Xmas Book Scenes: Carol Singers

Christmas Book Scenes!  During December I like to post entries which are more Christmas in Books than Clothes in Books, and kind readers say it puts them in a seasonal mood.

If you have a favourite Christmas book or scene not featured yet – please let me know

Xmas Carol singing: Catt out of the Bag by Clifford Witting

published 1939

 

[Excerpt] Our first stop was on the corner of Handen Street. There we sang Good King Wenceslas…. The collectors were lost in the mist, but I heard a prim rat-a-tat not very far away… ‘We’ve just time for another’ our leader decided.

We trooped round the corner to the corner of Griffin St and the Paragon, where there was another street light.

We did very well from passers-by when we carolled by the equestrian statue that stood in the centre of the Square. Quite a crowd gathered round us, and our collectors expertly mulcted them.

 

comments: This book was a kind present from my friend Chrissie Poulson.

I featured another of Cliffford Witting's books earlier this year, Measure for Murder, and I had the same mixture of enjoyment and irritation with this one. Overall, enjoyment wins out, but the books do have some very strange features.

This is a first person narrative: the hero and his wife are staying with friends, the de Fraynes, before Christmas – and the book is very funny about the general difficult business of being a guest. John Rutherford is roped into an evening of carol-singing, organized with great attention to detail by his hostess.

The evening of singing is then described minutely by our narrator – there is a map of the town, and every street and port of call is listed in the chapter. It is also very funny on the subject of people’s styles of singing, not remembering the words, the bossy organizer….

One of the singers disappears during the evening:

‘I’ve seen nothing of Mr Vavasour’ she said anxiously.

‘He is probably exchanging badinage with a servant’ Mrs de Frayne viciously replied.

[I love this sentence to distraction]

 

And there are the seeds of the mystery: what has become of him, and what about the box of money (the carol collection) he was carrying?

There will be plenty of opportunity for Rutherford to investigate:

She [his wife] dropped her head and looked at me sideways in a manner that I found rather attractive.

‘Mrs de Frayne wants us to stay for Christmas.’

Her pose lost its charm.

‘Christmas?’ I bellowed. ‘But that’s ridiculous.’

And a new character is introduced to help: Raymond Cloud-Gledhill, ‘an interesting talker who had undoubtedly knocked around the world a good deal’. Did you ever hear a more Golden Age name and description?

I enjoyed the book very much for the humour and setting, and Rutherford has a splendid self-deprecating manner as he lives through the various Christmas activities foisted on him by Mrs De Frayne.

There is something distinctive about Witting’s style, which is difficult to describe – an unevenness, whereby some incidents are described in very tight detail, while others are skimmed over. Its as if he’s not sure what is important while he’s writing. But it’s not off-putting, he is very readable indeed. It’s a very good Christmas book, coming to a neat climax on New Year’s Eve.

Some carol singers, and then some ladies of the era dressed in their warm coats – probably too smart and fashionable to be the carol singing women of Paulsfield, but at least they will be warm….

The Galileo Press is reprinting Clifford Witting’s books, and I do recommend them to any fans of 30s detective fiction.