Books – Page 4 – F C MALBY

Review by Jon Wilkins of “Dead Drop” by F. C. Malby

Monday, 12 December 2022

Reposted from Everybody’s Reviewing

I cannot recall ever reading a book with such a sensual, sense-ful, scent-ful opening. The tastes and sights and sounds enveloped me as a reader drawing me into Vienna and its streets, cafes and churches. I can smell espresso, then I can taste the Guglehupf. I feel the wind on my cheek and the bustle of people on their way to goodness knows where. It is enchantingly delightful. Malby should be asked by the Vienna tourist board to promote their city. And that is only after the first two chapters!

I haven’t even mentioned the dead body, found by our protagonist Leisl, on Stephansplatz underground steps, as if it were the most natural of things to discover. Well it was where she was told it would be. But who by? And what of the broach and the note she took from the body? Art thief by career, Liesl finds herself in a terrifying world of murder and deception in this well-researched, beautifully written thriller. She is a hero we root for, despite her criminal behaviour, as she goes on an adrenalin-running-high escapade as she seeks the truth. To Malby’s credit. I found myself in the streets and buildings of Vienna, described with the minimum of fuss, but described in such a way that I felt I was part of the city, part of the chase and totally enmeshed in the plot.

I hope this is the first in a series as there is room for so much more.

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 66. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about Dead Drop by F. C. Malby on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

See original post at Everybody’s Reviewing

Writing News….

LINEN PRESS

Linen Press will be releasing news about my next book, a psychological thriller about the art underworld, this week! Follow @linenpress on Twitter and Instagram for updates…

REFLEX PRESS

My story, You Fold Yourself into Tiny Spaces, was longlisted in the Reflex Press International Flash Fiction Competition in 2021. It has just been released in their anthology, In Defence of Pseudoscience: Volume Five, Reflex Press, July 2022. My contributor copy arrived this morning, along with a copy of the London Review of Books. I’m very much looking forward to reading stories from fellow contributors.

You can purchase a copy directly from Reflex Press. Keep your eyes peeled for more exciting book information to be released this week from Linen Press. I can’t wait to share news about my latest psychological thriller with you! Pop back soon…

A Library of Books and a Writing Desk

We spent yesterday exploring one of the oldest timber-framed buildings in Suffolk. It is one of the best preserved of the cloth towns in the county, and was built in the 14th century. Little Hall, in Lavenham, belonged to clothiers and later, scholars and schoolmaters.

I was fairly captivated by the books in the library, the scent of lignin, the choice and range of books, and a beautiful writing desk with a window view. I think the pictures speak for themselves…

How Do You Organise Your Bookshelves?

A friend told me yesterday that their books are all arranged in alphabetical order. I smiled and said that mine are roughly arranged by type. I have a section for psychology, travel, theology, biographies and autobiographies (which are mostly political, but I also have one on Miles Davis), crime thrillers, short stories, poetry, literary fiction, commercial fiction, favourite books (mostly by J.M Coetzee, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Alice Munro, Colm Tóibín, Milan Kundera, Deborah Levy and Alison Moore).

This morning, I noticed that I have a selection of books with yellow covers, although I’m not entirely sure how the lime green snuck in! It’s the only colour I seem to have grouped together, purely because I love yellow. I don’t think I will ever match my books by colour, having seen a few well-known figures (who shall remain nameless) adding the results of this to Instagram. It feels a little too OCD for my liking, by we are all beautifully different.

How about this cascading cover colour bookshelves look from Book Bub?

As a writer and a reader, I love books, bookshelves and other people’s bookshelves. If I go to a home and there is a large book collection on the shelves, I like to scan the collection and see what the owner reads. Sometimes I find we like similar authors and there are other occasions where I find something new. Amidst the Covid pandemic over the past 15 months or so, and with life as we knew it transferred to Zoom and Teams meetings, a background of bookshelves never fails to capture my attention. Personally, I like a more mixed approach to bookshelves.

How do you arrange your bookshelves? Do you have any favourite bookshelves? Drop a link to a snap in the comments, or tell us how you organise your shelves, and share the book love.

#bookadayuk Hooked you into reading: The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm

For those of you who have been following the #bookaday posts, I’ve been up in the Alps for a week. I’m back and refuelled, and will pick up with the posts and get back to writing. We drove the length of the Grossglockner Pass, which is the highest and one of the most beautiful roads in Europe. Here are a few photos before I write about what hooked me in to reading. It seems fitting that the photos are of Europe, the home of the writers I want to talk about.

I was influenced by so many great authors throughout my childhood. While I enjoyed Enid Blyton, Judy Blume and Noel Streatfeild early on, what hooked me in to reading was primarily fairy tales. I loved Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea and, although I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to the Happy Ever After endings, there was something magical about the idea of anyone being able to feel a pea beneath layers of mattresses. Children often want to believe the unbelievable, don’t they? Think Peter Pan, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; or, in my case, The Lochness Monster, the Abominable Snowman and the Tooth Fairy. The first two exist, don’t they? Anything implausible, I believed in it. Such was my hopeless and incorrigible imagination. The thing is children want to believe in unreality, they want a world beyond the real and the plausible. And I think adults sometimes look for the same thing. It’s why we read fiction.

And then there were the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales: Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella. I devoured them all, utterly absorbed in another world. Hansel and Gretel grabbed my attention for the suspense as the children become lost in the woods. I liked the idea of a house made of sweets, and was always captivated by images of the roof. I have started to make a European gingerbread house at Christmas, a tradition in Germany which comes from this story.

In Germany, there’s a rhyme that’s said about Gingerbread Houses that comes directly from the story of Hansel and Gretel:

Knusper, knusper, knäuschen,
wer knuspert an meinem Häuschen?
Der Wind, der Wind,
das himmlische Kind.

English Translation:

Nibble, nibble, gnaw
Who is nibbling at my little house?
The wind, the wind
The heavenly child.

I’ll also throw in Joseph Jacob’s Jack and the Beanstalk. A giant at the top of a beanstalk? Really? These imaginary worlds are a wonderful escape from the real world and teach children about the far reaches of the imagination. And you are never too old to read them.

Einstein said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” While I am certainly no genius, I find his quote interesting because it suggests a link between the imagination and the intellect. What are your thoughts?