Monthly Archives: October 2026

Susie Dent, Death Writ Large

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Susie Dent, Death Writ Large. Zaffre, 2026, hb, 401 pp.

A genre of fiction that seems now to be generally known as cosy crime isn’t usually my cup of tea. In the past I’ve read the odd Maigret novel, even tried Agatha Christie. They’re often entertaining, and make a change from what might pass as more ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ fiction.

Susie Dent’s follow-up to Murder By Definition (2024 – I posted on it HERE) repeats the formula she established there. Once again the protagonist is Martha, leader of a team of lexicographers working on a lightly fictionalised version of the OED in Oxford. The surviving members of that team from two years ago also reappear.

It might help to look up online the plot summary of M B Definition, as there are frequent allusions here to what happened in that novel; Martha in particular is still haunted by some of its traumatic events.

The convoluted plot closely resembles its predecessor. An apparent murder is accompanied by cryptic messages and puzzling clues, seeming to point an accusing finger at a snooty group of ex-Oxford undergraduates known as the cabal. When members of that exclusive, elitist clique seem to become targets of a would-be murderer, the rather languid earlier pace of the novel picks up and tension increases.

As in the previous novel the formula moves in the final chapters to the revelation of the perpetrator of the attacks. What’s slightly more interesting this time is that Martha herself is seen to be in danger.

Susie Dent once more handles her material with aplomb, despite some rather clunky stage direction-like narrative details during scenes involving dialogue. Here’s a random example; Martha is talking with a friend:

Alice didn’t push. She sipped her wine and looked around the warm kitchen.

We’re constantly given these rather annoying and random details of business that suggest to me that the author is trying too hard to bring to life these scenes that form, of necessity, the bulk of the narrative – people discussing what’s just happened and how they interpret the events and puzzles accompanying them.

The characters aren’t, for the most part, successfully brought to life – they’re either insufficiently differentiated, or made to behave and speak like stereotypes: the snob, the eccentric academic, etc. There’s a not too convincing, faltering romance sketched out between Martha and the senior detective who reappears from the previous Dent novel – this seems like an afterthought, or an attempt to add a bit of colour to a fairly monochrome genre piece.

My thanks to Mrs TD who passed Death Writ Large on to me after she’d finished it. I don’t share her level of enthusiasm for this genre or author, but I wouldn’t want to put people off reading what’s essentially an entertaining novel.

As with M B Definition, the main interest for me, and largely what kept me reading, was the erudite stuff about language. There are, once again, obscure items of vocabulary that form the headwords of every short chapter that relate to the content of that chapter (eg ‘ludibry, noun, sixteenth century: an object of derision’). The dictionary team frequently ponder the significance of words and sayings; another example chosen at random: Martha uses the expression ‘It’s still touch and go’, which causes her colleague to reflect ‘Nautical, that phrase, like so much in English’.

Make of such linguistic digressions what you will. At least it makes Susie Dent’s otherwise generic crime fiction possess an element of originality and distinctiveness.

Private Peaceful, by Michael Morpurgo

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Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful

We went this week to see the stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful. Adapted by Simon Reade from Morpurgo’s YA novel first published in 2003, it’s a one-man play about the final hours of teenage ‘Tommo’ Peaceful on the night and morning before his execution during the early years of WWI.

It was an extraordinary performance by the actor Benjamin Cain. With only a camp bed as prop and a stark backdrop of a shell-scarred, mist-shrouded no man’s land, Tommo frequently checks his watch and counts the hours passing. His terror and barely suppressed sense of injustice are palpable, and make for a deeply moving and heartbreaking experience.

He begins by reliving scenes from his childhood and family life in rural Devonshire. By frequently adopting the voices and personalities of the characters he encounters, he creates, with that magical impact that’s only possible in live theatre, the impression of a large cast of actors. We’d seen a similar feat in the live-streamed film of Jodie Comer’s extraordinary performance for the National Theatre in the courtroom drama Prima Facie.

During these early parts of the play we hear through Tommo’s ingenuous account how unjust and exploitative the class system was – a hierarchy that was replicated in many ways in the military.

When war comes, Tommo is reluctantly moved to enlist (lying about his age – 16 – as so many others did) when a recruiting campaign comes to his village. In another scintillating act of ventriloquism he enters the character of an onlooking old woman who taunts him with the accusation of cowardice if he doesn’t join up. This ‘white feather’ emotional pressure from the womenfolk (and others) of the time reminds us of the populist, bullying misconception about the ‘nobility’ of young men fighting and probably dying ‘pro patria’.

The trench warfare scenes are brilliantly conveyed entirely through the actor’s performance, reinforced by sound and lighting effects; he doesn’t even have a prop rifle, he just mimes shooting (and being shot at and shelled). This makes the terror and hellishness of endless hours under enemy fire that he endures more powerful than any realistic film representation (the story was filmed in 2012): the psychological damage is conveyed into the audience’s imagination through a kind of theatrical osmosis. It’s the visceral kind of experience only possible in live theatre performance.

Tommo is court martialled for refusing to obey an order in battle. It was a stupid order, which would have meant leaving his badly injured, much loved older brother in a shell-hole in order to join a futile, suicidal advance into the enemy guns. The programme notes point out that over 300 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed for similar charges of ‘desertion’ or ‘cowardice’. The concept of shell shock or PTSD wasn’t considered seriously until years afterwards – which puts us in mind of course of the writings of the likes of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and, more recently, Pat Barker in her Regeneration trilogy of novels.

As the hours tick past and the inevitable climax arrives – the execution – the tension is almost unbearable. The cruel fate of this young lad, who’s probably only 17 when he’s shot by firing squad, is a salutary reminder of the potential for otherwise civilised societies to lapse into barbarity and class oppression. At least the UK government finally, in 2006, posthumously pardoned these men.

I’m writing this on the day after the US so-called ‘war secretary’ announced that an execution by firing squad in December of a former army major who shot dead 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood will be live streamed for the public to view. Only two countries in the world that still make use of the death penalty have done so in public this past year: Iran and Afghanistan.

Two films

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Here are some first impressions of two films I’ve been to the cinema to see over the last couple of weeks.

‘Pressure’ was directed by Anthony Maras and co-written with David Haig, the author of the 2014 stage play on which the film is based. It’s a vehicle for a fine central performance by Andrew Scott as the scratchy but brilliant British meteorologist, group captain James Stagg, who had to argue his case vehemently to overrule his American counterpart’s insistence, on the basis of a wrong-headed trust in historical data, that the D-Day invasion scheduled for June 5, 1944 should go ahead. Stagg, basing his prediction on scientifically up-to-date meteorological data, finally wins the agreement of supreme commander Eisenhower – the predicted storm duly shows up on cue, and Stagg is vindicated.

It’s a bit slow at times, and some of the invented material not based on historical fact is a little contrived, but the screenplay writer, director and cast did a fine job in making what must have been a very static and technical central premise – which scientist to believe and trust – sustain the whole film. Especially as we all know from the start what happened in history, so creating the dramatic tension that’s so apparent in this film was a fine achievement.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ is a brave but flawed attempt by British director Georgia Oakley to bring Jane Austen’s first published novel (1811) to life on the screen. Many of us will recall director Ang Lee’s fine film version of 1995, with a radiant 19-year-old Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood, the impulsive, passionate and emotional representative of ‘sensibility’, and Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, as older sister Elinor, the more restrained, rational embodiment of ‘sense’.

Hugh Grant played Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars, while Alan Rickman was Colonel Brandon, whose constancy, moral probity and decency are rewarded when Marianne learns to rein in her impetuous, romantic infatuation with the philandering gold-digger, Willoughby, and recognise the more sober decency and probity of Brandon as a better bet for a happy marriage.

It’s a complicated plot, revolving around the usual urgency for a young woman to find a wealthy husband (I’ll resist the temptation to quote the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, a novel that sets the scene more ironically and subtly than in this less mature and nuanced Austen effort). Love might conquer all, but economic security was the more ‘sensible’ route. Elinor’s outwardly more rational, restrained, self-denying character perhaps represents Jane Austen’s moral touchstone in the novel; I read it so long ago I don’t remember it well enough to assert this definitively.

What this new film version does convey is that the sisters can benefit from learning something from each other: Marianne’s immature, exuberantly emotional approach to life is endearing but potentially leads to catastrophic misjudgements, and an element of more temperate rationality, she discovers, leads to a less precarious outcome. It’s worth remembering that in the novel she’s only 16. Brandon is 35 – a sort of prototype Mr Knightley.

Elinor, for her part, comes to realise that repressing her own powerful feelings and sacrificing her hopes for happiness to a higher moral purpose doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness – though I suppose Jane Austen ultimately tips the balance in her favour by engineering plot devices to make Edward conveniently available again, freed from his honourable but loveless engagement to another heartless gold-digger, Lucy.

When Edward’s decency leads him to refuse to break off this arranged match, his mother ruthlessly strips him of his inheritance, making his newly enriched brother a more desirable match for Lucy.

That rather clumsy summary probably conveys some of the overly apparent authorial (by Jane Austen I mean) inclination to favour Elinor as the guiding spirit of the novel. What Oakley’s film failed to achieve, as Mrs TD and I found, was to make Marianne’s character appealing while she overdid the teenage emotional stuff. Instead she tends to come across as irritatingly self-absorbed and foolish. We just didn’t care what happened to her (and to a lesser extent to Elinor) – we left the cinema half an hour before the 132-minute film ended.

There were some touching moments depicting the love of the sisters for each other, but Marianne’s self-destructive impetuosity led to some serious overacting by Esme Creed-Miles. Even allowing for her character’s youth, she failed to engage our sympathy. Daisy Edgar-Jones does a better job as Elinor, but she still seemed to us to be a bit colourless.

It all looked wonderful, with some atmospheric indoor evening candlelit sequences, but many scenes just went on too long, and slowed the pace to the point of tedium. The actors playing Edward, Willoughby and Brandon came across as too one-dimensional and vapid – especially stiff and seemingly bored Brandon.

On a more positive note, the film succeeds in portraying the dismal necessity for young women at that time, and to a lesser extent young men not in possession of a large fortune (or inheritance), to balance the prospect of a happy, loving marriage against the reality of needing to secure a suitably wealthy spouse.