There's Trouble Brewing, by Nicholas Blake

 

9781912194025

Ipso books, 2017

originally published 1937

paperback

The back-cover blurb is short but succinct, and reveals that a local brewery owner loses his dog in one of the brewery's vats.  It will also go on to reveal that said brewery owner will later be found in the same vat (more on that later).   I'm not kidding when I say that my mind immediately flashed to particular episodes of Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse, New Tricks and even Brokenwood in a variation on the theme (a fermentation vat for wine instead of beer).  I'm sure there are more that I've missed, but it seems that death in a vat is quite a popular way to go.  Of course, all of the above came long after There's Trouble Brewing,  which made its appearance in 1937.   This is the second novel I've read by Nicholas Blake after The Beast Must Die, both read out of series order.  There's Trouble Brewing is number three  in the series featuring Blake's Nigel Strangeways, and I'll confess to enjoying his The Beast Must Die, number four, much much more than this one.  

When Strangeways accepts an invitation to speak to a local literary society in Maiden Astbury (Dorset),  he has no idea that his stay there will last a bit longer than he'd intended. During dinner with his hosts, Herbert and Sophie Cammison,  which includes a bottle of beer from Bunnett's Brewery,  the conversation turns to the brewery's owner, Eustace Bunnett, or at least to his dog Truffles, who had been found dead in one of the vats at Bunnett's Brewery.  Later, after Nigel gives his talk on Caroline Poets,  Bennett approaches him and tells him that he is positive that Truffles had been murdered and that he is "exceedingly anxious to find out who did it."   He then makes a request than Nigel finds "bizarre," asking him to find out who sent Truffles to his untimely death.  Nigel doesn't want to do it, but having been warned earlier not to "sauce" Eustace Bennett and after one of the members of the society urges him to do it, as "none of us will get a moment's peace" until the matter is "cleared up,"  he agrees.   

At the brewery next day to begin his investigation,  he is shown around while waiting for Bennett, but everything comes to a halt when a body is discovered in a "pressure copper."  Well, not quite a body, but a "half-disjointed skeleton" wearing the "soaked and tattered remnants of a dinner-jacket and boiled shirt."  When certain other articles are discovered, rumor starts that the remains belong to "the guv'nor" himself.  While the police are brought in, Nigel stays on to help and soon discovers that there are any number of people who wouldn't have minded seeing Eustace Bennett dead for many reasons.  He was, apparently,  the most odious person in the small community, and it seems that nobody is sad that he's gone.   As Nigel himself says, "Eustace was a crook, a menace, and a stunger." 

probably my favorite cover image of this novel, from Coverbrowser

I very much enjoyed the writing here, and only after two books now I have become a fan of  Nigel Strangeways.  I like his wife Georgia who sadly makes only a brief appearance here -- they are perfect for each other.  And who doesn't love a story  in which  a character is so particularly  loathsome that no one's going to be shedding a tear when he or she is dead?   With the number of possible suspects and possible motivations that Strangeways uncovers here, it should have been a great read.   The thing is though that Blake gives away the show much too early here with a particular remark that I took notice of  that colored my thinking,  so that by the time Strangeways cottons on to the solution, I'd already been there and was just waiting for our erstwhile detective to catch up.  At  chapter thirteen where Strangeways is going over the timetable of the case and makes an important discovery, I was just about ready to skip  and get to the ending I knew was coming.  It's a shame when that happens, really, because this could have been a most intriguing mystery novel otherwise.   

Lament for a Maker, by Michael Innes

978191294148

ipso books, 2017

originally published 1938

275 pp

paperback

"Sen for the deth remeid is non,

Best that we for deth dispone

Eftir our deth that lif may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me." 

Right at about page 165 of this book I stopped and made a comment on my goodreads group's "currently reading?" thread in which I said that it seems that everything has been laid out by now, and I'm stumped.  Looking back on it now,  it turns out that I may have jumped the gun a bit there thinking I had all pertinent information, but I still had no clue, and continued to remain in the dark until the very end.   This book is hands down one of the twistiest and strangest crime novels I've ever read, which is a good thing; at the same time, I had to really work at this one which raised my level of frustration more than once.  

The main action takes place, as the blurb for this book states, "in the depths of a howling winter night"  in a "remote castle isolated in the Scottish Highlands."  Down below Glen Echany is the village of Kinkeig where, when news came of the suicide of Randalf Guthrie, current laird of Echany,  "there was little grieving."  In fact, as we learn right away, "folk hated his very name."   This information comes from Ewan Bell, the shoemaker of Kinkeig, who lays the groundwork for this story and introduces us to the somewhat strange Guthrie and the castle's inhabitants (niece Christine, Hardcastle the sinister-seeming factor and his wife) before turning over the narration to others who will "tell of their own part in it."  Someone somewhere (maybe on goodreads? I don't remember now) mentioned "Rashomon-style," but for me the telling was much more in the vein of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.  By the end of the story, four other people will offer their voices to the furthering of the tale:  Noel Gylby, a young man on his way home to London and ends up "benighted" at the castle with the young woman whose car he crashed into during a blinding snowstorm;  Aljo Wedderburn, attorney; John Appleby, detective-inspector from Scotland Yard and finally the "testament" from "the doctor"  before the narrative is handed off once more to two people already heard from.  Here's the thing:  piecing together their individual accounts, it seems that perhaps there is much more going on here than Ranald Guthrie simply taking "his own ungodly life" -- and yet, if it wasn't suicide, then what exactly happened that night? 

The title of this book derives from a poem written by William Dunbar (as this brief article notes, one of  "a group of medieval Scots poets known as the makars" -- or "makers" ), and according to Christine, it is  often chanted by her uncle as he roamed about his castle.   The haunting last line of each stanza "Timor mortis conturbat me" (fear of death disturbs me") adds to the already Gothic-ish atmosphere provided by the setting, the overall strangeness that pervades this novel, and even the sighting of ghosts by various people.  While it was written during the Golden Age, it comes across as an example of an atypical story of this time, which I actually prefer. For me it's a case of the stranger the better.

 I quite enjoyed Lament for A Maker, which aside from its bizarre story appealed to my puzzle-solver self who loves a challenge, and I definitely got that here.  I will also admit that the joke was on me more than once, when I thought I had figured it out and really hadn't,  but I'd much rather things go that way than actually solving a mystery early on.    Aside from Innes' The Mysterious Commission which wasn't a John Appleby novel, I haven't read any of his other books, so I'm pretty stoked to read more right now.   Yet, as noted earlier, I did have to put a lot of effort into this one. My main issue with this book is that  it's not often that I sit with my iPad at the ready while reading a mystery novel -- that's usually what I do while reading nonfiction or more esoteric, out-there kind of books --  but here it was almost a necessity, at least at first,  since the entire first chapter was offered in a Scots dialect causing much frustration and necessitating multiple google visits.  It took me a while to warm up to this story, but in the long run, it was well worth it. 

Readers who make it through that first chapter will find a fine puzzler here, so don't give up.  

The Beast Must Die, by Nicholas Blake

 

9781911295945

ipso books, 2017

originally published 1938

251 pp

paperback

While I'm very a much a mystery series purist, meaning I have to read them in order, over the rest of this year I'll be making a lot of exceptions, including this book which is number four in the series featuring Blake's private detective Nigel Strangeways.   There's a reason for this -- my crime/mystery shelves are overflowing with books I've picked up here and there over the decades that I've never read, so in trying to get through at least some of them, I needed some organizational help.  I found it by chance while reading through a book called Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More (eds. Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti; Palgrave MacMillan 2015) when I came across Miranda's chapter entitled "More Than the Sum of its Parts: Borges, Bioy Casares and the Phenomenon of the Séptimo Circulo Collection" (31-40).     Fascinated, I went online to discover exactly which titles were included, landing here.  As I read through the list, I realized that I owned more than quite a few of these books, and thus the decision was made to read as many as I can  this year and very likely on into the next.  Problem solved. 

Just a bit about the Séptimo Circulo Collection before moving on.  According to an article at the blog of the International Crime Fiction Research Group ,  this series of books was the creation of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares which began in 1945.  The name derives from  the seventh circle of Hell, à la Dante's Divine Comedy,  the outer ring of which is reserved for various types of violent criminals.  You can read more about how this collection came about in an excellent article by Scott Adlerberg at Crimereads ,  but basically the idea is that prior to the publication of this series,  mystery/crime fiction in Argentina had been classified as "literatura de kiosco"  or newsstand literature, looked down on by as Carolina Miranda notes, " 'serious' Argentine writers,"  but that all changed in the hands of "a close circle of educated writers, translators and editors" including sisters Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, with Borges and Bioy Casares at "the core."   One main influence that would help turn what Scott Adlerberg  refers to as "amusing confections, at best" into a  "literary phenomenon worthy of the educated reader" as well as a "popular ... form of entertainment available to the less educated reader"  was Victoria Ocampo's influential literary magazine Sur, which served "as a platform promoting and validating the collection," publishing seven articles between 1940 and 1948  "specifically referring to Séptimo Circulo titles" (Miranda, 34).   There's much, much  more to this story, of course, but any of the links I've provided will fill in the gaps here, and there are a number of articles online in Spanish as well.  

Original 1938 UK edition.  Photo from John Atkinson Fine and Rare Books 

All right -- back to the book now, which is, if I may say so, a brilliant piece of writing, worthy of the mental round of applause I gave it upon finishing.   It is a solid whodunit -- I went through more than one round of  "it was him/her" and still did not get it right.   It's also a story about which I won't be saying very much, since any hint of what happens here would be a crime in itself.   The barebones outline is this: Frank Cairnes, a writer of crime novels under the name of Felix Lane, is out to get whoever it was that was responsible for the death of his young son in a hit-and-run accident.  As the novel opens, we are made privy to Felix Lane's diary entry of 20 June 1937, which begins as follows:  

"I'm going to kill a man. I don't know his name, I don't know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him ..."

Writing the first part of this book as Cairnes' diary is a move of sheer genius on the author's part, as there is no way anyone will put the book down at that point.  Aside from Cairnes' desire for revenge, and his plans to "kill a man," just some nine days later we discover that he has slowly pieced together the identity of the driver as well as the woman in the car at the time. It's no spoiler to reveal that Cairnes now has his sights set on George Rattery (it's right there on the back-cover blurb), who lives with his wife, his son and his mother in Gloucestershire.  Eventually he meets Rattery, and not too long afterwards has ingratiated his way into the Rattery home as Felix Lane, where he has devised (and detailed) the perfect method of exacting his revenge, with the added bonus of making George's death look like an accident.   One would think that knowing what's going to happen would not leave much room for surprise, but the author  is not quite finished with his reader yet.  After a shift in viewpoint that begins part two, it seems that not only is Cairnes' murder attempt thwarted, but later, someone back at the Rattery home has taken it upon himself or herself to finish the job, albeit in a different way.   A phone call brings in private detective Nigel Strangeways, who agrees to help Cairnes, as he has now become the prime suspect in the eyes of the police even though he swears he is innocent.     

Not one more word of plot shall pass my lips (okay, in this case my fingertips) but I will say that my first venture into the mind of Nicholas Blake has been a successful one.   Not only is it worthy of my picky inner armchair-detective self,  but it also offers an insightful character study as well as the ingenious use of literary references that clicked into place in my head only after finishing the book.  Definitely not your typical 1930s, golden-age mystery, and it's one I can most certainly recommend.  I loved Georgia Strangeways; I'll now have to backtrack and go back to book number one to find out more about Nigel. 

My advice: do NOT read reviews of this book that want to take you to the big reveal. You'll kick yourself if you do, trust me.