Poison for Teacher - Nancy Spain

http://emilydewsnap.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/poison-for-teacher-nancy-spain

There’s a rural girls’ school, an assortment of bizarre characters, a murdered teacher and, of course, a play. It can only be a Nancy Spain whodunit.

Miriam Birdseye is as poised as ever; this time she’s prepared to take on the role of Elocution tutor at Radcliff Hall, right down to the clothes that she wears and her part in the school play. Engaged by the mannish and eccentric Miss Lipscoombe as an unlikely body-guarding service, Birdseye &co. set out for Brunton on Sea disguised as teachers, where all sorts of tomfoolery is afoot.

Radcliff Hall is an old-fashioned girls’ grammar in the county of Sussex. Recently deserted by the enterprising Miss bbirch, the school has turned to bedlam at the hands of one very bored traitor, and it is Birdseye &co’s responsibility to sniff this conspirator out. But it is only during a rehearsal of the school play, Quality Street, that the mischief turns sinister and the prankster finds herself the prankstee. Ex-actress and contemporary private detective, Miriam Birdseye (along with her partner in anticrime, Russian ex-ballerina, Natasha Du Vivian*), is the perfect candidate for investigating the murder of Radcliff Hall’s French teacher, the spiteful Miss Devaloys. But will she expose the murderer before s/he strikes again?

Poison for Teacher would never win the Booker, but, whether you catch on or not, between its sheets, Spain has raised a staunch eyebrow at the society in which she lived. Let’s take one reference from many; the most obvious: Radcliff Hall… otherwise known asRadclyffe Hall, one of the literary world’s most well-known lesbian writers. Not overtly sexual in tone, the underlying themes of homosexuality surface in Pukey, the bumbling Classics teacher, and her too-close interest in Gwylan Fork-Thomas, the elegant Chemistry mistress. It is also latent in the schoolgirls and their adolescent crushes on their tutors, and even in the relationship between Miriam and her partner, the recently separated “Darling Natasha”, who has no wish to be found by her dashing and brilliant husband, no matter how hard he searches.

The question of bigotry hangs over this novel and prevented its republication prior to its being picked up by Lesbian Landmarks in 1979. As well as Spain’s not so complementary portrayal of the only overtly gay character in the book, Roger Partick-Thistle**, there is the "woolly-haired", "dusky-skinned" and butch Miss Lesarium and the small-boned, “oriental” Jew. It would be easy to get on a high horse about these references, but only if they were to be taken out of context. Spain, being a lesbian and one that openly cohabited with a figure as public as herself, Joan Werner Laurie***, could only be attempting to create a story as a wry outsider inside a society that had pressured her to feign a public relationship with Gilbert Harding. Spain was writing as a writer who would be accepted and published, whilst still imparting a nod to the minorities. Radcliff Hall clearly represents Roedean, Spain’s own girls’ school from the same coastline; and the characters’ bigoted opinions, that of Roedean’s inhabitants.

Poison for Teacher is light-hearted entertainment. With a writing style somewhere between Wodehouse and Christie and not dissimilar to Pamela Branch, Spain delivers homicide with as much humour as she would farce. Witty, satirical and regrettably forgettable, this book would never be hailed for its literary content; however, I put it down feeling cheered and slightly mischievous with not a grisly thought in my head. Tongue-in-cheek and gentle, this novel of murder most horrid, is a surefire pick-me-up that will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy, but ultimately unmoved.

FOOTNOTES

* nee Nevkorina

** You’ll recognise him as the screaming queen

*** The creator of SHE Magazine

The Wooden Overcoat, Pamela Branch

Who says girls aren't funny?

When I unwrapped Pamela Branch's The Wooden Overcoat on my birthday last year, I was more than a little confused; the format was odd, the blurb sounded naff, I'd never heard of it and there was a quote from the queen on the back - as if I have the same sense of humour as that old trout! Nevertheless, a few months later, curiosity got the better of me and I plunged into Chapter One. Imagine my surprise when the very first line made me laugh out loud. And I don't mean I gave a wry smile, I guffawed so loudly the wine I'd been about to swallow shot out of my nose.

It's obvious from the off that Branch's style is far from austere. She has an easy, P. G. Wodehouse-esque way of turning the serious into the comical; except that Wodehouse only ever went as far as the stealing of pearl necklaces and getting engaged to the wrong girl. The Wooden Overcoat, however, takes on a far more macabre tack; the body count could rival that of a horror film, and that's not including the "rets". Perhaps it's the unlikely contrast between the grim and the farcical, but for some reason the two work together with hilarious consequences.

The Asterisk Club is an exclusive and clandestine boarding house for wrongly aquitted murderers, as Benji Cann has just discovered. A dangerous combination of people under usual circumstances, but the club has very strict rules that prohibit the bumbing off of fellow guests. So when the seemingly unsuspecting neighbours in the adjacent house begin carting around dead bodies in an amateurish fashion, the members of the Asterisk club are most confused; except of course the most recent addition, Benji, who is the first to fall victim. They vow to keep a close eye on these clumsy part-timers who are wavering dangerously close to their turf. Meanwhile, the inhabitants next door, each in a bid to protect their respective other halves (while secretly suspecting them) are finding their first shot at disposing of dead bodies less successful than they might have hoped. This combined with the fact that a large family of rats has taken the opportunity to infest the skirting boards is stretching tempers somewhat and the rat-man will insist on going into minute detail about his very own hush-hush methods for disposing of "rets".

The improbability of this premise does absolutely nothing to deter; once I started reading, I just couldn't stop. I found myself absolutely crying with laughter while in the most inopportune of places: on the bus, at work, at the train station, in the waiting room at the doctors' surgery, anywhere other people are generally found, actually. And it carried on long after I'd put the book down. On more than one occasion I caught myself chortling as a few lines popped into my head whilst walking down the road or waiting in the queue for a cashpoint. And I think my work colleagues will clearly remember the day I shook and snorted with repressed laughter for, at the very least, an hour after my lunch break, muttering "...tide's out". I shall leave that one with you to find out for yourself.

The one thing that displeases me is that every single one of P. G. Wodehouse's books has been reprinted over and over, and rightly so, but when it comes to something as good as Pamela Branch's masterpiece, why so long? True, it was written in the early fifties and clearly relates to that era; but as such I find the almost naïve narrative rather refreshing. With believable characters, each sporting their own eccentricities, and an effortlessly deft writing style, Pamela Branch has written the unforgettable and I firmly believe that this book should never have gone out of print.

The Wooden Overcoat was reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press in 2006, on luxuriously thick, shiny paper, and since then the other three Pamela Branch novels have followed suit. They sit on my shelves, patiently waiting to brighten a gloomy Sunday.