P books

We went into Waterstones. For fun, as Daughter put it.

What she really wanted to do was check out their boardgames.

Meanwhile I looked at their fantasy nook. I could always buy myself a new Terry Pratchett, and preferably not one on the list Daughter and the Resident IT Consultant carry round with them. (I live in hope for my birthday.) But while they had half a dozen or so, none of them were ones I needed.

Stepped sideways to the next nook. The one housing crime. The new Sara Paretsky was published – in the UK – on Thursday. I already have my copy, but wanted to see if they did too. They didn’t. And after a while I worked out why. They don’t seem to stock any hardbacks. They are – as I frequently complain about – so very large. I’d say they wouldn’t fit on the shelves.

It’s an interesting concept, though. Can you really not sell a book when it’s first out, but expect your customers to wait for the paperback? I suppose they’ll say you can order it to collect, bypassing the shelves.

Some new hardbacks were displayed near the doors, on tables, where I spied Percival Everett’s novel, James. I pointed meaningfully at it as we passed. But no Pay Dirt.

Due North

Ten years on I see things differently. The online reminders of what happened on this date bring stuff back, and the memories of the move north helps me reflect on what my Bookwitchery caused.

I happened to mention on social media that the old Bookwitch Towers had sold, and how I now merely wanted for a new one to replace it. You know, those days when you’re waiting, holding breaths and crossing digits.

One of my online author friends said how she wanted a comfortable cave in Umbria, with cappuccino on tap (to paraphrase a little). Just knowing that one of ‘my’ authors was listening to my housing woes gave me a warm glow.

This led eldest Offspring to pitch in by mentioning Due South, the Chicago based television show that wasn’t filmed there. That in turn made my Umbrian wannabe very happy, hearing from another Due South fan, and she decided to pop downstairs to watch an episode. Because some people own the box set.

Finally another friend piped up to say she too was a Due South fan. Aren’t we all?

And I’d only aired my worries about having nowhere to live…

Return to my roots

I loved Brinn mig en sol, by Christoffer Carlsson. If you recall, he’s the crime writer from my past, only thirty years after me. This is his second novel set in our shared home town, and it is so much better for that, rather than a great crime novel set anywhere else. Or do I think so because I can see just about every place where there is a dead body, where they work(ed), and I know the two police stations involved, and so on and so forth? I got to walk around somewhere familiar, with people behaving in a way I would expect them to behave.

(I gather there is already a translation into English; Blaze Me a Sun. I agree with one UK online reviewer that it comes across as very American. The US readers seem to have loved the book.)

The narrator is a person very much like Christoffer who, having moved back home, starts digging into what happened the night the prime minister was murdered, when there was also a murder in the woods outside Halmstad. Why does he do this?

Police officer Sven Jörgensson ends up dedicating the rest of his life to solving the several deaths, and his son Vidar trains to be a policeman too, and he also continues to dig. It takes well over thirty years to find the answer.

It feels very true to real life Sweden/Halmstad. I would have enjoyed the plot and the characters anywhere, but it’s the fact that they brought me ‘home’ that is so special. There is not enough fiction set in my past world, but until I read Christoffer’s first Halmstad novel I didn’t know how much I needed them. The title is a quote from a poem by Elsa Grave, who even features in the book. Just a page, but it rings true, because I also have Elsa knowledge.

As people say about momentous dates, I remember precisely what I was doing on March 1st 1986. I woke up with a migraine. And many years before that, I picked bilberries at the scene of the crime.

Deadline

First published in 1957, Deadline by Bill Knox which has just been reissued by Zertex/J D Kirk/Barry Hutchison shows what you can do when you happen to run a small publishing business. When he discovered his first second hand Knox, Barry was so excited, and when he’d been excited enough, he realised he could actually publish these books anew. So that’s what he’s doing. Deadline came in January, and two days ago the second Knox novel – Death Department – hit the world.

Just as the time travelling reader from the past might be a little shocked by the profanities and the violence and the sex in our current crime novels, so the reader travelling back to the 1950s is stunned by how polite they are, how much the police care about crime and about being fair. I was mostly taken aback by how much staff time they have at their disposal, and also how sensibly proactive even quite junior detectives are.

The reader knows from the start who the killer is and why (and I have come to the conclusion that I don’t much like that format of storytelling), and you are left to discover how the police will work out who killed their colleague, and no effort is spared.

It’s fascinating. I came to like, not to mention trust, Thane and Moss, a well functioning duo who will not tolerate a ‘cop killer’ in their midst. This is Glasgow, so not much cosiness among the landladies, wives and demanding girlfriends.

We’re still in the capital punishment era, so you worry that the slightest mistake will mean the end for the wrong suspect. But Thane is not easily fooled, and he is very fair. Did I already mention that?

Anyway, there will be a new title monthly.

Lost and Never Found

Having ordered the ebook version of Simon Mason’s Lost and Never Found on the day before publication day – I was keen, and they kept emailing me not to forget to buy it, including after I had bought it – I started wondering when I’d actually ‘get’ it. Would they be smartly on the starting line at midnight, or would they saunter in some time during the day?

I couldn’t sleep. Not because of the book, but anyway. Around four a.m. I checked my inbox and discovered the book had been delivered at three minutes past midnight. Downloaded it straight away, in case the insomnia demanded some immediate reading which, after a very early breakfast, it did. I had even avoided starting on a new book the previous day, just to be available.

It was as if I’d not been away from the Oxford of the two DI R Wilkinses. I was home. Disturbed rich girl crashes her Rolls and disappears. This time I looked carefully for those small clues, but not carefully enough it seems. Next time I will write down every character who turns up. (Oddly enough, a couple of them are in the novel I’m reading right now, albeit with other names.)

Next time; yes, I vowed not to read the first chapters of the next book, on the grounds that I got a little irritated with recognising what I must have read a year ago. But, obviously, I didn’t stick to that. I was so eager for it by the end, that I had to devour the early pages of book four.

The one I feel sorry for is Ryan. Not sure if it’s little Ryan (though if he’s really 20 inches tall at the age of three, I’ll eat my hat) or Ryan père. Both, probably.

The single gift

Our latest Christmas present rule was one only, from each person to the other persons, which in our case meant two from me to the other two. I reckoned that putting more than one book into the same wrapping paper could count as one, so I gave the Resident IT Consultant four books. All four were books I wanted to read. I was fairly sure he’d like them too. (But it does kind of deal quite nicely with what I want.)

He started on the one I had expected him to reach for first, and I have to thank the facebook friend who recommended the – to me – unknown E C R Lorac. The next one was by Nicola Upson, another fb recommendation.

I have just finished reading them myself, and it’s interesting how they coincidentally are quite similar. Lorac’s Fell Murder is set in a Lancashire farming community during WWII, and also written at that time. Nicola’s book is brand new but Shot With Crimson is set in 1939, in the countryside near Peterborough.

Nicola’s style is modern, both in plot and language. The Lorac novel is its complete opposite, being a little slow – but not in a bad way – and thoroughly of its time.

Shot With Crimson doesn’t shy away from the seriousness of murder, but I found myself looking at it from my current day view point. In Fell Murder the most shocking thing to the modern reader is how the farming population refuses to speculate when urged to by the police. Because they know that the murderer will be executed, and have no wish to send the wrong neighbour into the arms of death.

You tend to forget this. You know that murder was a capital offence back then, but somehow it’s quite easy to overlook. Because I had this book in such recent memory, I was able to contemplate Nicola’s various suspects differently. Was there someone I would be happier to see die for their crime?

The death of an elderly farmer in Lancashire, with relatively few suspects, is vastly different from Shot With Crimson, which features both Daphne du Maurier, Josephine Tey and Alfred Hitchcock, with the action both in old England, and in Hollywood. (There was also an unexpected mention of George Devine, which I won’t bore you with now.)

I recommend both books, as well as the way I managed to lay my hands on them.

Murder Crossed her Mind

‘I wonder if there are any more?’ I said to myself, as I came across the first two crime novels by Stephen Spotswood on my shelves. ‘It’s been a while.’

As I may have mentioned before, I am a witch, and within a week there was a book in the post. I must have sensed something there. It was Stephen’s fourth novel featuring Pentecost and Parker, and I naturally set about looking for the third. It had been published just a month previously (so I will have to get my hands on that one as well).

There is only one, major, spoiler if you read the books out of order (I simply couldn’t wait). And it is a positive spoiler, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Set in 1947 this one is about an elderly woman who remembers everything, but who has now gone missing. The FBI is involved, and there are Nazis. Possibly, anyway. Parker puts herself in some danger and tries to sort it out on her own. But then, her boss, Pentecost, is also quite keen to avoid involving others at times.

Murder Crossed her Mind is as excellent as the earlier books. It does end with something of a cliffhanger, though, so I am trusting that number five will be along shortly! The crimes are interesting, there is a lot of humour and kindness, and Pentecost and Parker are two seriously enjoyable detectives.

Partners in Crime

We had tea together in Daughter’s flat on Saturday afternoon, the whole family. It was nice, and quite rare that all of us were in the room at the same time. The Resident IT Consultant was there to lift boxes – of books – for the umpteenth time. We were in post-decorator mode. I was there, I think, to provide moral support. Or something. Daughter was there to enjoy being back after some enforced staying with the old people while paint was wielded. And Son was only there on a laptop screen, as he was mid-event with his fellow translators and some crime writers and academics. But he was sort of there.

It was the Scottish Society for Northern Studies’ half day conference of Partners in Crime. It’s the kind of thing that can threaten to be worthy but boring if you’re unlucky. We weren’t though. It was pretty good throughout the afternoon, including the tea (which we had to provide ourselves).

We missed a few minutes here and there, as we drove from A to B, dealt with a grocery delivery, and generally carried furniture around. But I caught Son in his introduction, followed by more introduction from Alan Macniven, head of Scandinavian Studies in Edinburgh, followed in turn by Dr Joe Kennedy, who seems to have taken over the running of the Gothenburg students’ classes at Sussex. Very appropriately he had to leave to deal with childcare.

Then there was Lorna Hill on women in crime fiction. Before she finished she was joined by Lin Anderson, who had been expecting a green room, but who ended up ‘on stage’ so to speak. She in turn was joined by Arne Dahl and their chair Jacky Collins, who were also a little startled to find there was no privacy, so we could hear everything! But it was nice to listen to these authors discussing their writing, and I will now forever think of bad weather, or good weather, or any other weather, as characters in their books. And I didn’t know that so many small aeroplanes from the Nordic countries crash in the Cairngorms…

After we learned to exercise care in the non-existent green room it was time for Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen to talk. Daughter and I puzzled over his accent to the extent that we didn’t hear all he had to say. Sorry. The last session of the day gave us three Scottish-based translators of Scandinavian crime fiction, Anne Bruce, Kari Dickson and Ian Giles discussing their work with Duncan Beattie. And I/we might have heard it ‘all’ before, but it was actually both fun and interesting. Swedes spend too much time in the staffroom talking about coffee, and sometimes a dead author is best. The Norwegians are dropping their funny letters to sell better abroad. You know, ø and the like.

And as we’d already ‘had our tea’, we didn’t join people in the Magnusson Arms for an informal chat afterwards. I’m sure it was good.

The Christmas Appeal

I don’t generally like the email/text message type of novel. They are hard to read. But here I was, with Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, all about the [sort of] appalling people in Lower Lockwood, who are hoping to raise money for the church roof by putting on a pantomime. And it’s great fun.

I recognise Janice from her photo in the book press, and gather she’s a big deal, but have not read anything by her before. This should find her many new fans.

The thing here is the way people ‘talk’ to each other in the group, WhatsApping and emailing, the way we all seem to these days. And we have all met these people in our own lives; the ones who boast of their wonderful achievements in a round-robin while being really quite awful, and the hard-working ones, and the others who flit between the two, wanting to stay on everyone’s good side, and the gossips who spill beans faster than you can pick them off the beanstalk.

After a while I started to dislike most of them. They are just too true.

Nestling in among the messages and the panto preparations is something else. Maybe a murder? How can you know who is a criminal, or who is merely eccentric? Will there be a dead body? Whose is it? Who dunnit?

Can it really be a merry Christmas with a corpse?

The Space Between Us

“There weren’t many Google hits for ‘telepathic octopus’.” How could you resist a book containing a sentence like that? Admittedly, you need to reach chapter 20, but that is easily done. Especially with a sci-fi novel that more or less reads itself. Just as it sort of jumped out at me in the bookshop. I knew I’d be all right with Doug Johnstone, and if he’d ventured into science fiction, rather than his usual crime, then that was probably a good idea too.

It was.

Not all novels feel deeply satisfying at the end of chapter one, but here four pages were enough to make me crave the rest of The Space Between Us. It’s nicely Scottish, too, starting near the water in Portobello, before reaching other parts of Scotland. The extraterrestrial creatures clearly knew where to come.

To continue with chapter 20 about care home teenager Lennox, “Now he was wanted for murder and kidnapping, sitting in a cheesy brown van with an old woman and a pregnant teacher, and getting psychic messages from a telepathic octopus.”

All three have suffered instant strokes after a meteor hits Edinburgh, but all three are miraculously recovered the next day. They set out to rescue the octopus-like creature in the news, because it’s what you do, isn’t it? And then the race is on, with seemingly everyone after them.

People could learn a thing or two from beings from elsewhere in space. And you don’t need to have super-human powers to succeed; being properly human can be enough.