Greed, lust and deadly crime

Taking over from where I left off last night – since nothing particularly new and exciting happened all day today – I have moved on to a new book of the treasured lot I picked up at The Hyderabad Book fair a couple of weeks ago. For around 600 bucks, I picked up 12 awesome books, including some that I thought were out of print ages ago.

I have been soaking them up for the last week or so and just taking in the smell and feel and theme of them. I have a taste for a very specific genre of fiction (detective fiction, or what is more currently called police procedurals), and that too of a very specific era – pre-incest, pre-computer, pre-NYPD. The problem with that sort of rigidity in literary taste is that most authors of those books are dead, not many of them are best sellers any more. Ergo, they are out of print, or hard to get.

What I loved about my short stay in Canada was the old, old library. There were so many in the mould of Dorothy L Sayers, Patriacia Moyes and MC Beaton. They even had A A Milne’s only detective novel, The Red House Mystery. For those who think the name looks familiar, Winnie the Pooh was the brain"bear" of Milne.

What is so reassuring about old police procedurals is the setting. The murderers always commit murder for some plain old reason like greed. And you always have man comfortably shot in a country house with plenty of room, so that the rest of the party can continue to have their tea and scones next door, or their kippers and scrambled eggs - whichever is the appropriate meal of the time of the murder.

Nowadays all is sex and hell fire. Very unsettling at 11:00 p.m. And now I’m signing off for today….