Life must be filled up

‘Ambrose Parry’ is a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife team, Christopher Brookmyre and Marisa Haezman. This book is billed as the fourth in the Raven and Fisher series, which is set in nineteenth century Edinburgh. I enjoyed the first three but didn’t think this one was quite as good as the others. Dr Will Raven, a good doctor but beset by problems from a violent past, now works for Dr Simpson (the chloroform man) and hopes to specialise in obstetrics. Sarah Fisher has been disappointed in her ambition to become a doctor and she also works for Simpson. As the book begins, Raven is not a happy man. His two-year-old-son seems permanently angry and screaming. His wife Eugenie is discontented; pregnant again and wanting Raven to set up his own practice with help from her father, which he is unwilling to accept.

This book is all about deception and transformations. The prologue describes a murder which at first seems to have no connection to later events. Raven is yet again drawn into a murder case when body parts are found in various parts of the city. How to identify the victims? Kimble is a drunken magician turned medium, who is knowingly tricking people into believing he can contact the dead for them. Sarah is drawn to Dr Malham, an American aiming to set up a practice using mesmerism with his business partner, Mr Somerville. She thinks that mesmerism may be a way into medicine for her and turns out to be good at it. (The book is set in 1853, when Victorians were very interested in mesmerism. Charles Dickens was fascinated by it and was a natural, once mesmerising his own wife.) When Malham gives a public demonstration in which he appears to extract a tumour from a sick man with no sign of a wound, it causes a sensation and, not surprisingly, scepticism amongst doctors. Sarah is disappointed, seeing Malham now as another Kimble.

Neither Malham nor Somerville is the man they seem to be and Raven worries about Sarah’s friendship with Somerville. Yet again, his past connections are catching up with him. As the book races to a dangerous and exciting close, it picks up a lot and the reader is wondering who will be exposed and who might be murdered. Will it be Raven to the rescue again? I found I really wanted to know. I recommend reading these books in order.

The book is published by Canongate and will be out on June 15th. I read it thanks to NetGalley.

I’m still enjoying the old (early 1960s) episodes of Maigret on Talking Pictures. Looking round for something to read, I found some old green Penguin crime books which I hadn’t read. I tackled the two shown above plus Maigret Meets a Milord. My goodness, what miserable books they are! It never stops raining and there’s mud everywhere. Maigret, far from Paris, smokes his pipe, doesn’t say much and solves the mysteries without seeming to do anything. Very different from the TV series (perhaps they chose the best stories?) and I missed Lucas (‘Lucas!’ ‘Patron?’) and Madame Maigret. The best of the three was Maigret Meets a Milord. This is set on a canal (more rain and mud) and is very atmospheric; you really do get a feel for the life of the canal.

A blogger recently mentioned Green for Danger by Christianna Brand. Sorry I can’t remember who you are! I’ve seen the film (1946) at least twice: a great cast including Alastair Sim, Trevor Howard and Megs Jenkins. I was delighted to find that I’d picked up a Penguin copy of the book sometime but not read it. This is absolutely brilliant and I really recommend it. Set in a wartime hospital with bombs falling all around just to make things worse. The staff a mixture of established medical practitioners and wartime volunteers. A harmless man dies on the operating table during a straightforward operation. Is it the anaesthetic? This is problem for anaesthetist Barney, who had a previous case die, through no fault of his. When a nurse is found stabbed after saying she knew what had happened, it’s clear the first case was murder. Only one of six people could be guilty and Inspector Cockerill knows quite quickly who the criminal is. Five of the others don’t, and a claustrophobic atmosphere develops in which they are constantly under police watch and treated like lepers by everyone else at the hospital. Tension mounts horrifyingly around an operation which Cockerill attends and the ending is a genuine surprise.

Never tried Robin Stevens’ books about schoolgirl detectives Wells and Wong? Now’s your chance because the first book in what has now become a long series is 99p for the Kindle today. I love these books and you can read my 2014 review of Murder Most Unladylike here.

I saw this book advertised in Private Eye, promoted as ‘by a Private Eye hack’ and immediately wanted to read it. It’s a cracking read (if you look on Amazon’s page you will find Tom Robinson using a rather different adjective); fiction which is based on real events.

It’s 1970s London and homosexuality has already been legalised. But the protagonist, who calls himself Tom Wildeblood, is an under-age former runaway and has already had several run-ins with the police while he was working as a ‘Dilly boy’. He’s given that up, is homeless and finding it hard to make a living. By chance, he hears of the death of a boy dragged from Hampstead Heath pond and agrees to investigate it. Just another example of gay-bashing or something more sinister? There was no proper post mortem and the body was cremated with unseemly haste. Through his many contacts in Soho, Tom tries to find out what really happened and as a result, is hunted down by unknown assailants. He has got himself mixed up in the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, which I’ve written something about here. Tom searches in vain for Norman Scott because this is an alternative version of history in which it is Scott, not his dog Rinka, who is killed.

Those of us who remember the seventies will find Macqueen’s reporting very accurate (nothing like my blameless life at the time, I hasten to add), and will have our memories jogged by many names of people then famous but now dead; people from what seems another world. As reviewers have said, the book is a real page turner, with many twists which keep you reading ‘just another chapter’ as you ask yourself, ‘How will he get out of *this*?’ Tom does find answers but not the ones he was expecting, which makes for a surprising and shocking ending. I raced through this ‘what if’ thriller, enjoying it very much but after I’d finished, I felt angry. Angry about the exploitation of young boys by both thugs and what Tom calls ‘officer class’. Angry about police corruption, about government cover-ups and what seems to be a quite illegal use of the Secret Service for purely political ends. As if I weren’t paranoid enough already!

I'm fed up with Dreamwidth failing to crosspost!

Some people have a policy of never writing about a book they don’t like. Very nice of them but I think that if I’ve been sent a book to review, I should tell it as I see it. I finished this book feeling disappointed, cheated and outraged that there was no proper ending and too many loose ends. I actually could not believe the 100% which appeared at the bottom of the Kindle page, because who ends a book like that? I was really angry with the author beacuse I like everything wrapped up. Although there is a crime at the centre of the novel and one with many ramifications, it’s not enough to fill a novel, at least, not as written here. The book is padded out with chapters about things we already know: Simon’s demons (fed up with them); Cat’s niceness (she’s as lovely as ever); their father’s appalling behaviour (same old, same old). Nothing is added to our understanding of any of the characters.

This is formulaic, lazy writing; the formula being that of all the other Serraillier books. In addition, Susan Hill seems to have wanted to include everything she’s heard on the news that’s frightening about modern Britain. For example, two completely gratuitous incidents: a machete attack at the police station and the fatal stabbing of a teenage boy on a London street. I felt it failed completely as a detective mystery, the few moments of tension ending too quickly, so that there is no pace at all. Would this book have been published if it were a debut novel?

This is the tenth Serraillier mystery, so I’ve missed one. I wrote about #8 here.
I read this thanks to NetGalley and it will be out on October 3rd.

If you would like to read a real thriller, I recommend Ben MacIntyre's The Spy and the Traitor, the true story of KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky who spied for Britain, providing invaluable information. The plan to spring him from Moscow if it became necessary was amazingly complicated and there were so many ways it could go wrong that, not knowing the story, I was on tenterhooks waiting to find out what happened. It also sheds interesting light on just who gets to know about such top secret plots and reflects rather well on Margaret Thatcher.

This is a collection of short stories, first published together in 1989 and now reissued by Agora Books, thanks to whom I read it. The title is strange, since Mr Campion appears only briefly; most of the book consists of standalone short stories, one of which I’d read previously in Campion at Christmas. There’s an essay by Allingham about the way critics treat detective fiction differently from other novels; she defends her craft vigorously. There are two whimsical pieces in which she writes as herself. In one, My Friend Mr Campion, she explains how Campion began as a minor character but insinuated himself into the books until he was the hero. In the other, she has a fantasy meeting with Lugg in which she asks how he can possibly still be alive? It’s nice to meet Luke again in a couple of stories but the lack of Campion is disappointing, as is the repetition of a story already in another collection.

The Property of a Gentleman, Catherine Gavin
The Missing Sister, Dinah Jefferies
Teddy: her Daughter, Anna Chapin Ray
Spella Ho, H E Bates
Who Killed Dick Whittington? E & A M Radford
The Case of the Haven Hotel , Christopher Bush
The Case of the Housekeeper’s Hair , Christopher Bush
The Deans Move In, Kathleen Fidler
Family Afloat, Aubrey de Selincourt
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A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson
Reasons to be Cheerful, Nina Stibbe
Death of a Doll, Hilda Lawrence
Double Cross: the true story of the D-Day Spies, Ben Macintyre
Adventure in Prague, Winifred Findley
Achachlacher, Emma Menzies
The Liar in the Library, Simon Brett
Speak to me of Love, Dorothy Eden
Young Farmers in Denmark, Nancy Martin
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Great stuff from Anthony Horowitz! I hadn’t read The Word is Murder, the first Daniel Hawthorne book, so I was completely taken by surprise to find that Horowitz was narrating the book as himself. The very first scene is set at a shoot for Foyle’s War and there are mentions later for his Alex Rider books. This is highly ingenious and, strangely, it works. The shoot is interrupted by Hawthorne, who tells the writer he has a case on which might interest him. Although he was sacked from the Met, Hawthorne is still called in occasionally to help with odd cases and this one is certainly odd. A well known and wealthy divorce lawyer has been found murdered. The ex-wife of one of his clients is known to have assaulted and threatened him in a restaurant. Did she do it? Once we meet her, she seems capable of anything; she’s a ghastly woman. But there’s another possible line of enquiry, involving an incident six years earlier in which a man died.

The author/Horowitz, wants to solve the case before Hawthorne or the unpleasant police officer who has threatened him can do so. He gives up a lot of time to it until he’s sure he’s worked it all out. But is he right? I enjoyed all the social detail in the book: the real London locations, the people in the literary world, the unfortunate events at Daunt's bookshop (you’ll have to read it now!) and of course, Hawthorne. By the end of the book neither writer nor reader is closer to understanding him. I read this thanks to NetGalley.

Battlestar Suburbia, Chris McCrudden
Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit, Catriona McPherson
The Death of Anton, Alan Melville
Honourable Intentions, Gavin Lyall
One Enchanted Evening, Anton du Beke
Love is Blind, William Boyd
A Colourful Death, Carola Dunn.
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