A souvenir guide for Sun City in South Africa, a sort of Las Vegas of the south, with a large hotel of extravagant design (involving lots of large models of elephants) and a very large entertainment complex, presumably mainly given over to gambling, although we did get a double page spread on the tastefully topless dancers. The address is the Republic of Bophuthatswana, a place with an odd history and I hope that, despite the name, talk of royal palaces does not mean that there is some royal family raking in all the loot, without much concern for the welfare of the workers.
Two ancient copies of the house magazine of the coastguard service, once the property of the Inverness Sector Officer. From a time when radio telephones were important and rated a lot of advertising. Perhaps they still are and still do.
One candidate for the Book Prize of 2014, described as a metaphysical thriller, otherwise in mint condition and as yet unopened.
One fat murder mystery from P. D. James, Dalgliesh variety, weighing in at 454 pages. So about three time the length of the Simenon or Christie variety. Now more or less read, although quite a lot of pages were skimmed. I found the prose very off putting at first and nearly abandoned ship, but eventually the story took hold. Something of the same sort often happens when I read a Christie novel, often in the wake of one of the many TV adaptations.
Too much stuff about the trials of women trying to make a career in a mans' world. All very worthy, but not what I look for in a murder mystery. Too much stuff about the nuts and bolts of working in large government organisations, accurate enough, but not of much interest to yours truly. Some space given to the ways of the upper classes and their hangers on, upper classes who still, on this account, ran to the odd servant or retainer in their town houses. Some space given to nasty betrayals of women by their men friends. All perhaps stuff in which James had a particular interest. All that said, the story did finally take hold, but it was so long and so complicated that I had trouble keeping track of it all. And I still don't understand why the murderer did it or why the murderee had a life-changing mystical experience in an Anglican church in Paddington. And I still puzzle about the fascination that High Anglican or Catholic parsons and churches seem to have for the writers of murder mysteries.
Headed for burial in the compost heap.
Reference 1: A taste for death - P. D. James - 1986.
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