Random Thoughts

What a great cover by Daniel Torres.

I’m still feeling under the weather, so I wanted something fun and easy to read. And so I reached for Blue Heaven, which I’ve read before (although probably thirty years ago) and remember as being just the thing.

And it is and it isn’t. As the cover copy states, the book goes for a P. G. Wodehouse thing… but it’s way more complicated than one of Wodehouse’s farces are, and has much higher stakes. It’s a comedy of errors about a group of friends that find themselves swindling the Mafia out of money — so there’s the uncomfortable tension between the farce and the unusually high stakes.

But that’s not really the real problem for me as a relaxing read — the problem is that there’s a gazillion characters, so many plot twists, and so many jokes that it’s just exhausting to read. I mean, I liked the book on this re-read, too — but it wasn’t ideal for this situation.

(Favourite joke: ‘Bong!’, the musical based on The Bell Jar.)

What I’m now wondering is whether this was ever adapted into a movie? I’m guessing not, because they’d have to cut and cut and cut the plot down to make it fit, and if you cut that much, you’re just left with a skeleton mobster heist comedy, which has been done many times before. The genius of this book is in the particular details… but perhaps it would make a very funny eight episode TV season?

Blue Heaven (1988) by Joe Keenan (buy used, 4.15 on Goodreads)

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)