Tag: classic crime

Book of the Week, crime, new releases

Book of the Week: The White Cottage Mystery

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We’re back in classic crime territory for the week’s BotW – although it’s a bit of a cheat as this is a reissue of whole book – Margery Allingham’s The White Cottage Mystery – but it is excellent and it gives me a great chance to talk about an author who I think is a bit neglected.

This is a tricksy and intriguing standalone mystery which sees a policeman and his son trying to solve the murder of a particularly nasty neighbour. Jerry happens upon the scene of the crime and soon has his Scotland Yard detective father involved.  This was originally a serialised book (just like some of Harriet Vane’s novels in my beloved Peter Wimsey) and you can really tell from the pacing and multiple cliffhangers. There is a clever drip feed of clues which method you turning the pages, and although I had suspicions about the culprit, it wasn’t until quite late on that I worked it all out.

This was my first non-Campion Allingham and it didn’t disappoint. I usually prefer my detective books to be part of a series (I prefer Miss Marple and Poirot to Christie’s other books) but this was a pleasant surprise. But then it’s not that different in style to the Campion series, you could almost swap the leads for Albert and his son and it would nearly work (except that Albert is not a cop) and that totally works for me! In case you haven’t met Allingham’s most famous creation,  Albert Campion is the younger scion of a noble family, who uses an assumed name and solves mysteries with the help of his faithful manservant and police officer friend. Sound familiar? Well that’s because it supposedly started as a Lord Peter Wimsey parody, but developed into much, much more (an BBC ran for much longer). Albert’s Bunter equivalent is a reformed (ish) criminal and Campion end up being much older than Peter.  They’re also more adventure stories than detective, most of the time you don’t have a chance of working out the solution to Campion’s cases but they’re such great fun you don’t care.

I discovered Margery Allingham when I was living in Essex – where she still had a large presence in their libraries as a local author, even though she’d been dead 40 years at that point. I devoured as many of them as I could lay my hands on, and although the series has its ups and downs, I defy you not to like them if you’re a fan of Wimsey, Marple and Poirot or even adventure stories like Amelia Peabody or Vicky Bliss. It’s not the first one, but start with Sweet Danger and I defy you not to get hooked.

My copy of The White Cottage Mystery can via NetGalley, but you can buy it in paperback from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones  or on Kindle. You should also be able to find new or secondhand copies of Albert Campion too.   Don’t blame me for the spending spree that will ensue though…

Book of the Week, detective

Book of the Week: Death at the Opera

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This week’s BotW  Death at the Opera and also is a bit of a compare and contrast.  I read of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley Mysteries last week – this one I loved and the other I could barely get through.  As I didn’t read a huge amount last week – and two of them were books I’m reviewing for Novelicious (which I can’t preempt here) – I’ve made Death at the Opera my book of the week.  Death at the Opera ticks a lot of my boxes – it’s a murder mystery set in a girls school – but Mrs Bradley is a bit different to a lot of the Golden Age Sleuths.  She’s going to track down whodunnit, but she’s not necessarily going to hand them over to the authorities when she does.  And that’s what makes her interesting – she wants to know, but often without having a yearning for justice for the victim – she’s more detached and curious than some of the other dectectives of the time.

Death at the Opera is fulled with interesting and intriguing characters, some of whom have very modern attitudes, and a twisty turny plot that I didn’t work out until right at the end.  I absolutely zipped through it and went straight on to another Mrs Bradley from the to-read pile (I picked up three from the charity shop a couple of months back) – and what a contrast that was.  I really struggled with Come Away, Death.  I didn’t like the characters or the setting and I found it really difficult to get into.  I finished it, but only just – and only because I liked the Death at the Opera so much I was hoping it would improve.  But I guess when a series is so long running there’s bound to be a few duds.  Hey ho.