| Title | : | The Widow of Bath |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1952 |
First published in 1952, The Widow of Bath offers intricate puzzles, international intrigue and a richly evoked portrait of post-war Britain, all delivered with Bennett’s signature brand of witty and elegant prose.
The Widow of Bath Reviews
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Run, Rabbits, Run!
Hugh Everton bumps into some old acquaintances in a hotel bar and accepts an invitation to dine with retired Judge Bath and his much younger and glamorous wife, Lucy. Tensions are high, since it becomes clear that Everton and Lucy once had a fling, and the other two guests, Atkinson and Cady, both seem to be watching the clock carefully, as if waiting for something to happen. And something does! A few minutes after the Judge has retired to bed, a shot is fired, and he is found dead on his bedroom floor. But by the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared…
While the world of vintage crime is a wondrous thing in which I’ve spent many happy hours over the last few years, occasionally I’m reminded that some authors become “forgotten” for a reason. I had a mixed reaction to Bennett’s earlier entry in the BL’s Crime Classics series, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, but this time my reaction was pure – this has to rank as one of the worst books in the series to date. I got so tired of it that I more or less gave up two-thirds of the way through, skimming the last few chapters to find out whodunit, although I can’t say I cared much.
There are three problems with it – major problems, that don’t leave much in the way of positives. The first is the truly dreadful style. The second is the convoluted and overly complicated plot. The third is the clumsy characterisation of a bunch of truly unlikeable, pretty despicable people – and that includes the hero. Some writers have a natural flow that may not be especially literary but is great for telling an interesting story. Others write so well that the writing itself can make up for some weaknesses in plot or characterisation. And then there’s Bennett. It seems to me as if she thought up a story (I’m sure there must be one buried in there somewhere) and then decided to experiment with style, with the end result being that the whole thing reads like a pastiche of the more realist mystery novels that were just then, in 1952, coming into vogue. It’s not dark enough to be noir, but she has attempted to give it that noir atmosphere of amorality and a kind of existential despair. She makes everything deliberately vague, not in a plot sense but in a writing sense, so that the book never flows – all the time the reader is left trying to catch up with things that should be made plain, but aren’t: for example, starting chapters with ‘she’ rather than a character name so that for the first couple of paragraphs we don’t know which character we’re reading about. I found it all intensely irritating.
Although it’s written in third person, we see the action almost exclusively through Everton’s eyes. Everton is a weak and cowardly man with a criminal background and a depressed and depressing outlook on life. He doesn’t respect anyone, and so it’s hard for the reader to get past his self-pity and misanthropy to see any good in any of the other characters. Most of the other characters sneer at him, and he sneers right back. But he also sneers at the one or two who try to be nice to him, which makes him deeply unpleasant to spend time with. I’m convinced Bennett thought that having an unlikeable lead character was terribly “modern”, and in that she’s right – that’s exactly why the Golden Age died as authors began to despise the conventions that had made the genre golden.
The plot starts out as a straightforward mystery, a mix of whodunit and howdunit, but soon descends into a convoluted mess, incorporating everything from blackmail to fugitives from the failed Fascist regimes of Europe. If she’d stuck to the basic plot it might have been a fairly good, if run of the mill, murder mystery, but each new chapter seemed to be adding another rabbit for the reader to chase, with the result that this reader lost all interest in trying to keep track of the original bunny.
No, I’m afraid this one was a major miss for me.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com -
Oh, this is such an odd little duck. I gave it 4 stars (rounding up from 3.5) and Leah, below, gave it 1 star and...I think we're both kind of right?
She's summed up the story below very well so I won't reiterate, just point out that it's a post-war whodunit in a dingy little seaside town that quickly involves criminal gangs, fleeing war criminals, and international conspiracies. It also involves unlikeable characters, impenetrable dialogue, and characters taking rash and at times downright stupid actions that often make zero sense. It's often deeply annoying to read.
And yet, I found it very worthwhile. Part of it is just the weird baby it is of British Golden Age mysteries and American hard-boiled style—seeing the actions and emotions of a Chandler novel transplanted to a sort of hellish Butlins is fascinating, particularly if you're a fan of both subgenres. It doesn't work all the time, but seeing how it succeeds and fails, and why, was engaging enough to keep me going through some of the more infuriating bits. The other part is that Bennett is a beast at prose, and I mean that as a compliment. Throughout, there are gorgeous little turns of phrase and descriptions that made me stop just to appreciate the artistry (and I'm usually not nearly so precious).
Maybe that's my sum-up. If you're looking for a ripping yarn, this isn't it. If you're a detective fiction fan and feel like exploring one of the weirder beasts of the genre, this is well worth your time. But don't just take my word for it... -
Nope. I didn't like this writer's almost comedic style, and all of the main characters were unlikeable. I rarely give up on a book, but this one just did not work, and there are so many other Golden Age mysteries on my list.
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I picked up this new BLCC entry recently at Dogberry & Finch in Okehampton, at the very moment where the shop owner discovered she had won a Muddy Stilettos Award. With that transactional background, I had high hopes for this book, and it was certainly a very good read.
With a Chaucerian title, The Widow of Bath focusses on the adventures of Hugh Everton, whose past flirtation with criminality catches up with him while he's staying at a coastal hotel. When he's invited to the home of former judge Gregory Bath, his host ends up dead while his guests are downstairs playing cards. But the responses of the other guests to this event convince Everton (and the reader) that there is much more going on, especially with Lucy, the eponymous widow.
The ensuing mystery is an interesting mix of classic amateur detective and thriller. Everton has the tendency to get himself overly involved in situations, leading to some high-action sequences. But the murder puzzle itself remains at the heart of the book until the very last chapter. And the writing throughout is wonderfully evocative, witty and engaging. I look forward to reading some more of Margot at some point. -
3.5 stars. A nice little 50s whodunnit with a murdered former judge and an oddly assorted group who spend his final night with him.
I really enjoyed the tone and humour in this book - Margot Bennett is clearly a great writer and there are some fantastic one liners in the book. Sadly the plot isn’t quite as good - at times stretching credibility with fairly implausible actions by the characters.
An enjoyable read however! -
At this point, I'm a little surprised that Margot Bennett's books have been republished through the British Library Crime Classics line. Her writing doesn't even make sense much of the time. Both The Man Who Didn't Fly and The Widow of Bath are terrible.
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Having only managed to get through one- third of "The Man Who Didn't Fly", and having seen that Julian Symons approved of this one, I hesitated before taking the plunge- appropriately considering the number of people who end up in the sea during the action of this book.
"The Widow of Bath" is beautifully-written, but the plot is ludicrously overdone, and the characters mostly cardboard and intensely irritating.
It is beyond belief that people would act as they do here.Hugh Everton, for instance, goes from bedazzled drip to tough action man in less time than Clark Kent takes to become Superman. The villains are so bright that they can improvise and devise new plans in seconds. The police were just on the point of dealing with the villains when Everton chanced to blunder in...and so on.
Only the writing propelled me to persevere, but I am sure others will find this a compelling read.
Difficult to rate.
A grudging 3.5 stars. -
Hugh Everton is sitting at a crumbling seaside hotel having a terrible meal and feeling perfectly rotten about it but not at all surprised. And that's how the novel opens - an Archie Goodwin 'lite' character basically doing a food review and giving the downtrodden and disinterested waiter a hard time about how terrible he is at his job. It doesn't make you like Everton or the waiter any, but it is an amusing little scene and I was excited to see where the book would go from there if that's the premise.
We soon learn that Everton is a disaffected young man. He's had a rum go of it as a junior agent for the British Embassy in Paris. While there, he meets Lucy, falls head over heels, and is persuaded to fork over all the cash he has to extricate her from a nasty blackmailer and then of course she will run off with him, abandon her husband, and they will live happily ever after. Except all the money Everton has isn't enough, so he's persuaded to open a new account, write a bad check. When that bounces and he's really in a bind he's approached by Freddy Ronson - with an offer he hopes Everton can't refuse. He just wants Everton to drive a few 'refugees' over the border in his customs approved company vehicle for 1000 pounds. Easy money. Unfortunately Everton's ethics kick in and he declines the opportunity. Ronson responds in quick measure by following Everton home late one evening and giving him a knock on the head and helpful shove into the Seine. Everton miraculously manages to survive and gets pulled out of the Seine by a barge, then spends 1.5 years in prison for his check fraud, never implicating Ronson because he wants to protect Lucy.
This is all backstory that we get in the first 30 pages of the novel. After his mediocre meal in the hotel and while he's nursing a whiskey at the hotel bar, Everton bumps into Lucy, Ronson - with different color hair and a new name of Atkinson but Everton's convinced it's Ronson all the same - a weasely looking man named Cady, Lucy's husband Gregory Bath (not long for this world in a book titled The Widow of Bath, I just assumed it referred to the town of Bath, not the husband named Bath) and Lucy's niece Jan, who was Everton's original paramour and the reason he met Lucy in the first place those fateful years ago. Snappy dialogue is exchanged, introductions and re-introductions made, and then Everton is invited back to the house for drinks... where Gregory Bath ends up dead by 11:30, shot in the head. The dog is missing, and soon after, so is the corpse. The phone lines don't work, there's a trip made to the police station, and then when the police arrive there's no body.
The whole writing style is rat-a-tat-tat, like the hard beat of a 1920s rapid fire gun. The tone is caustic, the pacing rapid, the red herrings thrown at the reader fast and furious. There's international espionage - Everton plays a leading man, amateur detective, with an element of James Bond meets Archie Goodwin but without the wits or confidence. He's reactive and constantly one step BEHIND those he pursues.
Author Margot Bennet throws phrases and adjectives around without any of them actually sticking to her characters or telling you anything useful about them. For example:
"Inspector Leigh was a shadowy, yawning figure, who, seen through Everton's exhausted eyes, seemed to swell and diminish as leant across the desk. The two men looked at each other silently for a moment, both struggling for perception. Leigh was a flabby, loose man, with a truculence that suggested he was not the perfect bureaucrat." See - what does that tell me about Leigh that's useful?! Is he a good detective? Is he perceptive, insightful? Facts driven? Is he patient with questioning his subjects? Sympathetic? Bennet has just thrown a lot of words at me but I don't feel like I know much about either of the men in the room or how they are handling the conversation!
Or when he bumps into Jan again for the first time:
"He put the glass down again and looked at her. She was a pretty girl with her dark, almost neat, head, spoilt, as usual, by a wisp of hair loose at the back. She had a small nose, a short upper lip, wide-spaced teeth. She had been restless, energetic, melancholy, gay, erratic, and often too earnest." That's SIX adjectives and still tells me diddly squat about Jan as a person or her feelings about Everton after all this time.
Describing Lucy's husband on first glimpse: "His eyes, trying to struggle from the pit, were frozen, masked, and a little bulbous behind his glasses, as though he were doing logarithms in his head. He looked as ancient in experience as a lonely monster in a side-show, but he was only a retired judge."
There's something going on with the wait staff at the hotel - they aren't just "foreign" and disengaged with their work... and there's about five other subplots running. By the time we get to the last page and back to the original body - the judge, on the upstairs floor of his house, with a bullet in his head - I had honestly forgot about that mystery because there were so many others to solve and keep track of!
Still not sure how I felt about this one overall. It was an interesting mash up of American hard boiled film noir detective novels, set in a decrepit English seaside town, with a post WWII spy element, a dash of spoiled love and waylaid hopes, with a sprinkling of crazy car chases and subterfuge akin to James Bond... it's such an eclectic mix with some startling turns of phrase thrown it to boot. It's certainly one of a kind! -
Following an attempt on his life in Paris and a short stint in prison, Hugh Everton has taken a position with a travel magazine, making the rounds of English hotels and reviewing them. He finds himself in a seaside town (unnamed) at a hotel with surly foreign waiters...and discovers that he has again crossed paths with the glamorous Lucy, her husband (the retired judge Gregory Bath), and a man now called Atkinson (though Everton knew him in Paris as Ronson, the man who had thrown him into the Seine to drown). There is a young man named Cady with them -- and Hugh is about to renew his acquaintance with Jan Deverell, the judge's niece. Lucy invites everyone back to their house for drinks and conversation; it is not long before a shot rings out upstairs and Lucy has become the title character: the widow of (Judge) Bath. When the police arrive, however, the body has mysteriously vanished, washing up on shore several days later. Everton finds it difficult to refrain from asking questions and finds himself drawn into the mystery of the judge's death, much to the annoyance of the local inspector. -- I wanted to really like this classic British mystery, originally released in 1952, but, while I enjoyed the flights of wit and humor and sharp observation in the writing, I found the characters inexplicable and the situations curiously uninvolving. Things got quite intriguing toward the end (and the resolution to the central mystery had an unexpected twist to it), but it was a case of too little, too late -- for this reader, at least!
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8/10. Surprisingly fun read, with a lot of good twists. I actually bought this book because I was going to end up in Bath, England a few weeks later and I *thought* that the title of the book referred to a widow living in Bath...imagine my surprise when I cracked open the book in Bath only to find that the widow's deceased husband is Mr. Bath. Haha.
I liked this book more than I expected to, because going off the first chapter or so I didn't think I'd like the main character much. And actually I didn't come to like him any better over the rest of the book-- he reminded me of Nick in the Great Gatsby (a character I hate and a book I hate even more), in that he seemed to be lacking in whatever it is that makes people human. He did have more initiative than Nick, which I appreciated, but he was similarly soulless.
Sometimes books just have The Thing. There isn't a lot I can point to in this book that's standout amazing (and frankly it's been too long and I don't remember all the things I was originally going to say about it); there's plenty of good, but I've read a lot of decent mysteries that didn't hold my attention like this one did. This one had The Thing, the something that holds your attention and doesn't let go until the last page. -
A peculiar whodunnit with more twists and turns than a particularly convoluted rollercoaster.
There is some very nice writing but, excellent twists aside, it's a little slow and doesn't really kick in until the final third when our 'hero' gets himself into danger.
He's a strange hero and a promising one (embittered former embassy staffer who's served time in gaol and now reviews cheap hotels for a travel agency) but, though his character background promises much, he doesn't really deliver in the end. -
A very well-written and evocative book. Despite this, I had some trouble with it because I found it a little difficult to like the majority of the characters. They’re very human, and that frequently makes them unsympathetic. It’s only a little bit a mystery book, and if you want detection here it’s frequently off to one side. But it’s a really good depiction of characters.
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Good
This is clever, too clever, it’s too tricksy for its own good. I enjoyed this book as a well written curiosity, it glitters with clever dickiness, but I can’t say that I really took to it. -
Well-written enough but kind of bloodless (pardon the pun), as many of these British Library Crime Classics seem to be--more of a puzzle than a story peopled by actual humans. Probably 3 1/2 stars thanks to some of the dialogue.
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I really like Margot Bennett - British fifties noir at its best.
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Tortured plot. Delicious dialogue.
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A bit weird with a convoluted storyline and an array of unlikeable characters but vastly better than "The Man Who Didn't Fly" also by Margot Bennett.
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Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
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A solid crime story, a blend of post-war ennui and whodunit. The lineup of suspects is limited and make for a fine rogues gallery of grotesques and chiselers.
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Excellent. Would happily read it again someday.
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Unattractive cast of characters; unpleasant style; and unconvincing plot complications.
