MYSTERIES in PARADISE

7 November 2010

Sunday Salon - 7 Nov 2010 - the countdown begins

Once November starts the season of pageants, Christmas day planning, and present buying is upon us. There's now officially less than 7 weeks to go!

Today I've launched my version of Give Books for Christmas 2010. This meme invites you to add links to a "Mr Linky" for crime fiction books you've read or reviewed and have no hesitation in recommending to others, or to a page on your blog where you have a list of recommendations. My own suggestions for Give Books for Christmas 2009 were really just my best reads for the year.

If you'd like to participate in Give Books for Christmas 2010 just go to the post and add your recommendations.
Of course, if you are looking for crime fiction books to give, it will provide an invaluable source of information too.

This week also I've launched Smik's Crime Fiction Daily on paper.li. It is a sort of daily summary of some of the twitter posts I follow. It is divided up into section and each shows 3 stories but you will see a link to other stories in each section. You can subscribe for an alert to be emailed to you everyday. It is another way of learning about even more books to read.

Reviews posted this week:

Other blog posts

News & Headlines

TBRN (To Be Read Next)
To finish the Global Reading Challenge:
* HAVANA BLACK, Leonardo Padura (Cuba)
* BEAT NOT THE BONES, Charlotte Jay (New Guinea)

* BAIT, Nick Brownlee (Kenya) - Kindle

Just two weeks to the next edition of the Agatha Christie Blog Carnival.
The next edition will publish on November 23/24, so if you have a blog post about an Agatha Christie title that hasn't yet been part of the Carnival, I invite you to submit it here.
The Agatha Christie Reading Challenge is one of those it is never too late to join. You can read the books in order of publication or just in the order you locate them.
Read at your own pace, write a review on your blog, go to the Carnival collecting space and put in the URL, your details, and a comment about the post.

Weekly Geeks 2010-36 Readers Advisory

This week's Weekly Geeks task has prompted me to release, a couple of days early, a meme that I was going to run anyway where I invite readers to suggest crime fiction books we could give for Christmas.

This meme, called Give Books for Christmas 2010, invites you to add links to a "Mr Linky" for books you've read or reviewed and have no hesitation in recommending to others, or to a page on your blog where you have a list of recommendations.

For myself, I'll probably just link to my "books read" in 2010, where my list is ranked in rating order, so there is no doubt about which ones I thought are the best.

My own suggestions for Give Books for Christmas 2009 were really just my best reads for the year.

If you look in the right hand side of my blog you'll see that I have linked to this post to help you find it easily in the future once you have decided what you can add to Mr Linky. And there is no limit to how often you can come back and add a link!

Books to give for Christmas - crime fiction of course

This is one of two memes that I will be running that have a Christmas theme.

In this one which will run from now until Christmas I'm asking for your suggestions for crime fiction books to give for Christmas.

You may like to create a special page on your blog and list some books there, or alternatively link to already posted reviews on your blog of books you think would make good presents.

Please complete the details in the Mr. Linky below.

Suggested format BOOK TITLE, author name - your name
Please link to the actual post on your blog, not just the blog itself.
In your post or your blog, please link back to this page, and feel free to use the image I've created.
You may link to more than one blog post if you wish
Links not complying with the above will be edited or removed altogether.

Thanks for your participation

6 November 2010

Review: MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA, Agatha Christie

Published in 1936, having first been serialised both in the US and the UK.
The edition I read was published by Hamlyn London in an Agatha Christie Crime Collection, from my own library.
175 pages
The cover image on the right comes from the original UK dust-jacket.

Synopsis
Nurse Amy Leatheran is at the Tigris Palace Hotel, about to return to London, when she is recommended by friend Dr Reilly to Dr Leidner who is heading an archaeological dig in Iraq. Leidner's wife is in need of a companion/nurse although the archaeologist is a bit reticent in his interview with Nurse Leatheran about what is actually wrong with his wife. Nurse Leatheran joins the party at the dig and learns that Mrs Leidner has been receiving threatening letters. Nurse Leatheran finds the whole atmosphere at the dig is quite uncomfortable and then, rather predictably, Mrs Leidner is murdered. It becomes obvious that the murderer has to be one of the party, but who? There are plenty of suspects.
The investigating officer Captain Maitland learns that the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot will be travelling through Baghdad from Syria. Poirot is persuaded to assist in the investigation. He treats Nurse Leatheran as his confidante, and she becomes his "Hastings". It is her account of the investigation that we read.

I really read this too close to watching the latest TV production with David Suchet as Poirot. (see the Youtube video embedded below)
If you watched that television production, you will remember that Poirot visits the dig quite early in the story because his friend Captain Arthur Hastings is there. There is a "memorable" scene at dinner where Hastings makes an absolute mess of explaining the meaning of the word Mesopotamia.
Well, it may not surprise you to find that Hastings is not actually in the original book.

In actual fact in the book Poirot does not arrive until well over half way through the story. Mrs Leidner is already dead.

I think that in MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA Agatha Christie toyed with the concept of the unreliable narrator. You will remember that she had already done this previously in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD.
Nurse Leatheran prides herself as being an excellent judge of character, she says nurses generally are, and so there are times when we need to take her conclusions with a pinch of salt. In fact Poirot does come to recognise that because Nurse Leatheran is so observant she may also be in real danger from the murderer.

Several aspects of the way that Poirot works are highlighted for us: the way he encourages people to "gossip" with him; the way he whittles down the list of suspects; his romantic streak; his liking for young women.

After I learnt that the novel had originally been published in serial form, I looked for signs of fragmentation, perhaps discontinuity from one part to another, but I didn't find any.
It is quite a detailed novel, showing how much Christie undestands about life on an archaeological dig, and a number of side stories run simultaneously with the main murder mystery.

My rating: 4.4

I've just recently read and reviewed THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN by P.D. James and the plot similarities struck me. In the James novel Clarissa Lyle's husband employs Cordelia Gray as a companion/secretary to his wife because she is receiving death threats through poison pen letters. If you think of the archeological dig in MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA as a sort of cultural island, then in both novels the field of suspects is a confined one. In addition we are given cause to question Cordelia Gray's reliability as a narrator. In both cases the companion does not manage to prevent murder.
But perhaps there the similarities end. No Hercule Poirot appears on the scene in THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN and Cordelia Gray eventually solves the mystery in a way that Nurse Leatheran would never have been able to.

Historical Mysteries read this year

The announcement this week of the winner of the 2010 CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Mystery reminded me that I really haven't read all that many "historically set" crime fiction titles this year.

Mind you, a history teacher by trade, just as I can see a mystery element in almost every novel, so I can see the historical in many.

Just at the moment I am listening to ALEXANDRIA by Lindsey Davis, and I've just finished Dan Waddell's THE BLOOD DETECTIVE which reminded me how much I enjoy a historical element.

So I've explored my records to see what else I've read in 2010 that I could count if I was "doing" a Historical Challenge.

The first problem that I came across was the books that were written/published in the past, but did not involve the author delving back into history. They give us a glimpse of times past, but that was not what the author intended. He/she was not writing a book that we would today classify as "historical crime fiction".
So I've separated them out from the others. You might like to comment on what I've done.
And then there are those that provide a sort of bridge between the past and the present - they have sort of dual time frames.
They are listed in the order in which I have read them this year. Who would have thought that I had read so many?

Crime fiction written in the past.
4.4, THREE ACT TRAGEDY, Agatha Christie, 1920s
4.2, THE SWAYING PILLARS, Elizabeth Ferrars - set in an African state in the 1960s
4.1, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, Edgar Allan Poe - America, publ. 1840
4.5, THE SPY'S WIFE, Reginald Hill - Britain, Cold War publ 1980
4.4, THE HOUND OF DEATH, Agatha Christie - England 1930s
4.2, THE LISTERDALE MYSTERY, Agatha Christie - England 1930s
4.6, DEATH IN THE CLOUDS, Agatha Christie - England 1935
4.6, THE A B C MURDERS, Agatha Christie - England 1930s

Crime fiction written recently but given a historical setting.
4.3, CONSEQUENCES OF SIN, Clare Langley-Hawthorne - England, suffragette movement
4.7, DANCING FOR THE HANGMAN, Martin Edwards - the story of Crippen who was hanged in 1910
4.2, MARCH VIOLETS, Philip Kerr - Berlin 1936
4.7, BURY ME DEEP, Megan Abbott - America 1931
4.4, THE PILGRIM OF HATE, Ellis Peters - Brother Cadfael, Shrewsbury 12th century England.
4.3, DEAD MAN'S CHEST, Kerry Greenwood - Australia 1920s
5.0, A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE, Malla Nunn - South Africa 1952

Those that bridge the past and the present
5.0, SKELETON HILL, Peter Lovesey - involves modern day police procedural and Civil War re-enactment
4.5, BLOOD & ICE, Robert Masello - Antarctica, bridges 1850s and current time
4.6, THE WHITE GALLOWS, Rob Kitchin - set in Ireland, some elements of bridging between World War 2 and the present.
4.6, THE CROSSING PLACES, Elly Griffiths - a blend of police procedural and archaeology
4.5, THE BLOOD DETECTIVE, Dan Waddell - a blend of police procedural and genealogy
4.3, THE LABOURS OF HERCULES, Agatha Christie - bridges ancient legend and 1930s

4 November 2010

Review: THE BLOOD DETECTIVE, Dan Waddell

Michael Joseph (Penguin) 2007
ISBN 978-0-7181-5416-5
291 pages
Source: borrowed from my library

Publisher's blurb
When the naked, mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is put on the case. As one after another victim is found in various locations all over London, each with a different mutilation but the same index number carved into their skin, Barnes and the police work frantically to figure out how the corresponding files are connected. With no clues to be found in the present, Barnes must now search the archives of the past to solve the mystery behind a string of 100-year-old murders. Only then will it be possible to stop the present series of gruesome killings, but will they be able to do so before the killer ensnares his next victim? Barnes, Foster, and Jenkins enter a race against time - and before the end of the investigation, one of them will get much too close for comfort.

THE BLOOD DETECTIVE was Dan Waddell's debut crime fiction novel although he is an established non-fiction writer. I found it an interesting and engaging read that moved at a good solid pace. A genealogist is an unusual person to be part of a detective trio, particularly when the other two are police officers.
The story line appealed to that part of my psyche that likes history. In the main we follow genealogist Nigel Barnes as he works out the links between the past and the present. Both he and the police are working against a 100 year old time line, tracking incidents in a London whose topography has changed greatly in a century that has seen the growth of the Underground, the bombing in World War II, and the demolition of old houses for the building of motorways and high rise housing.

I thought that in particular, for a debut novel, THE BLOOD DETECTIVE, was written with great assurance. On the cover Reginald Hill recommends the novel with "Elegant writing, engaging characters, a cracking climax", and he's right. Recommendations on the back cover from Val McDermid and Kate Moss comment on what an original and intriguing story this is. Again they are right.
Never mind that I had worked out what the climax was about 30 pages before it happened. It was still a great read.

My rating: 4.5

Like Bernadette at Reactions to Reading, I read this for our face to face discussion group on the coming weekend.
THE BLOOD DETECTIVE was nominated for Macavity Awards First Novel nominee (2009).
It was also shortlisted for the 2009 CWA New Blood Dagger.

My library has the sequel, BLOOD ATONEMENT, that apparently sees a continuation of the partnership. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it.

Dan Waddell has a website
There is a pdf extract of THE BLOOD DETECTIVE here, or else you can read the same extract on Amazon, where it is also available for Kindle.

Forgotten Books: DEADLY VARIATIONS, Paul Myers

This week's contribution to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books comes from my records of 1993.

DEADLY VARIATIONS (1985) was the first in the Mark Holland Mystery series.
Underneath the book cover on Fantastic Fiction is a recommendation by Erich Segal:
"Paul Myers bids fair to becoming to music what Dick Francis is to racing."
Well, I remember the Dick Francis titles pretty well, but not a lot about Paul Myers.

Publisher's blurb:
Seven years ago, Mark Holland left British Intelligence and a woman he loved because the duplicity in his life was unbearable. Now, successful as a classical music agent in Geneva, and in love with his beautiful assistant, he is understandably perturbed when an ex-colleague from the Department cajoles him into taking on one last assignment. His wariness turns out to be justified, as the job requires that he not only manipulate the trust of a man whose life he once saved, but also that he endanger the life of his ex-lover as well.

There's this rather unflattering addenda:
Myers writes at too slow a clip (and his plot turns are too facile and few) for him to generate much suspense, but he does have a moving, poetic knack for capturing the flavor of certain cities particularly New Yorkand in conveying the sophisticated world of international concert stars.

An Amazon reviewer says that when it came to music Paul Myers knew what he was talking about!

I must have liked the books because I read the first 3 in the series as far as I can see. DEADLY VARIATIONS appears to have been fairly short, at 197 pages in hardback, so perhaps that's why I read 3.

1. Deadly Variations (1985)
2. Deadly Cadenza (1986)
3. Deadly Aria (1987)
4. Deadly Sonata (1987)
5. Deadly Score (1988)
6. Deadly Crescendo (1989)

In 1993 Myers published a non-mystery called CONCERTO, and in 1998 a biography of Leonard Bernstein in Phaidon Books's 20th Century Composers series.