jdcorley's Reviews (191)

You can see The Black Dahlia as the hinge point for Ellroy - you can follow him into the more conventional, Manichean cop stories, dark and exciting but suffused with good versus evil...or you can enter the Underworld USA series. American Tabloid is an unflinching, completely brutal and repellent in-your-face mission statement for the series, portraying midcentury America as a horror show of racism, corruption, hate, bigotry, antisemitism, and oligarchy. Thoroughly rooted in a history that's frantically being suppressed (this is not to say it's a true story, or that the conspiracies depicted are real, but simply that America is desperate to scream that it was never as bad as it was), it is the world, not the awful, broken characters violently staggering across it, that draws the reader in and drowns them. Ideology is for chumps, patriotism is stupid. America's an irredeemable wasteland of human garbage strangling each other to get ahead. As the underrated film Killing Them Softly would eventually summarize: "In America you're on your own." It's a lonely, cold vicious book, and in the last moment you realize everything that's coming after in a way you can't get from a history book. Beautiful, sickening, there's nothing like it.

It's actually hard to read "bad writing comedy" in large doses, and the book does the right thing by splitting it into three novellas. It's still just a bit too much, I had to put it down and read something else just to take a break. The best joke in it isn't even related to the writing - you get a very clear picture of the absolute loathing the "author" has for women through clueless revelations about their exes, a woman character acting completely bizarrely about shoes, and the usual litany of misogynist complaints blithely worked into the stories "without noticing". Still, you shouldn't miss it. 

It's fairly rare for Rex Stout to have a fully "classical" detective story, with a relatively limited cast and a "deductive" approach to determining who did what, or at least a fair challenge-to-the-reader.  This might be the best of them, when Wolfe is presented with an impossible task that Stout seems to delight in making more and more impossible with every twist and turn; yet, to Wolfe, each additional complication also is revelatory, until he knows everything, and if you closely look back in the book, you can too.  It's great watching Wolfe get skunked and then slowly turn it around. You do truly feel like Wolfe is a genius at the end of this even though he berates himself for his stupidity.

A workmanlike sf/horror scenario that's more or less incomprehensible if you don't at least know what the "SCP Wiki" is.  Okay, fine, it's easy enough to find out. But should you?  I think overall the answer is yes. Unlike many sf/horror scenarios, the scenarios described (this is a collection of linked short stories and novellas) are actually thought through from a speculative fiction perspective - what would the world be like if things existed like this? How would people react, and what would the consequences of those reactions be?  This unusual attention to its own concept elevates it both above the typical SCP story and the typical sf/horror story.  Still, the awkward cuts between time, places and characters for each of the stories makes it hard to piece together, a pretty significant crime for a book about characters piecing things together.  Let's call it a decent start.

The Golden Spiders may not be the greatest of the Wolfe mysteries, but it certainly is one of the better Archie Goodwin capers, with mobsters named "Lips" and truly atrocious murder and blackmail schemes. After a light hearted beginning Wolfe gets his comeuppance by the metric ton, and so we are as "committed" as he is to the outcome. One of the all time greats as a result.

Wolfe novels rarely "play fair" to the extent that this one does. Wolfe does what he very rarely does and openly states, more or less to the dummy of a reader, exactly the logic that is needed to solve the case, and if you really look back at what happened in the case, you can solve it before him - or, as we find out in a delightful twist ending, before Archie at least.  The solution to the murder can't be guessed, exactly, but the solution to how Wolfe will find the final clue is both logical and exciting. One of the masterpieces of the series.

One of the more gruesomely exciting Christie's - the manner of death is a true delight, as is the psychological explanation behind the actions of the victim. But it all just seems mechanical, rather a polemic against mercy of all things - it's all in our genes, Poirot asserts tiredly, thinking back on a long career of murders literally invented by the lady who is now giving him that opinion. Sheesh!

Estleman provides a rambling, tangential narrative of Prohibition era Detroit through the life of an impulsive Jewish gangster, observed by a cool-headed newspaper columnist. Each episode builds a picture of character and location that becomes much more than its parts. The slight interjections of the "present" (a hearing, years later) give a feeling of melancholy and inevitability. An American crime classic, one of the greatest.

It's a real pity that one of Poirot's most memorable crimes and most twisted setups are marred by some of Christie's most casual racism and anti-Semitism. What's worse is she makes it clear that the only bad kind of racism is the gauche kind. It doesn't let up, either. A real pity.

The relentless hatred and brokenness of poverty and the deprivation of small town life is painted with such endless ferocity that it seems like it will go on forever, lurid and awful. Weirdly, the

double

killer reveal goes too far in a way that decidedly diminishes the impact. Yeah, Libby, it is crazy that that happened but it wasn't a curse or mistake, it's just the author getting high on her own supply. At least it isn't boring!