Sun 11 Jul 2010
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: JOHN SHERWOOD – Creeping Jenny.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[2] Comments
JOHN SHERWOOD – Creeping Jenny. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Celia Grant #9. No US paperback edition. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1993.
Celia Grant is a horticulturist, and owner of Archerscroft Nurseries, which specializes in the rarer and more rarely seen varieties. She also finds time to become embroiled in various forms of shady doings.
Celia hires for the summer a painfully shy girl whom she doesn’t really take to, the Jenny of the title. She’s even less fond of her after she seduces Celia’s head gardener, and then is apparently kidnapped.
The investigation leads to a radical environmental group who are threatening dire consequences to a local garden show, among other more serious things, and all this at a time when Celia is in the middle of a squabble between a local landowner and an industrialist new to the area.
I like this series. Celia is an enjoyable character, and I think one of the better realized crop of British amateur sleuths. Sherwood writes well, and generally tells a good story, occasionally with a little edge.
Though not really hardboiled, Celia isn’t Miss Marple. Some in the series have more depth than others, but they are usually peopled with interesting characters, and the plots are usually adequate.
I don’t think this is one of the stronger entries, but it was certainly readable, and stopped short of being disappointing.
The Celia Grant series —
1. Green Trigger Fingers (1984)
2. A Botanist at Bay (1985)
3. The Mantrap Garden (1986)
4. Flowers of Evil (1987)
5. Menacing Groves (1988)
6. A Bouquet of Thorns (1989)
7. The Sunflower Plot (1990)
8. The Hanging Garden (1992)
9. Creeping Jenny (1993)
10. Bones Gather No Moss (1994)
11. Shady Borders (1996)
John Sherwood had a crime-writing career than spanned six decades. He was not uniformly prolific throughout that time, but he had two periods in which he was very active. Starting out in 1949 with a longish series of adventure and espionage novels, including several with a series character named Charles Blessington, he wrote only four in the 1960s and 70s. He might be best known for a book called Death at the BBC (as it was titled in the US) in 1982, then came the long run of Celia Grant books.
July 12th, 2010 at 5:11 am
“the plots are usually adequate” and “stops short of being disappointing” – not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?
July 12th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Sounds like he was saying that the series was character-oriented rather than plot-oriented, and even in terms of the former he wasn’t as enthusiastic about this one as he’d been for other books in the series.
Or in other words, I think you nailed it. This wasn’t a ringing endorsement by Barry by any means — but I might try some of the earlier Celia Grant books, should the occasion arise.
The chances are slim, I suppose, but maybe. He and I agreed more often than not.