Book Box
For anyone interested. I can't believe they banned this book. But it doesn't suit the white man's agenda. . .
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Deservedly a classic, by an otherwise undistinguished writer, at least in the greater scheme of literary history. (His only other works that anyone really remembers are The Jewel of the Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm, the latter of which tends to be regarded as terrible by those who dare to read it.) The stroke of genius in Dracula is its epistolary structure, making it a bit like what Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone was to the detective genre.
You don’t need me to recount the plot for you, so it’ll suffice to say that lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to assist with the affairs of soon-to-be-emigrating Count Dracula, only to discover that the Count is a little too enamoured of the music of the night… The narrative is composed of various first-person documents by characters from Jonathan to his wife Mina Harker, occult scholar Dr Van Helsing, asylum director Dr Seward, and newspaper journalists whose articles paint a picture of vampiric shenanigans once the Count comes to London.
The epistolary style adds a verisimilitude that really works in the novel’s favour and is likely a large part of why it became so embedded in the public imagination, combined with Stoker’s obvious research into vampire myths and legends. The combination of these elements makes the book feel like a work of scholarship, almost, as if you’re reading a genuine history rather than an occult thriller. There’s always something happening in the plot and even despite the more melodramatic moments - you can see Stoker’s origins as a writer of moral fiction in his heavily strictured presentation of gender (men are protectors, women are helpmeets) - its suspense holds up all the way.
Perhaps most importantly, the horror set pieces still work. I can’t speak for all readers, of course, but I still get a horrible thrill from things like the woman who arrives at Castle Dracula to cry for her stolen child, the “Bloofer lady” that lures and attacks London children at night, and the stipulation that one must sever a vampire victim’s head and stuff its mouth with garlic to stop “the un-dead” coming back. Stoker might not have written a better or even an equal book, but his legacy was rightly assured by Dracula.
Rating: 4/4
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Written by Cooper as her debut detective novel at 76 (she’d previously written mainstream and historical fare), Tea on Sunday seems to have departed the public consciousness soon after publication and felt like an oddity that left me a little nonplussed when I received it for my British Crime Classics subscription this Christmas. The publication year and advanced author age for a genre debut threw me, I think, as I typically expect Crime Classics to be firmly Golden Age.
To be honest, I was a little worried that Martin Edwards, who introduces all the books, had come a cropper for interesting goods this Christmas. The “Christmas” aspect of this one is certainly marginal; it takes place in snowy weather, but beyond some snowmen on an orphanage lawn there’s not much thematic going on in that direction.
Still, although it took a short while, I found myself settling into the story and enjoying this well-written novel quite a bit. It’s about a formidable older woman (I won’t say “battleaxe”, though she conforms a little to the type described by that dated term), Alberta Mansbridge – pride of a father who’d wanted a boy and left her in charge of his rural engineering firm – and her murder before a tea party she’d arranged at her London home. The culprit must be one of eight guests for whom she’d set out cups since evidence makes clear that she knew and answered the door to her murderer. Enter Inspector Corby of the CID and his trusty sergeant Newstead to investigate.
The cast is typical, to a point where you wonder if Cooper had been re-reading her Agatha Christies and modelled her characters using them. All of the usual suspects are here: the doctor, lawyer, inadequate nephew, his beautiful but irreverent wife, a foreign conman (referred to as an “adventurer”), the dead woman’s longtime companion, and the young ne’er-do-well.
A large part of what I liked about the novel was its ‘70s feel. Some of its character interactions would raise eyebrows now, like how the nephew’s wife is basically referred to as a stuck-up “bitch” who needs a good slap. But overall it has some of the same charm as Christie’s later books before she lost her touch completely, where she’s describing the swinging ‘60s from a seventy-something’s perspective.
As Edwards points out in his introduction, Tea on Sunday is a highly traditional genre work. Its strength is in its characterisation. Cooper was a skilled and accomplished novelist and she brings real humanity to characters that could have been cardboard elsewhere. The closest she comes to flat stereotype is in the nephew’s wife, but she’s too good a writer to make even her a complete sexist caricature. Inspector Corby, meanwhile, is an empathetic and intelligent sleuth with a whiff of Adam Dalgliesh about him.
The mystery is engaging enough though not exactly surprising in the end. It’s not one of those perfect machines like a Christie plot, and “whodunnit” is very straightforwardly about whom you’d expect to have done it, and why. Nonetheless, Tea on Sunday does compel for its length as you see the various threads of revelation and motivation come together. All in all a good, solid read.
Rating: 3/4
Pictured edition: British Library
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