Random Thoughts

It felt like Wodehouse had absolutely perfected his formula in his previous book, The Luck of the Bodkins, so I was wondering how he’d follow that up. And he does that by doing something completely different.

This is a kind of high concept thing that Wodehouse usually doesn’t do — it’s basically Freaky Friday. And he points out several times that the body-switching thing has been done a lot of times before, but he uses the plot device to poke fun at Hollywood in general, and also express some mild indignation as to how Hollywood treats its child stars.

But is it a good book? Euhm… well, yes, it’s Wodehouse, so it’s impeccably written on a scene to scene basis, but this kind of that demands a more tightly plotted book isn’t really Wodehouse’s forté: It sometimes seems more nightmarish than screwball.

It’s pretty good? But it’s far from being Wodehouse’s strongest work.

I wonder whether there’s a history behind it… Wodehouse adapted some of his plays into novels, and those aren’t very good, and they totally seem like theatre adaptations. This doesn’t seem like a screenplay adaptation, but I’m wondering whether the idea originated in something he tried pitching to Hollywood.

Nothing here:

Laughing Gas was serialised in This Week magazine (US) in six issues between 24 March and 28 April 1935, illustrated by Wallace Morgan.

Laughing Gas (1936) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy new, buy used, 3.88 on Goodreads)

I have glass-fronted box full of Marion Chesney/M. C. Beaton regency romances that bears the inscription: “Break In Case Of Flu”. *cough cough* The closest thing to being asleep is to watch Murder She Wrote, but reading Chesney’s books is a close second.

However, this is the worst book of hers that I’ve ever read. It’s also probably the longest of her regency romances? And that doesn’t work for Chesney at all, because her approach to structure is to just not have any: She establishes a situation, and then just goes through various permutations until she has enough pages (usually about 170) and then in the final chapter, the evil miscreants all die because of various misfortunes, and the protagonists get married. The end!

This is perfect for when you have a fever, because you don’t have to think at all. But in this book, Chesney just flounders — there’s about a dozen attempts on the heroine’s life, and the heroine and her intended break up about the same number of times. It’s just incredibly tedious, and I gave up on the book about reading three quarters of it, because I decided that I just didn’t care at all.

Indeed.

I do think that if you cut this down to Chesney’s usual length, it wouldn’t have been all bad, though — there’s some scenes here that are even more satisfyingly ludicrous than usual, and that’s saying a lot. Did Chesney feel that she had so interesting characters that she could do a Wodehouse and putter along amiably or something? Bewildering.

Regency Gold (1980) by Marion Chesney (buy used, 3.43 on Goodreads)

I was unnaturally exhausted after the metal fest, but I realised why yesterday: I was coming down with some virus or other. So I had to pick some book appropriate to read while having a fever, and I picked an Elizabeth Peters — she writes books that are easy on the brain.

Cracking open this book, it just looks very strange. I mean, the margins are unusually wide for a text that’s that compact… and it’s a bit blurry? And then I realised: This must be a print-on-demand book! That’s printed from a scan of a paperback, but not printed the same size. And after flipping to the last page, that turned out to be true: It’s printed by Lightning Source, a print-on-demand firm. Mystery solved!

If I’d known, I’d have bought a used copy instead. Butl this is a pretty nice print-on-demand book — it doesn’t have that icky soft-touch phthalate coating that many of them use to mysteriously “class things up”, but achieve the opposite effect. And I quite prefer a facsimile version (even with the slightly blurred text) over a cheaply OCR’d and barely proof-read one — those things can be truly horrible.

Oh, what’s the, like text like? It’s pretty good. Peters writes in an amusing way, and she’s good with characters, but she often gets lost in the weeds when it comes to the actual mystery and the plot. You can just tell how she struggled to manage to get to the end of this one — it’s 360 pages, and that’s mostly because she’s set up so many complications that she has to work through, and halfway through she starts to get a bit desperate. At least that’s how I read it.

Which led to me not only guessing who the red herring was, but also what the solution was way ahead of time, and that’s not fun. And I still have a fever! If somebody feverish manages to figure out the mystery, you were struggling while writing it.

But it’s perfectly entertaining nonetheless.

Naked Once More (1989) by Elizabeth Peters (buy new, buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)

I’m exhausted after two days of Desertfest, so I thought that another mystery might be the right thing to vegetate with.

And it is indeed. This is another quite amusing and pretty smart mystery. But — it’s not as good as the two preceding books in this series. Those two books were so chock full of ideas and jokes, while this is way more straightforward. There was a six year pause between this and the previous book, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that Stevenson had used up all his plot twists and didn’t quite know how to continue.

Which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the books in this series, but I think I’ll keep reading and see how things go. At least a couple more books, because while not as good, this book was still a very pleasant way to zone out.

Third Man Out (1992) by Richard Stevenson (buy new, buy used, 4.1 on Goodreads)