Battered Penguins - Reading 2021 - Cork in the Doghouse and Cork in Bottle

I already wrote a post explaing how I acquired a set of books about the adventures of the insurance man Montague Cork. I realise now that I was lucky to get them while visiting a National Trust property. These days the powers that be at the National Trust would be so appalled by the books and the entirely traditional Britain they portray that they would need to organise a book burning, rather than palming them off on innocent members of the public for a song.

All of which is by way of saying that, like the first in the series that I read, these two volumes, are charming, very old-fashioned and slip down so easily that I've practically forgotten them. They are precisely the kind of thing I find very soothing to read, set entirely in middle-class Britain in the 1950s. While their stories involve crime and there is even some violence in their telling, they are closed worlds of calm where you know that sooner or later Mr Cork will smooth things over and bring order from what is in any case fairly minor chaos. Hastings is good at conjuring a scene and fairly bad at plot - one of the books relies on a secret underground tunnel which is really sub Enid Blyton level stuff. But I don't really care about the flaws of the books. I recognise that they are not masterpieces. Nevertheless, they both provided shelter from modernity for a couple of hours and I am grateful for that.