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Monday Murder Mishmash
Dec. 7th, 2015 12:08 pmArchived from Livejournal
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
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.
