Cimorene

After reading most of John Dickson Carr's books — maybe 25? — I've moved onto a few recs for more GAD (Golden Age Detective Fiction) by other people that I picked up recently.

I read The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich, the famous midcentury author of Rear Window and a whole heap of other bleak thrillers, apparently. I might read more later. The Bride Wore Black was obviously, to me, from the first sentence of the recommendation, a major inspiration behind Kill Bill. Tarantino is on my shit list, but I really enjoyed some of his movies, and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill is just iconic to me. Anyway, TBWB is a series of five short interludes where the Bride stalks and then kills five men in revenge. Her motive and even her identity are gradually revealed. This isn't a descendant of samurai films: she uses a new method each time, as well as a new disguise. If your curiosity is piqued, here's the review by JJ of The Invisible Event which sold me. I wouldn't rate it as highly, although it was a great read that I fully recommend; I couldn't put a book with a flaw this big on a Best Of list, and the whole last episode doesn't work for me, with a disappointing and rushed solution that felt too shallow. ( Read more... )

Yesterday I read another book from that list, Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice. This is a 1944 YA comedy murder mystery about the children of an ADHD single mom mystery writer trying to solve the murder that happens next door in order to matchmake their mom with the investigating detective. It's full of 1940s slang and affectionate family squabbles, the children outwitting and misleading the cops as they collect clues, and lots of evocative scenes of preparing and eating food and casual mentions of 1940s suburban life that were fascinating. The tone isn't just comic, but it isn't really a serious murder mystery, either; the puzzle and the mystery take a back seat to the children's adventures. But it's so much fun to read anyway that I heartily recommend it. The only significant flaw is the cops being sympathetic, but at least they're also constantly outwitted by the kids. Here's JJ's review that sold me. I should also say that this book predates the existence of the modern YA genre, and all the markers and conventions that I can't stand in it. I describe it as YA on the basis of the reading level, the child protagonists, and the less serious and complicated mystery.

I have written some rather harsh things about John Dickson Carr, and I stand by them and by being a hater.

But I wanted to be able to articulate just what it is that bothers me about them, so I started reading some more of his work. I found a GAD blogger who loves the guy and picked ones he mentioned. I quite liked the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery I read (originally published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson), 1943's She Died A Lady. Then I read 1944's Till Death Do Us Part, which is the first mystery I've ever read with a setup to rival Christie's The Clocks. The setup takes longer: about 30% of the novel. But it is fantastic.

In The Clocks, as you know, Bob, a war-hero sort of young man who later acts as sidekick to Poirot is walking down a residential street when a door opens and a young woman runs out screaming. She just arrived to this house and found it empty except for a dead body; she's a typist and was hired through a secretarial bureau. He goes in with her and they find the corpse in a room that also contains a whole bunch of different clocks for some reason (six maybe?). The owner of the house then returns. She's blind, she didn't hire the typist, she has no connection with the victim and doesn't know how he got there, and she also doesn't own the clocks.

In Till Death Do Us Part the narrator (a playwright of crime thrillers) and his brand new fiancée go to a county fair. His fiancée first appears to have some sort of confrontation with the fortune teller (witnessed in silhouette through the tent), then accidentally shoots said fortune teller with a target rifle from outside the tent just as he was saying to the narrator, "I'm the famous criminologist from the Home Office and there's something I've got to tell you!" He is carried away by the doctor, but sends for the narrator to tell him that his fiancée is a murderess who has gotten away with poisoning two husbands and a past betrothed by injection of prussic acid so they looked like suicide, and that he wants the narrator's help to catch her. ( This is part of the setup but it's also a twist at like 30% of the book so )

The thing about the changes made in the new miniseries of The Seven Dials Mystery is that they seem motivated by a couple of motives that strike me as unwise and illegitimate:

• to make a rollicking comedy-adventure-farce way more serious and solemn and sad


• to make sure the main heroine is not motivated by spunk, excitement, or sheer desire to solve crimes, but by revenge for the man she loooooooooved


• to make the heroine just the MOST speshul, not because of what she achieves or her choices and actions, but because of who she innately is

You see what I'm saying? ( Read more... )

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.

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).

I've been thinking about Wake Up Dead Man some more even though I haven't gone and looked up the list of books, because I am not ready to purchase new ebooks yet, and that's what I'll have to do for the ones there I haven't read before.

Meanwhile though, I have been rereading some Agatha Christie. I am not exactly a giant Christie fan, but I have read most of Agatha Christie's works (and usually multiple times) because I like Golden Age mystery as a genre and my MIL was a superfan, so I have had convenient access to paperbacks of Christie's works.

And I realized with a start yesterday that while the setting and setup in Wake Up Dead Man is in some respects is EXTREMELY typical of Golden Age detective fiction, in another it's very very unusual - ( Some spoilers )

I have been reading and skimming 1920s magazines and have not got tired of that yet. I have learned so much more about the period, and have a much firmer grip on the idiom of the time.

It was a didactic article about world literature from one of these 20s women's magazines that actually made me curious about the Arabian Nights - I didn't read the whole article, bc racism, but the brief history inspired me to read on Wikipedia. The history and background there fascinated me, and I wanted to read the translation of

[t]he Leiden Edition, prepared by Muhsin Mahdi, [...] the only critical edition [...] to date,[48] believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available. [... It] was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[61] This translation has been praised as 'very readable' and 'strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales'.

It is very readable and really entertaining! In fact I've stayed awake longer than I meant to several nights this week because of wanting to finish one of the stories.

I've also realized that the... maybe not exactly subgenre; category? of Arabian fantasy is all stylistically influenced by them. That seems painfully obvious now that I've thought it, but I've never thought about it before! I have not read much of it, though, and I know there are newer fantasy novels in that setting that are not written by white people, some on my to-read list; they are possibly quite different or more diverse. But in the past (mostly childhood), I've read

• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones (1990), set in the universe of Howl's Moving Castle


• The Harem of Aman Akbar by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1984)


• Night's Master and Death's Master by Tanith Lee (1978-79)

Oh, Wikipedia even says on the page for the last series that it's inspired by the Thousand and One Nights. I must've seen that before I read them (it was only like five years ago maybe) and forgotten.

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what thefourthvine and norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.