Crime

The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Eccentrics and attention-seekers, I’d always assumed. And here, I saw that they refer to themselves, rather grandly, as ‘anti-Stratfordians’. So, why do these people think that the man named William Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1516, and who died there in 1564, did not write the plays and the sonnets, then? Well, say the anti-Stratfordians, Brenda James and William D.

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again to the notice of Louise Monroe, a hard-bitten Scottish CID officer.