Guest review by Rachel Ward: THE POSTSCRIPT MURDERS by Elly Griffiths

 

"A light-hearted read in the vein of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club or S.J.Bennett’s The Windsor Knot."

Rachel Ward has written five thrillers for young adults, the first of which, Numbers, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize. Her novels for adults, The Cost of Living, Dead Stock and Expiry Date (Sandstone Press) are cosy crime stories set in and around a supermarket. Rachel lives in Bath where she also paints and takes photographs. Twitter: @RachelWardbooks Facebook: Rachel Ward Art

When ninety-year-old Peggy Smith is found dead in her armchair by the window in a care home by the sea, her death is put down to natural causes, but her carer, Natalka, suspects foul play. For Peggy was a ‘murder consultant’ who plotted deaths for authors and had told Natalka that someone was following her. Natalka investigates, helped by Peggy’s friends, eighty-year-old former BBC Radio 3 presenter, Edwin, and ex-monk turned coffee barista, Benedict, and also local police detective D.S. Harbinder Kaur. The case takes them through the murky world of publishing and to further deaths before the truth is finally revealed.

This is a light-hearted read in the vein of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club or S. J. Bennett’s The Windsor Knot. The action keeps coming with surprising twists and turns. For this reader, there are rather delicious references to the crime-writing world. What marks this book out from others in the cosy crime genre is the fine and complex characterisation. Griffiths makes you really care about Natalka, Edwin, Benedict and Harbinder. We learn about their, in some cases unusual, backgrounds and history and enjoy their friendships developing. The plot may stretch credibility a little (which I didn’t mind at all) but the relationships between the main characters are utterly believable.

This is the second book to feature D.S. Harbinder Kaur. I don’t think it matters that I am coming to them out of sequence and I’m looking forward to reading the first one, The Stranger Diaries.

The Postscript Murders is published by Quercus.

Rachel Ward's Ant and Bea books are reviewed here by Savita Kalhan.

The Windsor Knot  by S J Bennett is reviewed here by Penny Dolan.

Guest review by Jill Dawson: NEGATIVE CAPABILITY by Michèle Roberts

"Feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet ..."

Jill Dawson is the author of ten novels, including The Crime Writer, about Patricia Highsmith. The latest is The Language of Birds, about the nanny murdered in the household of Lord Lucan in 1974. She runs a mentoring scheme where established writers work with new ones, Gold Dust Mentoring.

Following a series of devastating rejections, novelist and poet Michèle Roberts decided to keep an account of her life in order to make sense of her shattered sense of self. This wonderful, fearless, surprising memoir is the result. I have been recommending it lately to all my writing students because if there’s one thing all writers need to understand it’s how to cope with rejection, how to survive it and carry on writing.

I should state here that I know Michèle (she was my boss, the Director of the MA in Creative Writing when I taught at UEA) so I don’t doubt I’m biased, but I loved her writing long before I met her: its sexy openness, daring experimentation, vividness and warmth. If you haven’t read her, along with poetry and memoir and short stories, there are fourteen novels. Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker, is a good place to start. 

I devoured this. An honest insight into how another writer – one as established as Roberts no less – feels when a novel gets bounced around by agents and publishers is rare. The book could be read as a companion to her earlier memoir, Paper Houses, which tells of her formative years as a young feminist in the 1970s. Alongside her thoughts on writing, on Creative Writing students who want to produce ‘marketable commodities’, set against her own passionate desire to make art and take risks, there is also a glorious exploration of food, sex, friendship, loss, feminism, art and religion. This intimate memoir feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet, (although this artlessness, the creation of such a natural-sounding voice is of course the skill of an accomplished writer who makes it look easy).

In one chapter, reading Roberts on rejecting the idea that the male gaze creates desire, I was struck by how powerfully her thinking had influenced me in my twenties. The idea of the radical nature of actively desiring, feeling desire as a woman and not just wanting to be desired, reflected back at twice your natural sexiness is a theme that comes up in my novels a lot. Since I was reading Michèle Roberts in the 1980s at the start of my writing life, I am aware of how much I owe her.

‘Negative capability’ she reminds us, is a term Keats used in a letter to a friend, meaning ‘to be capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ Dwelling in the not-knowing, not being able, is of course so much easier to talk about, preach, than to actually practise. Might the concept be extended not just to writing but to living? Perhaps it could more broadly refer to all situations where a person felt out of control, even to ‘not being published, not being read’?

‘Just treading water, swimming, just lying on my back, floating in the present, the buoyant present holding me up and rocking me’, she suggests.

If you want to be buoyed up, nourished, encouraged to be fully alive, to challenge and to doubt, this memoir is a joy from start to finish.

Negative Capability is published by Sandstone Press.

ON WRITING by Stephen King, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"He comes over as assured but not conceited, generous with his encouragement, genuine in his desire to pass on the joy he finds in writing."

This post first appeared on Linda's website blog. 

I have to confess that I've yet to read a complete Stephen King novel. Trusted friends have recommended CARRIE, MISERY and others, and after being so impressed by ON WRITING, which I first read a few years ago, I did try MISERY. But ... no. I read only two or three chapters before concluding that Stephen King's fiction just isn't for me. It was gripping, undoubtedly, but perhaps I'm just too much of a wuss for such meaty stuff (and also vegetarian).

This, though, I highly recommend. It's part memoir, framed by King's early days as solitary writer of stories, contributor to a school magazine and journalist - always with a hunger for writing, and tireless energy - and, at the other end of the book, an account of the traumatic accident which he was lucky to survive (he was hit by a truck driver while walking alone on a country road) and his slow recovery, during which resuming the writing of this book was a significant stage.

There is so much to like here, not least Stephen King's devotion to his wife Tabitha (also a writer) and his gratitude for her support throughout his career, especially after the accident. His sales number hundreds of millions, he has published more than 50 novels, won a barrowload of prestigious awards and his current novel END OF WATCH is a New York Times bestseller; yet here he comes over as assured but not conceited, generous with his encouragement, genuine in his desire to pass on the joy he finds in writing.

I've always disliked the nuts-and-bolts approach to writing which suggests that if you follow the rules and work hard you'll end up with a publishable novel. Although King does look at aspects of style and technique, he is clear that writing well is more than that. "At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style ... but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic." Yet he's good at debunking ivory tower notions of writerly preciousness, stressing that the most important thing is simply to get on with it. "There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station." (In a footnote, King explains "Traditionally, the muses were women, but mine's a guy; I'm afraid we'll just have to live with that.") Like many writers, he finds his 'muse' mainly by turning up for work and putting in the hours.

He stresses the need for truth in what you write, dismissing a cynical market-based approach which puts sales and profit ahead of honesty. "It's morally wonky, for one thing - the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck. Also, brothers and sisters, it doesn't work." In terms of his own love of the horror genre, "If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have," fed by his early love of horror movies and comics. Interestingly, King is a writer of suspense thrillers who does not give foremost importance to plot: "I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story."

This isn't a writing textbook and there are no exercises, but there are plenty of examples (good and bad), a section of text which is then revised, with explanations, and one exhilarating what-if masterclass in which King takes a simple, familiar situation as the basis for a story and then plays with expanding it in ways that tighten the tension. It seems that his prodigious output since the publication of Carrie, his first novel, in 1974, has done nothing to dull his enjoyment in writing and creativity. "In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

Reading this book for a second time, I like Stephen King every bit as much as I did on my first reading. So: should I give his fiction another try? What would you recommend?

This account of The Dead Zone, published in 1979, has a particular, prescient resonance now. King says that his initial idea "called for a dangerously unstable politician ... a fellow who could climb the political ladder by showing the world a jolly, jes'-folks face and charming the voters by refusing to play the game in the usual way." Thinking about his other narrator, King wonders: "Can a political assassin ever be right? And if he is, could you make him the protagonist of the novel? The good guy?"

I might have to read The Dead Zone to find out how it's resolved...