The Swimming Pool: From the author of ITV’s Our House starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton

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Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote mystery novels and other forms of fiction and non-fiction, between 1908 and the mid 1950s. I'm not sure how I discovered her, possibly through my mother? I got my hands on Rinehart's novel "The Album" when I was a teenager, and fell for it with every fiber of my Agatha Christie-obsessed nerdy little heart. The Album opens with an ax murder that happens in broad daylight in a home on a street mostly inhabited by families who still live as if it's 1897, though in the book it's more like the 1920s. I love The Album so much! Stroud might have been terminally inhibiting for the young Hollinghurst, but he escaped. At eight his "aspirational" parents took the curious decision to send him to prep school as a boarder. "Neither of my parents had been to boarding school, but they thought it was important," he says vaguely. From there, he went to Canford public school in Dorset, also as a boarder, and it proved an artistic awakening. "Being in a beautiful and interesting old house made a profound impression on me at an early stage." The decision to send him away was to be the making of the young aesthete, as well as the beginning of the remarkable voice.

Swimming pool". screenrush.co.uk. Screenrush. Archived from the original on 7 January 2008 . Retrieved 8 April 2008. This book is on the long side. The plot has a complex structure with its foundations in the present (at the bedside of Molly, seriously ill following an incident we aren’t told much about) and swirling around significant events in the distant past (centred on a suburban pond, Nat’s haunt one wild summer with her bad-girl friend Mel) and the recent past (the big end-of-summer lido party). This device worked for me, though reading on paper/screen may have proved easier to follow than the audio version (I kept wondering if I’d lost my place).

Aside from the prologue, “The Swimming Pool” brings you into the life of Natalie, a normal woman with a husband and a teenage daughter, who lives an extraordinary experience: make friends with Lara Channing, a local celebrity. She is thrown into an artificial environment that attracts her more and more, leading her to overlook her old friends and family. Don't get me wrong, there's lots to like, it's just spread too thinly over the course of the book, so I'm giving this a low rating because I really had to slog through (but I really wanted to know the ending, so Rinehart was at least doing something right. Mary Roberts Rinehart is famous for being the source of the phrase The Butler did it" and also for inventing the "Had-I-but-Known" school of mystery writing. As other reviewers have mentioned, she dips into that well too much for this book. Almost every chapter has an "I should have known" or "as it turned out" which didn't add to the suspense. In fact, it happened so often you couldn't tell what she had referred to by the actual events were unfolding. I realised early on that Molly was slightly different, and I don't feel its a spoiler to say that she has aquaphobia, a fear of being in water, or even being splashed. She has had various treatments for the condition but nothing has worked, and swimming lover Natalie just wishes Molly would overcome her fear. Here I'm going to repeat some of my review of "The Great Mistake" by the same author, but only some!

The Swimming Pool draws the reader into a whirlwind of gossip, envy and desperation, inviting you into the world of the wealthy - and though some characters are wealthier than others, everyone seems quite privileged to just be living in the area itself. You can tell Natalie and Ed are certainly not living on the breadline, and live a comfortable - if at times a little dull, in Natalie's opinion anyway - life. But is this enough? Oh, I liked this. Mary Roberts Rinehart should still be every bit as popular as she once was, as popular as Agatha Christie and the rest of the Golden Agers. She knew what she was about. And her writing was a joy.I wonder if, with the new novel done, he feels bereaved. "Normally, I do have a brief but acute sort of depression when I finish a book, which is to do with saying goodbye to this place you've been inhabiting. But I was so desperate to get this thing off that I seem to have escaped that." He has a deep, drawly voice – so deep he used to be known as Basso Profundo when he worked at the Times Literary Supplement in the 80s – and a hesitant, donnish manner, but his brown eyes sparkle behind his glasses, and he laughs a great deal, managing to take himself very seriously and at the same time not in the least seriously. So she tries to hill herself!" he said. "That's jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire with a vengeance. I've been in this business a long time, Miss Maynard. I've seen a lot of death and some suicides. But I never heard of killing yourself to avoid being killed." The Stranger's Child – the title comes from Tennyson's In Memoriam – is Hollinghurst's fifth novel, and his first since The Line Of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004. His first four books, written over a span of almost 20 years, form a quartet that explore gay life in the UK, present and past. The Swimming-Pool Library, his sex-drenched first book, published in 1988, mapped the gay world before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality; The Folding Star (1994) was a disturbing study of pederastic desire; The Spell (1998) a sex-and-drugs-fuelled comedy of manners; The Line Of Beauty another dark comedy exposing the hypocrisy and cupidity of the 1980s. This nonfiction book chronicles one man’s quest to complete the Ocean’s Seven, in which a swimmer must cross: the Channel, the Cook Strait, the north Channel (from Ireland to Scotland), the Strait of Gibraltar, the Molokai Strait, the Catalina Channel and the Tsugaru Strait. Only a handful of people have completed all seven swims. It’s a retelling of an adventure that’s difficult to put into words precisely because so few people have done it. Natalie Steele is looking forward to spending the long summer holiday by the pool at the newly opened lido in Elm Hill, the only difficulty and danger that she can foresee is her thirteen-year-old daughter Molly's intense fear of water. Molly has suffered with aquaphobia since she was just eighteen months old when she was involved in a terrifying incident at the local park. Natalie and her husband Ed have explored every available type of therapy and counselling to try to help Molly, but so far, nothing has helped. Natalie also feels an overwhelming feeling of guilt about what happened to her daughter all those years ago.