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Summary
Summary
The heartwarming and hilarious second installment in the Corduroy Mansions series presents the further adventures of Alexander McCall Smith's newest, already-beloved characters, including the Pimlico terrier Freddie de la Hay.In the elegantly crumbling four-story mansion block in Pimlico called Corduroy Mansions, the comings and goings of the wonderfully motley crew of residents continue.A pair of New Age operators has determined that Terence Moongrove's estate is the cosmologically correct place for their Centre for Cosmological Studies. Literary agent Barbara Ragg has decided to represent a man who is writing a book about his time "hanging out" with the Abominable Snowman. And our small, furry, endlessly surprising canine hero, Freddie de la Hay - belonging to failed oenophile William French - has been recruited by MI6 to infiltrate a Russian spy ring.
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 (2)
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.
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.