The starting book this month is Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë. I don't remember ever reading that book, but recently when I read some reviews, it was described as being about obsession and revenge.
1st degree:
I searched on my blog for a book that combined obsession and revenge and the only one that came up was The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake. This book, a part of the Nigel Strangeways series, is widely acknowledged to be a crime classic. But I resisted reading it for years.
The story begins with these lines from Frank Cairnes' journal, in which he plans the death of the person who killed his son.
"I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him…"
2nd degree:
I purchased my copy of The Beast Must Die at the Annual Book Sale in September 2019. The same year, I purchased four old paperback editions of books by Mary Stewart at that same book sale. One of them was The Ivy Tree, published in 1961. It is about a young woman, Mary Grey, who has a strong resemblance to the heiress to a fortune, who disappeared years before. She is persuaded to impersonate the heiress in a scheme to get the inheritance.
3rd degree:
Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar is another impersonation novel, published in 1949. I read that novel but it has been so long that I want to read it again. From what I have read, Brat Farrar was an inspiration for Mary Stewart's book. I have read all of Josephine Tey's mystery novels. She wrote six Inspector Grant novels and two standalone mysteries.
4th degree:
Josephine Tey is the sleuth in a historical crime fiction series by Nicola Upson. I have read the first book in that series, An Expert in Murder. I don't always enjoy mysteries where the sleuth is a real person, and I had reservations about how much the sleuth in this book resembles the real Josephine Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh), but I did find the story compelling and enjoyed the setting, so I had planned to read more of this series. I have four more books from this series on my shelves so I should follow up on that.
5th degree:
Another mystery novel with a real-life author as the sleuth is Jane and the Man of Cloth. In this case the sleuth is Jane Austen. This 2nd book in the series was published in 1997 (and I read my copy in 2004). The 15th and final book in the series was published in 2023. I have only read the first two books but I have read many good things about the series and the way that Jane Austen is handled as a main character, so I may return.
6th degree:
My final book for this Six Degrees is from a historical mystery series that features real-life people as characters, but not as the sleuth. Toby Peters is a private investigator who is often asked to help movie stars of the 1940s with their problems. The first book in the series, Bullet for a Star, features Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, and Peter Lorre. In Dancing in the Dark, the 19th book in the series, Fred Astaire is being harassed by a gangster and his girlfriend. The series is written by one of my favorite authors, Stuart Kaminsky.
And that concludes my Six Degrees. All my books were mysteries. All of them were either vintage mysteries or historical mysteries. And all of the books were set in the UK except for the very last one. I prefer more variety in my Six Degrees chains, either in genre or setting or both, but these are all good books, so I am happy with the chain.
If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you? Have you read any of these books?
The next Six Degrees will be on April 4, 2026 and the starting book will be Virginia Evan's epistolary novel, The Correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment