Most people, when they're taking a month's break, do something that isn't related to their job.
Brandon Sanderson, apparently, writes a Hugo-winning nMost people, when they're taking a month's break, do something that isn't related to their job.
Brandon Sanderson, apparently, writes a Hugo-winning novella.
At novella length, the worldbuilding and the magic system are a bit thinner than his usual, not very far beyond the initial inspiration of looking at some East Asian seals in a museum and thinking (in the way Sanderson does), "What if that was a magic system?" The main character uses such seals to "Forge" - that is, to alter the essence of something in a way that is plausible if it had a different history. She's been caught stealing from the Imperial Palace, fortunately at the exact same time as the emperor has been brain-damaged in an assassination attempt and can be expected to spend 90 days out of the public eye in mourning for his assassinated wife, and the faction that backs and largely controls the emperor want her to do the impossible - Forge his missing soul, so that he can continue ruling and they won't be displaced from power.
The idea that she achieves this (and so much else) in 90 days when it should take years is made somewhat more plausible by the knowledge that the author wrote this book in a month (though he did have plenty of time to revise and improve it). As a novella, it's inevitably somewhat linear, though it does have some clever structural features which are fully visible only when you reach the end. The protagonist is clever and skilled, and I do enjoy watching a clever, skilled person do what they do so well (and here I mean the author as well as the protagonist).
The antagonist still feels like a threat, even though we know, at a meta level, that the protagonist will win out; the way in which she wins out is clever and, in its way, amusing, though this isn't as humourous a book as many of Sanderson's. The East Asian feel is present, though not as in depth as a novel would make it.
Given the length Sanderson usually writes at, a novella is his equivalent of a short story from a more normal writer, and it should probably be judged as such rather than compared to his novels directly. Considered as a short story, it has everything it needs to succeed....more
Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will alContinuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.
All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.
If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)
Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.
The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.
Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.
Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).
The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.
There is one odd error: early in the book, Lord St. George (Peter's nephew) is referred to as the "uncle" of Peter and Harriet's children and the children of his Aunt Mary, when he is in fact their older cousin. Near the end of the book, he's correctly referred to as their cousin.
I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely....more
Despite references to the atom bomb and Eric Johnston (president of the MPAA at the time of original publication, 1948), this is clearly set in WodehoDespite references to the atom bomb and Eric Johnston (president of the MPAA at the time of original publication, 1948), this is clearly set in Wodehouse's eternal interwar period for all practical purposes, and the characters have not noticeably aged from their pre-war appearances. In fact, it remixes so much of his classic material that any Wodehouse fan will recognize most of the elements immediately. There's an uncle, to start with (Uncle Fred/Lord Ickenham), one of Plum's genial, eccentric old buffers who ought not to be let out without a keeper; an ill-tempered retired British civil servant; a determined, managing young woman, daughter of the civil servant, to whom a hopeless poop (Lord Ickenham's nephew Pongo Twistleton) is engaged; a bright young thing, to whom the hopeless poop ought to be engaged; a large Man of Action type, to whom the managing young woman ought to be engaged; a ponderously interfering policeman; a country house; a Maguffin which ought, by all principles of natural justice but against the actual letter of the law, to be stolen from said country house; and a complicated plan to do so that involves people impersonating other people and sneaking about at night, and that is foiled by one of the many coincidences which abound in the plot (most of them aimed at getting the cast together in one place).
Is this a criticism? No, it's not, because as Wodehouse fans we love these elements, and will read them over and over in fresh combinations, all the while distracted by the sparkling of the language.
One element that I don't remember seeing before is the sympathetic treatment of a middle-aged woman, the wife of the grumpy retired civil servant and mother of the managing young woman. She looks like a horse, but that's not her fault, and she personally regrets it; she makes up in good-heartedness for the failings of her spouse, which she puts up with out of devotion to him. There's also a housemaid who has a lot more personality than most of the female servants in Wodehouse, who usually have few and basic lines and act like frightened poultry when they're not simply furniture. This one rises to the level of a character, and a determined, intelligent and effective character at that, despite her Cockney origins, gender, and occupation, which don't normally get such positive treatment in the master's earlier work. He appears to have been quietly progressing in some ways; perhaps his experience of being interned during World War II played a role.
The other shift I noticed from his pre-war work is that, for Plum, this has its risqué moments. There are several references to Lord Ickenham's grandfather's collection of nude statues of Venus, and a young woman gets her dress accidentally torn off while escaping a policeman. The actual relationships are just as pure as always, though.
Though Wodehouse had been involved in controversy because of his wartime (non-political) broadcast from Germany while interned there, and had suffered some loss of popularity as a result, he still had plenty of dedicated fans, and perhaps he didn't want to risk alienating those he had left by too much of a departure from his classic style. In any case, his classic style is what this is in, and if you enjoy Wodehouse it will be pleasantly familiar.
The introduction by Greg James to the 2023 Heinemann edition is completely skippable; not clever or funny, and too long. ...more
One of the reasons we admire the work of particular authors is that they do something that nobody else can do. It might be possible to pastiche their One of the reasons we admire the work of particular authors is that they do something that nobody else can do. It might be possible to pastiche their works, but they're essentially inimitable. So if, after their death, another author attempts to extend the series, all too often it ends up as bad fanfiction (there is such a thing as good fanfiction, but Sturgeon's Law applies). I'm thinking here of Eoin Colfer's awful sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, or the review of Sebastian Faulks' continuation of the Jeeves series which runs "FAULKS stop WHAT ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop WHY ORANGE BLOSSOMS stop CONSIDER YOUR PLOT THE FROZEN LIMIT stop WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY PLANTING YOUR LOATHSOME BEAZELS ON MY HEROES LIKE THIS stop DEEPLY REGRET YOUR HEAD HUNDRED MILES FROM ETHEREAL REALM AS UNABLE TO HIT YOU WITH BRICK stop LOVE PLUM".
So I approached this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series with more than a little trepidation. Technically, it is partly by Dorothy L. Sayers; she began the book and set it aside for other work, and the incomplete draft was found in a publisher's safe and passed to the already respected crime novelist Jill Paton Walsh to finish.
I have to say, I was favourably impressed. It felt like a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, even to the persistent fault of introducing a lot of similar, and inadequately distinguished, characters all in a bunch, though it didn't have the persistent fault of going so deeply into some obscure area of knowledge that the reader has to just let it wash over them, aware that a lot of nuance is being missed. It builds on and extends the relationship established between the newlywed couple of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane in the last book completed by Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon, without (as far as I was concerned) contradicting what that book and its predecessor, Gaudy Night, had established about the characters individually and as a couple. Like several previous books, it teases me with a mention of Miss Climpson, my favourite character in the series, but doesn't bring her onstage. It quotes and references English literature like a Wimsey novel. I'm happy to accept it as a Wimsey novel, and a good one, though not one of the best; I enjoyed it about as much as Have His Carcase, which I liked.
It takes a third of the book to get to the actual crime, but the setup is (mostly) necessary. There are several subplots concerning Harriet's integration into Peter's world, her ambivalence about continuing to write, her sister-in-law Helen's disapproval of her, and Peter's valet Bunter's relationship with another photographer. Harriet gains a lady's maid, who has the unlikely surname of Mango; a few of the new characters struck me as having Dickensian names, more so than in previous books, where the names have tended to be characteristic of the place where the crime occurs. Mango gets a chance to shine as an undercover operative in the solution of the crime at one point.
The main crime itself - the murder of a woman with whom Peter and Harriet are slightly acquainted - has a personal dimension for them, and the authors do a wonderful job of compare-and-contrast between the dead woman's relationship with her husband and the very different "marriage of true minds" that Peter and Harriet are striving for. The detective couple's self-doubt and mutual support are both very much in evidence.
There is a bit of coincidence at work, both to provide one or two clues (Harriet happens to be lunching somewhere and sees two people together, for example) and to provide several red herrings (on the night of the murder, the garden of the house where the murder is committed is practically a railway station), but it's subtle enough that I didn't mind it.
For me, at least, this works as an extension of a beloved series with distinctive characters who have grown across the series, and continue to grow in ways that make sense for their complex personalities. It's also a good detective mystery. On that basis, I plan to try at least the next book in the series, which is solely by Jill Paton Walsh, to see if it continues to stand up.
The Hodder & Stoughton edition I read was well edited, in contrast to some of the previous editions I've read in the series....more
The last of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels (the series was continued after her death by another author, who started by finishing a booThe last of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey novels (the series was continued after her death by another author, who started by finishing a book that was in very early draft; I plan to read at least that one to see if they're any good, even though such efforts rarely are). This one was adapted from a play, on which Sayers collaborated with another writer, and it shows; some of the dialog and the scene staging feels distinctly theatrical, though not necessarily in a detrimental way.
It's funny. There are moments of humour in the earlier books, too, but this one is hilarious, particularly at the beginning, which is a series of letters and diary entries surrounding Harriet and Peter's marriage. We get an extended contribution from the Dowager Duchess, who is, as always, simultaneously fluffy and incisive, and that alone was worth the price of admission to me. I don't know how much of the humour was Sayers' and how much was her collaborator's, but I enjoyed it.
Conventionally, romance stories stop before the wedding (perhaps because Jane Austen never married, and bestrides the genre like a colossus), but there's a great deal of juice to be squeezed from a couple's early married life, and this book demonstrates it. Peter and Harriet are two highly intelligent, independent people who are genuinely devoted to one another and must find a way to live together and create a partnership that works for both of them. They do this with plenty of mutual respect, and it's wonderful to watch. At the same time, they work away on solving the (as it turns out) ingenious locked-room murder of the unpleasant man who sold them their honeymoon getaway/future country home, while dealing with people who want to take the furniture in payment of the deceased's debts, his rather pathetic niece and heir, one of Sayers' good-hearted but vague vicars, a neighbour who helps out with the housework and whose treatment of the vintage port breaks Bunter's legendary calm and even makes him drop his aitches, a chimney sweep with many layers of jerseys, a capable but morally questionable gardener... Unlike in some other Sayers books, the cast doesn't become a mob of largely indistinguishable minor characters; each of them has something distinct and memorable about them, and there are no spares or duplicates, almost certainly because of the story's beginning as a play.
We do still get a lot of quotation from (mostly) English classic literature, though here it's highlighted as a feature, and partly interpreted to the reader, because the police superintendent is self-educated in the classics, and he and Lord Peter play a kind of game of apt quotations (with attribution). There is some untranslated Latin and a couple of letters in untranslated French, which always strikes me as an annoyingly elitist move whenever I see it in Golden Age British crime novels (Agatha Christie did it too); unlike educated British people of the 1930s, I don't read either French or Latin fluently. Fortunately, these days it's easy to find the translations online.
For me, the non-English portions were the only significant flaw in an otherwise excellent novel, which worked as the portrait of the beginning of a marriage between two admirable people trying hard to be good to one another, as well as a clever murder mystery. Not only does the romance get extended past the wedding, but the murder mystery gets extended past the trial, conviction, and execution of the criminal, and we get to see Peter's ambivalence about the consequences of his "hobby" of detection and the ways in which he tries to mitigate them. The emotional beats are sound, the writing assured and capable, and along with those elements, the depth of reflection the characters undertake on the events places it strongly in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list.
The edition I read has a few typos in it, but they're the kind you get from a human typesetter (such as "Mrs Climpson" for "Miss Climpson"), rather than the kind you get from an OCR program, so that's something....more
It was clear from reading Murder Must Advertise that Sayers hated her time working in advertising; it's equally clear from reading this book that It was clear from reading Murder Must Advertise that Sayers hated her time working in advertising; it's equally clear from reading this book that she loved her time at Oxford. In it, Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest, returns to her old college and becomes involved in solving a mystery (not a murder mystery; there's someone sending unhinged and abusive notes and committing minor vandalism), at the same time wrestling with her own existential questions. Could she, even part-time, be a scholar as well as or instead of a mystery writer? Could she, can anyone, balance being a female academic and a wife, or is it one or the other? How does she feel about, and what should she do about, the fact that Lord Peter Wimsey loves her and has asked her several times a year for the past five years to marry him? Can a man and a woman be equal partners, or would she inevitably have to give up part of herself? Is the pursuit of truth the highest value, even above humane considerations? What is the responsibility of someone who unknowingly does harm with good intentions? The answers are complicated, and at least some of the questions seem to have been questions the author had as well; she is now known not only for her mystery novels but for her translation of Dante, for example.
Harriet Vane has an odd place in the Wimsey novels. She was introduced in Strong Poison, in which she was on trial for murdering her lover and in which Peter fell in love with her (for, as far as I'm concerned, inadequately justified reasons, though they receive some shoring up in this book), and also cleared her by discovering the actual murderer. In Have His Carcase, she discovers a murder (that may not even be a murder, but a suicide) by chance, and Peter takes advantage of the fact that she calls him in to help investigate by asking her repeatedly to marry him, which she repeatedly refuses to do. She's not mentioned at all in The Five Red Herrings (which comes between Strong Poison and Have His Carcase); she's mentioned only briefly, indirectly, and not by name in Murder Must Advertise, next after Carcase, and not at all again in The Nine Tailors, which comes between Advertise and this book. But here she's the viewpoint character most of the time.
The introduction to the edition I read was by the actress who played her in a TV series originally to be titled Harriet Vane, and covering Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, which became the inaccurately titled A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery and then, for American broadcast, was renamed Lord Peter Wimsey, ironically in view of its original working title. So this adaptation of books by a woman, with a woman as a key unifying character, in which the man goes out of his way to give her independence and dignity, still ends up being named after him.
The book itself is complex, more of a true novel than a detective story, though it has both the good old standby subplots of mystery and romance going on (albeit not in a conventional way in either case). There's a lot of jargon and reference to features of life in academic Oxford, and English and Latin literature of the kind that one is presumably introduced to at Oxford, or was in the 1930s, at least, all of which requires annotations to make complete sense of; this site does a good job of providing such annotations, particularly necessary for the final scene, which contains a good deal of nuance that is lost if you don't know the background (and what the Latin means that Peter and Harriet speak in it). For me, it was a bit too much inside its milieu, like the earlier Murder Must Advertise with advertising and The Nine Tailors with campanology, awash in jargon that someone from outside that milieu would just find incomprehensible, even though it was never key to following the plot. Like both of those books and The Five Red Herrings, it also had a few too many minor characters who weren't adequately distinguished from one another and were hard to keep straight, in the absence of a dramatis personae page giving both their name and their role or occupation; this was especially the case in Gaudy Night, since sometimes a character would be referred to as "the Dean" or "the Warden" or "the Bursar" and sometimes by their name. These two factors (the overabundance of jargon and the large and inadequately distinguishable chorus) kept it out of the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list, despite the fact that it has exactly the kind of depth and reflection on the human condition that would normally put it there; it sits in Silver, with works that are solid but not brilliant, because the way in which it's brilliant wasn't particularly accessible to me and, therefore, not as enjoyable as it might have been. It's a failing in me as much as in the book.
I was also highly annoyed to be teased not once but twice with the possibility of Miss Climpson, my favourite character from the series, becoming involved, only to have her turn out to be unavailable to assist and so never seen on the page. (I would read the juice out of a book in which Miss Climpson and Bunter, my second-favourite character, team up to rescue Lord Peter, or to do anything else, for that matter.)
The Hodders edition I read shows telltale signs of having been set using a scan and OCR and then not proofread adequately; there are double commas, missing commas, inserted commas, commas that should be stops and vice versa, and typos (increasing towards the end, which suggests a rushed deadline), including several words that a simple spellcheck would have caught. A typical sloppy Hodders job. Get a different edition if you can manage it....more
I've said in previous reviews of the Lord Peter Wimsey books that they're often at their best when what is on screen is not the solving of the mysteryI've said in previous reviews of the Lord Peter Wimsey books that they're often at their best when what is on screen is not the solving of the mystery, hence my disappointment with The Five Red Herrings, where the mystery apparatus is so obtrusive there's not much room for anything else. This book is the direct opposite of that; it spends a great deal of time on establishing the scene of the crime before the crime is even suspected, and some of its best parts are, indeed, not related directly to the solving of the mystery. I was particularly moved by the way the community pulled together to cope with a natural disaster, late in the book.
Some of the non-mystery parts are about campanology (bell-ringing), and I'll admit that they were so technical I didn't follow them much, but I don't think I was supposed to. They created an atmosphere, and I got a clear enough idea of how the change-ringing was done to understand when that became relevant to the plot. The Rector of the small village that Wimsey happens to end up spending New Year's in after a minor car accident is a dedicated campanologist, and one of Sayers' delightfully discursive characters, whose dialog gives you everything you need to know about his character and is also enjoyable in itself. Like most if not all of her Church of England clergymen, he's genuinely devout and a deeply kind person, which speaks well of her father, an Anglican vicar.
Some time after Lord Peter takes part in a record-setting all-night bell-ringing session and goes on, car repaired, to his original destination, a man dies of illness, and when his recently-deceased wife's grave is opened in order to add him to it, the gravediggers discover another corpse, mutilated to be unrecognisable, that has been there roughly since New Year (shortly after the legitimate inhabitant of the grave was interred). Discovering who he was and how he got there turns out to involve a jewel theft from years before in which the loot never turned up, and a bizarre and complicated series of events involving false identities, mistaken assumptions and an unusual cause of death.
I did spot how the victim had died some time before Wimsey, but I think I was supposed to (the author dropped a clear hint), and the scene in which he realizes the explanation was powerful and vivid enough that I forgive his not working it out earlier. It's one of several strong scenes, and the whole book has wonderful description of the landscape and weather of East Anglia, good characterization, and plenty of incident both relevant and irrelevant to the plot which is enjoyable in a cosy way. It's excellent work, and because of that and the moving passages about the flood, I'm putting it in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list....more
A standalone Wodehouse in the classic style, despite being written in 1967. I had the impression that it was set in his usual time period (between theA standalone Wodehouse in the classic style, despite being written in 1967. I had the impression that it was set in his usual time period (between the world wars), despite an anachronistic reference to the UN, and the sums of money mentioned tend to confirm that; an annual income of 800 pounds through a legacy would certainly enable someone to leave their job in, say, 1930, but in 1967 not so much. Also, 8000 pounds is considered a reasonable price for a house in London. And Kelly is noted as an unusual name for a woman, which was not so much the case after World War II as before - though it was commoner in the USA than in Britain (this Kelly is American, but the person who finds her name unusual is not), and would still not have been an unremarkable name for a middle-aged woman by 1967, when most Kellys would have been under 30.
It's certainly in Wodehouse's usual milieu: an old country house, with train trips to London (45 miles away). And the characters and plot are very much what he'd been writing since the 1920s, even down to his abiding fault, no doubt picked up from writing musical comedy, of keeping the cast tight by having them coincidentally connected in multiple ways and always happening to stumble over each other in ways that complicate the plot. He even re-uses a plot device from Money for Nothing : P.G. Wodehouse’s Original 1928 Vintage Collectible Edition, British Comedy Classic, the fake theft of an entailed heirloom.
All in all, it's a Wodehouse book, no better, but certainly no worse, than plenty of others in a similar mould. We get the sparkling banter, the mistaken and/or false identities, young love (and, in this case, middle-aged love), money as a complicating factor, schemes practical and impractical that cross and foil each other, and a happy ending.
The Everyman edition, to my surprise, lived up to its claim of being a fine edition; it's very well edited, something that can't always be said, for example, of the Penguin editions of Wodehouse....more
I enjoyed the series of YouTube shorts on which this book is based, but was initially put off getting it because of some of the reviews. Apparently thI enjoyed the series of YouTube shorts on which this book is based, but was initially put off getting it because of some of the reviews. Apparently the metafictional part didn't work for everyone. But then I saw it at my local library, and picked it up - and I'm very glad I did.
Jill Bearup is a very funny (and intelligent, and genre-savvy) person, and that's fully on display here, but it isn't just a parody of someone writing a bad fantasy romance. In my experience, it's almost always impossible to distinguish between someone writing a parody of a bad novel and someone actually writing a bad novel. Fortunately, the author doesn't attempt to do that. Instead, she shows us Caroline, the metafictional author, writing a better novel than anyone (including her) knew she was capable of, because her characters take on a life of their own and absolutely refuse to go along with the stupid romance tropes. Rosamund, her heroine, is particularly determined, ruthlessly sensible, and rather than being the typical young airhead yanked around by her feelings, is a 36-year-old mother whose actions are always driven by protecting her children. As Caroline's editor points out to her, that is the plot; it isn't a distraction from the plot. She's a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation (meaning that she cares about something, and it's threatened unless she takes action), and that's a terrific way to set up a novel.
Even though it's funny, there are also serious stakes and moments of danger and suspense and genuine difficult emotion, which is what vaults it into the Gold tier of my annual recommendations list; it would work as a novel even if it didn't raise a single laugh (though, from me at least, it raises many). And, though it builds firmly on the foundation of the original video series, we get another layer in the book version, a parallel story in which Caroline learns from her heroine how to stand up for herself, battle her villain, and go after her love interest. Having myself had the experience of doing something that frightened me because one of my fictional characters would have done it and I couldn't stand to be a lesser person than him, I found this relatable. And the way the stories unfolded in parallel was, I thought, well handled. Yes, perhaps the occasional intrusions of editorial comments from Caroline's Hot Editor and her replies, and even her conversations with her characters while the action froze, did sometimes break the flow and detract from the main story/stories, but for me it wasn't a big issue.
The editing is excellent; apart from one clumsy phrase, I didn't spot a single error, which is vanishingly rare (and proves that indie-published books can be as good as trad-pub or better). I suspect that Jill Bearup wrote quite a clean manuscript to start with, but if she didn't, huge kudos to the editor for getting it to this state.
I would be very happy to see a sequel, and I recommend it without hesitation....more
The previous book in the series, The Five Red Herrings, disappointed me because it was so busy being a complicated mystery novel it had no time toThe previous book in the series, The Five Red Herrings, disappointed me because it was so busy being a complicated mystery novel it had no time to be anything more. This is a return to form; not only do we get a good deal of human observation, but it's a ferocious satire on advertising, the industry Sayers herself worked in until her books became successful enough to provide her with a living. I have to say, I'm glad I've never hated my job as much as Sayers clearly hated hers.
We also get more of Lord Peter Wimsey, though most of the time he's pretending to be his fictional illegitimate and disreputable cousin, Death Bredon. He's gone undercover in this identity at an advertising agency where there's been a mysterious death, but the murder investigation becomes entangled with the investigation his brother-in-law and close friend, Chief-Inspector Parker, is conducting into the drug trade in London. There are vivid (occasionally bordering on lurid, though it's kept tastefully vague) scenes of the night life of the rich and addicted, among the scenes of gossipy, back-biting ad-agency life (a lot of people seem to do very little work there), and assorted vignettes such as an inter-company cricket match. It's a box of chocolates, with something for most tastes.
I realised something about Wimsey in this book that I'd vaguely been aware of before. He's always kind to honest people, but can be fiercely unkind to the dishonest ones. Not always; if he feels sorry for someone, even if they're a criminal, he can be very sympathetic. He's also good with children and young people.
Favourite characters from previous books - the Dowager Duchess (Peter's mother), the impeccable manservant Bunter, and Peter's love-interest, Harriet Vane - are either only referred to or else appear very briefly. We do get to see the domestic life of Parker and his wife, Peter's sister Mary, but because Peter is incognito most of the time, his usual cast of backup characters is absent. To make up for this, we get plenty of new characters, vividly and succinctly drawn, in the advertising agency and the demimonde (and at the cricket match, where the elderly sponsor of the opposing team declares robustly and sincerely that he doesn't care who wins as long as they play the game).
The advertising-agency setting gives a fascinating glimpse into commerce as it flourished between the world wars, and among the insights it offers is that advertising is mainly aimed at people who don't have much money, but can be convinced to part with it easily, because their lives are mundane or miserable and they're vulnerable to pitches that suggest they can improve it by buying something.
There's a lot going on at once, and for me, it's well handled and well integrated. There are, perhaps, a few too many minor characters at the ad agency to be kept track of, but otherwise it's strong. The quality of the writing and the pointed satire on the advertising industry lift it into the Gold tier of my recommendation list; the author experiments, I think successfully, with techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and an omniscient viewpoint that understands things about characters that they are not themselves conscious of, but she does it judiciously, so it doesn't become tedious through overuse.
The edition I read has clearly been scanned from an earlier edition and set using OCR; there are tell-tale errors like "bell" for "hell" and "he" for "be," and a number of commas and full stops that are either missing, inserted, or substituted for each other. If you use OCR, you need to put in more proofreading than this to get a clean edition, and Hodders, characteristically, have not done so....more
The problem with this mystery story is that it's so full of its own machinery there's hardly room for anything else.
By "machinery" I mean the things The problem with this mystery story is that it's so full of its own machinery there's hardly room for anything else.
By "machinery" I mean the things that make it a mystery: suspects, clues, theories, alibis, evidence. The trouble is that there are six suspects (the actual murderer and the five red herrings of the title), and they're not very distinct from each other, so I had trouble keeping them straight, and the murderer is one of the ones who's even less distinct than some of the others. And all of them have some form of alibi, but several of them coincidentally and suspiciously left the village right after the crime was committed, and there are clues strewn hither and yon, and a lot of page time is spent discussing, in great detail, theories of how the crime could have been committed by any one of them. So when I finally got to the part where we find out which of them it was, and how it was done, I felt more relief that the book was nearly over than anything else.
It's unfortunate, because the best parts of a Dorothy L. Sayers book are usually the parts that aren't the mystery, and this one has hardly any of those. There's no Harriet Vane, no Miss Climpson, no Dowager Duchess, and only a couple of female characters at all, who play very minor roles. It feels much more like a Freeman Wills Crofts book than a Dorothy L. Sayers book, and that's not a compliment. It's well enough done of its type, but it's not what I was looking for from this author.
It's well enough executed that it still makes my recommendation list for 2024, but in the lowest tier.
I read a large print edition, in which the typesetter is careless with quotation marks and makes basically all the possible errors with them - not closing them, putting them in where they shouldn't be (both at the start of a sentence that isn't a quotation and at the end of some paragraphs where the same speaker continues in the next paragraph), and using the wrong one (double instead of single) for a quotation within a quotation. There are a few other minor typos as well....more
Michael Chabon introduces this book with a thought experiment: What if literary fiction hadn't settled on just one mode of plotless mundane contemporaMichael Chabon introduces this book with a thought experiment: What if literary fiction hadn't settled on just one mode of plotless mundane contemporary realism ending with a realization?
Which sounds great. But the very first story (admittedly not contemporary or realistic, and if there isn't quite a plot there are a series of events) still feels very like the literary stories that have driven me away from lit-fic; it's all about the character's feelings and his relationship with his past, and it's still the usual progression through ineffectual activity (or inactivity) to tragedy, even if it is set in the outer form of an old-fashioned adventure story from about the 1930s.
When a quick glance through suggested that this was mostly what I was going to get, I couldn't quite nerve myself to try more. I probably didn't give it enough of a chance, though, and if you like lit-fic more than I do, you may well find this interesting. ...more
The final Jeeves and Wooster book, and while not the best of them, certainly well up to standard.
Admittedly, the formidable woman that Bertie has to The final Jeeves and Wooster book, and while not the best of them, certainly well up to standard.
Admittedly, the formidable woman that Bertie has to struggle not to marry might as well be Florence Craye, and her jealous, thuggish fiancé might as well be "Stilton" Cheesewright, except that both of them are out of circulation following events in a previous book, so these are new characters (or, at least, have new names). Wodehouse's socialists and Communists always seem to be hypocrites, in it for what they can get (ever since Psmith), and these two are no exception.
Major Plank returns from another previous book; he was always a stock character (the colonial military man/intrepid explorer), and remains one, but he does provide some tension as Bertie wonders whether he will remember their previous encounter accurately (to Bertie's detriment).
The author doesn't seem to have re-read previous books before writing this one, which he wrote late in life and many years after some of the earlier entries in the series, and gets several details from them wrong; the cosh is the property of the wrong cousin (Aunt Dahlia's Bonzo instead of Aunt Agatha's Thos), for example, and the wrong location is given for the fight between Spode and Gussie in which Gussie hits Spode over the head with a painting. This makes no difference, but it is a bit jarring.
The title (and the alternate title, The Catnappers) refers to Aunt Dahlia's scheme to nobble a racehorse by stealing a cat that it's fond of in order to send it into a decline. This is achieved with the help of the local poacher, Harold "Billy" Graham. The reference to the American evangelist (who became known internationally in the 1940s) is one of the occasional anachronisms in the series. Wikipedia claims that the Jeeves and Wooster books have a floating timeline, that they are always set in the present day as at publication date. The technological and sociological milieu, though, is always that of the 1920s or 1930s, so my theory is that they are always set then, but Wodehouse occasionally dropped in an anachronistic reference because he wanted to evoke a particular image in the minds of his audience, and one that would have been correct for that increasingly distant time period wouldn't have cut it because it wouldn't have been familiar enough.
The cat subplot supplies freshness to the formula, and all in all this is a successful Jeeves and Wooster for my money. Read in the Ulverscroft edition (not on Goodreads), which has the usual mediocre typesetting. ...more
Read in the Ulverscroft large print edition, which has a few typesetting errors.
Not one, not two, but four romances have to be prevented from crashinRead in the Ulverscroft large print edition, which has a few typesetting errors.
Not one, not two, but four romances have to be prevented from crashing and burning in this entry to the Jeeves and Wooster series, including, once again, the Gussie Fink-Nottle/Madelyn Basset romance - which, if it fails, will leave Bertie obligated to marry the Basset, a fate he quails from.
Written after World War II, it has a subtly different feel from the earlier books. Wodehouse had been living in France at the time of the Nazi invasion, and had been interned by the Germans. He endured some discomfort in the process, and made several (apolitical) broadcasts over German radio to the US, which caused a lot of controversy at the time. He was criticized for this error of judgement by, among others, his friend A.A. Milne, whose Christopher Robin poems are gently mocked in this book.
The language is also stronger than in earlier books, both "bitch" and "bastard" appearing as descriptors for different characters. Most notably, Jeeves is largely absent from the narrative, and when present is less subtle and more hard-boiled. (view spoiler)[He coshes the atheist policeman, which I predicted would lead to the man's conversion (thinking he'd been struck down by a judgement of God), and I was right. It's rare for Wodehouse to be predictable, but he was in this instance. (hide spoiler)]
Wodehouse was notoriously afflicted with aunts, several of his twenty aunts and fifteen uncles having part of the task of raising him in England since his parents were stationed in Hong Kong, where his father was a magistrate. The aunts in this book are, apparently, a close reflection of some of his actual aunts, and the way they're scored off in the denouement must have been a satisfying piece of wish-fulfillment for him.
All in all, it's not the best in the series. On the one hand, it largely follows the established formula without too much that's fresh, but on the other, when it does depart from the formula it does so in a way that veers, for Wodehouse, a little dark. I did have several chuckles, though, and the mastery of language and the convoluted, farcical plot are both still there to enjoy....more
Classic Wodehouse hilarity. I think the Brinkley Court stories may be my favourites, probably because of the fondly disrespectful banter that goes on Classic Wodehouse hilarity. I think the Brinkley Court stories may be my favourites, probably because of the fondly disrespectful banter that goes on between Bertie and his beloved Aunt Dahlia (and the character of Aunt Dahlia herself, a hearty fox-hunting countrywoman who's also something of a schemer).
Here, the point of tension between Bertie and Jeeves (there always seems to be one) is that Bertie has grown a moustache, but Jeeves, displaying the feudal spirit of the title, doesn't let it hinder him from helping in the inevitable complications that accompany Bertie wherever he goes. He's once again engaged to Lady Florence Craye, who he very much does not want to marry (but he can't tell her that; one must be civil). Her previous fiancé, Stilton Cheesewright (previously featured in The Mating Season) is cutting up rough about this and threatening bodily violence to Bertie; Aunt Dahlia has pawned her pearls to pay for a prominent author to do a serial in her magazine, Milady's Boudoir, so that she can sell it to Mr Trotter of Liverpool, who is under his wife's thumb; Trotter's stepson is in love with Florence Craye; Roderick Spode, previously seen in The Code of the Woosters, appears likely to expose Dahlia's schemes to her husband; and in general it's as tangled a plot as any in Wodehouse, the kind that only Jeeves can sort out (after Bertie has had plenty of alarums and excursions).
(view spoiler)[One unusual factor is that a couple breaks up and doesn't get back together again, instead moving on to new partners who suit them much better. I don't think I've come across that elsewhere in Wodehouse, though I haven't read all the books by a long way. (hide spoiler)]
Fun plot, Wodehouse's language skills in full flower, and in general a classic. The only thing that might have improved it would have been a scene or two with the volatile French chef Anatole and his quaint grasp of English idiom, but he remains, sadly, offstage....more
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