Adventures in reading, running and working from home

My final two reads for Dean Street December, where several of us have been spending the month reading books published by Dean Street Press (an indie publisher which finds and republishes good fiction and non-fiction) were Golden Age crime novels! Please see this post for all the details, and this post for the list of reviews. Both of these books were offered for free by the publisher; they cycle through a few they offer for a week at a time and it’s well worth snapping them up! Both of these feature resourceful heroines, which is gratifying, and were great fun to read.

Winifred Peck – “Arrest the Bishop?”

(3 March 2025, Kindle)

Having already read this author’s Furrowed Middlebrow title, “Bewildering Cares“, I knew Peck knew her religion, and this gives a deeper, interesting aspect to this “locked house” mystery, as there’s an underlying theme of knowing yourself and keeping faith. The main characters are flawed and a bit unpleasant, the younger investigators attractive and steadfast.

Various high-ranking clergymen are gathered at the Bishop’s Palace to prepare for the ordination of a crop of youngsters, and they’re joined by the Bishop’s older, naughty daughter, Judith, with the Bishop’s younger daughter Sue and current wife already there. Into this mix comes the odious Reverend Ulder, already paid off and rusticated once and now bent on a bit of light blackmail. When he’s found dead, it turns out almost everyone has a reason to want this to have happened, and it’s down to Dick Marlin, once in military intelligence, now an ordination candidate himself, and his old friend Bobs, assistant to the household after an injury has incapacitated him for more strenuous work, to help the somewhat biased police inspector to work out what happened. As usual, I wasn’t able to work out whodunnit and cheerfully followed the red herrings – there’s something to be said for being a relatively naive crime novel reader as I don’t feel I have to worry about working it all out myself!

There’s an interesting introduction by crime writing doyen Martin Edwards.

Patricia Wentworth – “The Red Lacquer Case”

(27 January 2025, Kindle)

This one was a bit more alarming than the other, as it featured a kidnapping and holding prisoner which felt genuinely worrying, even though obviously in a book published in 1924 the heroine is going to get out alive! Sally Meredith is visited by her uncle Fritzi after the aunt she’s been caring for dies. He tells her of an invention he wishes he hadn’t invented, a new poison gas (this feels timely, coming only half a decade after World War One) and he’s been pursued by unpleasant people and spies. He doesn’t know what to do, science and ethics warring in his head, and has hidden it in a special box that he shows Sally how to open. Of course they’re overheard and watched, and soon Fritzi has disappeared, so has the box, and Sally, fooled by misdirected telegrams and letters, is in mortal danger. Hope springs in the form of her ex-fiancé, Bill Armitage; they broke up seven years ago because of her addiction to suffragism but can see each other’s good sides now, and we hope that Bill will be able to track Sally down – which he tries to do, with the aid of a police constable ally. There are sinister foreigners, a fooled, silly woman and a cunning older lady to bring the plot along at a rollicking pace.

Wentworth is famous for the Miss Silver mysteries; Dean Street Press publish all her others, many of them standalones, as this one is.

You can buy these two books in all the usual places (see this post for details) and read more about them on the publisher’s website here and here respectively.

These were my Books 7 and 8 for Dean Street December.

My fifth and sixth books for our lovely Dean Street December, the month dedicated to reading books published by Dean Street Press, the indie publisher which finds and republishes good fiction and non-fiction are both a little unusual. Please see this post for all the details, and this post for the list of reviews. Both of these Furrowed Middlebrow imprint books were Christmas presents last year from Ali (Heaven-Ali), and I’ve now read and reviewed seven out of my twelve print books acquired in December 2024!

Susan Scarlett – “Love in a Mist”

(25 December 2024, from Ali)

Sometimes, as she tidied her hygienic house, washed and dressed her hygienic baby, and talked to her brilliant, hygienic Jimmie, a stab of doubt would run through Doris. For all her brains, modern outlook and intelligent thinking, was she as successful a wife and mother as her retrogressive, almost uneducated, mother-in-law? (p. 172)

We know by now that Susan Scarlett was the pen-name under which the beloved Noel Streatfeild published, well, romance books, but this is hardly that, hence me classing it as unusual. We meet three sisters-in-law and their mother-in-law, and, yes, their husbands and children, but it’s the women who take centre stage. Ruth is American and pushing against the stolid Trings – she sees all sorts of psychological difficulties in her small son, Paul, who is dramatic, prone to hysterical fits and definitely spoiled. Her sisters in law, the socialist, right-on Doris, keen on fresh air and exercise, and Anna, very posh with a BBC accent that gets her mocked and pretensions for her very girly daughter, are wary of her, and each other. Emma, their mother in law, tries to keep things kind and calm and shares how to manage your husband, working for the best of everyone as much as she can, even though she’s seen as a bit shallow and obvious by them all.

Scarlett is always good at families and relationships and she does a superb job here as you wonder how Emma will tie all the ends together and make it all come out right in the end. Elizabeth Crawford in her introduction makes a good point about this 1951 novel looking at a return to housewife life after having working heroines in her wartime novels. Not a Bookish Beck Serendipity Moment as such, but Ruth and Peter’s house being called “Clovelly” made me determine to order the house name sticker for our front door’s fanlight, as our house was called that, too, but the painted pane had to go when we replaced the door!

D. E. Stevenson – “Green Money”

(25 December 2024, from Ali)

Mr Millar had been very decent, really, but somehow or other George did not quite trust him. George knew nothing about businessmen – they were outside his experience – but he knew a good deal about horses, and he could always tell when a horse was untrustworthy, no matter how beautifully it behaved; there was a look in its eyes, there was a sort of feel about it, and you just knew, but some sixth sense, that you had better be careful. George had this feeling about Mr Millar. (p. 92)

This one is unusual because the main character is a young man, kind and sweet, and he follows an almost thrillerish path as he battles to save his (hitherto unknown, very recent) ward from herself and fortune-hunters. We meet George Ferrier on Bond Street, having a holiday in London and enjoying his last day. He encounters a Mr Green who claims to know his father, and finds himself signing up to become a trustee for Mr Green’s daughter Elma, who lives quietly with a governess close to George’s family home.

Elma is a funny girl, brought up too quietly, who once she gets a taste of modern life is a liability; George is helped by his beloved mother, Paddy, a lively Irish horsewoman who never gives him a dull moment, and his quiet, bookish father, and the Seeley family down the road, Peter being his best friend and Cathy providing quiet understanding but also standing up for him within her somewhat chaotic family. When George’s duties suddenly become pressing, he needs all the help he can get, as he’s a man of action rather than thought and intellect; although when we meet him he seems a bit of a dilletante, he knows his horses and human nature very well and is actually utterly charming. We do feel for lovely Cathy, running the house and somewhat put upon by her family, and hope for a good outcome for her, too. And we end up on Bond Street again at the end of the book in a very satisfactory manner!

You can buy these two books in all the usual places (see this post for details) and read more about them on the publisher’s website here and here.

These were my Books 5 and 6 for Dean Street December.

Here we go with my first book by Dorothy Lambert and my fourth book for Dean Street December, which is a month dedicated to reading books published by Dean Street Press, the indie publisher devoted to finding and republishing good fiction and non-fiction. With this post, we’re up to 27 reviews submitted for the month so far, which is wonderful! Please see this post for all the details, and this post for the list of reviews. “Much Dithering”, from the super Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, was a Christmas present last year from Ali (Heaven-Ali), and I’ve now read and reviewed five out of my twelve print books acquired in December 2024!

Dorothy Lambert – “Much Dithering”

(25 December 2024, from Ali)

He followed Jocelyn across the hall and into the drawing-room, feeling that he really had met the one woman in the world for him. A meeting outside the church on Christmas morning, love at first sight – had anything ever been so romantic? It was like a fairy tale. A fairy tale? Yes, and all the best traditions were being observed, for there, actually in the chimney-corner, sat the Wicked Fairy, without whom no fairy tale could ever be complete – Ermyntrude! Of all people in the world, why would it be Ermyntrude? (p. 43)

We open what turns out to be a light and entertaining novel with plenty of action with the dreadful Ermyntrude bemoaning the fact that her daughter Jocelyn is dull, her house doesn’t have enough hot water, but she needs to go and stay with her to save money. All the women appear to be widowed; Ermyntrude is having an affair with a young man who turns out to be staying with his family in the neighbourhood and said young man naturally falls directly in love with Jocelyn when he sees her (she has a dull life, but is very pretty). But she’s encountered yet another young man who’s much more interesting, and she certainly doesn’t want to be re-married off to a 60-year-old colonel when she’s only 25 herself.

Add in village colour, the essential sweet and vague but really steely vicar’s wife and a battle between the old feudal system and new-money incomers (she has one of the newcomers be quite acerbic on this at one point) and you’ve got a classic novel of village life – in fact a classic Dorothy Lambert. Will Jocelyn ever break out of her dull life, and will her aunt and mother-in-law let her? And who stole the jewels?? Note: there is much use of an outdated and offensive term for Spanish/Italian people, who are seen as magnificent but shifty so stereotyped as well. But no more than you’d find in anything else of the time and certainly not as uncomfortable as Angela Thirkell’s Eastern Europeans.

You can buy “Much Dithering” in all the usual places (see this post for details) and read more about it on the publisher’s website here.

This was my Book 4 for Dean Street December.