Lantern Hill by Barbara Worsley-Gough
published 1957
The ever-excellent Shedunnit podcast
recently did an epi on cricket in crime books, and mentioned Alibi Innings
by Barbara Worsley-Gough. That’s a very enjoyable country house mystery
based around a cricket match – I blogged on
it here, and then it inspired another
post on clothes panics for young women. Good all round. So then I got hold
of another book by her – Lantern Hill.
As I prefer, I started reading it without reading any blurb
or details, and boy was I in for some surprises. So this post will not contain
spoilers as such, but will contain a lot that I didn’t know or guess before I
read it.
It is a crime story, but until a long way in I was convinced
it must be just a straight novel: there is a death but it occurs almost exactly
half-way through, and is a complete shock. Up till that point it seems to be
entirely a novel of manners, dealing with a set of raffish types in London of
the 1950s.
There is Phyllis a hugely successful popular singer - splendidly known as The Spirit of Song – who
describes herself as ‘noisy and enormous and celebrated’. She is widowed but
has passing men friends. Next door lives a Bohemian couple connected to the art
world. Phyllis’s other friends include a Russian émigré prince, a notable
sculptor, some artists, and various songwriters and agents. All of them rattle
round attending openings, going to restaurants and clubs, getting drunk.
A third of the way through, the action shifts to Ireland.
The Lantern Hill of the title (which has not featured till now) is the Anglo-Irish
house and estate owned by Phyllis’s in-laws: her husband died in WW2, and we
assume that her son Desmond will inherit this estate in due course. Everyone
goes up to Dublin for the day, and many of the other characters turn out to be
in Ireland too. The death occurs. The rest of the book is dedicated to solving
the crime.
The motive for the crime, when eventually revealed, is
wholly and completely unexpected, and brings a most unexpected (& unguessable) dimension to the
story arc, leading to an even more startling final line, and some unexplored
ethical dilemmas you might have thought - though that doesn’t seem to occur to
any of the good guys. That’s all I can say really, though that possibly makes
the book sound more thrilling than it is – I enjoyed it hugely as a novel, for
the characters and dialogue and social details, but found the plot turns just
bizarre. (My description makes it sound as though there is some supernatural
element, but that is not what it is at all.)
So I am going to move on to the real joys of the book: the
details.
One character, Enid, wears cheap clothes and sandals and
lectures and writes textbooks. Unhappy about her husband’s bad behaviour, and
worried about the private view at his gallery, she gives herself a makeover –
something I do love in a book.
The well-cut blue dress that
wrapped Enid’s bones effectively and deepened the colour of her eyes was
quickly chosen… Miss Rose [the saleslady] went with her to the Beauty Salon and
gave instructions about her hair – ‘Upswept wings from the temples’ – and her
face – ‘First, the rose and then the coral’. Enid, listening without much
interest, thought that it all sounded like fragments from a chorus in the
Bacchae...
She smiled encouragingly at Enid
and said, ‘Well, I hope it will be a lovely party and you enjoy yourself.’
‘It will be a dreadful party,’
Enid answered with her grim little smile, ‘but thanks to you I’m equipped for
it – and I think I shall enjoy it one way or another.’
Miss Rose would have given anything to know more about the party… In the end she decided that Enid must be going to her boyfriend’s wedding.
There is a reference to brunch – the term had been around
for a long time, but it can’t have been terribly common in the UK in 1957.
Someone mentions that getting alcoholic drinks for visitors is much easier and less
trouble than getting tea for them – something I’ve noticed myself but never seen
written down.
Phyllis picks up her son, arriving from school to Paddington
station, on their way to Ireland, and attracts much notice there with her elegance, so naturally I had to use yet again the top picture, from the Clothes in Books Hall of Fame (a concept I have just named for the first time): showing a supermodel of the day, exactly at Paddington. (by Toni Frissell
from the library of
Congress, with the unimprovable detail that it used to be wrongly filed as being Victoria Station. I love to think of the online discussions where fashion nerds met railway nerds.)
The Anglo-Irish section is in marked contrast to London life
– I have
said before how much I love books with this setting: ‘I don’t like books
about squabbling Irish families (‘I can get that at home’) but show me the
Protestant Ascendancy in a decaying house in Ireland and I am entranced.’
There’s actually a post called The
Big Houses of Ireland (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com), and you can find links
in these posts the works of Molly Keane, John Banville, JG Farrell and others. Annabel
Davis-Goff is another favourite, and WC Ryan’s The
Winter Guest. (All posts with excellent pictures from the National Library
of Ireland, as above.)
So… the action moves there, and all the expected tropes turn
up: the uncomfortable house, the terrible food, the memories of the Troubles, and
the trip up to the Royal Dublin Show, the horse show which was (is?) the
highlight of the Irish social year. The daughter of the house, Ellie, ‘would
wear her bright bargain dress with a silly little white hat trimmed with
daisies and tulle… the old men would say, ‘Ah, she’s a great girl’, the women
would greet her approvingly.’ Phyllis’s much nicer dress – grey silk with
a wide cherry-coloured sash – won’t be noticed.
Without giving too much away, there is an element of make-up
detection – splendid and almost unprecedented.
There are fascinating takes on highbrow and lowbrow cultures
in the book – some of it quite snobbish and condescending, but it is very
interesting.
The other thing I loved was the collection of first names people had – SO MUCH of their time. Here are some of them: Desmond, Phyllis, Wally, Enid, Basil, Arthur, Doreen, Madge, Edna, Minnie, Brian. Nailing the action totally to the 1950s. Meanwhile, the very arty couple have three children called Tanis, Glaucon and Yseult. A treasure trove of names.
The Irish family sitting together is a wedding photo from
the National
Library of Ireland.
1950s woman striding out (Ellie in her not-so-good outfit) from Clover also.
That does sound like a bizarre set of plot twists, Moira. It makes me wonder what was behind her decision to work the story out that way. At any rate, it also sounds like a really interesting look at people's lives of the time, and I do like a book that uses detail to give the reader a sense of 'being there.'
ReplyDeleteIt is VERY strange Margot! But, I did enjoy it so I forgive the weirdness. It was quite realistic in many ways, then took that odd turn.
DeleteIt's interesting with names. In the early 1950s Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy names their daughter Tracy - presumably it was the epitome of arty stylishness then. Seventy years later - fairly or not - it's the trope for the daughters of unemployed and uneducated families.
ReplyDeleteWhat was its history?
One theory for the take-up of the name is that Tracy was made popular in the 1930s and 1950s through the movies The Philadelphia Story and High Society, when Katharine Hepburn and Grace Kelly respectively played the stylish, rich Tracy Samantha Lord.
DeleteThanks both for Tracy input.
DeleteI think there are a few names like that. I am fascinated by the whole business, and am often disapproving of modern authors who use what I consider the wrong names. eg from an old blogpost:
'My sister Sharon, she’s in service in London…'
I am willing to go out on a limb here and say there was no Irish housemaid in the whole of London in 1888 called Sharon. So naturally I assumed Sharon was a time traveler. [Spoiler: she isn’t. It is just a mistake.]
But then - someone told me recently that Tiffany is actually a very old-established name, but it sounds so modern that no-one would dare call their character that...
Grace - that's a very good theory. And I can lower the tone - there was an adult movie star in the 1980s called Traci Lord (once had a brief misunderstanding over that, you can just imagine - 'she's from one of my favourite films' etc)
DeleteGrace's theory explains the name's early popularity well, but the curious aspect is the name's swift decline in status. It's odd how names change: Shirley was a male name until Charlotte Bronte got going (Bronte's heroine was given the name of the son her father didn't have) and in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma Jennifer is described as a very unusual name.
DeleteYes, it's so interesting and so unpredictable I think. Kevin suddenly went downmarket: in Josephine Tey's Franchise Affair the posh Irish barrister is called Kevin, but in the 90s it became a different kind of indicator.
DeleteThere's a patricia Wentworth book where Miss Silver says she has never before come across the name Janice, which was very widespread among women of my generation.
Tiffany is an abbreviation of the old classical name Theophania (fem. variant of Theophanes). A thoroughly dislikable character in one of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels has that name/nickname.
ReplyDeleteRight, yes is it Nonsuch? She is a hoot. And Heyer would never have used an unconvincing name.
Delete(In my list of comments, yours was followed by someone saying 'oh yes Masquerade', talking about a different post. And I thought, 'wow, is there a Tiffany in Heyer's Masqueraders, I don't remember that...')
I was checking out my local library catalogue to see if they had this book, (they didn't) when I discovered she also wrote a book titled Fashions in London, published in 1953. I will have to make a trip to the Reference Library to have a look at it. I thought you might be interested too.
ReplyDeleteThanks - I think we have followed exactly the same path! I have ordered a copy, it sounds, as you say, right up my street.
Delete