The Saturday Morning Post (No. 96) EXTRA! EXTRA!

I'm getting quite at home down in this Regency rabbit hole of English high society, "the ton" in the years 1811 to 1820.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer  A

This is my favorite Heyer story so far. It is a delightful mashup of Austen and Wodehouse. It is more a comedy more than a Regency romance, or perhaps more accurately, a comedic Regency romance.

Young Lord Sheringham, a rather wild, free-spending, gambling, but kindhearted young man finds his marriage proposal to the beautiful neighbor of his, Incomparable Isabella Milborne rejected. He leaves for London vowing to marry the first woman he meets. He doesn't get far before he meets another childhood friend, the 17 year old Hero Wantage sitting on a wall crying. Orphaned, she has been brought up in the household of a cousin without love. She is crying because  she's to be shipped off to be a governess at some school in Bath the next day. The kindhearted Lord Sherry feels for her, and after explaining his own troubles, she points out that she's the first woman he's met. Realizing this is true, and that he's known her all his life, and likes her, he asks her to elope with him. She does. They get married, and story then recounts her introduction to the life of "the ton", which is to say high society, the free and easy life of a wealthy and rather foolish young man about London. 

In London we are introduced to Sherry's three pals, all three of them straight out of a P G Wodehouse book. They become friends with our cheerful and naive young bride, Hero, otherwise known as Kitten. There are, of course, all sorts of escapades that Hero innocently gets into as she tries to fit into both high society, and the free and easy life that her husband lives prior to his marriage. However there is one question, does Sherry love Hero? She loves and is devoted to him, but is he in love with her? Oh, he is very devoted to her and goes to great length to look after her. But is he in love with her? I'm not sure if this is really a friends to lovers story, but we do see, over the course of the story Sherry growing up as he finds himself now having to consider more himself.

As I said at the top, this is a very lighthearted comedic romance, written with a very witty and lively prose - in may ways comparable to P G Wodehouse with just a little more dose of realism. Just a little. In any event, just my cup of tea.

If you care to learn a little more about Georgette Heyer, Stephen Fry has a nice piece on her that you can read HERE.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 95)

 

Still down that rabbit hole, but this time, with one of the originals. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen  B-

This is not the first Jane Austen book I've read, though to be honest, I'm not sure what the other one was. I  suspect it was Pride and Prejudice. But that was at least 30 years ago, and I only remember picking it off the classic shelf of the little library to read, nothing of the story. While I enjoyed this book, it is not one I'm going to reread every year or two, like true fans of Miss Austen.

My interest in this book is entirely due to my recent Georgette Heyer books. I wanted to see how a story written in the period would read, if only to compare it to the more recent, but certainly not recent, works of Georgette Heyer. If you are interested in the story itself, move along. You can find that on other places on the internet to satisfy that curiosity. So how does Heyer's Regency Books - the couple I've read - compare to this Austen book? 

The Heyer books that I've read have much more colorful characters. Fanny Price, the main protagonist in this story is rather colorless and is no doubt meant to be so. She is, for the most part an observer rather than a player. Maybe you get to know all the main characters perhaps a bit deeper than in the Heyer books, but it's hard to say. You certainly get a lot more speeches in the Austen books, some go on for pages explaining their feelings. While the story in Mansfield Park has it moments of tension and drama, they are set within a fairly mundane venue. Well, the mundane venue of wealthy people who don't have to work for their living. This is true for the Heyer books as well. Almost no one in any of the stories I've read actually do anything. That's not quite true. The women sit around and sew things. All the time. And Sir Thomas, the master of Mansfield Park does have to go off to the West Indies to look after his business concerns there, but otherwise, all the characters in both this story, and in the Heyer stories I've read, fill their days with riding horse, riding in carriages, visiting, dancing, clubbing, and gambling.

In these stories there is a clear sense of the helplessness of women in society - the limits of their freedom, and how the clever ones can overcome some of these limits with wit, charm, and cunning. In both stories, one is introduced to a time when people were commonly in ill health, which often plays a role in the stories.

As one would expect, the Heyer books are written in a more modern style, than Austen's book. They move along quicker, have more action, and are less reflective. I read books for entertainment and, in the case of historical fiction, for an insight in to life in another place and time, so that I can not address the issues that Jane Austen may've been addressing in her story. I suspect that she was addressing issues, but they likely either went over my head, or were absorbed unconsciously.

While I enjoyed Mansfield Park, I read in two days, I can't say that it entirely enchanted me. There is an ever-so-slightly remove from the story in the narration, and indeed, Jane either ran out of time, paper, or interest, as the ending is rather unsatisfactory - a simple summarization of the fall out of the main plot resolutions. On the whole, while recognizing the worth of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, I prefer the Georgette Heyer's stories I've so far read a bit more.

A side note: The 1999 movie of this novel is free on YouTube and I have given it 25 minutes of my time. Of course a 2 hour movie is not going to directly replicate a book, and one must expect things will be sliced, diced, and condensed. And from what I could tell, they were. Rather drastically. What was most telling, however, was the re-imagining of the heroine, Fanny Price. In the book she is quiet, submissive, rather sickly, intelligent, and observant, but is about as effervescent as dishwater, after washing the dishes. In the movie she is creative, cheerful, playful, unrecognizable from the Fanny in the novel. One could see why this transformation was necessary, but it is quite jarring and off-putting if you, like me, have the book fresh in your mind. In short, don't mistake the movie for the book.

 

Introducing The Darval-Mers Dossier

Back in January, with my part of Glencrow Summer done, save for the corrections as they came in, I turned my attention to my next writing project, my "Project 2027" i.e. my book for 2027 in my one-book-a-year plan. However, since I like to make hay while the sun shines, I, with something of a story in mind, sat down and started writing the first draft of my next book, The Darval-Mers Dossier. (Working title.)

So what is The Darval-Mers Dossier all about, you ask? (I hope.) Well, when, after finishing  Chateau Clare, I said I wanted to write another story set in that world, one of my beta readers suggested that I write a "Red Wine Agency" story. Readers of Chateau Clare may recall a fictional series of books of intrigue of that name, which were set in the revolutionary period leading to the Second Founding. These Red Wine Agency books played a key part in that story. So when he suggested I write my own Red Wine Agency story, I thought, why not? Though, I will admit I put off tackling it until I finished the story I had already in mind, which came to be Glencrow Summer, also set in that world.

However, with Glencrow Summer written, save for corrections, I turned my attention to a story about Mr Redinal Wine. It quickly became clear to me that the type of story described in my book, was not the type of stories I write, unless there is there such a  thing as "cozy thrillers. I found the prospect of writing a secret agent/detective story set in the cutthroat struggle between the Great House of Lorria rather daunting. Not being a reader of thrillers, I doubted that I could live up to their standard. And then, well there's my laziness. While I had built up the world for Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, a Red Wine Agency story needed to be set in a much earlier time period to be consistent with its appearance in Chateau Clare. This era was one were advanced technology was still being used, if slowly dying out. In short, a semi-new world to develop. Plus I would have to come with a backstory for Mr Wine to place him in the world and his trade. There had to be an easier way.

What I hit upon was to write a "prequel" to the main Red Wine Agency stories, a story set before Mr Wine became heavily involved in all the intrigues of that period. It would serve as the backstory for the character and his introduction to that trade. I also decided to write it in the form of an old fashioned mystery story, with the main character, i.e. the proto-Mr Wine acting like an amateur detective, who, following clues, solves the mystery. It even would have the classic who-done-it style exposition at the climax, though it's not a murder mystery. I don't do murder. Having decided on the form, and having come up with a fairly straight forward story, I started writing it on 6 January 2025 and finished the first draft of 48,014 words on 10 March. That's 63 days, or around 762 words per day on  average. I usually average a bit over 1,000 words a day, but I didn't have a looming deadline, and I was working out a lot of things on the fly.

Now, 48K words is not a long book. My second drafts usually add around 10%+ more words as I add the descriptions I skimped on, and expand dialog and such, so its final world count could be close to the wordcount of The Prisoner of Cimlye which is 53K+ words. I think is fine, since Agatha Christie has said that the best word count for a mystery novel is between 40K and 50K. I'm happy go along with the master on this one.

Given that I have a first draft in hand, I believe that, unless life and/or death get in the way, I'll be able to release it before 2027. I'll put this on the shelf for maybe a month before tackling the second and third drafts. Given the shortness of this story, a month of revisions should do, after which there is proof and beta readings, and coming up with the cover art. Still, I'm looking to release The Darval-Mers Dossier a few years early; hopefully in June or July 2025. Between now and then, I will be providing more details about this story. Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post ( No.94)

 

We're back down that rabbit hole again this week. What can I say? There are a lot of them, many of which are available at the library with no, or short waiting lists.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer  B+

This story is set in pre-revolutionary France and England - 1740's -  rather than in England's Regency period of some 70 years later. It concerns an English duke with half a dozen different names, and a young person who he "buys" to be his page - for a reason that slowly becomes apparent. This duke is notoriously coldhearted and ruthless fellow who is bent on revenge. The type of fellow, who having lost one fortune gambling, and wins another fortune from a young an foolish fellow who gambles with him and who ends up recklessly getting killed in a duel, it is said, as a result of his financial ruin. In short, he's not a very pleasant fellow, as we first meet him.

I found this book's beginning worrisome in that, as I said, the duke is anything but likeable, and the setting in Paris. However, as the story goes on it becomes  much more enjoyable once it focuses on the fate of the very engaging "page." I can't really go into the details of the plot as it is hard to talk much about it without spoiling some of its secrets. Suffice to say there is a lot going on in the story, with plenty of action. 

While romance seems to always be a feature of her stories, Heyer is very much a historical fiction writer, and a creator of a great variety of different, and often engaging characters, as well as a writer of witty dialog, which is always a plus for me. I do think that historical fiction of this sort is going to be my go-to genre for the foreseeable future.

I find it hard to grade these stories. I really enjoy them, but when I compare them to my A grade books, specifically the Brother Cadfael books, I have to admit that I find the Cadfael stories are better or perhaps, more appealingly written stories. Brother Cadfael and his friend Hugh, are rather dear to me. That said, I really have enjoyed all of the Heyer stories I've read so far. They could be A stories. It is only when I compare them to Peters' stories, do they fall just a little short. 

A Milestone Passed

 

I was standing behind the door when ambition was being passed out. I would like to believe that I was sharp enough even then, to have quietly slipped behind it, for ambition is an uncomfortable curse gift. You can get into all sorts of trouble with ambition. So far I have avoided both ambition and all sorts of trouble. I mention this only because when I set out to write, and eventually publish my books, my ambition extended only so far as to not make a fool of myself. 

I will admit that I always wanted to be a writer. Call that ambition if you care to, but my approach was hardly ambitious, nor were my goals. Which, in addition to not making a fool of myself, was simply to entertain some people who had the same taste in stories that I have. My books are happily just niche books. I had no great expectations at all.

Well, here we are nearly ten years later, and my ambitions, such as they are, have been met. They were met long ago. Now, I've kept a record of my sales, but it's just a game for me. I had, and still have, no numerical goals. I'm just curious to see how my books do each month. 

Where was I? Right. The milestone. Sometime in the middle of last month, I sold my 100,000th book. Not something I set out to do, but there it is.

Still, I will admit 100,000 is a nice round, fat number. It is big enough to impress some people, if anybody ever asks. Few do. And despite my bargain prices, I believe I made about a penny profit on each book I sold. Not a lot. Still, considering that most author/publishers lose money publishing their books, it's something. But in the end it is merely a milestone to mark and move on.

With that milestone behind me, I don't see another significant milestone on the horizon. What do you make a big deal of after 100,000?  200,000 or a million? Who knows?  Who cares? I don't and won't, if only because I'll likely be dead in either case. 

As I said, I never had any grand ambitions when I started publishing my books. I find myself more impressive by the number of books I've written. I'm truly amazed that I have written 17 or 21 books, depending on how you care to count them, written in the last 15 years. That is 1,956,952 published words. I wouldn't have thought I had that many words or stories in me to set down.

Of course, all I did was write the books. Really, this milestone is all about you, dear readers. You are the ones who are actually responsible for all those copies sold. It was you, my readers, who, in buying, reading, and hopefully enjoying these books carried all of us past this milestone. And for that, I am extremely grateful to all of you. Thank you so very much!

The Saturday Morning Post (No.93) EXTRA! EXTRA!

YET ANOTHER EXTRA EDITON

Today we have another book I came across watching a Tristan and the Classics video This time he listed what are considered the 50 greatest espionage novels by polls, writers, and experts. The Secret of the Sands, which I reviewed not long ago came in at No. 47, and The 39 Steps, another favorite of mine came in at No. 8. Since I'm not interested in Cold War espionage, I chose a WWll espionage novel set in England.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett  DNF 46%

I gave it a good go. But the deeper I got into it, the less I was enjoying it. So, by the time I was nearly halfway through the book, I was wishing it was finished. So I finished it.

This book didn't work for me for several reasons. The first being that the story was told from a number of points of view and spans five years. I'm simply not a fan of stories with multiple points. It's not an automatic thing, but it has to be done well for me to enjoy the book. For example, there was as young couple featured in several early chapters that basically disappeared after the first quarter, though, I gathered by a brief reference in the forward of the book, that they would be playing their part in the story near the end of it. 

That brings me on to my second complaint, which is that the story was told in a very fragmented way. It was a patchwork quilt of episodes over the course of five years of a variety of characters, that included their backstories, or rather parts of them, as well as some background history, and scenes designed to set the stage for WWll England. In short, all sorts scenes, characters, and info jumbled together, destroying, for me, the flow of the story. 

Of course, none of these would matter, if the characters were compelling. But I found that none of them were in the least compelling, perhaps because of their scattered appearances throughout the story. The Nazi spy is a clever, ruthless, and utterly colorless character, who sometimes does unbelievable things. We follow him through various episodes. The British counter-intelligent agents are also utterly colorless and forgettable, despite the pages spent giving them something of a backstory, most of which seemed irrelevant. Moreover, as I mentioned they appear and disappear throughout the story, often only briefly and episodically. Thus, as a reader, I was never brought into the story enough to care about them, nor for that matter, the stakes. 

The stakes are a problem with books like this because we know the ending. They can say in the story, that the secret the spy discovers could change the outcome of the war, but we know that nothing of that sort actually happened. And while I'm not that knowledgeable about the history of the D-Day invasions, I still have to question if the spy did, in fact, succeed in his mission, if the secret he discovered was critical enough to change history. And thus, unless I was invested in a character, and/or the story, as just a story in and of itself, like I was in The 39 Steps, whose basic premise is much the same, the story doesn't work. This one didn't. 

I believe this is Ken Follett's first published novel, and he's gone on to write some very acclaimed books. Indeed, one of the reasons I picked this book from the 50 is because his massive historical fiction books, like The Pillars of the Earth, have been highly praised. All of which is to say, this book didn't work for me, but it might work for you.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 92)

We're still down that rabbit hole...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Toll-Gate by Georgette Heyer  B

Yes, it's another Georgette Heyer Regency story, only this time it's a mystery adventure story set shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, i.e. around 1816 or so. The story concerns one ex-captain in an elite British regiment, one Captain John Staple. He is the second son of a landed gentry and as such took up soldiering as a profession, and had a great time doin so during the wars. However, he finds peacetime soldiering didn't appeal to him, so he sold out and is now roaming about, getting into and out of strange adventures. 

In this story, he arrives at a toll-gate on a rainy night while traveling home from his brother's country estate. He finds that it's manned by a frightened youngster.  It seems that toll roads are not a new thing, and travelers on this road had to pay to use it, enforced by toll-gates along the way. In any event, he learns that the youngster's father had gone off for an hour or two, but had yet to return. The youngster finds himself alone in the night, so Captain Staple decides to spend the night in the gate keeper's cottage, to keep the frightened boy company and get himself out of the rain. He expected the father to return before morning. But he doesn't, leaving his son in the lurch, manning the toll gate by himself. What Captain Staple would've done next is an open question, because while playing the part as the toll-gate keeper that morning, he meets a beautiful lady in a carriage at the gate, and, of course, falls in love with her. He then stays on pretending to be the cousin of the true gatekeeper in order to get to know her. She turns out to be the daughter of the local gentry who is slowly dying.  He also feels that he should try to solve the mystery of what has happened to the true gatekeeper. 

In the course of the story we get to meet a colorful assortment of characters, booth good and bad, as Captain Staple sets out to solve what turns out to be several the mysteries, while at the same time courting, and protecting his true love from some very unpleasant characters who are staying in the house of the dying gentry. The story is told in the dialect of the times, and the slang of the rather raffish characters we met. I could've spent hours looking up all the slang terms she used in my copy of the Dictionary of Historic Slang if I had cared to. I did not. I just went with the flow. It works just as well.

All in all, an entertaining book. This one is more of a historical mystery and adventure than a romance. I'll no doubt be returning to Georgette Heyer in the future, as the two I've read have been entertaining and are readily available from the library whenever I need something to read.