A Murder Born Every Minute Monday
Dec. 19th, 2016 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted to Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Eventually, I got to like Dreaming of Babylon, a lot, even. C. Card meets a “knockout blonde” who offers him a thousand dollars to steal a corpse out of the morgue. Will this be the break he needs? C. Card doesn't ask for much, just enough money to go on daydreaming in relative comfort. In his imaginary Babylon he's a famous chef, a baseball player, a detective battling a mad scientist's army of shadow robots. In real life, he gets distracted easily, thinking up names for his hard-boiled Babylonian alter egos. The dead body deal goes south in a dreamlike way and he winds up exactly where he started, only with a corpse in his refrigerator. The reality is as nonsensical a mishmash as the dream, but the dream is a lot more comfortable.
What I'm Reading Now
The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. I promised to post a picture of the cover, so here it is:
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
“It sounds like my son,” she'd always say. “But he wouldn't have the nerve to call if he was still a private detective. He just wouldn't have the nerve. He still has some respect left.”
Eventually, I got to like Dreaming of Babylon, a lot, even. C. Card meets a “knockout blonde” who offers him a thousand dollars to steal a corpse out of the morgue. Will this be the break he needs? C. Card doesn't ask for much, just enough money to go on daydreaming in relative comfort. In his imaginary Babylon he's a famous chef, a baseball player, a detective battling a mad scientist's army of shadow robots. In real life, he gets distracted easily, thinking up names for his hard-boiled Babylonian alter egos. The dead body deal goes south in a dreamlike way and he winds up exactly where he started, only with a corpse in his refrigerator. The reality is as nonsensical a mishmash as the dream, but the dream is a lot more comfortable.
”I know you're sorry, son, but why are you a detective? I hate those magazines and books. They're so seamy. I don't like the long black shadows those people have on the covers. They frighten me.”
“Those aren't the real thing, Mom,” I'd always say, and she'd answer, “Then why do they sell them at the newsstand for everyone in the world to see and buy? Answer that one if you can, Smart Guy. Come on and answer it, Mr. Private Eye. I dare you. Come on! Come on! This is your mother!”
I couldn't answer.
I couldn't tell my mother that people want to read stories about people who had long black ominous shadows. She just wouldn't have understood. Her thinking didn't run along those lines.
What I'm Reading Now
The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. I promised to post a picture of the cover, so here it is:
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.
