veritywilde

I don’t know about you, but there’s something about some books that means I just want to get them out to read them in the autumn. Curl up on the sofa with a blanket and re-read a favourite type things. So here we are today with some of the books that I think would make a great read at this time of year.

I would say there are two big themes in the autumn. One is back to school and the other is Halloween. Well the spooky books can wait til next month, but I have a boat load of school books on my shelves as you know, but most of them are for kids and are somewhat… classic. So I’m going to suggest Jenny Colgan’s Maggie Adair series – I’ve read the first two which were originally published under the pseudonym of Jane Beaton, and there are now two more. They’ve been blurbed as Mallory Towers but for Grown ups if that helps with the vibes. The first one is Class, then Rules, Lessons and most recently (earlier this year) Studies and they should be relatively easy to get hold of.

Autumn is also the perfect time to start a new to-you series. I often do a re-read of The Cazalets at this time of year, and given that I bought Casting Off in French the other week, I could try my luck at that if my brain is feeling in gear. But I think Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire books also make for good autumn reading. You don’t have to read them in order, but the earlier ones are better – my choices for good ones that feel autumnal include the first one High Rising, or Pomfret Towers or The Brandons. And there are also a couple of school-set ones if you want to continue the back to school vibes. And it’s also a pretty good time to start a Cozy Crime series – and goodness knows I’ve written about enough of them over the years, although some feel more autumnal than others – probably due to where they’re set. So for example Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery series feel like more summery books to me because they’re set in sweltering hot Arizona, but her Library Lovers series definitely feels autumnal because it’s set in Connecticut and there’s often talk of stormy weather. I know. I’m weird.

If you want a more recent release, I think recent BotW The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club would be a good pick – because it’s about new starts and despite having been out of school for a while I always think of the new school year as a new start.

And that’s your lot for today – Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, detective, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: The Man Who Didn’t Fly

September 24, 2024September 24, 2024 veritywilde

It’s been a while since I picked a British Library Crime classic, but I’m back with another one this week because it’s really good.

So, four men are due to fly on a plane to Dublin, but only three board. When it goes down in the Irish Sea, there are no bodies and the police have no idea who the man was who didn’t board the plane. And so they turn to the Wade family, who knew the four men due to fly, and question them to find out. Over the course of the book we find out about the dynamics of the household and try to work out who on earth was the man who didn’t fly.

According to the introduction it was the first novel to be nominated for the both the Golden Dagger and its American equivalent – and I can see why. For perspective also nominated for the Golden Dagger (then called the crossed red herring) that year was Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice. The following year it was won by previous BotW pick The Colour of Murder. It is not a conventional murder mystery and I’m going to warn you now: there are a lot of unlikeable characters in this one. But it’s so good. I read it in basically an evening and I didn’t care if it ended up making me go to sleep late. It’s that sort of book.

My copy came from a friend – who left a stack of secondhand BLCC’s with me because her bags were too full – but as with the others in the series it’s also on Kindle and I’m sure sooner or later it will turn up in their KU selection.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 16 – September 22

September 23, 2024September 23, 2024 veritywilde

A slightly shorter list than I would have hoped this week, but Kingmaker is *really* long – 500+ pages all in – but it’s also really good, so I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading that this week. And I’m nearly done with Hitchcock’s Blondes too – I’ve reached Tippi Hedren, but as I said last week, it’s a hardback and they don’t travel to work with me. Anyway, fingers crossed this week I’ll actually finish them as we barrel towards the end of September.

Read:

Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh

Murder in Waiting by Lynn Cahoon

Negligent in New York by Patti Benning

Razing the Dead by Sheila Connolly

Privy to the Dead by Sheila Connolly

The Man Who Didn’t Fly by Margot Bennett

Started:

Tour de Force by Christianna Brand

Still reading:

Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell*

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans

Hitchcock’s Blondes by Laurence Leamer

One book and one ebook bought – and a couple of last week’s purchases arrived too!

Bonus picture: after mentioning Maigret in my post about Parisian books on Wednesday, I noticed this themed display tower in Waterstone’s Gower Street when I was in there on Thursday!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

film, not a book

Not a Book: The Thomas Crown Affair

September 22, 2024September 22, 2024 veritywilde

You know there are some films where if you come across them on TV you just end up watching them again? Hot Fuzz is one of them for me – and the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair is another.

Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is a wealthy industrialist and playboy. And as we discover in the opening sequence, he’s taken to stealing art from museums for kicks. Rene Russo is Catherine Banning, the insurance investigator sent to find out what happened to the Monet that has gone missing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She soon grows suspicious of Crown and the two start a romantic cat and mouse game.

This has got romantic tension and intrigue galore and two brilliant heist sequences to boot. You can’t help but root for Thomas, even though he’s stealing things, and Rene Russo is impossibly glamorous as Catherine. This is a remake (although somewhat tweaked and updated) of an earlier Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway movie of the same name, which I keep meaning to try and find and then never getting around to. But in terms of a film where people have cool jobs and live amazing lives in New York, this is right up there. Just try not to think too hard about how much money this must all cost – although at least to give this some credit Thomas is explicitly super wealthy and Catherine explains she gets a percentage of the value of the artwork that she recovers, so it fairs better on that front than say You’ve Got Mail or When Harry Met Sally!

The Thomas Crown Affair pops up fairly regularly on the various ITV channels in the UK, and it’s also on the MGM subscription service within Amazon Prime. And just a couple of weeks ago it was announced that there is third version of the story coming – this time directed by and starring Michael B Jordan. I’ll be going to see it just to see how different it is from the other two…

Have a great Sunday

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Shakespeare and Company

September 21, 2024September 21, 2024 veritywilde

This week’s Recommendsday was inspired by the trip to Paris, so it’s only fair that I write about a Parisian bookshop – and this is probably Paris’s most famous bookshop of all.

It should first be noted that this is the second bookshop called Shakespeare and Company that Paris has had – the first was set up by Sylvia Beach just after the First World War and was where Hemingway and all the Lost Generation crowd hung around in the 1920s and 1930s. That Shakespeare and company was forced to shut down by the Nazis in 1941 and never reopened.

This Shakespeare and Company opened as La Mistral in 1951 and was renamed in 1964 on the 400th anniversary of Shakepeare’s birth in honour of Sylvia Beach and her store. And it is now iconic in its own right. It sells new, second-hand and antiquarian books and the crowds to get in start early. We came past about an hour before opening time on the day we visited and there were already a couple of people waiting. We went and had breakfast, stopped at another bookstore (about which more next week!) and came back and the queue had grown somewhat…

This is one of my photos from the queue – you can see some of the queue but also the wonderful (working) water fountain. Luckily it was quite a fast moving queue that morning – we were probably only waiting about ten or fifteen minutes to get in, which was less than I was expecting so I was pretty happy on that front.

You’re not allowed to take photos inside, so this is all I can offer – but you can see the sort of higgledy piggledy ambiance that’s going on, which is just the sort of bookshop that I love. There’s no rush to get you in and out and there are plenty of spots to sit if you want to – but we were a bit tight for time, so we had a really lovely wander around – I picked up that second hand Elizabeth Taylor you saw in Books Incoming and my sister got a cute childrens book – mine got the famous stamp, hers got the sticker, and we were very happy. It’s literally just across the river from Notre Dame, so if you’re heading there to see how the rebuild is going, it’s really easy to find.

Have a great weekend.

detective, series

Mystery series: Alan Grant

September 20, 2024September 15, 2024 veritywilde

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!

Happy Reading

Book News

Third Magpie Murders coming!

September 19, 2024September 15, 2024 veritywilde

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.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Paris

September 18, 2024September 18, 2024 veritywilde

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.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Vicki Finds the Answer

September 17, 2024September 15, 2024 veritywilde

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!

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 9 – September 15

September 16, 2024September 16, 2024 veritywilde

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!

Read:

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer

The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

Between a Flock and a Hard Place by Donna Andrews

Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

Memories and Murder by Lynn Cahoon

Monument to the Dead by Sheila Connolly

Vicki Finds the Answer by Helen Wells