#blogjune10 In the teeth of the evidence

This morning I just finished my latest Dorothy L. Sayers though it was a reread, of course. As I have previously blogged, I am now up to her short stories and the book I finished this morning was a 1939 compilation called In the teeth of the evidence after the first (and Wimsey) short story in the book. The book contains two Lord Peter stories (the above mentioned and "Absolutely elsewhere"), five stories with wine and spirits salesman Montague Egg as detective, and ten other stories of mystery and suspense with no detective.

I enjoyed them all as little jewels of cleverness and wonder as I frequently do how someone has the ingenuity to come up with plot after plot. However, on a whole short stories are not my preferred style of reading. I have one more collection of DLS's short stories and then I am back to a full-blown book where there is more plot and character development.

#blogjune 9 Vale Patrick Leigh Fermor aged 96

What an end of an era! Paddy Leigh Fermor was well-known for his famous walk across Europe with Horace in his bag and his travel classics A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water. I wonder where my copies are and feel that I should pull them out.

Apart from that for me he was synonymous with the Mani and his eponymous book on the Mani and his Roumeli are both classic books on Greece. I didn't ever meet him but while I was in Athens in the 1970s he was certainly around at various times.

There are many obituaries and I have a couple of links here:

http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.politikh&id=283540 (in Greek)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/patrick-leigh-fermor-british-adventurer-writer-and-war-hero-dies-at-96/2011/06/10/AG5bfpQH_story.html (in English)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8568395/Sir-Patrick-Leigh-Fermor.html

#blogjune 8 Striding folly

Striding folly is a collection of three Dorothy L Sayers short stories featuring Peter Wimsey in his detective role. "Striding folly" and "The Haunted policeman" were originally published in 1939 and "Talboys" was written in 1942. All the stories date to a time after Peter and Harriet's marriage in Busman's Honeymoon. "The Haunted policeman" depicts him as a new father after the birth of Bredon whilst "Talboys" depicts him as the father of three boys and the mystery of the stolen peaches. Whilst they are all good stories and offer some insight into Lord Peter's later life, #shortstoriesarenotthesame :( The volume Striding folly also has an informative introductory essay by Janet Hitchman entitled "Lord Peter Wimsey and his creator" and that essay is well worth a read.

#blogjune 5 Beyond the Ladies Lounge

One of the projects I have been working on with the Collingwood Historical Society for some time is an online directory of hotels of Collingwood. This has involved a number of us in research into obscure references to and photographs of over 100 hotels which at various times operated in Abbotsford, Clifton Hill and Collingwood. The online presence for this is being finalized currently and it will be a fabulous resource once it is up and available.

During our research into this, we were very pleased to come across Clare Wright's Beyond the Ladies Lounge, published by Melbourne University Press in 2003. Based on her thesis, Wright explores the history and role of female publicans. I remember being very surprised at the outcomes of her research. I had come across a couple of notable female publicans in my research (both in Hawthorn and Collingwood) and had thought them very unusual women. But Wright's research really challenges that view. In fact, being a publican appears to have been quite a common practice for women and one of the ways women could succeed in eras when it was very difficult for women, particularly married women, to have good employment prospects. However, single women also found and find this a pathway to becoming successful business women.

Wright's books draws on oral history, archival sources, interviews, folk songs and literary sources to create a great resource for those interested in the history of Australian hotels and the role women played in these.

#blogjune 4 More Peter Wimsey

I got on a real roll reading Dorothy Sayers crime fiction and, of course, once I had finished all her novels I wanted to read more about Peter Wimsey. That left me with two options: to read the ones written by Jill Paton Walsh and to search out the various short stories written by Dorothy L Sayers about him. So I have been doing both.

Jill Paton Walsh in 1998 published a completed form of Dorothy Sayers last but unfinished Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations. After its success, she followed up with two other Wimsey titles A Presumption of Death in 2002 and The Attenbury Emeralds in 2010. Both of the latter titles were based on ideas or hints of cases from DLS who refers to the Attenbury Emeralds as Wimsey's first case after the war and who wrote a series of letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family on which A Presumption of Death is based. In fact A Presumption of Death is identified as co-authored by the two writers as is Thrones, Dominations.



I had read Thrones, Dominations previously and read it again at the end of my recent Sayers burst. Coming as it did at the end of weeks of reading DLS's prose and allusions I really didn't find it as good (though certainly not bad). I had decided I wasn't going to read Jill Paton Walsh's other Wimsey titles but they came up in conversation with some friends, one of whom said the next two were very good. So I did read them and I have enjoyed both of them particularly The Attenbury Emeralds. But, they just are not Sayers. One can read her books on so many levels and the prose is just filled with literary and other allusions including, I am sure, many I don't get. But if you like the Wimsey stories do read the Jill Paton Walsh ones bearing in mind that this is another writer who writes well but differently.

#blogjune 3 Dorothy L. Sayers

During the last month or so I have had a very yucky run of being poorly with sore throats, cold, sinusitis, hay fever and gastro! That was the down side but the up side of this was that I took to my bed a few times and was only in the mood for very recreational reading. And well let's face it for me that really means crime fiction. But I didn't want some new titles. I needed some comfortable old rereads that would delight me by their prose and give me the thrill of the chase when sometimes I really knew the outcome.

So I decided to read a Dorothy L Sayers or two. In fact, it ended up being not stopping at two but encompassing her whole corpus of crime novels as well as the one she left partly written, Thrones, Dominations, which was completed by Jill Paton Walsh. I decided I wanted to read them in order so I searched out a chronology first off and found one here (along with a lot of other information). This was a list in internal chronology rather than by year of publication.



So in due course, I read: Whose body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Documents in the Case, The Nine Tailors, The Five Red Herrings, Have his Carcase, Murder must Advertise, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, and the afore-mentioned Thrones, Dominations. I was amused to see as I clocked these up on Goodreads which then broadcast my reading to Twitter and Facebook how I seemed to be starting a trend amongst my followers! I hope they had as much please as I did :)

What a pleasure were they all! I love her prose and her literary allusions and, of course, her plots. They are all really fabulous but Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night are still my definite favourites! Some things don't change in decades. I didn't really like Thrones, Dominations as much as the real DLS but I was encouraged last weekend to start reading the other couple of Wimsey books that Jill Paton Walsh wrote as the person recommending them said they were good. I am currently reading A Presumption of Death which is also based partly on some extant DLS stuff. So I will be reporting back further on these titles.

#blogjune 2 MacRobertsonland by Jill Robertson

I have some fairly vivid but also unclear memories of being taken as a primary school child on a tour of the MacRobertsons factory in Fitzroy. The nuns and various parents (mothers really) took us from Armadale to Fitzroy. I have no memory of how we got there but remember that school trips in my childhood often involved a special tram we had hired. So maybe that is how we got there! I do still remember the vats of sweet stuff and the sample bags we got to take home. But I had forgotten until I read Jill Robertson's book this week that McRobertsons had created Freddo Frogs, Cherry Ripes and Columbines!

Jill Roberston's book is the story of MacPherson Robertson the man as well as the story of his confectionery enterprise in Fitzroy and it is a fascinating story of rags to riches success, philanthropy that covered the Mawson Antarctic expedition, MacRobertson High and MacRobertson Bridge, and a personal life that was unusual. I loved the memories this book evoked for me, both in the text and the illustrations, and I loved the local connections for me. Fitzroy, Clifton Hill and Kew are all areas which I have connections with and with which MacPherson Robertson had connections.