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Articles by Melanie Gay

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About Melanie Gay

A former literary agent with three published novels of her own, Melanie retains her life-long love of the written word and recently mastered the Kindle. She is currently writing a historical novel set in 17th Century Britain and Holland. More Posts

Prussian Blue/ Philip Kerr

I have written before on my admiration of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels. The first three The March Violets were well received but writer and publisher would scarcely have predicted he would go on to write another 14. After all a detective novel set in Nazi Germany is not the stuff of [...]

June 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

Olive Kitteridge/Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge and rightly so as it’s a fine novel. The structure is a collection of short stories set in the coastal town in Maine with the common theme of Olive Kitteridge, a former maths teacher in the local school appearing in all [...]

May 23, 2017 // 0 Comments

Keeping a diary

Mae West once said “Keep a diary and a diary will keep you”. I am always interested in why people keep a diary. In the case of politicians diaries tend to be self serving and remunerative. Barrack Obama is reportedly getting a record advance for his. The best written political diary in [...]

May 18, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Bugatti Queen/ Miranda Seymour

Miranda Seymour has written an outstanding biography of a woman of whom I have never heard, Helene Delangle aka Helle Nice arguably the finest female racing driver of all time. Born at the very start of the twentieth century, in a provincial French family, her father was a postman, she first went [...]

March 27, 2017 // 0 Comments

The thrill of crime

Crime/thriller-writing is a genre with legions of fans – I like to dabble myself from time to time quite separately from my reviewing duties – and it’s pleasing to note that some of its most popular exponents and indeed fictional characters are women. Here are some relevant links [...]

March 21, 2017 // 0 Comments

Golden Hill/Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford is a historian and broadcaster whose first effort at fiction wring is Golden Hill and it’s good. He has written a novel set in middle of the eighteenth century and in the style of Henry Fielding. It’s set in New York, not the heaving massive metropolis we know today but [...]

March 14, 2017 // 0 Comments

Trading Futures/ Jim Powell

When it comes to writing about angst and misery some feel that women do this best. I disagree. Novelists like Edward St Aubyn and now Jim Powell can “do” self- recrimination, pathos, self-absorption, fragmentation of the character with humour and sensitivity. Jim Powell has an [...]

January 31, 2017 // 0 Comments

Berlin Red/ Sam Eastland

Publishing is like most industries: if your competitors have a successful product, copy it. In 1989 Philip Kerr, a copywriter at Saatchi and Saatchi, wrote The March Violets set in Nazi Germany in the thirties and introduced to us the cop Bernie Gunther. Gunther was like Raymond Chandler’s [...]

January 26, 2017 // 0 Comments

Shantaram/Gregory David Roberts

I studied modern languages at school which provided an excellent education on French and German classic literature for which I am grateful. Our teacher had a theory that the life of the writer was irrelevant. The cleverest boy in our class challenged him one day on this. Since that day I have often [...]

January 10, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Spanish Game/Charles Cumming

My recent reviews of the Charles Cumming espionage novels reflect an admiration for this novelist. Indeed I would have put this admiration as high as nominating him as the successor to John le Carre. So I read an earlier one of his  called The Spanish Game and having just finished it I am less [...]

November 25, 2016 // 0 Comments

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