Agatha Christie was the first grown-up author I ever read. My mother was keen on her books and one day I picked one up, simply because it was lying about. I started to read it and discovered it was no more difficult then the Chalet School or Blue Door Theatre books which were my usual fare. Thus a bridge was crossed. I was probably 13. Thereafter I read most of AC’s novels and it would be another decade and a half before Dame Agatha died aged 86, in 1976 and the books stopped coming.

Of course there have been countless TV adaptations, films and stage plays, sequels and spin-offs based on the works of the woman who was outsold only by The Bible and Shakespeare and holds the record for being the best selling author of all time. But I hadn’t actually read an Agatha Christie book since I was a teenager. Time, then, to revisit one.

Published in 1957, 4.50 from Paddington, is based on the intriguing premise that in the few seconds two trains are level on parallel lines, an elderly woman witnesses a murder in the other train. I often think about it when, briefly, I can see into an adjacent train.

The plotting (which I had, of course, completely forgotten) is neat and tight. The witness tells her friend, Miss Marple what she has seen, and with the help of a nicely characterised young major domo (is there a female term for that?), who takes a job at a nearby big house, the search for a body is on. Most of the characters and suspects are part of, or connected to, the Crakenthorpe family who own said big house. They are, on the whole, a bunch of self-interested schemers although the long suffering daughter, Emma is nice and you hope desperately that she won’t turn out to be the “one what dunnit.” I’m not giving anything away for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that, as nearly always with Dame Agatha – I worked out the formula very early in my reading journey –  the murderer turns out to be the least likely person. She’s very good at smoke screens, unexpected twists, suspense and attention-holding.

I read this book partly with the intention of assessing the quality of the writing which I wouldn’t have noticed at all at 13 or 14. Today I come to it with a life time of reading – for pleasure, for study and for teaching purposes – behind me. My reading lens has changed.

And my goodness, what a pleasant surprise! She is almost as succinct and direct as Hemingway with lots of lovely short sentences and scant use of subordinate clauses.  “Lucy obeyed the imperative finger. Old Mr Crakenthorpe took hold of her arm and pulled her inside the door and shut it.” Or: “Dr Quimper walked upstairs to his bedroom and started throwing off his clothes. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes past three. It had proved an unexpectedly tricky business bringing those twins into the world but all had gone well. He yawned. He was tired – very tired. He looked appreciatively at his bed.”

Her dialogue is pacey and free flowing too. Agatha Christie was also a successful (and some – witness The Mousetrap) and it shines clearly through the dynamic, rhythmic way she gets her characters talking.

She can also be very funny. I think my favourite sentence in the whole book is “Madame Joilet was a brisk business-like Frenchwoman with a shrewd eye, a small moustache, and a great deal of adipose tissue”. That’s a good example, Chaps, of zeugma and of the literary uses of a list of three. Oh sorry – I’m not in the classroom any more. Sometimes, I wish I were.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Go-Between by Osman Yousefzada

In 1968 I went to teach in a challenging inner London boys’ secondary school. The journey from my refined grammar school to dusty Deptford, via a college in leafy Sussex was something of a culture shock. It’s all detailed in my 2019 memoir, Please Miss We’re Boys.

Anyway, on arrival at South East London Secondary School for Boys I cautiously explored the English department stock cupboard. Therein I found a lot of “boy” literature and very little that I’d ever read before. Well, Treasure Island and its ilk never did much for me but I was intrigued by Norman Collins’s 1948 adventure story, Black Ivory. I knew Collins’s work because I’d read and enjoyed  a number of his adult novels such as London Belongs to Me and Penang Appointment. I didn’t learn, until recently, though, that he was a BBC man responsible for the genesis of Dick Barton Special Agent and Woman’s Hour. Later he defected to ITV and, as a major executive, was a key figure in its launch and development.

I pounced eagerly on Black Ivory. Here, maybe, was a novel I could make work with my hard-to-quell classes of teenage boys. Well some classes actually liked this 1820s adventure story and I got to know it pretty well. I’ve just reread it for the first time in half a century knowing that books often seem to have changed a lot when you return to them after a long absence.

It’s a first person narrative which tells the story of  Ralph Rudd, a lad obliged to go to sea because his farming family have lost everything. Naïve and easily duped, he finds himself on the Nero, crewed by well characterised ugly brutes.  Now, this is the 1820s and slave trading had been banned in the British Empire since 1807. Inevitably there must have been ongoing illegal trading for a while and that is what the Nero is involved in – to Ralph’s horror. He does his best to scupper it when he realises what’s happening but of course it isn’t simple.

So how do we feel about such a novel now? The story telling is strong and Collins’s pacy style keeps you turning the pages. From a literary point of view, it’s rooted in one of the world’s seven stories: voyage and return. It feels very odd now to read a novel in which there are no female characters apart from Ralph’s mother and sister who feature peripherally at the beginning and end.

Inevitably the unspeakable people who are running this trade (and all trying to double cross each other) use what is now taboo language when speaking of their “cargo”. Ralph himself neutrally uses the word “negro” and it is absolutely clear that the author and his narrator are appalled by what is going on and expect the reader to be too. Justice eventually prevails and all the men trying to traffic slaves get their comeuppance at the end.

I don’t think, when I was in my 20s that I had heard of the Zong massacre of 1781 in which 130 slaves were killed by being thrown overboard leading to an insurance claim by a Liverpool-based syndicate. It must, however, surely have been in Collins’s mind when he has the beleaguered Captain Swing giving the order to unshackle the slaves and drive them overboard in order to destroy the evidence of his trafficking crime? Even now, thinking about this is chilling, nauseating and profoundly shocking. Fortunately in the novel – eleventh hour and all that – it doesn’t actually happen.

It amazes me now that I used to teach this book quite cheerfully to the most diverse classes I have ever taught. Some of those boys would have known far more – from family history – about slavery and man’s inhumanity to man than I ever will but I don’t remember much in the way of in-depth discussion.  I doubt very much that any teacher would offer this novel to students now – it’s actually a pretty moral tale in a derring-do sort of way but could easily be misconstrued by anyone who didn’t read it thoughtfully.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

Rose Tremain’s Lily was published last year and I’ve just read it in paperback which, unusually, was cheaper than the Kindle version.

We’re in the mid-nineteenth century. An abandoned newborn, Lily is rescued by a policeman and taken to the Foundling Hospital founded by Thomas Coram.  At this point I sighed. Not very original, I thought.  Jacqueline Wilson explored this territory pretty thoroughly in Hetty Feather (2009). From a different angle so did Jamila Gavin in Coram Boy (2000) and there have probably been others.  But I was wrong. Tremain turns it into something quite different: a suspenseful tale of love, cruelty, revenge and justice. In places it reminded me much more of Sarah Waters’s novels such as Affinity and Fingersmith than of anything about else I’ve read about Coram hospital.

The point – historically – about Coram Hospital is that was benignly set up to rescue the children of mothers without support and other orphans from a life of abject poverty, crime or worse. The intentions were good but, inevitably the routines were harsh by modern standards. And such places sometimes attract the wrong sort – sadists, paedophiles and the like – to work there. They always did. And despite the thoroughness of modern checking systems, tragically it still happens occasionally. And that’s fertile ground for novelists although it doesn’t make for easy reading.

The worst thing about Coram Hospital to any common sensible, decent 21^st century person who has ever been responsible for children is that the babies were sent to foster homes – often quite kind and loving ones. Then when they were six they had to be returned to the hospital never again to meet the family which had nurtured them.

Thus Tremain’s fictional Lily is blissfully content on a farm in Suffolk with people who love her for six years. The return to Coram’s Hospital would be brutal by any standards but Lily is targeted by a staff member called Maud who treats her with violent cruelty and it gets a great deal worse as she gets older.

The story is told on two time levels so that we meet the teenage Lily managing to live independently by working for a wigmaker who “freelances” privately as a high end prostitute. This alternates with Lily’s experiences at Coram Hospital until in the end the two strands meet.

Along the way is Lily’s childhood friend Bridget, another desperately traumatised child who doesn’t get any sort of peaceful ending. Sam Trench the policeman who finds her and re-enters her life later is an interesting character too and his wife epitomises decency and kindness. Conflicts of interest abound.

But the very best thing about this meaty novel, which I liked so much that I gobbled it in two days, is the ending. The adult Lily is expecting something terrible to happen to her because of something she’s done. In the event it doesn’t and if this were a piece of music I’d describe it as ending in a very gentle but hopeful major key with the dynamic at a tender mezzo piano. Tremain is very good indeed at nuance.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Black Ivory by Norman Collins