Miss Marple: the Complete Short Stories

I love this collection. I could read it every week! I'm particularly fond of the first set, generally known as the Tuesday Club Murders or Thirteen Problems. These short stories are a great introduction to Miss Marple and the way in which she goes about solving crimes (the well-known village parallel). The writing is particularly evocative and you can clearly picture a white-haired woman carefully counting stitches in the corner, listening to everything being said and quietly solving the mystery without anyone noticing.

In the Teeth of the Evidence

This is a set of short stories. The first two, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey are pretty good. The next five or six feature a travelling salesman named Montague Egg. They're enjoyable but nothing special. The rest of them feature no one in particular and are frequently nothing more than misdirection masquerading as a mystery. It was a fun, quick read, but not something I'd recommend.

Seven Cities of Gold

I borrowed this from Confluence recently. It's a beautifully written book with a lyrical quality that one doesn't often find in prose.

I jumped straight in to the story, skipping the explanatory note at the beginning. Possibly I would have found the story easier to understand in terms of geopolitical stuff if I had read it first. Also, I would have liked for this book to have had a map so that I had a clearer idea of the geography and whereabouts events were taking place. As it is I found the story fairly easy to follow without it, though there were a number of questions I had.

This is not the sort of book that ties everything up neatly for the reader. This is the sort of book that leaves you with questions. Nagging thoughts that simmer in the back of your brain as you try to work out just what exactly it is that things are supposed to mean and whether or not you got all the nuances that you were supposed to.

If you don't like to think about things, especially those complicated things that make people uncomfortable, then this is not a book you should read.

Hercule Poirot

I do love my detective stories (I blame Enid Blyton). Naturally one turns to Agatha Christie and her most famous detective, Poirot. I'm always amused by Christie's apparent dislike of the character and I can't say I blame her. I love to read them, but I would hate to be tied to writing such a character for 59 years (first story written 1916, last 1975), though, of course, I haven't read them all yet.

What I particularly like about these books is that the information is (usually) all available to the reader. This gives one the opportunity of figuring out the mystery themselves (the lack of which is the basis for my otherwise unexplainable dislike of Sherlock Holmes). Some people have complained that they can't read Christie's books because of the sheer number of supporting characters (read: suspects) in each book. I have never had a problem with that. What I do occasionally have a problem with is the utter ridiculousness of the plots. Some of them are reasonable, decent murder mysteries. Some of them, like The Big Four, which I read last night, are utterly ridiculous. While it doesn't really affect my enjoyment at the time, it does mean that I'm less likely to reread the book in question. It affects my memory of the worth of the book.

What this comes down to is: I really enjoy detective stories and I really enjoy the majority of Christie's Poirot books. I particularly like the fact that the books are set at the time she was writing and so move through the aftermath of the Great War to the 70s. I also enjoy the fact that these books do not contain graphic depictions of sex and violence, as some recent series do (I'm thinking Stephanie Plum and In Death). While I enjoy those series, that's not always what I'm in the mood for and I particularly enjoy having the choice.

Love in a Fallen City

This is a lovely book that I picked up at a Wordsworth book sale shortly after seeing Lust, Caution (a movie and experience I enjoyed greatly) with theOtherAmy. This is a set of short stories written by the same author. It's a book of beautifully written stories set in China in the early 20th century. I don't know much about translating works into English, but this seemed very well done as it kept the lyrical quality that I imagine the original Chinese had. It seems terribly wrong to call it 'Chinese' but I don't know enough about the Chinese languages to be more specific.

These are beautifully written, lyrical tales that evoke an atmosphere of a time I never knew. Read them if you can.

Father Brown

I imagine you're all astonished that with my constant posting, there was not a single thing written here yesterday. I am less surprised, as I know that I went to CAFDA yesterday. I must admit that it was the hardest time I've ever had spending money there. Usually the books pile up within minutes, but it took me about half an hour to find the first one. The advantage of this, of course, is that I pick up all sorts of unlikely things. I will say that I found a lovely (though unillustrated) copy of Fellowship of the Ring, so I can now read LotR in the bath quite happily until I get to Return of the King.

I picked up two volumes of short stories, which I do very rarely. The only other volume of short stories I own is a collection of Agatha Christie's Poirot from before he had full length novels of his own (I'll review those sometime). These were written by GK Chesterton, who I thought only wrote non-fiction and religious non-fiction at that (I have a biography he wrote of St Francis that I'll review sometime as well). These are stories of a Catholic priest who solves mysteries/crimes. They are somewhat reminiscent of Cadfael, except that the similarities end with the Catholic crime-solver bit. Father Brown lives in the 19th Century and drifts slowly and dreamily through mysteries solving them through intuition and a knowledge of human nature. He reminds me a great deal of Hercule Poirot, who I was particularly reminded of when I saw the full name of a major character - the Frenchman Hercule Flambeau. Rather makes you wonder about Christie's inspiration.

There are lovely, simple detective stories without the gory violence we've become accustomed to these days. A break for those tired of the violent descriptions so prevalent in modern detective fiction. Also, a good introduction to the genre for younger readers, as it combines crime and occasionally murder with a detective without too descriptive violence, no sex and less intricate plotting and fewer characters than Poirot.