It’s time for the 1970 Club, the bi-annual event where Simon and Karen ask readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of a particular year in books. Any book published in 1970 counts – in whatever format, language, place.

I’ve previously read and reviewed read three books published in 1970:

Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie – not representative of Agatha Christie’s books and not one I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read any of her books. Although there is a degree of pessimism and cynicism running through it there is also a strain of humour, a sense that you shouldn’t take it all too seriously and I did enjoy it.

Sir Stafford Nye, a diplomat is on his way back to London, sitting in an airport lounge in Frankfurt. He was thinking that “life and journeys by air were really excessively boring” when he met a dark haired woman whose life was in danger and his own life changed for ever. The woman wanted his passport to get her safely to London, disguised by his dark purply-blue cloak with its scarlet lining and hood.  He agreed. So far, so good. From then on Sir Stafford is dragged along, somewhat unwillingly at first into a world of espionage, and world-wide organisations dedicated to anarchy and violence.

A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill, his first published book and the first book featuring Dalziel and Pascoe. My first encounters with Dalziel and Pascoe (played by Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan respectively) were the TV adaptations that began in 1996 and I was pleased to find out that Warren Clarke’s portrayal of him was a good match for Reginald Hill’s description.

Connon, known as Connie, was set to play rugby for England before an ankle injury ended his career. He is no longer Wetherton Rugby Football Club’s star player but he still plays occasionally. After a match in which he returns home dazed and confused after a blow on the head he finds his wife, Mary watching television, leaving him to get his own meal. Feeling sick he goes upstairs, then passes out. Later he realises that she is still downstairs, apparently still watching the television – then he discovers that she is dead, with a hole in the middle of her forehead. Dalziel, who is a member of the rugby club, and Pascoe investigate the murder. 

Wycliffe and How to Kill a Cat by W J Burley is the second book in the Wycliffe series. It’s set in Cornwall in the late 1960s, specifically at the time of the astronauts’ first moon landing in July 1969. Superintendent Wycliffe, despite being on holiday, can’t help getting involved when a young woman is found murdered in her seedy hotel bedroom. She’d been strangled and her face had been savagely smashed in. A thousand pounds was still in a drawer, hidden beneath her clothes, so the motive wasn’t theft. I like Wycliffe, a quiet man who works on instinct and I’ve read a few more of the books in the series.

I have two other books published in 1970 to read in my TBRs:

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill, which I am currently reading and The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch.