A tale of two pictures Part 1

 Caro Ramsay   Scotland  on a Friday

Pam Carter

1952 - 2022

I guess a tale of two pictures Part One is the tale of one picture.

A rather well known Scottish painting called Storm Over Rhum. ( Rhum is a very pretty island to look at, but rather wet, rainy and windy to be on.) Storm Over Rhum has had many prints made of it, all numbered and signed. They are quite valuable, and sadly more so, now that the artist Pam Carter has passed away.

Doing my job, lines of practitioner/ patient can become blurred. I think lockdown and covid obliterated them completely. So. as I think back,  it's hard to see exactly when my relationship with a very old lady, we'll call her Jo, changed. It was probably during covid, or maybe before that when she’d bring her tablet into work, or her phone, to ask for her technical help. Or maybe it was when she lost her last dog, and started to emotionally borrow mine, Mathilda The Staffie.

Jo's children live faraway, they checked in regularly.  But I had my eyes on her once a week.

Jo was one of a kind. 

It's difficult to sum her up but she was 92 and drove a blood red Fiesta, with all kinds of turbos and extra bits. It was fast.

She was a Guardian reader, (she admired Bernie Saunders). She was a graduate of Cambridge University, studying literature. She was born in Liverpool,  and was lucky enough to be tall and slim with  a face made for modelling.

Due to work, she and her husband, relocated up in Scotland, in a small village about 30 minutes drive from where we live. It’s on the other side of the brae, so driving over the hills in winter was …. challenging. Not the first time Alan had to drive out to get her, and let her drive back in his wake so to speak. Or when she was diverted and had no idea where she was going.

 

She had a great interest in literature. So we talked about about books, about the TV series based on those books and how bad they were. She was very into ' proper literature' . She tried to educate me. She failed.

Jo was great fan of Simon Brett and for her 90^th birthday I asked him to send her a wee message saying happy birthday. He wrote her a rondel. She answered with a  sonnet. Or vice versa. They both videoed their performances.

She treasured that little clip very much.

She was the type who quoted Shakespeare correctly. And corrected anybody who quoted him wrongly.

She was  always beautifully dressed, (her father had been a tailor). Always very strong on her opinions, supporting children's charities, donkey charities,  horse and charities.  But she could be brutal in her put down. Which was great fun if you weren’t on the receiving end of it. She had a 'look' that could kill a lesser being at 50 paces. I  think most teachers have a  'look' they can weaponise.

And she loved dogs. In the small clinic I run from the house, the resident dog is often in the waiting room, cadging treats. Two patients just turn up to see the dog, not for any treatment.

There was a weird relationship between Jo and Matilda. Jo being a strict teacher would tell Mathilda to to sit in no uncertain terms, the dog gets a treat. Down gets a treat. Stand gets a treats. 

After doing that twice, Mathilda would run them together as a sequence and ask for 4 treats,

Jo would lecture her that she had to do each one WHEN SHE WAS TOLD.

Mathilda would point out that Staffies DO NOT do things when they are told, they sort of do things when it suits them. Vaguely.  This interplay went on for ten years or more, much to the amusement of others in the waiting room. I’m sure that all parties knew the game that was being played. It became a battle of wills.  The treats became  of higher value, as the sequence became more complex.

At the end of the day, I'm still unsure who was winning, but I suspect it was the dog.

Jo and her hubby  collected art, proper art. And jewellery. And Persian rugs that she hung on the wall. She’d say things about the weave and the weft. I'd say what happens if the dogs peed on it, and why have carpet on the wall?

Two months ago, we came home from holiday and Jo had sent me a text message that was a little odd. Some thing was not right.

We contacted her neighbours. Jo had had a fall.

She passed away a few days later.

Her two children wanted me to have something from the house as a memento.  And that was hard as she was quite posh. I had no idea, so I left it to them. They sent me pictures of a few things- a  few Persian rugs, a few vases, some jewellery.... what did I want?

I couldn't decide.

On Sunday,  Jo's son came by the clinic with two pictures, both Pam Carters, for me for choose between. I had seen them both on the WhatsApp, on a small photo.  

They were huge.

I let her son decide which one to give me.

He gave me the bigger one  Storm Over Rhum.

It was only when he left we discovered that it was an original.

THE original.....

It's now probably the most valuable thing I own that's not bricks and mortar.

We needed to get it valued as  it will need to be named on the house insurance.

I had no idea how to do that, so I sent an email to the person who looked after Pam’s work. She emailed me straight back. Turns out she was Pam's lifetime partner and she said that she was so glad the work had been given to me, and that I should enjoy it. It was one of Pam's favourites, one that was reprinted many times.  She pointed me in the direction of a valuation expert.  And I have to let her know what happens next.

  

So,  then I got on to the big art auctioneer in Glasgow. I sent them an email. I think I had barely pressed send  when they phoned me.

Are you sure it's original? 

Do you have Provenance? Do you want to sell it? Oh that was one of her biggest paintings. He sounded quite ( very!!)  excited.

 

A following email told me they sell more Pam Carters than all the other auction houses and galleries in  the UK put together.

More about Pam next week, she’s an interesting lady (born in Tanganyika in 1952 to an Austrian mother and a Scottish father.)

Meanwhile? The painting?

 

It’s covered in towels, leaning against the wall in an upstairs bedroom, with the door closed so no four legged interested parties can gain entry.

Do you want to see it?

Well, here it is; Storm over Rhum. The canvas is  over a metre wide,  half a metre tall.

I think it needs to be admired. Once I get the details of value and insurance, I might ask a public gallery if they want it on loan for a while.

Caro

 

Introduction & How I Ended Up in 1870s London

Karen Odden - alternate Thursdays 

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a Left Coast Crime panel in Tucson comprised of four very talented authors, including the prolific, award-recognized Karen Odden. 

 

Karen is the author of multiple works that take her readers on a first-person 5-senses journey through Victorian London and the mores of its different classes. I think it’s fair to say Karen has been immersed in all things Victorian for most of her adult life. She’s taught about it, written about it, edited about it, and sets her acclaimed Scotland Yard Inspector Michael Corravan series in 1870s London, where she deftly weaves in sharply divisive prejudices, deeply traumatic national tragedies, and the ruthless domestic politics of Britain on the world stage.

 

I’m honored to announce that Karen is bringing her prodigious talent to Murder is Everywhere as our newest team member. What follows is her debut post, which I assure you will have you yearning for more. 

 

Welcome, Karen.

 

––Jeff

First off, thank you to all the MIE folks for asking me to join. I’m delighted to be blogging with some longtime friends in the mystery world! 

By way of introduction -- I was born and raised in Rochester, NY and after graduating college, I bounced around to Ann Arbor, San Diego, Providence, New York City, Milwaukee, and various spots in Connecticut before finally landing in Arizona, where my husband and I raised two kids and adopted a very winning beagle named Rosy, who sat in my office chair and kept me company for years. She passed away, and we all still miss her.

I’ve set all my novels, and most of my short stories, in 1870s London. It’s my zone, my happy place, smelly and dank and foggy as it is. (Here’s a particularly appealing illustration of the Thames, during the Great Stink, summer 1858.) 

My fascination with the period began in graduate school, in the 1990s, at New York University. My first semester there, I took a course called "The Dead Mother," with Professor Carolyn Dever. She was curious about why there are so many orphans in Victorian novels – Jane Eyre, Pip, Oliver, Daniel Deronda, Heathcliff, etc. One of the insights I took away from that class was how a literary trope (the orphan) gestured toward a real socio-economic phenomenon, namely a significant shift. In the 18th century, your social and economic standing was determined by that of your parents; if your family was working class, you were too. However, in the 19th century, with the new opportunities that came with industrialization, men (and a few women, but mostly men) had the opportunity to bootstrap themselves to a different socio-economic standing. Victorians wholeheartedly embraced the idea of “Self-Help,” espoused by Samuel Smiles in his wildly popular book by that name. The parentless orphans in fiction marked the Victorians' evolving, uneasy belief that they were free to define themselves, apart from their parents, and to determine their own place in the world. Observing this link between literature and history sparked something in my brain. 

When it came to writing my dissertation, I became fascinated with another historical phenomenon – railway disasters. With virtually no safety devices, railway crashes occurred frequently – but nowhere near the rate at which people wrote about them. There were thousands of works written about railway crashes and the subsequent injuries they caused – in newspaper articles, medical journals, parliamentary reports, novels, poems, musical hall songs, pamphlets, cartoons (such as Cruikshank's alarming rendering, here), and so on. In many ways, representations of railway crashes became a trope for the new, modern chaos and the dangers of the newly industrial world.  

One of the most famous accounts of a railway disaster was penned by Charles Dickens, who survived a railway crash at Staplehurst, in Kent, in 1865. He crawled out, dragging his mistress Ellen Ternan (a pretty young actress) after him, and helped minister to other victims (photo). He returned home to London and went to bed, but in the morning when he woke, his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t write his name. Over the years he developed tremors, high blood pressure, and nightmares that were so terrifying he would often fall asleep at his desk rather than go to bed. We’d probably call this PTSD; some of the medical men who were confronting this bizarre array of symptoms came to call it “railway spine.” (Note: Dickens never fully recovered, and he died five years to the day after the crash.) 

My dissertation traced the way these thousands of written works formed a linguistic web of words, phrases, and concepts that eventually underpinned ideas about hysteria (for Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in 1890s), shell-shock (for WWI physicians), and our current ideas about trauma and PTSD. After graduating NYU, I continued writing for academic journals, edited for the journal Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP), and taught literature at UW-Milwaukee. But with two small children at home, I eventually opted out of academia … and decided to try my hand at a novel. 

But what could I write about that hadn’t been done a million times already? 

Well, I knew a lot about 19th-century British railways. (#trainnerd) 

I plundered my dissertation for my first book, A Lady in the Smoke. It’s about a young woman, Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who, after an unsuccessful London Season, gets on a railway train with her laudanum-addicted mother. The train runs off the rails, the result of sabotage by a corrupt railway magnate who is manipulating stock prices for his own gain. And so I remained camped out in 1870s London for my second book … and my third and fourth and fifth. 

My sixth book, AN ARTFUL DODGE (Soho, June 2026) is about a  jewel heist and an all-women thieving gang operating out of Elephant & Castle, in 1879 Southwark, based on true history. Fun fact: women thieves often had special pockets that extended the length of their crinolines. Stay tuned for thieving tips... 

Saint or Slayer? The Two Faces of Santiago in Oviedo

Kwei--Wed

I’ve been settling into living in Oviedo, Spain, but not all of it has been easy, to say the least--hence my long absence. One outstanding issue is that I don’t yet have WiFi (don’t ask — it’s a Spanish bureaucracy thing), so loading photos and other content takes a while using data, and it seems worse here on this platform than on Wix, where I post my blogs. For now, if you’ll forgive me, please click on the link (or copy and paste?) to access my latest update.

https://bit.ly/saintorslayer