Category: Six Degrees of Separation

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

My first link is The Magician’s Assistant also by Ann Patchett, the first book of hers that I read. It’s about illusion – Parsifal was a magician and Sabine had been his assistant for twenty years. She and Parsifal had been married for less than a year when he died suddenly of an aneurysm, leaving her alone in their large house in Los Angeles, apart from a large white rabbit, called Rabbit, who was retired from the stage as he was too big to be pulled out of a hat.

My second link is Hemingway’s Chair by Michael Palin. Martin Sproale is an assistant postmaster obsessed with Ernest Hemingway. Martin lives in a small English village, where he studies his hero and potters about harmlessly–until an ambitious outsider, Nick Marshall, is appointed postmaster instead of Martin. I haven’t written a review of this yet so the link in the title takes you to Goodreads.

My third link is Nothing Ventured by Jeffrey Archer, in which there is another assistant, Beth Rainsford, a research assistant at the Fitzmolean Museum. It’s the first in a series of books following William Warwick’s progress from detective constable to the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. When William meets Beth they fall in love almost at first sight – but Beth has a secret that she keeps from him. 

My fourth link is The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox in which Aidan Waits is a Detective Constable working night shifts with Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe, known as Sutty. They investigate the death of the ‘Smiling Man‘ at a disused hotel, The Palace, in Manchester. This is a fascinating and complex novel. Be aware though (if this bothers you), there are some violent scenes, and one strand of the story concerning a particularly loathsome and brutal character called Bateman and an eight year old boy and his little sister is very chilling.

My fifth link is The Clocks by Agatha Christie, which Detective Inspector Hardcastle and Colin Lamb investigate the murder of a dead man found in the sitting room at the home of Miss Pebmarsh at 19 Wilbraham Crescent. The strange thing was that there were five clocks in the sitting room and all, except for the cuckoo clock, which announced the time as 3 o’clock, had stopped at 4.13. 

My final link is another book by Agatha Christie, but not a crime fiction novel. It’s Come Tell Me How You Live, an archaeological memoir. She wrote it in answer to her friends’ questions about what life was like when she accompanied her second husband, Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s.

My chain is made up of the following links – assistants, detective inspectors, detective constables and books by Agatha Christie.

Next month  (April 6, 2024), Kate is changing it up a little: look at your bookshelf – do you see a Lonely Planet title there? Or an Eyewitness Travel title? Or any other travel guide? That’s your starting book.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with the book that I ended my last Six Degrees chain with, which was The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts. I’ve recently finished reading this British Library Crime Classic, first published in 1933, during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. Dr James Earle and his wife live near the Hog’s Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. At first he suspects a simple domestic intrigue – and begins to uncover a web of romantic entanglements beneath the couple’s peaceful rural life.

I’m starting my chain with High Rising by Angela Thirkell, another book first published in 1933. Set in the 1930s it’s an entertaining and witty social comedy, in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope. Laura Morland is a widow with four sons, who supports herself by writing novels, which she knows are not ‘in any sense of the word, literature‘ but which have appeal.

My second link is to Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie, in which one of the characters, Ariadne Oliver, also writes fiction. The victim is Mr Shaitana, a collector of snuff boxes, Egyptian antiquities and murderers.This story has just four suspects and any one of them ‘given the right circumstances‘ might have committed the crime. It’s also a book first published in the 1930s, that is 1936..

My third link is via ‘card’ to A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp. She and Angela had been friends for a number of years. This book uses the postcards Angela sent to her to form a sort of biography. Sent from various places around the world some have a full message, some only a few words, which Susannah uses to paint a picture of what Angela was like, a ‘great curser’, capable of the sharpest of remarks, clever, unpredictable, quirky, and funny.

My fourth link is to a book written by another author called Susannah, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective by Susannah Stepleton, subtitled ‘Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime‘. This is narrative non-fiction. Was Maud West really who she said she was? Susannah Stapleton discovered that she really did exist and was indeed a private investigator with her own detective agency, based in London in the early part of the twentieth century, from 1905 onwards.

My fifth link is to crime fiction featuring a private investigator, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, first published in 1939. Private Investigator Philip Marlow is hired by the paralysed millionaire General Stallwood, to deal with the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

And my final link is Maisie Dobbs, a book featuring yet another private investigator. This is the first in Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. In 1929 Maisie set herself up as a private investigator, having started as a maid to the London aristocracy, studied her way to Cambridge and served as a nurse in the Great War. I’ve read a few more of the series since I read this one.

My chain forms a circle beginning and ending with crime fiction. The other links are books with the word ‘card’ in the titles, books with authors named Susannah and books featuring private investigators. The first five books, like the beginning book, were all published in the 1930s.

Next month (2 March 2024), we will start with Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin a book I haven’t read. It’s the story of Sam and Sadie, who are both gamers, but according to Amazon this is not a romance but a story about love.

I’ve seen this reviewed in numerous places but never been tempted to read it until I read Kate’s review @ Books are my favourite and best. Like Kate I also thought it was about gaming and so not for me. But she explained that it wasn’t really about gaming but relationships, so maybe it could be.

Anyway, I’m starting my chain with a book with another character called Sadie. It’s The Search Party by Simon Lelic. Sixteen year old Sadie Saunders is missing and five of her friends set out into the woods to find her. At the same time the police’s investigation, led by Detective Inspector Robin Fleet and Detective Sergeant Nicola Collins, is underway.

My second link is to another crime fiction set in woods – In the Woods by Tana French. It’s set in Ireland mainly around an archaeological dig of a site prior to the construction of a motorway. Most of the wood that covered the land had already been cleared, but a small section remains. A little girl’s body is discovered on the site. Is her death connected to the disappearance of two twelve year-olds 20 years earlier? It’s Tana French’s debut novel.

My third link is to another debut novel – The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan. It’s a harrowing account of the atrocities of Srebrenica in 1995 and the search for justice forms the basis of this novel. Alongside that is the investigation by detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty into the death of Christopher Drayton who fell from the heights of the Scarborough Bluffs, Ontario. Was it suicide, or an accident? Ausma Zehanat Khan is a Canadian author.

As is Sheena Kamal, whose book Eyes Like Mine, was also a debut novel. It’s a dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense novel. The main focus of the book is Nora, a recovering alcoholic, who works for a private investigation firm in Vancouver, and her search for her daughter, Bonnie, now a teenager, who she gave away as a new-born baby.

My fifth link is His and Hers by Alice Feeney, in which there is another recovering alcoholic. The narrative moves between two characters ‘Him’, Jack Harper and ‘Her’, Anna Andrews. Jack is a Detective Chief Inspector, who has recently moved to Blackdown in Surrey to be in charge of the Major Crime Team there. When a woman is murdered in Blackdown village, both Anna and Jack are suspects.

And my final link is another book set in Surrey. It is The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Croft. Hog’s Back is a ridge in the North Downs in the Surrey countryside. It was first published in 1933 during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. It’s an Inspector French murder mystery where first one person then others disappear. Have they been murdered?

My chain has taken me from the USA to the UK and Canada, ending back in the UK. There are three debut novels and all six books are crime fiction novels.

Next month (February 6, 2024), we will start with the book you finished on this month (or the last book read).

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with  Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain described by Amazon:

After twenty-five years of ‘sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine’, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all – and he meant all.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.

I spent more time than usual deciding which route to take with my chain. I considered starting with another book by a celebrity chef, and there are plenty to choose from, or a book with ‘kitchen’ in the title, but both chains just fizzled out.

So I opted to start with a book by an author with the same initial letters in the surname:

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, telling the story of Her Majesty, not named, but she had dogs, took her summer holiday at Balmoral and was married to a duke. She came across the travelling library outside the palace and borrowed a book to save the driver/librarian’s embarrassment. 

Also by Alan Bennett The Lady in the Van, is one of the stories that I read in his collection Four Stories. It’s also available as an e-book. In 1974, the homeless Miss Shepherd moved her broken down van into Alan Bennett’s garden. Deeply eccentric and stubborn to her bones, Miss Shepherd was not an easy tenant. And Bennett, despite inviting her in the first place, was a reluctant landlord. And yet she lived there for fifteen years.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen is a unfinished novella in Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanderton. Told in a series of letters it’s the  story of an unscrupulous widow who plans to force her daughter into a marriage against her wishes.

Lady Susan reminded me of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, not just because both are epistolary but also the content – manipulative and evil characters without any moral scruples, who delight in their power to seduce others. One of the characters is an innocent convent girl, Cecile Volanges.

Another character called Cecile is in Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon, one of the best Maigret books I’ve read – and it is complicated, remarkably so in a novella of just 151 pages. 

Another novella in the crime fiction genre is Wycliffe and the Last Rites by W J Burley – set in Cornwall. Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe investigates a bizarre murder that shakes the village of Moresk. Arriving at church on Easter morning the vicar discovers the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps.

Well, this is my chain travelling from cooking to murder and passing through royalty, to eccentric and unscrupulous characters.

Next month (January 6, 2024), we will start with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!). Amazon describes it as A beautiful and moving novel about grief, sisterhood, squash and a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself.

1 – Saturday by Ian McEwan, which also has a squash player, a neuro surgeon. He is troubled by the impending war with Iraq, pessimistic after 9/11. On his way to his weekly squash match through London’s crowded street filled with anti-war demonstrators he gets into a quarrel with another motorist, Baxter, an aggressive young man.

2 Iraq is also the setting in Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie. It’s a Poirot mystery, but he doesn’t appear until about halfway. As the title tells you it is set in Mesopotamia, the area in the Middle East between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the area of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey).Her books set in the Middle East are based on the everyday life that she experienced on digs and on the people she met. In this one an archaeologist’s wife, Louise Leidner, the wife of the leader of the expedition, is found in her room, dead from a blow on her head, and suspicion falls on Louise’s first husband who had been sending her threatening letters, or so she had claimed.

3 The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths, the 9th Dr Ruth Galloway mystery – Ruth is a forensic archaeologist. It centres on the plight of homeless people and the maze of tunnels under Norfolk. Bones are found during the excavations when an underground restaurant in one of the tunnels is proposed. It becomes a murder mystery when two of the homeless, ‘Aftershave Eddie’ and then ‘Bilbo’ are found dead, both stabbed. Then two local women go missing and it soon becomes clear that all these events are linked.

4 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel is also set in Norfolk. It mixes the past and the present, moving seamlessly between the Eldred family’s current life (in the 1980s) in Norfolk, with their earlier life in Africa in the 1950s. The Eldreds were missionaries, first in South Africa, then in Beuchuanaland (Botswana) where a terrible and horrific event occurred and they returned to England.  However, their memories of these traumatic events refused to remain buried, eventually bringing their lives and those of their children into terrible turmoil.

5 Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

6 Another book with thirteen in the title is The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie, a collection of short stories about the Tuesday Night club, whose members include Miss Marple. They tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries.

Well, I didn’t expect where this chain was going at all beginning with the starting book, but as usually happens in my chains it includes a number of murder mysteries.

Next month (December 2, 2023), we will start with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

The starting book this month is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It’s written in such a seemingly simple style, but it captures so well the innocence and naivety of youth and hope for the future. It’s just, well, so English. I first read it as a teenager and it didn’t fail to live up to my memories of it when I reread it years later.

My first link is via castle to Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, and the fabulous Gormenghast Castle, another book I first read in my teens. The novel is poetic,  rich in imagination, description and characters. It all came alive as I reread it, and the same magic I felt the first time was still there.

My second link is via another castle – Corfe Castle, in Dorset, in The Gloriet Tower by Eileen Meyler. Another book I read as a child. It’s set in Corfe Castle a few years before the beginning of the Hundred Years War, but it is mainly fiction. As far as I remember I chose this book because of its historical setting in a castle – I loved castles (and still do).  

My third link is Corfe as it is also the setting in Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island, the first book in The Famous Five series, and possibly the first one I read as a child. Staying at Kirrin Cottage the five children visit Kirrin Island and explore the ruins of Kirrin Castle (Corfe Castle).

My fourth link is via Treasure to Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion, a sequel to Treasure Island. The children of Jim and Long John Silver return to the island. One of the crew is a certain Mr Stevenson – ‘a Scotsman and a wisp of a fellow, whose place was generally in the crow’s nest, where he acted as our lookout.’ (page 115)

My fifth link is via Stevenson, that is Robert Louis Stevenson and the first book of his I read A Child’s Garden of Verses. My Great Aunty Sally, who was my mother’s aunt, gave me this book for my birthday one year and I loved reciting the poems out loud.

My final link is via garden to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I read this several times as a child and the story has stayed with me ever since. For years my picture of the ideal garden has been a walled garden, just like the secret garden. Rereading it as an adult I realised it is full of symbolism using nature, the Bible and myths, that I never noticed as a child. 

Apart from the first one my links are all children’s fiction, which I didn’t set out to do – all my chains just grow of their own accord. I’ve read all six books.

Next month (November 4 , 2023), we’ll start with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!).