Inspector Cockerill is on holiday. He’s already regretting leaving Britain on a package tour by the time the plan lands in Italy, but by the time the tour group make it to a tiny island off the Italian coast the whole tour group is consumed with tension and rivalries. And then one of them is murdered in the hotel. Cockerill believes the killer must be one of the people who was on the beach with him and sets out to try and figure out who is responsible before the local police pick who they think is the culprit.
This is the sixth mystery featuring Inspector Cockerill and was first published in 1955. It contains some of the attitudes to foreign people that you often spot in British books of this era, but the difference between this and say, Shirley Flight – Air Hostess, is that I’m fairly sure Christianna Brand is doing that as satire – or at least for humorous reasons. The actual murder itself is a really cleverly constructed “impossible crime” and there are certainly plenty of people with motives for it. And when the solution is unravelled you see that all the clues were there and you just missed them. It’s pretty good.
This only came out in July – and it’s currently in Kindle Unlimited, which means you won’t be able to get it on Kobo at the moment. But the BLCC have published several other Christianna Brand books and some of them are not in KU at the moment so you should be able to get hold of those on Kobo if you want – and they’re petty good too. Green for Danger was a BotW as well and I’ve reviewed Suddenly at His Residence as well.
The mornings are getting darker, we’re into October and it’s the final quarter of the year. Whatever happened to 2024? Anyway, a fairly ok week in books – not quite as much finished as I wanted, but there was a lot going on in the world.
We are back at the theatre again this week because I had such a good time at Pride and Prejudice (sort of) on Friday night that I needed to write about it asap.
So, if you’re here and reading this, I’m going to assume you know the story of Pride and Prejudice. And this is a modern retelling of the story through the eyes of the servants, and with a cast of five each playing a servant and then various of the main characters, who sing carefully chosen pop songs at key moments. Here’s a trailer to give you a bit of a sense of what we’re talking about because it’s sort of hard to describe.
The London production of this won the Olivier award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play in 2022 and I can totally see why. The commentary on the events of the book is on point, the songs are witty (including Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and You’re So Vain) and the running jokes are a hoot too. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought my mum who was sat next to me was going to cry laughing at more than one point.
We did wonder how it might work if you *don’t* know the story of Pride and Prejudice – which as I said may not be a problem for you but maybe your normal theatre going companion isn’t an Austen fan. Well luckily I know someone who went earlier in the week to me and who isn’t familiar with the original text and she also enjoyed it – her description was “pretty good” and she liked the meta-commentary on the events and also the sweary bits, of which there are a few. So I think it’s probably a pretty safe choice for a theatre trip – if you don’t mind a bit of swearing (my mum coped) and some double entendres!
We were the second stop of a new national tour around the UK – you can find all the rest of the dates here along with info on how to book.
As you know from the special Books Incoming after my trip, I went a little bit book buying mad on the trip to Malaysia – and so here we are with the wrap up (there’s a pun there because they were all wrapped in plastic) of my trip to the bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.
So our hotel was right near one of the big mall complexes – and like in Manila, where there was one mall there tended to be more. So I went off on a nice wander around one early evening to see what I could find, in the hope that one of the things I would find would be a book store – and there was, hidden at the top of the third (or maybe fourth) mall I went in, was Book Xcess.
And as you can see, it was lovely and big – there was about the same behind me as in front as I took this picture, and it had a really interesting mix of English language books -mainly American editions, but also a few British ones – you can see the Jenny Colgan Rules from the series I mentioned the other week which is a UK version.
There was a big mystery section as you can see – but although I combed it carefully, there was a sad lack of American Cozy Crime novels, which was a shame because I was really hoping this might be the solution to filling in some gaps in the series that I read. But it was mostly the more hardboiled end of the spectrum, which a healthy dose of British authors along side the US ones.
It was a big cramped around this romance shelves, so there’s a bit of duplication as I tried to get all the stuff in here. And you can see the mix of stuff – British editions of saga-y type novels like the Anna Jacobs; Nick Hornby who isn’t usually romance but I think this one is actually a love story; then a load of contemporary romances Kate Clayborn, more Jenny Colgan and then books I haven’t seen before like Hope Nicely’s Lessons for Life and The Hook Up Dilemma which are both a few years old but I don’t remember coming across anywhere previously.
And more of the same on this one – but also can I just say it also shows how many different sizes the books where. Everything is pretty much the same size in the romance category in the UK – usually when I’ve got something bigger or smaller it’s been because it’s a US import – so you can see what I mean about how many different places they’re drawing their English-language editions from. If you look back at that Books Incoming every book I bought back from Malaysia is a different size/format. Every. Single. One.
I was interested by the tag “Classics and Literature for this shelf” because it’s such a random mix and with so little of what would be considered the classics in a UK store – ie the Dead White Man canon, plus Jane Austen. It’s actually mostly relatively recent prize winners with a fair bit of P G Wodehouse.
General Fiction was the section I found trickiest on the purchase front -t here was lots of stuff here that was really tempting based on the blurb, but the cellophane that everything was wrapped in meant that I couldn’t have a sample to see what they were like. I’m still regretting not buying Agatha of Little Neon: it sounded intriguing but also felt fairly literary prize candidate which isn’t really my vibe as you know but I had limited space in the suitcase – except it’s much more expensive in the UK so maybe I should just have done it, even if it could have been a book that sat on the shelf for years.
And the same applies really to Madonna of the Mountains and Super Host – which all turned out to be a couple of years older than I thought they would be (because I hadn’t heard of them or come across them at all) but could have gone either way on the enjoyment front. And of course when I was making all my choices I was doing it pretty blind – because I was in the back of a mall without access to the internet because there was No Signal so I couldn’t check Goodreads etc. So it was a bit of a lottery.
And I had made my initial choices – of three – when I got to the till and the lovely shop assistant pointed out the offer so back I went again – and as you know my final choice was one of the Blind Dates with a Book, which turned out to be a Hemmingway, which only increased my FOMO on the others books I had left behind. But it was free, so it doesn’t matter right?
And they had two tables and the wall display you can see behind the signs of blind date with a books – so they were very tempting and it remains such a clever idea, I think every time I see it, but the problem with it (for me at least) as we see with the fact mine turned out to be a Hemingway is that when you read as many books as I do, the chances of getting something you’ve already read (even if in the case of the Hemingway it’s a decade or more ago) really increases.
Anyway, I had a ball in the bookshop, probably was in there for nearly an hour all in, and I was very, very glad that my suitcase was the sort that has a zip that expands it for a bit more capacity on the way home!
Most read author: Sheila Connolly – four in the Fundraising the Dead series
Books bought: still not counting, because Kuala Lumpur was… book heavy
Books read in 2024: 305
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 747
A pretty solid month I’m going to say helped a fair bit by those long haul flights right at the start. And now we enter the last quarter of the year heading towards the festive season and all the Christmas books…
Bonus picture: Worrals goes East may have been a terrible book, but it did push me over the 200 book mark for the year. Time to up the target!
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 4 this month!
It’s not that long since I wrote about Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series, so I wanted to mention that her new book (not set in Bright Falls) Make the Season Bright came out on Tuesday. This one features two exes who discover they are going to be forced to spend Christmas together after they are invited to spend it with a friend (the friends are sisters, the blurb isn’t clear on whether the sisters know that their friends are exes). I’m intrigued to see how this works out because the blurb says that Charlotte was left at the altar by Brighton and I’m not sure how you redeem that in romance terms.
Make the Season Bright now is out now on Kindle and Kobo and also in paperback- and all the Waterstones near me seem to have copies available.
Just a couple of books to tell you about today – September was very much a month of series reading and some/many/a selection of those will feature elsewhere!
Hitchcock’s Blondes by Laurence Leamer
Leamer’s previous book Capote’s Women was a Book of the Week right back at the start of the year (side note: the mini series based on that one still hasn’t appeared on TV here which is annoying) and this one tackles another group linked by a man. Alfred Hitchcock was a great director, but not necessarily a great person as this book will hammer home. I think I would have appreciated a bit more a clarity about why he picked the women that he did – no Doris Day here for example and she was definitely blonde – but it’s an interesting read and there’s some good Classic Hollywood insider info in here too.
The Red House Murder by A A Milne*
I filled in a gap in my crime-fiction history knowledge by reading this, the only mystery novel by the author of (among many other things) Winnie the Pooh. It’s a locked room-type mystery and it’s hard to tell at this distance – and having read so many similar plots – how revolutionary this might have seen at the time. That said, it’s a really good example of the genre, with the long lost brother of the host of a house party found shot through the head shortly after arriving from Australia. I figured out part of the solution, but not the hows and whys of it – and enjoyed reading how it had all been done. Worth reading if you’re a fan of classic mysteries.
Worrals goes East by W E Johns
This is the latest in an occasional series of reviews of genuinely terrible Girls Own (or Girls Own-adjacent) books. Worrals was the female version of Biggles, in a very literal sense, and gets up to all sorts of adventures as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. The last one of these I read, you could probably have swapped Worrals and Frecks names for Biggles and Ginger and it would have still made sense (or as much sense as these make) and as that one was set in occupied France, there was just the usual anti Nazi stuff rather than actual racism. You know where I’m going with this don’t you? This one at least has a plot that could only be carried out by women, but that’s because it’s set in Syria and Iraq and, yeah. I suggest you don’t read it!
As I said yesterday, it was a pretty easy choice this week. And this was actually the first book I finished last week – I didn’t manage to get it finished in time for the previous week’s list, and it would probably have been BotW last week instead of The Man Who Didn’t Fly (because there’s always a BLCC post in progress somewhere where I could write about that. But actually this works better in a way as this js somewhat Truman Capote adjacent and he would have been 100 yesterday, so sort of points to me on the timing of this review!
Pamela Harriman has crossed my reading path a couple of times in the past – most often as one of Truman Capote’s slightly more tangential Swans – namely the one who came and stole Slim Keith’s Husband and whose amorous exploits were among those featured in Capote’s notorious La Cote Basque 1965. Anway, Pamela’s reputation was as a modern courtesan, but in this book, Sonia Purnell sets out to re-examine Harriman’s life and legacy and position her as a secret political power player who learnt how to exercise soft power as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law and took those lessons on to the rest of her life – to help Gianni Agnelli while they were lovers and then later to help the Democratic Party back to life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in her appointment as Ambassador to Paris by Bill Clinton and a role in American involvement in the Balkan conflict.
Considering that Harriman is most often referred to as a courtesan, or as someone who made a study of rich men’s ceilings, this is quite a reappraisal. But Purnell makes a strong case for Pamela as a woman who used the skills and talents that she had in the ways that were permitted as a woman at whatever the given time was, and then seeking to improve and better herself and her education throughout her life. I look forward to what I’m sure will be a number of articles in response to this to see what the response is but Purnell has had access to a wealth of papers and interviews to write the book and in her telling the story of Harriman’s life is remarkable and compelling – and hard to find parallels to.
My copy of Kingmaker came via NetGalley, but it came out in hardback about two weeks ago and so hopefully should be in the bookshops now. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
A total mix of reading this week – non-fiction, fiction, children’s fiction, murder mysteries, new stuff, old stuff. And it’s been a real mixed bag although it was fairly easy to decide what to write about tomorrow! And tomorrow is the start of a new month too, so there’ll be all the usual bits and pieces this week as well.
Bonus picture: it has been so wet this week. It feels like it hasn’t really stopped raining, although of course it has. This is a photo from outside town at the start of the week (thanks dad!) – basically you shouldn’t be able to see any water here – the brook runs between the trees to the right – and is usually well out of sight.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
I’m not going to lie, I had a different post planned for today, but then the news broke on Friday afternoon that Dame Maggie Smith had died and I changed my plans.
There’s been a lot of talk of her two great late-in-life roles – Professor McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Grantham Abbey – but I’m that little bit older, so for me the first time I saw her was in The Secret Garden and then in the Sister Act Movies. And she was as perfect in those as she was in those later roles, and in fact in everything else she did. You all know my tastes by now – so it’ll be no surprise to you that I’ve seen more of her comedic performances (I’ve got Death on the Nile on the TV as I watch this) on film than I have of the serious stuff, but five years ago I was lucky enough to see her performing in what turned out to be her final stage role in A German Life.
I’ve been really lucky in my theatre-going life to see a lot of the acting greats – and great performances. When A German Life was announced – more than a decade after her last stage role, I bought a membership to The Bridge Theatre just to get the priority booking – and the trip was not just me and Him Indoors, but also my sister and her now-husband and my parents too. And it was so worth it.
In A German Life, she played Brunhilde Pomsel, a German woman who had been a secretary to Goebbels during the Second World War. She spent the whole show alone on stage, sitting a chair telling you about her life – and I think it was the most mesmerising thing I have seen on stage. You couldn’t drag your eyes off her – in fact it was only right at the end, that I realised that her chair had been moving forward and the set receding the whole time. She was that good – and she was in her mid 80s. It was just astonishing.
I should also say that I’ve seen her son Toby Stephens live on stage too – twice in fact because I thought he and Anna Chancellor were so good in Private Lives that I went back for a second visit – with Him Indoors and my parents. So as well as being sad for the loss of one of the greats of British acting, I’m also thinking of him and his brother Chris Larkin and the rest of her family. Their statement announcing the death on Friday was very touching.
I’ll be checking the TV listings to see if any of her film performances pop up over the next week or so as a tribute, but in the meantime as well as Death on the Nile I have both Sister Acts on the TiVo, so I’m sure I’ll find a chance to watch that at some point in the coming days.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 