The Face of a Stranger by Anne Perry (1990) – The William Monk Series #1

 

I’ve finished reading the first three books in Anne Perry’s William Monk series which are set in Victorian London. The first book is The Face of a Stranger.

William Monk is a police detective and the story begins with him waking up in a hospital. He’d been unconscious after a severe accident where he was a passenger in a carriage and the driver had been thrown off and killed. He has no memory of the accident and no idea of who he is. His memory is completely blank.  A clue to his identity comes when he is visited by a man named Runcorn. It happens that this man is his superior in the police force and his Nemesis, as he later discovers. 

When Monk recovers sufficiently, he goes back to work as a detective. He knows that if it is discovered that he has lost his memory, he will lose his job and would probably end up in a workhouse. So by deduction and some internal instinct, he pieces together who he is (or was), all the while terrified that his secret will be discovered.

When he first looks in the mirror he sees the ‘Face of a Stranger.’ In some ways the whole premise of Monk’s story is implausible but it is an interesting idea. As Monk meets people at the police department and on the case he is assigned to on his return to work, he has no idea if he has met them before, if they like or dislike him, or what his relationship to them has been in the past.

Monk is a brilliant, arrogant detective and he discovers that while he is respected, he is also feared and generally disliked. Did anyone care for him? Did anyone love him? He discovers from letters in his room where he lodged that he has a sister, Beth, in the country. She wrote to him often, but he hadn’t seen her for years and rarely wrote back to her. He visits Beth and her husband, who accept him readily and don’t expect much from him. This gives him pause – was he really so insular and uncaring? He kept his memory loss a secret but let them know that he had been in hospital and was not yet fully recovered. What kind of a man was he? Occasionally he has flashes of remembrance but the past is still dark. 

Runcorn obviously hates him and Monk suspects that he knows his memory is affected and if the opportunity came would be happy to get rid of his subordinate. Why was this man so antagonistic to him?

Runcorn assigns Monk to a difficult case involving the murder of Jocelyn Gray, son of Lord Shelburne.  Gray was celebrated as a hero of the Crimean War and returned home with a leg injury which left him with a limp. While pursuing his investigations, Monk meets Hester Latterly, who had worked as a nurse in Crimea and eventually she helps Monk solve the case. 

Monk is assigned John Evan, a young policeman, to assist in the case. Over time Evan proves to be a true friend who respects his senior officer and learns about his memory loss.

Perry captures Victorian London well. Sometimes she tends to be repetitive and ‘tells’ rather than ‘shows’ the attitudes of the time – class distinctions is an example. It seems that Monk had a chip on his shoulder about his origins and she labours that at times. The murder case involved a man of the upper classes and Runcorn didn’t want to upset anyone by Monk’s findings in the case. The three books that I’ve read so far contain quite a bit of social commentary which sometimes feels overdone. The Crimean War is referred to often which added some more layers to the story. This was interesting and inspired me to learn more about the subject. 

One of the things I liked most about this book was Monk’s objective discovering and examination of who he was. He didn’t like what he saw. It had a redemptive aspect in some ways. Here is a man given a second chance at making his soul.

As the first book in a series, The Face of a Stranger was excellent and I thought the best out of the first three. 

A Dangerous Mourning (1991) #2

Monk, still struggling with amnesia, is assigned to investigate the murder of Octavia Haslett, the daughter of the wealthy aristocrat, Sir Basil Moidore. Octavia is found stabbed to death in her bedroom and Monk insists that the murderer must be either a family member or a servant.

Hester Latterly features prominently in this book. She and Monk have similar reactive personalities and often clash with each other but in this book they start to understand one another more. When Monk refuses to arrest one of the servants for the murder he is fired by Runcorn and he has to give up the murder investigation. He asks Hester to get entry to the Moidore home by becoming a live in nurse to Octavia’s mother who is in a fragile state after her daughter’s murder.

Hester plays a major role in the solving of this murder and it is she who asks the brilliant barrister, Oliver Rathbone, to defend the charge against the accused servant. There’s a twist to the solution of this story which was cleverly done although once again, Perry tended to overplay the class consciousness theme.

Defend and Betray (1992) #3

There are some dark themes in this book, s*xual abuse being the major one. A courtroom drama towards the end deals with this. I was surprised and put off by the details that came out at the trial and questioned whether such things would have been made public in Victorian England. 

General Thaddeus Carlyon, a military hero, meets his death not on the battlefield but in a freak accident while attending a dinner party at the home of a friend. The freak accident turns out to be murder and the general’s wife confesses to it.

William Monk is really a background character to this story, which was disappointing. He goes off and investigates clues to his past in different places while playing a secondary role in the mystery. Oliver Rathbone’s performance at the trial was a highlight. In the days before the trial he and Monk try to break through the wall that the guilty woman erected to get to the truth. 

It appears that Oliver and Hester may have a relationship developing. But what about William Monk…?

Some thoughts generally:

I was pleased to find a modern author who could write a clean sort of mystery that didn’t feel anachronistic. Defend & Betray did deal with themes that were sordid, even though they were dealt with in the context of a courtroom trial. This is as far as I’ve read in the William Monk series so I can’t speak about the rest of them.

Having read three of Perry’s books, it seems that moral dilemmas are a focus in her writing. In Books #1 and #2, a murder was committed where the accused, although found guilty, was in a way justified in doing what they did or driven to it because of circumstances. 

I’m still interested in this series. Monk’s amnesia and search for his identity and past are drawing cards.

As a Blackwell’s Books affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. 

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie (1951)

 

‘Outside in Bank Street it was sunny and full of swirling dust and the noises were terrific and varied. There was the persistent honking of motor horns, the cries of vendors of various wares. There were hot disputes between small groups of people who seemed ready to murder each other but were really fast friends; boys and children were selling every type of tree, sweetmeats, oranges and bananas, bath towels, combs, razor blades and other assorted merchandise carried rapidly through the streets on trays. There was also a perpetual and ever renewed sound of throat clearing and spitting, and above it the thin melancholy wail of men conducting donkeys and horses amongst the stream of motors and pedestrians shouting, “Balek — Balek!”

It was eleven o’clock in the morning in the city of Baghdad.’

It is 1950 and everyone is coming to Baghdad.
Mr. Dakin, the undercover head of British Intelligence in Baghdad, is awaiting Henry Carmichael who is returning to Iraq with evidence to back up his fantastic story of an international plot involving a deadly weapon.

‘In substance, it is exactly like the Fifth Column activities at the beginning of the last war, only this time it is on a world-wide scale.’

Dakin’s best and most reliable man has either gone mad or his story is true. Four men with similar features to Carmichael have already been murdered in Persia and Iraq. He didn’t get away unsuspected and the enemy are on his trail. When he enters Baghdad the danger will be even greater.
World leaders hoping to promote peace are coming to Baghdad for a secret summit and Dakin is desperate to have Carmichael’s evidence to present to them.

Meanwhile in London, Victoria Jones, a young Cockney typist just fired from her job, is sitting in a park eating her lunch when Edward, a handsome young man, strikes up a conversation. Victoria, who considers herself an excellent judge of character, is immediately smitten, so much so that when she hears that he is heading to Baghdad the next day to work for a Dr. Rathbone, she decides that somehow, she would get herself to Baghdad.

They Came to Baghdad is one of the few Christie novels that is a spy/political thriller rather than her typical detective novel.
I think her detective novels are better than her spy thrillers but this book was a fun read with a complicated plot full of people who are not what they seem.
It took me a while to figure out that Victoria Jones was the main character. She didn’t seem very promising at first with her tendency to tell elaborate creative lies to make her life more interesting. Her sudden decision that she was in love with a man she’d barely talked to gave all the appearance of an airhead; but she was also generous, courageous and thoroughly optimistic, and she grew on me.

‘She, Victoria Jones, a little London typist, had arrived in Baghdad, had seen a man murdered almost before her eyes, had become a secret agent or something equally melodramatic, and had finally met the man she loved in a tropical garden with palms waving overhead, and in all probability not far from the spot where the original garden of Eden was said to be situated.’

Victoria’s quick wits and inventive qualities are given plenty of scope in Baghdad where she is caught up in a kidnapping and a murder and manages to talk her way into working at an archaeological dig by posing as an anthropologist. Through it all she matures and learns some truths about human nature while keeping her inherent optimism and revealing her true mettle.

‘Surely those were the things that mattered — the little every day things, the family to be cooked for, the four walls that enclosed the home, the one or two cherished possessions…
Humility is what keeps you sane and a human being…’

They Came to Baghdad was a good Christie book to follow on from her autobiographical, Come, Tell Me How You Live, where she recounts her time working and travelling with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, in Syria and other parts of the Middle East.
It also captures a very different Baghdad to that of today, just over 70 years later.

Interesting links:

Mysteries and the Middle East

Agatha Christie in Egypt & the Near East

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim (1925)

Love was the second novel I’d read by Elizabeth von Arnim, and along with Edith Wharton, she shot up on my reading radar. Both authors have gotten under my skin with their beautiful literary writing and their sensitive treatment of women’s issues and sometimes difficult themes. In the context of the times in which they lived, they explored subjects that tended to be either avoided or were taboo.

Wharton and von Arnim’s lives overlapped; both were born in the 1860’s and died at age 75 years in 1937 and 1941 respectively. Both belonged to wealthy, upper-class families and spent a good portion of their lives in Europe.

Where Edith Wharton wrote with a good dose of realism, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s writing has a gentler, more subtle tone, almost whimsical at times, and in The Enchanted April and Love, she leaves the reader to imagine the long-term outcomes of her characters’ lives. I didn’t mind this with the first book but it left the ending of Love uncertain and therefore a little unsatisfying. However, it is a memorable story and has lingered with me.

I keep wondering how everything is working out for these fictional characters!

Publisher’s Summary

‘A gentle romance begins innocently enough in the stalls of a London theatre where Catherine is enjoying her ninth and Christopher his thirty-sixth visit to the same play. He is a magnificent young man with flame-coloured hair. She is the sweetest little thing in a hat. There is just one complication: Christopher is 25, while Catherine is just a little bit older. Flattered by the passionate attentions of youth, Catherine, with marriage and motherhood behind her, is at first circumspect, but finally succumbs to her lover’s charms.’

©1925 Elizabeth von Arnim (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Catherine Cumfrit had been married to a much older man and was a widow for twelve years after his death before she met Christopher. She had a 19-year-old daughter, Virginia, who married a man a little older than Catherine herself. He had been waiting for Virginia to come of age for years and snapped her up as soon as she did. They were quite happy together and Virginia was expecting their first child.

Von Arnim contrasts the societal attitudes to both couples and does so with perception and humour, highlighting the obvious hypocrisy where a man could marry a much younger woman and nobody thought twice about it whereas that wasn’t the case if the situation were reversed.

Virginia’s mother-in-law, who was in her 70’s, treated Catherine as if she were the same age as herself, forgetting the fact that Catherine was actually younger than her own middle-aged son.

Beginnings were not suitable, she felt, after a certain age, especially not for women. Mothers of the married, such as herself and Mrs. Cumfrit, should be concerned rather with endings than beginnings.

I enjoyed the ‘omniscient narrator’ aspect of this story where the reader is privy to each character’s thoughts and motives. This worked extremely well, especially in Christopher’s case, and added some very witty and humorous elements.

'The woman has a beak,’ he thought, standing red and tongue-tied before her. ‘She’s a bird of prey. She has got her talons into my Catherine.’

Love explores attitudes to marriage, ageing, and the complexity of family dynamics.

It is poignant in places, especially where Catherine begins to be anxious about looking older than her husband and being taken for his mother. Later in the story when she takes steps to try to regain her youth, I wondered how on earth Elizabeth Arnim would manage to bring the narrative to a conclusion. A novel twist did it.

The book is out of print but is available secondhand. I highly recommend the Audible version narrated flawlessly by Eleanor Bron if you don’t have a copy of the book.

Laughter – one of the most precious of God’s gifts; the very salt, the very light, the very fresh air of life; the divine disinfectant, the heavenly purge. Could one ever be real friends with somebody one didn’t laugh with? Of course one couldn’t.

Read Along: For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

I'll be hosting a read along of Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's book, For the Children's Sake on Substack. My first post will be in early June and will cover the Introduction and Chapter 1.

Whether you are a parent, home educator, a teacher, a grandparent, an aunty or uncle, or you have a heart for children, this book will show you how to extend learning to every facet of life. Good and true ideas may be found in many different contexts and this balanced and practical view of education and life will be beneficial whatever your background or beliefs.

For more details see here.

Crooked House (1949) by Agatha Christie

Crooked House is one of Agatha Christie’s special favourites – she said that writing it was pure pleasure and she considered this book one of her best.

I saved it up for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself: ‘one day, when I’ve plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself- I’ll begin it!’

There is no Poirot or Miss Marple, but there is Charles Hayward, a young man who comes back to England after five years' war service to ask Sophia Leonides, the woman he loves, to marry him. But a problem arises. Sophia’s rich grandfather, Aristides, dies suddenly and his doctor suspects poison. With the whole household under a cloud, she will not accept Charles’ offer of marriage until the situation is resolved. If it ever can be.

Charles’ father is none other than Assistant Commissioner for Scotland Yard. The Leonides case, being under his jurisdiction, he suggests that Charles get information from the ‘inside’ – with Sophia’s full knowledge, of course. And so Charles is introduced to the family and ends up doing some detecting on the side.

I’d always taken a certain amount of interest in my father’s police work, but nothing had prepared me for the moment when I should come to take a direct and personal interest in it.

Crooked House is a clever story with a very surprising and unsettling end! Agatha Christie displays some psychological leanings in this book – the influence of hereditary being one:

Most people can deal with one weakness – but they mightn’t be able to deal with two weaknesses of a different kind.

Charles asks his father if there is a ‘common denominator’ of murderers and he replies,

‘Yes, I’ve never met a murderer who wasn’t vain…It’s their vanity that leads to their undoing, nine times out of ten.’

Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant made the same observation about the vanity of murderers in The Singing Sands and The Franchise Affair.

A Daughter of the Land by Gene Stratton Porter

 A Daughter of the Land was published in 1918. It’s a little different – you might say darker – than some of her other novels and doesn’t seem to be as well-loved as some of her other books. It is less sentimental than Freckles or Girl of the Limberlost, and its protagonist, Kate Bates, isn’t as romanticised as some of Porter’s other female characters. She blunders through life and makes some unwise decisions. Kate learned the hard way. She was impulsive and headstrong; her upbringing had left her unprepared to navigate life outside of her own family. Despite her flawed character, I liked the realism of the story with its sharper view of life and how Kate’s character developed during the course of the story. 

‘I don’t know what life has been doing to you, Katie, but Lord! it has made a fine woman of you.’

Kate was the youngest child in a large family. She wanted to teach as her older sisters had done, but her mother wanted her to stay at home and help her with the farm work. Her father had always driven himself and his family like slaves and her mother went along with what he wanted. He was the richest farmer in the county, land was his one and only God. But he refused to hire help, keeping his sons as ever-ready help by promising them two hundred acres of land each with a house and some stock while keeping the deeds to their land under lock and key. His sons were under his authority and in his power. The women of the family were,

‘…to work and to bear children…Put them at the first job when they are born, and at the second at eighteen, and keep them hard at it.‘

Kate is the only one who rebelled against this and left home, taking ‘the wings of the morning,’ – Opportunity.

‘Home hasn’t been so overly pleasant. It has been a small, dark, cramped house, dingy and hot, when it might have been big, airy, and comfortable, well furnished and pretty as Father’s means would allow, and as all the neighbours always criticise him for not having it; it’s meant hard work…’

Gene Stratton Porter, besides being an author, was an amateur naturalist and this shows in her writing. Kate was drawn to the land and was tireless and hardworking. In many ways she was selfless and took the hard road,

‘…when one turns mental surgeon and operates on the ugly spots in one’s disposition, there is no anaesthetic, nor is the work done with skilful hands, so the wounds are numerous and leave ugly scars; but Kate was ruthless.’

In other ways she was thoughtless and willful and had to live with the consequences of decisions she made in ignorance or impetuosity. But she did learn and observed that,

‘It really seems as if failure and hardship make more of a human being of folks than success.’

This is a book I’ve had for a while, so I’m pleased that my book club chose it this month and pushed me to read it. I haven’t read anything by Gene Stratton Porter for some time and I liked this one, partly because it was a little different from some of her others, but mostly because it explored how adversity made a woman out of an ignorant and headstrong girl. A redemptive and realistic story.

I’ve linked to where you can get my copy of the book, which is published by Norilana Books. I have a few of their publications and I like the print and the covers, but there are the occasional typos. They are also more expensive than when I bought mine years ago. Porter’s books are free online.

Linking to TBR 24 in ’24 at Rose City Reader.

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Book Beginnings: The War on the West

 Linking up with Rose City Reader's weekly Book Beginnings

The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason by Douglas Murray (2022)

"In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.''

Murray, a British author and journalist, describes “Western” societies as European countries or countries descended from European civilization. He wrote this book to address the one-sided view of the West that has come from ‘politicians, academics, historians, and activists who are saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious but flat-out false.’

''In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other people outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgements.”

The author sites a poll of young British people carried out in 2016 that found that 50% had never heard of Lenin and 70% had no idea who Mao was. 41% of 16- to 24-year-olds who had grown up after the fall of the Berlin Wall had positive feelings about socialism, while 28% felt the same sentiments about capitalism:

“One possible reason for this is that 68 percent said they had never learned anything in school about the Russian Revolution.’’

From the back cover:

“If the history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it?’’

I'm about a third of the way through this book and although the subject matter is heavy at times, the author is articulate and thoughtful. His thoughts on the dearth of historical knowledge, although not surprising, is alarming. 

Book Beginnings

 Each week Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings:

Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

I've just started a book I've had for a while: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman, which was published in 1962. Tuchman was a superb writer, and for this work she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. The book concentrates on the first month of World War I and opens with this paragraph:

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

In the Foreword of my copy of the book, Robert K. Massie said that the paragraph above took her eight hours to complete.

Barbara Tuchman had a sardonic sense of humour which she used to describe some of William II, the German Emperor (Kaiser)'s antics. He hated his uncle and had come to England to 'bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany's encirclement...'

He flew into one of his rages and scolded (King Leopold) for putting respect for Parliament and Ministers above respect for the finger of God (with which William sometimes confused himself).

The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey (1929)

This is the first in Tey’s Inspector Grant series of which there are only six, which is unfortunate because Alan Grant one of the most likeable detectives in fiction. 

The Man in the Queue is a mystery surrounding the stabbing murder of a man who was lined up outside a London theatre waiting to be admitted to the last performance of a popular musical. No one had witnessed his murder and the press of people around him kept him upright until the doors to the theatre opened and he fell forwards.
He had nothing upon his person to reveal his identity and a loaded revolver was found in his pocket.
Inspector Grant is brought in to cover the investigation and by a painstaking process and some good luck, he manages to identify the victim and from there, the prime suspect.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book was the exploration of circumstantial evidence: how facts, evidence, and motives come together to pinpoint a suspect. In Grant’s mind there was a clear case to incriminate his suspect, but something felt wrong. What if all this was merely a series of accidents that were completely unrelated? What if he had arrested the wrong man?

‘Was the man by any remotest possibility telling the truth? If not, he was the most cold-blooded wretch Grant had ever had the unhappy lot to meet. But the man appeared unconscious of Grant’s scrutiny; he seemed wholly absorbed in his story. If this was acting, it was the best Grant had ever seen, and he deemed himself a connoisseur.’

Josephine Tey’s books are always satisfying reads and I enjoyed this one as much as her others. Being the first book in the series I thought it would lack some finesse but she didn’t disappoint.
The only quibble I have, if you could really call it that, is that her description of Detective Alan Grant in her first book didn’t match another description that stayed in my mind after reading The Daughter of Time. In The Daughter of Time Grant is confined to a hospital bed after an accident on the job and was wincing at the indignity of being thrown around by a small nurse he nicknamed the midget.

‘…she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grant found humiliating.’

For years I pictured Grant as a tall, solid, garrulous type of fellow and then I read this in The Man in the Queue, which didn’t sit with the picture I had in my mind after reading The Daughter of Time:

‘If Grant had an asset beyond the usual ones of devotion to duty and a good supply of brains and courage, it was that the last thing he looked like was a police officer. He was of medium height and slight in build, and he was – now, if I say dapper, of course you will immediately think of something like a tailor’s dummy, something perfected out of all individuality, and Grant is most certainly not that; but if you can visualize a dapperness that is not of the tailor’s dummy type, then that is Grant.’

The resolution of this mystery came out of the blue and was as unpredictable as it was clever. Once again Tey has Grant romping around the Scottish Highlands which is always a treat.

Death Makes a Prophet by John Bude (1947)

The British Library has been reprinting some neglected old British Crime Classics. I counted 99 in my last check. The last time I looked there were about seventy-four books by a variety of authors including Freeman Wills Croft, George Bellairs, E.C.R. Lorac, John Bude and others. They're rather expensive to buy here but I have found a couple secondhand and picked up some more when I was in the U.K .a couple of years ago.

I've enjoyed a few by John Bude and thought this one looked promising so I bought a new copy. I didn’t regret my pick and thoroughly enjoyed this droll, and at times a little dark, crime novel.

The Children of Osiris was a cult created and led by the High Prophet, Eustace K. Mildmann, a widower with an only son, Terence, who was twenty-one years of age at the time of this story.

The cult, adopting the initials of their full title, referred to their doctrine as the Cult of Coo, or Cooism. Their dogmas included a mixture of Ancient Egyptian beliefs and bits and pieces of lesser-known religions with a modern twist.

The Cult of Coo believed in ‘magic numbers, astrology, auras, astral bodies, humility, meditation, vegetarianism, immortality, hand-woven tweeds and brotherly love.’ Mildmann was a sincere, dreamy man who believed Cooism was the key to all life’s mysteries.

‘His best ideas had always come to him when sunk in a self-imposed trance, or, as he pithily expressed it, “during a phase of Yogi-like non-being.” (“Non-being” figured as a very important factor in the Cult of Coo, though nobody seemed able to define its exact significance.)’

When he moved to the trendy Welworth Garden City in the 1940’s he found the right soil for his ideas and before long a group of intellectuals ripe for the picking. When the Hon. Mrs. Hagge-Smith came on the scene she totally embraced Cooism and became Mildmann’s patron and financial backer.

The author spends the first half of the book building the scene for a murder by introducing the various characters associated with the cult; their backgrounds, quirks, ambitions and petty jealousies. The second half of the book is more serious, although it still has some sparks of humour, and it’s here that Inspector Meredith makes his first appearance.

There are some bizarre and baffling circumstances for Meredith to untangle. This book was quite different to The Lakes District Murder, mostly because of the humorous aspects that Bude scattered throughout, but also because the plot didn’t go into intricate details about things that I knew nothing about.

Some of my favourite parts are those that deal with Terence. Here was an athletic, practical young man with the appetite of a horse and the physique of a boxer. He was the very antithesis of his father who ‘had done everything to undermine his normality.’ From clamping down on his tremendous appetite with a strict vegetarian diet, giving him a very small allowance of sixpence a week, requiring him to wear ‘rational clothing’ which included shorts in the middle of winter, and making him a Symbol-bearer in the Temple.

One day Terence met Denise, Mrs. Hagge-Smith’s secretary and immediately fell in love with her. She didn’t mind him either.

‘Terence…shot a quick glance at the miracle in his midst and asked abruptly:

“I say, don’t think this is rude of me, but do you have manifestations?”

“Manifestations?”

It sounded as if he were referring to insects or pimples.

“Yes, you know – astral visions and all that sort of thing. Spirit shapes.”

“No – I can’t say that I do. I dream rather a lot after a late supper. But I’m not at all psychic, if that’s what you mean.”

“I am,” announced Terence, to Denise’s surprise. “I’m always having astral manifestations. I get quite a kick out of it.” His eyes assumed a dreamy expression and then suddenly narrowed, as if he were trying, there and then, to penetrate the Veil. “It’s marvellous sometimes how clearly I see things. They’re so terribly realistic.”

“Things?” enquired Denise. “What things?”

“Steaks mostly. But sometimes its mutton-chops or steak and kidney pudding. I just have to close my eyes, relax my mind and body, and there they are…You think it’s blasphemous of me to see things like that, don’t you? I know it’s not very high-minded, but -”

“I don’t think anything of the sort. I think it’s very clever of you to see anything at all.”

Terence just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for peanut cutlets and raw cabbage and he confessed to his new-found friend that he went on the binge the week before and spent ten-weeks pocket money on a good feed.

Inspector Meredith always considered this investigation involving the Children of Osiris to be one of the most interesting, bizarre and exacting of all his cases. I thought it was an unusual mix for a murder mystery but very enjoyable.

From My Commonplace Book - Elizabeth Goudge

 

📚 Elizabeth Goudge’s book, ‘The Child From the Sea,’ first published in 1970, is set around the time of the English Civil War. Lucy Walters, the main character, is devastated when her mother leaves her father. Lucy and her brothers are torn between their loyalty to them both…the tangled threads. This passage where her grandmother on her mother’s side is speaking to Dr. Cosin, a Royalist and high churchman, explains why Lucy decides to go with her father:

“…inborn loyalty has a fearsome strength and can cloud our thinking more than any other emotion.”

“Why do you say a fearful strength?” asked Mrs. Gwinne. “Is loyalty not admirable?”

“Certainly. Do we not suspect turncoats? and rightly. They are not usually good men. But very occasionally they may be. The threads of the web are tangled, madam. That is the tragedy of a world riddled by sin.”

“And you?” asked Mrs. Gwinne.

A smile softened Dr. Cosin’s rugged face. “Madam, I have thought deeply about these things, but I am a hot-tempered man and like all such men deeply committed. I love the King, whose chaplain I am, and the Church of England is my firstborn. That last sentence, madam, is one that could be written on my tombstone.”

It had been a dialogue between the two of them, for Mrs. Gwinnes thoughts had wandered to the book beside his plate, and Lucy could not understand all they said. But she knew about the tangled threads for she had discovered them at home in Wales, and she understood what loyalty was. There was disagreement in her home, forcing her to decision, and day by day for months past her heart had been like a ball tossed backwards and forwards between father and mother. Now, looking at Dr. Cosin’s sternly resolved face, it seemed that her heart was at rest as she thought of her father. “He is my firstborn,” she said to herself. 

Later on in the book... 

'...the dilatory reluctance of the law had as yet brought no settlement between William and Elizabeth, only increasing bitterness that shamed their children, but Lucy was learning to live both with the longing and the shame, to love her father as her firstborn and her mother as much as she could, and to pay no attention to what they said about each other. She was like a mother with two quarrelling children confined in different rooms, and went from one to the other with tolerant tenderness.'