Julian Worker - Author

Maigret is unofficially ‘asked’ to investigate a case where a young man has been mangled by a train, but there are suspicions that he might have been dead prior to the train running him over. Maigret heads out of Paris and as he travels to the place where the death happened, he sees a former colleague called Justin Cavre – affectionately known as the Old Cadaver – who is going to the same place…

This is a fascinating book. Every few pages I’d stop and try to think about the ‘Blade Runner’ film and wonder whether what I’d just read happened in the film. This is distracting but enjoyable too. World War Terminus on Earth killed many tens of millions of people and the after effects of radioactive dust and radioactivity kill more each day. Most animal species have become extinct but…

There are fourteen short stories in this collection by the Czechia author Bohumil Hrabal whose story ‘Closely Observed Trains’ is published by Penguin (there may be others but this is the only one I’ve seen). In these fourteen stories, great events pass by the eyes of ordinary people while they are preoccupied with their own experiences and acquisitions. The title story surprised me because the…

The Time Out Market has opened at the Oakridge Centre in Vancouver. This shopping centre is at Cambie and West 41st Avenue. I ventured along recently to have a look and at first glance it seems slightly smaller than the Time Out Market in Lisbon and has a different layout. The place was full of people (the time was 13:30) which was good to see and it did make me wonder how full the place would…

Willa Cather knew the frontier life as a young girl and she used this experience to write this book, the first of the Great Plains trilogy. Alexandra Bergson comes over the ocean from Sweden as a young girl with her parents to live on the Nebraska frontier. When her parents pass away, Alexandra becomes a surrogate parent to her three brothers Lou, Oscar, and Emil. Alexandra is well-organised and…

The Time Out Market has opened at the Oakridge Centre in Vancouver. This shopping centre is at Cambie and West 41st Avenue. Cambie Street heads from Marine Drive Skytrain station to the city centre. The Canada Line metro line follows Cambie from Marine Drive to Olympic Village and there’s a metro station at the Oakridge Centre. 41st Avenue is a major East-West road starting from Victoria Drive…

This is another excellent mystery by Josephine Tey because the fact that Brat Farrar isn’t who he claims to be is revealed early in the book to the reader, it’s how the revelation comes about for the characters in the novel that is rather clever. The book doesn’t receive five stars for two reasons. The first is that most of the main characters in the book like horses and a lot of the background…

According to the book, the Most Dangerous Game of all is another man with a gun… This story is set in northern Finland in the area from Rovaniemi to Ivalo with the denouement on the Russian side of the Finnish border where the strands of the story are tied together. Bill Cary is a float-plane pilot in northern Finland who smokes a lot, drinks a lot, and gets into many scrapes. He flies…

A Clergyman’s Daughter is the second novel and third book by George Orwell. Dorothy Hare is the Clergyman’s Daughter of the title. She lives in rural Suffolk, looks after her father, and gets involved in parish matters. One day she is pounced upon by a character called Mr Warburton near the church. He tries to kiss her but she rejects his advances. They may have been seen by the village…

This is a brilliant book about a small ship that along with her sister ship, Terror, survived the Antarctic only to sink in the Arctic on an expedition to find the North-West Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The book is incredibly well researched and engagingly written and is a maritime mystery that will almost certainly never be solved. For anyone interested in exploration and…

The book is set in the Burma of 1945, the Japanese are meant to be in retreat, but they’re still firmly in the minds of the local population who are worried their enemy will return. Squadron Leader Forrester is the commander at an air station on the “purple plain” of Burma, but gradually loses the will to live once he hears his young wife has been killed in the London Blitz. However, he meets a…

This was a 2.5 stars rounded up to three stars as there isn’t a wholesale massacre of characters in the story. The White Cat Club of the title is a members club integral to the politics and poker-playing of the town / city of Plattsburg. The narrator is a lawyer called Jack Knox who lives with his married brother, Fred, Fred’s wife and their two boys in a nearby city called Manchester (USA not…

Freeman Wills Crofts worked as a railway engineer and trained as a civil engineer. He makes good use of this precision both in his description of what the criminals did to achieve their aims and in the rigorous investigation of Chief Detective Inspector French. The Jane Vosper is carrying five cargoes in its holds from London to various ports in South America ranging from Pernambuco to Buenos…

The Prisoner of Zenda is a swashbuckling story set in the mythical area of central Europe known as Ruritania. Rudolf Rassendyll has a private income and a lust for travel. He has the Elphberg red hair and large nose, courtesy of an affair between a young English girl and a previous king of Ruritania centuries before. When he goes to Ruritania for a quiet holiday, the attendants of the king,…

The first outing for The Continental Op sees him visit the corrupt mining town of Personville. He arranges to meet a man called Don Willsson who will tell The Continental Op what is required of him in Personville. The Continental Op arrives at Willsson’s house but he’s out according to Willsson’s wife. She then goes out and comes back with blood on her shoe. It transpires Willsson has been…

This story is quite possibly the ultimate road trip in a novel as well as being a commentary on the social and economic history of the period. The Joads have to leave The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma of the early 1930s where big business is demolishing their shacks and find a better life in California. The whole family are piled into their truck, some of them riding on their belongings on top. Not all…

This book about the investigations of Inspector Imanishi takes place in Japan in the year 1960, so is not only a murder / mystery story but also provides an insight into Japanese culture just 15 years after the end of World War II. More than most murder / mystery stories Inspector Imanishi eats a lot of varieties of food in many types of restaurant. His investigations cover most of Honshu island…