Hunt the Tortoise by Elizabeth Ferrars

 

Hunt the Tortoise by Elizabeth Ferrars

published 1950

 

 

Elizabeth Ferrars (known as EX Ferrars in the USA) – where would you put her on your list of crime authors? I don’t think she’s very well-known or widely-read these days, and I don’t suppose many people would put her at the top of their lists, but she consistently – 70+ novels over 50 years – produced solid entertaining crime books. She did several different series, and many standalones, and the tone and style varied a lot. I have done posts on eight of them – a substantial presence, though not shaking the surface of her oeuvre.

I preferred her straightforward crime stories, particularly the 30s and 40s ones, and have said before now that some of her later books resembled romantic thrillers - adventures of a feisty young woman who is going to find love as well as uncover a crime, probably in a semi-exotic location – see for example this one, Alibi for a Witch. They are rather like Mary Stewart books, though in my opinion not as good.

 Whereas – the 1946 Murder Among Friends couldn’t be more different, and is a truly excellent murder story both for creating convincing characters and giving a haunting picture of the Home Front of WW2 in London.

Hunt the Tortoise is very much in the romantic thriller mode: a few years after the war ends, a young woman goes back to a French seaside village in the South of France – a place, a hotel and people that she knew well. She is seeking some kind of closure, though we don’t immediately know what, and it is obvious that the war is not forgotten, and changed things a lot.

Incidentally, she is called Celia Kent. There is no reason why that name should be keyed to a time – Celia is a Roman martyr’s name and turns up in Shakespeare (as You Like it) and George Eliot (Middlemarch). Yet somehow I feel ‘Celia Kent’ would always be the young attractive heroine of a 1950s thriller. (could easily be a Mary Stewart name).

Anyway, she turns up at her hotel and it is full of strange people and it is extremely difficult to keep track of who is who: too many characters, all introduced initially by appearance, So there is ‘a black-haired sunburnt man… an unknown middle-aged woman… a big burly blond man.’ Their names come later  - a few pages maybe – something that drives me mad in books.

There is a lot of weird staccato dialogue, people walking away in mid-conversation, nothing really explained. There is a lot going on, with the owners and staff of the hotel, and with the guests.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s wrong with everybody? What’s in the air? Canadian divers and treasure ships, ungrateful sons and anxious parents, voices that talk in the night about mortal terror, Frenchwomen who think that England and Frace should be one nation, lucky tortoises, husbands who are afraid of their wives talking to me in case they should say what they shouldn’t. Is that what one expects to find when one comes on a holiday?”

Well yes indeed.

Now, the tortoise  of the title: it IS a lucky tortoise, and it gets lost – or did someone hide it? -  and everyone looks for it, and that is when something bad happens. It felt a bit glued on, though I like the oddity of the title.

There was some clothes description: I was surprised at how informal people were – ‘a woman of 45… wearing shorts and a linen jumper and a gaudy cotton handkerchief round her head’. This is at lunch in the hotel.

One man comes to lunch in his swimming-shorts and beachrobe. I think none of this would’ve been likely in a British hotel of the era, even a holiday resort.

There is a fete over several days which is very nicely and vividly described:

‘The evening’s so beautiful now, the lights are pretty, the music’s so silly and so cheerful, the air’s so soft, and the young people in their charming dresses look so happy and free.’

The hotel had become very noisy. They saw a large crowd gathered round the bar. There was singing and laughter, and one or two couples were dancing in and out among the tables.

 

I found this an entertaining read, and although the style was odd (and there seemed various loose ends), I got used to that, and it made for an unchallenging Sunday afternoon read. I very much liked that she created a fascinating and complex atmosphere: the leftover suspicions and difficulties of the war, the determination to try to recover a good life, the charm of the fete, and the happy warmth of the South of France – not yet the tourist magnet it would become.

It was interesting to compare it with Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy, which I read a couple of years ago: that was written and set in the runup to the War, but has a very similar setting in a small hotel with attention turning on all the guests in turn (and I would say Ambler was the better writer).

Kate at Cross-Examining Crime also likes to read a Ferrars – she reviewed this one a couple of years ago, and reading it after I’d written this, I found we had both chosen the exact same quote to summarise the plot.

-- and Bev at My Reader's Block also has a very helpful review - and also chose that exact same quote!

Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery has also reviewed several Ferrars books, though not actually this one.

The two b/w pics of, exactly, young people dancing at a French fete are from a book of old photos that I wrote about in this blogpost.