The "I am currently reading" thread

[Padders]

I'm currently reading the sell by dates on packets of crisps. Grrr.

[PRESLEY]

17 minutes ago, Padders said:

I'm currently reading the sell by dates on packets of crisps. Grrr.

Why!    Have you passed on your Penthouse and Mayfair Magazines on to Hackey.  

[hackey lad]

3 hours ago, PRESLEY said:

Why!    Have you passed on your Penthouse and Mayfair Magazines on to Hackey.  

Penthouse and Mayfair are to upmarket for him , he’s more of a Razzle man .

[metalman]

On 03/07/2023 at 06:06, nikki-red said:

It was the use of ‘Nadsat’ (the made up English/Russian slang) that I was struggling with, having to look in the glossary every 5 minutes to see what words mean.

Im having to do that less and less now tho so I am starting to actually enjoy it now.

I rather like books like that. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is another really good example.

[nikki-red]

I’m currently reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

 

Im only a few pages in but I’ve just finished Fahrenheit 451 and enjoyed that.

[wearysmith]

On 13/07/2023 at 22:33, nikki-red said:

I’m currently reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

 

Im only a few pages in but I’ve just finished Fahrenheit 451 and enjoyed that.

Read both of them while in my teens. Plenty of food for thought. Timely, as we're doing Macbeth at school with the kids at the mo 😀.

I'm part way through Pratchett's 'Making Money' - for the nth time.

 

It's one of my favourites.

 

[metalman]

Thanks to the rubbish weather I've got through nearly a dozen this month.

 

Stephen Booth - Lost river. DC Cooper witnesses a child drowning in Dovedale, DS Fry goes to Birmingham to deal with her past. Definitely not one of my favourites in this series: Booth's sense of place is usually one of his strengths but here he goes over the top, so it seemed too much like a travelog of Birmingham a lot of the time, and the separation of the two leads made it disjointed too. Meh.

Margaret Hinxman - The corpse now arriving. Fellow passenger investigates when a woman is thrown out of a train. Pretty good.

Edited by Martin Edwards - Serpents in Eden. Another British Library short story anthology with the theme being crimes set in the countryside. Edwards knows his stuff and can be relied on to make a good selection.

Kate Ellis - A high mortality of doves. Set just after WW1, a serial killer is dispatching women and then stuffing doves into their mouths. Hadn't tried anything by this author before but I thought this was a good effort.

L. A. Lewis - Tales of the grotesque. Originally published in 1934 by Philip Allan as part of the Creeps series (so the first edition is v. expensive) but fortunately reprinted a couple of times since. Lewis displays a lurid imagination and a good streak of originality. Recommended if you can find a copy.

G. D. H. and M. Cole - Murder at the munitions works. Wartime mystery from 1944:  the works manager's wife is blown up by a bomb, with prominent trade unionist suspected. Supt. Wilson pieces it all together; although he's often bracketed with Crofts' Inspector French as one of the rather plodding detectives of the era, I always enjoy the Cole's books.

Douglas Clark - The longest pleasure. Someone is injecting tins of food with botulism then putting them back on the supermarket shelf. Masters & Green track down the culprit with some clever detection and a big slice of coincidence. Good as usual though.

Peter Lovesey - Wobble to death. Murder at a Victorian endurance walking contest. Sgt Cribb is the detective here and those of a reasonably advanced age might remember this series being turned into a TV series in about 1980.

Freeman Wills Crofts - Sudden death. When Mrs Grinsmead seemingly gasses herself, her husband and his mistress come under suspicion. Inspector French does his usual meticulous job. After years of being out of print, most if not all of Crofts' books are available at the moment and are all well worth reading, though they might seem a bit slow-paced compared to some more modern ones. Personally I don't mind that.

Margaret Millar - Fire will freeze. Snowbound bus passengers take refuge in an isolated mansion in Quebec, and then the murders start. Excellent stuff from one of the best exponents of the psychological crime story.

Elly Griffiths - Bleeding Heart Yard. An MP is murdered after a school reunion. The third in the series featuring policewoman Harbinder Kaur, now newly promoted and moved to London. I think I prefer this series to the one featuring forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway, not least because it gives the author freedom not to have to fit in exhuming some bones. Really enjoyed this for 95% of its length (even despite its rather woke flavour) but then the end was a bit far-fetched and came out of nowhere.

 

Now reading: Margot Bennett - The man who didn't fly. I first read this years ago and now it's been reprinted by the British Library I'm enjoying it again. In an unusually ingenious plot, four men book a flight on a small plane, but only three turn up. When the plane crashes into the sea and their bodies are never recovered, the question is: which one didn't go and why is he keeping quiet about it?

 

[cressida]

There is nothing like a Dame.

[feargal]

Recently finished The Betrayals by Bridget Collins.  Really good, if a little slow to start.

[metalman]

Nearly all crime again for me this month, with a bit of psychic investigation at the end:

 

Stephen Booth - The Devil's Edge. A series of attacks on householders in their homes leads to a murder, but Ben Cooper suspects it may not be part of the same sequence. Much better than the last one, though Fry doesn't make much of an appearance at all in this one.

Douglas Clark - Bouquet Garni. Three girls are poisoned to death on the same day, with two of them faintly connected through a seed merchant's nursery. Masters and Green track down the obscure toxin as usual. 

Dominic Devine - Sunk without a trace. Another cracker from Mr Devine involving electoral fraud in a Scottish council office. Sounds dull but it's anything but.

James Branch Cabell - The certain hour. Ever since reading his most celebrated book, Jurgen, I've been a fan of Cabell's writing, but he's currently going through a period of being completely unfashionable. Here we have a dozen short stories written in his usual elaborate manner, to do with episodes in the lives of various poets from history. I enjoyed it, but then I may be an exception.

Loren D. Estleman - Sweet women lie. Chandleresque private eye Amos Walker goes down the mean streets of Detroit in search of a hired killer. Not bad.

George Bellairs - The tormentors. Old man stabbed to death outside a pub on the Isle of Man. Fortunately Supt. Littlejohn is on holiday there and sees more to it than a casual mugging. As good as Bellairs usually is.

John Wainwright - Blayde R.I.P. Supt. Robert Blayde is a recurring character in many of Wainwright's books set in the imaginary northern conurbations of Lessford and Bordfield. Here we learn his life story (in which several other recurring characters appear) and his eventual demise. Very good in a Wainwright sort of way.

Dell Shennon - Murder most strange. Another selection of cases for Lt. Luis Mendoza and his squad, from 1981. 

Elly Griffiths - The woman in blue. Back to the Ruth Galloway series. This one focuses more on DCI Nelson investigating murders in Walsingham during a religious festival, which is all to the good really because Ruth is a bit of a wet blanket. Not bad but the eventual motive was decidedly feeble in my view.

 

Now reading: The haunting of Cashen's Gap by Harry Price and R. S. Lambert. The mid-1930s saw a celebrated case in which an isolated farm on the Isle of Man, Doarlish Cashen, was haunted by a talking mongoose called Gef. Present day thinking is that it was probably a clever hoax by the daughter of the house, but at the time professional ghost hunter Price (of Borley Rectory fame), Lambert (then editor of The Listener) and various others seemed pretty convinced. This is a really hard book to track down, though somebody did reprint it a couple of years ago.