Penguin no. 2024: Maigret Mystified by Simenon

     Maigret did not bat an eyelid. He was up to the neck in this everyday squalor which was more sickening than the drama itself.
     The old woman facing him wore an appallingly jubilant and menacing expression. She was talking! She was going on talking! Out of hatred for the Martins, for the dead man, for all the tenants in the house, out of hatred for the whole of mankind! And out of hatred for Maigret!
     She stood there with her hands clasped over her great flabby stomach. She seemed to have been waiting all her life for this moment.

Maigret Mystified was originally published in 1932 with the title L'Ombre chinoise, which translates as 'the shadow puppet show' or 'the silhouette'. It alludes to what Maigret observes when he first passes through the archway at 61 Place des Vosges in the Marais district of Paris. He has been summoned by the concierge, and as he stands in the darkened courtyard he looks up upon a series of well-lit apartments with curtained windows displaying the shadows of their occupants. One shows a man pacing backwards and forwards, and another has a woman gesticulating in anger. There is a laboratory adjacent to the residential building and its frosted window reveals the shadow of a man slumped across his desk. The concierge knows the man to be dead, shot through the chest while sitting in an armchair.

Penguin no. 1928: The Fig Tree by Aubrey Menen

He felt that it was only by some irony of fate that his schoolteachers and professors were living in this Christian - or post-Christian - world. They would have been so much more at home among the Greeks. Some of them, as he knew, felt this so strongly that they spent their whole lives in classical studies, barely troubling about the rest of the world or the remainder of history. Their calm assurance that the Greeks invented all that was worthwhile was thus fortunately undisturbed by the successive discoveries that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Sumerians, the Indians of the Five Rivers, and the Chaldeans had, in fact, invented nearly all of the things centuries before.

Harry Wesley had always wanted to save people and so he decided to become a scientist. He had been taught as a child that humanity was doomed: it was certain to die out either through war or starvation, the latter an inevitable consequence of the world's population growing at a faster rate than the food supply. With no hope of preventing war, he dreamt instead of preventing the alternative catastrophe by discovering an effective contraceptive. The real focus of this dream, though, was the acclaim which he felt would certainly be his when he succeeded. He hoped for statues erected in his honour.

In time he decided to attack the problem from the other direction, by studying biology and seeking to increase the food supply. He was to find, however, that success brought no statues; he received instead a Nobel prize at the age of 32 and all that brought was the resentment of his colleagues.

Harry Wesley had discovered a compound which, when injected into plants and trees, stimulated the fruit to grow to a substantial size while still retaining its flavour. He took his compound to Italy where it suited the government to make a show of doing something for the peasants, but while those in charge were keen for quick results, they were less enthusiastic about providing any funding, and so Harry opted to trial his compound on a lone fig tree, doubling the usual dose. His experimental fruit grew to an enormous size, and the trial seemed a success, but the real test would be in the eating, and this revealed that he had created something beyond his expectations.

Penguin no. 62: The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes

If this was a Father Brown story it would here be described how the inspector gazed over a bleak hill-top, rounded like a grinning and sightless skull and covered with purple heather, which encroached upon its stark nudity like a fungus growth of decay and death...In this atmosphere of evil his thoughts would turn to vampires and werewolves, those monstrous Undead rejected of heaven and hell alike, until a casual remark by Father Brown would reveal the key to the whole mystery. But the unromantic and unchestertonian truth must be told - in real life and in actual fact Ridley looked out of the shop door, past the serried ranks of quack medicines and baby foods, on to a cobbled street lighted by electricity and sludgy with drizzling rain. And instead of the illuminating remark of the Deus ex machina of the novelist there was merely the sound of a man spitting noisily on the pavement.

Judging from Google, W. Stanley Sykes seems better remembered as the author of Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia, which was comprised of three volumes, two published posthumously. But despite being an eminent anaesthetist, he was also the author of three detective novels^[1] written during the 1930s, and in his obituary^[2] it was noted that the first 'achieved such a popularity that it was eventually published in the Penguin series'.^[3] 

The missing moneylender of the title is a Jewish man by the name of Israel Levinsky who one weekday morning, for the first time in thirty years, fails to arrive at his office on time. Inspector Ridley is diligent in investigating his whereabouts but is unable to solve the mystery of his disappearance and so calls in Scotland Yard for assistance. They assign Inspector Drury who concludes that Levinsky is more likely to have been removed than to have disappeared, and the investigation becomes instead a search for a murderer and a victim.

It is difficult to sketch the plot further without revealing too much, as the details of the murder lie at the centre of the story. It is suggested in the blurb that Sykes' motivating intention in writing the book was to plan a theoretically perfect murder, one which could be relied upon to despatch the intended victim while leaving no detectable traces to reveal how it had been done. He draws on his knowledge of contemporary medical practices and recent scientific discoveries, and fills his story with references to newly developed medical technologies, and exhumations, pathology and X-rays. He also manages to weave in discussions (or perhaps lectures) on topics as diverse as how to calculate the probability of a series of independent events, and why rugby is a better game than soccer. There is the sense that he sees himself writing for the intelligent reader who feels some pride in being well informed.

Penguin no. 133: Watkins' Last Expedition by F. Spencer Chapman

Read this book and you will know something of the life of that fantastic land, of its ascetic nakedness, of its strong weather, of its laughing people and of the feelings of an impetuous Englishman who has lived there. To know more: throw away your job, your friends, your cares, beg a quarter of the money you will need and an eighth of the food you will eat, learn the language and go there; not as a great white man to teach, but as inferior to learn from these people something of their way of life: how to get a living from their barren country, how to share as they share, how to endure as they endure, to live for the day caring nothing for the morrow, as they have have done since before the time when we were painted blue.  (Augustine Courtauld)

In 1932, after a disappointing year spent trying and failing to raise sufficient funds for an expedition to Antarctica which would have attempted to establish if it was comprised of one continent or two, Gino Watkins was offered 500 pounds by Pan-American Airways to take a small party to East Greenland to undertake meteorological work. He asked ornithologist and photographer Freddie Spencer Chapman, meterologist Quintin Riley and surveyor John Rymill to accompany him.

The four men had all been there the previous year as members of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition, and Watkins had followed this with a 600 mile journey in an open boat surveying Greenland's southern coastline. Their preparations for the substantially smaller 1932 expedition were hurried and underfunded, but by July 14th they were all sailing to Angmagssalik, a small settlement on the east coast of Greenland, on the only boat making the journey that year. They intended to base themselves 112 miles away at Lake Fjord as Watkins believed this region had potential as a future landing site for aircraft.

Penguin no. 2109: The Man on the Rock by Francis King

The staff consisted, for the most part, of pious, well-intentioned and hardworking English and American women, and Greek men, who like myself, took advantage of them. We borrowed money off them, and then forgot to repay it: we sold the petrol, the stationery, and even items of furniture; when a parcel arrived for distribution, we substituted worn-out clothes or shoes of our own for the clothes and shoes inside. The office station-wagon took us to the beach or to football matches. From time to time, one of us would be caught out, and then the rest would have to pretend to exclaim in horror at his crime.

Spiro Polymerides lies in his bed in a small flat in Battersea, suffering cystitis and feeling sorry for himself. His immediate problem is not his illness but the prospect of hours without any company, as it seems that Greek men hate spending any time alone. Even more than this, though, he resents the predicament he finds himself in: he is living in a foreign country without any hope of employment, and he is forced to hide from his creditors, and juggle what little money there is to pay some of the bills so that he and his heavily-pregnant wife can keep their small flat and get a little food. And all this through marrying a woman he doesn't love and barely cares about.

He knows that he alone is responsible for this fate. He married Kiki because she was the only daughter of Vrissoglou, a well-known and very wealthy Greek businessman living in London, and he was banking on a substantial dowry. His one goal in life has been to find someone who was willing to pick up the tab while he took it easy, unconcerned with whether they were young or old, male or female, and irrespective of what was required in return. He suggests that this is all any Greek peasant is ever seeking. But Kiki's father has chosen instead to disown his daughter as long as she continues to live with Spiro

Penguin no. 1230: The Alleys of Marrakesh by Peter Mayne

I am resolved never to run, to walk always with a slow measured tread, and that when I choose, or am actually compelled, to look to right or left, I shall do so calm and tranquil. I shall gear down my jittery European reactions to those of a Blueman riding his camel across the Mauretanian deserts. I shall refuse to be hustled - why hurry? All the evidence about me points to the fact that it is for ever NOW. You can't go skipping into the future, however much you hustle. I shall be content, as the Moors are, with me in the centre of my universe and leave the universe to do the spinning.

Peter Mayne is never very clear on why he chose to travel to Marrakesh. When anyone puts the question to him he avoids answering it, reluctant to admit that he allowed chance to decide, choosing his destination using a pin and a map. But when the question is really pressed, he reveals it had something to do with a feeling of being over-civilised. He is seeking some respite from what he perceives to be the constant Western emphasis on progress and achievement, and he believes he will find it living amongst the Moors. As he makes clear in the passage quoted above, he wants to learn to live in the moment.

He travels to Marrakesh with an idea about the kind of life he wants to live, but with no clear plans as to what to do when he gets there. An unsought encounter in a cafe in Tangier en route provides him with the name of a hotel owned by Moulay Ibrahim. (In a different context he notes that a Moulay is someone descended from the Prophet, and therefore a person of some importance.) It is to this hotel he heads with a letter of introduction when he gets to Marrakesh, but it is a journey he makes with some difficulty, for he cannot read the address which has been written in Arabic, and his victoria driver cannot read at all. They find the hotel eventually, with the assistance of a passerby: it is located down an alley within the historic centre of Marrakesh. His room comes with no facilities for washing, and as a Christian he is not permitted to use the communal baths.

Penguin no. 78: Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley

There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him? - not the feverish confidence of men in danger from a blow of fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is in hand in some great or little thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory, the man on the green knows that he will suddenly put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of achievement.

Trent's Last Case is an Edwardian novel. It was first published one hundred years ago at a time when the short-story was the typical format of the detective story. My favourite moment comes when the Oxford graduate Marlowe finds that it is necessary to describe the form and purpose of a rear-view mirror, and then does so using oddly precise and formal language which is at odds with the ordinariness of the subject, at least for a modern reader. That there is a need to do this, and the way in which it is done, both emphasise just how long ago this book was written, and just how different the world was at the time. Such differences underpin the whole story, as the protagonist's actions are guided by a set of values which seem all but unrecognisable today, and which weight the preservation of someone else's reputation above all other considerations.

The co-authored Penguin I read last week, Trent's Own Case, was published more than twenty years after this one. I think the most striking difference between the two stories, at least initially, is in the personality of Philip Trent. In both stories Trent is a successful artist, one who actually manages to sell his paintings, but here he is also an occasional journalist. The man who arrives in Marlstone intent on investigating the murder of Sigsbee Manderson is young, untidy, and excitable, and fairly eccentric in his habits and in his way of speaking. He seems at first to have far more in common with Ellery Queen or Gervase Fen than with the more sober Philip Trent who investigates the murder of Randolph in the later book.

Penguin no. 543: Trent's Own Case by E.C. Bentley & H. Warner Allen

The house of Clerihew Bros. and Co. inspected, purchased and offered rare and ancient wines with a reverent dignity which made precious stones seem commonplace by comparison. The shop was an oasis of peace in the noise and mercenary bustle of the West End. Its panelling and its ancient floors, which dived capriciously in any plane but the horizontal, the collection of quaint historic wine bottles, and the unequalled excellence of the wines that were tasted within its precincts, made it a place apart. While the rest of London was demolishing the old and masking the beauties of the past under the unsightly dullness of modernity, Mr. Clerihew had been quietly busy preserving the traditional simplicity of his premises, and rescuing from the overlay of later bad taste the peculiar charm of the original building.

It is always a delightful moment when I see a box of Penguins waiting for me at the end of the driveway. I had such a moment recently when twenty-one old and predominately green books turned up in the mail, a very kind gift from Patrick O'Sullivan. They arrived only a few days before I was leaving for Europe and there was no time to look through them properly, but my attention was particularly attracted by this one, as it bears, on the inside front cover, an impressive list of plaudits from an impressive list of reviewers.

I realised a little too late that the commendations were for E.C. Bentley's earlier and similarly-titled book, Trent's Last Case. It was this earlier book which Agatha Christie asserted as 'one of the three best detective stories ever written' and which G.D.H & M.I. Cole jointly claimed to be the best detective story they had ever read. I have since read it and plan review it next, so I understand the reasons for their praise. This one, co-authored with H. Warner Allen, is fine: it is entertaining and well written, but it is seems fairly conventional when compared with the earlier book.

James Randolph is murdered early one evening when he is shot from behind in the bedroom of his small London flat while dressing for dinner. His body is found a few hours later when his butler Simon Raught returns around midnight from his scheduled night off. When the police arrive they discover that Randolph's safe has been ransacked and discarded wrapping paper litters his bedroom floor. Other items throughout the house which are clearly of value remain undisturbed.

Penguin no. 1279: Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

1st edition, 1958,
Cover by Imre Reiner.

Franklin looked at the revolver and saw it suddenly as a pathetic and useless thing. He saw his own belief in it as pathetic. He had become so used to handling a weapon as big as a house, and carrying enough power to wipe out a small town, that he had forgotten there are other types of power. He looked at the three people sitting in the lamplight waiting for a sound. He saw them, the three generations of one nation, as part of a defenceless people, as part of the little people possessing an immeasurable power that could not be broken. He saw them suddenly as little people who had lain on the ground and had their faces trampled on but whose power was still unbroken. He knew it clearly now as a more wonderful, more enduring and more inspiring power than he had ever believed possible: the power of their own hearts.

H.E. Bates was drafted into the RAF as a writer during the second world war, commissioned initially to write a series of short stories with the aim of improving the morale of a war-weary civilian population. He knew little of aeroplanes or flying, but he was given considerable opportunity to observe the airmen closely, and this included the chance to interview a pilot who had been shot down over France, and who had then managed to escape with the assistance of the French Resistance. This was clearly his inspiration for Fair Stood the Wind for France, which is an inspiring story of a bomber pilot's assisted escape from the German-occupied northern region of France during the latter part of the second world war. It is part-romance, part-adventure story, and perhaps a little melodramatic at times. But it is also a book in which a simple summary of the plot would seem rather inadequate in conveying what it is about.

It seemed to me to be principally a story about the inherent decency of ordinary people. Not all of them, clearly: inevitably some people think only of themselves, and it is the difficulty of distinguishing between the treacherous and the trustworthy which heightens the tension all the way through this novel.  H.E. Bates inverts the common action-oriented approach to war fiction which is centred on a tale of personal heroism; instead of one man as hero saving a community, this is the story of a communal effort to help one man.

Vintage Penguins in Eastbourne (courtesy of Camilla's Bookshop)

I didn't get to see a lot of Eastbourne.

There was no time during my recent two-week stay in Europe in which the weather was particularly conducive to sight-seeing, but the day in Eastbourne was particularly unpleasant. I arrived in the rain on a day when the wind was so fierce no one seemed able to get the door of the hotel shut, and I saw the pier only because it was across the road from the hotel. Now I look back rather fondly to last year when I walked along the cobb at Lyme Regis early one morning and naively reflected on how much more tranquil the pebbled beaches of England were compared to the beaches of Perth. It is the problem with extrapolating from small samples.

But Eastbourne is the home of Camilla's Bookshop, and that made my brief visit worthwhile.

The first thing I saw of Camilla's was an outside bookshelf which clearly operates on an honour system: there was a large bookshelf running alongside the side of the shop which was filled with paperbacks, and people are trusted to take a book and leave whatever is required, just as you see in Hay-on-Wye. There were no Penguins here, but as the bookshop was open there were other books in front of the shop available for sale, including a box of inexpensively-priced green-spined Penguins, and so finding several that I wanted to purchase, I was enticed inside.

The photos below show how Camilla's presents: it seems completely disorganised, and there are books stacked anyhow on the shelves, and surplus books stacked anyhow on the floor. There is a bookshelf of green Penguins not far from the front door, but then downstairs there is a whole bookcase filled with orange-spined books, a mixture of vintage Penguins and those published more recently. The books which don't fit on the shelves are stacked on the floor, so it meant a pleasant afternoon searching through them for the ones I wanted, with all the books I saw priced below two pounds each.

I think I found about 40 more Penguins (and therefore faced a heavily-book-laden search for my hotel). Many from of these dated from the late-60s which, with their less-interesting covers, are often surprisingly difficult to find.

Links:
Half a Million Books (A Fiction Habit)