The coronavirus diary, or continuing to read...

What with being on furlough, I have been continuing to get through the unread novels on my bookshelf…

I was rather looking forward to The Shadow of Doctor Syn. This was the last of Russell Thorndike’s  adventures about the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, that fascinating fictional character who is a vicar by day, a smuggler leader by night and a former pirate captain; sadly they have long been out of print (my version is a paperback from the Sixties that originally sold for two-and-six). Although it’s the last published Doctor Syn novel, the action takes place shortly before the events of the original novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh (all of the follow-up ones were prequels). It’s the time of the French Revolution, and the talk in fashionable London is of two things – the Terror in France and the continuing exploits of the Scarecrow, that smuggler extraordinary who is still able to bring bootleg brandy over the Channel and whose reward has gone up to £1,000 (the reader is, of course, aware from the start that this the Scarecrow is Doctor Syn’s alter ego). Captain Foulkes, a bully of a man who cheats at cards but gets away with it because his opponents are afraid to challenge him to a duel, makes a bet that he can bring the Scarecrow to justice; when he makes his way down to Romney Marsh, he’s in the same horse-drawn coach as a certain vicar…

What follows is all rather fun, up to a point. There’s the usual hapless troop of dragoons down on the marsh trying and failing to beat the smugglers. Jimmy Bone, the highwayman who’s in league with the smugglers, is at one point obliged to don the Scarecrow costume so that smuggler leader and vicar can be seen together. Doctor Syn goes across to France and, as L’Épouvantail – the Scarecrow’s French alias – he gets the better of Robespierre himself (as The Scarlet Pimpernel was an inspiration for Doctor Syn, I presume Thorndike had been toying with this one for a while). Lord Cullingford, a young nobleman impoverished by Captain Foulkes to the point where he goes to Romney Marsh to try and capture the Scarecrow himself (and thus claim the reward money), is talked out of this course of action by Doctor Syn and ends up joining the dragoons before they get posted abroad.

And yet. This is one of the later books and it shows, for Thorndike is not just going through the motions but actually repeating himself. The officer in charge of the dragoons is Major Faunce, a name that has been encountered before although this one is actually the brother of the original. Captain Foulkes’s nickname, ‘Bully’, has been used before (it was applied to a character in an earlier novel whose fate was, as it happens, the same as this one’s). Finally, a major plotline of The Shadow of Doctor Syn is the story of the squire’s youngest daughter Cicely, who falls in love with the vicar while becoming fascinated with the Scarecrow, a repeat of what happened to another daughter of the same squire in an earlier adventure, Doctor Syn Returns. Much though I like the Doctor Syn books, the fact that Thorndike ended up re-hashing old plots means that this was ultimately not as enjoyable as I’d hoped.

Following that, I tackled an archaeological thriller from the Seventies which has (also) long been out of print but which I was able to find going cheap (on the £1 stand outside my local second-hand bookshop; back in 1976, it went for £3.75 brand new). The Pontius Pilate Papers is a novel by Warren Kiefer, an American film director who also wrote a few novels but who is rather obscure given that he often used an alias. The main character (and narrator) is Jay Marcus, a somewhat unlikable millionaire playboy who trained as a doctor but is content to spend his time (and money) indulging in his passion for archaeology. He’s endowed a museum in Jerusalem and the adventure starts when an archaeologist who works for that museum gets murdered; the dead man had previously discovered some Roman papyrus scrolls while excavating a site at Caesarea and had been rather secretive about the content of these, which shed new light on the actions of a Roman official stationed in Jerusalem during the first century AD. There are no prizes for guessing who – the clue’s in the title – but this new evidence will inevitably call in to question the Biblical account of the events leading up to the Crucifixion. The scrolls have of course been stolen, and by the end of the third chapter our hero has managed to get lucky with Nicoletta, the dead archaeologist’s beautiful Italian assistant. Everyone else – the museum director, another benefactor who appears to be just as rich as Jay and a seemingly shifty museum employee – is a suspect.

The action of The Pontius Pilate Papers flits from Israel to Paris, Vienna, London and Oxford, during which Jay and Nicoletta have to contend with an array of (mostly) two-dimensional characters. There are cops from several countries who aren’t sure what’s going on (not helped by Jay and his uncle Aaron choosing not to keep them fully in the picture), bitchy academics, bitchy academics’ wives who like to start drinking early, a somewhat ridiculous antiquarian book-dealer and private detectives who are either reckless, incompetent or who moonlight as international film stuntmen and provide Jay with an extra woman when he has to spend the night away from Nicoletta. One of the British cops was called Sergeant Battle, which I presume to be a nod to Agatha Christie who had a recurring police character in some of her books called Superintendent Battle.

I had originally bought the book because I like thrillers which revolve around a potentially very dangerous secret – and, given when this one was published, it would be not so much sub-Da Vinci Code as pre-Da Vinci Code. But it never quite takes off. Jay, the protagonist, is both unsympathetic and unconvincing. There are a few sequences that rather jar, being either implausible or long-winded. There are also parts – descriptive sequences as well as character descriptions – that have not aged well at all. By the time the villain of the piece was revealed I no longer cared (although the fact that I had guessed, and guessed correctly, at said villain’s identity before I was half-way through may have had something to do with this). Finally, the wrapping-up of the plot was spoilt a bit by a final twist on the last page. Here, I think, is one to forget.

There followed much better fare courtesy of Agatha Christie. Sparkling Cyanide is an enjoyable murder mystery which centred around the murder of an upper-class heiress by way of cyanide administered in a glass of champagne at a dinner party (hence the title). This method of murdering someone, by the way, is identical to the murder in the Nero Wolfe mystery Champagne for One, although a quick bit of research told me that Sparkling Cyanide was first published in 1945 and Champagne for One in 1958. Thus, Rex Stout was copying Agatha Christie, not the other way round. 

Everyone initially assumes it was suicide, the victim having been depressed for some time prior to her death. However, a few months later her husband starts to receive anonymous letters hinting that it was murder. He therefore decides to repeat the dinner party with the same guests at the same place on the anniversary of his wife’s death, only to meet the same end as his wife. It falls to Colonel Race (a military intelligence officer who’d previously assisted Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile) and the original victim’s sister’s boyfriend to work out what’s been going on and try to prevent a third murder. A good read, in which all of the supporting characters are well fleshed out, each of them with a convincing reason for wanting the original victim dead. Recommended.

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)

A story of Elizabethan Cornwall

Who was it who once said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? Not so long ago, I came across a very tatty paperback (spine cracked, cover page rather faded and held on with Sellotape, original UK retail price 80p) by Winston Graham, best known as the author of the Poldark books. This, though, was one of his other ones, an historical novel called The Grove of Eagles which was first published in 1963. The blurb was very complimentary indeed, and despite having never previously read anything by Winston Graham (or even bothered with Poldark, for that matter) I decided to go for it.

The Grove of Eagles is about the Killigrews, an influential Cornish family who were governors of Pendennis Castle in Tudor times and who were later responsible for founding and developing the port and town of Falmouth (being a semi-regular visitor to Falmouth as part of my work, I already knew a little bit about this family, who as well as being the local landowners were also heavily involved in smuggling and piracy in that part of the world; their memorial, a granite pyramid erected by the last of them, stands in Falmouth today opposite Arwenack House, the old family home which was destroyed during the Civil War and rebuilt in the eighteenth century). In the historical notes at the end, Graham describes them as “a not unimportant Cornish family whose history appears and disappears tantalisingly among the records of the time”. Which, I suppose, makes them an ideal canvas for an historical novelist.

Several of the Killigrews of Arwenack House were called John (it seems to have been a family tradition that this was the name given to the eldest son) and there has been some confusion among historians not only about the various John Killigrews but also their wives; due to knighthoods, history records more than one Lady Killigrew and one such – a woman who was born Mary Wolverston – has been confused with both her mother-in-law and her grand-daughter-in-law, in addition to which we know neither the year in which she was born nor the year in which she died! What we do know is that this particular Lady K. often received stolen or smuggled goods at Arwenack House, and that furthermore she was charged with piracy in 1582 when the crew of a Spanish ship that had sheltered from a storm nearby were murdered and their cargo stolen; she was actually sentenced to death for this but was pardoned by Elizabeth I.

At the hands of Winston Graham, Lady Killigrew became one of the more influential characters in The Grove of Eagles, she being the formidable widowed mother of the master of Arwenack House, John Killigrew (who in real life was born in c.1557 and died in 1605). At the time in which the novel is set, the last years of the sixteenth century, this John Killigrew was in a key position. As well as being the local landowner, and a rather ruthless and unpopular one at that, he was also the governor of Pendennis Castle and as such responsible for the defence of the mouth of the river Fal, “a great natural anchorage, one of the finest in the world”, which could have been of great strategic importance in the event of a Spanish invasion. Alas, the defences as organised by John Killigrew were found wanting at the times of both the Spanish raid on Cornwall in 1595 and the invasion threat of 1597 (of which more later). Although his excuse was that he couldn’t afford to properly garrison the castle (something of which he had informed the government on several occasions), there were inevitably rumours about how loyal he actually was to Elizabeth I – was he, perhaps, secretly in cahoots with the Spanish via intermediaries such as the pirate captains with whom he associated? Although allegations of treason on his part were unproven, in 1598 he was nevertheless deprived of the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and he died in poverty seven years later.

In real life, he had a large family by his wife (herself a member of the Monck family); to this brood Winston Graham added an illegitimate son, a boy unaware of his mother’s identity but nevertheless acknowledged by John Killigrew as his son and brought up with that surname. It is this boy, Maugan Killigrew, who narrates The Grove of Eagles (which refers to the meaning of the name Killigrew, the family coat-of-arms being a double-headed eagle which of course hints at all sorts of duplicity on the grounds that it faces both ways), and what a tale his creator has him tell!

This story of Elizabethan Cornwall, told from the point of view of someone who is of gentry blood yet expected to have to make his own way in the world, is a very good one. Graham, who in the novel’s postscript makes much of having drawn on manuscripts from the time, shows a really good understanding for the period. Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you realise the extent to which The Grove of Eagles is not only populated by real people but based very much on real events, most notably events from the war between England and Spain which lasted from the mid-1580s until the 1604 Treaty of London. Maugan is caught up in the resistance to the 1595 Spanish raid on Cornwall in which troops from four galleys landed in Mount’s Bay and sacked Mousehole, Newlyn and Penzance, beating back a local militia under Sir Francis Goldolphin (whose first wife was a Killigrew; when not trying to defend England, he is shown to be warning his in-laws about how their reputation for lawlessness will lead them to ruin) before withdrawing. Later, Maugan is taken on as a secretary to no less a person than Sir Walter Raleigh – for some reason, Graham makes a point of spelling his surname ‘Ralegh’ – and as such he gets to participate in the English capture of Cadiz in 1596 which allows Graham to provide a fantastic description of this event.

Much is made in The Grove of Eagles of the Killigrews’ misfortune; what with the fate of one of the John Killigrews (see above) it is a running theme in the book, with the set-piece hearing before the Queen herself coming towards the novel’s end. Early on, Graham gives an explanation of this via Maugan. Having referred to the rebuilding of Arwenack House in the mid-sixteenth century on a grander scale than before by another John Killigrew (this one being the grandfather of Maugan’s father), it is noted that the Killigrew family, “for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself; each generation failed in greater measure than the last.” It is this which becomes key to both the family’s apparent lack of regard for the law (any ship that uses the Fal estuary as a haven is fair game, it seems) and the question of John Killigrew’s supposed treachery.

Maugan seems to be particularly unlucky. Captured by the Spanish in a raid on Pendennis Castle, he’s assumed to be dead and as a result his love interest – a young lady whose family has been evicted from their house by the Killigrews for defaulting on the rent – marries someone else (a circumstance that Winston Graham also bestowed on his more famous creation, Ross Poldark; apparently he got this particular idea from hearing the story of a pilot who he met during the Second World War). Later on, our narrator (a bit of a rogue, but one with a conscience of sorts – no Flashman, he) manages to get captured by the Spanish again when returning from Cadiz – he gets put on a ship home by Raleigh after getting injured in a fight while attempting to loot a church, and after being imprisoned for several months he finds himself sailing on the ill-fated Spanish Armada of 1597, the plan being that he will liaise with his father once the invaders have landed in Cornwall. Fortunately for England but not for Maugan Killigrew, this little-known attempt to invade founders thanks to the weather, the result being that Maugan actually gets to go home by way of being shipwrecked off the Cornish coast (the failure of this invasion attempt, which happened in October 1597, really did owe much to a storm that wrecked and scattered the Spanish ships; England was at the time very poorly defended, not just because of John Killigrew but also because most of its ships were absent on the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated expedition to the Azores). For anyone wondering about who Maugan’s mother is, rest assured that this gets revealed at the end although you could probably make an educated guess before then.

Having finished The Grove of Eagles, I’m rather disappointed that Graham didn’t write a sequel; even after more than 500 pages I found myself wanting more. Towards the end, Maugan starts to work (against his better judgement) for Lord Henry Howard, a courtier who would in a few years play a key role in putting James VI of Scotland on the English throne after Elizabeth I’s death (for which he was ennobled as the Earl of Northampton) and turning said king against Raleigh, a man whom Maugan admires. It would have been fascinating to have Graham relate the story of how this played out. As it is, The Grove of Eagles ends with a pensive Maugan getting married, following which there’s a ‘postscript for purists’ which begins with Graham asserting that “bibliographies in the historical novel are pretentious” – this at a time (1963) before the likes of George MacDonald Fraser and Bernard Cornwell made historical notes a standard practice for the historical novelist.

After revealing where he got the ideas for some of the events of his novel from (for example: “the extent to which John Killigrew became committed to the Spanish cause is perhaps arguable, but the evidence which exists does seem to me conclusive … the conclusive testimony comes from the Spanish side … I have no evidence that Ralegh [sic] spoke up for John Killigrew when he was brought to London to answer for his behaviour, but it is not out of keeping with his character that he should have done so”), he explains what happened to some of the characters in the novel who were actually real people (“the mystery of Jane Fermor’s dowry has never been cleared up”, “Jack Arundell of Trerice became Sir John Arundell and was governor of Pendennis Castle in 1646”, etc) before mentioning that Maugan was inspired in part by one Robert Killigrew, a friend of Raleigh’s “who was later innocently involved in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury”. I found myself wanting to know more about this, and also wondering about what might have been had Winston Graham decided to give Maugan another outing; here, alas, a character whose slender luck sadly didn’t extend to a second novel.

But the first and only adventure of Maugan Killigrew, though, is definitely worth reading. I just hope that, should you decide to do so, you can find a copy that’s in better condition than the one I found!

A visit to a ruined manor house in the Cotswolds

In the Cotswolds, the ruins of a medieval manor house can be found by the banks of the Windrush, a tributary of the Thames. Minster Lovell Hall is located behind St Kenhelm’s church in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell (located between Burford and Witney) and it’s a pleasant place to visit and wander among the ruins if the weather’s nice. The place was built in or around 1440 and was used as a manor house until the mid-eighteenth century, after which is was partly dismantled and abandoned. The ruins are listed and administered by English Heritage, but there’s no charge to visit.

The original owners, after whom the hall and the village are named, were the Lovell family. The most interesting member of this noble family is the last of them, Francis Lovell, the ninth Baron Lovell who lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses. He was a friend of Richard, Duke of Gloucester – to whom he was also linked by marriage, their respective wives being cousins. Richard had him knighted in 1481, and when he seized power and became King Richard III two years later he upgraded the Lovell peerage; it was as the first Viscount Lovell that Francis held the Sword of State at his friend’s coronation. Lovell’s closeness to the King resulted in him being mentioned in a famous piece of doggerel which was posted on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral by a Lancastrian supporter in 1484:

“The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.”

To explain: the ‘hogge’ refers to Richard himself, his personal badge being a white boar. Lovell is of course ‘Lovell our dogge’, his coat-of-arms having included a silver wolf. The ‘catte’ and the ‘ratte’ were two of Richard III’s other principal supporters, Sir William Catesby and Sir Robert Ratcliffe.

Naturally, the fates of the King’s main followers were intertwined with his own. Richard III, as is well known, was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22^nd August 1485 – the last King of England to die in battle; what happened to his body afterwards would remain a mystery until 2012, when his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park. Ratcliffe died on the battlefield with his king, while Catesby survived, only to be captured and subsequent executed by the victorious Lancastrians (a notable descendant of his was Robert Catesby, one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot).

Lovell also fought at Bosworth, following which he was able to evade capture. He went on to become a leading figure in the Yorkist revolts that plagued the early part of Henry VII’s reign. He’s reckoned to have been behind an attempt to have Henry murdered at York in 1486, and a year later he played a leading role in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne – an attempt that came to an end at the battle of Stoke Field in June of that year. Lovell survived that battle too, but after that he disappears from the pages of history.

Some said that he lived in hiding for many years afterwards – and it is at this point that the history of Minster Lovell Hall crosses into legend. In 1708, the skeleton of a man was found in a secret chamber at Minster Lovell Hall, and it was assumed that that was the skeleton of Francis himself – who, so the story goes, hid out at his ancestral home with only one faithful servant who knew that he was there; the plan was that Lovell would be kept under lock and key with the servant bringing him food. Unfortunately for him, the servant died without letting slip about his master and so Lovell, locked in and with no-one left to bring him food, starved to death. It’s an interesting tale but it does seem unlikely, as Francis Lovell’s estates were forfeit after Bosworth, with the hall being given to Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor. Hardly somewhere for a Yorkist fugitive to go into hiding.

I was also interested in the place because the hall also has a literary association, playing a key role in John Buchan’s 1931 historical adventure The Blanket of the Dark which is set in the Cotswolds during the reign of Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII. This story, not one of Buchan’s better-known works but still highly readable if you like historical fiction and can get hold of a second-hand copy (I got an old Penguin one, original retail price 2s 6d), concerns a young Oxford scholar by the name of Peter Pentecost who is told that he is in fact the son of the Duke of Buckingham (Edward Stafford, who in real life was executed for treason in 1521). Buchan was always a master of describing the countryside in which his stories were set, and with The Blanket of the Dark he showed that he was as at home in rural Oxfordshire (for many years he lived in Elsfield, about three miles north of Oxford; his ashes are buried in the churchyard there) as he was in his native Scottish Lowlands. The ordinary people who appear in the novel – beggars, small farmers, foresters and suchlike – are treated with a high degree of empathy and, as is the case with Katrine in Witch Wood, there’s an intriguing but ultimately elusive love interest (as they usually are in Buchan’s novels; in this case, she’s called Sabine and one contemporary of Buchan’s was moved to comment that the one quibble he had with The Blanket of the Dark was that Buchan didn’t spice things up a bit with Peter and Sabine, but one can hardly have expected the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister to have done that).

Like many a fictional character before and since, Peter gets caught up in events that he cannot hope to control; at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he becomes the subject of an ill-fated plot to put him on the throne which climaxes when king and pretender meet face-to-face at an abandoned Minster Lovell Hall after the latter has rescued the former from an over-flowing Windrush. Henry is portrayed in less-than-flattering fashion, with Buchan adding some compelling descriptions of him: “the face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face ... this vast being had the greatness of some elemental force ... power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil, maybe, but someone born to work mightily in the world.” The Blanket of the Dark is a really good, perhaps even great, work of fiction that, although Henry VIII does make an appearance, focuses more on the ordinary people of rural England (the Cotswolds, specifically) than on high intrigue even though there is something of that; this is at heart a story of what Buchan succinctly called “a world of which there has never been a chronicle; the heaths and forests of old England”, and it’s the better for it.

Fools and Mortals: on and off the stage with Shakespeare's brother

Bernard Cornwell’s got a new book out, and I’m not taking about the latest instalment in the Saxon saga (or, as it’s now being billed thanks to the TV series, the Last Kingdom saga). It’s a stand-alone adventure set in Elizabethan England, and the protagonist is a brother of one William Shakespeare.

He’s not a soldier or a government agent or anything like that. The world of historical fiction does have a Shakespeare brother who’s a government agent, though – John Shakespeare, an entirely fictional older brother of the Bard who’s working for Sir Francis Walsingham to make sure that Elizabeth I is safe from assorted Catholic plotters who’d rather have her Scottish cousin on the throne. He is the creation of Rory Clements, who has set out to do for Elizabeth I’s reign what C.J. Sansom’s excellent Shardlake novels have done for that of Henry VIII – provide a series of thrillers (Revenger, The Queen’s Man, etc) that explore the more dangerous side of Tudor England. They’re not bad but there are a lot of Tudor-era thrillers around these days, and if you try to compare any of them with the Shardlake books then there’s only going to be one winner.

Bernard Cornwell’s latest is not about threats against the crown. It’s set on the stage, or rather in and around the world of the theatre, and the Shakespeare brother who leads the action does at least have the merit of being a real person. Well, based on a real person at least. Richard Shakespeare is the narrator of Fools and Mortals which is set in London in 1595. Little is known of the real-life Richard Shakespeare, a younger brother of the Bard who is thought to have spent most of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon and who predeceased his famous brother by three years. This, in a way, makes him an ideal candidate for being a character in a Bernard Cornwell novel as the author has a more or less blank canvas to play with. At Cornwell’s hands, he’s a bit of a tearaway who, rather than be apprenticed to a brutal Stratford merchant, ran away to London to become a ‘player’ like his brother, who was less than pleased to see him show up in the big city. He’s shown some talent for acting but he is in a bit of a rut; although a boy no longer, he’s only considered for the female roles in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. What with having to resort to the occasional act of petty theft to supplement his meagre pay, he is growing ever more resentful of his big brother (who, as is the case of William Shakespeare as depicted in Upstart Crow, is on the cusp of fame here).

Despite being disapproved of by Puritans, going to the theatre is very popular in Elizabethan London (theatre-goers come from all walks of life and seem surprisingly willing to suspend their disbelief for the duration of a play, which can last for several hours although Cornwell reckons that they would have been edited for performances in order to get them down to the two-hour mark). As audiences get bored with repeat performances of plays they’ve seen before, the playing companies are always in need of new material. Play manuscripts are therefore jealously guarded by the company (not the playwright) that owns them; other than getting closed down by the Pursuivants (quasi-official ruffians on the look-out for the merest hint of sedition against the Queen, this being less than a decade after the defeat of the Spanish Armada), the worst thing that can happen to a theatre company is a manuscript going missing.

One such company is the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – named for their patron, Lord Hunsdon (who, being a son of Mary Boleyn, is a cousin of Elizabeth I as well as being the Lord Chamberlain). Will Shakespeare originally joined them as an actor but has since become a partner of the company; he may not be the most handsome chap (as his better-looking brother often tells the reader), but he’s definitely the brains of the operation. He’s recently written a new comedy which will be performed indoors at his lordship’s grand-daughter’s wedding which, it is thought, will be attended by none other than Good Queen Bess herself. Funnily, he uses this play – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – to mock his fellow-actors, having written parts for them that allude to some of their foibles; brother Richard finally gets a male part, but it’s that of Francis Flute – the ‘mechanical’ who is disappointed to learn that he’s been given a female part in the play-within-a-play.

His resentment towards his brother is therefore higher than ever when the manuscript of Will’s recently-completed tragedy about two star-crossed lovers in Italy gets stolen, thus driving the plot of Fools and Mortals. This happens at around the half-way point, the first half having set the scene with plenty of detail about Elizabethan society and the politics of the time, with emphasis on theatres (which have to be outside the City of London; as the Globe won’t be built until 1599, the theatre where the on-stage action takes place is the, ah, Theatre, located off Bishopsgate) as well as sufficient background concerning how Richard ended up in London and why he resents his brother. He’s even been tapped up by a rival acting company, offering him male roles provided he steals his brother’s manuscripts, but has turned them down. But the very fact that he was approached means that the finger of suspicion points towards Richard, who must prove his innocence by figuring out who’s actually nicked it and then getting it back. The former is fairly straightforward, the latter considerably less so.

This is a pretty interesting departure for Cornwell, probably the best living historical novelist at the moment but one more associated with military adventures (in various historical periods). Fools and Mortals is more of a slow-burner than your usual Bernard Cornwell novel, and when the action does come there’s not actually a lot of it; those expecting a Tudor-era version of Sharpe or Uhtred will be disappointed. I liked it, though. There was plenty of historical detail (Cornwell, as ever, is second to none in this regard) and Richard Shakespeare made for an interesting and multi-layered character. William Shakespeare himself remains somewhat elusive, even a bit dislikeable – there’s little on why he has acted the way he has done to cause his brother’s resentment, and his domestic life is merely hinted at (he seems to have a mistress or two in London, while Anne Hathaway is back in Warwickshire with the kids). Perhaps it’s better that way. At least Cornwell is depicting William Shakespeare as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays; on top of having produced an engaging historical novel, he is fully deserving of top marks for refusing to buy into that ‘Shakespeare was written by someone else’ conspiracy nonsense.

Two Scottish novels

Following on from my visit to the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, I’ve recently been reading a couple of books by Scottish authors – John Buchan and Ian Rankin, both of whom happen to be favourite writers of mine. One is a tale of cruelty and intolerance in the Lowlands of the seventeenth century, the other a story of murder and violence in modern Edinburgh.

First published in 1927, Witch Wood is one of John Buchan’s historical novels, and as such there’s a lot more depth to this than there is in what he called his ‘shockers’ – think Midwinter rather than The Power-House and Greenmantle. Buchan himself thought of it as his best novel. It’s set in Scotland at the time of the Civil War, an age of religious extremism which came in the form of the Presbyterian-inspired Solemn League and Covenant. In such an age, those who sided with Charles I could expect to be denounced as traitors and hunted down without mercy (their leader, the Marquis of Montrose – also the subject of a biography by Buchan, and who makes a brief appearance in Witch Wood – was a particular hate-figure), while by contrast it was not unknown for apparently upstanding and devout Covenanters to privately dabble in crime and devil-worship (Major Thomas Weir of Edinburgh being the most notorious example).

Witch Wood is the story of David Sempill, a newly-ordained Church of Scotland minister sent to a Lowland village called Woodilee. Although the villagers are firm in their Covenanter beliefs, their minister is less so to the point of befriending and sheltering Mark Kerr, a fugitive supporter of the afore-mentioned Great Montrose. Such tolerance is a dangerous act in itself, but it soon turns out to be the least of his problems.

Devil-worship is at the dark heart of Witch Wood, for David witnesses a diabolic ritual taking place in the woods; the satanists’ ringleader turns out to be Ephraim Caird, a prominent elder of the Kirk who is able use his standing in the community to turn the parish against its minister. A witch-finder arrives in Woodliee, and in the communal hysteria that follows the innocent suffer more than the guilty; to this is added an outbreak of the plague (vividly described) while a love-story between David and the ethereal Katrine plays out to its tragic conclusion. It is here that Buchan comes into his own, raising questions about human nature and religious tolerance with particular reference to self-deception and self-righteousness while not yielding to the temptation to merely brand certain characters as out-and-out hypocrites, although the novel certainly does deal with the contradictions which can become apparent in a society where religion totally dominates life (to a degree that is difficult to comprehend nowadays).

The conclusion is nothing if not dramatic, as David loses everything before he finally confronts Caird in the wood, forcing the latter to choose between God and the devil. David is never seen in the locality again, thus giving rise to the legends of the minister’s disappearance which are related in the novel’s prologue. This is a novel that works on many levels, with the exploration of important questions coming alongside an excellent description of the landscape – always a strong feature of Buchan’s – and strong depictions of the ordinary parishoners caught up in the events described; farmers so attached to the land that they are known by the names of their farms, cottagers, women – especially Isobel Veitch, David’s housekeeper – and Daft Gibbie, the village idiot. These well-drawn characters serve to add another layer of complexity, for with the notable exceptions of the leader characters Buchan has written much of the dialogue in the Lowland Scots dialect which can make the story a bit hard to follow at times; thank goodness my copy – a modern Polygon paperback version – has a glossary! A heavy read, but a rewarding one which I think may well benefit from a second or even a third reading, so I’m not getting rid of my copy yet.

Of a more recent vintage (2016), Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin is the twenty-first appearance of John Rebus, the hard-nosed Edinburgh detective who by now has once again retired from the police but that doesn’t stop him from getting involved in cases alongside his younger associates, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox (both DIs in Police Scotland, as Scotland’s various constabularies became in 2013, here depicted as a somewhat frayed organisation). Here, Rebus – trying to cut down on his trademark drinking and making a surprisingly good go of giving up smoking (thanks perhaps in part to his pathologist girlfriend giving him a specimen jar containing part of a diseased lung) – becomes obsessed with an old case from the Seventies, the unsolved murder of a glamorous socialite in the Caledonian Hotel.

This isn’t the first time a Rebus novel has focussed on a case from the past (witness 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible which was in part about investigations into an old CID unit which had a distinct whiff of Life on Mars). He’s showing his age – he first appeared in Knots and Crosses, 31 years ago – and mortality isn’t far from the surface as he is diagnosed with having a shadow on one of his lungs (naturally, he takes to referring to it as Hank Marvin; musical references are never far from the surface in the Rebus books, the title of this one coming from a John Martyn song).

Age and shadows are recurring themes here, along with violence, power, greed and betrayal. Once again Rankin’s focus is on the seedy side of Edinburgh – think dodgy nightclubs and even dodgier betting-shops, with much of the action taking place in the evening rather than in broad daylight. A would-be crime boss by the name of Darryl Christie has been beaten unconscious on his own doorstep. He’s trying to fill the void left by Rebus’s old nemesis, veteran crime boss ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, and it’s not long before rumours abound that Cafferty himself is behind it, hoping to come out of retirement. The beating should be Clarke’s case, but because Christie’s money-laundering activities are of interest to HMRC, Fox – previously transferred to the Scottish Crime Campus, which Clark resented – gets involved too. An attention-seeking vagrant who serially confesses to crimes (and who had previously appeared in 1997’s Black and Blue, one of the best in the series in which Rebus investigated an updated version of the real-life ‘Bible John’ murders) serves to bring Rebus himself on board in a semi-official capacity.

There is of course a link between the decades-old murder and the beating, for Christie is associated with Anthony Brough, the scion of an old Scottish banking family – and the murder victim, Maria Turquand, had been married to a man who worked for said bank. Not that she’d been faithful to him, adding various lovers to the list of suspects which includes a rock star who was staying in the Caledonian along with his entourage at the time of the murder (and who now lives just around the corner from the hotel in question). Brough, by the way, has disappeared, and the body of an ex-copper who worked on the Turquand murder is fished out of the Leith Docks (suicide it isn’t). There’s a mysterious Russian, who’s actually Ukrainian. Oh, and there’s violence a-plenty, some of it involving a hammer and some six-inch nails.

These distinct yet interlinked plots lead to something of a juggling act on Rankin’s part. Rebus and Cafferty are approaching the same point from very different angles. Being a criminal, Big Ger of course is subject to fewer constraints – although the retired Rebus, explicitly more concerned with the outcome rather than the process, is not averse to cutting a few corners himself, such as when he pretends to be Fox (a non-drinking anti-Rebus who, despite his more by-the-book approach, is the one who becomes increasingly compromised as the plot thickens). As was the case with Buchan, local knowledge and detail are key features alongside skilled story-telling. The ‘Caley’ is a real hotel, although as Rankin points out, it’s now the Waldorf Astoria, and there are nods to ongoing roadworks on Lothian Road and (of course!) the Oxford Bar amid confusion about the geography of Edinburgh on the part of some cops sent in from elsewhere. In short, this is a fast-paced and well-told story; Rebus may be getting on a bit, but his creator is still at the top of his game.

Recent reads - four second-hand novels

A fascinating quartet of second-hand novels has been receiving my attention recently…

The Path of the King by John Buchan

Fan of John Buchan though I am, I sometimes come across works of his that I have not previously encountered; he did, after all, write a lot of books and not all of them are still in print. This one, The Path of the King (first published in 1921), comes in the form of a smart-looking red hardback which was published by Thomas Nelson (an Edinburgh publisher, which as well as publishing Buchan’s books employed him as a director; the Thomas Arthur Nelson to whom The Thirty-Nine Steps was dedicated was a descendant of the company’s founder in addition to being a friend of Buchan’s). Later described by Buchan himself (in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door) as “my first serious piece of fiction”, it is an interesting tale of how greatness in people can be transmitted down the family tree; sometimes, it  lies dormant for generations before re-igniting at the right time. The story begins with a prologue set some time after the American Civil War, in which three men around a remote campfire theorise on how the “spark” of “masterful men” can be found in the most unlikely places: “The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last places to look for masterful men … who is more likely to inherit the fire – the eldest son with his flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find? … The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn’t begin there.” I guess we modern folk would say it was all about genetics. This story begins with Biorn, a Viking prince, before jumping down a few generations to Jehan, a Norman knight – and so on. Rather like Buchan’s Sir Walter Raleigh, The Path of the King is less a coherent novel than a collection of short stories held together by a unifying thread or theme, which in this case is what happens to Biorn’s descendants down the centuries – men and women, some of them noble, some of them very ignoble indeed, all united by blood and by their possession of a family heirloom in the form of a gold ring, made from the amulet Biorn received from his father and which I suppose acts as the physical manifestation of the “spark”. They get caught up in events like the Norman Conquest, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Popish Plot, and they encounter real people like Joan of Arc, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell and Daniel Boone. Eventually, the “spark” resurfaces in nineteenth-century America, in the form of Abraham Lincoln who is descended from Biorn on his mother’s side. He loses the gold ring, but it is no longer needed as it is he in whom the long-dormant “spark” will reignite – something his dying mother recognises. The epilogue has three men witness Lincoln’s funeral parade following his assassination; one of them (an American professor) remarks that “there goes the first American”, to which another (a British diplomat) replies: “I dare say you are right, Professor. But I think it is also the last of the Kings.” As novels go, this is very much one for those who are interested in history, and it reflects Buchan’s fascination with the New World and its ancestral links with the Old – particularly in his treatment of Lincoln and the admiration expressed for him by the British character at the end, which can be looked at in the context of people like Buchan looking to promote a spirit of cohesion between English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading this as an historical novel, it has to be noted that the the fact that so many real people and events over different centuries can be successfully woven into the plot in a way that it doesn’t feel like they’ve been crow-barred into it is testimony to Buchan’s great skill as an author.

The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn by Russell Thorndike

Having recently touched on this particular character when looking into smuggling on Romney Marsh, I was delighted to find a couple of old Doctor Syn paperbacks in a charity shop recently; the adventures of this most extraordinary of fictional clergymen, written by Russell Thorndike, ran to seven in total and have long been out of print. They make no claim to be great literature but as adventure stories they are most definitely up there with the exploits of (say) the Scarlet Pimpernel, Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe. Published in 1939, Courageous Exploits was the fifth Doctor Syn book to be written, but if the novels are to be read in sequence it’s the fourth. By this stage in the series, the Reverend Doctor Syn is well established at Dymchurch as the much-loved local vicar and, under the identity of the ‘Scarecrow’, the ruthless leader of the Night Riders, the local smuggler gang (the secret of his identity is known only to a select few). Exasperated by the Night Riders’ continued success, the Admiralty has sent the ruthless Captain Blain down to Romney Marsh to defeat them and bring the Scarecrow to justice; his men are to be billeted in a local barn, while the captain himself moves into the vicarage! There follows a series of cat-and-mouse adventures, which could stand alone as short stories as well as parts of a coherent whole, as Blain tries to do his duty while Syn, or rather his alter ego the Scarecrow, rises to the challenge by growing ever bolder. A real historical person, the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), makes an appearance – as he does, funnily enough, in the adventures of the other three fictional heroes I have mentioned above. As is the case with “that demmed, elusive Pimpernel”, in Courageous Exploits HRH manages to encounter both Doctor Syn and the Scarecrow and respect the pair of them while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are the same person. This is good, old-fashioned adventure; a modern version would doubtless dwell more on the duality of Syn himself, the upstanding community leader who is also its most notorious criminal, and there would doubtless be a lot of trying to impose the values of the present onto late-eighteenth-century England which would mean that it would not be anywhere near as much fun to read. The Doctor Syn books may be out of print, but they are still worth looking into.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

As was the case with John Buchan, I first discovered P.G. Wodehouse when I was in my early teens, at first because of the superb Jeeves and Wooster TV series with Melchett and George from Blackadder – sorry, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – in the title roles. They were brilliant in that, by the way, and it was but a short step from watching Jeeves and Wooster to discovering the books on which the series was based, of which the school library had a plentiful supply. Oddly, though, I never really progressed much beyond the Jeeves stories – the other Wodehouse creations, like Psmith and the Blandings crowd, didn’t really hold much appeal and while I have tried over the years to expand my horizons in the world of Wodehouse I always find myself coming back to the Jeeves stories. Maybe it’s because they are told in the first person, with that upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster as the narrator, he being not so much an unreliable narrator but one who is not in full grasp of everything that’s going on. Luckily, though, he has Jeeves, the incredibly clever manservant who is able to extract his master, and at times his master’s friends, from the most unlikely and desperate of scenarios, allowing them to continue to amuse themselves, and us readers, at the Drones Club and various country houses. There are a lot of things going on in The Inimitable Jeeves, what with Bertie’s chum Bingo Little falling in love with every woman he meets, his rather scary Aunt Agatha trying to get Bertie married off at every conceivable opportunity, the mental-health specialist Sir Roderick Glossop (who, naturally, thinks Bertie’s off his rocker) putting in the odd appearance and his cousins Claude and Eustace (“the curse of the human race”) getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Unlike some of the Jeeves books, The Inimitable Jeeves is actually not so much a novel as a collection of short stories (they first appeared in The Strand Magazine before coming out in book form in 1923), although some of them do follow on from one another. Some showcase Wodehouse at his best, with the humour deriving from the most unlikely sources. For example, ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ is all about a group of young men, led by Claude and Eustace, placing bets on which of the local vicars in a corner of rural Gloucestershire will preach the longest sermon on a particular Sunday; naturally, Bertie and Jeeves get drawn into the mayhem that ensues. More of the same can be encountered in ‘The Purity of the Turf’ which involves bets being placed on, and attempts being made to rig, the races in a rural parish’s sports day (Mothers’ Sack Race, Choir Boys’ Hundred Yard Handicap, etc). There are some great set-pieces too, like the time Bertie has Sir Roderick for lunch on the same day that Claude and Eustace hide three cats and the top hat that they have stolen from Sir Roderick in Bertie’s flat, Bingo pretending to be a communist and Bertie actually getting one over on Aunt Agatha when the woman she’s been trying to set him up with turns out to be a jewel-thief. Finally, Bertie’s ongoing claim to be an author of romantic fiction under the pen-name of Rosie M. Banks (originally done in order for him to impress Bingo’s uncle so that he can persuade him to increase the ever cash-strapped Bingo’s allowance) gets exposed as a sham when it emerges that the woman whom Bingo has just married is not a waitress as he had supposed but none other than Rosie M. Banks herself. Only Jeeves can sort out this unholy mess. Hilarious.

Who Pays the Ferryman? by Michael J. Bird

The TV series of this name was before my time, but I’d vaguely heard about it from somewhere – it is set in the mid-to-late Seventies and concerns Alan Haldane, a middle-aged Englishman returning to Crete, the island where as a young man he spent part of the Second World War fighting in the mountains with the andartes of the Greek Resistance. He wants to try and reconnect with his wartime lover, but soon finds out that she is dead although she did bear him a daughter who is unaware of her true parentage. While many see ‘Leandros’ (Haldane’s nom de guerre among the andartes) as a returning hero there are a few who wish him ill because of what happened during the war. Seeing this in a charity shop, I was interested as I have previously read and enjoyed books about occupation and resistance during the War, both fictional (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Guns of Navarone, etc) and factual (Ill Met by Moonlight, and for what it’s worth the real-life Kriepe kidnapping gets referred to in Who Pays the Ferryman?, the implication being that the fictional Haldane was somehow involved in this operation along with Billy Moss and Paddy Leigh Fermor). The novel version of Who Pays the Ferryman? is based on the TV series, not the other way round (Bird, whose TV dramas were usually set in the Mediterranean, wrote both). It is pretty good, although there are some annoying typos which might indicate that publication was a somewhat rushed job, the TV series having been very popular in its day (1977). As for the plot itself, a slow-burner of a relationship between Haldane and Annika, the sister of his old love (she being unaware that Haldane is her niece’s biological father, and he being reluctant to commit to her for that very reason) plays out alongside sub-plots like an Australian visitor trying to lay the past (in the form of his late Cretan grandfather) to rest, the sudden appearance of Haldane’s (English) ex and Haldane’s restoration of an old caique (sailing-boat), while in the background a vendetta against Haldane establishes itself. The characters are well-rounded and very believable. It’s a good story which shows us that war casts shadows which continue to fall long after the guns have stopped, and that while actions always have consequences, it can sometimes take decades for the consequences to make themselves known. I liked this book enough to find some episodes of the TV series on YouTube, and very good it is too.

Jamaica Inn

[Spoiler alert – don’t read on if you do not wish to have the major plot-twist of Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier revealed to you.]

“Bodmin is the greatest and wildest stretch of moorland in Cornwall … I came unprepared for its dark, diabolic beauty. People say that my fictional characters seem to emerge from the places where my stories are set, and certainly when I first set eyes on the old, granite-faced inn itself it made me think there was a story there, peopled with moorland folk in strange harmony with their background.”

So wrote Daphne du Maurier (in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall) about the Jamaica Inn, a moorland pub/hotel located in a hamlet called Bolventor which is just off the A30 in the middle of Bodmin Moor, about mid-way between Launceston and Bodmin (both of which have at some point served as Cornwall’s county town). It’s about a mile away from Dozmary Pool, a small lake which some say was the lake where King Arthur received his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. But I digress; back to the Jamaica Inn. Although much altered over the years (it’s been renovated considerably since du Maurier’s time), the current building dates back to around 1750 although there’s been an inn on the site since at least the 1540s, serving as a staging-post for the changing of horses on stagecoaches travelling on the London-to-Penzance road which, as the A30, went straight through Bolventor until a by-pass was built in the 1970s. I cannot say what it is like as a pub, for I, like many a traveller in the West Country, have only ever used it as a brief stopping-point on the way home, as a last place to get a coffee and a few Cornish souvenirs before heading back across the Tamar.

It is, of course, famous today for being the main venue for Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier first visited the Jamaica Inn in the early 1930s at the suggestion of a friend of hers, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – a prolific writer, known as ‘Q’, best remembered today for being the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse. She ended up going there with Q’s daughter, and while staying there they decided to ride a few miles across the moor to visit someone. Unfortunately the weather turned, and in rain and fog they got lost – in the end, they resorted to leaving the reins loose and hoping that the horses would lead them back to the inn, which they eventually did.

It was her stay at the Jamaica Inn that inspired her to write the novel of the same name, her second, which was published in 1936. In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, Mary Yellan, a farm girl from Helford in the south-west of the county, goes to live with her aunt and uncle after the death of her mother. Her uncle, Joss Merlyn (who she has never met before) is the landlord of the Jamaica Inn, and even before Mary gets there on “a cold grey day in late November” we readers get the impression that all is not well at the isolated roadside inn. The coachman initially refuses to go beyond Bodmin, and it’s only after Mary tells him that she’s the landlord’s niece that he is reluctantly persuaded to take her there, and he’s very cagey as to why (“Jamaica’s got a bad name … Respectable folk don’t go to Jamaica any more”).

Strange things are indeed happening at Jamaica which, despite being on the main road, has no passing trade. Joss Merlyn is a violent drunkard (although, as he points out during one of his drinking-sessions, “I’m not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forgotten spot”; that comes later), while his wife – the sister of Mary’s late mother – is a timid, almost ghost-like figure. The only activity is at night, when horse-drawn waggons occasionally arrive to unload vast amounts of goods at the inn (the passage in which Mary witnesses this from her bedroom window is particularly good). Then there’s the late-night drinking-session that occurs when strange men come from all over Cornwall, and which ends with Joss Merlyn ordering the murder of one of the men. Mary assumes that her uncle is heavily involved in smuggling – with the inn being used to store contraband that’s been landed all over the county – but it is actually worse than that. For Uncle Joss is not involved in smuggling but wrecking – the act of deliberately luring ships onto the rocks of the northern Cornish coast, and then murdering survivors and stealing whatever the ships are carrying.

Meanwhile, there’s Bodmin Moor itself, for this is a tale as much of a place as it is of people. All around Jamaica Inn and its nefarious goings-on is the brooding presence of the moor – “a silent, desolate country … vast and untouched by human hand; on the high tors the slabs of stone leant against one another in strange shapes and forms, massive sentinals who had stood there since God first fashioned them”. Like her creator, Mary Yellan goes for a walk out on the moor – she gets lost, and is saved (more or less) by the local vicar.

Ah, the vicar. The Reverend Francis Davey, who happens to be an albino, is the vicar of the nearby village of Altarnun (like the Jamaica Inn, a real place, located in the north-eastern edge of Bodmin Moor). He comes across as being a kindly man, but all is not what it seems. For it is the vicar who is the real villain of Jamaica Inn, the unlikely brains behind Joss Merlyn’s brawn. He’s only revealed as the leader of the wreckers towards the end, of course, after Mary finds a picture of his in which he depicts himself as a wolf preaching to his congregation who are shown as sheep.

I really enjoyed Jamaica Inn, even though reading it ‘blind’ – not knowing who the real villain of the piece is – is difficult, as the story is so well-known. Would I have seen that twist towards the end coming had I not already known that the vicar was the bad guy? It’s impossible to say. I’d’ve liked to have seen more characterisation of said villain, though, but that’s not really possible when his true identity is revealed so late in the novel (and, as we shall see, revealing him as the baddie-in-chief earlier would’ve ruined the whole thing). Part of me wonders if it might have worked better had du Maurier made Mary Yellan the narrator rather than telling the story in the third person. From my own perspective, though, the main thing I was wondering about was how the evil vicar compares to another fictional man of the cloth who turns out to be heavily involved in activities of a nocturnal and highly illegal nature.

I refer, of course, to Doctor Syn. How does the Vicar of Altarnun measure up against the Vicar of Dymchurch? It’s rather hard to say, for Doctor Syn (similarly not revealed as the smuggler leader until close to the end of the original novel in which he appeared) got to return in six adventures that fill out his considerable back-story – for which we readers must be thankful that Russell Thorndike’s acting career did not pan out as he’d hoped, forcing him back to writing novels. Daphne du Maurier, of course, was (unlike Thorndike) a novelist first and foremost, and she never saw any reason to return to the characters of Jamaica Inn (although it would be great to have had a sequel about how Mary’s relationship with Jem Merlyn pans out after they leave Cornwall at the end). Plus, of course, it is easier to make a smuggler leader into a sort-of hero (in a Robin Hood way) than it is a wrecker leader, given how the latter activity involves a lot of cold-blooded murder (or did it? This, I feel, is something that should be explored in greater depth in another ‘Historic English crime’ piece!). So, as far as the Reverend Davey is concerned, he’s a more out-and-out villain than the Reverend Doctor Syn for that reason, but we have just a few hints at how a man of God came to be the leader of a gang of wreckers: “I am a freak in nature and a freak in time. I do not belong here, and I was born with a grudge against this age, and a grudge against mankind. Peace is very hard to find … I thought to find it in the Christian Church, but the dogma sickened me”. There are also hints at an obsession with paganism which might, if dealt with in any more depth, tie in with the elemental nature of the moor (“I have stood in the church at midnight, Mary, and listened to the silence; there is a murmur in the air and a whisper of unrest that is bred deep in the soil and has no knowledge of the church and Altarnun”), but no more. At the end, the Reverend Davey remains a bit of an enigma, just like Rachel in My Cousin Rachel. And it’s the enigmatic bit that makes Daphne du Maurier’s characters linger in the memory long after you’ve finished reading her books.

Even the ones you already know about, for Jamaica Inn has been adapted several times. Unfortunately, a couple of the more high-profile adaptations haven’t been particularly good, with the film and TV people failing to do the novel justice. There was that BBC adaptation back in 2014, which didn’t go down too well thanks to the almost-inaudible dialogue; the 1983 ITV version, with Jane Seymour as Mary Yellan and Patrick McGoohan as Joss Merlyn, is much better. And then, back in 1939, there was the Alfred Hitchcock version.

Jamaica Inn was to be the last British film to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock before he moved to Hollywood (decades later, he would return to his native London to make Frenzy). It wasn’t one of his better efforts. Problems began when he had to comply with Hollywood’s Production Code, which frowned upon negative depictions of the clergy – meaning that the Reverend Davey was replaced as the villain of the piece by a local squire called Sir Humphrey Pengallan (the English gentry, of course, was fair game). Hitchcock then managed to do away with much of the novel’s tension and suspense. This, one suspects, was mainly because Charles Laughton, the actor who played Sir Humphrey, was also one of the film’s producers and demanded that his character have more lines (Laughton had a lot of pull in the British film industry back then, having won the Oscar for Best Actor a few years previously for playing the title role in The Private Life of Henry VIII). This forced Hitchcock to have him revealed as the baddie sooner than planned. Daphne du Maurier didn’t like it, to the point that she apparently considered withholding the film rights to Rebecca, which had been published a year earlier. Thankfully, she relented, and Rebecca was made into a film by Hitchcock in America a year later.

There's something about Rachel

Last year, work took me first to Rotherhithe and then to a farm outside Rickmansworth. By ‘work’, I am in this context referring to being a film extra; Rotherhithe was where I went for the fitting and Rickmansworth for the filming. The fitting was done in under an hour, as is usually the case, and the filming – rather unusually – was over before lunchtime. Such was my very modest contribution to the movie My Cousin Rachel, and for what it’s worth a mere couple of seconds of the scene I was in made the final cut.

[Spoiler alert: if you have neither seen the film My Cousin Rachel nor read the novel of the same name, be prepared to have key plot details (including the ending) revealed to you if you continue reading this blog-post. You have been warned.]

Naturally one feels obliged to go to the cinema to see the films one is in (or in this case the films one might have been in, had the director decided that the flashback scenes required a couple more minutes than they ended up getting), and as My Cousin Rachel is based on a novel I also felt obliged to read said novel. So, for the first time in my life, I sat down and read a Daphne du Maurier novel. I’ve seen and enjoyed film versions of her work before – Rebecca, The Birds, Don’t Look Now – but I’d never read one of her books. Until last month. For the record, My Cousin Rachel was first published in 1951 and this is not the first time it was made into a film (that was in 1952, and I have not seen that version).

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though.” 

The opening lines both grab the reader and give the first hint of murder, and hints of murder are what this story is all about. The opener is followed by a description of a decaying body (that of a convicted murderer) encased in a gibbet, and after the first few-dozen pages one of the main characters is dead in what are presented as suspicious circumstances. Ambrose Ashley is central to the plot despite being dead, for it is the manner in which he died that is at the heart of My Cousin Rachel. He is the one who raised Philip – his orphaned cousin, the novel’s narrator – on the family’s Cornish estate in a curiously female-free environment; a man content with avoiding the company of women and yet one who suddenly decided to marry his other cousin, the titular Rachel, when he met her when he went to Italy for his health. His death not long after marrying Rachel is the event that drives the rest of the novel.

It is young Philip who, via a rather alarming letter and an all-too-late trip to Florence, has to come to terms with Ambrose’s death at the same time as coming to terms with the existence of this mysterious female cousin on whom he has never laid eyes. Rachel, of course, comes to Cornwall and Philip’s feelings towards her are confused enough before he receives further communication from the late Ambrose in the form of letters or fragments of letters that surface throughout the novel. Philip’s only friend, Louise (the rather sensible daughter of his rather sensible godfather and the girl who everyone appears to have assumed he would one day marry), can only stand by and occasionally provide the voice of reason as he veers between feelings of hatred and infatuation towards his beguiling, enigmatic cousin Rachel.

It’s one of those books that has stayed with me since, mainly due to the ambiguity over the central question: Did Rachel kill Ambrose? Well, did she? Du Maurier does well to keep the reader guessing even after the end by providing no definitive answer. Even at the end, we do not know for sure. At first I was convinced that she had killed him, then I wasn’t so sure, then I was absolutely certain and then at the end doubts resurfaced once again.

Rachel, of course, is not the type to do something as rash as incriminate herself – assuming, of course, that she has anything to incriminate herself about, she being to all intents and purposes the grieving widow who has come to see her late husband’s estate that he was always talking about. Therefore, all Philip has to go on are the afore-mentioned letters which occasionally appear and his own gut instinct, and neither of these can be considered to be entirely reliable. The reliability of what cousin Ambrose says in his letters about Rachel trying to kill him is brought into question by Rachel herself, who tells Philip about his deteriorating mental state prior to his death; but then, if she did indeed kill Ambrose she would of course have a vested interest in making sure that the content of his letters is discredited as the ravings of a diseased mind. As for Philip’s gut instinct – well, he’s a bit of a fool is Philip, first building Rachel up to be an evil murderer before he meets her, and then making an idiot of himself as he falls for her despite what he thinks about her supposed role in his beloved cousin’s death.

A good farmer and a competent manager of a country estate he may be, but boy is Philip Ashley useless when it comes to interacting with a woman (the shortcomings of Ambrose’s unconventional way of raising him become clear as events take their course). Philip presents a string of pearls (a valuable family heirloom) to her as a Christmas present, only to be forced to take them back. Although Ambrose left the estate to him and not Rachel, he signs everything over to her despite being advised not to. He then becomes convinced that having sex with her equates to a successful proposal of marriage; this turns out to be particularly humiliating as he doesn’t bother to clarify the situation with Rachel before telling everyone that they’re engaged. The involvement of Rainaldi, the shady Italian lawyer who Philip mistrusted on sight in Italy and who over the course of the plot turns up in Cornwall, adds to Philip’s frustration and confusion; rather like Doctor Watson and Bertie Wooster, he is not so much an unreliable narrator as a narrator who doesn’t have all of the facts to hand (but unlike them, he has no Holmes or Jeeves to explain things and put things right).

It’s only when Philip himself falls ill, with symptoms not unlike those that affected Ambrose, that he (on recovering) veers back to his original hypothesis regarding Rachel’s involvement in Ambrose’s death, and for good measure it looks as though she might have been trying to do away with him too. All that tisana that she insists on making for Philip looks rather suspicious (a special brew just for him?), but he and by extension we cannot be sure even though there is strong circumstantial evidence (those laburnum seeds, “poisonous to cattle, and to men”) to suggest that this may have been the method by which she did for Ambrose.

But enough doubt remains. Rest assured, though, that we readers and viewers are not the only ones in the dark. A revealing line in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall shows that the author herself wasn’t entirely sure about Rachel’s guilt: “I have often been asked whether Rachel was really guilty of murdering Ambrose or whether it was in Philip’s mind. I cannot answer the question. One moment I thought, ‘Well, I wonder if she is?’ and the next moment I was not at all sure. What is certain is that our past will not be buried, for it is alive, with us and within us.”

As My Cousin Rachel nears its climax, one of the characters is on the same wave-length as the author, and it’s not the narrator: “‘If there is no proof,’ said Louise, ‘you cannot condemn her. She may be innocent. She may be guilty. You can do nothing. If she be innocent, and you accused her, you could never forgive yourself. You would be guilty then, and she not at all ... I wish now we had not meddled with her things.’”

This makes Philip’s actions at the end all the more questionable. Although he cannot be sure of Rachel’s guilt, he is nevertheless prepared to send her to her death by encouraging her to go for a walk in the terraced garden without warning her that the newly-installed bridge is merely decorative and not in any way load-bearing (in the movie, he encourages her to take the horse for a ride on the top of a cliff that he knows to be dangerous; the effect is the same). With Rachel dead, the question of her guilt must go unanswered; suspicion is and was always tempered by doubt. But it does raise the issue of Philip being responsible for Rachel’s death; does him sending her out into the garden (or onto the cliff) without warning her of the dangers make him guilty of murder? It’s tantamount to manslaughter at least, and Louise clearly suspects worse (“‘What have you done?’ she said; and apprehension came upon her, conviction too.”).

What is not in doubt is the fact that My Cousin Rachel is a thoroughly engrossing read; the question of whether or not Rachel is a murderer is frustratingly left unanswered, but conversely that is in itself what makes the book so fascinating; had du Maurier provided a definite answer one way or the other, I suspect it would not have remained in my mind some two weeks after I had finished it.

And the film? Well, it was well-acted (especially by Rachel Weisz as Rachel) but it had a predictable feel to it that the novel did not. In addition, I wasn’t overly impressed with the way in which the film-makers contrived to provide Philip with a happy-ish ending (marrying Louise, no less) after the death of Rachel, rather than the ambiguity concerning his fate that du Maurier provided by repeating those haunting first lines at the end; as a reader I was left with a very real sense that, for all the question-marks about Rachel murdering Ambrose, there is much in those last few paragraphs to suggest that Philip’s fate is to be thought of as the murderer of Rachel; why on Earth would Louise or anyone else marry such a man?

So there we have it. Much to my surprise, I find myself at the age of 38 teetering on the brink of becoming a fan of Daphne du Maurier. Naturally I will have to read some more of her books before I can be sure of this new departure in my literary tastes, and following a recent trip to Cornwall which involved stopping at a certain old coaching inn on Bodmin Moor I have an idea about what the next one will be…