100 books like The Listening Eye

I don’t know if I’d feel as surprised if I read this book today for the first time. But when I encountered it decades ago, I was gobsmacked when the murderer was revealed. This is an unusual Agatha Christie mystery, set in ancient Egypt and inspired by her husband’s archeological digs. In my view, Christie can’t be topped. She’s also the one who introduced me to the unreliable narrator with her fabulous Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 

This is a great one to curl up on a cold night with. A group of carolers go out to sing at Christmas. One disappears. That’s it. The stage is set in such a simple way, it’s masterful. Bring on the ‘sleuth’, John Rutherford, who manages to be the Watson to the official police investigators, along with his wife Molly. The story is witty, intriguing, and beautifully put together. 

Witting really deserves to be better known as his writing is definitely on a par with the Golden Age detective writer greats. Now being republished by Galileo Publishing.

I highly recommend every mystery Sayers has written. She’s my kind of author — articulate, inspiring, a writer who writes about her surroundings with a realism that allows a reader to enter and learn more: In this book, death by the ringing of church bells in a small English village.

She’s complex but delivers layers of life and death with profound simplicity and understanding. The daughter of a minister, an advertising copywriter, a poet, she graduated from Oxford and used her life experiences to color every page she wrote.

I love her spunk and the exciting way she has written. But mostly, I love her monocled amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey who exploded on her typewriter in her first mystery.

I always like to get in at the beginning of an ongoing romance/relationship and this is the one where Alleyn meets Troy, the artist and his future wife. Actually, no I take that back, it’s a spoiler, don’t pay any attention. What if she’s the killer? Then where would the rest of these books be? 

You might think Marsh’s characters seem no different than Sayers’, Christie’s, etc well-to-do detectives and their privileged suspects, but there is a difference here. There is tension between Alleyn, his traditional outlook, his job, and Troy’s more liberal leanings. But like any great couple, together they make a great, if not very romantic, combination. 

Today, it is almost impossible to imagine aircraft roaming freely over British cities, disgorging bombs onto the streets below. So, it’s vital for us to have access to the personal, unvarnished stories and contemporary accounts from those that actually lived through this particular horror. In The Secret History of the Blitz Levine pulls no punches as he documents the behaviour of ordinary people faced with extreme experiences. Some reacted with fortitude, uniting in neighbourhood solidarity and extending charity to strangers. Others exploited the chaos, breaking legal and moral codes for their own personal enrichment. To this day, the British psyche collectively benefits from the social concept of a Blitz Spirit. But we should remember it was always a two-sided coin.

This gorgeously illustrated book is the story of Morgan, who becomes the Book Cat at the real publisher Faber. I adored TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a child, and Morgan was a real cat who was one of the inspirations for the poems. These are his adventures during the London Blitz – in some ways a familiar story, but so moving from a cat’s point of view! 

The Night Watch is a chilling, atmospheric book that shows us the lives of a group of Londoners through the air raids of the 1940s. The story is told backwards from a point shortly after the war and reveals the motivations and characters of the story slowly, painfully, and with great care. A group of lesbian women, a woman entangled with a married man, and a young man punished for his part in a desperate pact: their personal stories are played out against a backdrop of fear and destruction. Perhaps my favourite of all Sarah Water’s fabulous novels, The Night Watch is so intricately and cleverly constructed it takes your breath away.

June Spencer was a debutante. In 1938, she was presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. A year later, her life changed with the outbreak of war. Always independent, June became an ambulance driver, and later a WREN. At the same time, she continued to go to nightclubs and spend time with well-connected friends, and fall in love. She detailed everything in private diaries which Clifford was given access to by June’s daughter. June was an extraordinary ‘ordinary’ woman, another who lived through ‘history being made.’ This is a wonderful account of her life and times.

This book made me think differently about air war, arguably the defining element of 20th and 21st-century conflicts. Grayzel traces its evolution and experience for Britain from the first bombing raids of the First World War to the start of the blitz in the Second. Unlike most other studies, which focus on military strategy and state policy, she interweaves the stories and experiences of the civilians who were to be the targets of this new technology. The book reminds us (if we needed reminding) of the shock of air raids, and the way that these impacted every aspect of life.

This book should not be out of print. It is beautifully written – economical, witty yet discreet, and joyful. Bowen was a young woman from Adelaide, in South Australia, who set off to London to be an artist and landed there during the Great War. She had a long affair and daughter with writer Ford Madox Ford, painted and partied in Paris, moved her daughter back to England in time to watch German bombers fly overhead during the Blitz. This book became another guide for how to live the creative life, the bohemian life, a life full of honesty and art. Like Hemingway’s memoir, it’s full of anecdotes of other writers and artists that were her friends for a time. It reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman artist, an artist and mother, ideas that still hold true as they are about the inner life of… show more.