I have been reading...

 Again, I meant to post a bit sooner than this but I'm still not quite back in the swing of things and suspect that might continue for some time. The oddness of it all is very hard to shake. I have been reading though and thought I would a do brief rundown of the books I've been reading this month.

I finished this BLCC collection, Guilty Creatures, edited of course by Martin Edwards. The theme in this one is 'animals', each story has a connection to wildlife or pets. So we have a chap with a fear of earthworms, a yarn about nobbling racehorses, there're gorillas, parakeets, slugs, all life is here. Authors include G.K. Chesterton, Christiana Brand, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Josephine Bell, Edgar Wallace and so on. Overall, I thought this was a better than average collection, only a few failed to please and the rest were top notch. I didn't jot down my usual notes so I can't name any favourites, other than remembering that the Father Brown was good and so was the Christiana Brand. And what a glorious cover!

The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White is a novel published in 1936, and subsequently made into a Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes. I'd seen that years ago, so the plot was slightly familiar, but I couldn't remember the outcome, so it was fine. Socialite, Iris Carr, is travelling back by train from a holiday somewhere mountainous (they don't say exactly where but I think northern Italy) in Europe. An English governess, Miss Froy, takes her under her wing, but the next day the woman has disappeared and no one in the carriage can remember her being there. Is Iris suffering the results of sunstroke  or is there a conspiracy of silence. Excellent read this one, a little too heavy on the surreal, 'am I going crazy?' aspect but nevertheless, a real pageturner and not a little creepy, to my mind anyway.

 

The Man by the Sea by Jack Benton is book one in his 'Slim Harding' series. Slim is a private detective, ex-army and an alcoholic. He's hired by a woman who thinks her husband is having an affair. Slim duly sets about following the husband only to discover that what he's actually doing is driving to an isolated cove and reading something aloud to the incoming tide. Slim thinks the man might be mad. Delving a bit deeper, the case ends up being connected to a woman who went missing just before her wedding. Is she dead and haunting this part of the wild Lake District coast? And what does she have to do with a man reading to the waves? I liked this a lot despite not being all that enamoured of the detective, Slim Hardy. As is the nature of the beast, his alcoholism rules and that was hard for me to identify with. That said, the story has a huge sense of place and is really atmospheric. I also found the plot intriguing enough to carry me through the book without any wish to abandon it. I will probably, at some stage, continue on with the series.

So, my most recent book, I finished it yesterday, is Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge. Lady Grace Kilmichael  is leaving her husband and grown-up children behind and going off on a European trip. Only they don't know. She thinks her husband might be having an affair and the children are not really interested in her nowadays. She does leave a letter to her husband however, telling him she's off to Greece to paint as Grace has recently become quite a well-known artist. She doesn't go to Greece. She starts in Paris and then on to Venice where she comes across Nicholas, aged 23, half Grace's age, who wants to be a painter but whose parents won't hear of it, they want him to be an architect. She takes him on to mentor him, and the pair travel together along the Dalmatian (present day Croatia) coast, not just painting but learning a lot about life from each other. So this sounds like a fairly simple plot and indeed it is. If I'm honest the whole thing is more of a travelogue and homage to the Dalmation coast and, in fact, I read that the impact of this book when it was first published in 1935 was to up tourism in the area and even Edward and Mrs. Simpson took a cruise down the coast to see what all the fuss was about. Fascinating. 'And' I have no problem understanding it because that was exactly what the book made me want to do... pack my bags and set off! It has quite an introspective sort of narrative and this might not be everyone's cup of tea. I was reminded of Absent in the Spring by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott, or Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim, they too have older ladies looking for a break from humdrum life or difficult relatives and trying to find a way to make life work for them now they're older. It's not often I finish a book and find myself wanting to go back to the beginning and start again but I did with this. A five star read and certainly a book that will be in my top ten for this year.

So, that's me, up to date. I hope you're all well and finding lots of good book to read this spring.