Rooms in books

Once in a while, a book I am reading has such an interesting or lovely or evocative description of a room, that it makes me stop and consider it for a while.

I just recently started "Flowers for the Judge" - I thought I had read this before but it is not at all familiar so I guess I did not. This is one of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels. It's set in a publishing house run by several cousins - the bombastic John, youngest-cousin Mike, excitable Paul (also the victim - and that's not such a spoiler as we learn that early on), and Ritchie.

Ritchie has largely been written out of the will and the running of the company; one of the other cousins, out of pity perhaps, has taken him on as a "reader" and has given him an office of sorts on the top floor. Ritchie is "different." I'm not sure if he's supposed to have a certain disability - he is clumsy and also speaks in a strange, halting way (most of his sentences are three words long, and he tends to jump from topic to topic). Perhaps he has a mild form of cerebral palsy or Asperger's syndrome - he is clearly intelligent, just "different" and perhaps not as readily tolerated by the others in the family as he might be. (Campion befriends him, which suggests something about Campion's basic dignity - that he can see the value of a person beneath their exterior)

Anyway, his room is apparently a sort of attic: it's accessed by a "secret" stairway behind paneling. And it's a very small room, built around an "old fashioned" chimney (there is a small fireplace let into the chimney) and just big enough to contain two chairs, a reading lamp on the mantel, and then the untidy stacks of manuscripts that stack to the sloping ceiling. (There is also one window in the room, apparently).

It's funny how that sounds so cozy to me - a room whose entire purpose is reading, hidden away from the rest of the firm. Somewhere this rejected cousin can go and work. And obviously, if he's being kept on as a reader, his intuition about books is fairly solid.

The Campion novels are another series of "Golden Era" British mysteries - most of them seem to feature upper-class or upper-middle-class individuals, both as the detectives and as the individuals suffering the crimes. (Campion, it is hinted but never made entirely clear, is related in some way to the Royal family - perhaps even a younger brother of the King, hidden away a bit for his own safety, or because of past espionage activities. Campion is not his real name....) I suppose that might make some object to the books as "classist" but I see it as an interesting escape. I admit, I'd generally rather read about people with more money than what I have, at least in somewhat non-realistic novels. (Then again: the "bright young things" who have nothing else to do but drive their cars too fast and develop cocaine habits - a la some of the Fitzgerald stories, or Evelyn Waugh, I find kind of uninteresting. I suppose the fact that most of the people in the novels I read have some form of employment, or at least the detective does, is what makes it interesting to me. I think that's because I know if I wound up as one of the "idle rich" I'd be terribly bored; even volunteer work would probably not be the same as actually working to earn your bread)

I think of all the series I've read (I've yet to dip into Dorothy Sayers in any kind of a way), the Ngaio Marsh "Inspector Alleyn" novels are my favorite - they're the best-written, I think, and the least nonsensical. (With the Campion novels, as fun as they are, at times you have to remind yourself, this is just a book, I should really just relax, when you're asked to suspend disbelief a bit farther than might be comfortable). And as much as I love Hercule Poirot....well, there are things in some of those novels that require a bit of swallowing camels.

I also recently re-read a Ngaio Marsh novel - I actually retrieved this one, and began re-reading it, at my parents' house. It's called "Death at the Bar." It's one of her earlier novels (I tend to prefer those) and feature Alleyn and his colleague Fox (also known as "Br'er Fox" or "Foxkin" by Alleyn) traveling to the "West Country" to investigate the murder of a barrister. I think this might be my favorite Alleyn of the ones I've read - partly for the setting, partly for the mystery.

Another reason I like these novels is the fact that at least some of the characters continue from book to book: Alleyn and "Foxkin" and sometimes Agatha Troy (Alleyn's wife; she is a painter). Or Campion and his wonderfully-named manservant, Magersfontein Lugg. Or Poirot and Hastings. There's something fundamentally comforting about coming back to familiar characters - characters whose quirks you know and whom you like well enough to be happy that they have had yet another success. (And I don't like it when a novelist decides to kill off a serial character. There is one Poirot novel I will never read....and there was a series of modern-day mysteries set in Ireland, I even forget the author's name now, because in one of the more recent novels, a fairly-central and very sympathetic character was killed off, and killed off in a way that I felt was unnecessary.)