The Devotion of Suspect X (Original 2005, English translation 2011)
Published by: Little, Brown
Author: Keigo Higashino
Acquired from: Melbourne City Library
BLM Rating 9.5 / 10
The first chapter of this book is unlike any other mystery novel I have encountered. It starts slow, with high school maths teacher Ishigami crossing a river bridge, making his way to a little lunch bento-box café he frequents. His neighbor single mother Yasuko, who he has a crush on, works at this café. On the way, just like every other day, he notices a set of homeless men who live under the bridge, one crushing cans, another brushing his teeth - as mundane as it could possibly get. Later in the day, café worker Yasuko's good-for-nothing ex-husband turns up. He wants more money, brags that they will never be rid of him and makes suggestive comments about Yasuko's daughter. The daughter, terrified, attacks him with a copper vase and in the ensuing struggle Yasuko and her daughter end up killing the ex-husband.
All this within the first chapter. 25 pages into the 374 murder mystery and we already know where, how and by whom the murder was committed!
I've always been a big fan of Book Grocer, Melbourne's retailer of good quality discount books, and this week I was lucky enough to be working two minute from their Elizabeth Street store, so of course I had to treat myself!
The best thing about not having had a chance to get into one of their stores for a while is the wonderful selection of new stuff I get to choose from!
Here are my six new books, on their awesome "Six Books For $50" deal... Why would you not take advantage of that???
Hello again.
Time to give you all an update on what I've been reading and other things of note in my reading world.
Firstly a tongue in cheek thank you to somebody in Oregon USA who clearly liked our site so much they tried to hack our password. Thanks to Google and it's password restrictions we were unable to get in ourselves for a day or two but we are back in control! Well, as much as we ever were anyway.
There are a couple of books I've finished in the last couple of weeks, firstly Lloyd Shepherd's Savage Magic, third in his series that revolves around the adventures of River Constable Charles Horton.
I first mentioned this novel back in September but it's annoyingly taken me until now to get around to it. (There's always a long queue etc etc...). This time Constable Horton finds himself consigned to the Surrey countryside by Aaron Graham, Bow Street Magistrate on a matter of personal importance. This set runs alongside a series of brutal murders back in London which seem in some way linked to Horton's own personal circumstances, in particular that of his wife's present incarceration in a mental facility.
Rumours of witchcraft fly through the tale which has it's core within the actions of a group of men of 'quality' and their sordid sexual debauches.
As with previous novels in the series there is enough of an element of the supernatural running through the plot to add another dimension of interest but never so much as to remove the reader from the idea one is reading historical fiction. A combination of elements I think Lloyd Sheperd pulls off magnificently.
I really enjoyed Savage Magic, I hope this is not the end of Constable Horton's story. So many good stories only seem to make it to a trilogy these days, I definitely want more!
The other book I wanted to bring to your attention is Operation Pax by Michael Innes. I came across this one in a massive batch of Penguin Crime green-covers I picked up on good old Ebay.
I'd never come across Innes's work before so did a little research and found it to be the pen-name of J.I.M. Stewart, Scots academic and author. As well known for his academic writing as his fifty plus crime novels, one is under no illusion very early on in the book that this is a work written by a lecturer in English at Oxford University. I can't remember the last time I had to make so many dictionary checks reading a piece of crime fiction! I know this will put some people off, many people read just to enjoy, we're not necessarily here to learn right? He can be erudite to the point of verbosity, but is nonetheless entertaining.
With the usual measure of somewhat improbable coincidence one expects from mid-twentieth century crime writing, and the character biases one might forsee from a male academic of the period, this is still worth a read. I have a number of Innes's works in my bulk purchase so I'll definitely be giving some of his other novels a look.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago on the 16th of November, I posted on our sister-site: https://www.facebook.com/bookloversmelbourne a message regarding a cafe in Melbourne looking to share some space with a would-be bookseller. Coffee Automatico would still love to hear from anyone interested so either contact them direct or drop us a line and we'll put you in touch.
Happy reading
Stevie at BLM
It's been a busy few weeks for me, a trip to Las Vegas (one book purchase, an after-thought at the airport...) and a great trip to WA and the Margaret River area for wine tasting, sightseeing and of course, book buying (a ridiculous 12 book purchases!!)
I had a wonderful time in Vegas, but the draw of the blackjack tables, the booze and a great group of friends meant the only book I got my hands on was one by the name of "When The Mob Ran Vegas" by Steve Fischer. An entertaining little piece with gangster tales galore, I can't resist a bit of local history when I travel and Vegas history is somewhat predictably 'mob' orientated.
Western Australia was less predictable. In amongst the great wineries and little Aussie towns I found a surprising amount of fare for a book lover. We travelled through a great little town called Busselton which, if my sources are accurate, had four book shops for only a population of 15'000!
Further down south I stayed in the town of Margaret River where the aptly titled Margaret River Bookshop was a great find. Keith, the owner, set up shop 8 years ago, knowing, by his own admission, nothing about the business but by a combination of good luck and good judgement he's managed to come up with a real gem. In its early days also an internet cafe, Keith told me that knowing nothing about computers, his fallback plan when a customer had an IT related issue was to call the "support team" which consisted of his kids!!
Definitely worth a visit if you're in that neck of the woods. A few hundred metres up the road is the Margaret River Book Exchange, a great source for old paperbacks with very friendly, helpful staff and as the title suggests an exchange programme for old titles.
Finally, we made our way up to Fremantle for the WA Mecca of book buying that is Elizabeth's Bookshops. A quick teaser visit to the store in Perth CBD on the first day (where I first discovered their really cool idea of a "Blind Date Book" a brief description of a brown paper wrapped book, how exciting!!) followed by visits to both the warehouse shop in Queen Victoria Street, a rambling cornucopia of bookish stuff, and the store on South Terrace or The Cappuccino Strip as the area is known.
I've bought many books in recent months online from Elizabeth's so I was really looking forward to visiting in person. The range is awesome, beautifully laid out and cared for and with some real exciting finds. Sadly I didn't get to meet Elizabeth herself but I'm sure I'll be visiting again. They were also very kind in posting on our FB page, condolences for our little cat Smoko who sadly died this week.
So with two holidays and the loss of a dear little family member I've been somewhat distracted recently. But plenty of time in the air meant plenty of reading of course. I won't go into my current reads right now, but all these distractions means my efforts to catalogue and cover all my recent purchases are way behind schedule!
I hope you're all having a great reading time, this blog is dedicated to Smoko, her love of hanging out in my library makes her all the more missed.
Happy reading.
Stevie at BLM
Full Dark House (2003)
Author: Christopher Fowler
BLM Rating 9 / 10
As I mentioned a few days ago here I've only recently discovered this, the first in Fowler's series about detectives Bryant & May and their adventures. Inspired by watching TV series Foyle's War, I was keen to find some detective fiction set in England in World War II, so this was very much a stab in the dark (ahem...) as I had never come across the authors work before.
The duo work for the Metropolitan Police's little known Peculiar Crimes Unit, an underfunded department thought of by many as a dumping ground for the more irritating or nonsensical crimes that plague London.
At the book's outset, one of the detectives is killed in 2003, and his desolated partner of over half a century sets out to discover the perpetrator of the crime. We are soon taken back to London during the Blitz in 1940, to the duo's first case together, which seems to have some bearing on the modern murder.
The 1940 part of the story is set in a London theatre where a series of murders plague a new production that is set to shock the city. The scenes depicting London in both eras are wonderfully atmospheric, and though I can't speak to the depiction of wartime London personally, the scenery of early 21st century Camden is spot on.
The author's device of representing the main characters in their early twenties at one moment and then in their eighties the next, is cleverly utilised and gives the reader a great sense of the character's personalities and motivations. There is also a refreshingly humorous side to the author's delivery that does not detract from the tense expectation and drama of the genre. The murder mystery element itself is very well constructed with the obligatory twist in the tail being beautifully executed.
This is a great read and I can't wait to get into more of Bryant & May's adventures soon.
Stevie at B.L.M.
I know, I may as well make this a monthly spot and be done with it right? But hey-ho, busy man etc...
So since MWIB last, I've managed to get myself embroiled in the situation of reading five books at once, something I try to avoid but often end up doing anyway, due to my inability to resist starting a book that looks interesting.
I actually find it quite a fun way to read, rather like flicking through a multitude of TV channels to see what one fancies. I can quite happily read a chapter, switch books, read a chapter etc etc. An odd way to do things perhaps but I like it. I also find this style of reading helps my mind to explore tangents and different ideas via the complexity of processing a handful of story-lines at once and helps to fill in background details when I'm reading non-fiction with relevance to the particular time period.
So, what have I been reading? Well, I've finished a couple recently so I'll begin with those.
Geoffrey Blainey's "A Very Short History Of The World" is an abridged version of his earlier "A Short History Of The World", unsurprisingly, and it still runs to 479 pages, although as it covers a few million years of the human story, so I guess that's fairly short.... It's a very good read, refreshingly non-eurocentric in it's perspective. Of course it will cover many of the historical nuggets you've picked up over the years, albeit briefly, but there's lots of our story in there you won't know so well.
Whilst ducking out of a three hour long IKEA trip a couple of weeks ago by disappearing downstairs to Dymocks (I know, chain store book shopping, but I was desperate for escapism...) I came across a great little Penguin Special, "The Badlands" by Paul French. At only 91 pages, I had read most of it before leaving the shopping centre, but what a fascinating glimpse into an entirely unknown (to me) world of the seedy side of old Peking in the 1930's and 1940's. At once dark and horrifying, but as addictive as an opium pipe, this is a great little book.
It lead me to desperately seek out a copy of French's earlier work "Midnight In Peking", the true story of a bizarre murder case in the city in 1937. To make up for chain store buying the other one, I decided I'd enrol the help of our local bookstores to track down a copy of this and was entirely unsurprised to find them very helpful, including plenty of polite friendly responses even if their particular store didn't have a copy.
Beth from Jeffreys Books in Malvern came up trumps for me, getting a copy posted to me within three days!!! Awesome work, thank you! Got to love local bookstores!
As to what I'm working my way through at the moment, as always there's an Agatha Christie in there, "Lord Edgware Dies", indeed murder mysteries are playing a prominent part at the moment as I'm also enjoying "A Morbid Taste For Bones" first in the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters and another great new discovery for me, "Full Dark House" by Christopher Fowler, which introduces the crime fighting duo Bryant & May. This particular novel has a wonderfully irreverent feel to it, with some exquisitely eccentric characters.
I'm still reading Claud Cockburn's "The Devil's Decade" which has taken me months to get through. It's very dry, and more than a little polemic, but I'm determined to finish it as I find the subject matter, (the 1930's) a fascinating period in European history.
Finally I'm also thoroughly enjoying Lloyd Shepherd's latest offering "Savage Magic" that I mentioned in an earlier post.
So that's what's going on in my world of books at the moment, I hope it inspires you to give one or two of those mentioned a read.
Happy reading
Stevie at B.L.M.
