evelyn_b

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What I've Finished Reading

I'm sorry to report that HARDMAN #6, Murder's Not an Odd Job left very little impression on me in the end. There's a guy some people are trying to kill and some women and HARDMAN worries about his weight and eventually he and HUMP DAVIS hole up in a shack in the mountains to shoot some people for reasons that weren't clear. HARDMAN has a girlfriend, but he also sleeps with other people, because 1) it's the shock-proof 70s!! and 2) he needs to reassure himself that his aging body is still desirable, poor guy.

I left it on the library's "adopt-a-book" shelf as I came in and when I left the library, it was gone. If no one had picked it up in the course of the afternoon, I meant to take it back and try to figure out some more things, like what actually happened in the plot, but fate decided otherwise. Good night, sweet HARDMAN. I hope your next reader appreciates you a little more.

I'd bought a beautiful first edition of Grave Mistake by Ngaio Marsh many months ago, in what I thought was good condition. The dust jacket is still fine, and the spine seemed all right when I bought it. But apparently it was only holding out long enough to entice someone to buy it, because as soon as I started reading it, all the glue crumbled away and all of the pages fell out into my lap, like it had just touched down on human roads after three thousand years in fairyland. I've taken a picture of the cover so you can see how nice it looked (it's a little deflated from losing the pages).



Grave Mistake itself is pretty good. I enjoyed the wry spinster playwright (not named Ngaio)'s relationships with her selfish, hypochondriac friend and the friend's much more sensible adult daughter. I guess she can't properly be called a "spinster" now that it's 1978(!) There's some good interrogation in this one, where everyone has a dark secret or two and can't see why it has to come out just because some silly woman got herself murdered. The murder motive was a bit hard to sell, but you can't let a little thing like that spoil your fun. Besides, good motives for murder are just depressing.

Dumb Witness didn't have as much of its title character as I would have liked, but if it were up to me, all books would just be pictures of dogs. That's not true all the time, but it's true now and then. This is a solid but not breathtaking Christie with a good cast and lots of Hastings being stupid but making up for it by being adorable and playing with the dog. And there's this charming slice of backstory:

"Remember a case that made rather a stir in the late nineties? Mrs. Varley? Supposed to have poisoned her husband with arsenic. Good-looking woman. Made a big to-do, that case. She was acquitted. Well, Thomas Arundell quite lost his head. Used to get all the papers and read about the case and cut out the photographs of Mrs. Varley. And would you believe it, when the trial was over, off he was to London an asked her to marry him?"

My heart goes out to you, Random Poisoner Marrying Guy, but where is your sense of self-preservation? Anyway, he doesn't get poisoned (not a spoiler), but his grown children certainly come in for a lot of suspicion when their great-aunt fetches up dead of maybe-poison. Eventually, The twin specters of Evil Foreigners and Bad Blood are neatly sidestepped. There is a happy ending for the dog and that's all that really matters.

What I'm Reading Now

Every time I pick up Photo Finish, the part of my brain that is slow on the uptake expects it to be about horse racing. In fact it has nothing to do with horse racing and is about an opera singer who is plagued by a tabloid photographer before being murdered. Troy is invited to paint her portrait! in beautiful New Zealand! so we are treated to a double dose of New Zealand Scenery and Theatre People. The opera singer has just shelled out a tremendous amount of money to produce a new opera written by her young protege/lover, but the poor guy is so tormented by the knowledge that his opera is actually terrible that he comes on stage, following a perfectly adequate debut in which everyone was being polite and a few people even enjoyed themselves, to apologize for the opera and announce that he wished he'd had the strength of character to withdraw it as soon as he realized it was bad. Oh, opera guy, no. :( I'm afraid this is a terrible impulse I can relate to all too well, though I am sadly lacking in fabulously wealthy patrons with no taste.

The last book in my Mystery Bundle is called something like The First Rule of Hawkins or The Fourth Law of Harris; I have left it at home and am unable to check. It's about a very angry guy who drinks tequila and orange juice out of a jar in public and hates his ex-wife for 1) being obnoxiously saccharine and innocent, and 2) failing to save him with her innocence, which apparently he tried to apply to himself like some kind of dodgy Victorian poultice to soothe his Vietnam (or possibly Korean) war wounds. Does he realize that this was a bad reason to get married? It's not clear. PLEASE MARRY RESPONSIBLY. The guy also has some strong feelings about religion. So far it is all the angst with none of the detection, and it remains to be seen whether it will be good or "interesting" or bad. But it will be a neat trick if I end up sympathizing with this guy after all.

What I Plan to Read Next

Whatever's next in my stack! There's this historical thing called A Conspiracy of Paper that may or may not be good. And Light Thickens, of course. I hope Alleyn doesn't die in the last book. Closure is all very well, but I don't want any. :(

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What I've Finished Reading

The Crooknose Mystery doesn't make much use of its setting (the author doesn't seem interested in or capable of the kind of self-indulgent writer-culture satire I was hoping for) and is a pretty boilerplate mystery with forgettable characters. Gin functioned perfectly well as corpse magnet and amateur sleuth, but I didn't care about her -- except for one line:

“.. .Remember Bess, Gin. You thought you knew her.”

I remembered Bess. As though I could forget the woman I had loved, who had killed and would have allowed me, or anyone else, to hang for it.

. . . oh, no, what do we have here? Presumably this is a callback to a previous Gin Crane adventure, but WHAT HAPPENED? For once, I regret that there's no helpful publisher's footnote instructing me to read about the doomed love of Gin for Bess in The Deceitful Heart, Scribner's. Unfortunately, Laura W. Douglas is too obscure for a page on orderofbooks.com, and Amazon is almost as unhelpful. But it looks like there's a decent chance it might be in The Mystery of Arrowhead Hill.

(There's probably no point in trying to nominate a single line from an obscure mystery novel for Yuletide, is there?)

Tancredi by Lou Cameron, another in the Mystery Bundle. The front-cover blurb says it all: "The gripping bestseller of a cop in a corrupt city, caught in a deadly crossfire." Robert "Tank" Tancredi is the cop in question. It's basically Jake Peralta's 1970s TV-daydream life, only with a lot more ethnic slurs. Not really my flavor of garbage, but it was interesting to read and kept moving until it stopped.

What I'm Reading Now

( Last Ditch by Ngaio Marsh )

Tancredi didn't have a very interesting cover (photo of a gun and some bullets), but the next book in the mystery bundle has a great cover AND a beautiful title:

[A Forest of Eyes]

This is neither a murder mystery nor a Tough Cop Punches the Mob story, but a spy story set in Yugoslavia. I'm having a hard time getting into it, but it does have a nice title.

What I Plan to Read Next

Guess what finally arrived? The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter! I had a look inside and it looks good. Plus whatever comes after A Forest of Eyes in the Mystery Bundle.

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What I've Finished Reading

Tied Up in Tinsel was all right! You can sort of tell who the killer is going to be all along, just by the relative strength of the misdirection, but finding out how it was managed is still enjoyable.

I'm not sure at what point Marsh's setups got to be reliably better than her interrogations, but this is one of those. Troy's detached interest in the eccentric millionaire with a face "like a good-looking camel" and her growing anxiety as tensions in the house come to a boil are a little more engaging than the subsequent interrogation period, with everyone sulking in drawing rooms and Alleyn being imperiously judgmental at various survivor-suspects. Anticipation about how and when The Detective Part will eventually break into and devour the novel we've been reading has become the most common source of suspense in the Alleyn series.

I was a little worried about Black as He's Painted -- it's the one where Alleyn's old school friend becomes president of a newly independent African republic -- and found myself reading it more closely than usual, on the alert for racism. In some ways it was a little better than I expected, and in some ways worse -- I didn't expect or appreciate some of Alleyn's out-of-nowhere musings on "the Negro," for example. On the plus side, there's no obvious nostalgia for the colonial period, even if Marsh does take care to make the worst of the white villains secretly Portuguese instead of British. None of the other African characters have much to do, but President Bartholomew "The Boomer" Opala is as about as complex as any Marsh major-minor character, more than some. Marsh makes all the overt racists grotesque and the "enlightened" whites a little embarrassing, and might suggest that the difference in Alleyn and Opala's political beliefs is some kind of fundamental "racial" difference, but not with too much force. It was ok.

As an Inspector Alleyn book, it's worth reading for its wealth of rare Alleyn personality catalysts. Alleyn gets a childhood, after all this time! -- it's just a couple of memories of conversations with The Boomer over herring toast at Davidson's, but they're friendly and evocative -- and Alleyn's occasionally-mentioned but seldom seen brother shows up! He is a diplomat who is embarrassed that his brother is a "cop;" Alleyn seems to dislike him because he is a stock character left over from the earliest days of the series when Marsh didn't really know what she was doing. They have some awkward interactions at a state function. Alleyn also gets to talk to a cat on more than one occasion! Alleyn likes cats and cats like Alleyn. Troy is also around, though she feels slightly off-model here for some reason. I'd expect her to be a little more ambivalent about doing the portrait for a current head of state, posed on a throne no less, however much she likes his face.

This book also contains WHAT MIGHT BE a nod to Doctor Who:

"I caught myself wondering -- well, almost wondering -- if the whole affair could have been some sort of hallucination. Rather like that dodging-about-in-time nonsense they do in science fiction plays: as if it had happened off the normal temporal plane."

thisbluespirit, or anyone else who might know: might a British retiree have used "play" for "teleplay" for "television show" in 1974? This seems plausible to me, based on no particular evidence.

What I'm Reading Now and Next

I thought I would take a break from murder for a little while, but then I started reading A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell, and it's pretty ok, so the murder break is on hold until I finish it. It's about a wealthy woman who lives a charmed life, OR DOES SHE? Well, not anymore. After so many slow-developing Marsh books, it's a little startling to see a corpse so early in the game. Inspector Wexford is the detective, a portly small-town professional who likes a nice quotation now and then but doesn't let it get in the way of procedure (mostly). His partner Inspector Burden has a great name and is clearly representing my interests in this book: when Wexford nearly sprains his eyes rolling them at a pompous survivor-suspect's "dull and conventional" wife, Burden says that he for one is pleased to meet a nice ordinary person who is doing her best. DAMN STRAIGHT, BURDEN nothing wrong with being ordinary. YOU TELL HIM. I hope she doesn't turn out to be the killer; that would be so disappointing for Inspector Burden and for all of us. :(

Next: maybe nothing for a while? We'll see. But guess what's available for pre-order RIGHT NOW? By the pricking of my thumbs, something comfortable this way comes!

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What I've Finished Reading

"He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I'm yelling, 'Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!'"

"You do not yell, 'Stop, motherfucker.'"

"I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, 'Stop, motherfucker.'"

I really enjoyed The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters, about a tenacious detective at the end of the world. I think this is my first official example of I didn't mind it here, though I would probably start to mind it if it happened in every book. Hank Palace is a guy who likes to get his work done. He makes some mistakes and almost drops the case entirely, but eventually he keeps on because it's his job. Every now and then he meets other people who like to get their work done, even in the shadow of the end of everything.

There is a sequel, Countdown City, which I'll probably read. But I feel a little anxious about it -- I don't know if I want to get to October when the asteroid lands. I would rather leave Hank Palace where he is, faithfully getting his work done because he's alive right now and that's what you do when you're alive.

What I Didn't Read

I made a game attempt to listen to a previously unread Agatha Christie book, Cat Among the Pigeons - I thought Christie's writing style might be clear enough to allow me to follow along - but no luck. I immediately became attached to the classic Christie hypercompetent PA character at the beginning, but then she vanished and suddenly some plummy dudes were talking about the plot and I was completely at sea. With the L. K. Hamilton book, I didn't care what was going on and could just enjoy the free-floating goofiness and all the Mary Sue monologues about bra holsters and expensive dinners and the annoying burden of responsibility. But trying and failing to listen to a new-to-me book by an author I like was too frustrating; I had to bail after the first thirty minutes.

I should note that the very entertaining narrator of Burnt Offerings was Kimberly Alexis. The narrator for Cat Among the Pigeons was Hugh Fraser, who plays Hastings in the Poirot TV show and is delightful. Here he's a little too aggressively squeaky on the female voices, but generally ok, I think (I was too sad about not being able to follow the story to judge).

What I'm Reading Now

In A Clutch of Constables (1968!), Troy attempts to relax after her latest gallery show by taking a peaceful riverboat vacation all by herself. Surely murder won't tread on the innocent heels of this harmless artist whose only mistake was to marry a detective! Surely! Luckily, Troy is Troy and can take just about anything in stride. So far, Troy has been quizzed about her full name by one of Marsh's hysterical spinsters, and there has been an awkward flurry of interest when "a coloured man" joins the party. The narration wants me to join Troy in wishing her far away, but I like the spinster for this book -- a nice mix of vintage and late-sixties cliches.

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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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Special Announcements Can Be Murder

Starting today, I'm shifting Murder Mondays to once every two weeks, to make room for some RL projects that are not as much fun as fictional homicide investigations. If I get really bad at time management, I might eventually do the same with the Wednesday Reading Meme, but we'll see.

What I've Finished Reading

A Study in Scarlet:

"It was magnificent," he said, as he took his seat. "Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood."

"That's rather a broad idea," I remarked.

"One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature," he answered.

Holmes, that's not what you said three pages ago!

It was funny to see how abruptly the footnotes dried up once the narrative shifted to Mormon Melodrama. There were a few notes on geographical and historical inaccuracies, and that was about it. Maybe because the milieu is less familiar/more invented out of whole cloth, maybe because the fandom just isn't as interested. Even though the rational portion of my brain wanted to make fun of the Mormon Melodrama, the part that is 9 and hiding behind the couch with a busted library paperback and five Oreos still thought it was pretty exciting.

Also Sweet and Low by Emma Lathen. Murder on the Cocoa Exchange in 1974: Very interesting as a period piece, almost incomprehensibly boring as a mystery.

( 'M-z-z-z!' she interrupted fiercely )

What I'm Not Reading

The Abominable Bride was all right! It didn't break my heart or rock my world. The Victorian AU was fun -- I liked John's Mustache of Flourishing (to contrast with his Mustache of Sadness in "The Empty Hearse") and Lestrade's Sideburns of Haplessness. The beautiful Victorian costumes sometimes seemed to underscore the weaknesses in the writing, but I couldn't tell you why.

The solution to the Victorian mystery was SO DUMB, but as a ( SPOILER for The Abominable Bride )

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot more than "His Last Vow." I even kind of liked Moriarty, which I was not expecting.

What I'm Reading Now

Death of a Fool is an odd duck, part return to form for Marsh, part. . . not quite? It's interesting. The Special Topic this time is a traditional dance performed every year in an obscure village. In the dance, five sons betray their father and chop off his head, but he bounces back up at the end. The blacksmith and his five sons have performed it every year, but this year there has been some conflict in the family. Meanwhile, a German folk-dancing enthusiast has been sneaking around trying to get enough material for a full description, and the blacksmith's long-lost granddaughter, whose mother married some posho and betrayed the family honor or something, has turned up in search of her roots.

It's a mix of (mostly) gentle mockery of Traditional Folk Culture enthusiasts, and Village Gothic played (partly) straight, so far, at least. Eventually everyone gathers to watch the dance in its traditional circle of thistles up on the hill, but there's a snag. ( You already know what the snag is going to be, right? Is it. . . murder? )

The original title was Off With His Head, which is much more dynamic and descriptive, and gives you a better sense of the tone and content of the book than the American title Death of a Fool, which could be any old pack of doofuses in a drawing room.

What I'm Reading Next

Nothing this week! I'm on a week-long break from reading to see what happens. I have a Wednesday post written that covers the past few days, which I'll post on Wednesday. I'll start again with my crumbling Christies on Monday, and maybe by then the library will have Career of Evil (or I'll break down and buy it, one or the other).

I was planning to start reading Agatha Christie's autobiography, but someone bought it so it's not at the bookstore anymore. Maybe I'll see if the library has it.

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What I've Finished Reading

The Silkworm. Ouch, Rowling, that was nasty! I think she gets away with it though. I don't know. It's nowhere near as good a confrontation scene as the immortal Leg Incident and its lead-up in The Cuckoo's Calling, though it is a good solution to a difficult problem and very cleverly seeded.

( Not that I could put it down or anything. . . )

Also read: The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. ( We did not get off to a good start. )

I'm not sure why I found it as boring as I did (so boring that I was reading NKVD telegrams to perk me up between chapters). None of the characters were interesting to me, even as parodies, but why not? In order to answer that question, I'd have to read it more closely, which I don't have much motivation to do. I guessed the culprit right away, but that wouldn't bother me if there were other things to like. The narrative voice wound up being sort of the worst of both worlds: all the smug imperiousness and cultural insensitivity you would expect from a real Victorian memoirist, none of the richness of detail. It's probably not bad at all -- just not my thing.

What I'm Reading Now

The corpse shows up early in Scales of Justice (early by Marsh standards, so about eighty pages in), surrounded by suspicious objects, and it's a good thing: these people are a bit dull on their own. (I do like the relentlessly competent village nurse, though). Luckily, Alleyn is on the scene, razor in hand, ready to catch all their hideous secrets in a gleaming silver bowl.

I'm about halfway into In the Company of Sherlock Holmes -- a mixed bag, but a pretty good mix. I especially liked "The Curious Affair of the Italian Art Dealer" by Sara Paretsky, which is a crossover with another fictional detective, and "The Memoirs of Silver Blaze" by Michael Sims, which is a Sherlock Holmes Adventure told from the POV of a horse (in the tradition of Black Beauty), with a happy ending for the horse.


What I'm Going to Read Next

I meant to get Career of Evil from the library, but it was out with like 8 holds already on it, so I'm going to check back later, and pretend that Cormoran Strike is using the intervening time to get some sleep and maybe even eat something other than takeout. Justice is not served by your stubborn self-immolation, Strike! Even the greatest detectives need to rest. :(

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I'm behind on everything, and heading out to visit my family this afternoon, but a couple of notes:

1) Spinsters in Jeopardy provides yet more evidence why you should never marry a detective, even a nice professional one who promises to leave murder at the office. Murder cannot be left at the office. You'll be living your life, not hurting anyone, when suddenly fate or the author will swoop down and contrive to get your small child kidnapped for maximum drama in the middle of one of her occasional Reefer Madness Orgy Cult plots while you are just trying to enjoy a peaceful vacation. The drama will not even be successful.

1a) It's not my favorite plot, but this iteration of the Reefer Madness Orgy Cult is a lot better written than the (twenty years earlier) Death in Ecstasy. The final infiltration of the cult is beautifully silly and really funny. Unlike Death in Ecstasy, it's set in a foreign land that is not New Zealand, so cringe-inducing local color blossoms abundantly at several points.

2) Cormoran Strike gives me life. I'm still not done with The Cuckoo's Calling, but I already recommend it to anyone who likes competent investigators who are also great characters. The mystery is excellently paced and the balance between investigations and Strike's trainwrecky personal life is perfect. So is the awkward but highly productive relationship between Strike and his accidental temp/co-detective Robin, who turns out to be a natural at the mystery-solving game (and at getting Strike to eat kebabs when he's had too much to drink).

2a) That said, I'd love it if JKR could tone down the phonetically spelled dialect a bit? She's perfectly able to create/evoke strong character voices without it, and it can get very distracting at some points. Particularly when the character is already dipping heavily from the caricature bowl, like Lula Landry's birth mother. I don't even hate phonetic dialect as much as some people, but . . . we really will get the point without this fog of apostrophes. You can trust us, Rowling!

(I also can't understand why JKR or her publishers have chosen to use "handwriting font" to represent handwritten notes. That's pettier than the dialect complaint, but still baffling. You don't need a special font to represent handwriting! Any more than you need a special font for typing or a drunkenness font or a Cockney font or a painfully-still-trying-to-hide-your-prosthesis-from-your-de-facto-partner font. What purpose does it serve?)

There's more, but it will have to wait.

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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.