The Daft and the Furious

All the way back in September of last year, I absolutely lost it. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you might remember September as the month in which I published a series of my mental breakdowns, disguised as a review of season one of the BBC’s Father Brown. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. Like the grizzled veteran of an action movie, who gets dragged in for “one last mission”, I’m back to once again do battle with the BBC’s Father Brown, mano-a-mano.

I’m a very big admirer of G. K. Chesterton. I love the man’s work, both as a writer of detective stories and as a spiritual writer. I’ll also admit I’m not an expert. I don’t know all the ins and outs of all things Chesterton. I own the brand-new, massive biography by Ian Ker, but I haven’t even gotten to the halfway point yet. I haven’t read Chesterton’s own autobiography for that matter (though I have read excerpts). I read Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man for the first time last year. All in all, there are people far more knowledgeable than I am on Chesterton’s life, works, and worldviews…

Of Shoes and Ships and Cereal

I might as well have tried to explain to a man dying of thirst that the water was being saved to do the laundry with.

- Archie Goodwin, The Silent Speaker

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you of course know by now that I love the work of Agatha Christie. She is the original Queen of Crime, the woman who introduced me to the world of detective fiction. For a long time she was my favourite author; with books like A Murder is Announced, Five Little Pigs, And Then There Were None, and Murder on the Orient Express to her credit, I consider her one of the most important figures in all of detective fiction.

Unfortunately, her popularity and historical importance have one major drawback, in that they’ve spawned a group of haters who mindlessly claim that Christie is psychologically shallow, a hackneyed writer repeating old clichés, “cozy”, naïve about sexual matters, or just plain “bad”. The most cursory look at Christie’s work is enough to dispel these notions, but the public perception of Christie has been influenced by many factors. And one of the most fatal is that Christie’s grandson, Matthew Prichard, is willing to put his grandmother’s name on just about anything.

Perhaps you’ve guessed what the subject of this article is going to be. If not, perhaps you haven’t heard the news yet. Well, last week reports surfaced that the Agatha Christie estate (read: her grandson, Matthew Prichard) has commissioned a brand-new Hercule Poirot novel, to be written by author Sophie Hannah. This book is expected to hit bookshelves next year. And if you look really carefully at the publicity photos, you can see that Matthew Prichard’s eyes have dollar signs in place of their pupils.

The Sound and the Fury

Do you have any idea how long it’s taken me to write this post? I’ve been trying to sit down and write a review of Father Brown for months, ever since the first episode aired. I thought the first episode was decent – not particularly good, but not out-and-out terrible either. But it didn’t inspire me in any way. I didn’t feel like watching more of the show, nor could I write a half-decent review of the first episode. Along with Elementary, it’s one of the few things I’ve watched which I simply couldn’t review. I tried and I tried, but everything I wrote seemed absolutely terrible. I even tried writing a post comparing the flaws of Elementary with the flaws of Father Brown, and abandoned it after writing two pages. Even in that aborted attempt at a post (abandoned in mid-May), I complained about just how difficult it was for me to write a review about Father Brown. Here is the relevant excerpt:

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G. K. Chesterton’s original tales are remarkable works, some of the finest short stories ever written. Father Brown solves mysteries not with the dropped handkerchief or burnt cigarette ash, but with his knowledge of the human spirit and the evil of which it is capable. And how did he get this knowledge? His religion: as a priest, he has seen all kinds of evil and has heard it in the confessional booth. I’m afraid, however, that someone at the BBC missed the entire point, and like the editor in The Purple Wig, decided that “God” should be replaced by “circumstances”.

All Aboard the Cliché Train!!!

There’s a certain type of mystery plot out there that is really starting to get on my nerves. The plot isn’t confined to a single sub-genre. The book can be set in a charming English village where an elderly lady plays the role of amateur sleuth. It can just as easily be a tough-as-nails hardboiled story about a tough wise-cracking PI. But for some reason, many authors think it’s a clever idea to use the following twist ending: the killer is gay.

What does the author of such a tale expect me to do? Throw my hands in the air and scream “Oh, my God!!! A gay person!!! I thought they were only mythical creatures that hid in forests, picked berries while the moon was full, and secretly stole pens whenever you needed them!” This twist ending has long outgrown its shock value… and its welcome. And the ending has introduced a brand-new set of clichés to the genre, clichés I’m sick of seeing.

A Book That'll Kill Ya

I admire the mission behind Books to Die For, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke. Some mastermind (whose plots make Ernst Blofeld’s look positively humble by comparison) has brought together some of the world’s finest crime writers from all four corners of the globe. These writers were asked to write a piece on a “book to die for”. It’s defined as follows: “If you found our contributors in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite novels, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so they could be confident they had done all in their power to make you read it.”

It’s an admirable idea, and after all, what could go wrong? Sure, a volume of this sort is bound to contain some omissions, but at least its inclusions should be excellent, and the different viewpoints should cancel each other out. For every author who is convinced that nothing is better than noir you can have one author who is convinced that plotting in the Christie mould is the best policy. For every author who prefers characterization and setting you can have one who prefers plotting and action. And thus, this collection should contain a book for everyone, and at the very least give you a balanced portrait of the genre.

Ha! In a perfect world, maybe. But we live on this world, and in our world we got a highly biased and highly problematic book. Some of the individual contributions are brilliant, but just as many (if not more) are very bad indeed and in only gets worse the further you read.