Second paragraph of third chapter: Think of the price of stamps and melons. I was having a blazing row about a melon. Savvy Savvy's a supermarket. Their only superlatives are their blinking prices.
I read a bunch of Lovejoy books back in 2012-2013, and eventually gave up because I couldn't take the narrator's narcissism and misogyny. On impulse I ( Read more... )

The house lies back from the pavement. Beyond the line of dwellings is a row of gardens. Then the dreadful countryside starts, rolling fields, woods, streams, trees. Really horrible, not an antique shop anywhere. I hate the bloody stuff.
I think that this will be my last Lovejoy book for a while. The actual antique mystery bit is particularly well ( Read more... )

The canal runs straight from the landing-stage into the heart of what is left of Torvello's great square. Now it's not even a village green. The great stone arches of the fifteenth century bridges, the dazzling fondamento, the might of empire literally fallen and overgrown.
This is a reasonably good illustration of both the strengths and weaknesses ( Read more... )

Just when I was in paradise the phone rang.
This is the very first Lovejoy novel, published in 1977 and adapted for TV as part of the first season in 1986. It is interesting coming to it after having read more than half of the rest of the series. Very few of the other books are really recognisable as murder mysteries; they tend to spiral off into ( Read more... )

'These aren't padpas, Doshie,' I said. 'They're tsavorite.' A tsavorite is properly green grossular, a sort of garnet discovered some seventy years ago near Kenya's National Park at Tsavo. Its lovely green lies between deep Sri Lankan emeralds and a peridot. (Tip: Don't buy a tsavorite unless it's above one carat in size.) 'Measure its single ( Read more... )

I heard his voice exclaim, 'Listen to the noisy sods.' And a female voice, husky with love, said, 'Never mind them, darling. Come back here.' And I thought another thought, except this one was even more stupid. I actually recognised her voice, until I corrected myself. It couldn't be, never in a million years.
This is the most recent Lovejoy book, ( Read more... )

Another Lovejoy book, from the later end of the series, and operating very much to the formula of richly realised foreign setting (in this case a cruise ship going round the Baltic, with special attention to St Petersburg), with Lovejoy mixed up in a heist most of whose details are incomprehensible (and remain so) and his supernatural sense of ( Read more... )

My regular reader will be glad to know that I'm taking a break from Lovejoy at present, but I am well behind with book-blogging so here is one I finished a week or so ago. Actually it is rather a nice story, Lovejoy being much more like the lovable rogue played by Ian McShane on TV than the duplicitous psychopath of the earlier books. Here he falls ( Read more... )

Blogging has been very light round here for the last week or so - I have been travelling a lot, with some unexpected wrinkles and last-minute changes of plan, am behind in bookblogging and also in the middle of three very thick books.

But I will break my silence with notes on a couple of screen adaptations which I watched today of texts which I ( Read more... )

Lovejoy goes to Ireland this time, lured into a particularly implausible (though for once fairly comprehensible) scheme involving fake gold copies of a Celtic torc, and Lovejoy becoming very entangled with the women behind the scheme. As with the Hong Kong of Jade Woman, this Ireland is of an earlier time period than the one the book is ostensibly ( Read more... )