Author: katenepveu

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Christie, Agatha: Murder in Mesopotamia (radio play)

Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia is a Hercule Poirot mystery with a non-Poirot first-person narrator, Amy Leatheran, a nurse engaged to keep a nervous archaeologist’s wife company. Her patient has been receiving threatening letters signed with her dead first husband’s name, and when she turns up dead, suspicion falls on the other members of the archaeological dig.

I’d read this one years ago, too young to realize how implausible the last twist of the ending is. Worse, it’s unnecessary; it would have been a much more interesting book without it. Well, at least Nurse Leatheran is a sensible person to spend time with.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (09) Treason’s Harbor (audio)

Patrick O’Brian’s Treason’s Harbor, the ninth book of the twenty-book Aubrey-Maturin series, appears to occupy a slightly complicated place in the development of the series. On one hand, I suspect it of being a duology with the prior book, The Ionian Mission, as it also concerns a political mission from the Mediterranean command—and it doesn’t take spoilers to know that the next book, The Far Side of the World, will be set elsewhere. On the other, I suspect it of setting up a longer plot arc, as it introduces elements that are unlikely to be resolved before the characters ship off to the far side of the world in the next book (unless O’Brian splits the action, which seems unlikely as I don’t believe he’s done so before without Jack or Stephen to follow).

This is a relatively land-based book, and a bit more lively than the previous one. It also has a second-hand recounting of Jack’s opinions on literature that’s nearly as good as his comments on Hamlet in The Surgeon’s Mate:

[Stephen] was writing now . . . the letter had begun the day before, when the Surprise, steering for Santa Maura . . . had been forced away by stress of weather, forced away almost to Ithaca. ‘To Ithaca itself, upon my word of honour. But would any amount of pleading on my part or on the part of all the literate members of the ship’s company induce that animal to bear away for the sacred spot? It would not. Certainly he had heard of Homer, and had indeed looked into Mr Pope’s version of his tale; but for aught he could make out, the fellow was no seaman. Admittedly Ulysses had no chronometer, and probably no sextant neither; but with no more than log, lead and lookout an officer-like commander would have found his way home from Troy a d—d sight quicker than that. Hanging about in port and philandering, that was what it amounted to, the vice of navies from the time of Noah to that of Nelson. And as for that tale of all his foremast hands being turned into swine, so that he could not win his anchor or make sail, why, he might tell that to the Marines. Besides, he behaved like a very mere scrub to Queen Dido — though on second thought perhaps that was the other cove, the pious Anchises. But it was all one: they were six of one and half a dozen of the other, neither seamen nor gentlemen, and both of ’em God d—d bores into the bargain. For his part he far preferred what Mowett and Rowan wrote; that was poetry a man could get his teeth into, and it was sound seamanship too; in any case he was here to conduct his convoy into Santa Maura, not to gape at curiosities.’

(Though Stephen changed his mind about including that passage in his letter.)

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Stout, Rex: (31) Champagne for One

In Rex Stout’s Champagne for One, Archie Goodwin attends a party and is warned that one of the attendees is carrying poison and might kill herself. The woman dies shortly after, and though Archie couldn’t prevent it, he can swear that he was watching her and she did not put the poison in her own glass. Since his evidence is all that turns a neat suicide into a messy murder, this naturally fails to endear him to everyone at the party (and some people outside it, too).

I re-read this over a few breakfasts in New York City last weekend, more because I had it on my Palm than because I’d chosen it as a New York-specific book. I rather like this one, as it has some fun detecting sequences. Others may have less favorable reactions to it, particularly if they find Archie annoyingly sexist: the dinner is attended by selected graduates of a charitable program for unmarried mothers (this is the 1950s), which gives him some opportunity to discuss the women—though, now that I think of it, not really much more than usual, unless they’re off in the wilds somewhere. (Archie doesn’t bother me; I never get the sense that he thinks less of women because he has opinions about their looks. I’m aware this opinion is not universal, however.)

As I recall, the A&E TV adapation of this book was also quite good.

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Lynch, Scott: (01) Lies of Locke Lamora, The (re-read)

I know, I know, I just read The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. The thing is, when I was paging through it looking for quotes, I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the characters, and that I’d given a bit short shrift to the descriptions. (I usually re-read a book I’ve liked immediately, to better appreciate how it all fits together; but I didn’t do that here, because I felt that I had a good grip on the plot and I didn’t have time.) So I decided to bring it into work and re-read it over lunch. I wasn’t planning to booklog this re-read, except partway through a question hit me:

Why isn’t this being compared to Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series?

Okay, yes, it’s told in third omniscient not First Person Smartass, and it’s thicker, but otherwise, I think it has pretty similar minerals and vitamins (TM Teresa Nielsen Hayden). First and most obvious, there’s the organized crime: both protagonists start out in a Mafia-like organization (and the morality of that involvement gets raised to varying extents). Then there’s the setting and the history: non-medievaloid with a proportionate history; sophisticated cities; vanished alien races with lasting influences—Camorr is filled with Elderglass structures, indestructible by human means. (The history of the Eldren is not central to the series, according to the author.) There are smart, quick, clever characters with backstories, who get into serious trouble and make it out by the skin of their teeth through wild improvisation. And the books themselves are self-contained pieces of a larger character arc.

If you read the Vlad books solely for the narrative games, you won’t get that with Lies; but otherwise, fans of the Vlad books could do much worse than to check this out.

[I wrote this when our DSL was out and the only thing I had access to was the blurbs on the jacket copy (which, as Chad points out, are possibly not likely to compare the book to a series from another publisher—two other publishers, even). Google tells me that at least three people have made the comparison: Library Journal, in a review behind a paywall; Kenneth Hite, in a comparison mostly about the voice (and slightly disfavorable to the Vlad Taltos series); and C.M. Morrison at Strange Horizons, who appears to have hated the book so much that she went out of her way to spoil the ENTIRE FLIPPIN’ THING in her review. Obviously I neither agree with nor recommend that last. But, since I went to the trouble of writing this, I’m posting it anyway. So there.]

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Vess, Charles: Book of Ballads, The

Another un-booklogged anthology, Charles Vess’s The Book of Ballads. This is a collection of thirteen ballads adapted as sequential art by Vess, mostly from scripts by writers other than himself; nine were originally published by his Green Man Press, two were published in other anthologies, and two are original to this collection.

The most important reaction I had to this collection, for purposes of you-the-reader, is that I’m more interested in a ballad retelling the more it does with the source, or the further it goes from it. So Neil Gaiman’s “The False Knight on the Road” and Delia Sherman’s “The Daemon Lover,” which as far as I can tell are entirely straight retellings, leave me cold. They’re very pretty, but I’m afraid that my main reaction is, “Why bother?”

(You may now commence jeering.)

(Another very straight retellings is Jeff Smith’s “The Galtee Farmer,” but I like the wonderfully comic art, so I’ll give it a pass.)

The rest of the stories work with the ballads in different ways. Sharyn McCrumb’s “Thomas the Rhymer” and Charles Vess’s “Alison Gross” extend the stories in time, but what interests me most about those ballads is motivations, not what-comes-next, and that’s not where the authors chose to go.

A number of the other retellings add or change motivations. Lee Smith’s “The Three Lovers” looks, at first, like a pretty straight retelling, made interesting by its presentation as a stage play (with the edges of the stage framing the panels), but it changes the killing insult from a racial slur to a broken heart. Charles de Lint’s “Sovay” and Jane Yolen’s “The Great Selchie of Sule Skerry” interpolate motivations: why dress up as a highwayman, why marry a gunner? Along the same lines, but much more extensive, are Midori Snyder’s “Barbara Allen” and Elaine Lee’s “Tam-Lin”. Of these, I really like Snyder’s story, which provides a complete backstory to explain why Barbara Allen scorns young William and laughs at his corpse. Lee reimagines Tam Lin as a Celtic sacrifice, bound to guard a well, who deceives Janet in order to be reborn as her child; however, I can’t get past the prose, which is set as blocks on the page facing a full-page illustration: “I am the chosen . . . the Holy Sacrifice! My blood nourishes, my life makes fertile, and my soul . . . guards this place. For such as me, there is no hope of rebirth!”

Two other retellings change or specifiy the settings. Jane Yolen’s “King Henry” specifies Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn as the main characters. And in what’s perhaps the most extensive re-imagining, Charles de Lint sets “Twa Corbies” in what’s almost certainly his imaginary present-day city of Newford: two crow girls listen to a dead homeless man recast his life story as the tale of an errant knight. (I believe the crow girls reappear in one of de Lint’s novels.) If you like de Lint’s work, you will certainly like this, as it’s entirely characteristic; I’m less enthusiastic about de Lint’s characteristic-ness than I once was, but I still enjoyed the story well enough.

And last, there’s my favorite, Emma Bull’s “The Black Fox.” This is actually a recent (1974) ballad by Graham Pratt, based on a fragment of a Yorkshire folktale; it tells of a fox hunt that’s not finding any foxes, until someone injudiciously remarks that they’d chase the Devil himself if he appeared. Out pops a black fox, and the chase is on. I like this one because in its sixteen pages, it has vivid characters, humor, sense of wonder, and an interesting little twist on the ballad. To my mind it’s the most satisfactory as a standalone story; the tension with the ballad is a bonus.

(“The Black Fox” was first printed in Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November; that might count as another un-booklogged anthology, except that I’m not sure if I ever finished it. I’ll have to fish it out and see.)

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Pratchett, Terry: (21) Jingo

I picked up my long-interrupted re-read of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, City Watch sub-series, with Jingo. As I suspected in reading Feet of Clay, Carrot’s POV is dropped completely in this book, though he’s still not perfect (“Mr. Spuddy,” anyone?). What particularly interested me were the little frictions between him and Vimes, or rather on Vimes’ part, regarding the running of the Watch; these are pretty thoroughly gone by Thud!, and I don’t recall whether they came to any explicit understanding or Carrot just grew up. I have The Fifth Elephant on audiobook—it’s the first of the Watch books that Stephen Briggs reads, and I far prefer his reading to Nigel Planer’s—and since I remember nothing about that book but werewolves and Russian sisters, I look forward to the listen.

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Edghill, Rosemary (ed.): Murder by Magic

Murder by Magic, an anthology edited by Rosemary Edghill, is a 2004 book that was never booklogged, but not inexplicably: anthologies are more work to booklog. But I’m trying to get rid of that very old stack of to-be-booklogged: behold my virtue. Or something.

As the cover says, this is an anthology of “crime and the supernatural,” and so the stories have two potential hurdles to jump. If they go for the detective end of crime, then they have to fit a reasonable mystery into a short story; and if they do anything remotely different or new with the supernatural elements, then they have to fit in world-building too. That’s a fair bit to ask for a story.

Of course, a story can take shortcuts. The opening story, Jennifer Roberson’s “Piece of Mind,” relies heavily on a real-life crime, which is precisely why I didn’t like it; it felt dated already in 2004, and hasn’t held up any better in the couple of years since. Lillian Stewart Carl’s “The Necromancer’s Apprentice” takes a similar approach by reimagining the death of Amy Robsart, which at least has stood the test of time as a mystery, though not one that much interests me.

Unfortunately, two of the stories stick out in my mind as badly needing some kind of shortcut, not having one, and thus collapsing under the weight of their world-building. It probably doesn’t help that the stories, Susan R. Matthews’ “Snake in the Grass” and M.J. Hamilton’s “Double Jeopardy,” were back-to-back in the anthology.

At least four of the stories are identifiable as part of an ongoing series, though this is only a problem for one of them. Debra Doyle’s “A Death in the Working” is set in the Mageworlds universe, and is a translation of a story from one culture, by a scholar from another, complete with snarky footnotes. The scholar is a minor character in Starpilot’s Grave, but you don’t need to know the series at all to enjoy the story; indeed, the snarky footnotes are a handy means of exposition. Mercedes Lackey’s “Grey Eminence” is part of a series of short stories about Victorian girls with psychic abilities (The Wizard of London is partly a fixup of the stories); it also stands alone reasonably well, though its exposition is much less graceful. Teresa Edgerton’s “Captured in Silver” is “set in an obscure corner” of The Queen’s Necklace universe, according to the introductory note; I haven’t read the book, but the story is elegant, decadent, and cynical. The fourth and least successful is Laura Anne Gilman’s “Overrush”, which is set in her “Retrievers” universe, but doesn’t have anything like a conclusion. On re-reading, I wonder if that was deliberate, setup or added context for the second book; but either way, it doesn’t work for me.

Susan Krinard’s “Murder Entailed” doesn’t appear to be part of a series, but I think it could be if the author were inclined. It does a quite nice job exploring an interesting magical system: magic is entailed, and passes at the bearer’s choice to the same-sex heir of their choosing. (Their other children are left with Residual gifts, small touches of magic.) The entailed magic is of a particular type: fire, sensing illness, water-summoning, and so forth. I quite like the idea, and I’d be pleased to read more in this world.

I don’t know that there’s more to be written after Laura Resnick’s “Doppelgangster,” but this light and funny tale of mysterious deaths among the Mafia reminds me how much I enjoyed her Disappearing Nightly (unfortunately, the sequel is currently lacking a publisher, possibly a victim of the Great Luna Downsizing). Anyway, the story is good fun and worth reading if you want to get a feel for Resnick’s lighter style.

And completing a theme, Diane Duane’s “Cold Case” isn’t obviously within any of her established universes, but it is so deeply characteristic in its themes and concerns that it almost might as well be. This isn’t a criticism; I liked the story very much. It’s just remarkable how it flashes “Diane Duane” from a mile off, as it were.

I’ve run out of themes, and I’ve also run out of stories I had something to say about: the rest were readable and, well, unremarkable. There is a pretty wide range of settings and approaches represented in the anthology, so if you’ve a taste for a little crime with your fantasy, check it out.

(And in the meantime: admire the new tags for authors, courtesy of MT 3.3! We believe in a plethora of browsing options here at Outside of a Dog.)

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Christie, Agatha: Appointment with Death (play)

I’d listened to Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death as a radio play and been badly puzzled by the ending, because I thought the ending was different. A commenter going by “creepygirl” pointed out that Christie adapted the novel for stage, removing Poirot and changing the ending to what I remembered (so, err, don’t read the ROT13’ed text in that post if you don’t want to know how the play comes out). I re-read the play today over lunch just to see how it compared.

I agree that the play’s solution is better; I find it more emotionally satisfying and less snobbish about class, or at least less suspectible to a reading that it was snobbish about class. In fact, the play takes a class thing that was annoying me and turns it neatly on its head, which I appreciated. The proof of the mystery is a little lame, but on the whole I do think Christie’s rewrite improved the story (which is not always the case, e.g., And Then There Were None).

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Lynch, Scott: (01) Lies of Locke Lamora, The

The Lies of Locke Lamora is Scott Lynch’s first novel and the standalone beginning to the “Gentlemen Bastard” sequence. Locke Lamora is a person, not a place (as for some reason I first thought); he is a con artist extraordinaire and the leader of the aforementioned Gentlemen Bastards.

I love capers, especially capers with distinctive narrative voices and good banter. The opening of the Prologue caught me right away:

At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-Seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro, desperately hoping to sell him the Lamora boy.

“Have I got a deal for you!” the Thiefmaker began, perhaps inauspiciously.

“Another deal like Calo and Galdo, maybe?” said the Eyeless Priest. “I’ve still got my hands full training those giggling idiots out of every bad habit they picked up from you and replacing them with the bad habits I need.”

“Now, Chains.” The Thiefmaker shrugged. “I told you they were shit-flinging little monkeys when we made the deal, and it was good enough for you at the—”

“Or maybe another deal like Sabetha?” The priest’s richer, deeper voice chased the Thiefmaker’s objection right back down his throat. “I’m sure you recall charging me everything but my dead mother’s kneecaps for her. I should’ve paid you in copper and watched you spring a rupture trying to haul it all away.”

“Ahhhhhh, but she was special, and this boy, this boy, he’s special too,” said the Thiefmaker. “Everything you asked me to look for after I sold you Calo and Galdo. Everything you liked so much about Sabetha! He’s Camorri, but a mongrel. Therin and Vadran blood with neither dominant. He’s got larceny in his heart, sure as the sea’s full of fish piss. And I can even let you have him at a . . . a discount.”

The Eyeless Priest spent a long moment mulling this. “You’ll pardon me,” he finally said, “if the suggestion that the minuscule black turnip you call a heart is suddenly overflowing with generosity toward me leaves me wanting to arm myself and put my back against a wall.”

The Thiefmaker tried to let a vaguely sincere expression scurry onto his face, where it froze in evident discomfort. His shrug was theatrically casual. “There are, ah, problems with the boy, yes. But the problems are unique to his situation in my care. Were he under yours, I’m sure they would, ahhhh, vanish.”

“Oh. You have a magic boy. Why didn’t you say so?” The priest scratched his forehead beneath the white silk blindfold that covered his eyes. “Magnificent. I’ll plant him in the fucking ground and grow a vine to an enchanted land beyond the clouds.”

“Ahhhhh! I’ve tasted that flavor of sarcasm before, Chains.” The Thiefmaker gave an arthritic mock bow. “That’s the sort you spit out as a bargaining posture. Is it really so hard to say that you’re interested?”

The Eyeless Priest shrugged. “Suppose Calo, Galdo, and Sabetha might be able to use a new playmate, or at least a new punching bag. Suppose I’m willing to spend about three coppers and a bowl of piss for a mystery boy. But you’ll still need to convince me that you deserve the bowl of piss. What’s the boy’s problem?”

“His problem,” said the Thiefmaker, “is that if I can’t sell him to you, I’m going to have to slit his throat and throw him in the bay. And I’m going to have to do it tonight.”

The Prologue begins the backstory thread of the novel, Lamora’s training as a thief. It’s interwoven with the present-day thread, in which the Gentlemen Bastards are running a long con on some nobility—in quiet defiance of the Secret Peace that protects the nobility from being robbed, an agreement made between the city’s Duke and the Capa who took over all the city’s gangs some years ago.

“My name,” said Locke Lamora, is “Lukas Fehrwright.” The voice was clipped and precise, scrubbed of Locke’s natural inflections. He layered the hint of a harsh Vadran accent atop a slight mangling of his native Camorri dialect like a barkeep mixing liquors. “I am wearing clothes that will be full of sweat in several minutes. I am dumb enough to walk around Camorr without a blade of any sort. Also,” he said with a hint of ponderous regret, “I am entirely fictional.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Master Fehrwright,” said Calo, “but at least we’ve got your boat and your horse ready for your grand excursion.”

(Just because it made me laugh when I skimmed the page looking for something else.)

But an ominous dark shape is ghosting overhead as the Gentlemen Bastards run their con; and in the wider world, someone known only as the Gray King is assassinating the leaders of the city’s sub-gangs, who ought to be untouchable.

The pacing of the book is off, with the present-day thread being somewhat too slow at the beginning (we don’t hear of the Gray King until about a hundred pages in, I believe) and somewhat too fast at the end. When I was reading, I didn’t know that it was meant to be a standalone volume in a larger series, so when Chad asked me how things were going, I said, “Well, I can see why there’s going to be more of them, because [major bad thing] just happened,” meaning that many more pages would be needed to overcome [major bad thing]. He exercised great restraint and said not a thing, but obviously I was quite wrong. I was hooked enough at the beginning to not mind the initial slowness, and also I read it all in one gulp anyway, but those who read over longer periods should keep it in mind. Things do speed up, oh yes indeed.

I’m also not entirely happy with the body count of the book, but I really shouldn’t say any more about that. I really enjoyed the capers and the banter, the hints of backstory yet to be revealed for Locke, and the non-medievaloid setting of the city of Camorr: the setting, like the book, has flash and grit in equally-convincing and appropriate measure, and it’s a refreshing, impressive, and entertaining mix. I quite look forward to the next one.

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