Category: Crime Fiction

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

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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.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: T is for The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

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I’ve read two books by Josephine Tey – The Daughter of Time and now The Franchise Affair. Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh(1896 – 1952). She was a Scottish author who wrote mainly mystery novels.

I read The Daughter of Time a few years ago and thought it was an excellent book, a mix of historical research and detective work. Inspector Alan Grant is in hospital and to keep his mind occupied he decides to discover whether Richard III really did murder his nephews – the Princes in the Tower.

Franchise Affair001When I saw this hardback secondhand copy of The Franchise Affair on sale last year (on a hospital book sale trolley, for £1) I had to buy it and have been going to read it ever since. So as Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series has reached the letter T I thought now was the right time to read it.

It is also an excellent book, one I devoured and enjoyed immensely. It was first published in 1948 and it’s set in a post Second World War England reflecting the social attitudes of its time. It’s actually based on a real case from the 18th century of a girl who went missing and later claimed she had been kidnapped.

The Franchise is a “flat white house“, isolated on a road out of the town of Milford, surrounded by a “high solid wall of brick, with a large double gate, of wall height” – “the iron lace of the original gates had been lined, in some Victorian desire for privacy, by flat sheets of iron, and the wall was too high for anything inside to be visible”, except for a distant view of roof and chimneys“. It’s where Marion Sharpe and her mother live.

DI Grant is just a minor character in this story, the main investigator is local solicitor, Robert Blair, of Blair, Hayward and Bennet. He doesn’t normally deal with criminal cases but Marion appeals to him for help because she and her mother are accused of kidnapping Betty Kane, a girl of fifteen, of holding her prisoner for a month in their attic, and of beating her unless she agreed to work for them.  She’d escaped one night and arrived back home, covered in bruises.

Even though Betty Kane is able to describe them,  their house and its contents accurately the Sharpes completely deny her story. Reluctantly Robert agrees to give legal advice and is then drawn into investigating what had happened to Betty during the time she claimed she had been held captive, becoming convinced of their innocence. His life is completely changed. The problem is that it is possible to believe Betty’s story and also to find it a complete invention from beginning to end.

Betty is described as an innocent with baby blue eyes, intelligent and truthful – how could she have invented such a story? Marion and Mrs Sharpe on the other hand are a bit odd, a bit eccentric, keeping themselves to themselves and distrusted by the locals. Mrs Sharpe is intimidating – Robert thinks  she is “capable of beating seven different people between breakfast and lunch any day of the week“, but he rather likes Marion’s “habit of mockery“. In fact he is rather smitten by Marion.

Then the press get hold of the story and public opinion is outraged at the tale of Betty’s ordeal. The case goes to trial as the Sharpes are vilified and their house attacked. The letters to the newspaper shock Robert with their contents:

… he marvelled all over again at the venom that these unknown women had aroused in the writers’ minds. Rage and hatred spilled over on to the paper; malice ran unchecked through the largely illiterate sentences. It was an amazing exhibition. And one of the oddities of it was that the dearest wish of so many of these indignant protestors against violence was to flog the said women within an inch of their lives. (page 103)

But worse is to come as the trial comes to an end and hatred results in actions. I found it an irresistable book. I just had to know what happens, all the time convinced of the Sharpes’ innocence but somehow wondering if they really were guilty. I liked Tey’s style of writing, straight forward, with touches of irony. Her characters are believable, well developed and unforgettable. The locations are well described, although as I used to live near some of them I may be biased there.

Now I want to read more of Josephine Tey’s books. She didn’t write many, but I hope to read at least some of these (list copied from Wikipedia):

  • The Man in the Queue also known as Killer in the Crowd (1929)
  •  A Shilling for Candles (1936) (the basis of Hitchcock’s 1937 movie Young and Innocent)
  • Miss Pym Disposes (1946)
  • Brat Farrar [or Come and Kill Me] (1949)
  • To Love and Be Wise (1950)
  • The Singing Sands (1952)
  • Kif: An Unvarnished History (1929) (writing as Gordon Daviot)
  • The Expensive Halo (1931)
  • The Privateer (1952)
  • Claverhouse (1937) (writing as Gordon Daviot) (a life of the 17th-century cavalry leader John Graham, 1st Viscount of Dundee)

Crime Fiction Alphabet: S is for C J Sansom

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For this week’s letter, S my contribution to Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series is  Sansom and Shardlake, more specifically C J Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake  historical crime fiction series.

Chris J Sansom trained and worked as a solicitor before he wrote the Tudor murder mystery series featuring lawyer Matthew Shardlake. There are currently four books:

Dissolution – set in 1537 – Shardlake investigates the death of a Commissioner during the dissolution of the monasteries.

Dark Fire – set in 1540 – Shardlake is assigned to find the formula for Greek Fire, whilst defending a young girl accused of brutal murder.

Sovereign – set in 1541 – Shardlake investigates a number of murders whilst on a secret assignment  from Archbishop Cranmer.

Revelation – set in 1543 – Shardlake investigates the murder of his old friend Roger Elliard,and also works on the case of a teenage boy, imprisoned in the Bedlam hospital for the insane.

A fifth book – Heartstone (set in 1545) will be published later this year. Dark Fire won the 2005 CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and Sansom was “Very Highly Commended” in the 2007 CWA Dagger in the Library award, for the Shardlake series.

Matthew Shardlake, the main character, is a hunchback, an outsider, scorned by society, but prized by Thomas Cromwell for his intelligence and persistence.  As the story progresses through the books he begins to question both his religous and political beliefs. He is a fascinating character.

The books all have a rich historical background. The 16th century was a time of great change – changes in thought, belief and social control. The books have a wonderful sense of time and place – Tudor England from the gutter to the court. The historical characters include Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Chief Minister, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and  Henry VIII. They had me turning the pages to see what happens next and find out who committed the murders, and there was enough commentary on the political, religious and social scene for me to grasp what it was like living in Tudor England. They are written in a  fluent, readable style with a good balance between dialogue and description and the characters are well-defined and believable. I loved all of them.

I read the first three books before I began this blog, so I’ve only written about Revelation – see here. There is a BBC4 Bookclub broadcast interview with Sansom talking about his first book, Dissolution.

I’ve seen reports that Kenneth Branagh was in discussions about playing Shardlake for the BBC, but I don’t know how true this is and after seeing him as Wallender I can’t imagine him playing Matthew Shardlake. Does anyone have any more information?

Sansom  has also written Winter in Madrid, an action packed thrilling war/spy story about the Spanish Civil War. It is tense and gripping  but it’s also a moving love story and historical drama. I wrote more about it here.

Not Safe After Dark by Peter Robinson

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Not Safe After Dark and Other Works is a collection of twenty short stories by Peter Robinson. There are three Inspector Banks stories, one of which Going Back is a novella that had not been published before. The other stories are varied in length, technique and style.

 Of them all I prefer the Inspector Banks stories, in particular Going Back. There isn’t much mystery in this story, but a lot about Banks himself, his youth, relationships with his parents and brother Roy and about his old girlfriend, Kay. It’s his parents’ golden wedding anniversary and Banks goes home for the weekend for the party. He sleeps in his old bedroom with its old glass-fronted bookscase containing a cross-section of his early years’ reading, finds old records he’d forgotten he had, his old school reports, photos and his books of adolescent poetry. His mother treats him like she did as a child, prefering his younger brother Roy and his visit is spoilt by the presence of a new neighbour, the ever-helpful and charming Geoff Salisbury. He is suspicious of Geoff from the start – and with good reason.

Some are historical –In Flanders Field, Missing in Action and The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage. The latterwas inspired by Robinson’s visit to Brockhampton in Dorset where Thomas Hardy was born and also by his interest in Hardy. In 1939 the narrator of the story as a young man first met Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa, who had known Thomas Hardy – was she really the Tess on which he based Tess of the D’Urbervilles? She denied it but then it turned out that Miss Teresa was charged with murder, although  nothing was proved. Years later Miss Eunice had a shocking tale to tell.  This reminded me I still haven’t finished reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Hardy – The Time-Torn Man.

Of  the other stories I also liked Some Land in Florida, in which Santa ends up in the pool with his electric piano thrown in after him – still plugged in. A private eye, there on holiday isn’t convinced it is an accident. April in Paris is a poignantly sad love story about happened when love turned to hatred.

Some of the stories were written when Robinson was asked for stories on a specific topic – Gone the the Dawgs, about American Football and The Duke’s Wife, a modern telling of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

I enjoyed some of these stories more than others – mainly the longer ones. I do prefer novels where characters and plots are more developed than is possible in a short story. I wrote more about this book here.