WILD NIGHT - Book review

L J Washburn’s first mystery novel about private eye Lucas Hallam is a highly enjoyable read. A while back I read Washburn’s short story ‘The Battle of Edendale’ in a mammoth collection of stories entitled The Untamed West. That was my first introduction to Hallam and my review of the book included this observation: I’d like to read more about this guy! And at last, now I have, and it was rewarding to renew my acquaintance.

Hallam is an ex town marshal, ex Texas Ranger, ex Pinkerton and now a P.I. in the Hollywood of the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with western stars of the period, including Tom Mix and William S Hart, and he even finds time to act in some flickers. He still carries a Colt Cavalry .45 and a Bowie knife. ‘Time was, I was considered a mite wild and woolly.’ (p144) He’s getting on in years, which is a fine touch: ‘… there had been too many years, too many wounds.’ (p146) 

Hallam is employed to protect a local evangelist, Reverend Elton Forbes, founder of the Holiness Temple of Faith. Then, during a scheduled meeting with a disgraced movie director called Wallace, the night turned wild. Wallace and his henchman were shot dead and Forbes was found with a smoking gun. Yet Forbes pleaded innocent. Hallam agreed to investigate on behalf of Forbes.

It appeared that Forbes had good reason to murder Wallace. However, there was no shortage of candidates for the killing of Wallace, an unsavory character. Then again, Reverend Forbes was not particularly popular either and could have been framed.

This is the Hollywood of scandal – the Fatty Arbuckle case is fresh in memories; however, the salaciousness and graphic goings on are not described in any lurid detail, yet taint some individuals nevertheless.

What makes this mystery satisfying is its fast pace, the authenticity of the period depicted and the character of Hallam.

‘Lucas Hallam had been good, all right. One of the best, people said. But those days were twenty years and more in the past. Hallam tried not to reminisce too much; a man could get lost in bygone days and not pay enough attention to what was going on around him now. The way he saw it, he had a lot of living to do. Daydreaming was a good way not to get around to it.’ (p3)

‘The detective business sometimes made you feel lower than a snake… You had questions that needed answers, but to get the answers you had to dig around in people’s feelings and stir up things that would just hurt them.’ (p115)

Throughout, besides dry humor, Washburn throws in telling phrases: ‘There was more brewing in this old house than coffee.’ (p225) And ‘Wasn’t the first time he’d walked down a road with a gun in his hand, and one thing never changed. Walks like this were always long ones.’ (p243)

As with many classic P.I. novels, it’s the past that often comes back to bite you.

Recommended. I've ordered the sequel, Dead Stick.

 

A Dance to the Music of Time (1 of 12)

I blame Anthony Burgess. In 1984 he produced a book (written in two weeks) titled Ninety-Nine Novels: The best in English since 1939. He chose 99, allowing the reader to choose one of their own to make up the hundred. There seemed a paucity of female authors listed and, of course, as with any list of ‘the best’ it was bound to be controversial. He declared it was his personal choice, which he was entitled to make (in the days before a growing phalanx of people feel obliged to be offended by any statement of personal viewpoint).

I’ve read a good number of books from his selection; others are still on my bookshelves, waiting for me to read eventually. Only now, some thirty-four years later am I tackling the sequence A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, a 12-book novel, dauntingly amounting to just under 3,000 pages! All in the first person viewpoint narrated by the character Nick Jenkins.

The back covers don’t provide a blurb telling the prospective reader about the book; instead, they’re filled with reviewers’ comments:

‘I would rather read Mr Powell than any English novelist now writing.’ – Kingsley Amis.

‘One of the fictional landmarks of our time.’ – Times Literary Supplement.

‘A Question of Upbringing is a witty and shapely account of conventional English education.’ – Francis Wyndham, Observer.

Powell’s first book, A Question of Upbringing (1951) in the sequence is set in the period 1921-1924. It starts, however, with our narrator Nick viewing men at work gathered round a bucket of coke in winter. This two paragraph passage is highly visual and conjures up a distant memory – a Proustian madeleine moment in time – of winter at school in 1921 when Nick first takes much notice of fellow student Kenneth Widmerpool. And so the long novel begins…  

At the time Widmerpool was ‘fairly heavily built, thick lips and metal rimmed spectacles.’ Widmerpool was not highly thought of at school and was the butt of jokes, yet he seemed to possess a thick skin.

Nick shares a room with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer.

The fact that Templer had declared ‘he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour: though he knew far more than I of the things about which books are written. He was also an adept at breaking rules, or diverting them to ends not intended by those who had framed them.’ 

Stringham was ‘tall and dark, and looked a little like one of those stiff, sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in sixteenth-century portraits…’ (p12) He was an excellent mimic, and used this to good effect to get their housemaster Le Bas arrested! (pp 48-52) As you will gather from this, the novel is at times comical – never laugh-out-loud, but it possesses amusing scenes and dialogue. For example, Stringham’s attractive mother observes, ‘Still, you weren’t expelled, darling. That was clever of you.’ And Stringham replied, ‘It took some doing.’

Sillery is a manipulative Oxford don who hosts students with tea and cake, and while he inclined ‘to the Right socially, politically he veered increasingly to the Left’ (p165). He is a name-dropper and maintains contact with ex-students who might prove useful. ‘Sillery was a keen propagandist for the League of Nations, Czechoslovakia, and Mr Gandhi... and had been somewhat diverted from earlier Gladstonian enthusiasms by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917.’ (164)

Nick spends a summer in France, where he stays at a large house, La Grenadiere, run by a Madame Leroy. The time-worn taxi ride from the train station has its moments: ‘Even when stationary, his taxi was afflicted with a kind of vehicular counterpart of St Vitus’ dance, and its quaverings and seismic disturbances must have threatened nausea to its occupants at the best of times.’ (p108)  On arrival, Madame Leroy ‘led the way through the door in the wall in the manner of a sorceress introducing a neophyte into the land of faerie…’ (p109)

Throughout there are apt references to classical paintings, which isn’t surprising since Powell studied art in the early 1920s. What appears impressive is the forward planning in the early novels: ‘He piled his luggage, bit by bit, on to a taxi; and passed out of my life for some twenty years.’ And ‘This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time. The path had suddenly forked. With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.’ (p222)

Clearly, much of the book has an autobiographical feel about it, reinforced by the first person narration. The writing is measured, considered, and coldly precise. There is much to admire in that regard. Yet, not a lot happens. The colours and hedonism of the 1920s do not seem in much evidence; the depiction, despite the paintings, appears colourless. There is no depth of feeling, only good observation. It’s a book of quite engaging characters; a slice of life and manners, perhaps, in a moment in time long gone by.

The cover features a quote from the Sunday Times: ‘A remarkable picture of the history of our times.’ This must relate to the entire sequence rather than this single book.

I’m determined to read all twelve books to see what happens to Stringham, Templer and Widmerpool.

Editorial comment

My copy was published in 1983 (after 14 prior impressions) and yet there were two glaring typographical errors at the outset; ‘street had made a a kind of camp…’ (p5) and ‘he was found to posses an overcoat…’ (p10).

There are only four chapters.

There’s a tendency to write long paragraphs – sometimes only one or two per page.

An over-indulgence with colons in these lengthy paragraphs gives the impression that the pages have succumbed to a contagion of sorts.

Sentences should certainly vary in length, to provide diversity and change pace; however, Powell employs too many complex and lengthy sentences for the modern taste.

Book of the TV series - Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates

First in the Miss Fisher Mystery series of books by Kerry Greenwood, Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates was published in 1989. Its title was Cocaine Blues (though in the US it was called Death by Misadventure). Since then, over the years Miss Fisher has gained many readers from age 17 to 90. The popularity of the books has only increased since the airing of the TV series first in 2012 – now the third series is available on DVD  – starring Essie Davis, which is perfect casting.

To date, Kerry Greenwood has published twenty Miss Fisher novels, the latest being Murder and Mendelssohn (2013). The short story collection A Question of Death (2008) features Miss Fisher also and has been mined for the TV series. The first episode of season one retained the Cocaine Blues title.

Although Phryne Fisher’s family was poor prior to the First World War, all male heirs to a British peerage were killed in the conflict and her father inherited the title and moved to England with the family. The book begins in 1928 with Phryne, rich and bored, solving a jewel theft and then being asked to investigate a Colonel’s daughter who is married, living in Melbourne, Australia: they fear she is being poisoned by her husband. Phryne agrees and moves to the antipodes.

We soon learn that Phryne is not your normal aristocrat. After completing school, she ran away to France and worked with a women’s ambulance unit in the war. Now, she can fly a plane, and drives her own car (a Hispano-Suiza) and is quite comfortable wearing trousers. Her personality seems to match exactly that of her 4th century BC namesake; apparently, when born her father had chosen to christen her Psyche, ‘due to a long evening at the Club the night before, when he was called upon for her name, he had rummaged through the rags of a classical education and seized upon Phryne. So instead of Psyche the nymph, she was Phryne the courtesan.’ (p16)  

The story unfolds effortlessly, with light humour interspersed with a social conscience. Drug dealing – cocaine, obviously – and illegal abortion figure in this tale. Phryne is an emancipated woman, happy to love and leave men – she has no wish for commitment or children. A Russian dancer, Sasha, intrigues her while attending a soiree: ‘The guests were silenced by a painful mixture of Schoenberg and Russian folk-song, derived from musically obtuse Styrian peasants who had absorbed their atonality with their mother’s milk. The sound hurt; but it could not be ignored. Too much of it, Phryne was convinced, would curdle custard.’ (p77/78) Sasha is on a quest of his own, too, and she gets involved in more ways than one.

Her investigations inevitably bring her into the evil orbit of hoodlums: two men accost her – one, with a waxed moustache containing ‘rather more crumbs than fashion dictated…’ while the other possessed a ‘thin moustache like a smear of brown Windsor soup. Both had suggestive bulges in their pockets which told of either huge genitalia or trousered pistols. Phryne inclined to the handgun theory.’(p81)

Along the way, Phryne recruits Dot as her maid and confidante, and taxi drivers Cec and Bert as her spies and contacts. She briefly meets Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, who is blissfully unaware how Miss Fisher is going to turn his world upside down in future adventures.

An enjoyable crime caper with likeable characters and plenty of plot. As I came to the book after watching the TV series, I tend to hear the character voices from the show, which is praise to the scriptwriters who have captured the essence of the book(s).

[Puzzling why the UK publisher doesn’t use the TV series images on the covers; the publisher of the Murdoch murder mysteries had no such qualms: possibly a contractual issue.]

Essie Davis - Miss Fisher TV series - Wikipedia commons