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A Fine Burgundy

Mark Valentine on Peter Vansittart, The Tournament

Vansittart's great achievement is to take us into the completely different way of thinking of the men and women of those times; their superstitions and certainties, their rituals and fetishes and taboos. As he pointed out in an essay heralding his aims in the novel, even such primary things as colour had different meanings for them which were ‘bewilderingly complex; the medievals gave each colour heraldic, moral, magical, religious, strategic meanings, often contradictory’. With quick, deft imagery he conjures up not how things might seem to us from the distance of our own time, but how they would have been seen then. The effect is unusual and arresting; he is so swift-footed, his prose so teeming with curious detail, that we want constantly to stop and reflect on what we are reading.

Stac Lee

Paul Kershaw

Mark Valentine explored the Isles and wild seas with Robert Atkinson in his article on Island Going in Slightly Foxed Issue 50, beautifully illustrated by Paul Kershaw’s woodcut of Stac Lee, home to part of the world's largest colony of northern gannet.

The Islands Beyond

Mark Valentine on Robert Atkinson, Island Going

Here, I knew at once, was a skilful writer who took joy in what he made. The book proved to be about two students barely out of their teens who go off to look for a bird: to be exact, Leach’s Fork-tailed Petrel, which the author describes jauntily as ‘like a true ornithologist’s child, cumbrously museum-named and not far removed from the class of lesser yellow-bellied fire-eater’.

Sleuthing with the Colonel

Mark Valentine on Philip MacDonald, the Gethryn novels

This relative neglect is all the more surprising because MacDonald was much admired by his peers. He was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe prize twice. His early novel The Rasp (1924), which introduced his series detective Colonel Gethryn, was chosen by the American detective writer S. S. Van Dine, the creator of Philo Vance, for his ‘library of great mysteries’. And a later novel, the remorseless Murder Gone Mad (1931), was selected by John Dickson Carr as one of his ‘Ten Best Detective Novels’.

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