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Summary
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith brings his peerless wit to this second entry featuring a motley collection of residents in London's Pimlico neighborhood. Literary agent Barbara Ragg has agreed to represent a man writing a book about his experiences hanging out with the Abominable Snowman. And our small, furry, endlessly surprising canine hero, Freddie de la Hay, has been recruited by MI6 to infiltrate a Russian spy ring. Needless to say, the other denizens of Corduroy Mansions have issues of their own. But all of them will be addressed with the wit, charm, and insight into the foibles of the human condition that have become the hallmark of this truly peerless storyteller.
Author Notes
Alexander McCall Smith was born on August 24, 1948 in Zimbabwe. He was a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, but he left in 2005 to focus on his writing. He has written over 60 books, including specialist academic titles including Forensic Aspects of Sleep and The Criminal Law of Botswana, short story collections including Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and children's books including The Perfect Hamburger. He is best known for the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. He also writes the Corduroy Mansions, Isabel Dalhousie and 44 Scotland Street series.
He has received numerous awards, including The Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award and the 2004 United Kingdom's Author of the Year Award. His book, The Full Cupboard of Life, received the Saga Award for Wit in the United Kingdom. In 2007, he received a CBE for his services in literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Simon Prebble delivers a brilliant performance in this audio version of McCall Smith's second installment in the Corduroy Mansions series. This time around, wine merchant William French lends his heroic terrier, Freddie de la Hay, to MI6 to help infiltrate a Russian spy ring. Meanwhile, literary agent Barbara Ragg is trying to sell an autobiography ostensibly written by a yeti, and New Age practitioners are moving into the mansions and setting up a center for cosmological studies. Prebble's narration captures the farcical essence of the text, and he deftly portrays the wacky residents of Corduroy Mansion-and the equally wacky supporting characters-with skill and ease. He brings a sense of indecision to French, who wants to be daring but really isn't all that brave. And Prebble matches art student James's prim mysophobia with clean-almost antiseptic-pronunciation and delivery. A Pantheon hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fans of McCall Smith are in roughly the same enviable position as fans of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were in the nineteenth century. McCall Smith's novels are produced exuberantly and regularly, often with two or three delivered in the same year. And, like his Victorian forebears, two of McCall Smith's series (44 Scotland Street and the newer Corduroy Mansions) are serialized the first, which is set in a mansion converted into flats in Edinburgh, runs in the newspaper The Scotsman, while the second, also set in a building of flats, appears in The Telegraph. Unlike Dickens and the others, though, McCall Smith ups the ante on serialization: his stories are produced daily rather than weekly or monthly. This second installment of Corduroy Mansions focuses on a cross section of residents, including young, hard-up flatmates and more settled inhabitants, like the literary agent Barbara Ragg, who is juggling love and a dubious manuscript supposedly dictated by the Abominable Snowman, and wine merchant William French, who agrees to lend his beloved Pimlico terrier to the service of the M16. A tracking device implanted in the dog's collar, after the dog is placed in the midst of a Russian spy ring, serves as a wonderful device for keeping suspense high throughout these interlocking stories. The second installment in the Corduroy Mansions series has much comedy and poignancy and a captivating dog-spy story. Brilliant. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Yes, the Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is still McCall Smith's most popular series, but all the others are chugging right along, too. Any new entry in any of his series draws crowds of devoted readers.--Fletcher, Conni. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Seventy-eight more slices of low-key comedy, originally serialized in theDaily Telegraph,concerning the denizens of Pimlico's Corduroy Mansions and their lovers, friends and unavoidable relatives.The outlook isn't good for wine merchant William French and his caterer friend Marcia, who keeps coming out with too many nitwit remarks for him to take seriously, or for his downstairs neighbor Caroline and her fellow art student James, a sensitive, sympathetic mysophobe who's not into physical expressions of attachment. But literary agent Barbara Ragg's new romance with Hugh Macpherson defangs her long-standing feud with her partner Rupert Porter, exacerbated now by a new problem: the agency's mild, delusional client Errol Greatorex, who's mistakenly been encouraged to serve as amanuensis for the Abominable Snowman's autobiography. And psychotherapist Berthea Snark, still gathering material for her tell-all biography of her son Oedipus, the most loathsome Liberal Democrat in Parliament, never seems to have a nice day, especially now that her brother, clueless mystic Terence Moongrove, has fallen in with a pair of sharpies determined to fleece him. But Caroline's herbalist flatmate Dee has had a notable idea that may just take offmarketing gingko bilboa as a remedy for failing sudoku fansand William's faithful Pimlico terrier, Freddie de la Hay, vaults to a leading role when he's recruited by Sebastian Duck of MI6 to spy on neighborhood Russian blackmailer Anatoly Podgornin. As in his series debut (Corduroy Mansions,2009), Smith places exactly the same emphasis on the cloak-and-dagger histrionics of espionage; the pursuit of the yeti through Fortnum Mason; and the question of who stood whom up for dinner, Caroline or James. The results will charm fans who thought44 Scotland Street(2005) and its sequels should have been set in London.Like Henry James, Smith clearly believes that relations stop nowhere; unlike James, he seems determined to trace every single one of them to its vanishing point.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is the second entry in McCall Smitth's "Corduroy Mansions" series. It features most of the same beloved characters, but the title derives from William French's Pimlico terrier, Freddie de la Hay, becoming a spy for M16. This is not the only component of the work: there is a budding romance; a young man who is questioning his sexuality; a naOve and gullible brother; and the author of an autobiography of a yeti. There is something about this series that is highly reminiscent of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. It is more about the people than the plot. It focuses on how some eccentrics and some regular folks deal with life in general, and it does so with gentle humor. Verdict Recommended where character-driven gentle reads (for example, those of Clyde Edgerton, Nick Hornby, or even Helen Fielding) are popular. [See Prepub Alert, 12/20/10.]-Susan Hayes, Chattahoochee Valley Libs., Columbus, GA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. What Our Furniture Says About Us William French, wine merchant, Master of Wine (failed), somewhere in his early fifties (hardly noticeably, particularly in the right light), loyal subscriber to Rural Living (although he lived quite happily in central London), longtime supporter of several good causes (he was a kind man at heart, with a strong sense of fairness), widower, dog-owner, and much else besides; the same William French looked about his flat in Corduroy Mansions, as anybody might survey his or her flat in a moment of self-assessment, of stocktaking. There was a lot wrong with it, he decided, just as he felt there was a lot that was not quite right with his life in general. Sorting out one's flat, though, is often easier than sorting out oneself, and there is a great deal to be said for first getting one's flat in order before attempting the same thing with one's life. Perhaps there was an adage for this--a pithy Latin expression akin to mens sana in corpore sano. Which made him think . . . Everybody knew that particular expression, of course; everybody, that is, except William's twenty-eight-year-old son, Eddie, who had once rendered it within his father's hearing as "men's saunas lead to a healthy body." William had been about to laugh at this ingenious translation, redolent, as it was, of the cod Latin he had found so achingly funny as a twelve-year-old boy: Caesar adsum iam forte, Pompey ad erat. Pompey sic in omnibus, Caesar sic in at. Caesar had some jam for tea, Pompey had a rat . . . and so on. But then he realised that Eddie was serious. The discovery that Eddie had no knowledge of Latin had depressed him. He knew that the overwhelming majority of people had no Latin and did not feel the lack of it. The problem with Eddie, though, was that not only did he not have Latin, he had virtually nothing else either: no mathematics worthy of the name, no geography beyond a knowledge of the location of various London pubs, no knowledge of biology or any of the other natural sciences, no grasp of history. When it came to making an inventory of what Eddie knew, there was really very little to list. He put his son out of his mind and returned to thinking about the proposition mens sana in corpore sano. Was there an equivalent, he wondered, to express the connection between an ordered flat and an ordered life? Vita ordinata in domo ordinata? It sounded all right, he felt--indeed, it sounded rather impressive--but he found himself feeling a little bit unsure about the Latin. Domus was feminine, was it not? But was it not one of those fourth declension nouns where there was an alternative ablative form-- domu rather than domo ? William was not certain, and so he put that out of his mind too. He walked slowly about his flat, moving from room to room, thinking of what would be necessary to reform it completely. Starting in the drawing room, he looked at the large oriental carpet that dominated the centre of the room. It was said that some such carpets gained in value as the years went past, but he could not see this happening to his red Baluch carpet, which was beginning to look distinctly tattered at the edges. Then there was the furniture, and here there was no doubt that the chairs, if once they had been fashionable, no longer were. If there was furniture that spoke of its decade, then these chairs positively shouted the seventies, a period in which it was generally agreed design lost its way. It would all, he thought, have to be got rid of and replaced with the sort of furniture that he saw advertised in the weekend magazines of the newspapers. Timeless elegance was the claim made on behalf of such furniture, and timeless elegance, William considered, was exactly what he needed. He would give his own furniture to one of those organisations that collect it and pass it on to people who have no furniture of their own and no money to buy any. The thought of this process gave him a feeling of warmth. He could just imagine somebody in a less favoured part of London waiting with anticipation as a completely free consignment of surplus furniture--in this case William's--was unloaded. He pictured a person who had previously sat on the floor now sitting comfortably on this Corduroy Mansions armchair, not noticing the large stain on the cushion of which Eddie had denied all knowledge, though it was definitely his responsibility. It was a most unpleasant stain, that one, and William had never enquired as to exactly what it was. Yet he had noticed that Marcia, when she had lived with him, had studiously avoided ever sitting on that chair. And who could blame her? Our furniture, he reflected, says so much about us, and our tastes--perhaps more than we like to acknowledge. We may not like a piece of furniture now, but the awkward fact remains that we once were a person who liked it. And unlike clothes, which are jettisoned with passing fashion, furniture has a habit of staying with us, reminding us of tasteless stages of our lives. William looked at his settee; he had bought it at a furniture shop off the Tottenham Court Road--he remembered that much--but he would never buy something like that now. And certainly not in that colour. Did they still make mauve furniture? he wondered. He moved on to the kitchen. William liked his kitchen, and often sat there on summer evenings, looking out of the window over the rooftops behind Corduroy Mansions, watching the sun sink over west London. Sometimes, if conditions were right, the dying sun would touch the edge of the clouds with gold, making for a striking contrast with the sky beyond, as sharply delineated as in a Maxfield Parrish painting. He would sit there and think about nothing in particular, vaguely grateful for the display that nature was providing but also conscious of the fact that there was not enough beauty in his life and that it would be nice to have more. Now, surveying his kitchen from the doorway, he saw not the outside vista but the inside--the cork floor that needed replacing, the scratched surfaces that surely fostered an ecosystem in which whole legions, entire divisions of Pseudomonas were encamped. Best not to think about that, nor about the bacteria which undoubtedly romped around the faithful body of his dog, Freddie de la Hay, who was sitting on the kitchen floor, looking up at his master in mute adoration, and wondering, perhaps, what the problem was. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Dog Who Came in from the Cold: A Corduroy Mansions Novel by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.