Murder by Accident (1947), by Leonie Mason (Joan Walker)

“This is a book for those who prefer to take their murders quietly” (dustjacket)

I’ve been in conversation with Brian Busby, of The Dusty Bookcase and Canadian Notes & Queries, about a number of authors of obscure Canadian mysteries, and he has kindly lent me his copies of Joan Walker’s East of Temple Bar (published in 1946 under her maiden name, Joan Suter) and Murder by Accident (published the following year under the pseudonym Leonie Mason). By the time these books were published in England, Walker had already (just) moved to Canada, where she married Major James Rankin Walker. Her early life as a war bride became the fodder for her Pardon My Parka, which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1954… but that is not (mostly) what this blog is about.

This blog is about mysteries. Most notably, British mysteries and how hooked I am on them as a genre. Not only do I devote most of my television viewing time to shows like Vera, Shetland, and Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple, but recently having contracted covid, I have not only binge-watched the entirety of the Endeavour – Morse – Lewis -verse but also revisited a number of favourite authors: Dorothy Sayers, Ruth Rendell, P.J. James, and of course Agatha Christie. So Leonie Mason’s Murder by Accident is in esteemed company. In the world of early Canadian women’s novels that I have read, though, it lies beside such questionable delights as Mabel Broughton Billett’s Calamity House (1927) and The Robot Detective (1932), and Mary Coad Craig’s The Two Decanters (1930), in much the same way as the Brokenwood Mysteries overshadows the trite Midsomer Murders or the dark, convoluted Hinterland.

In his review of Murder by Accident, Brian points suggests that its greatest failing lies in the title being “somewhat of a spoiler.” I have to admit that it turns out to have been an anti-spoiler for me. Brian’s comment led me to expect the initial poisoning to have actually been accidental, and I thus suspended my disbelief far more in reading than I usually would with mystery novels. “I don’t trust those mushrooms not to have been accidental… so let’s see what she does with this.”

What she does is weave a relatively successful mystery, albeit incorporating perhaps more than its fair share of tropes… but then, were the recognized elements of the British detective drama as ubiquitous in 1947 as they are now? So many of them can be attributed to Agatha Christie (certainly the drawing room conclusion scene, which Murder by Accident manages to avoid), and her first novel was published only in 1922.

As to tropes: Green Acres, the guest house owned by Christie and Henry Burton, is obvious (and yes, it not only was, but is a real thing: I have had the delightful experience myself); it also reminds me strongly of one of my favourite mysteries, Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight (1956), which also draws on the conventions of the “country hotel” trope, complete with love triangles, marital discord, and a femme fatale. Similarly, Mason’s cast of characters, like any Agatha Christie novel, spans the gammut, including the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, but missing the vicar and his entourage. Hotel guests Major Guy Warren, recently demobbed from the Intelligence Corp, and Angela Nash, the young, attractive secretary of the first murder victim – the acerbic author Anna Rawlings – combine forces and with the help of Guy’s friend Peter Martin, CID, unravel the mystery of what appear to be a series of coincidental accidents occuring at Green Acres. Other guests include the femme fatale, soon-to-be-divorced Lydia French; Anna’s toy-boy husband, Frank; and the greedy businessman George Heskett, who is attempting unsuccessfully to coerce the Burtons into selling the guest house.

And so the stage is set: but the story could go either way. That it turned into an enjoyable afternoon of reading is unquestionably for the same reason that the authors won two literary awards in the 1950s: Leonie Mason has a rather engaging narrative voice and facility with language. There is levity, too, although this is in no way a humourous book. The cabbie in the opening scene, who “had a private theory about bumps and potholes in the road” (5), and thus aimed for them to – successfully – increase his fare, reappears at times like Macbeth’s gatekeeper. The local poachers, when a shot is fired in the woods, are ”seething with indignation”: they “are far too good at the job to mistake Angela and Christie for a brace of pheasants” and not willing to become “the laughing stock of the place for their bad aim” (123). I enjoy a book, too, that includes as the final sentence of a chapter full of deep discussion of plots and motivations: “They queued up to use the boot scraper just outside the front door and they they went in to lunch” (183). One gets the sense that the irony of the prosaic action is intentional.

Overall, I’d have to say that I really enjoyed Murder by Accident, but I have to agree with Brian that the climax was highly disappointing. It was easy to anticipate, and the run up to the final scene included all of the information necessary, leaving no possibility of a satisfying denouement. We are just left there: “Oh. Okay then. Right. Next novel.”

Speaking of which: I now feel that I need to read Pardon My Parka (1953) and Repent at Leisure (1957), both of which deal with war brides. The opening pages of Murder by Accident hold some interesting comments about war brides, and I wonder how this fits in with Joan Walker’s biography. She married Ogilvie MacKenzie-Kerr in London in 1938, but had obviously divorced by 1946 when she married James Rankin Walker in Toronto. She had emigrated to Canada in April 1946, just as the novel was being published, so one wonders about her characters. Guy is glad he had avoided “making a fool of himself … with some unsuitable girl who had seemed to be the sun and the moon and the stars during a brief forty-eight hours’ leave” (11). And Lydia married during the war: “At first it was such fun. Leaves. … Dancing until all hours … and then when peace broke out, Rodney didn’t” (13). The tensions in the plot are underpinned by relationships built and destroyed during the war years, when men were deployed or on leave, and women stayed on the home front and… well, it depended, apparently, on the woman. But Joan Suter, Mrs. Ogilvie MacKenzie-Kerr, became a war bride herself. So where does that leave us? I’ll have to read on.

More by Mona Weiss…

After receiving this morning a particularly heartening comment on one of Mona Weiss’s poems, I decided to poke about in our records to see what else we knew about this poet. Not much, it turns out, so hopefully her family will get back to me with more. I did, however, find digitized copies of the complete run of The McGilliad, the magazine of the McGill University Arts Undergraduate Society, to which she contributed in 1931. Here is the complete set of poems (including the poem in the previous post) she published in The McGilliad, which only ran for 1930-1931.

Maybe the family might know, too, who S.K. is…

“To S.K.” and “Discovery.” The McGilliad 2.3 (January 1931): 10.

“Desertion” and “To S.K.” The McGilliad 2.4 (February-March 1931): 82.

“Burma Road” (1942), by Edna Jaques

Jaques, Edna. “Burma Road.” Lethbridge Herald (13 February 1942).

I found this while looking (rather unsuccessfully, I might add) for anything about Asia or the War in Canadian newspapers by Dora Sanders in the early 1940s.

At first I thought to myself: “Surely Burma is jungle, and humid, not a dry, dusty desert?” but then I consulted my oracle, Madame Google, who tells me that there is extensive desert in Burma, but that are not (as I also suspected) any hyenas.

Still, readers would not miss the intent, I am sure.

Dora Sanders in the Circle of Young Canada

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916).

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916). Playtime Prizes of one dollar each were “given to boys and girls from 11 to 13 years old for the best letter on any subject, the best story or nature letter, and the best poem, photograph or drawing.” Dora won “best poem for April” in 1915 and “best poem for January” in 1916 but it is not certain if “My Flower” was in fact the winning January 1916 poem. The correlation between publication and winning is tenuous; not all winning poems appear to have been published. Dora Sanders’s daughter Pat Carney, in her memoir Trade Secrets (Toronto: Key Porter, 2000), notes that her mother “published her first poem, ‘Song of the Trees,’ the the Globe in 1915″ (26), but I at least could not find it in the Globe’s online archives.

Here are all the poems I did find. They are barely legible, but hopefully can be parsed.

New entries coming soon: Dora M. and Byrne Hope Sanders

There are still so many women to include…

I’m creating entries for Dora M. Sanders, aka Dora Sanders Carney, journalist, author, and mother of BC politician Pat Carney. Her biography came out in 1980, which does not put her on our radar, but she also (we discover) was a journalist in the 1930s, which does. Her sister, Byrne Hope Sanders, is also on our list of women to include, so I will be adding her soon, as well.

Meanwhile, I have run across a couple of articles by Dora M. Sanders in the Maclean’s archives that reveal her position regarding women’s rights, especially politically. The first article —dealing with border crossings—seems prescient, given her own experiences during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1939.

Sanders, Dora M. “Shackled!” Maclean’s (February 2, 1933), 17, 41.

Sanders, Dora M. “Women Won’t Be Free,” Maclean’s (August 15, 1933), 8, 33.

More about Katharine and Helen Bagg

Today, I am going through all of our authors to discover who has or has not been added to Wikipedia… Yes: all 800 authors. It’s rather time consuming, especially when I go down the inevitable rabbit holes the internet provides, like discovering a beautiful photograph of Joyce Marshall on an island in an Ontario marsh, or coming across a twist in the convoluted biography of Marian Osborne that needed to be untangled, or landing upon this blog post from 2017 about the children of Stanley Bagg of Montreal, lamenting that the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has left out his four daughters, two of whom (Katharine and Helen) are authors in our project…

The post is written by Janice Hamilton, Stanley Bagg’s great-great-granddaughter, who assisted us in our initial creation of our entries; we are really grateful to her, here, for filling in more details of these authors lives.

Christmas Greetings and All Good Wishes for the New Year

This Christmas greeting card, signed by E. Cora Hind in 1938, includes poetry by Edna Jaques, Christina Willey, and Helen Bowes.

“A Little Wooden Cross,” by Margaret Clarke Russell

Russell, Margaret Clarke. “A Little Wooden Cross.” McMaster University Monthly 28.4 (January 1919): 53.

 

Now that we can travel again…

Some day, I want to take a holiday on a narrow boat in England. So, I thought to myself, why don’t I think about recreating the trip recorded in V. Cecil Cotes’s Two Girls on a Barge (1891), given my love of all things Duncan and my recent research about that text.

So I went through the text and tried to unravel the route. You think it would be easy, as it is a line, not a web, but there are a couple of items inconsistent with the actual geography of the canal. Still, the route does go from A (London) to B (Coventry), so all is not lost.

Here’s the page references from the text, and a bit about each. The Canal River Trust has a fabulous dynamic map. I have copied the pertinent parts and marked the mentioned places.

• Page 2: “She sat down with a decided air, and we composed a note to Messrs. Corbett, of the London Salt Works. For, as everyone knows, Messrs. Corbett’s boats are some of the best of those which ply between London and Birmingham.”
  —John Corbett (1817-1901), was notable in the salt trade: “Corbett acquired in 1852 the premises of [two salt works] companies, which stood respectively on opposite banks of the Worcester and Birmingham canal. Within a few years the enterprise was completely transformed [including] the acquisition of fifty canal boats, the cutting of tributaries from the canal to the lofts in which the salt was stored, the building of a railway—the property of Corbett—which traversed the works […] and the establishment of a wagon factory, a foundry, fitting shops, sawmills, and a brickyard. […] For his workpeople he built model houses, gardens, schools, a club-house, lecture-room, and dispensary. In 1859 he abolished female labour on the works, a step now commemorated by a window placed by public subscription in Stoke Prior church. He sold the works in 1889 to the Salt Union” (Dictionary of National Biography).
• Page 12: “The Cadet must have waited a long time on the wharf at Paddington, when we did at last arrive prepared to start.”
  —The Paddington Canal (or Paddington Arm) runs from Paddington Basin to join the Grand Union Canal in Bull’s Bridge, near the Hayes and Harlington Rail Station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddington_Arm).
• Page 21: “It was the Bargee’s face that shone over the bulwark with a tentative inquiry. ‘Being Willesden, there’s stabling for the ‘orse, at least if you think proper!’.”
  —At Willesden, the Paddington Arm now runs beside rail tracks and through an industrial area.
• Page 42: “So we left Uxbridge far behind, with its funny little streets and utterly uncomprehending air. … And dawdling through the morning, we came after a long while to Rickmansworth.”
  —Uxbridge is just north of Cowley, and just past the junction to the Slough Arm canal. I think if I were to repeat the journey, I’d have to pop up the Slough Arm, for nostalgia’s sake. Slough has always been an object of local derision: “Come friendly bombs and drop on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now”; also a sign posted between Slough and Maidenhead when we lived in Windsor read: “Slough, twinned with Chernobyl.” It’s really not that bad, but it is not Home Counties idyllic, certainly.
• Page 45: “We found our canal lingering lovingly through Lady Keppel’s park the third morning of our wanderings.”
  —“Lady Keppel’s park,” the estate owned by the Capell family since 1627, is now Cassiobury Park in Watford./https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiobury_Park). Cotes notes that they “had come to Lady Keppel’s acres through ‘a many’ locks. First a pound and then a lock, a lock and then a pound — ‘pound’ being a canal definition of the level reaches that lie between the locks — and we had begun to feel like some sort of accomplices in a very old book of the Arabian Nights. For these locks were, many of them, quaintly picturesque, with the quaintness that arises from an undisturbed possession of themselves” (page 45–46) but as the map shows, such a description is far more apt for the stretch of canal they encountered on the next day, between Hemel Hampstead and Marsworth.
• Page 59: “But fate having brought us to King’s Langley, the city of a Liliputian street, we paid the homage due at the shrine of local precedent.”
  —King’s Langley has a Roman villa excavated just to the south; not much else to say.
• Page 65: “So we found Stoke Brewin, with its low-roofed cottages among its grass-grown roads.”
  —”Stoke Brewin” is actually “Stoke Breuene,” which lies just south of the Blisworth Tunnel; not sure what it’s doing at this point in the narrative.
• Page 66: “ ‘Hitch their waggons to the Polar system of an Uxbridge or a Rickmansworth!’ quoth Mr. Squif, studying the old grey tower of the little church.”
  —Rickmansworth is not otherwise mentioned, but it lies just south of Watford so, like Uxbridge, they would have already travelled through it.
• Page 67: “Well, then, there was Berkhampstead. Berkhampstead reclining its lank self away inland, but staying for a little space on the side of the canal to dabble its white stones.”
  —Berkhamstead boasts Maria Edgeworth, Graham Greene, and the Whomping Willow from the Harry Potter movies.
• Page 72: “ ‘Leighton Buzzard it ‘ull be to-night,’ said Mrs. Bargee next day. ‘It’s a good stoppin’ place is Leighton, and there’s fodder for the ‘orse.’ But Mrs. Bargee was flustered as she stated this as a predetermined fact. If she had not been flustered she would immediately have added, ‘leastways, in the best of our endeavours it will be Leighton Buzzard.’ Perhaps that was an added reason for our not finding ourselves at Leighton when the evening came.”
• Page 75: “Therefore we went up to Tring at once.”
• Page 83: “ ‘Blisworth,’ shuddered the voice, almost involuntarily, it seemed.”
  —Blisworth Tunnel is the first tunnel they encounter. Apparently, as the horses couldn’t get through the tunnels (obviousl), two men would have to “leg it” through, lying on the deck and using their feet on the walls of the tunnel to propel the boat along. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/narrowboat-legging
• Page 88: “We went amiably together to beg roses from a dewy garden situated on a promontory of the conclusive name of Northampton Amen.”—I can find no place with this name, but a canal branches off to Nonrthampton at Gayton Bridge, just after the Bliksworth Tunnel.
  “ ‘There was somebody inquiring for you down at Fenny Lock yesterday when I come through,’ said a tall brown bargee — ‘a stranger-man’ — accosting the roses principally, as we came back to the barge.”
  —Fenny Stratford Lock is near Bletchley.
• Page 107: “Sunday had anchored at the Seven Locks with us in idleness.”
• Page 109: “We had turned out of the Grand Junction and crept up a smaller channel that branches out of the main stream somewhere between Watford and Crick. An unfrequented channel — a sort of a baby canal, where the water was so shallow that, leaning on the bulwark, one could see the tangled roots of the reeds, and the silly little shoots and foolish, straggling grasses which grow on the brown wrack of last year’s sedge. Then the stream had grown broader and deeper, and more still and dignified, and there stood in front of us the Seven Locks like seven cool white sisters in some old quiet park with the water all about them.”
  —This description is not consistent with modern maps of the canals, but there is a story. The Leicester Line Arm of the Grand Union Canal was previously the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire Union Canal, which ran from the junction of the River Soar with the Trent & Mersey Canal through to Market Harborough. It was extended down, intending to meet up with the Grand Union Canal just south of Watford (Leicestershire), but the dates of the construction of this Arm are not easy to find. The “old” Grand Union Canal and the L&N Union Canal were purchased (by a company named Grand Junction—hence the confusion about the names Grand Union and Junction Canals) in 1894, three years after the publication of Two Girls on a Barge. So it is likely that the only waterway connecting the two at the time was a small canal where the larger one would soon be. If this were true, the small canal would have led directly to the Seven Locks at Watford.
• Page 128: “It is a long way by canal from the Seven Locks to the Braunceston Tunnel, and it was noon when we reached the gorge between the quivering larches that creep by the dark portal in the hill.”
  —The route from the Seven Locks to the Braunceton Tunnel would have been to backtrack through the small canal to the Grand Union Canal proper.
• Page 136-37: “So we glided on, as the afternoon was waning, to Braunceston, Mrs. Bargee’s home.”
  —After Braunceston, in order to get to Coventry, the route leaves the Grand Union Canal and heads north into the Oxford Canal, which runs from Oxford to Exhall, where it junctions with the Coventry Canal. The route then runs south from that junction into Coventry.
• Page 139: “One day he stood still on the bank, and the Bargee, indicating all the meadows in a large-minded way, observed, ‘This be Rugby, sir.’”
  —Rugby, as is mentioned in the book, was not only the name of the town but also of the preparatory school run by Dr. Thomas Arnold, father of poet Matthew Arnold and author William Arnold.
• Page 144: “Stealthily, silently creeping up between low banks, slowly gliding by the shingle to the denser shadows of Godiva’s town, we came to Coventry, and on the farthest outskirts of her mantle, just where its border wears a sheen of poetry and its hem curves gently to the water, we dropped anchor, lingering.”—Coventry, much described in the book, is where the journey ended. The barge and fittings were sold up, and the travellers returned to London. The Grand Union Canal continues from the junction with the Oxford Canal, through Leamington Spa, on to Birmingham.

Audrey Alexandra Brown (1904-1998)

The things you find when dancing about the internet…

I’m adding some missing references to our entries, and came upon a 1934 collection of essays by Martin Burrell that includes a biography of Audrey Alexandra Brown. Our entry for her is not as well fleshed out as it could be, so I know what this afternoon’s task will be…

But I thought you might like to have the whole essay to read, as she is a little known but quite interesting poet from Victoria, back when the Victoria and Islands branch of the Canadian Authors Association was highly active and populated with great talent.

Burrell, Martin. “Audrey Alexandra Brown.” Crumbs are Also Bread (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934): 313-327.

Brown AA – bio in BurrellDownload