Review: Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife

Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife by Deston J. Munden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is much compared with Legends & Lattes , and for once that's accurate. Not only were they discovered by the same "tastemaker" (which is apparently a thing now), they both feature a retired Orcish warrior taking on a cozy project in food-and-beverage retail. My own feeling is that if you liked one, you'll probably like the other, though this isn't just a clone of Legends; the plot is different in detail, and so is the main character's backstory, which plays into the frontstory a lot more in this book than in the other.

The MC is not just an orc, but an undead orc, killed and then raised by a typical evil necromancer a couple of hundred years before and forced to commit atrocities as a mind-controlled thrall. He and five others broke free from the necromancer's control (exactly how is carefully not stated), destroyed him, and founded a city in which the living, the undead and those summoned from other realms could live together peacefully and prosperously. He then served the city for a long time as a member of an elite guard, but now a new ruler is taking over, and she decides it's time for him to retire from the guard, undergo a necromantic process that restores him to something much closer to life, and do what he wants instead of serving the will of others. But what does he want?

Back during the relatively brief time he was alive, he was an Orcish war chef (which I kept reading as "war chief," but it's chef), a special traditional role that's like an army cook, but respected. So he decides to open a restaurant and start cooking again. After so long, he doesn't know if he can do it, but he rapidly acquires a group of friends who encourage him: a professor who's also some sort of gang boss (but in a good way?), his restaurant employees, and a ten-year-old girl he happens to meet. This young girl turns out to have a connection to his past that requires some working through.

Although this is definitely cozy, it's not just slice-of-life without conflict. There's a rabble-rouser in the city who hates the undead (and the summoned, but mainly the undead) and believes that the living should have everything, and he and his faction cause escalating problems. And the orc and one of his oldest friends, another of the six founders of the city, come into conflict over the little girl's heritage and what it means.

From a plot point of view, all of this works excellently, and the MC has a considerable character arc which is believable and moving, involving a change of name - which is why I'm not using his name in my review. There are some indications that the author needs more experience (and more editorial input), though. To me, the employees weren't distinct enough, and I had to keep thinking hard to remember which was which, even though they were each a different kind of undead or summoned entity (it says at one point, I think, that he'd also hired living employees, but if this was true I missed which one that was, unless the vampire doesn't count as truly undead). At one point, there are two different and contradictory explanations for the origin of the orphanage (noblemen's buildings claimed by the state or a donation by the former owner) within a single paragraph. A person has grey hair on one page and brown hair on the next. I've already mentioned the careful skirting of the plot hole about how mind-controlled thralls broke out of their conditioning and overthrew the necromancer. I was sometimes taken by surprise, too, by how much or how little time had passed between two indicators of when things were happening, given the events in between.

Relevant to that last point, the author has the common fault of often not using the past perfect tense when talking about events that happened prior to the current narrative moment, which I always find disorienting and distracting. What I mean is that in a sentence that should run "she needed to trust the system she and her family had created" or "the room had never looked better" or "he had never truly let it all sink in," the "had" gets left out, resulting in a moment of temporal whiplash while I parse it.

The author also reaches beyond his vocabulary at times, and unfortunately "mediocrity" is one of the words that's apparently beyond his vocabulary (he writes "mediocracy" instead). In fact, it has a lot of small glitches, like missing words, vocabulary errors and fumbled idioms. They're not in every sentence or even on every page - there are usually two or three per chapter - and (standard disclaimer) I read a pre-release copy via Netgalley, and there may be more copy editing to come.

While all of these minor issues reduced my enjoyment (they may or may not affect yours), overall I did think this was a strong debut. It's positive and hopeful - relentlessly so at times, insisting that nobody is born evil, that we're shaped by our environment and, secondarily, our choices. The city of necromancy is, we're told over and over, one of the safest in the kingdom, though it's having an atypical time in this particular story. A dupe of the populist manipulator comes round relatively easily to a verbal appeal and admits he was fooled, which I found slightly unrealistic, but I suppose if "it's too hopeful" is one of my complaints, the author has at least understood the cozy genre. There is an unexamined tension, though, between the cozy values and the violence of a sword-and-sorcery setting, and I was never completely clear on what the fate of the antagonist actually was - which may have been another intentional skirting of an issue, or just the author not clearly conveying what was in his mind.

It lands in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, which is usually for solid work with no significant issues, but in this case reflects what would be a Gold-tier book (emotionally moving, strongly written) demoted by a tier for vocabulary errors, missing past perfect and not completely making sense all the time. Still a recommendation, and since most people don't notice these things and some of them may even be corrected before publication, I suspect that it has a strong future ahead of it, and possibly some awards.

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Review: That Affair Next Door

That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before Miss Marple, there was Miss Butterworth.

Miss Butterworth is a very decided middle-aged spinster (middle-aged by today's standards; perhaps elderly by the standards of her time), living in the fancy New York neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. When a murder is committed in the next-door house, she - in the most dignified possible manner and with full consciousness of her social position - pokes her nose in and starts figuring things out, in tandem with the police detective, Grice, who had appeared in seven previous books by the same author, and is at this point quite old even by today's reckoning, at 77.

My big objection to the first Grice book, which is the only other one I've read by this author, was that people kept declaiming set-piece speeches about their emotions. The style seems to have settled down somewhere in the interim, and the whole book is a delight, with the notable exception of a nasty piece of anti-Chinese prejudice dropped right in the middle, apropos of nothing whatsoever. It may only be part of the characterization of Miss Butterworth's type of person and her likely prejudices, rather than the prejudice of the author, but it's a jarring note in any case. She's a slightly unreliable narrator, at least when it comes to herself, so I'm choosing to believe this was at least mostly the character's unexamined prejudice.

Miss Butterworth conveys more personality in a paragraph than, say, Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French does in probably his entire series (I have only read a couple of those books, but I'd risk a small bet). Take this example:

I don't like young men in general. They are either over-suave and polite, as if they condescended to remember that you are elderly and that it is their duty to make you forget it, or else they are pert and shallow and disgust you with their egotism. But this young man looked sensible and business-like, and I took to him at once, though what connection he could have with this affair I could not imagine.

Grice retains his quirk of not looking directly at people, but always picking some object in the room and apparently addressing his remarks to it, while remaining fully conscious of everything that's going on. He's smart enough to treat Miss Butterworth and her deductions and discoveries with respect, while not being so unprofessional as to open up all of his own investigation to her. She has knowledge he lacks; he's a man (who, if I remember rightly from his first appearance, is of the working class, though that's not mentioned here), and she's a woman who has spent her life in the level of society that the Van Burnams, the family who own the house where the murder was committed, also inhabit.

The mystery involves obscured identities, deceptive young gentlemen, and an odd murder which appears to have taken place in two stages. There are plenty of twisty twists and startling revelations. I've not given it my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag, because although the murder happens as it does because of a reasonably unlikely coincidence, and there's another coincidence later that raises the irony level, neither of them assist the plot to stay on track, which is the sense in which I mean that tag.

The only significant issue I noticed with the copy editing is that quite often something phrased as a question has no question mark.

I am demoting it a tier ranking (from Silver to Bronze) in my annual Best of the Year list, because of those couple of moments of really horrible racism, but other than that I thought it was better than most other classic mysteries I've read lately.

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Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll be honest: I didn't expect this to be good.

A lot of people who write "licensed" fiction are, let's face it, hacks - and hacks who, all too often, don't have much of a grasp of the basic mechanics of prose.

This author is better than that, and better than the average writer in general.

Because the characters are a D&D adventuring party, it's an ensemble cast. Those can be difficult to do. Giving multiple characters distinctive viewpoints, voices, motivations and backgrounds, and then meshing them together in such a way that they both clash and support each other and all contribute to the overall plot, is not a trivial task, and here it's handled well. The characters have some dimension to them, and they all have believable arcs which are complementary.

The plot trots along at a good pace without sacrificing characterization, though you are expected to be familiar with the world of the Forgotten Realms; its places and creatures and organizations get minimal description. It even took me a while to realize Tess, the group's leader, was an elf, partly because I was left to assume that the people whose species wasn't specified were human, and (unless I missed something) Tess's elven ancestry wasn't mentioned immediately. There's also a good deal of reference back to the previous book, which I haven't read, but I didn't feel lost because of it; everything said about the events of that book is said in a context where it's relevant to whatever's going on in this book.

Overall, it felt like a good, solid pulpy adventure with well-intentioned, capable but flawed characters who bounced off each other in interesting ways.

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Review: The Lerouge Case

The Lerouge Case by Émile Gaboriau
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This 1863 mystery is so very, very French. There are two mistresses central to the plot, one of them particularly awful, and the other one has an illegitimate son, upon whose identity the plot hinges. Everyone is very excitable. Someone literally dies of shame; someone else, rejected by his love interest, runs out to murder the man she prefers to him, can't do it, and falls into a delirium for six weeks. (Said love interest, incidentally, is about 19 at the time of the main events, since it's roughly two years since events, including the rejected suitor's offer, that took place when she was stated to be 17. However, her successful suitor, who is 33, has been trying to convince his father to let him marry her for the past five years, meaning when he started she was 14 and he was 28. Those aren't good numbers by modern standards, though in 1863 France nobody would have turned a hair; that was the year that the age of consent was raised from 11 to 13.)

The inciting incident is that an elderly woman is murdered in a village near Paris. The amateur detective thinks over the scenario, and concludes that obviously she was a former servant who was blackmailing her former employer over an illegitimate child, which turns out to be correct. The detective, by the way, is not Lecoq, even though this is considered the first Lecoq novel; Lecoq appears only briefly at the beginning, with another brief mention late in the book, and his sole role is to bring the amateur detective, Tabaret, into the story. In later books, apparently, Tabaret is his mentor, and Lecoq takes a more active role.

Tabaret then goes to see his neighbour, who by complete coincidence is closely connected with the crime, thus short-circuiting a great deal of tedious investigation and getting straight to the drama and sensation, which was presumably what the original audience was there for. Plus! The investigating magistrate also has a coincidental connection to the prime suspect, one that will give that punctilious official a good deal of angst, because he's not sure he can be fair and impartial. This development, at least, uses coincidence to create difficulties rather than remove them, but I still don't love it. (Though it will later turn out that, in a way, the first coincidence also caused difficulties...) The author lampshades the convenience of the coincidences, and also the ridiculousness of the hackneyed baby-swap backstory, which, of course, doesn't justify either one.

It soon appears that the prime suspect has been expertly and comprehensively framed, with a lot of physical evidence clearly pointing to him. The physical evidence is subtle enough that a bungling police officer, such as the one who's investigating, would miss it, but Tabaret picks up on it because he's very smart (if eccentric). Tabaret is then convinced of the suspect's innocence by the fact that he has (or at least proffers) no alibi, and someone who was as careful as the criminal they're looking for would definitely have one, but also we, the readers, are privy to the suspect's thoughts, and he is not thinking "I done it, it's a fair cop" (or the aristocratic French equivalent).

And then the supposedly bungling officer tracks down his completely different suspect, and there's a twist that gets us re-evaluating the significance for this case of the old forensic maxim "Who benefits?," and makes it pretty clear who the criminal must be (and we've already seen their motive). Cue manic pursuit and dénouement, including another coincidence to help the detective along, and it turns out the murderer wasn't actually as clever or as careful as Tabaret had thought.

This isn't a "procedural" in the English style at all. It's full of Gallic high drama, and the whole book is driven by character interaction, by people desiring things intensely and taking often ill-advised steps to obtain or keep them. It's a roller-coaster ride of emotional beats that, if they were music, would be speed metal. The forensic aspects of the investigation are misleading more than they are helpful ((view spoiler)[and, in fact, the original cleverly detected details which pointed to a particular suspect turn out to be another complete coincidence, not a clever frame-up at all (hide spoiler)]), and the investigators, far from being the problem-solving plot mechanisms that most English detective novelists would produce starting half a century or more later, are flawed human beings with their own quirks and foibles that impact the plot as well as themselves. The narrator retains a stance of the inevitability of Justice, but the characters come to doubt it, and themselves, deeply.

I'm not sure who translated this particular version, or if they were English or French; the Project Gutenberg text doesn't credit a translator. The phraseology often reflects the original French more closely than a truly idiomatic English translation would, and there are some misplaced or missing commas (for example, comma before the main verb or before "that," or no comma before a term of address). The quotation marks need another going-over as well, since a number of them are missing, while others are where they shouldn't be. Some sentences phrased as questions are missing question marks, while a couple of sentences not phrased as questions do have question marks. There's even an its/it's error. Not a great edition, in other words, and Project Gutenberg is likely not to blame for most of it; they follow the original texts pretty accurately, on the whole.

Although I'm not a fan of the massive role of coincidence in the plot and the over-the-top melodrama, it was a thrilling ride for sure. I'm going to be a bit generous and include it in my annual recommendation list, though right at the bottom of the lowest tier. And I may venture on another Lecoq book, though if it's just like this it will be the last.

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Review: The Bittermeads Mystery

The Bittermeads Mystery by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story opens with a man who's amazingly strong, stealthy (despite being large and apparently ungainly), alert, and an excellent tracker. He feels more like a larger-than-life pulp hero than the protagonist of a detective novel, and indeed this is less a detective novel than it is a thriller. The difference between the two often comes down to time orientation: the detective novel is about solving a crime in the past, and the thriller is frequently about preventing a crime in the future. Not that the main character does a particularly wonderful job of that, at least for the first half of the book. He's busy gaining the trust of one of the criminals, falling for the love interest while trying to work out if she was complicit in the murder of his old friend, and maintaining his undercover identity. There has been more than one murder, but it's not really a mystery who committed them; the trick is getting to a point where he can prove it and foil the villain's plans.

It's only around the middle of the book that we discover exactly who he is and get at least some idea of what he's trying to do and why (I guessed it before the reveal, but not a long time before). About two-thirds of the way in, I, but not he, figured out who the mysterious figure behind the crimes was; the main character is notable for his physical rather than his mental aptitude. I was never in any danger of being bored, though; the tension is well maintained, in part by keeping information unrevealed as long as possible. And then there's a race against time to save multiple people in different places, where seconds could count.

The style, particularly at the start, is excitable and overdramatic, again more like a pulp adventure novel than the urbane narration I'm used to in classic detective stories.

The author isn't good with commas, using them to splice sentences together, placing them incorrectly in sentences or leaving them out where they're needed, and not using them when he splits a sentence of dialog in two parts with a tag; he punctuates the second part, incorrectly, as if it was a stand-alone sentence. Today's authors do this kind of thing all the time, but a century ago it was less common, and publishers generally had better editors, who knew the rules even if the authors didn't.

Between the not-too-bright protagonist, the pulpy prose and the mediocre copy editing, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list, but if you ignore those things, it's exciting and full of tension and, at times, action-packed.

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Review: The Wrong Letter

The Wrong Letter by Walter S. Masterman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The introduction by G.K. Chesterton mentions unspecified faults with the book, which he however commends for fooling him about who the murderer was.

These faults, from my perspective, include simplistic prose mainly consisting of declarative sentences, some of which are comma-spliced, others of which are missing their question marks despite being phrased as questions. The paragraph breaks sometimes make it slightly confusing to work out who is speaking, since the author uses a break after a beat, even if the dialog that follows is from the person who was taking action in the beat.

It's a locked-room mystery, made less mysterious by the fact that in the discovery-of-the-body scene the amateur detective of the (unrealistic) amateur-and-professional pair opens the door of the murder room by manipulating the key, which is in the lock on the other side, with a pair of pliers, thus demonstrating how the murderer could have left and locked it behind them. However, nobody seems to pick up on this, and the police strip the entire room looking for secret passages.

I was finding it tedious, mainly because of the prose style, so I glanced at the ending to see what Chesterton was talking about, only to find that it breaks two of Ronald Knox's rules of detective fiction (rules 1 and 7, if you want to look them up and don't mind a big spoiler). So I didn't bother to finish it.

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Review: Flecker’s Magic

Flecker’s Magic by Norman H. Matson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Short, and yet it seems much longer than it needs to be at times. This is because the main character, a 21-year-old struggling American artist living in Paris, spends so much time introspecting and philosophizing. He is dithering about what to wish for, having been given a ring by a young woman who says she's a witch (and can back it up by performing remarkable feats), and told that it will grant him one wish.

He has a vivid imagination, and can see the downsides of each wish he thinks of, which at least puts him ahead of most fictional people who are granted wishes - but it also means that he just wanders along through his life, procrastinating the decision while the deadline he's been given looms closer. He eats (very well; he's not a starving artist), he philosophizes, he paints, he sleeps, he havers, he dithers, he blathers. An old witch turns up a few times and advises him to wish for happiness, but, disgusted by her, he's also repelled by the idea (and worried that she might be the same person as the young witch, who he's fallen for, in the way of young men).

He fails to make a decision, and then the book goes into a series of long conversations which get increasingly nonsensical and self-indulgently pointless, and at that point I gave up on it. I can see it being interesting if you were around the main character's age and still looking for a philosophy of life, though even then, the philosophies of life it presents are diffuse, out-of-date and sometimes surreal. But for me, it wasn't interesting.

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Review: The Problem Club

The Problem Club by Barry Pain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amusing and different. Club stories were almost as much a staple of English literature as clubs were of London life at one time, though this isn't a club in the Drones Club sense (with its own premises), but more like a supper club that meets each month in the private rooms of a restaurant. The members compete in quirky challenges like "who can steal the most handkerchiefs from other club members?" or "try to get someone to say to you, 'You ought to have been a giraffe'." It bears some similarities to G.K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades .

The format of each story is the same. The month's challenge is announced (as a formal reminder) by the chairman, a rotating office among the twelve members, so each member is chairman once a year. The chairman doesn't compete, but adjudicates who among the other members has won. Most of the club subscription goes into a pool, which is taken by the winner or winners.

The chairman then goes around asking the members whether they have completed the challenge. It's all done on the honour system; these are pukka Englishmen, and while they might not blink at manipulating people (harmlessly) or bending the law a bit to complete the challenges, they would naturally never lie about whether they had won. Most of the entertainment value comes from the oddness of the challenges, the discomfiture of the non-winners and their unsuccessful attempts, and the ingenuity of the winners (though at least one winner is a winner by pure luck). Some people attempt to argue that they have won by a technicality involving the precise wording of the rules, and the chairman adjudicates. Once the prize is awarded (or not, if nobody has won; the prize is then added to the next month's pool), the next month's challenge is announced. The meeting then breaks up, and some members play bridge or otherwise socialise amongst themselves. Within this format, the stories are varied; different people, with different specialty knowledge or skills, stand out in each competition, the challenges are diverse, and the solutions even more so.

If you enjoy heist stories for the ingenuity of the plans and the ability of the characters to manipulate, this may be something you'd enjoy too. It's all good fun, nobody is harmed, and some of the club members set out to be clever and end up looking ridiculous.

Even though I found it amusing rather than hilarious, it was entertaining, and original and different enough that I've placed it in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. A lot of what I read is, inevitably, changes rung on old concepts, and this, despite being more than a century old, struck me as fresh and with further potential for development.

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Review: The Middle Temple Murder

The Middle Temple Murder by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fletcher was a journalist, which is probably why the journalist who is the hero of this story, and solves the case, is so exemplary. He's empathetic to people who could be hurt if he reveals everything he knows, and keeps some things out of his paper in consequence, though admittedly they are friends and a potential love interest.

The pacing worked well for me, and never bogged down in a lack of progress; the journalist and (less frequently) the police detective were constantly discovering new clues and facts that progressed towards a solution, and those facts revealed a complex and engaging story, involving fraud, false identities, theft, blackmail and murder.

I was engaged enough that I'm not even demoting it by one tier in my annual recommendation list for relying on coincidence for the plot to happen. The core cast of nine people turn out to have multiple connections to one another, a good many of them completely coincidental, and the murder itself is the result of at least three coincidences. But given that those coincidences happened, it does all make sense, and the process of unravelling it all was enjoyable.

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Review: The Achievements of Luther Trant

The Achievements of Luther Trant by William MacHarg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something different: An early (1910) presentation of a detective using psychological science to solve cases.

Unfortunately, much of the psychological science of 1910 is bunk, and those parts of it that are valid are badly oversold. For example, the authors take it for granted that anyone who's lying will be stressed, and therefore detectable using early predecessors of the polygraph. There's a reason that polygraph evidence isn't accepted in courts: it's not that simple, not that clearcut, and not that reliable.

It reminds me, in fact, of every overhyped technology ever (such as AI today), which, when you actually start trying to apply it, comes up against the fact that the real world - and particularly the human part of it - is a lot more complicated than the technology evangelists have allowed for.

It's not all polygraph; in fact, there's quite a lot of variation, and no two stories use exactly the same method. There's some stuff about "hysteria" that, I think, takes a few laboratory experiments that were probably exaggerated in their writeup and interpretation, and turns them into "known facts" that apply generally. In one chapter, the detective solves a case based on giving a brief word-association test to a group of bank employees. In another, he measures the speed of response in a word-association test using an elaborate apparatus (all the scientific instruments are mechanical or electro-mechanical, in this time before electronics) in order to discover the guilty party. The response speeds quoted seem extremely slow for what is supposed to be a "word you first think of" test, and could easily be distinguished without using a clock accurate to a tenth of a second. We also don't ever get a discussion of how this young man, who's implied to be off a Midwestern farm, can afford to set himself up with all this presumably expensive precision equipment (once he leaves the university and goes out on his own, that is).

The whole thing takes psychological effects which, if real at all, are probably only visible in a large-scale statistical analysis, and makes them act like universal laws that apply to every subject every time, and can be easily and quickly measured outside a lab setting.

So, treat it as science fiction. But the mysteries are clever, and it's not just the same thing over and over; each story in the book presents a different type of puzzle and a different type of solution, so points to the authors for that.

There is generally a young woman in each story, but she's always engaged or married to someone already, and Trant - young, handsome and athletic as well as highly intelligent - never has a romantic interest. He is, like most early detectives, more of a crime-solving plot device than a character with his own life and interests outside detection. But if you enjoy a clever puzzle, and can suspend disbelief about the "psychological science," it's an enjoyable collection.

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Review: If I Were You

If I Were You by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The British obsession with class - and the fact that some of the brighter Brits suspected quite early on that nurture was more important than nature in creating any detectable differences between people of different classes - has produced a few comedies with a baby-swap at the centre of the plot. Gilbert and Sullivan have two (HMS Pinafore and The Gondoliers). In the US, Mark Twain did something similar, only with race, in Pudd'nhead Wilson .

Here we have a story where - according to his old nurse - the Earl of Droitwich is not the son of the previous earl, as everyone has always believed, but the son of the nurse, and the man who's grown up as the son of the nurse is not a Cockney barber but the rightful holder of the title. The Family, of course, are outraged; so is the butler, especially since the nurse in question is his sister, and he doesn't fancy calling his young nephew Sid "m'lord". The mercenary Modern Girl who has just got engaged to the man who she thought, at the time, was the earl isn't happy either.

Fortunately, the barber's manicurist, Polly Brown (a name like that in Wodehouse always signals a worthy, sensible girl), suggests that the Claimant should be shown just how much he wouldn't like earling, and the Family begin a campaign along those lines, making him ride, attend highbrow concerts and lectures, and so forth. Meanwhile, Tony, who was previously believed to be the earl, takes over the barbershop, spends time with Polly, and falls in love with her. Hijinks ensue.

The novel was based on a play, written by Wodehouse and his frequent collaborator Guy Bolton, which was never produced; they later adapted the novel into another play titled Who's Who?, which ran for 19 performances. Bolton adapted the play into a musical, Who's Who, Baby?, which was even less successful, running for 16 performances. I'm not sure why audiences didn't take to it; it's a typical Wodehouse bit of fun, with amusing dialog and situations. The novel shows its origins as a play, with limited locations and, occasionally, the feeling that the characters are saying lines to each other rather than conversing, but overall it's a solid piece in the Wodehouse manner, and I enjoyed it.

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Review: At the Villa Rose

At the Villa Rose by A.E.W. Mason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An unusual structure for a mystery story: the criminals are identified and captured just over half-way through the book, after which we get a (rather horrific) sequential account of how their crime unfolded. They're cruel and brutal, and honestly it's more than I bargained for. Then a chapter or two of how the detective figured it out.

It's a clever crime cleverly detected, but too dark for me.

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Review: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a lot of classic mysteries lately (more than 50, not sure how that happened), and you can only do that for so long without turning to Christie. My grandmother had a collection of Christie books, which I used to read when I stayed with her, but that was many years ago, and I don't remember whether or not I read this one specifically. I've certainly seen the wonderful TV adaptation, and when I read Poirot's dialog, I hear it in my head in the voice of David Suchet. He is Poirot.

Compared with most of her contemporaries, Christie's prose feels smoother, less stiff and more modern, closer to the way people write today than to the Victorian or Edwardian style. She's not the literary stylist that Dorothy L. Sayers is, but her writing is fit for its purpose. She does occasionally commit a comma splice.

She also makes a mystery story feel like a story and not just a puzzle. The characters have more life than a lot of authors of the time manage, and in particular, her detective, Poirot, has an individuality that's missing from a lot of detectives of the era, despite its presence in the great model, Sherlock Holmes. I sometimes say that one of the things I enjoy most about a great mystery story is the parts that aren't the mystery, and Christie provides that: the interpersonal dynamics and the thoughts and feelings of the narrator all seem more developed, more in colour and less in black-and-white, than in a lot of classic mysteries.

Part of it, I suspect, is that Christie, as a woman, was permitted, even expected, to be more comfortable and familiar with emotion and relationships than the male English authors of her time, whose stories often feel like you're watching them through a window of thick glass rather than being in the same room with the characters. I've noticed a similar phenomenon with C.L. Moore in the fantasy and science fiction genre. She, like some other female authors writing at the time, introduces another layer of emotional realism and significance that's missing from most of her male contemporaries, and that we've come to expect in modern fiction.

At the same time, Christie doesn't let us down on the detective-story part. The mystery is intricately constructed and carefully unfolded, just as much as it would be in a book by one of the Freemans (Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman).

Hastings, the Watson character, makes a delightfully dim narrator. Take this passage, for example, where Poirot is speaking to him:

"We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.”
I acquiesced.
“There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me.”
I was pleased with the compliment. There had been times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
“Yes,” he continued, staring at me thoughtfully, “you will be invaluable.”

The excuse for Hastings' presence in the story is that he's convalescing from an unspecified war wound at the house of an old friend from his childhood, but the wound doesn't seem to trouble him much; he plays tennis, for example, which requires quite a sound body. He's there for a long time, too, and is eventually given a job in the War Office, suggesting that his wound is serious enough not to send him back to the Front (though clearly not so serious that he can't play tennis), or that he brings some kind of ability to the job that is not visible in his assistance of Poirot, or has some sort of influence in high places that he never mentions. It smells strongly of authorial fiat to me, used to ensure that Hastings remains present throughout the whole series of events, but nothing else in the story smells similarly, so I'll let it pass.

He's not referred to as Captain Hastings in this book, even though he's a currently serving officer. It's odd that he gets that title in future books, since he says in this one that he wasn't a professional soldier before the war, and hence technically shouldn't retain his military rank into civilian life, particularly since it's a comparatively low one; it's usually only majors and above who get to keep their rank. According to the Wodehouse annotation site madameulalie.org on their page for Lord Emsworth and Others, "In English literature, former army officers who use the rank of Captain are almost always bounders". Hastings is a strong counter-example; he’s certainly not a bounder, being, in fact, brave, loyal, and scrupulous to a fault (except that in this book he's rather too admiring of his friend's wife).

It's very solid for a first novel, and comparing it to other detective fiction of the time makes it clear to me why Christie is still the most read of all the authors working in this period (though, of course, she did continue writing for many more decades too).

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Review: Max Carrados

Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

We aren't privy to the detective's knowledge until he explains everything at the end of each of these stories, so the enjoyment here consists of watching a clever man solve odd problems. There's an extra wrinkle in that Carrados is blind, so he relies on his other senses (and his author-given ability to reason accurately from limited information, and his extremely observant manservant) to work on the strange cases that he encounters, usually by having them brought to him by his friend the private inquiry agent. He doesn't do it professionally, having inherited a lot of money, so he can choose cases that he finds interesting - thus increasing the chances that we will also find them interesting.

The author is clever in setting up the situations and having the detective figure them out, so the stories are enjoyable, though they're not "fair play" detective stories by any measure. The author also makes sure that, usually, virtue is rewarded and vice punished, even if this sometimes requires coincidences outside the control of any of the characters, including Carrados.

The last story includes some tense moments and a bit of action, driven by Carrados being more of a protagonist than usual.

They're entertaining, but I'm not about to rush off and read others.

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Review: Mystery At Lynden Sands

Mystery At Lynden Sands by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the third Sir Clinton Driffield novel, Sir Clinton is accompanied both by his Watson from the first book (his friend Wendover, a JP who represents the sound British county chap who's a stickler for the done thing), and his inspector from the second book, who tends to play Scotland Yard bungler to Sir Clinton's Sherlock Holmes, though he's sound enough at basic police work. He can collect evidence and notice evidence, he's just not that good at stringing it together into a narrative, which is where Sir Clinton shines.

The motive for the first murder seemed pretty obvious to me, and gave a clear suspect from the start, though Sir Clinton tries to make out late in the book that it could have pointed two different ways. The main mystery, though, involved gunshots, multiple sets of footprints later washed away by the tide, several different people believing that something had taken place which had not, tyre tracks, eavesdropping, and bigamous marriages, and had me completely confused until Sir Clinton cleared it all up neatly. He's still a bit of a know-it-all; it would be nice to see him confounded, or making a mistake, from time to time just to humanize him (or having a non-professional relationship with anyone besides Wendover, who, because he's drafted as the Watson, ends up still being a professional relationship). But the crimes and solutions are clever, and if you enjoy Freeman Wills Crofts and/or R. Austin Freeman, with their puzzle-solving detectives who don't have much personality, this is another author for you.

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Review: Lord Emsworth and Others

Lord Emsworth and Others by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Short stories, in which, mostly, people win who don't always win. This is a bit of a theme for Wodehouse; he was always one for the underdog.

In the opening story, "The Crime Wave at Blandings," Lord Emsworth's despised former secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is shot with an airgun multiple times by multiple people, and another of Lord Emsworth's many nieces gets to marry the man of her choice because Lord Emsworth, emboldened by circumstances, uncharacteristically stands up to his sisters. It's prime Blandings Castle material.

We then get stories from those tireless raconteurs Mr. Mulliner and the Oldest Member (of a golf club; these are golf stories, but you don't have to be a golfer to enjoy them, since they're really about the struggles of young people in love). I'd say these stories are about average for Mulliner and Oldest Member stories: good, but not great.

Finally, we get three stories in which Ukridge uncharacteristically makes money out of his perpetual schemes, though not without the usual vicissitudes. The boxer he intermittently manages, Battling Billson, even wins a fight for once. His reluctant friend, "Corky" Corcoran, who narrates the Ukridge stories, in this case is mostly narrated to, as Ukridge recounts his triumphs and disasters. I enjoy Ukridge's inexpert con games and his eccentric costume and personality, and these three stories are well up to standard.

The cover illustration to the Everyman edition presumably is meant to be the Efficient Baxter, but with none of the features of his stated appearance (for example, his spectacles). Everyman have done an excellent job of copy editing, but I question their art direction.

The book cheered me up when I needed that, and what more can you ask from a collection of comic short stories?

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