evelyn_b: (cocoa)
. . . because I'm on vacation until August 1 (approximately) and have very little internet access.

What I've Finished Reading

Hamish took a step back. Then, with a flying leap, he vaulted the bar and, ignoring the barman's cries of outrage, proceeded to pour two Campari and sodas.

“I'll call the police,” shrieked the barman.

"I am the police,” said Hamish.


I do not like Hamish Macbeth. More accurately, I was not inspired to any feelings about Hamish Macbeth that were distinct from my feelings about the quality of M. C. Beaton's writing. He's a village bobby who is always shocking people and getting away with it in unconvincing ways, and being antagonistic with the higher-ups who don't know what they're doing etc.. Death of a Cad passed the time reasonably well while I was on a train, so it served its purpose. The killer is telegraphed from Page One and continues to be telegraphed repeatedly throughout. The one advantage it has over Lynley and Co. is that the author knows it's a silly murder romp and isn't trying to nag you into taking it seriously by throwing in a lot of grisly true-crime details and nervous breakdowns - and it's short.

I want to say more, eventually, about The Dollmaker. It's easy to make fun of the misery and the very on-the-nose symbolism (in which, for example, a child dies horribly because she's severed from the life of the imagination. . . and also her legs) but the more I think about it the more I think it's a very good book, or maybe a very interesting book that is good.

What I'm Reading Now

The Maltese Falcon, in a foreign language I'm trying to learn. Hammett is easy to follow when you're not quite literate, in part because his characters are constantly smiling in various ways, lowering their heads, and doing things with their hats. Everyone's eyes get described in great detail at every opportunity, and this repetition is also helpful.

And in English: The Common, issue no. 15 - a very well-made literary journal with good margins and typeface and a pleasant poetry-to-prose ratio.

I brought a Kindle on this trip in an attempt to give the Kindle an honest try, but I haven't looked at it once. Or rather, I looked at it once and was immediately discouraged by everything about it. There's still time, I guess. Unfortunately, it's a borrowed Kindle, so I have to lug it all the way back home instead of leaving it with the free library in the hostel like I did with Death of a Cad.

What I Plan to Read Next

I didn't get to A Game of Thrones on the plane here & have been saving it for the journey back. Eventually it'll be the only book I have left! Then I'll have to read either that or the Kindle. Or buy another book. We'll see!
evelyn_b: (Default)
What I've Finished Reading

Aunt Dimity's Death develops into a very mild mystery with the help of a ghost - Dimity's spirit carefully preserves plausible deniability by communicating through written messages that only specific people can read. She also subtly alters reality to make Lori a good cook for the first time in her life, and puts a rock in a cookie to break the tooth of a pompous ass, which I thought was a little much. Dude was severely pompous, but there was no real harm in him, and he was going to leave soon! I couldn't root for his tooth being broken. It would have been better to confront him with undeniable evidence of his factual errors or something, though I admit a rock in the cookie is easier.

How does she do it? The physics of being a ghost are not explored. The mystery is: what is the thing Dimity can't forgive herself for? The answer is: it was all a sad misunderstanding, and since consciousness persists after death in this book, everyone can reconcile in the afterlife and there's no harm done in the end.

Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie: a thoroughly enjoyable short story collection. Parker Pyne is a detective of the heart, not the murder kind, though every now and then a murder interposes itself between Pyne and a peaceful vacation because that just can’t be helped. Every story includes Mr. Pyne’s intriguing newspaper advertisement:

Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne.

Pyne arranges adventures for people whose lives are too dull, and concocts predictable romance restoratives for listless marriages (only some of which backfire). Sometimes he gets people’s jewelry back for them out of complicated jewel thefts. I don’t know exactly how I should feel about the one where he solves a rich woman’s malaise by dumping her back in her class of origin. Probably a little critical!

Quite a few of the stories take place in the Middle East or Iran, probably reflecting archaeological trips she took with Max Mallowan. The snapshots of English tourism and travel abroad are always interesting, even if they breed some startling and downright bizarre stereotypes along the way. (How could it even it be true that “no Armenian would have the nerve to kill anyone”?) There’s a jewel theft on the Orient Express! There’s a doting rich American and his self-satisfied daughter. I sometimes wish Christie would stop lecturing harmless uxorious Englishmen about the importance of not being too nice to women, but you can’t have everything in this fallen world.

What I'm Reading Now

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet!

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their rs give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

Is this as great an opening paragraph as I think it is? Now that I type it out, there seems to be something a little clumsy and flat-footed about it. Raymond Chandler would have handled the same material and the same twist with more eccentric music. But it works, doesn’t it? Personville = Poisonville. The narrator thought it was a meaningless joke, but then he learned better. And of course the narrator is a character, himself a little clumsy and flat-footed but you can’t deny that he gets the job done. It’s not a pretty job! But it’s going to get done, whether you like it or not. The Continental Op isn’t here to weave metaphors at you. He’s here to point guns and take names, and maybe make some sense of this garbage scow of a town. Maybe, if there’s any sense to be made. No guarantees in Poisonville.

I like Red Harvest so far, but I have to keep reading chapters twice to figure out where we’ve gotten to from the last one, if anywhere.

One thing I like a lot: Dinah Brand’s sloppiness. She’s a femme fatale with a bad haircut who cannot keep her cheap stockings from snagging, for love or money. It just can’t be done. She’s gone through three pairs of stockings in as many days. Why do I love this detail? It's just a small persistent reminder of physicality, one of several that prevents Red Harvest from being a collection of words and poses. It feels like it's anchoring the story even though I'm still confused. What’s more real than runs in your stockings?

What I Plan to Read Next

Possibly Why Didn't They Ask Evans? if I can get to it in time.
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Cross-posted from Livejournal

What I've Finished Reading

The Return of the Continental Op is five short stories by Dashiell Hammett , told by and about a nameless operative for the Continental Detective Agency. I really like Hammett’s first person here: short punchy similes, sardonically understated re-statements, “I lied” as dialogue tag. The Op is at his best when he’s castigating criminals, or watching them castigate each other, for being shit at crime. It’s a very specific form of satisfaction. In one story, he gets through twelve perfectly good reasons for why the elaborate set-up was a bad plan from the start before deciding he’s too thirsty to keep going. It usually happens some time after the Op has suffered some bodily trauma, since the Op gets knocked out constantly. Knocked on the head and thrown into the Bay, knocked on the head and beaten half to death, just plain knocked on the head. My Dell paperback edition (complete with crime map on back cover) is falling apart in my hands, and so cheaply printed that some of the pages have a blurry 3-D effect, so I won’t be keeping this one around, but it’s no fault of Dashiell Hammett’s.

Peril at End House was almost too overstuffed with Poirotisms, but what am I talking about? There's no such thing. Is there? Apparently I'm of two minds. On the one hand, it gets laid on a bit thicker in this book than in some of the others. On the other - well, the other hand is just the same sentence with "and it's great!" appended. Hastings and Poirot bicker about breakfast and modernity; Hastings takes great pleasure in describing the peculiarities of his friend to outsiders. This one is fast, fun, and a little crazy, but in the best Agatha Christie tradition rather than the worst. Nick Buckley, the hapless "modern" near-murder victim who charms Hastings and dismays Poirot with her disorderly ways, is a standout character from beginning to end. In the end, the mystery grows so dense that only a fake seance can dispel it. When in doubt, hold a fake seance!

What I'm Reading Now

I've started P. D. James' Death of an Expert Witness. I've read two P.D. James books a while ago, which I admired but didn't quite love - James leans more toward the disquieting end of the puzzle-horror continuum and -- I was about to say I like my murder stories to have less in common with actual murder, but that isn't always the case. I tried to read a couple of other books by James off and on, but wasn't able to keep my attention on them for some reason. I'm guardedly optimistic about this one.

It starts with a late-night call to a forensic pathologist, who reflects briefly on his unhappy middle age before setting off to work. Then the pathologist's daughter reflects a little on her parent's unhappy marriage. That's a lot of unhappiness for the first ten pages, when we haven't even met the corpse yet. But I like this pathologist. He couldn't hack it as a doctor for the living, so he's trying to do his best by the dead.

What I Plan to Read Next

It's all a mystery! Either Christie or not-Christie, depending on whether the library has Thirteen Problems. I keep forgetting to check.
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What I've Finished Reading

Love Lies Bleeding turned out to be pretty good! Fen remarks at one point that he's calmed down a lot in the past ten years, which is accurate. More accurately: it's just much better constructed than The Moving Toyshop, so we don't end up stuck in a lot of cul-de-sacs with Fen doing half-formed stand-up routines, there's a complete and complicated plot instead of two-fifths of a plot and some chase sequences, and more of the humor holds up, in large part because it's less random and more plot-directed, but maybe also because it was better to begin with.

It had an unusual problem (in my experience) for murder mysteries: I wasn't convinced by the motive for murder. It wasn't an unusually petty motive as these things go, so I'm not sure what the problem is there. And given the light-n-breezy tone of the Fenverse, it probably doesn't matter much. As in The Moving Toyshop, there is a madcap car chase and ExpandNon-central spoilers for Love Lies Bleeding ) But I was very pleased with the way the Missing Wayward Teen plot worked out, after some misgivings early on. The offhand reference to "Crispin's readers" really is odd -- it comes out of nowhere and escapes into thin air. There's no harm in it, but nothing else, either. I was hoping for a little more -- robust? -- metafiction, I guess. Well, I might have to read some more Crispin to see if it ever materializes, but it probably won't be soon. Love Lies Bleeding was fun, though, and Fen's not the worst detective after all.

By far the best part of The Thin Man was the relationship between Nick and Nora Charles: unmistakably adult without being conventional or even particularly responsible. Nick is a retired detective whom events have temporarily un-retired; Nora is his independently wealthy wife. They go to parties, drink incessantly, take their dog for walks, and poke around at the underworld. I like their casual, comfortable trust in one another, and the complete absence (as far as I could tell) of an undercurrent of despair in their entertainments. The rest of The Thin Man is also pretty good: energetic and convoluted, a little sordid in the corners, but not so that it hurts. Hammett has abandoned the distracting tendency he had in The Maltese Falcon to call attention to every character's unnaturally bright eye color and eye-movements, possibly because Nick is the narrator and it would be out-of-character for Nick to keep harping on people's cobalt blue eyes like a teenage romantic.

What I'm Reading Now

Third Girl by Agatha Christie is a later Christie, in which Poirot Meets the Sixties. I have had some warning against late Christies, but I liked the creepiness of Halloween Party quite a lot, and Third Girl is off to a great start. An untidy young woman shows up at Poirot's office with an intriguing problem: how can she find out whether she's committed a murder? Poirot indulges in some judgmental thoughts about her generation and the falling standard of grooming, and before he can say anything out loud, she concludes, apologetically, that she's made a mistake; he can't possibly help her; he's too old. Poirot is hurt. He hates to be too old, even though his patent-leather shoes pinch his feet and by this point he would be over a hundred if not for Detective Stasis. He goes to see his old friend Ariadne Oliver -- there's a great bit where she yanks out one of her hair extensions in her excitement and Poirot discreetly picks it up and sets it on the table -- and they decide to investigate the problem anyway.


What I Plan to Read Next

More Cormoran Strike Adventures! I'm going to get The Silkworm out from the library, and then I'm going to read it! I really hope there will be an awkward conversation with Robin about The Leg Incident.
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What I've Just Finished Reading

I haven't seen it in many years, but The Maltese Falcon was one of my favorite movies from childhood; I loved the mythical golden bird that may not even exist anymore under its protective enamel, and Sydney Greenstreet's never-ending list of things he doesn't trust in a man, and the great line, "I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon."

Reading the book was an odd experience because, except for a lot of weirdly vivid eye colors, it deviated so little from my memories of the movie that it felt like a transcript, not a novel. Not surprisingly, Hammett wrote the screenplay and pasted all his own best lines in (plus a few extra; Greenstreet's best line seems to have been movie-only).

Sam Spade is an oddly opaque character, which I think is deliberate. I found his constant derisive chuckling plays a lot better as a performance by an actor than it does on the page. The descriptions of characters and their actions are highly meticulous and a little alien, as though Hammett were making notes for a Galactic Cosmographic Society study on Earth Detection and its Gestures. I think it must have been a startling prose style in 1930, but it may be suffering from its own success a little now.

What I'm Reading Now

Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin. It's not bad at all, even if the title pun is a groaner. Gervase Fen has just shown up, less actively unlikeable (so far) than he was in The Moving Toyshop, and the humor is less manic and forced -- it helps that it takes place in a school, with plenty of low-hanging fruit in the form of classroom discussions, etc., but the book also feels a little better constructed in general. And because it's not Fen's school, there's no opportunity for me to get annoyed by how indifferent a teacher Fen is. Two teachers have been killed, a chemistry cupboard has been broken into, and a student is missing. Is there a connection? Almost certainly!


What I Plan to Read Next

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett -- this one was also made into a movie, but I haven't seen it, so hopefully I will be better able to read it on its own terms.

Also, did you know that someone wrote a Porfiry Petrovich mystery? The Gentle Axe by R. N. Morris is a new case for Crime and Punishment's indefatigable detective, apparently. I found it today while cleaning up the mystery shelves at work -- I don't know when I'll read it, but probably sometime this year.
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What I Bought While Staying With my Family

Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin, a tiny, super-pulpy-looking book called The Angry Amazons by Carter Brown, and a beautiful 1966 hardcover edition of Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Dolphin under its even more beautifully ridiculous American title, Killer Dolphin -- only it's this muted beige and grey avant-garde cover design with no caps, so the title is rendered: ngaio marsh, killer dolphin -- a waifish Left Bank whisper.

Also, one of my brothers gave me The Daughter of Time, in the sincere hope that I hadn't read it yet, and my other brother gave me back the two Sayers books I had lent him earlier this year, one with its cover newly missing. So it was a Very Merry Murdermas at the House of B..

What I've Just Finished Reading

When we left for the airport on the 23rd, I was almost finished with The Cuckoo's Calling but had to abandon it (it was a sturdy library hardcover and wouldn't fit into my luggage). The first thing I did when I got back on Saturday was to read the last three chapters. They did not disappoint: the reveal is not a shocker, structurally speaking, but the reveal scene was beautifully cathartic and had some well-paced surprises of its own, plus the best and most ridiculous possible way for Robin to learn about Strike's prosthesis after he spends four hundred pages stupidly and stubbornly trying to hide it from her, plus an excellent epilogue that introduces, at the last minute, a brand-new sharply drawn character who tugs the entire story into a new shape. This was an immensely enjoyable mystery, Cormoran Strike is an ideal detective along every axis of fictional detective virtue, and I can't wait to read the next one.

What I'm Reading Now

The Complete Novels of Dashiell Hammett was also left behind due to bulk. I decided to start with The Maltese Falcon because I've already seen the movie. Hammett wastes absolutely no time and it's fascinating. Everyone is described in cartoonish terms, but the overall effect is not cartoonish -- it's more like the narrator is just a fraction too high to be trusted with a narrative, but is putting forth a tremendous amount of effort to maintain.

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