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Murder Never Sleeps Monday
Mar. 7th, 2016 10:51 amArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Two crumbling Christies: Towards Zero (1944) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), both featuring the solid and (mostly) likable Superintendent Battle.
Towards Zero was a terrific mystery with an impossibly stupid random romance stuck on at the end; Seven Dials spent a lot of time being boring and silly, but the random romance was charming in that meringuey Beresfordian way (and might have been even more so if I could have remembered who the one guy was for most of the book).
I spent the entirety of Towards Zero feeling fairly confident that I had cracked the code, only to be taken completely off guard by the solution (unlocked by an obvious detail that was beautifully sleight-of-handed away in the early chapters, of course). It was very well made and even a little chilling. Seven Dials follows a handful of perky young weekend-partiers whom murder pulls into the orbit of a lot of fake/real/fake conspirators, and the identity of the criminal mastermind is obvious, once you learn that there is a criminal mastermind, from [spoiler redacted]. And there's a Raffles reference! I should read more Raffles.
I had a whole sightseeing wish list for my trip out of town, but the only thing I actually managed to do was visit this bookshop. It's a nice space, though the used book section was much smaller than I was expecting and did not have the out-of-print Clemence Dane-Helen Simpson books I hoped they might. (Helen Simpson did turn up in one of the Annotated Holmes footnotes, though). On an impulse, I bought a book by Helen McCloy called The Long Body, which was in even worse condition than the crumbling Christies; as soon as I began to read it the cover fell off, and by the time I finished all the pages had detached themselves from the spinal glue and were disintegrating into flakes of crispy brown paper.
It was a tiny book, well under two hundred pages. I read it in about an hour and a half and loved it, even though the xenophobia hinted at in the early chapters was decidedly not undermined by the end, and the reveal/conclusion was so rushed that it felt like the author had suddenly noticed she was about to run out of paper. The "psychological insights" of the police-psychiatrist detective were not always much more convincing than Mrs. Bradley's, but the narrator's were better; the careful depiction of emotional states made suspension of disbelief easy even when the action was frankly ridiculous. And once the killer was revealed, you realize that there was only ever one viable suspect for most of the book. But that doesn't matter at all; it's full of intelligent character details, beautifully readable, and very quick. This was a serendipitous purchase and I'll probably be reading more Helen McCloy in the future.
What I'm Reading Now
It's a good thing I already have enough goodwill toward JKR and the Strike-Ellacott Agency to coast on for another ten books, because if I'd picked up Career of Evil first, I would have put it down immediately after a few paragraphs and never looked back. Why? Killer POV in the first chapter! ( If your name is not Raskolnikov, I do not want to hear your murdery hopes and dreams. )
What I Plan to Read Next
Also bought at the Mysterious Bookshop: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Watson's Choice by Gladys Mitchell. Recommended to me and just waiting for me to open: Malice by Keigo Higashino -- a contemporary mystery featuring another murdered author, which looks promising.
What I've Finished Reading
Two crumbling Christies: Towards Zero (1944) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), both featuring the solid and (mostly) likable Superintendent Battle.
Towards Zero was a terrific mystery with an impossibly stupid random romance stuck on at the end; Seven Dials spent a lot of time being boring and silly, but the random romance was charming in that meringuey Beresfordian way (and might have been even more so if I could have remembered who the one guy was for most of the book).
I spent the entirety of Towards Zero feeling fairly confident that I had cracked the code, only to be taken completely off guard by the solution (unlocked by an obvious detail that was beautifully sleight-of-handed away in the early chapters, of course). It was very well made and even a little chilling. Seven Dials follows a handful of perky young weekend-partiers whom murder pulls into the orbit of a lot of fake/real/fake conspirators, and the identity of the criminal mastermind is obvious, once you learn that there is a criminal mastermind, from [spoiler redacted]. And there's a Raffles reference! I should read more Raffles.
I had a whole sightseeing wish list for my trip out of town, but the only thing I actually managed to do was visit this bookshop. It's a nice space, though the used book section was much smaller than I was expecting and did not have the out-of-print Clemence Dane-Helen Simpson books I hoped they might. (Helen Simpson did turn up in one of the Annotated Holmes footnotes, though). On an impulse, I bought a book by Helen McCloy called The Long Body, which was in even worse condition than the crumbling Christies; as soon as I began to read it the cover fell off, and by the time I finished all the pages had detached themselves from the spinal glue and were disintegrating into flakes of crispy brown paper.
It was a tiny book, well under two hundred pages. I read it in about an hour and a half and loved it, even though the xenophobia hinted at in the early chapters was decidedly not undermined by the end, and the reveal/conclusion was so rushed that it felt like the author had suddenly noticed she was about to run out of paper. The "psychological insights" of the police-psychiatrist detective were not always much more convincing than Mrs. Bradley's, but the narrator's were better; the careful depiction of emotional states made suspension of disbelief easy even when the action was frankly ridiculous. And once the killer was revealed, you realize that there was only ever one viable suspect for most of the book. But that doesn't matter at all; it's full of intelligent character details, beautifully readable, and very quick. This was a serendipitous purchase and I'll probably be reading more Helen McCloy in the future.
What I'm Reading Now
It's a good thing I already have enough goodwill toward JKR and the Strike-Ellacott Agency to coast on for another ten books, because if I'd picked up Career of Evil first, I would have put it down immediately after a few paragraphs and never looked back. Why? Killer POV in the first chapter! ( If your name is not Raskolnikov, I do not want to hear your murdery hopes and dreams. )
What I Plan to Read Next
Also bought at the Mysterious Bookshop: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Watson's Choice by Gladys Mitchell. Recommended to me and just waiting for me to open: Malice by Keigo Higashino -- a contemporary mystery featuring another murdered author, which looks promising.
