The Affair of the Mutilated Mink - James Anderson

The Earl of Burford can't believe his luck; Rex Ransom, his favourite star from the 'talkies', and his hot-shot producer, Haggermeir, want to film their next feature at Alderley, the family's seventeenth-century country estate. Somewhat less enthusiastic is the Countess, who suddenly finds herself hosting an impromptu house party for the incoming Hollywood crowd. It's almost too much for poor Merryweather, the family's imperturbable butler, to cope with. And that's before there's a murder in the dead of night - By morning Inspector Wilkins of the Westshire Constabulary is cast in the unlikely role of hero, as he tiptoes through the evidence and endeavours to unravel the slightly batty, thoroughly baffling mystery - and work out just what a mutilated mink coat has to do with anything. 

Another enjoyable visit to Alderley and the unfortunate Earl of Burford, who is lovely but seems to attract trouble! The characterisation in this, the second of the series, is more confident, and the mystery itself is full of twists and turns. Spiffing fun! :o)

The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy - James Anderson

 

The theft of the diamond necklace and the antique pistols might all be explained, but the body in the lake - that was a puzzle. "Don't expect me to solve anything," Inspector Wilkins announced modestly when he arrived to sort out the unpleasantness. And at a house party that included English aristocracy, foreign agents in disguise, a ravishing baroness, a daring jewel thief, a Texas millionaire, and of course, the imperturbable butler, it was going to take some intricate sleuthing to uncover who killed whom and why...

The cover image is a good clue to the contents of this fun book - it's a return to the 1930s, with war looming, but people still having "top hole" fun in the country house of an English earl - a house which comes complete with a secret passage. The author has his tongue firmly in his cheek, but has written an affectionate tribute to Christie, Sayers et al and he has constructed a convoluted plot worthy of Christie at her peak. Some of the characterisation is weaker than the others, but again, I think that is very Christie-esque - as is Wilkins' repetition of "not sanguine, not sanguine at all".

An enjoyable mystery, and I'm looking forward to the other two in the series.

The Winter Garden Mystery - Carola Dunn

So who put the body in with the spring bulbs? The merest hint of spring has arrived in Cheshire, and so has young reporter Daisy Dalrymple. The feisty flapper’s visit is a breath of fresh air for gloomy Occles Hall. But while photographing the rather barren grounds, Daisy spots that someone’s been digging among the first green shoots – and much to her horror unearths the corpse of missing parlour maid Grace Moss. So begins an extraordinary adventure, as first the dead woman’s shocking secret is revealed and then Daisy swiftly realizes she needs to catch the killer before she herself is left pushing up the daisies . . .

This spiffing mystery harks back to the Golden Age of crime fiction, with nods to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and even P G Wodehouse. It is a nice, easy read, without jarring anachronisms and vocabulary - although I'm sure Christie never used "spiffing" quite as much! The plot and motivations are plausible, and the denouement is done in the classic style.

Excellent froth for a lazy day!

Crippen - John Boyne

If you are going to write a novel about such a well known event you can't rely on dramatic tension - after all, everyone knows the outcome. To make the narrative work, the writer has to make his or her readers involved in the lives of the characters, to believe in them, and to understand them.

Unfortunately, Boyne's characters are stock stereotypes - the upright captain, the maverick seaman, the snobby pleb married to money - and he has not heard of the maxim "show, don't tell". And let's not forget the anachronistic behaviours and vocabulary ... a personal bugbear of mine in historical fiction! Perhaps I wasn't reading the same novel as the other reviewers on Amazon but truly, this was not well done at all. I have eclectic tastes, and will cheerfully read "lightweight" stuff as well as "literature" as long as either are good - and this wasn't.

What could have been an interesting story was rendered dull and unimaginative. Boyne should be locked in a room with Beryl Bainbridge's historical fictions Every Man for Himself and The Birthday Boys and not allowed out until he realises that that is how it should be done when you're telling a story whose ending is already known.

The Crossing - Kathy Watson

In August 1875 Captain Matthew Webb became the first man to swim the English Channel. Feted and adored, praised and imitated, for a while he was the most famous man in Britain and his gallant 22-hour endeavour helped to make swimming the popular sport it is today. It was to be both the highlight of his life and the start of his ruin.

This was an interesting and well written biography of the man whose name I first knew from matchboxes. This book explains how - and why - Webb became known as "England's Glory". It is a sympathetic portrait, written by a swimmer, but I think Webb would have been easy to like - modest, unassuming, hardworking. He was not flashy, and he wasn't a speedy swimmer - he preferred breaststroke to the new crawl style strokes - but he was strong, dogged and determined. I can empathise with that! His epic swim was fuelled by beer, brandy and sandwiches - the cutting edge of sports nutrition!

Hero is perhaps an overused word these days, but I think Captain Webb was a true one - whilst serving as second mate on the Cunard Line ship Russia, travelling from New York to Liverpool, he attempted to rescue a man overboard by diving into the sea in the mid-Atlantic. The man was never found, and Webb nearly lost his own life.

Webb drowned trying to swim the Whirlpool Rapids in the Niagara River.

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett

 

The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny.

This book is unalloyed delight from start to finish. It's a slight read - barely longer than a long short story - but it packs so much fun, philosophy and character observation within its pages a lesser author could have made it into a doorstop sized novel.

Bennett's main argument is about the transformative power of books. An argument that I did not need convincing of in the slightest, having lived my life through the written word since babyhood - thank you parents :o) He makes the argument far more wittily than anyone else on the planet (probably) could and although very erudite, never patronises his readers.

I wonder if HM the Queen is a reader? I'm not sure she would be - I can see her dipping into Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, possibly evena  bit of Anitas Shreve and Brookner, but not Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureshi.

Spilling The Beans - Clarissa Dickson Wright

Clarissa was born into wealth and privilege, as a child, shooting and hunting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper. Her mother was an Australian heiress, her father was a brilliant surgeon to the Royal family. But he was also a tyrannical and violent drunk who used to beat her and force her to eat carrots with slugs still clinging to them. Clarissa was determined and clever, though, and her ambition led her to a career in the law. At the age of 21, she was the youngest ever woman to be called to the Bar.

Disaster struck when her adored mother died suddenly. It was to lead to a mind-numbing decade of wild over-indulgence. Rich from her inheritance, in the end Clarissa partied away her entire fortune. It was a long, hard road to recovery along which Clarissa finally faced her demons and turned to the one thing that had always brought her joy - cooking. Now at last she has found success, sobriety and peace.
With the stark honesty and the brilliant wit we love her for, Clarissa recounts the tale of a life lived to extremes. A vivid and funny story, it is as moving as it is a cracking good read.

I think if I ever met Clarissa Dickson Wright in person, we might not get on - I'm a working class vegetarian atheist who hates hunting with a passion - but this is a very good read, and I really warmed to her. Her life has certainly been eventful and through it all, she's managed to keep many of her friends - so possibly I'm doing her a disservice. 

The decline into alcoholism is well written - I think to use the jargon, Dickson Wright was a "high functioning" addict and to drink away quite so much money is some sort of an achievement... and appears to be frank and honest. I do wonder which MP she had sex with behind the Speaker's chair in her pre-sobriety days...

Save Karyn - Karyn Bosnak

 

Drowning in $20,000 of credit card debt, shopaholic Karyn Bosnak asked strangers for money online -- and it worked!
What would you do if you owed $20,000? Would you: A) not tell your parents? B) start your own website that asked for money without apology? or C) stop coloring your hair, getting pedicures, and buying Gucci? If you were Karyn Bosnak, you'd do all three.Karyn received e-mails from people all over the world, either confessing their own debt-ridden lives, or criticizing hers. But after four months of Internet panhandling and selling her prized possessions on eBay, her debt was gone!
In Save Karyn: One Shopaholic's Journey to Debt and Back, Karyn details the bumpy road her financial -- and personal -- life has traveled to get her where she is today: happy, grateful, and completely debt-free. In this charming cautionary tale, Karyn chronicles her glamorous rise, her embarrassing fall, and how the kindness of strangers in cyberia really can make a difference.

When I first heard about this on the news, I was sceptical, and a little doubtful as to why people would want to help someone who freely admitted she'd spent the money on ... well, nothing.

And then I read this, and I saw why. Karyn is honest, funny, sweet - and I could identify so much with how and why she spent the money. I've been a bit ... silly... with plastic in the past, and I defy anyone to read this and to be judgemental.

I got out of debt too, eventually, but I'll never have a great credit rating. I'm envious that Karyn managed to do it with so much more grace and humour but I was rooting for her all the way.

Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby

Well, I'm snuffling with a cold here, and it's horrible stitching and sneezing - methinks I'll need to wash my current WIPs ... so I've been doing some more reading. This one was Nick Hornby's newest, Juliet, Naked.

Product Description (from Amazon)
Nick Hornby returns to his roots - music and messy relationships - in this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike of his latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changing consequences for all three. Nick Hornby uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we so often let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeed life evaporate. And he comes to some surprisingly optimistic conclusions.

Another Hornby book where the men are always slightly inadequate - and the women who settle for that. And what's wrong with that? It's certainly a better book than his last three, and there were some laugh out loud moments - Gooleness, where Annie and Duncan live is so lacking in culture "it didn't even have a Waterstone's" - yes, I definitely know places like that ...

Being a forty something living with a person who can be obsessive, this book probably resonated more with me than it would with people who live busier or more glamorous lives ;o) And the sadness that overlaid the book was that wistful sadness that comes with the eternal optimism that things will get better ... which appeals to the Pollyanna in me...

My only criticism is about one of the sub plots - I can see it working in a film version, but describing Northern Soul moves on paper didn't really work.

Giotto's Hand - Iain Pears

As well as crafting, my other main passion is reading. I used to review on my Livejournal every book I read, didn't do it last year, and have just begun again. As I know a lot of my stitching bloggy friends are also readers, I thought I would post the reviews here too. I'm quite active on a number of book sites (including Bookcrossing, Bookmooch, ReadItSwapIt and GreenMetropolis) and I'm happy to give out my IDs if you drop me an email.

Product Description (from Amazon)

Witty and clever art history-mystery featuring Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the bestselling masterpiece 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'. General Bottando of Rome's Art Theft Squad is in trouble: his theory that a single master criminal, dubbed 'Giotto', is behind a string of major art thefts has aroused the scorn of his arch enemy and rival, the bureaucrat Corrado Argan. He needs a result, and the confession of a dying woman may just provide the vital clue. In pursuit of the elusive Giotto, Bottando's colleague, Flavia di Stefano, sets off hotfoot for Florence, and English art dealer Jonathan Argyll is dispatched to London and then on to rural Norfolk -- only to discover a body and a mystery which could lead to the greatest art find of his career!

This was an enjoyable and amusing "whodunnit" which harked back to the Golden Age of crime novels, with its setting in a Miss Marple-ish village where the local Lady of the Manor opens the Village Fete and the villagers are all related to one another...

Looking at Bookcrossing, I have read this book before, but I couldn't remember it ... so it's not an amazing book, but it is one that adequately passes the time. I realised the perpetrator quite early one, because they appear in a later book in this series, which I do remember ... I think!