Crime

Blue Lightning (Macmillan, £16.99) is the fourth novel in Ann Cleeves’ excellent Shetland quartet. Blue Lightning (Macmillan, £16.99) is the fourth novel in Ann Cleeves’ excellent Shetland quartet. It is just as good as its predecessors. Cleeves has found a way to serve up many of the pleasures of the traditional mystery in an unusual modern setting. Her series detective, Jimmy Perez, returns to his own island, Fair Isle, with his artist fiancée, Fran. Autumn storms cut the island off from the rest of the world. Perez anticipated that he would suffer mild embarrassment when he introduced Fran, an outsider from the south saddled with a six-year-old daughter, to his

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. In conversation he was full of amusing scandal, but the transcript of his dictated reminiscences was painfully discreet. I suggested they might be ‘sexed up’ — a new, comparatively innocent but still obviously vulgar expression — and he looked puzzled. ‘The first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham,’ the transcript read, ‘who was very stupid and rather dirty, and came to a bad end.’ Bingham became Lord Lucan, so if there were more about his stupidity and dirtiness, along

In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the public. The earliest known literary hoaxer was the philosopher Dionysus the Renegade, who inserted a number of unflattering acrostics — ‘HERACLES IS IGNORANT OF LETTERS AND IS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS IGNORANCE’ — into his trumpery Sophocles play, Parthenopaeus. Dionysus had acted in a spirit of mischief. Recent spoofers have been motivated more by the promise of celebrity. In 2001, Michael Gambino published his bestselling memoir, The Honoured Society, which purported to reveal the ‘innermost workings’ of the American Cosa

For a crime writer, success comes with its dark side. As Conan Doyle learned to his cost, your readers often become obsessively attached to your series hero, while you yourself find him or her increasingly tiresome — and limiting. Ian Rankin’s well-deserved success with the genre has largely derived from his Inspector Rebus novels set in Edinburgh. When he brought the series to an apparent end with Exit Music in 2007, his readers were curious to know what lay ahead. Last year’s Doors Open, a relatively lightweight caper novel set in Edinburgh, was no more than an expanded version of a previously published short story and clearly a way of

Old detectives rarely die — or age, for that matter: Poirot is forever 60, Sherlock Holmes 50, P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh a handsome 38 or so.  Old detectives rarely die — or age, for that matter: Poirot is forever 60, Sherlock Holmes 50, P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh a handsome 38 or so. But Rendell’s George Wexford is ageing all right, and it shows. He is all nostalgia and reminiscence and remarking on things that are not getting better in the latest novel set on his old patch, the Suffolk market town of Kingsmarkham. That has certainly changed. It has expanded, become less genteel and sleepy — though plenty

An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. Time’s moved on to 1944, and Hitler’s doodlebugs are spreading fear and destruction through the war-weary city. But Detective Inspector Ted Strattton’s immediate concern is the murder of a doctor on a bombsite near the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and the linked activities of a medical impostor. Meanwhile, his wife, Jenny, is mourning the absence of their evacuated children, who no longer seem quite

A passage in that most insidiously influential of histories, 1066 And All That, tries to explain who the Scots, Irish and Picts really were: The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. Gordon Thomas’s account of MI5 and MI6 could lead to similar confusion. He correctly says they were founded in 1909 with Vernon Kell heading MI5, responsible for counter-espionage, and Mansfield Cumming MI6, responsible for espionage. Subsequently he says they both ‘emerged’ two years later out of the 1911 Official Secrets