jdcorley's Reviews (191)

A collection of four Nero Wolfe short mystery stories - three holiday themed.  Certainly Stout is able to get across Archie's charm and Wolfe's irascibility in only a few sentences, which is what, tonally, we all want. But there are enough missteps here that this becomes one of Stout's weaker contributions.

"The Easter Parade", for example, give us a hilarious setup - Wolfe demanding Archie hire one of his shady friends to steal an orchid from a woman's lapel, but the woman turns up dead.  But the explanation that the story wants us to swallow is that she was killed by a dart fired from a camera, which seems just wildly implausible given the descriptions in the book. If we don't believe the misdirect then there really is nothing to go on and Wolfe doesn't seem smart when he solves it. It's fun Wolfe and Archie antics but it isn't a mystery, really.  "Murder is No Joke" is equally contrived in setup and therefore it doesn't feel very exciting when Wolfe reveals the contrivance was foolish from the start.  If you have to invent a Rube Goldberg machine to kill someone, it's disappointing when the solution is "it wasn't a Rube Goldberg machine".

"Fourth of July Picnic", similarly, has a bunch of fun Wolfe and Archie banter and manipulation, but very little in the way of detection or mystery-building. A guy is stabbed, one of five people could have done it, and Wolfe and Archie get one of them to give themselves away.  That's it!  There isn't much there from a "cleverness" perspective.

Probably the best of the stories from a mystery perspective is "Christmas Party" - the reader and Archie and Wolfe all slowly narrow the window of suspects one by one until a trick (the same one from "Fourth of July Picnic", really) is used to identify the culprit.  Although the trick is the same, the way our heroes slowly work out who did what is much more effective. Unfortunately, the story is marred by a miasma of anti-Asian racism that persists even if you swallow hard and tell yourself "Oriental" was the polite term of the time.  It's deeper than just a "wrong word". A pity too, because it's a well worked story overall.

Christie takes the first third of the book - before Marple's arrival - to slowly go over and over each of the witnesses' statements, in a certainly intentional plodding, methodical and repetitive way. But we can already begin to see the differences in what different characters focused on and revealed. This is a slower Marple mystery, with a killer who is reacting to what's happening around them, and, so, we too must be highly alert to what's happening.  There's more than one motive that isn't a motive to commit these crimes this way, and more than one method that doesn't make sense for the motives we find.  Hanging over it all is the horrid cloud of the war - a shattered refugee, a war widow, a deserter, a gun jammed in the back of the drawer, pathetic trading of vegetables and foodstuffs among villagers still trying to keep a stiff upper lip despite having been through an apocalypse. Who wouldn't commit a few cold hearted, calculated murders to get out of it?

Breen's tone is on display in this collection of a few brief short stories, not any particular character or even any particular horror; the casual dryness of the tourist guide melds with the twisted surreality of the monstrous.  When it works, it works marvelously, you laugh as your skin crawls. When it doesn't work it just seems smug. Still, there really isn't enough Breen in the world so every little bit you can get, you should get.

Often after a significant event or incident, journalists rush a book into print to capitalize on public interest about it.  It's very rare that one is as well written and fast-moving as this one.  Usually the writer tries to make it more than it is, perhaps not wanting to simply recapitulate reporting on the subject, but not really having the skills to provide needed context.  Kaplan and Marshall forego almost all of this in favor of a story that, while tragic, is tense and quick-moving.  In fact, only at the end, when they start to speculate that apocalypse cults will be the biggest threat of the 21st century, does the book start to feel loose and meandering.  

What's wilder is there actually is enough information in this book for an entirely different conclusion: that even a police force with the free hand that Japan's police provably have, in a nation where there are few rights once the police put their eyes on you, they can't actually handle organized terror any more than a free society could.  This conclusion is not explored.  Perhaps it was unimaginable to American reporters pre-9/11?  

If you've heard of Aum, or perhaps the sarin attacks, but don't know exactly what it was all about or how it happened, or the facts of the pursuit, this is a great place to start. It comes together as a great work of narrative journalism.

Wolferen, a journalist, attempts to do what many journalists in long foreign placements do, and write some kind of social history.  It's amusing to see him strain at the just-so stories of Japanese history and "temperament", often insisting such reductive stereotypes are insufficient only a few pages before turning around and asserting them once again, or using some long-distant historical example, poorly understood and outside of its context, to make new reductive assertions.  Where it is at its best, it is attempting to be a journalistic account of how Japan got to where it was in the 1980s without any of the American business world's derangement; it has a fully readable and understandable account of decisionmaking in the 1970s which means that, if you wanted, you could work very hard and pull a reasonable amount of good information from the volume. And sure enough, the "decline of Japan" after the publication of this book makes it seem quite prescient.  But boy oh boy does this author not have the understanding or context to truly back up his assertions. 

In this, perhaps Enigma is most generously understood as a bridge between the borderline-racist "to understand the inscrutable Japan-man, the American businessman must read about how things were in the 9th century" books of the sixties and the more modern, context-driven approach of the 1990s and 2000s. I didn't hate reading it, but there were plenty of assertions that simply didn't check out.

A puzzle of trust: everyone seems to have a reason to lie, yet there's really nothing other than people's statements to proceed on. The serious reader has to really think, like Marple urges, about what they really know versus what they are told. Christie plays fair here and it's a pleasure to see her at work.

Even a second rate Christie is still not a bad read. A character piece more than a plot, there are character turns that simply don't add up, especially in the last two chapters, where revelations and counter-revelations come thick and fast.  You can guess the ending relatively quickly, but even once you know the ending, you still are left with many characterization and motivation questions unanswered, some quite significant.  You don't need to have a twisty plot in a Christie drawing room mystery, but if you don't, motivation has to be the center, and it just doesn't hold.

An airport thriller at its best; the bottom of that very deep pile at its worst. The split storyline doesn't serve the literary value of the recovery-from-trauma story or the desperate-criminal-POV story.  And the supposed twists are, instead of recontextualizing events that we didn't understand, just throwing more events at the reader for a highly uncertain purpose. In the end we don't really feel that we know the "Good Girl" any more than we did at the beginning. (And what is that title about, anyway? not a single person in this story thinks she's a good girl, not her, not her family, not the cops, not the criminals... it's not a twist that she isn't a good girl, folks!)

Christie withholds Miss Marple from us for a solid three-quarters of the book and instead lets us marinate in the English village life that Marple draws her insights from. The challenge, to the experienced Christie maniac, is in trying to draw those insights ourselves, before Marple shows up to finish her knitting.  A dream sequence and a harmless note combine to give a strong impression of what's really going on, and when it's revealed, of course it makes perfect sense.  What's most marvelous about The Moving Finger is that one of the crimes can only be solved by identifying the motive, and the other can only be solved by identifying a very specific physical observation - and either will lead you to the culprit!  Christie plays absolutely fair and this makes it one of her best works, though perhaps we could have used a little more Marple in our Marple.

A significant change in how American campaigns were covered, considered and examined in midcentury arose from this classic. Methodical and fascinating, certainly greater than the horse-race-coverage movement that came after it as a result of White's top tier contacts and journalistic consideration.  Eventually White's point of view will be derided as "establishment"; it's hard to remember at this late date that these books were considered incendiary exposes in their time.