Short Story Wednesday: "Philomel Cottage" by Agatha Christie

For my Short Story Wednesday post this week, I have reviewed a story for the Agatha Christie Short Stories Read Along hosted by Fanda at Fanda Classiclit. Fanda's post for April is here. 

"Philomel Cottage"

To be honest, I enjoyed this story of psychological suspense, but when I got to the end I could not figure what had happened.

Alix Martin is the main character. She is in her thirties and for fifteen years supported herself in a clerical job. Then she received an unexpected inheritance which allowed her some independence. Shortly after that, she married a man she met at a friend's house, after a whirlwind romance. When they married they moved into a remote cottage that she paid for with part of her small inheritance.

This all sounds very idyllic but Alix begins to have doubts about her marriage. She has several dreams about her husband dying and she hears of questionable things that her husband has said or done but not shared with her. 

Then she hears from an old boyfriend who wants to drop by and visit her and her husband. This confuses her even more because the boyfriend had been in her dreams about her husband. 

The ending was abrupt, and I thought that it was ambiguous, although not all reviewers agreed with that. Regardless the story is filled with tension and was very entertaining. 

This story first appeared in The Grand Magazine in November 1924. It later appeared in a collection titled The Listerdale Mystery in the UK in 1934 and in The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories in the US in 1948.

Short Story Wednesday is hosted by Patricia Abbott at Pattinase. 

Books Read in February and March 2025

 

I read a lot of good books in February and March, in a variety of genres and different settings. 

Fiction

The Goodbye Cat (2021) by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel

This book consists of seven short stories; all of the stories are about cats and are set in Japan. See my review.

Rachel's Holiday (1997) by Marian Keyes

This book was one of two books I read for Reading Ireland Months 2025. It is the second in Marian Keyes' Walsh family series. The story focuses on Rachel, the third of five sisters, after she overdoses on drugs and almost dies. I enjoyed this book and the preceding one, Watermelon. See my review.

Plays

Much Ado About Nothing (1598) by William Shakespeare

I read this play for my Classics Club Spin in February. I haven't written a post about it but I will do one, soon I hope. I was leery of reading any Shakespeare play, so I picked a comedy that I was more familiar with. I read the play in the Folger Library Edition which presents explanatory notes on the left hand page and the actual text of the play on the right hand page. That was useful at first but with the last three acts I found I could pick up the meanings myself and move faster through the play. All in all it was a good experience.

Historical Fiction

A God in Ruins (2015) by Kate Atkinson

I am sad that I don't have time to review this book, because I loved it so much when I read it. I did not like the ending and I still gave it 5 stars. It is a hard story to summarize and describe. This book is sort of a sequel to Life After Life by the same author. Life After Life was about Ursula Todd, and is a time loop novel, where portions of Ursula's life are repeated over and over with different results. A God in Ruins is about Ursula's brother Teddy. It also has a strange structure jumping back and forth to various times in Teddy's life and focusing most often on his years in the RAF during World War II.

Science Fiction 

The Ministry of Time (2024) by Kaliane Bradley

This was another book that I rated very highly, even though it was confusing and I was not fond of the ending. The book is advertised as time travel, romance, espionage, and "a workplace comedy." Looking back on it, it does have elements of all of those, but having these thrown into one book diluted each of them. Nevertheless, it was a compelling read and I wanted to get back to reading it every day. The characters were interesting and fleshed out and mostly sympathetic. One thing I especially liked was that I learned a lot about the Franklin Expedition, a failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage. I have never been interested in that story but now I am. 

Diving into the Wreck (2009) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This is the first book in Rusch's Diving Universe series. The protagonist in this story is a woman who makes her living diving into derelict ships out in space. She does these salvage operations to support herself, but her real love is history and she likes to study the ships. See my review.

Crime Fiction

Silent Parade (2018) by Keigo Higashino, translated by Giles Murray

This book is the 9th book in the Detective Galileo series, but only the 4th book translated to English. It is about two crimes that take place in Tokyo, separated by about 20 years. In both cases, young girls have been killed. The suspect is the same for both but all the evidence is circumstantial. Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi turns to his old friend, physics professor and sometimes police consultant, Manabu Yukawa (aka Detective Galileo), to help solve the murders. See my review.

Fall From Grace (1991) by L.R. Wright

This is the fourth book in one of my favorite Canadian mystery series. The main character is Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Karl Alberg. I have found most of the books in the series to be more of a character study than a mystery. See my review.

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (2012) by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg, translated by Rod Bradbury

This book is  kind of a comedy / heist / romance all mixed into one. (The romance is very low key.) It is the first book in the League of Pensioners series. The main characters are all around 80 years old and living in a retirement home that is going downhill. The owners are medicating the residents to keep them in line and manage costs. Five of the residents, three women and two men, decide to carry out some robberies, sort of a Robin Hood scheme to give money to the poor. I enjoyed reading this book, but it required suspending my disbelief a lot. 

I have seen a lot of good reviews of this book, but this review at AnaBookBel was my favorite. The book was published in 2012 in Sweden, then a few years later in the UK and the US, but this was the first I had heard of it. It was an interesting picture of Sweden. 

Scene of the Crime (2024) by Margot Kinberg

This is the fifth novel in Margot Kinberg's Joel Williams series. The setting is academia; the protagonist is a college professor in Tilton University’s Department of Criminal Justice. Joel is not a policeman but he was in the past, and he has ties to the police department. Thus, the books are part academic mystery and part police procedural. I have read the four previous books in the series and this was another good one. See my review.

Winterland (2008) by Alan Glyn

This book is another book I read for Reading Ireland Month 2025. It is a thriller, and I don't always like those, but this one worked for me. Very dark and a good bit of violence, but none of that bothered me. Two men named Noel Rafferty die in one day in Dublin. The younger one was part of a gang; the second one was his uncle, who was chief engineer for the development of a high rise building.  Supposedly the second death was the result of a car accident, but Gina Rafferty (sister of the older Noel Rafferty) doesn't believe that. And she refuses to stop asking questions. I liked the book; if you are OK with thrillers and enjoy reading about Ireland, you might enjoy it too.

Three Witnesses (1956) by Rex Stout

This book is a collection of three novellas in the Nero Wolfe series. In January, I reviewed "Die Like a Dog." In March, I reviewed "The Next Witness" and "When a Man Murders." All three novellas were entertaining and clever.

The photos at the top and bottom of this post were taken at the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show that we attended in March. I plan to share more photos from the show in a future post. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

Short Story Wednesday: More Stories by Peter Lovesey

From the description of this book on the dust jacket:

More than fifty years ago, Peter Lovesey published a short story in an anthology. That short story caught the eye of the great Ruth Rendell, whose praise ignited Lovesey’s lifelong passion for short form crime fiction. On the occasion of his hundredth short story, Peter Lovesey has assembled this devilishly clever collection, eighteen yarns of mystery, melancholy, and mischief, inhabiting such deadly settings as a theater, a monastery, and the book publishing industry. The collection includes the career-launching story, as well as three never-before-published works.

The cover of this book is lovely: the cat, the books stacked up, the skull on the window ledge, the old-fashioned lamp and the teacup on the desk.

In February of 2022, I read the first ten stories in this book. My brief notes on those stories are in this post. I have now read the last eight items in the book:

• "The Deadliest Tale of All" 
• "Gaslighting"
• "A Three Pie Problem"
• "Remaindered"
• "Agony Column" 
• "The Bathroom" 
• "The Tale of Three Tubs" 
• "A Monologue for Mystery Lovers" 

The first six of these are short stories. "The Tale of Three Tubs" is a nonfiction piece on George Joseph Smith and the brides in the bath. "A Monologue for Mystery Lovers" is a humorous poem. 

My favorite story in this set is "Remaindered." The story is a bibliomystery, first published by MysteriousPress.com / Open Road Integrated Media in 2014. 

Robert Ripple, the owner of the Precious Finds bookstore, died slumped over a box of Agatha Christie hardcover books that he had recently purchased. It was determined that the cause of death was coronary. This event led to the discovery of many secrets about the bookstore and the meetings that had regularly been held in its back room. 

"Remaindered" was humorous, somewhat unbelievable and over the top, but a lot of fun. The ending was not obvious, at least not to me, although it was somewhat ambiguous. The story was the longest in the book at 42 pages. Almost novella length.

The other story I especially liked was "Agony Column," the shortest story in the collection at five pages. It consists of letters sent to an advice column by a woman who worries because her husband is taking two hour walks at night and is ignoring her when he is home. She receives answers from Dr. Wisefellow with advice and questions. It is humorous but I cannot say more without spoiling it.

My Name is Michael Sibley by John Bingham – #1952CLUB

I read My Name is Michael Sibley for the 1952 Book Club hosted by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings. The book had been on my shelves for 12 years and I am glad I finally read it.

This summary is from the back of the book:

Michael Sibley and John Prosset shared a history that dated back to their first years at boarding school, and so the news of Prosset's murder came as a great shock to his old friend – especially because Sibley had been staying only the day before at Prosset's country house, where the body was found.

When the police arrive to question him in connection with the murder, Sibley finds himself lying about his recent visit, and thus begins to reveal the true nature of a longstanding but volatile friendship, fraught with mutual deception and distrust. As he tells his version of the truth to the police – and to the reader – Sibley makes the first of many fateful mistakes and finds himself not only under suspicion, but a primary suspect in the investigation.

My Thoughts:

I was surprised to learn that this was John Bingham's first novel. It is a very compelling and well written story. His writing is quiet and restrained.

As the narrator, Michael Sibley, tells his story, we learn about his school days with Prosset and how he grew to hate him. He also reveals that he planned to kill him at one time, but stresses over and over that he did not follow through on that. The reader does not know what to believe.

The way the story is revealed gradually throughout the novel, interspersed with flashbacks to earlier times, is very effective. Towards the end, about the last 20 per cent, the story got very tense and I was speeding through to find out how it ends. 

The edition of My Name is Michael Sibley that I read has an Introduction by John le Carré. It was interesting and it confirmed that George Smiley, the central character in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and other related books, was based on John Bingham, who was a British intelligence officer who served in MI5 in various positions. Bingham and le Carré had a falling out due to Bingham's opinion of how le Carré portrayed the intelligence services. 

Short Story Wednesday: "A Man With a Fortune" by Peter Lovesey

Peter Lovesey died on April 10, 2025, at the age of 88. He was a British author who published historical and contemporary mystery novels, from 1970 to 2024. I have enjoyed many of his short stories and novels over the years. You can read more about his career in this post at the Rap Sheet, "A Decent Man and One Hell of a Writer."

I looked around for some of Peter Lovesey's short stories and I found this one, published in 1980.

"A Man With a Fortune"

Eva is returning to England on a flight out of San Francisco. She is nervous about flying and is very uncomfortable during the take off. The man in the seat next to her starts up a conversation; he is going to England for the first time to try to find out if he has any long lost cousins in the UK. He is a widower, has a bad heart, and even though he is forty two, he doesn't expect to live much longer. He also owns two vineyards and has lots of money. He plans to find where birth and death records are stored, although he realizes the search will be a difficult job because his grandfather's name is a very common one, John Smith. 

When Eva gets home, she tells her roommate, Janet, about John Smith and his search for relatives. When Janet learns that John is rich she gets interested, and suggests ways that they could be helpful to him. 

In the end, both of them got quite a surprise.

Per the list of Peter Lovesey's short stories at his website, this story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 3, 1980, and was also titled "How Mr Smith Traced His Ancestors." It was adapted for an episode of Tales of the Unexpected in 1982.

I read this story in A Century of Mystery 1980-1989, an anthology edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. I first saw this book reviewed at George Kelley's blog. I immediately found a copy for myself at ABEBOOKS, but this is the first story I have read in the book. I will be getting to more stories in the book soon, I hope.

Please check out George's review of the anthology. He includes a list of all the stories and authors included.

 

Rachel's Holiday: Marian Keyes

I was initially drawn to Marian Keyes' Walsh family series when Moira at Clothes in Books reviewed The Mystery of Mercy Close. That book is a mystery; the protagonist, Helen Walsh, is a private investigator. When I saw it was part of a series, I wanted to read the previous books, in order, even though I knew that they were not mysteries. I first read Watermelon (about Claire, the oldest daughter). Now I have read Rachel's Holiday, the second book in the series.

The story is set mostly in Dublin. Rachel is the third daughter in a family with five daughters. She has supportive parents, although there are communication issues in both directions. In her late twenties, she has been living in New York but she overdoses on drugs, almost dies, and her family brings her home to Dublin to go into a rehab facility called The Cloisters. Rachel mistakenly thinks it is a luxurious spa and is eager to go. The majority of the book takes place at the rehab facility, which treats people with various addictions. It was an emotional, immersive book, but it could have been shorter.

My thoughts:

• I liked the depiction of the rehab facility.  I don't know how accurate it was, for the time it was written, or for now. But the approach to the actual rehabilitation process seemed valid. The story continued after she left the facility and covered how she adjusted to recovery from her addictions. This sounds like it would be a sad story, and there were plenty of low points. But there is also humor throughout.
• I empathized strongly with Rachel, even though her experiences and what she was looking for in life seemed very different from mine. I liked the emphasis on how the events in one's childhood can mold you, and how different personalities react to the same childhood experiences. 
• This book had more emphasis on romance than I care for. It also had a little more sex and too much detail in that area than I wanted. However, I don't want to give the wrong impression, for most readers it would be fine. 
• There are a lot of interesting characters, both those going through rehab and the counselors. None of them got the attention and character development that Rachel did, especially since she is the narrator of the story, but they offered looks at different types of addictions and different reasons behind it.
• Most of the books I read set in Ireland are crime fiction; it was interesting to read about family settings, daily life, and relationships in a non-crime fiction setting. 
• Overall I enjoyed the book. I intend to keep reading the books in this series as long as I like them. And I will read The Mystery of Mercy Close for sure.

-----------------------------

Publisher:   William Morrow, 2002. Orig. pub. 1998.
Length:       565 pages
Format:      Trade Paperback
Series:       Walsh Family, #2
Setting:      Dublin, Ireland
Genre:       Fiction
Source:      I purchased this book.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Knife to Valley of the Kings

  

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 Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. I haven't read this book; I don't read many memoirs. And when I first read about Knife, I did not think I wanted to read it. But having since read many reviews that have praised the book, I do plan to read it. 

My first link is to another memoir. In 1946, Agatha Christie published Come, Tell Me How You Live, a memoir of the time she spent with her second husband, Max Mallowan, at archaeological digs in Syria. I have not read that memoir yet either, but it is on my shelves to read.

Next is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, Murder In Mesopotamia (1936), set at an archaeological dig in Iraq. This novel is part of the Hercule Poirot series. One of the members of the expedition is murdered. Poirot happens to be passing through the area and is called on to look into the death. The story is narrated by Nurse Leatheran, and that is what I liked best about the book. 

The books in the Gideon Oliver series by Aaron Elkins series feature a forensic anthropologist who often works at archaeological digs. In Curses, Oliver is invited to an archaeological dig on the Yucatan Peninsula. Both my son and I have read a few books in this series. The first book in this series was published in 1982. 

My next link is to a novel in a historical mystery series that I read years ago, the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters. Amelia begins her adventures in archaeology in Crocodile on the Sandbank, which is set in 1884 in Egypt.  

The fifth link of my chain, also set in Egypt, is a nonfiction book, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. The author, Howard Carter, was the leader of the excavation and this is his firsthand account of the discovery of the tomb and the artifacts discovered. This book is from my husband's bookshelves and he has several other books on this subject. We visited the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1978. 

Staying with Egypt and archaeology sites, the last book in my chain is another of my husbands books, also nonfiction, Valley of the Kings by John Romer. The Valley of the Kings is an area in Egypt where tombs were constructed for pharaohs and nobles for nearly 500 years. Per the Preface of this book, it is a nonfiction account of "two interlinked stories: the first is the history of the travellers and scholars who studied and excavated the royal tombs of the valley; the second is that of the tombs themselves and the motives and methods of the people who made them."

My Six Degrees focused on archaeological sites in fiction and nonfiction. If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on May 3, 2025 and the starting book will be a book longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Rapture by Emily Maguire.

Short Story Wednesday: Two Books of Horror and Strange Stories

  

Today I am sharing two of my husband's short story books, which lean toward the strange and the weird. Normally these are not the sort of stories I prefer, but I think I will be trying some stories from both of these in the future.

Nightmare Flower 
Stories by Elizabeth Engstrom
Introduction by Lisa Kröger

Description from the back of the book:

This collection of eighteen short tales, a novelette and a short novel takes the reader inside the dark imagination of Elizabeth Engstrom, author of acclaimed horror classics like When Darkness Loves Us. 

In these stories, you will read about a woman asked to be complicit in her own mother’s death, a grandmother with a macabre hobby, a bizarre, phallic-shaped flower that portends evil for a married couple, a father whose son is caught up in a sinister government experiment. These are weird and unsettling tales that will linger with the reader.

​In her introduction to this new edition, Lisa Kröger writes, “There are true horrors that await readers in all of Engstrom’s works ... reminds me of another giant of horror literature, Shirley Jackson.”

Elizabeth Engstrom is an American author of speculative fiction, who grew up in Illinois and Utah. This book was originally published in 1992 by Tor. Many of the stories in it were published between 1986 and 1991; others were published for the first time in the 1992 Tor edition. 

Scotland the Strange: Weird Tales from Storied Lands
Edited by Johnny Mains

Description from the back of the book:

From misty moors, crags and clifftops comes a hoard of eighteen strange tales gathered by Johnny Mains, award-winning anthologist and editor of the British Library anthology Celtic Weird. Sourced from Scotland’s storied literary heritage and bustling with witches, ghosts, devils and merfolk, this selection celebrates the works of treasured Scottish writers such as John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy K. Haynes and Neil M. Gunn alongside rare pieces by lesser-known authors – including two tales translated from Scots Gaelic.

Brooding in the borderlands where strange folklore, bizarre mythology and twentieth-century hauntings meet, this volume promises chills and shivers as keen and fresh as the wind-whipped wilds of Scotland.

The stories in Scotland the Strange were published between 1818 and 1976. Each story is preceded by one or more paragraphs about the author. 

Here is a list of the stories and authors in Scotland the Strange:

• The Hunt of Eildon / James Hogg
• The Murder Hole / Catherine Sinclair
• The Doom of Soulis & The Seven Lights / John Mackay Wilson
• The Devil of Glenluce / Eliza Lynn Linton
• The Cavern of Steenfoll: A Scottish Legend / Wilhelm Hauff, translated by S. Mendel
• Ticonderoga / Robert Louis Stevenson
• "Death to the Head That Wears No Hair!" / David Grant
• The Ghosts of Craig-Aulnaic /Anonymous
• The Stag-Haunted Stream / Mrs. Campbell of Dunstaffnage
• The Two Sisters and the Curse / Translated by Rev. John Gregorson Campbell
• The Outgoing of the Tide / John Buchan
• Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm / Elizabeth W. Grierson
• Black-Haired John of Lewis, Sailor / Translated by Rev. James MacDougall
• The Moor / Neil M. Gunn
• Good Bairns / Dorothy K. Haynes
• The Lass with the Delicate Air / Eileen Bigland
• The Inheritance / Simon Pilkington
• The Curse of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan / Angus Wolfe Murray