A novel from the 50s, quite good, about a solicitor and his relationship with his grown (and gone) son and his wife. A little quiet, clearly postwar. I liked it.

Mortimer's first novel is about a young man who joins a film crew which is making an apparent documentary on soldiers and their training, just before D-Day. The story is about the kinds of people in that world: their intrigues, jealousies, talents and shortcomings are where the focus really is. Good, but not what I would recommend as an introduction to Mortimer.

Felix is a mild mannered English novelist in love with his publicist. Someone seems hell-bent to make his life less boring, and the next thing we know, he acquires a lifetime of trouble in a few days.

Good for Mortimer fans, but not the best choice as a first read.

This is a sort of mystery masquerading as a social novel. An English family zips off to Tuscany for three weeks and discovers all sorts of local intrigue there - some of it real and lots of red herrings. If you're a Mortimer fan, read this - it's kind of a cross between Paradise Postponed and Mayle's A Year in Provence. The writing is quite nice, but the story is uncompelling.

Story of Mortimer's "second chance" - new career, new wife. Better than Clinging, quite well done. I'm not sure why I don't give these 4 stars, but if I did, I wouldn't be sure why they got them.

Well, I'll quote some: steers delicateley between satire and sentiment and an eddy of wisdom and comic resignation and then words like wry and eccentric are used a lot.

So, this is social comedy, a little mystery, and lots of use, misuse, and abuse of English country life. I had a little bit of a hard time getting going, then couldn't put it down.

This refers to a bunch of books about a British barrister who's unimpressed by artificial status or pomp. He likes to defend criminals in the Old Bailey, and you encounter plenty of that, but the real value of the stories is Mortimer's acute perception of human nature - the criminals, the other lawyers, the judges, his wife ("She Who Must Be Obeyed"), and, notably, himself. The writing itself is good as well. The stories are set in the time of writing.

The Penguin omnibuses are the way to go; there are three: 1, 2, and 3.

An early work of Mortimer's, from the 50s I think. An English couple encounters some questions and possibly strife in the marriage when a local tart is found dead. The story is about people's thoughts and relationships and the impact of social rules or boundaries we maintain in our lives - it includes a segment where a fellow shows up as asks the wrong questions and tells the wrong truths and makes people uncomfortable for example - but doesn't judge them very much. I wouldn't recommend this as a first taste of Mortimer.

This book is very well done, and quite good, but it may or may not be very entertaining. The story is a darkish tale of a leftist would-be politician in a small borough in England. Our hero gets a girl and, with the help of a once-powerful Tory minister, gets a parliamentary seat. But, somehow, the process has robbed him of his ideals and somewhere along the way enough means were justified by ends to make the whole mess quite questionable. In the end, the results as well as the philosophy are indicted.

I guess this tale was too true to life and too sad for me to like it. I'm not recently in the mood for exposés on institutionalized stupidities and injustices.