Leeuwarden City Book Rescue July 2014.

Gefeliciteerd! U of jij hebt een zwerfboek gevonden. Dit boek mag mee op reis en ik wens u of jij er veel plezier mee! Ik zou het erg fijn vinden, te weten waar het boek is. Of het gevonden is door iemand zogezegd.Dan weet ik dat het boek niet verloren is gegaan. Een bericht dat het boek ergens veilig logeert, in goede handen is bij u of jou of jullie, wordt erg gewaardeerd. Een zgn. 'vangstmelding' mag anoniem!
Nogmaals veel plezier met het boek en geef het boek straks door aan iemand anders. Dank voor de moeite van het melden, indien van toepassing.
Vriendelijke groet Dutch Fire Bird.

This book was still on one of the tables around 4 pm, and as English books always seem to be very popular in our "Minibieb" (Little Library), I took this with me. :) Thank you, DutchFireBird!

I left this book in de Minibieb Lincolnlaan. Enjoy! :)

Was still in the Minibieb/back again. I'll release it elsewhere. :)

This book will be taken to the BookCrossing Meeting in Oss.

Now and again it's fun to read a murder mystery. This one's short and has a great back-cover blurb: "In fact this bad baronet died true to the conditions of his kind - mysteriously in his library, at midnight, while a great deal of snow was falling outside." Added to Mount TBR.

ETA: In Graham Greene’s second autobiography, Ways of Escape, he talks about being on a cargo ship sailing on the slow route to West Africa, sent by the British Secret Service. On the long, boring journey, he read “a detective story both fantastic and funny” by Michael Innes, inspiring him to write a similarly fantastic and funny thriller, The Ministry of Fear.

Mind boggling! This somewhat humorous country house crime novel kept me guessing until the end. It was a sort of cross between Wodehouse, Christie and good old British farce, with people climbing up and down trellises, posing as other characters, dressing up, making hoax phone calls and generally causing confusion and provoking moral outrage. When I started reading, I was surprised that the author and book weren’t better known, but it appears that this is less well known than his Appleby series of crime novels. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is the fact that this story has particularly non-PC aspects. The brothers George and Denzell Simney had been on youthful ‘blackbirding’ raids in Pacific islands, i.e. they had been involved in small-scale slave-trading, though I’m not entirely sure where this was supposed to have taken place and exactly what it involved. As a result, they were on the run from the Australian authorities, but seemingly more so because one of them had shot at an anthropologist, not for the slaving raids themselves. Though this was used as one of the many examples of their appalling behaviour, there isn’t much moral outrage about these exploits. As for the language, not only is there the ‘blackbirding’ itself, but ‘the N word’ is also used. What is more, Mervyn is described as an effete mummy’s boy, Willoughby has aspersions cast upon his manliness as he is an artist and another character has had extensive psychotherapy to cure him of his aversion to marrying his beautiful fiancée Nicolette, a woman every other male character finds totally irresistible. This is definitely not a novel that translates well into 21st century sensibilities. The story, however, does stand the test of time and could be filmed as an entertaining period piece, bar the racism and homophobia.



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If you find this book, please leave a comment to say where you found it (they sometimes travel on their own!). You can do this as an ‘Anonymous Finder’. Or why not join us as a BookCrossing member? It’s free, fun, with active members who meet up on the forum and at real life meetings where we swap books and bookish talk. If you do sign up, I would be delighted if you filled in my screen name, Bookguide, as the ‘referring member’.

This book has been released as part of the following BookCrossing challenges:
- The Ultimate Challenge - read and release books, with extra points for a monthly theme
- Reduce Mount TBR (To Be Read) - read and release books on the TBR list since before the end of the previous year.