en-US Fri, 02 May 2025 00:06:41 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg CommunityAnswer28986340 Fri, 02 May 2025 00:06:41 -0700 CommunityAnswer28986338 Thu, 01 May 2025 23:55:35 -0700 UserStatus1054854618 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:58:02 -0700 Bruce Beckham added a status update.
Bruce wrote: FREE TODAY until Sunday 4 May in the Kindle Store, number 10 in the DI Skelgill series, MURDER AT DEAD CRAGS. To download a free copy, just click where it says "$0.00 to buy":

US


UK


CA


OZ


If you liked 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', you might enjoy this one! ]]> Review7488312077 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:00:47 -0700 /review/show/7488312077 Bruce gave 5 stars to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (Paperback) by Robert Louis Stevenson
I was gifted a superb cloth-bound collector’s edition of this book, and was soon struck by several revelations, the first being that I had never actually read it!

So many screen adaptations are there of ‘Jekyll & Hyde� that somewhere along the line my subconscious erroneously made up its own mind on this matter, so to speak.

The second was that it is barely a novella, at around the 25,000-word mark. It is considerably larger than life.

Next � it is not set in Edinburgh! Living here in the Scottish capital, five minutes� walk from the Rest & Be Thankful (featured in Kidnapped), and ten as the crow flies from Stevenson’s former home in the New Town, it came as a surprise to discover that his most celebrated story actually plays out in Victorian London.

Fourth. Jekyll is big and Hyde is small. That said, what the latter lacks in stature he makes up for in malevolence. Indeed, the evil of Hyde, and his shadowy presence, are what feed the plot and make the book a compelling page-turner.

Even in its brevity it succeeds in conveying the progressive agony of Jekyll’s drug-induced transformation to his alter ego, and his horror that he is powerless to resist the creeping tentacles of addiction.

The structure of the narrative is unconventional. There is a protagonist of sorts, Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer who presents the case almost as a documentary, relying in large part on correspondence left under seal should the worst occur.

In some respects, I actually found the climax a little unsatisfying. I shan’t elaborate, in case, like me, it will be fresh to you. And I would have liked more biographical detail; for example, Edward Hyde arrives fully formed, with little reference to a back story, or even the origin of his name.

Regardless, it feels like a great piece of literary heritage, and I enjoyed taking my time, reading just a few pages each night. There cannot be many such abridged works that have so left their mark (perhaps Of Mice and Men, and The Turn of the Screw).

And in the hall of famous epigrams, its walls lined with the likes of a ‘Catch 22 Situation� or ‘Big Brother is Watching�, arguably the ‘Jekyll & Hyde Personality� takes pride of place.
]]> Review7388034097 Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:42:19 -0700 /review/show/7388034097 Bruce gave 3 stars to Busman's Honeymoon (Lord Peter Wimsey, #13) by Dorothy L. Sayers
Billed on the front of the first edition as “A love story with detective interruptions�, Busman’s Honeymoon is the eleventh and final Lord Peter Wimsey novel and was published in 1937.

It charts Wimsey’s marriage to crime novelist Harriet Vane, rescued by him from the gallows (three books previous), and their unconventional honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Harriet’s native Hertfordshire, impetuously purchased as a nostalgic wedding gift by Wimsey.

Fleeing their reception to avoid the paparazzi � and arriving after dark to find Talboys locked and barred � the new couple finally gain entry with the help of mystified neighbours and retire to bed. Next morning they discover former owner William Noakes dead in the cellar with his head bashed in.

Detective interruptions ensue.

The crime proves to be from the Agatha Christie School of Complicated and Improbable Murders. As one contemporary notice stated, if the killer needed that much help from Providence, he was in the wrong business!

The majority of the narrative concerns the relationship between Wimsey and Harriet � both suffer feelings of inadequacy, and the novel charts their troubled journey through their insecurities by the vehicle of the plot.

There is a rather disjointed ending, when the newlyweds travel to the Wimsey country seat in Norfolk, modelled I should say on Holkham Hall. Eccentric characters enter the tale for no obvious reason, and it rather fizzles out with Lord Peter casting doubts over his future as a sleuth.

While I largely enjoyed the book, I felt it suffered from the very claim made on the cover; that is to say, the two quite disparate strands did not comfortably interweave and maybe were stories worthy of independent telling.
]]> UserFollowing324889282 Sat, 05 Apr 2025 10:18:10 -0700 /user/show/16139414-mel Bruce Beckham is now following Mel ]]> Review7217406927 Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:55:07 -0700 /review/show/7217406927 Bruce gave 3 stars to The Mind Readers (Albert Campion Mystery, #18) by Margery Allingham
This is Margery Allingham’s last self-completed novel, number eighteen in the Albert Campion series, released in 1965. The first, The Crime at Black Dudley was published in 1929 and the author held that her gentleman sleuth was the age of the year, which puts him close to retirement in this adventure.

For the most part it was an enjoyable read, though anachronistic in that its Golden Age inter-war style jarred with the subject matter of Cold War espionage and the advent of modern technology.

Indeed, the plot is more of a spy story than a whodunit, as Campion (now officially it seems on the payroll of MI5) battles a mysterious adversary over a top-secret device that harnesses the powers of extra-sensory perception. The gadget works better for children and somehow his two young nephews have become embroiled through their public school. Added jeopardy arrives as one of them goes missing.

There is an excellent scene at a research station on the lonely Essex marshes where Campion finds himself cornered by a ruthless assassin. He quickly realises that at his age he is no longer in any condition to fight his way to safety.

This really ought to be the climax of the novel, but there ensues a lengthy information dump, like the unravelling of a tangle of wool of different colours, that really ought to have been carefully woven throughout the story itself.
]]> ReadStatus9168897603 Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:54:25 -0700 /review/show/7390954316 Bruce is currently reading Cumbria Within Living Memory by cumbria-federation-of-women-s-institutes
]]> Review7388032699 Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:42:36 -0700 /review/show/7388032699 Bruce gave 5 stars to Handstands in the Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (Kindle Edition) by Janey Godley
Our newest street book group read, the late Glaswegian comedienne Janey Godley’s autobiography. I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author, which I would say is the only way to do it.

She recounts her upbringing in Shettleston, a tough district in Glasgow’s East End, her survival of deprivation, discrimination and sexual abuse, her coming of age and marriage into a gangster family, and her life as a young mother running a hard-drinking corner bar with its backcloth of street fighting, hard drugs and prostitution.

On the one hand the tale is a bottomless pit of despair, domestic violence and manipulation, but on the other a beacon of hope, of ephemeral joy found in chronic adversity, and incalculable fortitude.

Janey Godley’s grippingly honest narration is nothing short of brilliant, and her talent for the Glasgow vernacular makes the graphic profanity that peppers the dialogue sound not in the least gratuitous. (But it does contain more swear words than any other book I have read.)
]]> ReadStatus9164612668 Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:39:50 -0800 /review/show/7388034097 Bruce is currently reading Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
]]>