This weeks BotW is one of my purchases while I was writing the Kindle Offers post after I got the sample which didn’t get to the end of the first short story (a Poirot one) and I needed to know who did it! So here we are, an Autumn book read in Autumn – check me.
This is a collection of twelve short stories from Agatha Christie, including all of her most famous detectives among them and with a preface that is a relevant section of her autobiography complete with a poem that she wrote about her childhood. It also includes the original version of Witness for the Prosecution which was turned into a film in the 1950s starring Marlena Dietrich and has been running in a site-specific production at London’ in an actual courtroom’s County Hall for more than five years.
As is always the case with me and Christie (and in fact crime more generally), I enjoyed the ones with the regular detectives more than I enjoyed the standalone ones but they’re all pretty good and I read the whole book in less than a day, which again given that it was a work day says a lot about how much I was enjoying it!
This is on offer at the moment in Kindle, and Kobo. It also comes in a hardback edition. There are also three other short story collections – for the other seasons obviously – and Midwinter Murder is currently in Kindle Unlimited if you want some more.
I’m having one of those spells where I’m finding it hard to settle down and read some of the things on the list – but instead bingeing through something else. In this case, it’s manifesting in Patti Benning novellas and some Charlaine Harris. Who can tell the mysterious ways my mind works, I certainly can’t. Anyway, the weather has been awful, it’s proper sit inside and read weather – I feel like my feet have been on the edge of being damp for about a month now it’s been so wet. Hey ho.
Well, as usual in kindle offers week, a few ebooks bought – and I still have some samples left to read for other things so potentially more to come there. Two books in Foyles which you’ve already seen and a couple more ordered (but not yet arrived)
Bonus picture: some Art at the Outernet last week – it’s very cool but it makes my head hurt quite quickly!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 