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What was Virginia Woolf up to in 1930?

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Whenever our club years have fallen during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, I’ve looked into her diaries to share something of her life from the period. And the 1930 Club is no different! Her first entry isn’t very inspiring, but I like this from 11 March. It’s part of the entry, and shows her observational skills and her power with words. And, more sadly, what she thought about her own potential old age – that would never come. Spelling and grammar her own! 

Tuesday 11 March

all because I have to buy myself a dress this afternoon, & cant think what I want, I cannot read. I have written, fairly well – but it is a difficult book – at Waves; but cant keep on after 12; & now shall write here, for 20 minutes.

My impressions of Margaret & Lilian at Monks House were of great lumps of grey coat; straggling wisps of hair; hats floppy & home made; thick woollen stockings; black shoes; many wraps, shabby handbags, & shapelessness, & shabbiness & dreariness & drabness unspeakable. A tragedy in its way. Margaret at any rate deserved better of life than this dishevelled & undistinguished end. They are in lodgings – as usual. Have, as usual, a wonderful Xtian Scientist landlady; are somehow rejected by active life; sit knitting perhaps & smoking cigarettes, in the parlour where they have their meals, where there is always left a diet of oranges & bananas. I doubt if they have enough to eat. They seemed to be flabby & bloodless, spread into rather toneless chunks of flesh; having lost any commerce with looking glasses. So we showed them the garden, gave them tea (& I dont think an iced cake had come Lilian’s way this 6 weeks) & then – oh the dismal sense of people stranded, wanting to be energised; drifting – all woollen & hairy. […] Must old age be so shapeless? The only escape is to work the mind. I shall write a history of English literature, I think, in those days. And I shall walk. And I shall buy clothes, & keep my hair tidy, & make myself dine out.

Turn Back The Leaves by E.M. Delafield – #1930Club

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I hope and suspect that most of us have read one of the books that E.M. Delafield published in 1930 – The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rather less popular is the title that I picked off my well-stocked Delafield shelves: Turn Back The Leaves. I have quite a few unread Delafields among the many that I have read, and it was good to get one down.

Turn Back The Leaves is a very different novel from The Diary of a Provincial Lady. It is not at all funny, for starters. Often Delafield combines serious topics with some levity, but this is nearly absent in this tangled story of illegitimacy and secrets. And, above all, the tensions of a family maintaining Catholic mores.

The novel starts in 1890 and ends in 1929, though most of it takes place just before and after World War One. But that section needs a bit of back story, and that’s what Delafield starts us with. In brief, a woman with the extraordinary name Edmunda marries a man named Joseph, despite neither of them being enthused by the match. They are both ardent Catholics, and their families are keen for them to marry other upstanding Catholics. It is a loveless match, though neither of them have been and love and don’t particularly miss what they haven’t had. Except then, of course, Edmunda does fall in love with another man – and Stella is born illegitimately. Joseph forgives her; they have four other children; she dies. Stella is left alone in London with a paid governess and nurse, and the others grow up with Joseph and his second wife.

Fast forward a few years – and some rather unnecessarily detailed characterisation of characters we will never see again, along the way – and Stella moves back to live with her half-brother and half-sisters, though none of them know the connection. She is only there as a ‘family friend’. And has been taken in because Joseph and his new wife are keen to give her a ‘good Catholic upbringing’. Only… there are temptations in the way of her and one of her half-sisters. They both fall in love with Protestants. Marrying out of the Catholic church is not forbidden, but it is only allowed if the non-Catholic partner allows their children to be brought up as Catholics – ‘the promises’ – and the prospective husbands won’t allow this.

Delafield’s author’s foreword reads that ‘this book is in no way intended as propaganda either for or against the Roman Catholic faith. It purports only to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of a little-known section of English society as it has existed for many years, and still exists today’. This is pretty disingenuous. As with quite a lot of Delafield’s novels, particularly the early ones, this is clearly motivated by some distaste for her Catholic upbringing. It isn’t a bitter book, but you never get the sense that the author is ambivalent.

But the Catholic characters are not monsters by any means. Sir Joseph is rather domineering, but others are motivated by their love for their church and their eagerness to do right. And it’s a very engaging, well-written novel, with vivid characters who only slightly lose their vividness by the author’s attempt to have slightly too many focuses. Stella should really be front and centre, but disappears towards the end when Delafield wants us to empathise with the rest of the family too.

I don’t know much about Catholicism, and I don’t know if inter-marrying is still as big a deal, or if the official line is still that no other Christian denomination is properly following Christ. I do know that Protestants still follow the beliefs of the Protestants in this novel – that following Christ is the important bit, not the specific church. As Delafield writes in her foreword, the Catholic angle was a niche point even in 1930 – and many readers might be uncertain that their interest could be sustained in a novel which revolves around the Catholic/non-Catholic angle.

Which would be a pity, because I think Turn Back The Leaves is very good indeed. At her best, Delafield is great at giving a novel momentum as well as psychological complexity and empathetic characters. Her writing is not unduly fancy, nor does it have the hilarious phrasing of the Provincial Lady books, but she does use the quiet, unshowy prose to pull the rug from under our feet. We are suddenly hit by observations and emotional moments, in few and precise words, that we might not be expecting. I think this is the 25th novel I’ve read by Delafield, and it’s up there among the ones I’ve enjoyed most. It feels odd to read one in which she is almost never humorous at all – but perhaps she wanted to make her 1930 output as distinct as possible. And the Provincial Lady this ain’t!

Corduroy by Adrian Bell – #1930Club

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The first book I picked up for the 1930 Club was Adrian Bell’s memoir Corduroy, the first in a trilogy all of which – I think – have now been reprinted in beautiful Slightly Foxed editions. That’s quite hard to track down now, but there are plenty of other editions kicking around – and I’d certainly recommend getting your hands on a copy, because it’s lovely.

The premise is that Bell didn’t really know what to do with his life when was 19 – which was in 1920. Between them, he and his father decided that he might become a farmer – and Corduroy is his account of getting some experience to this end. Before putting all his eggs in one basket, he had to find out how the farming malarkey went.

So off he went to Bradfield St George in Suffolk – known as Benfield St George in Corduroy – accepted by the Colville family. From here, he plays a slightly odd role in the social strata of the farm. He is clearly on the level of the farm owner and family, in terms of accommodation and society, but he is among the working men for the tasks.

The majority of the book is Bell being introduced to a task, doing it badly, and getting better. What makes Corduroy such an enjoyable book is the way he writes about the experience. He is never patronising about the labourers, and nor does he idolise them in with the eye of a Romantic poet. He recognises their expertise, and they recognise his eagerness to learn – not mocking him when he is useless at milking a cow or ploughing a straight furrow or being able to tell one pig from another. At least they don’t in Bell’s memories of his year as a farmhand – it’s worth remembering that their perspectives are, of course, given in Bell’s narrative and not their own.

As with his depictions of the workers, Bell has a great eye for the natural world. Again, it is observational rather than a paean. I enjoyed this vivid description of pigs at feeding time. Don’t say you don’t get variety from Stuck in a Book:

I wandered out again, and watched Jack feeding the pigs, helped him by carrying slopping pails of barley-meal, which gave my boots a less genteel appearance. At the first rattle of a pail the pigs set up a pathetic squealing, and, when one pen was temporarily lulled with a pailful, the laments of the others rose to a hysteria of anxiety at the sight of their brothers being fed before them. By the time we had brought the refilled buckets to the second pen, the first had finished theirs and were wailing for more. Thus the chorus went on, in strophe and anti-strophe, till all were filled and slept.

Fun, no?

I’ve realised what I want in people who write about villages. Either gossipy fun, like Beverley Nichols, or the sort of writing Bell does. People who respect the countryside and village life without romanticising it. And many things haven’t changed – like the sense of community. And many things have, of course. I’ve lived in three different villages all with working farms, but there is no longer any sense that everyone in the community is involved in the life of the farm. Even more than all the mechanisation of farming, I think that’s the thing that’s changed the most. Back in 1920, when Bell started farming and my great-grandad was a farm labourer, it was the whole world for almost everyone who lived nearby. The city was another world. As exemplified when Bell asks a farmhand what his brother does, and is told ‘nothing, just some writing’ – only to learn that he has an office job with the water board!

Corduroy looks at a period a decade before the book was published, so this isn’t an absolutely accurate reflection of 1930 – but I think it gives a good sense of the sort of semi-nostalgic writing that was coming out as the dizzy hope of the 20s started to turn to the nervous misgivings of the 30s… Was war already looming on the horizon? Perhaps not quite, but Bell writes with already a sense of a world that was disappearing.

#1930Club: kicking off!

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For the uninitiated – Karen and I are asking everyone to read books published in 1930, and together we’ll get an overview of the year. It’s the seventh, maybe, year that we’ve done a club for, and they’re always great fun. As for the rules – you can make them up, really, but essentially any sort of book, in any language, is welcome.

Here are the new reviews from this week:

Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham

Typings

Corduroy by Adrian Bell

Stuck in a Book

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton

Stuck in a Book

It Walks by Night by John Dickson Carr

She Reads Novels
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Enter the Saint by Leslie Charteris

Engineer Guy

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

The Book Trunk
What Me Read

The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

HeavenAli
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman

HeavenAli

The Blank Garden

Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

Neglected Books

Turn Back the Leaves by E.M. Delafield

Stuck in a Book

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield

JacquiWine’s Journal
The Book Trunk
The Captive Reader
Staircase Wit
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Tredynas Days
Booked For Life
Shoshi’s Book Blog

Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Briefer Than Literal Statement

An Evening with Claire by Gaito Gazdanov

1streading’s Blog

Second Harvest by Jean Giono

Intermittencies of the Mind

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

ANZ Litlovers LitBlog
Mockingbirds, Looking Glasses, and Prejudices

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

Bookconscious

Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer

Desperate Reader

Vulgarity in Literature by Aldous Huxley

Stuck in a Book

Cat’s Company by Michael Joseph

Stuck in a Book

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Staircase Wit

The Virgin and the Gypsy by D.H. Lawrence

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Rebels by Sándor Márai

Winstonsdad’s Blog

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

ANZ Litlovers LitBlog
Harriet Devine’s Blog
What Me Read

Le Bal by Irene Nemirovsky

Annabookbel
Book Jotter

Last Night Of Love, First Night of War by Camil Petrescu

Finding Time to Write

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Just One More Page

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

Bookword

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

The Blank Garden

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Indextrious Reader
What Me Read

1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman

The Book Trunk

The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd

Rosemary Kaye
Desperate Reader

Fame by May Sinclair

The Neglected Books Page

Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole

Beyond Eden Rock

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Winstonsdad’s Blog

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

Leaping Life

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

Squeak2017
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends
Tredynas Days

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

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Image result for notes made while fallingSometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Quite a while ago I was asking Twitter what recommendations I could get for funny, well-written, modern fiction. All the modern fiction I read – which is admittedly not much – seems to be quite serious. So I wanted the twenty-first-century equivalent of all those twentieth-century writers who knew how to be funny AND turn their hand to prose.

One of the suggestions that came up more than once was Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer, which has the added distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend Tom even lent me his copy – and, even better, it turned out to be a surprise entry for Project Names, where I’m reading lots of books with people’s names in the title. Because our main character is one Arthur Less. I never worked out if this was intended to sound like half-or-less, or if it would require a very particular English accent to get that from it.

As it satirised at one point in the novel, Less is a middle-class, middle-aged white man with sorrows. Though undoubtedly living a privileged existence, he is definitely on the unhappy side of things. His writing career is rather lacklustre (“too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”), he is single, and as the novel opens he is (a) not recognised by the person organising a sci-fi event he is supposed to chair, and (b) receives a wedding invitation from an ex-boyfriend. In order to avoid the wedding and the unacknowledged feelings it would bring, Less decides to accept all the author engagements that he usually ignores. Wherever they are in the world.

As luck would have it, they all neatly line up and take him across the globe. But he is usually not wanted for his own work, but because – in his youth – he was the lover of a revered, older poet. That seems to have secured whatever reputation he does have.

Usually I find this sort of structure to a novel quite annoying – where it’s just a series of events, without a central momentum or the same set of characters to engage with. I don’t know how Greer makes it so compelling, but he certainly does. I thought Less was very good indeed – and, yes, very funny. Part of that humour came from more orchestrated humour, like Less’s belief that he speaks good German (cleverly rendered in an English translation); a lot is a gentle ongoing satire of the life of a very self-conscious, not very happy writer. Even where he is revered, he realises it is because his translator is an excellent writer. He is simply a mediocre man not quite able to accept that mediocrity – for who, after all, accepts their mediocrity.

And despite this, Less is not the butt of all the jokes by any means. The reader becomes very fond of him. I wouldn’t say I was desperate for a happy ending, but I certainly sympathised with him – Greer has the impressive gift of writing warmly about a character without writing dishonestly about him. I don’t know how much is a self-portrait, other than Greer is, like Less, also a gay writer nearing 50 who hadn’t previously had enormous success with his novels.

The things that happen in the different countries, and the transitory other characters who pop up, don’t feel as important as this central portrait. Indeed, I only finished the novel recently and I can’t remember much of the plot. But I do remember the commitment to a character and a lightly satirical style that must have been very difficult to pull off – and I can see why the Pulitzer Prize would want to reward this sort of assured writing.

 

 

Sixpence House by Paul Collins

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Image result for sixpence house paul collinsOne of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.

I first went around 2003, I think, which is also when Paul Collins published his memoir Sixpence House. I’ve been ten or so times in the intervening years and I still love it, but each time there are fewer bookshops and more non-bookshops. Reading Sixpence House reminds me of its heyday, when there were 40+ bookshops and you couldn’t visit them all in a day.

I’ve seen plenty come and go over the years, with many seeming to last less than a year. I suppose the internet is the culprit, though it gives with one hand and takes with the other, as far as book-lovers are concerned. But it is still a glorious place – and that’s what brought Collins and his wife there in the early 2000s.

They’d been before, but now wanted to move there for good – or at least for a period. Neither of them are particularly drawn towards concrete, long-term plans. In a manner that wouldn’t feel possible were it not true, Collins manages to get a job at Richard Booth’s bookshop ‘sorting American books’, simply by loitering around and being American.

It’s a joy to read Collins’s love of books. He often goes on delightfully bookish tangents related to novels and memoirs he picks up in this job, or stray thoughts leading to other books. I didn’t expect to find two mentions of relatively obscure novels I wrote about in my DPhil – Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew and David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo – but they are among the miscellany of titles Collins is reminded of. You get the sense that living in Hay allows you to live in this tapestry of literature past and present – even if most of the booksellers are interlopers, and most of the locals have more down-to-earth jobs. As Collins puts it, the locals are book movers and the foreigners are booksellers.

They start house hunting. The title of the book rather gives away which house they’ll ultimately decide is their ideal home, flooded basement and all, so the reader isn’t super surprised when various other viewings end up in disappointment. But surprise isn’t the point of Sixpence House; it’s about watching a book lover discover his ideal homeland – and then discover that not all that glisters is gold. Not that there’s a dark underbelly to Hay – simply that life doesn’t always work out quite the way one hopes, particularly if you are trying to bring together many disparate threads.

One of those threads is leaving America. Collins has a British passport, but he is American through and through – and this book is clearly aimed at Americans. Occasionally that made it a bit off-putting to read for this Englishman. I don’t need to be introduced to things from my culture like Countdown with the breathless incredulity Collins relays them. I don’t need to be told that our roads are too narrow, our bedrooms too small, and our teeth too bad. (Though I do always welcome an American marvelling at the wonders of the NHS!) On the flip side, he doesn’t explain American cultural references – what on earth is C-SPAN, for example? (I have Googled it now). On yet another flip side, he mentions Lord Archer in a way that assumes the reader knows everything about him – did that news really get across the Atlantic?

As a memoir, it naturally doesn’t have the central narrative-non-fiction of Collins’ excellent book about William Shakespeare that I read earlier in the year, and I suppose Sixpence House is almost entirely a memoir that also looks a little at the life and recent history of a place. It’s nice to learn more about Richard Booth, particularly after his recent death, and there is an engaging ongoing thread of Collins editing his first book about notable losers, but there is a slight caginess – cageyness? – to the storytelling that makes you wonder if Collins felt entirely comfortable about writing a memoir. And it’s also unclear exactly why they decide to leave, in the end, while in the midst of looking to buy houses. He can draw the parameters wherever he wants, naturally, but I was left with quite a few questions.

Despite that, this is a really enjoyable book. As I say, I think it’s primarily targeted at Americans – but it is also special to those of us who know and love Hay. So if you’re an American who loves Hay but has also not picked up too many details about life in the UK, then you might just be the ideal reader for Sixpence House!

Tea or Books? #77: Fantasy vs Fantastic Fiction and Wine of Honour vs Beneath the Visiting Moon

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World War Two fiction and the difference between fantasy and fantastic fiction – welcome to episode 77!

In the first half of this episode, I dive back into the topic of my DPhil and we talk about fantastic and fantasy fiction. In the second half we compare two of the new Furrowed Middlebrow reprints from Dean Street Press – Beneath the Visiting Moon by Romilly Cavan and Wine of Honour by Barbara Beauchamp.

You can find the podcast at Apple podcasts – please rate and review, it really helps us – or download the episode from your podcast app of choice. You can support the podcast at Patreon – and please get in touch if you need any reading advice at teaorbooks@gmail.com!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth
A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne
Eric Rabkin
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
The Love Child by Edith Olivier
Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan
Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
Daniel Defoe
The Sheik by E.M. Hull
Miss Carter and the Ifrit by Susan Alice Kerby
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple
The House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair
Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon
The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski
Look Back With Love by Dodie Smith
Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff
I Was A Stranger by John Hackett
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Corduroy by Adrian Bell
Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
The Village by Marghanita Laski
Elizabeth von Arnim
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
Sanditon by Jane Austen
The Watsons by Jane Austen
Lady Susan by Jane Austen

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

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I loved this book! It was one of those times when I had to decide between racing through it and treating myself to a few pages at a time – and I went largely for the latter route, reading a bit with my breakfast each morning.

I bought The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne back in 2013 in Malvern, and have been a bit nervous about picking it off the shelves. I thought it might give away the endings to all the Christies I haven’t read, which is probably about half of them. My fears were allayed as soon as I read the preface – Osborne promises not to give away any murderers or major spoilers, and he sticks to this throughout.

The book goes through Christie’s works one by one, in order. Each section gives some context about Christie’s life at the time, a few details about the set up of the novel, what the critics and public thought etc. There’s about two pages per book – which, considering how many she wrote, comes together for a very satisfying book. Osborne is so good about giving you a taste of what makes each book original. In a short space, he might tell us how it fits into Poirot’s career, how Christie was inspired to begin, how it was reviewed, whether there were adaptations. He is remarkably good at hinting at a novel’s ingenuity – or, alternatively, if it repeated a trick or wasn’t as convincing as others – without giving a single jot away. There are plenty of biographical details about Christie, even though this isn’t quite  a biography. He gets the combination of elements perfectly.

And this is a critical work, in the sense that he shares his opinions. He’s not afraid to point out some of her weaker work, but he is obviously also an avid fan – most of the time he is enthusiastic and picks out the reasons why he likes the books. It’s not quite an out-and-out appreciation, but nor is it one of those dispiriting works where the writer seems to have chosen a subject they barely respect. Osborne writes very affectionately. And he is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Christie, and I enjoyed the times where he points out that other Christie critics got things a bit wrong.

I really enjoyed Osborne’s tone of voice, and his very English sense of humour. For example…

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so.

He’s also not afraid to point out errors in Christie’s novels, with the acuity of the superfan. This section is perhaps not quite representative, as it is more detailed than most, but…

Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were the singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews and in the novel Evil Under the Sun; (iv) the plot another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel A Murder is Announced; (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate.

This is one of the few times when he names which novels/stories share traits – a little unfair, if you happen to have read one but not the other. More often he’ll just say that something appeared earlier, without specifying where.

Osborne clearly knows a lot about opera and music, and it is these areas where he often picks up on errors. Elsewhere, he teasingly decides to pretend Christie deliberately included the mistakes – for instance, suggesting that Poirot’s inaccurate French is clearly a result of spending too much time in England, or that Miss Marple has got absent-minded and forgetful when certain details don’t line up.

I mostly enjoyed Osborne’s personality shining through. It’s a little less palatable when he goes on a tangent about how longer jail terms are needed for criminals, or a very unnecessarily impassioned defence of the use of the n-word in the original title to And Then There Were None. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is cut in the revised and updated edition from 2000, that I don’t have.

But his other quibbles are all part of the charm for me, and make it feel even more like you’re listening to a keen fan discussing their favourite author.

As I say, I’ve read about half or so of Christie’s books, and I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hadn’t read any or many. I definitely enjoyed reading about books I knew a bit more than those I didn’t. But to anybody who loves Christie – this is a total delight.