Looking for the next Agatha Christie

Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood

When the wealthy Phryne Fisher decided to quit London, it wasn't because the season had ended - to the contrary! No, Phryne left to set sail for Melbourne to investigate the mysterious illnesses of Lydia, whose father was suspicious that her husband might be poisoning her to get to her money. With only this to go on, Phryne packs her bags. Certainly being on her own, in late 1920s Australia would be more fun than arranging flowers or helping her parents to entertain their boring, polite society friends. Aside from that, the idea that Phryne could play at being an amateur sleuth along the way sounded like just what Phryne needed. So begins the first of the Phryne Fisher mystery novels.


I loved Agatha Christie's novels, but I've never succeeded in latching onto any other mystery writer since. This is probably because most writers in this genre tend to give us mostly dark characters and heavy atmospheric tomes. Detectives, private investigators, and even journalists are very serious professionals, and they seem to evoke more stolid portrayals these days. Even characters accidentally caught up in an intrigue seem to end up in books that are either violent or at the very best, grim. Someone who might be slightly comical in how they always seem to stumble upon a crime, is more my style. I'll even take busybodies who go looking for a mystery to solve, if they make me smile along the way. I thought I might have found this in the Alexander McCall Smith's #1 Ladies Detective Agency books, but sadly, that was a huge disappointment. However, after reading several shining reviews of Greenwood's series, I decided to try her books, and start from the very beginning. This might have been my mistake, but it also may end up being for the best.

After I started reading this book, I noticed that one reviewer suggested that the first novel in a series is usually less about plot and storyline, and more about setting up the reader with a group of characters that they'll want to follow in the future. While that person did have a certain point, I think I'd prefer a fully formed work than just an introduction. In any case, Greenwood seems to have let her readers down in this regard, since the portrait of Phryne leaves us with more questions than answers. For example, we understand that she started life poor, but a series of unfortunate deaths put her and her family in line for great wealth. What made this a baffling bit of good fortune was that Phryne doesn't seem to conduct herself like anyone who ever suffered even the tiniest bit of deprivation. Even if the Fisher family were impoverished aristocrats, I still don't believe Phryne would be as flamboyantly extravagant and, frankly, snobbish as she seems in this book. In fact, Phryne was so much of an enigma for me, that I had a hard time liking her in general. Despite this, Greenwood does give us one character you can believe and love, that being the girl Dot that Phryne rescues off the streets of Melbourne, and makes into her maid. Unfortunately, she's the only character that I took to with any level of affection, which doesn't say much for this book.

This brings me to the problems I had with the plot. It seemed a bit puzzling that Phryne was able to have amazing insights into certain people's characters, and yet be completely blind or unable to assess others. Furthermore, I had a problem with the initial premise of this book. That being that Phyne's ability to foil a theft within moments of the event was enough for someone to decide to send her across the globe to root out the problems with their own daughter. Of course, perhaps before the action of this book rumors abounded regarding her extraordinary abilities, so maybe this incident was just the proof in the pudding for the Colonel, but Greenwood gave us no indication of this. Furthermore, it felt like Phryne's prime reason to going to Australia immediately took a backseat to the story, where it stayed throughout most of the book. In the meanwhile, Phryne gets involved with saving the life of a girl who almost died after a botched illegal abortion, leading to a convoluted scheme to bring the abortionist to justice. Top that off with some strange intrigue and romance involving an aristocratic family of Russians still fleeing from the revolution, the cocaine in the title and something having to do with a health spa, and what we end up with is quite a bit of a mess.

I should add to this that Greenwood's writing isn't bad, in fact, this was very entertaining to read and Greenwood's prose was engagingly sprightly with no small amount of charm. Still, if she couldn't get me to love her protagonist, why would I want read more about her? Although it might not be fair to compare her to Christie, I'm afraid I must, and unfortunately, Greenwood is no Christie, and Phryne is no Miss Marple or Tuppence. Maybe Greenwood's subsequent novels have better focus, with explanations of some of Phryne's motivations behind her behavior, but I'm not going to waste my time or money to find out. That's why even though I'm sure that many will disagree with me, I'm afraid I cannot truly recommend this book and can only give it two and a half out of five stars. (Mind you, I have a feeling that I might enjoy the TV series a whole lot more than the books.)

Poisoned Pen Press released "Cocaine Blues" (aka "Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates") by Kerry Greenwood in 1989. This book is available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Barnes & Noble, Kobo eBooks (USA, Canada & Australia), eBooks, iTunes (iBook or audiobook), The Book Depository (free worldwide delivery), new or used from Alibris or Better World Books as well as from an IndieBound store near you.

You can also buy the DVD of TV series from Amazon US, and Amazon UK.

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Guest Author Post by Roz Morris: Out of sight, but not out of mind

As noted in my recent review of Roz Morris' travel diary book Not Quite Lost: Travels without a Sense of Direction, Roz's afterward for that darling travel diary truly fascinated and more importantly, intrigued me. So I requested she write a post for this blog based on some of the things she mentioned there. Without further ado, please enjoy this lovely piece about her real life travels, writing fiction and personal history.

Out of sight, but not out of mind

by Roz Morris

I have an averagely bad memory, and this has a nice advantage - I can reread books with only the slightest sense of déjà vu. It was certainly handy when I compiled my most recent book, a travel diary called Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction. The book was distilled from 20 years of notes, and trawling through them made them new again.



I enjoyed the return trip, especially to places that were desolate, ruined or abandoned. A house in Suffolk that had once been the centre of a medieval village, but was now isolated in a forest, a quarter of a mile from the nearest road. I’d studied them carefully, committed them all to paper, then pretty much forgotten about them.

Only I hadn’t forgotten. As I read, 20 years on, I found the origin stories for my novels. They might have been out of sight, but they were never out of mind.

A significant place was Stevenstone in Devon. Modern Stevenstone is a hamlet of mews cottages and bungalows surrounded by farmland, but is built on the remains of Stevenstone House - a rambling Victorian pile of pinnacles and towers that once overlooked a park with deer, lakes and garden follies. The mansion was gradually demolished in the 1950s, cannibalised to build the houses that stand there now: a couple of bungalows on the old terrace; mews houses in the stables and laundry. Chunk by chunk, the grand house disappeared and just one corner remained, a half-demolished tower thickly shrouded in ivy.

One of the garden follies had survived and I stayed there as a holiday let. It stood on a sward of green, with a view of the ruined tower that was most provoking – provoking because it was securely inside somebody’s garden and not available to nosy visitors. Provoking also because, although it had lost its topmost rooms and roof, it still dwarfed the other structures. What would I have given for a time machine?

But even so, there was plenty to delight. I went exploring with a picture of the house from the 1870s and found some of the structures still intact. A stone staircase in the lawn, rosetted with lichen. Ornate gateposts far too substantial for the cottages that now stood behind them. A long, graceful balustrade, which the picture showed running along the length of the mansion’s terrace. It now bordered the back gardens of the current houses.

Some years later I was walking in a National Trust wood in Surrey and I had a sudden thought: we were treading on the past. Under this path was an older path, which went to places that had now gone. I started to write a novel set in a time when all the countryside had been built on except for one preserved valley - the estate of a grand, crumbled house. It is rediscovered - a marble floor waiting under the tree roots; outlines of rooms tangled in the ivy. That must have been Stevenstone, stirring in the sediment of memory. It became Lifeform Three.

As I wrote deeper into Lifeform Three, I felt I needed a back story for the world. Readers might want an explanation for why we had squandered our green spaces. The answer came easily - rising sea levels had eroded the coastal towns and then crept inwards.

Lucky inspiration? No, I’d been there. For real.

On a visit to Suffolk, I stayed in a Napoleonic Martello Tower on the end of a lonely spit of land. On stormy days, the sea lashed right over the roof. Sometimes the coastguard would hammer on the door and entreat the visitors to drive their car further inland in case it was washed away. The tower itself looked tough enough - a giant drum of brick like a decapitated lighthouse. But even that was barely hanging on. It once had an outer wall, but that had been smashed by the sea, and the waves now lapped against the foot of the building. Pictures from the 1900s showed several cottages and an inn close by, now gone. All up the Suffolk coastline it was the same story. A string of towns, now just names on placards facing over the waves.

But why this love of lost places anyway? I didn’t realise that until I got some unexpected news. The house I grew up in, an Edwardian villa in Cheshire, had been knocked down. This shocked me. I wrote its obituary for the book, remembering rooms I had not stood in for three decades. I remembered being a very serious child tapping the walls looking for hollow spots that might be old fireplaces. I remembered a footpath that disappeared mysteriously under the bungalow next door. From my earliest years, it seems I was a house whisperer, a land whisperer. As I toured the house one last time in my memory, I understood a little of where I came from - and where I like to go.

Roz Morris is an award-nominated novelist ("My Memories of a Future Life" and "Lifeform Three"), book doctor to award-winning writers (Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012), has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter and teaches writing masterclasses for The Guardian. "Not Quite Lost" is her first collection of essays. Find her at her website and on her blog, contact her on Facebook and tweet to her as @Roz_Morris. 

Links:
My Memories of a Future Life
Lifeform Three
Not Quite Lost

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Matching Wartime Messages

Last Christmas in Paris by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb

When the "war to end all wars" began in the summer of 1914, British soldiers were sure that they'd all be home for Christmas. Unfortunately, they didn't know that many of them wouldn't make it to see that Christmas, or the next or the next one after that. To get to the heart of this era, historical fiction writers Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb bring us this mostly epistolary work of the letters that Evelyn (aka Evie) Elliott writes and receives from those she loves, including ones she shares with her life-long friend, Thomas Harding.

There's something very intimate about letters, and telling stories through them can be fascinating and often poignant. However, one of the biggest problems with this mechanic is making the various authors of the letters sound like different people. Thankfully, Webb and Gaynor seem to have mastered this fine art, and each of the characters comes through with just enough variances, and some excellent consistency, that helps us believe that these missives were from different individuals. Gaynor and Webb also intersperse these war-era letters with regular prose introductory passages and a concluding chapter. This is because some things just can't be described using letters, since all of these take place in 1968, a full 50 years after the end of the war, at Christmastime, in Paris (hence the title of this book) after the death of one of the correspondents.

Epistolary novels lend themselves well to a story involving romance, or at the very least, some kind of close relationship, which either succeeds or fails to develop into something lasting and/or long-term. Webb and Gaynor start with Evie and Tom as being friends at the start of this book (since Evie's brother Will is Tom's oldest and best friend), and slowly develop this into something much more. At the same time, we also observe how this terrible war increasingly wears on all of these characters, both mentally and physically. The other letter writers help round out the story, and give the readers pieces of background, while at the same time, assist the various writers in expressing things they can't say to certain recipients. All this combines into an absorbing story that persuasively unfolds, and written with elegance, even during the most awkward of circumstances.

This book works on many different levels. The writing, the concept and the characters are all there for our enjoyment and empathy. However, one thing didn't sit completely right with me, and that was the climax. On the one hand, Gaynor and Webb build up the relationship between Evie and Tom to a very crucial point through these letters. To their credit, they achieve this with just the right balance of up-front information and hints for us to read between the lines of what's left unsaid. On the other hand, the place where I think they could have gotten a real emotional punch out of their readers somehow got lost. This is probably because they wanted to stick to the formula of all the war-era action confined to letters (and some telegrams), and only use conventional prose for the more modern sections. My thinking is, had they allowed themselves to stray from this, and perhaps changed to a third person narrative for just this part, it might have been more poignant for me. That little switch also might have highlighted this section of the story even further. (I'd say more, but that would mean including a spoiler, which my readers know I'll never do.)

Apart from this one drawback, I truly enjoyed this book. I fell in love with almost every one of the characters writing these letters; that is, after all, what makes a good story. I believe that Webb and Gaynor made a superb team with this novel, where both these authors were truly in their element. I would even go so far as to say that we should include Gaynor and Webb among the best historical fiction writers out there today. I warmly recommend this book and believe it deserves a solid four out of five stars. 

William Morrow will release "Last Christmas in Paris" by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb on October 3, 2017. This book is available (for pre-order) from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Barnes & Noble, Kobo eBooks (USA, Canada & Australia), Kobo Audio books (USA, Canada & Australia), eBooks, iTunes (iBook or audiobook), The Book Depository (free worldwide delivery), new or used from Alibris or Better World Books as well as from an IndieBound store near you. I would like to thank the publishers for sending me an ARC of this novel via Edelweiss in exchange for a fair review.

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Book Promotion & Excerpt: Sleep, Savannah, Sleep by Alistar Cross

BAM Literature is pleased to announce the release of:

SLEEP, SAVANNAH, SLEEP

by Alistair Cross 

RELEASE DATE SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

The Dead Don’t Always Rest in Peace

Jason Crandall, recently widowed, is left to raise his young daughter and rebellious teenage son on his own - and the old Victorian in Shadow Springs seems like the perfect place for them to start over. But the cracks in Jason’s new world begin to show when he meets Savannah Sturgess, a beautiful socialite who has half the men in town dancing on tangled strings.


When she goes missing, secrets begin to surface, and Jason becomes ensnared in a dangerous web that leads to murder. But who has the answers that will prove his innocence? The jealous husband who’s hell-bent on destroying him? The local sheriff with an incriminating secret? The blind old woman in the house next door who seems to watch him from the windows? Or perhaps the answers lie in the haunting visions and dreams that have recently begun to consume him.

Alistair’s debut novel, The Crimson Corset, was an immediate bestseller, earning praise from such authors as Jay Bonansinga, author of The Walking Dead series, and vampire-lit veteran, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Alistair also writes with international bestseller, Tamara Thorne, and together they have released several bestsellers, including Mother, The Cliffhouse Haunting, and The Ghosts of Ravencrest.

Together, Thorne & Cross also host the popular radio show, Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE!, which has included such guests as Laurell K. Hamilton of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels; world-wide bestseller, V.C. Andrews (Andrew Neiderman); Charlaine Harris of the Southern Vampire Mysteries and basis of the HBO series, True Blood; Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter novels that inspired the hit television series; #1 New York Times bestseller, Kim Harrison; Peter Atkins, screenwriter of Hellraiser: 2, 3, and 4; Mick Garris, film director of Hocus Pocus, Psycho IV: The Beginning, and Stephen King’s The Stand; and New York Times bestsellers Preston & Child, Christopher Rice, Jonathan Maberry, and Christopher Moore.

Excerpt

Sleep, Savannah, Sleep

“This is it? Seriously? It’s like we’re moving into Hill House.” In the passenger seat, Brent looked uneasy.

Jason Crandall turned to his son. “It has character.” He looked up at the old Victorian. But he’s right. It’s creepy. Surrounded by mid-century houses, the decrepit Victorian seemed like a flaw on the neighborhood, a stain on something otherwise clean. The cat’s claw vine climbing the walls seemed to shroud the house, as if trying to hide it, the violently yellow blossoms creating a diversion from the faded wood siding - as did the bowers of honeysuckle that accented the yard, draped the veranda, and sweetened the air. Two second-story windows peered out from between the lush vines, looking like the eyes of a hunted beast.

Surrounded on both sides by white split-rail fences coated in spindly climbing roses, the property was spacious, with a small courtyard beyond a wisteria-choked arbor that lead to the back yard. “I don’t know. I think it’s charming.” He offered his son a grin, and shut off the silver Legacy. The annoying squeal - probably a fan belt - went silent and Jason made a mental note to hunt down a local mechanic.

“It’s creepy, Dad. Seriously creepy.” Brent leaned back and assumed his usual air of annoyed indifference.

“But creepy in a cool way, right?” asked Jason.

Brent’s eyes, the color of seawater, looked unimpressed. “Only if you like haunted houses.”

“It’s haunted?” In the back seat, Amber sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Even Ruby, the blond, blue-eyed doll that never left her arms, looked alarmed.

“Of course it isn’t haunted.” Jason shot Brent a warning look. “It’s just old.”

The three of them stared at the house and it seemed to stare right back. All in all, it didn’t appear pleased to meet them.

“Let’s go have a look around.” Jason undid his seatbelt. “After that, you two can help me unload.” A large moving van was a day or two behind them; the small trailer they’d pulled contained only the essentials - and most of Jason’s massage equipment. He knew he was being optimistic about how quickly he could get his studio up and running, but he couldn’t help it. His new business was the entire reason he’d bought the house. It had a basement complete with its own entrance, so Jason could work without having strangers traipsing in and out of the family’s living space. Overall, the old Victorian was pretty ideal, even if it was a little spooky.

Then again, the whole town - or what he’d seen of it so far - was pretty spooky, too. Quaint and quiet, Shadow Springs was a startling contrast to the buzzing pace of Los Angeles. Jason told himself this would be good for him - good for all of them.

Here, just outside of Ojai in Ventura County, they’d begin their new lives, free of bad memories. That was what Jason had told himself a hundred times in the past weeks - it was what he had to believe.

Books by Alistair Cross

The Angel Alejandro

The Crimson Corset
The Book of Strange Persuasions
Sleep, Savannah, Sleep

The Cliffhouse Haunting with Tamara Thorne

The Ghosts of Ravencrest with Tamara Thorne

The Witches of Ravencrest with Tamara Thorne

Mother with Tamara Thorne
Darling Girls with Tamara Thorne (Release Date late 2017 or early 2018)

About the Author

Alistair Cross' debut novel, The Crimson Corset, a vampiric tale of terror and seduction, was an immediate bestseller earning praise from veteran vampire-lit author, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and New York Times bestseller, Jay Bonansinga, author of The Walking Dead series. In 2012, Alistair joined forces with international bestseller, Tamara Thorne, and as Thorne & Cross, they write - among other things - the successful Gothic series, The Ravencrest Saga. Their debut collaboration, The Cliffhouse Haunting, reached the bestseller’s list in its first week of release. They are currently at work on their next solo novels and a new collaborative project.

In 2014, Alistair and Tamara began the radio show, Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE!, which has featured such guests as Charlaine Harris of the Southern Vampire Mysteries and basis of the HBO series True Blood, Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter novels, Jay Bonansinga of The Walking Dead series, Laurell K. Hamilton of the Anita Blake novels, Peter Atkins, screenwriter of HELLRAISER 2, 3, and 4, worldwide bestseller V.C. Andrews, and New York Times best sellers Preston & Child, Christopher Rice, and Christopher Moore.

You can visit Alistair Cross’ website at www.alistaircross.com

Contact:

Berlin Malcom, Publicity Manager

BAM Literature

berlin@bamliterature.com

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