Sunday 17 February 2013

A three pipe problem by Julian Symons

Started: 12 feb 2013
Finished:16 feb 2013
Pages: 192

It's funny, but although I wouldn't normally think of something written in the mid 70s as being a " period piece"' this one feels that way.  Not so much because its so much of its time, as because it isn't.  The respect shown by the " little people" for the peer who hits them with his car, the bereaved middle class wife who's mostly shocked because she's now going to have to earn her own living, the seamy gambling club frequented by the actress who's no better than she should be....I honestly thought this one was written in the 1950s or 60s, and might have placed it earlier if the protaganist weren't an actor in a television series.

Interesting...did this seem old-fashioned when it was published?  Or was the daily texture of ordinary life so much different from now, so recently?  I suspect the latter, actually.  I was a kid in the 70s, but I remember our neighbours initially considering it shocking that my Mom was mowing the lawn after my parents separated in 1974.  Mowing was for males in suburbia.  And don't get me started on her struggle to get credit in her own name.

I sometimes think that the most disconcerting time travel might be a time trip to an era earlier in our own lives.

But that's kind of bye the bye.  What about this book?  As a mystery its unusual, as it features both a professional and an amateur detective.  And although they don't work together,  precisely, they are both essential to the solution of the mystery.  The twist in this one is that the actor-detective has an obsession with Sherlock Holmes, lives on Baker Street, and plays Holmes on TV.

Tuesday 12 February 2013

Watery Grave by Bruce Alexander

Started: 6 Feb. 2013
Finished: 9 Feb. 2013
Pages: 305

Okay, you know that feeling you get when you have chocolate for breakfast or chips for supper?  Oh so good, but after a while, really not so good?

I am on a junk book binge.  More or less.  Yes, this is another mystery.  And I can't even claim that I'm reading much else in the background for balance.  (Just Sibley's Birding Basics, and that's more of an ongoing study than a read-through kind of book).

But at least this is quite a good historical mystery, set in Georgian England.  The hero is an orphan boy who assists Sir John Fielding.  Fielding was the blind magistrate of Bow Street who founded and led the first professional English police force, the Bow Street Runners.

In this book Fielding and Jeremy encounter the rather more quixotic justice system of the Royal Navy as they attempt to assist in the investigation of a murder at sea.  The Navy comes off rather the worse than it does in Patrick O'Brian's books.

Saturday 9 February 2013

House of the Vestals by Steven Saylor

Started: 30 Jan. 2013
Finished: 5 Feb. 2013
Pages: 260

How to earn your living if you have a Classics degree?  Write mysteries, apparently. Steven Saylor,
Lindsey Davis, Ruth Downie....all three have published multiple books that have meticulous attention to historical detail, while also being entertaining stories with convincing characters.

House of the Vestals is a book of short stories, each of which illustrates some aspect of Roman culture.  For example,  "Saturnalia Silver" is the story of an investigation that happens during the mid-winter festival,  while "King Bee and Honey" involves a mysterious death linked to Roman bee-keeping practices.

How successful are they?  Frankly, they felt a bit didactic.  Because these stories are so short, the educational/informational content of each one seemed to overwhelm the character and the plot.  But perhaps I'm not the best judge:  in general I find short stories unsatisfying.  They're over before I can really engage with the characters, and they're too short to investigate their themes very extensively.  So I suppose I shouldn't single these out as being any less successful than the ordinary run of the genre.

Sunday 3 February 2013

Memory by Linda Nagata

Started: 25 January 2013
Finished: 30 January 2013
Pages: 416

"We have been so very fortunate to have so wild and reckless a daughter as Jubilee.  Obviously she was sent to teach us wisdom."   So says her mother as we begin to follow Jubilee's adventures in their very strange and artificial world.

The book is Jubilee's "hero's journey" but also an SF story of world exploration:   almost as if Ringworld were told from the point of view of one of its residents.  And what an odd world it is.   Perhaps three nights in ten a silver fog rises in the valleys, a fog that destroys every living thing it touches.  But the silver also leaves behind gifts:  veins of metals that can be mined, or follies like gazebos or machinery seemingly plucked at random out of history and deposited on low hilltops or valley bottoms.  The only protection from the silver are the kobold wells:  eruptions in the earth from which small mechanical insects crawl, each with a specific and catalogued purpose like exuding a chemical which repels the fog.

Learning about the world and its history is just as much the point of this novel as is Jubilee's quest, so I won't tell you more other than to say that the book is nicely done.  And that no pet puppies are harmed in the course of bringing the adventure to its conclusion.