Michael J. Ritchie's Blog, page 13

“The Last Day” by Andrew Hunter Murray (2020)

“Two thirty a.m., and no signal yet.”

Look, I half made myself a promise a while ago to stop reading dystopian stories while the world still feels like one, but if I did I’d be wiping out many great books. I’ve definitely cut back though, and it was time to make an exception for Murray’s The Last Day.

The year is 2059, and thirty years ago the Earth stopped spinning. Now tidally locked to the sun, half of the planet exists in a permanent daylight, the other is frozen and pitch black. Eking out a...

“Murder By The Book” edited by Martin Edwards (2021)

“Joseph Newton settled himself comfortably in his corner of a first-class compartment on the Cornish Riviera express.”

It might be a new year, dear readers, but there’s still plenty of murders to be solved. This time, Martin Edwards has gathered together some of the short stories from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction that all centre around murders involving novels, authors, publishers, booksellers, and librarians. What’s there for a murder mystery novel lover to take umbrage with?

Many of the...

“Breakfast Of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut (1973)

“This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.”

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the strangest writers I’ve ever come across. A few years ago, I ended the year with him, so it somehow felt right to do it again. Could be quite a nice tradition, actually.

Some time in the middle of the twentieth century, Kilgore Trout is hitchhiking to Midland City to attend an arts festival. Elsewhere, car salesman Dwayne Hoover is unaware that the chemicals in...

“One-Hit Wonder” by Lisa Jewell (2000)

“Bee hissed under her breath at the sack-of-potatoes cab driver sitting there in all his Rothman-breathed, greasy-haired splendour while she hoisted boxes and boxes of stuff from the back of his estate car.”

Like Thirtynothing, this is another Lisa Jewell book from the archives that I’ve not read in over a decade. Reading it now, I wonder how much of it I took in at the time, as there is some really quite emotionally intense and deep stuff going on here.

In 1985, Bea Bearhorn was everywhere. She...

“Shame Pudding” by Danny Noble (2020)

“An invisible wolf lived in Grandma Min’s cupboard.”

One more graphic novel for the road. I’d definitely like to get some more in my eyes throughout 2022.

Shame Pudding is the story of Danny Noble, an artist and musician from Brighton. It charts her childhood onwards, with the story centred mostly around her relationships with her grandmothers, Grandma Min and Ma. As she grows, she goes from being a grubby, quiet child to becoming a grubby, politically active teenager and young adult with a pass...

“Murder Underground” by Mavis Doriel Hay (1934)

“Dozens of Hampstead people must have passed the door of the Frampton Private Hotel – as the boarding house where Miss Euphemia Pongleton lived was grandly called – on a certain Friday morning in March 1934, without noticing anything unusual.”

For every Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers that made it from the Golden Age to the modern world, there is someone like Mavis Doriel Hay that didn’t. The British Library continues to dig up these forgotten gems. Hay, however, may well have been happier ...

“Battlestar Suburbia” by Chris McCrudden (2018)

“If you took the wrong turning off the A32222 Earth-Mars highway (via Dewsbury) you ended up among the Dolestars.”

I’ve been reading an awful lot of murder mysteries recently, so I thought it might be time to slip into a comedic science fiction hole instead to get as far away from creepy country houses as possible. It can’t be good for the anxiety. I ended up thousands of years in the future where life as we know it has changed immensely.

In the distant future, machines gained sentience and deci...

“In The Best Possible Taste” by David Lister (1996)

“The midwife who delivered the future Kenny Everett would have been obliged to have a name that could belong in a Goon Show sketch.”

As someone who isn’t especially funny themselves and has no aspirations towards the world of comedy, I sure do love funny folk. Comedians biographies and memoirs have taken a semi-regular place in my reading pile, with the likes of Paul Merton, Julie Walters, Victoria Wood and John Cleese completed. Kenny Everett is someone who I know of, but have little direct rel...

“Tunneling To The Center Of The Earth” by Kevin Wilson (2009)

“The key to this job is to always remember that you aren’t replacing anyone’s grandmother.”

I like a short story now and then. Writing a short story is entirely different to writing a novel, and not many people can do both successfully. I’ve not read any novels by Kevin Wilson, so I don’t know how he ranks there, but I can confirm he’s got a way with a short story.

The stories in this collection are focused – as almost all stories are – on love and death and how we cope with both. The titular st...

“The Dinner Lady Detectives” by Hannah Hendy (2021)

“The sky outside was grey and miserable, a damp kind of darkness that sucked any remnants of joy from the tidy cul-de-sac on Seymour Road.”

It’s been a pretty heavy month of murder mysteries, so why not one more for the road?

Margery and Clementine have settled well into middle-age, in a comfortable house in a pleasant town, with nice jobs at the local school working as dinner ladies, serving up chips and fizzy drinks to hungry students. The town’s peace is shaken however after their kitchen man...