Random Thoughts

I wasn’t going to re-read another Christie, but I didn’t really feel up to doing anything much, so here we are.

I didn’t remember the plot of this at all, and it’s a doozy. While reading, I was going through all permutations of who the killer could be — from an evidentiary point of view, and from a structural point of view, and I failed miserably.

I even tried to figure out if the protagonist/narrator could be the killer — Christie did that at least once, right? I almost got it to work logistically, but I couldn’t really make it make sense from a storytelling point of view.

Barnard:

‘Pure pleasure’ was how the author described the writing of this, which was long planned, and remained one of her favourites.

And I see why, but perhaps that also explains why it goes on a bit too long, perhaps? I mean, it’s all fun, but it feels pretty static.

Crooked House (1949) by Agatha Christie (buy used, 4.08 on Goodreads)

Oops! I read another one of these novellas. I hadn’t really meant to, but…

Like the previous ones, I found this one to be really entertaining. But it would probably have been better to have a few months between reading these “chapters” — it reads like a serial, and you need some time between episodes.

However, the storyline comes to a kind of possible ending here — the four original Murderbot novellas were all published in 2017/2018, I see now, and then there was a couple years before the next one — which is a proper novel. So perhaps it made sense to gulp this one down, anyway…

Anyway — lots of fun.

Exit Strategy (2018) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)

A few months ago, I 86’d a whole bunch of books by Lawrence Block — so what am I doing with a new one now? Well, those books were from his really awful action/thriller series, but while perusing his bibliography, I saw that there was one final mystery series of his I hadn’t tried yet — the Chip Harrison books.

It’s so hard to find competently written trash, so I gave it a go, and here we are.

And this is a fun read. It’s explicitly a Rex Stout pastiche — the schtick is that Harrison’s boss is a detective who collects rare fish, and who believes that Nero Wolfe is a real person, and has (sort of) modelled his life after him.

The plot is satisfyingly loopy — up to a point. Block makes the rookie mistake of breezing past a bunch of different characters that could all be the killer, but the second we get to the culprit, he shifts mode and goes into more details. So I went “OK, that’s the murderer — I have no idea why, or how, but mystery solved”, and that turned out to be accurate. (And the why and how was probably the stupidest I’ve read in a mystery novel, and I’ve read a lot of stupid mysteries.)

But still — there’s repartee and amusing characters, and that helps a lot. It’s fun, and I think I’ll get the other two books in the series, and then I’ll be done with Lawrence Block.

Make Out With Murder (1974) by Lawrence Block (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

“Creatives”? Eurgh!!!

Full disclosure: I bought this book by mistake. It’s published by Drawn & Quarterly, so I assumed it would be comics. But instead it’s a book about what it says on the tin, written by a graphical designer that’s unknown to me.

The writing’s OK, though — it’s pretty entertaining and it has drive. But the book makes some rather strange choices, mainly with the illustrations.

It’s about having your illustrations ripped off, so you’d think that it’d be interesting to see those illustrations, right? But I don’t think we even get a single one — instead we get illustrations like the above, that mostly are vaguely related to the text, but aren’t dated. And since the Biesinger talks a bit about his evolution as an artist, it sure would have been interesting to see some examples. Oh, and he also talks about his use of colour, so of course the book is totally in black and white.

I’m guessing all these illustrations are new(ish)? They seem very samey. I mean, “have a distinct graphic expression” or something.

Now, Biesinger doesn’t give the names of any of the people/organisations that have ripped him off — perhaps for good reasons. He doesn’t want to get sued, and he doesn’t want to put people in harm’s way. So that may be a good reason to not use the actual illustrations in dispute — but even when he’s describing his method (in general), it’s like above: He talks about a sketch, and… then he shows a completely different sketch? What? Why? Who? When? *voguing spontaneously*

And finally, the book doesn’t have nine times he was ripped off — he talks about other people being ripped off, too, and that’s just not as entertaining.

But I mean… it’s a kinda OK book?

9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off (2025) by Raymond Biesinger (buy new, buy used, 4.65 on Goodreads)

Novellas used to be a big thing in science fiction. Either published separately in small paperbacks or as “doubles”. But then they went out of fashion — in the 80s and particularly in the 90s, you couldn’t publish any science fiction book unless it was 300 pages, minimum.

That’s changed again over the past decade and a half — with ebooks, people somehow don’t seem to care that much about getting “value for money” like in the 90s… and perhaps shortening attention spans is also a factor? I tend not to think so, but it’s possible.

Perhaps the influence from science fiction fan fic is a thing, though.

Anyway, whenever I try to read an ebook novella, I’m disappointed: It seems like the ebookness of it all lessens the ambition and probably the work put into the novella — just write it, and publish it, and get some money in.

The Murderbot series doesn’t feel like that at all, which is probably why the book I have here is the 19th printing. Since 2018! It’s a runaway hit series of sf novellas (in print!), and that has to be pretty unique?

This is the third one, and I enjoyed this a lot. It feels like almost like very short novel (as opposed to a padded short story) — it’s satisfying in that way. And it’s just quite amusing, so it’s the perfect way to spend an evening.

It is a difficult trick to pull off, and since this is the third one, I guess I’ll keep reading. Oh, there’s eight of these books? Nice.

Rogue Protocol (2018) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.24 on Goodreads)