The Earl Elopes
Jan. 2nd, 2017 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyDecember books read
See if you can spot the theme to last month's books.
* Mistletoe and Murder - Evelyn James (2015) ★ ★
This is a cosy murder mystery set in the years after World War I. It's the fifth book in a series, and maybe reading the previous four would have helped me understand the relationships of the main investigating team. Clara Fitzgerald is Brighton's first female detective, and this Christmas, she is invited to London to work for a former suffragette who is being "haunted" by a ghost in her house. What follows is the worst Christmas ever, with the suffragette's bickering family joined by Clara, her brother, her friend and their maid, as well a party of ghost hunters, all staying together for Christmas, despite two murders (one on Christmas Eve) and several attempted murders.
The story is okay, but the book needed a good edit for grammar, characterisation and modern concepts. It cost me 96 cents, but I notice it's currently free on Amazon. That's a much better price for it.
Mistletoe: Mentioned as part of the decorations.
Murder: Two murders (one shot, one pushed down the servants' stairs).
* Mistletoe and Murder - Carola Dunn (2002) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is more like it. It's not great literature by any means, but it's a lot of fun, and streets ahead of the one above. This is a cosy murder mystery set in 1923, number eleven in a series. Daisy Dalrymple is the daughter of a Viscount, who has shocked her mother by marrying a widowed policeman, becoming step-mother to his young daughter, and working as a journalist. And solving murders, obviously. This Christmas, Daisy is writing a story about a country house owned by her distant cousin, Lord Westmoor. Daisy and her family spend Christmas with the family who live in the house: the Indian-born wife (or not) of Lord Westmoor's youngest brother and her possibly illegitimate sons. What follows is a splendid piece of nonsense about who Lord Westmoor's heir really is.
The following exchange between Daisy and her husband, about the wife of one of the sons, made me laugh:
"You know, I'm a bit surprised he let his daughter marry a man whose legitimacy was in doubt."
"I daresay he despaired of getting her off his hands."
"Don't be beastly, darling. She can't help her teeth."
There is an author's note explaining that the house is based on Cotehele in Cornwall, so you can visit and recreate your favourite scenes from the book if you like.
On the down side, there are several attempts at phonetically rendering regional accents, which is confusing, hard to read, and just the teeniest bit classist.
Mistletoe: Used to decorate the house and criticised by an ultra-religious vicar as a pagan tradition, which makes him rethink his willingness to reveal something he knows that may help the family.
Murder: One (the vicar, stabbed with an antique knife).
* Mistletoe and Murder - Robin Stevens (2016) ★ ★ ★
Well. This puts me in a quandary. There is a lot to like about this:
1. Really well written: PD James aside, this is the best writing of the books this month (although the gap between the quality of this and the Carola Dunn book isn't as great as that between Dunn and everyone else).
2. A interesting and likeable narrator: Hazel Wong is a fourteen-year-old girl from Hong Kong attending boarding school in England in 1935.
3. Creative use of mistletoe in a Christmas-themed murder: see summary below.
On the other hand:
1. Hazel's co-investigator and best friend, Daisy Wells, is the most irritating creature to investigate a murder since Flavia de Luce, and I spent a lot of the book hoping that someone would shut her in a cupboard.
2. I think I'm turning into a Scooby Doo villain, shaking my fist at those meddling kids. Hazel and Daisy trespass and steal and generally poke their nose into things that don't concern them.
What I've discovered is that this is the fifth book in a series set in their boarding school. Stuck in a school setting, Hazel and Daisy might make more sense. Out in the real world (the girls are spending their Christmas holidays in Cambridge with Daisy's aunt and brother), they seemed out of place. I suspect this book deserves more stars; if you can tolerate Daisy, it's probably a four-star book at least.
Mistletoe: Put in a bottle of port to poison (not fatally) everyone at a party.
Murder: Two (one tripped by a fishing line at the top of a staircase, one poisoned with arsenic in his Christmas cake).
At this point in the month I ran out of books called Mistletoe and Murder. There are more, you understand, plenty more, but they either weren't available in my local library or cost more than I was willing to pay for a Kindle version. So I moved on to books with "mistletoe" and "murder" in the title, of which there are even more. I thought it was interesting that all the mistletoe and murder books set in England were set in the past, while the American ones were contemporary. I'm sure that says something deep about their cultural differences, although I'm not sure what. (Someone should write an Australian version. We have ninety varieties of mistletoe, apparently, compared to Europe's one, including a bright orange one that is the world's largest.)
* Mystic Mistletoe Murder - Sally J Smith & Jean Steffens (2016) ★ ★
Mystic Mistletoe Murder is set in New Orleans, or on an island near New Orleans. The Mansion on Mystic Isle is a former plantation that is now a holiday resort, with a focus on magic and stuff. Tarot and whatnot. Basically anything the authors think is a bit alternative. Or mystic, I suppose. Our narrator is Melanie Hamilton, who works at the resort. She inks tattoos... and solves murders. She also has to dress like Elvira while working.
This is one of those books in which I was less interested in the plot than with how the business ran. Why would the resort organise a talk on leprechauns for a group of visitors from Ireland? They could get that at home. Why would someone who dresses as Elvira and works in a resort of alternative types be surprised that druids wear robes? Why would a resort fix a recording of the funeral march to play every time someone entered or exited by the main door? And who plays "Jingle Bell Rock" at a wake?
Despite being an experienced tattoo artist, Melanie reads very young. She is obsessed with describing clothes, and with assessing the hunkiness of every man she meets, especially her boyfriend, Jack, whom she calls Cap'n Jack. Blech. At one point she says how much she is looking forward to seeing "her handsome Jack" in costume as Bob Cratchit in the resort's production of A Christmas Carol. Ah yes. Sexy Bob Cratchit.
At one point in the book, Melanie runs into the murder victim's wife, a bitter and disturbed woman who rants to Melanie about her no-good husband's debts. Then she cheers up and says, "Well, I gotta boogie. His ashes won't pick themselves up."
Like some of the earlier books, this one also attempts phonetic accents. Also, the police are hopeless. I mean, Melanie is a terrible investigator who ends up solving the murder by accident, but she still outwits the professionals.
On the plus side, when Melanie is called on to give a false name, off the top of her head she comes up with Priscilla McGillicuddy. Excellent alias work, Melanie.
Mistletoe: Mentioned by one character while flirting with Melanie; used by a visiting delegation of druids in a ceremony.
Murder: One (someone dressed as Papa Noël is run over and his bag of toys to give to orphans is stolen)
* Murder at Mistletoe Manor - Holly Tierney-Bedord (2016) ★ ★ ★
What an odd little book this is. I think it's trying to be a farce — there is a lot of opening and closing of doors, and a surprising number of people coming and going for a hotel supposedly cut off by snow — but it doesn't quite commit. The police in particular come and go a lot as the town of Windy Pines appears to be going through the single most eventful day in its history: avalanches, blizzards, a snow plough running into a building downtown, a woman giving birth trapped in a car, not to mention all these mysterious deaths at Mistletoe Manor.
Mistletoe Manor is a boutique hotel in a small town of Windy Pines, Idaho. It's run by Klarinda Snow, who bought it a few years earlier to escape the rat race. Klarinda isn't making a go of it; the book begins with a realistic depiction of the difficulties of small business ownership. With my accounting hat on, I approve of that, as far too many of these amateur sleuths have terrible business practices... although I must admit it was a bit of a downer to read.
Klarinda is surprised one Tuesday night in December when all seven rooms of Mistletoe Manor are booked out, and even more surprised when all the guests turn up and reveal they won their rooms as a prize. The guests in turn are surprised to find that six of the seven guests went to school together. We find out early on that while they were at school, another girl there killed herself due to their bullying. And that's all you need to know to work out for yourself who the murderer is and why. Basically it's And Then There Were None crossed with I Know What You Did Last Summer. It's a cheery tale of awful people being bumped off in slightly ludicrous ways, and what could be more festive than that?
(It also features a bizarre product placement for the card game Skip-Bo. "It's the perfect game for five players!" says one character.)
Like most the other books, this is one of a series, only this appears to be a series with a twist. Reading about the second book, it seems that it takes place somewhere else in Windy Pines on the same night, which explains why the police are so busy.
Mistletoe: It's in the name of the hotel.
Murder: There is a high body count, but it's not revealed until the end which are murder and which are accidents. In summary: one poisoned, one crushed by an armoire, two drowned in a bath, one crushed by the same bath falling through the ceiling, one's car trapped by an avalanche while fleeing (unclear if this one survives), one suicide (that's the murderer).
* Mistletoe is Murder - Kathy Cranston (2016) ★ ★ ☆
This was... competent? Like all the above, this is one of a series, and I think if I'd read at least one of the others I'd have better understood how the characters were connected. It took me half the book to realise that the police chief was engaged to the narrator's aunt. Even then, I didn't really understand why the police chief relied on the narrator, who otherwise works in her aunt's bakery, to help with his detecting.
It is obvious quite early on that the murderer is left-handed, and then it's a matter of the book giving us a number of untrustworthy left-handers to pick from.
Mistletoe: Mentioned as part of the decorations.
Murder: Two murders (one stabbed with a meat thermometer, one beaten with a monogrammed golf club).
* The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories - PD James (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
All those cheap cosies were rotting my brain, so it was time to go back to a better class of author. I'm not a huge fan of either short stories or PD James, but this was a lot of fun. Published posthumously, this is a collection of four Christmas-themed short stories, two of which feature Adam Dalgliesh. The second Dalgliesh one is a parody of a Golden Age cosy and is a delight.
Mistletoe: The house in the first story is decorated with mistletoe, and the fallen berries give a clue as to which door the murderer used.
Murder: Four (one in each story): bludgeoned with a golf club, stabbed, poisoned with arsenic in his gruel, overdosed with sleeping pills in his whisky.
Fittingly, I finished the PD James on Christmas Day, and that was the end of that little bit of festive fun. If nothing else, all those easy reads bumped up my book count, leaving me on forty-eight. Could I read two more by the end of the year?
* The House of Ulloa - Emilia Pardo Bazán (1886) (trans. Paul O'Prey & Lucia Graves, 1990) ★ ★ ★ ★
I started this ages ago, only to be distracted by my mistletoe mission. This is a classic of Spanish literature, the story of a young, kind, naïve priest, Don Julián, who is sent to the Galician town of Ulloa to work for the local marquis, Don Pedro. Don Pedro marries Nucha, a childhood friend of Don Julián's, and mistreats her. Just when I was wondering where it was all going, there's an election, which ends badly for everyone.
I read this because I read a review comparing it to Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which... yes, I can see where that's coming from, but this is suffused with Gothic doom rather than the aching melancholy of The Leopard. It would probably benefit a reader who knows more about nineteenth century Spanish politics than I do, but even so, this is worth a read if classics are your bag.
* Love and the Loathsome Leopard - Barbara Cartland (1977) (I won't do stars for Barbara, as they'd all be both five and zero, depending on how you looked at it.)
Previously discussed.
Out of my fifty books this year:
- It was a fifty-fifty split between male and female authors.
- It was also a fifty-fifty split between paper and Kindle.
- Non-fiction was twenty percent, which is down a bit on last year.
- Only 1.2% were written by non-white authors, which is also down a bit.
- None were in a language other than English, and less than one percent was a translation.
That gives me something to think about when picking books this year. I've got some reading planned: I've written my read-before-all-else list, which is a mixed bag of classics and rubbish, and of course there will be the Booker read in September.
Year end book meme using titles of books I've read this year
Describe yourself: Misbehaving - Richard H Thaler
How do you feel: The Somnambulist - Essie Fox
Describe where you currently live: The Field of the Cloth of Gold - Magnus Mills
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The High Mountains of Portugal - Yann Martell
Your favourite form of transportation: Drive - Daniel Pink
Your best friend is: Daphne - Justine Picardie
You and your friends are: The Chalet School Reunion - Elinor M Brent-Dyer
What’s the weather like: Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
You fear: His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnett
What is the best advice you have to give: Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Madeline Thien
Thought for the day: Mistletoe is Murder - Kathy Cranston
My soul’s present condition: Dancer in Danger - Lorna Hill
See if you can spot the theme to last month's books.
* Mistletoe and Murder - Evelyn James (2015) ★ ★
This is a cosy murder mystery set in the years after World War I. It's the fifth book in a series, and maybe reading the previous four would have helped me understand the relationships of the main investigating team. Clara Fitzgerald is Brighton's first female detective, and this Christmas, she is invited to London to work for a former suffragette who is being "haunted" by a ghost in her house. What follows is the worst Christmas ever, with the suffragette's bickering family joined by Clara, her brother, her friend and their maid, as well a party of ghost hunters, all staying together for Christmas, despite two murders (one on Christmas Eve) and several attempted murders.
The story is okay, but the book needed a good edit for grammar, characterisation and modern concepts. It cost me 96 cents, but I notice it's currently free on Amazon. That's a much better price for it.
Mistletoe: Mentioned as part of the decorations.
Murder: Two murders (one shot, one pushed down the servants' stairs).
* Mistletoe and Murder - Carola Dunn (2002) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is more like it. It's not great literature by any means, but it's a lot of fun, and streets ahead of the one above. This is a cosy murder mystery set in 1923, number eleven in a series. Daisy Dalrymple is the daughter of a Viscount, who has shocked her mother by marrying a widowed policeman, becoming step-mother to his young daughter, and working as a journalist. And solving murders, obviously. This Christmas, Daisy is writing a story about a country house owned by her distant cousin, Lord Westmoor. Daisy and her family spend Christmas with the family who live in the house: the Indian-born wife (or not) of Lord Westmoor's youngest brother and her possibly illegitimate sons. What follows is a splendid piece of nonsense about who Lord Westmoor's heir really is.
The following exchange between Daisy and her husband, about the wife of one of the sons, made me laugh:
"You know, I'm a bit surprised he let his daughter marry a man whose legitimacy was in doubt."
"I daresay he despaired of getting her off his hands."
"Don't be beastly, darling. She can't help her teeth."
There is an author's note explaining that the house is based on Cotehele in Cornwall, so you can visit and recreate your favourite scenes from the book if you like.
On the down side, there are several attempts at phonetically rendering regional accents, which is confusing, hard to read, and just the teeniest bit classist.
Mistletoe: Used to decorate the house and criticised by an ultra-religious vicar as a pagan tradition, which makes him rethink his willingness to reveal something he knows that may help the family.
Murder: One (the vicar, stabbed with an antique knife).
* Mistletoe and Murder - Robin Stevens (2016) ★ ★ ★
Well. This puts me in a quandary. There is a lot to like about this:
1. Really well written: PD James aside, this is the best writing of the books this month (although the gap between the quality of this and the Carola Dunn book isn't as great as that between Dunn and everyone else).
2. A interesting and likeable narrator: Hazel Wong is a fourteen-year-old girl from Hong Kong attending boarding school in England in 1935.
3. Creative use of mistletoe in a Christmas-themed murder: see summary below.
On the other hand:
1. Hazel's co-investigator and best friend, Daisy Wells, is the most irritating creature to investigate a murder since Flavia de Luce, and I spent a lot of the book hoping that someone would shut her in a cupboard.
2. I think I'm turning into a Scooby Doo villain, shaking my fist at those meddling kids. Hazel and Daisy trespass and steal and generally poke their nose into things that don't concern them.
What I've discovered is that this is the fifth book in a series set in their boarding school. Stuck in a school setting, Hazel and Daisy might make more sense. Out in the real world (the girls are spending their Christmas holidays in Cambridge with Daisy's aunt and brother), they seemed out of place. I suspect this book deserves more stars; if you can tolerate Daisy, it's probably a four-star book at least.
Mistletoe: Put in a bottle of port to poison (not fatally) everyone at a party.
Murder: Two (one tripped by a fishing line at the top of a staircase, one poisoned with arsenic in his Christmas cake).
At this point in the month I ran out of books called Mistletoe and Murder. There are more, you understand, plenty more, but they either weren't available in my local library or cost more than I was willing to pay for a Kindle version. So I moved on to books with "mistletoe" and "murder" in the title, of which there are even more. I thought it was interesting that all the mistletoe and murder books set in England were set in the past, while the American ones were contemporary. I'm sure that says something deep about their cultural differences, although I'm not sure what. (Someone should write an Australian version. We have ninety varieties of mistletoe, apparently, compared to Europe's one, including a bright orange one that is the world's largest.)
* Mystic Mistletoe Murder - Sally J Smith & Jean Steffens (2016) ★ ★
Mystic Mistletoe Murder is set in New Orleans, or on an island near New Orleans. The Mansion on Mystic Isle is a former plantation that is now a holiday resort, with a focus on magic and stuff. Tarot and whatnot. Basically anything the authors think is a bit alternative. Or mystic, I suppose. Our narrator is Melanie Hamilton, who works at the resort. She inks tattoos... and solves murders. She also has to dress like Elvira while working.
This is one of those books in which I was less interested in the plot than with how the business ran. Why would the resort organise a talk on leprechauns for a group of visitors from Ireland? They could get that at home. Why would someone who dresses as Elvira and works in a resort of alternative types be surprised that druids wear robes? Why would a resort fix a recording of the funeral march to play every time someone entered or exited by the main door? And who plays "Jingle Bell Rock" at a wake?
Despite being an experienced tattoo artist, Melanie reads very young. She is obsessed with describing clothes, and with assessing the hunkiness of every man she meets, especially her boyfriend, Jack, whom she calls Cap'n Jack. Blech. At one point she says how much she is looking forward to seeing "her handsome Jack" in costume as Bob Cratchit in the resort's production of A Christmas Carol. Ah yes. Sexy Bob Cratchit.
At one point in the book, Melanie runs into the murder victim's wife, a bitter and disturbed woman who rants to Melanie about her no-good husband's debts. Then she cheers up and says, "Well, I gotta boogie. His ashes won't pick themselves up."
Like some of the earlier books, this one also attempts phonetic accents. Also, the police are hopeless. I mean, Melanie is a terrible investigator who ends up solving the murder by accident, but she still outwits the professionals.
On the plus side, when Melanie is called on to give a false name, off the top of her head she comes up with Priscilla McGillicuddy. Excellent alias work, Melanie.
Mistletoe: Mentioned by one character while flirting with Melanie; used by a visiting delegation of druids in a ceremony.
Murder: One (someone dressed as Papa Noël is run over and his bag of toys to give to orphans is stolen)
* Murder at Mistletoe Manor - Holly Tierney-Bedord (2016) ★ ★ ★
What an odd little book this is. I think it's trying to be a farce — there is a lot of opening and closing of doors, and a surprising number of people coming and going for a hotel supposedly cut off by snow — but it doesn't quite commit. The police in particular come and go a lot as the town of Windy Pines appears to be going through the single most eventful day in its history: avalanches, blizzards, a snow plough running into a building downtown, a woman giving birth trapped in a car, not to mention all these mysterious deaths at Mistletoe Manor.
Mistletoe Manor is a boutique hotel in a small town of Windy Pines, Idaho. It's run by Klarinda Snow, who bought it a few years earlier to escape the rat race. Klarinda isn't making a go of it; the book begins with a realistic depiction of the difficulties of small business ownership. With my accounting hat on, I approve of that, as far too many of these amateur sleuths have terrible business practices... although I must admit it was a bit of a downer to read.
Klarinda is surprised one Tuesday night in December when all seven rooms of Mistletoe Manor are booked out, and even more surprised when all the guests turn up and reveal they won their rooms as a prize. The guests in turn are surprised to find that six of the seven guests went to school together. We find out early on that while they were at school, another girl there killed herself due to their bullying. And that's all you need to know to work out for yourself who the murderer is and why. Basically it's And Then There Were None crossed with I Know What You Did Last Summer. It's a cheery tale of awful people being bumped off in slightly ludicrous ways, and what could be more festive than that?
(It also features a bizarre product placement for the card game Skip-Bo. "It's the perfect game for five players!" says one character.)
Like most the other books, this is one of a series, only this appears to be a series with a twist. Reading about the second book, it seems that it takes place somewhere else in Windy Pines on the same night, which explains why the police are so busy.
Mistletoe: It's in the name of the hotel.
Murder: There is a high body count, but it's not revealed until the end which are murder and which are accidents. In summary: one poisoned, one crushed by an armoire, two drowned in a bath, one crushed by the same bath falling through the ceiling, one's car trapped by an avalanche while fleeing (unclear if this one survives), one suicide (that's the murderer).
* Mistletoe is Murder - Kathy Cranston (2016) ★ ★ ☆
This was... competent? Like all the above, this is one of a series, and I think if I'd read at least one of the others I'd have better understood how the characters were connected. It took me half the book to realise that the police chief was engaged to the narrator's aunt. Even then, I didn't really understand why the police chief relied on the narrator, who otherwise works in her aunt's bakery, to help with his detecting.
It is obvious quite early on that the murderer is left-handed, and then it's a matter of the book giving us a number of untrustworthy left-handers to pick from.
Mistletoe: Mentioned as part of the decorations.
Murder: Two murders (one stabbed with a meat thermometer, one beaten with a monogrammed golf club).
* The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories - PD James (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
All those cheap cosies were rotting my brain, so it was time to go back to a better class of author. I'm not a huge fan of either short stories or PD James, but this was a lot of fun. Published posthumously, this is a collection of four Christmas-themed short stories, two of which feature Adam Dalgliesh. The second Dalgliesh one is a parody of a Golden Age cosy and is a delight.
Mistletoe: The house in the first story is decorated with mistletoe, and the fallen berries give a clue as to which door the murderer used.
Murder: Four (one in each story): bludgeoned with a golf club, stabbed, poisoned with arsenic in his gruel, overdosed with sleeping pills in his whisky.
Fittingly, I finished the PD James on Christmas Day, and that was the end of that little bit of festive fun. If nothing else, all those easy reads bumped up my book count, leaving me on forty-eight. Could I read two more by the end of the year?
* The House of Ulloa - Emilia Pardo Bazán (1886) (trans. Paul O'Prey & Lucia Graves, 1990) ★ ★ ★ ★
I started this ages ago, only to be distracted by my mistletoe mission. This is a classic of Spanish literature, the story of a young, kind, naïve priest, Don Julián, who is sent to the Galician town of Ulloa to work for the local marquis, Don Pedro. Don Pedro marries Nucha, a childhood friend of Don Julián's, and mistreats her. Just when I was wondering where it was all going, there's an election, which ends badly for everyone.
I read this because I read a review comparing it to Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which... yes, I can see where that's coming from, but this is suffused with Gothic doom rather than the aching melancholy of The Leopard. It would probably benefit a reader who knows more about nineteenth century Spanish politics than I do, but even so, this is worth a read if classics are your bag.
* Love and the Loathsome Leopard - Barbara Cartland (1977) (I won't do stars for Barbara, as they'd all be both five and zero, depending on how you looked at it.)
Previously discussed.
Out of my fifty books this year:
- It was a fifty-fifty split between male and female authors.
- It was also a fifty-fifty split between paper and Kindle.
- Non-fiction was twenty percent, which is down a bit on last year.
- Only 1.2% were written by non-white authors, which is also down a bit.
- None were in a language other than English, and less than one percent was a translation.
That gives me something to think about when picking books this year. I've got some reading planned: I've written my read-before-all-else list, which is a mixed bag of classics and rubbish, and of course there will be the Booker read in September.
Year end book meme using titles of books I've read this year
Describe yourself: Misbehaving - Richard H Thaler
How do you feel: The Somnambulist - Essie Fox
Describe where you currently live: The Field of the Cloth of Gold - Magnus Mills
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The High Mountains of Portugal - Yann Martell
Your favourite form of transportation: Drive - Daniel Pink
Your best friend is: Daphne - Justine Picardie
You and your friends are: The Chalet School Reunion - Elinor M Brent-Dyer
What’s the weather like: Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
You fear: His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnett
What is the best advice you have to give: Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Madeline Thien
Thought for the day: Mistletoe is Murder - Kathy Cranston
My soul’s present condition: Dancer in Danger - Lorna Hill