THE BOOK  PAN, 1970 pp 188

The PAN cover design is specifically based on Sing a Song of Sixpence, one of twelve stories that make up this collection. The sixpence is surrounded by other trappings of the study of Sir Edward Palliser, QC.

The Fontana cover image is incredibly lazy and could have been used for any book by this author or, indeed, almost any other author.

THE STORIES

The stories in this collection were mainly written in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War, a prolific period of short-story writing for the author. Eight of them involve bright-ish young things desperate for money getting involved in scrapes with a twist, and many of the characters and elements of the plots are interchangeable.

Otherwise there are four tales of death and deception, and two of them have become famous in their own right: Philomel Cottage and Accident.

CHARACTERS 

Here are a few somewhat tongue-in-cheek summaries of the main characters in the non-whodunit stories, but even so it should give some idea of the range (or lack of it) of stories in this collection.

Mrs St Vincent and her (adult) children Barbara and Rupert: genteel, down-at-heel, gentlefolk who are invited to live in a mansion at a peppercorn rent; Mrs St Vincent ends up as Lady Listerdale

George Rowland: a somewhat shiftless well-off young fellow who has hit hard times because his uncle has sacked him; he takes a train and gets involved in a deception involving foreign royalty

George Dundas: a somewhat shiftless young fellow who has hit hard times because his uncle has sacked him, and who finds himself taken in by an heiress and her two chums 

Edward Robinson: a mouse of the lower orders who mixes with Lady Noreen and her chums and becomes a lion

Edward Palgrave: a mouse of the lower orders who is persuaded to at least consider criminal activity by his girl-friend when they come across exotic jewellery

Jane Cleveland: a down-on-her-luck young woman who will do anything (including conniving in crime) for money, and is exploited by someone she thinks is a foreign Grand Duchess and her two retainers 

Anthony Eastwood: a young fellow with writer’s block who is taken in by an exotic foreign woman and her two retainers and has his flat ransacked as a result 

James Bond: a young fellow out of his financial depth on holiday who happens by chance to locate a missing jewel and earns the gratitude of Lord Campion

ATTITUDES

Here are some quotes from the title story which speak for themselves. They evince a snobbery and disregard for those not of ‘our type’ which is a characteristic of the whole collection.

Here, from the title story, Mrs St Vincent considers the realities of ‘genteel poverty’:

In real life, with a son starting on the bottom rung of the ladder, it means London. Frowsy landladies, dirty children on the stairs, fellow-lodgers who always seem to be half-castes, haddocks for breakfast …

Then she considers her daughter Barbara’s prospects:

‘I should like you to marry Jim Masterson,’ she said. ‘He is – one of us. He is very well off, also, but I don’t mind that so much.’

And then Rupert’s:

‘I should hate it if Rupert got engaged to that dreadful girl in the tobacconist’s. I daresay she may be a very nice girl, really. But she’s not our kind.’

Here is Mrs St Vincent considering the butler’s likely reaction to the onset of an Age of Hooper: ¹

‘He’s one of the old lot, too. He’d like me to have it – not a labour member, or a button manufacturer! We’re dying out, our sort, but we hang together.’

Now a quote from The Girl on the Train: a 1920s railway guard’s training in the 1920s must surely have been different from today’s!

The guard looked from one to the other. His mind was made up. His training led him to despise foreigners, and to respect and admire well-dressed gentlemen who travelled first-class.

And finally, a description of Mr Cowan, the main observer of Swan Song (and possibly the nicest character in it) :

He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with a frame rather too well covered, and clothes that were rather too faultless. His hair was very black and shining, and his teeth were aggressively white. When he spoke, he had a way of slurring his ‘s’s which was not quite a lisp, but came perilously near to it. It required no stretch of imagination to realise that his father’s name had probably been Cohen.   

SWIGATHA RATING  4/10 

Many people will really like this collection but most of it feels very churned out to me. The snobbery throughout the whole of the title story made me shudder.  Having said that, there are one or two top-notch tales that make it worth reading; I particularly enjoyed Swan Song.

There was to be a sea-change in the representation of social attitudes in her books once she started spending more time in the Middle East, and especially after the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939.

WHERE IT LED 

The bottom of the barrel of old short stories was being scraped. After the uninspiring collection The Hound of Death (1933), then this set and the woeful Parker Pyne Investigates, both published in 1934, Agatha Christie’s publishers concentrated on the full- length novels that were to consolidate her status as the most popular crime fiction writer of that time (and this!).

She produced a dozen of them in the next five years, all of them of good quality and some of them the most famous of their ilk ever-written.

ADAPTATIONS  

Three of the stories in the collection, The Girl in the Train, Jane in Search of a Job and The Manhood of Edward Robinson, were adapted for by ITV’s Thames Television in 1982 as part of their ten-part programme The Agatha Christie Hour.

The story of Philomel Cottage was hugely successful. In the US and UK alone it was twice adapted for each of radio and TV, once for the stage and twice for the cinema. It usually went by the name given to the stage adaptation: Love from a Stranger.

NOTES

¹ ‘The Age of Hooper’ is a phrase from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which Captain Charles Ryder laments the likely decline of the landed gentry and their country estates and the rise to eminence of the lower-middle classes, as personified by his lieutenant, a man named Hooper. Lady Eileen Brent experiences a similar shudder when she meets the nouveau riche Cootes at Chimneys in The Seven Dials Mystery.