Imperfect Messengers of Murder Monday

[evelyn_b]

Flowers for the Judge was ok. Not great, not terrible. There are a couple of good moments and a lot of meandering. It seems as if Allingham gets in about one good scene and one interesting character per book, and even their dark secrets are a little weak. But her writing is still improving noticeably. Flowers for the Judge probably has about as

Comments

[therck]

I know I read a couple of Nicholas Blake books, many years ago, but I can't remember much about them. My main impression was that I really didn't understand what on earth was going on in the books either because I was missing a lot of details in the text or because those details weren't explicitly there and the text expected me to be able to fill them in. At any rate, I didn't keep trying.

[evelyn_b]

I think I know what you mean! There's an understatedness to the way characters and images are introduced that would be fine for a quiet novel of manners but is a little too colorless for readers who need to be able to remember key details in order to follow a fairly convoluted mystery plot.

Though actually, given the characterization so far, I'm not sure that quiet novel of manners would be that good, either.

And for someone who actually is a poet, Blake isn't really selling me on the importance of this guy's poetry. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to take the whole "protect the genius at all costs!" thing at least semi-seriously, but it's falling a little flat. Then again, I'm reading it right on the heels of The Horse's Mouth, which includes a really intense picture of artistic vision and drive, so I'm probably being a little unfair by comparison? And it's probably at least a little easier to convince someone that a character is a good painter than it is to convince them of the awesomeness of fictional poetry. You can invent the

[osprey_archer]

"But you're still a woman! What about your woman's heart!?!!?"

Hahahaha oh Star Trek, that is absolutely how it deals with women. It's so uneasy with having women on board the starship, actually doing work and stuff.

[evelyn_b]

I respect TOS for trying, because they really did try, and sometimes they even succeeded. But at the same time, they could have tried a lot harder than they did. There are so many competent women doing important jobs in space, and they all get wrist-grabbed sooner or later