Dear friends,
I aim to send out my monthly reading digests as soon as each month is over, but this one has just sat at the bottom of the to-do list, stubbornly resisting my efforts, for 20 days now. But finally, I have made it! It's the shortest day of the year, it's been dark since 3pm, and there's a huge gale blowing outside, but at least I've finally done this.
Casting my mind back to November... This was a very busy month of reading for work, as I tried to claw my way back from always being behind with new episodes of my podcast. One of the things listeners tell me they like about Shedunnit is how deeply researched it is, and I set myself very high standards for how much I will read about any given subject before I consider publishing anything on it myself. That's all fine, but it does make the lead time for every episode very long and catching up after a break or an illness is quite hard.
One writer dominated this month, for entirely predictable reasons, with four of the books I read being by or about them. I had set myself the goal this year of making four podcast episodes about "lesser-known" writers of early twentieth-century detective fiction, for which I would read all (or nearly all) of their work in preparation. I'm pleased with the four episodes that resulted from this project, but it was A Lot. They are, if you would like to explore them yourself, Lucy, Anthony and Anne about Anthony Gilbert, The Mystery of A.A. Milne, Christianna Brand's Impossible Crimes, and latterly Edmund Crispin's Inside Jokes.
A reminder: the books listed below are ones that I read in their entirety, either for pleasure, for a book club, or as part of a longer-term project. I skim a lot of others or read portions of them as I'm working on articles and podcast scripts, but I'm not counting those as fully "read" for this purpose. I'm presenting them in the order in which I read them throughout the month. If you'd like to see previous posts in this series, they're available here.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
I got out of my months-long audiobook rut thanks to a suggestion from a newsletter reader to try the Rivers series in this format. I read the books in print and ebook form a couple of years ago, but Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration gave me a whole new level of appreciation for the world. This first book has a fair amount of exposition, what with there being both a system of magic to outline and a pantheon of divinities to introduce, but it never drags. I'm now on the library app waiting list for several of the subsequent titles as audiobooks too, and I'll be keeping one on the go whenever possible to keep me from making depressing podcasts my default background chatter again.
Buried for Pleasure, The Long Divorce and The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin
I've put these three together because that's the way I remember them, as one great mass of quips and clues. I had good intentions of spacing out my reading of all nine of Edmund Crispin's detective novels throughout the year before writing my Shedunnit episode about them for November publication, but I didn't manage it. I ended up having to do these final three as audiobooks at the fastest speed I could bear (1.45x) in order to get them all "read" in time. I don't recommend consuming any books this way if you want to enjoy them. I think I liked Buried for Pleasure best, which is the one where Crispin's detective Gervase Fen runs in a parliamentary by-election and then decides, last minute, that he despises democracy and all who sail in her.
The Examiner by Janice Hallett
Alongside my grimly rapid reading of books for work this month, I turned to some lighter relief when I had the opportunity to switch off my brain. My library hold on the newest Hallett finally came good and I enjoyed this mystery set among the students and academics on a dubious-sounding postgraduate art course. It is once again presented in her trademark "documents in the case" style, but it lacked some of the wow factor of her first one, The Appeal, which I read in a single night back in September. I also had to text a friend to help me clarify my thoughts on the ending, which is never a great sign.
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
More comfort reading! I enjoyed the film adaptation a few years ago, so thought I would try the book. It made for pleasant, quick reading, but I think this might be a rare situation where I preferred the screen version. The changes the screenwriters made to streamline the plot were good and spending more time in the heads of ultra-rich characters didn't make me more inclined to sympathise with them.
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
I made the mistake of reading too many Janice Hallett books too close together, I think. I blame the unpredictable nature of the library hold system. Once again, this is done as a series of documents and messages, this time revealing an ongoing investigation being conducted by a true crime author. Some of the cynical jokes about the publishing industry made me chuckle, but the cult-based plot felt completely detached from reality. When the gimmick is realism, via the "real" messages and sources, the events need to match in tone. I think this format might have run its course — Hallett needs to break into something else, soon, or she will be stuck writing these until they flop irrevocably.
China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
The cross-cultural romance in Crazy Rich Asians was plausible. The nuances that were teased out between a Singaporean-Chinese man and a Chinese-American woman were interesting. This sequel, in which said woman is found to be related to a Chinese-Chinese billionaire, jumped the shark about thirty pages in. I did still read it all, mostly because it required very little effort and I was still feeling a bit disorientated from absorbing so much information about Edmund Crispin in such a short space of time. I'm not in a hurry to read the final part of this trilogy, Rich People Problems.
Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin
This is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen book for December. Published in 1944 but set in 1937, it follows the fortunes of one Lady Lupin, a ditzy debutante who falls in love with a vicar, marries him, moves to a country parsonage and then has to reinvent herself as the moral and feminine centre of the community. If that wasn't enough, the parish curate gets himself murdered on Christmas Eve. Lupin takes it upon herself to solve that problem too, while hosting a seasonal house party of friends and family. Not to everyone's taste, this frothy style, but as a lover of E.M. Delafield and P.G. Wodehouse, I liked it a lot. There are three more books about Lupin's adventures, and I will be looking out for them with interest.
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
I recorded something for BBC Radio 4 about this novel part way through the month, so dashed through a quick re-read to refresh my memory. Every time I read a Josephine Tey book I think "this is the best one, I'm sure", and it happened again. So spare, so emotional, so tense, so spooky — there are such hidden depths to this deceptively simple tale of an inheritance scam that works too well. It's based on the Tichborne Claimant case from the 1860s (also the basis for Zadie Smith's recent novel The Fraud) but is updated for the late 1940s. Is this now my favourite Tey, eclipsing The Franchise Affair? I will have to seriously consider this. I'll share the link to the programme when it goes out in a couple of months, as I think other people are talking in it too so it will be a richer analysis.
Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books by David Whittle
This scholarly biography of Edmund Crispin was something that I started out using as reference material for my episode about him. I got sucked into reading it cover to cover, though, because of the thoroughness of its research and the long quotations from letters written by Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis (all three were close friends from their student days). They were just so horrible about him, sometimes with provocation, but often not. It made me wonder what this kind of book might be like in fifty years. Will a biographer be able to excavate all the Whatsapps where this kind of material lives now, or will our sniping be lost to history? I'm not sure which outcome is better, honestly.
There we have it, my reading for November. For those who are interested in the data, that was eleven books, bringing me to a total of 103 for the year. So close to my goal for the year of reading 104 books (or two a week). If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.
I'll try to do a December post in a more timely fashion as well as some broader reflection on what I read over the whole year. If you have any feelings about the timings or formats of those posts, let me know.
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Until next time,
Caroline
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