Double dose of Brodie mystery

Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

'The Hanging Shed', by Gordon Ferris (Atlantic Books) R125

THIS, the first in a new series by a promising Scottish writer, was a massive e-book hit for Ferris last year, and deservedly so.

The mystery genre conventions here - former policeman turned journalist Douglas Brodie attempts to save a childhood friend from the gallows and winds up in a big mess himself - may seem familiar, but Ferris' evocation of the Gorbals and gloomy Glasgow in the 1946 post-war austerity is an eye-opener. The second Brodie mystery, The Unquiet Heart, has just been published. Pick them both up.

THE ISSUE

LATER this year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first single release, Love Me Do. Cue, then, a fresh wave of '60s nostalgia. Which is understandable, I guess.

The decade may have been a short one - it began with Beatlemania and was all over bar the shouting with the Charles Manson family murder spree in California in mid-1969 - but events of those seven years continue to cast a shadow over popular culture. One enormously influential person was miniskirt inventor Mary Quant. A review of her new autobiography (see below) says she liberated women from hobble skirts, girdles and lacquered hair with clothes "in which women could walk freely".

Quant suggests the radical hairstyles developed by Vidal Sassoon were probably just as important to the emancipation of women as her designs and the contraceptive pill. She writes: "Sassoon, the Pill and the miniskirt changed everything."

Back to the music, and Clinton Heylin's All The Madmen: Barrett, Bowie, Drake, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, the Who and a Journey to the Dark Side of British Rock (Constable), which asserts that by 1968 - when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were riven by infighting - English rock was coming to an end. That would have been that, were it not for the mental health problems (drug-induced or not) of the above-mentioned, who went on to save the day by losing their minds.

CRASH COURSE

STILL with the '60s: Kent Hartman's The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret (Thomas Dunne Books) details the lives of an extraordinary group of in-demand session musicians who performed on the early recordings by the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Monkees and many other pop outfits whose members were perhaps a little musically inept. And that was the secret: these nine-to-five journeymen who punched the clock were good at their jobs. Simple, really.

THE BOTTOM LINE

"THE Q is particularly strong and jumps out of the page or across a street, but is also female and pleasing. The M is a dominant graphic letter and the Y is soothing." - Mary Quant: Autobiography, by Mary Quant (Headline)

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