Six Degrees of Separation: From Dangerous Liaisons to Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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 Dangerous Liaisons. This is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782, with the original title of Les Liaisons dangereuses. It tells the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two lovers who plot to seduce and manipulate others. I don't know much about this book except that it was adapted to film many times; the one I am most familiar with is Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. Two other English language versions are Valmont (1989), directed by Miloš Forman, and Cruel Intentions (1999), which relocates the story to modern-day New York.

1st degree:

My first link is to another French novel adapted to the screen, titled D’entre les morts (1954), written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock adapted the story as Vertigo, set in San Francisco instead of France.  The first translation of the  book to English was published in 1956 as The Living and the Dead. Pushkin Vertigo more recently issued a reprint of the novel with the title Vertigo.

2nd degree:

For my next link, I picked another book adapted to film by Hitchcock, The Rainbird Pattern (1972) by Victor Canning. It is the 2nd book in a loose spy fiction series called the Birdcage books. The film version was titled Family Plot, and is very different from the book. The basic elements of the plot remain, but the story is turned into a comedy.

3rd degree:

My husband and I have watched a lot of Hitchcock movies, and another novel that he chose to adapt was Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier. The adaptation, released in 1940, stars Laurence Olivier as the widower Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the unnamed woman who becomes his second wife.

4th degree:

Moving away from Hitchcock and adaptations, my next book is another by Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand (1969). I was surprised to find out that this book is a time travel story; my son found it for me in the science fiction and fantasy section of the book sale in 2023. I haven't read it yet so check out reviews at Constance's Staircase Wit blog and Kelly's Thoughts & Ramblings.

5th degree:

And now I move to another classic book of time travel, this time with a scientific basis: The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov. This book is about a group of people called the Eternals, who live outside of time and either observe time at different points or make Reality Changes to make positive changes for the future. I read this over ten years ago but I remember I liked it a lot. Even though the book has very few women characters, there is definitely a romance of sorts, and it reads like a thriller.

6th degree:

There are many  different takes on time travel stories. Some are science fiction, using machines of some type to take the person back in time. Others lean more towards fantasy. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, visitors to a tiny café in Tokyo can take advantage of a special service; they can travel back in time if they drink a cup of the special coffee made by this café. This is the first book in a series about the café and its unique brand of time travel.

My Six Degrees took me from France to England and then to the past via time travel. Have you read any of these books? If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on  March 1, 2025 and the starting book will be the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

My Mystery Books from the 2023 Book Sale

 

From September 15th through September 24th this year, we visited the Planned Parenthood Book Sale five times. Here I have listed ten of the crime fiction books that I purchased at the sale. There were some older books, some newish books.

The House on the Strand (1969) by Daphne de Maurier

I had been looking for books by Daphne de Maurier at the book sale, and my son volunteered to help. He did not have any luck either until he found one in the Science Fiction and Fantasy area. We were both surprised. It turns out this is a time travel book of sorts, so of course I had to try it. Almost 300 pages; I think it will be a good read.

The English Teacher (2013) by Yiftach Reicher Atir

I bought this book because it is spy fiction and the protagonist is a female Mossad agent. Otherwise, I know nothing more about it. The author drew on his own experiences to write the book. It was translated from the Hebrew by Philip Simpson.

Tangerine (2018) by Christine Mangan

I bought this because it is set in Morocco and it is a mystery / thriller. I don't know much about Morocco at all. BookerTalk has reviewed this book. Based on her thoughts on the book I may be disappointed, but it won't hurt to give it a try.

A World of Curiosities (2022) by Louise Penny

I bought this book because I plan to read all the books in this series. And because it was a very good price for a newer hardback, although I usually don't pay $6.00 for books at the book sale. I have read 11 of the books, and this is the 18th. It will take me a while to get to this one.

The Outcast Dead (2014) by Elly Griffiths

This is another series I am working my way through. This is the 6th book of a 15 book series, so it is up in the air whether I will read all of the books in the series or not.

Bitter Wash Road (2013) by Garry Disher

Garry Disher is a prolific Australian author; I think most of his novels are mysteries. I have read one book from his Peninsula Crimes police procedural series, The Dragon Man. His first series stars a thief, Wyatt; two years ago I was lucky to find the first four in that series at the 2021 book sale. I still haven't tried any of those. And this year I found the first book in his most recent series starring Paul Hirschhausen, Bitter Wash Road. 

Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene

I haven't read much by Graham Greene so I was happy to find this old hardback edition of Brighton Rock with the dust jacket mostly intact. The protagonist is Pinkie, a gang leader who has murdered a journalist and thinks he can get away with it. The book goes beyond a thriller to explore moral issues. 

Anatomy of a Murder (1958) by Robert Traver

I have a paperback copy of this book and had wanted to read it for years, but it has the tiniest print I have ever seen. So I was thrilled to find this copy at the book sale. 

This is from the prologue:

"This is the story of a murder, of a murder trial, and of some of the people who engaged or became enmeshed in the proceedings. Enmeshed is a good word, for murder, of all crimes, seems to posses to a greater degree than any other that compelling magnetic quality that draws people helplessly into its outspreading net, frequently to their surprise, and occasionally to their horror."

Missionary Stew (1983) by Ross Thomas

I have enjoyed the Ross Thomas books I have read, which were espionage books. Not all of his books are in that genre, but I think this one has at least a tinge of it.

This is part of a review in the October 16, 1983 Washington Post by Stephen King:

"In a country that chooses to canonize a few of its many fine comic novelists and ignore the rest, Ross Thomas is something of a secret. Missionary Stew is Thomas's 19th novel (five of them were issued under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck), but the people who know and relish the work of Ishmael Reed, Don DeLillo, and Peter DeVries do not know the work of Ross Thomas, and that seems a great shame. Perhaps Missionary Stew, certainly the best of the Thomas novels I've read, will help to rectify that situation. It is funny, cynical, and altogether delicious. If buying a novel is, as a friend of mine once said, always a speculative investment for the reader, then take it from me--this one is a blue-chip stock. Baby, you can't go wrong."

Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald, edited by Tom Nolan

From the dust jacket of the book: 

"In an important literary discovery, Macdonald biographer, Tom Nolan, unearthed three previously unpublished private-eye stories by Ross Macdonald. 'Death by Water,' written in 1945, features Macdonald's first detective Joe Rogers, and two novelettes from 1950 and 1955, 'Strangers in Town' and 'The Angry Man,' are detailed cases of Lew Archer."

This was my most expensive purchase at the book sale. The book was published by Crippen & Landru in 2001. It is in excellent condition and includes an additional small booklet with a piece written by Macdonald titled 'Winnipeg, 1929.' Ross Macdonald is a pseudonym of Kenneth Millar; he was brought up in Canada and met his wife Margaret Millar there.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Romantic Comedy to The Beast Must Die

  

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 Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy. I have not read that book or any of the books by that author, although I am curious about her writing.

For my first link, I will start with a romance novel ...

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is a romance, but definitely not a comedy. I like romance in a book, but usually not if that is the only focus. This one is also a mystery and a classic.

I like it when a book features a romance but the romance is secondary to the main plot, as in...

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, the second book in the Thursday Murder Club series. In this book the mystery plot is primary but a secondary plot is DCI Chris Hudson's developing relationship with his PC's mother, Patrice. 

Elizabeth, one of the four main characters in The Man Who Died Twice, was formerly an MI5 agent, and in this book she is helping her ex-husband Douglas, who is still working for MI5. This leads me to my next link, also featuring an MI5 agent...

The Last Defector by Tony Cape features Derek Smailes, an MI5 agent sent to London to work at the UN. The plan is for him to aid in a plot to convince a Soviet (also working at the UN) to defect and provide information on disarmament plans in Russia. 

This leads to another book I read featuring a defector...

Catch a Falling Spy (apa Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy) is one of seven novels featuring an unnamed British spy. The agent is tasked with evaluating a Russian defector, Professor Bekuv. This novel felt like a world tour. It starts out in the Algerian Sahara Desert and returns to that spot for the denouement.  In between they visit the US, France, and Ireland.

My fifth link also features an unnamed spy, this time working for the CIA ...

The Mulberry Bush by Charles McCarry is about a man whose main focus is getting revenge for his father, a spy for the CIA whose career ended in disgrace. Now the son has succeeded in getting a job with the CIA and is bent on avenging the wrong that Headquarters did to his father. I am currently reading this book and have only about 100 pages left.

I did not realize how many books I have read that have revenge as the prime motivation.

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake is a classic mystery novel, part of the Nigel Strangeways series. Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym use by Cecil Day-Lewis, who was an Anglo-Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. In this book, a father seeks revenge for the death of his son, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Nigel Strangeways does not show up until midway into the book.

My Six Degrees takes me from a romance set on a fictional late night comedy sketch show set in the US to a classic mystery novel set in Gloucestershire. Along the way I discussed several novels in the spy fiction genre.

If you are participating in the Six Degrees meme this month, where did your links take you? If not, have you read these books? 

The next Six Degrees will be on September 2, 2023, and the starting book will be Wifedom by Anna Funder.

Short Story Wednesday: Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

After I purchased this book of short stories, I noticed that the cover was a blurry photo of a face of a person in anguish, or so it looks to me. Later I learned that it is a video still from the horror film Repulsion. At that point I wasn't sure what to expect.  Are these horror stories? I had never associated that word with Daphne du Maurier before, but it appears that many reviewers do consider some of her works to be horror. So far, however, I have found none of the stories in this book horrifying. I did find some of them dark and tension-inducing. 

Each of the first three stories in this book are very different. They vary in length from 20 to 55 pages.

"Don't Look Now" has elements of the supernatural and is set in Venice, where an English couple is vacationing. They have recently lost their youngest child, and the trip is an attempt to move past that. Sometimes the supernatural in a story puts me off, but not in this case. The atmosphere is tense and I was dreading the outcome of the story. It wasn't what I expected at all. (about 55 pages)

The second story is "The Birds," which was the inspiration for the film by the same name. I say inspiration because the story is quite different from the film, but both are unsettling. The story focuses on a farm hand and his family who are trying to save themselves from birds of all types and sizes who are driven by some compulsion to invade their house. He recognizes the threat early on but most people laugh it off, and are not prepared.

This story comes the closest to horror (but then I don't read many horror stories).  I would say that the story is darker than the film but it has been years since I have seen the film. (about 40 pages) 

"Escort" confused me a bit, but I liked it. A tramp steamer is returning to England from a Scandinavian port in the early months of World War II. At some point they see the periscope of a German submarine. Another ship comes up beside them, offering to escort the ship to safety. At first I thought this one was just a simple, straightforward story, but it turns out to have a supernatural element too. (about 20 pages)

Patrick McGrath's introduction to this collection of stories notes that du Maurier often writes inconclusive endings; the stories are not tied up neatly, with a clear ending. She leaves the reader to embellish the ending or decide how they think the story ends. This is true of at least two of these stories: "The Birds" and "Escort." And "Don't Look Now" certainly left me tense and reviewing the events for quite a while after finishing it.

Per the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Escort" was first published in 1940, "The Birds" in 1952, and "Don't Look Now" in 1970.

Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier #DDMreadingweek

I read Rebecca in April for my Classics Club list and for the Back to the Classics Challenge and it was a great read. I wasn't sure how to classify this book as to genre. It could be called a mystery, or romance, or romantic suspense, or gothic mystery. Although I think many people consider this a romance, especially if they haven't read the book, at Goodreads the top genres it is categorized in by members are: Classics, Fiction, Mystery, and Gothic, with Romance a distant fifth. It is all of those things at times, and maybe that is why some readers don't care for it.

The heroine is very young (21), inexperienced, and naïve. She is alone in the world. As the novel begins she is in Monte Carlo working as a paid companion to Mrs. Van Hopper, an overbearing American woman. When Mrs. Van Hopper becomes very ill and cannot leave the hotel room for more than a week, Maxim de Winter invites Rebecca to go with him driving around the countryside, and after several days of this she gradually falls in love with him. She knows that he is a widower and that his wife died a year ago, but only because Mrs. Van Hopper had told her that. 

Mrs. Van Hopper decides to return to the US, and Maxim proposes to our heroine. Quite quickly, she become Mrs. Maxim de Winter and after a protracted honeymoon in Italy, they go to Maxim's home, Manderley. From the moment she arrives, she feels like she is in competition with the memory of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca.

We never learn the narrator's name. If she is referred to in the book she is called Mrs. de Winter or the current Mrs. de Winter. The first Mrs. de Winter is usually referred to as Rebecca. 

Quotes

There are some wonderful descriptive paragraphs, especially in the first chapter or two. The first line is very famous: 

I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

And later in the first chapter:

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky. 

In Chapter 5, when the narrator is telling of the days in Monte Carlo:

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.

My thoughts

• In addition to the main characters already noted, there are many interesting secondary characters. Some of them are: Mrs. Danvers, who adored Rebecca and intimidates the new Mrs. de Winter; Frank Crawley, the estate manager at Manderley, a kind and honorable man; and Beatrice Lacy, Maxim's sister, and her husband Giles. Also some of the servants at Manderley: Frith, the butler; Robert, a younger servant; and Clarice, the new Mrs. de Winter's maid.
• I liked the structure of the book. At the beginning, the narrator is looking back on events earlier in her life, when she met Maxim de Winter, and their life at Manderley. At that point she is approaching middle age, and she and Maxim are traveling and staying in inexpensive hotels. We know that they have a life together and the story is about how they arrived at that point. 
• I did not like it that we never learn the narrator's name, but it wasn't really a problem.
• I wavered as to how much I liked the novel as I was reading it. I felt like I was reading the book for a second time, but it may just be that I remembered the story from watching the film adaptation (with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine). Regardless, having some familiarity with parts of the story did affect my reading. I liked the writing throughout. I was tense while reading the middle section, filled with dread because I knew what was in store for Rebecca. Luckily, I had forgotten some aspects of the ending so that part was a surprise and I ended up loving the book. 

This edition includes excerpts from Daphne du Maurier's The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories: an author's note, an essay on the real house which the fictional Manderley was based on, and du Maurier's original epilogue to the book.

This review was written for the Daphne du Maurier Reading Week hosted at Heavenali's blog. Check out other posts related to du Maurier's books there.

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Publisher:  Harper, 2006 (orig. pub. 1938)
Length:      386 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Setting:      UK, Monaco
Genre:       Fiction, Classic
Source:      On my TBR pile, purchased in 2020.