Category: Crime Fiction

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

My teaser today is from Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, which I’ve just started to read. This is the first Tommy and Tuppence mystery first published in 1922. It begins:

“Tommy, old thing!”

“Tuppence, old bean!”

The two young people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective “old” was misleading. Their united ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five. (Kindle Loc 56-61)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter B – W J Burley

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This week I’ve chosen to feature W J Burley to illustrate the letter B for Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. I knew of  his Wycliffe novels but had never read any, or watched any of the TV dramatisations, so I came to Wycliffe and the Last Rites with no preconceptions. I really don’t know why I never watched the 1990s TV series starring Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe, but as I didn’t I was able to form my own image of him in my mind directly from the book.

William John Burley was born in Falmouth, Cornwall in 1914. His first book was published in the 1968. All in all he produced 22 more Wycliffe books and 5 others. He died in 2002 whilst he was writing his 23 Wycliffe book. There is more information about him at this website – W J Burley.

Wycliffe and the Last Rites
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Orion; New Ed edition (7 Nov 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 075284931X
ISBN-13: 978-0752849317
Source: I bought it

Description from the back cover:

A bizarre murder shakes the Cornish village of Moresk. Arriving at church on Easter morning the vicar discovers the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps. To add to the horror, the church is filled with the discordant sound of an organ chord, the notes apparently chosen at random and wedged down.

Has the church been desecrated by a Satanist ritual? Chief Superintendent Wycliffe sees the crime more as an expression of hatred directed at others in the community, besides the dead woman. His investigation, however, is frustrated at every turn, and when another horrific murder is committed Wycliffe thinks he knows who the killer is. But can he prove it?

My thoughts:

This novel has a strong sense of location, with many passages describing the beautiful countryside of Cornwall. The characters are also well defined – a small local community focussing on the twin sisters, Katherine Geach and Jessica Dobell. The relationship between them is strained, with Jessica having a sense of guilt about a hit and run accident she’d witnessed 16 years earlier and admitting that she hadn’t played fair with Katherine.  After their parents’ deaths Jessica had inherited the family farm and lived there with the Vintners and their son, a strange family filled with hatred and resentment over their reduced circumstances. Then there is the Vicar and his sister, who had been forced to move from their previous parish, the houseboat man, Lavin, who is badly disfigured following an accident, and Arnold Paul, the organist and his ‘brother’.

Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is a quiet character who thinks things through before divulging his suspicions to his colleagues. He delegates tasks to his team leaving himself free to concentrate on the victim. To him ‘hope is an ultimate resource’. His evening walks are a necessity for him to ponder what he has discovered and he is calm and collected:

It was characteristic that he should walk rather than drive or be driven; he refused to allow his days to become crowded with events in a frenetic succession of images like a television screen, lacking even commercial breaks to aid digestion. (pages 44 -5)

His problem in finding the murderer is that all the possible leads pointed to a limited range of possible suspects but none of them matched his specification for the criminal. It seemed he had to believe the impossible. It’s a tightly plotted book, concisely and precisely written and I enjoyed it very much. I have one other book of Burley’s to read – Wycliffe and the House of Fear. After that I’ll be looking out for his other books.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This week I’ve finished reading two crime fiction books:

and posts on these books will be on my blog this coming week.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcast: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. So far I’ve been reading about Bronson Alcott and his unorthdox ideas about educating and bringing up children.  It was quite a coincidence I thought, when I was reading the Daily Express in the coffee shop recently and came across a review of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. The reviewer describes this book as a

… richly textured history of the life and times of a back’‘to’‘nature community in 19th-century America. It was called Fruitlands, though Fruitcakes would have been more apt.
(Read more from this review.)

I haven’t got up to this venture so far in Eden’s Outcasts. There are many entries in the index under ‘Fruitlands’ so I expect to find out much more about it. His career as a teacher was not a success and it seems that his venture into communal farming wasn’t either.

I spent other reading time this week downloading more books onto my Kindle and have read the opening paragraphs of most of them. It really is so easy to get carried away and add more books to my to-be-read lists! But I only bought one book this week, so that’s not too bad.

It’s Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and it’s been on my wish list for a long time. I read fairly quickly and know that I often read too quickly to take in all the detail. Prose writes that reading quickly can be ‘a hindrance‘ and that it is ‘essential to slow down and read every word‘. She also contradicts the advice to novice writers ‘to show, not tell‘, when ‘the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language‘. Using Alice Munro’s short story Dulse as an example, she says:

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

Most interesting, I thought.

I still haven’t got used to Kindle’s use of locations as opposed to page numbers – the extract above is from Location 409 – 12. Nor have I mastered the technique of transferring my highlighted passages and notes from the Kindle to the computer!

I’m also reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. This is an Advance Uncorrected Proof; the book is scheduled to be on sale on 8 February. It’s the first book I’ve read by Delaney, described by the publisher as a

… lush and surprising historical novel, rich as a myth, tense as a thriller …

From what I’ve read of it so far I’d go along with that description, except for the tenseness – but it’s early days yet. It’s set in 1943 in Ireland, a neutral country in the Second World War. It’s a long book and takes its time in setting the scene and introducing the characters. It promises well.

Welcome to My Life

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I love the start of the New Year – new beginnings and new books to read.  So I like this set of questions thinking about the year  to come in books from Margot at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.  You can put as many restrictions (e.g. only books you read in 2010, or only books on your 2011 TBR list, etc.) or as few restrictions on your answers as you want. Following Margot’s example, I’ve used crime fiction titles to complete the answers to the questions and except for the first book (which I’ve read) these are all books on my TBR list:

I spent my New Year’s Eve: Among the Mad ‘“ (Jacqueline Winspear)

I’ve made a resolution to: give up Playing with Fire (Peter Robinson)

I plan to quit my habit of: Road Rage (Ruth Rendell)

I hope I’ll get to visit: The Black Tower (P D James)

One project I didn’t finish last year but want to finish this year is: The Death Maze (Ariana Franklin)

I want to learn: The Interpretation of Murder (Jedd Rubenfeld)

I’m not looking forward to: Evil Under the Sun (Agatha Christie)

My biggest dream for the year is: A Cure for All Diseases (Reginald Hill)

I hope I don’t end up: The Dumb Witness (Agatha Christie)

I’ll probably spend a lot of time: Telling Tales (Ann Cleeves)

Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

It was a pleasure to read Frozen Moment, Camilla Ceder’s début novel, a police procedural set in Sweden. It is centred on the characters as much as on the plot. Camilla Ceder has studied social science and psychotherapy and as well as writing works in counselling and social work and this comes out quite strongly in this book.

Publishers’ blurb:

One cold morning, in the wind-lashed Swedish countryside, a man’s body is found in an isolated garage.  The victim has been shot in the head and run over repeatedly by a car. Inspector Christian Tell, a world-weary detective with a chequered past, is called to the scene. But there are few clues to go by, and no one seems to be telling the truth.

Then, a second brutal murder. The method is the same, but this victim has no apparent connection with the first. Tell’s team is baffled.

Seja, a reporter and witness, thinks a long-unsolved mystery may hold the key to the killings. Tell is drawn to Seja, but her presences at the crime scene doesn’t add up, and a relationship could jeopardise everything. For the inquiry to succeed, the community must yield the dark secrets of the past…

My view:

I liked this book straight away from the opening scenes describing how Ake Melkersson woke up and got ready for his last day at work and the shock he had on finding the dead man:

He’s only half a man, thought Ake Melkersson, a hysterical, terrified giggle rising in his chest. He’s flat, half of him smeared over the gravel. He thought back to the cartoons of his childhood, in which characters were always getting run over by steamrollers, ending up as flat as pancakes. There was never any blood in the cartoons, but there was blood here, collected in a hollow in the gravel around the man’s head, like a gory halo. (page 5)

After that it seemed to stall for a while and I was beginning to wonder if the plot would ever get going. A few chapters further on and I was relieved to find that it did. At times I felt the descriptions of the characters, their thoughts and motives were too detailed and I wanted the action to speed up, but by the end of the book I was converted to Ceder’s style.  There is a strong sense of place – the atmosphere of a bleak, and cold Scandinavian winter is well drawn.

I hope Ceder writes more books about Inspector Tell and his team, even if he is yet another detective who likes to work on his own, who is lonely and introspective, who can’t sleep well, smokes and likes a whisky or two …

Missing Link by Joyce Holms: Book Review

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

A few weeks ago I quoted a short extract from Missing Link by Joyce Holms in a Tuesday Teaser post. This book is the 9th in the Fizz and Buchanan series, but it does stand well on its own and I had no difficulty in sorting out the relationship between the two main characters – Fizz Fitzpatrick and Tam Buchanan.

Fizz and Buchanan are an interesting pair. Fizz  is a lawyer, working for Buchanan and Stewart and Tam has recently left the law firm to work as an advocate.  Mrs Sullivan asks Fizz for help to prove that she is the person who killed Amanda Montrose, despite the fact that Terence Lamb has been convicted of the murder. Fizz immediately thinks that Tam is the person to investigate, even though she doubts Mrs Sullivan’s story:

Daft as the whole story line appeared on the surface, there was something about the old lady’s matter-of-fact delivery that precluded too confident a rebuttal. She was delusional of course, there could not be the slightest doubt about that. Sane, mature and reasonably intelligent people, such as Mrs Sullivan obviously was, simply did not bash someone with a hammer. Not hard enough to kill them. … So Mrs Sullivan was probably fantasising about that at least, if not the whole damn incident. All the same she had Fizz well hooked and willing to hear the rest of her crazy story, if only for the pleasure of relating it to Buchanan at a later date. (page 23)

It had me well hooked too.

I liked the relationship between Fizz and Tam, colleagues, like brother and sister, but may be more than that? And Fizz certainly lives up to her name, a real live wire. The characters are well-drawn, even the lesser ones like Justin, the decorator who can cook delicious meals. Just how reliable is Mrs Sullivan? She seems physically incapable of  killing anyone with a hammer and then dragging  the body and pushing it over a sheer drop into a ravine below. But why when she appears to be gentle, motherly and sincere would she want to confess to a murder she hadn’t committed?

This is a well- paced novel, full of twists and turns and plenty of tension. The plot is well thought out and had me guessing nearly all the way to the end, in fact the whole answer took me by surprise. This is a book I thoroughly enjoyed from beginning to end.