Badelynge

Meany

2012-01-30T14:45:00.003Z

I would echo another reader's opinion that Peazy Monellon's writing does bring to mind early Stephen King. Meany has that dark playfulness that King was so adept at. A young girl called Jenny and her cohort of brothers and sisters (mostly sisters) are growing up on a farm under the increasingly cruel rule of their dictatorial father. The place is also awash with spooks. For a first book this is pretty well written though at times I felt it did get a little tangled up in the different angles and ideas thrown up by the narrative. One of the farmhands provides confessional interludes that mainly injects frequent doses of foreshadowing into the read. The author doesn't pull any punches with the horror angle, throwing a fairly disturbing scene into the story in the first few chapters. I mostly enjoyed the sequences from the POV of the younger kids; Jenny's first encounter with benevolent spook Emma being one of the highlights. Other bits don't quite work as well; a surreal overly detailed game of Mouse Trap is a pretty audacious inclusion though it pretty much swamps the creepiness and tension with the nostalgia of children's games. It's not a long read, the generously spaced bold typeset makes the pages fly by. Basically a nicely written début.
Review copy from Goodreads giveaway.

The Betrayal of Trust

2012-01-24T15:11:00.008Z

The sixth book from Susan Hill to feature the inhabitants of Lafferton. The two main characters are siblings Dr Cat Deerbon and top cop DCS Simon Serrailler. The plots and themes explored usually feature the family's ongoing story and topics and situations thrown up by the pair's respective professions; health or lack of it, crime in society - all sensitively addressed in Hill's brilliant prose and her thoughtful insights into human emotions. Crime fiction? Well yeah, but not really comparable to much of the genre's staples and conventions.
In this one flooding in Lafferton has unearthed the bones of a young girl missing for 16 years, a mystery from the past that caused a big splash on the national consciousness. But alongside them are the bones of another young woman whose disappearance contrastingly caused not even a ripple. Serrailler is tasked with the cold case but is hampered by severe budget restrictions and he's just met the love of his life. Cat Deerbon deals with financial problems directing the local hospice, calling on the expertise of a newcomer to the town who is setting up a new care home for Alzheimer sufferers. In her general surgery she is consulted by a woman called Jocelyn with the early symptoms of Motor Neurone Disease, which leads to the thorny subject of assisted suicide. I think Hill tackles the subject as objectively as possible, though of course her characters are more swept along with the emotions of the terrible choices they face. Age, mortality, memory, lives lived and lives cut short, all played out in the setting of a Cathedral town and tied together with the lines of synchronicity within a cold case murder inquiry. I would add the advisory that this one is probably going to have more resonance with older readers or folk who have had their lives touched by terminal illness.

Nameless

2011-12-12T17:38:00.007Z

The Snatch is a very early Bill Pronzini novel and the very first of his long running Nameless Detective series. And it's a very decent beginning. Pronzini may have been just starting out on his longer form career but he'd already gone some way to developing his skills through his short stories. Don't be fooled by the pedestrian seeming set up to the plot, what looks like a routine kidnapping and ransom soon manages to throw a few curve balls. It's all cleanly written and constructed, playing to its pulp noir influences, the most commendable aspect being the character development of our unconventional hero. He's a very engaging character, a devotee to the pulps himself which engenders a neat homage within homage dynamic that blurs the boundaries between Pronzini himself and his nameless protagonist. Within the first few pages, Nameless has already compared someone to Doc Savage and greater props to the author for allowing an image of Lester Leith, Erle Stanley Gardener's crafty pulp creation, to jolt Nameless from a blue funk onto a hotter trail. Nameless's obsession with the pulps is a major aspect of the series, in this first book it highlights the cracks in his already crumbling and damaged relationship with his current girlfriend. Her judgement being," I want a man. Not a stubborn and self-deluding adolescent trying to live the life of a fictional hero." This isn't just fan fiction though, Pronzini just happens to be a very fine storyteller, mastering the art of hard-boiled dialogue and first person stream of consciousness that wouldn't sit uncomfortably next to the 30's pulp maestros both he and Nameless idolises.

Jacinto's Remnant

2011-12-02T16:23:00.011Z

Jacinto's Remnant is the second book in the Gears of War series following on directly after the events portrayed in Gears of War 2 the popular Xbox 360 game. The humans of Sera have destroyed their last major stronghold Jacinto in a desperate attempt to flood the underground lair of the Locust. The survivors flee in search of a new refuge, hoping that the monsters from below have been all but wiped out. The book documents the Gears and the civilians of Jacinto scouting for a new island home - an old CoG Naval Base at Vectes. Like the first book it periodically looks back at an earlier historic moment in the conflict. This time it shines a light onto the dark days when Prescott authorises Hammer Strikes to obliterate all but one human enclave on the planet of Sera. The CoG government has come to the conclusion that they are doomed - unless they do the unthinkable. It still seems unthinkable to me, even knowing that saving a few is better than saving none, to press a button and wipe out 99% of your own people seems like the sort of scenario that sits more comfortably among the back story of a computer game, but in a book it has to pass closer scrutiny and even though I love Gears I tend to think ordered societies would be much more likely to go down fighting rather than resort , even in desperation, to such tactics. Mores and attitudes are very much to the fore within these books, with many of the characters, particularly Hoffman and Mataki, struggling to shift perspectives when society shifts to and from a war footing and to and from fighting a completely different and unfathomable monstrous species to fighting their own, sometimes hardly less monstrous and unfathomable.
I get the feeling Traviss really has a soft spot for Hoffman and that some of the careless characterisation from the game doesn't sit well with her. Hoffman's decision to leave Fenix, a decorated war hero, to die in an abandoned prison, overrun with Locust, being the standout bump in the road. Following on from Gears 2 the book also has to deal with the aftermath of Dom Santiago finding his long lost wife and the terrible choice he had to make. It's perhaps the key note emotional event from the sometimes quite thin plotting that the game achieved and Karen Traviss does well in painting a more detailed account of the consequences to Dom and those around him.
For a book standing squarely in the military sci-fi genre there's a severe shortage of actual action, no large Aspho Fields style battles, just some fairly routine skirmishes. It wasn't a problem for me, I enjoyed the post apocalyptic scenario focusing on rebooting society from a bare remnant. Despite the lack of action there's still plenty of drama, spot on characterisation, a sort of cosiness that come from spending time with well loved and time worn Gears and mystery lurking in the dark and the deeps.

Gears of War - Aspho Fields

2011-09-21T16:18:00.008+01:00

Karen Traviss does a great job of bringing some Gears of War goodness to those of us who like to relax our trigger fingers once in a while. Traviss admits herself that she's worked on a lot of stuff in her day, tie-ins and the like and that not all of the varied franchises and projects have been particularly worthy. But Gears is different. She thinks it's special. I'm inclined to agree. Working on something you really love rather than it just being the latest meal ticket has really brought out the best in the writer, both in these books and her hands on work with the latest Gears game.
This one tells the untold Story of the battle for Aspho Fields. A battle we've heard about in the game that takes place several years before Emergence Day when the humans of Sera are still locked in a world war over Imulsion that has lasted the best part of a century. At this time they are unaware that another race called the Locust are biding their time beneath their feet, waiting for a good time to pop out and call 'Time' on human Seran history. The Cogs have discovered that the other power block are developing a weapon of mass destruction called The Hammer of Dawn at a research base at Aspho Point. Now at this stage Gears fans will most likely be grumbling that a Gears book without Locust is not something they signed up for. Traviss cleverly frames the pre-Emergence Day sequences with a story set between games 1 and 2, just after the deployment of the Light Mass Bomb. The Cogs are consolidating as best they can and are cautiously hopeful that the worst of the Locust threat has been dealt with. A face from the past in the form of a veteran female Gear called Bernie brings the past back to the surface. Dom Santiago wants to know the full story of the death of his brother Carlos at Aspho Fields. Marcus and Bernie were the only witnesses and neither are keen to talk about it. During an escort mission all the main characters get a chance to reflect and more of the story of the friendship of the brothers and Marcus gets revealed along with a lot of other stuff involving the feud between Hoffman and Fenix. These books can't tell the big story - that is for the games to tell, instead they tell the other stories that the games don't have time or the opportunity to tell. It's very well written with a great feel for the characters. All the dialogue just feels right, so much so that you can't help hearing the voice acted tones from the game; Fenix's tortured gravel, Cole's booming bonhomie, Baird's verbal sniping, Dom's quiet dignity, Hoffman's caricatured parade ground bark. And Traviss's new female characters fit in fine. The military attitudes are very believable. It's infantry soldiering with thoughtful introspection in a world that has become so desperate that the values of humanity are having to be sacrificed. Sure it still knows it's an actioner filled with chunky guys, chunky guns and chunky aliens... getting chunked, but it doesn't mean it has to be empty between the ears.
Even though fans of the game will get the most from this book I'm convinced that folks who enjoy gritty military sci-fi will still enjoy themselves. That was violent, reckless... and necessary! Well done.

Harry remembered

2011-09-20T15:53:00.003+01:00

Debbie is holding a special giveaway competition to commemorate the memory of our special friend Harry today. See her blog for details Shagrat's Attic.

Arctic Ghost Story

2011-09-14T19:56:00.004+01:00

Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is a chillingly accomplished ghost story that takes place in the dark isolation of a snowbound base-camp of a small but ambitious scientific expedition, as the long dark night of an Arctic Winter sets in. The year is 1937. Unbeknown to the youthful group, their new home already has a black history and a reputation that makes the hardened seamen and trappers of the region reluctant to even speak of it.
Paver's love of the Arctic, first hand knowledge and experience of the region shine through the narrative. When A.C.Doyle wrote classic's like The Captain Of The Polestar, his experiences on Arctic Whalers' fueled the authentic tone and similarly Algernon Blackwood's tales of isolation and fear drew on his extensive trekking through the various wild places. There is an art to writing a good ghost story and one of the absolutes is in the appearance of authenticity. If the reader can't forget that the story is a fiction then the story loses its power. Paver certainly succeeds in that regard. Jack is well realised character, that I had no problem investing my interest in along with his horrific travails.
The narrative is in the form of a journal by the expedition's newest member and here again Paver excels in the form, using a journal's natural economy to provide ambiguity when needed but also to ride closely the mental battle taking place as our faithful scribe Jack details the occurrences. I've read other similar types of story that have been ridiculously large tomes, supposedly the diary of a few weeks stretched out to 700 page monstrosities, as if the narrator could possibly do the work that a professional author would have to chain themselves to the desk to achieve. There is a sort of infectious anxiety that slowly builds as the days slowly advance and the ill-fated expedition goes from one set back to the next. The ambiguity I mentioned has nothing to do with questions of whether the haunting is real or imagined - take it from me - the place is Haunted as Hell, no rather I ascribe it to the visual descriptions of the more visceral episodes. The scenes are painted with as few strokes as possible, so that in true classic style the reader has room to draw on their own nightmare imagery.
You could easily read Dark Matter in one sitting, though I spread it out over four. This is the sort of book you don't see too often these days, indeed you might be fooled into thinking it was written contemporaneously. Recommended.

Chasing chickens

2011-09-03T12:36:00.001+01:00

Camera Critters

"Mummy look... look, the chickens are chasing me," the little girl shrieked hopefully.
The chickens, doing nothing that even remotely resembled pursuing small female humans, pondered instead the likelihood that feeding time would be sooner rather than later.

The God of the Hive

2011-09-02T15:42:00.008+01:00

The God of the Hive follows on directly from events in The Language of Bees and is the 10th book to feature Mary Russell. Mary and Sherlock are separated again and on the run. At first assessment you think of Reichenbach, and there are certainly deliberate similarities but the suspense gets left behind too often. Laurie R. King chooses instead to tell a more character driven story, examining Russell's new relationship with the recently discovered granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes. It's easy to forget that the whole business began as a search for the girl's missing mother. King has covered similar ground to this in her Kate Martinelli detective series.
The die hard Sherlockian in me can't read the start of a chapter beginning with the words 'Chief Inspector Lestrade' without at least a slight twitch of my arm muscles (perhaps to punch the air) even if this Lestrade is a younger chip off the original block. A lengthy interlude in the wild woods of northern England takes up a large section of the book, including the introduction of a new character called Goodman. A man with a tortured history of war damaged psychosis, King fancies as an embodiment of the English folklore legend of The Green Man and a similar revisit to another of King's character experiments - see the Martinelli book To Play the Fool. It's this particular Holy Fool who is partly responsible for a funeral so bizarre it might not have looked out of place on an episode of The Prisoner.
The writing is as good as ever but with the plot, thin though it is, sidelined so often the experience isn't quite as compelling as usual. When the plot does finally emerge from the London fog with so few pages remaining I was beginning to think we were going to end as the last book ended with another 'TO BE CONTINUED'. Thankfully that doesn't happen and we are treated belatedly to a proper Reichenbach style finale in the shadow of Big Ben.

Hungry sheep

2011-08-10T15:27:00.004+01:00

Camera Critters

I hope this sheep knows what it is doing, stripping the foliage from the low branches. Not everything they fancy is actually good for them and some things can be downright poisonous. I'm no expert on the subject but unfortunately, neither are the sheep. I suppose he should be ok as they've lived and grazed here for a long time.

Victorian Ghost Stories

2011-07-25T17:58:00.007+01:00

Excellent selection of 35 ghost stories from the Victorian age, chronologically compiled here dating from 1852-1908. The stories included have been selected as much for aspects of innovation or for the part they played in influencing stylistic developments within the genre than their actual quality. Though there are some great ghost stories here and barring three or four stories are generally of very good quality.
Along with the stories are a comprehensive list of all ghost story collections published during the half century of years following 1840, full source details for the 35 stories and an introduction by editor Michael Cox.
Highlights for me include:
The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell. It's probably the best written ghost story here with superb characterisation, lush prose and as a ghost story endlessly imitated even today.
An Account Of Some Strange Disturbances In Aungier Street by J.S.Le Fanu. One of his best and the veteran of countless anthologies.
The Open Door by Charlotte Riddell. Not particularly scary but a well written example of its type and introducing a rare detective element.
The Captain of the Pole-star by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Eery arctic tale coloured by Doyle's own experience of life on a steam-whaler.
The Kit-bag by Algernon Blackwood. Only Blackwood could imbue such an innocent inanimate object with such a deep sense of malevolent dread.
The only ones I'd have left out would be:
An Eddy On The Floor by Bernard Capes which although suitably macabre is also a shade too long compared to the other entries and probably the least accessible due to its convoluted syntax.
Miss Jeromette And The Clergyman - a very weak effort by Wilkie Collins.
The Tomb of Sarah by F.G.Loring - Nice story but very much a vampire tale.
Reading these in order shows how the genre developed. It's a genre that in the Victorian era was very much designed to be read aloud at the fireside after dinner and ever associated with mid winter and Christmas. It goes through phases of doomed love triangles, vengeful victims, tragic victims of accident defeating mortality to see their loved ones a final time, portentous warnings, cursed objects and places, spiritualism, tragic reenactments etc.
There will probably never be a definitive collection of ghost stories. The editor could easily have selected 35 alternate stories and still pleased this reader as much. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Little Manfred

2011-07-24T15:55:00.005+01:00

In the Imperial War Museum there is a wooden Dachshund. It was carved by a German prisoner of war in the 1940s. This is its story. Well almost. It's a story that captures the spirit of the true story though.
In the summer of 1966, just after England's famous footballing victory against the Germans in the World Cup Final, a young girl, her brother and their dog encounter two men on the beach. One has a story to tell about the girl's mother from when she also was a little girl during the second World War. It's a story about friendship and kindness, both heart warming and tragic that begins with two German friends going to war on the fated German battleship Bismarck. Michael Morpurgo tells a moving and nostalgic story, deeply shadowed by the conflict of nations but brightened by the hope and peaceful humanity of ordinary people. He's aided by Michael Foreman's beautiful sketches, brought to bright summer life by water colour. I'd say this would be ideal for the 8-10 reading age group but really I don't see why this can't be enjoyed by ages of any number. It certainly would be a great starting point for summer projects, perhaps investigating the untold stories of parents from when they were children. As the cover states, "The past is all around us."
There is also an afterword about the history touched on in the story and a short chapter about Michael Foreman's memories of that World Cup... and another dog, this time named Pickles, who saved the day.

Blue tits abound

2011-07-22T19:48:00.000+01:00

Camera Critters

It's been a bumper year for blue tits this year round my way. Fledge after fledge all spring and still going today are bumbling about in the nearby trees. This one is taking in the sunshine and showing its still obvious fledgling gape.

Acts of Nature

2011-07-22T16:27:00.009+01:00

This is the 5th book featuring Max Freeman. An ex Philadelphia cop who has retired to a remote cabin in the Florida Everglades. Over the last 4 books Max has been getting his life back together after a fateful night when he shot a 12 year old kid at a convenience store hold-up and was badly injured himself. No longer on the force, he spends his days in solitude at his cabin or occasionally doing investigative work for his best friend Billy Manchester.
In this one Max is taking some time out to try to rescue his relationship with local cop Sherry Richards by spending some quality alone time with her out at his cabin. Unfortunately there's a storm coming. A Hurricane rips through the Glades, badly injuring one of the pair. Throw in a gang of opportunistic house-breaking Gladesmen, a couple of ex-military hired guns and an ornery alligator named Wally and you know this is going to all end in blood. By this time I've realised that this one has gone off track. No slow burning mystery with Max grinding away at the rough edges this time. Now I don't mind long running series breaking the formula, but this one just had set-up written all over it. Jonathon King writes great confrontation scenes it has to be said and Max v. the Gladesmen is as sparky as you would expect. I'm not keen on the split point of view though, establishing all the different characters so thoroughly could be described as padding. Contrary to the cover blurb, nobody is being stalked by persons unknown, as everyone's motivations are comprehensively explored with no stalking being part of the agenda. Ok, I can't speak for Wally. The plot is what it is: people coming together in the wrong place at the wrong time - a storm of consequences, you might say. It all being said, King's writing is good, going down like the first cold beer on a hot afternoon and I always enjoy Max's company. King's description of the Glades is, as ever, very good, mindful of the environmental issues and the conflicting forces of the natural world and the nature of mankind. It's just a shame the plot was so thin, considering how much the events in this one are going to impact on the series.

Cleopatra: A life

2011-07-09T17:30:00.002+01:00

In 2000 Stacy Schiff won a Pulitzer for her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife of Author Vladimir Nabokov. In this biography she casts her researching skills a little further back in time and tries to pierce the glare and glamour of mythology, push past the propaganda and traverse the abyss of 2000 years of history in search of Cleopatra VII. At hand she has a wealth of sources that might be as daunting as searching for truth buried by two millennia of hyperbole and obscurement. On ancient historians Schiff comments, "They are by modern standards polemicists, apologists, moralists, fabulists, recyclers, cut-and-pasters, hacks."
She sets out as her mission plan, in dealing with so many biased, unsafe testimonies and incomplete evidence, most of which written centuries after the event or destroyed by the censor of the victorious or the ravages of time and environment, to not add to the confusion with her own opinions and supposition but rather, as she puts it, to coral the probabilities. Considering that according to Schiff, Cleopatra VII, "Effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room." it is no surprise that this account pretty much begins with the young queen rolling out of that famous travelling sack at the feet of Caesar. History doesn't do childhoods apparently. In many ways the author seems to suggest that Cleopatra and Egypt at that time were synonymous, and in the absence of a clear account of the woman, a detailed portrait of Alexandria and Egyptian society would have to suffice, initially at least. It's with a note of indignation that Schiff bemoans that in an age of accomplished, realistic portraiture there is not a single authoritative bust of Cleopatra. The Romans general opinion of both the woman and her country was:
"A shame to lose,
a risk to conquer,
a headache to govern."
Portraiture aside there is some time spent in supposing why Cicero, that prolific Roman speaker and writer, (Schiff quotes him endlessly in the first half of the book) says so little of Cleopatra during her time in Rome. The second half of the book is dominated by Cleopatra's first meeting with Mark Antony. If there are an almost infinite number of things we don't know for sure about Cleopatra, one thing we do know is that the woman could throw one hell of a party. The lush dinners she held in Tarsus, primarily to court Antony were unimaginably opulent, though Plutarch, our primary source for these overblown nosh-ups, seems to have had a good attempt. So what is the truth behind one of histories most famous and notorious love affairs, Cleopatra and Mark Antony? Was it love? And to what degree? Or was it purely an association based on political and military machinations? Schiff presents the evidence but leaves the question unanswered. Ultimately it is a question that is unanswerable beyond mere opinion or preference. Too much time has passed. Too much Roman propaganda disseminated. Too many myths have accrued. And as history becomes entertainment, from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor, the truth, even were it known, never draws the greatest crowd.
And so to perhaps one of the greatest death-bed scenes of history, though again as an end-game of such notoriety the truth is obscured by the grand stage. After Mark Antony's bloody demise the negotiations between Cleopatra and Octavian and her eventual end, as represented by history, are differentiated by Schiff by mise-en-scene; Plutarch is writing for Puccini; Dio for Wagner. "'The truth of the matter,' Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears,'No one knows.'" Schiff declares that Octavian created the myth of the snake, a bit of propaganda that stuck to the event so indelibly it could never be separated, even in the face of so much contradictory evidence.
The book as a whole is a work of questions unanswered. But they are fascinating unanswered questions. Schiff does the hard and boring part for the reader in collating and presenting the clues, opinions, document and context, advising where necessary of bias, agenda or obscurement and if she doesn't explode all the popular myths, she at least points a spotlight at their unlikelihood.
This review was from an Advance Reading Copy

Common beauty

2011-07-09T15:24:00.003+01:00

Camera Critters

The closer you get to our insect life the more beautiful they are. This Dragonfly - a Common Darter (Sympetrum striolatum) is one of the most common dragonflies in the uk, but up close it is a wonder of intricacy.

War Horse

2011-06-26T16:43:00.004+01:00

I was drawn to this book after seeing the life-sized horse puppets in the theatrical version of War Horse. Former UK Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo usually has an entire shelf dedicated to him in most British book shops and this one, written nearly 30 years ago is one I can recommend to both children and adults alike. It tells the story of Joey, a half-thoroughbred red bay bought by a drunken farmer to spite another and beloved of the farmer's son. The events of 1913 shatters the pair's brief happiness as Joey is sold into a war of wire, mud and carnage. His first new owner is Captain Nicholls who takes Joey as his cavalry mount. He also meets his loyalest equine friend, a shining black stallion called Topthorn. It's all told from Joey's point of view as he tries to survive the unfathomable conflict and regain the company of his farmboy. Along the way he'll find kindness where he can find it, endure crippling work and health sapping conditions. Although Joey is often in the thick of the chaos the book never dwells closely on the bloody results beyond detailing the casualties and the effects of their loss. It's a quick read, engaging ,moving and a great excuse to get some history into young reader's minds.

Deceiver

2011-06-24T21:23:00.000+01:00

Writing a review for the 11th book of a beloved series, nearly two decades in the reading is probably not the most useful thing I could be doing with my time. If you've got to book 10 I doubt you are going to need much prodding from me to pick this one up. But I love this series too much not to want to just tuck the book away and move on without getting a few words about it out of my system. The politics is thick in this one. There's always quite a bit but this one seemed to have more than usual. I'm not much of a political animal so I'm glad Bren, our trusty paidhi, is on hand to keep track of the situation. Like the previous book, instead of the single Bren point of view we also get to see the world from the perspective of the precocious Atevi lordling Cajeiri. He's having a spot of bother with his new bodyguards who are showing no signs of forming manchi with him, that unquantifiable (at least on human terms) Atevi instinct that causes members of their race to form attachments. To their cost humans have confused manchi with the Human understanding of love or friendship, neither of which have any Atevi equivalent. Inter-species linguistic confusions caused the Atevi-Human war not long after the Humans first arrived. Peaceful co-existence was deemed too unstable and prone to further misunderstanding and the human survivors were ceded an island kingdom and a permanent separation from Atevi interaction. With one exception. Bren Cameron. He is the paidhi. A diplomat charged with interpreting all Human-Atevi contact. Things have moved on quite a lot since those early days and Bren is now paidhi-aiji. He's basically gone native, and become so valued by the Atevi high-muck-a-muck's he's been granted his own lordship, land and the loyalty of his own Atevi aishid (currently four Atevi bodyguards). Great characters, thorough world building, Cherryh's brilliant style of prose and restricted point of views make for fascinating and beguiling sci-fi. If you haven't tried a Foreigner book yet, do yourself a favour and go hunt out book one.

Henrietta

2011-06-24T15:02:00.006+01:00

Camera Critters

Every time we come to the Tranquil Otter lodges we encounter a fair sized badelynge of Mallards. One of them, a female, has become a bit notorious. She's not shy. Mallards can easily live into a third decade if they can avoid getting nabbed by the local predators so we are pretty sure it is the same duck. She doesn't mix with the other ducks very well, is very loud, is prone to rushing about and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. We've taken to calling her Henrietta. I often read on the decking with nothing on my feet and Henrietta has been known to try to make off with my big toe. Debbie and Henrietta seem to get on quite well.
Here's my dad encountering her about six or seven years ago. He only went out for a smoke.

Circle ducks

2011-06-15T18:28:00.005+01:00

Camera Critters

These little balls of fluff can't be long out of the egg. They are sticking together like they are magnetic. I hope they keep safe. Fingers crossed. They'll need it too. This was the view when I pointed my camera to the ground. Tilt the camera back and look up into the sky and it won't be long before the silhouetted deadly shapes of a pair of buzzards can be seen circling patiently.

The Observations

2011-06-12T18:20:00.003+01:00

The heroine, and faithful scribe, of this tale is one Bessy Buckley, or so she introduces herself. She's a young Irish girl, running away from a mother who has ruthlessly exploited her from an early age. She arrives at a ramshackle mansion, somewhere near Edinburgh, where she is taken on as a housemaid by the mistress of the house, Arabella Reid. The 'missus' as she calls her soon has young Bessy confused and bewildered by a succession of seemingly random and mostly pointless requests. And every night she must write an account of the day's events along with her inner thoughts. Despite all this Bessy develops a fierce loyalty for her mistress and then she finds out, by the chance discovery of Arabella's in-progress book 'The Observations', what the object of her devotions is really up to and tellingly what her opinions of Bessy are.
What happens next is best left for the story to tell, but it is a fascinating read that weaves Bessy's dark past, the mysterious fate of her predecessor, Arabella's paragon of all house maids, Nora, and Arabella's own secrets into a startlingly engaging narrative mystery. Bessy is a wonderful character, who colours her tale with the most vivid and sometimes lurid slang and colloquialisms. I'm often put off by such inclusions, though in this case they are pretty much essential to the style and don't distract at all. Though being a native of northern England, where many of the expressions are still in common use or fondly remembered from use by my Grandparents, I could be more immune from irritation than the average reader. Bessy is also not averse to casting ridicule on the people she recounts by exaggerating or over annotating their speech patterns and accents. The more she despises them the more extreme the exaggeration. I think it's no accident that Hector, the sex obsessed Highlander, gets the brunt of it.
The Observations is an excellent début novel. I've read the latest book by Jane Harris, 'Gillespie and I', which appeared some 5 years after 'The Observations' - so if you enjoyed this book I'd recommend you look it up with all due dispatch.

Favoured places and favourite faces

2011-06-11T14:45:00.005+01:00

I got back to one of my favourite holiday places this Summer - The Tranquil Otter lodges in Cumbria. This year was different though. It was a great favourite of Harry the Labrador. He adored chasing around the lawn, taking in the sounds, the sights and of course the smells. He was a true aqua-dog but this was one lake that was too wild and too inhabited by a myriad of birds and creatures for dipping his body into the water. Swimming would have been dangerous for both Harry and the wildlife. That didn't stop him setting sail in the little boat a few times though in years past. For me this place has many bright memories and Harry was one of the shinier ones. He's no longer with us anymore but he still walks happily through our minds.

Gillespie and I

2011-05-11T23:27:00.000+01:00

I've never been the quickest of readers but this vibrantly written novel, weighing in at 500 plus pages, so engrossed me I devoured it in just 4 days. It seemed so innocent at first, beguiling me with its engagingly described cast of characters.
In 1933 Miss Harriet Baxter sits in her Bloomsbury apartment, tending to her caged finches and writing her memoir of the times she spent with Ned Gillespie over 4 decades earlier, an up and coming young artist, her dear friend, she dubs him, her soul mate even.
At once we are informed that her friend Gillespie and his young family are ill-fated, that the tale will end in tragedy, a tragedy so deep that the young man will destroy his life's work and take his own life. The first half of the book follows Harriet, then a thirty something spinster, as she relocates from London to Glasgow after the death of her Aunt, a woman who had brought her up after the death of her mother. In 1888 Glasgow hosts the first International Exhibition and Harriet decides to rent rooms nearby to take in the spectacle. A chance encounter, amusingly recounted through Harriet's memoir, brings her into the orbit of the Gillespie family, her timely extraction of half a set of dentures from the back of an old lady's throat, who turns out to be Ned's mother, is the first step on the road to what lies ahead. Over several months Harriet becomes almost part of the household, finding opportunity after opportunity to ingratiate herself among them.
Just as we start to get comfortable with the happy set up, Harriet reminds us that there are dark times ahead - a trial even, though what crime is looming and who is to stand accused is left unsaid. Although leisurely, the narrative at no stage bored me. Despite its length I was always either entertained or intrigued. I was fascinated by the complicated family dynamic, the Victorian detail, the depiction of Glasgow and its characters both fictional and historical, and of course, Harriet's colourful and often acerbic observations. It's fairly apparent that Harriet at times does resort to being manipulative, she's prone to bias and there's something quite off-kilter in some of her references to her stepfather and Ned, her so-called soul mate, but I still found myself liking her. The second half of the novel deals with the break down of the Gillespie family and the trial. I hold my hands up and admit I was completely wrong footed by how things progressed. I'll not say any more as I'd be risking straying into spoiler space. Suffice it to say that the conclusion doesn't disappoint.
I would heartily recommend this book as a great summer read, perfect for that sunny afternoon in the garden, though I must warn you that you may not notice the sun on your face, or the pleasant bird song in the trees, or the bees in the Buddleia - not if you sink as deep into Harriet Baxter's world as I did.
This review was from an Advance Reading Copy.

The Man Whom the Trees Loved

2011-05-01T18:47:00.007+01:00

David Bittacy and his wife have been happily married for decades. Mr Bittacy has another love though. He loves nature. More specifically he loves trees. So when he discovers an artist who paints portraits of trees in a way that captures their individuality... their personality even, he decides to invite the artist to stay at his home. The two men are kindred spirits, both believing that trees have souls... that God is in the trees. Over a long night gazing at the trees that encroach his garden, with the deep wood close by, the two men venture to put into words a philosophical understanding of nature that frightens and disturbs Mrs Bittacy. Their words cause her to catch a glimpse of wild, potent, sentient impressions of the life that is a forest. It jars her deep religious convictions to the core.
Algernon Blackwood is brilliantly adept at this sort of psychological dance, playing the known world and its belief systems off against the limits of human knowledge and understanding. Blackwood's beautifully rich descriptions of nature, and his deft maintenance of disquiet are excellent. There are few writers, short of Mary Shelley in full Godwinian flow, who could keep that disquiet going while exploring a philosophical idea for over 70 pages and still retain the interest of the reader.These trees are on the hill where my house is built.

My Swordhand is Singing

2011-04-29T19:32:00.003+01:00

Marcus Sedgewick takes us to a cold lonely place in the 17th Century in this YA style short horror novel. The dead haunt the snow covered forests of Transylvania. An isolated village hides from the dark and what lurks at the shadows edge, painting their windows with tar and and trusting that evil will not cross their defences. Sedgewick draws on the vampire folklore of the region to deliver a horror story that predates the more romanticised trappings of the last century. A woodcutter and his son live a solitary life on the edges of the dark woods, barely tolerated by the nearby village and running from a bloody past. It's all very well set up by Sedgewick, maintaining a quiet menace by the alchemy of dark woods mixed with snowy isolation. The characterisation though is pretty insipid. The cast are the smooth edged archetypes of fairy tales. It made it hard for this reader to make any sort of connection with them. The vampires are quietly chilling though, devious in their imitation of the people they once were and jealously hateful of the living. They're more recognisably zombie to modern readers or even Deadite to film goers.

A Red Herring Without Mustard

2011-04-27T18:16:00.005+01:00

This third outing of Alan Bradley's irrepressible Flavia De Luce gets the series back up to top form. Flavia saves the life of an old Gypsy fortune-teller who has been beaten and left for dead. Ok our young heroine had almost managed to burn her to a crisp the previous evening but the less said about such details the better. Flavia sets out to track down the assailant, trampling over several crime scenes in the process, bamboozling the local constabulary and driving her family to new levels of embarrassment. Flavia can't resist the siren call of an unsolved serious misdemeanor, so when a body is found hung on an ornamental fountain in the grounds of Buckshaw Flavia is ecstatic. Never mind justice - think of the opportunities to prove her cleverness to that lovely man Inspector Hewitt. Perhaps he'll even invite her to tea.
The second book stepped over the line a few times with the added absurdities of the world of the puppet show. The fun, tongue in cheek adventures of Flavia combined with the exaggerated staginess of puppeteering didn't quite complement each other. This one is much more to my liking. We also get the introduction of a new character called Porcelain Lee who is a great inclusion, mainly because of her ability to bamboozle the bamboozler. She also gets a wonderful scene homaging perhaps Du Maurier's Rebecca, as she appears on the staircase dressed as Flavia's late mother Harriet. It's the ability to bring off that sort of a poignant vibe counterpointing the cheeky adventures of our precocious investigator that sets these books aside from a lot of its competitors. Bravo to Mr Bradley. And please sir, can we have some more.

Nest builders

2011-04-22T16:55:00.008+01:00

Camera Critters

Hope everybody is enjoying the extended Easter weekend. No rest for the birdies though. Stuff to do, nests to line, it's all about to kick off.

Barbecue Easter

2011-04-21T17:54:00.006+01:00

It doesn't seem that long since the kids were making the best of the snow in our street. I swear the year turns faster every year. And now we get our first bit of warm weather and some fool has just coined the phrase ' Barbecue Easter'. Guess this is the last we'll see of the sun this year. You can tell Spring is here though as this blackbird completely ignores the food we put out, choosing instead to pull out a strand of my sister's red hair. Nest building underway.

The Wendigo

2011-04-19T18:07:00.006+01:00

A Dr. Cathcart and his nephew Simpson go hunting for moose in the Canadian wilderness, accompanied by two Canadian guides and a native American cook.
On the surface this classic horror story by Algernon Blackwood revisits the sort of set-up that worked so well in The Willows. There are other similarities but they feel quite different; the other worldly eeriness of the Willows is quite different than the overall tone in The Wendigo. The first half of The Wendigo is very powerful, with the characters having their differing world views challenged by the perilous vastness of the natural world. The focus at this stage is more on Simpson as he sets out with Defago, one of the guides, to explore 50 Island Water in search of those elusive moose. These are the most powerful scenes as he contemplates the wild space about him and Defago starts to be broken down by his own superstitious knowledge. Blackwood characterises Simpson as being a 'student of divinity' counterpointing Cathcart's rationalistic adherence to science and the bulwarks of civilisation. Blackwood also describes one of the guides as being 'nearest primitive conditions' by which I believe he means that he (Hank) is the most in-tune with nature. It's a challenging and atmospheric read that pitches human instinct against rationalism, superstition against science and the awe of nature against the human social constructs of civilisation. The weakest part of the story is The Wendigo itself or more accurately Blackwood's choice to focus so strongly on one of the more absurd elements of the legend. I'm talking about the flaming feet. It's still a great story full of Blackwood's beautiful contemplative descriptive prose. It's not quite in the same weird horror league as The Willows but then again, what is.

87th Precinct

2011-04-18T15:40:00.006+01:00

An early 87th Precinct story. This one promises rather more noir than it actually delivers. Its opening pages are the hook that tries its darndest to stop you putting the book back onto the spindle and choosing some other more tempting paperback. And even though it's many decades since this one saw anything other than thrift sale piles or charity shop boxes, I can appreciate why McBain lays it on so thick at the start. The city sounded like such a dark and shadow infested place on those pages... and cold, man it's cold.
'The citizens grinned into the wind, but the wind was not in a smiling mood.'
After that it gets down to business, the shadows are swept aside and the cold only nips at the narrative infrequently as McBain gets down to populating his police procedural with interesting characters. That is the real strength of these books - just well thought out and realised characters, which doesn't stint with even the minor cast.
I've heard all the comparisons to Dragnet but I'd be pulling the wool over your eyes if I agreed with them as I've barely seen more than an episode of that old series. So I'll stick with what I do know, throw my cards down on the table and say it most put me in mind of 'On Dangerous Ground' a classic noir film from the 50s starring Robert Ryan, which in turn was an adaptation of an old noir pulp by Gerald Butler. The early scenes set in the city do sing 87th Precinct at me. And I could draw a little parallel with Carella's romance with his deaf-mute wife Teddy to Robert Ryan's character falling for Ida Lupino's blind girl. I think it's true that screen writers and novelists were feeding on each other voraciously in the 40s and 50s, several of the 87th Precinct novels made it to the big screen itself, as well as a short half-life tv series which is largely forgotten.
This one is a strong entry in the series. It's strongest in the heat of the character dialogue, which is very naturalist. If you saw them acted out you would assume the actors were improvising or in some reality show sequence. It's weakest when McBain starts constructing his torturous ironic word-plays.
There's also a historic element for modern readers to enjoy, because even though though the stories take place in an imaginary city it can't hide being a city made up of amalgams of New York in the 50s. It's probably a more faithful representative of police procedures than a lot of today's detective fiction can claim, and McBain isn't shy of relating the technical minutiae of 50s forensics.
I'd recommend this series to anybody who liked the first 20 minutes of 'On Dangerous Ground' and fans of Dragnet or Hill Street Blues, though it's a bit tricky trying to dig these things up cheaply over half a century since they first gave us a twirl on those paperback spindles.

Spring is Found

2011-04-07T14:53:00.005+01:00

Camera Critters

My dog discovered Spring,
Though it wasn't hard to find.
It's carried on the air,
The song of feathered kind.
Soon the blossom,
The hungry nests,
Life rioting all around.
It cannot hide
This tide of life.

My dog barks,"Spring is found."

Michael Finn

The Seance

2011-04-02T19:46:00.005+01:00

The Seance by John Harwood is set in the 1880s and is the story of Constance Langton. She becomes involved in spiritualism in an effort to lift her mother from the crippling grief of losing a child. Constance, due to the lack of regard and love from her parents has always had the nagging feeling that there is some mystery about her heritage, believing herself to be a foundling. Through diaries and journals and the aid of a world weary solicitor called Mr Montague she discovers a frightening legacy linking her to a crumbling deserted manor, Wraxford Hall, with a dark and murderous history. It's a brilliantly written homage to the Victorian mysteries and ghost stories of such classic authors as Wilkie Collins, Dickens, A.C. Doyle and M.R. James etc. It's full of styles, motifs, little references, names etc that will be familiar to fans of this area of literature. My personal favourite segments are those featuring the testimony of John Montague; with such a name it shouldn't surprise anybody to discover the style during these segments is an almost perfect homage to the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James. It's a style I've seen attempted many times (I've tried it myself), but Harwood nails it flawlessly, bringing to mind stories like Count Magnus, The Mezzotint, Lost Hearts and others. If the book had been able to maintain its creepy, portentous atmosphere throughout I'd have given it 5 stars but the last third, as it attempts to resolve the various strands of mystery, does become a little more pedestrian in style. It's still one of the best book I've read this year so far.

Cairo

2011-03-30T16:24:00.003+01:00

Cairo begins with a hashish smuggler called Ashraf sitting at his mother's grave as he relates to her how his day went.
"So today I hit one of those stoned camels with my truck."
He tells her the Bedouin have fields of marijuana out in Sinai. The camels graze on the stuff. He tells her about the Israeli border guards who nearly catch him smuggling hash hidden inside bulbs of Smelly Beet. He tells her not to worry, that's just life in the City Victorious. It's a deft and assured way to start the story off, introduce a major character and set the tone. The other pieces of the mosaic follow on soon after: A female Israeli special forces soldier, injured and rescued ironically by the very Bedouin that Ashraf curses for not securing their camels; in the sky above is a passenger jet with two Americans on board, one of Lebanese extraction called Shaheed with an idea to live up to his name, the other a naive girl trying to broaden her Orange County boundaries; dating Ashraf's sister is a journalist/activist who amusingly knows more about Peter Parker and Spiders Man (that wasn't a typo) than some Americans; and Shams who lives in a hookah.
The cover blurb cites the book as belonging to a genre called magical realist, which I've never heard of before but suits the book. Primarily it's a book set in a Cairo, before the people's revolution, but not an overtly fictionalised Cairo or one seen filtered through western preconceptions. Sure it's full of magic and mysticism with a plot about a magician gangster trying to recover a powerful artifact guarded by a Jinn but it's all authentic Egyptian mythology and the writer G. Willow Wilson, though American, is heavily committed to Cairo and its people, having lived there for many years to this day and formerly a regular contributor to the now defunct Cairo Magazine. I loved all the idiomatic Arabic expressions, though I suspect in respect to the colourful cursing, the translation into our woefully inadequate English doesn't quite do it justice.
The art is excellent too. Turkish artist M.K. Perker delivers some extremely expressive and detailed shaded black and white pencils, bringing the characters and locations to life.
It all ends a little too soon and if the concluding tone is one of hope and perhaps wishful thinking, in the land of the Jinn anything is possible.

The Dead of Winter

2011-03-20T16:33:00.007Z

Imagine if Le Fanu had tried to write for a YA market and he might have produced something like The Dead of Winter. I'm sure Chris Priestley would cite him as one of his primary influences, along with others like Elizabeth Gaskell. Her 'The Old Nurse's Story' springs to mind quite strongly. The book, more a novella, is artfully written, perfectly invoking the Victorian setting that uses as much Gothic imagery and motifs as it can possibly pack into the page count. Michael Vyner is a young orphan, who becomes the ward of a rich man whose life was saved by the boy's late father. Reluctantly he agrees to spend Christmas at his sprawling mansion. What is it about ghost stories and Christmas? I blame Dickens - no, I blame the Victorians. Now I have to read every ghost story with the nagging compulsion that I should have saved it for Christmas. This one is told in the first person (what other form would suffice?) by the adult version of the boy, writing an account of that fateful Christmas. The mystery is too slight though for a book of this length. The atmosphere is well maintained but there is not really enough complexity to the plot to make the conclusion anything other than expected.

Faceless Killers

2011-03-17T18:33:00.006Z

I really enjoyed the BBC adaptations of the Wallander books. People tell me I should try the Swedish-language series but to be honest if I'm going to have to cope with the subtitles I might as well go the whole hog and read the books by Henning Mankell. So here we go. Start at the beginning is my mantra, even if this first story is still relatively fresh in my memory from 14 months ago. Faceless Killers kicks off with a prologue cunningly disguised as Chapter One (I say that because I hate prologues with a vengeance so fierce that I wouldn't put any devious trick beyond their nefariousness). I needn't have bothered as it turned out to be the best piece of writing in the book; a stark, poignant prelude detailing the discovery of the murder scene before we join our main protagonist for the duration.
The rest of the book stays tight to following Wallander around as he doggedly directs the investigation while trying to scrape the remains of his private life into something he can cling onto, skimming his internal monologue where required. The book works well as both a police procedural and as a character study, coloured (if that's the right word) by the cold bleakness of the Swedish winter. If there are problems with the book I'd have to point at the long list of poorly drawn supporting characters, starkly one dimensional against
the richness of Wallander's character. The less Wallander cares about a character the less you get to know about them. Some are barely characterised at all; one detective's only distinction is a liking for horse racing. The translation from Swedish to English pokes you in the eye a few times with some slightly off context dialogue, but it's not too bad. Maybe I've read too much Chinese to English manga for it to bother me.
Kurt Wallander is the acting chief of police in the small Swedish town of Ystad. His marriage has been devoured by his dedication to his job, his daughter avoids him, his father is slipping into senility and what friends he once had have faded away. He works long hours, eats badly, drinks too much and is dogged by bad luck.
For those who want a bit of extra seasoning to spice their reading tastes there's a social commentary going on throughout, most notably examining immigration and the way society compares to people's conception of the past. I'm glad Mankell chose to use real Swedish locations and didn't just create an imaginary town. I always prefer to read about real places. It's refreshing to see the world from a different perspective than the usual American or British standpoint.
I'll definitely continue with the series, even though I've already encountered many of their tv incarnations.

French Detective the third

2011-03-09T17:02:00.002Z

Loose-limbed by David Barrie sees Captain Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle invite us once again to sit in on his latest investigation. The Paris Opera Ballet is preparing for the premiere of a bold new Ballet based on the Greek myth of Diana and Acteon. Franck is called in when the female lead dancer is found strangled in her apartment. Like me he knows next to nothing about the world of Ballet so he has to learn fast at a time that he has to cope with absorbing all the mass of information that the first days of an investigation throws up (interviews, crime scenes, forensics, etc). It's a formula readers of the first two books will be familiar with - one that works very well I hasten to add. I'm still enjoying Franck's company and I was happy to meet a few of the recurring characters from the series again, especially Sylvie and Sonia, though there is no shortage of strong female characters in the books.
It's hard to comment on the main aspect of the book, the murder mystery itself, without giving too much away. I really hate spoilers, so I'll just say that I almost put it all together before Franck did and leave it at that. I was impressed with David Barrie's attention to detail and thorough researching of the different aspects of the story. There's nothing worse than lazy researching or sketchiness to ruin the verisimilitude. The Parisian locations are as beautifully described as ever, not least the Opera de Paris itself, with all its myriad internal locations, its architecture and history. Although it's the focal location of the book the story doesn't spend all its time there. It acts more as a central hub for the story and we still get to visit the cafes, restaurants, parks, hotels etc that surround it as well as some more further afield. The author points out things of interest, often using his characters to do it, which helps to colour the narrative without it straying into pedantry. Loved the stuff about Dumas - it really has been too long since I last engaged with those musketeers.
A very good detective story, with engaging characters, an interesting puzzle of a plot, well executed from a hidden gem of an author who seems to be hitting his stride. Recommended.
Loose-limbed will be published in the UK on the 18th of March 2011.

Madam Crowl's Ghost

2011-03-06T16:54:00.005Z

In judging the quality of this collection of ghost stories by Sheridan Le Fanu I think it's worth mentioning that this particular collection was compiled by M.R. James to bring together all of Le Fanu's anonymously published supernatural short stories. It's not a collection of his best work, far from it. Le Fanu's writings throw up all sorts of obstacles for the more ordered reader wishing to read all of his back catalogue. Many of these stories appeared uncredited in Le Fanu's own Dublin University Magazine or Dickens' famous periodical All the Year Round. James' included notes are invaluable to anybody embarking on a Le Fanu reading list. Though Le Fanu's penchant for publishing his stories, ideas and characters many times, often revised in small ways, completely rewritten, or subsumed into other works, tests even James' extensive study of his works. These stories are often set in the author's native Ireland or in the North of England, some very close to where I live in Lancashire. The English setting, mostly in his later works was an attempt to appeal to the larger English market. Exploiting the English market was probably one of the factors resulting in some of the revised publications.
Le Fanu is rightly acknowledged as one of history's finest writers in the genre of the ghost story. Though none of his very best are included here. His stories are often characterised by a slow build up of atmosphere through the use of highly evocative language, with the supernatural elements often included sketchily or by implication. It's a formula that he made himself master of, though this collection does highlight some of his shortcomings. His syntax sometimes becomes meandering. His habit of transcribing regional dialects directly into the dialogue does add local flavour but more often renders the text almost indecipherable. Sometimes his story structure is undermined by the inclusion of little extras tagged onto the endings. There is still much to be admired. My favourite story from this collection is 'An Account Of Some Strange Disturbances In Aungier Street'. Very creepy. though even this does sport some of those extras I mentioned or as Le Fanu would have it some 'valuable collateral particulars'.

Stories included are:

Madam Crowl's Ghost
Squire Toby's Will
Dickon the Devil
The Child that Went with the Fairies
The White Cat of Drumgunnoil
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling
Sir Dominick's Bargain
Ultor de Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen
The Vision of Tom Chuff
Stories of Lough Guir

A Kind Man

2011-03-04T15:35:00.004Z

I read my first Susan Hill book back in the dim, misty past of my college days. Nestled in my English Lit reading list amongst Thomas Hardy, T.S.Eliot, G.B.Shaw, Grahame Greene etc was I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill. To an 18 year old who was more used to reading wall to wall epic fantasy and sci-fi I found Hill's writing the most accessible, though I admit it wasn't until a much later reread that I really appreciated the sheer depth and truth of her writing. Although A kind Man doesn't hit the heights of her earlier works it is as ever a very emotive read. This short book initially seems to be a somewhat prosaic story, set in a northern mill town during a hard depression, about the life paths of two sisters and the petty resentments that follow. One sister, Mirriam, marries a selfish and inconsiderate man, the other, Eve, marries the titular kind man, Tommy Carr, as selfless and giving a man as it 's possible to know. Mirriam can't stop having children, all boys, and Eve struggles to conceive at all. Eventually she has a single girl. From early on in the narrative, Hill generates a sense of anxiety, which is very subtly felt at first, but as the story advances and tragedy strikes, this anxiety slowly increases. What happens next is totally unexpected and far from prosaic. It's Hill's skill in engendering empathy from the reader for her characters that draws the reader in, making you worry for them and pre-empt their decisions. Essentially the book is a parable about love and kindness in a world that seems to be forgetting their value in a self made hell of drudgery and selfishness.

The Assassin's Prayer

2011-03-02T20:08:00.011Z

This is the fourth in Ariana Franklin's 12 century mysteries featuring anatomist, doctor and mistress of the art of death Adelia Aguilar. King Henry II has tasked Adelia with watching over the ten year old Princess Joanna on her journey to meet her new husband in Sicily. As ever the best scenes are with the King though in this case they are so short as to hardly be worth mentioning. Likewise, the cameos by the King's sons, including Cœur de Lion himself are too brief to make much of an impression. Franklin seems to be collecting characters too beloved to herself, and to some readers, for her to leave out of the narrative. And there lies the problem. The book is great fun, with lots of the characters that we've all grown used to but the mystery aspect of the book seems to be anemic by comparison. Tracking Adelia is the totally nutso outlaw Scarry, disguised as one of the travelling company and bent on bringing Adelia down before he kills her in revenge of her killing of his outlaw lover from the previous book. Working out this mystery shouldn't be too taxing even for the most amateur of armchair detectives, which considering we don't have the same benefit of having already seen the guy, as Adelia has, begs the question how does it take so long for our heroine to work it out. Barring several pages with the curious incident of the ex-goat in the nighttime there is very little opportunity for Adelia to call on her deathly arts at all. Having several sub-plots but no notable primary plot turns this one into a colourful travelogue rather than a mystery. It's still an enjoyable and easy read, bolstering the already rich ensemble of characters with some new note worthies, like Boggart, the O'Donnell and Rankin - an overly caricatured Scotsman (the peeps, the peeps). The historical aspects of the journey are fascinating, not least the emerging religious and political landscape of the middle ages. Fans of the series will probably be too satisfied to be back in the company of old friends to be concerned with the shortcoming's of the plot.

Springtime on the way?

2011-02-25T19:34:00.002Z

Looks like we've just about made it through the dark again for another year. Yesterday was almost Springlike. When the sun was out it was almost warm. Not warm enough for the rest of the Bamber Bridge lunchtimers to come out from the blare of the jukebox poppiness and listen to the birds singing sweeter songs in the outdoors. I guess I'll be munching alone in the beer gardens of Lancashire for a few more weeks yet.

The Small Hand

2011-02-21T16:24:00.003Z

Susan Hill's new ghost story is a subtle and insidious melancholy tale about a book collector who on discovering a lonely house feels a ghostly small hand slip into his own. From a strangely subdued beginning Hill weaves a clever story that hides deeper fears and anxieties behind the trappings of the ghost story. Fear of insanity, incipient madness waiting on the edges of our perceptions like a dark spider, can be far more terrifying than fear of the supernatural. What Hill does here is to blur the lines between the two, and even though this book won't have you nervously inspecting the darkest corners of the room, or even make you shiver with disquiet, it is a finely drawn story that subtly engenders introspection. The gaps in our knowledge of the working's of the mind and the question of the unexplained, the supernatural are all topics that can be examined but never fully brought completely into the light of human understanding. Hill impresses again by challenging the reader on many different levels rather than simply trotting out a string of strange happenings to raise a chill thrill.

Ghost of a Chance

2011-02-16T20:57:00.005Z

Rhiannon Lassiter's Ghost of a Chance is aimed squarely at YA readers. Or others, of more mature years (that's me), who think the young shouldn't have all the fun where reading is concerned. It follows the attempts of lost spirit Evangeline Chase, haunting her crumbling stately home as she attempts to discover who killed her before the killer bumps off the rest of her family. Eva is an excellent character. All the best scenes belong to Eva. Her character works on many levels and holds the sympathy of the reader throughout. All the ghostly characters are fine, from the sad young ghost Sinje to the vengeful and lethal Witch and Stalker. The living characters are where the book fails though. They are for the most part half written and dull. Kyle is ok but his twin Kyra just doesn't work at all. There's a sort of half hearted anti-bullying theme which misfires completely, mostly due to the contradictory and unrealistic description and realisation of the girls character.
Despite all this I was quite enjoying this book until about three quarters through. Unfortunately, things start to flag at the end of the long and eventful ghost walk, which takes up most of the middle section of the story. The book loses its focus at this stage and starts to tread water. The narrative is further undermined by a sudden onset of random head jumping among the minor supporting characters.
The murder mystery won't baffle many readers and I expect even the most inept detectives among them will have had the killer tagged with a good proportion of the book still ahead. The shock ending is also not in the least unexpected, even if most of the telegraphing were removed it's unlikely anyone will reach the end without twigging well in advance.
It's a shame the atmospheric and well paced opening half of the book wasn't better served by its conclusion.
One other minor external quibble is the choice of title. A quick search on Goodreads reveals there are well over 60 books already called Ghost of a Chance and I dread to think how many are about ghosts who are called Chance. I'm all for a cheesy chapter title or two for a bit of fun but the book title drives the book's shelf identity and I would think something less well worn would serve it better.

Cheeky Chancers

2011-02-04T16:10:00.004Z

Camera Critters

Glad to see our squirrels have returned. We used to spend so much time trying to do the impossible. Water into wine? Quite tricky. Lead into gold? Might take some time. Stop squirrels eating from the bird-feeders without harming them? Sorry I don't do miracles. Then when they did go missing a couple of years ago we really couldn't wait to get the cheeky chancers back.
Debbie put some hazelnuts out on the front lawn. It didn't take long before they got claimed.

Blood Maidens

2011-01-29T17:58:00.004Z

I'd pretty much given up on there ever being anymore James Asher vampire books by Barbara Hambly. It's 15 years since Traveling With the Dead was published. In recent years much of her output has been dominated with her Benjamin January books. Blood Maidens picks up the story in 1911. War is waiting for a spark to start the firestorm. Former secret service agent James Asher is manipulated/recruited again by the ancient Spanish vampire Don Simon Ysidro. Asher and Ysidro travel across Europe tracking down a missing female vampire and follow rumours of experimentation on vampires and unexplained spontaneous combustion. Drawn into the mystery and danger is Asher's studious wife Lydia. The combination of Hambly's meticulous historical research, intricate plotting, three vibrant characters and Hambly's talent for making the night seem perilous makes for a great vampire story. Along the way she explores the psychology of vampires in depth which underpins the richness of the characters and the choices they make. This is a true vampire novel, full of darkness, and peril which is refreshing considering how neutered by the whole teen romance brigade the vampire has become today. The vampires here are as they should be; inhuman, hypnotic seducers, lethal, merciless, manipulative and contemptuous of humanity. I hope Hambly writes some more.

Never the Bride

2011-01-28T15:52:00.007Z

My previous encounters with Paul Magrs have been limited to his Doctor Who fiction, none of which quite tickled my Doctor Who sensibilities, being for the most part too strange and off centre. He did create a great character though in Iris Wildthyme, who would go on to be so ably voiced by Katy Manning in the audio stories made by Big Finish. I would have been reluctant to try any more of his work if I hadn't been tempted by the promise of a book set in Whitby that was endorsed by Susan Hill, being respectively a favourite holiday destination of mine and a thoroughly respected author by me. Never the Bride follows the episodic adventure of Whitby B&B landlady Brenda and her friend Effie as they encounter a series of mysterious strange events whilst attempting to hide their own considerable strangeness from the world.
This was a lot better than most of his Doctor Who work. It's quite light, still somewhat surreal and a nice place for Magrs to pour his Gothic fancies inspired by the writings of Shelley, Wells, Stoker etc not to mention their filmic incarnations à la Universal & Hammer. It's the bizarre mix of the strange and prosaic which gives the book something different. I'm still not sold on Magrs prose but he does have lots of good ideas and they seem a lot more at home in this setting. I think it just passes the mark enough for me to think about trying the next book in the series.

The Somme Stations

2011-01-26T20:01:00.006Z

The Somme Stations is Andrew Martin's seventh book featuring Jim Stringer. The series usually follows Stringer's investigations as a Detective at the York office of the North Eastern Railway Police. This one though takes place during the First World War. It begins after most of the events in the book have concluded with Jim's wife writing letters to a friend as he recovers from injuries sustained during his time in France and with a murder charge hanging over him. How we got to this point is recounted in first person by Jim himself, beginning with his enlistment and followed by his war service, the tone being very like an extended letter home or a personal memoir. It's colourfully written with language authentic to the time and location, though thankfully it doesn't try to annotate the local accents. I'm a northern lad myself, of the red rose variety rather than the white, but even so books that insist on putting accent onto the page do become tedious fast unless the writer is something of a genius. The writer here keeps it simple. He builds the ensemble characters/suspects competently, choosing to focus on their little quirks and eccentricities to quickly establish the who's who. It's well done and something a bit different. Stringer retains no police rank in this book and gives a suspect's point of view to the investigation which takes a while to get started and then simmers quietly in the background as Stringer's regiment is trained, goes to France, including that fateful day, July 1st on the Somme, and later establishing a network of light railways, ferrying ammunition to artillery emplacements. Even without the mystery element to the story, the fictional war memoir is very well researched, amusing, poignant and authentic sounding. Add to that the author's obvious love for all things relating to steam locomotion and you have an unusual addition to the crime fiction genre.
The Somme Stations will be published in the UK on the 3rd of March 2011.

The Quick and the Dead

2011-01-24T16:45:00.004Z

I know it's a grim picture. I've mentioned our sparrowhawks many time on this blog, so it is with some sadness that we discovered the dead body of this young juvenile. He's obviously dived full force into one of our front windows in quest of another song bird for his lunch. He or others like him have done the same thing many times before but always in the past they've dusted themselves off after waiting for their eyes to clear of spinning stars and flown off to nurse a headache and bide their time for another foray. I'm not going to join the little birds at their celebration party because it is sad and even though I know they kill lots of little birds I also know they are part of the natural order and have been for thousands of years. The reason most of our little birds are so quick, agile and acrobatic is because they are the sons and daughters of the quickest, most agile and acrobatic of their neighbours. It's all evolution.

Heartstone

2011-01-22T19:38:00.004Z

Heartstone is the fifth of C.J. Sansom's Tudor mysteries featuring the hunchback lawyer Shardlake. In previous books he'd been tasked with dangerous mysteries with political ramifications by two of the most powerful men in Tudor England - the doomed Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. In this book he primarily sets out to do a favour for the Queen (Catherine Parr) by looking into a legal matter connected to one of the Queen's old servants. Along the way he resolves to look into another mystery involving a character introduced in the last book involving the woman's commitment to an insane asylum (Bedlam). Add to that yet another mystery connected to his new house steward. All three seem to present no danger to himself but Shardlake soon discovers that things aren't what they seem. The book proclaims on the cover 'Shardlake goes to war', the backdrop to the story being the threatened invasion by the French in 1545 after the King's foolish attempts to invade France. I used to have a bit of a thing for the Mary Rose, having been involved with a school project regarding it and watching the raising of the ship on tv in the early 80s. I used to have dreams about being a soldier on that ship when it went down. The scenes aboard the Mary Rose are very striking, haunting and sad. Sansom does a good job of portraying the futility of war without being too preachy or trite. I worried a little early on that the writer seemed to be dwelling on too many characters who had little or no connection to Shardlake's mysteries but his reason for doing so pays off in the end.

Blue Meanie

2011-01-18T17:45:00.003Z

It's always a bit odd having a bird look directly at you. You wonder what they are thinking about. This one looks like it has 'got the hump' with us. Debbie thinks he looks fierce - mean even. Maybe he wants to know why we haven't done anything about that sparrowhawk who keeps trying to brain himself against our windows. The sparrowhawk dived into our front window last week. He'd already gifted us a sparrowhawk print on our back patio windows last year.

Kick-Ass

2011-01-03T15:26:00.005Z

Got a copy of the Kick-Ass graphic novel for Christmas. I love this book. Ok I've already read it back on its original comic run beginning in 2008 but it's great to have all the issues collected together. Now if you watched the movie first (which I also adore), well I'm sorry to tell you that you made a big mistake. Reading the comic book after the movie means you are going to encounter all the 'feel good' changes that the movie introduced first and then get them taken away by the book. You aren't going to like it. That's why those changes were added - to make you 'feel good'. You'll also have all the explosive power of all the splash page issue endings completely defused by having watched them all at once in the movie. So if you just got hold of the DVD and you missed the movie, do yourself a favour and file it until you've read the 8 issues in this collection. They didn't outsell Spider-man for nothing. I think you'll find you love both comic and movie better if you do it this way.
Sometimes everything just comes together to make something special. Mark Millar's script is funny, dark and shocking. John Romita, Jr's art is just perfect. It's strange to say that because I'm not usually a fan of his work. His style has certainly evolved over the years from his early imitation of his dad's work to today's distinctive style. And he does have a distinctive style - you never have to check the credits to recognise his work. His big strength has always been the way he gets the action across rather than on the prettiness of his line work but it's clear something about his style just suits this book. Also the colouring from Dean White should not be underestimated. My copy has a lot of bonus material featuring Hit Girl which show some comparisons of JR Junior's covers inked and then coloured that really emphasise how good Dean White's colours are.
Volume 2 is now underway. It's still very cool though the wait between issue one and two has been a bit torturous.

Slow Storm

2010-12-17T18:41:00.003Z

Although Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm is a good 170+ pages in length the sparsity of the written narrative makes this book a short one sitting read. It's sort of a character piece about a Mexican illegal immigrant, Rafi, and Ursa, a somewhat unloved female firefighter who spends most of her working hours fighting a sometimes vindictive sibling rivalry with her brother and fending off the unwanted advances of another of her workmates. Their brief connection occurs at a time of emotional crisis when Ursa is at breaking point and Rafi is caught in the fallout. It sort of works with some quite poignant scenes though the best thing about the book is the quality of the artwork. The character linework can look a bit too simplistic but taken as a whole it does succeed in both telling the story and painting the emotional landscape. The literal landscapes of Kentucky and its sky and weather painted in startling watercolour washes are superb. Combining storms and weather with mental turmoil is a much used device but the art is good enough to break through any possible triteness. Although on the surface very little is happening there is a lot going on below the surface. Relationships, family, religion, homesickness, dreams, resentment, guilt, wonder, love, hope, freedom - the list goes on. Well worth a look.

American Vampire

2010-12-14T16:38:00.002Z

Remember when vampires were still scary? Perhaps you don't. I should break out my copy of Salem's Lot to remind myself that these bloodsuckers used to be more than just pale possible boyfriends in the latest teen/vamp/rom. Stephen King is one half of the writing talent on duty for this tale of mostly very bad vampires in the wild west of the late 1800s and the movie making era of the 1920s. King's introduction to the book has a lot more to say about the current state of vampire fiction and he doesn't mince words. This is also the first time King has written for comics. I know many of his stories have have been adapted for the genre but always by usually established comic book writers. This time he does it himself, which means basically writing the dialogue (no problem there) and, in place of the narrative, describing the contents and layout of the panels so the artist knows what to draw. He does a pretty good job barring a little muddiness in the way the supporting cast find their places in the opening part of the story. This book holds the origin story of our hero Skinner Sweet as told by King. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word hero as this guy was a very bad man even before he became the first American vampire. Sweet is a good creation, a vampire who revels in his new powers, whose love interest doesn't get beyond a craving for blood and candy. He's brash, violent, cunning and relentless. Alongside King's story in each issue is a later story set in Los Angeles about an aspiring young actress doing extras work for silent movies, who runs afoul of a nest of old European vampires who have an unstable truce with the powerful new vamp on the block, Skinner Sweet. This story is ably written by series creator Scott Snyder. Rafael Albuquerque does the artistic honours brilliantly in both arcs which helps the stories stand together. Under both stories is a suggestion of a subtext about America and its emerging place amongst the old world order. The book features the first 5 issues and also includes an afterword by Scott Snyder, variant covers by various artists, samples of script instructions by King and Snyder and early concept art. Altogether a nice piece of work.

The Nobody

2010-12-07T17:40:00.003Z

Canadian writer/artist Jeff Lemire brings H.G. Wells' classic psychological sci-fi tale The Invisible Man forward in time a hundred years to 1994 in three acts. Lemire's spare narrative and simple black and white artwork (sorry black, white & icy blue tint) are well suited to the subtle storytelling of The Nobody. The original novella put forward several philosophical theories about what would happen to a man freed of the moral constraints of society by the escape route of invisibility. J.R.R. Tolkien was also fascinated by such ideas and used them in his stories about a magical ring that could make the wearer invisible. Lemire's take on the story is somewhat more subtle, drawing on small town paranoia, as did Wells, of the mysterious stranger and the irony of an invisible man who is quite the largest and most visible event to visit the place, but adding little alternative perspectives with protagonist and satellite characters , most notably Vickie, vying for their visibility in society. The way familiarity makes people or things fade from our attention is another of the clever observations subtly suggested, usually with hardly any scripted direction beyond the panels of artwork. There's plenty of space in the telling of the story for the reader to expand their own thought on the subject. Just goes to show that you don't need to fill the page with words to tell an intelligent and subtly poignant tale.

Dunnocks on the Run

2010-12-05T15:58:00.004Z

If in a hundred years in the deep of winter there are still robins & dunnocks still in England, I'm sure there will be somebody looking into their gardens and feeling sorry for the poor harried dunnock, bravely scurrying about on the hard ground and the frozen twig from that most autocratic garden bird - the robin.

The Forever War

2010-11-23T21:25:00.005Z

I've just reacquainted myself with Joe Haldeman's anti-war sci-fi classic The Forever War. First published in 1974 the book tells the story of William Mandella, one of the first conscripted troops to be trained and thrown at an alien race the expansionist human race has encountered unimaginable distances from Earth. After his first tour of duty, lasting two years, Mandella returns to Earth to a home that has advanced by a decade due to the relativistic nature of long distance space travel. The alienation and disconnection with the world he returns to echoes Haldeman's own experiences of returning home from his tours in Viet Nam. As more time passes, Mandella becomes more divorced from the human race as a whole, compounding the meaningless of conflict to preserve a race he no longer identifies with. It's all cleverly written, leading the reader to consider the nature of war and man's relation to it. He explodes the glorification of war and all its cliches one by one, bringing the act of war down to something mechanical with its human components as mere specialised cogs in the machine. The book won the Nebula, Hugo & Locus awards which is no mean feat considering the hot bed of sci-fi talent operating when The Forever War first appeared. Ridley Scott is said to be interested in bringing the book to the big screen.

In between

2010-11-21T17:49:00.004Z

I'm in one of those in between periods of the year. I'm not finishing anything worth writing about, nor am I starting anything. This part of the year sometimes gets me that way. The autumn has mostly wrapped up barring the last of the migrations and the winter keeps poking at me saying, "I'm coming, just you wait." Recently it poked so hard it whipped up a storm powerful enough to blow the dome off the top of one of our local landmarks - Darwen Tower - perched up on the heights of the Darwen Moors. My trips out have been like the snowbound mouse from last Christmas, nipping out into the cold to search for a crumb of sustenance and then darting back into the warmth to my cozy nest. I know I should look up more, or scrub the condensation off the windows and let the world give me something, some inspiration or spark, but it's only when I'm sat here thinking of something to write, to prove I'm still here, that I realise that I didn't.

Apocalypse Suite

2010-11-03T17:38:00.007Z

Ah, the autumn. The wonderful colours, the spectacle of migrating birds, the.... damn it's so dark... and so wet.... and windy... and I'm coughing again... and my nose is running again... and is this a cold... please don't be flu... or octopus flu... or whatever the hell is coming next. Anyway - the autumn... isn't it great? It's out there and I'm in here reading my comics again. This time it's Gerard Way's comic book debut with the remarkable first collection of The Umbrella Academy written when he was still on the road with My Chemical Romance deep in a world Black Parade tour. Well before he rose to fame as part of a successful rock band Gerard began writing and drawing comics. It would be easy to dismiss this book before reading it, thinking that the only reason it succeeded was on the back of MCR's popularity but a lot harder to maintain such an opinion after you finish the first issue. No mean feat considering the first issue is titled The Day the Eiffel Tower Went Berserk, which you might think is some kind of oblique metaphor but no .... the Eiffel Tower does really go berserk, striding about Paris shooting laser beams with only a bunch of weird kids calling themselves the Umbrella Academy the only thing standing in its way. After such an incredible first issue come the remaining 5 issues, mainly featuring the adult incarnation of the Academy after their break-up. It's completely bonkers, full of wit and creativity but still very grounded with strong characters and an off kilter plot. Gabriel Ba's off-centre art brings to mind Hellboy artist Mike Mignola but with a rougher edge that suits the narrative perfectly. The wonderful James Jean covers are all here too. The collection is completed with some pre-launch publicity shorts and some early character and concept art which features Gerard Way's original drawings. He's actually a very good comic book artist in his own right but obviously he wouldn't have been able to find the time to be front man of MCR and do more than script the series.

The Lion & the Spider

2010-10-31T16:37:00.004Z

It's the late 1970s. I'd spent the decade absorbing Marvel's back catalogue of reprints, learning to read along the way from the day my aunt handed the four year old me my first Spider-man issue. Okay - four year old me got my dad to do the reading initially but you get the idea. I reread those early Lee/Ditko & the Lee/Kirby (back-up strip was The Mighty Thor) stories time and time again. Not too long after - 1976 to be exact - I fell in love with Marvel UK's new hero: Captain Britain was born.
Unfortunately, most of the other kids were more impressed with The Beano, TV Comic, Look-in or all those war comics. Captain Britain was dead. After 39 weekly issues Marvel UK's British experiment was laid to rest. The UK just wasn't in tune with America's love of the super-hero comic genre. At this time Marvel had got used to canceling comics after the shine had worn off the launch glitz. These titles usually ended with just a small loyal following which the publishers would try to tempt over to another title by merging the defunct title with one of the more viable titles. In this case Captain Britain's loyal die-hards would have to start collecting Marvel's flagship unsinkable British reprint title: Super Spider-man. The 11 year old me was a big fan of both. This archive volume begins with those post cancellation stories.The Captain Britain series was already deeply flawed even before the merger. It inhabited a Britain that only existed in the lampoon influenced American psyche. The first installment is pretty eye-watering as the writer tries to fit every perceived Brit cliche and mannerism into that first 5 page segment. I'm guessing there were some editorial memos on the fly following this as they did attempt to tone it down a bit in following installments. Two arcs of fairly lacklustre story-telling followed, getting wackier by the week, which seemed to have more in common with vintage titles like Batman from a decade or two earlier. The entirety of Claremont's Captain Britain/Spider-man Team-Up with the original splash pages (included here) would complete the phase-out for our hero. This team-up is quite decent, even considering it features Marvel's 'filler' villain - Arcade.
Captain Britain was dead. Or was he? In 1978 the new Hulk Weekly, designed to cash-in on the popular tv-series but without the use of Marvel's Hulk back catalogue, was looking for British produced back-up titles. One of these was the Steve Parkhouse written Black Knight series that would feature a mysterious stranger who would turn out to be an amnesiac Brian Braddock. The brief was to write a Tolkienesque quest, while drawing on British mythology. It would be packed with mythical creatures and magic, most notably the diminutive feral looking elves commanded by master archer Moondog. At this stage there is no sign of Jackdaw (Captain Britain's future fated side-kick) though I guess we should assume he is one of Moondog's troop. Paul Neary would provide the startling and distinctive black and white art, ably assisted in inks by John Stokes. Sometimes something astounding just comes together by people coming together at just the right moment in time. It was destiny I suppose. For the first time since his launch Captain Britain gained an identity that wasn't just an amalgam of successful American comic book characters. The first 29 installments are included here for the first time in over 30 years. It's a shame the series has been split up with the concluding parts kicking off the next volume. Early concept art closes the book as well as some memos from Stan Lee and bizarrely Neil Tennant (the then Marvel UK London editor of latterly Pet Shop Boys fame).
For British comic book nostalgists this book is a dream and for those who know Captain Britain's history they'll know this was to be the stepping stone that would bring our hero under the triumphant pen of the master himself - Alan Moore. The Best was yet to come.
Captain Britain was alive.

On the hills

2010-10-22T18:11:00.005+01:00

Camera Critters

I've seen a ghost that strides the line

where earth and sky reside.
I've heard the gentle heart
That yearns for places wide.
I've felt the breath that mists the air
With clouds that mark your course.
No whip or line should damp your pride,
Trammel your soul with force.

Michael Finn

Started Early, Took My Dog

2010-10-21T18:32:00.006+01:00

I'd fully intended to take this book on holiday with me but for one reason or another I'd not managed to get hold of a copy in time. Fortunately, as readers of my blog might already have read, there was a copy on the shelf in the living area of my holiday let, perhaps left behind by a recent visitor. I suppose I was fated to spend my holidays with Kate Atkinson no matter what I did. Fate and synchronicity aren't strangers to Kate's writing either, not least this fourth outing for retired private detective Jackson Brodie. It's another deliciously enjoyable read from this ever dependable author. This one seems even more personal to me than ever. How does she do that? It's like she writes books just for me. Dipping back to the 70s, that golden time of my childhood, here the dark era of the serial killer infested Yorkshire, and back to the now and the consequences of decisions made over three decades later, Kate weaving a web of complexity with characters and plot-lines that slowly converge. My favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, gets more than just the title; she crops up throughout both quoted and thematically. Even Jackson seems to be tracking me north to Whitby, dogging my tracks to my holiday escape. And driving home, south through Yorkshire I'm almost keeping an eye out for a Saab in the rear view mirror, a light-up Virgin Mary blinking on the dashboard and further behind dogging him - that silver Avensis. Maybe he's hampered by the detours too. We pass Byland Abbey, clearly visible from the road. Surely that should hold him up for a while. Jackson loves his abbeys. Sadness, regret, fatalism - they're all still here but tempered by humour and lastly by hope. It's probably fitting that Emily Dickinson gets the last word.

'Hope' is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of Me.

Emily Dickinson

Collected Ghost Stories

2010-10-20T17:46:00.002+01:00

I often take Montague on holiday with me. He doesn't take up much room and he doesn't eat all the Baby Bells. I'm talking about Montague Rhodes James - my favourite writer of ghost stories. This time Montague is telling me the stories that didn't get printed in his four haunting anthologies. I prefer the individual publications to the doorstop collection here. It's pretty evident why these six stories didn't make it into the original publications.

The Uncommon Prayer-Book
A Neighbour's Landmark
Rats
The Experiment
The Malice of Inanimate Objects
A Vignette

They are a little rough around the edges, lacking the gloss of a story that an author has done tinkering with. There are still chilling moments to be had but there are no classics present unfortunately. Also included are several excerpts from prefaces by James that were published in his collections and other ghost story anthologies. They are very honest descriptions and opinions on the writing process and the qualities James valued in the creation of stories of this genre. He also talks about that drawer that all writers possess that houses the unfinished writings, or unused ideas. It's all invaluable stuff for writers interested in developing a style that might be influenced by James and others of his degree of adeptness.

The Sir Nigel Gresley

2010-10-19T17:56:00.006+01:00

On our last full day in North Yorkshire we visited Grosmont which along with the steam railway station is also the location of the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group and their engine shed. We were lucky to see the Sir Nigel Gresley, a restored Gresley A4 Pacific, named after its designer. It's the same type of train as the Mallard, the holder of the official world speed record for steam locomotives at 125.88 mph. To get round the back of the engine shed you have to make your way through a long tunnel.On the way back to the station one of the other locomotives steamed past us.
We watched more trains steaming in and out of the station until it started raining and we made our way back to Palmers over the North Yorkshire Moors.

Return to places well known

2010-10-18T16:43:00.004+01:00

We also revisited our old stomping ground at Sandsend. Harry loves the beach here; the smell of the sea always perks him up. He's been coming here since he was a pup. Debbie thinks the smells trigger memories for him. The ritual of chips and fish from the Magpie in Whitby serves just as well to perk up the human members of our party.

Runswick legends

2010-10-17T18:11:00.007+01:00

North Yorkshire is alive with folklore, myths and legends but Palmers didn't seem at all spooky, considering its age, remote location and nights blacker than the raven wings of midnight (ta Mr Poe). I tried my usual best to embrace the night side, taking along another collection of ghost stories by M. R. James to read at the witching hour; a helpful barn owl providing the blood curdling screams of lost souls somewhere beyond the garden walls, but it was no use. Some places just don't cooperate. The rumble of night flying planes and stray headlights on the windows remained stubbornly unsupernatural.
We took Harry out to Runswick Bay which has its fair share of its own folklore. The village here, having been a fishing village for well over half a millennium, has lots of fishing related superstition. It's been written that children used to light fires on the cliff during stormy weather, dancing and singing to influence the wind:

“Souther Wind, souther,
And Blow father home to mother.”

Did they really sacrifice cats when the fisherman returned home safe? Were fisherman really so superstitious they'd stay at home if they saw a woman before casting off... or heard talk of pigs? Apparently so.
There are stories of a hob (a goblin) who used to live in the caves at the southern end of the bay. This hob was supposedly a benevolent creature who could cure coughs. When the whooping cough struck their children, mothers would take them to the caves and cry out:

“Hob – hole Hob!
My bairn’s getten’t kink-cough:
Tak’t off! Tak’t off!"

I probably should have taken Debbie out there to see if he could help her with her cough. I wonder what his rates are like? Other stories tell of smugglers who would employ an owl to call out a warning as he perched on the inn sign. Smuggling did happen here as the caves were a useful place to hide out or store the goods.
In 1664 the entire village slid into the sea, the only building remaining was the house that belonged to the man whose wake occupied the villagers during the disaster. I can well believe how it could have happened too as the bay is so steep it seems to try to tip you all the way to the brine.

Port Mulgrave: Palmers

2010-10-16T15:27:00.007+01:00

We returned to North Yorkshire again this autumn, not to Sandsend this time but to Port Mulgrave, a few miles up the coast in the parish of Hinderwell. The building we rented is part of a collection of buildings called Rosedale Cottages. Many of the buildings in the area were erected to serve the miners working to extract iron ore. One is converted from an old stable block and another was the old servant's quarters but the building we moved into was built in 1857 for the then mine and port owner Sir Charles Palmer. It's set in a half acre of grounds and was recently restored five years ago.
The first thing we noticed as we drove though Sandsend and then on to Palmers was how the trees had already shed their leaves in the wind from the North Sea. It seemed like we had moved the calendar along a month during the three hour drive north.
Harry led the charge into our new home for the week, his nails tip-tapping on the wood floors. I selected the room with the lowest bed and tried the bedside lamps. One wasn't working and the other blew its bulb when I flicked the switch. Intending to read my books in the dead of night I retrieved another lamp from one of the other bedrooms. I'd meant to bring the new Kate Atkinson book, Started Early, Took My Dog, but for one reason or another had not managed to get a copy. Fortunately a previous visitor had left a copy in the bookcase in the main living area. I pounced on that with some relish and relocated it next to my transient lamp. What a great stroke of luck to start the holiday with.

The Parkers Arms

2010-10-09T16:34:00.007+01:00

One of my most favourite parts of Lancashire is the Forest of Bowland. It's an area filled with high fells and sweeping views over large valleys and woodland. If you've been there you'll know that it is well deserving of its AONB designation (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty).
I keep thinking every week that this is going to be the last bit of sunshine warm enough to sit out without coats before the chill winds of winter force us to wrap up in layers and layers. So when the sun was still hanging on for one day more I was quick to get somewhere nice to enjoy it. This week it was at a tiny village in Bowland called Newton. It has a fabulous friendly pub called The Parkers Arms, with top quality nosh and plenty of places to sit out and enjoy the scenery. They've won all sorts of awards which are as well deserved as Bowland is of its AONB status. We had a very tasty lunch, though I managed to drop my change on the floor again which had the bar guy nearly on hands and knees trying to retrieve it for me - turned out it was only 20p.

Dockland refections

2010-10-08T19:09:00.004+01:00

Weekend Reflections

The somewhat murky waters of Preston Docks.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

2010-10-05T16:34:00.009+01:00

The key to producing a good adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in any media is for the producers to understand that perhaps the most important character in the story is not Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Watson; it's the moor and the atmosphere it generates in all its aspects, whether it be the shadow filled night or the stark brightness of the day. Ian Edginton's adaptation of the famous story into the medium of graphic novel is very faithful to the Conan Doyle original, but without the bulk of Doctor Watson's emotive text the realization of the moor falls to the artistic talents of the artist I.N.J. Culbard. Edginton makes the most of the early scenes in London, understandably as this is the part of the story, barring the conclusion, that features Holmes the most. Culbard's style uses what on the surface look quite simple caricatures but somehow he brings them alive with expressiveness. Each character is quite distinctive.He is also very creative in the use of available light. If Edginton relishes some of the more famous lines, Culbard who has a century of imagery from all the other mediums to draw inspiration from, doesn't disappoint.

"Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound."

It's a very commendable and collectible effort. Edginton and Culbard work well together and readers who enjoyed their other work such as A study in Scarlet previously reviewed on Badelynge here, should have a pleasant time with this book. Also included are a teaser for A Study in Scarlet and early character and cover designs for those interested in the creative process.

Grumple

2010-09-28T15:34:00.003+01:00

Harry has bounced back from his recent health problems quite well. He still limps and he's had to get used to shorter walks, but he's happy. Recently he's become a little more vocal. I don't mean he barks. Harry rarely barks. If he catches anybody getting out of vans filled with bottles who audaciously try to appropriate the empty bottles from our step... then he might have a go. Or if strange blokes bearing ladders and buckets start dabbing our windows with damp cloths... well then surely he's allowed a few vocal outbursts. No, I mean he makes more grumbly noises than he used to, usually because he wants stuff clearing from his next settling point, or if folk insist on eating buttered toast without offering it up to him entirely. Or if you stop scratching his ears too early... if there is such a thing.

White Rabbit

2010-09-25T15:02:00.004+01:00

Camera Critters

Wild white rabbits are quite rare I believe. I suppose this one, visiting our local cemetery, is an albino. He doesn't blend in very well does he. I suppose this accounts for their rarity. Perhaps last winter, being so cold and snow filled, might have contributed to this buns survival chances for once.

Hidden treasures

2010-09-21T14:48:00.012+01:00

Stained glass windows in the village of Brindle that I visited a few weeks ago in a previous post, depicting the possible burying of the great Cuerdale treasure, following what might have been the battle of Brunanburh. That sounds like a lot of suppositions but much of the details of medieval history rely on joining scattered facts together with a network of ifs and buts.

Season's end

2010-09-17T14:52:00.004+01:00

Camera Critters

I keep hearing a certain word. An innocent sounding word. A quiet little adjective that trips off the tongue too easily. That word is autumnal. I don't have anything against autumn, it's a splendid time of the year, but with every spectacular autumn you have to know that winter is just around the corner and unlike the other three seasons just seems to last forever. I like spring and summer too much and this year's offering of new life and sunshine has skipped past in the blink of an eye. The familiar sights of summer are fading away again. The gatekeepers are gone and the last of the small whites are drinking their last sips. The day feels autumnal.

Eagle & Child

2010-09-10T22:57:00.005+01:00

A few miles outside Blackpool is a village called Weeton. It's an old village. So old it was mentioned in the Domesday Book, though back then it was known as Widetun, which derived from the Old English means willow settlement. If you were to visit the place now you would see that some fine willows grow there still. The rather unusual name of the village's pub The Eagle & Child is taken from the crest of a former local land owner Lord Derby. The pub itself is one of the oldest public house in Lancashire, dating back to 1585. It's got a lot of history. Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have stayed here and there are many stories of ghosts and strange happening, though quite a few of these were created over the years to add to the old place's mystique to drum up trade. Tales of ghosts are always popular and I must admit that I too was drawn to the place purely by its supernatural reputation. I'm not saying I believe in ghosts, though I'm always open minded about such things, but I'm more interested by how history generates folklore and mythology. And of course, I love a good ghost story. The story that has gained the most notoriety is that of Bleeding Ears Murph, a highwayman who can be heard muttering to himself in the quiet of the night. I visited the place in daylight so I didn't get a chance to find out what the unfortunate fellow mutters about but I did get a chance to sample the pub's excellent cuisine.

The Ship Inn

2010-09-03T22:44:00.010+01:00

With the prospect of a long cold winter to match last year, I've been trying to make the most of every brief appearance of our mostly absent summer sun. This week we ventured further westward along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, fetching up at the Ship Inn near Haskayne, somewhere well off the beaten path - in this case just off the Maghull Southport Road.
I sat for a while watching a coot eyeing up the canal boats as if he were searching for the best words to introduce himself. Some patrolling ducks came along. One duck peeled off and jumped up onto the bank and a coot followed him. The two strolled along together, uncommonly friendly, like the oddest couple promenading proudly together. At one point they managed to get the wrong side of a fence separating them from the water. They marched up and down that fence at least three times, searching for the way back, turning back on themselves just before the gap each time.
"It's this way, dear," they quacked.
"No I'm sure it's the other way."
"No dear, I distinctly remember..."
"No, no, I remember this daisy..."
"There are daisies all over."
At last they found the gap and the duck went back to the other ducks and the coot went back to eyeing up his canal boat. It never would have worked.
We had a drink and lunch while we watched the canal boats emerging from under Ship Bridge #22. Although the location was pretty much ideal, with shady trees, the soothing atmosphere of a place by the water and picnic tables right up to the canal bank, I can't really recommend the food. It was pretty basic. But the ducks, the coot, the sunshine, the shady trees and the quiet water more than made up for it.

Skulduggery Pleasant

2010-08-31T13:21:00.009+01:00

Back when I was eleven years old, if you had handed me a book featuring a magic using, skeleton detective, I would have likely snapped your hand off and demanded to know where I could get the next twenty books. As a soon to be 44 year old it takes a little more to impress me. Although there are some gems of children's fiction about these days, this one doesn't come close to competing with the current gold standards of Rowling, Pullman and Stroud. The book, on the whole, is quite easy to read and the action is enthusiastically described like a blow by blow radio commentary for WWF. Derek Landy's world building follows his small group of characters around like a small bubble generated by their presence. There is little depth to it. It just sort of springs up as the characters progress. Skulduggery Pleasant isn't the dynamic and extraordinary figure the cover blurb promises either. He's a rather contradictory fellow who happens to be a skeleton. He doesn't do much detecting either, coming across as more of a gung-ho soldier, though perhaps in future novels he will get a chance to show off his skills rather than his kills. I had trouble sometimes, when there were extended scenes filled with dialogue, in keeping track of who was actually speaking, which considering usually featured a centuries old undead skeleton detective sorcerer conversing with a 12 year old girl hardly seems possible. Stephanie is also too shallow a character, her motivations seem mainly to be driven by avoiding boredom. There are moments when she almost comes alive, notably as she wonders how her parents will deal with the doppelganger living in her bedroom, who will continue to fool the world with a hollow smile after the real Stephanie has died in her quest for adventure but these are way too few. Back when I was eleven none of this would have mattered. My imagination would have filled in all the blanks and coloured all the characters in blazing technicolor. These days my imagination needs a bit more grist for the mill.

Last lambs

2010-08-28T12:23:00.002+01:00

Camera Critters

This is the last of our lamb pictures. Now I'm going to have to wait until next spring to get a top up.

Simon Serrailler

2010-08-25T22:32:00.032+01:00

Susan Hill has been writing extraordinary fiction for over four decades. She is adept at characterisation and building complex emotional landscapes for her characters to inhabit. In 2004 she turned her hand to writing in a completely new genre; the detective novel. She plays with the genre's staple ingredients and adds her own flare for exploring human relationships to the mix, creating a thoroughly engrossing series. The latest installment The Shadows in the Street, continues to follow the primary characters, brother and sister, DCI Simon Serrailler and Dr. Cat Deerborn. Serrailler often takes a back seat in the narrative, most notably in the first book, The Various Haunts of Men. The crime or mystery is used primarily as a backdrop to explore related themes of the effects of crime, murder, loss, insanity, loneliness, paranoia and more. Hill never coddles the reader with comfort reading; there are many scenes of true heart rending sadness in all the books. It's not offered up as melodrama but rather as an attempt to show the results of tragedy that can enter any of our lives at any moment. The sixth Serrailler book, The Betrayal of Trust will be out sometime next year. I recommend them all.

Canal fruit

2010-08-20T13:43:00.005+01:00

This week I had lunch at The Boat Yard, which is a pub/restaurant/coffee bar by the canal side at Hoghton. While I was waiting for my fish and chips a bunch of kids turned up on an outdoor activity thing. Some chap took them through all the rules and safety issues and then unleashed the kids onto the water. They careened about like a bunch of multi-coloured slices of fruit bobbing about in a large trough of water. At least they've got some water to bob about on. Some parts of the canal have been allowed to run dry and are sill closed. After plenty of torrential rain this month the hose-pipe ban was lifted at last today. Water levels in reservoirs are still low but apparently they are higher than they were and water in Cumbria and North Wales is at decent levels.
It was only after the kids moved away that the true masters of the water started to reappear.

The Neon Rain

2010-08-18T00:44:00.003+01:00

Neon rain is the first of the books by James Lee Burke to feature Dave Robicheaux. He's still employed as a New Orleans homicide detective and by the time the book opens he's already managed to trigger events that will explode in his face with ever more violent consequences. Robicheaux is an odd character. A Cajun Viet Nam vet driven to alcoholism but now dry for some years. Lauded as an outstanding detective by his superiors but seen here to be more versed in the arts of violence and intimidation. He's a master of the N'awlins' jive-talk and colloquialisms, so much so many of the natives don't know what the hell he just said, though thankfully Burke never even attempts to annotate the accent. Intelligent and widely read, anecdotes and philosophical opinions flow from him like water - even sometimes bandied with the low-lifes and cut-throats that dog his world. His relationship with Annie displays the gentler side of his nature, to a degree patronizing, but never really becomes as real as the violence around him; it's a movie romance, accelerated to match the screen's pace and caught in dream-like glimpses. He's like the extra cog from another machine, jammed into the works and striking sparks from every other character he encounters. He does wax-poetic from time to time, often about the natural world beyond the fringes of the human one. He lives on a house boat, listens to classic jazz and eats industrial quantities of shrimp. It does all sort of work though, even if the character of our hero is quite hard to pin down. Burke writes well, his own voice is there from time to time, hiding among Dave's thoughts, and there may be an element of the author setting up the character for the long running series that is to come.

Raymondo Sunshine

2010-08-16T13:11:00.004+01:00

The sun has become an infrequent visitor to our gardens in recent years. If we can't have the real thing then we have decided that we'll grow the sun. Last August I introduced Frank the Sunflower to the world. He was the shining light of the garden for a few weeks but eventually his light waned and we made him into sunflower seed bread so that the last day of August became The Day We Ate Frank. Any Frank fans can still see him by looking at last years August blog Archives or by clicking the highlighted links in this post. We still talk about Frank. He was a legend. But every legend has to step aside one day to let the new kids on the block have their day in the lime-light. This year we grew more sunflowers. We tried to grow different varieties too. One of the top shiners this year is the guy in these pictures. Let me introduce you to Raymondo Sunshine. And guess what? On the day I pointed my camera at him the real sun came barging onto the scene.

Little buns - big tums

2010-08-14T14:39:00.004+01:00

Camera Critters

I swear the buns round here think the cemetery is an all-you-can-eat buffet bonanza. This wide-eyed chap is doing a little organic weed-killing in repayment.

Scorton

2010-08-13T13:36:00.024+01:00

This week I set out to visit a little village called Scorton near the River Wyre on the edges of the Forest of Bowland. The village is relatively new, dating back to the 16th century when it was then known as Scurton, which translated from the Anglo-Saxon means farmstead near a ditch or ravine.

A little dog was so friendly, every time he got up to greet a new friend he managed to tangle himself up a little more on his lead. He just seemed happy to be out in the air.

We had an excellent lunch and drinks at The Priory, which serves the village as a restaurant, tea-rooms, pub & accommodation. The sun even came out for the duration of our stay and made it a very pleasant afternoon.

Famous Modern Ghost Stories

2010-08-09T14:38:00.005+01:00

This collection of fifteen famous ghost stories edited by Dorothy Scarborough was first published in 1921. Only about half of the stories have survived the past century with any notoriety intact. Scarborough's selection process was quite wide and loose with the term ghost. Most of the stories are drawn from American publications of the time, the Harper brothers gaining the biggest slice of the publishing credits.
Gems for me are:

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, more a novella than a short story but one of the great horror stories of the 20th Century (see my previous review).
The Beast With Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey - A very creepy story about a possessed severed hand. This story spawned two feature films.
The Woman at Seven Brothers by Wilbur Daniel Steele - Very atmospheric ghost story set on a remote lighthouse. I admit I have a love of lighthouses and relish any story well told from its windy staircases, lamp-rooms and common rooms. This story is a little traditional but still well told.
Ligeia by Edgar Alllan Poe - Poe shows off his sumptuous use of the English language, penning on the layers of creepiness with aplomb. Some of Poe's stories are worth reading just for the use of language alone: e.g. 'blacker than the raven wings of midnight'. Brilliant.

The rest of the stories range from quite good to quite trite. None of them are particularly bad but some seem to have been added to raise the story count. There are also a few oddities worth a read like Myla Jo Closser's At the Gate. The image of all the faithful dogs waiting patiently at the gates of Heaven for their owners to arrive is quite moving. None of the dogs will go through without their owners.

Quackers & croakers

2010-08-07T14:11:00.006+01:00

Camera Critters

Another family of ducks from last month to brighten the day of anybody needing a bit of pure cuteness to get them through the day. This isn't the family I featured earlier in the year.
Where did the sunshine go anyway? This month just seems to be cloud and wetness again. I suppose the ducks don't really mind but I crave a bit of sunshine on my face. This wetness this week seems to have triggered the annual frog pilgrimage down the hill again with several hoppers fetching up in the gardens again. This one is having a rest on my back step before he sets off again.

Brindle

2010-08-06T14:09:00.003+01:00

After exploring some more of the leafy lanes of Lancashire near Chorley we found ourselves in the small parish of Brindle which was established here well over 800 years ago, though its name has gradually morphed over the centuries, as our language does, from the Old English Burnhull, which means hill by the stream, to Brindle. It's claimed that the battle of Brunanburh was fought here between King Athelstan and a mixed force of Vikings and Northmen in 937, images of which can be found around the parish if you look closely. Other places claim as much including my own home patch of Livesey. The great Cuerdale treasure was discovered near to Brindle which perhaps adds some substance to the claim. It has a great traditional village pub called the Cavendish Arms, which dates back to the 1540s complete with a shady beer garden off to the side and a most singular bar: a desk and chest of drawers. The church of St James (in pre-Reformation days known as St. Helen’s) stands beside the pub, the oldest part still remaining being the tower shown here, built in the 15th Century, though the clock was a later addition made by Thomas Kirkhall of Bolton-le-Moors, 1637. Two of the original bells are still intact and operational. Much of the rest of the church has been rebuilt or restored.

Guests for Summer

2010-07-30T12:09:00.012+01:00

Camera Critters

A welcome new visitor this year was a heron. He would never stop but his flight path took him west to east directly over our house in the evenings. I caught my first glimpse of him in the spring. Maybe he was returning from a day on the reservoirs, or some river beyond our valley. Some have suggested he might be doing the rounds of the garden fish ponds in the area. Whichever it is I've enjoyed his flights into the sunset, his crazy legs dangling back behind him like half deployed landing gear.
Our tawny owls are joyously back in force this summer after their strange absence last year, as are the bats. Two years ago our bats had all but disappeared and there were a few at the back last year but this year they are front and back flitting back and forth. Maybe we are having a better year for their foodstuff, I've notice the moths seem to be up on last year. Are the butterflies doing better than last year? Hard to tell. This Ringlet seemed to be enjoying itself. We featured the Orange Tip earlier, and Debbie showed off her Speckled Wood, but we've also entertained Meadow Browns and many others of the common varieties. I'm still not convinced they are having as good a year as they should be.
One other visitor of note is the sparrowhawk. He was here last year and took a few birds from the front tree right under our noses but he really shocked us by upping his stakes and taking out a magpie, which he consumed in situ on the hillside surrounded by curious and seemingly unconcerned bunnies. We put up a new feeder on one of the back trees a few weeks ago which didn't remain hidden from his hawk eye for long. There is now the perfect imprint of a sparrowhawk on our patio windows. Following the line of where the feeder was hanging, he must have glided low down the hill, made his snatch from the feeder at speed, he's spotted daylight through the patio window through to the front window and tried to escape with the spoils by flying through our living room. The closed window put paid to that plan. Fortunately for the sparrowhawk and rather less fortunately for our sparrow colonies, there was no dead or comatose hawk sprawled on the patio when we investigated. Hopefully he'll think twice before trying that trick again.Lastly we have spied on occasion a cheeky face at the window. Three years ago this tree was constantly infested with feeder destroying cheeky faces but nowadays we are lucky (yes I did say lucky - that was not a typo) to see a brief visit from one of our old adversaries.

Not so blobby now

2010-07-26T14:13:00.003+01:00

I few weeks ago Mark sent me some pictures of black and white amorphous blobs. The next day he wanted to know why I hadn't featured his Canada Geese on the blog. I told him he needed to get closer to the subjects or use a tripod. So here we have the results of my advice. No he didn't use a tripod, and no he didn't venture closer, but the obliging not-so-amorphous geese did come closer to him. Right up to his garden fence no less.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

2010-07-19T00:31:00.002+01:00

The previous book in this series had me rummaging around in my cupboards to find my old stamp books, since the plot revolved around stamps and their collectors and admirers. Said rummaging also involved turning over some of my childhood memories connected to my own involvement in the hobby. See review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This time the old traditional puppet show takes centre stage instead and unfortunately I'm not a closet puppet collector with vintage Punch & Judy puppets lurking in my attic so I'll just have to review the book instead. Ok so maybe I had a Sooty hand puppet way back when but he was hardly the star of my toy cupboard. The star of this book though is the formidable Flavia De Luce. At nearly 12 years old she might not be in Sherlock Holmes' league but she's more than a match for the local country constabulary. I found myself imagining Flavia as a Wednesday Addams who has grown out of her spiders and turned her hand to chemistry and crime fighting. Many of the characters introduced in the first book are here again, including all the extraordinary De Luce's plus staff and a whole bunch more to fatten up the suspect list. The story starts quite slow as the stage is meticulously dressed with clues and red herrings and distractions of the Flavia kind but when the first body hits the ground things start moving. Flavia's detective work probably compares more with Columbo than Holmes, as she uses her youth to tease information from everyone she meets. Between the sleuthing there's always time for a few interludes of De Luce family disharmony. Alan Bradley's writing manages the difficult task of keeping things fun without sending his creations up. As a wise man once said, "That's the way to do it!!!"

The Sound of Vorms

2010-07-17T14:00:00.005+01:00

Camera Critters

"Be very, very quiet."
"Why's that Mr Jay?"
"I'm listening."
"What are you listening for, Mr Jay?"
"I'm listening for Vorms."
"Vorms? Oh.. worms. What do vorms sound like?"
"They sound..... tasty. Very tasty."

The Language of Bees

2010-07-12T22:28:00.007+01:00

The 9th Mary Russell book, or alternatively, you could think of it as the first half of the 9th book as this one ends on a big TBC. I think the reason I held off on reading this one for a full year is because I had read that it was the first half of a two parter. Part two - The God in the Hive hit the UK bookshelves last week so I won't have any problems with forgetting half the plot in the interim.
Laurie R King doesn't disappoint very often and this is a very solid addition to the long running series. The last few books have been part of a globe trotting arc as Sherlock Holmes and Russell travel through Asia and America. If you are new to the series and can't get hold of the first book - 1994's The Beekeeper's Apprentice - then you could do worse than dipping your toe in the water with The Language of Bees. It's been nearly a half decade wait since the last book - the superb Locked Rooms from 2005, so there is a subtle element of a reboot here with Russell and her famous other half arriving back in Sussex and those canonical retirement plan bees. The arrival of a long lost son sends Holmes in search of a missing daughter-in-law and granddaughter, leaving Russell alone to contemplate a mystery within one of Sherlock's beehives. The author cleverly weaves bee mythology, psychology, symbolism and science throughout the twisty mysteries that wind through the southern English countryside, creaking under the weight of our Pagan monoliths and ancient sites of druidism. Add a cultural mix of Norse mythology and it's only fitting that the lead up to the deadly climax is preceded by a 'Valkyrie ride' north from London to the Orkney Islands aboard a rickety 1924 Bristol Tourer, piloted by a seemingly unreliable drunken pilot. Great stuff.

Friends on the hill

2010-07-10T14:32:00.007+01:00

Camera Critters

These are shots from our upper windows onto the back field. The horses have had a great week on the hill. My mum has decided that this mare in the coat is nearly ready to foal. I'll take her word for it as I haven't a clue about these sort of events. She took these pictures. I'm trying to get her used to digital cameras but she's not too impressed. Too small, she says, and you struggle to see what's on the screen when the sun is out.
Looks like our old chestnut friend is still in quest for apples, poking his head out of shot into a neighbour's garden.

Danger - Deep Water

2010-07-09T00:00:00.004+01:00

This is Guide Reservoir. Not looking too full is it. So after all that wetness, snow and floods, the North West is having to implement a hosepipe ban. I know it has been a very dry spring but it seems a bit odd that we are already getting ready for water shortages.
These shots are actually taken from the back patio of a different sort of watering hole called The Willows. This pub is a relatively new addition to the small village of Guide on the southern edge of Blackburn, high on the hillside. There is another larger reservoir called Fishmoor Reservoir off to the right of this one, which looms above where I spent my school days at Blackamoor (recently demolished). I'd sit in a stuffy class room looking up at these reservoirs. Now all these years later I sit on a summer's day looking down at them, drinking my cider, wondering how much less water is in there than last time I looked. This area of Blackburn is quickly being swallowed up by more and more development, new roads and I just noticed that a Starbucks is now under construction.

Grin of the squirrel

2010-07-03T14:10:00.004+01:00

Camera Critters

Just when I thought we'd captured every cheeky squirrel face in the 'Squirrel's Book of Cheeky Faces' along comes another.

Duckling alert

2010-07-02T13:06:00.004+01:00

Just a little addendum to how the duck family are getting on. In the last post I said there were about seven of the original eleven still surviving but they have since been spotted again. These shots are actually nearly two weeks after the last shots and the ducklings are much bigger. We counted ten ducklings.

A lamb's life

2010-06-29T23:21:00.003+01:00

Face of the week

The problem with spring is it crept up on us so quickly and before you know it spring isn't spring anymore it's summer. All those great spring themed photos are suddenly out of date. I don't think it matters though. You can read a poem that invokes spring and still enjoy it, even in the depths of winter, so why should photographs be any different. I like this one because the lamb looks like it is drinking in the fine spring day right through its skin. It's scenting spring on the air like the promise of life ahead, which considering the fate of much of its kind is a little sad and bittersweet.

The magnificent seven

2010-06-26T13:24:00.007+01:00

Camera Critters

This is just a little update on the family of ducks I featured not too long ago - see here. In the beginning there were about eleven ducklings. Although in most of these shots you can see only five ducklings there were actually about seven knocking about. They are getting more adventurous at this age so there might also be an intrepid adventurer duckling just out of sight of the main group. I like the one who seems to have spotted something in the water - or is he just admiring his own reflection?

Hiding from the horse

2010-06-22T01:00:00.006+01:00

I'm sure I've mentioned the horses in the back field that range down from Bunker Hill many times over the past year. When I'm grasping for something poetic to colour a post the horses never let me down. Even though they aren't wild hoses they still have something of the wild spirit about them. They are a solid and reassuring presence most days, going about their business, snorting and breathing, running and browsing. They are just wonderful creatures to share the afternoon with. They take very little notice of me, maybe I'm reading or watching the bees or the birds. They take no notice of anybody in our back gardens. They only have time for each other and what tasties they can find growing near the fence.

Well at least they did until sister of mine decided, whilst eating an apple back there, that she might share one with one of the horses. Sure the horse loved that. Do horses count? I doubt they bother with the number one. One is just not enough to bother counting.

Face of the week

So now the horse knows that in a certain back garden apples appear as if by magic. Here you can see he is looking for sister of mine in the certain knowledge that, if he could count, one apple would surely be not enough. So now we are hiding from the horse. We are hiding from a horse in our own back garden. Visions of the horse deciding to cross the fence crash disastrously to mind. We've had fence jumpers before. We remember the bunny that jumped the fence and didn't leave for several fun flowerchomping days. And all the Kamikaze sheep who stumble over of course. But a horse? If he comes over we may have a problem. We have visions of leading him through the house, maybe getting stuck in a doorway, equine devastation left behind in his wake and red faces all round. So yes, we are hiding, in our own back garden. Has he gone yet?

The duck is smiling

2010-06-16T01:30:00.003+01:00

Face of the Week

Ducks almost seem to be born with a smile on their face. Their bills have that little curve that always suggests a smile. So that curve is only there because it is the perfect design for sifting small bits of food from the water. To me the ducks are always smiling. And I'm sure the mother ducks trailing a Badelynge of little bobbling dabs of glowing life are smiling the happiest and most contented smiles of all. But I know it is tough being a duck and toughest of all being a little snack-sized duck. She keeps smiling though as the eleven becomes ten, and the ten becomes seven, the seven becomes five. Some will make it won't they? Of course they will. These happy smiling balls of eating frenzy have conquered the world already.

A year of Badelynge

2010-06-09T00:01:00.002+01:00

I didn't really expect to be still writing this blog one year later but here we are. Last year on this very date I had just finished a book review of a book called The Blue Handbag that I'd won from the author in a competition. It was a fairly self indulgent review with several little personal segueways including some stuff about a woodpecker. When I'd finished I reread and thought, "Right, now edit all the personal stuff out and it will be a usable review". So I did. But I still liked the original so I decided I would start a blog of my own so that I could still post the unedited review without feeling guilty for any personal bits or whimsy I'd included. Maybe I would write a few more reviews.Before I knew it I'd introduced Harry, Mofo, the garden and a host of ducks and wildlife. During the year I would write 168 posts, inspire my sister to start her own blog, get her hooked on nature photography and I would also meet lots of fellow bloggers and their blogs along the way. At the end of that first post I wondered whether I would see the woodpecker again. Over the months we caught brief glimpses of them, we heard their drumming, we saw their empty holes but it was only this last fortnight that we would track the wonderful Greater Spotted Woodpecker back to its current home, rearing the little ones.Camera Critters

Debbie says I should make up a knock knock joke because apparently woodpeckers and knock-knock jokes go together. I hereby apologise in advance.
"Knock-knock."
"Who's there?"
"Woody."
"Woody? You mean Woody Woodpecker. Wow I'm your biggest fan. I've seen all your shows."
"No no. This tree. It's very.... woody. Listen....."

Long grass Harry

2010-06-05T14:08:00.003+01:00

Camera Critters & Face of the Week

Harry in the long grass.