Six Degrees of Separation: from Wuthering Heights to Dancing in the Dark

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

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.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark

 

Description at Goodreads:

'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life...'

Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the crème de la crème, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty ...

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.

 

This book was my Classic Club Spin for Spin #41, from October 2025. I put off reading it, so only just finished it in February. It was first published in 1961, but the story is set in the years leading up to World War II. I read it in eBook format, which I don't do very often. This year I have a goal to read at least 12 books on my Kindle.

My thoughts:

I think I was prejudiced against this novel from the beginning because I dislike the idea of teachers with favorites or pet students, and I dislike cliques in academic situations (or anywhere I guess). I tried to let go of my assumptions before reading it, but from the beginning I was appalled by Miss Jean Brodie's behavior, and it became even more disturbing later in the story.

So, I did not enjoy reading this book at all. In retrospect, I can appreciate the good points of the book, especially the way the story was told. It has an interesting structure with shifts in time both backwards and forward, and the end result is interesting and sometimes confusing. 

But for me,  there was no one to like in this story at all. I can deal with unlikeable characters, but I need someone in the story to care about. The main character seems admirable at the beginning, trying to enlighten her students with new and different ideas. But she is revealed as a narcissist, only interested in controlling others. The school girls that she has chosen for her "set" of six proteges are of course only young girls; some are more perceptive than others. I gradually realized that most of them were not taking her ideas all that seriously, for various reasons.

One of the girls in the set, Sandy Stranger, was a very interesting character and a lot is revealed about her towards the end. I did not realize that so much emphasis was placed on her character until I read some other reviews. But in some ways she was as manipulative as Miss Brodie.

Even though I found the book distasteful, the end result is that I want to try more books by this author, and I hope that I will like them better. Most (maybe all?) of her books are short, novella length. 

Going to Beautiful: Anthony Bidulka

 

From the description at Goodreads:

International chef Jake Hardy has it all. Celebrity, thriving career, plenty of friends, a happy family and faithful dog. Until one day when a tragic accident tears it all apart. Struggling to recover, Hardy finds himself in a strange new world–a snow-swept prairie town that time forgot–a place where nothing makes sense. Cold is beautiful. Simple is complex. And doubts begin to surface about whether Jake's tragedy was truly an accident after all. As the sun sets in the Land of Living Skies, Hardy and his glamourous, seventy-eight-year-old transgender neighbour find themselves ensnared in multiple murders separated by decades. In Bidulka's love letter to life on the prairies he delivers a story of grief and loss that manages to burst with joy, tenderness and hope. Redolent of his earlier works, Going to Beautiful brings us unexpected, under-represented characters in settings that immediately feel familiar and beloved. Beautiful–a place where what you need may not be what you were looking for.

Praise for Going to Beautiful:

Going to Beautiful is poignant, often funny, always wise…the quiet joy and hopefulness of this novel are gifts readers will value for years to come.

--- Gail Bowen, author of the Joanne Kilbourn Shreve mystery series including An Image in the Lake

My thoughts:

It took me a while to get around to reading this book, and I am glad I finally did. It was a great experience for me. It was the 2023 winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime Novel. It is a mystery, but the overarching story is about a man working through his grief after his husband of thirty years dies, and I found it very compelling. The mystery plot sort of sneaks up on you. The story starts out in Toronto, but it is set mostly in Saskatchewan. 

After months of grieving the loss of his husband, Jake finds some information about where Eddie grew up while going through his papers. He decides to go to the town where Eddie lived and try to find more about his early life and why he left it behind. Baz, his transgender friend from Toronto, goes with him. 

The town where Eddie grew up was Beautiful, in the province of Saskatchewan. Most members of the community are of Ukrainian descent. The town is dying; it has nothing to offer its youth. But the loyalties and relationships among the variety of residents still living there is inspiring, and they offer their friendship to Jake and his friend Baz. Two of my favorite characters are Chung, the owner of Ming's Café, a gathering place in town, and Sister Genowefa, who is the last remaining nun at her convent. She is over 90 years old and when she dies, the beautiful convent will be sold.

Eddie never told Jake anything about the town of Beautiful or his family, and when he finally meets Eddie's family, Jake is surprised to find out that Eddie had a twin brother. Gradually Jake gets to know more about Eddie's family and truly appreciate the people in Beautiful. Along the way, he clears up some mysteries related to Eddie's death.

This book was a magical read. It is hard to explain why I enjoyed it so much. The story was moving and uplifting without being maudlin. And I learned so much more about Saskatchewan.  

 

I have only read one of the books in Bidulka's Russell Quant private detective series, but now I am going to go back and read more in that series. 

Murder of a Lady: Anthony Wynne

 

Description from the back of the book:

Duchlan Castle is a gloomy, forbidding place in the Scottish Highlands. Late one night the body of Mary Gregor, sister of the laird of Duchlan, is found in the castle. She has been stabbed to death in her bedroom -- but the room is locked from within and the windows are barred. The only tiny clue to the culprit is a silver fish's scale, left on the floor next to Mary's body. Inspector Dundas is dispatched to Duchlan to investigate the case. The Gregor family and their servants are quick -- perhaps too quick -- to explain that Mary was a kind and charitable woman.

An amateur sleuth, Dr. Eustace Hailey, is visiting in the area, and because of his reputation with solving crimes, was called in before Inspector Dundas arrived to check out the body and the scene of the crime. Dundas is not happy with that situation and does not wish to work on the crime with anyone else. Yet he doesn't make much progress with his investigation, and irritates the family and the people who live in the surrounding area. Eventually he changes his mind and asks Dr. Hailey for his help. 

From the first, the victim is presented as a saintly woman who was always trying to help people and was loved by all. Eventually this is debunked as the depth of the toxic family relationship between the laird of Duchlan and his sister Mary, and the younger members of the family, the Laird's son, his wife, and their young son, is revealed bit by bit.

Most of the book focuses on the locked-room aspect,  which is one of the problems I have with some locked-room stories. The search for the answer to who could have done the crime and who had the motivation, plus how the murderer could get into and out of the locked room, seemed very repetitive.

Although I had a negative attitude about reading this book when I found out that it was a locked-room mystery, I did not regret reading it. I would even read another in the Aubrey Heiling series if I could find one. There were some good points. I enjoyed the setting in a castle in Scotland in the early 1930s. The solution at the end was a big surprise to me and there was more variety than I realized because of the contrasting of the varied approaches and the skills used by the sleuths, both from the police and the amateur sleuth. Also, it has a gorgeous cover.

Short Story Wednesday: More Short Stories by the Lockridges

 

I read the first few stories in Flair for Murder by Francis & Richard Lockridge in January 2025. Now, over a year later, I have finished the remaining 10 stories in the book. My earlier post from January 2025 provides more information about the short story collection and all the series that the two authors wrote together.

All of the stories in the book are relatively short. Of the stories I recently read, the lengths of the stories were between 6 - 10 pages, and they feature Captain M.L. Heimrich of the New York State Police. The stories take place in Westchester County, usually in rural areas. I have fond memories of reading some of the Captain Heimrich novels years ago, so it was fun to revisit that character.  This was the perfect set of stories for me, since they are in a subgenre I like, police procedurals.

With the briefness of these stories, the solution had to be quickly resolved and not dependent on long investigations or interviews with many suspects. In many cases, the culprit seems to be obvious, but soon new evidence comes to light and / or Heimrich has an "aha" moment when some event he sees or experiences how the death could really have happened. Several of the stories revolved around deaths caused by automobile accidents. The last two stories were related to gardening which I especially enjoyed. 

I actually liked every story in this book, which is unusual. Probably because I like how the Lockridges tell a story, very conversational and matter of fact, and I think it suits short stories especially. Also, I think Captain Heimrich is a great character. Now I want to go read some of the books featuring that character. I have several in eBook format that I can try.

Spin #43 for the Classics Club, February 2026

 

The latest Classics Club Spin has been announced. To join in, I choose twenty unread books from my classics list and list them in a post before Sunday, February 8th, 2026.  On Sunday, the Classics Club will generate a random number between 1 through 20 and post it at the website. Then I will read whatever book falls under that number on my Spin List by March 29th, 2026.

So, here is my list of 20 books for the spin...

1. Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr.Ripley (1955)
2. Madeleine L'Engle – A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
3. Graham Greene – Our Man in Havana (1958)   
4. Roald Dahl – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
5. Ray Bradbury – The Martian Chronicles (1950)
6. Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
7. Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
8. Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five  (1955)
9. John Steinbeck – Cannery Row (1945)
10. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)
11. Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
12. J. D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye (1951)
13. Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart (1958) 
14. Lewis Carroll – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
15. Dashiell Hammett – Red Harvest (1929)   
16. Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre (1847)
17. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Sign of the Four (1892)
18. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
19. Edna Ferber – Giant (1952)
20. Edna Ferber – Show Boat (1926)

The four books I would most like to read for this spin are A Wrinkle in Time, The Talented Mr.Ripley, Jane Eyre, or Our Man in Havana. But, really, any of the books on my list would be fine.