Peter Dickinson's The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

     "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."

 

This was totally bats. But I really mean that in the best possible way...

 

During World War II, the Ku tribe sheltered a downed Australian airman. The Japanese found out and killed everyone they could lay their hands on, and this included the British anthropologist studying the tribe. The anthropologist's daughter Elizabeth has brought the remains of the tribe to London, where they live in a house, attempting to keep up their tribal customs in an alien environment. They all take the last name Ku.

 

Then the chief of the tribe, Aaron Ku, is bashed over the head by a lefty at the top of the stairs.

 

Elizabeth has gotten her own Ph.D. in anthropology after the war, and this arrangement will enable her to keep up her father's work more comfortably, with the tribe arranged for viewing like ants tunnelling in a kid's glass terrarium. And one of the things she tells Pibble is that, while the Kus don't approve of murder, of course, if they were to murder someone, they would naturally use the left hand, because that's the hand of evil deeds.

 

Most of the clues kind of go like that. This is the first case (out of six) with Chief Inspector Jimmy Pibble by Dickinson, but in his world he's already got a reputation. We're told he's the one who gets these kind of cases. He interviews an old lag at one point:

    "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. 

 

 

James Weldon Johnson's The Creation

 

The Creation

(A Negro Sermon) 

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 see


Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights


Down 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 hands


Until He made the sun;


And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun


God gathered it up in a shining ball


And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light


He 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 trod


His footsteps hollowed the valleys out


And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw


That the earth was hot and barren.


So God stepped over to the edge of the world


And 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 hand


Over the sea and over the land,


And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"


And quicker than God could drop His hand,


Fishes and fowls


And beasts and birds


Swam 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 around


On 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 world


With 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 river


God scooped the clay;


And by the bank of the river


He kneeled Him down;


And there the great God Almighty


Who 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 dust


Toiling over a lump of clay


Till 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.

 

-James Weldon Johnson

 

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, professor, and executive of the NAACP. This comes from his book of 1927 God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. That and the novel The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man are generally considered Johnson's two major works.

 

I first read (or maybe heard) the poem in sixth grade. Mrs. Lydia Gaines was one my favourite teachers in grade school. But for the longest time all I remembered (and that not quite accurately) was "Blacker than a hundred midnights/In a cypress swamp".  

 

Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

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.