What I’m Reading Now…

 I have been bingeing on my reading the last couple of weeks. I’ve read two books this weekend alone, so I thought I’d share with you. 

I’ve just finished reading Dead And Buried by Barbara Hambly. It’s the ninth book in the Benjamin January series. I thought I’d read the lot - and I’ve ordered the twenty-first novel, which I’m looking forward to reading. But for some reason, I can’t remember reading this one. 

Benjamin January, an African American former slave living in New Orleans where he teaches piano, plays with a dance band and occasionally gets to use his skills as a surgeon, also solves mysteries. Sometimes he’s even paid for it. 

In this novel, he is attending a funeral when the wrong body falls out of the coffin and it turns out to be an old friend of January’s best friend and fellow musician, Irishman Hannibal Sefton. He has been murdered. If the killer isn’t found, someone innocent will be executed. We learn about Hannibal’s back story, and it’s a doozy. A lot of other sub stories are connected. I enjoyed it as always. If you haven’t read this series, give it a go. 

The other book I read this weekend is part of the Rivers Of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, Masquerades Of Spring. In it, we meet Augustus(Gussie), a former schoolmate of Thomas Nightingale, later to become Peter Grant’s mentor at the Folly, the magical section of the police department. It’s in New York in the 1920s, where there is a lot of jazz music. Gussie moves there from England and Nightingale comes to him for help with finding out about a magical saxophone, and where it comes from. It is great fun and reads a lot like the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves stories. I have a strong feeling that was done on purpose. 

I still have some books in the series to read, but this one was a novella and I read it easily in a day. 

Recently, I discovered a trilogy by Rick Riordan. Rick is, of course, best known for the delightful Percy Jackson novels, with Greek mythology. I’ve read several and also his Magnus Chase trilogy, which is set in the same universe and is Norse mythology themed. 

The Kane Chronicles, my latest discovery, is Egyptian mythology themed. I’ve read the first one, The Red Pyramid, and bought a download of the whole trilogy. Siblings Sadie and Carter Kane discover that they are descended from the Pharaohs and have magical abilities due to Egyptian gods they are hosting. It starts off with their archaeologist father blowing up the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, where he is locked into a coffin by the god Set, and continues with their having to stop Set from destroying America and possibly the world. They do have help from their uncle Amos and various Egyptian gods. Sadie’s cat Muffin, who comes with them on the adventure, is more than she seems.

I really like that Rick Riordan creates entertaining adventures, but gets his child readers interested in learning more about mythology.

I have just started reading Isabelle Carmody’s new novel Comes The Night, which is on this year’s CBCA short list, in the Older Readers category. It’s set in a future Canberra. I really need to finish it quickly and read the rest of the short list, at least in the Older Readers, but it’s a thick as a brick book. It looks good so far. 

I’ve begun reading All The King’s Bastards by G. Lawrence. Gemma Lawrence writes historical fiction, but this is alternative universe, in which she asks “What if Henry VIII actually died in that tournament in which in our world, he nearly died?” I love alternative universe books. This is a fascinating idea.

Speaking of AU, I have just read Harry Turtledove’s Joe Steele, which I had to buy in print from Amazon. I do try to get everything in ebook these days, but this one wasn’t available in ebook, so I ordered it. The premise: what if Joseph Stalin was born in the US, of Russian immigrants, and became President? He is just as dreadful as the one in our world, as you might guess. It’s seen from the viewpoint of two brothers, journalists, one of whom gets a job as a speechwriter at the White House, the other of whom gets into trouble for being rude about the President. 

There are a lot of books in my pile, but these are the most recent. 

The Rick Riordan book I’ve just read was published some years ago, but is still in print, so easy to get. 

If you’re interested in any of them, you should be able to get them all easily in your favourite bookshop or web site, except maybe Joe Steele, which I was lucky to get. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Some Afterthoughts!

And here is my last A to Z post for the year, on some afterthoughts. 

I’ve been doing this since 2017 and I never know till just beforehand what my theme is going to be. Every year I have wondered if I even will come up with a theme and then… I come up with something. I always learn something too.

In this case I realised suddenly just how much mystery fiction I have read over the years, even if I’ve only read one book or even one story by each author. I probably even left out a fair few. I confess I looked up lists of mystery writers each day to see if I could find someone with that letter, whom I have read at some stage. 

The lists were long, but most of those authors I hadn’t heard of, let alone read. And sometimes it was someone I was familiar with, but hadn’t read in years, or had read, but hadn’t realised wrote mysteries. Yes, I’ve learned again. 

It has been nice to rediscover some authors I hadn’t read in a long time, such as Nury Vittachi. I don’t regret choosing this topic.

I really appreciate your comments and enjoyed wandering over to your blogs to see what you’d been writing about. Thank you! You will be  having visits from me over the next few days. 

I’m glad, too, that some of you had the chance to remember books you’ve read yourselves, or found the ones I mentioned interesting enough to add to your TBR piles. 

Thanks again, and happy reading. I’m now heading for bed, to catch up with my own reading.

Cheers and see you soon. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Z Is For Israel Zangwill

 

Today is my final post for 2025, apart from the afterthoughts I’ll be writing tomorrow.

I seem to have discovered a number of familiar writers who aren’t best known for writing mysteries, but have done it anyway. Today’s is Victorian/Edwardian era British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, who wrote as a journalist and playwright and, among other things, popularised the term “melting pot” with his play of the same name, which was about America’s absorption of immigrants, and was performed there in 1910. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt loved it and wrote to him to say so after he had seen it.

Zangwill was born in London in 1864, the son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia(his father) and Poland(his mother). He attended the Jews’ Free School(it’s still around and one of its houses is named for him). He taught there for a while and got a degree from the University of London. It was a family thing, as his brother, Louis Zangwill, was also a writer.

Eventually he became involved in various Jewish movements and women’s suffrage.

He was known as “the Dickens of the Ghetto”.

However, the reason he has made it into this post is his novel The Big Bow Mystery, first published in The Star newspaper before being published as a novel in 1892. It is one of the first locked room mysteries. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, it refers to a mystery in which the victim is killed in a locked room, with no immediate way of working out how it could have happened. Of course, it is eventually worked out. The novel was filmed three times in 1928, 1934 and 1946. 

There is an introduction to the novel in which he says that readers who had read it in The Star kept writing to him to give him their idea of who was the murderer, including one who must be seven feet high, judging by the illustration! In the end, he had to choose a character who was the last one left after he had decided the others were not guilty. And then he admitted he’d been joking. 

He complained that you weren’t supposed to write humour in a mystery novel, and he did. Like Agatha Christie and her movement, he made rules for whodunnit, as in it had to be a character you had already met, and readers had to have a chance to work it out. 

If this is of interest to you, it’s available free on Project Gutenberg, along with a lot of his other works.

And here we go! I hope you have enjoyed my A to Z this year. I’ve enjoyed yours, where you wrote them. 

Tomorrow I’ll post some thoughts on what I’ve done this year.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Y Is For Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a very prolific American author of about 70 books and many short stories. She is best known for her horror fiction, especially the novels about vampire Saint Germain. So I was surprised to find that she has also written some mystery fiction, even if it is basically Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. I only have her novella length ebook The Case Of The American Twins, but she wrote a series of books featuring Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, with Bill Fawcett, under the pen name Quinn Fawcett, so it’s a universe with which she is familiar.

This novella is based on a play of the same name(see above for a poster). It’s not written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. It is set early in Holmes’ career, and Holmes asks Watson not to write about it, because the client wants confidentiality, so it is in third person, unlike the original stories, which are told in first person as if written for publication.

The story starts with an American woman, one of the twins of the title, coming to Holmes for help in finding her brother, whom she hasn’t seen in four years, but their father has died, leaving them a huge estate.

 Holmes doesn’t do the usual observations that let him work out who he is dealing with; when the client is impressed with what he knows about her, he explains that he got the information from the American Ambassador. Then he visits Mycroft to ask for help in getting information. 

Still, an interesting story and not her only one. It’s available in print as part of the two stories in the Sherlock Holmes Collection. It’s on Amazon, but rather expensive for paperback, at about A $50.00, with free overseas shipping. It’s not available in Kindle, but American Twins is in Apple Books.

See you tomorrow for my Z post!

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: X is For EXtras

 This is the post where I slip in a couple of items I had no room for, elsewhere. I have only managed to find a word starting with X once, when I was doing an A to Z about Greek mythology, which does have X words in it. 

This time, I will start with Faye Kellerman, who I was going to write about in K, but Kerry Greenwood died, so I gave her that post instead. If you haven’t been following, feel free to go back and read. 

Faye Kellerman is an American mystery writer. It seems to be all in the family, because her husband Jonathan and their son Jesse are also mystery writers, though Jesse also writes plays. I saw Faye and Jonathan at the Melbourne Writers Festival some years ago. I haven’t read anything by Jonathan, because his books are psychological thrillers, not my favourite genre. 

Faye’s books are basically police procedurals, with Jewish themes; the author is herself an Orthodox Jew. Her main characters are police detective Peter Decker and Orthodox widow Rina Lazarus, whom he eventually marries. They meet in the first novel of the series, Ritual Bath, when there has been a crime in her local community. Peter was brought up as a Baptist by his adoptive parents, but his biological parents were Jewish teenagers. He decides to study and become Orthodox himself. None of this stops him from investigating crime. There are twenty-seven Decker/Lazarus mysteries, though Faye Kellerman has written more books, including a novel about Shakespeare and a Jewish woman. I haven’t read all of them, but have, so far, enjoyed the ones I have read. 

Second Extra: Enid Blyton. I don’t know about you, but she was my introduction to mystery fiction. She wrote several series in which a group of children solve mysteries. The best known is the Famous Five series, of course. Three siblings, Julian Anne and Dick, have adventures and solve mysteries with their cousin George(Georgina), usually during the school holidays. The fifth member of the group is George’s dog, Timmy. A friend of mine calculated that, by the end of the series the kids should be in their twenties! 

Kerry Greenwood wrote a Famous Five short story in which they solve the mystery of some missing ginger ale. She had fun with the sexism of the original stories, with Anne finally objecting to being expected to do all the cooking. 

There was another series, the Five Findouters, which was set in a village rather than the holiday travels of the Famous Five. It’s a lot funnier. The group is made up of Fatty(Frederick), Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets and Fatty’s dog Buster. Fatty is the leader and Sherlock Holmes of the group. He is able to get into disguise and work out whodunnit. The local policeman, Mr Goon, hates them because they always solve the crimes before him. Buster snaps at his heels quite a lot. Notice that he is named “Goon”, a slang word for police, and sent up? 

I read these books in my childhood and loved them. The Famous Five alone are still selling around two million copies every year.

See you tomorrow! 

A To Z Blogging Chsllenge 2025: Mysteries: W is for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Poster. Fair Usage

 You have probably, at one time or another, heard the sentence, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” It’s become a classic line, even if you haven’t seen the film. 

It comes from a 1980s film called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? starring Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, a private eye in a 1947 Hollywood in which humans and animated cartoon characters called toons live side by side. The toons live in Toontown and get work in animated features. 

Roger Rabbit is a cartoon rabbit and has stressed out because he thinks his beautiful human toon wife, Jessica Rabbit, is unfaithful. It starts with Valiant being called in by Roger’s boss to find out if this is true and take photos. He’s not keen on the job, but needs the money to repay a loan, so agrees. The joke is that “playing patty cake” is literal - the photos show Jessica playing patty cake with her hands, as in “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man…” with the supposed lover, owner of Toontown. This still upsets Roger, who stresses out and says how he feels.

Next day, the man is found dead, killed by a falling piano, toon-style, with Roger accused of murder, and Valiant has to find out who really committed the crime before the villain can execute him.  

This isn’t by any means the first film with a combination of animation and live action, but it’s very cleverly done. There are Disney characters and Mel Blanc voices his various characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. There is a warehouse for various Acme products - remember Acme from the Roadrunner cartoons, where the Coyote is constantly ordering stuff from them? At one point, Valiant makes use of a portable hole.

It’s a tribute to classic Hollywood animation.

The director is Robert Zemeckis of Back To The Future fame, and even has Christopher Lloyd as the villain. The role of Jessica Rabbit - the one who gets that famous line - is voiced by Kathleen Turner, who has a distinctive voice, but for some reason she isn’t credited. 

I hope you don’t mind my using a film, but I did need a W post and I haven’t read the novel on which it’s based. 

This is a day late, but I was unable to get it done yesterday and I wasn’t doing the weekend anyway. Next post, on Xtras, is Monday. See you then! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: V is for Nury Vittachi

 

Nury Vittachi is a Hong Kong writer whom I once heard speak at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. We exchanged emails for a while. He is a very funny man and it shows in his writing. He has done a lot more than mysteries - children’s and YA fantasy are among his other work. 

But he created a series called The Feng Shui Detective, which is set in Singapore and centred around C.F. Wong, a Feng shui master, whose day job as a geomancer involves designing offices and houses which follow the practice of feng shui. Feng shui is a Chinese practice that involves arranging objects and space to optimise the flow of positive energy. Even Wong’s tiny office is meant to face in certain directions to make sure he gets the most out of it.

But crime somehow always gets into the picture. And on top of it all, Wong is having to supervise an intern on her gap year, an Australian girl called Joyce McQuinnie, who wants to work with him and learn about feng shui to help her get into her chosen university course. He has been promised a pay rise for helping her and her own pay will be taken care of.

Here is the first description of Joyce, who has just promised to be quiet. 

Wong realised immediately that this person could not be quiet, even if she had her larynx surgically removed. Her look was not quiet. She was big. She wore bright colours. She was a Westerner. It would be as logical for a giraffe to say he is inconspicuous because he has no voice.” 

Very colourful! 

Wong is a sort of Asian Sherlock Holmes, with Joyce as his Watson. It sounds a little strange, but it works. The humour is a delight, as are the characters, who travel around Asia solving crimes. There is even one book which happens in Australia.

I admit it has been a while since I read this series, first published in 2000, but I’m rediscovering it with pleasure. 

The books - there are five of them -  are available in ebook, both in Kindle and Apple Books but also in paperback from Booktopia. If you need them in paperback, it’s probably best to look for them secondhand on ABEBooks. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: U Is for Nicola Upson and Arthur Upfield

Yesterday’s post was about Josephine Tey, author of the Inspector Alan Grant series. There was something I left out so I could use it today. 

The author appeared as a character in a number of mystery novels by Nicola Upson! It’s not that nobody has ever written novels with historical figures before. I’ve read books with amateur sleuths from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and even one series with Elizabeth I solving mysteries. But they are usually from a long time ago, not within the last fifty or sixty years. 

The fictional Josephine Tey(referred to by her pen name) works with a detective, Inspector Archie Penrose. The series is set in the 1930s, featuring historical events such as the abdication of Edward VIII. One of them was shortlisted for a Historical Dagger award.

There are, so far, eleven books in the series, all available in ebook.

I confess I have not yet read any of Arthur Upfield’s Bony mysteries, though a late friend of mine was a passionate fan, but I do know about him and one very dramatic event in his life, because I researched and wrote about it in my children’s book on crime, Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. 

It was described to me by Kerry Greenwood, who suggested the subject for a chapter, as a writer’s nightmare. 

What if someone gets an idea for a real murder from one you are writing about? This happened to Arthur Upfield. 

He wasn’t only a novelist. In 1929, he was working on a novel called The Sands Of Windee, while also having a job as a boundary rider on the Rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia. One night, when he was with his workmates, he asked for a suggestion about how he could have a murderer dispose of a body in such a way that it would be very hard to catch him. A man called George Ritchie came up with an idea. You could burn the body, then sift out the bits of bone from the ashes, scatter the ashes and use acid to destroy the bones. It was such a good idea that he couldn’t use it without a flaw to help the detective work it out. Upfield offered a pound for anyone who could think of one.

Unfortunately, there was a travelling stockman called Snowy Rowles who was listening in. He liked the idea so much that he used it several times to get himself a car and money. He was caught, in the end, because one of his victims had an unusual wedding ring which identified him, and that wasn’t destroyed. 

The story made it into the newspapers along with extracts from Upfield’s new novel - which sold a lot of copies after that. Not only that, but he used the wedding ring in another of his books. 

Was it a nightmare for that particular author? It would have been for Kerry, and certainly for me. I wonder how Arthur Upfield felt? 

The Bony(Napoleon Bonaparte) novels are still available.