Forgotten Book - A Grave Affair

I've been a fan of Shelley Smith for many years but it's only recently that I got round to reading her penultimate book. A Grave Affair, which dates from 1971. One of the reasons why she was such an admirable writer is that she avoided repeating herself and this book is unorthodox and interesting. Those stern critics Barzun and Taylor admired it.

The blurb quotes the author's views: 'We like to think of ourselves as small independent units consisting of our families and friends, living our private lives as if they had no connection with anyone else. But that is not so at all. An invisible network connects each of us with everyone else, seen or unseen, known or unknown.' The events in this novel are designed to illustrate exactly what she means.

This sounds rather didactic, but it isn't. Rather, Smith shows us the perspectives of a wide range of very different individuals, while focusing on the misadventures of a politician called Edmund Burke (why she chose that famous name, I've no idea - I find it rather odd). There are some curious infelicities, notably when she switches viewpoint within a short scene, and I didn't find her portrayal of a libel trial particularly credible. Her decision to use elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was very bold, but although aspects of it are very dated, the sad truth is that conflict over Palestine remains a recurrent theme in modern life.

So this isn't a perfect book, but ambitious novels never are. I found it extremely readable and interesting as well as pleasingly unpredictable. My copy was inscribed by the author 'To Sister Duncan...from her grateful patient' and I do wonder if health problems explain why she only wrote three novels in the space of more than twenty years after a flurry of early successes. Whatever the reason, it's a pity there aren't more Shelley Smiths. The novels she published are invariably worth reading.   

Forgotten Book - The Party at No. 5 aka The Cellar at No. 5

I've often written about my enthusiasm for the novels of Shelley Smith. She was an ambitious writer, who was always keen to do something different, and that approach (while not necessarily conducive to great commercial success) and the flair with which she pursued it meant that she was one of the most impressive British crime writers of the 1950s. I regret the fact that her books aren't more widely known.

The Party at No.5, which dates from 1954, offers a good example of her skill and economical and effective literary style. It's essentially a novel about character, about the vagaries of human nature. It's also a book which is about women and the relationships they have with each other. The male characters (including a solicitor whose grasp of the law struck me as very shaky) only have minor parts, although they are depicted with Smith's customary cool insight and wit.

Mrs Rampage is an elderly woman with a rambling old house in London. Actually, by modern standards I don't think she is really ancient, but attitudes to older people were different then, in a rather depressing way. She is persuaded to take in as a sort of companion-helper a woman called Mrs Roach. Mrs Roach is, on the surface, a very pleasant and caring individual who has an unrequited longing for a younger woman, Eleanor, who is stuck at home with her aged father. But the two women don't hit it off and although Mrs Rampage becomes increasingly dependent on Mrs Roach, her unpleasantness towards the other woman is a catalyst for crime.

This isn't a whodunit, but I found it a highly suspenseful read. Smith's prose is clear and engaging and her depiction of the way that relatively minor character flaws can lead to very damaging consequences is compelling. It's a tribute to her gifts that although I didn't much like either of the two lead characters, I became intrigued by them and wanted to know what their fate would be.    

Forgotten Book - The Lord Have Mercy aka The Shrew is Dead

Over the years, I've reviewed several of Shelley Smith's books on this blog. I was introduced to her work by Julian Symons' Bloody Murder and I share his enthusiasm for her work. He was especially keen on The Lord Have Mercy, and having recently acquired an inscribed copy of the Hamish Hamilton edition from 1956, I thought I'd share my thoughts on a book that I first read more than thirty years ago.

This is an English village mystery with a suspicious death at its heart, but first and foremost it's a study of character and of social attitudes. In many ways, it's a good illustration of the post-war shift in attitudes towards the genre. The puzzle is almost incidental to the portrayal of psychological disintegration and there's an ironic flavour to the writing that was guaranteed to appeal to Symons (as it does to me).

By modern standards, it's a short novel and frankly I think that is all to the good. A long, meaty crime novel is great - so long as the length is justified; alas, that isn't invariably the case. In The Lord Have Mercy, the writing is taut throughout and the final paragraph is disturbing and enigmatic.

I don't want to say too much about the detail of the story, but essentially it focuses on Editha, the desirable but provocative wife of the local doctor, a good man who is, as the story progresses, pushed to the limits of endurance by the behaviour of others. Smith (whose real name was Nancy Bodington) portrays him with sympathy and understanding and there's a subtlety about the characterisation that was relatively uncommon in the crime writing of its day. Jamie Sturgeon speculates that the village in the novel may have been based on Steyning in Sussex, where she lived.

To me, it's very surprising that after writing such a good novel, Smith produced only three more novels in the next twenty-one years. Like Margot Bennett and Mary Kelly, she seems to have run out of steam. I know less about her life than I do about those other writers, so I'm not quite sure why her productivity tailed off. But her books, even those that aren't wholly successful, are always interesting, and this quiet novel of small cruelties and misunderstandings is still well worth reading. 

The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury by Sean O'Connor

The Rattenbury-Stoner murder trial of 1935 was, as the dustjacket blurb of Sean O'Connor's new study of the case says, one of the great tabloid sensations of the interwar period. The story behind the trial is poignant and complicated and it certainly doesn't have a happy ending. But it does have a great deal of human interest, and casts light on the mores and legal process of the Thirties.

The story has fascinated a number of crime writers, most notably Francis Iles, who wrote a long essay about it in the Detection Club book The Anatomy of Murder (recently reissued in paperback, and a very good read covering famous and little-known murder cases) as well as As for the Woman. That book took some elements from the case as well as from the even more famous Thompson-Bywaters case, to which the Rattenbury-Stoner case bore certain striking similarities.

Another novelist who made good use of the story was Shelley Smith, in The Woman in the Sea, a book now so forgotten that it doesn't earn a mention even in this wide-ranging and well-researched study. And without giving too much away, I can say that there are one or two elements from the story that inspired one of the plot strands in Mortmain Hall, the sequel to Gallows Court, which I've been working on recently and which will be published next year.

Sean O'Connor is a writer, director, and producer who first came to my attention a few years ago with his interesting examination of the Neville Heath case, Handsome Brute. He makes the point in his foreword to this book that the Rattenbury case has been examined not only by the famous criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse but also by such leading lawyers as Sir Michael Havers and Sir David Napley. But he has undertaken extensive investigation of his own, and the result is a book that will, I'm sure, be of great interest to true crime fans.

The Running Man - 1963 film review

The Running Man is a film I've wanted to watch for a long time, and thanks to the Talking Pictures channel, I've finally caught up with it. The reason for my interest was that, many years ago, I read the novel on which the movie is based - The Ballad of the Running Man by Shelley Smith, an author I've discussed several times on this blog, as well as in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books. What I hadn't realised was that the screenplay was written by John Mortimer, in itself a recommendation.

As well as the ingredients of a good source novel and a good scriptwriter, the film also benefited from a first-rate cast, a good director (Carol Reed) and a theme tune by Ron Grainer. Yet it wasn't a big success - some people claimed that this was because the two stars were Laurence Harvey and Lee Remick and in the wake of the JFK assassination, "Lee" and "Harvey" had unfortunate connotations. Hmmm....Anyway, I found it a very watchable piece of work, quite tense at times, although also rather low-key.

In essence, it's an insurance scam story. Harvey plays Rex Blake, charismatic but reckless, a glider pilot who feels he's been cheated by an insurance company, and that this entitles him to commit fraud by faking his own death. So it's a "Canoe Man" type of story, but with a glider substituted for a canoe. Alan Bates plays the insurance investigator who seems to suspect that something is amiss - but the pay-out is made.

Rex resurfaces in Spain, under a false identity, where his wife (Remick) joins him. All seems to be going well until Bates suddenly turns up. What is his game? A cat-and-mouse story ensues, and I thought Mortimer maintained the suspense pretty well until the end. The novel was published in 1961, when Smith was at the height of her powers, but she only published two more books, both in the 1970s, and neither made any great impression. I've always been puzzled by this, and I'd love to learn more about why her career fizzled out in this way.

Forgotten Book - The Woman in the Sea

An older woman called Mrs Robinson seduces a naive young man. Sounds familiar? Well, my subject today is not The Graduate, but a much less familiar story, Shelley Smith's novel of 1948, The Woman in the Sea. It was her sixth book, and it's the work of an accomplished and interesting novelist, much admired by Julian Symons.

There's an Author's Note at the beginning, in which Smith states that "Looking about me for a suitable plot by which to illustrate certain aspects of morality which were much exercising my mind..." she recalled a real life case which seemed "to provide a framework both solid and pliable enough for my purpose". Here she is referring, I have little doubt, to the Rattenbury and Stoner case of 1935 (although that case bears uncanny similarities to the earlier, and even more famous, Thompson and Bywaters case).  She denies that her characters are intended to represent their real life counterparts,and on the whole I think this denial is not disingenuous, but fair enough. Francis Rattenbury, for instance, led a very different life from Zoe Robinson's husband Bertram.

The book has a prologue involving the discovery of the body, and essentially the rest of the story is a flashback, recounting the events in a doom-laden house which led up to that particular death. I suspect that Smith realised that her method of structuring the story reduced the tension, but that she though it a price worth paying. A debatable decision, as far as I'm concerned, but despite being quite sure how it was all going to end, I kept reading.

This is because Smith was a writer of genuine ability and intelligence. She could plot very well when she wanted to, but her main concern here was with those issues of morality. To a modern reader, perhaps these are not quite as compelling as they were in 1948, but the account of Zoe's affair with a really rather stupid lad is handled with some poignancy. I'm glad I read it. Smith's constant determination to try to do something different strikes me as admirable.

Forgotten Book - Man with a Calico Face

I've written here previously about my enthusiasm for the crime fiction of Shelley Smith, the pen-name of Nancy Bodington, nee Courlander. That interest was originally fired by Julian Symons, a long-time admirer of her work, who heaped praise on her in Bloody Murder, and subsequently shepherded that brilliant novel An Afternoon to Kill back into print in a series of Collins Crime Club reissues.

Man with a Calico Face is a fairly early book, first published in 1951 and it's hardly ever been mentioned on the internet. I did, however, find a link to a negative contemporary critique in Kirkus Reviews, which moans about the unpleasant nature of the characters. This is a complaint often made about the books of Francis Iles, whom Symons and I both admire, and although there is a grain of truth in the complaint, I think it's overdone in relation to both Iles and Smith. Like Symons, I think that Smith's work occasionally betrays Iles' influence, and that is especially true of the final twist in this novel.

At first, I have to admit, I was underwhelmed by the story. An attractive wife and mother is found dead at the bottom of the stairs. The body is discovered by a young man who has nursed an unrequited passion for her, and her large house is occupied by a number of people who might be described as hangers-on. There is no sign of her husband. How has she come to die? The seasoned mystery reader might have a good idea, but the seasoned mystery reader might well turn out to be wrong, because Smith was a very clever writer

The structure of this novel is extremely interesting. After the set-up section, there is a section which delves into the past, before we come back up to date again. This is the same structure that Henry Wade used in the masterly Lonely Magdalen, and although I don't think this book is as good as that one, it's certainly intriguing, and after a slow start builds to a highly dramatic and ironic climax. And who is "the man with a calico face"? We don't find out for a long time, but the explanation rather pleased me. Not Smith's best book, for sure, but definitely worth a read..

Forgotten Book - Death Stalks a Lady

Shelley Smith followed up her debut, the enjoyable Background for Murder , with a novel first published in 1945, Death Stalks a Lady. Here she moves away from the private eye story to a "woman in jeopardy" mystery very much in the style of Ethel Lina White, who had died not long before the book appeared. And Smith shows that she is equally adept at this kind of story.

Judith Allen returns to her family home after ten years away, an absence consequent upon her parents's divorce, and immediately stumbles across the body of a woman in a car. The deceased bears a superficial resemblance to her, and was going under the name of....Judith Allen. This is a fascinating plot device,and although the plotting of the mystery is a little uneven, overall this is a crafty whodunit which - even at this early point of Smith's career- demonstrates her skill as a writer.

The plot quickly thickens. Judith falls in love, but we learn that she's an heiress, and people have reason to wish her ill. Can she even trust the handsome chap she's fallen for? Another death occurs, and the pace never lets up. It's all perfectly enjoyable, and I galloped through the story. In the Fifties, Smith would write even more accomplished crime fiction, but her early books are also entertaining.

My copy is inscribed by Smith to a reader, and accompanied by a postcard in which she says that her radio play about the "wicked bank manager",called No Wreath for Susan, is due to be broadcast shortly on the Home Service. I imagine that no copies exist of that play - though I haven't yet checked - but I must say I'm intrigued. Smith was an energetic and capable writer, and the only surprise to me is that her enthusiasm for writing novels seemed to fade after the early 60s.

Forgotten Book - Background for Murder

Today, my Forgotten Book comes from another author whose reputation owed much to the advocacy of Julian Symons in Bloody Murder. Shelley Smith was a writer he greatly admired, and his enthusiasm prompted me to read her avidly in my younger days. Suffice to say that I shared his opinion about the excellence and variety of her writing. An Afternoon to Kill, in particular, is a real tour de force.

Background for Murder was her very first book, published in 1942, and I've only recently tracked it down and read it. Whilst Smith later developed into an accomplished writer of psychological suspense, this is a genuine whodunit, with a dizzying list of suspects. But she was clearly also trying to update the classic form. The story is narrated by Jacob Chaos, a private eye who is called in (rather improbably, to be honest) by Scotland Yard, to solve a baffling murder mystery which has the local police stumped. There's a distant influence of Philip Marlowe here, although Chaos is not a tough guy, and the setting is much more genteel than the mean streets of Chandlertown.

The setting is, in fact, a hospital for the mentally ill, and one of the interesting features of the book when read today is how attitudes towards the mentally ill have changed in the last seventy odd years. They've changed markedly for the better, although in my opinion there's still a long way to go. But it seems to me that this book was quite 'progressive' in its attitudes - by the standards of the Forties. Smith was a young writer, and the plot touches on issues such as abortion and a key character who is described as "sexually gay" (I discovered that this meant the chap in question was heterosexual but promiscuous.)

The author's youth and inexperience are evident in the liveliness of the story and also one or two flaws. Overall, though, it's a very good debut, although Chaos only appeared in one more book, as Smith rapidly moved away from whodunits. Smith's real name was Nancy Hermione Bodington, nee Courlander. She wrote vividly, and it's no surprise that she later became involved in film work - she was one of those who worked on the screenplay of that successful movie Tiger Bay. Her career as a crime writer rather petered out in the Seventies, but Symons was right. She was a fine crime novelist.