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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Corpsing by Toby Litt, published in 2000 by Penguin Books; cover photography by Luke Kirwan.
Content note: death, suicide, gunshot.
For the last Page One of 2013, Charles Adrian serves up a dish of murder. Expect classic writers alongside a couple of relative whippersnappers. Happy holidays, everybody!
George Lewkowicz, who is mentioned, is featured in Page One 60.
Charles Adrian subsequently started to read The Leper Of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters (which he mistitles The Leper Of Saint George in this episode) while flying short-haul across Europe and left the book on the plane. Much sadness.
Another book by P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, is discussed in Page One 92. (Her recurring detective, wrongly described as Chief Detective Inspecter Adam Dalgleish on the back of the book Charles Adrian is reading from – and hence also in this episode – should more properly be Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish)
Another book by Toby Litt, Becoming Myself, is discussed in Page One 119.
Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow is also discussed in Page One 105.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 17th December, 2013.
Book Listing:
The Leper Of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters
Cover Her Face by P. D. James
Death In Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh
Corpsing by Toby Litt
Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow by Peter Høeg (trans. F. David)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Music
[Coventry Carol by The King's Singers]
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 63rd Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the last Page One before Christmas 2013. The last one before the end of the year, in fact.
Now, familiar as some of you are with my unrepentantly cheesy sensibility, you might have expected me to do a Christmas-themed Page One for today – all Bob Cratchit and... well, whatever other Christmas books there might be. But no. I also happen to think that murder is a perfectly good subject for the end of the year. So hello and welcome to the murder mystery edition of Page One. If you want to blame someone for this, by the way, blame George Lewkowicz, who gave me the idea while I was interviewing him for the 60th Page One, which went out a couple of weeks ago. It's still there, still available through iTunes. And on pageonepodcast.com.
Now, you might have noticed that I played us a carol to start the podcast today. This is for two reasons: one, because I like a good Advent carol and this is the time of year for it. And two, because I find the Coventry Carol, which was sung there by the King's Singers, so beautifully sinister – bye bye thou little tiny child, lully, lullay – and I think it sets us up pretty well, if you can ignore the four hundred year discrepancy and the translocation from Coventry to Shrewsbury, for my first book, which is a mediaeval whodunit. That's what it says on the cover. It is, of course, a Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters and it's called The Leper Of Saint George [sic] – or [in bad Welsh accent] The Leper Of Saint... Okay, sorry, no, my Welsh accent seems to abandoned me.
I lapped these up when I was a teenager. I read all of the Cadfaels they had in my school library. But I'm pretty sure that this wasn't one of them so that's very exciting. Also exciting is that it comes with its own bookmark, as I discovered after I bought it. This is a postcard with a kind of St. Trinian's–esque girl on the front and the legend: “I am active, adventurous, aggressive, assertive, curious, energetic, enterprising, frank, independent and inventive. Needless to say, this hasn't won me very many friends.” Ho Ho Ho. I should probably say that I don't tick many of those boxes myself.
Here's the first page of The Leper Of Saint George [sic].
1
Brother Cadfael set out from the gatehouse, that Monday afternoon of October, in the year 1139, darkly convinced that something ominous would have happened before he re-entered the great court, though he had no reason to suppose that he would be absent more than an hour or so. He was bound only to the hospital of Saint Giles, at the far end of the Monks' Foregate, barely half a mile from Shrewsbury abbey, and his errand was merely to replenish with oils, lotions and ointments the medicine cupboard of the hospital.
They were heavy on such remedies at Saint Giles. Even when there were few lepers, for whose control and assistance the hospice existed, there were always some indigent and ailing souls in care there, and the application of Cadfael's herbal remedies soothed and placated the mind as well as the skin. He made this pilgrimage on an average every third week, to replace what had been used. These days he made it with all the better will because Brother Mark, his much-prized and dearly-missed assistant in the herbarium, had felt it to be his destiny to go and serve with the unfortunate for a year, and a visit to Saint Giles was now a blessed reminder of peaceful days departed.
For to make all plain, Cadfael's forebodings had nothing whatever to do with the momentous events soon to be visited upon the abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul of Shrewsbury, no reference to marrying and giving in marriage, no omens of sudden and violent death. He was expecting, rather, that in his absence some vessel full of precious liquid would be broken, some syrup left to boil over, some pan to burn dry, in his [...]
I love that. I find it so gently conversational and friendly. I always enjoyed reading those. And I should probably say at this point that this book – and the next one, in fact – also link two of my great loves: whodunnit and radio drama. Because there are several Cadfael mysteries that appear with comforting regularity on Radio 4 Extra, which is my station of choice. And Cadfael himself is voiced in most of them by the wonderful Philip Madoc of fond and esteemed memory. I very nearly got to meet him once at a barn dance in Saint Albans but, sadly, I missed my chance.
Now, my next book is Cover Her Face by P. D. James, which also appears on 4 Extra from time to time in a version starring Siân Phillips and Hugh Grant among others. P. D. James is someone that I've come to fairly recently. I'm not totally enamoured of her poet detective – Chief Detective Inspector [sic] Adam Dalgleish to give him his full title – but I like the way that she lays out her mysteries. There's a calmness to her writing and a thoroughness that I find very appealing. This is a Sphere paperback edition of the book from 1974, priced at 40p and described as a CRIME THRILLER. The spine is really nicely broken. I like that. It's one of the things that persuaded me to buy it. It says to me: “This book has been properly read”. And... okay, the cover has a picture of a woman... it's her head but... and her shoulder... you imagine that she must be naked. And one assumes that she's dead. Now, on this first page you're going to see a really classic opening strategy for this kind of literature, okay? So get ready now for a full character list.
CHAPTER ONE
1
Exactly three months before the killing at Martingale Mrs. Maxie gave a dinner party. Years later, when the trial was a half-forgotten scandal and the headlines were yellowing on the newspaper lining of cupboard drawers, Eleanor Maxie looked back on that spring evening as the opening scene of tragedy. Memory, selective and perverse, invested what had been a perfectly ordinary dinner party with an aura of foreboding and unease. It became, in retrospect, a ritual gathering under one roof of victim and suspects, a staged preliminary to murder. In fact not all of [sic] the suspects had been present. Felix Hearne, for one, was not at Martingale that week-end. Yet, in her memory, he too sat at Mrs. Maxie's table, watching with amused, sardonic eyes the opening antics of the players.
At the time, of course, the party was both ordinary and rather dull. Three of the guests, Dr. Epps, the vicar and Miss Liddell, Warden of St. Mary's Refuge for Girls, had dined together too often to expect either novelty or stimulation from each other's company. Catherine Bowers was unusually silent and Stephen Maxie and his sister Deborah Riscoe, were obviously concealing with difficulty their irritation that Stephen's first free week-end from the hospital for over a month should have coincided with a dinner party. Mrs. Maxie had just employed one of Miss Liddell's unmarried mothers as house-parlourmaid and the girl was waiting at table for the first time. But the air of constraint which burdened the meal could hardly have been caused by the occasional presence of Sally Jupp who placed the dishes in front of Mrs. Maxie and removed the plates with a dextrous efficiency which Miss Liddell noticed with complacent approval.
It is probable that at least one of the guests was wholly happy. Bernard Hinks, the vicar of Chadfleet, was a bache- [...]
There we go. I also recommend... oh, I think it's An Unsuitable Job For A Woman. That was one of the first P. D. James novels that I read and, yeah, I really enjoyed that. And also The Private Patient, which is a more recent one, which is also dramatised on Radio 4 Extra.
It's time for a little more music now. This is another a capella track. This is O Death by Ralph Stanley. You can start when you like, Ralph.
Music
[O Death by Ralph Stanley]
Ralph Stanley with O Death.
And now this right here is what you might call the classic heart of the podcast. Just for a moment. I don't have any Agatha Christies. I don't have a Dorothy L. Sayers here. What I do have is something by Ngaio Marsh, who is the third of the so-called queens of crime. She “was made a Grand Master of [sic] the Mystery Writers of America, was named Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, won numerous prestigious awards, and penned 32 mystery novels”. I'm reading all of that from the back of the book, which is Death In Ecstasy.
Now, on the front cover there's a quotation from New York magazine, which goes as follows: “It's time to start comparing Christie to Marsh instead of the other way around.” Personally, I don't think that's ever going to happen. I don't want to make excessive claims for dear old Agatha but there's something rather cramped about the Ngaio Marsh books that I've read. And, well, frankly, they just don't seem to grasp our imagination in the way that a Marple or a Poirot do and have done for longer than I've been alive. I mean, how many of us if, we're honest, are not artificially nostalgic for a time when you could leave your bike unchained outside the post office while you popped in to gossip with some of Britain's finest theatre and television actors, one of whom would turn out to be the murderer. Hint, it's usually the one playing the actor/tress – if there is one in the story. Still, that said, if anybody's thinking of making new dramatisations of the Ngaio Marsh books, I would happily play Inspector Alleyn. Or indeed Nigel Bathgate. I think I would be perfect for either. And, who knows, maybe we could turn things around. Okay, I'm just putting that out there.
Right. Now, technical information: This is a St. Martin's Dead Letter Mysteries paperback edition of the book from 1997, priced at $5.50. And we're told on the page opposite the contents page that:
NOTE: if you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
I'm very happy to announce that my copy is complete with cover. It's a slightly odd cover. There's a goblet of fire on there that Harry Potter might recognise and some attempt at a kind of Art Deco stripe. But here's the first page:
CHAPTER 1
Entrance to a Cul-de-sac
On a pouring wet Sunday night in December of last year a special meeting was held at the House of the Sacred Flame in Knocklatchers Row.
There are many strange places of worship in London, and many remarkable sects. The blank face of a Cockney Sunday masks a kind of activity, intermittent but intense. All sorts of queer little religions squeak, like mice in the wainscoting, behind its tedious facade.
Perhaps these devotional side-shows satisfy in some measure the need for colour, self-expression, and excitement in the otherwise drab lives of their devotees. They may supply a mild substitute for the orgies of a more robust age. No other explanation quite accounts for the extraordinary assortment of persons that may be found in their congregations.
Why, for instance, should old Miss Wade beat her way down the King's Road against a vicious lash of rain and in the teeth of a gale that set the shop signs creaking and threatened to drive her umbrella back into her face? She would have been better off in her bed-sitting room with a gas-fire and her library book.
Why had Mr. Samuel J. Ogden dressed himself in uncomfortable clothes and left his apartment in York Square [...]
Why indeed? You'll have seen, by the way, that this page combines the beginning of a character list with another very important technique, which is the place and the atmosphere, evocations of.
Now, my fourth book today – classic heart of podcast over – is by Toby Litt. I'm not going to say an awful lot about it, except that I've read a couple of books by Toby Litt that I really liked – a collection of short stories called Exhibitionism and a novel called Finding Myself – and I'm really happy to see that he's also written a detective novel. I think he's an interesting writer. I'm really looking forward to reading this. I haven't read it yet. It's a lovely, largely red Penguin paperback edition with a couple of bullets on the front cover and writing in shiny gold and silver. It's from the year 2000 and it's called Corpsing.
Now, before I read the first page, I would say that Litt's techni… [laughing] Litt's technique! I would say that Toby Litt's technique is a fairly modern one. I would compare it to Christopher Brookmyre perhaps. So to me this says: “This is not just a detective novel. It's a novel in which someone dies and there will be some detecting but focus on the characters, okay?” It's also a good chance for me to show off some of my exquisite character acting. Casting directors take note. I'm playing a woman at the beginning of this.
1
‘Conrad? It's Lily. Hi. Yes. Glad I got the number right. How are you? Really? That's – encouraging. Look, someone's just blown me out. I've got this table at a restaurant, Le Corbusier, Soho. D'you know it? Uh-huh. Yeah, but the food's really wonderful – and we do need to meet up sometime, you know. There are things we need to talk about. Like you said. So why don't we make it this evening and keep it in a public place – try to make it {pleasant}, at least. Well, it's y'know, a difficult situation. And I promise I won't cry if you won't. Conrad, that was a joke. Christ! Eight, yeah. You don't want to meet up for a drink beforehand? You never. Hey. It was a jo. Mmmm. Touch-eee. Okay, yeah-oh. Yeah, there's some. I'll bring it along. God. Mm-'kay. Yeah-bye.’
Lily has caught me in the edit suite at the Discovery Channel, So the VT Editor, Chris – all VT Editors are called Chris – is sitting next to me with a big I'm-not-listening smirk on his face.
We're putting together the sixth of seven scarifying trailers for Shark Week. A Great White is freeze-framed on the screen in front of us, having just taken a watermelon-huge slice out of a scuba-diver's right thigh.
No way can we cut this particular shark-attack footage into what is intended to be a heavy-rotation trail. But Chris and I enjoy watching it – forwards and backwards, in ultraslow motion, frame by bloody frame.
At the moment Lily calls, we are using the Great White's gaping [...]
Okay.
And now for my last book, which also has a radio connection because... well, I've forgotten which way round it was, but I've read this and I've heard it read on Radio 4 Extra and both were wonderful experiences. I definitely remember buying the book in the now non-existent Borders on Oxford Street. And then I gave it to a friend. And then I found another copy just today in my local Oxfam Books. And so I've bought it with the thought that maybe one day when I've got through a few of the books on my to-be-read pile – which I try not to think about too much – I might reread it. It's Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow by Peter Høeg translated by F. David and it's a Flamingo Overseas paperback edition from 1994. And it comes, I think – I would say – from a time before the recent vogue for Scandi thrillers. I'm even wondering if maybe it started the whole thing off. It was certainly a massive success. [laughs] I say that in the past tense. It probably still is. I don't have any sales figures in front of me. Anyway. I love the atmosphere of this book. And I love all the facts about snow and ice. And I love the names. And... Well, I'm just going to read you the first page. Here it is:
1
IT IS FREEZING, an extraordinary – 18 ºC, and it's snowing, and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik – big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost.
December darkness rises up from the grave, seeming as limitless as the sky above us. In this darkness our faces are merely pale, shining discs, but even so I can sense the disapproval of the pastor and the verger directed at my black net stockings and at Juliane's whimpering, made worse by the fact that she took disulfiram this morning and is now confronting her grief almost sober. They think that she and I have no respect for either the weather or the tragic circumstances. The truth is that both the stockings and the pills, each in their own way, are a tribute to the cold and to Isaiah.
The women surrounding Juliane and the pastor and the verger are all Greenlanders, and when we sing “Guutiga, illimi”, “Thou, My Lord”, and as Juliane's legs buckle under her and she begins weeping, the volume slowly increasing, and when the pastor speaks in West Greenlandic, taking his point of departure in the Moravians' favourite passage from St Paul about redemption through the blood, then with only a tiny lapse of concentration one might feel oneself transported to Upernavik or Holsteinborg or Qaanaaq.
But out in the darkness, like the bow of a ship, loom the walls of Vestre Prison; we are in Copenhagen.
The Greenlanders' cemetery is part of Vestre Cemetery. With Isaiah in his coffin has come a procession consisting of those of Juliane's friends who are now holding her upright, the pastor and the verger, the mechanic, and a small group of Danes, among whom I recognize only the probation officer and the guardian.
Ah. I think it's gorgeous. I love it. I love the way it begins. And I love the way it continues.
But that's it for today's Page One. For those of you who are listening to this in a timely fashion, I hope you have a lovely holiday season and an auspicious start to the New Year. For anybody else, the same but in the past tense. I'm taking a little break now but I'll be back on the 7th of January with the first Page One of the New Year. I haven't decided what it's going to be yet but it will probably be a Second Hand Book Factory. You'll just have to come back too to find out who I'm talking to. Ah! Too many toos! In the meantime, I hope that you've enjoyed this episode.
Those of you who have been listening to this before bed probably think that you've had something of a lucky escape. I mean, nobody actually dies on the first pages of any of these books. Obviously, I don't count the funeral in that last book. I mean, you don't actually see the death. We only find out about it later on. Here's where your luck runs out, though, I'm afraid. I'm playing us out with Bill Withers singing Better Off Dead. This is a lovely track but warning: it doesn't end well.
Music
[Better Off Dead by Bill Withers]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]