evelyn_b | Entries tagged with gratuitous detective romance

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What I've Finished Reading

The Good Detective by H.R.F. Keating, who was president of the Detection Club from 1985-2000. This is a police story, kind of rough and laddish and also very 90s, with its ecoterrorists and pointed pronunciations of "Ms." Ned French is a CID man who, years ago, bullied a young fanatic into confessing to planting a bomb that killed four people. Now, new information has come to light and the case is being reopened. Since Ned and his supervisor deliberately falsified records to make their interrogation look less torturey, this can only mean trouble for Ned and the CID. Will the crusading lawyer ruin Ned's takedown of a dangerous new crime family with her nosy ways? What does it mean to be. . . a good detective?

( Spoilers ahoy )

What I appreciated: this book doesn't fall into the Law and Order: SVU trap of making its criminals EXTRA SUPER TRIPLE HEINOUS in an attempt to make an emotional case for unscrupulous policing. There are no serial killers or torture dungeons, just some unattractive middle-aged wankers who are out to make a buck and don't care about beating a few guys to death along the way. I don't know if the sordidness is really successful, but it's an honest attempt.

I also appreciated how unabashedly pasted on the sexual tension was. At the first meeting between Crusading Lawyer and (Not Actually) Good Detective, the narrator says, in effect, "Suddenly, there was sexual tension! Ned couldn't figure out why." Their relationship becomes a driving force of the plot, but no one ever does figure out why. Sometimes that's the true mystery.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm excited to be reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles, because even though I've been reading Christie off and on since 2014, this is the first Christie, and reading it feels like embarking on a long and important journey. . . OF DEATH. It's a great debut novel, brisker and smarter than The Secret Adversary, which will be Christie No. 2. It's a nice job of misdirection to have Hastings, our affable Jam Watson, announce to his hosts at Styles that he has "always had a secret hankering to be a detective."

"But really, seriously, I am awfully drawn to it. I came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me. He was a marvellous little fellow. He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method. My system is based on his -- though of course I have progressed rather further."

Alas, the dream is destroyed once the man himself turns up, now a refugee under the protection of the philanthropic Mrs. Inglethorpe, whose murder is soon to confuse everyone. Poirot is a little more demonstrative here than I remember him from the future, but can you really blame him? He "clasped [Hastings] in his arms and kissed [him] warmly."

"Mon ami Hastings!" he cried. "It is indeed mon ami Hastings!"

The edition is odd - an attractive new paperback with elaborately reproduced handwriting (not handwriting font) for the handwriting parts, but full of typos; about a quarter of the "mon amis" are printed, "Mom ami."

What I Plan to Read Next

More from 1921's most promising debut author, Agatha Christie! I've actually read a couple chapters of A Conspiracy of Paper, too, but I don't have anything to say about it yet.

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What I've Finished Reading

Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer. The twist here (which is not really a spoiler) was that it looks like the case is going to be solved by a Bland Professional, but then an Obnoxious Amateur swoops in and steals the show. Here it's one of the Mitchell family's ultra-arch young cousins, Randall. Competition for Most Insufferable Detective is a crowded field, but Randall Mitchell deserves a special award for being the most pointlessly and incessantly caustic. It's like he's under a witch's curse that prevents him from speaking without sarcastic diminutives. I might like Randall if he starred opposite Bette Davis in All About Eve, but in book form he's tiring. At the last minute apparently Heyer and/or her editor decide they need to establish his heterosexuality for some reason, so he bullies and insults his cousin Stella until she agrees to marry him. Why?? We just don't know.

This was a very crisp, small, and smoothly running English Overlarge House Murder machine that I read all the way to the end and then forgot about completely, except for the lingering memory of Randall being the worst.

False Scent and Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh, ( both highly typical and pretty good )

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What I've Finished

Miss Pym Disposes shed its harem-anime lightness eventually -- well, the harem goes first and then the lightness, though neither one completely -- and becomes something else: a slow-building meditation on justice and responsibility? Shrewd and quiet dismantling of the entire premise of the mystery genre? Fascinating period piece about the presumably lost world of Physical Training Colleges? All these things, but especially the latter. Structurally, it's odd but effective -- not much happens, until everything does - and the ending is deliberately unsatisfying.

Miss Pym stays on at Leys for the company and finds herself in a position to suppress evidence of wrongdoing twice: once for cheating on an exam, once for murder. There is no investigator and no mystery in the traditional sense, just Miss Pym who is in the wrong place with all her fallible judgement at the wrong time, and all these earnest young women she thinks she's come to know but doesn't know at all. The moral dilemmas, and the final twist, might be more compelling if they didn't lean so much on Face Detection, but that's classic Tey. So is the protagonist getting everything wrong. Our old friend Richard III makes a cameo appearance -- and so does another Tey bugbear that it might be too much of a spoiler to mention.

What I'm Reading

Singing in the Shrouds by Ngaio Marsh. Another serial killer story! Featuring a flower-fixated serial killer who might be hiding on board a ship? Possibly [spoiler redacted]. Alleyn has been sent on board to investigate, in disguise as Not A Detective (it's not a very convincing disguise, despite how annoyed the captain is by his undetectively poshness), which means instigating a lot of sprightly conversations about popular psychology. Alleyn has just been writing a very Alleynesque letter to Troy, in which carefully measured portions of soppiness act as awkward buffers between long passages of forensic observation. Never change, Alleyn. <3

So far, I love The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler -- actually a Murder Monday/99 Novels overlap! It fell into my hands as part of a book donation, so I thought, "Why not?" Chandler's dialogue is terrific, brittle and artificial in the best way; he walks that tricky line between "characters have seen too many movies" and "author has seen too many movies." A private detective in Los Angeles does a reckless favor for an acquaintance, and lands himself in the middle of more mystery than is healthy. A few chapters in, I thought I knew more or less where this story was going, but now I have no idea, and it's the best thing.

What I Plan to Read Next

After I finish Brat Farrar, I will be all out of Josephine Tey mysteries. I'll be sorry when that happens, even though Tey and I don't always entirely get along. Of course, I can always re-read the best ones if I want to. I haven't decided if I'm going to try her non-mysteries.

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What I've Finished Reading

Two crumbling Christies: Towards Zero (1944) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), both featuring the solid and (mostly) likable Superintendent Battle.

Towards Zero was a terrific mystery with an impossibly stupid random romance stuck on at the end; Seven Dials spent a lot of time being boring and silly, but the random romance was charming in that meringuey Beresfordian way (and might have been even more so if I could have remembered who the one guy was for most of the book).

I spent the entirety of Towards Zero feeling fairly confident that I had cracked the code, only to be taken completely off guard by the solution (unlocked by an obvious detail that was beautifully sleight-of-handed away in the early chapters, of course). It was very well made and even a little chilling. Seven Dials follows a handful of perky young weekend-partiers whom murder pulls into the orbit of a lot of fake/real/fake conspirators, and the identity of the criminal mastermind is obvious, once you learn that there is a criminal mastermind, from [spoiler redacted]. And there's a Raffles reference! I should read more Raffles.

I had a whole sightseeing wish list for my trip out of town, but the only thing I actually managed to do was visit this bookshop. It's a nice space, though the used book section was much smaller than I was expecting and did not have the out-of-print Clemence Dane-Helen Simpson books I hoped they might. (Helen Simpson did turn up in one of the Annotated Holmes footnotes, though). On an impulse, I bought a book by Helen McCloy called The Long Body, which was in even worse condition than the crumbling Christies; as soon as I began to read it the cover fell off, and by the time I finished all the pages had detached themselves from the spinal glue and were disintegrating into flakes of crispy brown paper.

It was a tiny book, well under two hundred pages. I read it in about an hour and a half and loved it, even though the xenophobia hinted at in the early chapters was decidedly not undermined by the end, and the reveal/conclusion was so rushed that it felt like the author had suddenly noticed she was about to run out of paper. The "psychological insights" of the police-psychiatrist detective were not always much more convincing than Mrs. Bradley's, but the narrator's were better; the careful depiction of emotional states made suspension of disbelief easy even when the action was frankly ridiculous. And once the killer was revealed, you realize that there was only ever one viable suspect for most of the book. But that doesn't matter at all; it's full of intelligent character details, beautifully readable, and very quick. This was a serendipitous purchase and I'll probably be reading more Helen McCloy in the future.

What I'm Reading Now

It's a good thing I already have enough goodwill toward JKR and the Strike-Ellacott Agency to coast on for another ten books, because if I'd picked up Career of Evil first, I would have put it down immediately after a few paragraphs and never looked back. Why? Killer POV in the first chapter! ( If your name is not Raskolnikov, I do not want to hear your murdery hopes and dreams. )

What I Plan to Read Next

Also bought at the Mysterious Bookshop: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Watson's Choice by Gladys Mitchell. Recommended to me and just waiting for me to open: Malice by Keigo Higashino -- a contemporary mystery featuring another murdered author, which looks promising.

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What I've Just Finished Reading

Third Girl was unexpectedly satisfying. Poirot Meets the Sixties was less jarring than I expected; the constant refrain of Girls These Days being Trouble was a little repetitive, but no more than usual for any Christie motif, and I don't think Poirot is actually any fussier or more judgmental here than he was in the Thirties. Poirot is uniquely suited to an improbably long active life in fiction, because you can count on him not to try to be hip. He knows what he likes and he's going to keep on doing what he likes, because why would he do anything else? (Miss Marple is similarly well-suited to all times and places, though her dominant mode is empathy and self-possession rather than complacency and self-possession). He's an almost completely static character whose stasis is a strength, not a weakness: Poirot may never get new, but he also never gets old. Here, he even learns a little from his mistakes.

Ariadne Oliver has a large and entertaining role in this book. At second glance, the solution is a little bit too neat and too thorough a relief, but it's a good one anyway. There's also a very weird and abrupt last-minute marriage at the very end, the only sour note for me, and so strange and out of nowhere that it barely had time to register.

What I'm Reading Now

Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh -- there is a fly-fishing tie on the spine, an early warning sign that the title will be a fish pun. Further fish puns arrive in the first chapter by way of Mr. Phinn, a cartoonishly eccentric Cat Bachelor who would seem to have wandered in from one of those cat mysteries, if cat mysteries had been invented yet (Have they? Scales of Justice is 1955; I don't actually know when the cat thing got going). So far, we have a conflict over fishing rights, the pursuit of a legendary large fish, a barely-submerged conflict over the local Plummy Colonel having accidentally shot one of Mr. Phinn's cats in an archery mishap, a second wife no one seems to like (for reasons that may or may not be fair, but who knows at this point?) and an unspecified scandal in re: some unspecified past malefaction that is currently being discussed in vague but animated terms in dark-paneled drawing rooms that have seen better days. So far, so good.

Cormoran Strike continues to be the best detective, and to recklessly stump all over town when his knee is already inflamed and he hasn't slept properly. TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF, STRIKE. :( The Silkworm is great so far: a faded ex-wunderkind novelist has disappeared, taking his latest manuscript with him; the manuscript is a gleefully disgusting, priapic roman a clef with lots of suppurating organs and repulsive but instantly recognizable caricatures, and everyone in "the publishing world" is furious with him (he's probably already dead). The idea that a roman a clef could cause such an uproar -- especially one as grotesque and dreamlike as the manuscript described -- seems a little fanciful, but I don't mind that. It's probably not the real motive? Well, we'll see.

I'm not any less annoyed at the way Matthew (Robin's too-patently scheduled for demolition Jerk Fiance) is being characterized. Because the relationship is clearly scheduled for demolition (presumably to make room for Eventual Robin/Strike Estates, a development about which I have mixed feelings at best), Matthew can do no right and receives no quarter from the narrative. There's plenty of straightforward jerkitude, but also plenty of character moments that could easily be sympathetic -- his insecurity about establishing himself in London, for example -- are presented as unambiguous flaws. Partly this is just the Strike POV being self-serving, but partly it isn't. And I wish Robin weren't so insecure about Strike's approval, either, though I love that she's doing all this work toward becoming an investigator in her own right. But we can't have everything we want all the time, and The Silkworm is entertaining enough to more than make up for all my little peeves. I already have (already had, from the first fifty pages of The Cuckoo's Calling on) enough goodwill toward Strike as a character that there's no telling what I might put up with over the next twenty years.

What I Plan to Read Next

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, a short-story collection that is, hopefully, exactly what it says on the tin.

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What I've Just Finished Reading

The Great Mistake racked up a huge body count by the end, and was enjoyable on the whole but not always completely engaging -- I got the feeling the characters would have played better in a movie, where their faces could do a lot of the work of making them more memorably likable or un-. Even the Thirties suburban social milieu felt underdeveloped -- suffering a little by comparison with the grubby, sticky intensity of The Group, probably, which is hardly fair to Rinehart. There's a very complicated plot involving several layers of blackmail and secret relatives by the score.

Honeymoons Can Be Murder was pleasant and a little silly and very moderately charming -- far and away the most successful of the random contemporaries I've read so far. The characters are reasonably likable and the difficulties inherent to amateur investigation are handled pretty well, though there are some VERY convenient coincidences (and a possible convenient anachronism -- were enough people really going to weekly confession in Taos in the 1990s to create the crucial data set Charlie uses at one point? I don't know, but I have my doubts). Author Connie Shelton is not really interested in getting eros all over her death or vice versa; the instigating murder is several years in the past and the first-person narration is so thick with fades-to-black that it begins to take on a faintly narcoleptic quality. There's some suspense toward the end, but nothing worrying; the tone of the book is protective above all else. I'll probably pick up Shelton's "cozy mystery Christmas novella," Holidays Can Be Murder, if it's easy to find.

Opening Night (Night at the Vulcan in the US) is excellent. Martyn Tarne, penniless New Zealand actress in London, stumbles exhausted into a show-business fairy tale, and it's just as unpleasant under the surface as fairy tales usually are. Lots of theatre grotesques, some better than they seem at first, at least one a murderer -- you know how it goes.

Nearly all of the action takes place in the Vulcan Theatre during rehearsal for what sounds like a magnificently awful Serious Modern Drama -- not over-the-top comedy awful, but just believably awful enough to be quite funny -- and there's a great atmosphere of sweaty, stale, closed-circuit backbiting that not even the best-intentioned characters manage to escape entirely. Some of the characters are very well drawn, others less so (the murderer never quite manages to be real, for example) but the overall effect is extremely enjoyable. It's another one where the setup is so interesting in its own right that the murder comes as a genuine disappointment and the appearance of Inspector Alleyn almost as a surprise. There is also an unconvincing romance, but it's barely noticeable.

What I'm Reading Now

Night Watch, the Holmes-Father Brown crossover, has four epigraphs, and opens with an introduction in which author Stephen Kendrick describes being given a lost manuscript of Dr. John Watson by Watson's daughter. She's decided to give it to him because she liked that his previous book (apparently a real book of essays about Holmes) did not fall into Jam Watson stereotyping. It's all right so far? I don't know if it's a Holmes fandom tradition that the authors of pastiches should always allude to the shortcomings of previous pastiches, or how I should feel about that.

I promised myself I wasn't going to go another day without trying The Cuckoo's Calling, and I didn't, though the public library did its best to thwart me by changing their Sunday hours. So far, so good. Flat broke and extremely disheveled PI Cormoran Strike is a joy to meet, from his first clumsy act on (possibly because I keep mentally conflating him with Bernard Black?) -- so much so that I find myself wishing Galbraith had begin with the temp's arrival at his office, and skipped the prologue, which gets rehashed within a few pages anyway. But there's probably a method here that I don't see -- maybe? Anyway, we're investigating a high-profile death, ruled a suicide, that the victim's brother is convinced was murder. Want to bet that he turns out to be right? Also, Strike is dragging a camp bed up the stairs to his filthy office because he doesn't have anywhere else to sleep. Very promising!

What I Plan to Read Next

I brought home a Complete Novels of Dashiell Hammett along with The Cuckoo's Calling from the library; I had some vague plans to get another Ellis Peters book, but the library perversely carries only the twentieth book in the Brother Cadfael series, and none of the earlier ones, so Hammett it is.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Home By Nightfall, the latest in the Most Comfortable Man in London series, which has settled into a pretty strong formula. Here, Lenox helps his brother Edward after the death of Edward's wife, and gets mixed up in a murder, as usual -- well, more than one, this time. The village murder has an unsavory explanation, involving a culprit who is comfortably and perhaps a little unrealistically condemned by all the good people in the narrative. There's also an unscrupulous rival detective agency trying to discredit Lenox's firm, but given what we've seen of the Comfortverse so far, can we really doubt that virtue will win out in the end?

Meanwhile there are the expected updates on Team Comfortable: Polly and Dallington are still flirting less discreetly than they think they are, Jane is still gentle and socially adept, the McConnells have sorted out their marriage and are more content than before, the babies are growing up, but not too quickly yet.

It was nice to spend some time with Lenox's brother, and we get a very low-key meditation on mortality and relationships, as befits the Most Comfortable Man in London's amiable nature. The multiple-mystery plot means there is a lot going on at once, and Charles Finch is not as good at action and suspense as he is at evoking the leisurely gravity of an armchair by the fire, but that doesn't hurt anything.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm finding The Great Mistake a little harder to follow. It's very dense -- with incident, with characters and their pasts, with corpses -- and there's a through-line of romance that isn't working as a through-line because I spent too much time being annoyed by one of the partners to notice when it was supposed to be developing. I really liked the first-person "murder in retrospect" conceit when I first started, but now that several murders have happened and multiple investigations are underway, that aspect of the narrative voice has dropped into the background, and Pat, the narrator, becomes less distinctive and more burdened with detail. But it'll probably come together by the end.

Ngaio Marsh's Night at the Vulcan is completely delightful. A young New Zealander, having made a poor (but so far unspecified) decision, finds last-minute work as a dresser for a troupe of Marsh actors, and gets some much-needed kindness and advice from the night porter, despite the night porter's inability to stop making fun of the antipodes. Now she's learning the ropes, along with plenty of gossip.

Also borrowed from my in-laws during Thanksgiving: a contemporary mystery novel with the irresistible title Honeymoons Can Be Murder. Charlie Parker is a CPA who does a little murder investigation on the side, and Drake is her new spouse, a helicopter pilot. They try to take a vacation, but naturally the guy who rented their cabin gets wrongfully arrested for murder immediately upon their arrival, so Charlie takes it upon herself to poke around and set things right. It's ok! The writing is not very exciting, but it does its job better than either Murder Uncorked or Murder is a Girl's Best Friend. Drake and Charlie are basically inoffensive, and there's a certain amount of fun vicarious activity (snowshoeing, flying around in a helicopter) that keeps the book moving. The actual investigation has been pretty casual so far -- lots of sidling up to people at parties and some mild poorly executed cattiness -- but the author is making the amateur investigator thing work, more or less, so I'm curious to see where it goes.

The tagline on the back cover, which has nothing to do with any aspect of the plot as far as I can tell, is "You may now KILL the bride!"

Appeared at my bookstore in the past week:

Night Watch by Stephen Kendrick, described in a subtitle as "A long-lost adventure in which Sherlock Holmes meets Father Brown."

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