The Saturday Morning Post (No.82)

 

I put a hold on this book after reading A Spy in the House, the first book in The Agency series, and lo, and behold, it became available on the day I finished Celia's House. This is the third of the four book series featuring Mary Quinn, undercover agent of The Agency. I haven't read the second book, but since this was an ebook from from the library. i.e. take it or get back in line, I guess I'm reading them out of order. So, let's see this entry lives up to the modest promise of the first installment.

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 Traitor in the Tunnel by Y. S. Lee  C+

Like the first book, this is a penny dreadful sort of novel, with several loosie-goosey plots lines that sort of resolve themselves. In this installment, our hero, Mary, has been placed in Buckingham Palace  to work as a maid in the royal household in order to discover who is stealing a number of semi-valuable items from the palace. Then there's the murder of a toff in a Limehouse opium den, who happened to be in the company of the Bertie, the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's oldest son. While this incident must be hushed up to the general public, Mary is in a position to learn that the opium-addled alleged murderer has the same name as her father, whom she had thought was dead, lost at sea. Could it be? She must find out, and so sets out to investigate both the murder, the murderer, in addition to her assigned mission. As well as another mission involving her sometimes-boyfriend, and a sewer tunnel under the palace. There is a lot going on in the story, all rather loosely tied together.

Mary Quinn is an engaging character who dares almost anything. I noticed that I often questioned the wisdom of what she dares to do, when I have a feeling that I never would have, if the hero was a male. I guess it's a touch of sexism when you find yourself thinking a woman shouldn't be doing dangerous/foolish things that a you'd have no trouble imagining a male doing. Or maybe you think a woman would just know better. Just a random observation. 

This story lost points because it uses one trope that I really dislike. And that trope is, in Victorian era stories, including Queen Victoria, and/or Albert, and/or in this case, Prince Bertie, as active characters in the novel. It really bugs me how often authors like bringing historical royalty into their stories. I don't know why, except maybe to add some glamor to their story? In this story we have both Queen Victoria acting uncharacteristically, at least in my opinion, and poor Bertie, doesn't fare well in it, though I can't say how historically accurate his portrait was.

All that said, I guess I'll read the other two books when they become available. They get a passing grade, mostly on the writing and characters, certainly not on their plots.

Next week, a special edition listing all the books I read in 2024... Stay tuned.

Happy Holidays!

 

HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE TO EVERYONE, WHATEVER AND HOWEVER YOU CELEBRATE! HAVE A WONDERFUL TIME!

The Saturday Morning Post (No.81)

This week we have another D E Stevenson story. This one dates back to 1943.

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. 

Celia's House by D. E. Stevenson   C+

This story is a modest family saga. Sagas are not really my cup of tea when it comes to stories, so that might color my appreciation of the story, a little. The story is set in what I believe is the Borderlands of Scotland and tells the story of the Dunne family of Dunnian House starting in 1905 and ending in 1942. 

The initial premise is that the eighty-something old spinster of Dunnian house, Miss Celia Dunne, decides to leave the house to her great-nephew naval Lt. Commander Humphrey because she likes him much better than a more direct heir, with a wife that she knows will change Dunnian House all out of recognition. There is one catch, however. Unlike the custom of the time where the eldest son would inherit the estate, Lt Commander Humphrey must leave the estate to a daughter, one of which he doesn't have yet, and she must be named Celia. Despite some reservations, he agrees, in order to settle his family in a place of their own, who up to then had been moving frequently, and living hand to mouth on his naval pay - family that he rarely gets to see as a naval officer. With this settled, we then follow the family as they grow up over the course of nearly forty years, each with their issues as they make their way to adulthood, and eventually families of their own. As such, the novel is one of episodes dealing with various characters and issues strung out over the years.

As with all the work of Stevenson, it is well written with sharp observations of people and customs, laced with sentimentality. What it lacks, for me, is a central character to follow through the story. And, as I said at the top, I'm not a very avid fan of long drawn out saga. And while I enjoyed reading this story when I was reading it, I wasn't all that eager to get back to it when I put it down. And, I must confess I skim-read certain small sections, so that I can't really give it more than a grade of C, with a plus for Stevenson's always readable writing.

 

Stories Going Forward

I thought I might, for a change, use this week's post to talk about my writing. (That's a joke, son.*) The fact is that 've been talking about my current writing focus in a number of posts over the last several months - in connection with Chateau Clare and Passage to Jarpara. However, I thought I might as well pull all my thoughts together and set them down in one post. A manifesto, of sorts.

I should say at the top, that you should not expect to see any radical change in my style. What has been changing, over the last year or two, is the focus of my stories. This is largely due to that fact that I find that I want to write novels. Full stop. Not genre fiction. Rather, light fiction novels without the expectations of any particular genre. Just novels.

In the past, most of my novels could be described as either romances and/or adventure stories and marketed as either science fiction or fantast (or both), which is to say, genre fiction. What is changing is my emphasis on adventure. It's mostly gone. I consider an unpleasant situation in real life to be an adventure, but only when it is viewed as a pasted event. In stories, adventure is putting your poor characters into situations where there's a real danger of them getting killed. In my case, this often involved travel as well. I hate to travel, so it's also a "adventure" for me. Going forward, don't see myself crafting a story around extreme danger and travel. I won't absolutely rule out deadly danger, or travel, but it will not be an integral feature of my stories. In short, my days of writing adventure stories are likely over. 

All my stories will continue to be set in the future, either on distant planets or far future Earth. In this respect they could be considered science fiction, or fantasy. I may list them in one of the fantasy categories, because fantasy outsells science fiction, but I will also list them on other categories as well. For example, The Girl on the Kerb has done very well as a espionage thriller. Lesson learned. Expand my potential readership.

I won't be listing them as SF because they don't fit the story mode of science fiction. Almost all of my SF stories feature societies that have an early 20th century vibe to them, since that is my favorite time period. Thus, even when I've set stories in the future, the stories are looking back, which makes them more akin to fantasy than to science fiction. That being the case, they're fantasy, low, mundane fantasy. But fantasy.

As for the setting, the future setting is just that - a setting, a backdrop, and a cheat that allows me to invent everything I want to, without having to do any research into the known past.

As I mentioned above, my stories have been, and will continue to be light fiction, with a bit of humor. I have nothing to say about humanity or the real world. My goal is to take myself, and my readers, to a different world for a while. Escapist literature. They will be as character focused as I can write them, with a first person narrator like every other novel of mine. They will likely feature a romance of some sort. I blame that on my early love of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, which always had a romance element to them - John Carter & the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Tarzan and Jane.

They may well have a thread of mystery or little mysteries to solve, most of which will likely involve something science-fiction-y, since the worlds I set these stories on will either be a future Earth, or a world settled by Earth in the past. There may be some incidental danger. However the basic plot will be based on an unusual, but still commonplace, series of events, and the characters will be ordinary people facing this out-of-the-ordinary situation. That said, for the most part, they will be very much slice-of-mundane-life stories. Hopefully, the fact that they are set somewhere else, will add to their appeal. All of them going forward will be stand alone novels, though they may share a world or setting between them.

If you've read Chateau Clare, you've read a perfect example of my new (old) approach to novels. Both A Summer in Amber, and Some Day Days, where also very much in this mold, and so I feel that my current approach is more of a return to my original story telling concept, than a whole new approach. I think this approach offers me the flexibility to write a variety of stories. Indeed, I have several story ideas -Project 2026 & even Project 2027 - in mind. But at this point, they are still birds in the bush.

So to sum it up, Chateau Clare is the type of story I see myself writing in the future - a story with a bit of romance, a bit of mystery, maybe a little danger, all set in an early 20th century-era setting.

Stay tuned.

* Just in case you're not ancient and/or not an American, that's the tag line of an old cartoon character, a rooster named Foghorn Leghorn as in: This Clip  However, from googling it, it seems that it was a phrase used widely prior to these cartoons.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 80)

 

I came across this week's book while browsing the library's catalog for historical fiction ebooks. It's another Victorian era mystery set in London. Let's see how this one fares.

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 Spy in the House  by Y S Lee   B

I'm going to be honest right up front. This is a penny dreadful novel with a loosey-goosey premise and a rather ramshackle plot, to say the least. The motivations of most of the characters are hard to take seriously, their actions stretch credibility. And yet, it is well written and features a pleasant, interesting main character with a subtle, but knowing sense of place and time. This is not surprising since the author has a PhD in Victorian literature and culture. As a result, I was able to overlook all the things that, in other hands, I would've, and previously have, criticized in past reviews. Thus I was able to enjoyed the book, hence its grade of B. Good writing and good characters go a long way with me.

As for the plot, this is the first book in a series of four, featuring Mary Quinn, who, as a child of 12 was caught stealing and sentence to be hung. Just before her execution she is whisked away to a school for girls where she is trained to make an independent living, and, become an agent for a detective agency run by the school's founders. The premise is that women are so overlooked and underrated in Victorian society, that they can be placed in situations where they could ferret out, without suspicion, the information that a male agent could not. Her first assignment is to act as a companion for the daughter of a family suspected of being smugglers and insurance frauds. As I said, the premise and plot are pretty loosey-goosey, but it clips along regardless.

I have complained in the past about contemporary historical fiction that likes to impress the reader with the author's skill at using for their research Wikipedia, by including all sorts of factoids dropped in here and there in the story. One of the things that elevated this story above the others I've read, was that the historical period was presented without resorting to overt info dumps. Except in one case. The story is set in the year 1858, and describes the how bad the river Thames smelled. This was part of the story's backdrop setting. I happened to have come across the fact that there was one year when the river's smell was so strong that it resulted in a massive rebuilding of the river and London's sewer system. I would've looked it up once I finished the book, but Lee felt the need to tell the reader a little about the Great Stink in a conversation. I was disappointed, but for the most part she was able to convey little facets of London life in 1858 without calling attention to the fact that she was doing so, unlike the other books of this period that I've read recently. So I turned a blind eye to this infraction. 

So, the bottom line - an entertaining adventure story. Not much of a mystery, you can figure out the culprit pretty early on, and the "detecting" is pretty basic. Nothing clever. You're here for the characters, not the plot or mystery. If the library has the second volume, I'll order it up, which is more than I can say for the other Victorian London mysteries I've read.

Words

English words, to be precise. The little tools I use to create little worlds for my amusement. What about them? Well in this post, I'm going to talk about how they came to be so annoying to write them "properly." We're talking about spelling here. I promise not to make this into a rant about how English words are spelled seemingly randomly, though I will have to keep a tight rain reign - rein on my temper.

I will readily admit that I am a terrible speller, but then, English is a terribly spelled language. In one of the videos I'm going to mention, the fellow said that fully 70% of English words actually follow some sort of rule. Wow! That, folks, is a "D" grade in English. It seems that I spelled as well at the English language does itself. He goes on to say that a lot of the "rules" are known only to those who specialize in the study of the language. In short, unless you get an university degree in the study of words and language (I'm too lazy to look up the term) you have to learn to spell correctly by rote memorization. A deep knowledge of phonetics may help, but it's hardly a surefire method. I have neither the talent to rote memorize, nor any training in phonetics - I doubt they taught it sixty years ago, like they may do today. I am, therefore a terrible speller, but thanks to the computer, I can overcome that handicap.

However, there is a cost. My handwriting, never elegant, is now almost unreadable, and I've developed a fear of using it for anything more than a shopping list. I've become so reliant on my computer's spell checking, that I just don't trust myself to spell anything correctly without it. This is also true: in several of the jobs I've had, I had to make shelf signs, advertising specials, etc., and found that if I stared any length of time at a word as simple as "The" I would began to feel uneasy, as to if I spelled it right. It would begin to look wrong, even though I couldn't think of another way to spell the word. Anyway, this is just the intro to what I really want to talk about, and that is the YouTube video channels that talk about words and the English language which I find interesting. I find a lot of things interesting that I never have any interest in doing.

The first video I what to highlight is this one from Let Them Talk TV which you can find HERE In this video the host, Gideon outlines the events of the last 1500 years that have gone into making English spelling such a chaotic mess. Briefly, the people of Britain had their own alphabet, a variation of the runic ones found across Northern Europe. My other word  channel Robwords recently had a whole episode on this topic HERE that you can watch to learn more them. In any event, the short story is that in the sixth century the Catholic church wanted its scribes in England to use the Latin alphabet rather than the runic one. The problem was that the runic one had letters for sounds that the English used, but Romans didn't, so that over time, combinations of Roman letters came to be used to make these sounds. But then the Normans conquered England and brought their French spellings into English. Plus, the monks who copied text used a form of the text that was almost all straight vertical lines, making them almost unreadable, so they added some letters to words to distinguish them. And then printing came along, and in order to justify the line of text left and right, the printers would add letters to some words just to make the line even on the right. And then the way the English pronounced their language changed over the course of two centuries, while the spelling did not. And then the renaissance happened and scholars wanted the words to better reflect what they thought was the Latin root word so they added letters that were not pronounced to look like the Latin root word... And so it goes. 

Robwords also posted a recent video on all the words Shakespeare is said to have invented HERE.  There are some 1,700 of them, made by more or less creatively combining words, or using them in unaccustomed ways. Ah, those were the days. And in some ways, they are still those days, at least on social media where English is evolving or decaying, quite happily. But the fact is that these videos show that the English language has always been changing, generation to generation, century to century, as society changes. This fact seems to be lost on some people. The people in particular who were able to master the rules and proper uses and spelling - 20 or 30 years ago. And unless they have changed with time and English usage, (Unlikely) they've become out of step with current English. Still, especially in the early self-published ebook days, you'd frequently find them in book reviews pointing out all the errors in English usage and spelling, and bemoaning the ignorance of the writers, if only to make a point of exhibiting their superior knowledge of the supposedly "right" way to use the language. It was a hill they seemed happy to die on. And die on it they will. Phuc'em.

Not that it really bothered me. My early efforts did have more typos then I realized, so I can only thank them for pointing them out. As for grammar, well my stories are written from within the story itself by a character in the story and in the vernacular, a much more loose version of English. A third person narrator, on the other hand, is a professional novelist telling the story from the outside, and can be expected to use more proper English. That's my story, anyways.

In any event, both of these channels offer many interesting stories about words - how they came to be, were used, and where they originally came from and meant. All very interesting.

Back in the day, it was thought that the internet would open up the world to knowledge, and it does. But I've found that YouTube makes all that knowledge much more entertaining to learn. These days, I have too much time during the day, and so I spend too much time on YouTube. However, if I learn something new, I can justify it. In a future post I think I might go through the YouTube channels that I watch, and all the stuff that I learn about but will never use.

Next week, however, more thoughts on my 2026 Project. Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 79)

Where did this book come from? To be honest, I don't remember. Having finished my last book, I opened up my Fire tablet's Kindle page, and found this week's book in my library. By the look of it, I suspect I downloaded it several years ago when I first started reading again. At that time I was going through the Kindle store looking for free books in several categories, one of them was historical fiction, which this book would fall into. I don't know if I sampled it back then and gave it a miss, or if I never got around to trying it. If I did, I didn't read more than a page. But I've read more than a page this week, so on with the show.

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 Ops Room Girls  by Vicki Beeby  C+

This is "An uplifting and romantic WW2 saga" or in other words, a cozy World War ll romance novel, the first of a three book series. Now, I am likely not the target audience for this book, so that any reader who's into (tame) romances, will probably rate this book higher than I did. That said there is nothing to dislike about this story and things to like about it.

I would call it a cozy story, as there is no sex to speak of, just romance, friendships, and happy endings, with little violence, no blood and gore. It is set in the summer of 1940, my favorite summer, and recounts the story of Evie, who's mother turned down Evie's scholarship to Oxford upon the death of her father. She who wants Evie to take a job at a bank. Evie is determined to do something more with her life, and on a whim of defiance, joints the WAAF, the Woman's Auxiliary Air Force. She is trained to work in one of the fighter control's centers which were used to direct British fighters to intercept raiding German air forces during the summer leading to the famous Blitz. 

Here she meets and bonds with two other woman becoming the good friends she never had before. And of course, being a romance, she meets and falls in love a handsome pilot, who is constantly in danger. The author has done her homework as to how her job worked, and the operation of the base. However, this it the year and the place, as I said in another post about a book from this period, that is my favorite time in history, and having read a variety of accounts, I've developed my own "sense" of the time and place, and, alas, I've never found a novel that captures my sense of that time and place. I think that despite being about the war, the larger war outside of her job, with England waiting for a Nazi invasion, is hardly touched upon in this book. Indeed, the beginning of the blitz on 7 Sept 1940 with the mass bombing of East London is not even mentioned. It is a minor quibble, and not something the target audience would ever notice nor likely care about. My one other quibble with this book is that while competently written, it has no authorial voice to speak of. I found it rather bland reading. Not bad, just bland.

I also found the structure of the story a bit strange, in that it is told from point of view of the two major romantically linked characters, Evie and Alex, her pilot, with an occasional aside  with another character, here and there. This may be common in romances, for all I know. In any event, we see the thoughts of both of these people, so we, as the reader, know that each is in love with the other, long before they reveal it to each other. Knowing what we know, are we meant to root for them to get together? The same thing applies to the secret Nazi saboteur in the story. The author tips her hand right from the beginning who the saboteur is, so there is no surprise ending. It's him from first to last. Is this suppose to keep the reader on the edge of their seats, waiting for everyone in the book to discover what we know?  I suppose it's not a mystery story, and doesn't pretend to be, but knowing all these secrets, the story seems to substitute one sort of suspense for another, the tension is not within the story, but between the reader and the story, if you get my meaning. We, the reader know everything, but we have to watch the characters waiting for them to discover what we know. 

There are two other books in this series, and Beeby has written several other series featuring women in British military service in WWll. If it sounds like your jam, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest that you give them a try. I was happy to find it in my kindle library, however it got there.

December Writing Update

As anyone who have been following this blog knows, I felt some trepidation about the release of Chateau Clare. I wondered if it might be too different from what I had written in the past for it to be well received by my readers. I am happy to say that, at least so far, early readers seem to have enjoyed it. The earliest ratings likely come from my most loyal readers, the choir, so to speak, and so its rating average will inevitably fall as it makes it into the hands of readers less familiar with my writing. Still, it's off to a very good start indeed. Between my sales on Amazon.com for $3.99 and the free sales on Amazon.uk.co, I've sold over 50 copies on Amazon which has generated 7 ratings, with one very kind review by acflory. This is an amazing 14% response, with all but one a 5 star rating. Thank you all! Its over all sales on all my markets combined currently exceed 840 copies of the ebook and audiobook, along with some 20 ratings, all but 3 of them being 5 star. All in all, it's off to a (surprising) great start.

Now, with my 2025 novel out a few months early, it's time to turn my attention to my "Project 2026" i.e. my 2026 novel. Like all my books it's creation is being sparked by the various stories I've read, shows I've seen, songs I've heard, viewed with the attitude of "but this is how I would do it instead." Usually each story is a mix of a variety of inspirations. For example, one inspiration for A Summer in Amber, was the first two seasons of Downton Abbey that I watched 15 years ago on Netflix, specifically the romance plot. I took the premise of an outsider with a romantic interest in one of the daughters of an upper class family as one element of my story. In addition, there I found a lot of inspiration in the stories of Scotland from the likes of Compton Mackenzie and John Buchan. 

It's early yet, but I thought I might tease one ingredient that I've chosen to be part of crafting Project 2026. As an inciting incident for the story, I am drawing on the premise of a P G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Bertie Wooster short story, that being Jeeves Takes Charge. I'm not writing a Wodehouse type of story, but I am going to "borrow" that story's premise.  

In Jeeves Takes Charge, Bertie is ordered by his fiancée Florence Craye to steal or destroy the manuscript of his Uncle Willoughy's reminiscences, "Recollections of a Long Life."  It turns out that in his youth Uncle Willoughy was something "on the tobasco side" and his reminiscences are full of stories about how he and half of the now respectable ruling class of England were being thrown out of music halls for their scandalous behavior in the year 1887, including the father of Florence. She is determined that his reminiscences never reach the publisher. ( I seem to recall that Wodehouse uses this premise again in a Blandings Castle story.) AIn any event, I think I'll use a similar mission to launch my Project 2026 narrator into the story, though in his case without Jeeves, and it will be his great aunt who is writing her memoirs of her scandalous youth and her son who would like it suppressed for several reasons.

There are many other elements, including locations, songs, and fly fishing that I'm going to weave into creating my next novel. I'll talk more about those down the road. But god willing and the creek don't rise, there looks to be a 2026 novel in the offing. We live in an age of miracles.