The Appeal

This is amateur dramatics, not the RSC.

 

I took this smart and amusing murder mystery to Brighton last weekend and it was a great beach read with a highly original structure.  The story is relayed entirely in emails and WhatsApp messages yet still manages to have a bit of a Dorothy L Sayers classic crime feel.

Legal students Femi and Charlotte are handed six months' worth of email correspondence between a local amateur dramatics society and asked by their boss to look at it with a fresh perspective.   Some emails are missing, some irrelevant, some fail to deliver and some remain drafts.  Femi and Charlotte are given no background information but deduce that it is an ongoing legal case.

From the emails they learn that The Fairway Players have just staged a successful production of Blithe Spirit and are planning their next play when director Martin Hayward announces that his granddaughter Poppy has a cancer diagnosis.  Martin and wife Helen (leading lady) and his extended family appear to be queen bees in this group and the players and wider community begin a fundraising appeal called A Cure for Poppy.  However, sponsored runs, cake sales, charity football matches and Yogathons won't raise the required amount and more ambitious ways to raise money are considered.

Clever character portrayals emerge  - needy nurse Isabel, pushy former PR Sarah and my favourite - 23 year old Jackie who is 'currently travelling' and whose emails arrive from all over the world, always a step behind and giving away more than she may wish to.  There are also some highly amusing moments when their boss who is not tech-savvy tries to join the WhatsApp exchanges between Charlotte and Femi as they try to work out why someone dies and who is not as they appear to be.

This mystery also examines how a fundraising appeal can become heartlessly corporate  expecting people who work as tea ladies and nurses to stump up £10 for a raffle ticket or £80 to attend a ball.  The most moving email was from a man who donates to the Appeal for Poppy describing the loss of his own daughter and the impact it has had on him and his wife only to get an automatic Dear Donor reply telling him where to make his cheque payable to.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett is my reading highlight so far this year. Hope you enjoy it, too!

Josephine Tey

 'Go away from here.  Go away while the going is good.  Go away.  Away from here.'

I made the rookie mistake of reading the blurb on the back of the book before starting Josephine Tey's 1946 novel Miss Pym Disposes and annoyingly it gave away the crime!  It didn't spoil my enjoyment though and I loved the setting - a girls PE college which teaches gymnastics, ballet and anatomy as well as taking in remedial patients.  Just the spareness of the opening sentence shows what a good writer Tey is:

'A bell clanged.  Brazen, insistent, maddening.'

The central premise - young woman writer visits alma mater and her success and stylishness proves to be a hit with the girls and the teachers - is not disimilar to Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night although they differ in style and focus.  In fact, the hectic timetable, teachers arguing in the staff room and a bit of cheating in an exam reminded me a lot of the Enid Blyton classic girl school stories Malory Towers and St Clare's. 

Before whole-heartedly recommending Miss Pym Disposes though I will just say that those of us who read a lot of novels from the early part of the 20th C have to keep a sense of place and time and there are a couple of expressions in this book which are really not acceptable now. 

I've also started another Tey novel The Singing Sands set in the bleak beauty of the Scottish Highlands.  It has a great opening with a London Euston train sliding into a Scottish station.  On board is Detective Alan Grant of Scotland Yard visiting an old friend in the 'great clean Highland country' on doctor's orders.  Overworked and suffering from claustrophobia Grant is planning to fish the lochs and relax.  On board, there is also a dead body, as is the way with detective novels and Alan Grant doesn't want to get involved.  He's off duty, he's not well, he's going on holiday.  But something about the dead man's young face and rumpled black hair gives me the impression that Grant is not going to have a relaxing holiday.

Gaudy Night

Dorothy L Sayers was one of the first generation of women to receive her degree from Somerville College in Oxford.  She described her Oxford days as her happiest and created a fictional women's college for her greatest novel Gaudy Night which provides a fascinating insight into what life must have been like for female academics in the 1930s. 
 
Pre-occupied by the life of the mind, the female dons only concern on a more mundane level is how to stop the undergraduates sunbathing in only 'a brassiere and a pair or drawers' on the Quad. That is until the college is troubled at night by what appears to be a poltergeist who sends poison pen letters and leaves an alarming effigy in an academic robe hanging in the library.

When Harriet Vane visits her old alma mater for the gaudy (an Oxford alumni celebration) she is asked to stay on and investigate the poison pen letters.  Harriet's only real experience is as a writer of detective novels, but the college is anxious to avoid publicity, particularly as it appears that the poison pen is a member of staff.  When Harriet feels that events are getting beyond her control she calls in her friend Lord Peter Wimsey.

It is thought that Dorothy L Sayers had fallen in love with her main character the infamous Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey. Monocled blue-blooded aristocrat and amateur sleuth.  Discovered to be a brilliant all-round natural cricketer at Eton.  Accomplished musician who read History at Balliol.  A man of sensitivity who was mentally scarred by the Great War and regularly proposes to Harriet - he manages to get all the female dons in Gaudy Night in a flutter, too!

It has to be said that the dialogue in Gaudy Night has dated and there is also class snobbery, but it is still my favourite novel and full of memorable scenes and imagery including the 'poltergeist' running through the college at night switching all the lights off, the antique ivory chess set purchased by Peter for Harriet and the memorable final scene where Harriet and Peter sit on a turret at the top of the Radcliffe Camera gazing out over Oxford shining after the rain.

Harriet Vane

After re-reading Gaudy Night earlier this year I promised myself that I would read more of the wonderful literary detective novels of Dorothy L Sayers.  I'm rather fond of Harriet Vane who features in four of the books - Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon - so I'm starting with those.

Have His Carcase published in 1932 begins with Harriet on a solitary coastal walking tour.  As an independent young woman who writes detective novels, enjoys her own company and repeatedly turns down marriage proposals from the adorable Lord Peter Wimsey she is a character ahead of her time:

She was twenty-eight years old, dark, slight, with a skin naturally a little sallow, but now tanned to an agreeable biscuit-colour by sun and wind.  Persons of this fortunate complexion are not troubled by midges and sunburn, and Harriet, though not too old to care for her personal appearance was old enough to prefer convenience to outward display:

After finding a cove on the beach to sit down for lunch the hot sunshine sends her to sleep.  Upon waking she walks along the sand and is puzzled by an object on a rock a short way out to sea known as the 'flat iron'.  Upon close inspection it turns out to be a man's body with the blood still wet and the chilling suggestion that perhaps he was murdered while she was asleep.  Harriet is not the kind of woman who runs away screaming, instead she examines the body, tries to calculate the tides and searches for help.

I'm only about 100 pages in but very much enjoying it so far.  Do you have any favourites from the golden age of detective fiction?

Gaudy Night

I spent Christmas racing through the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and I'm now compiling a tbr list of Scandi-crime from your suggestions.  Thank you so much.  I've temporarily moved from the seedy underbelly of Stockholm to the dreaming spires of Oxford to re-read Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers.  Published in 1935 Gaudy Night is part of the golden age of detective fiction.  It is highly enjoyable but it has dated and some of the snobbish references to 'common shop girls' can grate.  However, I think if you read a lot of early 20th C fiction you do have to keep a sense of time and place.

The main premise of the story is that detective writer  Harriet Vane visits her alma mater, Oxford University for the Gaudy Night celebrations.  While she is staying there someone sends poison pen letters to staff and students and acts like a deranged poltergeist at night.  The female dons ask Harriet to help them discover the 'poltergeist's' identity without too much adverse publicity for the college.  Harriet agrees but soon finds the situation beyond her and calls in her old friend Lord Peter Wimsey.

I loved the descriptions of Oxford, 'students dashing to lectures their gowns hitched hurriedly over light summer frocks', the porter's lodge stacked with bicycles and punting on the Isis.  Sayers is wickedly funny on academia and there is a long running joke about Miss Lydgate's epic work History of Prosody which always needs just one more footnote.

The actual crime element is pretty slight.  The novel is really about the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet and the dilemma of intellect versus domesticity for women.  I did enjoy it though.  Did anyone who has read it find the business about the dog collar absolutely bizarre?