Describing - or not describing - your characters

Today I came across this piece I'd written back in 2004, and never seem to have done anything more with. If nothing else it's fun to read how different writers describe their characters: 

A character in a recent* Tim La Haye novel is described as ‘a hunk with dark hair.’  This may not be La Haye’s fault, since he regularly uses other writers to fill out the details, but it’s symptomatic of the weak descriptions prevalent in many current popular novels.

Here’s another from a recent thriller: ‘Linda. Soft, beautiful, generous, and solid, his backbone for three and a half decades.’ Solid? 

Many writers tend to avoid describing characters these days, partly a result of fashion, and partly a result of the ‘show, don’t tell’ school of writing, whereby they reveal their characters through dialogue and action. But an author who can give us a succinct description of one of their creations, adds something to the reader’s imagination.

Consider Agatha Christie’s first description of Hercule Poirot: ‘He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.’

Dorothy Sayers’ detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, fares worse: ‘His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.’ Looking at the various images of Wimsey, from drawings to TV performances, no one seems to have achieved anything like this wonderful description. 

Chesterton manages to describe Father Brown in endless ways, but here are a couple: ‘there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage.’ [He had] ‘a breathless geniality which characterises a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus.’

P G Wodehouse not describing a minor character: ‘There is no need to describe Teddy Weeks….a sickeningly handsome young man, possessing precisely the same melting eyes, mobile mouth, and corrugated hair so esteemed by the theatre-going public today.’

One of my favourite character descriptions comes from Middlemarch. George Eliot gives us more than a page on Sir James, so it’s difficult to pull out any particular piece, but here goes: ‘a man’s mind – what there is of it – has always the advantage of being masculine – as the smallest birch tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm – and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.’ Fortunately, Sir James turns out to be worth more than this description of him. 

Likewise, Annie Proulx in The Shipping News builds up a picture of her main character paragraph by ruthless paragraph: ‘A great damp loaf of a body. Head shaped like a crenshaw,** no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the colour of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.’ It’s almost as if she didn’t like him very much.

And finally, Shakespeare on one of his favourite characters, Falstaff: ‘that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years.’

* 'Recent' in 2004, that is. 

** A variety of melon, apparently. 

It's probable this piece was originally intended as a column for the NZ Anglican magazine, Taonga. Those columns were published under the heading of The Juggling Bookie. 

Weak week on Netflix

It's been a couple of weeks of poor selections on Netflix NZ. We watched the first episode of Daughters of Destiny, about a school for lower caste children in India. Each one is selected and their education is paid for. It was interesting but quite slow, and so far we haven't watched any more of it. 

We gave up on Operation Buffalo, a dreadfully overacted and overdone Australian series which didn't seem to know whether it was a comedy or a drama. Set in the Australian desert where scientists were testing atom bombs, it quickly got sidetracked into a subplot about a rapist. The actors were working hard, but something just wasn't quite coming together. 

A Suitable Boy was all very pretty and colourful, but unengaging. Based on a now classic 20th century novel, it should have had everything going for it. Survived one episode. 

Another story mostly set in India, White Tiger, was about a young man who was doing his best to become successful when his family and village were dragging him down. Again it couldn't work out whether it wanted to play for laughs or for drama, and kept falling between the two stools. Not only that the crude language used not only by the main character but also by a gang of drivers kept getting in the way of any enjoyment. Along with crude behaviour. We didn't manage to finish the first episode. 

I've mentioned The Girl on the Train in another post. It was perhaps the worst piece to come from this week though we watched it right through. Oceans Eight wasn't quite up to the mark of the others in the Ocean series but with some stellar actresses in the cast, it couldn't fail completely. 

And finally, as of this moment, an adaptation of Agatha Christie's murder mystery, Crooked House. According to some sources this was one of her two favourite novels amongst those she'd written. Sadly, the film comes nowhere near being a favourite. The story remains somewhat the same, but has made some odd choices in terms of changing the source material. 

Charles Haywood acts as the kind of glue that holds the story together, but for some reason he's played by Max Irons (son of Jeremy Irons) as a dull, stolid character with almost no charm. Perhaps this was the director's decision, since the film as a whole is dull and stolid. Various top actors do their best to enliven the proceedings, including Glenn Close and Gillian Anderson (in one of her typical disguises) but even they can't keep the film from sinking and sinking. 

The biggest mystery in this story, compared to Christie's original, is why this family would allow an outsider to wander round the house, barging into rooms, accosting people with questions and ignoring their requests for him to go. Character aspects of the original novel are dropped completely: the second wife's lover who's supposed to be tutor to the children though there's never any sign of it, was originally a conscientious objector as well; this has been removed from the film, as has the science background of younger brother's wife. Neither of these is a great omission, but considering the length of the film, and the slowness of the pace of much of it, it would have benefitted the actors to have had more backstories and not just each be presented as yet another jealous member of disgruntled family. 

The child in the book is ugly-looking, not just ugly-natured as in the film. This gives the ending of the movie a real awkwardness, quite apart from the fact that the writer chose to reverse the placing of some of the final revelations, so that we know too much too early. The film ends with a literal bang (and one of the worst pieces of CGI you'll see in a while) but that's followed by a whimper. There's barely any climax, and the words The End suddenly truncate the movie as a whole. 

It's hard to believe that anyone could fail to produce an interesting and exciting film of an Agatha Christie story, but Gilles Paquet-Brenner manages with ease. He seems to think this is a film noir - many of the interiors are darkly lit, and there's little sunshine in the exteriors. He lacks the light touch that's required to make Christie's story believable when dramatised, and so we never really get into sympathy with any of the characters, including the two young leads. 

Peters and Rankin

I came across some of Ellis Peters' non-Brother Cadfael murder mysteries at an op shop in Devonport the other day, none of which I'd read or seen before. Decided to start with A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. It's an Inspector Felse mystery, though since he's on holiday with his family in this one his detective work is minimal. The plot is neat enough, with a few surprises, though I thought I'd figured out the villain early on, and for once was right. Except that things weren't quite as they seemed, and Peters had one or two twists up her sleeve before the end.
The dialogue made things seem very dated - it was written in 1965. Perhaps the most curious thing was having both the 18-year-old and the 15-year-old boys in the story call their respective mothers Mummy.  Even among the middle-classes of that period I would have thought this was a little odd.  In this book the characters don't seem to have distinctive voices, and sometimes when Peters doesn't qualify who's speaking, you can't actually tell who's speaking from what's being said. It seems that it takes a much stronger character, like Cadfael, to lift the bar for Peters.  In the Cadfael books it's generally seemed to me that most of the characters had personality - as opposed to having it described. I find this with Agatha Christie too.  If one of her strong characters, such as Poirot, or Miss Marple, is missing, the tone of the dialogue goes downhill.  These strong characters somehow make the other characters take on more life.  Of course there are Christie books in which nothing comes alive, but they aren't the majority.
I finished reading another book I picked up secondhand, last night: Ian Rankin's Doors Open. Compared to the more well-known Rebus books (Rebus is another character who lifts everything around him) this is largely a lightweight story, though it has an intricate plot and some considerable violence towards the end.  But it shows that Rankin isn't going to die as an author if he's not writing about Rebus. Still, the main character here isn't as rounded as Rebus, and he and the other characters are mostly subservient to the plot. The characters aren't memorable, as Rebus is, but they do well enough given their own room to play in, and the story is very entertaining, especially the way in which the professional criminal (as opposed to the amateurs he's surrounded by) keeps us guessing as to whether he's actually got a heart with a leaning towards culture or not.
The plot centres around an improbable heist - pinching reasonably famous, and certainly valuable, paintings from the storage warehouse belonging to Scotland's National Gallery, replacing them with fakes and then pretending there was no actual heist at all. Of course it all unravels, and the best part of the book is seeing how the various individuals react to the unravelling.  If you've had enough of gloomy Rebus for the time being (and when you think you have you find you can still take more of him) try this one out.  You'll read it in great gulps.

Doing things in Auckland

For the past week I've been in Auckland, and haven't heard a radio, haven't watched television, and have only touched a computer to print out the boarding passes for our flight back to Dunedin.  Of course, we had an iPad with us, and my new Samsung Galaxy phone, so we had plenty of communication with the outside world, but in the house we were staying at they barely watch television any more (and who can blame them?) and the radio isn't turned on as a matter of course. 

We did Sudukos and read books, and went out and so on, so we were hardly starved for entertainment.  I finished one of Agatha Christie's least successful books, A Pocket Full of Rye, a book so contrived to fit to the silly nursery rhyme that characterization is virtually nil, and plot isn't much better. The murderer is a disappointment, because we actually want someone who provides a much more interesting solution to the plot.  There were times when Christie could be quite witty, and could allow her characters to speak for themselves. Here, however, she's forever providing stereotypes, so that the characters are barely distinguishable from each other as people. She also introduces a new detective, Neele, but he's such a dullard (though she keeps telling us he's not) that she has to bring Miss Marple in about three-quarters of the way through to provide some light relief.

I also finished reading Justin Lee's Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate.  This is one of the most generous-hearted books on this usually contentious subject I've come across, that I would recommend it to anyone who wants to find a way through the current mire. Not that Lee has all the answers, or attempts to give them, but he does want people from both sides to acknowledge each other and be able to communicate. I'll probably write more about it at another time. 

We went to see Speaking in Tongues, by Australian playwright, Andrew Bovell.  This NZ production, at the Herald Theatre, was brilliantly put across by the four actors (all familiar faces from TV) and their director.  The cast played nine roles in all, each person in the story intersecting at some point with at least one other character.  Structurally I'm not sure that it quite works, but the scenes within the piece are often intense and there's a great deal of reflection on relationships throughout. It's certainly a very actor-driven piece; they're required to perform considerable feats not only of memory but of timing: the show opens with two actors often speaking in unison, but not necessarily the same two actors; they often cut into each other's lines and finish them off and so on. Other scenes are more conventional in approach but there's a terrific section in the second half when a recording of one of the actresses is intermingled with the live dialogue. The sound person is very involved in this play, and has to be on his/her toes constantly.

When I say structurally I'm not sure that it works I mean that individual scenes work to a climax - for the most part - but the two acts don't particularly.  In fact, the night we went, so unsure was the audience that the first act had ended that no one clapped. When it became evident that it had indeed ended I was so amazed at the silence, that I started to clap and was soon joined by some others. The second act ends in a similarly abrupt way with a number of loose ends left hanging.  While I appreciate that Bovell is probably not intending to write a 'well-made' play in the older sense, I couldn't quite see why he worked against the elements he presented to such a degree that he left his audience a bit stranded.  Anyway, what do I know?  The play has been a huge success wherever it's been presented.  I think this is mainly because it provides the actors with such rich characters to work on. Apparently the film version, (Lantana) is more cohesive (our hosts actually watched it the next night on DVD), so maybe that's a hint that Bovell felt he needed to bring some more order to things in the screen version. 

We also attended the Joan Baez concert, on Thursday, at the wonderfully over-the-top Civic Theatre.  It's like Dunedin's St James Theatre used to be before it was hacked around and turned into several smaller cinemas. Joan was preceded by Kate Fagin, an Australian folk singer (or 'independent roots' singer, as she's dubbed on her website), who suddenly appeared on stage, sang a song, introduced herself, sang another song (again accompanying herself on the guitar) and then sang two more songs with piano accompaniment.  She was good, but the crowd really wanted to see Baez.  Most curiously, after Fagin, there was a fifteen to twenty-minute interval, in spite of the fact that Fagin had taken only about ten to fifteen minutes herself.  The stage was reset for Baez and her group, and you had to wonder why what Fagin had done was so remarkably different to what was then set up; surely it could all have been left as it was.  Anyway, after a bit of an irritating interval, with a kind of amateurish feel to all the jostling about that went on onstage, Joan finally appeared - unannounced, something that the NZ Herald critic thought was poorly handled - and just began to sing.  Her charisma made you forget the weak start to the programme (in different circumstances, I'm sure that Fagin is a very good performer), and she was soon joined by her son, Gabriel Harris, on percussion, and the multi-instrumentalist, Dirk Powell, who during the evening played banjo, guitar, bass guitar, piano, fiddle, accordion, and probably something else. Baez's assistant, Grace Stomber, a short young lady, joined Joan in one or two of the songs, but mostly contented herself with swapping Baez's guitars between every song during the entire night. Presumably she was off tuning them and adding capos or maybe even giving them a bit of polish.

Anyway, Baez was wonderful when singing in her middle to low register; struggling a bit in her upper register.  She is 72, so she has an excuse for no longer being able to sing as she once did, but for the most part her vocals floated with ease across the accompaniments, often sliding between the beats but never losing their rhythm.  My wife was the one who'd been really keen to see her, since she's been a fan of Baez since the early sixties.  But I was won over to her as well; I've heard her songs sung around the house as long as my wife and I have been married, but it was altogether different hearing them sung by a little old lady picking away at a guitar in front of a couple of thousand mostly grey or white-haired people.

For a full review of the evening read Liz Gunn on the 13th Floor. 

Three Act Tragedy

Last night I finished reading Agatha Christie's 1935 mystery, Three Act Tragedy.  I've had it on my shelves for years, but never actually read it before.  Christie makes a wonderful jubilee from some of the heavier reading I seem to have been doing of late, and this book not only has a neat plot, it keeps you guessing even while Poirot is doing his usual summing-up at the end.  You start to realise who the murderer is, but hope, for the sake of one of the other characters, that it isn't.

It features an actor, Sir Charles Cartwright, and the book is full of references to acting, the stage and the theatricality of normal behaviour - Poirot's included - and the way in which people play at being someone they're not.  It also has some of Christie's allusions to the art of writing murder mysteries: the three main characters, who do most of the leg-work for Poirot, continually compare what is happening in their 'real life' to what happens in books. And it has some of Christie's delightful humour (she occasionally compares with P G Wodehouse in her wit), the same sort of humour I noted when I performed in a production of The Mousetrap a couple of years ago.  The world of the novel is one that's mostly gone, I suspect - people who live without any obvious means of support, 'penniless' upper class people, and an assortment of servants.  And people with names like Mary Lytton Gore, known as 'Egg'.  Christie is quite good at names - certainly they're memorable, unlike those in many modern thrillers. Occasionally she goes a little too close to absurdity; is anyone likely to be attracted to a girl with the nickname of 'Egg?'

Christie published some fifty novels in her career, along with 150 short stories, half a dozen romances under a pseudonym, and around twenty plays, so she can forgiven for the occasional dull entry in the canon.  This book isn't one of those.  The plot is tight, the structure is clever and the clues she lays along the trail are all there - even if we miss them - as well as a good number of red herrings.

On one of my other blogs I've posted a few extracts from the book as well.

Murder on the Orient Express

We watched the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express last night.  A very classy production with a wonderful cast.  Albert Finney plays Hercule Poirot - with a limp, for some reason - and he presents the character as always in charge, always at work on the information given to him, and quite able to pick up clues from what people do and don't say.  And even to manipulate the occasional character if it suits his purpose.  

Ingrid Bergman got an Oscar and a Bafta for Best Supporting Actress, though her performance comes across now as a performance.  We never quite believe all that stuff about her vocation as a missionary and her call to the little African children.  It's a bit too acted, for my liking.  Various other members of the cast won awards of different sorts, including Finney and Gielgud, although the latter is doing no more than playing Gielgud, pretty much as he always did.  That's what great stars do, when all is said and done.  Anthony Perkins is the same in the role he plays: he's not quite being Norman Bates, but that character isn't far away.  Great stars bring such a particular personality to their roles that there's almost no need for them to create the character. 

Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam are good in parts that they could do standing on their heads, but Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Connery are woefully under-done as the secretive lovers.  Connery looks as though he's longing to get into something with a bit more pizzazz to it; Redgrave has almost nothing to get her teeth into either.  The married couple, Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset ,also suffer from underwritten parts, and quite honestly we're suspicious of their Hungarian status from early in the piece.  Wendy Hiller is all hammer and tongs in her role as a Russian princess, her face like a permanent mask - her doctor advised against her ever smiling, says the character.  Jean-Pierre Cassell makes a great steward, always there, seemingly innocent of anything and honest as the day is long.  Rachel Roberts is perhaps a bit too Germanic, as the cook turned maid, and Richard Widmark doesn't get to do much except be nasty before he's dispatched early in the piece.  

But with such a crew on board the picture could hardly go wrong.  Sydney Lumet obviously enjoys himself as the director, and there are some delightful jokes in the script, for example:

Mrs. Hubbard: [to Bianchi] Don't you agree the man must've entered my compartment to gain access to Mr. Ratchett? 
Princess Dragomiroff: [dismissively] I can think of no other reason, madame! 

or

Foscarelli: Hey, what are you reading, Mister Beddoes? 
Beddoes: I am reading "Love's Captive," by Mrs. Arabella Richardson. 
Foscarelli: Is it about sex? 
Beddoes: No, it's about 10:30, Mister Foscarelli. [He's already sardonically told Poirot that Foscarelli speaks a kind of English: "I think he learnt it in a place called Chicago."]

or

Mrs. Hubbard: What's the matter with him? Train-sick or something? 
Hercule Poirot: Some of us, in the words of the divine Greta Garbo, want to be alone. 

or

Dr. Constantine: [referring to Pierre] He had the means to do it. The passkey to Ratchett's room. 
Hercule Poirot: And a knife borrowed from the chef. 
Bianchi: With whom he was in league. 
Hercule Poirot: Which he plunged, repeatedly and without motive, into the body of his suitably astonished victim. 

or

Hercule Poirot: If all these people are not implicated in the crime, then why have they all told me, under interrogation, stupid and often unnecessary lies? Why? Why? Why? Why? 
Dr. Constantine: Doubtless, Monsieur Poirot, because they did not expect you to be on the train. They had no time to concert their cover story. 
Hercule Poirot: I was hoping someone other than myself would say that. 

The solution to the puzzle is perhaps signalled rather more obviously in the movie than it would be in Agatha Christie's original book, where she tends to flit past clues by not highlighting them.  Anyone paying attention to the movie will have picked up a number of them by the time Poirot gets round to explaining the whole thing.  And the opening sequence, in which a wealthy couple's child is kidnapped, is repeated in snatches throughout, adding to our understanding of what's going on.  

For all that, the piece is entertaining, and has stood the test of time - as long as you're prepared to take it as it is, a fun vehicle for a bunch of stars who obviously had a ball with it.  

HitTail catch-up II

Last week HitTail's new email system announced that the following three items would be top of the pops if mentioned in my blog:

the mousetrap study guide 
sequoia cunningham dunedin
people wear ties

This week the list is a little different, with ties dropping out and three other items coming in.  

chrissy popadics
ralph davis musician
salesman in beijing
the mousetrap study guide
sequoia cunningham dunedin

Chrissy Popadics made a comeback on this blog just a month ago, when I mentioned she was now known by her married name of Johnson.   Nevertheless, people still keep looking for her under her maiden name.

I've never written about Ralph Davis the musician, as far as I'm aware, but I've certainly written about Ralph Davis the pastor and commentary writer.   He's one of my favourite commentary writers, and I have (or have lent out) all his books.  Maybe I should have a lapel pin produced saying something like: I'm a fan of Ralph Davis.  That would cover all bases, including any that related to Ralph Davis the musician, who may or may not be this guy.

 The third of the new items on the list today is Salesman in Beijing, which I wrote about at the end of 2009.  The book is by Arthur Miller, and details his trip to Beijing to produce a version of his play, Death of a Salesman.   I suspect people looking for a combination of the words salesman and Beijing are looking for something more in the retail line, however. 

Rehearsing The Mousetrap

Rehearsals for Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap continue apace...the two late additions to the cast (the young man who stepped in to take over the role of Sergeant Trotter - Sam Irwin - and myself - replacing an actor who fell ill) are making great strides at catching up with the rest of the actors, who've been rehearsing for five or six weeks. 

The cast have rehearsed in a variety of venues, and on Tuesday have their first night in the theatre for a technical rehearsal...the set is being built that day too, and painted, so it may be an interesting occasion for all concerned!

Today (Sunday) we had a photo shoot down at the Railway Station, using some of the ready-made 'sets', and wandered around in our costumes, which entertained - and bewildered - some of the tourists.  

Five more days to opening.   Phew!

A role in The Mousetrap

Well, the last couple of days have had added to them the need to learn lines for The Mousetrap, which opens around the 24th of this month (or 24th inst, as a character in the play would put it).   For those who haven't caught up with what's happened, a person had to drop out of the cast due to illness, just last weekend, and so I've taken over his (thankfully fairly small) role.   The character is Paravicini, who may or may not be a fraud, and who - as he hints more than once - isn't quite what he appears. 

To my amazement you can get a 52-page study guide to The Mousetrap.   Crikey...the script is only 69 pages long as it is!  Let's hope they don't give away the denouement - it's traditional to ask the audience before the play starts not to do so.   The study guide has things like Historical context, critical essays and overview, and much more.   Two interesting points from the historical context: Food is in such short supply in England that 53,000 horses were consumed for food in the previous year to feed a population that now exceeds fifty million people. And in London, a four-day smog kills more than four thousand people.

Makes you glad to be living in 2011, doesn't it?   The characters mention ration books in the play, and there are several other lines that have had to be elucidated for younger members of the cast - and such a discussion has reminded those who lived in the UK in the fifties of some of the privations they and their families went through. 

The other interesting thing about reading the script for the first time, is the way Christie's wit shines through it: the rather dour photo that appears of many of her book covers doesn't indicate just how much fun she can be as a writer (I've found one that shows her warmer side better).   Some of her books are more humorous than not, and certainly The Mousetrap has some very funny lines. 

Notebooks

After reading about Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks on Agatha Christie.com yesterday I checked our public library and found they had a copy - and a fairly unused one as well.

It's quite a large book, but in fact doesn't take a lot of reading - the print is not small (unlike the print in most of the Christie paperbacks I've got) and the layout is such that there's a lot of white space.

There's also not all that much in it to interest me, unfortunately, and I've given up about halfway through. I thought it might give some background to the way Christie wrote, but it's quite skimpy on this. The author, John Curran, does his best to work out how Christie put her novels together, but he's hampered by having some seventy notebooks that are anything but complete in their info. They're a very haphazard bunch, and though he's done his best with them, they don't actually give much information into how Christie wrote. Or maybe I was just expecting something more.

He does say that she has told us elsewhere (not in the notebooks) that her plotting was done a great deal in her head, and that she didn't write out full outlines for her books. But in contradistinction to that he also says that some of the notebooks have fairly complete outlines of a few of the books: but they come at a stage when all the thinking has been done.

So just how Christie worked out her often intricate stories remains a bit of a mystery. There are plenty of very sketchy one-line notes reproduced in the book, but they're so sketchy that they need Hercule Poirot to unravel them.

The book is useful in the way it cross-references the books themselves, telling us how Christie reused plots and ideas, and that would be interesting if I'd read more of the books recently. But I haven't, and I think rather than read more of Mr Curran's book, I'll move onto reading the novels themselves - or at least the ones I have on my shelves.

Light reading

My grandson brought home a book from his school library which turned out to be a bit beyond his reading level. So his mother read it. And I read it.

The title was Rowan and the Keeper of the Crystal by Emily Rodda. Rodda is the penname of an Australian author, Jennifer June Rowe (born in 1948). She writes crime fiction for adults under her own name, but her children's fiction is published under two pseudonyms: Emily Rodda and Mary-Anne Dickinson. She has written several children's fantasy series: Deltora Quest, Rowan of Rin, Fairy Realm and Teen Power Inc., and recently the Rondo trilogy.

The book I read last night comes third in the Rowan of Rin series. It's nicely plotted, stylishly-written and requires the hero and the three young people he encounters to use their wits to overcome several difficult but connected problems. My daughter enjoyed it enough to say she might check out the school library and see if the rest of the series is there!

I'm in agreement: I often find children and young people's books are more imaginative and better written than some of the adult fiction I've encountered.

I started another book yesterday as well. It's a very early (1922) Agatha Christie called The Secret Adversary. It has a joie de vivre that's sometimes missing from her later mysteries, and is full of Bolsheviks and Sinn Fein and the overthrow of the civilised world, and stars a couple of her early characters, Tommy and Tuppence. Yup, that's what they're called. I've come across them before in another one of her books - if I remember rightly it had a very P G Wodehouse style about it. This one lacks that sense of humour (although Christie could be surprisingly witty when she wanted) but it zips along at a cracking pace and even if it's almost entirely unbelievable, it's very entertaining.

Seven Dials Mystery

I read Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery over the last couple of days. The copy was originally my mother's, but I seemed to have taken it over at some point. I've never read it before, even though it's either been in this house or the house I was brought up in for years. (The edition came out in 1962, so the copy's probably that old). The book itself was first published in 1929, so it's fairly early in the canon, but not that early: a book with some of the same characters, The Secret of Chimneys, appeared five years earlier. (It's sometimes hard to gauge just how old some of the Christie stories now are.)

In this one (and presumably in its earlier companion piece) Christie uses a light-hearted style that's reminiscent of P G Wodehouse. She doesn't have quite the wit or wondrous use of language that Wodehouse can provide, but all in all, there are some funny moments, and some of the characters are just as daft as those in many of the Wodehouse books. This means, however, that when two of the young men are murdered quite early in the piece, there's not much sense of anything except frivolity. No one really gets very upset about the deaths.

The tone of the book is similar to some of the Christie short stories that my wife and I listened to while we were on holiday at the beginning of the year. They have two particular features: one is the humour, which isn't quite what you expect from Christie (some of her novels are quite dark), and the other is a sort of self-referencing, in which the characters often remark on how much like a story or a novel or a murder mystery the events happening to them are. In Seven Dials, Christie has various characters say that such and such a thing couldn't be happening, because that only happens in books. It's almost as if she's trying to see whether the reader will accept the absurdity of what's going on. Curiously, she gets away with it, time and again.

The plot is very involved (the section at Wyvern Abbey being perhaps the most complex) and the reader is expected to juggle a bundle of characters who apparently all have very different agendas. Some of these turn out to be red herrings, as you'd expect, and there's a good deal of double crossing of the reader on Christie's part. It's probable everything fits (there's a rather longwinded explanation section at the end) but who's going to go back and check it all out?

In general the thing fizzes along at a good pace; only towards the end is there a kind of speed bump, when things seem to go temporarily into hiatus before resuming normality again.

20.1.26

A Netflix three-part version of the book has just appeared on streaming television, and after a good start in the first episode in went into such a state of disarray and dullness and lack of tension that it seemed almost as though a different director and scriptwriter had been involved with episodes two and three. Plainly the book presents the events in a better way in terms of how they're written about; in this version, things are just odd and remain odd, and then they finish up in a mess, as though some amateur had put the whole thing together. Which is a pity because Mia McKenna-Bruce puts her heart and soul into the leading role, and doesn't deserve the production chaos around her. Martin Freeman is dreadful, plainly having no idea what sort of style he should be putting across; Helena Bonham-Carter starts off well (as all the cast do) then looks bored and you can see her just coming to work for another day's pay. 

When in Rome

I've never read any of Ngaio Marsh's murder mysteries before, though I think I began one many years ago and abandoned it before I'd read more than a few pages. Can't remember why, but think it was because it seemed at the time a bit dry.

However, the other day I picked up When in Rome for a couple of dollars, and found it to be very good and an enjoyable read. It was published in 1970, so it's a bit dated - in fact I suspect it was a bit dated when it was written. (The word 'gay' appears frequently with its older meaning, for instance, but there are other indications that Marsh was already writing in a style that was on its way out.) Nevertheless, the Sun is said to have written: The finest writer in English of the pure, classical puzzle whodunnit, at the time, as the cover tells us.

What is noticeable about it is the excellent style. Even if you didn't think much of the mystery side of it (and it's not bad) the stylish writing has to impress. None of your rubbishy adjective-less, adverb-less modern approach to writing, with no descriptions of scene or place beyond a few overused words. That was what really struck me about the Mary Higgins Clark I read recently: how impoverished the language was. For example, someone's chair was 'comfortable' - what does that tell us? Nothing about the chair or the person. Characters were 'dressed up' by the author only in the sense that she told us that so and so changed into something that you would expect the character to change into for whatever it was he or she was doing. Marsh, on the other hand, seldom tells us about clothing unless it's important to what's going on.

The story has two angles to it: Inspector Alleyn (Marsh's regular hero/detective) is in Rome at the behest of Interpol to deal with a drug-smuggling ring. He 'happens upon' a tour party that's slightly unusual and gets himself involved - and is on hand to deal with two murders as a result. The characters are a stock group, but they have subtlety within that - for instance the lovers not only have twenty years in age separating them, they spend a good deal more time irritated with each other than might be the norm.

Marsh wrote in the days when writers wrote and audiences enjoyed their writing. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, Marsh was classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female British crime writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s. She published 32 detective novels in all, between 1934 and 1982.

On holiday

On the way up in the car to Otematata we listened to some Agatha Christie short stories (The Listerdale Mystery) read by Edward Petherbridge. None of them were mystery stories in the usual Christie sense; rather it was if she was having time off and was writing for the sheer fun of it. The tone of the stories was much more like P G Wodehouse, in fact, and there was a delight in the use of words, and a wit you don‘t necessarily associate with Christie. Two fo the stories had a hero named George, which seemed a bit odd; in fact initially we thought we’d put the same tape back in. But the two Georges were very different, as it turned out. Petherbridge does the reading very well, with a great ability to delineate the different characters.
In the evening we watched the TV version of a Philip Pullman story, The Ruby in the Smoke, in the evening. I’d gone off Pullman after the bad theology of His Dark Materials series, but in this story he’s pitting good against evil without anything more theological than just plain storytelling. A host of well-played characters appeared within the first five minutes, but they sorted themselves out in due course, and an exciting story with constant twists. Julie Walters had a ball as the villainess, Mrs Holland, whose desire to have the ruby in question left her no room for qualms about killing people off. The highlight of her role was removing her false teeth (they’d belonged to her deceased husband and she wasn’t going to see them wasted going to the grave with him), and washing them off in her cup of tea. She conveyed a great sense of menace even with her death mask of a face, and an inability to see her evil as anything other than necessary. Billie Piper from the Dr Who series played the heroine.
The story was set in late Victorian times (I think), a period in which men were no longer so concerned about no wearing their suitcoats at all times (particularly indoors), and young women had stopped wearing bonnets out in the street, and were free to go unchaperoned.

Murder on a Midsummer Night

This book is a Phryne Fisher mystery, written by Kerry Greenwood

I began to read an earlier Phryne Fisher mystery a few years ago, but between dealing with the main character’s name and an atmosphere that reeked of the knowing the right thing to eat and the right thing to drink, I didn’t get very far.

However, Phryne Fisher is more charming than her name (though no easier to spell than Dalgliesh), her taste in everything that smacks of money is up with the best, and her creator has a nice line in wit and humour. This last undercuts the otherwise hothouse atmosphere of a world in which nearly everyone has plenty of money, and those that don’t speak funny. So I gave her a second try.

In this, Fisher’s 17th outing, she solves two mysteries at once, one to do with a ‘lost’ child, and the other the murder of a young antique dealer. Neither mystery is quite up to the mark of an Agatha Christie, but the details are interesting enough, and the journey towards solving them has plenty of curiosities and side-turns along the way.

If you like mysteries that don’t tax the brain too much, this will do nicely.

Success at the Provincials

Down to Invercargill today to play for three bandspeople (two men and a young woman) who were playing solos in the Provincial Competitions.

The two men had the Championship Air Varie to themselves, so both won (I'm just not sure which came first and which second, as they were being a bit coy about it).

The young lady had already won her slow melody by the time I arrived (she had to start at the ungodly hour of nine am, and I would have had to leave home about 6.30 to get there, so I didn't go for that one), and she went on and got a second for her air varie in the afternoon.

I didn't wait for the results of the men's slow melody - it would have taken almost another hour - so at this point I don't know how they got on.

My wife came with me and we shared the driving (two and a half hours each way). As usual on longer trips we listened to some stories on cassette: this time, four short stories by John Mortimer about Horace Rumpole, and one short story by Agatha Christie, which was more of a romance than a mystery - and was extraordinarily dated. Charming, all the same.

Compilation Mystery

I’m reading an interesting detective novel at the moment, one that was first published back in 1931. It’s unusual in that it’s not written by one author but by a dozen, each one taking a successive chapter and building on the work of the authors that have gone before. G K Chesterton provides a rather elliptical prelude, and Dorothy L Sayers tells how it came into existence. The writers were all members of The Detection Club and arranged to write the book following two particular rules: they had to construct their instalment with a definite solution in view and not introduce complications just to make the whole thing more difficult. They had to be able to explain their clues coherently and plausibly, if called on to do so, and to provide an actual solution for the benefit of the other writers. Not that the others had to read that solution before they wrote their own chapter, but it had to be available.

The interesting thing about the list of writers is that only a few are still remembered – well, remembered by me, anyway. Sayers and Chesterton are still widely read; Agatha Christie even more so and most of her books have probably never been out of print. Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Croft and Clemence Dane are still familiar names. But what about these? Victor Whitechurch, G D H and M Cole, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Edgar Jepson and Anthony Berkeley. None of these mean a thing to me, so I’ll be devoting a little time to letting you know who they are over the next several posts.

By the way, the book is called The Floating Admiral.