Death of a Gossip

It’s a while since I read this and I realised when I started this sentence that I couldn’t even recall the plot.  Presumably someone died at some stage.  Then it came back to me.  There is something rather comforting in the predictability of books such as this.  It’s undemanding and involves death through murder in a feel-good sort of way.

As a devotee of the BBC series Hamish Macbeth based on these novels I was surprised to discover that the Hamish of the TV series does not quite fit with the Hamish of the book; well, not the one I remember anyway.  I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised but I did rather prefer the TV Hamish.

Even I (a person who reads novels, even light ones, as though they were legal tomes) managed to read this in a few hours in small bite-sized chunks.  It can safely be said, therefore, that it’s not long or demanding.  But it is good fun and there are much worse ways of spending a few hours - even if they did happen to be on a ‘plane journey when the alternatives were hardly throwing themselves at me.

Would I recommend it?  Yeah, why not.  I’m sure you’d enjoy it ‘cos, frankly, there’s nothing not to enjoy about it.

Agatha Raisin And The Quiche Of Death

In May CJ stayed with me and read some of the books on my shelves. One of these was Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by M C Beaton. Naturally he wrote a blog entry on A Book Every Six Days. I couldn't remember what he had written (although I knew that he had enjoyed it) and had deliberately not re-visited the entry until I had read the book myself. Which I have done over the last few days.

This is the first of a series of Agatha Raisin murder mysteries. Agatha sells up her public relations firm and takes early retirement to a quiet village in the Cotswolds. She is the antithesis of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Booklist described her as 'A refreshing, sensible, wonderfully eccentric, thoroughly likeable heroine'. Which book, I wondered, had they been reading. Doubtless we will come to love her as we love Miss Marple but to describe her as any of those things is, in my view, palpably incorrect. She doesn't even have the virtue of being eccentric. She's friendless, boorish, rude, selfish and rather pathetic figure of an anti-heroine. Or was I reading a different book?

That may sound as though I didn't enjoy the character or the book. In fact I enjoyed both. And I will read another one. That will be the test for me. Will the next book continue to provide interest or will the novelty wear off very quickly?

Quotes

Not for the first time , Agatha wondered about British Rail's use of the word 'terminate'. One just expected the train to blow apart. Why not just sat 'stops here'?

'If you want to make your mark on the village, Mrs Raisin, you could try becoming popular.' Agatha looked at him in amazement. Fame, money and power were surely the only things needed to make one's mark on the world. 'It comes slowly,' he said 'All you have to do is start to like people. If they like you back, that is a bonus.'