The Little Stranger - 2018 film review

The Little Stranger is a film version of a novel by Sarah Waters, a writer of great talent. I haven't read that particular book, but I find her evocation of historical periods compelling and the same can be said of Lenny Abrahamson's film, which was scripted by Lucinda Coxon. I felt that ultimately it fell short of the highest calibre, but I found it consistently engaging and interesting and it's regrettable that apparently it didn't do well at the box office.

I suspect the film's relative lack of commercial success is due to the fact that, although it's usually billed as a supernatural or Gothic movie, it's quite low-key, and certainly doesn't focus on melodrama. But it's so well done that I didn't think that mattered, at least under the closing minutes. Much of the credit must go to the actors, who are absolutely excellent.

Domhnall Gleeson is Faraday, a G.P. in rural Warwickshire who is drawn to Hundreds, a manor which fascinated him as a child. It's now quite run down, and is owned by the Ayres family. Roderick Ayres is a former pilot who was physically and mentally damaged during the war. He is cared for by his sister Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and mother (Charlotte Rampling) as well as by a young maid (Liv Hill). We learn that another sister, Suki, is dead, and before long we start to wonder if her spirit haunts Hundreds.

Faraday and Caroline are drawn to each other, but the creepy and oppressive atmosphere of Hundreds seems to cast an eerie spell over everyone. The terrors are under-stated, and although the storyline is very different, I was in some ways reminded of the mood of The Turn of the Screw. My reservation about the film was simply this. It's all very well for a film to be under-stated, but I felt that, artistically, there was a need for a pay-off that was more powerful than that delivered by Abrahamson and Coxon. A climactic scene is reported as a flashback, which struck me as odd - why would a writer choose to do that? And I'd have preferred to know rather more about Suki. So I did feel a bit of frustration at the end, but overall that didn't seriously impact on my enjoyment.

Forgotten Book - Mind Your Own Murder

Mind Your Own Murder was Yolanda Foldes' solitary venture into detective fiction. The author's real name was Jolan Foldes, and she was Hungarian, but emigrated to Britain in 1941. At that time she was already established as a highly capable novelist. This book was published in 1948, but set during the war. Foldes' English is so good that I wouldn't have guessed it wasn't her first language. In fact, I felt the novel was conspicuously well-written.

I've been interested in this one since Kate Jackson gave it a rave review on her Cross-Examining Crime blog. And the premise is certainly worthy of note. The setting is a country house, and this is one of those Golden Age-style stories in which a very wealthy old person torments his relatives by threatening to cut them out of his will. So far, so formulaic. The difference is that old John Marchmont has constructed a bizarre and elaborate scheme. He is terminally ill and he challenges his four male heirs as follows - whichever one of you murders me will inherit my fortune.

We are introduced to the characters at first by a female member of the family, Genia, and events are at first seen from her perspective before the viewpoint begins to shift around. I felt that rather too many people were introduced too quickly and it took me a while to get them straight in my head. When the fun and games about the will began, I admit to becoming rather frustrated by the endless talkiness of the story. There wasn't enough variety for me, and the touch wasn't as light as, say, Agatha Christie's.

As a result, I found myself hoping that the irritating and foolish old bloke would get his come-uppance sooner than proved to be the case, and that the endless debate between his heirs would come to an end. Relief eventually came thanks to the intervention of an appealing character called Robinson, who is by far the most likeable person in the book. But I didn't much care about the rest of them, and I cottoned on to the identity of the culprit quite early, since I thought I recognised a particular storytelling trick - and so it proved. I can't say I share Kate's enthusiasm for this novel, but it is nonetheless an interesting, relatively late, example of the classic country house detective story.

Jonathan Creek Revisited

For me, as for many people, the lockdown has (among other things) meant more time for writing, reading, and, to a lesser extent, watching television. As far as TV is concerned, I've caught up with a few recent series and also had another chance to enjoy some old favourites. I found, to my surprise and delight, that Ian Carmichael's Lord Peter Wimsey series from the 1970s held up much better than I'd expected, but the greatest pleasure has come from revisiting David Renwick's brilliant series Jonathan Creek.

I've rhapsodised about Renwick's writing and this series in particular on this blog in the past, but what strikes me on a second viewing is just how strong and tightly written the scripts are. One recurrent feature of many series nowadays is that they are excessively long and tend to drag. This is true even of strong series that I've watched lately, such as Sharp Objects, based on Gillian Flynn's novel, and The Hour (which I hope to blog about shortly). But with Jonathan Creek, there's never (or almost never) any padding.

The care with which Renwick writes is evident from the early episodes to the recent shows, such as The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, which I watched again last night. I'd forgotten the story, but on looking back at this blog, I see that I gave the episode a rave review on its original showing, more than six years ago. If anything, I enjoyed it even more the second time around, which is saying something.

I've found that I've forgotten the detailed plots of almost all the stories (except the brilliant Miracle in Crooked Lane) but that doesn't indicate a failure on the writer's part. Rather, I think that Renwick's command of detail is such that it compels attention at the time of viewing while not distracting from the overall pleasure of the character of Creek and the bizarre and deftly handled scenarios - and it's that overall sense of satisfaction and indeed delight that lingers in the memory.

I've been thinking about locked room mysteries a lot recently, partly because of the arrival of a new anthology (I'll talk more about this shortly), partly because I've been reading some more John Dickson Carr, and partly because I've been toying with an idea for a new locked room mystery of my own. Watch this space... 

If You Can Walk With Kings by David Ian Chapman

William Le Queux was a famous name in his day, a bestseller whose influence extended far beyond his readers. It may be argued that his warnings about the threat of invasion in the period leading up the First World War was of great benefit and may have led, at least indirectly, to the creation of the modern British secret service. For most of the past century, however, his reputation has been in serious and sustained decline.

David Ian Chapman has set out a revisionist view in If You Can Walk With Kings: a view of William Le Queux, seeking to put forward a more balanced assessment of a writer and public figure who was undoubtedly a talented entertainer. Like many writers, he lived a great deal in his imagination, and his liking for fiction extended to accounts of his own life. I've never, for instance, found his account of an encounter with Dr Crippen plausible, and David Chapman doesn't cover it in this book, perhaps for that reason.

But he does cover a great deal, and in an accessible style. The text is supplemented with illustrations, some of them in full colour, as well as extensive quotations from Le Queux's correspondence. A good deal of painstaking research has gone into this book, but even more importantly, David Chapman has thought carefully about his subject, and has avoided the trap of simply repeating the standard criticisms of Le Queux.

At the same time, he doesn't overlook the man's faults. Le Queux's personal life was complicated,and although he made a great deal of money, he also spent extravagantly. As a result, he was declared bankrupt. He is best-remembered as a leading proponent of "invasion fiction", but as this book explains, he was highly prolific and wrote detective fiction as well as thrillers. I found this a very interesting and readable study, a nicely produced paperback from Janus Publishing which first came out four years ago.

Forgotten Book - Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke

When I was about thirteen or so, a friend of mine, knowing of my interest in detective stories, lent me a copy of a novel by R.Austin Freeman that belonged to his family. I took a look at the first page, but found the style off-putting. I never got any further and in the end I gave the book back. But a little while later, another schoolfriend lent me an omnibus volume of Freeman's short stories about Dr Thorndyke, and I found that much more to my taste. (Yes, I was lucky in my schoolfriends, wasn't I?) Ever since then, I've had a soft spot for Austin Freeman.

The novel that I failed to persevere with was Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke, and I've finally got round to reading it. And guess what? This time, I rather enjoyed it. It's one of those books with two distinct plot strands which eventually come together. The early pages are narrated by a likeable young fellow called Jasper Grey who gets involved in some mysterious goings-on, while the puzzle put before Dr Thorndyke concerns the inexplicable disappearance of Sir Edward Hardcastle.

Austin Freeman is often described, and fairly, as a major figure of the Golden Age, but several factors differentiate his work from that of, say, Dorothy L. Sayers (who greatly admired him) and Agatha Christie. He was an older person who came to prominence as a writer in the Edwardian era, and there is an old-fashioned feel about his prose and dialogue. This is partly why I was deterred from reading this book originally, and helps to explain why Julian Symons famously (if too harshly) compared reading Freeman to "chewing dry straw". There's also a whiff of antisemitism about some of the language used; whether that reflects Freeman's thinking or simply the attitudes of his characters, I'm not sure, but I suspect the former. Another issue is that Freeman's great interest lay in the meticulous scientific and technical accuracy of his criminal and investigative schemes. So if you're looking for "least likely person" whodunits, you won't get much joy from a book like this. His ingenuity was of a very different sort to Christie's.

Yet despite these reservations, I found myself being more entertained by this book than I'd expected. It's not a masterpiece, and I don't even suggest that it's one of Freeman's best books. But it's a bit out of the ordinary and that's no bad thing. I'm glad that, after so many years, I finally got to the end of it.

Nothing But the Night - 1973 film review

Nothing But the Night is a curious film with a first-class pedigree and an outstanding cast. It's fair to say that the whole is less than the sum of its considerable parts, but I found it watchable and interesting, despite several significant flaws. It's a film that spans more than one genre: crime, sci-fi, and horror all play a part. Overall, though (and I'm trying to avoid spoilers here), it would be a stretch to describe it as a crime film.

The stars are Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, two actors who were never less than watchable. In fact, this was the film that Lee made just before The Wicker Man, and there's one scene which has slight Wicker Man aspects to it, although this movie doesn't compare in quality to Anthony Shaffer's classic. Lee here plays a retired senior cop called Bingham, who is convinced that there is a connection between three recent deaths.

Those deaths get the film off to a dramatic start. They are all incidents which are designed to appear as accidents, but the viewer knows from the start that they are murders. It turns out that all three victims are trustees of an orphanage on a Scottish island. In fact, when I first saw a brief synopsis of this film, I did wonder if the story might bear a resemblance to Gallows Court. It's always irritating when you come up with an idea, and then find someone else had the same notion years earlier! But I needn't have worried. Suffice to say that it is a very, very different sort of story.

The script was written by Bryan Hayles, who was an accomplished exponent of sci-i, and based on a novel by John Blackburn, whose work did span several genres. The cast includes Keith Barron, Georgia Brown (better known perhaps as a singer), Diana Dors (a very over-the-top performance), Fulton McKay, and a young Michael Gambon. The soundtrack was written by Malcolm Williamson, later the Master of the Queen's Music. With all that talent involved, one would have hoped for a less uneven film than this, but it's not bad entertainment. 

Forgotten Book - The Little Lie

While I was reading Jean Potts' The Little Lie, I must confess that for quite a while I was in two minds about it. On the one hand, Potts's prose is very readable and I know that two excellent judges of a crime novel (John Norris and Kate Jackson) rate this story highly. On the other hand, I felt that the narrative was so low-key, I simply wasn't too excited about what was going to happen. But as I kept turning the pages, it began to dawn on me that this is, indeed, a top-class novel of suspense.

Suspense is the key word. Often, for example in the work of Cornell Woolrich or some of today's psychological thrillers, the author sets out to keep the suspense at fever pitch. This can work brilliantly, although sometimes it can also become rather exhausting. Jean Potts is at the other end of the spectrum, a quiet craftswoman who ratchets up the tension so gently that you hardly notice that you're being squeezed into a breathless state.

This book is one of two in another of those nicely produced volumes from Stark House Press, through whom I've discovered a number of gems lately. John Norris provides the introduction. The little lie of the title is told by Dee Morris, a landlady who has a bitter argument with her boyfriend, Chad. When Chad walks out on her, she pretends that nothing is wrong between them. However, the row has been overheard by one of her tenants, the nosey teacher Mr Fly.

Mr Fly is a great character, someone whose undeniable good intentions prove disastrous because they are accompanied by inquisitiveness and naivete. Potts draws him with great skill. For quite a long time, not a great deal happens, hence my initial reservations about the book. But a patient reader will reap a considerable reward. The later chapters are quite devastating. Definitely a novel to savour. I admit it - this is a book much subtler than at first I realised. 

Lockdown Musings

The virus is still very much with us, but at least there are signs that British society is taking tentative steps back to some semblance of normality. And I'm continuing to do what I can to make good use of the time that I'd normally be devoting to events, festivals, and travel.

At present I'm working on revisions to the new Lake District Mystery, The Crooked Shore. I'm still reluctant to travel to the Lakes to do a final bit of scene-checking, but the book is now getting into reasonably good shape ahead of being sent to the editor. This one is rather different from earlier books in the series, with more emphasis on psychological suspense.

I've also been working on a couple of non-fiction projects, one of them speculative at present. More about these at a later date.

In the meantime, I've been doing what I can in terms of promotion, most recently on Monday, a Facebook Live chat with Mitzi Szereto about my essay on Dr Harold Shipman, the serial killer, "The First of Criminals": https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=269733067694694

And last but by no means least, I've been thrilled by a review of Mortmain Hall by A.N. Wilson, of all people. The Booker Prize-nominated author describes the book as: "an ingenious modern 'take' on the classic whodunnit...It's a winning formula...A whole page would not give me space to explain the intricacy of this story. A tangle of satisfying clues and a pleasing denouement in the classic Christie manner". Very pleased with that!

Collecting Richard Austin Freeman

Whilst I was researching The Golden Age of Murder, I corresponded with David Ian Chapman, who had been introduced to me by a mutual friend as someone very expert in the work of R. Austin Freeman, a crime writer admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Chandler (and many others, but that's not a bad trio to start with...)

I've never met David, but the information he supplied me was very helpful. This included fascinating insight into Freeman's coded journal, extracts from which David allowed me to publish in the book. Our hope was that someone would come along and help to decipher it. This hasn't happened as yet - Freeman's code is tricky! But I live in hope.

Anyway, it's only recently that I've acquired a copy, inscribed by David, of his bibliography of Freeman and also his biography of another author he's very interested in, William Le Queux. Le Queux was a fascinating character and I am planning to devote a separate blog post to David's very enjoyable study of his extraordinary life.

In the meantime, I've enjoyed the Freeman book, because I've collected a number of the author's novels and David discusses them, and their background, in fascinating depth. He also explains how he came to collect Freeman's work, and if you fancy collecting a crime writer, what he has to say will be of special interest. I'm in regular correspondence with a number of collectors in different parts of the world and my impression is that interest in the older detective stories is growing.

The lovely illustrations in Collecting Richard Austin Freeman, some of them in full colour, are in themselves a delight. If you're interested in Austin Freeman, do take a look at David's book. It was published two years ago by Highfield Press.

Forgotten Book - The Broken Penny

For all my admiration of Julian Symons as a novelist, as well as as critic and historian, one of his novels has always passed me by. Until now, that is. The book in question is The Broken Penny, first published in 1953, and Symons' only attempt at writing a political thriller. In the first edition of his Bloody Murder, Symons invited Edmund Crispin to comment about his writing, and Crispin - though positive generally - was less than enthusiastic about the book. I suppose that may have influenced me.

More recently, I discovered, to my surprise, that Symons had quite a soft spot for the novel, so I thought I'd give it a go. And I was even more surprised to discover that it's a good book, far superior to a good many thrillers I've come across. Interestingly, it seems that Symons based the central character, Charles Garden, very vaguely on George Orwell...

Garden is a man of 45, and has a history of political radicalism, although the war has left him somewhat disillusioned. It is the post-war period, when the map of Europe has been redrawn, and it seems that a small country - not named, but shaped like a broken penny - may offer a foothold for Britain and its allies who are concerned by the power of Russia. A man named Arbitzer from that country is now based in Britain, and he is seen as a suitable leader for a movement of insurgents.

Against his better judgement, Garden is persuaded to join Arbitzer and his family as they return to the Broken Penny, but the planned revolution rapidly unravels. A tale of one double-cross after another unfolds. It's all done rather excitingly, and it's not like any other Symons novel. I was impressed. The Broken Penny is a book of its time, but it's an entertaining story which deserves to be better known.