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I can't imagine Wolfe ever using a tablet or webcam. The whole point of his rule about not leaving the house on business is to ensure that you have to come to him on his terms. Peering out at the world through FaceTime seems far too undignified, and as Rand says, there's no way Wolfe would ever tolerate anyone assuming he was on call all the time. I've read a couple of the 80s-90s Goldsborough books, and they were, well, okay. The Wolfe books are so formulaic that I don't think it's too hard to write a serviceable pastiche; the real magic is in the dialogue and the relationship between Wolfe and Archie, and that's a lot harder to imitate.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:43
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The first Wimsey I ever picked up was Strong Poison, and I still think that's a good one to try. Sayers has improved by leaps and bounds from her early novels by then. I also like Murder Must Advertise, which is a satirical look at life in an advertising agency as well as a mystery. I don't like Gaudy Night as much, but it does get a lot of praise from people who are not me. I'd like to put a word in for a couple of mystery series I like. First, for those of you who do like police procedurals, my favorites are Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. McBain wrote several dozen over the course of his career, and they're quick, snappy reads, with an Elmore Leonard-ian flair for dialogue and a dry sense of humor. Also, since it's about that time of year, there's Troy Soos's Mickey Rawlings series, whose protagonist isn't a detective. He's a pro baseball player in the "dead-ball" era (pre-World War I to early 1920s). It's a running joke in the books that Mickey is an adequate, but not great, player, so he's always getting traded -- so every book he's playing for a different team, and of course is constantly getting caught up in mysteries as well. Even if you're not a hardcore baseball fan, the books are a lot of fun. The first one is Murder at Fenway Park.
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Mar 14, 2019 16:50
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Loutre posted:I'm a huge Agatha Christie fan but I've never really branched out. Are there any modern-ish (80s+?) authors in Mystery that stand out as must reads? I'm overwhelmed by choice since I've barely read anybody else at all. If you want a more recent Christie-alike, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell come to mind. They're a bit older than your specification (they both started their careers in the 1960s) but they do, to me, have a similar feel.
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Mar 27, 2019 17:44
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Yeah, it's been a long time since I read the McGee books as well, but I remember Junior Allen as being a particularly memorable villain. I also recall Nightmare in Pink's plot revolving around the use of drugs and Skinner-style conditioning on humans, which was a very '60s-70s preoccupation -- see House of Stairs, for instance.
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Mar 30, 2019 02:40
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Stopped by one of my local used bookstores on Saturday and someone had apparently dropped off about a dozen Ellery Queens, so I grabbed a few I haven't read before. I'm currently halfway through The Spanish Cape Mystery, which is great fun. I prefer the early Ellery Queen, where he's a snotty intellectual who keeps dropping literary references so you know he's smart, very much like an Americanized Lord Peter. In Spanish Cape, he actually quotes Proudhon's "Property is theft" -- in French yet -- while looking disapprovingly around a Wall Street shark's mansion. But then, it was written in 1935, and stockbrokers and bankers were still popular villains back then. The later books tend to be a little too psychologically overwrought for me to enjoy when I just want a whodunit, and their solutions often skirt the edge of what I'd consider a fair play mystery (e.g. Ten Days' Wonder). But even then there are good ones -- Cat of Many Tails and The Player on the Other Side are a couple of my favorites.
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Apr 29, 2019 19:04
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Jerry Cotton posted:I'm pretty sure it was one of the sixties or seventies Queens that literally ended with "I hadn't noticed it before but that guy has wide hips so he's gay so he must be the murderer oh and he's also trying to murder someone right now" which kind of threw me as a kid because I was used to the pre-war novels. I managed to spot the murderer in both of the Queens I read recently, although I wasn't even trying that hard. Unfortunately, the second, Face to Face, turned out to be another of the preposterous ones. So the murder victim is a musician who wrote down the word "face" as she was being killed. But none of the suspects have anything unusual about their faces. Aha, says Ellery, F, A, C, and E are also musical notes. And since these notes are written between the lines on sheet music, the victim is telling us to "read between the lines!" And lo and behold, there's a message written in invisible ink between the lines of the victim's will. No, really. Anyway, I wonder what Wolfe would have made of a royal baby named Archie.
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May 8, 2019 17:30
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I liked White Jazz myself as sort of the ultimate refinement of Ellroy's idiosyncratic style. But as I said in another thread, I think he's been working that style a little too long and it's getting stale. Perfidia, for one, felt messy and disjointed to me, and Ellroy's attempts at writing a female and an Asian protagonist instead of his usual almost-all-white-male cast came off as unconvincing.
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Jun 27, 2019 23:36
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Rand Brittain posted:In a lot of ways Wolfe's rules are just him establishing a pattern of self-indulgence so that he has an excuse to not leave the house unless he actually wants to. I cannot actually think of an occasion where Wolfe held to the rule when he actually wanted to go out. As I said earlier in this thread, I think the rule is mostly so Wolfe's (often quite wealthy and powerful) clients don't start expecting him to come to them all the time. And from the Doylist point of view, having Wolfe forced to break his rules -- leave the house, be interrupted at a meal, have to come down during orchid time -- is a handy way for Stout to up the tension a bit.
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Jul 2, 2019 17:27
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As I've mentioned before, the later Ellery Queen books cut away Ellery's more snobbish behavior. Unfortunately, they don't replace it with anything else, so he becomes more of a generic character. (In general, if it's one of the books that follow the The Nationality Thing Mystery title format, you're getting Original Ellery.) I haven't read that particular book, and I don't recall any other instances of Inspector Queen getting pre-Miranda-warning with suspects in the ones I've read. He's mostly just there to give Ellery someone to bounce ideas off.
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Aug 31, 2019 03:34
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Jerry Cotton posted:I read Highsmith's "Those Who Walk Away" and it was about 100 pages too long. I've been thinking of reading the Ripley books at some point (I think I have some) but... are they unboring? I've only read The Talented Mr. Ripley but I thought it was quite good, not boring at all.
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Sep 25, 2019 04:21
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Silver2195 posted:Another thought about early Ellery Queen: Motive really was an afterthought for Dannay and Lee, wasn't it? I don't think that's unusual for whodunits; John Dickson Carr, for instance, is rarely interested in motive except as it provides an excuse for X to kill Y in some puzzlingly complex way. I picked up another Queen, A Fine and Private Place, on my last visit to the used bookstore. Halfway through now and it's quite fun and very Swinging '60s New York, which I enjoy. Hope the solution isn't a letdown. Looking it up, I see it's actually the last Queen novel, which is a bit of a surprise. (One more for the Inspector Queen Is a Bad Cop file: upon finding a suspect stinking drunk, the Inspector insists on questioning him right then and there instead of giving him time to sober up.) (later:) Not a letdown, after all. Contrived solution, but not awful by Queen standards. I spotted the murderer about halfway through, but not by figuring out the clues -- I just realized Dannay and Lee were working a variation on a trick they'd used in another book. By the way, my version has this cover. I'd have liked to be there for that modeling session. "Okay, honey, put on this romper and drape the big gold 9 around your neck, then go stand in the box clutching a Luger and flashing your tits while looking vaguely nervous." 
Selachian fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Sep 26, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 13:56
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Interesting essay on how to write mystery novels, by Charles Finch.
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Oct 16, 2019 20:35
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Spotted this and thought it was interesting: an unsold pilot for a Nero Wolfe show featuring young William Shatner as Archie. (He's actually pretty good!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_AoebAAig4
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May 9, 2020 21:10
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The Arthur Conan Doyle estate is suing Netflix over a movie based on Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes books. Springer allegedly swiped the concept of Sherlock Holmes being cold and unemotional at first and then learning to be nicer. No, really.
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Jun 27, 2020 20:39
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I don't feel that every mystery has to be a fair play mystery (e.g., Ellery Queen or The Westing Game), but I think there's a happy medium between fair play and "detective pulls clues out of their rear end in the next-to-last chapter." As an example, Murder on the Orient Express, where the suspects' connections with the Armstrong family is kept back from the reader at first and only revealed slowly, but it doesn't feel like a cheat to me. Unlike, say, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is just bullshit.
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Sep 25, 2020 16:31
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Visited a new (to me) used bookstore over the weekend and came away with a couple of new (to me) Ellery Queens. I've just finished the first one, The King Is Dead. Interesting read. It's barely a mystery novel. There's a locked-room attempted murder, but it doesn't happen until deep into the book, and Ellery solves it fairly casually. Most of the book is dedicated to setting up the environment -- a munitions millionaire's private island -- and the personalities involved, and it frequently feels intended as a critique of U.S. postwar militarism (it was published in 1952). It's also the only mystery I've ever read that ends with the victim's corpse being incinerated in a nuclear explosion.
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May 17, 2022 20:51
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Fighting Trousers posted:So I've been on a massive Brother Cadfael kick again. They are the epitome of comfort reads for me, but I'm thinking I want to try out some other historical mysteries. Preferablly relatively cozy - I'm not a fan of the grimdark blood-and-poo poo variety. Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco books are good and there are plenty of them.
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Nov 22, 2022 19:35
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Oh, and I should throw in a mention for Troy Soos's Mickey Rawlings series, where the detective is a baseball player in the pre-WWI major leagues.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:44
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So I felt like I need to read some more modern mystery writers, and on my latest visit to a used bookstore I picked up Malcolm Mackay's In the Cage Where Your Saviors Hide. I liked the book design, and private eye stuff in modern Scotland by a Scottish writer sounded promising. Okay, so it's set in a fictional city. Not a problem, I'm a fan of the 87th Precinct books so I'm used to fictional cities that are thinly disguised versions of real cities. Except ... this is also a fictional world where Scotland is an independent country with its own monarchy, and has colonized parts of Central America. That's a bit more different. The protagonist, it turns out, works for a "research agency" because he'd rather not deal with all the rules private detectives have to follow. The book introduces him at a party with lots of talk about how impressively cool and laid-back he is. He's there following a serial rapist/murderer, and he watches as the guy picks up a girl, trails them back to the man's apartment, waits for the screams to start, and then busts in and beats up the rapist, finishing up by stomping on his dick. He then turns the rapist over to the police, who are very grateful for the help and let him go with a pat on the head and several mentions of how funny the dick-stomping was. At which point I put the book aside. Has anyone else tried Mackay? Does it get better?
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Jul 22, 2023 23:07
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Just finished This Storm. Since I prefer physical books, this means I've been carrying around a book with a big red swastika on the front cover. I thought Perfidia was weak, but This Storm was much better, even if part of it was Ellroy playing the old hits (Dudley Smith, again). We're now two books into what he's calling the "Second L. A. Quartet," which is actually a prequel to the first Quartet.
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Sep 9, 2023 02:28
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I have to wonder at the thought process that lands Dirty Harry in "can solve" and Shaft in "can't solve."
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Oct 16, 2023 20:10
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Spotted one of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club books, The Bullet That Missed, on my last bookstore trip and picked it up solely on the strength of having seen Osman as a contestant on Taskmaster. It turned out to be a pretty fun read. A group of amusingly dotty senior citizens take up investigating cold cases as a hobby, spreading chaos as they dig into the past. It's fairly light and cozy but there are some genuinely well-handled moments of drama and emotion.
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May 18, 2024 00:35
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