Month: May 2004

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (05) Lord Peter Views the Body

Next up in my Sayers re-read was the first short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body (reprinted as the first twelve stories in Lord Peter [*]). I realized, reading this, that my backbrain doesn’t consider these stories canon. Obviously they are, but I think my backbrain sets them aside for two reasons. First, I don’t recall that there’s any reference to the events of these stories later on, and at the least people ought to comment on the spectacular and improbable events of “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba.” (Maybe they do and I’ve forgotten. I will be looking for that when I get back to the re-read.) Second, with the exception of “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” which is chronologically the earliest canon story and shows Peter’s shell-shock in a different form, there’s very little character development or movement in the stories. I’m not sure that this lack makes the stories bad, considering the constraints of the form, but it does make them less interesting to me.

[*] My edition of this omnibus has a smarmy introduction by James Sandoe which gives me hives. You won’t miss anything if you skip it.

I do quite like the first story, because I’ve liked clubs whose members tell tales since I first encountered the idea (probably in Arthur C. Clarke, possibly in Stephen King’s Different Seasons). (I’m going to pretend that the technological bits aren’t dubious, as claimed by the online Annotated Wimsey.) Some of the stories are interesting because of their underlying cultural assumptions: the story whose crucial clue is in untranslated French, for instance, or the story that is basically an excuse for a British-style crossword. I’m guessing that Sayers thought she was playing fair with her intended audience, which was pretty clearly not me. The longest story, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention,” is dreary and tedious in a way that reminds me of one of the later novels, the name of which I have blocked from my memory—possibly The Five Red Herrings, the Scottish dialects of which are given a trial run in “The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach.” Oh, I suppose I should mention “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” which does actually illuminate Peter’s character through his dealings with his nephew, St. George.

Hmm. I should dig up the Montague Egg stories and see what I think of those: is my relatively low opinion of this collection a matter of comparing the stories to the novels, or is just that mystery short stories (as opposed to the crime short stories of Westlake) don’t work for me? At any rate, I wouldn’t recommend that someone new to Sayers start here (I’m going to reserve my opinion on where I think someone should start until I finish my re-read).

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Westlake, Donald E.: (11) Thieves’ Dozen

When I saw that Donald E. Westlake had a new collection of Dortmunder short stories, Thieves’ Dozen, I said, “Oooh! I didn’t know there were Dortmunder short stories! I must have this.” And I did, and it was good.

I’d never read Westlake in short form before, though I believe we have at least one of his collections. I certainly didn’t expect him to be bad at it, considering his level of craft and the frequently episodic nature of the Dortmunder novels—I’d just never gotten around to it. A few of these stories are slight, but none are bad, and “Too Many Crooks” and the one where Dortmunder meets a horse are particularly good.

In some ways, actually, the one non-Dortmunder story is the most interesting: at some point, Westlake recounts in the Introduction, it looked like he might lose the rights to Dortmunder to someone in Hollywood. So he settled on a pseudonym for John Dortmunder, just in case: John Rumsey. As he says, “Fortunately, the evil empire’s shadow receded from my peaceful village, so Dortmunder could go on being Dortmunder after all, and once that happened, I could admit to myself that even Rumsey wasn’t a completely satisfying substitute. The problem is, John Rumsey is short. John Dortmunder is of average height, but John Rumsey is short. . . . Don’t ask me how I know; I know.” When Westlake wanted one more story to round out this collection, he decided to see how the doppelgangers of Dortmunder and the gang would play out in their own story: and how about that, they really aren’t the same. I’m sure this would say a lot about Westlake’s writing processes to someone more experienced than I.

If you like the Dortmunder novels, you should absolutely read this collection. If I’ve been pushing the Dortmunder novels on you and you haven’t read them yet—pick this up in the store, read “Too Many Crooks,” and if it amuses you, buy one of the novels for the full effect, but get this one too.

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Brust, Steven: (205) Sethra Lavode

I read Steven Brust’s Sethra Lavode, the concluding volume of The Viscount of Adrilankha (prior volumes: The Paths of the Dead and The Lord of Castle Black), quite a while ago. I’d planned to post about it just as it was released, to remind all six people who read this that it was time to buy it—and, of course, when our published copy arrived, I only had time to flip through it, not to re-read or post. These good intentions just aren’t working when it comes to delayed posting; next time I read something pre-publication I’m going to put it directly in the posting queue. After all, I often get far enough behind that I’d end up posting around the time of publication after all . . .

Anyway, Sethra Lavode. Interestingly, three of the four titles in this sequence are names, and none of the eponymous characters really dominate. Each named character is in the book, but the story is spread out among many different characters and the balance stays fairly constant over the series. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.) In particular, I think the reader learns more about Sethra Lavode in the Vlad books, or even in Five Hundred Years After, than in this book. This book is also tied much more closely to the Vlad books, specifically Issola, than the other Paarfi novels, to the extent that I think it would seem rather weird to someone who hadn’t read Issola.

As an individual book, this was a very enjoyable read. I have a quibble or two, but I turned pages rapidly, I smiled and sniffled and gasped and cursed Paarfi, who at one point opened a chapter with, roughly, “Surely you’ve been panting to know what happened—with something completely different than the shocker I just dropped in your lap? Right, let’s go talk about that, then.” As a conclusion to a three-volume work, and to the Paarfi books overall, well, unfortunately I can’t really say, because I haven’t had time to re-read the books as a whole. There were certainly series-long payoffs that I noted, but other things Paarfi appears have to left as unrealized dramatic irony (or something). Personally, while I liked the Viscount and his friends, my truest affection remains for Khaavren and co., who we started with all the way back in The Phoenix Guards, and it’s them I’m sorriest to leave behind. On their behalf, I’m glad that the very end of the novel, with its wrapping-ups and goodbyes, was very satisfying.

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Johansen, Iris: Face of Deception

I got bad guys fueling an incredibly out-there conspiracy thriller in Iris Johansen’s Face of Deception, an random paperback exchange selection by another ex-romance-genre author. This is the first in an apparent series about a forensic sculptor; in this one, she’s bullied into reconstructing a skull’s face by a rich alpha male, with unexpected results. The forensic stuff is interesting, and the plot certainly moves briskly, carrying me past the “oh come on” moments, of which there are many. This is actually fairly far from the genre romance conventions, as there’s an implicit love triangle that isn’t resolved in this volume. I was at the library just after I finished this and actually checked out the next; I got it home, picked it up, and only then came to my senses: I don’t actually like either of the two guys in the triangle. I skipped to the end, just to see if it turned out the way I guessed (it did), and then put it aside to be returned.

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Roberts, Nora: Birthright

Another lunchtime read: Nora Roberts’ Birthright. I’d basically stopped reading Roberts’ mainstream hardcovers, as she’s best at people forming relationships and living their lives, and I found the ObVillains distractions from that. (Her mainstream paperbacks have lately tended towards dopey New Age plots, alas, so I haven’t read the latest sets of those either.) Somewhere I saw a favorable review of Birthright, however, and when it turned up in the paperback exchange, I decided to give it a try.

It started out fairly well: there were only two couples instead of the three Roberts tends toward, which kept the focus tighter; and the fallout from one character’s secret adoption is nicely nuanced, even to my hyper-sensitive reading. But the villain is really just tedious. Can’t I please get some rational bad guys for a change?

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Brockmann, Suzanne: Heart Throb

Here we go with the catching-up. First, a batch of trash read at work [continued to two next posts for import into MT]:

Heart Throb by Suzanne Brockmann is a genre romance that was re-issued with a special $3.99 cover price. I saw it at the grocery store one day, recalled that I’d heard the author’s name before, and said “Why not?” So, publishers, this stuff works—except you want to make sure it’s a good book you’re trying to get people to pick up. This is not, and I will be strongly reluctant to try other Brockmann novels as a result.

Heart Throb does have its strong points. It is a romance of the “force characters into close proximity by any means possible” type, and the proximity-forcing device sounds completely idiotic when summarized (movie producer desperately needs star for movie, must stay with star every waking moment to make sure star doesn’t relapse into addiction); however, the book does put a fair bit of effort into making the premise a teeny bit plausible, kinda-sorta. It has an actual interracial romance—as a secondary plot, granted, but still.

Unfortunately, the central relationship—well. Bujold readers, remember when Ekaterin asks Miles if he’s trying to one-up her dead? All the central protagonists do is one-up each other’s angst; it’s what passes for relationship development, the constant revelations of even deeper levels of angst. I might have loved it when I was younger, but it’s astonishingly tiresome now. Not recommended.

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