So...here's a sampling of some of the stuff I've read lately...
I've heard so many people praise Edmund Crispin to the rafters, and I heard a review of this that made it sound intriguing, so I finally picked up a copy. I have to say it....I wasn't impressed. This isn't quite the puzzle mystery I was hoping for, more of a thriller, and it's full of self-referential humor and meta-zaniness that I find offputting. A man, wandering lost in town one night, enters a toy store that's mysteriously open, and finds a dead body. When he tries to go back with the police the next day...the body is not only gone, but the building is now a grocery store. What's going on? Well, it's a fairly complex story, and not very plausible, but at least it keeps moving. There's a lot of comical goings-on, a car chase, and other crazy stuff, but after a while I was almost screaming for the book to get to the point. (I had a similar problem with Charlotte McLeod as her series ran on, and devoted more time to comical zaniness than to things like story, plot, and character, to the point I walked away from her works, gave away the ones I owned, and wasn't even aware when she died from Alzheimer's.)
Edmund Crispin was really Robert Bruce Montgomery, a noted composer of film music. He died in 1978, but all his mystery novels were written in the 40s and 50s. He apparently had some serious drinking problems that got in the way of his writing, which is too bad. But while his style certainly wasn't for me, he still has fans galore, so don't let that stop you if you want to check it out. It's not a bad book, per se, just not for me.
Elizabeth Peters (real name: Elizabeth Mertz, and she also wrote as Barbara Michaels) was a friend of mine. I would hang out with her at Malice Domestic and occasionally when she did book signings near me, and I was stricken when I got news that she had passed away some years ago. Although her works are technically "romantic suspense", I enjoy them, because let's be honest....sometimes the difference between being classed as "romantic suspense" and a regular "mystery" or "thriller" or "spy novel" is the sex of the author. Really...read some Helen MacInnes and Robert Ludlum back-to-back. They're in the same style with similar content, but MacInnes' work was always classed as "romantic suspense" because she was a woman. Like how Mary Renault's historical novels of ancient Greece would be stocked as "romance" because...well....the obvious reason. OK, I'll stop ranting...
Published in 1968, The Jackal's Head is her first novel as Elizabeth Peters, and while it's rough, it's got a lot of her strengths in place. I love books with a sense of place, and Peters was great in giving life to her settings, which range from Egypt to Mexico to Scandinavia. Her books also generally involved archaeology and/or art history, topics I enjoy. And she's one of the more feminist of romantic authors as well, at least for the time. (Again, we're not in an eternal present.)
Althea Tomlinson, in need of a job, gets one accompanying a spoiled girl on a trip to Egypt. She holds back that she grew up there, the daughter of a controversial archaeologist. And as the plot proceeds, she runs into old friends and her father's colleagues, and slowly discovers that the treasure her father had claimed to have discovered is actually real, although he was forced to say it was fake. But the forces of evil are gathering....
It's nonsense, but it's slick, fun, nonsense, although it lacks polish. (Then again, I think it was only her third work of fiction. She was still developing her skills.) The denouement is a bit abrupt and I sat there for a while questioning why the villains did X when it got them nothing....but I just shrugged it off. The description of the final treasure (Spoiler: the tomb of Akhenaton and Nefertiti) is gorgeous and rings of expertise; Peter/Mertz was Egyptologist, and wrote two standard works on the subject, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs, and Red Land, Black Land.
All in all, an enjoyable entertainment. You learn a little bit from it and have a fun, exciting story. My kind of thing.
Here's another comedy-thriller, from someone who normally wrote very serious thrillers. Published in 1944, Fire will Freeze is a classic tale of an ill-assorted group of travelers stranded by a snowstorm in a ramshackle old house...I mean, really, this sort of thing had been a staple of thriller novels and films since the 20s. But Millar seems to be having fun poking fun at the genre conventions, and it works better for me than Crispin's zaniness. Millar had remarkable ability with character, and this book's humor comes mostly from character rather than zany situations. The murders are treated with tragic seriousness, and the menace is always real. When murders start to happen, the reactions are plausible...for the most part, and the rationale behind it all is realistic. The characters are all drawn well, and the chilly confines of the house are truly menacing as the travelers, all driven by a distrust of each other, try to make sense of the bizarre situation they're in.
It's a fun read, and would be good for a cold snowy afternoon this winter, I'd guess. You can pretend to be an in an old-dark-house mystery of your own...
So, pick your favorite of the three...one wasn't for me, but I enjoyed the others.
