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The Murder's In the Details Monday
Sep. 11th, 2017 08:42 amWhat I've Finished Reading
I bought Trent's Last Case when I was out of town and read it on a plane. It's another now-obscure Detection Club favorite, and to be honest, I expected it to be at least half as disappointing as Enter Sir John. Imagine my surprise when I wasn't disappointed at all! E. C. Bentley's prose can be a little too cluttered and creakily clever - the first chapter suffers from this in particular - and there's a random racist ditty ten pages from the end to remind us that it's 1913 - but overall the story is brisk and fun.
Philip Trent is a gifted young painter/ray of sunshine who's cracked a few cases and thinks he has a head for detection - a nice mix of likable wunderkind and overconfident schadenfreude magnet. He falls instantly in love with the dead man's widow, like you do, but spoils his chance when he deduces (incorrectly!) that she was having an affair with his best murder suspect. Too bad! This is one of those classics that defines a genre by preemptively subverting it. Confronted by one outlandish plot twist after another in the final pages, Trent inaugurates the Golden Age of Detection by declaring it entirely too absurd for a rational human being, and washing his hands of the whole silly business in his first book. Get out while you can, Trent! It only gets sillier from here.
Deadly Nightshade also uncovers an unbelievably convoluted plot, though here the Gothic absurdity doesn't quite undo the grisly sadness of the child murder - or vice versa, for that matter.
What I'm Reading Now
Cards on the Table! which means Ariadne Oliver has arrived, spilling apple cores all over the ground and flatly refusing to learn about Finland. Mrs. Oliver is in fine form from Chapter One, and the plot - an eccentric society troll invites four uncaught murderers and four representatives of law and order to a bridge party, just to see what happens! - is enjoyably batty and artificial. What happens is murder, of course, and our four sleuths are forced to put their largely incompatible heads together to figure out who did it.
What I Plan to Read Next
Dumb Witness is no. 31 in the Great Agatha Christie Publication Order Mega-Read, and after that I might take a small break from Christie and read some other things. I’ve got a brand new anthology called Atlanta Noir, some Helen Reillys, a Raymond Chandler collection, and probably a few more books that aren’t directly in my line of sight right now.
I bought Trent's Last Case when I was out of town and read it on a plane. It's another now-obscure Detection Club favorite, and to be honest, I expected it to be at least half as disappointing as Enter Sir John. Imagine my surprise when I wasn't disappointed at all! E. C. Bentley's prose can be a little too cluttered and creakily clever - the first chapter suffers from this in particular - and there's a random racist ditty ten pages from the end to remind us that it's 1913 - but overall the story is brisk and fun.
Philip Trent is a gifted young painter/ray of sunshine who's cracked a few cases and thinks he has a head for detection - a nice mix of likable wunderkind and overconfident schadenfreude magnet. He falls instantly in love with the dead man's widow, like you do, but spoils his chance when he deduces (incorrectly!) that she was having an affair with his best murder suspect. Too bad! This is one of those classics that defines a genre by preemptively subverting it. Confronted by one outlandish plot twist after another in the final pages, Trent inaugurates the Golden Age of Detection by declaring it entirely too absurd for a rational human being, and washing his hands of the whole silly business in his first book. Get out while you can, Trent! It only gets sillier from here.
Deadly Nightshade also uncovers an unbelievably convoluted plot, though here the Gothic absurdity doesn't quite undo the grisly sadness of the child murder - or vice versa, for that matter.
What I'm Reading Now
"I've written thirty-two books by now and of course they're all exactly the same really, as M. Poirot seems to have noticed - but nobody else has - and I only regret one thing - making my detective a Finn. I don't really know anything about Finns and I'm always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he's said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it's the long winters with no daylight"
Cards on the Table! which means Ariadne Oliver has arrived, spilling apple cores all over the ground and flatly refusing to learn about Finland. Mrs. Oliver is in fine form from Chapter One, and the plot - an eccentric society troll invites four uncaught murderers and four representatives of law and order to a bridge party, just to see what happens! - is enjoyably batty and artificial. What happens is murder, of course, and our four sleuths are forced to put their largely incompatible heads together to figure out who did it.
What I Plan to Read Next
Dumb Witness is no. 31 in the Great Agatha Christie Publication Order Mega-Read, and after that I might take a small break from Christie and read some other things. I’ve got a brand new anthology called Atlanta Noir, some Helen Reillys, a Raymond Chandler collection, and probably a few more books that aren’t directly in my line of sight right now.
