CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

crime and mystery fiction

Read Christie 2021: my April book choice – The Seven Dials Mystery

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Read Christie 2021 April: The Seven Dials Mystery

This month I have chosen to read The Seven Dials Mystery as part of the Read Christie 2021 challenge. The remit for this month was to read a story which was written before World War II. There are a number to choose from but I chose The Seven Dials Mystery because I haven’t read this book for decades. I have to say that I absolutely loved revisiting it and read it in one day, which is something I hardly every do!

This is very much a ‘young person’s adventure’ plot and also sees Christie returning to some of the characters who had their first adventure in The Secret of Chimneys. If you have read Chimneys, and recognise the mansion, you’ll probably also recognise the name of Lady Eileen Brent, commonly known as Bundle, who lives at Chimneys with her father and is irrepressible in her pursuit of the truth.

This time, Bundle and her father come back from a holiday abroad to find that a man belonging to a party of people who were renting Chimneys has died in one of their bedrooms. It certainly makes Bundle’s father give second thoughts to renting out their home while they are away in future!

It doesn’t take long for Bundle and her adventurous friends to decide that this man was murdered. The situation becomes graver when another friend dies, his last words being the mysterious ‘seven dials’.

This phrase takes Bundle and her crime-busting friends to Soho, and the discovery of masked members of The Seven Dials Society, who meet in a secret room. Who are they, and what are they planning? And were they responsible for the killings?

This book also reintroduces Superintendent Battle, who occurs in several Christie novels as the presiding investigating officer. Battle is a large man but with a very astute, softly-softly approach to getting things done. Battle acts as an enabler to Bundle’s wish to act as sleuth by giving her permission to do so, and often both of them are present as events pile up and things get most and more mysterious – and dangerous. But Bundle proves herself extremely capable of figuring out what’s been going on, surprising Battle on more than one occasion with her capabilities.

This is very much a relatively fast-moving adventure with plenty of intrigue, secrets and shenanigans. There are also some very wry twists in the plot that couldn’t help but make me smile. So much of this story is like real life in that whatever we see and believe is based on what we expect to be the case and on our preconceptions about people.

If you love Christie’s light-hearted adventure mystery novels then I think you’ll enjoy this one. Next month’s Read Christie book has to be one which features tea. I’m going to return to my favourite of Christie’s sleuths – Poirot – in After the Funeral.

Read Christie 2021: my January book choice – Crooked House

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I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was participating in the #ReadChristie2021 challenge, and as well as telling you what the official Agatha Christie team have chosen for their January read (The Hollow), I said that I had opted to read something different.

January’s challenge is to read a Christie book set in a grand house. Instead of The Hollow, I chose Crooked House, a book that I first read when I was about sixteen, and which I have recently watched on TV – in fact, this probably prompted my choice because I wanted to compare the original with the adaptation.

Plot

The Leonides family live together in a huge house on the edge of London. They had no idea that one of them could be capable of murder until Aristide Leonides, head of the household, was found poisoned.

Leonides had a regular injection of insulin which the murderer had substituted for eserine. Was the murderer a bit stupid? Whoever it was had not even removed the incriminating evidence. Or was there something much more sinister, much more evil at work here?

Charles Hayward is the son of the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. He also is about to marry one of the household, Sophia Leonides. Solving this murder therefore becomes his priority and he sets about tracking down the culprit. But will the murderer strike again and, if so, who could possibly be next on the list – and why?

Of the standalone novels, it, for me, stands out as one of the best. It certainly didn’t fail me on that score when re-reading it this month. It has all the hallmarks of classic Golden Age mystery – the amateur sleuth, a tight cast of characters in a closed setting, in this case the English Country House, and one hell of a puzzle to solve. And in this case, it has the added impetus of making the reader seriously question their detecting beliefs, and what they actually want to believe. It is truly incredible (and I mean that in as many ways as you wish to take it).

I think of it often as I’m scanning my Christie bookshelves as one of the stories that really packed a punch for me because it left me truly shocked. No spoilers here, but if you’ve never read Crooked House, I thoroughly recommend it.

I would love to know if you decided to take up the Read Christie 2021 challenge, and if you did, what you decided to read for January and what you thought about your choice. Have you read Crooked House previously and, if so, what did you think of it (try to avoid spoilers in your comments, or mark them clearly beforehand, please, so others who don’t know the story can choose to skip over them).

Happy reading!

Spell the Month in Books: January

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I began getting involved in ‘Spell the Month in Books’ on Instagram last year, having come across the hashtag and decided it looked like fun. If you don’t know, the idea is that you gather together a bookstack of titles and create the name of the relevant month with the first letter of the title of each book.

This year, I have decided to try and find books that fit into the crime and/or mystery category, and which I currently have in paperback in my bookcases. I can tell you already that finding certain letters of the month has been a challenge, and as much as I would love not to repeat a book in the twelve bookstacks for the year, I get the distinct feeling that there might be one or two that I have no choice to repeat, unless I go out and deliberately buy books beginning with specific letters! I’m resisting doing that, as I have so many unread books that I’m determined to use ones I’ve got.

This is my chosen Spell the Month in Books bookstack for January:

Jamaica Inn – Daphne du Maurer

Among the Mad – Jacqueline Winspear

Nemesis – Agatha Christie

Under the Dragon’s Tail – Maureen Jennings

A Shilling for Candles – Josephine Tey

Return of Sherlock Holmes (The) – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

You Let Me In – Lucy Clarke

You’ll notice a few Golden Age (or modern versions of Golden Age) mysteries among this lot – and being the Agatha Christie obsessive that I am, I couldn’t resist adding one in. However, this group ranges from Victorian to contemporary, and spans detective, suspense and thriller books.

Jamaica Inn combines the Gothic elements of landscape that Daphne du Maurice made so famous in her incredible book, Rebecca, with crime and dark deeds in Cornwall. Labelled as a suspense novel, there are enough dark deeds for me to include this in a set of crime books. When Mary ignores the coachman who warns her against travelling to her aunt at Jamaica Inn, she becomes ravelled in a whole host of villainy going on inside the house. Can she trust the mysterious stranger she meets there? Because she falls in love with him, and danger lurks everywhere.

Jacqueline Winspear’s Among the Mad is one in a series of mystery novels set in post-World War I Britain, featuring her sleuth, Maisie Dobbs. Maisie is drafted in by Scotland Yard after she sees a man commit suicide on a street in London, followed by threats to the Government by a lunatic who threatens mass destruction of people if certain demand are not met. It leads Maisie down a dark route to discover who could possibly be able to commit such atrocity, and to stop him before it is too late.

Nemesis is one of the much later novels of Agatha Christie and features the indisputably astute Miss Marple. When an old acquaintance dies and sets her a challenge of solving an old crime and setting right a wrong, Miss Marple takes it with relish. Thus, the wheels are set in motion to solve the mystery and discover a killer. The only problem is, she has been given absolutely no clue as to who is involved in this mystery or when the crime happened. A curious puzzle…

Under the Dragon’s Tail is a Murdoch Mysteries novel. The murder of Dolly Merishaw is not really unexpected. She was a midwife and abortionist for both high and lowborn, but held every one of her ‘clients’ in contempt and derision. One week later, a boy is found murdered in Dolly’s kitchen, leaving Murdoch to chase down a murderer. Or just maybe there were two on the loose.

A Shilling for Candles sets Alan Grant of Scotland yard on the trail of a murder – but where to start, and how to end? A young screen actress washes up on the south coast, but it seems that everyone the Inspector comes across during his investigation wanted her dead. There are more false and puzzling clues and dead ends than the Inspector knows what to do with!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle caved in to public pressure after the publication in 1902 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and resurrected his famous detective in (The) Return of Sherlock Holmes. The tales in this collection see Holmes returning to London to recount the tales of his life between 1891-4 (the time between Holmes’ supposed death and his ‘present day’).

You Let Me In in a psychological thriller by Lucy Clarke. Being a sucker for red, black and white, the cover on this (although more grey than black) sold it to me, to try. Yes, I did actually buy this for the cover, initially! Ella is a writer; she uses her imagination every day. But something doesn’t feel right when she rents out her house. It feels like someone is watching her. As threats arrive and she feels trapped in her own home, she knows that someone has discovered the secret of her past.

I hope that this makes you think about the books on your bookshelves, and maybe you now fancy taking part in #spellthemonthinbooks too. Can you create a bookstack for January, and can you create it in just one genre (although you don’t have to in the slightest)? Maybe yours would be a virtual stack of ebooks. I haven’t tried that yet – maybe that’s my challenge for next year! I’d love to know what your books for January are/would be, so do please pop them in the comments, or you can email me at claire@claireladds.com with your choices.

I also hope that I might have encouraged you to try one of the books in my bookstack! Just so you know, if you do happen to purchase any of them through my links, I may earn a very small commission (depending on the country you’re in) at no extra cost to you. I’ve only linked to the ones I’ve actually read – not ones that are sitting in my ‘to be read’ pile, so you know that if I’ve linked to it, I thoroughly recommend it.

Happy reading!