Conservative Book Talk

Part 2 of 6: Most Poorly Executed

I’m not big on short stories, mysteries excepted. Unfortunately, this anthology includes a selection of “mystery” stories that are more like horror, or fairy-tales gone amok; so I can’t recommend the whole batch of 50. That said, there are too many stories for one review: this is review 2 of 6, the nine short stories with the most plot holes /poorest writing.
• Ransom, by Pearl S. Buck A little boy is kidnapped, and we spend a lot of time looking for him but its not clues that solve this mystery, its luck. Unluckily, it comes too late into the story for us to care about the boy, much less his parents (who we have to endure for most of the story); all are stock figures of bored brat and panicked adults, respectively.
• The Treasure Hunt, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Tish This story has a great set-up: a charity fund-raiser, a night-time treasure hunt, lots of racing cars, and a townful of odd Joes and Janes. Too bad the writing is so poor we never get beyond names for any of the characters except Tish (our lady detective whose key characteristics are vandalism, stealing, and beating up her fellow charity-gala-attendees in life-threatening ways. Charmed, I’m sure).
• The Owl At The Window, by G.D.H. and M. I. Cole, Superintendent Wilson, 1923. A man is found dead, in his own home, the only suspect having just arrived and left late the night before while the man was clearly still alive. An original murder method, if you can endure the meandering and red herrings of ten too many pages.
• The Pink Edge, by Frank Forest and George Dilnot, Inspector Barraclough, 1915. A missing millionare’s daughter, a forgery trial, and randsom notes with pink edges. Excellent plot development, but most of the connecting plot points are simply missing, leaving the reader to wonder how we got from A to D when not even the end’s expounding mentions B and C.
• The Absent-Minded Coterie, by Robert Barr, Eugene Valmont, 1906. The literary founder of Hercule Poirot, this author has a great idea in the beginning, but the plot holes are so gapingly large that the ending falls through. So, *SPOILERS* the hero just waltzes into the bad guy’s office, is told he’s out of line (not having a warrant or police authority or even retaining a single clue), and stays around arguing long enough for all the evidence to be destroyed. Really annoying, this one. *END SPOILERS*
• The Perfect Crime, by Ben Ray Redman, A detective with a big ego, a keen-eyed scientist, and a long evening of friendly conversation. This isn’t as much a mystery as a recounting of past mysteries, which recreates the atmosphere of the night-time so successfully I was bored to sleep. The title is explained by the end of the story, though its got to be the least reasonable crime (motive and means are equally unexplained) ever, and far from perfect (an investigator “in”hibits the search for evidence).
• The Hands of Mr. Otter-mole, by Thomas Burke, is well written in the technical sense, but the plot leaves much to be desired, deliberately not telling us why the murders happen or how the detective solves it. This might be a philosophical point but it isn’t stated and was really annoying, so I’m including it on grounds of poor plotting.
• The Mystery of the Missing Wash, by Octavus Roy Cohen, Florian Slappey, A washerwoman, recently divorced, is losing her commissioned clothes and will soon lose her clientele if the their isn’t found. This one isn’t so much bad writing as it is laziness. The author writes himself into a corner, then suddenly, whoosh, we’re at the end, mystery solved, and the reader is left scratching her head.
• The Mad Tea Party, by Ellery Queen, Ellery Queen, A crazy architect is murdered, and a whole host of things go missing while our detective, the arcitect’s adulterous wife, and few other random and convenient guests lock themselves in and start to go crazy. If you enjoy mind benders without solutions, you’ll love this.

OVERALL: The mix wasn’t entirely boring to read, but generally by the end it got tiresome and or downright annoying. “Most Poorly Executed” definitely.

Tags: detecives, Ellery Queen, Mystery, Sincerelyornot

I’m not big on short stories, mysteries excepted since about ten years ago when I met one Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, this anthology includes a selection of “mystery” stories that are more like horror, or fairy-tales gone amok; so I can’t recommend the whole batch of 50. That said, I did find this very interesting from a historical perspective. There are too many stories for one review: this is review 1 of 6, the introduction and an overview of the anthology with some commentary on the commentary J.

PLOT: This is basically a short history lesson on mysteries in general and short stories in particular. In case you wondered, yes, Sherlock Holmes is mentioned, but no, he’s not in any of the stories. I think the editor’s hope is to introduce people to the lesser-known detectives of short story, and get mystery fans to stretch beyond their traditional limits in Doyle’s work. I love that idea, though as we’ll see, I’m not fond of the direction Ellery Queen takes us. The effects of that idea are lots of historical facts (detective short stories in history 101: dates of characters, the first detective story ever, etc), and fun editorial commentary on each story that give some historical background or maybe just hints at the plot twists. The introduction throws a lot of names and titles at you, while comparing them to Doyle’s work. It’s quite fun, and makes you think (especially since there are no Doyle stories in the thousand-plus pages that follow. The editor doesn’t mention why or even forewarn the reader that there will be nothing by Doyle). If anything, it shows how much an author expected of their readership fifty years ago; we’re expected to think it through and draw our own conclusions, a rarity in short story anthologies of my experience.

GOOD: Only two or three detectives are featured more than once, making a veritable smorgasbord of non-Doyle stories. Information about each detective, author, and story time-period provide opportunities to explore new serials for the interested reader. While only about a third of the stories are exceptionally good mysteries, roughly half are good stories overall, and very entertaining. The most worthwhile part of this book is the introduction, which describes the history of mystery. The only comparably interesting part is the first chapter, especially the very first mystery story ever written (by Edgar Allen Poe). The introduction is a crash course in the famous people and detectives of the mystery genre, and gave me countless names to look up for future reading. I enjoyed the categorizations of mystery stories (comedy, female detectives, Holmesians – Doyle imitators – and Comedic-Holmeisans, great detectives, and clever mysteries), and there is at least one good story in each category, all put into context by this introduction.

BAD: Roughly half the following stories are either boring or unacceptably non-mystery-like. So the book as a whole is not recommended, despite the cool introduction. The editor clearly feels that mystery includes the horror genre. Also, the standard for “best” is pretty low, despite the intellectual commentary.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: The introduction is worth every word. The rest of the book varies greatly in quality, but that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with 101 years and so many different authors. Why do you think the editor would spend most of his introduction comparing different authors to Holmes, and then omit all stories featuring the famous detective? Any ideas?

Tags: detectives, Ellery Queen, Mystery, Sincerelyornot

DISCLAIMER: I had to read this book for a historiography class, so it wasn’t my idea, for one thing. Also, the point of the assignment was to learn as much as I could from skimming/reading really fast, so portions of the book were skimmed over.

The title of this book caught my eye because, as a history fan, I love a good footnote. Long dissertations on sources and people not directly relevant to the point at hand make for great biographies. By way of explanation: a footnote is when there’s a little number or parenthetic citation in a sentence, and the source is at the bottom of the page. An endnote is the same thing, only all the information is at the back of the book (more cumbersome as a reading aid, but still worth looking at in most good biographies). An explanatory footnote is a footnote that not only lists the source, but also some useful or interesting information (a mini-biography on this servant of Edward III, the full Latin text of the Magna Karta, a recipe, etc).

PLOT: Unfortunately, Grafton isn’t really interested in explaining his promised history of the footnote (I had to ask the professor for that), more in rambling on about how we can’t really know the truth or accuracy of anything, and other elements of post-modernist philosophy. Its really confusing, because he also isn’t big on grammar or specificity. Apparently there is a school of post-modernist thought that argues for obscurity in writing (as a way of emphasizing their theory that all meaning is defined by what other people think of what is written, not what the writer thinks he wrote). I didn’t understand that from the book itself, either, but again asked the professor and my Dad about postmodernism, and figured it out from there.

GOOD: To illustrate his philosophy about history writing, Grafton mentions many important figures in the field of historiography (the study of the history of writing history). So we are introduced to a lot of obscure but influential people like Leopold von Ranke (German historiographer, he argued for history as the study of facts as recovered from written sources, of which the best were eye-witness accounts, and of these the best were in state archives, because the state is the ultimate figure in history). These people are all important because their theories have profoundly influenced thought and scholarly practice in our modern society (Ranke, for example, invented the idea of a college seminar, where students do their own research instead of just listening to the professor talk about doing it, and writing their own research papers, etc). I’d never read a book that actually USED postmodern writing techniques, and to such a blatant extent; so that was enlightening…

BAD: …if really confusing. I wanted to learn more about the drift from marginal notes in Bibles to numbered verses to combining both elements in other areas of scholarship (Shakespeare’s numbered lines for example), and how all that evolved into Chicago style, MLA, etc. Instead, I found a jumbled mess of obscure people and even more obscure explanations of why they were important. The assignment for my class was to skim the book and grasp its basic meaning. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any points he might have been trying to make, or any narrative structure at all, even after reading twice or three times.

OVERALL: Not recommended. If a reader can’t make heads or tails of your argument, the book is pointless: which may be the point, but it isn’t worth 250 pages of monotony to figure that out.

Tags: Anthony Grafton, History, Sincerelyornot, The Footnote