Seven in January

I read seven books in January.

 

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Laetitia Rodd is an Archdeacon’s widow. It’s 1850. She lives in Hampstead with a landlady who once rented rooms to John Keats and she makes her living as private investigator. Her brother, a very successful criminal barrister, sometimes sends cases her way.

In the guise of a governess, she travels to Wishtide to find out more about the mysterious young woman whom the heir to the estate wishes to marry and is soon drawn into a much wider investigation.

Atmospheric, twisty, with great characters, especially Laetitia herself.

Kate Saunders (the late, sadly) was a very successful writer of children’s books (Beswitched is one of my favourite books of any genre) but I hadn’t known about this series of three titles until I spotted one in the library.

 

A Bed of Scorpions by Judith Flanders

Another find in the library’s crime shelves. The author’s name caught my eye because I’ve read her (history/non-fiction) A Circle of Sisters but didn’t know she also wrote contemporary fiction. Her heroine, Sam Clair, works in book publishing in London and, very satisfyingly for a book nerd, the uncovering of the villain was helped by Sam’s knowledge of publishing colophons … Three more in the series.

 

Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie

I was given this very attractive US edition. I've re/read Christie voraciously in the past and while her ingenuity is undoubtedly to be much admired I cannot see how the crime here, involving rucksack exchanges, could practically work … but then of course I’m not Hercule Poirot.

 

The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves

January – ’tis the season for crime reading. The latest ‘Vera’ and very good it is too.

 

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

I’ve read some non-fiction about the Roman occupation of Britain especially as it applied to (what became) the border between Scotland and England and find the history of this barbaric/sophisticated army fascinating. (Why, after they left, did we have to wait another 1600 years to have the under-floor heating they enjoyed?!)

A visit at the end of last year to the brilliant Trimontium museum/virtual reality experience in Melrose, in the Scottish borders, reignited my interest in the fabled lost Ninth Legion.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s book was written for children but please, do not let that put you off. The writing is perfectly pitched to appeal to anyone from 9-90, the descriptions are wonderful and the pace and excitement are nail-biting.

Beginning in what is now Dorchester in the south of England, Marcus Aurelius travels on horseback to the area around the Clyde in search of the lost legion, which had been commanded by his father.

There’s little to see now on the Border hills where the vast forts once stood but, reading the book and having been to the museum, it’s not hard to imagine myself there.

 

The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary

I enjoyed the author’s first book The Flatshare. This one not so much for various reasons.

It could have been a third shorter. I began to skim-read Izzy’s interminable and samey conversations with her friend Jem.

‘Enemies to lovers’ – I didn’t buy how Izzy and Lucas became ‘enemies’; a misunderstanding that could have been cleared up on page two. Also, couldn’t see why it was called ‘The Wake-up Call’.

I resented (and resisted) the attempts to manipulate my emotions – did Izzy really have to be a relation-less orphan?

And, a rom-com favourite cliché, the dash to the airport … here, last-minute flights were booked a couple of days before Christmas to/from Brazil, the USA and ‘the Outer Hebrides’ (no particular island given) – come on!

Plus, although not a complaint specific to this title, the first person/present tense is quite tiresome to read, especially in a long book, and sometimes unintentionally comical. ‘I give a slow smile.’ ‘I whimper.’ ‘I pounce.’

 

The Break-up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Another enemies-to-lovers, written in the present tense but not in the first person. Loved it!

Twelve years on from their youthful, drunken wedding in Las Vegas, Irish Fia and American Benjamin (still legally married but not having had any contact since) find themselves as mentor and mentee in a high-powered Manhattan law firm.

I heard Niamh Hargan talk recently at an event in Edinburgh. She has written a pilot episode for a series based on the book – do hope that is successful.

Half-finished jotters and midnights feasts

Scrap paper was hard to come by when I was a child so half-used school jotters came in very handy. What I most liked to do in them was not to actually write a story, but to think up titles, and names for characters, and then compose the blurbs (although of course I didn’t know that word at the time) for a long list of books I was going to write … one day.

All of these embryo books were for girls and most of them were set in boarding schools or in Cornwall. As my only experience of boarding school was through the eyes of Enid Blyton and Malory Towers, and as I had never been further south than Carrbridge in Inverness shire, my blurbs reflected the books I loved to read. I was writing about what I wanted to know, rather than what I knew.

There’s nothing wrong with that but in hindsight I wish I’d thought a little closer to home; it would be interesting for me, if no one else, to read now something of my ten-year-old self and what she thought of her surroundings and place in the world. It never occurred to me for a minute to write about what I knew. My life on a Highland farm seemed dull and ordinary, compared with the lives of girls who had midnight feasts in the dorm or found long-lost treasure in Cornish caves.

I was obsessed with names (still am, a blog subject for another time), so my blurbs each had at least four girls’ names in them plus a made-up name for their school or village or house. Again, these didn’t reflect my own local area, where place-names tended to have Gaelic origins, but were fanciful adaptations from those in my favourite books.

I still have the jotters I wrote those blurbs in and it’s fair to say that it’s no loss to the world that only one of them progressed any further. That was a story set in Cornwall called The Family at Greengates. I’ve still got the jotter it’s written in too, a hardback one, with about eight thousand words of – there’s no denying it – derivative drivel. So I wish, too, that I’d tried then to find my own writing voice rather than aping others.

I don’t want to write for children now but I love to read books for that age group by contemporary writers, and can highly recommend a brilliant time-slip novel called Beswitched by Kate Saunders. Guess what? – it’s set in a boarding school and during the holidays the heroine stays at her friend’s home in the West Country.

And guess what again? Fast forward to my writing a serial for The People’s Friend. It’s set in the Scottish Highlands and I’d called it Farrshore Summer. The People’s Friend renamed it The Family at Farrshore, by coincidence almost the same title as my childhood effort, and it was subsequently also published as a large-print paperback.

If my ten-year-old self could have known that was going to happen she’d have had a midnight feast to celebrate.