Sandlands - Rosy Thornton

It can be difficult to write about short stories. It's not easy to discuss plot without giving too much information. In this case, however, it's easier because Rosy Thornton's impressive new volume of stories, Sandlands, share many common elements. Place is the most obvious as all the stories are set in the Suffolk fenlands & often share the same locations - the Ship Inn, Willett's Farm, a WWII airfield now turned into a museum, the village of Blaxhall. There are also common themes - nature, remembrance, the past reaching into the present. I enjoyed the literary echoes too, of Dorothy L Sayers' The Nine Tailors in Ringing Night, a story featuring bell ringers & of Edward Thomas's poem As the Team's Head Brass in Stone the Crows, where a WWII Spitfire pilot looks back on his war service from his nursing home to a scene that became as familiar during WWII as it had been thirty years before.

Nothing in that evening landscape moved to give it life and substance - until suddenly, beyond my left wingtip, a miniature figure swung into view, straddling the midline of a field where it changed from the dull grey-brown of stubble, to a deeper richer russet, ridged in black. At first I had no sense that the figure was in motion, so slowly did it creep along the line of the last furrow, edging forward no faster than a sluggish beetle, dazed by the sun. I took another turn, dropping my height a little, to gaze down until I could make out the broad backs of a pair of chestnut horses, the glinting Y-shape of the plough and, behind it, just visible, the dot of a man's head.

Sometimes the literary inspiration is more overt as in A Curiosity of Warnings, when a man follows in the footsteps of the protagonist of one of M R James' ghost stories with unintended consequences. Other stories with supernatural touches include The Witch Bottle, where Kathy's new home holds the memory of a long-ago tragedy that threatens the present; The White Doe, where Fran experiences the mythical or mystical visitations of the doe while coming to terms with the death of her mother & The Watcher of Souls, where a barn owl's nest hides a cache of love letters from long ago.

One of my favourite stories was Whispers. Dr Theodore Whybrow has been working on the definitive biography of Regency poet Wiliam Colstone for years. He's almost paralysed by the pressure that comes with writing a book so long-awaited. On impulse, he buys a Martello tower on the coast, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars that he knew as a boy, & as he spends more time there, he feels the closeness of the past & the inspiration that he needs.

It had been a calm night outside, overcast and starless, the sea as close to a millpond as he had known it. But the tower was never silent. Even on the most breathlessly still of nights, there were whisperings in the bricks. He sometimes wondered if it was really the sea - some subterranean echo or vibration, rippling up through the walls from the shingle on which they stood. Or perhaps an illusion, a trick of the mind, like the echo of the waves heard in a seashell. Yet, for all that, there was a paradoxical realness and solidity about the voices here, an immediacy - yes, that was the word for it: immediate, unmediated - which recalled with a sudden sharp pang the early days of his scholarship, that quickening of the blood he had thought to have lost. A connection thought severed, rejoined.

Many of the stories are about the links between generations, of the same family or of the people who have lived in a house or a place. In All the Flowers Gone, three generations of women are connected to an airfield. Lilian works at the airfield during WWII & falls in love with a pilot. Her daughter, Rosa, protests against nuclear weapons at the base in the 1980s. Rosa's daughter, Poppy, is a botanist, searching for a rare flower that has been sighted near the old runway. I loved the way that the women were linked not only by blood but by cycling with its connotations of freedom & the way that the place played a significant role in the lives of Lilian, Rosa & Poppy.

It was a perfect morning for cycling. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist had formed over the fields.As Poppy bowled along Tunstall Lane it rose in layers, which seemed to lift and peel away without losing any of their density, and hung just clear of the barley so that sunlight filtered through underneath, tingeing them from below with watery gold. Once through Tunstall village and out on the road that stretched straight ahead into Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her battered trainers, pushing down harder with each stroke, enjoying the stretch in her calves and the rush of cool air in her lungs, until the dark trees on either side were no more than a blur.

In Nightingale's Return, the son of an Italian POW travels back to the farm where his father worked during the War & we travel back to Salvatore's time at Nightingale Farm while his son makes the journey in the present day.

I loved the humour in many of the stories. I think my favourite story was The Interregnum. The rector of St Peter's Blaxhall goes on maternity leave & her replacement is Ivy Paskall. Ivy is a lay reader studying for the ministry rather than a member of the clergy but secretary of the PCC, Dorothy Brundish, is sure that the parish will manage. That is until Ivy's plans for bonfires at Epiphany & a women's feast at Candlemas, the Christian equivalent of Imbolc, begin to cause some uneasiness. Ivy's explanations seem very reasonable but are her ideas maybe a little pagan for the congregation of St Peter's?  In High House, a woman cleans for Mr Napish, a retired engineer whose obsession with theories about tides & flooding feed into his unusual hobby.

I enjoyed this collection of stories very much. The book is beautifully produced by Sandstone Press & the cover image is incredibly striking, evoking the themes of nature & unease in the stories. I've read all Rosy's novels & reviewed several of them here (see Ninepins, The Tapestry of Love, More than Love Letters). Rosy was the first author to contact me back in 2010 when I started blogging & ask if I would like to review her book which was such a thrill. Luckily I've enjoyed her books so reading them has been a much-anticipated treat.

Rosy Thornton kindly sent me a review copy of Sandlands.

Silent Nights : Christmas mysteries - ed Martin Edwards

I do like to read Christmas books around this time of year. Yesterday I started my annual reread (or relisten) of A Christmas Carol, read so beautifully by Miriam Margolyes. Thankfully the weather has calmed down a little after a few horrible days around 40C. I had to go to work on Friday but Saturday & Sunday were spent inside with all the blinds down & air conditioning on, drinking iced tea, reading & watching Christmas movies, especially the ones set in very cold places.

One of the books I finished reading over the weekend was Silent Nights, an anthology of Christmas mysteries, mostly from the Golden Age, edited by Martin Edwards. This is one of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics, a very successful series of mystery novels & short stories reprinted by the British Library. Silent Nights is a mixture of well-known & newly resurrected stories. The first story features Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, is an old favourite involving the theft of a famous diamond & a Christmas goose. The Necklace of Pearls by Dorothy L Sayers is another favourite, more stolen jewellery & a clever plot that tests the skills of Lord Peter Wimsey.

One of the most interesting & atmospheric stories is Waxwork by Ethel Lina White. A waxworks museum has a reputation for being haunted. Two people have tried to brave the ghosts by staying in the museum overnight & been found dead next morning,. Ambitious young reporter Sonia is determined to succeed where others have failed but can she debunk the stories? The tension is heightened as the night wears on & I was almost looking through my fingers at one point. I haven't read any Edgar Wallace but the story included here, called Stuffing, is beautifully plotted as well as quite funny. Both the good & the bad get their just deserts.

Edmund Crispin is another favourite author. I read all his books one summer many years ago & Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language & Literature at Oxford, is a wonderful character. Reading this story again after so many years that I'd forgotten the solution, I thought that Stephen Fry would be a very good Fen if the books were ever made into a TV series. In The Name on the Window, architect Sir Lucas Welsh is found stabbed in a supposedly haunted pavilion at the home of fellow architect Sir Charles Moberly. Before his death, he had time to write the name of his murderer on the window but all is not as it seems.

This is an excellent anthology of stories. I read one every night over a couple of weeks & I like to read anthologies that way. Reading too many short stories at once can be a little indigestible but one a day is perfect & this collection was just what I needed in the busy & hot days before Christmas.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather - ed by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

Before Willa Cather died, she did what she could to prevent this book from ever existing. She made a will that clearly forbade all publication of her letters, in full or in part. And now we flagrantly defy Cather's will in the belief that her decision, made in the last, dark years of her life and honored for more than half a century, is outweighed by the value of making these letters available to readers all over the world.

This is how Andrew Jewell & Janis Stout begin their Introduction to this volume of the letters of Willa Cather. My first reaction was to think, Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Then again, if I was going to take the high moral ground, I would have closed the book immediately & returned it to the library the next day. Instead, I read every word & loved it. Jewell & Stout go on to write that Cather may have wanted to prevent the reputation of her work being overshadowed by her private life. She was always careful to protect the two most important emotional relationships of her life, with Isabelle McClung & Edith Lewis, from prying eyes. As it is, very little of Cather's correspondence with either woman survives. In this book of over 600pp, there are only a couple of short notes or postcards to each of them. She also left the ultimate decision about publication in the future to her Executors & Trustee. Jewell & Stout believe that "These lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation." which is certainly true.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1875 & moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska as a child. After attending university in Lincoln, Nebraska, she worked as editor of McClure's magazine in New York, travelled several times to Europe &, more productively for her fiction, to Arizona, New Mexico & Quebec. While working at McClure's, she began publishing her own work & working on the magazine, often filling the pages herself, was a wonderful apprenticeship. She remained close to her parents & her elder brothers, Roscoe & Douglass; girlhood friends such as the Miner sisters; fellow writers, especially Dorothy Canfield Fisher, & her publisher, Alfred Knopf. All these relationships are well-represented in the letters.

Cather's growing reputation led to correspondence with readers & critics which often leads to fascinating stories about the origins of her novels. The friendship with singer Olive Fremstad that was the inspiration for The Song of the Lark; her memories of her immigrant neighbours in Red Cloud that inspired stories like The Bohemian Girl & the novels O Pioneers! & My Àntonia. The trip to New Mexico & her reading about the French Catholic missionaries that became Death Comes for the Archbishop; the childhood memory of a day at her grandmother's house in Virginia that was the beginning of Sapphira and the Slave Girl. She was also interested & knowledgeable about every aspect of the production, presentation & promotion of her work from the font type & size, the bindings & illustrations to the copy written by the publicity department of her first publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

Cather lived in New York for many years but always tried to leave the city during the heat of summer. She had several favourite places, from Jaffrey, New Hampshire to Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, where she & Edith Lewis owned a cottage. She also spent considerable time in France & New Mexico.

The editors have left Cather's wayward spelling as a young girl alone & it gives a picture of  impetuous enthusiasm about books, music & the theatre as well as an intense interest in everything that was happening to friends & family. Although her spelling improves, her love of literature & music is with her all her life. Cather was a loyal & generous friend, never forgetting S S McClure, who had given her the opportunity of editing his magazine. She also went home to Nebraska frequently & always remembered friends & neighbours at Christmas & especially during the hard times of the Depression years. Her own success meant that she had the ability to help in practical ways as well as with kind thoughts & sympathy.

I always enjoy reading about the elements that go into fiction & the way that writers can take the seed of a story from life, a scene briefly glimpsed, a person known in childhood & transform it into something new. Cather explained to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood about the characters in her story, Two Friends,

You never can get it through peoples heads that a story is made out of an emotion or an excitement and is not made out of the legs and arms and faces of one's friends or acquaintances. Two Friends, for instance, was not really made out of your father and Mr Richardson; it was made out of an effect they produced on a little girl who used to hang about them. The story, as I told you, is a picture; but it is not the picture of two men, but of a memory. Many things about both men are left out of this sketch because they made no impression on me as a child; other things are exaggerated because they seemed just like that to me then. January 27, 1934

I also enjoyed her responses to critics' opinions of her work. Margaret Laurence wrote a chapter on Cather's work &, in a letter to Carrie Sherwood, Cather praises Laurence for her understanding of her craft,

She seems to understand that I can write successfully only when I write about people or places which I very greatly admire; which, indeed, I actually love. The characters may be cranky or queer, or foolhardy and rash, but they must have something in them which gives me a thrill and warms my heart. June 28, 1939

She also had trenchant views about the value of trying to teach creative writing (in a letter to Egbert Samuel Oliver, who had written to her asking for her views),

I think it is sheer nonsense to attempt to teach "Creative Writing" in colleges. If the college students were taught to write good, sound English sentences (sentences with unmistakable articulation) and to avoid hackneyed woman's-club expressions, such as "colorful", "the desire to create", "worth while books", "a writer universally acclaimed" - all those smug expressions which really mean nothing at all - then creative writing would take care of itself. December 13, 1934

Cather's last years were made difficult by ill health. She damaged her right wrist & this restricted her ability to work. She writes that she learned to dictate her letters but could never dictate her work. She also had several operations. The deaths of those close to her, especially her parents, her brothers & Isabelle McClung, hit her very hard. She writes movingly of the loss of her father (& Dorothy's mother) & the ill-health of her mother to Dorothy Canfield Fisher,

But these vanishings, that come one after another, have such an impoverishing effect on those of us who are left - our world suddenly becomes so diminished - the landmarks disappear and all the splendid distances behind us close up. These losses, one after another, make one feel as if one were going on in a play after most of the principal characters are dead. September 30, 1930

This feeling intensified as those closest to her died, especially those who were far away. Isabelle McClung was living in France with her husband, Jan Hambourg, when she died of kidney disease in 1938. Cather wrote to her niece, Margaret,

Isabelle knew very little about books, but everything about gracious and graceful living. We brought each other up. We kept on doing that all our lives. For most of my life in Pittsburgh (five years) Isabelle and, I think, your father (Cather's brother, Roscoe), were the only two people who thought there was any good reason for my trying to write ... Isabelle has always been my best and soundest critic ... I have sent Isabelle every manuscript before I published (part missing?) were always invaluable. Her husband is returning to me three hundred of my letters which she carried about with her from place to place all the time. She had lived abroad for fourteen years, but I often went to her, and in mind we were never separated. Now we have no means of communication; that is all. One can never form such a friendship twice. One does not want to. As long as she lived, her youth and mine were realities to both of us. November 8, 1938

Reading an author's letters always takes me back to the work & I've been rereading some of Cather's short stories. I bought this Virago edition of the stories, edited by Hermione Lee, in the late 1980s. I've read The Bohemian Girl, Two Friends, A Wagner Matinée & Coming, Aphrodite! & will probably go on to read the rest of the book, as well as the novels I haven't yet read.

The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards

The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written during this period, most of them inaccurate & quite lazy. The books were just puzzles, with cutout characters reminiscent of the board game Cluedo. Their authors didn't play fair with the reader, including untraceable poisons & mysterious Chinamen in an effort to bamboozle the reader. In reality, the best books of this period have been read & loved by millions of readers. Their plots, far from being cosy, featured serial killers, sadistic murders, plots based on real crimes of the period & the beginnings of the forensic thriller. The names of the greatest authors of the period - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh - are still well-known today. Their books are still read, we listen to audio books & radio productions & watch the many TV adaptations. Martin Edwards tells the story of the Golden Age through the history of The Detection Club & the authors who founded it & were its members. It's the story of a period of history & a group of writers that have always fascinated me.

The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of writers that included Christie, Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote under the names Anthony Berkeley & Francis Iles. The Club was an exclusive one. Members had to be proposed by a current member & approved by the committee. The initiation ritual, complete with members dressed in ceremonial robes & the swearing of an oath to uphold fair play in the plotting of the detective novel taken while holding a skull known as Eric, was all part of the game. The Club met for dinner & conversation several times a year in London & the meetings provided an opportunity for gossip about publishers, agents, sales, the topics that probably feature in the conversation of any group of writers. For some of the members, the Club provided an escape from the disappointments & problems of their private lives. Writing is a solitary occupation & the opportunity to talk shop with colleagues must have been another attraction.

The Golden Age of Murder focuses principally on three writers - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox. Much has been written about Christie & Sayers but I was especially interested to read more about Berkeley. He was an innovative novelist whose brilliant plotting was a feature of his work. Two of his books written under the pseudonym Francis Iles radically changed the conventions of detective fiction. In Malice Aforethought, the reader is in the confidence of the murderer from the beginning & the opening of Before the Fact tells us that Lina Aysgarth was married to a murderer before taking us back to the beginning of their relationship with this knowledge in our minds. Under the name Anthony Berkeley, he wrote a series of novels featuring Roger Sheringham, an amateur detective who usually gets everything wrong before finally coming up with the correct solution. Berkeley felt adrift after his war service & tried various jobs before becoming a writer. He was a contradictory personality, eccentric, obsessive, difficult. His private life was unconventional & this is something he had in common with other members of the Detection Club.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the private lives of the members. A theory I've heard several times about the Golden Age writers is that their interest & facility in writing detective stories came from the need to hide secrets in their private lives. Just last week, I listened to the latest episode of BBC Radio's Great Lives where Val McDermid discussed P D James, who gave a lecture on this theory. Christie famously disappeared for twelve days in 1926, distressed over the end of her first marriage. Even after her happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie, an intensely shy woman, shunned publicity. Sayers had an illegitimate son, whose existence she kept secret from all her closest friends. Her difficult marriage, to an alcoholic who had suffered from his war experiences, was another reason for her love of the Detection Club's dinners & the gusto with which she entered into the spirit of all the rituals & rules.

Edwards also mentions many other writers, some of them famous in their day but unknown now. Interestingly, as consultant to the very successful British Library Crime Classics series, Edwards has been instrumental in bringing some of these authors back into print. Christopher St John Sprigg, J Jefferson Farjeon & Freeman Wills Croft are just three authors mentioned in this book who have been brought back into print through this series. Another cliche of the Golden Age is that it was dominated by women writers, the Queens of Crime. Martin Edwards features many male authors of the period, some of them undeservedly obscure now. His knowledge of the period is exhaustive & obviously the product of many years reading & research. Martin's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name? bears witness to this interest with regular posts on forgotten books & interesting snippets of information from his ongoing research into this fascinating period of literary history.

It's impossible for me to encompass this book in a brief review. I haven't even mentioned the interest in true crime that led to the anthology, The Anatomy of Murder (recently reprinted), or the collaborative novels published by members of the Club (Ask a Policeman, The Floating Admiral) to replenish their funds & pay the rent on their Soho rooms. I enjoyed reading about the group dynamics of these projects, with Dorothy L Sayers bullying & cajoling members into writing their contributions & submitting their copy. The current members of the Detection Club (including Edwards who is the Archivist of the Club) are working on a group novel of their own called The Sinking Admiral in homage to the earlier book. There are also some fascinating photographs in the book, including one of my favourites of Dorothy L Sayers & Helen Simpson drinking beer & Gladys Mitchell in her other job as a PE teacher, instructing her pupils. The research that has gone into the book is phenomenal as can be seen by the rare illustrations & the detail in the footnotes.

I mentioned the British Library Crime Classics above & I've been reading a recent anthology, Capital Crimes, edited by Edwards, which throws light on a discovery in the book that I found really thrilling. Martin Edwards has discovered a connection between Berkeley & one of my favourite authors, E M Delafield, that has been previously unsuspected. I won't go into detail but the clues are there in Delafield's work if you know where to look. Although best-known today for her delightful Diary of a Provincial Lady & its sequels, Delafield had an interest in true crime & wrote a novel, Messalina of the Suburbs, about the Edith Thompson case (which disturbed & fascinated several of the Detection Club members). The story by Delafield in Capital Crimes, They Don't Wear Labels, is a revelation & just one example of the influence her friendship with Berkeley had on her own work.

The success of the British Library Crime Classics as well as the continuing popularity of adaptations of Golden Age novels attest to our love of this period of detective fiction. I'm just as fascinated by the authors as their books so The Golden Age of Murder has been a real treat for me. I think anyone who has read the novels of this period would find much to enjoy in Martin Edwards' book & the recent reprints by several publishers, including Dean Street Press, Langtail Press, Rue Morgue & Felony & Mayhem (featuring Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case this week) mean that if you've read everything Sayers, Christie & Allingham ever wrote, you have many more authors to discover.

Christmas at Thompson Hall - Anthony Trollope

Christmas at Thompson Hall is one of a set of five Christmas Classics published by Penguin this year. This is the only one I bought but they all have variations on the same elegant cover with snow & cardinals on a pine tree. The other authors are Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol, Louisa May Alcott & E T A Hoffmann. Series like this are one of the reasons that, however much I love my ereaders, I will always want real books as well. I have these Trollope stories in my Delphi Classics ebook edition of Trollope but this little hardback was just irresistible.

The title story is about a couple traveling from the south of France to the woman's home in England. The Thompson family love getting together at Christmas but, since their marriage some years before, Mrs Mary Brown & her husband, Charles (their names have been changed to spare them embarrassment) have stayed in France rather than travel back to England for the holiday. Mrs Brown's family have become more & more upset about their defection & so, this year, even though Mr Brown has a terrible head cold, she convinces him to make the journey. When they arrive in Paris, Charles is so ill & so irritable that he almost refuses to go on. However, his wife proposes to make him a mustard plaster, having seen a jar of mustard in the dining room. So, late at night, & in her nightclothes, she begins wandering the endless corridors of the hotel.

Discovered by a porter, she is too embarrassed to admit her real errand & pretends she has lost a handkerchief. The porter insists on accompanying her to the dining room & back to her room so she then has to retrace her steps once he's gone to find the mustard & make up the plaster. Unfortunately, she gets lost on her way back to her room, enters another man's room & applies the mustard plaster to him instead. Mortified by the impropriety of this, Mary rushes back to her room & prepares to brazen it out next morning when the hotel is in uproar over the assault on a defenceless guest & the very strange behaviour of an English matron. I have to admit that this story, at almost 60pp, was too long & a bit tedious. Mary's wanderings through the hotel were interminable & the identity of the man with the mustard plaster is not difficult to work out. It's a very English story of embarrassment & a level of refinement that prevents poor Mary from just telling the truth.

Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage is the story of a young girl, in love with a boy but unable to get past her pride & a silly quarrel when he declares that Christmas is a bore. There are many tears & misunderstandings before the happy ending. In The Mistletoe Bough, Elizabeth Garrow has broken off her engagement to Godfrey Holmes & has ever since been miserable. It takes a Christmas visit from Godfrey & his sister, Isabella, to reveal the true story of why Elizabeth broke the engagement.  The Two Generals is set during the American Civil War & concerns two brothers, each a general but one fights for the North & the other for the South. They both love the same woman & their rivalry in every area of their lives leads to the potential for betrayal one Christmas. Not If I Know It concerns a quarrel between brothers-in-law, George & Wilfred, at Christmas time & the efforts of the exasperated woman who loves them both to make them see sense.These are slight but charming stories, all set at Christmas & just right for reading at the end of a busy day.

My Christmas reading seems to have started later than usual this year. I'm reading several books at the moment & still listening to the sublime Moby-Dick but I do hope to get to these two Christmas mysteries, Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer & Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon, as well as my annual reading of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I haven't even started watching Christmas movies yet although I have them all lined up - several versions of A Christmas Carol, including the Muppets, The Holly & the Ivy, Miracle on 34th Street & The Bishop's Wife. I have been listening to carols for several weeks though as I cook & wrap presents. Christmas seems to have crept up on me this year although I'm organised, even though I'm working until Christmas Eve, & now don't need to go near a shop until it's all over, thank goodness. Plenty of time for all this Christmas reading, watching & listening.

Books & Cats miscellany - Part 2

Part 2 of the miscellany has to begin with the latest photos of Phoebe, taken last weekend as she lolled on the back steps, one of her favourite spots on warm days. She moves from step to step as the shade moves & then, eventually gives up altogether & comes inside if I'm home & the air conditioner is on.

I've been reading short stories, including these two collections released as ebooks. Trisha Ashley's Footsteps in the Snow and other teatime treats is a collection of 11 stories previously published in magazines as well as the opening chapters of Trisha's new book, Creature Comforts, which will be published next year. These are lovely, romantic stories, just long enough to read in a coffee break or at teatime as the subtitle says. Most of the stories are set around Christmas so they're seasonally appropriate too, even if my Christmas isn't going to involve snow, frost & open fires.

Martin Edwards was the winner of the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham short story competition, sponsored by the Margery Allingham Society. His winning story, Acknowledgments, has been published by Bloomsbury in this ebook which also contains two more stories by Edwards & an appreciation of Margery Allingham as a short story writer. Martin Edwards is an expert on the Golden Age of detective fiction so it's appropriate that he was the winner of the competition with a wicked story about an author of travel guides thanking his friends & family for their help with his career. As the narrator thanks his second wife, his agent & his publicist for their help with By-Ways Around Britain, the tone moves from comic self-satisfaction to something much darker.

Martin Edwards also announced some exciting news on his blog last week. He's been appointed as the Series Consultant for the British Library Crime Classics series I've been enjoying so much this year. The series has been incredibly successful & there are more treats in store next year, including two anthologies of short stories compiled by Martin. All the details are here.

I was very pleased to discover that The English Air by D E Stevenson has been reprinted by Greyladies. If this book & the other DES titles available from Greyladies sell well, hopefully other reprints will follow.

It's also available in the US from Anglophile Books as are lots of books by Georgette Heyer.

Finally, for Georgette Heyer fans, Vulpes Libris featured posts on Heyer's novels all last week. Here's the link. With the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo coming up next year, I feel that I should definitely read An Infamous Army, even if I read nothing else about Waterloo. Or, I may listen to it. I see that Audible has the audio book read by Clare Higgins.

I can't finish this post without a couple more photos of togetherness. On Monday night, I was watching the news on TV & Phoebe was asleep on my lap. Lucky was not impressed & sat on the arm of the chair looking plaintively at me for the whole half hour.

A couple of hours later, all change. Next time I sat down, Lucky was right there. She wasn't going to be usurped again. So, Phoebe sat on the arm of the chair staring alternately at Lucky & me. Every so often she would put her paw on my arm & made me feel as guilty as possible that there wasn't room for her on my lap as well.
Sorry about the terrible angles of these photos. I used the iPad & I could not work out how to fix the angle on the second photo. Actually I'm amazed I managed to get the girls in the frame at all when I was holding the iPad out to my right & hoping for the best!

PS I just noticed that this is my 900th post, not that I'm counting. Almost five years of blogging & 900 posts - I feel exhausted. I think I need to sit down with a cup of tea & a book or maybe listen to a podcast or watch another episode of An Age of Kings...

Weird Stories - Charlotte Riddell

I love a good ghost story & I don't read enough of them. I have quite a few collections on the tbr shelves & with Halloween last week, I decided to read one of the collections reprinted by Victorian Secrets. I was also reminded of this book because, as I mentioned last week, I've ordered the new Tramp Press edition of Charlotte Riddell's A Struggle for Fame, which I'm looking forward to reading even more now.

The popularity of the ghost story really grew in the Victorian period. The sensation novel created a market for the shocking & the unusual & there were many periodicals looking for short stories to fill their pages. Women writers proved to be particularly adept at the ghost story &, on the evidence of this collection, Charlotte Riddell was one of the most effective at creating a genuinely spooky atmosphere. I think she's also unusual in choosing male narrators, often in the first person, for her stories.

The stories in this collection are all similar in their setup. A house, left empty for some time, is rumoured to be haunted. A man, often young & over-confident, agrees to stay in a house to disprove those rumours of haunting. Sometimes it's a married man, like Dick Tippens in Old Mrs Jones, doing quite well for himself, deciding to rent a house said to be haunted by Mrs Jones, a woman who was supposedly ill-treated by her husband & who disappeared mysteriously. All goes well at first but then, Mrs Tippens finds that her lodgers won't stay, her children tell her that an old woman comes into their room at night & stares at them. Finally, Dick's young cousin comes to stay & is tormented by Mrs Jones every night in her dreams until she takes to sleepwalking, desperately trying to remember what the old woman wants her to do.

In The Open Door, a disaffected auctioneer's clerk agrees to go down & investigate the mystery of a house let to one of their clients. The client, Mr Carrison, refuses to stay there because of a door that refuses to stay shut. In The Old House in Vauxhall Walk, a young man who has quarreled with his father & walked out of home with nothing, meets an old servant who allows him to stay overnight in a house that he's about to leave. Stories of a rich, miserly woman who once lived there & spent a lonely old age regretting her failure to help her family with her money have led to stories of haunting & Graham Coulton has a very odd dream that leads to the solution of a mystery about the old woman's money.

Apart from the interest of the stories themselves, what I really enjoyed was the matter of fact style of writing. There are no Gothic overtones or quaintly archaic language. Charlotte Riddell tells her stories in plain, unadorned language that seems very modern compared to some Victorian fiction. I'm reading Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth with my 19th century bookgroup at the moment. I'm enjoying it but it's a real baggy monster of a book. It must be at least 600pp long (it's hard to tell as I'm reading the ebook), set in the 15th century & full of that archaic language that Josephine Tey in The Daughter of Time calls "writing forsoothly". I'm enjoying the book (there are lots of things I love about it, especially Margaret's story & Denys, the Burgundian soldier) but Reade obviously had to fill his three volumes as there are endless adventures that our hero is involved in on his journey from Holland to Rome (several of us were so bogged down in the journey that we'd forgotten where Gerard was going!) & the dialogue is very forsoothly indeed. To read one of Charlotte Riddell's stories every night - short, sharp, very modern in style - was a refreshing change.

I also loved the sense of place. Several of the stories are set in the countryside & Riddell describes the delights of the country beautifully. Of course the beauty of the country side is in contrast to the evil lurking just out of view. Nut Bush Farm, to be let cheaply because there's a mystery about the fate of the last tenant, is just what Jack is looking for.

I looked at it over a low laurel hedge growing inside an open paling about four feet high. Beyond the hedge there was a strip of turf, green as emeralds, smooth as a bowling green - then came a sunk fence, the most picturesque sort of protection the ingenuity of man ever devised; beyond that, a close-cut lawn which sloped down to the sunk fence from a house with projecting gables in the front, the recessed portion of the building having three windows on the first floor. Both gables were covered with creepers, the lawn was girt in by a semicircular sweep of forest trees; the afternoon sun streamed over the grass and tinted the swaying foliage with a thousand tender lights. Hawthorn bushes, pink and white, mingled with their taller and grander brothers. The chestnuts here were in flower, the copper beech made a delightful contrast of colour, and a birch rose delicate and graceful close beside.

Of course, the mystery of what happened to the last tenant - did he elope with a pretty young girl, leaving his wife & children destitute or was he murdered for the large sum of money he'd just withdrawn from his bank? - will colour Jack's opinion of his new home.

Weird Stories is perfect for any time of year, not just Halloween. Read just one story a day & see if you find the tales of ghosts & haunted houses easy to dismiss from your mind.

Folio Society splurge

You'd think Phoebe didn't want me to get at those books, wouldn't you?! Well, this was one battle of wills she didn't win.

I'm rushing towards my goal of 1,000 books on the tbr shelves with a vengeance lately. I was tempted by the Folio Society special offer for their new titles & bought these three gorgeous editions. I've always wanted to read William of Malmesbury's Deeds of the English Kings, which was written in the 12th century & tells the story of English history from the coming of the Romans to the reign of Henry I. This is the 1998 translation for OUP but with the usual attention to detail & gorgeous illustrations of Folio editions.

I already own a copy of Desmond Seward's biography of Richard III, first published in the 1980s. The subtitle says it all really : England's Black Legend. Although I'm a member of the Richard III Society, I've always been interested in different interpretations of Richard's life & reputation & Seward has updated the book twice - in 1997 & again this year after the discoveries in Leicester. I'm looking forward to reading it again.

After reading Pushkin's poetry over the last few months, I couldn't resist this volume of his stories, including his most famous, The Queen of Spades.

Another incentive for this little purchase was the inclusion of a free copy (yes, it was free!) of this beautiful edition of A E Housman's A Shropshire Lad. Apart from the poetry, this edition includes the woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker that were used in the 1924 edition.

I love woodcuts & these are just lovely. Here are a couple of examples. There are full page examples like these as well as little vignettes. One of the joys of the early Persephone Quarterly magazines was the inclusion of woodcuts by artists like Claire Leighton, Gwen Raverat & Tirzah Garwood. This book is so lovely that Sunday Poetry will be featuring Housman for the next little while.

I've also bought a couple of secondhand Folio editions. When I book my car in for a service, I often hop on the train & go to Camberwell, a suburb with a lovely Art Deco cinema (the Rivoli) & an equally lovely secondhand bookshop, Sainsburys Books. I saw a very sweet movie, Begin Again, with Keira Knightley & Mark Ruffalo, had some lunch & browsed around Sainsburys. I've bought some lovely Folio editions there &I wasn't surprised to find two more to add to my collection.

The woodcuts by Peter Reddick were the attraction of this edition of Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies.

Also, the lovely endpapers with a map of Wessex. This was Hardy's first published novel & is a bit of an anomaly as it has definite elements of the sensation novel. I've never read it & look forward to seeing what Hardy does with a plot that sounds more Woman in White than Mayor of Casterbridge.

Then, there was the Chevalier de Johnstone's Memoir of the 'Forty-Five. Despite his title, the Chevalier was a Scot who rallied to the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie. I couldn't resist the lovely binding of this copy which is based on an original binding of the period.

Kinsey and Me - Sue Grafton

I've been taking a nostalgic walk down memory lane with Kinsey Millhone through reading this collection of short stories by Sue Grafton. I accidentally left my current book at home the other day & realised I had nothing to read at lunchtime. Thank goodness I work in a library! I saw this among the new arrivals & thought a short story or two would be perfect lunchtime reading.

I can remember when I first met Kinsey. It must have been the early 1990s & the first book in the series I read was G is for Gumshoe. I'd read a few other series featuring female private investigators, I particularly remember Sara Paretsky & Marcia Muller (who I'm still reading). I was working at my first library & I must have picked up G is for Gumshoe from the shelves as it was published a couple of years earlier. I loved it & went back to A is for Alibi & read all the earlier books. Since then I've read all the books as they've been published & I see that the next book, W is for Wasted, is due out later this year.

The attraction of these books for me is that Kinsey is still living in the 1980s. When the series began in 1981, Grafton decided that Kinsey would age one year for every 2 1/2 books. So Kinsey has aged from 32 in 1981 to her early 40s in the latest books but it's still the 1980s in Santa Teresa, the fictional Californian town where Kinsey lives. She conducts her investigations without mobile phones, computers, the internet or many of the forensic tools available to modern day investigators. She relies on a phone with an answering machine, writing notes on index cards & physically going to government offices or the reference library to look things up. The books have become historical novels which for me is a large part of their charm.

The first half of Kinsey & Me consists of a selection of short stories Grafton has written featuring Kinsey that were published in the late 1980s. For me, the books published in the 1980s & early 90s represent Kinsey's Golden Age. Reading the first story, Between the Sheets, was so nostalgic. A woman is sitting in Kinsey's office telling her that she's found her lover dead in her apartment. They'd argued the night before which several neighbours overheard. She threatened to kill him & had just bought a handgun which she describes in great detail. She didn't call the police but, after finding him shot dead & lying in her daughter's room, she picks up the gun lying beside him, puts it down again & runs out of the apartment,. When Kinsey arrives at the apartment to investigate, the body is gone & there's no evidence that the story is true at all. Kinsey has the case worked out before the police arrive.

The charm of this series is Kinsey's voice. The narrative is first person & Kinsey has the wry, amused voice of all the best private investigators. She's not quite the loner that Marlowe & Spade were, though, even though she was orphaned young & grew up living with her Aunt Gin. Twice divorced & wary of new relationships, Kinsey nevertheless has a circle of friends that have become her family. Her landlord, Henry Pitts, is the most important of these but his siblings (all in their 80s & 90s) & restaurant owner, Rosie, all make regular appearances.

Here's the opening of another story in the collection, The Parker Shotgun. All the novels & stories begin in a similar way, introducing Kinsey for new readers & making fans settle down with a smile.

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed, bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two, unmarried and physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with my feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and tossed a photograph on my desk. My introduction to the Parker shotgun began with a graphic view of its apparent effect when fired at a formerly nice-looking man at close range. His face was still largely intact, but he had no use now for a pocket comb. With effort, I kept my expression neutral as I glanced up at her.
"Somebody killed my husband."
"I can see that," I said.

The book opens with an essay about the beginnings of the series & the second half consists of more personal stories Grafton wrote after the death of her mother. I have to admit that the Kinsey stories were the reason I picked up the book & I've had a lovely time reading them over the last week.

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse - Diana Athill

Diana Athill has become well known for her memoirs & her work as an editor which she wrote about in Stet (a book I'm very keen to read now & it's sitting on my desk at the moment). However, in the 1960s, she also wrote short stories. A collection was published in 1962 in the US & more appeared in magazines but they've never been reprinted until this collection from Persephone Books was published a couple of years ago.

Athill describes the beginning of her life as a writer  as "being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958." As an editor she had always seen herself as one who helps others write rather than as a writer herself. The stories often have an autobiographical element or are about the people Athill knew or the social circles she moved in. They are beautifully written, funny, poignant & very readable.

A Weekend in the Country is the story of Elizabeth, a young woman who has fallen in love with Richard, a man she knew when she was a child but they've recently met again in London. Elizabeth is an artist, sharing a flat with a friend. She's moved a long way from her country childhood in her attitudes about society, class & politics. Richard, however, loves his country life in his ancestral family home with his conservative politics & comfortable opinions.

I am making too much of it, she thought. I am inventing the gulf between us out of some kind of vanity. It is only that they live in the country and I live in London; that they have capital and land, while I have no money but my earnings. Our circumstances are different but we are not creatures of a different kind, there is no need to go into disguise.

However, Elizabeth does feel that she's in disguise. Making polite conversation with people whose class assumptions & political opinions appall her. Realising how stifled she would feel living in the country again after the freedom of her life in London with her friends & her work. When Richard takes her to an island on his estate for a picnic, she knows that she is in love with him but she also knows that their relationship will never work. No matter how much she longs for him physically & emotionally, she knows they are so fundamentally different that love wouldn't be enough.

'I really couldn't go on voting in the accepted way and going to church in the accepted way and dismissing people in the accepted way because they spoke with a different accent or wore funny clothes, without ever questioning it. My ideas are much more different from yours than you think.'
'But we get on very well, don't we?' he asked, looking distressed.
'Yes, we get on.' The arrogance of adding 'but only because I have kept most of myself shut off from you' was impossible, so instead she reached for the Sunday paper they had brought with them and said, 'Let's see what's new.'

The crisis comes when Richard tells Elizabeth that he loves her & she has to try to make him see the impossibility of it.

I enjoyed this collection very much. It is a very Persephone book, highlighting women's experiences, the domestic life but always the emotional life of the protagonists.

Dimanche and other stories - Irène Némirovsky

One of my reading plans this year is to get back to reading short stories. I have many collections of stories on the tbr shelves - 53 of them if you can believe Library Thing - & I want to read some of them this year. Another of my plans for the year is to read my unread Persephones. I don't have many of those, only 10, but the new books for Spring will be out next month & I would like to read my Persephones when they're published rather than see them slip down the reading pile as so many books tend to do. As there are several collections of short stories on the Persephone shelf, they will be the first stories I read.

Irène Némirovsky's work was rediscovered some years ago when her wonderful novel, Suite Francaise, was published. Irène Némirovsky died in Auschwitz & her daughters carried the manuscript of her final work around with them in an old suitcase for years without being able to bring themselves to read it. When it was published, it was a sensation & several more of her novels have been translated & reprinted since.

Writing about collections of short stories is difficult. It's hard to write a review of a story without giving away too much plot so I'm going to concentrate on one story in each collection. My favourite story here was also the longest, Liens du sang (Flesh and Blood).

This is the story of Anna Demestre, a widow with three grown-up sons & a daughter, Mariette. Anna is a demanding old woman, dismissive of her daughters-in-law & clinging on to the tradition of the weekly Sunday dinner which all her family attend, more out of a sense of duty than out of love. Albert & Augustin are in their 50s, reasonably well-off & reasonably happily married. The youngest son, Alain, is the most dissatisfied. He has married Alix, whose sister Claire is married to Augustin. Alain has never been in love with Claire & he feels increasingly stifled by his life. He has a plan for escape that needs financial help from his brothers. Albert & Augustin are dismissive, telling Alain to grow up. Augustin also realises that he will be left to pick up the pieces, caring for Alain's wife & children if he leaves. Mariette has led a sad life. She married an older man, divorced him &, now in her 40s, has begun to look faded after a series of unhappy love affairs.

She was one of those delicate blondes who, on reaching forty, appear to wither overnight, like a corsage of flowers worn to a party.

The Sunday lunches follow their usual course. Anna loves finding fault with her daughters-in-law & only gives a compliment if she can also undermine it,

Claire and Alix exchanged looks. It was always like this: when their mother-in-law was invited to dine at one of their houses, when they had carefully cooked one of her favourite dishes, she would immediately look suspicious and disappointed. Even if she thought it was excellent, and said so, she only recovered her serenity and her appetite after declaring, 'There's too much cream, my dear' or 'It's very good pastry, but too heavy.'

The siblings are always pleased when their weekly duty is over & they can return to their own lives. However, when Anna falls ill & suddenly takes a turn for the worse, they are brought together through one long night as they wait by their mother's bedside. Throughout the night, memories are revived, secrets are disclosed & promises are made.

I loved this story. The picture of the dutiful children & the miserable old woman was beautifully presented. The daughters-in-law sitting together on the same sofa every Sunday emphasized their fate as outsiders. The brothers reverted to their childhood roles. Albert & Augustin, the older, more responsible & boring pair, lecturing Alain on his thoughtlessness & lack of prudence. Alain's expectation that he has the right to ask his brothers for financial help no matter the consequences & their assumption that Mariette, as the daughter & the one without family ties will come back home to look after their mother should she survive her illness. Alain's desperation as he tries to grab happiness no matter how uncertain it might be. There were so many telling moments when the facades of their lives cracked & the truth peeped out.

Christmas short stories by Trisha Ashley, Katie Fforde & Elly Griffiths

I love reading books about Christmas at this time of year. This year, I have three treats to read in a spare moment with a cup of coffee as three of my favourite contemporary writers have published short stories on a Christmas theme - & two of them are free.

Katie Fforde's story, Staying Away at Christmas, is available as a digital-only story from Amazon. So, you'll need a Kindle or Kindle app to read it. It costs $1.52US & includes the first chapter of her forthcoming book, A French Affair. Miranda is a single mother setting off to spend Christmas in Devon with her two daughters. Miranda is taking stroppy teenager Isa & young Lulu to the holiday cottage they'd loved in summer but will it have the same charm in the middle of winter? When they arrive, they discover that widower Anthony & his two children, Dan & Amy, have also arrived for Christmas thinking that they had booked the cottage.  Anthony is aggressive & prickly & Miranda is anxious enough about Christmas without dealing with these complete strangers. Will Christmas be a disaster or a delight?

Trisha Ashley & Elly Griffiths have given their fans a Christmas present with a free short story available through their websites. Both are PDF documents so you can read them online, print them off or download them to your e-reader (I did this with Calibre).

Trisha's story is called A Christmas Wish & it's available here. A young Chloe Lyon from Trisha's novel Christmas Wishes sees an angel. Trisha also includes some yummy Christmas recipes from her books as well as a few new ones.

Elly's story, Ruth's First Christmas Tree, is available through the Quercus website. Just register here & you'll be sent a link to the story. Ruth is determined that her daughter Kate will have a proper, traditional Christmas, including a Christmas tree. Her plans don't quite work out but thanks to Cathbad & Nelson, Kate & Ruth have a Christmas to remember. I'm looking forward to reading Elly's new novel, A Dying Fall, when it's published early in the New Year.

Back to Work

Back to work this morning after a lovely week off. The tomatoes, basil & lettuce have been planted, the vegie garden mulched, the Christmas cake made & lots of reading, walking & playing with the cats has been done. A perfect holiday, in fact.

At one point last week, I had four books on the go, which is a lot, even for me. I reread Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers & then realised that it's less than a year since I last reread it. I finished two other books that I'll be reviewing later this week. And I've been dipping into Persephone no 100, The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is a celebratory collection of short stories because one of  the specialties of Persephone Books is the short story collection. About a third of these stories have been published in short story collections in the Persephone collection, another third have featured in the Persephone Quarterly & Biannual & the rest are stories by authors not published by Persephone. The authors include Persephone favourites Dorothy Whipple, E M Delafield, Mollie Panter-Downes & Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The "new" authors include several who would be perfect for Persephone's list in the future - Phyllis Bentley, Malachi Whitaker & Helen Hull (who is about to become a Persephone author when her book, Heat Lightning, is published next year).

Two of my favourite short stories are in the collection. Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes is the title story of the WWII short story collection that was one of Persephone's early successes. I love this poignant story of a woman who is a mistress, not a wife. She has met her lover every Thursday night but when war breaks out & he's posted overseas, she realises that she will have no right to be told if he's wounded or killed. Roman Fever by Edith Wharton is a story of secrets & misunderstandings between two women who meet again after many years on a visit to Rome. It's a beautifully subtle story with an ending that you will never forget. I've read it many times & I'm always moved by the last few lines.

I've bought several cookbooks lately & this lovely book about baking was one of them. I couldn't wait to try a recipe so I chose the Marbled Chocolate Crumble Cake.

Whether it looks like the picture in the book will have to wait until morning tea time when I see if I followed Rachel's directions properly or overdid the swirling! The recipe called for two bowls of cake batter, one plain & one chocolate. Spoonfuls of each mixture are placed in the tin & then it's swirled together with a skewer to give a marbled effect when it's cut. It's so easy to give the mixture one more swirl but it looks alright from the outside. Fingers crossed!

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons has enjoyed something of a revival this year with new editions of several of her novels from Vintage Classics & this volume of short stories, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm. Only the title story is set at Cold Comfort Farm & a miserable place it is, especially at Christmas. The story takes place some years before Flora Poste arrives to sort everyone out. The Christmas pudding is full of not charms but curses. Whoever gets the coffin nail will be dead within the year. Why anyone had any desire to eat that pudding, I have no idea. Aunt Ada is fulminating against all her kin as always & Adam's attempts to fill the Christmas stockings with treats like turnips & swedes are not appreciated. Luckily Dick Hawk-Monitor saves the day, at least as far as Elfine is concerned.

The other Christmas story, The Little Christmas Tree, concerns a woman who decides to spend Christmas alone in the country. She refuses all invitations & is just starting to find herself feeling a little lonely & bored when two children arrive & her day ends very hopefully. In To Love and To Cherish, a woman decides to leave her husband. She writes him a farewell letter, takes a train to London for a job interview but gradually realises that her boring, comfortable life has left her unfitted for any other.

More Than Kind is about a very modern second marriage. Ian Wardell's first wife, Sophie, comes to stay so that the children won't be traumatised by their parents' separation & his new wife, Lillian, is expected to welcome her with open arms & without jealousy. The fact that no one, not even the children, really enjoy Sophie's visits, is immaterial. They're behaving in a modern, sophisticated way as all their friends would expect them to do. Sophie upsets the servants & causes Nanny to resign when she upsets the children's routine. She visits Ian in his room which makes him uncomfortable & Lillian resentful. Finally, the explosion we've been waiting for comes & modern morality is shown to be a facade with all the old emotions seething underneath the polite small talk.

My favourite story, apart from the visit to Cold Comfort, was Sisters. Elaine Garfield is a kind, middle-aged spinster living in a village. She decides to employ a young girl who has been ostracised because she's had an illegitimate baby. At first, Elaine is irritated by the girl's clumsiness & her annoying chatter. But, gradually, she becomes accustomed to Ivy's presence &, as they become more intimate, Elaine tells Ivy about her own great secret. The result is not what she expected. What this story does so well is explore the chasm between the classes, between Elaine's kind but patronising efforts to help Ivy & treat her as she would wish to be treated herself & Ivy's working class family's strict moral code which they apply to everyone, including Elaine.

These stories were originally published in magazines such as The Lady & Good Housekeeping and, as Alexander McCall Smith says in his Introduction, they come from a period when a story had a tale to tell & told it straightforwardly with maybe a twist or two before the resolution. Literary effect was not as important as plot. All these stories are about an England that would be changed by the Second World War. The moral attitudes, some of the class consciousness, the formality would be swept away. I enjoyed these stories for that picture of another England & for the touches of dry humour & satire that Stella Gibbons is so good at portraying. Hopefully now that Vintage have reprinted some more of her fiction, Gibbons's reputation as a one-hit wonder will be gone forever.

Christmas reading

I've started putting together a collection of books to read this month with Christmas themes. I made my Christmas pudding last weekend to the sounds of Christmas carols & the Christmas cake was made on Cup Day (first Tuesday in November) & had its final feeding of brandy the other day. I've planned the contents of the hampers I'm putting together for Christmas presents. I'm buying a few things from the farmers market tomorrow morning & I'm going to make chocolate truffles & panforte a couple of days before Christmas. My Christmas cards (from Animal Aid this year because that's where I adopted Lucky & Phoebe) have arrived & I hope to have them written in the next week or so. I'll set up the Christmas tree tomorrow as well. I have a small pine tree in a pot that I'll bring inside & decorate. Abby never went near the tree in previous years, I'm not so sure about Lucky & especially Phoebe so we'll see how long the decorations last. I found Phoebe asleep on the top shelf of the pantry the other day. I have no idea how she got in there.

Anyway, back to books. Last year I enjoyed lots of 19th century stories as well as some romance. This year is looking more 20th century. I'm very excited about the Stella Gibbons reprints from Vintage. Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a volume of short stories. Although only the title story takes place at the famous Cold Comfort Farm, the reviews have been enthusiastic in the Guardian & the Independent & I'm looking forward to reading it.

Nancy Mitford is another author who's had lots of attention this years with reprints of her non-fiction from Vintage & her fiction from Capuchin. I'm not sure how Christmassy Christmas Pudding is but I can't resist the title at this time of year.

Romance is covered in Trisha Ashley's new book, The Magic of Christmas. This is "loosely based on one of my earlier novels, Sweet Nothings, with the addition of a lot of new material." according to a note at the beginning. I've read Sweet Nothings but it was a long time ago so I'll think of this as a whole new story as the author intends.

Every year I read and/or listen to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I have an audio book of Miriam Margolyes reading the book which I'll be listening to on the way to work in a couple of weeks & Hesperus has just published a book by Miriam Margolyes & Sonia Fraser called Dickens' Women. This is the text of the one woman show that Margolyes has toured around the world & there will be another tour next year to celebrate the Dickens Bicentenary. I'm looking forward to it very much. Margolyes is a Dickens devotee & presented an excellent series some years ago about Dickens's trip to America. She also played Flora Finching in the 1988 TV production of Little Dorrit.

So, I'm all set for a month of reading, listening to far too many Christmas carols, watching my favourite Christmas movies again & wondering how long the angel on top of the Christmas tree is going to survive Phoebe's attentions. I also have a new gardening enterprise to keep me busy. I'll post some photos of that in a couple of days.

Christmas - Fact & Fiction

I’ve been reading about Christmas this week. Both the historic origins of Christmas & fiction published at Christmas time, usually with a Christmas theme. Over the past few years, Hesperus Press has reprinted several of the Christmas special editions of Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine. These special editions, although “conducted” by Dickens, have contributions of stories or poems by other authors. The Seven Poor Travellers & The Holly-Tree Inn were first published in the 1850s & brought together by a theme, a surrounding story written by Dickens.

In The Seven Poor Travellers, the framing story is of a traveller who visits an almshouse at Christmas time & provides a lavish Christmas dinner for the seven poor travellers who are entitled to a meal & a night’s accommodation. In return, he asks each of the travellers to tell him a story. In The Holly-Tree Inn, a young man planning to emigrate after an unhappy love affair is snowed in at an inn & after reading everything he can find, relieves his loneliness by asking the staff at the inn to tell him a story. The quality is variable. Wilkie Collins’s contributions in both volumes are the best. I may be biased because Wilkie is one of my favourite authors & I’ve read a lot of his work this year but I enjoyed his stories very much. In The Holly-Tree Inn he tells The Ostler’s Story. This was subsequently reprinted as The Dream Woman & is a frightening tale of a man who dreams of his own murder by a woman who he subsequently marries. In The Seven Poor Travellers, Collins is the Fourth Poor Traveller & tells an exciting story about a wedding almost derailed by blackmail & a clever lawyer who foils the plot. I’d read both these stories in other anthologies but I enjoyed reading them again.

Dickens’s own contributions consist mainly of the framing stories but he also wrote The Boots’s Story in The Holly-Tree Inn & I’m afraid this is a dreadfully twee & sentimental story of two children who decide to elope. There are also stories very much of their time that read very uncomfortably today. George Sala’s story in The Seven Poor Travellers is a disturbing story full of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Adelaide Anne Proctor’s poetry is conventional narrative verse with moral pointed out at the end.

One of the most interesting stories for me was William Howitt’s Landlord’s Story in The Holly-Tree Inn. Howitt was a well-travelled man who spent some time in Australia & it immediately struck me when reading his story that he had been here in Melbourne. I know it’s changed a little in the last 160 years but I recognized his Melbourne. He tells the story of a family who emigrate to Melbourne in search of the wealth they’ve heard about from their friends. When they arrive, they discover the colony in an economic depression & the future looks grim. But, this is a story for Christmas & tragedy wouldn’t be appropriate. Mr Tattenhall buys up property with the little bit of capital he has brought with him &, eventually, after some lean years, he starts to recover & build up his wealth. This is the passage that had me smiling in recognition,

Bob had got a station out at the Dundenong-Hills, and told wonderful stories of riding after kangaroos, and wild bulls, and shooting splendid lyre-birds ... And really my brother’s villa on the Yarra River is a very fine place.   It stands on a high bank above the valley, in which the Yarra winds, taking a sweep there, its course marked by a dense body of acacia trees. In the spring these trees are of resplendent gold, loading the air with their perfume. Now they were thick and dark in their foliage, casting their shade on the river deep between its banks.

I can see the Dundenong-Hills from my house but now they’re called the Dandenong Ranges. I shuddered at the thought of shooting lyrebirds but I could smell the acacia blossom that we call the wattle. Not sure about villas on the banks of the Yarra but there are still plenty of 19th century mansions there. Howitt also wrote Land, Labour and Gold, about his time in Victoria, a book in every library’s Local History collection. It was lovely to come across this story. Both these books are lovely seasonal gems to dip into or read straight through. I think it’s a clever idea of Hesperus to reprint them.

I’ve also been listening to Miriam Margolyes read A Christmas Carol every day on the way to work. My favourite Christmas story. I read it every year & know passages of it by heart. My favourite part is the beginning. Marley’s Ghost. I can see & hear the ghost trailing its chains and cashboxes as it comes up the stairs to Scrooge’s fireside. The description of the ghost with the pigtail & the grave cloth around its head telling Scrooge, “I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.” sends a shiver through me every time.

I’ve also read The Making of the Modern Christmas by J M Golby & A W Purdue. This beautifully illustrated book is about the history of Christmas from the earliest times to the present. The authors discuss the pagan origins of the Christmas tree, the holly & the mistletoe & how the old festivals of Misrule & Yule were changed into Christmas. How the Christian Church gradually took over pagan festivals as its influence grew & how some of the traditions we associate with Christmas are of much more recent origin than we think. Most of the customs we think of as traditional were started in the 18th or 19th centuries. They were popularised by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol & the Christmas chapters of The Pickwick Papers & Washington Irving’s story, Old Christmas. There are chapters on the differences between the American & English Christmas & how Christmas was celebrated during the World Wars. A really interesting look at the historical origins of Christmas.


After all this 19th century tradition, tomorrow I plan to reveal the technological leap I've taken into the 21st century. Stay tuned for further details!