Mince pies, Murder, and something nutty

The last day of November is almost done, I've dug out the advent calendar I fell in love with back in October (Angela Harding, very pretty), baked some lebkuchen, and whilst I was at it the first mince pies of the season. The best mince pies in the world are my mothers (best to me at any rate, because a) they're really good, and b) hers being the first I ever had are the benchmark by which all others are judged). It's a most unusual fit of post work enthusiasm.

I was feeling quietly smug about the home made mincemeat earlier until I had a flash back to the first time I tried making it. It was a disaster. I used an Elizabeth David recipe that made kilos of the stuff, it was dry, never ending, and dribbled all over the fridge. Thank god for Fiona Cairns and her altogether more sensible recipe (you will not be eyeing it up at the back of the cupboard for the best part of 5 years before you give in and shamefacedly bin it). Homemade mincemeat is minimal effort (the only bit I find tiresome is chopping the apple) and because it is dryer than shop bought doesn't weld itself to the tin like some sort of red hot superglue (a win).

Despite rarely drinking them, I find liqueurs hard to resist, the more unlikely they are the more appealing they seem. Inevitably it turns out the money would have been better spent on gin which I know I like (in moderation). My bottle of Fratello (like Frangellico, but disappointingly not in a bottle shaped like most of a monk) was bought primarily for cooking but I've had it for a year now and it really needs using up. A good slug of it went in the mincemeat so it seemed reasonable to drink it with a mince pie whilst deciding what the perfect book to finish the scene would be. It tastes like toasted hazelnuts, vanilla, and syrup so it's basically a very acceptable food match.

Book wise it's a bit trickier, Frangellico hasn't really been around that long, though traditional hazelnut liqueurs of some sort must have been. It's tempting to choose Hoffmann's 'The Devil's Elixir' because this isn't really the sort of drink I approve of (to sweet, not gin or whisky) for myself, and then the bottle is shaped like a monk, but it doesn't fit the tone of the book.

Mavis Doriel Hay's 'The Santa Klaus Murder' on the other hand... The British library have just re released this with a smart new jacket to fit in with the rest of the crime classics series. I wrote about it a couple of years ago Here when it first appeared at the begining of the series. Liqueurs like Fratello aren't what I think of as serious drinks, they're fun, designed to go into frivolous cocktails or Nigella style puddings. 'The Santa Klaus Murder' is similarly fun. A puzzle to be solved along with a few hours of escapism into a comfortable 1930's world (murders aside) and who knows, maybe the Melbury's are coffee and liqueur people too.

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library

I've been told that using the British Library as a library can be a challenge, never having had to try I can neither confirm or deny that information, but as a tourist destination it's amazing. An English teacher friend persuaded me to visit with her about a decade ago, since when it's become a favourite destination; it has a lot to recommend it. First off it's very convenient for St Pancras (where I get on and off the train) so it's very easy to fit in a quick visit on the way to or from other things. Then it's well supplied with cafés, comfortable places to sit, a peaceful atmosphere, and toilets you don't have to pay to use or queue for ages for. Physical needs met, the permanent (free) exhibition of treasures is very good indeed, and the gift shop is basically a very nice bookshop (what's not to love).

And then there are the exhibitions. This Gothic show is the second I've seen at the BL (the first was the Georgians at the beginning of the year) and it's confirmed that their exhibitions are another thing to love them for. As much as I'd like to see the Rembrandt's at the National the really big blockbuster exhibitions aren't always much fun to look at, mostly because so many other people are trying to look at the same time that it's really hard to see anything very much. 'Terror and Wonder' was by no means empty when I went (about 11am on a Tuesday morning) but quiet enough to really look at things, read about them, listen to the audio clips at various points, go back and look again, and generally take it all in. Consequently I spent a lot longer going round this exhibition than I normally do and feeling like I'd got rather more from it than I might generally expect.

The set up worked for me too, I like the space used for these exhibitions, in this case broken up into a series of rooms partly through the use of floating black muslin curtains (very atmospheric) and the occasional bit of dramatic velvet. The lighting was good, the colour scheme effective (an attractive Strawberry Hill appropriate blue leading into sepulchral black, a nice juicy crimson, and finally a stark white, all of which helped mark different developments in our gothic imagination) and effective film and audio clips.

It all starts with Horace Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto', the first Gothic novel - though even this has it's roots in a much older tradition (the exhibition draws specific links to Shakespeare, Spencer, and others). It then moves on to the likes of Ann Radcliffe, concerns around the French Revolution, the works of the Minerva Press (my favourite single exhibit may have been the collection of Northanger Horrids - the 7 titles Austen mentions in her Gothic parody) and a look at some aspects of the romantic poets work. After that it's the Victorian take on Gothic with penny dreadfuls, Christmas ghost stories and a move into a more urban contemporary setting - the dark streets of London slums rather than unlikely Italian castles before bringing us up to date with the popularity of the Twilight saga, zombie mash ups, and goth culture.

This is an exhibition with a sense of humour (a vampire slaying kit would be my second favourite exhibit) which does an excellent job of charting our flirtation with the dark side of the imagination and some of the directions in which it's flourished. There's a lot to think about here with the definite bonus that an exhibition based around the contents of a library comes with an obvious (and enjoyable) reading list. Disgorged back into the gift shop there's a whole pile of books for sale to consider so you can really immerse yourself in the experience, in some ways it feels like a continuation of the actual exhibition, as does the view of the St Pancrass hotel as you leave the BL. I really recommend it, tickets are £10 for adults - it was money well spent.

A Scream In Soho - John G. Brandon

This is one of the British Library's crime series, it caught my eye with it's definite promise of somewhat camp entertainment - a promise it keeps. John G. Brandon wrote over a hundred novels of which this is judged to be the best - I take this as an indication that his work isn't generally worth seeking out these days (I can't imagine that it's aged well) but 'A Scream in Soho' is an entertaining read which provides a useful insight into the paranoia's and attitudes during the early days of the second world war.

Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy is meeting his boss for dinner in a Soho restaurant when he spots a suspicious looking individual (well dressed in a European way, olive colouring, and startling ice blue eyes) who then disappears into the night. Later, and just as he's about to go to bed a terrible scream rends the Soho night. McCarthy thinks it's a man screaming, the bobby on the beat assumes a woman, both grope through the blackout to the source of the scream (McCarthy still in his pyjamas) where they find a pool of blood, a stiletto dagger, and a woman's lace handkerchief... but no body. In short order the bodies start to pile up (a hapless constable placed on guard, and an old man who had a coffee cart) and the pickpocket that McCarthy sets to follow the man with the ice blue eyes is found covered in blood wandering around on Hampstead heath next to the body of a murdered woman, the very body that went missing from Soho. She turns out to be a cross dressing German spy, and we are given to understand that the Germans are generally keen on cross dressing. Back in Soho some gangsters of Italian extraction (but Soho breeding) try and dispatch McCarthy by running him down in a car - but he escapes. After that there is a mysterious Austrian aristocrat in the traditional femme fatale role (she doesn't turn out to be a man), a ruthless Soho Italian beauty who seems to be going to the bad, a stalwart taxi driver, a dwarf assassin, some missing anti aircraft defence plans, and of course the villainous character with the ice blue eyes.

In his introduction Martin Edwards warns that there are attitudes that will make the modern reader wince - he's right, sometimes it's funny (there is a moment discussing the wig the cross dressing spy wore - it had to be a wig because no man on earth could have grown his hair to look like a woman's) sometimes it's shocking or uncomfortable, but this is also a brilliant evocation of London, specifically Soho in 1940. I haven't pulled out an A2Z to follow the action but I could do, and next time I'm in London it might be fun to see if I could follow the book round Soho. The attitudes might often grate but it's useful to be reminded of how people thought, and to some extent why. I'm also fascinated by descriptions of the blackout. I find it very hard to imagine what it must have been like. There was one occasion going through a village on a night time bus when there was a powercut which gave me some inkling, but it was a starry night so not pitch black. In a city where the sky is obscured by buildings which cast extra shadows - well it's no place for someone afraid of the dark. It brings some element of fairly tales and wild woods back to life.

Over all this is an amusing curiosity, worth reading for the details, and because in the end it's a well crafted piece of pulp fiction and as such a lot of fun.

Death On The Cherwell - Mavis Doriel Hay

As a fan of Persephone books, Dorothy L. Sayers, and golden age British crime 'Death on the Cherwell' was always going to sound like a winner to me - published in the same year as Sayers 'Gaudy Night' (1935), and set in the fictional Persephone College (apparently based on St Hilda's which Hay attended between 1913 and 1916 - it wasn't until 1920 that Oxford awarded women degrees, Cambridge somewhat later) there's a lot here I was bound to enjoy. I hadn't realised that 'Death on the Cherwell' was contemporary with 'Gaudy Night' until I read Stephen Booth's excellent introduction, comparisons between the two are interesting, I'm inclined to say that in some ways 'Death on the Cherwell' has aged rather better.

I was 13 when I first read 'Gaudy Night' (I can still remember retiring to bed with it one very wet weekend) and it made me fall in love with both the idea of Oxford and the possibility of higher education. Reading it again a couple of years ago I still think it's a brilliant description of academic life and harriet Vane remains a character I'm deeply attached too, but Sayers increasing infatuation with her detective, an underlying snobbery, and occasional mentions of eugenics were all distractions that reminded me of the books vintage and Sayers own shortcomings. 'Death on the Cherwell' isn't as ambitious in it's scope but there's not much in it that needs explanation, excuse, or apology.

Four students gather together on a boat house roof late one January afternoon with the object of forming a secret society dedicated to cursing the bursar. Disconcertingly for them just as they're about to swear an oath the dead body of the bursar floats past in her canoe, odder yet she's clearly drowned so what's she doing under the thwarts of the canoe... The police are called in but the girls are anxious to do their own investigating, they're also anxious to protect their own. Fortunately the Scotland yard man is both intelligent and sympathetic and without much trouble the students tell all they know and the mystery is quickly unravelled. It's a sad story with an interesting twist at the end which makes this stand out from the standard murder mystery. Apart from that Hay is also rather good on undergraduates - as she observes on page one "Undergraduates, especially those in their first year , are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult. It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human. Emerging excitedly from the ignominious status of schoolgirl or schoolboy, and as yet unsteadied by the ballast of responsibility which, later on, a livelihood- earning career will provide, they enter the university like beings born again...". I live on the edge of a campus, it's a description I recognise. Hay definitely likes her undergraduates though (as do I for that matter, they make good neighbours) the group here are nice young women caught in that moment between childhood and adult life when everything is possible.

Hay doesn't really examine university life in the way that Sayers does, but curiously both express distaste for the journalistic habit of referring to women students as undergraduettes (I'm not surprised it seems to have really irritated the educated women of the day), and she also makes the point that Cambridge doesn't yet offer proper degrees for women, which puts it at a distinct disadvantage to Oxford. I enjoyed 'The Santa Klaus Murder' which the BL bought out last Christmas, but this book is much more, it really does make me regret that Hay only wrote 3 books and correspondingly pleased that she's back in print. It's light entertainment but almost everything about it is delightful (the one exception is an overly excitable foreign student) and as a piece of golden age detective fiction it feels very fresh.

The Lake District Murder - John Bude

'The Lake District Murder' is the second title I've read from The British Library's crime classics series and it's proved to be every bit as enjoyable as the last one (The Santa Klaus Murder). The back blurb tells me that John Bude was the pen name of Ernest Elmore who wrote 30 crime novels, all of which are now rare and collectable - their rarity is doubtless one reason I'd never heard of him. Elmore was also a co-founder of the Crime Writer's Association.

Whilst I was reading this it occurred to me that the majority of golden age detective fiction I've read has been written by women - specifically Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers all of whom chose to distinctly aristocratic detectives and all of whom seemed to have rather fallen for their own creations. This is especially true of Sayers who definitely overdoes it in 'Busman's Honeymoon' with her descriptions of Peter and Harriet's wedding night. I think Agatha Christie is more sensible but it's a shamefully long time since I've read her. Anyway after that lot a book about a bunch of fairly ordinary chaps solving a crime perpetrated by a bunch of other fairly ordinary chaps was oddly refreshing. There are women in 'The Lake District Murder' but they exist to make tea for their husbands and clean things - clearly there were no femme fatales in Penrith in 1935.

It also occurred to me (again) how much I like it when a book has a very specific, real, geographical location. I'm not well acquainted with the lake district, and it's almost always blanketed in driving rain when I'm passing through it, but even so I've seen enough to roughly know what it would look like and there's just something about being able to follow a book on a map that brings it alive for me.

Plot wise a body is found in an isolated garage, at first glance it looks like suicide, but a very little investigation throws this into doubt; the dead man's tea is waiting for him with a kettle boiled dry and now slowly melting still on the hob, and further investigation confirms the theory that it's murder. Unfortunately for the police there is no obvious motive for either suicide or murder but a lot of cast iron alibi's. There is also an earlier case which was ruled as suicide but with some doubts hanging over how it was done - what's going on amongst the lakes?

Slowly the police begin to suspect there must be a criminal gang at work who have had good reasons to dispose of the dead men, but what sort of gang and what can they be up to? Effectively then we get two investigations; the murder mystery (which is fairly standard fare) and the efforts to uncover whatever scam is being perpetrated on an unsuspecting public and under the very nose of the police. Coincidentally it turned out to be a crime very much after my own heart - I found it both clever and entertaining. Inspector Meredith is a likable hero speeding around the lakes in, or on, the police motorcycle and sidecar combination, he makes mistakes, try's to bend the evidence to fit his theory's, forgets odd bits of evidence (before remembering them or their significance in the nick of time) and is generally thoroughly human. The feeling here is of solid police work executed with the aid of a good pipe of tobacco, there is no psychology or quoting of metaphysical poets, but the plot is ingenious and the whole thing is entertaining fun. I'm really excited about this series generally, the British Library must have access to some pretty cool stuff, and the idea that someone is poking around in a dusty stack somewhere unearthing treasures is delightful (it's probably not that romantic or hands on in real life but this is how I dream it). However the process actually works the result in this case is a book that's both entertaining to read and interesting to consider alongside more familiar Golden Age titles - so basically an all round winner!    

Vikings at the British Museum and Georgians at the British Library

The Vikings have finally arrived at the British Museum (this is an exhibition I've been anticipating for a while now) and so today we headed down (or should that be up) to London to see them. The reviews I've read for this (in The Telegraph and The Guardian) have both been a bit negative so I went along with suitably managed expectations. I don't think I've ever seen an exhibition at the British Museum before so can't comment on the difference between the old exhibition space and the new Sainsbury galleries but you can't go  to far wrong with rectangular boxes.

The biggest problem with these headlining exhibitions is how many people want to go along to them, given the so so reviews it might be slightly less crowded in a few weeks but today was sold out and even timed entry slots can only do so much. We didn't opt for an audio guide (£16.50 for a ticket, none of those leaflet things which run you through the exhibition like a mini guide that EVERYONE else gives you, an extra £4.50 for the audio guide, and then straight into a gift shop, and frankly the BM could have better toilet facilities - they have great stuff but it's never been my favourite museum) but a lot of people did which meant there were bottle necks all the way along where everybody who'd gone in at the same time tried to look at the same thing. Because there were so many people it was also quite difficult to see the little boards that identify what you're looking at (which without an audio guide you really want to do) and nobody should be allowed into a busy exhibition wearing a bulky rucksack.

Downside disposed of it's an exhibition that was worth the wait. I liked the dark grey boxy space, I loved that as you walk into the first room you hear (what The Guardian article tells me are) sagas in old Norse. The Guardian critic thought that they would have been better in translation but I think that would be distracting, you can't stop and listen very easily, and in a room full of people having quite reasonable conversations about what they're looking at you wouldn't hear much anyway, as it is it's pleasingly evocative without being intrusive. I liked the fairly stark presentation of the objects as well, heaps of silver and gold, brooches that ranged from the practical to the impractically ostentatious, swords - including killed swords that had been deliberately bent out of shape before being buried with their owners, axe heads, spear tips, scales and weights - all inviting you to look at them and consider them. The killed swords were oddly affecting, they seemed much more personal than most of the rest of the things on display, some were simply bent, but one had been coiled round in a spiral which must have taken some doing.

One thing that I theoretically knew but was still surprised by was the sheer scale of Viking trade and influence. Nearly identical objects turning up all over Europe, materials from even further afield ending up back in the Viking heartlands, hack silver which demonstrates a very practical attitude towards currency exchange, things which have Viking and Celtic motifs, and a few things clearly pinched from original owners and considered too attractive to be hacked up for currency all demonstrate a trading empire of truly impressive scale.

All of this was made possible by the boats and Roskilde 6 - the largest Viking ship found is absolutely the star of the show, as you enter the hall (which is almost to small for the boat - it's that big) it's to the sound of waves, once you're in there it's the sound of a Shetland man talking about tradition Shetland boats (this was a nice surprise for me but proved the point about something you understand but can only half hear being distracting) which are near descendants of the Viking boats. Seeing that ship was everything I hoped it might be - there isn't an awful lot left of it but the cradle it sits in fills in the blanks. I will say it again - it's huge, and very, very, impressive (I was impressed). I'm assuming this was a meant for a warship rather than for trade - even as a ghost it had an air of threat to it. It also held an echo of all those epics and sagas the Vikings have left behind for us.

The reason for going to The Vikings on a Sunday at the beginning of it's run (which was never going to be the best time to try and avoid crowds) was so that we could also catch the end of The Georgians at the British Library. This was also the first time I'd been to a BL exhibition and very impressive it was too. I wish I'd seen it earlier, it's a much quieter affair than the Vikings but full of enjoyable details including a suggested walk through surrounding London on the back of the (free) brochure that came with the ticket and just generally helps bring the Georgian city come alive in my imagination.

The Santa Klaus Murder - Mavis Doriel Hay

It's been my habit for the last decade or so to nab the first week of January as holiday. I hate the post Christmas slump at work and this way I get something like a proper festive season (the downside is that there's now no holiday until May) it's likely also a big part of why I end up liking winter so much. I've spent the last week catching up with old friends, drinking far to much good wine, messing around in a kitchen, and even reading a couple of very good books. Christmas itself bought a small shelf full of excellent looking books and now the New Year is all encouraging in the matter of fresh starts and good intentions - there are things to look forward to.

'The Santa Klaus Murder' came to me by way of Elaine Random Jottings and was my first read of the year. It concerns the murder of a difficult patriarch on Christmas day - apparently done to death by Santa Klaus - or at least someone in a Santa Klaus suit. A discontented family has gathered under the paternal roof, all of them with reason to want the old man out of the way, the reasons are basically all money, and there's an element of urgency added to the family anxiety courtesy of an indispensable and shapely private secretary. 

Sir Osmand Melbury isn't a very nice man, and far to many of the family are principally interested in his wealth or there own affairs to be particularly likeable either - as the chief constable feels moved to observe that they all lie far to easily and with far to little provocation. It's the lies about little things that obscure the truth of what happened, and for all the protagonists claim that they don't think they were important details they all have things to hide and people they think they might be protecting. 

Hay does a couple of things which are interesting - the first is that she writes from the perspective of seven different characters - mostly from that of Col. Halstock the chief constable who sees the family as an outsider and quietly gives the lie to their own images of themselves. It's a handy way of spreading suspicion around - the family obviously have their own doubts about each other. Hay also, I think, subverts our expectations about many of the characters; she certainly had me changing my sympathies all through the plot. As a murder mystery this is classic golden age country house stuff - a decent page turner with some real class about it, the plot is reasonably ingenious with a conclusion that was neat in so far as tying up the murder went, but just a little bit ambiguous as to the likely happiness (and characters) of some of the family. It's also interesting to read as a record of class attitudes of the time. Sometimes 1936 seems very close, other times it's quite clearly a long time ago. The Melbury's are presumably all good Tories with very fixed ideas about class and where people fit in to it. It's hard to judge on the back of one book whether Hay was simply sharing her own prejudices or if she was making a point. I'm inclined to believe that these are her actual opinions, so it'll be interesting to see if her other books reflect the same social mores.

I've written enthusiastically about the British Library publishing books like this before (back in November) I'm even more enthusiastic now I've read this. The possibilities for what they might unearth in the future are intriguing to say the least - 2014 does indeed have things to look forward to.