CB # 51- 52 Miscellany

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

I was super excited to get a new Pratchett novel out of the library. In this Discworld novel, Sam Vines goes on vacation with his family to their grand estate.  There are some great fish out of water moments, as well as the equality and human rights themes that are often appearing in the Vimes novels. It honestly wasn’t my favourite Discworld novel, but I still enjoyed.

Darwin’s Bastards edited by Zsuzsi Gartner

This is a great collection of Canadian speculative short stories about what the future will be like. The stories are a great mix of funny and sad. One is about a future where being a celebrity is illegal, and a musicaologist goes to secretly interview an eighty year old Feist. Chaos ensues. Another story is a mystery involving the  wealthy who now live on golf courses. There is a love story about a long distance relationship between people who cannot travel legally. The stories are all really inventive.

CB # 24-27 Mysteries!

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

The Spellmans Strike Again by Lisa Lutz

                I once read somewhere that librarians love to read mysteries. I think it has something to do with the fact that librarians love solving puzzles, since what is a reference question if it’s not a small mystery? Some of these are older, one is newer, and one is barely a mystery but I’m throwing it in just because.

Murder Must Advertise

                I have a deep and abiding love for Sayers.  I read her translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for class, and our professor informed us that she also wrote mysteries about the lovely Lord Peter Whimsy. Whimsy seems to be a dilettante but he’s really one of the greatest detectives of all time. One of the appeals of the Whimsy novels is that  Sayers  goes really in depth when writing her mysteries. Not only is it exciting and well written, but a huge amount of research must have been done, because you always learn something (not surprising coming from a translator of Dante). This one is set at an advertising house and was published in the 1930’s. There’s been an “accident”, and Whimsy is on the case, disguising himself by getting work at the agency. I learned a ton of about how ads were created and distributed, which makes sense since Sayers used to work in advertising. I also learned that cocaine has always been a hell of a drug, although I did find 1930”s drug slang confusing.

                Apparently this wasn’t Sayers favourite work, but I really enjoyed it. The mystery was interesting, Whimsy was divine and all the supporting characters were a delight. I also actually figured out part of the mystery myself, which made me feel super accomplished (sad but true).

Evil Under the Sun

                I reach for Agatha Christie novels when I want a quick read. I always fly right through them in an hour or so. It’s part of the appeal though, especially after you finish a slog of a book. Hercule Poirot is the detective in this one, and even though he’s not my favourite (Miss Marple is) he is still pretty wonderful. Vanity is always appealing in a character, but never in a real person. Also, he has a great mustache, which is always admirable.

                The mystery in this book revolves around a dead woman found on a private beach. Only people staying at the hotel could have access to it, so they’re all suspects. I find it hard to solve Christie’s novels, so I usually just read them for the thrill. She’s always using red herrings and I find it hard to ignore them. However, it was harder to ignore the 1940’s version of femininity that I was presented with. Christie regularly writes that way, but I found it really rubbed me the wrong way this time. Even so, it’s a good quick read.

Something Fresh

                To be honest, this is barely a mystery, but it was so funny that I have to recommend it. Especially since the last time I read a Wodehouse novel it was just offensive, and I need to believe that some good things did come out of Britain.

                Lord Elmworth is incredibly absentminded, and accidentally stole a priceless scarab from his hapless son’s future father-in-law. The millionaire father-in-law, J. Preston Peters, is incensed and decides that he’s going to  offer a reward if someone steals it back. Ashe is barely escaping poverty by writing trashy detective stories, and takes Peters up on the offer. Unfortunately for Ashe, his neighbor Joan Valentine has also heard about the reward from  Peters’ daughter Aline, and really needs to get her hands on some money. Then there’s the fact that Freddie, Elmworth’s son, has gambled too much and probably should be a confirmed bachelor since I don’t think he could make anyone happy. I’ve only mentioned the major characters, there are more and they are all ridiculous and therefore charming. This is a major comedy of errors with people running around Blandings Castle all night, falling in love, making huge mistakes, stealing scarabs and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

                Once again this is a quick read, but it’s funny and there is a bit of a mystery and a lot of  (hilarious) romance.

The Spellmans Strike Again

                One of these things is not like the others. The Spellman mysteries are set in present day USA, and not in first half of the 20^th century Britian. However, these books are funny and charming and they are mysteries, which is the connection I made to the others. This one is the fourth in the series.

                Izzy Spellman works as a private detective, which might sound interesting until you realize that it’s really a lot of watching people. If you’re wondering how she got into that work, it’s because it’s a family business. Everyone in the family, except for her brother David, works at the Spellman firm. It’s probably not best for family relations because they’ve become very used to surveillance and they spy on each other all the time. Izzy’s mother blackmails her with information from prom night so that Izzy will go on dates with lawyers. However, Izzy actually has a boyfriend, a bartender who doesn’t appreciate the fact that she absolutely has to go on dates with these men.

                Her younger sister Rae, wants nothing more than to be a detective, but her parents know that she’s practically a genius, and they want her to go to a renowned university. Oh, and there’s a mystery as well. A millionaire is losing his valet for a short period of time, and wants Izzy to figure out if the rest of his servants are stealing from him.

                The mystery is rarely the point in the Spellman books. It’s more about the kooky family arrangements, and the secrets that they’re keeping from each other. Once again, it’s a quick, fun read that’s really delightful.  I would suggest that you start with The Spellman Files, so that you get maximum enjoyment from the series.

CB # 19 One of Our Thursdays is Missing

One of our Thursdays is missing by Jasper Fforde

            I really enjoy the Thursday Next mysteries. Thursday Next lives in an alternative verison of our world, where cloning has allowed dodos to be pets, strong cheeses are traded on the black market and Wales is a socialist republic. Oh, and also it’s possible for a person to read her way into a book. I love the series as a whole. Fforde obviously love books, as seen by the way that Next can travel throughout BookWorld and meet all of her favourite characters. I love the allusions that occur throughout, they're always surprisingly funny. Some of them, especially in the earlier novels have caused me to pick a book up and read it myself. However, this (the 6^th novel by my count) was not his best work.

This novel is told not from the perspective of real world Thursday whom readers have come to know and love, but from the perspective of the written version of her, the one who is regularly read in the books about her adventures. These books are similar to what those who have read the series have read before, except that all the sections about Justification as well as the explanation of how Thursday read her way in, in the first place. The fictional Thursday is a bit of a hippie, and honestly, rather dull.   “Real” Thursday is simply more fun to read than written Thursday and a lot of the joy of the novel has been lost to me. Another factor is that  the geography of BookWorld has changed dramatically, as demonstrated in the prologue, when Thursday explains how BookWorld now consists of islands. This probably made the whole plot of the novel more reasonable to write, but it was sort of aggravating after being used to things.

There is a fun mystery in this novel, and there are still the fun allusions to other works, including War and Peace and Harry Potter fan fiction. If you haven’t read the Thursday Next books before, I definitely wouldn’t start here. Instead I’d read the first one, The Eyre Affair and continue on from there. For me at least, this one really completes the series, but it isn't a necessary read.

CB # 17 The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

            I do like ghost stories and I love horror. I like chill that runs down my spine as I read, but I don’t like to be scared after I finish a book. I don’t like the feeling when I’m lying in my bed that something is wrong. I don’t like feeling like closing my eyes is risky. To fight off this fact, I mainly read horror and ghost stories in the summer. The chill can’t stay for too long then, and the sun scares off all the murky thoughts from staying for too long.

I have to mention that I have loved the Sarah Waters novels that are set in the Victorian era, especially Fingersmith. It was thrilling and filled with crazy twists and turns. Waters seems to love exploring different genres each time she writes. I knew when I picked up The Little Stranger that it wasn’t set in the underbelly of the Victorian era, but instead in the grubby reality of post-WWII Britain. The gentry, or the upper class that has been falling apart since Jane Austen’s time is finally in the death throws, and part of the fear of the novel comes from the realisation that something real is finally dying off. The Little Stranger is set at dilapidated Hundreds Hall, where the matriarch and her two children are somehow still there. Roderick was injured in the war, and is having a hard time being the master of a falling-apart house. Caroline is a rather plain girl who doesn’t mind having the take care of the house almost completely by herself; in this time and place, she’s considered a spinster.

The story is told by Dr Faraday, an older bachelor who gets called down to the house one day to see to the maid, but gets entangled with the Ayres and the mysterious goings on in the house. Scorch marks are left in strange places, strange noises happen in the night, sweet and gentle dogs turn vicious and Roderick thinks that something is infecting the house and its inhabitants.

The horrors are not extreme, and Dr Faraday is able to rationalise away them all, but that’s not the point. The ghostly/ghastly occurrences appear to reflect the world outside of Hundreds. There is no place for the Ayres in the new society that is emerging after the war, and they realise it. The house just seems to reflect it back on them. Dr Faraday isn’t much help because he doesn’t seem to have any sense of self-reflection. His own mother used to work at the house, and he has always felt a strong connection to the house because of it. Instead of telling the Ayres to sell the place, he believes that things will work out in the end, without having any thoughts of how or why.

Now I just want to state my personal pet theory about the novel because I would love to know if anyone feels the same about it. Obviously, there is no one true answer, Waters likes to be ambiguous. I just had a feeling as I read that I need to sort through. So SPOILERS ahead after the jump

CB #8 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

 I love a good mystery, especially one by Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. They both wrote ridiculously British mysteries with oddball detectives, and if it’s one by Sayers, then you learn about something completely unrelated like the architecture of Oxford University, or about the complexities of bell ringing. Sayers translated Dante so I’m certain that she’s researched  the facts that she presents. I think that Bradley was aiming for something along the same lines (even if he's Canadian). This mystery was supposed to teach me about chemistry, stamps and a certain period in British history, and maybe it did. Mainly, I just wanted to punch Flavia in the face. However, since the police detective seemed to feel the same way, maybe that was the point.

  Sweetness is set in 1950’s Britain in a small town that is very like Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead. Flavia is the youngest of three daughters (the other two are Orphelia and Daphne), living in a grand old (decaying) house with her father. Her mother died in Flavia is extremely precocious. Her obsession is chemistry, poisons in fact, and she spends most of her time terrorizing and being terrorized by her sisters. One day, a dead bird ends up on their doorstep with a stamp in its beak. The next morning Flavia watches a man die in her garden. Now she has to solve the mystery, or her father could be charged with murder.

                I’m confused about how I feel about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed the 1950’s setting and I liked the writing style. There was a richness to it that I really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the way the sisters plot against each other. On the other hand, I found Flavia to be a bit too precocious. She felt unreal. I might have believed it if she was a bit older, or a bit younger and had a less strong vocabulary, but she felt like a character in a book, and not like a real person.  As well, I didn’t feel the urgency of the mystery, though I know that Flavia did. I guess that this is just a case of a disconnection to the book. I know lots of other people loved it, so it might just be me.

The Manual of Detection

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

Imagine a city with a rather strange detective agency. There are the watchers, who meet the clients, the detectives who investigate, and the clerks, who make the detective’s notes into tidy little reports. The clerks and the detectives are never allowed to meet.  As well there are the archives of the agency, including one of mysteries, one of solutions, and one of… well that’s sort of the secret at the heart of the book, so I can’t really tell you.

Charles Unwin is the clerk to the best detective in the agency, Travis Sivart, but when Sivart goes missing, Charles is promoted to detective and gets his office. Unwin really doesn’t want to be involved with this sort of thing. He feels that he’d be best as a clerk, so he decides that his first and last case should be to find Sivart and get him back on the job. Things aren’t that easy though. He’s dreamt that Sivart was in his bathtub and told him to look at chapter 18 of the manual, but it’s non-existent in his copy. He gets a secretary to help him with his work, but she’s narcoleptic and always falls asleep. He goes to meet his watcher, but discovers him dead. To top it all off, as Unwin investigates he discovers that Sivart’s three greatest cases: The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker, The Oldest Murdered Man and The Man Who Stole November Twelfth, were undeniably solved completely wrong.

The book is surreal and strange and it drew me into its odd little world. There’s a cast of wild characters including the separated Siamese twin  gangsters, Jasper and Josiah Rook,  who never sleep and Edwin Moore, the museum guard who tries to forget everything he hears.  There are also some incredibly beautiful odd moments, like crowds of sleepwalkers arriving at a grand mansion and gambling away their alarm clocks, and the man who types down everything everyone says. The revelations of the story make sense in the logic of this book, and the climax is genius and genuinely thrilling.

I have a soft spot in my heart for both surrealism and mysteries so I loved this book, especially Unwin and his discomfort with being a detective. His love for logic and reason has made him cut out parts of Sivart’s reports, so the cases have only one obvious answer. However, once he learns how wrong the solutions are, he realizes that he’s probably the only one with all the information, and that his need for reason has made him lose sight of the irrational nature of life. The overarching theme of the book is that mystery is necessary, and that logic can be restrictive and even wrong. The facts may speak for themselves, but they can be lying.