Forgotten Book - Lobelia Grove

Lobelia Grove was the second novel published under the name of Anthony Rolls, a follow-up to the successful The Vicar's Experiments. The book appeared in 1932, and my copy, from the Bob Adey collection, is signed by the author and dated September 1932. It's signed in his real name, C.E. Vulliamy, rather than as Rolls. (Bob's copy of the first Rolls book is signed in both names.)

The setting is a fictitious "garden suburb", and the social life of Kipperly  Park is portrayed with a great deal of sly wit. One always feels, with Rolls-Vulliamy that constructing a mystery interested him rather less than exercising his gift for satire,,but I must say I really enjoyed this one. He tackles the theme of the craving for respectability exhibited by so many English people, and he presents us with a number of incisive portraits of local characters, and how they behave when murder disrupts the serenity of their lives.

A case in point is Mr Bertie Quirtle (the author liked to give his characters unlikely names, a habit that I find a trifle irritating). Quirtle is returning home one night when he encounters a rude stranger in a hurry. Almost immediately thereafter,he stumbles across the body of one of his neighbours. Rather than doing something about it, he scuttles off and later tells a series of lies, seemingly out of fear of becoming involved.

There's a pleasingly ironic plot twist towards the end, but the real pleasure of the book comes from Vulliamy's jokes, and his ability to make shrewd points through humour. At the time he was writing, these books must have seemed refreshingly "different", and they still retain that quality. Yes, the influence of Francis Iles can be detected, but unlike Iles, Vulliamy was not someone who had written tightly structured whodunits, and this helps to explain why his novels focus more on people than on plot. He was a novelist who happened to write about crime. All the books of his that I've read are worth seeking out..  .

Forgotten Book - Clerical Error

My last entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books featured a title from the pen of Richard Hull. This week, the focus is on novel written by another disciple of Anthony Berkeley/Francis Iles. Clerical Error has also appeared as The Vicar’s Experiments, and it has been published under two different names – first as by Anthony Rolls, and then under Rolls’ real name, C.E. Vulliamy.

Vulliamy wrote, among other things, biography and satire. It is his satiric instinct which prevails in the opening chapter, when a seemingly inoffensive cleric snaps during a conversation with a disagreeable loudmouth:

‘Up to a quarter past three, Mr Pardicott might have been described as the gentlest of rural clergymen; at twenty minutes past three he was a criminal of the most dangerous kind. In a dizzy moment of revelation he saw that he had been chosen by the Inscrutable Purpose to be the destroyer of Colonel Cargoy.’

Alas, even when the murder of Colonel Cargoy has been accomplished, Pardicott does not rest content….

Vulliamy wrote a number of other crime novels. I’ve read one of them, Don Among the Dead Men, which follows a broadly similar pattern. I wouldn’t claim either book is a masterpiece. In each case, there is a neat initial idea, and some witty writing, but (at least, for a modern reader) the plot isn't complex or credible enough for the whole novel to live up to the promise of the early pages. But they have, at the very least, a deal of interest for readers fascinated in the development of the genre. Vulliamy was no Ruth Rendell, but he was no mug, either.