Tag Archives: reading

Book Bag Summer 2026

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Books are one of the great loves of my life and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sun bed is a good undisturbed read.  I read a lot at home but some books, as we all know, are just made for a really long, uninterrupted read.

I’ve just returned from a holiday in France and I thought I might share the contents of my ‘book bag’ with you. I’m a really big second hand book buyer and I buy my books from many sources. Second hand book shops, car boot sales, charity shops and of course, the internet. Even the occasional book comes my way as a gift. Anyway, without further ado, here are my holiday books:

Death in the Clouds; A Hercule Poirot Mystery by Agatha Christie

I do like a good crime read and for a long while I’ve been wanting to try a book by a writer who is the acknowledged master (or mistress) of the crime mystery genre, Agatha Christie. Agatha wrote over 66 detective novels as well as numerous short stories and created the famous detectives, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I picked this book up ages ago at a second hand book shop and recently found it filed away in a box of books unread. Perfect for a holiday read I thought.

The murder happens on board a flight from Le Bourget to Croydon. A woman is found dead just prior to landing and Hercule Poirot travelling on the same flight sees that she has been murdered, possibly from a poisoned dart. A further investigation finds a blowpipe hidden on the aircraft so clearly the culprit must have been one of the passengers, but who?

This was a short read but a very entertaining one and very well thought out and put together. The author introduces her cast of characters, all passengers on the fatal flight and scatters various clues throughout the book. Once the flight arrives in England Poirot begins his investigations alongside Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard and an officer of the French Sûreté but of course it is Poirot who ultimately unmasks the murderer.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this was a short but highly enjoyable read. I must look out for more of Agatha’s books.

Death of a Village: A Hamish Macbeth Mystery by MC Beaton

Some time ago I set myself the task of reading all the Hamish Macbeth books written by author MC Beaton. I haven’t read one for a while and I thought this would be a good opportunity to read another. Quite a lot happens in this story, the 18th in the series. Hamish as usual has to solve various issues but of course needs to avoid promotion so he can stay in his beloved village of Lochdubh. He has to deal with a husband beating wife, an old people’s home that seems to be murdering its residents and an entire village that seems to be behaving oddly. Nice to see a little more personal stuff thrown in about Hamish. He’s still pining for his old girlfriend who is about to marry someone else but at least he seems friendly enough with reporter Elspeth although romance doesn’t seem to be blossoming for the couple yet.

As usual, an entertaining read but the main story about the village was a little bit farfetched.

Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz

I ordered this from an online bookshop after reading another of Eve’s books Slow Days, Fast Company. Eve was born and bred in Hollywood and worked as a writer and artist. She designed album covers for a while and wrote essays and articles that were published in magazines like the Village Voice, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

I picked up this book because I mistakenly thought the title referred to Hollywood as the centre of American film making rather than the place where Eve grew up. The book is actually a series of essays and thoughts about her life growing up and living in Hollywood both as a child and as an adult. Eve talks about the people she meets and gets involved with. The book is really a sort of wandering stream of thoughts going off in various directions and although parts of it are interesting, for the most part I just wanted to get to the end. I read another review of this book on Goodreads and the reviewer said that reading Eve’s Hollywood was like hopping along the stepping stones of Babitz’ memories and not stopping until you reach dry land. I couldn’t agree more.

The sure sign of a book that fails to keep my attention is when I pick up another book and begin to read that one instead.

Sorry Eve but this just didn’t do it for me. It was a bit of an up and down read with passages that were really fascinating and others that just couldn’t get me interested.

American Prince: A Memoir by Tony Curtis

This was a little more in my line. I am a great fan of film and cinema and especially Hollywood. This is Tony Curtis’ own account of how he made it as a film star in Hollywood and it was interesting reading. Curtis clearly loved the film business and being a part of it and he seems to have especially loved his fame and success. The other thing he loves is women and to a certain extent this is a sort of voyeuristic journey through Hollywood and the stars (and non stars) that he has loved and bedded. One particular woman he married after being captivated by her beautiful breasts so I can’t say I was surprised when that one didn’t work out.

Tony spends a lot of time detailing his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, seeming to imply they were in love or at least close to being in love but their careers gave them little time for relationships. Later when the two made Some Like it Hot Together Tony goes to great lengths to explain his famous remark that kissing Marilyn was like ‘kissing Hitler’. Apparently, so he says, it was a sarcastic response to some crew member asking what was it like to kiss Marilyn. Obviously, so he says, it was great so he sarcastically responded with the Hitler comment.

Well I’m sure I’ve seen him years ago on TV actually denying he ever said it. Anyway, it was a good read and I loved hearing his stories about Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, Janet Leigh (wife number 1) Monroe and many more.

In the 1970s Tony was determined to keep working and making money and so when the film work dried up he appeared in the TV show The Persuaders with Roger Moore. He didn’t get on well with Joan Collins who starred in one of the episodes but Moore became a great friend. What is really interesting about Tony Curtis’ body of work is that even though he has given great performances in classic films like Some Like it Hot, Spartacus, and The Sweet Smell of Success, he has also appeared in some really poor features.

Anyway, his ethic seems to have been to keep working no matter what and even if the film was poor, he gave his absolute best.

Verdict: A great read even though Tony comes over as being obsessed with women but then again, it’s his story, and he certainly doesn’t seem to have been short of them.

What have you been reading this summer?

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Breakdowns and Books

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This might be the point in my French trip where I blog about the books I’m reading while I’m away. The thing that has really given me a problem is the breakdown of our lovely motorhome. How has that affected my reading? Well, let me explain.

We arrived in France at the end of August. The weather in the Loire was lovely and the only cloud on our horizon was that our favourite gite in France, a lovely villa which we regularly rent, was booked on the exact week we wanted it.

What we tend to do is potter about and explore various places in our motorhome and then spend a week, even a few weeks at the aforementioned villa in the village of Parçay les Pins.

The unexpected booking at the villa meant that after exiting our ferry we headed straight to Parçay les Pins for a week, actually a very hot week, of sun lounging, swimming and reading.

On only our second day there we decided to take a trip out to one of our favourite restaurants, restaurant La Gare. The place is only open at lunchtimes but they have a lovely buffet starter consisting of various meats and patés and a huge selection of salads. Then there is the main course, the fromage course and the final dessert, all served with a basket of fresh bread, chilled water, red wine and cider.

As I’m the nominated driver I always go for the low alcohol cider which is really tasty. After paying the paltry 30 euros for this feast for two it’s back to the villa for a rest in the sun.

On this occasion when we were only perhaps a mile from home our trusty ford transit motorhome conked out. It would not restart but happily, there was breakdown cover attached to the insurance. Within an hour our rescuer arrived, spotted the fault which could only be remedied at the garage so the van was hitched up to the back of his wagon and we were driven back to the gîte.

On the positive side, if the holiday had gone to its original plan and we were touring France, we would have had no where to go as of course we were living in the van itself. As it was the driver dropped us off at our gîte where we had already unloaded a few boxes of wine and plenty of food.

As the day wore on, we discovered various things we could have done with.

I had only one change of clothes although to be fair, in the continuing summer heat all I was wearing was shorts and a t-shirt. We were a little short on water but I had already unpacked the barbecue so at least we could relax and eat. Big problem though was that I had not yet unloaded my collection of books and for a great reader like me, that was a disaster.

As it happens, we have a bag which we call the pool bag which we take out to the pool every day. In the bag we have our sudoku books, reading glasses, notebooks, water, swimming trunks and all sorts of things that we need by the pool. Happily, there was one book which I had already begun to read and that is where we can move on to the book part of this post.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

This book was on a shelf in my late brother’s lounge and I picked it up when I went to clear his place out after his death. Despite all the praise and good reviews on the back cover, I really found it hard to read. It’s about a group of people who work for the UK intelligence service and all of them are either out of favour with the service or have fouled up in some way. They are all assigned to Slough House instead of the main HQ and they are all a bit fed up and disgruntled.

I found it rather slow reading and I was tempted to abandon it altogether but as one reviewer apparently thought the author was the ‘John le Carré of our generation’ (Le Carré’s books were rather slow moving too) I thought I’d carry on.

Anyway, the plot is about a group of right-wing activists who have kidnapped someone with the intention of chopping his head off on camera. Now it turns out, and I’m not 100% certain I’ve got this right, one of the kidnappers is actually an agent run by Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House.

Later in the book the action kicks off not only with the kidnapped guy but also with some internal fireworks within the intelligence service.

I managed to get to the end but I found it slow and disjointed and I was forever flipping back because I couldn’t understand which character the author was talking about and who is this and who is that person. Anyway, perhaps I was a little stressed with our van breaking down but I wasn’t impressed although to be fair, everywhere I have looked online the book gets universally good reviews.

After reading that I was a little stuck for reading matter but after a quick sift through the bookcase at the gîte, I came up with this next read.

Predator by Patricia Cornwell

Author Patricia Cornwell first introduced Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta in the book Postmortem originally published in 1990. The character is an Italian American. She is a perfectionist and workaholic and lives in a custom-built home where she cooks many Italian meals while she ponders her cases. She also, and perhaps this is me looking at the character from a UK perspective, seems to be overly obsessed with guns although on one occasion, having a gun under her pillow in the bedroom saves her life. In the first book Scarpetta has to deal with a series of murders and works with Benton Wesley from the FBI to create a profile of the murderer. The book also introduces DNA testing as a new technique and later Scarpetta hatches a plot to flush out the murderer. The murderer however, targets Scarpetta herself but is shot dead by policeman Pete Marino.

The books are fascinating reads and have been said to have influenced TV shows like CSI and other shows that use modern scientific techniques of detection and forensics. The first few editions are excellent reads but the later ones tend to stray into a bit of a fantasy area. Scarpetta has an affair with Benton Wesley who is murdered. In a later book he reappears, it seems he was not killed after all but was placed in a witness protection scheme for some reason. That seemed to me to be a little out of the ordinary but later things get really odd. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy appears in the first book as a ten-year-old but in later editions when she grows up, she becomes a computer wizard, and then joins the FBI where she has difficulties because she is gay. Later she develops an internet search engine and becomes a millionaire and creates her own super-secret investigation company called the Last Precinct. It’s all a little bit fantastic.

Anyway, getting on to Predator itself, this is the 14th book in the series and the name Predator is an acronym for a project which former FBI man Benton Wesley is running, in which he examines serial killers to try and find out why they kill. Former officer Marino is now an investigator for the organisation I mentioned above created by Scarpetta’s niece Lucy. Marino has now become some kind of biker wearing the sort of clothes I would associate with Hells’ Angel types. Despite him not being an actual police officer, he seems to throw his weight around a lot with actual police officers which I’m sure that in real life they would just not stand for. Anyway, the tension builds up nicely as the usual cast of characters close in on the murderers. Despite the book being rather gruesome in parts, the author brings the various story elements together really well. The end is rather odd though especially when Scarpetta is assaulted by one of murderers Benton is interviewing and the scene then cuts to Benton and Scarpetta driving away, the attack being sorted we are later told by the intervention of the security guards. The conclusion comes quickly afterwards almost as if the author had something better to do and wanted to quickly wrap up the book. Sadly this wasn’t one of Cornwell’s best.

Interestingly, both these book series (yes there are more books about Slough House) have both been made into TV series that belong to TV channels that I don’t have access to. Scarpetta is on Amazon and Slow Horses on Apple TV. There was a time when exciting new TV shows would have a run on some exclusive channel and then later finally end up on terrestrial TV.

Pity that doesn’t happen anymore.

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Book Bag May 2026

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Which books have you taken to read on holiday? This was my selection.

Slow Days, Fast Company

I first heard about Eve Babitz from a blog I follow over on Medium. It’s written by a guy called Loren Kantor and he tells some pretty interesting stories all based in California or more specifically, Los Angeles.

I’m pretty sure Loren has a background in film making but these days he teaches wood cut printing mainly to elderly people in care homes in LA. In one home there were only a few people wanting to take up his course so he asked some other residents if they were interested and someone he tried to bring on board was a woman called Eve, the other residents though didn’t care for her at all and didn’t want her in the group.

Anyway, Kantor got talking to her and she mentioned that she used to be a writer. Later he found out her name -Eve Babitz- did a little research and found that she was a pretty serious writer, well known for documenting the social scene in LA through various semi fictional memoirs written in the 1970s.

I’m a great lover of blogs and the essay was so interesting I searched for the book he mentioned and quickly got myself a copy of Slow Days, Fast Company.

It’s a really good read, a very personal series of essays and the book is split into 10 essays or chapters, each one about a different man she was either involved with or friendly with and set in a different area around LA. I read it rather quickly and then found myself going back to it and reading parts of it again. One chapter is about a man who is a soap actor on a long running US TV series. One day he gets to look at the flimsies. What are they I hear you asking? Well the flimsies are a sort of book, detailing what the coming storylines are and sketching out roughly where the show is heading. There are no scenes or dialogue, it’s just a sort of guide for the writers. Anyway this guy takes a peek and sees that his character is heading for a plane crash that leaves him alive but surviving as a vegetable. The guy is crushed and as much as Eve tries to help him he cannot get over this news.

In another chapter Eve talks about the demolishing of the Garden of Allah, the home of a silent film star that later became a famous hotel. It was knocked down and a dull office building was erected in its place and it seemed to Eve, that it was hard to believe that Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, two of the more famous residents of the hotel, ‘even existed’.

The book is full of similar sharp observations and I found it really intriguing.

Verdict: 9/10 highly entertaining.

Red Strike by Chris Ryan

Chris Ryan is the pen name of former SAS sergeant Colin Armstrong who uses his background in the SAS to great effect in this action packed book. In fact it reminds me a little bit of the novels of Frederick Forsyth in that the author tells a lot about preparations and planning and then the action suddenly takes centre stage. This was a great little read full of exciting incidents and with a pretty good story at its core. One thing struck me about the villain of the piece, he’s a British politician, known to be on the so called right wing, a beer drinking populist and a friend of the American president. Who does that ring a bell with you? Well for me I thought immediately of Nigel Farage. I like to think that Farage has a pretty good sense of humour so I’m fairly certain he’d be the first to have a laugh although whether the character was based on or inspired by Farage only the author really knows.

Verdict 9/10: A great holiday read.

The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry

This is a follow up to his previous book, Moab is my Washpot. In the first few pages Fry mentions how obvious it was that he chose that title although for poor uneducated non university me, that went right over my head. The book continues in the same stream of consciousness way of the first book, charging on headlong into the story with various forays to the left and to the right but this time perhaps not as so intense. A lot of the book is about his life at university and he patiently explains to us non-university folk the ins and outs of life as a student and about life at Cambridge in particular. He meets soon to be famous friends like Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie although I was surprised to find that Rowan Atkinson was not a contemporary of his but from an earlier student intake and Fry and his colleagues look up to Atkinson almost as much as they look up to Peter Cook and John Cleese.

Fry wonders what he will do after university but after success in the Edinburgh Fringe he acquires an agent and is soon involved in a TV show and then goes on quickly to writing for magazines, doing the book for a musical and creating the sketch show Fry and Laurie with his friend Hugh.

A lot of autobiographies of film and TV celebs seem to end up becoming lists of films or shows that the celeb has appeared in; I did this and then I did that, but this book is so chatty and interesting with a host of fascinating little stories about TV and film making and the characters involved in those pursuits, that it never seems to become boring.

Fry was a friend of Douglas Adams who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. The two bonded over a love of computers and Fry gives a compelling portrait of Adams and his stop/start way of working. (Adams famously said he loved the sound of deadlines as they went whoosh past his head.)

Ben Elton is one of those irritating TV personalities that I have always detested and Fry talks about Elton and how his poor reputation is so apparently undeserved. Fry puts forward a very positive case for his friend but I’m afraid Elton has always come across to me as obnoxious. (Not long ago he was a guest on Saturday Kitchen, the BBC cookery show and after a few minutes I was compelled to turn over.) Full marks to Stephen though for defending his friend.

This is not only an entertaining book but very personal and gives the reader a great insight into not only what makes Fry tick as a TV personality but what makes him tick as a human being.

Verdict: 10/10 well worth reading.

The Man who Died Twice by Richard Osman

This book is the follow up to the popular Thursday Murder Club and I have to say I enjoyed it more than the original. Perhaps I’m a little more used to the characters and the author’s interesting way of presenting alternate chapters as if written by a member of the club, actually a lady named Joyce. The Thursday Murder Club is a group of retired friends who meet to discuss murder cases, aided by two of their friends who they met in the first book, a detective and a female PC. The ending was a little fantastic and not something that I could really see happening but anyway, this was a very entertaining holiday read and I enjoyed it very much.

Verdict 9/10 due to the slightly fantastic ending.

It’s Not a Rehearsal by Amanda Barrie

Amanda appeared in Coronation Street for a number of years but I’ve always known her as the girl who played Cleopatra in the Carry On film Carry on Cleo, you know, the one where Kenneth Williams says ‘Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it in for me!’

Liz bought this book as Amanda went to school in St Annes where Liz has lived all her life and she was interested to read about that part of her life. I was running out of books to read so I was very happy when she passed it over to me.

Amanda tells us her story starting off with her life at school then becoming a dancer and performer. She explains how hard life is for dancers with rehearsals and late night performances. Amanda goes on to work in the West End as well as in film and television and I found the book very entertaining and interesting. I really do love reading about life in ‘showbusiness’.

One really interesting element was her life living in Covent Garden and the great sense of community there, especially when the market was in full swing. She tells of the early opening pubs to cater for the porters and market staff and how if you were ever short of something like an onion for an evening meal, you would always find whatever you needed out on the streets.

When the market moved away Amanda worked with local residents to preserve the area as the council just wanted to knock everything down and build houses.

The latter part of the book concerns her time in Coronation Street which was a complete contrast to her theatre days. Then she was working late at night but on Corrie, she had to start in the early morning, a complete turn around for her. Amanda found out early on in life that she was dyslexic so imagine how hard it must have been learning all that dialogue!

She cautiously tells us also about her love life and the men and women in her life and the result was a really engrossing look at the life of an actress in the theatre and TV as well as a little about her famous foray into the Carry On films.

Verdict 10/10

What’s in your holiday book bag?

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My Holiday Book Bag 2026

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Many years ago when reading a biography about Richard Burton, I was interested to hear about  Burton’s love of books and that when he went on holiday he looked forward with delight to the contents of his ‘book bag.’ I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but one thing I have in common with Richard Burton is a love of books and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sun bed is a good undisturbed read. So without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the  books I have been reading in Lanzarote this winter.

The Thursday Murder Club

I know I’ve written about this first book already but as it’s part of this month’s holiday read, I feel I have to talk about it once again. As I mentioned in a previous post, I saw the film version over on Netflix and enjoyed the first part but then lost interest during the middle and finally picked up again to watch the end. It is a rather complicated plot so I picked up the book hoping to understand things better but also I’ve always found it interesting to compare book and film versions of the same story.

The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very own doorstep. The group of mostly eighty-year-olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.

It’s a very original and witty novel and I’m already thinking about getting the follow up book. One minor complaint though; there is a large cast of characters and things do get complicated, making it not always easy to follow. After reading the book and realising that our villa here in Lanzarote comes complete with Netflix, we watched the film again and this time I managed to pay attention all the way through. Both the book and film are very enjoyable but I’d have to say I think the book is generally better than the film.

Verdict; 8/10. Great read but complicated plot.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

I sought this book out on the internet after reading Bennett’s The Lady in the Van which was a very enjoyable although short book. This volume is a collection of various essays and diaries by the author and it begins with the title essay, Untold Stories which is a series of observations mostly about his mother and father. He describes the life of his family in Yorkshire as he saw it evolve. It is perhaps a very ordinary story of a working class family and their fairly uneventful journey through life. It is very sharply observed and the author takes us through the lives of not only his parents but also of his two aunts as well as other family members. I found this section hugely interesting and with many parallels to my own life, especially when Bennett deals with his aging parents and he has to take them to numerous hospital appointments. His mother suffered with depression and was even hospitalised on a couple of occasions. Later in life she begins to suffer with dementia.

He ponders about the worth of a life, are children in some ways worth more than older people? If a child went missing there would be a public outcry but if an older person goes missing, no one is interested. His aunt, suffering with dementia in old age goes missing from a nursing home and the police seem uninterested. Later, Alan and his brother go searching for her themselves, taking what they think might be a logical way to walk from the home where she resides. They find her dead body in a field and the author wonders, why wasn’t there a search, why didn’t the police find her? Was it because she was just an old lady and they assumed that she would just ‘turn up’ one day?

There is a lot of humour also and I enjoyed hearing about the author’s father who had two suits, his ‘suit’ and his ‘other suit’.

His diaries were not so interesting, in fact most of the entries were rather boring and I found myself skipping various entries. Another section deals with his work in TV and the portrait he paints of actress Thora Hird is one of great warmth and affection.

Overall this was a good read but I found myself unable to agree with the comment on the back cover by a reviewer from The Sunday Times who says ‘I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret.’ I was glad to move on to something else.

Verdict: Interesting in parts. 7/10

Letter From America by Alistair Cooke

I picked this book up in a sale ages ago, in fact actually a few years ago. I think it was one of those offers like ‘buy two and get one free’. This was my free choice and as such it’s been lying around waiting to be read. It’s a collection from the author’s radio series ‘Letters from America’ which used to be broadcast many years ago on BBC Radio 4. I can’t say I’ve ever listened to the broadcast but I do remember watching a quite exceptional TV documentary series called ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’ which detailed the history of the USA.

The book is divided into decades starting with the 1940’s and records Cooke’s views of various things and people in the USA.. Some of the letters, which incidentally would be perfect for modern day publishing as a series of blog posts, are hugely interesting, others not. Cooke is a very eloquent writer and like one of the reviews on the back cover said, I felt I could actually hear his voice as I read them.

Cooke was in the Ambassador Hotel in California the night Bobby Kennedy was shot and he records what happened but little else. It mentions Watergate also on the back cover but I’ve just finished his 1970s writings and there was no mention of Watergate so perhaps he returns to it much later. The assassination of JFK is mentioned but Cooke seemed to be more interested in President Johnson than Kennedy but then perhaps that was the feeling of Americans back then, shocked by the murder of Kennedy and looking to Johnson to move the country forward.

Verdict: I felt the book was a case of more style than content. 7/10

The Outsider by Frederick Forsyth

This is not one of Forsyth’s thrillers but an autobiography and it was a really interesting read. Forsyth spoke many languages and he puts this down to learning them with local people. He studied French and German at school of course but then spent the summer holidays in France learning from a French family and then later did the same with a German family and even later with a family in Spain. His observations in France were really interesting. The French welcomed Forsyth as an English hitchhiker with the union flag on his backpack but later when travelling in what had been Vichy, France, he felt the English were not as popular.

His ambition was to be a fighter pilot and he trains privately as a pilot and then later gets accepted into the RAF indeed becoming a fighter pilot. He spends only two years in the RAF and then leaves to follow another ambition, that of being a foreign correspondent. After training with a local newspaper, he moves to Fleet Street and with the advantage of his language skills joins Reuters, first in Paris and later in a very fascinating chapter, he is stationed in East German Berlin.

He joins the BBC which he is not complimentary about, especially their civil service style hierarchy. Forsyth covers the Nigerian/Biafran war but is not happy with the BBC coverage and so resigns to work as a freelance. He clearly blames the Wilson Labour government for escalating the war in Biafra and supplying weapons to Nigeria which the Wilson government denied.

Out of work and broke, he decided to write a novel based on his time reporting in Paris. The Day of the Jackal was rejected by many publishers but then he explains why he thinks that was. Who is charged with reading submissions at a publishing company? The lowest of the low, students, new employees charged with making suggestions after reading perhaps one chapter.

Forsyth was lucky in that he met a publishing executive at a party and then decided to visit him and try to cajole him into reading his manuscript. Happily, the executive agreed, was duly impressed and The Day of the Jackal was finally published.

The final part of the book was not so good. It was as if the author had run out of ideas and decided to add some quick chapters detailing various situations, once when he was under mortar attack, another on a fishing boat when a cyclone hit and a chance he got to fly in a Spitfire.

Overall, a great read but a pity about the last few chapters.

Verdict: 9/10

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Blog 703: Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.

For our first night out we went along to the Gourmet Indian Restaurant where we had so much fun last year with the staff. We were rather surprised to find that this year, all the staff that had made us so welcome had now left. That is probably the same in restaurants the whole world over. Staff come and go but happily, the new staff, especially our waitress were fun and friendly and the food was just as superb as it was previously.

Last year’s Indian restaurant staff, sadly missed

Another favourite of ours is the Café Berrugo down in the Marina Rubicon. The manager Juan greeted us as warmly as usual. Last year the food wasn’t quite as good as it normally is so I wasn’t sure what to order but anyway, we went for five tapas dishes and they were all excellent, so much better than our last visit. Perhaps the café has gained a new chef during our absence, anyway, we were really impressed and happy and Juan gave us an extra shot of vodka caramel, a drink I don’t think I’ve had anywhere else except Lanzarote.

The interesting thing is that a few months back I was writing about a run of bad meals and I have to say, I much prefer this, a run of lovely meals.

Before we left the UK we switched on our Sky box and I was pleasantly surprised to see the film Nuremburg available to watch. I was surprised because it was only on at our local cinema a few weeks previously and it was something I wanted to watch. So, we poured ourselves a glass of wine and settled down to watch. The film is the story of the Nuremburg trials held in Germany after the Second World War. Hermann Göring, played in the film by Russell Crowe, is the most prestigious prisoner in the dock. He was the number 2 in the Nazi government until the last few days of the war when Hitler, incensed by a telegram from Göring in which he asked permission to take over the Reich, ordered his arrest.

By Charles Alexander, Office of the United States Chief of Counsel – Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, accession no. 72-911 (Retrieved 2017-04-26), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=161339177

Even so, when Göring handed himself over to the Americans, he was perhaps thinking of the events of the First World War when the Kaiser abdicated and fled Germany and left others to run the country in defeat. Göring, perhaps thought that he was the man to take over Germany in this new defeat. Things would not turn out that way however and Göring, amongst many others, was to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

The film is based on the story of Douglas Kelley, a psychiatrist who was tasked with examining the nazi prisoners with a view to determining whether they were competent to stand trial. Kelley also tried to get to the bottom of the nature of the evil they had practised. His theory was that they were just ordinary men rather than particularly evil men.

Kelley is played in the film by Rami Malek and the film focusses on his relationship with Göring. It was a good film though for me not in any way outstanding although Russell Crowe’s performance was excellent, I don’t think Malek’s portrayal was in the same class.

To be honest I remember a similar film, perhaps a made for TV film from some years ago which was much superior. I think it was a two part mini series also titled Nuremburg starring Alec Baldwin as supreme court justice Robert Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring.

Göring of course commits suicide rather than be hanged and in the mini series, they made much of the relationship between Göring and his American guard. Did the guard slip Göring a cyanide capsule with which to evade the hangman’s noose? It was probably more likely that Göring had it concealed all along. He was a charismatic character but at the end of the day, he went along with Hitler like many others.

Before leaving for Lanzarote, one of my friends asked me how many books I would be taking along to read. I wasn’t sure at the time but at least four I thought. So, she answered, we can expect another Book Bag post then! There will be a Book Bag post but to carry on from Nuremburg, I was surprised to see it on Sky cinema so soon after its theatrical release. I thought it might have been a Sky original production but it wasn’t so I was even more surprised to see it on Sky so soon.

Another film I watched recently on Netflix was the Thursday Murder Club. Again, it was on TV very soon after its cinema release, in fact I think it was actually a Netflix production. I enjoyed the opening part of the film but then lost interest somewhere around the middle. I might have picked up my iPad and started surfing and then got interested again towards the end. It was a good film with an impressive cast and its one that I should watch again and perhaps pay more attention to the next time.

It just so happens that I picked up the book to read here in Lanzarote. It’s written by Richard Osman who is more famous as the frontman on the BBC’s Pointless quiz show as well as various other TV shows. The book and film are about a group of people in a retirement village who meet to discuss cold case crimes but then find a murder committed on their very doorstop. The group of mostly eighty year olds then get on with the task of solving the murder. There seem to be a lot of things going on and a great deal of characters to remember which put me off a little at first but a great device used by the writer is having alternate chapters written as diary entries by Joyce, one of the club members. She goes over the past events, adding in details of her own life along the way, talking about her neighbours and daughter amongst other things and sometimes previewing the next chapter for us.

It’s a very original and witty book and even though I’m only half way through I’m already thinking about getting the follow up book. One minor complaint though, there is a large cast of characters and things do get complicated making it not always easy to follow.

You might have seen some horror stories on the internet and social media about Lanzarote lately. I’ve seen so many posts about the dreadful weather and the rain. OK, there has been rain, quite a lot of it which is pretty unusual for Lanzarote. The thing is, when it rains back home in Manchester, it tends to rain and rain and get pretty cold at the same miserable time. Here in Lanzarote, it rains for about five minutes and then the sun comes out and dries everything. It might get cloudy again and we might have another five minute shower but it soon slips away and despite what you may have heard, Liz and I have spent each day out on the patio swimming and sunbathing and occasionally moving our towels away from the edge of the patio canopy when the rain showers have encroached a little too close.

Now, time for another read or should I do a few more laps in the pool? Decisions, decisions . . .

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Reading Books and Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I thought for this week’s post I’d do a combination post, a little of my book bag mixed with some sun lounger thoughts. Let’s see how it all pans out.

Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.

I quite often, back in England, watch that TV show about people who want to buy a new house abroad. It’s called A Place in the Sun and it’s aways interesting to watch couples look for a dream home, especially when it features a location we know a little about like France or Lanzarote for instance. Sometimes the contestants -for want of a better word- will come across what I think is a really nice place and will criticise it and start saying how they will rip the kitchen out and knock this wall down and I really want to slap the pair of them. Now and then, the show will produce something really nice and the couple will fall in love with it, put in a bid and find themselves the new owners of a fabulous house in the sun.

Sitting by the pool outside this house in France I do feel that it’s really a place that Liz and I have both fallen for. It’s an old country house with very thick walls and our bedroom is a modern extension with an en-suite bathroom. In a morning our usual routine is for me to get up, make a brew and bring it back to bed and for Liz and I to check our emails and then see who will be victorious in a card game we play together on our iPads. Those thick walls come into play here though as being so thick we don’t get much of an internet signal in the bedroom so one of us will have to reach out for our phone and switch on our internet hotspot so we can play.

Card game done it’s time for breakfast and then out to the pool for a swim, a read and some sunbathing. Here’s the first of my holiday reads;

The Lady in the Van

I saw the film version of this a few years ago which was pretty good, if a little odd. It was presented in a very peculiar way in that the author, Alan Bennett, is portrayed as two people, one as himself as he appears in the story and two, as himself as he writes the story. That oddity aside it was really a rather good and original film. When I heard there was a book version I quickly went to one my usual internet book stores and promptly bought it.

I was disappointed to find that it was a very slim volume, only 100 pages in fact and the author might have been better saving it for a collection of short stories. Anyway, it actually made me feel better about my own book, Floating in Space, which is also a rather thin book, though I might add, much longer than this.

Anyway, moving on to the story it was a rather good read. It’s about an oddball character, an old lady who parks outside Alan Bennett’s house in a van and stays there for some time, actually living in the van. She appeared sometime in the 1970’s and when double yellow lines appeared moved into the author’s driveway, staying there until her death in 1989.

The lady, the enigmatic Miss Shepherd, lived in her van continually throughout the year, rain or shine, hot or cold and the author tells her story using his own diary entries. It’s a funny story but also a sad one too. When the lady passes away, he is forced to go through her things in the van;

“…I realised I had to grit my teeth (or hold my nose) and go through Miss Shepherd’s possessions.
To do the job properly would have required a team of archaeologists. Every surface was covered in layers of old clothes, frocks, blankets and accumulated papers, some of them undisturbed for years, and all lying under a crust of ancient talcum powder. Sprinkled impartially over wet slippers, used incontinence pads and half-eaten tins of baked beans, it was of a virulence that supplemented rather than obliterated the distinctive odour of the van. The narrow aisle between the two banks of seats where Miss Shepherd had knelt, prayed and slept was trodden six inches deep in sodden debris, on which lay a top dressing of old food, Mr Kipling cakes, wrinkled apples, rotten oranges and everywhere batteries – batteries loose, batteries in packets, batteries that had split and oozed black gum on to the prehistoric sponge cakes and ubiquitous sherbet lemons that they lay among”

In the van he finds about £6000 in cash and a name and telephone number. Bennett calls the number to find the man at the other end has never heard of Miss Shepherd but then after he describes her, the man realises Miss Shepherd was his sister, although she had for some reason been using an assumed name. Alan Bennett had a love/hate relationship with this strange old lady for many years and came to -I was going to say like, but that’s not the right word. He came to be connected to her in a strange way until one day her social worker arrived with some clean clothes only to find her dead in the van.

To sum up, this was a lovely read even though it only lasted a couple of days for me but I think now I might look out for more of Alan Bennett’s books.

Vide Greniers and Brocantes

Liz and I always visit a village fête at the weekend, usually those with a vide grenier or brocante attached. A vide grenier is just a car boot sale which we both love. I usually pick up connecting leads for my laptop or iPad, after all, you can never have enough electrical leads. Brocantes are more like flea markets or antique fairs. Just the kind of place to pick up those old telephones that I still love, especially those Bakelite ones.

We visited a couple of vide greniers last weekend although the rain put off a great many sellers. The refreshments area was still open though and I ordered sausages and frites undercover from the rain while Liz nipped over to the covered bar across the way and ordered two glasses of vin rouge.

Over the years I’ve picked up various things at French vide greniers including pin badges, glasses and decanters as well as old telephones, cables (of course) old photos and paintings including a framed poster from the Le Mans 24 hour race. What else? A small bust of General de Gaulle which sits on my mantelpiece back home and numerous other things which took my fancy.

Plenty of times we have sheltered in makeshift bars until a rain shower has passed over and the sellers have peeled away plastic covers to reveal their goods.

My Word is my Bond by Roger Moore

I picked this book up ages ago and thought it would be a good holiday read. I’ve always liked Roger Moore even though I absolutely hate his James Bond films. I love Moore’s self-deprecating humour, plenty of which is evident in this book. The first part of the book was really interesting and entertaining but like a lot of celebrity autobiographies, this one just gets a little tedious when Roger just seems to list the films and locations and other celebrities he seems to know. On the back of the book was a review claiming this to be the best film autobiography since David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon. Sorry but I can’t agree. Roger reveals numerous ‘funny’ incidents from behind the scenes of his films, all of which must have been from the ‘you had to be there’ category because I didn’t think they were that funny. His marriage to his third wife fizzles out with no explanation and the last section is just an endless list of his various travels as a UNICEF ambassador.

He seems to have had a great deal of fun making the Bond films but for me his tenure as 007 marked the series fall from serious spy films into farce. The crazy thing is that after making his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, in which he comes over as a sort of stuffed dummy rather than an action hero, he made a film called Gold. In Gold he starred as the boss of a goldmine and really looked the part of a very tough guy indeed so why he couldn’t have done that as Bond is beyond me.

I prefer to remember Roger as the star of The Saint and The Persuaders, two TV action and adventure classics I loved. Anyway, this was for the most part an entertaining read but don’t think for a moment that it comes anywhere close to David Niven’s classic book.

That’s all from me. The sun has come out so it’s time to put my laptop away and enjoy the pool.

Bye for now!

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3 Summer Reads

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.

Hamish Macbeth is a country policeman in the small Scottish Highland village of Lochdubh. Macbeth is a very relaxed kind of fellow. Some might even call him lazy. He shies away from promotion, even giving the credit for solving crimes to others so he can stay on in his beloved village.

A few years back the BBC made a TV series based on the books. ‘Based on’ is quite an interesting use of that particular phrase because the TV series is actually nothing like the books. The series was filmed in Plockton and Macbeth is played by Robert Carlyle. Macbeth is a laid-back relaxed character, just like in the books. He is not averse to poaching the odd salmon and he likes to apply the rule of law in his own way. He avoids promotion as all he wants is to remain in Lochdubh. That is pretty much where the resemblance to the books ends which was quite a surprise to me. Most of the characters in the series are the invention of the TV writers and not M.C. Beaton who wrote the books.

I’m not sure how happy I would be if someone made a TV show out of my book and then proceeded to change all the characters, still I did enjoy Hamish Macbeth as a TV show. It was an oddball, quirky little drama which ran for only three seasons and a few years ago Liz and I visited the village of Plockton which was very small and to be honest, didn’t actually look like the place in the TV series.

Not long ago after reading Death of a Scriptwriter last year, I put down the Hamish Macbeth books and took a little break from the murders in Lochdubh but as the summer has warmed up nicely and I’ve plenty of time to sit out in the back garden reading, I thought it was a good time to pick up the series again.

Death of an Addict.

This was a little different to the usual Hamish Macbeth novel. Macbeth and another officer, Glasgow DI Olivia Chater, masquerade as drug dealers to trap a drugs cartel operating in the highlands. I have to say that I didn’t like how the book leaves the usual village life behind and to be fair, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as the previous ones.

Death of a Dustman.

All the Macbeth series are titled ‘Death of’ someone and I noticed on the internet that there is one book that differs from the others called A Highland Christmas which seems to come in between Addict and Dustman. Anyhow, I don’t have a copy so I went straight on with Death of a Dustman. All the books in my collection end with the first chapter of the next book and Addict ended with chapter one of Dustman so perhaps the Christmas book is something a little different. Anyway, the action takes place once again in the village of Lochdubh where a new councillor decides to make the village ‘green’ by promoting recycling. As a result, the local dustman causes a lot of aggro when he declines to empty bins containing the ‘wrong’ sort of rubbish and of course he ends up getting bumped off.

Things get a little far fetched towards the end but overall, Death of a Dustman was a fairly pleasant read and another look at highland village life and its various characters.

Marathon Man

I mentioned a while ago about my brother dying and when I was sorting out his things I came across this short novel. Actually it was one of my own books and I must have lent it to Colin years ago and now it has once again come back to me. I can just imagine telling him ‘I told you that you never gave me Marathon Man back!’ to which he would probably reply ‘Well what about that Cary Grant book I lent you?’ Yes, I borrowed the Grant book ages ago when I wrote a post about Cary Grant and it’s still there, part read in my bedroom.

Marathon Man was written by the screenwriter William Goldman and later made into a film using Goldman’s own screenplay. It’s a fairly short book and according to Wikipedia it was the author’s most successful thriller novel. Escaped nazi dentist Christian Szell has been living in Paraguay since the end of WWII. He has a stash of diamonds acquired while he worked in a concentration camp which are in a New York vault looked after by his father. When his father dies in a car crash Szell has to return to New York to get the diamonds. Will it be safe though? Szell thinks that a US agent working for a secret department called the Division may be about to rob him when he picks up the diamonds.

The agent is known by the code name Scylla and Szell meets with him and uses a hidden knife to stab him. Scylla manages to survive long enough to get to his brother’s New York apartment whereupon he dies from his injuries. Szell believes that Scylla must have survived long enough to give his brother, nicknamed ‘Babe’, information about the diamonds and so his men kidnap Babe and he is tortured to reveal any information. Szell is a dentist and so he tortures Babe by drilling into his teeth. Later, Babe, a student who hopes to be a marathon runner manages to get away.

The story was made into a film starring Laurence Olivier as Szell and Dustin Hoffman as Babe. This led to an interesting confrontation of acting styles with Hoffman the ‘method’ actor and Olivier the celebrated traditional actor. On one occasion when Hoffman had to appear tired out after staying awake for three days Hoffman chose to actually stay awake for three days also. Olivier, tired of these antics famously asked Hoffman ‘Dear boy, why don’t you just act?’

(I should mention here that while researching this and checking my facts -I had originally thought that Hoffman had gone running to make himself appear breathless- I found a really interesting article in the Guardian in which the author finished with a wonderful quote about acting from George Burns who once said “sincerity is everything. Fake that and you’ve got it made!”)

The film very much follows the lines of the book except that in the film, it is Szell’s brother, not his father who looks after the diamonds and also in the book, Babe is a little more ruthless and cold blooded than Hoffman portrays him on film. In fact, Babe shoots Szell dead in the book but in the film, Szell is killed by falling on his own knife.

Both the book and the film were highly successful and Olivier’s Szell is one of the most famous screen villains, particularly with his catchphrase ‘Is it safe?’ which he continually asks Hoffman’s character before commencing to torture him. It’s a film which probably put a huge amount of people off going to the dentist for years and the book is equally as scary and also superbly written.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading. What are your summer reads?

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Three Reads from My Holiday Book Bag

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always good to slip out of the pool, dry yourself off and then relax in the sun with a really good book. Here are three of my latest holiday reads. (try the video version by clicking here!)

The Thief, His Wife And The Canoe

I first heard about this story on the TV news many years ago. I’d mostly forgotten about it until recently when there was an ITV drama based on the story. This was the book version and even though the story is fascinating, the book, written by a newspaper journalist wasn’t that gripping.

Essentially, John Darwin was facing bankruptcy after getting hugely overreached on a series of buy to let mortgages. He decided that the only way out was to fake his own death and cash in on some life insurance policies. His wife apparently tried to talk him out of the idea but John, a dominating and overpowering personality, went ahead and faked his own death. Amazingly he even went back to live with his wife, sometimes having to retreat to the bedsits next door when any friends or family came to visit. He arranged a false passport using a method explained in the book ‘Day of the Jackal’ by Frederick Forsyth and then the two, Darwin and his wife, planned to buy property in Panama and live a new life. Later, Darwin decided he wanted to return to the UK under his own name by posing as someone who had suffered with amnesia and in fact one day he disposed of his fake passport, walked into a police station and told them ‘I’ve lost my memory!’

Journalist David Leigh tracked down Darwin’s wife in Panama and managed to extract the entire story from her before she returned to the UK to face imprisonment along with John.

The result is interesting but not really a great read as perhaps the author is more used to newspaper stories rather than an entire book. Either way, it kept me interested for quite a few days.

Death of a President

I’ve read this book before many years ago but even so I thought I’d throw it in the motorhome and give it another read. The President’s widow, Mrs Jackie Kennedy asked the author, William Manchester to write the book so there would be one authorised record of what happened in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated. The result is a record, in fact a micro record of what happened to Kennedy and those around him, beginning a few days before the assassination and ending with his funeral and the shooting of his assassin by another assassin.

For me, who has been interested in the JFK assassination since at least 1968 when his brother, Robert Kennedy was also murdered and I was 12 years old, it’s a fascinating record. Others might think perhaps that the author has spread his research too far, that we are not interested in what the President’s pilot thought or did or how the honour guard prepared for the President’s funeral and how the President’s sister or brother-in-law reacted.

Anyway as a passionate JFK researcher, a couple of things stood out. One was a time chart that showed that JFK was shot at 12:30 and that at 12:31 and a half, motorcycle cop Marion Baker intercepted Lee Oswald, the supposed assassin, on the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository calmly drinking a coke. That meant that Lee had, in 90 seconds, hidden his Mannlicher Carcano rifle on the 6th floor and got himself down to the second floor to meet Baker. Did he shoot the President or was he in the lunchroom all the time?

Here’s another thing. In one of my favourite JFK assassination books, Best Evidence, author David Lifton reckons that sometime between leaving Dallas and arriving at Andrews Airforce base in Washington, JFK’s body was somehow removed from his coffin and transferred to a body bag and then helicoptered to Bethesda naval base where work was done on the body prior to it being seen by the official autopsy staff. In Death of a President, William Manchester says that Mrs Kennedy spent all her time sitting near to the casket on Airforce One with many of JFK’s team of assistants and secret service personnel. So how was Kennedy’s body removed without anyone knowing?

OK, I’ve gone off into the realm of JFK assassination folklore there but to get back to normality, this was a very well researched book and gives a massively detailed look at the events surrounding a tragic day. If anything, the detail is perhaps a little too much and I could sort of imagine it as a feature film using that split screen effect that you often saw in the 1970s; Kennedy getting into the limo side by side with a shot of the assassin getting ready and so on.

Verdict; an absorbing read, very detailed.

Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich by Donald Spoto

This was a very compelling read, a biography of Marlene Deitrich who to be fair, I didn’t know much about until this book.

Marlene was one of those people perhaps born at the wrong time. Today might be a better time for her when lifestyles of gay and lesbian people are not so much of an issue.

Marlene rose to prominence in the film world of Germany between the world wars. She was married to assistant director Rudolf Sieber and together they had a child, Maria. The couple had what we might call an open marriage and Marlene had various partners, both male and female and her husband too found himself another love. A big hit for Marlene was her performance as Lola Lola in The Blue Lamp, directed by Josef Von Sternberg in 1930. Shortly afterwards Marlene and Von Sternberg moved to Hollywood and the two made a series of films for Paramount. While she was away from Germany the Nazis rose to power. Goebbels himself asked her to come back and work in German films but when she declined, the Nazi party rejected her. Marlene became a naturalised American and even entertained the troops -the allied troops during World War II.

She had affairs with both men and women and at one point even began to wear male oriented clothes and once she was denied entry into a Paris night club for wearing trousers.

She was extremely concerned with how she looked in films and always arranged with the lighting crew for a key light to illuminate her face in a particular way, many times even bypassing the director. Alfred Hitchcock for one was not amused.

When the film work fizzled out she reinvented herself as a performer with a one woman show in Las Vegas. The clothes and lighting she organised herself, in fact at home she even had a special key light, just as she specified for her films, that she would stand under when she met journalists and even her friends.

She was always there to help her friends and still stayed close to her husband and his partner. If friends were sick or even just down, Marlene would come round and clean up and make food. She was not only a famous and beautiful star but also a proud hausfrau.

The book opens with her appearing in a short sequence in her very last film, which incidentally starred pop star David Bowie. She performed for the camera perfectly, only one take was required, then she returned to her Paris apartment and except for hospital and doctors’ appointments, she never left again until her death in 1992.

Not the best film book I’ve ever read but still an informative and intriguing read.

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Book Bag: John Grisham

Posted on by Steve Higgins

In my last few posts about books, rather than publish my usual Book Bag posts, I’ve incorporated book reviews into other types of posts; holiday memories and posts about books made into films and so on. During my last few holidays, I always seem to either have a couple of John Grisham books with me or found some in the places, usually rented villas, where we have stayed. I thought it might be an idea to write a John Grisham themed book bag post. Who actually is John Grisham then?

Let’s go over to Wikipedia and see what they have to say:

Born February 8, 1955 John Grisham is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best-selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three anglophone authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.

Pretty impressive credentials, aren’t they? Most of the inside back covers of my copies of his books say pretty much the same thing and in the back of the last Grisham book I read, The Racketeer, there are extracts from an interview with Grisham in which he mentions his favourite book is A Time to Kill, his first book and apparently the most personal of his legal thrillers.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the books that I have read.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham

As I said earlier, this book turns out to be Grisham’s first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it, as back then he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements; Grisham used to be a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.

The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. Next, the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.

The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.

It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.

The Client

This book was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the man kills himself (he is a lawyer defending a known murderer) he tells the boys, Mark and his little brother Ricky, where his client has hidden the  dead body of a murdered US senator. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he wouldn’t tell them about the body in the first place. Of course, if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This book might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in a way plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time, law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President instructs the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

The Firm by John Grisham

There is a process by which I choose books to take with me on holiday. I like to think it’s a thoughtful process combining different genres of books, some novels, maybe the odd classic, and some biographies and autobiographies. What actually happens is that the day before our trip I’ll just grab something near to hand that I know I haven’t read yet and shove it in my suitcase. Anyway, that’s how I ended up with The Firm. Last year I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham and I thought it was a pretty good read. I must have mentioned that to Liz so she filed that away and got me a stack of Grisham novels for my last birthday. The Firm isn’t a bad read and in my case it was a nice change of pace after reading some non-fiction books.

It’s a good story but like a lot of Grisham’s works, it’s more plot driven than character driven. The characters are sort of bland templates that I’ve recognised in a lot of his novels. Anyway, characters aside, this is a really original story about a young guy who graduates from law school and gets head hunted into a firm he has never heard of but which offers tremendous financial benefits, a brand new BMW, and an ultra cheap mortgage as well as other financial bonuses. The downside, as he comes to learn later, is that the firm is just a cover operation to launder money for a big mafia crime family and the FBI wants our hero James McDeere, to help them.

Verdict: Highly enjoyable and a great holiday read but nothing more, although that didn’t stop the book from becoming a best seller as well as a hit film in the 1990’s.

The Racketeer

This is another legal thriller about a man convicted of money laundering, which he denies by the way, sentenced to ten years in a federal institution. Naturally he is not happy but he hoped to get out by using rule 35 of the Federal Rules for Criminal Procedure which means that if the inmate can solve a crime which the federal authorities are unable to solve, then his sentence can be reduced.

The man, Malcolm Bannister, helps other inmates of the prison with their legal issues and in doing so has come across some information about the murder of a judge, in which the Police and the FBI have no clues about the culprit. He plans to barter this information for his freedom but it turns out that Bannister is actually double bluffing the FBI and has a scheme in mind in which he can gain his freedom and walk away with a considerable amount of money as well as a new identity.

Like most of Grisham’s books, this was an excellent holiday read but towards the end it almost feels as though the writer has become a little fed up with this increasingly complicated story and is rushing to get it finished. This was mostly a good read but the end was a little disappointing.

The Boys From Biloxi

This is a very oddball book indeed. It’s not a courtroom drama although courtroom battles do feature in the book. It’s actually a very long-winded story of two families, one on the wrong side of the law and one on the other. One family is part of a rough and ready area of town and owns saloons that have illegal gambling and prostitution on tap and the other family who hope to clean the town up.

A lot of the story is just reeled off like a sort of narration you might listen to in a museum (which is how one review I read described the text). The author just seems to recount a lot of the story in this same long distance way. Eventually the story becomes more fleshed out and detailed when a tornado hits the town and a lawyer with ambitions to become the district attorney helps the residents fight for compensation from insurance companies that do not want to pay out. His success with compensation claims help him to become the DA but he is murdered before he can bring the criminal family to justice. His son however goes on to clean up the town.

Again this was another great holiday read but if I had been reading it at home for twenty minutes or so before going to sleep at night, I reckon that after a few nights I would have perhaps picked up something else to read.

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Curry, Tapas and a Read in the Sun

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Over on the front page of this site you will find a whole lot of stuff about me. It tells you that I have always wanted to be a writer, that I enjoy writing as well as Formula One racing, classic cinema and books. In one segment it mentions that I like dining out, in fact it says that dining out is one of the great experiences of life and so I thought I’d start with that, great experiences and see where that leads me.

One of the great experiences of life, as far as I’m concerned anyway is a pretty simple one. It involves lying on a sunbed and relaxing on a hot, or even just warm day. Throw in a dip in the pool and that sensation of lying in the sun while you dry off is made even more satisfying.

Of course, doing that in the UK at any time of the year is not always possible, especially in February which is why for perhaps the last ten years, if you want to get hold of me at this time of the year, you’ll find me in Lanzarote.

What can I tell you about this place? Looking over on Wikipedia I see the Canary Islands emerged from the sea bed during a volcanic eruption about 15 million years ago. There is apparently some evidence the Phoenicians were the first settlers here although the first known records of the islands come from Pliny the elder, the Roman scholar.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, nothing is recorded about the Canary Islands until 999, when the Arabs arrived at the islands. In 1336, a ship arrived from Lisbon under the guidance of Genoese navigator Lancelotto Malocello, who used the alias ‘Lanzarote da Framqua’ which is where the island’s name comes from. Today Lanzarote is part of Spain.

When we first came here round about ten years ago, we hired a car and drove round the island. We visited the volcano which was pretty much what you’d expect a volcano to look like, although the drive down a very narrow winding road in a coach towards the centre of it was a little scary. Otherwise, apart from the usual touristy stuff, there wasn’t that much to see and we quickly realised that the Marina Rubicon in Playa Blanca is by far our favourite place. Our rented villa is on the bus route and only five minutes walk from both the bus stop and the local shop so renting a car is not a particular concern.

What else do I do on Lanzarote? Well I read a lot of books.

Crossfire by Jim Marrs

I do love a JFK assassination book and this is a good one. It covers pretty much everything there is to know about the assassination from Oswald to Ruby, the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the CIA, the FBI, the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on assassinations and everything in between. Who really did it? I’m not sure. Was Lee Oswald the killer or just a patsy? Again I’m not sure but a lot of the evidence against Oswald was compromised. The officers who found the assassin’s rifle said it was a Mauser, not a Manlicher Carcarno. Later all but one of the officers said they were mistaken. The one who said he wasn’t mistaken was later murdered.

Who were the people on the Grassy Knoll with Secret Service IDs when all the SS were in the President’s motorcade? The shells found at the scene where the fleeing Oswald supposedly shot officer Tippet  were marked by a police officer. Later, when asked to identify the shells, his marks weren’t there. I could go on and on. Maybe Oswald did it, maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he was a patsy as he claimed. Will the records which President Trump will release show what really happened? I doubt it but either way, the JFK assassination is such an fascinating mystery.

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

I absolutely loved this book. I mentioned it last week in a post about detectives but it really is a fabulous read and the film with Humphrey Bogart follows it closely, especially the dialogue.  If you have never read it or seen the film, it’s about Sam Spade, a detective who happens on a group of people all after the mysterious Maltese Falcon statuette worth untold millions and at the same time seeks to find his partner’s murderer.

The only real difference between the film and the book is that in the book, Caspar Gutman’s daughter makes a brief appearance but not in the film. In the film Gutman infers that Miss Wanderley has stolen a thousand dollar bill and Bogart as Sam Spade demands that Gutman confesses to stealing it or stands for a frisk. In the book, Spade surprisingly thinks Miss Wanderley has got the note and forces her to strip naked to show that she didn’t steal it. Only then does he challenge Mr Gutman.

I have to say I have found the works of Raymond Chandler a much better read but this particular story I loved almost as much as the film.

Another book by Hammett, The Thin Man, wasn’t as good. Detective Nick Charles is no longer a detective but many others seem to think he is and he seems to feel compelled to look into a case of murder, even though he doesn’t seem that interested. Perhaps that was why I lost interest early on and kept putting this book down in favour of others.

Going back to the thing I mentioned earlier, the one about dining being one of the great experiences of life, well, only a few minutes walk from our rented villa, just next to the shop I told you about is a really fabulous Indian restaurant. No need to get the bus to the Marina or the centre of Playa Blanca as we can just walk to the restaurant. The funny thing is, Liz and I are part of a curry club and once a month we meet at a curry house in St Annes and settle down for a curry and some chit chat. I was actually thinking of perhaps going every two months or even leaving the curry club altogether. Well, I like curry but I’d had all I really wanted to eat in that particular restaurant and, nice though it is, I perhaps fancied going to the Chinese on that day or the local Italian.

Now however, I seem to be once again hooked on curry. Our local curry house here in Lanzarote, The Indian Gourmet, is a very friendly place. We have established our favourite table. The staff know that Liz hates coriander and they have marked us down as preferring medium rather than hot as regards curry strength. The chef always comes out to see if we have enjoyed his creation and always recommends what we can try next time and so on. The curry house then has become our sort of go to place if we want to eat out and don’t fancy travelling far.

The Client by John Grisham

Time for another book and this one was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the lawyer kills himself, he tells the boys -Mark and his little brother Ricky- where the dead body of a murdered US senator has been hidden. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he would tell them about the body in the first place. Of course if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

Another of our favourite places is the Berruga Tapas bar which we have been visiting for years. Sadly, a lot of our favourite staff members have moved on in the intervening year since our last visit. The boss is still here though, Juan who always remembers us and greets us warmly and the food is still the same mix of Spanish tapas and English snack food like burger and chips and so on. It’s a rough and ready sort of place but it’s also a lot of fun. And we do like the freebie at the end of the night; a shot of vodka caramel in an ice cold glass.

So, what will we be having tonight? Tapas or curry or something new perhaps?

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