Review 2338: My Death

The unnamed narrator of My Death is a novelist who has been unable to write since her husband died a year ago. She has been isolated in a house in the west of Scotland. She decides to try biography instead and chooses the figure of Helen Ralston, whose accomplishments as an artist and writer were overshadowed by her tumultuous affair with her mentor, W. E. Logan, another artist.

When she begins to look into the subject, she finds that all of Ralston’s books are out of print but Logan’s are not. However, Ralston is in her 90s and eager to meet her and share her journals and photos. The narrator is struck with unease, however, when she sees a painting by Ralston entitled My Death, a supposed landscape of an island that is really a painting of the artist’s most intimate parts. As she continues her research, she keeps finding odd echoes of her own life.

This novella is described as gothic, but I wouldn’t exactly call it that, although it is unsettling and weird. Important to Tuttle is the theme of, as the Introduction by Amy Gentry puts it, “the erasure of women’s authorship by men.” That is certainly at work here, as she based some of the details of Ralson’s life on that of Laura Riding, an American poet and lover of Robert Graves, who accused Graves of stealing material.

This is an involving story that at first seems straightforward but gets odder and odder. I found it fascinating. Tuttle is in general a science fiction writer, but despite that I may look for more by her.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

Related Posts

The Bloody Chamber

Luckenbooth

Ghostly

Review 2329: The Warrielaw Jewel

I have read a few novels by Winifred Peck, so I was intrigued to learn she had also written some mysteries.

Betty Morrison is the newly married wife of an Edinburgh lawyer, John. She accompanies her husband on a call to the Warrielaws, an old family whose members are constantly feuding. The most recent dispute concerns the fairy jewel, a chunk of amber said to be given to an ancestor by a fairy and subsequently encrusted in jewels. Jessica Warrielaw, the old lady who was left the estate, hadn’t spent a penny on its upkeep but instead has been selling off treasures and giving the money to her nephew Noel. Shis is planning on selling the fairy jewel.

Jessica’s sister Mary as well as the other potential legatees are horrified by this. Mary, who lives with Jessica in shabby rooms divided in half by physical markers, wants the jewel to stay in the family as does niece Cora. Niece Rhoda, on the other hand, would like money to start over in America. She is horribly managing and makes the life of weaker Aunt Mary miserable. Other potential heirs are Neil, of course, and Rhoda’s much younger sister Alison.

First, there is an odd incident at the house that seems like a break-in except nothing is missing. Then Jessica leaves for London, presumably to sell the jewel—and isn’t heard from again. John, as trustee of the estate, finally hires Bob Stuart, an ex-police detective and friend, to find Jessica.

Weeks later Jessica is found dead, not in London but in the estate’s dilapidated stables. The jewel is nowhere to be found. Was Jessica murdered? How did she get back home when Betty herself saw her on the train to London?

As is often the case with mystery novels of the period (1933), this novel is more concerned with the puzzle than characterization. However, several characters do have strong personalities. The plot is rather slow moving, and once or twice just when things were getting exciting, Peck drove me crazy by inserting a several-page description. However, I liked Betty and though the novel was entertaining.

Related Posts

Bewildering Cares

House-Bound

4:50 from Paddington

Review 2286: #DeanStreetDecember! Because of Sam

I could fairly easily guess the main plot of Because of Sam from about page 3, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable to read.

Mild-mannered Millie Maitland has not had an easy life. Her feckless husband died leaving her badly off when her daughter Amabel was a child, and she has had a financial struggle ever since. When a relative died and left money for the use of Amabel, Millie was only delighted that she could provide for her daughter. Even though her lawyer believed she could fairly spend some of the money for her own benefit, or rather for the benefit of both of them, she refused. She has done everything for Amabel, so that her daughter has no idea of how hard Millie has worked. The result is that Amabel, now in her late twenties, is a little spoiled, plain-spoken, used to being waited on, and inconsiderate.

The farmer Martin Heriot catches sight of Millie looking young and pretty at a wedding and decides he wants to get to know her better. She makes a little money taking care of people’s dogs, so he soon makes arrangements for her to board Sam, a Labrador puppy he says belongs to his cousin. This gives him an excuse to visit Millie. But Millie, with no idea of her own attractions, gets it into her head that he is coming to see Amabel.

On another front, a new arrival to this small post-World War II Scottish village is causing problems. Mrs. Noble is a predatory blond whose husband is stationed abroad. She first goes after Martin and then after a young husband of a new mother.

Although Clavering’s books are similar to those of D. E. Stevenson, her friend and neighbor, I think that without becoming at all heavy reading, they go a little more below the surface. I enjoy them very much.

Related Posts

Mrs. Lorimer’s Quiet Summer

Near Neighbors

Dear Hugo

Review 2267: House-Bound

I read Mrs. Tim Carries On just before reading House-Bound, and they made an interesting contrast. They were written about the same time during World War II and both set in Scotland, House-Bound in a fictional city that stands in for Edinburgh and Mrs. Tim in the town base of her husband’s regiment. Both are social comedies, but whereas Mrs. Tim is busy raising her children and doing war work and remaining as upbeat as possible, Rose Fairlaw has raised her children, tends to the depressive, and fully realizes she is looking at the death of her way of life.

House-Bound begins with Rose at the registry hoping to get two servants to replace the two girls who are leaving to work in munitions. It’s clear to her that there are plenty of employers and no one to be employed. When someone remarks that millions of women do their own housework, she decides to try, even though she is fifty and has never done any housework or cooking.

The Laidlaws live in an ancient stone tower with a larger, comfortable Victorian addition. Aside from not exactly knowing how to do the work, Rose seems to have no idea that you might not clean every room every day or that one woman can’t be expected to do what three women used to. But almost immediately she meets Major Hosmer, an American who intrudes himself upon her to make domestic suggestions such as converting the small pantry on the main floor into a little kitchen so she doesn’t have to go up and down stairs to the basement kitchen.

Rose is struggling ineptly with the cleaning and serving her husband disgusting messes, but it appears to occur to no one else in the family to do any work. The family dynamics are important in this novel. Rose was a young mother and widow during World War I when she married Stuart Laidlaw, a widower with a frail only son, Mickey, whose mother died in childbirth. Rose became consumed with caring for Mickey, especially after he almost died, to the evident neglect of her own difficult daughter, Fiona, who has grown up ready to take offence and ready to blame everything on her mother. Major Hosmer is actually an acquaintance of Fiona, and his mistaken idea of her mother is straightened out almost immediately upon meeting her.

Luckily, the registry office comes up with Mrs. Childe, who is willing to teach Rose and work with her three hours a day, but her standards are so high that Rose is exhausted. She become house bound, with no time to do anything else, but Peck extends that idea to the lives of her class—that they are stuck in their ideas and habits.

At first, being someone who has always had to do my own housework (although admittedly not to their standards), I felt impatient of Rose and the others who seemed to thing she was taking on some momentous task. But later I feel I missed some of the comedy in my sympathy for her general conditions. There are some great comic characters here, who are as irritating as they are funny, although I was a little irked at the idea that an American major would push his way into Rose’s house not only to make home improvement suggestions but to make the dinner and do the dishes. I don’t believe that character at all. But Cousin Mary, who is always right, a single woman who keeps trying to force poor exhausted Rose into doing war work—and then there is Grannie Con-Berwick.

Related Posts

Bewildering Cares

The Land of Green Ginger

Mrs. Tim Carries On

Review 2265: Mrs. Tim Carries On

Mrs. Tim Carries On is the second in the Mrs. Tim series, continued after a long break at the beginning of World War II. The narrator, Hester Christie, begins the novel as diary entries after her husband leaves for the front. Her husband’s Scottish regiment is stationed in a small Scottish town, and at first Hester feels she should leave but decides she is of more use there.

The diary is of everyday life that doesn’t seem to be that different from before the war except for war work and worry about loved ones. One of the young officers in her husband’s regiment asks her to invite Pinkie Bradshaw to stay, and Hester is confused by this because she remembers Pinkie as a girl with braces. But Pinkie turns out to be a tall and beautiful seventeen-year-old, practical, too, as she lets one young man after another know they’re just going to be friends. Pinkie stays, and Hester is happy to have her.

After Dunkirk, Tim’s regiment reappears, but without Tim, which leads to some anxiety. Otherwise, the book is calm, pushing the stiff upper lip approach with a few scares, sometimes funny, and entertaining.

Related Posts

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment

Mrs. Tim Flies Home

Mrs. Tim Gets a Job

Review 2240: Deception

Since I discovered recently that I had missed one of Denise Mina’s books, I looked again and found I had also missed Deception (also published as Sanctum), from 2002.

Lachlan Harriot is on his way to his wife Susie’s trial at the beginning of Deception. She is a psychiatrist accused of having had an affair with a convicted serial killer, Andrew Gow, and then murdering him and his wife after he was released from prison on appeal. Lachlan is sure she is innocent and will get off. He is certain she never had an affair with Gow.

But Susie is convicted after the prosecution spins a lurid story. Lachlan begins spending his insomnia-filled nights in Susie’s office—previously off-limits—looking for evidence that can be used for an appeal. Slowly, he begins turning up indications that nothing is what he thought it was, starting with proof that Susie has lied. Months before the murder, she was fired from her job at the prison after being accused of stealing Gow’s files. She always said she was fired because of sexism and did not take the files. But Lachlan finds them in the office.

This is a slow-building novel that takes a little patience. The facts Lachlan turns up aren’t as shocking as promised by the cover blurbs, but Mina is a superb plotter. The book doesn’t disappoint.

Related Posts

Confidence

Conviction

The End of the Wasp Season

Review 2239: Love Comes Home

Jane Cranstoun is enjoying her stay in London with friends George and Kitty Mariner when she is summoned home by her mother because of the return from finishing school of her sister, Love. Jane is not really looking forward to going home, where she is expected to take charge of numerous commitments made by her mother, but also because she has begun to hope for a proposal of marriage from John Marsh, a young naval officer.

At her farewell party, Jane gets her proposal and accepts it but asks John to keep it a secret until her parents get to know him better. He has recently accepted a post that is nearer to her parents’ house in Scotland, so he agrees.

On the train north Jane meets Peregrine Gilbert, whom she takes to be shy and uninteresting, not realize he has become her neighbor. Then she meets him again the next morning and tries to send him off for trespassing.

When John appears, Love begins monopolizing him and throwing Jane together with Peregrine. In fact, there was a scene before he appears when I was certain Love already knew John. But that turns out not to be the case, even though it’s clear Love means to marry him before she even meets him. Silly misunderstandings lead to a broken engagement, and this situation was clumsily handled, I thought. In fact, although Love explains later that she thinks Jane and John are not well suited, she has decided this before she ever meets John.

I have enjoyed reading Clavering, but this one, I think, is the closest to a standard pattern romance than the others. I didn’t like Love, who takes over the story gradually until it is more about her. I also didn’t like John or later Kitty when she reappears. The only characters I liked were Jane and Peregrine and the girls’ brother, Meggie. Love is supposed to be 19, but she acts more like 14. I was a little disappointed in this one.

Related Posts

Susan Settles Down

Touch Not the Nettle

Yoked with a Lamb

Review 2235: News of the Dead

One of the things I like about my shortlist projects is that they bring me into contact with books and authors I probably wouldn’t encounter otherwise. Certainly, I would never have run into News of the Dead if not for my Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize project.

News of the Dead tells the story of one remote, secluded place—fictional Glen Conach—over the ages, mostly through a set of documents. The oldest is a book written in the middle ages about a Christian hermit the locals call St. Conach even though he’s not recognized as such by any authority. The Book of Conach tells the stories of lessons and miracles performed by the man, who died around 770 AD.

Another narrative is set in 1809 from the diary of Charles Gibb. Gibb is an antiquarian who has wangled himself an invitation to Glen Conach House ostensibly to study and translate The Book of Conach. His real goal, however, is to sponge off the Milnes, the current owners of Glen Conach House, for the summer. He rather cynically observes Glen Conach and his lady and daughter as they do him, at first. But slowly the situation changes.

The third narrative begins slightly pre-Covid and mostly concerns an elderly woman named Maja and her eight-year-old neighbor, Lachie, who likes to visit her. When Covid sets in, she decides to write him a letter telling the story of a girl who came to the glen as a child after World War II.

I did not have much patience for the stories about St. Conach, although it was clever how Robertson used variations of the stories to show how they change. It also, frankly, doesn’t reveal much about daily life except for superstition and wildness.

The other two narratives were a lot more interesting. Gibbs’s began at a fairly cynical level yet what we learn after it stops is surprisingly touching. And Maja’s story had me on the edge of my seat.

There were times when I wondered where this novel was going, but ultimately I found it a lovely examination of refuge. I also want to point out that all three narratives sound like they were written by different people, which they should in good fiction, and which is too often not the case.

Related Posts

Rose Nicolson

Luckenbooth

Ulverton

Review 2229: The Field of Blood

Ever since I read my first Denise Mina book, back in the Garnethill days, I thought I kept up with her. But it seems I might have missed The Field of Blood, which is the first Paddy Meehan book.

Two boys, 11 and 10 years old, take Brian Wilson, a three-year-old, out into a field and murder him. They are quickly found and thought to have committed the crime by themselves.

Paddy Meehan is an 18-year-old copy “boy” for the Scottish Daily News who wants to be an investigative reporter. When she reads about the story the police have put together of the crime, it doesn’t make sense to her. Why would the boys, who are from poor families, have taken a train out to a relatively posh area to kill Baby Brian when there are many desolate areas in their own neighborhood? She begins investigating and decides the boys were driven out to the scene.

Since she is not a reporter and is told to stop saying she is one, she uses the name of Heather Graham, the only woman reporter on staff. She is at outs with Heather, whom she previously considered a friend, because when the boys’ photo appeared in the paper, she recognized one as the cousin of her fiancé Sean and confided in Heather. Ambitious Heather suggested she break that story; however, she refused, saying her family would never forgive her. When Heather broke it instead, Paddy, who knew her family would think she did it, had a fight with Heather.

Heather is murdered, and Paddy doesn’t realize that because she was using Heather’s name, Paddy’s investigations have unwittingly caused her death.

Mina’s early mysteries are gritty. This one, set in 1980s Glasgow, is no exception—gritty and thrilling. Paralleling Paddy’s story is a real one about another Paddy Meehan, a thief who was framed by the police for murder.

Related Posts

The End of the Wasp Season

Still Midnight

The Red Road

Review 2200: Near Neighbours

The last book I read before this one was This Mournable Body, and after reading that, I felt in need of something light. So I skipped through my queue until I found this book, and it answered the purpose very well.

Unlike the other Clavering works I’ve read, which were set in small towns or villages in the Scottish borderlands, Near Neighbours is set in Edinburgh, in a once-exclusive neighborhood where stately homes are being split up into flats. The two surviving single-family homes are next to each other.

In one, elderly Miss Dorothea Balfour has been dominated all her life, first by her father and then by her older sister. But now her sister is dead, and Miss Balfour has just begun to realize that her life is her own. Still, she is lonely, as her sister considered them to be socially above their neighbors. However, she has always been interested in the activities next door, where the Lenox family, a widow with five grown or nearly grow children, live.

Young Rowan Lenox notices Miss Balfour at the window one day and decides to call on her to offer condolences. She finds the house gloomy but gets along with Miss Balfour well and invites her to tea. Everyone likes her and soon there are friendly visits back and forth.

The three oldest Lenox girls have a romantic concern. Willow is married, but because her husband is in the navy and is often away, she still lives at home. Her mother wishes they would get their own place, and Rowan is disturbed to notice Willow spending a lot of time with Mickey Grant while Archie is away.

Hazel Lenox is a level-headed nurse who is surprised to learn that the hospital heartthrob, Adam Ferrier, approves of her. He even asks her out a few times but then informs her he needs to concentrate on his career as a surgeon. Hazel hadn’t realized until then that she cares for him.

Rowan’s new Highland Dance partner is a brooding Byronic type but the best dancer in the class, Angus Todd. He is sensitive about his lack of background, being adopted, but shows an alarming tendency to be possessive of her, while she thinks of him as a friend.

Miss Balfour is surprised to receive a call from a strange man, who turns out to be the brother-in-law her sister split from six months after she married him. Mr. Milner seems not quite reputable, and Charles Frasier, Miss Balfour’s solicitor, is alarmed because the sister left her entire estate in such a way that Mr. Milner could lay claim to all of it. Through Miss Balfour, Charles meets the Lenoxes and is struck by Rowan.

The novel is a pleasant story about nice people with few real surprises, but the characters are interesting and you want to know what happens to them.

Related Posts

Mrs. Lorimer’s Quiet Summer

Dear Hugo

Yoked with a Lamb