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Another Christie favourite: completely made-up mental conditions. Oh we all thought he might have been suffering from early-onset brainitis of the glands! Ah yes that would explain a lot of things... But then it turns out they were their own uncle and therefore 3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Sep 21, 2021 |
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Sep 21, 2021 20:36
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Yeah, early Christie is definitely old-timey racist in some uncomfortable ways. I know at least one book (probably multiple books) casually drops "dagoes" to refer to eastern European people, and the less said about the extensive praise of Rhodesia in The Man in the Brown Suit, the better.
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Sep 21, 2021 23:25
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, early Christie is definitely old-timey racist in some uncomfortable ways. I know at least one book (probably multiple books) casually drops "dagoes" to refer to eastern European people, and the less said about the extensive praise of Rhodesia in The Man in the Brown Suit, the better. That's partly the spirit of the times, not just her. For instance, Josephine Tey's first book, The man in the queue, is notable for two things: being crap and having "The Dago" as its main suspect. The reason he's a suspect: the murder weapon was a knife, and everybody knows that's how those guys settle their scores, huh?
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Sep 22, 2021 02:58
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Global Disorder posted:That's partly the spirit of the times, not just her. For instance, Josephine Tey's first book, The man in the queue, is notable for two things: being crap and having "The Dago" as its main suspect. The reason he's a suspect: the murder weapon was a knife, and everybody knows that's how those guys settle their scores, huh? Ironic that the UK is now known as Knife Crime Island.
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Sep 22, 2021 03:01
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Ironic that the UK is now known as Knife Crime Island. Must be all those murderous foreigners, no thorough Englishman uses such weapons! Tey got better later, but The man in the queue makes Dame Agatha look like a paragon of tolerance in comparison. I mean: Josephine Tey posted:Lastly—the dagger. It was a wicked little weapon in its viperish slenderness. The handle was of silver, about three inches long, and represented the figure of some saint, bearded and robed. Here and there it was touched with enamel in bright primitive colours such as adorn sacred images in Catholic countries. In general it was of a type fairly common in Italy and along the south coast of Spain. Grant handled it gingerly. Josephine Tey posted:‘Idly he considered the type of man it would be. No thorough Englishman used such a weapon. If he used steel at all he took a razor and cut a person’s throat. But his habitual weapon was a bludgeon and, failing that, a gun. This was a crime that had been planned with an ingenuity and executed with a subtlety that was foreign to an Englishman’s habit of thought. The very femininity of it proclaimed the dago, or at the very least one used to dago habits of life. ... he thought about motive; Revenge or jealousy? Most probably - dagoes were notoriously vulnerable in their feelings; an insult rankled for a lifetime, a straying smile on the part of their adored and they ran amok.’
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Sep 22, 2021 04:44
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A razor is a knife.
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Sep 22, 2021 08:25
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Oh my god the knife is Catholic Next-level poo poo
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Sep 23, 2021 00:20
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e: There was a crime here.
3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Sep 24, 2021 |
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Sep 23, 2021 00:43
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Antivehicular posted:Oh my god the knife is Catholic Anglican knives don't do murder. Not even the High Church ones. But for all the racism in this first book, Tey wrote some good ones later. The Franchise affair is worth a read.
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Sep 25, 2021 03:38
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Swapped a Ken Follett and a James Hadley Chase for some Åsa Larsson and Juan Gomez-Jurado at the K-market book swap shelf. It's half-full of stuff in Swedish. Also reading my first Aurelio Zen novel (Cabal) by Michael Dibdin. I felt it was a bit of a slog, but when I put it down I'd actually read half of it in one sitting. Weird feeling!
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Oct 10, 2021 19:02
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I got through Murder in the Crooked House, by Souji Shimada. It was an interesting read, but I ultimately found it frustrating because none of the characters really felt like a human being, and because the basic outlines of the solution were easy to guess: "this must have been accomplished via some manipulation of unknown properties of this weird loving house, therefore the guy who had the weird house built is the killer", but the details of the actual murder mechanism were so ludicrously complicated that even John Dickson Carr would have raised an eyebrow, and the motive was impossible to guess. Really good translation, though. Didn't feel nearly as stilted as many other translations from Japanese I've read, although it's possible that that was just a factor of this not being a light novel.
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Oct 14, 2021 07:12
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I stared at that loving drawing of the house for two hours before I realized, it had to have been him or his daughter, and it made me annoyed as poo poo for the rest of the book. it wasn't nearly as interesting a mystery as the Tokyo zodiac murders he did previously.
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Oct 14, 2021 10:18
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I'm reading "Night Frost" by R.D. Wingfield. Starting out, I immediately thought "oh wow, they basically wrote the main character [Frost] to be a David Jason role" but then Wikipedia told me the author hated Jason as Frost. Goes to show writers aren't motion picture makers for a reason. E: Wingfield probably wouldn't've appreciated the Finnish publisher putting Jason in character on the front cover, but the translation only got published because the TV show was immensely popular here.
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Oct 14, 2021 15:51
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3D Megadoodoo posted:a James Hadley Chase I have read about 70 of JHC’s 90 books and I’m savoring the final ~20.
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Nov 6, 2021 06:25
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Hey thread, could I get some recommendation? What I'm looking for is what somebody in the thread earlier called "Scooby Doo Mysteries", i.e. what seems to be supernatural occurences that end up having a real, if contrived explanation. Stuff like The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Devil and the Dark Water, lots of Fred Vargas' oeuvre. Any ideas?
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Nov 6, 2021 11:39
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anilEhilated posted:Hey thread, could I get some recommendation? What I'm looking for is what somebody in the thread earlier called "Scooby Doo Mysteries", i.e. what seems to be supernatural occurences that end up having a real, if contrived explanation. Stuff like The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Devil and the Dark Water, lots of Fred Vargas' oeuvre. Any ideas? A lot of the Father Brown stories are in this vein.
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Nov 6, 2021 15:08
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John Dickson Carr wrote a lot in this vein, so you might try The Crooked Hinge or The Man Who Could Not Shudder. There's also Evidence of Things Seen by Elizabeth Daly, who I wish more people would start reading.
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Nov 6, 2021 16:01
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Silver2195 posted:A lot of the Father Brown stories are in this vein. Rand Brittain posted:John Dickson Carr wrote a lot in this vein, so you might try The Crooked Hinge or The Man Who Could Not Shudder.
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Nov 6, 2021 17:53
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Rand Brittain posted:John Dickson Carr wrote a lot in this vein, so you might try The Crooked Hinge or The Man Who Could Not Shudder. Many of Carr's books also have a very surreal and Gothic-like atmosphere, in case that's part of what the OP wants. His early ones are delightfully over the top, such as Castle Skull, about murders in a skull-shaped castle owned by a dead magician, and The lost gallows, which has a scene where a corpse drives a car, among other crazy stuff. quote:There's also Evidence of Things Seen by Elizabeth Daly, who I wish more people would start reading. Seconding that wish. Daly is criminally underrated. e: just thought of a couple more: Elizabeth Peters wrote some Scooby-Doo style Egyptology mysteries, starting with Crocodile on the sandbank. Also, you might like Christie's Pale Horse. Global Disorder fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Nov 7, 2021 |
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Nov 7, 2021 04:08
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Okay, got myself a couple Carrs (Castle Skull sounds kinda hilarious honestly) and Evidence of Things Seen. Thanks, will report!
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Nov 7, 2021 12:38
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anilEhilated posted:Oops, I forgot to mention that I read those. Good recommendation, though. Reminder that John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson are the same writer, just in case someone didn't know. I can't remember if there are any actual differences in the style. e: Yeah Lord of the Sorcerers kinda fits the bill at least. ee: Also several (I think) Van Gulik novels have others being spooked but judge Dee being all "I'm not spooked!" and solving the case. Again, it's been too long for me to remember which ones, but I'd hazard a guess that The Phantom of the Temple has some spookiness in it. Also the "framing" stories of at least two books were ghost stories if I recall correctly. I'm guessing van Gulik liked playing with the fact that in traditional Chinese crime fiction it often was ghosts and other satans appearing as ghosts and other satans, not the lighthouse-keeper in a mask. 3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 09:16
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Finished Leblanc's "Les Dents du Tigre", an Arsène Lupin novel that was probably meant as the last one (it wasn't). I was fine with the awkward 1920s translation. I was fine with the misprints due to bad 1990s OCR. But the story is also complete poo poo, and that surprised me, as I remember reading the first two books as a kid and liking them 
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Nov 14, 2021 11:09
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Authors' final books tend to not be great.
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Nov 14, 2021 11:39
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Megazver posted:Authors' final books tend to not be great. I don't think he meant to stop writing, and he wrote until his death in the 1940s. I just think he meant it to be his last Lupin novel (as evidenced by the fact that it ends with Lupin getting married and settling down). According to Wikipedia he actually wanted to write "psychological novels" (whatever the gently caress that is) but I'm glad he never got around to it because I bet they would've sucked big time stylee.
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Nov 15, 2021 08:03
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The Theodore Terhune mystery series by Bruce Graeme has turned out to be really good, and I particularly appreciate that none of the books in the series so far have been very similar to any of the others.
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Nov 20, 2021 01:30
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One of the more recent British Library reprints is Murder After Christmas, the only book by Rupert Latimer, and I wish he'd lived to write more because this one is very pleasantly loopy. Although I feel like either British law in the WWII period was either very different from my vague knowledge of English common law, or the author got a lot of things wrong about how wills work. In particular: 1) The murdered man left everything to his wife in his will. When she turns out to have predeceased him, he dies intestate. The will was written by a lawyer, so it seems really unlikely that it didn't have language that would account for this possibility. 2) The murdered man has no family members to inherit via intestacy since all his wife's children were adults from a former marriage... except his brother's son, but he can't inherit because he was "disinherited". I am pretty sure you can't just generically disinherit somebody and blot him out of the family tree for the legal purposes of every other family member.
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Dec 3, 2021 08:46
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Has anyone here read Locked Room International's translations? I've been enjoying their work alot, especially "The Moai Island Puzzle" the solution for that one was fantastic!
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Dec 19, 2021 22:54
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Just finished a crime novel by Totti Karpela and I found it slightly amusing that he used Isola as the name of a fictious Finnish town. The thing is it sounds absolutely fine for a Finnish place name (and there's at least one estate called Isola) but it's obviously a reference to Ed McBain. The book sucked tho and my dad was totally ripped off when he paid 8€ for it (there was a receipt between the pages).
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Dec 20, 2021 11:13
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Zeroth_Dragon posted:Has anyone here read Locked Room International's translations? I've been enjoying their work alot, especially "The Moai Island Puzzle" the solution for that one was fantastic! No, but it sounds interesting, so I'll check it out.
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Dec 20, 2021 20:23
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I'm working on The Moai Island Puzzle right now, after spending some time kicking the extremely messy ebook into shape, but I also took some time to read through some John Dickson Carr, and man, he may have written some decent mysteries, but it's getting really hard to ignore that he was just awful about women and that every single one of his male point-of-view protagonists needs a sock in the jaw.
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Jan 14, 2022 02:20
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm working on The Moai Island Puzzle right now, after spending some time kicking the extremely messy ebook into shape, but I also took some time to read through some John Dickson Carr, and man, he may have written some decent mysteries, but it's getting really hard to ignore that he was just awful about women and that every single one of his male point-of-view protagonists needs a sock in the jaw. Also everything is spooky (in the most spookless way) and boy does he love pointing it out every two minutes. (More so in some books.) And gently caress The Judas Window. e: Do not gently caress the Judas window.
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Jan 14, 2022 10:46
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Rand Brittain posted:There's also Evidence of Things Seen by Elizabeth Daly, who I wish more people would start reading.
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Jan 14, 2022 11:22
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anilEhilated posted:Trip report: I enjoyed that one a lot, even if the characters felt a bit colorless. The central mystery was intriguing and I didn't see the murderer's identity coming from miles off, which is always a plus. Good stuff. It was a neat piece of writing, although I solved it pretty quickly by the principle of "if somebody arranged for any coincidences to happen, who would it have had to be" and also because honestly there weren't that many suspects. Is there a word for "nearly anybody living in the city could have done this crime, but if you assume that only people named in this book could be guilty, the pool of suspects is actually fairly small"?
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Jan 30, 2022 03:36
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Rand Brittain posted:It was a neat piece of writing, although I solved it pretty quickly by the principle of "if somebody arranged for any coincidences to happen, who would it have had to be" and also because honestly there weren't that many suspects. I don't know if there's a term for this sort of situation, although the first part of Knox's First Commandment ("The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story") is what creates the loophole here. I guess it's fine as long as the detective has a specific explanation at the end for why it has to be this one person, instead of relying on implicit process-of-elimination logic that ignores the possibility that a nameless outsider did it.
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Jan 30, 2022 23:27
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I'm going to steal Knox's Rules.
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Jan 31, 2022 01:53
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anilEhilated posted:Hey thread, could I get some recommendation? What I'm looking for is what somebody in the thread earlier called "Scooby Doo Mysteries", i.e. what seems to be supernatural occurences that end up having a real, if contrived explanation. Stuff like The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Devil and the Dark Water, lots of Fred Vargas' oeuvre. Any ideas? I realize this is several months late (as I'm just checking out this thread for the first time), but there's also Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. Which is basically Scooby Doo, but the kid detectives are grown up now and there are also Eldritch horrors. Some of the Scooby Doo references were laid on a little too thick, but it was enjoyable enough, especially if you're looking something Scooby Doo related. Basically, I didn't love it enough to keep it, but I liked enough that I'm going to pass it onto a friend.
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Feb 3, 2022 04:00
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Recently finished "The Egyptian Cross Mystery" and "The Crooked Hinge". Ellery Queen continues to impress me with the clever plotting and chains of deductions. Carr continues to infuriate me with his absurd culprit and trick, which is a shame since I enjoyed "The Problem of the Green Capsule" so much. Also bought, and finished in the same day, "The Poisoned Chocolates Case". Hats off to Mr. Berkely, this book is amazing. Six different plausible solutions to the same case? That's amazing!
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Feb 3, 2022 15:57
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The Poisoned Chocolates Case is really good, and while not every book Berkeley did is good (while TPCC is good with women, some of his other books manage to hit exactly the wrong note), he gets a lot of credit for being relentlessly experimental with the form. Meanwhile, I just finished reading Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin, which turned out to be absolutely delightful. The dotty Lady Lupin, a society beauty who abruptly falls in love with a country vicar and settles down to be a vicar's wife, takes up detection when the no-good local curate is poisoned in order to clear a friend's name. She is somewhat hampered in this effort by not understanding a drat word anybody says to her, but she doesn't let that stop her. I thought this one was absolutely charming and ultimately had a lot of heart, but it looks like it's quite hard to find, as the only copies I could get were some of the remaining Rue Morgue Press copies that Barnes and Noble still had.
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Feb 7, 2022 04:18
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I just finished Fan-Fiction: A Mem-Noir by Brent Spiner and Jeanne Darst. It's essentially a semi-autobiographical thriller-mystery-comedy about Spiner being stalked by an obsessed fan while filming the fourth season of The Next Generation. I actually posted about it in the Star Trek thread first, but I felt I should mention it here as well. I actually listened to it on audiobook, as it's narrated by Spiner (who has a great voice) with the rest of the Next Gen cast voicing themselves. As a mystery, I found it to be an interesting twist as it's sort of a murder mystery but before the murder takes place. Spiner starts receiving letters from a fan threatening to kill him, all while claiming to be a character from a Next Gen episode. The book has enough red herrings to keep you guessing who is sending Spiner these letters. It also helps that Spiner, at least how he is portrayed in the book, is a neurotic mess himself who has no idea how to deal with the situation. I would definitely recommend listening to the audio version as Spiner and the rest of the cast do a great job.
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Feb 22, 2022 01:15
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Joined the Finnish Whodunit Society a while back and got the first issue (this year) of their newsletter. I think it's pretty cool they're able to publish a 100-page quarterly in colour. The only movie review was for "The Batman". He's the world's greatest detective I hear. Also there are like half a dozen Finnish publishers that I had no idea existed. One of them only publishes Japanese crime fiction, it seems.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:38
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