It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate atBooks 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 viaTreasure 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 NovellaNovember 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!).
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is Secondary/Minor Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book. This is just a quick run through of some of the characters in a few of Agatha Christie’s crime novels as I’m still not feeling up to writing much just yet, although the side effects of the chemotherapy aren’t quite so bad today.
Captain Hastings, a close friend, but he only appears in only eight of the thirty-three Poirot novels – he is the narrator in those books. He appears in the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Ariadne Oliver, a writer of detective fiction who assists Poirot. I think Agatha Christie enjoyed writing about her, using her to express her own thoughts about writing, about Poirot and playwrights adapting her plays. Probably my favourite Ariadne Oliver book is Mrs McGinty’s Dead.
Inspector Japp appears in several short stories and novels. Although he is a minor character in most of them, like Hastings he has a big part in three of the novels, including Death in the Clouds.
Raymond West, Miss Marple’s nephew in a few books including A Caribbean Mystery, in which she is on holiday that he arranged for her after her doctor had prescribed sunshine.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow appears in just one book, 4.50 to Paddington. Miss Marple enlists her help in investigating a murder that was seen on a train but there was no trace of a body and no one was reported missing.
Mr Satterthwaite, an observer rather than an investigator, who was in his sixties, a little man, with an elf-like face, is Mr Quin’s friend. One of my favourite stories he is in is The Man From The Sea in The Mysterious Mr Quin, a collection of short stories.
Harley Quin always appears unexpectedly and suddenly, and then just as suddenly disappears. He is, without doubt, the most mysterious and unusual character in all of Agatha Christie’s books. She describes him as a figure invisible except when he chose, not quite human, yet concerned with the affairs of human beings and particularly of lovers. He is also the advocate for the dead.
Colonel Race, who appears in four of the books. The first one is The Man in the Brown Suit, one of her earlier books and a thriller rather than a detective story.
Luke Fitzwilliam, a policeman who had returned to England from abroad. He investigates the murders in Wychwood-under-Ash, a picturesque village, in Murder is Easy.
Victoria Jones in They Came to Baghdad, a story about international espionage and conspiracy. I grew very fond of the amazing Victoria Jones!
I am so behind with writing about what I’ve been reading this summer.
Here’s the reason –
This is something I’ve been thinking about writing about for a while now, but now seems the right time, because in June I spent three weeks in hospital for major surgery and currently I’m having chemotherapy as a precautionary measure. Today I started my second session out of four, beginning with an IV drip over 3 hours. One of the side effects is that I have bad pins and needles in the hand where the cannula went and also up my arm. I can’t touch cold things or metal – the fridge, our door handles etc, including my laptop. I’m using a heat pad to alleviate the pain and that means using the other hand on the laptop and that is difficult ! It will gradually go away, but until it does I’m sorry but I won’t be posting very much.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is The topic this week is Books on My Fall 2023 To-Read List
I don’t plan what I’m going to read next, unless I have a review copy to read, so I don’t have a To-Read list. I do have many books waiting to be read – here are 10 of them, all e-books, that I may read this autumn. I’d forgotten I’d got some of these books, so it’s been good to sort through what I have in the black hole that is my Kindle.
I like to think I’ll read at least some of these, but when the time comes I could read other books instead.
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. I saw on Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings blog that she has started to read this book and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read it for years. She’s read the first four chapters and it sounds so good.
A compelling depiction of a man imprisoned by his own pride, Dombey and Son explores the devastating effects of emotional deprivation on a dysfunctional family. Paul Dombey runs his household as he runs his business: coldly, calculatingly and commercially. The only person he cares for is his little son, while his motherless daughter Florence is merely a ‘base coin that couldn’t be invested’. As Dombey’s callousness extends to others, including his defiant second wife Edith, he sows the seeds of his own destruction... (Amazon UK)
Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves, the 2nd Vera book, crime fiction. I’ve been reading the Vera books out of order and somehow missed this one. I have just started to read it and it’s looking good.
The residents of an East Yorkshire village are revisited with the nightmare of a murder that happened 10 years before. there was some doubt about the guilty verdict passed on Jeanie Long and now it would seem that the killer is still at large. Inspector Vera Stanhope builds up a picture of a community afraid of itself and of outsiders. (Fantastic Fiction)
Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson, the 21st DCI Banks book and the next one for me to read. Crime fiction
A disgraced college lecturer is found murdered with £5,000 in his pocket on a disused railway line near his home. Since being dismissed from his job for sexual misconduct four years previously, he has been living a poverty-stricken and hermit-like existence in this isolated spot.
The suspects range from several individuals at the college where he used to teach to a woman who knew the victim back in the early ’70s at Essex University, then a hotbed of political activism. When Banks receives a warning to step away from the case, he realises there is much more to the mystery than meets the eye – for there are plenty more skeletons to come out of the closet . . . (Amazon UK)
Now You See Them by Elly Griffiths, the 5th in the Brighton Mystery series.
Three young women have gone missing.
A girl called Rhonda has vanished from her boarding school. Maybe she ran away, but there are disturbing similarities to the disappearance of two other young women – those too thought not to be suspicious. Detective Edgar Stephens is under pressure to solve Rhonda’s disappearance, but it is his wife Emma, herself a former detective now frustrated at being just a housewife, who concludes there might be a connection between the three cases. Edgar’s friend, magician Max Mephisto, is reinventing himself as a movie star and trying not to envy his daughter Ruby’s television fame. Little do either of them know how close they are to being drawn into the deadly web of abduction and murder about to trap them all. (Amazon UK)
Exposure by Helen Dunmore, historical fiction, a Cold War spy thriller.
London, November, 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets, and arrested.
His wife, Lily, suspects that his imprisonment is part of a cover-up, and that more powerful men than Simon will do anything to prevent their own downfall. She knows that she too is in danger, and must fight to protect her children. But what she does not realise is that Simon has hidden vital truths about his past, and may be found guilty of another crime that carries with it an even greater penalty. (Goodreads)
Graham and Joan Bendix have apparently succeeded in making that eighth wonder of the modern world, a happy marriage. And into the middle of it there drops, like a clap of thunder, a box of chocolates.Joan Bendix is killed by a poisoned box of liqueur chocolates that cannot have been intended for her to eat. The police investigation rapidly reaches a dead end. Chief Inspector Moresby calls on Roger Sheringham and his Crimes Circle – six amateur but intrepid detectives – to consider the case. The evidence is laid before the Circle and the members take it in turn to offer a solution. Each is more convincing than the last, slowly filling in the pieces of the puzzle, until the dazzling conclusion. This new edition includes an alternative ending by the Golden Age writer Christianna Brand, as well as a brand new solution devised specially for the British Library by the crime novelist and Golden Age expert Martin Edwards. (Amazon UK)
It was rumoured that Hollywood stars would go to any lengths for the privilege of being photographed by the good-looking, brilliantly talented and ultra-fashionable portrait photographer Leslie Searle. But what was such a gifted creature doing in such an English village backwater as Salcott St Mary? And why — and how — did he disappear? If a crime had been committed, was it murder…fraud…or simply some macabre practical joke? (Goodreads)
As the UK’s top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right – and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die? (Goodreads)
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, historical fiction, set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies.
It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women all who seem determined to protect Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel journeys through recollection, reality and imagination to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, to piece together a story that feels something like the truth. (Amazon)
The Reckoning by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Freyja and Huldar Book 2, crime fiction.
A chilling note predicting the deaths of six people is found in a school’s time capsule, ten years after it was buried. But surely, if a thirteen-year-old wrote it, it can’t be a real threat…
Detective Huldar suspects he’s been given the investigation simply to keep him from real police work. He turns to psychologist Freyja to help understand the child who hid the message. Soon, however, they find themselves at the heart of another shocking case.
For the discovery of the letter coincides with a string of macabre events: body parts found in a garden, followed by the murder of the man who owned the house. His initials are BT, one of the names on the note. (Goodreads)
Huldar and Freyja must race to identify the writer, the victims and the murderer, before the rest of the targets are killed…
A history of the making of England as a nation, told through six bone chests, stored for over a thousand years in Winchester Cathedral.
William Collins| 14 September 2023| 400 pages| Review copy| 4*
The front cover shows a section of the Great West Window of Winchester Cathedral, made up of mosaics created after 1660 from the glass that had been smashed during the Civil War in 1642. I think it is just beautiful.
Description:
In December 1642, during the Civil War, Parliamentarian troops stormed the magnificent cathedral, intent on destruction. Reaching the presbytery, its beating heart, the soldiers searched out ten beautifully decorated wooden chests resting high up on the stone screens.
Those chests contained some of England’s most venerated, ancient remains: the bones of eight kings, including William Rufus and Cnut the Great – the only Scandinavian king to rule England and a North Sea empire; three bishops ; and a formidable queen, Emma of Normandy. These remains belong to the very people who witnessed and orchestrated the creation of the kingdom of Wessex in the seventh century, who lived through the creation of England as a unified country in response to the Viking threat, and who were part and parcel of the Norman conquest.
On that day, the soldiers smashed several chests to the ground, using the bones as missiles to shatter the cathedral’s stained glass windows. Afterwards, the clergy scrambled to collect the scattered remains.
In 2012, the six remaining chests were reopened. Using the latest scientific methods, a team of forensic archaeologists attempted to identify the contents: they discovered an elaborate jumble of bones, including the remains of two forgotten princes. In The Bone Chests, Cat Jarman builds on this evidence to untangle the stories of the people within. It is an extraordinary and sometimes tragic tale, and one of transformation. Why these bones? Why there? Can we ever really identify them? In a palimpsest narrative that runs through more than a millennium of British history, it tells the story of both the seekers and the sought, of those who protected the bones and those who spurned them; and of the methods used to investigate.
My knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons from school history lessons is very basic – little more than Alfred the Great on the run from the Vikings and letting the cakes burn, and King Canute, sitting in his throne placed at the water’s edge and trying unsuccessfully to forbid the waves from advancing and wetting his feet.
So I was looking forward to learning more in The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons. In her Author’s Note Cat Jarman clarifies that her intention with this book is to tell the stories of the chests, and of the tumultuous times that they and the people interred in them, lived through. She has concentrated on the south and south-west of England to consider why Wessex and Winchester took on such significance in the history of England in the early medieval period. So, the main emphasis in this book is on the history, on the kings and politics of the period rather than on the forensic archaeology and the modern scientific techniques.
Having said that there is enough about the use of DNA and isotopic analysis of teeth to investigate the diet and origins of the owners of the bones for me as a non scientist to understand. I found it all fascinating even though in places I was left wondering what century I was in, having moved from the 11th to the 21st century (when Richard III’s remains were discovered under a Leicester car park), via various Viking raids and the 17th century. At times I had to keep reminding myself which chest was being described.
The mortuary, or bone chests, themselves, are most interesting and I would love to visit Winchester Cathedral to see them for myself. There are six chests, painted wooden caskets which are displayed high on stone screen walls on either side of the high altar area. The bones are the remains of many kings and bishops who were originally buried in the Anglo-Saxon cathedral known as Old Minster, north of the present cathedral.
Jarman describes the chests in, vaguely, chronological order and has relied on the Mortuary Chests Project, a research project led by archaeologists from Bristol University in collaboration with Winchester Cathedral that began in 2012. She is not involved in the Project but has incorporated details of the team’s partial results released in May 2019 in her book.
The book is very detailed and well researched and I learned so much, bringing the medieval period to life as I read. I had never heard of Queen Emma and the details about her life stand out for me. She was the daughter of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wife of two Anglo- Saxon kings – Æthelred the Unready and Cnut (Canute) – and the mother of Edward the Confessor and Harthacnut of Denmark. She was given the name Ælfgifu and in 1017 she married Cnut. I was fascinated to read that the Project team has put together a set of bones that they confidently determine to be a female that could be the body of Emma. (See – details of an exhibition at Winchester Cathedral, Kings and Scribes: the birth of a nation. This includes a 3D model of the female skeleton thought to be Queen Emma).
The last section of the book is made up of Notes of the sources used, an extensive Bibliography, and an Index. There is also a List of Illustrations; the illustrations were not included in my review copy.
Many thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.
Dr Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist and field archaeologist specialising in the Viking Age, Viking women, and Rapa Nui. She uses forensic techniques like isotope analysis, carbon dating, and DNA analysis on human remains to untangle the experiences of past people from broader historical narratives. Dr Jarman has contributed to numerous TV documentaries as both an on-screen expert and historical consultant, including programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, History, Discovery, and more.
I’ve been reading almost non-stop and not pausing long enough to write proper reviews, so it’s time for a brief look at some of the books I’ve read. These notes are not as detailed as I usually write, but when you read quickly this is the result!
Inspector Alan Banks and his team, the Western Area Major Crimes Squad, investigate the murder of 19-year-old Hayley Daniels who was found raped and strangled in the Maze, a tangle of narrow alleys behind Eastvale’s market square, after a drunken night on the town with a group of friends. There are plenty of suspects and it’s a matter of looking at who was where and when to find the murderer. It wasn’t who I thought it was.
DI Annie Cabbot, on loan to the Eastern area, is assigned to look into the murder of Karen Drew, a quadriplegic, who was found dead in her wheelchair on a seaside cliff. It’s only when Annie discovers the real identity of Karen Drew, that the question of why anyone would want to murder a quadriplegic, becomes clear. But who could have done it? Annie has to revisit an earlier case to find the culprit.
Although this can be read as a stand-alone novel, part of the enjoyment in reading the series in order is that you see the development of the main characters and their relationships over the years. The books are basically police procedurals but along the way there’s a lot about Alan and Annie as people rather than police officers. Ihave become fond of the regular characters in these books.
This is the description on Goodreads: DCI Alan Banks reluctantly investigates DI Bill Quinn with Inspector Joanna Passero. Quinn, convalescing at St Peter’s Police Treatment Centre, was killed by a crossbow on the tranquil grounds, and left compromising photos. Quinn may be disreputable, linked to a vicious crime in Yorkshire and to a cold case – English Rachel Hewitt 19 vanished in Estonia six years ago.
Banks is not happy about this investigation, not only at the murder of one of their own officers, but because of the involvement of Joanna Passero who seems to him to be determined to prove that Quinn was a corrupt cop.
The team’s investigations lead them to a group smuggling illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe into the UK, taking Banks and Passero to Tallin in Estonia, whilst Annie heads the investigation in the UK. It’s remarkably complex. It’s also long, with many twists and turns, and it became too repetitive in the middle of the book, which is why I haven’t given it 5 stars. But I did enjoy it more than Friend of the Devil, especially the setting in Estonia. Robinson’s books are all definitely grounded in their settings, whether they’re in Yorkshire, Estonia, or elsewhere.
I have now read 20 of the 28 DCI Banks books.
I think the setting in Estonia means I can add Watching the Dark to the Wanderlust Bingo card in Central/Eastern Europe square.
BooksPlease 