#uk lit

Crooked House by Agatha Christie - 4/5 stars (★★★★)

Agatha got me with this one. I don't have much to say about this book -- I try not to make a habit of writing reviews on murder mystery stories, especially Agatha's, since I always end up with more of a spoiler-filled summary with commentary rather than an actual book review. But, at the risk of perpetuating my trespasses, I just want to say that Agatha was dead (ha) serious when she said anyone could be a murderer under the right circumstances. This is one of her age-old anecdotes, which I've read time and time again, but she still managed to smack me in the face with Crooked House because I really did not expect the ending at all. My suspicions were way off.

In a lot of murder mysteries, especially ones that care more for being cozy than thrilling, they try to emphasize this same point, but more often than not it falls flat: Usually, you can bet it won't be one of the young lovers or the archetypal Watson sidekick to the detective. (It's almost never the detective either). With Agatha, it really could be any one of those, perfect alibis and complete absence of a motive be damned. CH reminded me that Agatha is absolutely ruthless in her fiction.

I was amused to discover that she didn't actually have a specific murderer in mind when she began this novel. She basically wrote most of it because of whatever vibes she felt like going with. True, she had the idea of the extended family frozen in their rotting yet still-standing mansion, whose patriarch has suddenly died, but apparently she considered several suspects before landing on the winner. I saw reviewer say that if Agatha had chosen anyone else to be the killer, they "would be giving this fewer stars -- I felt it almost as a physical blow when she revealed the truth, then immediately thought that no other ending would have done half so well." I agree, although I do want to point out that the book has a lot of eugenicist undertones because of the murderer (and related themes) that Agatha ended up choosing. There're a lot of outdated implications on the hereditary nature of "madness" and "being born bad," which left a sour taste in my mouth once I got to the big reveal.

That being said, I enjoyed the multi-valenced term of the word "crooked." It was almost Shakespearean in its witty execution. Typical of Agatha, the title is a reference to a nursery rhyme that she contorts to something malignant and creepy: "And they all lived together in a little crooked house." The victim himself was a crooked in the legal sense, -- not to mention being a little shit with his family -- but his heart was in the right place. Well, until someone stopped it. Even though I usually prefer the more over-the-top murders, CH was so clever that I hardly even noticed the disappointing lack of blood and gore.

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz - 4/5 stars (★★★★)

"When you live in the country, you spend every minute of the day surrounded by a vast emptiness. I could feel it now. But you never think for a minute that you might become part of it."

I read Magpie Murders when I was still in high school. I really liked it and was blown away by the mystery within a mystery, but I didn't know that it was part of a series until recently. I picked up Moonflower Murders even though the last time I was with Susan Ryeland was back in 2016. I was worried I wouldn't understand where the story picked off from MPM, but thankfully Moonflower Murders stood well on its own.

This was a good whodunnit; it's a solid read, with a book within a book trope, so if you like that sort of thing you'll get full satisfaction here. Horowitz's writing is engaging (and his quintessentially British humor, which I suppose I have a fondness for because of my literary background and Doctor Who childhood hyperfixation, got a chuckle out of me once or twice). This novel was another homage to the classic Golden Age of crime and detective fiction. The inner mystery, Alan Conway's novel Atticus Pünd Takes the Case (terrible title), is written in the (attempted) style of Agatha Christie. I say that because the novel (within the novel) is a clumsy attempt at imitating Christie; the dialogues lack her wit and Pünd, while charming, is obviously a poor imitation of Poirot. I wish that Horowitz had instead included a few relevant chapters from Alan's novel rather than giving us the whole thing, but I understand that he had a pattern to uphold after MPM.

The main mystery of who actually killed Frank Parris (and knows the reason behind Cecily's disappearance) is a modern take on the genre, but it contains the same Golden Age hallmarks, including a small cast of characters, lots of clues and red herrings, and the grand dénouement when everything is explained and the murderer is unmasked. It even pokes fun at itself at times for being so cliché, which I thought was amusing.

There were so many subplots that made it a little hard to keep all the facts straight, but for the most part, I was reasonably intrigued and therefore fine with going along for the ride. Horowitz must have so much fun writing these books. There are layers upon layers here, so don’t dive into this if you want a light, cozy mystery. Both stories are convoluted in the extreme, but not to an insufferable degree. For example, while it does take a stretch of the imagination to believe that the Trehernes would hire Susan and not a real private detective to find what happened to their daughter, it was such a silly opening reminiscent of Dorothy L. Sayers that I didn't think too much about its realism. Apparently most readers preferred Susan's investigation over Alan's book, but I hold the opposite opinion.

MFM is definitely a long book, with the text coming in at just under 600ish pages, which makes sense because it's two mysteries for the price of one. But honestly, I breezed through the whole thing in just a few days. I was hooked from the first page, and I couldn't put it down. I saw some people say that they couldn't help but skim the book near the end, but I think that's just a skill issue. MFM is long and crowded, yes, but I had fun and didn't let the length intimidate me. I do agree it is a tad longer than it needs to be as a book, but whatever. Horowitz doesn't cheat the reader for either of the mysteries: All the clues are there, although some of the and links were so tenuous and complicated, especially in the main mystery.

That being said, while I enjoyed Alan's book -- despite figuring out who the murderer is and exactly how they did it to the last detail -- I couldn't say the same for MFM's overall ending. It just didn't match up to the Alan Conway book's wrap-up. When it finally came time for Susan to do the big reveal, I knew who the killer was, but I was disappointed because of how simple (and unrealistic) the explanation was compared to Pünd's case. I wouldn't go so far as to say you might as well just read the Pünd novel and ditch Susan Ryeland altogether, but prepare yourself for an anticlimactic ending.

And, since this is something that can't be ignored, I couldn't help but noticing that Horowitz has written yet another lowkey homophobic book. This is the third book of his (the other ones being from his Hawthorne and Horowitz series) in which gay men are portrayed as morally corrupt (Parris and Alan, who were the book's main queer characters, were sadistic pedophiles). And one of the ways Horowitz insists they're sick in the head is that . . . they like BDSM and kinky sex. Which is so boring. It's clear that Horowitz doesn't really know anything about queer life and the gay sex scene because, while I do know for a fact there are disgusting gay men like Alan and Frank Parris, their portrayals were comically inaccurate. While there aren't any extremely likeable characters in the book at all, Horowitz emphasized Alan and Frank as the worst of the whole cast. I saw a reviewer say, "When talking about Alan and Frank, other characters conflate their sexual orientation with their morally reprehensible behavior. They will say 'I have nothing against gay men' and go on to say something that equates being gay with perversion. This is the second novel by Horowitz in which his main character doesn't challenge other characters' homophobic remarks (Susan...you've let me down). In Horowitz's novels being gay makes you undesirable. This whole thing bugged me so much that I was unable to become truly invested in the story." So yeah. Couldn't have said it better myself.

I also didn't like how immigrants, the working class, and basically anyone who wasn't Anglo-Saxon white-skinned British were portrayed in this book. Susan herself is pretty unsavory, which sucks since I remember liking her in MM. In this book, she mentions how "[g]enerally, I don't like tipping. It feels old-fashioned, a throwback to the days when waiters and hotel staff were seen as belonging to a lower class." I know the tipping culture is different in the UK (and probably in Greece too), but she said this in response to one of the hotel staff members silently asking for a tip. She of course doesn't give him one, prompting them to "[scowl], turn on his heel and left." It's such an odd scene but it's clear Horowitz wants me to sympathize with Susan's "progressive" views on tipping culture. I've been firmly in lower and working class all my life, so I really truly hated her in that moment. I think I even put an annotation like, "Susan, you are a level A grade asshole."

Horowitz also gave away the fact that he's a white man from the United Kingdom so consistently, which didn't exactly ruin my reading experience, but it made me annoyed at times. For example, he describes Agios Nikolaos, which is where Susan and her partner Andreas run a hotel in Crete, as not "very much more than an overgrown fishing village." It's a small jab, but the condescension still stings, especially since Susan spends a large portion of the book romanticizing exotic, lethargic Crete while at the same time complaining about its people and culture.

There was also the character of Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Locke, who Horowitz describes as someone with "angry eyes," "black skin," and "muscular neck and shoulders." Apparently "even the way he walked -- as if searching for a wall to bulldoze his way through" left Susan feeling unsafe. I hate cops and men as much as the next person, but it was indeed racist for Horowitz to make a black man so stereotypically violent and aggressive in contrast to the book's white heroine. His portrayal of immigrant characters like Stefan Codrescu, Eloise Radmani, and Sajid Khan. These characters weren't exactly illustrated in a villainous light -- Stefan gets redeemed at the end of the book even though he only appears for one scene with Susan -- but as a person of color and immigrant myself, I was kind of uncomfortable. There were some throwaway microaggressive comments too, like when Pünd said, "Had Mr. Pendleton been Japanese, then perhaps I might have accepted that he would perform on himself hara-kiri!" (Hara-kiri is a spoken term, but only to commoners, which goes against Pünd's upper class character; and BTW, seppuku is the written term. It's also the one most used when referring to the ritual disembowelment of Japanese samurai. Not to be an "Um ACTUALLY--" bitch but like. Get it together). There was also a line about how, "Suffolk is not racist. But it is fairly white." Like okay, you sound so stupid it's embarrassing Susan. Also the fact that I had to keep track of so many estate names like Ladbroke Grove should be considered a hatecrime because why do white people love naming things that make zero sense like just call it a house on Ladbroke Avenue for chrissakes. No need for fancy titles, this isn't an Arthurian legend complete with like twenty different knights -- all called "Sir."

Still, I did like Horowitz's not-so-nice depiction of the publishing industry. I was interested in Susan's observations about the editing process or writing in general because they offered glimpses of Horowitz's actual writing career and experience with this cutthroat, bloodthirsty industry. As someone who wants to be in publishing and bookmaking myself, I found it was a refreshing peek into the behind-the-scenes goings-on of getting stories out there. Even though I didn't like Susan, I respected her talents as an editor and found myself agreeing a lot on the feedback she gave to Alan -- not that he listened to any of it, which is a sort of frustration I, too, can relate to.

Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz - 2/5 stars (★★)

"It's what makes a murder mystery unique in the world of popular fiction. It may seem brilliant, but an awful lot depends on the last chapter. Only when you get there do you find out if the book was worth reading to begin with."

This book was not worth much reading to begin with, but it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes levels of deduction skills to come to that realization; you needn't read to the last chapter to see this book's kind of a hot mess, like a dumpster on fire in the middle of a blizzard.

I read Marble Hall Murders immediately after Moonflower Murders because I just wanted to check this trilogy off my Goodreads To Read list. I read Magpie Murders -- which was a lot of fun -- in high school, and I can firmly say I should've just stopped reading the Susan Ryeland series then. It seriously should have been a one-and-done -- you can only stomach the idea that you're reading a Hercule Poirot rip-off for just one book. There should never have been a sequel after MM, but, instead of being satisfied with the first book's amusing romp of a murder mystery plot, I decided to fuck around and find out. (Just to be clear: I didn't outright hate reading this series, but I am happy to put it behind me. I hope I can sell my copies of MHM and MFM for a decent price so I can at least get some compensation for all my headaches).

MHM feels like a bleaker piece than the earlier two. I admit the whole book-within-a-book gimmick is managed with its usual aplomb and Horowitz does make an effort to add some twists to keep the plot semi-buoyant. An effort, however, is only as good as its effect, and this book is markedly the weakest one out of the Susan Ryeland series. I saw a reviewer say that, for Agatha Christie fans, "there will be those twisty moments, but it won’t happen until towards the end which means you have a long time to wait for it, and that may take some incredible patience because this book is 579 pages. Would it just be easier to skim through?" Yes, it would.

Like the other two, it can be read as a standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it because I was honestly only able to slog through the last two books because I'd grown used to the reoccurring characters. Because of that, I was (mostly) able to ignore the blaring questions in my head, most of which just had to ask, "How the hell is Horowitz doing another one of these Susan Ryeland mysteries?" And apparently he wrote it because the actress Lesley Manville, who portrays Susan in the television series, told him that she would like to do one more season, so here we are. Aside from that practical (and rather superfluous) reason, MHM doesn't really justify its own existence. Like I said, this is the third and final installment in the series, and for that I am grateful. The question of why it was even written in the first place was never adequately answered, which made it hard to vibe with the premise. And it's a shitty premise.

So, when I picked up MHM, I had to ask myself the same thing Susan did at the start of the book: Why am I here again? For her, there was a different answer: She had bills to pay, so, when she's asked to read and edit a manuscript that was being written by another author that would extend dead Alan Conway’s Atticus Pünd mysteries, she can't exactly say no. I get that. Even though revisiting Conway's books would bring up hideous memories, I can understand how and why she had to put that trauma aside in order to survive. I wished Horowitz commented a little more on how cruel this situation was to Susan, but the way he depicted it sounded more like crony complaining rather than actual criticism of the workforce, especially on older women.

I would say that one of the few things I did like about MHM was that it opens with Susan's amicable, yet still sad, breakup with Andreas (who I liked but knew wasn't a good match for her). Leaving Crete behind, Susan's forced to start her life all over again in London despite being in her 50s, alone, and essentially shadow-banned from the publishing industry. Throughout the three books, Horowitz did a good job conveying how she was always career-minded and independent, so this introduction at least made sense, and to have her start over literally from scratch was interesting. Life never goes according to anyone's best-laid plans, so it was a bit refreshing to see how Susan handled figuring out what was right for her even though she's well past the age society believes you should have everything worked out.

Susan being a disgraced editor and late bloomer also allowed for some nice insights into the (British) publishing industry:

"Writers aren't like other people. All those hours spent alone, obsessing about every word, can make them neurotic, nervous, needy or -- like Alan Conway -- plain nasty. When you think about it, all the odds are stacked against them. . . . According to the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society, the average salary earned by a novelist is just seven thousand pounds a year, which makes a nurse or a librarian look rich. I've seen it often enough. The excitement of a new writer when they're told that their book is going to be published, followed by the dawning realization that it's not the end of the journey or even the beginning. They've just been invited to stand on the platform and wait for a train that may never arrive."

I'm slowly dipping my feet into the literary publishing world now that I'm finished my master's, and, while I make it a point not to expect much, it's hard to keep your dreams in check when you don't really know the goings-on of the publishing industry. Susan, who was really a vessel for Horowitz's experience as a long-time writer, had a lot of evocative things to say about how her career played out, as well as the experiences she had because of it. I doubt I'll have as much of a shitty time as she did throughout this trilogy if I ever become an editor myself, but nevertheless her character shined through in her critique of the industry she both kind of loathes yet also can't let go of. She really is good at her job, and you can't help but admire her determination to keep doing it.

One other interesting thing was how Horowitz brought back the killer in MM Charles Clover and his wife for MHM. Unfortunately, I thought the scene where Susan confronts him years after what he'd done to her was going to be good, but it turned out to be more melodramatic than the prison scene in MFM. Charles' monologuing about how much he hated life in jail because of how it stripped him of his identity and rich bitch habits was pathetically laughable. White men will always paint themselves as the victim. His wife Elaine Clover's subplot was better, although her crashout near the end of the book wasn't very hard-hitting. It felt like a cheap attempt at action and angst. I think MHM certainly benefited from Horowitz's return to Susan's disastrous relationship with the Clovers, but he unfortunately sidelined it too much that the tension in their dynamic lost its grip on me.

I still also very much dislike Susan as a character; this book didn't necessarily enhance it so much as it more concretely affirmed it. There were multiple sections where I rolled my eyes, like when Susan lowkey fat-shames Eliot Crace by pointing out that "[h]e had filled out a bit. I wouldn't have said he was fat, but he could certainly have done with a bit of time in the gym." People -- even fictional characters -- who feel the need to passive aggressively comment on others' body weight are immediately losers to me. Susan's dislike of Eliot later on was certainly valid, but I feel like she never actually considered him as more than her meal-ticket out of unemployment. He definitely was an asshole, but Susan's total lack of sympathy towards his childhood trauma, substance abuse + addiction issues, and extreme depression was quite chilling: "I don't think I'd ever met anyone so broken and Eliot had set the bar pretty high. . . . I'd met trauma victims who were stronger and more stable . . ." I put a note when she said that like, Seriously? The most broken person you've ever met in your 50+ years of life was a white trustfund baby manchild who hits his wife and cries about it in a redpill bar? It makes me think Susan herself isn't all that well-rounded a person if that's the best she can think of. Hhh. Again, I didn't like Eliot either, and he did a lot of unforgivable things, but Susan isn't exactly a saint herself and isn't that much better than Eliot in my eyes.

To get back to the book, the mysteries themselves are unbelievably convoluted and boring. Even the way the main victims died by poison was dull. No blood or dramatic confrontation scenes here. Blessedly, we get the literary murder of Lady Margaret Chalfont quite early in the book -- much earlier than in Moonflower Murders, yet it still took too long. Aside from the fact that I shipped Pünd and Voltaire (who was copaganda through and through, by the way, as evidenced when he threatened, "If anyone interrupts before Monsieur Pünd has finished, I will have them arrested!" Like okay, that's totally moral and not at all an abuse of your power. #ACAB), the story of the Chalfont family and their seedy dealings in the art world after WWII were plain stupid -- and quite honestly, borderline insulting with how little attention the Nazi subplot was given??? I didn't care about any of the characters because they were all privileged assholes! Pünd kept trying to make me feel sorry for Lady Chalfont being killed, but honestly her disgusting wealth and ignorance to the world around her made it extremely tough to cry over her corpse, let alone feel bad for the ratty family she left behind supposedly in mourning.

The only characters I really felt bad for in Pünd’s Last Case were Monsieur Lambert and Alice Carling. When Alice is killed, I feel like Pünd didn't really care as much for her unjust death as much as he felt sorry for Lady Chalfont's ("Never has there been a victim of a murder who deserved to die less."), which I suppose makes sense since she was actually his friend, but it doesn't escape my attention that Pünd and Lady Chalfont are both well-off aristocrats and Alice was a working class girl who came from a small village. I think this subtle classist bias between the two main murder victims can be seen in how careless the inquest into Alice's murder was. For example, when Pünd interviews the Carlings, he mentions how Alice thought herself to be engaged to a man named Charles Saint-Pierre, but he never actually questions her parents if she was truly engaged to anyone. You'd think it was an obvious thing to ask, and I was waiting for Pünd to do it, but he literally never does.

In a callback to MM, MHM's mystery author inside the main mystery (Eliot) also dies before finishing the book, which was a unique concept in Book 1 -- reading a book within a book that ties both plots together neatly -- but now it feels old and worn out, which you can kind of sense Horowitz was also feeling since Pünd’s Last Case and its less than 150 pages could barely be counted as a novella, let alone a mystery novel. It felt unnaturally forced and awkward; you could tell Horowitz didn't care much for the Chalfonts and just shoved in a sloppy, overcomplicated murder mystery narrative to complete the series' gimmick. What was most annoying was that there wasn't much of a clean split between the main mystery and the literary one either. I understand, narratively speaking, why Horowitz had to cut the manuscript into several sections, but by the time you wrapped up with Susan and came back to Eliot's book, and vice versa, you found yourself mind-numbingly indifferent to what was going to happen next because it was all so ridiculously dragged on. Supposedly, if the reader pays close attention, both mysteries' continuations throughout the rest of the novel give us clues within clues to Susan’s third bout of armchair sleuthing, but the writing felt uninspiring, to the say the least.

The murders are also irritatingly convoluted -- and therefore meh -- due to their over-the-top nature, which is a crazy thing for me to moan about since I usually love silly, unrealistic murder mysteries, but this one lacked pizzazz. The two supposedly intertwined plots (Susan and the Craces vs Pünd and the Chalfonts) then has this looping quality where it's constantly trying to find sane reasons for Susan to do the things she needs to do to push the plot forward, but literally none of them really land. For example, no reasonable person who wants to stay out of drama because she's traumatized beyond repair goes uninvited to a family gathering and asks insane questions in the middle of the festivities, only to then be surprised when the hosts throw her out. Like girl. The only way this scenario works is if Susan is a depraved snoop who openly admits that she can't help herself from finding out the tea, but she spends the entire book claiming she's the exact opposite of that, which, of course, adds to the hilarity of the all: Coming up with implausible reasons for her to fuck around in the Crace family's personal businesses while claiming that she doesn't want trouble is just one of the many things that didn't work here. Don't even get me started on how illegal a lot of the shit she gets Detective Inspector Blakeney to do for her, like letting her sleep after her assault despite knowing who the murderer of both Eliot and Miriam were. Horowitz takes the time to lament on realism in detective fiction in this book whilst subtly positioning himself as above all that by criticizing the common discrepancies that occur in 21st century crime and detective fiction, but he falls for the exact same trappings! Of course Susan can't tell Blakeney what happened in her hospital room, the big reveal has to happen in Marble Hall! Get the hell out of here with your official legal proceedings and technicalities!

And yet, despite being batshit crazy, all the murders were actually quite predictable. I really wanted Cedric to have been the killer of his grandmother -- perhaps a small allusion to Agatha Christie's Crooked House, which famously revealed the child of the family to be the culprit -- but they really laid it on thick that all the Chalfonts (and Robert) wanted Elmer Waysmith dead; the pieces weren't all that difficult to put together. A similar lethargic line of reasoning may be expelled for the Crace family mystery and have it yield the same correct yet tedious results, because Horowitz pulled a Chekhov's gun -- but instead of a gun it was simply color-blindness. (Bruh).

To be fair, I did find the Crace family's dysfunction a bit more intriguing, probably because I was supposed to actually believe it was real. There was only one degree of separation with the Craces, unlike with the Chalfonts:

"But there was also an inexpressible sadness about [them] that . . . made me wonder how anyone in this family had managed to survive their own lives."