Spring Magic (1942) by D.E. Stevenson

 

In his Introduction to Spring Magic, Alexander McCall Smith writes that D. E. Stevenson’s books,

‘…eluded the sort of classification that reviewers and scholars like to engage in. They are not simple romances; nor are they anything that would today be recognised as thrillers. They are in a category of their own: clearly-written straightforward tales that take the reader through a clear plot and reach a recognisable and unambiguous ending. The appeal that they have for the contemporary reader lies in the fact that there is no artifice in these books…These are gentle books, very fitting for times of uncertainty and conflict. Some books can be prescribed for anxiety - these are in that category. And it is an honourable and important one.’

Spring Magic is a delightful story with likeable characters and a sprinkling of humour. It is gentle in that it isn’t a nail-biting thriller, but it does have a certain amount of tension that kept me turning the pages and staying up late to finish it. Set during the Second World War, the story takes place in both the Highlands of Scotland and later in London, and it doesn’t ignore the social upheaval and uncertainty of that time.

Twenty-five-year-old Frances Field had lost both her parents before she was four years of age and had gone to live with the Wheelers, her uncle and his wife, in London. They were old-fashioned, had no children of their own, and didn’t want a child in the house, but there was no one else to take her, so to them she went.
As Frances grew older, Mrs. Wheeler found her to be very useful and as she herself was very lazy and professed to be an invalid, Frances basically took on the running of their large house.
When the war started Frances was keen to help in some way but Mrs. Wheeler ‘couldn’t manage without her.’ One day Dr Digby came to attend the ‘invalid’ and as Frances saw him to the door, he told her that there was nothing the matter with her aunt except laziness. He suggested to Frances that she should take a holiday. She had slaved for her aunt for years and had been blind to the fact that her aunt was always well enough to do anything she wanted. It would do her aunt good if she had to hustle around a bit.

‘It was odd that she had reached the age of twenty-five without having decided what sort of a person she was - or wanted to be. It was because she had never had a chance to follow her own inclinations nor to develop her personality.’

Frances felt invisible. She had a yielding personality and as she did not like scenes, she allowed herself to be dominated and repressed by her aunt. Dr. Digby had planted a seed in her mind and when the bombs began to fall on London she made her decision to leave. She wanted to go somewhere where she could think. She had seen a picture of Cairn, a coastal village in Scotland, at the Academy in London and had made up her mind that someday she would go there. Now was her chance.

The beauty of the place, the eccentricity and charm of the local folk, the friendship of three army wives, and a potential romance help her get back her own soul. She had never had to make her own decisions and at first found choosing between even small things difficult to do, but in this new environment she found freedom and became accustomed to making her own decisions and knowing her own mind.
This is only the second book I’ve read by D. E. Stevenson. I think the first was Sarah’s Cottage but that was about twenty years ago and I can’t remember much of it but I liked this one so much that I’ll be looking out for more of her books. Her characters were interesting and explored more fully over the course of the story. She contrasted two particular characters by their attitude to work and how that attitude extended to their relationships - a careless, slack outlook wasn’t confined to just one area of life; it permeated across into other areas.

Some favourite bits:

‘An epidemic of whooping-cough which was racking the children and disturbing their parent’s nights seemed much more real than the war.’

‘Miss Stalker was a small woman with a large nose and thick black eyebrows - it was her nose and eyebrows that you saw first - the rest of Miss Stalker seemed to be attached to these striking features.’

‘I don’t know whether you have realised what an extremely altruistic person I am. I have always been renowned for the way in which I sacrifice my own interests to the interests of my friends. For instance, when I was six years old I was very ill after eating a whole box of chocolates which belonged to my sister - I did it merely to save her from a similar fate.’

'Several girls had fallen rather heavily for (him) - nice girls too - but he had not even noticed the fact; he had remained heart-whole.'

 'Heart-whole' is a description I hadn't heard of until recently and it has popped up in some other books of this vintage. 

 

John Macnab by John Buchan (1925)

Two distinguished highflyers had separately been to see Dr. Acton Croke. Both were suffering from a common ailment - they had all grown too competent and comfortable and their doctor had given them both the same diagnosis and suggested treatment:

“You’ve got to rediscover the comforts of your life by losing them for a little…
You need to be made to struggle for your life again.”

The good doctor’s suggestions, as a friend and not a medical man, included dropping into another world, a harder one, for a month or two; stealing a horse in some part of the world where that crime was punishable by hanging, or to induce the newspapers to accuse them of something shady that would require a great effort to clear up.

Sir Edward Leithen, a barrister‘who had left forty behind him but was on the pleasant side of fifty,’ and John Palliser-Yeates, 45 years, an eminent banker known for his youthful athleticism, discovered their common complaint when they happened to dine at the same club that evening.

Lord Charles Lamancha, a cabinet minister in his early forties, was also there with a young friend, Archie Roylance, who was endeavouring to cheer him up. The three older men were close friends but were surprised to find they all suffered from the same ennui.

Archie Roylance stared blankly from one to the other, as if some new thing had broken in upon his simple philosophy of life.
“You fellows beat me,” he cried. “Here you are, every one of you a swell of sorts, with everything to make you cheerful, and you’re grousin’ like a labour battalion! You should be jolly well ashamed of yourselves.”

Archie’s advice was to go and do some hard exercise like sweating ten hours a day on a steep hill but he had a moment of illumination when the men responded that it would do no good. He recounted the story of Jim Tarras, a poacher on a grand scale, and the three men decided to take a leaf from that man’s book; to do something ‘devilish difficult, devilish pleasant, and calculated to make a man long for a dull life.’
Archie was staying at a lonely, isolated house in the Scottish Highlands and the three friends plotted to go there in secret and join him. Their plan was to inform three Scottish estates in writing that they would be poaching on their properties during a given time and would take two stags and a salmon from each estate.

‘The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint.’

The letters were sent from London and signed with the nom de guerre, ‘John Macnab.’ It was imperative that whether they failed or succeeded, the trio must not be caught, but there were complications from the very start.

One of my favourite characters in this book is Sir Archie Roylance, who having implicated himself with ‘Macnab,’ is totally smitten by one of the Scottish laird’s daughters.

He was in the miserable position of having a leg in both camps, of having unhappily received the confidences of both sides, and whatever he did he must make a mess of it.

At the back of his head he had that fear of women as something mysterious and unintelligible which belongs to a motherless and sisterless childhood, and a youth spent almost wholly in the company of men. He had immense compassion for a s*x which seemed to him to have a hard patch to hoe in the world, and this pitifulness had always kept him from any conduct which might harm a woman. His numerous fancies had been light and transient like thistledown, and his heart had been wholly unscathed. Fear that he might stumble into marriage had made him as shy as a woodcock—a fear not without grounds, for a friend had once proposed to write a book called Lives of the Hunted, with a chapter on Archie.

John Macnab has been called ‘the sunniest of Buchan’s fictions’ and is his second most famous novel. It mixes comedy, adventure and friendship with an underlying attitude that life is what you make it.
Although more light-hearted than most of Buchan’s other novels, it is a great adventure story with a delightful romantic element.

A Trip to The Orkney Islands

The Orkney Islands is an archipelago off the northernmost coast of Scotland. We took a 40 minute ferry ride from John O'Groats across the Pentland Firth to get there.
I lived in the lowlands of Scotland as a child and the nearest I'd ever been to The Orkney Islands was when I went to the Edinburgh Tattoo with my parents and I was too young to remember that. I had a strong desire to visit the Orkney Islands and had to convince my husband who wasn't enamored about going to some remote area that experiences gale force winds and bleak weather for most of the year. (The Orkney Islands in latitude are only about 50 miles south of Greenland.) However, we went; the weather was better than expected - some wind and rain, but nothing exceptional and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
I was surprised to discover that there was no Gaelic influence here - no clan system or tartans. The predominant influence historically were the Vikings or Norse from Norway, who were only about a day's sailing trip away. They settled on Orkney in the late 700's displacing the Picts, and their influence is all over the place.

The Churchill Barriers - in 1939 a German submarine sank a British ship in the Scapa Flow. Winston Churchill, at that time the First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered a series of four causeways or barriers to be built to block the channels between the islands. These barriers were topped by roads which enabled better access to local communities for the Orkney residents.

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall

This was one of highlights of the Orkney Islands for me. I felt like I'd stepped back into the world of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter - it's such an atmospheric place that you really do feel like you're stepping back in time to medieval Norway.

A modern wooden statue of St Olaf that I think is a replica of the one found in the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway. The Nidaros Cathedral was built over the remains of King Olav II, the patron saint of Norway. More information here.

The Cathedral here was named after Saint Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney, also known as Magnus the Martyr. There's some history here.

Kirkwall

Stromness

The Standing Stones of Stenness - Neolithic monuments

Skara Brae, a 5,000 year old Neolithic village, was uncovered by a storm that swept the area in 1850.

Sunset as we head back to John O'Groats

Highlights from Scotland

We've just returned from a long-awaited (for me, at least) trip to Scotland. I was born there and came out to Australia with my family when I was 8 years old. For the first four years in Australia we lived in a migrant town in South Australia and I was about 12 years old before we really tasted Aussie culture. That happened when we moved interstate to Western Australia.
Even then Scottish culture was predominant at home. My Granny lived with us and I had to act as interpreter whenever I had friends visit! She had a very thick Glaswegian accent bespattered with Gaelic and colourful colloquialisms.
We took two of our children with us on this trip - Moozle, the youngest, and Hoggy, who's the middle of our seven children.

We flew into Edinburgh and stayed in the New Town for four nights during which we went to the Royal Edinburgh Tattoo. We'd been to this a couple of times when it was held in Sydney but it was pretty special to be at Edinburgh Castle for it.

Edinburgh Castle

Street music is alive and well in Edinburgh & Glasgow

Since I've lived in Sydney, I've rarely heard a Scottish accent, apart from family, and one of my delights was to be immersed in it again: 'Nae bother,' 'How are ye the noo?' A sign in a local bookshop, 'Books for the Weans,' (i.e. children, or little ones).

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival was on while we were there and the place was buzzing. We mostly walked everywhere as we decided not to hire a car until we left Edinburgh - we were close to the centre so parking is expensive and limited but there's much within easy reach. We went through Edinburgh Castle, took a bus around the city and out to Leith, the port to the north of Edinburgh where we went aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia. Then it was a visit to Holyrood Palace, the official Scottish residence of the Queen and where Mary Queen of Scots resided along with Lord Darnley.
Later, a stiff walk up Arthur's Seat where you get a lovely panoramic view of the city. Thankfully it wasn't raining or the path would have been a bit treacherous on the way down.

The View From Arthur's Seat

The Summit

We picked up a hire car just before we left Edinburgh, drove to Bannockburn and Stirling Castle, and from there to Glasgow. The gardens at the castle were magnificent. In fact, the whole of Scotland was in flower - hanging baskets throughout the cities & towns were beautiful.

Stirling Castle

 Greenock on the Clyde where I was born - I have family who live here and my cousin showed us around and pointed out where we used to go swimming once a week (an indoor heated pool) and one of the houses where we lived. An earlier home had been knocked down not that long ago.

Eilean Donan Castle in the Western Highlands - this is such a fairy tale place!

Dunvegan Castle in the Hebrides - again, magnificent gardens here! 

Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland - the remains of a Neolithic village

A Hairy Coo

Scotland is expensive, at least if you're coming from Australia with the exchange rate as low as it is at present. We had to pay for parking everywhere, even in little pokey towns. Generally you also have to pay to use the loos unless you're on a tour of a castle or something similar where you've already paid an entry fee. This was a problem when we first arrived and didn't have any local currency.

The food is terrible - I can say that because I hated it when I lived there! Now I know why I was such a fussy eater. Just about everything is battered and deep fried, even haggis, for goodness sake.

My uncle ordered some haggis on the side so everyone could try it and we all had a wee bit of the  inside...but nae black pudding

We went out for breakfast one day and Moozle was shocked that her 'toast' was fried. I remember my Granny eating bread with dripping. My husband couldn't get over the fried mars bars, although he's a Kiwi & I think it was something that took off over there. I did indulge with some tablet when I was in Edinburgh but I didn't remember it being so sweet! I remembered some sweets we had when we were kids but I didn't remember what they were called. My cousin told me we used to have fondant rolled in cinnamon in the shape of cigarettes and we'd pretend we were smoking them.
It wasn't until we got to Inverness that I had some grilled (not battered & deep fried) chicken and salad and I had to go to Maccas for that. My kids thought that was hilarious because I only ever go there just for coffee if I'm desperate.
I'd never seen e-cigarettes before but they are very common in Scotland, as is smoking generally. It's almost a crime here in Australia so it was very noticeable to us over there.

We passed by this bonnie wee hoose as we were driving up to Inverness. Isn't it a work of art?!

I'll post some more about our trip later but I thought I'd say hello, have a catch up and let my lovely readers see what I've been up to. I managed to get through a few books during the many hours we were flying or travelling by train and a couple of them were set in the places we visited. I also visited some seriously good bookshops in the UK and Paris and had to be dragged out. So sad. I really could have spend another four weeks perusing some of those.
The only downside to a trip like this is coming home after 4 weeks in a different time zone and trying to adjust and get on with normal life. If I've written anything that sounds garbled you'll know why.

Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)

Catriona continues the story of David Balfour who was introduced in Stevenson’s well-known book, Kidnapped. Kidnapped was published in 1886 but Stevenson’s ill health at the time prevented him from bringing the story to the conclusion he originally intended so he left the door open for a sequel. Catriona didn’t appear until 1893 and it is quite a different story compared with most of Stevenson’s other works, being more of an historical romance with a convoluted plot and strong female characters as opposed to high adventure and daring exploits.
Catriona starts just at the point where Stevenson left David Balfour at the end of Kidnapped - at the doors of the British Linen Company’s bank - only this time he was coming out instead of going in.

The Gist of the Story

The book is set in the mid 1750’s after the Battle of Culloden in which the Jacobites were defeated. In 1752, Colin Roy Campbell, a government official also known as The Red Fox, was shot and killed, and members of the Jacobite Stewart clan were blamed. David sets out to clear his old friend, Alan Breck Stewart and his relative James Stewart (James of the Glens) of what became known as the Appin murder.
David visits his cousin, Mr Balfour, who provides him with a letter of introduction to the Lord Advocate Prestongrange and David presents himself before him as a witness for the accused.
Prestongrange is in a difficult situation as the Campbell clan are determined that James Stewart should be hanged for the murder but he tells David that he will arrange for him to be a witness at the trial.
In the meantime, David meets Catriona Drummond, the beautiful young daughter of James More Drummond, a son of the notorious Rob Roy.
David is unimpressed with More and thinks he is an unworthy man to be the Catriona’s father. His dislike is warranted as More is working behind the scenes to get him out of the way until after the trial, which he does by getting his Highland followers to kidnap David and keep him on the Bass, an island off the east coast of Scotland.
More is a selfish, conniving man, but Catriona is devoted to him. Gradually, his treachery comes to light but not before David and Catriona are separated and she realises that her father has been a manipulator and helped to send an innocent man to the gallows.
I enjoyed the latter part of the book most of all as it describes David’s poor attempts at courting Catriona, their misunderstandings of one another, and Alan Breck’s advice to his friend on the subject.

Another aspect I enjoyed was the description of the Lowland Scots’ attitude to the ‘Heiland’ folk. My Grannie was a Lowlander and she had a typical reaction if someone did something stupid or very clumsy. She’d say, “Och, dae'n be sae Heilan’!” I only found out many years later that it was a put down of the Highlanders. I don’t know it’s like that now but the same attitude has come up in Josephine Tey’s books only she takes the side of the Highlanders and makes references to 'vile Glasgow speech.'.

Catriona contains many of the characters found in Kidnapped so it’s best to have read that book beforehand or else you’ll miss connections. Kidnapped also helps to introduce some of the Scot dialect - and be warned, it’s all through Catriona. 

Some highlights:

Upon our reaching the park I was launched on a bevy of eight or ten young gentlemen (some of them cockaded officers, the rest chiefly advocates) who crowded to attend upon these beauties; and though I was presented to all of them in very good words, it seemed I was by all immediately forgotten. Young folk in a company are like to savage animals: they fall upon or scorn a stranger without civility, or I may say, humanity; and I am sure, if I had been among baboons, they would have shown me quite as much of both...

From these I was recalled by one of the officers, Lieutenant Hector Duncansby, a gawky, leering Highland boy, asking if my name was not “Palfour.”
I told him it was, not very kindly, for his manner was scant civil.
“Ha, Palfour,” says he, and then, repeating it, “Palfour, Palfour!”
“I am afraid you do not like my name, sir,” says I, annoyed with myself to be annoyed with such a rustical fellow.
“No,” says he, “but I wass thinking.”
“I would not advise you to make a practice of that, sir,” says I. “I feel sure you would not find it to agree with you.”
“Tit you effer hear where Alan Grigor fand the tangs?” said he.
I asked him what he could possibly mean, and he answered, with a heckling laugh, that he thought I must have found the poker in the same place and swallowed it.
There could be no mistake about this, and my cheek burned.
“Before I went about to put affronts on gentlemen,” said I, “I think I would learn the English language first.”

A sample of the Scot's tongue:


“Mony’s the time I’ve thocht upon you and your freen, and blythe am I to see in your braws,” she cried. “Though I kent ye were come to your ain folk by the grand present that ye sent me and that I thank ye for with a’ my heart.”

This conversation between David and his gaoler while he was captive on The Bass is found in Chapters XIV and XV contains the largest section of Scottish dialect:


“Well, Andie, I see I’ll have to be speak out plain with you,” I replied. And told him so much as I thought needful of the facts.
He heard me out with some serious interest, and when I had done, seemed to consider a little with himself.
“Shaws,” said he at last, “I’ll deal with the naked hand. It’s a queer tale, and no very creditable, the way you tell it; and I’m far frae minting that is other than the way that ye believe it. As for yoursel’, ye seem to me rather a dacent-like young man. But me, that’s aulder and mair judeecious, see perhaps a wee bit further forrit in the job than what ye can dae. And here the maitter clear and plain to ye. There’ll be nae skaith to yoursel’ if I keep ye here; far free that, I think ye’ll be a hantle better by it. There’ll be nae skaith to the kintry — just ae mair Hielantman hangit — Gude kens, a guid riddance! On the ither hand, it would be considerable skaith to me if I would let you free. Sae, speakin’ as a guid Whig, an honest freen’ to you, and an anxious freen’ to my ainsel’, the plain fact is that I think ye’ll just have to bide here wi’ Andie an’ the solans.”
“Andie,” said I, laying my hand upon his knee, “this Hielantman’s innocent.”
“Ay, it’s a peety about that,” said he. “But ye see, in this warld, the way God made it, we cannae just get a’thing that we want.”

Bass Rock, Scotland

And Alan’s opinion of David’s attempts at wooing:


“I cannae make heed nor tail of it,” he would say, “but it sticks in my mind ye’ve made a gowk of yourself. There’s few people that has had more experience than Alan Breck: and I can never call to mind to have heard tell of a lassie like this one of yours. The way that you tell it, the thing’s fair impossible. Ye must have made a terrible hash of the business, David.
...It’s this way about a man and a woman, ye see, Davie: The weemenfolk have got no kind of reason to them. Either they like the man, and then a’ goes fine; or else they just detest him, and ye may spare your breath — ye can do naething. There’s just the two sets of them — them that would sell their coats for ye, and them that never look the road ye’re on. That’s a’ that there is to women; and you seem to be such a gomeril that ye cannae tell the tane frae the tither.”
“Well, and I’m afraid that’s true for me,” said I.
“And yet there’s naething easier!” cried Alan. “I could easy learn ye the science of the thing; but ye seem to me to be born blind, and there’s where the deefficulty comes in.”



Catriona is free for Kindle here.
The book was published under the title David Balfour in the USA.

Linking to Back to the Classics Challenge 2018: Classic with Single-Word Title

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey (1897-1952)

Josephine Tey is the pseudonym of Elizabeth MacKintosh, a Scottish author, who also wrote numerous plays under the name of Gordon Daviot. She was one of the great British writers who wrote during the Golden Age of Crime and is best known for her mystery novels.
The Singing Sands was published after Tey's death in 1952, and features Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard who appears in five previous books by the author. The only other book I've read by the author is The Daughter of Time and in both books Tey delves into the psychological aspects of her characters, which makes for very interesting reading.
Inspector Grant, for example, in The Singing Sands, is on stress leave due to  overwork. He's been having panic attacks when in confined spaces and Tey cleverly weaves Grant's personal problem and an enigma he encounters to resolve both dilemmas. I really enjoyed how she did this and the way she created empathy for both the dead man and Grant's struggles.

The book begins with off duty Inspector Grant travelling to the Highlands by train to spend some time recuperating at the home of his cousin Laura and her husband. At the end of his journey he witnesses the train guard's discovery of a dead passenger. The police findings are that the man died of misadventure but Grant is haunted by memory of the young man's face and some cryptic poetic scribbling left on a newspaper in his compartment:

The beasts that talk,
Th streams that stand,
The stones that walk,
The singing sand...

This was such a well-written and engaging book to read, full of interesting characters, and with the added delight of being set in the Scottish Highlands and the Outer Hebrides.
Grant is a likeable, gruff, sort of character. Single, and happy to be so, in spite of his cousin Laura's attempts at lining up a female every time he visits; he is a canny judge of character, a quality that serves him well, especially in this particular case, where he pinpoints a character trait in an otherwise unimpeachable person that leads him to believe that the person could commit murder. The character trait was Vanity and here Grant expresses his thoughts to Tad, a friend of the deceased:

'I find vanity repellant. As a person I loathe it, and as a policeman I distrust it.'

'It's a harmless sort of weakness,' Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.

'That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says "I must have this because I am me". It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn't understand what you are talking about. He will kill a person rather than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six months' stretch.'

'But that's being insane.' 

'Not according to Vanity's reckoning. And certainly not in the medical sense. It is merely Vanity being logical. It is...the basis of all criminal personality...true criminals vary in looks and tastes and intelligence and method as widely as the rest of the world does, but they have one invaluable characteristic: their pathological vanity.'

Grant's obsession with finding out the truth behind the man's death takes him to the Hebrides where the 'singing sands' were said to be found. The wildness, the isolation and the 'barren water-logged universe' soaks into his soul and brings healing. He feels he has become something more than the young man's champion now: 'he was his debtor. His servant.'


A free kindle version of The Singing Sands is available here.

 

Back to the Classics - The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers (1931)

Lord Peter Wimsey, although an Englishman, was well-received in the close-knit fishing and artistic community of Galloway and had passed many a season in the area. One night when he was having a drink at the local pub, a dispute broke out between Campbell and Waters, two of the resident artists, and they came to blows.
Campbell was universally disliked, 'a devil when he's drunk and a lout when he's sober,' and since his arrival in the community there had been nothing but rows and bickering. After the men were forcibly separated, Campbell stormed off in high dudgeon into the night.
The next day he was found dead at the bottom of an outcrop of granite; his body lying face down in the burn and an unfinished painting on a sketching easel on the rock ledge above. There seemed little doubt that Campbell had accidentally fallen as he stepped back to observe his painting. But then Wimsey noticed something everyone else had missed. He declared that it was a case of murder and that it had been committed by an artist.

'...I don't mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving it, eh, what?'

There were six suspects, all of whom detested Campbell and had grievances against him. Five of the suspects were red herrings; one was the killer, and it took all the ingenuity of Wimsey and the local 'pollis' to piece events together and decide who was responsible.

It was a marvellous day in late August, and Wimsey's soul purred within him as he pushed the car along. The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton Stewart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter's cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.

I relished the setting of The Five Red Herrings - a part of Scotland about 180 km south of my birthplace, and there is quite a bit of Scottish brogue in the dialogue, which I know sometimes causes problems if you're not familiar with the tongue. The BBC audio version is good and is narrated by Patrick Malahide who does a pretty decent Scottish accent, for a sassenach, although two of the police detectives sound almost identical.

Elizabeth George, a mystery writer herself, had this to say about Sayers:

While many detective novelists from the Golden Age of mystery kept their plots pared down to the requisite crime, suspects, clues, and red herrings, Sayers did not limit herself to so limited a canvas in her work. She saw the crime and its ensuing investigation as merely the framework for a much larger story, the skeleton - if you will - upon which she could hang the muscles, organs, blood vessels and physical features of a much larger tale.

George said that Sayer's writing was like a tapestry and this is so true. I've read a number of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and there is a  richness and attention to detail that you don't usually find in detective fiction. I enjoy her literary allusions, Latin quotations, the intellectual stimulation and the humour woven into her novels.
Speaking of humour, in The Five Red Herrings Wimsey decides to re-enact the crime, having guessed the murderer's identity but having insufficient evidence to make an arrest. The Chief Constable, Sir Maxwell, is chosen to be the corpse and Wimsey plays the murderer.

'Now, corpse, it's time I packed you into the car. I probably did it earlier, but you'd have been so uncomfortable. Come and take up your pose again, and remember you're supposed to be perfectly rigid by now.'

'This may be fun to you,' grumbled Sir Maxwell, 'but it's death to me.'

'So it is,' said Wimsey. 'Never mind. Ready? Up you go!'

'Eh!' said Macpherson as Wimsey seized the Chief Constable's cramped and reluctant body and swung it on to the back seat of the Morris, 'but your lordship's wonderful strong for your size.'

'It's just a knack,' said Wimsey, ruthlessly ramming his victim down between the seat and the floor. 'I hope you aren't permanently damaged sir. Can you stick it?' he added, as he pulled on his gloves.
'Carry on,' said the corpse in a muffled voice.

A nice little extra included in the Hodder and Stroughton editions of Sayer's Wimsey novels, (pictured above) but not in the HarperTrophy or Dover copies, is a short and entertaining 'biography of Lord Peter Wimsey, brought up to date...and communicated by his uncle Paul Austin Delagardie.'


Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey's mystery classics are scheduled as free reads in the Ambleside Online Year 12 curriculum, although we've used them at a younger age after Agatha Christie's novels and the Father Brown series by Chesterton had been read to death.


This is my entry in the Back to the Classics 2016 - Classic by a Woman category