Category Archives: Index of Authors

A Century Of Women – 1920’s

I have fallen behind in reviews for both of my Century projects, so I’m going to be posting quick, short, multi-book posts until I catch up. Which will probably be never.

I haven’t quite finished up the 1920’s yet, with 1920, 1921 & 1928 still open. This year, I’ve finished books for 1923, 1925 & 1928.

Anderby Wold
by Winifred Holtby
Rating: ★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1923
Genre: fiction
Pages: 278
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

Mary Robson is a young Yorkshire woman, married to her solid, unromantic cousin, John. Together they battle to preserve Mary's neglected their beloved farm, Anderby Wold. This labour of love - and the benevolent tyranny of traditional Yorkshire ways - has made Mary old before her time.

Then into her purposeful life comes David Rossitur. Young, red-haired, charming, how can she help but love him? But David is from a different England - radical and committed to social change. As their confrontation and its consequences inevitably unfold, Mary's life and that of the calm village of Anderby are changed forever.

I finished Anderby Wold, published in 1923, in February. I am a huge fan of Winifred Holtby’s South Riding – so much so that I have been considering rereading it. I didn’t like Anderby Wold nearly as much as that one, although it was still an enjoyable read. In some ways, it felt like an obvious precurser to South Riding, set in the same sort of a location and with similar, if less well-defined, characters. Anderby Wold was Holtby’s first novel, but feels like a mature novel nonetheless.

There are also connections to be made to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte’s lesser known book, Shirley, both of which focus on the changes that industrialization and modernity bring to small, rural British farming communities.

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: May 14, 1925
Genre: classic
Pages: 197
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with far-away remembrances. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. Undeniably triumphant, this is the inspired novelistic outline of human consciousness.

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway last week, so it is fresh in my mind. Published in 1925, it takes place on a single day in June (June 18 seems to be the day that has been designated as Dalloday), so I decided to re-read it on its centenary. I didn’t finish it one day, which is apparently a thing, where people read Mrs. Dalloway contemporaneously with the times that are vaguely identified within the novel by the ringing of Big Ben. I had forgotten how much of the novel is spent away from Clarissa Dalloway, in the lives of other characters as they move through London.

I have not read a lot of Woolf’s work. I’ve previously posted about her first novel, The Voyage Out, and I’ve read her (second most) famous novel To The Lighthouse, although it’s been years.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway really worked for me this time. I often struggle with stream of consciousness, but with this reading, I was really able to let go of my need for linearity and plot and just immerse myself in the words. It has inspired me to seek out more Woolf over the next few years.

Young Anne
by Dorothy Whipple
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1927
Genre: fiction
Pages: 292
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

Young Anne (1927), was Dorothy Whipple’s debut novel. It is about the first twenty years of a girl’s life: she lives at home mostly looked after by the kindly Emily, goes to school, falls in love and finally marries someone else.

Young Anne is Dorothy Whipple’s first and most autobiographical novel.

I can never go wrong reading Dorothy Whipple. This was my third of her novels, after The Priory (my favorite so far) and Because of the Lockwoods. There is something about her books that are completely engaging to me; each time I have started a Whipple, I haven’t been able to put it down until I finish the last page. This is true even when her books are very long – I spent five hours on my couch reading The Priory. Young Anne was my least favorite of the three so far, but was not an exception to this rule.

Young Anne is Whipple’s first novel, published in 1927, and is a bildungsroman of the title character who seems to be a bit of a stand-in for Dorothy herself. We follow Anne from childhood, through first love, first job, and marriage to a much older and wealthy doctor.

I feel like I could read all of Whipple’s novels in about two weeks, they are so engaging. But, if I were to do that, then I would have entirely run out of Whipples and have no more to anticipate. So, instead, I am spreading out the reading. I actually own one of them, Someone at a Distance, which is sitting on my book cart, waiting for me to pick up.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

The High Window
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Philip Marlowe #3
Publication Date: August 17, 1942
Genre: noir
Pages: 272
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime, summer of noir

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily.

In The High Window, Marlowe starts out on the trail of a single stolen coin and ends up knee-deep in bodies. His client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part.

But Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail - or worse, in a box in the ground.

Starring Toby Stephens, this thrilling dramatisation by Robin Brooks retains all the wry humour of Chandler’s serpentine suspense novel. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 8 October 2011.

It felt like this is the point at which Chandler settled comfortably into his character and his style. He has a knack for scene setting, which shows in the opening paragraph

The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big sold cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded downstairs and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming around them.

From the front wall and its attendant flower bushes, a half acre of so of fine green lawn drifted in a gentl slope down to the street, passing on the way an enormous deodar around which it flowed like a cool green tide around a rock.

Marlowe has been called to the home of a wealthy widow to recover a valuable, and rare, coin: the Brasher doubloon. He is told by Mrs. Murdock, the widow, that it was stolen by her daughter-in-law, who absconded with the coin and her son’s heart. This is a very basic set up for what turns out to be a very complicated scheme that – as usual – ends in a series of sordid murders. He is told, severely, that he is not allowed to talk to anyone about the job, including the son. Mrs. Murdock has a young secretary, Merle, who will figure prominently in the story.

The son shows up at Marlowe’s office shortly after he leaves the house in Pasadena.

He didn’t curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in. “A private detective,” he said. “I never met one. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing.”

“You here on business,” I asked him, “or just slumming?”

His smile was as faint at a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.

Chandler has a unique way with words, which excuses the fact that his plots are convoluted and thin. The High Window, like the prior two novels, is full of gold nugget language to excavate.

But, as well, Marlowe himself has become wholly convincing as a sort of a hero. Not an anti-hero, which has become ubiquitously, and sort of sadly in my opinion, popular in this nihlist age in which we live, but the real thing. Bashed about, a bit dented, but a real hero.

In this, he makes me think of Harry Bosch (or, more accurately, Harry Bosch makes me think of him) to the point that I wonder if Michael Connelly had Chandler’s LA and Marlowe himself in mind when he began writing his long-running series, which I have been reading for more than three decades. Bosch – who represents the uncorruptible side of law enforcement – has a credo – Everybody counts or nobody counts.

In Chandler’s LA, you count only if you count. If you are important or rich, or famous in some way. Marlowe swims in a sea of corruption, but maintains an integrity and a sense of honor that everyone around him seems to entirely lack. The government is corrupt. The police are corrupt. Everyone is beholden and bought and paid for by someone else. In talking to a police officer, he says:

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted everytime and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may – until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience…

This is the conflict that has animated the Bosch series from the beginning, because Harry Bosch is a cop who can be trusted everytime and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may. And he has spent 20+ books at odds with the LAPD brass, which is less than worthy of this trust. From 1942 to 2025, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Phil Marlowe,” he said, “The shop-soiled Galahad.”

This was the last novel in my collection of “the early novels,” which also contained a bunch of the pulp stories. I am not a huge short story fan, so I may or may not circle back to read them at some point. Next up, though, is The Lady in the Lake, but first I’m going to branch out and read The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson.

Friday Reads: 6.20.25

Something has really reignited my interest in blogging recently. Maybe it’s that I’m finding the internet so much more boring than I used to – enshittification is real.

Anyway, my 20 Books of Summer plan continues. I haven’t posted a review of The High Window (Marlowe #3) yet, but that’s coming. I’m also currently reading The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, because I’m also on a quest for books that have a summer vibe to them. That is another planned post, but probably not until July.

I’m also expecting to finally finish Black Lamb and Grey Falcon next week. I’m down to about 150 pages left, which in an 1180 page book is a mere 14% of the book, although it’s long enough to be a novella in its own right. I’m in the final section – Montenegro – and then I have the 75 page Epilogue left. That book has been a marathon not a sprint and I cannot wait to remove it from the sidebar.

So, for next week, I’m planning to read:

Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard: this is the 4th book in the Cazalet Chronicles, which will just leave me with All Change to finish the series. I’m excited to see what’s next for Polly, Clary and Louise.
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson: this is one of the books in the LOA American Noir of the 1950’s collection and is on my Summer of Noir list. There is also a 2010 adaptation that I may or may not watch.
The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: book 4 of the Philip Marlowe series.

Love in the Time of Barsetshire – Dr. Thorne & The Small House at Allington

What is the difference between a romance and the marriage plot? I surmise, without credential or support, that marriage plots are written largely from the perspective of marriage as an economic enterprise with the focus on the male half of the courtship, and romances are specifically oriented to the experience of female love, especially female sexual love.

Whatever the difference is, Trollope’s Barsetshire cycle is all about the marriage plot (with the possible exception of The Warden, although there is a prominent courtship in that one, as well), but they are definitely not “romance novels.”

And, I hasten to add, they are delightful.

A warning: there are spoilers to follow, so if you want to be surprised by the events of Dr. Thorne and The Small House at Allington, stop reading now.

Dr. Thorne
by Anthony Trollope
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Chronicles of Barsetshire #3
Publication Date: January 1, 1858
Genre: classic
Pages: 557
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, classics club round 2

Son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne, despite her illegitimacy and apparent poverty. Frank's ambitious mother and haughty aunt are set against the match, however, and push him to save the family's mortgaged estate by making a good marriage to a wealthy heiress. Only Mary's loving uncle, Dr Thorne, knows the secret of her birth and the fortune she is to inherit that will make her socially acceptable in the eyes of Frank's family - but the high-principled doctor believes she should be accepted on her own terms. A telling examination of the relationship between society, money and morality, Dr Thorne (1858) is enduringly popular for Trollope's affectionate depiction of rural English life and his deceptively simple portrayal of human nature.

I think that Dr. Thorne may contain my favorite of all of the courtships. Mary Thorne is so lovely, but Frank Gresham – he is a resolute hero.

In Trollope, the course of love does not run smooth. Frank is the only son and heir of a (rather minor) squire, who falls in love with Mary and never wavers. His mother, Lady Arabella, a pain in the ass woman if one has ever existed, is insistent that he marry money. His father has squandered most, if not all, of the family money and Frank is tasked with bringing the family fortunes back. Mary, on the other hand, is the adopted illegitimate daughter of Dr. Thorne’s sister, who was seduced by the drunken, but now wealthy, Louis Scatcherd.

When I mentioned the economic enterprise of marriage, Dr. Thorne really leans into to that aspect. And, indeed, marriage was one of the primary, if not the only, mechanisms by which individuals in Victorian England were able to change their class. They could marry up, into wealth and stature. Or, alternatively, they could marry down, into genteel poverty and loss of stature.

Lady Arabella married down. She wants Frank to marry up. Frank wants to marry Mary.

There is almost always a happy ending in Trollope. Except in:

The Small House at Allington
by Anthony Trollope
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Chronicles of Barsetshire #5
Publication Date: January 1, 1864
Genre: classic
Pages: 695
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, classics club round 2

'She had resolved to trust in everything, and, having so trusted, she would not provide for herself any possibility of retreat.'

Lively and attractive, Lily Dale lives with her mother and sister at the Small House at Allington. She falls passionately in love with the suave Adolphus Crosbie, and is devastated when he abandons her for the aristocratic Lady Alexandrina de Courcy. But Lily has another suitor, Johnny Eames, who has been devoted to her since boyhood. Perhaps she can find renewed happiness in Johnny's courtship?

The Small House at Allington was among the most successful of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and has retained its popularity among modern readers. This new edition identifies the novel as a subtle study of the heroism and the cost of constancy, drawing out the intense psychological drama which lies at the heart of the story, and how it reflects Trollope's divided feelings about change in a rapidly evolving world.

This is the penultimate book in the Chronicles, followed only by The Last Chronicle of Barset (which I am reading now). I would rank it behind both Framley Parsonage and Dr. Thorne, but I rank all of these books very high, so that doesn’t mean much. I just like the plots in the other two better. Strangely, I think that my least favorite, at least right now, is Barchester Towers. This is odd, because that one seems to be acknowledged as the best of the lot.

The Small House at Allington concerns itself with the romantic travails of the Dale girls, Lily and Bell, resident at the small house. Lily falls in love with the definitely unworthy Adolphus Crosbie – a man less like Frank Gresham cannot be imagined. I definitely got the impression that Lily surrendered everything to Crosbie, including, probably her virginity.

Here I channel my inner Taylor Swift, in Fifteen:

And Abigail gave everything she had
To a boy who changed his mind
And we both cried

‘Cause when you’re fifteen
And somebody tells you they love you
You’re gonna believe them
And when you’re fifteen
Don’t forget to look before you fall

Trollope creates a love triangle for us – Johnny Eames, a local young man, has been in love with her for as long as he can remember. When Crosbie jilts Lily, the reader, along with most of the neighborhood, roots for Johnny to get the girl. Lily takes a cue from Miss Havisham (without the dress or the rotting, spider web clad wedding cake) and decides that spinsterhood is her only option.

Crosbie and Johnny Eames each get what they deserve. And the marriage plot ends in a marriage, but not for Lily.

I first read the entire Chronicles a decade ago, in 2015, and have been waiting for a reread ever since. They are just as good – possibly better – the second time around. After The Last Chronicle of Barset, I will be moving on to Can You Forgive Her, which is the firsts book in the Palliser novels.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Philip Marlowe #2
Publication Date: January 1, 1940
Genre: noir
Pages: 304
ReRead?: No
Project: summer of noir

Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

The second book in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series begins with a coincidental encounter between Marlowe and Moose Malloy, who has just been released from a stint in the Oregon State Penetentiary, where he did time for robbery. He is back in L.A., looking for his lady love, Velma, who used to be a torch singer, and for revenge on whoever it was who sold him out to the police.

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show hankerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Marlowe is there, checking out Florian, which used to be a white night club but has been taken over by the black community (Chandler uses a number of words for this community which are both unfamiliar and unquestionably offensive, and which I will not repeat herein) for someone he never finds. Moose, who has been out of the area for a while, struggles to understand that no one knows Velma or her whereabouts. Things end badly.

And this is how Marlowe ends up in the middle of a rather confusing case that involves, at various points, corrupt police, a psychic who seems to engaged in some decidedly non-psychic behaviors, a doctor who may or may not be distributing heroin, a spunky, red-headed Irish gal whose father was a police man, illegal gambling taking place far enough off shore that no one really cares about it, and the very beautiful wife of a very old, very rich man. And murder. Quite a lot of murder.

Once again, Chandler wields language like a scalpel. Or an angel.

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn’t see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

This was the first time reading that I noticed Chandler making what appear to be references to other writers – Dr. Fell (I assume John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell) and Philo Vance both get a mention. He also refers to on of the police officers as “Hemingway.”

This book is packed full of striking sentences and paragraphs. No one else writes like Chandler, although it seems like so many writers have been trying to ape his style, generally to less than positive effect, in the decades since. It’s amazing that he wrote only 6 novels (I don’t think that Playback really counts. I never see anyone talking about it. I guess I’ll find out), given the depth of his influence.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while, I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room . . .

And this one. It’s so good.

The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.

I probably could have tabbed every other page with sentences that are that evocative.

1939: The Big Sleep by Philip Marlowe

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Philip Marlowe #1
Publication Date: February 6, 1939
Genre: noir
Pages: 231
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything a well dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

So begins The Big Sleep, the first of the novels featuring Philip Marlowe, the most famous and longest lasting of the hardboiled detectives in the noir tradition. Chandler writes like Hemingway, if I enjoyed Hemingway (and he wrote about crime). He has been imitated so many times that he is almost a parody of himself, except that he is so good.

I think I have read most of the Marlowe books previously, but never with any sort of intention. I have definitely not read Playback, the last of them. Has anyone read it? It never seems to be mentioned and may not be very good. I’m not sure if I’ve read The Little Sister. I’ve definitely read Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye.

Chandler’s L.A. is a place, a character and a feeling. Nostalgia is a trap, and in the case of Marlowe, it’s a trap that is grimy, well-worn and slightly sordid. I don’t live in L.A., visit it only occasionally, and can barely think of it without thinking of Marlowe and Bosch, two characters that I associate most firmly with it.

The thing about The Big Sleep is that the plot is almost entirely beside the point. Everyone says that Chandler was all about character and place and I believe this to be true. Each sentence is beautifully crafted to convey a feeling – as the reader, I can see his characters; they are archetypes, but they are his archetypes and no one else’s, except for all of the admirers who came after and all of the compatriots who came before but maybe didn’t do it quite so well. I can see the places he writes about, as well, and smell them, and hear them, I can see the outline of the palm tree in the diminishing light, and smell the slightly unpleasant odor of salt water and sewage.

We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay in the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.

Damn. That is so good.

But, back to the plot, which is convoluted and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It is fable at this point that when Chandler was writing the script for the movie adaptation, he was asked about one of the murders and who had committed it because the book overlooked identifying the perpetrator. It is reported that he said that he didn’t know. He had forgotten to resolve the plot point, and no one reading the book seems to have cared very much.

And isn’t it crazy that this book – which feels completely modern – was published 86 years ago.

1927: The Tragedy at Freyne

The Tragedy at Freyne
by Anthony Gilbert
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Scott Egerton #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1927
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 230
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

When Sir Simon Chandos is found poisoned in his library, with a confession in front of him and a phial of morphia tablets on the table at his side, suicide is the obvious deduction. This is a dreadful shock to the members of the house party gathered in his picturesque old Norman country house, Freyne Abbey. But the discovery of a trivial discrepancy, by one of the guests, turns the suspicion in the direction of murder, and from that slight clue the amateur detective, Scott Egerton, unravels the web of an exceptionally brilliant and cold-blooded plot…

Anthony Gilbert was the penname for Lucy Malleson, who also wrote under the name Anne Meredith. The first book I read by her was Portrait of a Murderer, published as Anne Meredith, which was reprinted by British Library Crime Classics to much success in 2017.

The Tragedy at Freyne is the first in her Scott Egerton series, and is a classic British country house closed circle/impossible crime mystery (these are obviously not the same trope – one can have an impossible crime without it being a closed circle, and vice versa, but I don’t want to go into more detail, in an effort to avoid major spoilers).

The set up is a weekend house party* at Freyne manor. The host, Simon Chandos, is found dead in the morning after a night of revelry and drama. There was an effort by the murderer to make it look like Chandos committed suicide, but this is quickly debunked.

The four of us—Bannister, Egerton, Dacre and I—had slept in adjoining rooms the previous night, the other side of the wing being closed, so that the step Miss Dennis had heard might have belonged to any of us, except for the lameness to which she testified. Above our rooms were the servants’ quarters, in a long wing stretching out in an ungainly manner from the side of the house, like a clumsy chicken trying to extend her leg, and fearful of being nipped.

There are a lot of twists and turns in this golden age mystery. There are also a fair few (typical) obnoxious statements about women, like this one:

As far as reason goes women have not progressed much from the stage of the savage whose head can hold only one idea at a time. That’s where men score. They do, as a rule, take the impersonal standpoint; women see life as individuals, and it’s as individuals that they regulate their lives. Law-givers? No sane man wants to see laws made by women. To begin with, not one in ten has a grain of respect for the law she wants to create. Lady Chandos hasn’t; Miss Dennis hasn’t. As for Miss St Claire, I don’t suppose she cares either.

Everytime I read something like this, I laugh out loud, thinking about men in public life who take nothing from the “impersonal” standpoint. But, I digress into politics (Trump. I’m talking about Trump). As a person who reads a lot of vintage fiction, it’s like water off of a duck’s back for me. What’s a woman – who is also a lawyer and a former prosecutor – supposed to do but laugh at this sort of nonsense.

Which brings me to the next point – as a former prosecutor, I often find myself thinking about whether or not the mystery presented wasn’t just solved, but was it also prosecutable? It’s obviously not a requirement that the “case” be prosecutable at the end of the book, but it’s interesting to think about. Many times I conclude that they are not.

This one, I would say, gets a yes from me. There are some solid clues that would make solid, admissible evidence to present in court. There is one piece of evidence related to typewriter print matching that is quite fun. If you remember typewriters, they had very unique characteristics (off kilter, damaged or faded portions of letters, spacing mismatches/issues, etc) that would be able to be linked with absolute certainty. Opportunity with respect to the morphia is well thought out. There is also a clear and compelling motive.

The murderer is a particularly nasty piece of work who leaves quite a path of destruction in (his/her) wake.

This one is available for kindle from Spitfire Publishers Ltd for a mere .99 in the U.S. For fans of golden age mystery, I recommend.

*Sadly, no one has ever invited me to a weekend house party at a manor in the English countryside, with or without murder.

1991: Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Back in May, 2017, I bought the Open Road Media omnibus edition of the Cazalet Chronicles for $3.03, which is about half what Starbucks charges for a mocha these days. Over the subsequent eight years, I would occasionally remember that I had it, mostly when Elizabeth Jane Howard’s name came up in a podcast or book I was reading.

It recently moved to the top of the queue, for reasons which are pretty murky. I started by reading the first book in the series, The Light Years, but that year in my project was already occupied by Possession. The following year, 1991, however, was open, so here we are. After reading Marking Time, I took a bit of a hiatus, but started book 3, Confusion, yesterday. I plan to complete the series this summer.

The Light Years
by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Cazalet Chronicles #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1990
Genre: historical fiction
Pages: 436
ReRead?: No

The Light Years is the first novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's bestselling Cazalet Chronicles. Home Place, Sussex, 1937. The English family at home . . . For two unforgettable summers they gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of the Second World War. In the heart of the Sussex countryside these were still sunlit days of childish games, lavish family meals and picnics on the beach. Three generations of the Cazalet family. Their relatives, their children and their servants – and the fascinating triangle of their affairs . . .

Marking Time
by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Cazalet Chronicles #2
Publication Date: January 1, 1991
Genre: historical fiction
Pages: 496
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

For fans of Downton Abbey, the second volume of the critically acclaimed Cazalet saga takes readers into the lives of an extended British family and their devoted retinue It is 1939, and Hitler has just invaded Poland. The exigencies of wartime will force the Cazalets to make difficult choices as the older children are evacuated from London and settled in Home Place, their longtime Sussex summer estate.

Narrated primarily through the voices of three Cazalet cousins—sixteen-year-old Louise and fourteen-year-old Polly and Clary—Marking Time details the continuing saga of their fathers. With the outbreak of war, Edward is determined to do his part for England. Hugh, crippled in World War I, must sit back and watch other men fight for their country, including his brother Rupert, who enlists and goes missing in action. The Cazalets’ story plays out against the greater drama unfolding on the world stage. Three young girls yearn for the freedom they believe adulthood will confer upon them in this tale of struggle and sacrifice, love and loss, as a new generation of Cazalets makes itself heard. With strong female characters such as the stoic Kitty; her daughter, Rachel, who’s in a relationship with another woman; and the loyal governess Miss Milliment, Marking Time explores the role of women during the war amid early stirrings of feminism.

Overall, I enjoyed both of the first two books. Howard uses a family saga as the framework for understanding the changes in British society as a result of WWII. The Cazalets are a largish family, with three brothers (Hugh, Edward and Rupert) and their wives (Sybil, Villy & Zoe) as the parent generation, and their children, especially their daughters – Polly, Louise and Clary – who are really the narrators of the books. Louise is the oldest of the girls and Polly and Clary are the same age. There are some brothers and babies, but they are really just background. There is also a spinster sister, Aunt Rachel, who plays a prominent role.

The plot summary compares the Cazalet Chronicles to Downton Abbey, but I don’t really agree. I think it’s more similar to The Forsyte Saga, which I read many years ago (possibly time for a reread). The Cazalets are in trade, and while there is generational wealth, they aren’t the aristocracy in the way that the Crawley’s are.

Of the adults, Edward is a truly loathesome character, and is the worst of the bunch. I have grown weary of Louise, but there are valid reasons for her irritating behaviors. Both Clary and Polly are interesting and engaging. The characters are well drawn and compelling, and I really love historical fiction set during WWII.

There are three more books in the series, and I can’t draw final conclusions until I’ve read them all. But, at this point, I’m enjoying the series a lot!

1959: Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin

Uncle Paul
by Celia Fremlin
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1959
Genre: suspense
Pages: 249
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

While sisters Meg and Isabel relax with their children on their seaside holiday, their older half-sister Mildred moves into the cottage where her bigamist husband Paul was arrested for the attempted murder of his first wife. First published in 1959 this psychological thriller follows the women as Paul's release from prison makes them ever more unnerved.

I was pointed in the direction of Celia Fremlin by a friend’s Goodreads timeline. It was honestly the cover that made me sit up a take notice – and when I read the plot summary, I was completely sold. I ended up buying a 3 book set of the Faber & Faber reprints, which includes this one, The Hours Before Dawn and The Long Shadow. So far, I’ve only read Uncle Paul. All of the covers are wonderful.

I don’t quite know where to slot this book, genre-wise. It’s not really a crime/mystery. It’s also not really a thriller. It’s fairly suspenseful, but in a 1950’s and 1960’s way, not in a 2020’s way. The pacing is fairly slow, and the ending took me by surprise, but didn’t shock me.

The main character is Meg, the youngest of three sisters, who is basically summoned to the English coast by the middle sister, Isabel, because the oldest sister, Mildred, seems to have taken leave of her senses by renting a dumpy, remote cottage where her imprisoned (bigamist) husband, Uncle Paul, attempted to kill his first wife a decade or so prior. So, yeah, that’s quite the set up.

Meg is a career girl, with a new boyfriend named Freddy, who behaves in some frankly bizarre ways throughout the course of the book. We really aren’t to know what to make of him. And the middle sister, Isabel, is also married to a man in the Navy, and about whom she seems to know basically nothing. Meg seems to be the only character with even a lick of sense or independence.

Once the characters are all assembled at the coast, the suspense begins to build because no one is talking about Uncle Paul, but everyone is thinking about him. Has he been released? Is he looking for revenge on the three sisters who seemingly betrayed him? Is Freddy Uncle Paul in disguise? Is Isabel’s husband Uncle Paul in disguise? Is everyone losing their ever-lovin’ minds (the answer to this is yes).

If you cross Elizabeth Taylor (the author, not the actress) with Patricia Highsmith, you might end up with Celia Fremlin. If that sounds intriguing, check her out.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
Translated from: German
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: November 1, 1924
Genre: classic
Pages: 706
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 Big Reads

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.

The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

At the end of 2024, when I was contemplating my 2025 reading plans, I decided that I would select six “big books” (i.e., books that were over 600 pages) to read this year. The six that ended up making the cut were:

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
~~War and Peace~~ by Leo Tolstoy
~~The Magic Mountain~~ by Thomas Mann
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (this is actually 3 books, but I bought the omnibus edition, so I’m treating it like 1 book)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

I’ve read to the midpoint of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and while I do intend to finish it, I very definitely bogged down. It’s a very long book (1181 pages) and it’s non-fiction/travel/memoir, which is a genre that I find troublesome. My reread of War and Peace, while undocumented at this point, is also complete. I plan to write a post fairly soon.

Which brings me to The Magic Mountain. This is a chunky read, albeit not so chunky as either W&P or BL&GF, at about 700 pages. It took me about a month to read it – I started it on April 28, and finished it on June 1. I found it to be between W&P and BL&GF in terms of readability. I love chunky Victorian era novels with sprawling casts covering epic events, and while W&P wouldn’t be considered “Victorian,” being Russian, it was published during that era. I find that type of novel both enjoyable and readable.

The Magic Mountain is . . . what . . . modernist? Post-modern? I dunno – I’m not a critic and I’m bad at that sort of analysis. Nonetheless, it was an easier lift for me that BL&GF because I do much better with fiction than I do with NF.

It always feels vaguely ridiculous to me to rate a classic book – who am I to decide if The Magic Mountain is one star or five stars? I’m perfectly comfortable rating the newest Michael Connelly, but it seems pompous to start assigning star ratings to books that have already managed to stand the test of time as classics, about which entire additional books have been written by scholars, especially when, as is the case here, I feel like I got about 35% of it. So, there you go. I gave it 3 1/2 stars. Make of that what you will.

Sometimes I read a book and I think I will get a lot more out of this when I reread it. In the case of The Magic Mountain, I’m sure that I would get a lot more of it, if I reread it. Nonetheless, I doubt that I will ever reread it. It was too internal, too ambiguous, too “think-y” for my taste. I’m not a reader that requires action or a lot of plot, but I am a reader who wants to feel like the characters could be real people. This book felt like a giant allegory, where ideas were given flesh and turned into characters expressing archetypes, and, unfortunately, I neither enjoyed nor was I interested in the allegory or the archetypes. To say that nothing happened in the first 600 pages is accurate. Mann’s use of time is interesting, from a technical standpoint, but, at the end of the day, I just found the whole thing vaguely annoying.*

So, I’m glad that I read it. It wasn’t a struggle, and I never felt compelled to set it down, but this was a one-off for me.

George Packer, who writes for The Atlantic, and who also wrote a book that I really liked when I read it in 2020 (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) wrote a piece about The Magic Mountain for the centenary last November, which I thought was great, even though he got a lot more out of the book than I did. So, if you want to read a different perspective, you can find it here.

*Having said this, I did find it interesting that the arguments between Settembrini and Naphta were sort of like listening to Ezra Klein argue with Steve Bannon. So, there is a relevance here.