A Mind To Murder

Do you ever get a notion in your noggin that you are so certain of you never question it? That's what I did with the author, P.D. James. I never picked up any of her books even though I knew she was a best selling mystery writer because I had it in my mind that I knew who she was and didn't care to read her novels. I had her confused with J.D. Robb for Pete's sake! Do you see any similarity in those names other than the initial D?
A Mind to Murder is the second book in the Superintendent of Scotland Yard, Adam Dalgliesh series. It was published in 1963. It appears there are now fourteen books in the series. Dalgliesh has been called a gentleman detective with parallels drawn between him and my beloved Inspector Morse. I now plan to read all of the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries and, most likely, all the other P.D. James books our library has including her most recent, Death Comes to Pemberley, which I know our library just got. It may have taken me awhile to realize my James/Robb mistake, but I will make up for it.

Another satisfying Gaslight Mystery read - number 8 in the series - Murder in Little Italy. Victoria Thompson does such a good job writing about turn of the century New York. If you are at all interested in this time period and like mysteries, I think you would enjoy this series and the characters.

In the box of books I received from Kristina last fall was a reprint of Jetta Carleton's only book first published in 1962, The Moonflower Vine. The story seems a simple one about a family in western Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century. A couple raises their four daughters on a farm and later in a small town before returning to the farm to live out their lives. Each summer the sisters return to the farm for their annual visit. In their remembering, the stories of their lives unfold.
I absolutely loved this book. The prose is beautiful and I could so clearly relate to the farm setting and the way the girls grew up - playing in the creek, catching fireflies, trying to find where a hen had hid her nest of eggs and helping their mother with the garden and canning. I would have said I had never read this book before. Nothing of it seemed familiar until almost the end. For many, many years there has been a scene from a book which I have always remembered although I forgot what book it was from. Although the scene I remembered was not exactly like the one in this book, it was close enough to make me think I may have read The Moonflower Vine forty or fifty years ago. Perhaps that is why I always wanted to grow moonflowers.
If you can find a copy of this book, I strongly recommend reading it. It is just plain beautiful.

One of the blurbs on the back cover of The Moonflower Vine was this: "The flavor....is much the same as that of To Kill A Mockingbird...." which made me wonder, "Did I ever read To Kill A Mockingbird?" I remember watching the movie starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (for which he won the Oscar in 1962), but did I read the book?
Bud remembers reading it for a high school class. But he was two years behind me in school and the book wasn't published until 1960, so I know I missed reading it as a class assignment. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Harper Lee in 1961. In 2006, British librarians said it was one "every adult should read before they die". And now I know for sure I've read it. It is everything I expected a great American novel to be.