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robinwalter's Reviews (1.87k)
hopeful
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
My fifteenth and final book for Dean Street December 2023 was my 13th D. E. Stevenson and was FAR from unlucky. It washed away the toxic aftertaste of the morally and ethically repugnant Smouldering Fire, my last of hers, and left me feeling very glad I ended the challenge with this story.
Like Touch Not the Nettle, the Clavering book I read shortly before this one, what I loved about this story in particular were the nuanced characterisations. Most of the Stevenson books I've read have been set in the Scottish Borders and include wonderfully lyrical descriptions of their geographical setting. This one was set in an English village and comparatively very little space in the book is given to lauding the landscape. Instead, she dives deep into her characters and delivers detailed portraits of the people, while just sketching the place.
The characters in this book come across as very credible. VERY MUCH of their time, but presented with more subtlety and contrast than in Smouldering Fire. This book was written some ten years later, and it's quite possible the author's own world view had changed in that time.. Certainly she writes with a great deal of sympathy for characters perceived by others to be unlikeable, while also writing with refreshing candour and a lack of sentiment about the most truly noxious characters. in the story - of whom there are happily few.
This was another similarity with Touch Not the Nettle and another reason I scored this as high as 4.5/5. The "worst" characters in the book were the protagonist's sister and niece, in that order. Her sister reminded me quite a bit of the odious mother in Touch Not the Nettle, and in the end she received a similarly apt treatment. She simply disappeared from the story as an irrelevance. It was the perfect end to her arc.
The synopsis hinted at supernatural elements which I do not enjoy, but here again, the story surprised me in a good way. The "spooks and sorcery" all turned out to be manifestation of very human actions and attitudes, nothing remotely fey about them, and indeed several characters chide others for believing otherwise.
The romantic storyline in this one was also one less commonly seen in the middlebrow book I've read, and Stevenson deserves extra bonus points for the carefully considered trajectory of the romantic relationships and especially for
having her female lead propose to the man she loves
The romantic storyline in this one was also one less commonly seen in the middlebrow book I've read, and Stevenson deserves extra bonus points for the carefully considered trajectory of the romantic relationships and especially for
Finally, of course, there's the matter of the writing itself. To borrow from Douglas Adams (again), I know as much about writing as a tea leaf knows about the history of the East India Company, but I do know that at her best, Stevenson really wows me with her skill as a wordsmith. Here's one of my favourite examples from this book, wherein the writer protagonist is describing her process (on a good day, Stevenson is careful to add🙂):
The IDEA which had visited Kate in the barn and which she had likened to a fawn bounding through the thicket, returned to her as she had known it would and was now being tamed. Kate was treating it very carefully, not hurrying it at all, but coaxing it with unlimited patience to feed out of her hand. It was good. She knew that. She was beginning to suspect it was very good indeed. There were set-backs, of course. Some days things wouldn’t come right—the fawn was intractable—but other days she made excellent progress and all went well.
All in all, this was a real treat, a truly satisfying way to end the 2023 Dean Street December and a remnider of why I like middlebrow as a genre and Stevenson as one of its leading exponents.
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
This was a very interesting addition to the Bathurst series. The "why" was revealed in the prologue, and that meant it was obvious how the "who" had to be connected to that "why". Because the reader had in some ways more data to start with than Bathurst, it was fun to watch him make a few stumbles along the way.
The tone of the book was bright and fun, too. This exchange between Bathurst and McMorran nicely sums up their relationship
The tone of the book was bright and fun, too. This exchange between Bathurst and McMorran nicely sums up their relationship
McMorran: "Where am I?"
“Drinking Lady Madrigal’s best Scotch, if 'm any judge.”
“You misjudge me. Sorely. If I did join her in a wee spot, it was merely out of courtesy to her, and just to keep her company. You ought to know by now that I rarely drink when I'm on duty.”
“I do. There’s not a lot offered to you these days. Opportunity would be a fine thing. ”
Banter like that made this a pleasant read, while the mystery elements were nicely handled. Bathurst genuinely struggled with key parts of the case, and the tension in the climactic final chapter was palpable. Perhaps that's why a rare instance of truly CLUNKY writing leapt out at me.
" With swift and lightning-like instancy, Anthony flung himself upon the aggressor. "
I mean UGH, what needlessly repetitive tautology! Then again, when it comes to being WRONG about language, Flynn's fixation on the etymological fallacy rears its tiresome head in this one too. As he often has in the past, Bathurst takes a big step forward in a case by gaining, quote:
a closer acquaintance with the word and its absolute, etymological meaning. "
The idea that a word, ANY word, has an "absolute" meaning based on its etymology is a mountain of merde, of course. It is, in fact, "nice" (ycliu). But that doesn't stop Flynn leaning on it in many of his BAthurst stories, this being one of them.
Hoary old linguistic chestnuts aside, this was a ripper of a tale, one where I was again certain I knew who the killer was, and was again wrong. The my pick and the killer did share some important characteristics, so I was kind of in the ballpark. I'm looking forward to taking Bathurst on again soon.
Inlcuding the supernatural in a murder mystery is both a turn off for me and a cop out (pun intentional) from the writer. Let detectives detect and let their 'prey' be of this world, tyvm.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was my 12th book for Dean Street December 2023 and the first one I scored 5/5. The last Molly Clavering book I read, "Because of Sam", was almost perfect — warm and sweet and fuzzy with relatable characters and authentically annoying characters, and it wrapped up with a sweet happy ending. I gave it 4.5 out of five because it was a trifle too long. This one gets five because of the complexity and nuance of its characters and for avoiding a trope I loathe.
I have now read well around 26 "middlebrow" books, almost all of them Dean Street's editions. Many I have really enjoyed, one I hated, and three I did not finish. All are very character focused, and the ones I like best are the ones where I felt the characters were best developed. The genre was intended for a very specific audience, so a more or less happy ending is more or less guaranteed, but in many of them that sweetness extends to excusing or in some way redeeming basically every negative character. This book did not go there, and that is a major reason why it is my first five-star read for Dean Street December 2023.
Outside of recreational reading, my primary entertainment comes from East Asian dramas, and a trope there which fills me with fury is the evil mother who is forgiven, despite having no redemption arc and making no changes, simply because of biology. It is not uncommon in some East Asian dramas for the final episodes to include the evil mother's primary victims (her child/ren) apologising to her after hours and hours of runtime detailing their horrific treatment. They basically grovel for having dared failed to worship the woman who gave birth to them. There are elements of this mindset in many middlebrow books. Malicious characters act maliciously, do not change but are still forgiven and given a happy ending — especially if they are biological family. "Touch Not the Nettle" completely avoided that aggravating trope.
We are introduced to the malicious mother right at the beginning of the book, and she is truly a horrible person. She treats everyone horribly, but her daughter especially so. The whole story is built around the daughter escaping her mother, and right to the end, the mother remains an utterly loathsome human being, and her daughter's assessment of her mother as such remains completely unchanged. Hooray! It's a remarkable tribute to the skill of the writer that she manages to give the bad mother her own happy ending without that character changing at all and in a way that also works in the best interests of the mother's primary victim, her daughter.
The misanthropic mother was not the only malicious character the story felt no compulsion to redeem. A central character's sister was even more malignantly malicious than the heroine's mother. She remained evil to the end. No apology was made for her, no free pass given to her. To have two central characters who were simply nasty, malicious people and remained so to the end of the story without impacting on the positive end for the positive characters is such a rare treat that I had to give this book 5 stars.
Once again Molly Clavering paints beautiful and loving descriptions of the book's setting. Not just its geographical setting, the Scottish Borders she called home, but also its temporal setting. 70 years after the book was written, this passage really resonated with me in today's consumerist, capitalist, climate-killing culture.
Quite suddenly, when Glede Water beside them had dwindled away to no more than a burn seeping through moss and peat, running small and very clear, creeping round great boulders, they ran into a great shallow cup high among the hills which reared their splendid heads all round its circumference, a cup filled with pale golden light to the brim, so lovely, so remote, so alien to the modern world, where progress had come to mean mass-production and the race to arm, where science and art were turned to purely material advantages or to destruction
This book was something of a follow-up to "Susan Settles Down" and although the blurb says they can be read in either order, reading that one first did help this one make more sense. One reason I am particularly glad I did read the first book first is that in addition to the truly evil characters who were left that way until their story arc ended, there are three characters from Susan Settles Down who do receive something of a redemption arc. The three gossipy sisters, who come across like the Furies in Susan Settles Down, start off that way in this book, but by the end of the book we are given a more sympathetic perspective on them and all three of them show signs of personal growth. Once again the fact that Clavering was able to incorporate different outcomes for different types of negative characters really impressed me as a refreshing break from the norm.
The development of the central romance is also well handled. The two characters are presented sympathetically while displaying their positive and negative personality characteristics. Their happy ending did require what was almost literally an operation of deus ex machina for certain critical secrets to be revealed just in the nick of time, but because the characters were so well drawn, because Clavering had the good sense to acknowledge the rather freakishly fortuitous nature of the key revelation, and especially because it allowed the two without requiring atonement or forgiveness for the two truly nasty characters, the presence of the hand of fate was acceptable.
In summary, the sheer delight at reading a middlebrow book which candidly admitted that simply giving birth does not make someone a good mother or even a good person guaranteed that I would love this book. The deftness and depth with which Clavering drew her characters ensured that it is now one of my absolute middlebrow favourites.
lighthearted
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
This was book 11 in my Dean Street December. Book 10 had been a celebration of savagery, feudalism and honour killing, which quite literally ended with a murderer smugly smiling & accepting plaudits for his courage and cleverness in shooting a man in the back as he tried to run away. That meant I was pretty much certain to enjoy this one a whole lot more. Which I did.
Ludovic Travers is something of a Wimsey-esque character, but with MUCH more whimsy, which is what makes his adventures fun. Not for him an entire page of untranslated French, or a couple of paragraphs of conversation in Latin (again untranslated). Instead we get passages like this
Ludovic Travers is something of a Wimsey-esque character, but with MUCH more whimsy, which is what makes his adventures fun. Not for him an entire page of untranslated French, or a couple of paragraphs of conversation in Latin (again untranslated). Instead we get passages like this
“Yes,” he said importantly. “I’ve had one or two ideas. I don’t know how it struck you, sir, but I think that volume of mine might be on the short side. Perhaps another half-dozen poems might give it just the length.”
I agreed hypocritically enough. I didn’t care how many of those damn poems he added provided I didn’t have to read them first.
I don't think Bush's Travers stories can be called Fair Play, because there is almost invariably key information not shared with the reader. That said, looking back on this one, it could be possible to deduce one of the key elements: The identity of the first of the title's "Missing Men". Travers' description of the mechanics of the second murder make me think it unlikely that "how" of that crime could be easily worked out by most readers, especially if like me they don't pay RIGOROUS attention to descriptions of the layout of the house. In that regard, I'm not sure if it is simply a quirk of the ebook edition I have, but Travers specifically mentioned including a diagram of the house, which my copy did not have. He said:
One other thing remains to do—to show you the lay-out of some of the upstair rooms. The sketch is a very rough one made for my own use, and, I should guess, considerably out of plan. But good enough for its purpose, which is to show you where various people slept, or where they happened to be spending their time that vital afternoon.
but there was no subsequent diagram or drawing of any sort in my ebook edition.
It is just possible that I would have been less surprised by the 'how' of the second murder if I'd seen that diagram, but the beautiful thing about this story is that none of that matters. Because it's a fun and interesting journey. The second murder has echoes of Rube Goldberg about it and as always the interactions between Travers and Wharton are priceless. This was typical, and typically amusing:
I said he was begging the question, and he was. That’s the worst of George. When I initiate a theory—and Heaven knows I’m apt enough at that—George treats it with either contempt or complete disregard. But he keeps it well in mind, and if it turns out a winner, then in less than no time the theory has become his own, and himself the only begetter.
All in all, another clear winner - clever construction, especially of the first murder and its link to the first missing man, and great fun along the way. This is the 30th Travers story, and my 18th — all Dean Street Press editions. With more than 30 Travers books to go in the series, on the strength of this one Dean Street Press will continue to make a killing from me. #TooEasy #SorryNotSorry
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book took my breath away — and that is not a compliment. I read this book as part of Dean Street December 2023 and as an exercise in satisfying my curiosity. There were reviews here at the Storygraph which made it sound bad, and I wanted to see if it really was that bad. It was not.
It was much, much worse.
It was much, much worse.
The introduction to this Dean Street Press edition was written by Alexander McCall Smith. I gave up on his Mma Ramotswe series after about a dozen books having reached my limit of cloyingly twee. If there is one thing no one could accuse this book of being it's "cloyingly twee". At the very end of his intro Smith says of Stevenson's books in general
These are gentle books, very fitting for times of uncertainty and conflict. Some books can be prescribed for anxiety – these are in that category.
There is definitely plenty of uncertainty and conflict in this book; enough to make it clear that he and I have very different views of what constitutes "gentle". As for being prescribed for anxiety, I would prescribe this book only if someone were looking to increase their anxiety levels.
There is some truly beautiful writing in this book, and it is crystal clear that Stevenson really, truly loved her Scotland. This is the first of her books that I've read which is set in the Highlands as opposed to the Scottish Borders where most of her middlebrow books are set. It was a big plus for me that there is a lot of Gaelic in the story and a not insignificant amount of it is left untranslated. Kudos for that. Her descriptions of the setting are as lyrically beautiful as ever. That is where my plaudits end.
In one of his "Hitch-Hiker's Guide" books Douglas Adams wrote of a particularly stupid species of bird that it "had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it". This book suggests very strongly that Stevenson "had heard of the notion of subtlety but wanted no truck with it."
One of the other books I read for Dean Street December 2023 was "Love Comes Home" by Molly Clavering, who was for a long time Stevenson's neighbour. I did not finish that book because I found its feudally right-wing politics difficult to swallow. That book was written in 1938. This one was written in 1935 and makes "Love Comes Home" look like the work of a loony left-wing liberal. The rest of this review will explain why I feel that way, and because it contains spoilers for what happens in the story it will be hidden behind spoiler tags
Clavering's book had repeatedly insisted that the hereditary landed gentry in Scotland were cruelly maligned and grossly misunderstood. This book says that their serfs adored them and knew that underlying feudal allegiance was the natural order of things. This book does not imply that, it states it. Exhibit A:
****To-night his heart sang... because MacAslan had asked for his help. It was foolishness, of course, MacAslan had no need to ask. Did MacAslan doubt him that he should ask his help? Did he not know that Donald would lay down his life in the service of MacAslan? What could this thing be—this thing that MacAslan had done and already regretted? If it were that he had killed a man, Donald would hide him until the danger was past ****
I was flabbergasted when I read that but she was just warming up. After the laird had manipulated someone into doing what he wanted (to win a bet), this was Donald's reaction
**** Calum had been wiled from his thicket and was now MacAslan’s slave. Where had all Calum’s ideas of Socialism gone? Those crazy ideas that he got out of a weekly paper and insisted on expounding to all who would listen to him, ideas that had no sense in them, to Donald’s way of thinking—that a man was just as good as his master, if not better—Sheer foolishness, Donald thought, Calum Mor would learn sense as he grew older. ****
The hero of the story is the Laird, and it is very clear that readers are supposed to love his story of falling in love. For me, his anger issues were horrifying. After meeting the boy who would eventually become his stepson and arranging to take on a boat trip, this is reaction when the young boy turns up for the trip the next day, with his mother
**** She said, “I wanted to thank you for being kind to Richard.”
... He was angry, angry and ashamed. He felt it a kind of insult that he should thus be taken at a disadvantage. He would not look at the woman. How dared she invade his solitude, discover him in such an invidious position—dirty and untidy, a pariah on his own land? His Highland blood boiled in his veins.
She said a trifle diffidently, “I hope—I hope Richard wasn’t a nuisance—”
...
“Richard was very useful,” said Iain quickly. He was not going to hurt the child. Even if he were angry, and justly so, the child should not suffer. ****
The idea that he was "boiling" with rage and considered himself to be "justly" angry when a young boy he had met just the day before brought his mother along rather than travel unaccompanied with a complete stranger said a lot about the "hero" and his view of his place in the world. He expressed that view much more clearly as the book progressed. For example, after he and the boys mother started developing a relationship, this is what he said about life in the modern world:
**** “Life is awfully complicated now,” he said, trying to express his thoughts; “you have got to conform to laws that your instinct tells you are false laws—it makes me angry sometimes.”
He doubled down on that in the next paragraph when looking back fondly on the good old days of his ancestors and the "laws" by which they lived.
“Natural laws, dictated to them by their own consciences, by their honour, by their own feeling of what was right for themselves. If the chief ... had naturally fine instincts, the thing worked admirably. Everybody was happy and prosperous. Laws are made for bad people, really. They are made for people who have no decent instincts. " ****
Like any good romance there is an impediment to the two lovers getting together. In the case of these two lovebirds the minor hitch is that she's already hitched. Her husband is a brute and a bully, of course, but what makes him especially contemptible in the eyes of our lovable laird?
**** “He’s afraid of the law?” Iain said doubtfully. It seemed to him a queer thing for a man to fear the law. ****
When it becomes clear that the love of his life will not be free of her horrible husband without drastic action, that is exactly what he proposes.
**** "I shall have to kill Medworth,” said Iain quietly. ****
Not surprisingly, his beloved, born and raised in 20th-century civilisation, is horrified
The following passage REALLY made me glad I never have to worry about upsetting Stevenson
(character names added for clarity)
**** Linda: "Murder is wrong—it’s unthinkable—it’s the most dreadful wickedness. Promise me, promise me faithfully that you won’t think of it any more.”
Ian: “It’s the only way, Linda. I don’t think of it as wickedness—the man is bad all through, you know it as well as I do—”
Linda: “I know, but you mustn’t,” she cried. “You can’t take the law into your own hands like that. You can’t kill a man, even if he is bad—it’s murder.”
Ian: “It would be worse than murder to let him have Richard—think of it—”
Linda: “I have thought,” she cried. “Do you think I don’t see how frightful it would be? I see it more clearly than you—”
Ian: “He’s a bad man,” Iain urged. “A dangerous man—a man without any decent instincts.” ****
The nobility of his "this bad man needs killing" is exposed for sheer selfishness when he later says to his loyal serf Donald
**** "would to God I had lived in the days when a man took what he wanted by force and held it" ****
Which at least has the virtue of being much more honest. At many places throughout the story our hard done by hero had railed internally at the gross injustice of living in a world where he was expected to pay taxes, and bemoaned the unfairness evident in the fact that other people could be rich and he wasn't, for no other reason than that he knew nothing about land management or how to run a business.
The story has what we are supposed to accept is a happy ending. The bad husband gets what's coming to him, and the lovable laird doesn't have to do it. The closing paragraphs of the book are unalloyed praise and compliments for the person who did do it— whose identity one does not have to be Hercule Poirot to figure out.
In conclusion, I stress again that the reason I couldn't stomach this book was the way it made it VERY difficult to believe that Stevenson did not herself share the sentiments expressed and applaud the actions to which those sentiments led.
lighthearted
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Straightforward, old-fashioned fun! One of the most enjoyable of the 14 Brian Flynn stories I've read to date. I read as this as book 9 of 15 in my Dean Street December challenge for 2023, and it was the perfect pick me up after a dire Dalton for book 8. This was a bright breezy Bathurst, and it seems like the author may have had a lot of fun writing it. Certainly, Bathurst came across as more jovial and likeable than in some earlier outings, to me.
It might seem odd to talk up as breezy and fun a story set during the rise of Hitler and using that political background as its ostensible motivation, but the key to the story could be summed up in the famous maxim: Eschew obfuscation. There really is plenty of obfuscation to be eschewed. That much became clear fairly early on, but the who, how, and why still didn't fall into place until the end of this rollicking yarn.
It might seem odd to talk up as breezy and fun a story set during the rise of Hitler and using that political background as its ostensible motivation, but the key to the story could be summed up in the famous maxim: Eschew obfuscation. There really is plenty of obfuscation to be eschewed. That much became clear fairly early on, but the who, how, and why still didn't fall into place until the end of this rollicking yarn.
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
In general, I don't read mystery novels with the intent of trying to figure out whodunnit. I lack the intellectual wherewithal. Which is why it is not a recommendation of this book that I figured out whodunnit well before halfway. The chimps in the private zoo featured in the novel would also have figured it out well before halfway.
I really like Inspector Collier, he is one of my favourite golden age of serious detectives. This is my eighth Moray Dalton and my seventh Inspector Collier. It is TECHNICALLY an Inspector Collier story but he literally doesn't turn up until the story is two-thirds complete (65% on my Kobo Sage ereader, in the interests of exactitude). By that time my interest in the story was almost as dead as the murder victim.
As with others in the Dean Street Press reissues of the Moray Dalton Collier stories, this one features an introduction by Curtis Evans. His introductions are always worth reading and this one had some thoughtful insights on the sociopolitical background against which the story was written, and on the way Dalton's own sensibilities were reflected in the story. In hindsight, it may be telling that his intro says very little about the story itself.
The first third of the book is the murder and the set up of the innocent framee. This takes longer than it needs to because the account of what happened on the night of the murder is given three times. First, as it happens then when the victim of the frame up recounts it to his sister, and then again in court. After that, the sister gets a letter from Collier's stepson which eventually leads to her rushing off to see if she can find out the truth about what happened. This involves going undercover at a spooky pseudo-Gothic mansion with a private zoo, and within a few pages of her arrival the culprit should be clear to any multicellular organism with more than one synapse.
As a consequence of this there is little tension in the story. The identity of the culprit being so obvious means that the progression of the story is also not so much telegraphed as megaphoned, and Collier's role is less investigator/detective/mystery solver more white knight, rushing to try to keep the body count to a minimum.
Evans' introduction does mention the dénouement of the story which is easily the most gripping part of the book. At the very end there is a palpable sense of tension. For me, that tension was followed by relief - primarily relief that I had finished the book.
hopeful
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I dropped the last Molly Clavering book I read, Love Comes Home, after reaching my limit of being told on what seemed like every other page just how terribly overworked, under-appreciated and cruelly maligned the hereditary landed gentry were. I read these as part of Dean Street December 2023 , and I told the organiser/host of that reading event that I was annoyed by all the politics in Love Comes Home because it wasn't "what was on the box". Thus I approached this one with some trepidation.
Happily my fears were completely unfounded. This book delivered EXACTLY what was "on the box", the book was pretty much the very essence of what it is I hope to read in a "middlebrow" story.
Happily my fears were completely unfounded. This book delivered EXACTLY what was "on the box", the book was pretty much the very essence of what it is I hope to read in a "middlebrow" story.
There was plenty of politics in this story, but it was all very personal, quotidian and down-to-earth. All of the characters were very believable and all of them behave in character. The excellent introduction by Elizabeth Crawford describes this as a "comedy of errors", the errors in this case being confusion and misunderstanding about who loved whom. Within that framework Ms Clavering delivered a delightful tale of ordinary people living ordinary lives. At times, the writing had a poetic beauty to it as this, one of my favourite passages:
There was a pricking under her closed eyelids, and with considerable surprise Mrs. Maitland realized that there were tears gathering, slow, pleasant, almost luxurious tears which she would rather enjoy to feel rolling down her cheeks.
But mostly where the writing shone was in the characterisation. Ms Clavering created truly three-dimensional characters who were sufficiently real to generate authentic reactions from me to their actions; positive reactions when I approved, negative when I did not. Any time a writer makes me react that way, I’m happy, since it means the characters have truly been brought to life
The central character in the story, the widowed Mrs Maitland, is a great example of this. Initially we get the impression she might be almost too good to be true, a supremely selfless saint who lives for her utterly self-centred daughter and is the put upon do-everything dogsbody doormat of the village. As the story progresses mother and daughter both grow, we see more of the daughter's positive characteristics as she gets a new perspective on her mother's life, and we see a much more human side to her mother, including actions much less saintly.
It's a tribute to Ms Clavering's writing that for the penultimate fifth of the book I was annoyed with the stupidity of Mrs Maitland's actions and her inability to grasp the obvious. Of course, this being a middlebrow book by the end all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, letting me approach my next Molly Clavering with equanimity. And, like the happy endings in the book, that’s all Because of Sam.
It's a tribute to Ms Clavering's writing that for the penultimate fifth of the book I was annoyed with the stupidity of Mrs Maitland's actions and her inability to grasp the obvious. Of course, this being a middlebrow book by the end all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, letting me approach my next Molly Clavering with equanimity. And, like the happy endings in the book, that’s all Because of Sam.
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was the seventeenth Travers mystery I've read and in some ways the most interesting. Both the as always excellent introduction from Curtis Evans and the intriguing opening chapter talk about Travers' crisis of conscience. Travers as narrator extends that in the form of a challenge to readers - will those who read "his" story suffer the same crisis of conscience, and would they make the same decision he does, or not? As openings go, it got me completely hooked.
This fascinating approach was not without its downside however. The story was not remotely Fair Play. Despite a quite lengthy and explicit Chekhov's rifle paragraph in which Travers tells the reader that absolutely everything in the story they're about to read is there is a critical element and there is no padding, he also explicitly says that he withholds information - from the reader as he does from the police.
Because I seldom read mysteries with the intent of trying to figure out whodunit, the mystery that intrigued me in this story was the nature of that crisis of conscience and the related questions of how Travers resolved it and whether I would suffer any pangs of conscience myself. This meant that I read the story quite quickly because I was in a hurry to get to the dénouement.
In the end, that climactic reveal was a bit of a damp squib. There was little evidence that Travers' conscience was really that troubled at all by the decision that he made, and because he had withheld from the reader key pieces of information relating to identities and motives, it felt like the reader wasn't given much opportunity to suffer the moral dilemma promised at the start. Poirot’s Curtain it was not
This is the second Travers story that I've read in which he is operating more or less solo as a PI, and both he and his authors seem to have settled into it more comfortably. I like the inventive and teasing introduction, even if the reveal wasn't all that, and Travers does come across less pompous and priggish than and some earlier stories. An enjoyable addition to the series for me, I look forward to seeing how his independent career develops in later stories.