A friend loaned me Donna Andrews' mystery novel No Nest for the Wicket because she knows I like playing croquet. I like backyard croquet best, preferably with partners so we can play off each others' balls and go for the final post together, rather than suffer the inevitable ignominious defeat when one person hits the post and goes out, leaving his partner at the mercy of all the other players on the field. I have played competition croquet, with the billiard-smooth lawns and tall, narrow wickets. But I have never played X-treme croquet as it is described in this mystery...nor am I ever likely to, because the rules are not explained in enough detail to recreate the game. It would have to be created from hints like that cow legs can serve as wickets and radios can be used to inform far-flung players when it's their turn.
I did enjoy one character's explanation of why croquet was banned in Boston in the 1890s:
"Several prominent clergymen denounced it for encouraging drinking, gambling, and philandering. Men and women playing on the same field. The occasional bare ankle explosed to the leering eyes of the spectators. Young couples disappearing into the shrubbery in search of lost balls."
Come to think of it, my version of extreme croquet should probably include some drinking; makes the game more challenging!
And I very much enjoyed the culminating decision on house rules for the game being played during a murder investigation: "Spectators are fair game, but if you try to murder one of the other players, your team's out."
Croquet, of course, is infamous for having wildly varying house rules. Personally, I don't much care for playing with people whose major fascination with the game is rocqueting balls into the next county and chortling that there's no out of bounds.
The mystery itself, in this novel, was uninteresting. Possibly this is because the croquet one is the seventh in a series (my friend did tell me this), and it's more interesting if you know some background on the characters and their unfriendly dog. I spent three hundred pages with these characters and never got to like them, so I'm not feeling inclined to start at the beginning of the series to see if we could get off on the right foot.
I have started some mystery series novels with one of the middle ones and been interested enough to read backwards after the first one, and then forwards. I did that with Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael tales, and Dorothy Gilman's series about Mrs. Pollifax. Have you ever tried dipping into a mystery series in the middle?
Showing posts with label Elizabeth George. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth George. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Monday, October 13, 2008
It's a Mystery
It's a mystery to me how my very fair-skinned daughter could walk around un-sunscreened in a sleeveless top in the sunshine all day yesterday and not get pink shoulders. It's a mystery why someone would practice long and hard enough to be able to make a sandwich with his feet. It's also a mystery why I would pay to watch this.
The main mystery for today is how Elizabeth George's last two books have been so boring. I thought that What Came Before He Shot Her was just an aberration, probably because it focused on characters I didn't already know. But the newest one, Careless in Red, has Lynley and Havers in it, two of my favorite characters, and it's still as boring as the book is long. Did she have a good editor when she was younger, and now has too much power to have to accept editing suggestions? Or is she just so full of herself she thinks she can write any old long-winded, sloppy way and we'll keep reading her books? Well, she's wrong about me. Passages like this one make her books not even worth carrying home from the library:
He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family--the four of them then, the three of them now--they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a respository of secrets. She'd believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother's troubles, her mother's periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had alwasy been referred to as "a bit of an embarrassing situation." Don't breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and "What's the cow up to now?" from her granddad. But "Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?" was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually thing would return to normal, whatever normal was.
After about 500 pages of that kind of overblown prose, having learned too many details about too many characters' lives, the completely improbable mystery is finally revealed. It follows up on one of about 200 red herrings, the rest of which are left, stinking, on the shore.
There are good Elizabeth George mysteries: A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, Well-Schooled in Murder, A Suitable Vengeance, For the Sake of Elena, Missing Joseph, Playing for the Ashes, In the Presence of the Enemy, Deception on His Mind, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, A Traitor to Memory, I, Richard, and A Place of Hiding. But that, it seems, is that. I'll never know what else happens to Lynley, unless one of you, against my advice, wants to plow through hundreds of pages of tripe just to find out what he does next. It's just not worth it to me anymore, and that's sad.
I don't think I know any other mystery series where the quality plunged this precipitously before I was finished caring about the characters. But I came late in life to reading mysteries. Do any of you know another series where this happens? Share your warning!
The main mystery for today is how Elizabeth George's last two books have been so boring. I thought that What Came Before He Shot Her was just an aberration, probably because it focused on characters I didn't already know. But the newest one, Careless in Red, has Lynley and Havers in it, two of my favorite characters, and it's still as boring as the book is long. Did she have a good editor when she was younger, and now has too much power to have to accept editing suggestions? Or is she just so full of herself she thinks she can write any old long-winded, sloppy way and we'll keep reading her books? Well, she's wrong about me. Passages like this one make her books not even worth carrying home from the library:
He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family--the four of them then, the three of them now--they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a respository of secrets. She'd believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother's troubles, her mother's periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had alwasy been referred to as "a bit of an embarrassing situation." Don't breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and "What's the cow up to now?" from her granddad. But "Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?" was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually thing would return to normal, whatever normal was.
After about 500 pages of that kind of overblown prose, having learned too many details about too many characters' lives, the completely improbable mystery is finally revealed. It follows up on one of about 200 red herrings, the rest of which are left, stinking, on the shore.
There are good Elizabeth George mysteries: A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, Well-Schooled in Murder, A Suitable Vengeance, For the Sake of Elena, Missing Joseph, Playing for the Ashes, In the Presence of the Enemy, Deception on His Mind, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, A Traitor to Memory, I, Richard, and A Place of Hiding. But that, it seems, is that. I'll never know what else happens to Lynley, unless one of you, against my advice, wants to plow through hundreds of pages of tripe just to find out what he does next. It's just not worth it to me anymore, and that's sad.
I don't think I know any other mystery series where the quality plunged this precipitously before I was finished caring about the characters. But I came late in life to reading mysteries. Do any of you know another series where this happens? Share your warning!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
My favorite flavor of mind candy
Yesterday when we dropped off our kids for soccer practice, my friend Amy handed off the latest J.D. Robb to me. This one is entitled Strangers in Death. Despite chauffeuring duties (lighter this week, because the kids are on spring break) and children and animals needing to be fed, I spent much of the afternoon reading it and had it all read by the time I had to leave for symphony rehearsal.
I have loved this series since Amy passed off the first ones to me, and there are now 26 of them. They're murder mysteries (hence the "death" titles), but they take place in a New York City of the future, described like this in the very first book (Naked in Death): "Street, pedestrian, and sky traffic were miserable, choking the air with bodies and vehicles....Even at this hour there was steam rising from the stationary and portable food stands that offered everything from rice noodles to soydogs for the teeming crowds." When the main character, Eve, sees the murder victim, she also is shown the murder weapon: " 'Thirty-eight caliber,' he told her. 'First one I've seen outside of a museum. This one's a Smith & Wesson, Model Ten, blue steel.' He looked at it with some affection. 'Real classic piece, used to be standard police issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three, when the gun ban was passed.' "
The series has details about the future and also about Eve's life and the lives of her circle of friends and fellow cops, so it's the kind of series you need to start reading at the beginning (like Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries or Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries). You find out that jobs of the future include "Licensed Companion," (a respectable prostitute, kind of like Inara in Firefly) and "Professional Mother" (one who gets paid by the government for doing a good job!). And you get Eve's cop-thinking about what motivates people: "Marriage is a promise....If you break one part of the promise, it's going to crack other parts." When the crime-fighting characters find out that an abused woman has been part of a murder plot, one of them tries to convince Eve to go easy with her: "There's a difference between weak and evil." Eve's reply is "Yeah, but there's sure a lot of overlap."
Each book has been just as good as the last, despite the growing narrative problem of Eve's life and the lives of all her friends becoming increasingly happy and settled. I like the way Eve can fly off to another planet or a tropical beach after she solves each mystery.
I have loved this series since Amy passed off the first ones to me, and there are now 26 of them. They're murder mysteries (hence the "death" titles), but they take place in a New York City of the future, described like this in the very first book (Naked in Death): "Street, pedestrian, and sky traffic were miserable, choking the air with bodies and vehicles....Even at this hour there was steam rising from the stationary and portable food stands that offered everything from rice noodles to soydogs for the teeming crowds." When the main character, Eve, sees the murder victim, she also is shown the murder weapon: " 'Thirty-eight caliber,' he told her. 'First one I've seen outside of a museum. This one's a Smith & Wesson, Model Ten, blue steel.' He looked at it with some affection. 'Real classic piece, used to be standard police issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three, when the gun ban was passed.' "
The series has details about the future and also about Eve's life and the lives of her circle of friends and fellow cops, so it's the kind of series you need to start reading at the beginning (like Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries or Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries). You find out that jobs of the future include "Licensed Companion," (a respectable prostitute, kind of like Inara in Firefly) and "Professional Mother" (one who gets paid by the government for doing a good job!). And you get Eve's cop-thinking about what motivates people: "Marriage is a promise....If you break one part of the promise, it's going to crack other parts." When the crime-fighting characters find out that an abused woman has been part of a murder plot, one of them tries to convince Eve to go easy with her: "There's a difference between weak and evil." Eve's reply is "Yeah, but there's sure a lot of overlap."
Each book has been just as good as the last, despite the growing narrative problem of Eve's life and the lives of all her friends becoming increasingly happy and settled. I like the way Eve can fly off to another planet or a tropical beach after she solves each mystery.
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