The joy that overcame me when ‘A Red Herring Without Mustard’, the latest Flavia De Luce novel, arrived on the door mat was quite something. I have been following Flavia’s adventures since I received an early proof of ‘The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie’ and then ‘The Weeds That Strings The Hangmans Bag’ and each has been a pure pleasure to read. Then my joy wavered slightly as I had that worry of ‘oh no, will this be as good as the previous two?’ and so I held of reading… for a whole day when I could wait no longer. How chuffed am I then that ‘A Red Herring Without Mustard’ might just be my favourite of the Flavia novels, and also one of the most enjoyable reads for me of the year so far.
The only problem with writing any book thoughts on a mystery is that you really don’t want to give too much away and this is the issue I am facing writing about ‘A Red Herring Without Mustard’ because so far of the Flavia De Luce mysteries I think this is the most twisty and complex. It is still set in the 1950’s fictional English town of Bishop’s Lacey where the De Luce’s reside in the grand house of Buckshaw and it is indeed in the grounds of Buckshaw where a brutal attack is carried out on a gypsy who Flavia has given permission to camp in. Palings is a slightly spooky wooded part of the estate which of course gives great atmosphere to the opening of the book and makes it all the more thrilling.
Naturally the police involved, in particular Inspector Hewitt, don’t want Flavia to be. This is much to Flavia’s fury and indeed indignation as she has solved a few crimes for them for in the past. So naturally she starts trying to investigate herself. What turns up is not just the mystery of the gypsy but a murder mystery from Bishop Lacey’s past and one that isn’t as forgotten as Flavia initially believes. If that wasn’t enough as Flavia uncovers more secrets new light starts to shine on the very death of Flavia’s mother Harriet, all started off by her whimsical visit to the gypsy in question at the village fete.
Some people might say that these are cosy crime novels and yet I think in every one of Alan Bradley’s novels so far there is a real darkness, along with a certain camp, that make them so addictive. I also think his choice of Flavia as an unusual child protagonist with her character and observations are precocious, hilarious and blunt all in one, are spot on. You are thrilled and entertained in equal measure. In only a few pages, when discussing her sisters Daphne and Feely, you know you are in the mind of Flavia and the fun begins.
“Oh there you are, you odious little prawn. We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
It was Ophelia, the older of my two sisters. Feely was seventeen, and ranked herself right up there with the Blessed Virgin Mary, although the chief difference between then, I’m willing to bet, is that the BVM doesn’t spend twenty-three hours a day peering at herself in a looking glass while picking away at her face with a pair of tweezers.
With Feely, it was always best to employ the rapid retort: “How dare you call me a prawn, you stupid sausage? Fathers told you more than once it’s disrespectful.”
I loved ‘A Red Herring Without Mustard’. Not only for its plot which is the perfect mystery with thrills and spills, and lots of red herrings, also because I got to spend more time with Flavia, more time with her family and more time with some of the bonkers characters living in the village. If you want a mystery that is entertaining, well written (and really makes you feel you are living in the world it creates) and will have you guessing then you can’t go wrong with this. 10/10
Have any of you read the Flavia de Luce books? If you haven’t then drop what you are doing and read them from the start straight away. They will bring you hours of entertainment I can almost guarantee. Which are your favourite series of novels, be they crime or not, and why? Any novels where you simply read them to spend time in the protagonists company?
I think in all honesty I should have stopped reading Tessa Hadley’s at about page 70 of the ‘The London Train’ but what kept me going was hope and a little bit of faith in the blurb that it was ‘a vivid and absorbing account of the impulses and accidents that can change our lives’ and what kept me going, again from the blurb, that ‘connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far reaching consequences for Paul and Cora’ those being our two protagonists. In fact it was the promise of Cora’s tale, in the second of what is really two novellas co-joined by the slimmest (and we are talking really slim) of moments that seems to be the longest one of the very few moments that any of the London trains get a mention, that kept me going as Paul’s story was not only boring me silly but becoming more and more ridiculous as it went on.
It is four initially disparate stories which make up ‘The Birth of Love’. We first have the story, in forms of letters to a Dr Wilson, of the incarceration of Herr S in a Viennese asylum in the 1800’s. This is a man wracked with guilt over the amount of women he believes he has murdered and the never ending dreams and visions of blood that he is the subject to. Secondly is the tale of Brigid whose second child, she is what is now deemed as a mature mother, is overdue and we join her as her mother arrives and so it seems do her contractions. Thirdly is the narrative of Michael, and author whose works on a doctor from the 1800’s has just been published and on the day of release learns his mother is ill with dementia. Fourthly, and finally, we have the unnamed Prisoner 730004 in the year 2153 who has been captured after leaving the ‘safety’ (which we soon learn are confines) of Darwin C and has escaped to an island where the ‘Magna Mater’ Birgitta is rumoured to have given birth, a quite impossible act in the times of egg and sperm harvesting and offspring farming.
Susanna, the main protagonist of ‘Repeat It Today With Tears’, is a rather quiet and subdued young woman. Growing up with an overbearing mother, rebellious sister who her grandmother much prefers over Susanna and lets her know as much, the one thing missing from her life is her father who we learn left when Susanna was very young. What starts off as general inquisitiveness soon becomes an obsession that leads to a rather dark opening of the book from the first line. “The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the Easter holiday.” From the very start we know we are in rather unchartered territory and from here on Anne Peile takes us on a rather a dark journey of Susanna from that point, whilst also taking us through her past.
When you start reading ‘The Troubled Man’ you can almost instantly tell from its style and delivery that this is going to be the last of the Kurt Wallander novels. Not because the ending of it all is given away from the start, and fear not I shall not give anything away here either, but because Wallander seems incredibly reflective and nostalgic about his past and indeed his future. Initially this concerned me slightly. This wasn’t going to be a case of an author spinning out the final instalment using as many words and random tangents as possible was it? Not really, is the answer. What Mankell uses this for is to show us just where our protagonist is in his head and why he takes on a case that really doesn’t fall under his jurisdiction, though I could be wrong as I don’t know the ins and outs of Sweden’s legal system or its police procedures.
