Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Set six years after the events of Pride and Prejudice, Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett are happily married with two young children. However, their tranquil lives are thrown into disarray one wet and windy night when a carriage comes hurtling up the driveway. The door bursts open and Lydia, Elizabeth's younger spoiled brat of a sister, spills out, screaming that her husband, the charming but deadbeat George Wickham, has been murdered. Actually he hasn't, to Darcy's disappointment, and a search party finds Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodied, beside the body of Captain Denny, babbling what sounds like a confession. But, even though he is a rogue and a serial seducer of young woman, is Wickham really a murderer?

I found it difficult to finish this book. The story didn't hold my attention and it was easy to put down, even in the middle of a chapter. To be honest, it was a dull read. I confess that I've not read any of Austen's works, relying instead on the BBC adaptations, but there was none of the witty dialogue or the wry observations so often attributed to Austen. The characters too were wooden and lacked life and personality. Elizabeth was written as an passive and dutiful wife concerned with propriety and keeping up appearances, seemingly weighed down by her responsibilities. What happened to the witty and sharp-tongued Elizabeth Bennett of Longbourn? Darcy is a little more animated but full of self-doubt and self-recrimination, constantly examining his conscience with regard to Wickham and even his own marriage. Although this insight into Darcy's inner thoughts are interesting, his constant whinging gets tiresome after a while.

Death Comes to Pemberley is disappointing on the mystery side as well. The story is tame by modern standards and there is no detective work to speak of as in those days there were no police and crimes were investigated by local magistrates. This may be historically accurate but makes for a less than exciting read. The solution is contrived and relies on the mystery solving itself at the inquest with the help of last minute revelations from cardboard characters written solely for that moment. The pace too was slow. I wasn't expecting a frantic pace - the story is set on the Georgian country estate after all - but the story plodded along.

In summary, don't bother. The glacial pace of the book, the stilted dialogue and the dullness of the characters made me lose all interest in finding out whodunnit and why.

Read On:  I'll be steering clear of Austen sequels for a while. Maybe I'll finally get around to reading Pride and Prejudice,  or try to salvage PD James' reputation by reading one of her many crime books.

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.