People sometimes ask me about my writing habits, how I’m keeping up with writing one post per day. It’s not easy. I usually work a few days ahead but recent travel plus a lingering cough have caught up and I’m barely staying ahead of my 8 am posting time. (I get up at 5 am and start writing about 5:30 and have to finish by by 7:45 to get to work on time. As I write this, it is 7:49.) My writing space is small, carved out of the L of our living room by a wall that the previous owners put up. But the apartment is old enough that there were (and are) no electrical outlets in this “room” and the HVAC ended up on the other side of the wall. We’ve run one extension cord under the wall to a surge suppressor on the desk that serves as my WFH office; and another under the door, where I plug in my laptop, when I don’t have a fan plugged in there to make the temperature bearable.¹ Aside from the desk, there is a loveseat with one end-table, where I put my water glass. This morning, I had forgotten to charge my laptop and, since I needed the cord under the door for a fan, I had to sit at the other end of the loveseat so I could plug my laptop in at the desk, which meant I needed to place my water glass on a tray beside me on the loveseat, which works fine, as long as I sit down with my laptop first and then set the tray next to me. Which I forgot to do in that order. Which meant that, when I sat on the loveseat, the water glass tipped over and drenched the loveseat.

This is why you have to feel passionate about or have purpose for what you do: to get you through trying times like this. And then you have to stop feeling guilty for having first world problems.

Today I’m going to write about my favorite Appleby book: Hamlet, Revenge! If you’re not familiar with Appleby, he is a golden age detective from Great Britain. When you think about Golden Age detectives, you have amateurs like Whimsey, Campion, Fell, Merrivale, Brown, and Fen – and I’m going to include Marple and Silver² in here although they are different than the men – because they all get involved in solving murders because they feel strongly about right and wrong and because they all – even Miss Marple – secretly enjoy the thrill of bringing evil-doers to justice. Then you have policemen like Alleyn who combines the aristocrat with Scotland Yard; and retired policemen like Poirot.

And then you have Appleby. He’s not aristocratic, he grew up in a suburb and his grandfather was a baker. He earned a scholarship to college, where he developed a taste for the finer things in life³, and then went on to police college. His university education gives him enough polish that he can detect in that quintessential golden age setting, the country manor, without being relegated to the kitchen for beer (as Alleyn’s Inspector Fox would be) but he also doesn’t cause, as Alleyn himself often does, surprise.⁴

Hamlet, Revenge! takes place at Scamnum Court, a gothic country manor so elevated and historical, that it becomes a character in the book itself, much like the Overlook becomes a character in The Shining⁵. It is tenanted by the Duchess, who has been a collector of people her whole life, and her husband, the Duke. When the Duchess was younger, one of her set was a young man who went on to become Lord Chancellor of England, a high political position that gives him double top-secret clearance, and he remains a good friend and comes down off his high horse to participate in her amusements. The duke’s college-aged son and daughter are there; as well as the son’s college tutor (who seems to be what, in the US, I suspect we’d call a thesis advisor). The tutor, Gott Giles, also writes detective stories; and he dabbles in Shakespeare, in an amateur sort of way. He’s come up with a novel idea for staging Hamlet and what it all means and all that, and the Duchess offers to stage it at Scamnum Court, and secure a leading Shakespearian actor to play Hamlet, and gather enough friends and family to play the rest of the parts, and build a stage, and supply an audience – including leading theatre critics and Shakespearean experts and there’s even a rumor that royalty might attend – and you can see that she’s really gotten carried away in a very beneficent way and the thing has taken on a life of its own.

Only then, the Lord Chancellor who is playing Polonius, gets shot during the performance, just at the moment that his character is stabbed just out of sight of the audience. Since this happens on-stage, you’d think it would be easy to figure out what happened. But the way that the set and the curtains masking the backstage were arranged, it almost seems as if designed to conceal the murderer from the audience. To complicate matters even more, a top-secret document had been delivered to the Lord Chancellor just before he left for Scamnum Court. To ensure its safety, he had been carrying it on-stage, disguised as a scroll, and now it is missing. The thing seems impossible. Call in Appleby!

Appleby finds himself confronted with threatening messages to the Lord Chancellor, mostly in Shakespearean quotes; an American philologist⁶ who has a primitive sort of recording device that uses wax cylinders instead of tape and who is determined to capture everyone’s accents for research; a house-party full of future marketers, debutantes, dashing young men, brain surgeons, equine enthusiasts, and so on. And the duke’s brother, who has also brought with him a Russian Ballerina and black widow (one person, not two).

And, saddest of all, one of the duchess’s finest collection pieces, a young man from India, who is attending university in England, and finds it all very strange and new, and is quite careful to avoid violating the quaint native customs of this exotic land. As one example, she tells how she met him at a big research library in London, where they were both conducting studies that put them in close proximity for several weeks. At lunch, they would retire separately to the library steps outside to eat their sandwiches. She noticed that he avidly watched the ladies who fed the pigeons on the steps every day and assumed that he secretly longed to feed the birds, too, something we know from Mary Poppins was every little British boy’s secret longing. But, when she diplomatically approached him one day and commented that she had brought too much bread, and would he like to help her feed it to the birds, she discovered she had misread the situation: he thought that the ladies feeding the birds were charged with doing so, that it was their sacred responsibility that he would not want to trespass against. He was in the habit, when confused by British custom like this, to write his father in India for advice, and then wait for an answer. Unfortunately, it turns out that he was the only witness to the murder and so, on page 113 of the 1961 Penguin edition, he is the unfortunate second victim.

The people of Scamnum seem determined to distract Appleby with red herrings: a document hidden between chair cushions in the green room by a young woman the son of the house seems interested in – could it have been the missing secret document? The Russian ballerina seen with a miniature camera – could she have been photographing the missing document? Could the brain surgeon secretly lust to add the Lord Chancellor’s unusual skull to his scientific collection? Or could the murder be the result of a long-standing feud from the Lord Chancellor’s college days, one that everyone but the two participants has long forgotten? And was the philologist banged over the head the next day because he resembled Appleby from the back, or because someone for some reason wanted to get their hands on his wax scrolls?

And what of the worries of the elderly majordomo who rarely leaves his rooms deep in the heart of the house? He knows every detail of domestic arrangements, right down to how many cookies and what sort of have been placed in the cookie tins in each guest room in case an esteemed guest wakes up in the middle of the night feeling a bit peckish. This considerate idea makes it all the more of a violation when someone, some guest, raids the pantry on the night of the murder after the servants have gone to bed. Another distraction, Appleby thinks at first, but he stores it away in his little grey cells for later, perhaps subconsciously recognizing that the key to the whole mystery lies in a handful of cookies stolen from the pantry.

What I think I like most about this book – besides the wonderful characters and setting – is Appleby’s ability to keep his feet on the ground. Insanity surrounds him, people theorizing and accusing each other. He quietly takes it all in, processing it in the computer in his brain. There’s none of the frivolity of Whimsey or Campion, none of the heavy hinting of Poirot or Merrivale or Fell or even Marple. He just quietly takes it all in, totals it up, and comes up with the answer… a few minutes too late. Luckily the situation is saved by an inventive young woman who unfortunately gives away that she has recognized the answer in the presence of the murderer, and is forced to take off her clothes to escape being yet another victim. How does disrobing save her life?

You’ll have to read it to find out. It’s very clever.

It’s Appleby’s humility, his lack of need to prove how smart he is, how much cleverer he is than everyone else, that makes me like him. In an age where e v e r y o n e touts themselves as an expert – online, in the news, in social media and god help us that’s all LinkedIn seems to be now: people telling us that they’re experts – it’s nice to meet someone who doesn’t profess to any expertise and just solves the problem instead of displaying their intelligence.

If you like golden age mysteries and haven’t stumbled across Appleby yet, give him a try.

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1. I keep the door to the living room closed because that’s where the TV is and I can’t write with the TV on – especially when it is full of talking heads arguing about who is right; or YouTube videos about overpriced mansions or boats or why we should believe that retribution will catch up with politicians on earth which it doesn’t seem it will ever do. My only hope is that it will soon catch up with them in the afterlife. ↩︎
2. I call Miss Silver an amateur, one who does something purely for the love of it, which isn’t accurate. She is a paid private detective. ↩︎
3. When he is called in to this murder, the commissioner is searching London for him because and he isn’t at home – he was at the ballet, and not just the ballet, but a very modern ballet full of symbolism and modern expressionism. Tut tut, you can almost hear Inspector Fox, as representative of the old school Scotland Yard Detective, scold, It wouldn’t happen in my day. ↩︎
4. “Why, you’re a gentleman!” Suspects often exclaim upon meeting Alleyn over a dead body for the first time. ↩︎
5. Though without the evil intent or the ghosts. ↩︎
6. Think Rex Smith’s character in My Fair Lady and you have a pretty good idea of this guy. ↩︎