An English Murder by Cyril Hare

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At first glance, Cyril Hare’s 1951 novel An English Murder, seems to be a fairly typical example of a certain type of golden age detective story. A group of guests are snowed in at an isolated country house over Christmas when a mysterious death occurs and they find themselves involved in a murder mystery. The murderer can only be one of the occupants of the house. So far, so familiar, with a hint of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

What sets this apart is the more realistic tone, the deeper characterisation and the political theme of the story, which is set during the years of the 1940s Labour government. Hare was a lawyer who became a judge and his precise, dry and ironic prose style means that although the novel is only some 200 pages, an awful lot is packed in and it does not feel short. 

Lord Warbeck is ill, so this small gathering of family and friends over Christmas may be his last. The guests include his son, Robert, who is the leader of a Mosley-style fascist party, and Lady Camilla, Robert’s on–off girlfriend, who would like their relationship to be resolved one way or the other. Then there is his cousin Sir Julius, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is responsible for the punitive tax regime making post-war country-house life so difficult. Also present is Mrs Carstairs, daughter of the local vicar and wife to the man who would like to succeed Julius as Chancellor. The stage is set for tension and disagreement.

The party is completed by Dr Botwink, a Czech academic historian and survivor of the concentration camps. He is present in the house because he has been carrying out research on historical documents held there. Botwink is a fascinating character, with a keen interest in the nuances of the English language and the distinctive English way of doing things. In both these fields he proves rather more knowledgeable than his hosts.

After the death that at first appears to be suicide and is then confirmed as murder, the investigation is carried out by Sergeant Rogers, the Special Branch detective assigned to Sir Julius, because the local police are unable to get through the snow to reach the house. However, it is Botwink who is the real investigator here, and who is led to the solution of the case by something he finds in a book from the library.

Another crucial clue is provided by his outsider’s ear for the oddness of English expressions, and the precise meaning of the phrase “to have words with someone”.

The explanation of what has taken place is a comment on the England of that time, which is described as a curious mixture of modernisation and anachronistic survivals. An ancient legal oddity means that the crime could not have happened the way it did in another European country, hence the appropriateness of the title. This is almost a “state of the nation” novel, rather than simply a detective story.

The character of the butler, Briggs, is developed in more detail than is usual in this sort of story. He is a man who has devoted his life to the old way of doing things and must now try to adapt to changing times, struggling to keep up standards with a much-reduced complement of staff. He is rather reminiscent of the butler in Kazuo Ishoguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day.

One thing puzzled me, though. Was it normal in upper-class households at that time to have the Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve?    

Time and the Conways by J B Priestley

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Having achieved success with fiction in the early 1930s, J B Priestley turned his attention to the theatre. He wrote several plays that became known collectively as the “time plays” because they made use of ideas and theories about the nature of time. He was very influenced by his reading of the book An Experiment with Time by J W Dunne, published in 1927.

Perhaps the most effective of these plays and the one that leans most heavily on the work of Dunne is Time and the Conways, first staged in 1939. I recently listened to a BBC radio version of this play. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I shall try to explain just why it impressed me so much.

A while ago, I attempted to write a novel, based on my own experience when I was considerably younger. As I wrote, with a mixture of memory and imagination, the presence of the past became so strong that I began to feel it must all still be going on somewhere, somehow. That is exactly the feeling that I had when listening to this play.

The play opens in 1919 when the first world war is over and the wealthy Conway family have a bright future to look forward to. Robin, the favourite son, has returned from the RAF. We hear about their hopes and plans for the future. They are all in high spirits during the evening party. Yet Kay, the daughter whose twenty-first birthday is being celebrated, falls into an oddly melancholy state of mind, a sort of absence, oblivious to the laughter around her. Mrs Conway says that the late Mr Conway used to do the same thing.

The second act jumps forward to 1937. Things have not turned out as hoped. The money has gone, one of the daughters has died and Robin’s ambitions have come to nothing. It’s the less ambitious son, Alan, who seems to be the least unhappy, not embittered or frustrated like some of the others. He says it is to do with time and he tries to explain this to Kay, quoting a poem by William Blake. If we could understand time properly, realise that it is not linear, we would see life differently. It’s all in a book he says. This is presumably a reference to J W Dunne.

Then the third act returns to the party in 1919, minutes after we left it, but we see it all differently now. It’s heavy with dramatic irony because we know what awaits the characters in the future but they do not. We are seeing the origins of what will go wrong later. A relationship starts that really should not have done; another one is tragically thwarted before it has got going. Mrs Conway is given financial advice that turns out to be wrong.    

It’s the rather complacent Mrs Conway who predicts a rosy future for everyone. She patronises the only working-class person at the party, someone who will turn out to have rather more impact on the family fortunes than she realises. Kay seems to be aware of the conversation about time that she will have with Alan in the future. It’s a spine-tingling moment when she asks Alan about the Blake poem. In her dreamlike state, she was given a glimpse of the future, as we the audience were.

The play combines several themes. There is the family tragedy, the social comment about England in the inter-war period, and the speculation about the nature of time. What makes it so wonderfully effective is that these elements are all combined harmoniously. It’s the slight hint of the supernatural that makes it more than a conventional realistic drama.

Film director Jean-Luc Godard famously said that “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. He was speaking twenty years after Priestley’s play when manipulating the time sequence of a story had become commonplace. I suspect that Priestley might have been one of the first to do this sort of thing, at least in drama, perhaps influencing Noel Coward’s films In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter.

My late father used to talk about the great impact that the time plays had made on him. I wish I could go back and tell him how much I enjoyed Time and the Conways. If Dunne is right, he probably knew anyway, and could see that one day I would be sitting here writing this.

I feel the final words must belong to William Blake, as quoted by Alan in the play:

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so,
We were made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.

The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 by Charles Causley

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Oh mother my mouth is full of stars
As cartridges in the tray
My blood is a twin-branched scarlet tree
And it runs all runs away.

Oh ‘Cooks to the galley’ is sounded off
And the lads are down in the mess
But I lie down by the forrard gun
With a bullet in my breast.

Don’t send me a parcel at Christmas time
Of socks and nutty and wine
And don’t depend on a long weekend
By the Great Western Railway line.

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz,
Hang my tiddley suit on the door.
I’m sewn up neat in a canvas sheet
And I shan’t be home no more.

[HMS Glory, 1945]

This is an appropriate poem for Remembrance Day.

Charles Causley (1917– 2003) was a Cornishman, born and bred, and apart from his years in the navy during the second world war, spent most of his life working there as an English teacher, writing poetry in his spare time.

He was unusual among poets of the world wars in that he served in the ranks, rather than as an officer. The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 appeared in his first collection in 1951 and a line from the poem gives the book its title, Farewell, Aggie Weston. The poem can be seen as a more modern version of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. It is also an interesting contrast to Henry Newbolt’s heroic naval ballads.

The “AA 1” in the title tells us that the speaker is an anti-aircraft gunner, first class. In the last verse, “Aggie Weston” refers to the sailors’ hostels founded by Dame Agnes Weston, “Guz” was Plymouth and a “tiddley suit” was a seaman’s best uniform, kept for shore leave.

1805 by Robert Graves

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At Viscount Nelson’s lavish funeral,
While the mob milled and yelled about St Paul’s,
A General chatted with an Admiral:

“One of your colleagues, Sir, remarked today
That Nelson’s exit, though to be lamented,
Falls not inopportunely, in its way”

“He was a thorn in our flesh”, came the reply—
“The most bird-witted, unaccountable,
Odd little runt that ever I did spy”.

“One arm, one peeper, vain as Pretty Poll,
A meddler too, in foreign politics
And gave his heart in pawn to a plain moll.

“He would dare lecture us Sea Lords, and then
Would treat his ratings as though men of honour
And play leap-frog with his midshipmen!

“We tried to box him down, but up he popped,
And when he banged Napoleon on the Nile
Became too much the hero to be dropped.

“You’ve heard that Copenhagen ‘blind eye’ story?
We’d tied him to Nurse Parker’s apron-strings—
By G-d, he snipped them through and snatched the glory!”

“Yet”, cried the General, “sic-and-twenty sail
Captured or sunk by him off Trafalgar—
That writes a handsome finis to the tale.”

“Handsome enough. The seas are England’s now.
That fellow’s foibles need no longer plague us
He died most creditably, I’ll allow.”

“And Sir, the secret of his victories?”
“By his unServicelike, familiar ways, Sir,
He made the whole Fleet love him, damn his eyes!”

It was the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar the other day, so here is an appropriate poem, 1805 by Robert Graves. This is a humorous look at how the Royal Navy actually thought of Nelson before his exploits made him a national hero and beyond criticism.

It’s a reminder that history always depends on who is writing it, an idea explored in another Graves poem, The Persian Version.

The admiral in this poem is rather more concerned with the navy’s way of doing things, than with its true purpose. That concern for the institution above all else seems quite modern.

Now, as then, an unconventional genius is always going to trouble those who look at things in a more hidebound way.

Ballad of the Londoner by James Elroy Flecker

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Evening falls on the smoky walls,
    And the railings drip with rain,
And I will cross the old river
    To see my girl again.

The great and solemn-gliding tram,
    Love’s still-mysterious car,
Has many a light of gold and white,
    And a single dark red star.

I know a garden in a street
    Which no one ever knew;
I know a rose beyond the Thames,
    Where flowers are pale and few.

I found this poem by James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) quite by chance when I was looking through one of those Poems on the Underground anthologies in a charity shop.

I have a personal connection with the poem because it reminds me that my father said he had never actually been south of the river until he met my mother.

I’m not sure exactly when it was written. Although it is more traditional in form, I think the opening lines have something of the same urban feel as T S Eliot’s Preludes.

Flecker was only thirty when he died, not as you might imagine a casualty of the first world war, but from TB.

He’s best known for poems that have a connection to the middle east, where he worked as a diplomat, such as The Gate of Damascus. With Ballad of the Londoner he created a fine, evocative poem of the city, adding to the great collective picture of London that so many poets have left behind.


Railway Scrapbook by Peter Ashley

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Here’s my little contribution to the Railway 200 celebrations.

Peter Ashley edited the anthology Railway Rhymes (2007) and included his own poem, Railway Scrapbook. He very cleverly, through the use of half-rhyme and rhythm, turns a list into a poem, an evocative picture of a vanished, gentler age of railway travel. It’s striking how only a few of the things described remain as a recognisable part of the railway scene today.

It’s a marvellous anthology, and I’ve included more than one poem from it on this blog. The dustjacket resembles the clipped railway ticket mentioned in this poem.

My only quibble is that I would have liked the lyrics to the song Slow Train by Flanders and Swann to be included.  

Railway Scrapbook by Peter Ashley

Dockside stations
Estuary halts
Trolleys for luggage
Platelayers’ huts
Steamy warm buffets
Station clock hands
Weighing machines
Post Office vans
Sidings and signals
Newspapers sweets
Cycles in cardboard
Platform seats
Coalyards and taxis
Pincers on tickets
Gaslight on blossom
Pigeons in baskets
Fire buckets red
Timetables white
Posters for seasides
Booking halls bright
Bridges and cuttings
Telephone wires
Tunnels and viaducts
Waiting room fires

At Lord’s by Francis Thompson

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As the cricket season comes to an end, it’s an appropriate time to look at one of the most famous of all cricket poems, At Lord’s by Francis Thompson (1859–1907).

The lines quoted below are actually the opening and closing verses of a longer poem, but they have become well-known in their shorter form.

For non-cricketers, Lord’s in London is regarded as the home of cricket and the red rose is the symbol of Lancashire.

The poem is as much about nostalgia and the passing of time as cricket, so perhaps it’s not a surprise to find out it was written near the end of Francis Thompson’s life.

At Lord’s by Francis Thompson

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro: –
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

The Retired Colonel by Ted Hughes

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Here is an early poem by Ted Hughes. The Retired Colonel appeared in the Spectator magazine in August 1958 and then in Hughes’ second collection Lupercal. The date is important, because 1956 was the year of the Suez Crisis, the last occasion when Britain acted as a great power, and often taken as the real end of the British Empire.

The poem is rather double-edged. Towards the end there is a tinge of regret for the grandeur of the era that has now passed for ever and already seems impossibly remote. The colonel is a figure to be mocked yet respected, representing something bigger than himself.

The very structure of the poem seems to emphasise the passage of time. With its overlapping lines, it’s a more modern type of verse than the Edwardian patriotic ballads of Kipling and Newbolt that we might associate with such a character.

The Retired Colonel

Who lived at the top end of our street
Was a Mafeking stereotype, ageing.
Came, face pulped scarlet with kept rage,
For air past our gate.
Barked at his dog knout and whipcrack
And cowerings of India: five or six wars
Stiffened in his reddened neck;
Brow bull-down for the stroke.

Wife dead, daughters gone, lived on
Honouring his own caricature.
Shot through the heart with whisky wore
The lurch like ancient courage, would not go down
While posterity’s trash stood, held
His habits like a last stand, even
As if he had Victoria rolled
In a Union Jack in that stronghold.

And what if his sort should vanish?
The rabble starlings roar upon
Trafalgar. The man-eating British lion
By a pimply age brought down.
Here’s his head mounted, though only in rhymes,
Beside the head of the last English
Wolf (those starved gloomy times!)
And the last sturgeon of Thames.

Precipice by Robert Harris

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Robert Harris’ 2024 novel Precipice is a clever mixture of history and fiction. Britain’s prime minister in 1914, Henry Asquith, married with grown-up children, had some sort of relationship with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley. That much is fact, because his letters to her survive. Her replies do not and that is what gives Harris the space to create a story about what may have been going on. Asquith’s letters make clear that he had got into the habit of confiding in her about government business and even sending her confidential documents.

Asquith was also in the habit of taking her for drives in his car, the blinds drawn and the chauffeur unaware of what was happening just behind him. He screws up an official telegram and casually throws it out of the window. It is found and handed in by a member of the public and an investigation into a possible security breach is started by the early version of what is now MI5.

There is a powerful sense of the pressure Asquith was under, first to try and find a solution for Ireland and then as events led inexorably to Britain’s involvement in the first world war.

The sheer number of letters and their frequency is staggering. This was made possible by the efficiency of the postal service at that time, with several deliveries each day. It feels like a present-day couple communicating by text message. The question being asked here is whether Venetia Stanley was a necessary support to Asquith when he was under huge pressure or a distraction when his mind should have been on other things.

It’s quite astonishing that Asquith might have been so distracted over Venetia that he wasn’t paying full attention when the cabinet was debating whether the Gallipoli operation should go ahead. No less astonishing is that he couldn’t be quite sure what general Sir John French had actually said about the shell supply situation on the western front because he had sent Lord Kitchener’s letter to Venetia.  

It’s a bit similar to Harris’ earlier novel, Munich, in that it’s more of a character study of a prime minister than anything else. Like that novel, it’s packaged as a thriller but it isn’t really, as the spy plot involving a completely fictional character is rather less convincing and seems a bit “bolted on”. The part where the investigator goes undercover to infiltrate the Stanley family home is the most fictional and the least convincing, I feel.

Harris is on firmer ground with his depiction of a time and a particular class of people. Did Asquith and Venetia actually have a physical affair? Harris hints that upper-class girls knew exactly how to go so far and no further. The suggestion is that whatever they were doing in the back of that car, it wasn’t full intercourse.

There are a couple of historical details that I particularly liked. When Venetia takes a job as a nurse, the artist Sir John Lavery comes to the hospital to do a painting in the ward, featuring Venetia and a wounded soldier. This is a description of a real painting. And I hadn’t realised the extent of the anti-German riots after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Apparently, in Southend, the army was called out to restore order.

Harris is an established and well-connected author, a former Times journalist and something of a political insider. Only someone like that could get the access and necessary permissions from the characters’ descendants to tell a story like this one. I think some of the dialogue seems a bit too modern, but this may be deliberate. The whole situation between Asquith and Venetia feels rather modern. I wondered whether Harris might be trying to draw a parallel with more recent events. Does he have any particular current politician in mind?

But the great strength of this novel is the depiction of how people of that class lived at that time, which is very convincing. When the novel opens, Venetia is a member of a loose group of wealthy young people known as the Coterie. Their cavalier attitude to life is revealed by their reaction to a drowning in the Thames during that carefree summer of 1914.

This world is created so vividly that the historical note at the end about the decline of the Stanley family is rather sad: “Venetia died in 1948 at the age of sixty. By then, the Stanley family’s fortunes were in steep decline. Today, Alderley Park no longer exists; all that remains of Penrhos House are parts of the walls and corner towers, mostly overgrown with ivy, hidden in the woods.”

He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr

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John Dickson Carr was one of those crime writers I had been aware of for years but never got round to reading. For one thing his books were not readily available. When I did read The Hollow Man, often considered to be his masterpiece, I found it rather disappointing. Then I heard the radio versions of the Gideon Fell novels. I was impressed with the plotting and the atmosphere and I decided to give him another go. I’m very glad I did because He Who Whispers is, for me, on a different level to The Hollow Man. It’s an atmospheric and intense read. In fact, I think it’s one of the best stories of this type that I have ever come across.

Carr lived in England for many years and most of his best novels are set here. His work feels as if it belongs more in the English golden age tradition than the American hard-boiled one. He was one of the only American members of the Detection Club and a version of that appears in He Who Whispers, which was published in 1945.    

The war has finally ended and the Murder Club is to hold its first meeting in five years. Miles Harding is the guest of detective Dr Gideon Fell. When he arrives at the Soho restaurant where the meeting is to take place, he finds that none of the members have turned up. There is another guest, Barbara Morell, and the speaker for the evening, Professor Rigaud. Rigaud tells the story he had prepared anyway.

It is the tale of a seemingly impossible murder that took place in rural France in 1939. The victim was found at the top of a ruined tower and there are plenty of witnesses to confirm that no-one else was seen entering the tower during the relevant time. The victim was English and there was a young woman called Fay Seton who was staying with the family. She was romantically involved with the victim’s son and a cloud of suspicion has hung over her ever since. Rigaud shows her photograph to Miles who is fascinated by her.

Miles is looking for someone to help him catalogue his uncle’s book collection in the country house he has inherited. He is living there with his sister Marion who is about to be married to her fiancé Stephen Curtis. The candidate that the employment agency sends is none other than Fay Seton, who has just been repatriated from France and Miles takes her on.  

At the house in the New Forest, another seemingly inexplicable crime takes place. Just who or what is Fay Seton? It is then that Gideon Fell, accompanied by Professor Rigaud, arrives at the house and the investigation begins.

The two mysteries and the non-appearance of the Murder Club members all turn out to be connected of course, but it will be a very astute reader indeed who disentangles all the threads before Dr Fell does. There are many twists and turns along the way and it is a compelling, page-turning read. This is not a conventional whodunnit. There is even a hint of the supernatural. To explain the title would be to give too much away.  

What makes it so special I think, is the quality of Carr’s descriptive writing. He is able to summon up the mood or feel of a place in a few words so that it does not interrupt the pace of the plot. The three main locations come vividly alive. Shabby and exhausted post-war London, a world of back-street flats and overcrowded railway trains, contrasts with the rural peace of pre-war France. The New Forest is seen mostly by moonlight, quiet but almost haunted, unchanged for centuries. Everything feels realistic yet slightly heightened, dovetailing perfectly with the carefully crafted artificiality of the story.

That’s not to say that character or psychology are overlooked. More than one of the people here is not quite what they appear to be at first. The shadow of the war looms large and underneath everything is the mysterious personality of Fay Seton.  

This is ingenious golden age detective fiction at its best, by the acknowledged master of the impossible crime mystery. It is perhaps most similar to the Father Brown stories by G K Chesterton. You either like this sort of thing or you don’t. I very much do and I’ll be on the lookout for more books by John Dickson Carr.