Penguin no. 1107: X v. Rex by Philip MacDonald

'I said wrecked,' said the Secretary of State for War. 'And I meant wrecked. Don't you see, man, where this may lead us? Aren't there thousands of men and women, some vicious, some foolish, some lustful, some mad, all of whom have been praying night and day for some such collapse of authority as we're faced with? Don't you realize, man, that it wouldn't be beyond the truth to say that the whole of England's social fabric rests upon her trust in policeman? For trust in policeman is trust in the Law, which means the country's trust in herself.

The first police officer is murdered in Farnley which ten years before had been a small country town near London, but which had undergone a dramatic increase in population during the intervening years. At work in the new police station, a marker of the town's recent prosperity, and unaware of the danger he is facing, the police sergeant sends all three of his on-duty constables to investigate a burglary reported to be under way at a nearby house; they return to find him still sitting at his desk, and suspect him of having fallen asleep. But he is dead, having been shot through the forehead. It soon becomes apparent that Sergeant Guilfoil's murder is only the first in a series specifically targeting policemen in uniform. One month later a patrolling police officer is found dead in a deserted Mayfair street, having been strangled with a white handkerchief. A few days later another deceased policeman is found, this one the victim of a knife attack.

The account of these consecutive murders is interspersed with excerpts from the murderer's diary in which he records the mounting excitement he feels with each success. He is intent on collecting police officer victims and commemorates each successful kill with a knot tied in a ribbon. There is no thought of the men whose deaths he has caused as individuals with lives independent of the uniforms they wear while at work.

Penguin no. 1788: Just for the Record by Stanley Price

And that's today's message of hope. Uplift in the mire. For some barmy reason these days everybody seems compelled to prove they're alive, really alive. I've read it in a load of books, and seen it in a heap of plays. It's like the boy who cried 'Wolf'. They go shrieking they're alive till, poor bleeders, they drop down dead. I shall never dig all this 'our life to live, every minute of it' school of art. I suppose it's an O.K. message because that's just what everybody's doing anyway. It suits me fine. If I'd had to write something about Ted Mulvery getting a quick yen for Zen, or a sudden vision of Christ on Charing Cross, I'd have been scuppered, but this LIFE bit is easy. Everyone reads it and nods knowingly because it all sounds so deep and yet so obvious, but really nobody understands what the hell you're on about.

Stanley Price's protagonist explains the increasing popularity of fiction which concentrated on the grittier aspects of working class and provincial lives during the late 1950s via its obverse - that readers not so much embraced the new literature as suddenly ceased to be interested in the alternative of correctly-punctuated classic tales. Just for the Record is a satire on this emerging interest in stories which featured protagonists who were often aggressive, rebellious and self-obsessed working class men aiming for something more. The trend is referred to as the British New Wave, and by taking advantage of the possibilities for exposure offered by the new mediums of television and popular journalism, the novelists involved could become celebrities.

James Breedin is one of these aspiring writer-celebrities, and his plan is to ride the wave as far as can along a path to fame and fortune. He entered into adulthood with little ambition and no thought of being a writer, but he is pragmatic and shrewd and quick to spot an opportunity, and so he is perfectly happy to write what people think they want to read, and to tell them what they think they want to hear, irrespective of whether it provides the reflection of reality his readers assume they are being given. He is not even aiming for authenticity, because he is aware that his audience lacks the knowledge to assess how true to life his stories are, and he suspects that all they are really looking for is some respite from their dull lives. They hope to find it temporarily in the safe exposure to a seedier life which such novels and films purport to provide.

Penguin no. 1655: At Home by William Plomer

As a child I had seen Chinamen wearing pigtails; at Mukden I saw in the street a richly dressed Chinese woman tottering along on tiny bound feet, a belated martyr to an uncommonly perverse fashion. I supposed it was the mingled appearance of helplessness and affectation which these broken, crippled, trotter-like feet gave to the gait that had caused them to be thought beautiful. Possibly for the male the sexual attraction lay in the certainty that, if pursued, no woman with such feet could run away. But behind this woman loomed smoking factory chimneys. On their black stilts the Satanic mills were after her. They would soon overtake her. She would never be seen again.

William Plomer has such an interesting way of describing the things he has observed, that after having read the first few pages, I never suspected that this was a book I would struggle to finish. I loved his first two chapters in which he describes his journey to England in 1929 to begin what he refers to as a process of re-Westernization. He records fragments of his experience; small moments observed during the nine day train journey from Japan to Ostend, via Siberia, aware that he is glimpsing a fast-vanishing world that few will have the opportunity to witness again.

He is 26 years of age at the time, and thinks of himself as heading home while never losing the sense of feeling like an outsider. He recognises that his attitudes are likely to differ from those of his contemporaries, as his have been conditioned by all the years spent living in Africa and Asia. He has no sympathy with the insular European idea that barbarism begins 'where Europe, or European civilization, has its ostensible boundaries.'

William Plomer was born in South Africa in 1903 to English parents. He spent only four years at school in England, including one year at Rugby, before returning to Africa to work at farming, and then spent some years teaching in Japan, before heading to London. He began his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, at the age of nineteen, and had it published in 1925 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf.  At Home is his autobiography covering the period from his departure from Japan to the conclusion of the second world war.

The only dramatic event that he recounts occurs soon after his arrival. He rents some rooms in a house in Bayswater owned by a woman he describes as 'a lively, pretty, fresh-looking Jewess in her early thirties', and one weekend, when he is staying elsewhere, she is butchered by her husband in the presence of her six year old daughter. The husband's jealous feelings had become obsessive, and he could no longer bear the thought of any man, including the uninterested Plomer, gazing upon his wife. William Plomer believes that he has been fortunate in escaping the same fate as his landlady, and uses the experience as the basis of his third novel, The Case is Altered. He also sets about looking for somewhere else to live.

Penguin no. 1369: Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie

I began to study the phenomenon of homosexuality and was amazed to discover that so far from being the sign of a decadent society it was conspicuously prevalent in England during the first quarter of the eighteenth century when the national vigour was at its height. If the penalty of death was no deterrent then, what effective deterrent could the law devise to-day? ... One day at my club I heard a top-notch Treasury counsel aver his belief that three-quarters of the male suicides in England were due to blackmail for homosexual offences. I was appalled. Yet I have to confess with shame that I remained silent because I fancied that if I showed too much interest I should be suspected of habits that exposed me to the possibility of being blackmailed myself.

In the context of the time it was written, this story probably provides a fairly sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality. Henry Fortescue is certainly an appealing character: he is forthright, capable and determined, and exceptionally attractive to women, but they hold no interest for him, as his inclinations are the other way.

Apart from some distaste expressed for those with an exaggeratedly effeminate manner, there is never any criticism of the inclination itself nor of the associated behaviours, but nonetheless homosexuality is being presented as an affliction, comparable with a propensity to alcoholism. The idea is that both are degenerate tendencies which could and should be fought, both for the benefit of the individual and for those who know them and, in this story, for the benefit of the country as well. As alluded to by the title, indulging in such behaviours carried risks which could have long-reaching consequences at a time when the commission of homosexual acts was still a criminal offence. Abstention from homosexual activity, or at the very least discretion in this regard, is therefore being presented as a moral choice.

Penguin no. 2024: Maigret Mystified by Simenon

     Maigret did not bat an eyelid. He was up to the neck in this everyday squalor which was more sickening than the drama itself.
     The old woman facing him wore an appallingly jubilant and menacing expression. She was talking! She was going on talking! Out of hatred for the Martins, for the dead man, for all the tenants in the house, out of hatred for the whole of mankind! And out of hatred for Maigret!
     She stood there with her hands clasped over her great flabby stomach. She seemed to have been waiting all her life for this moment.

Maigret Mystified was originally published in 1932 with the title L'Ombre chinoise, which translates as 'the shadow puppet show' or 'the silhouette'. It alludes to what Maigret observes when he first passes through the archway at 61 Place des Vosges in the Marais district of Paris. He has been summoned by the concierge, and as he stands in the darkened courtyard he looks up upon a series of well-lit apartments with curtained windows displaying the shadows of their occupants. One shows a man pacing backwards and forwards, and another has a woman gesticulating in anger. There is a laboratory adjacent to the residential building and its frosted window reveals the shadow of a man slumped across his desk. The concierge knows the man to be dead, shot through the chest while sitting in an armchair.

Penguin no. 1928: The Fig Tree by Aubrey Menen

He felt that it was only by some irony of fate that his schoolteachers and professors were living in this Christian - or post-Christian - world. They would have been so much more at home among the Greeks. Some of them, as he knew, felt this so strongly that they spent their whole lives in classical studies, barely troubling about the rest of the world or the remainder of history. Their calm assurance that the Greeks invented all that was worthwhile was thus fortunately undisturbed by the successive discoveries that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Sumerians, the Indians of the Five Rivers, and the Chaldeans had, in fact, invented nearly all of the things centuries before.

Harry Wesley had always wanted to save people and so he decided to become a scientist. He had been taught as a child that humanity was doomed: it was certain to die out either through war or starvation, the latter an inevitable consequence of the world's population growing at a faster rate than the food supply. With no hope of preventing war, he dreamt instead of preventing the alternative catastrophe by discovering an effective contraceptive. The real focus of this dream, though, was the acclaim which he felt would certainly be his when he succeeded. He hoped for statues erected in his honour.

In time he decided to attack the problem from the other direction, by studying biology and seeking to increase the food supply. He was to find, however, that success brought no statues; he received instead a Nobel prize at the age of 32 and all that brought was the resentment of his colleagues.

Harry Wesley had discovered a compound which, when injected into plants and trees, stimulated the fruit to grow to a substantial size while still retaining its flavour. He took his compound to Italy where it suited the government to make a show of doing something for the peasants, but while those in charge were keen for quick results, they were less enthusiastic about providing any funding, and so Harry opted to trial his compound on a lone fig tree, doubling the usual dose. His experimental fruit grew to an enormous size, and the trial seemed a success, but the real test would be in the eating, and this revealed that he had created something beyond his expectations.

Penguin no. 62: The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes

If this was a Father Brown story it would here be described how the inspector gazed over a bleak hill-top, rounded like a grinning and sightless skull and covered with purple heather, which encroached upon its stark nudity like a fungus growth of decay and death...In this atmosphere of evil his thoughts would turn to vampires and werewolves, those monstrous Undead rejected of heaven and hell alike, until a casual remark by Father Brown would reveal the key to the whole mystery. But the unromantic and unchestertonian truth must be told - in real life and in actual fact Ridley looked out of the shop door, past the serried ranks of quack medicines and baby foods, on to a cobbled street lighted by electricity and sludgy with drizzling rain. And instead of the illuminating remark of the Deus ex machina of the novelist there was merely the sound of a man spitting noisily on the pavement.

Judging from Google, W. Stanley Sykes seems better remembered as the author of Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia, which was comprised of three volumes, two published posthumously. But despite being an eminent anaesthetist, he was also the author of three detective novels^[1] written during the 1930s, and in his obituary^[2] it was noted that the first 'achieved such a popularity that it was eventually published in the Penguin series'.^[3] 

The missing moneylender of the title is a Jewish man by the name of Israel Levinsky who one weekday morning, for the first time in thirty years, fails to arrive at his office on time. Inspector Ridley is diligent in investigating his whereabouts but is unable to solve the mystery of his disappearance and so calls in Scotland Yard for assistance. They assign Inspector Drury who concludes that Levinsky is more likely to have been removed than to have disappeared, and the investigation becomes instead a search for a murderer and a victim.

It is difficult to sketch the plot further without revealing too much, as the details of the murder lie at the centre of the story. It is suggested in the blurb that Sykes' motivating intention in writing the book was to plan a theoretically perfect murder, one which could be relied upon to despatch the intended victim while leaving no detectable traces to reveal how it had been done. He draws on his knowledge of contemporary medical practices and recent scientific discoveries, and fills his story with references to newly developed medical technologies, and exhumations, pathology and X-rays. He also manages to weave in discussions (or perhaps lectures) on topics as diverse as how to calculate the probability of a series of independent events, and why rugby is a better game than soccer. There is the sense that he sees himself writing for the intelligent reader who feels some pride in being well informed.

Penguin no. 133: Watkins' Last Expedition by F. Spencer Chapman

Read this book and you will know something of the life of that fantastic land, of its ascetic nakedness, of its strong weather, of its laughing people and of the feelings of an impetuous Englishman who has lived there. To know more: throw away your job, your friends, your cares, beg a quarter of the money you will need and an eighth of the food you will eat, learn the language and go there; not as a great white man to teach, but as inferior to learn from these people something of their way of life: how to get a living from their barren country, how to share as they share, how to endure as they endure, to live for the day caring nothing for the morrow, as they have have done since before the time when we were painted blue.  (Augustine Courtauld)

In 1932, after a disappointing year spent trying and failing to raise sufficient funds for an expedition to Antarctica which would have attempted to establish if it was comprised of one continent or two, Gino Watkins was offered 500 pounds by Pan-American Airways to take a small party to East Greenland to undertake meteorological work. He asked ornithologist and photographer Freddie Spencer Chapman, meterologist Quintin Riley and surveyor John Rymill to accompany him.

The four men had all been there the previous year as members of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition, and Watkins had followed this with a 600 mile journey in an open boat surveying Greenland's southern coastline. Their preparations for the substantially smaller 1932 expedition were hurried and underfunded, but by July 14th they were all sailing to Angmagssalik, a small settlement on the east coast of Greenland, on the only boat making the journey that year. They intended to base themselves 112 miles away at Lake Fjord as Watkins believed this region had potential as a future landing site for aircraft.

Penguin no. 2109: The Man on the Rock by Francis King

The staff consisted, for the most part, of pious, well-intentioned and hardworking English and American women, and Greek men, who like myself, took advantage of them. We borrowed money off them, and then forgot to repay it: we sold the petrol, the stationery, and even items of furniture; when a parcel arrived for distribution, we substituted worn-out clothes or shoes of our own for the clothes and shoes inside. The office station-wagon took us to the beach or to football matches. From time to time, one of us would be caught out, and then the rest would have to pretend to exclaim in horror at his crime.

Spiro Polymerides lies in his bed in a small flat in Battersea, suffering cystitis and feeling sorry for himself. His immediate problem is not his illness but the prospect of hours without any company, as it seems that Greek men hate spending any time alone. Even more than this, though, he resents the predicament he finds himself in: he is living in a foreign country without any hope of employment, and he is forced to hide from his creditors, and juggle what little money there is to pay some of the bills so that he and his heavily-pregnant wife can keep their small flat and get a little food. And all this through marrying a woman he doesn't love and barely cares about.

He knows that he alone is responsible for this fate. He married Kiki because she was the only daughter of Vrissoglou, a well-known and very wealthy Greek businessman living in London, and he was banking on a substantial dowry. His one goal in life has been to find someone who was willing to pick up the tab while he took it easy, unconcerned with whether they were young or old, male or female, and irrespective of what was required in return. He suggests that this is all any Greek peasant is ever seeking. But Kiki's father has chosen instead to disown his daughter as long as she continues to live with Spiro

Penguin no. 1230: The Alleys of Marrakesh by Peter Mayne

I am resolved never to run, to walk always with a slow measured tread, and that when I choose, or am actually compelled, to look to right or left, I shall do so calm and tranquil. I shall gear down my jittery European reactions to those of a Blueman riding his camel across the Mauretanian deserts. I shall refuse to be hustled - why hurry? All the evidence about me points to the fact that it is for ever NOW. You can't go skipping into the future, however much you hustle. I shall be content, as the Moors are, with me in the centre of my universe and leave the universe to do the spinning.

Peter Mayne is never very clear on why he chose to travel to Marrakesh. When anyone puts the question to him he avoids answering it, reluctant to admit that he allowed chance to decide, choosing his destination using a pin and a map. But when the question is really pressed, he reveals it had something to do with a feeling of being over-civilised. He is seeking some respite from what he perceives to be the constant Western emphasis on progress and achievement, and he believes he will find it living amongst the Moors. As he makes clear in the passage quoted above, he wants to learn to live in the moment.

He travels to Marrakesh with an idea about the kind of life he wants to live, but with no clear plans as to what to do when he gets there. An unsought encounter in a cafe in Tangier en route provides him with the name of a hotel owned by Moulay Ibrahim. (In a different context he notes that a Moulay is someone descended from the Prophet, and therefore a person of some importance.) It is to this hotel he heads with a letter of introduction when he gets to Marrakesh, but it is a journey he makes with some difficulty, for he cannot read the address which has been written in Arabic, and his victoria driver cannot read at all. They find the hotel eventually, with the assistance of a passerby: it is located down an alley within the historic centre of Marrakesh. His room comes with no facilities for washing, and as a Christian he is not permitted to use the communal baths.