Murder As A Fine Art - Carol Carnac

I absolutely loved this one from The British Library Crime Classics series - it speaks directly to several of my interests and turned out to be an excellent mystery with really delightful characters - so all boxes duly ticked. 

As a bonus, I learnt quite a bit about the architect Decimus Burton (I suppose if you have 10 children it's acceptable to start numbering them?). there were so many real artists names being thrown about that despite not initially believing in Decimus I looked him up, and not only real but prolific and important. The way the building feels like a living character in this book is very much one of its charms. 

That the victim is done to death by an outsize Canova bust of an extremely unattractive Earl is another winning point. The building and victim belong to the Ministry of Fine Arts, the Minister for Fine Arts is Humphry David and he's a delightful character too - one who does not believe in the use of his department or the validity of much of the art it holds. 

The mystery and its solution are fun as well as clever, but I'd suggest the best reason to read this is for its gentle arguments about modern art which run through the whole plot. There are characters who are pretentious about it; and ignorant in equal measure. Characters who admit they don't understand it but strive to, and characters who come to see something where previously they had not. It's an intelligent and thoughtful process that reveals an ingenious scam, enjoys a few jokes, and feels remarkably timeless. 

Bath Tangle - Georgette Heyer

I have a gross cold which has done nothing for my weekend plans (spend time with husband, catch a bunch of comedy festival gigs, finish some of the many books I've read 3/4s of and then abandoned). I think I might be in the process of finally learning the patience to sweat onions properly - I'm craving onion soup with lots of garlic, but it doesn't feel like much of an achievement when it;s as much as I can concentrate on. 

The Georgette Heyer Readalong that was such a lockdown lifeline has partly migrated to Signal as a chat group, but we have recently resurrected the group read with Bath Tangle - 3 chapters a week with an hour or so chatting on the night and then the odd opinion shared throughout the week. It's a really good format for a dozen or so people to slowly read and discuss a book. We know each other well enough to be open to a range of disagreements on characters. We also all love Georgette Heyer's books even if we don't love all of her books equally which helps keep things friendly. 

Bath Tangle was nobody's favourite going in and probably isn't going out either, but I enjoyed the slow read much more than I expected to and like the book more for it. It opens at a funeral with 2 young women waiting for the men to join them. The younger of the two turns out to be a late Earl's widow, the other his daughter. The Earl we swiftly concluded was a bit dodgy, first for marrying a woman younger than his daughter, and secondly for leaving his 25-year-old daughter's financial future tied up in the hands of her ex-fiance. 

What follows is a book that has a whole lot of characters trying their best not to hurt each other, financially controlled by one another, scared of various mothers, and overall demonstrating how vulnerable women's lives were to the men around them. It was written in 1955 when a woman wouldn't have been able to get a mortgage, or any kind of bank loan without a male guarantor and would still have been expected to leave work when she married. 

The emotional entanglements continue to complicate themselves (In Bath) very much in the manner of a drawing room comedy - and this would make an excellent stage play, before suddenly resolving in mostly satisfactory ways. We all agreed that we didn't think much of the main characters, but that their often appalling behavior was all too easy to believe in - and that's the genius of Heyer. Every character feels fleshed out and feasible. When they behave badly we understand why, we also get a fun dissection of how not everyone is suited - one woman's hero might be another villain.

Given the relatively limited education and employment options for a lot of girls even in the 1950s, as well as the social stigma of divorce it's interesting to see Heyer's evident distaste for marriage between very young women and much older, richer men. Yes, they offer financial and social security, but there's a cost. 

A Death In The Parish - The Reverend Richard Coles

My connectivity issues persist and as Norton has decided not to let my laptop connect to any open networks I can't even head out to a café to post which somewhat ups the pressure to get a new network provider. All very annoying.

Something I am looking forward to though is the next Richard Coles coming out in paperback next week. I'm late to Canon Daniel Clement - which is hardly a deterrent to enthusiasm. The mood of 'A Death in the Parish' is distinctly different to 'Murder Before Evensong' and I'm curious to see where Coles will take us next. 'A Death in the Parish' definitely feels more personal, impossible to say if Canon Clement is closer to Reverend Coles or not, but the murders here are both closer to home (Daniel's home) and less important to the heart of the book - it's characters.

I have read elsewhere that Audrey is closely based on Coles' own mother - impossible to doubt if you remember his tweets about her, and this has to be why Audrey is a creation of near genius. She is the perfect mix of impossibly frustrating and absolutely plausible. As a reader you have to love her, not least because her writer so clearly does and makes her irresistible in the process. 

The stakes between Daniel and Neil are raised by a growing friendship, something deeper, and then betrayal - and this also is beautifully handled. I loved the first book for the way it reminded me of E M Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, I find more Barbara Pym here, and much more Richard Coles, he's definitely settling into his fiction style in this one. 

There's not much else I can say about a relatively high profile series that's still also relatively new - other than read it if you haven't already!