Life must be filled up

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 )

Mary Wakefield, Mazo de la Roche
The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde , Eve Chase
N or M?, Agatha Christie
Because of the Lockwoods, Dorothy Whipple
Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers, Alexander McCall Smith
The Killing in the Café, Simon Brett
Hiss and Hers, M C Beaton
The Unpleasantness in the Ballroom, Catriona Macpherson
Number 10, Sue Townsend
A Summer at Sea, Katie Fforde
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
Variable Winds at Jalna, Mazo de la Roche
The Z Murders, J Jefferson Farjeon
Over the Gate, Miss Read
( thoughts )

Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Emma, Jane Austen
Blotto, Twinks and the Mystery of the Sphinx, Simon Brett
Still Missing , Beth Gutcheon
Strong Poison, Dorothy L Sayers
It’s the Little Things, Erica James
The Queen of New Beginnings, Erica James
Have his Carcase, Dorothy L Sayers
Caroline Crusoe, Mary Gervaise
Creature Comforts , Trisha Ashley
Emma, Alexander McCall Smith
Heirs of the Body (Daisy Dalrymple), Carola Dunn
The Misbegotten, Katherine Webb
( opinions )

Beastly Things, Donna Leon
Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger’s Moll, Simon Brett
The Mapping of Love & Death (Maisie Dobbs), Jacqueline Winspear

It’s a coincidence that two of these books involve unpleasant goings-on at an abbatoir. Beastly Things opens with the discovery of a man’s body in a canal. He’s been stabbed, not drowned and Brunetti traces him through his uncommon medical condition. Inspector Brunetti spends his life despairing of the corruption rife in Venice; here he uncovers massive collusion in crimes against public health. This is not really a cosy murder, as the more you know about the dead man, the nicer he seems. As usual, I enjoyed the descriptions of Venice and marvelled at the amount people eat and drink. Brunetti has a couple of pastries with his coffee every morning and still manages the three course meals his wife produces twice a day, on top of her work as a university lecturer. This book left me feeling short changed. When I saw the font size, I thought at first that I’d picked up a large print copy by mistake but no, it’s just the publisher’s way of making a short book look longer. A rather half-hearted effort by Donna Leon; perhaps she’s tiring of Brunetti.



In Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger’s Moll, the slaughterhouse is put to an even more sinister purpose (think Sweeney Todd). The body count in this book is very high indeed but you’re not expected to care about the victims. For those who haven’t met them before (see also here), Blotto and Twinks are the younger children of a duke. Both are stunningly beautiful but Blotto is extremely thick (except when hunting or playing cricket), while his sister is 'a Grade A brainbox'. The plot (hah!) is that poor old Blotto is ordered by his unloving mother to marry an American heiress, in order to replace the failed plumbing at Tawcester Towers. The pair arrive in Chicago at the time of Prohibition and find that the future father-in-law, a meat processing magnate, is a crook hand in glove with the mob. The prospective bride is a sweet girl but Blotto can’t face life in a country where the chief sport is rounders :-) How can he escape his fate (and avoid being murdered)? As ever, courage, ingenuity and deft use of a cricket bat see the siblings through. These books (this is the fourth) are silly but very entertaining. You have to be impressed by Simon Brett’s unflagging ability to coin new soubriquets and similes in Wodehousian style.

The Mapping of Love & Death came from my-man-at-the-market who looks out books for me. (He also found me two old school stories *in a charity shop*! This almost never happens these days.) I haven’t been able to read the Maisie Dobbs books in order but it’s usually possible to infer what’s been missed. Yet again, Maisie’s investigations take her back to the time of the War. A young American cartographer, who volunteered with the British army, was posted missing in 1916. In 1932 his remains are found and it seems that he was murdered rather than killed in action. Maisie agrees to act for his parents to find the murderer. She has access to Michael Clifton’s journals and to letters he received from ‘the English nurse’; she needs to trace the letter writer and people who served with him. The violent crimes which follow suggest that someone still hopes to benefit from the original death. Maisie solves the puzzle with her usual combination of intellect and intuition, while coping with fresh developments in her private life. She worries about her assistant Billy (my favourite) and his family; two men seem to be in love with her; her adored mentor Maurice is very ill.

I do enjoy these mysteries but find the flow of my reading is often interrupted by the language. Fires are always ignited rather than lit; people have hot beverages rather than hot drinks. As for the stilted way Maisie speaks, it’s hard to see how her admirers could stand more than an hour of her company.

Freddie de la Hay, the dog of Corduroy Mansions

Anderby Wold, Winifred Holtby
Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter, Simon Brett
The Music at Long Verney , Twenty Stories, Sylvia Townsend Warner
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Alan Bradley (Flavia de Luce)
Katherine at Feather Ghyll, Anne Bradley
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Humbug, E M Delafield.
Leave the Grave Green, Deborah Crombie
A Conspiracy of Friends, Alexander McCall Smith
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I wrote here about Ann Featherstone’s book The Newgate Jig. Walking in Pimlico was her first novel (her other works are academic) and I looked forward to reading it.
‘And though I never saw the murder, hardly knew the person what done it (not really), and only nodded to her what was done in, I was there at the beginning. And at the end, too, though it cost me my health and reason …’
So Corney Sage, clog dancer and comedian, begins the book. A young girl, working on the stage, is brutally murdered in Whitechapel. There are two witnesses who might be able to identify the murderer and the story is all about whether or not he will catch up with them.

The reader pretty soon guesses the twist to this story but it’s made explicit anyway and the narration is split between the murderer and Corney. I much preferred Corney’s chapters, because he’s likeable and his part of the story includes a lot of interesting stuff about low theatricals in Victorian England. I felt the book went off the boil rather about half way through but as the hunt quickens the story fairly gallops to a conclusion. I enjoyed it but I think The Newgate Jig is better plotted and a better book. I hope there will be more.

From brutality and real evil to the cosy murders of Simon Brett. Earlier this month I read another of his Blotto and Twinks stories, Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess which was highly entertaining. My very next visit to the library yielded the latest Fethering mystery, Bones Under the Beach Hut. Carol Seddon is definitely mellowing; she rents a beach hut, not entirely legally! This is what comes of being a doting grandmother. Unfortunately, before she can take possession of this desirable property, ‘human remains’ are found underneath it. Another mystery for Carol and Jude (who *still* has no surname). As usual, I’m amazed at people’s willingness to talk to the pair, where most of us would put down the phone or shut the door in their nosy faces. It still makes for an enjoyable read and I can’t see why the series shouldn’t run for ever.

The other crime novel I’ve read recently is a new-to-me Miss Silver novel, The Traveller Returns. This is a Brat Farrar-style identity mystery. Anne Jocelyn was killed on a beach in Brittany in 1940 and was buried by her husband. Three years later she returns to England. Is she really Lady Jocelyn or her cousin, Annie Joyce? It’s a good story made more interesting by the wartime background and *spies*. One of Patricia Wentworth's best, I think.

On my last visit to the library I was lucky enough to find some books I wanted to read. Mary of Mary’s Library has been reading her way through Deborah Crombie’s crime novels and rating them highly, so I was pleased to get In a Dark House. This is set in Southwark, quite atmospherically and I only noticed one slip: nobody says ‘Millenium Wheel’; everyone calls it the London Eye. Crombie’s technique is to have several plot lines on the go and to move between them every few pages, which makes for a good page turner. As usual with this sort of book, I’m far more interested in the crimes than in the personal relationships of the detectives. On the back of the book it says, ‘Comparison with Elizabeth George is inevitable.’ I gave up reading Elizabeth George some time ago as I dislike all the main characters except Barbara, and just couldn’t stand them any more. So I prefer Deborah Crombie and will look out for more of her books.



In complete contrast was The Other Garden and Collected Stories by Francis Wyndham. If you’re looking for an exciting read, look elsewhere. I’m not keen on short stories and the ones collected here (some written when the author was very young) are so inconsequential that they read like chapters which have become detached from their novel. The title story, The Other Garden is more of a novella and very reminiscent of Anthony Powell in that the narrator is less interesting and important than the characters he writes about. It’s a quiet sort of story, very well written but with no shocks or thrills.



I simply loved The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan. It’s set in a Dylan Thomas-ish Welsh village and is told from the child’s eye view of Gwenni. Poor Gwenni, far too imaginative for her own good, thinks she will solve a local mystery when a neighbour disappears. By the end of the book she’s learned more than she could want to know about village and family secrets and her mother’s mental illness. Luckily her father is an absolute saint so you hope that things will turn out well for Gwenni, even if she inherits the family disease.



I’ve enjoyed several of Laurie Graham’s books, finding them funny. Life According to Lubka is funny but the joke wears thin by the end of the book. Buzz Wexler is a pill popping, hard drinking and hard smoking executive in the music business, who’s made her name promoting Urban Music bands with ridiculous names. In spite of her high maintenance body and self belief in her total fabulousness, now she’s over forty she finds herself demoted to World Music. This is how she meets Lubka, one of the Gorni Grannies, a singing group from Bulgaria. Much of the book’s humour comes from the Bulgarian version of the English language. Buzz is awful but so lacking in self-awareness that you feel sorry for her. Lubka is a great character but rather sentimentally portrayed, I think. Needless to say, Buzz is changed for the better by the Grannies and even learns to knit, which she finds ‘better than Valium’. I liked Buzz’s assistant Mal and all the south London name checks. An amusing light read with an unlikely ending.

I’m still reading The Shooting in the Shop by Simon Brett, which was my fifth pick. It’s another Fethering mystery so there’s nothing to say about it except that it’s the same as all the others and that I happen to like them. Definitely not Crombie territory but cosy crime.

Nothing but light reads this month.

A Blunt Instrument, Georgette Heyer. Unfortunately I guessed the solution to this one pretty early on in the book.
Penny Plain, O Douglas. She is incomparable for reading in bed.
The Dangerous Islands, Ann Bridge
Beswitched, Kate Saunders
Emergency in the Pyrenees, Ann Bridge. Julia is now married to Jamieson and the fool packs off his wife, six months’ pregnant, to a remote house in the Pyrenees. Author and reader curse his idiocy and unfortunately I had to abandon the book because I couldn’t bear to read about Julia’s problems (more would be a spoiler) while feeling ill. Don’t read this if you’re pregnant. So snuck back to the ever-welcoming safety of
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding. Watched the film, again, as well.
Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason
Duplicate Death, Georgette Heyer. Reuses the Kane family characters from an earlier novel.
The Double Comfort Safari Club, Alexander McCall Smith
True to the Trefoil , a celebration of fictional Girl Guides, edited by Tig Thomas
The Torso in the Town, Simon Brett. Another case for Carole and Jude and I’ve obviously read several since this one came out. It doesn’t matter where you pick them up, though.
Detection Unlimited, Georgette Heyer. The last of the ten I bought and probably the least good.
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The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale is about a real, horrific murder which took place in the summer of 1860 and seized the imagination of the Victorian public. Jonathan ‘Jack’ Whicher was one of the first official detectives appointed. These men wore plain clothes and were held in deep suspicion at the time because they seemed like spies and the English hated surveillance. Most of them were highly intelligent men from working class backgrounds and when they started poking around in middle class homes and impugning the purity of young ladies, they were even more reviled.

Whicher was known to Dickens, whose Bleak House (1853), featured the omniscient detective, Inspector Bucket. Dickens was as interested in the Road House case as everyone else. He was wrong about it and Whicher was right but Summerscale suggests that Whicher’s original failure to secure a conviction and the blackening of his name changed the course of detective fiction. Bucket got everything right but Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) made a mistake. Sherlock Holmes and his successors were amateurs and always right.

I hope this gives some idea of the depth of this book. It’s a well documented case but I’d never heard of it so the first layer is simply the story, fascinating and baffling. Victorian England with its railways, its sensational press and population avid for sensation seethes in the background. There’s obviously a huge amount of research in this book but it’s never obtrusive. The whole thing is very well done indeed and I recommend it highly.

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