Happy New Year!
01 January 2020 | Detectives, Guardian, Reviewing | Post a comment
It’s 2020 already and I realise I haven’t posted here for ages. I blame Twitter. And the number of reviews I’m writing now (thanks Guardian!)…
But 2019 was certainly a great year for books — or rather, for other people’s books, as the amount of reviewing I’m doing has rather delayed my own book on detectives, which I am still writing, thanks to the patience of my editor…
Anyway, just in case you missed any of my reviews, here are some of the best ones from 2019:
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar
Where Shall We Run to? by Alan Garner
Outpost by Dan Richards
Excellent Essex by Gillian Darley
The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson
An Economic History of the English Garden by Roderick Floud
And here are some of my favourite detective reads this year:
Black Money by Ross MacDonald (1965)
Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo (1995)
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway (2017)
1974 by David Peace (1999)
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke (2017)
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985)
And, to finish, some great lines from those books:
“Just a banal gangster story. One more story and surely not the last. Money and power. The story of mankind. With hatred of the world as the only scenario.” (Total Chaos)
“The human condition is most accurately chronicled in pulp, I think.” (Gnomon)
“He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter.” (Bluebird, Bluebird)
