AJ Cronin was one of those authors who was dearly loved by millions of readers in the 1950s when I was growing up. People like my mother had read his books – along with those of Daphne du Maurier, Naomi Jacobs, Hammond Innes, Neville Shute and many others before the war when she was growing up herself. These authors were still active in the post-war period and tens of millions of library users awaited their new books eagerly.

My snobbish, narrow minded grammar school English teachers condemned these writers as “middlebrow”, by the way, so it was best not to mention them in class. Were we really supposed to read Chaucer, Swift and Conrad in bed or on the bus when we were 14? I was, and am, a voracious and eclectic reader but not because of anything I was told in school.

Anyway AJ Cronin and his ilk were ubiquitous in our household and I read most of his best known works – Hatter’s Castle and The Citadel for example –  in my teens. But I don’t think I ever read any Doctor Finlay stories partly because Doctor Finlay’s Casebook arrived on TV in 1962 (and ran for eight series until 1971) memorably starring Bill Simpson, Andrew Cruikshank and Barbara Mullen. There were only three channels at the time so almost everyone watched it.

It’s a strange hotch-potch of a book to read now. It isn’t quite short stories and it isn’t quite a novel – it reads like notes for a TV series in places but Scottish physician Archibald Joseph Cronin (1916-1981) can’t have had that sort of foresight when he first wrote these stories for a Hearst magazine between 1935 and 1939. Later they were republished under various titles in book form including, eventually  Doctor Finlay’s Casebook.

Finlay is a young, Glasgow trained doctor who becomes assistant to an older doctor in the fictional town of Levenford between the wars.  Like Morse, he does without a given name. He’s decent, kind  and medically on the ball. He isn’t above revenge, however, when someone upsets him. He’s sporty (if you count shooting hapless birds and tormenting fish), quite a whizz on the tennis court and keen on hill walking. He would dearly like to marry and has several romantic encounters none of which ends happily. During the course of the book we meet his patients, the residents of the town and get a pretty convincing picture of what it would have like to practise medicine in Scotland before the genesis of the NHS. Of course, Cronin was inspired by his own experiences.

AJ Cronin

Trying to read Doctor Finlay’s Casebook straight through is not quite satisfactory because the episodic format means that many things go unexplained. Some of the stories are self-contained. Others run on.  It’s not consistent either. One minute he’s practising in Levenford and the next the whole practice seems to have moved to Tannochbrae. Finlay drives a gig out to see patients until, without explanation, he’s doing his rounds by car.  Doctor Cameron is a wise, benign elder statesman with a huge amount of experience until he suddenly morphs into a lazy hypochondriac. The angelic Alice, a nurse, helps Finlay to run a convalescent home for children and seems to be the epitome of virtue until, without warning, she becomes a sexually exploitative femme fatale. Janet, the stalwart housekeeper, is grittily sensible until she gets cross with her two doctors and the worm turns – which seems unlikely.

The other thing which really took me aback was what an age of innocence this was. Finlay treats the children he looks after alone and in a very “hands on” way and at one point falls in love with a girl who has only just left school. It makes a 2023 reader, living in a world of child protection and DBS clearance, blink and wince a bit.

On balance – and very unusually for me – I think Doctor Finlay’s Casebook makes better drama than it does reading material. Maybe that’s why Cronin, by then in his late forties, was involved in the early instalments of the BBC series.  It’s also why, I suppose, that it was  serialised on radio (with the original TV cast) from 1970 to 1978. An ITV series with David Rintoul as Finlay, began in 1993, took the narrative into the 1940s and ran for four series. There were also dramatisations in the early 2000s. It clearly had/has masses of dramatic potential.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Cracking Humpty Dumpty by Tim Devlin

When I was about eight or nine someone gave me The Observer’s Book of Music as a birthday or Christmas present.  I was already learning to play the violin and keen on the (mostly classical) pieces I was hearing at school, on Derek McCulloch’s Saturday morning Children’s Favourites or on the newly acquired family radiogram. I read this neat little book a lot and can remember its contents very clearly – the beginning of my wider musical education, I suppose.

Acquiring Observer’s books was quite a thing for 1950s children and when I married Nicholas Elkin in 1969 we merged our collections and discarded the duplications. He didn’t have the music one so we kept mine, first published in 1953.

Something made me think of all this recently and I went to the shelf where smallest books live to refer to The Observer’s Book of Music in connection with an article I was writing. It was missing. What? Both the middle aged men who used to be my small boys deny all knowledge of it. Did someone else borrow it? Perhaps it got lost in the move “home” to London in 2016?

Just before Christmas I was strolling round Ely market with my elder son, Lucas, and his wife when he spotted a pile of Observer’s books on a stall. He picked out the music one and said “Look – that’s what you want”. So I bought it for £6 which made me chuckle since the original 1950s price was 5/- or 25p.

And, golly, how I’ve enjoyed the nostalgic revisit. It packs in a deal of information but is never patronising. I struggle, even now, to understand the opening section “Sound and how we hear it” which is pure physics but, as ever, I really like the detailed account of musical instruments and how they work. There’s a drawing of Beethoven’s pianoforte, an account of the evolution of the cornet, a wonderful drawing of a Russian bassoon along with details about stringed instruments and not, obviously, just the four you find in a standard symphony orchestra. For such a small book, the amount of information Freda Dinn packs in is extraordinary.

She’s good on terms in common use too. I think this was probably where I first read, for example, that scherzo is the Italian for joke so it usually denotes a jokey sort of movement in a symphony and that andante means walking pace. The little pieces we were playing at primary school didn’t, in general, use these grown up terms much. Then of course, a year or two later when I started first French and then Latin at secondary school the linguistic links began to make sense.

The Observer’s Book of Music ends with biographical notes on composers from Albeniz (who?) to Wolf. I wonder what the criteria for inclusion were? Several contemporary composers are in: Britten, Arnold, Bax, Barber, Walton etc. Of course all the obvious greats are there: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Purcell and the like but some of her choices (Cui and Palmgren, for instance)  now seem a bit obscure.  She includes Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Ethel Smythe the former the only black entry and the latter the only woman – and this was why I grew up having heard of both of them although it took the world most of my lifetime to wake up to the fact that, of course, neither was unique, Paul Sharp provides a nice little pencil sketch of each composer.

Rediscovering this book was fun. I realise now that the whole of the Observer’s series comprised beginner’s guides. They were child friendly but not intended exclusively for children. Indeed, even now, anyone wanting to learn more about music – mostly but not entirely classical – could do a lot worse than start here. It’s widely available on second hand book websites.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Doctor Finlay’s Casebook by AJ Cronin

I recently saw, enjoyed and reviewed a quirky but powerful dramatisation of Madame Bovary at Jermyn Street Theatre. At one point one of the actors dropped out of role to tease the audience about not having read the novel anyway so it didn’t, he implied, matter what they did with it. Well of course I’ve read one of the most famous of all French novels (although not, sadly, in the original language – if only) but not for many years. So I’ve now put that right.

The first thing which struck me – as nearly always with 19^th century literature which didn’t stem from Victorian Britain – is how explicit Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel is compared with, say, Little Dorrit or Barchester Towers which were published in the same year. This is the Emma Bovary meeting her lover Leon for one of their regular trysts in a hotel, for example: “There was a great big mahogany bed in the shape of a boat.  The curtains, made of red oriental stuff, hung from the ceiling, curving out rather too low over the wide bed-head – and there was nothing in the world as lovely as her dark hair and her white skin set against that crimson colour, when in a gesture of modesty, she closed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.” Even the simplicity of “She yielded” when she finally gives in to her earlier lover, Rudolphe, is sharply arresting.

Emma Bovary – a pretty woman who reads romantic novels and has extravagant dreams – marries a not very competent and not over-bright country doctor, Charles Bovary, which she sees as an exciting escape and a step up from her own humdrum rural childhood. Bovary, generally a decent man, adores her but she quickly comes to view him, and everything he stands for as dull. “He [Charles] had his cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and his thick lips were trembling, adding a touch of stupidity to his face: even his back, his tranquil back was irritating to behold, and in the very look of his coat she found all the banality of the man.”

So she does two things – she spends money they don’t have and, despite having had a child with Bovary, she takes secret lovers with whom she enjoys rampant passionate sex. It’s effectively a sex and shopping novel. There is, of course, no happy ending for anyone. Flaubert’s last few pages are blunt, matter-of-fact and painful. But of course they’re also truthful. It is pretty much what would/could probably happen in real life. There is none of the jokey satire that we associate with Dickens of Trollope.

What Flaubert is doing is to consider the role, feelings and predicament of a real woman with needs (cf Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, 1879)  and that’s as topical in 2023 as it was 166 years ago when Emma Bovary first made her presence felt.  And look at the contrast with. for instance, Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House published three years earlier in Britain which is a saccharine paeon of praise to female domesticity.

Emma is not content to potter about in the country, supervising her husband’s meals, bearing children and socialising with the local pharmacists apparently idyllically happy family.  She and Charles, reasonable as he usually is, never understand each other and what ensues is a tragedy for both of them. But even in 19^th century France society cannot accept her individualism so she cannot, possibly, be allowed any sort of upbeat resolution. Anyway Rudolphe and Leon are both, in their different ways, using and exploiting her for their own ends. She would never have been happy with either of them in the long term any more than she is with Charles. In many ways she is the naïve victim of her own rose-coloured inexperience and expectations.

There was an obscenity trial in January 1857 following the serialisation of Madame Bovary the previous year. Flaubert and his book were acquitted but of courses, just as with Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London a century later, the publicity did wonders for sales. When it was published in book form that spring it became a best seller.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Observer’s Book of Music by Freda Dinn.

Confession: I have no idea how The Godwulf Manuscript got into my Kindle library. Someone must have recommended it to me or maybe I read a round-up of historical and/or American crime fiction somewhere. Either way it’s been beaming “read me” at me for months. So now I have.

And I have to say it’s different from most of my usual reading matter. Spenser is a private detective in 1970s Boston and he narrates his own stories – of which there are a huge number. Robert B Parker died in 2013 with dozens of titles under his belt. Others have taken up the baton since and there are now over 40 Spenser mysteries. The Godwulf Manuscript (1974) was the first.

We’re in a world in which insolence is snarled out of the sides of mouths – often quite wittily. Guns are ubiquitously owned, brandished and fired.  People die like flies – but no one seems to grieve much and at one point our lusty protagonist describes personally strangling a criminal. Of course the man richly deserves it and it’s partly self defence but the casual, unashamed detail made me gulp several times. Then there’s the sex – Spenser takes his where he can get it. And that’s a bit eye watering too. None of it – guns, death, sex –   is very serious.

The plot – fairly simple by crime fiction standards – gives us a medieval manuscript stolen from a university and Spenser brought in to find and recover it. Then a student at the same university is arrested for the murder of her boyfriend. Spenser believes first that she’s innocent and second that the murder is connected with the manuscript. And the background is a lucrative drug dealing culture.

For all the macho stuff, Spenser is an interesting character. Underneath it all is decency and passion for justice He knows Terry is innocent and is determined that she won’t go to prison for something she didn’t do. As JB Parker writes him he is master of terse prose too:

“I remembered Hayden. I looked round, I didn’t see him. He was going to get few merit badges for semper fidelis. I started for the door. The chain lock was still on it. The door that Phil had come through was locked from the other side. I went over to the bathroom. It was locked.”

I love that spare simplicity.

At one point Spenser asserts that “close observation is my business”. Thus his obsessive habit of describing every detail of clothing or everyone he meets or everything which is in every room he enters isn’t just there to irritate readers (as it did me, initially). It’s a subtle part of the characterisation.

This book is fun for a change. No one wants to be reading similar books all the time and I’ve always tried not to be a single track reader. I read this, for example, hot on the heels of Tim Spector’s Food for Life and Leah Broad’s Quartet, both non-fiction titles alongside Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth and Christmas stories by Dickens. I’m not sure, however, that I want to read 39 more of them – maybe one or two, though, at some point in the future.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert