Crook O' Lune by ECR Lorac

 

Crook O' Lune by ECR Lorac

published 1953

 

 

Last week I posted on ECR Lorac’s Death of an Author. Her Crook O’Lune – ‘a Lancashire Mystery’ – came in 1953 (nearly 20 years later) and couldn’t be more different. This one features Lorac’s series detective Inspector Robert MacDonald, missing from Author. But also, Crook O' Lune more than most is all about the setting - remote valleys and villages in Lancashire, and the lives of the farmers and workers there. It is very obviously based on a real place, and one that Lorac knew well (see below...). The plot is complex, and very well done, but the real achievement in the book is the picture of people and their individual worlds: the couples working hard to build a life and eke out their money, the shepherd living the same way his forebears did hundreds of years before, the troubles caused by wills and bequests and cranky people. There are those whose families have been in same place for generations, contrasted with rootless people who move around, lives disrupted by the war that ended a few years before. There are the solid certainties of the hill farmers, and there are the changes that always come, whether it’s an Education Act or rationing.

And she has thought about the inner lives of her characters:

Men who live solitary lives—and most shepherds spend the greater part of their time alone—often have an awareness that is implicit rather than explicit. “Words aren’t their medium,” meditated Macdonald. “The things they do so skilfully aren’t the result of thought, but of long practice: the skill becomes ingrain, like a conditioned reflex, and words have nothing to do with it.”

You believe that she reports on all this authentically and  well. I read it a while back, and don’t honestly remember that much about the final solution but the setting lives on in my mind.

In a Foreword from the author, Lorac says this: ‘Incidentally, the house I have called Aikengill is not for sale, nor is it to let. I live in it myself.’  Martin Edwards has done a fascinating Introduction for the British Library edition in which he tells us more about the real life traces in the book.  And so well done to the British Library for reprinting her works – there is a theory that she has been under-rated because she was so productive, that people assumed the quality must be low. But she is a really reliable writer – yes some of her books are better than others, but you can at least hope to enjoy a few hours of classic crime and detection with her.

Top picture from the National Media & Science Museum in Bradford. "A photograph titled 'Ninety and Nine', showing an elderly shepherd carrying a lamb and holding a crook, taken by Colonel Joseph Gale (c 1835-1906) in 1890. This image of rustic life shows a shepherd resting at a gate to his field, a lamb under his arm. His faithful sheep-dog waits in the background for his master's next command."

Second picture: "Jevington, Sussex. A shepherd and his dog with a southdown flock on the Sussex Downs near the village of Jevington."