The Pledge
About ten years ago I saw an impressive, if sombre, film, The Pledge, which starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Sean Penn. It’s a dark tale in which a policeman is called to one last case on the day before he retires. It is the murder of a child and Nicholson’s character, moved by […]
Sheer Bliss
I’ve just read John Mullan’s WHAT MATTERS IN JANE AUSTEN: TWENTY CRUCIAL PUZZLES SOLVED and haven’t enjoyed a book as much for ages. However the title is misleading: he doesn’t solve puzzles as much as explore fascinating questions, such as ‘Why is the Weather Important?,’ ‘Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?,’ ‘Is There Any […]
Souvenirs
Soem time ago (December 2008 and February 2009) I wrote about trying to decide which of my mother’s books to keep after she had died. It wasn’t until this summer that I finally took the last ones to the charity shop. I have kept a fair number, integrating them into my own collection, but accepted […]
I’m glad I didn’t read . . .
. . . THE QUARRY by Friedrich Durrenmatt before I wrote my own short story, ‘Vanishing Act'(published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine last year). I got THE QUARRY out of the London Library after Mark Lawson talked about Durrenmatt recently in one of series of programmes about European crime fiction on Radio 4. And as […]
The Fear Index
My sadness at seeing that Blackwell’s in Broomhill was about to close didn’t stop me from going in and buying a few books at half price. One of them was The Fear Index by Robert Harris, and what a gripping read this turned out to be. Alex Hoffmann has become fabulously wealthy through his invention […]
Another book shop bites the dust
Well, a branch of Blackwell’s, rather than the company itself. Last week I went into Broomhill in Sheffield as I do every six weeks or so to have my hair cut and signs were up in the windows of Blackwell’s announcing that everything was half-price because the shop was about to close. I don’t know […]
Present Tense
Yesterday I was browsing in Smith’s on Sheffield station and my eye was caught by a promising book title: Autumn Killing by Mons Kallentoft. I hadn’t read anything by the author before, but when I’d scanned the blurb, I felt inclined to buy it. I love Nordic crime and this was set in Sweden, one […]
The tale, not the teller
I’m returning to a lot of old favourites at the moment – I might explore the reasons for that in another blog – and as I planned another raid on the shelves of the London Library for Maigret novels I reflected not for the first time on the discrepancy between the man and the books. […]
Montalbano
Readers of my earlier blogs might remember my admiration for Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series. I’ve read all those that have been translated into English and have enjoyed them all. And I’ve enjoyed the series of TV programmes based on them, too, showing on BBC 4 on Saturday evenings. Luca Zinagretti is excellent as Montalbana and […]
Don’t you hate it when . . .
our hero doesn’t call for back-up, but just goes straight in to tackle the bad guy. This happened in a novel I read in the summer (I won’t name names). There was no good reason why she (yes, I am afraid it was a woman) should not have waited, but she didn’t and one of […]