Author: madamebibilophile

“Some things have happened in this house that are not to be cured by pots of tea.” (Cyril Hare, An English Murder)

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I enjoy a golden age mystery at Christmas. It’s my comfort reading at any time of year, but I always try and read one at Christmas, when the tropes of being snowed in (and what will the thaw reveal?!), country houses, groups of people with various tensions trapped together, jovial facades and traditions hiding mendacity and murderers, work especially well.

Unfortunately I had a couple of false starts. The first two I tried promised much of the above, but for various reasons didn’t quite work. Thankfully, a recent addition to the TBR, Cyril Hare’s An English Murder (1951), came to the rescue.

The title of the mystery is very apt: Hare takes a humorous but incisive view of postwar English society, making his points without rancour. Published only six years after the war, perhaps too harsh a criticism would not have been well-received by a generation who went through horrors in service of country, but at the same time things were changing and Hare captures this well.

The story opens:

“Warbeck Hall is reputed to be the oldest inhabited house in Markshire. The muniment room in the north-eastern angle is probably its oldest part; it is certainly the coldest. Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink, Ph.D. of Heidelberg, Hon.D.Litt. of Oxford, sometime Professor of Modern History in the University of Prague, corresponding member of half a dozen learned societies from Leyden to Chicago, felt the cold sink into his bones as he sat bowed over the pages of a pile of faded manuscripts, […] The real obstacle that was worrying him at the moment was the atrocious handwriting in which the third Viscount Warbeck had annotated the confidential letters written to him by Lord Bute during the first three years of the reign of George III. Those marginalia! Those crabbed, truncated interlineations! Dr. Bottwink had begun to feel a personal grievance against this eighteenth-century patrician.”

Dr Bottwink is a concentration camp survivor. He is learned and wise, and really wants to be left alone with his papers “in response to an instinct that drove him to seek refuge from the horrors and perplexities of the present in the only world that was entirely real to him.”

Unfortunately for him, he will be drawn into the Warbeck family’s Christmas, including having to deal with the revolting Robert, heir apparent:

“I don’t think I shall greatly enjoy sitting down at table with Mr. Robert Warbeck.”

“Sir?“

“Oh, now I have shocked you, Briggs, and I should not have done that. But you know who Mr. Robert is?”

“Of course I do, sir. His lordship’s son and heir.”

“I am not thinking of him in that capacity. Do you not know that he is the president of this affair that calls itself the League of Liberty and Justice?”

“I understand that to be the fact, sir.”

“The League of Liberty and Justice, Briggs,” said Dr. Bottwink very clearly and deliberately, “is a Fascist organization.”

“Is that so, sir?”

“You are not interested, Briggs?”

“I have never been greatly interested in politics, sir.”

“Oh, Briggs, Briggs,” said the historian, shaking his head in regretful admiration, “if you only knew how fortunate you were to be able to say just that!”

One of the drawbacks of golden age crime is that you often come across anti-Semitism. It was a relief to see Dr Bottwink quickly established as the reluctant detective, and Robert and his organisation given short shrift.

Also present in the house are Sir Julius, cousin to Lord Warbeck and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new socialist government, whose budget is likely to mean Warbeck Hall will be sold; his Scotland Yard bodyguard, Rogers; Lady Camilla Prendergast (who for unfathomable reasons is attracted to Robert); Mrs. Carstairs, politically ambitious for her husband; Briggs the ancient retainer steeped in duty to the class system and struggling with all changes; and his daughter Susan. I have a terrible memory with too many characters in mystery novels and this number was just right – enough for various suspects but not so many that I had trouble keeping them straight.

Hare lightens the story with gentle humour. Dr Bottwink’s outsider status means there are plenty of digs at English social mores, as well as direct from the authorial voice too, such as this sickbed reunion between Lord Warbeck and Robert:

“When they met they shook hands as English people should. But there is something rather absurd about shaking hands with a man who is lying down. Eventually he compromised by placing one hand lightly on his father’s shoulder.

“Sit down over there,” said Lord Warbeck gruffly, as though a little ashamed at his son’s display of emotion.”

I also enjoyed Rogers’ resolute imperturbability in the face of any heightened emotions from his political employer. Mrs Carstairs provides broader humour through unstintingly loquacious self-interest:

““She overran [Lord Warbeck’s library] like an occupying army, distributing her fire right and left and reducing the inhabitants to a stunned quiescence.”

If you’ve struggled with the social demands of Christmas dragging you away from your reading, you will certainly identify with Dr Bottwink. Far away from his beloved manuscripts, his considered, intelligent attempts at small talk fail miserably in the face of English ignorance:

Camilla laughed. “That was very simple of you, Dr. Bottwink,” she said. “Did you really expect a Cabinet Minister to know the first thing about constitutional history? He’s much too busy running his department to bother about a thing like that.”

“I fear that my knowledge of England is still imperfect,” said the historian mildly. “On the Continent it used not to be uncommon to find professors of history in Cabinet posts.””

On the first night Robert gets horribly drunk and offends even those more favourably disposed towards him. Dr Bottwink’s assessment of him remains unchanged:

“A disregarded spectator in the shadows, Dr. Bottwink gazed at him with cold and steady dislike, remembering other men who had professed principles not so very different from those of the League of Liberty and Justice, who had been noisy and genial in their cups, and had thereafter committed crimes beyond all reckoning.”

Unsurprisingly someone soon bumps Robert off with cyanide in his drink. But as it snows steadily, cutting everyone off, are the others safe? Will Dr Bottwink find the culprit in time, and if he does will anyone listen to him?

An English Murder was well-paced and a quick read.  I hadn’t read Cyril Hare before but on the strength of this I’d be keen to read more. The Guardian included An English Murder in its Top Ten golden age detective novels and I can see why.  

“When I am told that I cannot possibly think anything, my nature is so contradictory that I immediately begin to think about it.”

To end, Dr Bottwink’s knowledge of William Pitt helps him solve the mystery. He may take issue with the historical accuracy this portrayal:

“Have you practised swooning?” (Ruby Ferguson, Apricot Sky)

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This is my contribution to Dean Street December, a month-long celebration of this wonderful indie publisher, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home.

Dean Street Press’ imprint Furrowed Middlebrow focuses on early and mid-twentieth century women writers, and it’s from this collection that I’ve chosen my read, Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson (1952 – please note for Simon and Kaggsy’s 1952 Club running next year!)

I must confess that rather than a DSP edition, my copy is a nice little hardback I found in my local charity shop, inscribed with the author’s love to Flossie and John 😊 I picked up her later novel The Leopard’s Coast at the same time, also given with the author’s love, so I wonder if Flossie and John lived near me and their books have been cleared out…?

Aside from the Jill pony books I read as a child, I only knew Ruby Ferguson from Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary  (1937) republished by Persephone Books. But I’d enjoyed that so much that I felt confident enough to swoop up the two books when I saw them; and what a total joy Apricot Sky turned out to be.

Set in 1948 in the Highlands of Scotland, the story follows the MacAlvey family through the events of one summer. A descriptive passage on the first page sets the tone:

“The charm of islands which changed their colour every few minutes, of lilac peaks smudged on the farthest horizon, of white-capped waves on windy days, of distant steamers chugging romantically on their ways, of little boats with faded brown sails scudding before the breeze, of sudden storms pouring fiercely across the terrific expanse of sky and water, of thousands of seabirds planing and diving, of floods of sunshine scattering millions of diamonds upon the rippling waves, all this made-up the view about which the MacAlvey’s visitors had so much to say while the MacAlvey’s themselves listened indulgently and with inward amusement.”

The MacAlvey’s are a nice family living a life not without trials but without any great drama, comfortably well-off and settled.

“Kilchro House was noted for its hospitality. It was a gay house where a gay family gave charming entertainment and never tried to descend into banality by prattling about themselves.”

The MacAlvey’s younger daughter Raine is due to marry Ian, brother of the Laird of Larrich. This is the thread which runs through the novel, as the wedding gathers apace for the September ceremony.

Raine’s older sister Cleo is back from three years in America, everyone expecting her much changed, but her heart stayed with her Highland home, and Neil, the Laird. Whenever she sees him she becomes utterly tongue-tied, and feels entirely inadequate alongside the charms of Inga Duthie, a sophisticated widow who is new to the area.

“Cleo MacAlvey could think of no worse desolation than that those she liked should not like her. She was a great deal more diffident than her sister Raine, who barged through life without caring whether people liked her or not, and was about as introverted as a fox-terrier puppy.”

Alongside these adult concerns are the younger children, left to their own devices. Primrose, Gavin, and Archie were orphaned by the war and live with their grandparents. The whole summer stretches before them:

“At Strogue there was no promenade and no cinema or skating-rink and only about three shops, and you couldn’t move without getting yourself in a mess with tar and fish and stuff left about, but everything you did there was full of exhilaration and had a way of turning out quite otherwise than you expected.”

They love boats and beaches and being out of doors. The only blight on their idyll is distant cousins Elinore and Cecil who come to stay for a few weeks. They are refined and self-contained, and in the case of Elinore, an unmitigated snob.

The children’s adventures are reminiscent of the Famous Five: there are islands, swimming and a big focus on picnics. There is post-war rationing to contend with, but it is seemingly straightforward to overcome – they frequently manage sweets, pies, jam, sandwiches and fizzy drinks.

For the adults, the trials are tedious houseguests in the shape of Dr and Mrs Leigh, and the appalling Trina, married to their son James. Mrs MacAlvey loves having guests though, and loves her family and her garden. Her part of the world gives her all she needs and she feels no desire to venture any further:

“She found herself unable to picture it, for she had never been to England, and always thought of it as being full of successful people living in Georgian houses.”

Despite being so rooted in her domestic life, she remains blissfully unaware of what her grandchildren get up to all day, and how tortured poor Cleo is by her unspoken love for Neil:

“Nobody talked about their feelings at Kilchro House, it was considered one stage worse than talking about your inside.”

I thoroughly enjoyed my summer with the MacAlvey family in a beautifully evoked part of the world, far away from chilly London. The stakes were soothingly low, and the humour was gentle. Any drama was short-lived, and things worked out exactly as they should.

If you are looking for a warm-hearted, escapist read, Apricot Sky will serve you well.

“‘All right,’ said Raine, holding out a ten-shilling note. ‘I’ll try anything once, even altering the course of history.’”

“If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.” (Margaret Atwood)

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This is the second of my two posts for Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2024 (#MARM2024) hosted by Marcie at Buried in Print.

I really wanted to get this posted in time, but those of you who read my previous post will know I’m currently getting over labyrinthitis. So the same disclaimer applies: please bear with me and apologies in advance for inadequacy/incoherence!

Old Babes in the Wood (2023) is a collection of short stories split into three sections. Tig & Nell contains three stories about the titular couple, My Evil Mother contains eight stories and the final section returns to Nell & Tig with four stories.

I find it hard enough to write about short stories even when my ears aren’t making life extremely trying, so I’m just going to focus on the final section for this post. The Nell & Tig stories explore what it means to be part of a long-established, now elderly couple and the challenges of aging, illness and bereavement.

These issues form a large part of my working life, and I thought Atwood nailed it with her characteristic insight, wit, compassion, and lack of sentimentality. I’m not one for biographical readings generally, but it is worth noting that Graeme Gibson, Atwood’s partner of 45 years, died in 2019 and Old Babes in the Wood is dedicated to him.

In A Dusty Lunch, Nell is sorting through Tig’s father’s belongings. The Jolly Old Brigadier – JOB – fought in the war and covered his PTSD with relentless joviality which didn’t quite fool anyone.

“The Brig had been shunted off to peacetime babysitting, a headquarters here, a headquarters there, a defence attaché in Washington decorating cocktail parties, but for what? Soldiers in peacetime are superfluous: celebrated once a year for something they once were, avoided in the here and now for what they have become.”

As Nell sorts through his belongings she realises the myriad stories that make up a life, and how many remain unspoken and therefore unrealised by even those closest to the person. She has no idea what to do with the deeply meaningful accoutrements of a life that hold no meaning for her, including the ghosts that haunted the Brig.

“What about the silent people, some alive, some dead, who sit in armchairs but aren’t really there, […] Because they’re part of it too.”

This will resonate with anyone who has had to sort through the material contents of another’s life. By placing it with the war generation, further emphasis is given to silent enduring traumas and the cost of choices made for domestic life in peacetime.

Widows is an epistolary episode, capturing the inadequacy of responses to the bereaved as Nell writes to her friend Stevie:

“You were always a well-meaning busy body. I don’t fault you for it – you have a kind heart, you are filled to the brim with good intentions, but I don’t want any casseroles or oblique, probing questions, or visits from professionals, or nieces talking me into buying an assisted-care condo. And no, I do not wish to go on a cruise.”

And really, responses can only ever be inadequate in the swirling disorientation of immense grief:

“Time has ceased to be linear, with life events and memories in a chronological row, like beads on a string. It’s the strangest feeling, or experience, or rearrangement. I’m not sure I can explain it to you.”

In Wooden Box, Nell is working out how to manage the demands of the everyday, when her whole life has been entirely disrupted by Tig’s death:

“It’s like being a student again: the same disorganisation and fecklessness and sudden bursts of intention, the same formless anxiety, the same bare bones meals. How easily she has slipped back sixty years, give or take: grazing, dubious leftovers, no ceremony.”

The titular box is one Tig made in school, with a few bits and pieces in it, which evade Nell as to their meaning. She is baffled and overwhelmed as to what to do with them, the box symbolic of her entire widowhood.

The final story which gives its name to the collection, Nell and her sister Lizzie are sorting through their childhood summer cabin, layers of memories alongside layers of dust and ancient belongings. In line with the fairytale title, Nell recognises her magical thinking, whereby Tig is both absent and ever-present.

“It’s an optical illusion, the retreating figure dwindling, growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance. Those retreating stay the same size. They aren’t really diminished, they aren’t really gone. It’s just that you can’t see them.”

Old Babes in the Wood is as accomplished as you’d expect. The collection overall is a varied one, including elements of sci-fi, fairytale and even whimsy (in The Dead Interview Atwood communes with George Orwell via Mrs Verity, a medium.) Atwood completely understands the form of whatever she turns her hand to. She always has something interesting to say and she does so with humane understanding.

To end, Margaret Atwood reading one of the earlier Tig & Nell stories, Morte de Smudgie:

“Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.’ (Anthony Powell)

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This is the eleventh instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The eleventh volume, Temporary Kings, was published in 1973 and is set towards the end of the 1950s. I can’t believe I’m at the penultimate volume!

I’m writing this as I recover from labyrinthitis; today is the first time I’ve been able to sit up after two and a half days flat on my back. So I’m not sure how much sense this post will make, but I wanted to get it written in November. Please bear with me!

Temporary Kings is set for the most part at a cultural conference in Venice in 1958, which Nick has been sent to somewhat unwillingly, by Mark Members who has organised it but can’t be bothered to go himself.

I felt a sense of slowing down, as old acquaintances arrive and new people join the dance; it is almost a series of character sketches. Given Powell’s enormous talent for incisive but never cruel summations of people in just a few lines, this made for an enjoyable read.

For example, how’s this for a description of Louis Glober, a filmmaker:

“What did not happen in public had no reality for Glober at all. In spite of the quiet manner, there was no great suggestion of interior life. What was going on inside remained there only until it could be materially expressed as soon as possible.”

I also liked the new character of Dr Brightman, an academic who:

“had made clear a determination to repudiate the faintest suspicion of spinsterish prudery that might, very mistakenly, be supposed to attach to her circumstances.”

The Widmerpools turn up trailing controversy in their wake: Kenneth has lost his seat as an MP and so given a knighthood and a seat in the Lords (sigh…) and Pamela has been embroiled in a sex scandal. I do enjoy Pamela’s relentless creation of discomfort wherever she goes:

“She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”

On returning to the UK, Nick finds the conference hard to shake off:

“The conference settled down in the mind as a kind of dream, one of those dreams laden with the stuff of real life, stopping just the right side of nightmare, yet leaving disturbing undercurrents to haunt the daytime, clogging sources of imagination – whatever those may be – causing their enigmatic flow to ooze more sluggishly than ever, periodically cease entirely.”

There is an unsettling feeling to the scenes, and sense of so much unknown among the characters which could implode at any moment. Somehow it doesn’t entirely, but I felt a creeping sense of doom alongside the belief that things will just carry on.

We also have Stringham’s suspected death in a POW camp confirmed. More than any other, that character broke my heart.

Towards the end of the novel, Nick reflects:

“One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardised fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living […] After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief.”

This is a terrible post and I’ve missed so much out! I blame my ears 😉 But I hope it’s given something of the sense of the novel.

Paula’s recent Winding Up the Week post alerted me to this wonderful article about Violet Pakenham, Anthony Powell’s wife and her role in the production of Dance. It’s also a great portrait of postwar Bohemian family life. I really recommend it and you don’t have to have read any of Powell to enjoy it.

To end, a song from 1972 but a UK hit the same year as Temporary Kings was published. I chose it from many 1973 hits because after 11 volumes, Nick still remains somewhat elusive to me as a reader:

“We may safely assume that all tales are fiction.” (Margaret Atwood)

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This is the first of what I’m hoping will be two posts for Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2024 (#MARM2024) hosted by Marcie at Buried in Print, as I aim to read the two short story collections I have in the TBR.

Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (2014) turned out to be perfect autumn reading with its edge of darkness, verging on Gothic at times.

The first three tales are connected. Alphinland sees fantasy writer Constance negotiate heavy  snow after the death of her husband; in Revenant, the poet she loved in her youth, Gavin, tries to manage the frustrations and isolations of older age; in Dark Lady one of his lovers with whom he cheated on Constance is back living with her twin brother.

All of these are grounded in reality, but Atwood weaves through touches of unreality to destabilise any certainty the reader has about what is being portrayed. Constance’s fantasy world is entirely real to her, and there are hints that it is an effective means of controlling people. But is this psychological or metaphysical?

“How did he manage to work his way out of the metaphor she’s kept him bottled up in for all these years?”

Atwood’s portrayal of Constance and Gavin allows for some light satire as to the vagaries of literary trends, and the uses writers make of their art. Gavin enjoyed the male privilege of 1960s bohemianism and is disappointed that the world has moved on alongside his aging body:

“His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?”

Dark Lady portrays the life of an aging muse, using the Shakespeare reference to make Jorrie a slightly ghoulish presence. As her brother Tin reflects on her appearance:

“at least he’s been able to stop her from dyeing [her hair] jet black: way too Undead with her present day skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tan-coloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineral-elements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.”

“He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.”

Gavin’s nostalgia for the sexual politics of the 1960s is given further short shrift in the titular tale. I was delighted to learn that the idea came about on an Artic cruise, where Atwood’s late husband started to work out how to murder someone on a ship and get away with it. Atwood decided to finish the tale and the logistical details are closely observed.

All the tales are memorable, and the collection finishes on one that feels truly terrifying as an external threat builds towards vulnerable people in a nursing home. Like the tales that have preceded it, Torching the Dusties is touched with the fantastical while staying rooted in the recognisable. Wilma has Charles Bonnet syndrome, hallucinating due to her failing eyesight:

“she locates the phone in her peripheral vision, ignores the ten or twelve little people who are skating on the kitchen counter in long fur-bordered velvet cloaks and silver muffs, and picks it up.”

Atwood relentlessly builds the tension in the tale, ending it on a jovial note that is brilliantly inappropriate.

There’s so much here for Atwood fans to enjoy: the sharp observations (particularly on ageing), the wry societal commentary; the mischievous humour, and of course the fierce intellect. She’s clearly having fun here and encouraging her readers to have fun too. I’m looking forward to the other collection I have to read, Old Babes in the Wood (2023).

“I’ve always looked at myself from above, as pleased as an omniscient narrator.” (Empar Moliner, Beloved)

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Trigger warning: mentions childhood sexual abuse

This is my contribution to the wonderful Novellas in November 2024 hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Beck at Bookish Beck.

I heard about Beloved by Empar Moliner (transl. Laura McGloughlin 2024) through Stu at Winston’s Dad’s blog. I was immediately tempted and it seemed a good choice for my resolution to buy a book a month from an indie press/bookshop. The lovely 3TimesRebel Press even included a tote bag 😊

The striking cover illustration is by Anna Pont, a Catalan artist. She died from cancer earlier this year and all the proceeds from Beloved are being donated to cancer research.

The paw is courtesy of Fred aka Horatio Velveteen aka Mike Woznicat (as like the comedian Mike Wozniak he has a handsome moustache). Anyway, enough of my blithering about my cat. On with novellas!

Remei is in her early 50s and going through menopause. She is married to a musician ten years younger and at the start of the novella she has a revelation:

“Falling oestrogen, combined with lactose intolerance and loss of near sight, makes me see the world through the light wings of a dragonfly. Because of this I can see, with utter clarity, that my man is going to fall in love with this other woman.”

The novella follows Remei as she works out how she will manage this, as she tries to cope with her bodily changes and memories of a traumatic past at the same time.

She is a witty, forthright, slightly sardonic narrator. I really enjoyed the distinctive voice of this resilient woman.

“I must point out I find modesty overrated: I’m still a good deal. What’s more, until now I’ve performed pre-feminist sexual positions with total dedication and delight.”

Her husband, whom she calls Neptune, is not as clearly drawn. But this is not his story: we are firmly in the first person narration of Remei. She and her husband don’t seem hugely well-suited:

“I like music much more than him and I’m an illustrator. But he likes comics much more than me and he’s a musician.”

“I like everyone, in one way or another. He likes hardly anyone, in one way or another.”

“That’s how we see life too, he and I. Me: everything and right now, so nothing is left over. Him: only what fits, even if what is discarded will rot.”

But she loves him and she loves being a mother to their daughter. Her career is successful, although not quite in the way she planned. However, she is not entirely happy. She self-medicates with alcohol:

“My whole life is a gallop between the pretentious and the epic, depending only on how many drinks I’ve had.”

As she goes for runs with her friends, she reflects on the sexual abuse of her childhood, sanctioned by her family. She is estranged from her brother, after she spoke about what was happening and they were taken into care. Remei seems very much alone, despite all the people that surround her.

She is blisteringly honest about her attitude to her husband and the confusion of feelings as she recognises future events:

“Do I want him to continue to love me as much as ever? Yes. No. I want to float along, no more. I want him to be frozen.”

There is a lot of humour too. Remei never demonises Cris, the young colleague of her husband, but wryly observes her behaviour:

“Punctual, efficient, her ovaries functioning at top speed.”

Beloved shows how control is only sustained through the lightest of ties. Remei is a functional alcoholic who could tip over at any time; she realises her relationship with her daughter is on the brink of change as the latter grows older and more aware; she attempts to control her body with running but aging is relentless; and she takes steps to manoeuvre her husband and Cris in a way that will allow her to cope with the affair, but where will this leave her?

Remei is so flawed, so honest, so tenderly vulnerable and spikily self-sufficient, I was really rooting for her to find a way through all the hurt.

To end, the ever wonderful Tracy Chapman singing about changes in life:

“I have looked for life, but I can’t find it.” (Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel)

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November is the month of sooooo many reading events, and I’m hoping to take part in Margaret Atwood Reading Month and Novellas in November, but I thought I’d start with German Literature Month XIV, hosted by Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy Siddal at Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929, transl. Basil Creighton 1930-1 revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo 2016) is a novel I’ve been meaning to get to for some time, republished by the wonderful New York Review of Books Classics.

I find a Weimar Republic setting always so enticing, and this novel was a bestseller in it’s day, originally serialised in a magazine. Sometimes with serials you can really see the joins when they are placed in novel form, but the episodic nature of hotel stays by various guests works well and Grand Hotel felt entirely coherent.

The titular building is opulent and glamorous:

“The music of the jazz band from the Tearoom encountered that of the violins from the Winter Garden, and mingled with the thin murmur of the illuminated fountain as it fell into its imitation Venetian basin, the ring of glasses on tables, the creaking of wicker chairs and, lastly, the soft rustle of the furs and silks in which women were moving to and fro.”

As readers we know that momentum for World War Two is building, but for the guests at this time it is the shadow of World War I which still looms large. Doctor Otternschlag’s face has been severely damaged by a shell. Every day he asks if a letter has arrived for him which it never has. We don’t know what this quiet, traumatised man is waiting for.

“Doctor Otternschlag lived in the utmost loneliness – although the earth is full of people like him…”

Glamour is brought by Grusinskaya, a prima ballerina desperately trying to hang on to physical vigour against the forces of aging. She is somewhat ambivalent, feeling driven to be as she has always been, and exhausted by it all:

“Perhaps the world would have loved her as she really was, as she looked now, for example, sitting in her dressing room – a poor, delicate, tired old woman with worn out eyes, and a small careworn human face.”

The most pathos occurs in the guest who doesn’t fit in: Kringelein, a clerk from Fredersdorf, given a terminal prognosis and determined to squeeze the pips from life before it’s too late. He chooses the Grand Hotel as his boss, Herr Preysing, stays there when in Berlin.

“He felt again, here in the bar of Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the same intoxication, a sense of exuberant plenty as well as of anxiety and alarm, the faint threat haunting the wicked joy of wrongdoing, the excitement of an escapade.”

Kringlein’s difficulty is, he is unsure of how to achieve his somewhat nebulous aim. Doctor Otternschlag tries to help but fails, unsurprising given his jaded, damaged view of the world. More successful is gentleman thief Gaigern, a dashing young nobleman who charms everyone:

“I am quite without character an unspeakably inquisitive. I can’t live an orderly life and I’m good for nothing. At home I learned to ride and play the gentleman. At school, to say my prayers and lie. In the war, to shoot and take cover. And beyond that I can do nothing. I am a gypsy, an outsider, an adventurer.”

He kits out Kringelein in fine clothes and takes him for fast drives in cars and up in a plane, but what are his motives? As Kringelein throws his hard-earned but limited money around, what will Gaigern do?

“Human kindness and warmth was so much a part of his nature that his victims always received their due share of them.”

Baum weaves together these disparate lives expertly, as they bump against each other within the Grand Hotel to a greater or lesser extent. There are overarching plots that draw characters together but Baum demonstrates that while hotels are places where change may occur, they do not lend themselves to resolution so easily. Hotels are by nature transitory and lives must be continued, consequences dealt with, once the guests pass through the revolving doors and back into the world.

“Perhaps there is no such thing as a whole, completed destiny in the world, but only approximations, beginnings that come to no conclusion or conclusions that have no beginnings.“

The tone is so well-balanced, with moments of light humour, almost slapstick, alongside darker elements. I did feel a constant undercurrent of sadness, but this highlighted the resilience of the characters who keep on keeping on during this interwar period, rather than being depressing.

Grand Hotel provides a compelling evocation of the Weimar era too, with glamour, seediness, riches and poverty all bound together in a vibrant, intoxicating, overwhelming Berlin. I’m so pleased to have finally read this novel.

“The room had taken on that utterly strange and enchanted appearance often encountered in hotel bedrooms.”

Grand Hotel was adapted by Hollywood in 1932, which despite my love of Garbo I’ve never seen. Time to remedy the situation!

Blog Tour: Black Storms – Teresa Solana (2010, transl. Peter Bush 2024)

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Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. For those of us in the northern hemisphere the nights are drawing in, and settling down with a crime novel that opens on All Saints Eve (Hallowe’en) felt like a perfect read for this time of year.

Here is the blurb from Corylus Books:

“Who murders an elderly professor in his university office – and why? Norma Forester of the Barcelona police force is handed the case and word from the top is to resolve it as quickly and as quietly as she can. Set against the backdrop of one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in Europe, Black Storms also highlights the darker side of Barcelona and its past, overshadowed by the bitter Civil War of the 1930s.

The past also touches Norma Forester, the granddaughter of an English International Brigades volunteer who didn’t survive to see his Spanish daughter.

This first novel in Teresa Solana’s is a fast-paced crime story that balances the hunt for a killer with Norma Forester’s colourful and complex personal life. She’s surrounded by her forensic pathologist husband, her hippy mother, and her anarchist squatter daughter whose father is Norma’s husband’s gay brother. Then there are Norma’s police colleagues and superiors – plus an occasional lover she can’t resist meeting.”

Black Storms begins with the murder from the point of view of the murderer. This wasn’t gory or gratuitous. There had also been a brief but effective portrayal of the victim, Professor Francesc Paradella who was an expert on the Spanish Civil War, which definitely evoked my sympathy without being sentimental.

We’re then taken to a birthday dinner at Deputy Inspector Norma Forester’s family home. I really enjoyed the portrait of Norma’s family, full of somewhat eccentric characters without seeming unrealistically colourful.

Her mother Mimí looks like “an old Hollywood actress who’d gone to seed or an eccentric fortune teller.”, in contrast to Isabel, her conservative mother-in-law. Her daughter Violeta briefly returns from living in a squat and also visiting is Aunt Margarida, Mimí’s step-cousin and a nun aka my favourite character:

“she’d been living comfortably isolated from the world and its problems for eight years, reciting ancient prayers behind those impenetrable stone walls. However, occasionally, she did miss the freedom of her secular life and, now and then, invented an excuse to go out and took advantage of her escape to go to bingo sessions, drink cocktails in Boades and hit the town with Mimí.”

I also liked Norma’s husband, principled forensic examiner Octavi, angry that because the Professor was from a powerful family, his death is treated more seriously than others.

“There were class differences even among the dead: upper-class corpses that led to frantic investigations and second-class corpses that were processed routinely.”

The legacy of the Civil War is part of Norma and Octavi’s home, not only through the family history but in their present. Senta, Norma’s grandmother mistakes outside noises for those of conflict and becomes highly distressed. It’s a brief scene but so moving in how it demonstrates the enduring trauma of war.

The reader soon knows who the murder is, someone pathetic and seedy, and very believable. The mystery of Black Storms is not therefore whodunit, but why. The why enables Solana to look at the long shadows cast by the Spanish Civil War and the enduring corruption in society.

My knowledge of the Spanish Civil War is shockingly rudimentary and Solana did a great job of weaving the history throughout the story without ever info-dumping. Past events are evoked through characters; there is an excellent scene between Norma, whose grandfather was killed by state execution, and Gabriel, her second-in-command, whose grandfather was killed by FAI anarchists.

The most severe condemnation is saved for how the legacy has been mishandled: “the circus orchestrated in the corridors of power had succeeded in drowning the transition in a mist of amnesia”.

But the novel is also resolutely contemporary and Barcelona is wonderfully evoked, even the less salubrious sides: “A city for tourists with cirrhotic livers looking for cheap alcohol.” Ouch!

From the start Black Storms had an assured style and Solana is so accomplished in how she weaves together a crime plot, the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and contemporary social commentary. It never felt remotely laboured and the story pace was never weighed down by the importance of the issues highlighted. I thought Black Storms was a hugely impressive novel. And now I want another in the series to be translated, because I am already missing Aunt Margarida!

Here are the stops from the rest of the tour, so do check out how other bloggers got on with Black Storms:

“I loved all of Harlem gently.” (Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner)

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The 1970 Club is running all week hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. The Club weeks are always great fun, so do check out the posts!

Whenever the club weeks are announced I always go straight to the TBR to see what I’ve got available. 1970 didn’t yield as many fruits as 1937 Club back in April, but it did offer four choices. Unfortunately I don’t think 1970 is my year as far as my TBR pile goes…two DNFs and a third I wish I had DNF’d rather than ploughed through. Thankfully the fourth I found to be excellent!

Daddy Was a Number Runner was the first novel by Louise Meriwether and widely acknowledged to be bona fide classic in its evocation of 1930s Harlem, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, Francie Coffin. In the Foreword, James Baldwin writes:

“she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy.”

From the opening lines as Francie helps her father with his titular illegal lottery, her voice is so direct and distinctive. As she runs home to try and get to school on time, we are thrust into a hot summer’s day in Harlem.

“The air outside wasn’t much better. It was a hot, stifling day, June 2, 1934. The curbs were lined with garbage cans overflowing into the gutters, and a droopy horse pulling a vegetable wagon down the avenue had just deposited a steaming pile of manure in the middle of the street.

 The sudden heat had emptied the tenements. Kids too young for school played on the sidewalks while their mamas leaned out of their windows searching for a cool breeze or sat for a moment on the fire escapes.”

Francie’s family are incredibly poor, and running the numbers brings some money in. If lotteries are a tax on hope, Harlem is full of hope. It’s also full of bed bugs, rats and roaches. Poor Francie is eaten alive every night and has to go armed into her favourite pastime:

“I was sitting at the dining room table reading a library book, armed with my usual supply of weapons. Tonight I had a hammer, a screwdriver, and two hairbrushes. When I heard a noise I threw the hammer toward the kitchen and the rats scurried back into their holes. When I got down to my last piece of ammunition I would give the dining room up to the rats and go on to bed.”

Reading and schooling are seen as a way out of the ghetto. Francie’s older brother Sterling is bright and just about staying in school. Her other brother, James Junior, found school hard and, much to the worry of his loving parents, he is running with the local gang:

“He wasn’t mean enough to be an Ebony Earl nohow. How could he ever mug anybody, good-natured and nice as he was. Why, when he smiled his whole face laughed. He wasn’t like old Sterling who didn’t like anybody and whose narrow, old man’s face was full of dark, secret shadows.”

Francie’s parents are loving and kind, and how they hold onto those traits against the relentless grind of poverty is a miracle.

“[Mother] was always either soaking clothes or scrubbing them or hanging them out on the line. With all of that activity we should have been super clean but somehow we weren’t.”

“Daddy played by ear and could swing any piece after he heard it only once.”

Francie’s father is proud and doesn’t want to accept state relief or for his wife to work. But eventually he has to give in on both counts:

“They don’t give you enough money to live on so you have to bootleg some kind of work, then they deduct that from your relief check, too. I wonder how they expect you to live. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to mess with those people?” But for once he didn’t shout, seeming to be more tired than angry.”

The structural racism faced by Francie, her family, and everyone she knows is brilliantly evoked. Meriwether displays it through various characters, and there is an enormous tragedy looming for several families. The fallout on children is vivid, through Francie but also her peers. Her best friend Sukie is always filled with fury, which young Francie fails to see is due – at least in part – to Sukie’s father seeking release in alcohol and her sweet sister China Doll working for a violent pimp who beats her in front of onlookers.

Meriwether also articulates issues directly to the reader in her portrayals of, or references to, real life characters who Francie encounters, such as Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Father Divine, Marcus Garvey, and the Scottsboro case.

There is so much hardship in Daddy Was a Number Runner, and outside of the home Francie has to navigate violence and sexual attention from many that grows into assaults. There’s also a horrible scene with a cat. What stops the novel being unremittingly bleak is her loving parents; her love of books; and Francie’s resilient, honest, humorous, indignant voice.

“I walked to 110th St and looked across Central Park at the lights twinkling in the skyscrapers. That was another world, too, all those lights way over there and this spooky park standing between us. But what good would those lights do me anyway?”

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.“ (Anthony Powell)

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This is the tenth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The tenth volume, the wonderfully titled Books Do Furnish a Room, was published in 1971 and is set just after World War Two. (If you google, there are some marvellous images of Anthony Powell in his book-furnished study, reclining on a red chaise longue 😊)

It opens with Nick back at Oxford, researching a book on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and meeting old tutor Sillery. At the end of the novel he again returns to an educational establishment from his past, organising a place for his son at Eton and meeting old tutor Le Bas. Between times, he is in London, part of a literary scene, where people are trying to re-establish themselves after the upheaval of the preceding years.

“The war had washed ashore all sorts of wrack of sea, on all sorts of coasts. In due course, as the waves receded, much of this flotsam was to be refloated, a process to continue for several years, while the winds abated. Among the many individual bodies sprawled at intervals on the shingle, quite a lot resisted the receding tide. Some just carried on life where they were on the shore; others – the more determined – crawled inland.”

After the focus on companies of men in the war trilogy, much of this novel reads like an extended character study of one person: author X Trapnel. And what a character he is – uncommonly bearded (for the time), wearing a safari suit, tie embossed with nude ladies, and dyed black RAF greatcoat, he carries a skull-topped sword stick.

“When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough.”

And yet:

“The practical expression of the doctrine of ‘panache’… played a major part in Trapnel’s method of facing the world.”

As with all Powell’s characterisations, his presentation of Trapnel is clear-sighted but never nasty. He has a way of being unsentimental but never unpleasant; discerning but non-judgemental. He seems to enjoy people as they are.

“No brief definition is adequate. Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, comrade, and eccentric, a sage, virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, hard case, spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the slightest affront, to live to a hundred full years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age.”

Around Trapnel swirl the other characters and events of this time. He is employed by publishers Quiggin and Craggs to write for a new magazine, Fission. The ever-present Widmerpool is an investor, and his beautiful wife Pamela continues to bring disdain and chaos with her wherever she goes.

Widmerpool is an MP, as is Nick’s brother-in-law Roddy Cutts, and I enjoyed this brief portrait of Nick’s visit to Westminster:

“We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters.”

Where of course he and Roddy run into Widmerpool:

“The two MP’s were in sharp competition as to whose passion for directness and simplicity was the more heartfelt, at least could be the more forcibly expressed.”

There are also some great descriptions of the seedier parts of London (now very swish areas, but back then poorer and war torn).

Books Do Furnish a Room is quite a contrast to the immediately preceding war novels and a really effective evocation of a chaotic and impoverished postwar London literary scene. I can’t believe there’s only two more left in the sequence for me to read.

“It turned out in due course that Trapnel impersonations of Boris Karloff were to be taken as a signal that a late evening must be brought remorselessly to a close.”