DJs Bait in a Box

Some blogging friends are coming up with such interesting features to their blogs.
Dorte at DJs kimiblog has been running something called Bait in Box.

She's been using interesting images like the one to the right, but primarily what she is doing is running a little competition among her readers.

She gives you a quote of some lines from a book, crime fiction of course, and generally a British author, but sometimes an expatriate, and asks you to guess who. Only you are not allowed to say who!

The rules are as follows:
1) if you think you can guess who wrote it, please post your guess.
2) if you recognize the quotation, please post a clue to other readers - do not spoil the fun by giving too much away.

Dorte herself gives clues, and the "bait in a box" is a prelude to a book review she will be posting in the next few days. It is a very nifty idea!

Review, PORTOBELLO, Ruth Rendell

Hutchinson 2008, ISBN 978-0-09-192585-7, 278 pages

Anybody who has visited London is familiar with the Portobello Road and its markets. Some of the families, rich and poor, who live in the streets off Portobello Road have lived in the district for generations. Eugene Wren's very successful art gallery of fine arts in upmarket Kensington Church Street for example, is the successor to the one his father had in a glossy arcade quite a long way up the road. Gene, seemingly a confirmed bachelor now in his 50s lives in the more fashionable Chepstow Villas.

In contrast is the Gibson family, once market stall holders, now most of the family either lives on the dole or on the products of breaking and entering. Lance, unemployed, lives with his step-uncle Gib,an elder of the Church of the Children of Zebulun. His girlfriend has thrown him out, and his parents won't let him in. Lance needs instant money to repair his girlfriend's teeth after he knocks her front tooth out, and burglary provides afeasible option.

When Joel Roseman has a heart attack in the street he becomes a patient of Eugene's lady friend Ella, who is a GP in a nearby practice. Ella soon realises that Joel's problems are as much psychological as they are physical, and outside her capabilities. And in an illustration that the problems right on our own doorstep often go unrecognised by our nearest and dearest, Eugene has an addiction he doesn't dare tell Ella about.

Ruth Rendell has taken the lives of three principal characters and the circles within which they move, and played with the concept of degrees of separation, forging connections between them that we would never have expected.

In a sense, although several crimes take place in the novel, this isn't really a crime fiction novel. For me, it is more like those novels that Rendell has written under her Barbara Vine pseudonym. I've felt that with the last couple of Rendell stand alones, most recently in in THE WATER'S LOVELY. It is almost as if she has changed her mind about what goes under what name. As others have commented, this isn't Rendell at her best. She struggles with a couple of plots to make them interesting, and I found the one involving Eugene Wren particularly tedious. However she still writes well, but the crime fiction strands are really not tensioned enough.

My rating: 4.2

For a full list of Rendell novels see Fantastic Fiction

Left Coast Crime - Arrival

Well, we've arrived. This post is coming courtesy the internet connection in our room at the Wakaiola Marriott on Big Island, and my wonderful Dell Mini.

Very important too is that the luggage got here safely too including the case of books mentioned in my last LCC post.

Things don't really get underway until Saturday when we have a 4MA breakfast, and then some sessions happen Saturday afternoon. Tomorrow a number of us are booked on a 12 hour round island tour, so it be a good chance to meet some fellow conferees.

Crossing the international date line means that you get a version of Ground Hog Day happening. The airline captain explained, "put your watches forward 3 hours and then after midnight it will still be today". That meant that we landed in Honolulu, in terms of date an time about 12 hours before we left Sydney! Does my head in even thinking about it. When we return to Australia we lose a day!. For us most of Monday 16 March will not exist.

The flight from Sydney to Hawaii was in one of the more elderly Qantas planes. Not sure what it actually was but none of the TVs in your headrest malarky. Didn't really sleep much so I managed to finish a couple of books and I'll get the reviews up in the next few days.

The grey weather that hit Adelaide prior to our departure seems to have followed us here. Very overcast. Yesterday we went out to the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbour by public bus. - number 20 there and number 42 back. We were trying to stay up for the day to kill off the jet lag and that seems to have worked fairly well.

Chatting in Crime Fiction land

Many thanks to Petrona for the wonderful image!
Join us here for friendly chat about books of mutual interest.

Forgotten novel: THE END OF THE AFFAIR, Graham Greene

Another contribution to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books

One of the questions that Dorte asked me recently was Some people do not regard crime fiction as 'real' literature. How would you defend the genre?

Graham Greene is one of those literary authors who also sometimes wrote mysteries and thrillers. THE END OF THE AFFAIR appears in my little green book of records in 1975. (As does ENGLAND MADE ME which wasn't a mystery).

Fantastic Fiction has this synopsis of THE END OF THE AFFAIR:
Maurice Bendrix's love affair with his friend's wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship. Two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Parkis, a private detective, to follow Sarah.

It is a novel that has stood the test of time well, with a remarkable list of re-publishings.
Wikipedia has lengthy biography of Greene, while Fantastic Fiction lists his novels with brief synopses.

Green collected the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter, and in 1974 was tipped for the Nobel prize for literature, although he didn't get it. He was awarded the British Order of Merit in 1986.

Customised Google Search- crime fiction

Many thanks to FyreFly who mentioned on her Sunday salon post that she had created a customised Google search called Book Bloggers.

I've played around with that now and created one that points first of all to the crime fiction blogs that I follow on Crime Fiction Journeys. I've also put the search in the right hand column of MYSTERIES IN PARADISE.

You now get reasonably targetted results if you search for an author, a character, or a specific blog.
The only thing I don't like is that the search results come up in the same window - I would prefer they opened in a new window, but I'll work on that. Perhaps I can customise the code.

However, if you want to try it here it is

Crime Fiction unites us all

An idea that came to me when I was reading Dorte's blog. She publishes her blog in English and Danish, and had a graph showing the language of her readers in this post.

Unlike Dorte's, my graphic shows that my readership is almost entirely English speaking:

I have a number of maps accessible from my blog so I captured some graphics- sorry if they are a bit fuzzy. Blogger doesn't allow you to have very large images unfortunately, so some of them I've had to stretch. If you click on the fuzzy ones, you see a clearer, larger graphic.

I was struck from the very first mapping tool that I used, Clustrmap, how wide flung my visitors are.

This is a recent ClustrMap. The red dots of course indicate where people live (according to their IP address)


Site meter gives me very nice pie charts (which is what Dorte used)

And then this map is generated by Feedjit: once again apologies for the fuzziness but you get the idea.


So what does all this tell us? Probably what we already know: that crime fiction is a genre with wide appeal, crossing language and location boundaries. You only have to check what other languages your favourite English language author is translated into, or think yourself about the books that you read in translation. A subject for a later post I think.