More Crime 'Reviews' - Catherine Aird and Peter Swanson

 Catherine Aird - Past Tense

I think I said before that I'd taken a short break from reading Catherine Aird – not because the books aren't good, but because reading them one after another ‘glutted’ me of the characters and places. Anyway I've resumed now.

Aird (to use her professional name) had a long career as a writer, and it’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t change as I jump years, even decades, up and down in the series. My latest – Past Tense – was published in 2010.

Some things, of course, are eternal: Crosby and Dr Dabbe the pathologist still drive too fast, Leyes still does evening classes and imparts pearls of wisdom from them in his chats with Sloan,  Sloan bites his tongue when talking to his boss, is believably and actively happy in his married life and is still not entirely convinced young Crosby is the stuff detectives are made of. 

Meanwhile the outside world has moved on. Where an earlier book had the student sit ins of the 70s, 2010 is in that odd period where people had mobile phones but didn’t always switch them on or carry them (there are probably still people who do this but I don’t think I actually know any).

The story kicks off with the death (by natural causes) of an elderly lady in a very upmarket care home, and her niece-in-law being contacted as the nearest known relative, physically speaking (her husband being abroad for work). 

She’s never met the aunt, had no idea she was living so close, but gets on with organising and attending the funeral - and is surprised when another unknown relative turns up last minute for the service, claiming to be the woman’s grandson.

Meanwhile the care home is broken into, a vase smashed but nothing actually taken - and then a young woman drowns in the river and Dabbe is sure she was thrown rather than jumped…

All of which ties together nicely at the end when Sloan solves it in his usual smart but unflashy way. 

Peter Swanson – The Kind Worth Saving.

This is the third book I’ve read by Swanson I think – others were a novella and Rules for Perfect Murders. I realised quite early on that The Kind Worth Saving follows on from The Kind Worth Killing, which I haven’t read, but chugged ahead anyway. 

Saving works perfectly well without, but I should caution that if do as I did you will get spoilers. I might still read the first one though. Swanson is very readable, even in the heads of people who you wouldn’t necessarily want to be in.

In Saving we have two timelines – one in the third person, set years before when two teenagers conspired to kill a third, and the other in the ‘now’, written in the first person and seen through the eyes of Henry Kimball, former police officer and teacher.

Having had to leave both those jobs for different reasons (Kimball is a deeply flawed but fundamentally decent person, in the best noir tradition), and now working as a private investigator, he takes on the case when a former pupil of his contacts him because she thinks her husband is having an affair. She even thinks she knows who with.

After the case ends in tragedy though, Kimball starts to think he’s been set up. So naturally he starts digging into the past and very nearly gets himself killed...

E C R Lorac - Murder on a Monument

I need to start with my standard disclaimer for some of the Loracs: Murder on a Monument is not readily available, and I apologise in advance if you read this review, decide you want to read it yourself, and can’t get hold of a copy.  That said (spoilers) I wasn’t too struck with this one.

The story begins promisingly enough - siblings Nick and Jonet Airdrey are on their way into Rome on the bus from Ciampino Airport. We get some of the background quite early on – Jonet is 8 years older and worried about Nick but trying to be fairly ‘hands off’ as she’s convinced his overbearing uncle (they’re orphans) and horrible school are the reasons he’s a bit of a nervous case and got in with some dodgy friends who may or may not have fleeced him of his inheritance (i.e. did the business legitimately go bust, or did they take his capital under false pretences?).

Also on the bus with the Airdrey’s are an elderly lady and her niece, a couple of English businessmen who identify Jonet as secretary to a powerful business magnate and consider how they can somehow fall in with her for business reasons never fully explained, an American who may or may not be doing the same, a pair of missionaries and an Irishman who does so little up to the point he’s coshed and killed I genuinely forgot he’d ever existed.

Jonet and Nick find his body - next morning - on the simply enormous Vittorio Emanuele monument, a place Nick was recommending back on the bus not for its own sake but because you can see all Rome spread out before you from the top. Unfortunately as the brother and sister have taken different sets of steps up, not quite playing hide and seek but almost, Jonet cannot give her brother an alibi.

Add that to the fact the murdered man is identified as someone from that dodgy business he put money into, and that he’s so desperate to get away he tells a rather silly lie to he police, it all starts to look bad for Nick. Enter Jonet’s boss’s security officer (Belloni), who points out to police that there were other people around at the time, including one who left sharpish when the body was found. If Nick is a suspicious character, then so it he. 

At this point I had to look the Vittorio Emanuele monument up to work out how feasible the whole set up was. Despite having been to Rome at least three times, and the fact it’s not a thing anyone can feasibly not have noticed, it doesn’t seem to have made much impression on me. 

Frankly, having identified it, I don't mind the thing, but I can understand Lorac’s distaste for it (Nick’s verdict is that it’s a good thing to walk up to get a view of Rome, but not to actually look at, and the authorial voice clearly agrees) it's big and bombastic and neo-classical - which seems odd in a city with so many truly ancient things. 

Anyway, back to the story – Nick is arrested and Jonet is terribly worried, and so her employers involve not only Belloni but MacDonald, who is actually in Rome investigating a drug smuggling business, which of course it turns out might possibly be connected…

So the ingredients are good, but somehow it never came together for me. My first issue was with the endless slew of street names and place names we don’t really need to know, as if the book was written with one eye on a map of Rome. I felt a competent editor should have toned that down.

Then there’s Jonet. A minor quibble was that the name gave me problems - my eye kept catching on it as a typo for Janet or Jonette. A larger one is her internal monologue about Nick - although her thoughts make perfect sense they feel strangely superficial and lacking in emotion. There’s no anger at the overbearing uncle or the people who took advantage of her brother, no desire to protect him that is having to be resisted, no irritation with him she's having to tamp down. It seems unnatural.   

I was also a bit disbelieving that literally none of the Brits and Americans in the story feel any inclination to co-operate or tell the truth to the police.  This may have been an accurate reflection of the time for some people (another hangover from a war only 13 years in the past?), but surely not every single normally law-abiding person would take this attitude? 

No wonder the police are happy to have MacDonald and Belloni unofficially on board.  Off they dash on a jolly up into the Roman hills (which I recommend btw. The hills around Rome are lovely) to try and break some alibis, spilling out more place names as they go… and I was left wondering why MacDonald was there. He doesn’t really seem to do much Belloni couldn’t do by himself.

So one only for the completists I think. As I said at the beginning it’s not at all easy to get hold of (I used the British Library again).

Lions and Llamas and Dogs

 

York, 26th June 

Sheffield 28th June 

York 26th June

   Museum in Bourne Hall Park 

12th July

Bourne Hall Park, 

12th July

It has been, in case anyone has missed it, a warm few weeks in the UK (and hotter still in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal...). I'm generally alright in the heat, but I did pick a walk yesterday where I knew there would be plenty of trees - and I'm definitely stopping for cold drinks and crisps more than usual. 

So far the only thing the heat has actually deterred me from doing was walking round the whole of the city wall in York. It was so exposed, and so sunny, that I told myself I'll go back. 

Chelsea in Bloom

Got up early - well, early for the weekend - and went into town to see Chelsea in Bloom before it got too ridiculously busy.

 

BtLS has been in France

 

Attrition rate

Since I started the habit of putting books in the bookswap bag instead of on my shelves unless I'm really, really sure I want to read them again (I think my previous criteria was 'did I enjoy it?', which wasn't strong enough - the world is rich in books, there will always be something new to enjoy, and only very old favourites tend to get a re-read) I've found I have a bit more space on my shelves. There's still some double-shelving (books behind books) but it's manageable. 

I have roughly 600 physical books (and some ebooks, but I'm leaving those aside for now), of which I think about a half to a third are what I'd consider my 'core' library - books I wouldn't think of getting rid of. 

And it occurred to me that leaves only about 300-400 books that I haven't read still on my shelves - and that 400 books max is actually doable. I could make a commitment to only read my own books and at a rate of 80 books a year (roughly) I would get through the lot in five years. 

Only, now I'm coming to write it down, I'm wondering why I'm even considering this. Remembering the posts I made in January last year about how I'd got bored of tracking things and it was making stuff that should be enjoyable a chore, and went back to my very relaxed New Years Resolutions this year - 12 'things' fewer overall, lose a few pounds, finish the canal. 

Things are already shifting in the right direction. 15 books in and 24 out - an attrition rate of about 2.25 a month. Reading off the shelves I've enjoyed The Victorians by Jeremy Paxman and The End of Everything by Katie Mack, Levels of Life by Julian Barnes and Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. So all I need to do is keep doing what I'm doing, and I will get there in about 14 years or so - and really, why make a chore of it?

April Jumble

As usual I had plans for blog posts that never really got as far as an actual post, and now April has slipped by. 

I started the month in Bath, where I went for a short break at the end of March. The pictures I've taken make it look wetter than it actually was -  Bath is very lovely when the sun comes out and the bath stone glows gold, but despite trying, I didn't manage to capture those fleeting moments. 

I didn't go in the actual baths either as I've been there before, but I did visit a number of other attractions, and also popped into Persephone Books, mostly in search of a copy of Few Eggs and No Oranges which I borrowed from the library some years ago and wanted my own copy of. I also picked up a copy of Minnie's Room by Mollie Panter Downes, but although I enjoyed it I didn't think I'd read again and have dropped it at the bookswap. 

Bath has quite a few bookshops, and I also bought Brandy Sour, which I think I will read again - as well as having a beautiful cover, it packs a lot in a small space. 

Then later on in the month I read Sophie Kinsella's last book How Does it Feel? - also very slim - which is a fictionalised account of discovering she had a brain tumour and the confusion and treatment and ways she found to get through it. 

It's the first book of hers I've read through since Shopaholic, which mildly irritated me with it's excessively happy ending.  She's very funny in this book in describing how she started writing Shopaholic and the horror of one of her fans at a book signing when she threatens to write a book without a happy ending. 

She also, rather sweetly, tries to provide one here, but of course she can't.  

Between that and Julian Barnes' Levels of Life - which is about the death of his wife (as well as about hot air balloons), and Olivia Laing talking about Virginia Woolf's drowning in the Ouse, April could have been a gloomy month, but actually none of these are gloomy books. I'd recommend any of them. 

I'm still gradually walking the Grand Union Canal - I'm well within striking distance of London now, and have been taking in some lovely Cotswolds scenery, as well as more frequent villages and pubs. The next bit begins at Apsley, and perhaps takes me as far as the top of the Metropolitan line.