Coelacanth and the tiger scene

A celebration of a classic movie scene. I don't follow dance as an artform, but this evening Clare was watching the BBC Four Young Dancer competition, and I overheard from my office some music that was very familiar and evocative. It accompanied the duet by Jacob O'Connell and Jason Mabana performed for the Contemporary Final. It took a few minutes to place it - or, it turned out, to place what it was so strongly recalling.

The Long Memory

Moving to a setting just a few miles eastward from Erith ... The Long Memory (1953) is my favourite British 1950s film, acclaimed as one of the best British attempts at film noir. Having just tracked down a copy, I decided to get the 1951 Howard Clewes novel it's based on.

Micah Morey's Cave

John Ptak's blog Ptak Science Books has a very useful category - "History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things"- and this handily covers a now-lost Isle of Wight cave connected with a grim story.

Parson's Tunnel and The Ocean Sleuth

The Parson from Lea Mount - 4th March 2013

I think Network Rail are missing a trick; a lot of people (me included) would be very happy to pay £10 to don a hard hat and walk through the Brunel tunnels on the currently unused South Devon Main Line between Dawlish and Teignmouth. However, we'll have to make do with a fictional account in the 1915 crime thriller The Ocean Sleuth.

A Devonshire tragedy

An out-take from writing up a walk I did on Monday: I ran into this story in the Universal Magazine.

DEVONSHIRE
Shocking catastrophe—The following tale of woe should serve as a caution to parents not to permit their children to witness scenes of cruelty of any description whatever:— Mr Hall, a miller at King's Bridge, having employed a butcher to kill some pigs for him, during the absence of the latter to get some refreshment, having left his kinfe behind, four young children, who had been witnessing the operation, agreed to play at kill-pig; the youngest was to play the pig, when one of the others, who acted the part of the butcher, stuck him in the throat and killed him on the spot: the other three alarmed at what they had done, ran into the adjoining mill, and hid themselves under the wheel, which was not working at the time, but was set going almost immediately afterwards, and crushed them all to death!
- Universal Magazine, February 1810, page 166.

"King's Bridge" is an old name of the market town of Kingsbridge. A quick look in the British Library newspaper archive finds that the story is ripped off verbatim from The Morning Post of Saturday, February 17, 1810, which says it happened "Monday last" (i.e. February 12th 1810), and much the same text was syndicated around regional papers (though it's peculiar that I can't find any sign of it in West Country papers such as Trewman's Flying Post). While children do kill other children on occasion, this story has a bit of an urban myth flavour, especially in its moral message and instant retribution. Also, since all concerned were dead, how is the course of events and motivation known? My immediate thought is - even assuming the basics are true - that the miller ought to be a suspect. We'll never know.

- Ray

The Wiles of the Wicked

Small world: while Googling the geography of a recent walk (see Microclimate) I ran into a novel with a local setting in part, William Le Queux's 1900 The Wiles of the Wicked. It's a mystery thriller, distinctly far-fetched in some major aspects, that's nevertheless very readable, and intriguing in the puzzle its narrator has to solve. It concerns a man who calls himself Wilford Heaton:

Robot & Frank

publicity still from official site

A minor recommendation: Robot & Frank, a 2012 independent film directed by Jake Schreier, currently on at the Exeter Picture House.

The central character is "Frank" (played by Frank Langella) an elderly man living alone and managing poorly due to the onset of dementia, whose son buys him a helper robot of a design similar to the Honda ASIMO. Frank initially resents the unnamed robot, which forces him to eat properly and maintain a scheduled day, but changes his mind when the robot helps him in a minor act of shoplifting - by some oversight, legality is not part of its programming. We then find that Frank is an ex-burglar, and he warms to the possibilities of restarting his career. The robot, whose prime directive is fostering Frank's physical and mental health, accepts Frank's enthusiasm and concentration on the project as beneficial to his well-being, and so it helps him with a crime. I'll leave the plot description at that point.

I'd probably have spotted Robot & Frank sooner if I'd noticed it was borderline science fiction. It's not greatly stressed in the blurb, but it's set in the near future, subtly indicated by differences in mobile phone styling and considerable advances in speech recognition and AI, and less subtly by Frank being the last book reader of a print library that's being closed down in favour of e-resources and a robot librarian. As such, the film is unusual in presenting the consequences of technological change quite neutrally; the library closure is dystopian from our viewpoint, but there are equally no doubts as to the benefits Frank gains from his robot helper, quite apart from it being a criminal accomplice. It won an Alfred P Sloan Prize for this portrayal of technology.

I say "minor recommendation" because it's a rather more 'gentle' and far less dark film than I'd normally spend money on seeing at a cinema. Clare was originally going to see it with friends, but they immediately dismissed it on seeing the R-word in the title. This is very much their loss: it proved to be worth every penny. Quite apart from Langella's excellent central performance, it tackles its theme very nicely, interweaving the threads of Frank's memory problems, the obsolescence and removal of the books he loves, and his discussion with the robot of its own erasable memory - all in the format of a "last adventure" plot. A pleasant, subtly humorous, and ultimately moving film, it's well worth seeing.

The official website is here.

- Ray

Full Dark House

Euw. I just spent most of the day in bed coughing, courtesy of a bug I picked up mid-week. But it gave me a chance to read Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House.

I mentioned Fowler's "Bryant & May" detective series in 2010, when I read his 2008 The Victoria Vanishes. Possibly I dropped into the series at the wrong point (i.e. its then final book), but I've remedied that by reading the first, which Felix kindly sent me.

Full Dark House starts with the rather bold device of introducing an elderly duo of London detectives - Bryant and May - via killing one of them off in a bomb explosion. Then the story proceeds by intercutting the surviving partner's investigation with a flashback to their first case together, a series of gruesome murders (apparently themed serial murder based on the Greek muses) in the Palace Theatre in November 1940, during the London Blitz.

Police procedural is a staple of fiction, but Fowler's angle is that Bryant & May work for the bizarre and underfunded "PCU" (Peculiar Crimes Unit) which - with the exception of the dapper and stoical May - is largely staffed by misfits from other departments. Bryant, heading it, is a "tortoise-like" badly-dressed hypochondriac who sees no problem in consulting mediums as an aid to the investigation of crimes such as the "Leicester Square Vampire". Again, the idea of mismatched detective partners is pretty staple, but Bryant and May are extremely likeable, and Full Dark House is populated with similarly sympathetic grotesques.

The plot is, essentially, an extended 'contrafactum' on The Phantom of the Opera, and the book skilfully portrays the gothic atmosphere, and the relationships and conflicts within a theatre company producing a revival of Offenbach's satirical Orphée aux enfers in what proves to be a controversial adaptation: the faux-nude costumes risk breaching the Lord Chamberlain's then censorship of theatrical nudity. Fowler neatly slots this fictional production into the theatre's real timeline - a gap between summer 1940, when a revival run of Chu Chin Chow ceased due to bombing, and summer 1941, when it restarted. Overall the novel is a vigorous and historically accurate take on Blitz-era London - darkly comic without being the least flippant about the horror of the time - and Fowler's general fascination with the little-known corners and 'deeps' of London shines through (for example, I'd never heard of The Other St Paul’s on Vauxhall Bridge) - but without the book turning into a "research dump" of what the author found out. I highly recommend it.

The only downside is that this is a book where (at least, if you're me) you constantly want to Google the details. The Palace Theatre, of course, still exists, and deserves to be considered in its own right a character in Full Dark House. As is easily findable online, it started out in 1891 as Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House, but rapidly failed in that role (in part due to its initial run of Sullivan's lacklustre Ivanhoe) and became The Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1892. Ir's a building of the astonishing complexity required to contain all the machinery of top-of-the-range stage productions. The arthurlloyd.co.uk Musical Hall and Theatre site has a special feature - The Royal English Opera House - Now the Palace Theatre - with photos, contemporary sketches, and even floor plans of its many levels.

As I mentioned back in 2010, there's more of interest at Christopher Fowler's website. His Independent series on forgotten authors is also worth checking out: the Neglected Books site has usefully collated archive links: “Invisible Ink".

- Ray

The Coming Back of Laurence Averil

A gallery of images from Maurice Drake's The Coming Back of Laurence Averil, originally published as The Salving of a Derelict (Maurice Drake, London: T. Werner Laurie, 1910). These are from the New York: Edward J Clode 1915 edition, illustrations by AW Parsons, Internet Archive comingbackoflaur00drakiala). Maurice Drake (1875-1923) was an Exeter-based glass and stained-glass expert with a sideline in maritime crime fiction. See previous post for biography and bibliography: Maurice Drake and WO2.

Maurice Drake and WO2

I just followed up the reference in Adventure through Red Devon to "Maurice Drake's strange novel WO2", since it turns out to have local connections.

Edwin Drood

A recommendation, if you didn't see it: the current BBC adaptation by Gwyneth Hughes of Charles Dickens's half-finished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, serialised in 1870 until its termination by the death of Dickens. (see the BBC feature Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens's last mystery finally solved? and the BBC2 microsite).

Due to previously-mentioned events over Christmas, I've only just seen the concluding part of the two-part series.

Read on - if you don't mind spoilers.

The first episode set the scene in Cloisterham (a thinly-disguised Rochester) where Drood, a slappably optimistic and fortunate young engineer, is visiting his fiance Rosa Bud (to whom he is betrothed via an arrangement in her late father's will) and his uncle John Jasper (an opium-addicted choirmaster). What Edwin doesn't know is that Jasper has the hots for Rosa, and has repeated opium dreams of throttling Edwin in the cathedral. A further tension is thrown into the mix by the arrival from Ceylon of the mixed-race orphan twins Neville and Helena Landless. The hot-blooded Neville too fancies Rosa, and immediately gets into an argument with Edwin over this. But what neither of Edwin's rivals know is that Edwin and Rosa aren't that into each other, and have more or less amicably agreed to break their engagement. Things come to a head on a dark and stormy night, when Edwin and Neville, apparently reconciled, visit the cathedral at night, and Jasper gets another especially vivid vision (maybe real - we don't know) of throttling Edwin. End of episode.

Judging by both the dramatisation and the novel text - there's a nice copy of the 1870 Chapman & Hall imprint on the Internet Archive (ID mysteryofedwindr00dickrich) - Dickens was doing something rather different from his usual fare. This is not a cast-of-thousands tranche of Victorian social commentary, but an economical and claustrophobic psychological mystery. The scenario reminds me a deal of a Maxwell Gray novel: there's a guilt-ridden ecclesiastical character, as in The Silence of Dean Maitland; and a young woman with three suitors, as in The Reproach of Annesley. Maybe the simplicity was down to Dickens losing his touch; he was exhausted by a tour of America, and had sufferered a minor stoke - a precursor to the one that permanently interrupted his work on the novel. Nevertheless, he's still on form with atmosphere and characterisation.

Dickens did leave a sketch of  where he intended the story to go: essentially it came down to John Jasper having murdered Drood:

His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?--Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. I first heard of the later design in a letter dated "Friday the 6th of August 1869", in which after speaking, with the usual unstinted praise he bestowed always on what moved him in others, of a little tale he had received for his journal, he spoke of the change that had occurred to him for the new tale by himself. "I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it. So much was told to me before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer.

- Charles Dickens, letter to friend and biographer John Forster, published in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1876, vol. 1

But the many authors who have picked up and run with the story - see Continuations, in the Wikipedia article - have varied in whether they took up this hint. The recent BBC adaptation doesn't entirely.

Spoiler warning again.

Episode 2 begins, as did Dickens, with general consternation after the night of the storm due to Drood's disappearance. Neville naturally falls under initial suspicion, with Jasper happy to fuel that suspicion, but no real evidence implicates him.

Meanwhile, Bazzard, the geeky assistant of Rosa's guardian, is doing some detective work, finding that Neville and Helena Landless are half-siblings of Edwin, and that their mutual father appears not to have died in military service in Egypt as supposed, and is in fact alive somewhere and picking up his pension. Jasper continues to be angst-ridden, but despite this pursues increasingly aggessive attempts to court Rosa. His mental state isn't helped by the revelation that his jealousy had become misplaced after Edwin and Rosa were no longer an item.

Ultimately Bazzard's trail leads to the discovery of an unexpected corpse in the Drood tomb, just as Jasper drags Rosa into the cathedral and confesses to Drood's murder. But, simultaneously, the corpse is found to be that of an older man, apparently dead for a year or so - and Edwin, fresh back from Egypt, walks into the cathedral wondering what's been going on. He'd left town in a huff after Rosa broke off the engagement, and that was why he hadn't written.

This turn of events so fazes Jasper that his story unravels. He and Edwin aren't uncle and nephew, but half-brothers - he was the illegitimate one - and he has for years been consumed with anger at their father's favouritism toward Edwin. A year previously he had killed their father when the latter arrived in Cloisterham and snubbed him yet again: the elder Drood is the corpse in the tomb. In Jasper's opium-addled mind, the murder of the elder Drood and the fantasy of murdering Edwin had become so conflated that he had come to believe he had actually murdered Edwin. Believing himself to be haunted by Edwin, he kills himself. In the slightly feelgood aftermath, his friends and family forgive him posthumously; Edwin and Neville depart for foreign climes as half-brothers, friends and business associates; and Helena Landless becomes engaged to the Rev. Mr. Crisparkle, the canon of Cloisterham.

While perhaps the web of family connections stretches coincidence a little too far, nevertheless I think Gwyneth Hughes did an extremely good job of completing a story where the resolution could have been a little too linear. In the novel as far as Dickens wrote it, everything (including his own guilt) points to Jasper having murdered Edwin. This adaptation nicely had it both ways, with that evidence being just as valid, except for another murder, while leaving the reappearance of Edwin thoroughly plausible. The motivation for the murder - intense anger at a parent's favouritism for one sibling, exacerbated by the favoured sibling's inability to perceive a problem - is psychologically plausible. Luckily I'm not in that situation, but I know people who have been, and it's highly toxic. So all in all, a rather good production.

If you're in the UK, both episodes are currently watchable online with BBC iPlayer at the BBC2 microsite The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

- Ray

Vampire Poets!

It's Charles Babbage's 220th birthday today, and if you want a spot of relevant, erudite and heavily-footnoted post-Christmas steampunk webcomic entertainment, I recommend Sydney Padua's website 2D Goggles, where you'll find the continuing saga of Babbage & Lovelace as 19th century crimefighters. Their current adventure involves Vampire Poets. Read on (the strange numbering is, I assume, intentional):

Vampire Poets, Prologue (in which the shade of a Gothic poet arises to set the scene, and we get examples of real-world bad Victorian poetry featuring the protagonists).
Vampire Poets - Part One! (in which Babbage, collecting statistics on window-smashing, encounters a mysterious young woman high on maddening draughts of Hippocrene; she later disappears, and her sisters - she is in fact Emily Brontë - enlist Babbage's help in finding her).
Vampire Poets Part the Third (in which Babbage introduces the sisters to Lovelace, whose hereditary temperament has acquainted her with the dangers of poetry. We see a spot of Byronic/Holmesian target practice, and get no explanation from Babbage as to why he thought he would have been a poet if he had been blind).

Here's the index to all the stories. And there's a great list of primary documents.

- Ray

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

If you didn't see the program and are in the UK, the 94-minute fact-based drama The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is worth checking out on ITV Player (it's available for 30 days from the broadcast date, 25th April).

It's based on Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House, which tells in novelised format the true story of the investigation of a notorious child murder in 1860s Wiltshire. Here's the offficial site: www.mrwhicher.com.

In June 1860, Francis Savill Kent, the 3-year-old son of a respectable family in Road (now Rode) near Frome, was found stabbed to death in the privy outside their home. Local police having failed to find the murderer, national outcry led to the talented Scotland Yard detective Jonathan ("Jack") Whicher being assigned to the case. Whicher strongly suspected Constance Kent, Savill's 16-year-old half-sister, and her brother William of murdering Savill out of half-sibling resentment. He had Constance arrested, but the case collapsed on lack of evidence, and he was pensioned off in disgrace with "mental depression arising from congestion of the brain". Five years later, however, Constance got religion and confessed to the crime. She received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment, and was released in 1885. She emigrated to Australia, joining William (who became an eminent marine biologist), and lived the remainder of her life as a respected nurse, dying aged 100 in 1944.

The drama conveys very well the frustrations of police work in an era before forensics and in a community where social hierarchies conspired to prevent unbiased investigation. As the Metropolitan Police Service account puts it - see Constance Kent and the Road Hill House Murder -

It is a classic illustration of how early investigations were directed heavily by magistrates, of the influence which well-to-do people could exert over local police officers, and of the importance of immediately searching and questioning the whole household at the scene of a crime, regardless of social status.

Then, as now, the public were horrified by child murder and wanted a result, but equally horrified by Whicher's then-unprecedented detective investigation of the Kent family (he evidently understood the unpalatable reality that family members are, with statistical justification, the prime suspects for child murders). Viewed purely as a drama, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher had strong resonances with Priestley's An Inspector Calls, with its unpicking of conflicts within a middle-class family with zero end result except their traumatic self-knowledge.  Kate Summerscale - see the September 2008 Bookslut interview - further likens it to The Turn of the Screw (the TV adaptation strongly focusing on the theory that Constance and William Kent committed the crime together).

As the Wikipedia page for Constance Kent says, the Road Hill House case impinged on major issues including Priest-penitent privilege in England. The 1865 vindication was too late to save Whicher's police career, but he became a successful private investigator. A friend of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, he was the prototype for "Sergeant Witchem" in a number of Dickens crime stories such as The Artful Touch, and "Sergeant Cuff" in the 1868 The Moonstone (see p139, Reassessing British literature, 2007). Elements of the Kent case also featured in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1862 Lady Audley's Secret. For other connections, see The prince of sleuths (Kate Summerscale, The Guardian, 5 April 2008).

- Ray