Forward Dash to Bookcase Six

I have finished Forward Slash and found it reasonably enjoyable, although I am beginning to weary a bit of the spree killer stories which have been my main experience of the crime/thriller section so far. The start of this book was terrific and got me immediately hooked on the story, wanting to know more. The main plot centres around Internet dating and social networking as a way of luring women to their deaths, as such it's a book that will be out of date in a few years time because the pace of technology is so fast that readers before long won't follow some of it. As with all of these books, the psychopath of course kills minor characters very quickly but lingers over the death of the central figures in the story, which gives them time to escape/strike back. If I take all this as artistic licence and to be almost expected of the genre, I still found the end to be a bit disappointing and contrived. If only the authors had given the ending as much thought as the beginning, rather than just a way of wrapping up the book as it started to approach the optimal length, I would give it a higher mark, but it still gets a respectable 7/10.

 For Bookcase Six (Crime and Thrillers, R-S) I had the full choice of the bookcase, with the exception of Wilbur Smith whom I have read one non-crime book by. In the end I picked The Whispering Gallery by Mark Sanderson. It's set in the 1940s, unlike all the other crime fiction I have read which has taken place in the present day. The story still seems to revolve around the inevitable spree killer (note to myself, the next book shouldn't contain a spree killer), and it's set in London (note to myself, I have to move away from books set in England), but at least it's got an historical theme to make it a bit different to what I have already read. There'll be no tweets or plot devices based upon Facebook security settings in this book!

State of Play

While I am busy reading Book 6 here is a quick update on the current State of Play.

Bookcase	Section	Title	Author	Pages Read	Rating (1-10)
6	Crime & Thrillers	The Whispering Gallery	Mark Sanderson	310
5	Crime & Thrillers	Forward Slash	Louise Voss/Mark Edwards	400	7
4	True Crime	Gone: The Disappearance of Claudia Lawrence	Neil Root	270	2
3	Crime & Thrillers	Dead Man Walking	Paul Finch	310	8
3	Crime & Thrillers	The Black Dahlia	James Elroy	20	Rejected
2	Crime & Thrillers	Under Your Skin	Sabine Durrant	310	7
1	Crime & Thrillers	Errors of Judgement	Caro Fraser	290	4

Going, Going, Gone

Gone by Neil Root was very disappointing I am afraid to say, I award it a measly 2 out of 10. Neil Root has attempted mission impossible in even writing about the Claudia Lawrence case, because you could summarise the whole mystery in a sentence the length of a tweet: one day Claudia Lawrence set off to walk to work, she never arrived and was probably kidnapped and possibly killed. Nobody (except presumably the person responsible) knows anything and therefore writing a 270 page book on the subject is a big ask. Neil Root of course is not a friend or relative of Claudia, if he was then a first person account might have improved things a bit, but the terse replies he has received from Claudia's dad to a few basic questions are not enough to form a basis of any book. It's a rambling, repetitive work which I spent the first 100 pages of waiting for something to happen. What it became apparent that it wasn't going to, I dutifully read the rest as a kind of punishment.

It's frustrating to pick a bad True Crime book because I'd imagined that this was an area that I was fairly well read in, maybe in my top dozen non-fiction categories, as I must have chalked up over 100 True Crime books in the 33 years since I bought my first book about Denis Nilsen in WH Smiths. Since then I've read books about murderers. rapists, kidnappers, gangsters, drug users and dealers, prostitutes, fraudsters, bank robbers and burglars, but I have rarely read a book as bad and as pointless as this one. The book by Madeleine Mccann's mum about her daughter's disappearance is much better than Gone because it is told from the heart, and of course a but more happened after she disappeared.

I hope that both these well know cases reach a conclusion one way or another one day, for their families's sake's, and I'll definitely read Neil Root's sequel if the Claudia Lawrence story is one day uncovered. As it is I'll have to read over 130 other library books before I can return to the only True Crime bookcase in Dorking Library to pick something else. Who knows, the crime might have been solved and the sequel written and sat there waiting for me by the time I head to this area of the library again!

Anyway, onto Book 5, and a return to Crime and Thrillers. After bookcases 1-3 of Crime, I am now working my way through, I think, five bookcases of books ordered by A-Z of the author's name. I am not sure whether the first 3 cases that I have been through already are crime and these five are thrillers, although if so I don't envy the person who has to decide which side of the divide each book falls. I am sure there is some reasoning behind it though, it doesn't really matter, all I have to do is pick a book from every book case.

I'm heading backwards through the alphabet, so am starting on S-Z. The book I selected is Forward Slash, which is unusually by two authors (Louise Voss and Mark Edwards), neither of whom I have come across before.

In fact the only author I was excluded from on this bookcase was Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell). I picked this one because it stood out being placed, Waterstones-style, on the bookcase with the cover facing outwards. That probably means it's just been returned, rather than some implicit recommendation by the library, but in either case it's obviously a book which has recently seen some usage. It caught my eye as well because it has a reference to Facebook and Twitter on the front cover, so it's positioned as a thriller set in the modern world of the Internet, which as a software developer and heavy user of the web, I hope I will relate to.

A break from Crime

I am glad I switched books on Bookcase 3 and ended up reading Dead Man Walking by Paul Finch because I very much enjoyed this book. I was expecting a standard police chasing serial killer book but it was far from a routine piece of fiction. Setting the book in rural Cumbria was a masterstroke, the geography and isolation of this part of the world in winter is a major part of the plot and a makes the book quite original. The main body of the book, the part when the killer is on the loose, is a great piece of suspense and kept me turning the pages. I averaged over 100 pages a day reading this book, which is very fast for me, and I was quite disappointed as the end of the book approached. I wasn't especially impressed by the ending, or the whole reason why the main characters had assembled in Cumbria in the first place, but I'll take that as artistic licence because once the story got going it was very addictive. My score for this book is 8/10, it's been the best yet.

The next bookcase is tucked away in the corner of the library, surrounded by crime novels, and that is True Crime. I must confess that I have never noticed this bookcase before I started my tour of the library, but I certainly have read plenty of True Crime books in the past 30 years. I have always been interested in what drives people to do senseless things like mass murder so have read lots of books about serial killers, especially the British ones. There were only six books on the case I was not allowed to read as I had read before, or had read other books by the same author. These books included a couple works on Jack the Ripper, one on the Austrian kidnapper Josef Fritzl and a non-fiction book by Gabriel García Márquez, who I thought was just a novelist.

In the end I selected Gone by Neil Root, about a woman who vanished one day near York on her way to work. I have read plenty of books about criminals, but not many about the victims. I can only think of the books by Kate McCann and Kevin Wells that I have read about their missing children, which it would be ghoulish to say I enjoyed but I read with interest and sympathy. This book is about an adult who disappeared, and no explanation has ever been found of why she vanished, let's see what it is like....

Book 3 substitution

I am afraid I didn't make much of The Black Dahlia by James Elroy and I have had to go to the substitute's bench for a replacement. I read the first 20 pages and couldn't really make much of it. I normally give a book 20 pages and if I am not sure whether to continue I decide again after 50. Occasionally I might bail out later, but once I get to page 100 I am generally committed. With this book I found it difficult to follow the story or really develop any sort of interest in it. These are probably my own inadequacies, not the book's, I should add.

Anyway, what's the point in reading a book I hate when there are 100 more to choose from on the same bookcase?! Fortunately I had a couple of replacements lined up, and I have already read enough of the first one Dead Man Walking by Paul Finch to nail myself to its mast.

This is another British book I'm afraid, unusually set in Cumbria (the last two were both London-based) , but at least it's by a male author so I have deviated a bit from the pattern of the first two selections. It's fairly chunky at over 450 pages long and I suspect there's going to be quite a few murders in this book judging by the contents of the first few pages and the sheer amount of content yet to come.

So, just to summarise, here is my reading so far:

Bookcase 1 (Crime and Thrillers): Errors of Judgement by Caro Fraser (290 pages) Score: 4/10
Bookcase 2 (Crime and Thrillers): Under Your Skin by Sabine Durrant (310 pages). Score 7/10
Bookcase 3 (Crime and Thrillers): The Black Dahlia by James Elroy (rejected after 20 pages):

On to Bookcase Three

Yesterday I completed the second book in my one man mission to go round the library: Under Your Skin by Sabine Durrant (310 pages). This is a Kafkaesque crime story where a woman finds a murder victim in the opening chapter and gradually becomes drawn into the case. It's impossible to discuss the storyline too much without spoiling the plot but it certainly has lots of twists a rather unusual ending! It was a fairly easy, enjoyable book to read, certainly better than Bookcase One's Errors of Judgement. I award it 7/10!

Bookcase 3 was completely uncharted territory for me as none of the authors or books I had read before. In the end, after two books by female former broadsheet journalists, I opted for a book by a male American writer, not the sort of book I would normally read, but that's the whole point of this project, to re-examine my own selection process for what it is that I decide to pick.

The book I chose was The Black Dahlia by James Elroy, someone I have not come across before. It (or at least the author) had a glowing recommendation from a British broadsheet The Independent on Sunday on the cover, which I suppose vaguely continues my theme so far.




Should I not like this book, I have a couple of back-ups from Bookcase 3, which like most of the shelves in the crime section, contain impressively recent publications (I think books 1 and 2 were published in 2013 and 2014 respectively).

A Lifetime of Crime

While I am working my way through the crime section (I am currently two thirds of the way through the second book Under Your Skin) it's worth looking back on the crime writers I have read a lot of in the past.

When I started reading adult books I read a lot of Agatha Christie, almost 20 books I think, before I got bored of the repetitive nature of her novels. She was one of those writers who found a formula and churned out dozens of very similar books. A lot of readers are quite happy to be have a similar tale retold again and again. I tend to be a bit more demanding and want something more original after the first few books. Consequently it's quite rare for me to have read anyone's complete output.

An author who I discovered at the age of 15, and is normally classed as a crime writer (although you could argue the case that she doesn't belong there at all) is Patricia Highsmith. I have enjoyed all her books, even the ones with fairly weak plots (and there are a few) and I still read them today 30 years on. If you haven't read a book for 20 years it's almost like reading it again so I try and read a Highsmith book every year in the order they were written. I have tried to find similar authors to her over the years, but never really been successful. I have read her influences, supposedly Poe, Henry James and Dostoevsky. I have read counterparts of Highsmith like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, but none of them have really hit the spot like Highsmith did. If anyone knows of any writers similar to Patricia Highsmith then please let me know! Or maybe I'll discover the next Patricia Highsmith on my way round the library!

The only other crime writer that I have read in large numbers in Ruth Rendell (aka Barbara Vine). A few of her books are very good, but there are too many mediocre ones and I have stopped reading her altogether, although I have managed to rack up about 20 Rendell books in the 30 years I have been reading adult books for.