flemmings | (no subject)

Lessee. Finished Thoughts Contingent on a Blithe Spirit, a Dr. Priestley, The Terracotta Bride, and a fast reread of After the Funeral because I'd totally forgotten Who Done It as well as Who Was Done in the first place. This is very pleasant. Evidently I do forget Agatha Christies because in turning out my shelves I discovered a paperback copy of The Clocks, which I could have sworn I never read in my life.

But mostly I've been beavering through Murder After Christmas, a seriously batshit version of English country house Golden Age mysteries. It has one of those seriously batshit English families that one usually finds in places like Wodehouse where genre stops you from taking them as anything but comedic. I'm not sure if the author, one Rupert Latimer, intended this to be comedic because the rest is fairly deadpan serious. The twists in the plot made my head spin, as they did the inspecting Inspector. I'm still going But wouldn't his third wife's family still inherit? But no, because evidently his first wife was still alive when he married his third? But she couldn't have been because didn't he remarry his first wife when the second one died so he couldn't have married the third until she was dead but wait... I don't want to have to reread this to find out but it's seriously going to bug me if I don't. Also am not champing at the bit to start When They Burned the Butterfly which sounds like a downer.

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Sometimes one feels as though one should be taking notes when reading murder mysteries. I was wondering whether I needed to do that with the book we've just started listening to because all the members of the large family of the victim were introduced at once. However, the author is managing to distinguish them now the story is underway.

I've read books like that, Michael Innes most recently, where a whole lot of people with bland confusible white bread names all appeared at once and I was floundering among Bobs and Toms and Jims with no idea who was who.

After the Funeral did give me a family tree, which was of limited use because I was reading on the tablet and scrolling back was such a pain. But like that Flavia Alba mystery that gave you a family tree except it warned that the tree was a spoiler, Murder After Christmas' family tree would also be a spoiler.

I absolutely couldn't keep track of characters if I was just listening to a book.