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This is my third attempt at writing a review of Aprilly, by Jane Abbott. I’m not sure why writing about it is so daunting. It’s never going to be my favorite Jane Abbott book — there are structural issues, and a lot of what happens feels unearned. Also I found it hard to sympathize with the protagonist, and wished some of the other characters got more page time. But all of these things are things I’ve had time to think out. When I finished the book, I mostly just thought, “that was nice, but the romance was kind of creepy and unnecessary and Laughing Last was better.”

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but I doubt I’ll want to read it again. And if you want more information than that (you should) here’s a bit of a synopsis:

April Dangerfield is left penniless and homeless (I mean, approximately) after the death of her circus performer mother, and somehow ends up in a small town in Maine, where she finds a number of friends, including the usual crotchety spinster, and eventually acquires a family. And also a horse.

Jane Abbott falls flat for me sometimes, usually in the books everyone else seems to like best. I guess this is just one of those times.

I’ve been feeling lately like I’m having a hard time being enthusiastic about the books I’m reading. That happens every once in a while, and it’s always hard to tell whether it’s the books, or me suffering from a general deficiency of enthusiasm, or just my poor memory of how much I enjoyed things.

Looking back at recent posts, I don’t think it’s that third thing. I ended up mostly liking Dwell Deep, and Up the Hill and Over was fascinating, but neither of them comes anywhere near being my new favorite book. Although actually, The Turned-About Girls was great. And I guess Laughing Last, by Jane Abbott, isn’t my new favorite book either, but I love it enough to that I feel like I can safely blame any lack of enthusiasm on my recent reading material. I mean, I don’t feel like gushing about it or anything, but basically it was delightful and I have no complaints.

Jane Abbott is just so good, you know? Very few authors are as good at writing girls of a pre-romance age. And Laughing Last is very Jane Abbott-y, but it’s also got elements of L.T. Meade and Augusta Huiell Seaman and most of it is set in a kind of Joseph Crosby Lincoln milieu, and it’s just delightful in all sorts of ways. I might have to take back what I said about gushing.

The beginning of the book is perhaps the Meade-iest part. It introduces us to the four Romley girls, who range in age from 26 to 15. They’re the daughters of famous poet Joseph Romley, and while they do technically have a pair of guardians or trustees, in effect they’re under the thumb of the local chapter of the League of American Poets, which paid off the mortgage on their house, and consequently feels that it’s okay to bring tours through on Saturdays and keep the girls at their beck and call.

Isolde, the eldest, usually handles the tours, mostly because she’s the one who best fits everyone’s notions of how a poet’s daughter ought to look and act. Then there’s Trude, the practical, motherly one; Victoria, the prettiest and least responsible; and Sidney, the dreamy, stifled fifteen year old.

In search of adventure, Sidney invites herself to spend the summer with a totally unknown relative on Cape Cod. Elderly Achsa Green and her “different” nephew, Lavender, aren’t what Sidney expects, and nor is their home. Sidney’s kind of appalled at first, but with the help of the Green’s summer boarder, she learns to appreciate them. Then she meets Martie Calkins, a girl about her age, and learns a bunch of practical skills, like digging clams. And then, finally, she has a pretty exciting adventure. Jane Abbott’s good at adventures, too–this is, in a way, the most over the top adventure I’ve read in one of her books, but she keeps it grounded.

But mostly you just get to watch Sidney grow up a little, and see things turn out well for her, and it’s great. Sidney’s a little ridiculous sometimes, because she’s a fifteen year old girl with an imagination, but that’s actually an awesome thing to be, and Abbott doesn’t suggest otherwise or condescend.

Again: Jane Abbott is so good. I don’t know why I don’t read her more often.

I’m sorry to report that I didn’t love Cloudy Jewel. A bunch of people recommended it, and it definitely sounds as if it should be right up my alley, but I’ve never met a Grace Livingston Hill character I liked more than a little, and if I had, Julia Cloud wouldn’t be it.

She should be. She’s a capable, unselfish spinster left at loose ends after her mother dies. She doesn’t want to go live with her genuinely awful sister and brother-in-law, and fair enough, but she hasn’t got enough money to do anything else. Enter her orphaned, almost grown-up niece and nephew, Leslie and Allison. They’re bound for college, and they want her to live with them and keep house and be a substitute parent with a salary. They find a house and furnish it at length, with nice rugs and modern appliances and kind of a lot of homemade curtains. And I don’t know what French gray enamel furniture looks like, but somehow it sounds really appealing.

So there’s home-making (always fun!) and winding the population of the town around the Clouds’ collective finger (usually fun) and also there’s kind of a lot of religion. Which isn’t actually a problem for me in itself, but it might be becoming a problem for me with Grace Livingston Hill. I might not have realized this if I hadn’t stopped in the middle of Cloudy Jewel to read something by Amy Le Feuvre, but I did, and when I came back to Hill afterwards she started to look like a hypocrite.

I mean, there’s a fine line. You want characters to be human beings, not saints, right? But Julia Cloud seems meant to be saintly, only Grace Livingston Hill doesn’t know how to show that. Julia’s clearly not meant to be too saintly — Hill knows not to do that. But she doesn’t know how to temper Julia’s saintliness. Like, laughing at Leslie and Allison’s mean-spirited jokes. Not cool. These aren’t, like, sociopathic, Tom Rover mean jokes, but they do betray a fundamental lack of sympathy for people in general.

Okay, so, eight or ten years ago I was at a bar or bat mitzvah for one of my cousins, and the rabbi talked about the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. My family hated this rabbi so much. We still talk about him once in a while. And here’s why: mostly he wanted to narrow the definition of “neighbor.” Your neighbors, he said, weren’t the people who happened to be around you. They were the people you’d chosen to go through life with.

Take a minute to think that through. Going by that definition, the commandment becomes meaningless. Because this is the golden rule: treat people as you want to be treated. You don’t get to choose who to be nice to and who not to be nice to. But what this rabbi was saying kind of boils down to this: be nice  to the people you want to be nice to. You only have to be nice to the people who are like you. In fact, you get to decide who is and isn’t worth treating well. And I’m not religious, but doesn’t that completely miss the point? I mean, you’re only really as nice as you are to the person you’re least nice to.

Hill reminds me of that rabbi. Not in an overt way, but…I don’t know. If I’m reading a book about people who are “real Christians,” I don’t want to see them delighting in uncharitableness towards people who haven’t done anything especially awful. And I say that as someone who’s pretty uncharitable, as a rule. If Julia Cloud is supposed to be better than me, I want her to actually be better.

I guess the bottom line is that all I want from religious fiction is a sense of everyone being essentially human, and worth being nice to. And it’s less important that I get that from the character then that I get it from the author. I get that from Le Feuvre. I get it from Susan Warner. I even get it from Mary Jane Holmes, who is super vindictive all the time and not necessarily very religious. But I don’t get it from Hill, who doesn’t seem to think anyone other than the three Clouds and their two best friends is terribly important. And sure, that’s not the end of the world. But it does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway.

I thought Cloudy Jewel was fun. I didn’t care about or respect any of the characters enough for more than that, and I haven’t figured out why the interior decoration and club organizing bits weren’t more satisfying for me, but I was, at least, really into Leslie’s motoring adventure. I mean, I was into any bit where Leslie shot at people. Also I’ve spent entirely too much time wondering why they couldn’t have carried a thermos or two on their cold-weather hikes and canoe trips instead of an actual pot of soup.

Cathlin recently recommended The Turned-About Girls, by Beulah Marie Dix, and it was already sort of in the back of my head, because someone else — Mel? — was reading it recently. And I’ve been reading a whole string of things trying to avoid reading any more of Bulldog Drummond, so I started it almost immediately. And it’s really, really good.

The girls in question are Jacqueline Gildersleeve, a wealthy orphan on her way to spend the summer with her father’s aunt and cousin, and Caroline Tait, a poor orphan being send to live on her aunt’s farm. Neither of them has ever met the relatives in question, and neither of them is eager to. So when they meet on the train and discover they’re headed for the same town,  Jacqueline, who’s just read The Prince and the Pauper, hatches a plan for them to switch places.

Both of them are clearly happier with each other’s relatives than they would be with their own. Caroline, who is quiet and dreamy and musical, gets pretty things and piano lessons and two women who come to dote on her. Jackie, who is active and fearless and headstrong, gets kids to play with, new skills to learn as she helps out around the house, and an aunt and grandmother who come to love and depend on her, which is more satisfying than the sheltering kind of love that Caroline gets from Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope.

If there’s a major flaw in The Turned-About Girls, that’s it. Dix alternates between Jackie and Caroline’s points of view, and succeeds in making both of them sympathetic, but as the book progresses, it’s hard to avoid noticing that Jackie is growing as a person and Caroline is not. Jackie is the one who does things. It’s not just that she’s working hard on Aunt Martha’s farm while Caroline is being pampered in town — Jackie is actively learning new things. Her new skills go with lessons learned. When she learns to cook, it’s not just a new skill; it goes and in hand with her growing desire to be helpful to Aunt Martha and Grandma. When she gets into scrapes, it’s because she’s learning to have consideration for other people’s belongings. Caroline makes use of and improves upon skills she’s already got – sewing, playing the piano — but there’s no corresponding character growth. The closest she comes to growing is prompting growth in Cousin Penelope. And she spends most of the book scared or hiding or on the verge of tears. Jackie acts. Caroline is acted upon.

I actually started out wanting to focus on Caroline, and getting impatient with Jackie’s sections. Caroline, I think, is meant to be the real protagonist of the book. But Jackie is the one that makes the book compelling.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, because the key thing is that the book is compelling. It just makes the ending a little less satisfying, because Caroline is the one  who gets to stay with her family of choice. Jackie will help out the Conways financially, but I can’t be the only one who finished the book worried about how Aunt Martha was going to cope without Jackie or Caroline to help her out around the house. Right?

I mostly avoid reading Marie Conway Oemler books I haven’t read before — I dread the point at which there won’t be any left I haven’t read. So I’ve been putting off reading Two Shall Be Born for, like, five years at least.

I don’t know if it was worth waiting for. I don’t, at this point, expect any book of hers to live up to Slippy McGee or A Woman Named Smith, and this one certainly doesn’t. But that’s not to say it isn’t pretty interesting and weird, and that’s all I really want, I guess.

I don’t want to say that this is Marie Conway Oemler’s Ruritanian romance, although it has a bit of a flavor of that. And I’m not sure if I want to say that this book is Mary Roberts Rinehart-ish in the same way that Slippy McGee is Gene Stratton Porter-ish, but there were moments when it seemed to have more in common with Rinehart than with Oemler’s other work. I only recognized Oemler in flashes — the disheveled single-mindedness of an artistic genius, the hero who looks like “a young god with good morals,” anything relating to what Irish people are like.

The premise of the book is, I suppose, about people falling in love at first sight. Fortunately, that’s not actually what the book is about. Countess Marya Jadwiga Zuleska’s love interest doesn’t even appear until what feels like more than halfway through the book, but apparently isn’t quite. Really it’s Marya Jadwiga’s book, but I didn’t feel like I got to know her as well as I got to know anyone in A Woman Named Smith or Slippy McGee or evenThe Purple Heights.

Marya Jadwiga is the daughter of a famous scholar and Polish patriot who apparently functions as some kind of spymaster for a Polish independence movement. Everything he has, he contributes to this movement — including his daughter, who he educates so as to make her as useful as possible to him. It’s not really clear exactly what that education consists of, or how he intends to use her, but I think the book would have been so much better if it had been. Anyway, we never really find out what he meant to do, because his impending death and the pressure exerted on him by Russian and German agents force him to change his plans and send Marya Jadwiga to America.

I mean, other stuff happens first. But I don’t really know how to get into it without spoiling the grisliest axe murder I’ve read since The After House, so.

Once she gets there, there’s a little bit of a Samuel Hopkins Adams in The Flagrant Years vibe, and once we’re introduced to Brian Kelly there’s a bit of a Samuel Hopkins Adams in general vibe, neither of which upset me. Brian’s story gives us a little of the character makeover thing — he’s had a fight with his rich dad and run off to become a policeman, and of course he learns to be a very good one. But, as with Marya Jadwiga, I wished more time had been spent on the learning part. If not the traffic policeman stuff, more than a few vague hints about other, more exciting police work would have been appreciated.

Brian and Marya Jadwiga meet one evening after Marya Jadwiga stabs someone (yeah, it’s pretty cool) although they’ve already seen each other and fallen in love at first sight at that point. Brian brings Marya Jadwiga to his boarding house, and the final turns of the plot take place there, among the friends he’s made. But the two of them, having gotten the falling in love part out of the way at the beginning, don’t seem to have much to say to each other.

It’s as if, having already fallen in love, they don’t need to get to know each other. And that’s what I hate about stories where people fall in love at first sight, because the getting to know each other part is the best part, and I don’t understand why anyone would want to skip past it. Especially Marie Conway Oemler, who’s so, so good at having her characters enjoy each others’ company. I mean, Sophy and Alicia. The Author and anyone he appreciates properly. Armand de Rancé and Slippy McGee. There’s no pair of characters in Two Shall be Born that made me feel like just seeing them interact was enough, except maybe the Kelly siblings. Some of that might be because it’s meant to be a very serious book, with attempted rape and beheadings and people watching each other die, but Oemler wasn’t really a serious story kind of author.

I did enjoy Two Shall be Born. I just think Oemler could have done something batter. I mean, that, and I wish I could read A Woman Named Smith or Slippy McGee for the first time again.

Mel happened to be reading this one when I said I wanted a Cinderella book, and something that was like The Blue Castle but wasn’t The Blue Castle, and recommended it. And Margaret Widdemer’s The Year of Delight is very definitely both of those things, and if Margaret Widdemer can’t stop her characters from coercing each other into being married…well, it bothers me a lot less when the person being coerced is the man.

The title makes both more and less sense when you know that it’s the name of the title character. Delight Lanier is a dreamy, obedient child, brought up at a cross between a boarding school and an orphan asylum, and she grows up into a dreamy, obedient young woman, working as a secretary for a philanthropic cousin. She exist more in her daydreams, which take place in the year after next, than in her real life.

That changes when her cousin dies and leaves her six million dollars and she’s simultaneously diagnosed with pernicious anemia. She’s only got a year to live, so there isn’t any year-after-next anymore. But she’s got millions of dollars at her disposal, so she decides to start living in year-after-next now. She collects the girl she wanted as a best friend when she was a kid and hires her as her companion, does a lot of shopping, buys a house in the country, and gets up a house party with the man she hasn’t realized she’s in love with and his fiancée as its nucleus. And, with all that in place, she tries to be an ordinary young person, in a way she’s never gotten to be before.

She’s very good at it, of course. That’s the kernel of the whole Cinderella story thing: a heroine who’s out of the world in some way — whether because she’s poor, or sheltered, or a drudge or whatever — to the point where she doesn’t really know how to…do life, I guess. But then she gets fitted out with a nice set of worldly possessions and thrown in with a nice set of people, and finds out that actually she’s very good at doing life.

Margaret Widdemer has a pretty solid grasp on that concept — see The Rose Garden Husband, The Wishing-Ring Man, Why Not?, etc. Don’t see I’ve Married Marjorie, because it’s gross. And she executes it very well here: The Year of Delight is materialistic but light-hearted, and Widdemer understands the value of being pettily mean to the hero’s fiancée, and of having an extra man on hand to fall in love with the heroine. She’s also really good at convincing you that her characters really enjoy each other’s company, which is always a plus.

The Year of Delight is almost too much like The Wishing-Ring Man, without being quite as good. Delight’s love interest, Julian, was a little less attractive by the end than he was at the beginning, partly as a consequence of clinging to Edna, his fiancée, for a little too long, and while Widdemer tries to make Delight’s inconsistency seem more like a feature than a bug, it doesn’t quite work. Still, though, mostly it’s just super, super fun. I feel like Widdemer delights in the same kind of knotty emotional situation that I do, and sometimes I almost don’t dislike her for I’ve Married Marjorie.

I haven’t read all that many E. Phillips Oppenheim books, but I’ve read The Great Impersonation three times. I worry that no other Oppenheim book will measure up to it, but if none does, that’s okay. I enjoy rereading it even though I know exactly what happens.

Two men meet in German East Africa in, oh, 1912, maybe? One is Sir Everard Dominey, self-exiled from England and steadily drinking himself to death during and in between a succession of hunting expeditions. Then there’s Leopold von Ragastein, exiled to Africa by the Kaiser after killing his lover’s husband, but doing his best to make himself useful to his country while he’s there. And he knows another assignment is coming to him soon. Dominey and von Ragastein are lookalikes, which offers von Ragastein the perfect opportunity to establish himself in England, as he’s been instructed to do.

The Sir Everard Dominey who arrives in London some months later has no real trouble establishing himself and claiming his property — even his meetings with his half-insane wife go more smoothly than anticipated. But there are also questions, and it’s interesting to watch him deal with people having a hard time recognizing him, or commenting on how much he’s changed. And then he’s got his instructions from his German handler, and the Hungarian princess who insists on recognizing him as von Ragastein.

The spy plot is given approximately the same amount of weight as the romance plot, which revolves around Dominey’s wife and the guy Dominey may or may not have killed before he left for Africa. There’s a sort of Mrs. Danvers-ish character, and Lady Dominey herself is delightful, although the number of times she was described as childlike made me a little uncomfortable.

So, you know. There’s a lot going on. And pretty much all of it is great. Also, I can’t think of any plot threads that are left hanging. I just really, really like this book, for whatever reason. I don’t even care that Oppenheim doesn’t have a sense of humor.

So, here is a thing that could pass for a description of a book, or possibly a Hallmark Christmas movie, minus the Christmas:

A girl manufactures a fictional fiancé to show up her dismissive roommates. She tells them she’s getting married the day after their double wedding. When she gets on the train for the country retreat she’s planned for her “honeymoon,” she discovers that her friends and their husbands are on the same train, because the friend who lent her his farmhouse has also lent them houses on the same property. She talks the nearest man into impersonating her fiancé, only to find that he’s her crush, disguised in order to avoid the man who’s trying to serve him with a subpeona.

Weirdly, those are the parts of Wanted: A Husband that I didn’t like. Also, that is just the second half of the book. The first half is a makeover book, and I kind of love it.

The heroine is Darcy Cole, a graphic artist living in an apartment with two other girls, Maud and Helen, both of whom have recently become engaged. Darcy is the cranky, dull, disheveled one. She receives no male attention, ever, and doesn’t seem likely to, which is why the opening of the book finds her at the door of her friend Gloria Greene. Gloria is an actress, and a generally pretty awesome person, and, after warning Darcy that it’s not going to be easy or cheap, she offers to make her over.

I love makeover books, I guess. And this — well, it’s Samuel Hopkins Adams. And there’s a grumpy trainer. And Darcy becomes nicer as she becomes more physically fit. The whole sequence is so deeply appealing to me that I don’t know what to do with myself. Mostly I just wish there was more detail.

Once Darcy’s new good looks and attractive personality are faits accomplis, Wanted: A Husband loses momentum. I mean, the fake engagement scenario is fun, for sure — see Patricia Brent, Spinster — and I understand that the whole first half of the book is setup for it, but maybe that’s not where the book wanted to go. And it’s not just my partiality for the makeover section — both halves of the book would have been better if they’d had more space to move. Almost every plot point would have been better for being expanded upon. Still, it’s a delightful, Samuel Hopkins Adams-y romp, and it’s full of bits that couldn’t have been improved upon, like Maud’s fiancé’s appreciation of Darcy, Gloria’s dislike of Maud and Helen, and Jack Remsen and Tom Harmon’s defeat of the subpoena-server. And honestly, I  almost never think the second half of a book lives up to the first half, or that a book I like wouldn’t have been even better if it was more detailed, so maybe it’s just me.

So, Captain Blood Day. Yay!

Actually, though, I completely forgot about it until last week, so instead of thinking seriously about which Sabatini book I might want to talk about next, I just grabbed The Romantic Prince off my bookshelf. I read it once before — whenever Batman Begins came out, if the ticket stub I was using as a bookmark is any indication — and I recalled being pretty pleased with it.

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time reading Redeeming Qualities, you’ll know that I’m kind of fascinated by the way novelists solve problems. In particular, there’s a thing you get a lot in romance and adventure novels, where the hero is situated in such a way that it would be dishonorable for him to take any action whatsoever to resolve whatever issue he’s having. And often, as it is here, the issue is mostly just that the hero can’t be with the heroine. And sure, I love the resultant pining, but I also love watching the author’s resultant struggle to steer the characters to a happy ending without in any way impugning their honor. That’s Rafael Sabatini’s principal task in The Romantic Prince, so obviously it’s a lot of fun to me. It doesn’t hurt that the actual barriers keeping Count Anthony of Guelders and Johanna Claessens apart are strong enough that Sabatini doesn’t have to resort to the completely avoidable misunderstandings he seems to like so much.

Anthony is the fictional eldest son of the real Duke of Guelders. He’s also the cousin and best friend of Charles, Duke of Burgundy. But mostly he’s a classic Sabatini character: he begins the book by deciding that the world he lives in is no place for a gentleman. He leaves Charles’ court to travel around incognito and try to be more like Jacques de Lalaing and ends up falling in with a hapless Zeelander named Philip Danvelt. Danvelt introduces Anthony to Johanna Claessens and her father, a rich burgher, and it quickly becomes clear that Anthony and Johanna are exactly the right amount of ridiculous for each other. Anthony knows that it’s not really appropriate for him to make the daughter of a merchant his countess, but it takes the Governor of Zealand having him escorted back to Charles’ court by force to stop him from marrying her anyway.

Eventually Johanna marries Danvelt, making everything super uncomfortable for everyone. This is where Sabatini stops adding obstacles and starts solving them, predictably but also interestingly. Sire Claude de Rhynsault’s pursuit of Johanna and prosecution of Danvelt may look like problems, but they’re actually the machinery that’s eventually going to free Johanna from Danvelt and Anthony from Charles.

So yeah, I like The Romantic Prince. I enjoyed the intricacies of the plot, the heroine who for once doesn’t believe literally everyone else in the world over the hero, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the cast of characters. Sabatini’s prone to making almost everyone but the hero and heroine totally morally bankrupt, to the point where characters who start out by seeming like okay people are, by the end, cringing and groveling and turning on anyone who’s ever been nice to them. The only Sabatini novel I can think of with even half a dozen really likable characters is Captain Blood, which is maybe one of the reasons why it’s my favorite. The Romantic Prince doesn’t have anything like Captain Blood’s merry band of pirates, but Sabatini does reverse his usual MO by making Danvelt initially seem like a completely worthless human being and then giving him bits and pieces of his humanity back. It would probably be more accurate to say that he goes back and forth, but Danvelt is a better person in his last appearance than in his first, and I’m counting that as a win.

Another character worthy of note is Kuoni von Stocken, Rhynsault’s fool. You may recognize the name from “The Fool’s Love Story” — the hero of that story and the not-quite-villain of this one both seem to have taken their name from a Swiss (?) legend that I’d be able to relate if I knew German, or if Google Translate was better. This Kuoni, like Sabatini’s earlier character of that name, is a jester, but he’s got beady eyes and evil features instead of the other’s lean sardonic countenance, and spends most of the book treating other people as his puppets. And yet he too gains some humanity, and is kind of hilariously perplexed by any actions that aren’t guided by self-interest in ways he’s familiar with.

The Romantic Prince is not available in full online, but this edition at Google Books makes some chunks available as a preview. Also, if you don’t mind partially spoiling yourself, you can read a version of the story upon which Sabatini based The Romantic Prince here. He also did a short story version more closely based on the original for his Historical Nights’ Entertainment. The Historical Nights’ Entertainment version sticks closely to the historical account, but somehow I like the shorter, simpler version best. Still, I can see why Sabatini can’t go for the original, more satisfactory ending: once Sabatini creates Anthony to be the hero of the story, Charles has the potential to become a deus ex machina, and while most of the changes Sabatini makes are at Charles’ expense, I see why it has to be that way — or why Sabatini feels that it does, at least.

Anyway, happy Captain Blood Day. As ever, if you’re going to spend September 19th talking like a pirate, make that pirate Peter Blood.

I’m exceedingly thankful to Jenn right now for recommending a book that sounded so exactly like what I wanted that, less than seven hours after she posted the link, I’m already writing a review. I think this means my reading drought is over, although it will probably be hard to tell until after the Stanley Cup final is over too.

The book is The Blue Castle, and I expect that some of you have already read it, because it’s by L.M. Montgomery, and if you love Anne of Green Gables and are in the habit of reading public domain fiction, you’ve probably read everything of hers that’s available. I sort of love Anne of Green Gables, just…selectively. And The Blue Castle isn’t public domain here in the US, but Project Gutenberg Australia is a beautiful thing.

Anyway. This is one of those books where a woman with a deeply unsatisfying life turns over a new leaf — or has one turned over for her — and comes into her own. Like Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce, or Now, Voyager. Or A Woman Named Smith, but less so. It’s such self-indulgent fantasy, but it’s my favorite kind. The heroine of The Blue Castle is Valency Stirling, a 29 year old spinster, frustrated and unhappy and firmly under the thumb of her widowed mother and a vast array of aunts and uncles. When she visits a doctor to ask about her recurring chest pain and he diagnoses her with terminal heart disease, she finds that knowing she’s only got a year to live is what she needed to cure her of her fear of her family. She strikes out on her own, becoming nurse/housekeeper/companion to the dying daughter of the local drunk, and then marrying a man who is rumored to have done all sorts of terrible things.

She gets the material things she’s been wanting — a husband, nice clothes, a home of her own, better looks — but, more importantly, she learns to speak her mind and trust in her own judgment and, you know, have fun. And it’s a delightful journey to accompany her on. There were things I didn’t love, too: the specific awfulness of Valency’s family would have worked better for me if Montgomery rubbed their faces in Valency’s transformation a bit more, for example, and I would have liked some of the romantic bits to be taken down exactly one notch. Also, there was one of those passages where a woman discovers she’s in love and doesn’t expect anything to come of it but somehow feels that her unrequited love has transformed and validated her life, and I find passages like that kind of irritating. On the whole, though, The Blue Castle is approximately as perfect as I want it to be.

There were ways in which I identified with Valency very much. Her feelings — at least, the ones that don’t feel a little performative — are real feelings. But one thing that interested me as I read was the ways in which I didn’t identify with her. I (obviously) read a lot of old books, but somehow they don’t usually make me think of the ways in which certain things — the things that have an impact on my day to day life — have changed since they were written. This one did. I’m not that much younger than Valency, and I have things in common with her, but…I don’t know. In Valency’s world whether a woman is married or unmarried is barely her choice, and I took a moment this evening to be thankful that even whether or not you want to be married is a choice in mine. It was nice.

The Flagrant Years is Samuel Hopkins Adams’ novel of the cosmetics industry. I say “of” rather than “about” because while most of it takes place in a Fifth Avenue beauty parlor, mostly it’s about people. You get the impression that if Consuelo Barrett’s job search had led her to a different industry, the novel would have followed here there. It would be a wrong impression, because Adams clearly knew what he meant to write about, but this is exactly the kind of sleight of hand he’s best at — his ridiculously engaging characters are there to mask the lump of information he’s forcing down your throat and it actually works.

So, Consuelo Barrett. My favorite thing about her is that when she first meets Ipsydoodle Smith — who has just offered to make her a movie star — she tells him her name and he thinks she’s joking, because it’s such a perfect movie star name. Actually, that’s not my favorite thing about her. My favorite thing about her is her. Connie Barrett is one of those fictional heroines who is frank and straightforward and subtly classy, which is both a thing I really enjoy and a thing Adams does really, really well.

Connie is in New York looking for a job, and after running into Ipsy Smith at Coney Island and getting his recommendation to Gerstel Corss, an Upper West Side hairdresser, she finds one. She learns how to give all the “treatments” and is soon a fully-fledged “operator.” And when Gerstel Corss’ salon closes after a woman ends up with green hair, she doesn’t have much trouble joining her friend “Bob” Roberts at Primavera, a salon on Fifth Avenue.

Bob is pretty awesome, too — she comes from a totally different world than Connie does, but you never feel like that’s a bad thing. Yeah, she’s in the book because Connie has to have a friend, but she sometimes almost feels like she isn’t. She gets to have an inner life.

The other three main characters are the men: Ipsydoodle Smith, Rowdy Pontefract, and Waller Daniels. No, Rowdy’s name isn’t really Rowdy, but his manner is, when he’s drunk. Yes, Ipsydoodle’s name is really Ipsydoodle, but it’s his middle name. This is so Samuel Hopkins Adams, in that it’s kind of twee and irritating, but it turns out that Adams’ occasional twee and irritating moments work a lot better in a book that’s occasionally kind of dark. Although, to be fair, it’s still Samuel Hopkins Adams. Even a murder can’t make it particularly dark.

Ipsy Smith enters the story at Coney Island, where he flirts with Connie and sets her on her path towards becoming a cosmetologist. By the time they meet again, they’ve become friends. He’s a bit of a mysterious figure — everyone knows and likes him, but it’s rarely clear what he’s up to. Connie meets Rowdy Pontefract outside Gerstel Corss’ salon. He’s a girl-shy overgrown boy with an alcohol problem, but he overcomes his girl-shyness in order to fall in love with Constance.

Then there’s Waller Daniels, one of those vastly wealthy, notoriously ruthless businessmen you find in books. They’re never quite as ruthless as people think they are, but Daniels almost is. He’s also Rowdy Pontefract’s uncle, and once he gets to know Connie, he’s absolutely in favor of her becoming Rowdy’s mistress, or even marrying him. I love any and all scenes between Connie and Ipsydoodle, but I think my favorite relationship in The Flagrant Years is the one that springs up between Connie and Waller Daniels. My fondness for fictional cranky middle-aged men aside, every interaction between them is just…interesting. Really interesting.

Poking around on the internet for information about Samuel Hopkins Adams, I learned that in the ’20s he published some books under the name Warner Fabian, apparently because they were too scandalous to publish under his own name. And sure, fair enough. But having read The Flagrant Years, I’m a lot more curious about how racy the Warner Fabian novels were, because it’s full of casual sexual relationships and even women talking about their sexuality, and I would have thought that if there were books not fit for Adams’ real name, this would have been one of them.

Anyway, if it’s not clear, I liked this a lot. There are times when Adams’s irrepressible charm is a bit too much for me, and having it tempered with a little bit of tragedy and what I assume Adams thinks is realism makes it just about perfect. I don’t know if he could write a sad or realistic book, but I like what happens when he tries.

Terror Keep might be my favorite of Edgar Wallace’s books featuring J.G. Reeder, but I can’t help feeling that it’s all wrong.

J.G. Reeder is the kind of character one doesn’t associate with thrillers. He’s thin, shabby and middle-aged, with side-whiskers and a diffident manner. He also sort of knows everything, and claims his high success rate in tracking down crooks — mostly bank robbers and forgers — is due to his “criminal mind,” which sees evil motives in everything. He provides everything one should really require in a hero: moral rectitude and endless competence. But he’s not a romantic hero, and he’s not an action hero. At least, not at the beginning of Terror Keep.

Some of the earlier Reeder stories — the ones in The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder, I think — feature Miss Margaret Belman, a young woman who lives on the same street as Reeder, and, after they become friends, is often a target for those who want revenge on Reeder (about half of all J.G. Reeder stories revolve around people he’s put in prison wanting to get back at him).

In the earlier stories featuring Margaret Belman, Wallace skirts the issue of whether Reeder’s interest in her is romantic, and vice versa, but right at the beginning of Terror Keep she’s upset with him because he’s not more upset at the idea of her moving out of town, and later she picks a fight with him after he refuses to shave off his side-whiskers. It’s sort of cute, on one hand, but on the other it’s just undignified. But hey, that’s only the beginning of J.G. Reeder’s transformation into a vaguely appropriate object for Margaret’s affections.

Margaret is leaving town to take a job as secretary at a fancy country estate/boarding house called Larmes Keep. The proprietor, Mr. Davers, is funny looking and mysterious, and the three boarders are just mysterious. Meanwhile, an insane elderly crook named John Flack has just escaped from Broadmoor and is — surprise! — looking to get revenge on J.G. Reeder. This being an Edgar Wallace book, these two plot-lines are connected. And, this being a book where J.G. Reeder has to step up his game in order to be worthy of the girl, he gets increasingly action-y in response to the various attempts on his life.

Also there are caves and tunnels. Lots of caves and tunnels. Edgar Wallace understands the appeal of these things, so you’re never going to get just one cave, conveniently placed for smugglers. It’s always going to be a vast network of caves, with multiple entrances and stairs and ladders and furnished apartments. Oh, and it could collapse at any time.

I like Terror Keep so much, mostly for the same reasons I like Edgar Wallace’s books in general: It’s exciting, there’s just enough mystery to leaven the action, the characters are incredibly appealing without any apparent cause, and you never lose sight of Wallace’s sense of humor. And because I enjoy the book so much, it’s hard to complain about it, but there’s something that’s not right here. The great thing about J.G. Reeder as a character is that he’s not action-y or romantic. He just…knows everything. Or almost everything. What he doesn’t know he can figure out with the assistance of his criminal mind. I still like J.G. Reeder in Terror Keep, and I enjoy it when he fights off criminals and shaves off his side-whiskers, but I also have a nagging feeling that he shouldn’t have to do any of these things.

Actually, I’m reminded of how I felt after seeing Skyfall, the most recent James Bond movie: I thought the things they chose to do were executed well, but I kind of wish they’d chosen to do other things instead.

I am all set to go on an Edgar Wallace kick. It will actually be a delayed-onset Edgar Wallace kick. Thursday last week I was hunting around for something to read and found myself wishing I owned more Edgar Wallace. I eventually settled for one of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books — and then three more — but the yen for Edgar Wallace was still there and last night I went over to Project Gutenberg Australia (is it illegal for me to download post-1923 books from there? I don’t think I want to know) and read Room 13, featuring Wallace’s series detective J.G. Reeder.

So, here’s the thing about Edgar Wallace — I’ve talked about it before — every time I try to write about one of his books in particular I end up taking about his books in general. It’s like most authors’ books are individual objects, which can be discussed and compared, but Edgar Wallace’s fiction is a fairly homogenous substance to be measured out in page-lengths. I’m going to pretend for a moment that it’s not, though, and that Room 13 stands alone and has nothing to do with any other book. And when I am done, I will have described a pretty typical Edgar Wallace thriller.

Room 13 opens in Dartmoor Prison, where Johnny Gray is serving out a sentence of a couple of years for something to do with horse racing. There’s lots of fairly self-consciously used thieves’ cant — a “screw” is a warder, forged banknotes are “slush” — and a clear picture of what the world of professional criminals in England looks like (I mean, what it looks like in this book. The connection to reality is probably pretty tenuous). There’s a sense that everyone who lives by breaking the law is acquainted with all the others, if only by reputation, and that a stretch in jail is an accepted part of their way of life. [redacted for rambling about Edgar Wallace].

There’s also a fair amount of gossip, which introduces us to old lag Emanuel Legge, who was in Dartmoor when Johnny’s sentence began, and to his son, Jeff, who is responsible for Johnny’s imprisonment. Jeff has never been in jail, and has rarely been seen, but he’s known by some to be the Big Printer, whose counterfeit notes are so good that even the police can’t tell them from the real thing.

We also hear about Peter Kane, another criminal — or former criminal — who is a friend of Johnny’s. He has a daughter, Marney, who Johnny’s in love with, but Peter would prefer that she marry someone respectable. The night before he’s released from prison, Johnny receives a letter from Peter, letting him know that Marney is engaged to be married to a Canadian, Major Floyd.

Johnny’s independently wealthy, so when he’s released from prison, his luxurious apartment and valet are waiting for him. Marney, on the other hand, isn’t — although he heads straight to the Kanes’ home the day after his release, she’s already married to Major Floyd. And Major Floyd, when Johnny comes face to face with him, is none other than Jeff Legge, impersonating a respectable Canadian in order to help his father get revenge on Peter Kane.

That sets most of the plot threads in motion. There’s the question of Jeff and Marney’s marriage — is it bigamous? — the mystery of the Big Printer — can anyone actually get proof that it’s Jeff? and where are the notes printed? — the bad blood between Peter Kane and Emanuel Legge, and the question of why a wealthy, well-educated young man like Johnny would get involved in crime anyway. Not to mention all the smaller questions that come up (who shot Jeff Legge?). [redacted for rambling about Edgar Wallace]. Having all of these different things going on at once means there’s no slow, investigative section of the book. Aside from the occasional appearance of the unassuming, middle-aged J.G. Reeder, knowing much more than anyone thinks he ought and making the most delightful insinuations, the pace is pretty breathless. Something is always happening, and it usually involves guns. [redacted for rambling about Edgar Wallace].

“Action-packed” isn’t always a recommendation, especially if you’ve passed your fourteenth birthday, and it’s not enough to make a book enjoyable all by itself. Humor is. Engaging characters are. Twists that you don’t see coming right alongside ones that you do probably aren’t, but they are pretty fun. And Room 13 has all of the above. We’re exclusively concerned with archetypes, obviously, but they’re archetypes with charm, or a sinister fascination, or an innate trustworthiness. You can see the strings above the puppets, but that doesn’t stop you from liking the characters you’re meant to like and hating the characters you’re meant to hate. And puppets are all that’s called for, really.

Room 13 doesn’t particularly want to do anything but entertain, and it does that very well. And it does it without being a half-coherent mess, which by all rights it should be. [redacted for rambling about Edgar Wallace]. Instead, every time the plot does something twisty, you can pinpoint the clues that led up to it. It’s great.

So, yeah. That’s what Edgar Wallace is like. As a writer, anyway. As a person he seems to have been pretty unpleasant. But he’s been dead a long time, so you can read his books with a clear conscience.

Just Sweethearts, by Harry Stillwell Edwards, is subtitled “a Christmas Love Story,” but it’s not really a Christmas story at all, although it does make a halfhearted stab at the Unity of Christmastimes. It starts with a Christmas Eve meet cute, and ends the following Christmas Eve. I suspect the subtitle was mostly an excuse to publish an edition with a fancy Christmas-themed binding.

Two years ago I spent a day in December at the library and read all the Christmas stories I could get my hands on, plus this. I promptly forgot the title, but I’ve thought of it from time to time over the past couple of years, and when I finally figured out what it was, I reread it to see if I could figure out why it was so memorable, and whether it was as terrible an excuse for a Christmas story as I remembered. And it was definitely the latter, but the former still has me stumped.

The sweethearts of the title are King Dubignon, an architect, and a young woman he knows only as Billee. He falls in love with her at first sight, and thereafter alternates between talking a lot about how she’s his woman and feeling super awkward about talking about how she’s his woman. If King must talk about fate and stuff as much as he does, I like the way Edwards handles it — Billee is plausibly weirded out and then reassured.

The plot, such as it is, has to do with a young girl being rescued from drowning by a boy who kept them both afloat for many hours, and who these kids are, which…well, they are who you think they are. There are only, like, three other characters in the book.

It’s a pretty silly book, really, but there are bits here and there that seem like they’re from a more modern and self-aware sort of book. It’s as if he’s writing in a sort of Henry Sydnor Harrison milieu and then every once in a while you feel almost as if you’re reading Cosmo Hamilton. It’s weird.

I think the weirdness might be why I like Just Sweethearts, though — that and they way King’s career develops. A lot of the book is much too saccharine for me, but not all of it — its inconsistency works in its favor there. I kind of love it when a book’s badness works in its favor, and I think that’s what’s happening here. The shifts in tone and loose ends make me feel like it’s a puzzle, and I’m probably going to end up rereading Just Sweethearts again in an effort to solve it.

Maybe next Christmas.

About a month ago I picked up a copy of Galusha the Magnificent at a used book store. It’s the fourth Joseph Crosby Lincoln book I’ve read, and it’s made clear to me that Lincoln has simultaneous and competing talents for making me — and presumably other readers — feel as if the book of his I’m reading is his best book, and that nothing could be better; and creating sense of impending doom, a thing that makes me super uncomfortable. Usually that first one wins out.

All of which is to say that although one of the major plotlines of Galusha the Magnificent makes me kind of upset and I don’t think Galusha’s attitude toward his cousin is in keeping with his character, it’s kind of delightful. I can’t honestly say that nothing could be better, but if you’re into sensible spinsters, mild-mannered archeologists, New England, and stories about stock sales, you won’t be disappointed.

Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.

Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.

I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.

Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.

Sherlock Holmes

It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.

Jeeves and Wooster

Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves

I think I’ve explained before how sometimes I find things on my kindle that I have no information about and no memory of downloading. I’ll never know why I downloaded The Pit Prop Syndicate, by Freeman Wills Crofts, I guess. It can’t have been because I’d heard good things about it, that’s for sure.

The thing is, Freeman Wills Crofts was both popular and well thought of in his day, and I cannot imagine how that could have been, because this book is terrible. The characters are wooden and moronic, and the plot is full of that thing where characters speculate wildly and their speculations end up being taken for facts. The worst thing, though, was that Crofts does little more than connect the dots; when protagonist Seymour Merrriman meets Madeleine Coburn in rural France, you know he’s going to fall in love with her, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to be convinced of it — and Crofts is singularly unconvincing.

As I read, I began to feel that Crofts shared my frustrations with his characters. By the time we’ve seen Merriman run out of gas while motorcycling through France, scrape an acquaintance with Madeleine and her father, and note some suspicious circumstances at the lumber camp Mr. Coburn runs, he’s gone from being a dull blank slate to the most stupid and irritating character I’ve encountered in ages. When Merriman goes back to London and enlists the help of his friend Hilliard in investigating the mystery, it seemed almost as if Crofts was making a second attempt as developing a halfway sympathetic protagonist. And for maybe half a chapter, I thought he might be succeeding.

Hilliard is the cue for an extended ripoff of The Riddle of the Sands, as he and Merriman tool around some French canals and Merriman gets increasingly and unsympathetically irrational about Madeleine Coburn. But Crofts is unable to supply supense or humor, so it doesn’t really work. Next, he tries transferring the action to the vicinity of Hull, where both Hilliard and Merriman spend a lot of time sitting in barrels being massively uncomfortable, which I sort of enjoyed.

Then Crofts makes a complete departure from his Riddle of the Sands imitation, as the murder of Mr. Coburn becomes the occasion for Crofts’ take on The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which he at least acknowledges in the text. This is also his opportunity to have yet another go at creating a tolerable main character in the form of Inspector George WIllis. Willis is, thankfully, less amateurish and moronic than Merriman and Hilliard, but I don’t know what else I can say for him, except that he brings us fairly quickly to the end of the book, which I appreciated.

Are Crofts’ other books better than this? I mean, exponentially better? Because otherwise I don’t see the point.

4 Comments on The Pit Prop Syndicate, last added: 5/30/2012

For some reason, I only feel like writing about E. Phillips Oppenheim when I dislike him. Which is to say that this was meant to be a post about Richard Lane’s creepy methods of courtship in Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo, but then I finished Nobody’s Man on the subway this morning and it was worse.

For one thing, Andrew Tallente’s political career didn’t interest me, and that’s what the book is about. Tallente is an MP, the token leftist in a coalition government. Except that Oppenheim’s notion of socialism contains a generous helping of conservatism, and his fictional Democratic party sounds kind of awful.

Tallente is well thought of, but has recently lost an election to a guy named Miller, a political rival and a bit of a personal one. Having lost his seat in Parliament, he’s thinking about living a quiet life at his country house in Devonshire for a while. Then Stephen Dartrey, head of the Democratic party, comes to visit with Miller and a writer named Nora Miall in tow, and offers Tallente a place in the Democratic party. It’s strongly hinted that when the Democrats take over the government, Tallente will be the Prime Minister. And, mostly because he’s a lot more in sympathy with their ideals than with the ideals — or lack thereof — of his current party, he takes Dartrey up on his offer.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well for Tallente personally. He and his wife, Stella, have finally separated after a long and uniformly dissatisfying marriage: he wanted her money and she wanted the social position she thought he would acquire, but he ended up not wanting that much money, and his time in the army during WWI hampered his political career. When the book begins, Stella is having an affair with Tallente’s secretary, Tony Palliser. Tallente takes Palliser to an outcrop over the sea to have a fight with him, but he accidentally knocks him over the edge. Only afterwards does he find out that Palliser’s just stolen a damaging document from Tallente’s safe and sold it to Miller. Then Tallente and his servant go look for him at the bottom of the cliff and find no sign he was ever there. It’s all very mysterious and suspenseful, especially when a police inspector — one Tallente compares to Inspector Bucket from Bleak House multiple times — comes around and starts asking pointed questions. But Oppenheim mostly abandons that storyline pretty quickly. He’s a lot more interested in Tallente’s relationship with his neighbor Lady Jane Partington, who is attractive, worshipful, and twenty years younger than he is. That and the fake politics.

There was no one thing that infuriated me — except, okay, the bit where Tallente gets all snotty and writes Jane a nasty letter breaking off their relationship because she’s worried about what people will think if they see him leaving her house in the middle of that night. That made me kind of angry. Most of the rest of the things were just mildly irritating, like socialist Tallente’s deep dislike for trade unions, the way the women exist in service to the men, Tallente’s massive understatement in saying that his dislike for Miller is almost snobbish, etc. And then there’s the fact that the Tony Palliser storyline — and, for that matter, the entire book, is resolved by Tallente visiting Jane after not communicating with her for weeks, and saying something along the lines of, “Hey, the political storyline is resolved, Stella has divorced me without any input from me whatsoever, and now she’s married to Tony Palliser, which I guess means he’s not dead.”

All the minor irritations combine to make this one of of the most frustrating books I’ve read in a long time. The setting r

Say hi to Inez Haynes Gillmore. I know some of you are familiar with her, but I suspect most of you are not. She could easily be your new favorite author. She’s pretty good. But mostly what she is is versatile.

I read a book of hers the other day called Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce. It made me re-examine three of Gillmore’s other books, just because it seemed so unlikely that they all could have come from the same person. So, there’s Gertrude Haviland, a divorce novel — and please don’t try to tell me that’s not a genre, because I won’t listen — and then there’s an adorable children’s book, a fluffy romance/adventure/ghost story/paean to old furniture, and a disturbing, bloody, and terrifyingly upbeat allegorical feminist fantasy. All of them are, in their separate ways, perfect.

We’ll start with Maida’s Little Shop. It’s the most innocuous. There were fifteen Maida books, two of which are in the public domain, but although the series ran until the 1950s, it was obviously never intended to be a series at all — there wasn’t so much as a sequel for eleven years. I’ve only read Maida’s Little Shop and Maida’s Little House, but that’s enough to be glad there was a sequel, and to take the rest of the books on faith, because they’re lovely. Maida is the daughter of the kind of fictional millionaire of whom, despite the fact that he’s clearly a great guy, everyone is terrified. She’s also a bit of an invalid, only capable of walking because of a recent operation by one of those specialists who are always curing crippled fictional characters. All she needs to complete her recovery is to take a real interest in something, so when she expresses a desire to run a store, her father buys it for her. I might have liked to hear a bit more about the actual running of the shop — logistics, and the kind of financial detail you only get from Horatio Alger, and things like that — but the friendships she forms with the children in her new neighborhood are completely satisfactory. Based on Maida’s Little House, I expect the rest of the series revolves around Maida and her friends being happy and industrious in a variety of settings while her father spends vast amounts of money on them. And what more could you want?

Then there’s Angel Island. I don’t know how it was received when it was first serialized in The American Magazine, but right now it’s probably the most famous thing she wrote, because of all the feminism. I kind of wish it was even more feminist, though. Or maybe a bit less pessimistic about human nature. This is the story of five young men who are shipwrecked with a lot of dead bodies and even more supplies. After they’ve been hanging around on their new island home for a while, they discover that they’re sharing it with some winged women — conveniently, five of them. In spite of the language barrier, they begin to pair off, “Peachy” showing off for Ralph, “Chiquita” hanging out with Frank as he writes, etc. And then Ralph is like, “So, obviously the next step is to capture them and force them to marry us.” The other men are initially horrified by this, but eventually they all come round to the same point of view, at which point they trap the women in a cabin the’ve built and cut off their wings. That was a but of a surprise for me. There’s all this talk about capturing the women, and then once they’ve done it Gillmore is like, “and then they pulled out their freshly sharpened shears.”

Then the men proceed to “tame” the women. Which, you know, if it’s going

Howard Chandler Christy specialized in Edwardian era pretty-girl subjects painted with the sort of looseness popular with the American bourgeois classes of the late Gilded Age. He’s remembered today for the WW I poster captioned “Gee! If I were a boy I’d join the US Navy!” with a grinning girl wearing her brother’s sailor outfit.

Here, such fluff is abandoned for a more serious message (without abandoning the girl as object of a salacious gaze, note). He combines a 19th C allegory with a flapper, to create this rather spooky comment on modernity and its attractions and pitfalls. Some of the technical aspects are a bit iffy - weird shadow on the chest area - but the painting, taken as a whole, is to my mind his most interesting and contains some superb passages. It will be offered Dec 10 at Illustration House’s next auction; more eye candy  on the site.

I made this dress several weeks ago, strictly on a whim, inspired by a wee baby’s dress I found at a yard sale and a blouse spied on Pinterest (via Casey).  In my excitement and haste, I went about things rather haphazardly, throwing all caution to the wind.  It’s made in a typical 1920s fashion, the skirt is created from a series of squares and rectangles sewn in various ways, not wasting too much fabric.  2 rectangles for the front and back, 2 slits cut into each, and a triangle (half a square) set into each slit is all the skirt is, easy to do but looks extra nice.

While I love wearing silk georgette, I simply do not like sewing with it (see my dress using this fabric).  The nude fabric inset’s seams are a bit wonky.  I think if I had planned better and not rushed, stabilized the fabric (or something) it would have turned nicer.  All I can say is the next time I do a fabric inset like this, it won’t be with georgette!  The bodice and hem are finished with a zigzag stitch and the back closes with a single vintage button (that I forgot to photography).   I like to think it looks like an actual vintage garment and not something newly created.

But, despite the issues, I adore this dress.  Unlike many projects I have sewn, I wore this out and about–to the pet store of all places…ha!  Why wait for a fancy occasion to wear a fancy dress?  And the color is gorgeous.  I’m not sure how it looks on your monitor but I would describe it as salmon pink.

I have other sewing projects in the queue (as usual) that I hope to continue working on this weekend but I’m also going to start a knitting project, something I haven’t done in quite a while.  (And it’s all I can think about even though it was 98 degrees yesterday!)  I bought a skein of the prettiest mermaid green yarn that I’ll use to make this little scarflette.  I’m just going to ease into knitting slowly before I jump into anything more complicated!

Have a splendid weekend.

Some authors have only one great book in them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also write a lot of other books. I think of A.E.W. Mason as one of those. The Four Feathers is a masterpiece. It’s the only proper adventure novel I can think of that is also successfully introspective and, you know, intelligent, and…”if you want any whiskey, stamp twice on the floor with your foot; the servants understand.”

But anyway. I adore The Four Feathers, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s my favorite A.E.W. Mason book, because there’s also The Prisoner in the Opal. And The Prisoner in the Opal is indisputably one of the ‘other books,’ but I love it.

I think Mason’s detective, Inspector Hanaud of the Surete, is as direct a predecessor of Hercule Poirot as you’re going to find anywhere — he’s tremendously full of himself, he uses psychology to solve crimes, and his behavior seems calculated to offend the English people with whom he comes into contact. He first appears in At the Villa Rose, in 1910. It’s not so great. I haven’t read any of the other Hanaud books, but I have high hopes for the one titled They Wouldn’t be Chessmen.

So, there’s Hanaud. He’s moderately entertaining. But The Prisoner in the Opal isn’t really Hanaud’s book — it’s Julius Ricardo’s. Mr. Ricardo is Hanaud’s English friend who serves as our introduction to the Great Detective, and whose job is mostly to ask leading questions so Hanaud can display his genius more easily. But Mr. Ricardo doesn’t fade into the background the way most of those sorts of characters do. Mr. Ricardo gets to be the main character. And he’s not very bright, and he’s pretty full of himself, and he’s peevish and thoughtless, but he’s also a vivid, fully realized character. Lately I’ve been noticing that a lot of authors think that making fun of characters is the same thing as writing funny characters. It’s part of the reason I had so much trouble with Myrtle Reed, and it’s the reason I hate almost every comedy show on television. A.E.W. Mason skates pretty close to the line, but he’s got enough affection for Mr. Ricardo that he’s almost always on the right side of it.

Mostly, though, it’s the delightfully silly mystery that keeps me coming back.

The story begins when Mr. Ricardo encounters Joyce Whipple (“a name as pretty as herself”) at a party. She knows he’s planning to go to Bordeaux, and she wants him to stay with their mutual friend Diana Tasborough. Joyce is worried about her because when she reads Diana’s letters, she sees drowned faces sloshing around under the text. And you should be very impressed by A.E.W. Mason, because I’ve had this book for years and I’ve read it at least five times and it’s only just occured to me that the person one should really worry about when one hears that is Joyce, not Diana.

So Mr. Ricardo goes to Château Suvlac and finds Diana oddly distracted, her friend Evelyn Devenish kind of scary, her vineyard manager Robin Webster oddly precise in his speech, and Joyce, unexpectedly, present. Then someone turns up dead, and Hanaud shows up and finds all kind of things that are unutterably beautiful and sad and also indefinably evil.That’s one of my favorite bits, actually–where they find this mask with purple lips and it’s unutterably beautiful and sad and indefinably evil and one of the policemen puts it on and creeps everyone out, and then afterwards everyone keeps sneaking looks at him to make sure he’s not some kind of mysteriously evil being that was revealed to them by the mask. It’s pretty hilarious.

The whole thing is kind of silly, but there are occasional flashes of insight to remind you that yes, this is the guy who wrote

Don’t you love it when you are so inspired to do something that you have to do it RIGHT NOW?

Several weeks ago I saw these 1930s floral-pattern and metallic shoes on Pinterest (from the Thought Patterns blog):

Beautiful!  I immediately bookmarked this image, on Pinterest, and in my mind.  I knew there was a way to make/refashion similar shoes.  I had a starting base:

Very old, maybe 1920s or ’30s Mary Janes.  You can see me wearing them here.  I had been thinking about getting them professionally repainted/dyed a darker color for fall but had been putting it off for no particular reason.  (OMG, I just realized, looking at this photo, the perforations form a heart in the center!)

So I’ve been trying to figure out how I was going to get the roses on here.  Paint them?  (HA!)  Waterslide decals?  (Probably not suited to leather.)  Decoupage with Victorian clip art?  (Might be messy.)  I have a whole bunch of Victorian stickers on my stationery drawer that I haven’t used.  While decorating a package today (for a certain little fairy friend), I realized that the stickers were printed on thin, clear plastic.  Eep! Just the ticket.

I went to work straight away.  No, I don’t know how durable this is and what will happen when I actually wear them out and about.  But I didn’t care, I was having too much fun.

And they are not perfect, there is a wrinkle here and there but I think they look pretty good.  I’m going to wait a while to see if the stickers start to peel off; if so, I might put on a coat of satin clear acrylic paint over them.

To finish these off I painted the trim a pretty, faded gold (“Champagne Gold” metallic acrylic paint from DecorArt).  These are now the prettiest shoes I own!  OK, so where to wear them?

So, there’s this girl named Olivia Gale. Her mother married beneath her, her father and two older brothers died in World War I, and now her mother’s died too, so Olivia lets the house to Blaise Olifant, a scientist who lost an arm in the war and wants a quiet place to work, and moves to London. There she meets up with her old friend Lydia, who owns a fashionable millinery. Lydia introduces Olivia to her glamorous friends, and for a while Olivia has fun running around with them and dancing all night and doing whatever else idle young people with disposable incomes do in the aftermath of World War I. But Olivia is our heroine, so she eventually gets fed up with being shallow, and it’s around that time that Olifant comes to London for a visit and introduces her to his friend Alexis Triona.

Triona is a bit famous, because he’s written a book about his experiences working as an agent in the Russian secret service during the war, and it is both popular and critically acclaimed. And he’s kind of a genius, but he’s also boyish and unaffected and — soon — completely smitten with Olivia. So they get married, and for a while they’re cloyingly happy, and then Olivia discovers that Alexis has been lying to her and everyone else about some pretty big things. And the one big lie is almost understandable, but all the little ones he piled on top of it kind of concerned me. I don’t know whether he’s a pathological liar or he just likes making things up, but neither option is good.

Anyway, whatever else he is, he’s probably the biggest drama queen I’ve ever encountered in fiction. When Olivia finds him out, he a) leaves her a note about how he’s going to cut himself out of her life, b) sneaks out of the house while she’s taking a walk to clear her head, c) rushes off to see Olifant, who he treats to a dramatic retelling of his life’s story, complete with hand gestures, and d) decides to run off and join the Polish army. But before he can heroically give his life for the only country that currently seems to offer any opportunity for heroic life-giving, he gets hit by a truck.

While convalescing, Alexis ponders what he’s going to do with his life. He’s lame now, so he can’t go adventuring, and if he tries to write for a living, he won’t be able to stop his genius from shining through and revealing his identity. He really, really needs to get over himself And he sort of does, I guess. He becomes more appealing, and Olivia becomes less so, and then they’re ready to meet again, he having proved once again that he’s good at everything — except, presumably, honesty — and she humble and contrite, which only makes slightly more sense in context. I can’t decide whether I was reconciled to them getting back together because I didn’t think Olivia was too good for Alexis anymore, or if I’d just gotten over most of my frustration with Alexis. Probably a bit of both.

It’s pretty much as ridiculous as it sounds, and yet I really liked The Tale of Triona. Olivia, at least at the beginning, was lovely, and if there was kind of a lot of moralizing, and an unnecessary amount of anti-communism, there was also no shortage of incident. This isn’t one of those books where the hero and heroine moon at each other for four hundred pages, although I can’t deny that there’s a fair amount of mooning. Mooning plus action is probably a pretty good formula for a fun book.

I’ve posted all I can find of the illustrations from when the novel was serialized in Good Housekeeping on Tumblr: here and here.

I have been checking my mailbox at least twice a day for the past 4 days, waiting for this to arrive.  (OK, not yesterday as it was Sunday–and Easter!–though I was thinking how I looked forward to Monday, of all days, to check the mailbox again.)  I don’t know, I just get that way about things sometimes.

PICTORIAL PRINTED PATTERNS (#5802).  Yes, it is quite small in size, even for me.  But I think I’ll just need to widen it in the bodice to make it work.  And yes, I can see it is a girls’ pattern, but I am young at heart, right?  This can totally translate into a pretty grown-up dress, even for a grown-up who has just discovered–just this morning, actually–even more grey hairs whilst tying up said hair in a ponytail?  (Yes, I have hair enough to do that now; with my bangs cut short it looks a little bit like the one sported by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face–if you don’t mind me making such a comparison!)  Anyway, made up in some voile this dress would be so perfect for spring/summer.  And since it’s a ’20s-style dress (1925 to be exact), the construction should be relatively easy with no closures and such.  (Listed under notions: Thread–that’s it!  No zippers or snaps or buttons to mess with.  Yay!)

Oh, I have to share with you some of the text, one of my favorite things about vintage patterns.  The description reads as follows…

GIRLS’ AND JUNIORS’ FROCK.  A bouffant skirt, made in three horizontal, gathered sections, lends a party-like air to this frock.  [Goodie!  I like parties.]  It may be made sleeveless with the cape collar [!] or with puffed sleeves which carryout the quaint feeling.  [Hee hee.]  Ribbon is suggested for the neck bow and tie-belt.  [Okie-dokie, got it.]

Oh also, suggested materials is always a fun read…

MATERIALS SUITABLE

1.  Taffeta, Organdy, Batiste

2. Organdy, Taffeta, Dimity

3. Georgette, Cottons

Celanese, rayon, Bemberg or A.B.C. Fabrics in some of the above materials.

(I do believe the numbers are referencing the views, or versions, this pattern comes in.  I’m not entirely sure what the last line is referencing but I’ve included it nonetheless.)

You will not be surprised to learn this pattern has moved up in my queue of new frock to-dos!  I really hope this is a simple as it seems in my sewing fantasy.  Wouldn’t it be lovely in Georgette as well, perhaps with the bodice and first tier in one (light) color, then the second tier in a dark shade and the last tier even darker than that?  Sort of like faux-ombre, or perhaps like the gradual change in color that happens in the petals in a rose?