Nicholas Blake's The Worm of Death (#1961Club)

 

Dr. Piers Loudron is a successful and well-to-do doctor living in Greenwich, the eastern end of London. 

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." 

The Isle of Dogs isn't the sort of place old tarts live anymore I think.

 

My original list of 1961 candidates is here. 

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. 

Some Previous 1961 Reads

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:

Riders in the Chariot

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?

 Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Symptoms of Love (#1961Club)

 

Symptoms of Love

Love is a universal migraine.

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.

 

Symptoms of true love

Are leanness, jealousy,

Laggard dawns;

 

Are omens and nightmares--

Listening for a knock,

Waiting for a sign:

 

For a touch of her fingers

In a darkened room,

For a searching look.

 

Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such grief

At any hand but hers?

 

-Robert Graves

 

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was an English poet who conveniently wrote a short book called More Poems 1961. What could be better for a year club poetry post, I ask you?  😉

 

 

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I don't actually have that first edition shown above, of course. Allow Gumby to introduce the beat-up paperback I do have: