Category: Crime Fiction

Crime Fiction Alphabet: I is for Innes

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906 – 1994), a British scholar and novelist, and is my choice to illustrate the letter I in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet.

He was born near Edinburgh, the son of a Scottish professor, and attended Edinburgh Academy, then Oriel College, Oxford where he won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize in 1939 and honours in English. He was a Lecturer, then a Professor in English at different universities, finishing his academic career in 1973 as a Student (Fellow) at Christ Church Oxford.

He published many novels, and short stories as well as books of criticism and essays under his own name, including biographical works on Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. Writing as Michael Innes he wrote many crime novels, the first being Death at the President’s Lodging, written in 1934 during his sea voyage to Australia. It was the first of his 29 books about his Scotland Yard detective, John Appleby, published in the UK in 1936, and in the USA in 1937 as Seven Suspects, to avoid readers thinking it dealt with the US President.

In an essay written in 1964 Innes described his writing methods – during the academic year he wrote for two hours before breakfast. He thought that reading detective stories was addictive (I have to agree with that!) and that he managed to escape the compulsion to read them by writing his own mysteries (maybe I should try that). He thought in depth characterisation wasn’t right in detective stories and he avoided having real problems or feelings intrude on his characters. He regarded crime fiction solely as escapist literature.

Death at the President's Lodging 001I’m currently reading Death at the President’s Lodging – a used Penguin Books edition published in 1958, one of the green and white crime fiction books.

It’s set in a fictional English college, St Anthony’s (much like an Oxford college) where the President of the college has been murdered, his head swathed in a black academic gown, a human skull beside his body and surrounding it, little piles of human bones.

As I would expect from a professor of English, Innes’s writing is intellectual, detailed, formal and scattered with frequent literary allusions and quotations.  The plot is complex and in the nature of a puzzle. There are plenty of characters, the suspects being the dons of the college. As well as Appleby there are the local police, headed up by Inspector Dodd, who acts as a foil to Appleby’s intellectual approach to the murder. I’ll write more about the book when I’ve finished it.

For a list of Michael Innes’s work see Wikipedia.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: H is for The Hanging in the Hotel

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

The Crime Fiction Alphabet has reached the letter H this week and I’ve chosen Simon Brett’s The Hanging in the Hotel. I listened to the audiobook read by Simon Brett. This is the fifth book in his Fethering Mysteries series.

Synopsis from Fantastic Fiction:

A young solicitor is found hanged from his four-poster bed in a country house hotel following an all-male society dinner the night before. Jude doesn’t believe it was suicide, and with her friend Carole’s help, it would appear that The Pillars of Sussex are involved in a grand collusion. 

Jude and Carole are neighbours and they often find themselves involved in solving murders! They’re an interesting pair, Carole a retired civil servant, cautious and analytical, Jude, impulsive, an alternative healer and very inquisitive (nosey). Jude perseveres in believing the young solicitor’s death was murder, despite the police insistence that it was suicide. Her belief is reinforced when her friend Suzy Longthorne, the hotel’s owner, wants to keep things hushed up and accepts it was suicide. There are too many inconsistencies for Jude to accept that idea. The Pillars of Society are an obnoxious bunch, misogynists, who drink too much and are very fond of themselves, and they are the prime suspects.

Jude and Carole go over and over the events, discussing the whys and wherefores, talking to everyone concerned, who all seem to have impeccable alibis, and following up lots of red herrings.There was just too much speculation and introspection which slowed down the action.  The murderer could have been anyone and by the end I didn’t much care who it was.

I didn’t like this book as much as the others that I’ve read, namely The Body on the Beach, the first in the Fethering series, The Stabbing in the Stables and Murder in the Museum. It may be because I was listening, rather than reading, so I shall still read more of the Fethering books.

Best new-to-me crime fiction authors: a meme: April to June 2012

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

This meme about the best new-to-you crime fiction authors (or all) you’ve read in the period of April to June 2012 is hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise.The books don’t necessarily need to be newly published.

Out of the 54 books I’ve read this year 17 are by new-to-me authors. I reported on the first 10 (2 of which were crime fiction) in April. Four of the 7 are crime fiction writers and they are:

M R Hall: I read two of his books – The Coroner, the first in the Jenny Cooper series and The Redeemed, the  third in the series.

In The Coroner, Jenny Cooper, a newly appointed Coroner, divorced, and recovering from a nervous breakdown gets involved in investigating the deaths of several teenagers at local detention centres. Has her predecessor neglected some crucial information in this area? As Jenny digs deeper, she encounters a solid wall of bureaucratic resistance. But however screwed up her own life is, Jenny is not going to give up on the uphill task she’s set herself. (Synopsis adapted from Amazon)

I liked both books by M R Hall, but I preferred The Redeemed. 

Synopsis from M R Hall’s website: Coroner Jenny Cooper doesn’t just have an accusation of murder hanging over her head’¦

The discovery of a dead man lying outside a Bristol church with a sign of the cross gouged into his flesh looks to her like another grisly, routine suicide. But the unexpected arrival of an enigmatic Jesuit priest reveals deeper levels of mystery.

Father Lucas Starr is protesting the innocence of a convicted prisoner who made a doubtful confession to the murder of Eva Donaldson, a former adult-movie actress turned world-renowned anti-pornography campaigner. Persuaded by him to look at Eva’s death afresh, Jenny uncovers a sinister series of connections between her killing and the body at the church.

As her investigation links to yet another tragic death, Jenny’s suspicions turn towards a powerful new global phenomenon: the politically ambitious and intoxicatingly charismatic Mission Church of God.

Answering to no one but the dead, Jenny’s lone quest for justice takes her to the heart of the fight between good and evil, sex and the supernatural, and on a dark inner journey to confront ghosts that have haunted her for a lifetime.

 Arthur Conan Doyle:  I’m surprised that I’m including Conan Doyle in a new-to-me authors post, but it is the first time I’ve actually read one of his books. I wrote about The Sign of Four in June.

Ngaio Marsh: another well-known author whose books I’ve not read before now. A Man Lay Dead was her first crime fiction novel featuring Inspector Alleyn, in which guests at Sir Hubert Handesley’s weekend house-party play the ‘Murder Game’, in which a guest is secretly selected to commit a ‘murder’ in the dark and everyone assembles to solve the crime. This ends in a real murder for Alleyn to work out who-did-it. I wasn’t overly excited or puzzled by the mystery.

Dana Stabenow: I read her first in the Kate Shugak series, A Cold Day for Murder. Synopsis from Amazon:

Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise ‘The Park,’ a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and the righting of wrongs. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she’d hoped never to confront again.

The other books by new-to-me authors are (with links to my reviews):

Best Crime Fiction January-June 2012

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is collecting readers’ best crime fiction reads for the year up to the end of June. She asks for the title, author and year of publication of your best 10 (or so) reads. They do not need to be recent publications.

These are the titles that I’ve rated at least 4/5:

Crime Fiction Pick of the Month – June 2012

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise by Kerrie. I read 5 crime fiction books this month and my pick of the month is:

Red Bones by Ann Cleeves

Red Bones is the third book in Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet. It’s set on Whalsay, where two young archaeologists, excavating a site on Mima Williams’s land, discover human bones. They are sent away for testing – are they an ancient  find or are the bones more contemporary? Sandy Wilson, Inspector Jimmy Perez’s sergeant is Mima’s grandson. He is visiting his family when late one night he finds Mima’s body. It appears she was shot accidently by his cousin Ronald, out shooting rabbits. Then one of the archaeologists is also found dead, and even though it appears to be suicide Jimmy and Sandy are not convinced, thinking it could be murder.

I really like these Shetland mysteries. They are complicated and slow-moving books that enable you to immerse yourself in the mystery. The characters have depth and the locations are superbly described. In this book Ann Cleeves explores both the history of the island, its close-knit community, its traditions and the intricacies of the close family relationships. In contrast to the rest of the series the novel is narrated by Sandy as well as Jimmy and consequently both their innermost thoughts and feelings are revealed.

Red Bones is currently being filmed for a two-part TV drama. More good news – Ann Cleeves’s website reveals that there is another Jimmy Perez mystery in progress  – Dead Water to be published in January 2013.

The four books in the Shetland series are:

Crime Fiction Alphabet: G is for Sue Grafton

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

This week’s letter in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet is the Letter G.

Sue Grafton is the author of the alphabet- titled series of books featuring Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator. So far there are 22 books in the series covering the letters A – V. For the full list see Sue Grafton’s website.

The books are set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California, based on Santa Barbara, where Grafton has a home in the suburb of Montecito. She was born in 1940, the daughter of detective novelist C. W. Grafton. She began writing at the age of 18 and before writing the Kinsey Millhone novels she was a TV scriptwriter. I think it’s remarkable that her novels have been published in 28 countries and in 26 languages, including Bulgarian and Indonesian, but she has no wish to sell the film and television rights to her books. Based on the one book of hers that I’ve read, A is for Alibi, I think they would make an excellent TV series, but maybe it’s a good decision. TV adaptations have a most irritating tendency of changing plots and the characters rarely match up to my mental images! 

A is for Alibi was first published in 1982.

Synopsis from Grafton’s website:

When Laurence Fife was murdered, few mourned his passing. A prominent divorce attorney with a reputation for single-minded ruthlessness on behalf of his clients, Fife was also rumored to be a dedicated philanderer. Plenty of people in the picturesque Southern California town of Santa Teresa had a reason to want him dead. Including, thought the cops, his young and beautiful wife, Nikki. With motive, access, and opportunity, Nikki was their number one suspect. The jury thought so too.

Eight years later and out on parole, Nikki Fife hires Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killed her late husband.

A trail that is eight years cold. A trail that reaches out to enfold a bitter, wealthy, and foul-mouthed old woman and a young boy, born deaf, whose memory cannot be trusted. A trail that leads to a lawyer defensively loyal to a dead partner – and disarmingly attractive to Millhone; to an ex-wife, brave, lucid, lovely – and still angry over Fife’s betrayal of her; to a not-so-young secretary with too high a salary for too few skills – and too many debts left owing: The trail twists to include every turn until it finally twists back on itself with a killer cunning enough to get away with murder.

My view:

I thought this was a well constructed and convincing murder mystery. Kinsey is a likeable, strong character. In this first book she comes across as a loner. She’s 32, twice divorced with no children or pets, or indeed any ties, although she does have plenty of friends and contacts who help out with her investigations and she goes jogging – a lot. There are  some cameos of characters, who I suspect feature in the later books. There is her landlord Henry Pitts, a former baker aged 81 who makes a living devising crossword puzzles. Kinsey is ‘halfway in love’ with Henry.

It’s a fast-paced book, easy to read and with no gory details, which I have to skim read in other books (the equivalent of watching the TV  behind my fingers). I liked it and now will have to find the other books in the series.