A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Martin Edwards’ The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story, which I spent all of yesterday reading and very much enjoyed, although I do have some quibbles about it. Whatever it lacks, it does have a lot of propulsive force as a book: you just want to keep reading, and reading, and reading.

However, the organization is quite poor. It’s sort of vaguely kind of chronological, but it still feels somewhat random, especially given that Edwards packs in a short biography of every single member of the Detection Club(or so it seemed to me), a club of mystery writers founded in London in the early thirties. It wasn’t (and isn’t) a very large club, but it’s large enough that the array of names and titles becomes confusing, especially given that many of the writers have multiple pseudonyms.

Sayers and Christie form the clearest through-line in the work - along with a male detective writer, Berkeley, who sounds like a misogynistic ass, but he was one of the founding members of the Detection Club so you could hardly leave him out. I think the book shaping the book more firmly around them would have given it more structure, even though it would probably have required cutting some of the material about the lesser-known writers.

Having said that, almost all the individual material is good, so it would be hard to know what to cut. But it’s very much a case where lots of interesting individual parts never come together to form a whole that is larger than the parts.

Then again, Edwards is hampered in that endeavor by the fact that the early Detection Club minutes disappeared during World War II (probably burnt up in the Blitz), so I can’t really blame him that there isn’t more about the Detection Club itself. As much as I would have loved a chapter relating the goings-on at a Detection Club dinner, the materials to recreate one clearly just aren’t there.

What I’m Reading Now

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, which is about… well, the history of the gulags. Because clearly I needed more gulag in my life, I guess.

I’ve also been reading the newest Robert Galbraith book, Career of Evil, and I’m kind of stalling out. This is partly because of Robin’s Irritating Fiance, Whose Face is Probably Next to the Word Tosser in the Dictionary, who is unsupportive and cranky and generally a manchild, and also irritating on a meta level because the more awful he gets, the more obvious it becomes that Robin and Strike are probably going to get romantically involved at some point. The clearer that gets, the more that I oppose it.

There’s also a generous helping of Robin in Peril, which I find stressful. I’m not even a fifth of the way through and very little Peril has actually manifested itself, but the sections from the point of view of a guy who wants to murder Robin to get revenge on Strike are creepy and gross and, you know, meant to be creepy and gross, but that doesn’t make them less unpleasant.

And they feel unnecessary to me, and I think they distract from the mystery. We already know far more than our detectives, and the only reason we don’t know every terrible detail of Creepy Cross Guy’s plan is because the narrator is being cagey. I don’t buy for a minute that CGG doesn’t constantly spell them out to himself in minute detail, so on top of everything else I feel like the book’s cheating.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to whisk Charles Finch’s Home by Nightfall to me. Also L. M. Montgomery’s Pat of Silver Bush, and Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On. We shall see which one wins the race!

I just read J. K. Rowling’s new mystery novel The Cuckoo’s Calling. I kept thinking, “I’ll read one more chapter. Well, maybe another chapter. They’re pretty short chapters, just one more…” and then somehow it would be a hundred pages later and midnight and I would still be reading.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is not quite as engrossing as Harry Potter: when I realized that it was midnight I could, in fact, put the book down. It’s both like and quite unlike the Harry Potter books. The mystery aspect - the disparate clues that rush together at the end, in a way unexpected but entirely satisfying - it is reminiscent of Harry Potter’s puzzle-box plots.

If you were into Harry Potter for the magic and the worldbuilding, though, The Cuckoo’s Calling will not scratch your itch. Although it occurs to me that The Cuckoo’s Calling does have a similar eye for detail - it’s just that this is detail about London, particularly high-society London, rather than the wizarding world.

I don’t know enough about London (or, for that matter, high society) to know if it’s accurate, but it’s certainly very vivid, and the mystery format gives Rowling the chance to show off her ability to capture a wide range of different voices as our detective, Strike (yes, he has a hardboiled detective name!) interviews everyone involved in the case.

I’ve always really admired Rowling’s ability to capture characters swiftly: I haven’t read Harry Potter for ages, but I can still remember even quite minor characters surprisingly well. It’s sort of like the ability of a gifted caricaturist: you see all of a character’s most important characteristics in the initial sketch, a little exaggerated to make them more memorable. And this ability holds her in good stead in writing a mystery.

So, yes, I’m hoping that Rowling writes more murder mysteries. The ending suggests that this book may spawn a series, so fingers crossed!