Exploring Geyser Hill in Yellowstone National Park

If you have only a day to go to Yellowstone National Park, you can spend your time totally in the car driving the Grand Loop Road and stopping briefly to take photos at the major features (and you will inevitably be stopped by the traffic jams every time someone spots a wild animal), and that could take you all day. The Grand Loop Road is 140 miles long in a sort of figure 8 shape. The speed limit is 45 miles per hour at the top speed places, but many places are 25 to 35 miles per hour, so if you stay in your car and never stop, you are still going to spend at least a half a day just driving. I would stop if I were you! There are such lovely things to see. Even then, stopping everywhere is not possible unless you have several days to spend.

We had just a day and a half early in September to spend in Yellowstone National Park. We had only about four hours the first day, so we decided to head straight to Old Faithful Inn, see Old Faithful, and then explore the many features on Geyser Hill behind it.

We came in from West Yellowstone, driving alongside the Madison River

At Madison Junction we turned south toward Old Faithful Inn

The canyons are immediately beautiful to see

The Gibbon River runs placidly through little valleys

Sometimes you can see herds of elk in the meadows

The Gibbon River has stretches of rapids too

Then you come to Lower Geyser Basin and start seeing thermal features

At Lower Geyser Basin, you should stop at the Fountain Paint Pot Trail,
where you can see boiling mud pots like chocolate sauce, lots of very
pretty hot pools and geysers. We stopped there last visit.

At Midway Geyser Basin are the must-see Excelsior Geyser and the
fantastic Grand Prismatic Spring as well as a couple of other pretty pools.

At Biscuit Basin in Upper Geyser Basin you can see the amazing Sapphire
Pool, Mustard Springs, Shell Geyser and Jewel Geyser. 

We were heading straight for Old Faithful and planned
to see other things the next day as time permitted.

Almost as soon as we arrived, Old Faithful was due to erupt.

Old Faithful erupts every 70 to 90 minutes.

After its eruption, we walked across the Firehole River to Geyser Hill.
This is looking back across Old Faithful and its steam toward Old Faithful Inn.

 On Geyser Hill, we came first to
Blue Star Spring, one of the hottest in the Park

Chinese Spring, which was used as a hot water source by an Asian family
that ran a laundry service in the early decades of the 20th century

Firehole River between Old Faithful and Geyser Hill

The bridge and boardwalks across the River
(no walking on plain ground around here)

Vault Geyser

Teakettle Spring, always boiling

Giantess Geyser

Pump Geyser

Sponge Geyser

Doublet Pool

Aurum Geyser

Beach Spring

Ear Spring

Lion Geyser Group against the low sun

North Goggles Spring

Goggles Spring

Heart Spring

View to the west from Geyser Hill

Depression Geyser

A bubbling pool next to Beehive that I forgot to get the name of!

Beehive Geyser with Old Faithful steaming in the background

Up comes Old Faithful again

Old Faithful, from Geyser Hill

Old Faithful can go as short as five minutes and as long as fifteen

Old Faithful is always impressive, every time

Old Faithful steam and the Inn behind

Old Faithful Inn

Not all the water is hot--as this bathing bird proves

All cleaned up?

Sunset as we drive toward the Madison Junction and West Yellowstone

Click here for the second post about this trip, and here for the third and final post.

Plain Vanilla—Really?

You have to like China Bayles mysteries and to have been following the series for some time to really like A Plain Vanilla Murder, I think. I did like it a lot, and yet, there are flaws that I think are serious. The most egregious to me is that I don’t think the author, Susan Wittig Albert, played fair in giving enough clues to allow the reader to spot the murderer until the climactic scene starting in the Birkett kitchen.

Don’t read any further if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to read spoilers. This essay is nothing but spoilers!

The most stylistically fatal flaw is the title. After the author spends a lot of time on vanilla, and on how it is anything but plain—she even begins her endnote with a protest against its being a synonym for “bland or generic or plain . . . [u]nflavored, drab, typical . . . [n]o flair, no style, no panache”—then she has the nerve to serve up a plain vanilla murder. It is a slice out of ordinary life, with ordinary policing, and the solution being a combination of luck, coincidence, and that plain, ordinary police work.

Here’s how it unfolds. The first clue comes with the prologue. The prologue is a little vignette of a graduate student trip to Mexico’s Veracruz area to study vanilla in its native habitat. The botany professor, Carl Fairlee, makes a bad decision to follow a laden vanilla-pod truck that is set upon by thieves in the mountains. Then he makes another bad decision to try a U-turn getaway from the robbers, and they shoot the van, killing one of the students. The first real clue is a seemingly random description of the student, Shelley Harmon, with her boy-cut brown hair.

In the next chapter, we might be supposed to match that clue to the seemingly random description of the nurse, Karen Taylor, sitting in China Bayles’s “Not Just Plain Vanilla” workshop, with her short brown hair. But what would make us do that? Is that reasonable at all? I don’t call that a fair clue. Nothing in what Ms Taylor says is a clue.

There is more, though, that maybe should get us thinking about people. Not a lot of people at the presentation get a description. In fact, only Mrs Birkett, the Crockett Street neighbor beside whom Ms Taylor was sitting, and Edith Barlow, an auburn-haired woman, are named. A grey-haired lady gets some mention, but she isn’t identified, even though she is obviously a Pecan Springs resident. Of course, China’s partner Ruby Wilcox is introduced in this scene, and so is an off-stage character, Maggie Walker, the owner of Sonora Garden Center, where apparently you can board your orchid between blooming times. Everybody’s hair gets special mention. I call that hiding the clue with a vengeance. Nothing distinguishes it as a clue, if it even is one.

China introduces the subject of the prologue, and that introduces both Carl Fairlee as her friend Maggie Walker’s ex-husband, and it also introduces the dead college student, Shelley Harmon, as a former part-time employee of China and Ruby. A clue appears in this section, where we’re told Shelley’s mother wanted to sue the professor and the university for wrongful death, but the statute of limitations passed without a lawsuit being filed.

We’re also told that the investigation results were kept secret. Well, that sounds like a definite clue. But it ends up being a side issue, in that it would have revealed, perhaps, that Fairlee had been having affairs with different students and the dead student was going to sue him for sexual harassment when she got home. But we don’t find that out for quite some time.

The police investigation gives the clue that Carl Fairlee has a brand-new lover, a mysterious older woman who drives a green VW bug. The police (and we) get nowhere with that clue until the climactic scene.

If you are a long-time fan of this series, you will have picked up on the clue of the ghost-rung bell in China’s shop ringing the significance to the solution of China going to Mrs Birkett’s house for breakfast. But again, this clue does not lead anywhere until China actually goes.

It is only when China is at Mrs Birkett’s for breakfast to hear about a problem with a renter, that Mrs Birkett reveals all she has seen, which means that the renter is Shelley’s mother, that she drives a green VW bug, and that she has kidnapped the young Fairlee daughter in revenge for her own daughter’s death. She has also murdered Carl Fairlee.

With the aid of hindsight, we might be able to see that all that solid police work put in by Chief Sheila Dawson and her lead detective Dylan Miller has revealed enough of how slimy Carl Fairlee was, especially with regard to pretty female students, that we might think the mother of the girl who was killed because of his bad decisions, learning more about him, decided not to file a mere lawsuit, but to do something more drastic. But remember, the investigation into the Mexican trip was sealed, so presumably she didn’t know. She certainly wouldn’t have had access to the police investigation. We are back to wondering how we were supposed to ever put together the clues to figure out it was Karen.

All that solid police work was useful for the one clue about Fairlee’s new lover and her car. Of course it also provided a series of red herring distractions:

• It looked as if Maggie Walker had an excellent motive and the temperament, until China spent more time with her and told us she wasn’t really the type after all.
• It looked as if it could have been the department secretary, Charlaine Rudolph, who had been Fairlee’s lover for awhile and was dumped in favor of a younger woman student, but she turns out to be an informer working with the news reporter Jessica Nelson.
• It looked as if the wimpy girlfriend, Jennifer Haley, had an excellent motive in being thrown over too, but she turned out to be definitely too wimpy. Besides, she was the one with the older-lover-and-VW-bug clue.
• It looked as if poor Logan Gardner, the research assistant to Fairlee, who both was cheated out of the plant patent and lost his fiancee to Fairlee, had excellent motives, had the means because he was licensed to carry a gun, and had the opportunity because he had the keys and worked in the greenhouse where the murder happened. But he didn’t do it.

The plain vanilla fact (the boring, bland, everyday aspect) is that most people who are cheated, lied to, betrayed, and otherwise mistreated by the slimy Carl Fairlees of this world do not resort to murder, and that is what this murder is supposed to show. I think.

The plain vanilla fact (also boring, bland, and everyday) is that police work often relies on coincidences (China being in the police chief’s confidence in order to learn what clues there are known, and China going to breakfast with the woman who can crack the case) to resolve otherwise unsolvable murders featuring a killer with an extremely tangential relationship to the deceased and no known connection in the present.

What readers of murder mysteries expect (the plain vanilla expectation, if you will) is that given such a set up, the author is supposed to play fair. We are supposed to be given just enough information about the past (which this has), and just enough information about the repercussions of the past (which this lacks), and just enough information about the unfolding of the present to have a chance to crack the case before the resolution. One page before the resolution is not playing fair.

How about, Ms Albert, instead of all that annoying repetition of the problems Chief Sheila Dawson has in being pregnant and working a murder case, which consists almost solely in having to find a toilet every hour, you could have written a half a page here and there from the murderer’s point of view, withholding, of course, her actual identity? You are definitely clever enough to do that without actually telling us, but giving us just enough that the clever readers could figure it out.

You kept telling us how extraordinary vanilla actually is. You could have written one of your extraordinary books to show us that there is nothing plain and ordinary about murder, nor should there ever be.

Vanilla bean orchid

(SecretGardenPlants of Marianna, Florida, on etsy.com)

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

I did not expect to like this book as much as this. Australia was not high on my list of interests, but I found myself impatient at any breaks in my reading and anxious to get back to see what else Bill Bryson discovered in his extensive travels around and reading about this incredible and underrated country. If only there were more books like this! I am studying Bryson’s bibliography and marking things in it to get at the library.

The major charm of this book consists first of Bryson’s unflagging enthusiasm for the country, and second of the unending amount of interesting things there are about Australia to learn. Then as always you have the Bryson wit and flair for style, which is always a pleasure to read.

I kept a map open to follow him on his journeys around Australia by car, train, and plane and learned the geography of the country pretty well. I bet I could draw the states and territories on a blank map now, as well as locate the principal cities, seas, bays and harbors, and the Great Barrier Reef with little trouble. For an American that’s a novelty. We aren’t taught much of anything about Australia except where it is and that it has ties with Great Britain. Even then, my background as an older adult gives me better information. I mean, at least I read A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute. Today’s American students are lucky to get anything at all, barring the odd mention in popular culture. In the 1980s, the Crocodile Dundee movies gave a tiny bit of information and a whole lot of stereotyping; a generation later Finding Nemo nodded to the Sydney Opera House and the Harbor Bridge, which we also saw if we watched the 2000 Olympics (I did). If you’re at all aware of what various other movies have had Aussie settings and actors, you might have learned a little more. But a very little.

Bryson gets you interested in the flora, the fauna, the geology, and the history. Not only do you get a great introduction to these subjects here, but it is all done as well as can be done by someone with complete enthusiasm for his subject, surely the best of all teaching methods. Even the negative things, such as all the deadly creatures, all the deadly plants, and all the deadly ways the land itself has of possibly disposing of you are rendered not so much scarifying as interesting. I mean, he successfully travels all around this country and has no close encounters of a scary kind, so presumably I could do that too!

The more serious negative aspect of Australia, its infamous history of the treatment of the native Australians, gets an honest look, though short compared to the rest. But Bryson’s way of looking at it gives emotional impact and clarity to the very complicated issue of racism that Australia has continued to work at rectifying in the twenty years since this book was written. It stays with you. You want to research more about it. Surely that is the mark of a successful book about a country I probably will never get to visit in person.

On an upbeat note, the appendix contains the essays Bryson wrote for the newspapers at the Sydney Summer Olympic Games in 2000. As the Games were considered to be successful with no then-known downsides (later on Sydney and Australia suffered economic losses from the Olympic venues themselves), the book ends with a clear feeling of triumph.

Short-Beaked Echidna in Canberra

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=418045

Where Was the Editor?

In Georgette Heyer’s 1937 mystery novel, They Found Him Dead, there’s a curious mix-up in the correct relationships between family members that appears within the first nine pages.

Silas Kane is having a 60th birthday party, and the guests are described by their relationship to him. He is the head of the business firm of Kane and Mansell, which was started the previous century by old Matthew Kane.

Old Matthew Kane founded the firm in the 1800s. He and his unnamed wife had four sons. The first was John, who married a woman named Emily Fricker. At the time of this story, John had died and Emily is an 80-something-year-old widow. Their only child Silas is the head of the firm.

The second son had only one child, now-39-year-old Clement, heir of Silas, and married to the shallow-minded gold-digging Rosemary.

The third son went to Australia and had just one son before dying; the son also died and left a daughter named Maud who married Edwin Leighton.

The fourth son, James, married a woman named Norma and produced a son, James (Jim), and then a daughter who died young. The elder James died at Gallipoli during the Great War, about 1915. Jim is in his late twenties or 30 and is single. He doesn’t work for the family firm; he works for the national Treasury.

This would all be fairly clear, if complicated, but it gets difficult to understand because the author identifies Jim Kane as the nephew of Silas, when he is actually a first cousin. She also says that Clement is a nephew of Silas Kane, and again, he is another first cousin. It is true that Silas’s mother, Emily, is the aunt of Clement and James. The erroneous relationships are repeated up until page 9, when suddenly they are all straightened out and thereafter all called “cousins” correctly.

When you are just getting into a mystery and know that you need to understand the family relationships because it’s a cozy, and everyone knows in cozies the first relationships mentioned are going to be vital, it’s pretty disconcerting to have the relationships change like this. Where was the editor? Probably someone who never heard the word “genealogy.”

For shame, Editor.

Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet

I just read a 1924 novel by Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet, and thought I would jot down my thoughts about this 95-year-old suspense novel. I have been reading mysteries written by the authors who gained fame in the British Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and although this does not actually qualify as it has no detective, it was a lot of fun to read. Beware, spoilers are throughout this piece, so if you want to read the book, quit reading this right now.

In this mystery, pretty, poor 20-year-old Chloe Dane works for a dressmaker and is given the ticket and dress to go to a society ball, where her mysterious old distant cousin Mitchell Dane observes her and approves of her appearance of good breeding. She accepts his invitation to Danesborough, the family seat, but declines to accept living there as his heir. She had lived there as a child when her grandfather owned it. Mitchell Dane shows her the safe he has had installed inside an old family heirloom, a Chinese lacquer black cabinet and teaches her how to open it and tells her he will send her the combination. Which he does.

Meanwhile, she has met Michael Foster, the chauffeur of a terrible old lady, a few times: first when she bicycles to Rambourne to a tea dance held by Monica Gresson, her old schoolfellow, and she stops to help the broken-down car occupant by taking a spoiled Pekinese to Rambourne in her bike basket. She likes the looks of that chauffeur. Second, when she goes to tea with her old schoolmistress, Miss Tankerville, he comes to tea too, and he is revealed as the son of a former pupil who married into minor aristocracy. Third, he waits for her to come out of work and they decide to go to the pictures with her roommate Rose and Rose’s fiance.

Two big clues are buried in these early chapters. First, Martin Fosseter dances with Chloe at the tea dance and thinks to himself that this is the Chloe Dane whom Mitchell Dane is going to come and look over. We should keep it in mind—that he knows and is familiar with the plans of Mitchell Dane—when Martin reappears near Danesborough. Second, after the tea at Miss Tankerville’s, Michael Foster writes to his mother and includes his business plans for putting his Uncle Horace’s money into the car business where he’s been acting as a chauffeur. These facts make it clear who is on whose side. But we lose track because of the complexity of the following events, and especially because the next night after work, in Michael’s place stands Mitchell Dane, and the juxtaposition of the two names in the same place sets up a mistaken impression. Furthering the mistaken impression is Chloe’s attraction to Martin at the ball and Martin’s seeming indifference, after his undeniable warmth at the tea dance.

When Mitchell Dane shows Chloe the black cabinet, he provides several more clues we need to keep in mind as Chloe does. He tells her the handling of his stock in trade is something he does not want to fall into any of his former business partners’ hands. He also says that his secretary, Mr. Wroughton, knows about the cabinet because he helped build it. He says that “Stran” is rendered harmless by the receipts in the safe. He warns Chloe not to trust anybody.

Two weeks after Chloe rejects Mitchell Dane’s offers and returns to working for Miss Allerdyce, Dane dies and leaves everything to her anyway. It’s November and she won’t turn 21 until February, so Dane’s solicitor and secretary assume responsibility for her. She has to live at Danesborough, and the oppressive atmosphere becomes overwhelming. She has discovered the contents of the black cabinet safe are heaps of compromising letters that Dane used for blackmail to build up his fortune of half a million pounds. She is horrified and seeks to destroy some of the letters. Wroughton seeks to block her and tries to get her to give him access to the safe. He and his wife and cronies tell her there’s a quarantine on the house, they send away all the cars and disconnect the telephone so she is a prisoner. Their Plan A is to marry her to Martin Fosseter and have him “persuade” her to give them the contents of the safe. Plan B is to have her committed to an asylum.

Chloe successfully empties the safe of the letters and hides them until she can escape the house with Martin Fosseter, whose role she doesn’t know yet, but as soon as they get to London she catches him trying to deceive her. She gives him the slip and hides with the niece of her old governess. Comic scenes and cat-and-mouse chases ensue, with Michael Foster turning up to rescue and hide Chloe at his old nanny’s place when the Baduns find her address. Chloe gives Michael the receipt for the suitcases and he destroys the letters. She loses her job and ends up marrying Michael for support, protection, and also because he loves her and she loves him. But in signing the marriage register, she finds out he’s actually “Michael Stranways Fosseter.” She thinks he must be the “Stran” that Mitchell Dane warned her was a devil, so she runs away and hides. She comes to her senses and goes back, asking for his side of the story, and they reconcile.

Stuff I wonder:

• Aren’t there a lot of important male characters with similar first names? Michael, Martin, Mitchell. It almost requires a chart. Hm.
• Classism is rampant in the society of the time. Chloe’s “breeding” tells, first in her overall appearance at the ball, and then in her speech and demeanor in applying as a charwoman, then in the ease of her changing jobs to that of a secretary. But would they really accept a charwoman who could speak like a lady? See My Fair Lady. See also note about Hiding Places, below. Everybody allows a “lady” to get away with anything in this world.
• The villains’ plans are unclear. Plan A (my name for it) is explicit, but suddenly Plan B pops out while Chloe is living at Danesborough, with no reason why it was going into effect and why Plan A was apparently being discarded, especially as Plan A seems to be in fine shape when Martin persuades Chloe to “escape” with him.
• How is it that Chloe mistakes Michael’s last name and not Martin’s? Where would she have seen Martin’s name written down? As far as we know, she is introduced to him, so she should have heard the same last name, “Foster,” at the tea dance as she hears the next day at Miss Tankerville’s when Michael comes and is introduced to her. Is this fair of the author to deceive us by writing one name with its correct spelling and the other name with its pronunciation?
• HOW do the villains find her address when she hides in London? Do we assume they spotted her and kept her under surveillance? Wasn’t that awfully lucky, to spot this one girl out of the whole of London and not have her spot them, and not tell the readers either? Is that fair??
• Same with Michael. What a convenient coincidence that he should spot her in London in time to come to her rescue!
• Also, how did they find out the compromising letters were in the two suitcases at Victoria Station’s Left Luggage? Hm, since Chloe escaped Danesborough and Martin helped her with a) two suitcases, and b) a cardboard clothes box, and she kept the clothes box with her, he could deduce she didn’t need the suitcases, ergo, they were Something Else.
• For a girl who knows “nobody” in London, doesn’t Chloe have a lot of hiding places? First the niece of her nanny or whoever-that-was who moved to Australia. Loved this comic relief. Then Michael turns up and can let her live in the flat of HIS old nanny. Here we see Old Nannies Provide Hiding Places. Finally, she throws herself on the mercy of the relative of the girl at the organization where she worked for a short time, and this relative takes her in without references or anything (see note about Classism above, also about Looks, below).
• Why does Chloe trust her intrinsic reactions to people—liking Michael Foster at first sight, disliking Mitchell Dane and Mr Wroughton—and so suddenly turning against her feelings about Michael? Okay, there’s some experience to justify her. At first she liked the doctor in the village near Danesborough, but then she finds out he’s one of the Bad’uns. At first she liked Martin Fosseter, but then she finds out he’s lied to her and she reacts immediately by suspecting him, rightly as it happens, of being a Bad’un too. So when she sees the fatal name “Stranways” on the register, she’s shocked into reacting without thinking, just as she did with Martin.
• Chloe certainly gets to trade on her looks a lot. She definitely has merit underneath, but still. People accept her at face value because she’s pretty and apparently can look sincere. She should have become a master criminal herself; she has the talent for it: acting ability, innocent looks, resourcefulness, quick thinking, and hubris. Yes, hubris. How else does she so self-justifyingly reject Michael and then come back and barely apologize and instead turn the scene into a pity party for her own broken heart?
• Yeah. That reconciliation scene. It could have been so much better had Chloe humbled herself to the point of accepting that she bore equal blame for breaking Michael’s heart first by rejecting him and running away, before she got her own heart broken when he rejected her apology. As it stands, he has to assume most of the responsibility for the situation, which I thought was really unfair when it was so obvious that Chloe owes him the effort of becoming more understanding.
• Feminism takes a hit when Chloe, after exhibiting exceptional brains in foiling and eluding the Bad’uns all that time, falls back on allowing herself to be rescued by the Man and Marriage. Just because she marries Michael, she’s not suddenly safe, except from having to marry Martin. The Bad’uns could still have kidnapped her and gotten her committed to an asylum under a false name and then faked her death, going to a lot of trouble before they discover the destruction of all the letters and before Michael could find her (doesn’t this now remind you of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White?) and come to the rescue. All she really has to do is to write a letter to Danesborough that the contents of the safe have been destroyed, and the persecution would all end. Then we could have had a feminist win if Chloe had chosen the Man and the Marriage at the end of her adventures, not for any other reason than her own happiness.
• How could this much happen and it’s STILL NOT February???

Georgette Heyer Rewrites the Story

My book club recently decided to read a Georgette Heyer novel, and I was the one who ended up choosing which one and hosting the discussion. I picked Regency Buck, because it is the only one of her long list of works that combines mystery elements with the Regency period that she became so well known for evoking in period romances. I found out that it was actually a rewrite of an earlier contemporary murder mystery that she had published in 1933, Why Shoot a Butler?, so I read that one and led the discussion using notes I took on reading the mystery and then rereading the romance novel. I wrote up a very rough essay out of my notes and am not going to polish it; here it is for the benefit of my friends who were not able to be there that night who wanted to know the stuff we discussed.


Georgette Heyer: Same Story, Changed Setting

In showing how Georgette Heyer rewrote her contemporary murder mystery Why Shoot A Butler? as a Regency-period romance with mystery and suspense elements, I’m assuming we all read Regency Buck and are pretty familiar with it, so I’ll go over the plot of Why Shoot a Butler? first in some detail.

Why Shoot A Butler?

1933, south of England, within reach of the Kentish coast.

When barrister Frank Amberley is enroute to his uncle and aunt’s home, Greythorne, he stops to help a woman standing beside a stopped car on a lonely foggy road. A man in the car is shot dead, she is holding a gun, but she says she didn’t do it. Frank drives on and reports it to the police, omitting any mention of the girl, and begins to solve the case.

Dawson, the corpse in the case, was the butler at Norton Manor, home of the late Jasper Fountain. Jasper Fountain had no direct heirs, only a nephew, Basil, whose half-sister Joan is engaged to marry Anthony Corkran, an old school-fellow of Frank. Basil and Joan have taken possession of Norton Manor. Unbeknownst to us is that Jasper had made a last-minute will bequeathing the manor to his grandchildren Shirley and Mark Fountain, children of his disinherited son who died a dissolute drunk in South Africa. Dawson the butler and Collins the valet witnessed the will. When Basil Fountain takes over the manor, the two servants begin to blackmail him because of the will, which they have stolen and torn in half, each keeping a half for security. But Collins shoots Dawson because he suspects the butler of softening towards Mark and Shirley, who are “hiding” under the surname Brown, and who have taken Ivy Cottage in the vicinity to see what they can possibly do to get their inheritance. Dawson made an assignation in the lane with one of the Browns (can’t remember which), and that’s why Shirley comes upon him already shot dead in his car.

There’s a fancy-dress ball at Norton Manor to celebrate Joan’s and Anthony’s engagement. Shirley dresses up and crashes the ball, looking for Dawson’s half of the will. Collins is also looking for it. Frank (the almost-omniscient investigator) sees an 18th-century portrait of an ancestor who looks like Shirley, and he guesses she’s family. He sees her and Collins trying to look in a tallboy and each thwarting the other. While they are both trying to keep the other away, Frank opens the tallboy and finds the half of the will hidden there by Dawson-the-dead-butler.

Mark goes to the manor late one night and threatens to shoot Collins, but he’s so drunk he doesn’t really know what he’s doing or why.

Frank guesses some more. Puts a tail on Mark Brown, but the police don’t think it’s vital, and Basil has the chance to push Mark in the river when he’s reeling home from the pub, drunk as usual. Collins was tailing Mark, trying to stop his damaging the situation further, and tries to save him from drowning, to no avail. Nobody saw Basil, but of course, Frank guesses that it was him.

Frank’s uncle Sir Humphrey Matthews, local Justice etc., goes to Norton Manor with his daughter Felicity and borrows an old book from the library. Basil pays no attention to his book treasures. This book is where Collins hid his half of the will though. Collins is frantic. Sir Humphrey and Felicity stop at the Inn where Shirley is staying after her brother’s death (she doesn’t want to stay alone in Ivy Cottage), and Sir Humphrey accidentally leaves the book there. She finds Collins’ half of the will in it but thinks it was Dawson’s, and she takes it. Sir Humphrey returns for the book and she’s all gracious about it.

Then Greythorne (Frank’s aunt & uncle’s place) is burgled twice, papers and books scattered. Frank guesses that the other half will has gone missing. He still has his half, which had been Dawson’s.

Collins thinks Shirley has Dawson’s half of the will and that the Matthews family have his half. Shirley thinks Collins still has his own half and that she has Dawson’s half, but she has Collins’s half which had been hidden in that book. Frank knows he has Dawson’s half, and he thinks the other half is still in Norton Manor.

Shirley makes an appointment to meet Collins, thinking she can get the missing half from him. Basil tracks her through the woods, trying to kill her. But Frank is also tracking her, and he’s put his own valet, Peterson, into Norton Manor as a butler named Baker, and Baker is trailing Basil everywhere while looking for the will in his off hours. Frank gets Shirley safely out of the wood.

Shirley posts her half of the will to Marion, Lady Matthews, who has seen her resemblance to the older members of the Fountain family, has guessed her relationship, and has guessed that something shady has happened about the inheritance and that’s why Basil and all those Norton Manor servants have been acting so oddly. (Frank and his aunt are really annoyingly omniscient.)

Finally Cousin Felicity remembers to tell Frank that the book had been out of Uncle Humphrey’s hands for ten minutes when he left it with Shirley, and Frank realizes Shirley has half the will and is in danger from Basil twice over, once for knowing about and possessing half the will, and once for being his uncle’s true heir. Nobody had been suspecting Basil because he loves to have company over and to entertain everybody with good food, drink, and all the comforts. He’s the perfect host. Frank suspects him anyway. Because Frank Knows Everything.

Basil kidnaps Shirley, ties her up and takes her to his cottage at Littlehaven on the coast. He has a motorboat that is reputedly powerful enough to cross the Channel to France, and Frank is afraid he’s either taking Shirley there to kill her, or he’ll throw her overboard enroute. Frank and Sergeant Gubbins go tearing after them down to Littlehaven to rescue Shirley. Basil hates confrontations and can’t watch someone suffer, so he’s apologized all over the place to her as he’s weighted and chained her to a little dinghy that he tows behind his big motorboat. He cuts the dinghy loose and it swamps, and Frank reaches it and cuts Shirley free just as she begins to sink.

Basil escapes back to Norton Manor, where he’s arrested. The police egos get in the way and they ignore the sergeant telling them they need to handcuff Basil, so they let him get something from his desk. It’s a gun that he shoots himself in the head with.

Shirley Fountain, sole heiress of Norton Manor, agrees to marry Frank Amberley. He’s arrogant, but he’s extremely clever and always right. She’s bull-headed, but she’s got intelligence and courage aplenty. They’ll make a good pair.

Georgette Heyer apparently knew this book wasn’t as strong as it could have been, and she set out to rewrite it, changing the setting to the Regency Period. By putting the central focus on the heroine, the story gains considerable strength and a much-needed balance between the hero and heroine as the elements of the mystery unfold. If you recently read the Regency romance, skip this summary and go to the bullet list below.

Regency Buck

Judith Taverner, a beautiful young heiress, travels from Yorkshire to London with her younger brother, Peregrine (Perry), to join high society. In a small town where they stop for the night, they meet two important characters without learning their names or relationships to themselves until later in London. One is their gentleman cousin Bernard Taverner, whose manners impress the siblings. The other is a rude gentleman who nearly runs them down at a precarious place on one of the roads outside the town. He treats them badly and insults Judith; they are shocked later to discover that he is their unwilling guardian, Julian, fifth Earl of Worth.

Judith soon becomes a sensation in London, with no less a celebrated personage than Beau Brummel teaching her how to be very popular. She gets many offers of marriage (including one from the Duke of Clarence). Worth does not permit her to marry any one. This initially makes Judith very angry, but she comes to appreciate it later. Cousin Bernard Taverner seems always so kind and attentive, though there is little love lost between him and Worth. Meanwhile Perry, who is handsome, has very little sense and too much money to spare, is always getting into trouble. He is challenged to a duel, gets held up, and nearly gets poisoned. Worth suspects that Bernard is the villain and he sends his brother, Captain the Hon. Charles Audley to watch over Perry. Meanwhile, Bernard tries to convince Judith that it is Worth who is the villain. In the end, Worth provokes Taverner into kidnapping Judith and trying to force her to marry him, and Worth of course rescues her and all ends happily, for the two of them and for Perry too.

Elements of Regency Buck and Why Shoot a Butler that are kept the same, or close:

• First meeting of the hero and heroine: a road accident.
• Romance: the hero falls in love with the heroine at first sight. She takes an instant dislike to him which has to be overcome.
• Rich old guy who has died, and who has a dodgy relative: Jasper Fountain and his dissolute son who died in South Africa. Sir Whatsit Taverner (Judith & Perry’s late father) and his brother the Admiral, Bernard’s father.
• Seemingly nice but homicidal other relative: Basil Fountain, Bernard Taverner.
• Heroine’s younger brother: Mark “Brown” Fountain; a drunk who gets murdered by his cousin. “Perry” Taverner, gambler, bad driver, 19-yr-old kid; gets provoked to fight by Farnaby, who, hired by Perry’s cousin Bernard, is supposed to kill him in a duel, but the duel is stopped because the provocation was done at a very public cock fight and Perry’s guardian finds out; then Perry gets shot at twice on the commons on the way home from another fight, but Worth’s bodyguard shoots back, as does Perry; then Perry gets poisoned by the anonymous gift of special snuff, but Worth suspects and replaces it with a harmless copy; finally a plot is made to knock Perry out and put him aboard a ship for the West Indies where he will never arrive, but Worth has his tiger tailing Bernard and makes Perry come to his house to sign papers but drugs his wine and bundles him off aboard his own yacht for a week; meanwhile, Worth drugs the groom Bernard had persuaded Perry to hire who was to have knocked Perry out, and the groom instead is bundled to the West Indies ship. Perry is saved. It really was a mistake in the first book to kill off the younger brother. I’m glad in the rewrite he gets a happy ending! (See final bullet point here for how this is taken care of.)
• Kidnapping the heroine: Basil takes Shirley to Littlehaven where he tries to drown her. Bernard takes Judith to a little house out in the country to force her to marry him. In each case, the hero is hard on their heels and saves her.
• Saving the heroine where she says “Thanks” in a way to make the hero realize he has a chance: Shirley, chained to the sinking dinghy when Frank gets to her and cuts her free, clings to him and says “Thanks!” Judith, compelled to go with the Prince Regent into a salon of the Pavilion alone where he tries to take advantage of her, faints and comes to with Worth bending over her, and she grips his hand and says (meaningfully) “Thanks!”
• Second set of young lovers as foils to the main pair: Anthony Corkran and Joan Fountain (she’s the younger sister of the villain). Perry Taverner and Harriet Fairford (he’s the younger brother of the heroine).

I found it interesting that Georgette Heyer used so many real people who appear as characters in Regency Buck. Here is a list of the most famous (not all the princes listed here appear in the novel, but they were so interesting that I had to include them all):

• Beau Brummel. Born about 1778, he joined the 10th Hussars regiment which was attached to the Prince of Wales, and it was extremely expensive. Clothes cost £52,000 in today’s money. He was extremely careful with his money, never gambling nor racing until he was older (and no longer in his right mind because of disease). Left the regiment. Fashion expert and companion of Prince Regent; in fact, he was able to continue to be fashionable even after falling out with the Prince. Began to gamble and had to flee to France where he died of syphilis in an insane asylum.
• George, Prince Regent. First son of King George III, b 1762. The King, suffering from porphyria, went mad for a short time 1788-89, and then went mad again in 1811 and did not recover. Both times Parliament appointed George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent. He did not take much of an active role in government, leaving most things to his ministers and to Parliament. He was a wastrel who had enormous debts in the 1790s that his father only agreed to clear if he would marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick. They married, produced a daughter the next year, and parted forever, hating each other. The prince had illegally married Maria Fitzherbert in the 1780s and had a son with her; he reportedly had illegitimate children with a number of mistresses. He was a glutton who was immensely fat; his corset was made for a waist of 50 in. He forced painters of his portraits to take most of his fat off. One odd thing about his appearance in this novel is that in May 1812, when he was supposed to be entertaining in the Pavilion, his Prime Minister was murdered and he had to be in London about the business of forming a new government and getting a new Prime Minister. His only legitimate child, his daughter Charlotte, died in childbirth in 1817. He became the King upon the death of George III in 1820. After Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, the race was on among his younger brothers to produce another legitimate heir to the throne.
• Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. Second son of King George III, b 1763. Career soldier, fought in a number of Napoleonic wars. Resigned as Commander-in-Chief of Army in 1809 because his mistress, Mary Ann Clarke, was supposed to be selling army commissions with his help. But she was working for someone else, it was found, and he was reappointed later. He was married to a German cousin, but they were unhappy together and lived apart. They had no children. He died before his elder brother.
• Prince William, Duke of Clarence. Third son of King George III, b 1765. Had a naval career in his youth and in 1811 was appointed Admiral of the Fleet, strictly an honorary position. Lived with Dorothea Bland “Mrs Jordan,” an actress, for 20 years, having ten children. The affair ended in 1811, reportedly because William was so in debt. He tried to marry Catherine Tylney-Long, but was unsuccessful. William then wed Princess Adelaide, a German princess who was half William’s age. Their two daughters died young, and Adelaide suffered a number of miscarriages. William became king after his brother George IV died. He had no children outlive him.
• Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. Fourth son of King George III, b 1767. Lived with mistresses until death of Princess Charlotte, and then he raced with his unmarried brothers to provide an heir to the throne. He married a German princess and produced Victoria in 1819, who would become Queen Victoria in 1837 when her uncle William died.
• Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Eighth child and fifth son of King George III. Had a military career. Did not have public love affairs; married his cousin Frederica and they were very happy together. Ascended the throne of Hanover upon death of King William IV (Victoria could not inherit because of her gender.)
• Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex. Ninth child and sixth son of King George III, b 1773. Married Lady Augusta Murray 1793 w/out king’s consent or knowledge; annulled. They had two children. Had at least one mistress, then after Lady Augusta died, he married again. Was Queen Victoria’s favorite uncle.
• Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge. Tenth child and seventh son of King George III, b 1774. Married a German princess in 1818 and produced a son and two daughters.