Forgotten Book - The Gold Star Line

The Gold Star Line, first published in 1899, is a collection of six stories written in collaboration by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Their names appear together on the title page, though only Meade's name appears on the front cover and the spine.I don't know if the book ever had a dust jacket. My copy is one that I managed to acquire from a dealer, and its great point of interest is that it has the Detection Club bookplate, and a label pasted into it indicating that Eustace presented it to the Club's library in October 1933. (The library was auctioned off years ago, before I was involved with the Club.)

So Eustace was evidently pleased to be associated with the book, and I'm as sure as I can be that his role was as ideas man. There are at least two stories in the book which have plots turning on points involving medical or scientific expertise, and it's a safe assumption that these were contributed by Eustace. I'd imagine that Meade did all the writing; she was a big name in her day, and a prolific and versatile novelist.

The stories are all narrated by George Conway, purser employed by the Gold Star Line. Conway recounts a series of adventures in which he played a part; much, but by no means all, of the action takes place either on board ship or while the ship has landed somewhere in the course of a voyage. The range of international locations gives the book a cosmopolitan feel, which would have been a good selling point at the time.

Conway is a likeable fellow, but we learn very little about his personal life. For Meade and Eustace, the action is the thing. I found the stories agreeable light (very light) entertainment, and the scientific plot twists in "The Rice-Paper Chart" and "The Yellow Flag" were quite clever. They offer a pleasing glimpse into a vanished world, as well as an example of lively crime fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Eustace would, of course, go on to further collaborative success more than twenty years later, on that famous short story "The Tea Leaf" (with Edgar Jepson) and on The Documents in the Case with Dorothy L. Sayers.

Forgotten Book - The Documents in the Case

The Documents in the Case, first published in 1930, is in many ways an unusual book. It's the only novel that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in collaboration - with Robert Eustace. It's her only novel which does not feature Lord Peter Wimsey. And it's a novel that offers not only an interesting and unorthodox "howdunit" mystery, but also a fictionalised version of the Thompson-Bywaters case that fascinated a good many Golden Age novelists, not least Anthony Berkeley and E. M. Delafield.

Sayers is not by any stretch of the imagination a forgotten writer, but this is the one novel of hers that seems to me to have been generally under-valued. Perhaps it's the absence of Wimsey that accounts for the generally lukewarm critical reaction over the years (though I should add that a number of good judges have also praised the book.) Each time I read it, I find my appreciation of Sayers' skill increasing, even though, in the immediate aftermath of completing the book, she felt that she had failed to do justice to the clever idea at its heart.

In telling the story, she borrowed from Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Collins was a writer she greatly admired, and she was at the time she wrote the novel working on a biography of him that she never managed to complete. The events are seen from the point of view of characters in the story, and told in the form of letters. It's a very good device, when used well, and Sayers captures the different voices of the characters splendidly.

It's in the later part of the story, where the scientific material central to the plot is debated, that the narrative flags somewhat. Eustace contributed the scientific ingenuity here, as he did to stories by other writers such as L.T. Meade and Edgar Jepson, but Sayers did the writing. The method she chooses for conveying this material results in a rather abrupt ending, The problem with this section of the book is one of story structure, and I sense that she rushed those final pages, when with a slightly different approach she might have produced a book that would have been more widely acclaimed as an innovative masterpiece. Nevertheless, it's a novel of considerable interest and distinction, and if you aren't familiar with it, then it's definitely worth a read. There's a fascinating chapter about how the book was written, incidentally, in the late Barbara Reynolds' excellent biography of Sayers.

The Death Cap by R.T. Campbell

There's a good deal of exciting contemporary crime fiction being written these days, but I'm equally excited by the way that advances in publishing, including but not limited to the digital revolution, have made a great many wonderful books from the past available for 21st century readers. A splendid  new example is The Death Cap, by R.T. Campbell, just published by Lomax Press,a very interesting independent publisher based in one of my favourite places in Scotland, namely Stirling.

The title, a play on the judge's black cap, and a form of deadly mushroom, is one that was considered by Robert Eustace and Dorothy L. Sayers for their joint novel, a few years earlier. They rejected it in favour of The Documents in the Case, but I think The Death Cap is a better title. This book has an introduction by Peter Main and extensive annotations. It's beautifully produced with great jacket artwork, and is available in a limited edition of 300 copies. My copy arrived just today, and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Forgotten Book: Burglars in Bucks

The co-authors of today's Forgotten Book are those great political campaigners of the Golden Age, G.D.H. and Margaret Cole. I've been reading up about their life together and what strikes me above all is their unquenchable spirit. Time and again their crusades fell apart, yet each time they dusted themselves down, picked themselves up and started all over again. Rather like their number one sleuth, Superintendent Wilson, who resigned from the police force and became a private inquiry agent, only to resume his official career a few cases later.

I've not read any of the stories in which Wilson was not a policeman. In today's story, Burglars in Bucks, he is back in the police, but is rather on the edge of things, as here the Coles were experimenting. This is one of those stories told by gathering together bits and pieces of evidence - letters, press cuttings, telegrams, police reports and so on. It's a terrific concept, and I'd be glad to hear from readers of any similar Golden Age books they can recommend (other than, say, the Dennis Wheatley crime dossiers, which are not novels but, really, games.) The multiple viewpoint crime story has a hallowed tradition - think of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, or Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace's under-rated and noteworthy The Documents in the Case, published, like the Coles' book, in 1930.

One of the snags with this book is that there is no murder, just a burglary. And the reality  is that if you are going to write a full-length novel about a much lesser crime than murder, you have to write a truly gripping story. This is a book that is highly rated by a number of judges whose opinions I greatly respect, and I was looking forward very much to reading it. But I must say that it disappointed me. Which only goes to show how subjective an experience reading is.

Intriguingly, there is a seance scene, although it is less effective than the table-turning scene in a superior book published the following year, Christie's The Sittaford Mystery. I am sure there was no question of plagiarism. Probably the ideas common to the books of Christie, Sayers and the Coles were just "in the air" at the time - it often happens, and always will. Possibly conversations over dinner at the Detection Club played a part. Certainly, Christie and Sayers executed the ideas better than the Coles did.

And I was driven almost to scream by the laborious way information about the characters was dragged in, notably in the letters between one suspect and his wife. So we get lots of lines like "You surely can't have forgotten about the Pallants so soon...Don't you remember when the old grandfather died, in 1920, wasn't it?...what you've clearly forgotten is that the villain of the piece was the same Sir Hiram Watkins you're asking about..you'd better have the whole story for reference..." And so it goes on. Such clumsy writing defeats the whole purpose of the very interesting experiment that the book might have been. The Coles were very busy people and they often rushed their writing. Margaret Cole admitted this frankly in later life. They were, though, capable of better than this, and thankfully they bounced back yet again with stories like End of an Ancient Mariner..

Weirdly, for a story set, as the title suggests, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, the US edition was called The Berkshire Mystery.How can we explain this? Did the American publishers fall asleep before they read much of it? It wouldn't come as complete surprise...

Forgotten Book - The Documents in the Case

The author of my latest entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books is very definitely not forgotten. Dorothy L. Sayers’ reputation as one of the greatest British detective writers is secure. But The Documents in the Case is a book which doesn’t often seem to be discussed these days – something that surprises me, because it is an unorthodox and original piece of work.

For sure, it’s a very different book from the classic Wimseys. For a start, a co-author is named alongside Sayers. This is Robert Eustace, a shadowy figure who collaborated with a number of crime writers (most notably with Edgar Jepson on the classic short story, ‘The Tea Leaf’), supplying scientific expertise. And science plays a very important part in the story.

There are a number of intriguing themes in the book, but what has always fascinated me is that this is an epistolary novel. The story told through letters by various hands appears to be relatively commonplace but, bit by bit, a complex set of relationships is presented. I first read this as a teenager. At the time, I admired the skill with which Sayers conveyed information through correspondence, and I still do (I’ve flirted with variations of the device in one or two short stories, and I plan to do so again in the future.)

Like many innovative works, this one has a few flaws. There are not too many likeable characters, and the epistolary form does impose some constraints. But Sayers was a very fine letter writer indeed – examples of her mastery of that dying art are easy to come by, as five volumes of her letters have been published – and she deploys her skill to impressive effect here. In some ways, this book is as much a landmark in the history of the genre as the best Lord Peter Wimsey novels.