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cimoreneI was a bit at loose ends about what to read next and stumbled on the novels of Ethel Lina White, (1876 – 1944), who wrote the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock's early The Lady Vanishes was based. I had seen the movie, and it was one of the movies of that era that had some extremely dodgy spots but some other rather compelling bits. I read the book out of curiosity and learned it was much better without the changes to the plot that were made for the movie. I found the narration intriguing - the character of a not-wholly-likeable protagonist (but not like AWFUL) and several other characters who were kind of awful selfish people in their own separate petty ways without having the least suspicion of it (all while being perfectly, believably self-satisfied, in fact). The plot - a thriller-mystery, if you don't know about the plot of the movie - was fairly well done too. So I read a few more:
- The Elephant Never Forgets, 1937. I didn't finish this. A young Russian-British woman - or rather a British citizen, bilingual because she was raised by a Russian stepdad but not connected genetically or legally to Russia - is living in the USSR, where she moved after a Russian communist boyfriend, and has just learned that he was cheating on her and broken up with him when he is arrested for sedition. She's lost her money and her attempts to send to England for more in order to purchase her passage back to the UK go astray several times in a row, while she becomes increasingly paranoid that she, too, might be arrested on suspicion for her association with him, although it seems she knew nothing of his activities for the resistance and is firmly pro-USSR herself. Didn't finish. Too intensely suspenseful for me right now. I know, I know, it's a suspense novel, but. yeah.
- The First Time He Died, 1935. Labelled a mystery, this is actually a multi-pov narration of a faked death and life insurance fraud gone wrong for... a while... and gradually morphs into a kind of thriller as a character is revealed as... a very particular kind of sociopath and then as they gradually become motivated to get rid of co-conspirators and other people. I found the characterizations incredibly compelling here, and also the ways that the conspirators made stupid or careless assumptions and mistakes that unfornately with other people's errors and foibles... at times it was a little too on-the-nose, uncomfortably so, and at others it was hilarious. Also it's surprisingly separate from the kinds of sorta-slimily gross classist value systems that subtly underpin Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, and so many other writers of this period (not Dorothy Sayers, I would say, at least, not exactly).
- The Man Who Loved Lions (The Man Who Wasn't There), 1943. I picked this one because I recognized the second title, and assumed it had been adapted into a movie as well at some point, but it hadn't! There are several movies by this name and they're all unrelated to this novel, which was just retitled for America for... uh... not sure why. Anyway, I'm halfway through and enjoying it a lot so far. It's really pretty weird. It's introduced an even more Gothic setting than the other ones and then Made It Very Weird because there's this whole somewhat sinister and mysterious 7-year reunion of a college secret society (or they were actually a clique, or study group, but they called themselves a secret society because ???) that used to meet... in the tower room of an... abandoned castle belonging to someone's uncle? Only then the narrator belatedly remembers that the castle is also like a private zoo slash menagerie slash game preserve and to make the rendezvous people are going through an area where wild animals are roaming freely, and then it goes through another hairpin turn and she meets the uncle, it's not abandoned and he lives there, he's having an extremely glamorous house party, she's suddenly made friends with some guests, and her old study compadre is suspected of planning to murder the uncle and suddenly they're trying to prevent this, only then someone else dies instead... at this rate there have to be a couple more complete direction changes before the end of the plot and I'm fascinated to find out what they are. It's engaging and intriguing as I go along without including any unlikeable points of view, but it is rather all over the map; you'd have to be crazy to try and make a movie of it. It reminds me of one of my favorite Philo Vance novels, which isn't IMO one of the best ones, it's just a favorite because it's so incredibly bizarre - The Dragon Murder Case by SS Van Dine, which takes place at an eccentric fish-collecting millionaire's estate and has a swimming-themed murder that ultimately features hilarious 1935 diving suit technology.
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Date: 23 Dec 2020 12:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 23 Dec 2020 01:20 am (UTC)I suppose this is where the Clue game started...
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Date: 23 Dec 2020 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 23 Dec 2020 07:28 pm (UTC)The dotty-elite anything-goes houseparty, on the other hand, wouldn't be a *houseparty* without a collapsing clocktower or a menagerie of some kind, ghosts in the lake (discovered during midnight skinny-dipping) or roses with apparently lethal perfume... let alone a murder, which *could* be a freak accident -- or not -- because everything is Just That Weird, especially including the hosts.