Category: Books

When I was reading Good News, Bad News, one of the characters talked quite a lot about locked room mysteries. I decided that I probably hadn’t read enough of them myself. So I picked up this classic novel. John Dickson Carr is one of those people who turned out novels by the dozen, having to…

Over Christmas, I was thoroughly engaged by I Capture The Castle on BBC2. This film came out in 2003 and I must admit that it passed me by. The film stars the then newcomer Romola Garai (who I knew as Zoe from Attachments) as Cassandra as well as Tara Fitzgerald and Bill Nighy. I loved…

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A couple of weeks ago – on January 9 to be precise – The Observer recommended The Oxford Murders as its paperback of the week (incidentally, I can’t find the piece on The Observer’s website strangely!). I was intrigued as it was a book written by an Argentinian, but set in Oxford dealing with a…

In one of David Lodge’s campus novels, there’s a now very famous game where members of the English faculty have to admit to one another which books of monumental importance in English Literature that they haven’t read. I seem to remember that the trump book was Hamlet. My version is less likely to be books…

Having recently read The Dumas Club (not to be confused with the more recent Dante Club), it did occur to me that I probably had most of my knowledge of The Three Musketeers from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (altogether now). So I felt duty bound to read the original, and what a barnstorming read…

The Dumas Club is another of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s novels with historical riddles seemingly leading our hero on the trail of something. In this instance, we have a book collector who’s after a collection of three copies of a demonic books, of which only one copy can be the real one. At the same time, there’s…

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