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. 

Happy New Year 2026

I'm having a quiet New Year, having been staying in two other people's houses over the festive period up until yesterday. 

Which gives me plenty of time to get this post into shape before I relax with a glass of something celebratory. 

Like this gin, ginger ale and lime juice I had in August

Or this Harvey Wallbanger from January 2025

It's been quite a good year for walks.  

a long trek up the Phoenician steps in Capri

and up Vesuvius

and down the valley and up the other side in Matera

As well as places nearer home like Oxford and Brighton and Sheffield and my ongoing project to complete the Grand Union Canal, and of course London:

Its not been a bad year for books either. I gave C P Snow a whirl for the first and second time, read a Nina Bawden for the first time since I don't know how long (I read a lot of her as a child but never really got into her books for adults), read four books in translation and got seriously stuck into books by Catherine Aird, George Bellairs and of course E C R Lorac

Full list pasted below:

Black Beadle - E C R Lorac

The Affair in Thor's Head - E C R Lorac

The Long Shadow - Celia Fremlin

Army Without Banners - Ann Stafford

The Religious Body - Catherine Aird

The Captain of the Pole Star - Arthur Conan Doyle

Passing Strange - Catherine Aird

Parting Breath - Catherine Aird

Murder as a Fine Art - Carol Carnac

After Effects - Catherine Aird

A Going Concern - Catherine Aird

A Dead Liberty - Catherine Aird

Henrietta Who? - Catherine Aird

A Late Phoenix - Catherine Aird

Wild Chamber - Christopher Fowler

Guilty by Definition - Susie Dent

The Stately Home Murder - Catherine Aird

Some Die Eloquent - Catherine Aird

Talking to my Daughter about the Economy - Yanis Varoufakis

Slight Mourning - Catherine Aird

The Last Devil to Die - Richard Osman

Murder is Easy - Agatha Christie

Deadly Duo - Margery Allingham

We Solve Murders - Richard Osman

City Adrift - Naresh Fernandes

The Point of Distraction - Will Eaves

Scandalise my Name - Fiona Sinclair

Not to be Taken - Anthony Berkeley

Jumping Jenny = Anthony Berkeley

Leaving Beirut - Mai Ghoussoub

Underground, Overground - Andrew Martin

Cat and Mouse - Christianna Brand

Learning to Talk - Hilary Mantel

Ghost Cat - Beverley Butler

The Last Children of Tokyo - Yoko Tawada

Death Under Sail - C P Snow

Duplicate Death - Georgette Heyer

Black Plumes - Margery Allingham

Murder Makes Mistakes - George Bellairs

Death in the Fearful Night - George Bellairs

Death on a Dark Sea - R A Bentley

The House of Silence - E Nesbit

Excellent intentions - Richard Hull

Death of a Tin God - George Bellairs

A Strange Manor of Death - R A Bentley

Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie

What Katy Did Next - Susan Coolidge

Clover - Susan Coolidge

In the High Valley - Susan Coolidge

The Greenwell Mystery - E C R Lorac

The House of Footsteps - Mathew West

Unnatural Causes - Richard Shepherd

Stone and Sky - Ben Aaronovitch

Colonel Marchand - E C R Lorac

The Perfect Alibi - Christopher St John Sprigg

A Flat Place - Noreen Masud

Death in Room Five - George Bellairs

Lonelyheart 4122 - Colin Watson

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

A Legal Fiction - Elizabeth Ferrars

Murder in the Basement - Anthony Berkeley

The Mystery of Henri Pick - David Foenkinos

Death Stops the Frolic - George Bellairs

How to Stop Spending Money Your Don't Have on Clothes You Don't Wear - Jodie Gillarty

How to Save Money - Ann Russell

How to Clean Everything - Ann Russell

The Library of Unrequited Love - Sophie Divry

Hybrid Humans - Harry Parker

W is for Wasted - Sue Grafton

Smoke Without Fire - E X Ferrars

Insomniac City - Bill Hayes

Family Money - Nina Bawden

Crime in Kensington - Christopher St John Sprigg

Fatality in Fleet Street - Christopher St John Sprigg

The Gentleman in the Parlour - W Somerset Maugham

Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie

Homecomings -  C P Snow

A predominance of crime fiction as always (50 out of 77 books), 14 non-fiction books. Approximately two thirds women authors. Stand out books for me were both non-fiction: Noreen Masud's A Flat Place and Bill Hayes' Insomniac City. 

So on to 2026. My only resolutions are to declutter 12 more things than I bring into the place (this sounds a doddle, but in my experience is harder than you'd think. We seem programmed, both individually and collectively, for accumulation) and end 2026 at least a few pounds lighter than I am now. No unrealistic goals, or absurd regimes, just a bit of running and fewer fried potato products. 

So Happy New Year all. See you in 2026

 

Happy New Year 2025

As usual, here is a round up of the books I read this year. I did slightly lose track in November, but I think I've got them all.

Accident by Design - E C R Lorac

There's a Porpoise Close Behind Us - Noel Langley

We Had to Take Down This Post - Hanna Bervoets

Murder in Vienna - E C R Lorac

Marple - Various

The Green Mirror - Hugh Walpole

No Time Like the Future - Michael J Fox

Death Came Softly - E C R Lorac

A Time in Rome - Elizabeth Bowen

Around the World in 80 Trains - Monisha Rajesh

Spoon Fed - Tim Spector

Shroud of Darkness - E C R Lorac

Ropes End, Rogues End - E C R Lorac

The Moon and Sixpence - W S Maugham

The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey

No Signposts in the Sea - Vita Sackville West

A House Unlocked - Penelope Lively

The Last Escape - E C R Lorac

London Particular - Christianna Brand

Shroud for a Nightingale - P D James

The Christmas Guest - Peter Swanson

Letters of Travel - Rudyard Kipling

Bandits in a Landscape - William Gaunt

Last Will and Testament - Elizabeth Ferrars

Frog in the Throat - Elizabeth Ferrars

Beware of the Dog - Elizabeth Ferrars

Witness Before the Fact - Elizabeth Ferrars

Skeleton Staff - Elizabeth Ferrars

Death Mask - Ellis Peters

The Sentimental Novelist -  Ophan Pamuk

The Death of Mr Dodsley - John Ferguson

Thinner than Water - E X Ferrars

No Rest for the Wicked - E X Ferrars

The Killing Pool - Ross MacDonald

Less - Patrick Grant

Case in the Clinic - E C R  Lorac

The Arvon Book of Crime Writing - Various

The Island of Sheep - John Buchan

Strange Waters - Jackie Taylor

A Breeze of Morning - Charles Morgan

Space Invaders - Nina Fernandez

The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman

Pure Joy - Danielle Steel

A Spot of Folly - Ruth Rendell

Fly Country - Anthony Lang

Full Dark House - Christopher Fowler

Banking on Death - Emma Lathem

Marple - Anne Hart

Death in Fancy Dress - Anthony Gilbert

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio - Amara Lakhous

The Small World of Murder - Elizabeth Ferrars

The Bother At the Barbican - Guy Cullingford

N is for Noose - Sue Grafton

L'art de la Simplicite - Dominique Loreau

Phantoms on the Bookshelves - Jacques Bonnet

Other People's Shoes - Harriet Walter

Alive, Alive Oh - Diana Athill

Towards Zero - Agatha Christie

Death Goes on Skis - Nancy Spain

Tour de Force - Christianna Brand

The Dressing Room Murder - J S Fletcher

Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie

The Belting Inheritance - Julian Symons

On the Other Side - Mathilde Wolff-Monckberg

The Water Room - Christopher Fowler

Deep Waters - Various

Call for the Dead - John LeCarre

Dramatic Murder - Elizabeth Anthony

The Secret History of Our Streets - Joseph Buleman

Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christic

Murder After Christmas - Rupert Latimer

Strange Tide - Christopher Fowler

Who Killed Father Christmas? - Various

Lots of Crime as always, and a brief dip into spy stories. Of the crime stories I read Christopher Fowler and Richard Osman for the first time, and can see what the fuss is about. I also read some British Library Crime books of short stories that went largely in one eye and other the other, and some longer ones which again varied. 

Stand out books were Around the World in 80 Trains - I now want to read Rajesh' other book (I think there's only one as yet) - and The Island of Sheep, which shouldn't have been my sort of thing at all but was just so well written it pulled me in anyway. 

I started but didn't finish a blog post entitled 'Please Call Scotland Yard' after reading The Dressing Room Murder because the incompetence of the police officers in that case was so completely maddening. 

Some totals: I read three books in translation, 58 fiction titles and 18 non fiction. I'm not going to beat myself up, but that's less non-fiction than I'd like, or is usual, so my very relaxed reading challenge to myself is read more non fiction in 2025. 

Apart from books I'm not sure what to say about 2024. I had some good holidays, did quite a lot of walking (a rough average of 28 miles per week, although that average is very rough and it was nowhere near evenly spread) decluttered 52 things more than I acquired (this probably sounds mad, but this is a very small flat and is pretty full. I do need to keep an eye on the flow of 'stuff') and am neither sorry nor pleased to see the back of it. 

Happy New Year all. 

Elizabeth Ferrars and others...

One of the hazards of reading any sort of 'older' fiction - and especially something like detective fiction where there may be recurring and quite interesting characters, but the books themselves are written not as a series but a set of nice neat packages with defined beginnings and endings - is that you can find an author you like, republished or epublished, read two or three books, get interested in how things are developing, and then find the next in the series is, for whatever reason, not available from the same source. 

This recently happened to me with Elizabeth (otherwise E X) Ferrars. Intrigued by the odd dynamic between separated-but-never-got-round-to-the-divorce couple Virginia and Felix Freer, who clearly still care a lot about each other, I found that number three was not available as an ebook and have had to order a secondhand hardback for about four times the price - at least it's available as a hardback though. It would be maddening to not be able to get my hands on it. 

Of course I'm also in the fortunate position of access to the British Library if I were really desperate, but I've actually not been into the reading rooms since the cyber attack (for those who don't know: the BL was the victim of an attack late last year and has since put a number of measures in place, but the advice is still to ring up to check whether materials are available). I don't have a pressing need for anything specific, so am happy to wait for now. 

Elizabeth Ferrars had a good long career in writing - roughly 60 years, starting in what would later be called the Golden Age of detective fiction, and finishing up in the 90s. Virginia and Felix come into the late 70s, having separated because (and when) Virginia realised Felix was a crook - a light fingered compulsive liar with a lot of charm and a plausible face who genuinely doesn't understand why it upset Virginia so much to realise all the nice presents he got her were almost certainly stolen. 

On the other hand his moral code around such things as murder and blackmail is pretty strong. What is fascinating about the books I've read so far (which are written from Virginia's point of view) is you can see why Virginia was absolutely right to leave him, and not go back to him - and at the same time why she still cares about him enough not to sling him out when he turns up, and he still cares enough about her that when things turn nasty, it's the impact on her he focusses on.

The mysteries on the the other hand are interesting enough to hang a book on but would probably be quite disappointing to a purist. The puzzling and cluing is not precisely absent but... it definitely feels like Felix is more of the 'because I know how people's minds work' detective than the 'rock solid case' one. 

Anyway I'm enjoying them. 

Other recent secondhand purchases are Ellis Peters' Death Mask and Holiday with Violence. Death Mask I don't think I ever read before - despite binging Ellis Peters in the 90s. She has a tendency, in my opinion, to sometimes have characters read each other's motives so accurately it amounts to telepathy. She does that here, and it shakes my belief a little. No-one is that perceptive about someone they just met.  

Whereas Holiday with Violence is set on a backpacking holiday in Italy and was probably my favourite Ellis Peters when I first read it, which is why I absolutely read my copy to bits. I'm very glad to get a nice intact paperback that I'll hang onto - and the descriptions of place have made me want to go to Italy all over again, which luckily I am doing in October.  

I also read London Particular by Christianna Brand, and Shroud for a Nightingale by P D James. In the latter I kept thinking 'does Adam Dalgleish not know he can call for back-up?' Although he does feel moved at one point to suggest a member of his team should quit the job if he ever finds he enjoys being cruel, so perhaps you don't want back-up from people like that. It's very '70s, in the best of ways - realistic about the fallout of murder and how life goes on for some people while others never recover. 

London Particular was good - Brand is consistently so - but there's an unpleasant flavour of internalised misogyny that I don't remember in Green for Danger or Death in High Heels, although Death of Jezebel which I read last year had a bit of it too. Men in these books are apparently allowed to do all kinds of stupid things and be forgiven or at least sympathised with, but let a woman (or in this case little more than a girl) be a bit unpleasant or 'loose' and she gets what she deserves, apparently.  The use of the fog was excellent though. Very atmospheric, and the slightly mad household the story revolves around definitely kept me guessing to the end. 

Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson was, I'm sorry, rather more dry. It begins and ends well but the middle bit dragged. Perhaps I was expecting too much - the idea of a murder in a Charing Cross bookshop sounded so enticing. I was also infuriated by incorrect information about concussion - which I've had and can confirm absolutely does mean losing a period before and after the event and having perfectly normal recall outside it, which even in the 30s I'm sure was known. 

Happy New Year

It's been a mixed sort of year. A permanent job (I've been temping forever) with a better pension and more money. Some great holidays both with other people and by myself, but I also lost a cousin this year who was still in his 50s, and his stepdad had a heart attack shortly afterwards and is waiting on an operation in mid-January. We also had a health scare for one of my aunts but that was stabilised, thankfully, with medication.

I've done quite a lot of decluttering - I counted items in and out (not food or toiletries but things that must be kept and cleaned and given permanent house room) and more than twice as many things went out as in, which is good. It also encouraged me to read the books already on my shelves and let some go once read or if I knew I wouldn't get round to them. 

As usual though, here is the list of books I did read:

The Stoat - Lynn Brock
To the Holy Shrines - Sir Richard Burton
Agatha Christie - Lucy Wolsey
Sound - A Story of Hearing Lost and Found - Bella Bathurst
A Surfeit of Suspects - George Bellairs
The Kiss - Anton Chekov
Techniques of Persuasion - J A C Brown
Appointment with Death - Agatha Christie
Everything is Washable (almost) - Sali Hughes
Lonelyheart 4122 - Colin Watson
Charity Ends at Home - Colin Watson
Still More Commonplace - Mary Stocks
The Flaxborough Crab - Colin Watson
Broomsticks over Flaxborough - Colin Watson
Littlejohn on Leave - George Bellairs
How to Run Your Home Without Help - Kay Smallshaw
Deadly Company - Ann Granger
Snobbery with Violence - Colin Watson
Tribes - David Lammy
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
The Naked Nuns - Colin Watson
Novelist(a) - Claire Askew
Murder in the Falling Snow - Various
Christmas is Murder - Val Mc Dermid

Orchids on Your Budget - Marjorie Hillis

Death at Dykes Corner - E C R Lorac
Blue Murder - Colin Watson
Plaster Sinners - Colin Watson
Whatever’s Going on in Mumblesby - Colin Watson
Music - W H Hadow
Reality is not what it appears - Carlo Rovelli
A Deadly Affair - Agatha Christie
Mr Bazalgette's Agent - Leonard Merrick
Camera Lucida - Barthes
The Detective's Daughter - Lesley Thomson
Poirot - Anne Hart
Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie
The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke - R Austin Freeman
A Kind of Vanishing - Lesley Thomson
Size Matters Not - Warwick Davies
The Big Four - Agatha Christie
The Pilgrims - Mary Shelley
Content With What I Have - C Henry Warren
The Empty Space - Peter Brook
Literature, Money and the Market - Paul Delaney
Death of an Author - E C R Lorac
Death of Jezebel - Christianna Brand
Checkmate to Murder - E C R Lorac
Cross River Traffic - Chris Roberts
Goodbye Things - Fumio Sasaki
Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood
The Ice Age - Margaret Drabble
Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie
The Mystery of Three Quarters - Sophie Hannah
The No-Spend Year - Michelle McGagh
The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac
Ghost Girl - Lesley Thomson
The Practice of Writing - David Lodge
Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac
Artists in Crime - Ngaio Marsh
Murder having Once been Done - Ruth Rendell
Photo-Finish - Ngaio Marsh
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Pereira Maintains - Antonio Tabucchi
Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie
Rock Crystal - Adalbert Stifter
Glimpses of Bengal - Rabindranath Tagore
K is for Killer - Sue Grafton
The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac
The Hopkins Manuscript - R C Sherriff
The Assault on Jerusalem - Steven Runciman
Selective Memory - Katherine Whitehorn
A Backward Glance - Edith Wharton
Nightwalking – John Lewis Stempel
You Should Have Left - Daniel Kehlmann
Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett
Dead Famous – Greg Jenner
The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton
Anaximander- Carlo Rovelli
The Unpunished Vice - Edmund White
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L Sayers
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L Sayers
A Sentimental Journey - Sterne
Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood
Gilbert Keith Chesterton - Maisie Ward
The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham
What Katy Did Next - Susan Coolidge
Clover - Susan Coolidge
Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto
Games Without Rules - Michael Gilbert

91 books read in total, as ever a lot of crime - 43 murder mysteries and three crime adjacent books, being biographies of Christie, Chesterton and Hercule Poirot. 56 fiction books overall, and 35 non fiction. 

Six books in translation, which is fairly good for me, especially since I made no real effort to seek books in translation this time. 

This year we also have an even split between men and women, and just one anthology containing both. 

Standout books include Games Without Rules by Michael Gilbert. Gilbert wrote Smallbone Deceased, one of my favourite of the British Library Classics. Games Without Rules is written and set later, and is a low key but very engaging and inventive series of short spy stories - I'm sure I've read the last of these before in anthologies, but it's much more effective as the culmination of a series when you've got fond of the characters.

I also really enjoyed A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. Lorac is consistently entertaining, although some of her books are better than others, and the same might be said for Colin Watson, who I mainlined early on in the year. I also loved Pereira Maintains and You Should Have Left. 

Conversely The Big Four was every bit as terrible as I remembered (I don't normally diss books here, but given how much I love Christie, and her phenomenal success, and the fact she's not alive to be hurt, I'm making an exception), and although Nightwalking had some interesting ideas and is an attractive physical object it felt terribly padded. There's really not much original material in the book.

And that's me. I haven't made any plans for next year except to continue reading from my shelves a bit more and get the ones I likely won't read again out to the bookswap, and to hopefully read a full book in Italian - even if it's just a very short one or a child's one - by this time next year.

So here's to 2024. 

Short Reviews from A Brief, Unplanned, Foray into Translated Works

 Pereira Maintains – Antonio Tabucchi (tr: Patrick Creagh)

The last summer of peace before the Second World War. Pereira is a journalist - head of the culture section for The Lisboa, a small unimportant newspaper, with a small scrappy office of his own where it constantly smells of frying food and he suspects the housekeeper of being a police informer. Widowed and having fallen into an unhealthy lifestyle, regretting never having had a son of his own and the younger, fitter self of his youth, he decides to go to a health spa for a week and takes on an assistant – a young man who writes obituaries for him that are too infused with politics to publish.

Despite rejecting all his work Pereira goes on paying and befriending him anyway, buying him dinner and keeping in touch with his girlfriend when he’s out of town. Not quite sure why, still figuring out what his own state of mind is, and the state of Europe too. ‘Pereira maintains’ is a recurrent line in the book, and often it means Pereira maintains that he doesn’t know why he did such and such a thing, but like Pereira himself it gradually evolves from something very passive to an action in itself. That of bearing witness.

This is a book that gains something from historical knowledge – for example Pereira’s doctor is leaving for France, but the reader will know (as of course Tabucchi knew in the 90s when he wrote it) that France wasn’t, at that point in time, going to prove a safe refuge.  

It also has sprinklings of details about Italian and Portuguese literature which I rather enjoyed and may well lead down a rabbit hole of other books. It has certainly made me want to read more Tabucchi, who himself was Italian, and a translator of Fernando Pessoa as well as an author in his own right.

 

Rock Crystal – Adalbert Stifter (tr: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore).

This is a brief Christmas tale that would probably be unpleasantly sentimental if it weren’t for the glorious descriptions of the mountain itself. There’s a real sense of place – a place not untouched by the outside world (artists and mountain climbers are frequent enough visitors, and the local shoemaker’s excellent mountain climbing shoes are a local export) but with it’s own identity and a local unity that can make someone even from the next town a foreigner.

Interesting sidelight – Christmas presents in Germany were supposedly brought by the Christ-child, not St Nicholas.

 

Glimpses of Bengal – Rabindranath Tagore (tr: Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson). 

This really was just a glimpse of glimpses, both of Bangladesh and Tagore himself as a young man, in letters written mostly to his niece. The letters themselves are not complete – there’s a focus on philosophy and the natural world, a smattering of agreeable humour, but little personal detail, and no sense of a day to day progression or who they were written to. I’d like to read the longer book and fill in the gaps.

In the Bookswap Bag

Literature, Money and the Market – Paul Delaney (from Trollope to Amis)

I feel like I’ve gleaned random facts from this book but not much else. For example it led me on to two other books – The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble, and The Information by Martin Amis, which last is mentioned both because it is about writing, but also because of the size of the massive advance Amis got, which I do dimly remember there being a bit of a ‘the end is nigh’ flutter about at the time, even in the national (non-bookish) press, although I couldn’t have told you the name of the book and would have assumed it was London Fields. It’s amusing to me that his real big hitters were not the ones he got the most money for.

That incident is also mentioned by David Lodge in the last read book on this pile. Lodge’s take is that you can’t really blame Amis for taking the money. He also describes Amis (this is in the 90s) as being ‘famous for not winning the Booker’ which sent me off to Wikipedia to check – and astonishingly (and I say this even though he’s not really my cup of tea and I’ve only read 2 of his books) Amis never did.

I’ll let you know what I think of The Information. I'm cat sitting at my Dad's this week, so will take this one along. 

 

The Ice Age – Margaret Drabble

This is the other book mentioned in the Delaney above. Written in the mid 70s, the height of the energy crisis, with the property market having collapsed and inflation running at 25%.

Anthony Keating (described on the back of my 1979 copy and in several places in the text as ‘middle-aged’ despite being in his 30s) has recently had a heart attack. And well he might do, frankly, even at that age. A business associate is in jail for fraud, the country property he bought for a fortune is worth a fraction of the price he paid for it, the London house can’t be offloaded and has squatters in it, and the riverside location he and his friends bought for development is a white elephant. Oh and a friend has recently died in an IRA bombing and his step daughter been arrested behind the iron curtain for a traffic offence.

This book is almost entirely backstory – how did Anthony, his ex-wife, his friend in jail, and everyone else in these pages get where they are now when the 60s looked so bright?

It manages to avoid being a misery though, through humour and an awareness that at least part of the reason it’s hurting so much right now is how spoilt everyone has been up to this point. Drabble has a knack of making the reader empathise with people they might not really agree with, and this is of course a fabulous snapshot of a point in time.

Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

Both the above are covered in my post here: Briefer than Literal Statement: Brand and Lorac. I was in two minds about whether to let Checkmate to Murder go, but I'm determined to get the double shelving down and there are so many books out there. 

Death of an Author – E C R Lorac

This book is reviewed extensively and well on a number of blogs I follow and read. You don’t need my take. Very entertaining, but I won’t read it again.

A Natural Curiosity – Margaret Drabble

I started this after The Ice Age but its not working for me. It was under £1 in a charity shop, so I’m not going to fret about it.

The Practice of Writing – David Lodge

This is a book of essays and reviews over a period rather than a consistent book about writing or a book about how to write. I do find Lodge a tad academic at times (unsurprising since he was a lecturer in Birmingham) but his awareness of it is very disarming. He also sends this up beautifully in his campus novels.

This was most interesting when he was writing about adapting his own novel for tv, and adapting Martin Chuzzlewit, or casting and tweaking and finding a place for his play. 

The Empty Space – Peter Brook

This is about the theatre and different theories, or perhaps it would be true to say different kinds of theatre.  It’s a nice length for this sort of book – short enough that the lay person doesn’t get bogged down. 

Content With What I Have – C Henry Warren

This was a rather charming book of vignettes of rural life in the 60s and concerns about what was being lost. 

Strange Journey – Maid Cairnes

Another from the British Library, this time their Women Writers series. Arguably this book is a fantasy book, given the bodyswap element, but there was also humour and middlebrow is probably as good a genre to file it under as anything. 

I enjoyed it but couldn’t read books like this the time, any more than I could Amis’ oeuvre or constant spy novels (although I’ve read and enjoyed Amis and Buchan occasionally). I do wonder, if I hadn't gone in expecting it to be the kind of book it was, with the nice cover and the genre it's placed in, whether there might have been more tension to it. As it is there's more comedy of manners than any fear something more sinister is going on. 

Lions and Shadows – Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood advises the reader to read this as fiction, which I did my best to do, even though the central character is called Christopher, and has a life not a million miles from the author, starting with his school career, then sabotaging his university years, then trying to write a book while also trying to find something to do for a living. Overshadowed by something he describes as 'the Test' - the expectation boys of his generation had that they'd be growing up into a war, which then ends before they get there, leaving them with a feeling of displacement. 

Wickham Gore Doesn’t Always Get His Man (Or Woman)

 There’s a bit of a story arc to the seven Wickham Gore books by Lynn Brock (aka Alistair McAllistair or Anthony Wharton), although it didn’t go quite where I thought it was going in the end. By the middle of the series he’s a professional detective with an office and a junior partner, where at the start he’s looking around for a job as he cannot live within his army pension and gets pulled into a mystery after a knife he gave a young woman called ‘Pickles’ as a wedding present is used to stab someone. 

He is, of course, carrying a bit of a flame for Pickles, and if affection can be measured by first nagging him to get a job, then later in the series nagging him about the job he eventually takes up, Pickles is fond of him too.

Not that I can’t see Pickles’ point. Gore is one of those detectives who puts himself in danger repeatedly. During this short series he is bopped over the head, almost electrocuted, shot and gassed in his bed. Apart from that he’s not a bad detective – he can put two and two together (although sometimes I didn’t quite see how a case could be proved, and in book six or seven when it turned out one of his criminals had been acquitted for just that reason I could have shaken Brock’s hand).

A likable detective, competent with flashes of brilliance and moments of stupidity (especially, as I’ve said, where his own safety is concerned), middle-aged (I got the impression his image of himself is older perhaps than others perceive him) and not especially broad or narrow minded for the time, I think.

That said I don’t think the books would have suffered from taking some of the more offensive language out, but since the format I read was the cheap electronic publication for Kindle I suspect they were scanned in and skim read at best. I usually wouldn't complain given the cheapness, but for the sake of future readers I will say the transcription is far from perfect. Not so much that it’s unreadable, but it can be a distraction to find words missing or letters misplaced by numbers when tension is meant to be ramping up or you’re looking for clues. 

Anyway would I recommend this series? Definitely yes. I had no intention of reading them all when I started but I kept downloading the next and gobbling them down. I liked old Gore, and Brock’s lush descriptions of place and the ridiculous plots and occasional weirdnesses, and I wanted to see what happened next.  

New Year 2023

Happy New Year. 2022 was another year where things didn't quite get back to normal, and it felt like 'normal' shifted yet again, with energy in particular shooting up in price, the invasion of Ukraine, post-Brexit and not-yet-post-Covid still a drag on economy and spirits, and on a personal level both my holiday in May and my Christmas plans disrupted by sickness and quarantining. 

Books, on the other hand, there have been plenty of. 

The full list for 2022:

A Carribean Mystery - Agatha Christie
A Murder of Quality - John LeCarre
A Peaceful Retirement - Miss Read
A Pocketful of Rye - Agatha Christie
A Rose for Winter - Laurie Lee
A Short Book about Painting - Andrew Marr
A Stranger City - Linda Grant
Amongst Our Weapons - Ben Aaronovitch
Arthur Conan Doyle - John Dickson Carr
At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie
Black Teacher - Beryl Gilroy
Bloody Murder - Julian Symons
Bump in the Night - Colin Watson
Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett
Castle Skull - John Dickson Carr
Cheaper by the Dozen - Frank and Ernestine Galbreth
Christian Dior by Christian Dior
Coffin, Barely Used - Colin Watson
Come, Tell Me How You Live - Agatha Christie
Crime on the Coast and No Flowers by Request - The Detection Club
Death and the Dancing Footman - Ngaio Marsh
Death in the Tunnel - Miles Burton
Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie
Everything and Less - Mark McGurl
False Value - Ben Aaronovitch
Free Lunch (new edition) - David Smith
Get Carter - Ted Lewis
Going Postal - Terry Pratchett
Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
Hag's Nook - John Dickson Carr
Hidden Lives - Margaret Forster
Hopjoy Was Here - Colin Watson
In the Teeth of the Evidence - Dorothy L Sayers
Jingo - Terry Pratchett
London is a Forest - Paul Wood
Love Lies Bleeding - Edmund Crispin
Making Money - Terry Pratchett
Manhattan 45 - Jan Morris
Maskerade - Terry Pratchett
Mastering the Process - Elizabeth George
Miss Marple's Final Cases - Agatha Christie
Money, a User's Guide - Laura Whateley
Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett
Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie
Murder in Mesopotamia - Agatha Christie
Newton and the Counterfeiter - Thomas Levenson
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
On Writing - Stephen King
Our African Winter - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths - Barbara Comyn
Payback - Debt and Shadow Side of Wealth - Margaret Atwell
Portraits in Fiction -  A S Byatt
Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood
Prelude to a Certain Midnight - Gerald Kersch
Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson
Safer than Love - Margery Allingham
Scarp - Nick Papadimitriou
Settling Scores - Martin Edwards (ed)
She Died a Lady - John Dickson Carr
Simisola - Ruth Rendell
Skelton's Guide to Domestic Poisons - David Stafford
Ten Day's Wonder - Ellery Queen
The 4.50 from Paddington
The Adventures of Sally - P G Wodehouse
The Age of Scandal - T H White
The Babes in the Wood - Ruth Rendell
The Bleak Age - J L and Barbara Hammond
The Body in the Dumb River - George Bellairs
The Brutal Art - Jesse Kellerman
The Case of the Constant Suicides - John Dickson Carr
The Child's Books of True Crime - Chloe Hooper
The Courage to Create - Rollo May
The Dagwort Coombe Murder - Lynn Brock
The Deductions of Colonel Gore - Lynn Brock
The Detection Collection - ed Simon Brett
The Hollow Man - John Dickson Carr
The Holly-Tree Inn - Charles Dickens et al
The House by the Thames - Gillian Tindall
The House of Green Turf - Ellis Peters
The Kink - Lynn Brock
The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett
The Liquid Continent - Nicholas Woodsworth
The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering - Arthur Machen
The Lost Gallows - John Dickson Carr
The Mendip Mystery - Lynn Brock
The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie
The Mystery of the Yellow Room - Gaston LeRoux
The Patient at Peacock's Hall - Margery Allingham
The Plague Court Murders - Carter Dickson
The Powlett Murders - Lynn Brock
The Sailors' Rendezvous - Georges Simenon
The Savage God - Al Alvarez
The Secret Body - Daniel M Davis
The Secret Life of Money - Daniel Davies and Tess Read
The Service of all the Dead - Colin Dexter
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie
The Slip-Carriage Mystery - Lynn Brock
The Truth - Terry Pratchett
The Two-Way Murder - E C R Lorac
They Have a Word for It - Howard Rheingold
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett
Thrones, Dominions - Dorothy L Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh
Thud - Terry Pratchett
Tread Softly for you Tread on My Jokes - Malcolm Muggeridge
Trent's Own Case - E C Bentley
Witchcraft - Nigel Williams
Work Won't Love You Back - Sarah Jaffe

As always plenty of crime, including Lynn Brock, whose Wickham Gore books I was hoping to finish by the end of the year, and two excellent modern riffs on golden age crime fiction - The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and Rules for Perfect Murders. 

Also a small Terry Pratchett re-read, which is still ongoing. 

Stats: 108 books, 69 by men, 33 by women and 6 by a team of both. Figures skewed by Pratchett and John Dickson Carr, I suspect. 

34 non fiction, 74 fiction. A lot of the non fiction seems economy or finance related. This was also the year I started listening to 'Wake Up to Money' on the radio, and became more aware of the impact of macro economics on daily life. As did everyone else, I suspect. 

Stand out books - I enjoyed Christian Dior by Christian Dior far more than I expected to and was pleased to find Going Postal by Pratchett was as much fun as I remembered.

Plans for next year - I still have my last 80s book to read, and was contemplating a David Lodge readathon. First though I will finish and post my thoughts on Brock's central protagonist Wickham Gore, who is one of those tec's who have breakthroughs by getting conked on the head or shot and yet always survive until next time. 

Our African Winter by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - for the 1929 Club

 Since I ended the last review with mention of those diamonds I’ll start this with them. It really does seem like diamonds were almost lying around for the taking in that part of Africa, and that story in The Mendip Mystery practically plausible.

However, the most striking thing, to the modern reader, is in all the mention of diamond mines and artificial restriction of supply, and gold and platinum and farming and copper and everything else, the thought ‘it doesn’t really belong to us’ never once crosses Conan Doyle’s mind. In fact he thinks more immigration of Brits into Africa is the answer to certain social problems.

The word savage also gets used a lot (and worse) – and yet what the Europeans are described as doing is at least as savage, and Conan Doyle doesn’t sugarcoat or gloss over that, either. Wants some kind of oversight to be established to ensure proper criminal sentences are given to those who abuse or murder the natives and describes several cases and the meagre sentences and small fines that were given, clearly hoping to stir up outrage in his readers and get something done about it.  

He’s just – very complex, I think. The book is a journal of his and his family's trip to Africa for him to lecture about Spiritualism, and he’s clearly clever, and even sceptical in some ways, and yet in others he seems utterly naïve. His faith in the British Empire as a force for good, his faith in the Cottingley fairies and Spiritualism (although as I say he could be highly sceptical of certain practitioners and critical of practices). His pleasure at being greeted by crowds and spreading the message. His faith that during the Boer War the women and children were put into a camp to be fed (this may be true, I have no way of knowing, what I cannot help noticing though is a doubt of it never even crosses his mind) and outrage at a perceived slight on a memorial he’s unable to properly read.

I agree with him very little, but I would hardly expect to, nearly a hundred years later, and with him probably already old fashioned (Conan Doyle was 70). What I do feel is that he was scrupulously honest himself, and struggled to understand that other people could be horribly dishonest, or the world different to the way he’d always known it.

What is also utterly disarming is his endless curiosity – interested in everything: diamonds, the legal system, the friction between Boer farmers and English rule, the workload of the ship porters, what will happen to Johannesburg when the mines are worked out. One moment he’s describing his son collecting specimens with his killing bottle, the next giving lyrical descriptions of scenery and twilight, the next praising his wife’s work to try and ensure captive animals are treated better. 

But of course the main thrust of the book is about Spiritualism, news about which he believes it is his mission to spread. He gives well-attended lectures and seems to have given good value for money, wonders why the church is so resistant when after all the message he’s spreading is the good news of an afterlife, describes cases and particulars, complains that scientists won’t judge the matter scientifically but is scrupulously polite about them as people.

And he writes extremely well. Of course he does. However dated it’s a very, very readable book with a lot of fascinating asides about things I’d like to know more about. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs. 

The Mendip Mystery by Lynn Brock - For the 1929 Club

 Lynn Brock published two books in 1929. The first is the charming but light The Dagwort Coombe Murder, which I’ve also reviewed for the club. The second is The Mendip Mystery.

In this case we are in the hands of a professional detective, Colonel Gore (book five of seven in the series) who has been tasked with trying to trace a long-lost relation of a dapper little furniture merchant, and, in what appears to be an unrelated matter, to meet a possible new client at an unpopular inn to discuss another job. Despite mild annoyance at the venue, made with no thought of his convenience but purely because his prospective client will be hunting out that way, Gore agrees.

The set up is excellent.  High winds and fallen trees and a hunting accident earlier in the day result in several guests being stranded at the inn overnight, much to the proprietor’s dissatisfaction, since he just wants to get (more) drunk in peace and hasn’t enough sheets anyway. Understandably some of those guests decide not to go to bed at all and of course in the morning, one is found dead.

Brock has a great eye for detail, the state of the inn itself, the converted storage building in town and it’s creepiness after dark, the frustrations of a secretary who wants an extra day off for Christmas and is trying to time the asking of it right and go above and beyond in the meantime to earn brownie points, but resentful of the need.

If I had to criticise I would say there’s a lot going on in this book. One subplot about escaped lunatics (whose treatment is very much of the time I’m afraid, kicked back out into the storm and left), and another about diamonds – a long history by one of the characters about how he stumbled across a ditch full of rough diamonds in Namaqualand, which has since been found and worked by the British government, that I was half inclined to think completely made up until I read my last book, a non-fiction work by Arthur Conan Doyle, where he describes that exact place. Clearly Brock incorporated it because it was big news.

It's also often quite a funny book, although not with the obvious humour of Dagwort Coombe, with the odd call back to earlier stories. I’m tempted to go back and start this series from the beginning now. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs. 

The Dagwort Coombe Murder by Lynn Brock – For the 1929 Club

This book starts in sunshine, bit PG Wodehouse, bit Elizabeth von Armin. Our heroine, Sarah (aka Sally), has written a highly successful play that she herself thinks is tripe, and decides her next offering must be something meaningful. In order to concentrate she hires a tiny caravan, hitches it to her car and invites along a friend called Susan Yatt who is twice her age (I assumed as chaperone, but the friend goes back to London shortly after the murder, so presumably not) on a touring holiday.

A short while into this holiday Sally a) realises she doesn’t have a meaningful play in her and would rather have the money anyway and b) backs the caravan into a ditch. Three men, all of different classes and respectability, and seemingly at loggerheads, suspend their various arguments long enough to help her and Susan and By-by (being the name of the caravan) out again. 

It’s our first introduction to the tensions in the village where they’ll be parked up a while, and it’s not the last. 

Still the weather is beautiful, the field they’ve been allowed to park in charming, the gipsies picturesque, and the love interest turns up and is permitted to sleep in a tent and make himself suspect number two when the actual murder happens. 

So Sally decides to jolly well stay on in her caravan, and while summer turns into autumn and everyone else drifts off and drifts back (all of which is written too amusingly to actually drag but does seem to go on a long time) she ferrets. 

Apparently, as well, without causing the slightest anxiety in her friend, her young man, or herself. I mean, she's only riling up murderers and searching for evidence and even at one point surviving a car ‘accident’. Why should anyone be worried about her sleeping in a tiny caravan by herself, presumably still washing in a stream and cooking outdoors, in more or less the enemy camp? 

I'm about the age of her friend Miss Yatt and I would certainly have had Things to Say. As a modern independent 1920s woman she may well have rebuffed me, but at least I would know I had said them. 

My other complaint – and I will repeat before I do complain that this is a very amusing book and I read it in a day – is the pacing. Flurries at the beginning and end and slow and stately in the middle, and also what turned out to be possibly the stupidest plan for catching a killer I can imagine, and which involved several people - again none of whom were troubled, apparently, by the fact it was a likely way to end up with at least two more people dead. 

Signs of the times:

The biggest is surely the absolute disregard for speed limits and road safety. 

The assumption that even an independent young woman like Sally would think marriage the culmination of a woman's life, even to a man 25 years older, as has happened with her friend Pam. (Having now checked out the Wikipedia entry I suppose that could be partly down to our author being male, but I suspect it was simply a convention of the time.) 

A suggestion someone’s forehead is an indication of their temperament or not being a proper gentleman. That surely wouldn’t fly now.

In closing, thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs. 

Reading in May - Short Crime Fiction Reviews part 1

What with a 2 week holiday and covid it's been a great crime reading month. I also made one attempt to read something more challenging (The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watts) early in the month when I was still poorly, but really couldn't focus for itching and what you might call mild but chronic exhaustion. 

So that must mean we're due some short Crime Fiction reviews:

The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman is the most recent of the books I've read, both in the sense of when it was written / set (still over 10 years old though) and when I actually read it. Set in the utterly bonkers art world of New York, but taking in quite a lot of other places and people, Kellerman's main protagonist is utterly convincing in his fond and not so fond descriptions of everything including his city and himself, and provides a fantastic sense of place and time. 

Our story starts with the discovery of pages and pages of connecting drawings, all numbered to be fitted together in one vast work, abandoned in the empty flat of a building belonging to the Muller family. Since our narrator is the youngest son of that family, opting out of his dad's business and into his own gallery, naturally he gets called in. Equally naturally he sees dollar signs and markets the work, artist's absence notwithstanding. 

Only then one of the cherubs in a central part of the work is reprinted in the press and turns out to be the spitting image of a real child from a cold case, and from there it all starts falling apart...

This one has been sitting on my shelves a while and I'm really glad I finally got round to it. 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson is another one from my shelves. I didn't realise when I started that it was True Crime, a genre I'm not very fond of as it often feels voyeuristic. In this case though the details were so fascinating - much of the story of Newton's work on gravity and optics is part of the history I've picked up without knowing how, a woven-in part of British culture, but his later work with the mint, and the issues of disappearing silver coinage, and the way justice worked (or didn't work) before proper police and lawyers,  made for a fascinating and enlightening read. 

Coffin, Scarcely Used, Bump in the Night and Hopjoy Was Here - by Colin Watson.

I picked up these three books - the first three in the Flaxborough series - secondhand while I was on holiday in Devon (Paignton is rich in charity shops and places to buy fudge, fish and chips, and buckets and spades). I had previously read the first in an older edition and had no idea the series had been republished recently until I stumbled across these. They are almost police procedurals, and our erstwhile inspector is bright, but not genius or maverick or inclined to dramatic denouements, and has a dry humour that I really enjoy. Each book is better than the last, so I may have to buy number four and see if that trend continues.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton. 

We begin, dear reader, with a man lost in a wood, unsure how he came there, unsure who he is. All he can remember is the name Anna, and that he's let her down somehow. 

This is a doorstop of a book, but strangely unputdownable. Our hero - if he is a hero - is trapped in a country house murder mystery, and each time he sleeps or dies he comes back as a different character and lives the same day's events, culminating in the apparent suicide of Evelyn Hardcastle. The only way to escape is, of course, to solve the mystery. 

Turton credits Agatha Christie as his influence and if you like Christie this is a very nice tribute without being too derivative. I will say though that the final explanation for what was going on really did test my suspension of belief. Perhaps though, that was because I didn't want an explanation.

Simisola - Ruth Rendell. 

There are some challenging themes in this book. The most overt one, and the one I feel fares worst because it is so overt, is racism. Wexford spends a lot of time thinking about his reactions to the family of a missing girl because they are one of the very few black families in the Cotswold town (whose name I can't remember and can't be bothered to look up) and then, having spent so much time thinking and trying to avoid being racist (which, of course is 'othering' in itself), Rendell brilliantly and wincingly shows how actions can speak so much louder than all this introspection ever could, how some people can simply become invisible, and what horrible things can go completely under the radar in nice homes.