Category: Reviews

Due to a Death by Mary Kelly – #1962Club

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This week Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their club weeks, where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time, the year is 1962 and what a great year for publishing it has turned out to be! There were lots of tempting books to choose from, but I decided to start with one from the British Library Crime Classics series by an author who is new to me: Mary Kelly.

Due to a Death is a very different kind of BLCC book; it’s not really a detective novel, not really a thriller, not a country house or locked room mystery – not even much of a mystery at all. Although there is an element of crime, I would describe this more as a character study and an exploration of the lives of women in a small community in the early 1960s.

Our narrator, Agnes, lives in Gunfleet, a fictional village in the marshlands of Kent. Agnes used to be a teacher but her marriage to Tom meant she was no longer expected to work. It’s not a very happy or satisfying marriage and Tom, who works in a museum, spends most of his free time with his friends, Ian (who is also his stepbrother) and Tubby. Agnes appears to have no friends of her own so Tubby, Ian, and their wives Carole and Helen (whom she doesn’t particularly get along with), form her entire social circle. When Hedley Nicholson, a newcomer to the village, joins their little group he seems to sense that Agnes is lonely and bored and begins to spend more and more time with her, teaching her to drive – something she hopes will provide independence and freedom.

In the opening chapter, we learn that the body of a young woman has been found in the marshes. The rest of the novel is then told in the form of a flashback as Agnes sits in a church, thinking back over the events of the summer. The identity of the dead woman and her connection with the other characters is slowly revealed, but the focus of the book is always on Agnes and her relationships with Hedley, Tom, Ian and Tubby. It’s an interesting study of how, despite living in a small, claustrophobic community where everybody knows everybody else’s business, it’s still possible to feel isolated and alone.

I was very impressed with this book and although it has a slow pace, I found it difficult to put down. However, everything about it is relentlessly bleak, from the desolate marshland setting to the dreary lives of the characters and the tragic motive behind the young woman’s death. I liked it but, as I’ve said, it’s not a typical crime novel, so be prepared!

I hope to have at least one more 1962 review for you later in the week. Meanwhile, here’s my list of other 1962 books previously read and reviewed on my blog.

Night Train to Marrakech by Dinah Jefferies

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Night Train to Marrakech is the third and final book in Dinah Jefferies’ Daughters of War trilogy, but if you haven’t read the previous two books that shouldn’t be a problem as I think this one would also work well as a standalone. While Daughters of War and The Hidden Palace followed the stories of the three Baudin sisters, Hélène, Élise and Florence, during World War II, this third novel moves forward to the 1960s to focus on Élise’s daughter, Vicky.

In July 1966, Vicky Baudin arrives in Morocco to visit her grandmother for the first time. Having lost her father during the war, Vicky has only recently discovered that his mother, Clemence, is still alive and living in the mountains outside Marrakech. Vicky has just received a diploma in fashion design from a London art college, so this seems like a good time to travel abroad before beginning a postgraduate course in Paris. As her train arrives at Marrakech station, Vicky is looking forward to getting to know Clemence – and is determined to find a way to meet her hero, the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, who also lives in Marrakech.

In her mountain home, the Kasbah du Paradis, Clemence is awaiting her long-lost granddaughter’s arrival with mixed emotions. Vicky will want to know why she played no part in her son’s life and Clemence doesn’t feel ready to explain. However, she’s forced to confront the memories she’s tried so hard to forget when a man from her past reappears, threatening to reveal her secrets. Meanwhile, Vicky and her cousin Bea also stumble into trouble when they become witnesses to a crime.

Night Train to Marrakech has a much stronger thriller element than the previous two books, which I found quite surprising. The novel is set against a backdrop of rising political tensions – a few months before the novel begins, the Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka is abducted in Paris (a real life incident) – and although this doesn’t form a large part of the plot, it does give a sense of the danger for two young women who unintentionally become mixed up in a situation they don’t fully understand. The descriptions of Morocco itself – the scenery, the buildings, the food, the sounds and smells – are also beautifully done.

The three sisters from the first two books (Vicky’s mother, Élise, and her two aunts, Hélène and Florence) do eventually make an appearance in this one, but I was disappointed that we don’t see very much of them. This is very much Vicky’s story and Clemence’s, and although having two completely new characters to get to know so late in the trilogy unsettled me slightly, I did warm to them later in the book. I found Clemence in particular an intriguing character as she seems so cold and secretive at first but as more and more of her story unfolds, the reason for this becomes clear and by the end of the book I had gained a lot of respect and sympathy for her.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Daughters of War and The Hidden Palace – as the third in a trilogy I would have preferred it to be more closely linked with the first two books rather than moving on to the next generation – but the gripping plot and evocative setting still made it worthwhile. As for whether or not Vicky achieves her dream of meeting Yves Saint Laurent, you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 40/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie

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The September prompt for Read Christie 2023 is a motive: hatred. This is obviously a common motive for murder and there are plenty of Christie novels to fit this month’s theme, but the suggested title is Appointment with Death, a 1938 Poirot mystery set in the Middle East.

Newly qualified doctor Sarah King and French psychologist Dr Gerard are relaxing in the lounge of their Jerusalem hotel when their attention is drawn to an American family who have just entered the room. The head of the family is Mrs Boynton, a monstrous woman who takes a sadistic pleasure in controlling the lives of her adult children. Even her eldest stepson Lennox, who is married, is still completely under her thumb. As Sarah and Dr Gerard learn more about the Boyntons, they each begin to develop a personal interest in the family – Sarah because she has become romantically attracted to Lennox’s brother, Raymond, and Gerard because he thinks he has spotted the early signs of schizophrenia in the youngest Boynton child, Jinny.

When the party moves on to Petra, with the additions of British politician Lady Westholme, her spinster friend Amabel Pierce, and a certain Hercule Poirot, a murder takes place. Nobody has much sympathy for the victim, but the murderer must still be caught – and who better to catch them than Poirot? Insisting that he can solve the mystery in twenty-four hours, he sets out to interview the suspects and sort through the available clues, while remembering a conversation overheard from his hotel window one night: “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

I always enjoy Christie – even her weaker books are entertaining – but this is a particularly good one! The relationship between the members of the Boynton family is fascinating; Mrs Boynton is a truly horrible woman who has ensured that her children and stepchildren have no friends, no freedom and no independence. Why she has allowed them to come on this trip at all is a mystery in itself and one of the questions Poirot will have to answer.

I loved the Middle East setting (a part of the world Christie knew well due to her travels with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan) and although the crime is committed amongst the historic sites of Petra, it almost still has the feel of a typical country house mystery with caves and tents taking the place of rooms. I can’t really claim to have solved the mystery, but I did narrow it down to two suspects and one of them was correct! I missed an important clue which would definitely have pointed me in the right direction earlier on if I had picked up on it, but I think Christie is very fair with the reader in this book and all the clues are there to be seen, as long as you’re paying attention.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be taking part in Read Christie next month, but if not I’m looking forward to reading Endless Night in November.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

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I loved Janice Hallett’s most recent novels, The Twyford Code and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, so I was looking forward to going back and reading her first book, The Appeal. I know Hallett’s style is not one that works for all readers (to be honest, I’m very surprised that it works for me), but if you enjoyed either of those other two novels, I can almost guarantee that you’ll enjoy this one as well.

The Appeal begins in the small English town of Lower Lockwood where the members of an amateur dramatics society, The Fairway Players, are preparing for their upcoming production of All My Sons by Arthur Miller. The Players are led by Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, a couple who also own the local golf club and are highly respected within the community, as well as members of several other prominent Lockwood families. On the fringes of the group and desperate to be accepted into the Haywards’ social circle is Isabel Beck, a young nurse who convinces her new friends Sam and Kel Greenwood to join the Players.

Before the group even begin rehearsals, disaster strikes: Martin and Helen’s two-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has developed a rare form of brain cancer which is unlikely to be cured with conventional chemotherapy. Poppy’s parents have placed all their hopes in a new experimental treatment which is not yet available in the UK. Determined to obtain this very expensive new drug from America, the Haywards and their friends launch a fundraising appeal, ‘A Cure for Poppy’. At first, everything seems to be going well, but when one of the Fairway Players is found murdered, questions are raised not just regarding the killer but the appeal itself. Does the doctor responsible for obtaining the new treatment really have Poppy’s best interests at heart? Why did Sam leave her last nursing position in Africa so suddenly? And who is the mystery donor who promised a large sum of money then changed his mind?

Roderick Tanner QC has set his two law students, Femi and Charlotte, the task of looking through the documents associated with the Lockwood case. Someone has already been sentenced for the murder, but Tanner believes they are innocent and he wants the students to confirm his opinion as he prepares to appeal the decision. The novel is presented entirely in the form of emails sent to and from the various characters involved in the case, as well as several WhatsApp discussions between Femi and Charlotte as they try to make sense of the evidence. As I’ve said, this is probably something you’ll either love or hate, but for me it’s very effective – I find that the short length of each email makes the book very immersive and compelling as it’s easy to think ‘I’ll just read one more!’ It also allows a lot of misdirection as every character could be considered an unreliable narrator; we can never be sure who they really are or how they really feel because all we see is the way they choose to present themselves in an email or on social media. Some suspension of disbelief is required, though, as most people aren’t sending constant emails to each other all day long!

The weakest aspect of The Appeal for me was actually the murder mystery. The murder doesn’t take place until late in the novel and then we learn that Tanner has been withholding information from us, which makes it very difficult to solve the mystery for ourselves. I also wasn’t sure why he wanted help from Charlotte and Femi, as he already seemed to know everything anyway. Apart from that, I enjoyed following the progress of the Poppy campaign and correctly guessed some of the twists in that storyline! There’s a large cast of characters to get to know, but I found that most of them had their own very distinctive personalities – from needy, eager to please Isabel to practical, no-nonsense professional fundraiser Sarah-Jane – so I had no problem keeping track of them all.

Of the three Janice Hallett books I’ve read, this is my least favourite, but it still kept me entertained from beginning to end. I’m looking forward to reading her new novella, The Christmas Appeal, coming in October!

Henry VIII: The Heart and the Crown by Alison Weir

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Henry VIII: The Heart and the Crown is the second book in Alison Weir’s new Tudor Rose trilogy: three novels exploring the lives of Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII and Mary I, three generations of the Tudor family. It also works as a companion to her earlier Six Tudor Queens series, which told the stories of Henry’s six wives.

This novel is quite unusual because it’s the first I’ve read by Weir to be written from a male perspective. So many of today’s historical fiction authors are choosing to focus on historical women, particularly those who have been forgotten or neglected, I feel that famous male figures like Henry VIII are currently less ‘fashionable’ subjects. As there’s also been so much written about him in the past, I wondered whether this book would have anything new to offer.

The novel takes us through Henry’s life in chronological order, beginning with his childhood and his unexpected change in status after the death of his older brother and then moving on to look at his six marriages, the religious changes that took place during his reign and all the political intrigue of the Tudor court. His relationships with advisers such as Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell – and his court jester, Will Somers – are covered, as well as his rivalry with King Francis I of France and finally his declining health and his death in 1547.

I remember mentioning in some of my Six Tudor Queens reviews that Weir’s depiction of Henry was surprisingly positive throughout that series. All six of his wives are shown to have some genuine love and affection for him and his cruel actions are usually excused as being the fault of somebody else. She portrays him in a similar way in this book, showing how easily he is manipulated by people around him and trying to make him a more sympathetic character than you would usually expect, while not ignoring his obvious flaws – his jealousy, insecurity and hot temper. Weir does a particularly good job of showing how important it was to Henry to have a legitimate heir to carry on the Tudor dynasty founded by his father and the panic that he felt every time he suffered an illness or accident, knowing that if he died he would be leaving the future of his kingdom at risk.

Another unusual thing about this book is that I somehow found it both too long and too short at the same time! I read it on my Kindle, but the paper version has over 600 pages, so it’s a big book and not one that can be read very quickly. On the other hand, the six novels in the Six Tudor Queens series were all nearly as long and this single book on Henry has to cover a lot of the same information, so I felt that it didn’t really have the same level of depth, particularly where Henry’s later wives were concerned. About half of the book is devoted to Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon and the ‘Great Matter’ that arises when he attempts to have the marriage annulled so he can marry Anne Boleyn. This means his relationships with his other four wives are squeezed into the remainder of the book, along with major events like the sinking of the Mary Rose, which is covered in just a few paragraphs.

Overall, I found this an interesting read, if a bit dry at times, but I don’t really feel that I learned anything new from it – and, as I’ve said, a lot of the material is repeated from the earlier six novels. If you don’t have much knowledge of Henry VIII and the Tudors, though, I think this would be a good alternative to non-fiction to start you on your journey and introduce you to this period of history. Be aware that the US title of this book is The King’s Pleasure: A Novel of Henry VIII – I don’t want anyone to buy the same book twice!

Thanks to Headline Review for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 39/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr

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He Who Whispers is one of John Dickson Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell mysteries, originally published in 1946 and recently reissued as a British Library Crime Classic. I read another in the series, The Black Spectacles, earlier this year and loved it, so I had high hopes for this one.

The book is set in the aftermath of World War II and is written from the perspective of Miles Hammond, a Nobel Prize winning historian who has just inherited his uncle’s estate, which includes a house in the New Forest containing a large collection of books. As the novel opens, Miles is in London looking for a librarian to assist with his uncle’s collection, and while there he accepts an invitation to attend a meeting of the Murder Club, a group who get together regularly to try to solve true crime cases. On arriving at the venue, Miles is surprised to find that nobody else is there apart from a young woman, Barbara Morrell, and tonight’s speaker, Professor Rigaud.

Despite only having an audience of two, Rigaud proceeds to tell them the story of a crime which took place in France before the war and is both unsolved and seemingly impossible. It involves the murder of a wealthy Englishman, Howard Brooke, found stabbed with his own sword-stick while apparently alone on top of a high tower with witnesses on three sides and the fourth unreachable as it overlooks the river. Fay Seton, Brooke’s secretary, is suspected of the crime for the dubious reason that she is believed to be a vampire – and only a creature that can fly through the air could have reached the top of the tower!

Miles is intrigued by Rigaud’s story and when Fay Seton turns up in London, he offers her the job of librarian so that he can find out more. Heading for his uncle’s house in the New Forest with Fay and his sister Marion, Miles finds that he is becoming increasingly fascinated by the suspected vampire – but when Marion has a terrifying experience while alone upstairs in her bedroom, does this mean Fay has struck again or is there another explanation for the strange occurrences? Luckily, Gideon Fell arrives that same night and begins to investigate!

I enjoyed He Who Whispers, but not nearly as much as I enjoyed The Black Spectacles and I’m not really sure why this particular book is considered one of Carr’s best (apparently even by Carr himself). Yes, the solution is very clever, but I felt that we, the reader, are given very little chance of solving it ourselves, particularly as we don’t really see any of Fell’s thought processes during the novel. He reveals everything in the denouement at the end, but until then we’re as much in the dark as Miles Hammond. There was also too much focus on the vampire storyline for my taste; I thought the mystery was interesting enough without the supernatural element, but I expect other readers will love that aspect of the plot.

Carr captures the feel of post-war Britain very well; a surprising number of 1940s crime novels barely refer to the war at all, but in this one it’s an integral part of the story. Several of the characters in the novel have served in the war, there are mentions of rationing and bombed-out streets and of the effect all of these things have had on people’s mental health. There’s quite a small cast of characters and Carr takes the time to flesh each of them out, but I never really warmed to our protagonist, Miles – he has two possible love interests throughout the novel and although his final decision could have gone either way, I felt that he made the wrong choice in the end!

I want to read more of the Gideon Fell mysteries, so if you’ve read any of them please let me know which ones you particularly enjoyed.

The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian

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I’m continuing my very slow journey through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series and have now reached book eight, The Ionian Mission. As usual, I seem to have let a gap of about three years go by since reading the previous book, completely unintentionally! Fortunately, I always find it easy enough to get back into the story even after a long break – O’Brian often recaps some of the most important plot points in the first chapter and if not I can refer to the very detailed summaries of each book on Wikipedia to help refresh my memory.

The series is set during the Napoleonic Wars and follows the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his close friend, the ship’s surgeon and spy Dr Stephen Maturin. If you haven’t yet read the first seven novels, be aware that the rest of this post could contain spoilers you would prefer to avoid!

The Ionian Mission picks up the story from The Surgeon’s Mate, which ended with Stephen marrying Diana Villiers at sea. They are now at home in London, but although they seem happy with their relationship, it’s certainly not a conventional marriage and the two are already living separately. Anyway, they don’t have long to experience married life before Stephen is off again, accompanying Jack on a mission in the Mediterranean, blockading the French fleet at the port of Toulon. It’s a boring, tedious job and Jack is unimpressed with the ship he has been given, HMS Worcester.

Because of the nature of the blockade duty, there’s a sense that, for a large portion of the book, we and the crew of the Worcester are just passing time, waiting for something to happen. The lack of any real naval action gives O’Brian a chance to explore the various ways the members of the crew attempt to amuse themselves while at sea, such as rehearsing an oratorio, holding a poetry contest and trying to stage a performance of Hamlet. However, none of this made for particularly gripping reading and I was pleased when the tedium was relieved for a while by Stephen going ashore to carry out his spying duties.

Later in the novel, Jack is transferred to command of his old ship, his beloved HMS Surprise, and is sent on a new mission to the Ionian Islands where he must decide which of three Turkish rulers would prove the strongest ally for Britain in that region of the Mediterranean. I found this part of the book, where political intrigue comes to the forefront, much more interesting and I enjoyed the descriptions of Kutali, the place Britain hopes to use as a naval base. Unfortunately, this all came too late in the book to change my overall impression of it as one of the weaker entries in the series so far. I was also sorry that we saw so little of Diana, after she had played such a big part in the previous few books, and nothing of Jack’s wife and children either.

Although this one hasn’t become a favourite, I’m still looking forward to moving on to book nine, Treason’s Harbour!

This is book 38/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.