jdcorley's Reviews (191)

A dreadful "hero" who fucks - through underage girls and the developmentally disabled, even - and kills his way through a seedy Los Angeles underbelly depicted with all the nuance of an air horn.  The worst part of it is that it isn't any fun. By the time his shapely secretary is raped to death and he finds the mutilated corpse you are just disgusted by the whole thing.  I've got no issue with sex as a driver in fiction - the best Shell Scott mysteries have just as much of a parade of horny Californians eager to jump into and out of beds, swimming pools, showers, and baths with our hero - but Scott (at his best) is a goofball, and you don't get the impression from this book that Hunter has ever spent a moment of his life where he didn't hate every woman on earth.  Or maybe that's the author's point of view shining through.  Good thing I got this free during a big sale. Awful.

Although the good-natured mid-century horniness of Shell Scott is present here ("by golly, that girl is in a SWIMSUIT!"), there's the looming shadow of the crank Prather would eventually become, with an anti-drug animus that's frankly creepy, complete with a "all addicts will murder you for a fix" side story that takes up two and a half pages.  It really ruins the fun of what would otherwise have been quite a serviceable Shell Scott adventure.  

What makes a Marple mystery great is when motivation and character are our pathways through a thicket of apparently bizarre and random events. That's present in this masterpiece.  There's a lot here that doesn't make sense.  But you have everything you need, and Marple's presence reminds us this isn't going to be solved by piling up clues, but instead by understanding motives.  

The book confirms that Night Vale's charms are, in part, in how short its stories are (typically 2-3 minutes, spoken) and in the performance of its lead.  Set down as a novel, the lack of characterization or character depth makes living with them this long almost unbearable. The tone's right, there's plenty of funny bits in here, but the fun of Night Vale includes its brevity, how you just get a taste of a character or situation before you move on. 

The titular novella is a bravura performance; Oates lets you relax into a langorous "well perhaps nothing will actually happen" until Bluebeard's previous bride shows up and you realize that you're deeply, deeply in a trap, and you don't get out of it, not even at the last sentence.  The other stories revert to the mean somewhat. "Execution" could have used a whole additional act, but Oates has made her feckless narrator so worthless that it wouldn't have gotten anywhere.  Still, even an average Oates gothic is a wonder to behold.

One of the odder Poirot novels, this is a posthumous adaptation of a play starring Poirot that was written by Christie. Christie as playwright is a little more mannered, a little less vicious than she is in novel form.  And so, there's a bit of a spark missing here. The Dupin/Poe reference hangs a little heavy right in the middle of it - would, truly, the audience miss it? Would the characters? It's adequate as an adaptation; just a little misbegotten.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the Mac series is a noir private eye series where the key feature of Mac is that he's just a good guy, solid, thoughtful, his wisecracks don't seem to come from a deep sarcasm or despair or sadness.  Instead, he genuinely stands up for people who are wronged in the world of crime and deception. In this, his first book, he displays these traits in a most satisfactory way. A solid hook, right from the start, you want to see where he's going and want him to succeed.

While there are flashes of emotion here, the positioning of Catton's view directly over Grant's shoulder doesn't actually add much to the understanding of this portion of the war. As Catton is fond of pointing out, many times Grant is in the room and we don't realize he's there. So, despite his position, he isn't, often, an ideal choice for exciting stories.  Indeed, the best portions are those where he has to assert himself most vigorously, or in his family and non-military professional relations. I think, overall, Catton's centennial trilogy is better than his Grant books. You get very little insight into Grant as a person by the end of this.

A Wodehousian delight, set in the British foreign service during and after World War II. Never cloying or precious, it's one mishap and petty bungling drunken mistake after another.  For the Wodehouse fan looking for something more (and aren't we always looking for something more?) it can't be beaten.

All the things I feel about this book are things Marco Polo, in this book, feels about Venice.