Coming home from the Canaries

Many thanks for your comments whilst I was away - apologies again for the delaying in publishing them. I'm now back in Britain, and as I look out of the window, there is fog, ice and traces of yesterday's snowfall. All a far cry from life last week, when I was on a cruise around the Canaries and it was about 25 degrees warmer.

Islands fascinate me, but I've never visited the Canaries before, and I can't recall coming across a book set there. There must be one, surely? Or more, given that Tenerife and Lanzarote are such popular destinations? If you know of any mysteries set in the Canaries, please do let me know.

I'd also be interested to know recommendations generally of good mysteries set on islands. My own list would be topped by And Then There Were None. It's a long time since I read The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James, but I did find it less satisfying than her best books. Panic Party by Anthony Berkeley has its merits, and of course Ann Cleeves, with her Shetland Quartet, has captured the fascinating yet sometimes claustrophobic nature of island life very effectively. A very clever and little known book by Eileen Dewhurst, Death in Candie Gardens, has a splendid setting in Guernsey, where Eileen used to stay with the widow of the late thriller writer Desmond Bagley. And Chris Ewan is soon to publish a new book set on the Isle of Man, which I will feature here before long.

Other ports of call included Agadir, in Morocco, a place I found interesting but less so than Marrakech. Of the Canaries, I think my favourite was Lanzarote, with a trip to some fascinating places designed by Cesar Manrique, including the amazing grotto (second picture from the top; others feature Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, the lovely La Palma and Agadir.) But the stand-out destination was one I'll mention in a separate post tomorrow.

Where to begin a series?

When reading a series of crime novels, is it necessary to begin at the beginning? In the past, it hardly mattered. Poirot and Sherlock Holmes don’t exactly ‘grow’ as characters. Nor, really, do Father Brown or Gideon Fell or Jane Marple. But Lord Peter Wimsey did develop, in the books featuring Harriet Vane, and Dorothy L. Sayers set the trend for treating detectives as people who would change over time, almost (if not quite) in the way that people do in real life.

Now, it is common for detectives’ lives to change as the series goes on. In fact, many readers love this aspect of a crime series – I do myself. But it raises the question – should one read the stories in the chronological order in which they were written? And to complicate matters, some authors write ‘prequels’.

I have read many crime series, but very few have I read in the order in which they were written. An exception is Ann Cleeves’ books about Jimmy Perez, the Shetland Quartet. And that is a series where, in my opinion (but for reasons I won’t explain – no spoilers here!) it is best to read them in order. Often, though, this is a luxury which a reader does not have. What if the early books are out of print (like my early Harry Devlin books), for instance?

As a rule of thumb, I am relaxed about reading a series out of order, and I think most readers should be. But the author’s side of the bargain is that it’s important to bear new readers in mind even when one is writing, say, book six in a series – one needs to sketch in the backstory, but with great economy, so that spoilers are avoided, and long-time readers do not become bored by repetition.