evelyn_b | Entries tagged with robert galbraith

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What I've Finished Reading

My very mixed feelings about Career of Evil didn't actually prevent me from reading the whole thing in about two days. ( A partial selection of mixed feelings, below the cut )

Definitely my least favorite of the three, but will that stop me from putting the next one on pre-order as soon as it becomes available? Reader, it will not.

Also finished: Death of a Fool. Not bad, but the patented Ngaio Marsh Death Performance Reconstruction felt a little tired -- I think the action might just have been too complicated to present clearly while maintaining any kind of suspense. This is another post-war story -- we're up to 1956 in the chronology -- and that aspect of the book is interesting in the ordinary way but not particularly deep or startling. Alleyn is Alleyn, Fox is underappreciated, everyone has a secret or two -- a slightly less than typically excellent Marsh, but still good.

And "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," featuring ( Spoiler! )

What I'm Reading Now

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. I meant to get the next Marsh book, Singing in the Shrouds, but the university library stacks keep being moved around due to construction, so I got lost and decided to start on Tey's non-Grant books instead. I love it so far. I've never actually seen a harem anime, but ( now I seem to be reading one? )

There's no sign of a murder yet. Maybe there won't be one? Maybe this is a genre vacation for Tey, and we're all just going to put on our bathing suits and play some lawn tennis and have a couple of sleepovers and call it a day. I think I'd be on board for that. Murder is the worst, after all, and it's been so nice out lately!

Malice by Keigo Higashino. This is a recent translation of a book written in 1998 about the murder of a writer, so it's full of plot-relevant conversations about 90s writing technology -- word processor vs. computer vs. writing in longhand in notebooks, and there is a clever alibi trick with a fax machine. It feels translated -- in that way that's hard to explain; the writing always seems to be stepping gingerly around something -- but that doesn't hurt anything very much. I don't know if I should give too much away about how it's structured, because part of the fun is finding out for yourself, but [spoiler temporarily redacted]

What I Plan to Read Next

I started Champagne for One a while ago, so I should get back to that. It's a Rex Stout story about a murder at a benefit dinner for unwed mothers. And more Annotated Holmes, probably.

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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 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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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 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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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.