My First Green Penguin Transcript

Green Penguin music

Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

I'm two years and twelve books into Green Penguin Book Club, my ongoing series within Shedunnit where I'm reading all the books in the Penguin Crime series in order and discussing each one with a different guest. I absolutely love doing it — it brings me into contact both with crime novels that were popular at the time of publication but which have faded from view now, and acknowledged classics that I can consider in a new light. The one overarching thing I've learned so far, aside from the fact that there is even by the 1930s there was more variety within crime fiction than I had ever dreamed of, is that people tend to have a quite a close and emotional connection to the original Penguin series. It's more than just a list of books. For lots of people it was their way into reading, or of discovering new authors, or of collecting rare titles. Over the course of this year, I've been asking all of my guests about their history with the series, and today you're going to hear what they had to say.

To begin with, cast your mind back to the first Green Penguin Book Club episode of the year, when Moira Redmond and I read a book that was completely unknown to both of us — The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes. That proved to be a surprisingly good read, avoiding most of our fears about anti-Semitic tropes and introducing an interesting medical mystery. As well as talking all about that, though, I got Moira to talk about her first contact with the Penguin extended universe, as it were, and it turns out, she was a very early adopter.

Moira: Well, I'm very proud of something, which is that there used to be, I don't think it exists anymore, but there was something called the Puffin Club, which was started in the mid sixties, I think, and I was a founder member of the Puffin Club.

And one thing that was wonderful about Puffins was that they thought they were bringing up readers. They weren't just out to make money, and so they would print anything they thought was good. They wouldn't print anything they thought was bad, but they also tried to make it fun. And the Puffin Club was just an amazing thing, especially it was aimed at people like me. I had a happy life, busy life, and had friends, but I didn't have friends who loved books the way I did. And so, I was such a keen member of the Puffin. I've still got all my Puffin club magazines. In fact, when they did an exhibition about the Puffin Club, for one of the anniversaries at the V&A, I lent them some of my stuff.

Caroline: Oh, wow.

Moira: And I'm going to say that I think probably the first Puffin book that I bought under my own steam was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I had read because I'd been, I think either in school or in, there was a passage from it in that we did in school. Like, you know, you did something for comprehension or you had to read something out, and I thought, oh that sounds good. And it is still to this day, and it's quite a few years later, it's still one of my favourite books. I love A Little Princess and I absolutely adore it, and I've still got my copy, which is falling apart and has inside it my Puffin Club book plate, which says, this book belongs to Moira Redmond.

So that's my original puffin And I loved puffins, I loved everything about it. I loved the way they organized it and the way they obviously liked kids who liked reading, and it was a really, really important part of my life.

Caroline: So what was involved in being in the Puffin club? What, what did you get?

Moira: You got full magazines a year, which were very brightly colored. Very sort of sixties. So sixties, and they were full of, competitions, puzzles and articles by your favourite writers, so they could obviously get all their writers to write little pieces for it. And I would be so excited when I knew the magazine was due and I can remember my mum meeting me at the door saying, it's here, it's here!

But that's how big a deal it was. They also actually, they have loads of competitions, which I entered all the time and never, ever, ever won anything at all, which now I think is a bit strange, although I think a lot of people were members. Famously, Emma Thompson was an early member and she won a prize for a poem, I think, early on.

And they also had meetups, but of course those were the days they were all in London. Nowadays they would make a huge effort, I'm sure. And Liverpool, where I grew up, would absolutely be somewhere they'd have had them, but they absolutely didn't have them.

They also had competitions that you could win to go on holiday with the Puffin Club and so you could go to a Swallows and Amazons holiday in the Lake District. There was a lot of sailing and that kind of thing. I never won any of those. I'm quite sure my parents wouldn't have allowed me to go. But that might be just as well because when they had this exhibition at the V&A, they had a party to begin with, a big sort of reunion of founder members and, the people who'd run it.

And I can remember chatting to the person there and she was saying, well, there was all this health and safety thing. We always got lots, you know, we sank a boat and were lost in the fog. And I was like, oh my goodness. It's awful when you think about it. But it was just such an adventurous thing to do, brave of them,. It must have cost them money. I remember I had to save up to renew my subscription every year and it was quite expensive. It was a big deal for me, but it came first. But even so, they can't have made money out of it. They just did it for the love of books and it sort of sunk away now.

I think that they carried on for a bit, but there was just something about it. I loved that feeling that I was one of these thousands and thousands. I can't guess how many actually, but there's thousands of children around the country all getting very excited and me doing my writing projects, which was to enter the competition, which I was not going to win. Not even highly commended, and I'm sure the prizes were five bob or a free book or something, but I would've loved to have won something.

Caroline: It's funny, isn't it? Because, yes, I'm sure you are absolutely right. And they probably lost money on it all the time from the beginning throughout, but it was a long term investment, wasn't it? Absolutely. In creating people who would buy books for the rest of their lives.

Moira: But you know what? I think fair play. I've probably paid them back. I've bought plenty of secondhand penguins, which doesn't help them, but I've put so many penguins and puffins in my life that probably it was a good investment.

And actually I showed the copies of the puffin post that I had to a friend who was in sort of children's publishing in America, and she was looking at it. She was saying, oh my goodness, why did they make it so high quality? I mean, that's what she said. If they were producing this in 66 or 67, you know, she was being very technical saying how many colors in the printing and said, oh my goodness, I can't believe there's so many color pages. I can't believe they've done that cover. They've obviously paid high rent illustrators. And so on. And she was saying, gosh, that's incredible. That's incredible. It must have cost them so much to produce this every three months. And members of staff, presumably somebody was on it full time. Oh, it was fun though.

Caroline: And I, I think also it just, as I've learned through doing this series, people do have this incredible affection for the Penguin series and its associated related ones, and I think part of it is in recognition of the fact that there was investment, there was care, there was love in it, you know?

Moira: Yes. On the back of Puffin Post, each month I think, or each quarter they would have pictures of forthcoming puffins that I'd be looking at them thinking, oh, how can I afford to buy this? Can I save up my pocket money for that one? Because they were a bit more expensive.

I do know this. There were Armada books. Now they had loads of Enid Blyton. They were, which I don't think Puffin would have had Enid Blyton. But the Armada books were two and six when I was growing up which will be 12 and a half pence now. And puffin ones tended to be three and six. So that's another 5p, about 17p.

This one was three and six, actually, they were a bit more expensive. They were a bit more of a save up thing or ask for as a present. They would also do things like if there was a puffin book was going to be on television or made into a film, they would go take photographs on the set and I would be envying all these child actors who, again, something I couldn't possibly have done any more than I could have sailed a boat. Unlike you, Caroline, it wouldn't have suited me. Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to be a child actor and appearing in, you know, a Leon Garfield book as it might be or something. It was a whole world, which is quite separate from my extremely ordinary, happy world and I loved it.

Caroline: What were a few other favourite titles apart from A Little Princess?

Moira: Well, they published a bunch of the Noel Streatfeild books which were always favourites. And so I've got quite a few of those: Ballet Shoes, Apple Bough, I think. There were other Frances Hodgson Burnett books, but I'm making them sound as though they're more old fashioned and they had quite modern ones.

They had, you know, books set sort of in contemporary times. I think they did Jennings and Darbishire as well, which was schoolboy stories. I really liked those. Oh, the Molesworth books. How To Be Topp, I loved those. Sometimes they used to sell them in our school library and you could bring in sort of six pence a week, I think, and work up to them. Yeah, so I've still got quite a few of them actually.

Caroline: Guy's a big fan of Molesworth, or was.

Moira: You take to Molesworth or you don't. I think some people just say, I don't understand. It's just bad spelling.

But, I met a friend's new boyfriend who became her husband and he quoted something from Molesworth and I knew immediately what it was and we kind of bonded. Yeah, you can have him. It's great. Mrs something's prize for Rafia work. Great feature. And also then there were the peacock books, which were what you would very much now call young adult books, which were aimed at slightly older children, which were tended to be very dramatic, romantic, not always a happy ending.

So there was Still She Wished For Company by Margaret Irwin, which was all these names. I haven't had to look that up which was kind of ghost story. Oh, I think Philippa Pierce, her books were always in puffins. Those are some very dramatic book about Marjorie something, the Vipers about, you know, medieval Italian things all very Rigoletto, so I really liked those too.

I suspect I Capture the Castle might have been a peacock at one time. I couldn't swear to that. But I like those 'cause they made me feel quite grown up. Those books that I was reading, these books for older children, so they did charm me.

Caroline: Yes. When I was a child, goosebumps sort of had that cache, because the library at my primary school, which was a small cupboard, had a shelf that only children who were 10 and older or something were allowed to look at, and that was just all goosebumps.

Moira: Right.

Caroline: It felt special.

Moira: Right. Yeah, I can read those. Yes.

Caroline: So the, yeah, I think there is definitely something to the sort of color coding or really formalizing, I think children like that sense of organization of I'm in this group and then I'll be in that group and so on.

Moira: Yes, yes. Because some adults don't like that. They think you shouldn't be categorizing. But I think to be fair, children love it. Children like the "I've moved up now I'm going up to gold books or whatever it might be." You don't want to be too confined by age suggested ages, but it can help a little bit.

Caroline: Hmm, yes. Well thank you very much for sharing your puffin experiences with me. It's delightful.

Next, in the company of Darryl Jones, we took a trip back to the very end of the nineteenth century, with the short story collection Raffles by E.W. Hornung, first published in 1898. For Darryl, the idea of a first penguin took him back to his student days.

Darryl: Oh my goodness. I think unknowingly I saw them as a student in secondhand bookshops in York, and I think the first time I saw them, it was in a secondhand bookshop where they had an enormous set, a shelf of sometimes very well loved ones, all kinds of ones, and I didn't really know what they were then.

This would've been back in the sort of, oh early to mid eighties. I wasn't quite sure what they were back then. I knew about orange spined penguins. I even knew about the pelicans with the pale blue spines. But these are new ones on me, so that was the first time I think I ever encountered them.

Caroline: We stayed in the pre-golden age, pre world war one era with the next title in the Green Penguin series, The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace, which was originally first published in 1905. The author and locked room mystery specialist Tom Meade joined me to discuss this one, and it turns out that he is quite an avid collector of Green Penguins. Or Penguin Greens, as he likes to call them.

Tom: Well, I have in recent years built up quite a lovely collection of Penguin Greens. I absolutely love them. I don't know what it is. I suppose it's there's a kind of nostalgia in just the very sight of them, you know, with that white stripe across the middle. When my granddad passed away, I inherited his collection of books, some of which were crime novels, not all. But he did have a few interesting titles. My first was Green for Danger by Christiana Brand, which I still think is one of the best of the golden age whodunnits.

And I think she is one of the true queens of crime, really very underrated in my opinion. As in, she's not held up in the esteem of an Agatha Christie. But I think she should be. I think she's superb. So yeah, that was my first penguin green, and since then I have been snapping them up whenever I spot them on the shelves in secondhand book places.

Caroline: Do you have a particular focus for your collection or are you just grabbing ones you like the look of?

Tom: Well, my particular area of interest is the locked room mystery. So the kind of very complex, convoluted puzzle plots appeal to me the most. I have most of John Dickson Carr in Penguin Greens.

I suppose my prized titles among the Carr collection would be the early Carter Dicksons. The Plague Court Murders, The Red Widow Murders and The White Priory. They are three of my favourites anyway. But they are particularly nice ones that I come back to a lot. And then I managed to track down a few rarer ones, from golden age authors recently. So, John Rhode is one who I've had trouble tracking down. But I got The House on Tollard Ridge last year in a lovely edition. And most recently The Dangerfield Talisman by J.J. Connington.

Caroline: That is a rare one.

Tom: Yes, I know. And they happened to have a copy at Scarthin books, which is in Cromford near me.

It's a beautiful secondhand book shop and it's in a lovely picturesque setting, so it's one of those places where you can spend a day really. But they recently got a sudden influx of penguin greens, so I've spent plenty of time sifting through and yeah, that was a hidden gem.

Caroline: it's always wonderful to connect with a fellow collector.

Who could follow Edgar Wallace? Well, John Ferguson had to, because his The Man in the Dark from 1928 was next on the list. Crime blogger Kate Jackson was my guest for this one, and she explained how, while she's not a dedicated collector, her heart lies elsewhere, the Green Penguin series was really helpful when she was first getting into discovering golden age detective fiction.

Kate: I think when I became interested in older crime fiction about over a decade ago, I think I became very quickly aware of the Green Penguin series simply through doing secondhand book hunting.

And I think I found them really useful because at that time I wasn't very familiar with lots of authors' names, but if I could see one of these green and white books on the shelf, I knew it had to be a classic crime novel of some sort. I'm not really sure which was my first Green penguin that I bought, but I suspect one of the early ones will have been for Michael Innes. An author who I've really tried to love, but I've sadly failed.

I think another early one was In Spite of Thunder by John Dickson Carr. Which, in hindsight was not a very good, you know, first novel experience for, for Carr. It was a little bit like being introduced to Christie through Postern to Fate, or Passenger to Frankfurt. So don't do it, folks. Just don't do it.

I don't go out of my way to specifically collect green penguins, but I think I'm more interested in who an author is. But sometimes the Green Penguin is the only way you're going to access a book. So I do have quite a few in my collection. I also have quite a few in my TBR pile.

So this year to try and tackle my TBR a little bit, I set myself the challenge of reading one Green Penguin a month. Which people can find out more about on my blog. I don't know if this is going to sound really controversial, but if I was going to sort of buy books purely on how they look. I would be more tempted by the Dell map-backs, I think. Because I really love the artwork on those.

Caroline: Yes. I think there, you're absolutely right. There is something very visually useful about the Penguin series. They just pop out at you when they're on the shelf, but they're not such beautiful objects. There are more interesting looking books, as you say.

For our next book, we had the ur-text for golden age detective fiction, Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley. I had my first double guest feature for this one, with Australian mystery podcasting duo Flex and Herds joining me to consider it. And their routes into the green penguin series more general threw up a couple of overlooked gems that deserve a little more attention. First, you're going to hear from Flex.

Flex: I think I've got the unscrupulous honour of starting with perhaps the most obvious one in the public eye, which is The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I know you've already covered at this point. It's the only one of the Green Penguin collection that I ever past tense owned a physical copy of in its green Penguin format, which I got from a bookshop in Leichhardt here in Sydney. Having been a massive fan of the David Suchet adaptation of that series, it was a bit of a breaking in point in many ways, but after that one, I honestly don't know because I've become a digital reader and so as I'll often recount with great complaints to my friends, as much as I love e-reading for its many benefits, my books change cover without me asking them to. So I have no idea who published it when it was published. It's just like, is this a first edition, a second edition? Have changes been made? Oh, the thrill of the chase.

Caroline: How about you, Herds?

Herds: For me, I believe it was Trent's Last Case. I'd have to do some more digging through the history of the show, but obviously on Death of the Reader we tried to cover a wide variety of stories and I had just come back from a little bit of a holiday and Flex said to me, we're covering all these more classic murder mysteries, why don't we have a look at Trent's Last Case as it is, you know, so widely regarded, and that was kind of my first introduction to the series, I guess.

Flex: I did want to shout though, herds one of your best picks from the series, which is Robert Van Gulik.

Herds: Oh yes, of course. We also have covered The Chinese Gold Murders, which is an excellent Chinese story. It's got a long, convoluted history, but essentially, I believe it was a Dutch diplomat discovered some old Chinese stories and decided to steal and localize them.

And what we've come up in is that  The Chinese Gold Murders, it's the second in a series of stories covering the life in times of a fictitious Chinese judge. Judge Dee I believe he is. And it's sort of part of the Chinese traditional magistrate murder mysteries where in the course of a magistrate's duties, the peasants and the commoners, they bring all these stories and these mysteries for the judge, the magistrate, to kind of sort through.

And it was a much more bureaucratic murder mystery than I think we were used to at the time. But it's a bit different from the classic murder mystery of the freelance detective, rather choosing someone who is definitively on the side of the law, let's say.

Caroline: Yeah. So that joined the Penguin series in the 1960s, I think.

I think those Robert van Gulik books are overlooked gems. I think they deserve more attention than they get these days.

Flex: They're just so silly. I absolutely love the way that, you know, whenever the plot is stalling, someone will just show up at court and be like, hello. I have for you the next beat of the story.

Herds: Yeah, it's really fun.

Caroline: And that brings us up to our most recent green penguin: The Rasp by Philip MacDonald from 1924, which since MacDonald was also very involved in the film industry offered an opportunity to dip a toe into cinema history as well as the murder mystery. My guest Sergio Angelini is an expert in both, and also brought an international perspective to the question of his first penguin.

Sergio, do you remember your first encounter with the Green Penguin series?

Sergio: I do. And the first one I ever read was, I think Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley. And I still have that on my shelf, and it's not necessarily the most representative of the Campion books, but I love Marjorie Allingham and uh, it's lovely to have it.

So that would be the first, I think the one that sort of turned my head around that changed my world as a reader, was probably The Big Sleep, which did a bit of research and it was number 652 and I think I read it when I was 13. And it was very much an experience for me of reading something and me thinking this isn't just something that I can read at my age. It's kind of aimed at slightly older readers, and I suppose I was old enough to be aware of that, you know, without it being not, oh, because it's spicy or something. But because of thinking it's the idea of subtext. There is more going on. And so I think deep down, that's a book that's just remained with me and that experience has remained with me.

And I have multiple editions. Not all of them penguins. One of my favourite is the pan editions from the late 1970s, which I love. I collected all of those, went out of my way to get those two because obviously the Penguin one, very straightforward, you know, lovely. But it's a book that seems to me that it was about serious themes, and I didn't think that when I had my first encounter with Agatha Christie, I didn't think that the first time I had my encounter even with Margery Allingham or Ian Fleming, those sort of early books that you read, I think, or at least that I did when I was a teenager growing up in the early 1980s.

But that book did. It's partly to do, I think, with the opening chapter and the closing paragraph, which is about what The Big Sleep is and what that means, which is very much about sort of death and regret and all these kind of important universal themes that you'll get to explore if you study literature later on in your life.

But at the time, it rang a chord and it stirred something within me, so that's the one that stuck with me. I have lots of others I could have chosen, but I suppose that would be the one that I would have to absolutely pinpoint. And that's just to do with my personal history.

Caroline: And do you have a Green Penguin collecting strategy? Are you trying to get a certain run of numbers? Do you just like to pick them up when you see them?

Sergio: I just pick them up when I see them. I'm not that kind of collector. Having just said that admittedly I did get all the Pan editions of the Chandler books and they never did Farewell, My Lovely, very irritating, just never got it, they didn't have the rights. It was with a different publisher, so they couldn't do it.

I've mostly avoided that. I think partly it's been a question of affordability as well, so I never really approached it that way. For me, I wanted to read the books. I absolutely want to keep them in as good condition as I possibly can. It's not that the idea of uniform editions doesn't appeal to me. It does. And so if I had a whole bunch of green penguins for, say, all my John Dickson Carrs or something, that would be marvelous. But my John Dickson Carrs are an absolute mess. One of the reasons I should explain, and again, personal history, is that I'm from Italy, my mum's English. Bilingual household, but I was brought up in Rome and I did most of my golden age of detection reading in Italian, in translation. So my shelves still have additions in both languages, so it's very hard to get any real uniformity. Although of course in Italy as we perhaps all know Italian mystery covers are yellow, which is why they're called gialli, or giallo, which is yellow and Italian.

So I suppose I have quite a lot of green and quite a lot of yellow on my shelves, so I've never pursued it that way. On the other hand, my goodness, you know, if you pass what looks like a really good condition penguin, even if you've got it. Very hard for me not to go ooh, I think I'll have that.

You know, that would be marvelous. You know, and I've got a few like that and I've got a few extra John Dickson Carrs, a few Margery Allinghams like that. I thought, oh yeah, I'll have that. I might not read it, but it'll be there on the shelf looking beautiful.

Caroline: Yeah, no, I'm the exact same. I'm a collector primarily for reading purposes, but they are just nice to have, and I do have a fair, standing arrangement with my husband and a few other friends who like to look through secondhand book shops like if you see a reasonably priced one, like under six pounds, just buy it for me. Doesn't matter what it is. I'll find a use for it.

Sergio: That sounds very sensible. I should totally do that.

Caroline: I hope you'll agree that it's been an incredible year of green penguin reading, and I'm really grateful to all my guests for joining me to discuss all of these books. My enthusiasm for the Green Penguin Book Club series is undimmed and I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into a really interesting mixture of titles over the next few months — we've got work from some of the all time greats of detective fiction, and authors I've never heard of before in my life. The first one we'll be tackling will be The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, so if you're reading along with me, make sure you pick that up in the next couple of weeks.

Thank you again for listening and supporting the show this year, and I'll be back with more Shedunnit very soon.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

You can find links to all the books and sources referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/myfirstgreenpenguin. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.