Happy Australia Day 2014

Greetings from Indianapolis where we are about to have some winter chill.

Review: GIDEON'S WEEK, J.J. Marric (aka John Creasey) - audio

• first published in 1956
• aka GIDEON'S FEAR
• this version available at Audible.com
• narrated by Christopher Scott
• unabridged, length 6 hrs and 33 mins
• #2 in the Gideon series
• source: I bought it

Synopsis

No week in the life of Commander Gideon of Scotland Yard could be entirely uneventful. However, a mass escape from Millways Gaol made this a particularly harassing week. Ruby Benson set up her killer husband and it's up to Gideon to protect the woman from her bloodthirsty spouse's vendetta--or die trying.

My take

I thought this was a more accomplished piece of writing than GIDEON'S DAY,  the first in the series, which I listened to and reviewed last week. The hunt for the escapees from Millways Gaol holds it together nicely for the whole book.

Gideon and his wife Kate have overcome some emotional hurdles, a friend of his daughter Pru approaches Gideon at work when her brother is accused on murder, and we get a better glimpse of the personal lives of Gideon and his offsider Lemaitre.

George Gideon is really the fore-runner of Ruth Rendell's Reg Wexford. He is so well described I can see him in my mind's eye. He is a big man, someone all his colleagues and those he commands look up to, thoroughly nice, with a photographic memory and the ability to make snap decisions.

My rating: 4.4

Completed - 2011 Vintage Mystery Challenge

This challenge is hosted at My Reader's Block by Bev Hankins.


2011 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge Completed


Get a Clue Level: 7-9 books,
must have been written prior to 1960
My extra rule: all need to be by different authors 


Progress page on the challenge site

1. 3.8, BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Rex Stout (1955)
2. 4.4, GIDEON'S DAY, J.J. Marric (aka John Creasey) (1955)
3. 4.2, AN ASSISTANT MURDERER, Dashiell Hammett  (1926)
4. 3.6, X.Y.Z. A Detective Story, Anna Katherine Green (1883)
5. 4.1, DEATH AT THE PRESIDENT'S LODGING, Michael Innes (1936)
6. 4.3, DIED IN THE WOOL, Ngaio Marsh ( 1942)
7. 4.5, DUMB WITNESS, Agatha Christie (1937)
8. 4.4, MAIGRET & the MAN on the BOULEVARD, Georges Simenon (1953)
9. 4.4, IN THE TEETH OF THE EVIDENCE, Dorothy L. Sayers (1939) 

Looking at the ratings I have given the books it is perhaps true to say that from my point of view most of them have faded a bit with time, although if they rate 4 and above they are really solid reads.

You'll notice too that I put a restriction of 9 individual authors on myself, so I have 11 Agatha Christie reads that don't appear here.

Review: GIDEON'S DAY, J.J. Marric (aka John Creasey) - audio

• Narrated by Tim Bentinck 
• Unabridged
• Length: 6 hours 22 mins
• first published in 1955
• #1 of the Gideon series (aka GIDEON OF SCOTLAND YARD)
• Available from Audible.com

Synopsis

London is faced with the murder of a little girl and a policeman's murder. George Gideon, while trying to bring these killers to justice, has to deal with a criminal gang that is after one of it's own.

One of the most senior officers within Scotland Yard, George Gideon's crime-solving abilities are in the finest traditions of London's world-famous police headquarters. His analytical brain and sense of fairness is respected by colleagues and villains alike.

If you'd like to read some of the book click on the cover image to the right.

My take

GIDEON'S DAY, published under the pseudonym of J.J. Marric, really was the forerunner of those police procedurals which have become so popular in recent decades. It precedes by 10 years the works of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the Martin Beck series.
There were eventually 22 titles in the Gideon series 1955-1978 (2 of them posthumously).

Of course many of us remember the television series too.
On YouTube there is a segment of the colour film with Jack Hawkins playing George Gideon.
The television series starred John Gregson.

What strikes you as you listen is how busy Gideon's day actually was, so many things happened. George Gideon was a pretty fiery character who demanded high standards of himself and all who worked with him. His day begins with him dressing down a subordinate whom he has discovered is taking bribes from a London drug peddler. Within the hour the man has been killed in a driving hit-and-run.

I'm looking forward to following this up with GIDEON'S NIGHT and GIDEON'S WEEK.

My rating: 4.4

Forgotten Book: X.Y. Z. A Detective Story, Anna Katherine Green

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 70 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004TPT4AE
• Source: I acquired it ($0.00)
• Published 1883

Story outline

The detective who is the central character, employed by the United States Government, is hot on the trail of some counterfeiters when he discovers that a Massachusetts post office is being used by a gang to drop instructions in envelopes addressed to X. Y. Z.

Here is the "hook".

Sometimes in the course of his experience, a detective, while engaged in ferreting out the mystery of one crime, runs inadvertently upon the clue to another. But rarely has this been done in a manner more unexpected or with attendant circumstances of greater interest than in the instance I am now about to relate.

The gang have established a pattern in picking up the letters and so the detective's curiosity is piqued when a young man arrives at the "wrong time" and asks for X.Y.Z's correspondence. When the new arrival collects the letters he hands all but the last one back to the postmaster saying they are not for him. The detective decides to follow him and observes a murder.

My take

X. Y. Z.  A DETECTIVE STORY is one of a number of Anna Katherina Green novels and novellas available free for Kindle from Amazon.
My attention was drawn to it recently by Margaret@BooksPlease in the Crime Fiction Alphabet for Letter X.

As Margaret says in her mini-review "It’s written in a somewhat formal and stilted style, and is melodramatic" but even so it is interesting to note how much it seems to have in common with writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, at the same time realising that the writer is a woman.

Wikipedia says this of her: Anna Katharine Green (November 11, 1846 – April 11, 1935) was an American poet and novelist. She was one of the first writers of detective fiction in America and distinguished herself by writing well plotted, legally accurate stories.
She apparently wrote about 40 stories, including The Leavenworth Case (1878), praised by Wilkie Collins, and the hit of the year.

X.Y. Z is really a novella or an extended short story and takes almost no time to read.

It is one of a number of Green's books available from Gutenberg Project if you are looking for something other than an .azw file. Click here for a full list of books.

My rating: 3.6

Forgotten Book: DIED IN THE WOOL, Ngaio Marsh

This week's contribution to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books is a book I have just completed reading.

I read this as an audio book from Audible.com
Publisher: BBC WW
Narrator: James Saxon
LENGTH: 9 hrs and 2 mins
AUDIBLE RELEASE DATE 03-18-05
Originally published:1945

Blurb
One summer evening in 1942 Flossie Rubrick, MP, one of the most formidable women in New Zealand, goes to her husband's wool shed to rehearse a patriotic speech and disappears. Three weeks later she turns up at an auction, packed inside one of her own bales of wool and very, very dead.

My take:
As with COLOUR SCHEME (see mini-review below) Ngaio Marsh used World War II as the setting for DIED IN THE WOOL. Roderick Alleyn from Scotland Yard was in New Zealand as part of the war effort, seeking out fifth columnists and espionage undermining the war effort.
Mount Moon station on the South Island is being used by two young men as a base for developing a new anti-aircraft device, and the authorities believe that the blueprints have been leaked.

Marsh uses the setting as a country house, closed venue, mystery. There can only be a certain number of suspects, because of the isolation of the station. Alleyn arrives at Mount Moon over 18 months after Flossie Rubrick's murder and in fact after the death of her husband from illness.

One of the interesting ploys of the plot is that Alleyn assembles the main characters and gets them each to tell their opinions of the dead Flossie, who does not appear to have been a very nice character at all.

It was interesting to hear of the things that were concerning the characters (and by extension the author) late in the War. Flossie is very conscious that she must contribute to the war effort, although her offers of assistance to the War Cabinet in London have been repulsed. Three of the young people at Mount Moon station have already been "over there". The preoccupation with the possible presence of enemy agents is also interesting.

I thought there were a few things apart from the setting that dated the book. The style was a bit ponderous and the vocabulary contained words no longer in frequent use. The plot was very carefully crafted though and has worn well.

My rating: 4.3

Mini-review COLOUR SCHEME, published 1943, my rating 4.2
COLOUR SCHEME    Believed by some to be her best novel, this classic by Ngaio Marsh is set in New Zealand during World War 2. Someone is assisting Germans to sink British ships off the coast of New Zealand and flashing lights on a nearby mountain are thought to be an enemy agent signalling a German boat or submarine. The setting is a run-down spa with boiling mud pools in the North Island near a Maori pa. This is an almost theatrical novel. Marsh makes extensive use of her knowledge of Maori customs and of course there is a murder, a victim lured into a boiling pool. Enter Roderick Alleyn on loan to the NZ government, searching for enemy agents.

I'm counting DIED IN THE WOOL in my lists for 2011 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, Historical Fiction Challenge, 2011 Global Reading Challenge (7th Continent: History), and my list of New Zealand novels.

Review: MAIGRET AND THE HEADLESS CORPSE, Georges Simenon

First published in France 1955
Translated from French by Eileen Ellenbogen
This edition: Chivers Press Large Print 1990
238 pages
ISBN 0-7451-1079-7

Blurb from back cover
Two brothers find a grisly package clinging to the propeller of their barge in the Canal de Saint Martins, and by the time Maigret arrives most of a mysterious corpse has been assembled, except the head. The search shifts from finding the missing piece to finding a motive, as the Inspector's keen mind gathers clues from the torso which lead to a trio of suspects. A flash of intuition linking the principal suspect's sordid life to the whereabouts of the victim on his last day alive brings the case near its end but starts Maigret thinking about the reason for the crime.

My take:
This is one of the Maigret novels that demonstrates quite clearly how timeless an author Simenon was.
The discovery of body pieces without a head, thus making identification very difficult, is a scenario explored by a number of crime fiction authors since. In fact I have some books reviewed here in MiP:

PRIME CUT, Alan Carter And then they are called to a murder scene, at HopeToun: a headless torso in the shallows on the beach. The local policewoman is Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire, recovering from sick leave after being beaten up. ... 

SKELETON HILL, Peter Lovesey The bone discovered during the battle is re-discovered by three rescue dogs, and is found to belong to a headless corpse. Forensics tells Peter Diamond, Head of Bath CID, that not only are the bones not old, but the skeleton is female,

THE SIMIAN CURVE, Mark Lalbeharry First of all when young Hattie Locke becomes stuck in a narrow walkway between two lockup garages in London, a headless corpse is discovered. Hundreds of kilometres away in a Frankfurt court, the charges against small time villain ...

It is a case just made for Maigret who worries tenaciously at identifying the corpse, and once he thinks he has that nailed, takes the focus to who killed him and why.
Another theme that emerges, that we tend to see frequently in more modern novels, is how the case takes over Maigret's thinking, and indeed his whole life. It serves to illustrate what a special person Madame Maigret is, in that this doesn't cause a marriage breakdown, but instead evokes a sort of sympathy from her, as she realises he is even eating without tasting.

THE HEADLESS CORPSE illustrates how, like Sherlock Holmes in many ways, Maigret can assemble minute observations and then make an intuitive leap that generates a bigger question.

My rating: 4.5

I am listing this book in my 2011 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge and of course among my "translated" books.

Review: IN THE TEETH OF THE EVIDENCE, Dorothy L. Sayers - audio

AUDIOBOOK: In the Teeth of the Evidence: UNABRIDGED

• By Dorothy L. Sayers
• Narrated by Ian Carmichael
• Length:8 hrs and 15 mins
• Release Date:04-02-10
• Source: I purchased it.

A collection of 17 short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers first published by Victor Gollancz in 1939.
The book's title is taken from the first story in the collection.

The stories in the collection

Original cover

* Lord Peter Wimsey stories:
          o "In the Teeth of the Evidence"
          o "Absolutely Elsewhere"
 * Montague Egg stories:
          o "A Shot at Goal"
          o "Dirt Cheap"
          o "Bitter Almonds"
          o "False Weight"
          o "The Professor's Manuscript"
* Other stories:
          o "The Milk-Bottles"
          o "Dilemma"
          o "An Arrow O'er the House"
          o "Scrawns"
          o "Nebuchadnezzar"
          o "The Inspiration of Mr. Budd"
          o "Blood Sacrifice"
          o "Suspicion"
          o "The Leopard Lady"
          o "The Cyprian Cat"

My take:

This was an entertaining audio book, narrated with touches of the dramatic by Ian Carmichael.
I thought it gave a good idea of the range of Dorothy L. Sayers' crime fiction writing.
I particularly liked the Lord Peter Wimsey stories and enjoyed meeting Montague Egg who was new to me. Many of the "other stories" had a Poe-ish quality to them.

My rating: 4.4

I'm "counting" this in the  2011 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge and the Cruisin' thru Cosies Reading Challenge