The Last Chapter by Edmund Power

I have finished the book I didn't need to read, The Last Chapter by Edmund Power, and I am very pleased I decided to dip into a second unnecessary book on Bookcase 7. As far as I am concerned The Last Chapter is almost the perfect book. Yet amazingly hardly anyone seems to have even read it - there isn't a single review of it on Amazon!

The story is simple. A struggling Irish writer discovers a manuscript in his dead neighbour's flat and decides to pass it off as his own work. Gradually his minor crime of plagiarism escalates and he ends up in all sorts of scrapes. I won't say too much because I don't want to spoil the story for anyone wanting to read The Last Chapter.

After reading several crime books on my tour so far where an "evil" villain is pursued by a "good" hero, it was good to have an account from the criminal's perspective. Edmund Power masterfully gets you, almost without realising it, to side with the villain in the book and see the people trying to uncover his crimes as interfering busybodies. You want him to get away with his plagiarism and turn his life around. Patricia Highsmith, one of my favourite writers, manages the same technique in all her books, to get you into the mind of the criminal - we're all potential criminals after all.

The Last Chapter though is nothing like Highsmith though, and it is very funny in places. I am not the sort of person to laugh out loud at books on trains, but I did so several times with this book. It's a moral tale I suppose as well, the message being that small crimes can soon grow into larger ones, and escalate far beyond the instigator's original intentions. I can't fault the characterisation, plot of style of writing at all, and I award it 9/10.
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Of course, in the book, the novel that the writer tries to publish would inevitably be his last published work,  as he doesn't have the ability to write a second. Amazingly although this book was written a decade ago, it's never been succeeded by another! It's almost a though it foretold its own writer's fate. Please let me know if you know what happened to Edmund Power as it would be a tragedy if he wrote no more books, and even this, his one hit, seems to have been forgotten!

Anyway my readathon must go on and for my next book I had to select something from Bookcase 9, Crime and Thrillers (L-M). I was just excluded from Andy McNab on the grounds of having previously read something by the author (I enjoyed Brave Two Zero and soon got bored by his subsequent output). In the end I selected The Lie of You by Jane Lythell. It's a British "psychological thriller" (whatever that means), I'm not sure what it is about, but the cover and first few paragraphs appealed to me, so it's next on the agenda. Let's hope it is as good as The Last Chapter!

Kiss The Girls by James Patterson

I have finished Kiss The Girls by James Patterson from Bookshelf 8 and I hated it! It's written as an action-packed page turner. No chapter is more than four pages, no paragraph is longer than four sentences, most sentences are just a few words long, and there are endless cliff hangers.

The two main characters of course never die, the villains are totally evil and totally stupid, and the police (other than Alex Cross) are useless. This book doesn't ask an awful lot of the reader and I found myself hating it more and more is it trundled on to the inevitable ending where the killers were first revealed and then killed by Alex Cross. I award it 3/10, and I will definitely not read any more "airport" thrillers like this.

I'll finish my second book that I got distracted with from Bookshelf 7 and then reveal the chosen book from Bookshelf 9.

Ramage by Dudley Pope

I have finished Ramage by Dudley Pope my first book from Shelf 7.  The book was actually written in the 1960s and was published a few years before I was born. Dudley Pope is long dead of course, but it's the first book I have read during this project that was not set or written in modern times.

It was a nautical adventure story set at the end of the Eighteenth century. There was a lot of naval terminology which took a while getting used to but in the end I just accepted that I couldn't follow all the details of ships and navigation described. That didn't stop me getting the general story-line I hope. I'd describe this book as a good yarn, It seemed to very well researched for an historical novel, with a passable plot and fair, if a little stiff, characterisation. I award it 6/10.

I've just over 100 pages left of Bookcase 8's Kiss the Girls, which I can't wait to finish! Then when that's done I will return to Bookcase 7 for The Last Chapter, which I foolishly started reading and am desperate to continue, even though I have already read a book from that bookcase - and therefore under my own rules don't need to.

Then I will be free to proceed to Bookcase 9.....

Another Chapter - The Last Chapter

I am a glutton for punishment because I am now reading two books on Bookcase 7. I never envisaged I would want to read more than one book on the same bookcase, when I have the best part of 150 books to work my way through as it is!

I got bored of Ramage, so started on another book from Bookcase 7 which I had lined up as a replacement. But then I carried on reading Ramage as well as the new book and also Bookcase 8's Kiss the Girls. I now have acquired more of an interest in Ramage which improved after a slow start, but the new book The Last Chapter by Edmund Power I simply have to read having started it because it has the makings of the best book yet!

The Last Chapter may have a very boring looking cover but it's definitely got the most original story as it is about plagiarism, a failed writer who steals his dead neighbour's unpublished book. This is definitely my kind of book, it's original, got some proper characterisation, and there's no a hint of a murderer or rapist in it!

For now though I'll finish Ramage, then work through Kiss The Girls (easy to read but essentially pulp fiction) before I can resume the book I really want to read - The Last Chapter.

Jumping a Bookcase

I have been away for a couple of days and got bored of Ramage so have started on Book 8 before completing Book 7. I've got another book at home from bookcase 7 which I might switch to before deciding whether to continue with Ramage (65 pages read so far). Ramage is an action thriller, but set in the 18th century, a kind of Napoleonic Guns of Navarone. It's got all sorts of nautical terms in it, the characters are very wooden, and it doesn't really do anything for me. It might improve, but I doubt it.

For bookcase eight (Crime and Thrillers M-P) the only author I couldn't consider because I had read her books before was Kate Morton (great books, but they are all very samish). There were two shelves of books by James Patterson, someone I had never heard of until fairly recently. That's the most books by anyone I had seen so far in Dorking library (two shelves!), so I felt obliged to get one out as clearly the people of Dorking must like his books. Kiss the Girls is supposedly one his better works (I did my research for once).

I know I have been moaning about spree murder books, and this is yet another example, but at least it is American! All the books I have completed so far have been British. Some of my favourite writers are American, but I find a lot of the books from the USA are written for the mass market. This appears to be as well: short chapters, short paragraphs, short sentences, short and snappy, but a long book. It's written to grab the attention and keep the reader turning the pages. Let's hope it gets me doing the same!

My route around the library

I did the library an injustice in an earlier post when I said that the first shelves in the crime section were not alphabetized. In fact all the bookcases in this area are, I just never noticed. I actually started on the cases near the beginning of the alphabet and then flipped to the end as I went round the corner by the door. You see my route round the library is initially books cases with their backs to the wall and I will gradually spiral inwards. I am doing this to try and introduce some variety rather than systematically going through each section. Already I am already beginning to weary of all these crime books about psychopathic spree killers and yearn for something less stereotyped. That said there are over a hundred books on each case, I am not short of choice! I have a few more crime and thrillers to plough through before I venture right round the perimeter of the building and head towards the Teenage section. I will eventually work my way around the wall until I return to the crime section for my second lap.

From Land to Sea

The Whispering Gallery by Mark Sanderson turned out to be a poor book. I had high hopes for it at first, and even after 100 pages I would have said it was quite good. But alas, the plot was terrible, the characters unbelievable and uninteresting and, worst of all, there was no sense of suspense at all, despite the presence of the obligatory psychopathic killer with a succession of victims. I just didn't care what happened. You really got the impression Mark Sanderson himself didn't have a clue what the plot was going to be and he made it up as he went along without then going back and rewriting the early parts of the novel to fit in with what happened later. I award it 3 out of 10 on the basis that the first half gets a 6 and the second half gets a zero.

Bookcase 7 was Crime/Thrillers (P-R), with Ruth Rendell the only writer I was restricted from reading as I had read before. I was looking for a non-serial killer book and in the end I picked Ramage by Dudley Pope. It looks like a historical novel set at the end of the 18th century in the days of Nelson. It's set at sea, and is the first in a long series.

I have read quite a few books so far in Books 1-6 that are sequels to other books I haven't read. Crime and thriller writers seem particularly prone to thrash out a long succession of books with the same characters and similar plots and storylines to an earlier bestselling work. Fine if you have read the original, but if you haven't then sometimes you are reading a book that probably wouldn't have been good enough to get published had it not already acquired a legion of faithful readers waiting to buy it. But Ramage is is the first in the series so I am hoping that it's also a good book otherwise it wouldn't have spawned so many successors.