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Authors know everything
After a week in which it was a revealed a Conservative MP had to ring his 78-year-old former campaign manager (Katie Fieldhouse, not pictured) in the depths of the night because some “bad people” were demanding £5,000 for his release...
“Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.”
Mark Menzies MP proved Oscar Wilde's observation by stirring the imagination no end – there are people who hold members of parliament to ransom?
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The Eighth House
by Linda Segtnan
Ithaka
£20
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While researching a walking tour in an underground reading room at Sweden's national library in 2018, the author is seized by a murder report from an old newspaper. On a Friday evening in May 1948, Birgitta Sivander, 9, of Perstorp, had wandered home after watching a local football team train, yet never arrived. A search party of villagers found her body in the woods. Cause of death: blunt force trauma. No sexual assault. The police believed that “the young girl was lured into the forest by an abnormal individual.” Yet the abnormal individual was never found.“Why murder a 9-year-old girl?” wonders Linda Segtnan, and gains access to the case files to apply her amateur detective gaze. Giving birth to a daughter during this obsessive hunt for a child killer intensifies her chilly Swedish focus, as do those still alive who remember the incident well enough to share their haunting memories of the suspects.
Buy this book
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The Strong Words Hot List
Late April – a great time to sample some recent fictional wrongdoing |
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5 The In Crowd
by Charlotte Vassell
Faber, £16.99
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Rowing on the Thames is challenging at the smoothest of times, but a corpse in the tideway can really throw an eight off its stroke. At a nearby summer garden party, the chinless of Richmond (there's an Inigo and a Calliope) are lubricating their braying conversation with heavily fruited Pimms, unaware of the discovery. Or are they? DI Beauchamp gets the docket to identify the woman in the river, whose connection to a decades-old fraud may be bad news for at least one of the appalling hoorays, Rt. Hons and their muckety-muck chums. Buy this book |
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4 The Stolen Coast
by Dwyer Murphy
Bedford Square, £9.99
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Twisty diamond heist ahoy! A tiny speck of coastal Massachusetts called Onset is home to a community of people with the sort of reputation that fishermen used to have in Hastings: i.e. they have never caught a fish in their life, but if you need anything illicit smuggled in, they're your guys. Here, Jack is a lawyer (and son of a former spy), but also has a sideline helping people evade the clutches of those who may wish them ill. The serenity of the neighbourhood is interrupted when an old girlfriend arrives, her noirish aura sweeping in the prospect of a tempting gems swindle. Buy this book |
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3 The Underhistory
by Kaaron Warren
Viper, £16.99
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As if haunted houses weren't already busy racking the nerves, here comes a group of malevolent individuals to add their own sinister menace to a property with a supernatural reputation. Tour guide Pera knows the floorplan well. She was the only survivor – aged nine – when a plane crashed into the address decades ago. Since then, she has rebuilt and embellished each room with a story to give paying visitors the chills. And that ability to spin a tale could save her life when the final group shivering to the notorious building's dark history before it closes for the season is joined by some escaped prisoners. Buy this book |
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2 Blessed Water
by Margot Douaihy
Pushkin, £9.99
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People are drifting away from the pleasures of smoking, but many-a-day nun Sister Holiday Walsh seems determined to sustain the industry unassisted. A New Orleans music teacher/detective (in partnership with her fire chief pal Magnolia), Sister Holiday comes across the body of a priest afloat in the Mississippi. Her little agency is commissioned by the police to look into the holy man's premature end, and instead of spending Easter at prayer she gets to lend her tattooed, gold-toothed and nicotined presence to the service of busting whoever is killing off the clergy. Buy this book |
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1 A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering
by Andrew Hunter Murray
Hutchinson, £18.99
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A cocky “interloper" – a sort of high-end squatter, who only moves into quality properties when the residents are off travelling – discovers some holes in his strategy when interrupted by a homeowner's unplanned return. A swift exit triggers a chain of mistakes that leads to his falling prey to another group of interlopers who don't entirely buy his story. Their joint venture unfortunately coincides with a crooked search for some missing millions and a collateral killing ends up with their innocent fingerprints all over it. Ingeniously plotted, sharp-tongued and with adrenaline to spare, the occupier brand has never been so appealing. Buy this book |
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An entertaining old drunk has wandered back into the spotlight again
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(Photo: MoviestillsDB.com)
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If you're in the catchment area of the Birmingham Rep theatre in May, then you've no excuse not to go and see the stage adaptation of Withnail and I, the first time the drink-saturated late-sixties road fiasco has been allowed anywhere near a stage. Since first appearing in 1987, the film has achieved cult immortality, several of its lines have acquired a fame of their own and the internet is overflowing with Withnail analysis. It has been the subject of a documentary and there are several books about it, including the screenplay. Yet still waiting to be given its chance is the novel that began it all. Written by Bruce Robinson in 1969-70 when he was between engagements as an actor, and self-authenticated as “70% autobiographical”, the 72-page typewritten, revised, stained and scribbled upon manuscript came up for auction at Sotheby's in 2015, and exceeded the £4-6,000 estimate by being knocked down for £8,000. So someone is in possession of this foundation text, the first written record of Robinson's experiences of being the last person to share a large house with the late lighter-fluid connoisseur Vivian MacKerrell (no one else could stand living there any longer), and sodden excursion to Uncle Monty's Crow Crag “holiday” home. (In a recent interview in the Telegraph, Robinson shares that the Monty character was inspired in part by the handsy director Franco Zeffirelli. Robinson appeared as Benvolio in his 1968 Romeo and Juliet and describes him as “sadistic to me” – offering to dry Robinson's hair post-shower before sticking a tongue down his throat. Zeffirelli also provided Monty's magnificently sleazy enquiry “are you a sponge or a stone?”) Though the book publishing world is not known for leaving many gaps in its market, surely there is room for this slim volume. And while waiting for the deal to be done, I recommend Robinson's eccentric and funny childhood memoir The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, and his angry housebrick of Ripper detection, They All Love Jack. Withnail and I is at Birmingham Rep, May 3-25Buy Thomas Penman Buy They All Love Jack |
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On the build up to the feast of the dragon slayer...
Ed, you mentioned Saint George in a recent Book Club (and the fact that he came from the part of England known as Turkey), but did you know he has a literary connection? Saint George (or Sant Jordi, as they call him), is also the patron saint of Catalonia, and on his day, April 23rd, it is traditional for men to give women a rose and women to give men a book. The rose has got something to do with the blood of George's legendary victim. Unfortunately he was too busy ridding the Middle East of dragons to bother much with reading, and so April 23 marks the day in 1616 when both Cervantes and Shakespeare died.
Katerina B.
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Thank you Katerina. As a former resident of Barcelona I am familiar with the book/rose exchange – definitely preferable as a symbolic love ritual to being rinsed in a restaurant on Valentine's Day.
Book Club members – would you rather the book, the rose, the Michelin-starred dinner or the bill at the end of it? Which do you feel best encapsulates feelings you may have towards a loved one? Ed
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And the hairy hand of Mexico is back again...
Dear Ed, a friend passed me your newsletter about the “Mano Peluda” of Mexico. I have a Mexican grandmother who used to threaten me and my siblings with the “Mano”. If we didn't shut up and go to sleep, she said the hand would come out from under the bed (or through the wall), and take us down to the underworld. I don't know if you know but there was a famous radio show in Mexico also called La Mano Peluda. It was on for a long time and stopped I think about five or ten years ago and had people calling to share their supernatural stories. It was most famous for a man called Josue calling to say he had made a pact with Satan, and gave all sorts of creepy details and made unusual noises. When the presenter of the show, his name was Juan Ramon Saenz, went to interview Josue, the cameraman got a hernia, the researcher had a car crash, and Saenz died of a heart attack the week after. People say it was the curse.
Andrés J.
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Thanks Andrés. The Book Club would be eager to hear from all members currently experiencing curse issues. Ed.
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Another great solution from the art world for when you're fed up with your car's attitude.
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Since cars discovered computers their personalities have definitely become less attractive. Bossier. More pleased with themselves. Never short of something to beep about. Among the responsibilities they've assumed without anyone wanting them to is as head of seatbelt police. You can't drive fifty yards unseatbelted without them pinging at you to put it on. Coming unexpectedly to the rescue are two rogues of the art world, as described (for the second week running) in Orlando Whitfield's All That Glitters ( Profile, £20, out May 2). Whitfield and his charismatic pal Inigo Philbrick (destination: prison), are taking their first steps as freelance art dealers, and are trying to sell a Paula Rego picture to a fellow merchant in Portugal. The dealer is very drunk. But at least he knows a way to circumvent the seatbelt nanny...
“ João and his assistant were steaming. You could see the booze coming off them like heat on a desert road. João’s seatbelt was buckled behind him, allowing him freedom of movement without the alert going off.”
Your move, smug vehicle! Buy this book
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Subscribers in the UK should have received the latest issue from the loving embrace of the Royal Mail this week. If not, it can't be far off. Please get in touch if you feel you've been let down and the detectives will be alerted. Those of you overseas – thank you for your exquisite reserves of patience. Issue 50 is somewhere on its lonely postal path, seeking you out. In the meantime, the effort to inform the planet of Strong Words' existence never ceases, so if you are ever able to recommend the newsletter, urge an acquaintance to try the magazine, give a subscription as a gift or sign up yourself, please don't be shy. Producing magazine and newsletter single-handedly is a demanding climb up a steep hill, and any assistance would be collosally appreciated. To share the Sunday Book Club newsletter, this is the link. To show a potential subscriber some sample pages from recent back issues, here's another link. And to peruse the various subscription options, yet another link. As previously mentioned, the deal that is proving especially popular is the £4 a month option (for six issues annually). But you may prefer a different arrangement. Who else works harder to hook you up with life's greatest dramas, cliffhangers, histories and weirdos? |
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For all advertising enquiries info@strong-words.co.ukPlease share this email with anyone you think might like a weekly shot of lively book recommendations – here's the link. Strong Words receives a small percentage of the price of any books bought via these links. All pictures Shutterstock.com. |
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