Irish Murder again: Creeping Venom by Sheila Pim

Creeping Venom by Sheila Pim

published 1946

 

 

 

[excerpt] To make it world-famous, Brainborough’s fair had to have some individual feature to distinguish it from all the other fairs and sports and races and patterns and carnivals held in other Irish towns and attended by the same tinkers, quacks, three-card tricksters, traveling shops and traveling gambling wheels. Brainborough had all these and a goat too.

The goat is the king of the fair, nobody quite knows why. A note about Brainborough, printed on the back of the tourist map of the county, suggests that this is a survival of some ancient form of animal sacrifice or possibly a form of totem worship. It adds to the interest of the subject for the folklorist that this is the only instance of a goat in connection with midsummer rites, though at Killorglin, in County Kerry, a goat plays its part in the well-known September Puck Fair. There is room here for research. One writer on folklore, an Englishwoman, has suggested that the antiquity of the Brainborough custom has been exaggerated, and that Brainborough, jealous of the publicity given to Killorglin’ s fair, borrowed the idea of the goat in modern times. This unsupported opinion is perhaps hardly worthy of mention.

 

comments: I very much am loving the works of Sheila Pim – she wrote a handful of crime stories in the 1940s, set in small-town genteel Ireland, and very funny and observant and enjoyable.

The first chapter of this one is ‘It Starts at the Flower Show’, so you know where you are. In quick succession we get Protestant soil, RC flowers (Madonna lilies) and the idea that breeding snails might be useful because perhaps they are non-meat and can be eaten by Catholics on a Friday.

Next there is a lot about the Work Depot – sewing party – with the ladies of the area doing their bit making ‘clothes and hospital dressings for various charities’.

There is a lunch party, someone dies, and that has to be investigated.

You can spot who the potential victim is in advance because she was about to change her will. This is to do with religion again – she is Protestant, and is worried that a potential heir will become a Catholic. ‘I wonder if he means to turn’ someone says – a phrase I hadn’t heard in years.

There is not much wickedness, or jeopardy, in the story, but it is as full of wonderful details as it could be – just like the first book. There is double summertime, which some people refuse to recognize, giving rise to difficulties. There are young people going up to Dublin for a dance. There is a witch-like old woman with the splendid name of Mrs Shegog who has a wholly-out-of-control goat, and who (it turns out) gets her potions and magic out of a book from Woolworths. (One of the maids gets her traditional recipes from the Daily Mail cookbook, rather than their being handed down the generations as others are hoping)

There are horse skulls and bones found in a most unlikely place, and there is a Beltane celebration at the climax – the goat fair above is part of it.

modern day Beltane fire

This book has everything.

Recent blog theme mourning: 

Mrs Linacre had felt too upset to come down till lunchtime. By then she had achieved a successful little frock to wear as mourning out of an old black chiffon evening dress.

At the funeral: 

Meriel was looking smashing that morning. A frantic search to wear that was right for both the funeral and the heat wave had ended in a little black afternoon frock and a small sophisticated black hat in which she looked like somebody else, but somebody even more glamorous than her usual attractive self.

I was surprised at the mention of a Supermarket – I am always on the lookout for items that sound like anachronisms but are not.

And I like a good, appalling mother – see this from a post on a book called Alibi Innings:

Mrs Ford, the mother of the doctor’s fiancée Molly, is definitely in the Georgette Heyer line, in her red tartan dress and big black hat, though no-one will ever equal Mrs Dean in Heyer’s masterwork, Envious Casca. (and it always does to remember, too, Mrs Dillington-Black in Ngaio Marsh’s Singing in the Shrouds.)   

         

Here, the young companion Priscilla has a mother who turns up just in time to block the funeral procession, starting as she means to go on. She is bossy and nosey and pulls apart a mattress to find its secrets, and is full of good advice for people who don’t want it.

My favourite line in the book came when the young people are discussing possible motives, including blackmail. One young man puts forward an idea, having found out someone’s secret, and gets this sharp response:

“Well do go and tell her you’ve found out, and see if she poisons you.”                                      

A truly enjoyable book.

Sheila Pim's Common or Garden Crime is here on the blog.

Picture of a Puck (=goat) fair at Killorglin (the one they’re alleged to have copied it from).

Fair day in Glenties in co Donegal.