Somewhere in past posts from earlier this year, I mentioned that one of the things I missed most while being on the road hiking was being able to read as many books as I wanted to.
I made a serious effort to "solve" that problem in the three months I spent at home, mostly resting. In fact, I read 77 books before I headed back to the trail. That's not quite one a day, but not bad. I just can't stop.
And, I'm now up to 90 books read in 2023, and I've discovered two good, new-to-me mystery series. Both are British.
One is the Charles Lenox mysteries by Charles Finch. These are set in Victorian England, and the first in the series is The Beautiful Blue Death.
Today, I traveled down a bunny trail of a bunny trail and discovered another. The first bunny trail was that Rex Stout wrote several books that aren't Nero Wolfe books. He had a series of three mysteries with a detective named Tecumseh Fox. I already knew this, and I own two of them (I'll have to get the third). Interestingly enough, one of the plots is a near duplicate, with even the same character names, as a Nero Wolfe short story. The Fox book, Bad for Business was an expanded version of the short story, "The Bitter End," which was eventually printed in a posthumus volume of Nero Wolf stories called Death Times Three.
So I read all three Techumseh Fox books, and I read the third one, The Broken Vase, for the first time. Now we come to the next bunny trail. One of the murder "weapons" in this book is nitrobenzene, so I looked it up. It's a chemical that is used in small amounts in the manufacture of candy, acetaminophine, and in larger amounts to make aniline dye. But in pure form, a few drops on your skin can kill. So when I looked that up, there was a list of other mysteries that used nitrobenzene to kill.
One of these is from another British author, Anthony Berkeley. The book is The Poisoned Chocolates Case. I'm reading that one now, and it turns out there are four in this series starring Roger Sheringham. These were written in the 1920s-1930s and are from that golden age of mysteries. This book in particular is supposed to be a true classic of the age. But I had never heard of it.
I'm going to copy a paragraph from it. This is unequivocally good writing.
Facts were very dear to Sir Charles. More, they were meat and drink to him. His income of roughly thirty thousand pounds a year was derived entirely from the masterful way in which he was able to handle facts. There was no one at the bar who could so convincingly distort an honest but awkward fact into carrying an entirely different interpretation from that which any ordinary person (counsel for the prosecution, for instance) would have put upon it. He could take that fact, look it boldly in the face, twist it round, read a message from the back of its neck, turn it inside out and detect auguries in its entrails, dance triumphantly on its corpse, pulverise it completely, re-mould it if necessary into an utterly different shape, and finally, if the fact still had the temerity to retain any vestige of its primary aspect, bellow at it in the most terrifying manner. If that failed he was quite prepared to weep at it in open court.
You can be sure that this bunny trail will lead to reading the other books in that series. Reading well-written books in your own genre is a great way to help improve your own writing.
And, since we are on the topic of books, I copied a wonderful quote from Archie Goodwin (Nero Wolfe's legs and eyes, if you don't remember).
If you don’t walk much you wouldn’t know, but the angle you get on people and things when you’re walking is absolutely different from the one you get when you’re in a car or in anything else that does the moving for you. - Archie Goodwin.
Most of these books can be read for free at archive.org
In other news: I got busy on quite a few of my ongoing projects today, but am in a bit of a panic in that I can not find something that is quite important. It's not where I thought I left it when I headed back to the trail. I've looked in the obvious places. Tomorrow I'll expand the search.
 | See Tidbits from Nero Wolfe |
3 comments:
Lulu: "Ooh, yes, our Dada has read one of those Tec Fox books. He said to ask you if you had read the Inspector Cramer solo mystery, 'Red Threads'?"
Lulu- tell Dada I just learned about that one yesterday. It's on my list! Surprisingly, the list of Rex Stout books I saw did not include A Prize for Princes. I need to read that one again too, because I remember just being confused when I read it the first time. I thought maybe it was supposed to be a young Nero Wolfe in there somewhere, but apparently not. Now I see that it has some bad reviews. Probably mostly a case of modern readers not having patience with a 1914 book.
I love that Archie quote. He’s one of the great, lesser-known characters of mystery literature. Deb grows orchids, and they often remind me of Nero Wolfe stories. As did our travel in Puglia last month, when we could almost see Montenegro across the Adriatic.
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