The Lively Dead
by Peter Dickinson
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In this mystery from CWA Gold Dagger winner Peter Dickinson, a landlady discovers a corpse beneath her crowded London boardinghouse A sturdy young woman with a knack for home repair and a practical sense of Marxism, Lydia is renovating her London townhouse while her husband finishes law school. To bring in extra money, she rents her upper floors to the exiled government of Livonia, a Baltic state that was long ago absorbed into the Soviet Union. One day, as Lydia is taking up the show more floorboards, the Livonians carry a coffin through the house. It bears their housekeeper, who is to be honored with vodka toasts and a solemn funeral. After the ceremony, Lydia returns to her floorboards. Beneath the rotted wood is dirt--and in the dirt, she discovers a corpse that never reached the graveyard. Identifying the body and finding the person who stashed it there draws Lydia into a tangle of spies and counterspies as her quiet little boardinghouse becomes a new front in the global Cold War. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
I was hoping that this would be a "comeuppance" novel, one in which the primary character achieves an epiphany, ideally of a rude kind. Not only was I disappointed in that, but, apparently, the author is firmly on the side of his creation. The chief mystery concerns who among the many put-upon characters will kill the amateur sleuth and put the reader out of his/her misery.
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Author Information
109+ Works 10,500 Members
Peter Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia on December 16, 1927. He served in the British Army before receiving a B.A. in English literature from King's College, Cambridge in 1951. He was an assistant editor and reviewer for Punch Magazine for seventeen years. His first book, The Weathermonger, was published in 1968. He show more has written over 50 books for adults and young adults. His works for adults include Death of a Unicorn, Skeleton-in-Waiting, Perfect Gallows, The Yellow Room Conspiracy, and Some Deaths Before Dying. His works for young adults include The Iron Lion, The Ropemaker, Angel Isle, and In the Palace of the Khans. He has won several awards including the Boston Globe Horn Book Award in 1989 for Eva, the Carnegie Medal in 1979 for Tulku and in 1980 for City of Gold, the Whitbread Children's Prize for Tulku, and the Crime Writer's Golden Dagger for Skin Deep in 1968 and A Pride of Heroes in 1969. In 2009, he was awarded the OBE for services to literature. He died after a brief illness on December 16, 2015 at the age of 88. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Wodka konserviert
- Original title
- The Lively Dead
- Original publication date
- 1975
- People/Characters
- Lydia Timms
- Important places
- Notting Hill, London, England, UK; London, England, UK
- First words
- Bending to adjust the claw of her crowbar against a joist, Lydia saw the man's feet.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)'Course it is.'
- Blurbers
- Laski, Marghanita; Crispin, Edmund
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 109
- Popularity
- 296,832
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.59)
- Languages
- English, German, Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 4
