Retired GP

Nov 28, 2024 | bjgp.org | John Launer |Retired GP

Edogawa Rampo Penguin, 2023, PB, 112pp, £9.99, 978-0241656914How’s this for a plot? A Japanese novelist who writes detective stories becomes acquainted, apparently by chance, with an attractive young married woman. She confides in him that she is receiving death threats from another Japanese writer of detective fiction who used to be her lover and feels bitterly rejected. Novelist A (who knows Novelist B to be secretive and reclusive as well as a literary rival) determines to track him down.

Jun 27, 2024 | bjgp.org | John Launer |Retired GP |Anton Chekhov |Ronald Wilks

Anton Chekhov (Trans. Ronald Wilks) Penguin Classics, 2004, PB, 240pp, £9.78, 978-0140448986There’s much to be said for short novels you can read in a couple of evenings, without the commitment needed for a blockbuster. If you’re looking for a great example, I’d recommend The Shooting Party by the Russian dramatist, Anton Chekhov. He wrote it in his early 20s in 1884, the year he qualified as a doctor.

Apr 25, 2024 | bjgp.org | John Launer |Retired GP

One of the greatest English comic novels is The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, a Victorian stage comedian, and his artist brother, Weedon.1 The novel purports to be the diary of a middle-class city clerk, Charles Pooter, who recounts the surpassingly dull events of his everyday life in detail. Its status as a masterpiece (it has never been out of print since it was published in 1892) derives from the deadpan ordinariness of its fictitious narrator.