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Post by mikef6 on Mar 4, 2024 20:03:15 GMT
Not really "reading" this one, it is more of a browse but am enjoying what I'm finding. ![](https://d3myrwj42s63no.cloudfront.net/300/978/125/007/116/3/9781250071163.jpg)
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Post by Captain Spencer on Mar 5, 2024 2:36:37 GMT
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Post by theravenking on Mar 5, 2024 9:28:22 GMT
You have been reading some great Golden Age authors lately. In 2020 during the shut-down I read some Ruth Rendell, Ellery Queen, Freeman Wills Croft, and Peter Lovesey, but some of the editions I bought from Amazon were print-on-demand copies which were cheaply made with print almost too small - and very little white space on the page - to read, but would like to find library copies somewhere. I would love that Fredric Brown. Happy reading. Unfortunately this is not the copy of Night Of The Jabberwock I own and read, it's just a cover image I found on Goodreads and liked. In fact I read the book in French, since I couldn't get hold of a decent quality English language copy. I had just recently read Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in French too, so it seemed somewhat fitting.
I believe the works of Freeman Wills Croft, and Peter Lovesey have been re-issued in modern paperbacks. Ruth Rendell is an author I read a lot when I was younger.
I was inspired by all the classic crime blogs which have been starting to pop up over the web from the 2010s on which inspired me to read more Golden Age authors. The British Library Crime Classsics has also republished quite a few mostly obscure writers from that era, but also more popular ones like John Dickson Carr.
Thank You and happy reading to you too.
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Post by CrepedCrusader on Mar 5, 2024 16:37:08 GMT
Bone White by Ronald Malfi ![](https://files.catbox.moe/7umu7c.jpg)
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Post by sabrias on Mar 8, 2024 21:21:44 GMT
This Other Eden by Paul Harding ![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71NpSWqt3kL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg)
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Post by theravenking on Mar 14, 2024 14:53:40 GMT
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Post by CrepedCrusader on Mar 14, 2024 20:50:49 GMT
December Park by Ronald Malfi
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 16, 2024 17:37:14 GMT
Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971). I’m a big Macdonald fan, but this is not one of his best: Some of the symbolism is a bit ham-fisted (the fire that tears through lives as sleuth Lew Archer’s investigation does, the son with daddy issues who ends up literally underground), and he’s just plain using too many similes, to the extent that the book almost comes off as if he’s writing a parody of himself. (This happens, I know, to a lot of authors later in their careers.) I’m not sure I even understand what he’s saying with this one: “Her body fell into a beautiful still pose, but her faintly pinched blond face seemed bored with it, or resentful, like an angel living with an animal.” Presumably she’s supposed to be the angel and her husband the animal, but does boredom or resentfulness suggest the angelic? And are we expected to know that an angel would be bored or resentful living with an animal? And—wait, what are we even talking about? That may seem nitpicky, but Macdonald has quite a few lines like that throughout the book—and, worse, he puts them close together, making them more conspicuous. Also, the plot gets almost as contortuplicated as the angel-animal line. I wanted a chart to keep track of who knew whom when, who was whose parent, ad seemingly infinitum. Worse, I found the twist ending somewhat underwhelming: Macdonald was always skilled at misdirecting the reader’s attention away from the killer, but I was expecting one of those breathtaking moments when all the plot points suddenly come together and the confusions suddenly make sense, as in his The Galton Case and—especially, chillingly— The Chill. That said, I like even subpar Macdonald. I always think that he and I have a lot in common, at least psychologically, and end up wondering irrationally if that has anything to do with our both being Sagittarians. (I recently saw this brief interview/documentary on him, and in it he oddly reminded me of my late grandfather, whom I loved dearly and who was also a Sagittarian. I don’t think my grandfather ever read Macdonald, though I think he would have liked him.) I find his worldview appealing, despite all the Freudian horrors and ancestral sins that fester in his books, and even somehow hopeful. And he still has those moments when he shows off just how good a writer he usually is.One more thing. Halfway through the book Archer finds a letter from a minister. If the victim followed the minister’s advice, Macdonald suggests, most of the tragedies in the book would have been avoided. I found this interesting: Everyone says Archer functions as a therapist as much as a detective, in part because Macdonald wears his interest in psychoanalysis on his sleeve, but also Archer is something of a priest. He both gives advice and, despite his personal failings, actively restores order to a sinful world (“all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” to use a reference that Macdonald probably would have liked). I wonder if someone has looked into Macdonald’s religiosity.
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Post by theravenking on Mar 17, 2024 17:06:49 GMT
Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971). I’m a big Macdonald fan, but this is not one of his best: Some of the symbolism is a bit ham-fisted (the fire that tears through lives as sleuth Lew Archer’s investigation does, the son with daddy issues who ends up literally underground), and he’s just plain using too many similes, to the extent that the book almost comes off as if he’s writing a parody of himself. (This happens, I know, to a lot of authors later in their careers.) I’m not sure I even understand what he’s saying with this one: “Her body fell into a beautiful still pose, but her faintly pinched blond face seemed bored with it, or resentful, like an angel living with an animal.” Presumably she’s supposed to be the angel and her husband the animal, but does boredom or resentfulness suggest the angelic? And are we expected to know that an angel would be bored or resentful living with an animal? And—wait, what are we even talking about? That may seem nitpicky, but Macdonald has quite a few lines like that throughout the book—and, worse, he puts them close together, making them more conspicuous. Also, the plot gets almost as contortuplicated as the angel-animal line. I wanted a chart to keep track of who knew whom when, who was whose parent, ad seemingly infinitum. Worse, I found the twist ending somewhat underwhelming: Macdonald was always skilled at misdirecting the reader’s attention away from the killer, but I was expecting one of those breathtaking moments when all the plot points suddenly come together and the confusions suddenly make sense, as in his The Galton Case and—especially, chillingly— The Chill. That said, I like even subpar Macdonald. I always think that he and I have a lot in common, at least psychologically, and end up wondering illogically if that has anything to do with our both being Sagittarians. (I recently saw this brief interview/documentary on him, and in it he oddly reminded me of my late grandfather, whom I loved dearly and who was also a Sagittarian. I don’t think my grandfather ever read Macdonald, though I think he would have liked him.) I find his worldview appealing, despite all the Freudian horrors and ancestral sins that fester in his books, and even somehow hopeful. And he still has those moments when he shows off just how good a writer he usually is.One more thing. Halfway through the book Archer finds a letter from a minister. If the victim followed the minister’s advice, Macdonald suggests, most of the tragedies in the book would have been avoided. I found this interesting: Everyone says Archer functions as a therapist as much as a detective, in part because Macdonald wears his interest in psychoanalysis on his sleeve, but also Archer is something of a priest. He both gives advice and, despite his personal failings, actively restores order to a sinful world (“all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” to use a reference that Macdonald probably would have liked). I wonder if someone has looked into Macdonald’s religiosity. I don't know whether the documentary touched on this, but towards the end of his life Macdonald was suffering from Alzheimer's disease which might've affected his writing negatively.
Archer as a priest would make sense, since his personal philosophy seems to be turning the other cheek when he's attacked.
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 17, 2024 17:21:49 GMT
I don't know whether the documentary touched on this, but towards the end of his life Macdonald was suffering from Alzheimer's disease which might've affected his writing negatively. I knew this, though I don’t know when the Alzheimer’s first started affecting him.Good point. In this book he kinda came off like Father Brown!
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Post by CrepedCrusader on Mar 20, 2024 2:19:48 GMT
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Post by theravenking on Mar 20, 2024 11:20:35 GMT
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Post by thekindercarebear on Mar 23, 2024 2:00:45 GMT
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Post by CrepedCrusader on Mar 24, 2024 23:56:21 GMT
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens ![](https://files.catbox.moe/dp2j8n.jpg)
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 26, 2024 22:22:27 GMT
More Ross Macdonald: The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962). ![“](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/TheZebraStripedHearse.jpg) I’ve got some nitpicks about this, but I liked it a lot more than The Underground Man. The ending is one of “aha!” moments that I was hoping for—in fact, it’s one of those mystery moments where the linchpin the story is based on turns out to be the opposite of what we expected. Funnily enough, it’s a bit like an Ellery Queen or Christianna Brand, with the false solution followed rapid-fire by the real one, which the detective only discovers by happenstance. Macdonald’s writing is at its best, without the strain in Underground Man’s similes. Here he’s got a punch-in-the-gut passage about gambling that the late great critic Terry Teachout highlighted. I also particularly liked this:And this:And:Not to mention:Which points to the short line that sums up all Macdonald:I wonder, on a nerdy note, about Macdonald and cluing. His plots make sense, which he intended as a distinction between his books and Raymond Chandler’s, and have the inevitability of Greek tragedy, but I wonder if here he’d be considered “fair-play” by, say, John Dickson Carr’s standards. He may well be; it’s difficult to gauge because, unlike Carr or Queen, he doesn’t cross-reference clues at the end. Anyway, I enjoyed The Zebra-Striped Hearse, even if I can’t figure out what Macdonald’s trying to say with that image (Lew Archer sees a real zebra-striped hearse throughout the book, and it ends up providing a clue—but surely Macdonald is trying to say something with it). I’ve got a Muriel Spark book out of the library and intend to finish that, and then I’ve got one more Macdonald in this collection I have out. By the way, some more evidence for my Archer-as-priest theory. Maybe sorta-kinda a spoiler, though I won’t mention the names: {Spoiler}
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