Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
What a wonderful book. I really, really enjoyed this re-read of West with the Night, by Beryl Markham. A great book, wonderfully descriptive and compelling, about East Africa in the time from WWI to WWII. And about flying in the days when a compass was nearly your only instrument. Markham has a great talent for going off on a tangent without losing track of where the story is going and without letting you mind, or even really notice. If you've never had a chance to read this book, I highly recommend it.
|
If you liked Beryl Markham as a female aviatrix in general as well as her literary contribution in WWTN, may I take the liberty of highly recommending one TV mystery miniseries and one historical mystery novel series set in early Kenya/British East Africa which kind of have characters based upon her?
Heat of the Sun (
PBS,
Wikipedia) is an excellent ITV miniseries done in the late 90s, which has Trevor Eve in it starring as an ex-London cop who shoots an unsavoury but highly politically connected man in the line of duty and gets quietly reshuffled to 1930s Kenya colony as the new Nairobi Superintendent of Police to get rid of him.
Along the way, he ends up solving mysteries based partially on and incorporating characters from real-life British East Africa colonization history, including Karen Blixen's coffee farming efforts, the debauched denizens of that club whose name I can't remember which served the Happy Valley set, the post-Boer War tensions with the South African settlers, and of course Emma Fitzgerald, a feisty, self-made aviatrix who's directly based, looks and background and character-wise, on Markham who contributes a great deal towards the new Superintendent Tyburn's crime solving rate, along with his eventual Assistant Superintendent, who happens to be played by one of my favourite British actors.
It's one of my personal favourite series and it's been shown on PBS, so chances are good that if your local library carries DVDs, they'll have this since libraries tend to love having PBS stuff on shelf.
NB: If you're thinking possibly of buying a copy for yourself, I highly recommend importing the Region 2 UK release from ITV DVD if you've got a compatible player. It's pretty low cost and contains extra scenes that were edited down or cut out in order to make the series fit PBS Mystery! runtimes with the added introductions by Diana Rigg in them.
Incidentally, fun fact: Trevor Eve once played Denys Finch-Hatton in a made for TV miniseries biopic about Beryl Markham (
IMDB), which I also happen to own on Region 2 import DVD.
Also in a more adventurously-oriented vein are
Suzanne Arruda's (
SYKM,
Wikipedia) Jade del Cameron mystery series set in 1920s British East Africa Protectorate before it became Kenya.
Jade is a very independent and slightly commitment-phobic former WWI ambulance driver who eventually learns to fly, and while she does initially start off her cases being prodded by the loss of a former (heterosexual) love and discovering a new one along the way, there's very little relationship drama in these and Jade is much more likely to save a guy's hide than to be saved by him (although at certain points, there is reciprocal mutual saving going on), and she develops strong female friendships and ties as well.
I'll warn that sometimes these have a bit of a Mary Sue/White Saviour element going on in them, because Jade is occasionally written as the bestest brightest and most resourceful Especially Special Action Girl Who Can Action and Help Save The Locals From The Evil Things, but sometimes Jade's skills and connections get her into more trouble than they get her out of, and she has to stop and think and take time to work out a better solution to the problem than the one she thought she could use going in.
Also, while there is a lot of Jade Saves The Day For Both The Native And The Transplanted Proto-Kenyans (occasionally with Unfortunate Implications), Arruda did a lot of historical and cultural research which she
put up on her blog here, and generally tries to treat the local cultures with respect.
The first 6 of these were published by Penguin's Berkley imprint and I bought the lot of them as they came out, and I thought the series had finished, but now that I look it turns out the author is self-publishing the new ones (on Amazon-exclusive, it looks like, alas, though I guess I'll just set price-drop alerts and hope some of these become the Kindle Big Deal Monthly Sale picks at some point).
I really liked this series back when they were still coming out and would count them as nearly as fun as the Ava Lee books, though not quite as good writing quality/plot-wise, but still highly enjoyable, so YMMV. (Unfortunately, they're rather price-y if you're trying them from the start as Penguin sets these at $13-ish CAD non-couponable, and you do have to read them in order, though perhaps the library can get them in for you if you're interested).