Silent Nights : Christmas mysteries - ed Martin Edwards

I do like to read Christmas books around this time of year. Yesterday I started my annual reread (or relisten) of A Christmas Carol, read so beautifully by Miriam Margolyes. Thankfully the weather has calmed down a little after a few horrible days around 40C. I had to go to work on Friday but Saturday & Sunday were spent inside with all the blinds down & air conditioning on, drinking iced tea, reading & watching Christmas movies, especially the ones set in very cold places.

One of the books I finished reading over the weekend was Silent Nights, an anthology of Christmas mysteries, mostly from the Golden Age, edited by Martin Edwards. This is one of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics, a very successful series of mystery novels & short stories reprinted by the British Library. Silent Nights is a mixture of well-known & newly resurrected stories. The first story features Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, is an old favourite involving the theft of a famous diamond & a Christmas goose. The Necklace of Pearls by Dorothy L Sayers is another favourite, more stolen jewellery & a clever plot that tests the skills of Lord Peter Wimsey.

One of the most interesting & atmospheric stories is Waxwork by Ethel Lina White. A waxworks museum has a reputation for being haunted. Two people have tried to brave the ghosts by staying in the museum overnight & been found dead next morning,. Ambitious young reporter Sonia is determined to succeed where others have failed but can she debunk the stories? The tension is heightened as the night wears on & I was almost looking through my fingers at one point. I haven't read any Edgar Wallace but the story included here, called Stuffing, is beautifully plotted as well as quite funny. Both the good & the bad get their just deserts.

Edmund Crispin is another favourite author. I read all his books one summer many years ago & Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language & Literature at Oxford, is a wonderful character. Reading this story again after so many years that I'd forgotten the solution, I thought that Stephen Fry would be a very good Fen if the books were ever made into a TV series. In The Name on the Window, architect Sir Lucas Welsh is found stabbed in a supposedly haunted pavilion at the home of fellow architect Sir Charles Moberly. Before his death, he had time to write the name of his murderer on the window but all is not as it seems.

This is an excellent anthology of stories. I read one every night over a couple of weeks & I like to read anthologies that way. Reading too many short stories at once can be a little indigestible but one a day is perfect & this collection was just what I needed in the busy & hot days before Christmas.

Rambling towards Christmas

I seem to be jumping from one book to the next at the moment, led by serendipity to a story here, a dip into an old favourite there, but not actually finishing very much. This seems to happen to me more and more these days. I could blame age or the internet for my short attention span but really, I just wish I wasn't interested in so many different subjects, genres & authors. I'm halfway through The English Festivals by Laurence Whistler (brother of Rex, who I wrote about here) just reprinted by Dean Street Press. This is a lovely book about the traditions & customs of the festivals of the English year from Christmas to Candlemas, Plough Sunday & Easter, which is where I'm up to at the moment. I'm just about to start The Octopus by Frank Norris with my 19th century bookgroup which I'll be reading in weekly instalments for about 6 weeks. It's the story of a dispute between wheat farmers & the railroad in California in 1880. I haven't read any Norris so I'm looking forward to that.

I'm listening to Antonia Fraser's childhood memoir, My History, on audio, read by Penelope Wilton. It's wonderful. If you would like a taste of it, the lovely blog, Books as Food, has had some excerpts here. It's not only about Fraser's childhood, her own history, but about how she came to love history as a subject. It's sent me off on some reading & browsing trails as well as wanting to reread some of Antonia Fraser's biographies. She mentions Our Island Story by H E Marshall, which was recently reprinted & which is on the tbr shelves. Reading the chapter about the Princes in the Tower made me wonder if this was the school book that the Amazon loaned to Alan Grant in The Daughter of Time (do I have time to read it again?).

Part of her schooldays were spent at a convent school founded by Mary Ward, a seventeenth century nun who believed passionately in education for girls. Fraser wrote about Mary Ward in her book on seventeenth century women, The Weaker Vessel, which I haven't read since it was published 30 years ago. I picked it up to read about Mary Ward but I'm much more interested in the seventeenth century than I was back then so I'd love to read the whole book again.

The nuns & the convent school also provided the setting for Fraser's first detective novel, Quiet as a Nun, published in 1977. Open Library had the same edition that I read all those years ago so I'm reading it for at least the third or fourth time. I loved the Jemima Shore books & this first one, about the mysterious death of a nun in the tower called Blessed Eleanor's Retreat in the convent grounds, was the best.

Then, I received an email about a conference on the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Among the sessions was a reading group discussion of one of her stories, The Mystery at Fernwood. Braddon is one of my favourite sensation novelists & I had this story in the Delphi collection on my eReader so I dropped everything to read it. Braddon is an early member of the Had I But Known school of mystery writing.
  
If I had but gone with her! It is so difficult to reconcile oneself to the irrevocable decrees of Providence, it is so difficult to bow the head in meek submission to the awful fiat; so difficult not to look back to the careless hours which preceded the falling of the blow, and calculate how it might have been averted.

Isabel is intrigued by the air of mystery at the home of her fiance, Laurence Wendale. There are forebodings of misery & secrets & a mysterious invalid who lives in a separate wing of the house & is never seen. The secret wasn't so very mysterious but Braddon's writing is so atmospheric. She uses the weather so well to suggest a sinister atmosphere & heightened emotion. I loved it. However, Laurence's sister, Lucy, mentions Sir Walter Scott's Demonology & I'd never heard of it so needed to find out what it was. Then, I checked my Delphi edition of Scott, & there it was, so that's another book I want to read.

Christmas is coming so I'm starting to think about some suitable reading, listening & watching for the next few weeks. I've started reading one story each day from Silent Nights, the Christmas mystery anthology edited by Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics series. The first story is an old favourite, The Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, but most of the stories are completely new to me.

I'm also reading poetry. Last year, someone mentioned Janet Morley's anthology, Haphazard by Starlight, a poem a day from Advent to Epiphany. I was too late to get hold of it then but I did buy it & also the Lent anthology, The Heart's Time, which I enjoyed reading. The poems aren't all religious, or not overtly religious, but I'm enjoying concentrating on one poem a day. I've started listening to Christmas carols & I watched Miracle on 34th Street again last weekend. It begins at Thanksgiving so I always seem to watch it at this time of year. The original version only, please. I'm sure I'm not the only one who cries when Kris sings with the little Dutch girl, no matter how many times I see it. I just love 1940s movies, especially set in New York. You'd never have a movie these days where the romantic leads were called Fred & Doris, would you? Such lovely, old-fashioned names. Maureen O'Hara, the last of the main cast members, died recently. She was such a beautiful actress, I remember her in How Green Was My Valley as well.

I'll be listening to Miriam Margolyes reading Dickens's A Christmas Carol, & I've borrowed a couple of Christmas mysteries from work, new reprints of 1930s titles - Crime at Christmas by C H B Kitchin & Murder for Christmas by Francis Duncan. Not the most imaginative titles but they have lovely retro covers (I tried to load a photo but it came out upside down) & the more reprints the better!

I have finished reading a book, Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, which I'll be reviewing soon. My non-book buying has been going well (I obviously don't need to buy books when I have so many on my shelves & eReader to dip into) although I do have a little confession to make but that can wait a couple of days. This post is long enough already.

Shiny New Books no 6 & a completely unrelated cat photo

The latest issue of Shiny New Books is now available to read here. I'm very pleased to have two reviews in this issue. My review of Martin Edwards' new book, The Golden Age of Murder, has been reprinted as well as a review of Truly Criminal, a new anthology of true crime written by the members of the Crime Writers' Association. The anthology has been edited by Martin Edwards. Other highlights of the latest SNB are a review of an anthology of holiday crime stories, Resorting to Murder, (one of the British Library Crime Classics) edited by Martin Edwards & an interview by SNB editor Harriet with - you guessed it - Martin Edwards!

In non-Martin Edwards related news, there are also reviews of new editions of Peking Picnic by Ann Bridge (I read this a few years ago & reviewed it here), Kate Atkinson's new book A God in Ruins, Nicola Upson's new mystery, London Rain (plus an interview with the author), & the latest Persephones, London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes & Vain Shadow by Jane Hervey. I haven't read everything yet but I'm looking forward to reading the article on four Canadian classics by Barb from the terrific blog, Leaves & Pages. I'm especially intrigued by I Married the Klondike by Laura Beatrice Berton. I've been reading some American & Canadian authors recently & want to read more. Where I'm going to find the time is another question.

And now, for no other reason than that I want to share it, here's a selfie Phoebe took the other night (with help from me to push the button) as she sat on my lap at the kitchen bench. I was reading the newspaper on my iPad & remembered that I could switch the camera around to take a photo of her. I'm using it as my iPad wallpaper & it makes me smile every time I switch it on, it's such a typically Phoebe look.

The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards

The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written during this period, most of them inaccurate & quite lazy. The books were just puzzles, with cutout characters reminiscent of the board game Cluedo. Their authors didn't play fair with the reader, including untraceable poisons & mysterious Chinamen in an effort to bamboozle the reader. In reality, the best books of this period have been read & loved by millions of readers. Their plots, far from being cosy, featured serial killers, sadistic murders, plots based on real crimes of the period & the beginnings of the forensic thriller. The names of the greatest authors of the period - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh - are still well-known today. Their books are still read, we listen to audio books & radio productions & watch the many TV adaptations. Martin Edwards tells the story of the Golden Age through the history of The Detection Club & the authors who founded it & were its members. It's the story of a period of history & a group of writers that have always fascinated me.

The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of writers that included Christie, Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote under the names Anthony Berkeley & Francis Iles. The Club was an exclusive one. Members had to be proposed by a current member & approved by the committee. The initiation ritual, complete with members dressed in ceremonial robes & the swearing of an oath to uphold fair play in the plotting of the detective novel taken while holding a skull known as Eric, was all part of the game. The Club met for dinner & conversation several times a year in London & the meetings provided an opportunity for gossip about publishers, agents, sales, the topics that probably feature in the conversation of any group of writers. For some of the members, the Club provided an escape from the disappointments & problems of their private lives. Writing is a solitary occupation & the opportunity to talk shop with colleagues must have been another attraction.

The Golden Age of Murder focuses principally on three writers - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers & Anthony Berkeley Cox. Much has been written about Christie & Sayers but I was especially interested to read more about Berkeley. He was an innovative novelist whose brilliant plotting was a feature of his work. Two of his books written under the pseudonym Francis Iles radically changed the conventions of detective fiction. In Malice Aforethought, the reader is in the confidence of the murderer from the beginning & the opening of Before the Fact tells us that Lina Aysgarth was married to a murderer before taking us back to the beginning of their relationship with this knowledge in our minds. Under the name Anthony Berkeley, he wrote a series of novels featuring Roger Sheringham, an amateur detective who usually gets everything wrong before finally coming up with the correct solution. Berkeley felt adrift after his war service & tried various jobs before becoming a writer. He was a contradictory personality, eccentric, obsessive, difficult. His private life was unconventional & this is something he had in common with other members of the Detection Club.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the private lives of the members. A theory I've heard several times about the Golden Age writers is that their interest & facility in writing detective stories came from the need to hide secrets in their private lives. Just last week, I listened to the latest episode of BBC Radio's Great Lives where Val McDermid discussed P D James, who gave a lecture on this theory. Christie famously disappeared for twelve days in 1926, distressed over the end of her first marriage. Even after her happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie, an intensely shy woman, shunned publicity. Sayers had an illegitimate son, whose existence she kept secret from all her closest friends. Her difficult marriage, to an alcoholic who had suffered from his war experiences, was another reason for her love of the Detection Club's dinners & the gusto with which she entered into the spirit of all the rituals & rules.

Edwards also mentions many other writers, some of them famous in their day but unknown now. Interestingly, as consultant to the very successful British Library Crime Classics series, Edwards has been instrumental in bringing some of these authors back into print. Christopher St John Sprigg, J Jefferson Farjeon & Freeman Wills Croft are just three authors mentioned in this book who have been brought back into print through this series. Another cliche of the Golden Age is that it was dominated by women writers, the Queens of Crime. Martin Edwards features many male authors of the period, some of them undeservedly obscure now. His knowledge of the period is exhaustive & obviously the product of many years reading & research. Martin's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name? bears witness to this interest with regular posts on forgotten books & interesting snippets of information from his ongoing research into this fascinating period of literary history.

It's impossible for me to encompass this book in a brief review. I haven't even mentioned the interest in true crime that led to the anthology, The Anatomy of Murder (recently reprinted), or the collaborative novels published by members of the Club (Ask a Policeman, The Floating Admiral) to replenish their funds & pay the rent on their Soho rooms. I enjoyed reading about the group dynamics of these projects, with Dorothy L Sayers bullying & cajoling members into writing their contributions & submitting their copy. The current members of the Detection Club (including Edwards who is the Archivist of the Club) are working on a group novel of their own called The Sinking Admiral in homage to the earlier book. There are also some fascinating photographs in the book, including one of my favourites of Dorothy L Sayers & Helen Simpson drinking beer & Gladys Mitchell in her other job as a PE teacher, instructing her pupils. The research that has gone into the book is phenomenal as can be seen by the rare illustrations & the detail in the footnotes.

I mentioned the British Library Crime Classics above & I've been reading a recent anthology, Capital Crimes, edited by Edwards, which throws light on a discovery in the book that I found really thrilling. Martin Edwards has discovered a connection between Berkeley & one of my favourite authors, E M Delafield, that has been previously unsuspected. I won't go into detail but the clues are there in Delafield's work if you know where to look. Although best-known today for her delightful Diary of a Provincial Lady & its sequels, Delafield had an interest in true crime & wrote a novel, Messalina of the Suburbs, about the Edith Thompson case (which disturbed & fascinated several of the Detection Club members). The story by Delafield in Capital Crimes, They Don't Wear Labels, is a revelation & just one example of the influence her friendship with Berkeley had on her own work.

The success of the British Library Crime Classics as well as the continuing popularity of adaptations of Golden Age novels attest to our love of this period of detective fiction. I'm just as fascinated by the authors as their books so The Golden Age of Murder has been a real treat for me. I think anyone who has read the novels of this period would find much to enjoy in Martin Edwards' book & the recent reprints by several publishers, including Dean Street Press, Langtail Press, Rue Morgue & Felony & Mayhem (featuring Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case this week) mean that if you've read everything Sayers, Christie & Allingham ever wrote, you have many more authors to discover.

Bookish ramblings

I thought I'd highlight a few bookish links & some news about one of my favourite series. The British Library Crime Classics have been one of the publishing successes of the last couple of years. I love them. I've always enjoyed Golden Age mysteries & these books are so beautifully produced & attractively presented. It's a real treat to be discovering new authors from this period. After all, what do we do when we've read all of Christie, Sayers, Tey, Marsh & Allingham? I've bought nearly all of the Crime Classics & have reviewed several of them here, here & here. Martin Edwards has become the consultant for the series which means that future titles will be interesting, sometimes surprising & always well worth reprinting. I've just started reading Capital Crimes, a collection of short stories set in London & I was very excited to read on Martin's blog that there are another half dozen books in the series to be published before the end of the year. The British Library also have another series of Spy Classics which I haven't investigated as yet.

The latest edition of Shiny New Books is available to read here. I've just finished reading a gorgeous book about the artists Rex Whistler so I was very interested to read the review of A Curious Friendship by Anna Thomasson, about the friendship between Whistler & Edith Olivier. There's also an article by Anna Thomasson about her research for the book, which I always find fascinating. I was also interested to read Desperate Reader's review of George Gissing's The Whirlpool, just reprinted by Penguin. I love Gissing & I've only read a couple of his books. There are lots of other reviews & interviews, including a review of Capital Crimes & an interview with Robert Davies, the publisher of the British Library Crime Classics. There's another interview with Davies here, on a blog I've just discovered, Past Offences.

Margin Notes Books have just reprinted one of my favourite books, Mara Kay's The Youngest Lady In Waiting. This is the book that first interested me in Russian history. It's about a young girl who becomes lady in waiting to Grand Duchess Alexandra, wife of the future Nicholas I. It's set at the time of the Decembrist revolt in 1825. I borrowed it from my school library so often that they should have just let me keep it. I'd never seen a copy since (the cover above is the edition I read) so I was beside myself when I read than it was to be reprinted. I've bought the first book, Masha (also just reprinted by Margin Notes Books) which, funnily enough, I only read once all those years ago

& The Youngest Lady In Waiting arrived yesterday! I've been dipping in & reading bits & pieces & I can't believe it's 35 years since I last read it, it's all so familiar. I have a feeling I'll be dropping everything to read this next.

Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers in the world. I know that's quite a bold statement but he makes me laugh so I'm prepared to go out on a limb. One of my favourite Bryson books was Notes from a Small Island, about the UK. Well, after many years & a diversion into books on science & his childhood, Bill Bryson has written another travel book about Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling which will be published later this year. If I'd been keeping up with reading The Bookseller at work, I'd have known about this weeks ago. I'd also have known that Bryson has sold 8,648,774 books in the UK (exactly). As it is, I read about it on Elaine's blog & this article in The Guardian.

Also in The Guardian was an article celebrating the 200th anniversary of Anthony Trollope's birth. Writers nominated their favourite Trollope novel. I'm currently rereading Miss Mackenzie with my 19th century book group & I started reading Cousin Henry at the weekend after reading about it here as it was the only Trollope in the list I hadn't yet read. Books and Chocolate is celebrating Trollope's anniversary with giveaways & reviews here.

Has anyone read The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu? I enjoyed reading about Japanese history so much in Judith Gautier's The Usurper that I've just ordered this lovely Penguin Deluxe edition on a whim. All 1,216 pages of it... I could have dipped my toe in with the abridged edition but I couldn't resist a Penguin Deluxe. However, I feel completely justified in buying yet another book because I've read this article where Umberto Eco tells us why unread books are more valuable in our lives than read ones. Thank you Rose for sending me the link. Eco calls these books the antilibrary & describes them as the repository of all the knowledge that we don't yet have. So buying a huge novel about 11th century Japan is completely justified because I know absolutely nothing about the subject. This theory may not justify the purchase of my 100th book about Richard III (The Bones of a King by the Greyfriars Research Team, ordered this week) or the 3rd or 4th copy of a favourite book because I love the cover (Testament of Youth, Cold Comfort Farm, The Return of the Soldier...) or it's a Folio Society edition (Possession, Lord Peter Wimsey novels, The Daughter of Time, Excellent Women), but it justifies a lot of my other book buying decisions & I'm adopting it immediately!

The Anatomy of Murder - The Detection Club

I'm not a fan of contemporary true crime, much too gruesome, but I do enjoy reading about historical mysteries. This book, The Anatomy of Murder, is one of a series of books originally published in the 1930s that have been recently reprinted. The authors, all well-known detective novelists in their time, were also members of the Detection Club, an institution still in existence today. The Detection Club's archivist, Martin Edwards, is a distinguished detective novelist & has written the Introduction to this book. Martin has also written a history of the Detection Club, The Golden Age of Murder, which is published next month.

The Anatomy of Murder explores seven murder mysteries from the Victorian period to the 1930s. There are well-known stories such as the murder of three year old Francis Saville Kent at Road Hill House (recently the subject of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale) (by John Rhode), the case of Adelaide Bartlett who was accused of poisoning her husband Edwin with chloroform (by Margaret Cole) & the murder of Julia Wallace (by Dorothy L Sayers).Then there's one that solved a bit of a puzzle for me. I'd always wondered who the Landru in the publisher's name Crippen & Landru was. Now I know. He was a Frenchman who, in the early 20th century, murdered at least a dozen women, leaving no trace of their existence. He chose his victims carefully, single women or widows with no family. He met them through the personal ads, looking to buy furniture, took them to his secluded country house & there, murdered them. How he disposed of the bodies isn't definitely known but these women were there one day & gone the next. It's a chilling story of a man with no remorse for what he had done. He never admitted his crimes & stayed calm throughout a lengthy investigation & trial.

The cases aren't confined to Europe. The first story, by Helen Simpson, is set in Australia in 1865. The story of Henry Kinder is a tale of a love triangle. Kinder was a heavy drinker & his death was first thought to be suicide. However, his wife's lover, Louis Bertrand, started making wild statements about the case & was eventually charged with Kinder's murder. Another case, in New Zealand, is the final story in the book. Freeman Wills Croft tells the story of the double murder of a sheep farmer, Samuel Lakey & his wife, Christobel. Christobel was found drowned in the dam on their property but this was obviously no accident. There was a wound on her face as though she had been knocked out & her body was found face down in the water, covered with sacks. The first idea was that Samuel had murdered his wife & fled, as he was nowhere to be found. However, through brilliant detective work & careful forensic examination of the crime scene, it became apparent that Samuel too had been murdered. The murderer's plan was clever but, as is often the case, just a few mistakes set the police on the right path. Proving it was the difficulty when physical evidence of Samuel's death was elusive.

My favourite chapter was on the murder of Julia Wallace, a case that, even today, is a cause of controversy. Just a couple of years ago, P D James came up with a new theory in the case (I haven't been able to read her article as it's behind a paywall but the main points of her theory are here). William Herbert Wallace was tried for the murder of his wife, Julia, in 1931. The case is baffling because, as Sayers writes, every fact can be interpreted in at least two ways. Wallace seemed to have no motive for the killing & his alibi was unusual. He was an insurance salesman & said that he had received a telephone message asking him to go to an address the next evening to meet a man about an insurance policy. The man & the address turned out to be fictitious but while Wallace was roaming around looking for this address, his wife, Julia, was battered to death in their home. Had Wallace himself made the phone call to establish an alibi or, had the murderer made the call to get Wallace out of the way?

Dorothy L Sayers looked at the case as a detective novelist & assessed the facts as if the story were a novel. The business with the phone call & the alibi is very like fiction but it was fact. The dilemma was in interpreting the facts. Wallace's behaviour - calling attention to himself repeatedly on the tram journey to the fictitious address, making sure his neighbours were with him when the body was discovered - could be interpreted as guilty or innocent. Witnesses who could have proved that Julia was alive after Wallace left the house were dismissed as mistaken or unreliable. If this had been a novel, Sayers or James would have been able to come down on one side or the other according to their plan but, in real life, it wasn't so easy. Wallace was acquitted but many people still believe him guilty & if he was innocent, the real murderer got away with his crime.

Frances Iles examines the Rattenbury case of 1935, where an elderly man was murdered by the lover of his much younger wife. Alma Rattenbury's case has been compared with that of Edith Thompson, who was hanged for the murder of her husband in similar circumstances even though she had not actually committed the murder or been aware of her lover's intentions. It was considered that Mrs Thompson was executed for adultery rather than murder & there was considerable sympathy for her at the time so Mrs Rattenbury's case was treated differently. As Iles says,

However, if it was the women of England who hanged Mrs Thompson, against all reason and all justice, then it was equally due to the women of England that Mrs Rattenbury was saved from the gallows; for if Mrs Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs Rattenbury surely would have been.

Alma Rattenbury's life was ruined by the trial & the publicity & she committed suicide shortly afterwards. Although there was really no mystery about the murder itself, as George Stoner wasn't clever enough to even try to hide his guilt, it was a landmark case in that the personal life of the people involved was excluded from deliberations of the Court. The judge in the Rattenbury trial was determined not to make the same mistakes as his colleague had in the Thompson case. No matter what the judge, lawyers or jury may have thought of the morals of the accused, they didn't allow it to influence their decision.

A new anthology of true crime writing by members of the Crime Writers' Association, Truly Criminal, is about to be published. It includes essays by Catherine Aird, Peter Lovesey & a newly discovered essay on the Wallace case by Margery Allingham. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Books & Cats miscellany - Part 2

Part 2 of the miscellany has to begin with the latest photos of Phoebe, taken last weekend as she lolled on the back steps, one of her favourite spots on warm days. She moves from step to step as the shade moves & then, eventually gives up altogether & comes inside if I'm home & the air conditioner is on.

I've been reading short stories, including these two collections released as ebooks. Trisha Ashley's Footsteps in the Snow and other teatime treats is a collection of 11 stories previously published in magazines as well as the opening chapters of Trisha's new book, Creature Comforts, which will be published next year. These are lovely, romantic stories, just long enough to read in a coffee break or at teatime as the subtitle says. Most of the stories are set around Christmas so they're seasonally appropriate too, even if my Christmas isn't going to involve snow, frost & open fires.

Martin Edwards was the winner of the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham short story competition, sponsored by the Margery Allingham Society. His winning story, Acknowledgments, has been published by Bloomsbury in this ebook which also contains two more stories by Edwards & an appreciation of Margery Allingham as a short story writer. Martin Edwards is an expert on the Golden Age of detective fiction so it's appropriate that he was the winner of the competition with a wicked story about an author of travel guides thanking his friends & family for their help with his career. As the narrator thanks his second wife, his agent & his publicist for their help with By-Ways Around Britain, the tone moves from comic self-satisfaction to something much darker.

Martin Edwards also announced some exciting news on his blog last week. He's been appointed as the Series Consultant for the British Library Crime Classics series I've been enjoying so much this year. The series has been incredibly successful & there are more treats in store next year, including two anthologies of short stories compiled by Martin. All the details are here.

I was very pleased to discover that The English Air by D E Stevenson has been reprinted by Greyladies. If this book & the other DES titles available from Greyladies sell well, hopefully other reprints will follow.

It's also available in the US from Anglophile Books as are lots of books by Georgette Heyer.

Finally, for Georgette Heyer fans, Vulpes Libris featured posts on Heyer's novels all last week. Here's the link. With the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo coming up next year, I feel that I should definitely read An Infamous Army, even if I read nothing else about Waterloo. Or, I may listen to it. I see that Audible has the audio book read by Clare Higgins.

I can't finish this post without a couple more photos of togetherness. On Monday night, I was watching the news on TV & Phoebe was asleep on my lap. Lucky was not impressed & sat on the arm of the chair looking plaintively at me for the whole half hour.

A couple of hours later, all change. Next time I sat down, Lucky was right there. She wasn't going to be usurped again. So, Phoebe sat on the arm of the chair staring alternately at Lucky & me. Every so often she would put her paw on my arm & made me feel as guilty as possible that there wasn't room for her on my lap as well.
Sorry about the terrible angles of these photos. I used the iPad & I could not work out how to fix the angle on the second photo. Actually I'm amazed I managed to get the girls in the frame at all when I was holding the iPad out to my right & hoping for the best!

PS I just noticed that this is my 900th post, not that I'm counting. Almost five years of blogging & 900 posts - I feel exhausted. I think I need to sit down with a cup of tea & a book or maybe listen to a podcast or watch another episode of An Age of Kings...

The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude

One of the most exciting recent publishing ventures for lovers of the Golden Age of crime fiction has been the British Library Crime Classics series of reprints.It's been so popular that titles are being published ahead of schedule. My copy of John Bude's Sussex Downs Mystery arrived last week although it wasn't due to be published until early next year. If I were being frivolous, I'd say it was the beautifully nostalgic cover art that's selling the series but that wouldn't be enough on its own. On the strength of the books I've read so far, it has just as much to do with the content which is a real treat for anyone who's looking for a new Golden Age mystery author.

The Cornish Coast Murder was the first of 30 books by John Bude (the pseudonym of Ernest Carpenter Elmore). It's a traditionally plotted mystery enhanced by the evocative setting & the mix of amateur & professional detectives. The story begins with the Reverend Dodd, Vicar of St Michael's-on-the-cliff, Boscawen, sitting by the fire waiting for his friend, Doctor Pendrill, to arrive for their traditional weekly dinner. Every Monday night, the two friends divide the contents of a box of library books, every one of them mysteries. On this evening, though, a phone call for Doctor Pendrill interrupts the evening. Julius Tregarthan has been found shot dead in his study.

Tregarthan's house, Greylings, is only a short distance away & the doctor & Reverend Dodd arrive on the scene to find Tregarthen's niece, Ruth, who found the body, shocked & upset. Mr & Mrs Cowper, housekeeper & odd job man, are the only servants. None of them seem to have heard anything but a thunderstorm overhead may have masked the sound of the shot or shots as three bullets have been fired, as it seems, from the cliff path outside the study window. Local constable Grouch arrives soon after followed by Inspector Bigswell from the County Police. Tregarthan seemed to have no enemies although he was a secretive man. He didn't get on well with his niece as it seemed he disapproved of her friendship with local writer & war veteran, Ronald Hardy. On the night of the murder, they had quarrelled at dinner & Ruth had left the house, returning some time later to find her uncle dead. Ruth's behaviour since the murder is evasive & suspicious but is she trying to hide something that incriminates herself or is she trying to protect someone else? When Ronald Hardy & his revolver go missing on the very same night & it emerges that Tregarthan had just confronted him about his relationship with Ruth, he becomes the number one suspect. Then there's Ned Salter, local "black sheep", who was seen arguing with Tregarthen on the day of the murder about the eviction of his family while he was in jail.

The Inspector whistled. He couldn't see the wood for the trees. Ruth Tregarthen? Ronald Hardy? Ned Salter? Which? they were all under suspicion. They all had a motive for the murder. They had all quarrelled with Tregarthan a few hours before his death. The puzzle was assuming gargantuan proportions. No sooner had the Inspector assembled a few bits to his satisfaction, when the puzzle altered shape, with all the startling inconsequence of a landscape in Alice in Wonderland.

I loved The Cornish Coast Murder. The Cornish village setting is beautifully drawn &, as it turns out, integral to the solution of the mystery. Reverend Dodd is a clever, intuitive detective who comes up with some vital insights with his practical knowledge as well as his insights into the hearts of his parishioners. I'm not sure a Police Inspector would have taken a parish priest into his confidence quite as readily as Inspector Bigswell does here but it's very well done & he certainly wouldn't have come up with the solution without him. There's plenty of routine police work too which I always enjoy reading about.

Martin Edwards has written an informative Introduction for this edition which gives some background on the writer. A series of mysteries set in the English countryside was very unusual for the 1930s when London was the setting used by most writers. We're used to mysteries set in cities, towns & villages all over the United Kingdom from Ann Cleeves' Shetlands to Edwards's own Lake District series &, of course, the murder capital of England, Midsomer, but it wasn't so common during the Golden Age. I'm so pleased to have had a chance to read John Bude & I have two more of his books on the tbr shelves.

Books & roses

First, the roses. These are the first roses of the summer, picked on Sunday morning. The pink ones are Eglantine & the red, The Squire. My roses are looking beautiful this year, covered in buds so I'm hoping to be able to pick lots of them for the house & to take to work so I have something lovely to look at & to smell when it all gets too much. Of course, ten minutes after I put the flowers on the kitchen bench, Lucky was nibbling away at them. Why does she do this? I often wake up to find that she's very delicately flipped a rose out of the vase or jug & has nibbled all around the edges.

The books are a few new books & preorders I wanted to mention. I thought of Monica Baldwin the other day when a friend said that she once lent a copy of The Letters of Rachel Henning & it was never returned. This reminded me that I once lent a copy of Monica Baldwin's memoir, I Leap Over The Wall, & never saw it again. So, I was pleased to discover that it's being reprinted in January. I'm not sure I like the cover though... Anyway, Monica was the daughter of Stanley Baldwin, & entered a convent when she was 21 in 1914. Twenty-eight years later, she leaves, & this is the story of her life in the convent & what she experiences when she leaves.

Charlotte Riddell is an author I've read about rather than read. I've been reading her Weird Stories this week, reprinted by Victorian Secrets, & another of her novels, A Struggle for Fame, is being reprinted this month by Tramp Press, a new Irish publisher. This is the first in their Recovered Voices series & I can't wait to read it.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir is one of my favourite movies - I watched it again last weekend - & Vintage have reprinted the novel by R A Dick as part of their Movie Classics series which also includes Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington & Show Boat by Edna Ferber.

Persephone in the UK & Sourcebooks in the US have both been reprinting D E Stevenson in recent years. It's a shame that they began by reprinting the same titles (the Miss Buncle series) but Sourcebooks have kept their reprint list going with The Four Graces, The Young Clementina &, in January, The Listening Valley. I listened to this on audio a couple of years ago but will probably need a copy for rereading in the future. I also feel compelled to buy copies of authors like Stevenson & Angela Thirkell when they're reprinted in case they go out of print again, which they probably will.

The British Library Crime Classics series has been very successful in alerting fans of Christie, Sayers & Allingham to other Golden Age mystery writers we'd never heard of. It doesn't hurt that the covers are just gorgeous, often based on railway posters of the period. Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon (brother of Eleanor) (great review by Desperate Reader here) & A Scream in Soho by John G Brandon have just been published & The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude & Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston will be published in January. I enjoyed The Santa Klaus Murder & Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay & I'm looking forward to reading more in the series.

I've also preordered Mark Bostridge's new book, Vera Brittain and the First World War : the story of Testament of Youth. Published to coincide with the new film, I'm hoping it's not just a rehash of his 1995 biography of Vera. I know I'll feel compelled to see this new movie version of Testament of Youth but I don't imagine it will be as affecting as the TV series with Cheryl Campbell.

You can watch the trailer here but it looks too pretty, too clean. I feel a reread of the book & rewatch of the series coming on.

Finally, two books by favourite authors on favourite subjects published next year. The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards published in May & The Lives of Richard III by Chris Skidmore published in August. A history of mystery fiction by one of my favourite contemporary crime writers (who has written Introductions for many of the British Library series) is unmissable & a new biography of Richard III incorporating all the new information since the discovery of his remains in Leicester is a very exciting prospect. I really enjoyed Skidmore's book on Bosworth so I'm looking forward to this one. Two books that will definitely not find their way to the ever-increasing tbr shelves. I will read them as soon as they hit the doormat. Absolutely, I promise.

Bookish things

I always begin the New Year with the intention of not buying any books for a few months. I have so many unread books that it would take me years to read them all that it really shouldn't need a new year's resolution to motivate me to stop for a while. I'm usually quite disciplined &, apart from a few ebooks (which are just too easy to buy - at least they're invisible), I stick to it, at least until autumn & the thought of long winter afternoons send me off to check my wishlists.

I have just bought these four VMCs from World Of Books, a secondhand bookshop in the UK. They were £1 each so even with postage, they only cost $25AU which I thought was very reasonable. They're in lovely condition & I'm looking forward to reading them. I had read a review of The Wild Geese by Bridget Boland somewhere & that's what sent me off to Abebooks in search of a copy. It's the story of an 18th century Irish family, told through letters. The Wild Geese are the young men of the family, rebels who risk their lives by returning from exile. I was also fascinated to read the Bridget Boland was a scriptwriter who had written the screenplays of several well-known films including Anne of the Thousand Days & the 1940 version of Gaslight. I couldn't just buy one book though, could I? So, I found myself looking through the bookstore's listings for VMCs & came across The Misses Mallett by E H Young, Company Parade by Storm Jameson & The Way Things Are by E M Delafield.

Does anyone remember Catherine Gaskin? I loved her novels when I was younger. She was born in Australia, but, like many artists of the mid 20th century, left Australia to live in the UK & US most of her life. She wrote novels of romantic suspense & could be compared with Mary Stewart. I especially enjoyed Sara Dane, set in early 19th century Australia, Falcon for a Queen, set in Scotland & The File on Devlin, a suspense novel. I came across the website dedicated to Gaskin (follow the link) through a link to an interview there with Linda Gillard, author of Cauldstane. I enjoyed my trip down memory lane & was pleased to discover that one of her books has been released as an ebook with hopefully more to come. The Property of a Gentleman is about a young woman working for a London antiques house who is sent to a remote country house in the Lake District, Thirlbeck, to assess the art collection. She finds romance, suspense & family secrets. I don't remember reading this one but it sounded so intriguing that I bought it. Some of the book covers here look very familiar & I would love to read more of her books.

I also have a few books on preorder. I'm looking forward to the British Library Crime Classics. I couldn't resist the gorgeously nostalgic covers of the books by John Bude & Mavis Doriel Hay so I've ordered all four of them. Martin Edwards has written the Introductions to the John Bude titles so that's another reason to look forward to them. So many good things to look forward to!

The Frozen Shroud - Martin Edwards

I don't know how the Lake District got its image as an idyllic rural paradise when murders like the ones in the Lake District mysteries by Martin Edwards seem to happen so often. The Frozen Shroud is an atmospheric novel about murder past & present, jealousy & overwhelming love. It's also an opportunity to catch up with historian Daniel Kind & cold case detective Hannah Scarlett, one of my favourite detective teams.

Ravenbank Hall is a house in a remote part of the Lake District that has been the scene of more than one tragedy. Over one hundred years ago, at Halloween, housemaid Gertrude Smith was found dead, her face brutally obliterated & covered in a woollen cloth. Gertrude had been having an affair with the master of the house, Mr Hodgkinson, & she was pregnant. The day after Gertrude's body was found, the mistress of the house, a woman in a fragile mental state, killed herself. The inference was that Letitia Hodgkinson had murdered Gertrude in a jealous fit & then couldn't live with what she'd done. Clifford Hodgkinson had had grand plans for his estate but, after Gertrude's murder & the scandal of his wife's suicide, it all came to nothing. He died not many years later & his daughter, Dorothy, became a philanthropist. Gertrude's ghost, her face hidden by a frozen shroud, is said to walk the lanes of Ravenbank on Halloween in despair that her murderer was never brought to justice.

Five years before the main action of the novel begins, Ravenbank Hall is once again a private home, after many years as a care home after WWI. Clifford Palladino lives there, a lonely man since his wife's death. Or, he was lonely until Sheenagh Moss came into his life. A brash Australian, Sheenagh has become the centre of Clifford's life & he plans to marry her. Until, on Halloween, Sheenagh goes out to walk the dog & doesn't return. Clifford stumbles on her body, her face beaten into blankness & covered by a shroud.

Five years have passed since Sheenagh's death. Clifford never recovered & died soon after. Ravenbank Hall is now owned by event organisers Oz & Melody Knight. Daniel Kind has been a guest speaker at a conference organised by the Knights, speaking about his research on Thomas De Quincey. Daniel is fascinated by the history of murder & soon hears about the legend of the Frozen Shroud & the murders of Gertrude Smith & Sheenagh Moss. Sheenagh's killer was presumed to be Craig Meek, a former boyfriend who couldn't or wouldn't let go. He was seen in the area on the night of her murder but was killed in a car crash before he could be brought to justice. So, two murders almost one hundred years apart. Two young women murdered in the same way & neither killer brought to trial. Daniel's curiosity is aroused & he begins researching both cases, especially when he learns that one of the detectives investigating Sheenagh's death didn't believe that Craig Meek was guilty.

Daniel is invited to a Halloween party at Ravenbank Hall with his sister, Louise. Among the other guests are Jeffrey Burgoyne & Alex Quinlan, partners in life as well as in a theatrical company; Miriam Park, who had been housekeeper at Ravenbank Hall for the Palladinos & Terri Poynton, a close friend of Hannah Scarlett, who is now going out with Miriam's son, Robin.The party guests go on a ghost hunt, hoping that Gertrude's ghost will appear, but they're disappointed. However, when the body of another young woman, murdered in the same way as Gertrude & Sheenagh, is discovered next morning, the search for her killer will lead to the reopening of Sheenagh's case &, ultimately, to the truth behind the murder of Gertrude Smith as well.

This is a fantastic mystery series. Fast-paced & very readable, I always devour Martin Edwards' books in big gulps, unable to put them down. The sinister atmosphere of remote Ravensbank is beautifully conveyed through the biting cold weather & an atmosphere of dread that affects all the inhabitants of the small community. Daniel's research inevitably steps on some toes as everyone has something to hide although not necessarily about the murders. Daniel himself is an immensely likeable character, who loves his work & is relentless when he gets a lead on a mystery. I enjoyed the details of Daniel's research into Gertrude's murder & the breakthrough he needs comes from a dusty archive where he can finally put the pieces together.

Hannah Scarlett has more than enough problems to cope with. Her Cold Case team is threatened by budget cuts; her ex-partner, Marc Amos, is reluctant to believe that their relationship is over; & she's attracted to one of her team, Greg Wharf, a smooth talker who is pursuing her even though she knows what a disaster a relationship with a colleague would be. Hannah & Daniel's relationship has barely moved on from friendship although the sparks are definitely there. When they're brought together again in the search for a murderer, will Hannah be able to disentangle herself from Marc & Greg & find some space in her life for a relationship with Daniel? Speculating about when or if Daniel & Hannah are going to get together is one of the many pleasures of the Lake District series.

I read The Frozen Shroud courtesy of NetGalley.

Yesterday's Papers - Martin Edwards

I've read two of Martin Edwards's books featuring Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin over the past couple of weeks. I Remember You & Yesterday's Papers. 

I Remember You is a story of murder & deception with its roots in Northern Ireland. Finbar Rogan, one of Harry's clients, is having a run of bad luck. His tattooing business is burnt down, he thinks he's being followed & a bomb is found strapped to the bottom of his car. Finbar has plenty of enemies from his ex-wife to various disgruntled husbands & boyfriends whose women he's seduced. The story also involves a local radio station that features local personalities on the morning show to discuss the news & play a few favourite songs - on one memorable occasion, Harry is featured. The story is fast paced &, as always, well-plotted. Harry is an immensely sympathetic character, still mourning the death of his wife, Liz, two years before & not ready to move on emotionally from her loss. He's never going to be highly paid but he's honest, compassionate & always does his best for his clients, even if that means getting too involved in their affairs & doing a little investigation on the side.

Yesterday's Papers begins as Harry meets Ernest Miller, an elderly man who has been researching a famous murder case of the 1960s. Carole Jeffries, a beautiful 16 year old girl was found dead in Sefton Park near her home, strangled with her own scarf. Edwin Smith was convicted of Carole's murder but before he could be executed, he committed suicide in prison. Now, all these years later, Miller is convinced that Edwin Smith was innocent. He was an inadequate young man who fancied Carole but had never had a chance with her. He was an easy & obvious suspect & Miller thinks the police didn't look any further once they discovered that Smith knew some details of the murder scene that only the killer could know.

Miller wants to look at the legal files of the case & Harry's firm has just bought the practice of Smith's solicitor, Cyril Tweats. Tweats was an incompetent lawyer but amazingly stayed in business until retirement. Harry is intrigued & agrees to look through Tweats's notes on the case. Against his will, he becomes involved, even though he finds Miller's interest in the case a little distasteful. Carole's murder had a devastating effect on her family. Her father, a prominent political writer & lecturer, was crushed by his daughter's death & began drinking which destroyed his career. Several other men, including Carole's pop star boyfriend, her employer, Benny Frederick & Clive Doxey, a family friend but now a prominent justice campaigner, could all be in the frame if Edwin Smith was innocent.

Harry becomes increasingly intrigued by the case &, after Ernest Miller's death from a fall during an asthma attack, he discovers the source of Miller's information about the case & begins to wonder if his death was a little too convenient for one of the men he now suspects may have been the real killer of Carole Jeffries.

This is the most complex of the Devlin books so far. Martin Edwards wrote a post about the book on his blog just a couple of weeks ago & he says that it was a new departure for him. It's a story with several strands & more than one murder to be solved & not all of the murders are in the past. The atmosphere of 1960s Liverpool, home to the Beatles & the Mersey sound, is beautifully described & Edwards obviously has a great nostalgia for the period & its music.

Luckily I still have three more Harry Devlin books to read & I'm so pleased that the digital revolution has lead to the series now being available as ebooks. I'm also lucky enough to have a pre-publication copy of Martin's latest book in the Lake District series, The Frozen Shroud, courtesy of NetGalley & I can't wait to read that.

Top Ten Books of 2012

Here's my list of the best books I read in 2012. No rereads & I've cheated a little by including two series & lumping two books by the one author together. There is no order to the list & it's a mixture of Fiction & Non Fiction. Follow the links to my reviews.

In the year of the Bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, it was inevitable that I would read something by the great man. I read the last two of his novels that I had never read before, Barnaby Rudge & Martin Chuzzlewit. Put off by the stodgy names & reputation for unreadability, I was surprised at how much I loved both books. Knowing very little about the plots was also an advantage. I was eager to find out what happened to everyone. I also reread Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood & A Christmas Carol.

Staying with Dickens, Michael Slater's The Great Charles Dickens Scandal was much-anticipated & didn't disappoint. A drily witty, succinct account of the lengths that Dickens went to to hide his relationship with Nelly Ternan & the efforts everyone else has gone to ever since to find out what really happened.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard was the most harrowing book I've ever read. The story of Scott's last expedition to find the South Pole, this is a beautifully-written account of hardship & determination by one who was there.

Almost as harrowing was Germinal by Emile Zola. Like all Zola's novels, this is an absorbing journey into the lives of the working people of 19th century France. The scenes in the mines are unforgettable & chilling in their horror.

I'm including a couple of series in my Top 10 because I can't choose just one book & I read them as a whole so it's easier to just nominate all of them. Bloomsbury have re-released many of Ann Bridge's novels as POD paperbacks & e-books. I loved the Julia Probyn series which I started last year & finished reading in August with Julia in Ireland. Julia is a female James Bond - beautiful, intelligent, well-connected & resourceful. I loved her adventures, set in exotic locations in Europe such as Emergency in the Pyrenees.

Martin Edwards has also benefited from the e-book revolution. After being out of print for some years, his Harry Devlin series is now available in paperback or as e-books. I've read the first two books, All the Lonely People & Suspicious Minds, & I have the third downloaded & ready to go. Harry is a lawyer in 1990s Liverpool & the atmosphere of the city & Harry's dogged pursuit of justice make the series compelling reading. Harry's adventures will keep me happy while I wait for the next Lake District mystery, The Frozen Shroud, to be published next year.

Catherine Aird's standalone novel, A Most Contagious Game, was a delight with its echoes of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. I loved the way that research was still done in libraries & newspaper archives (it was first published in 1967) & the historical aspect to the modern-day mystery was fascinating.

More history in Linda Gillard's The Glass Guardian. The legacy of WWI combined with a romantic ghost story set in wintry modern-day Skye was the most all-consuming reading experience I had this year. I read it virtually in one sitting, just wonderful.

I read very little historical fiction these days but Hilary Mantel is the exception. Bring Up The Bodies continues the story of Thomas Cromwell begun in Wolf Hall & brilliantly retells the story of the fall of Anne Boleyn. We all know how the story ends but this novel read like a thriller. An amazing achievement.

Queen Victoria's Letters to her daughter Vicky, Empress of Germany are touching, opinionated, gossipy & compelling. Vicky left England when she was only 17 & the letters selected here cover history, politics & family matters. The Folio Society edition is also beautifully produced with some gorgeous plates as well.

Well, that's it for 2012. I'm looking forward to plenty of good reading in 2013 & will be back in a couple of days with some thoughts about reading plans for the year. Happy New Year!

Suspicious Minds - Martin Edwards

Harry Devlin is a Liverpool lawyer who we first met in All the Lonely People. In that book, Harry's estranged wife, Liz, was murdered &, finding himself a suspect, he decides to do a little investigating of his own to discover the killer. In Suspicious Minds, Harry is still mourning Liz & still getting too involved in his clients' problems.

Jack Stirrup is a businessman who made a fortune in the wine business. His wife, Alison, has disappeared & the police suspect that Jack had something to do with it. Alison's mother, Doreen, has always hated Jack & she's pushing the police to arrest him even though there's no evidence to suggest that Alison is dead. Jack's daughter from his first marriage, Claire, is a sulky teenager who disliked her stepmother & is driving her father crazy with her relationship with law student Peter Kuiper. Jack disapproves of Kuiper but his disapproval only makes Claire more determined to pursue the relationship. Jack isn't short of enemies, including ex-employee Trevor Morgan, sacked for harassing the female staff.

Then there's the Beast. A series of attacks on young, blonde women has everyone worried. The attacks have escalated from indecent assault to rape. Has blonde Alison become the Beast's latest victim? Harry can't be sure that Jack wasn't involved in Alison's disappearance & he does what he can to find out where Alison is. But, when Claire goes missing & is then found murdered, her body surrounded by red roses, the case becomes much more complicated.

I'm so pleased that the Harry Devlin series is available again. Harry is a flawed but sympathetic character. The suspicious minds of the title include Harry himself as he tentatively pursues a relationship with barrister Valerie Kaiwar & finds himself unsure of her feelings & jealous of her close friendship with a colleague. Harry is a fair, honest lawyer who does his best for his clients but isn't always able to sort out his own life. There's a melancholy about Harry that's very appealing.

The Liverpool setting is gritty & I love the details of Harry's office life with incompetent & unhelpful staff & his calm, unflappable partner, Joe Crusoe. The pace is snappy & the plot is as tangled as any crime fan could wish. I also love the fact that the books are about 200 pages long. I'm not a fan of very long mystery novels. I think the ideal length for a mystery is 200-250 pages, probably because I enjoy reading the Golden Age novelists who rarely wrote long novels. Martin Edwards improves on a lot of the writers of that period though because he values character & place as much as plot & puzzle. I'm so pleased that I have five more novels in the series to read.

All the Lonely People - Martin Edwards

Harry Devlin arrives home on the night of his 32nd birthday to find his estranged wife, Liz, sitting in the living room, wearing one of his T shirts, as if she'd never left. Harry is a Liverpool lawyer & he's spent the last two years hoping that Liz would come back. She'd left him for a gym owner & small-time crook, Michael Coghlan, when she realised that Harry could never provide the money for the lifestyle Liz aspired to. Now, she begs Harry to let her stay for a while. She wants to leave Coghlan but not to return to Harry. Liz has met a man she thinks is the love of her life - if only he weren't married & dithering about leaving his wife. She's afraid of Coghlan & thinks she's being followed. The next night, Liz arranges to meet Harry at the Ferry Club but doesn't show up & doesn't return to his flat. Harry is woken early the next morning by two policemen who tell him Liz is dead. She'd been found stabbed to death in an alleyway.

Initially Harry finds himself under suspicion as the police are sceptical of his story. Harry can only think of revenging himself on Coghlan who he's sure is behind Liz's murder. So, he begins his own investigation. Tracking down Coghlan immerses Harry in Liverpool's underworld & leads him into danger as Coghlan & then his lawyer try to warn him off. Harry also discovers a lot about the woman he loved. Liz was a fascinating, desirable but shallow woman who had several men lusting after her. The list of potential suspects grows as Harry talks to Liz's sister, brother-in-law & a childhood friend, but Harry is focused on Coghlan as he tries to find any evidence against him while also exonerating himself.

All the Lonely People is the first book in the Harry Devlin series. Harry is a great character, in the tradition of the lone detective walking the mean streets of Chandler & Hamnett. He's honest, sensitive, kind but tough & determined. Foolish sometimes in the way he stubbornly keeps searching for the truth even after a brutal bashing that almost kills him. Martin Edwards describes Harry's world beautifully. The soul-destroying atmosphere of the courts & police station, the sleazy clubs & the refuse tip where Harry goes to follow up a lead - this is the darker side of Liverpool. Harry's not quite alone though. His partner, Jim Crusoe, bored receptionist Suzanne & needy neighbour, Brenda, are well-rounded characters who add a lot to the plot as well as helping the reader get to know Harry. All the Lonely People is an excellent start to the series.

Luckily for crime fans, all of the Harry Devlin books are now back in print. My copy of All the Lonely People is a recent reprint from crime publishers, Arcturus. The whole series is also now available as e-books or POD paperbacks from Andrews UK & I'm very pleased that my library has added them to our e-book collection. I read Waterloo Sunset a couple of years ago & I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series from the beginning while I wait impatiently for the next book in Martin's Lake District series. Luckily as this post on Martin's blog makes clear, I won't have too much longer to wait!