One week to publication day

So the countdown begins to the release of my short story collection. :-) Stormy Nights is now available for pre-order direct from the publisher’s website and from all the usual suspects including SmashWords, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and the many and varied Amazons – UK, US, AU or search on your local ‘Zon for the ASIN B073RRNKBD.

Official list price is US$3.99. Looks like local prices are currently £3.09-£3.49 and AU$5.25 for the UK and Oz.

Sex and love, lies and truth, shades in between. Happy endings and might-have-beens. Nine tales of these things between men.

book log: 71) Barry Perowne — Raffles of the M.C.C.

71) Barry Perowne — Raffles of the M.C.C.

Not the original Raffles stories, but one of the pastiche collections. Alas, I have not yet read the original as created by EW Hornung (though I’m currently enjoying the 1970s tv series on DVD), so I have no idea how well this compares, either in fidelity to the tone of the original, or in quality of writing. It was simply the Raffles book that happened to be possessed by my local library in the dim and distant past, when the way one tracked down books one had heard of was to consult the library’s copy of “Books in Print”. I liked it well enough as a teenager to grab a copy when I saw it a few years ago, and thought I’d re-read it in conjunction with watching the DVDs.

I don’t find it quite as good now as I remember it being thirty years ago, but that’s a change in my reading tastes rather than a criticism of the book. It’s still good fun, and staying on my bookcase. This collection includes 11 short stories, each a nicely constructed mystery/caper. Some of them also include as secondary characters historical figures that a contemporary reader at the time of publication would be expected to recognise, although in the period of the story they were as yet unknown to the public at large. I suspect that this conceit could prove irritating to some readers, but I enjoyed it.

LibraryThing entry

book log: 69) Agatha Christie — “How does your garden grow?” and other stories [audiobook]

Back to posting July’s book log…

69) Agatha Christie — “How does your garden grow?” and other stories [audiobook]

Five short stories taken from the collection “Poirot’s Early Cases”, read on 3 CDs by the man who plays him so perfectly on tv, David Suchet. The stories included in this set are “The Plymouth Express”, “The Submarine Plans”, “Problem at Sea”, “How Does Your Garden Grow?” and “The Market Basing Mystery”. Entertaining short mysteries, and Suchet is an excellent reader. I’d like to get more audiobooks read by him.

LibraryThing entry

Book review: Isaac Asimov — The Union Club Mysteries

This anthology collected the first 30 stories from a monthly series of mystery shorts Asimov wrote for Eric Potter at Gallery magazine. The frame story for the series is a group of four men who sit together at their club. One of their number claims to have a background in intelligence, and has a habit of telling stories about problems he has solved for the police and intelligence services. The problems are typically in the form of lateral thinking puzzles, and Griswold invariably finishes by commenting that the answer was obvious, and waiting for his companions to admit that they can’t work it out before giving them the answer (thus also giving the reader a chance to try to work it out before the answer is revealed). With only 2000 words to play with each month, the stories are of necessity fairly pared down and low on characterisation. They’re often great fun, and I find it entertaining to watch the ongoing frame story about the narrator and his two friends trying to decide whether Griswold is telling the truth about his past or pulling their legs; but if you don’t like bad puns you won’t like a fair few of these little mysteries, and some of them have dated badly.

I enjoyed the collection, though it’s more of a book for dipping into occasionally than reading all the way through in one sitting. I find them excellent for when I want something that will occupy me for five or ten minutes without making it difficult for me to put down the book at the end of a chapter. The collection has kept me entertained through more than a few bouts of 3 am insomnia when I wanted something light and short to focus on that I could put down again as soon as I felt sleepy.

It’s not really worth going to a lot of effort to lay hands on a copy, but if one comes your way it’s well worth trying a few of the stories.

LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US