Music careers, war times and the 1960s remembered

If you read one book this week

'Curtain Call' by Anthony Quinn (Jonathan Cape) R280

A deft nod to the elegant mysteries of the 1930s, à la Dame Agatha Christie, albeit one dressed up as a comedy of manners and mistaken intentions. It is set in pre-war London against a backdrop of rising fascism and political upheaval in Europe. A young West End actress accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a hotel - and could be the killer's next target. Gripping and unexpectedly poignant.

The issue

More non-fiction coming our way. On the music front, Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band is out next month; Elvis Costello's A Memoir in September and Grace Jones's all-revealing Miss Grace Jones in November. Peter Ackroyd's Alfred Hitchcock is here in April. Adam Sisman's John Le Carré: The Biography, out in October, explores the author's recruitment by MI5 and MI6 and his career as the ultimate spy novelist.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth and Claire Harman's as yet untitled biography, out in October, promises new material from the Brontë archives.

For World War 2 buffs, Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble is here in May, while Jonathan Dimbleby's Battle of the Atlantic, out in August, plunges us into the most destructive naval battle in history. Finally, there's Mary Beard's SPQR, which details Rome's rise as a superpower, out in October.

Crash course

Farewell Robert Stone, who passed away at 77 on Saturday. He was one of the few writers to capture effectively what The New York Times termed "the apocalyptic madness" of the 1960s and 1970s as the US got lost in the Vietnam conflict and back home the counterculture turned to violence and nihilism. Forget Woodstock and the hippies, this was the country of the Weathermen and Charles Manson.

His best books - the award-winning A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (filmed as Who'll Stop The Rain? with Nick Nolte) (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Damascus Gate (1998) - had supercharged echoes of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, though ultimately it was Stone's own brooding, philosophical voice that lingered, reverberating with an old-fashioned political power and intense moral fervour.

In Prime Green, his memoir of the 1960s, he wrote: "In our time, we were clamorous and vain ... We wanted it all; sometimes we confused self-destructiveness with virtue and talent, obliteration with ecstasy, heedlessness with courage ... We wanted to die well every single day, to be a cool guy and good-looking corpse. How absurd, because nothing is free, and we had to learn that at last."

The bottom line

"You may think there's nothing there, but there's never nothing there." - Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble by Marilyn Johnson (HarperCollins)