Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be hosting another edition of our Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Clubbers live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - that's 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European.
Monday was The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday. I thank all our First Day Founding Members who opted to re-up for an eighth season. We hope all our First Week members will wish to do likewise as the days roll on. Richard Palmer writes from Texas:
As a First Day member seven years ago, I am glad to renew. Fight the good fight.
Alysia Lucas was sufficiently unimpressed that she waited till the second day, but is still with us:
Can't believe I'm starting my eighth year!
Nancy Knowlton in Michigan adds:
Happy Birthday to The Mark Steyn Club! What a great place to be! I'm having trouble keeping up with all the great content. But I'll keep trying. I'm several episodes behind on the Tales, and now there's a Non-Stop Number Ones that I can't wait to listen to. Thank you for the download option so I can catch it when I'm not hooked up to Internet. I'd also like to mention again that SteynOnline is the BEST organized and MOST navigable website on the World Wide Web.
Thank you, Nancy. Notwithstanding a surfeit of birthday jubilations, here we go with Episode Nineteen of our current Tale for Our Time - Agatha Christie's second published novel The Secret Adversary. And that is the correct number: Episode Nineteen. Yesterday, for an hour or so, we accidentally published the wrong episode, but we corrected it and put Part Eighteen up. So, if today's headline and illustration seem familiar, that's because they were floating around for a while yesterday evening, but be assured: this is the right episode in the right order. Apologies for the confusion.
In tonight's episode Tommy and his new friend set about turning the tables on the coup plotters:
Before he had time to ask her anything more, she had flitted lightly down the ladder and was in the midst of the group with a loud cry:
"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?"
The German turned on her with an oath.
"Get out of this. Go to your room!"
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Nineteen of The Secret Adversary simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
You'll hear a reference in tonight's show to "an A.B.C. shop" [see above, with intriguing slogan re pound cake]. That's a reference to the Aerated Bread Company, whose tearooms were a familiar sight on British streets in the 1920s. The Aerated Bread Company was founded by a Scots medical student, John Dauglish, who disliked the bread available in nineteenth-century Edinburgh, and discovered that, by introducing (stand well back) carbon dioxide into the process, one could do away with human kneading of the dough.
The first ABC tearoom came along in 1864, and they played an important part in the movement for women's suffrage, being the first chain of cafés where a lady could eat without a male escort. At their height - circa this novel - there were some 400 ABC tearooms and shops in London: George Bernard Shaw frequented dozens of them, but George Orwell did not care for their ruthless uniformity, dismissing them as the "sinister strand in English catering, the relentless industrialisation that was overtaking it ... everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or is hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube." He did not live to see Taco Bell or Dunkin' Donuts.
The Aerated Bread Company was sold in the Fifties to Allied Bakeries, founded by my fellow Torontonian Garfield Weston. But I recall the big ABC bakery on the Regent's Canal in Camden Town as open for business as late as the 1980s. Today, ABC shops live on in innumerable classic novels, including Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, and of course The Secret Adversary.
We're now embarking on our eighth season of Tales for Our Time and have built up quite an archive. So, if you've a chum who's a fan of classic fiction in audio form, don't forget the perfect Christmas present: a Mark Steyn Club gift membership.
Please join me tomorrow both for Clubland Q&A and for Part Twenty of The Secret Adversary.
