Just noticed this one – I’m completely with you as regards Kinsey Millhone: Little Ms. Perfect, and by heck, she very much thinks so too. I struggled through a couple of the books, and then gave up on her and Sue Grafton: I was ardently wishing for something very horrible and terminal to happen to Millhone.
I find Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski to be a polar opposite, and I’m a fan of V.I. I like how – though she’s an able detective, and recklessly courageous to the point of lunacy – with her various emotional and mental hang-ups, and prickly personality, and tendency to make numerous bad decisions, her personal life is always pretty much of a disaster; and she’s ruefully aware of this.
I finished the second Lockwood book, I am really enjoying this series (although I do without a book with a strong female protagonist using “like a girl” as an insult), and looking forward to the next one, I am on the wait list for it at the library.
I recently finished The Hired Girl, by Laura Amy Schlitz, which is YA and a hoot and half. A young girl around the turn of the century runs away from her family farm and finds a job as the hired girl in the townhouse of a wealthy Jewish family in the city. It’s told as a diary, and the narrator is very Anne Shirley – you get a lot of melodramatic misunderstandings, but it’s skillfully done so it’s clear to the reader what is actually going on. It is a bit glossy as to the life and prospects of a servant girl (the whole thing is pretty upbeat), but I thought it was a delight to read and it’s legitimately funny. You can tell the author has read all of the right books, too – it feels, in tone, like a mix between Betsy-Tacy and Anne of Green Gables and All-of-a-Kind Family.
DzedNConfused: the folk we identify most with, maybe… I’d never heard of Eve Dallas, before your mentioning her in your post a while ago; I get the feeling that I’d be well advised not to seek closer acquaintance.
Sangahyando, I like the In Death series but the characers are whopping BIG Mary Sues. i’ve read enough to think that JD Robb aka Norah Roberts is satirizing both the romance and the hard boiled detective genres.
I’m reading Precious Bane by Mary Webb, and in a quandary. The book has a first-person narrator, Prue Sarn, who lives in ?Somersetshire? in the early 19th century. Prue narrates in dialect: there’s a lot of gledy, lanthorn, mixen, housen, mere, and all those delicious forgotten English words/spellings. Grammar, too.
Mary Webb lived in the area the story takes place. The book was published in 1924. So certainly she had some sort of native feel for the dialect, but still. It’s so alien and so encompassing. Was Mary Webb a narrative genius, the likes of which I’ve never encountered, or was she simply writing the way people still, in her lifetime, spoke?
In any case, it’s given me a major case of Not Good Enoughs about my own writing. I’m enjoying the book enormously.
Pedantic nitpick from English participant: not the county of Somerset, but that of Shropshire – some 100 miles north of Somerset, and just on the English side of the border with Wales. Shropshire and Somerset are both beautiful, hilly, highly rural areas – Mary W. is very strongly associated with the former, her “home patch”. On the language matter, I really don’t know – suspect that that may indeed have been how the countryfolk thereabouts spoke, circa 100 years ago – but “anybody’s guess”, I feel.
[spoiler]I was surprised that we skipped so far ahead in Maisie’s life, totally missing her marriage and the death of her husband and baby, but if the series continues there will opportunities to revisit those years. Maisie’s nursing years during the war were over before the series started, but we’ve revisited those years plenty over the series. And now it looks like she’s going back to nursing in yet another war!
I find the problems of the early, poor, lower class Maisie more interesting, compelling and believable. I enjoyed her sneaking into the library, getting a brass plate for her new business, getting a telephone. Now she is rich and a Lady and I can’t really relate to her problems. I didn’t really understand why she was unable to go home.
It seemed slightly odd that we didn’t have that last chapter of Maisie going back over her investigation after it’s conclusion. Didn’t she always take learnings and put things away in the last chapter?
I know next to nothing about the Spanish Civil War. Maybe I’ll be inspired to read up on it.[/spoiler]
I binge read three Kate White books featuring Bailey Weggins, and quite enjoyed them.
And last night I finished Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects which I hated. I hated all of the characters. They were all mostly crazy and mostly evil. I couldn’t relate to any of them. The entire atmosphere in that small town seemed oppressive and crazy, and was it 12 bars in a town of 2000?? I couldn’t wait to finish the book and escape.
Just read two detective novels by two of my favorite authors: Sara Paretsky’s Brush Back and Peter Lovesey’s Down Among the Dead Men. Both very, very different in tone:
Paretsky (VI Washawsky is the detective) is American, Lovesey (Peter Diamond) is British.
Paretsky’s novel is a tight first=person narrative throughout, Lovesey’s is not.
Paretsky’s provides a tremendous sense of place (though I’m from Chicago, which may help); Lovesey’s, though set in a particular place in Britain, really does not.
Paretsky’s narrative is extremely detailed, giving all kinds of information that isn’t directly related to the plot and describing almost every move she makes in the period of the case; Lovesey keeps it tight and relatively terse, with every word telling.
Paretsky’s detective has an extensive (seriously extensive) history and backstory, which is fleshed out in this novel as much as in any other; Lovesey does very little to flesh out his character’s background.
And yet, both detectives seem real, both cases are interesting, the minor characters are deftly drawn, the plotting and pacing work, and I really enjoyed them both.
That girl was indeed German. Christiane Susanne Harlan, billed in the film as Susanne Christian. She and Kubrick married the year after Paths of Glory came out, and they stayed married until his death in 1999.
I’ve started The End of All Things, John Scalzi’s latest (and, he says, last) book in his fantastic Old Man’s War military-sf series, and it’s pretty damn good.
I am reading and thoroughly enjoying Arcadia by Iain Pears.
It’s nominally set in Oxford in 1960 and features an academic who was once a minor Inkling and is preparing his own work of fantasy. Another colleague is writing a rather dull sf novel to demonstrate his ideas on philosophy. But books tend to have a life of their own, and a time machine, or maybe a parallel worlds machine is invented in the future novel and characters start popping up in our time (well, Oxford, 1960) and in turn the bucolic fantasy world is also accessed via the machine.
It’s a fascinating braiding of the different characters timelines as they all have differing aims and knowledge of just what might be going on. Ruthless billionaires in the future, ex-WW2 spies and police, etc. in Oxford and scholars, woodsmen, villagers, etc. in the fantasy land.
I’ve still got 170 pages (of 600) of it to read and I’m hoping the author can pull it all together at the end and not have it all be a dream, or something. It’ll still have been worth reading even it it does eventually fall flat, though.
Ha ! Brand-new 'tecs from two favourites of mine – trip to bookshop, a priority. I knew that the one by Lovesey was shortly to appear; re Paretsky’s, I didn’t.
I have a great fondness for Lovesey’s Superintendent Peter Diamond – a very astute detective, gruff and tactless but with a saving sense of humour. My keenness on the Diamond novels, probably enhanced by my knowing and liking the part of England in which they are set.
Lovesey is a prolific author, of mainly but not entirely, detective novels: the Diamond mysteries, only part of his output – they are one of several series, plus a number of stand-alones and some short stories. He’s done a couple of series set in Victorian times, including a shortish one which has the future King Edward VII as an amateur sleuth. I have yet to come across a book by Lovesey which I didn’t enjoy – those featuring Diamond are definitely my favourites, though.
But then I’m a prickly person with more hangups than a fashion show closet and prone to making stupid decisions too