Random Jottings

Current Books - Part two

OK here is a round up of my current reading having got through a shedload of slightly disappointing reads.

After the Romanovs - Helen Rappaport. I am a great fan of Helen's books, I have most of them on my shelves and as well as being impeccably researched, they are also immensely readable and she has the knack of making you want to keep turning the pages. Not all historians manage this. I can think of a few whose books have been a chore but never here.

This is the story of Russian Exiles in Paris between the Wars. I have just started it so cannot give a full review yet, but my goodness it is interesting.  As the blurb says "former princes could be found driving taxi cabs................talented intellectuals, artists, poets ....eked out a living at menial jobs while others found success"

A simply gorgeous cover as well which I always find adds to the pleasure of owning and reading and this book is top of my pile at the moment.

I have long been a fan of Jane Casey the creator of the Maeve Kerrigan series of crime novels and she has a new one out next year, The Close. I was lucky enough to be able to read it ahead of publication and thoroughly enjoyed it.   It is available for pre-order.

The first in this series, The Burning, was written in 2016 and so if you decide to try them you will have a lot to look forward to.   They can be read on their own but the relationship between Maeve and Josh Derwent, her colleague and boss, is fascinating and it is interesting to watch it grow.   I have now decided to re-read them all from the beginning as I freely admit that I have forgotten details so this week I read The Burning and was hooked in once more.   I know what I will be doing over the next few weeks.

As it is near Christmas time I have hauled out my copy of A Christmas Carol by Dickens and have it waiting as I always re-read it at this time of year. I never tire of it. I have about six editions and each year I read a different one. I have yet to choose for for 2022.    Also to hand is the Pickwick Papers. For years I put off reading this, I am not quite sure why, but it did not appeal. And then one day I decided to try it when a lovely new paperback edition was sent to me by Oxford University Press, and I simply loved it. There are the odd passages that I do find not as amusing as I would wish, but there are also moments of sheer laugh out loud fun and I did laugh.   We always think of Dickens at Christmas (well at least I do) and the chapter of Christmas at Dingley Dell is simply wonderful.

I am finding these days that I am reading less and less of what is called 'literary fiction' in some quarters, ie modern novels. This is not something that has crept up on me over the advancing years. I have always found current writing of little interest to me. Why I know not and yes, I will agree with any argument you may put forward that I am missing out, but I am really not bothered now.  I tried so many times to read the Booker list and other lauded books and, while I admired Attwood hugely, and some of A S Byatt and other luminaries, I found their oeuvre challenging and admirable, but I cannot say I have ever felt any desire to re-read any of them. So I have now come to terms with my lack of intellect and happily read books from Dean Street Press, Persephone, and similar publishing houses, and also gobble up as much crime as I can. The British Library Crime Classics series is wonderful as I have mentioned so many times and keep me going.

I have been having a sort out of books recently and have got rid of a shedload. Before you throw up your hands in horror I was very strict and asked myself honestly was I going to read this again and if the answer was no, then out it went. I have sold a lot and the local hospice shop which has a wonderful book section has benefited from several bags full. I still have several shelves to do and the interesting thing is finding stuff I had forgotten I owned and duplicates too and realise that I have plenty to keep me going.

In 2023 I have decided to take a book off my shelves, whether it be in print or not, and write about it. I shall make a resolution, early I know but never mind, to do this each month and I ask you all to keep me up to the mark.

So that is something planned for next year but I must not get ahead of myself....

Current books - Part One

I have had a few disappointing reads recently so am pleased that I seem to have struck lucky now and have been enjoying catching up.  Nothing too eclectic or academic, just good enjoyable books.

No Plan B - Lee Child with Andrew Child. I gather Lee is retiring from the fray but his brother is taking over the Reacher books. I always find this rather odd. I remember when Dick Francis died his son, Felix, took over the franchise and I cannot tell the difference in the writing. Makes you wonder.

Lee Child was interviewed recently and said he thoroughly enoys his success and his life, he and his family spend money and have a great time, though he gives a lot away.  Says you cannot take it with you.  He said that his books are generally looked down on and not taken too seriously but he is not too worried about that. When a new Reacher book comes out and immediately swlls in hundreds of thousands, he knows that for the next day or two all those readers would have a good time enjoying the story and that was good enough for him. I agree.

It is the usual tale. Reacher arrives in town, stumbles upon a wrong and sorts it out. Nothing new but, as always, punchy and well written and I am enjoying the latest in which it appears that a state of the art detention centre run on progressive lines may not be what it appears. Who would have thought?

Linwood Barclay - Take your breath away. Just spotted this in paperback at Waterstones the other day so I had obviously missed the original publication. I usually read the Barclay books because, as with the Reacher stories, they are great fun, well written and terrific entertainment.

Andy is married to Brie and one night he comes home and she has vanished and no sign of what happened to her. It goes without saying that the police have him down as the suspect in his wife's murder but no case can be proved. Eventually he moves away, changes his name, starts a new life until one day a woman drives up to the old address, where a new house has been built, and screams "what has happened to my house?"  It looks remarkably like Brie. But is it and where has she been all this time.  I am half way through and have no idea of how it ends. Good stuff.

An arrival from the British LIbrary. I am so lucky that they send me shed loads of stuff to
review. Some of it I love, others not so much, but there is always somewthing interesting there. This is for the festive marked as it is called Stories for Christmas and the Festive Season and includes authors Muriel Spark, Stella Gibbons, E M Delafield and others. This is currently on my bedside table and from the start of December I shall read a story a night.

Another book to read, but as with short stories and diaries, a little at a time is best is The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.  The editor is Giles Brandreth so you know it will be witty and amusing and so it is.  There are anecdotes about every actor you can possibly think of in the British theatre and they are all, without exception, delightful and rather touching too. If I started quoting those I loved this blog would be neve rending so I suggest you get your mitts on it. It would make a wonderful Christmas present for a lover of theatre.

John Osborne has an anecdote about Richard Burton and it was suggested that Burton be invited to lead a National Welsh theatre.  A leader of the principality asked what were Burton's qualifications.

It was explained that he had played Henry V at Stratford and a Hamlet at the Old Vic which was applauded by Churchill. "the reply which evoked no surprise was 'yes I can see that, but what he done in Wales'"

Wonderful.  Loads more so do buy.

Enough for today. More later.

 

 

Recent reading

I have had problems with the blog the last week or so as my host, Typepad, who I have been with for years, had a new update etc etc and like all updates it caused mayhem and the blog was unavailable. An irritant for me, but checking on Twitter I could see how upset so many users were who were running businesses and were losing customers and orders.

Well they finally got it sorted and my post on Magpie Murders finally was able to be logged on.  SInce posting I have finished Moonlight Murders, a follow up to Magpie, and enjoyed its complexity and fun very much.  I am not sure if there will be another in this series, I do hope so.

I have also re-read the Karen Pirie books by Val Macdermid. I have read all her output and this particular series is my favourite.  I revisited them as I knew there was a tv adaptation coming up of A Distant Echo and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The TV dramatisation was a huge hit with large ratings and I gather another is in the pipeline.  I did not care for the actress who played the title role very much and I thought she was totally unlike the Karen of the books, but I put that to one side a she was very good indeed.   There were minor irritants with the characters, gender changed for one main protagonist for no reasont that I could understand, and the ethnicity of others was changed, presumably to tick diversity boxes as it made no difference to the story at all. I do find this virtue signalling that casting directors go in for rather boring and wish they would not do it but hey ho.   By the last episode it did not really matter as the tension was racheted up and it really had me gripped.   Do catch it if you can. Also if you read the books then please do read them in order.

I then turned to Marple: twelve new stories featuring the famous Christie creation. Twelve writers producing "new" Miss Marple tales.  This really irritates me as it is totally unneccessary and the main reason for this exercise is Money using the Christie name. 

I found most of them heavy going and nearly all lacking the  gentle wit and Marple touch. Oddly enough the only one which rang true in any way was the story penned by Val Macdermid. She got it right. The rest did not.  But it is out in time for Christmas and that is the obvious reason.

I have already written about the Alan Rickman diaries which I found disappointing and revealed a tormented, self absorbed persona in one of my favourite actors. Why they were ever published is beyond me. They were clearly personal and not written with publication in mind. I presume the reason is, once again, money.

As an antidote to this I turned to Patricia Wentworth. I have read all the Miss Silver cases and loved them but the author wrote many other crime stories and Dean Street Press (one of my very favourite publishers) have reprinted many more of these. I read three in one day (well it was raining and my arthritis was playing up so it was a day on the bed with hot water bottles) and they were huge fun. Madly dramatic and a bit over the top but thoroughly enjoyable. I read The Amazing Chance, Dead or Alive and the Red Lacquer Case and gave myself over to sheer in fun.

Left you Dead by Peter James.  I read this mainly because I have waded through all the Inspector Grace books but they really had become rather tedious and on at least a couple of occasions when it seems to me he had no idea what to do with a character he just killed them off. He did it again in this book.  I really enjoyed them when I started and I do wonder why authors carry on when they are clearly tired of churning them out. There was an interview with Lee Child in the paper today and he said that is why he stopped writing the Reacher books. 

Sadly though there will be no more Grace books because when I was writing this post I discovered that the author had died.  He was hugely successful and enjoyed by many including me though, as I said, I had rather lost interest in them.

Another of my favourite authors, Andrea Camilleri, died last year and he left several books behind for publication after his death. He was in his late eighties when he passed and the last few books showed a lack of focus which is understandable.   The final Montalbano book, Riccardino, was, I am sorry to say, really poor.   I have loved the Montalbano books with Catarella and Fabrizio and they have given me hours of enjoyment and many laugh out moments.

I mentioned in an earlier post the novels of Susan Scarlett AKA Noel Streatfield which I simply wallowed in, no other word, and they come once more from the Wonderful Dean Street Press. Well I read a couple more and have one left and am saving it up for a treat. Does that make sense?   Do check them out.

And finally, after a rather disappointing run, I turned to Agatha Christie.  I have recently rewatched the superb Miss Marple series on the TV and I re-read Murder at the Vicarage, Moving Finger, a Pocketful of Rye and A Murder is Announced and loved them all over again. I think Christie was a superb writer with a deftness of touch as well as steel and also she was funny,

There is one line in the TV version of A Murder is Announced which is pure Christie but I cannot find it in the book, so assume the script writer came up with this gem.  Miss Marple is having tea with Dora, and they are discussing a young man on the list of suspects.

"you know he is a communist don't you Miss Marple?"

"Oh dear, he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn"

Priceless.

Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz

“There was going to be a funeral. The two gravediggers, old Jeff Weaver and his son,  Adam, had been out at first light and everything was ready”.

The funeral is taking place in the church of St Botolphs in Saxby-on-Avon. Mary Elizabeth Blakiston of the Parish, housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, had met with a nasty accident while hoovering the stairs of the manor.  Rushing to answer the phone, she gets her foot caught in the flex and tumbles head first down a flight of stairs until her head meets the hard tiles at their foot.

So that is that, but all aficionados of a good crime story know full well it is not as simple as it seems. A few weeks later the world famous detective Atticus Pünd has a visitor, the fiancé of the dead woman’s son. It seems he was on bad terms with his mother and the day before her death he had been heard shouting at her and wishing she was dead. Now the village suspect him of murdering her.

It is clear from the outset that we are in St Mary Mead country (devotees of Miss Marple will

have no hesitation in realising this) but the detective is a German refugee who survived the camps of the second world war and is now living in England.  Hercule Poirot immediately comes to mind.  As the reader reaches further into the story we realise that there are many references to Dame Agatha Christie and her works – at one stage a character takes the 2.20 to Paddington.  We all know full well that the 3.50 from Paddington was a famous Christie title.   Then we note that Atticus Pünd has a well meaning but slightly dim associate, in the Magpie Murders he is called Fraser and, once again, Christie aficionados will immediately realise the reason for this name as Captain Hastings, the companion of Poirot, is played by the actor Hugh Fraser in the television series.

By now the reader will realise we are being led up the garden path and all this is deliberate but to what end?   The story progresses and Pünd becomes involved when Sir Magnus, the housekeeper’s employer, also dies but this time there is no wondering if it was an accident as he was killed in a particularly gruesome way.

So Pünd comes to investigate and it is all intriguing and fun and then suddenly, bang, we leap from the 1950s to the modern day, and find that Susan Crosland an editor for a publishing firm is reading the Atticus Pünd for publication and horror of horrors the last chapter of the manuscript is missing.

It is slightly discombobulating to be wrenched from the mystery into Susan’s life and her attempts to track down the missing pages.   The author of the Atticus Pünd books is a deeply unpleasant man who does not hesitate to grill people with a smile and then create a version of them, usually derogatory, in his books and is disliked by many.   So when his body is found at this country house at the foot of a tower there are many who would be glad to see him dead.

Susan sets out to find out what happened to the missing pages and why he was murdered. The rest of the book is her story, in the first person which I rather liked, and we become so immersed in that story that when it comes to an end, we then have to read the final chapter of the Atticus Pünd manuscript to give us the solution of the earlier murder.

It is clever, it is witty and it is intriguing and Magpie Murders abounds in various Christie hints and names that are a joy if you are a fan of hers as I am.

There is a second, Moonlight Murders, which I am half way through and once again it is split into two time slots. 

A Murder has taken place at the Moonlight hotel, an arrest is made and the case is closed. Several years later the daughter of the hotel’s owners reads Alan Conway’s book in which he has used the location and hotel staff in an Atticus Pünd book.   Celia reads the book and realises that there is a clue in it which proves that the police arrested the wrong person.  She decides to investigate and then she disappears……………..

I am only half way through and am enjoying it immensely.   I do hope Anthony Horowitz writes another.

PS there is a tv series of the Magpie Murders, available on Britbox if you have it, and it is very good indeed.