Today at last it's the fortnightly meeting of the Intermediate Danish Group that Lois and I run. And we're gagging for the online meeting to start because the group is reading a humdinger of a "whodunnit", "Judaskysset" (the Judas Kiss) by Danish author Anna Grue.
And, to make things even more thrilling, we're just getting to a bit of a cliffhanging moment - almost literally - as Ursula's young lover, Jakob, takes her for a clifftop walk only inches away from a big drop down to the waters of the Kattegat - the gulf that divides Denmark from Sweden.
Yikes!!!
Of course, we know, from the blurb on the cover, that this book is going to be a murder mystery.
So far, however, there haven't been any murders at all. But then that's perhaps not surprising because our group has only got to page 10 - it can be slow-going when a group of rowdy "old codgers" get together to try and read a foreign-language whodunnit, that's for sure!
So, to sum up: by page 10, number of murders - zero, but on the other hand, number of sex acts - already multiple, described or alluded to. My goodness, those Danes !!!!
Yes, Jakob and Ursula are having a sudden and extraordinarily passionate affair, an affair that started within minutes of the couple's first meeting, in the "visual arts" room of the local college, where Ursula is a teacher, after Jakob, a local paints-maker, arrived to try and sell Ursula some of his non-toxic paints.
Within minutes of meeting, the pair are "at it", on one of the desks in the arts-room, "between damp lumps of unfired clay and a pile of old rags" (Danish: mellem halvvåde klumper af ubrændt ler og en bunke gamle klude). Luckily the desk is the one nearest to the door, so that Ursula is able to kick the door shut with her foot, so they can get a bit of privacy.
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
This afternoon our group is already speculating about whether Jakob will take the opportunity of their romantic clifftop walk, to push his mistress, the menopausal Ursula, down into the grey-green waters of the Kattegat.
'Is Jakob getting tired of Ursula already, after only a few weeks?', somebody speculates.
'Have they been overdoing the sex?'
'Is Ursula's bed too narrow?' (it's a typical what-the-Danes-call "1.5 person bed" (Danish: halvandenmandsseng), so between 120 and 140cm wide (about 4 ft to 4ft 8in).
'Is the young Jakob frustrated by Ursula's menopausal hot flushes, habitual backache and poor vision?'
'Does he just want to get his hands on Ursula's money?' - she had a big lottery win recently apparently.
Etc etc...
I definitely think we should be told, though, don't you, and quickly for preference!!! However, we're only on Page 10 and maybe it'll all start "kicking off" on Page Eleven. For now, however, it must remain a mystery, because 4 o' clock chimes and our little online group meeting comes to a close.
16:00 Lois and I, feeling totally drained, as always, after attempting to "lead" one of these rowdy group-meetings, wind down on the patio with a cup of Earl Grey tea, and we continue to speculate about Jakob and Ursula.
Lois and I have become generally more "savvy" about solving crime mysteries, that's for sure, particularly since starting this Danish group and having over the years read a bunch of "Danish noir" murder stories.
We also both tend to focus on crime stories in the news, much more than we used to. At the moment we're both trying to solve a mystery in the village of Upper Wick, a mystery that has even defeated local master-sleuth Cliff Hardy, according to the local Worcestershire section of Onion News - and the county police are baffled too, no doubt about that.
But more interesting even than that, perhaps, is master-sleuth Cliff Hardy himself and his problems "hooking up" with local women in the village of Upper Wick, which, as you may know, lies somewhere midway between the Stanfield Nursing Home and the Rushwick Cricket Club, although nobody's quite sure exactly where it is.
“I’d like to be in a relationship, but the only girls I ever meet are the ones who walk into my office—I look up and they’re just there, slowly pulling their gloves off, telling me some sob story about their dead husbands,” Hardy said from beneath a tan fedora, recalling the dozen or so women he’d met most recently, all of whom were wealthy dowagers primed to inherit their husbands’ multimillion-dollar oil empires, former Hollywood starlets next in line to run their husbands’ blockbuster movie studios, or femme fatales who married and then destroyed men just for the sport of it.
“I need to find a way to meet women who don’t want to hire me to investigate the very murders they themselves turn out to be guilty of. It’s hard, because they give me these signals like they’re really into me, often sitting suggestively on my desk and flashing me a bit of thigh or taking a seductive drag off my cigarette. But then the next thing I know they’ve got a pistol pointed at me. What gives? Just once I’d like to meet a dame done up head-to-toe in a ravishing evening gown who isn’t trying to pin the disappearance of her rich husband on me! Maybe it’s time I got out of this village.”
At press time, reports confirmed Hardy had struck out again after he agreed to have a drink with a woman, his vision started swirling, and he woke up to find he had been committed to a local mental institution.
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