Thursday 28 March 2024

Some more short crime (and spy) fiction reviews

 Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto

This is one of those timetable mysteries. I couldn’t warm to it for that reason, and although I wouldn’t mind getting hold of an earlier translation and seeing if that feels a bit more atmospheric, I probably won’t.

The central theme, that the deaths aren’t investigated as they should be because they look like a ‘love suicide’ (ie a pact) and the idea that a civil servant would commit such a suicide to avoid bringing shame on his employers probably comes over more strongly in the original cultural context (Japan in the early 50s) but it’s very well explained, as is the corruption element, and I did warm to the two police officers most involved and was happy to follow them to the end. 

However I still felt the alibi would be broken and I didn’t much care how. Fans of this kind of transport timetable howdunnit will get a lot more out of it than me. 

 

Game Without Rules – Michael Gilbert

This is a collection of short stories featuring Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, two middle aged agents who vaguely reminded me of those tv shows in the 60s and 70s where a mysterious ‘M’ or ‘Mother’ sends agents out on various jobs. In this case though the boss has a name, and also manages the London and Midland bank as well as being the head of a small extra secret section of the intelligence service.

It’s also not glam like those shows often were, and its not any more dramatic than it needs to be to get the job done. Despite the lack of sexual tension, dry martinis and fast cars though, I was impressed with how diverse these stories were. I’ve read the last one of these before in anthologies but it works much better as part of the series because of course you care more about the characters.

Gilbert also wrote Smallbone Deceased in 1950, which has recently been republished by the British library classics and which I really enjoyed but don’t think I reviewed. That is much more your murder mystery than spy story.

 

The Fashion in Shrouds – Margery Allingham

Campion has a sister called Valentine. Who knew? 

Normally I either really like or really don't like an Allingham, but I'm on the fence about this one.

The relationships are a smidge odd. Lukewarm. There's the least romantic proposal ever (although at least the chap is upfront that he will expect his wife to drop her career when they're married. I'd be interested to know how many men who married in the 30s just assumed this and didn't mention the fact until it was a done deal.)   

Whereas Angela first blindsides Campion by pretending they are engaged (there are reasons) and at the end rejecting ‘cake-love’ - her name for precisely the kind of 'love is blind' mentality of the other couple. Campion is cheered by the fact. 

Lastly the relationship between Campion and his sister is.. analytical. They don't so much relate as theorise about each other, at each other.  What went on in their family I can't imagine, but apparently they only really talk to one another now. It might be better for them both if they stopped doing that as well. 

The mystery felt as messy as the relationships. Skeletons and aeroplanes and blackmail and long lost relations. Too much going on, I never quite believed in the motive. Readable, but already fading.


Murder in Vienna - E C R Lorac

McDonald is on holiday. Of course this is like Poirot going on holiday, a body is bound to turn up. 

If I'm honest I enjoyed this much more for the setting and the friends Macdonald was joining and and the logistics of taking a plane to Austria in the 50s than I did the actual crime. There was some clever stuff around a head injury, and double crossing, and a photographer who keeps popping up and skirts a nice line between garrulous nuisance and entertaining character. 

Of the four I've reviewed this is the one I will probably read again. 



Monday 1 January 2024

Happy New Year

It's been a mixed sort of year. A permanent job (I've been temping forever) with a better pension and more money. Some great holidays both with other people and by myself, but I also lost a cousin this year who was still in his 50s, and his stepdad had a heart attack shortly afterwards and is waiting on an operation in mid-January. We also had a health scare for one of my aunts but that was stabilised, thankfully, with medication.

I've done quite a lot of decluttering - I counted items in and out (not food or toiletries but things that must be kept and cleaned and given permanent house room) and more than twice as many things went out as in, which is good. It also encouraged me to read the books already on my shelves and let some go once read or if I knew I wouldn't get round to them. 

As usual though, here is the list of books I did read:


The Stoat - Lynn Brock
To the Holy Shrines - Sir Richard Burton
Agatha Christie - Lucy Wolsey
Sound - A Story of Hearing Lost and Found - Bella Bathurst
A Surfeit of Suspects - George Bellairs
The Kiss - Anton Chekov
Techniques of Persuasion - J A C Brown
Appointment with Death - Agatha Christie
Everything is Washable (almost) - Sali Hughes
Lonelyheart 4122 - Colin Watson
Charity Ends at Home - Colin Watson
Still More Commonplace - Mary Stocks
The Flaxborough Crab - Colin Watson
Broomsticks over Flaxborough - Colin Watson
Littlejohn on Leave - George Bellairs
How to Run Your Home Without Help - Kay Smallshaw
Deadly Company - Ann Granger
Snobbery with Violence - Colin Watson
Tribes - David Lammy
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
The Naked Nuns - Colin Watson
Novelist(a) - Claire Askew
Murder in the Falling Snow - Various
Christmas is Murder - Val Mc Dermid
Orchids on Your Budget - Marjorie Hillis
Death at Dykes Corner - E C R Lorac
Blue Murder - Colin Watson
Plaster Sinners - Colin Watson
Whatever’s Going on in Mumblesby - Colin Watson
Music - W H Hadow
Reality is not what it appears - Carlo Rovelli
A Deadly Affair - Agatha Christie
Mr Bazalgette's Agent - Leonard Merrick
Camera Lucida - Barthes
The Detective's Daughter - Lesley Thomson
Poirot - Anne Hart
Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie
The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke - R Austin Freeman
A Kind of Vanishing - Lesley Thomson
Size Matters Not - Warwick Davies
The Big Four - Agatha Christie
The Pilgrims - Mary Shelley
Content With What I Have - C Henry Warren
The Empty Space - Peter Brook
Literature, Money and the Market - Paul Delaney
Death of an Author - E C R Lorac
Death of Jezebel - Christianna Brand
Checkmate to Murder - E C R Lorac
Cross River Traffic - Chris Roberts
Goodbye Things - Fumio Sasaki
Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood
The Ice Age - Margaret Drabble
Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie
The Mystery of Three Quarters - Sophie Hannah
The No-Spend Year - Michelle McGagh
The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac
Ghost Girl - Lesley Thomson
The Practice of Writing - David Lodge
Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac
Artists in Crime - Ngaio Marsh
Murder having Once been Done - Ruth Rendell
Photo-Finish - Ngaio Marsh
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Pereira Maintains - Antonio Tabucchi
Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie
Rock Crystal - Adalbert Stifter
Glimpses of Bengal - Rabindranath Tagore
K is for Killer - Sue Grafton
The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac
The Hopkins Manuscript - R C Sherriff
The Assault on Jerusalem - Steven Runciman
Selective Memory - Katherine Whitehorn
A Backward Glance - Edith Wharton
Nightwalking – John Lewis Stempel
You Should Have Left - Daniel Kehlmann
Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett
Dead Famous – Greg Jenner
The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton
Anaximander- Carlo Rovelli
The Unpunished Vice - Edmund White
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L Sayers
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L Sayers
A Sentimental Journey - Sterne
Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood
Gilbert Keith Chesterton - Maisie Ward
The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham
What Katy Did Next - Susan Coolidge
Clover - Susan Coolidge
Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto
Games Without Rules - Michael Gilbert

91 books read in total, as ever a lot of crime - 43 murder mysteries and three crime adjacent books, being biographies of Christie, Chesterton and Hercule Poirot. 56 fiction books overall, and 35 non fiction. 

Six books in translation, which is fairly good for me, especially since I made no real effort to seek books in translation this time. 

This year we also have an even split between men and women, and just one anthology containing both. 

Standout books include Games Without Rules by Michael Gilbert. Gilbert wrote Smallbone Deceased, one of my favourite of the British Library Classics. Games Without Rules is written and set later, and is a low key but very engaging and inventive series of short spy stories - I'm sure I've read the last of these before in anthologies, but it's much more effective as the culmination of a series when you've got fond of the characters.

I also really enjoyed A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. Lorac is consistently entertaining, although some of her books are better than others, and the same might be said for Colin Watson, who I mainlined early on in the year. I also loved Pereira Maintains and You Should Have Left. 

Conversely The Big Four was every bit as terrible as I remembered (I don't normally diss books here, but given how much I love Christie, and her phenomenal success, and the fact she's not alive to be hurt, I'm making an exception), and although Nightwalking had some interesting ideas and is an attractive physical object it felt terribly padded. There's really not much original material in the book.

And that's me. I haven't made any plans for next year except to continue reading from my shelves a bit more and get the ones I likely won't read again out to the bookswap, and to hopefully read a full book in Italian - even if it's just a very short one or a child's one - by this time next year.

So here's to 2024. 



Wednesday 18 October 2023

Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett. For the 1962 club.

I'd never heard of Stephen Prickett before I got this book, but a bit of googling has turned up some information and he seems to have been well thought of in his chosen career in academia, writing many respected works about English literature and religion and romanticism. 

This book however is his one, youthful, punt at fiction and in theory a murder mystery. Spike, the courier of a couple of narrow boats used for holidays on the Shropshire canal, has found a dead body in the dining room. We're told this in retrospect, because the first chapter is Spike's tangled, internal, stream of consciousness as he steers the boats through the locks, deals with someone dropping keys in the river, and wonders when the body will be found. 

The problem is that this style of writing was intended by the modernists to get closer to the way people actually think and make writing less artificial, not more. It doesn't function here for a number of reasons, but mostly because our writer doesn't have the experience or ability to pull it off, and certainly not against genre and while trying to stuff as many literary quotes and allusions into his characters speech as is (un)feasibly possible. 

I feel mean, because he can't have been much past 21 when he wrote the thing, and it's not a terrible first novel - but it is a first novel that should either have had a good trim and suggested rewrite by a competent editor, or been seen as a trial run for a better, tighter book, and slipped quietly in a drawer without publication. 

Also, despite all the lunacy and meandering and the points where it is patently impossible that any group of people would behave as this group of people are behaving (I think Prickett might have been a fan of Edmund Crispin, but without Crispin's talent for maintaining that thin thread of plausibility or the knack of making us care about the characters), the final solution does kind of make sense, the person whose point of view we see the most of does have flashes of something like three-dimensionality, and the shifts between point of view don't jar as much as they could. 

Thanks as ever to Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings for running these clubs every six months. Do check out their blogs for posts linking to other reviews. 








Tuesday 26 September 2023

The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac.

I should start by saying that I don't know how available this book actually is. I apologise in advance to anyone who reads this review, fancies judging for themselves (or even just seeing MacDonald's first sally)  and then finds it impossible. It's not one of the books republished by the British Library, and doesn't seem to be available at any of the usual second-hand sources. In fact there is at least one retailer online urgently seeking it. If it does turn up I suspect it will be as gold-dust and priced accordingly.

It is available at the British Library to readers, which is how I got my grubby paws on it, but I realise that's not helpful to most people. 

That said, on with the review:

The Murder on the Burrows was Lorac's first book and as debuts go it's pretty good - it starts with two mismatched holidaymakers who've decided to go for a walk, get caught by the rain, explore a car that's parked up and find a body. Some of the phrases used by the smaller of the two (described as the 'little cockney') seem to belong to wildly different social classes, but that's a minor quibble, and as always Lorac hooks you in quickly. You want to read on. 

The story itself is middling. The main thing that struck me about our sleuth, compared to the later books I've read, is that MacDonald seems posher in this one - more of the gentleman 'tec and less of the police officer, chatting up society ladies but bored by it, complete with a manservant to look after him and an Oxbridge background (the war intervened before he completed his studies, alas!). 

Other characters are, as usual, interesting and varied - the famous pianist and her long suffering neighbours, the dead man himself, a communist who has spent time in Russia and taken a Russian name but was born plain old John or Bob or Fred something, the young lady who was sent down or removed from Oxford because of her relationship with him, and then married a much older man because she was unhappy at home - MacDonald's natural sympathy for people and their circumstances is already firmly established in this book. 

That said there were bits around AA scouts and roads that made me glaze over. Possibly it's me - I'm the same when Wimsey starts playing cricket or if there's anything in a book around railway timetables. There was a mild snob element and of course the gender politics have changed, but nothing odd for the time. If anything more liberal than you'd expect. So I'm slightly surprised it hasn't been republished - it may not be the best, but it's perfectly good, and I think there would be a market.