Month: December 2025

“Words, and for that matter cleverness, were for the common people.” (Tessa Hadley, The Party)

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

New Year’s Eve seemed a good time to post on The Party, a novella by Tessa Hadley (2024). And a book is about as near as I plan to get to a party on this day 😀

Tessa Hadley is a great writer, and every time I read her I wonder why I’m not a completist for her books. Now, there’s a New Year’s resolution I could actually fulfil!

The Party is only 115 pages, but fully realised due to the astute observation I associate with Hadley. It follows sisters Moira and Evelyn, students living in Bristol, as they navigate young adulthood in the 1970s.

“Anything could happen between now and tomorrow. Evelyn couldn’t believe her luck, that she was going to an actual party – and not just any dull ordinary party but this wild one with her sister’s friends, in half-derelict old pub with a terrible reputation, hanging over the black water in the city docks.”

The Party brilliantly captures a time when young people are trying on who they are, desperate to spread their wings and flourish into something unfamiliar, desperate to stay in the safety of their childhood bedrooms.

“She longed for and feared the moment when she would shed her thick winter coat and reveal herself. To tell the truth she feared everything: part of her wanted to get straight back on the 28 bus and go home.”

The sisters are close in age but not emotionally, as Moira holds herself deliberately apart:

“Moira had made such efforts to transform herself, when they moved down to Bristol, into this controlled, poised young woman. Yet some essence of the fierce bold child persisted in her, and had been diverted into new channels, sexual and personal.”

The titular gathering is both exciting and disappointing. They meet Paul and Sinden, from another world in terms of experience, class and money. Neither of the sisters like these men or finds them attractive, yet a couple of days later when Sinden invites them to Paul’s house, they go.

“Having made a bet with herself – not just for this evening, but for life – on her looks and her wits, she mustn’t falter or look down, she had to carry her performance through.”

There is no nostalgia for youth in The Party, it’s too real. Yet there is compassion, and a tender realisation of coming-of-age from the narrator that the characters don’t recognise, however much they long for it.

“To lose herself properly in a book she had to be crumpled and snug, oblivious of her appearance, scrunched up in an armchair with her shoes off and her legs tucked under her. When she was really reading, she forgot who she was.”

To end, a suitably bittersweet song about people and home changing, but from a band who seem like they know how to enjoy a party:

“A quintessential English village will prove to be a hotbed of murder, mystery and intrigue” (Martin Edwards)

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

Continuing my cosy mystery reads for Christmas, it was Kaggsy’s tempting review at the start of the month which alerted me to Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth (1952), republished by the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

It opens with Liane – Lee – Crauford reflecting on what happened when she accepted her friend Betty’s invitation to stay at Christmas:

“As far as the murder went, we all disliked the victim so heartily that nobody could screw up much actual grief on that score; but all the same it was an upsetting thing to happen and caused a good deal of distress one way and another in the village.”

Betty is the doctor’s wife and has two small children. Lee is married but her husband will be joining her later, so she heads to the small village of Staple Green alone. It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and Lee soon meets several of the neighbours when Betty throws a drinks party.

Sir Henry Metcalfe is the local retired hanging judge and landowner who is given to pronouncements like:

“No wonder the Empire’s going to the dogs when people of our standing—the very ones who should know better and set an example to the working classes—behave like a set of hedonistic escapists.”

As well as smaller scale observations:

“Once a week, not to mention Sundays, we are left stranded and servantless while they frivol away their time and my money in the vulgar and overheated precincts of some neighbouring picture palace.”

In other words, his staff go to the cinema at Tunbridge Wells.

His wife Diana is universally acknowledged to be entirely lovely, not least by the land agent John Wickham – rumours abound but no-one can quite believe it of the irreproachable lady of the manor.

His tenants are the Qualnoughs, Lewis and his bright young daughter Ann, a slightly affected actress who calls everyone Darling. Sir Henry is threatening to turn them out of their home, and Ann is deemed an unsuitable match for Sir Henry’s son Michael, who also wants to pursue a career on the stage, against his father’s wishes. So it’s hardly surprising that when Sir Henry is found dead at home, Ann speaks for many when she pronounces it:

“The best bit of news we’ve had in Staple Green since they put in the main electricity cable”

While her father refuses to be hypocrite and freely admits, most entertainingly, that he found the deceased to be “a fraudulent nincompoop”  and “a pedantic popinjay”.

It soon emerges that Sir Henry was poisoned, and given that Betty’s husband Howard leaves his surgery unlocked with all manner of medications freely available, any of the neighbours could have wandered in and helped themselves, including the mysterious and glamorous newcomer Sonia Phillips…

Scotland Yard arrive in the form of Detective Inspector Hugh Gordon and Sergeant Spragg. Hugh and Lee know each other and there are clear references to a previous mystery, although I didn’t feel I needed to have read that one to enjoy this. Hugh stays at the Blue Boar in the village with its “depressing air of frowst and aspidistras” and he and Lee are soon charging about in his flashy new Lancia to find the murderer.

I thought it was entirely obvious from some heavy clues at the start who the murderer was, and mostly how they’d done it too, apart from some logistics a twenty-first century reader is unlikely to pick up. But this didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all. These types of stories are comfort reads for me, and the detectives working everything out and tying it all up neatly is soothing escapism.

Lee is an entertaining narrator, clear sighted and witty. She is grumpy at not being a full confidante of Scotland Yard which seemed a bit presumptuous to me, while she lets being called “a good girl” by men who want her to be convenient slide by (no doubt a sign of the times). She and Hugh have a flirtatious relationship which provides an additional frisson to proceedings while never becoming anything more.

The story is well paced, believable and entertaining. There are also some lovely details to convey the Christmas setting:

“It was only a short distance to the village green, and we strolled up the lane admiring the wonderful patterns of filigree lace made by the spiders webs which hung festooned all over the high hedges, sparkling in the chilly sunshine, and the way each blade of grass on the verge stood out stiff and encrusted with thick frost.”

I hope this is the start of more Gilruth issues from BLCC – fingers crossed!

To end, mine is a secular Christmas, but I still have a favourite carol:

“A desire to move furniture is a desire for life. “(Celia Fremlin, The Long Shadow)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

I’ve been meaning to read Celia Fremlin for a while, encouraged by JacquiWine’s excellent reviews. Happily, this coincided with my plan to read some Christmas-set golden age/cosy mysteries in December, as The Long Shadow (1975) builds its tension through a haunted group of houseguests throughout the festive period.

I immediately knew I was in for a treat with Fremlin. We join Imogen at the first party she’s attended since her husband died two months ago. We quickly learn that while she is grieving, she also recognises that Ivor was not a pleasant person. There is no sentimentality in her reflections.

“How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame that he was missing it all. How he would have loved to watch the letters pouring in, day after day, by every post, in their tens and in their dozens, each one a tribute to himself.”

She also casts a critical eye over the niceties of solo party attendance:

“She’s a widow, that’s what she is. With wooden detachment, Imogen watched Myrtle’s social aplomb faltering before the task of finding something intriguing to say about Imogen: something at least as amusing as Dutch Elm disease.

She gave it up.”

There’s also some astute observations about the deeply odd ways that the English approach the bereaved:

“Even Edith Hartman from next door had at last stopped popping in with cups of tepid Oxo and soothing stories about people who had died of cancer recently.”

But soon Imogen has more to worry about than navigating social mores, as someone rings in the middle of the night, telling her they know she killed her husband.

Told from Imogen’s point of view, she is clear she didn’t kill him. She has little time to reflect though, as it’s not long before her adult step-children turn up; the somewhat reprobate son Robin, and acquisitive daughter Dot, with her husband Herbert and their two young sons, Vernon and Timmie.

More bafflingly, Robin brings an almost silent girl to the house who wafts around preparing macrobiotic food, and Ivor’s scatty second wife Cynthia flies in from Bermuda to also take up residence. Then someone starts moving Ivor’s papers and updating them, the children have faces visiting them in nightmares and see a man in a Santa costume sat in Ivor’s study, and Imogen begins to wonder if a ghost isn’t part of the company too…

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house”

As a reader we are meant to be sceptical of ghosts and suspect everyone else, and they certainly act suspiciously! All of the adults seem to be Up To Something but I certainly couldn’t work out what was going on.

The Long Shadow is well-paced at only 242 pages, with a finale that is satisfying and believable. There’s even a final comic twist right at the last sentence. It’s certainly made me keen to read more Fremlin and thankfully Faber have made more reissues available.

Although not heavily Christmas-themed, it’s a great Christmas read with its house full of extended family, things unspoken, and would be easily digested after a dinner of heavier festive fare 😊

To end, two of my favourite folk singers coming together to sing insults at each other in honour of Christmas (please note, they have updated some of Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan’s name-calling, but the language remains decidedly colourful):

“She had adored her husband, and was very fond of her French pepper-mill.” (Margery Sharp, The Foolish Gentlewoman)

/ madamebibilophile / 28 Comments

It’s been a busy month trying to get to grips with my new job, but I’m delighted to contribute to Dean Street December, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. This reading event provides a lovely end to the reading year, and it encouraged me to get The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp (1948) off the TBR, which Dean Street Press publish as part of their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.

I really enjoy Margery Sharp’s comic eye, and there’s a perfect example early in this novel in a description of the family’s Sealyham:

“His shaggy eyebrows and meditative gaze gave him an old-gentleman look; he sat there like a retired Colonel, newspaper laid aside, contemplating Socialism.”

The terrier’s family are hodgepodge: widowed fifty-five year old Isabel Brocken, “sentimental, affectionate, uncritical,” and her priggish brother-in-law Simon:

“Mr Brocken was not conceited enough to perceive in himself any compensating charms. To be loved without reason did not flatter him. He put up with Isabel’s affection, as he put up with Isabel, because he had to.”

As well as two younger people staying at the house: Isabel’s nephew Humphrey and her companion Jacqueline, both recovering from the recent war.

This unlikely group live a life of very little strife, ensconced in Isabel’s old family home of Chipping Lodge, sat in a suburb of London which escaped the bombs. (Unlike Simon’s house which is why he finds himself having to tolerate other people, while it is rebuilt.)

Keeping them in domestic order are the self-contained housekeeper Mrs Poole and her teenage daughter Greta.

Their domestic peace is shattered when Isabel invites her old school friend Tilly Cuff to stay indefinitely. The motivation stems from a perceived injustice she did to Tilly years ago, and a plan to make amends. For Tilly does not seem to have thrived:

“No-one ever fell in love with Tilly, not even curates.”

Simon, Humphrey and Jacqueline are horrified. Firstly by Isabel’s plan to leave Tilly all her money, and secondly by Tilly herself:

“Is she to be allowed to beggar herself for the sake of a peculiarly offensive incubus?”

Sharp is always good at villains without caricature, and Tilly is a perfect example. She is manipulative and mendacious, particularly towards Greta Poole. It is Greta and her mother that provide the greatest emotional engagement in the novel: Tilly’s treatment of them shows her to be a real threat, and Simon’s attitude towards them shows him not to be irredeemably hard-hearted.

Yet Tilly is also shown to be vulnerable, lonely and defensive. Although she is powerful in her ability to completely destabilise the entire household, really she has less resources, personal and financial, to draw on than anyone else.

I found The Foolish Gentlewoman to be a surprising page-turner, as I wanted to see how the household would escape Tilly! And yet, things didn’t quite pan out as I expected. Sharp has fun with confounding reader’s expectations:

“To set one’s foot on a tragic stage, and find that the part thrust into one’s hand belonged to a domestic comedy: to read on, and perceive in prospect a crisis after all potentially tragic: to turn the last page upon anticlimax. How inartistic, and yet how life like!”

Yes, anti-climatic in a sense, but wholly satisfying and enjoyable. I particularly liked the happy ending arranged for Simon:

“With no less than five persons had Mr Brocken narrowly escaped, if not intimacy, a degree of acquaintance that would have allowed any one of them to become a nuisance to him.”

A gentle joy made readily available thanks to the excellent Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow.