{reviews} bleak books: barnard, west, block

Whoa, so... 
                 far... 
                         behind... 
                                       with reviewing. 

I'll start with three books offering a bleak - but more or less amusing - look at the seedier side of the lives of academics, journalists, and, er, hit men.

Robert Barnard Death of an Old Goat (1974)

Professor Wickham was giving a tutorial. Or rather, he was being given one. Every year he put Hardy as late in the term as possible, hoping that by then his first-year students would have become reasonably chatty. This was because he never could be quite sure which Hardy novel it was he had read. Whichever it was, it had left on his mind a vague impression of doom and landscape, but nothing much else remained.

This is a very funny book about academia and country Australia. Barnard (who died this year) has a brilliant eye for the difficult life facing the second-rate Oxbridge academic exiled to an uncomfortable and ugly rural university ("Even the Queen had managed to avoid it on most of her visits to Australia, and there were few places in Australia of which that could be claimed.") of the type which sprang up in Australia from the 1950s onwards. 

The 'old goat' is Professor Belville-Smith, an elderly Oxford don on a lecture tour of the provinces. He is a typically dry academic figure, full of snobbish distaste - and "senile malice" - for the colleagues he encounters ("tut-tut[ting] mentally at their vowel-sounds and their shirts"); and no one is particularly looking forward to listening to him either, given he "had been delivering that lecture since 1922" (!). But it would seem that the Old Goat knows something about one of the academics he encounters, and what he knows will lead to his brutal death... 

The crime was fairly easy to figure out, but this book was elevated above the ordinary for me by Barnard's absolutely wicked sense of humour about the snobbishness of Australian academia ("This is what one gets for employing Adult Education lecturers who got their degrees at Leeds, thought Wickham grimly.") and the rural 'squattocracy' who provided the social background to all the university's activities ("'Just like the Wickhams to let the drink run out,' said Mrs McKay, a little tipsily, to Mrs Lullham. 'They’re only academics, after all, however much they try to hide it.'"). 

The actual crime, and the inexperienced macho racist cop assigned to solve it, were far less interesting than the setting and eccentric characters who-[might have]-dunnit. (I discovered this book thanks to clothes in books.)

Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

"Perhaps I can make you understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator."

Ouch. What a book. Like being mentally excoriated with a wire brush. Like the best sort of totally black satire. No glimmer of relief, no hint of light, and certainly no hint of escape in here. But also funny - well, sort of funny. Uncomfortable, ghastly funny... 

What hope is there for the writer of the lonely hearts column ("the priests of twentieth-century America") in Depression America? Alcoholic, depressed, unloved and unlovable ("his heart remained a congealed lump of icy fat"), prone to fighting, poor at grasping cues, misunderstood, self-defeating ("he stumbled purposely, so that she would take his confusion for honest feeling"), numb from suffering ("more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife"), doomed... 

There's a lot going on here about the body too that I think I haven't properly grasped (when I wikipedia-ed it, apparently it is "Bergsonian" - I am in no way enlightened. Also existential. And Expressionist. Hmmm.). How can something so horribly bleak also be funny? 

A classic: I'm glad I've finally read, but oh how miserable I felt after I finished.

Lawrence Block Hit Man (1998)

He took the exit for the mall and found a parking place, taking careful note of where it was so he could find it again. Once, a couple of years ago, he had parked a rental car at a mall in suburban Detroit without paying attention to where he’d parked it or what it looked like. For all he knew it was still there.

A likeable hit man? A dog-loving stamp-collecting likeable hit man in need of a good psychiatrist? The 'voice' of Block's professional killer is just wonderful - sort of pensive, thoughtful, idealistic, melancholy, desperate to feel needed - a 'good' man despite his terrible day job. This book is a series of short stories ostensibly about John Keller's assignments, but really about what has made him the man he is today. If you like slowish little polished gems (someone sweetening a coffee "stirred it long enough to dissolve marble chips") about moral ambiguity, then these are for you.

He did that sometimes. Looked up his name in the phone books of strange cities, as if he might actually find himself there. Not another person with the same name, that happened often enough, his was not an uncommon name. But find himself, his actual self, living an altogether different life in some other city.

Lawrence Block died this year too (I see a theme here). This is the first of his books I've read, but I'm very keen to read more now. (I found this book thanks to belle, book and candle.)

*

Note [27/11/2013]: Brona remind me that I should link my Barnard post to her wonderful AusReading Month. Please do visit her blog for links to many, many interesting posts on Australian books and writers.

{review} the gabriel hounds

Mary Stewart The Gabriel Hounds (1967)

This is a post for Mary Stewart Week, the brainchild of Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights.

I went back to the bookshelf. It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even The Golden Bough and curl up with it for a glorious evening’s read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into The Tiger in the Smoke, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.

     

Let me confess: the first image matches the lovely vintage edition 1967 Hodder & Stoughton edition I bought for this week. Then I opened it to discover the print was agonisingly small. So I bought the kindle edition with the ridiculously anachronistic cover. The book is set in the late 1960s, for heaven's sake! That camel will eat your hat and nosegay.

Apart from being a teensy bit incestuous for my tastes, The Gabriel Hounds is very much a classic Mary Stewart romantic suspense book:

Wonderful setting? – tick!

Adventure? – tick!

Proper old-school bad guys? - tick!

Some sort of morally abhorrent crime? – tick!

Heroine with lovely expensive mostly linen clothing which undergoes almost complete destruction without ever affecting the integrity of her innate daintiness? - tick?

Romance – tick!

The years rolled back more swiftly even than the crimson silk as he said, with exactly the same intonation with which a small boy had daily greeted his even smaller worshipper: ‘Oh, hullo! It’s you!’ I wasn’t a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn’t worship any more. For some reason it seemed important to make this clear.

Let's get this out of the way first. Cousins! Any cousins here? How about you get out more and meet other people? Dilute that gene pool! Go on... You're both young, rich, gorgeous and set loose in an exotic location in the Middle East - go fall for someone to whom you're not related. Especially if you're also the off-spring of parents who were twins (not with each other, but you get the picture). Ick and yuck and aren’t there laws about that?

Anyway...

Christy (Christabel) Mansel is a "stinking rich" girl of independent mind on a tour of the Middle East when she runs into her cousin Charles, whom she has not seen for several years. As a child she had worshipped him. The two make a plan to meet up in Beirut after her tour and visit their wildly eccentric and rarely seen great-aunt Harriet, who has adopted the manner and the lifestyle of the early nineteenth century lady traveller Lady Hester Stanhope. Great-Aunt Harriet is holed up in a ruinous palace outside Beirut and is living the life of an orientalised nabob. Charles was a favourite of the dog-loving old lady, who wishes him to have her pair of Ming dynasty china dogs – the eponymous Gabriel Hounds.

There is a bit of a travel mix-up and Christy - always strong-minded – decides to visit her aged relative alone. The palace is falling to pieces and a personable but vague young man is living there with the great-aunt. When Christy eventually gains admittance, she is wholly horrified by exactly how crazy her great-aunt appears:

Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must have shaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.

But beyond this theatrical horror show, Christy fears that something is badly wrong in the palace. What is going on in the old dungeons (I do love a dungeon in a book!)? What was in those really very aromatic cigarettes? Where are the missing Gabriel Hounds? And, as the nearby river rises and she is cut off from civilization, is it too late for rescue? Well, of course not - this is a Mary Stewart book, after all – but how will Christy extract herself from danger? And what has happened to handsome Cousin Charles?

This is an enjoyable read with typical Stewart touches of darkness and mild horror. Her language is a joy: "Eastern-looking sheep" are "spatchcocked with black"; the iron bedstead "came across the cracked marble with a dot-and-carry-one screech of broken castors"; when drugged, one's thoughts "dislimned". I have quoted a passage on the intriguing contents of a bookcase in the palace, and there are plenty of small touches that increase the suspense. Among these I would particularly note: the atmosphere of being trapped in a proper old-school harem seraglio with all its white-slaving implications for nice young English ladies; the heroine's name, Christabel, with its Gothicky poetic overtones (I didn't figure this out for myself – Stewart likes to quote from Coleridge's spooky poem); and, of course, the mysterious Gabriel Hounds themselves – named after the pack of Hounds of Hell "that run with death, and when someone's going to die you hear them howling over the house at night."

An additional sense of melancholy suffused this reader too, thinking about Christy's mostly idyllic Syria and Lebanon and the terrible devastation those countries have suffered since.

I have previously been facetious about elements of the sameness in Mary Stewart's romantic suspense books. Nevertheless, I am a 100% believer that well-constructed beautifully written sameness can be one of the most comforting things about reading a beloved author.

If you liked this... I have now moved on to another Mary Stewart – Thornyhold – which I am enjoying, although it offers quite a change of pace to The Gabriel Hounds, and may be a tad witchy for my tastes. I think that my favourite Stewart (so far!) is The Ivy Tree (definitely one for fans of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar), with My Brother Michael battling it out for the next spot with the exciting Avignon-set (but unpleasantly domestically-violent) Madam Will You Talk. I have also commented briefly on Airs above the Ground, Wildfire at Midnight, and Touch Not the Cat (cousins again!). Curiously I have not reviewed any of my favourites. 

I hope everyone is enjoying Mary Stewart Reading Week, 

and thanks again to Anbolyn for hosting!

 

{review} variations on the great game

A mound of unreviewed books teeters precariously on the edge of my desk, their teeter aided by one of my little helpers who also likes to sit in judgment on my desk.

George

Here are three vaguely themed on the Great Game - espionage. 

Mary Stewart Airs Above the Ground (1965)

(This is the cover of the copy from my university library, 

donated by a former Professor of English).

Yes, I have been guilty of suggesting that all Mary Stewart books are alike. But, don't get me wrong, the reliable alikeness of their travel-mystery-romance is the drawcard. Airs Above the Ground did not start prepossessingly: I don't particularly like books about horses (except the Jill books by Ruby Ferguson: but that was way back in my 'pretend my bicycle is a horse' pre-teens, so that doesn't count...); I'm not particularly keen on blushing youths in adult books; there were also a fair few jibes aimed at plumper women. Stewart heroines do not carry a spare ounce, of course. My private theory is that declining cream cakes explains why they often feel weak enough to express thoughts of the sort of "it helps occasionally to be made to feel that it is little short of marvellous for anything so rare, so precious, and so fragile to compete with the tough world of men." [Short pause while I barf into my rubbish bin]. Interestingly, this heroine - Vanessa - is a veterinary surgeon, although she dumped a career for marriage. Anyway - anyway - the plot soon starts barrelling along with mistaken identities, circus performers, dancing horses (Xenophon gets a look-in!), jewels, castles, the Cold War, and a lot of treacherous Austrian mountain scenery. There's even some sex. 

*

Kim Newman Anno Dracula (1992 [2011])

 

Anno Dracula is a Victorian 'Great Game'/fantasy/alternative history/thriller novel with a vampire twist. It's 1888 and Queen Victoria is married to Count Dracula. Vampires live openly in the community, and to get ahead in the new administration it is almost obligatory to undergo the transformation (as Inspector Lestrade has done). Those who disagree with the new movement have been sent to prison camps. Among their number is Sherlock Holmes, which provides a neat excuse for his absence from the scene during that most horrendous of crime sprees, the Jack the Ripper killings. This book cleverly blends history, alternative history and fiction. It is also very funny if you like Victorian in-jokes and references. Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau are conducting experiments together (though Dr Jekyll is acting rather oddly); Professor Moriarty (obviously) heads up a huge criminal organisation with the aid of Raffles; Dr Seward, still pining for Lucy, runs a hospital/refuge for the East End poor with the assistance of our nearly 500 year old heroine Geneviève Dieudonné; Basil Hallward is sketching the vampire Prime Minister; everyone dreads the possibility that Tennyson might remain Poet Laureate for "dreary centuries. Egads, imagine Locksley Hall Six Hundred Years After"! Ruddigore was written to entertain vampires. Rupert of Hentzau, Joseph Merrick, Madame Corelli… This is a book with an excellent sense of history and of humour. In sum: hero-spy Charles Beauregard (of the Diogenes Club) and vampire-heroine Geneviève set out to sort out the Jack the Ripper crimes, but their investigation will bring them up against the greatest of ancient evils, Count Dracula himself. It's the first of a series in which its long-lived protagonists work on cases throughout the 20th century. Fun, but really perhaps a bit long. Annoying pedantic note: I suspect that, along the lines of anno domini, Anno requires the genitive of Dracula (which I'm guessing is Draculae); but I can see that's not so perky. 

*

P. D. Martin Body Count (2007)

P. D. Martin Hell's Fury (2012)

  

Body Count is procedural rather than espionage, but I'll squeeze it in. The heroine is an Australian behavioural analyst and cop in the serial killer unit at Quantico. I overestimated my ability to deal with women being kidnapped, raped, murdered and dumped, so this serial-killer book with an E.S.P. twist (the first of a series) didn't work for me. Personal judgement only here, obviously - it's an interesting concept. I have also read P. D. Martin's Hell's Fury, which I liked a lot more. The heroine of Hell's Fury is a real toughie who has survived a horrific experience while spying for the CIA. I thought the plotting of this book was well done, notably the slow revelation of the heroine's ordeal set against her struggle to rehabilitate herself. She is strong, clever and determined never to be a victim again, and her world is one where justice matters. This was a solid spy-action-mystery story. I found some of the dialogue a little stilted in places, but I'm keen to read the next one in the series (don't think it's out yet). P. D. Martin is an Australian author. 

If you liked these: well, my favourite espionage story set in a circus in the Cold War is Alistair McLean's Circus; the most memorable vampire book I've read recently is Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire {REVIEW}; and for decent CIA stuff it has to be anything by Charles McCarry. Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise has recently caused me to remember my resolution to re-read Helen MacInnes too.

{not really a review} how nell scored

Bessie Marchant How Nell Scored (n.d. [early 1950s]) 

Less a review and more of a 'I bet you couldn't get away with naming a children's book this nowadays'.

I bought How Nell Scored in Carnforth in the U.K., after touring the railway station where the classic weepy Brief Encounter was partly filmed. If I wasn't totally banned from buying anything that wouldn't fit into my one small suitcase, I would have come away with a lot more from this very nice bookshop. But how could I resist How Nell Scored? It truly deserves a place on anyone's list of Worst Book Titles. 

How Nell Scored is a pretty awful book for young people. Or maybe a book for young people that is pretty awful? The writing style leaves much to be desired and the plot is flimsy. The setting is interesting in a ye olde colonies sense - New Zealand. 

Nell lives on a farm (I note that she is not going to be educated at a decent school like her brother). She manages to rescue a couple of dubious types from a shipwreck. One of them is less dodgy and has a fortune in pearls concealed in his undies (I am being less delicate about this than the book). Nell is entrusted with the pearls (which she also stores in her undies, perhaps more aptly) since - COINCIDENCE! - their owner was actually on his way to find her oldest brother who had foolishly lent him money. Without the money being repaid, Nell's brother will lose his reputation. Etc. 

Nell, whose sense of geographic direction is even worse than mine, sets off on a do-or-die mission to get the pearls to the bank before the other dubious character catches her. She lies in a lot of hay and spends a lot of time up trees. Bulls wish to gore her. She walks in circles and, unsurprisingly, is often hungry. Everywhere she goes, people have accidents. In a better writer, she'd be Carrie. Eventually everything turns out OK. This is how Nell scored. 

Rating: Tosh. Love the title though.

There's an interesting assessment of Bessie Marchant's works here. She was crazily prolific.

{review} wildfire at midnight

Argh! My internet has been playing up at home. I've set up some posts to go out automatically, but my commenting will likely be sporadic. Frustrating...

Mary Stewart Wildfire at Midnight (1956)

So we faced each other, the murderer and I, marooned together… alone together, above the silent world, on the mountain where already he had sent three people to their deaths.

He was smiling still… He liked me, and he was going to kill me. He was sorry, but he was going to kill me.

Another satisfying Mary Stewart book, with plenty of red herrings, a spot of old and new romance, lovely scenery (Skye), some nasty murders, and a smart, beautifully dressed heroine (Titian hair, exotic name) who isn't afraid to do that INCREDIBLY ANNOYING THING WHERE YOU WANDER OFF BY YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH THERE'S A MANIAC ON THE LOOSE. 

Oh, sorry, spoiler...

Rating: Sometimes well-done predictability is what one wants in a book.

If you liked this... I liked this one much more than Nine Coaches Waiting and Touch Not the Cat and nearly as much as The Moonspinners or My Brother Michael. I've reviewed some of them here. Then again, I'm currently reading The Ivy Tree and wondering if that is going to be my absolute favourite.

{weekend words}

The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetizing, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee. The waiter removed the little silver filtres, and vanished, leaving us alone in our alcove. The liqueur brandy was swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses, and for a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam, then I leaned back against the cushions and looked about me with the eyes of a patient who has just woken from the first long natural sleep after an anaesthetic. Where before the colours had been blurred and heightened, and the outlines undefined, proportions unstable, and sounds hollow and wavering, now the focus had shifted sharply, and drawn the bright little restaurant into sharp dramatic outline.

Mary Stewart (1954)  

Madam, Will You Talk?

{review} a kiss before dying

Ira Levin A Kiss Before Dying (1953)

 

He had discovered that she liked to be called 'baby'. When he called her 'baby' and held her in his arms he could get her to do practically anything. He had thought about it, and decided it had something to do with the coldness she felt towards her father.

I have raved over and over again about how brilliant are Ira Levin's books {REVIEW; REVIEW; REVIEW}. A Kiss Before Dying was his first book and I am in awe of how good it is. It is almost impossible to describe without giving away what happens, but in the simplest terms it is structured in three parts. In the first we see events from the perspective of the killer, whose carefully wrought plan to marry the rich daughter of a morally upright copper industrialist goes awry when she reveals she is pregnant and his only escape seems to be murder. In the second part, the girl's sister decides to investigate her sister's apparent suicide. I think we know that this can never be a good idea... And I am not going to say anything about the third part as it would give everything away.

The characterisation is superb. Here's the killer:

Viewing himself again as he refastened his jacket, he wished he could as easily exchange his face, temporarily, for one of less distinctive design. There were times, he realized, when being so handsome was a definite handicap. As a step, at least, in the direction of appearing commonplace, he reluctantly donned his one hat, a dove grey fedora, settling the unfamiliar weight cautiously, so as not to disturb his hair.

And one of the sisters:

She rented a two-room apartment on the top floor of a converted brownstone house in the East Fifties. She furnished it with a great deal of care. Because the two rooms were smaller than those she had occupied in her father’s home, she could not take all her possessions with her. Those that she did take, therefore, were the fruit of a thoughtful selection. She told herself she was choosing the things she liked best, the things that meant the most to her, which was true; but as she hung each picture and placed each book upon the shelf, she saw it not only through her own eyes but also through the eyes of a visitor who would some day come to her apartment, a visitor as yet unidentified except as to his sex. Every article was invested with significance, an index to her self; the furniture and the lamps and the ashtrays (modern but not modernistic), the reproduction of her favourite painting (Charles Demuth’s My Egypt; not quite realistic; its planes accentuated and enriched by the eye of the artist), the records (some of the jazz and some of the Stravinsky and Bartók, but mostly the melodic listen-in-the-dark themes of Grieg and Brahms and Rachmaninoff), and the books – especially – the books, for what better index of the personality is there? (The novels and plays, the non-fiction and verse, all chosen in proportion and representation of her tastes.) It was like the concentrated abbreviation of a Help Wanted ad.

As in Levin's other books, he proves himself to be the master of the surprise twist and I am still slightly stunned from the one two-thirds through this book. 

Rating: 4/5.

If you liked this... The Stepford Wives {REVIEW}, The Boys from Brazil {REVIEW}, Rosemary's Baby {REVIEW}. See also Teresa's review of the audio-book at Shelf Love.

    

{review} worth dying for

Lee Child Worth Dying For (2010)

Reacher waited for quiet and pumped the gun, a solid crunch-crunch, probably the most intimidating sound in the world. 

Oooh, the ?15th Jack Reacher novel. I wasn't so keen on the last two, but this one is a return to form (at least, I mean, the sort of form I like) with the seemingly immortal Jack Reacher emerging nigh-unscathed from all sorts of completely improbably trouble -- despatching the bad guys, saving the townsfolk (especially the women), fixing his own broken nose with a whack against a wall, and then strolling off into the wide, wide spaces of America.

This one hit the spot like a Reacher punch to the chest:

[He] lay completely still. Not breathing. No visible pulse. No signs of life. The standard first-aid remedies taught by the army medics were artificial respiration and external chest compressions, eighty beats a minute, as long as it took, but Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter. 

This particular Reacher book was also funny; almost tongue-in-cheek. I've missed humour in the last few books. It's a nice feeling when a series you've sort of given up on, comes back with a bang.

Rating: 3/5.

If you liked this... you should really start at the beginning. The first couple are awesome.  I've reviewed 61 Hours here.

    

{review} fowler & bryant & may and edwards & scarlett

Christopher Fowler Full Dark House (2004)

Martin Edwards The Coffin Trail (2004)

I recently mentioned second and third novels in a series, but there can be no greater delight than discovering that all important first novel which hooks you into continuing the journey onwards. I've recently read two 'firsts', both published in 2004, which I am sure are going to lead me to seconds, thirds... elevenths...

Full Dark House is No 1 in the 'Bryant and May' series by Christopher Fowler. Bryant and May have been partners in Scotland Yard's Peculiar Crimes Unit since the 1940s. Now in their 80s they are still operational, called in to investigate crimes that other, 'normal' police units cannot handle.

'How many other files have you got tucked away?'
'You'd be surprised. That business with the tontine and the Bengal tiger, all documented. The runic curses that brought London to a standstill. The corpse covered in butterflies. I've got all our best cases, and a register of every useful fringe group in the capital.'
'You should upgrade your database. You've still got members of the Camden Town Coven listed as reliable contacts. And do I need to mention the Leicester Square Vampire?'
'Anyone can make a mistake,' said Bryant.

I took a while to warm to this one as I was suspicious that it might suddenly submerge me in the supernatural. Also it jumped about a bit between past and present. It didn't like interruptions or lack of concentration and I kept tangling myself up by forgetting who belonged where. Perhaps I was meant to? I thought some of the witticisms somewhat forced (and the 'Bryant & May'/matches thing sort of irked). But, really, I was a goner from the first paragraph's ginger tom cat:

It really was a hell of a blast. The explosion occurred at daybreak on the second Tuesday morning of September, its shock waves rippling through the beer-stained streets of Mornington Crescent. It detonated car alarms, hurled house bricks across the street, blew a chimney stack forty feet into the sky, ruptured the eardrums of several tramps, denuded over two dozen pigeons, catapulted a surprised ginger tom through the window of a kebab shop and fired several roofing tiles into the forehead of the Pope, who was featuring on a poster for condoms opposite the tube station.

In this, Bryant & May's first outing, we travel from a modern day explosion back to their first case, in the early years of the Second World War, when death rained from the heavens courtesy of the Luftwaffe. Death is also stalking the artistic troupe trying to stage a risque version of 'Orpheus in the Underworld', with suspiciously mythological deaths cutting appropriate victims down before the coppers' eyes. Who, or what, is stalking the Palace Theatre?

Bryant is the termagant of the pair - bad-tempered, useless with the ladies; prone to major attacks of over-thinking and very, very receptive to the kookiest explanations. He combines intuitiveness with extreme clumsiness: "He had misplaced his regular pipe. May would spend the next sixty years locating lost objects for his partner." May is the better-looking ladies' man, active, interested in the modern world and resistant to his partner's liking for introducing fortune-tellers to their cases. I thought that this book packed in a hell of an amount, along with many, many teasers for what is to come. The scenes from WW2 were marvellously done as was the marking of contrasts with modern London.

Rating: liked a lot, didn't love, but want to read more, 7/10.

My second first (oh dear, this could get confusing) is No 1 in the 'Hannah Scarlett' (The Lake District Mysteries) series by Martin Edwards, The Coffin Trail.

Source

This is old school crime. A lovely Lake District setting, plenty of juicy characters with mysteries in their pasts, a likeable cop and an interesting amateur from an academic background. For about half the book anyone could have done it, then the pool of suspects begins to narrow... I want to find out what happens to Hannah Scarlett and her team and I want to read another cosy and thoroughly English mystery like The Coffin Trail. BTW, these books are criminally cheap for the Kindle. I think this one was a lousy AUD$7 for some well-written, neatly plotted, high quality entertainment. Incredible.

Rating: just what I felt like, 8/10. 

If you liked this... Martin Edwards maintains a very interesting blog featuring lots of 'lost' crime books.

{review} india black & the widow of windsor

Carol K. Carr India Black and the Widow of Windsor (2011)

Ah the miracle that is a pre-ordered book, about which one has entirely forgotten, popping onto the Kindle on its day of release. I really enjoyed the first India Black mystery {REVIEW} and the second proved to be a pretty good follow up.

India - the brothel madam with a secret past - and the mysterious French are dispatched by Disraeli to Balmoral where Queen Victoria has been persuaded to spend Christmas. She was persuaded by a spirit message from the dead Albert, which is the first hint that Carr's Queen Victoria is going to be characterised by most of her least attractive traits - "In any other family, Her Majesty’s eccentricities would have meant a locked room in the attic and a lifetime of meals on trays" - such as gluttony and her ill-considered relationship with Mr Brown. 

But the Queen has other problems than mere eccentricity: Scottish nationalists are plotting to assassinate her in Scotland, and India and French must go undercover to discover the assassins. In India's case, she must pretend to be a lady's maid to a wildly eccentric Marchioness with a snuff habit and - more worryingly - a habit of sniffing out India's secrets. This "snuff-dipping, narcoleptic bibliophile" makes for some of the funniest moments in the book.

India Black & the Widow of Windsor is a satisfying 'cosy' mystery with an acceptably historical enough set of trappings (I frowned at the housekeeper being a 'Miss': aren't Victorian housekeepers granted an honorary 'Mrs'? Or have I got that wrong?). The sexual tension between India and French continues to grow, albeit slowly, and the little hints at India's past tantalise the reader. Some of the minor characters are also very amusing, notably 'Bertie', Queen Vicky's naughty heir. 

Rating: 7/10. An easy frolic. There were a couple of odd typos: wretch (for 'retch'); broach (for 'brooch'). Eek.

If you liked this... the Lady Julia Grey mysteries by Deanna Raybourn are an obvious parallel.