Magical Libraries are the Flavour

Magical Libraries seem to be popping out everywhere I look.

First we have the Library of all books that I have already reviewed – The British Library on Steroids -, and then you have a complete series of books about a Lost Library of magical texts by Kate Baray – the 4th being called A Witch’s Diary -and now I find there is also a TV series about a Library under New York (but not really – more like in hyperspace), which is magic, with not only the first editions of every book ever published, but also a number of magical items. So it is a cross between all the libraries with Warehouse 51 thrown in for good measure!

Just who is copycatting whom I start to wonder here? Or have some TV producers and book editors found themselves on a bar one night and started discussing how cool it would be to have magical library? Who knows, but here we are with competing books and a TV series too.

The TV series is OK but not 5 star. I can take it or leave it, but it is a bit of fun and the characters aren’t bad. It is just too reminiscent of the Warehouse series to be really exceptional.

The most interesting of the new items is the library that was lost but is now found and which contains magical texts which very few people can read. It was un-catalogued and in multiple actual languages, and the books are magically protected so that only the ‘right’ person can read them. And for some books that also means only the right person who knows and likes other ‘right’ people… confusing ain’t it?

I read the first 4 books of the Lost Library series straight off. It now seems to have become a habit with me. If the first in a series interests me, then i read the rest. But the first has to be of 5 star quality. It is just such a shame though that if the first book is a 5 star none of the rest are. So far that has been my experience. However, i still found them 4 star and thus I am ready and waiting to read the next in the series!

Scream Girl Scream

Susannah Screaming by Carolyn Weston

A Netgalley Review

The book from which the TV programme and film ‘Streets of San Francisco’ was derived

I find it interesting that really apart from the occasional mention of triplicate copies and typewriters, how easily this book translates into a modern story. Well crafted stories can stand the test of time, and this is well crafted.

It is a police procedural set, obviously, in San Francisco, around the 1960s with the Haight Ashbury area just setting up shop and parties that take place in strangely decorated homes with funny cigarettes and a distinct lack of forensics – apart from fingerprints and maybe saliva.

We have the now, common, police partners with different personalities and reactions to crime and criminal behaviours.

We have corruption, bullying and some drugs and guns of course, this being the USA. And little understanding of the hippy scene with its tolerances for what was then considered deviant behaviours by the police and other members of society. Much of it centred around the art and music world. And those wannabes who wanted to be part of this hip world but just a little too old and thus considered as not quite one of the scene.

As a well written story I must give it four and if it had been written today I would have given it more for getting the atmosphere of those times right! However, as it was actually written in this era it certainly echoed the sentiments and is worth reading as somewhat of a classic police procedural that set the target for those that followed.

 

Ophelia and her wet hair in San Francisco

Book Review: [For NetGalley and Brash Books]

Poor Poor  Ophelia  by Carolyn Weston

A Summary:

“Traditionalist veteran cop Lt. Mike Stone is partnered with Inspector Steve Keller, a young, inexperienced college-educated go-getter in the homicide division of the San Francisco Police Department. The two enjoy a bantering relationship while they hunt down the bad guys..”

Except that this isn’t a summary of the book but of the TV series that was created from the book!

First aired in 1972.  Yes 1972.

This another book that has been taken and re-issued by Brash as a digital book, and yet despite it having been written some 40+ years ago has stayed the test of time and you wouldn’t necessarily have realised just how old it was until you looked up the author’s bio.

You might remember the somewhat tinny theme song if you heard it (and are old enough of course!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgPZ81xA_Ao to listen to it and then do look at the actors too… you must surely recognise that rather pitted and jowly face of Karl Malden and the young Michael Douglas.

Just look at that hair! 

It ran until 1977, was filmed actually in San Francisco (that makes a change but close to Hollywood of course), there was even a TV movie made, but no episode covered the storyline of Poor Poor Ophelia that I can work out. *

So in this book story there is a lawyer who gets reluctantly involved with the police investigation of a drowned girl to whom he gave a laminated business card, which she was found clutching. It was a very suspicious death as the pathologist Deacon remarked – ‘Deacon was famous for preliminary reports full of what he called ‘details’, and the card being one of these famous details.

The girl lived in a bedsit with a very nosy landlord -‘It’s a crime or something to keep an eye on your property?’ – perhaps a voyeur? And yet the landlord didn’t ask for any proof of identity when a man claiming to be the dead girl’s uncle – a man he had never seen before – came and collected her post after her disappearance – more than once.

The cop looking for her murderer was

‘Depressed by the idea of another air-tight compartment in a society hellbent in separating itself into rival camps…tribalism’

when looking at her set of apartments for singles only.

I liked this book a lot and will give 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

*

Correction:

I have been told  by Brash Books that The book *was* filmed as the pilot episode of STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO. Robert Wagner played the attorney!

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. Here’s the link to the pilot episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O91oKitZ9Q