Where There's Life There's Murder Monday
Dec. 12th, 2016 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
My plan to read all of Agatha Christie got knocked out of commission by RL and is on temporary hiatus. But I did finish The Inheritance, which was both beautifully comfortable and surprisingly painful, within its own perfectly maintained stasis field of coziness - I didn't expect Dallington was going to be made to suffer that much for his Upper-Class Twit Redemption, and I'm not sure I like it! I mean, it's not like he was doing anything wrong, even (just dallying a ton). Poor little shambles. But it was another solidly enjoyable entry in a series that just keeps getting better, and unlessCharles Finch decides to betray us all in the name of Serious Literature I am very much mistaken, there will be plenty of coziness next time to make up for this book's narrow brush with tragedy.
No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell: an odd story as much about DI Mike Burden's troubled sexual re-awakening as it is about the missing child cases that make up the bulk of the plot. I like Mike Burden because he is an ordinary policeman in a field crowded with extraordinary policemen, and because Rendell portrays his narrow-minded conservatism with sympathetic interest.
There's a fine, awkward line between sympathetic interest and too much information, and I'm not sure it's actually all that fine, on reflection. Rendell walks it -- reasonably well, I guess? I mean, she's a good writer, so it's not awful. I didn't particularly want to know that much about poor Mike Burden's sex life, but I read this entire book and now I do. So it goes.
Still, it's always nice to be sympathetically interested in a character for whom, in real life, I would have no time at all. Burden is genuinely (and because he is safely fictional, touchingly) convinced that Gemma, the mother of one of the missing children, will mend her modern city ways once she's married to him. He's touchingly convinced that she will marry him in the first place, because they are sleeping together and that's how his frame of reference works, even though they have nothing else in common, barely even a language, just a missing child and a whole bunch of sublimated fear and grief. The mystery with the children is good, necessarily a little grim but not gleefully so.
What I’m Reading Now
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 by Richard Brautigan
I bought this because of the opening sentence of the back cover copy: “When you hire C. Card. . . you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel.” Since the middle of the private eye barrel is already a dark wood of confusion and booze, what can the bottom be like? I couldn’t resist this question. The answer so far is “a lot like the middle, but with less interesting prose.” C. Card is a detective, technically, but he can't stop daydreaming about a fantasy life in Babylon, so he never gets anything done. There are some good funny moments and some that fall flat. The back cover promises that it will “upend the conventional private eye novel,” but is it possible to upend the conventional private eye novel any more than Chandler did by writing one? That’s always the problem with trying to upend things. Anyway, it’s too soon to tell.
What I Plan to Read Next
Either In the Woods by Tana French or The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. Maybe Agatha Christie, but I might leave it until after the new year.
What I've Finished Reading
My plan to read all of Agatha Christie got knocked out of commission by RL and is on temporary hiatus. But I did finish The Inheritance, which was both beautifully comfortable and surprisingly painful, within its own perfectly maintained stasis field of coziness - I didn't expect Dallington was going to be made to suffer that much for his Upper-Class Twit Redemption, and I'm not sure I like it! I mean, it's not like he was doing anything wrong, even (just dallying a ton). Poor little shambles. But it was another solidly enjoyable entry in a series that just keeps getting better, and unless
No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell: an odd story as much about DI Mike Burden's troubled sexual re-awakening as it is about the missing child cases that make up the bulk of the plot. I like Mike Burden because he is an ordinary policeman in a field crowded with extraordinary policemen, and because Rendell portrays his narrow-minded conservatism with sympathetic interest.
There's a fine, awkward line between sympathetic interest and too much information, and I'm not sure it's actually all that fine, on reflection. Rendell walks it -- reasonably well, I guess? I mean, she's a good writer, so it's not awful. I didn't particularly want to know that much about poor Mike Burden's sex life, but I read this entire book and now I do. So it goes.
Still, it's always nice to be sympathetically interested in a character for whom, in real life, I would have no time at all. Burden is genuinely (and because he is safely fictional, touchingly) convinced that Gemma, the mother of one of the missing children, will mend her modern city ways once she's married to him. He's touchingly convinced that she will marry him in the first place, because they are sleeping together and that's how his frame of reference works, even though they have nothing else in common, barely even a language, just a missing child and a whole bunch of sublimated fear and grief. The mystery with the children is good, necessarily a little grim but not gleefully so.
What I’m Reading Now
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 by Richard Brautigan
I bought this because of the opening sentence of the back cover copy: “When you hire C. Card. . . you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel.” Since the middle of the private eye barrel is already a dark wood of confusion and booze, what can the bottom be like? I couldn’t resist this question. The answer so far is “a lot like the middle, but with less interesting prose.” C. Card is a detective, technically, but he can't stop daydreaming about a fantasy life in Babylon, so he never gets anything done. There are some good funny moments and some that fall flat. The back cover promises that it will “upend the conventional private eye novel,” but is it possible to upend the conventional private eye novel any more than Chandler did by writing one? That’s always the problem with trying to upend things. Anyway, it’s too soon to tell.
What I Plan to Read Next
Either In the Woods by Tana French or The Headless Lady by Clayton Rawson. Maybe Agatha Christie, but I might leave it until after the new year.
