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Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Sarah Caudwell's four books were all perfect and I strongly regret that more people haven't read them.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to get fed up with Patricia Wentworth because her books are so... manipulative. She writes the kind of books where Virtue always triumphs in the end, and what this winds up meaning is that anybody who is standing in the way of the two young lovers will, if they avoid getting murdered, turn out to be the murderer, and after a while it starts to feel fakey fakey fake. There's also usually a fair amount of contrived reasons behind the forces keeping the young lovers apart, most of which seem to break down to "the heroine is really, really gullible."

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Leocadia
Dec 26, 2011

Megazver posted:

Have you tried the Marcus Didius Falco novels?

Not yet. I've been a little intimidated by how long that series is, but I enjoyed the Flavia Albia books from the same author, so I might just bite the bullet!

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Leocadia posted:

Not yet. I've been a little intimidated by how long that series is, but I enjoyed the Flavia Albia books from the same author, so I might just bite the bullet!

I've read the first, uh, five books, I think. They're pretty good and also fairly stand-alone - it's the usual mystery series deal where it's mysteries of the week interspersed with ongoing relationship stuff.

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice

Megazver posted:

I've read the first, uh, five books, I think. They're pretty good and also fairly stand-alone - it's the usual mystery series deal where it's mysteries of the week interspersed with ongoing relationship stuff.

I read a bunch of them. They're not bad. But near the end, the narrative voice got on my nerves, and I started finding Falco pretty insufferable.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Leocadia posted:

I'm hoping this thread can recommend me some new authors. I pick up a book this morning and realised it was the last one on my to-be-read pile, which has never happened to me before.

I just finished (and loved) Ruth Downie's Medicus series, and Carola Dunn and Gary Corby are right up there in my favorite authors, and in general I enjoy historical non-cop mysteries.

Don't read S.J. Parris unless you like "idiot dude bumbles about all over the city and the crime is accidentally solved ,and the protagonist is obviously far dumber than the reader who figured it out two hundred pages before the end" type of crime fiction.

Leocadia
Dec 26, 2011

Jerry Cotton posted:

Don't read S.J. Parris unless you like "idiot dude bumbles about all over the city and the crime is accidentally solved ,and the protagonist is obviously far dumber than the reader who figured it out two hundred pages before the end" type of crime fiction.

Thanks for that! Parris did pop up as someone I might be interested in, but accidentally solved mysteries are just so frustrating.

Ben Nevis
Jan 20, 2011
I just finished Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. It's a mystery set in deep East Texas. Like, I grew up near there, but don't recognize all the places listed. Sensing a racial motive, a suspended Texas Ranger looks into a pair of killings in the tiny town of Lark. Solving the crimes naturally involves digging into dark mysteries of of a place that doesn't even merit "wide spot on the highway" status. A few reviews call it "rural noir" and it certainly has that aspect. It's a good mystery, steeped in Texan-ness and the underlying racial tensions that can haunt a peaceful community.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer

Leocadia posted:

I'm hoping this thread can recommend me some new authors. I pick up a book this morning and realised it was the last one on my to-be-read pile, which has never happened to me before.

I just finished (and loved) Ruth Downie's Medicus series, and Carola Dunn and Gary Corby are right up there in my favorite authors, and in general I enjoy historical non-cop mysteries.
The Judge Dee books by Robert van Gulik? Brother Cadfael books by Ellis Peters?

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

anilEhilated posted:

The Judge Dee books by Robert van Gulik? Brother Cadfael books by Ellis Peters?

Judge Dee is as much a cop as they came.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
I've gotten started on Anthony Boucher lately, and I was really pleased with myself for figuring out the answer before the book pulled a last-minute swerve that I don't think was really set up.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer

Jerry Cotton posted:

Judge Dee is as much a cop as they came.
Oops, missed that part.

Xotl
May 28, 2001

Be seeing you.

Rand Brittain posted:

I've gotten started on Anthony Boucher lately, and I was really pleased with myself for figuring out the answer before the book pulled a last-minute swerve that I don't think was really set up.

Which one? I read Nine Times Nine and was pretty disappointed by it.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."

Xotl posted:

Which one? I read Nine Times Nine and was pretty disappointed by it.

The Case of the Crumpled Knave.

Leocadia
Dec 26, 2011

anilEhilated posted:

The Judge Dee books by Robert van Gulik? Brother Cadfael books by Ellis Peters?

Thanks for the suggestions! I should probably branch out my reading a bit...

Not just now though, since I'm in the hospital and have regressed to the cheesiest of cosy mysteries as mental comfort food.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Silver2195 posted:

I recently read Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin. It was good! A solid plot, reminiscent of Agatha Christie*, but with frankly better prose and characterization than Christie. I had a good idea of who the murderer was by around page 140; maybe that just shows that I've gotten better at reading murder mysteries lately rather than a weakness in the construction of the plot, but arguably it's a side effect of the characterization actually being too good. Even then, though, there were some major twists that took me by surprise but were still essentially fair.

Apparently Akunin wrote a bunch of other mysteries featuring Erast Fandorin, although every book in the series supposedly belongs to a different mystery sub-genre, so the others are likely to be very different. I'm still likely to try them anyway.

* At least, the basic setup of the fixed number of suspects from different countries together on the boat is reminiscent of Murder of the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, but opening the story with 10 corpses, including 2 children, before they get on the boat is a decidedly un-Christie touch. To be clear, this isn't actually a particularly gory or sadistic book; it just has a high body count.

I just read the first Fandorin "mystery," The Winter Queen. "Mystery" is in quotes because, at the risk of sounding like a rigid Knox/Van Dine purist, it's more a thriller than a true mystery. The plot revolves around an implausibly vast, successful, and (from a certain point of view) benevolent conspiracy, the focus is as much on Fandorin escaping death as on his detective work, and Fandorin (being new to this whole detective thing) succeeds as much by dumb luck as by rational deduction. As a thriller, it's pretty good! It's a weird choice for the beginning of a series, though, because the plot is so much larger-scale than Murder on the Leviathan, and, I assume, the other Fandorin books. The ending is unexpectedly dark, not only because Fandorin's wife dies but also because the ending comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that basically everything that went wrong for the world from 1872 onward was indirectly Fandorin's fault. The latter was a really weird narrative choice for the first book. Then again...if Astair House and Azazel fell apart that easily (despite Lady Astair's confidence that her projects would survive her death), then I guess it was all doomed anyway. And if that mad scientist who tried to zap Fandorin's brain is anything to go by, a lot of Astair House alumni, even ones who weren't in the Force section, were probably making things worse rather than better. Too bad about the orphans, though.

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Aug 19, 2019

ProperGanderPusher
Jan 13, 2012




Rand Brittain posted:

Why the heck is so much of Dickson Carr out of print?

Knox is ridiculously hard to find too despite his Rules being so well known. The SF Library has NONE of his mystery novels in circulation.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012
Just read my first Ellery Queen book, which is also the first Ellery Queen book, The Roman Hat Mystery. The mystery was clever enough; I didn't manage to solve it (although I guessed an important aspect of the solution), but I think it was reasonably fair. It's not especially plausible, but the implausibility is in the problem rather than the solution; I have trouble believing that anyone has the nerves of steel necessary to stealthily murder someone in a crowded theater like that.

I don't like the main characters much, though. Richard Queen is a bully and Ellery Queen is a smug, lazy brat. The way Richard Queen treats suspects sometimes really surprised me, because while Poirot sometimes acts like that, Christie was always careful never to allow sympathetic cop characters like Superintendent Battle to do so, IIRC. Though it's specifically noted that he has a chameleon-like personality and only bullies suspects when he thinks it would be the most effective approach under the circumstances, so hopefully he'll do it less in future books. I've read that Ellery's personality gets toned down in future books, at least.

I like how the plot revolves around (and maybe implicitly criticizes?) aspects of 1920s America, such as a particular form of racism, leaded gasoline, gangsters, and ubiquitous hats, but didn't become "unfair" to a modern reader with the passage of time (unlike, e.g., Christie's Death in the Clouds, where the solution revolves around the fact that back in the day, flight attendants were men who dressed exactly like dentists).

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

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.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Selachian posted:

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.)

That's what the wiki I linked above said, yeah.

quote:

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.

Good to know.

One disappointing thing about The Roman Hat Mystery's ending: we don't really find out what happens to the suspects afterward. In particular, I would have liked to see how all the Ives-Popes react to finding out that Stephen is a) "tainted" by black ancestry b) a murderer, as well as what sentence Stephen receives (would his confession have prevented him from getting the death penalty? I don't know enough about criminal law in the 1920s to know). Perhaps this shows that Dannay and Lee saw the story strictly as a puzzle and didn't expect readers to be emotionally invested in the murderer or the other suspects, or perhaps they weren't comfortable dealing with racism (in 1929) as directly as that sort of epilogue would require in a story that wasn't about race prior to the solution portion (but then why introduce that element in the solution portion in the first place?).

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Silver2195 posted:

I don't like the main characters much, though. Richard Queen is a bully

Never read David Hume.

I mean that has nothing to do with Ellery Queen; just don't. The Cardbys are just straight-up thugs.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Jerry Cotton posted:

Never read David Hume.

I mean that has nothing to do with Ellery Queen; just don't. The Cardbys are just straight-up thugs.

Hume the mystery writer seems to be pretty obscure; he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Silver2195 posted:

Hume the mystery writer seems to be pretty obscure; he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

He does, just not in English :smugmrgw:

All I know is he was heck of popular in Sweden and Finland for some decades (judging by the amount of translations I happen to have, in both languages).

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

I'm becoming convinced that Edgar Wallace was, in fact, a very bad writer. I just read (on Wikipedia) that he just dictated poo poo for 72 hours straight and the publisher rushed it off to the printer without much editing and... that's exactly how his crime novels read. loving Fellowship of the Frog more like fellowship of poo.

E: time to update my blog again I guess. A lot of people like so-called police procedurals. If you want to NOT like a police procedural, might I recommend a Freeman Wills Crofts novel. It's literally the polar opposite of a Wallace in many ways while still sharing the trait of having a lovely plot. The Box Office Murders? More like the...Book-reading Snorers!

3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Sep 13, 2019

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012
I was in the middle of a long post about the second and third Ellery Queen books, but the computer ate it. I'll keep it short and say that they were mostly good, but The French Powder Mystery has a bit of authorial cheating just before the Challenge to the Reader that made me guess wrong, and Ellery's reasoning in determining the murderer, while the most logical option if you ignore the aforementioned bit of cheating, isn't very conclusive.

I never got the chance to guess the murderer in The Dutch Shoe Mystery, because I accidentally went back a page and read the ending while looking at the map, because the ebook makers put it in the back for some reason.

Edit: I guess you could argue that it was me rather than Dannay/Lee who cheated with the French Powder Mystery. Ellery talks to Richard Queen in private about Crouther's testimony as though he believes it to be true, even though it turns out that Ellery has already decided by this point that Crouther must be the murderer. But maybe it was unfair of me to try to determine who the detective thought was the murderer instead of figuring out the identity of the murderer independently. But then again, mysteries, including The French Powder Mystery earlier on, seem to expect you to do that all the time; we know early on that Weaver isn't the murderer because Ellery explicitly trusts him as a personal friend.

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Sep 14, 2019

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Okay, on review, I'm starting to get really tired with Ngaio Marsh's take on the nobility. Death in a White Tie is a good mystery, but in retrospect it's hard to take seriously the suffering of a woman who's 'straining herself to the utmost' by giving too many very expensive parties.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Rand Brittain posted:

Okay, on review, I'm starting to get really tired with Ngaio Marsh's take on the nobility. Death in a White Tie is a good mystery, but in retrospect it's hard to take seriously the suffering of a woman who's 'straining herself to the utmost' by giving too many very expensive parties.

Lol.

I believe a fair among of ink has been spilled on the subject of snobbery in Golden Age crime fiction. I've noticed that Agatha Christie had some snobbish attitudes (a condescending view of domestic servants, and even some antisemitism in the early books), but only up to a point, and there's some great scenes where she poked fun at the attitudes of people more snobbish than herself (e.g., the bit in The ABC Murders where an aristocratic suspect needs to be reminded that the other suspects have day jobs and can't just take an hour to talk to Poirot anytime, or the subplot in Peril at End House where Hastings can't accept that someone who went to the "right schools" can be a bad guy).

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice

Rand Brittain posted:

Okay, on review, I'm starting to get really tired with Ngaio Marsh's take on the nobility. Death in a White Tie is a good mystery, but in retrospect it's hard to take seriously the suffering of a woman who's 'straining herself to the utmost' by giving too many very expensive parties.

I wonder how much of that sort of thing is meant as wish fulfillment/voyeurism for the reader? The reader can see how the other half lives, and fantasize themselves in a world of rich people who dress well and throw fancy parties.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012
Just read the fourth Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery. It's pretty convoluted, even compared to the first three books. I guessed wrong again, although my wrong guess was the final wrong answer - Knox - so in a sense I got close. I never even included Pepper in my list of possible suspects, though, so in a sense I was as far away as possible.

I like how Dannay and Lee seem to have realized by this point that Ellery's Philo Vance-inspired personality was annoying, so they wrote a book where the other characters are appropriately annoyed by him, and he embarrasses himself by making some mistakes in his theories. I also like how Ellery's reaction to his own mistakes addresses my big problem with The French Powder Mystery: why Ellery talks to Inspector Queen as though he takes at face value the words of someone Ellery already believes by then to be the murderer. Apparently Ellery is under a convenient vow never to tell anyone the solution until the last possible moment, to avoid the risk of embarrassing himself with the wrong solution again!

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012
Another thought about early Ellery Queen: Motive really was an afterthought for Dannay and Lee, wasn't it? The Roman Hat Mystery has a memorable motive, but there's no attempt to foreshadow the details of it prior to the solution; the Queens figure out early on that the victim was probably blackmailing the murder, and what specific thing the murderer was being blackmailed over isn't important. The motive in The Dutch Shoe Mystery is narratively arbitrary. The murderer was acting on behalf of another character who she had no established connection to prior to the solution, but who it turns out she was secretly married to. The French Powder Mystery and The Greek Coffin Mystery integrate the motive into the plot a bit more, but in both books the psychological side of the story is focused on how the murderer thought of the methods used to cover up evidence, rather than on the motive for the murder.

Now on to Egyptian Cross Mystery. I've been spoiled on a certain aspect of the solution, but not the identity of the murderer. Apparently this one isn't as well-regarded as Greek Coffin, but I'm willing to give it a chance.

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Sep 25, 2019

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

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?

Xotl
May 28, 2001

Be seeing you.
I tried the Chinese Orange Mystery and found Queen profoundly annoying. I can't figure out why Dannay and Lee thought that this would make for interesting reading, the success of Vance notwithstanding. I guess it worked, but I can't imagine trying to wade into other books in the series.

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

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.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Xotl posted:

I tried the Chinese Orange Mystery and found Queen profoundly annoying. I can't figure out why Dannay and Lee thought that this would make for interesting reading, the success of Vance notwithstanding. I guess it worked, but I can't imagine trying to wade into other books in the series.

I've heard the later books tone Ellery's personality down somewhat. Also, the Greek Coffin Mystery has some funny bits where Dannay and Lee seem to be aware of how annoying he is.

quote:

Ellery sat down and straightway began to polish the lenses of his pince-nez. Alan watched him in a sort of absent irritation.

quote:

"Ah, love. I feel the quotations creeping upon me, but perhaps I'd better not..."

quote:

"That's what I get," groaned the Inspector, "for having sent my boy to college."

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

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

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

One odd thing just struck me; when I read old(er) British or French crime novels, the fact that convicted killers were murdered by the state gives some stories an evil atmosphere that probably most often wasn't the intention of the author at the time. However, that vibe doesn't exist when reading modern American crime fiction. I guess it's because one doesn't really see Americans as human beings; a "modern" society where institutional murder exist can't be really real.

3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Sep 26, 2019

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Jerry Cotton posted:

One odd thing just struck me; when I read old(er) British or French crime novels, the fact that convicted killers were murdered by the state gives some stories an evil atmosphere that probably most often wasn't the intention of the author at the time. However, that vibe doesn't exist when reading modern American crime fiction. I guess it's because one doesn't really see Americans as human beings; a "modern" society where institutional murder exist can't be really real.

Hmm. Van Dine’s Commandments imply that he thought a good mystery could only be set in a society with the death penalty. But Van Dine’s rules were often weird and arbitrary.

Edit: Not Van Dine. I misremembered. Maybe it was Chandler?

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 26, 2019

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Silver2195 posted:

Hmm. Van Dine’s Commandments imply that he thought a good mystery could only be set in a society with the death penalty. But Van Dine’s rules were often weird and arbitrary.

"There is no good crime fiction in the EU" is a take, I guess. Then again Van Dine died in the 30s.

e: I'm always at least a few years behind on modern literature but, based on what I've read, I could be persuaded to believe there's been a trend in European crime fiction towards stories with poetic execution, i.e. murderer(s) who end up dead anyway.

ee: I guess some people just call it poetic justice but I don't know about that.

3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Sep 26, 2019

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Silver2195 posted:

Hmm. Van Dine’s Commandments imply that he thought a good mystery could only be set in a society with the death penalty. But Van Dine’s rules were often weird and arbitrary.

Edit: Not Van Dine. I misremembered. Maybe it was Chandler?

I found the quote I was thinking of. It was actually R. Austin Freeman.

R. Austin Freeman, The Art of the Detective Story posted:

1. The problem is usually concerned with a crime, not because a crime is an attractive subject, but because it forms the most natural occasion for an investigation of the kind required. For the same reason — suitability — crime against the person is more commonly adopted than crime against property; and murder —actual, attempted or suspected — is usually the most suitable of all. For the villain is the player on the other side; and since we want him to be a desperate player, the stakes must be appropriately high. A capital crime gives us an adversary who is playing for his life, and who consequently furnishes the best subject for dramatic treatment.

The quote is also less absolute about it than I remembered, but Freeman does seem to think that people write murder mysteries specifically because murder is a capital crime. I don't really buy this, TBH - I think the focus on murder is because of the seriousness of its effects rather than the punishment, especially since murder mysteries frequently aren't particularly interested in the criminal's sentence anyway.

Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Sep 27, 2019

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Why do we want them to be a desperate player? How does that make them best for drama? What an odd thing to take as a given.

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Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Murder is visceral, and unlike most other physical crimes against a victim, can leave no witnesses, hence creating a puzzle which must be solved.

Assault, battery, grievous bodily harm, rape, etc., there's no mystery, because you have a witness, the victim.

If you're gonna write a puzzle story about a crime, it either has to be a murder, or there has to be no victim, or you have to use fairly contrived circumstances to avoid giving a multiplicity of clues (blind victim, etc.)

That said, I think a fair number of classic mysteries aren't murders at all. There are at least a few Sherlock Holmes stories that aren't. The Red-Headed League and The Adventure of the Naval Treaty, plus a bunch of others where the death is incidental and not the primary mystery (Six Napoleons, etc.) Some of it is just cozy mystery genre convention requiring a foul and most unnatural murther.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Sep 27, 2019

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