mrs_bramley

firstly - "a respectable woman" by david fletcher. right... so there's this middle aged detective. he's failed a bit in life and especially love. he has something of a pathetic boy-crush crossed with tinges of lust for a suspect. he has a bit of a drinking problem and gets grumpy far too easily. there's some sexual shenanigans of the more outre variety involving the gentry. and the whole thing is solved via the detective's knowledge of opera. and this isn't an inspector morse mystery. i do suspect colin dexter may have read this though and thought "this is rubbish. i can do better crime fiction than this". pretty much anyone can actually. if it wasn't for the fact that it's just generally stunningly obvious who the criminal is as soon as they turn up, you could also work out the solution because of the ham fisted way fletcher writes the book. fletcher is *not* a bad writer. he's just a clumsy, heavy handed writer. and the sort of evidence that leads me to this conclusion? well, if you do read the book you will notice fletcher likes to indulge himself in heavy handed pieces describing the thought processes of characters. well most characters. in fact pretty much every character. apart from the murderer. just think two thirds through the book who HASN'T had a heavy handed thought piece and... yes, that's the criminal

not very good quite frankly

on the other hand there's "appleby's other story" by michael innes. this is very much typical of late period innes - a master of his craft, not so much caring about writing a masterpiece but enjoying stretching his writing muscles and setting a fiendish puzzle. "appleby's other story" is no classic like "appleby's end", although it is delightfully witty and as light as a souffle. but it is... well... how do i put this? okay... the solution is perhaps the most stunningly cheeky bit of crime writing i have ever read. seriously, only a truly brilliant writer, fully aware of their own skills could bring off a bit of... well, sheer gall like the end of this book. it's astonishing. once i'd realised what innes had done i basically sat and shook with laughter and admiration that anyone could get away with it. i can't tell you anymore, but when you've finished it hopefully you'll see what i mean. cheeky sod!

finally, it's not really a crime novel per se but has a heavy link with both my holiday and crime fiction. "the earth hums in b flat" by mari strachan is pretty much set in harlech, from the detective work me and wife did during the last week (some of the locations match completely and the whole post office selling signed copies with the subtitle "local author" pretty much gave it away), and is that rare thing: a coming of age book that WORKS. the heroine is a slightly dreamy 13 year old girl, not really able to connect with her parents and peers, a bit lonely and a bit special. but she's also tremendously likeable as a heroine and a joy as a central character. she's also a bit of a crime fiction addict, with her eccentric aunt forever dropping off campion novels which gwenni in turn lends to the local police officer. there's a sort of crime at the heart of the book, with a brilliant, cunning solution (cunning especially in it's neat simplicity), an event whose repurcussions are felt throughout. so although it's not a crime novel as such, there's a lot that the average crime fiction fan will find very appealing. irrespective of that, it's also quite utterly the best book i've read all year and doubt that anything else will come near it. a beautifully written, loving, witty, moving and joyful book. the best way to describe it is sort of "the wasp factory" but without the slightly adolescent obsessions that hampers that book. a stunning thing to treasure. highly recommended

well... it doesn't so much fail, as not quite fully succeed. there are some loose threads here and there which warriner seems to be more than aware of - some online reviews of his work seem to accuse him sometimes of acres of pages of conjecture and discussion rather than actual storytelling, and particularly towards the end of this book when toft and ambo's go-to man (and woman) of scotter and lottie turn up there's quite a bit of this going on. there are a couple of plot points that warriner doesn't really seem fully satisfied with and all credit to him for actually discussing this openly in the character dialogue, this still doesn't stop the reader from being rather less than convinced by his reasoning. it's a slight quibble though, because otherwise warriner is quite a wonderful writer. he's at pains to make the murder make sense - even though the actual incident (man tied to a roundabout in the middle of a village green overnight) is utterly grotesque - where other, lesser writers would have just settled for the admittedly startling image. in fact i thinki i can safely say that warriner's real claim to genius here is that unlike other authors who dabble in the fantastic and grotesque in crime fiction - i'm thinking of john dickson carr, margery allingham and, basically, every other crime writer of the golden age to the fifties - he actually makes the unusual events of the book seem *plausible*. the nearest comparison to "the doors of sleep" is michael innes' "appleby's end" but the difference here is that the village locals, the central family, even the occultist character all seem... likely to exist. it's quite an achievement given the plot of the book

a few other thoughts about the book: warriner is a nicely evocative writer without ever relying on the florid or hackneyed expression. the book is incredibly pacey, yet never seems hurried either. most lesser crime writers would have padded this out with local colour and some crazy antics with the heroes (i mean archdeacon toft is described as a massive, fat, food obsessed cleric but warriner seems to be reluctant to flog this point to death - compare with john dickson carr, a far better writer obviously, and his occasional lapses of judgement with the ostensibly similar henry merrivale). when scotter and lottie turn up towards the end, these rather odd, scruffy "charing cross road types" (as warriner calls them) who seem the biggest indication of the book's 1955 origin, do cause a tiny furore when they interrupt one of toft's sermons... but the incident is merely brushed aside in a couple of lines. i can easily see other crime writers avoiding warriner's economy of writing here and needlessly milking the slight comedic conceit for all its' worth

and possibly the oddest thing about warriner's characters are how suprisingly MOVING they are. i'm thinking of how christie deals with a similar occultist character to shand in "murder is easy", and turns him into a camp, shrill pain in the arse. there's a delicacy to shand, a poignancy to his role in the book, a real sense of sadness to his position in life. similarly i've come across countless relationships in crime fiction akin to the anton/ alyson/ charlesworth one here but never one remotely so moving and touching as this. and as for mr ambo - sort of the main detective of the three ostensinble heroes (toft has the big ideas and strides around being important, scotter does the leg work and the reasoning but ambo has the sense of humanity and the good judge of character of the trio) - there's a lovely, albeit achingly sad hint of a sad past somewhere in there... but one warriner only hints at, teasing out gently with great skill

warriner seems a rum cove of his own accord: a youthful theatrical career, a poultry farmer, cinema technician and finally author. apparently, according to the penguin blurb, "his favourite pastimes are walking and finding obscure pubs and churches". and i'm glad to say he put those pastimes to good use... it's not the greatest crime novel ever, but it's full of good ideas and haunting characters and set pieces that i fancy will hang around my head for years. i'm going to look very hard for the other ambo/ toft/ scotter books. very good indeed

Current Mood:	impressed
Current Music:	eleventh dream day

the best thing about the book though, and it really is a *very* good thing indeed, is the way in which christie sets up the solution. my feeling is the solution in the end is 1. very messy in terms of the mechanism by which the murder was apparently done and 2. the murderer more than a little arbitary, but if you try and retrace what christie's aims and objectives in writing the book might have been then you can see that the original *thrust* of the book as an idea was almost something very special indeed. to me, the key to the book is the idea that the victim - simeon lee - and his deceased wife have a certain amount of character traits that are then shared throughout the next generation. it has a sort of logic problem element this idea, that the combination of venom, pettiness, mischief and loyalty that makes the surprisingly complex character of lee so interesting has also combined with the sweetness, innocence, love and certain amount of psychological weakness inherent in his late wife and produced various combinations in their children and grandchildren. this is the area where the book really does flourish - the son who most ostensibly takes after his father shares certain aspects with his mother, and in another brother's case the one devoted to the memory of his mother has the same steely desire for revenge inherent in his father. if christie had really gone to town with this idea then the book would have been easily the match of "cards on the table", with that same psychological streak of logic playing through the variant characters as you try and match the suspect with the most in common with the late victim (for much of the book i was convinced it was an elaborate suicide made to *look* like murder). but instead she sort of gets bored and just plumps for just any murderer and a rather silly method which really frustrates the hell out of you when you're beginning to finally think there may be more to this writer

of course this wasn't helped by the other wintry christie i experienced, "the sittaford mystery" in the form of a nineties radio four adaptation. let me see, how do i put this? well, the first cd of the adaptation was really quite fun and interesting and then the second one proved to be... bollocks? is there a sillier reveal than the one for this book? i wasn't convinced by either the method OR the motive, *especially* not the motive. it all seemed incredibly arbitrary - and as for the heroine suddenly plumping for her weak fiance over her collaborator in detection "because he needs me and you don't"... good god, what kind of ending is that? maybe i need to stop reading charles osborne's fawning "the life and crimes of agatha christie" as i work through these books. every time he goes on about how brilliant she is compared to other crime writers, i'll remember the ending of "the sittaford mystery" and wonder if the poor bloke was somehow feeble minded. frankly, it's a load of bollocks and two worryingly poor endings to christie stories in a row are perilously close to undoing the good work of "the hollow" and "cards on the table"

why do i ever bother with this maddening author?

1. it was only a pound

2. it was in it's original forties thriller club dust jacket, a wonderfully lurid thing with a skull and a mask of a beautiful woman

3. it was by some called f a chittenden, for goodness sake. i mean how can you go wrong with something by someone called f a chittenden?

well... by dint of it being a bit crap. this is one of the most maddening crime novels i've read in a long, long time... mainly because so much of it isn't technically bad at all. the detection works well. the detectives - a local policeman called rennie and a retired american investigator called raynor (alarm bell ringing straightaway as the names are so close that you often get them slightly confused) - work well. the plotting works well. in theory this should mean a rewarding and enjoyable bit of minor golden age shenanigans, but sadly not

this is because chittenden isn't so much a bad writer, but a chronic underwriter. his idea of building tension is to go on about the stifling atmosphere and weather outside and the threat of a storm. and then he leaves it as just that. tension between characters is underlined and overly explained by chittenden, but then never ably expressed in the narrative itself either by characters' actions or dialogue. if we meet one of the main suspects in the case, it must be so fleetingly that i wasn't really paying attention during that chapter. it's so undercooked, chittenden may as well just have published dialogue, a series of character names and descriptions and then just the outline of the plot itself. the whole thing just drags on with an incredible lack of tension to a rather predictable ending (you know the kind: everything points toward X not being the villain so thusly you suspect X and hope that the author will then prove you wrong and the villain will be Y... and then it still turns out to be X). so lacking in tension in fact, i just skim read it in the final pages because the whole dreary thing was just going on and on and on and on and on....

why this is so frustrating is because unlike many of the crime novel stinkers i've read over the years, chittenden can obviously cook up an intriguing plot and solution, and can even write passably well. he just... can't make them all stick together as a book. it's as if he's bringing all the ingredients together to make a soup and just leaves them as ingredients, rather than actually cooking them in some way

avoid

i mean how could i fail to pick that up? any book with a cover showing a munchkin with a dagger in it's back simply *has* to earn a place on my shelf. "murder on the yellow brick road" by stuart kaminsky is the story of the murder of a munchkin, found on the set of "the wizard of oz" about a year after the film has been released. the studio have kept the set up for publicity reasons - something i imagine is true, especially as kaminsky used to be a film lecturer before he became a ludicrously prolific crime writer - and are much alarmed to find the corpse of one of the 'little people' found in costume on set. to investigate the murder - and particularly to placate the immensely anxious judy garland - MGM hire private detective toby peters to look into the crime

the idea is very simple - rather than a clever, knowing, postmodern take on cameo appearances kaminsky is plain and simply doing a nostalgic romp where the private eye genre meets the golden age of hollywood straight on. he admits as much in interviews he's written. there's a great deal of humour that he gets out of this situation, and his hero, but the most amazing thing is how straightforward a crime book this is. the puzzle is simple, straightforward and satisfying and doesn't take a genius to work out - but that's not a bad thing. because it's so direct and simple it means he's able to spend time on atmosphere and colour, and even though the plot is simple it's still got a few twists and turns on the way. kaminsky's main aim is to create the antithesis of philip marlowe in peters - he's a big lug of a man with a broken nose, he's a bit moody and sullen although kind at heart, he's not terribly bright, he's on the lower rungs of american society, he's prone to some good leaps of logic but is no great detective - and make him a believable central figure to weave the sillier stuff around. and so we get cameos by clark gable, judy garland, victor fleming, louis b mayer, raymond chandler and - blink and you'll miss him - william randolph hearst and pretty much all of them except chandler work well. there's none of the silly (but fun) postmodern pranks someone like m j trow likes to play when he puts famous historical figures in the lestrade books. these are just iconic figures that kaminsky plays amazingly straight and uses simply to further the plot and there's a lot to admire in that... the temptation to play around with our preconceptions must be massive and to his credit i'm impressed he's resisted it

but... but... it does kind of make the book a bit dull? the really interesting characters are peters' inner circle of friends and hangers on: his dentist friend, the swiss translator dwarf, his very bitter brother... maybe this was the point of the book to contrast the lumpen proles with the high profile icons and accordingly show the rough mechanicals are as interesting - if not more so! - than the starry hollywood types. but that alone doesn't quite save it. i was hoping for something a little more ludicrous than how it turned out and apart from a sly moment at the end where garland gets the better of the villain which nicely reflects a moment from "the wizard of oz" (and frankly i could have done with a lot more moments like this) it's all a bit bland and forgettable... with further volumes detailing the hero's run ins with the likes of bela lugosi, w c fields, joan crawford (the ludicrously titled "mildred pierced" where a character's wife called mildred gets killed with a crossbow purely to allow for a terrible pun in a title), cary grant, charlie chaplin, mae west and most tantalisingly of all the marx brothers (and he's attempting to work abbott and costello into one as well which has pretty much sold me immediately) there's hope the books pick up. because is there a thought more depressing than a crime novel starring the marx brothers that's actually BORING?

but that wasn't player's fault. "the homicidal colonel" though is. and inherently the problem is that about 90% of the book itself is given away just in that title. you know immediately who said colonel is, and you know his madness is going to turn homicidal. there are two tiny, perfunctory twists at the end - one of which is not so much signposted as explained away by about chapter three so clumsily is it foreshadowed and the other of which is not so much a twist but more a touch of irony that i'd pretty much assumed was just meant to be an implied undertow to the book. no. nothing that subtle here. whatever happened in the twenty five odd years between "mr stone" and this, player's writing has almost entirely gone to pot

the idea is quite intriguing - the pangborne family are a bunch of louisiana plantation owning ne'erdowells. their father is a bully who has his mistress and their daughter living under the same roof as his wife and children. three of these children are patently shits and the other two vaguely sympathetic. after the patriarch's death - in a flashback - the family splinters, with youngest son hugo particularly going awol. the book starts in cheltenham 1956 with the death of the matriarch and the reading of her will. the plot then darts back to louisiana in 1912 and then forward through the thirties, forties and eventually back to the fifties to reveal what happened to the family and the incidents leading to said will that started in the book. so far so good. there's a nice sense of narrative structure as befits a man who was an architect by trade. but the problem is the clumsiness of the story telling. the focus soon falls on the titular colonel as he starts his killing spree and the many weaknesses of the book follow very soon

firstly, the plotting is all over the place. obviously i'm giving nothing away because it's in the title of the sodding book, but said colonel's killing spree is *all over the place*. at the end of the book one of the big chunks of plot exposition tries to imply that there's been a bit more of a steady line of deaths we haven't known about but that seems more of an after the event insertion by a writer who's having a panic he's not structured his book very well. then there's the murders themselves. the colonel's killings are either out of a desire to further himself financialy or within polite society or later on this weird sexual kink he has as his tendencies begin to overwhelm him. but the key problem is player's writing style is more suited to murders for profit or greed than it is sexual proclivities. there's this odd, artless style to these mid book deaths which has an unusually stuffy, airless, arid style of writing with odd violently florid touches which makes them rather... jarring? and disturbing somehow? and not in a way you imagine he planned it to be. this dodgy writing also bleeds into the dialogue, if you can call it that. people either talk in national cliches - pity the poor irish people for example - or simply do plot exposition at each other. there's an awful early sequence at the plantation where the seeds of the familial crisis are meant to be sowed and instead you get this tortuous chapter of characters describing ancient family history in the form of dialogue which just goes on and on and on

by the end of it, the titular colonel meets an odd, rather subdued end, the big twist is played out - in more plot exposition (you can see why so many writers get the murderer to kill themselves so they can leave some kind of letter detailing their history because as dialogue this stuff just doesn't work) through dialogue - and you very quickly realise it's that very basic plot point you noted in chapter three and then finally, almost as an afterthought, a tiny third one comes mewling and puking into the daylight before it gets cruelly snuffed out three pages later. about a third of the way through the book, half of the novel suddenly fell out and i spent a week reading this sodding thing rather than the day or so it deserved purely because it was such a nightmare to physically hold it together. i should have taken that as a warning quite frankly

it's not all bad though. well actually it is all bad, but there are glimmers of hope. if you take it, as i do, as a first draft of a novel that managed somehow to escape to a publisher's office then you can sort of vaguely dream at how a fourth or fifth draft would have looked. the murders of the colonel could still be the thrust of the book, but the twists could be hidden better, there could be another mystery going on of which the colonel is just a small part. someone could be behind the colonel, encouraging him, pushing him on. there's a great deal a writer could do to make this book fundamentally decent... if he worked hard at it and played with the formula a bit. as it is, what we have is this sickly child of a novel that should have been strangled at birth. still... the cover's an improvement at least

the set up is great, reminding me of julian symons' later "the belting inheritance" that i read about this time last year. sir john farnleigh has returned to his family's country seat after many years in america (his journey there was slightly interrupted by the small problem of being on the titanic), married his childhood sweetheart of sorts and basically become admirable and ernest rather than the young tearaway he was in his youth. but suddenly a claimant turns up a few years later, another man claiming to be farnleigh, a man who claims that the current incumbent of the family seat attacked and tried to kill him aboard the titanic and swap identities. it's during the test to see which is the real farnleigh that tragedy strikes. but is it suicide? murder? who is the real farnleigh? what about the strange death a year before? what about the rumours of dark doings in the neighbourhood over the years? what has any of this got to do with anything?

firstly, like in "the belting inheritance", i have to say a good old claimant story is always a bit of a winner. from the tichborne claimant onwards, the claimant plot grips us because it's about duplicity, about doubles, about doubting what we know... and mainly because a claimant is a lot juicier and easier to write about than an overly complex will or codicil plot. i have to admit that while the book concentrated on this, i had a suspicion as to how the whole thing was done that proved to be utterly, horribly wrong - but still is a thunderingly good idea which i am very much filing away for a rainy day. so thanks for that one mr carr! i'll think of forgiving you for "behind the crimson blind" now... anyway. then there's all the rather juicy black magic subplot which simmers along just nicely and... well i can't say much about the conclusion in and of itself. carr is too much of a craftsman and enjoys his plot construction too much not to judiciously drop hints a plenty throughout the book. i actually took notes this time, because although it's near impossible to actually work out a carr solution, i thought i may at least pick up on some of the hints. and i was right. i picked up on one very important clue dropped at the very beginning of the book and if i'd bothered to research another one of the key aspects of the book - and pay attention to half a dozen other hints given throughout the book - i'd have got halfway to working it out

i also really liked the subtlety of the characterisation. the villain is sort of portrayed in two ways - if you are like me, you'll no doubt hate him and pity the victim, but it's not a massive leap to imagine someone who felt the victim had it all coming to him and to pity the villain. carr is just subtle enough not to overplay that part of the book. then there's the character of page who's basically the de facto carr second lead hero, a sympathetic patsy figure who's been watching all that's been happening over the years and has an unrequited love for one of the heroines. as ever with carr, the romantic subplot is *just* played out well enough for it to not clash with the tone of the book. again, there's a sympathetic policeman who seems to be as much of the detection team with fell throughout the book and then there's a smattering of very well nuanced cameos, from murray the aged teacher of farnleigh through to welkyn the lawyer with an overly developed interest in the dark arts through to both of the claimants themselves. some people will no doubt be frustrated that the villain isn't quite brought to justice, but as i said above that's all part of the subtlety of the book and anyway, i read the book as evidence that said villain's psychological make up will be of the kind that they will probably act again at some time and not quite be so lucky

the one thing it does demonstrate though is carr is beyond a shadow of a doubt a showman first and foremost - the automaton at the centre of the book has shades of the very different one in "he couldn't kill patience" which is intrinsically about magic, and with carr's references to magical text books (i'm *desperate* to get hold of hoffman's "modern magic" now) which remind me of the references to the cannell book on houdini in "the hollow man", basically it underlines that always carr is at his best when misdirecting his central illusion. it's no coincidence that the most carr-ish detective outside of carr/ dickson is jonathan creek and that creek is, of course, a magician's assistant. the heavy atmosphere of magic and illusion positively *drips* from carr's best books - and with the subplot based on maelzel's chess player and the constant presence of the possible witch-cult pervading everything in the book this is one of the most heavily "arcane" of all his novels

and as for it's usefulness for me? untold. as all the best fell books do, there are references to books carr has been using for research which are a treasure trove for the likes of me to slowly work out how his mind developed these brilliant little intricate plots. i truly wish that there was a catalogue of carr's library like those we get for the likes of lovecraft. i mean how much use is lovecraft's library listings when the only really useful info it could give us is already in his essay on the supernatural in fiction? but carr's... oh my. what i would do to really know. it's also been useful because in many ways the villain shares a great deal in common with how i've slowly been seeing the villain in madame_marillat developing. and similarly the gothic tone, especially the florid black magic stuff, is absolutely *catnip* for me at this point in plotting. i've noted a fair old list of ideas to use at a later stage i can tell you. my only fear now is that the only way to go after a classic like this is, sadly, down... but i'll take my chances! oh i'll take my chances!

anyway. to the book in question. firstly, i'm completely smitten with the detectives themselves. archie goodwin is a watson with brains and smarts, intelligent, thoughtful, witty and sharp witted and with only his love of milk as his one eccentricity. he's an engaging narrator, obviously fond of his boss as much as he is frustrated by him and it's his breezy tone of voice that leads you through the book. wolfe is frankly astonishing. i was always a bit sceptical of a quarter of a tonne detective who never leaves his house if he can help it and dotes on orchids, but it's as if stout has tried to work out how to balance those eccentricities with his more entertaining and believable traits. i love how wolfe is at heart a desperately lazy man who doesn't really like to do any work if he can help it. it's as if sherlock holmes - because obviously mycroft is the template for wolfe - spent all his time in bed rather than taking drugs and playing the violin. that stout turns this cantankerous, lethargic, woman hating grump into the hero is frankly stunning. i laughed out loud a number of times at wolfe's responses to suspect's attempts to account for their movements and there's a lovely dry tone of humour to wolfe at his very best. i even like the fact the detectives come in two sizes - big, idiotic bullies and slightly weary, wary intelligent types. even they're sympathetic... to a degree at any rate

before i get to the book itself, a quick aside. the interesting thing i've noticed on a general level about the - admittedly two or three - american crime novels i've read, is that hammett and stout both had left wing tendencies and sympathies and that the tone of the book is almost diametrically opposite that of the british novels of the period. by which i mean, there's a strong argument that a great deal of british crime writers of the golden age period are very conservative and see the crime novel as a way of reiterating the status quo - a murder happens somewhere beautiful and the police and the talented amateur restore that status quo and root out the evil nestled at it's heart. the american crime novel seems to allow a space to challenge the status quo. big business men are often corrupt and undue riches aren't usually a good thing in these books. even if stout and hammett are exceptions, there's still a feeling that you couldn't have such questioning about the values of the upper classes and the monied members of society comfortably existing in a british crime novel. that, to me, is a very telling difference in tone

anyway - to the book in question. as far as a puzzle plot goes, it's no great shakes. there's a nice bit of deduction at the end even if the ruse for getting all the interested parties gathered in one room is a little less than convincing. but the key is that there's a nice easy flow to the way the mystery progresses and the investigation itself, with the keen eyed archie backed up by the behind the scenes - and even keener eyed - wolfe himself. what's most interesting is that the victims of the crimes are all genuinely people whose loss is very tangibly felt. they are by no means perfect characters, but the widower's anger at his wife's death is awful and the final death is almost heart rending. as well as the playfulness - wolfe is wonderfully withering and blunt and must have been a joy to write - there's a real deep seated level of humanity in the book. and that humanity is almost entirely in the form of archie goodwin. the conclusion and solution is satisfying if a little unspectacular, but then i'm getting the impression already that stout never saw that as the be all and end all of the crime novel. there are other, more important, issues at stake here about loyalty and loss. i was surprised by how actually *genuinely* moving the book could be at times as well

i get the feeling that aside from the fact that archie is the client in this book, it's probably a reasonably minor bit of nero wolfe. i can't really compare with the rest of the series until i read any more. but i do definitely know i'll be reading a lot more if they're as good as this

Current Mood:	tired
Current Music:	the divine comedy - a sea song

"the case of the constant suicides" is definitely minor carr. not actively bad carr - those exist, as "behind the crimson blind" by carter dickson ably proves being as it is the single worst crime novel ever committed to paper - but definitely not in the league of "the reader is warned", "the hollow man" or "the ten teacups". it most reminds me of a very similar wartime HM novel, "he couldn't kill patience". there are a number of similiarities - both set in the war time, both fairly grotesque in setting (deserted zoo, ugly and collapsing scottish castle) and most noticeably both have a very similar pair of romantic leads, ostensible proffesional rivals who over the course of the book don't so much put their differences aside, but instead realise they can comfortably co-exist as long as they're together. i've always liked the romantic side of carr's books as they're always so nicely unsentimental and sweet natured. but aside from that, "the case of the constant suicides" is about the most odd - and occasionally jarringly odd - book i've yet read by carr

the problem is the tone of the thing. one minute you get a horrible description - and quite brilliantly evoked - of a suicide victim swinging with a soft rope covered in silk handkerchiefs around his neck, and his dog plaintively, hopefully running around the dead figure. it's a stunning image. but the problem is a few chapters before, you've had an incredible amount of nonsense involving broadsword flights, the constant pursuit and humiliation of an annoying canadian reporter and a vile family whisky concoction called "the doom of the campbells". all of which are actually very funny indeed, rather than the sometimes slightly overplayed farce in the lesser HM books, but they really do belong in the world of the HM novels which are far more light comedy in tone rather than the mock gothic universe of dr gideon fell and his g k chestertonish physicality. the book seems to a weird combination of the strengths of both detectives but never fully satisfying because fell just seems a bit lost amongst all the antics. there's also a bit too much of a tendency for carr to dabble in comedy scottish accents, especially in the figure of elspat - who is deeply entertaining, but also deeply irritating at the same time

the oddest thing though about the whole book - and by far and away the best thing about it - is the order all the events occur in. about halfway through the book, fell cracks the method of the central crime and hints at it wildly - enough for me to get the general gist of how it was done at any rate - and then gives it up at least eighty pages before the end of the novel. and similarly, the romantic subplot is wrapped up nice and neatly about three quarters of the way through the book. also, unusually for a carr novel, it's pretty obvious all the way through who did the crime and how it was done. the motive is pretty much introduced about a hundred pages in and the criminal is fairly obvious merely in terms of simple deduction: it's obvious who didn't or couldn't have done it and that leaves us with - well - the villain. but oddly, i don't mind this. sometimes carr over reaches himself terribly, with convoluted but admirable designs for crimes which are tremendously entertaining but rely on blind luck and chance. by having a really simple plot and motive, carr manages for once to make a book that satisfies as well as teases. and the second murder method is both simple, elegant and fiendishly complicated - although again, showman that he is, carr wildly hints at how this is done as well

so although minor, it's actually going to be one of my favourites. the comedy stuff is like the lost screenplay to a follow up to "the lady vanishes" or "the thirty nine steps", the plot zips along (shortest carr novel i've yet read) and for all it's many faults it's oddly the one i think i'll look back at as the most simply elegant of all carr's novels. it's not got the grandeur and folly of his masterpieces, but it undeniably *works* beautifully and that simplicity is sometimes more than enough. the man was a genius, nothing less

Current Mood:

impressed

by this i mean that i've finally found the one book that tonally, thematically and in readability basically amounts to everything i aspire to make mrs_bramley and madame_marillat. and that book is "hatchett and lycett" by nigel williams. it's far from a perfect book - in fact there are a handful of genuinely awkward problems the book never fully manages to successfully navigate - but the more i read, the more i realised that the awkward problem i've had from the start trying to work out what level to peg my books had finally been sorted. here we have high drama, murder, emotional angst, dark deeds of the past, melodrama, poignancy and farce all nestling together almost entirely perfectly. and by golly am i glad to finally have something i can turn to which can shake up the more moribund and wobbly bits of prose i've written

nigel williams is a bit of an odd writer. he was quite a big thing a few years ago, especially around the time of the wimbledon poisoner novels. he was considered one of those authors i would always look for, quite highly regarded and very popular - but something seemed to happen to him after "scenes from a poisoner's life" and he rather disappeared off the radar. a shame really as when i was at university he was definitely one of the authors i always scanned the shops for. i still hold the wimbledon poisoner books as classics of their kind, even if it has been a few years since i dipped into them. i'd not really thought about him or considered him at all for quite some time now, but then stumbled across this book in a todmorden charity shop and liking the plot description and having 50p to spare decided to plump for it. oh am i glad i did! basically the plot goes something like this. dennis hatchett and alec lycett have been close friends for getting on for eighteen years now and for much of that time, the third member of their group has been their friend norma lewis. suddenly lycett finds himself attracted to norma and hatchett begins to wonder whether he's been interested in her all this time as well, and the group dynamic slowly begins to shift. meanwhile someone is bumping off teachers at their croydon private school, world war 2 has just started, norma has inherited a sort of niece and there's some distant rumbling from the past about incidents in 1921 and the early days of hatchett and lycett's friendship. certain questions have remained unanswered or plainly ignored and hidden for years. like what happened to hatchett's absent vicar father? and what happened to lycett's thoroughly unpleasant twin lucius?

as you can see from the description above, the book is densely plotted. and if i'm honest it's far too densely plotted for it's own good. none of the plots *don't* work, but some seem to have intrigued williams more than others. the murder plot - although it works quite nicely - seems definitely undercooked and a little underthought out. for a plot so intriniscally intertwined with agatha christie novels, it doesn't really feel like the product of anyone who knows many agatha christie books at all. also, although it contains some of my favourite bits of the book, the story of the refugee and her involvement in the german nuclear fission programme sometimes seems as if it has wandered in from a far more serious novel. the book is far more at home relating the strange emotions between hatchett, lycett and norma and how this all linked with the horrible, secret events of many years ago. williams plays a blinder here and manages some really moving scenes. some of this is moving because it deals with love, some of this is moving because it deals with death (there's a really beautifully understated sequence towards the end of the book involving a very sudden, unexpected and bittersweet death of a rather minor character), some of this is moving because it deals with anger and bitterness and rage and confusion and secrets and really dark human emotions. and then suddenly williams unexpectedly plays a comedy card and brings us a set piece such as the awful sermon before war is declared (basically it all hinges on the correct capitalisation of the pronoun for God) or the hilarious miswritten version of chamberlain's speech announcing war delivered by a well meaning but rather foolish schoolboy. he also has some very funny simple jokes such as a running gag about lycett's moving letters of love to norma being heavily edited by a paranoid superior officer in the army and coming back as weird, filthy, abstract notes. and he has an unsurpassed way with a metaphor: there's a great cricket game back in 1921 and the young hatchett is doing pretty much what i did whenever fielding - cringing in fear and holding out my hands vaguely hoping the ball will come my way. williams describes this stance as like a roman wife pleading with the emperor for her husband's life and later on has this fantastic sentence where "hatchett was still playing aggrippina pleading for aggrippinus maximus' life". i laughed out loud at that and almost applauded. it must be a wonderful feeling to make a sentence *that* perfect

as i said it's not entirely perfect. the dunkirk stuff seems a little off - a shame, because a bit of digging about on the internet reveals this is what williams worked on the most, although the death of one of the schoolboy's really is pitched perfectly and really moves and makes you feel awkward at the same time - and the final showdown at the church during a combination of a funeral and a wedding is a little hurried and unrealistic after what has gone before, stuff that has been so meticulously planned out. but it's quibbling because for all those scenes which don't quite work out there's stuff like the bombing of croydon which does. and the characters, including the staff and students, really seem like real people. williams has a wonderful way of making a cameo appearance actually seem like a proper character. a perfect example of this is hatchett's mother who is barely in the book but whose presence looms over a great deal of the novel. and also, and this may seem a bit odd to a lot of you but it's really appreciated by me, williams really has a way with character names. peckerley, mavroleon, forssander etc etc are brilliant discoveries and this comes from someone who's been for the last year or so noting any first or last names that strike him as potentially worth using in the future (even wandering around graveyards to find ones at times)

but why this book is so important a discovery is because suddenly i feel like i have a rudder. madame_marillat has frankly been a bit hard to control of late. i'm slowly working on it again - mostly writing stuff in longhand and then typing it up later - but the problem has been quite how to pitch the book. what is it meant to be? a genre book? pastiche? comedy? a serious novel with elements of both? should i be trying for more than all of those? suddenly i have an answer. because although far from perfect, suddenly i have a guide through all this, a book i can dip into to see how someone else managed to pull this off. at times "hatchett and lycett" seems like a slightly less adventurous version of jonathan coe's "what a carve up!" and "the house of sleep". this may sound like a bad thing, and from someone who fell in love with coe because of his adventurous way of trying to turn a great novel into something more by playing with the format and the structure you may think i'm criticising williams. i'm not. coe is a far more complex and rich writer of prose but when he's not trying to achieve something extraordinary with his books he falls a bit flat (accordingly why i'm no big fan of "the rotters club" and "the closed circle" and those odd, pre "what a carve up!" novels which seem all over the place and seriously lacking in cohesion). williams is not attempting anything on the scale of coe's novels here, although he is aiming at saying something about britain and the war and english society, and because he has his sights a little lower he manages to pretty much hit every target. and accordingly whereas, say, the big twist at the end of "the house of sleep" is a bit of a stinker to some people, the twist at the end of "hatchett and lycett" is far more convincing (although to be honest, williams has been trying too hard all book to make you think the opposite of what has happened actually happened and as such you rather suspect him of protesting too much and accordingly pretty much have the twist pegged from the beginning). i hope it is part one of a trilogy as well because i think i may need more of this sort of thing as i keep writing

as i said, this is far from the best book i've ever read. it's not even the best book i've read this year - "the thin man" gets that vote, although this is the second best out of, what, six? - but it's so good to have something to aspire to, to aim at, to use as a guide through this world of prose that's bogging me down. the more i write this blessed book, the more i complicate the narrative and the thing gets more and more awkward to navigate. i'm going to work on that in the second draft and just use the first draft to get the bugger written. but this book has managed to so deftly juggle the complex strands (even though some of the strands aren't quite as used as much as they could be) and make it all seem so easy, i finally feel i can get this bastarding book done. thank you nigel williams. i think i may just owe you...

Current Mood:

impressed

the good stuff: thorndyke himself is tremendously engaging, a sort of warmer sherlock holmes with a soft spot for old pupils and people in need. he also holds his cards very close to his chest. he comes across as a mixture of the omniscient holmes type of detective and a more benevolent, less crusty gideon fell - especially with regards to his relationships with dr gray. of course you can't read thorndyke without looking at the parallels between the hero (surgeon, pathologist, teacher, scientist) and freeman himself (pretty much all the same things - i am particularly impressed by the fact freeman always tested any experiments mentioned in his books) and as such freeman does come out particularly well on that count. as for the other characters, i particularly loved polton, thorndyke's wonderfully crinkly assistant (one of the most effective bits of freeman's writing is whenever he describes polton's crinkly face. polton comes across as a lovely little extended cameo with far more wit and potential in him than, say, a mrs hudson type) whose sprightly assistance to thorndyke is always enjoyable. even gray and marion d'arblay aren't badly written, for all their leaden romantic dialogue and peculiarly un-frisson like romantic dabblings

there are lots of nice cameos as well. there's a certain degree of anti-semitism romping through this book (i'm probably being overly generous describing it as a *degree* though) so a lot of the villains come across a bit clumsily, but i've also read a good deal worse. the main villain - when he's not putting on masks and all but yearning for a moustache to twirl - is actually enjoyably sinister when the panto-villain front fades. the police are also for the most part pretty decent sorts - thorndyke gets along with them fine and although they can be spectacularly dim to be fair pretty much everyone in the book is aside from thorndyke. i pretty much worked out what was going on - with a few exceptions - very early on but when the final chapter explains the plot everyone's going "oh heavens! can that be so?". there are some nice bits of local colour as well, particularly in a couple of elderly ladies who are sort of pivotal to the plot and a nicely brash - but not too boorish - doctor type

and also freeman is a surprisingly engaging prose writer. yes, the age of the thing shows at times and for some reason one of the chapters very near to the end of the book seems to oddly revert into this weird, "betwixt" style language which the book has never done before almost as if the fact that the book is suddenly ratchetting towards an exciting climax means freeman feels he has to temper himself with far more sober language. it's a very odd thing. you'd also never believe the novel was written in 1926 - knock a good twenty years off of it and you'd be far closer to the feel of the thing. people are driving around in broughams and nary a mention of a car. but for all the slightly stilted nature of freeman's prose, it's tremendously readable and he has a particularly strong way with a striking image. the book creaks but there are moments i'll definitely cherish

but to the bad stuff. obviously there's the anti semitism and the pantomime villains - but to be honest i find agatha christie more offensive here because she's far more prone to making sudden, violent statements about the jews or whatever in the middle of a bit of mild, poirot based comic whimsy. it's more pervading here and slightly more dispiriting for that but i found i could just about tune it out. christie just keeps banging on about it in each book i read and seems never to have learnt how unacceptable it is. anyway, then there's the wet heroine and hero, with such a stilted and almost asexual romance. a better writer would have certainly had the heroine and her father as less overtly wonderful characters and used a bit of morally grey psychology with them. as such no one for a *moment* believes either of the d'arblays are involved in the crime and as such the book is crucially hampered as a lot of the time they do look particularly suspicious. and then there's the plot itself. as i've said, the whole thing wanders far too closely down the melodrama line to completely work but that's not the biggest problem. the biggest problem is frankly that we're asked to accept a couple of coincidences and then later asked to then believe that for some mad - and very unexplained and rushed - reason those coincidences are meant to be part of the bigger criminal design. let me tell you, as someone who's currently sweating *blood* trying to work out any coincidences in his own plotting nothing bothers me more than someone who just seems to not mind using big plot holes and hopes no one notices. listen, why should i be the only one who has to suffer to iron these out? put some bloody effort into it freeman!

generally speaking though, i'm looking forward to reading more freeman and hope i can find a few more skulking about the second hand shops. so far he's by far one of the more interesting early crime writers and i'm *very* keen to read more of dr thorndyke...

but this year i'm going to try and do something about my inverted snobbery and actually start reading stuff outside of my little cosy golden age comfort zone. last year with my dabblings with not crap historical crime - the andrew martin steam detective books - and my first attempts at american crime fiction - "at last mr tolliver", "blood on the snow" and the glorious bardin novels - i began to do something about that. this year i'm going to do more and, hell, read some modern crime, read some of the cosy historical crime novels i'm forever passing judgement over without ever having read any (what? me? make snap judgements on things i know nothing about?) and read some proper american crime fiction - not just minor ones (stop being such an inverted snob, chris!) but some actual major ones. and first stop? "the thin man" by dashiell hammett

i've known "the thin man" films well for many years now and obviously loved them (i mean, is there any other way of watching william powell and myrna loy at the top of their game? seriously?) but never read the book. or anything else by hammett as a matter of fact. i had a pretty good idea of what to expect but i'm glad to say i was partially wrong. i expected wit and grit and i got those - in spades - but what i didn't expect was such a strong prose stylist and such brilliantly zippy dialogue. i mean, dear god, this is some of the best dialogue i've ever read. there's a similarity to wodehouse in terms of the actual complexity put into something which reads so simply. nothing this easy to read is ever that simple to write and the dialogue here just makes you squirm with pleasure. there's a great bit where nick and nora are discussing the case whilst simultaneously discussing what to drink and hammett almost juggles the two conversations perfectly so that you get a real sense of the case being furthered as well as more witty, pithy banter disguising the ridiculously OTT intake of booze in nick and nora's life. it's brilliantly done. and he can do the impossible and sketch a character in but a few brief words and make that character real. i'm thinking particularly of nick's comments about a character with a large, fleshy and "almost boneless" nose which seems incredibly vivid some two days later

the plot is brilliant too. i'm seeing that some hammett fans think this is not the best of his books, so i'm looking forward to delving into the better ones if this really is inferior, but to be honest after the wit inherent in the prose and dialogue i'd not have given a monkey's about the mystery itself. but lo, hammett gives us a doozie. in retrospect it's a little on the obvious side, but he bamboozles us with twists, turns, brilliant cameos and gorgeous (have i said this enough?) dialogue for us not to notice it too much. in many ways the nearest thing i've read to it is the zippiness of "the moving toyshop" by edmund crispin but that's still closer to an ealing comedy than the marriage of crime and screwball comedy that hammett manages to pull off here. i also love the fact that what would ostensibly be minor characters are given such life. hence we get the gangster morelli whose second appearance is a tour de force and particularly gilbert wynant, the son of the titular thin man. in lesser hands he could have come out like david did in "the hollow" - slightly contrived, a good idea for a character (in this case, morbidly fascinated with the concept of murder, crime, violence and drugs) played out thinly on the page. as it is, gil is that unique beast - a perfect marriage of genuinely compelling character (his psychological make up is particularly fascinating) and light relief (he also is genuinely funny every time he turns up). good god, hammett is good at this

it's a very different beast from the film, and you really must worry about nick and nora's prodigous alcohol intake, but i've rarely read anything quite so hilariously witty but also genuinely thrilling. it's also nice that nick and nora are a genuinely believable couple. crime fiction is littered with lots of attempts at a relationship like this - campion and wimsey spring immediately to mind - but they never get anywhere as close as this level of affection. i can't wait to dip my feet further into hammett's works. excellent stuff

Current Mood:

impressed

i really enjoyed "the hollow". i've been slowly beginning to "get" the point of agatha christie this last year, enjoying the central idea of "cards on the table" for example even if the actual book itself had about as much development in terms of dialogue, writing and characters as - say - your average "doctor who" target novel of the late seventies and early eighties. but i certainly began to appreciate the central brilliance of her ideas even if she never delivered very well in terms of how she put that down on the page. "the hollow" is far from perfect, but the stunning thing for me is that she finally seems to be putting effort into the other departments of her books and although the characters and dialogue clunk as badly as much of the rest of her fiction, the attempt to lift it all from simply "the next agatha christie" novel must be identified and quite rightly praised. there's a tension and depth to the book and some passages are actually quite moving. christie was right to edit out poirot from the theatrical version of the book, because he does really jar when compared to the actual genuine human emotion being bandied around in this book. he seems a cypher, they - almost - seem real

of course it's not all perfect. i'm actually beginning to feel a little sorry for agatha christie now. i finally stumble across one of her books that isn't entirely rot and i'm still not fully satisfied. "the hollow" really is a massive improvement though and even when she falls - the development of some of the characters, the dialogue - i can safely say that i've read plenty of humdrum golden age detective novels which are just as bad in this that i've enjoyed more than your average agatha. so i shouldn't be too critical. big problem number one though: the characters aren't anywhere near as cleverly sketched as she thinks they are. they are still obviously *types* and cyphers - the upper class beauty with little concept of the real world, the angry left wing type, the downtrodden wife who has no idea her husband is having an affair, the slightly boho artist, the slightly impractical heir to a country pile, the virile doctor etc etc. these almost work, but for example the victim is meant to be this great "all things to all men" virile hothead who everyone either loves or hates with a passion. to be honest i wasn't convinced by him for a single second, and thought him to be little more than a bag of cliches. i never once was convinced by him as a real character which then fundamentally undermines his value as the central figure of the book. the second problem is the dialogue, which clunks like nobody's business. it all seems like second rate noel cowardisms and is horribly overwrought at times. these are just tiny quibbles and really i should be praising christie for at least *trying* even if she is obviously over reaching herself. i really shouldn't quibble too much because this is a cut above the rest of her books and if there's anything else this good out there, then i'm entirely sold. and i'm not just saying that because i worked it out either (although that helps)

a big improvement on gladys mitchell. next time, "the thin man" which so far is an absolute *joy*

Current Mood:

impressed

"twelve horses" isn't exactly an improvement either. i quite like the character of bradley's young amazonian assistant, laura, who does most of the legwork and does a lot of the detection but she's a little thinly sketched if you haven't come across her before. so you're immediately a little at sea with your detective guide if you don't know your mitchell before this. i also was looking forward to a bit of the new forest as i'm setting part of <lj user="madame_marillat"> there (that should be coming back soon, as i'm starting work on it again) and wanted to see how mitchell dealt with lymington and brockenhurst particularly. as it turns out, the new forest is woefully underused - everytime she does write about the place the prose seems to come alive. but she barely does write a thing about it. so that's also out of the window. basically we're left with the mystery then

and it's not a very interesting one at all. in fact i'd go as far as saying it's a bit dull. a bit of sub famous five nonsense with a gypsy, a mystery wrapped up almost prosaically in the penultimate paragraph, no tension... it's not badly written per se, it just seems like... well it seems like a refined draft of a book, but refined in the wrong way. if i'd written the first draft of "twelve horses" i'd have then redrafted it, focussing on tension, drama, characters and intrigue, building up the slack bits of the plotting and making the whole thing a bit livelier. mitchell seems to have basically polished her sentences and dialogue and that;s about it. i've rarely read a duller book that's as nice to read in terms of prose. no life to it at all. characters just seem to do huge amounts of activity within a paragraph (ie one character will visit another and have a discussion and it'll all be over by the paragraph's end) which has no real interest put into it... and then suddenly there'll be four pages of drawn out business with a gypsy called zozo. it's just.... very dull. in fact i'm not sure when i read such a bad crime novel. if this is as good as mitchell gets, then i'm particularly worried about her standing in the crime fraternity. still, these people also seem to think agatha's still a pretty good idea so what do they know? avoid

Current Mood:

thoughtful

and dammit, agatha christie has beaten me to it. instead of monopoly, however, she uses bridge. and even though i have bugger all idea how bridge is played i understand the brilliance of the central idea. the rather heavy handedly symbolic mr shaitana - rather mephistolean wouldn't you know, as if you couldn't bloody guess from the stupid name - collects unusual things and in this case he collects four people he knows have killed in the past. in one room of his decadent park lane flat he has the four killers playing bridge in the same room as him and in the adjacent room he has four sleuths - poirot, superintendent battle, ariadne oliver (a thinly veiled send up of christie herself) and colonel race. and when shaitana is killed we know it has to be only one of the four killers who could have done it and because they all have motive and we know how he was killed - a dagger - christie states in her introduction, the point is all about the psychological make up of the individuals. they all could have done it, but under such circumstances who *would*?

it's a brilliant idea frankly. character as determined by how they approach a game of bridge. and the puzzle is absolutely solved magnificently - christie doesn't cheat at all and plays the game perfectly fair. i'd have done it differently myself - i've had a sleuth have done it because obviously you'd suspect one of four existing murderers - but that's why i'm not one of the most succesful writers of all time. and so as a crime novel it's an absolute tour de force of it's kind. but as a novel... it's absolutely diabolical

aside from ariadne oliver, who is surprisingly sophisticated in her portrayal of a crime writer of a certain age saddled with a ridiculous foreign sleuth (this time a finn), absolutely none of the characters really seem particularly developed or worthy of your interest. poirot has less bits of mad french dialogue thrust into his mouth so comes across as less annoying as usual. battle is fairly stolid and reliable so isn't particularly irritating. but colonel race is barely in the bloody thing so it's hard to feel anything towards him unless you've bothered reading "the man in the brown suit" where apparently he appeared previously. of the suspects, mrs lorrimer comes across the best even though she's still just faintly sketched out. dr roberts is just sort of *there* and could frankly come from any crime novel of the era. but miss meredith and major despard are very nothingy and vague, aside from a bit of rampant racism from despard every chapter or so. rhoda, miss meredith's friend, comes out pretty well but only because she's got a bit more oomph to her. she still is pretty undeveloped. none of the characterisations are *terrible* - no bloody tommy and tuppence nonsense here - but none are particularly great

no, the real problem with the book is that agatha christie just cannot write prose. at all. i mean it's readable, but it makes me realise how good a writer enid blyton is - pacey, aimed at just the right level and with just the right amount of suspense. a few weeks ago i was reading sarah bits of daisy ashford's hilarious "father mcswiney" a hilariously naive, innocent tale of a jesuit going out on the town with the pope around london. there's a charm to ashford that comes from her young age when she was writing and the undeniable fact that for all her misguided choices of words and phrases, she knew a good deal about storytelling and had a way around a charming phrase to make even some of the most leaden cliches she dipped into seem somehow alive. you forgive her the weaknesses to her prose because she was thirteen. but christie? is it just me who finds something really ugly about the sentence "around them a well-dressed languid london crowd eddied mildly"? and the dialogue is frankly rotten and hackneyed in places. there's a bit where a sergeant is sent to woo a servant to identify clues to a murder from the past and either it's meant to be comically unsubtle or christie is just a terribly clumsy writer. i fear it's the latter

and the damned thing about her is that she's an absolutely brilliant puzzle writer. she's possibly the very best. even john dickson carr strains it at times. anthony berkeley's "the poisoned chocolate case", which this reminds me of at times, is a masterpiece but again a bit of a push. only cyril hare has the same skill with the elegance of his solutions and they're hampered by occasionally poor writing and the fact that unless you have as much of a knowledge of the more esoteric byways of english law you'll never see the solution coming. no, christie is absolutely a genius at laying a trap and solving it perfectly. there's a simplicity to it that staggers you. but my god! the prose! with all the best will in the world, it's like the melodies of satie being written and performed by the most heavy handed musician imagineable. and for me i don't think i'll ever be able to get over that fact. until every character is as appealing and enjoyable as ariadne oliver i think that admiring christie is as far as i'm ever going to get. and i'll still stand by the fact that she is responsible for some of the worst writing i have ever come across EVER. nothing's going to make me forgive tommy and tuppence in a hurry, that's for sure

no, the real problem with historical crime fiction is how you use that setting and your reasons and intentions for going back to the past. i'm going back to the fifties (and with the second volume of mrs_bramley to the thirties as well) because i feel i have something to say about the rules of the golden age detective novel and that period really marks it's final stand before the modern psychological thriller took hold. i want to play those rules and regulations - ones that i love, may i add - against themselves. so i like to think i have a reason for my choice in era. other books just seem to choose it for nostalgia or for irony or for cheap postmodern jokes (which in the best hands, like m j trow's lestrade novels, can be wonderful but are still cheap postmodern jokes) - but not andrew martin's jim stringer books. having finished "the necropolis railway" and almost done with "the blackpool highflyer" i think i can safely say that here is an author who very much has a reason for taking on the past. firstly martin obviously has an enthusiasm for steam trains and the edwardian era, but those alone would not be enough. partly i think he wants to redress the whimsical romp school of historical crime fiction - no jokes about accidentally bumping into a young churchill here and no bodice ripping nonsense. there is a painfully awkward incident with a prostitute in "the necropolis railway" but it's there to make you feel the agony of how low his hero has stooped since moving to london. martin seems to want to write a proper novel about the victorian era, using the crime genre as something of a peg, and then make both of them psychologically real through the real stroke of genius of these novels: jim stringer himself

stringer is one of the most beguiling characters in crime fiction. after two of these novels i'm beginning to think of him as almost a friend - he's naive, awkward, socially clumsy but thoroughly likeable and dependable and with a shrewd eye for a mystery. when we first meet stringer, he's a starstruck and deeply optimistic 19 year old who's come to london because he hopes it's the first step towards a career driving steam trains after a chance meeting with someone high up in the world of london locomotion. needless to say he ends up alone, hating the smog of the city compared to the beauty of his home in baytown (robin's hood bay) in yorkshire and ostracised and bullied by everyone he works with. there's a tangible desolation to these passages as stringer reports his continuing failures to bond with his work colleagues and how his landlady who he has a crush on finds his awkward small talk about stuff from "the railway magazine" incredibly boring. almost to distract himself from this he gets involved in a mystery about his predecessor at waterloo who mysteriously disappeared. it all seems to hinge upon the necropolis railway, a very real train service from waterloo to a large cemetary just outside london that was built to provide space for burial that the metropolis just couldn't achieve

really the mystery is just a peg for the novel. it's a bloody good peg as well - when the solution is given i was satisfied, a little disappointed the solution was so prosaic, but definitely satisfied with it on the whole. and then comes the twist which not only manages to successfully throw you as a reader but also is genuinely believable in terms of the plot. this is always the problem with a twist - it threatens to overwhelm the realism of the rest of the book, and with the jim stringer novel the realism is pretty much all. martin has a wonderful ear for not only dialogue but for victorian idiolect - by which i mean this isn't a pastiche of wilkie collins or charles dickens like charles palliser dips into so successfully in his masterpiece "the quincunx" but instead writes very much in the way you imagine someone from the lower classes of the day very much would talk. you really can hear stringer as a vivid character speaking these words (oddly i hear the poet simon armitage's oddly stilted speaking voice as stringer's voice - something to do with his awkwardness and naivety, i imagine). it's very natural and frequently a turn of phrase becomes actually rather moving

"the blackpool highflyer" is very nearly even better. his crush on his landlady has come to fruition and he's now married her and although still very much the same hero of "the necropolis railway" he's two years older, a little wise and much happier, back home in his native yorkshire and a fireman on a train rather than a cleaner. not a driver yet but closer to his goal. and his happiness is very much reflected in his writing style - more confident, more knowing, much wittier. it's also very interesting for me because the book is set in the calder valley. jim and "the wife" live in halifax and the geography of 1905 halifax is eerily accurate - every time he describes turning and seeing the clough mill or beacon hill he's absolutely right in terms of local geography. similarly there's a day trip to hebden bridge and hardcastle craggs which again is near perfect. only a bit of a quibble about how he can see the church tower in the centre of todmorden on the turn to burnley and which school he sees from the train on the same route seem a little out. i tell you, it's very odd to be travelling by train through smithy bridge when your hero in a book is describing the very same route and stopping at the very same station. you don't really expect to see the name mytholmroyd in print very often, but here it is - in fact the rather moving conclusion takes part in what i'm guessing are the fields across from our old flats

the only problem with "the blackpool highflyer" is whereas in "the necropolis railway" martin decided to take an ostensibly simple answer to the crime and suddenly, and rather deftly, complicate that solution, here he takes a complicated crime and suddenly, surprisingly, simplifies it. here's where sarah and me part company. she liked how martin seemed to lay the trails for red herrings which were not delivered whereas i felt a little... disappointed with it somehow. not to say it wasn't well done, because it was - i wonder whether the point is that stringer is getting more observant and brighter when it comes to identifying crimes as he matures and this, unfortunately for him, means he gets terribly addled with regards to the actual solution of the crime. certainly i think martin is deliberately mirroring stringer's travels from the scarborough coast to the blackpool coast with his suspicions of anarchists, colleagues, industrial espionage and even ventriloquists. i think i'll probably need to reread it and try and be a little less dispassionate about how unerringly right he got the calder valley to judge how good a crime novel it is. or alternatively just get cracking with the next two volumes instead

mrs_bramley

The plot is simple: Colin Revell, our hero, is an old boy at a middle ranking but rather grand boarding school called Oakington and has spent the ten years since he's left at Oxford and writing epic, satirical poetry, pieces for magazines and a single novel. He's also got a bit of a reputation as something of an amateur sleuth and when a horrible accident undergoes a pupil at his old school he gets called in by the headmaster to have a nose about. He finds a few things of interest, but not much and returns home and pretty much forgets about the whole thing. Six months later another accident occurs - this time to the older brother of the victim (and head boy) and also seemingly a lot more suspicious. Although, oddly, this time the headmaster doesn't seem remotely worried by the events. And thusly Revell returns to the school, observing what's happening from the periphery of school life and slowly but surely finds himself pulled into the tragic events.

The problems first - it's screamingly obvious who did it from pretty much the get go and Hilton badly fudges the misdirection. He creates about five possible suspects, three of whom are the key ones: the really obvious and thusly not very likely one with the motive, the slightly obscured one with the dark past and thus the second most likely one (and by dint of this also not very likely to have done it) and finally the innocent seeming one who is so obviously the criminal you keep despierately hoping he'll whip out some major twist at the end. But he doesn't. It's about the most obvious crime novel I've read since E F Benson's "The Blotting Book" which had a similar sense of thinking it was being very clever and actually being thuddingly obvious. He also badly misjudges when to wheel out the big conclusion - because Hilton is aiming for something akin to psychological realism here, he mistakenly swaps a dramatic and satisfying denouement for revealing the murderer two chapters before the end and just letting the detectives waffle on for a bit about why the person did it. All dramatic tension is basically gone out the window. And for a school story nary a single student gets a walk on part (I think two of them get any dialogue which is pretty shocking) despite the fact two of them are victims of the murderer.

But the good things are *very* good - he has a simplicity and directness of prose which helps his slight story and the whole thing is tremendously pacy. The book doesn't get bogged down by the psychological stuff at all and Wilton very effectively pares down the narrative to the most essential bits of the story only. Also, the hero is just the right side of engaging and not too crass as he could easily have been as a cynical writer and bon viveur. There's a twist midway through the book whereby the amateur detective's work is revealed to have actually hindered the professional's job which is nicely done. There's a similar idea in "The Cartwright Garden Mystery" by J S Fletcher which I really liked but somehow seemed a happy accident there. Here it seems entirely intentional and the detective - Guthrie - is a nicely caustic figure, pleasant enough when he needs to be but also sharp and brittle when crossed. Similarly almost all the supporting characters are nicely drawn, particularly the shell shocked and war wounded teacher Lambourne whose character will, I think, be the most striking thing I will carry from this book. He's a wonderfully tragic figure, all the more powerful for being sketched quite simply by Hilton. I also liked the very simple device by which the murderer was discovered. It's a bit corny but actually works and is so simple and nicely developed you feel a bit sad that Wilton didn't try and perfect his style with a few more crime novels.

On the whole, highly recommended - but be warned! It will be liable to madden you just as much as it delights you.

mrs_bramley

trow's an interesting writer. i've mentioned him and his lestrade books before, when i was accusing "a bullet in the ballet" for being firstly not funny enough and secondly not crime orientated enough to be a comedy crime novel. the lestrade books captured my imagination when i first discovered them in the early nineties. i was a sherlock holmes fan of the highest order with a particular fondness for non canonical oddities (i have ridiculous amounts of them, i really do) and when i discovered that these tongue in cheek books existed i leapt on them. the idea is simple - lestrade is not the stupid, idiotic plodder of the books but something of a wily, thoughtful plodder instead. he's no genius, but he works out the crimes and uses sound reasoning on the way. but it's a way that usually takes a fair few pages, long enough for a cavalcade of puns, historical cameos, incongruous use of popular culture and bawdy humour to jolly you on the way. they really are *hilarious* - if the bad puns don't do anything for you (or the bad jokes or the fondness of naming characters after contemporary figures: thusly an athlete called ovett, a photographer called litchfield, policemen called morse, lewis, dixon etc etc) then the historical cameos might well do instead (this book has most of the suspects of the ripper case, half the big names in the police force of the time, a few smatterings of government and royalty and - particularly wonderfully - reverend spooner). really, someone needs to send stephen fry or mark gattiss (there's a hefty amount of the trow romps in gattiss' lucifer box books) a copy and persuade them to make them into telly NOW. seriously...

trow was a history teacher by trade and has put that profession to good use in both his crime series - history with lestrade, teaching with the plodding and oddly popular maxwell series that has been keeping him busy these last few years (although FINALLY there's a new lestrade coming - "lestrade and the giant rat of sumatra"). and it's history rather than holmes that inspires the lestrade books. you get the feeling trow brushed up on the holmes books after the first couple of books had been written, because the jokes are rarely about the doyle books (watson is very much the nigel patrick watson for example and most holmes/ watson jokes are at the expense of watson's rather distrubing adoration of the great detective which all lead to one of the best punchlines in the whole series: what REALLY happened at the reichenbach falls). because "ripper" is one of the most historically based of the books (fred abberline is a very prominent figure, although one being constantly mocked by lestrade and his fellow policemen) there's a much closer following of historical detail than usual, but all the novels involve at least two or three important historical setpieces as they weave through lestrade's life (the books to and fro through lestrade's career even going up to the twenties). for example poor old lestrade - one of the more accident prone heroes in crime fiction - only survives the titanic by falling off the boat during the launch party. "ripper" is a bit of an oddity because half of the crimes ARE the ripper murders including pretty much every theory bandied about for the murders (they settle pretty much on the duke of clarence/ william gull/ freemasons cause in the end) turning up at one point or another (i'd never heard of ostrogg or kosminsky before reading this for example) but the second half is a tangentially linked series of murders based at a northamptonshire private school

when i first read the books i remember not really caring at all about the mysteries themselves, so distracted as i was by the endless jokes and comedy nonsense between the thrills and spills. maybe i'm more of a sophisticated reader now or i know my crime novels a bit better because i can see the cracks a lot more these days. i know it's an early novel, but there are at least two or three moments where you can see trow actually PLANTING a clue for later. they really stick out half a mile. and there's a terrible bit of connecting two clues together which doesn't work at all. if you ever read the novel you'll spot the moment as a police handwriting expert makes an astonishing claim with absolutely no explanation which lestrade just accepts. it works structurally but as detection? shockingly bad frankly. and to be honest that pretty much is the only complaint i have about the book. the detection is a bit strained - you accept the reasons and the methods as they are revealed in a breathless last chapter but you have to think there were at least another two drafts worth of trying to paper the cracks due for the book. the jokes, the dialogue, the characters (first appearance of lestrade's loyal assistant walter "dr crippen" dew, lestrade's close friend fred wensley, sundry scoundrelish schoolboys and masters and oddly i think the only novel without lestrade's close friends the bandicoots) and the writing style are an absolute treat - when i wasn't thrilled i was laughing or groaning and never EVER bored. and particularly it's a good example of research used properly. there's no useless pages of research dumping, everything's just slid in elegantly and properly (something i hope i'll be worthy of myself when i get round to finishing the second part of "bramley II"). but the crucial plot points - my goodness, do they creak. he distracts you enough for it not to actually bother you and he really does improve as the series continues, but for now, must try harder!