This week’s BotW is Fidelis Morgan’s The Murder Quadrille – which is another Fahrenheit Press crime novel (that subscription I purchased is turning out to be a good move so far). Honorable mention goes to The Little Shop of Happily Ever After by Jenny Colgan – but that got a mini-review in my Half Term Reads post, so it’s not entirely left out!
This is really hard to summarise without giving the plot away, but I’m going to try. The Murder Quadrille opens at a dinner party being given by a businessman to impress his bank manager. His (really quite annoyed) wife is doing the food. Also invited is their lawyer and his trophy girlfriend and an American crime writer. Talk around the table turns to the dead body that’s turned up on the Common, but is that a good idea?
I liked this so much. It’s dark and funny and clever and you never quite know what’s happening. The narrative moves around from dinner guest to dinner guest – often jumping at just the point when you think you’ve worked out what’s happened, only to reveal another twist that you didn’t see coming. Brilliant.
This is so difficult to categorise – it’s not a detective story, but if you like cozy crime it’s not really very bloody or graphic – although it is blooming creepy – and really quite thrilling. I can’t really think of anything that’s really similar, although in the initial stages Suzette A Hill’s Francis Oughterard series came to mind – but it got much more complicated than that very quickly!
Get your copy of The Murder Quadrille from Amazon Kindle or investigate the possibility of a Fahrenheit Books Subscription here. I’ve had three books through the subscription (which I bought for myself, on the recommendation of a friend) and read two of them so far and really enjoyed both. The price has gone up since I purchased – but so has the number of books they’re publishing this year, so it’s still a saving.
I know – two posts in two days. I’m spoiling you. But I couldn’t let Valentines Day go past without mentioning some of my favourite romantic books.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I don’t care about all the posts about how you wouldn’t actually want to be with Mr Darcy in real life because I love this book. I started reading my mum’s copy of the book as soon as I’d finished watching the first part of the 1995 BBC adaptation of it and I adored it. I was in the tail-end of primary school and just flat-out loved Lizzy. My TV tie-in copy is much loved and I read it a lot. Read it and fall in love with Lizzy as much as you do with Darcy. And he grows as a person people. Everyone’s allowed to make a mistake and compared to some of the stuff romance novel heros have in their past, being a bit stuck up and arrogant is not the biggest problem ever!
These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer
And a prime example of how Darcy could be so much worse is the Duke of Avon. Justin’s nickname is Satanas. You’re told he’s lost a fortune at the gaming tables and then won back someone elses – someone who then killed themselves. He kidnapped a woman to try to force her to marry him. But I defy you not to be rooting for him as he turns Leon the page into Leonie the lady and restores her to her place in eighteenth century French High Society. And the way he achieves it isn’t exactly all hearts and flowers (although it is totally deserved). One of my favourite romance tropes is I’m not good enough for him/her and this is just the perfect example of that. And then when you’re done falling in love with Big Bad Justin, read Devil’s Cub and meet his son Dominic – mad, bad and dangerous to know and watch prim and proper Mary win his heart. He doesn’t think he’s good enough either. Swoon.
Stately Pursuits by Katie Fforde
Still my favourite Fforde novel (see my love letter to Fforde here), and you may start to detect a theme in my heros here. Connor is tall, dark, brooding and moody. Hetty’s mum’s sent her to look after Great Uncle Samuel’s stately home. Hetty wants to save it, Connor thinks selling it is the best solution. Cue fireworks of two different types. If you like your heros a little bit more beta, try Fforde’s Flora’s Lot and Charles the auctioneer. He’s engaged and thinks Flora is pushy. She thinks he’s uptight and change resistant. Another of my favourite tropes – I hate you, I hate you, I can’t stop thinking about your hair as Sarah McLean of Smart Bitches would say.
Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This is the most romantic detective story ever. After 3 books of angst and tension, Peter and Harriet are finally married. But a body turns up at their honeymoon dream house and unless they can figure out who did it Harriet is worried that Peter will be haunted by it forever. You’ll appreciate it most if you’ve read the other three books first, but once you have you’ll come back to it again and again. I’ve listened to it once this week on audiobook already. If you need more convincing I wrote a whole post about the wonders of Peter in general and Peter and Harriet in particular.
And Finally…
And if this still isn’t quite enough romance for you, try Eloisa James Duchess by Night featuring another of my favourite tropes – girls dressed as boys (see also the aforementioned These Old Shades) or Sarah MacLean’s Nine Rules to Break when Romancing a Rake (I would suggest Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover but that’s the end of a series and a big spoiler for the earlier books) which is another great trope (heroine needs to learn about love, asks rakish man to teach her) or a bit of Julia Quinn. Try not to get hooked. American-import romance can be an expensive habit.
Here it is, slightly later than planned (don’t ask), the Christmas-themed book post! It’s Christmas Eve, I’ve finished work for Christmas and I’ve read my way through a whole stack of Christmas-themed reading to come up with some top recommendations for you to read on your Christmas break. As this is now too late to go to the shops, tonight’s links are to Kindle – but you can click through from that to buy the paperback if you want to. Or you can pick them up in the scrum at the Supermarket on Boxing Day.
For once I have some of my recommendations in paperback!
Asta is back in Ireland for the first time since she fled with a secret years ago. Now the secret is sixteen and desperate to know about her family. Asta was hoping to be in and out in a flash, but ends up snowed in with her madcap extended family. Will she gets the answers that she needs or will her trip home bring more complications?
I think this is my favourite of the bunch – it might well have been BotW last week if it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to feature it in this! Clare Sandy has featured on this blog before (with A Very Big House in the Country and What Would Mary Berry Do?) and this is such a joy. I was trying to sum this up and I came up with Ballykissangel meets Marian Keyes and your favourite romantic comedy movie. This book is wickedly funny but also touching and paints a vivid picture both of Asta’s London life and the village in Ireland. It is so much fun – and very Christmassy – but without feeling contrived or saccharine. It is a fabulous story that happens to be set at Christmas.
Last Christmas Livvy was knocked over in the supermarket car park and now she’s dead. But she’s not ready to let her husband and her son go, so she’s hovering on the edge of the afterlife – fuming over her husband’s new girlfriend and fretting about whether her son’s coping without her. When she gets a last chance to make it right, will she take it – and what is right anyway?
This is so clever. I started it thinking it wasn’t going to be my sort of book and then got totally sucked in. I found Livvy quite a tough character to like, but I was totally rooting for her husband Adam and her son Joe. This is not a sweet and fluffy Christmas book – it’s funny, but it made me cry too. I had moments of wondering whether it would all turn out right (in my opinion) in the end, but when I got to the end I had that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that you get from a good story well told.
Other top tips – I’ve already mentioned Trisha Ashley’s latest A Christmas Cracker on the blog, but I thought it was worth repeating that this is a great festive read – warm and witty and romantic. I’ve got Jenny Colgan’s latest (in paperback anyway) A Christmas Surprise waiting for me still – it’s the third Rosie Hopkins book. And there’s my Novelicious colleague Cressida McLoughlin’s A Christmas Tail which I read through the year as the four part Primrose Terrace series. For some Christmas crime, try Mavis Doriel Hay’s recently republished the Santa Klaus Murder or go equally golden age with a dose of Inspector Alleyn with Ngaio Marsh’s Tied up in Tinsel (which I can only find on Kindle as an omnibus with Clutch of Constables and When in Rome).
Shorter reads
If you want something a bit shorter but still festive, there’s a bunch of excellent short stories and novellas too. Some of my favourites were revisiting characters from other books that I’d read earlier in the year. So you can see what happened next to the Winter family in Harriet Evans’ A Winterfold Christmas or you can catch-up with the residents of Hazy Hassocks in Christina Jones’s Mitzi’s Midwinter Wedding. There’s also a new Christmas short from Katie Fforde – A Christmas in Disguise – which I enjoyed, but wanted to be longer. And if you’ve been following the residents of Cherry Pie Island all year, then the final part of that, Four Weddings and A White Christmas is out as well (I’m halfway through it!). There’s also the final part of Cathy Bramley’s Wickham Hall series White Christmas. And don’t forget Silent Nights – the short crime story collection that was BotW a few weeks back.
And there you are. Have a happy Christmas and I hope you all get what you wished for. I’m back at work at 6am on Boxing Day, please think of me as you’re waking up with your hangover!
Disclosure: I bought my own copy of all of the books and novellas in this post except for: Silent Nights and The Santa Klaus Murder which came via NetGalley, Snowed in for Christmas which I was sent by the author and Make A Christmas Wish which I won in a twitter competition. In addition I received the Trisha Ashley via NetGalley – but bought myself a copy as well!
This week’s BotW sees normal service well and true resumed with Silent Nights – a book of Golden Age detective short stories set at or around Christmas. This is one of the British Crime Library’s reissues – I’ve read quite a few now and have discovered some really good authors that I was previously unaware of and who help me with my cravings for “proper” classic crime.
As well as familiar names like Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle and lesser known but still in print authors like Margery Allingham, there are others I hadn’t heard of before and who I’ll now try and investigate. Some of them have had long out of print titles recently republished in the same series, some of them are even more obscure than that.
There’s also a really good variety of types of mystery. The Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes, complete with leaps of deduction unfathomable to the normal person, The Sayers is a Wimsey locked room-esque short story about a missing necklace. There’s also really quite creepy suspense in the form of Ethel Lina White’s Waxworks, a story based around a chess problem, another which leaves you to work out who was arrested (with an explanation at the back of the book) and a poisoning with a really nasty old man.
I enjoyed all of the stories in Silent Nights. The weak point for me was the chess-based story, but that was because chess isn’t really my game. I also really appreciated the biographical notes about each of the authors at the start of the stories – complete with information about other notable titles.
If you’re looking for some Christmas reading, this might be a nice, bite-sized place to start, and equally it would make a nice present for any fan of classic crime – particularly those who haven’t ventured much beyond the obvious suspects. It’s also not violent or graphic so might work for the cozy-crime lover in your life too. Talking of Christmas present ideas, I have many more to share with you – and they’ll be posted very soon as I know this is prime Christmas shopping time!
My copy of Silent Nights came from NetGalley*, but you can the very pretty paperback from Amazon or I’ve seen it on the speciality Christmas displays in several Waterstones stores as well as Foyles in Charing Cross Road – so it may have made it into your local bookshop too. And the Kindle version is a bargain £2.99 at time of writing, so you could treat yourself to a bit of festive sleuthing without having too big an impact on your Christmas Present Buying Fund! Several of the other British Library Crime Classics are a similar price, I can recommend Mavis Doriel Hay – Her festive story Santa Klaus Murder as well as Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell are all under £3 at the moment – as well as books by J Jefferson Farjeon and Christopher Sprigg.**
* And as usual, I only feature books here that I genuinely like – I’ve read 25 books from NetGalley in the last quarter, but only a few of those have made it to a review on here (although they all get reviewed over on Goodreads).
** Back on full disclosure again – I bought Murder Underground and Death of the Cherwell for myself, but have read various Farjeons and Sprigg’s Death of an Airman via NetGalley over the last year.
This week’s book of the week is a rediscovered Classic crime novel, Christopher St John Spriggs’ Death of an Airman – first published in 1934 and now re-released as part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series. Regular readers of this blog will know that I love Golden Age Crime (and re-listen to a Peter Wimsey audiobook at least once a month) and this was right up my alley.
George Furnace is a flying instructor at Baston Aero Club – killed when his plane crashes. But the people who knew him are baffled – he was a skilled pilot and the plane was in perfect condition. Although the inquest decides it was death by misadventure, a visiting Australian bishop suspects the truth may be more complicated. Is it suicide? Or murder? Together with Inspector Bray a very cunning scheme is uncovered.
This is brilliant. I’ll admit that I don’t know enough about flying (and in particular 1930s flying) to be able to tell you how accurate the aeroplane information is, but it certainly all made sense to me – and the titular death is brilliantly contrived. I didn’t figure out all the solution until very late on – at which point I appreciated how clever Spriggs had been in dropping hints earlier in the book which passed off as totally innocuous at the time.
I’ve now read about half a dozen titles in this British Library Crime series – and have really enjoyed discovering forgotten murder mysteries from my favourite era – which in many cases rival their more well known counterparts – the Wimseys, the Poirots etcs. The actual paperback copies look lovely (although they are a weird inbetween size) and some serious knowledge of the genre has clearly gone into the selection. I read two from the series last week – I didn’t enjoy the other one as much, but it was clearly an important book in the development of the genre – and I’ll keep looking out for more.
My copy came via NetGalley – but it should be out now in book shops (I’ve seen and bought titles in the series in both Waterstones and Foyles usually displayed with a couple of others from the series) but if you can’t wait to get to a proper book seller, then here are some links – Foyles, Waterstones, Amazon, Kindle – although I couldn’t find it on Kobo.
I have a rather complicated history with detective stories. When I was 11, I scared myself silly by forgetting I’d put a pillow in my bed to confuse my sister while I was downstairs watching Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple with my parents. Once I’d seen Miss Marple on the TV, I promptly read all the Agatha Christie books that my mum owned, bought more with my pocket money and then in a fit of angst over death (in particular my own), gave all my purchases to the jumble sale and hid mum’s copies out of sight. I know. I was a strange child.
After that, I left detective stories alone for probably about five years. Then a friendly librarian, who found out that I was a bellringer, pointed me in the direction of The Nine Tailors, which I duly read, enjoyed and then forgot about – although by this point I had started reading Agatha Christie again.
Fast forward nearly 10 years and I’m living in Essex, working the early shift at a radio station, a bit lonely and hitting the library hard. I don’t know if I started reading them because I was reading Margery Allingham (who had lived locally) and seen comments that Albert Campion had started as a take-off of Peter Wimsey, or because I’d seen a recommendation, or because I happened across them in the stacks at the library and remembered I’d enjoyed The Nine Tailors, but I did rediscover them and boy did I love them.
My little local library didn’t have many books in the series – and once I’ve found something I like, I want to read them all, as quickly as possible. So I started buying them in the local book shop. But it didn’t have many in stock. So I picked up a few second hand paperbacks from my friendly book dealer who happens to do detective stories as well as classic school stories, then I started buying the ones that I’d read at the library (because I *had* to have the whole set) and so my rag tag collection was born.
My Dorothy L Sayers collection
For those who have had the misfortune to have never come across Lord Peter Wimsey, he is the archetypal gentleman detective – much copied and never equalled. The second son of the Duke of Denver, born in 1890, educated at Eton and Oxford, he is a bon vivant with a private income who solves mysteries because he can. But Peter is troubled – he’s battle scarred after the First World War, with shell-shock and a fear of responsibility; which sits badly with sending men to the gallows. He’s much more than just an idle rich man with a vaguely foolish face – which is the image he likes to project to the world. Assistance comes principally from his faithful valet Bunter (who had been in his unit in France) and Chief Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard. The books were published between 1923 and 1937 – and Peter ages in real time as the series progresses.
The four books that feature Lord Peter Wimsey and the mystery writer Harriet Vane
My favourite four books are what I call the Peter and Harriet Quartet – that is Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon – the novels that feature Harriet Vane, first encountered in the dock at the Old Bailey on trial for murder – who Peter falls in love with and pursues across the next three books. As well as my paperback copies, I have all four as audiobooks or radio plays – and they run in high rotation on my generic mp3 device on my journeys on the train, on my lunchbreaks and late at night when I’m staying away from home and need something to listen to to get to sleep. I didn’t read them in order – Have His Carcase came first, then Busman’s Honeymoon, Strong Poison and finally Gaudy Night.
I’m firmly convinced that Busman’s Honeymoon is probably the most romantic detective novel in existence. In the dedication at the start Sayers writes:
It has been said, by myself and others, that a love-interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective-interest might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story. This book deals with such a situation.
And to me, that pretty much sums it up perfectly. Busman’s Honeymoon is a perfectly formed detective novel (I didn’t figure out who did it until the reveal) but also is a beautifully romantic story about the start of a couple’s married life. And if you’ve read the three books that lead up to it, it’s the perfect end to a long and sometimes painful courtship, which must have felt tortuous to readers when the books were first published – because Strong Poison was appeared in 1931 – and Busman’s Honeymoon came out six books later in 1937.
Gaudy Night is the weakest of the four when it comes to the detective plot – it’s not an actual murder but a poison pen mystery and actually has very little Peter to a lot of Harriet. But it’s still a very good book and you learn a lot more about Harriet, her life, her side of the courtship and what she was doing while Peter was solving the mysteries in the two novels of that part of the series that she doesn’t feature in. Strong Poison and Have His Carcase have two of Sayers’ best puzzles – they’re utterly ingenious and perfectly plotted.
Among the other novels, my favourite is Murder Must Advertise, where Peter – under the psedonym of Death Bredon – goes to work at an advertising agency where one of the copywriters has fallen to his death, leaving a letter hinting at scandalous goings on in the firm. Sayers was herself a copywriter for a decade – and the book is a fascinating glimpse into the world of advertising in the early ’30s as well as a really very clever murder mystery.
My collection (unusually for me) has several different styles of cover
I could write at even greater length about the wonders of these novels, but this post is already massively long. I hope that if you’ve read this far and you haven’t ever read any of Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, you might be tempted to go and try one. My recommendation as a starting point would be Strong Poisonor Murder Must Advertise, although equally Nine Tailors or even the very first book Whose Body?would be a good introduction. Don’t start with Busman’s Honeymoon (I’m not even linking to it to deter you further) as you’ll regret it if you don’t read Peter and Harriet for the first time in the order in which they were intended – I know I do and as soon as I had finished Gaudy Night for the first time I went back and read all four again in the right order!
As usual, my links are to Foyles – because I love them, their Foyalty points, their order in the morning and pick it up from a store in the afternoon feature (which even gives you discount) and I’ve found that for this sort of book (ie not a mass-market new release) they are often cheaper than the alternatives – but equally you can find Lord Peter in your high street bookshop, at major online booksellers and often in charity shops. They’re also widely held by libraries because they are, after all, classics of the genre.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 