I’ve the Dalgleish series on Britbox (?) which does 4 James books, and Death Comes to Pemberley as a follow-on to Pride and Prejudice, but never read her.
And on Dervla McTiernan, I wish she’d give up on books based in the US and concentrate on Ireland and Australia.
Most definitely, beautiful writing, and, imo even more important, beautiful storytelling.
PD James’ best, by an absolute country mile, IMHO at least, is Innocent Blood. It doesn’t feature Adam Dalgliesh, who I always found rather dull as a lead character. It’s about a girl, Philippa, who was adopted at a youngish age by a wealthy academic sociologist and his wife, and on her 18th birthday sets out to find out who her birth parents are or were. The answer turns out to be rather different from what she expected. The main character is the girl, but there are two other characters whose psychology gets fully explored as well. It’s beautifully written and I re-read it every year or so, without getting tired of it. There’s one false step right at the end that is jarringly out of place and completely unnecessary; I wish she hadn’t written it, but she has, and at least it doesn’t spoil the whole book.
Most of the others are okay, but they pretty much all suffer from the usual fault of having a solution that’s ridiculously implausible.
Death Comes to Pemberley is terrible. She begins by trying to write in the style of the early 19th century, but about halfway through seems to have decided it was all too much trouble. I don’t think I made it to the end.
If you want to see a murder mystery that takes 19th century novels as a starting point, try Dickensian, a series of 11 or 12 parts that you can find if you look for it. If you know your Dickens it’s an absolute delight. The murder to be solved is that of Marley, the partner of Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol; the detective is Inspector Bucket from Bleak House; there’s a young Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and a host of others. It’s brilliantly done. I loved every minute.
For spy shenanigans in Europe, Eric Ambler novels and his reluctant players, can’t be beaten.
Greenmantle by John Buchan on British and German rivalries is also worth a read, although his racism wouldn’t pass muster these days.
I read a few of his a while ago. They have a very high reputation, but I didn’t find any of them absorbing. Just a question of taste, I guess.
In a completely different direction, I re-read three Elmore Leonard novels last week: Swag, Stick and Mr Majestyk. The first two feature a character named Ernest Stickley Jr, known universally as Stick, who’s been a car thief and done time for it. Mr Majestyk is different, a small-time melon farmer who’s being squeezed by some crooks and fights back. It was filmed with Charles Bronson.
They are all classic Elmore Leonard, tightly plotted, very inventive, full of action, and in the case of Swag and Stick, a lot of humour too. I enjoyed the re-read as much as I enjoyed the first read.
Dornford Yates, from the same era as Buchan, was much worse.
Berry and his mates were travelling through Spain when they encountered a swarthy local, so they lynched him. Yates had a bit of a reputation for DV.
And Sapper, who wrote the Bulldog Drummond books, made Yates look like a humanist.
Although Jack Reacher and Mike Hammer are, or were, much the same with their scant regard for the lives of people they took umbrage with. “Ooh, I don’t like the way he parts his hair. I’ll kill him”
Buchan became governor general of Canada in the 30s as Baron Tweedsmuir, and became the first GG to travel to the sundry north-western territories. Some of his books covered those experiences in fictional form, with one, Sick Heart River I think, having one of his London characters, Edward Leithen, travel there as a treatment for his TB. But his Richard Hannay and Dickson McCunn (Gorbals Diehards) books are more what he’s known for. I always rate The 39 Steps as a movie which diverges most from the original book. The titular surname, and the fact that there was a chase through Scotland, were pretty much the only constants.
There was a collection that came out in the 80s called Classic Thrillers, which I still have most of. The likes of the three I’ve mentioned, plus J B Priestley, Edgar Wallace, E Phillips Oppenheim, Sax Rohmer (Fu Manchu), Saki (Yates’s uncle).
I’m not sure that Saki wrote thrillers but he was a wry swine.
Late to the party on this cracker of a book but just finished “Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata and found it to be amusing, profound and thoroughly addictive. Apparently a best seller, especially in Japan, it charts the fortunes of a single Japanese woman in her mid thirties, and definitely ‘on the spectrum’, in her attempts to appear normal and deal with the judgements of her family and co-workers, which might sound a bit dour but I found it weird, witty and unlike anything else I’ve read. It’s also novella length, a definite plus for me at present.
I’m on a bit of an eBook run at the moment and was notified that David Downing has added to his Station series with Union Station.
John Russell and his German actress wife Effi Koener have ended in LA after escaping from the DDR in 1948 . Effi’s working in a TV sitcom but Russell doesn’t have a working visa. Stalin has just died and the couple are concerned that Beria is still after them. Russell is worried that his ancient communist connections will cause him to get deported, while a cast member on Effi’s show has fallen foul of the HUAC.
Still three-quarters of the book to go but you keep seeing how the HUAC has morphed into the GOP.
Halfway through this one and I’m absolutely hooked and have no idea how it will end.
There seems no reason for it to be set in the USA other than to appeal to that market.
Have you made a start on it yet, @Darli ?
I’m saving it for the weekend. Although am tempted to start tonight 
David Downing is very scornful of the right-wing elements in the USA…those obsessed with anything remotely caring or charitable.
As I’d mentioned, Russell and Effi return to Berlin for her film accolades and get caught up in the potential disintegration of the DDR until its suppression by the Soviets. The CIA order Russell to do their bidding or they’ll revoke his visa. Someone is trying to kill him and it’s not Beria’s lads. He uncovers some real dirt on the Yanks re the Nazi racial purity and eugenics laws.
Finished that this morning and back on the analogue media now…The Strip by Iain Ryan, set in Surfers in 1980 with a female NSW cop joining into a murder investigation on the border.
Just finished the Dervla McTiernan book and it was an excellent read. I didn’t anticipate how it would end and I do like stories that keep me guessing. Highly recommended.
As much as anything, it was about social media, online trolls, the power of the press, the influence that serious money can buy and the way our modern world operates.
Next up is a complete change of pace with a book about working the graveyard shift at a service station. Having done this job for a while in a previous life, I look forward to comparing the author’s experiences with my own.
OK so I’ve finished it and, tbh, I’m not really sure what I think. I’ll preface this by saying that Dervla is one of my favourite authors but this just didn’t feel like her.
It was very American, and had that contrived feeling I get from a lot of American modern fiction. I didn’t really like or care about any of the characters, they all felt one dimensional and the plot was predictable.
Overall it was OK but not a book I’d read again or recommend to others and I definitely hope it’s not a path she continues on.
I weakened under @OBITV’s advice and bought the Dervla book…$18 at KMart. I know she’s not an Aussie, but setting your books in the US is a massive sellout for me.
I get ■■■■■■ off enough when translations or subtitling are just for US. I hate it when the prosecutor is called the DA, not the juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate or the procurator, and police officers are given American ranks totally unrelated to the originating police force.
I’ve recently read The Strip by Iain Ryan. Set on the Gold Coast in 1980, it’s a thrill a minute book that makes the outrageous suggestion that 1980 cops in Queensland…and NSW less so…were completely and utterly corrupt. Peter Dutton should sue.
And The Concierge by Abby Corson, a Manchester-born Melbourne resident who writes for the major papers here as a travel writer. This is set in the Yorkshire Dales and written from the viewpoint of the concierge of a luxury hotel, 73-year-old Hector Harrow. Hotel’s been taken over by an obnoxious American and a murder’s happened during a wedding.
Can’t say I liked the denouement though. Bit contrived, but it’s very readable.
Now onto another Sarah Bailey, Body of Lies with Gemma Woodstock as the detective sergeant on maternity leave. Just started. 470 pages, so might take a while, and I’m due for another Dymocks visit tomorrow.
Just borrowed this from Libby. Really looking forward to it!
This turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.
Although entertaining and funny in places (particularly for anybody who has done this job), I thought it was overly long and had a bad habit of digressing from the subject matter.
If you were thinking of giving it a go, be warned that the writing style is the most purple of prose to the point that it feels like the author is just showing off his linguistic chops.
Sarah Bailey’s Body of Lies is one of those books where it takes a little while to climb up the hill until you start freewheeling down again. The second half of the book goes a million miles an hour.
Now onto Radiant Heat by Sarah-Jane Collins, an Australian writer who now lives in New York, and that fact irritates me. She uses too many American turns of phrase in a very Australian setting.
It’s based on an event like the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009. Alison is caught in her bathroom protected by a blanket as the fire engulfs everything around her, but she, and the house, survive. On leaving the house, she finds a strange car in the driveway with a dead woman in the driver’s seat, but she finds a piece of paper in the woman’s wallet with her own name and address inside it. Alison is back in her home town in Victoria after escaping from an abusive relationship in Cairns, and it seems the dead woman was in a subsequent relationship with the same man.
Right…that’s the setup, but what irritated me was the use of kilometers, vise, Fahrenheit temperatures and the habit of omitting the “and” in numbers over 100…a hundred five rather than a hundred and five. There were a few more that pricked me.
Still, it’s well written other than that, and I have half the book to go. Alison seems to be one of those people who simply can’t make decisions that benefit her.
Is that Gemma Woodstock? I just can’t like her as a character…spend most of the book wanting to slap her
It is. I know what you mean, she can be a tad obstinate and contrary.
Alison in Radiant Heat can be a bit like that.
Finished that now, with only one more addition to the outrage library. She needs to know that, where in UK, you can use -ise or -ize, in the US, you can only use -ize, but in Australia, -ize is not an option. I think the UK choice is because the Times opted for one while the Oxford Dictionary opted for the other, so they’ve left it a choice.
Maybe I should email her and tell her to set her keyboard, spell-checker etc to Australian English, not US English. They’re not the same.
But apart from all that, it’s a good read with one requisite evil bastard.
Onto “Gone” by Glenna Thompson now.
Buggered if I can find “Gone”. Must have put it down somewhere.
Just picked up Garry Disher’s new book, Sanctuary, yesterday.
Grace is a thief, who’s just run across someone from her past, who Grace thinks wants to kill her, so she goes on the run. She ends in the Adelaide Hills where she finds an antiques and collectibles shop looking for an assistant…but Erin, who runs the shop, is also hiding from an extremely abusive ex-husband (he’s an absolute shocker).
Rattling good yarn, in the true Disher mould.
Thanks, I didn’t realise he had a new one out. Duly ordered!