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A Murder Born Every Minute Monday
Dec. 19th, 2016 09:22 amCrossposted to Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
( Dreaming of Babylon )
What I'm Reading Now
The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. I promised to post a picture of the cover, so here it is:
( Murder, Magic, and the Great Merlini! )
It's neither as good nor as bad as the cover suggests. There seems to be a collaboration between a magician/amateur detective and a detective novelist to produce novels (i.e., the true adventures of the Great Merlini) for money. The novelist shows up at the magician's magic shop, trying to get him to look at some proofs or something, and a woman shows up, desperate to buy the Headless Lady illusion and take it home. How suspicious! Eventually they go to the circus to investigate, and find themselves in the middle of a murder mystery, like we always knew they would.
The biggest draw of this book is its infodumping: Merlini is an insider who keeps helpfully explaining carny slang to the narrator-novelist. Since popular slang is always a little behind the underworld, the profusion of circus/grifter jargon has an interesting effect: the book (published in 1940) often "feels" about twenty years later than it is, at least to me, the casual temporal outsider. There's also an interesting digression on hobo signs -- apparently the proofreader's mark for "add a period here" is the same as the 1930s hobo mark for "this town will arrest you for vagrancy." Other than being fonts of information, Merlini and the novelist are not overwhelmingly interesting characters, or possibly I'm just tired.
What I Plan to Read Next
Tana French! Maybe also The Mystery of the Blue Train.
What I've Finished Reading
( Dreaming of Babylon )
What I'm Reading Now
The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. I promised to post a picture of the cover, so here it is:
( Murder, Magic, and the Great Merlini! )
It's neither as good nor as bad as the cover suggests. There seems to be a collaboration between a magician/amateur detective and a detective novelist to produce novels (i.e., the true adventures of the Great Merlini) for money. The novelist shows up at the magician's magic shop, trying to get him to look at some proofs or something, and a woman shows up, desperate to buy the Headless Lady illusion and take it home. How suspicious! Eventually they go to the circus to investigate, and find themselves in the middle of a murder mystery, like we always knew they would.
The biggest draw of this book is its infodumping: Merlini is an insider who keeps helpfully explaining carny slang to the narrator-novelist. Since popular slang is always a little behind the underworld, the profusion of circus/grifter jargon has an interesting effect: the book (published in 1940) often "feels" about twenty years later than it is, at least to me, the casual temporal outsider. There's also an interesting digression on hobo signs -- apparently the proofreader's mark for "add a period here" is the same as the 1930s hobo mark for "this town will arrest you for vagrancy." Other than being fonts of information, Merlini and the novelist are not overwhelmingly interesting characters, or possibly I'm just tired.
What I Plan to Read Next
Tana French! Maybe also The Mystery of the Blue Train.
