Fish provide the clue: Scales of Justice (Ngaio Marsh)

 

Ngaio Marsh. Scales of Justice (1955). A tight-knit community settled along an idyllic trout stream in an idyllic English vale suffers a nasty murder. Alleyn, Fox and Co. winkle out family and personal secrets, collect a convincing number of clues, and arrive at a suitably surprising solution. Along the way breaches are healed, character is revealed, people learn salutary lessons, and true love blossoms twice over. A nicely constructed puzzle kept me turning the pages, and I hardly had time to notice the creaky wheels of the plot and the barely 2D characters. The scales in the title belong to two fish, one of which was a source of conflict between neighbours, supplying both important forensic clues and a possible motive.
     Marsh here indulges in a fantasy of an England in which social class and degree kept people within moral bounds. In other books, she satirises this kind of romantic comedy, so I don’t know what she’s up to. With a severely limited cast of characters, she’d written herself into a corner, and maintaining the tradition of noblesse oblige must have seemed the only plausible path out of the maze. A good entertainment, but not her best work. **

Alleyn's First Case: A Man Lay Dead

 

Ngaio Marsh. A Man Lay Dead (1934) The first Alleyn novel. Pretty good puzzle, albeit with a murder method that’s a bit too contrived, and actually impossible. The setting is a country house whose owner gives fabulous weekend entertainments. This one is the game of Murder, and of course the corpse is really dead.
     Alleyn isn’t much more than a talking head, but so are the other characters. Fairly placed clues and red herrings, with Fox and the other cops lending an air of verismilitudinous police procedure. Marsh never did pay much attention to procedure, though. Apart from photography, dusting for prints, and the collection of odd objects, mentioned but never well described, the forensics happen offstage. Nigel Bathgate, aspiring reporter, who figures in many of the early Alleyns, provides the admiring amateur foil. His admiration is not uncritical, however. The book ends on a more realistic note as Bathgate and Alleyn ride the train into Paddington. Bathgate’s romantic life gives us the necessary coda for every comic romance: love prevails.
     Marsh wrote this book to see if she could make a plausible entertainment. She succeeded. In the 1920s and 30s there was a great demand for light reading to while away train and ocean journeys, and damp weekends. The crime puzzle was one of many genres supplying the market. Pretty well all the genres were translated into film and television over the next few decades, when those media became mass entertainment and needed a constant supply of product.
     Alleyn develops into a much more complex human being in the later novels; Marsh’s talent for satire makes them social comedies hung on crime puzzle plots. I like Alleyn and his colleagues. I like the world they inhabit, a world looks and feels like the world I knew in England in the 1940s and 50s, but one in which justice is, inevitably, done. It’s a comforting fantasy. **

Three more by Lapham: Philanthropy, Spies, and Disaster.

Lapham’s Quarterly VIII-3: Philanthropy (2015) There are two main themes: you should give alms or other assistance to those who need it; and you should give alms or other assistance to those who deserve it. This collection offers argument to support both principles, but on the whole, those who wish to limit their philanthropy to the deserving tend to concoct self-serving rationalisations to avoid giving anything. There are also accounts showing us what it’s like to be at the giving or receiving end, which range from the amusing to the harrowing.
     Anthropologically speaking, humans have survived and thrived best when they collaborated, and have kept accounts more in terms of ability than performance. The golden rule applies as much to sharing one’s wealth as to any other aspect of our lives. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly IX-1: Spies (2016) Spying is as old as human conflict. “Intel” has determined the outcome of battles and wars. But success in spycraft appears to be random. Too many things can change between acquisition and delivery, quite apart from the inevitable defects of error, lack of context, and limited scope. Spies are traitors, hence we despise them even as we use thme. And reliance on spycraft as a tool of government fosters paranoia, which renders rational calculation difficult. For paranoia suffers from the prime weakness of all logic-based attitudes: logic is no better than the premises on which we use it. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

     These, and other like ruminations, were prompted by this collection, which has the rather sad effect of melancholy. For if we cannot trust each other, we cannot live together. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly IX-2: Disaster (2016) Whether caused by human error or malice, or by natural accidents, disasters shift our common enterprises into new directions, and sometimes completely change them. Soon after their effects have subsided to a pre-catastrophic level, we forget the perils that threatened our existence. Our preparations for the next disaster diminish as the memories of the last one fade. Eventually, we resent the cost of maintaining the defenses, and the next disaster’s destruction is, once again, greater than it could have been. – That’s the general thesis that emerges from these accounts of the sometimes unspeakable horrors we visit on each other or that are visited upon us.

     This collection was assembled four years before the covid pandemic upset all our plans. The records of past disasters show that our responses to covid-19 are simply the human responses to any disasters. Pity for the victims, help offered, sometimes heroic sacrifice, as well as denial, suspicion of conspiracies, blaming of the outsiders, rage at the authorities who must do the unwelcome work of constraining our choices, we find all these in the record. When it comes to disasters, only the details differ. Our behaviour repeats. Which is, I suppose, one reason that we wisely nod our heads and mumble cliches about not learning from experience. ****

Reread of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens.

 I've added a note to my review of Ngaio Marsh's Light Thickens, which I've just finished rereading.

Sixteenth century women: Tougher than they seemed.

 

Antonia Fraser. The Weaker Vessel (1984) A thorough survey of women’s lives in the 1600s. Fraser covers every role for which we have direct or indirect documentary evidence. The result is the usual mess of human virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. The sad fact is that during the 1600s, women lost some of the gains in legal and economic power that they had gained during Elizabeth I’s rule, which demonstrated that women were as capable as men. But even Elizabeth had to admit (in public anyhow) that her talent for government was a masculine one.
     A reminder that women have been treated as chattel through most of history. There are Y-chromosome burdened people who would like women to revert to that status. And also a reminder that women had (and have) to be tougher than men. The title is ironic: pregnancy and childbirth were and are dangerous; only the toughest (and luckiest) survived.

     Recommended, but it’s a long read. ***

A woman at the end of her tether: The Fire-dwellers (M Lawrence)

 

Margaret Laurence. The Fire Dwellers (1969) We eavesdrop on Stacey MacAindra, married to a salesman, with four children, over a few weeks while she tries to cope with increasing despair. She has a brief fling with a young man in a beach house, discovers that her husband’s bullying boss is an old schoolmate, a fraud who’s reinvented himself into an empty shell. When Duncan, the younger son, nearly drowns, she realises that Mac and eldest son Ian share a laconic code that’s as expressive of their deepest emotions as her more loquacious interior monologue,. Finally, she reconnects with her husband. But she’s still afraid for her children, and has to accept that she can’t protect them from every danger, real or imagined, that looms on the horizon of her mind.
     She’s managed to endure a crisis that threatened a nervous breakdown. That’s some achievement, when you think about it. It’s also what we all have to do from time to time, and some of us don’t have the resilience to manage self-doubt, childhood baggage, fear of the future, obsessive worry, and all the other psychic perils entailed in being human. Beautifully written, a classic that I didn’t read when it first appeared. I don’t think I would have understood it back then, actually. The writing, a mix of stream-of-consciousness, first person point of view, and omniscient narrator, is superb. ****