Tag: England

Day 265: Here Was a Man: A Novel of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I

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Cover for Here Was a ManI don’t think I’ve read anything by Norah Lofts before, but even though she was a prolific historical novelist, I would rate this effort as mediocre.

Here Was a Man attempts to draw most of Raleigh’s life in a short space and does so by a series of vignettes illustrating important events. Although I am not completely familiar with his career, I know that Lofts  has chosen to portray a couple of apocryphal events, in particular the cloak in the mud story, which I believe has no basis in fact. The other serious lack of the novel is any depth of characterization.

The novel begins with Raleigh as a teenager, listening to sailors’ tales and dreaming of traveling the seas. He is also full of ambition for worldly success, an ambition that sometimes works to his disadvantage.

We are told many times about Raleigh’s sense of adventure, but we don’t really feel it. In fact, he seems to spend more time in prison than on his adventures. It is curious, too, that although he has many enemies at court, at least in this novel he has done nothing to earn their enmity. I would doubt that was really the case.

Raleigh is probably a character who could support an interesting and exciting novel, but this is not it. To be fair, it looks like it may have been one of Lofts’ first works.

Day 263: A Great Deliverance

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Cover for A Great DeliveranceAlthough Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series seems to be floundering with the past few books, the first dozen or so were really good. A Great Deliverance is the first one in the series.

Father Hart comes to Scotland Yard to ask for help. Roberta Teys, the daughter of a farmer, has been found in the barn next to the bodies of her father and the family dog, both of whom have been attacked with an ax. Father Hart begs for someone to investigate the apparently open-and-shut case, as Roberta has confessed to the crime and now refuses to speak. Father Hart says he believes the girl, who seems to be mentally handicapped, is innocent. Barely registering in the background, someone is killing men on the subway.

Inspector Thomas Lynley is given the Teys case, and he has just been assigned Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers as his partner. Havers is a belligerent, untidy working-class woman who is being given a final chance, since she has failed to work well with other supervisors. She believes that the immaculate Lynley, the eighth Earl of Asherton, is nothing but an upper-class fashion plate, playboy, and womanizer.

Lynley is dealing with his own problems, because the woman he loves is about to marry his best friend, Simon St. James. He also bears guilt because St. James is crippled from an auto accident in which Lynley was driving. Lynley is actually relieved to be called away from the wedding reception to deal with the murder investigation.

Lynley thinks the roots of this murder may be in the past. Roberta’s mother disappeared when she was a child. Was she actually murdered? Roberta’s older sister also ran away from home. What happened to her?

This novel and the first books of this series perfectly meet my taste for mystery novels that are on the dark side. I find Lynley and Havers to be engaging, with fully developed personalities. The novels are complex and the plots exciting. I have not tired of the incidental characters, as I often do. I am just sorry that the more recent novels have taken some turns I do not find appealing or interesting, since for so many years, I could rely on an Elizabeth George mystery to be a great read.

Day 261: Blue Monday

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Cover for Blue MondayI never read Nicci French before and was at first irritated by Blue Monday because the reader is introduced to several characters, using a shifting third-person limited narration, without understanding who they are or why they’re important. Eventually, though, I was able to fasten on Frieda Klein as the main character.

The novel begins in 1985, with nine-year-old Rosie going home from school, followed by her five-year-old sister Joanna. Rosie takes her eyes off Joanna briefly, and the little girl is gone.

Twenty-two years later, a little boy, Matthew Faraday, disappears on his way home from school after his mother is late picking him up. Although at first the crimes don’t seem to be connected, Detective Chief Inspector Karlssen thinks they may be.

Psychiatrist Frieda Klein has recently taken on a new patient, Alan Dekker, who claims to be having such troubling obsessions that he can’t sleep or function correctly. They are about having a son, a boy he can play ball with. He is unable to have children but he doesn’t want to adopt. He obsessively wants a son, one who looks like him as a boy–exactly like the missing Matthew Faraday.

Confidentiality laws apparently not being exactly the same in England as they are in the states, after some soul searching, Frieda feels she must go to the police. Karlssen is impatient with her until she tells him that Alan had these feelings once before about having a daughter but they went away–just around the time of Joanna’s disappearance.

This psychological thriller, which is the first in a series, turns out to have a couple of twists I have never before encountered, so proved to be very interesting. Frieda is an unusual heroine, a cold, analytical person who roams the streets of London at night because of insomnia. I think it would be well worth it to continue reading books in this series.

Day 259: The Greatcoat

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Cover for The GreatcoatI am not familiar with Helen Dunmore, but I looked for this book after reading a review of it on another blog citing it as a good ghost story.

At first I was inclined to dislike it. Isabel Carey is a new wife in 1952, married to a young doctor in a small village in Yorkshire. Isabel is a poorly trained housewife who spends her time disliking her new home in the bottom floor of the landlady’s house and feeling as if everyone is looking at her. She especially dislikes the landlady, Mrs. Atkinson, who paces back and forth on the floor above, sometimes all night.

Unable to get warm in the dank little house, one night she searches through a cupboard and finds an officer’s wool greatcoat, which she uses as an additional bedcover. The next night a strange man dressed as a World War II officer comes and taps on her window.

Soon the officer, Alec, begins coming to visit her and by his behavior shows that he thinks they are lovers. She knows almost immediately that he is a ghost but seems to passively accept their relationship. Who the soldier’s actual lover was should be almost immediately apparent, but Isabel doesn’t seem to guess.

At this point, I was extremely annoyed with the novel, believing I was supposed to find all this romantic when all I could think about was Philip, Isabel’s poor, hard-working husband, who only treats her kindly. The only negative thing about his character is his desire to protect Isabel from everything, and I believe that attitude was typical of the times. I also thought Isabel is a spoiled little brat who does little but complain and thinks nothing of launching into an affair with another man, ghost or not.

Eventually, though, the novel takes a more sinister turn, which is more to my taste. My final overall impression was ambivalence.

By the way, the Amazon write-up of this book (probably taken from the publishers) compares Dunmore as a historical novelist to Tolstoy and Emily Brontë. Aside from the oddness of an implicit comparison between those two writers, this is a gross overstatement of Dunmore’s abilities. What Dunmore has written is a slight, moderately entertaining novel that cannot be compared to the work of the other writers.

Day 258: Busman’s Honeymoon

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Cover for Busman's HoneymoonI have always thought that, with a few exceptions, the arrival of Harriet Vane into the Lord Peter Wimsey series pretty much ruined it. Some of those mysteries are not so bad, and Have His Carcase (wherein Lord Peter meets Harriet) and Gaudy Night (wherein Harriet solves a mystery on her own) are very good, but Busman’s Honeymoon is just too sappy. It is hard to know if Peter and Harriet’s marriage is Sayers’ idea of an ideal relationship or a reflection of some relationship she actually had, but I find that Lord Peter’s galumphing happiness contrasts strangely with Harriet’s odd undertones.

Lord Peter and Harriet are married and travel for their honeymoon to a house they bought in the country. But when they arrive, they find the house is not ready for them and the previous owner, Mr. Noakes, is nowhere to be found–until next morning when Bunter finds him dead in the basement. In the meantime, the servants have been cleaning, and all the clues are gone.

One positive point for the novel is that the Dowager Duchess shows up, a favorite character. We also get a little more background on the relationship between Wimsey and Bunter.

I guess this isn’t the best selection for Valentine’s Day, since I’m criticizing it for sappiness, but if you have different tastes than mine, you might like it. I see that the reviewers on Amazon are remarking at how romantic it is. And also commenting on the subtle humor. Well, I didn’t find it so subtle.

Day 256: The Truth-Teller’s Lie

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Cover for The Truth-Teller's LieIn The Truth-Teller’s Lie, Sophie Hannah has written another perplexing, dark tale. (Caution, book buyers: as with some other of Hannah’s book, this one was previously published under another title–Hurting Distance.)

Naomi Jenkins has a secret she has never told anyone–that a few years ago she was viciously raped. Lately, she has been having an affair with a married man, Robert Haworth. When he doesn’t turn up for their weekly meeting, she is convinced that something has happened to him, but she can’t get Detectives Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse to do more than ask his wife about him. So, she decides to tell a bizarre lie–that Robert was the man who raped her.

When Simon searches Robert’s house, he finds him lying bleeding on the bed and his wife Juliet behaving strangely. Juliet refuses to tell what happened. As the police investigate, they begin to think that there is a serial rapist abducting women and raping them in front of an audience and that there is some connection between these incidents and the attack on Robert.

As usual in a Sophie Hannah novel, everyone is a bit strange. Even the innocent parties seem to be quite batty, and the police have their own, very odd problems. But her novels are dark and complex, and that’s what I like about them.

Day 255: Anderby Wold

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Cover for Anderby WoldMary Robson is a young married woman who has been working for years to save her family farm, Anderby Wold. She even married John, her much older husband, whose hard work has kept it going these past years. She is a managing woman who thinks it is her duty to oversee the welfare of the village, making herself disliked by many. Because of her preoccupations, she seems much older than she actually is.

One day she encounters David Rossiter, a young radical journalist who disagrees with everything Mary believes in. David is trying to get farm workers interested in unionizing, and Mary becomes unsuitably obsessed with the younger man. The schoolmaster, Coast, becomes involved in the unionization issue expressly to make trouble for Mary, whom he detests.

Anderby Wold is an interesting slice of Yorkshire life in the 1920’s. It reflects the issues of the times, when farmers were facing increased demand for workers’ rights. Another of Winifred Holtby’s consistent themes that appears here is getting on with life after the death of a loved one. This novel is Holtby’s first, and its realistic depictions of village life of the times reflect her background as a journalist.

Day 250: The Last Detective

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Cover for The Last DetectiveMy husband and I have been enjoying reruns of the older British TV series The Last Detective on Netflix, so I picked up this book. Unfortunately, I spent the first part of the novel bemoaning its lack of resemblance to the series. Since it has a strong message of lack of trust in “new” police methods and technology instead of reliance on the police’s judgment and intuition, I also couldn’t help thinking of recent cases such as that of Michael Morton, who spent 25 years in prison for murdering his wife based on very little but a scenario invented by the police and was last year found by DNA evidence to be innocent. However, since one of Lovesey’s hero’s traits is a dogged pursuit of the investigation rather than a rush to judgment, I got over that.

The body of a woman is discovered nude in a lake near Bath. Although the police aren’t certain of the cause of death, her clothes and possessions don’t turn up anywhere, and the pathologist believes she has been asphixiated. After some time, the body is identified as that of Geraldine Snoo, a soap opera star who had been written out of the plot months before.

One obvious suspect is Gregory Jackman, Gerry’s husband and a professor of English at the local college. Detective Superintendant Peter Diamond leads the investigation, which eventually seems to point toward another suspect, Dana Didrickson, a divorcee who seems to be in love with Jackman. The mystery also involves the whereabouts of letters purportedly written by Jane Austen.

My biggest problem with the novel is one of approach. It contains two long sections narrated first by Jackman and then Didrickson that are supposedly their statements to the police, an approach very similar to that used in older detective novels like The Moonstone. The Moonstone, though, had the excuse that its statements were written ones requested by the investigator to separately verify everyone’s statements of the crime. In the context of a more modern novel, I found them completely unlikely, written as they are like prose, containing too much detail, and with few questions interjected by the police.

Once the novel gets past these sections it improves a lot, though, and becomes lively and entertaining, including a chase through the Roman baths.

Day 244: The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

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Cover for The Killings on Jubilee TerraceThe cast of a long-running British soap opera, “Jubilee Terrace,” is perturbed. Director Reggie Friedman has just informed them that a detested former cast member will be rejoining the show.

Not only is Hamish Fawly extremely nasty, he loves to cause trouble. In this case, he announces to everyone that he is engaged to marry Bet Garrett, an occasional cast member who is the real-life wife of Bill Garrett, the bartender on the show. Bet, who loves to make Bill miserable, promptly dispatches a letter from her lawyer claiming custody of their three daughters, even though she doesn’t really want them.

Detective Charlie Peace arrives on set because the police have received an anonymous letter claiming that the death of a previous cast member, Vernon Watts, was no accident. Finding no substance for the claim, Peace thinks he’s seen the last of the cast when someone sets Hamish’s house on fire, burning to death Hamish and a woman, presumed to be Bet. But shortly, it becomes clear that the victim is another woman, who also had a connection to Vernon Watts.

The novel has many characters, and they are so one-dimensional that I found it difficult to keep them straight, especially as most of them are called by two names, their character’s name and their own. I found The Killings on Jubilee Terrace only mildly interesting, even though it has a difficult solution.

Day 243: The Pursuit of Love

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Cover for The Pursuit of LoveIt’s always fun to re-read Nancy Mitford’s charming and funny autobiographical novel about her youth and young womanhood. Mitford’s alter ego is Linda, a young woman with terrible taste in men, who throws herself from one extreme to another in pursuit of love.

Mitford’s strength is her portrayal of peculiar but lovable characters, all modeled upon her own eccentric family or on figures in society. The novel is narrated by Fanny, a sensible but lonely girl who spends a lot of time with her cousins, the Radletts. Her terrifying Uncle Matthew (modeled on Mitford’s father) loves to hunt his children instead of foxes, a game the children love. Aunt Sadie is unutterably vague, which she probably has to be to live with Uncle Matthew. Uncle David is a cultured hypochondriac. The Bolter, Fanny’s mother, is supposedly a portrayal of Lady Idina Sackville, a famous society woman who kept leaving her husbands and was a member of Kenya’s famous Happy Valley set.

Mitford starts the novel with childhood–the children are hunted, hang out in the linen cupboard fantasizing about running away, and generally run wild–and follows the older girls into young adulthood. The novel finally centers on the story of how Linda first impetuously marries a stuffy banker who bores her silly, then leaves him for a communist who only thinks about his causes, and finally falls into the arms of Fabrice, a French duke who is a world-class womanizer. Characterized by facetious observations of society life and dialogue brimming with zingers, Mitford’s novel is a joy to read.

Just as an aside because I’ve recently read a few posts about cover design, I originally copied into this post the most recent cover of the book, which shows a romantic black and white photo of a debutant holding a bouquet of flowers with a pink banner for the title. I decided to replace it with this older cover (the one on the copy I have), which I think does a much better job of conveying the type of novel it is, much more of a social commentary than a romantic novel.