Here are 5 books that Brighton Mysteries fans have personally recommended once you finish the Brighton Mysteries series.
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Success isn’t about money. It’s about character and personal experiences. I accept Viktor Frankl’s conclusion that fulfillment comes from having a purpose, caring for others, and living life with love. From my earliest movie heroes like Lash LaRue, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers, to John Wayne, Cary Grant, and George Clooney, my favorite heroes have been modest and kind. Book heroes like Donna Leon’s Inspector Guido Brunetti, Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache, and John Le Carre’s George Smiley are modest and kind. This returns us to Lou Gehrig, my authentic, real-life hero. His early influence is clear in my heroic Duff Malone character.
Dunstan Ramsey is not supposed to be the main character, but the story cannot survive without him.
Ramsey drew my affection during my impressionable thirties. He was modest and kind, and showed an inner strength that was expressed with patience and good humor. He also represented a dramatic figure who was new to me, the obscure hero who stands outside of the spotlight and causes important things to happen.
Ramsey’s story is full and nuanced enough to enrich three complete novels, The Deptford Trilogy, each with its own kind heroes, though not so modest as Ramsey himself.
The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link
Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball…
I’m fascinated by long stories where things aren’t exactly as they seem. Most crime fiction is secrets and lies and their eventual uncovering but most ‘literary’ fiction is too. For what it’s worth, I was a book reviewer for all the posh UK papers for about 15 years, including crime fiction critic for The Observer for twelve (so I’ve read far more crime novels than is healthy for anyone!). I’m a voracious reader and writer and I love making things more complicated for myself (and the reader) by coming up with stuff that I’ve then somehow got to fit together.
More insane narrators (or are they?) but you can’t get more unreliable than that. Discovered these thematically linked novels decades ago and came back to them when I was trying to work out the voice of the Trunk Murderer in my Trilogy and what mental state that person might have been in.
In The Deadly Percheron a psychiatrist has a patient, otherwise seeming perfectly sane, claiming delusions that aren’t necessarily believable. (Except, of course, in fiction the best delusions are. The psychiatrist is drawn in and you know that’s not going to end well.)
Between 1946 and 1948 john franklin bardin produced 3 quite extraordinary novels, all distinguished by a hallucinatory intensity of feeling and an absorption in morbid psychology remarkable for the period. "the deadly percheron", "the last of philip banter" and "devil take the blue-tail fly" are unlike anything else in modern crime literature. 10/6/87 UK PRIORITY REISSUE
I’m fascinated by long stories where things aren’t exactly as they seem. Most crime fiction is secrets and lies and their eventual uncovering but most ‘literary’ fiction is too. For what it’s worth, I was a book reviewer for all the posh UK papers for about 15 years, including crime fiction critic for The Observer for twelve (so I’ve read far more crime novels than is healthy for anyone!). I’m a voracious reader and writer and I love making things more complicated for myself (and the reader) by coming up with stuff that I’ve then somehow got to fit together.
This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.
In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’? Whoosh.
I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!
Paul Auster's signature work, "The New York Trilogy," consists of three interlocking novels: "City of Glass," "Ghosts," and "The Locked Room" - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller."City of Glass" - As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might hace written"Ghosts"Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired to spy on Black. From a window of a rented house on Orange street, Blue stalks his subject, who is staring out…
I’m fascinated by long stories where things aren’t exactly as they seem. Most crime fiction is secrets and lies and their eventual uncovering but most ‘literary’ fiction is too. For what it’s worth, I was a book reviewer for all the posh UK papers for about 15 years, including crime fiction critic for The Observer for twelve (so I’ve read far more crime novels than is healthy for anyone!). I’m a voracious reader and writer and I love making things more complicated for myself (and the reader) by coming up with stuff that I’ve then somehow got to fit together.
Not crime although there are crimes in it. The narrative structure of the quartet was a major influence on structuring my trilogy. The first three present different versions of the same events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt before and during the Second World War. In Book 1, a self-absorbed, pretentious narrator, Darley, presents an account of an intense love affair. In book 2, Balthazar shows how ignorant he was about what was really going on about him. Mountolive widens the political context and shows both earlier narrators were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Book 4 manages to tease out yet more solutions to mysteries thought resolved.
Rediscover one of the twentieth century's greatest romances in Lawrence Durrell's seductive tale of four tangled lovers in wartime Egypt that is 'stunning' (Andre Aciman) and 'wonderful' (Elif Shafak)
'A masterpiece.' Guardian
'A formidable, glittering achievement.' TLS
'One of the great works of English fiction.' Times
'Dazzlingly exuberant ... Superb.' Observer
'Brave and brazen ... Lush and grandiose.' Independent
'Legendary ... Casts a spell ... Reader, watch out!' Guardian
'Lushly beautiful ... One of the most important works of our time.' NYTBR
Alexandria, Egypt. Trams, palm trees and watermelon stalls lie honey-bathed in sunlight; in darkened bedrooms, sweaty lovers unfurl.…
I’ve been fascinated by "sea stories" since I could read, maybe before. I was born in Liverpool, my dad was in the navy, my family ran an 18th-century inn named the Turk’s Head after a nautical knot, and I’ve directed or written more than twenty films, plays, and novels with the sea as their setting. But they’re not really about the sea. For me, the sea is a mirror to reflect the human condition, a theatre for all the human dramas I can imagine. More importantly, I’ve read over a hundred sea stories for research and pleasure, and those I’ve chosen for you are the five I liked best.
Golding will forever be remembered for Lord of the Flies, but I think this is better (and so did he, apparently, a lot better).
It’s the story of people on a seemingly endless voyage from England to Australia in the 19th century, but for me, it’s like a spaceship on a voyage to another planet, like the spaceship in Alien with its own monsters aboard, the social mores, the injustices, the class privileges and prejudices, the sexual hangups, and the guilty secrets they carry with them. Pity poor Australia!
For me, it demonstrates that the sea can be a metaphor for reading (and writing). You embark on a journey, and you want to get to the end, but in a way, you want it to last forever.
Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, stinking warship, where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the crammed spaces below decks.Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a 'hell of self-degradation', where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.
