metalman

Have seen it at Asda at Chaucer

Another dozen of the usual variety in August. Stuart Kaminsky - Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. It's 1940, and on the set of the Wizard of Oz, a Munchkin is stabbed to death. Private eye Toby Peters investigates, and on the way enlists the help of Judy Garland, Clark Gable and Raymond Chandler. Neatly done. Michael Wood - A room full of killers. DCI Matilda Darke investigates a murder in a young offenders secure unit on the outskirts of Sheffield. Michael Wood - The hangman's hold. Now a vigilante serial killer is hanging criminals that he consider have got off lightly. Two more cracking entries in this series. Even the proofreading seems to have improved in the second one, though even then Hastings has mysteriously moved from Sussex to Kent. Sarah Woods - Call back yesterday. Woods wrote a large number of legally-focused detective stories featuring lawyer Anthony Maitland. In this one a female stalker is convinced she was married to her victim in a past life. Not bad though it stretched credulity somewhat. J. Jefferson Farjeon - Mystery in white. Stranded train passengers enter a deserted house, finding tea laid on the table and a fire in the grate but nobody home. Another good read from this author in the British Library crime classics series. Shelley Smith - The Lord have mercy. Murder of village doctor's wife leads to a whispering campaign against him, but with an unexpected outcome. Every book I've read by Shelley Smith has been top drawer and this one's no exception. Tom Gauld - Department of Mind-blowing theories. Amusing cartoon book. Maybe not quite as clever and amusing as he thinks he is, but still a good effort. E.C.R. Lorac - Fell murder. Murder of an old farmer in the Vale of Lune in Lancashire investigated by the patient Inspector Macdonald. Probably the most enjoyable Lorac I've read so far. Janice Hallett - The mysterious case of the Alperton Angels. Rival journalists research the background of a cold case where members of a cult committed suicide. While she may be a one trick pony in terms of style, Hallett shows no sign of slacking in the plot department. Excellent. Kate Ellis - The plague maiden. A vicar's murder, a modern body in a medieval plague pit and contamination of supermarket goods with botulism all come together for DI Wesley Peterson. Still really enjoying this series. Hillary Waugh - Madman at my door. Homicidal maniac released on parole from secure unit goes after the man who shot him years before. It's another cracking read that winds up the tension effectively. Shaun Bythell - Seven kinds of people you find in bookshops. Bookseller sorts his customers into species. Amusing, though a bit worrying that I seem to fall into several categories.

Unfortunately Sunderland haven't got the handicap of being managed by Wayne Rooney.

Great start by Wednesday even if Plymouth are battling the handicap of being managed by Wayne Rooney.

A round dozen this month, mostly crime as usual but also a couple of books about books. Susan Hill - Howard's End is on the landing. Novelist Hill revisits and discusses some of the books in her home. Booklovers will recognise themselves here. Edward Brooke-Hitching - The madman's library. A round-up of the strangest books encountered by Brooke-Hitching, himself the son of an antiquarian bookseller, including books bound in human skin, toxic books (from arsenic-containing dyes), big books, small books, books in code and so on. Fascinating for anybody who loves books (which includes me in case you hadn't worked that out). Michael Wood - Outside looking in. Second in the Sheffield-based DCI Matilda Darker series. A man and woman, both married but not to each other, are slaughtered in a car in a country lane. I'm already enjoying this series. Stephen Booth - The murder road. Back in the Peak District with Cooper and Fry. After a lorry gets jammed under a railway bridge in an isolated village, the driver turns up stabbed to death. Another well constructed mystery, though it was perhaps stretching credulity that so many people involved in a particular incident should end up in the same tiny village. Hillary Waugh - The Billy Cantrell case. In the 1980s, Waugh, famous for his police procedural novels, wrote half a dozen books featuring hardboiled private eye Simon Kaye. In this one he investigates when Cantrell, a boxer, unexpectedly keels over with a heart attack in round 5. Hillary Waugh - The Doria Rafe case. Kaye busts a protection racket for the daughter of a shopkeeper. Hillary Waugh - The Veronica Dean case. Randomly beaten up on the way home, Kaye is drawn into a case involving two halves of a treasure map. I found all three of these to be excellent reads - highly recommended if you happen to come across a copy. Peter Robinson - Dry bones that dream. Inspector Banks tackles the case of a man taken from his house and shot in his garage. Another excellent one in this series. Kate Ellis - The skeleton room. A woman pulled from the sea and a skeleton walled up in a former girls school exercise the brains of DI Wesley Peterson and his boss. Still enjoying this series too, with its clever interplay between historical events and the present day. J. Jefferson Farjeon - Seven dead. Man breaks into a house only to discover seven corpses in a shuttered room. One of the British Library crime classics originally published in 1939. Not bad. G.D.H. and M. Cole - Counterpoint murder. A man murdered in a London club, an old lady poisoned with nitroglycerine, a hit and run accident... Supt. Wilson joins the dots. Entertaining, but the solution was disappointingly Highsmithian (although it predates Highsmith). Francis Gerard - Fatal Friday. Another obscure detective story from 1937. Lord Colchester confesses to shooting a man in his library, but it turns out he couldn't have done it. Scotland Yard tec John Meredith sorts it out in a well written, humorous story. Good stuff.

Well that makes a bit more sense. I didn't think even our council would close it for roadworks while tramlines is on.

Why is Catchbar Lane going to be closed for 10 days to accommodate this? I don't think that happened last year. The disruption caused by this event just keeps getting worse and worse.

Can anybody recommend an electrician who would be able to deal with old Bakelite light switches? Our house has them (maybe original) and the connections seem to have gone a bit hit and miss in them. I don't want them replacing with modern ones if at all avoidable, I like them.

As long as somebody knocks down that eyesore structure on the corner of Penistone Road and Herries Road (the thing with the chimneys, think it used to be a garage), I don't care what goes there - it's got to be an improvement.

Here's my round-up for June. Kate Ellis - A painted doom. The murder of an ageing rock star shot in a field is linked to the discovery of a medieval church painting in a barn. Another excellent entry in this series. Susannah Clarke - Piranesi. The title character inhabits a vast deserted, partially flooded, mansion filled with statues. Gradually he comes to understand his environment. Clarke's long-awaited second novel is nothing short of brilliant. Michael Wood - For reasons unknown. The first in the series featuring Sheffield cop DCI Matilda Darke. Having suggested this series to someone who wanted a locally set crime novel, I thought it was about time I got round to reading it myself and fortunately I thought it was pretty good. Here she's investigating a cold case murder of a couple slaughtered in front of their young son. Mark Forsyth - The etymologicon. A book about the connections between words and their derivations, originally a blog. I always find these sorts of books really interesting but it may not be everyone's cup of tea. Stephen Booth - Already dead. More locally set crime. Ben Cooper's still on compassionate leave so Diane Fry takes charge in this one to investigate a man drowned in a shallow Peak District stream. As good as usual. Stephen Booth - The corpse bridge. Cooper's back on the job now with a case involving a woman murdered on a track on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border. Again really good. George Bellairs - A knife for Harry Dodd. Dodd, a man with some unconventional living arrangements, receives the said utensil in the back after a night at the pub. Inspector Littlejohn tackles the case with his usual Maigret-like thoroughness. Excellent. Richard Osman - The last devil to die. Pensioners investigate murdered antique dealer and a vanishing consignment of heroin. Once you accept that any connection to reality has long since vanished from this series, it's still an enjoyable read. Doris Piserchia - The dimensioneers. This months SF book: a teenage girl and a telepathically-linked big cat travel to other worlds by hopping dimensions. Good fun. Alan Garner - Treacle Walker. Economically told mystic fable about a boy and a rag and bone man. He's been writing these strange, memorable books since the 60s and is still brilliant at it.

Since we can now post pictures...

This month's round-up of crime and science fiction: Kate Ellis - An unhallowed grave. DS Wesley Peterson and his boss find a woman hanged from a yew tree in a village churchyard - could it be linked to a woman hanged from the same tree centuries ago? Kate Ellis - The funeral boat. The disappearance of a Danish tourist and the discovery of a possible Viking boat burial are the two parallel investigations in this one. Kate Ellis - The bone garden. Skeletons unearthed during restoration of a lost stately home garden and the murder of a man in a caravan park are occupying DS Peterson here. As you can probably tell from the fact that I've read three of them this month, I'm really enjoying this series. Mark Mason - The importance of being trivial. A book about how trivia annoy some people and fascinate others. OK, but in the end I found it all a bit, well, trivial. Thomas Burnett Swann - Green phoenix. In the 60s and early 70s, Swann wrote a number of fantasy novels involving the twilight of the old inhabitants of Earth such as dryads, centaurs etc. as they are gradually driven out by humans. This one concerns the meeting of the dryad Mellonia with Trojan hero Aeneas. I really rate them all; it's a great pity his career was cut short when he died of cancer in 1976 aged 47. Julia Chapman - Date with evil. The eighth instalment of the Yorkshire Dales-set cosy crime series satisfyingly ties up all the loose ends from the previous books and sees the main villain get his just desserts. I've enjoyed this series and I thought that might be the end of it but she's recently published the ninth volume. Anthony Horowitz - Close to death. The latest book in which detective Daniel Hawthorne is shadowed by a writer conveniently named Anthony Horowitz, except in this one he isn't really. Hawthorne has a different sidekick as he investigates the murder of a nuisance neighbour in an exclusive gated community in Richmond on Thames. Still excellent though. John Brunner - The infinitive of go. A matter transmitter leads to problems with parallel universes. OK. Emily St. John Mandel - Sea of tranquility. A time travel novel with more than a hint of Cloud Atlas about it. Canadian Mandel is one of the new stars of science fiction and it's easy to see why from this one. Highly recommended. Norman Hunter - Professor Branestawm's great revolution. An amusing quick read, but it was one of the later ones from the 70s so it wasn't quite as inventive, as it were, as the early ones. M. D. Lyon - A village match and after. Totally obscure comedy thriller from 1929 featuring cricket and horseracing. The author was a wicketkeeper for Somerset, and famous batsman Wally Hammond found it uproariously hilarious in his introduction, whereas I found it mildly amusing. Nice illustrations though. Ross Macdonald - The barbarous coast. Private eye Lew Archer looks for a missing woman, and finds several murders. Up to the usual standard.

Mostly crime again this month. Leo Bruce - Death on All Hallowe'en. This isn't a Sergeant Beef story, instead it features Bruce's other recurring sleuth, schoolmaster Carolus Deene, here investigating the death of a boy in a superstitious village. The Deene books tend to be more serious in tone than the Beef ones. It was OK but I prefer the latter. Jonathan Meades - Filthy English. Over the course of a few short stories, Meades manages to cover almost every sort of perversion known to man. Despite which, they were cleverly written and enjoyable. Anne Blaisdell - Strange felony. A selection of cases for Hollywood detective Ivor Maddox and his squad. If this sounds very similar to the Luis Mendoza series by Dell Shannon, that's because the authors were the same person and really, if you changed the names, it could easily be a Mendoza book instead. Not bad though. John Sherwood - The limericks of Lachasse. Hapless Englishman sent to manage a chemical plant on the German-Swiss border investigates the demise of his predecessor. Good. Frank Parrish - Caught in the birdlime. I thought I'd read all of these mysteries featuring poacher Dan Mallett but here's another one. Not bad, but perhaps not as good as earlier ones in the series. Jeff Noon - Automated Alice. Lewis Carroll's Alice steps into a clock and is transplanted through time to 1990s Manchester. Pretty good this one, with plenty of amusing wordplay. J. S. Fletcher - Murder in the Squire's Pew. Called in to investigate a church theft, detectives Camberwell & Chaney soon find a man's body in a box pew. Unusually for the era, it takes the combined efforts of them and the police to solve the mystery. It's a typical Fletcher novel in that the leisurely journey to the solution is followed by a bit of a rushed ending, but as a traditional detective story, it wasn't bad. Alasdair Gray - Mavis Belfrage. A short novel and some short stories. Gray was all the rage in the 90s but since his death he seems to have slipped out of public consciousness. Very good in his usual slightly nihilistic way. Ross Macdonald - Find a victim. Private eye Lew Archer does exactly that, picking up a dying man on the side of the road. Before long he is caught up in a complex web of murder (it goes without saying). I thought this was one of the better ones, but the standard of the whole series is excellent. Kate Ellis - The merchant's house Kate Ellis - The Armada boy. Like Elly Griffiths, Kate Ellis writes a series where a police investigation is linked with archaeology and events in the past; these were the first two. In this case the main character is DS Wesley Peterson, a black Londoner transplanted to the Devon coast (a thinly disguised Dartmouth) who has a degree in archaeology. In the first one, a kidnapped boy and a woman murdered on a clifftop turn out to reflect the events in the title establishment in the 17th century. In the second, an American GI on a reunion trip is murdered, with parallels to events in 1588 when Spanish sailors got ashore after their ship sank. First impressions: Ellis is a better writer and a better plotter than Griffiths, so I think I'm going to enjoy this series if she keeps it up (there are about 20 in the series by now).

Another month, another selection of mainly crime and science fiction... David Mitchell - Black Swan Green. A year in the life of Jason Taylor, 13, growing up in a Worcestershire village at the time of the Falklands War. This was Mitchell's semi-autobiographical novel, as he did grow up in such a village (in a neat touch, the names of some real Worcestershire villages are used as the surnames of some of the characters). Excellent. Peter Robinson - Wednesday's child. The sixth in the Inspector Banks series. A child is abducted by fake social workers, and a man is knifed to death at a mine; the seemingly separate cases turn out to be linked. Another really good one. Ross Macdonald - The ivory grin. Hired to find a missing nurse, Lew Archer soon finds himself caught up in murder and the search for a kidnapped socialite. As good as the rest of the series. Leo Bruce - Case with ropes and rings. Sergeant Beef, who got the better of some thinly-disguised more famous detectives in 'Case for Three detectives', and his snobbish chronicler Lionel Townsend, investigate when a boy is found hanged in the gym at a public school. Beef's methods involve drinking lots of beer and playing darts, but he gets there in the end. Leo Bruce - Cold Blood. Sergeant Beef is on the case again when a millionaire is bashed over the head with a croquet mallet. I really like this series; it's high time someone reprinted them. Poul Anderson - Tau zero. A starship develops a fault which means it has to keep accelerating. I remember reading this in the early 70s and being suitably mind-boggled by it, and I thought it was still pretty good now. Edith-Jane Bahr - Help please. Stopped at a traffic light in a snowstorm, a woman sees a girl in the neighbouring car mouthing these words. When the girl is found murdered, she realises she could be in danger too. Good. John Buxton Hilton - Dead-Nettle. Inspector Brunt investigates a woman's murder in a Derbyshire lead-mining village in 1905. Lots of local and period detail, but a decent mystery too. 'BB' - A child alone. Denys Watkins-Pitchford's autobiographical account of his early years growing up in a rectory in Northamptonshire. A naturalist of the old school (hunting, shooting, fishing, birds-egg collecting), he wrote all his books under that pseudonym, but illustrated them under his own name (leading one reviewer to say it was as though the artist could see into the author's head). Cordwainer Smith - Quest of the three worlds. For about ten years spanning the 1950s and 60s, Smith was one of the most original SF writers around. This short novel is actually a fix-up of four shorter works, and while not his best, it's still got the same magic. Sadly he died at the early age of 53 in 1966, thus depriving the field of a major talent. Stephen Booth - Dead and buried. Finally got back to the Cooper and Fry series after a few months gap. Wildfire arson and murder at an isolated pub in the Peak District. Excellent.

Think Al Bundy might have called it right here.