Harriet Devine's Blog

Girl Looking in Mirror Instead of Reading

Yes, she's abandoned her book on the chair in favour of a rather self-consciously cute pose in front of the glass. I think the clue may be in the rose that's lying next to the book -- sent by an admirer (secret maybe? or not) it's taken her mind off reading and on to wondering how best to look at him next time they're face to face? 

As far as I know this is called 'Girl Looking in the Mirror', and it's by the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens (1823-1906) whose work has appeared on here several times before, most recently here.

 

Woman (presumably) Reading

This very charming image is by the well-known American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), whose paintings I've shown on here before. I don't know what it's called but maybe someone will tell me. I'm assuming the girl is reading, though there's no book visible, but she could be just day-dreaming, I suppose. The landscape looks very English to me, and Wikipedia tells me Homer did spend two years in England, so I suppose it could be.

Reading not reviewing

I've been reading a lot this week but have nothing to offer you in the way of a complete review, for a variety of reasons. I had a stockpile of review copies, several of which I'd requested and therefore thought I should read, but some were advance copies which will wait for review till after their publication date, one was a novel I'm going to write on at length for the next Shiny, and one was an unsolicited 600 page chunkster that looked really promising but which I gave up on a quarter-way through. 

The first two, coming out in March, were both published by Urbane Publications, which describes itself as 'a  new and exciting independent publisher dedicated to developing and producing the books you want to read – hip, contemporary, groundbreaking  fiction and non-fiction designed to entertain, excite, and engage'. I'd been contacted with a review request by one of their authors, Guy Fraser Sampson, who many people will know as the author of recent new Mapp & Lucia novels. He's just branched into crime fiction, and Death in Profile is subtitled 'Hampstead Murders No. 1', so he's obviously envisaging a series. This is rather a lighthearted and slightly peculiar novel about a serial killer -- or rather, the method of solving the crime is peculiar, to say the least. More to come on this next month.

Flicking -- or rather swiping -- through the Urbane catalogue I spotted Hold Still, which begins with the intriguing line 'I photographed the moment of my husband's death' -- said husband having jumped, fallen or been pushed off a seventh floor balcony. We're soon plunged into a scary world of Albanian gangsters and lots of unpleasant things happen to poor Kate. Kept me reading, and I'll return to it later.

Lots of happy hours on the sofa reading A Man of Genius, which I'm going to write a full review of for Shiny. This is the first novel by the celebrated literary critic and biographer Janet Todd, and obviously makes use of her decades of reading and writing about women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her heroine is a writer of trashy gothic novels whose life takes an unexpected and unwelcome turn and plunges her into experiences as scary and gothic as anything she's ever written about. Great stuff.

Finally, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord landed with a thump in my mailbox and I was certainly curious. Though not a crime novel as such, this is pure Scandinavian noir, and that's a genre I love. Set at the end of the 18th century, this is the story of Morten Falck, a young man who sets out to be a priest, and ends up as a missionary in Greenland, which must surely be one of the bleakest and most horrific environments known to man, nothing but snow as far as the eye can see and a bunch of very unpleasant inhabitants. I started out really loving this one, and gobbled up the first couple of hundred pages, which dealt with his early years in wonderfully rich detail. Morton is a brilliant character, conflicted and complex, and I looked forward to hearing about the rest of his life, but when the novel skipped forward to what he sees as his old age (though he's only about 40) I found things got so dreary and depressing that I packed it in. I suspect I may be forced to go back to this, as it's certainly a beautifully written novel and I really do want to know what happened to Morten. I just need to feel a bit stronger to cope with the tough bits, though. 

Now I'm reading Margery Allingham and finding it a great pleasure. More on that soon.

Woman Reading

This is The Visitor by Ignaz Gaugengigl (1853-1932). Born in Germany, he settled in Boston, and many of his paintings, including this one, are on display in the Museum of Fine Arts there. I love the way the lady visitor is waiting in a room or hallway, and is almost a part of the furniture.

This one is for Danielle, of A Work in Progress, who sent me a postcard with this picture on it -- it just arrived today! Lovely.

The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths

A new Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway novel is always a cause for rejoicing. Amazingly, this is number 8 in a series I've been following with the greatest pleasure -- how time flies. There's something immensely comforting about these novels. Yes, crimes take place and people find themselves in danger, but you know you're in safe hands and that all will be resolved at the end. I suppose that could describe the majority of crime novels, but the great charm of these books is in the people who recurringly  inhabit them, their relationships with each other, and the issues that are raised by the crimes and their motives. Central to the novels is Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist and single mother, her friend DCI Nelson, a married man who happens to be her child's father, their friend Cathbad, who is a druid, and various members of Nelson's team. Then you have the added interest of Ruth's historical and archaeological background, which invariably has something to contribute to the solution of the crime. All in all I was really delighted to get a review copy, and it didn't disappoint.

Ruth and Nelson live in Norfolk, so of course the novels are set in this rather remote and slightly mysterious English county. Here we are in Walsingham, a village with a tremendous early Christian legacy, primarily associated with the Virgin Mary. It's a pilgrimage site with numerous shrines, ancient churches and chapels, dotted with various retreat houses, and surrounded by myth and legend. Given all that, it's not entirely surprising that Cathbad, house/cat sitting for a friend, spots a lovely woman in blue in the nearby churchyard and thinks he's seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. He hasn't, of course, as becomes quite clear when the poor young woman is found dead in a nearby field. She turns out to be Chloe Jenkins, a well-known model, who has been a resident in a nearby clinic specialising in addictions, The Sanctuary. Who would want to kill beautiful, gentle Chloe, who seems to have inspired great love among all who knew her? As the investigation gets underway, a further complication is added. Ruth has been contacted by an old friend, Hilary Simpson, who has become a priest and is participating in a conference at one of the retreat centres. Hilary has received a number of highly unpleasant and threatening anonymous letters from someone who is appalled by the church's admission of women to the priesthood. Could the letter writer and the murderer be the same person?

As always, the progress of investigation becomes inextricably associated with the relationship between Ruth and Nelson. Their daughter Kate, the result of a one-night stand, is now five years old, and Nelson has managed to be a good father to her as far as the circumstances allow. His beautiful wife Michelle has supposedly accepted the situation with good grace, but as we learned in the previous novel, she has become involved with one of Nelson's officers, Tim Heathfield -- she's always been rather a shadowy figure, but here we see the real unhappiness that lies under the surface. Understandably, there's always been a huge amount of unresolved tension between Ruth and Nelson, and here it comes well to the surface. I always think Griffiths does brilliantly at depicting the deeply complicated and confusing feelings these two have for each other -- both doing their best to accept the status quo, both secretly wishing and hoping that things might change but never allowing themselves to follow the thought or even admit to it. Add to that the interactions between the members of Nelson's team, the glimpses of the home life of Cathbad and his policewoman partner Judi, and the various suspects (here mostly rather peculiar members of the clergy or slightly deranged addicts) and you have a mixture that I read with huge enjoyment. Yes, it's essentially a police procedural, but it's so much more as well. Great stuff. 

Death on the Riviera by John Bude

Once off the quayside Bill realised the the small hours of a bitter February morning was not the ideal time to weave one's way out of Dunkirk. Presumably there had been roads between the rubble heaps and undoubtedly, before the holocaust, they'd led somewhere. But now there was nothing but a maze of treacherous, pot-holed tracks meandering aimlessly between a network of railway-lines and flattened buildings.

How's that for a bit of priceless period detail? Unless you're a fan of the British Library Crime Classics series, you probably haven't heard of John Bude,  one of those erstwhile popular writers who dropped off the radar after his death in 1957. The BL published a couple of his early novels back in 2014, and I reviewed them enthusiastically for issue 1 of Shiny New Books (you can read that review here). Those two were set in arguably the most attractive parts of England, Cornwall and the Lake District, but this latest offering, published in 1952, moves the setting to the south of France. 

Readers of The Lake District Murder will remember Detective-Inspector Meredith, who is still going strong eighteen years later. He's acquired a young sidekick, Freddy Strang, and as the novel begins we find them getting off the cross-channel ferry and setting off for Menton, on the French-Italian border. The two of them have been dispatched on the track of a well-known forger, Chalky Cobett, who's been flooding the market with counterfeit notes and is apparently now functioning on the French Riviera.

Menton is a highly attractive town, and the pair soon start enjoying delicious food and classy wine, not to mention the balmy temperatures (a bit of wishful thinking on Bude's part, this, as the book takes place in February, when Menton won't be all that much hotter than the UK, but never mind that). They soon fall in with the residents of the stylish Villa Paloma. This is owned by a wealthy widow, Nessie Hedderwick, who delights in filling her house with attractive and unusual guests. Needless to say, most of them prove to have secrets, and one of them soon becomes a suspect in Meredith's forgery investigation. To complicate matters, young Freddy falls head over heels in love with Nessie's pretty young niece Dilys, which rather takes his mind off police business.

For a novel called Death on the Riviera, this is unusually slow in living up to its title. Somebody mysteriously disappears around page 154, his bloodstained car is found on page 157, but there's not going to be any sign of a corpse for some time yet. Mind you, once a body turns up at the bottom of a ravine, having gone over the edge of the dangerous corniche coastal road, things start to hot up considerably, and the final pages of the novel are full of as many twists and turns as anyone could wish for. The solution to the crime is extraordinarily ingenious, perhaps rather unbelievably so, but there's so much fun to be had along the way that I didn't care.

I got a huge amount of pleasure from this novel, a good chunk of it due to the wonderful period detail. As a child I actually visited the area around Menton on my first ever holiday in France, so this was doubly evocative for me. Bude evidently adored France, and his love for the place is evident on every page. Add to that the presence of the delightful Inspector, his attractive young assistant, and the cast of somewhat bizarre characters, both French and expat, and you have a recipe for the most delightful escapism, which must have been very welcome to readers in grey, dreary post-war Britain.  If you'd like a second opinion, get over to the most recent Shiny New Books, where Hayley Anderton has written a review. Great stuff.

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

His own face looked strange to him. Who am I, he thought, where am I going? Thoughts that had never occurred to him before. 

I've read a great many of Agatha Christie's novels, but I don't claim to have read them all, and this is one I'd never heard of until I caught the first episode of a dramatisation on BBC Radio 4 recently. I was instantly hooked, and when I discovered that it was only going to be on once a week, I sped off to Audible, where I luckily had one free credit, and downloaded it. And how glad I am that I did. Read by the incomparable Hugh Fraser (better known to most of us as Captain Hastings), this gave me many happy hours of listening, and kept me up far too late last night as I couldn't wait to get to the denouement.

Apparently one of Christie's own two favourite novels (the other one being Crooked House), Ordeal by Innocence features neither Poirot nor Marple -- though Wikipedia tells me it was adapted, with Marple inserted into it, for the series starring Geraldine McEwan. That seems a shame, as it stands up brilliantly without either of them. For this is not a detective novel in the generally accepted sense, though there are several people trying to solve the crime. Instead, it can best be described as a psychological thriller, and one everyone should read if they think Christie isn't much good at characterisation.

This is the story of a family, though quite an unusual one. Wealthy, childless Rachel Argyle and her husband Leo adopted five children, all from disadvantaged homes. Now adults, they were a seemingly united family, apart from one bad apple, the youngest boy Jacko, who seemed determined on a life of dishonesty and crime. However, when the novel begins, Jacko has died in prison, having been convicted of the murder of his adoptive mother. He had claimed to have an alibi, though it had not been possible to verify. But all this is now going to change, as Dr Arthur Calgary returns from a long period overseas ready and willing to confirm that Jacko was in his car at the exact time that Rachel died. As soon as Arthur realises what has happened, he rushes round to the Argyles' house to tell them that Jacko was innocent. He expects this news to be greeted with delight by the family, but is initially puzzled by their lack of gratitude. Slowly it dawns on him that Jacko's innocence shows that one of them must be guilty. But who? As he sees a dark cloud of suspicion polluting previously happy relationships, he determines to solve the crime himself. 

Christie does a wonderful job of revealing the flaws in these well-educated, privileged people, and the cracks that begin to appear in previously untroubled relationships. Everyone, it seems, had a motive of sorts, and nobody can any longer trust anyone else. Rachel's widower Leo had been about to announce his engagement to his secretary Gwenda, and beautiful, troubled young Hester had been planning to marry the local doctor, but both couples now drift further and further apart, each suspicious of their other half. As for the oldest daughter Helen -- a particularly chilling creation -- her previously (apparently) happy marriage is slowly eroded by her  husband Philip's determination to uncover the real murderer. Philip Durrant (that's him in the quotation at the beginning) lives his life in a wheelchair, a result of an attack of polio, and feels increasingly smothered by Helen's obsessive adoration -- she neither cares for nor takes any interest in anyone else, while he longs to get more involved with the outside world and to test his sharp intellect with a real-life puzzle. Then there's quiet, mixed-race Tina, who seems to be nursing a secret, and rebellious Mikey, never able to forgive Rachel for not being his promiscuous, uncaring birth-mother, who was happy to sell him to Rachel for £100. And then there's the middle-aged housekeeper, Swedish Kirsten Lindstrom, who has been with the family since they were children -- what secrets about them all might she know? I suspected everyone in turn.

I see this was made into a film in the 1980s, with a lot of famous names in it (Donald Sutherland, Anthony Hopkins and Faye Dunaway among others) but I don't feel much inclined to watch it. Apart from the fact that the actors look as if they were too old to play the quite young men and women Christie portrayed, I'm sure I'd be troubled by any changes made to what seemed to me an almost perfect plot. I didn't guess who did it, but that's no surprise as I never have guessed the identity of any of Christie's murderers. If you've never read this, please do. It's highly recommended.

Woman Reading

Isn't this a glorious picture? I'm afraid I've stolen it from one of my favourite blogs, the wonderful A Gallimaufry, and Helen tells us she got it from here.  But that's how it goes. We have to find pictures somewhere, and I poke around all over the internet to find things I like and think that you may like too. This is actually called An Evening at Home, painted by the British artist Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) who, so Wikipedia tells me, was a Baronet, not that that has any bearing on his artistic abilities. I love everything about this picture, which was probably painted in the 1880s, and I hope you will too. 

My Shiny Reviews

I had great fun re-reading a couple of old favourites, Robinson Crusoe and Dracula, newly re-issued and aimed at the YA audience by Alma Classics. Here's how the review begins:

I suspect that neither of these two great classics has ever been out of print since their respective first appearances in 1719 and 1897, and a quick look at Amazon reveals that there are numerous editions available today. Do we need any more? Well, yes, if you are talking about what Alma Classics has done with these new reprints. Essentially, they have repackaged them for younger readers. This involves not just new, eye-catching covers and a smattering of new illustrations in the text, but also a section at the end called Extra Material for Young Readers. I’m not sure what age group they have in mind, but my thirteen year old grandson – admittedly quite a precocious reader – is reading Dracula at the moment and will appreciate the extra information about the writer, the book, and the characters, and may find the glossary helpful too. 

 

You can read the rest of my review here.

The Widow by Fiona Barton

This debut novel, which came as a freebie from the nice people at Audible, supplied me with more than ten hours of often quite intense listening. I normally listen to audiobooks in the car and in bed at night (though when I do that I often fall asleep and have to rewind, so it's good that the app comes with a sleep timer), but I found myself snatching more listening time than usual, which in itself must be a recommendation. But I do have some reservations.

This is the story of Jean Taylor, a rather ordinary young woman who was working as a hairdresser when she met and married her charming, loving husband Glen. She adores him, and trusts him implicitly, so when he is suspected of the abduction and presumed murder of two-year-old Bella Elliott, she absolutely refuses to believe he could be guilty. Even when the police investigation reveals that Glen is an addicted online viewer of violent child pornography, Jean stands by him and tries to understand. After all, he seems so ashamed, and is extra kind and loving to his beloved Jeanie. The case comes to court, but the evidence is insufficient (there's no body, for a start), so Glen is freed and life can go back to normal. But of course it doesn't, and can't. The press constantly besiege the couple, vicious letters arrive daily, both Glen and Jean lose their jobs and their friends. And detective Bob Sparks, convinced of Glen's guilt, continues the investigation even when forbidden to do so by his bosses.

The complex structure of the novel enables it to be many things rolled into one. The narrative swings between that of Jean herself, and of various other characters -- Bob the policeman, Kate the journalist, and the child's mother, among others -- so it's partly a police procedural, partly a rather chilling account of the activities of the press (the author is or was an investigative journalist), and partly a psychological thriller. It also swings between time-frames, gradually revealing the true facts of the case but also charting the progress of Jean's thoughts and feelings, over a four-year period. And for almost all that time you don't know whether Glen is actually guilty or not. Other possible suspects emerge, and have to be thoroughly investigated, and it seems impossible to prove that Glen actually had the opportunity of abducting the child. Will there be a tremendous twist at the end? I was waiting for one -- and you'll have to wait till you've read it yourself to find out.

Although Jean is at the centre of the novel, I thought the character of Glen was extremely well-conceived and convincing. I suppose there must be many people like this in the world -- people with what we find to be unbearably shocking secret lives, who manage to show a plausible, trustworthy, likeable face to their friends and families. But the chief interest in the novel is obviously the psychology of Jean herself. She's a surprisingly unsophisticated woman -- she has no idea how the internet works, for example, which does seem a little unusual for a 39-year-old in 2010, when the book is set -- but really that's the point of the story, I suppose. And as time goes on she becomes a less and less reliable narrator -- the police begin to suspect she may have been complicit in whatever Glen is supposed to have done with Bella, and you can begin to see why, as Jean is childless and quite desperately unhappy about it. She even keeps a scrapbook with pictures of attractive babies and small children, and her interest in Bella does seem rather unhealthy. By the end of the narrative's timeframe, we see her having sold her story to a cheap and lurid daily paper, and realise she is skilfully manipulating the journalist who is in charge of the interview. All this is well done, and certainly, as the publishers' blurb and many reviews have noted, everyone must wonder what life is like for the wife of a convicted paedophile and abductor. 

I said I had reservations, so what were they? I actually got a bit tired of the constant swings back and forth in time and between different people and scenarios. In fact I found the whole thing a little long, and wished it could have been done rather more concisely. But no doubt most of the novel's admirers will argue that all this was entirely necessary. So cheers to Fiona Barton for an impressive debut, and thanks to Audible for a good chunk of mostly absorbing listening.