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I realise I’m falling behind a little with telling you what i’ve been reading since the end of last year..! That’s partly because i’ve been writing like absolute crazy for the past three or four weeks. I don’t think i’ve ever written so much per day, ever. I’m not sure what that’s about – whether i’m making the most of all this fizzing, creative energy that i’ve suddenly got access to – or whether it’s that, combined with just *loving* the three separate projects I’ve been working on this January,…  and all of this plus the fact that, for the first January in living memory i’m not doing anything academic-y like marking complete novels or teaching classes in the evening.

Anyway – no excuse for not telling you about what i’ve been reading…

I finished the year getting stuck with a Barbara Erskine  timeslippy novel, ‘Whispers in the Sand’ – which I should have loved, because it was all about past-lives and shenanigans aboard a Nile Cruise… but I gave up only about a hundred pages from the end, because it became so repetitive… with the hiding and losing of a magic bottle of perfume and the bothering of the wet heroine by two loathsome male characters – one of whom she was bound to fall in love with… I’m not sure what happened to my patience here. It’s usually boundless when it comes to Barbara Erskine’s transtemporal nonsense… but, you know those moments when it all seems a bit endless and you hit the eject button?

Well, anyway – that gave me the chance to start on the first volume of a new cosy mystery series – the Dorothy Parker Mysteries by J J Murphy. ‘Murder Your Darlings’ is the first of these, and it sets up the world of 1920s midtown Manhattan that Dorothy and her literary cronies knock about in beautifully. The Round Table at the Algonquin hotel at lunchtime is a hive of conversation, bitching and badinage that I’ve often wanted to eavesdrop on, and Murphy places us right at the centre of the action here – by making Mrs Parker and her fellow journalists, wits and wags participants in a murder mystery, when a rival newspaperman is found dead, stabbed through the heart by a fountain pen, beneath their legendary table.

It’s done so brilliantly and funnily – with Dorothy bustling around tipsily, clutching her lapdog to her and being cleverer and kinder than almost anyone in history. I loved the fact that her down-at-heel companion in this was William Faulker, before-he-was-famous, whom Dottie takes under her wing, and protetcts again accusations of homicide.

I’m looking forward to the second in the set, ‘You Might as well Die’. It’s quite a new series from Berkley Crime – and just the right point for you all to pick up and get into. These were a lovely present from a friend who went shopping in New York just before Christmas. I don’t think they’re published over here in the UK yet, but they should be. (As should that other Berkley Crime favourite of mine – Cleo Coyle’s Coffeehouse Mysteries. I don’t get UK publishing – don’t they think Cosy Crime would sell over here..? I’m sick of that nasty, violent, salacious crime that you see everywhere in British bookshops.)

Next time – i’ll tell you about how, mid-January I became a bit obsessed with kindle-only somewhat-supernatural novels… with vampires, were-cats and all sorts of crazy, mixed-up, misspelled, badly-punctuated stuff.