Dead Detectives

Being a massive fanboy of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) for the last four decades or so, a book featuring a dead detective should be an attractive prospect for me. I'm not comparing them though as they are two quite different beasts when all is read and done. Peg Herring's Dead Detective is a guy called Seamus who operates from a limbo between life and death cunningly incorporated as a swanky ocean liner. At the behest of the newly dead he takes on cases that resolve the recently deceased's unfinished business, in this case the suspicious death of a rich business man called Dunbar. This time he has to take along a headstrong female rookie called Mildred to help in his investigation. Dead for the Money is solidly written with well fleshed characters but is sabotaged from within by its own format. The Dead Detective goes about his business by hiding in the minds of the likely suspects or witnesses. In a way he inhabits the same sort of perspective as the reader and he's almost as helpless to influence events. In fact ninety percent of the time it's easy to forget Seamus and Mildred are part of the narrative at all. Ghostly gumshoes aside, the story still has a lot going for it; Dunbar's grandchildren Bud & Brodie are engaging and the story does build up to a thrilling finale.

The Uninvited Guests

In a large though crumbling country house the Torringtons prepare for the twentieth birthday of their eldest daughter Emerald, while their youngest daughter, mostly known as Smudge, prepares her own Great Undertaking. But during the preparations a train derails and the family are entreated to look after the survivors. 

I'm tiptoeing around spoilers here, even though the marketing for this book left great muddy footprints all over the cover. I can't really complain too loudly though as I probably wouldn't have even read the book if they hadn't been so indiscreet. The likes of Oscar Wilde and E.M.Forster are the the sorts of literary heritage this aspires to live up too. It's not quite consistent enough to pull it off completely and it suffers from having to hit its targets so far removed from the period of history it satires. It achieves on other levels though. It's engagingly written with many little impressionistic flourishes, entertaining throughout and did manage to put this reader on edge at times. It gave me pause to wonder that faced with a kitten neglected in a box (a present for Emerald) at the same time that the wretched train wreck survivors are similarly neglected, starving and cold in their own little box (the morning room), that the only forceful thought in my mind was: "Let the damn kitten out of the box!!!".

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

The de Luce family have suspended their usual Christmas preparations in order to try to generate some much needed cash, hiring out Buckshaw to a film company. Usually Christmas is the one time of the year that the warring sisters declare a temporary truce for the celebrations but that seems unlikely amongst the uproar of visiting film royalty. It's not long before things start going wrong and most of the population of Bishop's Lacy is camped out in the halls, pretty much snowed in and trapped with a killer at large amongst them. Much as Flavia de Luce loves a good murder to keep her 12 year old deductive skills finely honed, even she has to admit that juggling vital scientific experiments (proving the existence of Father Christmas) at the same time as digging into family history, while making sure the local police are suitably impressed with her cleverness and creating the firework display to end all firework displays, might be a little too much for even her array of skills.
This one is possibly as good as the series debut. Flavia and co just dance off the pages which seem to evaporate under your fingers and into your brain. If you can get it into your reading schedule over the Christmas period then all much the better. Flavia is as fascinating and captivating as ever, straddling the line of cleverness and hopeless naivety and brought to life by Alan Bradley with lots of wit, cheekiness and flashes of surprising depth of feeling. Whether you buy into his somewhat Ealingesque image of 1950s rural England doesn't really matter - it's just too much fun to give a damn.

Frogs that smile

Camera Critters

The mild winter has messed with our wildlife. We are already seeing a whole mess of frogs. Debbie stumbled on a whole gang croaking like an orchestra of TT racers revving up for the off. She says they were all giving her the beady eye glare as if to say: 'op it - this is our pad. Get yer own!!!!
By the time she got her camera fired up though there were only three frogateers left to guard the rear. Oh I missed one - that must be d'Artagnan.
And then there was one. I think he hung about because he was the only one who knew frog Karate. Beware ninja frogs who smile.

Elisabeth Sladen

Ninety-nine out of every hundred people reading this book are going to be dyed in the wool Doctor Who fans. Lis knew this quite well. Which is probably one of the reasons the bulk of the book is taken up documenting the short period of her life working on the show. She's giving the target audience what they want. I'm a hardcore Doctor Who fan myself. I love all her insights and observations about the show. But I would also have liked to read more about the real Elisabeth Sladen behind the Sarah Jane Smith parade. There are glimpses of it of course but not enough. Her parent's history is just a short prelude and her childhood rushes by in a confusingly unchronological blur of Elvis posters and tomboy hi-jinx. Her early career on stage and tv bring more structure to the book as the various productions provide a set of hooks to pin her years on. There are some fascinating insights into the many famous faces she worked with or encountered - names like Michael Crawford, Robert Morley and Alan Ayckbourn. Here she also meets her soon to be husband and apparent soul mate Brian Miller . There is a sort of embarrassed reluctance though to let the reader get under the surface of their relationship, whether in defence of their privacy or insecurity about how much personal detail a fan of a tv show would want - I don't know. There is an opinion, probably accurate, expressed by her daughter, that Lis didn't really fully realise just how much she was loved by the fans of the show.
It's no use denying that most fans of the classic show are pretty hard-core nostalgia junkies. I am one of them so I lapped up all the stories about her time on the show. All the stuff about her love hate relationship with Jon Pertwee are priceless, the utter Doctor Who legend that was Barry Letts, Tom Baker, the lovely but tragic Ian Marter. There are also names that she was less impressed with allowing her grumpier aspects to have a bit of page space. Her time on the show comes to an end and the book almost fast forwards to the finish, stopping briefly to describe some of her later involvements on specials and spin-offs, conventions, missed career opportunities, the birth of her daughter and the eventual resurgence of the show that would lead to The Sarah Jane Adventures.
We live in a media age where it seems that not a day can go by without someone familiar passing away but I can honestly say I have never been shocked so badly as the night I found out we'd lost Lis Sladen. This book was completed only at the last and it has been a sad pleasure to hear her voice in my head again.

The White Lioness

After the underwhelming Dogs of Riga I was hoping for a big fat Swedish murder investigation this time. The White Lioness is a far superior animal by far but it's also not entirely that big fat dose of Wallander I wanted. Written just before South Africa would throw away the worst of its horrific identity, Mankell once again writes a book that is so very rooted in the time of its writing - here the early 90s leading up to the eventual free elections in 1994. The first segment of the book is excellent. Wallander is still not quite on an even keel after his ordeal in Latvia. He throws himself into the mystery of a missing woman. A woman with no reason to disappear.
My biggest problem with this book is the way this promising opening is just cut off in mid flow. We turn a page and leave Wallander behind. For a chapter we think. Well maybe two chapters. Any time now. 50 pages. Can't be long now. 80 pages. Please. 100 pages... you've got to be kidding me!!! Don't get me wrong. The narrative here is still excellently written and Mankell gives us a very creditable, though Swedish filtered attempt at showing Afrikaner society through the eyes of de Klerk, the secret service and a shadowy organisation dedicated to preserving apartheid by assassinating Mandela. Is it Wallander meets The Day of the Jackal? Oh very definitely, though the assassins here aren't really in the Jackal's class, though why they decide to train in Sweden is beyond me. Any half decent assassin would probably conduct his preparations in a neighbouring country.
Eventually the action returns back to Sweden and the book starts to burn again. Wallander skips the rails even more spectacularly than usual, which gives Svedberg an opportunity to step out of the shadows thrown by Mankel's previously sketchy characterisation, joining the very small cast of fully drawn players.
From a political standpoint the book has become a bit of curiosity, a set of Swedish tinged views on a long dead social system, separated by a couple of decades from today's contemporary incarnation. As a thriller and a detective story the book does eventually redeem itself, though the way the two threads are woven together could have been much better.

Cop Hater (87th Precinct #1)

This is the first book in Ed McBain's long running police procedural series 87th Precinct. McBain would continue writing the ongoing series for half a century until 2005, the year of his death.
Someone is killing cops with a 45 calibre handgun. Steve Carella and the rest of the precinct have to find the killer before he kills again. Carella and Teddy are unmarried still and between the exhaustive investigation the pair try to snatch enough time together to decide on a date for the wedding.
As with quite a few of his books McBain makes good use of the weather conditions. You can almost feel the heat throughout. The last time I read one of these it was to the other polar extreme, with the city literally freezing in the depth and dark of winter. What really makes 87th Precinct books work though is the to and fro between the cops, the banter, some of it digging into the investigations or just the mix of everyday talk of a bunch of guys doing a day to day job, friendships, rivalries - real dialogue. McBain doesn't let the plot rule him. He takes time to develop characters and aspects of the city that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the central plot line. It's all canvas for big the picture. Don't expect summarised forensic reports either. For example if Carella gets a lab or ballistic report expect to hear it line for line. With this being the first book there's quite a lot of technical and scientific stuff to cover too. Fingerprints - here comes a breakdown of the chemical process that results in finger prints being created. It's just one of those signature elements that makes the series what it is.
Cop Hater isn't going to be the best book in the series but it does serve as a great introduction. The book was adapted for a 1958 movie of the same name starring Robert Loggia in the Carella/Carelli role.