“The Importance of Being Earnest” is a light-hearted play – and like everything written by Oscar Wilde it’s absolutely perfect. The author has produced the greatest abuse of Victorian morals, but in such a charming way that nobody could possibly be angry with him for this.
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Another one of Hercule Poirot cases – this time, his friend Captain Hastings is here too. The setup is a little unusual – before each murder is committed, Hercule Poirot receives a letter from the murderer, challenging him – and then, when it’s actually committed, Poirot can do nothing about it. Not every day we see this great man fail!
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As three men with a dog travel along the Thames in a boat faithfully following the route taken by the characters of “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome, Sergeant Cribb follows them. They are his chief suspects in the murder of a tramp. Accompanied by Constable Thackeray, Constable Hardy and a young principal witness, Miss Harriet Shaw, he travels by boat, by cab, by steamer and by train, only to find out that his investigation as not going to be as simple as he expected. He’ll need Miss Shaw’s assistance to succeed this time – she is shrewd enough to be a plain-clothes detective herself, only in those Victorian days nobody in England heard about policewomen. But she gives the Sergeant a very useful tip.
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This is my first encounter with this English author’s work – today at the English Speaking Club (hosted in a library in Saratov) I picked two books by him, and started with this particular one. The book, as Wikipedia tells me, was written in 1975, but the events take place approximately 90 years earlier. It must be hard to write with such confidence about the past, I daresay – involves a lot of historical research to get the background right.
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“The Painted Veil” can be justly tagged a love story, but it’s not quite a usual one. It goes much deeper into the psychology of everyone involved than it’s usually done in love stories – and it has, unfortunately, no happy end.
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This book – unlike most of the books written by this authors – didn’t grab my attention at once. When I first made an attempt at reading it, I did a chapter and a half – and then put the book aside. It bored me. Now I can’t believe it, because my second attempt was more successful, and the book proved excellent.
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Philip Marlowe obviously doesn’t like his new client – a nice-looking, quaint, modest young girl, an obedient daughter of a religious mother. Is it just because she disapproves of smoking and drinking? Or is there something more behind his rudeness? ESP, probably?
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This is another novel from the series about the American journalist Jim Qwilleran, his “psychic” cat Koko and his other Siamese – a female called Yum Yum without any super abilities. She is just charming and very independent – that’s all.
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My road to discovering Ian Rankin wasn’t a short one. Having received two of his novels as a gift from an English friend more than a year ago, I hesitated until recently, the unusual thickness of the volumes putting me off. Then I went through my collection again and found the third book by the same author – a collection of short stories named “A Good Hanging”. I put all three books together on the shelf – and this holiday season decided to try them finally, since all my fellow detective story lovers seemed to regard Ian Rankin as one of the masters of the genre.
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“The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” is a book of poems of Middle Earth, of which only the first two relate to Tom Bombadil – the enigmatic creature looking like a man but having powers no man possesses.
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