Category Archives: Fiction

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson

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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

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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

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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:

  1. Exit Lines by Reginald Hill 5/5
  2. Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon 5/5
  3. The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths 5/5
  4. Blood Harvest by S J Bolton 5/5
  1. Wycliffe and the Last Rites by W J Burley 4.5/5
  2. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter 4.5/5
  3. The Art of Drowning by Frances Fyfield 4.5/5
  4. The Stabbing in the Stables by Simon Brett 4.5/5
  5. Gently Does It by Alan Hunter 4.5/5 (Kindle)
  6. Cop Hater by Ed McBain 4.5/5
  7. The Case of the Lame Canary by Erle Stanley Gardner 4.5/5
  8. Intimate Kill by Margaret Yorke 4.5/5
  9. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie 4.5/5
  10. Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie 4.5/5
  11. The Hanging Wood by Martin Edward (Kindle) 4.5/5
  12. Awakening by S J Bolton (Kindle) 4.5/5
  13. Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson 4.5/5 – review to follow

 

Teaser Tuesday

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Currently I’m reading Agatha Christie’s The Clocks, which incidentally, is on ITV on Boxing Day -one of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series. Reading the preview it doesn’t sound as though they have stuck too closely to the plot, but never mind.

This description of a bookshop near the British Museum appealed to me:

Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table.

On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was in a old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing tide of books. (page 170)

I don’t suppose this will be included in the drama, but I hope it will.

I’m about halfway through the book and Poirot has yet to appear!

For more Teaser Tuesdays go to Should Be Reading.

A Trio of Maigret Books

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Recently I’ve been reading Maigret books – three on the run – The Madman of Bergerac, The Hotel Majestic and The Friend of Madame Maigret - by Georges Simenon.

First, The Madman of Bergerac, which I enjoyed the most of the three. It’s an early Maigret novel first published in 1932. There is a deranged killer on the loose, who pierces his victims’ hearts with a needle. Maigret is on the train on his way to visit Leduc, an old colleague near Dordogne, when he finds himself sharing a compartment with a restless stranger who jumps off the train. On an impulse Maigret follows and ends up being shot in the shoulder and laid up in bed for two weeks at a Bergerac hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre.

He conducts his inquiries from his bed, helped by Leduc and his wife, Madame Maigret. He reflects:

There is something slightly intoxicating about a narrow escape from death. and then to lie in bed and be cosseted … Especially in an atmosphere of unreality …

To lie in bed and let your brain work  of itself, just for the fun of it, studying a strange place and strange people through a sunlit window … (page 23)

It’s a complicated story and I had no idea who the murderer was. It’s a short book, quickly and easily read and a satisfying mystery. I liked the personal aspects, the insight into some of Maigret’s mind, his analysis of the crime and the local people, and his relationship with his wife – who cooks his meals for him at the hotel.

My rating: 4/5

Next, The Hotel Majestic, first published in 1942. Another complicated mystery for Maigret to solve. The body of Mrs Clark, the wife of a wealthy American is found strangled in the basement of the Hotel Majestic. Suspicion falls on Prosper Donge, a hotel employee, who finds the body and Maigret travels to a nightclub in Cannes to find out more about his background – and Mrs Clark’s.

I found this book a little frustrating as Maigret’s intuitive powers leads him to the solution. He has hunches, which are not made clear to the reader and spends time pondering the psychology of the characters. At times I felt very like Mr Clark, who doesn’t speak French and has to keep asking ‘what’s he on about?’

My rating: 3/5

Finally, The Friend of Madame Maigret, first published in 1950. What I particularly liked about this book is Madame Maigret’s involvement in the story. She actually does some detective work! It begins when Madame Maigret is sitting on a bench in a square when a young woman in a blue suit and white hat asks her to mind her little boy. She doesn’t return for several hours, then snatches the child from Madame Maigret and drives off in a taxi.

Meanwhile, Maigret is investigating a reported murder, although there is no corpse, just two human teeth in the ashes of Monsieur Steuvels’s furnace. Steuvals is the obvious suspect, but acting for him is the young lawyer, Liotard, who treats Maigret as his special enemy, claiming Maigret is out of date:

… a detective of the old school, of the period when the gentlemen of the Quai des Orfèvres could, if they chose, give a man the third degree until exhaustion drove him to make a confession, keep him in their hands for weeks, pry shamelessly into people’s private lives, in fact a period when any kind of trick was considered fair play. (pages 56-7)

Are these two stories connected? It seems unlikely at first. Maigret is dissatisfied, with too many people mixed up in the cases,which get ever more complicated and new characters appearing about whom Maigret knows almost nothing. He just wants to start the investigations again. It’s only when Madame Maigret comes up with a vital clue that he is able to make any headway.

My rating: 3.5/5

Reading these three books, one after the other has given me a much more rounded picture of Maigret than if I’d read them in isolation. Maigret is a big man, who smokes a pipe, actually he has many pipes, wears a bowler hat – often on the back of his head, who works mainly by intuition and analysis of the facts, is a bit handy with his fists, and has a happy home life. The stories are intricate, with many characters, have well developed plots, a great sense of location and at under 200 pages are quick, satisfying books.

Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer who wrote nearly 200 books, 75 of them featuring Maigret, from 1931 to 1972.

Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks

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I didn’t watch the TV series Faulks on Fiction but was interested enough to buy the book. It seemed a good idea to trace the history of the novel through a selection of fictional characters. To a certain extent Sebastian Faulks has done that, but the book is really about the characters and only touches on the development of the novel. Faulks, he reveals in the Acknowledgements, would prefer his book to be called Novel People, which I think would be better.

And if you haven’t read the books and don’t want to know the plot don’t read this book, because Faulks gives these in detail. There are 28 characters, categorised into Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains. It is a very personal book as Faulks himself features in his descriptions, telling of when he first read a book and what he thought on reading it and his impressions on re-reading. I liked that. He also discusses the way literary criticism has changed in that over the last twenty years the author’s life and its bearing on the works has become an issue:

The bad news was that it opened the door to speculation and gossip. By assuming that all works of art are an expression of the authors’ personality, the biographical critics reduced the act of creation to a sideshow. It has now reached such a pass that the only topic some literary journalists seem able to approach with confidence is the question of whom or what people and events in novels are ‘based on’. (page 2)

Accordingly, Faulks focuses on the plot and the characters rather than on the authors, although oddly enough he does indulge in some ‘based on’ descriptions, eg in his chapter on Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair where he discusses whether or not the character of Sarah was ‘based on’ a real life lover of Greene’s.

Faulks is rather disparaging about monthly book groups where the topic is not the novel but a discussion about the author’s life and how it is reflected in the book, together with how this is borne out by the ‘readers’ own experience of such matters’. (page 6) His book aims to show how novelists ‘create – from nothing, or from imagination’. It’s hard to imagine that novels are so divorced from life!

However, despite this and despite not agreeing with all of his interpretations – it would be strange if we all agreed about everything – I enjoyed reading this book. I’d read the majority of the books he discusses and enjoyed being reminded of them – books such as Pride and Prejudice, although Faulks fails to see the attraction of Mr Darcy, who he places in the section on Lovers, describing him as a  ’rude and gloomy man‘, a ‘manipulative, hypocritical, self-centred depressive‘ and considers that Elizabeth is his ‘lifelong Prozac‘.  I really must re-read Pride and Prejudice, because my memory of Darcy and Elizabeth is very different from Faulks’s picture of them.

Other books he discusses include Robinson Crusoe, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Clarissa and Great Expectations, to name but a few.

I haven’t read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and as I  want to read it without Faulks’s opinion in my mind I haven’t read the chapter on Count Fosco in the section on Villains.

As for the other books I haven’t read, which he describes, I think I don’t need or want to read them, such as Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Money by Martin Amis,or The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollingsworth. I also don’t want to read Faulks’s new James Bond book, Devil May Care, which he plugs in the section on Snobs. But maybe I’m being too dismissive, because as I didn’t agree with all his views on the books I have read, so maybe I should read the books for myself.

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: BBC Books (1 Sep 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1846079608
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846079603
  • Source: I bought the book
  • My Rating: 3/5

Tea and Books

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Part of the pleasure of reading is choosing books to read. So when I read about The Tea and Books Challenge I went to my bookshelves to see what would fit this challenge.

Birgit at The Book Garden blog was inspired by C.S. Lewis’ famous words, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

She writes that ‘in this challenge you will only get to read … wait for it … books with more than 700 pages. I’m deadly serious. We all have a few of those tomes on our shelves and somehow the amount of pages often prevents us from finally picking them up. You may choose novels only, no short story collections or anthologies, and in case you’re trying a short cut by picking large print editions of a book, well I’m sorry, those do not qualify for this challenge! Let’s battle those tomes that have been collecting dust on our shelves, so no re-reads, please! 

Both physical and eBooks are allowed, though personally I feel that especially the Tea & Books Reading Challenge is more fun with real books.Reviews of the books read are not mandatory’.

I do like tea, but I like books more and at one time I thought the longer the book the better. These days I like to vary my reading but I still have quite an armful (or two) of big books to read.

There are 4 levels, reading either 2, 4, 6 or 8 or more books. Six books qualifies for the Earl Grey Aficionado level and at the moment I think these are the books I’ll be reading:

 From top to bottom they are

  • This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson (750 pages)
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (794 pages)
  • A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (872 pages)
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (894 pages)
  • Helen of Troy by Margaret George (755 pages)
  • Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser (758 pages)

I do have more books that would qualify, so the following books are also possibilities which I could substitute or even add (some are on Kindle) and so I may ‘upgrade’ levels to the Sencha Connoisseur level (but I doubt this) :

  • Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (848 pages)
  • Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (800 pages)
  • Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (800 pages)
  • Dreams of Innocence by Lisa Appignanesi (712 pages)
  • Ulysses by James Joyce (944 pages)
  • No Name by Wilkie Collins (784 pages)
  • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (720 pages)
I think I have quite a good mix of books – old and not so old, classics and biographical fiction, plus one biography. I’ve listed some of these books before as books I want to read, so it would be good to finally read them, but I have a feeling that some (Ulysses, for example, which I have started before) will still be unread by the end of next year.

 

Book or Film? The Help

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I have difficulties with films of books, so I don’t often watch them. I’m usually thinking as I’m watching – ‘it’s not like that in the book’ and irritated when the story is changed, parts are missed out or even worse new scenes/characters added in.

One of the books I’ll be reading in the coming weeks is The Help by Kathryn Stockett (our local book group choice for January). I noticed the film was on at our local cinema and with some reservations decided to see it. I thought that if I saw the film first it might not spoil my appreciation of the book. The book is described on the back cover as

Outstanding, immensely funny, very compelling, brilliant. (Daily Telegraph)

Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver …

I can’t be that good, I thought, normally I wouldn’t read a book with so much hype.

We went last night – in a howling gale! I was completely wrong in my expectations – the film was that good! I just hope the book can live up to it. The audience laughed, and then sighed at the poignant moments as the film rolled on and even if I couldn’t quite catch all the words I thought it was brilliant. It’s essentially a female, domestic look at segregation, with brief glimpses of the contemporary political scene.

I was engrossed in the film and now just want to read the book. So much so that I got it off the bookshelf when I got home and began to read it. Actually I began at the back with Too Little, Too Late – Kathryn Stockett, in her own words, in which she writes about her upbringing and personal experiences. She writes that The Help is ‘by and large fiction’ and wondered what her family and Demetrie, their maid would think of it:

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid that I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature. …

Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or time to portray. (pages 450 -451)

She doesn’t presume to know what is felt like to be a black woman in that place at that time, but thinks

… trying to understand is vital to our humanity.

From my perspective I think she has achieved that.

 

The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell: a Book Review

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I posted the opening sentences of The Crocodile Birdlast Friday. It really grabbed my attention and got me wondering what had caused Liza’s world fall apart. The cause is revealed when Eve, Liza’s mother tells her she has to leave home because Eve is liable to be booked for murder in the morning. Liza is nearly seventeen but has been brought up with practically no knowledge of the world outside the little gatehouse to Shrove House, where she has lived in seclusion, never having been on a bus or train or having any contact with other children. As Liza explained, Eve had wanted to protect her:

The world had treated her so badly, it was so awful out there, that I wasn’t to be allowed to go through any of that. I was to be sheltered from the world, hence no school and no visits to town, no meeting other people, other people kept down to a minimum, a totally protected childhood and youth. (page 116)

Liza, however, has a secret lover, Sean and when she leaves home she to goes to live with him in his caravan. She tells him the story of her life in a series of tales each night, just like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, culminating in how her mother is now on trial for murder. It seems, moreover, that she has killed more than once. Eve’s passion and obsession is for Shrove House, owned by Jonathan Tobias. Eve and Jonathan had grown up together and she had once thought they would marry and Shrove House would be hers. She would do anything to stay there.

This really a psychological study, rather than a straightforward crime fiction novel. It’s written in a simple style matching Liza’s childlike naivety.  To some extent, I thought that reduced the tension, although as Liza’s eyes were opened and she realised the meaning of events she had witnessed as a child, the tension mounted. It seemed that she might be following in her mother’s murderous footsteps!

The Crocodile Bird is an easy book to read and one that I enjoyed. The title intrigued me for most of the book, as I wondered where the bird comes into the story. The explanation is as Liza explains to Sean that just as the crocodile bird is able to feed safely from the mouth of a crocodile, so whatever Eve did to others (and she did some terrible things) Liza, like the bird, was always safe with her.

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Arrow; New edition edition (29 Sep 1994)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099303787
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099303787
  • Source: I bought the book
  • My Rating: 3.5/5

What’s in a Name 5

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In September I completed this year’s What’s in a Name Challenge and I’ve been wondering whether or not to join in again for next year’s challenge. On the one hand, I’ve done it most years and it’s one of the few challenges that I’ve joined that I’ve finished. On the other hand I’m not over keen on reading a book based on the fact that it has a particular word in the title. But, then again I do like making lists and seeing if I can find enough of my unread books to match the categories.

So, I am going to take part, because I’ve gone through my books and found that I have more than enough books to finish the challenge and after all it only involves reading 6 books over the year. It’s hosted by Beth at Beth Fish Reads:

The categories and my choices are as follows:

A book with a topographical feature in the title.  I have lots of choice for this category - 

  • On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
  • The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter
  • The Secret River by Kate Grenville
  • Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson
  • The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
  • The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel
  • Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill
  • The Island by Victoria Hislop
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A book with something you’d see in the sky in the title

  •  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
  • Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

A book with a creepy crawly in the title – just one book!

  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

A book with a type of house in the title:

  • The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson
  • The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
  • Wycliffe and the House of Fear by W J Burley
  • I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

A book with something you’d carry in your pocket, purse, or backpack in the title:

  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale
  • Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
  • Village Diary by Miss Read
  • They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie
  • Book of Love by Sarah Bower

A book with something you’d find on a calendar in the title:

  • The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
  • The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
  • The Day Gone By by Richard Adams (autobiography of the author of Watership Down)