Recently Read Wednesday

[john_amend_all]

It's still Wednesday? Just about.

John Dickson Carr, The Plague Court Murders (as Carter Dickson)

This is, apparently, the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. As in the other book with Sir Henry, he only shows up in the second half, the initial portion dealing with the first-person narrator's experience of the murder. The mystery is one of Carr's standard fiendish locked-room murders, the victim having apparently been stabbed in the back by a 17th century ghost. While in a stone outhouse, locked from the inside and outside, which in turn is surrounded by a muddy courtyard with no footprints. And there's a police inspector as witness.

This book uses another of Carr's characteristic patterns: the detectives constantly getting interrupted with the next piece of evidence before they have time to set the last one fully in place. Any time Sir Henry is about to explain what's going on, an urgent telephone call sends the group off after another clue or red herring. I didn't guess who did it, though I did spot one element that was essential to the murderer's schemes.

John Dickson Carr, The Waxworks Murder

Like The Plague Court Murders, this lays on the atmosphere with a trowel. With TPCM it was supernatural evil and decay; here, it's Grand Guignol in Paris. Featuring a sinister, green-lit waxworks, a hedonistic secret nightclub where the rich and powerful attend wearing masks, the better to have clandestine assignations, and the sort of villain who strokes a white cat as he politely pretends to the detective not to know anything about the aforementioned locations. It has the same sort of feel as It Walks By Night, the other one of the Henri Bencolin mysteries I've read.

The stand-out character here for me was Marie Augustin, the waxworks proprietor's daughter who knows more than she should. It's difficult to go into a lot of detail without spoilers, but I can reveal she's the one who finds the murder weapon and is justifiably scathing about the police not having got to it first.

John Burke, The Power Game, A fascinating novel of the ATV Television Series

thisbluespirit's mentioned the parent TV series enough times that when I saw this book in a second-hand shop, I picked it up. It novelises three episodes, the first and last being presumably the first and last episodes of the series, and then one in the middle. It gives me an idea of Sir John Wilder and the Blighs, at least, though other characters (such as Lady Wilder) don't appear in the episodes that the novelisation picked.

Exactly how the interplay of politics and infrastructure it describes might be echoed today, I wouldn't like to comment, though the fates of projects like the Garden Bridge and the Croxley Rail Link suggest that if anything, Sir John would be an improvement on whoever's doing the same thing today.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I don't think most novelisers were, really! The only bonus you sometimes get is if they've swallowed what passed for the show's bible, but most of the time they don't seem to care and you can't even tell if any other info is a flight of fantasy or actual info.

(The Public Eye one didn't even know Mrs Mortimer's real first name, and the Frontier one kept insisting that James Maxwell's character was so despicable he was Very Short (as despicable people are, I suppose, along with having my particular shade of blue eyes - so, really trust nothing I say!), so they clearly didn't look too hard at the cast list either, let alone anything else. The Enemy at the Door one was disturbing, but at least supplied some character info that I think must be genuine show background, because it fitted too well into what was said on screen but not elaborated on not to be.)

[john_amend_all]

Of course, Who has its own share of novelisers who make weird changes — thus we get such phenomena as Blonde Victoria (and I think there's another one where Jamie's ginger, because of course all Scotsmen are).