Mysteries: Cosy, Cats, Capers, Historical, Medical, Procedural and everything in between

[Zorral]

The two of you have me quite looking forward Thursday Murder Club's arrival!  Thank you!

[Hereward]

19 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I read this for a book club I recently joined. In general I agree with the above though perhaps I wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic. That may be because of the many references to recent English middle class culture which go over my head as an American.   

Thursday Murder Club did have some twists in it that were a bit unconventional for a "cozy mystery", so I found it interesting and creative. 

I realise the difficulty of elaborating on things we don’t understand, but I’d be interested in any examples you can think of.

[Ormond]

19 minutes ago, Hereward said:

I realise the difficulty of elaborating on things we don’t understand, but I’d be interested in any examples you can think of.

For one example, I had to look up Waitrose through Google to understand what someone having "Waitrose money" meant. 

And I'm still a bit confused by Joyce and Joanna stopping at "Anything with a Pulse" in Chapter 64. When I Google that the reference that comes up is to the title of a stage play. Is there really a cafe or shop called "Anything with a Pulse" or is this a fictional location created by Osman?

[john]

That sounds like an ironic comment on the trend for vegan restaurants or cafes.

I haven’t read it but only heard good things about it, even from people who, by their own admission, think Richard Osman is a smarmy git.

[Zorral]

18 hours ago, john said:

 

I haven’t read it but only heard good things about it, even from people who, by their own admission, think Richard Osman is a smarmy git.

Is he?  Know nothing about the guy, other than he's written two popular mystery novels.  

Certainly possible, since, for instance, very popular US crime-suspense-thriller novelist, Lee Childs, most of whose books I've read, is definitely a US version of smarmy git as a person(ality) -- at least as he's come across in interviews.  In person for all I know he's utterly charming!

[john]

Osman is a huge tv personality in the UK. I find him very personable myself but I guess some people don’t like him.

[Zorral]

8 minutes ago, john said:

Osman is a huge tv personality in the UK. I find him very personable myself but I guess some people don’t like him.

Ah. Thank you.  This is interesting, as he's another person who began in media / journalism, and turned into a very successful novelist.  Louise Penny is one. Another is, my fave, Martin Walker, for that matter.

[A wilding]

In the UK it is a great deal easier to get your first book published, and to get the publisher to push it hard, if you are already famous or connected, and so the dice are loaded in your favour. Though it is still quite possible that no one remembers the book a few years later. At least in Osman's case we can be reasonably sure it was not ghost written by someone else.

Edited September 25, 2021 by A wilding
Typo

[Zorral]

I've been notified the book's on its way.  Maybe I'll be able to read it next weekend.

[lady narcissa]

Well for the first time I was a bit disappointed by an Anne Cleeves mystery.  Just read her newest - The Heron's Cry - which is the second in the Matthew Venn series.  It was a bit boring...if one can call a novel with murder, boring.  I liked the murder and the murder weapon but the ultimate investigation and resolution fell a bit flat.  But I'm just not taking to Matthew and the side characters the way I have taken to the characters in Cleeves' other series.  And while I love the location - the north coast of Devon which I have visited before and I can visualize the locations - I just don't feel like Cleeves is really doing it justice the way she does with her other locations.  I've had a really good run with Cleeves mysteries so I suppose its okay that this is the only one of hers that hasn't really worked for me.

[A wilding]

Can't get into the Matthew Venn books either. For me the issue is with his characterisation. As with Vera's skin complaint (though that gets forgotten after the first few books), she has given him an initial character trait to make him more interesting, but failed to flesh it out and make it plausible.

I suppose details are a mild spoiler:

Spoiler

He is a gay man brought up in a homophobic religious sect, who came out at university, and was disowned by the sect and his family as a result. And yet he is happily married to another man and completely relaxed about his sexuality without the slightest feeling of guilt or sin, and not even the recollection of a heroic internal struggle to reach that point. It just does not feel realistic.

 

[Zorral]

12 hours ago, lady narcissa said:

I just don't feel like Cleeves is really doing it justice the way she does with her other locations. 

It felt that way to me also.  Unless I've become so adjusted to the Vera books?  But I found her Shetland books terrific reads , so .... ? at heart, perhaps she's just a Girl of the North Country? 

[Zorral]

Hooray! Both Riccardino, the last Montalbano ever, and The Thursday Murder Club, are ready for me to pick up at the library this weekend! So with the Justinian - 6th century series, John the Lord Chamberlain Mystery series, I have some new dependable escapism on hand for a while.  Whew!  Been out of such for a while, alas.

[Wall Flower]

9 hours ago, Zorral said:

Hooray! Both Riccardino, the last Montalbano ever, and The Thursday Murder Club, are ready for me to pick up at the library this weekend! So with the Justinian - 6th century series, John the Lord Chamberlain Mystery series, I have some new dependable escapism on hand for a while.  Whew!  Been out of such for a while, alas.

I hope you let us know what you think about the The Thursday Murder Club. I always look forward to your mystery recommendations.

I have a second-hand bind-up of the first two Montalbano books and want to get to them soon. I've seen the TV series but never got round to the books until now. I'm missing my library, which is closed due to lockdown, but I'm whizzing through a lot of the books I own - one of the few consolations of being pretty much confined to the house.

I've never heard of the John the Lord Chamberlain series but it sounds intriguing. I do love a good historical mystery.

 

[Zorral]

13 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

I've seen the TV series but never got round to the books until now.

The television series was at least as good as the books, I thought!  Plus, seeing those places with the eyeballs rather than the mind's eye -- and the food / meals -- YUM!

13 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

I do love a good historical mystery.

Several have been mentioned, particularly at the start of the "History in Books" thread on this forum.  If you haven't looked through that one, you may get some ideas.  It seems a little wrong to me, intuitively, that if mysteries are set in the past they are also automatically classified now as 'historical fiction' which means putting something like John the Chamberlain next to the Lymond Chronicles, but that's how it is!

So nevermind.  Quite some time ago it appeared to me -- duh!, but I'm slow, yanno! --  when it comes to any kind of fiction, genre, literature, whatever, the mystery / crime formulae is fiction's universal solvent.  It can be successful in any form and genre, right?

 

[Zorral]

Osman, Richard (2020) The Thursday Murder Club.

The first night I cracked open this British Big Seller, I zipped right through the first 126 pp. / 36 chapters.  Some of these chapters are one or two paragraphs, thus so many of them.  Quite entertained, though I wasn't entirely sold on the tone of all the points of view and narrators, or on the interspersing of 'authorial' narration among the the povs, narrations and tones of some of the characters.  Nor was sold on the self-conscious references by the investigators to other mysteries and crime writers.  A quite first-time novelist, television personality thing to do! but fortunately this disappeared from the later thirds of the novel.

There are multiple deaths in this novel, committed by a variety of characters, so much so, sometimes it’s difficult to keep straight who killed whom, or who died, and when, particularly if the death takes place prior to the novel. Nor are all the deaths murders. 

There is a very upside to all these deaths, which are accompanying a primary-focused group of characters for whom awareness of imminent death for themselves and each other is their constant companion. They do not see this as a drawback from life, but as a release from expectations and standards that govern the lives of those not retired, opportunities for fun. "Fun" is the word most often used by each member in our primary group.  From them strands unwind into the larger world beyond the retirement community in which they live, into the local police, a neighboring town, even to Cyprus. These strands weave an expanding network of people outside the group who are congenial to each other as well as the primary group.  Murder creates community! just starting with a cold case murder club organized at a pricey retirement resort.  

Would this qualify as a cosy?  At the very least it is almost a cosy. I will find out more definitely, when I read this year’s Osman best seller, The Man Who Died Twice.
 

[Ormond]

On 10/6/2021 at 10:32 AM, Zorral said:

Osman, Richard (2020) The Thursday Murder Club.

The first night I cracked open this British Big Seller, I zipped right through the first 126 pp. / 36 chapters.  Some of these chapters are one or two paragraphs, thus so many of them.  Quite entertained, though I wasn't entirely sold on the tone of all the points of view and narrators, or on the interspersing of 'authorial' narration among the the povs, narrations and tones of some of the characters.  Nor was sold on the self-conscious references by the investigators to other mysteries and crime writers.  A quite first-time novelist, television personality thing to do! but fortunately this disappeared from the later thirds of the novel.

There are multiple deaths in this novel, committed by a variety of characters, so much so, sometimes it’s difficult to keep straight who killed whom, or who died, and when, particularly if the death takes place prior to the novel. Nor are all the deaths murders. 

There is a very upside to all these deaths, which are accompanying a primary-focused group of characters for whom awareness of imminent death for themselves and each other is their constant companion. They do not see this as a drawback from life, but as a release from expectations and standards that govern the lives of those not retired, opportunities for fun. "Fun" is the word most often used by each member in our primary group.  From them strands unwind into the larger world beyond the retirement community in which they live, into the local police, a neighboring town, even to Cyprus. These strands weave an expanding network of people outside the group who are congenial to each other as well as the primary group.  Murder creates community! just starting with a cold case murder club organized at a pricey retirement resort.  

Would this qualify as a cosy?  At the very least it is almost a cosy. I will find out more definitely, when I read this year’s Osman best seller, The Man Who Died Twice.
 

I think it qualifies as a cozy ("cosy" is the British spelling.) It's different from the average cozy in having a group instead of a single amateur detective and having a bit more connection with organized crime and espionage than is usual for a cozy. But there are other cozies that have an entire group of friends as the crime solvers (such as Susan Wittig Albert's "Darling Dahlias" series, where the amateur sleuth seems to be the entire membership of a small town garden club), and the murders in Thursday Murder Club aren't described in gory detail. And the relationships between the amateur club and the police seem to fit what I think of as being normal for a cozy. 

Edited October 8, 2021 by Ormond

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Ormond said:

the relationships between the amateur club and the police seem to fit what I think of as being normal for a cozy. 

A cosy/cozy relationship indeed!  Poirot! just for one. 

[Zorral]

Horowitz, Anthony. (2016 in the UK, 2017 in the US) Magpie Murders 

In some ways this is an odd, if clever, duck of a crime novel because it is two novels. There is The Magpie Murders itself, the last novel by Alan Conway, a best selling crime author whose series features Atticus Pünd, a detective much like Poirot, though German, not Belgian, and rather younger than Poirot, having gone through internment in a nazi death camp, whose rescue allowed him to remove to England, thus the series's plots are set in the 1950's. The second, framing novel is set in the present, narrated via Susan Ryland, the verging on middle-aged editor of Conway's series.

Throughout the two novels, past and present, do homage to the golden age of British crime fiction divas such as Christie and Allingham. They also reference constantly the crime novel series that Horowitz has been instrumental in producing, adapting and writing series for television, which are many, and all of which I've watched, just starting with Agatha Christie's Poirot, Foyle's War and o my -- Midsomer Murders!  To be sure, the opening chapter of the framed Conway novel feels right out of the opening shots of the pre-Neal Dudgeon Barnabys of Midsomer Murders, with a pan of the village and the character-suspects

Magpie Murders was a thoroughly engaging whodunit until -- soon in the second section of the framing novel, with us back to Susan Ryland's pov and narration. It sags then, going on too long, and ultimately the solution of the crime within it and who did it, is as unsatisfying as the one at the conclusion of the framed Atticus Pünd novel. 

Quote

.... Horowitz first developed the concept of Magpie Murders during the first season of Midsomer Murders, which premiered in 1997. He has stated that he wanted the novel to "be more than just a murder mystery story" and to be "a sort of a treatise on the whole genre of murder mystery writing. How the writers come up with the ideas; how these books are formed."[1] ....

It is that indeed, which is entertaining and even useful in itself for anyone who likes to read and watch such series, and anyone who wishes to read them.  Additionally, the book is as overstuffed with real life best selling crime series writers’ encomiums to Pünd, such as Ian Rankin, Ann Cleeves, etc.  Does one need to say Horowitz is adapting this novel for Britbox and PBS? 

Quote

.... In July 2020 Deadline announced that PBS’ Masterpiece would adapt the novel into a six-part drama series and air it in the US, and will air the series on BritBox in the UK.[12] ...

This Horowitz guy, never stops writing!  Check it out here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Horowitz#Television_series

Edited October 20, 2021 by Zorral

[Zorral]

The game's afoot!  As part of an observance of 125 years of the NYT Book Review, today there's up a selection of classic crime fiction, the first novels of authors who are still read and admired and influential right now.  It's nice to see that highly entertaining authors who are doing their genre more-than-right are recognized from the gitgo, isn't it?  We might even call these authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and George Simenon  Shakespears of crime and mystery genres.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/classic-crime-novels-that-still-thrill-today.html

However, for some reason sketches of the authors' head are all labeled as "Ross MacDonald" -- unless, that is the name of the person who created the sketches? But a google search says not.

 

 

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by Zorral