I read lots of mysteries last month, but nothing that really stood out. I also started on my reading project for this year. Next month is likely to be pretty slow, since I will be playing so much Zelda. This is me working my way through the stack of books I got for Christmas.

Black Coffee

Charles Osborne & Agatha Christie

The cover to this book is misleading. It has Agatha Christie’s name in big letters, but she didn’t write this. It is a novelization of a play she wrote starring Hercule Poirot. Charles Osborne actually wrote the book, using her play as the outline. That is clear as soon as you start reading; this doesn’t read like Christie. Her hand is evident in the plotting. This is not her best Poirot mystery, but it is clearly hers. In this Poirot is called to the home of a celebrated physicist who has created a new type of explosive. He thinks someone wants to steal it and wants Poirot to prevent that. Unfortunately, soon after Poirot gets there the physicist turns up dead. It is a good enough read, even if it feels like counterfeit Christie.

The Body in the Library

Agatha Christie

From Poirot to Marple, this time in a book actually written by Agatha Christie. Though this one isn’t much better. I liked Body in the Library, there is a certain level of entertaining competence that no Christie mystery I’ve read doesn’t meet, but this is no And Then There Were None. A family finds a dead body of a girl they don’t know in their library. Several investigators look into, including Marple, and they have trouble even identifying the body, let alone discovering who killed the girl or put her in the library. Figuring out her identity leads to an old man with an unusual inheritance situation and a handful of suspects for the murder. It all plays out pretty conventionally, with twists and turns and is perfectly engaging, but it isn’t especially memorable.

The Vanished Man

Jeffrey Deaver

This is a case of me getting exactly what I asked for, but not what I wanted.  For Christmas, I asked for mystery books, with no author or series listed.  The ones I would have asked for, like Dorothy Sayers, I have pretty well read everything.  I had hoped to get something new that I could then start reading a lot of.  Jeffrey Deaver’s The Vanished Man is a mystery, but it is not at all the sort of mystery I wanted.  I wanted Columbo, and this feels more like CSI.  

I don’t mean to say that this book is bad, only that it isn’t quite what I wanted to read.  It does set up an interesting case for our protagonists to solve; I just don’t like how it deals with the solving.  It features a culprit that uses stage magic and escape artist tricks to evade capture, but Deaver seems to relish spoiling the how for the reader before his characters can figure it out. That can work to build tension, with the reader wondering if the hero will see through the ruse in time, but here is just kills the discovery, leaving a not especially enthralling procedural.

The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens

One of my reading goals this year is to read the Charles Dickens novels that I have not yet managed to read.  So I started chronologically with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which was not a maybe the best choice.  It is the first book that Dickens published and it feels like it. It is essentially plotless and it really doesn’t figure out what it is until more than a dozen chapters in.  It eventually settles into something of a Don Quixote vibe, following the adventures of the naive Mr. Pickwick and his much more knowledgeable servant Sam Weller.

Dickens creates some great characters here in Pickwick, Sam and the rapscallion Alfred Jingle, but it lacks that central plot to pull everything through.  There is no real goal or driving factor other than Pickwick getting out and seeing England outside of his tiny corner of London.  Pickwick Papers definitely takes a while to find its footing.  It starts as a series of vignettes where Pickwick and his club are the butt of every joke, but soon Dickens switches things up to where the various foibles of the people they meet are as much the source of humor as Pickwick and his friends.  Which is good, because there is only so much enjoyment to be gleaned from reading about a hapless old man make a fool out of himself.  After he meets with Sam Weller, Pickwick learns and grows from each encounter, gaining greater understanding of the world and human nature.  The book has its moments, but it is largely a bit of amusing nothing.