Present tense? It’s happening right now!
The other day I was browsing in a bookshop and picked up a crime novel that has been well reviewed. I opened it and it was written in the present tense. Back it went on the shelf. It was the same with the next one I looked at. Is it just me, or are more novels […]
Why don’t people close their curtains in crime dramas?
Time for some more crime fiction clichés. Last Saturday’s episode of Beck began with a gangster and his family narrowly escaping being shot. Later, at home at night, he is an easy target standing next to a picture window in a well-lit room and is picked off by a sniper. Surely closing the curtains or blind […]
Surprised by Agatha Christie
I have just read Agatha Christie’s autobiography. Two things surprised me. One was that she couldn’t remember anything about writing Peril at End House – one of her most ingenious and highly regarded novels. The other was that she was favourably inclined towards the death penalty. I wouldn’t have guessed that from her novels. She […]
Miss Marple: Proto-feminist? Scarcely, and yet . . .
I’ve been reading with great pleasure Virginia Nicholson’s excellent, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War. In a chapter on the stereotype of the spinster I was interested to come across this as an example: ‘Agatha Christie’s knitting detective Miss Marple incarnated the spinster sleuth.’ Last week I was reading The […]
Well, I’m back …
…and it’s been so long that I have almost forgotten how to blog. No sooner was I recovering from the car crash – plaster off and walking on crutches – than I caught swine flu -and so did my daughter. There have been other problems too which I can’t write about, because they involve someone […]