The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - AUDIO read by Derek Jacobi


A fabulous collection of the 13 stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle after he brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead, read wonderfully by Derek Jacobi.  Holmes' mind and observational skills are just incredible, it's like cryptic crosswords in that once you know how he has unravelled the mysteries you can see how he did it, but I'm fairly sure I'm like most people who couldn't have worked it out on their own.  The wealth of period detail is fascinating, a world where the fastest form of transport is a train and personal transport is limited to train, foot and bicycle, communication to telegraph, letter and hand carried note.  The motivations of criminal intent have not changed, greed, coercion and desperation, but the motivators are different and are intriguing such as primogeniture and social and gender stratification in a very unequal society.

As the other reviews have said, the spindle is a bit hard to handle, but I liked having it all together like that.  Really enjoyable.

The City & The City by China Mieville

Two cities,  Beszel, a decaying soviet style society and Ul Qoma, near Eastern in style.  The body of a murdered young girl found in the vandalised playground of a sink estate by Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad [for some reason, annoyingly, Blogger doesn't seem to support accents, but there are acute accents over the first e in Mieville, the second in Beszel and the u in Borlu, which give an indication of the slavic slant of the language of the latter two].  But all is not as it seems, and Mieville's detective story is, Borlu says of his case on page 9, 'considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared'.  I won't give anything away, but the reference to Byzantium, also known as Istanbul and Constantinople over its history, as well as the meaning of 'byzantine' itself give clues to just how much of a ride Mieville takes you on.  Brilliantly conceived and written

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

Summerscale relates the true story of the murder on the night of 30 June 1860 of the youngest son of the family at Road Hill House, throat cut wide open and dumped down the servant's toilet in the grounds of the house. The murder exposes the internal workings of the upper middle class family, jealousy, adultery, guilt, grief and hatred. The Road Hill House case is significant in that it was one of the very first detective investigations undertaken by the fledgling Scotland yard and the story of the murder and the character of the detectives, in particular the lead detective Mr Whicher, directly inspired the early victorian melodramas and penny dreadfuls from Wilike Collins' The Moonstone to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Informed by contemporary developments in psychology, in particular the emerging theories of Freud, this is the classic murder mystery: the germ of the detective and crime novel which traces its routes through Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie to the present day.

I found the book interesting, but not compelling. It is perhaps the point of the book that because of our thorough grounding the present day with regard to forensic psychology which had its origins in the alienists and detectives of this time, that I knew pretty quickly who the murderer was and why. I did finish the book but there was no mystery to it and I found it rather dry and in the end unfulfilling.