Ah, the wild days of the tasty two inches
I'm not sure what put me in mind of this execrable book, but this morning the novel Seventh Avenue Murder by Liza Bennett popped into my head.
This book was a paperback original from Harlequin back when it had started it's Worldwide Mystery Library imprint somewhere around 1989/1990. At that point I was in college and had picked it up free from the bookstore I was working at as it had come in as used. The cover quote from some reviewer was a classic non-compliment ("Liza Bennett is strong on story-telling") so I figured I'd be in for some really awful writing fun.
Boy, was I! Holy crap, but this book was AWFUL! Besides the nauseatingly bad descriptions of people ("She was swathed in a pomegranate pantsuit..."), the obnoxious dialogue and the inane characters for whom a terrible tragedy was when they arrived in Paris too late to shop for the day, the plot made no sense.
For example, our heroine Peg Goodenough (a clue right there that this was not going to be classic literature) is convinced that a woman was murdered because the suicide note left on the mirror in the hotel room in Paris was written in a lipstick that was not her shade!!
You're probably wondering why I remember this book so well. Well, it rapidly became a source of entertainment in our suite during junior year. We'd occasionally pick it up, quote from the more ridiculous passages, laugh at it, give hilarious dramatic readings of the "kissing...smearing..." scene and then put it back on the shelf. The only other books we tended to do this with was the Gor series, so that ought to tell you something.
Man, I miss those days. Maybe I should host a bad writing party and have people bring over the worst published passages they can find.
This book was a paperback original from Harlequin back when it had started it's Worldwide Mystery Library imprint somewhere around 1989/1990. At that point I was in college and had picked it up free from the bookstore I was working at as it had come in as used. The cover quote from some reviewer was a classic non-compliment ("Liza Bennett is strong on story-telling") so I figured I'd be in for some really awful writing fun.
Boy, was I! Holy crap, but this book was AWFUL! Besides the nauseatingly bad descriptions of people ("She was swathed in a pomegranate pantsuit..."), the obnoxious dialogue and the inane characters for whom a terrible tragedy was when they arrived in Paris too late to shop for the day, the plot made no sense.
For example, our heroine Peg Goodenough (a clue right there that this was not going to be classic literature) is convinced that a woman was murdered because the suicide note left on the mirror in the hotel room in Paris was written in a lipstick that was not her shade!!
You're probably wondering why I remember this book so well. Well, it rapidly became a source of entertainment in our suite during junior year. We'd occasionally pick it up, quote from the more ridiculous passages, laugh at it, give hilarious dramatic readings of the "kissing...smearing..." scene and then put it back on the shelf. The only other books we tended to do this with was the Gor series, so that ought to tell you something.
Man, I miss those days. Maybe I should host a bad writing party and have people bring over the worst published passages they can find.