Crime Fiction – Page 144

Book Beginnings

Published on April 20, 2012 by Margaret16 Comments

Some books sit unread on my bookshelves for quite a long time before I read them. Then when I do pick them up I wonder why on earth I’ve left them so long – they look so good.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox is one of these many unread books of mine. I am shocked to see from my LibraryThing catalogue that I’ve had this book since August 2007, not long after I started writing this blog – no doubt I’d read about it on another book blog.

It begins:

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.

It had been surprisingly – almost laughably – easy.

The first chapter is called Exordium and a footnote explains that this means ‘an introduction to a treatise or discourse’. A second footnote tells me that ‘Quinn’s’ is a shell fishmonger and supper house at 40, Haymarket. So, not only is this a dramatic opening the first few lines tell me this is an historical murder mystery set in London, most likely to be in the Victorian period, all of which makes me want to read on.

Reading the back cover it seems that this book is following on in the tradition of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, described as a ‘tale of obsession, love and revenge, played out amid London’s swirling smog’, an ‘extraordinary story of Edward Glyver, book lover, scholar and murderer.’

I think one of the reasons I haven’t read it before now is that not only is it nearly 600 pages long, my copy is printed in a small font!

See more Book Beginnings on Friday at Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson: a Book Review

Published on April 18, 2012 by Margaret5 Comments

There are 20 books in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series (listed at Fantastic Fiction). I’ve read a few of them, completely out of order, but it doesn’t seem to matter too much as each one stands alone, although I suspect I’d get a better idea of Banks’s personal life if I had read them in order!

The Hanging Valley is the fourth one in the series.

Synopsis (from the back cover):

A faceless corpse is discovered in a tranquil, hidden valley below the village of Swainshead. And when Chief Inspector Alan Banks arrives, he finds that no-one is willing to talk. Banks’s frustration only grows when the identity of the body is revealed. For it seems that his latest case may be connected with an unsolved murder in the same area five years ago. Among the silent suspects are the Collier brothers, the wealthiest and most powerful family in Swainsdale. When they start use their influence to slow down the investigation, Inspector Alan Banks finds himself in a race against time…

My view:

As well as the Collier brothers, there are other suspects, including John Fletcher, a taciturn farmer, Sam Greenock and his wife Katy who own the local Bed and Breakfast guest house. There’s something not quite right about Katy, she’s obviously troubled and hiding something, and she is dominated by Sam. As I read on I thought the killer was first one character, then another and never really worked out who it was until quite near the end. I enjoyed the puzzle.

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks had been transferred to Eastvale from London two years earlier and is still getting to know the area. He’d moved from London because of the sheer pressure of the job and the growing confrontation between the police and citizens in the capital had got him down. Crime in Eastvale had been slack until this murder happened. And it’s complicated, the locals close ranks and Banks has to work hard to get information, first of all to discover who the victim was and why he had been killed. The trail leads him abroad to Toronto before Banks discovers the truth.

The Hanging Valley is rich in description, both of the Yorkshire Dales and of Toronto. (Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Toronto.) The hanging valley sounds a beautiful spot, a small, secluded wooded valley with unusual foliage:

… the ash , alders and sycamores … seemed tinged with russet, orange and earth brown. It seemed … like a valley out of Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’.

… the valley clearly had a magical quality. It was more luxuriant than the surrounding area, its ferns and shrubs more lush and abundant, as if, Neil thought, God had blessed it with a special grace. (page 5)

All of which makes the discovery of the corpse so shocking, with its flesh literally crawling. So, I enjoyed this book on two levels – the mystery and the writing itself. I did think, though, that it could have been shorter and more concise, and some of the characters were rather indistinguishable which is why I rated it 3/5.

Paperback: 324 pages
Publisher: Pan; New edition (8 Nov 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0330491644
ISBN-13: 978-0330491648
Source: I bought it

Wondrous Words

Published on April 11, 2012 by Margaret7 Comments

Reading Agatha Christie’s books I often come across words or phrases that I’m either not sure what they mean but can get the gist of the meaning from the context, or have never come across before.

I found an example of each type whilst reading The Murder on the Links, an early Poirot mystery first published in 1923:

Traps as in this sentence: ‘I had made a somewhat hurried departure from the hotel and was busy assuring myself that I had duly collected all my traps, when the train started.‘ (page 5)

Captain Hastings is the narrator and is returning to London on the Calais train, so I thought he couldn’t be taking animal traps with him on the train and it was more likely to be his luggage. According to the Chambers Dictionary that is the meaning of the word: ‘personal luggage or belongings’.

I didn’t know what the Bertillon system was. Poirot referred to it when talking about the lack of fingerprints on the murder weapon and remarked that ‘The veriest amateur of an English Mees knows it – thanks to the publicity the Bertillon system has been given in Paris.’ (page 35)

The Bertillon system is described in Wikipedia in the article on Anthropometry. Simple put it is a system for identifying criminals based on a series of their physical measurements introduced by Alphonse Bertillon in 1883. In 1894 England had adopted the system and had added the partial use of fingerprints. By 1900 England relied on finger prints alone.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Wondrous Words Wednesday is hosted by Kathy at Bermuda Onion.

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on April 6, 2012March 2, 2019 by Margaret4 Comments

I’m taking part in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. I couldn’t wait until I’d got them all in the order she wrote them so I’ve been reading them as I come across them. Some of her earlier books have been hard to find, but on a recent trip to Barter Books in Alnwick I was able to fill in some of my gaps.

I’ve read 34 of her books before finding her third book,The Murder on the Links, originally published in 1923. This is the second book featuring Hercule Poirot. There have been many editions published since then and my copy is a paperback, published in 1960 by Pan Books.

Agatha Christie had the idea for the book after reading newspaper reports of a murder in France, in which masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. From these facts she then invented her plot, setting the book in the fictional French town of Merlinville ( midway between Boulogne and Calais), at the Villa Genevieve, next to a golf course and overlooking the sea. The owner of the villa, Mr Renauld, a South American millionaire had written to Poirot asking for his help as he feared his life was in danger.

When Poirot and Hastings arrive they are too late to help him as the night before their arrival he was found dead, lying face down in an open grave, stabbed in the back. As they are in France, Inspector Japp does not appear, instead there is a young French detective, M. Giraud, who thinks very little of Poirot’s methods and disagrees with his findings. This is very much a mystery puzzle book, with many clues and several red herrings.

In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie describes how she was writing

… in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrange-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and I now added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passÃ©. (page 290)

And it was then that she realised that she had made a mistake in starting with Poirot so old. She would have preferred to have abandoned him after her first three or four books and begun again with someone much younger, but she was stuck with him.

It is rather a melodramatic tale, but still enjoyable as Poirot unravels the mystery. An interesting subplot involves a love interest for Hastings, when he mets a young lady calling herself Cinderella. There is a hint at the end of the book that he will marry her and move to South America. Agatha Christie was stuck with Poirot, but she felt she could get rid of Hastings – she was getting rather tired of him. She didn’t write him out completely and he does reappear in later novels, visiting Poirot from his home in Argentina. I like Hastings, who in this book shares rooms with Poirot and is a ‘sort of private secretary to an MP.’

Her Autobiogaphy also reveals that Agatha Christie was not pleased with the jacket cover her publishers had designed as she felt it didn’t reflect the plot. In fact she was ‘really furious and it was agreed that in future she should see the jacket first and approve of it.’

She thought The Murder on the Links was ‘a moderately good example of its kind‘ and I liked it. My rating: 3/5.

Best new-to-me authors – January to March 2012

Published on April 4, 2012 by Margaret1 Comment

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise has started a new meme. The idea is to write a post about the best new-to-you crime fiction authors (or all) you’ve read so far this year, 2012. The books don’t necessarily need to be newly published. The meme will run at the end of June, September and December this year.

So far this year I’ve read 10 books by ‘new-to-me’ authors, but only 2 of those are crime fiction. They are:

The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman, which I read it in January on my Kindle and didn’t have time to write about it. Phil Rickman is not a new author, of course. I had heard of him but had never read any of his books. He has written several books – 11 in the Merrily Watkins series, 6 other novels, including The Bones of Avalon, and a non-fiction book.

The Bones of Avalon set in 1560, is however, Rickman’s first historical crime fiction novel, a genre I particularly like. It has everything, mystery, murder,and witchcraft as Dr John Dee (one of my favourite historical characters – I really enjoyed Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee) sets out to discover the whereabouts of King Arthur’s bones. His search takes him to Glastonbury and into danger. Phil Rickman writes on his website: This novel is actually the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I think he pulled it off very well and I hope to read some of his other books.

The second new-to-me crime fiction author is Alanna Knight, another well established writer whose work I haven’t come across before. There is a Kindle edition of The Inspector’s Daughter, but I found a copy in my local library.

I wrote a a Book Beginnings post about it and a short account of it earlier – see here. For more details of Alanna Knight’s many books see her website.

I rated both of these books 3.5/5 and both Alanna Knight and Phil Rickman are now on my list of authors to look out for.

The other ‘new-to-me’ authors are (with links to my posts) :

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Beacon Hill by Michael Weaver
The Sensation Novel by Lyn Pykett (non-fiction)
The Arrow Chest by Robert Parry
The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines
Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
Standing Water by Terri Armstrong
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Books I read in March 2012

Published on April 1, 2012 by Margaret3 Comments

I read some good books in March, four of them are crime fiction, indicated below by *, and one is a memoir (Testament of Youth). The others are all fiction. (The links are to my posts on the books).

My Book of the Month has to be Pride and Prejudice and my Crime Fiction Book of the Month is a close call between the books rated 4/5, but on balance I think Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison comes out on top.

So far this month I’ve read 24 books, 22 of them fiction (12 of which are crime fiction), and 2 non-fiction. I’ve been making inroads into my TBR books, with 10 of the 24 books being books I’ve owned since before January 2012.