Category Archives: Crime Fiction Alphabet

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Letter H

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This week it’s time for the letter H in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet and I’ve chosen Reginald Hill’s Exit Lines, which is a Dalziel and Pascoe crime novel.

I first knew of Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell) and Pascoe from the BBC television series starring Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan, without realising that the stories were based on Reginald Hill’s books. I’ve since read a few of the books and not in the order Hill wrote them, although I have read the first one that introduced Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DS Peter Pascoe – A Clubbable Woman, first published in 1970. There are now 24 in the Dalziel and Pascoe series.

Reginald Hill grew up in Cumbria and is a former resident of Yorkshire, which is the setting for his police procedural novels. After serving in the army he went to Oxford University and then became a teacher, before giving that career up in 1980 to be a full-time writer. He has won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to the genre. He has also written another mystery series featuring Joe Sixsmith and numerous other books, including some under the pseudonyms Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland and Charles Underhill.

Exit Lines, first published in 1984 is the eighth book in the series and Pascoe is now a Detective Inspector. He and Ellie, his wife are celebrating their daughter’s first birthday on a cold and storm-racked November night when he is called out to investigate the death of an old man found in his bath bruised and bleeding. This is just the first of three deaths that night. All three victims were elderly and died violently and a drunken Dalziel is a suspect in one as it seems he was driving the car that hit an elderly cyclist. The third victim was found dying, having fallen whilst crossing the recreation ground.

Each chapter is headed with famous last words – exit lines from literary and historical people, such as George V – ‘Bugger Bogner’ and Oscar Wilde - ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do’.  The emphasis is on death and dying, and the ageing process is alarmingly illustrated not only through the lives of the victims but also by the sad portrayal of Ellie’s father as his senile dementia develops.

The plot is intricate, each separate case being linked in one way or another. There is some comic relief in the character of Constable Tony Hector, nicknamed ‘Maggie’s Moron’:

PC Hector had been the first officer on the scene and was therefore a potential source of illuminating insights. Unfortunately he was to Pascoe the last person he would have wished first. His principal qualification for the police force seemed to be his height. He was fully six feet six inches upright, though at some stage in his growth he had reached a level of embarrassment which provoked him to shave off the six inches by curving his spine forward like a bent bow and sinking his head so far between his shoulders that he gave the impression that he was wearing a coat-hanger beneath his tunic.

Although Dalziel  denies he was driving the car that hit the cyclist his actions are extremely suspect and he is sidelined, Pascoe leading the investigations. Just what Dalziel was up to doesn’t become clear until the end of the book. Exit Linesis an excellent crime fiction novel which kept me guessing until the end, and although I did have an inkling about Dalziel’s actions, the causes of the three deaths were a surprise to me.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – G is for …

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… Erle Stanley Gardner

I was wondering what to choose to illustrate the letter G in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet, but as I was writing how I began reading crime fiction I realised that it had to be Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. My introduction to Gardner’s books was the TV series with Raymond Burr as Perry Mason.

Gardner was born in  1889 and practised as a lawyer in California. He began writing detective fiction and gave up his practice in 1933, after publishing The Case of the Velvet Claws. He wrote under numerous pseudonyms, writing non-fiction as well as fiction. He died in 1970.

All his detective novels have a legal background, most reaching a climax in a court scene. In the Perry Mason novels (I haven’t read any of his other books) Mason is a lawyer-cum-detective who achieved fantastic results by using his legal knowledge together with fast talk, bluff and double bluff.

I have two Perry Mason books, The Case of the Lame Canary and The Case of the Substitute Face,  published by Penguin Books in green and white paperbacks. This description of the latter, first published in 1938, is taken from the back cover:

C Walker Moar used to be a book-keeper to the Product Refining company, Los Angeles: then one day he walked out and the office missed twenty-five thousand dollars. Mrs Moar sought Perry Mason’s help on a journey from Honolulu to the United States mainland, and Perry got to know the other travellers – their pretty daughter Belle, two other girls, a man with a broken neck, and a millionaire. Then things started to happen – a storm, a murder, a man washed overboard, and an accusation that launched the lawyer-detective into battle as soon as the ship docked. Bluffing, threatening, and fighting with a typical disregard for the niceties of the law, he rushes his adversaries onward to a brilliant cross-examination and the dramatic end of the story.

As I expected this book is fast-paced with lots of action and as I was reading it I had difficulty in solving the mystery as Perry Mason switches from one tack to another as the case progressed. I loved recalling what were once familiar characters – Mason himself, powerful, confident, who works hard to get to the truth and to defend his clients. At one point in this book, it seems to Paul Drake as if he’s ‘going off half-cocked’ and Della Street explains that it’s no use arguing with him because

His mental system is deficient in mystery vitamins, and fighting calories, and he’s out to balance his diet once and all. (page 71)

Paul Drake, who runs his own Private Detective Agency is on hand to help Mason, together with Della Street, Mason’s secretary. Although the other characters are described in detail there is little physical description of the main characters, which leaves me free to visualise them as I remember them from the TV series. The relationship between Perry and Della is most interesting and he obviously wants to move on from employer/employee but at the end Della protests:

Let’s not get too sentimental. You know as well as I do that you’d hate a home if you had one. You’re a stormy petrel flying from one murder case to another. If you had a wife you’d put her in a fine home – and leave her there. You don’t want a wife. But you do need a secretary who can take chances with you – and you have another case waiting in Los Angeles. (page 222)

A most enjoyable book.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter F

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This week Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet has reached the letter F and I’ve chosen to highlight Frances Fyfield and in particular her novel The Art of Drowning.

Frances Fyfield is a British crime writer who as a lawyer worked for the Crown Prosecution Service. She has written a number of books and won the following awards:

  • Edgar Awards – Best Novel Nominee (1990): A Question of Guilt
  • Dagger Awards – Best Novel Nominee (2006) Safer Than Houses
  • Dagger Awards – Best Novel Winner (2008) Blood from Stone

The Art of Drowning

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Sphere; New edition edition (4 Oct 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0751536202
  • ISBN-13: 978-0751536201
  • Source: Library Book

Description from Frances Fyfield’s website

Rachel Doe is a shy accountant at a low ebb in life when she meets charismatic Ivy Schneider, nee Wiseman, at her evening class and her life changes for the better. Ivy is her polar opposite: strong, six years her senior and the romantic survivor of drug addiction, homelessness and the death of her child. Ivy does menial shift work, beholden to no one, and she inspires life; as do her farming parents, with their ramshackle house and its swan-filled lake, the lake where Ivy’s daughter drowned. As Rachel grows closer to them all she learns how Ivy came to be married to Carl, the son of a WWII prisoner, as well as the true nature of that marriage to a bullying and ambitious lawyer who has become a judge and who denies her access to her surviving child. Rachel wants justice for Ivy, but Ivy has another agenda and Rachel’s naive sense of fair play is no match for the manipulative qualities of the Wisemen women.

My thoughts

This is a very edgy and tense crime thriller as Rachel determines to find Carl and bring about a reconciliation between him and Ivy and her parents. Right from the start I felt all was not it seemed to be on the surface and actually disliked most of the characters. But that didn’t prevent me liking this book.  The story is compelling, well paced and full of that creepy feeling of something not quite right – sinister references to past events signalling that not all the characters can be trusted – just who is telling the truth and how did Ivy’s daughter die?

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter E

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I’ve chosen Edgar Wallace’s The Clue of the Twisted Candle to illustrate the letter E in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. This is the first book by Edgar Wallace (1875 – 1932) that I have read. I downloaded it from Gutenberg. I’m not sure when it was first published – from different sources it appears to between 1916 and 1918. Edgar Wallace was a prolific writer and produced 175 novels, including The Four Just Men, screenplays, including the original draft of King Kong and many short stories.

The Clue of the Twisted Candle is not the one of the most puzzling murder mysteries I’ve read. It’s a bit rambling and disjointed. Basically it’s about John Lexman a writer of crime novels, his wife Grace, and Remington Kara a wealthy Greek/Albanian, a rich and handsome man who is also a notorious criminal. Grace fears Kara, whose marriage proposal she had rejected. T X Meredith, an Assistant Police Commissioner and friend of Lexman’s is investigating Kara, who in apparent fear of his life has made his bedroom into a virtual safe:

… its walls are burglar proof, floor and roof are reinforced concrete, there is one door which in addition to its ordinary lock is closed by a sort of steel latch which he lets fall when he retires for the night and which he opens himself personally in the morning. The window is unreachable, there are no communicating doors, and altogether the room is planned to stand a siege.

Lexman is found guilty of killing a moneylender, Vassalaro and imprisoned. He escapes from prison just after, unknown to him, he has been pardoned and T X is convinced that he and Grace have been abducted by Kara. In due course, Kara is found murdered inside this locked room and a small twisted Christmas candle is found inside in the middle of the room, along with the stub of an ordinary candle under the bed. The mystery is who murdered Kara and how did the murderer escape from the locked room? Why does Belinda Mary, Kara’s secretary disappear, and what is the explorer, George Gathercole’s  role? It’s not too difficult to work out who killed Kara. Everything is explained before a gathering of international police officials at the end of the book and the ingenious method of escaping from the locked room is revealed. All in all an entertaining book, but not one to tax the ‘little grey cells’ very much.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – D

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This week’s letter is D in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series and I’ve chosen to feature Colin Dexter’s The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, the third Inspector Morse book  first published in 1977.

For years I’ve been watching and enjoying Inspector Morse on TV, but I’ve only ever read one Morse book before – The Remorseful Day, the last novel in the series. We used to live not far from Oxford and one of the pleasures of watching the series was identifying the locations. One evening we went with a group of friends on a Morse pub tour, (organised by ourselves) visiting a few of the pubs featured in the books – one of our favourites used to be The Trout Inn at Wolvercote, before it was renovated when you could get an old fashioned Sunday Roast, with waiter service.

I don’t remember seeing an episode of The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, so apart from visualising John Thaw and Kevin Whately as Morse and Lewis I was free to see the novel through Colin Dexter’s words. My copy is a secondhand book – an Omnibus containing Service of All the Dead as well as The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.

Description from the back cover:

Morse had never ceased to wonder why, with the staggering advances in medical science, all pronouncements concerning times of death seemed so disconcertingly vague.

The newly appointed member of the Oxford Examinations Syndicate was deaf, provincial and gifted. Now he is dead . . .

And his murder, in his north Oxford home, proves to be the start of a formidably labyrinthine case for Chief Inspector Morse, as he tries to track down the killer through the insular and bitchy world of the Oxford Colleges . . .

My View

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As the blurb on the back cover indicated the time of Quinn’s death is of prime importance, but then so is the place of his death. His deafness, as I expected is also crucial. Morse and Lewis come across as well defined characters, and so do all the other characters – Quinn’s colleagues and neighbours. The setting, as I expected, is excellent, but then I am familiar with Oxford.

For a long time when reading I had little idea who the culprit was. It has a most complicated plot that kept me guessing right to the end. It’s one of those books that I want to start again as soon as I finished it to see  just which clues I’d missed. Morse, himself, was baffled too but eventually worked it out successfully, whilst Lewis struggled to catch up with his train of thought, as this extract shows:

(Morse speaking first) ‘Remember this, then: Quinn couldn’t hear what he didn’t see.’

‘Am I supposed to see why all that is important, sir?’

‘Oh, yes. And you will do, Lewis, if only you think back to the Friday when Quinn was murdered.’

‘He was definitely murdered on the Friday, then?’

‘I think if you pushed me I could tell you to within sixty seconds!’  He looked very smug about the whole thing and Lewis felt torn between the wish to satisfy his own curiosity and a reluctance to gratify the chief’s inflated ego even further. Yet he thought he caught  a glimpse of the truth at last … Yes, of course. Noakes had said … He nodded several times, and his curiosity won.

‘What about all the business at the cinema, though? Was that all a red herring?’ (pages 243-4)

Reading the book I realised that Colin Dexter not only knows Oxford very well (which wasn’t news to me!) but also was very familiar with the workings of  an Examination Board and understood the difficulties of lip-reading. The reason for this is that after being a teacher, because of his deafness he became the Senior Assistant Secretary at the University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations (UODLE) in Oxford, just like Quinn.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – C is for Christopher Brookmyre

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At first glance I wouldn’t have thought that Christopher Brookmyre would be my sort of author. He writes gritty,down to earth crime fiction, with no punches withheld. And when my son first lent me Quite Ugly One Morning I wasn’t at all sure that I would like it. I was wrong, I loved it – see here.

Brookmyre, a Scottish author, tackles corruption and social injustice in his books; they are satirical and full of bite, full of tension and pace. Before he became a full-time writer he was a journalist. After writing Quite Ugly One Morning he went on to write:

(Links go to Wikipedia)

For a critical perspective of Christopher Brookmyre’s work see this article at Contemporary Writers and for summaries of his books go to his page at Little, Brown Book Group.

Crime Fiction Alphabet is hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter B – W J Burley

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This week I’ve chosen to feature W J Burley to illustrate the letter B for Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. I knew of  his Wycliffe novels but had never read any, or watched any of the TV dramatisations, so I came to Wycliffe and the Last Rites with no preconceptions. I really don’t know why I never watched the 1990s TV series starring Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe, but as I didn’t I was able to form my own image of him in my mind directly from the book.

William John Burley was born in Falmouth, Cornwall in 1914. His first book was published in the 1968. All in all he produced 22 more Wycliffe books and 5 others. He died in 2002 whilst he was writing his 23 Wycliffe book. There is more information about him at this website - W J Burley.

Wycliffe and the Last Rites
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Orion; New Ed edition (7 Nov 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 075284931X
ISBN-13: 978-0752849317
Source: I bought it

Description from the back cover:

A bizarre murder shakes the Cornish village of Moresk. Arriving at church on Easter morning the vicar discovers the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps. To add to the horror, the church is filled with the discordant sound of an organ chord, the notes apparently chosen at random and wedged down.

Has the church been desecrated by a Satanist ritual? Chief Superintendent Wycliffe sees the crime more as an expression of hatred directed at others in the community, besides the dead woman. His investigation, however, is frustrated at every turn, and when another horrific murder is committed Wycliffe thinks he knows who the killer is. But can he prove it?

My thoughts:

This novel has a strong sense of location, with many passages describing the beautiful countryside of Cornwall. The characters are also well defined – a small local community focussing on the twin sisters, Katherine Geach and Jessica Dobell. The relationship between them is strained, with Jessica having a sense of guilt about a hit and run accident she’d witnessed 16 years earlier and admitting that she hadn’t played fair with Katherine.  After their parents’ deaths Jessica had inherited the family farm and lived there with the Vintners and their son, a strange family filled with hatred and resentment over their reduced circumstances. Then there is the Vicar and his sister, who had been forced to move from their previous parish, the houseboat man, Lavin, who is badly disfigured following an accident, and Arnold Paul, the organist and his ‘brother’.

Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is a quiet character who thinks things through before divulging his suspicions to his colleagues. He delegates tasks to his team leaving himself free to concentrate on the victim. To him ‘hope is an ultimate resource’. His evening walks are a necessity for him to ponder what he has discovered and he is calm and collected:

It was characteristic that he should walk rather than drive or be driven; he refused to allow his days to become crowded with events in a frenetic succession of images like a television screen, lacking even commercial breaks to aid digestion. (pages 44 -5)

His problem in finding the murderer is that all the possible leads pointed to a limited range of possible suspects but none of them matched his specification for the criminal. It seemed he had to believe the impossible. It’s a tightly plotted book, concisely and precisely written and I enjoyed it very much. I have one other book of Burley’s to read – Wycliffe and the House of Fear. After that I’ll be looking out for his other books.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – A is for …

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… Agatha Christie

For the first of this year’s Crime Fiction Alphabet hosted by Kerrie I’ve chosen a double A – AgathaChristie – An Autobiography.

I finished reading it at the end of December. I can’t remember exactly when I began reading it. I think it was the end of May because in a Sunday Salon post then I wrote that I was thinking about starting it. I read short sections of it most days since I started it and felt quite sad when I came to the end. It was like having a daily chat with Agatha.

It took her fifteen years to write it. She stopped in 1965 when she was 75 because she thought that it was the ‘right moment to stop’. It seems right that a book that took her so long to write should take me a long time to read. As well as being a record of her life as she remembered it and wanted to relate it, it’s also full of  her thoughts on life and writing. I’ve written about her Autobiography in a few posts as I was reading it:

It struck me as I was reading her Autobiography that  it’s not very easy to work out the dates of many of the events she described. It follows on chronologically but is so interspersed with her thoughts and reflections that I forgot the date, or she hadn’t mentioned it. She wrote about her childhood, teenage years, friends and family, and her marriage to Archibald Christie; but although she wrote about their divorce she didn’t write about her disappearance in 1926. She wrote about her travels around the world, the two world wars, her interest and involvement with archaeology and her marriage to Max Mallowan.

Towards the end of the book she wrote that she had decided not to tidy up her Autobiography too much:

Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way around. I am perhaps talking to myself – a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. (page 455)

What she remembered most were things that were most vivid and it was places that remained most clearly in her memory. She never had a good memory for people, apart from her own dear friends:

A sudden thrill of pleasure comes into my mind – a tree, a hill, a white house tucked away somewhere by a canal, the shape of a hill. Sometimes I have to think for a moment to remember where and when. Then the picture comes clearly, and I know. (page 416)

She wrote quite a lot about her writing methods, writing criticism, hearing your own voice, economy in wording, writing detective stories, adapting plays and writing them herself, the right length for a detective story (50,000 words), writing two novels at once, writing books set in historical periods and the joy of creation. The one book that satisfied her completely is not one of her detective books but one she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott – Absent in Spring – and she wrote it in three days flat (pages 516 -7).

She ended the book with these words:

A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’.

What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ (page 551)

Alphabet in Crime Fiction

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I hoped Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise would be running the Alphabet in Crime Fiction – a Community Meme/Challenge again. I really enjoyed taking part in it this year, not only reading and writing the books, but also reading the other participants’ posts. I found so many authors and blogs that were new to me.

And she has set it up again for  2011!

Here are the rules:

Each week, beginning Monday 10 January 2011, you have to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week.
Your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book’s title, the first letter of an author’s first name, or the first letter of the author’s surname.

So you see you have lots of choice.
You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow.

There is as Kerrie says lots of choice but the real challenge for me is writing a post every week and in some cases finding a title, or author for some of the letters – X, Q, and Z were  hard and I seem to remember that N was quite difficult and J too.  I was particularly pleased to have found Dave Zeltserman’s books and I’ll be looking for more by him to fill the Z spot.

I’m looking forward to it immensely.

My Crime Fiction A – Z

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Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet has come to the end. It’s been a most rewarding challenge. I’ve looked back at some books I read a while ago, read new books from favourite authors and discovered new authors.

The posts had to be related to either the first letter of a book’s title, the first letter of an author’s first name, or the first letter of the author’s surname. I did a mixture.

In the middle of the alphabet we moved house and I missed out the letter ‘L‘, so I’ve added in my review of Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon to complete the alphabet.

Here is my Crime Fiction A – Z:

They are all good reads in different ways.

I suppose it is inevitable that there are six books listed here by Ian Rankin and three by Agatha Christie as I’m reading steadily through their books. The series, though, has meant that I’ve sought out other authors, particularly to find those for the letters Q, X and Z and the books by the authors I found are probably the ones that most stand out in my mind now the series has come to an end.

Many thanks to Kerrie for thinking of this series. I hope she can come up with more ideas to stimulate my reading.