I love a country house mystery, especially those with a body on page one. So when the murder of ex-judge Sir Ernest Ferber in his private garden by man he sentenced harshly and the subsequent suicide of his assailant at the scene is communicated in the opening ten lines of The Baddington Horror, we’re off to a very good start. To my understanding, Walter S. Masterman wrote as many ‘weird tales’ as he did novels of detection, and so it was always a little uncertain what I was going to get here. But the first chapter could not be more Golden Age detection if it tried: murdered aristocrat, retired amateur detective who takes an interest, two big coincidences, and away we go…
You don’t need me to tell you that the murdered man was also unpopular, viewed in the bucolic surrounds of his ancestral pile as a bounder in the most unambiguous terms:
Dreadful stories of his wanton cruelty and abuse of power — largely fictitious — had crept round the firesides on winter’s nights. He had become something fabulous — an ogre from the past.
They talked together, these women, none daring to voice the thought that was in every mind: Banks, the dead convict, was the hero, the deliverer. They would have sent wreaths for his funeral had they dared.
“Widdershins”? Seriously? Sounds fun though – ta mate 😀
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What’s wrong with widdershins? I’ve told you this is an educational blog… 🙂
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I have read this book. Though it starts off well, it soon becomes so dull that I can’t rate it higher than 2. This has prevented me from reading his other books.
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Yeah, I think I was expecting it to be more in the style of GAD going in, but when it turned into more of a Victorian sensation novel I adjusted my expectations. But on those initial hopes it doesn’t quite deliver, I agree, which is why I’ve tried to makes its true nature clear here.
I think I’ll give one more Masterman a go and, if that’s in the same sort of vein as these two, leave him alone for a bit after that. But I could easily believe that he’s written one genius piece of brilliance without necessarily then knowing how it happened or how to replicate it.
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Loving the word widdershins – where do you find these cool words that I really want to slip into conversation?
Interesting review as it sounds like Masterman is sort doing a form of genre of hybridity, though whether it is entirely successful is another matter. There are a smattering of writers from the 20s and 30s who try to mesh a GAD detective fiction plot with other styles and it is always intriguing to see whether it works or not.
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What I find most interesting about this is how out-of-era it feels: I really do get the sense that he thinks he’s plotting for the mid-1800s…and that can’t be accidental, right? So there has to be a point where this approach really worked out for him. But I can’t imagine what that book must be like…!
As for widdershins and friends…dunno, I just find ’em in my reading mostly, or in conversation. Maybe this means I have a lot of conversations with pretentious people. Or, hey, maybe I’m the pretentious one…
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I don’t think I want to read this, but inDO want to know if I have ever struck anyone as tatterdemalion. WTF?? Widdershins, indeed!
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tatterdemalion: disreputable, ruined, having fallen into disrepair (be that literally or figuratively)… I always assumed it to be the origins of when a thing is said to be “left in tatters” following a notable event or significant fall from grace. No?
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Makes sense. And no, I’m not tatterdemehatsis!
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Well, you certainly make the start of the book sound very interesting. There’s nothing better than a murder on page one. I’m usually happy with it in the first chapter. My favorite example is Seeing is Believing by Carr, where the murder takes place in the first sentence.
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Masterman was apparently born in 1876 so I guess he may well have been brought up Victorian sensation novels. Perhaps he disapproved on the new-fangled golden age style.
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An interesting idea, perhaps he was heavily influenced by what was prevalent in his youth. Wouldn’t be the first author this was the case for, I’m sure, though surely by the mid-1930s he was going very against the grain of his chosen genre. Still, write what you love…
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