David Gillon

Recent Reading

The Burning Issue of the Day, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo are called in when a Suffragette is accused of causing death by arson. The local Suffragettes are adamant she couldn't have done it. To complicate things, the dead man was a journalist, and his closest friend was the Bristol Post's society columnist, who has an unfortunate history with Lady H and Flo after the events of the previous book (A Picture of Murder). But the dead man left a notebook about his investigations and she's convinced he wasn't the random victim everyone is assuming. The problem is, the notebook's in code, and she doesn't know how to break it, but she does know a couple of retired spies. So arson in the streets soon escalates to corruption in high places, and Lady Hardcastle is uniquely suited to enraging self-important pompous oafs.

Death Beside the Seaside, T E Kinsey

Flo finally gets the holiday beside the sea she's been wanting ever since they moved to deepest Mummerset, even if it is just at Weston-Super-Mare. But taking the advice of friends means she and Lady Hardcastle are staying in a rather nice boutique hotel, with an interestingly varied set of residents: the Japanese diplomat, the Austro-Hungarian dandy, the Russian industrialist, the French naval architect, the wealthy American chaperoning her niece on a tour of Europe, and a charmingly batty British boffin who insists on telling them he's here for a secret conference. And didn't that man they just drove past look exactly like Lady H's brother Harry? (And with that set of characters aren't they missing an Italian and a German?)

Before you can say Punch-and-Judy guests are dropping like flies and the hotel manager is distraught, but he has a couple of retired spies on hand who happen to know the number of someone at the Foreign Office - Harry. So no sooner has someone dropped dead than a couple of likely lads from Special Branch are round the back of the hotel with a van, a a big bottle of cleaning fluid and an even bigger bag. It's rapidly clear that it's the Maltese Falcon scenario - hunt the maguffin with the last one standing the winner, but the entertainment's in the getting there - and for Lady H and Flo, this is entertaining.

(I liked the story, but there's some clear ret-conning of people's ages going on to set up Kinsey's new series - see below)

The Fatal Flying Affair, T E Kinsey

Lady Hardcastle and Flo have finally given in to Harry's nagging, and are now officially back with the Secret Service Bureau, or back with the Foreign Office at least as one of the reasons they retired in the first place is that the whole Great Game seemed to be being played for the private amusement of a bunch of amateurs, something the brand new Secret Service Bureau is supposed to fix. And as Harry points out, Europe seems headed for war, so getting back in the saddle is clearly the patriotic thing to do. That hasn't actually needed them to do anything so far, but now Harry has a job for them. An engineer at the Bristol Aircraft Company has fallen to his death when an experimental parachute failed. He was considered a national asset, and the parachute even more so. Worse, they know there's a spy in the company because they intercepted his last set of dispatches, but they killed the courier doing so and don't have any idea who his source was. Lady Hardcastle is a ditzy socialite with more money than she knows what to do with, and she has connections with the company via her good friends the Farley-Strouds. It's completely in character for her to waltz into the company offices proclaiming she wants to buy an aircraft and have her maid learn to fly it for her, giving them both an excuse to poke around under a few rocks and see what crawls out.

I liked this, even the aircraft details didn't annoy me - Kinsey notes his Bristol Aircraft Company isn't the historic Bristol Aircraft - but I have my concerns about putting Lady H and Flo back in the game. These are basically cozy mysteries (bar Flo's Tiny Welsh Ninja tendencies) and I'm not sure that set of conventions  entirely fits within the espionage genre.

The Deadly Mystery of the Missing Diamonds, T E Kinsey

It's 1925 and the Dizzy Heights are making a name for themselves as a Jazz band on the London scene. At the core of the Dizzies are Ivor 'Skins' Maloney and Barty Dunn, drummer and bass player respectively, who've been friends since childhood. But when they go home after a show Dunn heads off to his landlady's in Wood Green with whatever girl he's picked up, but Skins goes home to a townhouse near the British Museum and his wife Ellie, an American heiress (and the niece in Death Beside the Seaside above - the retconning I mentioned was knocking a good decade off Skins and Dunn's age to barely 20 so that someone who'd made a pass at mid-30s Flo in 1910 could fall mutually head over heels in love with a 16yo heiress in 1911 without it being deeply creepy).

Current home for the Dizzies is the Aristippus Gentlemen's Club, aka Tipsy Harry's, where they have a residency on Friday nights, and have also just landed a midweek job sitting in as live music for a gentleman's dance class, there being a dance competition with another club in the offing. And that brings them to the attention of Superintendent Sunderland of Scotland Yard, who has history with Skins and Dunn, and could use a pair of eyes inside the club. Sunderland has been charged with tracking down a few very special deserters from the war, and he's had a tip one of them is a member of Tipsy Harry's. The problem is the only description of the man is he's 5' 7" with brown hair, which describes pretty much everyone at the club, and particularly the clique of overly-privileged buffoons who can hire not just a dance teacher, but an entire jazz band to teach the five of them to dance and who are Sunderland's prime suspects.

Advice from Sunderland, and from Flo's letters to Ellie, tell Skins and Dunn that the way to make progress is to get the buffoons talking about what they did in the war and to pick out the one with flaws in his background. But that's easier said that done as everyone seems to be afflicted with a dose of "The War? Rather not talk about it, old chap!". And then death reaches out to the Dizzies, and things get personal.

There's a noticeable change in style with this new series. Whereas the Lady Hardcastle books are written in first person by Flo, these are third person, and Skins and Dunn are a couple of lower class likely lads. Ellie, on the other hand, comes straight out of Lady Hardcastle's world, if an American-accented version, and bonded hard with Flo in the aftermath of Death Beside the Seaside.

Currently Reading: 

The Ides of April, Lindsey Davis

It's AD89 and Domitian is Emperor of Rome, which means death squads in the streets. Flavia Albia's life has already been quite interesting enough, thank you - orphaned as a babe in arms during the sack of Londinium during the Boudiccan Revolt, taken in by a family of shopkeepers, fled their care when it looked like they were weighing up how much she'd fetch at the slave auction, lived on the streets of Londinium as a near feral child, then adopted by a senator's daughter and her ne'er do well boytoy/private investigator/Imperial agent (aka Helena Justina and Marcus Didius Falco) and brought to Rome, grew to adulthood among the Didii, married, and widowed at 20 - and now at 28 she's looking to avoid the attention of the authorities (death squads!) while living a quietly satisfied life working out of Falco's old office in Fountains Court on the Aventine as possibly Rome's only delatrix - a female PI. The only thing missing from her life is a little male company, and her latest case may offer opportunities with an interestingly snide archivist.

Not that she actually wanted the case, Flavia initially took on an accidental death case because she was short of cash  - child killed by builder's ox-cart with drunken driver - but on the wrong side, getting the owner of the building company, a thoroughly unpleasant woman, out of paying compensation.  But then her client dropped dead, and her adult son is insisting she investigate that death instead. Flavia Albia's all for going through the motions on a sudden death with no suspicious circumstances, but then she learns that her client isn't the only sudden death, and the authorities really don't want anyone looking into it, and uncle Petro's not in charge of the local Vigiles cohort anymore so avoiding the attention of the authorities suddenly became much more difficult.

I used to read the Falco books and it's about time I gave these a try. Flavia Albia is clearly a chip off the streetwise and cynical Falco block, but with the additional concerns of being a woman in a very male-dominated world - concerns illustrated by her living arrangements. Everyone knows she lives at Fountains Court, but most people assume she lives in Falco's old one room office at the top of the building. A few know she actually has a room in a four room apartment on the ground floor otherwise occupied by a foreign family who don't speak Latin. But the only people who know that that second room is a decoy, and that she only ever goes into it to hop straight out of the window and along the alley to a hidden door with its own staircase up to her apartment on the second floor - the best one in the building - are  Flavia and her landlords, aka Helena Justina and Falco.

Up Next: 

I notice I'm two books behind in Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series, and one in the spinoff Alpha and Omega series, I'm currently debating whether just to reread the last couple to get back to speed, or to go for a full re-read.

Currently Playing: Valheim

Valheim came out of pretty much nowhere, then it went into early access on Steam in early February and started selling a million copies a week. I resisted temptation for a couple of weeks, but it just looks too good. It's a fairly standard sandbox survival game, much like Ark or Conan, but here the background is Norse Mythology. You're a Viking who just died in battle, but Hugin explains the drinks party at Valhalla is going to have to be postponed, Odin has a job he needs doing. When he created the worlds there were some evil beings he couldn't deal with immediately, so he threw them onto a world of their own - Valheim. And now he wants you to take care of them, even if you have been dropped off in the wilderness by a giant raven with nothing but the rags on your back.

So it's straight into the standard survival sandbox grind - clearcut the woods to build somewhere to live, terrorise the wildlife with improvised weapons in order to turn said wildlife into components of better weapons,  and eventually graduate to better tiers of materials - stone, bronze, iron etc. The complication being that to get access to the next tier you have to take out one of the bosses that Odin wants given a good seeing to. There's one boss per biome, and so far there are six biomes - meadows, dark forest, swamp, plains, mountains and ocean (I think) with an eventual nine planned.

So far so standard, but what makes Valheim stand out are the graphics and the map. The graphics look crude up close, textures are heavily pixelated, but get beyond a few metres and it starts to look gorgeous, and arcing overhead are the branches of Yggdrasil. They seem to have hit a near perfect balance point for showing large expanses of wilderness without requiring high-end graphics cards. The overall effect is a little like looking at a really detailed watercolour (IMO anyway). As for the world, what's startling there is the size. It's huge. I've been exploring for almost a month now, and covered a lot of territory, but zoom right out and that turns out to be maybe 5% of the equator - and just along the equator, I haven't really gone North or South. Such a big map is only possible because it's procedurally generated, and that allows the game to give every player a randomly generated individual world - though you can enter other random number generator seeds, and jump into a world with up to about 10 other players. To give an idea of scale, I was sailing around the island I started on for two hours real time on Monday, and I didn't cover more than a third of the coastline (possibly significantly less, there are several areas I haven't even started to explore).