TBR Thursday 365…

Episode 365

Reading-wise, this year has got off to a terrible start – I just haven’t been in the mood, for some obscure reason. So I haven’t finished a book this week, but fortunately I also haven’t received any. The TBR is staying balanced on 170!

(Yeah, I’ve used that gif before, but it’s too good to only use once!) Anyway here are a few more I should get to soon…

Factual

The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards

Courtesy of HarperCollins. An unsolicited one, and a giant tome. To be honest, much though I enjoyed Martin Edwards’ much shorter delve into the history of mystery writing, I’m not sure I’m interested enough to read over 600 pages on the subject. But I’ll dip in and see – I suspect this may be a book more intended for dipping than reading straight through anyway. I’ll soon find out!

The Blurb says: In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction.

Author Martin Edwards is a multi-award-winning crime novelist, the President of the Detection Club, archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association and series consultant to the British Library’s highly successful series of crime classics, and therefore uniquely qualified to write this book. He has been a widely respected genre commentator for more than thirty years, winning the CWA Diamond Dagger for making a significant contribution to crime writing in 2020, when he also compiled and published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club and the novel Mortmain Hall. His critically acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder (Collins Crime Club, 2015) was a landmark study of Detective Fiction between the wars.

The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded as his magnum opus, Martin Edwards has thrown himself undaunted into the breadth and complexity of the genre to write an authoritative – and readable – study of its development and evolution. With crime fiction being read more widely read than ever around the world, and with individual authors increasingly the subject of extensive academic study, his expert distillation of more than two centuries of extraordinary books and authors – from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the novels of Patricia Cornwell – into one coherent history is an extraordinary feat and makes for compelling reading.

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Fiction

Edith and Kim by Charlotte Philby

Courtesy of HarperCollins. Another unsolicited one, but one I would have picked for myself even if I hadn’t been sent a copy. I’m intrigued by the fact that it’s written by Charlotte, granddaughter of probably the most famous British traitor of the last century, Kim Philby. Whether that will give her any additional insight is a rather moot point as far as I’m concerned, since Philby ran off to his masters in the USSR in 1963 and died in 1988. But we’ll see!

The Blurb says: To betray, you must first belong…

In June 1934, Kim Philby met his Soviet handler, the spy Arnold Deutsch. The woman who introduced them was called Edith Tudor-Hart. She changed the course of 20th century history.

Then she was written out of it.

Drawing on the Secret Intelligence Files on Edith Tudor-Hart, along with the private archive letters of Kim Philby, this finely worked, evocative and beautifully tense novel – by the granddaughter of Kim Philby – tells the story of the woman behind the Third Man.

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Historical Crime

The Bookseller of Inverness by SG MacLean

Courtesy of Quercus via NetGalley. I’ve had a mixed reaction to MacLean’s books – her Seeker series didn’t really work for me, but I did enjoy one of her Alexander Seaton books. This one is set in the aftermath of Culloden, which gives it the advantage that I will be familiar with the historical background, and the disadvantage that I’m bored with the Scottish obsession with the Jacobites. So it could go either way! Fingers crossed…

The Blurb says: After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drumossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades.

Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he’s searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night.

The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him – a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for – and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.

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Dalziel and Pascoe on Audio

Good Morning, Midnight by Reginald Hill read by Shaun Dooley 

Continuing my re-read of my favourite police procedural series via audio, this is the 21st book. While I’ve been irritated by the constant changing of the narrator in the later books, I did quite enjoy Shaun Dooley’s rather understated narration of the last book, once I got used to it. 

The Blurb says: Like father like son. But heredity seems to have gone a gene too far when Pal Maciver’s suicide in a locked room exactly mirrors that of his father ten years earlier.

In each case accusing fingers point towards Pal’s stepmother, the beautiful enigmatic Kay Kafka. But she turns out to have a formidable champion, Mid-Yorkshire’s own super-heavyweight, Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel. DCI Peter Pascoe, nominally in charge of the investigation, finds he is constantly body-checked by his superior as he tries to disentangle the complex relationships of the Maciver family.

At first these inquiries seem local and domestic. What really happened between Pal and his stepmother? And how has key witness and exotic hooker Dolores, Our Lady of Pain, contrived to disappear from the face of Mid-Yorkshire?

Gradually, however, it becomes clear that the fall-out from Pal’s suicide spreads far beyond Yorkshire. To London, to America. Even to Iraq. But the emotional epicentre is firmly placed in mid-Yorkshire where Pascoe comes to learn that for some people the heart too is a locked room, and in there it is always midnight.

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NB All blurbs and covers taken from Goodreads, Amazon UK or Audible UK.

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So…what do you think? Are you tempted?