A promising setting in a lonely Yorkshire house leads to a satisfyingly written mystery which feels more than formulaic crime by numbers. Interest to see the variety in crime fiction from this time.

Scarweather* by Anthony Rollins. In 1913 John and his cousin, Eric, visit a famous, and eccentric, archeologist and his wife at their house on the English coast. Eric falls in love with the archeologist's wife. Eventually, John gets a message that Eric is missing, presumed drowned. The book then skips ahead about 15 years when John decides to look into his cousin's death a bit further. Frankly, I don't know why it took him so long since I could see the resolution a mile off. This was well-written and enjoyable even if very predictable.

Very different from any of the other British library crime classics i have read so far.
Which is not bad, just not what i expected going into it, so i actually think that if/when i will re-read this book in a year or two i will most likely enjoy this much more because i know to expect something different!

Its a slow rolling crime book, but at the same time it is not slow at all. Which honestly is just very strange while reading it since nothing really feels slow paced, but at the same time it does?
And there is also the fact that this book basically takes place over 15 years... but not really? Most o fit takes place before those, a part of it after 15 years past, but at the same time we do get pieces of what happened in between...

To say this shortly this book id very different from basically anything i ever read so far.
Which is great at some aspects but because of its very unique style it also is quiet hard to prepare for, or to know what to expect and so in some ways this book didn't deliver what i wanted, but i got something completely different out of it than i expected.

So was it a good read or not?

I have no idea!
It was different and quiet strange and not at all what i expected!

If that sounds like something you want to give a try?
Please do!

If you need something more predictable and knowing what you get yourself into?
This might be a hard one for you!

From http://www.bookbarmy.com

Is it possible to have a crush on a publisher?

My heart beats faster, my fingers fondle their book covers, and my wallet giddily opens its arms -- all for The British Library Crime Series by Poisoned Pen Press.

Just look at these beauties, I mean really, what mystery reader could resist?
I first became aware of this series with my first purchase of THIS long lost favorite mystery. Since then I have cultivated a insatiable craving finely-tuned taste for this Poisoned Pen Press imprint.

In 1997, husband and wife founders, Robert Rosenwald and Barbara Peters, who are also the owners of the legendary Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, saw an opportunity to re-publish the wonderful British mysteries novels of the 1930's and 1940's. They tapped into every bibliophile's secret desire --out of print titles, long lost authors, and beautiful covers to lovingly add to a bookcase:

“We knew that mystery readers wanted complete collections, so we thought we could make a business out of that.”
I've read several of these and, while some are better than others, all are well-plotted mysteries graced with some classic crime writing and completely interesting settings - in short they are pure fun escape reading.

There are locked room mysteries (Miraculous Mysteries), murders in Europe (Continental Crimes), small village settings (Death of a Busybody), and dead bodies in crumbling manors (Seven Dead).
In short, there's a British mystery for you in The British Library Crime Series. You got to love any publisher/bookseller who states this as their mission statement:

We are a community Bound By Mystery.

and who gathers praise such as this:

Hurrah to British Library Crime Classics for rediscovering some of the forgotten gems of the Golden Age of British crime writing.(Globe and Mail)

Might I suggest you support this fine enterprise by buying the books direct from their website ~ just click this logo.

Although I initially struggled with this title - it was quite dense compared to some of the British Library Classics, I stuck with it and quite enjoyed it!

If I hadn’t seen at the start that this mystery tale was first published in 1934, I would have guessed at a date nearer the beginning of the century. In writing style it’s more Conan Doyle than Agatha Christie and has been a great pleasure to read. Once or twice I tried putting a paragraph into the vernacular of today, but something was lost each time. I’m ashamed to say that occasionally there were words that were unknown to me, that had ceased to be common speech, but I didn’t pause to check them, not wanting to interrupt the flow of the narration.

The story is told in the first person by one of the participants, John Farringdale, a young lawyer. Also involved is his older friend and Cambridge academic, Frederick Ellingham. The Scarweather of the title is a remote house on the Yorkshire coast, home to a larger than life eccentric Professor Tolgen Reisby, his young wife and daughter. Near the house are ancient burial mounds, the excavation of which is a prominent part of the story. The book has an excellent introduction by the thriller writer Martin Edwards, who tells us that Anthony Rolls, the author, is another name for the novelist C E Vulliamy, a keen archaeologist. Archaeology, then gaining popularity, is a main theme of the story, although I did cringe at some of the primitive excavation techniques employed, when the sole object seems to be the recovery of objects. The science has moved on vastly.

The book, first reprinted after eighty years by the National Library, opens pre the First World War in 1913. The assorted participants come through the conflict and the narrative picks up again in 1926 with the continuation of the mystery. The whole tale would be a nonsense in our technological world eighty years later. The British class system was certainly thriving at the time and featured prominentally in the narration. Never the less I thoroughly enjoyed this literary dip into the past which has stood the test of time. Potentially one for a reading group to analyse.

It is 1913 and John and Eric visit the famous archaeologist Teisby. His house is situated in a remote but beautiful part of the northern coast of England. The description of the location was one of the finer parts of the book, along with the varying weather, the tides and how the sea and the surroundings govern the lives of the people in this story. The story of course is a crime which went hidden for decades.

Told slowly and steadily over a long period of time, the tragic disappearance of Eric and the events both leading to it, and subsequently with the discovery of the actual truth were a climax of the story. It was a bit unnerving to read that the discovery of the truth was going to remain hidden, only known to a very few and though the discovery was important, it went hidden into the history of those involved.

The characters were very well developed, the description of the locality was beautiful and the storyline fascinating.

Goodreads and Amazon reviews up on 16/6/2017. Review on my blog mid October 2017.

Dorothy L. Sayers loved the writing of Anthony Rolls, so I went into this with expectations. And the writing was excellent – I enjoyed the way Rolls (that is, Colwyn Edward Vulliamym using the pen name Anthony Rolls) strung words together. Believable characters, believable dialogue, tension and humor both.

The reason I didn't rate this higher or enjoy this more is that once the characters' roles were sorted out – for the apparent murder victim was not who I expected it to be – I foresaw pretty much everything that was to come. Funnily enough, it's as though Rolls anticipated this: "Does the reader now perceive the shadow of these events? If so, I congratulate him upon possessing a swift and practical imagination."

Still, the writing was excellent, everything you could ask of a solid Golden Age mystery. "Their boy, Peter Laud Ellingham, was about twelve years old—he was not more offensive than the average boy of twelve." "We spent our time very harmoniously and pleasantly, and in a manner that was decidedly sociable without being too restrained. It has always been my belief that only intelligent people know how to enjoy themselves." The glancing blow at the Great War and the narrator's part in it is kind of wonderful. I felt an actual pang when I realized who the murder victim was; I was worried about what would happen to the star-crossed couple who obviously belonged together. Dorothy Sayers wrote about him, "he handles his characters like a 'real' novelist and the English language like a 'real' writer—merits which are still, unhappily, rarer than they should be in the ranks of the murder specialists". Unhappily, that hasn't changed, so actual good writing still has a worth far above rubies or pearls.

I look forward to tracking down as much as possible by this author, under whatever name I can find him.

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.

Digging up the truth... 3½ stars

The story begins in 1913 when our narrator, John Farringdale, is just twenty-one. He and his cousin Eric are more like brothers, so when Eric meets the famous amateur archaeologist Professor Tolgen Reisby, he's keen to introduce him to Farringdale too. Eric has a bit of a hero-worship for Professor Reisby, but he's also well on the way to falling in love with Reisby's much younger wife, Hilda. Farringdale also has a friend who is considerably older than him – Frederick Ellingham, a man of eclectic tastes and knowledge and a wide acquaintanceship across the classes, from seamen to aristocrats. Ellingham knows something of Reisby and hints that there may be darkness hidden beneath his boisterous extrovert exterior! And so when Eric goes missing in what seems like a sailing accident, Ellingham decides to investigate further...

…which takes him roughly a decade and a half to do. Admittedly they all had to stop and go and fight a war in the middle of it all, but frankly those of us with at least one functioning braincell had the whole thing worked out before the war began, so one certainly can't accuse Ellingham of rushing things. Fortunately, there's plenty to enjoy in the book, though, even if the plot is so slight as to be almost non-existent.

As Martin Edwards informs us in his introduction, Rolls was himself an archaeologist and he puts his expert knowledge to good use. He pokes a lot of fun about the world of archaeology – the digging up of a shard of broken pot and extrapolation from that of an entire civilisation, the dismissal of anything that seems a bit peculiar as 'ritual', the arguments between experts over time periods, and the jealousies over access to the best sites and acquisition of the choicest finds. He also has his characters comment on the ghoulishness of the archaeologist's enthusiasm for digging up corpses, with Reisby himself keeping a kind of charnel house of finds in his own study. In fact, even the denouement makes fun of the cavalier fashion in which archaeologists spin theories based on the location of a few bones. (I'm sure it's all very different and much more professional now, even though it all rather reminded me of Tony Robinson rapturising over half a femur or a mangled old bit of bronze in many an episode of Time Team... ;) )

The set-up is a spin on the Holmes/Watson pairing, but I fear Ellingham and Farringdale don't match up to their illustrious predecessors in either detection or characterisation. Reisby himself is a fun character – a giant of a man, loud and jolly with an uproarious laugh, but also opinionated and quick to fury when crossed. I would definitely cast Brian Blessed in the role.

Scarweather is a remote place on the coast of Northern England, and Rolls does a good job with the setting, allowing the wildness of the landscape and sea to play their part in the story. The isolation of the setting also allows him to show the kind of unlikely friendships that blossom when people live close to each other but far from the rest of society. Many of these secondary characters add to the humour of the book, slightly caricatured but still believable and, on the whole, likeable despite their idiosyncrasies.

So, overall, while this isn't the most thrilling or fiendish crime novel in the world, it's still an enjoyable, well-written entertainment. 3½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Poisoned Pen Press.

Colwyn Edward Vulliamy enjoyed a varied career as soldier, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, biographer, humorist and crime fiction writer. Scarweather is one of four murder mysteries he wrote in three years in the 1930s under the pseudonym Anthony Rolls (the first dust jacket identified him as, "a writer whose real name is very well known in a very different field of literature"; the original Anthony Rolls are three scrolls cataloging the 58 ships in the Tudor Navy, produced in the 1540s by a guy named Anthony Anthony).

All four books are olios. They begin with conventional golden age plots, but develop in unexpected directions and do not resolve. The characters are satiric, although the books are not humorous in other respects. The main interest of the author is emotional growth. However, since the characters are not realistic, he accomplishes this by juxtaposition rather than conventional character development. The results are worthwhile in their own rights, but cannot be rated highly as mysteries, satires or novels.

The nominal anchor to the plot of Scarweather is the disappearance of the narrator's cousin in mysterious circumstances. The author piles on clues that suggest a bewildering range of explanations, each of which appears to be a satiric take on something. There is a spy story possibility that reads like [[ASIN:1545138125 The Riddle of the Sands]], a drug distribution scheme reminiscent of [[ASIN:0062341650 Murder Must Advertise]],
archeological and anthropological fraud that parallels the real-life [[ASIN:0752425722 Piltdown Man]] saga, a classic jealous husband and young wife adventure and a horror story of a tight-knit and a horror story of an isolated village sharing a dark secret like [[ASIN:1464205833 The Secret of High Eldersham]].

There is no real interest in the mystery, the author instead chronicles the fifteen year investigation that contrasts and eventually fuses the brilliant extroverted outsider suspect who loves snap judgements and the brilliant introverted insider detective who takes years to come to the most obvious conclusion. There is a subplot that brings the beautiful, shrewd and emotionally wise wife of the suspect together with the homely, obtuse and emotionally stunted narrator. In both cases the author seems to suggest that his satire is reserved for extremes, and when you blend opposite extremes you get fully human characters. To make the psychological growth realistic, the author lets it happen slowly. Clues are spaced years apart, as the characters go to war and return, advance in their careers and age naturally.

The result is very interesting, but as mentioned above, it's a defective mystery. The satire is very broad, and much of it is dated. There is some realistic archeological detail, but that is also dated. The book works best as a novel, with an unusual mix of caricature and psychology

A mystery that only a real dummy would not be able to figure out, peopled with a persnickety, priggish narrator, an amateur sleuth that rivals a bit of cardboard for personality, a love interest that consists mainly of nice hair, and one of those "large men" of a certain kind of fiction in which the author keeps telling us is a force of nature, but just seems like a right a**hole. Cut down to its main parts, this should be like 25 pages. I mean, maybe this is a send up of those tropes? Maybe? Anyway, a super hard pass.

Scarweather, another entry in the British Library Classic Crime series, is a curious book indeed. The author seem to be writing a straight-forward murder mystery. The novel is told in flashback by John Farrington. It opens in 1914 when Farrington is twenty-one years old. He has two really close friends, his cousin Eric Foster and Frederick Ellingham a brilliant academic who is the amateur detective in the novel. It is Ellingham who urges Farrington to record the events in the novel which stretch from 1914 to 1926.

In 1914, Eric Foster becomes acquainted with an eccentric archeology professor Tolgen Reisby and his wife Hilda who is thirty years younger than her husband. It seems inevitable that Foster would fall in love with the beautiful and accomplished Hilda, although their attachment is more innocent that salacious. When Foster invites his cousin and Ellingham to join him in his northern holiday, all the principle players seem delighted with each other. Reisby is the true academic eccentric with a benign and jovial manner and gladly welcomes the three men into his circle of friends. An enjoyable holiday is spent digging the barrows and tumuli in the area and the friendships, which last for twelve years, are firmly in place.

It is with shock and sorrow, that Farrington learns that later in the summer his beloved cousin has drowned during an early morning swim. The body is never recovered. World War I has begun and both Foster and Ellingham serve with great distinction, meeting in a hospital in France when both are recovering from their wounds. Ellingham makes some cryptic, yet serious comments about Eric Foster’s death. Years later, all the main characters are spending the summer together again and anticipating the excavation of the Devil’s Hump, a tumulus surrounded by superstition and intrigue.

Even the most naïve reader would have an idea of what is found and it is here that the book really veers off into satire and ambiguity. All through the novel, the author pokes fun at archeologists and their debates over the classification of pottery shards. The excavations are handled about as subtly as workers digging a new sewer line. Slabs are tossed aside; amateurs dig with spades and pick axes disturbing the layers of soil and precious evidence of age; jars are rattled; skeletons carelessly picked up. Everything is chaotic, with not a disciplined professional in sight. Ellingham even refers to archeology as “that so-called science.”

But even odder is the tolerance for the villain of the novel. For almost two decades he is allowed to do really evil things because he also does “good” things. It is so cynical that when I finished the novel I just shook my head. That’s when I decided the author drifted away from a straight mystery to satire. A very curious book.

It’s 1913 and the threat of war in Europe looms large. Fortunately, young barrister John Farringdale is able to distract himself from the pervasive mood of doom and gloom by accompanying his cousin Eric Tallard Foster on a jaunt to Aberleven, a fishing hamlet on the north coast of England. Foster’s love of archaeology had led to his becoming acquainted with Professor Tolgen Reisby, an authority on ancient burial practices, and he regularly visits the professor and his family at Scarweather, an isolated house some distance from Aberleven.

While proud that his cousin has found favour with as learned a gentleman as Tolgen Reisby, Farringdale is worried that the young man’s obvious friendship with Reisby’s attractive young wife Hilda might lead to trouble. He is therefore keen to visit Scarweather himself and assess the situation. Along with his friend Frederick Ellingham, yet another fellow of prodigious intellect, Farringdale makes the trip to Scarweather and he is pleased to see that all seems well. Reisby demonstrates his indefatigable love of digging up burial mounds and collecting funereal paraphernalia, although local superstitious has so far prevented him from excavating a tantalising local tumulus known as the Devil’s Hump, while both his wife and Eric Foster are the very models of propriety.

However, something sinister is certainly afoot at Scarweather and, although he does not know it at the time, Farringdale’s life is going to be intertwined with the lives of the Reisbys and other figures from Aberleven society for years to come.

John Farringdale relates the case in Scarweather and he acknowledges that he acted in the Watson role alongside Frederick Ellingham’s Sherlock Holmes. He is pleasant company and his relative lack of insight into matters (for, despite his avowed interest in “the psychology of the criminal”, he cannot or perhaps will not recognise the truth of the matter for a shockingly long time) allows the reader to puzzle out Ellingham’s theories. Ellingham himself makes a good central detective; he has enough esoteric knowledge to make seemingly miraculous deductions and he is just vague enough in his speech to keep everyone guessing. While it seems unlikely that Sherlock Holmes would take fifteen years to assess whether a crime has been committed and then take the steps he deems necessary for justice to be served, the circumstances of war and the mannered society of the time perhaps allow Ellingham a little leeway in that regard.

In fact, the central pull of Scarweather is not really “whodunit”, since the outline of the crime and the likely suspect(s) become clear quite early on, but rather how Ellingham and, to a lesser extent, Farringdale remain dedicated to the puzzle for fifteen long years. Of course, some of that time is spent at war and recovering from wounds received, so it’s not like they were deliberately pursuing a leisurely course of deduction. Further, knowing something and proving it are quite different things, and Ellingham really has to put all his little grey cells to work on the matter. Saying that, it’s hard to agree with all the choices he makes during his investigation, with one decision certainly proving rather cruelly perverse. Scarweather is the only book to feature Frederick Ellingham, although it would have been a good starting point for a detective series, so it’s impossible to say whether his deductive skills and his humanity would have been improved through further investigations.

Overall, Scarweather is yet another intriguing addition to the British Library Crime Classics collection. It does not feature the most complex of plots, but it does offer an insightful portrayal of the psychology of the criminal mind and the consequences of crime. Farringdale, Ellingham and all those in the vicinity of Scarweather have to live under a cloud of suspicion and distrust for years, and Anthony Rolls does a great job of portraying the impact that this has on all their characters. Although the central investigation takes a long time to reach its climax, it still features a few bursts of action (and some class-based humour) and the final confrontation is definitely tense. Scarweather is an unusual detective novel and one that is certainly worth a read, particularly for fans of Golden Age crime.

This book was a little different, in that the mystery ran over quite a few years. I just love the writing style in these older works of fiction. They really had a way with words and how to tell a story.
It certainly does not give you that instant thrill, but makes you work for the story which makes for a very enjoyable story from start to finish. A book that is hard to put down.

One can damn a book with faint praise; likewise, it is possible to damn a book by unfairly comparing it to much superior books and raising expectations unreasonably. That I do not wish to do to Scarweather. If you approach Anthony Rolls’ 1934 mystery novel (one of just four that C.E. Vulliamy penned under that pseudonym) thinking that you’re reading one of the era’s wonderful but less-well-know authors — J. Jefferson Farjeon, Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, or, heaven forbid!, Gladys Mitchell — you’re destined to be disappointed.

However, if you go into the novel expecting it to be a run-of-the-mill Golden Age mystery that is too long, too verbose, and too obvious as to both the crime and the perpetrator, then you will enjoy Rolls’ novel for its interesting characters, its window into an England of a century ago and its glimpse into the time’s dismissive opinion of the nascent science of archeology, described as “this make-believe of a science” that relied on “pseudo-this or neo-that, and the whole thing is lost in a senseless medley of jargon.” Clearly, the 1912 Piltdown Hoax gave birth to this novel. Still, I’m not sorry that I read Scarweather; with the right frame of mind, you won’t, either.

I received an e-ARC of this novel through NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press. Thank you.

Anthony Rolls is not an author I have read before, but I enjoy reading the British Library's Crime Classics re-issues so I decided to try this one. The novel is quite different because the involvement with the characters takes place over a decade and a half. With a death happening fourteen years before the proof is gathered I found this book to be both fascinating and slow. I was on guard as soon as I read in the introduction by Martin Edwards that the pace was "leisurely". Yes, that it was. Scarweather is an isolated manor house on the coast of northern Scotland, the story begins just months before the outbreak of World War I.

This mystery has archeology as the central theme so if you aren't interested in that subject you might take this as a warning. I know practically nothing about ancient burial sites in Britain or elsewhere so I found myself often wondering if the information was true or had been made up by the author. When so many experts in the same field have totally different opinions of what is fact and what is not it just confuses me more. Plus, I'm sorry to say I was correct very early on as to what was happening regarding the mystery ship and the death had a pretty obvious solution also. Yet in spite of all those things which would seem to be an impediment to enjoyment, I really did like the book. I certainly liked it enough to make it through the middle portions which slowed down from a crawl to a creep.

Read this novel if you want to see a different style of mystery writing done well.

Ah I enjoyed this and thanks to NetGalley, I had an early review copy on my kindle.

I am a huge fan of Golden Age mysteries and this novel was written by Anthony Rolls (a pseudonym) in the 1930ies. He has written 4 crime novels in total and most of them out of print.

The story is set over a time period of 15 years, which is quite unusual for a classic mystery as they quite often take place in a short time span and are solved with a neat solution at this end. You are quite often kept guessing and there is at least one person who is obviously the detective. This novel is very much different. Without giving too much away, I can say that you can sort of figure out quite early on who the culprit is but that does not deter from the enjoyment of this novel. The story is often quite dark, but I also laughed out loud in his quiet, snarky observations of the British "learned" classes. I also liked that the author casts women in a favorable light, which is given when the novel was written, quite unusual. All in all, a very enjoyable read, especially for fans of the Golden Age.

Scarweather is another highlight of the British Library Crime Classics series. Unlike modern mysteries with their specialised sub-genres and niches, Scarweather offers a bit of everything, wrapped in a writing style not unlike Conan Doyle's. A few outdated terms and prejudices reminded me as I was reading that this book was written in 1934.

Our narrator, John, is a university student at the start of the book, and his close friends include his cousin and a professor of science. The three of them become entangled with an attractive couple who live on a section of rugged coast in the North of England covered in barrows and tumuli. When an unexpected death occurs, it takes decades of excavations to solve the mystery.

Scarweather is packed with beautiful landscapes, humorous characters, a close-knit village, hidden romance, insights into WWI, and quite a lot of amusement at the expense of academia and archeological science. If you enjoy classic mysteries I would highly recommend.

Admittedly, some books published in this series (British Library Crime Classic) are a bit outdated,but this one really works,it has an atmosphere, a wonderful setting, well developed characters....it remains ,so many years later,a very good read.