Cimorene

I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.

Yesterday I sat down to make a consecutive list with ratings (by hand, because it's just nicer to write with a fountain pen) and it took three hours.

I have read a total of 19 by John Dickson Carr, counting the first one a few years ago (Castle Skull) and The Hollow Man, from the bookclub list in Wake Up Dead Man. Several more of his early books have the same irritating features as these, but his later books frequently do not. He has other weaknesses - most strikingly, his focus on surprising puzzle solutions sometimes leads to endings that are flat, thin, and/or ridiculously silly, like in the acclaimed The Judas Window (1938, 4/5, rec) and the less-beloved The Ten Teacups (1937, 3.5/5, rec). I can recommend about half the ones I've read so far. The only ones I would rate 5/5 apart from the previously mentioned Till Death Do Us Part (1944) are 1939's The Black Spectacles, 1944's He Who Whispers, and 1938's To Wake the Dead. I give 4.5/5, however, to 1935's The Red Widow Murders. Yet I nearly DNF 1942's The Emperor's Snuffbox (2/5) and 1935's Death Watch (3/5) and I ranted about 1937's The Burning Court (1/5) for a good ten minutes.

As a fan of Golden Age Detective stories I have incidentally read a huge variety of locked room mysteries, even though I don't especially like them more than other mysteries. Occasionally some of them are quite fun, actually, but as you read more and more of them a distinct pattern emerges, and you start just immediately going... Okay, was the murder actually done before the room was locked, or after it was unlocked?

And especially after reading two of John Dickson Carr's exasperating mysteries that are shrouded in heightened spookiness intended to make you wonder whether the solution is supernatural or faked to just LOOK supernatural, only for it to turn out that the corpse was stolen from the locked room before it was locked by the last guy in there, and then that the guy was killed by the last guy to leave before the room was locked (in this case before he was left alone on top of a tower with people watching the entrances).

This must get old even quicker for real fans of the locked room. My impression, without doing any tabulation, is that roughly 95% of locked room murders in GAD are done either before the room was locked or after it was unlocked. This has to take some of the excitement out of it, even if the fan is occupied in theorizing which person did it and exactly how.

Duke’s certainly did not rely for its popularity on external display. It was approached by three flights of narrow and rickety stairs, and the visitors had to satisfy two rather seedy-looking janitors, not in uniform, at top and bottom. And, when they entered the Club itself, Ellery had a still greater surprise. The famous Duke’s consisted of one very long low room—or rather of three long, low attics which had been amateurishly knocked into one. The decorations were old and faded, and the places where the partitions had been were still marked by patches of new paper pasted on to hide the rents in the old. The ventilation was abominable, and what windows there were did not seem to have been cleaned for months. The furniture—a few seedy divans and a large number of common Windsor chairs and kitchen tables—seemed to have been picked up at secondhand from some very inferior dealer. Tables and floor were stained with countless spillings of food and drink, and a thick cloud of tobacco smoke made it quite impossible to see any distance along the room. There was only one redeeming feature, and Ellery’s eye fell upon it almost as soon as he entered the place. Near the door was a magnificent grand piano, on which someone was playing really well an arrangement from Borodine’s Prince Igor.

—GDH Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)

So far, this appears to be a quite mild case of shingles, from what I've been able to gather. It's annoying and worrying, but it hasn't become more than slightly and intermittently painful. I'm not sure if I'm extraordinarily lucky, or if I'm just young enough to make mild symptoms much more likely. We are also having a cold snap again, though it's not really all that cold, only a little bit below the freezing point and a little bit more snow.

I watched the new Agatha Christie's Seven Dials Mystery, and then reread the book, as I had only a slight recollection of it. The visual design and costumes charmed me, but I was baffled by adaptation choices. Then I watched The Residence, which was much better, and visually lovely as well, as expected from Shondaland.

I stopped reading the works of Freeman Wills Crofts - I read all I could find, but there are more that I haven't yet. The guy was quite prolific. Then I finally got around to reading John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, the last book I hadn't read on the bookclub list in Wake Up Dead Man. It was... okay. It did not revise my previously unfavorable opinion of JDC as a mystery writer. It's a fun enough and okay read, but it's not satisfying and the tone and style are... weird. I suppose if I want to articulate this better I'll have to read more of his work.

Anyway, I've been reading some other random early mystery novels since then - AEW Mason (pretty good but some Of Its Time issues), GDH Cole (the majority of the narration is by silly characters whose cluelessness the reader is presumably meant to see through, a narrative technique which makes me gnash my teeth), JJ Connington (better but loses major points for extended scenes of a dumb detective being dumb and his smarter boss being even smugger and more secretive about everything than Sherlock Holmes).

I also have experienced a change of heart, not about the NHL - it's still evil and its culture is toxic and most NHL hockey players suck - but about posting the unfinished hockey WIP with all the names changed. I didn't want to do that from 2016 until like, this month, but now I think I would be okay with it, provided I did finish it (I like the bit I have anyway). I can't at all explain why this feeling changed, though. But clearly we've all been able to process quite a bit about the nature of fanfiction with the names changed since the release of Heated Rivalry.

I keep thinking I want to write something about one of these things, but shingles is making it uncomfortable to sit up with the laptop and type and I keep going, "Fuck it, I have a moderately horrible ailment anyway right now, so lying down and resting is virtuous", and crawling into the flannel duvet tent against the radiator with Sipuli. It's nice in there. In fact at times it's so toasty that I forget it's chilly out in the rest of the house.

We made a simple oven pan of roasted root vegetables, chicken, and lemon, which we've eaten many times, but it came out extra delicious, partly just from a larger, juicier lemon.

This got me thinking. I love lemon bars and two near-identical recipes from my childhood for lemon tea cookies and lemon muffins. But I've never been really impressed with a lemon cake, and I wonder if it's just that it could be lemonier? The intensity of lemon meringue pie is nice, but I don't fully love the texture combination.

Maybe a lemon meringue cake? Or some other dessert that combines lemon curd or custard with something cake- or cookie-like?

cimorene: I actually was impressed enough with Francois Arnaud to go watch him in other stuff, but not enough to watch The Borgias.
waxjism: Would you watch some fuckass weird French Canadian arty movie? Are you willing to watch Xavier Dolan?
cimorene: I've heard of that, but I don't know who it is.
waxjism: That's what it is. French Canadian arty weird movie. I think it's blahblah from year, or year. And I think it's in French.
cimorene: Okay, definitely not.

Sgt. Sheepshanks
Superintendent Sheaf
John Weatherup
Alec Quilter
Ebenezer Peabody
Superintendent Goodwilly
Grosvenor Mairs

I've been feeling a bit bored lately, but I started reading some more 1920s detective novels that I haven't read before (the works of Freeman Wills Crofts) and am having a lot of fun.

His plots are elaborate, not to say convoluted, and there are lots of details about the investigations as well as usually a bit of international travel and some colorful descriptions of scenery, but at the same time his narrative voice is rather dry and quite formal, sort of like a Data or Spock character was given a lively passage in another language and translated it as directly as possible into their own typical voice.

Also sometimes his character names are very funny: Pierce Whymper (The Starvel Hollow Tragedy), William Service (The Sea Mystery), Cosgrove Ponson (The Ponson Case).