Review: Thrones, Dominations (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers (5-Jun-2014) Paperback

Thrones, Dominations (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers (5-Jun-2014) Paperback by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the reasons we admire the work of particular authors is that they do something that nobody else can do. It might be possible to pastiche their works, but they're essentially inimitable. So if, after their death, another author attempts to extend the series, all too often it ends up as bad fanfiction (there is such a thing as good fanfiction, but Sturgeon's Law applies). I'm thinking here of Eoin Colfer's awful sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, or the review of Sebastian Faulks' continuation of the Jeeves series which runs "FAULKS stop WHAT ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop WHY ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop CONSIDER YOUR PLOT THE FROZEN LIMIT stop WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY PLANTING YOUR LOATHSOME BEAZELS ON MY HEROES LIKE THIS stop DEEPLY REGRET YOUR HEAD HUNDRED MILES FROM ETHEREAL REALM AS UNABLE TO HIT YOU WITH BRICK stop LOVE PLUM".

So I approached this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series with more than a little trepidation. Technically, it is partly by Dorothy L. Sayers; she began the book and set it aside for other work, and the incomplete draft was found in a publisher's safe and passed to the already respected crime novelist Jill Paton Walsh to finish.

I have to say, I was favourably impressed. It felt like a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, even to the persistent fault of introducing a lot of similar, and inadequately distinguished, characters all in a bunch, though it didn't have the persistent fault of going so deeply into some obscure area of knowledge that the reader has to just let it wash over them, aware that a lot of nuance is being missed. It builds on and extends the relationship established between the newlywed couple of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane in the last book completed by Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon , without (as far as I was concerned) contradicting what that book and its predecessor, Gaudy Night , had established about the characters individually and as a couple. Like several previous books, it teases me with a mention of Miss Climpson, my favourite character in the series, but doesn't bring her onstage. It quotes and references English literature like a Wimsey novel. I'm happy to accept it as a Wimsey novel, and a good one, though not one of the best; I enjoyed it about as much as Have His Carcase , which I liked.

It takes a third of the book to get to the actual crime, but the setup is (mostly) necessary. There are several subplots concerning Harriet's integration into Peter's world, her ambivalence about continuing to write, her sister-in-law Helen's disapproval of her, and Peter's valet Bunter's relationship with another photographer. Harriet gains a lady's maid, who has the unlikely surname of Mango; a few of the new characters struck me as having Dickensian names, more so than in previous books, where the names have tended to be characteristic of the place where the crime occurs. Mango gets a chance to shine as an undercover operative in the solution of the crime at one point.

The main crime itself - the murder of a woman with whom Peter and Harriet are slightly acquainted - has a personal dimension for them, and the authors do a wonderful job of compare-and-contrast between the dead woman's relationship with her husband and the very different "marriage of true minds" that Peter and Harriet are striving for. The detective couple's self-doubt and mutual support are both very much in evidence.

For me, at least, this works as an extension of a beloved series with distinctive characters who have grown across the series, and continue to grow in ways that make sense for their complex personalities. It's also a good detective mystery.

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Review: The Sea Mystery

The Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start by saying this: you don't read a Freeman Wills Crofts book for the characters.

In particular, you don't read one to enjoy the quirky antics of an unusual detective. This is not Poirot with his little moustache and his tisanes, or Lord Peter Wimsey with his monocle and his collection of rare books, or even Holmes with his indoor target practice and his shag tobacco kept in a Turkish slipper. In an earlier review, I've referred to Inspector French as more of a plot device than an actual character, and while this is perhaps too harsh, it contains a lot of truth. The author was an engineer, and he designed French as a crime-solving machine, with no extraneous parts.

French's appearance is never described, at least in this book. We don't learn his hair or eye colour, the style of his clothes, his height, what he likes to eat, drink, or smoke. He appears to have no interests outside his work, and no distinctive possessions or non-professional associates. The existence of his wife is referred to in a single sentence, but she plays no role (in one of the other books, she does act as his sounding board in one scene). He is Everyman, if Everyman is a dogged policeman who solves crimes perpetrated by criminals more clever than him by systematically following every clue to its absolute end.

Except that, in this case, he rebukes himself for not doing so sooner with one key line of inquiry, which almost leads to disaster. It also takes him quite a bit longer than it took me to click to a key point about the evidence ((view spoiler)[that the identification of the deceased depends upon people who he now suspects of involvement in the murder (hide spoiler)]). The author did at least know that watching a perfectly efficient machine work flawlessly is not interesting for very long.

What is interesting in a Freeman Wills Crofts story is the intricate and original crime and how it's unravelled, and this book is no exception. Starting with a body found in an estuary inside a packing case of unusual dimensions, it progresses rapidly via a combination of sound logic and thorough investigation by French; he figures out where and when the case must have been put into the water, how that was done, where the case came from, finds a case of disappearance of two men that would account for the body (but where is the other man?), rounds up a set of suspects and investigates each of them thoroughly. Because he isn't quite thorough enough, there's a scene of considerable risk and tension before he brings the case to its conclusion.

If the thing you enjoy most about a detective story is the bits that aren't the detective story, this one will disappoint you. But if you enjoy the puzzle aspect, with a judicious amount of detail about the beauty of the locations, a few technical details and some clever work by both the criminal and the detective, those parts are excellent of their type.

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Review: Tourmalin's Time Cheques

Tourmalin's Time Cheques by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An early piece of time-travel fiction, which has fun with the trips back in time being out of proper order, so the time traveller is struggling to figure out what's happened prior to the moment he's in. His trips are to an earlier point in his own timeline; the premise is that, stuck on a ship from Australia home to Britain, he's bored and wishes the time would pass more quickly, and a mysterious Bank Manager offers him a deal. Deposit your currently-unwanted time in our Time Bank, and you can draw it out later, using this handy chequebook!

The thing is, Peter, the traveller, has been sent on this voyage by his fiancée Sophia, an intelligent, managing woman who suspects (justifiably, as it turns out) that he's infirm of purpose and that he'll be tempted to make connections with young women on board the ship. It's a test to make sure that he's faithful to her, and he passes - but only because he's banked the time that he might have spent with two other young women, who, in contrast to Sophia, are neither intelligent nor serious. Once he's back in England, married, and starts drawing on his account at the Time Bank when life with Sophia gets a bit too earnest for him, he discovers that he's apparently been, as it were, making time with both of the young women, though at first he's, let's say, at sea as far as the details are concerned. He tries to be a faithful married man, but apparently his earlier self wasn't quite so scrupulous, and also kept being creatively misunderstood by his "friends"...

Peter is unlike the solid, worthy heroes of the other two Anstey books I've read, The Tinted Venus and The Brass Bottle . He's a slacker without much spine, who looks forward to being managed by Sophia in general but finds it a trial in particular. He has generally good intentions, but lacks the strength of character to stick to them. That makes him less appealing than those other heroes, but he's presented as so hapless (in Anstey's classic style of ever-escalating farce) that I couldn't help but feel for him anyway.

The ending is a classic cheat, but doesn't completely ruin the book; the journey is still fun, even if the destination is a letdown. While it's not as much to my taste as the other two Ansteys I've read, I still found it enjoyable. I will warn that Anstey has the somewhat long-winded style of his time (late 19th/early 20th century), and some readers will find that tedious.

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Review: The Lost Book of Anggird

The Lost Book of Anggird by Kyra Halland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kyra Halland can spell and punctuate, which is a lot less common than it ought to be for authors. It's unfortunate, then, that I don't always totally love her characters; they're often a bit grimier and grimmer than I really prefer.

Both of the lead characters here have a traumatic background from their childhood, the man more so than the woman. He also has a high sensitivity to pain, though it only seems to be a problem when the plot requires it to be.

The plot, in fact, has a lot of momentum, in the sense that it moves the main characters rapidly from a classic Odd Couple who consider each other vaguely attractive physically while being deeply annoying (because opposite) in personality, to banging like a screen door in a hurricane. I found the transition abrupt and inadequately set up.

Once they're together, they go off to solve a problem that, conveniently, they are uniquely able to solve, for multiple reasons that had to come together by chance. It's convenient for the plot, but not for them, since it involves getting people who don't approve of them to put them through difficult training while they're periodically threatened by other, adjacent people, and then they have to perform a difficult and dangerous task. Meanwhile, they're wanted by the authorities.

I stopped reading for a while, because I wasn't sure, at one point, that things weren't going to collapse into disaster that would be harrowing to read about, but it didn't; there was only a bit more torture (never a favourite of mine) and some comprehensive ignoring of all principles of justice and fairness. The government they had to deal with kept the populace contented and prosperous in order to keep them docile, but it was set up to be secretive and unaccountable, and quite capable of becoming dystopian and breaking its own rules when threatened.

Overall, then, although it was well written, had strong emotional beats, and was mostly mechanically sound, it wasn't a good fit for my personal taste, and so I place it in the lowest tier of my recommendations list for 2024. People with different tastes will enjoy it a good deal more, especially if they don't care about or don't notice the slightly railroaded plot.

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Review: The Brass Bottle

The Brass Bottle by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second F. Anstey read, and like the other one ( The Tinted Venus ), it involves an ordinary honest fellow troubled by a supernatural being who interferes with his life in general and his love life in particular. It was first published in 1900, right at the end of the Victorian era, and that's very much the milieu, but if you wanted to film it (and someone really should; it has, in fact, been filmed three times, but the latest was 1964), you could probably set it in most eras, including today's, without much difficulty. Indeed, the 1964 version, with Barbara Eden as the love interest (not the genie), was apparently set in the then-present day; from Wikipedia's account, it was so Hollywoodized as to fail to capture the charm and humour of the original.

The best thing, the truly original thing, about this tale of a man who releases a genie from the brass bottle where he's been imprisoned since the time of Solomon is that the man concerned, Harold, doesn't want fame and riches, at least not without earning them for himself through hard work in his profession as an architect. He (with good evidence from his observations of public figures) believes that unearned wealth will make him miserable rather than contented. The problem is that the genie insists, over Harold's escalating protests, on rewarding him for his unwitting favour in releasing the genie with the kind of rewards that most men of the genie's time and culture would have coveted. For example, he redecorates Harold's moderate lodgings in high Eastern style when his fiancée and her parents are coming to dinner, and has slaves serve Eastern delicacies to them, when Harold's prospective father-in-law is very strict on young men being extravagant and Harold only wanted to serve a decent plain meal cooked by his landlady. Of course, Harold's love interest isn't good enough in the genie's eyes, and he sets out to break up the engagement and substitute a relative of his.

The various shenanigans of the genie are hilarious, the more so as Harold gets more and more frustrated with them, and Harold has to exercise considerable ingenuity and tact to get the genie to reverse his schemes. It's a fun ride, and clever, and original.

There's some language in it, used by Harold's landlady and landlord rather than Harold himself, that is not acceptable today (referring to the dark-skinned servants the genie conjures up; I think you know what word I mean). Apart from that, it's unobjectionable.

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Review: The Mage War

The Mage War by Ben S. Dobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A strong finish to a series that also had a strong start, though for me one or two of the middle books seemed like they were mainly there to get the plot from situation A to situation B, without a lot of tension or development. That's not a problem in this book whatsoever.

There's plenty of tension and action; most of the second half of the book is an extended struggle by the now-ensemble cast against difficult odds, using varied skills and approaches to meet a variety of challenges. In the course of those struggles, they grow and develop as characters and some of their relationships also develop or change. The emotional beats are more than solid - in fact, I was moved at multiple points by the bravery and dedication of the characters and the losses they sustained during their fight for what they believed in. This is a true noblebright book, in which the line between good and evil is the line between people who will accept suffering and loss for the benefit of others, and people who will push suffering and loss onto others for their own benefit.

The worldbuilding, and the way in which the author has conveyed that worldbuilding, is good enough that I predicted multiple times how the characters would solve a problem right before they did so. This is a strength, not a weakness; it shows that the world makes sense and the magic system conforms to Sanderson's First Law.

The characters themselves are distinct and memorable. I read the previous book four years ago, but it didn't take long for me to remember who they all were and how they were connected, a mark of an author who has made his characters feel like people, rather than stereotypes who have roles in a plot. I'm sure the fact that I was listening to the audiobook helped, since the narrator did a good job of distinguishing the voices. His voice for the villain hit just the right note of arrogant, condescending smugness, and the characters who had accents had consistent-sounding accents that were not just Earth accents taken over into a fantasy world; I appreciated that.

Because I listened to the audiobook, I can't comment on the copy editing, though it's been mostly good in the previous books. I did wonder a couple of times if the author was writing "hurtling" when he meant "hurling".

There's very little to criticize here, and plenty to praise. The final book definitely brings a lot of things full circle from the first book, including the original premise of the Magebreakers: that the biggest flaw in magic is the mage, and if you can exploit that, you can defeat an enemy who has magic without having it yourself. I was glad to see it come back, after dropping somewhat out of sight in the middle books while they set things up for this rousing conclusion.

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Review: Murder in the Maze

Murder in the Maze by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A reasonably promising series starter, with an unusual detective - unusual in that he's the Chief Constable of the county where the murders occur, which is not often a post that involves detective work. The author was a chemist by profession and wrote on the side, and his chemical knowledge comes through in several places.

The title is slightly misleading in suggesting that there was one murder in the maze; in fact, there were two, twin brothers who looked similar (it's never clarified whether they're identical, but people who know them well distinguish them easily) and habitually dressed in similar clothes. There are clear motives for murdering either of them, and no shortage of suspects, so... did the murderer aim to kill one of them, discover that the first victim was in fact the other, and rectify the mistake? After all, what could be the motive for killing both?

Well, that was extremely obvious to me, though not to the Watson figure in the story: (view spoiler)[a family member who stood to inherit would have a motive for killing them both, and making it look like one had been killed for an external reason and the other by mistake. I didn't guess which family member, though, and for a while thought that the detective's eventual fixing on a particular one was poorly justified, though he made it work in the end, based on knowledge the murderer had that, by their own statements, they shouldn't have possessed. I also guessed that the "death" of the third victim was faked. (hide spoiler)]

It doesn't really stand out above the pack of Golden-Age mysteries for me. The detective, although not someone you'd expect, doesn't have much distinctiveness and has a rather high-handed attitude to determining who should face the process of the law, given that he holds a high position as a law-enforcement official. The Watson, though said to be smarter than he looks, is not at all smart. The detective's process is largely hidden from the reader until the end, though at least the clues are not. The suspects are the usual country-house lot. It's OK, but it isn't one of the greats. I might give the series another go eventually - the third one is also on Project Gutenberg - in case the author's skills improved as he went along.

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