Book Beginnings on Friday

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Margaret

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading. Book Beginnings is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages every Friday.

I’m in the middle of reading The Safe House by Nicci French. It begins:

The door was the first thing. The door was open. The front door was never open, even in the wonderful heat of the previous summer that had been so like home, but there it was teetering inwards, on a morning so cold that the moisture hanging in the air stung Mrs Ferrer’s pocked cheeks. She pushed her gloved hand against the white painted surface, testing the evidence of her eyes.

‘Mrs Mackenzie?’

Silence. Mrs Ferrer raised her voice and called for her employer once more and felt embarrassed as the words echoed, high and wavering, in the large hallway. She stepped inside and wiped her feet on the mat too many times, as she always did. she removed her gloves and clutched them in her left hand. there was a smell now. It was heavy and sweet. It reminded her of something. the smell of a barnyard. No, inside. A barn maybe.

These paragraphs drew me into this mystery/psychological thriller and I wanted to know why the door was open and the source of the barnyard smell. There’s not long to wait because that becomes clear on the next page. After a dramatic opening the book settles down to a more leisurely pace, but slowly building up the tension.

I am wondering just how safe the Safe House of the title really is.

Crime Fiction Pick of the Month: January

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Margaret

I didn’t read much crime fiction in January, just two books, if you don’t count The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. They are The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie.

And I’ve chosen One, Two, Buckle My Shoe as my crime fiction pick of the month. This was first published in 1940 (in the USA it was published as The Patriotic Murders). Hercule Poirot and Inspector Japp investigate the apparent suicide of Mr Morley, Poirot’s Harley Street dentist, who was found dead in his surgery, shot through the head and with a pistol in his hand. Each chapter is entitled after a line of the nursery rhyme and the first line contains an important clue.Earlier in the morning Poirot had visited his dentist and as he was leaving the surgery another patient was arriving by taxi. He watched as a foot appeared.

Poirot observed the foot with gallant interest.

A neat ankle, quite a good quality stocking. Not a bad foot. But he didn’t like the shoe. A brand new patent leather shoe with a large gleaming buckle. He shook his head.

Not chic – very provincial! (page 26)

The importance of the shoe and its buckle don’t become clear until much later in the book!

Mr Morley had seemed in good spirits when Poirot saw him and had shown no signs of wanting to take his own life. Was it coincidence that his assistant, Gladys, had been called away from his surgery on that day, leaving him on his own in his surgery? As Poirot and Japp interview the other patients it becomes obvious to Poirot that it was murder not suicide. Then one of the patients, a rich Greek, Mr Amberiotis is found dead, and another patient, Miss Sainsbury Seale, the owner of the buckled shoe, goes missing. Poirot begins to wonder if Morley had been killed by mistake whilst another of the patients Alistair Blunt, a banker was the intended victim.

This really is a most complicated plot, and even though the facts are clearly presented and I was on the lookout for clues, Agatha Christie, once again fooled me. Not all the characters are who they purport to be and the involvement of international politics and intrigue doesn’t help in unravelling the puzzle. Poirot, himself, is perplexed until during a church service he is alerted to the trap that has been set for him:

Hercule Poirot essayed in a hesitant baritone.

‘The proud have laid a snare for me,’ he sang, ‘and spread a net with cords: yea and set traps in my way …’

He saw it – saw clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen! (page 215)

It all fell into place and he saw the case ‘the right way up’.

Written in 1939, this book reflects the economic and political conditions of the time, with a definite pre-war atmosphere of a world on the brink of war. But Poirot is concerned with the truth, with the importance of the lives of each individual, no matter how ordinary or insignificant they may seem.

My Rating: 4.5/5
Paperback: 294 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins; Masterpiece edition (Reissue) edition (18 Aug 2008)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0007120893
ISBN-13: 978-0007120895

You can see other people’s crime fiction picks of the month at Mysteries in Paradise.

The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Margaret

This is the second in Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series.

Synopsis (taken from the back cover):

August 1923, and as the village of Queensferry prepares for the annual Ferry Fair and the walk of the Burry Man, feelings are running high. Between his pagan greenery, his lucky pennies and the nips of whisky he is treated to wherever he goes, the Burry Man has something to offend everyone wherever he goes whether minister, priest or temperance pamphleteer. And then at the Fair, in full view of everyone – including Dandy Gilver, present at the festivities to hand out prizes he drops down dead.

It looks as though the Burry Man has been poisoned – but if so, then the list of suspects must include everyone in the town with a bottle of whisky in the house, and, here in Queensferry, that means just about everyone …

Part of my interest in The Burry Man’s Day is that it is set in South Queensferry, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, now part of the city of Edinburgh, formerly in the County of Linlithgowshire. I’ve been there once. It’s close to the Forth Road Railway Bridge:

I haven’t seen the Burry Man’s Parade, which features strongly in this book; it must be a strange sight.

The book has a rather slow start, but it’s one I enjoyed for all its historical detail about the place, its traditions and the people. It has a great sense of place, with a map of Queensferry at the beginning of the book which helps you follow the action. I wasn’t very taken with Dandy Gilver. I liked her more in a later book in the series. In this book she comes across as a busy-body, albeit kind-hearted, and a snob, but then that’s probably just a reflection of the class structure of the times. She’s married to Hugh, who seems to spend his life hunting and shooting and managing his large estate at Gilverton in Perthshire. Dandy doesn’t have much in common with him, being rather bored by life at Gilverton and Hugh doesn’t feature much in this book.

This is Dandy’s second investigation and I suppose if I read the first book, After the Armistice Ball, I might understand her relation with Hugh and with Alec Osborne, her co-investigator. That’s one of the drawbacks of reading a series out of order.

There’s a lot more to this mystery than the death of Robert Dudgeon, who been the Burry Man for 25 years. He’d been extremely reluctant to take the part this year and the question why was that remained unanswered for the majority of the book. I had an idea about the reason, but only guessed part of it. It’s a convoluted tale and the motive for the murder is buried deep in the descriptions of the characters and their histories. It’s a book you need to concentrate on, and at some points I did have difficulty in sorting out some of the minor characters. Other than that I think it’s a very good book, although maybe a bit too long.

My Rating 4/5
Author’s website: http://www.dandygilver.com/author.htm - where you can read an extract from this book
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Robinson Publishing (30 Aug 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1845295927
ISBN-13: 978-1845295929
Source: Library book

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Margaret

I read Tony and Susan by Austin Wright last November and parts of it are still vivid in my mind, but a lot of it has faded away. I’d put a few markers in the book, which act as pointers to sections I found notable, and which have helped to refresh my memory.

It’s a novel within a novel. Susan receives a manuscript novel, Nocturnal Animals, from her ex-husband. This is the outer story, which is nowhere nearly as interesting or absorbing as the inner story, her husband’s fictional tale of a crime, an ambush on the highway that leads to murder. Each time Susan stopped reading I just wanted to get back to the story of Tony Hastings and his family. It made me nervous as I was reading it and even more nervous went we drove anywhere, because Tony, his wife Laura and their daughter Helen were travelling on an Interstate going to their summer cottage in Maine when two cars in front of them blocked the lanes and forced them off the road. This does happen in real life, and the description is tense and vivid enough to make me believe it. It is terrifying.

The rest of the inner story is about Tony trying to get justice/revenge for what subsequently happened. There are questions on the back cover about why Susan’s husband sent her the manuscript, but the book doesn’t resolve any of these questions, which was disappointing. But I found it compelling reading and strangely enjoyable, if a little drawn out. It was strange because that is Susan’s reaction as she reads about Tony:

This book has her in its grip, she can say that truly. The long, slow plunge into the evil night and Tony trying to brace himself by being civilised. The notion that being civilised conceals a great weakness.

…

She puts the manuscript back in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. (page 110)

This is what this book is about – fear and regret – and also revenge. And it’s also about writing:

Once she asked him why he wanted to write. Not why he wanted to be a writer but why he wanted to write. His answers differed from day to day. It’s food and drink, he said. You write because everything dies, to save what dies. You write because the world is an inarticulate mess, which you can’t see until you map it in words. Your eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your own use the stories in your life. You write because your mind is a babble, you dig a track in the babble to find your way around it. No, you write because you are shelled up inside your skull. You send out probes to other people in their skulls and you wait for a reply. (page 134)

There are more passages I could quote, but I think this one says a lot – and is long enough, anyway!

Tony and Susan was originally published in 1993. The author, Austin Wright was a novelist and Professor of English at the University of Cinncinnati. He died in 2003 at the age of 80.

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Books (1 July 2011)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1848870221
ISBN-13: 978-1848870222
Source: I bought it

My rating 3.5/5

‘New to Me’ Books

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Margaret

I had a good time at Barter Books in Alnwick yesterday. Bartering books is a good way to recycle the books I’m not going to read again. I took in a box of books and came home with these. As I had built up a nice little sum over my last few visits, I was able to indulge myself!

As you can see I was looking out for crime fiction and found three Agatha Christie’s I haven’t read:

The Labours of Hercules – Poirot undertakes twelve cases before he retires to grow superior vegetable marrows.
N or M? – a Tommy and Tuppence wartime mission.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – Poirot investigates the death of his dentist.

I also got another Wycliffe book by W J Burley – Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death, in which he investigates the murder of a bookseller.

And another Perry Mason book by Erle Stanley Gardner- The Case of the Howling Dog – according to superstition a howling dog means a death in the neighbourhood, then both the dog and his owner are killed.

I’ve read one of H R F Keating’s books before but none of his Inspector Ghote’s books – this one caught my eye, Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade, in which a millionaire philanthropist, the founder of a Bombay home for vagrants is murdered.

I’ve never read any of Sue Grafton’s books but have read reviews of a few, so I was pleased to find the first of her A-Z series – A is for Alibi. Kinsey Malone, Private Investigator has a cold case, hired by Nikki Fife, convicted of the murder of her husband eight years earlier, to find the real killer. If I like these there are plenty more in the series to look out for – and yesterday Barter Books had a shelf-full.

As I still had credit left I splashed out and bought two rather more expensive hardback books on crime fiction, which are at the bottom of the pile in my photo:

The Great Detectives by Julian Symons, fictional ‘biographies’ of seven detectives, including Sherlock Holmes in retirement! I’ve been watching the fantastic TV series Sherlock, so my interest is very high right now.
Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. I’m really excited by this book, even though it’s over 30 years since it was published. It’s a big, heavy volume which I’m sure is an excellent reference book, containing biographies and bibliographies of crime writers and articles on films, plays radio and TV series and so on. I’ll be dipping into it regularly.

And because I do like to read other books than crime fiction I also got these two books:

I’ve been attempting to draw and paint and this book, How to Draw Anything by Angela Gair makes it look easy, which of course it isn’t. But I’m hoping it will help me improve.

I looked briefly at the many bookcases of general fiction and was drawn (pun not intended!) to Still Life by A S Byatt. Maybe my mind was still on art but this book certainly caught my eye. It’s a novel set in the 1950s. The cover is Still Life with Coffeepot by Vincent Van Gogh.

The Clocks by Agatha Christie: My Thoughts

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Margaret

The Clocks is one of Agatha Christie’s later books, published in 1963. I read it in December and then watched the TV version. They are different and for once that didn’t irritate me, although I do wonder why some of the names were altered. The main difference is that in the book, Poirot doesn’t appear until about halfway into the book, whereas in the TV version he is the main investigator. So be it, I liked both versions. This post is now just about the book.

Sheila Webb, a typist, had found a dead man in the sitting room at the home of Miss Pebmarsh at 19 Wilbraham Crescent. He had been drugged and then stabbed. Miss Pebmarsh who is blind didn’t know the dead man and denied ringing the secretarial agency and asking for Sheila. The strange thing was that there were five clocks in the sitting room and all, except for the cuckoo clock which announced the time as 3 o’clock, had stopped at 4.13. Sheila ran out of the house in a panic into the arms of Colin Lamb. Colin has his own reasons for being in Wilbraham Crescent, which only become clear later in the story. He reports the death to Detective Inspector Hardcastle and together they investigate. The first problem is to identify the dead man as no one knows who he is. In fact no one seems to know anything.

This is where Poirot gets involved because Colin knows him. Colin has changed his surname; his father had been a Police Superintendent – presumably Superintendent Battle. Colin asks for Poirot’s opinion, and challenges him to solve the mystery. At this point Poirot then runs through what amounts to a potted history of crime fiction and the art of detection. He refers to real crimes and then to examples of criminal fiction, including The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green (which reminds me I have a copy on Kindle still to read). He lambasts fictional writers such as Gary Gregson (one of the characters in The Clocks) and Ariadne Oliver, another of Agatha Christie’s creations, thinking her books are highly improbable.

Colin gives him the facts and wants the answer. He says:

I want you to give me the solution. I’ve always understood from you that it was perfectly possible to lie back in one’s chair, just think about it all, and come up with the answer. That it was quite unnecessary to go and question people and run about looking for clues. (page 193)

I enjoyed these aspect of the book immensely, where I imagine Agatha Christie was amusing herself at her characters’ expense. Poirot sends Colin away instructing him to talk to people and to let them talk to him. Later on his curiosity gets the better of him and he does leaves his chair and visit the scene of the crime.

I also liked the descriptions of the neighbours in the Crescent and the confusing way the houses are numbered. I did work out the significance of the numbering quite early on in the book, which rather pleased me. There are many red herrings and I didn’t think the separate plot involving Colin’s work as a British Intelligence agent was terribly interesting,or necessary, although the two plots do connect by the end.

For a more detailed account of the book see Wikipedia.

My rating: 4/5

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Margaret

Death in the Clouds is a kind of locked room mystery, only this time the ‘locked room’ is a plane on a flight from Paris to Croydon, in which Hercule Poirot is one of the passengers.

In mid-air, Madame Giselle, is found dead in her seat. It appears at first that she has died as a result of a wasp sting (a wasp was flying around in the cabin) but when Poirot discovers a thorn with a discoloured tip it seems that she was killed by a poisoned dart, aimed by a blowpipe.

At the inquest the jury’s verdict is that the murderer is Poirot! However the coroner refuses to accept this and finds that the cause of death was poison with insufficient evidence to show who had administered the poison. All the other passengers and flight attendants are suspects and Poirot together with Inspector Japp, studies the passenger list with details of their belongings. There is a helpful plan of the cabin at the front of the book showing who sat where, including a crime fiction writer, a flute-playing Harley Street doctor, two French archaeologists, a dentist, a hairdresser, a Countess (formerly an actress), a woman who is a compulsive gambler, a crime writer and a businessman . Despite all this I was quite unable to work out who did it.

The question is who could have acquired the rare poison and how could it have been shot at Madame Giselle without anyone noticing that happening. Why would anyone want to kill her, and how were any of the suspects connected with her? Even when Poirot details the clues, including the Clue of the Passenger’s Baggage (and I read through the list a few times), I still didn’t work it out.

Apart from the ingenious mystery, which the coroner describes as the most astonishing and incredible case he had ever dealt with, there were other things I enjoyed in reading this book. First of all the ‘psychological moments’ in which people don’t notice what is happening in front of them because their attention is diverted. Then there is the way Christie makes fun of crime fiction writers and readers, making Japp comment that:

I don’t think it healthy for a man always to be brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head. (page 63)

Poirot’s dénouement at the end of the book clears up all the confusion, detailing his impressions, precise ideas and methods in dealing with the case. Looking back through the book, all the clues were there, of course, but so cleverly concealed that in most cases I had overlooked them or not realised their significance. A most enjoyable book!

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins; Masterpiece edition (Reissue) edition (3 Mar 2008)
Language English
ISBN-10: 000711933X
ISBN-13: 978-0007119332
Source: I bought the book
My rating 4/5

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Margaret

I hadn’t come across any of Catriona McPherson’s books until the publishers emailed me about her latest book – Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder, which is coming out in the spring and they kindly sent me the fifth in the Dandy Gilver series – Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains. Given that it has the sort of title and jacket cover that normally make me avoid a book, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed this book. It just goes to show not to judge a book by its cover.

It’s set in Edinburgh in 1926, when Dandy (short for Dandelion Dahlia!), a wealthy aristocrat who is also an amateur sleuth, receives a letter from Lollie Balfour asking for help as she is convinced that her husband is going to kill her. The only way Dandy can investigate is for her to go undercover as lady’s maid to Lollie. She manages to pass as a lady’s maid (albeit an inexperienced one) with the other household servants, who with just one exception, all have stories of how horrible Mr Balfour is. And then he is found dead in his bedroom, a locked room, stabbed with ‘a long, bone-handled knife, lodged to its hilt and standing straight up out of his neck, pooled all round with blood that was almost black.’

There are plenty of suspects for his murder, including Lollie herself, and Dandy has to work out who is telling the truth. I had my suspicions quite early on but hadn’t quite foreseen the actual outcome or culprit. Even though I didn’t get it right I was on the right lines, which is pleasing and in any case I wouldn’t have liked it to be too easy to work out the puzzle.

Along with a good plot, the characters are all well defined and distinct and although at one point I thought the amount of description of the miners’ strike was just that bit too detailed, it has a great sense of time and place reflecting the mood of the 1920s during the general strike. And now I do know the proper treatment for bloodstains.

Hardback: 291 pages
Publisher:Thomas Dunne Books (2009)
Language English
ISBN-13: 978-0312654184
Source: the publishers

My rating 4.5/5

I wonder how I’ve managed to be totally unaware of Catriona McPherson‘s books up to now. She is a Scottish writer who now lives in Northern California. I’ll certainly read more of her books in future.

Mini Reviews

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Margaret

I’ve been reading books recently and not writing anything about them. So, before they drop out of my mind completely here are a few notes:

Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing by Hermione Lee – this is a book about writing biography, which I’ve been reading on and off since I started it in 2007! I first wrote about my impressions in this post. It’s very good with an interesting selection, although some essays are a lot shorter than others. As with all books about writing it includes books and authors I haven’t read – and makes me want to read them – Eudora Welty for one. There are essays on T S Eliot, J M Coetzee, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, to name but a few.

My rating 4/5

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – I bought this book several years ago, so it’s one off my to-be-read list. A fantasy/science fiction magical classic and 1963 Newbery Medal winning book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s the story of Meg and Charles, searching for their father, a scientist, lost through a ‘wrinkle in time’, with wonderful characters such as Mrs Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which to help them.

My rating 4.5/5

Maigret in Court by Georges Simenon. Maigret is two years from retirement and is wondering about this with foreboding. He does seem rather tired as he investigates the murder of a woman and small child. The book begins in court as Maigret gives evidence against Gaston Meurat, but he is beginning to have doubts that Meurat is the murderer and carries on investigating to save Meurat from execution. A complicated story, packed into 126 pages, that at times had me completely puzzled.

My rating 3/5

I read two books on Kindle:

Breakfast at the Hotel Deja Vu by Paul Torday. I rather liked this little e-book about a politician, a former MP exposed in the expenses scandal and staying in a hotel abroad, whilst he recovers from an illness and writes his memoirs. All is not as it seems, however, as each day he discovers he hasn’t actually written anything.And just who are the woman and young boy he sees each morning?

My rating 4/5

Crime in the Community by Cecilia Peartree – a free e-book from Amazon. I was disappointed with this one – too wordy, and convoluted. It’s about a small group of people who are supposed to be organising events to improve their community, but who actually don’t do anything except go to meetings. I found this part quite true to life for some committees I’ve known. But then it got tedious and eventually too far-fetched with a retired spy, a missing person and a mental breakdown.

My rating 2/5

Best Crime Fiction Reads 2011

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Margaret

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is collecting lists of best crime fiction reads for 2011 – the books don’t have to have been published in 2011, but must be crime fiction.

These are the books that I’ve rated with 5 and 4.5 stars:

Exit Lines by Reginald Hill 5/5
Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon 5/5
The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths 5/5
Blood Harvest by S J Bolton 5/5

Wycliffe and the Last Rites by W J Burley 4.5/5
The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter 4.5/5
The Art of Drowning by Frances Fyfield 4.5/5
The Stabbing in the Stables by Simon Brett 4.5/5
Gently Does It by Alan Hunter 4.5/5 (Kindle)
Cop Hater by Ed McBain 4.5/5
The Case of the Lame Canary by Erle Stanley Gardner 4.5/5
Intimate Kill by Margaret Yorke 4.5/5
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie 4.5/5
Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie 4.5/5
The Hanging Wood by Martin Edward (Kindle) 4.5/5
Awakening by S J Bolton (Kindle) 4.5/5
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson 4.5/5 – review to follow