Month: February 2011

When did you begin to read crime fiction?

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Recently Kerrie wrote about when she began to read crime fiction which made me think about my own story. Although I didn’t think of them as crime fiction at the time, I began to enjoy crime fiction whilst reading Enid Blyton’s books. Later on my interest in crime fiction came through TV programmes, watching Raymond Burr as Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, and in Ironside, Rupert Davies as Simenon’s Maigret, and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint.

I don’t remember when I first read Agatha Christie, but as a teenager I devoured as many of her books that the library had in no time at all. Then I had a huge gap when I didn’t read any crime fiction – I was reading historical fiction mainly and classics. At that time I didn’t own half as many books as I do now and most of my reading came from the library and I can’t remember much of what I read. I started to do Open University courses partly to focus my reading and crime fiction just dropped out of my life. Later on I read John Grisham’s books until they all merged into one in my head and I stopped reading crime fiction.

Then about 5 years ago I began to read other people’s blogs.  That was when I began again with Agatha Christie and Ian Rankin and then found so many authors I’d never heard of before – like Kate Atkinson, John Baker, Simon Brett, Martin Edwards, Ariana Franklin, and Peter Robinson to mention just a few. Now crime fiction makes up about half of my reading.

This morning I went to Barter Books in Alnwick and remembering the Perry Mason books I looked for some and found a few of the green and white Penguin paperbacks, including The Case of the Substitute Face and The Case of the Lame Canary by Erle Stanley Gardner. I also bought Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit and Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner, an author I’d never come across before. It looks good, about a woman who collapses and dies on the brand-new Eiffel Tower in 1889, apparently because of a bee-sting. Victor Legris, a young bookseller determines to find out what actually happened.

So, now I’m even more spoilt for choice for my next book to read, especially as I also bought two more books – Margaret Drabble’s debut novel, A Summer Bird Cage and a book I loved when I first read it as a teenager – C P Snow’s The Masters.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter F

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

This week Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet has reached the letter F and I’ve chosen to highlight Frances Fyfield and in particular her novel The Art of Drowning.

Frances Fyfield is a British crime writer who as a lawyer worked for the Crown Prosecution Service. She has written a number of books and won the following awards:

  • Edgar Awards – Best Novel Nominee (1990): A Question of Guilt
  • Dagger Awards – Best Novel Nominee (2006) Safer Than Houses
  • Dagger Awards – Best Novel Winner (2008) Blood from Stone

The Art of Drowning

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Sphere; New edition edition (4 Oct 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0751536202
  • ISBN-13: 978-0751536201
  • Source: Library Book

Description from Amazon:

Rachel Doe is a shy accountant at a low ebb in life when she meets charismatic Ivy Schneider, nee Wiseman, at her evening class and her life changes for the better.

Ivy is her polar opposite: strong, six years her senior and the romantic survivor of drug addiction, homelessness and the death of her child. Ivy does menial shift work, beholden to no one, and she inspires life; as do her farming parents, with their ramshackle house and its swan-filled lake, the lake where Ivy’s daughter drowned. As Rachel grows closer to them all she learns how Ivy came to be married to Carl, the son of a WWII prisoner, as well as the true nature of that marriage to a bullying and ambitious lawyer who has become a judge and who denies her access to her surviving child.

Rachel wants justice for Ivy, but Ivy has another agenda and Rachel’s naïve sense of fair play is no match for the manipulative qualities of the Wisemen women.

My thoughts:

This is a very edgy and tense crime thriller as Rachel determines to find Carl and bring about a reconciliation between him and Ivy and her parents. Right from the start I felt all was not it seemed to be on the surface and actually disliked most of the characters. But that didn’t prevent me liking this book.  The story is compelling, well paced and full of that creepy feeling of something not quite right – sinister references to past events signalling that not all the characters can be trusted – just who is telling the truth and how did Ivy’s daughter die?

Sunday Salon – This Weekend

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Not a lot of reading has been done this weekend as we have been visiting our son and family, walking and babysitting.

I’ve had a very brief session with True Grit by Charles Portis, which is progressing nicely. This novel has a very realistic feel about it, not that I’m at all familiar with the American West, US Marshalls and tracking down killers of course. What I mean is that the dialogue is lively and fresh – even if I don’t understand all the Westernisms – and the characters come over as real people. It won’t take me long to finish it and already I’m wondering what to read next.

My choices are:

  • An Agatha Christie book – maybe The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
  • Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – inspired by our walk today on Yellowcraigs Beach with its view of the Island of Fidra, Stevenson’s inspiration for the book (more on this beautiful place in another post).
  • Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deidre Madden – because I keep meaning to read this book!
  • The Small Hand: a Ghost Story by Susan Hill – because it’s due back at the library soon.
  • The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney, which I’ve started and not finished.

Coming up tomorrow – Crime Fiction Alphabet – the letter F.

LibraryThing and Good Reads

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

Recently I saw on Bernadette’s blog that she had joined the Good Reads 2011 Reading Challenge, which asks members to nominate the number of books they would read during the year and if you did so then every time you log in to the site you see your own progress towards your goal.

This reminded me that I had joined Good Reads in April last year and had done very little with it, just adding a few books because I’ve got most of my books entered in LibraryThing. I’ve never set myself a target of books to read in a year and I’m not too fussed about doing so, mostly because that depends on a) the number of pages in each book – I’d read short books if I wanted it to look as though I read loads and b) I don’t actually care whether I read more or less than I did in other years or how it compares with other readers. But it seems an interesting exercise to set a target and see yourself moving towards it – or not as the case may be. So I had another look at Good Reads and realised that I could import my list of books from LibraryThing, which I’ve now done and signed up for the 2011 Reading Challenge.

2011 Reading Challenge

I’m not too familiar with Good Reads and I’m wondering what benefits it has over LibraryThing – or vice versa! Can anyone let me know what they think?

ABC Wednesday – D is for …

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

… Charles Dickens

What follows are merely my thoughts on the few Charles Dickens’s books that I have read.

The first book of his that I read as a child was A Christmas Carol. It was a small book with the original illustrations and I read it many times. It has a great opening paragraph:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. the register of his death was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to, Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s clear and to the point and it has to be because this is a ghost story and unless you are certain that Marley was dead, as Dickens goes on to say: ‘nothing wonderful can come of the story’. The story is well structured with Scrooge visited by the three Ghosts of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet to Come. The pathos of the story of Tiny Tim has stayed with me over the years and the transformation of the miserly Scrooge into a jovial, kind and happy man seemed to me a perfect Christmas story.

Following on from that I didn’t read any more of Dickens’s books until I read A Tale of Two Cities for ‘O’ level GCE, but I knew of so many of his books from watching them serialised on TV. In my mind Sunday afternoon tea time was the classic storytime, but I could be wrong. In any case Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations and David Copperfield come to mind from that period.

A Tale of Two Cities has one of the most memorable opening sentences:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

and a unforgettable ending when Sydney Carton goes to his death on the guillotine:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

I remember very little more about the story except that it was a wonderful love story set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. I’m thinking of re-reading it soon – I’ve downloaded it onto my Kindle – to see how much of it I remember and if I still think it as good as I did when I was 15!

Skip forward a few years and I read Hard Times whilst taking an Open University course. By that time in studying Hard Times I was more aware of Dickens’s social criticism than I had been before. There are some powerful scenes and characters portrayed, although to some extent I think of them as caricatures – Gadgrind and Bounderby – whose personalities are described by their names.

More recently my reading of Dickens has been after watching TV adaptations. I read Bleak House a few years ago, after being captivated by Charles Dance as Mr Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock and Dennis Lawson as John Jarndyce.  It was a most impressive performance and cast, so many well known actors, not forgetting Johnny Vegas as Krook who was almost unbelievably good in the part.

This post is getting very long, so I’ll just add I’ve recently read The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Holly-Tree Inn (the links go to my posts on those books).

Weekly Geeks: Blurry Book Disorder

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This week’s Weekly Geeks questions are:

  • how do we avoid BBD (Blurry Book Disorder): When one can no longer keep characters and storylines straight? Often brought on by reading multiple books from the same genre in a short period of time.
  • and secondly how we avoid reading ruts.

If I’m not careful I do suffer from BBD – if I read one book after another too quickly without pausing between them. This is one reason I write at least a few words about the books I’ve read, as it does fix them in my mind a bit longer, and I can check back what I thought about it. But unless it’s an outstanding book the details of plots and characters don’t stay with me for very long.

I also find sometimes that I’m not sure whether I’ve read a book or not. This can be because I know the story from seeing a TV adaptation or a film as in the case of some of Dickens’s novels, like Oliver Twist. As for Crime and Punishment, I think I read it years ago, but then again maybe not, maybe I just started it and never finished it. This is another reason for keeping a list of the books I’ve read. The difficulty is that I only started to do this about ten years ago and then only spasmodically.

Books can become blurry when I’m looking at them in the library or in bookshops. It’s not so bad borrowing books I’ve already read but buying duplicates is bad. I have duplicate copies of a few books because I think I’d like to read them, buy them and then discover they’re already in the to-be-read piles.

As I read from a wide range of genres I rarely find myself in a reading rut and if I do I try to read something completely different. That usually works.