Crime Fiction – Page 176

Crime Fiction Alphabet: O is for …

Published on January 25, 2010 by Margaret3 Comments

This week my choice for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth (published in the USA as Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance), John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2008, 355 pages). I read this in April 2008 and these were my thoughts about it at the time.

This is an ‘historical whodunit’ set in 1889 €“ 1890, fin-de-siÃ¨cle London and Paris. The mystery begins with Oscar Wilde finding the naked body of Billy Wood, a 16 year old boy in the candle-lit room in a small terraced house in Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament. Billy’s throat has been cut and he is laid out as though on a funeral bier, surrounded by candles, with the smell of incense still in the air. It’s a combination of fiction and fact, with both real and imaginary characters. Wilde with the help of his friends Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Sherard sets out to solve the crime. Sherard (the great grandson of William Wordsworth) who wrote poems, novels, biographies (including five of Oscar Wilde) and social studies is the narrator.

The story reads quickly and is full of colourful characters such as Gerard Bellotti, who runs an ‘informal luncheon club for gentlemen’. Bellotti is

‘grossly corpulent’ giving the impression of ‘a toad that sits and blinks, yet never moves’ wearing ‘an orange checked suit that would have done credit to the first comedian at Collins’ Music Hall and on the top of his onion-shaped head of oily hair, which was tightly curled and dyed the colour of henna, he sported a battered straw boater.’

Wilde is a fan of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories so much so that as the mystery is unravelled he picks up clues in the manner of Holmes, observing and deducing, exclaiming when questioned by Conan Doyle ‘Come, Arthur, this is elementary stuff €¦ Holmes is where my heart is.’ I think it is this combination of fact and fiction that I enjoyed most in reading the book. I knew little about Wilde or Doyle and nothing about Sherard before reading it, but I think I learned a lot about all three people, about their characters, their views on life and love, and their works, as well as about the society in which they lived.

According to The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries website the book is peppered through with quotes from Wilde, or Brandreth’s versions of Wilde’s words, together with Brandreth’s own inventions. I couldn’t tell which was which, as I’ve only read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and seen a TV production of The Importance of Being Ernest, but it all seemed perfectly in character to me. I found the details of Wilde’s love for his wife Constance particularly interesting in contrast to his trial for gross indecency in 1895. In fact I came away from the book really liking Wilde and wanting to read more about him and by him. Fortunately the biographical notes at the end of the book give more details of works by and about Wilde, Conan Doyle and Sherard.

I didn’t find the mystery too difficult to work out, with lots of clues throughout the book, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment. On the contrary it made it all the more pleasurable. There are two more books in the series Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death and Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: N is for Not Safe After Dark

Published on January 20, 2010 by Margaret4 Comments

My choice this week for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is N for Not Safe After Dark by Peter Robinson.

This is a collection of twenty short crime stories, including three Inspector Banks stories and an Inspector Banks novella (90+ pages). The title story Not Safe after Dark is just six pages long and yet those six pages are full of tension and suspense as an unnamed man enters a park after dark, even though he knows that such big city parks are dangerous places.

Peter Robinson’s introduction is interesting for me in that he explains how he writes and compares writing a novel to writing short stories. He’s used to thinking in terms of the novel, with it’s ‘broad canvas’ and finds it hard to ‘work in miniature’. Short stories don’t come easily to him.

I carry a novel around in my head for a long time – at least a year, waking and sleeping – and this gives me time to get under the skin of the characters and the story. Also, plotting is probably the most difficult part of writing for me, and being asked to write a short story, which so often depends on a plot twist, a clever diversion or a surprising revelation, guarantees that I’ll get the laundry done and probably the ironing too.

In short stories there is no space to develop the characters or the plot, nor to give different points of view as in a novel. But, as far as I’m concerned, with the stories I’ve read so far in this book Robinson has succeeded in creating convincing stories with believable characters in real settings.

Often reading short stories I’m left wanting more, which is what happened to Robinson with one of these stories. Innocence is a haunting tale of a man accused of murduring a teenage girl. After writing Innocence, which won the Crime Writer of Canada’s Best Short Story Award in 1991, he couldn’t let the story go and went on to write a whole novel expanding on the events of the story. This eventually became Innocent Graves, featuring Inspector Banks (who is not in the short story).

The other stories include a private-eye story set in Florida, a romantic Parisian mystery, a historical story inspired by Robinson’s interest in Thomas Hardy and the place where he was born, and stories about such varied topics as American Football and Shakespeare.

Note: Peter Robinson’s website is here.

The Sunday Salon – Books and Cross-Stitch

Published on January 17, 2010 by Margaret11 Comments

This week I’ve been reading just two books. Often I read more than this but I’ve decided for the time being to stick to one or two at a time. It’s been easy this week as one of the books is compelling reading – Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.

It’s a real page-turner and very complicated. I’m reading it quickly because I want to know what happens next and to see how Rebus gets himself of the terrible mess he is in – suspected by his superiors of being a killer(!) and of corruption back in his early days as a detective, along with Lawson Geddes, his boss at the time. He’s being investigated by a TV company and also by the police themselves in an internal enquiry and all the time he’s spiralling downhill under alcohol and cigarettes. I’m thinking that when I get to the end I may go back to the beginning and read it again more slowly to appreciate the detail.

This contrasts so well with the other book I’m reading – Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey. I’m reading this one slowly, one or two chapters at a time, because it is quite intense. It’s comprised of letters between a group of women writing from the 1930s to the 1980s about their “ordinary” lives, but it’s by no means mundane or ordinary at all. It’s social history, as told by the people who lived their lives through the Second World War and into the late 20th century. It’s a bit like eavesdropping on private conversations, reading these personal letters between woman who became friends through their Correspondence Club.

Both books are ones I’ve owned for a while and so are books off my TBR mountain. I have bought one new book this year, but as it’s a craft book it’s not adding to the pile to read, but adding to the pile of cross-stitch projects I want to do! The book is The Portable Crafter: Cross-Stitch by Liz Turner Diehl, a beautiful book full of designs for small(ish) items that you can work on anywhere.

One that caught my eye is a corner bookmark. But it looks quite tricky with Kloster blocks – you have to cut out the centres and it might be a bit bulky for a bookmark

There’s a design for a little Persian rug, finished size 3½” x 5″ I’d like to make.

But the one that I’d like to start first is a Garden Clock, the only thing is I don’t know where I can get a wooden clock in which to insert the design.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: M is for Mortal Causes

Published on January 17, 2010 by Margaret1 Comment

This week’s letter in the Crime Fiction Alphabet series is M and I’ve chosen Ian Rankin’s Mortal Causes, which is the one book I finished reading in December.

Mortal Causes is the sixth book in the Inspector Rebus series. In his introduction Ian Rankin explains that ‘mortal’ in the Scots vernacular means ‘drunk’ so Mortal Causes

evoked, in his mind, the demon drink, just as surely as it did any darker and more violent imagery. (page xii)

And there is a fair amount of violence in this dark book, starting with the discovery of a brutally tortured body in Mary King’s Close, an ancient Edinburgh street now buried beneath the High Street. It’s August in Edinburgh during the Festival.

Next time I visit Edinburgh I’d like to see Mary King’s Close. It’s open to the public and according to this website you can “experience the sights, sounds and maybe even smells of an amazing street that time forgot. Where everyday people went about their day to day lives and where you can now walk in their footsteps.” Just the place for a murder, away from the busy streets, undisturbed by the festival goers and soundproofed so no one would hear any gunshots or screams.

There are links to the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, the IRA, the Catholic/Protestant conflict, the Secret Service and organised crime. Rebus works his way through this mix, seconded to the SCS (the Scottish Crime Squad) because he’d been in the Army and had served in Ulster in the 1960s. The relationship between Rebus and Big Ger Caffety, Edinburgh’s gangster boss, develops in this book as the victim is none other than Big Ger’s son and he insists Rebus finds his killer. He tells Rebus he wants revenge. His men

… are out there hunting, understood? And they’ll be keeping an eye on you. I want a result Strawman. … Revenge, Strawman, I’ll have it one way or the other. I’ll have it on somebody. (page 74)

Rebus’s personal life is no better, his relationship with Dr Patience Aitken is difficult. They quarrel, she tries to civilise him, giving him poetry books and tickets for ballet and modern dance:

Rebus had been there before, other times, other women. Asking for something more, for commitment beyond the commitment.

He didn’t like it. (page 81)

Their relationship is also threatened by Rebus’s involvement with Caroline Rattray, from the Procurator Fiscal’s office, who ‘is mad about him’.

This book, like the other Rebus books I’ve read, is more than crime fiction. It’s a complex story exploring the psychology of guilt, revenge and fear.

Ian Rankin

Published on January 14, 2010 by Margaret11 Comments

On Tuesday evening Ian Rankin was presented with the West Lothian Libraries’ Scot Scriever Award and I was there, thanks to my son, who lives in West Lothian. He’d managed to get the last tickets. Ian Rankin was voted the public’s favourite Scottish author. He’s been my favourite Scottish author for some time so I was delighted to hear him talk about his work and shocked when he drew my ticket number to win a signed copy of one of his books, Exit Music.

(Photo courtesy of West Lothian Council)

It was a fascinating evening. Ian Rankin is an excellent speaker, even though he said that he isn’t a stand-up comedian – he’s a writer and writers sit in isolation in their rooms, scribbling away with a pen or writing on a laptop, or whatever. He finds it a strange existence coming out of his shell to speak on tour at book events. His talk was punctuated with many amusing anecdotes and there was much laughter from his audience.

He gave us some advice. As a teenager he’d entered a poetry competition and had read a book on writing poetry which said that you should write about what you know. Well, he did that, won the competition and got into trouble with his aunty because she recognised herself, even though his poem “Euthanasia” was about a tramp. Then there was a short story competition, which he won (he thought he could write a short story, because it was just like a poem but it goes to the edge of the page) writing about his uncle who walked through the streets naked and this also landed him in trouble when it was broadcast on the radio unchanged.

So his advice is “write about what you don’t know“, which is why when he decided to write a novel, Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus book, he wrote about the police because he knew nothing about them. He had done his research, talking to a couple of detectives, who as it turned out were investigating a crime similar to the one he was writing about in Knots and Crosses. They said the best way for him to see how they worked was for them to treat him as a suspect and he ended up for a while as a real suspect! So his next piece of advice is “don’t do any research“. He did no research after that until he met a detective, who later became his friend and helped him make the books more realistic.

He writes crime fiction because it helps him look at the world, it takes on moral and ethical questions, why things are the way they are, what makes people work, and what crime says about our society and the problems we have. Crime fiction is now a serious subject to study, both at school and at university, even though it doesn’t get considered for the Booker Prize for example.

He also talked about what he has been doing this year and the future. After the last Rebus book he wrote Doors Open , which is about an art heist. He planned it as the Scots Oceans Eleven, with all the great Scottish actors, but no one was interested in doing it. Later it was serialised in NY Times, then published as a book and now a film company is interested. He decided that he didn’t want any involvement in filming the Rebus books because he didn’t want the actors’ voices and faces in his head (the reason I don’t like films of books is just the same) and it’s not possible to fit a book into an hour and a half TV production anyway (which is why I think the books are better). But he’s going to be more involved in the films of Doors Open and The Complaints.

Even though he’s having a year’s break from writing he’s working on a film script of James Hogg’s book Confessions of a Justified Sinner. He’s finding this hard to write but I do hope he finishes it and the film gets made as I’ve been interested in James Hogg since reading Alice Munro’s book The View from Castle Rock (Hogg, born in 1770 was a poet, a protege of Sir Walter Scott, and a cousin of one of her ancestors). He may bring Rebus and Siobhan Clarke back investigating Cold Cases in another Complaints book – I hope he does.

It was a memorable evening – Ian Rankin is great storyteller. .

My Best Crime Fiction Reads in 2009

Published on January 2, 2010September 1, 2017 by Margaret6 Comments

Kerrie is asking for people’s top ten crime fiction reads of this year from which she will collate the books and come up with the best crime fiction reads of 2009.

The rules are

it is about crime fiction you’ve read in 2009. Year of publication doesn’t matter.
about 10 titles in the format of title, author (no need for description etc).
any order will do. If you think one was so much better than the others, you might like to put it in your list twice.
You have until Jan 7 to do it.

I’ve read a lot more crime fiction this year than in previous years (for example I read 16 in 2008 compared to 47 this year) so it’s really difficult to decide which to list as my top ten. Here they are in alphabetical order of title (tomorrow I could just as easily come up with another ten titles).