The Samurai – H Paul Varley with Ivan & Nobuko Morris

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This book is far more than the story of The Samurai in Japan, rather it is a history of Japan from the medieval period through to mid to late 19th century because to understand the development of Samurai it is essential to place them in context and as this warrior class was a significant feature of Japanese society for over a thousand years. Despite the book covering all of the Samurai Period, which is generally considered as running from the Nine Years War, which started in 1051, and concluding with the abolition of the Samurai class in 1876, the book actually starts on 26th February 1936 in a military attempt to overthrow by assassination the Japanese government and bring back the Emperor as the ultimate ruler. These junior soldiers were inspired by the Samurai of old, but unlike previous centuries the Emperor wasn’t interested in being made absolute ruler again and the senior officers of the army soon quashed the mutiny and those involved in organising it were dealt with swiftly, often by execution, without having a chance to declare their ideas in a court. This was not the first time that such an uprising had occurred in the 1930’s but it was the last; and the only subsequent appearance of the Samurai spirit in Japan would arguably be by the Kamikaze pilots of World War II. After highlighting these modern day examples the book then leaps back to the end of the Heian Period (794-1185 AD) to cover the Nine Years War and the later Three Years War (1086-88) and the rise of the Samurai fighter during those conflicts.

Early warfare in Japan was a particularly strange form of fighting and would have greatly confused a westerner if they had seen it. The Samurai would enter the field of combat and determine which of their opponents was an honourable, similarly ranked, foe and then once the armies had paired off they would effectively fight duels, only moving on to another enemy once they had defeated their current opponent. Gradually warfare evolved into something we would recognise with planned movements of blocks of men and greater strategy rather than one on one combat. This probably grew from the rise of the Shogun or General commanding whole armies on behalf of his Emperor which occurred more often during the Mongol invasions of Japan during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333 AD). This also led to the creation of one of the most remarkable documents on medieval Japanese warfare ‘The Mongol Invasion Scroll’ which covers both of the invasions and the successful repelling of Genghis Khan’s troops, although he didn’t accompany his warriors on either occasion. Below you can see a story of a particular Samurai during the second invasion which highlights the ‘code’ of these specialist warriors.

All very odd, but as stated above later conflicts were more ‘normal’ to western understanding and through the Ashikaga Period (1392-1573 AD) we see opposing warlords attacking each others fortifications and the book explores the various rivals for the throne and then during The Period of Unification (1573-1600 AD) a combined army was to make its first foreign invasion, that of Korea, up until then Japan had largely ignored the rest of the world and even when they had come across guns had largely rejected them as not appropriate to the man to man combat favoured by the Samurai.

It should be noted that the book is not for the faint-hearted, there are several references to seppuku or ritual self disembowelment often incorrectly known in the west as hari-kiri, a cruder term literally meaning belly slitting. There is even a three page eye witness description of the ceremony being performed in 1868. But the concept of a Samurai committing suicide dates back to the middle of the Heian Period and it would be done to avoid being captured in battle, to atone for a particular unworthy action or even more bizarrely for westerners to admonish the Samurai’s lord and master. Samurai generally wished to avoid being captured as there was no concept of ransoming prisoners or prisoner swaps as occurred in medieval Europe, instead they would quite often be severely badly treated as it was deeply dishonourable to be captured alive, not that this would happen often as massacres seem far more likely that the taking of prisoners. The authors make the point that ritual suicide is so common in the Japanese medieval war tales that it is unusual to go more then two or three pages without at least one account of seppuku.

Print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) depicting the ceremonial forging of a sword, attended by the fox spirit

The book was first published by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 1970, my copy is the Pelican first edition from 1974. I greatly enjoyed this exploration of a very different, at least to those of us in the west, civilisation and it was extremely well written assuming no prior knowledge of the subject matter so was an ideal introduction to a history I knew little about.

They Came From SW19 – Nigel Williams

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I had completely forgotten I owned this book, it was only when looking for another title that I found it tucked away at the back of a double stacked shelf. In fact I don’t even remember reading it or indeed ever buying it, it is the 1993 first paperback edition with no indication that I picked it up secondhand so presumably I bought it when it came out, but it gives all the impression of being new and unread despite being over thirty years old. For people unfamiliar with British postcodes SW19 is Wimbledon and this is the second book of Williams’ Wimbledon trilogy, so called because they are all set there, but unlike most trilogies they have nothing else in common, no characters appearing in more than one book or linked plot lines etc. This means that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the others, but maybe I spotted it was the second book and put it on one side intending to get volume one, ‘The Wimbledon Poisoner’, but never did.

The title, and indeed the cover, imply that this is probably going to have something about UFO’s, and it does, although to a much smaller extent than expected. Williams develops the characters of Mr. Marr, Purkiss and Walbeck in the first few chapters as Wimbledons self appointed extra-terrestrial vanguard only to have Marr apparently abducted and then forgets all about the other two less than half way through the novel as they never appear again, it’s as though he completely changed his mind regarding the plot but couldn’t be bothered to go back and tidy up loose ends. Instead the book is mainly a parody of a cult like Christian community, the fictional ‘The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist’ whose one and only place of worship is in an out of the way part of Wimbledon. We see the shambolic church through the eyes of fourteen year old Simon Britton, whose parents were both members of the congregation, although at first he isn’t that interested, being more concerned with UFO spotting out on the common at night with Marr, Purkiss and Walbeck. Indeed, unlike his mother, his father seems equally unsure about his adherence to the pretty odd ways of the church but we don’t get to explore this for long as he dies of a heart attack during chapter one and for most of the book he only exists as reminiscences from Simon and in a couple of probable sightings of his ghost. The church is after all called Christ the Spiritualist and they are big on talking to and experiencing the dead. Members of the church are round the Britton’s house as soon as the news breaks, not to offer condolences, but to organise a seance to contact the recently departed Norman.

As I said this is a parody of a cult style church, although parishioners see it as another Christian community with some extra rules and traditions which can mainly be traced back to its founders who communicated with the dead on a regular basis. Apparently getting most of the tunes for the hymns used from John Wesley who dictated them directly to Rose Fox. The fact that most of them differ only by a few notes from Methodist classics suggest more plagiarism rather than spiritual intervention but that would be denying the faith. Not all can be traced back to Wesley though…

This is from the service where the awful Quigley family are doing their best to convince Simon to become closer to the church, for reasons that will become clearer later in the book, instead he uses the opportunity to spread the word himself, but about alien visitations rather than Christ’s resurrection, which the church believes is happening soon. Like quite a lot of similar groups in the 1990’s they see the two thousandth anniversary of Christ’s birth, and or death, as highly significant and that is probably the most sensible of their beliefs beyond that of mainstream Christianity. Indeed the odd doings of the church and Simon’s desperate desire to keep them from ever interacting with his school friends are far better written and funnier than the alien spotting part at the beginning of the book which only really continues after Simon’s alien inspired schism in the church which possibly explains the change in direction of the novel. I quite enjoyed it and most of the plot lines get tidied up at the end in a mainly satisfying way, with the obvious exception of Purkiss and Walbeck. I wasn’t expecting a parody of a niche Christian community or indeed of spiritualism, from the cover ut it works quite well. I’m not sure I will hunt out the other two books of the trilogy, it was good for a quite read but doesn’t inspire further investigation of Williams’ output

William – EH Young

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Continuing with my project to read the first ten Penguin books in first edition to mark the 90th year of Penguin publications I have now reached book eight, William by Ethel Hilda Young. Now almost completely forgotten Young was a popular writer in the 1920’s and 30’s indeed this book, first published in 1925, made its eighteenth edition when published by Penguin in 1935 which is a considerable number of copies produced in just ten years so she clearly had a readership. I continue to be surprised by how good the first ten Penguins are, obviously Allen Lane was trying to start off his new venture with as good a selection as he could put together but he struggled to get reprint rights from a lot of the existing publishers, this one was from Jonathan Cape who were co-operative. Like Susan Ertz and Beverley Nichols I had never heard of Young, but also like those I have greatly enjoyed reading the book and being introduced to a sadly neglected author. I have heard of both of the two remaining writers that make up the first ten Penguins, but haven’t read anything by either of them, so this voyage of discovery will be continuing for another couple of months yet.

William and Kate Nesbitt have five grown up children, one son and four daughters, and by the time of the book all apart from the youngest daughter have married and left the family home in Upper Radstowe, a fictional town but which appears to be based on Clifton, with the docks of Radstowe below being based on the city of Bristol and the foundation of William’s wealth with his flotilla of vessels providing goods shipping along with passenger carrying pleasure steamers. They met when he left the Merchant Navy and set up on his own gradually growing his fleet as the family grew. As the book was written in 1925, the Nesbitt’s clearly met and were married in the late Victorian era and it becomes clear as the book progresses that although William has embraced the changing times Kate’s moral compass is firmly stuck in the straight laced Victorian era and this would result in conflict between the couple that have grown comfortably familiar with each others routines and mannerisms over the decades. The first half of the book introduces all the characters and their inter-relations and builds up a happy prosperous family with each person having their own quirks and William as the father and grandfather to a largely adoring and expanding group of people. Indeed by about half way through I was thinking that yes I like these characters who are so well fleshed out by Young that you really feel you know them but what is going to happen as something must as it is too much happy families.

Then daughter Lydia made a surprising move, she upped and left her husband in London and moved in with an aspiring writer in an out of the way place in Somerset. The book then takes a dramatic turn with William, who has always had a particular soft spot for Lydia beyond his other children, defending her right to live her life as she chooses being against Kate whose Victorian upbringing cannot consider one of her daughters ‘living in sin’ and who attempts to turn the whole family against Lydia. The upsetting of the quiet life of the Nesbitts and the gradual resolution of the ructions within the family is beautifully drawn by Young and the reader is pulled in all directions as first one side and then the other takes precedence as Kate gradually works through her outrage at both Lydia and her lover and also at her abandoned husband who seems to be making insufficient effort to win her back.

Whilst attempting to do some research on Young for this blog I came across this article by Rebecca Hutcheon, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales, which I totally agree with and I’m pleased to see that my guess that Radstowe was based on Bristol is confirmed. I don’t have any other books by Ethel Hilda Young, indeed none of her other works were published by Penguin so although this title presumably sold well enough they weren’t inspired to print any others. The most recent published retrospective of her works was in the 1980’s and was printed by the feminist publisher Virago, however they only have ‘Miss Mole’ still in their catalogue but did have several more including ‘William’. If you can find a copy I do recommend the novel, it is very much of its period, but so are the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and as Hutcheon points out in her article Young has much to recommend her amongst those great writers of relationships and family tensions, yet is closer to our own time so the characters are somewhat easier to relate to.

The beauties of a Cottage Garden – Gertrude Jekyll

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It is now March and thoughts turn to the great outdoors as the weather slowly improves with the first hints of spring. Sadly I no longer have a garden of my own so I get my joy vicariously from the woodlands that make up the sides of the gorge where I live and the gardens I pass on strolls through the town. I miss the small garden I had at my last house and am determined that my next move will bring a little bit of land back under my control. Until then I can dream and read books like this one by Jekyll or The Garden by Vita Sackville-West which I reviewed eight years ago at around this time, thoroughly enjoying its evocative poetry. ‘The beauties of a Cottage Garden’ is ten extracted chapters from Gertrude Jekyll’s classic 1899 work ‘Wood and Garden’ which was her first book and is a good introduction to her somewhat opinionated style and also the scale that she normally worked on in designing gardens for other people, of which she did over four hundred several of which can still be visited. A quotation is I think appropriate here:

The large lawn space I am supposing stretches away a good distance from the house and is bounded on the south and west by fine trees: away beyond that is all wild wood. On summer afternoons the greater part of the lawn expanse is in cool shade, while winter sunsets show through the tree stems. Towards the south-east the wood would pass into shrub plantations, and further still into garden and wild orchard. At the end of the lawn would be the brilliant parterre of bedded plants, seen both from the shaded lawn and the terrace, which at the end forms part of the design.

and so she goes on… The book starts with her growing love of plants and gardens from a young age with her own section of her parents garden and how she learnt what worked and what didn’t by practical application and reading standard references of the time (the 1850’s) her own works have become reference works for horticulture even up to today and it is Jekyll we have to thank for promoting the blend of colours in a planted border much as an artist draws together various paints to gain an effect greater than the individual parts. The chapter on flower shows clearly displays her distaste for the artificially contrived ways of presenting flowers at such events at her time, that this chapter is entitled ‘The Worship of False Gods’ speaks volumes in itself. She is also scathing with regard to ‘novelties’ especially the late Victorian love of dwarf varieties of plants she would much rather extend to their full beauty. “When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd”, and as for messing with the natural balance of colours well she is not happy to say the least. She also has much to say regarding ill-educated gardeners of large estates who are stuck in their ways and are not willing to accept the idea of the masters of those properties.

Yes Gertrude Jekyll is a product of her time but nobody could deny her influence and her writing is definitely entertaining both for and against trends and fads in gardens and plants. Her own home has recently been purchased by The National Trust, not only for its important gardens but also for the house itself designed by the great architect Edward Lutyens whom she worked with many times to create grounds for his various houses across the country. Together they became one of the leading lights of the Arts and Crafts movement which flourished largely between 1880 and 1920. An interesting article from The National Trust on the thoughts on preservation of her home and especially its garden can be read here.

A is For Arsenic – Kathryn Harkup

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An absolutely fascinating read, Kathryn Harkup is has a doctorate in chemistry and for six years ran an outreach program for the University of Surrey producing work on science that would “appeal to bored teenagers”. This skill set is admirably suited to explaining the chemistry in a technical, yet easy to understand way when approaching the various poisons utilised by Christie in her novels. What I hadn’t known before reading this book is that Christie was herself a dispensing chemist in a hospital up until the publication of her third book in the early 1920’s and returned to this role during WWII after retraining to update her knowledge of the various substances to be found in a hospital pharmacy. It is this background that allowed her to accurately describe not only the poisons themselves but the dosages needed and the symptoms when taken in excess and Harkup notes that she was by and large very accurate with the few errors being largely down to lack of knowledge at the time especially of the more unusual substances.

The book concludes with a couple of appendices, the first is a list of each of Christie’s novels with both UK and American titles, it’s amazing how many were changed, and the method of how each victim was killed or was attempted to be killed. For example with Christie’s own favourite book ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ we have Arsenic, Veronal *, Stabbed. The asterisk indicates that this was suicide there is also ** for attempted murder, *** for medication withheld and **** for an invented poison of which there is just one example ‘Calmo’ in ‘The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side’. This appendix in itself is a massive piece of work, whist the second appendix gives the chemical structure of he various products referred to in the book. There is also a bibliography and a comprehensive index which underlines the scientific background of the author. Veronal by the way is one of the chemicals with its own chapter in the book and is a barbiturate and the structure of this chapter, which is mirrored by the thirteen others, will give you an idea of the thoroughness Harkup has approached her task:

Firstly we get some historical context which in this case points out that the use of barbiturates dates the books with them in as they were commonly used for suicides in the 1920’s and 30’s but have unpredictable dosages, a large amount can be survived but small doses can kill depending on various factors which cannot be accurately determined in advance. The second section looks at a real life example of the poison being used and how this may have provided a basis for Christie and compares that to the chosen book to represent the use. In this example the book chosen is ‘Lord Edgeware Dies’, which is one of several stories to have barbiturates mentioned, four of which involve murder and two suicide.. As I said before, the level of analysis of the books is really noteworthy and any Christie fan should really have a copy of this volume as they will find it fascinating. The third section looks at the history of barbiturates in general, from their discovery to their usage in medicine and beyond. This also includes an explanation of how the drugs work, how they interact with the body and the effects that will be seen both whist being administered, the aftereffects and detection at autopsy if possible if they are used to kill. There is also a section on how they kill rather than just provide medical assistance. this can be a bit technical but Harkup explains things in as simple a way as practical for the non-chemist. This is then followed by consideration of any antidotes or remedial processes from an overdose. We then look at other real life cases to better understand the problem of the poison administered and finally a look at Christie’s own experience with handling the drug. An excellent and comprehensive overview both of the poison itself and how it featured in Christie’s books and in the real world.

The chemicals looked at in this volume are the eponymous Arsenic then Belladonna, Cyanide, Digitalis, Eserine, Hemlock, Monkshood, Nicotine, Opium, Phosphorus, Ricin, Strychnine, Thallium and Veronal. There is a second volume already out in hardback but as I have ‘A is for Arsenic’ in paperback I will wait for the matching book. But I’m really looking forward to ‘V is for Venom’ which is due out in paperback on the 24th September 2026.

The Fall of The House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

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Another beautiful volume from the Vintage Collectors Classic series by Penguin Books and easily the most comprehensive collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories that I have read so far. Below you can see the contents list of this book, which includes thirty one tales including all the most famous ones such as the one that lends its title to this collection ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ along with ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and one of the very earliest detective stories ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. all of which I’ve read before but it was a delight to encounter them again after a gap of several decades.

Poe was an outstanding writer and very much out on his own stylistically in the early 1800’s, he was born in 1809 and died, appropriately in mysterious circumstances, in 1849 after he was found delirious and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him, but was never sufficiently coherent afterwards to explain what had happened to him before he died. But back to 1831 and after his court martial from West Point military college, which he deliberately engineered as a means of getting out of the army, he turned to journalism to earn a living. He had been writing poetry since 1824 but his first short story was Metzengerstein from 1832 and that story opens this collection and is an indication of the horror/mystery style that would mark most of his subsequent works. I was surprised however by ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, which definitely falls into the category of comedy although with a satirical twist that only Poe would have thought of. I mentioned ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as an early detective story and in this collection I found the two follow up tales of Poe’s detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin of Paris, these are, the largely unsuccessful, and overly long, story ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and the much better ‘The Purloined Letter’. Dupin is so obviously a basis for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes including in Rue Morgue a passage where he interrupts his unnamed companion and narrators thoughts just as Holmes does in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ written in 1893, fifty two years after Poe’s tale, indeed Doyle references Poe in the story. ‘The Purloined Letter’ also has shadows of Sherlock Holmes but the less said about ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ the better, although it does have the distinction of being the first ever fictional detective story based on a real crime.

Still onto the contents list of this collection and a very well collated selection it is too:

I’m not going to go though all of these stories, I heartily recommend you have a go yourself, some are not as good as others, as you would expect from any book like this but almost all are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Gold-Bug’ which explains simply cryptology on its way to the discovery of pirate treasure and the humour in ‘The Sphinx’ which I cannot explain without giving away the whole story. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ both deal with the concept of placing a dying man in a hypnotic state just as he was about to expire although the effects of such a trance is markedly different in the two stories. There are murders aplenty and vengeful spirits abound if you like your reading dark and unexpected then there is much in Poe to explore.

Below is the contents list for the collection I already had of Poe’s writings entitled ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ and published in 1938. As can be seen the best known works are all here along with ‘Hop-frog’ which is the only tale in this volume that is missing from my latest purchase, so I have quickly read again that short story and enjoyed the tale of the revenge of two captive dwarfs who were being abused and made to entertain a medieval king and his courtiers. Yet again Poe surprises with his imagination and this story more than holds its own with the ones in the new book.

This Way Up – Mark Cooper-Jones & Jay Foreman

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This largely highly entertaining book looks at maps and what happens when they are wrong for any of a multitude of reasons. It is written by Youtube creators Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman aka MapMen. If that first sentence appears to be hedged somewhat, that is because it is, and I will come back to why towards the end of this blog but first let’s look at the good bits which is the vast majority. I’ve read books on the same theme before, notably Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Phantom Atlas, which is listed as a source in the bibliography of this book and was clearly the basis of the section on The Mountains of Kong (Chapter 4 The Map That Made Up Mountains) and which I covered in my review of The Phantom Atlas.

There are many map stories that I hadn’t come across before including the story of the remarkable navigation feats of the people of the Marshall Islands who can travel between the vastly spread out islands and atolls simply by noting the movement and pressure of the waves, well we think that’s how they do it, it’s probably a lot more complicated than that. Another fascinating story is of The Situationists, a small French anti-capitalist organisation who rejected traditional maps replacing them with diagrams indicating relationships between places. That Cooper-Jones and Foreman decided to illustrate this by trying to meet for lunch in London using maps of Paris is a suitably surreal experiment that failed but admirably made the point. The story of the television station map of the UK was informative and odd at the same time. I remember the various regions but had never really thought about how strange they were before now. Another tale I sort of knew was the IKEA world map that left off New Zealand but I wasn’t aware of just how common this is, to the point that maps with this geographical mistake have a dedicated reddit group. It should be noted here that chapter 3, where the authors use maps of Paris in London, starts with a QR code which links to a Spotify playlist to be listened to whilst reading, an idea I’ve never seen before in a book.

But let us look at a couple of places where the writers rather than the maps go wrong, the first one I spotted is a straight factual error. Chapter twelve, which ironically is about places being mis-located on maps, states that CNN produced a map that put the Libyan capital Tripoli in Syria for a piece about Colonel Gaddafi. and then later that chapter explains the mistake as:

Take for instance CNN’s map that misplaced the Libyan capital Tripoli in Syria. There is a Tripoli in Syria but it definitely wasn’t where Gaddafi was hiding at the time, and nor were CNN intending to suggest so.

Despite this assertion, in fact there isn’t a Tripoli in Syria, there is however the coastal city of Tripoli in the adjacent country of Lebanon which is presumably where CNN placed their map reference, not Syria at all. I must admit I picked up on this because I’ve been to both Tripoli’s, both in Libya and in Lebanon and whilst I liked both I wouldn’t recommend going to either currently for various geopolitical reasons.

For me though the biggest fault in the book is the longest chapter ‘The Deadliest Shortcut’ and it’s not for a factual error but rather for the badly misjudged tone of the chapter. Now I know this is supposed to be a humorous book, and yes it is very funny, whilst making excellent and quite serious points regarding maps and their use. But this chapter, written as a podcast, descends into almost slapstick jokes with people talking over one another, whilst describing the horrific ordeal of the 19th Century American settlers known as The Donner Party. For those people unaware of this story The Donner Party refers to a group of 87 settlers, including children, heading for California in 1846 who start falling behind the main groups and decide to take a shortcut shown on a map they had, but which crucially had been put there by somebody who had never actually made the journey. The group of families became trapped in the snow by what is now known as Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains and by the time they were rescued the following year only 48 out of 87 made it to California and the trapped group had largely survived by eating the dead, two of which were guides who were killed to supply food. Clearly a subject that should be handled with care and compassion, not with jokes and especially not in the cack handed manner exhibited here.

All in all I greatly enjoyed the book and with the exception of the aforementioned chapter ten I heartily recommend it.

Twenty-Five – Beverley Nichols

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Continuing my plan to read the first ten Penguin Books during the twelve months after their ninetieth anniversary of when they were published, I have now reached book seven and the second one in the blue covers of biography in that initial set after book one ‘Ariel‘. We wouldn’t see a new colour until book thirty one in March 1936 when the purple of Essays and Belle Lettres first appeared on HG Wells’ ‘A Short History of the World’ and there wouldn’t be another book classified as Essays until number 444 ‘The Times Fourth Leaders’ in July 1945. However back to this book, and I have to admit I knew nothing of Beverley Nichols, to the point that I was surprised to discover that he was male despite the more usually female first name. I was also not inspired by the idea of a twenty-five year old writing their autobiography, so was not particularly looking forward to the book, but I’m so glad I read it. Nichols started to win me over even in the foreword:

And meet interesting people he certainly did, by page fifty we have encountered US Presidents Wilson and Taft, along with poets John Masefield, Robert Bridges and WB Yeats and are about to have conversations with both GK Chesterton and then Minister of War, Winston Churchill. Nichols was born in 1898 and the narrative runs up until 1924, he was therefore involved in World War I, but luckily was not called up to the front rather his Oxford University education was interrupted by working in the intelligence section of the War Office and then as Aide-de-camp to Arthur Shipley on the British University Mission to the United States, which is how he met the two Presidents. On return to the UK he resumed his delayed time at Oxford and became president of the Oxford Union, which is how he subsequently met so many other people of note at the time and as it was normal for the president to take people to dinner before the evening debates he would spend several hours in their company. He also ran a student magazine, which Masefield, for instance, contributed to, so even in his early twenties Nichols was remarkably well connected. This is the joy of the book, it is not so much an autobiography but a series of reminiscences regarding the various people he met, you learn far more aout them than you do Nichols himself.

After leaving university Nichols eventually became a theatre critic giving him access to even more people but before that he spent some time as secretary to Australian opera star Dame Nellie Melba and there are numerous stories relating to those experiences included in the book, which like a lot of his anecdotes are really quite funny. One I particularly like has Melba taking a dislike to the position of some stone vases in a hotel and deciding to move them to a more ‘artistic’ formation which she duly did by strenuously pushing them up towards a wall much to the confusion of the staff. Typically for the lack of significant information about himself Nichols doesn’t mention that he was Melba’s secretary he just seems to spend quite a bit of time with her in Australia with no context given. Nichols also met Rudyard Kipling whom he had disparaged in a letter a couple of years earlier and then to his horror saw Kipling enter a room he was in:

The book is great fun and if I did have to look up a few people whose fame has somewhat died down in the intervening century there wasn’t many of them and it was worth the reference time but it is well written, amusing and far better than I expected it to be. Let’s leave the final words to Nichols, who did go on to have a long life as an author of over sixty books, using the final sentences of the book:

Again – I have done. Twelve o’clock strikes. There really should be slow music playing outside my window, so that I might work myself into a frenzy of pathos at the thought that another day has arrived to carry me on to middle-age. I should rather like to stay, just a little longer. But then – better not. Accept the joke of life for what it is worth. It is not such a very brilliant one, after all. And was there not a man called Browning, who wrote. “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”

The Bullet that Missed – Richard Osman

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I wasn’t planning to review another of Richard Osman’s excellent crime novels but there was so much in this, the third title featuring The Thursday Murder Club, that I felt I had to write something. If you want to read my reviews of the first two you can find them here and here, but I really recommend that you read the books especially if you like your mystery reading to feature well thought out plots doused with a sprinkling of often quite dark humour, whilst also being beautifully written. A quick example from page twelve of this book featuring Connie Johnson, the drug dealing villain from book two.

One of the things I like most is the re-appearance in subsequent books of not just the main characters but others that you thought had been specific to an earlier work and Connie gets to be a significant player in this story as well even though she spends the entire time in prison. At first reading the main theme of the book appears to be the Thursday Murder Club deciding to investigate the ten year old cold case of the death of TV journalist Bethany Waites whose car was found at the bottom of a cliff with blood stains and some clothing although her body was missing. Elizabeth doesn’t find that surprising, as she says “I once had to push a Jeep with a corpse sitting in the front seat into a quarry, and it popped out almost immediately”. That is one of the things that I love so much about this book, because as a parallel plot we get to find out so much more about Elizabeth as she is first kidnapped, along with her husband, and then set the task of killing Viktor Illyich, the ex head of the KGB in St Petersburg by a very tall but, at the time, anonymous Swede. The impression we get then is that Illyich was her opposite number as she was quite clearly very senior in MI6, we had established in book two that she is Dame Elizabeth, although doesn’t use the title, which was another nod to her seniority but equally that Viktor and Elizabeth know and like one another very well although haven’t met for twenty years so she has no intention of killing him.

Of course despite the quite disparate plot lines Osman finds a way of tying them together into a cohesive whole whilst also providing ongoing character development for not only the four members of the Thursday Murder Club but also the two police officers who have ended up working with them, Donna and Chris, both of whom are settling into new, and to them at least, surprising relationships. One of the great features in the book revolves around Elizabeth’s husband, Stephen, who is clearly undergoing fairly late stage dementia and is often struggling, although of course he doesn’t realise this. But whilst in the Swede’s library following the kidnapping spotted the very rare books surrounding them and from this, with help from a dealer friend, manages to work out who the Swede is as only one person is known to have accumulated such a selection. As a book collector myself it’s the little details that really make this observation and the fact that it was a first edition of Wind In The Willows that gave the first clue as I know this book is distinctive as I have owned a copy in the past, the other books mentioned are worth in the millions of pounds but Wind in the Willows even now is just a few thousand and my copy, which wasn’t in the greatest of condition, cost me in the late hundreds. Another thing about the tall Swede is that Chief Constable Andrew Edgerton estimates him as six feet six inches tall and I can’t help but feel that the references to height and difficulty in scale are there for the private enjoyment of six feet seven inches tall Richard Osman.

The Thursday Murder Club books are maturing nicely with Osman coming up with new and surprising adventures for his protagonists. I just hope that this isn’t the last we hear of Viktor Illyich or even the very tall Henrik Mikael Hansen.

Notes from an Island – Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

For twenty six summers from their late forties until their early seventies Tove and her life partner Tuulikki retreated to the small island of Klovharun in the Gulf of Finland where they could escape from city life and work and relax in relative peace and quiet. This book tells the story of the building of their cabin and some aspects of their life on the island with extracts from Tove Jansson’s diary, log entries from Brunström, a fisherman who with a couple of colleagues did most of the actual construction of the cabin including the dynamiting of a huge boulder out of the way, and of course Tuulikki Pietilä’s (Tooti) beautiful aquatints mainly done in the 1970’s. Originally published in 1996 in Swedish this is the first English translation, published by Sort Of Books in 2021. The lovely cover is a map of the island drawn by Tove’s mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson (Ham) who was a frequent visitor well into her eighties and was the inspiration for Moominmamma. Tooti was also to be immortalised in Jansson’s Moomin books as Too-Ticky; who has a lot of the characteristics of the real Tooti including practicality and a love of the sea.

This short book is an absolute delight, the first section deals with the decision of Tove and Tooti to seek another island as their own hideaway after Tove had shared the family retreat on the island of Bredskär with her parents, brother and eventually her niece. The construction of a cabin was done without formal permission as Brunström had pointed out that getting agreement from everyone who could be involved would almost certainly never happen but if they just built it and then asked the fait-accompli would probably just get passed, and so it turned out. Building on such a remote skerry which up until then had only been home to seabirds proved to be difficult and there are numerous log entries where Brunström (his first name is never given) couldn’t get materials out to the island due to the bad weather and high seas. Life on the island is covered more deeply in Tove’s work for adults, especially her best known ‘The Summer Book’, where Brunström is renamed Eriksson, but this is, as the title suggests, ‘Notes from an Island’ rather than the complete stories, with a blend of fiction and fact, found in the more famous book.

Tove introduces herself as a lover of rocks as is fitting for a sculptor’s daughter and many a tale is told of moving stones from one place to another throughout a summer to improve some aspect of the island only to find, when returning the next year, that everything had simply been moved back by the sea. Tooti is the daughter of a carpenter and her love is wood so maintaining the jetty and boat fell to her with less good wood being chopped up by Tove as firewood and the best pieces that floated by the island being saved for use in Tooti’s art. She was also more practical especially with the generator they would take a day coaxing into life or the temperamental propane fired refrigerator which was mainly used to store fish to feed their cat. Tove was also determined to have flowers growing on the island and cleared a small meadow for sea grass and also looked after that most Finnish of home features the rowan tree against one corner of the cabin.

I’ll close with a small section covering the time that Tove and Tooti made it out to the island before the surrounding ice broke up which will give a flavour of the narrative and the sheer joy these two ladies took in each others company:

The cabin had that closed in chill that Brunström would have called “cold as a wolf’s parlour”, and someone had burned all the firewood. We found a couple of wooden crates in the cellar and got them to burn and dragged in the sawhorse and some ice-covered timbers to thaw.

We were exhilarated by change and expectation and ran headlong here and there in the snow and threw snowballs at the navigation marker. Tooti made a toboggan out of thin strips of wood and we rode it again and again from the top of the island far out across the ice.

When we tired of that game, we sat down and took stock. The sea was chalk white in every direction as far as the eye could see. It was only then that we noticed the absolute silence.

And that we had started whispering.