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This tote bag with one of my favorite (and most often used) quotations from all of literature comes along with the complete set of the Melville House novellas. I've read nine of them, but some so long ago I need to read them again, and I own copies of six of them, a couple so old I dare not touch them or like the mummy of a pharaoh they might disintegrate. Another gem I found at Thomas' My Porch.
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Where Memories Lie by Deborah Crombie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The roots of the mystery in this, the 12th book in the Gemma Jones and Duncan Kincaid series by Deborah Crombie, lie in Nazi Germany and the escape from the Nazis of Gemma’s friend Dr Erika Rosenthal and her husband David. Her father was a well-known jeweler and he sent with her his masterpiece, a diamond brooch, which disappeared during the escape.
When a friend spots this diamond piece in an auction house catalog, Erika calls her friend Gemma to ask a favor: find out how the brooch came to be for sale. When the young clerk who introduced the current owner to the auction house is killed in a hit-and-run accident that was no accident, Gemma becomes interested in the murder of Ericka’s husband years ago.
This is a fine example of Crombie’s skill at pacing the plot and developing her characters without slowing down the story.
A particularly good review of the book is here at Nan’s blog, Letters from a Hill Farm.
2011 No 124
The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Steve Wick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Germany, from 1934 to 1940 was both the best place in the world for a reporter to be posted and the worse. There was so much going on: the Nazis were becoming more powerful and more violent, they were clearly remilitarizing, and they had begun systematically persecuting the Jews. One crisis after another was created by Hitler: occupation of the Rhineland, dismissal of the terms of the Versailles treaty, invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg Laws, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg, the fall of France, the bombing of Berlin by the Allies.
William L Shirer was there during all of it, first as a print journalist for the International News Service and eventually as one of the first CBS radio news journalists, working with Edward R Murrow. He broadcast from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Danzig, Compiegne – wherever news was being made. But fear of the Nazis was extensive and it was difficult to get people to tell him the truth of what was really going on. German censorship was extreme, with every word printed in US media being perused by the Nazis and stern warnings given when correspondents criticized Hitler or his government. Numerous journalists were thrown out of the country.
When Shirer began his historic radio broadcasts, the first news broadcasts sent live to the US, the censorship was worse. A censor went over every word Shirer spoke on the air and he was reduced to using a sarcastic tone, a pause, emphasis on a word, and other subtleties to attempt to convey the truth about what was happening in Europe to the American listening public. On occasion he refused to report what was clearly propaganda, such as the purported preparations in 1940 for an invasion of England. Troops and materiel were moving to the west but Shirer noted there were no boats, no naval vessels with which to transport men and equipment. He realized the Germans wanted the Allies to believe they were about to invade when to Shirer they obviously were not.
Difficult as his professional life was, Shirer’s personal life became one of worry and loneliness. He lived in Vienna with his wife, Tess, when they were first married but in the middle of the Anschluss she went into labor, Shirer was out of the city, she required a Caesarean, and their doctor, a Jew, disappeared. His wife became critically ill and required another surgery and only by moving her to a convent in the Vienna woods were they able to entice the doctor to return, at the risk of his life, to perform it. Tess and the baby moved to Geneva and Shirer got away to visit them as often as he could, but that was not often enough. Eventually he arranged for them to travel across France to Spain and from there to Lisbon and on to America.
Steve Wick, who is a reporter himself, portrays these adventures and Shirer’s mental state – a combination of excitement, worry, depression, fear, and loneliness - using Shirer’s books and his diaries, which he was able to sneak out of the country when he finally left in December 1940 as the Germans were preparing a case accusing him of being a spy. Shirer went on to write his monumental book about Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which was for many years the most popular and widely regarded (except among academic historians) history of the period in the US.
I borrowed this book from the library about 10:30 Monday and I finished it Wednesday mid-afternoon. It is a rich tale of the life of a reporter, writing from a viewpoint in the middle of world-shattering events, struggling to maintain ethical standards, and almost overwhelmed by the evil and destruction around him, but unable to report most of it to the free world.
2011 No 123
Water Like a Stone by Deborah Crombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This 11th Deborah Crombie mystery featuring Gemma Jones and Duncan Kincaid takes place on the canals and canal boats of Cheshire. One of the things I like about Crombie’s books is that they introduce me to different parts of London and of England and they explore subjects like distilling, firefighting, or in this case canal boating.
Gemma and Duncan have taken a long weekend to visit his parents in the country where he grew up. Things grow tense as they realize his sister is in a deteriorating marriage. Toby and Kit, their respective sons, explore their new surroundings and Kit falls for his lovely cousin, a girl with some problems that threaten to engulf him.
This was not as clever as some of the plots in recent book in the series, but the development of character and the country and canal descriptions make up for anything lost in the story.
2011 No 122
Poirot Investigates (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Watching the many episodes of the TV adaptation of Poirot mysteries I was puzzled to see “based on a story by Agatha Christie” in the credits of many of them. I had read all of Agatha Christie’s novels and these stories were definitely not among them.
Now I know where they came from. Poirot Investigated, which I borrowed from the library thinking it was a novel, turns out to be a book of short stories and I hadn’t read it so I was in for a treat. The mystery stories originally appeared in a magazine in the early 1920s.
The stories are as varied as the novels. There’s a locked room jewel robbery in a grand hotel in the summer resort of Brighton. Timing is everything. There's a movie star with a diamond of unique and unparalleled beauty. Or is it? There's a delightful tale in which Poirot helps a potential heiress find a will hidden in her uncle's old house. She has one year to find it or she inherits nothing.
One of my favorites in this collection is “The Kidnapped Prime Minister,” published in 1923, in which a major peace conference is jeopardized by the disappearance of the prime minister. Poirot traces him from Downing Street through a series of adventures, including a mysterious shooting.
Another unusual story is “The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge,” in which Poirot is in bed with the flu and Hastings and Japp have to solve the mystery, which has an interesting twist, by reporting back to the ailing detective.
And of course there’s the famous mystery about a box of chocolates, in which Poirot relates a story about his days as a Belgian police detective.
There are 14 mysteries in all and Christie has managed in short story form to keep us guessing just as she does in her novels. All of the stories are told by Captain Hastings, a voice I particularly enjoy. His bumbling, continual falling in love, and unwitting assistance to the great detective are all delightful.
2011 No 121
A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It all starts when the landlady of the pension where Charlotte Bartlett and Lucy Honeychurch are staying in Florence gives them rooms overlooking the courtyard. When Charlotte, an old maid cousin who is the young Lucy’s chaperone, complains of it at dinner, a fellow English visitor, Mr Emerson, offers to exchange with them. He and his son have rooms with a view of the Arno.
After a good deal of false reluctance and huffy protest by Charlotte, the women exchange with the men. Lucy opens the shutters and is stunned by the beauty of the view that the Emersons have provided for her. One day some of the visitors go to a site overlooking the city for a picnic and seeing her alone in a field of violets, young George Emerson impulsively kisses Lucy. Charlotte has arrived just in time to see this insult and fearing Lucy’s mother will be irate at Charlotte’s carelessness begs Lucy never to tell her mother or anyone else about this kiss.
Lucy returns home and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, an aesthete who begins immediately to tell her what to think, what to want, what to love. Lucy is restless under this constraint but it isn’t until George Emerson and his father move to their town that she finds her engagement intolerable. Cecil, she says, is a room without a view.
This book club reading is a much more optimistic novel than Howard’s End, which I read with the 22nd Avenue Book club recently, but it is about the same things: class differences and the difficulty of overcoming them, the rapid changes in England at the time (A Room with a View was published in 1908 and Howard’s End in 1910), honesty with oneself about what one really believes and what one perceives as true as opposed to what society tells us we should believe and the immense difficulty of living through the muddles we create in our lives and of making our way into a sunlit clearing – or into a room with a view.
2011 No 120
A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s always risky to re-read something you really enjoyed and thought was first rate when you first read it 25 years before. My sister suggested it would be fun to re-read Sue Grafton’s alphabetical mysteries together and so I got a copy for my Kindle and spent a few hours reacquainting myself with Santa Teresa, CA. It was a good move.
I had not remembered how well Grafton’s books are written and I had forgotten how slowly and carefully she builds Kinsey Millhone’s character and that of her landlord and friend, Henry. I was reminded how much I enjoy her reaching into the cluttered back seat of her VW and finding almost anything she wants from a toothbrush to a handgun. And her descriptions of the many pots and cups of coffee ingested in the course of one of these mystery stories make my mouth water.
This first in the series starts with a sort of Chandleresque office scene wherein a woman appears and asks Kinsey to find out who killed her husband eight years previously. The kicker is the woman has spent the last eight years in jail, having been found guilty of the crime. There are lots of suspects, some more likely than others, and as Kinsey narrows them down to two or three, the reader inches to the edge of her chair in anticipation of the denouement, which in Grafton’s books often involves the use of guns, knives, and other dangerous implements.
Give this first in the series a try and see if you don’t find yourself wanting more of Kinsey, Henry, and the balmy weather of Santa Teresa.
2011 No 119
