This freezing week made comfort reading an absolute imperative and I abandoned anything too demanding for the wonderful comfort of a well built country house where strange goings on, lead to murder and the arch intervention of a detective whose predatory 'eye' is as attentive as a hungry bird of prey. Details, maps and illustrations of burnt documents conspire to lull the reader into a sleepy passivity that is challenged by the revelation of Hercule Poirot's veiled briliance. We can never know what this reader of humanity knows. His tidy mind seeks out the anomalous and rearranges chronology so that what is becomes slippery and profoundly untrustworthy.

This was Christie's first novel, written whilst involved in her unhappy first marriage. As a novel of the 'Golden Age' of Detective fiction it gives ample representation to the art of reading 'signs' and I found the novel's accumulative weight of detail a perfect balance to the cold! Sometimes like the overwhelm of Milton Eriksson, I felt almost 'entranced' by this detail which brought about satisfying sleep!

I am fascinated by the capacity of a Detective writer to carry so many details forward in their narratives and their consummate ability to redirect an ostensibly plausible narrative in another direction. Instability proilferates until the healing sesne and 'eye' of the Detective returns the fallen unstable world to stability and a more serene relationship between the 'sign' and its meaning.

I think Stig Larsson may be next...

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens.  For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

How loving this poem proves to be. Time passes as it must and our physical shape and 'colour' may alter, yet the enduring affection described by the poet for her partner lights up the poem, converting the grey to the luminous, the heavenly, to 'the shooting stars.' The esoteric apects of the poem are teasingly interrupted by the tender and most imtimate practicality of the ending where the beloved's hair will be washed by her lover, 'in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.' What an irresistible and most intimate invitation! A hug of a poem!

Must be a William Trevor sort of a day! - perhaps it's the effect of the rain and the mood of remembrance day but this is a story which creeps up on the reader, suggestive of complex, unresolved sadness,which Trevor presents but does not dissect. Such reticence remains the responsibility of the characters rather than any intrusive narrator, burdening their creations with the contamination of their voice.

 In this story Trevor presents a couple's anticipation of their only child's birthday through quiet details which both suggestive of ritual and yet unnexpressed avoidance too. The story then briefly switches narrative focus to the son and we gather up enough details to know that he is gay, has inherited his flat from a dead older lover and now seems enmeshed with a younger man who is neither kind nor in love with him at all. Ironically it is the younger man, the 'rough trade' who has to call upon the couple and stand in for the birthday boy. The mother suddenly realises their son's  excuses made by their visitor are hollow and the story ends with the couple carrying on, depleted by this recognition but still capable and expectant of a tomorrow.

'They didn't mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places.They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was.'

William Trevor knows his characters here through and then through again. A lesser writer would have missed their survival, would have relegated them to dismal sorrow. Here Trevor simply brings into our vision their 'derelict' garden and then turns the relationships in his hand and reveals the impact that a loving marriage might have in terms of perhaps excluding or seeming to exclude a disaffected son with a grudge about his sexuality and its reception at home. The couple cannot painlessly integrate what they now must know, yet neither will it kill them. Acceptance is both brave yet also their only choice. Humans can survive most things says Trevor. Quite simply because they have to and therefore because they have to, they do.

'On November the 21st, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, RhodaGradwyn went to Harley street to keep a first appointment with her plastci surgeon, and there in a consulting room designed, so it appeared, to inspire confidence and allay apprehension, made the decision which would lead inexorably to her death.'

The opening line of PD James' latest novel steps carefully through each clause, delineating the fatal connection between action and outcome. There is something of the flourish about this opening, James celebrating her elegant poised style which contextualises the 'crime' within a very precise environmnet and chronology.

I haven't read any PD James for several years. I loved A Taste For Death and found it very satisifying to teach. She writes in a traditional, old school way of personalities and their fates, carefully building her narratives so that they seem solid and real. Characters are developed and move through their allotted paces without the 'clunkiness of some writers and Dagliesh her detective has few foibles to distract the reader from the purposeful stride of the plot.

Always admirable and tightly drawn. I am having a change  from James Lee Burke and John Connolly both of whom I love...but retreating this time to the cool climate of UK rather than the Southern Gothic of the Americans....

Just begun this novel and delighted to find it in the library after my new thrift policy eschewing spending lots in Tesco or Amazon! Very atmospheric from the first page. There is a rhythm perhaps to thriller writing in particular that emanates from the play on 'fatedness' in such narratives. For retrospect in a thriller is loaded with tension and implication. The 'clue' is a gateway to disaster as much as enlightenment and this novel by McDermid begins with a doomladen Prologue whose last sentence contains the word 'vengeance'. Perhaps too, there is a correspondence between a medical history and a thriller, for both are involved in the act of 'reading' and the problematic possibility of diagnosis. What may seem illegible becomes legible. What is a symptom afterall? Indeed all detection is about imperatives around knowledege and attention. Yet in this novel so far, the elected emphasis seems a diversion and yet, perhaps that is a trick in itself. Incongruity is not necessarily a sign of guilt, nor is the familiar ( and therefore unnoticeable) necessarily any proof of innocence.

I await the time shift with eager anticiaption!

The opening chapters so far explore the extreme tensions surrounding proof of innocence. Four St Andrews' University students discover a dying girl in a snow laden cemetery, notify the police and then find they are the main suspects in what will prove an unsolved 'cold case' until the novel opens again and the advent of DNA and new policing skils makes the possibility of resolution more hopeful.

So far, so bleak. The littering of cultural references like Ziggy Stardust and Pink Floyd( it is 1978) are rather different to Ian Rankin's Rebus, probably because the latter is a man always out of his time and such references to past icons serve to reinforce his ironic 'lostness' and psychological separation from his world. Here, McDermid adds intensity and credibility to the past in order to underline its continuing and contaminating influence on the present.

So far, so good. Utterly readable!

Gaiman's American Gods- What an engrossing read! Something I can't quite identify about the 'flavour' of this book...reminds me of a combination of Beckett, Sachar and even- maybe expecially Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Intertextual vitality plus plus!

Pathos and the surreal...a very tenacious narrative with Shadow the hero and then Mr Wednesday the completely ambivalent 'boss' who is part 'boss' aka Gangsta, part Mephistopheles....how unhomely is home...!!!

The USA's landscape is transformed...part of me expects John Connelly's predilection for the grotesque and then part seems Alice in Wonderland meets Steinbeck....Freudian maybe...or is it all illusion and game?

I am really enjoying the narrative and makes me laugh out loud and then grimace too...lively, stylish and brimming over with wonders and signs!

A magician of a writer!

Just read this over a couple of days and really enjoyed the easeful sequencing of past and nearly present. Manages to combine a high profile kidnapping narrative with a very intimate exploration of the miners' suffering during the infamous strike of the early 1980s. Unlike some of her other novels where forensic investigation is central to the narrative and 'gore' is very much explicitly to the fore, this reads like a more old fashioned thriller, perhaps penned by Ruth Rendell's alter ego Barbara Vine.

I enjoyed the persistence of the female detective and her strongly expressed value system as well as the very engaging romance with her thorny side kick too. I cared!

Great for its exploration of lateral thinking..or NLP 'reframes'...Pirie gains ascendancy over the obfuscation of others through her willingness to try new ways of reading characters' translations of events. Again, I felt involved and enjoyed the intelligence and imaginative power of the story telling and detection...

Clever, engrossing and well expressed. My only negative commen was that McDermid seemed to have run out of energy( or paper!) in the last few pages and I felt slightly cheated by the rapidity of the denouement.

Never mind. It was otherwise a most satisfying read!

    "At the same time," he remarked after a pause, during which he had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, "you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavored to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial."
     "The end may have been so," I answered, "but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest."
     "Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial. I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!" He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.
     It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:

"DEAR MR. HOLMES,
I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess. I shall call at half-past ten to-morrow if I do not inconvenience you.
"Yours faithfully,
"VIOLET HUNTER."

"Do you know the young lady?" I asked.
     "Not I."
     "It is half-past ten now."
     "Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring."
     "It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first, developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case, also." 

     "Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here, unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question."
     As he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover's egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.
     "You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure," said she, as my companion rose to greet her, "but I have had a very strange experience, and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice, I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should do."
     "Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I can to serve you."

Reading Sherlock Holmes is a tremendously satisfying distraction from NLP revision! In fact, as I convince myself, the expertise of Holmes' calibration of characters and seemingly inexplicable situations, anticipates NLP by nearly a hundred years! As someone who only yesterday discovered BBC Five's The Mentalist through the concerted recommendation of my mother, Holmes seems an unbiquitous inspiration this week! I was riveted to The Mentalist and the Holmes' tale this morning framed the day in a very engrossing yet oddly detached way. Conan Doyle is fascinated by the movement from illegibility to legibility, and he has a predilection for the symbolic that insinuates itself powerfully within a very short space of time.

In this particular tale, we re-encounter Holmes and Watson exchanging views over the 'sensationalist' manner of Watson's reediting of all their adventures. This short debate reminds us once again, that Holmes exists because Watson creates him. Holmes is thus Watson's 'Frankenstein' in a strange way and the metafictional aspect of all the tales draws attention to the perceptual acuity of Watson in terms of his recreation of Holmes' character. There is a sensationalist aspect to all Watson's titles for each episode, and of course each episode feeds into other episodes engendering a sense of continuity and relationship. Fog is everywhere both literally and metaphorically and the cast list of strangers who stray into Baker Street is Dickensian enough to amuse and terrify.  In the Copper Beeches' tale, a lone, impoverished yet eductaed woman seeks the advice and protection of the master bachelor and his 'staunch companion' Watson. Naturally the mystery is unravelled through the  perspicacity of the detective and the world, with its confusing words, returns temporarily to stability. Perhaps the titles retain the delicious alarm and uncertainty of their original mystery, so that even in retrospect, the residue of enigma remains. I am sure that the titles elevate the banality of mere detail to a symbolic level.

Makes me want to turn the page and read another whilst eating chocolate in front of a fire scented with cherry wood!

The first time I read this helter-skelter of a novel I remember secretly crossing myself just in case....for Bulgakov's masterpiece takes the reader to meet a very human Jesus in the midst of Soviet Russia with a retinue of cats and clowns all owned by Satan. And Satan takes a bow and offers up a witnessed acccount of Christ to a disabelieving rationalist who promptly loses his head and has to endure the end he has always believed in: nothingness for all time. Any attempt to paraphrase the novel reduces its energy and light. It races along provoking and delighting...and scaring as the pranks become wilder and only the secular love of Margarita for her beloved 'lost' master can save anyone....

Makes most novels appear unimaginative and dull. This challeges all comfort zones!!!

'Jesus did exist, you know. '

...It's not a question of having an attitude,' replied the strange professor.' He existed, that's all there is to it.'

...There's no need for any proof,' answeed the professor. In a low voice, his foreign accent vanishing altogether, he began: 'It's very simple- ealry in the morning on the fourteenth of the spring month of Nisan the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak lined with blood -red...'