Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

crime_fiction_alphabetI’ve already posted my letter B in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series, but here is a late entry for the letter A.

Among the Mad is by Jacqueline Winspear. It is the sixth in the Maisie Dobbs Mystery series. It begins on Christmas Eve in 1931 in London where Maisie notices a man sitting on the pavement. About to give him some change she becomes aware of a strange sensation of impending danger, somehow she knew that the man was about to take his life and before she can reach him there is an explosion.  This is the start of a series of terrifying events threatening the safety of not only Maisie but also thousands of innocent people.

Although the Great War had ended more than thirteen years years ago it still haunts Maisie and her assistant Billy Beale and this suicide brings all its horrors back to them. This is a dark novel as Maisie is drawn into the investigation by Scotland Yard to discover the identity of the man who is threatening to kill thousands of people unless his demands are met. It highlights the desperate conditions of the war veterans suffering still from shell-shock, unable to work and receiving no pensions. As first dogs and birds and finally a Government junior minister are found dead from some unknown chemical substance the search becomes increasingly more sinister as the mind of the madman is revealed.

At the same time Among the Mad gives agonising details of the medical treatment given to woman suffering from melancholia in the mental hospitals of the time when Billy’s wife, Doreen is admitted to Wychett Hill, or as Billy describes it “the bleedin’ nuthouse”. Doreen undergoes some kind of insulin therapy, and both Maisie and Billy are horrified to find her

lying on a cast-iron bed, her eyes wide open, her face contorted as she jerked her head back and forth on the pillow. Her wrists were secured to the bed on either side of her body, and her feet had been strapped to the bottom of the bed. Her slender wrists reminded Maisie of a sparrow’s tiny bones, set against the dark leather biting into her skin. Doreen had lost so much weight it seemed as if the sheet and blanket were flush across the bed, with slight protrusions to indicate the position of her feet, knees and hips. (pages 117-8)

I enjoy the Maisie Dobbs books; Maisie is meticulous, with great attention to detail, reflective and caring. There is so much social history which fascinated me, making me want to know more about the 1930s. There is also an interesting glimpse of Oswald Mosley:

He’s been hobnobbing with the likes of the Italian, Mussolini, and there’s talk that he’s thinking of setting up a Fascist Party here. There’s a recipe for terror, if ever I came across it. (page 103)

Weeding – Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

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Deb writes:

We’re moving in a couple weeks (the first time since I was 9 years old), and I’ve been going through my library of 3000+ books, choosing the books that I could bear to part with and NOT have to pack to move. Which made me wonder€¦

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain?

Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.)

And€“when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) €¦what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore?  SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

We’re moving house too so this is very appropriate. We’ve been going through EVERYTHING and have got rid of a lot of stuff, but not books!  We’ve looked through all our books trying to decide whether we could bear to part with some of them and guess what – there were three ! I suppose that’s because I do occasionally go through and pull out ones that I think I won’t want to read again, but usually that’s not many anyway.

The ones that we can bear to part with go to a charity shop or an Oxfam Secondhand Bookshop. If I take them to Oxfam I have to be very quick in and out of the shop, not looking at the shelves or shop window as otherwise I’d be sure to buy some more books!

Murder Being Once Done by Ruth Rendell

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Murder Being Once Done was first published in 1972. Inspector Wexford is convalescing, staying with his nephew, Howard, in London. He is bored, fussed over by his wife Dora, on a strict diet, denied the food he loves, absolutely ordered off alcohol and police work by his doctor, so all he can do to pass his time is to take walks and talk with his nephew about More’s Utopia which he has borrowed from the library. What makes it all most frustrating is that his nephew is a Dectective Superintendent and he is investigating the death of  Loveday Morgan, aged about 20, found in a vault in a London cemetery.

Wexford just cannot resist going to the scene of the crime – Kenbourne Vale Cemetery, a huge and bizarre  place, which Wexford finds profoundly sinister and awe-inspiring:

Never before, not in any mortuary or house of murder, had Wexford so tellingly felt the oppressive chill of death. The winged victory held back her plunging horses against a sky that was almost black, and under the arches of the colonnades lay wells of gloom. He felt that not for anything would he have walked between those arches and the pillars that fronted them to read the bronze plaques on their damp yellow walls. Not for renewed health and youth would he have spent a night in that place. (page 17)

From then on he defies his doctor’s orders and helps Howard with his investigations. He has to go carefully though, feeling rather lost away from the familiar ground of Kingsmarkham, his “essential Wexfordness” deserting him for a while, and aware of the attitude of the townsman towards his country cousin. Wexford gets more involved and is convinced he’s found the murderer only to discover that he’s made a mistake. Then he realises how

deeply his illness had demoralized him. Fear of getting tired, fear of getting wet, fear of being hurt – all these fears had contributed to his failure. (page 138)

He’s about to give up, feeling old and useless. Then, when he is presented with a vital clue he gets back his yearning for the truth, excitement sets the adrenlin surging through his blood and shivers traveling up his spine as he sees his quarry in his sight.

Although this is quite a short book it’s densely packed, not only with details of the crime, but touching on such issues as single mothers, poverty, ignorance and religious intolerance. It’s strong on sense of place, and although there are a few passages painting a picture of life in the 1970s it has a timeless quality about it, with enough twists and turns for me to be unsure of the outcome.

I liked the chapter heading quotations from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia – the title comes from one of these:

The murder being once done, he is in less fear and more hope that the deed shall not be betrayed or known, seeing the party is now dead and rid out of the way, which only might have uttered or disclosed it.

Teaser Tuesday – Nocturnes

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

teaser-tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) ‘teaser’ sentences from that page.
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I’ve just finished Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is a book of five short stories in which Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. I enjoyed some of them more than others; some of them just seem to stop rather than ending, leaving me wanting more. There’s nothing dramatic here, rather they are gentle stories with a touch of nostalgia and a sense of loss for what has gone or what could have been.

My teaser is from the title story Nocturne:

Maybe Lindy’s right. Maybe like she says, I need some perspective, and life really is much bigger than loving a person. Maybe this really is a turning point for me, and the big league’s waiting. (page 185)

Crime Fiction Alphabet: B is for The Brethren

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

crime_fiction_alphabetKerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is running a weekly meme: The Alphabet in Crime Fiction. Each week you have to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week.

Kerrie explains that your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book’s title, the first letter of an author’s first name, or the first letter of the author’s surname.

So you see you have lots of choice. You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow.

This week’s letter is B and the book I’ve chosen to write about is The Brethren by John Grisham. I first read this several years ago when I was having a Grisham binge, reading every book by him that I could find. I read them so quickly and then promptly forgot about them.

This one sticks in my mind a bit more than some of the others, mainly because of its title. There are two strands to the story. The first concerns the Brethren – three judges imprisoned in Trumble a minimum security federal prison. They meet every week in the law library with the prison’s approval to hear cases and settle disputes between the other prisoners, and also, but not with approval, they’re running a gay-extortion scheme raking in hundreds of  thousands of dollars. The money is then smuggled out to their attorney and deposited in their secret offshore bank account.

Then there is Aaron Lake, a congressman talked into running for President by Teddy Maynard of the CIA.  Lake is handsome, articulate and smart, with no bad habits, clean as a whistle with a pretty dull private life since he’d become a widower: a solid candidate, very electable. But then, of course the two plots link up.

I haven’t re-read the book, but my memory of it is, like all the other Grisham books that I’ve read, that it is fast-paced, packed with legal detail, complicated and for me at least totally absorbing. I may even read it again.