I have just finished reading my first biography type book. I used to think that perhaps biographies would not be up my street. I figured they might be boring or long winded or perhaps merely a chronological series of events dressed up in some floral language. How interesting could it be to read about some one's life and what they went through. I was not sure I would be interested to get the lowdown on how s/he suffered for her/his art, or what a nice and down to earth person s/he still is, even after all the success they have had. Well..... I am going to have to give that one a rethink! Mind you, I think the interesting-ness of the biography might very well depend on how interested you were in the person or his/her work in real life.
NB: no spoiler alert for this one - but do not read on if you do not want to know any more about the life of Raymond Chandler.
Raymond Chandler: A Biography - Tom Hiney
Initially I was concerned that reading more about Chandler's private life and getting to know the guy behind Philip Marlowe would undo the appreciation I have for his work but this is definitely not the case. In a way there are many reasons to firmly resent Chandler: he was an alcoholic (and in denial about it for most of his life), he drank himself out of a job and into a blackout several times, leaving him and his wife nearly destitute. He seemed to like women only if they needed rescuing, hated snobs and considered a lot of the modern literature around him fake, too intellectual and therefore unworthy of his good opinion. He hated cops and politicians and the FBI (not sure if that is a bad thing?). Also Chandler was restless, moved house a lot and never seemed to be able to settle down in one place for very long. Most things bored him and he acted like a spoilt child a lot of the time, especially when he was drinking. Yet, with all his obvious faults, he also comes across as a witty man who has a great sense of humor (black and self deprecating it may be) about himself and his writing. He can write the most amazingly personal and caring letters and was absolutely devoted to his wife Cissy (well, apart from the 2 times he heated on her) and their cat, Taki.
Chandler spent his first few years in the USA. It was not an easy life, especially not since his alcoholic father had run out on his mother and him. They had to move back to England so that her family could support them both and Chandler got to go to a nice school and even managed to get his uncle to pay for him to spend some time in Europe. Once he has completed his education and after several failed attempts at finding and holding down a job, he decides that his future is not in England and moves back to the States. After some less successful career choices he decides to train as an accountant and lands himself in a booming oil company to make a career for himself.
This he manages very well, in between courting Cissy and being drunk for a lot of the time. He then gets his mum over to live with him and ends up marrying Cissy. Chandler teaches himself how to write by doing a course and eventually makes his debut in the pulp magazines in the States. He even works in movies at one point as a script doctor. Life was sometimes hard for him and his wife. There were times they needed to watch the pennies and to had survive on very little but other times life was all sunshine and fluffy bunnies.
For me one of the most interesting parts of the book was the time he worked for the Pulp Magazines in the 1930's. It is great to read how he learnt to hone his skills as a writer by publishing his short stories in the pulps. The bit that I found really funny was when Chandler talks about doing a course in short story writing and learning to carry a prose scene. He says that it "was two or three years before he could get a character out of a room convincingly". The fact that something that I, as a reader do not even think twice about would take him so much time to master is kind of funny. Chandler also mentions his emphasis on atmosphere more than plot. This is something you can feel in his books. He loves to set the mood. He is not as descriptive as Dickens who takes 20 pages to describe some one's coat but Chandler does use beautiful descriptive language to set the scene and define the character. Plot wise you learn that sometimes he does not even know who did what and in one of his books a blonde all of a sudden becomes a brunette. In my opinion (and Tom Hiney's) this is just because he does not think these details are all that relevant. He is more interested in telling the reader why a character stands a certain way, thinks a certain way and acts in a certain way. His use of the I-perspective is developed in the stories published in the pulps and later carried forward into his novels. Hiney also mentions Chandler's relaxed pace of writing. This was something I had picked up on when reading his novels already but I was not sure whether it was just my opinion or an actual recognised fact. I really love Chandler's relaxed pace. It seems to suit Marlowe and the atmosphere projected in the novels - Marlowe is in no hurry and as a reader you tend to slow down your reading pace to match this relaxed attitude.
The books also takes you through all the Marlow novels one by one. It tells you about the circumstances in Chandler's life at the time of writing each one and how he approached the writing process. All this helps you to understand not only Chandler but Marlowe as well. At several points there are parallels drawn between Chandler's situation in life and those of the characters in his novels. I am sure Chandler is not the first author to work out some issues in his work. Not all his characters may speak for him but it is clear to me that several of them share Chandler's character traits or opinions.
One final thing I want to mention is that I think that it is a good thing that Hiney can see Chandler's works for what they are and relate them back to the times in which they were written. It is important to realise what the attitudes and opinions of society were when Chandler was writing his pulp stories and novels. The fact that he calls women "dames" or "chicks" is not necessarily derogatory but more the way he talks (he collected slang words and phrases), and the way society at the time saw women. Mind you, I am not saying that caveman attitudes towards women should be allowed nowadays but I am saying that looking at the times he was in, it explains why Chandler wrote the way he did.
The book is a great read (great pace, good structure, good source material, great sense of humor)and it goes through all the phases in Chandler's life. It gives us an even handed account of Chandler the man - it does not pull any punches about what a nuisance he could be when drunk but it also shows his caring side when his wife fell seriously ill. I came out feeling admiration for both the man and his achievements in life. It makes me want to go out and get all the Marlowe books and read the pulp stories as well (here's hoping Play and/or Amazon have them?!). Chandler started out as a writer of hard boiled detective stories for the pulps, grinding out stories to make some money and hone his skills. He ended up being a master at the genre and certainly deserves his place in American literary history.
Reading this book and learning about the time Chandler spent writing for the pulps has also made me curious about some of the other pulp writers that are mentioned; Dashiell Hammett and James Cain. I already knew that Robert E Howard used to write for them and HP Lovecraft but did not know that Chandler was one of the contributors to them as well. I seem have skipped from the ghost and horror stories of HP Lovecraft to the sword and sorcery stories of Robert E Howard and now skipped along to Raymond Chandler and that way back to the pulps. I love it when I come across potentially interesting authors that are new to me in this way. You stumble from one author to another and the discoveries that you make on the way are a great adventure.
PS: I did not bother with the notes and did not feel I missed out on anything. Also it would have been nice to have a list of published works in chronological order at the end instead of it all being tucked away under the index entry Chandler, Raymond.
Title: Raymond Chandler: A Biography
Author: Tom Hiney
287 pages
Vintage
ISBN nr 0-09-95351-0
Books to be read: 75
Sunday 22 August 2010
Saturday 14 August 2010
Good Dog
After a busy day at work there is really nothing like being able to escape into the world of fiction. A good book will make you focus on the story and forget everything around you. It never ceases to amaze me how this happens. I have music playing when I read but do not ask me what songs went past in the process of reading of my book because I have no idea. I tend to drown out the music and it becomes background noise rather than sounds disturbing my concentration on what is happening on the page. A good book absorbs you and takes you away from where you are, mentally. It engages our mind and imagination as you imagine how the characters look, what the environment they are in looks like, what they wear looks like. I always get a little "mind movie" playing in my head as I read. Part of my brain reads the words on the page, part of my brain follows the plot, and part of my brain sort of "projects" what I read into a little movie that plays in my head. It's a great buzz when all of that comes together!
This time I went for another one by Dean Koontz. He is an author that I like to read as much for his inventive and weird subject matter as for his pace of writing.
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
Dark Rivers of the Heart - Dean Koontz
The story in this book is again not too far off what you are used to from DK. A man with a dark past, or almost no past has a chance meeting with a woman. He becomes obsesses with finding her and (naturally) she is in some kind of trouble. The second story line is about a government agent (Roy) who thinks that he has the right to take people's lives away from them because he thinks they have had a hard life and can never reach perfection. He may call it compassion killing but really the guy is as nutty as they come. The third strand of the story is how a government can destroy innocent lives just because it can.
Spencer Grant is a man who has a past, only he has tried to hide it from others as much as from himself perhaps. Throughout the book you get snippets of information about what has happened to him as a young boy, why he now tries to make himself almost invisible, and how he got his scar. He has a past in the army and police force and is quite handy with a computer. Spencer comes across as a very nice guy. Calm, caring and dedicated to the friends that he has/s. He goes to bars to talk to strangers about the past he cannot unlock and one of these is a woman named Valerie. Turns out that Valerie is not who she says she is either and very soon Spencer finds himself hunted by an unknown enemy who will stop at nothing to find him and Valerie. Suffice it to say that both Valerie and Spencer have know violent deaths of loved ones and that has shaped who they are now. Valerie got into trouble for what she knew and she has been on the run for 4 months, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. So far she has been doing okay. She's a dab hand with a gun and can find her way into any computer network you can imagine. You kid of know that things will be okay between Spencer and Valerie from the start. They seem to be made for each other. The journey that they take is filled with car chases, violent government agents and the occasional burger. The cars used in the story are (as ever with DK) mostly Ford Explorers and Rovers, Chevy's. If I am not mistaken, proper American cars! Maybe they sponsor him, maybe he just wants to make the point that they are American cars not imported Japanese or European cars... which he does not seem to like that much.
In the end we find out what is lurking in Spencer's past and who he really is. Valerie's past is revealed much more quickly and easily but then what lurks in Spencer's past is, in a way, far more devastating that that in Valerie's.
One of the cutest characters in the book is Spencer's dog. He comes from the pound and is damaged with and unclear past just like Spencer and Valerie. He seems to cower behind Spencer most of the time and will not even do his business whilst watched but he has a need for speed and finds his inner canine when it matters most.
There is a nice side story of what happens to Spencer's old boss. He is the one who is most devastated by the system. Spencer and Valerie have elected to almost live outside the system but Harris Descoteaux is the one who loses his life and identity because one powerful but petty man took a dislike to him.
The guys that are after Valerie and Spencer are powerful and hard to recognise. They can be whoever they need to be (FBI, DEA) and infiltrate any computer system they want. They can go after whoever they want and devastate people's lives. They do this without any compassion and any respect for laws. To me this seems to be the main point that DK wants to get across He is not exactly on a crusade but he has created a book in which he riles against the power of the fictional organisation he has created, of the government that has turned against the citizens it is supposed to protect and aid in their survival. It seems to be he has an axe to grind with some of the laws that exist in the USA about seizing property. It is the indiscriminate power of shady government organisations that seem to grind away at basic human rights that annoys him as well. Furthermore, I distinctly get the feeling that he is not exactly happy about the power that computers have in the modern world either or perhaps he is more upset about how that power is harnessed for evil and unlawful purposes than it actually being there. Mind you, i have never investigated what DK thinks about anything what his political beliefs and how sees the world, but I do really get the idea that he is trying to make a serious point with this book. He does not always do this in his books. He usually has a point but it has more often a moral or human angle. His stories are about human behaviour and how people get in involved in weird things and how they deal with what the world throws at them.
The book has a very good pace from the start but in the last couple hundreds of pages it picks up another gear. I had to just finish it today as I had to know what it was that burdened Spencer and to see if him and Valerie would both survive. I kind of knew they would but yet, even knowing that they probably would, I had to get to the end and fast. There are some nasty, sick minds running around in this book and not all of them end up dead. The book does leave you with hope for the future for all the main characters. Their lives will be in danger many times and they will probably be running for a long time to come, maybe even for the rest of their lives but they have friends, people they trust and love around them and they will be alright. It also leaves with the hope that surely someone , somewhere will be able to stop the sicko ones from doing what they do best.
Title: Dark Rivers of the Heart
Author: Dean Koontz
728 pages
Headline
ISBN nr 978-0-7472-449-3
Books to be read: 76
This time I went for another one by Dean Koontz. He is an author that I like to read as much for his inventive and weird subject matter as for his pace of writing.
#### SPOILER ALERT ####
Dark Rivers of the Heart - Dean Koontz
The story in this book is again not too far off what you are used to from DK. A man with a dark past, or almost no past has a chance meeting with a woman. He becomes obsesses with finding her and (naturally) she is in some kind of trouble. The second story line is about a government agent (Roy) who thinks that he has the right to take people's lives away from them because he thinks they have had a hard life and can never reach perfection. He may call it compassion killing but really the guy is as nutty as they come. The third strand of the story is how a government can destroy innocent lives just because it can.
Spencer Grant is a man who has a past, only he has tried to hide it from others as much as from himself perhaps. Throughout the book you get snippets of information about what has happened to him as a young boy, why he now tries to make himself almost invisible, and how he got his scar. He has a past in the army and police force and is quite handy with a computer. Spencer comes across as a very nice guy. Calm, caring and dedicated to the friends that he has/s. He goes to bars to talk to strangers about the past he cannot unlock and one of these is a woman named Valerie. Turns out that Valerie is not who she says she is either and very soon Spencer finds himself hunted by an unknown enemy who will stop at nothing to find him and Valerie. Suffice it to say that both Valerie and Spencer have know violent deaths of loved ones and that has shaped who they are now. Valerie got into trouble for what she knew and she has been on the run for 4 months, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. So far she has been doing okay. She's a dab hand with a gun and can find her way into any computer network you can imagine. You kid of know that things will be okay between Spencer and Valerie from the start. They seem to be made for each other. The journey that they take is filled with car chases, violent government agents and the occasional burger. The cars used in the story are (as ever with DK) mostly Ford Explorers and Rovers, Chevy's. If I am not mistaken, proper American cars! Maybe they sponsor him, maybe he just wants to make the point that they are American cars not imported Japanese or European cars... which he does not seem to like that much.
In the end we find out what is lurking in Spencer's past and who he really is. Valerie's past is revealed much more quickly and easily but then what lurks in Spencer's past is, in a way, far more devastating that that in Valerie's.
One of the cutest characters in the book is Spencer's dog. He comes from the pound and is damaged with and unclear past just like Spencer and Valerie. He seems to cower behind Spencer most of the time and will not even do his business whilst watched but he has a need for speed and finds his inner canine when it matters most.
There is a nice side story of what happens to Spencer's old boss. He is the one who is most devastated by the system. Spencer and Valerie have elected to almost live outside the system but Harris Descoteaux is the one who loses his life and identity because one powerful but petty man took a dislike to him.
The guys that are after Valerie and Spencer are powerful and hard to recognise. They can be whoever they need to be (FBI, DEA) and infiltrate any computer system they want. They can go after whoever they want and devastate people's lives. They do this without any compassion and any respect for laws. To me this seems to be the main point that DK wants to get across He is not exactly on a crusade but he has created a book in which he riles against the power of the fictional organisation he has created, of the government that has turned against the citizens it is supposed to protect and aid in their survival. It seems to be he has an axe to grind with some of the laws that exist in the USA about seizing property. It is the indiscriminate power of shady government organisations that seem to grind away at basic human rights that annoys him as well. Furthermore, I distinctly get the feeling that he is not exactly happy about the power that computers have in the modern world either or perhaps he is more upset about how that power is harnessed for evil and unlawful purposes than it actually being there. Mind you, i have never investigated what DK thinks about anything what his political beliefs and how sees the world, but I do really get the idea that he is trying to make a serious point with this book. He does not always do this in his books. He usually has a point but it has more often a moral or human angle. His stories are about human behaviour and how people get in involved in weird things and how they deal with what the world throws at them.
The book has a very good pace from the start but in the last couple hundreds of pages it picks up another gear. I had to just finish it today as I had to know what it was that burdened Spencer and to see if him and Valerie would both survive. I kind of knew they would but yet, even knowing that they probably would, I had to get to the end and fast. There are some nasty, sick minds running around in this book and not all of them end up dead. The book does leave you with hope for the future for all the main characters. Their lives will be in danger many times and they will probably be running for a long time to come, maybe even for the rest of their lives but they have friends, people they trust and love around them and they will be alright. It also leaves with the hope that surely someone , somewhere will be able to stop the sicko ones from doing what they do best.
Title: Dark Rivers of the Heart
Author: Dean Koontz
728 pages
Headline
ISBN nr 978-0-7472-449-3
Books to be read: 76
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Britney Moment and reading anger
Let me start off by making another confession (it's been a while since my last one). On Saturday I actually managed to buy 3 books whilst on a little wander round in Northampton. The idea was to go there, have a little wander then get some freshly ground coffee from this nice little specialist coffee shop and then go home. However, I strayed into the British Heart Foundation shop and came out with three books. Two Graham Greene ones and one by Sebastian Faulks. Then on Sunday I managed to acquire a further 2. This was when I was on my way to meeting a friend for some coffee. Whoever put the Willen Hospice Book shop on the way to Costa Coffee is to blame. I just did what came naturally to me... buy books. So that means that the books count has gone up considerably.
Books bought: 5
Books to be read: 78
Good news is: I finished one as well!!!!!
Again, it is sort of a factual one so I will not be putting the spoiler alert up for it since there is no plot to spoil. If you cannot guess from the title what it is going to be about you are in serious trouble. So, if you do not want to know anything about haunted pubs, inns and taverns all over the UK stop reading now.
Haunted Taverns - Donald Stuart
The book is a collection of ghostly happenings in pubs all over the UK. Apparently England's pubs are haunted by a great variety of things. There are lots of fair maidens looking for lost lovers, lost children, lost husbands and lost virtue. There are smugglers who used the pubs as their watering holes and got captured and/or killed by constables or pub owners. It's amazing how many pubs seem to have people and animals walled up in a part of the building. There are reports of flying glasses, chairs being moved, people disappearing down hallways and into walls, barrels of beer being disconnected while no one is around, poltergeists pinching ladies' bottoms and even horses running around in the bar area of pubs. It's frankly amazing what happens in some of these places - and not just after midnight either. The author has gone around all the counties in England and collected all the tales he could find (be it those passed on by pub frequenters or pub owners) and has listed them alphabetically thus making for a neat and orderly set of tales. This is where my joy of reading the book ends.
It is the first book I have ever read that I felt the need to write a letter to the publisher about. The reason is that it is one of the most sloppy editing jobs I have ever seen! Let me clarify.
First of all there are the spelling mistakes. I am not always perfect in my spelling but some of the ones in this book are just so obviously wrong that I do not believe anyone has ever looked at the text properly prior to it going to publication. There are mistakes in the text that you literally trip over when reading. They are obvious and should have been picked up easily by an experienced editor.
Secondly there is the issue of grammar. In my opinion the author has a strange way of ordering his sentences. He tends to split up parts of sentences that I feel belong together. E.g. on page 26 the entry for the Bell Hotel, he writes:
A servant girl has been seen on many occasions dressed in eighteenth-century fashion in an upstairs room.
I would have written: On many occasions a servant girl dressed in eighteenth-century fashion has been seen in an upstairs room.
If you look at his sentence structure it can be interpreted as: many times people saw her she was wearing clothing from the eighteenth-century but at other times she was perhaps wearing 20th or 17th Century style clothing. I do not think this is how he wants the reader to interpret his sentence. He has several more of these strange sentence structuring issues. I am not going to name them all as that would take up way too much space in this review. However, for the fans...... one more example from later on in the book that got me really confused at the first reading is on page 64. Here, in the entry for the Hand & Shears in London we read:
In the sixteenth century on 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, the mayor came out of the inn to pronounce the market open and cut the first piece of cloth to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears.
On the first reading I though that the piece of cloth was going to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears but on reading it again (and again) I realised that the mayor used a pair of tailor's shears cut the first piece of cloth to be sold. I feel that weird sentence structuring like this makes the book much harder to read than it should be. I kept coming across sentences that I had to re-read a few times to get the meaning and this stopped me in my reading flow. I could not really get into the text because I noticed so many issues with it that it hampered my enjoyment of the book.
What also really confused me at times was his use of comma's. They seem to be everywhere when you do not want them and not to be found when you feel they are needed/required. I think I once counted about 8 in one sentence!!
A further issue is the use of verbs. Sometimes they are left out altogether and other times he seems to have a strong attachment to the verbs to have and to be. They occur in just about every other sentence you read. I am sure there are enough conjugations of both of them to fill about twenty books just from this little publication.
One other major thing that really annoys me is that the editor has not even bothered to do a check on the pictures in the book. If you look at page 77 there is a close up of a pub interior. Now look at page 10 and you will see a zoomed out shot of the same picture! On page 10 it is referred to as the Cross Keys in Pulloxhill and on page 77 it is said to be the George Hotel in Dorchester on Thames. So which one is it? A second picture issue is found on page 73. A pub (Ye Olde Cross) is said to be "locally... known" as the "Dirty Bottles". Really?? Why then is it that when I look at the picture with this entry that I can make out from the parts of the letters that are showing that it actually has the words Dirty Bottles on the front of the pub? Does that not mean that the place is actually called Dirty Bottles rather than "locally... known" as it?
Sloppy.. very, very sloppy! Not only is it sloppy but it also made me wonder if all the other pictures are correct. Furthermore, if they cannot even get their picture captions right what does that say about the rest of the text in this publication? Has the author actually collected genuine tales from people, has he even been to any of these places or has he just made up things that he thought would sound good?
One last that struck me is that the author has several names for the observed ghostly apparitions. Sometimes he calls them simply "ghosts", then "indwells" or even "other worlders". It's kind of cute, but I would rather call a spade a spade.
Title: Haunted Taverns
Author: Donald Stuart
122 pages
Tempus Publishing
ISBN nr 978-0-7524-4347-8
Books to be read: 77
PS: at the time of writing the review there was no reply yet to my letter to the publisher.
Books bought: 5
Books to be read: 78
Good news is: I finished one as well!!!!!
Again, it is sort of a factual one so I will not be putting the spoiler alert up for it since there is no plot to spoil. If you cannot guess from the title what it is going to be about you are in serious trouble. So, if you do not want to know anything about haunted pubs, inns and taverns all over the UK stop reading now.
Haunted Taverns - Donald Stuart
The book is a collection of ghostly happenings in pubs all over the UK. Apparently England's pubs are haunted by a great variety of things. There are lots of fair maidens looking for lost lovers, lost children, lost husbands and lost virtue. There are smugglers who used the pubs as their watering holes and got captured and/or killed by constables or pub owners. It's amazing how many pubs seem to have people and animals walled up in a part of the building. There are reports of flying glasses, chairs being moved, people disappearing down hallways and into walls, barrels of beer being disconnected while no one is around, poltergeists pinching ladies' bottoms and even horses running around in the bar area of pubs. It's frankly amazing what happens in some of these places - and not just after midnight either. The author has gone around all the counties in England and collected all the tales he could find (be it those passed on by pub frequenters or pub owners) and has listed them alphabetically thus making for a neat and orderly set of tales. This is where my joy of reading the book ends.
It is the first book I have ever read that I felt the need to write a letter to the publisher about. The reason is that it is one of the most sloppy editing jobs I have ever seen! Let me clarify.
First of all there are the spelling mistakes. I am not always perfect in my spelling but some of the ones in this book are just so obviously wrong that I do not believe anyone has ever looked at the text properly prior to it going to publication. There are mistakes in the text that you literally trip over when reading. They are obvious and should have been picked up easily by an experienced editor.
Secondly there is the issue of grammar. In my opinion the author has a strange way of ordering his sentences. He tends to split up parts of sentences that I feel belong together. E.g. on page 26 the entry for the Bell Hotel, he writes:
A servant girl has been seen on many occasions dressed in eighteenth-century fashion in an upstairs room.
I would have written: On many occasions a servant girl dressed in eighteenth-century fashion has been seen in an upstairs room.
If you look at his sentence structure it can be interpreted as: many times people saw her she was wearing clothing from the eighteenth-century but at other times she was perhaps wearing 20th or 17th Century style clothing. I do not think this is how he wants the reader to interpret his sentence. He has several more of these strange sentence structuring issues. I am not going to name them all as that would take up way too much space in this review. However, for the fans...... one more example from later on in the book that got me really confused at the first reading is on page 64. Here, in the entry for the Hand & Shears in London we read:
In the sixteenth century on 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, the mayor came out of the inn to pronounce the market open and cut the first piece of cloth to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears.
On the first reading I though that the piece of cloth was going to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears but on reading it again (and again) I realised that the mayor used a pair of tailor's shears cut the first piece of cloth to be sold. I feel that weird sentence structuring like this makes the book much harder to read than it should be. I kept coming across sentences that I had to re-read a few times to get the meaning and this stopped me in my reading flow. I could not really get into the text because I noticed so many issues with it that it hampered my enjoyment of the book.
What also really confused me at times was his use of comma's. They seem to be everywhere when you do not want them and not to be found when you feel they are needed/required. I think I once counted about 8 in one sentence!!
A further issue is the use of verbs. Sometimes they are left out altogether and other times he seems to have a strong attachment to the verbs to have and to be. They occur in just about every other sentence you read. I am sure there are enough conjugations of both of them to fill about twenty books just from this little publication.
One other major thing that really annoys me is that the editor has not even bothered to do a check on the pictures in the book. If you look at page 77 there is a close up of a pub interior. Now look at page 10 and you will see a zoomed out shot of the same picture! On page 10 it is referred to as the Cross Keys in Pulloxhill and on page 77 it is said to be the George Hotel in Dorchester on Thames. So which one is it? A second picture issue is found on page 73. A pub (Ye Olde Cross) is said to be "locally... known" as the "Dirty Bottles". Really?? Why then is it that when I look at the picture with this entry that I can make out from the parts of the letters that are showing that it actually has the words Dirty Bottles on the front of the pub? Does that not mean that the place is actually called Dirty Bottles rather than "locally... known" as it?
Sloppy.. very, very sloppy! Not only is it sloppy but it also made me wonder if all the other pictures are correct. Furthermore, if they cannot even get their picture captions right what does that say about the rest of the text in this publication? Has the author actually collected genuine tales from people, has he even been to any of these places or has he just made up things that he thought would sound good?
One last that struck me is that the author has several names for the observed ghostly apparitions. Sometimes he calls them simply "ghosts", then "indwells" or even "other worlders". It's kind of cute, but I would rather call a spade a spade.
Title: Haunted Taverns
Author: Donald Stuart
122 pages
Tempus Publishing
ISBN nr 978-0-7524-4347-8
Books to be read: 77
PS: at the time of writing the review there was no reply yet to my letter to the publisher.
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