Dear readers,
Mystery novels are like Thanksgiving dinner: formulaic but allowing for huge variations in quality. In both cases, in fact, it is the similarity of the components that makes the gap between the good and bad versions so stark.
As we enter a new year, beaming with reading ambitions, let me include a handful of comfort reads in your stack, in case you need a palate cleanser between the volumes of Proust, Kant or Darwin you’re finally tackling. No, seriously, in 2024.
—girl
Pacing is a diabolical problem in mystery novels. Often a story will unfold in a controlled manner for 180 pages and then explode into an LSAT logic problem for the remaining 10, as the detective protagonist goes through names, places and times, deleting, complicating and going back before settling on a solution. which could electrify the reader if he were not cross-eyed with fatigue.
AA Milne’s contribution to the genre is notable because it has the rhythm equivalent of perfect pitch. From beginning to end, the reader is carried away with all the precision of a Disney World visitor passing through Spaceship Earth. The ingenuity of the pacing is especially notable because Milne’s other ingredients are so familiar: English country mansion, secret passageways, amateur detective, the disruption of the moral order followed by the orderly restoration of it. He peppers the book with amusing comments on the clichés of the mystery novel, which as early as 1922 were ripe for light-hearted mockery!
And yes, it is the same AA Milne who gave us Winnie-the-Pooh. A man with reach.
Read if you want: WH Auden’s 1938 essay “The Guilty Vicarage”, buddy comedies, Wilkie Collins
Available from: Check out your local library or bookstore
The name of this murder mystery is “The Beast Must Die” and my order is “You must read it.” As fans know, murder mysteries tend to fall into a whodunnit or trap-trap structure. The first is well known. In the second, the perpetrator is revealed at the beginning of the plot and suspense arises as we learn if and how they will be stopped. (Anyone who has seen an episode of Colombo You will be familiar with the charms of a howcatchem.) This novel is a third entity: a fusion of the two. I will not reveal the formal mechanism by which Blake accomplishes his trick.
The cover of the previous edition remains famous among design nerds for its manifest excellence, but the text itself has slightly lost its prominence in the mystery fiction canon. When I checked its sales ranking on an extremely popular book website, it was ranked 687,883 spaces below what I consider Agatha Christie’s worst book (“Passenger to Frankfurt”). What injustice!
Incidentally, “Nicholas Blake” is a pseudonym for the Oxford-educated Cecil Day-Lewis, whose many achievements include being poet laureate of the United Kingdom and being the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Read if you want: “The Day of the Jackal” by Frederick Forsyth, astringent wit, “Night Train” by Martin Amis
Available from: Check your local library or bookstore, or search eBay
Why not…?
Nodding with great satisfaction at Dorothy Sayers’ character descriptions? Here’s one from 1923: “Her long, kind face seemed to have emerged spontaneously from her top hat, as white worms reproduce in Gorgonzola.” Exquisite.
Ask yourself if “The Glass-Walled Anthill” is the most unwieldy name ever given to a book of any genre. And then shrug: hey, I can’t judge a book by its title! And enjoy this anthropological-themed crime novel that focuses on a fictional tribe from New Guinea transplanted to the vibrant London of the 1960s?
Do you start “The Flanders Panel” if you’re in the mood for a chess-themed game? I wouldn’t say the prose shines (it possibly suffered in the translation from Spanish), but the plot is clever enough to keep the pages turning at full speed.
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