March 13, 2009
I’ve just finished Ellory’s ‘A Quiet belief in Angels’ and thought it was fab.
It is a murder mystery but it is the story of the main protagonist’s life and how these murders affect him. We do not follow a detective but the main character Joseph becomes the detective. Set in pre-war small town America and moving through into the final present day it is a story of tragedy overcome many times.
So, on to crime writing in the 40’s, a list of recommended writers with few names that I recognise. There’s Cornell Woolrich, Vera Caspary, David Goodis, John franklin Bardin, and Edmund Crispin. Fredric brown, Josephine tey, Cyril hare and Ross MacDonald.
Interesting stuff and some interesting authors, the last of whom, John macdonald wrote 78 books and 500 stories over his forty year career.
March 10, 2009
So after yesterday’s look at early crime writing I’m gonna look at the suggested reading for the 1930s which was the real rise of the genre after Agatha Christie’s first books. Must read crime novels of this period are a wealth of great reading.
Dashiell Hammett, Francis Iles, Paul cain, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickinson Carr, Rex Stout, James M. Cain, Gladys Mitchell, Michael Innes, Cameron McCabe, Nicholas Blake, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler and James Hadley Chase make up this famous litany of crime writing.
Pretty impressive set of books there, and a good few to keep an eye out for in the second-hand bookshops.
March 9, 2009
Well since my last post I have read Joseph O’Neill’s ‘Netherland’.
Yeh, it was good, but not as good as I’d expected after all the rave reviews.
I’ve been glancing through a copy of my husbands’ ‘100 must-read crime novels.’ Quite interesting, the number of authors that I was unfamiliar with and will follow this theme in a few subsequent posts. The novels of the 1800s cover the development of the genre of ‘crime novel’ with Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849) and his ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ written in the 1940s up to his death, Wilkie Collins ‘The Moonstone’ in 1868 and then Arthur Conan Doyle.
Between 1900 and 1930 the book chooses Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room ‘ (1907), G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Innocence of Father Brown’ (1911), E. C. Bentley’s ‘Trent’s Last Case’ (1913) and Agatha Christie.
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March 4, 2009
The LA Times has announced their book prize nominees-winner at the end of April.
Fiction:
Sebastian Barry, "The Secret Scripture", Richard Price, "Lush Life", Marilynne Robinson, "Home"
Joan Silber, "The Size of the World", Marisa Silver, "The God of War".
First Fiction:Uwem Akpan, "
Say You’re One of Them", Zoe Ferraris, "
Finding Nouf", Sadie Jones, "The Outcast"
Roma Tearne, "Mosquito",
David Wroblewski, "
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle"
Mystery/Thriller:
Colin Harrison, "The Finder", Michael Koryta, "Envy the Night", Simon Lewis, "Bad Traffic: An Inspector Jian Novel", Nina Revoyr, "The Age of Dreaming", Tom Rob Smith, "Child 44" .
A nice list introducing some unfamiliar authors to keep a look out for. I’m coming to the end of ‘A Good German’ and have really enjoyed it. The speech jumps off the page making the scenery around Berlin and the characters easy to imagine. It is a thriller, a love story, a historical novel all rolled into one. You don’t race through it- I felt like my progress was slow but the details are all essential and you certainly don’t scan pages. It’s 430+ pages and my husband commented that the type was small-maybe that’s why it’s taken me a long time!
February 27, 2009
The long-list for the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was published today;
Sasa Stanisic ‘How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone’ (translated from German)
Alexander Ahndoril ‘The Director’ (Swedish)
Celine Curiol ‘Voiceover’ (French)
Gyorgy Dragoman ‘The White King’ (Hungarian)
Thomas Glavinic, ‘Night Work’ (German)
Linn Ullmann ‘A Blessed Child’ (Norwegian)
Ismail Kadare ‘The Siege’ (Albanian via French)
Ma Jian ‘Beijing Coma’ (Chinese)
Eshkol Nevo ‘Homesick’ (Hebrew)
Yoko Ogawa ‘The Diving Pool’ (Japanese)
Evelio Rosero ‘The Armies’ (Spanish)
Sjon ‘The Blue Fox’ (Icelandic)
Dag Solstad ‘Novel 11, Book 18′ (Norwegian)
Juan Gabriel Vasquez ‘The Informers’ (Spanish)
AB Yehoshua ‘Friendly Fire’ (Hebrew)
Jose Eduardo Agualusa ‘My Father’s Wives’ (Portuguese)
My progress with ‘The Good German’ has improved-I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it but the description of Berlin post-war and the way people were living along with the British/American/Russian control of the city is fascinating. It has developed a kind of thriller edge to it now with the unexplained death of a young soldier so watch this space…
February 26, 2009
‘Netherland by Joseph O’Neill has won the 2009 Pen/Faulkner Award, a US book award. I don’t know why I’ve shied off this post 9/11 story; I think it’s all the comments about cricket-but maybe now I’ll read it.
In the meantime I’ve started ‘The Good German’ by Joseph Kanon. Seems good so far. Set in the immediate aftermath of the second WW in bombed Berlin as a US writer returns to find a woman (Lena) with whom he was having an affair.
February 25, 2009
Naomi Klein has won the Warwick Prize and £50,000 for her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’. The Guardian tells us how “the book charts Kleins four year investigation into moments of collective crisis, such as 9/11 and Hurrican Katrina, dubbing the ways in which they are exploited by global corporations ‘disaster capitalism’.” Good stuff and next on the book-buying list.
I’m half way through Sadie Jones ‘The Outcast’ and it’s marvellous; so sad, tragic and just tugs at you for the main protagonist Lewis who having witnessed his mother’s drowning at just ten is left with a distant father recently back from the war and a new step-mother who lacks the confidence to give Lewis what he really needs which is just love.
Well deserving of the various book award nominations/prizes, I only wish I read it earlier. On the back cover Joan Bakewell sums it up expertly “She writes in beautiful prose of terrible events, demonstrating how love denied brings brutal consequences.”
February 24, 2009
Jennifer Johnston’s novel ‘How Many Miles to Babylon’ published in 1974, was supposedly "something of a shock to the Irish literary and cultural system" according to Des Kenny in ‘101 Irish Books you must read’, being as it were about the Irish response to the First World War which was little written about. I must say that I had not heard of this author until I read Des’s great book and reading the bio about Johnston I see that she was Booker shortlisted in 1977 for ‘Shadows on our Skin’ and won the 1979 Whitbread Award for ‘The Old Jest’.
Although all written in the 70s, Johnston is still writing and published a new book last year, ‘Foolish Mortals
February 23, 2009
What a great book! How had I never been brought to this book before? I’m going to keep a record of a coment on philosophy that I particularly like;
"He [Bradley] defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that’s philosophy."
Great stuff!
I’ve tried to read Iain Banks’ ‘The Steep Approach to Garbadale’ this weekend but just couldn’t get into it-I wonder should I bother to press on? Anyway, that one abandoned I picked up ‘Brighton Rock’ which I’d started a few months back but got distracted with study reading.
It’s great and the subtitle on my front cover of "Violence and gang warfare in the dark seedy underworld of 1930s Brighton" is a great sum-up. Of course it contains one of the great first lines, much quoted, of "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him." Brilliant.
I’m now reading Aldoux Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’,
also like ‘Brighton Rock’ written in the 1930s and worryingly accurate in its portayal of a future society of test-tube babies, no-aging serums and visits to see primitive cultures in their natural state (who’s that gezer who goes into the jungle etc and takes part in all the native customs?-televised for sophisticates like us to gawp at.)
