|
|
Post by vegalyra on Oct 12, 2018 14:12:19 GMT
If you didn't read them as a young kid you probably wouldn't get the same nostalgic feel for them, but I still love the old Hardy Boys mystery stories. It takes me back to when I was 9 or 10 years old every time I re-read one. The old blue spine ones are the ones I grew up with in the '80s, but I started finding the original versions of the stories originally published in the late 1920's and 1930's and they are even better than the re-writes that were done to "modernize" the stories in the late 1950's and 1960's (the books have the same titles but in some cases are completely different stories). In the revised versions the boys are very respectful to the police and are friends with the Chief of Police of Bayport. They are also basically "model citizens." In the original 1920's and 1930's stories the boys play pranks on the police and goof off just like any teenage kid would do.
|
|
|
|
Post by wickedkittiesmom on Jan 4, 2019 10:45:12 GMT
I love to read "cozy" mysteries but my favorite "non-Cozy" mystery writers are the late Sue Grafton, the late Tony Hillerman, and The Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George. I don't often read reviews so I can't name an underrated work. I love Tony Hillerman. This is generally not my genre, but I thought he was excellent. I haven't read the others you mention, but another mystery writer I do like a lot is P.D. James. I haven't read P.D. James but I think I will pick up one of her books.
|
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Mar 21, 2019 1:32:12 GMT
I hope nobody minds this, but I wanted to offer some comments on well-known (or formerly well-known) mystery writers. Hoping they can spark a discussion.
Agatha Christie
Probably the most famous mystery-writer of them all (Sherlock Holmes is better-known than Arthur Conan Doyle). The early books are based around twists, which are gimmicky even at their best: she hadn’t yet figured out how to unite plot with character and style. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is justly celebrated, but strip it of its gimmick and it’s a fairly generic ’20s detective story. Her real talent is pacing, which shows when it’s lacking (Evil Under the Sun, They Do It with Mirrors, After the Funeral). Her best books are like Irving Berlin’s songs: not flashy, but cohesive, with light, fast-moving prose. She repeated some of the same tricks, but her plotting is usually very good. (Death on the Nile is one of the cleanest and most brilliant plots any mystery writer has ever done.) Poirot, unfortunately, is a rather tiring caricature, and Miss Marple becomes too twee as the books go on, but her lesser-known sleuths—Tommy and Tuppence and Supt. Battle most notably—are well-done. After the early books, characterization usually good and sometimes excellent, particularly of young women (Nick Buckley comes to mind).
Best books: The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Sittaford Mystery, Death on the Nile, Ten Little Indians, N or M?, Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero, The Pale Horse, Endless Night.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The “literary” counterpart to Christie’s pure-plotting, at least according to the late P.D. James—an unfair assertion at best, an egregious one at worst. The fact is that Christie was much more literary than James ever gave her credit for, and Sayers much more pulpy. Indeed, of the two Sayers is the writer who started in the pulps, trying to write a Sexton Blake thriller and never quite giving up that style even in her later fiction (Lord Peter Views the Body, Murder Must Advertise). She was a good writer with many diverse and worthy interests (and her translation of Dante is excellent), but, as critic Mike Grost notes, James and many modern critics are trying to make Sayers’ murder-mysteries into something they quite simply are not. She’s not even a better fiction writer than Christie—she lacks Christie’s naturalness and lightness, for one thing. She’s just a more allusive one. None of that, I hasten to add, makes her work bad.
Her early murder-mysteries are nearly completely good and often great, and no one other than Sayers could have written something like Unnatural Death, probably her best book. Unlike Christie, her books are rarely based on whodunit but, rather, howdunit; the murderer is usually known from the beginning, but how seems unfathomable. (Her one whodunit, The Five Red Herrings, is so dull as to be nearly unreadable.) Those methods, too, are often brilliant—medical or scientific, but never so much so that the reader is confused. Her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, is likeable and interesting in the early books, and there’s a touch (but only a touch) of Wodehouse. Unfortunately, Sayers’ later books are far too long, convoluted, and affected, leading up to Wimsey quoting Donne in his lovemaking (oi, as John Dickson Carr would say). Critics are right to say that Sayers fell in love with her creation, which only results in Wimsey’s becoming a bore—more Wimsey but less whimsy, as it were. Her best later mysteries are not Wimseys but rather the short stories involving the Father Brown-esque Montague Egg, an unassuming salesman who serves as detective. At her best, Sayers was very good indeed, but it’s only fair to point out her worse works as well.
Best books: Whose Body?, Unnatural Death, Lord Peter Views the Body (short stories), Strong Poison, Murder Must Advertise, Hangman’s Honeymoon (short stories), The Nine Tailors, In the Teeth of the Evidence (short stories), Striding Folly (short stories).
Ngaio Marsh
Perhaps the least interesting of the four so-called “crime queens,” but nevertheless an agreeable writer. She’s especially devoted to formula: as Mike Grost has written, “There is an opening section, which introduces the characters and sets up the background of the crime. This section is quite elaborate, lasting roughly four chapters or 70 pages. It climaxes with the actual murder. At this point, Police Inspector Roderick Alleyn enters, and spends the next 150 pages investigating the crime. Finally, he solves it, and the book ends.” In every single book. It does get tiring after a while.
Her books are rarely great, but they can be good, sometimes quite good. The opening sections to which Grost refers are lively and charming (Grost compares them to Wilde or Saki, and, if they’re not at that level, they’re close)—but unfortunately her books almost always stall after the murder, getting dragged down in ceaseless questioning of suspects (“dredging the Marshes,” as mystery-bloggers phrase it). But her characterization is skilled, and her prose is light. If only she’d written in a different genre! (She would have been great at light and/or historical romance, the sort of thing at which Georgette Heyer specialized.)
Her detective, Insp. Roderick Alleyn, starts off as a Wimsey clone and never becomes especially interesting, but his wife, Troy, is one of the best characters in the genre—an immense improvement on Sayers’ Harriet Vane. Nearly all of Marsh’s best books all involve Troy Alleyn, too, which can’t be a coincidence. Her plotting is decent without ever being inspired: she lacks Christie and Carr’s sense of surprise. Her best books, though, have clever, even if not shocking, solutions, combined with lightheartedness through the interviewing—and should be read. Her absolute best book is Final Curtain, which has Troy, a brilliant plot (prefiguring Christie), and excellent characterization. Unusually, her later books are largely far superior to her early ones.
Best books: Artists in Crime, Overture to Death, Death at the Bar, Final Curtain, Swing, Brother, Swing, Scales of Justice, Clutch of Constables.
Margery Allingham
The best prose-stylist of the four “crime queens.” Her books span the gamut: she began by writing light thrillers, then moved on to detective stories, then character-driven novels, and finally darker thrillers—all well-written and starring the same central character, the intentionally colorless Albert Campion (who, like Alleyn, started off as a Wimsey clone). She wrote one Christie-esque whodunit, Police at the Funeral, and proved she was good at it, then decided not to repeat the experiment. Her atmosphere and characterization are usually excellent, and she succeeds at being literary where Sayers seems only pretentious—though, vitally, she only truly develops her style with Death of a Ghost, leaving us with fewer classics than several other writers.
Best books: Police at the Funeral, Death of a Ghost, Dancers in Mourning, The Fashion in Shrouds, More Work for the Undertaker, The Allingham Casebook (short stories; including “The Border-Line Case,” an absolute classic).
John Dickson Carr
My favorite of all detective-story writers. His books are fun, colorful, and fast-paced—more inspired by Stevenson, Dumas, and Chesterton than by most detective stories. He’s curious about everything (except mathematics!), and references abound, but he’s never pretentious or cynical. He was a born storyteller, and his books are well-written. (Compare him to any of his imitators, Hake Talbot and Paul Halter most notably, and his storytelling gifts are evident.) His characterization may not be as skilled as Christie’s, and his detective-characters exist mainly just to solve the mystery (his most interesting sleuth, conniving lawyer Patrick Butler, only lasted two books), but some of it can be very good indeed; one thinks of Odette Duchêne and Claudine Martel in The Corpse in the Waxworks, Sir John Farnleigh and Patrick Gore in The Crooked Hinge, and Miles Hammond and Fay Seton in He Who Whispers, among many others. He rarely devotes time to interviewing—he drops his clues in entertaining scenes—and his books are eminently re-readable, a rare quality among mystery-writers. His solutions are some of the greatest ever—more surprising than Christie, yet absolutely inevitable in retrospect (“the Homer Simpson Effect”—“d’oh!”—as mystery-bloggers have called it). In addition to whodunit, there’s the ingenuity of the impossible crime: victims are apparently killed by ghosts, poisoned by witches, stabbed by unicorn-horns, drained by vampires, but there’s always (or almost always) a rational explanation. He turned to historical adventures (albeit with small mysteries worked in) in the second half of his career, which may be even better than his mysteries: The Devil in Velvet is an absolute classic. You can criticize some stylistic quirks or his politics, but on the whole he remains the best ever player of what he called “the grandest game in the world.”
Best books: The Corpse in the Waxworks, Hag’s Nook, The Plague Court Murders, The Red Widow Murders, The Unicorn Murders, The Arabian Nights Murder, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (non-fiction; investigation of real-life murder case), The Burning Court, The Crooked Hinge, The Reader is Warned, Nine—and Death Makes Ten, The Case of the Constant Suicides, The Seat of the Scornful, She Died a Lady, Till Death Do Us Part, He Who Whispers, The Bride of Newgate, The Devil in Velvet, Fire, Burn!
G.K. Chesterton
Carr’s master: if Carr is the greatest ever detective-story writer, GKC is the greatest writer ever to have dabbled in the genre. The Father Brown stories (NOT to be confused with the modern TV show!) may be the greatest detective stories ever written, the ur-source that everything that followed: ingeniously plotted (nearly every single mystery solution was invented by Chesterton), philosophical, musing on light, color, and the existence of God. Amazing. And that’s just his detective stories.
Best books (just of his detective fiction): The Complete Father Brown, The Club of Queer Trades, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (all short stories).
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes. Need I say more? (But I will, anyway.) They’re not even really detective-stories—they’re adventures, with Holmes and Watson rushing around a foggy, gaslit London that never was and always will be, coming to the aid of fair damsels, defending the innocent and punishing the guilty. Just wonderful. Everything works: the plots, the characters, the superb writing. So: need I say more?
Best books (just mysteries): The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Valley of Fear, Round the Fire Stories (ss; not Holmes).
Ellery Queen
Pen name (and sleuth) of Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay. The greatest American detective-story writer, if one leaves out Carr (born in Pennsylvania, lived most of his adult life in England). Logical analysis derived from Doyle and Holmes, philosophy and thematics derived from (but sharply opposed to) Chesterton. Love of patterns, organizing methods to structure series of crimes. Started off with logical but dry and mathematical detective-stories in which Ellery is an insufferable prig, but later humanized Ellery and the books: from The Spanish Cape Mystery on, the books get more intelligent and deeper, leading to Ellery’s questioning the goodness of God (Ten Days’ Wonder). The plots are brilliant and the writing, after the first few books, superb. Not known for character-drawing, but several great examples (emphasis on families: the Hatters, the Wrights, the Van Horns). The Wrightsville books have a profound sense of tragedy—we like the characters so much that Ellery’s finding a solution is in itself a great tragedy. (Ellery, like Queen fans Jorge Luis Borges [“Death and the Compass”] and Umberto Eco [The Name of the Rose], eventually starts to think that detection does more harm than good.) And many of the short stories are gems.
Best books: The Tragedy of X (a different pen name: Barnaby Ross), The Tragedy of Y (Ross), The Siamese Twin Mystery, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (ss), The Four of Hearts, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (ss), Calamity Town, Ten Days’ Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, The Origin of Evil, Calendar of Crime (ss), The Scarlet Letters, The Player on the Other Side.
S.S. Van Dine
Famous in his day, less-known in ours (despite tons of movies made of his books)—but one of the greats. Not, perhaps, the best plotter of the lot, and some of his stuff comes off as rather silly, but he imbues the detective story with color, fun, and surrealism, prefiguring Ellery Queen (and Batman!) and inspiring a whole American detective story school that included Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, among many others. Imaginative, evocative stories with adventure and mystery around every corner, victims killed by lunatics obsessed with nursery rhymes, Egyptology, or Sinology, all solved by brilliant, witty cosmopolite Philo Vance: what the detective story should be.
Best books: The Greene Murder Case, The Bishop Murder Case, The Scarab Murder Case, The Kennel Murder Case, The Casino Murder Case, The Kidnap Murder Case.
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 21, 2019 1:33:33 GMT
I hope nobody minds this, but I wanted to offer some comments on well-known mystery writers. Hoping they can spark a discussion. Agatha Christie Probably the most famous mystery-writer of them all (Sherlock Holmes is better-known than Arthur Conan Doyle). The early books are based around twists, which are gimmicky even at their best: she hadn’t yet figured out how to unite plot with character and style. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is justly celebrated, but strip it of its gimmick and it’s a fairly generic ’20s detective story. Her real talent is pacing, which shows when it’s lacking ( Evil Under the Sun, They Do It with Mirrors, After the Funeral). Her best books are like Irving Berlin’s songs: not flashy, but cohesive, with light, fast-moving prose. She repeated some of the same tricks, but her plotting is usually very good. ( Death on the Nile is one of the cleanest and most brilliant plots any mystery writer has ever done.) Poirot, unfortunately, is a rather tiring caricature, and Miss Marple becomes too twee as the books go on, but her less well-known sleuths—Tommy and Tuppence and Supt. Battle most notably—are well-done. After the early books, characterization usually good and sometimes excellent, particularly of young women (Nick Buckley comes to mind). Best books: The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Sittaford Mystery, Death on the Nile, Ten Little Indians, N or M?, Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero, The Pale Horse, Endless Night. Dorothy L. Sayers The “literary” counterpart to Christie’s pure-plotting, at least according to the late P.D. James—an unfair assertion at best, an egregious one at worst. The fact is that Christie was much more literary than James ever gave her credit for, and Sayers much more pulpy. Indeed, of the two Sayers is the writer who started in the pulps, trying to write a Sexton Blake thriller and never quite giving up that style even in her later fiction ( Lord Peter Views the Body, Murder Must Advertise). She was a good writer without many diverse and worthy interests (and her translation of Dante is excellent), but, as critic Mike Grost notes, James and many modern critics are trying to make Sayers’ murder-mysteries into something they quite simply are not. She’s not even a better fiction writer than Christie—she lacks Christie’s naturalness and lightness, for one thing. She’s just a more allusive one. None of that, I hasten to add, makes her work bad. Her early murder-mysteries are nearly completely good and often great, and no one other than Sayers could have written something like Unnatural Death, probably her best book. Unlike Christie, her books are rarely based on whodunit but, rather, howdunit; the murderer is usually known from the beginning, but how seems unfathomable. (Her one whodunit, The Five Red Herrings, is so dull as to be nearly unreadable.) Those methods, too, are often brilliant—medical or scientific, but never so much so that the reader is confused. Her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, is likeable and interesting in the early books, and there’s a touch (but only a touch) of Wodehouse. Unfortunately, Sayers’ later books are far too long, convoluted, and affected, leading up to Wimsey quoting Donne in his lovemaking ( oi, as John Dickson Carr would say). Critics are right to say that Sayers fell in love with her creation, which only results in Wimsey’s becoming a bore—more Wimsey but less whimsy, as it were. Her best later mysteries are not Wimseys but rather the short stories involving the Father Brown-esque Montague Egg, an unassuming salesman who serves as detective. At her best, Sayers was very good indeed, but it’s only fair to point out her worse works as well. Best books: Whose Body?, Unnatural Death, Lord Peter Views the Body (short stories), Strong Poison, Murder Must Advertise, Hangman’s Honeymoon (short stories), The Nine Tailors, In the Teeth of the Evidence (short stories), Striding Folly (short stories). Ngaio Marsh Perhaps the least interesting of the four so-called “crime queens,” but nevertheless an agreeable writer. She’s especially devoted to form and pattern: as Mike Grost has written, “There is an opening section, which introduces the characters and sets up the background of the crime. This section is quite elaborate, lasting roughly four chapters or 70 pages. It climaxes with the actual murder. At this point, Police Inspector Roderick Alleyn enters, and spends the next 150 pages investigating the crime. Finally, he solves it, and the book ends.” In every single book. It does get tiring after a while. Her books are rarely great, but they can be good, sometimes quite good. The opening sections to which Grost refers are lively and charming (Grost compares them to Wilde or Saki, and, if they’re not at that level, they’re close)—but unfortunately her books almost always stall after the murder, getting dragged down in ceaseless questioning of suspects (“dredging the Marshes,” as mystery-bloggers phrase it). But her characterization is skilled, and her prose is light. If only she’d written in a different genre! (She would have been great at light and/or historical romance, the sort of thing at which Georgette Heyer specialized.) Her detective, Insp. Roderick Alleyn, starts off as a Wimsey clone and never becomes especially interesting, but his wife, Troy, is one of the best characters in the genre—an immense improvement on Sayers’ Harriet Vane. Nearly all of Marsh’s best books all involve Troy Alleyn, too, which can’t be a coincidence. Her plotting is decent without ever being inspired: she lacks Christie and Carr’s sense of surprise. Her best books, though, have clever, even if not shocking, solutions, combined with lightheartedness through the interviewing—and should be read. Her absolute best book is Final Curtain, which has Troy, a brilliant plot (prefiguring Christie), and excellent characterization. Unusually, her later books are largely much superior to her early ones. Best books: Artists in Crime, Overture to Death, Death at the Bar, Final Curtain, Swing, Brother, Swing, Scales of Justice, Clutch of ConstablesMargery Allingham The best prose-stylist of the four “crime queens.” Her books span the gamut: she began by writing light thrillers, then moved on to detective stories, then character-driven novels, and finally darker thrillers—all well-written and starring the same central character, the intentionally colorless Albert Campion (who, like Alleyn, started off as a Wimsey clone). She wrote one Christie-esque whodunit, Police at the Funeral, and proved she was good at it, then decided not to repeat the experiment. Her atmosphere and characterization are usually excellent, and she succeeds at being literary where Sayers seems only pretentious—though, vitally, she only truly develops her style with Death of a Ghost, leaving us with fewer classics than several other writers. Best books: Police at the Funeral, Death of a Ghost, Dancers in Mourning, The Fashion in Shrouds, More Work for the Undertaker, The Allingham Casebook (short stories; including “The Border-Line Case,” an absolute classic) John Dickson Carr My favorite of all detective-story writers. His books are fun, colorful, and fast-paced—more inspired by Stevenson, Dumas, and Chesterton than by detective stories. He’s curious about everything (except mathematics!), and references abound, but he’s never pretentious or cynical. He was a born storyteller, and his books are well-written. (Compare him to any of his imitators, Paul Halter most notably, and his storytelling gifts are evident.) His characterization may not be as skilled as Christie’s, and his detective-characters exist mainly just to solve the mystery (his most interesting sleuth, conniving lawyer Patrick Butler, only lasted two books), but some of it can be very good indeed; one thinks of Odette Duchêne and Claudine Martel in The Corpse in the Waxworks, Sir John Farnleigh and Patrick Gore in The Crooked Hinge, and Miles Hammond and Fay Seton in He Who Whispers, among many others. He rarely devotes time to interviewing—he drops his clues in entertaining scenes—and his books are eminently rereadable, a rare quality among mystery-writers. His solutions are some of the greatest ever—more surprising than Christie, yet absolutely inevitable in retrospect (“the Homer Simpson Effect”—“d’oh!”—as mystery-bloggers have called it). In addition to whodunit, there’s the ingenuity of the impossible crime: victims are apparently killed by ghosts, poisoned by witches, stabbed by unicorn-horns, drained by vampires, but there’s always (or almost always) a rational explanation. He turned to historical adventures (albeit with small mysteries worked in) in the second half of his career, which may be even better than his mysteries: The Devil in Velvet is an absolute classic. You can criticize some stylistic quirks or his politics, but on the whole he remains the best ever player of what he called “the grandest game in the world.” Best books: The Corpse in the Waxworks, Hag’s Nook, The Plague Court Murders, The Three Coffins, The Red Widow Murders, The Unicorn Murders, The Arabian Nights Murder, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (non-fiction; investigation of real-life murder case), The Burning Court, The Crooked Hinge, The Reader is Warned, Nine—and Death Makes Ten, The Case of the Constant Suicides, The Seat of the Scornful, She Died a Lady, Till Death Do Us Part, He Who Whispers, The Bride of Newgate, The Devil in Velvet, Fire, Burn!G.K. Chesterton Carr’s master: if Carr is the greatest ever detective-story writer, GKC is the greatest writer ever to have dabbled in the genre. The Father Brown stories (NOT to be confused with the modern TV show!) may be the greatest detective stories ever written, the ur-source that everything that followed: ingeniously plotted (nearly every single mystery solution was invented by Chesterton), philosophical, musings on light, color, and the existence of God. Amazing. And that’s just his detective stories. Best books ( just of his detective fiction): The Complete Father Brown, The Club of Queer Trades, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (all short stories). Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes. Need I say more? (But I will, anyway.) They’re not even really detective-stories—they’re adventures, with Holmes and Watson rushing around a foggy, gaslit London that never was and always will be, coming to the aid of fair damsels, defending the innocent and punishing the guilty. Just wonderful. Everything works: the plots, the characters, the superb writing. So: need I say more? Best books (just mysteries): The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (ss), The Valley of Fear, Round the Fire Stories (ss; not Holmes). Ellery Queen Pen name (and sleuth) of Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay. The greatest American detective-story writer, if one leaves out Carr (born in Pennsylvania, lived most of his adult life in England). Logical analysis derived from Doyle and Holmes, philosophy and thematics derived from (but sharply opposed to) Chesterton. Love of patterns, organizing methods to structure series of crimes. Started off with logical but dry and mathematical detective-stories in which Ellery is an insufferable prig, but later humanized Ellery and the books: from The Spanish Cape Mystery on, the books get more intelligent and deeper, leading to Ellery’s questioning the goodness of God ( Ten Days’ Wonder). The plots are brilliant and the writing, after the first few books, superb. Not renowned for character, but several great ones (emphasis on families: the Hatters, the Wrights, the Van Horns). The Wrightsville books have a profound sense of tragedy—we like the characters so much that Ellery’s finding a solution is in itself a great tragedy. (Ellery, like Queen fans Jorge Luis Borges [“Death and the Compass”] and Umberto Eco [ The Name of the Rose], eventually starts to think that detection does more harm than good.) And many of the short stories are gems. Best books: The Tragedy of X (a different pen name: Barnaby Ross), The Tragedy of Y (Ross), The Siamese Twin Mystery, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (ss), The Four of Hearts, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (ss), Calamity Town, Ten Days’ Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, The Origin of Evil, Calendar of Crime (ss), The Scarlet Letters, The Player on the Other Side. S.S. Van Dine Famous in his day, less-known in ours (despite tons of movies made of his books)—but one of the greats. Not, perhaps, the best plotter of the lot, and some of his stuff comes off as rather silly, but he imbues the detective story with color, fun, and surrealism, prefiguring Ellery Queen (and Batman!) and inspiring a whole American detective story school that included Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, among many others. Imaginative, evocative stories with adventure and mystery around every corner, victims killed by lunatics obsessed with nursery rhymes, Egyptology, or Sinology, all solved by brilliant, witty cosmopolite Philo Vance: what the detective story should be. Best books: The Greene Murder Case, The Bishop Murder Case, The Scarab Murder Case, The Kennel Murder Case, The Casino Murder Case, The Kidnap Murder Case. good call on Queen a favorite of mine as well.
|
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Mar 21, 2019 1:39:10 GMT
good call on Queen a favorite of mine as well. Thank God someone else is interested in my rambling!  What are your favorite Queen books? Little-known nowadays, unfortunately. You may be interested in this thread: Ellery closely inspired Batman!
|
|
|
|
Post by alfromni on Mar 21, 2019 5:08:56 GMT
I've read most of the works by the authors mentioned above. I'm a fan of "cozy" mysteries mostly. One author I don't see above is M. C. Beaton (Marion Chesney). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_ChesneyHer main sleuths (Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth) have both been televised, but very badly. The novels are much better. |
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 21, 2019 5:27:12 GMT
good call on Queen a favorite of mine as well. Thank God someone else is interested in my rambling! What are your favorite Queen books? Little-known nowadays, unfortunately. You may be interested in this thread: Ellery closely inspired Batman! . I am surprised you like Carr he seems to have had a reinsurgence. |
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Mar 21, 2019 5:31:06 GMT
Thank God someone else is interested in my rambling! What are your favorite Queen books? Little-known nowadays, unfortunately. You may be interested in this thread: Ellery closely inspired Batman! I am surprised you like Carr he seems to have had a reinsurgence. “Surprised”? Well, he was my first avatar here! I can’t say I’ve noticed a Carr resurgence—where have you noticed it?
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 21, 2019 5:34:45 GMT
I am surprised you like Carr he seems to have had a reinsurgence. “Surprised”? Well, he was my first avatar here! I can’t say I’ve noticed a Carr resurgence—where have you noticed it? Ive noticed people interested in movie adaptations. |
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Mar 21, 2019 5:38:12 GMT
“Surprised”? Well, he was my first avatar here! I can’t say I’ve noticed a Carr resurgence—where have you noticed it? Ive noticed people interested in movie adaptations. Where’d you see that? Carr fans have been looking forward to movie adaptations for years. The Burning Court would make for a brilliant movie (it was made into a French film, but it pretty much had nothing to do with Carr’s text).
|
|
|
|
Post by alfromni on Mar 21, 2019 6:22:22 GMT
Nalkarj , hi224I often wonder, considering that Carr spent most of his life in England and that three of his sleuths are English, why UK TV companies haven't taken up the challenge of making series about them. Whodunits are still popular in the UK. Dr Gideon Fell plays have been produced for BBC radio, but that's it. Could copyright problems have anything to do about it? Most of the novels are out of copyrigtht range and in the public domain aren't they?
|
|
hanswilm
Sophomore
old imdb name was Hans-Wilhelm but this site tweaked it to hanswilm
@hanswilm
Posts: 679
Likes: 416
|
Post by hanswilm on Mar 21, 2019 18:44:27 GMT
Harlan Coben. I like all of his stuff but if I had to pick just one....I guess I'd go with "The Woods"
John Katzenbach is quite good too. I really liked "The Analyst"
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 21, 2019 18:49:41 GMT
Harlan Coben. I like all of his stuff but if I had to pick just one....I guess I'd go with "The Woods"
John Katzenbach is quite good too. I really liked "The Analyst"
Nice choice as well. |
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Mar 21, 2019 19:12:09 GMT
Nalkarj , hi224 I often wonder, considering that Carr spent most of his life in England and that three of his sleuths are English, why UK TV companies haven't taken up the challenge of making series about them. Whodunits are still popular in the UK. Dr Gideon Fell plays have been produced for BBC radio, but that's it. Could copyright problems have anything to do about it? Most of the novels are out of copyrigtht range and in the public domain aren't they? A bigger mystery than any Carr wrote! About 15 years ago, Carr’s grandchildren had written a script (I think it was based on one of the early Bencolin novels?) and were actually in the process of working out a deal with PBS. The series was going to be called The John Dickson Carr Mysteries. One of the grandchildren was named Wooda McNiven (his identity was verified by Doug Greene, Carr’s biographer), and he told the whole saga on “the Golden Age Mystery Forum” (now deleted, but saved somewhat in archive). I forget all the details, but eventually the deal fell through and PBS wasn’t interested anymore. As for why English companies aren’t interested…I’ve no idea. I’d say it’s because Carr was American and eventually left England after Attlee, but then why did BBC One adapt American Elizabeth George’s Insp. Lynley books? I don’t know about the copyright situation—who owned it (I’m guessing Clarice Carr and then the children?) after JDC’s death and if it were renewed or not. Doug Greene would probably know the details. I think one reason Carr’s work isn’t as well-known or as adapted as Christie’s (Carr only ever had five movies made of his work, and one was a remake: in 1951, 1953, 1957, 1963, and 1992) is because his solutions are so clever and complex. Take the cluing and the coincidence in The Hollow Man, for example—whereas Christie’s solution you can often sum up in a line, and the prose is smooth and simple (though not simplistic). Someone really should adapt Carr for the movies or television, though: his books are more visual and cinematic than Christie’s. (Think of the cinematic possibilities for The Crooked Hinge or He Who Whispers.) alfromni
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 21, 2019 19:18:31 GMT
John Dickson Carr. Books written more like adventures—in the vein of Doyle, Kipling, Chesterton, Stevenson—than mysteries, with verve and color and constant excitement. Instant hook of the “impossible crime”—how on earth could this have been done? Action and atmosphere, long, complex, yet comprehensible. More thematic than Christie, Carrian themes consistent and telling. Unlike most mystery authors, re-readable. Went to historical fiction later in career, but always could change genre quickly without sacrificing theme and character. Best BooksMysteries: The Corpse in the Waxworks (’32) Hag’s Nook (’33) The Red Widow Murders (’35) The Unicorn Murders (’35) The Arabian Nights Murder (’36) The Burning Court (’37) The Crooked Hinge (’38) The Reader is Warned (’39) He Who Whispers (’46) ____________________________ Historical: The Bride of Newgate (’50) The Devil in Velvet (’51) Fear is the Same (’56) ______________________________ Non-Fiction: The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (’36) The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (’46) Waxwork btw is a favorite carr as well. |
|
|
|
Post by alfromni on Mar 21, 2019 22:01:17 GMT
John Dickson Carr. hi224NalkarjThe Northern Ireland public library system and all titles available thereof are all online and can be borrowed and downloaded on line. In all of Northern Ireland libraries only two titles for John Dickson Carr or his pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn are available. Only four titles on Audible and they're the BBC radio productions. I find that shocking and disgraceful. I've been trying for ages to acquire the Sir Henry Merrivale novels (preferably audiobooks), which I found were the most complex when I first read them about 50 years ago. They're nowhere to be found. Someone please tell me they're not out of print. |
|
|
|
Post by alfromni on Mar 22, 2019 13:35:49 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 22, 2019 13:42:26 GMT
Ooo just browsed Wentworth. |
|
|
|
Post by alfromni on Mar 22, 2019 15:18:00 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by hi224 on Mar 22, 2019 15:26:41 GMT
|
|
