Forgotten Book - The Saltmarsh Murders

It's fair to say that the exuberant detective fiction of Gladys Mitchell is an acquired taste. Julian Symons, one of the best judges of all, never acquired it, and it's easy to understand why. Her books, or at least those that I've read (she was very prolific, and I've focused on reading her work from the 30s and 40s) often seem rather over the top. But I get the impression that she was a fun person, and had fun writing her novels, and that in itself I find appealing.

The Saltmarsh Murders, first published in 1932, was her fourth novel featuring Mrs Bradley, who is fine form, cackling and screeching as she sets about solving a whole series of mysteries which centre around the little coastal resort of Saltmarsh. The story is narrated by Noel Wells, the local curate, but one thing is for sure. This is really not a re-run of The Murder at the Vicarage. In place of Christie's coolly assembled and crystal clear storyline, we have a whirl of activity that often threatens to descend into incoherence - though it just about avoids doing so.

The starting point is that Meg Tosstick, a young girl who works at the vicarage, has got pregnant. Rumours swirl as to who the father might be. The baby is born, but nobody sees it. Then Meg disappears, and in due course is discovered to have been murdered. But there is more, much more going on than that.

I found some of the comedy in the book quite effective; not for nothing is mention made by Noel Wells of P.G. Wodehouse. Some of it, however, has not stood the test of time, while the presence in the story of a black servant prompts some depressing racial stereotyping. And although the presentation of sexual repression might have seemed advanced in the 30s, it's now unappealing. However, if you can cope with all the downsides of Mitchell's eccentric approach to crime writing, this is a book that most of her devotees regard as one of her very best. Me? I'm glad I read it, but I prefer Christie, no question.

Tom Adams Uncovered

When my first novel came out in a paperback edition, the sales rep from Transworld took me out for lunch during the course of a memorable and hugely enjoyable day, travelling round the bookshops and signing copies of the book. He was a pleasant chap and very experienced in the bookselling business, so I asked what he thought really mattered in making a novel saleable. "It's the cover, Martin," he said. "Always the cover."

This was not the answer I was expecting, or indeed hoping for. I pressed him, but he was insistent. Booksellers he visited would flick through his catalogue for a minute of so, picking out which covers they liked and would buy. The books themselves didn't really matter. Well, this may or may not have been a slightly jaundiced view, but the fact is that covers do matter. I can, for instance, vividly recall the cover of the first adult novel I ever read. It was the Fontana paperback of The Murder at the Vicarage.

That same cover features in a new book, Tom Adams Uncovered, which is sub-titled "The Art of Agatha Christie and Beyond." Tom Adams was the gifted artist responsible for many of the Christie paperback covers that I devoured at the age of nine and ten - other examples in the book include The Moving Finger, One Two, Buckle My Shoe and The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. John Curran, the leading expert on Christie, provides useful commentaries which supplement the artist's own thoughts about the covers.

Those Christie covers really are very striking, and it's no wonder that they are now regarded as iconic. There is, of course, much more to Tom Adams as an artist than Christie. I was interested to learn that he was responsible for the cover of Manwatching, a book hugely successful in its day, as well as covers for authors as varied as John Fowles, Peter Straub and Raymond Chandler. Cover artwork is a fascinating subject, and I hope to return to it in the future. In the meantime, I found Tom Adams Uncovered appealing and very attractive..

Forgotten Book - Death by Request

My Forgotten Book for today dates from 1933. Death by Request is unusual in at least two respects. First, its authors were a husband and wife team, Romilly and Katherine John, a pair of Cambridge graduates who were both in their twenties. Second, they never published another novel - either jointly or separately. Surely they weren't disappointed with this first effort? It still reads pretty well today.

My copy dates back to the Eighties. Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan provided intros for several good books reissued by Hogarth Crime at that time, and they do a good job of setting the scene, although one comment that they make, whilst not really a spoiler, does give the alert crime fan a better chance of guessing the outcome.

The story is in some respects a light-hearted homage to Agatha Christie, with a clergyman narrator just as in Murder at the Vicarage. (Gladys Mitchell also wrote a book told in the first person by a member of the clergy at around the same time.) I enjoyed the prissy voice of the Rev. Joseph Colchester, as well as the witty portrayal of an idiotic colonel, who is constantly putting his foot in his mouth.

The authors offer us a traditional country house mystery, with Lord Malvern, who is a bit of a cad, found gassed in his bedroom. The door is locked, but this isn't really a locked room mystery. The cause of death is soon obvious, as is the fact that it was no accident. A socialist butler is one of the other incidental pleasures, and although I felt the action dragged a bit in the middle section, overall I enjoyed the story, and very much regret that Mr and Mrs John didn't write more mysteries.

Katherine became a translator of Scandinavian literature, while Romilly's best-known book was a memoir of his early years in a strange household presided over by his father, Augustus John. Oddly enough, yesterday I was in London, and went to visit the Foundling Museum, a fascinating place that I can strongly recommend. As part of an exhibition of the life and work of Jacob Epstein, who was fascinated by children, there was a bronze of....the young Romilly John. .

Forgotten Book - Death in a Deck-Chair

I've written several times in this blog of my admiration for Anthony Berkeley, and I've also mentioned his contemporary and Detection Club colleague Milward Kennedy, whose approach to the genre reminds me of Berkeley's. Kennedy was another who liked to mix detection with humour, and he was also keen on experimentation.

My choice for today's Forgotten Book is a novel Kennedy published in 1930, Death in a Deck-Chair. It opens with a brief but very interesting introduction, in which Kennedy discusses the nature of detective fiction with a friend. He then describes how the conversation gave him the idea of taking the essential features of an actual case and reinventing it for fictional purposes, making use of his personal knowledge of police procedure, gained while working in Military Intelligence in the First World War.

Kennedy acknowledges at the outset that "complete realism" is out of the question – "is a novel pursued each possible clue to its final conclusion, it would run into volumes". This is the dilemma that succeeding generations of crime writers have grappled with. Unfortunately, it has to be said that this pioneering novel struggles to maintain a balance between plausibility and entertainment.

The body of the man who is found stabbed in a deck-chair at a seaside resort turns out to belong to a blackmailer who dies unmourned. The investigation moves slowly, and although Kennedy tries to compensate with humorous dialogue, for a modern reader the material simply isn't amusing enough to justify the lack of pace. In the latter stages of the book, things move more quickly, but overall the quality of the story does not remotely match that of books such as The Murder at the Vicarage, which was published in the same year. Yet Kennedy deserves a good deal of credit, I think, for his attempts to move the detective story forward from the straightforward puzzle. Unfortunately, in this book at least, the idea was stronger than the implementation.