Category: Crime Fiction

The House of Stairs by Barbara Vine: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

I finished reading The House of Stairs, the  third psychological thriller by Barbara Vine yesterday. It is a most remarkable book, in that it turns a murder mystery upside down, as it were. It is clear from the start that there has been a murder and the murderer is known – she has just been released from prison. But who did she murder? Why, where, when and how? The other characters all know – but not the reader.

The crime is only revealed very gradually, building up the suspense and tension in a series of flashbacks, as you realise the how, the where and the when, but only by inference – guesswork on my part really. The why too, can be worked out, but as for the who – I kept changing my mind, only finally deciding it must be this person, just a few pages before the denouement.  Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara  Vine certainly sets a puzzle, a tangled web of characters, situations, and psychological profiles. And, of course, there is a certain ambiguity right at the end. It’s not a book you can read quickly, but it certainly kept me turning the pages wanting to know what had happened.

The first person narrator is Elizabeth, who is told a terrible secret about her mother and lives her life as a consequence in fear of inheriting the family disease. At the beginning of the book she sees her old friend Bell, and follows her at a short distance, not sure it really is her. It gives her a sense of unease and a quiver of panic bringing back memories of earlier events that had resulted in Bell’s imprisonment for murder fourteen years ago.

She and Bell and a number of other characters (who come and go) lived with Cosette in the House of Stairs, so called because it’s a big house on five floors with a staircase of 106 stairs.  Cosette had been married to Elizabeth’s mother’s cousin and they came to view each other as mother and daughter. Cosette is a caring character, very tolerant and easy-going, one who welcomes other people into her home, who listens to them and leaves them feeling revitalized. Bell, however, is cold and uncaring. The menace is felt as Bell climbs the stairs to her room on the top floor, the 104th step creaking as she does so and enters the room, the room with the dangerous window that came down to no more than six inches or so from the floor (page 121).

There is so much I could write about this book. For one thing there are various allusions to Henry James’s work, which Elizabeth is studying hoping to write a thesis about James – to say any more would be to reveal too much.  Another allusion is to Tennyson’s poem Mariana and one that interested me greatly to a painting by Bronzino of Lucrezia Panciatichi, dressed in a beautiful red gown. It reminds Elizabeth of Bell, and when she wears a similar red dress found in Cosette’s belongings the resemblance is striking. I found a reproduction of the painting on Wikipedia:

Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (circa 1540), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Lucrezia Panciatichi by Angelo Bronzino

Elizabeth has a thought, which struck me as particularly chilling. She looks at people

… wondering which of them, if any, are like her. I mean like her in that they have killed someone and been sent to prison for it, served their sentence and come out again. It is a new phenomenon. Murderers used to be hanged.

Now they are set free and come back to live among us. Or to exist. I look at people and I wonder. … ordinary people looking like everyone else, having ordinary jobs, perhaps living next door. (page 212)

The House of Stairs:

  • Paperback: 282 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin 1989
  • Source: I bought the book (a secondhand copy)
  • Rating 4/5

Barbara Vine’s earlier psychological thrillers are:

Crime Fiction on a Europass: Italy

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Kerrie’s  Crime Fiction Europass stops in Italy this week, which gives me the opportunity to write about David Hewson‘s Italian mysteries featuring Detective Nic Costa and his partner Gianni Peroni. The books in this series are:

  • A Season for the Dead (2003)
  • The Villa of Mysteries (2004)
  • The Sacred Cut (2005)
  • The Lizard’s Bite (2006)
  • The Seventh Sacrament (2007)
  • The Garden of Evil (2008) Shortlisted for Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award 2009.
  • Dante’s Numbers (revised edition The Dante Killings in the US) (2008)
  • The Blue Demon (City Of Fear in the US) (2009)
  • The Fallen Angel (2011)
  • Carnival for the Dead (2012)

This is a new series for me and I’ve jumped in to read the fourth book, The Lizard’s Bite, I hope I shouldn’t have read the earlier books before this one.

 

In a dilapidated glass furnace off the island of Murano the fire races out of control. Two people are dead, and for Leo Falcone, exiled to Venice, with Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni, the question is whether he’s dealing with one murderer or two.

For Costa, life in Venice is more perplexing on other fronts too. His relationship with Emily Deacon is deepening, and she is missing the law enforcement work she’s abandoned for a different, quieter career. Slowly, the sluggish world of the lagoon begins to enfold the Romans in its sinister grip, as they try to untangle the complex family ties of the tragic Arcangeli family on a private island falling into ruin. (Description copied from David Hewson’s website)

The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths is the third Ruth Galloway Investigation. I enjoyed the first two more than this last one. I found the use of the present tense in this book grated on me more than the other two and I thought the mystery element less than satisfactory – I solved it straight away! But having said all that it was still an enjoyable book, because of the characters.

It’s all about Ruth, her job as a forensic archaeologist, her baby and its father, and how she copes with juggling work and bringing up a child, or rather how she struggles with it all.

The bones of six people are found in a gap in the cliff, a sort of ravine, where there had been a rock fall at Broughton Sea’s End. Sea’s End House stands perilously close to the cliff edge above the beach.

High up on the furthest point of the cliff, is a grey stone house, faintly gothic in style, with battlements and a curved tower facing out to sea. A Union Jack is flying from the tower. (location 51)

These bones aren’t as ancient as those Ruth usually investigates and date back to about fifty or sixty years earlier. Chemical tests indicate they are of German origin and there are local stories about strange happenings concerning the Home Guard during the war. The captain of the Home Guard was Buster Hastings, the father of the current owner of Seas End House, Jack Hastings. Does he know more than he is admitting?  Added to this mystery there is also the death of Dieter Eckhart, an investigative journalist to solve. Who wanted him dead and why?

This brings DCI Harry Nelson into the picture and as in the earlier books Ruth is drawn into great danger as she delves further into both mysteries. Other characters from the earlier books are also here – Ruth’s friends, Shona and Cathbad, the part-time Druid. I found some of the back stories slowed the action down too much for my liking and I just wanted it to move along. I found this at odds with the present tense, which does rush my reading. I really, really do wish these books weren’t written in the present tense!

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 475 KB
  • Print Length: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Quercus (6 Jan 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B004MME2H4
  • Source: I bought it

Looking forward to …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

… P D James’s new book – Death Comes to Pemberley, which is due out on 3 November.

I don’t usually like sequels to books written by a different author, but I think I’ll have to make an exception for this one. It’s set six years after the events of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s tale of romance and social advancement and sees Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage thrown into disarray when Lydia Wickham arrives unannounced and declares her husband has been murdered.

For more information see this BBC page after P D James’s talk on Radio 4 the other day, although she declined to give any further details saying, “It’s rather secret at the moment, because it’s something entirely new.”

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I enjoyed Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood, on several levels. There is the murder and mystery level, but also a great sense of the times, set in post-war Britain, reflecting the mood of the population, and, on top of all, that the characters stand out for the most part as well-rounded, convincing people. There are plenty of references to the changing social scene, to the attitude towards women and foreigners and to the difficulties  of war heroes adapting to civilian life.

It was published in 1948, when the aftermath of the war is felt by some people as a restless dissatisfaction with life,  feeling ‘rudderless’ just drifting along and by others, who had ‘come into their own’ during the war, benefiting from the need to plan and think and improvise for themselves.

Lynn Marchmont is one of the people feeling ill at ease and nervous; she was aware of ill will, ill feeling:

It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will. But here it’s more than that. Here it’s particular. It’s meant! (page 65)

There is certainly ill will in her family after her uncle, Gordon Cloade had died, killed in an air raid, and left the rest of the family ‘out in the cold’. They had all relied on him to help them out financially and expected they would inherit his wealth on his death. But Gordon had married Rosaleen, a young woman, whose brother, David Hunter has no intention of letting any of them have any money. Rosaleen has a chequered past and when a tall, bronzed stranger arrives in the village calling himself Enoch Arden, the question of his identity becomes of great importance. I didn’t know the reference to Enoch Arden, but knew it must be of significance when it stirs some poetical memory in David’s mind, from a poem by Tennyson. Then Enoch Arden is found in his room at the local inn, The Stag:

‘Dead as a doornail,’ said Gladys, and added with a certain relish: ‘ ‘Is ‘ead’s bashed in!’ (page 161)

Poirot is called in to help solve the crime. Was Enoch Arden was Rosaleen’s first husband, Robert Underhay or had Robert died in Africa, as she said? Would the family fortune remain with the Cloades? Is Rosaleen’s life in danger, are the Cloades wishing her dead?

It’s a baffling case and Poirot tells Superintendent Spence that it’s an interesting case, because it’s all wrong – it’s not the ‘right shape.’ Eventually, of course, he works it out and it is complicated as Spence complains, protesting when Poirot quotes Shakespeare. Poirot, however, explains that it is very Shakespearian:

… there are here all the emotions – the human emotions – in which Shakespeare would have revelled – the jealousies, the hates – the swift passionate actions. And here, too, is successful opportunism. “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood leads on to fortune …” Someone acted on that, Superintendent. To seize opportunity and turn it to one’s own ends – and that has been triumphantly accomplished – under your nose, so to speak!’ (page 319)

Book Beginnings: Life Support

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Life Support by Tess Gerritsen is the fourth book I’ll be reading in the RIP IV Challenge. According to the back cover this is ‘a quick, delightfully scary read‘, which fits in well with the RIP challenge criteria.

It begins:

A scalpel is a beautiful thing.

Dr Stanley Mackie had never noticed this before, but as he stood with head bowed beneath the OR lamps, he suddenly found himself marveling at how the light reflected with diamondlike brilliance off the blade. It was a work of art, that razor sharp lunula of stainless steel. So beautiful in fact, that he scarcely dared to pick it up for fear he would somehow tarnish its magic. In its surface he saw a rainbow of colors, light fractured to its purest elements. (Page 13)

This will be the first book by Tess Gerritsen that I’ve read. It’s been on my bookshelves for quite a while now and I have been wary of reading it in case it’s too gory for me. I didn’t buy it, it was a free book with the magazine Woman and Home, which I buy now and then. When I read the Introduction I was even less sure this book was for me as Tess Gerritsen wrote that she got the idea for the book whilst at medical school (she is a doctor), when she heard the professor say the words ‘human cannibalism’ in his lecture on Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, a viral infection of the brain.

So I put this book way down on my to-be-read books, but since then I’ve read several favourable reviews of other books by Gerritsen so I thought I’d try this one. I like the style of writing in this first paragraph and it does make me want to read on, so when I’ve finished one of my current reads I’m going to start Life Support. Let me know what you think if you’ve read it?

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.