callmemadam: (reading)
‘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.
callmemadam: (Default)
Dean Street Press has just released five more Anthony Bathhurst mysteries from the prolific Brian Flynn and, quite new to me, four Elvis Mysteries by Daniel Klein. The Sharp Quillet is an unusual title and the murders are very ingenious. I can’t get very enthusiastic about the Bathhurst books though, as I find them snobbish and old-fashioned.

I was intrigued by the idea of Elvis solving mysteries. I was sent the second book in the series, Blue Suede Clues. Elvis is at the stage of his life where he’s out of the army and making the terrible films which he hates but horrible Col. Parker likes because they make money. One day, he spots in the waste paper bin a torn-up photograph, showing a group of GIs in Germany. Parker disposed of it, of course, together with a letter from someone who says he served with Elvis in Germany. This guy is in prison for a murder which he swears he didn’t commit and begs Elvis to help him. He was formerly a stuntman on the very film set where Elvis is working. Elvis is interested and goes to visit him in jail. As a result, he starts nosing round the film set for information and finds himself in danger; in fact, deliberately injured by another stuntman.

This is so suspicious that Elvis hires the alcoholic lawyer who originally defended ‘Squirm’ Littlejon to help him. There’s a lot of travelling about (interesting for an English person to see America this way) and an ‘accidental’ death which is no accident at all. With the help of a laboratory in Mexico, Elvis and his new chum make out a case against A N Other and eventually solve the mystery, although not before Elvis himself is wanted for murder.

It’s interesting to see a writer’s take on what Elvis might have been like when still young. Fame is hard to deal with, as is the publicity about his affair with Ann Margret, which causes Priscilla to talk of running back to Daddy (they’re not yet married). What he wants is to play music like he used to but Parker prevents him. This Elvis is an intelligent, kindly man. Sadly, we see already a hint of his over-eating and his addiction to ‘prescribed medication’. I found the book enjoyable.

Green crime

Jul. 6th, 2022 08:46 am
callmemadam: (reading)


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.

callmemadam: (reading)
I’ve had two books, sent by Dean Street Press, sitting on my iPad for ages and have only just got round to reading them. Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning were a husband and wife writing team. In 1930 they produced their first mystery, The Unseen Host. It’s famous (not, previously, to me) because many people think it inspired Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. In New Orleans, a select group of people, all known to each other, receive an invitation to a party to be held in their honour at a penthouse in the city. None of the guests can resist the mysterious invitation and all turn up. While they chat and speculate about who can have thrown the party, The Voice comes over the radio, informing them that by morning they will all be dead. Cue a tense psychological drama: suspicion as to whether a fellow guest might be the organiser of this death fest; nerves stretched to breaking point as the murders begin. Who is The Voice and how is he killing people so easily? Will anyone escape? The reveal, when it comes, I found a slight let-down but it remains shocking. The book is unusual for a murder mystery in that there is no detective involved, no aftermath, no clearing up of matters by the police (there are a lot of bodies to be accounted for). Rather, the reader is left to contemplate the results of a terrible evening. It’s a very short book, which you can easily read in a day and you’ll want to!
the other book )
callmemadam: (reading)
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.
callmemadam: (reading)
I still keep my book lists but got tired of writing them up every month. Here I’m catching up with my reviews and expressing some heretical opinions.

Pink Sugar, O Douglas
In the Woods, Tana French
Penny Plain, O Douglas
Priorsford, O Douglas
Silver Snaffles, Primrose Cumming
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
The Secret Life of Books, Tom Mole
Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell
Dance of Death, Helen McCloy
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Firemaker, Peter May
Read more... )
callmemadam: (Default)
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!
callmemadam: (reading)
My header is taken from the email I had from Dean Street Press when they kindly sent me two new e-books to read. On 4th May, Dean Street will publish a further ten detective novels by Christopher Bush, to add to the forty already in print. I’ve read one: The Case of the Flowery Corpse.

Ludovic Travers is staying with a friend in a quiet Suffolk village when a puzzling murder is committed, followed by two more. Because of his experience, the police are glad to have Travers’ help in solving this knotty problem. We have here not only a period piece (it was published in 1956) but a portrait of what has suddenly become a vanished Eden, a world of pub lunches, bridge evenings, games of golf and convivial drinking.

I found it strangely soothing to read about daily life when all the characters had to worry about was a few murders :-) I predict an increase in reading of golden age detective stories, which are a good form of escapism. At the moment, several books written by Patricia Wentworth and published by Dean Street are free for the Kindle on Amazon.
callmemadam: (crime)


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.

callmemadam: (reading)


A Knife for Harry Dodd is another Inspector Littlejohn adventure by George Bellairs. So far, I’ve enjoyed all the ones I’ve read. Harry Dodd is an agreeable, popular chap, who’s made a mistake. He had an affair with a younger woman and now shares a house with her and her mother, while leading a separate life. The women are generally disliked. Who dislikes Harry Dodd enough to kill him? That’s the mystery Littlejohn has to solve and the answer lies within the complicated relationships of the Dodd family. I liked this until the last chapter or so, when the solution seemed a little too pat. Bellairs is one of those crime writers being reprinted whom I think is worth the effort.
This was the most recent Crime Classics Club offering, which the publishers now make available through NetGalley.
more )
callmemadam: (crime)


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.
callmemadam: (school stories)


I’ve enjoyed Elly Griffiths’ Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries, so when I learned that she’d written a children’s book about a schoolgirl detective, I just had to read it. Luckily, the publishers and NetGalley obliged and I got an advance proof copy.

When Justice Jones’ mother dies, her father, a criminal barrister, sends her to boarding school on Romney Marsh. Her first sight of the forbidding building makes her think it has ‘potential for murder’. As she’s never been to any school before, the rules, the terrible food and the cold are a shock to her. But almost as soon as she arrives, she learns that there’s been a death in the school which seems to have been hushed up and she’s on the case. I needed several clues before I was able to set the story between the wars. Justice finds that she’s hopeless at lacrosse but advanced in Latin, thanks to her mother's teaching. Some girls are snobbish and hostile but she chums up with nice Stella and with Dorothy, one of the servants, who will both help in her investigations.

As winter creeps on the cold intensifies, snow sets in and the school is cut off from the outside world. Justice doesn’t know who to trust when there’s another unexplained death. Why are so many people wandering about the old building in the night? Could even the charming yet scary headmistress, Miss de Vere, be involved? There are more murder attempts and it takes all Justice’s resourcefulness and courage, with the loyalty of her new friends, to discover the criminal at work in their midst. It helps that she’s read all her father’s murder cases and her mother’s detective novels.

I see this book is recommended for fans of Enid Blyton, presumably because the school has four towers, for I can see no other connection. Justice is far more like Flavia de Luce than any of Blyton’s heroines. If you enjoy Robin Stevens’ Wells & Wong mysteries, you’ll love this. It’s a genuine school story in the classic mould but with a brilliant twist. It’s out on 2nd May and I recommend it highly to all lovers of both school and detective fiction.

March books

Apr. 9th, 2019 10:33 am
callmemadam: (gertrude)


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
comments )
callmemadam: (crime)


The people at Dean Street Press are issuing more reprints of the Ludovic Travers series by Christopher Bush in May. Books 31 to 40 and they still won’t have finished! Here’s what they say:
‘May 4 2019 will soon be upon us, and what better time to release the next instalment of our Christopher Bush novels - sunny, funny and guaranteed to confound the keenest of mystery hounds…These novels…also feature lots of interesting aspects of the England of the time, now dealing with the immediate post-war period. These are all ably noted in the fascinating new introductions by Crime Fiction historian Curtis Evans.’
the books )
callmemadam: (reading)


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
comments )
callmemadam: (reading)


The Sentence is Death , Anthony Horowitz
Middle England , Jonathan Coe
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J K Rowling
Lady Macbeth, Nicholas Freeling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J K Rowling
All for Love, Jane Aiken Hodge
Constable Goes to Market, Nicholas Rhea
Buried in the Country, Carola Dunn
Once Upon a River, Diane Setterfield
reviews )
callmemadam: (crime)


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.
callmemadam: (Harry Potter books)


The Christmas Sisters, Sarah Morgan
Appleby Talks, Michael Innes
The Ghost it Was, Richard Hull
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J K Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The Levanter, Eric Ambler
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
brief thoughts )
callmemadam: (reading)


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.
thoughts )
callmemadam: (crime)


On October 1st, Dean Street Press are bringing out reprints of the Inspector Knollis mysteries by Francis Vivian. These were published between 1941 and 1956 and have been almost impossible to find since. Vivian is a new author to me. I’ve just read The Singing Masons, which Dean Street kindly sent, and found it rather good. An unpleasant person murdered, plenty of suspects, all connected and all lying and the clue to the whole mystery is with the bees. I certainly learned a lot about bee-keeping! A pity I guessed the murderer but I still enjoyed the book. Knollis is one of those intuitive, theory-making detectives and a lot of the basic police procedural is left to his colleagues. I still don’t feel I know what makes Knollis tick. Perhaps he becomes more human in some of the other books about him.

Profile

callmemadam: (Default)
callmemadam

August 2024

S M T W T F S
    123
456789 10
11121314151617
18192021222324
2526 2728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 05:25 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios