jdcorley's Reviews (191)

I got into a "haunted media" phase last year and recently re-read this.  (There are two digital versions of this, and somehow, through various bundles and sales, I ended up owning both. Not sure if there's any differences between them.)  I didn't remember liking it as much as I did this time.  I think I connected more with the main character, a film history professor who faces an autism diagnosis for her son and a loss of her job, throwing herself into the obsession of a long-dead (?) film pioneer and their experimental, untitled works, in part to escape the feelings of her present circumstances.  Yet those circumstances follow her throughout her journey.  As she teeters at the edge of cosmic madness, she also finds new facets to relationships, new sides to herself.  I remember disliking how some of the characters turned out to be my first time through - this time, though, I started to understand how these are just new sides to the characters.  This book is not a movie - thank goodness.  Highly recommended.

While the jaw dropping realization that Wolfe and his crew were already fully formed in the very first entry in the series is charming, the looming spectres of racism (even anti-Italian racism, though not only that) and prejudice mean that you can't quite write it all off as foibles of characters who Wolfe disapproves of. Since Wolfe, as Estleman explains, is always the same, you might as well skip this one and read one that's better.

Less of what we would consider today to be a genuine history - an attempt to grapple with events of the past and extract meaning from them - Thiers writes on the defensive. Everyone is perfectly reasonable, right up to and including violent mobs. It seems a little precious, ultimately, and less willing than one might hope at delving into the personal details, flaws and idiosyncracies that he would have had access to that we don't.

One of the best of the short-Wolfe collections, each of these three highlights different parts of Wolfe's personality, background and temperament, which is what we want in a Nero Wolfe story. He's dragged out of his house because his gardener has to take a leave of absence - he's pulled into murders he has no interest in, and the cops are worse than unhelpful.  Even some of the chintzy private eye tricks that seem beneath Wolfe are fully and fairly explained from his personality and temperament.  If you want an intro to Wolfe, you could hardly do better.

There's a whole subgenre of detective stories where the detective is our guide through the surreal and dreamlike, through psychological or magical oddness. While tempting and often worthwhile, it imposes a whole set of new requirements on both the mystery and fantasy. This work is solid in many areas - especially in the consistency of the strangeness and the rules of the fantastic.  But in the characters, it falls short. We need to have highly grounded characters, relatable people who do things for a relatable reason, so that we understand their paths through the strangeness. We don't quite have that here. It's the only thing holding this back from being a true classic.

The two novellas of Black Orchids have contrasting flaws which keep the volume from being the best of the best of Nero Wolfe, but they're different flaws, so you never quite get tired enough of them to be annoyed.  In the titular novella, the cast of characters never gets enough individualized time on screen or even in the spotlight to be more than just a collection of names.  In the second novella, "Cordially Invited to Death", the long slack time before the first murder and the long slack time afterwards robs the story of any real urgency.  Conversely, the first novella really crackles with Archie investigative work and the second involves Archie and the police dragging Wolfe into investigating something he has no interest in - always a pleasure.  Overall, the book makes a strong case that the novella is an ideal length for a detective story... but perhaps the flaws should give us pause.

Hannah improves on her previous Poirot outing with a more Christie-esque cast of characters and setting.  A good Poirot suspect must be at least a little Dickensian - that is, they must have a big, theatrical front and unknown, baroque secrets hiding behind it.  Two of our suspects, a flamboyantly loathsome couple, are absolute marvels of this.  You hate the more every time they open their mouths, but you can't help but suspect that it isn't they, but the "nice" characters, who are truly the lead suspects.  In this, the cast of characters is at least as memorable as anything Christie ever did.

When Poirot is on the scene from the beginning, of course, there must be twists and turns enough to keep him guessing - what Hannah achieves here is to give the reader enough information, through the redoubtable Catchpool (I actually think Inspector Catchpool may be more interesting as a second to Poirot than Col. Hastings was), that we can almost, almost, almost follow where Poirot is going.  The things Poirot chooses to follow up on also gives us more ideas and speculation, until we are right on his heels straight to the end.  

You think that a book that Christie approached almost as a dare to herself would end up either a successful but cold experiment or a failure, but instead it was sharpened to a knife-point.  The sense of the characters takes a little while to get going but once they're on the island it's perfectly clear that she has a full understanding of each of them, why they're there, and why they do what they do.  There's a reason everyone loves this one; there's a reason it holds a place of great esteem even though the classic detectives are nowhere to be seen and everyone has a reason to lie.  It's a marvel.

One of Christie's experiments - four suspects, all supposed to be murderers in their own right - and a crime that any of them could be supposed to have committed.  The book concerns itself with psychology, and the uncovering of the histories of the characters in hopes of finding one whose methods match the immediate death.  The real clue comes about three-quarters of the way through when, back to back, two different people give two different accounts of an event only the two of them were present for.  We never know who was right, if either, and it doesn't matter.  Poirot gains what he needs to know from the lies and mistakes as well as the truth. 

Christie's ending, usually drum-tight, is a little loose here, as if she couldn't quite stop with the "four suspects" routine even as she was eliminating one after another.  And seeing Christie's self-insert Ariadne Oliver is always a treat, a bit of a bumbler and completely full of herself.  Enjoyable enough, and there's nothing much wrong with it, exactly, but one can't help but feel that the experiment was carried on too long, or wasn't well considered in the first place.

It's really a pity that one of the best Poirots is marred by the casual anti-semitism of the era. One offhand remark could have been put down to a character's crassness or prejudices, but it comes from many sources.  The most widely adapted Poirots, Nile and Orient Express, are also among Christie's strangest.  Here, the situation is much more straightforward, much closer to Christie's home and heart.  

A crumbling old seaside Victorian home and a circle of young Londoner friends, ricocheting here and there, with shifting loyalties, deep passions, and, of course, just beneath the surface, the cold need for money, and lots of it.  Poirot is nearby when a murder is attempted, so he takes on the difficult matter of preventing the next attempt from succeeding.  The thrill of the chase is ever-present; the urgency of catching the murderer before they succeed (or, after they succeed twice...) is vital.  And Christie plays fair. Everything we need to know is right here in front of us. We just need order, method, and the application of the grey cells to make it work.  This is the nature of the best Poirots.