Author: The Good Reader

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace

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I was very excited when I found out about The Documents in the Case, published in 1930. I have read and enjoyed several of Dorothy L Sayers’ other books, but I did not realise she had written this, the only one not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a crime novel written in epistolary form, based to a certain extent on the real-life Edith Thompson case. I was hoping it would be another Trent’s Last Case or Malice Aforethought but despite being a compelling read, I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment at the end.

The beginning is the most interesting part, where we gradually learn about the slightly odd Harrison household. It’s rather reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s boarding house tales. Margaret Harrison is the much younger second wife of George Harrison, who has a grown-up son, Paul, working abroad. John Munting, a writer, and Harwood Lathom, a painter, rent the flat upstairs and since the hallways adjoin, come into contact with the Harrisons. Agatha Milsom is a sort of paid companion to Mrs Harrison. Mr Harrison is keen on his hobbies of painting and the study of wild mushrooms. It is his sudden death, supposedly from eating the wrong kind of mushroom, that is the case of the title.         

One picture of the Harrisons’ marriage emerges through Agatha Milsom’s letters to her sister. Another view comes from Munting’s letters to his fiancé. Mr Harrison seems quite a different character in his own letters to his son Paul. Miss Milsom thinks that Harrison is an unfeeling brute and his wife is a victim, but she inadvertently reveals that Margaret Harrison is a rather self-dramatising character, perhaps as much the cause of the rows as Mr Harrison. Munting has quite a low opinion of Mrs Harrison and is sure that the marital discord is her fault. Is Harrison the bullying husband that Agatha Milsom takes him to be, or simply older and rather set in his ways with fixed ideas of how a wife should behave? If Margaret Harrison is based to a certain extent on Edith Thompson, I got the feeling that Sayers did not altogether approve of her.

Agatha Milsom, the spinster companion who is mentally troubled and obsessed with sex is the most interesting character, but she disappears from the narrative too early on, after having played a crucial role in how events unfold. The later part of the book features the statements of John Munting and Paul Harrison. These are much longer than the letters and it begins to feel more like a conventional novel.

Munting’s letters to his fiancé, Elizabeth Drake, who is also a writer, convey something of the intellectual climate of the late 1920s, when old certainties had been shattered by the first world war and the ideas of Freud and Einstein were becoming known. His obsession with how life came into being is rather irritating, though. How are we supposed to take all this? It does rather neatly set up the discussion among the scientists at the end that leads to the solution. This chapter is very irritating, but more of that later.

Paul Harrison does not believe his father’s death was an accident and becomes the main investigator into what really happened. It’s very well worked out how he has gathered all the documents together. He also says that Munting’s letters to his wife were the work of a writer with one eye on future publication, giving us a clue as to how to read them. Some of Munting’s comments about publishers probably come from Sayers’ own experience, rather like the advertising agency background she used in Murder Must Advertise.

I was slightly irritated by Sir Gilbert Pugh only being named as the Director of Public Prosecutions right at the end of the book. Since it begins with Paul Harrison sending the bundle of documents to him, it would make the whole story much clearer if Pugh’s role was identified at the beginning.

It’s also slightly frustrating that once the poison is proved to be artificial, that is the rather abrupt end of the novel. Yet Paul Harrison spent a great deal of time trying and failing to work out exactly how the poison was administered and we never learn that.

The book was written as a collaboration between Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace. He was a doctor who had worked with other crime writers before, so I assume the science came from him. I suspect that the science versus religion debate might have appealed to the religious Sayers and her desire to write something that would be seen as more than a detective story. The penultimate chapter, in which the scientists discuss the method of proving whether a substance occurred naturally or was artificially synthesised is far too long and tedious in the extreme.

The novel as a whole reads like a cross between a golden-age detective story and a “highbrow” novel of the 1920s, by an author such as Aldous Huxley, whose Point Counter Point gets a mention. It is full of references to writers of the time. John Munting is rather dismissive about A High Wind in Jamaica, and Agatha Milsom is a bit puzzled by the work of D H Lawrence.

Sayers even refers to one of her own novels, because the pathologist Sir James Lubbock says he is working on an arsenic case, presumably that of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, published around the same time as The Documents in the Case.

The November Fog of London by Henry Luttrell

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Here’s another poem that I found by accident when looking for something else.

Henry Luttrell (1765–1851) is not exactly one of the great names of English poetry. A little research reveals that he began his career as a politician and became a well-known figure in London society, renowned for his wit. He was a writer of satirical verse.

I have not been able to find out exactly when The November Fog of London was written. The rhyming couplet style belongs to the eighteenth century, but the reference to industrial pollution perhaps indicates a slightly later period, although it’s not clear if Luttrell realised that the yellow fog and the smoke were connected.

At any rate, it belongs to the early industrial age and this evocative poem describes an earlier manifestation of what became known as “smog” in the 1950s. By then, the cause was fully understood.

Is it any wonder that one of the nicknames for London used to be “the smoke”?    

The November Fog of London by Henry Luttrell

First, at the dawn of lingering day,
It rises of an ashy gray;
Then deepening with a sordid stain
Of yellow, like a lion’s mane.
Vapour importunate and dense
It wars at once with every sense.
The ears escape not. All around
Returns a dull, unwonted sound.
Loath to stand still, afraid to stir,
The chilled and puzzled passenger,
Oft blundering from the pavement, fails
To feel his way along the rails;
Or at the crossings, in the roll
Of every carriage dreads the pole.
Scarce an eclipse with pall so dun
Blots from the face of heaven the sun.
But soon a thicker, darker cloak
Wraps all the town; behold the smoke,
Which steam-compelling trade disgorges
From all her furnaces and forges
In pitchy clouds, too dense to rise,
Descends rejected from the skies;
Till struggling day, extinguished quite,
At noon gives place to candle-light.

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

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Dreamers is one of Sassoon’s less well-known war poems. It was written in 1917, after he had made his declaration against the war and been sent to Craiglockhart hospital. It strongly evokes the contrast between the soldiers’ present day in the trenches, in which they seem to be already dead, and their imaginings of the past. It seems impossible for them to ever return to their former lives.

I wonder whether it might have been an influence on Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV (1914), published in 1964. The imagery of pre-war innocence is rather similar.

And although that imagery may be different now, there are volunteer soldiers out there, perhaps thinking rather similar thoughts as I write this.

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
   Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
   Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
   Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
   They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
   And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
   And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
   And going to the office in the train.

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

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This poem by Ezra Pound (1885–1972) always reminds me of my student days, because a fellow-student really did not like it at all. “Too short,” he said, “not proper poetry”.

I, of course, took the opposite view. When you read the poem and think about what it says, what could actually be a more serious or appropriate subject for a poem?

This is almost the definitive example of the style of poetry that Pound called “Imagism”. It is influenced by the Japanese Haiku form, although, strictly speaking, it is not a Haiku because it has more than the required seventeen syllables.

I like the way that the title is actually an extra line in the poem, providing a context and another image. It’s not really accurate to describe it as a two-line poem.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker

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With George Barker (1913–1991), as with any prolific poet, you have to make your way through an awful lot of not-so-good work to get to the real gold. I think On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast is one of his good ones. It is a forceful and dramatic depiction of an incident that could have become a tragedy. Perhaps it also appeals to me because I know that part of the Norfolk coast and its cold grey treacherous sea.

The phrase “the running grave” in the first line appeared in an earlier poem by Dylan Thomas. George Barker re-used it for his own poem.

Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling used it as the title of the seventh Cormoran Strike novel, in which one of the characters tries to pass off the George Barker poem as his own work. Is that a comment on literary plagiarism? Perhaps, but Dylan Thomas used it to refer to time, whereas Barker has it describing the sea. A drowning on Cromer beach is central to the novel’s plot, so I think Galbraith/Rowling had Barker’s poem in mind.

On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast by George Barker

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave
  Beside him as he struck
Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave
  Crossed him and swung him back,
And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.
  Then the farewell rock
Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out
  A pawing gag of the sea
Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout
  Like a dying airman. Then she
Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand
  Was awakened by whom
Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:
  And opened her eyes
On the death of her son’s begetter. Up she flies
  Into the hydra-headed
Grave as he closes his life upon her who for
  Life has so richly bedded him.
But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore
  Back by his hair
Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son
  Stood laughing where
He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down
  On that cold sand
Each holding the other by a living hand.

QED by Maurice Rutherford

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I found the poem QED online accidently when I was looking for something else. I have no idea who Maurice Rutherford is and there doesn’t seem to be any further information about him.

It is a poem about Philip Larkin, plainly written in a version of Larkin’s style and voice. Rutherford is using this to point out how Larkin’s poetry has been misunderstood. He is drawing attention to the way in which readers have made assumptions about Larkin’s personality from the poems and missed the humour. It gives the impression of having been written some years after Larkin’s death in 1986.

I’m posting it here because I think it deserves to be more widely known. It would fit nicely in the introduction to a collection of Larkin’s poetry.

QED by Maurice Rutherford

I might have thrived on novels, like my friend
Sir Kingsley Whodidnicely, but I end
holed up near Hull, a writer much misread –
a crassness that persists though I’m long dead:
why should, say, lines about a coastal shelf
suggest a mean and miserable self?
Can’t the fools twig when poetry’s tongue-in-cheek,
not about me or mine, but more oblique
to fox the man I might have been, the chap –
or woman maybe – spouting arrant crap?
It’s what and how, but not who writes the stuff,
that hold the reader rapt – they’re quite enough.
The thought that spawned a poem was my own;
the poem isn’t me, it stands alone
and should. Let critics flense us to the bone:
like love, the poem survives, as has been shown.

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

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It’s slightly confusing with Philip Larkin. There are two volumes entitled The Collected Poems. The earlier one, published soon after his death in 1986, contains many uncollected poems that Larkin might not have intended to preserve in book form. The later volume is a more streamlined affair, consisting of Larkin’s four published books and some later uncollected poems.

I only have the shorter volume to hand and this poem does not appear in it, so I have to assume that Why Did I Dream of you Last Night?is a relatively early poem by Larkin.

It’s got that distinctive realistic tone, capturing accurately an experience we have probably all had at one time or another. “Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;” is a wonderful line. Personally, I think it deserves a place in any collection of poems by Larkin. If he did not consider this one worthy of preservation, it just goes to show what a high standard he set himself. 

Why Did I Dream of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

Why did I dream of you last night?
   Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
 Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
         beyond the window.

   So many things I had thought forgotten
 Return to my mind with stranger pain:
– Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie’s novels are rather unfairly seen as “cosy” these days. Anyone who wants to find out just how dark her work can be should take a look at And Then There Were None, published in 1939.

An author’s note reveals what a technical challenge it was for her to write. It’s also a challenge for me to convey something of the flavour of the book without giving too much away.

The set-up is very simple. A group of ten strangers are lured to a house on the mysterious Soldier Island, off the Devon coast. During dinner on the first night, a voice rings out and accuses each of the guests of a crime. These are mostly the sort of crimes that are beyond the reach of the law, because no-one realises that any crime has actually been committed.

The voice turns out to be a recording that one of the servants has been tricked into playing.  

In each guest’s room there is a framed inscription of the old nursery rhyme which begins “Ten little soldier boys went out to dine” and ends with “and then there were none”. On the dining room table are ten china figurines. The guests begin to die, one by one, in ways that resemble the rhyme. Then they realise that each death is a murder. Every time someone dies the others find that one of the figures has disappeared from the table.

Someone is exacting retribution for the crimes that went undetected and unpunished.

A thorough search of the island reveals that there is no-one else there. The killer must be one of the guests.

The tension ramps up as the number of people left alive dwindles and the survivors become extremely suspicious of each other. Each of them is now trapped in a nightmare of doubt, believing one of the others to be the killer.

It would be unfair to anyone who has not read the book to say any more. It’s all very well worked out by Christie so that even the arrival of the police at the end does not clear up the mystery. That is revealed right at the end in a note by the perpetrator explaining how they set the whole thing up.

A quick resume of the plot may make the book sound like a rather soulless and mechanical exercise in suspense, but it’s much more than that. There is a crucial point at the very end that seems to go missing in the numerous film and TV adaptations. The guests die in the order of seriousness of their crimes. This makes the reader think back over what they have just read. There are different degrees of moral responsibility and guilt. There are also different ways of betraying trust. And Christie makes clear just what is the most serious crime of all, for which the punishment must be suicide not murder.

The characters are introduced skilfully so that the reader has little difficultly telling them apart. The introductory part of the novel is reasonably realistic. As the tension rises, this gives way to something different. The island is bleak and treeless and the only building on it is the house, a nineteen-thirties modernist structure. There are no gothic trappings here and much of the action takes place in broad daylight.

Everything is stripped back to focus the reader’s attention on the characters and their situation. There is a sort of double suspense, as to just what each did in the past, as well as who might be the killer now. As the survivors begin to contemplate the possibility of death, and their different attitudes to it are revealed, the novel takes on something of an existential atmosphere.

I wonder if this was because it was written at the beginning of the second world war. I detected a similar contemplation of mortality in Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear, written around the same time.

In the latter stages, the bleak setting gives the feeling that the characters are in a sort of hell. More than once, there is a hint of the supernatural, as if they are being punished by God. There is a touch of “the voice of God” about the recording. Indeed, the whole story has a rather parable-like feel to it.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sassoon is famous as a poet of the first world war, but On Scratchbury Camp was written during the second world war, in 1942. Scratchbury Camp is an iron-age hill fort in Wiltshire and Sassoon lived nearby for much of his life. This is an altogether calmer and more reflective piece than the angry and bitter western front poems.

The poem captures the atmosphere of the Wiltshire downs on a June day. The distant past and the present are linked, as are human activity and the natural world. By describing the way in which the ancient fort seems to have been absorbed into the landscape, Sassoon is suggesting that one day the current war will be forgotten. The dreamy mood tells us that the older Sassoon is content to be an observer of this new war rather than a participant.

I think there is a certain resemblance to John Masefield’s poems of the southern English countryside here.

The linking of modern aeroplanes to the distant past of the landscape also reminds me of the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.

Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.

I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear;
On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams:
One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird.

Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams,
Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass.
I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.

For Esmé, with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

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There are two good reasons for writing about J D Salinger’s 1950 short story, For Esmé, with Love and Squalor. First, 6th June 2024 will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And second, I recently heard a BBC radio programme about Salinger’s time as an American serviceman in England during the war, which forms the background to this story.

The story is in two distinct parts, or perhaps three, because a short introductory section makes it clear that the narrator is looking back from a happy and settled present day at events that took place sometime earlier.

A bored and lonely American soldier stationed in England in the run-up to D-Day is spending his day off wandering round the town in the rain. The church notice board catches his eye and he goes inside to watch the children’s choir practice. It strikes him that one particular young girl in the choir seems a bit different to the other children.

He meets the girl again later when she comes into the teashop with her governess and small brother. She detaches herself from the governess, comes over to the table where the narrator is sitting alone and strikes up a conversation. Esmé is poised and perfectly mannered in the English upper-class style. She is slightly precocious in her use of language, using words that are a bit beyond her years and not always quite correct. We find out that her father has been killed in the war. Her mother is also dead, but that is not explained.

The narrator has already told us that his fellow soldiers are solitary types and Esmé instantly says, to his surprise, “you’re at that intelligence school, aren’t you?”, perhaps explaining why that should be.

She gets the narrator to admit that in civilian life he is a short-story writer. She hopes that he will write a story for her. As we read on, we realise that the story we are reading is, as the title tells us, that very story. She hopes that he will return from the war “with all his faculties intact” and promises to write to him.

If that is the “before” part of the story, there is now an abrupt switch to “after”. The scene changes to occupied Germany at the end of the war. The narrator identifies himself as “Sergeant X”. A page of description makes clear that his war experiences have left him a dreadful state. He has spent some time in hospital. He chain-smokes but can’t taste the cigarettes, his gums are bleeding, and he can’t sleep. He has what we call today PTSD: “Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.”

He contemplates a book by Goebbels left behind in the house the American soldiers live in. It belonged to a woman, an official in the Nazi party who the narrator himself arrested. There is an inscription in her handwriting: “Dear God, life is hell.”  

There is a fleeting reference to the Hurtgen forest. This was in fact the gruelling battle that Salinger himself was involved in. It’s also made clear that the narrator and his jeep-mate, “Corporal Z”, have been involved in the whole campaign, from D-Day to VE day.  

He takes out a letter from a pile of correspondence that he has put on one side and not read. It is letter from Esmé, enclosing the gift of her father’s watch, with its smashed face. This loving gesture from the young girl he befriended is the beginning of healing for him. He has been unable to sleep and suddenly feels very tired. The nightmare is over. He realises that his faculties are, despite everything he has been through, intact.

The story is only twenty-eight pages long, beautifully written and profoundly moving. It appears to be quite autobiographical, closely based on Salinger’s real-life wartime experiences. It makes its meaning as much by what is understated or not quite stated as much as by what is said directly. It brings home the very real human cost of the liberation of Europe, both for soldiers and civilians.

It’s also worth noting that Salinger’s state of mind after his experiences in the war influenced his descriptions of Holden’s mental troubles in his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.