Happy new Vinyl Detective week. Underscore, which is the eight in the series came out on Tuesday and I have my pre-order in my grubby little hand! This time we’re in the world of Italian Movie Soundtracks, which is a great excuse for me to drop a video of one of an ice dance routines into this, because there have been some really good programmes to Italian film music. Anyway, I continue to be impressed with Cartmel’s ability to find new genres to use for this series, although I didn’t love last year’s instalment Noise Floor as much as I have liked previous books in the series. Fingers crossed this is a return to full form… If you want to dip back into my archive, check out my Series I Love post from 2022 here.
Series I love post was 2022, last year got a out today.
It’s Wednesday again and it’s Easter Week. So for this week’s Recommendsday I did try and come up with something appropriate to the season. But I think I’ve already written about all the books with vicars and churches that I can think of pretty recently (although more are bound to come to me as soon as this post publishes, so you never know), so instead I’m back with a post about unhappy marriages in fiction – of various kinds. This post is entirely inspired by reading At Mrs Lippencote’s last week.
Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippencote’s is set during the Second World War, when Julia joins her husband Roddy in a rented house near his RAF base. Their son Oliver is also with them as is Roddy’s cousin Eleanor. It is not a happy household. Julia and Roddy are not really well suited – he thought that she would grow and mature into her role as an officer’s wife under his guidance, while she thinks very little of the things that she is meant to do because of her “position”. They don’t spend a lot of time together, but what time they do spend together is mostly low-level unhappy as neither can ever do anything that will please the other. That makes it sound miserable – but it’s a social comedy, which I always enjoy. It was Taylor’s first novel – and although I like some of her others more, it’s definitely worth a look.
Julia has a husband problem – or does Roddy have a wife problem? – whichever way you call it, it’s an unhappy marriage and there are plenty of those around, particularly in novels set in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether it’s hurried marriages because people didn’t know each other well enough and there was a war coming (or happening) or marriages changed by war, there are plenty of options in books from the era.
In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust Tony and Brenda Last have been married for a little under a decade, have an eight year old son and live in a country pile. He thinks they’re happy, but Brenda is bored and starts an affair – which sets Tony on the road that eventually leads to utter disaster. This gets pretty bleak (in ways I can’t explain because: spoilers) but it’s clever and from the tail end of Waugh’s satirical era, before he turned into his more realistic and also more religious novels.
There are plenty of unhappy marriages in Daphne Du Maurier too, you can basically take your pick because there’s almost always one miserable marriage in her novels somewhere. And if you pick Rebecca you can try and decide which Mrs De Winter has the worst marriage – the first or the second! But Frenchman’s Creek would also work and possibly doesn’t get as much notice and it has pirates (it’s set in the Restoration).
Jumping a couple of centuries forward in time not to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. It’s the early 1980s, Rachel is very pregnant and has just discovered that her husband is in love with another woman. Across the course of the (very short) book, she cooks food (she’s a cookery writer), tries to win him back and rages against the world. If you’ve watched any of Ephron’s films you’ll recognise a few lines here and there from that. And it was inspired by the breakdown of Ephron’s own second marriage to the Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate exposé fame).
There are of course plenty of unhappy marriages in mystery fiction – but given that often one of them ends up dead or doing murders it would be a bit of a spoiler to include them here. There are plenty of them in Agatha Christie’s books though, and Christie’s own disappearance and the breakdown in her first marriage has been extensively writen about. The Christie Affair by Nina Grammont was a BotW back in 2022 and is a reimagining of what happened when Christie went missing, written from the perspective of her husband’s mistress. It’s a hard one to write about without giving too much away – but I did try and give it ago in my review, so do check that out.
I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!
It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.
This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.
My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.
So a couple of things are notable from last week’s list. Lets take them in order. Firstly: I finished the Ruth Galloway series. So that binge is over, and the book hangover has commenced. Secondly a large amount of Kerry Greenwood was read after the news that she had died – I’m more than halfway through Corinna Chapman book three – and would have finished it (and probably the next one too) if I hadn’t suddenly realised that I was going to have to write about other things than Kerry’s books on here in the near future. Thirdly: I’m having a good go at the NetGalley list this month. The Simon Brett is out in a couple of weeks (he’s clearly writing at a rate of knots at the moment!) and the Catriona McPherson came out last week. And I’ve started another one that came out last week. Now should I have read them in a different order: yes. But the fact that I’ve read them is progress in itself!
Four books bought – I just couldn’t help myself… but on the bright side none of them were hardback new releases, so I did at least resist that temptation!
Bonus picture: I have deployed the hammock! Sadly it was so lovely I fell asleep while reading the Cher memoir and ended up with a headache from too much sun and still without having finished the book. But I shan’t let that deter me. I shall put my head in the shade next time and wear a hat.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
There have been a couple of documentaries recently about Elizabeth Taylor – and I’ve watched them and I have thoughts! Golden Age and Old Hollywood is one of the areas that I’m always interested in reading about (fiction and non fiction) and watching documentaries about and it was interesting that two big productions about the same person popped up so close to each other at a time when there was no obvious anniversary to explain it.
The two documentaries in question are Elizabeth Taylor: the Lost Tapes and Elizabeth Taylor – Rebel Superstar. The former is an HBO documentary, the latter a three part series executive produced by Kim Kardashian. And given that they’re both about the same person, who only had one life (duh) they both cover fairly similar ground.
Rebel Superstar has more about her later business career and it also has the better talking heads – among them Taylor’s son Chris and granddaughter Naomi, Sharon Stone, Margaret O’Brien, Kim K herself and Paris Jackson (Michael’s daughter) and Joan Collins. And oh my it needs Joan Collins – she’s the only sharp voice in a documentary that is working hard to gloss over a few things and is basically a hagiography, such is the lack of critical voices and mention of less than flattering aspects of Taylor’s personal life.
The Lost Tapes has the advantage of recordings of Liz herself, made in the mid 1960s, which means that this focuses on that era and the time leading up to it and not later. You only get a very short section at the end on everything else – addiction and later marriages are skipped over, although her work in Aids activism at a time when there was a huge amount of stigma is given more of its due. You also get cine footage filmed on set with her by Roddie McDowell where you see her with James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. But the interviewer doesn’t give her a lot of pushback or press her on what she’s saying in the tapes, and again we’re in haigography territory.
Neither of these would have got me writing about them on their own, because it’s not really a recommendation – both lack a bite in slightly different ways. If you’re only going to watch one, I’d make it the Lost Tapes – because it has those recordings of Elizabeth talking about her life and the lovely home movie footage, but neither of them give you the full picture of Taylor’s life. If you go in not knowing anything about her, you could come out missing some of the details – like the fact that both Burton and Taylor were married to other people when they started their relationship, or the entirity of her marriage to Larry Fortensky. But if you’re interested in Hollywood history then they’re worth a watch, but if you are a newbie who wants a more complete picture, you’re probably better with a book – or even her Wikipedia!
If you’re in the UK, Rebel Superstar is on the BBC iPlayer and The Lost Tapes was shown on Sky Documentaries and is now on Now. If you’re elsewhere you’ll have to have a dig around and see which platform or streamer has bought them up.
A truly bumper month of acquisitions. But the good news – if such there can be – is that I have read all the Elly Griffiths at this point, along with the Edmund Crispin so they’re not actually on the to-read pile any more, they’re now in search of a place on the actual shelves. And of course given that I own all of the series except the first one in paperback there is a non zero chance that my mania for sets (preferably matching) will lead me to acquire The Crossing Places in paperback too so I have the set. I will try and resist. The Julia Buckley happened to be in the Picadilly Waterstones when I was in there buying one of the Ruth Galloways and although it’s not the next one in the series I haven’t read, it’s so rare to spot these in a shop I bought it anyway.
The Ann Granger is the first Mitchell and Markby which I have read but don’t own. Its the same edition that I read it in when a very dear friend lent me her whole set to me by post nearly a decade ago. She very sadly died last summer – but it would have been her birthday this week so when I saw this in the National Trust bookshop at the weekend it seemed like a sign to acquire it and reread. And then of course I got distracted by the Corinna Chapman re-read so it hasn’t happened – yet. And the other two were also purchased at the same time – and were total impulse buys. I’ve never come across them before but they’re books two and five in a twenty year old cozy crime series so I thought I’d snaffle them as they were only £1 each. I’ll either like them or I won’t and I was supporting a good cause!
With the news of the death of Kerry Greenwood at the start of the week, I felt moved to embark on a reread of her contemporary mystery series set in Melbourne. It’s been a while since I read them, but I was still surprised to see that I hadn’t written about them here – especially given how much I’ve written about the delightful Phryne Fisher. So today I’m remedying that.
Corinna Chapman is a baker in Melbourne. She owns and runs her own bakery which is in the same building she lives in: a delightful creation of an apartment building called Insula. Built in the 1920s by someone with a bit of a fixation on the Romans when it came to design. On top of that, each apartment is named after a different Roman God and it has a delightful roof garden too. I would move in myself except that across the course of the books quite a lot of drama happens in the building and its environs.
The first book in the series is nearly 20 years old now, so there are some bits here that are a little dated, but Corinna is such a wonderful creation. She is a reformed accountant, divorced, a reluctant sleuth and happy in herself despite society telling her that she should be miserable because she weighs too much. This is written in the first person so you’re inside her head the whole time and her personal monologue is idiosyncratic and wry. The other residents of the building and in Corinna’s life are also amusing and fun. And of course there are murders to solve. Often more than one of them too – in the first book for example Corinna finds herself investigating who is terrorising the women of her building but also who is killing off heroin addicts in Melbourne.
There are seven of these, with the final book The Spotted Dog coming some years after the previous installment which had lead me to hope that we might still get another one, but it seems that wasn’t meant to be. So I shall console myself with a reread. I’ve never seen these in paperback in the wild here in the UK as far as I can remember, but the good news for the rest of you is that the first one and the third one are in Kindle Unlimited in the UK at the moment, even if I don’t much like the new covers they’ve been given.
Honestly. I’m so excited about this. I’ve been saying in my reviews of Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorn and Horowitz books that I hoped that there would be another Magpie Murders book and today is the day: the third Susan Ryeland mystery book is out. This has a continuation to the Atticus Pund series being written by the grandson of a beloved children’s author who, coincidentally thinks his grandmother was murdered. The reason why I wasn’t sure if there would be another in this series is because how many murders could be tied into the Atticus Pund series. So I’m incredibly excited to see what Horowitz has come up with – and it’s already been bought up for a third series of the TV adaptation. I can’t wait!
I’ve been on a massive Elly Griffiths binge over the last month and a half so it would be remiss of me not to mention that her latest book The Frozen People is 99p at the moment. It only came out a the end of February and it is the first in a new series featuring cold cases and what the blurb would suggest is time travel – and so of course I bought it while writing this post! In other murder mysteries, former BotWThe Darkest Sin is 99p, as is the second Three DahliasA Very Lively Mystery, and the second in the Rivers of London series, Moon over Soho.
In Golden Age crime writers, Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar is 99p, Georges Simenon’s The Hanging Man of Saint-Pholien. As a side note: more and more classic crime novels are now getting lots and lots of very cheap kindle editions, where it’s hard to know if they are any good or not. So it’s not exactly 99p, but all the “proper” Harper Collins kindle editions of the Miss Marple series are £2.99 at the moment. They’ve also got relatively new audiobook readings with narrators like Richard E Grant, Stephanie Cole and Emilia Fox, which are the ones that I’m listening too at the moment. And as E C R Lorac’s books perform well in their BLCC editions, there are more of her books popping up in other Kindle editions too – lots of which are 99p, although as ever I can’t vouch for the quality of all of them, although the ones that I have read have been ok.
In other authors I like, Anthony Horowitz’s With a Mind to a Kill, which is one of his James Bond novel is on offer for 99p, as is PG Woodhouse’s Summer Lightning which is one of the Blandings series,
Normal service is somewhat suspended today, because yesterday morning I woke up to see the news that Kerry Greenwood has died.
I first read her Phryne Fisher series more than a decade ago now – in the days before the blog and the early days of Kindle ownership and before the TV series appeared on UK screens. Since then I’ve been back to them more times than I can count – as ebooks and audiobooks. And I’ve read new additions to the series as soon as I could get my hands on them. Only a couple of months back I posted about how excited I was that there is a new Phryne coming this year. And now Murder in the Cathedral will be the last.
Seventy is no age at all really, but I hope she knew how much joy her creations – Phryne and the gang and her modern day detective Corinna Chaoman – have brought people. And judging by the obituaries, she made a real difference to people’s actual lives as a legal aid solicitor as well. Thank you and rest well.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 