octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a bit of an unusual one, collected as it is with the rest of the Tuesday Club murder stories, as it relates a case that's ongoing, rather than one that happened in the past. A young woman kills herself, or so everyone thinks, but Miss Marple has her suspicions, and ropes in a retired Scotland Yard detective to prove it. She writes down the name of the person she thinks is responsible, and gives it to the detective, but although the reader can surmise that Miss Marple is indeed correct, we don't get know what the name is until the end of the story. Even so, I'd picked the murderer. It doesn't happen often, but when they turned up on the page I thought "You are exactly the sort that Miss Marple would finger for this" and lo, it turns out I was right.

Which lets me end this particular collection on a rather smug note. 

I don't often think of these Miss Marple stories as "fun" - they're entertaining, certainly, but often the circumstances they're relating are pretty grim. This particular mystery, however, is almost entirely hypothetical, and it's being told by Jane Helier. She's one of the Tuesday Club members, so she's used to hearing about other people's mysteries, but this time it's her turn to tell one. And, to put it mildly, Jane's as thick as a brick. That's not just me saying so... I think every single character, at one point, laments her lack of intelligence, but they only do it in the privacy of their own thoughts and never let on, because that would be unkind. But she's profoundly stupid, if still sympathetic, and the way that Miss Marple covers for her here is endearing. 

I have to admit that my guess as to who the culprit was, and why they acted as they did, was completely wrong. On the one hand, it's more evidence that I am terrible at mysteries, but on the other it's nice to be surprised. It is less nice that the culprit got away with it, and that the person they confessed to pretty much buried the knowledge of what happened so that said culprit continued to maintain their reputation even after their death. Given their horrible actions, that's pretty awful. 

There's not a lot of justice here, and I'm not especially happy about that. 

I couldn't really get into this one. I understand that, when you've written as many mystery stories as Christie has, some of the tropes will get used over and over. I feel as if I've read the twist about the body several times already from her, so it's hardly much of a surprise when that same narrative trick pops up yet again.

Maybe the tragedy here is that Christie ate a little too much of the brandy butter with her plum pudding, and wrote this, half-drunk, on Christmas evening. That would explain the repetition. 

I liked this, but it did rather strain credulity, I thought. One of the things I like best about the Miss Marple stories is that she often uses domestic details to solve the cases; details that the usual Scotland Yard detective might have missed. Here, I had to wonder if those detectives were sleeping on the job. The letter that was the key to the case was blatantly the key. I didn't know why, but it was still obvious that there was something fishy going on there, what with the spelling. I realise this is a little bit hypocritical of me, since I didn't know what the items being referred to actually were, but then I expect a little more of Scotland Yard detectives than I do of myself. It seems a bit strange that there was no one, no one in the whole bloody Yard, that didn't recognise those names for what they were, even if the capitalisation and acronyms were beyond them. 

I'd vaguely heard of Darkover before this, but have never read any of it. However, I'm visiting my dad for Xmas and this is on his shelves, so I gave it a go. It was alright. There was, it must be said, a deeply unconvincing romance that added absolutely nothing to the plot, and seemed to exist solely to insert a single female character into the text. I also expected, from the blurb, a much stronger emphasis on medicine, as I got the impression that this was a book about a plague. And it is, but much more of the focus here is travel and identity: a doctor's repressed personality is brought to the fore (and periodically buried again) as that repressed self is better able to endure the physical and emotional rigours of travel to ask for help from an isolated culture. Nice idea, basically adequate execution.

Included at the end of this particular edition is an unrelated short story, "The Waterfall." It's unreservedly dreadful, and book would be stronger without it. 

This is just enormously sad. The war's over, but there are so many dead that it doesn't really seem like a victory. In a series where death is both inevitable and valued, however, that sadness is also just a little ambiguous. Cyrus, for instance, is more affecting dead than alive, and I don't mean by that that his memory impacts on the other characters and makes me feel for him through them. I mean his ghost, who talks and wanders round in a sort of benign haunting, who makes friends with the reaper of fear, has both more narrative heft and more emotional pull. He's more interesting when he's dead, which is somewhat the case for a lot of characters in this series. 

I can't say enough about the artwork in these last few issues. Emma Ríos has done good work in the earliest Pretty Deadly comics, but the trench warfare sections are far beyond the rest. Far beyond. They're so good that I don't even really care about the story anymore, I'm too riveted to the pictures. There are some of them, particularly the ones involving Alice, that I would happily hang on my wall so that I could stare at them every day. And I genuinely find the story compelling, so when I say that I've stopped caring about it in comparison to the art, it should give an indication of just how spectacular that art is. 

This is absolutely awful, in the best possible way. The reapers of war, cruelty, and vengeance are on the trench battlefields of WW2 France, as the sympathetic human characters die around them. The reapers ask each other if these young men know what it is they're doing when they dig the trenches that will become their graves, and the answer is an unequivocal yes. It's such a waste, and that waste is reinforced by Emma Ríos' art, which is again outstanding. Her use of colour, in particular, is enormously affecting. Combined with the utter bleakness of the script the whole of the issue is just so compelling. 

I remember when I first read this series, this comic marked the point where I stopped liking it a lot and started loving it. The art here is spectacular, as the lurid green of chlorine gas seeps over the trenches, overwhelming the muted colours that the rest of the panels are in. The only relief is the equally bright red representing the reaper of war, but in its way that's worse. The green and the red together say more than the text or the rest of the imagery. It's fantastic, and all credit to Emma Ríos here, because she's done an outstanding job.