I’ve been taking a break between book projects, in reading just for fun, rather than research. I have about an hour in the evenings, after fifteen minutes diverting Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson, before his mother packs him off to the nursery for the night. Normally, the evening read is something on my Kindle, but for the last couple of weeks, I’ve returned to the bookshelves, to the books of a scribbler of mysteries… no, not Agatha Christie, but another English writer who was a fan of hers in turn; one Robert Barnard, who wrote mysteries ending towards the ‘cozy’ end of the spectrum rather than strictly procedural. Most of his books on my shelves can better be described as short and atmospheric novels with a mystery element. The two best – or the ones which I enjoyed the most are Skeleton In the Grass, and Out of the Blackout. The first is set in the late 1930s, focusing on a well-to-do family who are stars in the leftish intellectual firmament of the time – set of handsome, rich and glamorous parents who have all the correct progressive opinions, a son fighting in Spain with the International Brigade … and someone in the local village is harassing them with ugly pranks. The young governess for their youngest daughter slowly realizes that perhaps the family are not quite as noble in character as they seem. In Out of the Blackout, a small boy appears with a group of schoolchildren evacuated from London in 1941to a small country village … but no one in authority can find any records of him? Who is he, and where did he come from? Who put him on the train, and had he witnessed a murder, in the midst of the Blitz? As a grownup, the boy spends decades puzzling out his identity, based on a few sketchy memories.
The other Barnard books are almost as good – every mystery different, all with cunningly developed puzzles and interesting, unique characters. He only did a handful with an ongoing policeman sleuth, so there was no scope for making his books into TV series, as was the case with Caroline Graham’s Midsomer books, or Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series, which would have made his books much more widely read. But then again, with Midsomer Murders appearing to make the county of Midsomer have a murder rate to equal Cabot Cove, and Dalziel and Pascoe fizzling out after wandering too far from the book series as written – perhaps that is a good thing. Anyway – check them out; they’re good reads.
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