James Hadley Chase - Hardly Chased Today

 I cannot remember which I first read: a Raymond Chandler or a James Hadley Chase. Both write racy thrillers. However, while Chandler has received significant literary attention, posterity has not pursued Chase.  All I can proffer from memory is that, while Raymond Chandler had exquisite constructions which live on in the mind, the James Hadley Chase novels have not left much lingering.

Except for one story. It was in my early undergraduate years that I finally found my sort of friend. I lost touch with her after she left town to pursue studies in a big city. And I never quite found that kind of friendship later. But it was she who told me about Miss Shumway Waves Her Wand.

Naturally, a story about a bandit who becomes a sausage because of a curse and who is then eaten by a dog which then turns into a talking pooch is bound to fascinate. Well, let's admit that I have a taste for humour, for one thing. And, for another, whacky wit is irresistible to me. But it's not really everyone's cup of tea.  Most prefer the sensational tales of money hungry men and women and the bitter ends they meet.

That is what Chase basically offers (aside from the abovementioned sausage story). 

But who is Chase, you ask. Now, that is a charming story!

Like today's Lee Child, Chase was British. Like Child, Chase wrote about American gangsters. But how he came to do it is yet another fascinating tale. A salesman for books, Chase discovered that a particular novel was so well borrowed at the local library that it was always off the shelves. This gem was The Postman Always Rings Twice.

So Chase decided to pen some purple prose on his own and thus was born No Orchids for Miss Blandish. 

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (film) poster - Fair Use

And then he churned out one pot boiler after the other. Some were made into films but no one seems to rave about those. 

His novels were devoured around the world - India had or still has faithful fans. However, the Americans were not at all amused that a Brit made money out of their lurid lives. Oddly, the French have a fancy for Chase, it is reported. Which brings us to the similar phenomena with Harlan Coben. Whatever the je-ne-sais-quoi of a Hadley Chase, we must admit that the French have good taste.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. So why not nibble at a James Hadley Chase today? I bet you won't be able to stop till you devour the book and that you might not stop till you've munched through any Chase that you can find. 

A Labyrinthine Tale Set in Crete - The Moon-Spinners

A Nymph In The Forest - Charles-Amable Lenoir, via Wikimedia Commons

Greek myths are enchanting. Outside the European world, those with an interest in natural phenomena stumble upon this wealth as it was used to name flora, fauna, stars and more. The legends bring the night sky to life more powerfully than any other myths from elsewhere. 

In Greece, the beautiful island of Crete is rich with its own legends. 

Theseus Slaying Minotaur (1843), bronze sculpture by Antoine-Louis Barye, via Wikimedia Commons

Once upon a time, a queen of Crete fell in love with a bull and the result was a Minotaur with a bull's tail. Ashamed, the king had a craftsman and his son, Daedalus and Icarus, build a labyrinth, a maze, to keep the beast. There the Minotaur remained, merrily eating young men and women who were sent in to him every year. In time, a hero, Theseus, kills the Minotaur.

Since Daedalus helped Theseus handle the maze, he and his son were so persecuted by the angry king that they tried to escape by making wings with which to fly away. Of course, the wings melted and the story is tragic.

It is against a background of such legends that Mary Stewart creates her Moon-Spinners:

They’re naiads — you know, water-nymphs. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and onto these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff... all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter and the tides are still . . .’ ...

‘Then, on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles, into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising from the sea, just a thin curved thread, reappearing in the sky. Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moonspinners start their work once more, to make the night safe for hunted things . . .’

Click on Preview, above, to peek into the book 

Nicola Ferris works for the British embassy at Athens. She wants to have a peaceful holiday away from it all and heads for Crete. However, from day one, she's thrown into the arms of adventure. In the form of Mark, a wounded Englishman. He got mixed up with some local trouble. Now, Nicola has to shelter him from dangerous men who are after his life. But that's not all. The villains have Mark's brother, a teenager.

Nicola takes up the challenge like any other Mary Stewart heroine would and we can look forwards to some very exciting pages. There are knife attacks and tense chases through the Cretan landscapes as limping Mark and team scramble to hide from rowdy locals. 

Landscape near the village of Kera (Crete, Greece.)Marc Ryckaert, Wikimedia Commons

There bathed his honourable wounds, and dressedHis manly members in the immortal vest

From The 

Iliad, by Alexander Pope

After attending to Mark's injuries, our heroine goes back to the village where she has booked a room. Nicola finds out that the little village is not as innocent as it looks. She discovers the kidnappers and Mark's brother. The brave young lady defeats the plots of the gang and is rewarded with true love.

The Moon Spinners manages to delight genre lovers with great action scenes and it will also be enjoyed by botanists or horticulturalists.

As the Cretan windmills spin their arms, so Mary Stewart spins for us a tale as mythical as anything Homer wrote. Some of her 'legends', however, can be upsetting for those who are not British. In her times, Greeks were considered rather rowdy and barbaric in person. Such old fashioned ideas need not affect the reader as they are a charming way to see what was, to appreciate what is and to shape what shall be.

We must, for example, look at our own society, in India, and wonder if we are indeed rowdy and vengeful as colonial 'legends' paint us. It is entirely in our hands to decide to fit in with or reject stereotypes. 

Windmills on Crete. Michael, Wikimedia Commons

The Moon-Spinners is a wonderful way to enjoy Crete and Greece on a budget. Not many have money to dash around, visiting distant marvelous places! A book costs less than a tourist jaunt and works almost as well.

As added bonus, the novel helps us have a quick glimpse of English literature with quotes from Pope, Wilde, Keats and more!

There is a film of the book. Some don't seem to like it but I remember enjoying it. Perhaps you should watch the film first and then read the book. Sadly, I can't see it sold on Amazon India. Perhaps Netflix will oblige?

Besides the film, there are audio book versions. Here's an excerpt. Note that the narrator does tend to go blah blah for ages before reading from the story.  

The Ivy Tree - Creeps, Grips and Enthralls

The Ivy Tree, set in the bleak British Isles, opens chapters with verses. 

AngelikaGraczyk 

A North Country maid up to London had strayed,
Although with her nature it did not agree.
She wept and she sighed and she bitterly cried,
“I wish once again in the North I could be.
Oh the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in my own country.”

17th Century Song

Mary Grey, a Canadian, has moved to England. Things are not going too well for her. One Sunday finds her walking along Hadrian’s Wall, all alone.

Part of Hadrian's Wall - Jamesflomonosoff , Public Domain 

Lost in her sad thoughts, she hears someone call out.

Annabel!

It's a handsome but dangerous looking man. He is Connor, it turns out, and he seems to think she is his cousin who disappeared. And just before she vanished, her grandfather was going to leave his wealth to her.

Connor, now convinced that Mary is not Annabel, suggests Mary act like Annabel so that they can get the inheritance and share it.  It's not that easy as Mary is the opposite of Annabel in many ways. She hates horses, for example, while the Annabel loved them.

And how can she avoid horses when Matthew Winslow, Connor's uncle and Annabel's grandfather, owns Whitescar, a farm. He's had a stroke and is near death. Even so, the old man is controlling. This is, perhaps, why ruthless Connor, the farm's manager, is bad tempered.

Beanley North Side Farm
by Russel Wills - CC BY-SA 2.0

Connor has a loyal sister who would like him to inherit. And there's Julie, Annabel's cousin, and her boyfriend, Donald, an archaeologist working on Roman excavations. She knows that Annabel had an affair with Adam, a wealthy neighbor.

There are many twists and turns in this suspenseful romantic thriller which the reader cannot anticipate though the heroine is the narrator.

Double acting is a big thing in Indian films. Even around the world, people love stories about mistaken identity and twins and other doppelgangers. 

I really wonder why all Mary Stewart novels were not made into films or TV serials. Some say this novel reminds them of another one by another author - Brat Farrar.

Danger and death entwine themselves around The Ivy Tree, making it a thrilling read. Who is the hero and who the villain? The tension is folded nicely between gentle scenes and romance, making this a great read! 

Click on Preview on the book cover below to get a feel of the writing. And don't hesitate to buy, borrow and read The Ivy Tower, the perfect novel for this time of year. The ebbing monsoon breeze is hauntingly right for such a story.

With the next post, we shall see how Mary Stewart spins a story set in Greece. In a previous excursion through her novels, we visited Delphi and now it's time for Crete, an island surrounded by grand legends.

Bad Luck and Trouble

From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night…. In Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex–army investigators is being hunted down one by one.... And on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher — soldier, cop, hero — is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. From the first shocking scenes in Lee Child’s explosive new novel, Jack Reacher is plunged like a knife into the heart of a conspiracy ...

bookbrowse.com

And so are we. Plunged into the action from the spectacular first chapter of Bad Luck and Trouble. From then on, there's no looking back. The book boasts excellent action scenes and Child's detailed writing does not detract from the enjoyment.

This is my third Lee Childs. And the Reacher I'd read before this one had already won my approval. 

The Wikipedia entry, for Bad Luck and Trouble, has some engaging trivia on the book - a must for Reacher aficionados. Jack Reacher is Child's protagonist for a series featuring this singular man's various adventures. Jack's family, if any, is, effectively, the army. 

Recently, I read another Jack Reacher, The Enemy, which was not as enthralling as this one, where I learned about and met his mother and brother. However, in Bad Luck and Trouble, it's to the aid of his ex-comrades from the army that he rushes. All it took was a mere sequence of numbers.   

This Reacher is not one of his usual lone wolf stories. While it's true that a Reacher story usually has him teaming up with someone, often a lady, in this novel, it's almost like one of those J. T. Edsons where different members of the cowboy hero's extended family come together, from diverse parts of the country, to bring the villain/villains to justice.

Of course, there's the lady with whom Reacher will sleep in the course of the book - but that's part of the Reacher format, in any case. Here, however, we have two women in the team but no orgies! One of the reasons I do like my Lee Childs is that the author does the fairly decent thing in how he portrays the female actors in the dramas.

A part of the Reacher charm is the reflection of some of the author's life philosophies - some that he appears to try to live and others that he perhaps upholds. Thus, Reacher is not bound by the fetters with which most of us in today's world are chained: roots, credit cards and other such. It is said that Lee Child also follows some of that banking advice. However, while Child has used his earnings from the books to live well and has property, Reacher is like an Indian sadhu - free of all attachments.

"Lee Child, Bouchercon 2010" by Mark Coggins. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://wiki2.org/en/File:Lee_Child,_Bouchercon_2010.jpg#/media/File:Lee_Child,_Bouchercon_2010.jpg

Apparently, the title is taken from a song:

Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan - Born Under a Bad Sign

The very title holds promise - what can be worse than bad luck? Bad luck and trouble!  

 A must-have Jack Reacher!

A Devilishly Good Read - Tess Gerritsen's The Mephisto Club

I’m toying with giving up my library membership as my eyesight finds it harder and harder to cope with ‘real’ books. Reading on an app is so much easier. And handier. The latest visit to my library was during a slightly stressful time. I, thus, happily grabbed the book suggested by the librarian. And that was a Tess Gerritsen.

“I write because I love to tell stories, and I can’t think of a more amazing job than to sit at my desk and listen to fictional characters having conversations,”

Now, I’ve never heard of her before. And, while I’m far from a reader of best sellers, I’m one of those who simply has to know the plot before I plunge in, be it a film or a novel.

But the author has this going for her, in my eyes, that she's a medical person and into anthropology. I’m a doctor’s daughter and medicine often involves detection and I'm a huge fan of medicine and detection. As for anthropology, that's also fascinating - a rather messy area but quite full of things that read as juicily as fiction, one has to admit.

And then I used to be a fan of the Bones series. Alas, I’ve only read the one Bones book by Kathy Reichs as my library has mostly her books for young adults.

I’d planned the book to keep me company while I was home alone for the week. As it transpired, I read it through one night. Of course, that’s mainly because I skip and read. To be fair, life is short and, to lovingly read line for line, it would require writing that really takes my breath away. Or a plot. I'm both hard and easy to please.

The story lived up to the blurb’s promise of blood and dismemberment in dollops and lusty globs. Speaking of which some intercourse is interspersed. Quite juicy what with a Church Father being one of the participants. There is an amusing piece which would give you a rough

The novel is devilishly engaging - the Devil figures all over the place. Obviously! Mephisto! For me, as a non-Christian residing in a country where the majority are Hindus, the book offered some trivia about the concepts of the Devil in ancient Christianity. In general, it is a fairly informative book.

The ambience is alright but somehow rang a bit Agatha Christie to me. Which is why it just might be a hit with the ladies. Not to mention the fact that the author is highly cited as feminist. Well, apparently, to look deeper into that I'd have to read another of her books.

There is a more overt feminist slant here than in earlier books. Both heroines are far more capable and resourceful than any of the venal, stupid or criminal males they encounter.

A bit of a Roman Holiday feel in some chapters - such passages in a book are often as good as a trip to the place.

I’d absolutely try more of her in the meantime - perhaps for a nice vacation read this winter. Reading has become an ill affordable pleasure in today’s fast paced world.

In the meantime, this is a book which would go down well with fans of crime fiction who like their corpses in a far from neat condition.

Also, it has a lot of cute family scenes and offers a good representation of women as professionals and men as caring family persons. We still do require enough of this in our diet to change things for the better.

Lastly, I do think I’ve watched a show or two based on her stories.

So do yourself a favour and buy this one now - it’s got goats, for one thing, and is quite evocative of some good old time evil!

Another Deliciously Dark Nesbo - The Snowman

Hot on the heels of Hole’s The Redeemer, I’m racing through another Jo Nesbo:

By now we know that Harry Hole struggles with an alcohol problem and we’ve seen his efforts to work out in a basement gym.

We are privy to the fact that he had and lost a once in a lifetime love: Rakel. And the Snowman rocks because we get more vicarious drool time via extended peeks at quality time between the two lovelorn love birds. Thrillers, when the author is male, often appear to be thinly cloaked excuses for a male romantic genre. In other words, here is where we women get to glimpse what might be romance from the male point of view.

In The Snowman, we might have a serial killer or such is what I gather and I’m past the page 100 mark. Now, it’s interesting that we seem to require exotic criminals - psychopaths and serial killers and all. Personally, I find the Higashino approach more satisfying - of finding the criminal or crime in the most ordinary, as a chance surrender to a dark instant.

As for other highlights of this very yummy read, we have, interspersed, snippets of what Indians call ‘gyan’ - info/trivia… So far we learned about the mating habits of some kind of seal and about an interesting veterinary procedure using a fascinating cutting and cauterising implement.

It’s so sad to find readers at a library endlessly borrowing an Alistair Maclean or Jack Higgins when Nordic Noir titles gleam outstandingly at hand!

So, if you are one such, loving the crime genre but stuck in a worn out groove, or if you know of anyone wallowing in such stagnation, do just buy The Snowman.

And what better time than with the film being released this year?

   

My Degree of Obsession with Patterson's Degree of Guilt

Somehow, this was a rather satisfying courtroom drama read after ages. I have no idea why but I feel it can be remade as a very nice Japanese dorama.

I’ve cut my teeth on Perry Mason - our family had loads of those. And libraries all around had all we didn’t. But I doubt anyone can have read all of them these days let alone all Erle Stanley Gardner's output.

And, of course, years later, John Grisham took over that spot on the bookshelf.

After that the genre did not throw itself my way until I found Degree of Guilt by Richard North Patterson in a relative’s house. I needed something to read and I read it.

It was just one of those books I couldn’t really put down and was very handy as it came at a time when I was home alone and I don’t sleep well at all at such times, especially on a hot summer's night. So bad reading light and all, I sped through the book in a couple of days and nights.

I liked it from a couple of points of view, and one of those is the whodunnit part. Perhaps it’s because at two points I guessed the ‘who’. Not that it was easy but I liked the way it was crafted.

It’s fairly pacy, racy in a minor way and has all the huge drama of a TV Nordic Noir drama.

Apparently there’s a TV movie of this book too! I’d want to watch that. Though someone says it’s a mashup of two of his books.

Basically, the protagonist is a male lawyer. He has a son. The mother of the boy is a major mystery figure. She has a nice figure too, one figures out from Page One on.

The lawyer has a sidekick - a she. She’s smart. And go figure! Maybe not hour glass but good enough to warrant a scene where the abovementioned two ladies subliminally sniff each other out warily and with veiled hostility.

The book opens with a corpse. A dead man with his pants around his ankles.

The man is a writer. With a mother complex. And a perverted degree of fandom for a certain actress.

The actress had committed suicide sometime before the book begins.

And then there’s a psychiatrist, also dead a priori.

And he has a daughter and he left tapes of his sessions with clients.

Go figure! And a lady judge.

Yes. All that makes for a good slavering read! Don’t save it for a rainy day - this summer read: