Delicious Death: Some Quickfire Crime Reviews

First, some links to my latest reviews for The Bookbag:

Desolation Island by Adolfo Garcia Ortega (short answer: very very good)

The Story of English by Joseph Piercy (short answer: very very mixed)

Now I don't know if you've heard, but I like crime. Theoretically, of course. This blog does not endorse wrongdoing in any way, shape or form, and in fact would encourage you all to be nice to other people and not kill them.

Nonetheless, in the abstract, crime soothes me. Here is a round-up of my latest toothsome murder selections.

Sovereign by C. J. Sansom.

I've said before that I like Sansom's books a lot. Not only does he have a very good, very full-blooded line in historical recreation, he's becoming a technically better writer as he goes along. Sovereign is the third in his series of novels about a crime-solving hunchbacked lawyer struggling to stay alive among the political intrigue of Henry VIII's court. It's set in 1541 and concerns two of the aging Henry's more disastrous decisions: his marriage to hot young thing Catherine Howard (the second beheaded, according to the rhyme) and his royal Progress around a very tetchy and still rebellious North of England.

Matthew Shardlake and his sexy assistant Jack Barak are sent to York on a mission to look after the safety of a political prisoner. Of course, Shardlake gets royally mixed up in Henry's progress and ends up uncovering a plot to destabilise the entire Tudor succession. As you do. It's all a bit ridiculous (although based on real events and real intrigue, like all the best fiction) but thoroughly fun, and the story carrys you along at a breathless pace all the way to the end. It's a 650 page book that reads like a 250 page novella.

Poor old Shardlake is a good man in a bad world. He doesn't know when to leave well enough alone and who has a lot of trouble remembering that most people are a lot nastier than he is. Each book sees him sinking further into his pit of emotional despair, and each culminates with the inevitable announcement that this will be ABSOLUTELY HIS VERY LAST CASE. Since I know that Sansom has written at least two more Shardlake novels I can smell the lie and be very grateful for it. This series ticks both my crime nerd and  history nerd boxes, and long may it last.

I see I originally gave the Shardlake books 3 stars. I must have been feeling mean that day. For this outing, I'm revising upwards to

4 stars.


The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson

Before I actually read it, I had suspicions that The Affair of the Mutilated Mink might be a silly book. Imagine my joy when I realised that it is precisely that. Its pages give off gusts of the purest, most exquisite Golden Age foolery (in case you are wondering, this rare substance smells like leather-bound books, pearls, rolling acres and gunshot wounds, and Agatha Christie used to spray herself all over with it every morning).

The second in Anderson's series of pastiche Golden Age detective novels (my library didn't have the first), its English upper class characters bray and blether delightfully, its American characters say HOWDY and chew cigars and everyone has utterly creative secret backgrounds involving JEWELS and MISTAKEN IDENTITIES and TRAGIC DEATHS. The dippy set-up (American producer wants to shoot movie on location at the film-mad Earl of Burford's scenic pile) is an excuse to drag a motley cast of movie star types, aristocracy, long-lost relatives and the obligatory troubled artist together for a country-house weekend party that ends (surprise surprise) with MURDER MOST FOUL.

The Affair of the Mutilated Mink never makes the mistake of taking itself seriously. Even the characters know they're being ridiculous, and there's an extremely meta joke-that-knows-it's-a-joke atmosphere to the whole thing that reminded me a lot of P. G. Wodehouse. Fans of Golden Age detective fiction will have their hearts melted by throwaway references to Ariadne Oliver and Inspector Alleyn (who, in this world, are real people), as well as spot-on recreations of stock characters like the officious Scotland Yard man (complete with trusty valet), the prima donna actress and the American movie producer extraordinaire. At the same time, though, Anderson's doing something quite intelligent with the familiar tropes. The man sent from Scotland Yard turns out to be too smart for his own good and the mystery is actually solved by Wilkins, one of those adorably modest country detective who are always totally snubbed in Christie and Sayers novels. The leading girl is not only suitably plucky and resourceful but also quite a rounded human being, the Earl's bluffness is all for show... and so on, and so on. It's a really witty variation on a well-known theme that feels new and old at the same time - which, coincidentally, was what all those Golden Age crime novels were trying to do in the first place.

This book is wonderful. It affectionately embraces all the flaws of its parent genre, pokes gentle fun at its worst excesses and on top of that manages to put together a fairly tidy and inventive murder mystery. The reveal may not blow your mind, although there are some great twists in the tale, but the joy of any good Golden Age murder mystery is the silly, over-the-top journey to that final denouement, and this journey is ridiculously fun.

Another 4 stars.

Image from banisbooks.blogspot.com

Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh

By the way, in case you're wondering, I did not mistakenly smash my fingers against my keyboard to come up with that first name. Marsh was from New Zealand, so her parents gave her a name that's the Maori word for a kind of tree. The G is silent so it's pronounced like Naio. There you go, that's your fascinating trivia for the day. You're welcome.

Before I actually discuss the content of this book, I would like to direct your attention to the FANTASTIC cover of my edition. It is purest essence of the 1970s, when publishers had just discovered photography but were not yet conversant with realism. This image has it all: fake plastic trout, puzzled dog, daub of red paint where the blood should be. It is so ugly that I can't stop staring at it.

Unfortunately, though, it turns out that the best thing about Scales of Justice is that cover. A lot of Golden Age writers (apart from Dorothy Sayers, who got bored and turned to translating Dante instead) carried on relentlessly beating the dead horse of the 1930s setting well into the 1960s, and this book, published in 1955, contains themes so stale that they're practically suppurating.

The female characters wear twinsets with their tweeds and the male characters talk about Nazis, but apart from that you'd never guess that the year was no longer 1935. Retired colonels and dusty earls still perambulate around their small English country town, huntin' and shootin' and fishin' and sleepin' with each other. The murder itself is an example of the worst excesses of the clue puzzle format, which states that if the killer does not do the deed while balanced on one leg, wearing a swimming costume and a lion mask and wielding a melon borer the writer is NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

Marsh is trying hard, all right, but the effect is of insanity and extreme hideboundness rather than any kind of real invention. Add to that the tiresome upper-class honour displayed by all the characters, which pointlessly derails the investigation for 100 pages, and you have a murder mystery so idiotic that I could barely finish it. And when I did, the reveal was stupid. Nul points, Marsh. Nul points.

2 stars.

1001 Books review: David Copperfield

My experience with David Copperfield is a pretty excellent example of my theory that there is no such thing as an objectively good book. I picked it up for the first time when I was thirteen, as part of my efforts to be a Serious, Grown-Up Reader.

Internet, I hated it. As I remember, I got about three chapters in and gave up in impotent fury.

I started David Copperfield again last week. I am absolutely certain not a single word of it has changed (I know this because I was reading the exact same copy that I had when I was thirteen), but somehow this time I wasn't offended by them at all. Just like capers and things that taste like marzipan, it turns out that the adult version of me really likes David Copperfield.

I always try to be a bit sulky hipster about Dickens. He's so famous, and so beloved, that I feel like there must be a catch somewhere. But every time I stop whining and actually read a Dickens novel, I realise why he's lasted so well. Yes, he's mawkishly sentimental, yes, he has a thing for golden-haired angels and crossing-sweepers dying tragically in debtors' prisons, but he's also an excellent plotter with a total genius for creating instantly memorable and entirely unforgettable characters.  

David Copperfield is obviously just one novel, but it's given the world sickening snake-villain Uriah Heep, exuberant and permanently insolvent Mr Micawber, and secretly good-hearted donkey-hater Betsey Trotwood. And then there's Peggotty, who bursts all the buttons off her dresses whenever she gets emotional, and Mr Murdstone, so evil that he can kill his wives with just the power of his mind. And so on, and so on....

Dickens's heroes and heroines tend to be his weakest creations, dull and dinkily foolish respectively, but everyone else is stellar, and everyone else is the reason why Dickens is still so beloved. He is quite simply the best ever at creating his bit-parts.

Having said that thing about Dickens making up boring heroes, I actually found David Copperfield's hero quite interesting. This is largely because I can now appreciate that he is essentially just Dickens in disguise. David Copperfield is Dickens's autobiography. Consider the facts: like Dickens, David spends time as a child labourer in a London warehouse, he has a really bumptious small-time fraudster father figure in Mr Micawber, he grows up to become a famous writer and he has a very youthful marriage to a woman so helpless and daft that she is functionally a child. I'd say that was all pretty conclusive.

This woman. How I hate her.

That fictionalised portrait of his marriage, of course, interested me the most of all. I've somehow managed to get really involved in the Dickens relationship, but until now what I've read about it has been from the point of view of Mrs. I was all ready to blame Mr for everything - until I heard his views on the matter.

David's wife (the Catherine Dickens substitute) is called Dora, and on the strength of his description of her character, MAN do I now feel for Charles. I am a pathetically non-violent person. I can't even kill zombies in video games because I worry about their feelings. And yet while I was reading David Copperfield I had to struggle with vivid fantasties about taking Dora out and just SHOOTING HER IN HER STUPID CHILDISH FACE.

Lord have mercy, that idiot woman. She weeps because David points out that all their servants cheat him and he hasn't actually eaten dinner in weeks. She begs him to call her, and I quote, Child-wife, so that he will never forget how stupid and useless she is. (I am not kidding. She SERIOUSLY SAYS THIS.) I hate her. Yes, Dickens gives us an over-dramatic, highly biased version of events, but I can imagine that it would be pretty awful to be as smart and worldly as he was and married to someone with not an ounce of practicality in her fleecy little brain. Even Dickens/Copperfield has fantasies about her 'becoming an angel' (ie DYING). Beautifully, of course. So then she could be a hot fantasy object in his mind AND he could finally get the servants to bring his dinner on time. Dickens really was quite emotionally weird.

I do think Dickens has some serious issues about women and sexual relationships. I'd love to believe that the 'Child-wife' concept is presented as a bad thing and he understands the values of equal parnership in a marriage ... and yet. Quite aside from Dora, another character's beautiful emotional conclusion comes when she calls the man she married 'my husband and father'. Oh, and a lot of characters who are siblings (though admittedly not genetic ones) fall in love. We are meant to find this adorable. My brother and sister are adopted. I don't.

This kind of thing is so widespread in all Dickens novels, though, that protesting against it feels like trying to throw Boris Johnson over the Eiffel Tower. I've pretty much decided to ignore it and focus on the stuff that Dickens does do well. Like death. Dickens gives great death, doesn't he? I know all that Victorian hyper-emotionalism is a bit past its best, but you can't beat a good bit of tragedy, especially when everyone weeps and reconciles with their enemies just before they breathe their last. Without giving away the end of David Copperfield, I will say that the bodies mount up in a satisfying heap. And then everyone who doesn't die gets hitched. In fact, it all rounds up in a distinctly satisfactory (although totally not postmodern) way.

Second time round, I ended up having a great time following the ridiculous trials and tribulations of young David Copperfield. I found David Copperfield charming, silly and fun, if a bit morally dodgy in places. You know what? I've given up fighting Dickens. I've realised that if you want a big blockbuster Victorian novel with lots of charming, slightly crazy characters and a fat serendipitous plot, you just can't do better than him. I hate to admit it, but Dickens is great.

4 stars.

Delicious Death: Andrew Taylor Again

First, announcements: I've got a new gig reviewing books for The Bookbag. Isn't that nice! My first review (if you know me at all, you should not be surprised that I chose this one out of many) is of The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper. Go, read!

And now for something completely the same: I read another crime novel. After really liking The Anatomy of Ghosts a few weeks ago I've been trying to have an Andrew Taylor binge. Sadly for me (I blame the government), my local library has exactly... one more novel by him. So it wasn't much of a binge. But at least I tried.

Call the Dying is (of course it would be) not even the first, but the seventh in a series Taylor has written about the fictional Anglo-Welsh town of Lydmouth. This means that by reading it I have probably spectacularly spoilt myself for all the plot twists in the previous six books.

Luckily, though, Taylor has done a fairly nifty job of making this book operate under its own logic. Call the Dying is quite obviously part of a series, but at the same time it stands alone. It's actually a pretty good lesson in how to reintroduce longstanding characters and situations in a way that clicks with repeat readers but makes sense to the random punter who's just wandered in off the (metaphorical) street. Call the Dying would quite obviously have meant more to me had I read the previous six Lydmouth novels, but at the same time I felt like I was allowed to get to know Lydmouth's inhabitants while being shown enough of their baggage to stop me spending the whole novel wondering Who are YOU? And who is HE? And what is SHE and WHERE ARE WE AND WHAT IS THIS OH MY GOD.

The Lydmouth novels are set in the 1950s, which inevitably makes reviewers (or at least the ones quoted on Call the Dying's cover) compare them to later Agatha Christie. Well, technically, yes, but this is a very different kind of thing. Christie never quite disengaged mentally from large houses in the 1930s, so her '50s' novels are really set in the 30s but with different hair. She also believed very firmly that anyone who was not a member of the professional or landed classes was fundamentally not worth bothering about. The lower classes are sometimes in evidence, but always as bit-parts, usually called Gladys and often with more than a hint of mental deficiency and/or adenoids. No matter what her apparent theme, there's always something a bit big about Agatha Christie novels. They aspire.

Call the Dying, on the other hand, is all about littleness. It depicts a mean and menial post-war world where everyone is tired and weak and struggling to get by. Fog, both metaphoric and actual, smothers the whole novel, enclosing Lydmouth in an atmosphere of claustrophobic small-time nastiness. Taylor is very good at creating emotion in his reader - to me, the whole book felt grey - but it doesn't give off that tiresome smugger-than-thou world-weariness of a P. D. James novel. Taylor's characters don't pretentiously bewail their fate, they just get on with living their lives in a vaguely dissatisfied way.

The plot is as follows: journalist Jill Francis returns to Lydmouth to help out a sick friend and re-encounters unhappily married DCI Richard Thornhill, with whom she obviously has a lot of hot illegal history. Then a TV salesman disappears and the local doctor is found dead, nibbled by rats, and - well, you know. They solve crime.

No, I wasn't kidding about the rats. Taylor's got a creatively nasty streak to his imagination. I noticed it in The Anatomy of Ghosts, but he really lets it out here. Apart from Doctor Bayswater, who likes to feed his garden rats bread and milk and watch them as they play, there's a mysterious man who keeps weeing in letterboxes at the dead of night and someone else who desecrates graves. It's all very nearly horror, creepy in a way that most murder mysteries aren't.

Actually, the murder part of it isn't Call the Dying's strongest point. I'm not sure the final reveal is particularly well-executed. So much attention is given to B-plots about the life of Lydmouth town that the central mystery doesn't have quite time to play out. I was confused rather than enlightened by most of the explanation, and there wasn't enough trailing of the solution for most readers to be able to follow along, let alone guess the twist. But, just like The Anatomy of Ghosts, I think Taylor's charm lies in his set-up rather than his plotting. In terms both of their humanity and their time period Lydmouth's inhabitants feel believable (if slightly distorted, like lifelike caricatures), and Lydmouth itself is eerily fascinating.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I really like Andrew Taylor's novels. They're not quite like any other crime I've read - or not quite like crime novels, full stop - but they're engrossing, weird and imaginative. When I read one, I want more, and that's surely a good sign. As of today, I am haunting my local second-hand bookshops on the look-out for my next fix.

3.5 stars.

Review: The Snow Child

There are certain books that I pick up, read the first page, put down again and say "... damn."

Often, this is because the book is bad. Sometimes, though, it is because I have just read something so wonderful that I need time to come to terms with the fact that I did not write it. Reading the first page of The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey made me shrivel up with jealousy like a thwarted fairy-tale witch. It is a masterclass in the vivid, tactile transmission of a scene - from the first sentence you're right there, totally caught up in the action and a paid-up member of Ivey's marvellous and slightly magic-realist world. And it just gets better from there.

The Snow Child is the story of Mabel and Jack, an aging couple who have never been able to have children. They're both slightly weird and introverted (an understatement in the case of Mabel, who begins the book suicidal and with a total distrust of all other human beings), and they've come to Alaska to start again all on their own. Jack won't even let Mabel do any of the farming, so she spends her days baking pies and thinking about death. They're at the lowest point in their lives when they go outside one night and on a random impulse make a snow sculpture of a little girl. The next morning they wake up to discover that the statue has been destroyed - and there's a child hiding in the woods next to their house.

You can probably tell where this one is going. But the clever thing about Ivey's story is that some of her characters know it too. As the couple befriend the little girl, Mabel becomes obsessed with the idea that they've made their own snow child who, like the girl in the story, will melt in the spring: essentially, she believes that she's stepped into her own fairy tale. It's a clever idea, done delicately enough to make the reader genuinely unsure what's real and what's a myth in the universe of the novel. Even better, Ivey has split The Snow Child into three different sections in which she plays with three different versions of the basic Snow Child story, each similar to but subtly unlike Jack and Mabel's experiences with their girl from the woods. It's a nice comment on the essential differences as well as the similarities of each retelling of the same fairy tale.

Nothing truly fantastic ever happens in The Snow Child. The little girl's presence in Jack and Mabel's back yard has an explanation; she is certainly not made of frozen water. But at the same time, Ivey always leaves a little gap for conjecture. The snow child is a real person, living in the real world... but she can still summon a snow-storm with her mind. Maybe. Or maybe she can't. It's never entirely clarified, and that leaves the reader beautiful blank space to decide what they think.

Ivey's Alaska is wonderful in the literal meaning of the word: she is so good at conveying the wonder and beauty of the wilderness that surrounds her characters without turning it into a twee little snowy cottage garden. But even though it's got a gorgeous, out-of-the-ordinary backdrop and a weird central character, The Snow Child is really all about how exceptional everyday life can be. Sure, it's got a kid who might have unearthly powers, but its real magic comes from the relationships that are built up between the characters.

I know, that sounds really sugary and awful, as though the characters spend all their time crying and hugging each other and discovering their purpose in life. But while that does literally happen (the discovery, not the crying and hugging), Ivey does it in a really organic, sensible way. The snow child gives Jack and Mabel the chance to experience a version of parenthood; their nutty next-valley-over neighbours let them discover how nice it can be to have friends. It's sweet, but realistically so, a kind of wish-fulfilment that makes sense.

I'm aware that I'm raving about The Snow Child. But it's not often that I'm seized with the need to go online and find out how many awards a novel has won because I'm so convinced that it needs ALL THE PRIZES. This is an interesting story, yes, but what really makes it stand out is how gloriously good its writing is. A rational fairy tale with a spice of magic to it, it's so much more unusual and interesting than a totally mystical or completely factual retelling. I can't recommend this enough.

4.5 stars.

Delicious Death: The Detection Club

I am currently recovering from a dissertation about crime. So naturally, the only thing I want to read about is crime.

I bought Ask A Policeman as an extremely tenuous bit of dissertation 'research' (because Agatha Christie wrote the introduction and Dorothy Sayers wrote one of the chapters) but also because it is extremely relevant to my interests. I am competely and tragically obsessed with Golden Age detective fiction. My father gave me an Agatha Christie novel when I was twelve; I read one page of it and realised that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Not that it hasn't had competition. In the extensive game of Imaginary Historical Friends that I've been playing for years, I've never been able to decide whether I'd prefer to be a Pre-Raphaelite Brother or part of the Byron/Shelley Sexual Licentiousness and Monsters tour of 1816. Or maybe a beat poet. So many choices. But I have come to realise that all this is kind of contingent on me suddenly becoming a man, because the ladies in each group tended to get a raw deal. I am now, therefore, beginning to think that what I would really like to have been is a member of the Detection Club in the 1930s.

The more I read about The Detection Club, the more I discover how awesome it was. If you're a Christie fan, you've probably read about it (in a thinly disguised form) in her book of Miss Marple stories The Thirteen Problems. Basically, it was made up by a group of crime novelists in 1930 to 'further the cause of the clue puzzle form' ie. hang out, get squiffy and talk about murder. Not only were quite a few of the principal members women (Dorothy Sayers even wrote the official oath, which is hilarious), but it's pretty clear that the club members had a totally great time together, as witnessed by the fact that one of their favourite activities was making fun of each other in the things they wrote. Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case has a spot-on send-up of Agatha Christie, and in Ask a Policemen, one of the club's collaborative efforts, the writers all swapped detectives in order to be able to take the piss out of each other with even greater ease than usual.

Now, even though I know its authors have done this (because the blurb says so), I didn't find Ask a Policeman quite the humour-fest they clearly intended it to be. This is because, apart from Lord Wimsey, most of these detectives (and their authors) mean absolutely nothing to a reader from 2012. Certain things age well, and certain things don't, and although I would like to make the case for Anthony Berkeley (if you're interested in him, he also wrote as Francis Iles for some incomprehensible reason), Helen Jackson and Gladys Mitchell ... have gone deservedly into that good night. Without any idea what was being riffed on I could sense the presence of jokes, but that was about it. I didn't know who Mrs Bradley or Sir John Saumarez were, and because of that a large part of Ask a Policeman's central premise fell flat for me.

I felt kind of bad about this - what kind of Golden Age crime novel buff am I? - but I would have felt far worse about my bewilderment if the entire novel had not been such a swirling maelstrom of well-bred confusion. The four writers were each given the same information about the murder and then told to go away and solve it without consulting each other, and the result is that none of the timings match up, people miraculously fall ill and get well from one chapter to the next and there are lots of bizarre plot threads left dangling in the breeze.

Now, to an extent this is par for the course for the genre they're writing in. The main criticism of Golden Age crime novels is that their plots are - to put it bluntly - bloody ridiculous. In the words of Raymond Chandler, they all feature 

the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.

For me, that's one of the most charming aspects of them, but if that annoys you, you should definitely not come within one hundred feet of Ask a Policemen. Ridiculousness oozes out of its every pore. 

Consider its set-up. Evil media mogul Lord Comstock (think Murdoch before Murdoch even existed) has been shot in his study while surrounded by a motley and unlikely list of haters who include a Bishop, an upper-class twit, a mysterious lady, a Police Commissioner and the inevitable effeminate male secretary. In a twist of fate so painfully unlikely that it makes my brain ache, the Home Secretary decides to call off the police force and draft in four amateur detectives to solve the case. Because when a major public figure has been murdered, the people I want investigating his death are an old rich woman, an actor, a Lord and... some sort of wealthy jobless person (I've read a few of Berkeley's Sheringham books by now and I like them but I STILL haven't been able to work out what he does). 

Where do you go from there? How can you make the whole thing not crushingly stupid? The answer is, you can't, and none of these authors even tries. Each detective comes to a different (and totally whacky) conclusion from their version of the facts (I use the phrase 'their version' advisedly), and the result is brain-melting non-linear information stew with lashings of super-British jolliness.

Ask a Policeman is the result of a lot of people having a lot of slightly elitist fun with each other. I really wish I had been one of those people, and it was clearly hysterically funny to write, but the result is the purest silly froth that doesn't translate well out of its original moment. When you read a Golden Age crime novel, even a daft one, it's hard not to be infected by the sheer joy of it, but I cannot underestimate what an enormous pile of nonsensical nuts this particular book is. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then Ask a Policeman is a camel with five humps, zebra stripes and a tail made out of moustaches.

This is a book for the very specialised reader. I found the Sayers and Berkeley sections charming (if crazy) because I know their work, but the other two parts were absolutely lost on me. It's a period piece that's aged like Poundland cava, a glimpse of a craze that was weird at the time and seems even weirder now. I love this genre like nothing else in the world, but I still have to give this particular novel

2 (affectionate) stars.

Review: The Chrysalids

Look at this book, this book is amazing

Confession: I completely forgot I had even read this book. But then yesterday I was ill, and I realised that I absolutely had to read Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones.

Please note that I have read this book approximately 30 times before, as I have everything Diana Wynne Jones has ever written. She is one of the main reasons why, whenever I hear someone say that they are (or worse, tell off a child for being) 'too old' for a particular book, I want to set myself on fire. There is NO SUCH THING IN THIS UNIVERSE as being too old for a book. Sure, you can be too young for a book (consider American Psycho before you tell me this is not so), but you can never, ever, ever be too old to read a book that you love. If you think you are, then you have gone sadly wrong in life.

Hexwood is a classic tale about knights, dragons, intergalactic travel, robots and a contract killer with a heart of gold, and it could take most of the stuff that is sold as 'teen fiction' these days and grind it under its blood-red cyborg boot. In it, main character Ann has grown up with four imaginary friends constantly chatting away inside her head, but as the story unfolds she begins to realise that these people might not be imaginary after all. When she asks them to stop behaving as though they're real, they're each shocked, because she's the one who's not real - and of course it then emerges that all five of them are living human beings with a special mental connection.

Anyway, I read that part and suddenly remembered that I finally know (or at least can strongly guess) where Diana Wynne Jones got that particular idea from: I'd read something just like it two weeks ago in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids.

Which is when I remembered that I'd read The Chrysalids. Oops. To be fair to me, I read it in two hours, on the train to London and then on the train back again, so I must have failed to register it as an event. But on the other hand (it's all coming back to me now) I loved it. I loved it more than anything else I've reviewed on here for months. During the two hours it took me to read it, I sent a series of over-excited capslocked texts to my boyfriend telling him that HE SHOULD READ THIS and EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS and THERE SHOULD BE TEN SEQUELS TO THIS. Also (and most relevantly to this post so far) that I HAD FOUND THE BOOK THAT THE X-MEN CAME FROM.

I know I get really over-excited about literary influence (please see: my dissertation topic; countless other tinhatty rants), and I also know that it is impossible to second-guess the referential workings of the human subconscious, but I really struggle to see how a book first published in 1955 about people whose genetic mutations give them superpowers but also make them reviled by non-mutant society could NOT influence the content of the X-Men comics (first published 1963). The main characters are telepaths (they are all linked at the mind, hence the similarity to Hexwood), and that's really the only ability that's properly explored, but there's a fascinating background range of mutants who have incredibly long arms and webbed feet and so on, all just begging to be turned into superheroes. There is even a mutant described as 'the spider man' (to which I say: I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, STAN LEE).

John Wyndham is an author I don't talk about much. For some mysterious reason potentially to do with mind control (he is a science fiction writer, after all) I can never seem to remember how highly I rate him until I pick up another one of his books, at which point I am amazed afresh at what an understated genius he is. Like all the best sci fi writers, he goes about the business of writing fantasy as though it was fact, taking a particular proposition (in this case: a nuclear event has resulted in extreme genetic mutation) and following it through to all its logical conclusions. The hyper-religious civilization he has imagined in The Chrysalids has laws, prohibitions, holy texts, sayings and subcultures, and it all seems not only plausible but disturbingly likely.

Set in underpopulated, post-apocalyptic fronteer land, The Chrysalids is the story of the early life of David Strorm, son of the district's most outspoken and fanantic critic of all things mutated. In his society, mutant crops or animals are known as 'deviations', and mutant humans are 'blasphemies', and their holy book says that thou shalt not suffer a deviation or blasphemy to live. David doesn't really question this until the day he meets a little girl who is extremely kind and nice but who has six toes on each of her feet. Not long after that, he discovers that his ability to talk to his cousin and some of his other friends in his head is not exactly normal, and not long after that he realises that if he isn't careful, his natural desire to live without fear of being killed or maimed might suffer a considerable setback.

The Chrysalids is such a simple, linear story, but its background is so beautifully thought out that the novel could have been twice as long (or three times, or four sequels) and still have been just as fascinating. At times, actually, I got frustrated at Wyndham for making up something so great, dipping his toe into it and then getting bored and wandering away. There's so much that isn't fully explained that you're left crazy for more detail. How is it fair that the Twilight saga is half a million dribblingly pointless words long when this piece of perfection is less than 150 pages?

Nevertheless, what is here is mind-bogglingly smart and self-assured, an out-of-left-field work of the imagination that reads like lived truth. I love John Wyndham, I loved this book and I want very badly to resurrect its author so I can get him to write another five of the same.

4.5 stars.

Delicious Death: The Anatomy of Ghosts

As you may know, my dissertation was all about CRIME and therefore (and I feel awkward about admitting to this, as though I had a root canal and didn't even need to ask for an anaesthetic) alarmingly fun to write.

My theory, really only a theory in the way that 'The Pope is probably a Catholic' is a theory, is that Golden Age detective novelists like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey used real Victorian crimes as a basis for their plots. I mean, they did. It's true. Clouds of Witness is a rehash of the Road House Murder, about half of Agatha Christie's short stories use the Chocolate Cream poisoner and Brat Farrar is just the Tichborne Claimant case with a bit of window-dressing. QED, we can all go home. The difficult thing for me to work out was why almost no one else has ever written about this.

Anyway, so there was I in the British Library Reading Room, wading through piles of useless criticism and feeling more and more as though I could actually be wrong and on dissertation hand-in day I might be patted on the head and led away to a nice quiet locked room. Then I turned a page of an essay by Andrew Taylor on Tey and read the phrase 'Brat Farrar is Tey's version of the 19th century case of the Tichborne Claimant'.

I made a noise that can basically be described as a high-pitched animal howl with added sob of joy. I very nearly got up and did a victory lap.

It felt good to be agreed with, is what I am saying, especially when the person agreeing with you is a crime writer himself. I ended up emailing Taylor just to make sure he didn't know something I'd missed (like an essay where Josephine Tey talked about her great and abiding love for the Tichborne case) and he replied saying no, it just seemed obvious. Which made me approve of him as a person.

This all made me want to find out whether I approved of Andrew Taylor as a writer. So down I went to my local library and lo and behold, there was his latest novel, The Anatomy of Ghosts.

The last historical crime novel I read left me colder than the nipple of Satan. As a commenter pointed out, that might just have been me, but nevertheless, I hated it. The writing felt off, the period detail felt off and the characters felt so 'historical' they might as well have been aliens. Thank god, then, that Andrew Taylor has reminded me that historical crime fiction can sometimes be pretty great.

Set in Cambridge in 1786, The Anatomy of Ghosts starts with a meeting of a club in which students get catatonically wasted while pretending to be Jesus and his Apsotles. As you do. Of course, because this is That Kind Of Club, to become a full member you have to go through an extremely unpleasant ritual, and of course, because this is that kind of book, tonight that ritual has gone... very badly wrong.

Cue intrigue.

From that snappy and beautifully alarming beginning, though, things get a bit more diffuse. I was expecting a simple, linear murder mystery, but that wasn't what I got. Yes, there's murder in it, but the book and its characters are more interested in what happens after people are dead than in working out exactly how they came to be dead in the first place. The main character, Holdsworth, doesn't even know he's supposed to be an amateur detective - the author of a rational pamphlet on why ghosts don't exist, he's been drafted in to disprove the haunting of one of the University's students.

Said haunting, by the way, is one of the worst ever, and one of the book's weaker points. Yes, eighteen year old boys are stupid, and drunk eighteen year old boys are even more so, but surely even the drunkest, stupidest eighteen year old boy would wake up the next morning and realise that ghosts don't generally take corporeal form and hang out under trees? I wondered why Holdsworth was spending so much time trying to find a logical explanation when it would have been far more easy to give the kid a whack on the head and tell him to stop being so criminally silly.

Luckily, The Anatomy of Ghosts' other hauntings are much more effective. Holdsworth's got a sad, eerie backstory, and there's a creepily simple side-plot about a dead girl who talks and talks and won't leave the poor maid she shares a room with alone. As I said, the actual murder is a fairly slender part of the whole, and I was surprised to find that I didn't find the result structurally thin. Taylor's very strong on interesting, fun background detail, and because of that his 1786 is a place that I enjoyed visiting for as long as the book lasted.

A lot of this is because Taylor has given real thought to the way the people in his novel would reasonably be expected to behave. His characters aren't stock Historical Folk, gurning and capering and throwing slop buckets on each other, but they're not anachronistic transplants from 2010 either. Taylor's gone at least some way towards giving them the prejudices and belief systems actual people from 1786 would have had, even when those prejudices don't match up with our own.

I've written about the problem I have with this in C. J. Sansom's novels. His historical detail is great, but his detective Shardlake is liberal in a way that is pleasing to a twenty-first century audience but potentially unlikely in the late sixteenth century. In The Anatomy of Ghosts, though, we get a 1786 that's recognisably different from today. Freedom and democracy may be creeping in, but the upper class characters don't have to like it. Characters who are presented as basically good human beings are still shown reacting furiously when a lower-class person steps out of line, men behave awfully to women (not that that's changed at all) and pretty much everyone is a horrible snob.

Really, The Anatomy of Ghosts is a historical novel with a dash of murder on top. For me, it was the perfect combination of historical facts I knew and could relate to, and new information that I could use to flesh out my existing mental image of 1786. Taylor's made his time period come to life, and the result is a book that reads easily and well, a text that's smart without seeming clever-clever. I approved of it and, what's more important, I enjoyed reading it. It's not your conventional historical murder mystery, and you shouldn't quite expect it to be, but for what it is I liked it a lot. And now I shall be reading all of Andrew Taylor's other books.

3.5 stars.