Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper

Most Agatha Christie fans know of Frank Vosper (1899-1937) as the colourful character who adapted 'Philomel Cottage' into the Suspicion-esque play, and later movie(s), Love From a Stranger (from an original draft by Christie herself, which not many people know). Really, really keen Agatha Christie fans know that his sister Margery adapted the story 'Accident' as a one-act play, Tea for Three, in the 1930s. But did you know that he also wrote several detective stories and a novel?

Murder on the Second Floor (1929) was probably Vosper's most successful play before  Love From a Stranger. It ran in London and on Broadway and has been filmed a few times, although I've not seen any of these. What I do have is Vosper's own novelisation of the play. I'm not sure when it was published, but the edition I have, from the Daily Express Fiction Library, must have been printed in 1938 because it refers to the author's sad death the previous year. He fell from an ocean liner, the SS Paris, although the foreword in my edition identifies this as the SS Normandie. As Martin Edwards points out on his own recent post on this novel (pure coincidence, I promise!), he talks about Vosper's death in The Golden Age of Murder.

This is a short novel, at 190 small pages with very large text. I opened it up, not knowing what to expect (in fact, I had thought I was buying the play script). The opening paragraph is promising enough:

Meet Sylvia Armitage. She is the heroine of this story. Sylvia is not reclining gracefully in a hammock, attired in a simple gown of flowered muslin, beneath a cherry-laden tree in a quaint, old-world garden. Neither is she sitting on a table, swinging her long, slim, graceful legs, with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in a long holder in the other, saying shocking things about biological urges to a horrified aunt. She is not even in a notorious night-club in New York, standing on a table attired in less than half a bathing-dress, with a gentleman's silk hat at a rakish angle on her wicked little head, drinking her own health -- in such liberal potations as must seriously impair it -- surrounded by fifty intoxicated lovers in paper hats, carrying a dozen balloons apiece. No; at the risk of opening our story in a drab and disappointing manner, the truth must be told. Sylvia Armitage is washing-up.

Aha! I thought. Here we have an errant wit. Alas, the paragraph continues, and Vosper so thoroughly milks this clever device that one wonders if the whole idea is to bolster the word count. I'd guess this was a promotional tie-in for the 1932 movie, and such hastily written 'novels' were -- and remain -- a popular gimmick.

Soon, we are introduced to other characters including a suspicious Indian student who may or may not be a dope smuggler and a maid with 'an inferiority complex' who speaks more impossibly like a maid than any maid in the history of ever. This Lucy 'knew her place [...] and her place, poor little soul, seemed such a dull, obscure sort of place as scarcely to be worth knowing at all.' You get the idea.

Sylvia's love interest takes the form of a 'high-brow' playwright, Hugh, who 'looks down on' other people, especially the authors of thrillers. This snobbery dissolves when, at some point during the action, Hugh resolves to write a low-brow murder mystery play.

Once we've got to know these characters, we are introduced to some sinister goings on, involving affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, and drug smuggling, and before long the man at the centre of the whole thing is murdered.  With appropriate comic interludes, the body count mounts, and then a final double-twist makes us see the whole thing in a new, lighter light.

I wasn't sure the comedy or the tension work as well with Vosper's slapdash prose style as I'm sure they do on the stage. Notwithstanding occasional flowery passages, Vosper seems to have taken a similar approach to novelising his own script as Charles Osborne took when he turned three Christie plays into novels. That is to say, he's put the dialogue in speech marks and the stage directions into the past tense and sat back, thinking 'job done'. Job not done. One scene in which a suspect returns from church surreptitiously, trying not to be seen because she has forgotten her false teeth, must be riotous acted out. In prose, it's just bizarre.

There is also a moment quite early on when Vosper tries -- and, to my mind, manifestly, hilariously, fails -- to make a poignant and emotional point out of a rendition of the song 'How do you feel when you marry your ideal?' (you know, the one with the chorus of 'Ever so goosey, goosey, goosey, gooooosey.') 'How does one feel when one marries one's ideal?' Sylvia sighs, wistfully. 'Does he exist. Now if  only Hugh...' Similarly entertaining is the description of the corpse, with more melodrama than a day with my family.  The blood spurts from the victim's neck 'like finest threads of hardened sealing-wax, or the "feelers" of a lobster.'

To solve the mystery -- something I forgot to attempt -- just look for the least likely suspect and you can't go wrong. At the end of the novel, for various reasons I shan't go into here, everyone agrees that the story would make a marvellous play.

Maybe it would. Maybe it did. It did not, however, make a marvellous novel. That said, I'm delighted to have come across this and I got a great deal of pleasure from reading it. Just not the kind of pleasure the author intended.

Mini reviews #13

Gas Light (1938) by Patrick Hamilton. Describing itself as 'a Victorian thriller', Gas Light inspired the hugely successful Hitchcock film (which, amazingly, I haven't seen) and gave birth to the term 'gaslighting'. Until I read it, I didn't realise that the author also wrote the homoerotic psychological classic Rope. The play tells the extremely melodramatic story of a housebound wife in foggy London, who comes to believe that her husband is trying to drive her mad. The play is a hugely important precursor to the modern psychological thriller. However, even for a drama written 80 years ago, it feels slightly archaic in places; good, but more important than good.

Epitaph for a Spy (1938) by Eric Ambler. I'm incredibly impressed by my first taste of Eric Ambler. This early spy thriller, which is more of a detective story than later examples of the genre, stars a rather wonderful Hungarian immigrant, Josef Vadassy, who, taking his holiday snaps to be developed, discovers images of secret codes and weapons. Working with, but not really with, the French police, he stays in an hotel, knowing only that the enemy agent is among the other guests. The prose is fast-paced, funny, and, at times, beautiful. Although the culprit is fairly easy to spot, the denouement, on the rooftops of Toulon, is gripping.

Roseanna (1965) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The first in the series from the couple who invented Nordic Noir. A beautiful American tourist winds up dead in Sweden (true life inspiration: Sjöwall observed Wahlöö eyeing up just such a woman, and resolved to kill her off in Chapter One). Out of their depth, the local police call in the troubled Martin Beck and his murder squad. Beck enters an intense and uncomfortable international investigation, uncovering sex crimes, persecution, and betrayal. A bleak and uncompromising story, Roseanna is a pioneering novel that has influenced most western crime writers since. Essential reading, still fresh and powerful today.

The Twelve Deaths of Christmas (1979) by Marian Babson. Last month, I was sorry to hear of Marian Babson's death in December, and reminded of the only book of hers I've read: the ridiculously titled The Twelve Deaths of Christmas. It's a diverting enough murder mystery, nothing more and nothing less. Set around an 'old-fashioned Christmas', the narrative perspective alternates rapidly and it's difficult to spot the killer. I haven't read it since I was eleven, but I remember very vividly a death scene on the London Underground. Babson herself was quite a character, who loved cats and never owned a television; if you have access to the CWA's Red Herrings, check out the tributes in the latest issue.

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) by Andrew Wilson. Highsmith is the undisputed Queen of Suspense, an author we all want to know more about. Thankfully, Andrew Wilson's biography provides a detailed and nuanced account of her life and work. After reading this biography, I felt like I wanted to call Highsmith 'Pat', like I knew her in all her grubby, contradictory glory. It's not a happy story, but it's as compelling as anything she wrote.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Party time! It's my 100th review!

This special post concerns an acknowledged classic of crime and detective fiction. Agatha Christie's sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was published in 1926. The first book under a new contract with Collins -- who still publish her work today -- the legendary twist in this novel, combined with a good publicity campaign and an unfortunate media sensation around the author, launched her into genre-writing stardom. Her light has not yet dimmed.

* SPOILER KLAXON *

It's impossible to discuss The Murder of Roger Ackroyd without discussing the twist, for reasons that will become apparent. Okay, so: the narrator did it. I've lectured on this novel a few times, and I always begin my lectures with those four words. They serve as evidence that students need to do the advance reading before each class, and also set the stage for any careful consideration of the text and its contribution to crime writing.

Laura Thompson has written that 'Roger Ackroyd is all genre: not an atom of authorial personality comes between the writing and the reader.' As I argue in my book, Queering Agatha Christie, there is something very significant in the fact that it reads this way: up until the final revelation, the book is supremely conventional. It is, in fact, a more stereotypical Agatha Christie book than anything else she ever wrote. The setting is a country house, the victim in a nouveau riche type ('more impossibly like a country squire than any real country squire'), the suspects are stock figures, and the narrator is -- well, a country doctor. So, not only is he a doctor, like Holmes's Watson, but he is a country doctor; he's a local, reassuring, and reliable presence in every sense.

The plot: Hercule Poirot has retired to grow vegetable marrows (nothing unique here -- Sherlock Holmes retired to keep bees). However, when his old friend Roger Ackroyd is murdered, he is forced to investigate. The body is discovered by Dr James Sheppard, our narrator, who follows Poirot around until Poirot gathers together all the suspects.

In the final chapters, the profound conventionality ends. Poirot reprimands the suspects, tells them he knows the truth, and dismisses them. Then he takes Sheppard aside, and explains in private the truth of the matter: only one person could have committed the crime. 'In fact -- Dr Sheppard.' He then hints to Sheppard that the best thing to do in the context is to commit suicide. The truth, says Poirot, should not be revealed, for the sake of the murderer's devoted spinster sister. Sheppard goes home and writes an 'apologia' to the reader, gloating over his cleverness, and explaining that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was intended as a chronicle 'of Poirot's great failure.' On the verge of suicide, he leaves us.

Thank you to Chris Chan for pointing out
this cartoon's source: the New York Times. 

All throughout the novel, there are references to genre fiction, especially to Sherlock Holmes. Sheppard frequently tells the reader he is 'playing Watson to Poirot's Sherlock', and Poirot even compares him to Hastings. Although early reviews of Ackroyd tended to be glowing ('[few detective novels] provide greater analytical stimulation', wrote the New York Times critic), a light-hearted charge of foul play -- dismissed by Dorothy L Sayers as sour eggs over readers' having been successfully 'bamboozled' -- is often elevated by modern critics to the status of national outrage. To read contemporary scholarship on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you'd think that daily life ground to a stop when the Watsonian figure was proved to have 'dunnit'. However, these commentators are reading too literally on two levels.

First, they are not appreciating the great fun and artifice that characterised the writing and reading of detective fiction in the late 1920s. Second, they are wrong about the murderer's identity. Yes, the Watson figure never 'dunnit' -- and let me tell you why!

Sheppard is an unreliable narrator. We know this -- he gloats about it in the final chapter, referring back to the preceding text and to the act of writing itself; the trick that he -- and therefore the author -- has played. In chapter 4, Christie glosses over the murder without so much as a paragraph break:

the letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine.  It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread.  I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.

And gloating over the fairness of the mystery, the narrator of course refers back to this in chapter 27: 'supposing I had put a row of stars after the first sentence!' he says.  'Would someone then have wondered exactly what  happened in those blank ten minutes?'

When Sheppard says he has been 'playing Watson' he is misleading us again. He might be playing the part, but Poirot never joins in. Poirot never actually tells our narrator anything he wouldn't make public knowledge. The person he confides in -- the person he treats as a sidekick -- the person he shows affection for at the end of the book -- is James Sheppard's gossipy sister, Caroline. So, is it a foul? No, it's ingenious.

As most Christie fans know, Christie loved the character of Caroline, and eventually elevated her to detective status, creating Miss Marple in a set of short stories in 1928. Marple, an elderly spinster who relies on gossip to find out clues, is a direct literary descendent of Caroline -- and Christie felt so strongly about the original's narrative function that she objected when a playwright tried to turn her into a sexy love interest for Poirot, called Caryl. Christie knew exactly what she was doing.

Gossip is the key to everything in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My favourite scene fills a chapter, which is entitled 'A Game of Mah Jong'. It's absolutely one of the best and most ingenious scenes in the history of twentieth century crime fiction. The chapter is almost entirely made up of dialogue between four game-players. The Sheppards are, of course, among them. As the play their hands, they discuss the murder and the various suspects. Clues emerge, but so do psychological insights, both through the gossip and through the greed or restraint that characterises each player's contribution to the game. To my mind, this scene is much more elegant, concise, and interesting in execution than any variation of the 'Let's all look at the crime board and conveniently summarise the case' scene that occurs half way through most books and dramas.

'I'm a common, vulgar little thief!'

Poirot processes the gossip with a kind of popularised version of Freudian psychoanalysis. He has a surprisingly powerful speech in Chapter 17 about the corrupting power of money, and the socially-constructed nature of 'moral fibre'. In a 1926 context, the book is not quite as old-fashioned as it first appears, even before we get the 'twist'. Awareness that the world imagined -- the familiar, formulaic crime novel territory -- is a false one is spread throughout the book. One of Sheppard's tricks involves using a dictaphone to fake the time of death. So, after he's been killed, Roger Ackroyd is heard through the study door saying 'the calls on my purse have been so frequent of late...'

Of all the characters, it is only Thoroughly Modern Hercule who realises that nobody actually speaks like that; that what people heard was the recorded voice of Ackroyd reciting a letter.  What is so marvellous about this is that the novel doesn't just twist the old conventions and any nostalgia we might associate with the crime fiction genre. It tells us that (a) we can trust no one, however reassuring their presence might be, (b) tradition is artifice and conservatism simply doesn't work in real life, and, devastatingly, (c) we are no judges of the world we live in.


It is great that Roger Ackroyd is acknowledged as a classic and innovative crime novel. It's wonderful that it's taught at schools and universities, that it's used by narratologists discussing concealment and creative writers discussing revelation. However, as a novel, it is so much more than a stock puzzle with a shock solution. It is a stylised, self-referential tour de force.

Little People, Big Dreams: Agatha Christie by Isabel Sanchez Vegara and Elisa Munso

This is the 99th review to appear on A Sign of the Crimes, if we count each batch of mini-reviews as 5. So the next post will be a bit special. There is a small clue as to the subject of Review #100 in today's post.

As a member of an Agatha Christie group on Facebook (okay, as a member of about ten), I have heard a lot about this quirky book for children. Part of the 'Little People, Big Dreams' series, Agatha Christie was first published in Spanish, with words by Isabel Sanchez Vegara and drawings by Elisa Munso, in 2017. The series has a great and noble aim of introducing strong female role models for 5 to 8 year olds. Other figures considered in the series include Frida Kahlo, Maya Angelou, Amelia Earhart, Audrey Hepburn, Rosa Parks, Marie Curie, and Coco Chanel.

The story is a very basic, thirty-two page one. It begins with the young Agatha teaching herself to read and making up stories. It continues through her VAD service during the First World War and her acquisition of knowledge about poisons. Then, we see Agatha starting to write, encounter her books, plays, and characters, and learn about their extraordinarily broad appeal. The easy-to-follow words are accompanied by entertaining illustrations, mostly black and white but with nice splashes of colour.

I was impressed by the inclusion of small, little known details. For instance, when Agatha starts writing, there is a manuscript beside her titled 'The House of Dreams'; that was one of her first short stories, written well before 1920 but revised and published in 1926. The book also has her inventing Miss Marple whilst holidaying in Egypt and writing Death on the Nile. Of course, this didn't happen; the first Marple story was published in 1928 (and its provenance provides a second clue to Review #100...). However, as John Curran revealed in his publication of the author's notebooks, Death on the Nile was originally going to be a Marple novel. So that's kind of cool.

It's good that this series does not shy away from subjects that are traditionally sugar-coated children; war, revolution, and murder, for instance. If you read my review of Kenneth Illington's Conjuror's Alibi you'll know that I'm all for introducing young people to a few basic realities as early as possible. The mystery of who accidentally ate the pink teddy's strawberry cupcake just won't cut the mustard. However, while I think Agatha Christie is one of the greatest people in the world, ever -- naturally -- I am a little confused as to why she's in this series. I would have thought the rags to riches story of JK Rowling a little more interesting, because, amazing as Agatha Christie is, she never faced massive hostility in the way that Angelou, Kahlo, and others did. I suppose there is the significant fact that JK isn't dead.

And of course I'm delighted to see the Queen of Crime being introduced as a feminist role model in a world where role models are so sorely lacking.

The Comedy About a Bank Robbery by Mischief Theatre

On Saturday, Alan and I had a marvellous day in the West End, seeing not one but two shows, and enjoying the Lumiere festival in between.

The first play was saw was The Comedy About a Bank Robbery at the Criterion Theatre – and it was hysterically funny. This is not the kind of thing I usually review on here, but I wanted to share all the splendour, and, besides, a bank robbery is a crime, so it’s all good, right?

The play has been running since 2016 and is one of three productions by Mischief Theatre currently playing in the West End. The group, formed by a handful of LAMDA graduates, is probably best-known for The Play That Goes Wrong (an absolute masterpiece of physical comedy, which it’s impossible not to enjoy). The conceit behind The Play That Goes Wrong is that we are watching amateur actors butcher a murder mystery; predictably enough, everything goes wrong … and it’s wonderful. The same people did Peter Pan Goes Wrong for the BBC in 2016, and that too was hilarious. When they tweaked the format a little for A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, broadcast on BBC One on Christmas Day last year, the result was diabolical – quite possibly the biggest disappointment since Cadburys announced they were improving their recipe. So I was slightly wary about going to see The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. What if, somewhere along the line, Mischief Theatre had lost its touch?

Well, I needn’t have bothered. The Comedy About a Bank Robbery does not tweak the successful formula. Instead, it ventures into different territory. It is straightforward old-school farce, and it’s very well done. The story concerns an escape from prison in 1950s America, and the planned robbery of massive diamond from a secret bank vault. At the centre of all this is a romantic triangle involving one of the prisoners, the bank manager’s daughter, and a small-time grafter.

None of the jokes are new (that should be ‘is new’, I think, but it doesn’t feel right).  A running gag concerns the banker, Robin Freeboys, and one of the criminals assuming his identity in order to go robbing three boys – which owes a debt to the ‘don’t call me Shirley’ school of laughs. At one point, the gag gets tweaked with the introduction of a certain Roger Freeboys. There’s also a marvellous routine in which our young hero – the petty grafter – pretends to be the same man, his girlfriend’s father, while she mimes visual clues – reminiscent of a scene in in Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty tries to tell the hapless Polly which horse she’s supposed to have backed. The authors of this production – Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, who were among the original cast but are now off doing improv – have mixed their comic clichés in just the right doses. From two minutes in until long after the final curtain, the audience was in paroxysms of mirth.

One thing I really admire about Mischief Theatre productions is the way they use the whole stage, including the lighting box. This production has actors crawling up a vent over the front row of the audience’s heads. It also has a technically impressive and visually hilarious scene which takes place at a ninety-degree angle (sadly, I can’t find any images of this scene online). There’s also a great deal of singing, which neither of us was expecting and which helped keep the spirit light and kitschy.

At the performance we saw, one of the parts was played by an understudy (which means that the ensemble cast must have mixed around quite a few roles, as everyone plays two or three people). Honestly, I wouldn’t have known. We saw a very high-profile musical in the evening, also with an understudy, who has been understudying the role for two years, and that production didn’t run entirely smoothly. And, while Mischief Theatre doesn’t do dance numbers, it does a hell of a lot of physical comedy and choreographed stunts as well as intricate wordplay. So it needs good understudies, and it has them.

I would absolutely recommend going to see The Comedy about a Bank Robbery if you’re able to get to the West End, or if it ends up on tour, as I’m positive it will.

Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

I love Edmund Crispin (aka Bruce Montgomery) and have loved him since I read Love Lies Bleeding in my school library at a tender age. I loved that book so much that I made a deal with the librarian -- I slipped her some money for wine and she marked the book as 'lost'. It was a mystery why it was in the library at all; certainly nobody had checked it out in over twenty years. Slowly, with the internet in its infancy and golden age revivals a good few years off, I pieced together a collection of Crispin's nine crime novels (I only got the short story collections recently), and decided to ration them out over my lifetime. I haven't read a Crispin for ages, so I picked one at random, and dug in. The one I picked was Frequent Hearses (1950).

I'm sorry to say that novel showcases Crispin and his brilliant donnish detective, Gervase Fen, at their weakest. The opening is glorious: a young actress, known professionally as Gloria Scott (surely a Sherlock Holmes reference), sits in a taxi, making her way through Piccadilly. When the car reaches Waterloo bridge, she alights. She walks to the edge of the bridge, and jumps to her death. A clear suicide -- but why? The young woman had just obtained her dream role in movies.

Meanwhile, Fen has been called to a film studio to advise on a new biopic of Alexander Pope. He learns of Gloria's death and sets out to investigate. Before long, there is a murder... and then another one...

The puzzle element is more pronounced than in some other books, but it is also less well integrated than anything of Crispin's I've ever read. In fact, when the solution to the mystery is revealed, it feels very much like a Sherlock Holmes story updated to fit the mid-twentieth century. I get the impression that this is an idea that should have remained firmly in a notebook; a nice and ingenious story, not fabulously realised. It should have been developed into more of a homage to the genre's heritage.

The prose is wonderfully overblown, especially when Crispin sets a scene, and it's deliciously pithy in places. For example, I love the initial description of David Crane as 'a young, thick-set man, going prematurely bald, of a type that emanates social uncertainty like ectoplasm.' The pith has its down side, however, especially when Crispin introduces working class types and women. I have not noticed this problem to any great degree in my other reading of the same author.

While I would recommend Crispin to nearly every reader, I would not recommend starting with Frequent Hearses. It is dated in all the wrong ways, and is a snivelling shadow of the author's rapier wit at its best.

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

Recently, I met the crime writer Elly Griffiths, who is an awesome person. I was guest-speaking on a creative writing programme she runs at Cambridge, and to my surprise and delight she joined in with the writing exercises I set. Because I was going to meet this successful author, I thought it might be a good idea to get to know her books, so I bought one and read it.

The Crossing Places (2009) introduces Dr Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist based at the (fictional) University of North Norfolk, which is rather in the shadow of UEA. As an academic originally from Norfolk, I was especially keen to read a Galloway mystery, and made the sensible decision to start with the first. And I fell in love with Ruth from the very first chapter. She is likeable, awkward, shy, and she keeps cats. She is, in short, believable and sympathetic. There’s nothing of the clichéd detective about Ruth, who occupies a marshy hinterland between the amateur and the professional: after all, she is a bone specialist, legitimately working with the police, but she also finds herself leading them in their investigations. Over the course of the case, she grows increasingly close to the unrefined and slightly chippy Detective Inspector Harry Nelson (Norfolk, Nelson, see what Griffiths did there?).

The plot: Ruth is summoned by the police when they discover human bones on a saltmarsh in remote Norfolk. Arriving at the scene, she determines that the bones are 2,000 years old. They are not, as DI Harry Nelson feared, the bones of a young girl who went missing ten years ago. And that is that. Until another girl goes missing. Nelson asks Ruth to look, additionally, at some anonymous letters the police have received, taunting the police with cryptic literary and classical clues as to the locations of the girls. Before long, Ruth finds herself tragically embroiled in the investigation and in danger of death …

I love that, over the course of the narrative, Ruth finds herself. She starts out keeping herself to herself, but by the end she is comfortable with her role in the world, and open to the company of friends. When she has a breakdown, half-way through, about how she is perceived – ‘Only concerned with bones, a dull specialisation, useful but ultimately marginal. She is not a heroine type […], she does not belong centre-stage’ – every reader is on her side and rooting for her.

My only problem with this novel is the tense. It’s told in the present tense, but I am 99% sure the author must have written it in the past tense, been advised that crime thrillers happen in the present tense, and edited accordingly. As a result, we have sentences that don’t sit quite right, especially when someone is remembering something (‘She had known what she would find’, which works with a ‘she remembered’ sentence but not with a ‘she remembers’ sentence, if that makes sense). I flicked through some of the later novels in the series, and none of them seems to have this problem. It does seem to be a common theme in a lot of debut crime novels of the last ten years.

The pace is consistent and gripping. When the murderer is revealed, it isn’t really a surprise so much as a slow unravelling of the inevitable. I was so into the book by the end that, as I frantically turned the pages of the final showdown on the saltmarsh, when my phone went off, I screamed at it to shut up. I am certainly looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and I will do so in order. I can’t wait to see how Ruth’s and Harry’s realistic dynamic develops.