two mystery reviews

      April was one of my worst reading months in years.  I read all of two books, although a few others are on the go.  I had a really difficult time settling down to read.  So I challenged myself today and read a book this afternoon:   Death of a Perfect Wife, #4 in the Hamish McBeth mystery series by M.C. Beaton.                          
                                

 I love M.C Beaton; her Hamish McBeth mysteries are perfect when I want something light and good and often funny. The Hamish McBeth mystery series are cozy village mysteries.   Hamish is the perfect Highlands policeman, tall, lanky, red-haired, able to look after himeself quite well, and pining away for the young lady of the mansion on the hill, the aristocrats of the area, Priscilla Haliburton-Smythes. Hamish is resourceful, courageous, clever, kind, thoughtful, and responsible.  He is an ideal village bobby, enjoying his life, a part of the village life, and yet able to interview suspects by being frank and open with them.  If he has to investigate a crime, he tells the person he has to question them to clear them.  No one resents him though they do have opinions, and it's hilarious to see the real thoughts, likes and dislikes of the villagers as they try to live together peaceably.
  
 In this ideal world of Loch Dubh, in the mountains of Highland Scotland, Hamish investigates a murder or two in each book of the series.  Sometimes smuggling or poaching are the major crimes, but there is always a body, almost always of an outsider or newcomer to the village.
 
 In Death of a Perfect Wife, Trixie and Paul Thomas move to Loch Dubh from London, buying a dilapidated house and turning it into a room and board hotel.   Not too long after arriving, Trixie has turned the town upside down with her magnetic personality, convincing many of the village women that the way to be happy is to have a clean house and protest things that want changing.  Secretly she is up to something not so nice.  Trixie's influence on the village is funny at first as she convinces the doctor's wife that the doctor needs a healthier diet and a cleaner house.  But as she begins to play husbands against wives, and Priscilla against Hamish, she is revealed to be quite nasty, and it is a shock but not a surprise when she is found dead one day.  Suspects are many, as are motive, and Hamish has to investigate many of his neighbors before the culprit is uncovered.

 There is nothing better to cozy up with on a rainy Saturday afternoon for a few hours, than a trip to northern Scotland and watching Hamish outwit his boor of a superior officer DCI Blair. DCI Blair  loathes Hamish, mostly because Hamish is always solving the crime.   Hamish lets Blair take the success is because Hamish doesn't want to leave his village.  He has everything he needs there, and he is contented with his small police office, tiny tenant farm at the back where he raises sheep and chickens and eggs, his dog Towser at his side, and the occasional crime to solve. 

At Christmas I read two of the books in the series, and decided to read these in order - there are 21 now in the series:

Series

Hamish Macbeth
1. Death of a Gossip (1985)
2. Death of a Cad (1987)
3. Death of an Outsider (1988)
4. Death of a Perfect Wife (1989)
5. Death of a Hussy (1990)
6. Death of a Snob (1991)
7. Death of a Prankster (1992)
8. Death of a Glutton (1993)
     aka Death of a Greedy Woman
9. Death of a Travelling Man (1993)
10. Death of a Charming Man (1994)
11. Death of a Nag (1995)
12. Death of a Macho Man (1995)
13. Death of a Dentist (1997)
14. Death of a Scriptwriter (1998)
15. Death of an Addict (1999)
16. Death of a Dustman (2001)
17. Death of a Celebrity (2002)
18. Death of a Village (2003)
19. Death of a Poison Pen (2004)
20. Death of a Bore (2005)
21. Death of a Dreamer (2006)
22. Death of a Maid (2007)
23. Death of a Gentle Lady (2008)
24. Death of a Witch (2009)
25. Death of a Valentine (2009)
26. Death of a Chimney Sweep (2011)
     aka Death of a Sweep
27. Death of a Kingfisher (2012)
28. Death of Yesterday (2013)
29. Death of a Policeman (2014)
and
A Highland Christmas (1999)

I now have read the first four in the series, as well as A Highland Christmas, which was quite good and enjoyable to read over the holidays this past Christmas.  I will do a more thorough review of them in a post soon.  I have also read two others in the series over the past few years, while I decided if I wanted to read it sequentially.  I do!  There is a progression in this series, and references once in a while to past events, so reading them as they were written is a good idea, though not necessary. Depends on if you like dipping into a series or not.  I highly recommend these for anyone looking for a comforting, enjoyable mystery series to read. 

                                                            
One of the 2 books I read in April was Bellfield Hall (re-named A Moment of Silence in the UK), by Anna Dean.  This is the first in the Deductions of Dido Kent mystery series.  I really enjoyed it.  I had picked it up last year, but hadn't read it, and then Cath at Read-Warbler read it and loved it.  So her post convinced me to give it a try.  

I think I had hesitated to read it because I was afraid that it would be too Jane Austen-like. By this I mean, the temptation to write a character like Jane Austen would, or like Jane herself could have been, is immense these days.  I don't like either.  To me, Jane Austen and her characters belong to her, the author, and while I know many people enjoy the spin-offs from her novels, I have great difficulty reading them. In any case, even though the main character in this series, Dido Kent, is a spinster, and rather Jane-like in her sharp acuity in noticing people and their expressions around her, the similarity to Jane ends there.  The books are set in 1805, right at the time of many of Jane's novels, Regency England.  The social mores, conventions, and conversations and society rules are the same as in Jane's novels, because it is the same time period. However, the characters are Anna Dean's own creations. I am so happy to report this!   Reading Bellfield Hall is like having a series set in the wonderful time of Jane Austen.  We get to see more of Regency England, the way that women can and can't move around by themselves to go anywhere, and how spinsters rely on the goodwill of family members to support them.  Dido is 35, so considered out of the dating game by then, an old maid.  She is summoned to Bellfield Hall, home of the Montagues, where her niece had just announced her engagement to a wealthy country man, Richard Montague, at an engagement party. Catherine is distraught because her fiancé has tried to end their engagement during the party.  Catherine refuses to believe that Richard is serious, and asks Dido to come and try to track down where her fiancé has disappeared to.  She wants an explanation, for she thinks the letter he left doesn't explain anything to her.   However, upon her arrival, a dead body is discovered on the property:  a young woman, murdered. Who is she?  Is there a link to Richard's sudden disappearance?

Dido comes because Catherine is her favourite niece, and because her brother Francis (Catherine's father) asks her to.  Or as she says to her sister Eliza, Catherine has told her father she wants Dido with her, and so what Catherine wants, her father gives her. Dependent on him as on all of her brothers for her income, Dido goes where she is summoned, and her time is considered theirs to use.  In this way, we see some of what befalls unmarried women in Regency England. 

The fact that she is a spinster, and not wealthy of her own accord, allows Dido to approach the servants and socialize at the dinner engagements equally.  I am not sure that Dido would have been able to move so freely in a country house without being noticed that she was talking to the servants, but both of Richard's parents are otherwise occupied, and of course pay her no mind as she is just the spinster aunt of their son's fiancée.  

Part of the novel is constructed in letters Dido writes to her sister Eliza, which is very much in keeping with the letters Jane Austen wrote to her sister Eliza.  I kept thinking of Jane and Cassandra corresponding like this, and having recently read some of Jane's letters to her family, My Dear Cassandra, I was able to see that the tone in the letters in this novel as well as the tone of the book itself is close to perfect. It is like stepping into Regency England, with the the lightness and delicacy of touch that Jane Austen had, without the novel being Jane Austen like.  Dido is a woman in her own right, and her investigation is well-done with plenty of clues, questioning, searching out the truth hidden in plain sight, and concern for the people in the house.  Who could be the killer?  Was it a family member, a potential member of Catherine's family, and so of Dido's? What happened to Richard?  Why did he leave the engagement party without a word being said?  

A few of the things that elevates this book is that while Dido investigates, she has to do so carefully, aware that a killer is in their midst, and that she is there as a guest.  There is no real investigation into the death because there are no policeman at that time, no village bobby to call.  The local coroner investigates a little, but only so much as to determine the woman was murdered, by persons unknown.  Dido investigates in order to clear her niece's fiancé; Lord Montague, Richard's father, doesn't want scandal to touch the family, and so no real inquest is held, it is thought that someone outside the family happened by and killed the unknown lady.  Many of Dido's clues come because she talks to the servants, who are the ones who know what happens in the house, although they have no one to tell, except amongst themselves.  

And Dido falls in love.  It is most unexpected, and fun to watch happen.  It is even better that is possibly returned.....except that there is of course, something in the way.  He is a man of values, to esteem, after all. And the mystery ends on the happy note of the mystery solved and romance in the air, in the genteel sweet air of Austen's novels.  Lovely.

It is an enjoyable mystery, with interesting characters, and Dido shows herself to be skilled at reading people and understanding motives.  She is clever, and I liked her.  So thank you, Cath.  I have a new series!  Hurray!  Well worth reading, especially for country house mystery fans, Regency readers, and anyone who loves Jane Austen.

And in case you wanted another new mystery series to start:

And for those looking for a new paranormal mystery series, this one reviewed over at Lesa's Book Critiques looks very good:  Ghost Seer by Robin D. Owens.  Just released, and it looks interesting. 

Other reviews:
Bellfield Hall
Kittling Books
S.Krishna's Books
Eva at A Striped Armchair

The Pleasures of Persuasion - Jane Austen

                     I had watched Persuasion on Sunday afternoon, the Ciaran Hinds/Anne Root version.

It doesn't matter which of the many versions there are out there, though; every time I finish the screen version,  I immediately reach for the novel.  There is something about how Anne responds to the world around her that just can't be captured on the screen.  It is an interior novel, through Anne's eyes for the most part, and a movie can't capture those interior thoughts and impressions deeply enough.  It can only show the surface.  So I find the movies always lack a depth that I know Persuasion the novel has.  This time though, I thought I would try one of my annotated versions, Persuasion by Jane Austen - An Annotated Edition edited by Robert Morrison.
                                                                  
 I have not read an annotated version of one of my favourite novels before, so I wasn't sure what to expect.  Too much information?  Would it be difficult to read the story and read all the extra information without losing my place, or the pace and flow of the story?  Well, it helped that Persuasion isn't a fast novel.  It's slow and thoughtful.  This means that taking the time to read the annotated notes on each page was easy to do.  Each annotation had something to do with what was on the page, as well, so it was in keeping with that point in the chapter.

Illustrations grace this edition, so many wonderful images and paintings from the time Jane Austen lived, and of the places mentioned in the novel.  Places that could be like Uppercross or Kellynch, and actual paintings, drawings, and reproductions of maps of  Bath and surroundings, Lyme and surroundings, are all shown in detail. The political changes, and the historical especially: the War with Napoleon is the backdrop to Persuasion, with the war just ending as the novel opens.  Admiral Croft who rents Kellynch, when the Elliotts have to decamp to Bath, has just been released on half-pay as the war is over and he needs a place to live with his wife. And of course, Captain Frederick Wentworth, who has made his fortune in the war, and now seeks a wife to settle down with.

I won't go through the details of the plot, since I will assume that most of you gentle readers have read Persuasion already.  I have as it is one of my very favourite novels.  So I was anxious and curious to see if the annotated version would add anything to what I had already gleaned from my readings, and from reading about Jane Austen herself in her biography by Claire Tomalin.

 Well, I learned a lot.  There is much more to this annotated version than I expected.  It brings in texts and books and ideas and criticisms about Persuasion, that have occurred ever since it was published in 1817.  What the annotated version gave me especially, was an understanding of how Persuasion fits into the world Jane Austen was writing in.  Especially, the literature world then.  I did not understand how much she liked the Romantic poets - even though they are brought up by Anne Eliot in the novel, to Captain Benwick - and that Persuasion is the first novel where she tried to use the setting to show her heroine's mind.  The walk from Uppercross to Winthrop, and the scenery around Lyme are the two big examples of nature being used to show Anne's pain.   In the Uppercross scene, one annotated note says:

"Anne's walk to Winthrop is often cite as an example of Austen's new commitment to a darker and more passionate world in which she values feeling over prudence, and in which she explores her own deep sense of personal sorrow through techniques and natural settings that are more commonly associated with her major poetic contemporaries Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley......In their quiet and restrained fashion......Austen's last works are part of the new movement in English literature.  She has learned that the natural setting can convey, more surely than any abstract vocabulary, the movements of an individual imagination." p 127

At Lyme, the annotated notes suggest: " In her description of the 'immediate environs of Lyme," Austen comes "nearer to the Romantic poets than in anything else that she wrote," declares Althea Hayter.......Hayter proposes that Austen's own memories of Lyme, coupled with her reading of Coleridge's hypnotic poem [Kubla Khan], might have cast a 'strange glow' over the landscape, and now it would be the dark cliffs, the rocky fragments, the green chasms, the forest trees, that she felt moved to describe in Persuasion, as the setting for Anne Elliott's 'sorrowing heart', secretly yearning for the the love that she believed she had lost forever." pg 141

Now read the actual text of Persuasion for the first glimpse of Lyme and environs:
    " The scenes in its neighborhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; - the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state........."p 140

I stress that neither the annotated notes/author nor myself are suggesting that Jane Austen was becoming a Romantic writer; what jolted me was the understanding that the Romantic poets had moved her , so that she as a writer was trying to use what their poetry was showing her about landscape, and the heart, in her work.

In  Lyme, we the reader are aware that Jane is resigned to having lost Wentworth forever.  She is grieving, she is sorrowful, her heart is broken, yet still she can see the world around her, still respond to nature, and indeed to the grief of Benwick, whom  she is just about to meet. And in that discussion with Benwick, who reads only the Romantics, she suggests that he adds essays and other books to his readings, to give him a sense of morality and resolve to overcome his grief.   It also reveals the true character of Anne Elliott, that in the midst of her own private grief and loss of hope, she can rally - and this is how, by using the guidance of books to show her the way.  I just love how Austen uses books in her novels!

It really bothers me now that in the screen version I have, Anne smiles when she is at Lyme at the beach for the first time. I understand why the actress would show this - the change of scenery, being at the ocean - is renewing, revitalizing - but Anne would be contemplative.  The chasms and luxuriant forest life and rolling ocean would be her outlet to  express the powerful emotions that she is not free to reveal.  She should be shown alone, along the seashore, or gazing out at sea, sadly.  Or smiling ironically, in awareness that the world goes on even when her hopes have ended.  Anne is never bitter, and at the end of her evening with Benwick, she is self-reflective enough to say,
      "When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which  her own conduct would ill bear examination."
                                                                                               p 149

I think it's at this point that I know I would love Anne Elliott dearly as a friend.  So while Jane Austen uses nature in a different, modern way, her main character is not Romantic, or tragic.  She is self-aware, reflective, and humourous, and a marvelous creation.  The irony, gentle wit, poking fun - and indeed she might have been poking fun at the tragic Byronic character by making him be Benwick in the novel, who despite his great despair at the loss of his true love, very quickly - too quickly, all agree in the book - falls in love again.  I really enjoyed the Annotated version for giving me a glimpse of Jane Austen the writer at work. 

I love seeing how the books being published in her time affected her writing, and her growth as an author.  I enjoyed reading the bits of criticisms and essays used, although I did not always agree with the ideas, they still gave a deeper meaning to what was happening in the story.

Things I did not know:
- I did not know that Jane loved Scott's poetry, or was a huge fan of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth.  I will have to look for the novels now!
-I did not know that Austen changed the final chapters of Persuasion: she didn't like the original ending, so she cancelled the final two chapters and replaced them with three final ones of the published novel.
-The two cancelled chapters are the only section of any of her published novels to survive in manuscript.

I really enjoyed reading this annotated version.  I loved the notes about other authors and who she admired as a writer, and who admired her.  I enjoyed reading about all the little ideas, character references, other books, that Jane uses in Persuasion, or refers to, or links with. It makes for rich reading, and plunged me into the world of 1812 to 1816.  I think I was even dreaming of Regency England last night.......I loved reading about the differences in carriages, and why Wentworth's removing little Charles from Anne's back is so significant, and the reason why Elizabeth won't invite anyone to dinner, when the Harvilles invite every body. Regency England comes to life in reading this annotated version.

I think I love Persuasion even more, now.