jdcorley's Reviews (191)

Somewhere between the goofball Shell Scott and the dour Philip Marlowe lives Ed Noon. This debut outing leaves him in a bit of a no man's land - he's too casual with the wisecracks for the murders he's directly involved in,not to mention the casual anti-Chinese racial slurs slung around by anyone on screen for more than a chapter. It also doesn't leave us particularly excited by his romantic decisions. As always, the bad guy is the one with the slightly less than normal physical appearance, and the gay mobster. Noon finds his feet eventually but not here.

You get what the novel is after about a quarter of the way in, and there are whole chapters that can be skipped. We get it a lot faster than Joe does; the mystery isn't that complex. In the end it feels padded more than it feels like an in depth character study.

There's a thousand and a half Lovecraft anthologies hanging around every ebook site and plenty of libraries too. It's rarer to find an Aickmanesque anthology, though just like Lovecraft, Aickman is an almost universally beloved inspirational figure throughout the ranks of horror writers. The sustained anxiety, the decrepit streets of ancient too-sunny towns, these are Aickman's trademarks. And this anthology hits around four triples right out of the gate. When I got to the halfway point I asked myself, "is this the greatest horror anthology of all time?" No, it isn't, it does indeed slowly revert to the mean, but even a few average/decent stories doesn't detract from the great ones. And there isn't a clunker in the bunch.

Putting a big cast of girls in a room with Archie is always a delight, but what I think this book pulls off quite well is Wolfe's determination to look past the most obvious "next thing" that the lawyers, cops and rival PIs are unable to surpass.  Everyone else is just reacting to the "most recent thing", but Wolfe's more comprehensive understanding leads him to a solution, one you can get too - as he tells Cramer, he doesn't really have anything else that you don't - and the ending is just as charming and satisfying a classic mystery as one could want.

As I've mentioned in my other Oates reviews, while her talent is undeniable and undeniably wide-ranging, when she returns to the Gothic, to the horror genre, she is clearly at home, and her literary skills push the genre to its highest level.  This book is a fine example.  It's about a disappearance - or a murder, and it's about a relationship - or a confession, perhaps.  The book never makes it fully clear, but it gives grave and open hints at yawning black chasms of uncertain depth. You can fall into this book and just keep falling.  What a marvel.

Attempting a more standard cop versus serial killer story, Ellroy hasnt yet hit upon the right mixture of hate, terror and respect in his protagonists. And his protagonist's wife and daughters are pretty much a pile of nothing to reflect his problems onto. There is something here - the horror of the opening scene echoes in a way that "this must be the killers origin story" scenes rarely do. The racism and hatred, the homophobia and violence, above all the masculine self-loathing and mixed hatred of and desire for women as redemptive Madonna/whore are not only there but echoed again and again in many places and ways. That makes the antagonist a rarity for Ellroy - someone we almost feel we understand. He's just someone in the 70s, man. People were like that then.

Highly charming, you get the sense that this could be a sitcom/mystery TV show in the best way. To that extent, the things that don't work are the most novelistic - the mystery itself isn't much of one, and ultimately you can't be so precious in a private eye novel that the mystery doesn't work. Still, the Spellmans are worth getting to know and you'll cackle at them just as much as any other goofball detective. 

If a "puzzle" mystery is going to give us a thousand red herrings in a terrible tangle, it can't also withhold key information - either withhold it or hide it in a thicket of false starts.  You can't do both.  The many ping-ponging reversals of fortune among the main characters make none of them, even a supposed mastermind, feel like they really have anything they're pursuing or standing for, whether internal or external.  People just do things because that's when the plot needs it to happen.  I guess that makes it sound worse than it is.  It is ingenious, and the many levels of meta-textuality work surprisingly well together, something oft-attempted but rarely pulled off.  But it wasn't enough.

Classic mysteries can sometimes get caught up in harmful stereotypes and superstitions, partly because they depict people who are but sometimes they cross the line and depict them themselves. Without going into gruesome detail, this is a novel where incest has a strong presence. It isn't handled with the sensitivity or insight needed. A pity because it's one of the best Kindaichi cases other than that!

One of the more solid Zeck novels in part because you, like Wolfe and Cramer, are thoroughly stumped as to his actual involvement. Eventually Wolfe figures it out, and you can get pretty close, but ultimately neither he nor Archie does a whole lot, which diminishes the charm a bit, but it's still a delightful tangle.