The Ivy Tree - Creeps, Grips and Enthralls

The Ivy Tree, set in the bleak British Isles, opens chapters with verses. 

AngelikaGraczyk 

A North Country maid up to London had strayed,
Although with her nature it did not agree.
She wept and she sighed and she bitterly cried,
“I wish once again in the North I could be.
Oh the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in my own country.”

17th Century Song

Mary Grey, a Canadian, has moved to England. Things are not going too well for her. One Sunday finds her walking along Hadrian’s Wall, all alone.

Part of Hadrian's Wall - Jamesflomonosoff , Public Domain 

Lost in her sad thoughts, she hears someone call out.

Annabel!

It's a handsome but dangerous looking man. He is Connor, it turns out, and he seems to think she is his cousin who disappeared. And just before she vanished, her grandfather was going to leave his wealth to her.

Connor, now convinced that Mary is not Annabel, suggests Mary act like Annabel so that they can get the inheritance and share it.  It's not that easy as Mary is the opposite of Annabel in many ways. She hates horses, for example, while the Annabel loved them.

And how can she avoid horses when Matthew Winslow, Connor's uncle and Annabel's grandfather, owns Whitescar, a farm. He's had a stroke and is near death. Even so, the old man is controlling. This is, perhaps, why ruthless Connor, the farm's manager, is bad tempered.

Beanley North Side Farm
by Russel Wills - CC BY-SA 2.0

Connor has a loyal sister who would like him to inherit. And there's Julie, Annabel's cousin, and her boyfriend, Donald, an archaeologist working on Roman excavations. She knows that Annabel had an affair with Adam, a wealthy neighbor.

There are many twists and turns in this suspenseful romantic thriller which the reader cannot anticipate though the heroine is the narrator.

Double acting is a big thing in Indian films. Even around the world, people love stories about mistaken identity and twins and other doppelgangers. 

I really wonder why all Mary Stewart novels were not made into films or TV serials. Some say this novel reminds them of another one by another author - Brat Farrar.

Danger and death entwine themselves around The Ivy Tree, making it a thrilling read. Who is the hero and who the villain? The tension is folded nicely between gentle scenes and romance, making this a great read! 

Click on Preview on the book cover below to get a feel of the writing. And don't hesitate to buy, borrow and read The Ivy Tower, the perfect novel for this time of year. The ebbing monsoon breeze is hauntingly right for such a story.

With the next post, we shall see how Mary Stewart spins a story set in Greece. In a previous excursion through her novels, we visited Delphi and now it's time for Crete, an island surrounded by grand legends.

Colin Dexter - The Secret of Annexe 3

The seventh novel in the Inspector Morse series, Colin Dexter's The Secret of Annexe 3 might not be the first book you'd suggest to a novice reader of the detective genre. But I was led to the book because I'd watched the marvellous Endeavour TV dramas. From there, I meandered into the Inspector Morse TV series. And then found this book in the library.

The detective shows born out of Dexter's novels - particularly Endeavour - weave culture deftly into the fabric of the narrative. However, the book can be a bit of a plod where the television adaptations and especially the offshoots (Endeavour and Lewis) entertain and educate.

Morse turned, and for a few seconds looked back up the short corridor down which they had walked; looked at the marks of many muddy shoes (including their own) on the purple carpeting - the latter seeming to Morse almost as distasteful as the reproduction of the late Renoir, 'Les nues dans l'herbe', which hung on the wall to his right. 

Renoir was a major painter of his time but I have not found the painting mentioned. For the Indian reader, here is a sample of his work. Do look into Renoir's output and delight. 

 

Auguste Renoir: Luncheon of the Boating Party

Interestingly, The Secret of Annexe 3 might be the only Morse novel with no specific show based on it. Some say The Secret of Bay 5B (hard to find) draws something from it.

I must admit that I was also charmed by descriptions of the author's personality and the anecdote of how he came to write crime stories. They say that it was during a rainy holiday in the countryside. Holed up with a bunch of restless kids, he sat himself down at the kitchen table and out came the first story. However, nothing else about the man suggests any engagement with crime and punishment. He looks like a shy, kindly old academic and that, it appears, is what he was. 

But he does share traits with the detective he birthed: they both love doing crossword puzzles. The imaginary crime fighter loves classical music too - Wagner operas in particular.  

Dexter gave Morse his own interests: that fondness for Wagner, pleasure in cryptic crosswords and liking for real ales and single malt whisky. Both men were heavy smokers.

Colin Dexter obituary: Inspector Morse creator and one of the great whodunnit men

 

Getting back to the culture component, here is some Wagner in the times of the pandemic:

The Secret of Annexe 3 will delight those who enjoy reading about police procedurals:

Morse had asked him to check (factually) with Phillips all the names and addresses of those staying in the hotel, and briefly himself to interview as many vital witnesses as he could find – with Phillips to take on the rest; to try to form a picture (synoptically) of the scene at the hotel on the previous evening; and to keep his antennae attuned (almost metaphysically, it appeared) for any signals from an unsuspected psychopath or any posthumous transmissions from the newly dead. Festivities – all of them, including the pantomime – had been cancelled, and the hotel was now grimly still, with not even the quiet click of snooker balls from the games room to suggest that murder was anything but a deadly serious matter.

In contrast to the debonair Inspector Morse, Dexter created Detective Sergeant Robert Lewis. 

Lewis himself had never spent a Christmas or a New Year away from home since his marriage; and although he knew that family life was hardly prize-winning roses all along the way, he had never felt the urge to get away from his own modest semi-detached house up in Headington over such holiday periods. Yet now – most oddly, considering the circumstances – he began to see for the first time, some of the potential attractions: no frenetic last-minute purchases from supermarkets; no pre-feastday preparations of stuffings and sauces; no sticky saucepans to scour; no washing-up of plates and cutlery. Yes! Perhaps Lewis would mention the idea to the missus, for it seemed perfectly clear to him as he spoke to guest after guest that a wondrously good time was being had by all – until a man had been found murdered.

The murder takes place in a cosy hotel where people routinely book themselves in to celebrate things. And, in a nutshell, that is what the story will do for you and why you should probably decide to read it this Christmas or gift it. After all, it might be some time before we can book ourselves into a hotel for a holiday!

My Brother Michael - Romance and Adventure in Greece

Greece is a romantic destination. 

Tourism Sunset Sea Santorini Greece Oia Island
Creative Commons Zero - CC0.

A place of pilgrimage to see the ruins of the civilisation that birthed Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras, Alexander, ... 

One such spot there is the shrine of an oracle, a person who can see the future: Delphi, once thought to be the Navel of the World!

Kim Bach - Panoramic view of the Apollo Temple in Delphi (The Oracle) 

Delphi is where Camilla Haven, recovering from a breakup, has to drive to, on a strange and urgent request from a man. She is alone, on a holiday in Athens, the capital of Greece. The man approaches her in a café, just as she is writing to a friend that nothing ever happens to her. 

Athens Cafe - CC0 Public Domain

The man says that she must rush to Delphi and that a car is ready for her. Left with no choice, she dives headlong into adventure. Along the way, a Simon Lester becomes her traveling partner. He wants to find out how his brother, Michael, died in Delphi during World War Two. 

Now that we have a car, what more can we expect from Mary Stewart than some dare devilry in driving. Indeed, here, the heroine is in a foreign country and has only recently learned to drive. Now, Greek driving behaviour is shown to be something of the sort we can expect in India and so you can well imagine what to expect. Humour and thrills go well together and we enjoy how she has a bus in front that will not get out of the way, just as if there was one of those Haryana Roadways drivers at the wheel. If that is not enough then she is overtaken by a lady driver. One who looks exactly like her. 

Add to dangerous driving a bunch of some really scary villains. And a handsome, man-of-action hero. A sure formula for entertainment. However, a Mary Stewart is not only fun but good stuff for the mind. 

My Brother Michael is rich with quotes from Greek classics. And the hero is familiar with these classics 

Not only is the book rich with reference to Greek mythology, which has excellent stories, and descriptions of the beautiful terrain, it is also a quick way to get an idea of the history of the region. 

We learn what became of such a world capital of culture, and what it was like there in the Second World War. During that war, many European countries suffered greatly under invasions. Of course, there were freedom fighters in Greece but there were also traitors. And, it was because of betrayal that Simon's brother, Michael, died during the War. 

Just as in many other novels by Stewart, we do not know whom to trust. Camilla is alone, though with a new-found handsome and highly educated male companion, and she is very short of money. Grab the book and read on to find out what happens!

My Brother Michael is one of my favourite Mary Stewarts. I suppose I enjoyed it all the more because I was reading Gerald and Lawrence Durrell. Gerald's famous My Family and Other Animals is set in Greece as are some of his brother's more serious and less enjoyable books. Also, in the days when I came across the novels of Mary Stewart, Zorba the Greek was being screened in India.

Reading the book I could imagine doing Greek dances amidst olive groves and Greek ruins. 

Besides all these treats, Mary Stewart also offers us delightful descriptions of the country's food and drink.

elianemey

Perhaps, these places and happenings appear distant to us in space and time, but the more we know about the world the better it is for us in countless ways. We can enjoy many more things than if we only drank at the fountain of our own culture. We become comfortable with global thought and culture and this makes us better placed as ambassadors of our own culture. 

"I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us ... We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country ~~ and Greece."

My Brother Michael

Coach English - Nine Coaches Waiting

Nine Coaches Waiting is a romantic thriller by Mary Stewart, a British author. Usually, such books are not considered educative. However, a Mary Stewart can be a way to skim through classical English literature not only painlessly but with thrills and romance.

Still very popular, though first published in 1958, fast moving, griping, the novel is full of references to classical English writers. The title is inspired by lines in a drama from Shakespeare's times. Quotes from that play open nine of the twenty-nine chapters of the book. 

Those "coach" chapters involve travels by car, crucial to the story - the Ninth Coach is the last chapter. Car chases involving Bentleys and Mercedes are a highlight of Mary's mysteries.

Now, let's not put the coach before the horse and let's cut to the chase to tell you what it's all about. Linda Martin is going to the Château Valmy, a castle in France. 

Château De Menthon-Saint-Bernard Castle France by Pixaline

There, she will be governess to Philippe, a nine year old French aristocrat. She's only twenty-three. In the olden days, in England, rich people hired such ladies to tutor and look after their children.

Linda had lived in France, as her mother was French, until she lost her parents in a plane crash when she was only fourteen and was sent to an orphanage in England as her father was English. He was also a poet and this is another familiar theme in a Mary Stewart, besides the car chases. Somebody or the other, in her books, is a literary figure. 

When the novel opens, she has been working as a badly paid teacher. She is lonely, without family and friends. And this is why she is excited about the position in France. She was hired by the boy's aunt and, felt that, as the lady wanted an English person, she should not reveal her true background.

Since the boy is also an orphan, Linda feels a bond. After his parents' deaths, the child lived with an uncle, Léon de Valmy, an archaeologist who, due to the nature of his work, has only recently come into the boy's life.  And is now in a wheelchair. He is very dominating and Linda feels he can read her mind.

The aunt, Héloïse, is cold and the little boy is quiet, serious and well behaved. Some of the staff of the Chateau are friendly to Linda and others are not. The atmosphere is tense.

Linda, who had been excited to return to France, feels lonely. And, naturally, when Leon's son, Raoul, arrives and begins to take her out and more, she feels as if Prince Charming has come into her life. However, many accidents happen to young Philippe and Linda becomes suspicious. She takes matters into her own hands and flees from the castle with the child. She goes to an English friend, a man called William Blake, and hides in his cabin. It's a very scary part of the book.

Mary Stewart sets her action in very scenic locations. Here, we have the beautiful mountains of a part of France near Switzerland. The author will make you want to visit the area with her fine descriptions, including that of the famous Lac Leman.

Lac Leman, Delachaussée
CC BY-SA 3.0

The story will remind some of Jane Eyre. There are also Cinderella elements with the romance between a kind of lord and a common woman. The aristocrat in question, is, however, somewhat sinister, though also a Prince Charming.

Suspense, love, adventure in all kinds of adventurous terrain - what more can you ask for? Just the kind of book to curl up with this monsoon! Click the book cover at the top of this post to preview the book.

In Mary Stewart's own words, here's her recipe for her evergreen bestsellers: 

I take conventionally bizarre situations (the car chase, the closed-room murder, the wicked uncle tale) and send real people into them, normal, everyday people with normal, everyday reactions to violence and fear; people not 'heroic' in the conventional sense, but averagely intelligent men and women who could be shocked or outraged into defending, if necessary, with great physical bravery, what they held to be right.

theguardian.com

The novel is so well liked that many re-read it every year! 

From France, we travel next to Greece with My Brother Michael:  

Nothing ever happens to me. 

I wrote the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the café table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.

 As I breathed the smoke in I looked about me. It occurred to me, thinking of that last depressed sentence in my letter to Elizabeth, that enough was happening at the moment to satisfy all but the adventure-hungry. That is the impression that Athens gives you. Everyone is moving, talking, gesticulating - but particularly talking.

My Brother Michael

Thunder on the Right

Thunder on the Right has artist Jennifer Silver thundering off to the French Pyrenees to investigate a cousin's death in a car accident there. The Gothic mystery romance is studded with random handsome hunks. Add to that the usual Stewart stew of literary references and locale and you have just the book to curl up to on a rainy August. 

Mary Stewart has written a modern – that is, 1950s – take on the Gothic novel, featuring classic tropes such as a nunnery, stormy weather, isolation, an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, creaking doors etc. The narrator mentions Mrs Radcliffe, leading exponent of the Gothic novel.

MARY QUEEN OF PLOTS

Sinister nuns and a case of amnesia sound delicious in a story but that is not all that's mouthwatering - Thunder on the Right offers lip-smacking descriptions of French food. The story opens to a fabulous lunch:

a morsel of truite maison, exquisitely cooked ... the waitress, a pretty dark-haired Bordelaise without a word of English, brought the croquettes de ris de veau a la Parmentier, the pommes de terre sautees, and the petits pois en beurre, and Jennifer ... was making again the wonderful discovery that simple greed is one of the purest of human pleasures... she thought, helping down the sweetbreads with a mouthful of topaz-colored wine... the meringue Chantilly succeeded the sweetbreads at her table ...

With the beautiful mountains as backdrop, romantic suspense thunders right, left and centre in this Mary Stewart. 

Angel de los Rios Cirque de Gavarnie

In the next post, we continue - again in France - with Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting - a feast of literary allusions and more!

An Atmospheric Tale - Wildfire at Midnight

Wildfire at Midnight, in Mary Stewart's own words, is 

 "an attempt at something different, the classic closed-room detective story with restricted action, a biggish cast, and a closely circular plot"

The plot figures a shapely fashion model, fleeing a London awaiting Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, for the desolate Isle of Skye, Scotland. Another such historical reference is later elicited by a mountain climbing expedition - the novel was published around when Hillary's Everest feat was news. We've seen, earlier, that Mary Stewart is all about locale.

john mcsporran - Sgurr na Stri mountain on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. 

'The Peak of Strife' and the surrounding Black Cuillin mountains.

A locale, perhaps, not as enchanting as settings in other Stewart Crime-Roms, but marvelously suited to the story:

The sombre landscapes of the Hebrides mirror and magnify the human threat represented by the murderer: quicksand and deep gorges make for treacherous footing, while dense white fogs roll down unexpectedly from the mountaintops, suffocating and blinding. Alone unaffected by these hazards, the murderer creeps up behind his victims as they stumble blindly along, and with a single flash of his knife, it is all over. The resultant climate of fear and suspicion is as thick as the fog itself. 

missdarcyslibrary.wordpress.com

Escaping the past, our heroine finds her ex-husband and another handsome hunk. Indeed, there has to be a dour good looking man or two in a Mary Stewart. There are other characters, too, apparently very much in character with traditional settings when murders are on the menu. 

guests, ... include an aging "femme-fatale" movie star, a possessive mountaineer and her ingenue apprentice, and a writer of travel guides. 

Wikipedia

In this Mary Stewart, as in some others, there is an air of conflict between the ancient and the new.  

The mystery component lightly blends mountaineering, druid mythology, and pagan ritual, as distorted in the mind and actions of an insane killer who resents human arrogance in conquering nature. Add in a dash of Separate Tables interaction among the guests at the hotel and mix in a killer among them for traditionally entertaining suspense intrigue.

Wikipedia

And this interface with the ancient is where the author interweaves the literary into the romance-thriller genre. Often, a central character in a Stewart story is writer. In this case, the ex-husband.  As you can read below, Wildfire at Midnight is rich with literary reference:

Chapter headings: I didn’t realise it the first time I read Wildfire at Midnight but Delectable Mountain (chapter 25) comes from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: the Delectable Mountains are on Christian’s route to the Celestial City. Chapter 21, Slough of Despond, is also from Pilgrim’s Progress while The Blasted Heath (chapter 20) is from Macbeth. The Echoing Tomb (chapter 10) may come from Erasmus Darwin’s poem ‘The Botanic Garden’ or could it be biblical and refer to the empty tomb after the resurrection of Jesus?

marystewartreading.wordpress.com 

Though the locale is atmospheric, Scotland does not appear to have provided Stewart with food worthy of scrumptious description. However, readers shudder at the number of cigarettes consumed.

How prudish we've become! In the same breath, reviewers huff and puff to blow down the heroine for forgiving adultery. That much morality makes me hot under the collar.

After Wildfire at Midnight in craggy Scotland, we return to the Pyrenees with Thunder on the Right for the upcoming post.