Tower and Town, July 2023

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A Good Read

It’s summer (hurrah! As I type there’s brilliant sunshine and everyone sniffling with hay-fever, what it’ll be like when you read this is anyone’s guess.) So, put down that challenging little post-modern novella translated from the Lettish, and be diverted with something light and undemanding. May I bring to your attention The Three Dahlias by Katy Watson? What’s known as ‘cosy crime’, it’s a C21st take on the Golden Age country-house murder mystery. Three actresses, all celebrated for playing the lady detective Dahlia Lively are thrown together at a fan convention and promotional event for a new film, taking place in the family home of the late author. A murder occurs, the three actresses shelve their differences, channel their character and investigate. Hares are started running, red herrings are…I don’t know, kippered? – and it’s all secrets and lies and general double-crossing and bad behaviour. Just great fun, it’ll slip down without touching the sides, but that’s no bad thing. Pack it in your beach bag.

If you want more entertainment, the documentary Mad About the Boy about Noel Coward prompted me to read Masquerade by Oliver Soden. The first full biography for over 30 years, it’s a creative look at ‘the Master’s’ life; a life which seems to have been self-invented and re-invented till he became most comfortable wearing the mannered public face, and leading what the author describes as ‘an enacted life’. The book is painstakingly researched, making full use of the two major Coward archives which have been collated since the turn of this century. Neither a hagiography or a hatchet job, it’s lucid, readable, and what comes across most strongly is the phenomenal energy which Coward deployed in a variety of formats -plays, songs, screenplays, revues, painting and novels. We think of Noel Coward as epitomising a certain period; Soden demonstrates that to a large extent he helped to create our view of the inter-war artistic scene. He was also more involved than most people are probably aware in war-time intelligence and propaganda (and I was fascinated to discover that one of his plays received its world premiere in a POW camp in 1944).

But if you absolutely insist on something literary and stretching, Trust by Hernan Diaz might be your book for July. Four different versions of the life and career of a Wall St businessman before the 1929 Crash, it’s about the willingness to be deceived, the fantasy of money, inconvenient truths and I suppose, the nature of fiction itself.

Debby Guest