Cherchez la Murder Monday
Traitor's Purse was ok! It's about at the level of Dancers in Mourning for entertainment value, with a little extra boost from Amanda and the amnesia, minus the annoyance of getting a slightly creepy encomium to dewy youth every time Amanda is on the page. Allingham's technical skills have improved tremendously since Sweet Danger, which used some similar elements with much less confidence or coherence. The amnesia plot forces a little more characterization on Campion and his friends than anything else so far has managed to do, is a reliable source of humor and pathos, and gives the book a much better shape than usual.
A.S. Byatt was much more impressed than I was. This essay makes me feel a little bad for not recognizing the genius of Traitor's Purse, but I guess the heart wants what it wants, or not, in this case. For me, the thriller plot registers as "decently plotted goofy fun" rather than "eerily prescient," which is probably partly a spot of Edmund Wilson-esque genre blindness, and partly just pigheaded indifference to spy stuff. Someone will manage to cure me of the latter eventually, but it is not this day.
Oh, and Campion is supposed to be "urbane," apparently? Could have fooled me.
Anyway, it was fun and decently well-made and uses its amnesia to good effect. Byatt's not wrong. I enjoyed it a little more than any previous Allingham book, but not quite as much as the most mediocre Christie (that I've encountered so far; I know there are mountains beyond these mountains). I'm still curious about what Allingham is going to do next, but should probably stop reading in this series for now.
I've tried to begin Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout, about six times now without success. Last week I came across a Rex Stout book with the tantalizing title Too Many Women, so I decided to ditch Fer-de-Lance for the time being and try that one. It's just as casually misogynist as you might expect, and a pretty entertaining murder mystery.
The head of a New York insurance company hires eccentric private investigator Nero Wolfe to find out if one of his employees was murdered in a hit and run, or if, as he suspects, it was only manslaughter. He suggests that Nero Wolfe take a job in his company to investigate, but Wolfe's whole shtick is that he doesn't leave his apartment, so that's a no go. So an irritating narrator, who is Wolfe's live-in assistant or something, goes undercover instead, and is predictably terrible at it, but it doesn't matter because the whole thing is sorted out with a lengthy confession in the end.
Nero Wolfe is a potentially fascinating character -- enormous, abrasive, finicky, spectacularly self-possessed -- but he is sadly missing from most of the book, which is overrun by the irritating narrator, Mr. Goodwin. Goodwin is excellent on the many minor indignities of working for and living with Wolfe, but tedious on every single other subject, and sometimes affects a bizarrely unconvincing tough-guy posture that feels like something a ten-year-old copied from a bunch of movies circa 1947. It shouldn't be unconvincing -- according to events in the book, he is a tough enough guy to win an unexpected fistfight, for example -- but it is. Maybe it's just an idiom I'm not used to? I did like the details of office and city life, whenever they were visible through the dense foliage of Mr. Goodwin's weak jokes.
I've been advised to try another book to see if Goodwin grows on me, or if I can at least stop disliking him enough to get to know Wolfe better, but I might leave it for another week.
A.S. Byatt was much more impressed than I was. This essay makes me feel a little bad for not recognizing the genius of Traitor's Purse, but I guess the heart wants what it wants, or not, in this case. For me, the thriller plot registers as "decently plotted goofy fun" rather than "eerily prescient," which is probably partly a spot of Edmund Wilson-esque genre blindness, and partly just pigheaded indifference to spy stuff. Someone will manage to cure me of the latter eventually, but it is not this day.
Oh, and Campion is supposed to be "urbane," apparently? Could have fooled me.
Anyway, it was fun and decently well-made and uses its amnesia to good effect. Byatt's not wrong. I enjoyed it a little more than any previous Allingham book, but not quite as much as the most mediocre Christie (that I've encountered so far; I know there are mountains beyond these mountains). I'm still curious about what Allingham is going to do next, but should probably stop reading in this series for now.
I've tried to begin Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout, about six times now without success. Last week I came across a Rex Stout book with the tantalizing title Too Many Women, so I decided to ditch Fer-de-Lance for the time being and try that one. It's just as casually misogynist as you might expect, and a pretty entertaining murder mystery.
The head of a New York insurance company hires eccentric private investigator Nero Wolfe to find out if one of his employees was murdered in a hit and run, or if, as he suspects, it was only manslaughter. He suggests that Nero Wolfe take a job in his company to investigate, but Wolfe's whole shtick is that he doesn't leave his apartment, so that's a no go. So an irritating narrator, who is Wolfe's live-in assistant or something, goes undercover instead, and is predictably terrible at it, but it doesn't matter because the whole thing is sorted out with a lengthy confession in the end.
Nero Wolfe is a potentially fascinating character -- enormous, abrasive, finicky, spectacularly self-possessed -- but he is sadly missing from most of the book, which is overrun by the irritating narrator, Mr. Goodwin. Goodwin is excellent on the many minor indignities of working for and living with Wolfe, but tedious on every single other subject, and sometimes affects a bizarrely unconvincing tough-guy posture that feels like something a ten-year-old copied from a bunch of movies circa 1947. It shouldn't be unconvincing -- according to events in the book, he is a tough enough guy to win an unexpected fistfight, for example -- but it is. Maybe it's just an idiom I'm not used to? I did like the details of office and city life, whenever they were visible through the dense foliage of Mr. Goodwin's weak jokes.
I've been advised to try another book to see if Goodwin grows on me, or if I can at least stop disliking him enough to get to know Wolfe better, but I might leave it for another week.