Unearthing the Past

A Late Phoenix by Catherine Aird

Sometimes book finds can be so serendipitous – you can stumble across something in a second-hand bookstore; a cover can catch your eye; one of your favourite publishers can bring out a new-to-you author. Nowadays, however, many of my fun finds come from recommendations from other bloggers, and this book is no exception. Furrowed Middlebrow, a wonderful blog from Scott in SFO, covers all manner of obscure women writers from the early to mid-20th century and he’s compiled a staggeringly impressive set of lists of authors to along with it. However, it was a recent review of Aird’s “A Late Phoenix” which particularly caught my eye, and I picked up a copy as soon as I could.

Aird is one of those solid, reliable crime writers of the late 20th century, not perhaps that well-known (well, I confess I hadn’t heard of her) but nevertheless steadily producing quality mysteries over the years. Wikipedia says: Catherine Aird (born 20 June 1930) is the pseudonym of novelist Kinn Hamilton McIntosh. She is the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories. Her witty, literate, and deftly plotted novels straddle the “cozy” and “police procedural” genres.  “A Late Phoenix” is the fourth in her Calleshire series, published in 1970, and it features her regular detectives, Sloan and Crosby.

The book opens in the town of Berebury whether the new local doctor, Latimer, is taking over a practice after his predecessor of long-standing has passed away. However, he is soon being called to the building site across the road, lately the site of some failed excavations. The archaeologists failed to find any remains, but the builders have succeeded – however, the skeleton they uncover turns out to be only 25 years or so old, and therefore recent enough for Inspector Sloan to be called in to investigate.

It soon becomes clear that the death is linked back to wartime – still a relatively recent memory – and the victim was a pregnant young woman, shot with a rifle. This area of Berebury suffered a dramatic air raid, and it seems as if the death may well have occurred around that time. Sloan begins to investigate, tracking down the owners of the land, the owners of the houses lost in the bombing and tapping into local memories of the drama. He’s hindered rather than helped by young Constable Crosby, who seems to have little idea about anything, and his boss Superintendent Leeyes who seems to go off on several different tangents in each conversation. Leeyes is actually really funny, totally obsessed with the horror of the youth of today, men with long hair and the coffee bar over the road from his window known as “Dick’s Dive”! And then there is a second murder, and the past starts to affect the present…

“Otherwise what he saw at the site was still the same save for the swarming police. The timbers still shored up the adjacent house. The narrow, neglected gardens still ran away from the ruins. Desolation was still the order of the day. What difference there was between then and now lay in the minds of the policemen who were there. Before, their view of the site had merely been the beginning of a new job. Now, they were investigating an old death and a new one. With undertones of war. And overtones of murder.”

The mystery itself is an excellent one: well plot, well paced, absorbing and enjoyable. I confess to guessing the victim quite early on, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book one bit – and much of this has to do with what Scott picked up when he read the book (and I’d refer you to his excellent piece here). “A Late Phoenix” has a wonderful sense of place and time because of when it was written. The Second World War *was* still a recent event, clear in people’s memories, and there were plenty of folk around who’d witnessed it.

I’m old enough to have grown up in a small town in Hampshire during the late 1960s/1970s and this book gives the flavour of the time with immense accuracy. Our house was on a newish estate, built in the early 1960s, but we played in what was known as The Woods nearby. This was a piece of wasteland on the site of demolished houses (whether by bombs or not, I’m not sure, but there were plenty of ruins in the area). Part of the woods still had bomb shelters built during the War which we used to dare each other to go down (which was pretty scary as they were dark and damp), and there was very much the sense that the War was not long ago. Some areas damaged by bombing obviously sat for decades before being redeveloped (I think it was the 1980s before The Woods were finally built on) and the past and the present were still intertwined.

This kind of murder mystery, where the past informs and affects the present, is one of my favourite type (Christie’s “Postern of Fate” is a book I can read again and again) and Aird does it brilliantly. Berebury is a town on the cusp of change, as were so many at the time – dragging themselves forward from a past of outside toilets and Victorian slums into the brave new world of concrete and glass. Brutalist architecture does get bad press nowadays, but I confess quite a fondness for it; possibly because it was being built as I grew up! But that’s by the by. “A Late Phoenix” is an excellent, well-written and enjoyable murder mystery and on this evidence, I’d very much like to read more Catherine Aird. Thanks for pointing me in her direction, Scott!