The Holm Oaks - P. M. Hubbard

Jake Haddon and wife Elizabeth move into his uncle's home, a surprise inheritance. The house is located on a wooded estate but the forest of Holm Oaks was sold to neighbor Dennis Wainwright. Haddon has access to a right of way through the forest, but Wainwright seems unneighborly about the way Jake and Elizabeth, an avid birdwatcher who has spotted a night heron roosting in the trees, are spending time there.  Contentious relations follow. The problem is exacerbated when Jake begins an odd romance with Carol Wainwright, Dennis' wife. The two have secret trysts in the forest, talk of love, but never do much other than hold hands and embrace. Sex does not occur. Not even kissing! But Dennis senses that something is up between the two.

There follows a sort of symbolic rage expressed through legal battles about the forest and property rights. Wainwright wants to chop down the forest. The Haddons enlist the aid of a forestry council to prevent destruction. Then Wainwright puts up a fence and -- most bizarrely -- introduces some unruly and apparently violent pigs in the woods.  Elizabeth is fatally injured in a brutal encounter with a boar. Jake is certain that Wainwright means to kill his wife or him or both.

The setting, as is usual with Hubbard, is extremely well done.  The forest is imbued with menace. Throughout the entire book all of the Wainwright's actions and some of the Haddon's reactions are tainted with sinister ambiguity. This is Hubbard's hallmark as a suspense writer.  No one is ever really thoroughly good in a Hubbard novel.

Jake is depicted as a furtive man, spying on Dennis and Carol in early chapters, fantasizing about Carol, eventually falling in love with her. But his habit of lurking, eavesdropping and spying is as creepy and unsettling as the way Dennis comes across as a threatening, unfriendly neighbor.  Jake is the narrator and everything is filtered through his eyes so Dennis Wainwright is a villain from the get-go with little room for sympathy.

Late in the novel Elizabeth's sister Stella, a painter, shows up. She senses the house and forest are "not right". All her warnings to leave fall on deaf ears. Her antipathy for the entire area despite its wild beauty and tempting as a subject for her painting lead to an ugly argument.  Elizabeth kicks out her sister.  But Stella returns when all the warring with the Wainwrights leads to a violent death.

Overall, the book is very odd and sadly not one of my favorite Hubbard novels. It all turned out to be unsatisfying for me. The menace and weird spell-like hold the forest has over all the characters dissipates as the story focuses on Jake's infidelity. The whole thing devolves into a soap opera of hatred, jealousy and temporary madness.  There are better Hubbard books out there.

FFB: Picture of Millie - P. M. Hubbard

"I wish I could give you a proper picture of Millie," he said, "but I won't try, I don't think."

There are many perceptions of Millie Trent, the carefree vivacious wife of Major Trent, who serves as muse, object of desire, and dear friend for many of the characters in Picture of Millie (1964). Here is a story where the life of a dead woman is a greater mystery than the circumstances surrounding her unfortunate death. We only get to know Millie after her death and as such it is the perceptions of others we get. Their portraits are as varied and colorful as any that could be painted on canvas -- deeply personal, secretive longings, inexplicable attractions are all there depending on the person describing Millie Trent. Paul Mycroft never really knew her and can only base his opinions on what he saw and how she related to the other guests of the Carrack Hotel where he and his family are vacationing. His own assessment of Millie Trent will change greatly over the course of the novel as he tries to learn the truth of how she came to be floating in the ocean.

The amateur sleuth can be handled in a variety of ways in a detective novel. The Golden Age gave us hundreds of egocentric amateurs eager to show off their arcane knowledge, dozens of geniuses both male and female ever willing to assist the police or go off on their own to uncover the truth of baffling murders. None of that rings true at all. Those detectives belong to a wholly fictional world. Hubbard eschews this type of character for one who is more grounded in reality. In one of Hubbard's few true detective novels Paul Mycroft becomes a detective ever so slowly, by accident even. He is a victim of his own curiosity and uncontrollable imagination.

High above them a tangle of green paths criss-crossed the broken slopes. Nothing moved on them, but Paul saw with his mind's eye a small figure, parti-coloured in two shades of blue, climbing eagerly while the last grains of sand ran out through the waist of the glass. Lord, lord, he thought, what a fearful way to fall. Then he thought, but it can't have been like that.

He's on holiday and his main concern is his family. But while entertaining them with boat tours, line fishing for mackerel, and a visit to an estate dating back to medieval times he finds his mind wandering. Those pictures of Millie painted by all her friends, acquaintances and husband, her horrible fall from a cliff, the oddness of her missing life jacket which she always wore when anywhere near the water, all of these thoughts and images cannot be dismissed from his mind. Paul is compelled to learn the truth of why she was on the cliffs, who she might have be traveling to meet in secret, and how she ended up dead in the ocean.

Even as early as this second novel Hubbard's talent for describing the landscape and geography is a highlight. He arouses so many moods in his sensual writing and the action is inextricably linked to the setting. The coastline with its ominous jagged rocks, the turbulent ocean, a hidden cave where the unexpectedly violent climax takes place -- each are characters in their own right. Comparisons to John Buchan and Robbert Louis Stevenson, both writers of adventure stories who knew their settings well and wrote of them with lush detail, are not at all exaggerated. Readers who enjoy their thrillers taking place in evocative settings will find much to admire and absorb in reading any Hubbard novel.

As for the human characters the focus is on the men, all of whom find themselves drawn to Millie in one way or another. Dawson is the drunken fantasist with a harridan for a wife who, when he isn't engaging in public marital spats, drowns his sorrows in whiskey at the hotel bar. Mike Cardew, the local Adonis fisherman, catches the eyes of every women from teenage Susan to Mary, Paul's wife, and seemed to have a relationship with Millie that to everyone seemed purely sexual but was much deeper. Major Trent, a colorless personality rendered all but invisible by his young wife's death is seen by Paul and Mary as "the hollow man." And then there's Bannerman, a "professional bachelor" whose wealth is his identity. Aloof yet affable, somewhat sinister in the way he is always smiling, Bannerman is like an anachronistic medieval landowner treating the townspeople as his serfs and vassals.

Millie is their femme fatale. But she is not at all like the temptresses of noir cinema and hard-boiled private eye novels. For one thing she has no ulterior motives in the friendships she develops with these men. Described as full of life, always beaming, always laughing joyfully, and radiating attraction in all its forms Millie is not out to use people. She genuinely wants to be with them whether in order to learn the fine art of sailing with Dawson or to bask in the male beauty of virile Cardew. Never really aware of her allure she managed to weave a spell over all these men like the mermaid that Paul and Mary jokingly call her. In one way or another each is responsible for Millie's death.

Copies of Picture of Millie are rather scarce in the used book market. There were no paperback reprints that I could find and only one printing of each hardcover edition in the UK and the US. The US version has the collectible Edward Gorey DJ as shown above. But have no fear -- once again Orion's vintage crime imprint The Murder Room has released the book in digital format. This time the book is available to everyone with no "country of residence restrictions" as with some of Joan Fleming's books. While not as violent or dark as Hubbard's more signature works like The Holm Oaks or A Hive of Glass as one of his few forays into a traditional detective novel (albeit one with some non traditional twists) Picture of Millie is definitely worth reading.

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Reading Challenge update: Silver Age card, space L6 - "Book involves a form of transportation"
Boats and sailing are prominent in the story.

Friday's Forgotten Books: A Hive of Glass - P.M. Hubbard

When does a hobby become an obsession? What events can tip the scales and cause a collecting mania to become a dangerous monomania? There is one book in the crime fiction world that is an intricate study of antique collecting gone maniacally wrong and it has haunted me ever since I first read it. That book is P.M. Hubbard's nasty and violent A Hive of Glass.

 I have read many of Hubbard's books, but this one really hit home with me. I confess that I'm a book collector of the maniac variety and I recognized much in the rabid thoughts and feelings expressed by the book's narrator. Thankfully, I have never resorted to theft or murder (nor do I ever plan to) in order to acquire an object that sets my eyes and heart ablaze with the collector's drooling need to possess. The same can not be said of Johnnie Slade, the protagonist in A Hive of Glass. He is the kind of collector you never want to encounter in your life.

Within the first few pages we know that Slade will pretty much stop at nothing to acquire his object of desire. His particular fancy is 18th century glass. He rhapsodizes about the fine work exhibited in this kind of glass in a near orgiastic paragraph in the first chapter. He cheats an ignorant junk dealer out of a particularly fine example and nearly clobbers the poor man on the head with a pewter mug when the dealer realizes he's been duped. Too late, though. Slade already paid for it and is out the door pursued by two young men the dealer enlists to try and retrieve his prize.

No sooner has Slade got this latest addition to his collection but he learns of the existence of a true treasure. An Italian tazza (kind of a cake stand) by a master craftsman of the 16th century. He gets the name and address of an old man who has vital information about where the tazza can be found. When he arrives at the old man's home, he finds a dead body. Has someone already committed murder in order to get the tazza? When he meets Claudia James at an auction house he gains a new obsession. It is a deadly combination of lust for the flesh and lust for glass that will lead Slade to ruin.

Italian tazza, circa 1550.  Collection: Victoria & Albert Museum

The Maltese Falcon touches on the same theme of lusting after a valuable treasure. But Hammett never gets into the psychology of collector mania. In Johnnie Slade Hubbard has created a borderline sociopath who confesses that his love for glass objects has utterly consumed him. At one point he realizes that although it seems he may never actually get his hands on the tazza or ever possess it he cannot allow anyone else to have it. Slade is sorely underestimated by his rivals also in pursuit of the tazza. It is to their dire misfortune that they do not sense Slade's envy and avarice are more than mere sins; they are his driving lifeforce.

Hubbard's later work increasingly emphasizes place in a way that makes his books very much modern Gothic novels in the true sense. Setting and place become whole entities, an additional character to some extent, imbuing the atmosphere with dread and sinister foreboding. There is only a faint hint of this Gothicism in A Hive of Glass and that is in the household of Claudia's Aunt Elizabeth and in some of the weird scenes that border on the supernatural.

Hubbard was a master at inserting bizarre sequences into his books that just like the old 18th and 19th century Gothic sensation novels shift the book into high gear shock mode. One such sequence follows a dinner date with Claudia where Slade accidentally hits a deer with his car. We know how he feels about death from a previous encounter:

I cannot stand dead and broken things. I do not know what started this, but it goes a back a long way. It is not quite the same as the fairly common thing about blood, though blood makes it worse. It is the deadness. It seems odd when I have a good deal of violence in me.

Slade is incapable of removing the deer from the road or even extricating it from his car. Claudia is left to clean up the mess and she proves to be something of a bloodthirsty Fury. In a bizarre, almost supernatural, moment a fierce and ravenous dog comes tearing out of the woods to claim the deer carcass. Claudia does battle with the dog using a piece of the deer's broken antler savagely bringing the dog's life to an early end. This is the woman Slade has fallen in love with. They will make quite a duo in the remainder of the book.

For its complex and fascinating character of Johnnie Slade, the equally intriguing supporting cast, the weird incidents and overall Gothic atmosphere you would be hard pressed to find a creepier thrilling read than A Hive of Glass. And if you're a collector at heart, I guarantee after reading this book you will do a little closer examination of your own lust of objects and do your best to keep it in check.

For more on P.M. Hubbard's life and work I strongly recommend this excellent article at Mystery*File.