Category: Fiction

Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Asking for the Moon is described on the cover as a Dalziel and Pascoe novel, but it is actually a collection of four novellas. According to Wikipedia the collection was first published in 1996 in hardback by HarperCollins.

The first story is The Last National Service Man which tells how Dalziel and Pascoe first met. Neither of them are impressed by the other. Dalziel thinks Pascoe is everything he dislikes – a graduate, well spoken, and a Southerner from south of Sheffield. Pascoe thinks Dalziel is an archetypical bruiser who got results by kicking down doors and beating out questions in Morse code on a suspect’s head. When Dalziel and Pascoe are kidnapped by a madman with a serious and justifiable grudge against the Superintendent they need to get over their differences and work together to escape their jailer.

The next two stories both feature ‘ghosts’ – Pascoe’s Ghost and then Dalziel’s Ghost (both first published in 1979 in another collection of short stories). In Pascoe’s Ghost a man whose wife has been missing for a year gets some strange phone calls—as well as a visit from Detective Inspector Pascoe—in a novella that pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe, with each chapter headed with a quotation from Poe’s poetical works. This is the longest story and reminded me of Agatha Christie’s Golden Age Mysteries as Pascoe interviews the suspects in the library.

Dalziel’s Ghost is a brief and rather odd story in which the two detectives keep a nightly vigil in Sandstone Rigg farmhouse, an isolated house that had been renovated, apparently disturbing a ghost. In Dalziel’s experience there are three main causes of ghosts – ‘One: bad cooking. Two: bad ventilation and Three – bad conscience.’ Things aren’t what they seem and Dalziel is once again his devious self. But I think this one is the least convincing of the four stories.

One Small Step, was originally published in 1990 by Collins Crime Club.The story is set in 2010, when a French astronaut, one of an international space team from the Federated States of Europe, became the first man to be murdered on the moon. Retired Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, suffering from gout and Peter Pascoe, now Commissioner of Eurofed Justice are called upon to investigate – on board the space ship. In his Foreword I gather that Hill wrote this to celebrate the twenty years he’d been writing the Dalziel and Pascoe novels.

I think the best story in the book is the first one, The Last National Service Man.

If you haven’t read any of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, don’t start with this one. It’s not the best, but still an enjoyable 3* book for me.

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Tortilla Flat was my Classics Club Spin book to read by 30th April. It was John Steinbeck’s fourth novel, first published in 1935. Tortilla Flat is on the hill high above Monterey, an old city on the coast of California. Monterey is also the setting for Cannery Row (the first of John Steinbeck’s novels that I read) and Sweet Thursday, both of which I enjoyed, so I was expecting this book to be just as good. And after a somewhat slow start I soon settled into the book and thoroughly enjoyed it.

As Steinbeck explained in his Preface this is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends, Pilon, Pablo, Jesus Maria, and Big Joe. Tortilla Flat is a collection of stories about their escapades, and their thoughts and endeavours. They are paisanos, being a mix of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted Caucasian bloods, living in old wooden houses in the midst of pine trees. The stories have almost a mythical feel and indeed, Steinbeck compares Danny and his friends to the Knights of the Round Table.

It begins just after the end of the First World War, when they return to find that Danny has inherited two houses from his grandfather. He lives in one house and ‘rents’ the other to his friends, but they are all poor, do not work and never pay him, except in wine. They spend their days partying, drinking, sleeping, thieving or in jail. After a while Pirate joins them along with his five dogs who follow him everywhere. He’s the only paisano who works, making 25 cents a day selling kindling, but he doesn’t spend it, saving it and hiding it. But they don’t really care about money, they trade what they have or what they find for wine and then share it before sleeping it off.

Some of the stories are humorous, and some are tragic. I enjoyed them all. They stress the importance of home, friendship, and survival, giving an insight into their life in Tortilla Flat. And I loved the descriptions of the landscape:

In the morning when the sun was up clear of the pine trees, when the blue bay rippled and sparkled below them, they arose slowly and thoughtfully from their beds.

It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. when the glittery dew is on the mallow leaves, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning. (page 25)

And this passage:

They walked side by side along the dark beach toward Monterey, where the lights hung, necklace above necklace against the hill. The sand dunes crouched along the back of the beach like tired hounds, resting; and the waves gently practiced at striking, and hissed a little. (page 87)

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: The Close by Jane Casey

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

One of the books I’m currently reading is The Close by Jane Casey, the 10th Maeve Kerrigan book, one of my favourite detective series. I’ve been looking forward to reading this as I’ve read all the earlier books.

They are police procedurals, fast-paced novels, with intriguing and complex plots that also develop the relationship between the main characters, Maeve and her boss, Detective Inspector Josh Derwent. They have a confrontational working relationship and this is a recurring theme in the books. In the 9th book, The Cutting Place, it seemed to me that their relationship took a significant turn. So, I can’t wait to find out what will happen next.


All murder investigations were different and yet all of them began the same way, at least for me: standing in silence near a body, trying to catch the faintest echo of what had happened.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

‘You don’t want to look as if you’re patrolling the place. It’s a small community and we’ll stick out anyway. You’ll be attracting plenty of attention, believe me, so you need to look as if you don’t mind it. Start from now. Loosen up. Let your hair down.’

‘Literally?’ I kept my hair tied back at work, always.

‘Why not? And while you’re at it, don’t be so guarded all the time. You’re constantly on the defensive with me.’

Description from Amazon:

At first glance, Jellicoe Close seems to be a perfect suburban street – well-kept houses with pristine lawns, neighbours chatting over garden fences, children playing together.

But there are dark secrets behind the neat front doors, hidden dangers that include a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing.

It’s up to DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent to uncover the truth. Posing as a couple, they move into the Close, blurring the lines between professional and personal as never before.

And while Maeve and Josh try to gather the evidence they need, they have no idea of the danger they face – because someone in Jellicoe Close has murder on their mind.

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Excellent Women was first published in 1952, Barbara Pym’s second published novel. In his introduction to the book Alexander McCall Smith describes it as ‘one of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the twentieth century‘. It’s certainly not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is most entertaining, subtly and gently comic. And as McCall Smith says it’s about ‘those small things in life that become immensely important to us … a novel that on one level is about very little [but] is a great novel about a great deal.’

It’s set just after the end of the Second World War, about the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman – in other words a spinster – in her early 30s. The daughter of a clergyman she is one of those ‘excellent women’ who could be relied upon to help out at Church jumble sales, garden fêtes, to make tea when required or to make up numbers at social gatherings. She finds herself involved in the quarrel between her new neighbours, Helena and Rockingham (Rocky) Napier, a married couple who live in the flat below her, as well as in the difficult relationship between Julian Mallory, the local vicar and his unmarried sister, when he finds himself trapped by Allegra Grey, a vivacious widow when she moves into their spare room.

I’ve been meaning to read some of Barbara Pym’s books for years, so I was delighted that I found it so enjoyable. It’s such a change from some of the books I’ve been reading recently, as Pym is such a keen observer of human nature, giving the little details that bring the characters to life. I found them all totally believable, each with their own eccentricities. She writes so simply but with such depth. It’s a slow-paced book but all the better because of that.

I read the Virago e-book edition, published in 2011, print length 299 pages.

WWW Wednesday: 5 April 2023

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I’m reading four books:

The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. I started this in February and am taking it slowly. It spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centres around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. I’m still not very far into this book (chapter 7). I’m also reading Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman, a beautiful book my son bought me for Mother’s Day. It’s a collection of his essays and I’m dipping into it choosing an essay at random. The third book I’m reading is Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill, four novellas about Dalziel and Pascoe. I’ve read the first one, The Last National Service Man which is about their first meeting. And the final book is The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson, a follow-up to his Notes from a Small Island, seeing how Britain had changed twenty years later. I’m nearing the end of this book

The last book I read (on Kindle) is Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks, set mainly in Austria from the years before the First World War to 1933. I found parts of it very slow with too much about Freud. Anton and Lena are the main characters and I much preferred Lena’s story. I may write about it in more detail later on.

Next I’ll be reading – Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, my Spin book for the Classics Club.

Although this is a weekly meme I’m only taking part occasionally.

This Nowhere Place by Natasha Bell

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Mo, Cali, Jude.

Three teenagers befriend each other on the white cliffs, thinking they’ll save each other.

Within months, two of them are dead and the third is scarred for life.

Ten years later, documentary-maker Tarek Zayat and his film crew are in town, asking difficult questions, looking for secrets in the silence around that fateful summer.

Because in the shadow of the white cliffs it’s easy for stories, histories and people to get lost. And in a small town, the truth is something that must be carefully unburied – in case it buries you.

I was really expecting to like this book, attracted by the synopsis, but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it. It’s one of the books that has been on my NetGalley shelf for too long because I made several attempts to start it. I found it difficult to follow at the beginning and didn’t like the format with extracts from a TV/film Tarek is making. This made the beginning disjointed, switching between different characters. So I was in two minds about reading the book, and put it aside whilst I read other books. But there was enough mystery about what was going on to make me want to keep reading and I started it again recently, this time finishing it.

The narrative moves between 2016 and 2026, which usually doesn’t bother me but in this case I did have difficulty for a while sorting out the time line and what all the characters were doing – and when and how they were connected. This Nowhere Place covers a number of difficult issues – racism, immigrants, suicide, drugs and mental health problems. It also explores family relationships, and friendships. After a slow start the pace didn’t pick up for most of the book. The mystery element wasn’t too puzzling to work out despite all the twists and turns and the fact that most of the characters are lying or withholding information. I was relieved when I reached the ending with yet another twist, which I had suspected for a while.

On the plus side I think it’s well researched and the author recommends a list of books for further reading. The Dover setting is also well described, which has made me interested to find out more about the locations of the Western Heights fortifications, the Grand Shaft with its triple staircase, and the White Cliffs, in particular, the Shakespeare Cliff.

My thanks to Penguin, the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

  • ASIN: ‎ B08C793RMB
  • Publisher ‏: ‎ Penguin (18 March 2021)
  • Print length: 367 pages
  • Review copy
  • My rating : 3*