"The Case of the Late Pig," by Margery Allingham

Novel, 1937

Lively novel combining crime and mystery, with the familiar characters Campion and Lugg on the side of good, with an unfolding set of events and circumstances which lead to an ever-increasing sense of the inhuman and the grisly. The dead seem to come back to life, local police are found wanting in capability and there are other twists and turns en route. This is a light read mixing dappy behaviour with the macabre and jolly entertaining into the bargain. Nothing hugely compelling, but excellently diverting, all the same.

"I Live Under a Black Sun," by Edith Sitwell

Novel, 1937

Based on the lives and loves of Jonathan Swift, who is here painted as an arrogant consumer of the lives of the two women who love and who almost literally, bodily nourish him. While the novel occasionally judders along, and while it sometimes feels as if the reader is expected to know more about Swift than the layman might, this is a compelling tragedy, with some poetic description which is staggering in its beauty and evocation. A bit a mixed bag, overall, but largely effective in holding the reader's attentions and sympathies.