The Termite
Some primal termite knocked on woodAnd tasted it, and found it good,And that is why your Cousin MayFell through the parlor floor today.
Hubert and Gumby are crowded round for the results:
It's number 9, which means Virginia Woolf's The Years. An excellent choice. The spin gods have a certain liking for Virginia--this is the second time they've landed on her; the first was A Room of One's Own.
Do you know this one? Do I have a treat in front of me?
Did you spin and did you get something good?
Ars Poetica
Music first and foremost! In your verseChoose those meters odd of syllable,Supple in the air, vague, flexible,Free of pounding beat, heavy or terse.Choose the words you use--now right, now wrong--With abandon: when the poet's visionCouples the Precise with Imprecision,Best the giddy shadows of his song:Eyes veiled, dark with mystery,Sunshine trembling in the noonday glare,Starlight, in the tepid autumn air,Shimmering in the night-blue filigree!For nuance, not Color absolute,Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue!Nuance! It alone is what lets youMarry dream to dream, and horn to flute!Shun all cruel and ruthless Railleries;Hurtful Quip, lewd Laughter, that appallHeaven, Azure-eyed, to tears; and allGarlic-stench scullery recipes!Take vain Eloquence and wring its neck!Best you keep your Rhyme sober and sound,Lest it wander, reinless and unbound--How far? Who can say?--if not in check!Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?What deaf child, what Black of little witForged with the worthless bauble, fashioned itFalse and hollow-sounding to the file?Music first and foremost, and forever!Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flyingOff to other skies and loves, wherever.Let your verse be aimless chance, delightingIn good-omened fortune, sprinkled overDawn's wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover...All the rest is nothing more than writing.
I've been reading Richard Hell's novel Godlike, which retells the romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but setting the story in New York City in the 1970s instead of Paris of the 1870s. Pick your drug of choice: absinthe or something more modern. The novel is told from the point of view of the Verlaine character after the death of Rimbaud, with flashbacks to when the affair was at its hottest.
I didn't really know the poetry of Paul Verlaine at all, so I looked up some poems on-line to see what they were like.
Richard Hell is coming to the main Toronto library to discuss the book. Will he sing a few bars from Blank Generation? Probably not, alas, he's supposed to be retired from performing music.
Mr. Dickens ponders the possibilities of chance.
Yes! It's time for a Classics Club spin. You know the rules, but what are the books I'm ready to read based on the dictates of chance? Well, it's actually a pretty quiet time for me over the next month and a half, so I'm allowing a few of the longer choices on this list. I also prioritized ones that weren't on my last list. So here we go...
It is portentous, and a thing of stateThat here at midnight, in our little townA mourning figure walks, and will not rest,Near the old court-house pacing up and down,Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yardsHe lingers where his children used to play,Or through the market on the well-worn stonesHe stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,A famous high top-hat, and a plain worn shawlMake him the quaint, great figure that men love,The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.He cannot sleep upon his hill-side now.He is among us:--as in times before!And we who toss and lie awake for longBreathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.His head is bowed, he thinks on men and kings.Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?Too many peasants fight, they know not why,Too many homesteads in black terror weep.The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.He sees the dreadnoughts scouring every main.He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders nowThe bitterness, the folly and the pain.He cannot rest until a spirit-dawnShall come;--the shining hope of Europe free:The league of sober folk, the Worker's Earth,Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea.It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,That all his hours of travail here for menSeem yet in vain. And who will bring white peaceThat he may sleep upon his hill again?
Nigel Strageways (our series detective) and his partner Clare Massinger have just moved to Greenwich. They're invited over to meet their new neighbours the Loudrons. Dr. Piers' wife has passed, but there are also his adult children, three sons (one adopted) and a daughter.
Dr. Piers disappears on a foggy night. The Loudron children approach Strangeways for advice. A week later his body is found floating in the Thames. Both wrists have been slashed.
Suicide? But the wrists are slashed in such a way that suicide is unlikely, and if it was suicide how did the body get into the river? (As the cover suggests, a slashed-wrist suicide often takes place in the bath.) And just in case you were inclined to the suicide theory, Dr. Piers' daughter-in-law is strangled halfway through the book.
All four of the children have plausible motives to murder their father as does as the daughter's boyfriend, whom Dr. Piers didn't approve of. Strangeways hints he knows who did it pretty early (and I kind of did, too) but Blake does a pretty successful job of keeping us on our toes. I've had mixed results with the Strangeways series, but I thought this one a pretty good entry.
It was fun as a 1961 book because it makes good use of the old East End of London, which, of course is all changed now:
"When he [Strangeways] got home, Clare kissed him, 'My goodness you've been drinking port.''Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs."
Nicholas Blake is a pen name for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, probably better known now as the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt
Silver Age (1961). Dead body.
Two books from 1961 have made it on to the blog before, both by Erle Stanley Gardner. One was a Perry Mason story, The Case of the Spurious Spinster:
The other was a Cool and Lam tale, Shills Can't Cash Chips:
It being Gardner, those two weren't even all the books he wrote in 1961, but I thought both were pretty good entries in their series.
Also in the mystery department, but not on my blog, The Wycherly Woman is one of the best of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series.
I've seen lots of people remark how many great choices there were for 1961 and so, of course, some things will be neglected. But there were two I read before I started blogging that I felt were kind of masterpieces when I read them and they didn't seem to be on anybody's radar, so I thought I'd drag them in:
Patrick White (1912-1990) was the Australian novelist who won the Nobel in 1973. In his Riders in the Chariot--in spirit the chariot is that of Elijah--four otherwise unrelated individuals in suburban Sydney are marked by mystical experience as hidden saints in a world of prejudice and contempt. Can an Aboriginal artist, an evangelical washerwoman, a childlike heiress, and an Auschwitz survivor redeem this world?
A clue: in the epigraph to the novel, White quotes William Blake's idea of Isaiah speaking, "...the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences, but wrote..."
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a writer and activist on urban issues. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her major work. It's full of surprising and brilliant insights: she's a theorist of urban planning who quite often thinks too much planning is bad for cities. I have a couple of pages from an old New Yorker tucked in my copy and in it she says of the city, "...a place full of hope and expectation, and this is has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy." Her book isn't Theory with a capital T. It's often said she had a novelist's eye, and it's true: the book is wonderfully readable.
Jacobs cut her teeth as an activist saving Washington Square in New York City from an expressway. She moved to Toronto in 1968, and did the same for us here by helping to squelch the Spadina expressway. The last thirty-five years of her life she lived in a house shown on her Wikipedia page:
And the last four years of her life, she was my neighbour. (We live on the opposite side of the street about eight houses up.) In any halfway decent sort of weather I used to see her sitting on the porch--"Eyes on the street" was an important concept for her--but I never had the nerve to introduce myself.
What other 1961 books would you have liked to see?
Symptoms of Love
Love is a universal migraine.A bright stain on the visionBlotting out reason.Symptoms of true loveAre leanness, jealousy,Laggard dawns;Are omens and nightmares--Listening for a knock,Waiting for a sign:For a touch of her fingersIn a darkened room,For a searching look.Take courage, lover!Could you endure such griefAt any hand but hers?
"And in gloom, with the bells stroking and the wipers establishing the uncomfortable rhythm of the hour, the two wet men withdrew to the cars and in slow procession quit the sooty stables in Highland Green, drove separately through vacant city streets to uncover the particulars of this crime."
It's a crime story, but what I've quoted above is the very end of the novel. We have no particular reason to believe that the detectives will solve the crime.
The novel is divided into eight sections plus a prologue; each is prefaced by excerpts from the column of (fictional) sports writer Sidney Slyter. The prologue takes place during World War II when Hencher's house in London is bombed and his mother killed; later after the Banks have bought the restored house, Hencher takes one of the flats and starts the scheme.
The American John Hawkes (1925-1998) is usually labeled an experimental novelist. But as you can see from above the prose isn't Joycean-level difficult. It's not plotless. There are characters that feel real enough, even if they're generally objectionable--half of them gangsters, and the other half would-be crooks. The Lime Twig was his fourth novel, and was his breakout.
It's a violent story, though if you read Andrew Vachss or the Jack Reacher novels of today, it may not seem all that violent. But sometimes that's the way: something that seemed outrageous in 1961 comes to seem middle of the road later on. But I'd read another Hawkes before another Vachss or Child.
Hawkes seems to have been the anti-Hemingway: he wrote his rather violent novels, but in this interview aired on PBS, he says, "I like the idea of the author as an ordinary person." No need to hunt lions or go to war for him.
He taught writing at Brown for most of his professional career. He and his wife and kids would go every three years or so to the South of France where he'd write a new novel. He seems rather a nice guy for such a violent story... 😉
It's 1961 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.
My original list of candidates is here.
"as I saw myself, a sort of reverse Pilgrim trying to make some progress away from the City of God."
Don Wanderhope is born to a Calvinist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago before World War I. Both his parents were born in Holland. His uncle is a minister, but his father Ben's faith in God is shaky. Ben Wanderhope delivers ice; later when that's no longer a viable job, he switches to picking up garbage. Don Wanderhope intends to achieve a different sort of life.
Don's beloved older brother Louie is a student at the University of Chicago. Though the UofC was founded as a Baptist institution, it's already a hotbed of free-thinking, and Louie's faith has gone well beyond shaky to outright disbelief. But then Louie gets a severe flu, and the family gathers round to pray. His mother asks:
"You have no doubts, have you, Louie?""No doubts on my part."
Peter De Vries, (1910-1993) like Don Westerhope, was born in Chicago to family of Dutch Reformed immigrants. He went on to become editor of Poetry magazine for a stretch and then after World War II, a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote twenty-plus comic novels, a couple of which were made into Hollywood movies. This novel, too, is funny--one chapter is a parody of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:
"Thus were banished my visions of a sanitarium as a place were one sat on benches philosophizing in the sun in the manner of The Magic Mountain, or contracted imprudent passions in the music room."
But then the sanatarium does have two old men philosophizing, and a notorious libertine, who unlike Mynheer Peeperkorn, isn't Dutch. And Wanderhope does contract an imprudent passion.
So the novel is funny--just not in a guffawing way. I've read other novels by de Vries, though a long time ago, and I remember them funnier. But this is a dark subject, and it was inspired by the death from leukemia of de Vries' own daughter in 1960. So: moving and thoughtful, and not without humour.
It's the week of the 1961 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. Thanks to them for hosting!
Monday begins the week of Kaggsy and Simon's year club, and this spring the year is 1961. I piled up some candidates, because who doesn't like to look at a pile of books? (Right? You do agree, don't you?) In case the picture is hard to make out that's:
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| Jane Welsh Carlyle |
Jenny Kiss'd Me
Jenny kissed me when we metJumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to getSweets into your list, put that in:Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,Say health and wealth have missed me,Say I'm growing old, but add,Jenny kissed me.
"...the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have been reading.'"
"You can dream about his works, but you can't understand them clearly because they are indefinite, even in his own soul...He says himself he can explain neither the idea nor the picture that expresses it."
Illies' style in the book is anecdotal and impressionistic. Looking at a Friedrich painting in Dresden gave Samuel Beckett the idea for Waiting for Godot. Goethe awarded Friedrich the Weimar art prize in 1805, but later said that Friedrich was taking art in the wrong direction.
Both the Nazis and the East German Communists thought Friedrich was one of theirs; they may both have been wrong... In the late 1930s, a Jewish art dealer came to a Berlin museum and said I have a painting of Friedrich's that I want to sell. The museum agreed to buy it, at a fair value, but it didn't have enough money in its acquisitions budget, so it appealed to Hitler to cough up. Which he did. And which enabled the art dealer to get his family out of Germany in time.
A couple of years ago I read Illies' 1913. It works the same way: an anecdotal style that jumps around, but still it suggests a larger picture. It's not straightforward history, but it works and makes good reading. While I'd known of Friedrich before, I got to know him better when I saw several of his paintings in Germany last fall.
One of the paintings I saw (at the Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin):
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The Cross on the Baltic |
Covering Germany for my European Reading Challenge.
"Best or worst, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love. What silly nonsense it is."
It's not that there isn't talk about love: that's Amy Reardon above and she has just been discussing with her friend Edith why it is divorce is so difficult in England at the time. She had loved her husband Edwin at one point, but that point is probably past, beaten down by the couple's unbearable poverty.
So what it is, is a novel of money, or more, the lack of it. Balzac is referenced several times as a novelist writing on the right kind of subject.
Edwin Reardon is a novelist, maybe aspiring to be what we would now call midlist. And as in Balzac, we learn about the finances; in this case what it takes--and what you can make--as a novelist. Reardon's biggest success brought him £100, an amount that is the barest minimum for a respectable existence in London for a year. That was for a so-called triple-decker, a novel of 200,000 words or 600-800 pages. Think Middlemarch in size. He needs to write one of those a year, and with no guarantee he'll meet the demands of the moment. He can't. Book reviewing? Articles for the magazines? These pay, but not well. Reardon writes a shorter novel with a sensationalist plot; he hopes to get £75 for it, but nobody is willing to buy.
Reardon is not the only writer; the novel is set among a circle of writers. There's Whelpdale:
"And what's more, he made six guineas in the first fortnight; so he says, at all events. Now that's one of the finest jokes I ever heard. A man who can't get anyone to publish his own books makes a living by telling other people how to write!"
There's the nearly heroic Biffen, who lives in utter poverty in a garret, has (almost) no hope of marrying, toiling away on his novel: Mr. Bailey, Grocer. Nobody expects it to be read when he does finish it. Biffen himself says of it, "The result will be something unutterably tedious...If it were anything but tedious, it would be untrue." A nod to the naturalism still mostly in the future in English?
Amy Reardon's uncle Alfred Yule writes for the magazines with the aid of his talented daughter Marian. Someday he hopes to edit his own magazine. But until then:
"Seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical most people knew what to expect, but not a few forbore cutting open the pages he occupied."
Dora and Maud Milvain (and mostly it's Dora) write religious stories for magazines; once their mother dies, and her annuity with her, that's what they will have to live on. Dora finds the work beneath her, but she is good at it. Her brother Jasper tells her: "Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity."
The other main character is Jasper Milvain. He can't write 'stories' he says, but he sees making his way in the writing trade, via magazine articles, then an editorship:
"First of all, my qualities are not of the kind which demand the recognition of posterity. My writing is for to-day, most distinctly hodiernal. It has no value except in reference to to-day."
And he knows how to go about it:
"Art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade."
Milvain is a goer, and it's he who largely makes the plot go. At the beginning of the novel Milvain and Reardon are friends, with the impractical, somewhat older Reardon, having had some success. Milvain tries to get him to capitalize on it, but to no avail, with little effect other than increasing Amy Reardon's dissatisfaction. They don't become enemies, but their differing trajectories pull them apart.
Milvain meets Marian Yule (Amy Reardon's cousin) and falls in love with her. He certainly can't afford to marry when he first sees her, but if one or the other of them should ever come into enough money? But until then Milvain cannot acknowledge his love to anyone, scarcely even to himself. And maybe he could marry an heiress?
"You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame."
How to get around that conundrum? That's Milvain's problem and he intends to solve it. There's an inheritance to be sorted out, and there are marriages--though are any of them for love? (I'd say maybe one. If you've read it, what did you think?) Milvain's a bit of a monster, but not entirely. Milvain's advice to Reardon is sound, if unhelpful. When Mr. Bailey, Grocer finally does appear in print, Milvain does what he can to puff it.
The book was my Classics Club spin book, and I finished it last month, but I've only now gotten around to the post. (We went on vacation--though since I'm mostly retired, what exactly was I vacationing from? Blog posting, perhaps.) The novel is dark, but funny, complex, and engaging. It portrays a believable segment of society in interesting detail, different from today, but maybe not so different: even today midlist authors today scramble to publish articles, get grants, teach writing, all in order to achieve a bare middle-class existence, if that.
It's one of those novels I've known of for a long time, more read about than actually read, and I pulled off the shelf a couple of things I'd previously read to remind myself what they had to say.
But she also writes, "Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think," and this is quite true. He's not Dostoevsky, but his characters do think, do have ideas, those ideas come into conflict, and nobody is tendentiously given the right answer ahead of time. Milvain is perhaps shallow, but Reardon is unable to function.
As for Orwell, I feel Gissing is all over him, and the index of my four-volume Collected Essays, Letters, and Journalism backs me up. Well, one would expect the author of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier to be deeply interested in a novelist of poverty. But in 1948 Orwell was requested to write an essay on Gissing for the magazine Politics and Letters on the occasion of the reissuing of two lesser-known Gissing novels. The magazine went bankrupt before the article appeared, and Orwell had difficulty recouping his manuscript from the empty offices. The article only appeared in 1960, so it was Orwell's heirs who got paid, an ironic outcome Gissing would have darkly appreciated, I'm sure.
Orwell separates out what Gissing does from picaresque novels and other earlier types of narrative.
"A true novel...will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability..."
The very criteria for which Woolf faulted Gissing. But Orwell writes:
"But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain England has produced very few better novelists."
I think Orwell has the better of this argument.
From the last page of New Grub Street:
"'Ha! Isn't the world a glorious place?''For rich people.''Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils.'"
The Yak
As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.You will find it exactly the thing:It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,Or lead it about with a string.The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet(A desolate region of snow)Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,And surely the Tartar should know!Then tell your papa where the Yak can be gotAnd if he is awfully richHe will buy you the Creature--or else he will not.(I cannot be positive which.)
"All roads--always, always--lead back to Chicago."
"A friendship ended. In November of 1963, seven years before I was born, a friendship between two couples severed."
How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors
It's not rocket surgery.First, get all your ducks on the same page.After all, you can't make an omelettewithout breaking stride.Be sure to watch what you writewith a fine-tuned comb.Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.It's as easy as falling off a cake.Don't worry about opening upa whole hill of beans:you can burn that bridge when you come to it,if you follow where I'm coming from.Concentrate! Keep your door closedand your enemies closer.Finally, don't take the moral high horse:if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.
"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."
"The city in these pages is imaginary.The people, the places are all fictitious.Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."
from Vis and Ramin
So Adam's offspring live, and put awayThe happiness and grief of yesterday.Why should you grieve for what's gone by? Forget!Why brood on things that haven't happened yet?Grief won't bring back the past, and all your scoldingWill not prevent the future from unfolding.Enjoy a hundred years of victoryBut one day's all your lifetime here will be ;Whatever riches you might hope to winOne day alone is yours--the day you're in;The best course is to look for pleasure, toEnjoy the single day that's given you. [p. 264]
"We've got a lovely little set-up here, all airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I'd seen the Kus.""Coos?""Every single member of the household, my dear, is called Ku. They're a tribe from New Guinea, somewhere. Deceased's a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus. Except there aren't any."
"Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you Pibble?""Yes," said Pibble. "But how did you know?""Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn't send one of the ver big boys out on it--too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven."
There is a lot of slang and dialect. Pibble himself uses "Crippen" as an oath amusingly enough, but a fair amount of it might be easier for a Brit...
A second murder is in progress when it's thwarted by Pibble discovering the culprit.
Pretty entertaining. I'd read another from the series. Do you know it? Is this representative?
Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt
Silver Age (1968). Staircase.
And God stepped out on space,And He looked around and said,"I'm lonely—I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could seeDarkness covered everything,Blacker than a hundred midnightsDown in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,And the light broke,And the darkness rolled up on one side,And the light stood shining on the other,And God said, "That's good!"
Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,And God rolled the light around in his handsUntil He made the sun;And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.And the light that was left from making the sunGod gathered it up in a shining ballAnd flung it against the darkness,Spangling the night with the moon and stars.Then down betweenThe darkness and the lightHe hurled the world;And God said, "That's good!"
Then God himself stepped down—And the sun was on His right hand,And the moon was on His left;The stars were clustered about His head,And the earth was under His feet.And God walked, and where He trodHis footsteps hollowed the valleys outAnd bulged the mountains up.
Then He stopped and looked and sawThat the earth was hot and barren.So God stepped over to the edge of the worldAnd He spat out the seven seas—He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—And the waters above the earth came down,The cooling waters came down.
Then the green grass sprouted,And the little red flowers blossomed,The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,And the oak spread out his arms,The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,And the rivers ran down to the sea;And God smiled again,And the rainbow appeared,And curled itself around His shoulder.
Then God raised His arm and He waved his handOver the sea and over the land,And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"And quicker than God could drop His hand,Fishes and fowlsAnd beasts and birdsSwam the rivers and the seas,Roamed the forests and the woods,And split the air with their wings.And God said, "That's good!"
Then God walked around,And God looked aroundOn all that He had made.He looked at His sun,And He looked at his moon,And He looked at his little stars;He looked on His worldWith all its living things,And God said, "I'm lonely still."
Then God sat down—On the side of a hill where He could think;By a deep, wide river He sat down;With His head in His hands,God thought and thought,Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Up from the bed of the riverGod scooped the clay;And by the bank of the riverHe kneeled Him down;And there the great God AlmightyWho lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;This great God,Like a mammy bending over her baby,Kneeled down in the dustToiling over a lump of clayTill He shaped it in is His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,And man became a living soul.Amen. Amen.
"What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."
The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.
Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too.
In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...
There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.
There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind.
Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby.
Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.
February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings.
It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge:
Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt
Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
