And some more books

'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis

Eight-year-old Beth Harmon is sent to live in a children’s home after her mother is killed in a road accident. At the home, each child is given a tranquilizer twice a day, to calm them down. Beth learns to save hers up, to help her sleep. An older girl, Jolene, befriends her, after a fashion. One day Beth discovers the janitor, Mr Shaibel, playing chess in the basement. He shows her various moves and Beth practises in bed at night, visualizing the whole chess board in her mind. Mr Shaibel gives her a book of chess moves, which she studies under the desk in class. She eventually gets permission from the headteacher to play chess at a local high school. At the same time, Beth becomes increasingly obsessed with having access to more of the little green tranquillizing pills, and, after the home is told to stop giving them to the children, gets caught breaking in to the room where they’re kept. She is punished by, among other things, being forbidden to play chess any more.

When she is twelve, Beth is adopted by a Mr and Mrs Wheatley. Mr Wheatley disappears off to Denver “on business” shortly after Beth moves in to their home, and never comes back. Mrs Wheatley is quite kind to Beth but often appears distracted. She spends a good amount of time sipping beer and popping tranquillisers. With no access to chess at the Wheatleys’ home, Beth shoplifts a copy of Chess Review magazine, where she learns about the upcoming Kentucky State Championship. To cover expenses, she steals some money from Mrs Wheatley and from a girl at school. At the tournament, she manages to persuade the organisers to enter her in the Open not the beginners’ section. She blitzes the competition and beats the State Champion.

On learning that Beth has won 100 dollars in prize money, Mrs Wheatley’s interest in chess suddenly increases, and she starts regularly travelling to chess tournaments with Beth. Beth’s reputation spreads; she becomes an officially rated player, and is featured in media articles as a girl chess prodigy. She plays in the US Open in Las Vegas, where she meets and plays the defending champion Benny Watts, another former child chess prodigy. She loses to Benny in the final but on overall scores they share the Open Championship prize. At her first international tournament, in Mexico City, she plays the World Champion, a Russian named Vasily Borgov. Beth does well in the tournament, but is defeated by Borgov. At the next US Open Championship, she defeats Benny Watts for the title. This turns her focus internationally, to a tournament in Paris and to the Moscow Invitational, where she will play against the top Russian players.

Beth’s given to taking refuge in “helpful” substances and there’s a point at which you wonder whether her drinking and pill-taking is going to take her over, but thankfully she appears to have put herself on a more encouraging trajectory by the end of the novel. I have a slight suspicion that if this book were being written today it would wang on about Beth’s traumatic childhood experiences and adult semi-addictions at the expense of the chess – but thankfully it doesn’t do that; Tevis centres the drama in the chess, and on Beth’s struggle to master herself as well as the game. I wasn’t surprised that Beth and Jolene ended up meeting again, though I couldn’t warm to Jolene as I’d always suspected her (correctly, it turns out) of spitefully nicking Beth’s treasured copy of Modern Chess Openings just before Beth leaves the children’s home.

This novel was a much more absorbing read than the subject matter would lead you to expect. I know little about chess; I remember learning the names of the pieces and their permitted moves as a child – I guess Dad must have showed us – but have never attempted to play seriously, and the technicalities related in this novel were lost on me. However, it’s a tribute to Tevis’ writing that that didn’t matter, and that he makes the chess exciting even for a non-player, in the tactics Beth employs and her struggles to get under the skin of, and hence ahead of, other highly rated players. It’s interesting to watch Beth’s ego and competitiveness come up against the same qualities in other young-ish players, especially Harry Beltik, the previous Kentucky State Champion with whom she has a summer chess/sex interlude, and the former US Champion Benny Watts, with whom she has a somewhat longer such interlude. At one point, Beltik acknowledges to her that “we’re all prima donnas”. The last couple of pages – Beth’s final game against Borgov at the Moscow Invitational, Borgov's unexpected sportsmanship, and Beth's approaching the old man in the park and offering to play chess with him – a clear nod to Mr Shaibel – are magic.

From the clues given in the novel, I’d guess it’s supposed to be set in the early 1960s, but unless I missed it, I don’t think the date is explicitly stated. It was published in 1983. Tevis’ other works include The Hustler, The Color of Money (both about pool, I believe – I haven’t seen the films) and The Man Who Fell to Earth.

'The Wool-Pack' by Cynthia Harnett

It’s 1493. Nicholas Fetterlock is the son of a wealthy Cotswold wool merchant and lives at Burford. The story opens with Nicholas and his best friend Hal, the shepherd’s son, out in the fields with the sheep after a day’s sheep-washing.

That evening Nicholas’ father entertains at dinner two Italians – ‘Lombards’ – a banker from Florence who is an agent of the house of Medici, and the banker’s secretary. Nicholas dislikes the secretary, with whom he and Hal had a brief ill-tempered encounter earlier in the day, but is quite taken with the banker’s friendliness and elegant manners. Also at dinner – turned up unexpectedly – is Nicholas’ mother’s brother, John Stern, a former privateer but now a more respectable part-owner of a fleet of merchant ships based at Bristol. It becomes obvious that Stern does not like the Lombards, and later that evening he tells Nicholas that they are moneylenders – usurers – and a blight on the country. Nicholas has learned earlier in the day that Hal’s father, Giles the shepherd, also does not like Lombards, and was alarmed to learn from Nicholas that in the course of their meeting with Nicholas and Hal they had asked for directions to the house of Simon Leach, Master Fetterlock’s wool-packer. No one in the village likes Leach, and additionally he’s recently been observed to have built himself a suspiciously big barn in the middle of nowhere.

Shortly afterwards, Nicholas’ father shocks his son by informing him that he is soon going to be betrothed to the eleven-year-old daughter of a Newbury cloth merchant. While knowing that he must abide by his parents’ wishes, Nicholas inwardly reacts with horror to the news. Cloth is currently doing better than wool as a trade, as the wool merchants’ guild has been co-opted by a group of the biggest merchants who organize things to suit themselves. Master Fetterlock tells his son that many smaller merchants have been in difficulties, and his own business has only been kept afloat by borrowing money from the Lombards.

Nicholas and his father ride to Newbury to meet Cecily and her family, and stay for a week in order to see Master Bradshaw’s business and to attend the Newbury Cloth Fair. Luckily, Nicholas and Cecily like each other and the visit puts his mind at rest about his future bride – but there is a shadow as he is becoming more and more worried about how exactly his father is involved with the Lombards. He spots his father with them at Newbury Cloth Fair – despite their having announced that they were travelling to Southampton to pick up their ship – and notes that his father looks worried and browbeaten. After initially reacting angrily to being questioned by Nicholas about the Lombards, Master Fetterlock confides a certain amount in him, which worries Nicholas even more.

Back home in Burford, it’s sheep-shearing time. But there’s more worry for Nicholas, who is told by Giles the shepherd that he discovered several ‘sarplers’ that should have contained only clipped wool, actually filled with refuse. Around the same time, Thomas Fetterlock finds himself in trouble with the Staple – the wool merchants guild – after sarplers of Fetterlock wool were found at Bruges half filled with rubbish. A mystery opens up, not only re how the refuse got in there, but where the large amount of good wool that should have been in there has got to. Nicholas and his father travel to Southampton, where all the Fetterlock wool sold to the Lombards should have passed through, but after checking records there all appears in order. Trouble seems to be mounting for his father, who is now regretting his association with the sinister Lombard banker Messer Antonio Bari. From here on, it’s Nicholas on a mission to solve the mystery and save the day. Thanks to Nicholas, to Giles and Hal, and to a key role played by Cecily, all comes right in the end.

Cynthia Harnett wrote several historical novels for children. I did read The Wool-Pack as a child/early teen, but enjoyed it far more now than I remember enjoying it then (I think in those days I went into yawn mode at anything even vaguely historical). It’s a really good story. Even now I’m not all that interested in details of the fifteenth-century wool and cloth trades, but Harnett really brings to life the various characters and the details of village and domestic life. I don’t think it’s stated how old Nicholas is, but I’m guessing about fourteen, and as well as containing some enjoyable sleuthing and heroism, the story is also a coming of age story, as, in addition to becoming betrothed and being given his own horse, Nicholas’ friendship with Hal has to negotiate their class difference becoming more marked as they grow up: Hal starts to address Nicholas as “master” and Nicholas must spend time learning his father’s business rather than roaming the fields with Hal after the sheep flocks.

The Wool-Pack was published in 1951 and won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in the same year.

'The Private Patient' by P D James

Never been a big reader of crime novels and this was my first P D James. It’s part of the Adam Dalgliesh series – in fact looking at James’ bibliography on Wikipedia, it looks to have been the last one James wrote in this series. Given that it includes Dalgliesh musing on whether he’s had enough of murder, and ends with him getting married, that probably makes sense.

The story opens with Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old investigative journalist, making her way to a Harley Street clinic to see plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell to discuss the removal of a facial scar. We already know, from the novel’s opening sentence, that Rhoda is going to be murdered three weeks hence. The scar was inflicted when she was thirteen and her drunk father smashed a bottle in her face. Rhoda is anticipating that her life will change after the scar is removed, and in response to Mr Chandler-Powell’s question as to why she has waited thirty-four years to have something done about the scar, Rhoda responds that she no longer has need of it, which puzzles him.

Following the clinic appointment, she has lunch at The Ivy with Robin Boyton, a younger friend. Boyton is exercised at being excluded from inheriting any of the family fortune passed down from his grandfather Theodore via his recently deceased uncle Peregrine; all of it has been divided between his two cousins but Boyton’s view is that he deserves a share of it. Boyton’s uncle’s death followed his grandfather’s by only a few weeks, and Rhoda remarks in conversation that his cousins were lucky that their father successfully survived his own father by the twenty-eight days apparently required for a legatee to inherit. She makes a joke, referencing the plot of a novel she once read, that perhaps Boyton’s cousins popped their deceased father into the freezer to ensure that they could announce his death after the required time had elapsed. Rhoda doesn’t expect Boyton to take this seriously, but the story plants a seed in Boyton’s mind.

Rhoda chooses to have the operation done at Cheverell Manor, a Dorset country house purchased by Chandler-Powell to be run as a private clinic in the country. In the next few chapters a largish ensemble cast is introduced of people who live on the Cheverell Manor estate: Robin Boyton’s cousins Marcus Westhall, Chandler-Powell’s assistant surgeon and his sister Candace, an academic who has recently nursed her irascible father through a long final illness; the cooks, Dean Bostock and his wet wife Kimberley; Sharon Bateman, the somewhat odd and sullen general dogsbody who is strangely obsessed with the Cheverell Stones, a stone circle near the Manor reputed to be haunted; Helena Cressett, the general administrator, whose family owned Cheverell Manor for four hundred years before Helena’s father was forced to sell after losing all the family money in a banking crash; Flavia Holland, the head nurse who appears to be in a relationship of sorts with Chandler-Powell; Letitia Frensham, a 60-something widow who assists with the admin; and ‘Mog’, the attitudinous elderly groundsman. Once Rhoda Gradwyn’s body is discovered, that’s quite a list of potential suspects to work through.

The local Dorset constabulary is pulled off the case, and Scotland Yard pulled in, though the reasons for this are never entirely clear beyond the fact that Gradwyn was evidently a reasonably well-known journalist. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his Special Investigation Squad of Detective Inspector Kate Miskin and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith motor their way down to Dorset and settle themselves at Cheverell Manor to sort everything out.

This was an enjoyable read though I did get somewhat confused in the later stages of the novel as to the various iterations of Peregrine Westhall’s will and Candace’s motivation for killing her cousin. If I have it correct, the actual will did leave Robin Boyton half of the estate, and Candace faked a supposed later update that changed this to split the estate only between her and her brother. At the end of the novel, three people are dead, two murdered and one by suicide, but things have been satisfactorily resolved for most of those still living.

Also: I guess crime novels do throw out a whole bunch of red herrings that are actually irrelevant, to keep the reader wondering, but I guess I’m not sufficiently accustomed to them to not find that a bit frustrating. Things here: Rhoda’s scar and her issues around it; Sharon’s dark past; - and what’s with the hint of Number Ten involvement? The Met was pulled onto the case at the request of Number Ten, but this is never then revisited and we’re left wondering (or at least I was) what there was in the case that would have prompted this, given that it turns out to have been a revenge murder that reflected a private grudge and nothing at all to do with HM Government. There are the comments of Mrs Skeffington, the other patient at the Manor at the time of Rhoda’s death, who obliquely (to me, anyway) says to Dalgliesh that she’s glad he’s come, and that “Stuart said that … he’d get the best”. This leads to an “aha, so that’s why we’re here” moment on the part of Dalgliesh and DI Miskin, but left me absolutely none the wiser, unless I missed who “Stuart” was.

Anyway. Aside from all that, I enjoyed it well enough to probably read another one in this series.

'Darke' by Rick Gekoski

James Darke, a retired public school English master, has hired a handyman to remove both the knocker and the letterbox from his front door. To avoid having to speak to the handyman, he pretends to be deaf. He redirects his mail to his friend George’s address, and asks George to throw it all away and not to contact Darke himself, as he does not wish to be disturbed for the foreseeable future. All these are things on a list of “world-proofing chores” he is working through. He declares “I will never go out again.”

For the whole of Part I, we are given little idea of what has led to Darke choosing his current isolation. He is a challenging character, arrogant, unpleasant and almost unpalatably rude to those he has contact with – he refers to an email George sends him as “impertinent”, when its purpose is to plead with Darke to stop ignoring his daughter Lucy’s increasingly frantic attempts at communication: Darke emails back, telling him to throw Lucy’s letters away and “Never write to me like this again”. When George eventually brings the letters round, and Darke opens one of them, his first thought is “I do wish Lucy had learned to write properly”.

However, I pressed on, and Part II leads immediately in to the event that has triggered Darke’s isolation, the illness and death of his wife Suzy, whom he met when they were both students at Oxford. His reflections on the meaning of life and on Suzy’s death, are vivid and moving. Part III sees Darke starting to emerge from his isolation, having found some closure through his journal-writing, and making tentative steps to reconnect with Lucy and his grandson.

I liked it very much – the protagonist is certainly challenging but intriguing nonetheless, and there is plenty of humour woven in with Darke's general awfulness. The novel has quite a focus on ageing and of the decaying of the body, and there’s a moving passage about loss, which is what he has concluded old age is mainly about:

Loss of what we have been, loss of the history of our dear loved ones, loss of the incidents and narratives that have defined us.

This Guardian review is pretty good, though it puts too much emphasis on Darke’s reconnection with his young grandson, when the reconnection with his daughter is equally important and more difficult and complicated.

Darke was published in 2017 and was Gekoski’s first novel, though he has evidently written several non-fiction books. Gekoski has subsequently expanded Darke into a trilogy, with two further books Darke Matter and After Darke. I think I might have had my fill of James Darke as a character, but I’m glad to have read this one.