A Splash of Red

Jemima Shore #3

by Antonia Fraser

Jemima Shore is anticipating some peaceful research in the British Library when sinister things occur, a vicious murder and a disappearance. Jemima then finds herself involved in a tangle of possible motives and conflicting relationships.

Genres: Mystery, Crime, Fiction, British Literature, Detective, Womens

259 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1981

About the author

Antonia Fraser is the author of many widely acclaimed historical works, including the biographies Mary, Queen of Scots (a 40th anniversary edition was published in May 2009), Cromwell: Our Chief of Men, King Charles II and The Gunpowder Plot (CWA Non-Fiction Gold Dagger; St Louis Literary Award). She has written five highly praised books which focus on women in history, The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth Century Britain (Wolfson Award for History, 1984), The Warrior Queens: Boadecia's Chariot, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Franco-British Literary Prize 2001), which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola in 2006 and most recently Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. She was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000. Antonia Fraser was made DBE in 2011 for her services to literature. Her most recent book is Must You Go?, celebrating her life with Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve 2008. She lives in London.

Reviews

[Briar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Aghhh, bad, bad, bad! A very generous dollop of slut-shaming and an absolute torrent of victim-blaming: Jemima decides astonishingly quickly that because her friend Chloe has lied to her a couple of times, she's a massive liar and deserves all she gets. Apparently it was her own fault that her abusive-ex turned abuser; she drove him to drink and not only triggered his violence but actually enjoyed it. The only person who comes out of this whole situation well is the Lionnel fellow, who actually (shock!) believed Chloe when she told him how horrible it was for her in that relationship - and he is punished for this by death. Classy. And of course because Chloe apparently liked to have a lot of sex with a lot of people, she must be a bad person. Ew.

Jemima has what for anyone else would be a pretty traumatic time during this book. She loses a close friend. Then she gets badly beaten up by the close friend's abusive ex (but obviously that was the close friend's fault because she brought the violence out in him, which is presumably why Jemima is so sympathetic towards him for the rest of the book). Then another friend dies. She deals with all of this with perfect cool and calm. She is not upset. She has no nightmares and cries no tears. She appears, in fact, to have very few emotions apart from the occasional burst of panic and, of course, her indestructible self-confidence. As in the other books, she's definitely not as intelligent as she and everybody else thinks she is. In fact, she behaves remarkably stupidly on occasion.

[Janette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bleeeach! I read this straight after her Tartan Tragedy, and I am soooo tired of reading this pre-AIDS period stuff...

Young readers: be aware that in the 60s, 70s, and beginning of the 80s, it was perfectly acceptable to write of men who would be behaving discourteously if, upon first meeting a woman, they do not fondle her thigh, and a woman would be impolite if she didn't go to bed with him. Generally they would both then have a cigarette...

Jemima Shore behaves - very coolly - like this in both books. However, this is a review of the Splash of Red - the first intruder who bursts upon her is drunk and beats her up, then apologises. Because he is drunk, she says and does nothing about the beating; he also plant kisses upon her. The second intruder is not drunk, so he twists her nipple hard, and rests his hand on her thigh. They then sleep together. Another lover of her just-dead friend rests his hand on hers during lunch (he doesn't really want her - he's just being polite - though she does toy with the idea of sleeping with him). Yet another lover of the friend (as were also those two intruders mentioned earlier - the friend got about. She also, incidentally, had had 2 abortions - mentioned as a throwaway - and was said to not only enjoy the violence inflicted on her by her lovers, but to encourage and invite it) had made threatening and offensive phone calls to Jemima, and later confessed to spying on her and her friend in the friend's bedroom, through a peephole that he had made through the wall and a painting. "What's a little voyeurism among friends?" was her response.

Ack. I'm not at all a prude, but it is interesting how attitudes have changed over the last 25 years or so. I don't object to reading such things as a historical record of the tempora and mores, but the Jemima Shore trilogy I have just read was republished just a couple of years ago. I love Fraser's biographies, but these books were just tedious.

[Heather W · Rating 1 out of 5]

My third DNF for February 2018 (so have listed it as 2016 so that it does not count in my book challenge). I went into this expecting a cosy mystery, with a reasonable pace and nice characters. Unfortunately, this is not what I got.

I found the dialogue very difficult to read, which disrupted my enjoyment of the book which was a shame as the characters seemed to be well thought out and established. However, this was just the beginning of my discomfort with the book. I found the break ins to her flat to be uncomfortable, and not adding anything to the story (especially the second one). I also didn't like that the view of a "strong, independent woman" was depicted alongside a woman who would sleep with a man despite saying that she felt uncomfortable beforehand (especially since he had broken into her flat). This annoyed me more than I care to mention and it was shortly after this that I stopped reading so I cannot comment on the rest of the book.

I would like to say that the publisher definitely knew how to market this book, despite that what is written on the blurb may not be what you are expecting. It is a shame, and I had hoped to get some enjoyment out of this book. I probably wont be reading any more of this series. What a shame.

[TANSY · Rating 1 out of 5]

not good

[Stacey Handler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book on two levels. First it's a very good whodunit, finely written with interesting characters and an engaging story. But it's also verging on the historical. It was written in 1981 and you can tell times have changed. A man punches a woman and the woman doesn't even comment, doesn't think of going to the police, doesn't think it's anything out of the ordinary. The characters are mostly upper class London art types and talk as if they're from the 1930's. The casual sexism is rife throughout the book and the victim is blamed for being 'wayward' and sexually adventurous. It's amazing to think that only 40 years ago all this was acceptable. I'd highly recommend this book, as it works beautifully as a culturally historical document and as a whodunit with a great female detective lead. Don't read if seeing how women in the past were treated upsets you . . . or do! I'll definitely read more Jemima Shore books.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Popular historian Antonia Fraser brings her sharp sense of culture to fiction. Jemima Shore is an admired tv personality, and consorts with writers and artists. A SPLASH OF RED is her 3rd mystery -- I haven't read the first two, but that didn't damage my enjoyment. The culture is the 1981 London of the creatigensia.

Jemima is an involving detective with a wry eye. Her observations of her acquaintances, especially her wayward writer friend Chloe Fontaine and Chhloe's lovers, makes a lively, very visual story with a surprising ending.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think Jemima Shore, Investigator, is possibly the most irritating detective I've ever come across. Smug, snobbish, fond of beige, condescendingly giving the benefit of her 'feminine intuition' to the nice paternal policeman, acquiescently accepting violence from men as long as they're a bit sexy. Urgh.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Urgh! It's a long time since I've disliked a book this much.

I am a huge fan of Fraser's historical biographies, but she really should have stuck to that genre. Reading this novel provoked me to no stronger emotion than mild disbelief that anyone could write (or publish) such twaddle.

The heroine/sleuth, Jemima Shore is some kind of investigative television journalist - although she never actually seems to do any work. She agrees to flat-and-cat-sit for her friend Chloe, who is going abroad. Almost as soon as Chloe has left, Jemima starts receiving strange phone calls and visits, which culminate in murder.

I just couldn't get into this book at all. For a start, Jemima seems completely emotionless - during the course of the book, she is beaten up (causing her to lose consciousness but to be left with only a 'red mark' on her face - really?!), imprisoned, sexually assaulted, spied on by one friend and she finds the dead body of another - yet it all washes over her. No shock, grief, anger or fear, just Jemima Shore Investigator, swinging into action again in her beige silk dresses and high heels...In fact, the amount of time that Fraser spends describing Jemima's love of clothes, I'm left with the impression that Jemima would be far more upset by finding her favourite silk frock damaged than by finding her entire social circle massacred.

The other things that I found really offputting was the victim blaming attitude toward women and the slightly queasy enjoyment of sexual violence. Early in the book, Jemima is attacked by a drunken ex husband of Chloe's. When she has the opportunity to escape, she decides she feels 'too dizzy', and instead, hangs around until he kisses her in spite of her 'mute struggles'. Instead of calling the police, she just blames Chloe - "For Kevin John, it was possible to argue that he had been a promising young painter, his violent impulses confined to his canvasses...until Chloe...had let out his evil spirits of drink and assault." Later on, she is sexually assaulted by a man who gains entry to her flat without her knowledge - and "made no protest" when he takes her to bed. Female murder victims are also blamed for their own deaths. Jemima "would always believe that Kevin John had struck down Chloe in the face of some kind of intolerable provocation."

The irony is that, while criticising her friend Chloe for her promiscuous behaviour and her attraction to men who treat her badly, Jemima fails to see that she is exactly the same. The way she accepts (and is even turned on by) sexual and physical abuse from men is quite troubling - far from being a 'liberated' and confident woman, she comes across as a deeply damaged one in desperate need of counselling.

[Andrés Zelada · Rating 1 out of 5]

La periodista Jemina Shore ha tenido una idea genial: usar sus vacaciones para desaparecer del mundo sin salir de Londres. Para ello, se mudará al ático que tiene alquilada su amiga Chloe Fontaine, que, a su vez, se va de vacaciones a Francia. Por desgracia, la cosa no saldrá como ella quiere, ya que cuando vuelve al ático después de su primer día de vacaciones, se encuentra a Chloe muerta ahí.

Las últimas 100 páginas las he leído en diagonal, porque no me interesaba lo más mínimo saber quién mató a Chloe y por qué. Jemina va por ahí preguntando a unos y a otros, recibiendo agresiones por parte de varios sospechosos (el que se cuela en su casa y le retuerce un pezón, el que la secuestra durante 24 horas...) sin que ella misma, la Policía o el narrador parezcan demasiado escandalizados. Al final, todo se reduce a saber cuáles de los sospechosos fueron amantes de la promiscua Chloe y tuvieron, por tanto, motivos para matarla, pues este fue un asesinato "por amor". La conclusión está a la altura de estas premisas.

Entre el slut-shaming y lo mal escrito que está...

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another enjoyable bit of armchair detecting with Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator. This time it is her friend and temporary ... well, what do you call the owner of a flat who sublets to another? landlord when all they own is the flat and not the land? But I digress. Miss Shore is flat-sitting for her friend and fellow writer Chloe Fontaine, nee Dolly Stover, to take care of both plants and cat while said Miss Chloe is off on a holiday. So imagine Miss Shore's shock when she returns after a day of various activities, including researching at the nearby British Library. She finds Chloe's body, viciously slashed, in the bedroom. And thus the hunt begins.

I enjoyed the romp of discovery and the various characters Fraser defined in bringing us this intriguing tale. And, yes as usual, I guessed wrong on the killer.

[Jeff Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Investigative journalist Jemima Shore is lying low, living in the flat of a friend university Chloe Fontaine. Far from peace and quiet Jemima is harassed by her estranged husband Kevin John Athlone, a drunken but brilliant artist and a obscene phone caller. When Chloe finally resurfaces but before Jemima can talk to her she is found dead with her throat cut. Luckily for Jemima, her friend Detective Chief Inspector "Pompey" Portsmouth is on the case allowing her an insight in to the case. I first read "A Splash of Red" thirty five years ago, presenting a world that makes the book feel dated. There is nothing that seems unlikely in the narrative but while the book is highly readable it doesn't sparkle in a way "Quiet as a Nun" did. My change of opinion owes much to my age rather than any failings in the book it simply never engaged me enough.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The mystery is intriguing. But (partially but not entirely forgivable considering the book was written 4 decades ago) the author and/or main character do some unbelievable and unforgivable things that leave a sour taste in my mouth. Like not caring about being sexually assaulted and pretending that's normal. Or sleeping with a guy who treats you like trash and pretending that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Or pretty much dismissing the fact that a character spied on a woman through a hole in her bedroom wall and pretending that's not suuuuper creepy and messed up. (If you ask Fraser/Shore, the woman was probably "asking for it".)

[Carolyn Cash · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Jemima Shore offers to flat-sit for her friend Chloe, seeking some peace and quiet to work on her latest project, she never bargained for late-night threatening anonymous phone calls.

Or a vicious assault from Chloe's ex-lover, who turns up the next day.

Jemima realised she knows very little about her friend who has gone to France for a holiday.

Then Jemima discovers Chloe never reached her destination ... and who wanted Chloe dead?

This book kept me guessing, with a few late nights, as I couldn't put it down.

[Michelle Forsythe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remember seeing a series on PBS called Quiet As A Nun by Antonia Fraser. Really enjoyed the mystery so decades letter saw this paperback by her and thought it would be a really good mystery. Really disappointed. The book was a little hard to follow at times and the ending was a bit implausible to me.

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite awful, this novel. It's chockablock with unconvincing scenes — from all the deaths, to Jemima's brush-it-off physical abuse at the hands of men, to that cringily condescending policeman whom Jemima never puts to rights. Ugh. I'm happy to stick with Fraser's nonfiction from here on out.

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good

[Kathy]

Didn't finish

[Franziska Self Fisken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crime set in the heart of London. Varied characters, some well drawn, others less convincing. Clever story. Very 1970s 1980s feel.

[sonataiscool · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love how she writes

[Jinny]

Did not finish.

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Structurally this was much better than the first two; Fraser has found her ground in the genre, here, writing an actual mystery in which her detective investigates, set in a London social milieu that she can write both comfortably and believably. It had a taste of the guilty pleasure, her combinations of creative artists and those who live by promoting and publicising them, and she lays on the details of material culture, spending much time on clothing, decor, furniture and all, perhaps some short-hand I cannot read if one is British, or from the early 80s, or both.

So -- structurally better, more in the genre, more confidently written. But there are some very problematic gender portrayals here, and I found the way in which Shore eventually loses sympathy for her female friend and begins judging her harshly very distasteful. Much in character for the time, but it did not feel as though it was written with vision; I do not think Fraser knew that Shore was being so harsh, but rather failed to see the nuance herself. And, of course, any book which argues sincerely that a woman deserves a violent death, that she brought it on herself by being impossibly provoking, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Chloe is portrayed as being excited by danger, even by violence, but where Fraser goes with this seems to be the idea that murder is only to be expected in such a case, and that really Chloe deserved what she got. It is strange, a story of disillusionment in a way; Shore begins believing that Chloe has a messy private life but an amazing mind that produces excellent work, and then the book deconstructs that, so that by the end Shore is disdainful of the whole woman, her mind and all, and the work is forgotten. Was Fraser trying to enact that in the novel? If so I do not do her enough credit, but instinct says no. There is room to look, of course, but I do not think the book tries to do that.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Everyone loved Chloe Fontaine. Tiny and exquisitely pretty, her fragile looks hid a considerable talent as a novelist. Yes, everyone loved Chloe or had loved her; there had been a series of admirers, lovers, and husbands ever since her arrival in literary London. Her friends sometimes remarked on the odd contrast of her disorderly private life and the careful formality of her work, but it hardly seemed to matter when even the critics adored her.

"... [the] third Jemima Shore mystery centers around the strange and sudden disappearance of Chloe Fontaine, which leaves Jemima Shore in charge of Chloe's new London flat. ... a sinister story of what happened in a modern penthouse in Bloomsbury one hot summer."
~~back cover

Another convoluted plot, littered with odd, fairly improbable characters from London's artistic and literary scene. There's a lot of scaffold climbing as well as the (obligatory?) gratituous sex -- this time with various partners. The ending is somewhat unbelievable, imho.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Opening - 'At least you'll be very quiet up here,' said Chloe.

Product Description: How well do we ever know our friends? When Jemima offers to flat-sit for her friend the last thing she is expecting is threatening anonymous phone-calls on her very first night. A vicious assault by Chloe's ex-lover the next morning forces Jemima to accept that she actually knows little about her friend's life. Fuming, she is determined to confront her. But then she discovers that Chloe never reached her destination.

[Teotakuu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first met Jemima Shore on a television series and since read a number of the books but not this one.

The usual eclectic cast of characters drawn from worlds well known to the writer and therefore mostly believable

[Sara Eames · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Jemima Shore novel I have read and, unfortunately, nothing about it encourages me to try any more. The characters were ok - but none were really likeable and the plot dragged along at times. The ending seemed rushed and somewhat unbelievable.

[Viji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked it though it was a sort of laid-back kind of mystery.

[Kym · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always great to read a biography of an artist. Too often our biographies exclude the arts. This one is well done and written for younger children. Adults, however, will also enjoy it.

[Karen Osuji · Rating 4 out of 5]

kind of a sad book, but a book about overcoming obsticles

[Kimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly by the end I couldn't have given a shit who killed her !!!
I didn't like any of the characters and it was complicated at times following r erupted story x