It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Honeycomb.

Read Jonathan Kellerman, Jigsaw (2026), for a change of pace. While the perp is, for a change, not a serial killer with intricate pattern of murders, still a psycho, though revenge in the mix. I yearn for Dr Delaware to get a locked room mystery at a country house party with a load of ye trad motives.

Then back to Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands (2025), which I still found fairly confusing - admittedly the plot is rooted in confused/confusing stories - on a re-read.

Something or other brought to mind a really obscure author whose 2 novels I'd managed to find (after reading the second from the library and then wanting to read it again and searching for it for years), so actually managed to retrieve these from the approximate places where they were supposed to be on actual shelves.

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Parade in Pairs (1958), first novel, some good things, thought the racial violence at the end was a bit gratuitous - chronology suggests it could not have been response to Notting Hill Race Riots. Period racial attitudes are situated in characters and there is quite a bit of ambiguity going on. Also some, fairly peripheral, characters are gay.

On the go

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Never Had It So Good (1963), which is the one I first encountered. I see I wrote about it years ago back in LJ days.

Also on the go, as I was out and about today and did not want to tote about a substantial hardback, Farah Mendlesohn, Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, published yesterday.

Up next

No idea.

What I read

Finished A Slowly Dying Cause and she does seem to be grinding these out rather. Also I didn't actually check the details but there were some descriptive passages of places that seemed very similar, or least deploying the same epithets - 'the demilune beach' I think was one - that seemed a bit cut and paste. Also maybe more Havers, but when she finally appeared did we want that plot development??? And something entirely new (or rather, old and heritage) for Lynley to angst about.

Then read the latest Slightly Foxed.

Then onto GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which it is longer since I last read than I thought. Still v good but not sure that I will be reccing it for the book group.

Then this already discussed - further thought that it was rather like hearing somebody tell one about book they have read - at least this bore a fairly close resemblance to the original, was not like that scene in one of E Nesbit's Bastable novels in which they talk about Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and all appear to have been reading entirely different book.... But still left a lot out.

On the go

After that I actually started Nicola Barker, TonyInterrupter (2025), Kobo deal/sortes ereader, which I was quite enjoying, and then -

Arrival of Barbara Hambly, Death at the Palace (A Silver Screen Historical Mystery Book 4) so am currently immersed in that.

Next up

And after that, imagine it will be straight on to Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped, which also published yesterday. Then maybe back to TonyInterrupter.

What I read

Finished O Shepherd, Speak! - as ever, Lanny manages to find himself at major historical events. A particularly fascinating thing considering that news story about Hitler's DNA - he is admitted to the bunker and takes a slice of bloodstained sofa-cover.... In the aftermath of WW2, he has been left money to work for World Peace and he and friends are working for this. One thing I do find a bit curious about Lanny's generally progressive line is that the civil rights question (was it being called that in the 30s/40s?) doesn't seem to feature: maybe because he was brought up in Europe and mostly lived there? His focus on the World Stage???

Val McDermid, The Skeleton Road (Inspector Karen Pirie #3) (2014): not sure this was really doing it for me - there was a point where it just seemed to be going on and on.

Have plunged into a re-read of Barbara Hambly's Silver Screen mysteries (getting myself back up to speed on the series with a new volume forthcoming): so far Scandal in Babylon (2021) and One Extra Corpse (2023). Possibly one reads for the evocation of Hollywood at that era rather than the actual mystery plots, but good, anyway.

On the go

Saving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen #3) (2024)

Still dipping into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.

Up next

I am feeling the siren call of The Return of Lanny Budd.

I also realise that I have managed to sign myself up for 3 bookgroups meeting in January, 2 online (Pilgrimage, first meeting, Dance to the Music of Time, concluding volume) and 1 in person (fairly) locally - have managed to fight off suggestion that we read the Mybuggery wot won the Booker, but am now committed to the extremely LOOOOONG new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

***

Further to yesterday's mysterious email from Academic Publisher, have received a further and more official-looking email today:

You may recently have received a message from us with the subject line "Welcome to [redacted] GCOP".
This email was caused by a system error. You can therefore ignore it and do not need to take any action.
Apologies for any confusion the message may have caused.

What I read

Finished The Love Study, which I was a bit less taken by than some other works by Kris Ripper that I have read, but did move on to the sequel, The Hate Project (2021) about which I was sufficiently meh that I did not proceed to the next volume.

Tansy Rayner Roberts, Time of the Cat: An Annotated Adventure of Time Travel, Cats & Occasional Academia, with Endnotes (2023): possibly I was just not sufficiently beguiled by the intricate time-loops and conspiracies, but again, have read work by the author I liked a whole lot more.

Was also possibly - but this may be more down to having read the original series involved rather a while ago - a bit underwhelmed when I finally managed to get hold of the epub versions of Barbara Hambly's 'Further Adventures' novelettes, Cat's Paw (Winterlands) and Temporary Quarters (Windrose Chronicles).

Was tempted by Molly Clavering's Mrs Lorimer's Quiet Summer (1953, republished by Furrowed Middlebrow) - school of O Douglas, with perhaps slightly less houseporn and more problems of marriage and family, also, post WW2. I was not sure I entirely believed that the really annoying husband of the main character would turn up trumps in the crises towards the end with manly insights. Don't think I am entirely sold on Clavering.

On the go

Still dipping into Some Men in London Vol 1 - eugenics so still a thing in the early 50s - 'what a pity so many of these men of intellectual and artistic gifts are out of the breeding pool, maybe we can fix them' WTF, eh.

Have also been rather desultorily embarking upon Eliza Haywood's THE FORTUNATE FOUNDLINGS: BEING THE GENUINE HISTORY OF Colonel M——RS, and his Sister, Madam DU P——Y, the Issue of the Hon. CH——ES M——RS, Son of the late Duke of R—— L——D CONTAINING Many wonderful ACCIDENTS that befel them in their TRAVELS, and interspersed with the CHARACTERS and ADVENTURES of SEVERAL PERSONS of Condition, in the most polite Courts of Europe. The Whole calculated for the Entertainment and Improvement of the Youth of both Sexes. (1744). They do not write titles like that anymore.

Currently reading Susannah Gibson's The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement (2024), which is pretty good so far though I am irked that the author, while highly sensitive to things like class issues, the toll taken by pregnancy and child mortality, etc, has not taken the trouble to be properly informed about the law matrimonial respecting divorce at the period: conflates with post-1857 terms, in the era of Parliamentary divorce there were something like 2-3 women who ever managed to get an actual divorce, and it might be more useful to say a bit about legal separation, especially as Sarah 'Millenium Hall' Scott appears to have been legally separated from her husband.

Up next

I have quite a stack of new books including the classic 1936 account of the Ladies of Llangollen recently republished.

What I read

Finished Saving Susy Sweetchild - which, like Hambly's other mysteries, is as much about milieu as mystery - in this case, trying to deal with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star in the midst of the ongoing pressures and chaos of silent-era Hollywood movie-making as well as all the various who/why dunnit angles.

Discovered that there was a short prequel to NK Jemisin's Great Cities duology (or will there be further?), The City Born Great (2016), so I acquired and read that.

Then it was Jane Haddam, The Headmaster's Wife (Gregor Demarkian #20) (2005) as it picks up on characters from Somebody Else's Music and I did remember a fair amount about it; then on to Conspiracy Theory (Gregor Demarkian #19) (2003), which came between them and which I remembered absolutely nothing about. Massively convoluted plot even by her standards. Not among her best.

People were mentioning Ben Aaronovitch's The Masquerades of Spring (Rivers of London #9.2) (2024), expat Woosterish magician residing in Jazz Age New York and hanging out in Harlem. Nightingale arrives and hijinx ensue. A nice change of pace. I thought Kobo was pricing it rather steeply for a novella but found that I could buy the ebook directly from Subterranean Press at a rather more eligible price.

Also discovered to be e-available there (I thought there was only a Very Expensive Hardback Special Edition), Mike Carey's The Ghost in the Bone (Felix Castor #6) (2023) - again, a novella, but a welcome return to this series.

On the go

Latest Literary Review

Up next

Latest Slightly Foxed.

What I read

Continued to love The Halt During The Chase and see that two more of Rosemary Tonks' novels that I read back in the 70s are in the process of being reissued yay yay yay.

Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (2023). I'm not sure how this would work if one came to it without having read most of the Slough House sequence first - because I think some of it is going to be entirely opaque, e.g. one character who spends the entire book going under a code-name but if you have read those, is obviously [spoiler]. But with all that taken into consideration, pretty good.

Noel Streatfeild, I Ordered A Table For Six (1942), which I had read yonks ago, one of the Streatfeilds for grownups that I had, but had forgotten much about, set during the Blitz. Oh dear Noel, I did not think that ending worked, or maybe that is just me.

RF Kuang, Yellowface (2023): in the afterword Kuang says that it's 'in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry' - also seemed to me rather about people desperately wanting to Make It before they were [some age] and being stuck inside that world, and wanting to be A Writer, and I felt someone needed to pat them on the head and tell them to get a job in something unrelated and embrace the playful side of writing and not be desperately grabbing for Stuff to Write About. (Though honestly I thought there was going to be a much deeper plagiarism or identity fakery story around Athena beyond nicking other people's experiences and words and it was going to be intellectual property theft/masquerade all the way down.)

Rachel Swirsky, January Fifteenth (2022). Novella, near-future USA, Universal Basic Income has been instituted, vignettes of 4 women on the day it's awarded for the year at points throughout the day. Rather good I thought.

Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse (Benjamin January #20) (2023) - this arrived yesterday and I devoured it. Perhaps not one of the top ones in the sequence, but pretty good.

On the go

Sue Elliot and Steve Humphries, Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination (2017). Over on bsky my old pal oral historian Steve Humphries' name came up, and I looked to see what he'd been up to since A Secret World of Sex back in the day, and there was this, on gay men from before decriminalisation into the era of gay marriage. Solid stuff of a range of personal testimonies - possibly a bit white, but range of class, regions, backgrounds, trajectories.

Up next

Not sure.

***

A bit irked this morning to see someone claiming that Ye Illiterate Poorz luvd the works of Dickens so much they would club together to pay a reading person to read them out to them: you know, like they had been doing since the rise of popular literature, pretty much? ('Rejoice! Pamela has got Mr B to the altar! Ring the church bells!') They were probably also ponying up to have Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood, The String of Pearls, Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance, and very likely the latest crim.con. cases read to beguile their meagre leisure hours.

What I read

Finished Marking Time - these are insidiously addictive.

However, since I had been generously supplied with a copy of Barbara Hambly, The Iron Princess (2023), even though the Book Depository eventually emailed me that Copiez No Could Haz, and I had to cancel that, I was able to read that. Not really one of the top Hamblys, I thought, and slightly the air of being from an earlier period in her oeuvre? Okay, her work is always better than most but this did not really quite reach the bar she normally sets.

Then went on to Elizabeth Jane Howard, Confusion (Cazalet Chronicles, #3) (1993), which was really good, as the War drags on, and people get older, and there are various complicated emotional things going on. (I was wondering whether the creepy and terrifying Lady Zinnia was based on Kathleen Scott, Howard's own mother-in-law.)

Also finished the ms of biography being read for blurbing - would recommend - and dabbling into various other things for research purposes.

On the go

Barbara Wilson, Trouble in Transylvania (Cassandra Reilly Mysteries #2) (1993) - Cass faffs about in Europe for a bit with her mates and people she meets on the train until she finds herself reluctantly embroiled in a possible murder at a spa in Transylvania. These are fine providing you're cool with the digressions on European history and ruminating on the backstories of characters and their shared history and not expecting ACTION boom-boom-boom.

Up next

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Casting Off (Cazalet Chronicles, #4) (1995) and then the much later-published 5th volume, though I might slip in another Cass Reilly first.

Downloaded several deals of the day/month/week but am wondered about that bio of Howard that I have had around for Quite A While.

Recently spotted but failed to saved some survey of Who Is Your Favourite Fictional Detective, and thought they were all a bit obvious and banal -

- okay, I yield to no-one in my admiration for Miss Marple and her knowledge of The Evil That Lurks In the Heart of Man (and Woman), and I would not be at all surprised if former SIS female operatives had been a lot more like her and a lot less like Modesty Blaise -

- However.

Mulling this over, and thinking, who would be my top 'tecs and hawkshaws, I came the conclusion that, you know, I am not about the solitary brilliant mind, with, perhaps, the sidekick Hastings or Watson to whom he expounds his genius insights, but the person who has a team or posse to back them up -

Like VI Warshawski getting patched up (if scolded) by Lottie when the mean streets get a bit too mean, and having an uneasy ambivalent relationship with the local cops based on her father's reputation rather than shagging one (though she does shag one or two across the series), and the various people she can call on for help in particular emergencies and contingencies - the reporter, the rich capitalist who likes her style, the people she calls on for guard duty, etc.

When I was re-reading Sayers recently did I not comment that one of the pleasures of the early novels was Team Wimsey?

I noted some considerable while ago during a re-read of the Modesty Blaise corpus that while she and Willie are the centrally awesome duo there is a solid cast of backup characters who bring their own strengths to the mix.

Perhaps not quite the same thing, but in Gini Hartzmark's Kate Millholland mysteries, Kate, a highpowered lawyer, instead of being assisted by Some Random Member of the Local Police with whom she got entangled in Book 1, hires a competent PI to assist her in her investigations.

Benjamin January besides his immediate team of supporters has a whole range of connections (including e.g. his sister Marie) that enable him to work out the mysteries he gets embroiled in.

Spenser, now I think of it, has quite a posse.

This is perhaps somewhat different from a) the 'odd couple' (e.g. Lynley and Havers) brought together to fight crime or b) the 87th Precinct scenario, which as I recall had different members pursuing different crimes.

What I read

Finished A Bite of the Apple: and, okay, I see there did have to be a fair amount in there about the practicalities of publishing and the various decisions that were made and compromises that had to be borne with; and that if it had not been Virago the reporting would not have been heavily leaning on the 'cat-fighting' stereotypes when there were differences of opinion (though one does wonder if Goodings is perhaps therefore underplaying some of the fights that took place?). I was entirely there for her points about women's writing and publishing works by women and being intersectional in thus doing and that there are still massive forces of condescension and gatekeeping and exclusion, and trying to declare that it's all over now, over and over again. That said, I'm not frightfully on board with some of the actual decisions they took on who and what to publish, and cringed every time she mentioned her bezzie boosoom buddie who is one of their best-selling authors, who has been covered in inglory for her most recent travesty of history...

After which I turned to Barbara Hambly, Bride of the Rat God (1994), which still holds up, though possibly Hambly has got even better since then so it slightly fades by contrast?

Read a couple of Robert B Parker's - Chance (Spenser #23) (1996) and Small Vices (Spenser #24) (1997), which are not quite into that late phase if not as good as his early work, but as I may have mentioned, these are on a shelf very convenient for pulling something off late at night.

Rona Jaffe, Mazes and Monsters (1981): something, I forget what, reminded me of this so I went looking for it. Not really Jaffe's wheelhouse: I feel she was a lot happier when she got off the RPG-playing students and into the sad lives of their mothers, really.

DB Borton, Seventh Deadly Sin (Cat Caliban #7) (2004). I managed to find a copy of this at a really reasonable price though then had to wait weeks for it to arrive. Not at all bad, though I got a bit of a feeling that the move to the new publisher possibly came with lack of an editor, or a different editor, and this had a bit of an adverse effect.

Marcia Muller, Ice and Stone (Sharon McCone #34), arrived this week. I thought the setting was very good - McCone investigating the murder of two Indigenous women in a remote area where there are all sorts of jurisdictional issues and racial tensions and people with back-story - though I thought the solution rested a bit on a McGuffiny device.

On the go

As I had an Amazon gift voucher for Doing A Survey, I splashed out on what was not a very over-priced copy of DB Borton's Eight Miles High (Cat Caliban #8) (2007), only to find that vouchers for amazon.co.uk are not fungible to other sites. Still, I could use that voucher for other things I would otherwise have spent actual money on... Am now reading it and Cat Caliban is faced with a mystery deep in the past involving the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WW2.

Also, picked up during the process of looking for other things, Lisa Goldstein, The Uncertain Places (2011), which I see I read when it came out, but don't remember much about.

Up next

Dunno, really.

What I read

Well, I think I've come to the end of the Antonia Fraser Jemima Shore binge - there are a couple of volumes of short stories, at least one of which I think I have somewhere, but I'm not madly bothered. I finished Your Royal Hostage, read The Cavalier Case (Jemima Shore, #7) (1990) and Political Death (Jemima Shore #8) (1994). Am still not impressed with Ms Shore's sleuthing capacities, and while in theory one is all in favour of a distaff protag who pops in and out of bed with the cheerful abandon so oft manifested by the male shamuses of crime lit, she really does bonk some dodgy characters over the course of the 8 books, mixed up in her cases and not at all free of clouds of suspicion. Possibly these would work better if read (as I must originally have read them) at intervals as they were published or appeared in paperback, and not in a bunch.

Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead which was wonderful, and had me frantically looking for my copy of The Goblin Emperor to re-read.

A J Hall, To Call The King Your Cousin the twenty-first instalment of the Queen of Gondal saga:

A quasi-historical AU of the BBC Sherlock series set (more or less) set in three fantasy kingdoms devised by the Bronte children. The time period is the late seventeenth century and readers should bear in mind that this saga contains the doings of a set of supremely dysfunctional more-or-less European Royal families steeped in the “divine right of kings” ideology of monarchy, filtered through an early nineteenth century Romantic/Gothick sensibility and then depicted using the freedom of expression afforded by the early twenty-first century internet. The genre is basically Ruritanian romance, though the author reserves the right to cross over into other genres without notice.

On the go

Nothing except the things that have been lingering on the backburner for weeks.

Up next

Have finally bitten the bullet and acquired at vast expense in dead-tree versions the 7th and 8th volumes of DB Borton's Cat Caliban mysteries (nb I found that the Amazon voucher I had been given for undertaking A Survey was not valid on amazon.com, chiz) - no 7 has not yet turned up, so I am holding off on 8 so far.

Lennie Goodings' memoir of her time at Virago Press?

Coming very shortly, Barbara Hambly's Scandal in Babylon.