Books Read in December 2022

The first three books I read in December were Christmas mysteries, and I enjoyed that very much. I wish I could have reviewed them all. In addition I finished up an anthology of Christmas stories that I have been reading off and on for several years. Three other books I read had connections to Christmas but that was unintentional—a pleasant surprise.

Fiction

O Caledonia (1991) by Elspeth Barker

This book is short, about 190 pages long, and the only novel that Barker published. It is set in Scotland in the 1950s.  The story is about a young girl, part of a large family, who is willful and stubborn, and won't be molded into what others want her to be, even from a very early age. It is a sad story but a wonderful read, written so beautifully that it makes me sad that the author did not write any other novels. 

Crime Fiction

Not a Creature Was Stirring (1990) by Jane Haddam

This is the first book in the Gregor Demarkian series by Jane Haddam. The story in this book is set at Christmas, and has a Christmas theme throughout. My review here.

Smoke Without Fire (1990) by E.X. Ferrars

This book is #6 in the Andrew Basnett series and I read it out of order, usually a no-no for me. Andrew Basnett is a retired botanist, widowed, in his mid-seventies. He is visiting friends for the Christmas holidays, but I would not really call it a Christmas mystery. I have enjoyed every book I read by this author, whose books are published under Elizabeth Ferrars in the UK. My review here.

Murder After Christmas (1944) by Rupert Latimer

This is a book from the British Library Crime Classics series, and only became available in the US in October 2022. It is most definitely a Christmas mystery and it is about the strangest family I have ever met in fiction (or otherwise).  It was a bit too long, too humorous in a screwball comedy way for me. But overall I enjoyed it a lot. I liked the policemen involved especially. And it was written and set during World War II, an extra bonus.

A Death of No Importance (2018) by Mariah Fredericks

There were a lot of things I liked about this historical mystery set in 1910 New York. This is the story of a young woman who works as a lady's maid for the two daughters of a rich family. There is an unfortunate romance, a death, and the maid is the one who finds the body. The police want to pin the murder on anarchists who have been sending threatening notes. The maid narrates the story and I liked that part of it especially. It is a good picture of New York at that time and I liked the way it ended. 

Mistletoe Mysteries (1989) edited by Charlotte MacLeod

This is an anthology of Christmas stories published in 1989. All of the stories have a copyright date of 1989 and were first published in this anthology. I liked all the stories in this book. In 2020, I posted a review of three stories from the book.

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) by Agatha Christie

The short stories in this book feature Mr. Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite. Mr. Satterthwaite is an elderly man, quite well off financially, a bit of a snob, and loves good food and comfort. Mr. Quin is more mysterious, often showing up unannounced to help with a puzzle. How and where this happens is what provides the variety in the stories. I read the first eight stories in the book in January and reviewed them HERE. I read the remainder of the stories in December.

Death in the Off-Season (1994) by Francine Mathews

This is the first novel in the Merry Folger Nantucket Mystery series, and the first novel she wrote. Merry is a new detective in the Nantucket police, working under her father. The death of Rusty Mason, whose family was prominent in Nantucket years before, is her first murder case. This book was on my list of top ten novels in 2022. See my review here.

Snow (2020) by John Banville

I liked this much more than I expected, especially the setting, Ireland in 1957. See my review here.

Currently reading?

I am happy to say that I finished reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy in early January. It only took me four months. I ended up enjoying most of the second half much more than I liked the first half. Now I am reading The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson. I have only read bits and pieces about the Mitford sisters and I want to know more.

End of Year notes

I read 88 books in 2022. The shortest book was a mystery, Dead in the Water by Ted Wood, at 136 pages. My longest book was 752 pages, although I suspect at least 50 of those pages were end notes, etc. The book was Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, a nonfiction book about civil rights struggles in Birmingham in 1963. I lived in B'ham at the time, but I was a teenager and don't remember much. I am about the same age as the author, Diane McWhorter, who lived in a much more affluent part of the Birmingham metropolitan area at the time. Later she realized the extent to which her family and family friends had been involved, and wanted to learn more about it. A very good book, well researched, but depressing to read.

Of the 88 books I read, 48 books were from my TBR pile, which was my goal. I am only aiming at 60 books this year in my Goodreads Challenge, and still aiming at 48 books from my TBR pile, so we will see how that goes. 

The images at the top and bottom of the post were taken on a recent visit to Rocky Nook Park, in the Mission Canyon area. Mission Creek runs through the park and has been dry for a long time; I wanted to see how much water was in the creek. Water was rushing through the creek and it sounded wonderful. We had a lovely walk.

My husband took the photos. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

Short Story Wednesday: More from Mistletoe Mysteries

 

I purchased this book in 2014 after reading a post at GeorgeKelley.org. I read a few stories at that time, then just two years ago I featured the book on my blog, having read 6 more stories in the book. 

Today I feature three more stories from this book. I still haven't read all the stories in this book, but I hope to finish the last three by the end of 2022.

"Dutch Uncle" by Aaron Elkins

Per Charlotte MacLeod's introduction, this was the first short story Aaron Elkins wrote. At the time he had published a few mystery novels, but no short stories. [He has now published 18 novels in the Gideon Oliver series, two other shorter series, and four standalone novels.]

This story is about a lawyer who is hired by a client to help him purchase a piece of art for his wife's Christmas present -- at the last minute. It takes place on Christmas Eve in the late afternoon and that is the last thing he wants to be doing on Christmas Eve.  On top of that the client is extremely obnoxious. The two men find only one art gallery open at that time. With great difficulty they decide upon a painting to purchase, and return home on the ferry. There are two or three (maybe even four) twists before the end of the story and I liked them all.

"The Man Who Loved Christmas" by Henry Slesar

A police office in a small suburb of Dayton is called into work on Christmas morning. He is unhappy about this because his wife is very pregnant with their first child and could have the baby at any time. The case is the disappearance of a man whose wife reported him missing; he wasn't in bed when she woke up and she could not locate him anywhere. The missing man has two children and Christmas is very important to him, so the wife insists he has not just abandoned his family. 

This is another story with unexpected twists, but the results are more serious in this one.

"The Touch of Kolyada" by Edward D. Hoch

This is a Simon Ark story by Hoch, written especially for this anthology. Simon Ark is a mysterious man who claims to be 2000 years old, a Coptic priest hunting down evil. His tales are told by a friend who has known him for many years. His friend doesn't really believe his claims but he does notice that he hasn't aged in the time he has known him. I haven't read any Simon Ark stories yet but I do have a fairly recent collection of those stories from Crippen & Landru on my shelves. 

In this story, Simon Ark encounters a figure from Russian folklore, the elf maiden Kolyada, who distributes gifts to children at Christmas, similar to Santa Claus in western countries. It is an entertaining story, not very complex, and I like the way the narrator tells the story.

Murder Goes Mumming: Alisa Craig

Charlotte MacLeod is a mystery author known for her unconventional characters and outrageous plots. Rest You Merry, published in 1979, was her first mystery novel. It was followed by nine more in the Peter Shandy series, ending in 1996. While she was writing that series, she had three other series going. The Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn series was also published under her own name. Under the pseudonym of Alisa Craig she wrote two series set in Canada: the Grub and Stakers series and a series featuring Detective Inspector Madoc Rhys of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The first book in the Madoc Rhys series is A Pint of Murder, published in 1980. In that book Madoc meets Janet Wadman, and there is an immediate attraction between them. Murder Goes Mumming is the second book in the series and follows up on that relationship. Madoc is a Royal Canadian Mountie, and he is visiting Fredericton, New Brunswick where Janet works and lives in a boarding house. This book has the fastest engagement ever, with Madoc's mother, Lady Rhys, practically pushing an heirloom ring on them to seal the deal. (Not that I have anything against relationships that move along quickly; if you know you have found a good thing, why not go for it?) Madoc is the black sheep in a family of talented musicians.

This is my first Christmas mystery of the season. The couple is invited to spend Christmas with acquaintances of Lady Rhys, Donald and Babs Condrycke, at the family estate, Graylings. It doesn't hurt that Donald is a board member at the company where Janet is a stenographer. And of course Madoc, Janet, and the huge Condrycke clan all get snowed in. So this is a traditional country house mystery, very much on the cozy side, with lots of humor and some very unusual characters.

In the first mystery in the series, Madoc is sent undercover to investigate a suspicious death. In this one, he is in undercover in the sense that he does not announce that he makes his living in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Condryckes assume he has some unspecified research position in the government. When an elderly member of the family dies, only Madoc suspects that the death was not natural. Since a doctor cannot be called in and they cannot get out to report the death, he proceeds to do as much investigating as he can without alerting the others to the situation.

This is a fun story. I have always wondered what mumming is, and now I know at least one version of it. In this case the costumed group did not visit neighbors, but just traipsed and danced around the big house and partied.

One drawback is that most of the members of the Condrycke family are coarse, self-centered, and unlikable. It is hard to care who did what or why if no one is likable. (We never meet the victim, Granny Condrycke.) Janet and Madoc are really the only likable characters, and they are almost too good to be true. There is a very interesting Welsh butler, Ludovic.

As far as the solution to the mystery goes, it is sort of slapdash, and the explanation is long and involved. But really in this type of story, solving the mystery is not so important and I was mostly enjoying the author's wit and satire.

I will admit that I was drawn to this book because of its wonderful cover, which my husband discovered and pointed out to me.

In December of 2014, I read and reviewed MacLeod's first mystery, Rest You Merry, which also is set at Christmas.

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Publisher:   Doubleday Books, 1981 
Length:       180 pages
Format:       Hardcover
Series:        Madoc Rhys, #2
Setting:       New Brunswick, Canada
Genre:        Cozy Mystery
Source:       I purchased this book.

Reading in November 2016

Another wonderful month of reading with a good bit of variety. Some relatively current crime fiction, a fantasy novel, a couple of mysteries set at Christmas, and some mysteries from earlier decades.

I started out the month with a book from the fantasy genre, one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. I read Mort, the first book in the Death series. I am glad that I have finally started reading Pratchett's books.

I also read a very short graphic novel, RED. This graphic novel by Warren Ellis was the basis for the movie of the same title, released in 2010, starring Bruce Willis, Mary Louise Parker, and a lot of other entertaining and talented actors. When I say it was short, it was only three issues when first published, for a total of 66 pages. The book also includes character design sketches and the script and layouts for issue 1. I found these very interesting since I don't know the processes for developing a comic.



These are the crime fiction books I read in November...

A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake
(Originally published in 1935, this book is set in a boarding school. This was the first book in the Nigel Strangeways mysteries by Nicholas Blake. Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis, a poet laureate in the UK in the late 1960's into the early 1970's.)

Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake
(This was the second book in the Nigel Strangeways mystery series. It is set at Christmas, and is a traditional English country house mystery.)

The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald (reviewed here)

Past Tense by Margot Kinberg (reviewed here)

Dupe by Liza Cody (reviewed here)

Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves
(This is the second book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series, which is also now a TV series. A woman was put in prison ten years before for killing a teenage girl, the daughter of her ex-lover. Now it has been discovered that the woman was innocent, and Vera is looking into the original investigation.)

Murder Goes Mumming by Alisa Craig
(Another book set at Christmas. This one is a cozy, a humorous tale set in New Brunswick, Canada. Alisa Craig is the pseudonym of Charlotte MacLeod, used for two series set in Canada . Review coming soon.)

Rest You Merry: Charlotte MacLeod

Description of the book at Amazon:

Each December, the faculty of Balaclava Agricultural College goes wild with Christmas lights. The entire campus glitters with holiday decorations, save for one dark spot: the home of professor Peter Shandy. But after years of resisting the Illumination festival, Shandy snaps, installing a million-watt display of flashing lights and blaring music perfectly calculated to drive his neighbors mad. The horticulturalist flees town, planning to spend Christmas on a tramp steamer, but soon feels guilty about his prank and returns home to find his Christmas lights extinguished, and a dead librarian in his living room.

Charlotte MacLeod is a mystery author known for her unconventional characters and outrageous plots. Rest You Merry, published in 1979, was her first mystery novel. It was followed by nine more in the Peter Shandy series, ending in 1996. While she was writing that series, she had three other series going. The Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn series was published under her own name. Under the pseudonym of Alisa Craig she wrote the Grub and Stakers series and a series featuring Detective Inspector Madoc Rhys of the Royal Canadian Mounties.

I really enjoyed this book when I first read it back in the eighties. I read the next two or three in the series and I read several of the Sarah Kelling series. Before that I had read comic mysteries by Donald Westlake. My propensity for humor in fiction must have disappeared along the way, because I don't seek that sub-genre of mystery out much and generally don't enjoy it when I do.

That being said, this was a fine mystery, even if the story was a tad more unrealistic than I remembered. There is a romance and I loved it; I usually have the opposite reaction. Peter Shandy is a wonderful protagonist; one of the characters is a librarian and books figure into the solution. I bought a copy of the 2nd book in the series at the same time I got this one and I will read it sometime soon.

MacLeod's mysteries are mentioned in this interesting article on comic crime fiction at the website of the Whodunit? Mystery Bookstore:

MacLeod specialized in over-the-top characters with funny names, operating in strange situations. Her humour was very broad, hardly subtle, or to everyone’s taste. There were ten novels set in Balaclava College (beginning in 1978), an educational institution of higher learning in New England which bore no resemblance to any real operation I ever knew. Then there were twelve Kelling books, set in Boston and environs and featuring a very gutsy heroine with the most incredible cast of relatives it is possible to imagine. 

Between the two series, this first book in the Peter Shandy series is my favorite of the Charlotte MacLeod books, but the Sarah Kelling series appealed to me more overall. I haven't tried the series written as Alisa Craig, but I may try the one featuring the Royal Canadian Mounties.

Other resources

• Les Blatt describes this novel as "a very amusing, very cozy mystery" in his review at Classic Mysteries.
• Margot Kinberg of Confessions of a Mystery Novelist puts the Spotlight on the second book in the Sarah Kelling series, The Withdrawing Room.

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Publisher:   Avon Books, 1978
Length:       215 pages
Format:      Paperback
Series:       Peter Shandy #1
Setting:      US
Genre:       Cozy mystery
Source:      This copy purchased at the Planned Parenthood book sale, 2014.