My ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class went up on Friday for Insiders; I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the excellent baseball-themed deckbuilder Baseball Highlights: 2045.
I don’t know how or when I came across Philo Vance, the crime-solver at the heart of a dozen mysteries written by art critic Willard Huntington Wright under the psuedonym S.S. Van Dine, although I suspect it came about when I was researching J.K. Rowling’s favorite detective novels as she did press around the releases of her two Cormoran Strike books. I grabbed the first Vance novel, The Benson Murder Case
Vance’s diction reminded me a bit of Lord Peter Wimsey, the debonair star of eleven novels and a handful of short stories by Dorothy Sayers; Wimsey engages in more direct investigation, but his own peculiar manner of speech contradicts his high birth and education at Eton and Oxford. Wismey’s speech patterns and pronunciation made reading his dialogue unnecessarily difficult, whereas Vance’s is subtle enough that it was more mild annoyance than out-and-out distraction. That allowed me to focus more on trying to backtrace Vance’s thinking, while avoiding straying too far down the path of the obvious (where Van Dine is only too happy to lead you). So while I never went back for more of Sayers’ work (perhaps unfairly so) after reading her first novel, I’ll keep rolling with Vance, especially since the next two novels are available for Kindle at the same price.
I also read Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum recently, a dreadful account of war in China across three generations, told with horrifying detail of the violence perpetrating by the Japanese invaders on Chinese civilians and soldiers, and by Chinese fighters on each other during the same period. One scene depicts the flaying of a Chinese fighter in eerily similar fashion to the flaying scene in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Next up: I’ll review David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas