troisoiseaux

Read Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand......... a couple of weeks ago? To be honest, I don't remember much about it, although I definitely enjoyed how it featured both of Brand's detectives - shrewd, acerbic Cockrill, who is easy to underestimate, and slick, earnest Charlesworth, who tends to overestimate himself - who are, delightfully, tailor-made to get on each other's nerves.

Re-read The Crooked Wreath, also by Christianna Brand, and my favorite of hers. I just love the characters in this one— the family dynamic of the suspects, and how they all respond to the situation in understandably messy ways— sniping at each other as nerves fray, giggling at the inquest, coming up with increasingly absurd hypothetical solutions. (Which is very - ha! - on-brand, for Brand, and works better coming from the suspects rather than the detectives, imo.) I definitely had my favorite - Edward, an indulged, neurotic teen whose hobby is lying to psychiatrists (and is handled more sympathetically by the narrative than one would expect) - but they're such a memorable and likable cast of characters, overall, that it really is hard to accept that one of them is a murderer?? ( Read more... )

One thing I've picked up about Brand is that she really likes ( spoilers! )

Read The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham, who I've neglected terribly despite being on a Golden Age mystery kick for the past couple of years. I understand the comparison of Albert Campion to Peter Wimsey, now! I also found myself thinking of Agatha Christie's first Tommy & Tuppence book (The Secret Adversary), as ( spoiler?? )

Last book I read in 2021 was Christianna Brand's Green for Danger, a murder mystery set in a military hospital in WWII. Everyone who recommended this book was right! This is definitely her best one! The atmosphere is great, and the ending was probably the best in all of the many mysteries I've read this year, in terms of whodunnit, why, and how it was revealed.

( Spoilers )

First book I read in 2022 was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. Sentaru, an aspiring writer burdened by his criminal past, has been phoning it in at his job making dorayaki until he hires Tokue, an elderly woman with her own secret, to make the shop's sweet bean paste, turning around the shop's fortunes; they also befriend Wakana, a teenage girl from a broken home. Bit of a Lifetime/Hallmark movie vibe, especially once it turned out that Sukegawa had framed the story around a specific, and unexpected, social issue, but it was a sweet little book. (Pun intended.)

( Spoilers )

Read The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson. Knowing Jansson for the Moomin books and her at least semi-autobiographical Fair Play, I was surprised by how unsettling many of these stories were— not creepy, exactly, but with an undercurrent of tension, or menace, or the sense of something being ever so slightly off. Artists, especially illustrators, were a reoccurring theme. My favorites were "The Squirrel," about a woman on an isolated island who becomes obsessed with a squirrel that washed ashore on a piece of driftwood, and "The Doll's House," in which a retired man's passion for building an elaborate miniature mansion nearly wrecks his relationship.

Not reading, but book-adjacent enough to include here— I listened to BBC 4's radio play of Howl's Moving Castle (available until Jan. 10th)! It's only an hour long, so it cuts out a lot (including Sophie's family, and most of her backstory, although it kept Howl's) and condenses what is left, but it's still fun. I enjoyed the voice-acting, and that it has an actually Welsh Howl!!

Read The Crooked Wreath by Christianna Brand, yet another 1940s murder mystery— an elderly lord is found murdered shortly after declaring his intention to disinherit his grandchildren (for various infractions, ranging from having an affair to just being kind of a twit) and the new will, which he may or may not have already signed, is missing. I feel like Brand came at the mystery from a rather unique angle; her detective largely hovers on the sidelines, and the focus is really on the suspects, who spend less time being interviewed by Inspector Cockrill (nicknamed, unfortunately, Cockie) than in discussing their theories with each other.

The ending was absolutely bonkers. Not so much in terms of whodunnit, but the circumstances of the reveal— ( bonkers, I tell you! )

I've jumped on the bandwagon and started reading Emma Southon's A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome! I agree with the general critique that Southon's narrative voice sometimes has a self-consciousness to it that inadvertently loops around to coming across as kind of condescending, but I actually don't find this as annoying as I might have done if I hadn't recently read Helena Kelly's book on Jane Austen, the tone of which was frequently just straight-up condescending on purpose.