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Unseen Machinations of Murder Monday
Aug. 29th, 2016 09:56 amArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
The Dead Man's Knock was perfectly satisfying, and just as pulpy as its cover promised. Dr. Gideon Fell is a good old-fashioned eccentric amateur - an enormous, rumpled, and billowing English expert on something or other who walks with (and/or brandishes) two canes, likes baffling his American hosts with cryptic jokes and seemingly trivial unsolicited opinions, and intones every other sentence. He's been invited to this small American college to look at some letters of Wilkie Collins, but his true area of study is MURDER. There's plenty of probably spurious mid-twentieth-century psychology, distributed generously among characters who are not always as distinct from one another as Dr. Fell is from them, and everyone is always driving three blocks in a giant car, because it's America and 1958.
The best thing about The Keeper of Lost Causes by far is its title - or maybe I should say my favorite thing; it's not a bad book of its kind, I think, but it's not exactly what I want to read. Psycho killers, lots of meticulously planned torture, violent action-suspense ending with unhappy and ambiguous denouement - not deal-breakers by any means, but not worth wading through awkwardly translated prose for the sake of. Add some random jeremiads about obesity and the laziness of the Danish people, and you've got a fool-proof recipe for my indifference. As a dark thriller with strong detective elements, it wasn't badly made. Carl Mørck eventually gets around to doing his job, there's plenty of suspense, and if you like reading about people in extreme situations trying to keep their heads together, this is an example of that.
What I'm Reading Now
The next book in my mystery bundle is The Mystery of Crooknose!
The Mystery of Crooknose isn't anything remarkable so far: there's a young, perky, slightly mean couple who run into a lot of murders apparently (Gin is the corpse magnet; Red is just the dashing boyfriend) and this conference for writers is no exception. It's fun to see Gin being so blasé about her inability to go anywhere without someone fetching up dead in mysterious circumstances. It's also fun to see a semi-satirical picture of the writing-conference scene from 1963. Crooknose is an enormous and venerable conference in New Hampshire, very obviously based on the real-life Bread Loaf. The mystery itself is nothing to write home about (so far), and neither are Gin and Red, apart from their breezy no-nonsense attitude toward death by foul play. It's just ok!
Last Ditch begins with Ricky Alleyn, Alleyn's ambiguously-aged son! I guess he's supposed to have just left university, and he's spending time on some island off the coast of Normandy to try to be a writer. It's probably fitting that Ricky is a little dull, just as Alleyn is a little dull before you get used to him. He meets a thin-skinned painter from New Zealand who wants to be introduced to Troy. There is something about sponsorship offers from a tube paint company, and Ricky's new friend offers him some drugs and is rebuffed, naturally, because all Alleyns are upright and clean, even amid the temptations of the Groovy Now. Meanwhile, back in Stasis House, Troy and Alleyn are reading Ricky's letters and acting paternal at one another. What I'm really curious about, of course, is whether Ricky will inherit his parents' persistent agelessness, and if so, whether it will kick in after he turns forty, like his father, or strand him in his twenties to avoid the awkward possibility of all the Alleyns being the same age at the same time. There probably aren't enough books left in the series for me to find out.
What I Plan to Read Next
. . .is not the only mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.
What I've Finished Reading
The Dead Man's Knock was perfectly satisfying, and just as pulpy as its cover promised. Dr. Gideon Fell is a good old-fashioned eccentric amateur - an enormous, rumpled, and billowing English expert on something or other who walks with (and/or brandishes) two canes, likes baffling his American hosts with cryptic jokes and seemingly trivial unsolicited opinions, and intones every other sentence. He's been invited to this small American college to look at some letters of Wilkie Collins, but his true area of study is MURDER. There's plenty of probably spurious mid-twentieth-century psychology, distributed generously among characters who are not always as distinct from one another as Dr. Fell is from them, and everyone is always driving three blocks in a giant car, because it's America and 1958.
The best thing about The Keeper of Lost Causes by far is its title - or maybe I should say my favorite thing; it's not a bad book of its kind, I think, but it's not exactly what I want to read. Psycho killers, lots of meticulously planned torture, violent action-suspense ending with unhappy and ambiguous denouement - not deal-breakers by any means, but not worth wading through awkwardly translated prose for the sake of. Add some random jeremiads about obesity and the laziness of the Danish people, and you've got a fool-proof recipe for my indifference. As a dark thriller with strong detective elements, it wasn't badly made. Carl Mørck eventually gets around to doing his job, there's plenty of suspense, and if you like reading about people in extreme situations trying to keep their heads together, this is an example of that.
What I'm Reading Now
The next book in my mystery bundle is The Mystery of Crooknose!
The Mystery of Crooknose isn't anything remarkable so far: there's a young, perky, slightly mean couple who run into a lot of murders apparently (Gin is the corpse magnet; Red is just the dashing boyfriend) and this conference for writers is no exception. It's fun to see Gin being so blasé about her inability to go anywhere without someone fetching up dead in mysterious circumstances. It's also fun to see a semi-satirical picture of the writing-conference scene from 1963. Crooknose is an enormous and venerable conference in New Hampshire, very obviously based on the real-life Bread Loaf. The mystery itself is nothing to write home about (so far), and neither are Gin and Red, apart from their breezy no-nonsense attitude toward death by foul play. It's just ok!
Last Ditch begins with Ricky Alleyn, Alleyn's ambiguously-aged son! I guess he's supposed to have just left university, and he's spending time on some island off the coast of Normandy to try to be a writer. It's probably fitting that Ricky is a little dull, just as Alleyn is a little dull before you get used to him. He meets a thin-skinned painter from New Zealand who wants to be introduced to Troy. There is something about sponsorship offers from a tube paint company, and Ricky's new friend offers him some drugs and is rebuffed, naturally, because all Alleyns are upright and clean, even amid the temptations of the Groovy Now. Meanwhile, back in Stasis House, Troy and Alleyn are reading Ricky's letters and acting paternal at one another. What I'm really curious about, of course, is whether Ricky will inherit his parents' persistent agelessness, and if so, whether it will kick in after he turns forty, like his father, or strand him in his twenties to avoid the awkward possibility of all the Alleyns being the same age at the same time. There probably aren't enough books left in the series for me to find out.
What I Plan to Read Next
. . .is not the only mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.
