Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in the present, The Vault (Hutchinson, £18.99) deals with the discovery of four corpses in the disused coal hole of a Georgian
There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida. Bizarre? Perhaps not. It’s 50 years since he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, but he remains the most famous and widely recognised American writer of the 20th century, indeed of
Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups.
This is a book for anyone whose blood ever ran chill on reading the most sinister recipe in fiction, Samuel Whiskers’ instructions on how to cook Tom Kitten: ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner, make it properly with breadcrumbs.’ With or without breadcrumbs, or indeed butter and flour as
Barbara Pym, now thought of as a reliable and popular novelist of the 1950s and 1960s, has almost disappeared from sight, overshadowed by the more explicit and confessional writers we are accustomed to reading today. Indeed her eclipse was sudden and unforeseen: her mature novels were rejected by three major publishers when she was only
Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921,
As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer. In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of
According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library. According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred
At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times —
In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage
