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| I bought this one days before the sale. |
THE BETTER TO EAT YOU – Charlotte Armstrong
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| I bought this one days before the sale. |
Due to a recent resurgence in spam messages, I have disabled anonymous commenting. I realize this may be annoying to some users who do not wish to sign up for a Google account, but this is the easiest way for me to deal with spam and still have comments appear in a timely manner.
Please keep all discussion civil.
Up to this moment, he had been sustained by intellectual curiosity. The mystery had seemed more important than the murder. It had challenged him like a problem in chess or mathematics.
But now that it was no longer a mystery, he realized to the full that neither was it a game played with senseless pieces, nor a problem living only in the mind of a mathematician. He was dealing with human beings like himself who could feel and hope, think and suffer…
- Helen McCloy, Dance of Death
“The crime, you see, is just to set the stakes. The real message of the detective story is that even in the worst of circumstances, a man or woman can make things right using courage, tenacity, and brainpower. Even though writers depict protagonists who are corrupt or criminal, the characters are at least trying to do something about their lives. That’s especially appealing in these days when so much of so-called serious literature is plotless, hopeless, and, in the eyes of many, pointless. [...]
For a long time, there has been a school of criticism putting down mystery stories as ‘crossword puzzles in prose.’ This is nonsense, as the smallest familiarity with the genre will show. Mysteries range from light comedy to Grand Guignol, with every gradation in between, including that of (ahem) literary art. It happens rarely, to be sure, but it happens just as rarely in those rarefied circles of writing whose practitioners are shooting for art and nothing else. And in the mystery, the misses are still fun to read.
But even if mysteries were crossword puzzled with plotlines, what of it? What kind of plotlines are we talking about? Good versus evil, order versus chaos, illusion versus reality, and the necessity of thought as a tool of survival. I’ll take that.”
—William L. DeAndrea, Introduction to Encyclopedia Mysteriosa
Wonderful stuff Patrick - in afct, I only have a few of these and they all look great! Those of us still stuck with those paper-bound thingamebobs are well and truly envious!
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Although I do prefer regular books to ebooks, the machine is remarkably convenient in some situations, such as reading at work. So I'm very glad to get these books! :)
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