Fading Memories

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ten Lords A-Leaping is perhaps the best of the three Ruth Dudley Edwards books I've read. A strong plot, a sometimes merciless, but fair, dissection of the characters and motivations of the two sides in the fight for the banning of fox hunting and great descriptions of such institutions as the House of Lords and the English countryside.

As always, I have some problems squaring my lefty tendencies with the stance chosen by Ruth Dudley Edwards. I do think that there are better ways of fox control than having caravans of cars follow cavalry charges that follow a nightmare of dogs that follow one little fox. And I do think, too, that it's not always necessary to mess with other people's occupations, no matter how distasteful. It's like adultery; it's not something I do, but I don't concern myself with other people's proclivities -- not even when adultery almost always means someone gets hurt. Likewise, if people want to hunt, let them hunt. And if they hunt an edible animal, so much the better, since a nice game pie with deer, pheasant, mincemeat, saffron, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, onions and eggs is definitely a Good Thing.

Anyway, her book, first published in 1995, now has been made into a fantasy by the British government, so I wasn't even sure where to file my note of it...

Ruth Dudley Edwards

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This book is part of the series about Robert Amiss and Jack Troutbeck -- this volume is set before Publish and be Murdered, and is another really nice read. It's clear that Ruth Dudley Edwards main intellectual contention is that abuse of language to cover up for small-minded, spiteful, fuzzy thinking is something abhorrent. And in that she's right, of course.

In this book she makes fun of the academic crowd who confuse the person who performs a certain function in a meeting with a piece of furniture, and very good fun, too. Apart from the amusing invective against the PC crowd, there are some very interesting character sketches, notable Mr. Pusey and Mary-lou, and a horribly believable plot.

On to the third installment -- one about fox hunting.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

I've got an enormous backlog in reading matter owing to having been rather ill in the last few weeks. One of the books that have helped make the week bearable was this one. A really nice detective, I call it. There's even a Wodehouse reference in it -- rather in the open, but still.

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By Henry Holt

Lord John and the Private Matter was a washout, and one that came at a particularly inopportune time, namely the first leg of the train journey from Deventer to Paris. The prospect of having to travel for four or five hours by train without anything decent to read is something that makes the staunchest man flinch blanch, and while not being particularly staunch, I blanched, and flinched with the best. Fortunately succour was at had, in the form of Murder at the Bookstall, which Irina had bought for 50 cents just before our trip and which she had prudently placed in her bag. This book tided me over to Paris.

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I re-re-re-re-reading Strong Poison, one of the best, most rounded Dorothy L. Sayers novels (Nine Tailors is good, but this one has a dramatic quality over and above that prime example of the puzzle detective novel). And reading a little more closely than usual, I suddenly found the Dowager Duchess' remark on page 24 significant:

... I have been reading one her books, really quite good and so well-written, and I didn't guess the murderer till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15.

And true enough, about page 15 (13 in this edition), we get the scene where Philip Boyes is actually administered the poison. Quite clever. I wish I had a first edition: perhaps in that edition, the fatal dinner is first described on page 13.

When I gave Zeborah, our friend from New Zealand, a tour of Deventer on the occasion of her visit to us, we did not neglect to visit a few of the dozen or so second-hand bookshops that Deventer can count among its blessings. In one of those, I found The Yew Tree's Shade, a detective novel by Judge Cyril Hare.

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Raymond Chandler is widely regarded as the best writer of hard-boiled thrillers, and probably rightly so. I don't care much about the genre, so I don't own many Chandlers. Pick-up on Noon Street contains four stories from The Simple Art of Murder, and most of them were interesting enough to finish them, especially when read with a writer's eye.

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