Detective on holiday: E. H. CLEMENTS, Bright Intervals (1940)

Bright Intervals was Eileen Helen Clements' second novel. Her first, Let Him Die, had appeared the year before, her first mystery and the introduction to her series detective Alister Woodhead, who would subsequently appear in twelve more mystery/thrillers. Clements also later wrote a number of stand-alone crime-themed novels that didn't feature Woodhead. Bright Intervals, however, is a more or less one-of-a-kind (so far as I know) experiment, in that it features Woodhead and the Chattans, the charming, slightly eccentric family with whom he had solved a murder in Let Him Die, marrying into the family in the process, but this time simply on holiday in Devon, with no detecting in sight. Rather like if Christie had written a novel about the domestic turmoil Poirot and Hastings encounter in a ramshackle holiday hotel, or about Miss Marple and her nephew Raymond venturing on a murder-free cruise and helping the ship's chef reunite with his lost love. (Now that I think of it, I really wish she had written those…) Certainly, some mystery novels become as much about other things as about crime—examples like The Nine Tailors or Surfeit of Lampreys could arguably leave out the murders altogether and still be delightful novels—but I can't think of another example where a detective is used without a trace of a mystery element. Can you?

It's an interesting and charming experiment, and certainly makes me want to read other Woodhead titles. I wrote here (almost a decade ago, no less) about Cherry Harvest (1943), and noted that though Woodhead does put in an appearance (his first after Bright Intervals), it's a brief one. Perhaps that was why I seem to have been a bit lukewarm on it. He seems to play a bigger role in Clements' subsequent book, Berry Green (1945). Alister is a charming, odd character—kind and loving, but fiercely anti-social with most people, and with a gruff sense of humor that can take one aback. When the family's legal guardian, whom all adore, falls ill:

"I'm going to see Graham—to cheer him up."

"How?"

"I'm going to show him my stamp collection.''

"God help him," said Alister wearily. "I give you up. I give you all up. If he's sickening for scarlet fever, may you all catch it and die miserably."

Or, his method of "comforting" one of the youngsters during a storm:

"I say, Alister, that was a good one, wasn't it? Was it a thunderbolt, do you think?"

"I expect so. You go to sleep."

"Have you ever known anyone that was struck by lightning?"

"No. But I know several who ought to be. Shut up and turn over."

But it's a sense of humor I relate to, and children often do seem to be delighted by light-hearted verbal abuse, so I soon got rather attached to Alister.

The plot, of course, is rather beside the point. Family holiday in Devon, oldest son slightly troubled and younger than his age, mixup with tawdry well-to-do folks, tensions around Graham's guardianship and around his surprise engagement to a fiancee who is none too sure about having her beau so deeply enmeshed in a whole family's problems and affections. Mostly played for laughs, and mostly effective laughs at that. Predictable, of course, and not an absolute favorite, but a very charming, entertaining read. I am now requesting Let Him Die from interlibrary loan so I can see how all the characters were introduced, and how they worked together in solving a murder. I would think it won't be long till we see Clements back in print from one of the several excellent publishers now focused on Golden Age mysteries, but whenever that happens, I do hope they include this one in their batch and don't shunt it aside because no one gets murdered.

I was inspired to read this one—and at least one other book I'll mention soon—because I've been hard at work on both a new batch of authors to add to my main list and, perhaps of more interest overall, a thorough revamping and expansion of my long out-of-date Mystery List (of which you can see the woefully inadequate and outdated current version here). I've not only more than doubled the number of authors on the list, thanks both to having added many, many new authors to the main list since 2016 when I last updated the Mystery List, but also thanks to more in-depth research and the book reviews to be found on the British Newspaper Archive. As I look up lots of titles in order to make the info on the new Mystery List as thorough and complete as possible, I've come to a number of books I just couldn't resist getting my hands on. Bright Intervals being one, and a quite enjoyable one at that.

My obsessive research both on new authors and on mystery writers in particular is thus one reason I haven't got round to reviewing as much as I would like. But rest assured, I am diligently working away behind the scenes, and the payoff will be the much bigger Mystery List, coming "soon". You know how fluid that word often is with me, but I really do plan to finish in the next couple of months…

BETTY TRASK (as ANN DELAMAIN), Mabel Has Mink (1950) & Merry Widows Waltz (1943)

If one researches her books by looking through contemporary reviews and snippets in ads, Betty Trask, who also published as Ann Delamain (as in the case of both books mentioned here), can sound every bit as alluring and glowing with potential as the likes of Dorothy Lambert or Elizabeth Fair. Humorous romances, often with small town or village settings, with eccentric and varied characters—you know these are like opium to me. But having sampled a couple of her books—the first an inexpensive copy found on Abe Books, the second one pursued all the way to the British Library—I have to say, reluctantly (and probably without having given up completely yet), that she's not quite living up to that potential for me.

The blurb for Mabel Has Mink would undoubtedly have pulled me in (and simultaneously annoyed me a bit—see exclamation points), even if it hadn't been virtually the only affordable copy of one of her novels:

Not many writers could rivet the reader's sympathetic attention so closely to a heroine over sixty. [!!!]

But Ann Delamain does just that. Mabel, with a forcefulness and vitality years behind her age dominates the villagers and keeps her two sisters firmly up to the standards of "good" families in which all three had formerly been domestically employed. The story is concerned with Paddy Howland, whom Mabel, in service with the Howland family, had practically brought up. For him she would—and did, make every sacrifice.

The blurb goes on to reveal most of the plot developments, but I'll cut it off on the off chance that anyone actually comes across a copy (but yes, Paddy is as selfish and irritating as even this brief mention makes him sound). 

In short, this is a sort of tragicomic, 1950s precursor to Keeping Up Appearances, with Mabel Barter as a sixty-something aunt of Hyacinth Bucket. It's difficult (especially for an American) to grasp all of the implied or suggested class differentiations that Mabel recognizes, but it's clear that Mabel sees herself as considerably more genteel than the two sisters she lives with, not to mention the rest of the villagers in Ringerton—first because the family she was in service with was such a very superior one, but also due to the fact that she was soon advanced to the more prestigious position of nurse/governess. (Scholars interested in class distinctions could do worse than perusing this novel.)

Betty Trask (aka Ann Delamain)

The novel describes what happens when her former charge comes back into Mabel's life with a possibly shady young wife whose money never seems to run out, and Mabel becomes obsessed with her dear boy once again, and just as determined as ever to keep him on the straight and narrow and hold him to the old-fashioned standards she still associates with her upper-class employers. There are certainly some amusing and entertaining moments, though I'm not sure Mabel (any more than Hyacinth Bucket herself) is able to entirely "rivet the reader's sympathetic attention"—she's generally amusing, but also a bit exhausting and (like Hyacinth) hardly a person one would want to endure having tea with! But it's also true that I couldn't stop reading till the end, because it really wasn't clear how this atypical plot was going to resolve itself. In the end, though, I would say that it was pleasant and highly readable, but not a book to inspire joyous re-reads.

Trask/Delamain's writing was charming enough, however, that another not-very-informative blurb ("A story of refugees who tried to bring the sunshine, the laughter, gaiety, and music of Old Vienna to a small English country town") forced me to track another of her novels, Merry Widows Waltz, all the way to the British Library… 

Over the years, sampling various less-than-addictive forgotten titles run across in my research, I've gradually determined the need for a unique subcategory of middlebrow novels, though I'm afraid I haven't a very snappy name for it yet. The "Pleasant Enough if You're Snowbound in a Remote Hotel with No WiFi and No Other Books (and No Imminent Murders to Solve)" moniker is perhaps a bit clunky, but it does capture the gist of the feelings such books inspire.

Merry Widows Waltz, for which I had held out high hopes based on that blurb, seems to fit this category (PEIYSIARHWNWANOB(ANIMTS) for short), as have a few other books sampled recently. (I should note right from the start that I didn't finish reading this one—I got about halfway before getting distracted by more enticing reads, so I don't claim this as any kind of definitive review, only a report of my experience.)

A light-hearted wartime village comedy focused on (presumably Jewish, but only presumably—see below) Austrian refugees from Hitler was, in retrospect, probably unlikely to fully pan out—though I wrote here a while back about Rose Allatini's surprising success at drawing a joyful, life-affirming humor from the situations of Jewish refugees in her delightful Family from Vienna (1941). I might have been unfairly expecting a duplicate of that pleasure here. 

Trask's tale centers on two widowed sisters, Toni Wessler and Anna Sieding, arrived in the small town of Pinsford from relative wealth and sophistication in Vienna. Anna is self-absorbed and superficial and on the hunt for a new husband, while Toni is more sensitive and responsible and tries to smooth over the disruptions caused by Anna and make the best of things (they might almost be Susan Scarlett characters). Toni's husband was dead of a heart attack just before the war began, while if there was a reference to the cause of Anna's loss, I seem to have missed it, but neither are overly distressed by their loss ("Toni put on a touch of the scent she had always used when she was married to her Siegfried, whose greatest value as a husband was his tact in ceasing, at just the right moment, to be one"). They are, however, distressed by their less affluent position in London, taken in (supposedly as secretaries, but work is, shall we say, not in the forefront) by a fellow immigrant, the formidable Hélène Moore, who years before had had the foresight to marry a wealthy Englishman and set up as the gracious lady of the manor.

The two widows have the expected difficulties settling into English village life and English cultural norms, and manage to arouse in turn antagonism, light scandal, and more than one of the local beaus. It sounds delightful, I know, and it truly is pleasant enough, but overwritten and overly wordy—Trask may have been under pressure to keep up her quota of books under both her Delamain pseudonym and her real name, amidst the pressures of wartime life, and it often felt like she was, to paraphrase Truman Capote being bitchy about Jack Kerouac, not so much writing as typing—feverishly, perkily, but ultimately without much direction or sufficient interest. As a side point, I have to wonder if publishers during WWII, with paper shortages and all, insisted on looooooooooooonnngggg paragraphs? Walls of words in tiny print—I've noticed the depressing tendency before, and it here certainly affected my level of interest.

I found it a bit difficult to really care for the characters here as well, and part of that might stem from their bewildering and invisible background. It feels as though the author specifically wanted to avoid any suggestion that the widows (or Hélène herself) might be Jewish, though it's hard to imagine what else they could possibly be. They seem unlikely to have engaged in passionately anti-Nazi political activism either. And yet they are clearly refugees, having left many of their glamorous belongings beyond when hastily leaving the country. They give the impression of having left the country because the Nazis were just a bit too gauche for their taste, or because in wartime they were having difficulty obtaining the best kind of streudel… It seems the author is trying to have her, er, streudel and eat it too—use the then-familiar trope of refugees adapting to new situations, but carefully obscure any of the trauma that would have put them in the situation in the first place. She wanted frivolous, silly, superficial refugees with no worries but finding fun and romance, and as a result, the characters don't ever seem as real or alive as even a middlebrow comedy would reasonably require them to be.

That said, if I had been unexpectedly snowbound etc., and Merry Widows Waltz the only entertainment available, I would undoubtedly have been quite content to finish it and enjoy it. With lots of other of enticing books breathing down my neck, though, I moved on to other things and opted not to worry how it all turned out (more or less happily, I'm sure).

Despite my luke-warm feelings here, I do have one more Trask title (under her own name this time) among my British Library treasures—Only the Best (1935) is set in a department store—shades of Babbacombe's, I fervently hope?

I have to note that Andrew Hall has created a fascinating webpage to share his research on Trask here, and I owe grateful thanks to him as well for discovering in the process that Trask and Delamain were one and the same author—until he emailed me his findings, I had two separate entries for them. One fact Andrew discusses on his page is that, as obscure as Trask's own books have become today, a book award was established in her name in 1984, the Betty Trask Prize, and is still awarded to this day, including to some prestigious and recognizable authors whom Andrew mentions (though he also notes that the Society of Authors, who administer the prize, have long ignored the criteria she specified). But at least her name lives on. Even if her books don't…

"I've had a lot of bother with you myself": ELLA MONCKTON, August in Avilion (1940)

"Don't you remember she called me a fool when I married you?''

"You probably were then," Tim agreed. "I've had a lot of bother with you myself."

Seventeen years after disowning her niece, surly Aunt Amabel has a change of heart, seeing what a success Jane Gates has made of her marriage to Tim, a once starving artist who is now making a good living for Jane and their four children. Aunt Amabel's amends amount to leaving Jane her old family home, a sizeable but ramshackle and long-neglected house called Avilion, on the (apparently fictional?) Perra Cove in Cornwall, near the town of Camford. Practically as soon as she informs Jane of her legacy, Aunt Amabel conveniently keels over, and Jane, with characteristic determination, decides she'll overcome the obvious drawbacks and make a summer home there for her family (at least if she can rid herself of the Pollitts, the house's caretakers, "a couple of trolls" who feel the property doesn't properly belong to Jane).

As some of you will have already guessed, this sets us up for a fun family holiday story not unlike (if perhaps not as polished as) Ruby Ferguson's Apricot Sky, which as you know I particularly love. Tim remains stuck in London on a decorating gig for most of the novel, but in the meantime we come to know their children—Jeremy, Eleanor, Michael, and Jennifer—who have clearly been raised in laid-back artistic style, but who are mainly level-headed and responsible, if vividly imaginative. Arthur Royston, a friend of Jeremy's frequently neglected by his squabbling parents, soon arrives, along with Benjie, former nurse and now Jane's trusty right hand woman. Later, it becomes still more of a house party, as Hilda Morris, Jane's diva friend, grown bored with her own artist husband, arrives in a snit, along with Nils, a writer seeking inspiration in a nearby shack, and Jane's stodgy, judgmental brother Peter, loathed by the children for his philistine sportiness and intolerance. Then there's Robin Oakley, grandson of Aunt Amabel's solicitor, and infatuated with Jane from the moment he greets her at the train station. 

What follows is a perfectly charming, often funny, and very eventful holiday story, including a dramatic fire rescue, traumatic diving lessons, a possible haunting, thunderstorms, a backyard brawl over Hilda, and neighborhood scandals launched by the vicar's wife ("In a few plain words, Alfred, those people living at Avilion House are NUDISTS!"). Oh, and of course there's the children's games on the theme of Camelot, in which all the characters find themselves, knowingly or not, cast in prominent roles (Peter—unknowingly—as Mordred, of course). If it's sometimes a bit rough around the edges and unfocused, meandering from one event to the next with very little overarching plot, you know me well enough to know that's not a problem for me. In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I did that thing where you start rationing the remaining pages to make a book last longer. It still didn't last long enough. This one will definitely go on my list to re-read at some point when my world needs a bit of brightening.

The only scene I felt might startle modern readers was one in which all the children are reported to be smoking cigarettes as they plot their next move, to which Jane replies only "Little beasts! I hope they're sick." Naturally, the children are gloriously unsupervised most of the time as well, in keeping with the times and the conventions of children's fiction (but what fun would it be to read about well-supervised kids?!).

Ella Monckton seems to have published mostly children's fiction, often for very young children but also including the part-school girls' story Left Till Called For (1937), the most readily available of her books (and quite pleasant if not particularly remarkable—I read that one before setting my sights on August at the BL). August in Avilion seems to have been marketed more as an adult novel, and contains some slightly more adult concerns and focus on adult relationships, but I'd say it really falls, mood-wise, more into the realm of children's fiction, and indeed I've only just discovered that it appears to be a sort of sequel to one of Monckton's earlier children's titles, The Gates Family (1934), described as set in "the Bohemian household of an artist in Kensington." Food for thought for the next trip to the British Library!

I haven't thoroughly researched Monckton yet, but a web search revealed she was the wife of artist and illustrator Clifford Webb (who illustrated many of her books). They seem to have lived in Kensington themselves, so one wonders how much she is playing with real-life events in these books. One can only hope their real life was anywhere close to as cheerful as their fictional lives.

I seem to have a definite affinity for "adult" novels written by children's authors. Noel Streatfeild's Susan Scarlett novels, E. Nesbit's The Lark, not to mention Rumer Godden, Kitty Barne, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Making of a Marchioness, Richmal Crompton, Eleanor Farjeon's Miss Granby's Secret, and indeed even Ruby Ferguson, whose pony stories have a lingering fame—all authors best known for children's writing who have given me great fun in books they wrote for grownups. It's almost a subgenre of its own, which perhaps deserves more attention…

"They sinned. Need one say more?": ELEANOR FARJEON, Miss Granby's Secret (1941)

[Another review from my archives which never got published here. This one I was definitely holding off on publicizing until we could confirm rights and move forward on reprinting it. It's one of my all-time favorite discoveries, and I hope someone else will get round to reprinting it soon.] 

How much did Aunt Addie know?

How much did she feel?

I wouldn't usually begin a review with the final two lines of a novel, but in this case they're uniquely appropriate, and not at all a spoiler, since this entire clever, unexpectedly satisfying novel is clearly about—as well as leaving open to each reader's interpretation—just how much Aunt Addie did know.

Aunt Addie is better known to the world at large as Adelaide Granby, the fabulously successful author of 49 volumes of Victorian purple prose—gushing, melodramatic romantic fiction. Upon her death in 1912, flowers and cards pour in, including one particularly lavish set "From Stanislaw", whom her independent-minded, suffragette grand-niece Pamela confidently asserts to have been "darling Aunt Addie's Grande Passion." 

Rather to Pamela's surprise, she also inherits both Aunt Addie's childhood home and a stack of secret papers, which includes both diaries from Aunt Addie's youth and her first novel, written long ago when she was only 16 and inspired by the love of her life, entitled The Bastard of Pinsk. ("Bastard", 16-year-old Adelaide was convinced, referred to "A very noble Hero of Royal Blood"—she is gracious enough to provide a glossary of terms, which also includes "Pimp", "An exquisite Young Gentleman of Fashion", and "Wore", a woman "who has been worn by Life".)

We, the reader, explore these documents along with Pamela, as well as her conversations with Alicia Linton, Adelaide's old governess who aided and abetted her romance, now residing in a Home for Gentlewomen in Surbiton, and Ada Dancey, daughter of Adelaide's maid and butler, who will play an important role in the unraveling of Aunt Addie's secret (if unravelled it be), to try to find the real-life source of Adelaide's romantic sensibility.

Now, despite some very enticing contemporary reviews of this book, when I saw that it included a 200-page novel-within-a-novel, an attempt at a bodice-ripper by a young girl with a clearly limited understanding of just how bodices get ripped, I confess I had a distinct sinking feeling. I don't typically get on well with novels within novels to begin with (even the universally praised Magpie Murders proved too distracting for me), and I feared that the Young Visiters-type humor would wear thin in much less than 200 pages, however intriguing I found the surrounding narrative from Pamela's perspective. But I have to admit that Eleanor Farjeon (well-known for her children's fiction, but rarely acknowledged for her adult novels—more on that below) pulled it off. The Bastard of Pinsk, though certainly containing some wonderful jokes at the expense of poor Adelaide's ignorance (I couldn't stop giggling at the lines "They sinned. Need one say more?" followed by a footnote "Mem: Find out.-A.G.", and the novel ends with three sisters all expecting the departed Bastard's children at any moment—within hours, perhaps, or even after several years!), is actually a rollicking little page-turner, full of drama, secret identities, and plentiful romance. It's quite genuinely entertaining (with perhaps a bit of a satire on Georgette Heyer?), and in the context of the framing plot with Pamela investigating Adelaide's past, it's surprisingly effective.

I don't want to give the impression that the novel is entirely comic, either. Its structure might evoke A. S. Byatt's Possession, while it's perspective is a curious melding of The Young Visiters and Elizabeth Taylor's Angel, with more than a hint of the nostalgia of Ruby Ferguson's Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary. And yet it ends up producing effects all its own—humor at the expense of Addie's teenage romanticism and ignorance is leavened by a surprisingly touching story told in her naïve way; the acidity that Taylor brought to her portrayal of a silly writer of tortured romances is here rendered as a compassionate attempt to understand an oversheltered Victorian girl's experience of love; and the nostalgia for a simpler time that Farjeon must have intended as part of her 1941 novel's appeal (the brief author bio at the end notes that Miss Granby's Secret was written in a bomb shelter in London) is also undercut by the thoroughly modern Pamela's advocacy of progressive causes (initially the Vote, then others once that is achieved) and her gobsmacked horror at how sheltered and smothered Aunt Addie had been. 

I love novels that can't quite be nailed down. This book is sentimental, yet brutally honest, nostalgic for and horrified by the sentiments of the past, romantic and political, hilarious and poignant, all at the same time. I couldn't begin to say what perspective ends up dominant, as I imagine it could well be quite different for different readers. And as to how much Aunt Addie knew and felt, and whether Stanislaw really was a "Grande Passion", each reader will ultimately have to decide that for themselves as well. I could see the novel triggering some fascinating discussions of what makes a love "real" and how much one really needs to know to experience it…

One final quote, from the opening of The Bastard of Pinsk, which I found doubly humorous because, though clearly a joke involving Addie's ignorance of certain words, it might read rather like a news story about any number of contemporary politicians: 

These beauties were the wards and heirs of their great-uncle, Lord Tarletan of Braddon Hall and elsewhere. Lord Tarletan was a well-known lecher in London, where he enjoyed a wide and broad-minded acquaintance covering every class of society, from pimps to M.Ps.

I often seem to find that authors better known for children's books turn out to be surprisingly entertaining authors of novels for grownups. Margery Sharp, E. Nesbit, Ruby Ferguson, Noel Streatfeild, Verily Anderson, just among those we've reprinted, plus the likes of Rumer Godden, Dodie Smith, and doubtless numerous others I'm forgetting, all wrote entertaining novels for adults as well as their often more famous children's books. So I've meant to get round to Farjeon's adult novels for a long time now. She was quite well-known for her children's books (largely, if I'm not mistaken, for younger children), but also published a number of novels, particularly during World War II, for whatever reason. She was also, as many of you may know, the daughter of a major Victorian novelist, Benjamin Farjeon, and the sister of prolific mystery writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.

[Sadly, since drafting this review, I've got hold of several more of Farjeon's novels for grownups, and the magic has not yet repeated itself. Secret manages a delicate balance of themes, as mentioned above, but the others I've sampled have tended more toward coyness or cutesyness. This one, however, remains one to treasure.]

"Murder will be committed in this house": MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY, The Two Miss Spreckles (1946)

[Before getting on (finally) with a new review, I wanted to apologize for disappearing the past few weeks. There was a lot going on, both good and bad. Everything is fine with me, but in the busy-ness of it all blogging just sort of slipped down my list of priorities. I should also say that I am well aware that we are very much past any expected deadline for an announcement of new Furrowed Middlebrow titles. This was initially due to the usual issues that can arise in publishing—contract finalizations, the complexities of the project we were working on, etc.—but has now very sadly been extended indefinitely by a personal tragedy faced by Rupert at Dean Street Press. Some things are more important than work, even when that work involves preparing lovely books to be enjoyed by wonderful readers, but we are sorry for keeping you all hanging. In lieu of an announcement, however, I hope to at least get back to providing new reviews here and there...]

"We are getting on nicely, aren't we, Euphemia?"

"No. Murder will be committed in this house before we have finished with our paying-guests, or my name is not Euphemia Speckles."

Mabel Barnes-Grundy wrote in the neighborhood of two dozen light, mostly humorous, mostly romance-themed novels between the beginning of the 20th century and 1946, when this, her final novel, appeared. And I'm ashamed to say that although many of the earlier books are out of copyright in the U.S. and readily available online, I've not read any of those, because I was so obsessed, for the past several years, with getting hold of two of her final, wartime novels—Paying Pests (1941) and The Two Miss Spreckles (1946). Of the latter a review told me it was about two middle-aged sisters in Bath taking in boarders seeking haven from the war (much to the horror of the older, stodgier sister). Of the former, I knew nothing but the obvious clue in the title and that it too was set during the war. Now, thanks to our British Library visits, I'm happy to say that I've finally read the latter and sampled the first few chapters of the former. (For anyone interested, a third MBG novel published during the war, Mary Ann and Jane (1944), is actually set in the 19th century and so was of less passionate interest, though it may well come onto my radar down the road.)

Poor Unity Speckles, the younger of the two titular sisters in The Two Miss Spreckles, has long lived in the shadow and under the authority of the imposing Euphemia, though despite this there is genuine affection between the sisters. As so often in these sorts of stories, we learn that Unity's one chance at romance—a man with the unfortunate name of Onions (jokes about the Speckles/Onion union producing shallots as offspring)—was stifled many years ago by Euphemia and their mother, and they have lived in stately, if slightly decaying, conservative glory in Bath's Royal Crescent.

Mabel must have loved that
her publisher misspelled
the title of Mary Ann and Jane

But as the novel begins, a combination of Unity's frustration with her drab existence and the poking and prodding of young Jennifer Warwick, great-niece of a friend of the family, trying to stir the sisters up to their wartime responsibilities, causes them—much against Euphemia's instincts—to make the momentous decision to take in lodgers as an alternative to evacuee children (a similar motivation to that of characters in Dorothy Lambert's The Stolen Days, which I discussed a while back). As a result, the Misses Speckle are soon uneasily providing accommodation to the argumentative Miss Poldyke (nicknamed by neighbors "the War-horse"), the fluttery Mrs. Moorfen ("the Glow-worm"), and fashion conscious Mrs. Nimmits ("the Peacock"), each of whom present unique challenges.

When I started reading, I was a bit uncertain of the book, even after years of looking forward to it. Something about the tone didn't seem right—maybe Mabel was a bit cranky writing it (she was in her late 70s and the fatigues of war must have been wearing, so she was certainly justified)—and there was some uneasy humor on a couple of occasions—wishing glibly for people to have mood-improving stays in concentration camps, for example, to make them better appreciate their situations (at a time, surely, when MBG and her publisher should have known enough about the camps to know they weren't funny in any context). But once the scene and the characters were established, with Euphemia almost too well established as cranky and sometimes even a bit close to deranged, and the paying guests have moved in, it began to flow rather irresistibly and I had to surrender my more critical standards and just enjoy the ride. It also ultimately flirts a bit too much with sentimentality for my taste, so it's not an absolute favorite, but it was nevertheless a very pleasant wartime frolic.

Barnes-Grundy obviously had quite an interest in hotels and boarding-houses as settings. In addition to these two novels from the war, at least two earlier works, Sally in a Service Flat (1934) and Private Hotel—Anywhere (1937), would seem to have similar settings. I thought it was odd, nevertheless, that she would have used the "paying guests/pests" theme twice in her wartime novels. Reviewing the opening of Paying Pests, however, it turns out that while The Two Miss Speckles looks at the theme from the standpoint of the reluctant hosts bringing strangers into their home, Paying Pests shifts the perspective and features a young woman narrator evacuating with family members to paid quarters in quieter settings, no doubt encountering discomforts and complications living in other people's homes. It will pretty certainly be on my wish list to get hold of again should I make a return visit to the British Library…

And I do think I'll have to get round to sampling one of MBG's earlier novels now. Perhaps A Thames Camp (1902), described as "a wife's gossipy diary of outings on the Thames and at the seaside"? Hmmmm…

"Steal it out of the chaos": DOROTHY LAMBERT, The Stolen Days (1940)

"It's very unsettling," sighed Christina. "One really doesn't know what to do about things just now."

"What sort of things?" inquired Angela.

"Well, the Flower Show, for one thing. And William is so proud of the dahlias, it would be a dreadful blow if anything were to happen—"

"Oh, dahlias!" retorted Angela scornfully. "My dear Christina, what do dahlias amount to? Now if the Tennis Tourmanet at Cairnderry were blotted out, that would be a rotten blow."

Christina Monroe is the sort of joyless, incompetently bossy busybody who should, for the good of all, be parachuted into the desolate expanse of Antarctica in her nightgown. Or, as her mother (!) memorably puts it at one point, "One of these days someone will murder you, and then we shall have a little peace."

Christina, along with her brother Simon, live with their mother at Culsharg, an impractically large, drafty house in the Scottish countryside. Christina manages the house in her own unique way, while widowed Mrs. Monroe has been driven by Christina's stubborn belief in her mental and physical infirmity into sequestering herself in two large rooms upstairs—only occasionally putting in a hand to influence things when Christina's influence grows too disastrous for everyone involved.

Not too surprisingly, the beginning of World War II (frivolously under discussion in the quotation above) is one of the occasions when Mrs. Monroe must step in to fix Christina's mess. Christina decides that, at all costs, Mrs. Monroe must be kept from the inconvenience of evacuees, so she instead invites long-alienated extended family—out of the frying pan, indeed! Already in the house are Christina's long-suffering brother Simon, Mrs. Munroe's granddaughter, Angela, and her husband Michael—both frivolous and irresponsible, eager to get back to the party scene in India, but blocked by the war, Mrs Johnston the cook (a particular friend of Mrs Munroe's), Effie, the maid, and William, the gardener. Under Christina's master plan, new arrivals soon include Elspeth and Andrew Meiklejohn, Mrs Munroe's sister and brother-in-law ("distinctly a blight"), and their daughter Aily, a classic marriage-hungry Lambert joke butt; Judith Savile, another granddaughter invited with her neglected young son, Timothy; and Jill Meredith, a cheerful, practical young woman send by Judith in her place to take care of Timothy and give Judith her freedom from motherhood. Naturally, disruption and discord result, almost everyone behaves badly, and, as the "Phony War" drags on filled with anxiety and anticlimax, Mrs. Monroe (finally) takes charge and, shall we say, cleans house in classic diva style.

I had a blast with this novel and had trouble putting it down. It's very much in funny, "early days of wartime" mode, but it's also got a rather darker, biting edge to it. Mrs Monroe, though giving the ghastly houseguests their due (not unlike Odysseus) and bringing about happy endings where deserved, is a bit of a battle-axe herself, and her attitudes toward her family may make her a bit of a rough heroine to love wholeheartedly (how did her family get so awful, one might wonder, and does she not bear any responsibility for it?), but she's certainly entertaining to watch in action if you don't take it too seriously. It's also difficult to have a lot of sympathy for the family, and when we see Christina self-righteously herding everyone to the cellar at the sound of a siren (which turns out to be a lonely cow making her desires known), it's easy to see why Mrs. Monroe might joke about her getting murdered. (It's also interesting to note that here, as in many other wartime writings, the decision of whether to retreat to the shelter or stay cheerfully in bed is one that reveals depth of character—the terrible people scurry for shelter, the nobler ones laugh it off.)

By the way, the title of the novel comes from Jill's philosophy in dealing with the uncertainties of war, which struck me as rather appropriate to today's uncertainties:

"Well, there's no time at present," she explained, in a halting fashion as if she were trying to settle a problem in her own mind. "The days come and go, but somehow there is no definite to-morrow. You can't say 'To-morrow we'll do—oh, anything,' but if to-morrow comes and is a day that you can do something and enjoy it—why, that's what I call a 'stolen day'. I seize on it and hold on to it—steal it out of the sort of chaos that the weeks have become."

Here's wishing you all lots of stolen days in 2023!

A miss is as good as—oh, whatever: Two disappointments

The search for treasure among "lost" authors is always a hit or miss process, even when you've coveted the books for a long time. You win some, you lose some, but I feel I should get better about documenting even the misses, in case someone somewhere someday is searching for information about them, so here, on a slightly downbeat note, are a couple of books from our recent library visits that, vanishingly rare as they surely are, were hardly worth unearthing.

On the other hand, ouch! This first one really hurts.

P. Y. (Phyllis Yvonne) BETTS, French Polish (1933)

I struggled with this one for longer than I usually would, trying hard to like it, before giving up 70 or so pages in. This was genuinely my #1 "Most Wanted" book for our library visits, and I felt sure it would be a winner. The first reference to it I came across, quite a few years ago, described it as "a funny and sharply observed novel about a girls’ finishing school", which sounds like it was written specifically for me, and a 2005 article by Christopher Hawtrey in Slightly Foxed (see here, paywall), which I only discovered more recently, described the author's pleasure in reading the book in the British Library. Betts is also somewhat known for her only other published work, a memoir called People Who Say Goodbye (1989), published a remarkable 56 years after her debut.

All of which is to show how biased I was in the book's favor when I started reading, to give you an idea of my sorrow when it turned out that French Polish and I are simply not a match, and to show clearly, as always, that different readers will have different reactions and I don't pretend that my view is any more legit than anyone else's. 

The novel, published when Betts was only 24 years old, is, as described, set in a Swiss finishing school (the title stemming from the fact that the girls are particularly at work polishing their knowledge of French). It is—seemingly irresistibly—populated by an array of young women who are, in turn, sarcastic, witty, brilliant, horny, battling pudginess, rebellious, and, in at least one case, offering up highly questionable Latin translations, as well as several mistresses with similarly varied personalities. The girls are primarily British, with a couple of virulently racist Americans, and the two described as "the Brazilians" are, it turns out, not from South America but merely, according to their classmates, living incarnations of Angela Brazil characters.

There are some brilliant descriptions, and some genuine chuckles:

Madame spoke with energy, and her cheeks shook a little as she talked. From time to time small drops of water shot out of her mouth, described shining parabolas under the lamplight, and lighted here and there upon the table. Penelope and her plate were beyond the range of this bombardment, which she enjoyed watching.

There's also quite a lot of discussion of race, some just genuine curiosity on the part of sheltered young women, some horrifyingly racist. It's clearly in part intended to be a wry examination of racial attitudes, and although there are some cringe inducing scenes, in all likelihood Betts meant to satirize the racist attitudes rather than propagate them. You have to give her credit for stampeding forward onto ground angels would have feared to tread. The arrival of the school's first African student, Linga Longa, and her interaction with a well-to-do guest is at times funny, though often merely flinch-inducing, and also too witty by half even for those who aren't put off by its racial parody. Publishing-wise, I have to be frank that I wouldn't touch this book with a ten foot pole in the climate of the 2020s, but as a reader that isn't even my main problem with it. 

It's all very, very clever. It seems to have been written by a clever adolescent girl with quite a lot of brilliant observational skill and wit. I think the trouble for me is that adolescent wit, however clever and even (occasionally) giggle inducing, tends to wear after a while. It's all clever. Every single line is clever. Relentlessly clever. Exhaustingly clever. Tediously clever. One wonders if Betts didn't write another book for more than half a century because she was simply worn out. It seems certain that she herself must have found these characters hilarious, and I have no doubt there would be a few appreciative readers for the book if it were more readily available, but alas—and certainly not from lack of trying—I'm not one of them.

A. R. [AGNES RUSSELL] & R. K. [ROSE KIRKPATRICK] WEEKES, Clairefontaine (1941)

I didn't have nearly as much emotional investment in this book as I did in French Polish, but I did hope it would turn out to be a jewel. I've had it on my "consider" list ever since coming across a snippet review calling it an "adventurous romance about girl secretary to rich divorced English bibliophile in Ruritania. Agreeably told with light holiday atmosphere." I was ambivalent about the Ruritania part, but I thought just perhaps—if approached in a sufficiently tongue-in-cheek way by the Weekes sisters—it might be up my alley. 

It started off rather promisingly. Hyacinth Carey (I couldn't read her name without a grimacing Patricia Routledge flashing into my head, but I tried to get past that) has lost her secretarial job due to her boss having poisoned his wife (!!), and is finding it hard to find new work due to her association with him. As the novel begins, she tells her mother about an unsuccessful job interview in which a German employer had tried to kiss her:

"I hope you cuffed him?"

"No-o-o. Just went away."

"Then I hope you went with dignity!"

"No-o-o. Not very. Fell over a broom on the stairs."

"Noodle!" said Mrs. Carey, "you would."

Okay, that's promising, right? Finally, an agency calls her with a job with one Frances Ashley Hope in the fictional (and utterly implausible) country of Neuberg. This turns out to have been a misunderstanding—agency assumed employer was a women, employer assumed it was clear he wanted a male secretary. Hyacinth discovers that Francis (not Frances) has been in the papers for having seduced a woman and refused to marry her, after which she committed suicide (women get quite a raw deal in the background of this novel). Both sides agree to make the best of things, with Hyacinth wearing her frumpiest clothes and geekiest glasses to prevent any attempted seduction—she utters to herself the puzzling line "I look as if I went every day to the B.M.", which lost me—anyone know what this means? [I can't believe that in a post in which I actually mention the British Library, I didn't put it together that this reference was to the British Museum (former home of the British Library)! Thank you to the commenters below who pointed it out and reminded me of the chilly temperatures of the reading rooms.]

The descriptions of Neuberg are ludicrous—"a little state which had remained a century behind the times, where the peasantry still wore the silver chains and velvet jackets of their ancestors, and where the Prince's rule was absolute and no one knew what was going to happen from one day to the next." And nestled right in the middle of a Europe already seething with Hitler and Mussolini? Right. But I was still willing to attempt to suspend disbelief, until the story shifted to a young Brit Hyacinth met at the border and his hopeless love affair and competition with another suitor who … and then I fell asleep. I'm sure it all comes together in the end, but after reading 60 pages, I gave up, bored to tears and ready to get back to Dorothy Lambert. 

I can't help wondering if any of the Weekes' other romantic adventures would work better for me (though the Ruritanian theme seems to recur in many of them, and I may simply be allergic to the pollen of Ruritania), but this one, at least, was another dud. Alas.

So there it is. All that glitters isn't gold, even at the British Library.