I had a hangover over today from all that jazz yesterday, so I read another mystery.
This is pretty solid — lots of interesting characters and a brisk pace. The only problem was that I took a five minute time out to think about who the murderer could be, and there was really only one possible person. And being right about a mystery is always disappointing.
School for Murder (1983) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)
I bought this in 2008 — for a handful of years back then I bought basically everything published by McSweeney’s. I had a subscription to the quarterly, of course, but I also snapped up the other books they published.
Half of the charm was the humour surrounding McSweeney’s, even if the books themselves weren’t “funny books”, and the other half was the impeccable design sense. These books are just gorgeous.
The only problem with these books are the innards. Yes, the typography is good, although the typefaces are sometimes too wispy, and look like they’ve been laser printed instead of actually printed. (Which surely can’t be true?) But they also use very very white paper, and that just looks wrong for such classic book design.
Oh, and the other part of the innards: The writing. Much of what McSweeney’s published (and possibly still publishes) is by debut writers… and it reads like it. Much of it’s just not quite there? So I stopped buying McSweeney’s books, but I’ve got a lot left that I haven’t read yet.
And… my previous experience with these books make me ditch them a lot faster than I would other books. I just have no confidence in McSweeney’s taste level. So I got to page 20 of this, and I was thinking “well, this isn’t too bad, but it’s not thrilling? should I go on?” and I ditched it.
Sorry! For all I know, it might be awesome. The first 20 pages were totally OK.
I somewhat preemptively joked that this book spoke in the Universal McSweeney’s Voice, as used by a lot of young authors seemingly seeking to avoid overly rich or impassioned style. But Arkansas actually seems like the proper use such for pared-down, precise, affectless prose.
Arkansas (2007) by John Brandon (buy used, 3.72 on Goodreads)
I started this book last week while I had a cold, but then I suddenly got all better, and found it rather a chore to finish this book.
It’s not that it’s bad on sentence by sentence basis, but Babson here really goes for a P. G. Wodehouse-style farce, but also featuring cats, several dentists and two murders. It also feels oddly claustrophobic, as if this was originally intended to be a play.
She piles it on, but it doesn’t really help — it ends up being oddly static while being total chaos. I think I would have liked it a lot more if I still had a fever.
In the Teeth of Adversity (1990) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.51 on Goodreads)
