Death At the Sign of the Rook

Yet another murder mystery! But Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels (this is number 6) are a very different beast from Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet stories. There are a couple of murders, and a handful of near misses, but the real mystery centres on theft rather than murder, and the real pleasure of the story lies in Atkinson's witty, wandering, but tightly plotted style. Her characters loop in seemingly aimless spirals, playing with words, following diversions, colliding in implausible coincidences ('A coincidence is an explanation waiting to happen,' says Jackson Brodie), but Atkinson draws the strings tight by the end and ties up every dangling thread.

Death At the Sign of the Rook is full of in-jokes and references for fans of cosy murder mysteries, echoing Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, the cliches of Cluedo, and even newcomer Richard Osman, and probably others who went over my head. There are some lovely characters to linger with here: a vicar who has lost his faith and his voice; a drifting, depressed ex-soldier; a haughty, delightfully sterotyped lady of the manor. But for the regular reader, it's wonderful to be reunited with amiable detective Jackson Brodie and sharp little Reggie Chase. 

The Sign of the Rook has a feeling of belonging to an earlier time; though there are references to the pandemic and pocket trackers, it doesn't seem totally anchored in the modern world. But I'm not complaining.
 

Inspector Thanet Omnibus 2

I hadn't intended to return to the Inspector Thanet well so soon, but the book I wanted to borrow from the Athenaeum wasn't there, so I grabbed this instead. We are now well into the mid-80s, though the timeline seems to move more swiftly within the novels -- Thanet's daughter has aged ten years by the end of Dead On Arrival, despite only five years passing in publication time (Simpson could really churn them out! Kudos).

Again, though I do enjoy the mysteries themselves, the real appeal is in the social detail. Close Her Eyes (1984) features a fifteen year old victim, and it would be a brave author today who would describe an abused teenager as 'pure evil.' Last Seen Alive (1985) opens with a visit to the town by Princess Diana, at the peak of her popularity and before her marriage to Charles broke down. It also, rather yuckily, features incest, and the social panic de jour, children sniffing glue. Dead On Arrival (1986) (a title which, by the way, has nothing to do with the plot) breaks one of the Golden Age detective rules by centring on identical twins, though perhaps it doesn't strictly break the rule as we know about the existence of both twins from the beginning. Thanet's daughter enters a competition akin to Junior Masterchef, with the gorgeously eighties menu of Pork Chops With Mint and Lemon Flummery.

Looking forward to volume three! But perhaps not quite yet.
 

Look Back With Mixed Feelings

I've now discovered that there are actually four volumes in Dodie Smith's delightful autobiography; I think Look Back With Mixed Feelings might be my favourite title, though. This second book in the series covers Smith's late adolescence and early twenties, a period when she was training at 'the Academy' (later better known as RADA) and beginning to make her way in the theatre. You would barely guess that the First World War was going on during these years, and Smith herself admits to feeling guilty for giving the conflict so little thought. Like a typical teenager, she is mostly preoccupied with falling in and out of love and trying to find work. 

Probably the most important event for Smith during these years was the death of her beloved mother. After this, Smith drifted out of her family's orbit, though the band of Manchester uncles were as loving and supportive as ever, often coming to the rescue with badly needed funds. Again, like any young person, Smith turned to her 'Gang' of friends, mostly fellow members of the Three Arts Club, a home from home-cum-boarding house for women artists, writers and actors, which sounds rather like living in college, though I didn't think much of the cheap cubicle option, windowless, with the partitions not even reaching the ground!

There's much discussion of cocoa made on gas rings, theatrical 'digs' with sympathetic landladies, stage mishaps, flitting from one play to another (or, sadly, in Smith's case, not getting work for ages) and it's remarkable to reflect on this vanished world where even in the thick of war, plays were being constantly mounted, toured and even taken to the battlefront. There must have been thousands of people working in the theatre, and of course Noel Streatfeild also spent years in the same milieu (they were almost exactly the same age, I wonder if they ever came across each other?)

I've already nabbed Look Back in Astonishment (another great title) but incredibly, the usually reliable Athenaeum doesn't have the final volume, Look Back With Gratitude. It's just possible I might have a Christmas present on the way...

Windswept

I bought Annabel Abbs' Windswept: Why Women Walk for my friend Christine, who is a woman who walks herself, and enjoys histories of overlooked women, especially creative ones. Now she's lent it back to me and I loved it (maybe I really wanted to buy it for myself, let's be honest).

Abbs explores some forgotten stories of women who found freedom, strength, consolation and creative inspiration in walking, or what our American friends would call 'hiking.' Most of these women walked along rivers and across mountains at a time when long-distance walking was considered an exclusively masculine preserve. Georgia O'Keeffe gloried in the wide empty plains of Texas, while Simone de Beauvoir soothed her soul by walking through French forests. I had heard of Nan Shepherd's writing about the Scottish wilds, and seen her quoted by other writers I admire, like Robert Macfarlane, but I hadn't known her biography: she was one of the 1920s so-called 'surplus' women after the Great War, who would have expected to marry and have children. Instead, she taught, and walked, and wrote, though her writing wasn't fully appreciated till after her death. Painters, writers, philosophers, all found a new sense of self and purpose through walking.

At one point Abbs talks about the strangely liberating, sense-enhancing experience of night walking, an experience that is too often denied to women, barred to us for our own safety. When you think of all the men down through history who have enjoyed the thrill and oddness of walking at night, it's so unfair that this is something that most women will never be able to do with the same sense of freedom and power. I remember as a student the joys of walking the streets around the university by night -- it was a pretty safe area, but we never went alone.

Windswept is an invigorating and thoughtful book, and it makes me think I ought to get out in nature more. I'm relishing my short suburban morning walks, but perhaps I need to strike out into something more challenging...

Atomic Habits

I had James Clear's bestselling self-help book, Atomic Habits, on hold at the library for so long, I can't remember when or why I originally reserved it -- there were dozens of people in the queue ahead of me. But lo and behold, when my elder daughter saw me reading it, she said, 'You know I've got that book somewhere, Mum...' (Unfortunately, 'somewhere' means in storage on the other side of town, so not that useful after all.)

Various members of the family asked why I was reading it, as I'm notorious in this house as having any number of habits -- morning walks, crossword, Duolingo, yoga, tea, no TV before 6pm, no Candy Crush before 4pm. For someone who works flexibly at home, I actually have a pretty tight daily schedule. But perhaps that's not so paradoxical; it's easy to drift off track without guard rails.

Atomic Habits is a clear, easy read, and a lot of what Clear presents is common sense. He describes 'habit stacking' where you add a desired new habit to an existing one (eg take your meds at the same time as you make your morning cuppa). He points out that you want to try to make good habits easy, attractive, obvious and satisfying (put out your running gear the night before, reward yourself for sucess), while bad habits, the ones you want to lose, should be difficult, invisible, unsatisfying and unattractive (lock yourself out of social media and let a friend guard your passwords, put the naughty snacks at the back of the fridge and the healthy stuff at the front). And you need to be patient. Even the best daily habits won't bring results overnight.

I must admit that I borrowed Atomic Habits mostly so I could feel smug, and after finishing it, I do. It turns out I am pretty good at forming habits. But the difference between me and James Clear is that I'm not going to make a ten million dollar career out of it!
 

What Katy Did Revisited

 Here are a trio of books that I haven't read for a LONG time. Of course I was initially drawn to What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next because the heroine shared my name! I knew they were 'old' books but I don't think I realised just how old they were when I first read them: What Katy Did was published in 1872, so they were over a hundred years when I first discovered them at the Mt Hagen library, and they are 150 years old now.

It was fun to revisit them, but they haven't aged particularly well, and they are of interest now mainly as historical documents. There's not a lot of plot in any of the books. In the first volume we meet Katy as a harum-scarum twelve year old, who is crippled when she falls off a swing (which she was warned not to swing on) and learns to be patient and motherly during the four long years when she's confined to her bed, inspired by her saintly Cousin Helen. It's not quite as saccharine as it sounds but it's also not massively action-packed. Miraculously, despite not getting any physio or treatment whatsoever, Katy regains her ability to walk -- not sure how plausible this is!

My favourite was always What Katy Did At School, because Katy and her sister Clover, sent away for a year at a distant boarding school, make friends with a lively, mischievous girl called Rose Red who gets into all kinds of scrapes. I was mystified but intrigued by the habits of the 'young ladies,' but couldn't understand why they were 'ladies' while the boys in the school next door were 'students.' Naturally goody two shoes Katy gets up a society against flirting, but otherwise it's mostly wholesome fun. I vividly remembered the sisters' Christmas box, packed with delicious things to eat and lots of lovely homemade presents.

Lastly came What Katy Did Next, in which Katy gets to travel to Europe as a companion to a young widow and her daughter. It's mostly a travelogue, which I actually quite enjoyed this time round, as I've now visited most of their destinations myself. It reads very much as if it's adapted from the author's own travel diary -- weird to read about the Colosseum being overgrown with ivy! The main event is the illness of the young daughter, which also stuck with me -- she had to have her hair cut off, and her doll's hair, too, while Katy scours Rome for a feather pillow and tries to vain to obtain satisfactory beef tea. Happily, the widow's hot brother does the right thing and falls in love with Katy's nursing skills, so we all know what Katy will do after that...

Given their extreme antiquity, the Katy books hold up fairly well. I wonder it they were inspired by the success of Little Women, which was published a few years before? They are actually less heavy-handed on the moral front, though the characters are less vividly drawn than Alcott's. But I'm not sure if I would have loved them so much if Katy wasn't called Katy.

No Church in the Wild

I heard Murray Middleton's novel recommended on the ABC's Book Shelf programme but didn't know or had forgotten the details of what it was about. I'm so out of the loop that I didn't realise No Church in the Wild is a rap song (my daughter was able to play it to me). This novel plunged me into a world that is close to my own geographically, set in the housing towers of Flemington and Kensington in Melbourne's inner west, but a universe away in terms of experience. The casually racist police officer, the struggling high school teacher (okay, maybe I have come across a few of those), but above all the kids, flailing to keep their heads above the water of disadvantage, trauma and a society stacked against them, are people whose lives I don't ordinarily see.

No Church in the Wild loosely coheres around a planned trip to Kokoda, but the real drama lies in the quietly devastating revelations that Middleton almost buries in the midst of the kids' bragging, scheming and joking around. The ending made me catch my breath. This was a novel that I probably wouldn't have sought out, but I'm so glad that I read it.

Listen to the Nightingale

In addition to being an extraordinary writer, Rumer Godden made her living for years as a ballet teacher and ran her own dancing school in India. So it's not surprising that several of her children's books are set in dancing schools and theatres. Published in 1992, Listen to the Nightingale is a late-written novel, and it has an old-fashioned feel. It's rather like reading a literary Noel Streatfeild story. 

Lottie is an orphan who lives with her aunt, who is wardrobe mistress for a small but superior ballet company, Holbein's. Her mother was a ballerina (natch) and she's been taught by Madame Holbein herself (natch), and (natch) she makes her way into the elite ballet school, Queen's Chase. There is drama involving a rescued (or stolen?) dog, a duplicitous best friend, and a naughty boy who bullies her but doesn't really mean it. It's a charming fairy tale that finishes with a neat happy ending, very comforting to read.

There are poignant moments, too, and it's not all roses in the garden. There are sympathetic but also mean characters, there is anguish and loss as well as triumph and love. It doesn't really feel like a story set in the 1990s, but it belongs in a kind of timeless 'ballet world' where it's perpetually the 1950s, ballet dancers are celebrities, teachers are strict but kind and children wear cloaks to school.
 

The Places In Between

I am a huge fan of Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell's podcast, The Rest is Politics, and though I naturally lean more toward Alistair's Labour perspective, I have come to love and respect Rory immensely. He is a man who likes tradition, a small-c conservative, and although he did serve as a Tory MP, he quit on a matter of principle (he wouldn't serve under Boris Johnson) and he is driven by a deep desire to make the world a better place, a stance which is usually associated with the progressive side of politics.

That's a very long-winded introduction to The Places In Between, which is a memoir of his 2001-2 walk across Afghanistan. He walked alone, a British man in a country where the British and American military were in occupation, from village to village through the mountains, grudgingly accepted overnight, fed most often on bread and tea, suffering from dysentery. He picked up a half-wild dog, Babur, who reluctantly accompanied him most of the way. His life was threatened periodically and he had to talk his way out of trouble. Everywhere he saw evidence of the devastation of war -- wounded fighters, burned villages, traumatised people. 

Rory recounts these events in a very matter-of-fact way, which only underscores his personal courage and determination. Also, he speaks eleven languages! And this Afghanistan walk was only part of a longer trek across India and Pakistan. Although the walk sounds absolutely grim, he says he fell in love with the country and the people, and later returned to set up a charity, Turquoise Mountain, in Kabul, to which he is still committed. There are whispers, as there were about Arthur Ransome, that he might have been a spy; if so, he reserves a discreet silence. He would certainly make a very good one.

Scar Town

Scar Town by Tristan Bancks was the this year's winner of the CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers, and it thoroughly deserved it. At first I thought the cover made this book seem more like a young adult title, but the three protagonists are all twelve or thirteen, which puts it firmly in the younger category. However, the themes and events of the story do lean into older territory, with the kids finding human bones and ill-gotten money in the first chapter.

The pace never slackens -- the action takes place over only a couple of days. The chapters are very short and punchy, perfect for reluctant readers, hauling you through the story with one cliff hanger after another. There are thrills and perils, bike chases, quite a bit of violence, family drama and buried secrets, as Will and his friends fight to solve a mystery and keep ahead of the bad guys.

I was interested to read in the author's note that Bancks first came up with this story idea back in 2009. The plot hinges on a body and some money hidden in a house which has been long-drowned at the bottom of a dam and only revealed as the water dries up during a drought. Meg McKinley used a similar device in her terrific book Surface Tension, and I also based part of Crow Country around a dried-up lake. There is something gripping about that image of the past, especially past wrongs, being covered up but eventually revealed -- irresistible to a writer's imagination! And I'm sure we all saw the same stories and images of revealed ruins during the millenial drought; but just look at the very different kinds of plots we came up with.

Dirrayawadha

Anita Heiss is a best selling, award winning Australian author. She also happens to be a Wiradyuri woman, and in Dirrayawadha (Rise Up) she explores the troubled, tragic history of colonisation around the Bathurst area, Wiradyuri country.

Dirrayawadha centres on a love story between a Wiradyuri woman, Miinaa, and an Irish convict, Dan O'Dwyer. But Dan and Miina work for a pair of white settlers, and Miinaa's brother is the famous warrior Windradyne, who led the First Nations resistance in the eighteenth century. Love, joy and loyalty are inextricably intertwined with brutality, loss and tragedy.

This is an important story, and we need more stories about colonised Australia that centre the First Nations point of view. Heiss also draws an interesting parallel between First Nations dispossession and  the history of Ireland, also violently colonised by the British. I'm not aware of any Irish political prisoners, like Dan, who could clearly see the comparison between the two, but it's a fascinating idea that gave me food for thought. Like Melissa Lukashenko's Edenglassie, this book also includes many First Nations words.

In some ways, Dirrayawadha adopts a modern sensibility, perhaps intentionally, which might help a wider readership more easily relate to the power dynamics of the historical situation. Expressions like hyped-up, maintaining autonomy, racism, culture, self-worth, and you don't get it might be anachronistic, but if they gain this novel more readers, I'll swallow it.

Look Back With Love

Good old Athenaeum comes up trumps again with this delightful memoir from Dodie Smith, author of I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Born in 1896, Dodie (Dorothy) grew up in Manchester in a big house surrounded by aunts, uncles and grandparents -- the ultimate only child experience. Her father died in her infancy, but a plethora of uncles filled the gap.

Are antique author childhood memoirs my favourite kind of book? This one was sheer pleasure. The combination of social history, psychology, family dynamics and richly amusing writing made it impossible to resist. Smith wryly recounts her early acting experiences, casting herself as Sleeping Beauty (a mistake, because she lies unconscious for most of the story) and writing her own plays (terrible). It's interesting that adult Dodie clearly sees her later play-writing and acting as her chief legacy, where I had only the dimmest notion of her work in theatre and love her books above all.

The Athenaeum also holds the other two volumes of her autobiography, gorgeously titled Look Back With Astonishment and Look Back With Mixed Feelings. I can hardly wait.
 

Highway 13

One of my favourite kinds of novel (is it a novel?) consists of short story collections where the stories are linked -- by a single character, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, or by a theme or an historical event, as is the case here. The twelve stories in Highway 13 revolve around a series of murders in the Australian bush, which bear striking parallels to the so-called Backpacker Murders executed by Ivan Milat. In Highway 13, the murderer is Paul Biga, of Polish extraction (Milat's father was Croatian), but his crimes are very similar -- hitchhikers and tourists picked up by the side of the road, taken into the forest and brutally murdered. I should add that neither the murderer or his crimes ever appear directly in any of the stories, but their off stage presence looms ever more powerfully because of it.

Highway 13 reminds us that the effects of crimes like these ripples out far beyond the victims themselves. We meet a 'tourist,' ghoulishly obsessed with the murders; true crime podcasters; someone who knew Biga's sister-in-law; the brother of a missing woman; one of Biga's neighbours; someone who managed to get away; a police officer who worked on the case. The stories swoop across the years, before and after the crimes were committed, and across continents.

I absolutely loved this book. Each story is beautifully written, shining a different light on something very dark: moving, clever and compassionate. Superb.

Joan Aiken Wolves Chronicles

My signed copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is one of my prized possessions. The rest of the Wolves series I picked up at library book sales or in secondhand bookshops -- they are definitely not the covers I would have chosen, especially The Cuckoo Tree, which has one of the most mediocre cover illustrations I have ever seen and is ironically, probably my favourite to read.

I'm not sure if I've ever read the series back to back. I read them a lot in early high school, except for Black Hearts, which was the only one my school library didn't have, so I was never properly introduced to Dido Twite. She is a fabulous character -- smart, resourceful, brave and loyal, frank and decided -- and the series really takes off after her appearance.

There are so many things I love about these books. I adore the alternate history timeline, where the pesky Hanoverians are always conspiring to remove good king James Tudor-Stuart III from the throne and replace him with one of the Georges. I love the way Aiken writes about creature comforts, in what is quite a harsh world. Sylvia sleeping in a donkey-cart filled with geese and patchwork quilts remains a vivid image of warm, snuggly comfort. The food is evocative, too, whether it's clam chowder or huckle-my-buff (it's a real drink!), it always sounds super delicious and sustaining.

The plots are delightfully lively and inventive -- giant cannons to shoot from Nantucket to London, pink whales, wolves breaking into railways carriages, hot air balloons sailing over London, St Paul's Cathedral mounted on rollers to slide into the Thames during the coronation of King Richard IV.

But the real joy of these stories is the exuberant, intoxicating, rollicking play with language. Many of the words were unknown to me when I first read them, some of them are unknown to me even now, many of them no doubt originated in Aiken's own imagination, but nevertheless they always make perfect sense.

"This is a fubsy kind o' set-out,' Dido said to herself. "Still, no use bawling over botched butter -- have to make the best of it. I'd as soon not tangle overmuch wi' that old witch next door though. Only thing is, how are we going to get summat to eat? Oh well, maybe old Lady Tegleaze'll send some soup and jelly -- or cheese and apples -- no use fretting ahead. Queer old cuss she is, too -- all those rooms in that great workus of a place, and she has to send us to a ken that ain't much bigger than a chicken-coop."

There are other books featuring Dido and other members of her family whose existence I was previously unaware of, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for them in future.

Inspector Thanet Omnibus 1

Recommended by Susan Green as a classic, undemanding murder mystery, Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet proved to be exactly what was promised on the tin. My Athenaeum library has all five omnibuses, fifteen novels in all, and I must say, having raced through the first three, The Night She Died, Six Feet Under and Puppet for A Corpse, I am quite tempted to settle in with the next twelve and a cup of hot chocolate.

While I do enjoy the pure puzzle aspect of a murder mystery, though I'm not very good at figuring out whodunnit, perhaps the greatest pleasure for me lies in the snapshot of social mores that crime novels provide. This is why I love reading Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers so much -- there is nothing like a murder novel, with its high stakes, to spotlight social anxieties and pressures of the time.

The 1980s don't seem so long ago to me but these three novels, published between 1981 and 1983, were very much of their time. Luke Thanet's wife wants to go back to work now that their youngest child is starting school -- the fact that Thanet would even regard this decision as worth arguing about speaks volumes about how the world has changed in the last forty years. One story featured a deserter from the Second World War -- they are all long gone by now. The descriptions of clothes and furnishings are often hilarious. Most strikingly, the things that characters regard as utterly shameful secrets -- mental illness, male sterility, infidelity -- are much more accepted now and openly acknowledged (even if not exactly enjoyed). Even the reason why Dorothy Simpson gave up writing novels (RSI) seems quite dated!

I must note in passing that Thanet's small daughter Bridget is described as having sci-fi show Blake's 7 as 'one of her favourites.' I devoured Blake's 7 as a teen in the 80s but I can't approve of it as being suitable for an eight year old!

It is rather nice to have a detective who is so resolutely ordinary, rather than, I dunno, a poetry-writing aristocrat or a Belgian egg. Thanet's humdrum personal life allows the crimes to shine. I'm looking forward to his further adventures.