wot i red on my hols by alan robson (per crimen)

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I’ve just read, and thoroughly enjoyed, three detective novels written very much in the stylistic tradition of the Agatha Christie "golden age" detective club. The author is one Fiona Veitch Smith, a writer of whom I have never heard. Nevertheless, it was her name that attracted me to the novels in the first place, and when I read their synopses which explained that the stories were mostly set in the Newcastle On Tyne area of England, I was absolutely certain that I had to read them. Let me explain…

When I was a child my family would always spend our summer holidays in the north-east of England, in and around Newcastle. That’s where my father’s family came from and he had a lot of relatives scattered hither and yon around the place. Our holidays largely consisted of visiting those relatives, catching up with all the gossip about what had happened in the twelve months since we’d last seen them, and then doing various summer holiday things like going to the beach where we tied knotted handkerchiefs on our heads, rolled up our trousers and paddled in the sea. It was all very traditionally English.

Most of our Newcastle relatives had the surname Veitch – it’s a not uncommon surname in that part of the world, but I’ve never seen it used as a forename until Fiona Veitch Smith swept into my view. I immediately assumed that her name must originally have been Fiona Veitch and when she got married, she retained her old surname as her middle name. I have absolutely no idea as to whether or not this is a valid assumption – the potted biography on her web page makes no mention of it. Nevertheless I fell in love with my theory because it allowed me to assume that Fiona Veitch Smith might be a very, very, very, very distant relative of mine and therefore, of course, clearly I had a responsibility to read her novels. So I did.

There are three novels in the series (so far) and they are set in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Clara Vale is  a very modern lady. She has graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Chemistry, one of the very first women to be allowed to do such a revolutionary thing. Her family are nouveau-riche upper middle class, though her father has recently been knighted, which has moved them up a social peg or two. Her mother, now Lady Vale, has adopted all the social pretensions that go with her class status and she is an insufferable snob, as also are Clara’s sister and her brother. But Clara herself does not share their values and she has largely distanced herself from her family. She is determined to make her own way in the world. Unfortunately she is a woman and therefore her job prospects are severely limited. Despite her prestigious degree from Oxford, the only job she has been able to find is as an assistant in a dingy library in an insalubrious area of London.

But one day everything changes – she is contacted by a lawyer who tells her that her Uncle Bob has recently died and that she has inherited all his assets. She travels up to Newcastle on Tyne, where her uncle had lived. There she meets her uncle’s lawyer face to face and learns that not only has she inherited property and a very large amount of money, she has also inherited her uncle’s private detective agency. Her uncle, it seems, had made his fortune as a very successful detective. Clara starts to wonder if perhaps she too might make this her career.

The first two novels are set in and around Newcastle on Tyne and I was quite thrilled to travel vicariously with Clara as she explored all my old childhood haunts – Newcastle itself, Tynemouth, North Shields, South Shields, Whitley Bay and its famous Spanish City, an enormous fun fair where I spent many happy hours. The third novel is a bit of a departure and is set largely in Egypt. But never mind, you can’t have everything...

The novels follow all the rules of the traditional detective novel. As a consequence the plots are somewhat formulaic. The author is perfectly well aware of this and clearly has her tongue pressed firmly in her cheek – she has made Clara herself an avowed Agatha Christie fan, and Christie actually has a cameo role in the third book. Furthermore, because it’s a rule in this kind of novel, the stories all end with the unmasked villains explaining themselves and their motives at great length.

But none of that matters. It isn’t the plots that make these books really stand out, rather it is their strong and accurate sense of time and of character. L.P. Hartley told us that The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And nowhere is that better exemplified than in the trials and tribulations that Clara has to go through simply because she is a woman. Things that would not raise a single eyebrow today were terribly scandalous back then. Clara has inherited £10,000 from her uncle – a truly eye-wateringly large amount of money in 1929. It is safely stored in her uncle’s bank account, but Clara has no access to it. Despite the fact that nobody disputes that the money is legally hers, the bank will not allow her to claim it. The account cannot be changed from her uncle’s name to hers and neither can she open a new account and have the money paid into it. Her uncle’s account remains frozen and in limbo because she’s not allowed to have a bank account in her own name until she can produce a letter from a male relative giving her permission to do so. Women really were second class citizens in 1929. In some respects they continued to be second class citizens for many years afterwards as well. I know for a fact that a lot of British banks had a policy of applying similar financial constraints to women well into the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1918 women who met certain minimum property qualifications were (grudgingly) given the right to vote. But it wasn’t until 1928 that the franchise was extended to all women. So when Clara inherits her uncle’s estate, she has only had the right to vote for less than a year. Fortunately for Clara, 1929 was an election year (it returned Britain’s first ever Labour Government under the Prime Ministership of Ramsay MacDonald – I wonder if those two facts are connected?) and so Clara didn’t have to wait very long to exercise her new voting rights. Nevertheless despite the legalities associated with her position, she is still seen very much as someone who is subject to the will and the whim of the male members of her family. Doubtless they will instruct her on how best to use her vote and, by implication, how to live her life. Clara has no time for this nonsense, and the ingenuity with which she copes with (and triumphs over) the limitations that society in general and her family in particular impose upon her is one of the major delights of the novels.

Clara has a chemistry degree. This too is rather unusual in 1929 and it says much about her strength of character that she was able to achieve it. The University of London was actually the first university to award degrees to (a very limited number of) women in 1875. Most of the red brick universities soon followed suit though for a long time it was quite difficult for women to gain entry to their degree programmes. The more prestigious Oxbridge universities held out the longest. Cambridge first considered the idea in 1878, but the male scholars rioted in protest, burning effigies of women students in the streets. The Cambridge authorities were so shocked by this reaction that they didn’t actually start awarding degrees to women until 1948!

Oxford University was made of sterner stuff. It started awarding degrees to women in 1920 (prior to that, women had been allowed to study at the university, but they were not allowed to take their degree). Clara was one of the very first women to obtain a degree from Oxford. She is rightfully very proud of it and she is eager to make full use of her skills and her knowledge. Fortunately the combination of her scientific education and her natural problem solving inclinations have given her the tools she needs to succeed in her new career as a detective. In The Picture House Murders her detailed analysis of the site of a suspicious fire enables her to prove beyond doubt that it was definitely arson. In The Pantomime Murders she is able to detect not only the poison responsible for a series of deaths, but also the means by which the poison was delivered to the victims. In The Pyramid Murders, she deduces that a so-called ancient Egyptian mummy is actually the corpse of a modern day person who had been murdered and mummified only a very few years previously.

It’s all extremely impressive.

As an aside, and speaking as someone who also has a chemistry degree, I was very pleased with the way that Fiona Veitch Smith used Clara’s knowledge of chemistry to solve her cases. The chemistry in the books is well explained and is quite correct as far as it goes. There are one or two places where she does gloss over a few details, but that doesn’t really matter. Explaining those details would require far too many tedious asides into the structure of organic molecules and it would have slowed the story down far too much. Trust me, you really are better off not knowing anything at all about the structure of organic molecules. I slept through many an organic chemistry lecture about molecular structure. I’m an expert on the topic’s soporific nature.

Fiona Veitch Smith has done an absolutely superb job of bringing Clara’s world alive, socially, politically and scientifically.

I’ve now read the final two novels in Andrea Carter’s Inishowan series featuring the solicitor Benedicta "Ben" O’Keefe. The whole story has come to a very satisfying conclusion. All the various long arcs are brought together nicely and tied up with a pretty bow – though should Andrea Carter wish to continue the series, she has certainly left herself some wriggle room, so who knows what the future may reveal?

As The Body Falls opens, the village of Glendara is experiencing a very severe storm. Bridges are down and roads have been washed away. The flood damage is so severe that the village is effectively cut off from the rest of the country – nobody can get in or out. Then (this being that sort of book) someone is quite gruesomely murdered. The body of the murder victim is discovered in a most dramatic way – Maeve, the village vet, is driving home from a farm visit in her four wheel drive vehicle when the body literally falls out of the sky and lands on her bonnet! It soon becomes clear that the body had actually been concealed on the hilltop, but the torrential wind and rain have dislodged it, causing it to fall onto Maeve’s vehicle. The local doctor who, in the absence of a trained pathologist, examines the body detects snake bite wounds on the victim’s hand (the doctor has served overseas and has seen snake bite wounds before). This is all very worrying for of course there are no snakes in Ireland. Saint Patrick banished them long ago.

Fortunately, the murder victim is not a Glendara local. A group of cyclists taking part in a cross country marathon to raise money for charity have also been trapped in the village by the weather and the dead body is that of the organiser of the cycle event. As Ben and her partner Tom Molloy delve into possible motives for the murder it becomes clear that the organiser of the charity event was himself a much less than charitable person. Dark deeds in his past and present have given many people a motive to make sure that he doesn’t have a future. Can Ben and Tom untangle the complex threads of this murder while at the same time organising aid and rescue efforts for the victims of the flooding that the storm has caused?

And what about the snake?

The sixth and final novel Death Writes is set a few months later. Glendara is still reeling from the effects of the storm. In an effort to boost morale Phyllis Kettle, the proprietor of Glandara’s bookshop, has organised a literary festival. She has managed to persuade a famously reclusive local author called Gavin Featherstone to give a presentation at the festival, his first public appearance in more than a decade. Gavin has had a long and lucrative literary career – his first novel won the Booker prize when he was only 27 years old and several of his subsequent novels have also been nominated for the prize.

Everyone is eagerly looking forward to Featherstone’s presentation. Initially it is quite successful – he proves to be an amusing and interesting speaker. But as he prepares to read from his latest, as yet unpublished, book his voice falters, he stumbles, falls and dies.

Initially his death is reported as being caused by a heart attack but as the results of the post mortem are further analysed, it eventually becomes clear that Featherstone has been murdered in full view of everyone in the audience.

Oddly Ben discovers that she is now the executor of Featherstone’s estate. The solicitor from whom she bought her practice had set up Featherstone’s will many years previously and Ben, of course, had inherited the responsibility as part of her purchase of the business. Therefore she is now intimately involved in the ramifications surrounding Featherstone’s death whether she likes it or not. Mostly she likes it because it appeals to her nosy parker nature!

As always it is the sense of time and place that makes these books stand out from the crowd. Certainly the plots are complex and there is a great mechanical satisfaction to be found in the gradual working out of the details that lie behind the murder, the explorations of means, motive and opportunity that eventually unmasks the killer. But that’s part and parcel of every murder mystery ever written. What makes these books so involving is the immediate sense of actually being there that the reader gets from the words on the page. For example, I have seen at first hand the devastating effects of a severe storm on a small community and I would be willing to bet that Andrea Carter has also seen it. I was very impressed at how well she describes the storm scenes and the way that she dramatises the on going effects of such extreme weather events. She and I both know that the problems don’t disappear when the weather improves and the sun starts to shine – it is more than eighteen months since cyclone Gabrielle devastated the Hawke’s Bay region of New Zealand where I live, and people are still living with the after effects. Damaged infrastructure is slowly being repaired and houses are slowly being rebuilt, but the suffering and the trauma are still very much a daily reality for some people. Andrea Carter clearly understands this very well indeed.

This sixth and final novel, being about writers and writing, gives Andrea Carter lots of space to indulge herself with plenty of barbed remarks about writers, editors and the literary world in general. She doesn’t pull any punches here, and it’s all enormous fun.

In a way, I’m rather sorry that I’ve run out of Andrea Carter novels now. Oh well, maybe the writing gods will give me some more to read one day…

Arthur Upfield (1888-1964) was an Australian author of crime and mystery novels, most of them featuring Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ("Bony" for short) of the Queensland Police Force, a mixed-race Indigenous Australian who has a very nice line in self-deprecating dialogue.

Upfield was a member of the Australian Geological Society and he took part in numerous scientific expeditions, mostly in Western and Northern Australia. Probably his most extensive exploration took place in 1948 when he led a 5000-mile trek through the wilderness that is the Kimberley area of Western Australia.

His travels brought him into close contact with many Aboriginal tribes and gave him a deep, profound and respectful knowledge of Aboriginal culture. His novels mostly take place in outback Australia and they are full of fascinating Aboriginal lore.

Bolinda Audio-Digital Publishing have made the majority of Upfield’s novels available as audiobooks and I’ve recently listened to The Bone is Pointed, the sixth of his Bony novels, which was first published in 1938.

Jack Anderson was a big man with a foul temper. He was a sadist, a drunk and a bully. Once he had beaten an Aboriginal tribesman almost to death for some imagined slight. Not that it would have really mattered to anyone if Anderson had finished the job and actually killed the man. That wasn’t a crime back then, in white eyes at least.

One day Jack had ridden off into the outback tasked with patrolling the boundary fence of the station where he lived and worked, looking for damage to repair. His horse came back without him and, despite an extensive search, there was no sign of Jack to be found. Most people assumed he’d met with some sort of accident and that he was probably dead. Or maybe the Aboriginals had taken their revenge on him? Perhaps a rival in love had disposed of him? Nobody knows and nobody really cares very much. Jack Anderson is clearly dead. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Five months after Jack disappeared Bony arrives at the station, determined to find out what happened to Jack Anderson. After so much time exposed to the elements of the harsh outback climate, little or no trace of Jack can possibly remain.  But Bony is half Aboriginal himself. He knows the ways of the back country. He knows that nothing and nobody ever disappears completely. Something is always left behind, faint though those traces may sometimes be. Bony refuses to admit defeat – he has never left a case unsolved, and he has no intention of losing his perfect record to this fairly straightforward, open and shut case…

The plot is very thin – I’ve already told you almost every salient detail of it. Therefore the pace of its working out is glacially slow and there are no real surprises in the story. It’s obvious almost from the first page who the killer is, and why Jack Anderson had to die. There are one or two small details that sneak up on the reader out of left field, but they don’t make any real difference to the overall situation. However the plot is not what makes this book so fascinating; rather it is Upfield’s detailed depiction of outback life in the early twentieth century and the mindset of the people who were living that life that kept me eagerly turning the (audible) pages.

White Australia’s behaviour towards the native peoples has always left much to be desired. Genocide is not too strong a word to use when describing the settlement of the country. There is evidence that as late as 1981 the systematic killing of Aboriginals was still taking place, though by then it was rather less widespread and much less blatant than once upon a time it had been. And who knows – maybe it is still happening today? Only very recently has Australia even started to pay lip service to its appalling race relations history. Nowadays Australian TV programmes, public ceremonies and the like often have a rather sanctimonious and mealy-mouthed acknowledgement at the start which pays grudging tribute to the people of the land. I’m really not quite sure what practical effect that is supposed to have – I’m not even sure that it’s sincere – but at least it’s a start.

These days, Arthur Upfield’s novels are being seen more and more as valuable time-bound descriptions that document a way of life. They show not only an interpretation of the way that outback settlers thought of their place in the world, but they also detail the settlers’ relationships with the Aboriginals and, more importantly, they describe how the Aboriginals themselves attempt to deal with the consequences of that relationship and how they tried to protect themselves from its worst excesses. This is where Upfield’s bush ranging experience stands him in really good stead. It is abundantly clear that he knows whereof he speaks.

At one point the tribe becomes worried that Bony’s investigations are getting a little too close to them for comfort and they decide to remove him from the equation. The tribal cleverman (or kurdaitcha, a kind of witch-doctor) is persuaded to point the bone at him. Anyone who is the target of a bone pointing ceremony will surely die. Upfield details the elaborate ritual leading up to the bone pointing itself and spends some time pondering the reasons why it is generally such a highly effective killing mechanism. Bony himself is well aware that the bone has been pointed at him and, being half-aboriginal, he is also very clear about what its effects are likely to be. He does indeed eventually succumb to it – to an extent – but he also manages to get himself out from under its influence. After all, what one ceremony can invoke, clearly another can repeal. There is more than one kurdaitcha man in the outback.

Bony is saved from the consequences of the bone pointing because of his own twofold nature.  Partly he can be saved because his Aboriginal half thoroughly understands the implications of what is happening to him and how best to reverse it. And partly he can be saved because his non-aboriginal half insists that he is merely suffering from a perfectly ordinary case of the Barcoo sickness and clearly therefore there is no magic going on at all! As a result of both these things the effect of the bone-pointing is ameliorated and it loses a lot of its potency. That’s a nice dichotomy, and I enjoyed it.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I think about Australia I always eventually end up thinking about rabbits. They’ve been a pest in the country and a blight on the land almost from the minute they were released by the first fleet in 1788. By the middle of the nineteenth century more than two million rabbits were being hunted and killed annually with no noticeable effect at all on the spread of the overall population. A very dramatic scene towards the end of The Bone is Pointed describes the culmination of an extensive rabbit cull where thousands upon thousands upon thousands of the animals are driven into an escape-proof, ring-fenced enclosure and slaughtered wholesale. In an incredible piece of writing, Arthur Upfield brings home the terrible sights and sounds of the killing fields. It’s an astonishing tour-de-force that really made me appreciate both the extent of the rabbit problem and the futility of straightforward attempts to deal with it. Even today, despite the waging of all out biological warfare against them (first attempted with the introduction of myxomatosis in the 1950s), rabbits still remain a serious problem.

Eventually The Bone is Pointed comes to its all too obvious conclusion and everybody mostly lives happily ever after. But it’s not the unravelling of the tale that makes this such a brilliant book. The destination is really not important at all, it’s the journey that matters. The novel is an amazing historical document, both socially and politically (and even, to a certain extent, economically). I absorbed it all with utter fascination.