Strong Poison Part III contains spoilers

Peter has only a month before the new law sessions when a new trial will happen... So he and his organisation have to work fast.  He and his friend Marjorie Phelps, an artist, conduct  researches in Bohemian London, to find out more about Philip Boyes.  He was the son of a clergyman with many respectable middle class relatives, such as his cousin Norman Urquhart... a solicitor who had offered him a home after he split up with Harriet.. but who was not willing to help him financially.  Peter attends a party in Bohemia where he talks to some of Philip's friends. 

 Peter manages to get one of the women who works for him into a post as legal clerk in Urquhart’s office.    He discovers that Philip had an elderly great aunt, a former actress who was very rich. And that she’s living in the country, a helpless invalid.  He sends Miss Climpson, his chief detective, to her home town to try and find a way of getting into her house.

In spite of the serious nature of the case, the book has a lot of comic bits and Miss Climpson’s befriending of the old lady’s nurse is very amusing.  She finds out that the woman believes in Spiritualism and uses this to find the woman’s will. 

 Miss Climpson is voluble and very religious but she quite enjoys using her wits to find out things, using deception and guile. She has to pretend to be a medium, and use an Ouija board.  Joan Murcheson, another of the detective ladies, uses her job in Urquhart’s office to find out more about him... and they realise that Norman Urquhart had a big motive to kill Phillip Boyes…

She finds Mrs Wrayburn's will in her house, and the nurse sends it to Norman Urquhart. Miss Climpson manages to take a quick look at the Will and finds that Mrs Wrayburn left a substantial sum to Philip Boyes, and the rest to Urquhart. However, it appears that Urquhart had been involved in playing the stock market to try to make money and he was using Mrs Wrayburn's money and he lost a lot of it.

The snag is that it seems that Norman shared Philip's last meal.. and ate the same food…. Peter gets Joan Murcheson to get into Mr Urquahart's office at night, and she finds a packet of white powder which when tested proves to be arsenic. Peter works out that Urquhart has lost most of Mrs Wrayburn's money through his unwise speculations, and if Mrs Wrayburn dies, and she is very old and ill, he will have to account to Philip, who has inherited most of the money, for what he has done when acting as Mrs Wrayburn's trustee. So he makes up his mind he has to kill Philip. Peter takes some time to think and read up on arsenic poisoning, to work out how it was done. Bunter has been going out with Hannah Westlock, Urquaharts maid, and learns that the meal was shared between the 2 cousins and that it was hedged about with precautions. Everything that was eaten was eaten by both of them. He learns however that its possible to build up a tolerance to aresnic by eating a little every day, and works out that Urquhart must have done this and so was able to eat an omelette which had been made with poisoned eggs and it caused Philip's death, but his cousin was all right. Peter puts forward this theory to Urquhart and startles him into a confession.. He tries to escape but Parker is in the flat and stops him... and charges are brought against him. Harriet is exonerated completely, but she finds that Peter, as soon as the verdict was given, has left the court and driven away. He does not want to pester her into marrying him by reminding her that he has saved her life.

Strong Poison part II

Peter visits Harriet to discuss her case and tells her that he has fallen in love with her.  She is at first not very happy about this, since she has found that her notoriety has brought her several proposals… and she is emotionally bruised by her experiences.  However she accepts that he has fallen in love with her..

Harriet has been living with Philip Boyes a Bohemian writer for a year or so; she is not really an unconventional woman; she hoped for marriage but when he told her that he didn’t believe in marriage, she accepted his proposal of living together. She is not entirely happy with the situation. She refuses to meet his family so as not to embarrass them. However in their circle of writers and artists love affairs and living together weren’t uncommon and were acceptable. 

We learn during the trial that Harriet however broke with Philip.. And her reason for doing so was that he had - after a year -offered to marry her legally.  She was angry, because she felt that he had been lying to her, testing her devotion by getting her to go against her own wishes and live with him.  She left him and he kept pursuing her, not understating that his behaviour had killed her affection for him.  She refuses to consider his repeated proposals.  Philip visits her to again discuss the issue.. And soon after this, he becomes very ill with gastritis and dies.   Eventually the death is investigated as suspicious and it  is proved that he was poisoned by arsenic.  Because of the quarrels between them, and because Harriet as a detective story writer had been researching a book on arsenic  poisoning, she was suspected and arrested.

During the trial, the judge seems hostile to Harriet, probably largely because of her having lived with Philip.

Peter however is a worldly young man who has had several relationships himself and comes from the aristocratic world. so he is tolerant of Harriet’s past affair….

Strong Poison By Dorothy L Sayers Part I

Strong Poison, published in 1930, has always been one of my favourite Lord Peter Wimsey novels.   When I first read it, as a teenager I was very taken with the liberated heroine Harriet Vane... who later becomes Peter’s wife.

 Harriet is an indepenedent woman, who went to Oxford and supports herself by writing detective fiction...  At the time, in the 1920s and 30s, there were many women writing detective stories.  Although there were also a lot of male writers, some of the biggest sellers in the genre were women... such as Agatha Christie, Sayers, and Margery Allingham. 

I like Sayers’ novels much more than Christies, although there are times when I find her a bit snobbish-… and nowadays I’m less fond of Harriet.  However there is no denying that Harriet is an interesting figure.  She has had a university education which was unusual for the time.  Sayers herself also went to Oxford... but at a time when the main career for an educated woman was teaching she disliked that job very much though she did work at it for a few years.  She then took the unusual step of becoming an advertising copy writer.  It was a new form of business and Sayers was lucky to get a start in it.  Advertising was very “wordy”, at the time, in the form of slogans and written in newspapers and posters... and she had a quick witty way with words. However after a few years of advertising, Sayers, who was writing in her spare time, was able to give up the job and become a full time writer of journalism and detective novels.  Later she moved on to more serious religious and dramatic works.

Harriet Vane resembles Sayers in respect of her being a detective story writer... and also in her love life.  The novel opens dramatically with her being tried for the murder of her ex-lover, a novelist called Philip Boyes... who has died from arsenic poisoning. 

Wimsey attends the trial, but believes that although the evidence points to Harriet, she cannot possibly be guilty. He falls in love with her and is determined to save her.  There is a “hung” jury, and Harriet is lucky enough to get a new trial... and Peter and his organisation of women detectives work to prove her innocence before she is tried again. 

Rough Music

Thiss is a  “band” story set in the US, in the late 1970s.   I enjoyed writing this as it is not a romantic love story and does not have a happy ending. It’s more of a work story, about music and the life of an up and coming band.  I love the old time country singers.  This is set a bit later.. when there were great performers like Johnny Cash, Hank WIlliams Junior, Glen Campbell and the like.  THey were hard workers and hard livers.. who often turned to drink and drugs when stressed out by long tours.   
Most of them had marital problems because of the substance abuse and the long separations and other women.    So my story is all about that sort of life…   

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton

Kitty Wells woman country singer

Kitty Wells was born in 1919, as Ellen Muriel Deason.  Most of the earlier country singers were born in the Southern states, but Kitty was unusual in that she was actually born in Nashville Tennessee…  Her father was a brakeman on the Tennessee railroad who also sang and played Guitar. And her mother sang Gospel.  Other members of her family were singers.

At the age of 18, she married Johnny Wright, who was a country singer.  He was part of a duo, Johnny and Jack.   Women were thought of then as “girl singers”, and not as serious performers or song writers.  Ellen adopted the stage name “Kitty Wells” and performed with her husband but was not taken very seriously.  She worked for several years until the early 50s and became depressed at the lack of attention and success.  She was considering retirement.   

However a music executive suggested that she record a song “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” which she said she thought of as “just another song”... She was depressed and disenchanted but agreed to do the recording.   It was an “answer song” to Hank Thompson’s cynical song “The Wild Side of Life” which blamed women for leading men astray and being unfaithful.  Thompson’s song was popular but it was highly critical of women. And it was probably inevitable that there would be some kind of response to it.

Kitty’s song was considered rather shocking - It  attacked men for leading women astray and said that for every “honky tonk angel” there was some man who had drawn her into that lifestyle...and one of the lines was “It’s a shame that the blame is on us women”.. It was an early feminist statement, in the conservative country genre.  Yet the song took off and was immensely successful. Audiences loved it.   Kitty proved that women singers could sell well and make a lot of money... and she was now a success.   Now she became the first female country singer to issue an LP, starting with 1956's Kitty Wells' Country Hit Parade.  She also wrote songs and showed that women could be taken seriously as country artistes.   She led the way for newer women singers, like Loretta Lynn who came along in the early 60s and who wrote songs based on her own life as a woman... mother and housewife.  Loretta’s songs were feminist, in that they were written from a woman’s point of view and showed that an ordinary woman at the time had a hard life but was often still feisty and tough... Loretta sang for the woman fighting to keep her marriage together, telling off her husband for drinking and fooling around but not having unrealistic ambitions that men would become angels or that she as a woman would have a career.....

In the 60s and 70s’s Kitty Wells continued to have a steady career and even had her own TV show... though it did not last long, compared with the shows by male stars like Porter Wagoner.  She and her husband had 3 children, who all worked in the music and acting business, and was happily married for over 70 years.  Bobby her only son was an actor and singer.  Kitty and Johnny went on touring until 2007, and then retired and she died a few months after him, at the age of 92.

Beds and Blue Jeans Story

Beds and Blue Jeans is set in present day America.   It is about a love affair between a young couple who drift into living together and having a baby.  Sam is a singer, Patti is a housewife.. and they have to learn to live together... 

http://www.amazon.com/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443265304&sr=8-2&keywords=nadine+sutton