England
Ngaio Marsh: Swing, Brother, Swing (aka A Wreath for Rivera)
Blurb: Lord Pastern and Baggot is a classic English eccentric, given to passionate, peculiar enthusiasms. His latest: drumming in a jazz band. His wife is not amused, and even less so when her daughter falls hard for Carlos Rivera, the band’s sleazy accordion player. Aside from the young woman, nobody likes Rivera very much, so […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Death at the Bar
Well, as it turns out, I can’t leave well alone with just two books by Ngaio Marsh in a row, so here we go … As I revisited Overture to Death — the book immediately following Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie — last year as part of the Appointment with Agatha […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Artists in Crime
Blurb: One of Ngaio Marsh’s most famous murder mysteries, which introduces Inspector Alleyn to his future wife, the irrepressible Agatha Troy. It started as a student exercise, the knife under the drape, the model’s pose chalked in place. But before Agatha Troy, artist and instructor, returns to the class, the pose has been reenacted in […]
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Vladimir Nabokov: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Hoo boy. This starts out really nicely, as the story of two Russian half brothers growing up remote from each other (even though in the same home), from which beginning we segue more or less seamlessly into the surviving younger brother’s quest for the life and identity of his elder sibling, who under the English […]
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Ann Cleeves: The Long Call
The first of Cleeves’s Two Rivers books, and while I loved the atmosphere and (generally) the writing as such, the solution was rather a letdown — basically this is yet another mystery harping on corrupt powerful stale pale males. Don’t get me wrong, the particular kind of corruption at stake here, as well as the […]
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Susanna Gregory: A Bone of Contention
Matthew Bartholomew mystery #3, and by this time it’s fair to say that Gregory had found her groove. The plot still comes across as mighty complex, but it’s more tightly-constructed than in the first two books — also, I’ve learned (at last) not to get too caught up in individual incidents but, for all their […]
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D.E. Stevenson: Miss Buncle’s Book
Next to the Golden Age mystery writers, another group of seemingly long-forgotten writers who seem to be experiencing a mini-renaissance in recent yeas are the women writers of the interwar years — Winifred Holtby, Angela Thirkell, Stella Gibbons, Dorothy Whipple, Mollie Panter-Downes, Miss Read, and, well, D.E. Stevenson are all seeing a renaissance of their […]
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Elizabeth Lemarchand: Death of an Old Girl
Lemarchand was a contemporary of Ellis Peters and Catherine Aird and, like them, a representative of the “Silver Age” of crime fiction (i.e., the post-WWII decades, roughly from the 1950s-60s to the end of the 1970s / beginning of the 1980s). Death of an Old Girl is the first book of Lemarchand’s Pollard and Toye […]
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Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Virginia Woolf: Orlando
As I said elsewhere, given the fact that Virginia Woolf was a 2021 (M)DWS author in residence, too, as part of my exploration of the life and work of Vita Sackville-West’s life and work I decided to circle back to Woolf; or rather, to the link between the two writers, which far exceeds their almost […]
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Vita Sackville-West: Seducers in Ecuador & The Heir
Two novellas from 1922 (The Heir) and 1924 (Seducers in Ecuador) that both deal with transformative experiences — and I suppose that is why they are typically published together –; however, in tone and setting they couldn’t be any more different. Seducers in Ecuador was the first piece of fiction writing by Vita Sackville-West published […]
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Vita Sackville-West: All Passion Spent
The lovely, understated and gently ironic story of a woman who has had to lead a life opposite to the one that she wanted to live — that of an artist — for over 60 years, and who is at last liberated from the forces of social and family convention by the death of her […]
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Vita Sackville-West, Knole and Sissinghurst
Coming to the end of the first quarter of the year, one of the (M)DWS authors in residence was Vita Sackville-West — I’m sorry I didn’t manage to squeeze in more books by James Baldwin too, but I have every intention of making up for that during the rest of the year. Anyway, I’m glad […]
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Kate Ellis: The Armada Boy
Blurb: “Archaeologist Neil Watson did not expect to find the body of American veteran Norman Openheim in the ruins of the old chantry chapel. He turns to his old student friend, Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson, for help. Ironically, both men are looking at an invading force — Wes the WWII Yanks and Neil a group […]
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Margot Bennett: The Man Who Didn’t Fly
Blurb: Four men had arranged to fly to Dublin. When their aeroplane descended as a fireball into the Irish Sea, only three of them were on board. With the identities of the passengers lost beneath the waves, a tense and perplexing investigation begins to determine the living from the dead, with scarce evidence to follow […]
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Neil Richards, Matthew Costello: Mydworth Mysteries 1-3: A Short in the Dark / A Little Night Murder / London Calling!
Blurb: This compilation contains episodes 1-3: A Shot in the Dark Sussex, England, 1929. Mydworth is a sleepy English market town just 50 miles from London. But things are about to liven up there considerably, when young Sir Harry Mortimer returns home from his government posting in Cairo, with his unconventional American wife — Kat […]
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Neil Richards, Matthew Costello: Cherringham 4-6: Thick as Thieves / Last Train to London / The Curse of Mabb’s Farm
Blurb: Cherringham is a serial novel à la Charles Dickens, with a new mystery thriller released each month. Set in the sleepy English village of Cherringham, the detective series brings together an unlikely sleuthing duo: English web designer Sarah and American ex-cop Jack. Jack’s a retired ex-cop from New York, seeking the simple life in […]
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Helena Marchmont: Bunburry 4-6: Death of a Ladies’ Man / Drop Dead, Gorgeous / Murder in High Places
Blurb: Miss Marple meets Oscar Wilde in this new series of cosy mysteries set in the picturesque Cotswolds village of Bunburry. Here, fudge-making and quaffing real ale in the local pub are matched by an undercurrent of passion, jealousy, hatred and murder – laced with a welcome dose of humour. This compilation contains episodes 4 […]
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Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s
Blurb: Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and […]
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Agatha Christie: A Deadly Affair
Shout-out to WhiskeyintheJar for getting here first! So, HarperCollins’s latest ploy in cashing in on Christie’s undying fame seems to be to repackage her short stories roughly along seasonal lines: to date, we’ve had summer / vacations, Halloween / supernatural, Christmas / winter … and now Valentine’s Day / love and romance as a subtext. […]
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