One Corpse Too Many Monday
I finally finished One Corpse Too Many! I'm not 100% sure what I think of it. I liked it and admired it, but it was always a little at arm's length. It took me longer to get into than the first Agatha Christie book, and it still never completely fell into place for me.
I think I had certain genre expectations for it that it couldn't reasonably have met. The quick and sparkling snark-fountain prose style that I'm used to from the Golden Agers wouldn't suit the medieval setting, for example, while Ellis Peters' writing does, but I kept sort of subconsciously expecting it to move more like my idea of a murder mystery. What it's actually doing is interesting and balanced and thoughtful, but I kept finding that one part of my mind was admiring it while the other was getting bogged down.
Still, I liked it well enough that I'll probably pick up the next book sooner rather than later. Like I said earlier, Ellis Peters obviously loves and respects her medieval setting, and it's really fun to see the fusion of murder-mystery tropes with a decent simulacrum of medieval attitudes and practices (There is a trial by combat! It's suspenseful!) Plus, it has surprising and appealing side characters, a likable detective (who manages to be delightfully genre-typical despite being a twelfth-century monk), a pulpy plot and some fairly judicious infodumping, and it's genuinely well-written despite whatever was causing my weird attention-deficit problem.
I think I had certain genre expectations for it that it couldn't reasonably have met. The quick and sparkling snark-fountain prose style that I'm used to from the Golden Agers wouldn't suit the medieval setting, for example, while Ellis Peters' writing does, but I kept sort of subconsciously expecting it to move more like my idea of a murder mystery. What it's actually doing is interesting and balanced and thoughtful, but I kept finding that one part of my mind was admiring it while the other was getting bogged down.
Still, I liked it well enough that I'll probably pick up the next book sooner rather than later. Like I said earlier, Ellis Peters obviously loves and respects her medieval setting, and it's really fun to see the fusion of murder-mystery tropes with a decent simulacrum of medieval attitudes and practices (There is a trial by combat! It's suspenseful!) Plus, it has surprising and appealing side characters, a likable detective (who manages to be delightfully genre-typical despite being a twelfth-century monk), a pulpy plot and some fairly judicious infodumping, and it's genuinely well-written despite whatever was causing my weird attention-deficit problem.