Aye, see him: The house with Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown (1901)

This is a classic of Scottish literature that many non Scots will not have come across. Actually, a lot of Scots won’t have come across it either. This is most likely because it was only Brown’s second book – he died the year after it was published, and the other was published under a pseudonym. It is generally seen as a rejoinder to the sickly, sentimental fiction known as the Scottish kailyard, popular in the late nineteenth century.

I could perhaps best summarise this book as Lewis Grassic Gibbon meets the Mayor of Casterbridge, to give an idea of what it’s about. It shows rural Scots society in an altogether different light from that of the Kailyard, and I’m sorry to say, it’s a portrait that I still recognise to some degree in contemporary Scots culture – all small minded niggling and ‘ah kent his faither’.

Kissing cousins: Next of Kin by John Boyne (2006)

Set against a background of the abdication crises of 1936, with the plot deftly woven between real events, this erudite and entertaining historical thriller has a neat twist at the end.

Shooting Lions & Tigers: Manly Pursuits by Ann Harries (1999)

This book had been sitting on Mt TBR for over two years before I finally got around to reading it the other week. It started off well, and I was enjoying it, but it seemed to run out steam a bit, or perhaps I did, and it took me far longer than I would have liked to finish it. It is well written, ludicrously funny in places, and yet it never really sparked for me.

Birds of a feather: The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black aka John Banville (2007)

I was intrigued by the first novel in this new series by the pseudonymous Black, Christine Falls, which I reviewed last year. As I recall the thing that struck me most was the way the protagonist, Quirke lacked a first name – he still does. Is this literary pretentiousness on the part of Banville, or merely lack of imagination? Whichever, I find it’s beginning to grate. And get in the way of the story, which is always bad, especially when, as here, the story is actually pretty good. But then I know nothing about the working practices of pathologists in 1950s Ireland, and it may be total mince for all I know.

The story begins naturally, with a body. This time of an apparent suicide. Quirke is asked to do the autopsy by the body’s grieving husband; an old chum of Quirke’s that he hasn’t seen for years. Billy Hunt is desperate that his beloved’s body not be cut up, and Quirke agrees. But then he finds puncture wounds on the woman’s arm, and his curiosity gets the better of him. As in Christine Falls we have a picture of a society where inconvenient answers, indeed inconvenient questions are swept under the carpet, and the road to find the truth about the woman’s death is rocky indeed. Along the way, Banville creates a wonderfully evocative atmosphere that is so grim and claustrophobic that it makes you wonder how on earth Quirke is going to stay on the wagon until the end of the book.

I understand Banville is very dismissive of these two novels, claiming to have knocked them out in six weeks. Well good luck to him – I wish I could write that fast.

Stabbed through the heart: The Wounded Name by DK Broster (1922)

This is another of Broster’s adventure tales set during the French Revolution, similar to Mr Rowl, which I read 18 months ago. Like that book, it features two protagonists one of whom is a French royalist who displays a demeanour of noble suffering, which I have to say, is entirely self inflicted. It has a very slashy subtext, which I am beginning to realise is true of much of Broster’s work, although I’m sure this wasn’t intentional.