A Candle For Christmas

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments
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I haven’t finished this collection yet, but it’s Fiction Fan’s winner for best Anthologies and Collections 2025 and I have to say a worthy one!

A couple of the stories are with regular Detectives, Superintendent Dalziel and Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe and they’re a very likeable pair combining Dalziel’s experienced, straightforward Yorkshire cop with Pascoe’s psychology degree caring. And it was great seeing them behind the scenes, especially ‘Uncle Andy’s’ avuncular relationship with young Rosie Pascoe.

But the collection includes some stories that have the best twists I’ve ever read while dealing with some pretty dark subjects. It’s not that the stories are ‘light’, but I could be engrossed in a story about a serial killer or revelling in a jumped up twerp who’s just won the Man Booker see his life spiralling before him, while thoroughly enjoying the humour, sometimes macabre, sometimes silly.

There’s more than humour though, Hill manages in so few pages to show us the loneliness that can be caused by childhood trauma or even make us feel empathy for a killer. And then some of the stories are just plain clever.

Of the couple I still have to read, one is a Conan Doyle pastiche ‘The Italian Sherlock Holmes’ and then ‘A Shameful Eating’, an historical seafaring tale, which is a completely different world to the one of contemporary publishing, or Dalziel and Pascoe, but isn’t the only look back to a ghostly Christmas past. But even though I haven’t finished I wanted to get this tiny notice out to sign off for the year and wish everyone a very

Happy Christmas

“Arrest The Bishop?”

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments
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I wanted to read a Dean Street Press title to join in with Liz’s Dean Street December and when I saw this title and book jacket I knew it was the one!

It all takes place in the Bishop of Evelake’s Palace over a couple of days when the palace is full of young men preparing for Ordination. Mrs Broome, the Bishop’s wife is there of course, and their two daughters, Sue and Judith (more of Judith later), But into this reverential setting crashes The Reverend Ulder, a man who carries with him scandal and has managed to blackmail quite a few of those present.

‘He caught the back of a chair, staggered and groaned. There was a heavy crash and fall, and the parson lay motionless and livid, while lilies from a vase fell, like a wreath, across his chest.’

Unfortunately for many of those enjoying their sherry he isn’t dead and is carried upstairs and put to bed. The doctor is called and they’re all told that under no circumstances must he be given anything to drink. But footsteps are heard through the night passing his door along with the rustling of a dress, and in the morning Ulder is dead and his case of papers missing. Next to his bed is an empty glass, who could have given him a drink? A rustling of a skirt could mean anyone, how do they know it wasn’t a cassock? Major Mack of the local constabulary arrives, a man with no respect for the clergy and is determined to find one of them guilty; but the case is practically taken out of his hands by a young parson appropriately named Dick, who has no respect for anyone outside of his social circle.

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The Sittaford Mystery

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments
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Winter 1931 in the weeks leading up to Christmas and the tiny village of Sittaford on the fringe of Dartmoor has been completely cut off beneath deep drifts of snow.

Mrs Willet and her daughter Violet have just arrived from South Africa and have rented Sittaford House from its owner Captain Trevelyan, who has moved to a cottage in the nearby town of Exhampton. The Willett’s love a party and invitations are readily given out to the nearby cottages for tea and drinks, and on this particular night cocktails lead to a seance. The lights are dimmed, the group assemble and the board begins to spell out a name – Captain Trevelyan, and D-E-A-D.

There’s a pause, someone gasps, they all shudder and in the confusion Major Burnaby sets out with a hurricane lamp to walk the six miles to Exhampton, and just check on old Trevelyan. Mrs Willett thinks everyone needs a cocktail and rings her bell.

And that’s how Major Burnaby discovers the body of his best friend Captain Trevelyan, ‘on the floor, face downwards. His arms sprawled widely.’ and how we meet Inspector Narracott, with the far away eyes and soft Devonshire accent.

He’s an efficient officer, persistent, with a keen eye for detail and a logical mind, but he doesn’t get it all his own way. James Pearson, a young man down from London is quickly arrested for the murder and it’s his fiancee Emily Trefusis that gives Narracott a run for his money, determined to prove her true love innocent. But she teams up with Clive Enderby, a young reporter from The Daily Wire to try and solve the mystery and in doing so provides a love triangle – will James be her true love at the end?

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A Film For December: Fanny and Alexander

~ Jane ~ 13 Comments
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What makes a good Christmas film? sleigh bells ringing and drifts of snow? presents around a tree? a family full of noise, the adults sitting around a table groaning with food and wine while the children play happily under it? plush velvet gowns in deepest red sweeping across the polished floor? or something more gothic, more horror? a monotone world where the children have nothing, the windows have bars, and the only choice is which punishment?

At just over 3 hours this classic from Ingmar Bergman gives us both films. It opens with the theatrical Ekdahl family preparing for Christmas. Laughing maids bring baskets of gift wrapped boxes to go under the tree, children run through the rooms, the adults drink and chat and laugh and drink and chat; it’s 1907 and the rooms are richly decorated, vibrant with colour and furnishings. Family is central to them, confirmed by the willingness of the widowed mother, Helena, to accept her sons mistress as part of the family, a relationship that’s also accepted by his wife into their obviously happy marriage.

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But then another of Helena’s sons, the kindly Oscar dies, leaving his wife Emilie (Ewa Fröling) and their two children Alexander (Bertil Guve) and Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). And everything is thrown off kilter. Emilie turns to religion and the bishop for comfort and becomes his wife. Fanny and Alexander must leave their home and live in the bishops palace, taking nothing with them.

Large swathes of the film are seen from Alexanders’ perspective and it’s one of the films triumphs that he is such a true character. He feels the loss of his father and sees his ghost to talk to, but we also see him swearing, using all the bad words he knows under his breath, unafraid to look adults in the eye, and confront them if he needs too. Fanny, his little sister, stands by him, almost silent, she smiles at his use of language and backs him up all the way.

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Murder in Vienna

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments
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I’m sticking with Crime this month, Detectives in December if you will! And my first detective is Lorac’s trusty Superintendent Robert Macdonald, off on holiday to visit an old friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Natzler in Vienna.

First published in 1956, the occupation is over and the Austrian State Treaty has just been signed, so that the 25 people aboard the British European Airways flight to Vienna: twelve British, eight Austrian, two American and three French, are flying into a free, independent country. Which makes for an exciting and quite cutting-edge setting; behind the well to do professionals like the Natzler’s there’s certainly a sense of gossip and espionage in the bars and any one who says they know someone called ‘Auntie’ is obviously not all they say they are.

But as Macdonald flies over England and across France he doesn’t want to think about occupying powers, or the turmoil of East-West powers, or of the many place names he remembers from his time in the 1914-1918 war; he’s on holiday and he’s going to relax. He looks about him and considers his fellow passengers. A self-consciously artistic young man, a young women neat as a daisy, a photographer, a silver haired civil-servant or two. They fly over the Carpathian Mountains and he thinks of the Mongol hordes galloping in; Vienna the gateway to central Europe, from the Romans to the Hapsburgs ‘anyone with a gift for intrigue can make hay in Vienna.’

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Six Degrees of Separation:

~ Jane ~ 17 Comments
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I’ve wanted to join in with Six Degrees hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest for ages and ages and when I saw that this month begins with Seascraper, a book I’ve actually read I knew this was the time to start. Kate says, link 6 books to the introductory one and see where you get too.

Funnily enough the very next book I read after Seascraper held a link through the surname Flett. In Seascraper Tomas Flett is the young shanker, scraping the sea for mussels. My link from there is too Clear, which has a schoolmaster living in Orkney called William Flett.

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William Flett, is the last person who can teach the old Norn language to John Ferguson as he gets ready to go to the island. John Ferguson’s academic way of diligently recording the language gives me a link to, strangely enough, the very next book I read, Spiderweb by Penelope Lively. I haven’t reviewed this yet, but it’s about an anthropologist who goes to Orkney to study and record the lives of the inhabitants. In Spiderweb she travels south to Somerset in England, where she buys her first home. Which leads me to Father by Elizabeth von Arnim, a story about a young women finally free of the burden of looking after her father and therefore able to make a home for herself.

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Sitting in the garden, on a mattress in the moonlight, is the image that stays with me from Father, and it’s the same sort of haphazard situation that Jane and Lucilla in The Lark by E.Nesbit would find themselves in as they try to set themselves up in their first home and business. Staying with friends, my next link is to the two friends in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. In the early 1970’s, they hop on and off buses in London as they juggle jobs, childcare, lovers and ex’s. But something I always found funny was that when a very young child is ill in bed, he’s taken his favourite meal of creamed spinach and eggs – I can’t imagine a child now having that as their favourite meal! Anyway that leads me to my next link which via food is to Frenchman’s Creek.

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Having escaped her husband in London, Lady Dona St Columb retreats to Cornwall where she is lucky enough to be served a truly delicious meal

‘there on the sideboard was crab, dressed and prepared in the French fashion, and there were small new potatoes too, cooked in their skins, and a fresh green salad sprinkled with garlic, and tiny scarlet radishes. He had found time too to make pastry. Thin, narrow wafers, interlaid with cream, while next to them, alone in a glass bowl, was a gathering of the first wild strawberries of the year.’

So there we are, links via a name, academia, friends and food, from Orkney to Cornwall; and I realise there’s an overall theme of new beginnings as well! Next month (3rd January) the links begin with this months last book.

Brave New World

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments
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It’s 2540 a.d, or the seventh century of Our Ford, meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car. It’s a shiny new world order that runs itself on consumerism and prizes itself on absolute social stability.

Not achieved through a political or economic revolution, this new quality of life could only be found through a personal revolution of the souls and flesh of human beings, a revolution that purged the minds of the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilisation, and the messiness of choice. But how did they achieve such a revolution?

The Bokanovsky Process provides a foolproof system designed to standardise human products into a scientific caste system. If you’re Alpha or Beta then you’re ‘normal’ – one egg, one embryo, one adult; but the Gamma, Delta and Epsilon castes are derived from eggs that have been bokanovskified; the egg will proliferate and divide – the most humans from one egg has been over 16,000 in London alone; providing the government with a docile workforce they can control.

For the Alpha and Beta castes it’s almost a fertility cult, everyone belongs to everyone else; the government expects promiscuity and encourages it with rewards, while reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilises two-thirds of women, issues contraceptives and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans.

At the heart of the World State’s control of its population is a rigid control and psychological conditioning that maintains obedience; as well as proscribing Soma, the drug that clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations; it’s a tool for producing social stability through anonymity, lack of thought, expression and individuality. It’s a utopia that cherishes technology and gives easy access to every desire, there are no signs of ageing, no poverty, disease, unhappiness or war.

But what if there’s a backlash? What happens when Bernard Marx, who’s 8cm too short for an Alpha and feels like an outsider, wonders what it would be like to experience the full range of human emotion; or when Lenina, who on the whole is very happy, thinks she actually enjoys seeing the same man for four months? They get together and take a holiday to the ‘reservation’.

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Daisy Miller

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments
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It’s thanks to Rose’s review that I was finally inspired to pick this up from the pile and read in time for Cathy and Rebecca’s Novellas in November.

It’s the end of the nineteenth century and the small Swiss town of Vevey and then Rome, are filled with rich American tourists who have brought with them their stultifying air of polite society. Into this mannered world blows Daisy Miller with her mother and younger brother Randolph.

Natural, open, fresh and honest Daisy behaves as she wishes; she walks out alone or with a male friend, even an Italian; thinking nothing of a chaperone or her reputation. She flirts and laughs aloud, invites male friends to their hotel regardless of whether her mother is at home, or the hotel staff are gossiping.

Winterbourne, a young American living in Europe while he ‘studies’ is captivated. He loves her innocence, her naivity; but does her behaviour come from innocence, an unsophisticated flirtatiousness or is she actually ‘bad’, a dangerous coquette’?

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A Film For November: Morgiana

~ Jane ~ 12 Comments
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On the death of their father, Viktoria inherits a small castle while everything else goes to her twin sister Klára (both played by Iva Janžurová) Bitter with jealousy Viktoria consults a fortune teller who can supply her with a poison. As Klára drinks her poisoned tea she becomes increasingly, hysterically weak, and Viktoria becomes embroiled in ambition, blackmail, murder and evil, watched through the eyes of her loyal witness, the cat Morgiana.

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Like a dark, gothic fairy tale the twins consult their mirrors. They live in a world that’s a blend of La Belle Époque, 70’s frosted make up, and a Klimt painting, ‘a twisted Czech take on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Poe’s The Black Cat.’ says the BFI. ’Klára wears white, embroidered with flowers, she’s the sweetheart, the perfect desirable maiden, always surrounded by a giggling group of friends, parasols and swans, handsome lieutenant’s and sunshine, feathers and ribbons of chiffon.Viktoria wears black, her staff at the castle a strict semi-military uniform; one of those handsome lieutenant’s was meant to be hers.

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Clear

~ Jane ~ 14 Comments
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Scotland in 1843 and the Reverend John Ferguson has left the established church of Scotland to join with the setting up of the new Free Church. Impoverished without his living he accepts work from the landowner Henry Lowrie, and agrees to travel North to a remote island and clear it of its sole inhabitant to make way for a thousand sheep. Strachan, Lowrie’s factor hasn’t been to the island for years, and needs John to survey the island for any deterioration while explaining to ‘the idiot son’ who has always lived there, that he’s to leave his home and livestock, which will be disposed of. John is given a pistol in case of any trouble and the address of William Flett, a school teacher in Orkney who can teach him some words of the ‘old vernacular’ spoken on the island. The boat will collect them in one month.

John Ferguson arrives at the island and puts his few things, a fruitcake made by his wife Mary, his satchel with a carefully prepared speech written with the help of the school teacher, a change of clothes and the pistol, into the Baillie House but being of a clumsy disposition falls almost as soon as he arrives and is found by Ivar unconscious and badly hurt on the sand. There’s no sign of a ship, Ivar has no idea who he can be or where he’s come from but takes him to his home and nurses him back to health. From here a fragile friendship begins while John Ferguson knows that at some point he has to own up to the reason he’s there.

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