Having finished David Copperfield, and taking a break with a couple of mysteries (see above), I’m now reading Demon Copperhead, Barbra Kingsolver’s retelling of Dickens but set in Appalachia. So far, she’s sticking quite close to the source.
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I too loved the descriptive language and the ambiance , the mystery was bit of a throwaway
I think the greatest mystery writer was Dorothy L Sayers
I read them all when I was much younger. I also saw the BBC[?] productions in the 70s[?]. I should revisit.
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Two authors to add to the mix.
Josephine Tey. She was well-known in her day, producing seven or eight mystery thrillers, but she seems to be out of fashion now.
John Buchan, whose books are much better than his own description of “shabby little shockers”. His best-known book is ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’, which has been filmed four or fine times (most recently with Rupert Penry-Jones), even though each film director screws with the novel’s intricate plot line.
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I read The Thirty-Nine Steps, but nothing else by him. I’ve also seen the Hitchcock movie.
As for Josephine Tey, I’ve read several books over the years, including The Daughter of Time, which was rated as the No. 1 detective novel of all time by the Crime Writers Association. An acquaintance of mine tried adapting it into a stage play. I read a draft, but I found it rather dry.
I’ve taken two shots at adaptation myself (without too much success), from mysteries by Edmund Crispin and Sarah Caudwell. Both authors are worth checking out.
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Edmund Crispin. The Moving Toyshop by any chance?
steve
That’s right. His best known.
Back in the 80s a friend and I adapted his novel Swan Song for the stage. The novel is set in at a theater at Oxford, where an opera company is rehearsing Die Meistersinger. I have read that the setting of this 1946 novel was an attempt of get Wagner back in the good graces of the British public. Forty years later, our challenge was how to get the cast down to a reasonable size, so we switched to The Barber of Seville. Several members of the cast had to be able to sing Rossini.
We got mixed reviews. The NY Times decided to compare our backstage comedy to Noises Off. We definitely came off on the losing end of that comparison. But the NY Post theater critic, who also served as the mystery column critic in the NY Times Book Review, understood what we were doing and gave us a nice review.
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The Daughter Of Time is such a clever book, which - if memory serves - concerns the death of Richard III.
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Actually, the question is who really killed the two children in the Tower.
So my memory was not serving me well at all!
Adapted for Radio 4 and resurfaces on R4Extra occasionally. Worth a listen.
steve
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I shall look that up.
If you enjoy nature based true life adventure, try this.
Excellently written.
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Thanks. I’ve just read a brief resume and it sounds very interesting.
I particularly like ‘nature quest’ type books and I really enjoyed two books by Robert Michael Pyle where he chased butterflies all over the USA.
It was always Richard who got blamed
The autobiography of Alf Garnett’s creator. Will give wokies palpitations but it’s well-written, often very funny and (probably, I don’t know as I’m a lower middle class lad from SE London then Kent) a vivid portrait of growing up in dire poverty in East London’s Canning Town in the 1920s and 30s.
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Why not try the audio books ? They have much the same cast as the TV series .
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