TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION - P.D.JAMES

 

Spookily enough I got this book out of the library about an hour before I heard she had died. If this is your genre it's a great read. She concentrates mainly on the Golden Age where writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh were hitting their stride. She talks about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as well as the need for a Watson type character as narrator to move stories along and shoot the breeze about clues. She hardly mentions her own work although she would have been justified.

Read it to: help organise your thoughts.

THE GOLDFINCH

 

The book opens with a fair number of quotes from famous authors and reviewers that add veracity to the notion that this is a great novel. I can see it being set as required reading for classes from now until eternity as the need to dissect, analyse and expound upon sets in. I've been Tartt fan since The Secret History and this, for me, is undoubtedly the best of her three offerings. Detailed but not overwhelming. The hero, Theo Decker, is traumatised early on in the story and spends the rest of the novel trying to find a place in the world where he can fit in where his morals are not compromised.

I love Tartt's writing style and language. The conversations sound exactly right. They remind me of the joy I got when I read Martin Amis, another writer whose language is exquisite.         

THE GIRL WHO SAVED THE KING OF SWEDEN

If you read and liked the One-Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared you'll enjoy Jonas Jonasson's new one, a suitably laugh-out-loud follow-up in the same style. The story has it's fair share of preposterous situations with equally preposterous solutions and the elephant has been replaced by an atom bomb. Highly recommended.

CHEKHOV AND MANNERS

These comments resound loud and clear. In the absence of the highly overrated and appallingly overused mobile phone selfie I suppose many sycophants would have hired portrait painters to paint their encounters with Anton.

 
Go Anton!!

A PLEASURE AND A CALLING

Phil Hogan's William Heming has to be the creepiest guy I've come across in recent years. Having once sold real estate for a couple of years I believe there are agents who might have some of Heming's less extreme traits. Have a read. If you like a good creepy and macabre story this one will appeal.

 

DITA VON TEESE SPEAKS. LISTEN CAREFULLY.

EMMA WATSON SPEAKS

Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man

This was published in 1991 and is the first Jean-Baptiste Adamberg crime novel. The writer's name is actually Frederique Audoin-Rouzeau, archaeologist and author, writing in French. I'd call it whimsical but highly readable and often very funny. Dry? Yes. Detective Adamberg  reminds me somewhat of Adrian Monk with his strange attitude towards detection. The blurb above is a good guide. I'll be looking for more books from this author - there are plenty available. Give this one a try.  

Red Flags

RED FLAGS - Juris Jurjevics

I picked this up while racing through the library, assuming from the name of the author that it was yet another Scandinavian crime story. The words 'a novel of the Vietnam War' didn't register. My knowledge of that war is limited to news coverage and I've never read anything about it prior to this book.
I'd recommend it to anyone. It's very well written and as attention-grabbing as any Scandinavian crime thriller. The writer's afterword advises that there is little fiction in the story and that being the case this comes off as an expose of just what a waste of time the whole war was in view of the endemic corruption by the South Vietnamese and their collaboration with the VC and anyone else who could line their pockets.
It would be easy to give the plot away so I won't, but its worth a read. Educational and exciting. A great combination.

Ray Bradbury's classic horror about a travelling and malignant carnival is as good today as it was when it was published. When I was a kid the local A&P (agricultural and pastoral) show was a big event, not because of the animals, of which there were hundreds, but because of the sideshows which provided a colour seldom seen in my small town. I lived on the edge of town with easy access to the show-grounds and I haunted the show from the moment it started to set up the tents. The people who set it up were not like the locals, who were farm boys and dairy factory workers. These looked like hard men with their tattoos and bare chests, driving tent pegs and spikes into the ground. The whole process was quite fast and it only took a day to create the minor but colourful tent city.
I can't remember seeing many women around and I assume they were inside the many caravans, cooking for those semi-naked guys. This was the fifties and I assume (again) that the night before the show - it was only there for one day - the men who had shown off their bare chests decamped to a local hostelry, drank heavily and challenged the locals to physical confrontations. My family was teetotal so this is pure speculation. No reports came back to me.
Ball throwing, darts, dodgems, ferris wheel, candy floss - I remember wondering why I could only get candy floss when the show came to town - ring toss (we actually won two packets of cigarettes on the ring toss one year. I can't remember if it was illegal to give cigarettes to young people back then, maybe it wasn't. Anyway, they tasted like shit.)
House of Horrors ride, a cowboy sharpshooting show, and wasn't that assistant with the cigarettes used as targets glamorous? You bet she was. Glamour beyond a ten-tear-old's comprehension, as was the half man-half woman. What was that about?
The carousel, or roundabout as we knew it, was always favourite. Recently I've been looking at carousels with a new eye and I've written a short story about a carousel which is basically pornographic. The story, not the carousel, Actually that's not true. The story infringes copyrights belonging to the Elvis Presley industry. This means it will never be published but somehow Elvis was an obvious participant and I think he would have enjoyed the experience. Thank you very much. I love the many carousels you come across in Europe and the States. It seems so civilised.
As the sun went down and the lights came on, the sounds of conflicting music from rides blared louder and I was sent home clutching one last stick covered in candy floss and starting to feel sick, a sure sign of a good time. 

The Last Train Ride

A new short story on www.smashwords.com/profile/view/RexFausett

 

I'm partly obsessed with railways and trains and this story has been brewing for a while. In fact I'm still wrestling with getting it posted properly - my problem, not Smashwords. Deep down I think this was inspired by a Stephen King story quite a few years back, or maybe not. My deep downs are sometimes actually quite shallow. It has people thrown into circumstances beyond their control where the threat of death is imminent and seemingly unavoidable. Bears also feature briefly. At 99 cents, it's worth finding out what the worst that can happen really is.

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Light of the World

 

I want to record my disappointment with this novel. I've followed the exploits of Dave Robicheaux for many years and enjoyed the telling of the tales, party at least because I've been to New Orleans many times and New Iberia several times. This one is set in Montana, where, if I remember rightly, Mr Burke lectured on the subject of writing. This novel reads like it was written as a textbook. A good storyline is ruined by endless, mind-numbing warnings about the evil men do and spectacularly florid descriptions of the landscape. The title seems pointless and unrelated to the story as well. Oh, and the arrows. There is an arrow in this story, but just one which is a modern arrow with very sharp metal; bits designed to hurt or kill, but just one. The Indian arrows shown on the cover are surplus to requirements and possibly designed to attract purchasers who are swayed by Indian arrows. As you can see, it's a library book and I'm really glad I didn't pay for it.