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.
This month we start with Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the Booker Prize in 2023. It’s set in a dystopic Ireland as it’s in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.
I haven’t read Prophet Song so I decided to start my chain by linking to the word song in the title.
My first link is The Hangman’s Song by James Oswald, the third in his Inspector McLean series set in Edinburgh. a dark, tense book; crime fiction with elements of the supernatural and parapsychology thrown in. McLean is working on two separate cases – one investigating a group of prostitutes and the subsequent death of their pimp, Malky Jennings, who was beaten to death – and the second, two suicides, which he and his DC, MacBride consider to be suspicious. Digging deeper, McLean finds answers something terrifying stalking the city streets.
My second link is Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie, one in a collection of short stories, featuring Hercule Poirot. At first it looks as though a young widow, Mrs Allen has committed suicide, but as the doctor pointed out the pistol is in her right hand and the wound was close to her head just above the left ear, so it’s obvious that someone else shot her and tried to make it look like suicide. The plot is tightly constructed, with a few red herrings to misguide Poirot and Inspector Japp and a moral question at the end.
For my third link is a book I read just before Murder in the Mews – The Frozen Shroud by Martin Edwards. It’s the sixth book in his Lake District Mystery series. It begins at Halloween in Ravenbank, an isolated community on the shores of Ullswater. Gertrude Smith who was murdered on Hallowe’en, just before the First World War was found, battered to death, her face reduced to a pulp and covered with a woollen blanket like a shroud. Her murderer wasn’t hanged and the story goes that her tormented spirit
I enjoyed the previous five, featuring historian Daniel Kind and DCI Hannah Scarlett, head of the Cold Case Review Team and this one is no exception; it kept me guessing almost to the end.
My fourth link is The Shroud Maker by Kate Ellis, the 18th Wesley Peterson Mystery.
It’s the Palkin Festival in Tradmouth, a town in Devon, when the body of a strangled women is discovered floating out to sea in a dinghy. A year earlier Jenny Bercival had disappeared from the festival and her mother returns to look for her bringing with her anonymous letters claiming she is still alive. DI Wesley Peterson and his boss DCI Gerry Heffernan are investigating the two cases. Are they connected and is there a link to a fantasy website called ‘Shipworld’ which features the 14th century mayor and privateer of Tradmouth, Palkin as a supernatural hero with a sinister, faceless nemesis called the ‘Shroud Maker’?
My fifth link is to another book set in Devon, Murder in the Mill Race by E R C Lorac, a Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald book.
A few months after the Dr Raymond Ferens’ arrival at Milham in the Moor in North Devon Sister Monica, the warden of a children’s home, is found drowned in the mill race, the stream leading into the water mill. Everyone says that Sister Monica is a saint – but is she? Chief Inspector Macdonald faces one of his most difficult cases in a village determined not to betray its dark secrets to a stranger.
My final link is to Once Upon a River by Dianne Setterfield, in which a drowned body is also found, this time it’s that of a little child in the River Thames.It’s mystifying as hours later the dead child, miraculously it seems, takes a breath, and returns to life. The mystery is enhanced by folklore, by science that appears to be magic, and by romance and superstition. It is a beautifully and lyrically told story, and cleverly plotted so that I was not completely sure at times what it was that I was reading. It’s historical fiction with a touch of magic that completely beguiled me.
What is in your chain, I wonder?
Next month (April 5, 2025), we’ll start with Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!
The optional theme this month isChristmas or Nonfiction and I’ve chosen the Nonfiction option as I don’t read many Christmas-related books. The descriptions are taken from my posts on the books, where they exist.
D is for The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell, the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author.
After the war, in 1946, she went with her young son, John, to Berlin where Richard Parker, her second husband, had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration. It was here that she befriended the Altmann family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied.It covers the years from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949, with an Epilogue dated Autumn 1953. Her memoir is mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family – Frau Maria Altmann, her husband, Oskar and her children, Ursula, who works for a group of American service men, Lilli, a ballet dancer and son, Fritz, who was a member of the Hitler Youth and is now involved in the Black Market. Their eldest son. Kurt. is missing in Russia. Berlin had been divided into four sectors by the Allies – Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union – and Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams.
This is an extremely readable biography of a fascinating woman. It’s well researched and provides an insight into the early years of Australia’s colonial history. Elizabeth was born on 14 August 1766 in Devon, England and she married JohnMacarthur in October 1788. In June 1789 they sailed with their first child, Edward, to New South Wales where John joined his regiment, the New South Wales Corps, in the recently established colony of New South Wales.
For sixty years, Elizabeth ran the family farm in Parramatta, west of Sydney town – on her own during her husband’s long absences abroad, when she was responsible for the care of their valuable merino flocks, as well as the Camden Park estate and the direction of its convict labourers. By the time Macarthur came back from his second absence, he was overwhelmed by mental illness, and they spent the last few years of his life apart. He died in 1834. The house and gardens of her farm, aptly named ‘Elizabeth Farm’ is now an ‘access all areas’ museum. In 1850, she died in her daughter and son-in-law’s house at Watson’s Bay outside Sydney, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Agatha Christie had visited the Middle East in 1929 travelling on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on to Damascus and Baghdad. She visited the excavations at Ur and returned there the following spring where she met archaeologist Max Mallowan – by the end of the summer they had decided to marry, which they did on 11 September 1930.
It’s her memoir in answer to her friends’ questions about what life was like when she accompanied Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. The emphasis in the book is on the everyday life on a dig and Agatha took an active part, helping to catalogue, label and clean the items they found as well as taking photographs and developing them. She also found time to spend on writing her books. So, although she gives a detailed account of how they worked, how they employed workmen for the excavations and servants who looked after Max and his team of archaeologists, there is not much about what they found.
She described the local people in her Epilogue as people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life, who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, she also recorded their disputes: ‘Quarrelling is, in any case, almost continuous.‘ And ‘Syria is full of fiercely fanatical sects of all kinds, all willing to cut each other’s throats for the good cause! ‘
Cousin to Elizabeth I – and very likely also Henry VIII’s illegitimate granddaughter – Lettice Knollys had a life of dizzying highs and pitiful lows. Darling of the court, entangled in a love triangle with Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, banished from court, plagued by scandals of affairs and murder, embroiled in treason, Lettice would go on to lose a husband and beloved son to the executioner’s axe. Living to the astonishing age of ninety-one, Lettice’s tale gives us a remarkable, personal lens on to the grand sweep of the Tudor Age, with those closest to her often at the heart of the events that defined it.
In the first ever biography of this extraordinary woman, Nicola Tallis’s dramatic narrative takes us through those events, including the religious turmoil, plots and intrigues of Mary, Queen of Scots, attempted coups, and bloody Irish conflicts, among others. Surviving well into the reign of Charles I, Lettice truly was the last of the great Elizabethans. (Amazon UK)
Princess Louise was Victoria’s sixth child – her fourth daughter, born on 18th March 1848. It was an agonising and terrifying birth in a year of revolution and rebellion, a time when royal families throughout Europe were being deposed and in Britain the working classes were agitating for higher pay, better working conditions and more legal rights. There is so much detail about her life in this book, packed with intrigues, scandals and secrets.
She had a difficult childhood, disliked and bullied by her mother and she often rebelled against the restrictions of life as a princess. She had an unhappy marriage to John Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne, later the 9th Duke of Argyll, a homosexual, and went with him to Canada in 1882 when he was appointed as Governor-General. Her relationship with Canada became a love-hate one, but began and ended with Canadian adoration.
The scandals arose about whether she had had an illegitimate child and her long term love affair with the sculptor Joseph Boehm. The mystery is still unresolved as Louise’s files in the Royal Archives are closed and her husband’s family archives are inaccessible.
B is for Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor.
Her book recounts her experiences during the first four months of 2020, when she worked on the Covid-19 wards in the Oxford University Hospitals system. Taken from her diary that she kept at the time it has an immediacy as she records her insomnia, her fears for her family and also the tremendous resilience, courage and empathy that she and the rest of the hospital staff had. Although it is a grim account, it is also uplifting to know the care they took of their patients and the attentiveness to their patients’ needs despite the fact that many of the staff were not trained in intensive care and had never dealt with anything like this before. Breathtaking records the compassion and kindness of numerous people, and pays tribute to both NHS staff and volunteers in dealing with such a distressing and immensely horrific situation.
I like Paxman’s style of writing, I could almost hear him speaking as I read. He’s a person who has grown on me over the years and lately I’ve enjoyed his TV documentaries too. It’s always been entertaining to watch his interviews, even if I didn’t agree with his views – or his aggressive approach. It’s toned down in this book, but every now and then his acerbic nature comes across. He writes about food, sport, football hooligans, language, individualism, education, religion, ‘John Bull’, cities and the countryside – the English idyllic village, class structure and social tone, attitudes to women, business and trade to name but a few topics. It’s well researched and very readable, with a bibliography listing all the books he mentions plus others that presumably he has used. It seems there really is no such thing as ‘the English’ – we’re a mixture of all sorts, or as Paxman puts it, The English are a mongrel race‘. (page 59)
This is the story of a house and those who peopled it between the years 1930 and 1960. In 1930 Maxine Elliott, an American, commissioned the architect Barry Dierks to build the Chateau de l’Horizon on the land she had bought on a narrow stretch of rocks with a small promontory between Cannes and Juan-les-Pins. This is the part of the book I enjoyed the most, first of all about Maxine herself, then the description of the construction of the Chateaux and the years that Maxine owned it and lived there. Maxine really came into her own there as a superb hostess. Regular visitors included Winston Churchill, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham among many others – famous actors and actresses as well as members of the aristocracy and politicians.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived nearby before the Second World War, were also visitors. The picture painted of them is not flattering – and there was much talk about how to address Wallis and whether the women should curtsy to her. By the time the War approached Maxine had lost her sparkle, suffering from ill health and she died in March 1940.
The Chateau was bought by Aly Khan, the Aga Khan’s heir presumptive at the time. There is quite a lot about his time there, his womanising, his marriage to Rita Hayworth and the social scene of the post-war period up to 1960. It is a fascinating and entertaining book about a pampered, luxurious and decadent world.
The next link up will be on January 4, 2025 when the theme will be: New; this could be new-to-you books, new additions to your TBR list, recently published books, or something else that you connect with the word ‘New’.
Today I’m linking up with Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blogfor Throwback Thursday. It takes place on the Thursday before the first Saturday of every month (i.e., the Thursday before the monthly #6Degrees post). The idea is to highlight one of your previously published book reviews and then link back to Davida’s blog.
They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie is a standalone spy thriller. I first reviewed it on November 4, 2011.
My review begins:
I made copious notes as I read Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad because it’s such a complex plot and there seemed to be so many significant events and people that I wanted to clarify what was happening. This is not one of Agatha Christie’s detective novels – no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot,- just Victoria Jones, a short-hand typist, a courageous girl with a ‘natural leaning towards adventure’ and a tendency to tell lies. Set in 1950 this is a story about international espionage and conspiracy. The heads of the ‘great powers‘ are secretly meeting in Baghdad, where if it all goes wrong ‘the balloon will go up with a vengeance.’ And an underground criminal organisation is out to make sure it does go wrong, aiming at ‘total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth.’
It’s time for another Library Books post – here are my current library loans. From the bottom up they are:
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker – the continuation of the story of Troy following on from The Silence of the Girls (which I have, but have not read yet). It is a retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it. I hope I’ll be able to read both before I have to return it.
Hag-Seedby Margaret Atwood, a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one of my favourites of his plays. I’ve seen it performed on stage twice, once at the Barbican in London and then at the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors, so I’m expecting this will be good.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Now, this is a book I’ve wondered about reading ever since I saw other book bloggers’ reviews. It seems to be a book that some people love and others don’t, varying from five to one star ratings. I started to listen to the audiobook, but had to return it unfinished. It’s described as ‘part murder-mystery, part coming-of-age novel’ set in the North Carolina marshlands.
Murder on the Orient Expressby Agatha Christie, a Poirot murder mystery. I have read this book, but I fancied reading it again, even though I do know who murdered Mr Ratchett, an American tycoon who was murdered in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. I really like the cover of this book!
What have you been reading from the library recently?
which for me is The Mousetrap and Other Plays by Agatha Christie and I am delighted as this is a book I’ve wanted to read for years!. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 7th August, 2022.
Synopsis from the book:
These four gripping plays by the undisputed Queen of Crime, here published for the first time in book form, provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the domestic thriller. Agatha Christie’s talents as a playwright are equal to her skills as a novelist and reading her plays, with their ingenious plots and colourful cast of characters, is every bit as pleasurable.
The Mousetrap has made history by becoming the longest running play ever. And Then There Were None was another huge theatrical success and was made into a superb film by Rene Clair. The two remaining plays were both adapted by Agatha Christie from her earlier novels: The Hollow, set in the English countryside and Appointment with Death, set among the exotic ruins of Petra in the suffocating heat of the Jordan desert.
Agatha Christie dramatised many of her own stories and frequently devised new twists of plot and character to surprise and enthrall her audience.
The Mousetrap opened in London’s West End in 1952 and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the stage performances had to be temporarily discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then re-opened on 17 May 2021. It’s set in a guest house, Monkswell Manor, wintertime “in the present day”, that is the early 1950s. The play has a twist ending, which the audience are traditionally asked not to reveal after leaving the theatre, so I’ll be limited in what I can write about it.
Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?
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 a Book Quote Freebie (Share your favorite book quotes that fit a theme of your choosing! These could be quotes about books/reading, or quotes from books. Some examples are: quotes for book lovers, quotes that prove reading is the best thing ever, funny things characters have said, romantic declarations, pretty scenery descriptions, witty snippets of dialogue, etc.)
Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer. Not too young a one. What a mistake I made there. The result is that my fictional detective must be well over a hundred by now.
Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him to grow slowly into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man. (page 263)
About Miss Marple, who was about 65 -70 years old when she first appeared in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Agatha envisaged her as
‘the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies’. But she was not like Agatha’s grandmother at all – being ‘far more fussy and spinsterish‘.
In The Murder at the Vicarage Miss Marple is not the popular figure she appears in the later books as not everybody likes her. The vicar does, liking her sense of humour, and describing her as
‘a white-haired old lady with a gentle appealing manner’, whereas his wife describes her as ‘the worst cat in the village. And she always knows everything that happens – and draws the worst inference from it.‘
People suggested that Miss Marple and Poirot should meet, but Agatha dismissed that idea because she didn’t think they would enjoy it at all and wouldn’t be at home in each other’s world.
In one way Miss Marple was like her grandmother:
…I endowed my Miss Marple with something of Grannie’s powers of prophecy. There was no unkindness in Miss Marple, she just did not trust people. Though she expected the worst, she often accepted people kindly in spite of what they were. (pages 447 -50)
On Writing. Throughout her autobiography Agatha writes about writing, how she wrote, where she wrote and so on. Here are just two examples:
If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Sparl or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never have occurred to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. (page 422)
And:
… I knew that writing was my steady, solid profession. I could go on inventing my plots and writing my books until I went gaga.
There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. (page 490)
On Writing Detective Stories:
One of the pleasures of writing detective stories is that there are so many types to choose from: the light hearted thriller, which is particularly pleasant to do; the intricate detective story with an involved plot which is technically interesting and requires a great deal of work, but is always rewarding; and then what I can only describe as the detective story that has a kind of passion behind it – that passion being to help save innocence. Because it is innocence that matters, not guilt. (page 453)
On Writing Short Stories:
I think myself that the right length for a novel is 50,000 words. I know this is considered by publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get 50, 000 – so 60,000 or 70,000 are more acceptable. If your book runs to more than that I think you will usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter. 20,000 words for a long short story is an excellent length for a thriller. Unfortunately there is less and less market for stories of that size and authors tend not to be particularly well paid. One feels therefore that one would do better to continue the story, and expand it to a full length novel. The short story technique, I think, is not really suited to the detective story at all. A thriller, possibly – but a detective story no. (page 352) (my highlighting)
I’m not a great fan of short stories, but I think that Agatha Christie’s collection of stories in The Mysterious Mr Quin contains some of her very best short stories. They were her favourites too. They are set in the 1920s and have a paranormal element to them, as well as a touch of romance. I found them all most entertaining. She describes Mr Quin as
… a figure who just entered into a story – a catalyst no more – his mere presence affected human beings. There would be some little fact, some apparently irrelevant phrase, to point him out for what he was: a man shown in a harlequin-coloured light that fell on him through a glass window; a sudden appearance or disappearance. Always he stood for the same thing: he was a friend of lovers, and connected with death. (page 447)
On living :
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairing, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. (page 11)
BooksPlease 