"Judith is a psychedelically baroque novel full of unexpected quirks.
There is a road between sanity and madness and Judith walks it from start to finish.
The tale begins as an epistolary novel � Judith is writing a letter or maybe it is a diary or probably all this is just in her head�

I suppose this is one of the things it should be difficult to write about, women in stories having got used to seeing themselves as victims � I mean, in stories written by women. Of course, there are those phantoms with snakes in their hair in stories written by men. Perhaps everyone gets a kick out of seeing themselves as a victim.

The path is meandering and narrow and it goes deeper and deeper into the thicket of one’s consciousness�

This had to be accepted: it was impossible to observe objectivity without objectivity being affected by that by which it was observed.

And Judith sequentially finds herself as a heroine of histrionic dramas; as a mistress in the embraces of a mysterious lover; as a delirious drugs addict; as a figure in the paintings of antique scenes; as a visitor in an ashram which she sees as a garden in Eden�

I don’t know how much you know (you, who bump into these letters, these messages, on your way through the maze) about this commune thing, this ashram thing, this Garden thing: you who presumably (or why are you here?) have some interest in ways within the maze. What was known as the Garden was an ashram, or commune, set up on the shore of this hot sea: a thousand or so people lived and worked here; they tried to find, to build, to heal themselves; having come half-way round the world and in as it were at the back way. The maze was in their minds; they had become lost; what distinguished them from others was that they had known they were lost: if you do not know this, how can you know that you are in a maze? People who came to the Garden were like dogs or cats who had had tin cans tied to their tails; they had gone round and round; the tin cans were echoes from their past such as, perhaps, the sounds of bodies falling from windows.

Then she becomes a character amongst villains, wolves and witches in the frightening modern fairytale�

I was going further into the forest. I thought � I am like Red Riding Hood going to visit her grandmother: of course Red Riding Hood knew her grandmother was a wolf! why else would she have gone to visit her?

The insane dwell in the very solipsistic world � everything that happens in their heads is their reality."

"Sergeant Troot serves some punch.



All Troot wants to do is drive his children and wife to the seaside for a vacation in his lovely car. To make some extra pocket change, he's agreed to help the wealthy family down the road with their party and ends up topping off the drinks at the punch bowl. Be back by 9, honey!
But then - MURDER!



The best thing about this one was the hangdog vibes that waft off of Sergeant Troot when he realizes he might end up missing his vacation. And yes...he wants justice. But damn it! He wants to wrap this thing up and take his babies to the beach!



This one pushed me into looking up the (previously unknown to me) author and grabbing the first Inspector Cockrill book, Heads You Lose, from Audible. <--free at the time!

This was planned as a magazine story but was one of several unpublished stories left by Christianna Brand (1907- 1988). I read this as part of the short story detective anthology Bodies from the Library, where it finally got its first publication."

Lizz is currently reading The Scarlet Gospels