A Spot of Folly
A short story collection published by Profile Books in 2017
The stories in this book are amazingly gripping. Many protagonists, despite being devious themselves, are oddly naive. They run into trouble because they imagine everyone around them is more virtuous and less calculating than they themselves are. They fail, in one story after another, to make the imaginative leap from knowing what they’re capable of to working out that others might be capable of similar immorality.
In these tales, a businessman boasts about cheating on his wife, only to find the tables turned. A beautiful country rectory reverberates to the echo of a historical murder. A compulsive liar acts on impulse, only to be led inexorably to disaster. And a wealthy man finds there is more to his wife’s kidnapping than meets the eye.
Not a word is wasted in A Spot of Folly. For any writer wanting a master class in crafting suspense and crime short stories, this is a perfect book to study.
Notes
Contains: “Never Sleep in a Bed Facing a Mirror”, “A Spot of Folly”, “The Price of Joy”, “The Irony of Hate”, “Digby’s Wives”, “The Haunting of Shawley Rectory”, “A Drop Too Much”, “The Thief”, “The Long Corridor of Time”, “In the Time of his Prosperity” (as Barbara Vine) 2 and “Trebuchet”.
“A Drop Too Much”: read by Jon Rollason for BBC Radio 4 in 1976.
Short Works: Miles Jupp reads “The Haunting of Shawley Rectory”, Sam West reads “The Price of Joy”, and Hattie Morahan reads “Trebuchet”.
Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr investigates the curious case of detective fiction.
The Ruth Rendell Award was launched in 2016 by the National Literacy Trust and the ALCS in honour of the author Ruth Rendell, who tirelessly championed literacy throughout her lifetime and supported the National Literacy Trust since its foundation in 1993.
Footnotes
Review by Josephine Pennicott, 15 Dec 2017. ↩︎
First published as part of a Penguin 60th anniversary anthology in 1995. ↩︎