A Penguin a week

Penguin no. 1742: All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 May 2016 12:27:00 +0000

Occasionally I receive an email asking me where I have gone and when I will return to writing reviews of the numbered Penguins, and the answer at this stage is that I just don't know. I've spent the past six months indulging my other passion and really enjoying myself while doing so.

But I've always thought that creating a record of these forgotten books was a worthwhile one, and so I was delighted when my friend Adam (who blogs at Simple Pleasures) asked if he could write a review of an old Penguin he had sitting on his book shelf. And so below is Adam's review of Penguin no. 1742.

Karyn

Guest post by Adam Gee.

Cover design uses still from the
MGM movie 'All Fall Down'.

“Tomorrow I’m going on a health binge, get some filter cigarettes and start doing push-ups every night. Maybe I’ll do some right now, to make myself sleepy. Because I’ve got about forty-seven big knots in my chest, and they hurt.”

When I pick up an old Penguin I’m hoping for a surprise – something off-beat, long neglected, out of left field, a lost gem. ‘All Fall Down’ delivered.

It’s the first novel from the Detroit writer who went on to write ‘Midnight Cowboy’ five years later in 1965, James Leo Herlihy. It’s a coming of age story in the heritage of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, a decade in its wake. It follows the growth of Clint Williams from an isolated, uncommunicative 14 year old to an emerging adult with the capacity to care and love.

A fair proportion of the story is told through Clint’s diary – it’s like an external hard drive he relies on to compulsively capture memories and documentation from his chaotic family life. He steals his mother’s private letters (outgoing and incoming) to copy into this notebook which he keeps tucked in his trousers, right against his flesh. It’s the one place he controls and to which he can bring some degree of order.

Clint’s hero, his older brother Berry-berry, is absent for much of the story, on his low-life travels around the USA, much of the time just one step ahead of the law. Yet his being has immense gravitational pull on the family. The disparity between what mother, father and little brother hope for from Berry-berry and the real man (in as much as he is grown up) is the source of the all-round disillusionment which engulfs the family.

When the Williams move to a new house across the city in Cleveland, Ohio, the cracks open up. Berry-berry takes off before he’s even spent a night in his new room. The father, a former left-wing activist, spends his time in the basement doing puzzles. The mother immerses herself in domesticity on the ground floor, while Clint eavesdrops from the laundry chute upstairs and records the exchanges in the diary which he “made use of … with an unconscious ease similar to that of walking or feeding oneself”.

Clint, in an attempt to come to the aid of the older brother he idolises, goes on a road trip across the country to the Florida Keys. He loses his innocence along the way when he is sheltered by Shirley, a young tart with a heart, whose inner beauty and profound loss influence Clint for life.

The person who catalyses the final destruction of both the dysfunctional family and their illusions is the unmarried daughter of one of the mother, Annabel’s, friends. Echo O’Brien is a dynamic young woman, very attached to her perfectly preserved 1929 Dodge touring car. Tall and slender, she could, in a parallel universe, have been in the pages of ‘The Great Gatsby’. Think ‘Gatsby’ and Tennessee Williams for the kind of tension Echo brings into the Williams household as she becomes the object of both Clint’s innocent, tender love and Berry-berry’s careless lust, the latter returned to his home city and the proximity of his family, but living on the edge of town with a dark secret.

Watching Berry-berry live a lie and talk up his hollow, self-centred life, gradually grinds away at Clint’s hopes and illusions. Like Holden Caulfield’s obsession with ‘phoneyness’, Clinton Williams can’t take the lies: “I just stayed there at the table and thought about what big liars we all are”. Berry-berry tells his biggest, most unforgivable lie at the climax of the novel and it is this which finally severs his bond with his once adoring brother. Berry-berry ultimately cares only for himself and loves no-one, not even himself. Clint though has a great capacity and desire to care and cherish. His growth into adulthood is complete with the realisation that “[in] the difference in the love offerings people make to one another, lay the reason for all the pain in the world.”

First published in the U.S.A. 1960. Published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber 1961. Published in Penguin Books 1962.

Penguin no. 2308: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 09:33:00 +0000

Cover design by Robert Hollingsworth, using

La Course de Taureaux by Joan Miró.

     'Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat's cradle were strung between them. 'No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's...'
     'And?'
     'No damn cat, and no damn cradle.'

Felix Hoenikker was one of the (fictional) fathers of the atomic bomb - he excelled at finding ingenious solutions to difficult problems but he hadn't the slightest idea about how to relate to others, including the members of his own family; puzzles interested him, people did not.

As a Nobel prize-winning scientist, Hoenikker had been free to arrange his life to suit himself, but this had implications for those around him: his wife led a lonely existence up until her premature death, and his children grew up to be a little bizarre. And then, after his death, almost all humanity suffers on account of his indifference, for Hoenikker cared about solving problems but not about the implications of the solutions; he was tinkering in an ethical vacuum, and this explains why he created ice-nine.

Ice-nine - a crystallisation of water with a high melting point - is a clever but potentially catastrophic solution to a comparatively trivial problem which faces the army: given a choice, soldiers would prefer to undertake combat on hard terrain and a single crystal of ice nine can render mud solid. But it will also render any substance containing water solid, and this includes animals, people, rivers, lakes and oceans; one crystal of ice-nine could make the Earth uninhabitable in seconds.

Hoenikker delivers his gift to the world on Christmas Eve, and spends the last night of his life playing with his crystal - and toying with the fate of billions - by freezing and unfreezing saucepans full of water. His children divide up the all the unmelted ice-nine when they find him dead, and then each does a deal with the devil. With no concern for the implications, they trade some of their shares of ice-nine for the things they most desire.

The narrator sets out initially to tell the story of the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, intending to title his book The Day the World Ended and to tell the story of what the scientists were doing when the first atomic bomb was dropped. In researching his book, he travels to the despotic island nation of San Lorenzo in search of Hoenikker's eldest son, and there by chance meets all the Hoenikker children and learns of their ice-nine. He also discovers Bokononism which is the principle religion of the island - but it is a religion practised covertly; adhering to Bokononism is punishable by torture and death.

Cat's Cradle is a satire about science as a false religion, and it questions the idea that the pursuits of truth and knowledge necessarily deliver positive outcomes for society and enhance the quality of life. The flaw inherent in the concept of progress is human frailty; the scientists may be discovering more about the world but they are also creating means for its destruction, and they have no way of controlling the use which anyone might make of their inventions. Bokononism, an unquestionably false religion which doesn't pretend to be anything but, is offered as a contrast to scientific research; in the first sentence of The Books of Bokonon it is made clear that nothing described is true. Bokononism, although based on a collection of acknowledged fictions, works: it is the only thing which offers the citizens of the impoverished island of San Lorenzo solace.

Cat's Cradle tells a story which is ludicrous and filled with improbable coincidences, but which is also wonderfully clever and funny. It argues against strict rationalism, for here the truth is destructive or dispiriting, and delusion is constructive.

First published in the U.S.A. 1963. Published in Great Britain by Gollancz 1963. Published in Penguin Books 1965.

Penguin no. 571: The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 11:02:00 +0000

Though I do not expect that the terror of the island will ever altogether leave me, at most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men. And I go in fear. I see faces keen and bright, others dull or dangerous, others unsteady, insincere; none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal were surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale.

It was generally believed that Edward Prendrick had been drowned when the Lady Vain sank after its collision with an abandoned vessel, but he turned up adrift in a life boat, still alive, eleven months later. No one could believe the account he gave of his adventures during those intervening months, and it was widely suspected that his mental faculties had been addled by his term of solitude. He therefore decided to keep quiet, committing his story to paper but telling no one else about it. The Island of Dr. Moreau purports to be the account of those missing months, apparently found amongst his papers after his death, and brought to the awareness of the public by his nephew.

Of those who had taken to the dinghy after the wreck, Prendrick alone survives long enough to be rescued after his companions fall overboard during a tussle. He is rescued by a ship which chances to pass, and a messenger with some medical training, who chances to be aboard, saves his life by nursing him back to health. Prendrick then finds himself abandoned a few days later by the enraged captain of the rescuing vessel, and adrift once more, this time without any means of manoeuvering his craft or any provisions to sustain his life. He is saved a second time, albeit reluctantly, by Dr. Moreau who is moved by the desperateness of his situation, and who allows Prendrick the sanctuary of his island. This act of compassion is to bring about Moreau's downfall, along with that of his companion Montgomery.

The idea that a person's fate is entirely subject to the vagaries of chance events is a recurring theme in The Island of Dr. Moreau. It is through a series of unlikely events that Prendrick survives the ship wreck and the predations of his companions in the dinghy, and that he is nursed back to health and rescued a second time. It is through happenings no less likely that he is in time able to leave Moreau's island and return to London to commit his tale to paper. But the randomness of fortune is presented as an oppressive and bleak reality, for when the course of all lives, and the existence of humanity itself, is simply a matter of chance, nothing has any meaning.

It takes some time for Prendrick to work out the secret of Moreau's island, and the explanation for the bizarre human-like creatures which reside upon it. In time he learns that Moreau is an unashamed vivisectionist whose life's work has been focused on perfecting various surgical and psychological techniques which can be used to transform animals from their natural state into something which simulates human form, in an accelerated mimicry of evolution. Moreau is forced to undertake his research far from civilised society, because the concept is an outrage to his contemporaries.

And in this there seems a critique of the contemporary scientist, for Moreau - just like the process of evolution - is indifferent to the fate of those upon whom he experiments. Nothing matters but the pursuits of his research, and this includes the suffering endured by the inadvertent victims of the process he is attempting to perfect, and the difficulties they face in living with the altered conditions. For Moreau, every failure is an abhorrence, and something he turns his mind from: he has no compassion for them, and no concern for what becomes of them, but his island is there to provide a home to the rejected outcomes of his interventions.

In The Island of Dr. Moreau Wells explores the implications of the concepts which underpin the theory of evolution, both the idea of chance as an indifferent driver, and what it means if no distinct boundary exists between animals and humans. It is a well-told and fast-paced story, but also a bleak one, and Prendrick's obtuseness in working out what is going on can be frustrating.

First published by Heinemann in 1896. A film version by Paramount Pictures appeared in 1932. First published as a Penguin Book in 1946.

By the same author:
Penguin no. 151: The Invisible Man
Penguin no. 335: Kipps
Penguin no. 572: Love and Mr. Lewisham

Penguin no. 1620: The D.A. Draws a Circle by Erle Stanley Gardner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 11:23:00 +0000

Morning found Doug Selby lying in that condition of delicious drowsiness which is half sleeping and half waking, a warm, lazy languor. Birds were hopping through the eucalyptus tree which shaded his window. Down the slope were the fronds of palm trees, and below them Madison City, glinting in the early morning sunlight, seeming fresh washed and sparkling in its cleanliness. Overhead the blue-black of the California sky showed as a vast depth of cloudless azure. The morning sunlight, splashing through the window to glint on the counterpane of Selby's bed, made crime seem distant and remote, a hideous man-made nightmare superimposed upon a universe which was attuned to the singing of birds and the rustling of leaves.

A resident of Orange Heights, one of the better residential areas in Madison County, calls the police late at night to report the sighting of a naked man running along the edge of the deep canyon which separates her property from her neighbour's. Not long after, and just as the police arrive, a pistol shot is heard. Three young boys find an unclothed body the next day in a cleft of the barranca, and there is no doubt that the victim has been murdered. Perplexingly, he has been shot twice, with both bullets following almost the same trajectory and passing through the same bullet hole. More perplexingly, one bullet has been shot directly into the victim's naked flesh, and the other has been shot through fabric.

The chances of convicting anyone of the murder seem remote, as the forensic science of the time has no way of determining which of the two bullets was responsible for the man's death. It seems to everyone in rural Madison County that a clever subterfuge of this kind has all the hallmarks of the intervention of a big-city lawyer, one with a brilliant mind, a good understanding of the law and an affinity with criminals. A.B. Carr is just such a lawyer and he has recently taken up an unwelcomed residence in Orange Heights. His lavish and spacious property abuts the barranca in which the victim's body was found.

Penguin no. 464: Death on the Borough Council by Josephine Bell

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 12:30:00 +0000

There are a great many ladies present in this room, many of whom have brought up, or are bringing up, young families. These ladies will not need to be reminded that the first years of their children's lives were the most anxious ones...Now consider the case of the less fortunate of our residents. They are hampered by lack of means and lack of knowledge. They are hampered most of all by tradition, by obsolete, and often obnoxious ideas, handed down one generation to the next, and given to young mothers with all a grandmother's weight of authority.

For a crime novel, there seemed to be an unusual focus on pregnancy and motherhood in Death on the Borough Council. Two characters are heavily pregnant, and another is a new mother, though a reluctant one. There is also a long passage in the middle of the story - with little relevance to the plot - in which the Councillors of Stepping Borough, excepting the one recently murdered, interview candidates for the position of assistant medical officer in their soon-to-be-opened child welfare and maternity clinic. One candidate is eliminated immediately for being male; another is aware she has little chance of securing the position because she is married.

Josephine Bell was a medical practitioner, and she seems to use this novel to make a point about what she must have considered inappropriate attitudes to prospective motherhood among the working classes. A comparison is being made across classes: the middle-class mother does nothing but rest in the final weeks of her pregnancy and is delivered of a healthy child; the working class mother works herself to exhaustion keeping her house spotless, and risks opprobrium if she fails to do so, and the health of her newborn suffers as a result.

Penguin no. 1323: The Content Assignment by Holly Roth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 11:20:00 +0000

In the course of that afternoon I learned a good deal about that particular black line. You could walk Seventy-seventh Street's few miles, from river to river, in not much over an hour. Its east portion - from the East River Drive to Fifth Avenue - was largely elegance. First came beautiful town houses with polished brass, old shady trees, quiet and peace. Around Park Avenue I encountered vast but still quiet apartment houses, equipped with canopies and doormen. Near Fifth Avenue the town houses came again - more formidable now, magnificent stone structures that spoke of wealth.

The Content Assignment features the most enticing summary I have come across in an old Penguin. The synopsis writer would have you convinced that the story is going to be tense and compelling, and it may of been on account of that, or perhaps because the other Holly Roth novel I have read was such a well-written thriller, that my expectations were high when I first took this down from the shelf. But I couldn't take The Content Assignment seriously, and couldn't believe that an author expected any reader to do so. I kept waiting for it to improve, but it read all the way through as something that had simply been churned out.

John Terrant is a free lance journalist who develops the habit of reading every newspaper he buys from its first word to its last, often a few days after publication. He has little interest in the information he is reading, and only the slight justification that hidden in the text might be something he can use as the basis of an article. He recognises that this habit is a form of procrastination he is using to divert his mind from thoughts of Ellen Content, a young woman he had met in Berlin two years previously and who had since disappeared.

But his newspaper reading is a very convenient obsession from the perspective of the plot, because it means that he reads the list of passengers recently embarked on an ocean liner travelling to New York, and so finds Ellen's name; it is the first clue he has found in solving the mystery of her disappearance. It seemed a bit of a long shot from the perspective of Ellen, however, because she cannot have known of his recently-developed obsession when she used her only opportunity to get a message to the outside world to set in place the series of events which brought about the newspaper item.

Penguin no. 1102: Speak No Evil by M.G. Eberhart

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 11:41:00 +0000

    'Now listen, Elizabeth. There'll be time for talk later. All I want to say now is this. I heard this noon; there's a boat tomorrow, I've got to take it, Elizabeth - the world is wide. And war changes things. So the real things - love and time - are so terribly important. Elizabeth, I want you...'
     But he stopped then and took her in his arms.
     It didn't matter about the world being wide. She wanted it only as wide as the circumference of his arms. War. She would not think of that, then. She moved closer within his arms.

There were many things I disliked about Speak No Evil, including the paragraph I've quoted above, but I thought the story's main flaw was that its premise made such little sense.

It is clear that the reader is not intended to feel much pity for Robert Dakin, the first murder victim, as he is a violent and abusive man. He frequently drinks to excess, and his wife and a valet live in constant fear of his temper. He punches his butler without provocation a few hours before he is murdered, and the poor man is rendered unconscious and remains that way for days. Robert Dakin liked to make threats and was quite willing to use his wealth, his bulk and his connections to ensure that he always got his own way. There are probably plenty of people who wanted him dead, though there are only a few who could have been guilty of the crime on the night he died. And there is one woman - and not his wife - who does regret his death; the possession of wealth and power can be alluring.

The murderer takes an enormous risk but succeeds in killing Dakin, and in the process leaves ample circumstantial evidence which focuses the police's attention very firmly on someone else. The police seem well-meaning but lacking in imagination, so circumstantial evidence is enough to satisfy them that they have identified the guilty party, although they dally in making an arrest.

Penguin no. 1009: Aphrodite Means Death by John Appleby

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 May 2015 09:46:00 +0000

For us in Germany, who had a continent at our feet, the war was a much greater opportunity than it was for you, cooped in your crowded islands. To Hersfield and me Greece, of course, was no strange country, but never before had we been able to work so thoroughly and unhampered. With the co-operation of the German army we had no trouble in acquiring manpower for our digging, and the peasants who worked for us, though unskilled, were not expensive. Nor was there any of that tedious negotiation with the Greek authorities about the ownership of what we discovered. You may say it was an archaeologist's paradise.

Aphrodite Means Death has an unusual structure so that reading it could be likened to watching as a blurred image is brought slowly into focus. Everything begins in disarray and confusion, with none of the three characters introduced in the first section having a clear idea about what is going on or about whom they can trust. They form a triangle of suspicion, each trying to construct an understanding of the complete picture from the small sample of things they have seen and heard, but inevitably misinterpreting the events and reactions to which they have been witness.

We meet these characters through the eyes of Jane Arden, an Englishwoman living and working in Athens a few years after the Occupation. She goes for a walk in a pine wood on the last morning of a quiet holiday on an Aegean island, and in doing so she leaves behind the predictability and safety of a formerly uneventful life. One unanticipated event follows another in quick succession - bullets fly far too close to her for comfort in the morning, she is temporarily taken prisoner in a barricaded house in the afternoon, and in the evening she notices that her hotel room and luggage have been searched during her absence. This series of adventures seems to be triggered by having met a fellow compatriot during her morning walk. She is only slightly perturbed by the unusual events, however, believing that she will leave the excitement behind when she returns to the mainland in the morning.

A collection of Penguins

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 10 May 2015 10:29:00 +0000

I seem to have reached have reached yet another Sunday without managing to find the time to read a vintage Penguin and prepare a review, and so I am instead posting a photo of the project which has been diverting me of late.

I recently bought a house and my first priority was the bookshelves. The greater part of all recent weekends has been spent boxing, sorting and transporting books, shopping at Ikea and assembling flat-pack furniture - particularly bookcases.

Many of these books have been in storage for years, and others have been left in random piles while I waited for the opportunity to sort them properly. My daughter and I are still slowly working through them to make sure they are in order and that my lists of what I own and what I don't are up-to-date.

And there are still more bookcases to be built, as I have quite a few boxes of Pelicans and non-Penguins books which are yet to find a home.

Hopefully, I will be back on track by next weekend and in a position to resume posting on a vintage Penguin each week.

My Penguins in 2011:

My Penguins in 2012:

Penguin no. 362: Time Will Knit by Fred Urquhart

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:41:00 +0000

He was terribly ambitious when you got married. But his ideas were greater than his deeds. He didn't try to put any of his plans into action. By the time he had finished dreaming and planning he had got tired of the plan and another idea had crowded it out of his head. He never did anything. He was nearly fifty before he really started to try to do things and then it was too late. He was too old and tired. Rearing a family and working for them had sapped all his strength and courage. Wattie should never have got married at all, really. Men like him, who want to help their fellow-men, shouldn't get married and have obligations. They should keep themselves free so that they'll be able to give all their attention to what they feel is their life's work.

Time Will Knit is about many things, but the idea expressed in the paragraph above - that it is the responsibilities which come with marriage and family life which undermine an individual's ability to achieve anything substantial - could be considered its main theme. 'Having bairns' would seem to be the explanation for virtually every ambition forsaken, and the reason why the working-class never make their way. I know little about Fred Urquhart, but I suspect I could surmise much - I have never read a novel published this early which was so sympathetic towards homosexuals, nor one that was so scathing about women distributing white feathers during the First World War.

Time Will Knit begins in 1929 with Grace's young son Spike leaving Kansas and setting out for Edinburgh to meet his mother's family for the first time. Grace had left Edinburgh when she herself was young and she has no expectation of seeing her parents again, but she wants them to meet Spike before they die. And Spike is keen to go, as he has dreams of being a sailor - like his mother's grandfather - and Edinburgh is where he intends to find a vessel to join. It is through his young American eyes that we see the familiar landmarks of Waverley Station and Princes Street, and that we learn of the idiosyncrasies of his Scottish relations.

Penguin no. 865: The Cambridge Murders by Glyn Daniel/Dilwyn Rees

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 10:45:00 +0000

'We exist, this University exists, to educate young men, make them take an interest in passing their examinations, make them not want to climb into College, make them less interested in shop-girls with nothing but a pair of legs and pretty face and fair hair and no conversation or brains. Damn it,' he said again as he walked back to College, 'I must have a word with the Dean - a very sharp word. This is all wrong.'

Professor Glyn Daniel was an archaeologist who taught at Cambridge University and published mystery fiction under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees. My early copy of The Cambridge Murders bears his pseudonym; the later issue bears his name. Here he creates an amateur sleuth somewhat in his own mould: Sir Richard Cherrington is an academic and an archaeologist, and Vice-President of Fisher College. His enthusiasm for detective work seems to derive from its similarities with scientific enquiry; he cares more about the puzzle than the people, and he never doubts that his profession is ideal for developing the skills essential and sufficient for murder investigation.

There are many people whose animosity towards Dr Landon could be considered entirely reasonable simply on account of the treatment he is renowned for meting out. It means that when his corpse turns up, stuffed in an undergraduate's trunk, there are so many plausible motives that the county police find themselves baffled by all the possibilities. It seemed to me a flaw of this story that the police and Sir Richard between them seem intent on examining every one, so that the account of their investigations becomes interminable: the two investigations canvass an exhaustive series of hypotheses and virtually every permutation of the characters as interested parties, until it seems that a case could conceivably be made out against anyone and everyone associated at that time with the fictional Fisher College.

Penguin no. 745: Remove the Bodies by Elizabeth Ferrars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 09:58:00 +0000

George was a short man, broadly made, with stubby, pink hands and a pink expanse of face. In its rosiness his features made only gentle corrugations. He had fair hair and mild blue eyes and wore a high-necked jersey tucked into trousers of a worn and shiny blue. Photographs of him, full face and profile, as well as a record of his finger-prints, were in the possession of Scotland Yard; but so, doubtless, are those of many other excellent people.

I have spent a fair few hours waiting in airports or travelling by plane in the last fortnight or so, going from Perth to Canberra via Melbourne, and then from Perth to Adelaide, so I have had no difficulty finding time to read. But the varying time zones and competing distractions and obligations that come with working interstate have meant it has been a struggle to find time to write about the Penguins I have read recently. And so I have been fairly quiet of late.

Beyond Q, Curtin Place, Canberra

The best thing about having to head Canberra was the opportunity it provided to go browsing at Beyond Q, because the last time I planned a visit I ended up stranded in Katoomba en route by unseasonal snow.

Beyond Q is a below-ground bookshop in a nondescript arcade which has an entire wall of its in-house café (almost) devoted to numbered Penguins. They are sorted by colour, and then within-colour by author's name - rather than by number - which meant it was quite a search to find any I didn't yet own. But they have a great selection of older Penguins, priced around the $6 to $10 mark. This is perhaps not bargain-priced, but it is quite a bit cheaper than you would normally find such old Penguins selling for in Perth, and considerably cheaper than the incomprehensible prices I recently saw vintage Penguins selling for in Singapore.

Penguin no. 549: High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 10:51:00 +0000

She could see the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. They had made it; but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. Monstrous slag-heaps, like ranges in a burnt-out hell; stretches of waste land rubbed bare to the gritty earth; parallel rows of back-to-back dwellings; great blocks of mill dwellings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself; upstanding skeletons of wheels and pulleys. Mills and mines; mills and mines all the way to Manchester, and the brick, the stone, the grass, the very air deadened down to a general drab by the insidious filter of soot.

H.G. Wells seems something of a hero to the protagonist of High Wages. His novels are presented as having made a real difference in her life: she is emboldened by having read them, and in one difficult moment - perhaps the most difficult she will ever face - she argues her case successfully by using arguments culled straight from his books. The many references to Wells suggest that the similarities between this story and Kipps cannot be inadvertent - High Wages seemed to me an extension of Kipps; its premise had been reinterpreted from a female perspective, but it had also been built upon foundations the earlier work provided.

High Wages begins in 1905, the year Kipps was published, and Dorothy Whipple covers much of the same territory - there is a focus on the unnecessary hardships of the working poor, and on their vulnerabilities, and on the inequities inherent in a stratified society. Jane Carter is exploited by her employer because nothing constrains him from exploiting her, she is underfed and poorly housed by her employer's wife because to speak up would mean being left homeless, and she is harassed by a member of the upper classes because he can misbehave in this way without any consequences. The humiliations Jane is forced to endure are all inflicted by those well-aware that they are behaving unconscionably. But they behave so, and continue to behave so, because there is nothing to prevent them from doing so.

Penguin no. 1083: Reputation for a Song by Edward Grierson

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 10:26:00 +0000

'What was in his mind when he took the weapon in his hand need not concern us, for motive was never necessary to a prosecution of this kind, as His Lordship will direct. I know that this is not generally believed. But you, who are not concerned with fictions or illusions but with the law of England, will be proof against loose thinking and idle popular beliefs. Crimes are often motiveless - at least regarded from the standpoint of the normal man - and the law in its wisdom takes account of that. If the defence is able to explain how and why this youth could be justified in striking these terrible lethal blows, all well and good, but it is no part of my burden to investigate his mind, even if I could.'

We learn in the first few pages of Reputation for a Song that Robert Anderson, a country solicitor in the small fictional cathedral town of Turlminister, had been the subject of a violent attack one evening when he was working late, and that he had died of the injuries he sustained. We also learn that his youngest son Rupert, a slight and effeminate lad of just seventeen, has been charged with his murder. It takes him a few days, but Rupert eventually admits to administering the blows which killed his father. So this is a crime story in which the identity of the killer is never in doubt; the question of interest turns on whether the child is to be hanged for his actions.

The story goes on to relate the details of the family's life during the few weeks that precede Robert's death, and it is difficult not to feel sympathy for the mild-mannered and staid solicitor on account of the path he takes to his grave. He was a man living through a crisis not of his making, trying to act decently and with integrity and to uphold the values which had underpinned his life, while struggling to pass them onto his children. He comes across as a simple, quiet and decent man, but one who is being crushed by the circumstances which surround him.

Penguin no. 1108: Murder in Time by Elizabeth Ferrars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 10:14:00 +0000

'But why should you feel you ought to hate him?' she asked. 'Don't most of us do more hating than we ought to?'
'Not really,' he said. 'Not the hate that leads to anything. We're all pretty good at hating phantoms - that's why we don't mind making war - but someone who's standing quite close to you, looking at you, talking to you, seeming to like you, not threatening you in any way - it's extraordinary what that does to you, even when you've been choking with hatred. But I think that's mostly weakness and cowardice.'

Murder in Time conforms to a stereotype of the conventional Golden Age mystery insofar as it features a murder at an isolated country home during a weekend party, and a constrained set of suspects for each of whom a plausible motive can be inferred.

But the question of who killed the victim seems barely of interest in this novel, and the police investigation is really only sketched in the background. The real mystery which intrigues those gathered together in the country home is why they were invited to be there in the first place, and just what might have transpired had the murder not taken place. And these are such diverting questions that it is the suspects themselves who take the initiative in the murder investigation.

Mark Auty's initial explanation for his weekend house party always sounds suspicious. His claim is that he intends to celebrate his engagement to the wealthy Miss Barbarosa, but he eschews family and friends as invitees in favour of a select group of acquaintances he hasn't seen or spoken with in many years. It is hard to see how he could ever consider that such a disparate group could form the basis of a successful social gathering: his guests come from different parts of England, from different strata of society, and from differing age groups. In support of this odd behaviour he implies that he wants to parade his lack of embarrassment about his lowly origins so that his fiancée can see that he doesn't consider her family's wealth makes her any better than the people he has known during his life.

Penguin no. 2064: The Premier by Georges Simenon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 09:49:00 +0000

Cover design by Romek Marber.

     For a long time the Premier had paid no attention to the deaths of people in his circle, most of whom were his elders. He considered they had had their day, even those who died at fifty.
     Then when men hardly older than himself began to die as well, he had sometimes felt a certain selfish satisfaction, if not downright pleasure.
     Someone else had been taken, and he was spared!

In The Premier, Simenon sketches the inner life of a man who has lived beyond his time and who finds himself to be almost the last member of his generation still to be living. This quirk of fate has left him watching, and having to come to terms with, the process of his own gradually-increasing obsolescence.

And so this is a story about transience, of how things like youth, beauty and influence cannot be held forever, and about how someone who has known the acme of success copes with the inevitable receding of his faculties and his importance.

The Premier has lived his life at the very centre of power. He has been a member of twenty-two governments, and the central figure in eight, so that France during the Premier's era seems - at least to an outsider - a fairly unstable country, moving always away from one crisis and towards another, with a change of government seemingly the only mechanism available to deal with any deadlock. With such a history, the Premier has become accustomed to viewing himself as his country's saviour, and an essential part of any possible solution. The paragraph quoted above makes it clear that he is not the most pleasant man, and that he could readily be described as self-concerned.

Penguin no. 1672: Within and Without by John Harvey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 10:30:00 +0000

Cover drawing by John Sewell.

Perhaps it was my duty to marry her? But how can anybody say they're always going to love somebody for ever? They can't, and I'm sure they don't, and then you're stuck. But I did feel we could live together for a long time - say a year or so - and see how it went, and then perhaps we might get married.

The summary on the back cover of this Penguin describes Within and Without as the story of a love affair, but I thought it was more the portrait of a selfish and self-concerned man, and of the damage he wreaks in another person's life. I took it down from the shelf because it was short, thinking it would be a quick read (because I was off on holiday to Singapore), but I found the protagonist so irritating that it took me the whole week to make it to the end.

Even before he meets Sue Morley, when he knows nothing about her but how she looks, Mark Fearon decides that he is in love with her. Once having met her, he professes this love at every opportunity, with a frequency that makes her uncomfortable. But it seemed a strange type of love - one principally concerned with holding on to her and having her, and one which never for a moment concerned itself with how she felt or what she might want. Despite his claims, the only person Mark Fearon really seemed to care about was himself.

And what he principally cares about is not feeling unhappy, and - at least in the beginning - being with Sue provides an answer: by giving him something to think about other than himself, this relationship offers him some respite from feelings of boredom and purposelessness. He begins the story as a disaffected and dispirited art student who lacks the motivation to actually work at producing any art, but it seems clear that much of his problem is due to no one expecting him to be any better than he is.

Penguin no. 1006: The Man With My Face by Samuel W. Taylor

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 11:20:00 +0000

'If you ever get to know a guy really well, you find out something's eating him. Kids, yes. Young bucks with the dew in their eyes, yes. But take Joe Doakes when he's married and has a couple of kids and realizes he's not going to knock the world off its pins. When he sees he stacks up along with other Joes and can count on just about so much out of this life. And then, brother you find an unhappy man.'

Charles 'Chick' Graham plays along at first, thinking that he has been cast as the butt of some feeble joke. But by the evening's end he is aware that things are far more sinister, and that he is the victim of a conspiracy which has been carefully planned and executed over several years by those closest to him. There is only one plausible explanation of the evening's events, which is that his wife and business partner have worked together to enable a man he doesn't know to assume his identity. What he doesn't realise until later is that they had also planned to take his life.

He had arrived home from work to find someone who looked uncannily like him sitting in his place, with no one willing to admit that they knew him. His wife was adamant that she knew the stranger but not him, his dog attacked him at the stranger's behest, his business partner insisted that he and the stranger had come straight from work. When the police attend his home, Graham finds that he has no way of demonstrating his identity: he and the stranger share the same signature, and the fingerprints on his army ID turn out not to be his own. With his wife and his friends united against him, no one will give any credit to the story that he is the real Charles Graham.

Penguin no. 112: Children of the Earth by Ethel Mannin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 11:13:00 +0000

Life gave and it took away, and whatever it did to you or failed to do you had to carry on....The lobster and the crab and mackerel fishing, the potato and tomato seasons, the rising up with the sun to go to market, the toiling long after the sun had gone down, and the dark dreamless sleeps that linked day to day; the Spring tides coming with their May flowers and that aching sweetness on the air; the long hot summers, the sadness of autumn, and the long hard winters, year in and year out, the seasons going on, relentlessly, and one with them.

I took this Penguin down from my shelf after I received an email from John Enock, a fellow reader of old Penguins, expressing amazement that something of this quality should have left such a faint online trace. And faint it certainly is - a Google search turned up not one review on Goodreads or Librarything, and only a single contemporary description, and this despite the fact that Ethel Mannin was clearly a prolific and popular author in her day. It is a heart-rending tale: I cannot recall another Penguin which left me feeling as sad.

Children of the Earth is a family saga telling of the lives of Jean le Camillion and his wife Marie, and of their five children, who live a primitive existence on the island of Jersey. Ethel Mannin uses their story to reflect at least partly on what she seems to consider the smug and self-regarding attitudes of her contemporaries living an urban life, implying that their arrogance is ill-founded. She contends that they have insulated themselves from life, so that while they might preen themselves on account of their possessions and their refinements, and look down upon all those who lack such things, it is all a delusion: those they disdain are more fully alive than they are themselves.

Penguin no. 1870: Two Clues by Erle Stanley Gardner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:05:00 +0000

Cover design by Romek Marber.

'I thought so,' the sheriff said. 'You know, I don't know much about these new-fangled things, so us old-timers have to rely on human nature and character, and figuring what a person would do under certain circumstances and...'
'That,' Walworth announced harshly, 'is all bosh. The man doesn't live who can judge guilt or innocence by physiognomy or by trusting to the perceptions of his auditory nerves. It's merely a means by which the old-fashioned officer gave free rein to his prejudices. It's no more reliable than locating a well by a forked willow stick.'

Two Clues is a volume comprising two short novels, The Clue of the Runaway Blonde and The Clue of the Hungry Horse, both set in the small rural community of Rockville and both relating the well-deserved triumphs of the ageing sheriff Bill Eldon.

In Rockville, the prospect of publicity, eagerly sought by some while determinedly avoided by others, is a constraint on how life is lived, and this gives power to those who make spreading information their business, from gossiping housewives to the proprietors of the town's two newspapers. When Lew Turlock's teenage daughter is found not to be at the home of a friend she said she was visiting, for example, it is keeping her deception quiet which is of uppermost concern to her father because he fears for her reputation; no one seems too concerned about ensuring she is safe.

It is as if every action in this small town must be conditioned on the possible consequences of other people hearing of it, or on how details could be misinterpreted or misused to advance the agenda of a rival, whether this concerns the behaviour of a teenage daughter or the actions of those seeking to retain public office. Information is a weapon, but it is all spin, and those with influence seem very willing to intentionally distort facts for advantage or revenge. At present the Sheriff finds that he is the target of this kind of concerted effort.

Penguin no. 1353: The Sleeper by Holly Roth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 09:37:00 +0000

'By God, Kendall, what a strange hold it is - to be able to get and guide a young man of promise to his triumphant death! To make him negate his birthright of intelligence, charm, handsomeness, the American chance of wealth, love, and pursuit of happiness - for what? A country he's never seen? A doctrine that has been constantly perverted for years? A group of people who lie so shamelessly that they are constantly being caught flat-footed - and then, when caught, lie again with open contempt?

This seemed to me a paragraph which captures the brevity of historical memory, as I am sure that had I read The Sleeper a year ago I would have found its premise - that a young man of exceptional promise would willingly give up every prospect in pursuit of an idea foreign to his culture and beyond his experience - implausible. But this year the story is a familiar one.

The context here is different though: The Sleeper is set in New York during the Cold War, at a time when there was heightened concern with the possible threats posed by Communism and the advent of nuclear weapons. It was to facilitate the spread of Communism that a young American teenager named Francis Burton Hollister was willing to sacrifice everything he might have been.

Penguin no. 1634: After the Rain by John Bowen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 11:23:00 +0000

Cover drawing by
Quentin Blake

'What makes a god?' Arthur said. 'Any thinking person will tell you that men make their own gods. They do so by worship. Whatever you worship is God, whether it be a tree, or the sun, or two sticks, or a ring of stones, or a bull, or a lamb, or a river; it does not matter. Simple men worship the things themselves. Complicated men worship the ideas that the things express, or the spirit that infuses the things, but in terms of behaviour it makes little difference. The behaviour - the ritual, if you prefer - is what matters, because, while interpretations change, the ritual endures.'

After the rain begins as a kind of apocalyptic novel, but an unusual one, with events following each other just a little too quickly, and with its focus on appalling events counterbalanced by an equal focus on the absurd. I have read that John Bowen wrote this novel aiming to be for apocalyptic fiction what Michael Innes had been for the crime novel, and it seems to me that he achieved his aim for that is very much how the story reads: it is more fantasy than science fiction.

The unusual duality is there from the beginning, with this surreal story beginning in the most concrete and easily-visualised location - the lower floor of Foyles in Charing Cross Road. It is here that John Clarke meets a putative rain maker intent on selling his entire rain-making library to Foyle's book buyer before he heads to America. Clarke is a copywriter temporarily trying his hand at journalism and he elects to follow the rain maker to Texas where he has been hired on a fee-for-success basis to engineer the end of a nine year drought. The rain maker succeeds on a scale beyond anything he could have imagined, but it is his final act; as the rain maker plunges to his death the entire world is plunged into an extensive period of unceasing rain.

Penguin no. 780: Seven Against Reeves by Richard Aldington

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 09:54:00 +0000

While Mr Reeves dozed quietly after the holocaust of Mr Houghton's gospel, the rest of the house quivered with an activity particularly unusual on a Sunday. There was a certain tension, resembling on a tiny scale that of an army before an attack. The slumbering Reeves was unaware of the fact that, if he was incapable of solving the problem of what to do with himself, others were prepared to do it for him. With the quiet but deadly obstinacy of the philanthropist, who so often succeeds in squaring his interests with his altruism, Mrs Reeves was convinced that what Mr Reeves needed was to know the 'right people'. Besides, she wanted to know them herself.

I took this book down from my book shelf on one of those days when the title amused me because it seemed apposite, though I'm not sure I understand it's use in this context, for there are no seven pitted here against Mr Reeves. And if it is an allusion to Seven Against Thebes I cannot see that it makes things any more comprehensible, as Thebes was a city, while this is the story of a man who sets out, after much hesitation, to subdue those who would take advantage of him and in doing so wrestles back control of his life.

Mr Reeves is conservative in his outlook and conventional in his tastes, and so he seems an unlikely hero. But while everyone in the story looks down upon the poor man, the author seems almost to champion him, for Mr Reeves is the only character being portrayed here as having integrity, and also the only one who is decent and true to himself; everyone else is after something, typically something they don't really deserve, and it is Mr Reeves they are determined to manipulate into providing it.

Penguin no. 1182: Telling of Murder by Douglas Rutherford

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 11:23:00 +0000

     'Paddy,' Diana said as I set the fresh glass in front of her, 'I've been thinking. Can't you and I do something together? I mean, you are a private detective. I'm sure the police are very good, but you might be able to do something by sort of - using your intuition.'
     She was looking very earnest and trusting; I liked the way her mouth stayed just a little bit open as she watched me. It gave her an eager expression.
     You've been reading too many Green Penguins. Why, Maguire has just warned me to keep my nose clean. It doesn't work out in real life like it does in detective stories, you know.

The idea that someone might seek to bring down a commercial airliner, unconstrained by any concern for the inadvertent loss of life that such a plan entails, may seem unremarkable these days, but in 1952 it was evidently still an unthinkable idea, a clear sign that some fiendish and immoral organisation was behind the plot on Osborne Vandervell's life.

The first unsuccessful attempt at bringing about his death involves a bomb smuggled onto the plane which carries him from Trieste to London; the second involves poison in his morning coffee injected by syringe into the milk bottle left upon his doorstep overnight. Vandervell suspects these murder attempts will continue, and the only way he is going to survive them will be by returning to Trieste to seek information from his colleagues, together with the assistance of the Venezia Giulia Police Force. To increase the odds of his surviving the trip, he hires private investigator Paddy Regan to act as his chauffeur on the drive back.

But Regan has no idea of what it is that he has signed up for, naively viewing the proposed trip to Trieste by way of Paris as his chance to have a paid holiday on the Continent. He finds the journey to be anything but leisurely, as Vandervell's adversaries are indefatigable; the first half of story tells of one murder attempt after another, attempts that only cease when their objective has been attained. And so while Regan is still alive when they reach Trieste, Vandervell is not, and out of respect to his temporary employer Regan then applies himself to solving the mystery of just why so much effort was expended on bringing about Vandervell's demise.

Penguin no. 1391: Patrick Butler for the Defence by John Dickson Carr

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:53:00 +0000

'It is not at all irrelevant,' he said, 'that Mr Hugh Prentice's hobby should have been the reading of these stories. We've all read them. And very often we have found the same wearisome device.'
'A victim, murdered and dying, is just able to speak a few words. He would, of course, speak the name of his murderer. Instead, in some of these stories, he blurts out some weird gibberish which nobody would ever say, and which has been designed by the author merely to baffle detection. Such - it appeared! - was our own problem. The difficulty seemed to be gloves. It was raining gloves. And all because, apparently, Abu of Isapahan had gripped Hugh Prentice's wrist and with his dying breath said, "Your gloves".'

I suspect I would have been quite critical of this story had I read this old Penguin at any other time; it is so lightweight that even the author couldn't resist mocking its underlying premise, as you can see in the passage quoted above. But my life has been in such a state of flux recently that lightweight is exactly what I needed, and no matter how implausible the events canvassed here, it has seemed to me at times that those in my own life have been more implausible still. So on one hand I really enjoyed this novel's untaxing quality; on the other hand I found it somewhat ludicrous.

The eponymous Patrick Butler has little to recommend him, although John Dickson Carr seems to have a soft spot for him, and Butler also seems pretty keen on himself. Among the beliefs he takes for granted is a conviction that he is never wrong, although he does have a moment of self doubt when he concedes that he may have drawn an incorrect conclusion, an admission which brings with it the galling possibility that there may be something in the suggestion of his critics that his success to date has been underpinned by the efforts of Dr. Gideon Fell. But Butler's ego is such that his moment of self doubt is fleeting, and by the end of the book he is once again secure in the belief that he is always right.

It is as though he has been given a licence to behave terribly, as he goes uncondemned for behaviour which would never be tolerated in others. He is arrogant, misogynistic and vain, and he approaches his profession as barrister as though it were a sport, admitting that he prefers guilty clients to innocent ones perhaps because the challenge is all the greater and the victory all the sweeter. And like many successful, capable and wealthy men, he seems to have women in his thrall.