→ December 12, 2023
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The House of Silk.

I’ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle’s War, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day. He’s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels – Moriarty, which was well-written but relied too much on a gimmick; and The House of Silk, which, unlike Moriarty, actually features Holmes as the main character. It’s also well-written, and moves along well, but falls into the trap of so many authorized continuations, where the author is trying so hard to be true to or respectful of the characters/settings that the story itself ends up suffering.

The House of Silk builds slowly to the first of multiple murders that all seem to tie to some mysterious entity by that title, although it’s unclear to whom or what it refers. Holmes enters at the behest of an art dealer whose shipment of paintings was destroyed by Irish gang members and whose client is later found murdered. When Holmes uses his Baker Street Irregulars to look for evidence, one of them ends up murdered himself, spurring the detective to continue his investigations even when others, including his brother Mycroft, warn him away from anything involving the House of Silk. Holmes finds himself framed for murder, and Watson has to find a way to spring him before they can solve the case.

Horowitz’s Holmes is the one you expect. He repeats his catchphrase “The game is afoot!” which actually comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and just made me roll my eyes for its obviousness here. He does his parlor trick of glancing at a person and immediately coming up with a lengthy biographical sketch or a rundown of everything that person might have done that day, which has very little to do with the actual mystery here and didn’t happen nearly as often in the original Conan Doyle works because nearly all of them were short stories. He’s actually less disdainful towards Watson and the police in The House of Silk, where authenticity ends up lost to make him a kinder, gentler Holmes, and nobody asked for that. Watson, meanwhile, is even more of a cipher of a character here than he is in the original stories, retreating mostly to observer and chronicler status outside of the scenes while Holmes is in prison.

That’s one of my two main problems with The House of Silk – the characters are just not very interesting, including the man we all know and love. If you enjoy this sort of fiction, you likely have a favorite detective character; I’m a Hercule Poirot fan, and never enjoy the Miss Marple stories as much because she’s just not as interesting to me. Horowitz’s Holmes feels flat on the page, and none of the side characters are anything more than stock figures, some there because the reader might expect them (Lestrade, Mycroft), some there for the new plot, but none memorable at all once they leave the page.

The other is that the resolution to the story here is exceptionally lurid, and thus out of character with any of the original stories. Such things do happen in the real world, and did during the era of the novel, but putting Holmes into such a story is not only a break with the novel’s otherwise overzealous effort to stay authentic to the original material but requires a huge tonal shift for the character that the author can’t manage. It’s jarring in the wrong way, and Horowitz shows he’s a better craftsman than artist, able to frame and write the story but not to give it the panache or appeal of Conan Doyle’s works.

Next up: I’m currently about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang’s Babel, the most recent winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ January 5, 2023
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Glass Onion.

I loved Knives Out, even acknowledging some of its weak points, because the core mystery was done so incredibly well – including plenty of misdirection – and the dialogue sparkled with all kinds of humor, not least from the detective Benoit Blanc. Writer-director Rian Johnson signed a deal with Netflix to produce several sequels, the first of which, Glass Onion, appeared on the site right before Christmas. Glass Onion gets the humor stuff right, arguably even more than the original, and adds a second character who outshines Blanc, but the mystery is inferior to its predecessor and there’s nowhere near the effort to mislead the viewer that a strong mystery film or novel should have.

Glass Onion does give us Blanc (Daniel Craig), this time on a Greek island owned by billionaire tech bro Elon Musk Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is hosting a weekend murder-mystery party for five of his friends. Blanc received an invitation, but Bron didn’t send him one, so the latter is confused but also pleased to have someone so famous at his gathering. The other guests include Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), who co-founded Alpha with Bron but was forced out in an ugly legal battle; Connecticut Governor Claire DeBella (Kathryn Hahn), who’s running for Senate on Bron’s dime; Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), Alpha’s chief scientist; Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a Twitch streamer and men’s rights activist; and Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a model, fashion designer, and total dingbat. Birdie’s assistant and Duke’s girlfriend are also along for the ride. It’s very And There Were None, along with any of several Poirot novels where he’s invited to a gathering and ends up solving a murder (like Cards on the Table), so of course someone here ends up dead and Blanc has to solve the case.

Glass Onion is stuffed with humor of many kinds, including the ongoing satire of Bron, who is insufferably pretentious but also prone to malapropisms and rather transparently full of himself. He’s also in love with his gadgets and consumes conspicuously. On the other end of the humor spectrum, Hudson is hilarious as a fatuous and truly not very bright sendup of a type, one not unconnected to Hudson herself, since she’s the founder of Fabletics and Birdie started an athleisure line of her own. The film takes place around May of 2020, and we meet Birdie as she’s holding a giant, maskless party, while her assistant Peg refuses to give her back her phone because Birdie tweeted a slur (or more than one). I actually enjoyed the lower-brow humor, not least how dimwitted Birdie can be, than the satire, which was a more hit than miss but still a bit inconsistent.

The mystery, however, doesn’t live up to that of the first film, where suspicion was spread across a wide array of characters, and the script kept trying to redirect your attention to different suspects. Here, there’s one most likely culprit, and the film doesn’t spend much time trying to make you think it’s anyone else. I didn’t want that person to be the killer, because it was the least inspired choice of all. You might know who it is just from that description, which is unfortunate, but I think speaks to the way the ending here disappointed me.

It’s still a rollicking time, though, almost never letting up on the humor, and it’s buoyed by a great performance from Monáe, one of the best of her career. Monáe has always showed talent but she hasn’t had many opportunities to act in strong films since Moonlight. Her role here is far more challenging than it might first appear, as that character has unexpected layers to it, and she’s up to the task, whether it’s delivering dry humor, mockery, or faux-intellectualism, or acting the spy or even a little bit of the action hero. She even outshines Craig, who’s in fine form as Blanc but has far less to do this time around than he did in Knives Out, at least in exploring or growing the character. He has one scene right when all the guests sit down to dinner and Bron explains the rules for the murder mystery (the game, not the real one) where he goes full Blanc in the best way, and I hope in future films we get more of that. Glass Onion is like one of those Christie novels where Poirot doesn’t even show up until the second half of the film – you’re still entertained, but you want more of the character you really paid to see.

Then there’s the bombastic ending, which ties a few things together, including the necessary fulfillment of Chekhov’s gun, but goes on quite some time after the killer is revealed. Knives Out ended so perfectly, tying up every loose end while gently mocking itself and the conventions of the genre, that the shift to a very Hollywood-style resolution was surprising – it’s hard to imagine Poirot or Miss Marple or even Tommy and Tuppence in that situation, which was more befitting of the Continental Op, if even that. What leads up to the slam-bang finish is pretty clever, and the immediate aftermath is a satisfying comeuppance as well. I don’t mind fireworks per se, but I guess I wanted this film to adhere to its genre’s style more like the first one did.

That’s a lot of words about what was wrong with a movie that I ultimately liked, but you can’t talk about Glass Onion without comparing it to Knives Out. Where the first film might have been a little too by-the-book when it comes to the genre, Glass Onion got away from it more than I’d like. I’m here for all the Benoit Blanc films, but I hope the next one has more of him and a stronger mystery, with all of the same kind of humor.

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→ November 21, 2022
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Amsterdam (movie).

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)

The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.

I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.

Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.

And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.

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→ November 15, 2022
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See How They Run.

The success of Knives Out in 2019 didn’t just spawn a highly-awaited sequel, Glass Onion, which hits theaters later this month – it has spawned attempts to capitalize on its success, with two similar movies coming out this fall, See How They Run and Amsterdam. These movies are like catnip to me, as I love mysteries and detective stories in general, and Agatha Christie stories in particular, having read 50 of her novels and four of her short story collections. See How They Run doubles down on this, as it’s a period piece mystery that involves Christie’s famous play The Mousetrap and eventually features an appearance by the Queen of Murder herself as a character. So while I recognize this film’s limitations, I also loved just about every minute of it. (It’s streaming free now on HBO Max, or rentable everywhere, including Amazon.)

See How They Run is a bit more than a perfunctory murder mystery, though, as the script engages in some legerdemain, even starting out in one direction before the murder takes place and the whole thing shifts. After that point, we get our intrepid investigators, the overeager young Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who is one of the first women in that position in the London police; and Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), the drunken detective of stereotype. Someone has been murdered after the 100th performance of The Mousetrap, and, of course, everyone’s a suspect, from the actors to the playwright to the stage director. Constable Stalker is new to the homicide beat, so she starts jumping to conclusions, assuming every suspect is guilty, giving the film the biggest of its running gags, although Ronan’s performance makes it work. There is, of course, another murder, and the script plays around with the tropes of the British murder mystery, many of which Christie invented, before getting to the identity of the murder.

The script is about 80% formula, 20% clever, but this is a formula I happen to love, and there is at least a playfulness in the script that nods to the inherent predictability of it all. The core mystery is both well hidden and well written, credible with enough clues dropped along the way that at least in hindsight you can see how you might have figured it out. (I did not.) There is also some humor in here, not as much as Knives Out offered, but a number of laugh-out-loud moments for me from the bantering and a few sight gags. Your mileage may vary, of course.

What really makes this movie, though, is Ronan’s performance. We’ve seen Ronan be funny, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Lady Bird, but we’ve never seen her be this silly, and she seems to throw herself completely into it. Her comic timing is great, but she manages to make Stalker a comic character without making her seem totally un-serious. Stalker’s overzealousness actually leads to a significant blunder, although even that scene is also kind of funny, but she’s never an object of pity or derision, and Ronan’s portrayal is the main reason. Stalker is earnest but green, and her errors, even when played for laughs, are borne of inexperience rather than incompetence.

Rockwell, on the other hand, is a replacement-level detective here, with a generic British accent and nondescript mannerisms beyond a slight limp that itself becomes fodder for the script’s mockery of the formula. I’m not sure why Rockwell was chosen for a role when there are plenty of English actors available, but he doesn’t have a real direction here – he doesn’t lean into the role and ham it up, but he also doesn’t give the character any urgency or gravitas. The conventions of the genre almost require one or the other, and instead Rockwell gives a fine but ultimately forgettable performance. The remainder of the cast is mostly big names or great actors in bit parts. The one major exception is David Oyelowo, who plays the closeted writer Mervyn Cocker-Norris and is clearly having a blast, while also getting a good amount of screen to chew. Adrien Brody is very good but doesn’t log enough minutes, and Ruth Wilson, who was stunning as Jane Eyre in the 2006 BBC mini-series of that name, is barely in the film at all.

The script does offer a bunch of Easter eggs for hardcore Christie fans, some of which appear in this EW story, although I won’t mention them here beyond the one in the title – the original name of The Mousetrap was Three Blind Mice. I caught a couple, but clearly missed the majority, although I admire the cleverness in slipping so many tiny nods to Christie, her works, and her adherents into the script. That may have ultimately worked against the finished film, however, as there’s so much Christie-ness or those that there’s probably less plot and less humor than there could have been. It doesn’t fare that well in comparison to Knives Out for that very reason. If you liked that film and also just like this genre, you’ll probably enjoy See How They Run as I did. If you aren’t a fan of witty murder mysteries, though, this isn’t going to have the same broader appeal that Rian Johnson’s hit film did.

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→ June 22, 2022
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Lemon.

Kwon Yeo-Sun’s novella Lemon made a slew of best-of lists last year, from most-anticipated to top novels of 2021, for its unusual, incisive treatment of what might otherwise have been an ordinary murder mystery. Set in 2002, as the World Cup that took place in South Korea and Japan was coming to a close, Lemon examines the brutal murder of a beautiful high school student and the impact it had on her family, friends, the suspects, and others, while only partially unwrapping the mystery of who actually killed her.

Written through the perspective of three women who knew the victim, Hae-on, Lemon defies the conventions of the modern literary mystery, where a murder or other horrific crime defines the story’s structure and its solution must inform the ending of the book. Da-on is Hae-on’s younger sister, but was the more worldly of the two, often taking care of Hae-on when the older girl seemed ill-equipped to handle reality, forgetting even the most basic personal tasks; after Hae-on’s death, Da-on reacts in increasingly hysterical ways, including undergoing plastic surgery to try to resemble her dead sister. Taerim is the girlfriend of one of the two main suspects in the murder, and her sections are written as her halves of conversations with a suicide prevention line and a psychiatrist, and it becomes clear that she knows more than she has let on. She marries that suspect in question, but their life is shattered by a subsequent tragedy with a subtle connection to the original murder. Sanghui was a new student and classmate of Hae-on and plays the part of the demos from Greek tragedies, standing in for the audience (or the reader) and observing the story as a third party. Within all of these is the possible answer to the mystery, the obliquely described revenge plot Da-on takes on who she believes is the killer, and a powerful exploration of grief and the lack of meaning in this senseless death.

Kwon has won multiple literary awards in her native Korea, but this is her first work to be translated into English, which may explain some of the rapturous praise for Lemon – it’s our first exposure to her voice and style, even though she’s been publishing works in Korean for more than a quarter-century. She weaves poetry into the story, and her prose writing often has the metaphorical quality of poetry, with descriptions that leave the reader feeling like they’re looking at the story from an angle that leaves it shrouded in mist. There are recurring images and symbols, including the lemons of the title, and frequent mention of the color yellow, such as the dress the victim was supposedly wearing on the night of her murder, and meditative passages on appearance and identity or the meaning (or lack thereof) of life.

What the book doesn’t do, and what might frustrate a lot of readers, is give you a clear answer to the murder. The first chapter of the novella’s eight, each of which takes place in a different year, sets up what appears to be the plot of a literary mystery, with a police interrogation of one of those two suspects where the cop tries to coerce a confession, but Kwon defies any of those expectations afterwards. You just have to go with it, and what I believe is the answer is buried within other text without anything definitive, so you might miss it and you certainly don’t get the Big Confession that modern book culture has led us to expect. It’s a good ride because it challenges your reading mind, but if you need clear and unequivocal answers, it’s going to leave you frustrated.

Next up: I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning book The Line of Beauty.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Snow.

John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea and was shortlisted for the noirish The Book of Evidence, but he also writes mysteries featuring a pathologist named Quirke under the pen name Benjamin Black. He published a new mystery in 2021, titled Snow, under his own name, with references to Quirke but a new lead in detective St. John Strafford, whose first name is pronounced “Sinjin” and last name is mispronounced by everyone he meets. Banville can’t help but write beautifully, and he has crafted a narrative that zips right along, in a setup that could easily have come from an Agatha Christie novel … but my god, the ending is so predictable you could probably guess it from this setup: In the prologue, a priest is murdered, stabbed in the neck and then castrated. If a possible motive for someone to kill a priest in this way came to your mind, you probably got it right.

I’m a fan of classic English mysteries, especially those of Christie – I’m a Poirot guy, but I’ll read anything she wrote, and have read more books by her than by any other author. There´s something about the simple setup and intricate plotting that will always appeal to me; it’s similar to my taste in board games, where most of my favorites have simple rules that lead to complex strategies. There’s an elegance to it that I appreciate.

Banville follows the template to a tee, other than, perhaps, the detail of the gelding of the priest’s corpse. But is he subverting the genre, or playing it straight and just adding too little to the form to make it interesting? Banville’s prose evokes the setting, the place, and the cultural conflicts that lie beneath the surface of the story, including the Catholic/Protestant split in 1950s Ireland. The Osborne family, owners of the house where the priest died and where he was often a visitor, are Protestants, as is Strafford, which the Osbornes seem to think should make them allies, especially against the power of a Church that will eventually show up to lean on Strafford to let the truth lie. Yet the motive for the murder is mundane, and figuring out who did it won’t be difficult.

The novel also suffers from Strafford’s blandness: he’s neither likeable nor unlikeable, lacking the conceited air of Poirot or the wit of Archie Goodwin or the debonair of Lord Peter Wimsey. Strafford enters the book early enough to establish some sort of defining qualities for himself, even an eccentricity or two, but beyond his name and the running gag that everyone loses the ‘r’ in his surname when he introduces himself, there’s nothing.

Banville does seem to be making a bigger point here with this story, about Ireland, the Church, the aftereffects of trauma, and doing that in a murder mystery feels a bit off. I doubt Banville wanted to trivialize his subject, but that’s how it comes off in the end, especially with the last-minute twist to the resolution (which is also reasonably easy to see coming). There’s a follow-up novel coming this year called April in Spain that unites Strafford with Quirke, to be published under Banville’s own name rather than the pseudonym, and perhaps that will answer some of these questions. As much as I enjoyed reading Snow while I was in the middle of it, the ending revealed it to be just empty calories.

Next up: I’m reading Mike Schur’s upcoming book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which, so far, is just as good as you’d expect.

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→ December 7, 2019
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Knives Out.

Knives Out might as well have been made explicitly for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that fit so many things I like in movies or even literature. It’s a mystery, and a fairly clever one. It’s witty on multiple levels. It’s very fast-paced, with a sort of hyper-reality to the dialogue. It left me wanting more of the same, and never felt overstuffed. It’s an homage to my favorite genre of films and novels, but never descends to parody. It’s not quite perfect, but my god did I enjoy every minute of it.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed the film, and did a similar homage to noir mysteries with his first feature film, Brick, but without the humor of this film, which is very much a British mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s novels. He’s assembled an incredible cast, with Daniel Craig chewing scenery all over the country manor house as the pompous ‘gentleman detective’ Benoit Blanc – so we’re not even going to be subtle about the Christie allusions – who is Hercule Poirot with an exaggerated southern drawl that another character compares accurately to Foghorn Leghorn. It’s a bit of overkill, because he wrote the film like every Poirot or Miss Marple novel where there’s a bunch of eccentric characters who get very little depth or development, but given how much these actors appear to be enjoying the ride, it’s hard not to enjoy watching them do so.

Blanc, like Poirot in most of his novels, isn’t introduced until some time has already elapsed in the story. Instead we are introduced to Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, a delight as ever), bestselling mystery writer and, as of the opening scene in the film, recently deceased. A week later, two police officers (LaKeith Stanfield, woefully underused, and Noah Segan) arrive to question all of the family members, with Blanc sitting in the background and only interjecting after the formal questioning is over. The family members are all simply aghast at the implication that the patriarch was murdered – well, all except for his mother – and get worked up when Blanc starts probing. Enter Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s private nurse, a Peruvian woman whose mother is an undocumented immigrant and who can’t lie without throwing up. Blanc uses the latter feature to his advantage, while others try to exploit the former for their own ends. Marta was the last person to see Harlan alive, and knows more about the circumstances of his death than anyone else, so Blanc appoints her his deputy (in a way) and sets about solving the crime.

Knives Out is all story and dialogue, and I’m good with that. I especially love the Poirot stories because I enjoy his character – the pompous, brilliant little Belgian man with the “face fungus” and silly hat and ability to solve crimes by the “psychology” of the suspects – and Blanc offers a lot of that too, similarly enamored of his own abilities, perhaps less perceptive when it comes to the suspects’ psychological motives but more entertaining with his turns of phrase. If you’re looking for complex characters or character growth, though, it’s not here: this is an old-school whodunit that lives and dies – pun intended – by the murder and its solution, buoyed by rapid-fire dialogue that would do His Girl Friday‘s writers proud. It is frequently funny, never riotously so, but consistently amusing, and Johnson did imbue several of the characters with varying degrees of wit, with Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really inhabits her role and could carry a movie in that character) dashing off some of the best lines. So you’ll get to see a stupendous collection of actors – Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Chris Evans’ sweater, even M. Emmet Walsh – get not quite enough to do, but do a lot with what they get.

The story itself is good, but I think it’s a bit too easy to solve. I suspect I know what Johnson was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work. I wasn’t sure I knew it until the end, and even then I realized I missed one really big clue, but it’s a bit too clear from the midpoint of the film who the most likely culprit is. Johnson does dial up the resolution to eleven, though, and perhaps the greatest strength of the script is how often little lines or events from earlier in the film pay off at the end. It rewards you for paying attention, and my attention was rapt from the beginning.

Johnson has already said he’d like to do a sequel with Blanc as the lead detective solving another murder, and I’m here for it – but I acknowledge I am at the absolute center of the circle encompassing the target audience for such a film. I love an old-timey murder mystery, and Johnson gave me the best new one I’ve seen or read in a very long time. It has flaws I wouldn’t forgive in a non-genre film, but great genre fiction often adheres to the genre’s intrinsic rules. I wish I could have seen Curtis fire off a few more quips or to know how Evans character became such a spoiled disaster, or gotten more mileage from the gag about the grandson who’s an alt-right troll (and looks like someone hit Mark Gatiss with a Benjamin Button ray), but this isn’t that kind of movie. Your mileage may vary.

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→ June 18, 2019
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Magpie Murders.

Anthony Horowitz created one of my favorite television series of all time, the magnificent British mystery show Foyle’s War, which stands well on its own but also comes across as a loving homage to the golden age of mysteries, with its gentleman detective D.C.S. Foyle and solutions drawn as much from psychology as from unearthing clues. He’s also been tabbed by the estates of Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming to write novels using those authors’ signature characters, including the Sherlock Holmes novel Moriarty, which I found a quick read but unfaithful in style to the Conan Doyle novels and too reliant on a huge twist for its resolution. He’s also written three standalone novels of original characters, of which Magpie Murders is one, and it’s every bit as brisk and compelling … but this time, the twists work incredibly well, and the reader is rewarded with two different mysteries to solve.

Magpie Murders presents us with a Poirot-like detective, the Holocaust survivor Atticus Pünd, who has both the little Belgian’s dispassionate approach to solving murders and endearing arrogance, drawn against his first instincts into a pair of murders in a small English town full of eccentric but well-defined characters. Pünd is also dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and this is almost certain to be his last case, but this seems to motivate him further to solve it rather than dwell on his imminent death. The murders are linked more by place than by method or motive, adding to the complexity, and as is typical of mysteries of the era Horowitz evokes, everyone had a reason to want the latter victim dead.

The novel runs over 400 pages, which is quite long for the genre (in my experience, only Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels reached that length), but that’s because there’s a second mystery wrapped up in the first one, and I won’t spoil it here. The first narrative breaks right before Pünd appears ready to reveal the solution, and you’re plunged into a totally different story, written in a more modern tone and involving a new set of characters, one where it isn’t even clear that a murder has taken place. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, yes, there was a murder, because otherwise why would Horowitz even engage in this bit of metafiction?) The gambit here is that the end of the Pünd novel is missing, and the new narrator has to find the absent chapters to solve the mystery, which leads to a discovery of a murder and a conclusion that is more conventional for mysteries set in the last few decades. The marvel here is that Horowitz has nested two distinct, connected stories told in two entirely different voices, each mirroring a particular style of mystery novels – one from the golden era, one more contemporary – without ever ripping the reader out of the spell of the entire enterprise.

The twin payoffs here – I guessed the identity of the murderer in the inner story, but not in the Pünd one – help justify the book’s length, and Horowitz, who has eschewed the idea that this is an homage to Agatha Christie (even though her real-life grandson, Mathew Pritchard, appears as a character in the inner story), does capture the essence of the grande dame’s prose and structure. Unlike Moriarty, where the gimmick relied on fooling the reader from the beginning, the twist here is unforced and gives the reader a fair chance to follow what’s happening. As a Poirot fan (over Miss Marple), I was particularly pleased to follow Pünd, who is very much a Poirot surrogate in the novel, although he lacks the flourishes of the fastidious man’s mustache or ze little grey cells. Perhaps Horowitz is better when creating his own characters, even those which clearly draw from the icons of the genre, than when trying to work with the icons themselves.

Next up: Still reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

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→ September 18, 2018
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Unquiet Spirits.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, like all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings, is now in the public domain, which has the rather unfortunate effect of letting anybody who wants to write something involving him do so without restriction. If someone wanted to write a story involving Holmes with the supernatural, which would be entirely antithetical to the character and to the author’s beliefs during the period when he was writing Sherlock Holmes stories, they could do so. That’s why I tend to avoid these ‘continuations,’ whether it’s completing an unfinished story or crafting something out of whole cloth – it’s too much to ask most authors to write a compelling story with someone else’s characters while also capturing the prose and dialogue unique to the original author.

Bonnie MacBird is one of many authors who’ve attempted to write something new involving the famous fictional detective, with two novels to date, including 2017’s Unquiet Spirits. She hadn’t published any novels prior to her first Holmes story, with the screenplay to the original Tron film her best-known work, but there’s no evidence here to indicate her inexperience with the form. Her prose is light but mimics the style of Conan Doyle’s late 19th century British vocabulary and syntax, and the story itself moves along quite well until the resolution. The problem here, however, is that she’s managed to turn Holmes dull, and Watson along with him, while also whiffing on the form and structure of the standard Sherlock Holmes mystery – not least by writing a novel of nearly 500 pages, twice as long as the longest of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Unquiet Spirits is set mostly in a Scottish distillery and the castle of the family that owns the firm, the Maclarens, some of whom believe their castle is haunted by various specters, giving the title its wordplay and creating too many puns on the word ‘spirit’ within the text. A chance encounter takes Holmes and Watson to the south of France, where the central murder is revealed in gruesome fashion, after which they repair to the glens outside Aberdeen and investigate the crime. Aside from perhaps putting Holmes in more mortal danger than Conan Doyle did in most of his works, save “The Final Problem,” MacBird does a credible job unfurling the mystery at the book’s heart through the eyes of Watson watching Holmes investigate it, using observation, knowledge, and ability to extract truth from unwilling interviewees.

There’s a cadence to Holmes’ dialogue and a bent to his character that MacBird simply fails to capture, however, so in the process of writing this overlong story she manages to denude him of most of why his character remains so beloved. His discoveries and revelations are less wondrous than in the original stories, and his speech less sparkling, so he becomes tedious rather than charming. The mystery itself involves something from Holmes’ past, which is the same mistake many other Holmes adapters have made, including the creators of the BBC series – who seem obsessed with Holmes’ history, to the point that it’s truly taken away from the show more than once in the last two seasons – with MacBird going way too far in creating a failed romance, a lengthy back story involving prep school rivalries, and an emotional side to Holmes that simply did not exist in the originals.

The sheer length of the book makes the inventions and extrapolations all the harder to overlook. Unquiet Spirits needed an editor, badly, to trim much of the fat and perhaps simplify the resolution to the central mystery, which is both convoluted (not necessarily a problem) and far too personal to Holmes (almost always a problem) to be true to the spirit, no pun intended, of the character. Holmes is beloved because of how Conan Doyle wrote him – rational to a fault, observant of everything except how his demeanor and speech affected others, and exhaustingly brilliant. He’s still brilliant in Unquiet Spirits, but the rest of him seems to have been left somewhere in the Scottish highlands.

Next up: I’m nearly through Lauren Groff’s Florida.

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→ October 30, 2017
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The Westing Game.

A mystery novel aimed at kids, Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game is perfectly charming even for (much) older readers. I tackled it to vet it for my daughter (who then said she wasn’t interested, but I bet she’ll come back to it at some point), finding myself caught up in how the author packed such a clever, intricate plot in a short novel. It won the Newbery Medal for the year’s best work of children’s literature; I think it’s only the fifth winner I’ve read in its entirety (along with The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time, The Graveyard Book, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH). Although it takes a temporary turn towards the dark in the middle, I’ll spoil it just a little bit to say that Raskin wraps up the entire story very nicely, and shows the reader just how many clues were right there the entire time for the characters and the audience alike.

The start of the book is a bit of a slow burn, but once you get about a third of the way into it, the pace picks up dramatically, once the long setup is done. Samuel Westing, a reclusive millionaire and owner of Westing Paper Products, dies right at the beginning of the book, and has set up an elaborate scheme for his sixteen “heirs” – most of whom are unrelated to him and surprised they’re even mentioned – to compete in teams of two for the prize of the inheritance. Many of the heirs have unspoken connections to Westing or his family; some are in the apartment building where the story takes place, Sunset Towers, under false names. Each team gets a set of five one-word clues and must try to follow the oblique instructions in Westing’s will to identify which of the heirs killed Westing and thus win the prize.

The star of the story is the youngest heir, “Turtle” Wexler, a mischievous, astute thirteen-year-old girl who will kick the shins of anyone who pulls her hair braid, and who plays second billing to her older sister Angela within the family. Turtle and a judge, J.J. Ford, an African-American woman who is open about her connection to Westing, do the bulk of the real investigating, Turtle to win (and also to make money in the stock market), Ford for the thrill of the hunt. The narrative jumps around to other pairs as well, which I think helps to obfuscate the actual answer to the mystery by giving the reader too many ideas about the various clues, enough to send me in the wrong direction for about half of the book. There’s no other character as magnetic as Turtle, who seemed to me to be a direct ancestor of another of my favorite child protagonists, Flavia de Luce.

The real gift of this book is how Raskin has her characters playing with words, thinking about their meanings, the order, even messing with pronunciations or misspellings, all to try to decipher the clues. It’s a subtle encouragement to the reader to do the same – to expand one’s thinking about how we use words, and how tiny shifts can alter the meanings of anything we say or write, including, to pick one relevant example, the irregular will of an eccentric millionaire.

There’s one scene that might be disturbing for younger readers, although it’s eventually resolved in a way that should satisfy everybody. The remainder plays out as a fairly straight mystery novel, with a structure that certainly recalled Agatha Christie’s ‘bigger’ novels, where she uses a larger cast of suspects and moves the narrative around frequently with shorter chapters. The Westing Game feels in spots like a mystery for adults that was slimmed down – not dumbed down, just made shorter – for younger readers, given how quickly the narrative jumps, often with one character noticing something or coming to a conclusion right before the switch. It works, and might keep younger readers more engaged, although given how many mysteries I’ve read for adults I did get the occasional sense of watching a video with too many jump cuts.

Next up: I’m halfway through Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, her second novel, written before the Neapolitan quartet that begins with My Brilliant Friend.

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