Dawn's Reading Blog

I don’t know if Rex Stout happened to write a lot of Nero Wolfe short stories or if that’s just what my grandmother preferred to buy. Either way, I’ve read way too many “Three” collections along these lines. Curtains for Three is much the same as the rest of them. If you like these characters, I suppose you’ll like the stories. The first one is obvious, the second overly simple for the amount of effort invested in it, and the third one is hopelessly contrived. They are, however, exactly the right length for a single-sitting reading.

I suppose there was no reason to read The Five Bells, except that it was there. I’ve read one other by her about this group of characters and it was much the same. The overall tone isn’t bad, though a little unhurried, but the characters seem to know each other better than I know them. It’s a series.

The main character, a Richard Jury, is inexplicably loved by everyone. People, men and women, look for him to come. I don’t understand why this is. He seems like an ordinary sort of guy to me. Doesn’t do any particularly brilliant police work, doesn’t harm anyone, doesn’t make up to anyone, just quietly does his business in a polite, if uninteresting, fashion. It would be nice to believe that a man like that would be universally admired to the point of doting, but experience tells me this isn’t so.

Transgressions is a collection of ten novellas by some pretty famous people. I enjoyed almost all of them. There was one I hated, one that bored me towards the end because it forgot to stop and just kept going, and then there was the one by Stephen King. Does he even try anymore? (I believe Family Guy made that joke about him previously.) It wasn’t even well edited. But seven out of ten isn’t bad at all and I learned some new names to check out.

Not much to say about Mary, Mary. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good. It was somewhat transparent. I think I’m getting tired of Alex Cross and his family. For one thing, they’re so sweetly devoted to each other every single second that it makes me want to puke. For another, Alex manages to find the love of his life about every other novel. Then it somehow doesn’t work out, leaving him free to find the next love of his life. The police part is OK, but I’m bored with his home life. I’m happy to say that no one attacked them this time. If real life cops had their friends and families kidnapped, murdered, and raped as often as fictional cops, I don’t think we’d have any real life cops.

I’d never read anything by Tom Perrotta before but I enjoyed Little Children right up to the end where it fell apart. Guess he didn’t know what to do with it. But the intertwining plots were all interesting up to that point and it seemed like they ought to come together in a blazing climax. If I were his editor, I’d make him do it again. I’ll read more by him though because his writing is engaging and his plot was timely but original.

I can’t even remember the name of the thing. I gave it away as soon as I finished it. Luckily I bought it for a dollar. Still paid too much.

OK, it was about some secret agent being rescued by some chick and how they fell in love. I think it had diamonds in the title though I don’t remember diddly about diamonds in the plot. You have to suspend your disbelief a long, long way to make it through this one.

Easeful Death is by the author of the Father Dowling series so I guess I was expecting a Father Dowling mystery. Not that I’ve ever read one of those that I can recall. Anyway, Easeful Death is quite something else but not quite good. It’s the story of a writer who fakes his own death only to discover that someone has posthumously published his best work (which he didn’t actually write). Now he’d like to be living again. Meantime, certain characters are investigating (not enthusiastically) his faked death. A muddled plot with no interesting characters or suspense, just events that happen sequentially.

This collection of short stories–Learning to Kill–from McBain’s pre-McBain career is probably only of interest to his most sincere fans. OK, even I was a bit bored. It is good for the fledgling writer in that it shows how far you can come. Some of his early stuff was pretty pulpy and, in short story fashion, extremely sketchy. Learning to Kill is interesting history but not interesting reading.

Sleeping Beauty is written so simply, in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure, as to manage to irritate even me, the world’s biggest plain-writing fan. This isn’t Margolin’s best. Its flat writing and the fact that you can guess whodunnit in the first ten pages make it less than page-turning.

Apparently McBain used to write pulp fiction. One of his earliest novels and certainly not his best, The Gutter And the Grave reads like a Mickey Spillane story in places, though you can see glimmers of his future talent. Lots of plot twists but of course you know the girl dunnit in the end and the detective/bum goes back to his drinking. Predictable and formulaic but written with McBain’s usual smooth flow.