Category Archives: Murder Mystery Matters

Feb 26 2022

Ngaio Marsh: ‘Enter a Murderer’

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It was a shock to re-read ‘Enter a Murderer’ (1935) by Ngaio Marsh after 15 years and find that I didn’t like Roderick Alleyn.

Obviously I hugely admire Marsh’s body of work and I suppose I’m now so used to the wonderful Patrick Malahide version of the Chief Inspector on TV, that I have superimposed him on any of these stories that I now read.  This can work with the later, more mature stories.  But ‘Enter a Murderer’ is only the second in the series.  I also decided to re-read the first one, ‘A Man Lay Dead’ (1934), to get started again on the series, and I was definitely in for an unpleasant surprise.

The earliest Albert Campion I adore.  The earliest Lord Peter Wimsey likewise.  In fact I probably prefer them to their later more adult and responsible selves.  I love their craziness and ‘joie de vivre’, their gabbiness and self-confidence.  But Roderick Alleyn in his early incarnation – eek!  I found myself almost embarrassed for the poor chap.  He seemed fey instead of charming, condescending instead of self-confident, even slightly bullying and manipulative at times towards his minions, and as for his interaction with women – double eek!  I felt like searching out his future spouse Agatha Troy in the pages of books yet to come and saying ‘Run!  Run like the wind!’

It was doubly unfortunate that I was re-reading this book for our Classic Crime Club (at Bromley House Library in Nottingham) just after we’d discussed ‘Swan Song’ by Edmund Crispin.  I’d also read that one before but I can read Crispin any time and get a kick out of it.  The settings were similar – Crispin’s with opera singers at an Oxford theatre, Marsh’s with actors in a London theatre.  The fact that Marsh called this ‘the Unicorn case’ in the Foreword gave me hope that this might prove magical and exciting.  But of course it was only because the setting was to be the Unicorn Theatre!  Well, perhaps that disappointment reflected what was to come.  Crispin’s story was silly but sparkling.  In comparison it was very easy to get rather bored and bogged down in Marsh.

Ngaio Marsh

Plot

The background is dripping with hatred and blackmail.  I won’t go into any detail.  One problem with reading Classic Crime fiction is that we are so familiar with all the main methods of murder in the many subsequent novels that stories from the Thirties can look not just clichéd, but like a wrinkly cliché with long grey whiskers supporting itself on a walking frame.  We now know that the moment someone steps onto a stage that a heavy object from above will fall on them (usually a chandelier) and that any prop knife or gun will turn out out to be real.  Enough said.

Setting

I got a bit fed up of all the back-stage specialist knowledge, although I do appreciate that Marsh was writing this partly out of nostalgia for the theatre when she was back in New Zealand caring for her father after her mother’s death.   The difference in her level of skill between the early rather clunking descriptions of England and the English and her later stories, especially those featuring New Zealand, is obvious.

Characters

When the main suspects are actors you never know whether they’re telling the truth or acting their butts off – handy for the author but increasingly tedious for the reader.  Every time the Inspector interviews yet another flighty/drunk/egocentric narcissist, you think ‘Here we go again, they’re lying throughout their highly-polished teeth.’

I was amazed to realise that most of the main characters are in their mid-20s.  Several sounded like raddled old roués!   And what was Stephanie thinking in her dalliance with the repellent Surbonadier?   A problem all murder mystery writers have is that when a murder victim has got to be so unpleasant that at least one person would risk hanging to kill him or her, the victim has also had to be nice and attractive enough in the past for people to have wanted to hang out with them, have affairs with them, etc, in the first place.

And don’t talk to me about Nigel Bathgate the journalist.  The poor sap was bad enough in the first book.  And here he is again, in an even more unlikely role as Alleyn’s right hand man until, thank goodness, DS Fox takes over in later books (despite Alleyn calling him ‘Foxkin’ ).  The cigar-chomping impresario Jacob Saint was sufficiently terrifying (even if he does have a footman called ‘Mincing’!!) .  There’s old Susan Max the actress, Felix Gardener the star, the men and women behind the scenes – no shortage of suspects.  Could Surbonadier even have committed suicide and framed his main rival?

Roderick Alleyn

Alleyn’s appearance – his face is described as “winged”, ie. mouth, nostrils, eyes all slanting upwards – not bad for a 41 year old.  Although that could sound as though he’s had several sessions with an over-enthusiastic plastic surgeon.  (Perhaps there’s a tiny version of RA walking around made out of the excess skin, like in the famous Joan Rivers’ joke?)

Everyone says Alleyn has a marvellous memory at the beginning, but then later on he says his memory is “filthy”.  Is this Marsh reflecting her father’s character in the Inspector?  She says in her autobiography that his memory was notoriously bad and gives striking examples of it.  Her father was an ex-public schoolboy from Dulwich College in England, where the old boys were called Alleynians, after Edward Alleyn the Elizabethan actor who founded the place, thus the Inspector’s name.  And Marsh tells us that it is pronounced ‘Allen’, not ‘Allain’, in her article on Alleyn’s origins. Perhaps Alleyn’s early rather alarming playfulness is a direct reflection of her late Victorian father?  The fact that Alleyn asks Bathgate if he can do shorthand, when Bathgate took shorthand notes for him in the previous novel, is perhaps proof of his “filthy” memory.  (Another proof might be that he twice refers to the name of the murderer in the first book – does he not care about spoilers?!)  He is supposed to be good at mimicking people, and in this story imitates several accents.  He even gave one of his “rare laughs”.  He prefers a pipe to cigarettes.  Startlingly, he says he doesn’t “understand law”.  Er, what job do you do, again?

And then there’s the ‘romance’ – Alleyn’s B-movie dialogue and canoodling with an actress/suspect, despite the fact that he calls all actors “a bit thick”.  He holds Stephanie, the glamorous, in his arms:

“ ‘What’s this?’ he said roughly. ‘I know you’re everything I most deplore – and yet – look at this.  Shall I kiss you?’ “ 

He returns to this later:

“ ‘I would say I hated myself when I held you in my arms.  It would only be half true.  My thoughts were a mixture of grovel and glory.’ “ 

There is also the strange way he does a body search of another actress, almost in a mystical trance!

But I am grateful for one phrase of Alleyn’s that could prove useful.  Instead of getting the “heebie-jeebies” as we might say, he gets the “ooble-boobles”.  That’s great!  I might adopt that.

So, yes, I do normally love Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, and think Ngaio Marsh was astonishingly talented, but in this reading of ‘Enter a Murderer’ her creation has given me a touch of the ooble-boobles.  I stand by my advice:

‘Run, Troy, run!’

I’ve included some more problems with the plot in the NOTES below, which contain Spoilers.

And if you’d like to see a preview of my last book, here is a link:

NOTES

I’ve already read Ngaio Marsh’s ‘Enter a Murderer’ twice so I certainly don’t want to read it a third time to find out whether I’m right about what was wrong!  So forgive me if this is mere nit-picking or forgetful speculation on my part, but, as far as I could tell, these seem to be loopholes and/or gaffes in the plot:

1]  It’s possible, but not at all necessary, that Felix Gardener would not bother looking at the hanging figure and therefore spot it was only a dummy.  Alleyn was taking a heck of a gamble.  And it was highly likely who the body was supposed to be, by a process of elimination, so why couldn’t Gardener have made a correct guess and acted out his role accordingly?

2]  The “threatening letter” that was typed on stage – wouldn’t someone have been able to see that Felix wasn’t merely typing ‘Q’ over and over?  Plus there would have been the typewriter ribbon with the letter on it available to the police from the word go.  Why didn’t they check it?  Gardener wiped the keys clean but didn’t bother about the fact that he’d left evidence of an incriminating letter behind.

3]  As several people in our reading group pointed out, why on earth did the murderer choose a night when a police inspector was at the front of the audience?  Oh well, at least Alleyn had a “busman’s holiday” with a free ticket paid for by the murderer, as he himself concludes!

Apr 24 2021

The Honjin Murders

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THE HONJIN MURDERS

“From the moment I heard the first whispers about the case, I was fascinated…  This was no ordinary murder.  The perpetrator had planned the whole ghastly deed.  What’s more, it was worthy of the label “Locked Room Murder Mystery”… a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point in his or her career.”  (Seishi Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders, 1946).

I’m a member of the Classic Crime Club, a monthly reading group at the historic Bromley House Library in Nottingham. 

Of course we’ve been meeting on Zoom this last year, saying hello to each other from our own homes.  But that hasn’t stopped us going further afield in our reading.  We usually limit ourselves to UK crime fiction from the Golden Age of approximately 1920 to 1950.  But sometimes we’ve delved into fiction from an earlier period or a non-UK setting.  This has included Simenon from France and Rex Stout from the USA, for example.

But probably our furthest global reach so far has been The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo.  This story was originally serialised in Japan in 1946 but only recently translated into English and published in 2019.  The whole group found this book fascinating, especially the extent to which the writer used the classic tropes of British Locked Room mysteries.

Author

Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81) won the first ever Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948 for this book. 

He went on to create seventy seven mysteries featuring the same detective, although sadly only two of them have been translated into English – The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse (Pushkin Vertigo, 2020).

Plot

A newly married couple are killed on their wedding night in the annexe of a family mansion.  A Japanese sword is found embedded in the ground outside, surrounded by snow but no footprints.  Inside the bedroom there is a lot of blood plus bloody fingerprints.  Is it anything to do with a mysterious stranger with only three fingers on one hand who has been seen in the area, or is the reason for the deaths a deeper, darker family secret?

The first person narration was enjoyable, as if Dr Watson is telling us directly about a case of Sherlock Holmes’.  Indeed, the narrator is supposed to be a writer of crime fiction, this time researching ‘true crime’.

Yokomizo is particularly upfront about his favourite British, American and French authors and their influence on him, such as John Dickson Carr.  Having one character, Saburo, with an obsession with Western crime fiction means that discussion of methods of murder from these sources can be easily included in the text.

Japanese Context

As with many Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels in or around the Second World War, one is not immediately presented with wartime conditions. I was astounded by a  throwaway remark about a character being unlucky to be in Hiroshima on the wrong day  – this surely gives a new definition to ‘bad luck’!!  The murders themselves are supposed to take place in the 1930s.

I was engaged by the story throughout and found the details of Japanese life very interesting. The references to Japanese clothes and shoes and various rituals as part of the story were a huge plus, even if it extended to the use of ‘seppuku’, often known as ‘hara-kiri’, the form of suicide by disembowellment.  A different culture certainly provides different methods of grisly death for the use of the GAD writer!

Japanese music is also featured heavily, especially the creepy use of ‘koto’ music and the wire and plectrums used with that particular stringed instrument.  This made me watch some koto music online, which was intriguing and beautiful.

Plot and Motive

There was a major misdirection from the word go, plus several satisfying twists in the plot.  However the motivation of the killer might be rather hard for the modern Western reader to stomach (no pun intended)!  However, I do like a story where practically every sentence could include a clue.

Characters

There are many likeable characters and fortunately there is a very useful Character List at the beginning, in case you get your Ichiyanagis muddled up with your Kubos, the two main families concerned.  I particularly liked Ginzo, the bride’s uncle and patron of Kosuke.  The most irritating character was possibly Suzoku – was she rather stereotyped by the author or was this ground-breaking characterisation at the time?

The Detectives

As with many GAD stories, the official police are a rather negligible presence compared to the private investigator who is often an outsider or eccentric in some way.  This is certainly the case with the young Kosuke Kindaichi, the brilliant private investigator who gets all the glory.

  I was expecting an older detective who would perhaps have people’s respect, so the young Kosuke with his stammering and constant head-scratching was a definite surprise.  He was very much the scruffy but hyper-intelligent student-type.

I really liked him by the end of the book, despite his mannerisms, and wanted to read more.  The character Kosuko Kindaichi has since starred in many films and is now embodied in the form of a statuette awarded to a new unpublished mystery novel each year, like the Edgar in the US.

Conclusion

The Japanese setting gave a new zest to the usual GAD tropes and the author was very  endearing to be so upfront about the Western influences on his fiction.  I would gladly read more of Kosuke’s cases, if only there were more in translation – just one more is not enough!

Mar 31 2021

Children and Masks in Literature

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CHILDREN AND MASKS IN LITERATURE

The subject of home-schooling and the wearing of masks for children has been unavoidable recently.  It reminded me of the experience of the Brontë children, when being raised by their clergyman father Patrick.

When his wife died in 1821, he suddenly became a single parent of six small children.  He had to ask the same questions as many parents today.  How to teach these small people and prepare them for the future?  How to inculcate moral values and encourage healthy relationships?  How to get to know them better – to know what they’re really like?

Lessons from Patrick Brontë

Patrick tells us of an idea he came up with in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. Many years later, was wanting to write the biography of her friend and Patrick’s oldest surviving daughter, Charlotte:

“When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask.” [1]

This startled me when I first read it a few years ago.  Why would wearing a mask make the children more honest and forthcoming?  We tend to associate masks with hiding and disguising.  Would this actually work in drawing the children out?  Judge for yourself.  Patrick continues:

“I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, ‘Age and experience.’  I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell), what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, ‘Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.’  I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman; he answered, ‘By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.’  I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, ‘The Bible.’  And what was the next best; she answered, ‘The Book of Nature.’  I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, ‘That which would make her rule her house well.’  Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, ‘By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.’  I may not have given precisely their words, but I have nearly done so, as they made a deep and lasting impression on my memory.  The substance, however, was exactly what I have stated.” [2]

Perhaps to us these answers from young children sound more like some weird catechism than the free-flowing thoughts of children.  Were they just saying what they thought their clergyman father wanted to hear?  Of course we can’t possibly tell, even if we had been there at the time.  And of course there is the added fact that the Brontë children were in all probability child geniuses, three of whom would go on to write some of the greatest novels in the English language.  Even with our more ‘enlightened’ views in some respects, we might not be quite in their league!  But there is the reminder in the names included in brackets after the girl’s names that they would later feel compelled to write under male names in order to get an audience, in other words, by wearing a masculine mask.

But I was also intrigued by Patrick having a mask lying about the house.  Where was this from?  Had he gone to a masked ball with his young wife in happier days?  It was researching the subject of masked balls for my latest novel Night and Mr Knightley that made me look into the subject in the first place.  What sort of a mask was it – an ordinary black domino mask, or a tribal wooden carving?  Its appearance – and how scary it was – might well have an effect on how confident the children would feel in making their replies.  I was also surprised at the idea of a mask being used to help children become more up front about their real selves.  Was that a realistic expectation?  They would still be looking into their father’s eyes.  They would still have to live with him and their siblings the moment the mask was removed, still be in an adult’s power.

Mrs Gaskell concluded that it was a “curious education which was made by the circumstances surrounding the Brontës.  They knew no other children.  They knew no other modes of thought than what were suggested to them by the fragments of clerical conversation which they overheard in the parlour, or the subjects of village and local interest which they heard discussed in the kitchen.  Each had their own strong characteristic flavour. They took a vivid interest in the public characters, and the local and the foreign as well as home politics discussed in the newspapers.  Long before Maria Brontë died, at the age of eleven, her father used to say he could converse with her on any of the leading topics of the day with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person…. Wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds, were hidden under an enforced propriety and regularity of demeanour and expression, just as their faces had been concealed by their father, under his stiff, unchanging mask.” [3]

Perhaps a good exam question might be: ‘Illustrate the pros and cons of home education for children using the example of the Brontës’!  Gaskell obviously interprets the use of the mask as a symbol of repression.  More useful for them was the overhearing of adult conversation in the home, both of professional clergy and servants, all steeped in local life.  The reading aloud of books and newspapers and family discussion of the issues of the day made for mental stimulation and broadening of outlook.  But just that phrase “they knew no other children” chills our hearts.  Yet look what they became!  Gaskell reminds us of their “wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds” that emerged from this strange process.

A later reference to Charlotte and masks is from her adult experience in Belgium when she is taken to a Carnival, marking the beginning of Lent.  There were masked characters and she was singularly unimpressed:

“The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery.  M. Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks.  It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.” [4]

Hopefully not too traumatised by childhood experience then! I used Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre as a basis for my first Rotic Club murder mystery Murder and Mr Rochester, which of course reflects her great love for the Monsieur Héger who took her to see this parade of masks.

My second Rotic Club novel uses Jane Austen’s novel Emma as a starting point but it is in this one that I make use of the theme of mask-wearing and deception at a masked ball, a trope so loved by Golden Age mystery writers. You can see this reflected in the number of masks on the cover of Night and Mr Knightley!

Warnings from C S Lewis

Almost a hundred years later another Irish writer was making use of the concept of masks in the education of children. 

But the way C S Lewis utilised the wearing of a mask in his first novel Pilgrim’s Regress, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, is very different to the more sanguine and hopeful attitude of Patrick Brontë.  In this allegory, the little boy John is taken from playing in the fields and put into ugly uncomfortable clothes to visit the Steward (clergyman).  He is the local representative of the Landlord (God).  John has to sit still and be very good in the Steward’s big dark stone house.  His parents seem very grave and intimidated there, but at first the old Steward seems jolly and friendly.  He talks to the little boy about fishing and bicycles to the extent that John almost feels normal with him and relaxes.

“But just as the talk was at its best, the Steward got up and cleared his throat.  He then took down a mask from the wall with a long white beard attached to it and suddenly clapped it on his face, so that his appearance was awful.” [5}

The Steward then speaks to John in a sing-song hypnotic voice about how good the Landlord is to let them live on his land.  He gives the little boy a card with lots of rules written in small print: “half of the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing…”  There were also far too many to remember.  But just when John is despairing, the Steward whips the mask off “and looked at John with his real face” and advised him to lie about it all anyway.  He then “popped the mask on his face all in a flash” and threatens John with ending up in a black hole full of snakes and lobsters if he disobeys any of the rules and emphasises the goodness of the Landlord again.  John of course is terrified and doesn’t understand anything else the Steward says, apart from as he leaves when the Steward again takes off the mask and tells him not to bother about it all.

Lewis is here of course reflecting the very mixed messages and awkward teaching that he received as a child at church.  In this allegory, the parents abdicate responsibility for teaching their child about God themselves and instead leave him to the ambiguous moral advice and complex theological teaching of local clergy.  John is later given a little mask to wear at what is effectively the death of his “disreputable Uncle George”, who trembles so much before his eviction (death) that a mask will not stay on him and everyone “had to see his face as it was” which was too dreadful for them and they all looked away.

Later in the story, John as an adult meets Mr Halfways who has a long flowing beard and looks rather like the Steward but John is pleased to see that he doesn’t need a mask because “his face is really like that.”  A caricature of the Steward’s mask is later used by characters who want to mock their religious upbringing.

Lewis went on to use the idea of masks and veils in his final novel Till We Have Faces, in which religious leaders also use masks to hide who they really are to gain power over others, or as a way of transcending the self.  Apparently the original title favoured by Lewis for this book was Bareface, but the final title came from Orual asking near the end of the story concerning the gods: “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” [6]  To be our real selves and speak the truth is the only way we can truly relate to God and others and have meaningful relationships.

Sadly we are living in a time when masks are necessary to protect our health, but it does seem particularly poignant when it is forced on children who are still in the early stages of forming their characters and relationships.  We certainly seem to be ambivalent about mask-wearing, judging from the way they are used in literature, either literally or metaphorically.  Both Patrick Brontë and C S Lewis would have known from their classical and Biblical studies that a mask-wearer is ‘hypokrites’, an actor who wears a mask,

who pretends in public to be someone they aren’t and that Jesus was particularly stern in his warnings to religious and political leaders to avoid this sin against God, the self, and others.

A Cry from Paul Laurence Dunbar

And just as mask-wearing has become compulsory for so many, it is still psychological necessity for those who feel oppressed, who feel the need to hide their true selves from others behind a false public persona because of their gender, race or class. 

This has rarely been expressed more powerfully than by the American Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar at the end of the nineteenth century, in words that tell an uncomfortable truth for children and adults alike:

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!” [7]

Conclusion

At a time of global mask-wearing, Patrick Bronte’s desire that his children should learn to “speak with less timidity” so that he could get to know them better, C S Lewis’ goal that we should not need masks in order to look good because our faces are “really like that”, so that God and others can “meet us face to face” in reality, and Dunbar’s cry for relief to Christ from the pain of the need for a false outer self for protection – all of these are sentiments and stances that we can own today for our children and ourselves, even if we use different methods.  We all long for the one who truly sees us, who calls us forth, who won’t harm us in our vulnerability when we are “barefaced”, but who will meet us with love.

“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.  But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”  (I John 3:2)

Till the Time Without Masks then, Till We Have Faces…

[For more on Jeanette Sears’ latest books, see the WELCOME page on this website or go straight to her Amazon page]

NOTES

[1]  Elisabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, 1857.

[2]  ibid.

[3]  ibid.

[4]  ibid., quoting a letter from Charlotte Bronte, dated March 6, 1843.

[5]  C S Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933.

[6]  C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 1956.

[7] Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘We Wear the Mask’ from Lyrics of a Lowly Life, 1896.

Feb 28 2021

PATRICIA WENTWORTH: ‘MISS SILVER COMES TO STAY’

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“ ‘How can a poor policeman compete?  You can take the village lid off and see how the wheels are going round.  Gladys and Allan are people to you.  You know their relations to the ninth and tenth degree, where I don’t even know they exist!’ “

This is Chief Constable Randal March speaking to an elderly lady who knits and asks questions and observes and deduces and solves murder mysteries before the police.  Is it Miss Marple?  No.  It’s Miss Maud Silver in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1951), the third of the 32 Miss Silver novels.

It’s easy to get tied up in comparing Marple and Silver, but thankfully several other people have already done this, so that’s one less thing on the To Do list [1].  To put it briefly, the two characters appeared almost simultaneously in the late 1920s, with Marple just pipping the post in a short story of 1927 [2] but Silver beating her to novel form in 1928 [3].  Presumably this means that Wentworth’s creation may predate Christie’s in terms of the actual writing.

The Author

Like so many Golden Age authors of detective fiction, the name ’Patricia Wentworth’ was of course a pseudonym.  The ‘Wentworth’ came from the middle name of a stepson who had been killed in the First World War.  In real life, Dora Amy Elles was born in 1877 in Missourie, India, to a British military family – her father was a General and her mother a Lady.

As with many empire children, she was sent back to England to be educated.  She married twice, both times to Lt Colonels called George.  She had one daughter of her own as well as the stepsons.  After her first husband’s death in 1906 she moved to Camberley in Surrey, won a prize for her first novel in 1910 (an astonishing 250 guineas) for a romance of the French Revolution called A Marriage under Terror.

But we have to wait till 1928 for the first book with Miss Silver.  That was Grey Mask, then came a long gap while she experimented with other characters.

It was almost 10 years before The Case is Closed was published (1937), followed more closely by Lonesome Road (1939).

But it was during the Second World War that we see her Miss Silver production rocket, often more than one book a year, so most belong to the 1940s and 50s.  The final one The Girl in the Cellar was published in 1961, the year of Wentworth’s death at the age of 82.

Miss Maud Silver

Miss Maud Silver is a former governess and teacher who runs her own solo detective agency.  She is a reassuring figure from the past who likes to knit and quote Tennyson.  She has her own flat and office, uses business cards and charges fees for her work – a real professional.  She is particularly good at helping the relatively wealthy middle class, injured by lost love, war, theft, or some form of abuse, and sorting out their broken lives.  The books read like an Elizabeth Goudge novel with detection, or an Ethel Lina White story of a woman in jeopardy – but this time people get a spinster knitter to the rescue!

The Plot

Miss Silver Comes to Stay is the sixteenth book in the series.  Miss Silver has planned an innocent trip to see an old school friend in the country, but of course this not how things turn out.  The main character, an attractive middle-aged woman called Rietta Cray, first spots Miss Silver in the local village store. “She looked less like a detective than anyone Rietta could have imagined… the little lady who looked like a governess…” – probably because Miss Silver had indeed enjoyed twenty years “in the scholastic profession” [4].  Inevitably Miss Silver is drawn into solving the mystery of the murder of James Lessiter which is shortly to take place, even though its roots go back twenty five years.  He has inherited Melling House from his mother who previously let distant relative Catherine Welby live in the gate house of the manor and gave her some furniture and precious items – or did she only lend them?  James intends to find out and get them back, which means  Catherine is now in financial trouble.  And does Rietta’s nephew, Carr Robertson, have a very good reason to hate James?  And have servants or their offspring also been stealing from him?  When James goes to the family solicitor for help in sorting it all out, he might get more than he bargained for.

There are lots of clues spread around in these complicated relationships, plus in the steadily revealed timetable of who visited James on that last night and for what reason.  I found it easy to get involved and start rooting for the characters as Wentworth describes them like intimate friends.  The setting is also so very well realised.  I’m glad to say that I was so involved that I didn’t notice who ‘did’ it, as in fact it was very well hidden.  I got the feel of “this hard post-war world” [5] and felt invested in the fate of the characters.  One sub-plot was particularly interesting – the revived romance between Carr and Elizabeth Moore.  This in particular reminded me of an Elizabeth Goudge novel.  After years apart, involving war and other relationships with the wrong people, they were together at last:

 ‘Elizabeth’s world had come back to normal again…. She got up and began to make tea, fetching the kettle from the kitchen, moving about the small domestic tasks as if they were the whole of love and service.  It was perhaps the happiest hour she had ever known.  To receive back all you have lost, all that you have not even hoped for, to be allowed to give again what you have kept unspent, is joy beyond words.” [6]

That could sum up the situation for several key characters – the ones who survive the  revenge and bloodletting.

Conclusion

This Patricia Wentworth mystery is not just about restoring the moral order of the universe by punishing evil and rewarding good.  It is also about the restoring of relationship.  Right Order also includes Right Relationship and that’s where the romance fits in.  It’s not just important that the right person is punished for the crime, it’s extremely important that the right people end up together.  Just as the various murders have been about the catastrophic absence of love, the romance is about the restoration of love.  We’ve seen what happens, in the fate of James Lessiter and others, when human relationships go wrong, but we now need to see the counter-balance of human relationships going well and flourishing, and the restoring of community and meaning that goes along with it.  The love that is now possible between the survivors suffuses everything in a moment with meaning, even the most mundane of pastimes.

Surely this is another similarity between Patricia Wentworth and Agatha Christie – they are both as concerned as Jane Austen that their women end up with the right man!  But crucially this is more than counter-balanced by the role of the heroine spinster who enables all this to come about with an almost God-like role in exposing sin, bringing about right judgment and justice, and the restoration of right relationship.  Miss Silver may have only come to stay for a while, but in that space of time she helps put right what is wrong and leaves everything the better for her presence, however temporary.  Her knitting (that often is completed at the end of a case) is not just a pastime for a ‘silly old woman’, a mistake made at their peril by biased observers.  Miss Silver, like Miss Marple, is more like one of the Fates of mythology, the goddesses in the form of three elderly women who spin, measure, and then cut the thread of human life.

Even if the characters don’t realise it – and they usually don’t until it is too late – their fates are in her hands.

[For the latest news of Jeanette Sears’ books, please see the WELCOME page of this website, or go straight to her Amazon page]

NOTES

[1] Eg. Carol Westron’s blog ‘Miss Marple and Miss Silver – a comparison’ (13 Oct 2014) at www.promotingcrime.blogspot.com.  She also has a great little scenario imagining the two ladies meeting in a teashop.

[2]  Agatha Christie, The Tuesday Night Club (1927).

[3]  Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask, 1928.  I refer to this book in my previous blogpost ‘Masks and Murder’.

[4]  Patricia Wentworth, Miss Silver Comes to Stay, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1951, p50f.

[5}  ibid., p107.

[6]  ibid., p104f.

Jan 30 2021

MASKS AND MURDER

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A Golden Age for Masks?

Back in 2015 when I began planning my contemporary crime novel Night and Mr Knightley, I considered using a masked ball as the setting for a murder.  I was using Jane Austen’s Emma as the basis for the plot and so a regency ball seemed appropriate and the use of masks ideal for the schemes of a murderer. 

New novel: Night and Mr Knightley





But a masked ball?  Yes, it had been used extensively in Golden Age Detective fiction (GAD), but that in itself made it seem rather passé.  Would people now think that the wearing of masks could be at all believable?





The story itself was to take place in the autumn of 2016.





But then, at that precise moment, the world seemed to go a bit mad – in masks!  There were huge marches of protesters wearing stylised Guy Fawkes masks in the November of that year – the Million Mask March.





Guy Fawkes Mask










 There were gangs of clowns wearing make-up like a mask attacking people (I kid you not) especially in my home city of Nottingham where my stories are set.  The combo of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night had a lot to answer for!





Also there were protests in Europe about whether Muslim women should be allowed to cover their faces in public with only their eyes showing in case they were concealing explosive packages and couldn’t be identified. 





And on a more local level, I had planned on referring to one of our theatres, Nottingham Playhouse, as part of the story – they then staged Thomas Middleton’s ‘Revenger’s Tragedy’ in November 2016, which I soon discovered was a jacobean gore-fest featuring mass murder at a masked ball !  It couldn’t have been more appropriate so I decided to feature it as a major theme in my story.















But becoming a Carer for my dear Mum in the last three years has meant something of a delay in my speed of book production.  The publication of Night and Mr Knightley would have to be delayed to 2020.  Would the subject of the wearing of masks be considered passé by then?  Er, well…





There are far too many GAD stories featuring masks and masked balls for me to mention them all.  But here is a taste of a few of them that I either read for research or refer to directly in my novel, hopefully without any spoilers.





The Masks Themselves





Masks come in many colours and materials.  I began with reading Patricia Wentworth’s Grey Mask of 1928 which features a full-face mask of grey rubber.   A bank robber in John Dickson Carr’s Colonel March story Hot Money (made for TV in 1952) also wears a full-cover rubber face mask as a robbery and a murder are committed.  In White Face by Edgar Wallace (1931) the villain wears a white cloth cut with two eye holes. 










 Then more colourfully there was Behind the Green Mask by Ralph Trevor (1940), Greenmask by J Jefferson Farjeon (1944),















 and the classic short story The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe (1842).










Frequently, though, the masks were simple black eye masks such as that worn by E W Hornung’s Raffles (1901) 















or The Count of Monte Christo by Dumas (1844)















 or Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders (1928). 















 (I originally had a black eye mask featured on the cover of my book but the designer turned it a striking pink – which I rather like!)





 Party!





Just this list shows that masks were useful for individuals committing crime, sometimes skulking on their own down dark streets, but often in plain sight in public because everyone was at a party and disguised by masks as well.





JJ Connington’s detective Sir Clinton Driffield is annoyed in Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927) that his friends have chosen fancy dress for their large country house party –  masks make it too easy for a criminal:





“ ‘I’m not altogether easy in my mind over this masked ball of Joan’s.  Speaking as a Chief Constable responsible for the good behaviour of the district, Cecil, it seems to me that you are running some risks over it.  A dance is all very well.  You know all your guests by headmark [sic] and no one can get in on false pretences.  But once you start masks, it’s a different state of affairs altogether.’ “










So true.





This was certainly the case in Agatha Christie’s The Affair at the Victory Ball (1923).















But  Dorothy L Sayers of course reverses this in her Murder Must Advertise (1933), since disguising himself as a harlequin with a mask enables the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey to deceive and mislead the criminals.  















There is also her short story The Queen’s Square (1932) featuring a fancy dress ball (Lord Peter is dressed as the Jack of Diamonds) but I couldn’t see any references to masks even though one would have expected them to feature.  Sayers also refers to the American pulp fiction Black Mask magazine “that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction”, featuring it as a clue (or an anti-clue?) in Unnatural Death (1927) which Inspector Parker refers to disparagingly as “light reading for the masses”.















When looking at the subject of masks online I came across a lot of items on what has been labelled ‘The Party of the Century’.  This was Truman Capote’s bash in New York in 1966, ostensibly in honour of the Washington Post’s publisher Katherine Graham, and Everyone who was Anyone was there.  It took the form of a black-and-white masked ball.















 I used this in my novel as Prisha Chatterjee’s inspiration for the masked ball that she is helping to arrange for the fictional Nottingham Knights Entertainment Company.  The dresses of 1966, for example Mia Farrow’s, look almost regency, though somewhat shorter!










Edgar Allan Poe’s party in The Masque of the Red Death, however, is predictably more scary and apparently now has something of a cult following in America at Halloween.  It concerns a wealthy Prince who invites all his friends to his castle to join him at a non-stop lock-down party so they can avoid a plague that is ravaging the land.  The plague is called the Red Death.  It is a masquerade with music, food and entertainment, whilst the poor are left outside the castle walls to suffer (sounding familiar?).  Then a mysterious and ominous figure all in red, including a red mask, appears at the party uninvited…  I’ll leave you to guess the rest.  Just like the classic image of the executioner in a black hood to hide his face, masks can be worn to protect the identity of those who are a form of Nemesis, who implement appropriate revenge for wrongdoers and enemies.





Conclusion





In GAD masks were frequently worn around the eyes, not the mouth.  But usually if someone was in a mask it meant they were about to rob you at the very least but quite possibly kill you.  Here and now in January 2021 someone with a mask around their mouth and nose is more frequently trying to save your life.





As part of this general trend, there have been many literary-themed fabric masks produced, several featuring Jane Austen or quotes from her work.  The ‘social distancing’ of regency life has also meant lots of photoshop opportunities utilising her stories. 















 And representations of Jane herself have not escaped the mask message.





Statue of Jane Austen with mask





In 2016 masks were being worn by those protesting the curtailing of our freedom.  This can also be true now, but more often the opposite is the case – people  refusing to wear masks because they feel it curtails their freedom.  On the news it has just been reported that a third of police in the UK have had people without masks spitting at them or coughing on them, now a potentially murderous act.  There have been ‘COVID-deniers’ without masks invading hospitals and endangering the staff and patients’ lives.





So regardless of the time gap between now and the Golden Age of crime fiction, all this shows that masks are still a matter of life and death, although our perception of how they function has been turned upside down.





But I must leave you now.  A man in a black mask has just come to my door – delivering something nice from Amazon.










[For more on Night and Mr Knightley by Jeanette Sears, see the WELCOME page or go straight to Amazon Kindle]







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Jul
				29
				2017
				
			

		

						
		
The Incredible Crime

					
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A Review of The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh


‘The Incredible Crime’ by Lois Austen-Leigh


As if I didn’t already love Golden Age murder mysteries enough, this one came with the added incentive of an author related to Jane Austen (1). Who could resist?


The Incredible Crime came out in 1931 and was penned by JA’s great-great niece – or should I say ‘neice’ as JA herself always misspelled it – Lois Austen-Leigh (1883 -1968). Apparently she wrote her books on Jane Austen’s desk, later donated by her ‘neice‘ to the British Library. (Mm, pity I don’t have any nieces, they’re starting to sound extremely useful.)


I was also attracted by the academic environment of much of the story. The Cambridge University setting is beautifully realised, as indeed it should be by someone who in real life was the neice, sorry, niece of the Provost of King’s College, Augustus Austen-Leigh and his wife Florence Lefroy Austen-Leigh (2). In case all of these Austens weren’t enough, there are even a couple of cheeky references to JA herself and Northanger Abbey.


Perhaps not surprisingly, the heroine of the novel, Prudence Pinsent, is the spinster daughter of the Master of the fictional Prince’s College (I particularly enjoyed this as I made up my own Oxford College for my first murder mystery) (3). Prudence herself is well over 30 but doesn’t look it, and although a clergy daughter and generally dignified, will swear like a trooper when provoked.  Her main ambition in life at first seems to be gaining as many months as possible in the countryside for fox-hunting.


One definitely is fed the inside scoop over port in the ‘Senior Combination Room’ and the cosiness of afternoon tea and college gossip at a don’s fireside. Reminiscences of the eccentricities of past academics and students add authenticity and spice to the atmosphere. For example, join me in a Professor’s rooms:


“His man came in with a bright copper kettle which he put on the fire; it started to sing at once. He then drew the curtains and brought in an ample tea, putting a plate of hot cakes in the fender. Nothing more comfortable could be imagined.” (4)


‘The Nine Tailors’ by Dorothy L Sayers


The other very authentic aspect of the setting is the author’s descriptions of the Fenland country around Cambridge and Ely and stretching towards the east coast, which was very reminiscent of Dorothy Leigh Sayers’ 1934 mystery The Nine Tailors. Austen-Leigh writes:


“They turned into the flat fen country and drove at a reasonable pace. On a bridge over a broadish bit of water they pulled up for a moment. ‘This is very fascinating,’ said Prudence, ‘is it a ‘drain’, the Ouse, or the Cam, I wonder?’ ‘I think,’ said Thomas, ‘that this is what you might call a drain – it’s the New Bedford Cut. It was made I don’t know how long ago by some Duke of Bedford, and cuts off a long bend in the Ouse; we shall pass the depleted bit of river farther on.’ ‘Is this how you get from Cambridge by water to the sea?’ ‘No, you do that by going down the Cam into the Ouse by Ely, by Denver Sluice into the Wash.’ (5) (I chose that quote because I thought Sayers’ fans would enjoy talk of Dukes and Denver!)


The descriptions of the Suffolk coast are also splendid, as are the wonderful meals and rooms enjoyed by Prudence stopping off at Ipswich at the ‘Great White Horse’ Inn (1518 with a Georgian facade). It was also used by Dickens and by his creation Pickwick, and it made me want to go there immediately. How disappointing to look it up online and find that it closed as an inn in 2008, is now part-Starbucks and is to be made into a business centre by the local council. Apparently the 16th century builders failed to take into account the 21st century desire for en suite.


As with many of the books of this period, it can be hard to visualise the characters accurately as to their age – everyone is so tweedy and old fogeyish and smokes a pipe if male. And one doesn’t necessarily pick up on the hints about the women from their appearance and habits either. I was continually astounded that everyone was about 20 years younger that I had first assumed. The way an “independent” woman is described is very different to how we would describe a single woman today, much of which we might find laughable. This also applies to the attempt at ‘romance’ in the story – if you’re a single woman who values her independence, be prepared to choke at the ending! Again, I can’t help but compare this to Dorothy L Sayers’ far superior attempt at romance in a detective novel set in the academic world in the glorious Gaudy Night.


If I am taking my time getting round to the plot itself, perhaps it is because this was the least compelling part of the book for me. Suspected drug smuggling and chemical experiments at the university are the substance, but unfortunately much of the searching for smugglers in underground tunnels reminded me of Famous Five novels, no doubt unfairly as Austen-Leigh’s book preceded Enid Blyton’s by about ten years. (I think it was the unscrewing of a window seat to discover a tunnel that really did it, although no doubt such things existed aplenty in ancient coastal country houses!)


Crime Novel Reviews of Dorothy L Sayers


In view of the many reminders of Sayers’ work that this book sparked off in me, I thought I would consult the new collection of Sayers’ crime reviews from the early thirties (6) to see if she had anything definitive to say on her contemporary and part-namesake. But sadly neither this book nor the other three by Lois Austen-Leigh were among them. However, I did open the book at another review (7) to see that I had underlined Dorothy’s succinct criticism of what apparently had already become a cliché by 1933: “rather too much secret passage and dopery”. I couldn’t have put it better, Dorothy! I, for one, will now be forever wary of what people are really up to at night when they claim to have been out “duck-shooting”.


But I can’t resist finishing by returning to the Jane Austen references. A tobacco-smoking don in Cambridge is horrified at the thought of possible drug-smuggling at the university and has to go to a service at King’s College Chapel to “take the nasty taste out of my mouth and make me feel clean again.” I am pleased to report that after listening to Scripture and the singing of hymns “he left the place feeling like a different man.” (8) And he was the one who felt he had the courage to quote Jane Austen at a CID officer, using the words of Henry Tilney to Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey:


“If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to… Consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.” (9)


I would give The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh 5/5 for Setting, 4/5 for Characters, and 3.5/5 for Plot.


For my latest novel Murder and Mr Rochester, see: www.jeanettesears.com/wp/?p_id=789


My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


NOTES


(1) Lois Austen-Leigh, The Incredible Crime, British Library, London, 2017, edited by Martin Edwards. A reprint of the 1931 edition published by Herbert Jenkins.  Available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=lois+austen-leigh


(2) See Introduction to the novel by Prof Kirsten T Saxton.


(3) Jeanette Sears, A Murder in Michaelmas, Piquant Editions, Carlisle, 2012. See www.jeanettesears.com/wp/?page_id=27 


(4)Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 65%, loc.1979 of 3092 in e-version.


(5) Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 10%, loc.294 of 3092 in e-version.


(6) Martin Edwards (ed), Taking Detective Stories Seriously: the Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L Sayers, Tippermuir Books, Perth, 2017.


(7) ibid., p108, in her review of Watch the Wall by Laurence W Meynell (1933).


(8) Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 54%, loc.1646 of 3092 in e-version.


(9) ibid., 53%, loc.1620 of 3092 in e-version.







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				May
				14
				2017
				
			

		

						
		
Charlotte Brontë and the Strange Companion

					
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Charlotte Brontë and the Strange Companion


Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Shirley’


In ‘Shirley’ (1849), Charlotte Bronte describes a Mr Yorke who is devoid of imagination and empathy.  Chapter Four begins: “A Yorkshire gentleman he was, par excellence, in every point.” (1), which in itself perhaps shows a lack of imagination on Bronte’s part in choosing his name!


Apparently Mr Yorke lacks the “organ of Veneration” and can’t look up to anybody, even God. “He believed in God and heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe, imagination, and tenderness lack.” (2). She then goes on to list so many other inadequacies of his personality that one starts to think ‘Why should I care about this character at all?’ There are several pages of Brontë telling us about Mr Yorke rather than showing us what he’s like, acceptable in a novel written in the 1840s but which wouldn’t get past an editor today. But this does allow her to speak about the importance of the imagination as a “gift of the mind” and the error of those who dismiss it:


“…who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute – akin to weakness – perhaps partaking of frenzy – a disease rather than a gift of the mind?”


It’s very easy for me as a writer at the beginning of the twenty first century to look back to the beginning of the nineteenth and to imagine that it was a period when writers and those living by the products of their imagination were in a privileged position compared to my own time.  What would it be like to be an artist or poet in the Romantic era, or a novelist in the glory days of the Brontës, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot?


But this section of Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Shirley’ makes me think that it was just as hard then to be taken seriously if one took the imagination seriously and viewed it as an essential of life. She states that probably all people think the imagination is more of a disadvantage in life or even more like a “disease”, unless you actually possess it. Those who think they have strong imaginations speak very differently about it:


“To hear them speak you would imagine that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them; that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision; that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel.” (3)


Here Brontë seems to be claiming some sort of aristocracy of the Imaginative, and is depicting how the claims of the Imaginative can look like a superiority complex to others.  She gives Mr Yorke’s view: “An illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it up for gold.” (4).  Mr Yorke, we are told, did not consider a poetic imagination a necessity of life.  He could “tolerate” the results of it as works of art in the form of a good picture or music, but could not tolerate all the talk of the struggles of a quiet poet, who “might have lived despised, and died scorned, under the eyes of Hiram Yorke.” (5).


Bronte then gives a fascinating description of the character of the imaginative artist, “the true poet”, who has to somehow survive the fact that “there are many Hiram Yorkes in this world”:


“… it is well that the true poet, quiet externally though he may be, had often a truculent spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness, and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss, his own society with his great friend and goddess, Nature, quite independent of those who find little pleasure in him and in whom he finds no pleasure at all. It is just that while the world and circumstances often turn a dark, cold, careless side to them – he should be able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom, which makes all bright and genial for him; while strangers, perhaps, deem his existence a Polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true poet is not one whit to be pitied; and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve, when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when utilitarians sit in judgement on him, and pronounce him and his art useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad, deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden than consoled with.”


Perhaps Charlotte realises she is getting a bit carried away here and so comes back with: “These, however, are not Mr Yorke’s reflections; and it is with Mr Yorke we have at present to do.” (6).


Charlotte Brontë


But perhaps these words do stand as a rebuke to all those who mainly emphasise the outward “bleakness” of the Brontës’ lives and don’t look further into these glowing recesses of inner creativity and hope.  Bronte’s own images for the imagination here – comparing it to an elixir, a flame, a refiner of vision, an imparter of hope and charm, joy and consolation, bliss, a festal brightness and cherishing glow that can make all things bright and genial – these images inspire our imaginations too. And we are convinced by her conviction that true imagination is utterly necessary for tenderness and awe and veneration to exist in us, even for a truer appreciation of God and heaven. Who wouldn’t want more of imagination by her definition, this “strange companion” ?


 


To enjoy more of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination in the form of her most famous novel ‘Jane Eyre’, you can read my latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ which intertwines a contemporary murder mystery with the experience of a reading group studying her great classic.


My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


You can buy this at Amazon UK:


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears


Or at Amazon US:


https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1478345205&sr=1-1&keywords=jeanette+sears


 


 


NOTES


(1) Charlotte Brontë, ‘Shirley’, Penguin Classics edition, London, 1994, p44.


(2) ibid., p45.


(3) ibid., p46.


(4) ibid.


(5) ibid., p47.


(6) ibid.







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Dec
				31
				2016
				
			

		

						
		
Emma-Jane Austin and the Brontë Birthplace

					
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Emma-Jane Austin and the Brontë Birthplace


In my novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’, Emma-Jane Austin visits the birthplace of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë in Thornton, West Yorkshire.  She is really keen to take photos for an exhibition at her place of work, Bromley House Library.  But it is also the weekend of Mother’s Day.  And the other members of her reading group, the Rotic Club, are keen to see Thornton too, since it is 200 years since the birth of Charlotte Brontë in 1816 and they are studying her masterpiece ‘Jane Eyre’ together.  So a quiet contemplative solo trip turns into a more social pilgrimage and a celebration for Emma’s mother and grandmothers who swell the numbers – and the fun!


Their journey begins at Nottingham train station with a disagreement over changes to the architecture of the victorian building


Nottingham train station


eg. have the lovely old art nouveau features been sufficiently enhanced in the recent refurbishment?


Art nouveau detail on station gates


Fortunately the train is on time and on the way to Bradford the women share some of the Brontë memorabilia and objects of interest to begin their study day.  A taxi takes them through thick snow to Thornton and their rented cottage on Market Street, the same street where the younger Brontës were born.


Brontë birthplace plaque


You can see more at www.bronte-country.com/thornton.html .  But the highlight was having lunch at ‘Emily’s’, the lovely bistro that is now situated in the Brontës’ former home,


‘Emily’s’ bistro and Brontë birthplace


‘Emily’s’ bistro, Thornton


and that still has the original fireplace and some of the furniture from their time.  You can see this, plus a map of a walking tour of Thornton called ‘Brontëland’, at www.delucaboutique.co.uk/about-us3.html.


‘Emily’s’


Fireplace at ‘Emily’s’


Over their meal, the women compare photos of Charlotte B from various biographies.  Of course there is the portrait of the three sisters by Branwell


Brontë sisters


and the photo on the cover of Lyndall Gordon’s excellent biography.




At ‘Emily’s’ cafe the women also enjoy looking at drawings of the Brontë family growing up as imagined by Joan Hassall in ‘The Brontë Story’ by Margaret Lane.


Margaret Lane’s biography of the Brontës


They also hand round a copy of ‘Charlotte in Love’ by Brian Wilks and have quite a lot to say about Charlotte’s own romance and marriage.


Charlotte’s love life by Brian Wilks


This means that they are not just delighted at being in the Brontës’ birthplace but also wonder about a trip to Haworth Parsonage together, where the sisters and their brother grew up and practised their art.  The parsonage has become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans even more than Thornton, and Emma’s mother and grandmothers have some surprises for the younger women in the form of catalogues and guidebooks from their own visits to Haworth in the 1980s.  One of Emma’s grandmas has a 1967 guide to Haworth bought there in 1981.


1980s guide


And Emma’s mother produces a booklet called ‘Sixty Treasures’ from 1988, which shows 60 items kept at the Parsonage.  The women exclaim over the photos of everyday household items and artistic materials used by the family, and particularly Charlotte’s tiny dress and boots and her wedding veil.


1980s guide


Rosanna, one of Emma’s reading group, gives them some very useful web addresses for keeping up with Brontë news and fandom, such as www.eyreguide.awardspace.co.uk and www.bronteblog.blogspot.com and www.bronteparsonage.blogspot.co.uk .


She also shows a picture of her favourite painting of the character Jane Eyre by Sigismond De Ivanowski from 1907.


Jane Eyre by De Ivanowski


One of Emma’s closest friends, Nattie, talks about reading the famous novel by Jean Rhys which imagines life for Rochester with his wife before they come to England and Bertha Mason descends into madness.  Nattie has also enjoyed the Persephone edition of Frances Towers’ collection of short stories ‘Tea with Mr Rochester’ from 1949.


Tea with Mr Rochester


The Persephone books are plain grey on the outside but all have beautiful endpapers inside and matching bookmarks that fit in with the era of the story.


Persephone pattern


To everyone’s amazement, even Emma’s grandmother ‘Grambo’, who has been less than enthusiastic about the trip and its theme so far, produces a memento from a visit to the Brontës’ home from many years before – an old toffee tin!


1980s souvenir tin


She had even filled it again with toffees for their journey home!  The tin is rather lovely – very Puginesque – with victorian photos of the main Brontë sites on each side.


Side of tin


The only member of Emma’s reading group who cannot be with them on the trip is Maria, the German teacher.  Instead she sends them something of interest to read that is referred to in ‘Jane Eyre’ and comes from her own culture.  This is an extract from Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’ or ‘The Robbers’ from 1782.  Not everyone appreciates having to read this!  (You can find it at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6782 )


Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’


Instead Emma suggests they read ‘Henry Brocken: his Travels and Adventures’ by Walter de la Mare from 1904, a fascinating story imagining visiting fictional characters as if they were real – for example Henry Brocken goes to see Rochester and Jane and their dog Pilot in their small house in a dark wood after their marriage.  (You can read this at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15432 )


This shows that re-imagining the characters from ‘Jane Eyre’ and writing new stories about them is nothing new.  My own novel, ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ is in this category in a sense, as Emma-Jane Austin not only discusses Charlotte Brontë’s characters with her friends and family but feels she is meeting with them again in some form in her own life as she struggles to solve a murder mystery.  I am sure the Brontës would be amazed, and hopefully gratified, to know that we have still felt compelled to revisit their novels and even their birthplaces and homes in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.


My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


You can read all about Emma-Jane and her friends in ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ as an ebook on Kindle at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Oct
				28
				2016
				
			

		

						
		
Emma-Jane Austin’s Library

					
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Emma-Jane Austin’s Library


The main character in my novel Murder and Mr Rochester works at Bromley House Library in the centre of Nottingham. Although Emma-Jane Austin is fictional, the library most definitely is not. It is a Regency gem on Angel Row, next to the Council House and the main Market Square. 2016 has been the library’s 200th birthday.


Nottingham Council House and Market Square
Nottingham Council House and Market Square


Here are some photos so you can appreciate more fully the beauty of the building where E-J is privileged to work, and also see the setting for the terrible crime that takes place there in the story.  (There are some hints here to help you solve the murder too!)


In Murder and Mr Rochester I mention that many people do not even know of the library’s existence. All you can see at first is a mysterious doorway in between the usual sort of city centre shops.  The entrance sits discretely between Barnardo’s and a newsagent’s. But if you ignore the traffic, erase the shops and look up you can begin to imagine the size and grandeur of the house itself.


Bromley House Library on busy Angel Row
Bromley House Library on busy Angel Row


Once inside, you are in a hallway that leads either to the back of the house


Doorway to garden
Doorway to garden


and a walled garden


View of garden from upstairs window
View of garden from upstairs window


or up the stairs to the main desk and reading room.


Librarians in regency costume at main desk for 200th anniversary
Librarians in regency costume at main desk for 200th anniversary


Of course, the most intriguing feature that strikes you as you enter the main part of the library is the spiral staircase.


Spiral staircase from side
Spiral staircase from side


It was not part of the original structure of the house when it was built for George Smith of the famous banking family in 1752 but was added along with the gallery.


Gallery above main reading room
Gallery above main reading room


Let’s follow Emma-Jane on her journey on that terrible afternoon of the (fictional) murder in the Library…


She is in the George Green Room sorting out books for the library’s Charlotte Brontë exhibition. (The room is named after the Nottingham mill owner and pioneering mathematician.)


Door of George Green Room
Door of George Green Room


After switching off the lights, she walks towards the gallery that runs around the main reading room.


Left hand side of gallery
Left hand side of gallery


She turns to the right and walks along the middle section of the gallery,


View of right hand side of gallery
View of right hand side of gallery


but then witnesses the ghastly ‘accident’ on the stairs to her left.


View of stairs from right side of gallery
View of stairs from right side of gallery


Here is a close-up of the brown wooden stairs (the colour is significant!)


Wooden stairs
Wooden stairs


and the stone hearth around the fireplace. (The modern radiators in the library are necessary to control the heat and humidity more accurately than a gas or real fire.)


Fireplace hearth with stone edging
Fireplace hearth with stone edging


There is a gap between the bottom of the spiral staircase and the fireplace that will be of significance…


Bottom of stairs and hearth
Bottom of stairs and hearth


Here is the longcase clock that chimes loudly early one morning and scares Emma-Jane when she is in the library on her own, trying to solve the mystery.


Longcase clock
Longcase clock


Bromley House Library really did have a display of Charlotte Brontë’s books in the Spring of 2016 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of her birth, which is featured in the novel.


Display of Charlotte Bronte books
Display of Charlotte Bronte books


And for the 200th birthday of the library itself in April 2016, which in the story Emma-Jane is looking forward to, the real librarians held a birthday party in regency costume!


Librarians in regency costume for 200th anniversary
Librarians in regency costume for 200th anniversary


You can be a member of the library even if you don’t live in Nottingham – a ‘Country Member’ pays half the usual subscription fee.


Do have a look at the Bromley House website at www.bromleyhouse.com. It has more photos and some short films that really give you a feel of the place. There are many more beautiful rooms, old and new, to explore.


No wonder Emma-Jane Austin in my story feels very lucky to work there – apart from the murder, of course!


My latest novel 'Murder and Mr Rochester'
My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


You can buy Murder and Mr Rochester by Jeanette Sears on Kindle at www.amazon.co.uk or www.amazon.com.







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Oct
				28
				2016
				
			

		

						
		
Emma-Jane Austin and The Tunnel

					
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Emma-Jane Austin and the Tunnel


In my novel Murder and Mr Rochester, the heroine Emma-Jane Austin discovers a shortcut in the centre of Nottingham called ‘The Tunnel’.  It is one of the most interesting architectural features of Nottingham but is now largely hidden from view.


Access to hidden Tunnel
Access to hidden Tunnel


It is tends to just be called The Tunnel, or if one wishes to be more helpful and accurate, The Park Tunnel.


The Tunnel in Nottingham
The Tunnel in Nottingham


It echoes the days when Victorian engineers were blasting great big holes through anything that stood in the way of modern transport. This time it was in 1855 and was a way to gain a shortcut from Derby Road in the centre of Nottingham through to the new residential Park Estate owned by the fifth Duke of Newcastle.


It provides another fascinating revelation of the huge area of sandstone rock and caves that form the foundation of the centre of the city.


Tree and the sandstone Castle Rock
Tree and the sandstone Castle Rock


The Dukes of Newcastle were no strangers to this geological formation as their castle stood on the highest section of sandstone which was pockmarked with entrances to strange tunnels and caves beneath.


Nottingham Castle on Castle Rock
Nottingham Castle on Castle Rock


The job of designing the man-made tunnel and much of the new estate was given to the fifth Duke’s surveyor, Thomas Chambers Hine (1813-1899).


Thomas Chambers Hine
Thomas Chambers Hine


He also designed the layout of the roads and many of the magnificent houses, as well as having approval of other intended house plans in order to maintain the estate’s architectural integrity. Unfortunately the Tunnel was obsolete almost as soon as it was built. The gradient was slightly too difficult for horse-drawn carriages. Also other roads were built at around the same time that meant the Tunnel was no longer necessary.


Steps in central part of Tunnel
Steps in central part of Tunnel


But it remains an eccentric and hidden part of Nottingham’s history. And, despite electric lighting and an opening for natural light in the middle,


Artificial and natural light in the Tunnel
Artificial and natural light in the Tunnel


it can still be scary at night, as Emma-Jane Austin finds out in my murder mystery novel Murder and Mr Rochester.  Not a place where you want to bump into strangers in the dark…


My novel 'Murder and Mr Rochester'
My novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Oct
				8
				2016
				
			

		

						
		
Welcome to Emma-Jane Austin’s home!

					
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Welcome to Emma-Jane Austin’s Home!


The heroine of my murder mystery, Emma-Jane Austin, gets to live in her dream house. It is the beautiful Regency building that she has loved since childhood, that she used to call the Big Doll’s House. And you can see why.


Regency House
Regency House


It is a perfect example of a Regency style house right in the middle of Nottingham city centre, Grade II listed and standing at Canning Circus since 1820 on the outer perimeter of the very grand Park Estate.  This was land that used to be owned by the mega-wealthy Dukes of Newcastle when it was indeed just grassy parkland for the Dukes’ deer. Now called the ‘Beverly Hills of Nottingham’, the area is full of stunning Regency and Neo-Gothic homes in a gated community (although, fortunately for the rest of us, most of the gates are left open so we can explore).


Welcome to Park Estate
Welcome to Park Estate


One of the unusual things about the Park Estate is that it still has gas lighting.


Gas light on Park Estate
Gas light on Park Estate


Until 2015, a man in a vintage car used to light the lamps each evening, but now it is done automatically by an electronic trigger in each lamp.


Gas lamp on Park estate
Gas lamp on Park estate


But every two weeks or so a man has to come and reset the automatic triggers – not quite as romantic, but great that they are still gas lamps as in their Victorian heyday.


Resetting timer on gas lamp (Credit: Mike Hallam)
Resetting timer on gas lamp (Credit: Mike Hallam)


The light they give is whiter and paler than modern neon lights and doesn’t radiate as far, which does mean the Park can look rather Dickensian and creepy at night – though ideal for murder mysteries!


Park estate gas lamp at night (Credit: Mike Hallam)
Park estate gas lamp at night (Credit: Mike Hallam)


I too loved this house when I was a child, which I could see out of the bus window on the way into town each week.


Regency house at Canning Circus
Regency house at Canning Circus


Even though it was a dirty cream colour then and looked rather run down, it still stood out from the grottier modern buildings around it on a historic street called The Ropewalk. Now the house is a cool pale green with gold relief work on the plaster angels and wreath on the central pediment and is divided into flats. I have given Emma-Jane a room at the top on the left hand side at the back of the building.


Back of Regency House from road below
Back of Regency House from road below


Below her room is a large stone-flagged terrace above two garages where she and her flatmates can sit outside in sunny weather.


Patio
Patio


From her bedroom window she can see across the Park to Nottingham Castle on its sandstone rock.


Nottingham Castle
Nottingham Castle


In my novel the flat covers the top three floors on the right of the building and is owned by Penelope Galthorpe-Brown, who owns several florist shops throughout the Midlands. Another tenant is Jennifer Wright who owns a restaurant in town and is a successful chocolatier.


Top flat
Top flat


The flat provides a beautiful and cosy backdrop for the meetings of Emma-Jane’s reading group, especially as this architectural gem contains many of its original features, including a functioning fireplace in the main drawing room. In ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ they are of course studying Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ together.


My novel 'Murder and Mr Rochester'
My novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


In future books they will be delving into the works of Jane Austen, for which this stunning Regency house will be even more appropriate. But of course the novel is not just about women reading classic romantic novels together. The fact that Emma-Jane’s house was also next to a (very small) police station (before it closed in April 2016) is going to become somewhat appropriate as well…


Canning Circus police station
Canning Circus police station


Police station sign
Police station sign







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Sep
				17
				2016
				
			

		

						
		
The Kilns – What Was and Could Have Been

					
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The Kilns – What Was and Could Have Been


As a fan of C S Lewis, I love it when bits of Narnia or other elements from the life of Lewis weave their way into my everyday life.


Recently a friend gave me a special treat. It was a lunch out in the countryside nearby to celebrate finishing the final draft of my latest novel. It was to be at the Bottle Kiln in West Hallam, an unexpectedly beautiful place in a small Derbyshire village [1].


The Bottle Kiln
The Bottle Kiln


It was also unexpectedly crowded. No doubt the school holidays contributed to some extent, but in retrospect I can see that the quality of the place drew people like the proverbial magnet and we were lucky to get the last parking space at lunch time. Plus the weather couldn’t have been more gorgeous or the sky more blue.


Bottle Kiln and garden
Bottle Kiln and garden


This meant that my first view of the old kiln was doubly delightful as it rose above the surrounding brick buildings that now house a café and the sort of shops that translate me into retail heaven.


But, of course, the kiln itself was bound to remind me of C S Lewis’ home, the Kilns, in Oxfordshire, so I was hoping to find interesting resonances. At the Bottle Kiln there is an intimate garden at the back where people can eat their food and chat to friends but that is also quiet enough for contemplation.


photo 27


It is called a Japanese tea garden and I was immediately struck by the effort taken to make a tranquil space that was both friendly but that encouraged people to just stop and be quiet for a while.


Bottle Kiln Garden
Bottle Kiln Garden


We certainly couldn’t ignore the fact that this kiln had once produced bricks. They were everywhere, not just in the construction of the kiln itself and the outbuildings but also beautifully laid out in systematic patterns for paths. Even the tabletops in the restaurant were made of bricks and mortar. The whole place has been rescued and renovated with very creative and artistic touches.


Garden tiles
Garden tiles


The various chambers around the central kiln are now four selling areas for Gifts, Home and Accessories, Handmade items, and the Card Room, with the restaurant on the other side.


Central chamber of kiln
Central chamber of kiln


The design motif throughout was one of my favourites – Orla Kiely’s iconic leaf pattern. The predominant colour of green blended well with the brickwork and reflects the green ethos of so many organic and recycled items on sale, all of which were laid out with the precision and good taste of a magazine shoot.


Orla Keily wallpaper
Orla Kiely wallpaper


My friend knew I would love this, and I did!


Contemporary pots on sale
Contemporary pots on sale


It was also interesting to stand in the middle of the building and look up – to see right through to the sky above through the narrow outlet of the kiln’s original chimney.


Bottle Kiln Chimney
Bottle Kiln Chimney


It formed such a contrast to the vibrant life and colour all around me. For the brick flue was huge, dark, bleak and silent with the longest cobwebs I’ve ever seen draped from the top, like a spider’s dusty version of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Looking up at the sky, I felt as though I was in a tunnel again – the feeling I’d had for the last few months while writing my novel – head down, prioritising work, not seeing people, utterly concentrated and largely isolated. That’s not to say it’s been a negative experience – I’m an introvert and I love it! But one can’t do everything in life, and when I’m concentrating on a book, other parts of my life (like going out to restaurants with friends) just tend not to happen (like my blogging too, for that matter)!


The Tunnel in Nottingham
The Tunnel in Nottingham


This time there’s the added factor that a massive tunnel in the centre of Nottingham – just called ‘The Tunnel’ – features at the beginning and end of my novel (which is called ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ in case you were beginning to wonder). The Nottingham Tunnel is a huge Victorian construction blasted out of sandstone. This has often been in my mind as an image for the writing process – one enters the darkness of the imagination to construct an alternative reality in prose, which can feel like blasting one’s way through rock to find what’s on the other side. Then one day it’s all over and you emerge blinking into the daylight of normal life again. And friends take you out to lunch…


The light at the end of the Bottle Kiln’s towering chimney reminded me of this – I’m at least out of the tunnel of the final draft of my novel at any rate. I couldn’t help remarking to my friend how marvellous it would have been if the Kilns that used to be next to C S Lewis’ house of the same name had survived and could have been refurbished just like the Bottle Kiln here.


Original plan of Bottle Kiln
Original plan of Bottle Kiln


The home that Lewis bought with his brother and Mrs Moore in 1930 that is now a study centre would be enhanced by such a development next door, especially if still surrounded by the fields and wild countryside that so attracted the Lewis brothers. The original kilns in Headington in Oxfordshire could have become a similar visitor centre with beautiful shops, a café (or pub!), and a garden next to the lake and part of the nature reserve that’s still there. What a ‘go to’ spot that would have been for visitors to the area, and an even greater pull for The Kilns’ and the C S Lewis Foundation’s attempt to stimulate further interest in this great author and teacher. Instead of a small house in the middle of a modern housing estate, my mind’s eye could now see a much larger enterprise, with the chimneys of the old kilns visible for miles, like a sign, like the towers of a cathedral calling out to visitors to come and find.


Original Bottle Kiln
Original Bottle Kiln


I can imagine Lewis would have approved of a refurbished set of Kilns in the countryside next to his house where people could come and eat and drink with friends, talk about art and literature, contemplate nature, de-stress, and generally have good fellowship together or mediate on their own in God’s good creation. That was exactly what I was able to do with my friend. I could just imagine the Inklings having a drink and a meal here together, discussing their latest work in the restaurant or garden, as we were able to do.


Bottle Kiln restaurant
Bottle Kiln restaurant


Even the retail side of my experience was a blessing. I was delighted to find the very things I needed to buy – some kilner storage jars for the kitchen (plus they were about half the price of shops in the centre of town)!


Glassware
Glassware


But to go back to the very centre of the building, not only did the opening at the top of the kiln itself remind me of a tunnel, it brought to mind the experience of Jill Pole in C S Lewis’ ‘The Silver Chair’ when she and Puddleglum and Eustace have been in the dark Underland for what seems like ages. Then at last Jill sees a glimpse of light up above and can now emerge, with the help of friends pulling her out, into the heart of Narnia again. Then, what should I see in the restaurant at the Bottle Kiln after our meal, but a little bit of Narnia in the form of a children’s book on the newspaper and magazine stand. There, along with the Tatler and the Times, were a couple of picture books on the bottom shelf within the reach of children. I must admit I hadn’t seen this version of a Narnia story before, but there on the cover were none other than Puddleglum and Jill Pole in a version of part of Lewis’ The Silver Chair! [2]


Version of 'The Silver Chair'
Version of ‘The Silver Chair’


I love it when this sort of Lewisian synchronicity/serendipity happens. It seemed to affirm my experience of the light at the end of my own personal tunnel-cum-kiln.


And this linking of tunnels and kilns is not as fanciful as it might sound. Yesterday I looked at kilns on the web to see if there was anything else of interest. Well, there is even a ‘Tunnel Kiln’, apparently! And both the kilns next to Lewis’ house and the Bottle Kiln I visited this week were both built in the 1920s. There were two brick kilns and a brick drying barn about 100 yards away from Lewis’ house which was built in 1922. The area used to be known as the Clay Hills when the brick industry flourished there in the late 19th century.


But a glance at the Ashmolean Museum’s website revealed a much more ancient heritage for this area of Oxfordshire in its Archaeology section. Here we’re told that “large numbers of pottery kilns have been excavated in south and east Oxford. The numbers have suggested to some archaeologists an “industrial zone”, coincidentally but interestingly centred on the modern industrial zone around Cowley, but also stretching to Headington, Rose Hill, Littlemore, Sandford and as far south as Betinsfield. The kilns cluster around the Roman road…’ [3]. These were developed in the early 2nd century AD to provide good quality domestic ware, mostly for dining and kitchen storage, using the pure white clay of Shotover Hill.


However, these early kilns fell into disuse when the Romans withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century and it was only in the Victorian era that serious pottery and brick production began in this area again. But we can still see some of that early Roman homeware from the Oxford Potteries in the Rome gallery on the ground floor of the Ashmolean Museum.


Roman pots in the Ashmolean
Roman pots in the Ashmolean


Did Lewis ever look at any of these old pots and reflect that they could have been made just a few yards from his home 1600 years before? And how interesting that Lewis is buried at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry – named after the stone quarry there that provided some of the stone for the building of the Oxford colleges.


So, two of the main places most associated with C S Lewis are named, not after any high-flown literary or romantic themes, but after two of Oxfordshire’s oldest and most down to earth industries – the Kilns and a Quarry.


Model of bottle kiln
Model of bottle kiln


Perhaps my own envisionings of the imaginative process of writing as hewing through rock, or journeying through a dark tunnel, or trying to find the sky through a dusty and cobwebby chimney of clay bricks, are also sufficiently down to earth images and experience on which to build a creative literary life.  The kiln can become a model for how I think of my work.


Inside model of bottle kiln
Inside model of bottle kiln


And if that’s whetted your appetite to read the novel I’ve been mentioning – yes, it’s published now and you can find it on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears


My latest novel 'Murder and Mr Rochester'
My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’


NOTES


1] You can see more at www.bottlekiln.co.uk.


2] Hiawyn Oram, The Giant Surprise: a Narnia Story (HarperCollins, London, 2005) based on C S Lewis, The Silver Chair  (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1953).


3] From www.ashmolean.org/ash/britarch/roman-oxon/oxon-pottery.html, written by Susan Walker, 15 Dec 2011.







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Sep
				6
				2015
				
			

		

						
		
Donna Fletcher Crow interviews Jeanette Sears

					
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I was delighted to be interviewed recently by the well-known American novelist Donna Fletcher Crow for the International Christian Fiction Writers website.  Here are the text and pictures:


A Murder in Michaelmas:  Jeanette Sears Interview by Donna Fletcher Crow for ICFW


Jeanette Sears
Jeanette Sears


Donna: Jeanette, welcome to International Christian Fiction Writers! We are so privileged to have an internationally known C. S. Lewis scholar visit us. Before we get to talking about your last novel tell us about your contribution to Women and C. S. Lewis.


Jeanette:  Thank you so much, Donna, for inviting me. It’s great to speak with you, and thank you for asking about my non-fiction as well as fiction. Yes, I was asked by one of the editors of Women and C S Lewis, the wonderful Carolyn Curtis, if I would write a short opinion-piece for this Lion Hudson book which has been published in the UK and USA this summer. The aim was for around 30 contributors who regularly research and write on Lewis to say what influence he has had on them, particularly in the area of Lewis and women. Did Lewis have a bad attitude to women? Has his teaching had a negative impact on them? That was the sort of question we were to address in our response. Well-known writers such as Alister McGrath, Michael Ward, Colin Duriez, Crystal Hurd, Monika Hilder, Randy Alcorn, Malcolm Guite, Holly Ordway, David C Downing, Don King and others all chipped in to reassert Lewis’ reputation and standing in this area. I suspect the piece that’s most critical of Lewis is probably mine! I take him to task on the subject of women priests. But basically we’re all fans who are very grateful to him for his influence on our lives and we hope that this book on a popular level will be interesting for fans and critics alike.


New book 'Women and C S Lewis'
New book ‘Women and C S Lewis’


Donna:  And you also published a guide to C. S. Lewis’ Oxford, didn’t you?


Jeanette:  Yes, I’m glad to say that The Oxford of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis has sold around 7,000 copies and is in Blackwell’s and the main tourist shops in Oxford. I had been taking people on Inklings tours of Oxford and approached Oxford Heritage Trails who had published walking tours on different themes for many years. I’m glad to say it’s become their best seller, even beating the one on Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland!


'The Oxford of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis'
‘The Oxford of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’


Donna:  Now, tell us about A Murder in Michaelmas. Of course, I loved it because it’s set in Oxford, revolves around Arthurian legends and has an American heroine— subjects all dear to my heart. It must have been quite a challenge weaving all those strands together.


My novel 'A Murder in Michaelmas'
My novel ‘A Murder in Michaelmas’


Jeanette:  I thought you might like it! I’ve just enjoyed reading your A Newly Crimsoned Reliquary, so I suspect we have a lot of interests in common! I lived in Oxford for 10 years – as an ordinand at theological college, a curate, a student chaplain, and a Summer School Director for a college – so I got to know the life there from the inside. I found myself using it as a setting for a murder mystery very naturally, as of course have many before us. Oxford seems to bring murder out in people, in literature at any rate! (By the way, I used to live on Fairacres Road in Iffley, as did your heroine for a while.)


Donna:  Have you always had a love of things Arthurian?


Jeanette:  Not particularly. No more so than any other Brit – perhaps it’s in our DNA. But I wanted to have a plot that reflected the medieval setting of Oxford and that could easily include the theme of witchcraft and the occult. I had been to the Oxford Arthurian Society (which sadly no longer exists) and so made up my own Lancelot and Guinevere Society. I thought this could be a re-enactment group where students dress up as characters from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the nastier characters as well as the good guys. Was the murder a re-enactment that went horribly wrong, or did the victim’s death have some other cause? You may have noticed that I also love the Preraphaelites, and often quote them at the beginning of chapters. Well, they loved Tennyson and the Arthurian legends, and so I suppose I love Arthur because I love them. Of course, C S Lewis rather liked them as well – I really love That Hideous Strength in which he draws on these medieval stories.


Donna:  Why did you choose to work with an American heroine?


Jeanette:  My heroine, Eve Merry, was originally written as British, but then it occurred to me that her being American would work better, especially as a contrast to the English upper-class hero and fellow student Crispin Martin de Beauchamp-Massey. She’s studying Theology, he’s reading English Literature. She’s from a poor background, he’s rich. She’s a Christian (although struggling after her father’s death), while Martin is a bit of a cynic. So I thought to have them as different nationalities would add to the conflict and interest. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, for 4 years in the 1980s so I thought I could have Eve heralding from there, plus Oxford is blessed with many keen and enthusiastic American students, so I figured that would fit well too.


Donna:  Eve and Martin are such interesting characters. Will we be seeing more of them? Do you envision this book as being the first in a series?


Jeanette:  Oh, thank you. Yes, I hope this will be a series. I’ve started writing the second ‘Merry and Massey Mystery’ – it’s called Death of a Sluggard. The first mystery had the theme of Christianity versus the occult; this one has the debate between Religion and Science as the ideological background which the murder throws up. Eve and her friend Charlie Boscombe, who is a Biochemistry student, will be tackling the so-called New Atheists, with eccentric help from the irrepressible Martin of course.


Donna:  Your website says you’ve been a church minister, a university lecturer, a London bookseller and a writer. What a wonderful variety of experience. Do you find all this background helping you in writing your novels?


Jeanette:  Definitely. I’m sure you find that as a writer now you have to also be a public speaker, event planner, book seller, sales and marketing expert, teacher, pastoral counsellor, etc etc, as well! So it all comes in handy, whether it’s plotting the books, talking about them in public, or getting people to buy them. My children’s novel (although really it’s for everybody) called Pig’s Progress began as stories I told to live audiences at church and school.


'Pig's Progress'
‘Pig’s Progress’


Donna:  You also lecture on Dorothy L. Sayers— another of my favorites. How has a love of Sayers influenced your writing?


Jeanette:  She’s my heroine. I first read her Clouds of Witness when I was 10 and immediately wanted to be a writer. I include talking about her on my Inklings tours of Oxford, even though she wasn’t officially an Inkling. As a theologian and a writer of murder mysteries, she’s got to be my patron saint. If I can reflect any of her intelligence, style, faith and imagination in my writing, who could ask for more?


Donna:  You have so much to keep up with it must be hard to keep all your hats in a row. What’s next for you?


Jeanette:  Mmm, you’re right, it can be tricky combining everything. At the moment I have a lull in speaking events so there’s more time to concentrate on the writing. I’ve been finishing a comic literary novel called The Last Romantic. Then I’ll be writing the first of (I hope) a series of murder mysteries set in my home town of Nottingham. Oh, and finishing Death of a Sluggard, and working on more non-fiction on C S Lewis and Dorothy L Sayers.


Donna: Jeanette, thank you so much for taking time in your busy life to be with us today. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?


Jeanette:  It’s been my pleasure. The next publication is my contribution to C S Lewis at Poet’s Corner (Wipf and Stock) which should be out fairly soon. One of the highlights of recent years was being able to be part of the events surrounding the inclusion of Lewis in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, and this is the written form of those events, plus lectures and blogs it inspired.


Donna:  And where can we find you and your books on the web?


Jeanette:  My web address is www.jeanettesears.com and my books can be accessed on Amazon from there. Donna, many thanks again, and may God bless you and yours. (Perhaps we’ll get to meet in Oxford sometime?!)


[You can find the original of this interview at:

http://internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-murder-in-michaelmas-jeanette-sears.html and Donna at www.donnafletchercrow.com]


 







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				Mar
				28
				2015
				
			

		

								
The Jackdaw Richard the Third

					
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The Jackdaw Richard III


1970 orange and purple Scrapbbook and Josephine Tey novel
1970 orange and purple Scrapbbook and Josephine Tey novel


When all the fuss about the discovery of Richard III’s body erupted recently, one of my first thoughts was: “Oh, if only I still had my Jackdaw folder about him!” Then last year when clearing out old boxes from my parents’ garage, I found it again, albeit in the form of a scrapbook from 1970 containing pared down papers from the Jackdaw that I’d carefully trimmed to fit the pages and sellotaped into the album when I was eleven years old. Why do children love scrapbooks so much? What’s so appealing about cutting out pictures and sticking them in albums? I certainly had several scrapbooks when I was growing up, usually devoted to my favourite pop stars. But when I was eleven I developed this much more unlikely craze for a dead king, prompted by reading the classic detective story ‘The Daughter of Time’ by Josephine Tey.


It featured her main detective Inspector Grant who was holed up in hospital with a broken leg and was itching to do some detecting regardless. A friend suggests one of the great mysteries of history and so he settles on who murdered the Princes in the Tower – was it their “evil uncle” King Richard the Third, or his successor Henry the Seventh, the first of the Tudors? The evidence presented in this brilliantly told reconstruction of the crime convinced me forever of Richard’s innocence and Henry’s guilt. I then read everything about Richard I could lay my hands on back in 1970, including this wonderful Jackdaw folder.


Jackdaw 24: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower
Jackdaw 24: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower


It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1965 but my copy is by from the Paragon Press in 1970. It was edited and compiled by J. Langdon-Davies, an interesting character in himself.  I can still remember the metal carousel in W H Smith’s that contained the Jackdaw folders and the feeling of adventure that they generated as I span it round – which person or event from history shall I find out about next? These Jackdaw folders were bulging with fascimiles of historical documents to fascinate schoolchildren with the feel of handling primary sources. There were reproductions of oil paintings, family trees, the stories of famous people, and beautiful calligraphy in bold black Latin on thick brown paper. It really did make you feel like a detective handling original documents in the excitement of solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Plus there was the Justice angle – my eleven year old heart swelled with indignation at the thought of this poor wounded king who had been so maligned by history. I became a (no doubt very annoying) apologist for King Richard to anyone who would listen, wrote a long essay on him for school (which never got marked – it was so long it was overdue and handed in too late) and carried on collecting for my scrapbook, now entitled ‘HISTORY and other things eg. books, News-paper cuttings, Drawings etc. Jeanette Sears VOLUME ONE’. I can also see from my copy of ‘The Daughter of Time’ that this coincided with being given a Dymo label writer for Christmas which meant I labelled all my possessions with my name embossed on red plastic tape. It’s also evident that the fashionable colours for 1970 were orange and purple, judging from the cover of the novel and my scrapbook. I seem to remember my bedroom was painted orange then purple too (or was it purple then orange?)


Since the reburying of King Richard III this week in Leicester Cathedral has generated so much interest worldwide, I thought I would share the contents of my old Jackdaw folder for any of you interested who now can’t get hold of a copy easily. As I said, I cut up the papers it contained and stuck them in a scrapbook with sellotape that’s now brown with age, so they won’t look pristine but I think still of interest. It begins with the well-known portrait of Ricardus III Ang. Rex. by an unknown artist and a fascimile of part of Thomas More’s ‘History of Richard III’ [not shown here] written in 1557.


 


Rous Roll and portrait of Richard III
Rous Roll and portrait of Richard III


I can still remember the fury of Josephine Tey’s detective every time he came across the ‘backstairs’ gossip’ of More’s account in any so-called ‘evidence’. Above are also  drawings of Richard and his wife and son with their coats of arms from the Rous Roll.


'Richard through contemporary eyes' and 'Richard Crookback'
‘Richard through contemporary eyes’ and ‘Richard Crookback’


On large sheets of pink paper there are accounts of ‘Richard through contemporary eyes’ and ‘Richard ‘Crookback’’, featuring the notorious performance of Shakespeare’s play by Laurence Olivier and how the Tudors attacked Richard’s reputation and physical image. This sheet ends with: “One of the most exciting uncertainties of Richard’s reign is the story of the little princes, supposed to have been murdered by their wicked uncle in the Tower of London. Today historians admit that they do not know who the criminal was – it is not even certain that there was a crime. There is no certain evidence on which a jury would convict Richard; it would even be possible to make out some sort of a case that the real criminal, if there was one, was Henry VII.”


'Did Richard murder the primes?' and an account of his acts as king
‘Did Richard murder the primes?’ and an account of his acts as king


Then on orange paper an article entitled ‘Did Richard murder the princes in the Tower?’, containing a brief review of the evidence and concluding that we only hear about Richard’s guilt from his enemies whose accounts can’t be trusted. On the contrary Richard seemed like a good and just king from his other actions and  no court could convict him of the crime on the evidence available. Opposite on pink paper is ‘What do we know of Richard’s acts?’ asking “Was Richard a hypocrite or was he sincere?” when he passed good laws, was merciful to his subjects, etc. There is a list of just and righteous actions done by the king that make him sound the ideal Christian monarch. The conclusion is: “In short, as far as we can see from the documents which have been preserved, Richard’s rule was just and progressive. Indeed, there is a possibility that his unpopularity with some of the rich and aristocratic classes was due to a tendency to stand up for the underdog and undermine some of their privileges.” Reading through these actions of Richard again, I must say it is a very convincing case that he helped the poor and oppressed wherever possible and deprived the fat cats of their unjust gain. Did his spine condition give him an empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden? It makes Philippa Gregory’s description of him as “the People’s Plantagenet” seem very appropriate. It does look as though, when we lost Richard, we lost a very good king. There is even evidence of kindness to his rivals and enemies that makes it look very unlikely that he would have killed his nephews.


Facsimile document and pamphlet on the Battle of Bosworth
Facsimile document and pamphlet on the Battle of Bosworth


On the next pages lie a fascimile, on thick brown paper, of an extract from the Act of Parliament Rolls for the first year of Richard’s reign with a typed transliteration (almost as hard to read as the original but giving even a youngster a feel of medieval English).


Typed transliteration of medieval document
Typed transliteration of medieval document


There is an account of the Battle of Bosworth of 1485 where Richard lost his crown.


Next is a copy of a letter from Richard to the keeper of his wardrobe, Piers Curteys, from 31 August 1483.


 


Richard's letter to Master of Wardrobe
Richard’s letter to Master of Wardrobe


He is requesting clothes such as “one doublet of tawney sattayn lyned with Holand cloth and enterlyned with Buske”, as well as banners and “trumpet bands of sarcenet”. The transcription underneath meant that it was possible even for an 11 year old in 1970 to read the handwriting of 1483. The accompanying notes say that even experts on medieval costume don’t know what “spurves” and “guynysans” were!


The pamphlet ‘Edward V and Richard Duke of York: the Princes in the Tower of London’ gives photos of the Tower areas where the princes were kept and possibly buried, plus diagrams and rather gruesome photos of skeletons of children from the period.


 


Leaflet on Princes in the Tower
Leaflet on Princes in the Tower


The next page has a copy of a letter from Richard to his Lord Chancellor from 12 October 1483 with a transcription on the opposite page. I think the handwriting round the edge is Richard’s own.


Richard's letter to Lord Chancellor with own handwriting round the edge
Richard’s letter to Lord Chancellor with own handwriting round the edge


The guide to the Jackdaw documents assures children that “with a little patience… you will become quite an expert in reading fifteenth century handwriting” !!


I was then intrigued to see that I had a leaflet for a performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ at Nottingham Playhouse from Oct-Dec 1971, starring the comic actor Leonard Rossiter.


Nottingham Playhouse producing Shakespeare's 'Richard III' in 1971
Nottingham Playhouse producing Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ in 1971


This amazed me as I had completely forgotten this. It is described in the leaflet as “a vividly macabre performance”. Since Robert Lindsay has also played Richard, there must have been a trend for a while of having him played by comedians. And gosh, the prices of tickets – 50p for the stalls, 25p for the balcony, and travel subsidies were available if you were coming from elsewhere in the Midlands! They were certainly keen to get people into the theatres in those days and more willing to subsidise it with public money.


The next page shows ‘How Richard became King’.


'How Richard became King'
‘How Richard became King’


In my scrapbook this is juxtaposed with Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.


IMG_7162 copy


This is because the only other Jackdaw folder I owned was about him. I also have a hard time not saying “Boo!” after his name, as it was his propagandised account of Richard which Shakespeare used for his play. As an all-or-nothing 11 year old, to me this made Thomas More a baddie.


There was a general introductory booklet to the Jackdaw folder which for some reason I pasted at the end of my display rather than the beginning. It gives a run down of all the ‘Exhibits’ and questions for you to ‘Think for Yourself’, which begins: “This ‘Jackdaw’ shows how the story of Richard III may have been distorted by later historians to make a better case for the kingship of the Tudors. Can you think of any other well-known instances of history being rewritten?” Another question is “What do you think would have happened if Richard had won the Battle of Bosworth?”, then “How would you persuade anyone living in about 1500 that a crippled body does not necessarily mean a wicked soul?”, and lastly “Suppose the little princes were alive in 1485, what do you imagine they thought about it all? Perhaps we never heard of them again because they thought “Anything for a quiet life” and preferred to remain “lost”?” Hmm – rather a loaded question. There is then a list of ‘Books to Read’, including Josephine Tey’s novel of 1954 and the biography of Richard by Paul Murray Kendall (1955) which I can remember devouring in the school library on rainy lunchtimes.


I had then cut out the photos from a paperback on the Plantagenets by John Harvey (1967).


Portrait of Richard III
Portrait of Richard III


The portrait of Richard has him looking worried and placing a ring on his own finger (was this a symbol of usurping the throne?) as with the more well-known picture. He still looked preferable in my childish eyes to Henry VII who reminded me of a weasel.


Next to this in my scrapbook was a surprise. I had completely forgotten about the magazine version of Winston Churchill’s ‘History of the English Speaking People’ and that I owned No. 30 of the 112 issues (which apparently came out every Thursday) and was edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Hugh Trevor-Roper and A J P Taylor (BPC Publishing 1970).


Magazine cover: 'The Princes in the Tower'
Magazine cover: ‘The Princes in the Tower’


The cover shows the portrait of the Princes in the Tower by the Victorian artist Millais, the boys looking very much like Bubbles dressed as Hamlet.


Contributors to the magazine
Contributors to the magazine


It contains articles by H M Colvin, A R Myers, John Gillingham, and G D Ramsay, most of whom were Oxford dons.


Winston Churchill on Richard III
Winston Churchill on Richard III


Churchill’s own account follows Thomas More’s and so was anathema to me as a stout little Ricardian. There was also an article on the Tower of London plans of the Battle of Bosworth


 


Battle lines at Bosworth
Battle lines at Bosworth


and a taste of the arguments against Richard as the murderer of the princes, but this is pretty half-hearted. Perhaps no one felt they could come out too strongly against Churchill’s view when the whole magazine was supposed to be honouring his version of history.


Image of 'evil' Richard III and the princes
Image of ‘evil’ Richard III and the princes


I am intrigued now as to why I was such a ‘fan’ of King Richard III at such a young age. I think it was the injustice done to a young king that touched me, plus the fact that it was wrapped in one of the greatest mysteries in history. The Jackdaw folder gave me a ‘hands on’ experience in learning about it and the feeling that I was in touch with the historical characters concerned. The Josephine Tey novel brought the story to life in a way that completely gripped my imagination. It has only just occurred to me as I write this blog that the first murder mystery that I have written concerns students who like re-enacting scenes from the late fifteenth century from Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ – exactly Richard III’s lifetime. Perhaps I have Richard III to thank for my own first murder mystery!


My novel 'A Murder in Michaelmas'
My novel ‘A Murder in Michaelmas’


I also think that it is no coincidence that shortly after my fascination with Kind Richard as an 11 year old I became a Christian – it was possible to also see Jesus of Nazareth of the first century as a young King who had had great evil and injustice done to him, who had suffered a cruel death and whose truth needed to be defended. From the wounded king of medieval chivalry to the wounded King on a cross wasn’t too great a leap. Now that we know more of King Richard’s own Christian faith and his desire to live as a chivalric Christian knight, this is perhaps not surprising. I was particularly struck by this aspect of Richard’s life when hearing Philippa Langley speak in 2013, the amazing woman who led the discovery of Richard’s body in the Leicester car park.


 


Meeting Philippa Langley in Southwell Library, Nov 2013
Meeting Philippa Langley in Southwell Library, Nov 2013


I was determined to shake her hand and thank her, as I believe many have done this week. It was also very moving to see a young girl putting the crown on Richard’s coffin during the reinterment service at Leicester Cathedral, a girl about the same as as me when I ‘discovered’ him, in a sense reinstating him as a good Christian king.  Who would have thought that the supposed ‘evil child-killer’ King Richard III would have become a type of Christ for me as a young child?


Little girl 're-crowning' Richard III
Little girl ‘re-crowning’ Richard III in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				May
				5
				2014
				
			

		

								
In Switzerland with Sherlock Holmes – Part Two

					
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Statue of Sherlock Holmes in Meiringen
Statue of Sherlock Holmes in Meiringen


Of course, Sherlock isn’t dead! Conan Doyle was forced to ‘resurrect’ him in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ when it became clear that the public were not happy doing without their hero. I’m sure you know the story. Holmes comes again to Watson after three years’ absence in the Spring of 1894 and the tough ex-military doctor faints with the shock. When he recovers, he exclaims, “‘Holmes!… Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?’” He even grips Holmes’ arm to check that he is not a spirit. It is described almost like one of the resurrection appearances of Christ. Holmes then explains all about how he escaped Moriarty at the Reichenbach Fall. And as well as a joyful reunion, Holmes and Watson are now also able to solve the case of the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair and capture the crack shot who has been stalking Sherlock. Watson is thrilled to be with his great friend again and be in an adventure: “it was indeed like old times.”


It would seem that we too are not willing to let Sherlock Holmes die, or to just be a character on the page or TV. And the good people of Meiringen in Switzerland have been doing their bit to keep the character alive, with the help of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. And the Sherlock Holmes Society of Switzerland is actually called ‘the Reichenbach Irregulars’, founded in 1989.


Statue of Sherlock HolmesIn Meiringen, as I found on my trip this week, it is impossible to avoid the influence and ‘presence’ of Conan Doyle’s creation. There is a wonderful life-size brass statue in the centre of the town


 


 


 


 


 


Conan Doyle Place in Meiringen
Conan Doyle Place in Meiringen


in the aptly named Conan Doyle Place


 


 


 


 


 


The back of the Park Hotel du Sauvage
The back of the Park Hotel du Sauvage


outside the hotel where Conan Doyle (and Holmes and Watson) stayed,


 


Sherlock pub in Meiringen
Sherlock pub in Meiringen


there are pubs named after Sherlock,


 


 


Sherlock Holmes Hotel, Meiringen
Sherlock Holmes Hotel, Meiringen


and a Sherlock Holmes Hotel and restaurant, where we had a coffee and a fantastic view


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


View from the Sherlock Holmes Hotel
View from the Sherlock Holmes Hotel


of one of the many mountains surrounding Meiringen in brilliant sunshine.


 


 


 


 


 


Sherlock chocolates!
Sherlock chocolates!


There were Sherlock chocolates in the town’s many sweet and cake shops (although no Sherlock-themed meringues that I saw, even though Meiringen is supposed to be where meringues originate).


 


 


 


 


Sitting outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum
Sitting outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum


The main joy was the wonderful Sherlock Homes Museum, with a much better than expected range of artifacts and displays, including police uniforms from both the London and the Meiringen police forces of the 1890s.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


The interior of the English Church
The interior of the English Church


Sadly it is in what was the English Church, now unused as such, although one can still enjoy it as a piece of neo-gothic architecture from 1891.


 


 


 


 


 


 


A large part of the joyful atmosphere created at the Museum is due to the wonderful Marlyse Dettmar who has been looking after the collection for around 15 years and is now in her eighties, I believe, and is full of a bubbling enthusiasm and kindness, as well as speaking perfect English, of course.


1st May Opening Day at the Sherlock Holmes Museum
1st May Opening Day at the Sherlock Holmes Museum


She and her team are volunteers and were so kind as to open up the museum especially for our group on our arrival, so we could visit it on the same day as seeing the Reichenbach Falls. We were also there for the official 1st of May opening day of the season.


 


 


 


 


 


 


In the original story, Mrs Hudson the landlady understandably had “violent hysterics” at the re-appearance of Holmes. And Sherlock found that his brother Mycroft “had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been.”


Reconstruction of the living room of Sherlock Holmes
Reconstruction of the living room of Sherlock Holmes


I was extremely impressed with the re-creation of Holmes’ living room at 221B Baker Street in the basement of the museum. It did seem astoundingly authentic and is based on every detail from the Conan Doyle stories that could be culled. It felt to me as if Holmes and Watson had just stepped out for a moment, with the violin and newspapers left lying around and the fire burning, the lamps lit, and the intriguing corners full of Holmes’ experiments and notebooks. When watching the Jeremy Brett TV series, I had never felt that the living room was really Sherlock’s – I kept thinking “I’m sure he wouldn’t have chosen those curtains – was it Mrs Hudson’s taste?’ etc. But in this museum’s re-creation everything felt right straightaway: “the old landmarks were all in their place.”


Foot of Sherlock Holmes statue
Foot of Sherlock Holmes statue


Later in the week, I noticed that the feet of the main statue of Sherlock in the town were shining in the rain, the brass looking like the foot of the statue of St Peter in the Vatican that is touched and kissed by pilgrims. Is this how Sherlock’s feet have been worn to a shine??!! Hopefully the fans’ devotion is not that extreme!


 


 


 


 


 


But the main surprise came on the first night. At dinner some of our fellow guests at the hotel began to peer out of one of the windows in the corner of the room as it got dark. When asked why, it turned out that there was an image of Sherlock Holmes being beamed onto the side of the mountain near the Reichenbach Falls. I could hardly believe my eyes – it was like a Bat signal over Gotham City! It was a small circular image that changed every minute or so, alternating between two different profiles of Holmes with his trademark deerstalker and pipe. It turns out I could also see this from my room, although my camera failed to capture it properly – it just looks like a pinprick of light in the centre of the picture, although one can see how large it is compared to the lights of the town below.


Sherlock image over Meiringen at night (the pinprick of light in the middle!)
Sherlock image over Meiringen at night (the pinprick of light in the middle!)


It was rather strange, to have that image watching over us, like a beneficent presence.  If any proof were needed that Meiringen had taken Sherlock Holmes to its heart, this was it.  I began to wonder what the town would actually be like without this added literary aspect.  It is certainly a beautiful place and the hotel and food and Swiss trains were fantastic, our guide charming and delightful, and our fellow travellers fascinating and super-friendly, so I think we would have had a marvellous holiday regardless.  But there’s no doubt that Sherlock and his adventures at the Reichenbach Falls do give the town of Meiringen an edge over its competitors it wouldn’t otherwise have, and I am delighted that not just the Swiss but people from all over the world can enjoy what Conan Doyle obviously saw in the dramatic beauty and story potential of this historic place.


 


But of course Conan Doyle’s short story ends with Holmes and Watson now based back in England again, as am I: “once again Mr Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”


It’s been a privilege to be able to follow in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes on such a wonderful holiday.  Hopefully there will have been plenty of inspiration for my own future writing of murder mysteries in this great tradition.


IMG_5795
Outside the English Church with Sherlock Homes statue







			

	
	





				
					


	

				

			

				
				May
				4
				2014
				
			

		

								
In Switzerland with Sherlock Holmes – Part One

					
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Portrait of Conan Doyle at Sherlock Holmes Museum, Meiringen (with my camera in reflection!)
Portrait of Conan Doyle at Sherlock Holmes Museum, Meiringen (with my camera in reflection!)


I have loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for years, since student days when my friends and I would read them out loud to each other and relish the marvellous language, laugh at the unintentional humour, and of course enjoy the wide-ranging adventures. We also were great fans of the Jeremy Brett TV series, who became ‘our’ Sherlock, just as much as Basil Rathbone was for an earlier generation and Benedict Cumberbatch is for today’s. And as a murder mystery writer myself, it’s easy to view Sherlock as a kind of patron saint of fictional detectives.


So when I was given the chance to go to Switzerland, in the very footsteps of Sherlock and his faithful Watson (and of course, before them, Conan Doyle himself in 1893), I decided to make the most of it and compare my own ‘adventure’ with the original stories.  This begins with “Adventure XI – The Final Problem”.  Watson was writing this after “that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill.” Moriarty’s brother has been bad-mouthing Sherlock in public and so Watson feels he has no choice but to defend the honour of his great friend by writing a true account of the events of third and fourth of May 1891 in Meiringen, Switzerland. “It lies with me to tell for the first time what happened between Professor Moriarty and Mr Sherlock Holmes.”


Holmes had come to Watson’s consulting room on the evening of the twenty fourth of April, in an unusually nervous state, having been in a fight and concerned that someone is out to kill him. Watson knows him well enough to take this seriously when Holmes proposes that the doctor should “come away with me for a week to the Continent”. They then have a attempted secret, fraught and complex journey that ends at the Reichenbach Fall at Meiringen in Switzerland with the seeming death of Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty, today, the fourth of May.


I have just returned from my week on the Continent, a journey that included 30 separate train journeys and felt almost as fraught at times as Sherlock and Watson’s! We weren’t being pursued by murderous maniacs but it could feel scary climbing up snowy mountain passes and overlooking gorges thousands of feet deep as we explored the same terrain in Switzerland. Apparently it was “not in Holmes’ nature to take an aimless holiday”, nor is it in mine, and I am delighted to be able to share with you some of the amazing scenery and historic sights that form the backdrop to this most famous detective story.


On that April night, Holmes gives to Watson a detailed description as to how he is to get to Victoria station in London where they are to meet up on the train: “the second first-class carriage from the front will be reserved for us.” On our trip last week, we too had to take the equivalent of Watson’s brougham (a taxi) to the station but were to travel instead with ‘Great Rail Journeys’ and leave from St Pancras International on the Eurostar to Brussels, however it was usually the first class carriage at the front of the various trains that were reserved for us as we shot across the continent.


Eventually.


We arrived at Eurostar to find they had mysteriously voided our tickets (our wonderful and unflappable guide said this had never happened before in her experience!) and we had to wait half an hour to be re-instated. But Watson’s relief that “my luggage was waiting for me, and I had no difficulty in finding the carriage” I’m glad to say was usually our experience after that wobbly start. S and W get off the train at Canterbury as they are being followed, meaning to go to Newhaven to cross to Dieppe, fooling Moriarty with luggage labelled for Paris. The intention is to “make our way at leisure into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle.” This was exactly our route, although “at leisure” is hardly the way to describe our one-night stay. Again, there were no master criminals on our trail to stop us, only several thousand students demonstrating in Luxembourg at an unearthly hour of the morning (for students), blocking our way to the train station (just across the road). There were several occasions when I could sympathise with Watson at this point in the story, “looking rather ruefully after the rapidly disappearing luggage-van which contained my wardrobe…”. There was also the same problem as when to snatch snacks at the various stations and stopping points. Sherlock is well-known for always interrupting Watson with the promise of adventure when he is just about to eat. Watson must have groaned inwardly when Sherlock declares: “The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach the buffet…” You and me both, Watson.


Instead they too make their way to Brussels, then on to Strasburg and Geneva. Holmes tells Watson to return to London, as Moriarty now has nothing to lose and is a desperate man. But “it was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an old campaigner as well as an old friend.” Watson is determined to be faithful and not let Holmes go on alone, whatever the cost.


Tiny spring alpine flowers
Tiny spring alpine flowers


They have a “charming” week wandering in the Rhone Valley, going through the snow of the Gemmi Pass by way of Interlaken to Meiringen. “It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring below, the virgin white of the winter above…”


 


 


 


 


 


 


Interlaken
Interlaken


But of course Holmes cannot forget that they are hunted men. Near the Daubensee a large rock is dislodged and falls down next to them from the ridge above. Holmes is not depressed by this, however, but seems to exalt in this ultimate competition of two great intellects and strategists. “Again and again he recurred to the fact that if he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.”


 


 


“It was on the 3d of May that we reached the little village of Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof…” in 1891.


Park Hotel du Sauvage
Park Hotel du Sauvage


This is where we also stayed – now called the Park Hotel du Sauvage,


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


Furniture at hotel
Furniture at hotel


and still with many of the period details of the time.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


Hotel where Conan Doyle stayed in 1893
Hotel where Conan Doyle stayed in 1893


And the plaque to prove it…


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


View from hotel window
View from hotel window


We had large rooms with stunning views of the mountains. My room looked out on the Reichenbach Fall area itself.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


Reception at the Park Hotel du Sauvage
Reception at the Park Hotel du Sauvage


Like Watson and Holmes, we found that all the Swiss running and serving in the hotel spoke excellent English. Watson wrote that at the advice of the owner of the hotel “on the after noon of the 4th we set off together, with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui.” (I was amused to be given ‘Rosenlaui’ as the codeword for the day to use the wifi at a local institution).


 


 


 


 


 


Watson continues, “We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about half-way up the hill, without making a small detour to see them.” This week we were very glad of a mini-bus to take us up the hill as we knew it was an hour and a half to make the steep walk back down again.


Reichenbach Falls 2014
Reichenbach Falls 2014


Conan Doyle’s description of it as “a fearful place” was true as to the rock formations – basically when you looked down – but when you looked up at the falls itself, instead of a “torrent, swollen by the melting snow”, we only saw a small rivulet of water (someone unkindly described it as “the Reichenbach Trickle”). We were wondering whether Conan Doyle had seen it later on in the year when more snow had melted, but no, he seems very precise about it being on the fourth of May. So this is rather a mystery in itself, unless global warming is to blame.


 


 


 


Beneath the Reichenbach Falls
Beneath the Reichenbach Falls


There was “an immense chasm” underneath but the rock did not look particularly “coal-black”, nor was there a “boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip.” The waters did look green, but there wasn’t a curtain of hissing spray that with the swirling water could “turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour.”


 


 


 


 


 


Restaurant at Reichenbach Falls
Restaurant at Reichenbach Falls


If we did go giddy it was due to less oxygen than usual at that height, plus the need for tea or coffee at the local restaurant, fortunately situated on the path back.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


View from Reichenbach Falls
View from Reichenbach Falls


Of course, Holmes and Watson are ‘tricked’ by a fake message about someone who needs the doctor’s help back at the hotel and so Watson writes: “As I turned away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last I was ever destined to see of him in this world.”


Or so he thinks…


 


 


 


 


Swiss Flag at Reichenbach Falls
Swiss Flag at Reichenbach Falls


Part Two will look at the impact of Sherlock Holmes on Meiringen and the amazing way that this small Swiss town has taken him to their hearts.