Merry Christmas

"The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint. Their winds are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul."
                                                                  --Sir Edward Coley Burne Jones

Review: The Postman's Daughter by Louis Tracy

by Mary

John Menzies Grant is taking an after-breakfast stroll in the garden of The Hollies, a charming house just outside the hamlet of Steynholme, Sussex. An ex-officer and now writer, he's another of the typical Golden Age "healthy, clean-minded young Englishman" so sadly lacking in detective fiction these days. But what is not lacking is a body -- in this case a bound woman dragged from the river at the end of a line tied to Grant's side of the river.

Grant recognises the woman as actress Adelaide Melhuish, to whom he had proposed marriage three years before. He then discovered she was married, and her suggestion he pay her husband to facilitate a divorce so disgusted Grant it precipitated their parting. He had not seen her since except hers was, he thought, the face in the window he had glimpsed fairly late the evening before but had dismissed as his imagination running riot.

The other woman in the case is a mere slip of a girl, Doris Martin, the postmaster's daughter of the title. She lives across the river and she and Grant signal back and forth from home and garden. There is an as yet unacknowledged attraction between them, and the pair were in Grant's garden the evening of the murder stargazing at Sirius at a time deduced to be not long before the murder took place.

It transpires Miss Melhuish had been in Steynholme for a couple of days asking questions about Grant and his friends and doings, and so suspicion naturally falls on him. Feelings start to run high in the village, fanned by the arrival of Isidor G. Ingerman, Miss Melhuish's husband, who hints at a suit for alienation of affection against Grant and is otherwise quite beastly. Grant has some moral support from Miss Martin as well as the owner of another pair of boots which take up residence under his dinner table, this particular set belonging to Grant's close friend and global adventurer Walter Hart, whose conversational turns of phrase would make a number of present day humourists envious.

Tracy's delightful pair of dueling Scotland Yard detectives solve the mystery, although the eccentric Charles Furneaux initially turns up without his more stolid investigative partner James Winter, who does not get onstage until about half way through the book.

My verdict: This is the sort of novel where the reader is drawn along at a rattling pace. There are few clews and much obfuscation, with comic interest added by badinage between the Scotland Yard men and Hart. Readers will quibble with how some of the evidence is obtained, but the shifting moods of the local residents are well portrayed and the mystery ends with a strong denouement in the hamlet's main street, followed by a brief "what happened next" chapter tying up the loose ends. It's fair to say cosy fans as well as GADers will enjoy this novel. I certainly did!

Etext: The Postman's Daughter by Louis Tracy

Four For A Boy For £1

For readers outside the United States and (I think) Canada, Head of Zeus has been offering special Christmas deals on its books and today, The Seventeenth Day of HoZmas, the book is Four for A Boy

DEATH IN BYZANTIUM: At the heart of what is left of the Roman Empire, lies a city simmering with intrigue & treachery. Amid this maelstrom stands John, a slave who has risen to become the right hand of Justinian, the greatest of Byzantium's emperors. With violence and murder commonplace, it is John's skills as an investigator that the Emperor prizes the most.

In this series prequel, John the Eunuch takes his first dangerous steps along the path that will lead him to hold office as Lord Chamberlain.

In the unnaturally cold winter of 525, the city is convulsed by doubt and riots, Emperor Justin is dying and the streets are terrorized alternately by a group of thugs and forces under the City Prefect. When a wealthy philanthropist is murdered, rumours abound that the heir to the throne, Justinian, is trying to sway the succession. In an attempt to clear his name, Justinian engages an anonymous slave called John to investigate what many believe could be part of a succession conspiracy.

To discover for £1, click here.

Is the End Nigh?

(No, I'm not talking about the Mayan calendar this-month's-end-of-the-world-prediction, but rather about the publishing industry, books, readers, writers. It's my essay from the December Orphan Scrivener.

If you'd prefer something more seasonal, Mary writes about that English holiday tradition, the pantomime. And there's also the usual BSP.)

I'm sure you've heard the prophecies. Books are doomed. Doomed! The end is near! Polls have shown that twenty percent of Americans never read. Half never read fiction. Young people spend two or three hours a day watching television but only seven minutes reading. And the few who still read are turning to ebooks. All of which has driven publishing companies to the verge of extinction. Things have become so bad big publishers are forming vanity presses to make money off authors rather than readers.

No readers! No publishers! We're doomed! We're all doomed!

Nonsense.

In the first place publishers do not write. No one needs publishers more than the publishers themselves. Yes, the prospect of not being able to profit off readers and writers must be irksome to the big publishing conglomerates but for the vast majority of readers and writers it makes no difference. People somehow managed to write and read for thousands of years before the publishing industry came along.

In past eras, authors, like the literate generally, tended to be well-to-do. They were people whose circumstances allowed them both an education and free time to write, often as a secondary occupation. The great essayist Montaigne was a statesman. Writers not so fortunately situated often depended on patronage. Authors making their living selling works to large numbers of readers is a relatively recent development and even today only a small minority of authors do so. (It's been said that the first American author able to make a living entirely from fiction was Washington Irving.) If the books of every author who makes a living writing were to vanish from bookstores the shelves would not look much less full. Only the bestseller displays at the front would be bare.

Classical writers did not have publishers to monetize their work for them, or even to distribute it. If you wanted to own a book in Greek or Roman times -- which is to say a scroll -- you found a copy to buy or paid a scribe to make a copy for you. And neither the bookseller nor the scribe shared their profits with the author. There weren't any copyright laws.

None of which stopped Virgil, for instance, from writing.

And how big was the contemporary readership for the Aeneid? I have no idea, but I do know that whereas Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has reportedly sold around 44 million copies, the entire population of the Roman Empire during Virgil's time is estimated as 57 million, with no more than 10% even literate, let alone an audience for epic Latin verse.

Writers have never needed vast sales and wealth for inspiration.

It wouldn't surprise me if functional literacy levels fall and fewer and fewer people have the ability or inclination to take the effort to read a work of fiction. But I have no doubt there will always be some people who want to read books. Books are language and language practically defines the human mind. It might well be hard-wired into the brain. It's the way we think. And so long as anyone wants to read people will want to write. Heck, often they're the same people.

Mary and I are fortunate to have two publishers, both matching us up with readers and sending us the occasional check. I don't think publishers are going to vanish any time soon, or that readership for books will totally crater. But if, a hundred years from now, publishers have joined the dinosaurs and readers have become an infinitesimal minority, readers and writers will still manage to find each other as they always have.

Review: R. Holmes & Co by John Kendrick Bangs

by Mary

The family of writer Jenkins is temporarily out of town. On a blistering hot night he is dozing in a hammock on the fire escape when a nocturnal visitor climbs up and pops into his flat.

Surprised to say the least, Jenkins follows the burglar to his library, where he finds him perusing royalty statements. The visitor is Raffles Holmes, son of Sherlock and grandson of A. J., and he is there to suggest, if he finds these statements satisfactory, that Jenkins record some of his exploits for mutual financial gain. Besides which, he says, Jenkins needs some new ideas for his fiction. Ouch!

Here follow a few lines about the various adventures related by Jenkins, hopefully without giving too much of their plots away.

The Adventure of the Dorrington Ruby Seal relates how Raffles Holmes' parents met during the hitherto unrecorded case of a jewelry theft from Lord Dorrington's stately home, the swag including an immensely valuable ruby seal given to the family by George IV. Raffles Holmes' mother's name is Marjorie, daughter of A.J. Memo: who was her mother? Though Bunny did hint Raffles' had a number of escapades with the ladies...

The Adventure of Mrs Burlingame's Diamond Stomacher underlines the constantly warring nature of Raffles Holmes -- an insistent desire to pinch things and the equally strong wish to bring malefactors to justice. When Mrs B's highly valuable stomacher is stolen, her dinner guests, despite being the cream of society, are under a cloud of suspicion. To say more would be to reveal Raffles Holmes' cunning plan to collect the reward money for its return.

The Adventure of the Missing Pendants involves a theft from Gaffany & Company, whose craftsmen are cutting a section of a fabulous diamond into four pendants. Two pendants go missing, and the solution involves Raffles in disguise and a water cooler.

The Adventure of the Brass Check involves Mrs Wilbraham Ward-Smythe, who has a rope of enormous pearls. Raffles Holmes hatches a clever plan to claim a reward for its return without actually stealing the pearls.

The Adventure of the Hired Burglar involves an attempt to save the reputation of a man who has been up to no good with someone else's bonds and must produce them in a very short time when their owner reaches majority, Raffles Holmes agrees to help out, but this leads to a triple cross...

The Redemption of Young Billington Rand is necessary because while Rand is an honourable man he is also weak, and as a result is now more or less bankrupt and owes money right, left, and at the club. Raffles Holmes intervenes to save him from taking a criminal step.

The Nostalgia of Nervy Jim The Snatcher is for his cosy jail cell, preferably for ten or more years, as the old lag cannot cope with life outside prison. To help him achieve his wish, Raffles Holmes and Jenkins sing in the chorus of Lohengrin at a performance at which Mrs Robinson-Jones' valuable necklace is stolen.

The Adventure of Room 407 involves an intercepted telegram and a man masquerading as a member of the nobility, but despite a promising start it is perhaps the least of the stories related by Jenkins.

The Major-General's Pepperpots are a massive golden pair, a gift from the King of Spain, as now General Carrington Cox relates. Stolen some years before, Raffles Holmes sees one on a friend's dinner table and he has the other by way of a sentimental event. After hearing why Carrington Cox was given the pepperpots, Raffles Holmes decides he must do something....

My verdict: Fans of Holmes and Raffles will find this collection amusing and some of the planning and execution worthy of old Hawkface himself. The criminal collation tends more to the Rafflian turn of phrase than the Holmesian, and I must admit I laughed out loud when, after Raffles Holmes whacks Jenkins on the shoulders and almost topples him into the fireplace, the former declares "Don't be a rabbit. The thing will be as easy as cutting calve's-foot jelly with a razor." It's well worth spending an hour or two with Bangs when readers fancy something a little lighter than usual in the criminous literary line.

Etext: R. Holmes & Co by John Kendrick Bangs

Crying Over Werther

I just finished reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel about a heartsick youth that had a huge influence on the later Romantic literary movement. I mention it only because it's been on my to-read pile for forty years. Figuratively speaking. What happened to the enticing trade paperback I bought for a "German Literature in Translation" class back in college, many changes in residence ago, I have no idea.

Werther and the other books on the reading list sounded enticing to me, but as usual I found myself in a tiny minority. Only one or two other students signed up so the class was cancelled.

The previous semester I had reveled in "French Literature in Translation" which covered authors ranging from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Voltaire right up to New Novel proponent, and literary gadfly, Alain Robbe-Grillet. I've always been eager to read something which to me is new and exotic. So, I kept my class books rather than returning them for a refund.

But as an English Lit major I was too snowed under by actual English literature to get around to reading translated German. For the "Early English Novel" alone I ran through a marathon of twelve or fourteen books, mostly the size of Vanity Fair and Tristram Shandy. Luckily we were given a severely condensed version of Richardson's Clarissa, estimated to be the longest novel in English at 984,870 words. Even at that it was a monstrous tome, though not as monstrous as Lovelace who...well, I don't want to give anything away in case you plan on reading it soon!

Thus the years passed and Werther remained unread. I was reminded of him during my recent orgy of nineteenth century French literature when one author after another expressed a debt to Goethe's protagonist. Though my class book was long vanished, the text is readily available on Gutenberg.

The question you're probably asking is whether the forty year wait was worth it? As an insight into literary history, yes. As a reading experience...well....

Not that it wasn't fascinating in its way. But I found it hard to believe that even a callow youth could be quite as obtuse, whining and cruelly self-centered as Werther. Although, considering some of the poetry people have committed on the Internet, I might be wrong.

Maybe I would have felt more sympathy had I read about Werther's tragic crush when I originally intended to, when I was nearer Werther's age. Then again, I had enough sense to never write poetry.

I wonder what Goethe's attitude was while writing the novel? It was based on his own youthful infatuation with a woman already spoken for and he did not seem to stress Werther's abject stupidity. In his later years he claimed at least to regret airing so much autobiographical material in public, saying that "if Werther had been a brother he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by the vengeful ghost."

If only we could all be haunted by having written in our feckless youth one of the most influential books of all time, however embarrassing. When I was twenty four I was writing unpublishable science fiction like "The Blue Centipede of Happiness."

Anna Katharine Green's The Circular Study

by Mary

Oh joy, oh rapture! A mystery with a plan of the titular study!

What's more, the novel takes off at a brisk gallop. Octogenarian New York detective Ebenezer Gryce goes to Mr Adams' mansion after word of a crime there reaches the police department. And what does he find on entering the circular study? In the tapestry-hung, book-lined room with lighting whose colour can be changed at the press of a button, a room filled with curios and dominated by the portrait of a beautiful woman, lies a murdered man with a golden cross on his chest.

There were two witnesses: a deaf mute servant who has become mentally unbalanced by the sight and repeatedly re-enacts the murder and a talking bird described as an English starling, evidently a parrot, for it mimics speech.

Clues? Well, there's a scattering of rose leaves and several black sequins in the study, a pearl-handled parasol left behind, and a silver comb on the floor of the otherwise immaculately tidy bedroom opening off the study. Tracing whoever had been there is a tall task given the size of the city but Detective Gryce begins it, aided by his young assistant Sweetwater, and Amelia Butterworth, an aristocratic and occasionally sharp-tongued spinster of a certain age who has been involved in Gryce's investigations before.

My verdict: This case is one solved by reasoning, and very clever reasoning it is. The explanations of how certain persons of interest are traced is a particularly interesting demonstration of police leg work in the early l900s. I should mention the roots of the tragedy go back decades and are more gothic in nature than some mystery readers would prefer, but all in all I found The Circular Study a good read and recommend it.

Etext: The Circular Study

Roman Empire Conquers UK

Today Head of Zeus is launching our Death in Byzantium historical mystery series under the name of M.E.Mayer.

On Jane Finnis' blog Mary writes a bit about the origin of the series, and how she used to walk past an ancient Roman temple on her way to school.

Head of Zeus published Jane's Roman mystery novel Shadows in the Night a couple weeks ago.