I’ve written about Nicola Upson’s series about Josephine Tey, and this week it’s the turn of Tey’s actual mystery series to feature on the blog, because I’ve finally read all of them after picking up the last one at Book Con the other week. Yes I know. Book Con is doing me quite well on the reading front.
Our detective is Alan Grant, a police inspector at Scotland Yard although his cases take him all over England and Scotland. I’ve read these severely out of order and over a period of about 20 years because I’m fairly sure I read Daughter of Time when I was studying my History A Level and doing Henry VII, because when I read it the other week it seemed very familiar. They’re also very varied in the sort of stories they tell – which aren’t always murders, or at least not recent murders. The aforementioned Daughter of Time is an examination of whether Richard III was really guilty of the murder of the princes in the tower and also of how history is put together and how historical myths come into being. It’s regularly voted as one of the best detective stories of all time. Alan Grant is only slightly in The Franchise Affair, but that is a kidnapping and abduction type plot – which is cleverly put together although it displays some somewhat dated social attitudes.
As you know, I love a good Golden Age mystery and these can be pretty good. Josephine Tey is actually one of a number of pen names used by Elizabeth McKintosh – in fact the first in this series was originally published under the name of Gordon Daviot, under which name she was a successful playwright. My favourite of Tey’s books are the ones where she’s using her knowledge of the theatre scene that she was a part of (and which Upson also uses in her books). A Shilling For Candles, about the murder of a film star was turned into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock – albeit with a fair few changes, including the removal of Grant himself!
These are fairly easy to get hold of – Arrow did paperback editions a few years back, and second hand copies of various ages are fairly easy to come buy too. And they’re all on Kindle too, some times in multiple editions at different price points because that’s the sort of age they are. So good luck with that and hard copies may be your most reliable source!
I spotted this on Friday night and honestly I nearly screamed outloud with excitement:
I’ve been saying for ages that I would like another book in the Susan Ryland series and now my prayers have been answered. I’ve wondered as well how easy it would be to come up with another plot for this given that the author of the Atticus Pund series is dead, and in the second book Susan seemed to have unravelled as many secrets as had been hidden there, so I’m thrilled Horowitz has come up with something – and the blurb is intruiguing:
Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder.
She’s edited two novels about the famous detective, Atticus Pünd, and both times she’s come close to being killed. Now she’s back in England and she’s been persuaded to work on a third.
The new ‘continuation’ novel is by Eliot Crace, grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death exactly twenty years ago.
Eliot believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. And when he tells Susan that he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his book, Susan knows she’s in trouble once again.
As Susan works on Pünd’s Last Case, a story set in an exotic villa in the South of France, she finds more and more parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world – until suddenly she finds that she has become a target.
Someone in Eliot’s family doesn’t want the book to be written. And they will do anything to prevent it.
This is coming out at the end of March and I’ve no idea how recent this announcement actually is – I’ve checked the usual places and there was nothing, but I think it must be pretty recent because it’s the first time Amazon has suggested it to me and that algorithm knows I like Horowitz so suggests them to me on the regular, and of course it hasn’t got a cover yet. Anyway, I’m really excited about it – and in addition to that, the TV adaptation of The Moonflower Murders is hitting the screens in the US this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be here in the UK soon too.
After my Parisian odyssey last month, I started thinking about books I’ve read that are set in the French capital, and here I am with a post as a result!
And we’re going to start with a classic, by which I mean The Three Musketeers. I wrote about the latest movie adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’s book earlier this year and I’ve read the first two of the three books featuring d’Artagnan and friends, and I have The Man in the Iron Mask on the shelf too. If you like swashbuckling, these are great – and although they are long there is plenty of plot and loads of action. And they’re cleverly fitted into actual French history so if you’ve studied any of that they’re fun on that front too. I also think it’s really hard to exist in the world without having seen some sort of musketeers adaptation so it’s got that familiarity going for it too. Also constantly referenced in pop culture is The Scarlet Pimpernel – and the actual book by Baroness Orczy is actually pretty good too. Set during the French Revolution is the story of daring rescues made by a man leading a double life. Sort of like Superman or Batman, except he’s rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine and he can’t fly. But he is a great swordsman so maybe that’s nearly a superpower?
The Scarlet Pimpernel leads me nicely on to the Secret History of the Pink Carnation, where a modern day history student who sets out to write her dissertation about the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian discovers another spy that the history books have missed – the Pink Carnation. I’ve written a whole series post about Lauren Willig’s dual timeline novels – so you should probably go and read that too!
It wouldn’t be in keeping with my love of mid twentieth century mystery novels if I didn’t mention Maigret. He’s a police detective in the homicide squad in Paris and they’re meant to be the second best selling detective series of all time – behind only Sherlock Holmes. I can’t claim to have read them all – because there are 70 plus novels in the series, but I have read a fair few in a mix of English and French. Penguin have reissued all of them in the last decade or so, which means they’re pretty easy to get hold of if you want them.
As well as detective novels, I also love a mid-twentieth century novel about women, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado is the story of a young American woman in Paris in the late 1950s. Sally Jay Gorce is a 21-year-old college graduate who is living in Paris and trying to break into the film industry. And it goes about as well as you might expect. I’ve got a lovely Virago designer hardback edition but there are plenty of other less inexpensive ones if you want to read it.
And finally, Ernest Hemmingway spent a lot of time in Paris in the 1920s with the literary set there, and as well as his own books set there, there’s also The Paris Wife by Paula McLain about Hadley Richardson, who became Hemmingway’s first wife and was at the centre of all of that. It was a BotW here back in 2015 and it’s definitely worth a read.
Another week, another BotW pick that is a little bit niche. But on the bright side, it’s another of my acquisitions from Book Con, so at least I’m bringing the tbr-pile down a little. And hoo boy, the plot to this one is crazy.
This is the second in the Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess series, and it should be noted I haven’t read the first. Vicki is newly graduated from the stewardess school and is now being sent out on her first flights with Federal airlines. She’s living in a flat with five other stewardesses and has a bit of romance going on with a handsome co-pilot. SHe’s working on a short hop line and on one of her flights she encounters a young woman called Joan who is clearly in some sort of trouble and ends up helping save a timber business. Yes, you read that right a timber business. I now have a rudimentary understanding of how the timber business worked in late 1940s America, as well as the methods of fire-watching and fire fighting that were in place for forested areas. You weren’t expecting that were you? Me neither.
I feel fairly safe in telling you this, because I don’t think any of you are going to be buying this one. So I also don’t mind spoiling the plot a bit further and telling you that Vicki also rescues her younger sister from drowning in an icy pond, takes a crew of hunters up on a flight to a shooting trip – and one of them shoots a window out on the plane on the way – and that the denouement of the timber plot involves landing the plan on a track in the middle of the fire and then a life or death fight. All this in under 200 pages. You’re welcome.
The good news is that unlike her British equivalent, Shirley Flight, Vicki’s plane doesn’t crash. Shirley is in a worrying number of crashes over the course of her series, but in this one at least Vicki makes it safely down to earth at the end of all of her flights. It’s slightly random that a teenage air hostess is the one to work out how Joan’s father’s business partner is trying to put him out of business, and also that the guy who is organising the hunting trip is also a timber baron, but coincidences like that are the stuff of Girl’s Own adventure stories. And I love them for it.
There are fifteen other books in the Vicki Barr series and I’d happily read more if I can lay my hands on them at a sensible price because this is my sort of crazy. And unlike some of the other books of the ear, I didn’t spot any racism. Which is a low bar to be cleared, but there it is and the same can’t be said about some of the Shirley Flight Books. Helen Wells is also responsible for the majority of the books in the somewhat better know Cherry Ames series about a peripatetic nurse, some of which I’ve read as well and which are generally easier to get hold of.
My copy came from one of the sales at Book Con (the dealer one I think) and as it’s an American series, they’re not the easiest to lay your hands on if you want them. I can see a couple on the sales sites, but although the actual books are cheap there’s often a hefty whack of postage attached to them because they need to be shipped from somewhere else. But as I don’t think you’re going to be buying them anyway, it doesn’t matter – I just hope you’ve found this as entertaining as I did when I was reading the book!
Another really busy week – but this time commuting from home every day so lots of reading time on the train! A pretty good list to be honest, even if I didn’t manage to finish everything I started the previous week – but some of that is a hardback copy issue. Will work on that this week!
Bonus picture: Distinctly autumnal on the train to work last week. Which was a contrast with Kuala Lumpur on the temperature front that I was not appropriately dressed for.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
It’s probably stating the obvious, but it’s a long way from the UK to Kuala Lumpur, so on the way there and back I had plenty of opportunity to sample the inflight entertainment and although I did take full advantage of the fact that they had a number of my old favourite movies that I used to lull me to sleep (namely Sean Connery James Bond movies but also my beloved Pillow Talk and The Philadelphia Story), I do still have a recommendation to give you today from my viewing.
Swan Song is a feature length documentary (although if you are in Canada there was an extended four part series version) about the National Ballet of Canada’s staging of a new production of Swan Lake, under the directorship of their outgoing artistic director, retired ballerina Karen Kain. Originally due to premiere in 2020, the production was delayed by Covid, so it also shows an artform trying to regroup after the lockdowns and closures that threatened the survival of so many arts organisations. As well as Karen Kain, the documentary follows the company’s principal ballerina Jurgita Dronina and several members of the corps de ballet.
A lot of the issues that commonly come up when you’re talking about ballet are in this too – including the reckoning with racism and the fact that all the ballet “ideals” are built around white dancers, and the ever present spectre of eating disorders and body image issues. But it’s also got lots of beautiful dancing as well as a close up view of the effort it takes to mount a production like this, as well as how hard it is to be a member of the corps – which is something that often gets overlooked.
Regular readers will know that although I’m about as graceful as, well, something very ungraceful* I absolutely adored ballet books when I was a child – and in fact have all the Sadlers Wells and Drina books on my shelves to this day** and I really like documentaries that take you behind the scenes of ballet. The BBC has had a couple of really good ones – including Men at the Barre (sadly currently unavailable to watch on iPlayer) where we discovered that Vadim Muntagirov is known as Vadream by the ballerinas because he’s such a dream to work with – and so this was total catnip for me.
Although I’ve seen Swan Lake a few times and watched a whole load of documentaries about it, I wasn’t massively familiar with the National Ballet of Canada, so there was lots of interesting new stuff for me here. I wouldn’t count myself as a massive ballet fan though – so I don’t know how this would land for someone who is, but I think it would be interesting to the casual theatre or dance fan too. Him Indoors is usually my gauge of things like this for the non-fan – and I think there’s some stuff that he would have been interested in, but most of the backstage-y stuff isn’t for him, so it’s probably one that I would put on when he was out of the room and see what happened when he came back in, rather than one that I would put on to watch with him!
If you’re not going on a plane in the near future and want to watch this, it’s available to purchase now on the various streaming platforms. And just before I go it would be remiss of me to have a post about ballet this weekend and not mention the sudden death of Michaela Mabinty DePrince at just 29. Her journey from war-torn Sierra Leone to the highest level of ballet was remarkable, and she was a dedicated humanitarian as well as a beautify dancer. I’m still in a bit of shock about it to be honest.
See you tomorrow.
*I suggested Peter Crouch, but Him Indoors insists that Crouch is infact graceful. I was aiming for something that has too many legs and flails a lot. Answers on a postcard/in the comments
As promised last week, here’s a second Books Incoming post – as I said on Monday, I was in Kuala Lumpur for work last week, and I may have found a bookshop while I was there and gone a little bit crazy, on account of the fact that they had a buy four books and get a fifth free promotion on. I mean how could I not! More on the bookshop itself to follow, but first up, here are the books that I brought back from Malaysia with me.
Lets start with the airport purchases. The autumn releases haven’t really kicked in yet, so the selection in W H Smiths was a little disappointing, but I still managed to find two I wanted. I’d nearly finished Going Infinite by the time I got to Kuala Lumpur – and I’ve already written about it – and the Elena Armas was the other half of the buy one get one half price. Then the five from the bookshop are the three on the back row and the other half of the middle row. I’m hoping at least one of them is a Rich People Problems book, but the shrink wrap means it’s a bit of a lottery, but all the blurbs were good – and Marlowe Banks… is one I’ve had my eye on for a while, but which hadn’t come my way at a price I was willing to pay before. At the front we have a book of short stories that was given to me by the author, who is a friend of a friend and was kind enough to show me around while I was visiting, and she also gave me Ripples. So thank you Daphne – I had a fabulous time with you and I’m looking forward to reading the books. Oh and if you were wondering what the blind date with a book turned out to be, here’s the answer:
You might have noticed on the list last week that that new Rivers of London novella had no sooner arrived that it was read and it’s the final one of the season-themed novellas, which can be read apart from the main series, so that’s what I’m looking at today.
As Ben Aaronovitch says on his website, these are only spuriously linked together – he wanted to write four novellas about side characters in the series, and came up with the seasons theme to make it easier to sell them to his publisher. So you don’t need to read these in order – in fact they don’t even fit into the chronology of the series in the order that they were published. So The October Man features Tobias Winter, who is (roughly) Peter Grant’s German equivalent investigating a murder and filling us in about magic in Germany, which we’ve only ever heard snippets about in the context of World War 2 in the main series. What Abigail Did That Summer fills out Peter’s niece Abigail’s relationship with the foxes of London and has a complicated magical plot, being solved by someone who doesn’t have a lot of magical knowledge. Winter’s Gifts has an X-Files-y feel to it, with FBI Agent Reynolds who has become their magical liaison type person (and who is also referenced in the footnotes in Abigail) sent to snowy Wisconsin after a retired FBI agent called in a weird incident, only to find the town has been flattened by a tornado.
And then finally the new one The Masquerades of Spring which is Nightingale in New York, in the 1920s as seen told by one of Nightingale’s former school mates Augustus Berrycloth-Young. And if you think that sounds like a P G Wodehouse character, you’d be right and it is so very much fun as the Folly’s business explodes into his world and causes untold levels of chaos. I think it’s my favourite of the four, and I don’t think that’s just recency bias – I really like the New York-set Jeeves and Woosters and this really does feel like a cousin of that, plus Nightingale is the character that I consistently want to see more of in the books, so it scratches that itch too.
The Masquerades of Spring came out in hardback and ebook last week, and as you can see I own some of these in hardback because they came out past the point when I was prepared to wait a year for the paperback, but the other three are in paperback now too.
The Thursday Murder Club series has featured a fair bit on this blog, but after the last one came out Richard Osman said he was taking a break from writing the series to write something different – and today is the day that that something different comes out. It’s called We Solve Murders and it’s got a detective duo who are father-in-law and daughter-in-law. He’s retired, she’s a private security officer and from the blub it sounds like an adventure caper with murders. So I’m hoping for something that’s a bit early Steph Plum maybe, because Osman does humour in his mysteries. I’m hoping to pick up a copy of this at the airport next time we go on holiday, because once again it’s a hardback first release, and I’m bad at waiting. So watch this space!
Back once again to tempt you into opening your wallet/breaking your book purchasing rules, here I am with the Kindle post. t’s actually a really good month for offers – and given the positive orgy of book acquisition I’ve been on over the last few weeks, the very act of writing this was a little bit risky. How much more will I have spent by the end of this post? Who can tell, and you’ll have to read to the end to see if I’m prepared to admit to it…
Lets start with a book whose sample I loved so much that I bought the paperback straightaway – because the kindle edition was too expensive – because now that Kindle version is only 99p! Yes Summer Fridays is on offer, and it’s really good – although read my review for the caveats about why some romance readers may have an issue with it. Also a bargain and really good is last year’s Christina LaurenThe True Love Experiment. I really enjoyed Kirsty Greenwood‘s The Love of My Afterlife when it came out a few months back, and it’s got loads of buzz and great reviews too – so it’s a total bargain for 99p at the moment. More expensive at £2.29 but worth mentioning because it’s also in Kindle Unlimited now is Annabel Monaghan’s latest book Summer Romance which was BotW just a couple of months ago. A little bit older, but still a BotW is Rachel Lynn Solomon’s Business or Pleasure.
Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, is 99p, as is one of the earlier Katie Ffordes Life Skills, which is one of her books that features canal boats (yes there are more than one of them). The fourth in Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery series Sunrise by the Sea is 99p at the moment. I’ve only read the first in the Lovelight Farms series, but I keep seeing them everywhere in the bookshops, so it’s only fair to mention that the final instalment Business Casual is 99p at the moment.
I’m a big fan of Curtis Sittenfeld as regular readers will know, and Rodham, her alternative story of what might have happened to Hillary if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton is 99p at the moment. I really like Barbara Pym and should probably mention her more often, so you should definitely take a look at Jane and Prudence which is 99p at the moment if you’re interested in witty British authors from the mid-twentieth century. Also in this category is Elizabeth Taylor – I bought one of hers that I haven’t read (yet) in Paris, but one of my favourites of hers is Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – I have a lovely Virago Designer hardback copy, but you don’t have to have such a pretty one when the ebook is 99p! Another book that I should probably have mentioned more, and which has a spot on the downstairs bookshelf is Mary McCartney’s The Group – if you haven’t read her novel about a group of young female Vassar graduates in the 1920s, where have you been?
I’m slowly working my way through the Matthew Shardlake books when I get a chance, and the second one of them, Dark Fire is £1.49 at the moment. I’ve got the TV adaptation on my list of things to watch next time I get a Disney+ subscription (which may be sooner rather than later given the arrival of the latest series of Only Murders in the Building). Also in historical mysteries is Umberto Eco’s In The Name of the Rose which I have recommended more thanonce and is really worth reading – there’s also a recent TV adaptation of it to add to the movie (which has Sean Connery!).
This month’s Discworld is Jingo at £1.99 – it’s the fourth in the City Watch sub-series, and it’s a good one, as a new island appears in the sea between Ankh Morpork and Klatch and causes no end of trouble. The Georgette Heyer is The Nonesuch, which I actually listened to (again) last week on Kindle and always think is underrated. Summer Lightning, which is one of my favourite of P G Wodehouse’s Blandings series is on offer too
Frank and Red by Matt Coyne is on my Kindle waiting to be read, but it’s also 99p at the moment. And I read a lot of Jenn McKinlay’s cozy mysteries but her latest non-cosy Love at First Book is 99p at the moment. On the non-fiction front, still on the pile after I bought an airport paperback copy when we went on holiday but now out in actual paperback and on offer for £1.99 is David Mitchell’s Unruly.
What did I buy while writing this? Well Patrick Stewart’s memoir Making It So, Hema Sukumar’s Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments which I’ve had my eye on for a while and is finally on offer and Nisha Sharma’s Marriage & Masti which is the third book in her series which started with Dating Dr Dil and is a Twelfth Night* retelling.
And that is surely enough books to tempt anyone – I hope you’re not leaving me to spend alone…
Happy Humpday everyone!
*my favourite Shakespeare play, forever and always.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 