Reviewing "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart

When orphan Reynard “Reynie” Muldoon answers an enigmatic advertisement in the paper, he didn’t know what to expect. What he probably did NOT expect, however, was to be swept into an adventure involving three other uniquely-gifted children, a secret mission, dastardly worldwide conspiracies, subliminal messaging, abducted children (and secret agents), and lots and lots of riddles.

Expected or not, that’s what happened. After a few tests, Reynie found himself part of the Mysterious Benedict Society, a team of children hand-picked by the benevolent Mr. Benedict to carry out a vital mission: to go undercover at a shadowy Institute to stop some unidentified—but unquestionably horrible—plan from successfully unfolding.

Somehow, secret messages are being transmitted via television and radio* into people’s minds, and only Mr. Benedict has been able to discover them. Unfortunately, these messages have a protective fail-safe: they convince the people that hear these messages that the messages don’t exist. Only minds that are particularly focused on the truth can detect them at all…which is where the Mysterious Benedict Society comes in.

The Mystery of the Missing Mystery

At the end of December I was nigh-certain I was going to "fail" my self-inflicted appointed reading goal, having been consistently ten books behind schedule since The Brothers Karamazov. (Why I thought that would be a good selection to start out last year, I don't know.) So in desperation, I turned to re-reading some of the Juvenile Fiction I've been meaning to review on this blog. 

It was the T.C.D.C. to the rescue.

"What's a 'teesie-deesie'?" you may ask.

Reviewing “The Clocks” by Agatha Christie

It started out with such promise. 

A young typist with a shadowy past is assigned to go to 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Said typist, Sheila Webb, goes to said address…and finds a corpse surrounded by clocks. Just as she has discovered the dead man, a blind woman comes in—the real owner of the house, Miss Pebmarsh. Sheila goes hysterical and runs out into the street, bumping into marine biologist Colin Lamb—who, luckily, is actually a British spy who has friends in the police force, and thus can instantly become a first-person narrator.

Third-person narrative takes turns with Colin as he joins Detective Inspector Hardcastle on the routine rounds of interviewing all the possible suspects, most of them neighbors who are Rather Suspicious. Somewhere along the line Christie remembered that she meant this to be a Hercule Poirot novel, so she has Colin also coincidentally be old friends with the famous detective. Colin visits Poirot at his home, where Poirot is going bonkers from boredom. After a rather awkward diatribe of various mystery writers, Colin finally gives Poirot the Cliffs Notes of what has happened so far. Poirot proceeds to stay in his flat for almost the entirety of the book, only showing up at the end as a Belgian ex Machina to solve the crime without doing any legwork.

Reviewing "The Sittaford Mystery" by Agatha Christie

Originally titled The Murder at Hazelmoor, The Sittaford Mystery possesses all the needed factors to make a quintessential Agatha Christie whodunit:

• Locked room” murder situation
• Small English village in the country
• Variety pack of suspicious characters
• Distracting fear of foreigners
• Level-headed police investigator
• Charismatic and beautiful young woman
• Ace reporter helping said young woman with an independent investigation
• Lots of random red herrings

Reviewing “Dead Man’s Folly” by Agatha Christie

As I neared the end of Agatha Christie’s Poirot mystery, Dead Man’s Folly, I was reminded of another mystery writer, Rex Stout. Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels tend to be named in similar ways—for instance, including numbers (especially 3) such as Three Doors to Death, Curtains for Three, Triple Jeopardy, etc.  One of the other common titling “habits” was the title “Too Many ____”: Too Many Cooks, Too Many Women, and Too Many Clients.

It’s of this latter titling habit I thought of when reading Dead Man’s Folly, because there are too many suspects.

K.K. Beck’s Iris Cooper Mysteries

Iris Cooper is the unflappable flapper, pretty coed sleuth, and protagonist narrator of three novels by K.K. Beck: Death in a Deck Chair, Murder in a Mummy Case, and Peril Under the Palms. When we first meet Iris, she’s just finished traveling around the world with her Aunt Hermione.

Whatever exotic experiences she had on her trip, however, is nothing compared to the adventure that awaits on the trip home. Cruising back to America, Iris encounters a bevy of characters of all ages, nationalities, and personalities. And, as the title Death in a Deck Chair suggests, not all of these characters survive. What unfolds is a sort of frothy whodunnit reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Reviewing Agatha Christie's "A Murder is Announced"

I read A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie in tandem with The Rosemary Tree. While thematically and stylistically different, the setting of 1950-something English small towns sometimes made me mix up the two.

In this Miss Marple mystery, several characters are introduced reading the paper in their separate homes, and finding the strangest announcement that a murder is to occur at Letitia Blacklock’s house at 6:30 that night. For some reason a ton of people decide to show up, assuming it’s a joke or theme party of some kind. But since this is Agatha Christie, we readers all know that no matter how frivolous the warning, the murder itself is dead serious.

Little Old Ladies 8: The Nosy Miss Marple

“I’m old and I have very little strength in my arms or my legs. Very little strength anywhere.  But I am in my own way an emissary of justice.”  

Miss Marple in Nemesis, 

Chapter 21: The Clock Strikes Three

While I love Agatha Christie’s writing, and am usually outwitted by her mastery of mystery, I am usually more of a fan of her one-off novels than of her series. I’ve read a great deal of Poirot, all of her Mr. Quin, a few of her Tommy and Tuppence, and then a smattering of Miss Marple. Of all these series, Miss Marple is next to last my least favorite (I really didn’t care for Mr. Quin, but that’s another blog for another time). 

Why do I dislike Miss Jane Marple? She’s so odd, illogical, nosing into all sorts of crimes in a very un-grandmotherly type way. I always feel that it is unrealistic when she starts questioning suspects and these people actually tell her things. If some random lady came up to me and started talking local crime while she was knitting, I would at least equate her with a sort of Madame Defargean lady, especially if she started to rant about evil and seem morbidly fascinated with murder. Also the fact that she seems less than six degrees separated from murder victims would make me paranoid; at best she’s a bad luck charm, at worst a serial killer! 

(Of course Poirot suffers the same bad luck, since every time he goes on vacation a body shows up.  This trend continues from books to television, so much that one wonders why Archie Goodwin ever leaves a client alone since they’re bound to be strangled by Nero Wolfe’s necktie, or why Jessica Fletcher isn’t banned from book tours. Really, unless a detective is a cop or a private investigator, there is no other way of having a sleuth get involved in murder investigations, and even then fictional cops and gumshoes better never take a ride on the Orient Express unless they want to be accessories before or after the fact!)

Agatha Christie's "Endless Night" - A Review

It’s hard to describe Agatha Christie’s Endless Night without worrying about slipping up and spoiling the ending.  So I am not going to even try. 

 So, um, if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this.

Beginnings and Endings…not necessarily in that order…

Every year I make the same reading resolution, and every year I break it: to not start any new book series before I finish the ones I’m already working on. This includes but is not limited to the Amelia Peabody mysteries, all books by P.G Wodehouse, various YA books that seemed like one-off novels until the last page when it read “Such and such characters will return in ________.”  The worse repeat offenders of my ruined resolutions are Agatha Christie novels and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. Not that I’m complaining; these mysteries, either in paper or audio book form, are among my favorite reads. However, since there are so very many of them, I have given up trying to read them in order.

This had proved problematic for two reasons. First, sometimes Poirot or Wolfe refers to an incident in the past which is actually in a previous novel which I may or may not have read yet.  This is not as problematic for me personally, since chances are by the time I get around to reading that other mystery I will have forgotten the “clue from the future” and besides, these mentions rarely spoil the climax of the whodunit. 

More problematic is when I read the last book of a series and it spoils an aspect of the books that have gone before. Much like trying to watch any of the earlier Newhart episodes after seeing the historic ending, it’s hard to go back “home,” as it were, by reading any previous books.

Surprises and Disappointments: "The Birds of Pandemonium" and "Drood"

After the pleasant surprise of my previous audiobook What If? (which I briefly reviewed last week) I almost though it would be pressing luck to immediately get another random audiobook from my long library queue. However, I’d already clicked “Place Hold” so there was no going back, and before I knew it The Birds of Pandemonium: Life Among the Exotic and Endangered was waiting for me at the checkout counter.

When getting nonfiction books, I often stumble across little pockets of our world heretofore unknown to me. I didn’t know the blog xkcd existed until I read the book What If?, and even now I’m not sure I know how to spell it. 

 

The same thing happened with Pandemonium. The Pandemonium Aviaries is a nonprofit bird sanctuary that started out as a woman taking in unwanted birds, then developed into a breeding program for endangered species. The main characters are the birds themselves, of course, along with the humans who love them. 

You Win Some, You Lose Some: Agatha Christie's "Elephants Can Remember" and "The Moving Finger"

The hazard of finding an author you like whose work is prolific is that sometimes you find yourself disappointed. I’ll explain by giving a specific example: Agatha Christie. With 66 novels, 156 short stories, about two dozen plays (though some were based on aforesaid novels and short stories), and even a few nonfiction books, the odds are that even though I may love many of her novels, there are a few that will fall through the appreciation cracks.

It’s easy to understand how this happens. As a rule I’m not drawn to an author once I know they’ve written over a hundred works, figuring such a behemoth of work has probably resulted in a dilution of style, characterization, and plot. Quality is sacrifice for quantity. In fact if I see a book whose author’s name is larger than the title, I usually steer clear of it. A novel should rest on the merits of its title and plot alone, not on the name of the author. Marketing around an author’s name excludes new readers who may not know Agatha Christie is a master mystery novelist as opposed to some woman with two first names.*

The other reason this tends to happen is because an author gets “typecast” and stuck writing the same types of things, and when they start to get sick of it their prose suffers as a result.  Christie notoriously got sick of writing Hercule Poirot, just as Arthur Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock Holmes. The creative writer in them may have longed to try something else, but these series were what put food on the table so they were compelled to continue long after their excitement of writing these stories was depleted.

How to Survive if You're in a Mystery Novel

How to Survive if You’re a Character in a Sherlock Holmes Adventure:

1.      Hire Sherlock Holmes. 

2.      OR hire Scotland Yard. They will then go to Sherlock Holmes.

3.      Hide in the Diogenes Club until case is solved.

 

When the Sidekicks Tell the Story: The Often Irrelevant and Confusing Archie Goodwin

[Wolfe's] brain works better when he is sitting down and mine when I am on my feet. Not that I would dream of comparing mine with his, though I do believe that in one or two respects – Oh, well. 

~ Rex Stout, Plot it Yourself

To recap my “When the Sidekicks Tell the Story” series thus far: Watson is the narrator for Holmes because Watson adds emotional depth to the mind puzzles. Hastings is the narrator for Poirot mainly for his good-hearted, relatable British familiarity in comparison to the eccentric Belgian. Wooster is the narrator for Jeeves because it would be uber annoying to have every sentence end with “sir” which would have been the case had Jeeves narrated it himself. 

Archie Goodwin is the narrator for Nero Wolfe for NONE of the above reasons. No, the true reason Archie is the narrator is because Nero Wolfe NEVER WILLINGLY LEAVES HIS HOUSE. Therefore without Archie, Wolfe would just sit and read and never solve any cases until he ran out of caviar. 

Recipe for a Detective: Nero Wolfe and the Amalgamation of Mystery Styles

Take one deductive genius with outlandish eccentricities.

Combine with one hard-boiled gumshoe with an eye for a good-looking dame and a .45 in his holster.

Stir in some hardnosed, cigar-chewing NYPD policemen who think both genius and gumshoe are concealing evidence.

Fold in a Swiss chef who has no personal life. 

Pinch of Saul Panzer (if desired). 

Yield: 33 novels and 39 short stories by Rex Stout.* 

When the Sidekicks Tell the Story: Captain Arthur Hastings

In a recent entry I talked about Doctor Watson in his sidekick/narrator role for Sherlock Holmes.  I want to point out that nowhere in that entry did I call him buffoonish, comic relief (although Holmes probably laughs on the inside whenever he withholds the solution to a mystery from his friend), or foolish in any way. 

Unfortunately a lot of adaptations (*cough*NigelBruce*cough*) felt that in order to make Holmes look brilliant on film, they had to lower Watson’s intelligence to show a greater differentiation between the two. (Happily the latest adaptations of Watson (played by Jude Law in theaters, Ian Hart in the latest BBC adaptations, and Martin Freeman in the BBC update) have allowed him to actually possess some brain cells. One can only hope that these adaptations, and not the old cartoonish stereotype, will restore Watson’s reputation.)

In this entry, however, I get to introduce Captain Arthur Hastings, the sidekick of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. I haven’t read all of Christie’s novels (yet…), but I’ve noticed that Hastings’ character is the stereotype of Watson.