jdcorley's Reviews (191)

It's hard to evaluate a debut novel that changed the whole wide world, but here, I suppose, you can see a great sadness heave it's way out of the sump of bigoted jokes and sneering superiority and into view. It's the sadness that makes it work. If Marlowe were ever happy he'd be unbearable.

It's pretty tough, in a classic mystery, to execute the "it was who you suspected from the beginning" ending. Like why all the rigamarole then? You don't end up thinking Wolfe has accomplished much at all.

Chase is one of those pulp guys whose work can often be held up as some of the most racially deranged and misogynistic in the field, but at his best he could really look at some broken, greedy, seedy people and concoct wheels and wheels for them to run around each other with guns and a pile of money big enough to promise escape. This is one of his best, with a hero who is just callow enough to think he deserves to win and just reticent enough to shudder about what he might have to do. 

Our man Charlie mopes his way through a Hong Kong adventure that raises some of the racial elements of English domination there, but fully fails to follow through with them, leaving the Chinese characters to be underdeveloped stereotypes - especially damaging given the prevalance of these stereotypes in spy and thriller fiction of the 20th century. It's fine for Charlie to be sad about What Happened (in the last book) but the events of this book don't challenge his sadness or make him change. He's even more sad at the end, which is fine for a Charlie Muffin book, they're not exactly triumphant, exciting adventures, but it means we don't really want to accompany him anymore.

In the "investigator versus heist" subgenre there's often too much of a temptation to make either the investigator or the heisters too smart or competent, to make a situation too complex or to hide the ball so that the heist is revealed and the investigator's reversal is revealed in a double twist. If it works it's a feat of narrative acrobatics, brilliant and memorable. But it usually doesn't work. 

Swain goes another direction in Grift Sense. He may still be revealing facts right up to the end but you can get very close to an understanding both of the grifters and of our hero's actions. Instead of trying for a big twist, he tries to seek out the emotional reality inside the heist, the stuff that makes it work on us. And so, perhaps, above everything except the heist itself, this book is about aging and loss. Unexpectedly, despite the lack of fireworks, it's comforting and real.

This is the 42nd Nero Wolfe novel and perhaps the most incisive one into an element of Wolfe's character that's often remarked on inside and outside the books: his apparent loathing of women. You can have your critiques of the racial politics of Wolfe's novels but, to me, there was never any doubt that Rex Stout did not agree with Wolfe's position on women and, as the reader was also intended to do, found it a point of ridicule.  Ridiculing Wolfe is one of the things that makes Wolfe a unique classic mystery protagonist.  Only Poirot's vanity comes in for more teasing from the author than Wolfe's misogyny.  But faced with an undeniable force in the form of hepcat nightclub singer Julie Jacquette, Wolfe just can't hold to it, and we like him a little more because he can't, and he goes out of his way to do her a good turn.  The mystery itself is an interesting question of respectability and wealth, as many classic mysteries are. Jacquette isn't a "respectable" woman; she lounges around until eleven, eats breakfast in bed at a hotel she lives in, but she can count to two and say the alphabet backwards.  In the end it's her bravery that solves the case.

A beautiful mystery; it can't quite decide if its a fully classical experience or something a bit more experimental, and when it lags its because it's just having things happen in the noir style. Not such a bad flaw, is it?

For a historical understanding of where a lot of the mystery genre was in the first years of the 20th century, Sexton Blake is a key figure, but once you read a few of these you see why the genre really struggled to stand on its own two feet. Blake, a smug know-it-all, goes from puzzle to puzzle solving them with trivia-book level knowledge of science and deduction, without the emotional depth or even a charming central character. When people are annoyed by the mystery genre it's probably something like Sexton Blake that they're thinking about.

I actually don't mind a book about a bunch of scuzzy characters doing scuzzy things (I just dropped a 5 star review on American Tabloid by Ellroy for god's sake), but by the time everyone in this one's introduced, you're pretty much done with them. Yet we need to watch them circle each other on a confidence game, hired murder, and other criminal activities for the rest of the novel. The love affair that erupts between two of them is actually pretty charming but it is just too cynical to be able to carry our sympathy emotionally. The writing and situations are such that we are clearly meant to be having fun, but there's few enough people here to have fun with. Everyone's a fake or a piece of shit. I could have lived with it if it were shorter, simpler, darker, or lighter. As it is it isn't so good.

Sheckley is charming enough, as is his central character, but there's something rather careless about the idea of a bunch of counterculture burnouts forming a network of favors and information to facilitate an international detective. You get the feeling that if you scratched the surface of any of them that they would turn out to be the demand-to-see-the-manager/borderline sex tourist American/English expat type that we now loathe more than are charmed by.  The plot's a shaggy dog story and Sheckley does it better than most, but all in all I rather would have just seen our hero work it out on his own.