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| An injured Brody, expecting something - anything - please just feed me! |
As I often do, I am reading one of the books left in the cottage. The "Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus his famous cases as described by R. Austin Freeman" First published in 1929, reprinted 1965. This is a collection of short detective stories. Thorndyke is very much like Holmes, though the character is not so filled out. The reason for this is that the stories are about the detection, not the detector. So the stories could be summed up as Sherlock meets CSI. In the first part of the book, the stories are written by describing the events, then describing the detection. In the forward the author tells us that all the facts must be available to the reader - an intention that has so far been delivered, and one that should be essential to all detective novels - though sadly rarely is. Here, though, the clues are reasonably easy to see, but the reasoning of the detective is the interesting part of the story. Sadly, I thought I would not get to finish the book, only one day left and only 167 of 1080 pages read, but by the wonders of google I have found it, and ordered it from a second-hand bookseller - first Christmas present!
In the evening we headed into the darkness, there are a few street lights, one or perhaps two at important junctions and other places, but they are few and far between. So once off the main road, there are no lights. We drove to the wrong place, due to a sat-nav error. Then we couldn't see the road the sat-nav said was there (the road looked like a drive, and it was very dark). A couple of times we went down unmade roads, and finally found the road we needed - also unmade. It was worth the hassle. The Zetland Arms faces the beach in Kingsdown, it is a homely little pub - a communal front-room (a term I read in the CAMRA newsletter for the area). The service was exceptional, the food excellent and so the evening was very enjoyable.
