Category: Crime Fiction

Teaser Tuesdays – Crime on the Move

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

My teaser this week is from Crime on the Move: the Official Anthology of the Crime Writers’ Association of 2005, a collection of short stories edited by Martin Edwards. The last one in the book is Seeing Off George by David Williams.

Disposing of the body was so often the undoing of conspirators like Tristan and Laura, and she knew it. But not only had she lighted upon the perfect solution to their problem, she had also devised a credible story to account for George’s disappearance which would purportedly take place more than a thousand miles away from Farringly. (page 318)

I’ve now finished reading this book, which is an excellent selection of crime stories from a number of authors who were new to me, as well as some very well known ones.

Crime Fiction Alphabet W is for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’m returning to Agatha Christie to illustrate the letter W in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series, with Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? The copy I read is one of the Collected Works series with the original illustrations by Patrick Couratin and Sylvia Dausset. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? was first published in 1934.

Why didn't they ask evans

The book begins with Bobby Jones playing golf with Dr Thomas on a golf course on a misty day by the sea. They find a dying man, who had fallen off a cliff. He has no identification on him, just a photo of a young woman that Bobby finds in his pocket. At the inquest Mrs Cayman said it was a photograph of her and that she was the dead man’s sister.

Bobby tells Mr and Mrs Cayman her brother’s last words, which apparently are meaningless and of no importance.Then Bobby is drugged with enough morphia to kill him (he survives) and he realises that the photo in the dead man’s pocket was not Mrs Cayman.  Frankie, (aka Lady Frances Derwent), his aristocratic friend decides that the dead man must have been pushed over the cliff and the killer is determined to kill Bobby too. She and Bobby then set out to discover the dead man’s true identity.

Neither Poirot, nor Miss Marple feature in this book. Bobby and Frankie solve the mystery with a little help from the police in the form of Inspector Williams. The novel as a whole is light-hearted with staged accidents, as Bobby and Frankie, a self-confident and rather bossy young woman relish the adventure of it all, despite being bound and gagged by the villain. There are disguises and subterfuges throughout, drug addicts, an American heiress, a sinister doctor with a questionable sanitorium, suicides and a charming  “ne’er-do-weel”. Bobby says:

You can’t mix up too many different sorts of crimes. (page 59)

But Agatha Christie manages it admirably.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: V is for A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series moves towards the end of the alphabet and has now reached the letter ‘V’.

A Fatal Inversion was first published in 1987 and was reissued in 2009 by Penguin Books.

Although about a group of not very likeable characters I was drawn into the world of this mystery. In 1976 Adam, a university student of 19 inherited Wyvis Hall from his great-uncle. He stayed there for a while that hot summer with a group of young people. Something tragic and terrible happened which led to them leaving the house and eventually Adam sold it. Then ten years later the current owners, whilst burying their pet dog in the animal cemetery in the woods, find the bones of a young woman and a baby. The police are seeking previous owners of the Hall to identify the bodies.

It’s a complicated plot told in flashbacks, seen from mainly three of the characters’ viewpoints – Adam, his friend, Rufus, a medical student, and Shiva, a British Indian. Shiva and his friend Vivian had thought they were joining a commune whereas with no money Adam was just keen to get others to contribute. They are reduced to selling his uncle’s silver for food and drugs and after Zosie’s arrival to stealing to support themselves. I thought the characterisation was good and the setting excellent – a grand old house, out in the Suffolk countryside surrounded by dark, dense and menacing pine woods, ‘the kind of place you saw in story-book illustrations or even in your dreams and out of which things were liable to come creeping.’

I wasn’t sure at first who the victims were, but the killer soon becomes obvious. I thought it a clever book, with clues dropped casually, so that I had to read it carefully. The plot covers a number of issues – family relationships, friendship, loyalty, race and class discrimination, the consequences of our actions and above all the nature of evil and guilt.  The ending is most satisfying, such a neat inversion, I thought.

Sunday Salon – Reading And All That …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Today is Mother’s Day and I’ll be spending some time reading my present from my son – Amos, Amas, Amat … And All That by Harry Mount. It’s been on my wishlist for some time now! And a nice change it will make from all the crime fiction I’ve been reading recently. From the back cover:

 In this delightful guided tour of Latin, which features everything from a Monty Python grammar lesson to David Beckham’s tattoos and all the best snippets of prose and poetry from 2000 years of literary history, Harry Mount wipes the dust off those boring primers and breathes life back into the greatest language of them all …

Not that the crime fiction I’ve been reading is boring – far from it. My reading has been a real treat and is way ahead of my reviews of these books:

I finished reading A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine at the end of last week and was so pleased after not liking her book The Birthday Present to find that this book about the discovery of the bones of a young woman and a baby in an animal burial ground was very different. There is a real air of mystery surrounding the several unlikeable characters – anyone of whom could be the guilty party.

 The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith was a complete surprise to me as I had no idea when I borrowed it from the library just how much I was going to enjoy it. From a somewhat slow start I soon got used to the rhythm of his writing and was greatly intrigued by the character of Isabel Dalhousie.

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie is a light-hearted mystery featuring Bobby Jones and Frankie (Lady FrancesDerwent) as they investigate a murder. This is a highly fantastical tale which I read at break-neck speed and thoroughly enjoyed.

Dead in the Morning by Margaret Yorke is the first book in her Patrick Grant series, first published in 1970. Set in an English village this is about an English family upset by the death of their housekeeper. All sorts of family secrets are revealed with plenty of red herrings along the way but the ending is predictable.

I’ll be writing in more detail about each one soon.

Next week my choice of reading is between these books, which I have on the go:

  • The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson which I started a few weeks ago and put to one side.
  • Being Shelley by Ann Wroe – ongoing reading
  • Stratton’s War by Lorna Wilson. I’m not sure if I’ll finish this as I feel little inclination to pick it up at the moment.

I’m tempted to start a new one. Maybe another Agatha Christie or Ian Rankin, or The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which I’ve read is very good, or Maggie’s Tree by Julie Walters – her first novel, described as “dark and very funny”, which I found at the library.

A New Rebus Story

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

A new Rebus short story by Ian Rankin, The Very Last Drop was published in The Scotsman today. I couldn’t find it online but it is in a four page pull-out in the paper, complete with illustrations and a photo of Ian Rankin reading his story at the Royal Blind School fundraising event that took place last Thursday at Edinburgh’s Caledonian Brewery.

Rebus, now retired, is on a tour around The Caledonian Brewery as a retirement present from Siobhan Clarke. When the tour guide Albert Simms tells the group about the ghost of Johnny Watt, who had died sixty years ago “almost to the day” after banging his head when he fell in one of the vats overcome by fumes, Rebus’s interest is aroused.  As Siobhan says

Soon as you get a whiff of a case – mine or anyone else’s -you’ll want to have a go yourself. 

He can’t resist looking back at the case, using the company’s archives and back copies of The Scotsman. What he finds is more than a ghost story.

Teaser Tuesday – Crime on the Move

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week I’ve been reading short stories from Crime on the Move: the Official Anthology of the Crime Writers Association edited by Martin Edwards. The contributors include  Ann Cleeves, Reginald Hill, Michael Gilbert, Keith Miles Martin Edwards and Kate Ellis who wrote Top Deck, the story  I’m quoting from today.

The theme of the collection of the stories in this book is illustrated in Top Deck through Keith’s journey home from work in Liverpool by bus in 1965. What he sees has a profound effect on the rest of his life.

When the bus stopped briefly in the Ullet Road to let somebody off Keith found himself staring straight across into a lighted upstairs window. The curtains were wide open and two people were silhouetted behind the glass; a man and a woman who, for a split second, seemed faintly familiar. The man seemed to have both his hands raised up to the woman’s throat and they were moving slowly to and fro as if the woman was trying to ward him off, trying to save her life. (page 92)

The stories in this collection are varied, succinct and satisfying, ranging from the macabre and eerie to the comic, about journeys on the sea, in the air and on land. This is a book to dip into and enjoy.