Curtain Call - Anthony Quinn

Welcome to the Golden Age of Crime..... (Agatha Christie and all that, Penguin crime with green covers, heroines with names like Fliss, Bunty; heroes who were well informed and had names like Jolyon, Rupert), and the villains - ah! the villains!

Written only recently (pub. 2015) this is a great take on the genre.  Anthony Quinn makes sure that we know the era he is writing about.  Oswald Moseley;  King (not quite) Edward and Mrs Simpson are in the news, Crystal Palace has not yet burnt down, and homosexuality is a crime.  And in London, a serial killer is on the loose, and two women can identify him.  Dangerously, he saw them.

The key characters in the book are well drawn.  A married artist and his actress lover;  an unwilling prostitute;  a gay theatre critic and his straight male secretary will all have parts to play in this drama.  Other characters, though smaller in the scheme of things are well done too - there is a snivelling mother in there that I would gladly have slapped myself!  So when the artist sketches the face of the man the actress saw, it starts a chain of events that touch on everyone's lives.  And at least one of them is going to die because of it.

Edge of seat kind of read - Recommended.

Dirt Music - Tim Winton

As usual, before I write about a book I have enjoyed, I look at Amazon.  I don't need to read the 4 and 5 stars, they liked it, so I move straight down to the 1 stars, for an idea of why the reviewer didn't like it.  "Didn't like the non-use of speech marks" is an OK comment which I understand entirely although it never worries me.  But "no plot"?  That's an odd one, as there certainly is one in this book!

Georgie is 40, an ex-nurse, living with a successful commercial fisherman and his two sons in a small, rich town on the West coast of Australia.  Why?  Well, somehow that's where she ended up.  It isn't a love match - it is certainly driving her to drink.  She spends hours at night drinking vodka and surfing the net.  One night she sees someone down on the beach, and steps out to investigate, finding a truck and a friendly dog, which, it turns out, belong to a poacher - Luther Fox.  They meet, sex rears its ugly head, and well..... life takes a turn in the road for both of them.  At the same time, Georgie's mother dies, and on a trip to Perth for the funeral, she finds that none of her 3 sisters is really happy.  should she look for real happiness? 

Then things get worse, much worse.  Little secrets are starting to come out of the woodwork, and what seemed like a tale of unhappy families all round, now turns into a mystery and a thriller.  When Fox disappears, Georgie takes the decision to stick with Jim and get on with her own life....but it may not work out that way.

I must say I like Tim Winton.  Cloudstreet was the first of his I read, and so far it's the one I loved the best.  But Dirt Music comes a very close second.  If I say it's a love story, don't get me wrong.  It is, but it's about all sorts of love.  Love of parents long gone, love of siblings, love of yourself and love of strangers.  And, I think, from Winton, a love of his own country, Australia.

  

That wonderful detective Nero Wolfe

Rex Stout wrote 33 Nero Wolfe novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and  his death in 1975.  in the mid-2000s, someone was showing some episodes from a  US TV series over here in the UK, and I caught a few of them.  I really liked Timothy Hutton as Archie, Nero Wolfe's acerbic secretary, driver, and all round gofer matched against the man himself, Nero Wolfe, played by Maury Chaykin.

Nero Wolfe is a big man.  So big, in fact that his chair was specially made to fit his bulk, and most of this bulk seems to be because a) he has a private chef who uses a lot of cream and butter; b) Wolfe likes beer as well as good wine and drinks 3 bottles several times a day ( keeping account of his beer drinking by saving the bottle tops in  his desk drawer; and 3) exercise is an anathema to him.

He has two hobbies - growing orchids and solving crimes.  The crime solving brings in the cash, but I must say I think he might have a private income too, as a lot gets done for sometimes very little money and living in a rather nice brownstone in New York with staff and good food and wine and orchids must cost!

Wikipedia has two pages, one for Rex Stout the author, and one for Nero Wolfe; there is a website for Wolfe fans called The Wolfe Pack, and someone in Australia is making Nero Wolfe charm bracelets for sale on Etsy!

So how come I didn't know about Rex Stout and all those books?  The Red Box was one of those "found" books - second hand shop/house clearance warehouse/charity shop?  One of those anyway; and I have found, in my reading career, that any publication in the early Penguin Books crime series - always green covers - will be readable.  I'd never heard of Rex Stout, didn't know he was American and didn't connect him with the TV shows I had seen until I saw the words Nero, Wolfe and orchids.

The first book (Fer-de-Lance) was set at around the time it was written (mid 1930s), and although the series moves on through the years, apparently Nero and Archie don't age.  That's OK by me.  I may never read every one, but what a lovely surprise to find - all those books, a great hero (or not, as he is scathing when cross, and hardly ever leaves the house) and some clever thinking.  I did see a remark somewhere out there on the Internet that Stout is a cross between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.  I don't have any comment on that as I have never read either of them (GASP!) but I looking forward to more Rex Stout. 

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Not Forgetting the Whale - John Ironmonger

Sometimes you read a book with a tear, sometimes with a smile and some you throw across the room. This is the book I told you I was going to read in January - and look, we are only  five days in and I've done it!!

 

I finished this with a smile, even though it is a tale of dystopia - a city analyst who runs away from his job when he realises that a computer programme he invented is definitely showing him what he thought it would, but with disastrous results. The disaster could be an end-of-the-world scenario, and when he finds himself being given the kiss of life on a beach in Cornwall it may already have happened. And if it hasn't, it is going to. He isn't dead, he doesn't know why, but there must be a purpose here somewhere. Perhaps his purpose is to save the villagers from starvation? infection? what?  There are some dark moments in this book, but it isn't a dark tale. It is a heartwarming one, of how, if we are lucky, friends and neighbours just may help out when something is obviously going badly wrong. A clever and rather lighthearted telling of what might be. And of course .. not forgetting the whale.                                                                                                                                                                                       PS. Do please read the author's postscripts when you have finished... there are a few eye-openers there.

Mrs Mac Suggests - what to read in JANUARY

It's cold, you might even have snow.  So from my shelves I pulled a book with a deckchair, a seagull, and one of those telescopes that you put money in for a view on the cover.  Sort of Summery in fact.  My suggestion for you is therefore:

 a book with a seaside kind of cover

The book I mention is actually Not Forgetting The Whale by John Ironmonger which may be a little dystopian too.

Have a good time reading through 2017!

The Bucket - Allan Ahlberg

Now, sliding along to the turn of the year, I want to wish you Good Health and Happiness in 2017.

And to finish 2016 I bring you a little book which is full of joy, memories, laughter and tears.  The title is a nothing -The Bucket - but that bucket is full of all sorts!  This is less than a memoir, in fact it's sub-title is "memories of an inattentive childhood".   Exactly right.  At junior school he was a dreamer, inattentive as far as teachers were concerned, but obviously whilst not attending to them, he was already starting his writing career!   Ahlberg is a children's book author, most of them illustrated by his wife Janet Ahlberg, and much loved by many parents and children.  I didn't have them read to me (and in any case, as he is a similar age to me he wasn't writing when I was a small child) and in any case I am glad I found this book now.

Full of little memories of his childhood, short and long verses, embellished a little here and there, I defy anyone not to smile from time to time whilst reading this.  Some of the verse is taken from his books already published, some stories he tells you will have come from his children's books (and he marks them so that you know the source) but don;t let that bother you.  We obviously lived parallel lives because so many of his memories are carbon copies of mine - fear of the bacon slicer ..visiting cemeteries ......making slides after snow has fallen.  And about three quarters of the way through is a description in rhyme of playing football

"..................no nets, no posts, no lines alas
                   the only thing it had was grass"

Get the timbre right, read it out loud.  You may want to take up football afterwards.

 

I read the hardback.  It is an ideal gift size.  I see from Amazon reviews that this is not a good book to read on a kindle or similar - I think odd line illustrations and the verses don't do well on a machine.

The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

This author cannot put a foot wrong word wise for me.  Subject matter?  not always want you might like, but the words, the words......

This unchaptered novella, just broken up from time to time with an asterisk to denote a break was a strange, odd, cruel telling of Mary's view of her son; his miracles, his death and after.  For her he was just her lovely son.  That is until he left home and fell in with a crowd of men who wanted more.  He became someone else.  Stories drifted back to her about the lame walking and the dead rising, and at the wedding in Cana, the water into wine miracle is seen as something else altogether by her.

By the time the book was ended, I admired Mary greatly, disliked the disciples intensely, understood the point of view of Pontius Pilot, and thought about other teachers/leaders who got people to hang on their every word.  Chilling, brilliant.

Some readers have loved this book, others hated it because it was not as The Bible described..... but then the gospels were written some years after the death of the big man, and were very possibly embellished to instill wonder into those words.  If you think that blasphemy is a great sin, this may not be the read for you.  But as a different point of view it should be read.  And again, it's the words, the words.....