Down Nostalgia Road……

The pile of books to read for review grows bigger, and keeping pace with that is the slightly smaller pile of books to read for pleasure.

Last week, I decided I need to clean my palate, books-wise. And so I went back to three all-time favourite authors: Alistair Maclean, Georgette Heyer and Frank Richards.

Between my daughter and me, we have the complete collection of both Maclean  and Heyer, and I`d picked up 2 Billy Bunter books by Frank Richards at Bookworm, from the Cassell reissue  edition by Hachette Books.

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It took me a while to select my Heyer for my read du jour, and my eventual pick had an India connect. It was BLACK SHEEP, where the male protagonist Miles Calverleigh, he of the swarthy complexion and laidback manners, was how he was because of many years spent in India. All his shortcomings are excused by most of Polite Society and of course, blamed on India but apart from that, there was no overt racism to be read, all 59 years after the book was first published.

It was a pleasure reading Heyer, once more falling happily into a pond of loose fish, goose-caps, dunderheads, people whose amiability was only rivalled by the elegance of their minds, people who were excessively diverting, in other words.

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My Maclean of choice was THE WAY TO DUSTY DEATH, and boy, did I relish the read. Finished the slim volume of 222 pages, which was first published in Britain in 1973,  in a few hours, stopping to smile at the author`s characteristically British dry wit, stopping to chuckle at how even the Italian and Austrian villains in the book spoke English as she is spoken by Englishmen.

And apart from these little pleasures was the story itself, a mystery set on the dusty tracks of Grand Prix racetracks in Europe, involving much glamour, derring-do, espionage, the Corsican mafia and their drug- dealing, abduction and blackmail, murder and violence, a lot of dry humour….and a dashing F1 driver and a pretty young woman. What`s not to love, hey?

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BILLY BUNTER DOES HIS BEST, now, was somewhat a disappointment. First published in 1954, the re-issue edition carries chunky paragraphs telling the readers of the minimal editorial changes, how some `archaic` and `offensive`  words and phrases have been modified, and appealing to their good sense to realize and accept that some words and terms might come off sounding offensive/stereotypical/racist but they are a reflection of their times.

That nod to political correctness reads just fine. The problem lay in the near nil clean-up of the text, with typos, errors of grammar and syntax appearing  one to almost every page. I also suspect some slight tweaking of the Nabob of Bhanipur`s quaint way of misquoting proverbs was done, because they just didn’t read as funny as they did in earlier times, earlier editions.

Just not worth the cover cost of Rs 599. So, yaroooh but no huzzahs.