I got an email this week from Jane Finnis saying how much she enjoyed Mad About The Boy? which was nice to hear. She used – and I burgeoned with pride – the word “Unputdownable”. That’s fairly good coming from Jane, as her own books, A Bitter Chill, Buried Too Deep and Get Out Or Die are pretty unputdownable too. They’re mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (no, the Centurions don’t say “Hey up!) and her heroine, Aurelia, is definitely someone you want to spend time with. Incidentally, doesn’t the Roman name for York sound Northern? (As in Eee By Gum Northern.) Eboracum. That’s Eee-Ber-Acum.
Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend Jane’s books. Another book I really enjoyed this week was Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan. It’s a cracking thriller that reads more like a documentary than fiction. Frederick Forsyth used to be a journalist and it shows. He’s never afraid to describe the technology or how a system works by addressing the reader directly, rather than wrap it up as dialogue or as a character’s thoughts. It’s an interesting nuts-and-bolts approach, where you can more or less see the rivets. The subject of terrorism is important, of course, but that alone isn’t enough to keep the reader gripped, as I was. One thing Forsyth doesn’t do, though, is Character in the literary sense, which makes you wonder about that hoary old debate about Plot V. Character. Obviously the characters in any novel can’t be merely names, otherwise you couldn’t care less about what happens to them but if a novel is character and nothing much else, I do find it a bit slow.
There’s been a big debate on the Golden Age mystery website this week about Dorothy L Sayers with particular reference to Gaudy Night. It must admit I find Gaudy Night a bit heavy going (and I like DLS very much) principally because there’s so much about the characters that the story gets side-lined. I think my favourite of all the Wimsey books is Unnatural Death. There the plot and the characters come together and drive the story forward with tremendous pace. Miss Climpson is an absolute delight and enormous fun to read. The timing of Unnatural Death is great – the murder has to happen at a certain time otherwise it wouldn’t work at all and the scene when Peter twigs about the new Property Act is one of my all-time favourites. One correspondent to the Golden Age debate said the DLS was a poor writer. Well, each to their own, of course, but there’s bits of Sayers I love precisely because they’re so well written. Miss Climpson in Strong Poison, for instance, doing table-turning to get information from the nurse is a classic scene. What I don’t find so enjoyable in the Wimsey stories is Harriet. She’s fine in Strong Poison but after that, she doesn’t half take over. The interesting thing is that if I met her, I like I’d like her very much but I’d rather spend the book time with Wimsey.
On a domestic note, I’ve just cooked the Sunday dinner. It used to be eight for lunch and now, what with Helen at University and Elspeth working most Sundays, it’s more or less always six. It’s weird how much quieter it all is. Food; this isn’t a Sunday lunch recipe (that was roast lamb and rosemary from the garden) but a Saturday night favourite. It takes no time at all and tastes wonderful. Chicken breast with cream and mustard. Simply combine a tub of single cream with a tablespoon of wholegrain mustard, heat slowly, then pour over the cooked chicken. If you’re counting calories (and aren’t we all after Christmas!) then try natural yoghurt which will stand in for cream in most recipes.
Cheers,
Dolores
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