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Crime Fiction Alphabet: N is for Not Safe After Dark

Published on January 20, 2010 by Margaret4 Comments

My choice this week for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is N for Not Safe After Dark by Peter Robinson.

This is a collection of twenty short crime stories, including three Inspector Banks stories and an Inspector Banks novella (90+ pages). The title story Not Safe after Dark is just six pages long and yet those six pages are full of tension and suspense as an unnamed man enters a park after dark, even though he knows that such big city parks are dangerous places.

Peter Robinson’s introduction is interesting for me in that he explains how he writes and compares writing a novel to writing short stories. He’s used to thinking in terms of the novel, with it’s ‘broad canvas’ and finds it hard to ‘work in miniature’. Short stories don’t come easily to him.

I carry a novel around in my head for a long time – at least a year, waking and sleeping – and this gives me time to get under the skin of the characters and the story. Also, plotting is probably the most difficult part of writing for me, and being asked to write a short story, which so often depends on a plot twist, a clever diversion or a surprising revelation, guarantees that I’ll get the laundry done and probably the ironing too.

In short stories there is no space to develop the characters or the plot, nor to give different points of view as in a novel. But, as far as I’m concerned, with the stories I’ve read so far in this book Robinson has succeeded in creating convincing stories with believable characters in real settings.

Often reading short stories I’m left wanting more, which is what happened to Robinson with one of these stories. Innocence is a haunting tale of a man accused of murduring a teenage girl. After writing Innocence, which won the Crime Writer of Canada’s Best Short Story Award in 1991, he couldn’t let the story go and went on to write a whole novel expanding on the events of the story. This eventually became Innocent Graves, featuring Inspector Banks (who is not in the short story).

The other stories include a private-eye story set in Florida, a romantic Parisian mystery, a historical story inspired by Robinson’s interest in Thomas Hardy and the place where he was born, and stories about such varied topics as American Football and Shakespeare.

Note: Peter Robinson’s website is here.

Tuesday Teaser

Published on January 19, 2010 by Margaret4 Comments

In between reading the books shown on the sidebar (Black and Blue and Can Any Mother Help Me?) I’ve also read the beginning of William Fiennes’s The Music Room, which I borrowed from the library three weeks ago. It’s due back today and I’ve got to decide whether to renew it or return it. Some of it really interests me and makes me want to continue reading but other parts are rather boring and make me put the book to one side. It’s a gentle book, written with sensitivity and warmth.

It’s the story of William Fiennes childhood. It reads in parts like a novel, but is actually a memoir. He lived in a moated castle, in a beautiful setting with his parents, and older brothers and sister. Richard, eleven years older than him suffered from severe epilepsy, which has a profound effect on the family. I like the descriptive passages in this book and the details about the family, the loving memories that William evokes. The castle is open to the public part of the time and is also used by film crews and he was entranced by the filming as well as by the actors. Just fancy meeting Eric Morecambe when you’re five and he asks if you’re married, or selling Ian McKellen a postcard.

Here’s his description of the castle:

Our house was almost seven hundred years old, a medieval beginning transformed in the sixteenth century into a Tudor stately home, a castle surrounded by a broad moat, with woods, farmland and a landscaped park on the far side and a gatehouse tower guarding the two-arched stone bridge, the island’s only point of access and departure.

The gatehouse doors hung on rusty iron hinges, grids of sun-bleached vertical and cross beams, like the gates of an ancient city, a Troy or Jericho, creaking like ships as you manoeuvred them. (page 4)

Interspersed with the narrative about his family are sections on early experiments with electricity which, although interesting in themselves, slow down the book for me and make me impatient for the author to get on with his story.

But looking at the book again this morning has revived my interest in it. I hope I can renew it

The Sunday Salon – Books and Cross-Stitch

Published on January 17, 2010 by Margaret11 Comments

This week I’ve been reading just two books. Often I read more than this but I’ve decided for the time being to stick to one or two at a time. It’s been easy this week as one of the books is compelling reading – Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.

It’s a real page-turner and very complicated. I’m reading it quickly because I want to know what happens next and to see how Rebus gets himself of the terrible mess he is in – suspected by his superiors of being a killer(!) and of corruption back in his early days as a detective, along with Lawson Geddes, his boss at the time. He’s being investigated by a TV company and also by the police themselves in an internal enquiry and all the time he’s spiralling downhill under alcohol and cigarettes. I’m thinking that when I get to the end I may go back to the beginning and read it again more slowly to appreciate the detail.

This contrasts so well with the other book I’m reading – Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey. I’m reading this one slowly, one or two chapters at a time, because it is quite intense. It’s comprised of letters between a group of women writing from the 1930s to the 1980s about their “ordinary” lives, but it’s by no means mundane or ordinary at all. It’s social history, as told by the people who lived their lives through the Second World War and into the late 20th century. It’s a bit like eavesdropping on private conversations, reading these personal letters between woman who became friends through their Correspondence Club.

Both books are ones I’ve owned for a while and so are books off my TBR mountain. I have bought one new book this year, but as it’s a craft book it’s not adding to the pile to read, but adding to the pile of cross-stitch projects I want to do! The book is The Portable Crafter: Cross-Stitch by Liz Turner Diehl, a beautiful book full of designs for small(ish) items that you can work on anywhere.

One that caught my eye is a corner bookmark. But it looks quite tricky with Kloster blocks – you have to cut out the centres and it might be a bit bulky for a bookmark

There’s a design for a little Persian rug, finished size 3½” x 5″ I’d like to make.

But the one that I’d like to start first is a Garden Clock, the only thing is I don’t know where I can get a wooden clock in which to insert the design.

Teaser Tuesday – Can Any Mother Help Me?

Published on January 12, 2010 by Margaret9 Comments

One of the books I’m reading is Can any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey. It’s an edited collection of letters between a group of women calling themselves the Cooperative Correspondence Club, or CCC. They created a magazine that was circulated between the members for over 55 years. They wrote chatty letters to each other about all aspects of their lives, becoming close friends through their letters.

This extract is from letter from Roberta, who was living in Kent in September 1940. It was a Sunday, the sun was shining and just as the family sat down to lunch the peace and quiet was shattered by the sound of the siren and machine gunfire could be heard in the distance. Then suddenly the noise was terrifyingly close, as right overhead six planes were fighting and one plane was shot down in front of their eyes.

Roberta wrote:

This is war, I said, this is war. No, God, no, I screamed inside myself. This is wrong, wrong. (page 72)

Musing Mondays – Bookshelves

Published on January 11, 2010 by Margaret5 Comments

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about tidy bookshelves.

Are your bookshelves strictly books only? Or have knick-knacks invaded? Do your shelves also shelve DVDs? Photos? Why not snap a photo €“ I’m sure we all like to spy on other’s shelves!

My bookshelves are not tidy.

Since we’ve moved house I’ve only unpacked a few boxes of books, so the bookshelves are mainly empty, except for those that have odds and ends dumped on them temporarily. One bookcase is nearly full. This holds unread books:

On the top are a set of three little notebooks, a wooden teddy bear with its hands covering its eyes and a wooden cat peering down over the bookcase. I put these there by chance as I unpacked them, but they are quite representative of my interests – books, bears and cats. The guitar belongs to my husband.

The top two shelves are double shelved, there is a coffee tin holding coloured pencils on the third shelf and a pile of waymark discs (oops, wonder where they came from?) and on the bottom shelf there are a few odd things – a toy rabbit (this belonged to my sister), a photoframe (this belonged to my mother-in-law) and a pile of Alphapuzzle books (I’m addicted to Alphapuzzles, aka Codewords). Eventually the bottom shelf will just hold books.

The other boxes I’ve unpacked held both fiction and non-fiction and for the time being they’re on the shelves just as they came out of the boxes, in no particular order at all. Other non-book items have found their way onto some of the shelves – CDs, speakers and my mother’s sewing box, etc. In other words it’s all a bit of lucky dip.

Bookcases 2

The remaining boxes of books are spread throughout the house. Some unopened …

and some opened.

One day I’ll get organised!

Sunday Salon

Published on January 10, 2010 by Margaret3 Comments

Yesterday I began reading Ian Rankin’s Let it Bleed, the seventh Inspector Rebus book. This begins with a dramatic car chase in Edinburgh ending in a crash on the Forth Road Bridge. Rebus and his boss Chief Inspector Lauderdale are both injured, whilst the youths they were chasing stumble from their car and plunge from the Bridge embedding themselves in the metal deck of a Royal Navy frigate in the Firth of Forth hundreds of feet below.

I read further on this morning to be confronted with another suicide, this time Hugh McAnally, known as Wee Shug blows his head off with a sawn-off shotgun. Rebus is struggling, drinking and smoking too much, living on his own and at odds with his daughter. He’s rubbed people up the wrong way and is told to take time off, which worries him – without work his life has no shape or substance:

… it gave him a schedule to work to, a reason to get up in the morning. He loathed his free time, dreaded Sundays off. He lived to work, and in a very real sense he worked to live, too : the much maligned Protestant work-ethic. Subtract work from the equation, and the day became flabby, like releasing jelly from its mould. Besides, without work, what reason had he not to drink? (page 122)

The Rebus books are fast paced, with rounded characters, convincing dialogue and plots that keep me turning the pages. This one combines crime, politics and corruption in a bleak tale, set in a bleak wintry Edinburgh.