Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less by Jeffery Archer

Four men invest their life savings in a North Sea oil company. The next day they realise they've been conned. With nothing to lose, the four men - an Oxford don, a Harley Street doctor, an art dealer and a lord - get together to hatch a plan, con the conman and get back every penny they lost.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less has a great idea behind it. Four men, each with their own talents and connections, work together to con the man who tricked them out of thousands of dollars. It's a shame that Archer couldn't pull it off. The schemes the men come up with are clever - although the conman is conveniently gullible at times - but too often Archer misses opportunities to ratchet up the tension so that I never felt involved in the action. There is also little in the way of character development. Each of the characters he has created have potential; the young lord struggling under the expectations of his family, the society doctor bored with his wealthy, needy patients, the French art dealer navigating his way through society, and the brilliant but naive American scholar. However, like the plot, Archer misses opportunity after opportunity. His characters lacked personality, back story and, for the most part, emotions and so I never really understood their motivations (beyond retrieving their lost money) or grasp what was at stake if they didn't succeed. 

This may be a little harsh. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was a diverting read on a rainy day and I would have forgiven Archer if the ending hadn't been so bloody disappointing. It was like he just ran out of ideas and gave up in the final few chapters, writing a conclusion so lazy, contrived and frankly implausible that I felt cheated. In summary, it's a great idea poorly executed. 

Read On: Maybe I'll give Archer another chance with Kane and Abel. Or maybe I won't.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

In the 1860s a new literary genre appeared. Lurid, shocking and too much for some Victorian sensibilities (one critic even described it as 'unspeakably disgusting'), the sensation novel peeped beneath the skirts of Victorian respectability and revealed a world of madness, bigotry, murder and violence. One of the best tellers of the sensational tale was Wilkie Collins. At times a clerk, lawyer and would-be painter, he was a great friend of that other purveyor of sensationalism, Charles Dickens.

The Moonstone, written in 1868, is a typically elaborate tale revolving around the theft of a fabulous diamond. Looted from an Indian shrine, the moonstone brings a curse upon all those who possess it. The book is a sprawling tale, written in three chunks each with a different narrator telling their version of the same events. Think Vantage Point, Victorian style.

As for the madness, murder and violence, there is plenty of it but compared to modern crime fiction, it's pretty genteel madness, murder and violence. More interestingly, The Moonstone is arguably the first English whodunnit and it's in this book that Collins establishes the conventions of the genre; the country house setting, the renowned detective, the large number of loosely related subjects and, of course, liberal amounts of red herrings. Collins also throws into the mix the quintessentially Victorian ingredients of India, opium and an obsession with the gothic.

I liked this book. Compared to the gritty crime dramas and forensic thrillers of today, it seems like tame fare but it's easy to see that The Moonstone would have scandalised and delighted Victorian readers. The plotting and interweaving of the different narratives is skillfully done but a lot of the appeal for me lies in the unintentional evocation of Victorian England.

Read On: I know Dickens is the Victorian sensationalist writer, but I have such a hard time when it comes to reading his novels. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale is a modern retelling of a real-life crime that shocked Victorian society, while The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle is a typically chilling whodunnit.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

So a dame walks into a private detective's office...

Sound familiar? It probably does but luckily this is the noir detective novel. This is no ordinary dame and the office belongs to no ordinary detective. They are Miss Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the original femme fatale, and Sam Spade, the PI on which all fast-talking, tough, wisecracking PIs are based. 

Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout, the cops want him for the murder, a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story and dubious motives begs for his help, gun-toting villains demand a pay-off he can't provide and everyone wants a fabulously valuable golden statuette of a falcon. Who has it? And what will it take to get it?

I'm not going tell you - you'll have to read it to find out! But I will reveal that The Maltese Falcon has gunfights, fistfights, lots of well-dressed men trading banter while well-dressed women watch, bodies pile up, the police blunder about, everyone drinks a lot and it is awesome! The solution is as complicated as the motives of the people gathered in Spade's living room but this book doesn't flow neatly, like our hero it swaggers through the streets of 1920s San Francisco with a gun in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other.

Sorry if it seems like I'm gushing but I loved this book! The Maltese Falcon is all about the writing, especially the dialogue. It's stuffed full of snappy dialogue, brooding tension and a cast of odd and engaging characters without a good guy in sight. Sam Spade is the hero only by default; his motives are as grey as the clouds above and he saunters through the book as cool and as slick as a teflon cat. 

Read On: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is another must-read for fans of the detective novel.