The innkeeper is reputed to have tried to spy on her through a keyhole but all he could see was her navel.
Panettone is a traditional part of the Italian family table at Christmas
Tortellini in brodo, traditionally served in capon broth, remains a classic Christmas day dish in Italy.
For the main course, turkey or capon is likely to be served with potatoes and vegetables as side dishes.
The traditional end to the meal is almost always panettone, served warm, accompanied by a glass of sparkling wine.
Italian folklore has it that panettone was concocted by a Milanese baker, Antonio (Toni), to impress his girlfriend one Christmas in the 15th century. The result was so successful that ‘Pane de Toni’ has become a regular feature of the Christmas season all over Italy and now even abroad.
The feasting and family parties continue on 26 December, the festa di Santo Stefano (Boxing Day).
A Happy Christmas and Buon Natale to all my readers.