Not After Midnight
Last night I was reading a short story called "Not After Midnight" by Daphne du Maurier, in which a lonely schoolteacher from England goes on holiday to Crete to do some painting. He soon discovers that the last person who rented his chalet died in unusual circumstamces a couple of weeks earlier, and that he had some connection with a mysterious American couple who are renting the chalet next door, he soon finds himself reluctantly drawn into the mystery and very quickly comes to regret it. It was a pretty effective story.
Today I went out to the sales and bought The Simpsons Movie and a box-set of all five movies in The Omen series for £15, and a volume of the first two books in the 'Discworld' series by Terry Pratchett (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic), so that was really good. I bought my groceries on my way home and also got today's copy of The Guardian which had a free CD of poets reading their own work (the poets included on the CD are Siegfried Sassoon, WH Auden, TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney).
Back home I watched a movie on TV called Strangers on a Train, a 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, from a novel by Patricia Highsmith with a screenplay co-written by famous crime writer Raymond Chandler. The film concerns two men, successful tennis player Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) and wealthy playboy Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who meet for the first time on a train. It turns out that Guy's estranged wife is refusing to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend, while Bruno hates his father, and so Bruno proposes that they 'swap murders', basically he will kill Guy's wife and Guy will kill Bruno's father, so there's nothing to connect them. Guy refuses. However, Bruno dosen't take the hint and murders Guy's wife at a fairground. Guy is immediately the prime suspect, and Bruno soon starts trying to make him fulfill his part of the bargain. It's a good film, which is pretty suspenseful and does have some really effective set-pieces in it.
Today I went out to the sales and bought The Simpsons Movie and a box-set of all five movies in The Omen series for £15, and a volume of the first two books in the 'Discworld' series by Terry Pratchett (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic), so that was really good. I bought my groceries on my way home and also got today's copy of The Guardian which had a free CD of poets reading their own work (the poets included on the CD are Siegfried Sassoon, WH Auden, TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney).
Back home I watched a movie on TV called Strangers on a Train, a 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, from a novel by Patricia Highsmith with a screenplay co-written by famous crime writer Raymond Chandler. The film concerns two men, successful tennis player Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) and wealthy playboy Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who meet for the first time on a train. It turns out that Guy's estranged wife is refusing to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend, while Bruno hates his father, and so Bruno proposes that they 'swap murders', basically he will kill Guy's wife and Guy will kill Bruno's father, so there's nothing to connect them. Guy refuses. However, Bruno dosen't take the hint and murders Guy's wife at a fairground. Guy is immediately the prime suspect, and Bruno soon starts trying to make him fulfill his part of the bargain. It's a good film, which is pretty suspenseful and does have some really effective set-pieces in it.
posted by WildatHeart87 at 10:53 AM
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