1920s

The Return of Alfred by Herbert Jenkins

StuckinaBook All , , , 4 Comments

Quite a few of us, around the blogosphere, have delighted in the frothy joy of Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins – my own review was not the first, but was among the most deliriously enthusiastic. Naturally, it sent me off buying a whole bunch of other Jenkins novels – none of which I have read. Instead, I listened to an unabridged recording of The Return of Alfred (1922).

This came free, courtesy of Anna Simon, reading at Librivox. Here it is, if you’d like to listen to it yourself. This is my first experience with Librivox and, I’ve gotta say, I was pretty impressed. Anna Simon is an excellent reader, with a lovely tone and great subtle distinctions between voices (without going quite into ‘dramatisation’ style). Cynics, have a listen.

But what of the novel? Well, if you think Patricia Brent, Spinster was overly reliant on coincidence, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. The Return of Alfred revolves around a gentleman (whose real name I have forgotten; curse not being able to turn back the pages of an audiobook!) who masquerades as James Smith when distancing himself from an overbearing and cantankerous father. Said father wants ‘Smith’ to marry a neighbouring woman, in order to join their estates, but Smith is a determined war hero with independence coursing through his veins – oh, and he’s very witty too – so, false name and canvas bag in hand, he hops on a train. Only it goes no further than a village in the middle of nowhere, where Smith is thrown out into the rain. He scales the fence of the first house he comes to… and is joyfully greeted as the long-lost Alfred.

The greeting is joyful from the butler, that is. All of Alfred’s family are dead or absent, but his butler, governess, and sundry others are thrilled to see him after an absence of around a decade. The neighbours aren’t so sure; Alfred has done some misdeeds in his time. Yes, dear reader, we have to swallow that Smith has an exact doppelgänger – and that nobody at all believes his protests that he is not the man they believe him to be. These protests are constant and unswerving throughout the novel, and at no point do they seem to make the slightest impression on anybody except a fantastic young boy called Eric, who bases his adjudication on Smith’s cricketing ability.

So, why does Smith stay, rather than high-tailing it onto the next village asap? Readers of Patricia Brent, Spinster might be able to guess the reason – yes, it is a case of love at first sight, with a woman whom he has glanced at a window. That is enough, it seems, to make him stay put. And she is barely more delineated than that for large chunks of the novel. The love story rather holds sway in Patricia Brent, Spinster; in The Return of Alfred, we are more interested in the possible outcome of the mistake (given the nemeses Alfred apparently has, that Smith must now encounter) – and I spent my time wondering if the was a reason that nobody believed that Smith was not Alfred.

As you can tell from my teasing tone, I found The Return of Alfred all rather improbable – but also another total delight. There is a chapter where Jenkins indulges himself far too much in describing a cricket match (the chapter is twice as long as the others, and nothing unexpected happens in the cricket match; it was the only chapter that I found dragged) but, besides this, it is all great fun. Incidentally, I have discovered that I much prefer to read comic books than listen to them, as I always want to ‘do’ the pacing and comic timing myself, and found myself re-saying things in my head with a different rhythm, excellent though the narrator’s reading was.

So, it’s not quite up there with Patricia Brent, Spinster for me – which would probably have been true whether I’d read or listened to The Return of the Alfred – but it certainly proved to me that Jenkins wasn’t a one-trick pony when it comes to silly, delightful tales of extremely unlikely events. Smith is fab, the villagers are amusing, and Eric’s abbreviations were more than dece. Thank you, Librivox, for making this book freely available to all!

Oh, and fun fact – this, and Patricia Brent, Spinster, were originally published anonymously; this one was simply ‘by the author of Patricia Brent, Spinster‘, and dedicated: ‘To those in many countries who have generously assumed responsibility for the authorship of Patricia Brent, Spinster – this book is dedicated by the author’.

The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne

StuckinaBook All , , , 13 Comments

I’ve reviewed The Red House Mystery today, over at Vulpes Libris – a detective novel by the man who is probably my all-time favourite writer, A.A. Milne. Usually I’d just point you over there, but I hope my fellow foxes won’t mind me posting the review here too, since I’d really like to have my much-loved author reviewed in the Stuck-in-a-Book archives as well…

The Red House MysteryNowadays, The Red House Mystery is likely to provoke the words “I didn’t know A.A. Milne wrote a detective novel”; back in the day, you’d have been more likely to hear astonishment that the author of The Red House Mystery had turned his hand to children’s books. For, although Milne arguably only ever wrote one detective novel (Four Days’ Wonder just about counts as one as well, I’d suggest, but that’s another story), for a while it was the thing for which he was most famous. Having earned his name as a Punch humorist, he turned his hand to The Red House Mystery in 1922 and it was an enormous success. Two years later would come When We Were Very Young, and another two years later arrived a certain Bear of Very Little Brain – but, between 1922 and 1924, A.A. Milne and crime went hand-in-hand. And a few years ago The Red House Mystery was reprinted: hurrah.

I first read it sometime before that, in around 2002, when copies were traceable but the novel was certainly not in print. I enjoyed it, but that was about all I remembered when I decided, recently, to give it a re-read.

Everything kicks off ‘in the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon’; The Red House is occupied with various guests, but it is the servants who take centre stage at the beginning. Mrs Stevens (the cook-housekeeper) is talking to her parlourmaid niece Audrey about the colour of a blouse the latter will wear. That isn’t a detail that has any bearing on the later plot; it’s just an indication of the sort of domestic triviality that Milne so loves describing, whatever sort of fiction he is writing. And, indeed, whatever sort of fiction he is writing, he can’t avoid giving his prose an air of comedy. Both Stevenses are rather given to inconsequential conversation, and Milne throws in some fun verbal tics. Audrey relays the news that Mr Mark’s brother has returned from Australia (Mr Mark being the owner of The Red House); Mrs Stevens replies:

“Well, he may have been in Australia,” said Mrs Stevens, judicially; “I can’t say for that, not knowing the country; but what I do say is he’s never been here. Not while I’ve been here, and that’s five years.”
Upon being assured by Audrey that the brother has been absent for fifteen years, she says:

“I’m not saying anything about fifteenth years, Audrey. I can only speak for what I know, and that’s five years Whitsuntide. I can take my oath he’s not set foot in the house since five years Whitsuntide.”
You either like that sort of thing or you don’t. If you don’t, there is still the mystery to hang around for; if you do, you’ll find that Milne could write just about anything and you’d lap it up.

What he has written is a murder mystery that is pretty decent. My refusal to reveal any details at all about a detective novel has rather stymied this review, but suffice to say that it doesn’t revolutionise the genre particularly. That is to say, this was before the Golden Age had really taken hold, so the genre hadn’t come close to being clichéd. For context, The Red House Mystery came out the same year as Agatha Christie’s second novel. So, we have clues strewn willy-nilly, secret passages, midnight assignations, costumes, and all sorts of things that would be considered too hackneyed now. How nice to have been able to use them with impunity!

Milne lays out some ground rules for detective fiction (or, at least, his favourite detective fiction) in an introduction. Plain writing (no ‘effecting egresses’), no predominant love story, and ‘for the detective himself I demand first that he be an amateur’. He can be a extremely shrewd man, but not a specialist – or, at least, his specialism ought not to help him solve the murder. As Milne writes:

What satisfaction is it to you or me when the famous Professor examines the small particle of dust which the murderer has left behind him, and infers that he lives between a brewery and a flour-mill? What thrill do we get when the blood-spot on the missing man’s handkerchief proves that he was recently bitten by a camel? Speaking for myself, none. The thing is so much too easy for the author, so much too difficult for his readers.
The detective Milne creates is, indeed, an amateur; a guest at The Red House. He is Anthony Gillingham, and is intelligent, charming, quietly witty, and essentially an incarnation of Milne himself, so far as I can tell. It is difficult to get much of a sense of him here, besides his likeability, but I would have loved to see him feature in more detective novels. Sadly, that was not to be.

I have glossed over the surface of the plot, but that is to be expected. Importantly, The Red House Mystery is cosy crime at its finest. Milne does not have the genius for plotting that Christie had – but who does? This novel can certainly hold its own with the second tier of detective novelists and, I would controversially argue, is rather better than the Dorothy L Sayers’ books I’ve read. If you’ve somehow missed it, go and treat yourself.

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

StuckinaBook All , , , , 4 Comments

Over at Vulpes Libris we’ve started another Shelf of Shame week – where the book foxes dig out the books they’ve been intending to read for ages, or feel vaguely ashamed that they haven’t read. As I seem to be less well-read then all the others, I choose authors I’ve not read (let alone individual books). Last time I chose Christopher Isherwood; this time I chose Aldous Huxley. It seems that there are all sorts of men of the interwar period whom I haven’t read. And I haven’t even turned my attention to the Macho Men of American Literature (Hemingway, Bellow, Roth, etc.) who remain a barren land to me.

Like Isherwood, Huxley completely surprised me – not at all what I was expecting. But this time around, it came as rather a wonderful surprise. The novel is Crome Yellow (1921), and the review can be found over at Vulpes Libris. It’s one that I think a lot of SIAB readers will like, and that may come as a surprise to you too…

The City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings

StuckinaBook All , , , , 2 Comments

If your reading tastes are anything like mine, then you’ve doubtless read a lot of books about the Second World War. But how often has that Second World War been in the 1980s?

That is the premise to the 1920 novel The City of Endless Night, which takes place in 2151. Despite my aversion to sci-fi, I found this book really interesting and good – and so unexpected for 1920. My full review is over at Shiny New Books…

Letters from England – Karel Čapek

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

When Claire recommended Letters from England (1924, translated by Paul Selver 1925) by Karel Čapek it was one of those very welcome recommendations – being for a book that I already had on my shelves.  Usually I note when and where I buy books, but this time I didn’t – I can only assume it was because the name rang a bell, the physical book is quintessentially 1920s, and I have a soft spot for books about England. And, oh, how fun this book is.

It doesn’t that Čapek shares my feelings about the relative merits of London and the rest of the country. It is amusing, in the 1920s, to hear him complaining about grim housing and traffic (goodness knows what he’d think if he visited it today), but I entirely agree with him about the ferocious busyness of the place.  It is rather easier to be funny when one is criticising than when one is praising, of course, and Čapek is very amusing in these early chapters.

These houses look rather like family vaults; I tried to make a drawing of them, but do what I would, I was unable to obtain a sufficiently hopeless appearance; besides, I have no grey paint to smear over them.
Oh, yes, he includes plenty of pen and ink illustrations, of the variety that are deceptively simplistic.  He is particularly good at animals, despite what he says in the text.

But – thankfully for the self esteem of the nation – he doesn’t just stay in London and criticise it.  Instead, he travels around the countryside and (belying his title) pays visits to Scotland and Wales, and writes about Ireland without actually going there.

Where are you to pick words fine enough to portray the quiet and verdant charms of the English countryside? I have been down in Surrey, and up in Essex; I have wandered along roads lined with quickset hedges, sheer quickset hedges which make England the real England, for they enclose, but do not oppress; half-opened gates lead you to ancient avenues of a park deeper than a forest; and here is a red house with high chimneys, a church-tower among the trees, a meadow with flocks of cows, a flock of horses which turn their beautiful and solemn eyes upon you; a pathway that seems to be swept as clean as a new pin, velvety pools with nenuphars and sword-lilies, parks, mansions, meadows, and meadows, no fields, nothing that might be a shrill reminder of human drudgery; a paradise where the Lord God Himself made paths of asphalt and sand, planted old trees and entwined ivy coverlets for the red houses.
You see his way with words, and his fondness for the long sentence.  We will forgive him referring to any group of animals as a flock, and believeing Essex to be ‘up’, because he is so expressive and enthusiastic an appreciator of the English countryside – which means so much to me too, in a way which transcends expression.  The countryside is the only place where I feel properly alive, and I would love to have accompanied Čapek on his travels, gasping at the beauty of the Lake District, admiring the simple aesthetic pleasure of a thatched cottage, and (for we are not perfect human beings) sharing eye-rolls at the sort of person who bustles hither and thither in a city all year, and never ventures out to visit a sheep.

The Suburban Young Man – E.M. Delafield

StuckinaBook All , , , 10 Comments
Can we talk about how  pleasingly this bookmark goes?

I started reading The Suburban Young Man (1928) when Tanya was giving a paper on it at a conference we both attended – that link will take you to her great review of it, which includes interesting research into Delafield’s writing of the novel.  Well, I didn’t manage to finish it then, and it went back on the shelf for 18 months or so… and recently I picked it up and swiftly read through to the end.

It’s definitely not one of EMD’s best books, but it’s EMD – so it’s still definitely worth a read.

The main characters are aristocratic Antoinette and the eponymous young man – Peter – who is married to the saintly housewife Hope.  They begin an extramarital affair which is entirely a meeting of minds – Delafield, as with her better-known The Way Things Are, never takes things as far as the bedroom door, let alone further.

Much of the novel is taken up Antoinette and Peter telling each other how well they are suited, even though their backgrounds are so different.  One of the assumptions the novelist makes (and all the characters make) is that the suburbs – here represented by ‘Richford’ – are entirely beyond the pale, and culturally mired in the commonplace.  That view is essential to many interwar novels, but it falls rather flat for the modern reader.  Still flatter, for this modern reader, is all the earnest discussion of romance.  Delafield is at her weakest when she tries to be earnest – she is so, so much better at lifting the veil on self-delusion, or the comedy of everyday life, and not with paragraphs like this:

He was unable now to view himself as disloyal to his wife with any sense of conviction, and this not because technically he had remained faithful to her.  Merely he could not feel that he had taken from Hope anything that she had ever possessed, or would ever have wished to possess.  They had married one another neither by reason of passion nor from any strong sense of affinity, and the liking and admiration that he felt for many aspects of her personality had increased, rather than diminished, of late; nor did he think that she liked him less.
Hope is an absurdly tolerant character, who invites Antoinette to tea and has rational discussions about the possibility of her husband running off.  Their marriage is pretty emotionless, but she is almost violently rational, and it’s not terribly convincing.  More interesting (to me) are the scenes of Antoinette as a worker in an office, and discussions of what it was like for the newly-poor(ish) upper-classes to need employment.

Tanya wasn’t a fan of Norah (Peter’s sister-in-law) but I have to say that, along with Antoinette’s vague but surprisingly wise mother, Norah was my favourite character.  Mostly because it gave a chance for Delafield to show her claws, which I delight in.  Here’s a couple of examples.

Norah burst out laughing, as she invariably did at any opprobrious epithet, however applied.

Norah made a grimace that might have suggested a spoilt child in a prettier woman.
So, although I wasn’t hugely impressed when I put it back on the shelf in 2012, I rushed through the second half in 2014. Delafield’s writing is dependably engaging, and I certainly enjoyed reading The Suburban Young Man. But I’ve now read 23 books by Delafield, and this one is probably towards the lower end of the list, and I wouldn’t avidly encourage you to seek out the (extremely scarce) copies of this one.

Since Delafield came out of copyright recently, I’m hoping that more of her books will be reprinted – and not just endless copies of the (admittedly exceptionally good) Provincial Lady series.  But I shan’t shed too many tears if The Suburban Young Man is left to languish a bit longer.

The Underground River – Edith Olivier

StuckinaBook All , , , 5 Comments

Back when I discovered Edith Olivier’s brilliant novel The Love-Child in a charity shop, I started raving about it to my friends in the dovegreybooks online book email list.  Little did I know that The Love-Child would go on to play an important role in my DPhil thesis, and that I’d present a few papers on it, but I did know that it was a really special book.  And so I very gratefully accepted the kind offer of a lady called Jane to send me a copy of The Underground River (1929) by Olivier.  That was in 2007 – and I finally got around to reading it in spring this year, while doing extra bits and pieces of research for my Olivier chapter.  And here’s a quick little post about it…

It’s a children’s book, about Tony and Dinda who escape from their terrifying great-aunt by going underground and (you guessed it) finding a river.  Many are the adventures they find there… Surprisingly large numbers of people live alongside the river, lit only by candles in the gloom – and some of them are pretty terrifying.  Along the way are men who ask young ladies to dance… who can then never leave them (Dinda manages to avoid this fate).  There are smugglers, kindly magical folk, adventure, peril… it’s the standard fare that I’ve come to expect from a childhood reared on Enid Blyton.  And some self-aware humour at times, maybe?

After a time they felt hungry, but they found it was very difficult to eat their meal in the dark.  They each had a knife and fork, but they had never guessed how hard it would be to cut slices for themselves off a sirloin of beef, with no butler to carve, no carving-knife and fork to carve with, and no light to carve by.
My favourite passage, of course, had to be the following – it’s nice to know that we twins are up there with magical creatures in terms of wonderment.

Tony and Dinda were really delighted.  They had never seen twins before, and they had always longed to know some.  In vain had they begged their mother to give them twin brothers or sisters.  She had always refused, and now here was a family entirely consisting of twins.  It seemed too amusing to be true.
There are nice illustrations by Margaret Forbes throughout, and the edition itself is rather charming – part of ‘The Enchantment Series’, whatever that was, and it is indeed enchanting.

I’ve read quite a few of Olivier’s novels (as always, you can see them all by selecting her from the author drop-down menu in the left-hand column) and none have lived up to the wonder of The Love-Child, but that is hardly surprising.  Whilst Googling The Underground River, though, I stumbled across someone else who has read her obscure books – Scott, of The Furrowed Middlebrow (that link will take you to all his Edith Olivier posts).  There is a coda to this gift-giving; I spotted that The Underground River was one of the few Olivier books Scott hadn’t managed to get hold of, so thought I’d ‘pay it forward’ (if you will) – and now this little book is on its way across the Atlantic…

Pink Sugar by O. Douglas

StuckinaBook All , , , , 15 Comments

One of the shameful things about this year is realising how many books my dear friend Clare has given me over the years which I have yet to read.  Her name has appeared a few times already in my Reading Presently project (as the bestower of Four Hedges, Cullum, and possibly How The Heather Looks) and is likely to appear at least a couple of times more – but, for today, she is the provider of Pink Sugar (1924) by O. Douglas, the pseudonym of John Buchan’s sister Anna.  I’ll call her O. Douglas in this review, to make things simple.  It’s the only Greyladies edition I’ve read so far, although I’m thrilled that they have reprinted a couple of Richmal Crompton books, including the wonderful Matty and the Dearingroydes.  And, guess what, Pink Sugar is rather fab too.

Kirsty Gilmour is 30 and has made a home for herself in the Borders (so the blurb says for me), taking in an old aunt who fusses and worries, but is rather lovely, and three children Barbara, Specky, and Bad Bill. The novel opens in conversation between Kirsty and her livelier friend Blance Cunningham – Blanche was quite a witty character, and I was sad that she almost immediately departed the scene (she also said wise things like “People who knit are never dull”) but we are not at a loss for characters after her departure.

Kirsty is rather gosh-isn’t-the-world-wonderful at times, thankfully offset with some quick-wittedness; like Lyn I sympathised more with the minister’s unhappy sister Rebecca, and found the characterful novelist Merren Strang more amusing – but Pink Sugar needs someone like Kirsty at its heart, because it is neither an unhappy novel nor a caustic one.  It is emphatically gentle and life-affirming, where a cup of tea and a dose of self-knowledge are the inevitable accompaniments to evening.

The children veer a little towards Enid Blyton territory, but that’s no bad thing (especially compared to modern literature, where happy children seem such a rarity), and there is a wildly unconvincing love plot thrown in to tie things up, but Douglas’s good writing and refusal to bathe too deeply in sentiment made me able to love relaxing and reading this.

One aspect of the style I couldn’t get on board with was Douglas’s frequent recourse to Scottish dialect, for the maids, cook, etc.  It was so impenetrable that I ended up skipping forward a few pages every time it appeared, so fingers crossed that I didn’t miss anything of moment there…

And in case you’re wondering what ‘pink sugar’ has got to do with anything, as I was for quite a long while, thankfully it is explained by Kirsty in the narrative.  Excuse the rather long quotation, but I couldn’t find a neater way to cut it off…:

“I was allowed to ride on a merry-go-round and gaze at all the wonders – fat women, giants, and dwarfs.  But what I wanted most of all I wasn’t allowed to have.  At the stalls they were selling large pink sugar hearts, and I never wanted anything so much in my life, but when I begged for one I was told they weren’t wholesome and I couldn’t have one.  I didn’t want to eat it – as a matter of fact I was allowed to buy sweets called Market Mixtures, and there were fragments of the pink hearts among the curly-doddies and round white bools, and delicious they tasted.  I wanted to keep it and adore it because of its pinkness and sweetness.  Ever since that day when I was taken home begrimed with weeping for a ‘heart’, I have had a weakness for pink sugar.  And good gracious!” she turned to her companion, swept away by one of the sudden and short-lived rages which sometimes seized her, “surely we want every crumb of pink sugar that we can get in this world.  I do hate people who sneer at sentiment.  What is sentiment after all?  It’s only a word, for all that is decent and kind and loving in these warped little lives of ours…”
So ‘pink sugar’ is essentially akin to seeing the joy in life – and is, perhaps, a codified reference to any reader or critic who would sneer at Pink Sugar itself, as a novel.  Admittedly, it isn’t Great Literature, nor is it trying to be, but I think Douglas is doing herself an injustice with this sort of self-defence.  Pink Sugar isn’t a lightweight romance with no thought given to the style or characterisation.  It doesn’t stand on sentiment alone.



Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“The strength of the book is the atmosphere of village life.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading


“Pink Sugar is a lovely, sweet, frothy concoction of a novel” – Christine, The Book Trunk


“I am so very happy to have made the acquaintance of O. Douglas.” – Nan, Letters From a Hill Farm

Cullum – E. Arnot Robertson

StuckinaBook All , , , 13 Comments

I’ve been meaning to read something by E. Arnot Robertson for years, and as part of Reading Presently I picked up Cullum (1928), which my lovely friend Clare gave to me, it being one of her favourite books.  Being a tale of a young woman’s first doomed love affair (we are told in the first line that it is doomed) and featuring my bête noire, fox-hunting, I was a little nervous… but needn’t have been.  Cullum is really good – moving, engaging, and – most importantly – witty.  A novel about love and hunting without humour would have been unbearable.

The girl in question – possibly the one looking poignantly to her left on the cover of my Virago Modern Classic – is 19 year old Esther Sieveking, half-English, half-French, and entirely ready for a sexual awakening which will take her beyond her circle in Surrey.

Which of us could fail to empathise with this statement – one which probably brought most of us to the blogosphere in the first place?

I was desperately eager to find a companion who could enter into the intangible world of books and ideas, where I spent half my time.
Esther thinks she might have found a way out when she learns that a poet, one Mrs. Cole, is living nearby… My mean side emerges in my love of fictive character assassinations, particularly those given in measured, well-paced prose.  If it helps, I share four out of five of Mrs. Cole’s listed traits:

I learnt in ten minutes that she was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker and an anti-vivisectionist, and that she had innumerable other fads.  She was of the type that should have had many children, instead of only one son and many affectations.
She is a poet.  Nobody likes mocking writers like writers, and here is a demolition of Mrs. Cole’s poetry:

I was shown a collection of worn cuttings that had become illegible at the folds through constant handling. They contained sad little pieces of verse which always referred vaguely to ‘you’ in the last line.  ‘You’ had either jilted her of passed away; it was impossible to tell which, but they were all melancholy and had the most comprehensive titles; ‘Life,’ dealt with in eight of ten lines; ‘Love,’ inaptly, being a little longer.
Mrs. Cole isn’t herself a very important character, but she does provide the means by which Esther meets Cullum Hayes.  I don’t seem to have bookmarked any paragraphs which describe him, but essentially he is perfect for Esther.  Handsome, amusing, and persistent, he speaks romantically when needed and flippantly when needed.  Considering the other potential suitors in her life have, to this point, been of the damp, somewhat pathetic variety, the arrival of Cullum is easily enough to sweep her off her feet, and (seemingly) she him his.  (That ending of that sentence almost makes sense, and was too fun to write to ignore.) (So was the ending of that one.)  And, boy, does it get passionate – particularly for 1928.

Did I want him!  Many times, when I was with him and when I was alone, at nights, I had longed for him, almost faint for a second with the desire for his kisses, which I could only imagine.  Love, feeding on itself, had grown greatly.  Cullum obsessed me; all of me, mind and body.
So why did this not aggravate me, as pontifications on love are apt to do?  It was the humour which surrounded them.  Robertson is very amusing on the travails of working for a rubbish women’s magazine if one has any literary pretensions, and also quite biting of the huntin’ fraternity (Esther does hunt, but hates the idea of it at the same time.)  Here’s a sample which made me smile…

I saw a great deal of him.  He formed a habit of dropping in two or three evenings a week at my boarding-house.  Sometimes we talked, or if I had brought back some work to finish from the office, he read or smoked in the arm-chair in my bedsitting-room, to the thrilled horror of several elderly boarders of both sexes, who were convinced that he was my lover, since he had been allowed into a room which undeniably held my bed, even though it might be disguised as a sofa during the day.  That was conclusive.  The old ladies believed the worst because they secretly hoped it was true; the dear old gentleman because, in the virile period of his youth, it would have been so.
And, of course, Cullum turns out to be a bad’un – a liar and delusional fraud, and repeat offender at that.  I don’t know why Robertson chose to reveal that in the opening line – perhaps to avoid the trap of the novel being structured like a romantic penny dreadful? – but it gives Cullum a structure oddly akin to The End of the Affair – except we see the beginning, middle, and end, all the while knowing how it will end.

Having compared Cullum to The End of the Affair, I should point out the difference that tone makes.  The structure and the emotions may have significant overlap, but Cullum – for all its passion and anguish – still felt like a fun, light book with dark moments.  The End of the Affair, on the other hand – even with the comic detective – was a dark book with light moments.  And here ends a spontaneous comparison of two books I doubt anybody has compared before!

Thanks, Clare, for another gem.  I really should immediately read all the books you give me, shouldn’t I?