The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
For some reason I had taken it for granted that Bill Bryson wasn’t my kind of writer. (Too popular, perhaps? And to anyone who accuses me of intellectual snobbery, I have only this to say: THE DA VINCI CODE). But then I caught him reading from THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID on […]
Old crime writers don’t die . . .
. . . they just lose the plot. Which I am afraid is what has happened in the case of a recent novel by a writer I have often enjoyed – and have very much admired – in the past. I was well into the book, when I stopped and put it down a sigh. […]
Short Story Competition
New writers out there might be interested in the Mystery Women’s short story. It’s open to unpublished writers only and the closing date is 15 March. Go to the Mystery Women’s web-site at Mystery Women.freeserve.co.uk for further details.There’ll be a proper blog later in the week. Bye for now.
Historical novels
I am not generally a fan of historical novels, largely I think because I am an historian myself. I prefer the line between fact and fiction to be clear-cut. I really can scarcely bear to read novels set in my own period, the nineteenth century, because they so rarely seem to ring true. The way […]
Maidens’ Trip
I have been on the look-out for this book by Emma Smith for a while, even since I learned that it was about the war service of young women on the canals during the Second War War, and had recently been re-issued. It’s an intriguing subject. This was her first book, published in 1948, when […]
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are […]
Snow
After I wrote about SICK HEART RIVER in last week’s blog, I got to thinking about other works of fiction that deal with the intense cold, not least because we’ve had a bit of that ourselves and have been snowed in. I realised that some of the most memorable books I’ve read have dealt with […]
John Buchan and others
A friend who reads my blog asked me, ‘How do you manage to read so much?’ I don’t read nearly as much as I have done at some periods of my life, but still . . . ten minutes sometimes over an early morning cup of tea, half an hour over lunch, always at bed-time, […]
The Pattern in the Carpet
Margaret Drabble’s book is subtitled A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH JIGSAWS. It is partly a history of jigsaws (a little too much of this for me) and partly a memoir, focusing on her Aunt Phyl with whom she shared a love of jigsaws. Aunt Phyl was a key person in Drabble’s childhood. Drabble remarks that it […]