Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation: from Gaudy Night to The Cuckoo’s Calling

I love doing 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 it’s a wild card – the chain begins with the book that ended our July chains, which means that my starting book is Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers.

Gaudy Night

It’s set at Shrewsbury College at Oxford University. Harriet Vane attends the Shrewsbury Gaudy (a college reunion involving a celebratory dinner). It doesn’t go well – there are poison pen letters, nasty graffiti and vandalism causing mayhem and upset. It’s 1935 and explores the role of women in society, particularly with regard to education and marriage and the importance of truth and honesty.

My first link is the word ‘night’ in the title:

Endless Night by Agatha Christie. It differs from most of her other books in that it is a psychological study. It reminded me very much of Ruth Rendell’s books, writing as Barbara Vine. It has the same suffocating air of menace throughout the book, with more than one twist at the end. It’s a murder mystery, but there is little or no detection, and no investigators – no Poirot or Miss Marple – to highlight the clues to the murders, for there are several.

So, my second link is, The Brimstone Wedding, by Barbara Vine, also a book full of a menacing atmosphere. In it Stella, reveals her past as she talks to Jenny, one of the carers at the retirement home where she lives. It’s all very subtle at first with tantalising hints about what had really happened in Stella’s past. But the full horror is left to the end – it’s not horrific in the overblown graphic sense, but in a sinister, psychological way that really is ‘chilling’ and inexpressibly sad.

And my third link takes me to another chilling book, The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton – a remarkably powerful book, full of tension and fear. Assistant Commissioner Florence Lovelady attends the funeral of Larry Glassbrook, the convicted murderer she arrested thirty years earlier. The victims had been buried alive. But as she revisits the scenes of the burials she starts to think that maybe Larry wasn’t the murderer after all.

Moving away from chilling books about death and burials my mind jumped to a completely different book about death – The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. This is the story of Bod, the baby who escapes a murderer. He stumbles into the local disused graveyard where he is rescued by ghosts. Silas, who is neither dead nor alive appoints himself as his guardian. It’s about life, love and friendship, loyalty and the fight between good and evil. Above all it is about growing up and the excitement and expectations that Bod has about life.

Another character called Silas is Silas Marner, written by George Eliot about a weaver who was wrongly accused of theft and left his home town to live a lonely and embittered life in Raveloe where he became a miser, hoarding his gold and counting it each night. George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans.

Finally this leads me to my last link, The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, J K Rowling’s pen name. It’s crime fiction, set in the world of Cormoran Strike , an ex-army private detective, who is struggling to get clients and pay his bills, sleeping on a camp bed in his office.

My links are via the word ‘night’, chilling books, death and burials, characters called Silas and authors using pen names (the links on titles are to my posts on the books). I have read and enjoyed all these books.

Next month (September 7, 2019), we’ll begin with A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – a book I haven’t read, or even heard of before.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Where the Wild Things Are to

Where the wild things are

This month the chain begins with a book I haven’t read Where the Wild Things Are by Maurie Sendak. This is the summary from Amazon:

One night Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him ‘Wild Thing’ and sends him to bed without his supper. That night a forest begins to grow in Max’s room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to the place where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things and crowns himself as their king, and then the wild rumpus begins! But when Max has sent the monsters to bed, and everything is quiet, he starts to feel lonely and realises it is time to sail home to the place where someone loves him best of all.

Apart from the opening book I have read all the books in my chain and they are all crime fiction (the links on titles are to my posts on the books).

My first link is the word in the title, wild:

Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin – Rebus has retired but is asked to act in a ‘consultative capacity’ albeit not as a cop and with no warrant card or real powers and with no pay. It’s a complicated crime fiction novel and Rebus and retired gangster, Big Ger work together, although never fully confiding in each other.

My second link is also a word in the title – dog:

Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas, the second in her Three Evangelists series. It’s a strange murder mystery, full of bizarre events and characters in which two of the three ‘Evangelists’, Marc and Mathias help uncover the mystery surrounding a tiny fragment of human bone found in a pile of dog excrement on a grid around a tree.

My third link is to another animal that features in a crime fiction mystery – a cat:

The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun features Koko, a beautiful Siamese cat – who can’t actually read! Earl Lambreth, who runs an art gallery is found murdered and Joe Qwilleran, a newspaper reporter, with help from Koko, uncovers the identity of the killer.

There is also an art gallery in The Wych Elm by Tana French. Toby Hennessy, the narrator is a good looking and charming young man who works for an art gallery in the centre of Dublin. A human skull is found in the hollow trunk of a wych elm in his uncle’s garden.

And there is a human skull in Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes – the President of the college has been murdered, his head swathed in a black academic gown, a human skull beside his body and surrounding it, little pile.

Finally, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers is also set in a college, Shrewsbury College at Oxford University. Harriet Vane attends the Shrewsbury Gaudy (a college reunion involving a celebratory dinner), not sure she can face meeting her fellow students and the dons. It doesn’t go well – there are poison pen letters, nasty graffiti and vandalism causing mayhem and upset.

Next month (August 3, 2019) is a wild card – start with the book you’ve ended your July chain with (for those playing for the first time, start with the last book you finished reading).

Six Degrees of Separation: from Murmur to Alan Turing: The Enigma

Murmur

This month the chain begins with a book I haven’t read or heard of before, Murmur by Will Eaves. This is the summary from Amazon: Taking its cue from the arrest and legally-enforced chemical castration of Turing, Eaves fictionalises the devastating period before the mathematician’s death in an extraordinary contemplation of consciousness.

Murmur has won several prizes including the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize, an annual award, open to new works of fiction or non-fiction. To be eligible for entry, a book should have a central theme that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness.

I checked back to see if I had read any of the earlier Wellcome Book prize winners. I had to go back to 2010 when The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot was the winning book. I read this in April and thought it was excellent. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. The cancer cells taken from her tumour were cultured and became known as HeLa cells which have formed the basis for medical research and drug development ever since.

The Quarry by Iain Banks is a novel about Guy, a man dying from cancer. He lives in a house that is gradually falling to pieces, situated on the edge of a quarry in the Pennines..Feeling his death is imminent, Guy gathers around him his oldest friends as they reminisce about their time as film students and search through the house for a video tape they had made that could ruin all of their lives if it became public. It’s the last book Iain Banks wrote – whilst writing it he, himself, was diagnosed with cancer.

Another house in ruins is the setting for the opening of The Ruin, Dervla McTiernan’s debut novel. DI Cormac Reilly has left his high-flying Dublin career to return to Galway, where he is confronted with a case that has haunted him for twenty years. As a young constable he was called to a decrepit country house where he found two silent, neglected children and their mother lying dead upstairs.

Another debut novel is Everything But the Truth by Gillian McAllister set in Newcastle and Oban. This is a thriller about lies, secrets and relationships; about how we get to know people and learn to trust them.

Also set partially in Newcastle is Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves. It begins ten days before Christmas, as the Newcastle Metro is packed with shoppers, babies screaming, office workers merry after pre-Christmas parties where an old lady, Margaret Krukowski, is found fatally stabbed. This book was adapted for TV adaptation, but with many changes from the original.

Another adaptation is the film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley about Alan Turing as he tries to crack the German Enigma code. It’s an adaptation of the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. In 1952 Turing’s homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life – thus linking back to Murmur.

I’ve started and ended with books about Alan Turing, linked by books that have won the Wellcome Book Prize, books about cancer, set in ruined houses, debut novels, books set in Newcastle and books that have been adapted for TV and film.

The books are mostly crime fiction, all of which I’ve read. Although I haven’t read Andrew Hodges’ book I have seen the film – which is excellent!

Next month (July 6, 2019), the chain will begin with the children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Dry to The Song of Troy

The Dry

This month the chain begins with The Dry by Jane Harper, crime fiction set in a small country town in Australia, where the Hadler family were brutally murdered. I have had this book on my TBR shelves for quite some time now and I really want to read it as I loved Force of Nature and The Lost Man. I was thinking of linking to one of these books but decided to go for another book, one that I bought on the same day as The Dry. It’s Longbourn by Jo Baker, a story about the Bennet’s servants in a re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Another book that is a re-imagining is Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman, a companion novel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It is set 20 years after the death of Rebecca and the burning of Manderley. I’m hoping I’ll love it as much as I loved Rebecca and Hitchcock’s 1940 film of the book. Sally Beauman was a journalist before she became an author. She wrote Rebecca’s Tale after writing an article about the work of Daphne du Maurier in The New Yorker magazine.

My next link is through the author’s first name – Sally – to another author called Sally, Sally Gunning and her book, The Widow’s War. It’s historical fiction set in Cape Cod, Massachusetts during the years prior to the War of Independence. After Lyddie Berry’s husband of 20 years dies in a whaling accident she has to fight a ‘war’ for control of her own destiny. Under the laws of the colony widows had the use of only one third of their husbands’ real estate, and did not inherit the ownership.

A different type of war is the subject of Small Wars by Sadie Jones. This is historical fiction set in Cyprus in the 1950s as the EOKA terrorists are fighting for independence from Britain and union with Greece.

Another book set on an island is The Island by Victoria Hislop. Alexis Fielding discovers the story of her mother’s family on the island of Spinalonga, a tiny, deserted island off the coast of Crete – Greece’s former leper colony. Victoria Hislop was also a journalist before she became an author.

As was Colleen McCullough, the author of numerous books including the Masters of Rome series. So, my final link is to one of her books – The Song of Troy in which she recounts the tale of Helen and Paris, sparking the Trojan War. Colleen McCullough was also an Australian author so it links back to the first book, The Dry by Jane Harper, also an Australian author, who I’m delighted to see was also a journalist before becoming an author!

In addition to all the books being TBRs, four of the authors were journalists before becoming authors and two are Australian authors.

The chain moves through time from the present day back to late classical Antiquity, beginning in Australia and passing through England, America, Cyprus, Crete to Anatolia in modern Turkey.

Next month (June 1, 2019), the chain will begin with the winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize, Murmur by Will Eaves.

Six Degrees of Separation: from How To Be Both to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

This month (April 6, 2019), the chain begins with Ali Smith’s award-winning novel, How to be Both.

How to be both

‘How to be Both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s givens get given a second chance.’ (Goodreads)

I haven’t read this book but I’d like to sometime. I see that there are two versions: one begins with the contemporary story, the other with the 15th-century story. This reminded me of Carol Shields’ book Happenstance, two stories about the same five-day period – one from Jack Bowman’s point of view, and the other from his wife, Brenda’s. They’re printed in the same book in an unusual format of containing two books in one, either can be read first – then turn the book upside down and read the other story.

Happenstance

My next link is a bit of a jump – from the character Brenda in Happenstance I immediately thought of Brenda Blethyn, who plays Vera in Ann Cleeves’s books. One of these books is Silent Voices in which D I Vera Stanhope finds a dead body in the sauna room of her local gym. The victim, a woman had worked in social services – and was involved in a shocking case involving a young child.

Social Services also feature in Fair of Face by Christina James. Ten year old Grace is being fostered when her foster mother and her baby are found dead in their beds. Social Services are asked to work with the police, in order to question Grace and her friend Chloe, a child from a troubled family.

Another author with the name James, is P D James, also a crime writer. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a Cordelia Gray detective story in which she takes on an assignment from Sir Ronald Callander, a famous scientist, to investigate the death of his son, Mark who had been found hanged in suspicious circumstances. Mark had left Cambridge University without completing his degree and had taken a job as a gardener.

My next link is to Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, set mainly in an exclusive and expensive girls’ school, Meadowbank, in England. Some new staff members have been appointed, including Adam Goodman, a handsome young gardener.

My final link is to another school, the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Marcia Blaine is a traditional school where Miss Brodie’s ideas and methods of teaching are viewed with dislike and distrust. The Head Teacher is looking for ways to discredit and get rid of her. The girls in her ‘set’ fall under her spell, but one of them betrays her, ruining her teaching career.

Different formats, the name ‘Brenda’, Social Services, authors’ surname ‘James’, gardeners, and girls’ schools all link How To Be Both to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Except for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the books in my chain are all crime fiction and apart from How To Be Both I’ve read all the books in the chain – clicking on the titles takes you to my posts, where they exist.

Next month (May 4, 2019), the chain will begin with Jane Harper’s debut best-seller, The Dry.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Arsonist to The Ashes of London

The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire

This month the chain begins with The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper, a book I haven’t read. In fact, it isn’t to be published in the UK until May 2019. It’s non fiction about the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, when a man lit two fires in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. It is also the story of fire in Australia, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element.

My chain begins by using the word ‘Saturday‘ as the link. It’s Saturday by Ian McEwan which follows one day in the life of a neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne as his life takes an unexpected turn of events. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a man on the edge of violence.

Also following the life of one person in one day is Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, in which Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Mrs Dalloway first appeared in Virginia Woolf’s short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street published in The Dial magazine in 1923.

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie was also published in 1923, her second book featuring Hercule Poirot. She had the idea for the book after reading newspaper reports of a murder in France, in which masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. From these facts she then invented her plot, setting the book in the fictional French town of Merlinville next to a golf course and overlooking the sea.

Saturday Mrs Dalloway The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot, #2) The Chalk Circle Man Titus Groan The Ashes of London (Marwood and Lovett, #1)

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas is also set in France, her first book featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Strange blue chalk circles start appearing on the pavements of Paris and increasingly bizarre objects are found within them, including the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut. Like Poirot, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is a detective who works on intuition.

Vargas’s books are full of eccentric characters as is Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, the first of his Gormenghast books. It begins with the birth of Titus, soon to be the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. His father, Lord Sepulchrave has endured despair and then madness after his beloved library was burnt down and Steerpike, a disrespectful youth, has clawed his way out of the castle’s kitchen to a position of some power, by manipulation and deceit.

This brings me full circle to a book about fire, or rather the aftermath of a fire in The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor as people set about rebuilding London after the Great Fire had reduced a large part of it to ashes and rubble. Interwoven with a murder mystery, and the hunt for the regicides responsible for the execution of Charles I, it brings home the reality of being homeless – a refugee in your own country. I could hear the noise of the fire, smell the smoke and almost feel the heat and the pain of the victims of the fire.

So, the last link in my chain takes it back to the start of the chain, but to the results of a fire started by accident rather than arson. This month my chain has travelled from Australia to the United Kingdom, via France and the fantasy world of Gormenghast, connected by names, dates of publication, settings and eccentric characters.

Next month (April 6, 2019), the chain will begin with Ali Smith’s award-winning novel, How to be Both.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Fight Club to The Word is Murder

Fight Club

This month the chain begins with Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, a book I haven’t read but it’s about a club where men meet in the basement of bars and can fight ‘as long as they have to’.

The Friday Night Knitting Club

So I’m moving away from a club where men meet and fight to a club where women meet to exchange knitting tips, jokes, and their deepest secrets. It’s The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs. I haven’t read this book either. It seems as though they didn’t do much knitting so maybe there was more ‘natter’ than ‘knitting’. It sounds a bit too angst ridden for me and probably no more appealing than a fight club.

Dying In the Wool (Kate Shackleton, #1)

So, in a complete change of genre I’m moving on to crime fiction and my next link is to another use of wool in Dying in the Wool the first of Frances Brody’s Kate Shackleton Mysteries, crime fiction set in Yorkshire in 1922, with flashbacks to 1916. It’s a post World War 1 crime novel, along the lines of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs and Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple books, with an independent female amateur detective. Kate investigates the disappearance of mill owner Joshua Braithwaite who went missing after apparently trying to commit suicide.

Gallows View, the first Inspector Banks book by Peter Robinson, is also set in Yorkshire, where Alice Matlock, an old woman, living on her own, is found dead in her ransacked house in Gallows View, a row of old terraced cottages. One of the suspects for her murder is a Peeping Tom who is targeting young, blonde women, following them as they leave the pub and then watching as they undress for bed.

A Good Hanging

There is also a Peeping Tom in Tit for Tat, one of the stories in Ian Rankin’s collection of short stories, A Good Hanging. Rebus investigates a fire in a tenement in Edinburgh where John Brodie lives after a woman in a tenement opposite reported a Peeping Tom had been spying on her, aiming his binoculars towards her flat. He claims he was ‘bird-watching’.

When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

KateAtkinson has written four books about another character called Brodie – Jackson Brodie. My favourite of these books is the third one – When Will There Be Good News? It’s set mainly in Edinburgh where Brodie, along with Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, is involved in the search for a missing woman. It has the most complicated plot, with many twists and interlinking sub-plots (some with convenient coincidences) and I loved it.

The Word Is Murder

Brodie is an ex-policeman and now a private investigator, as is Daniel Hawthorne in The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. This is a very clever and different type of murder mystery in which the author plays the part of himself helping Hawthorne to solve the murder of Diana Cowper who was killed on the same day that she had made arrangements for her funeral. I was totally unable to solve the mystery, the clues were all there, but I was so involved in sorting out what was real and what wasn’t and enjoying the puzzle that I completely missed them.

This month my chain has travelled from America to the United Kingdom, connected by clubs, wool, settings in Yorkshire, Peeping Toms, characters called Brodie and ex-policemen turned private investigators.

Next month (2 March) the chain will start with The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper.