Some more books … during the last weeks of 2016 …

Scouting for more and more and other writers of police procedural novels led me to James Ellroy … after reading about him, I understood that he is more of a hard-hitting crime fiction author … not like Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, or Henning Mankell who had a ‘Detective Inspector’ and wrote a series of chronological police procedural novels with that Inspector in the lead … as I read on, I decided to try The LA Quartet, four novels with The Black Dahlia being the first … there is a police investigation involving fictional police detectives into the brutal real-life murder of Elizabeth Short … his style in these novels is described as moving towards “postmodern historiographic metafiction” from his earlier style of “classic modernist noir fiction” … mmmm … I need to find out more about these terms … anyway, a very basic layman understanding is there is some real-life people and incidents fused with fictional characters and maybe even locations involved, in the former … fact and fiction … Carl Muller, the Sri Lankan writer, called this style that he used in his novels (some of them riotously funny …)  as “faction” … very witty … just like his novels … So, The Black Dahlia went into the cart …

After I had finished collecting Peter Robinson’s ‘Inspector Banks’ series of police procedural novels, I felt there was some unfinished business … Robinson had also written three standalone novels and short stories … these short stories (many with Inspector Banks …) are collected in two volumes … actually I had been eyeing the short story collections for some time … I had bought one of them, The Price of Love, in August last year, but Not Safe After Dark was proving elusive … I found two of these standalone novels and Not Safe After Dark with a used books sellers on amazon … now, there was some satisfaction …

And I added three more to my collection of books by Stephen Fry … yeah, another used books seller on amazon … I loved him in Jeeves and Wooster and in the comic double act A Bit of Fry and Laurie, both with Hugh Laurie … Fry was superb as Jeeves … get a chance, watch it … whereas Moab is my Washpot and The Fry Chronicles are autobiographical narratives, The Liar is his first novel … I have read great things about these books, but I haven’t started any of them yet … Moab is my Washpot was highly recommended by a sensible friend … but I think I will start with The Liar …  

The last novels of 2016 … and nine (!) years of blogging …

All these novels came in a big rush towards the end of 2016 … during the last 2 weeks … I had wanted to post these early this year, but as it happens with me, every new year brings in a lot of confusion and uncertainty … I don’t know why, but it happens … and this time, January was also busy with lots of other things … Shruti’s Delhi visit and my parenting for two and a half days that brought its own tensions and anxieties, a celebration that brought in lots of guests and the attendant anxieties, a foolish idea that resulted in an interview and resultant pre- and post- anxieties … I am a great one for feeling anxious … anxiety keeps me together … anyway, the first casualty under the circumstances is my blog … no mental space, you see … so I drifted on … I wanted to write a post to sort of gloat over my 9 years of blogging … 11 January 2008 was when I posted my first piece on my blog … so this ‘gloat’ post too didn’t happen on time … no time to gloat too … he he …

Anyway, so, along the way I discovered this writer (I mean, I discovered for myself!) who is a farmer in Scotland and turned to writing crime fiction … James Oswald … he started in 2012 with Natural Causes … these are police procedural novels and Oswald’s hero is Inspector McLean … and already 5 Inspector McLean novels are released and have become hugely successful … I found three on a used books portal on amazon …

I have all along wanted to read Michael Connelly’s Inspector Bosch novels … again police procedural novels set in Los Angeles … Ian Rankin had referred to his novels in one of his interviews, where he said, “…What I like about crime fiction is the sense of place. You are right to mention Michael Connelly and Henning Mankell.  If I want to find out about contemporary Sweden or contemporary Los Angeles, I will go to these writers.  Not to the literary writers, but the crime writers.”  I had sent up a post when I completed Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus set and had looked for this interview (The Hindu, 28 January 2010) … and when I read this quote again, I was motivated to look for Connelly’s Inspector Bosch novels … and once again, I found these on one of the used books portals on amazon …

 

There are some more that arrived during those two weeks … soon …