A Philistine Takes on Three Giants

As my reading statistics at The StoryGraph for the year-to-date show, my leisure reading this year has been dominated by two genres: historical romance, and mystery. This post is about my mystery reading.

 I had a mission in mind with my mystery reading for this year. I was determined to read more of the golden age giants of the genre. In my teens I read pretty much everything that Christie, Marsh, Allingham wrote. Of those three,  my preference order is Allingham, Marsh, Christie. However I hadn't read any JD Carr, Ellery Queen or Dorothy Sayers. I set out to correct that this year.

 A content warning: The summaries below are not reviews. They describe my reactions to the reading experience provided by the three authors. They are utterly subjective, highly idiosyncratic and may be considered iconoclastic. You have been warned.

  

1.        Ellery Queen 

3 finished, 2 DNF. Average rating at the Storygraph 2.92

I have vague childhood memories of being entertained by some sort of television version of this detective, but when I started reading him, I hated the experience. This is reflected in the fact that I started five, but only finished three. It may well be a tribute to the skill of the authors, but I hated Ellery Queen the character. I could not stomach his patronising air of superiority, especially as reflected in the way he dealt with his father. The father who was apparently New York City's finest detective. That thought is frightening, because in the Ellery Queen books  I read Richard Queen could not deduce that it was raining if he was standing in a monsoon. The first three books in the series all consist of the insufferably superior Ellery doing his brain-dead father’s work for him. All with a healthy serving of quite astonishing casual racism, even for the period.

The last two I tried were two that were both highly recommended: Calamity Town started off promising to be one I might actually enjoy before the trial, which went on forever and in which he perjures himself by lying about his name while taking the oath. But at least I finished that one. In  Ten Days Wonder, his louche lechery made me feel so icky I had to stop just before halfway. I actually felt so unclean after reading it that  I resorted to my default go-to spiritual palate cleanser - blasting out  An die Freude loud and singing along even louder.

 

2.        Dorothy Sayers

 6 finished, 1 DNF. Average rating at The Storygraph 3.67

I actually started the first Peter Wimsey book, Whose Body? nearly 3 years ago, and found it  such hard work that I simply gave up. After reading Martin Edwards' exceptional The Life of Crime (a book I cannot recommend highly enough, do read it!) I decided to suck it up and give Sayers another try. I now wonder why I bothered. The character of Wimsey is marginally less unlikeable than the character of Ellery Queen; misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic –  all pretty much par for the course in that era - not pleasant to read, but something I can get past if there are enough positives outweighing it. In the end there were not.

One difference between the Ellery Queen books and the Wimsey books is that in the Ellery Queen books it was the character I came to especially dislike. After reading half a dozen of Dorothy Sayers Peter Wimsey books it was the author. At least, as much of her as was on display in the books. The most aggravating of her tendencies was her apparently uncontrollable need to show off, to flaunt her education. Probably the most egregious example of this was one of the stories I read in which on my 8 inch e-reader, one entire "page" was in untranslated French. Luckily for me, my schoolboy French was up to the task of working out what it said, but it was what that said about her that really annoyed me. 

It's hardly Fair Play if a mystery writer includes huge chunks of text in a language that readers may not understand. She did the same with Latin. There are instances where characters have brief conversations entirely in Latin, untranslated. Those were much harder for me, and further cemented my dislike of her writing style. There were flashes of promise in some,  particularly in his relationship with the policeman who became his brother-in-law. After An Unnatural Death, which I loved and gave 4.5/5, I thought we might have been given a really productive Holmes Watson relationship, but it didn't pan out.

 The last book of hers I read was Murder Must Advertise, and that one was the nail in her coffin for me. Advertising may be a profession which is not held in the highest esteem, but the idea that someone completely untrained in it could turn up and from day one outshine seasoned professionals as if he were born to be a copywriter was too much.

 

3.        J.D. Carr

4 finished, 0 DNF. Average score at the storygraph 3.25

To many, my verdict on this author may  be the most shocking of the three. With a perfect “ finished ” result, Carr did better than the other two, but in the end, I found him guilty of simply being too tedious. I could not connect with Gideon Fell. The Fell stories I read were hard work to read and provided little enjoyment, though The Case of the Constant Suicides did raise a few smiles, and the exposition on locked room mysteries in The Hollow Man is justly famous - I'm glad I read it. Both the character and the author as shown through his characters were far less objectionable than either of the other two above, but my leisure reading is supposed to provide entertainment and in the end, like the other two,  Carr failed.

 

So the results of my  attempt at the “must read” names proved yet again the absurdity of that concept. Happily, things got  very much better thanks to authors and a publishing house I’d never even heard of before 2022. TBC