Battered Penguins - Cork on the Water by Macdonald Hastings

Visiting Petworth House last month, I found a box of books for sale for almost nothing. Most of them were worth less than nothing but there were four clad in the old green and white Penguin covers that designated mystery novels once upon a time. They were all by Macdonald Hastings who, according to the back covers of the books, was one of the founders of Country Life magazine and, at the time the books were published, married to Anne Scott-James, who was a familiar voice on radio in my childhood. He also, I later learned, was the father of Max Hastings, journalist, historian and hater of  Boris Johnson

This week I read the first of the four and enjoyed it very much. The Cork of the title is Montague Cork, general manager of the Anchor Accident Insurance Company in the City of London. Clearly, the phenomenon of insurance men investigating incidents that their companies might have to cough up for was well accepted in the early to mid twentieth century, as Ronald Knox also established a series of novels with a main character, Miles Bredon, who works for the Indescribable Insurance company as an investigator targeting fraud.

Unlike Bredon, who is an investigator first and foremost, Mr Cork is new to investigating and is more usually to be found in his office. However, his instinct, something that he believes is "the secret ... of such success that he had had, the success that the company had had", tells him that there is something odd about a particular claim and, as he explains to another character, although the amount involved is a drop in the ocean for his company, for the sake of integrity - "This great City of London you're in now has become what it is for many reasons, but the first of them is honest dealing. That is what we are so anxious to preserve." - he sets out to discover more. This leads to Richard Hannayesque adventures in Scotland and eventual resolution, followed by a treatise on salmon, for good measure.

If you enjoy wonderfully old-fashioned attitudes, good writing - I liked, for example: 1. the way a villain's change of expression is described thus: "the smile slowly smeared over his face again"; 2. the conjuring up of a certain kind of Highland hotel interior decoration, probably now extinct: "He opened the door and looked out into the hall, lined with stags' antlers, coloured fishing prints, and a collection of unspeakable brass pots arranged on carved teak furniture which Mr Mackenzie, or Mr Mackenzie's father, had brought back with him from India years before"; and 3. this description of landscape: "In the grey light of early morning, the flooded burns glittered like burnished copper. The fronds of bracken, lining the banks, were sticky and heavy with rain. The peat hags were swollen like leeches with blood-red water. The storm, drawing all the bright colours out of the hills, had washed the landscape till it was all drab sepias, live greens and the reds of rotting vegetation. The silver birches, fighting for a living among the outcrop rock, bent and creaked in the wind like rows of dead men on a gibbet" - then Cork on the Water may be for you. 

Although essentially a light read, the story does raise questions about vengeance and is also interesting on the effects of war on those who live through it. As Mr Cork points out to Robert, his young associate, the villain of the piece, Gabriel Daggers, has been produced by the experience of war. "Daggers, like you too, Robert, was one of the products of a world war", he tells Robert, adding, "In you, war confirmed your good qualities. In Daggers, it had the opposite effect. He found out that he was more courageous, more ruthless, more cunning in battle than the men around him. He rejoiced in the dangers of war and the lawlessness of it."

The book is also extremely vivid when it comes to accounts of fishing, demonstrating that the sport is not a dull one, even if, to an observer watching fishermen waiting patiently on a river bank, it may appear to be. As Mr Cork observes, "If I didn't get excited, I wouldn't come fishing". Reading Hastings's descriptions of the struggle between man and hooked fish, I couldn't help wondering, as I often have, why it is that so much fuss is made about fox hunting, but the suffering of fish at the hands of sportsmen seems to affect the tender-hearted much less severely. My theory is that it is because fish don't bleed.

Hastings conjures up a number of believable, if slightly caricatured, figures to people his tale. My favourite in many ways is the person with whom the book begins and ends, Lt-Col. Adrian de Crecy Johnson (Rtd). It is he who provides the book's Appendix, which contains a great deal of information about salmon and is delivered with hilarious bombast. "It is characteristic of the cult of the mediocre, which is such a regrettable feature of our times...", he insists, before going into some specifics about the study of fish scales. What I found particularly appealing in this section was the Lt-Col's characterisation of cabillaud, the damp, dull fish that seemed to be ubiquitous on the dinner tables of Belgium when I lived there.  Cabillaud, or cod is, he declares "almost inedible." I wholeheartedly agree.