Material Witness

James Anderson livens up the country house murder

Towards the end of The Bloodstained Egg Cosy, Inspector Wilkins, the reluctant yet brilliant country detective, bemoans the fact that his success in solving a double murder and jewel theft will likely earn him a promotion. "It'll likely mean more case like this one. There seem to be hundreds of them among the English upper classes these days," he says. "And I really don't enjoy them. I'd be much happier working on the new one-way traffic system."

In this way, throughout the story, James Anderson pays homage to and gently pokes fun at the country house party murder, the foundation stone of British crime fiction. It is done skilfully and with respect for the golden age writers who first articulated the literary convention of sitting all the inhabitants of the house down in the drawing room while the socially inferior - who is always, it seems, an eminently more attractive character - local policeman reveals to all whodunnit.´

The late James Anderson pulls off something of a coup in his revealing tableau in that just about every one of the dozen people sitting before Wilkins is guilty of something - be it arrogance, lying, theft or murder. And this is the culmination of a very clever and hugely involved plot featuring an aristocratic jewel thief, international politics, diplomacy and espionage, revenge, love and a very large collection of guns. 

Barely a word is wasted and the story line is littered with clues for the sharp of eye and mind. The social observation is also very keen and the whole story is carried off with a witty charm. It is a worthy modern complement (and perhaps compliment) to the great detective stories of the golden age.

And, of course, Wilkins is spot on. There are hundreds of such crimes to be discovered. And so, if you liked Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, you'll love James Anderson. As I did, and I look forward to the Affairs of both the Mutilated Mink and the Thirty-Nine Cufflinks.

  

Three word reviews for a busy world...

The last two months have been so frenetic that at present I am on course to read just 32 books this year, compared to 83 last year and over 100 in 2007. There is little time to read, even less to write.

I do not want to let Material Witness wither on the vine, so rather than allowing the cyber silence to continue I thought a Digested Reviews post might tide me over until work calms down some.

So, a three word limit for the things I've read, seen and heard lately.

ITV's new series of Lewis: "Silly".

Amy McKinnon's Tethered: "Unusual".

Carl Hiaasen's Scat: "Anarchic eco fun".

Simon Kernick's Relentless: "Flawless".

Harlan Coben's Hold Tight: "Best since TellNoOne".

Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn: "Five star fiction".

That, sadly, is just about it, besides a very short note to say that I am really enjoying the late James Anderson's English country house murder weekend novel, The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy.

Ripper tours show the enduring appeal of the Whitechapel murders

One of the many things I didn't realise about the Jack the Ripper murders was that the weather in late summer of 1888 was not very good. Very similar in fact to the weather in the East End of London on Tuesday night, which is to say, very wet. 

This was offered by our Ripper tour guide Dave as something of a consolation for the fact that by the time we had finished the tour on Tuesday evening all 30 of us were soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone: it was surely not as cold in August and September 1888.

The enduring appeal of the Jack the Ripper murders - perhaps revived by a recent television series - was illustrated by the fact that at least three tour parties were out in Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the relentless rain on Tuesday. I estimated that there were probably at least 80 people in total. On our tour there were Australians, New Zealanders, Americans and at least one German (struggling with an uncooperative red umbrella) showing that the appeal is international.

At the conclusion of the tour, Dave offered two theories about why the murders still hold a firm grip on the dark side of the public imagination.  The first is that the time, the atmosphere and the grisly nature of the killings contribute to a "spook" factor that appeals to that odd part of some of us that likes to be scared. The alternative is that despite years of formal investigation, 120 years of amateur sleuthing and dozens of books and films on the subject, precisely nothing is known about the Ripper other than that he (or even she) is dead. The complete lack of physical evidence in the case, besides a strip of leather left in a doorway, has left a genuine mystery - perhaps the greatest unsolved crime mystery there is.

The fact that the case is so open has resulted, Dave reported, in no fewer than 200 people being suggested as suspect, and a cast range so diverse as to include a future, a Jewish slaughterman and a mad midwife.

Dave's tour was mercifully free of the conspiracy theories that rage around the Ripper. He guided us from Aldgate East tube station through the backstreets of Whitechapel via each of the accessible murder sites towards a final stop in Mitre Square in the shadow of the gherkin in the City, where the body of Catherine Eddowes was found. Along the way we saw some of the last remnants of Victorian London in the terraced houses of Fournier and Hanbury Streets. And in the gloomy darkness of those claustrophobic throughways it was just about possible to recover some of the eery atmosphere of late 19th century London, when the East End was an imporverished slum, a festering boil on the respectable face of the world's most important financial centre.

Quite what the people of the abyss - as the East End was labelled then, notably by Jack London in his excellent book of the same name - would make of three bedroom houses (where 20 or more of them might have slept then) in Fournier Street going for sums in excess of a million pounds, is anyone's guess.

But however much things might have changed there is a tangible air of desperation and danger around the modern East End.

In all it was £7 and 100 minutes well spent - despite the brush with hypothermia. Dave was informative and entertaining and the tour moved with purpose. He gave a decent historical overview of the social and economic conditions of the late Victorian East End.

In truth, I found that more interesting than the step by step account of the murders and so did not get as much from the tour as one conducted by the academic Bill Fishman, a man with a marvellous story-telling gift, that I went on in 1992 when I was a student at nearby Queen Mary College. Fishman's tour had a much broader remit, covering immigration and the politics of radicalism, but even he had a visible twinkle in the eye when passing known Ripper sites.

For anyone interested in that era I recommend Fishman's book East End 1888, to which Jack London's reportage account of life on the streets in The People of the Abyss is a perfect complement.

Fishman is now in his late 80s and so probably doesn't give tours any more, so as an alternative, particular if you are interested inthe Ripper, I can thoroughly recommend Dave.