I’ve had a thing about Corfe Castle since I was three years old. It’s that first glimpse of it through the Purbeck Hills as you drive from Wareham to Swanage along the A351. It got me then and it still gets me now. The grown ups were thrilled (I couldn’t think why at the time) when the day after my first sighting I created a sandcastle version on the beach with two pieces of driftwood. For that matter I’m very fond of Dorset in general. My grandmother came from Dorset and I was taken there annually until I was 16. Lots of fond memories. I still go as often as I can.

So how could I possibly resist a novel with a title like The Corfe Castle Murders especially as my go-to light reading is usually detective fiction?  And I wasn’t disappointed.

DI Lesley Clarke has been seconded to Dorset from the West Midlands following a trauma, the details of which gradually emerge. Before she even gets to work, the evening before she’s due to start, she and her daughter get involved in a murder incident. One of the academics on an archeological dig in Corfe Castle village has been bludgeoned to death and his much younger girl friend finds him and screams. Lesley happens to be nearby.

What follows is neatly plotted with all the requisite twists, turns, coincidences and byways a good detective story needs. And I liked the emphasis on the contrast between slow rural Dorset and the high octane, urban rough and tumble Lesley is used too. And every time she drives along the A351 I’m there with her.

She’s a well drawn character and good at her job. There are things going on in her own life too and one senses a long trajectory – the linking story across the series. This is the first of six books, all set in Dorset, with a seventh due later this year. There is also a free prequel detailing the case which led to the vacancy in Dorset – about which none of Lesley’s new colleagues want to talk.

Lesley is feisty, forthright and doesn’t suffer fools. She finds religious and insular Dennis, one of her sergeants, hard going but by the end of this first novel they are beginning to respect each other. She is also keen to expand the team and brings in a uniformed female constable – another strong character beginning to show initiative.

It would be an ideal one for a long flight, or a beach/garden read – as the weather warms up and you don’t want anything too demanding. It isn’t Great Literature but McLean writes well and this yarn held my attention to the very last page. The acid test is whether or not I read the next in the series. Probably will. Lesley is good company and I don’t need much excuse to visit Dorset.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell

Although I’ve read it at least twice in the distant past I have never taught The Mill on the Floss. Reading it again now with huge pleasure I’m struck by what a good novel it would be for an A Level group. It’s so full of themes, ideas and discussion that I’d need a great deal more than a single side of A4 to list them: parenting, siblings, education, disability, female inequality, duty, loyalty, forgiveness and much more. It’s a gloriously rich novel. It’s also – by 19^th century standards – a pretty accessible read.

It was her third novel – after Adam Bede and before Silas Marner – and I’m certain that there are elements of Maggie Tulliver which are modelled on Eliot’s own memories of being a fearsomelty intelligent, curious, imaginative girl growing up in a man’s world. After all Mary Ann Evans knew she had to write under a male pseudonym in order to be taken seriously.

Maggie Tulliver is a mill owner’s daughter who adores her brother, Tom who is by turns affectionate and dictatorial. She is drawn to Philp Wakem, who has been left with a minor disability by an illness. Unfortunately there is a long term feud between Wakem senior, a lawyer, and Mr Tulliver. The result of this is that Mr Tulliver loses his mill and, with a faint whiff of Romeo and Juliet, Maggie is forbidden to see Philip.

Years pass, Tom eventually manages to get the mill back and Maggie meets Stephen who is courting her cousin Lucy. There is, however, chemistry between Maggie and Stephen which both try to deny because of what they see as commitments elsewhere. Of course there is no happy ending for anyone. Eliot ends the novel with a gloriously symbolic flood sweeping through the community and washing things/people away both physically and metaphysically.

I love the way Eliot uses Mrs Tulliver’s very judgemental sisters as a quasi Greek chorus dispensing advice, opinion and, occasionally help although that always comes with conditions and chilly patronage which reminds me of that dreadful line in Measure for Measure: “See that she has needful but not lavish means”.  Their husbands – especially Uncle Deane who gives Tom a job when Tulliver fortunes are at their lowest ebb – are rather more attractive. You really wouldn’t want to share a cup of tea with any of Maggie and Tom’s aunts – George Eliot at her acidic best. She’s also very good (you see it strikingly in Middlemarch eleven years later) at small town group dynamics and the way distorted gossip takes a hold on communities.

I was repeatedly astonished by how topical some aspects of The Mill on The Floss are too. Maggie, in a moment when her agonising self-control slips, agrees to go away with Stephen and marry him. That means they spend a night together on the river before reaching the town where Maggie’s conscience overpowers her and she insists on leaving him and going home. Of course the night together is, although full of passionate longing, sexually innocent but Maggie is castigated by the populace of St Ogg’s for immoral behaviour in a way that Stephen isn’t. 162 years after the novel was published that still rings true. Although today nobody (or almost nobody) minds much whether or not young people have sex together, women are still judged differently from men on socio-sexual issues.

The character I empathise with most is poor, “more sinned against than sinning” Mrs Tulliver. Her story is tragic. She has two challenging children. She’s a fairly simple woman who can’t make head or tail of  Maggie’s mercurial intelligence and despairs of her sallowness and dark hair. Then she loses all her treasured possessions including her home and virtually has to go into service at the behest of her bossy sisters. Finally, long widowed,  she outlives both her children – an appalling fate for any mother. There’s scope here for a spin-off novel or play about Mrs Tulliver – anyone up for it?

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Corfe Castle Murders by Rachel McLean

Librarians and book prize panels do not care for Michael Morpurgo because they find his writing sentimental and predictable. I doubt that he minds much because he is one Britain’s most successful authors and children love his writing just as they did that of Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and now Jacqueline Wilson. None of them met/meet  with much literary approval.

Morpurgo is an issues man and makes no secret of it. He often writes movingly about the horrors of war ( Private Peaceful, Kensuke’s Kingdom) or animal welfare and sentience (Born to Run, Running Wild).  Sometimes, as in War Horse he combines the two. And The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips (2006) is another compelling story about both war and an animal.

Lily, who narrates, is an elderly lady. As a farm child in Devon, at the time when land was being evacuated for D Day training, she kept a journal which she is now handing over to her grandson.

Tips was her much loved cat. Lily was  an only child and her father was away at war. A cheerful, 18 year old, black American GI, who becomes a friend, eventually returns Tips to her because the cat gets lost when the family is forced to move out of the farm house. And then – at the end of the story the Lily of 2006 tells her grandson about much more recent developments. It’s a moving ending.

The detail about how the land was taken and used is what really happened  around Slapton Sands in 1943. And, as always, Morpurgo’s characters are all totally realistic – Barry the evacuee who comes to live with them from London and wants to be a farmer is, for example, beautifully drawn as is his in-your-face but nice bus driver mother when she visits. Lily’s grumpy grandfather is someone we all know too.

And as for the cat – well, anyone who’s ever lived with a cat will be able to feel Tips’s fur under his or her fingers, see her green eyes and hear her feline voice. Morpurgo really does do animals well.

The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips has been dramatised once or twice but seems never to caught on to the extent that some other shows based on Morpurgo’s books have. It would be great to see it done again somewhere soon so that more children (and adults) are driven back to this really rather good book.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.