Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Book Club discusses "Death of a Cozy Writer"

This month, the book club read and discussed the first of new series Death of a Cozy Writer: a St. Just mystery.

Writer G.M. Malliet, a former journalist, won the Malice Domestic Grant for this title. The grant is awarded to unpublished writers for traditional mysteries following in the tradition of a Agatha Christie novel--that is the setting is within a confined setting of people who know each other in a novel without explicit sex or excessive gore or violence. Here's a pix of Malliet from her website
.

Death of a Cozy Writer is set in Cambridgeshire, England (where Malliet also lives) with the unsettling activities of a wealth writer's planned remarriage and the negative reaction by his adult children. The writer, Sir Adrian Beauclerk Fisk, has build a successful book series with an Agatha Christie-type character. As a result, he may offer his children Ruthven, Sarah, Albert or George a wealthy inheritance upon his death. Instead, he toys with that possibility and changes his written will at whim--showing contempt to all his children. Tragically, during a major family gathering for the engagement announcement, one in the party is found dead.

With almost a third of the story told, Detective Chief Inspector St. Just enters the novel.

Here are some takes on the novel:

  • DCI St. Just has an amazing gift of deduction to solve the case--he appears to shortcut the investigation process...

  • the novel has its share of humor but not the sort of British humour some readers would expect (except for the laughable American character who tries too hard to fit in) and it struck me as being "catty" too often

  • the "Cast of Characters" in the front of the book was nice for the reader

  • the book was nicely written

  • as a murder occurs in a eighteenth-century Cambridgeshire manor to bring the police to the location, the family and others remain there during the investigation and--unfortunately--another death occurs there so it was suggested the people should have been moved

  • the most shadowy and seldom seem character,Violet Mildenhall was judged the most interesting because of her unique background

  • the favoritism which Adrian displays to some of his children at times, and disapproval more often, raised a long discussion about favoritism in real families and how the issue is handled in fair and biased manners.

Overall, the book was judged as a OK but not noteworthy.




Thursday, March 19, 2009

Two book reviews on library podcast--

I think this is ironic timing. I discovered at work last week while my voice had pretty much left me and I was reduced to whispering--the results of a cold--that a podcast session I recorded last year is now available. That is, I recorded a segment for a monthly podcast recording for the library system's "Reader's Club" website. One librarian hosts the sessions and invites others to participate.

My contribution are two book reviews from two previous book club meetings last year for Terry Hoover's Double Dead and Jesse Kellerman's The Genius in the month of February.

I had hoped to incorporate podcasts with this blog for months (and months) but I really haven't yet. It is still in the plans though.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

You Decide: Likable Characters Needed?

I paused for a moment while listening to a radio interview with author Zoe Heller, promoting her new book The Believers. [Here's a pix of her which accompanies this National Public Radio story on the web.] She makes the point of explaining her work by saying "My hope, at least, is that I write difficult, complicated but sympathetic characters."

And to further stress this, she continues [in a forceful tone] "I'm slightly irritated by what I think is a kind of modern demand for characters you can root for, characters you would like to be friends with. Speaking as a reader, I have to say that some of my favorite characters in literature are some of the nasty ones." Those comments caught me as I hear during book club sessions about novels with unlikeable characters.

Being in a book club focusing on mysteries (i.e. crime stories), how do we reconcile this? It--frequently, it seems with my book club--comes up that a novel doesn't have any likable characters. Is it a must to have a character to at least root for (redeemable wouldn't be strong enough here) to have a good reading experience? Or should readers just accept that too many fictional characters operate from their own their own selfish, narrow or jaded interests and that's their lives?

What do you think?

Friday, March 13, 2009

Hollywood Celebrity Pens New Mystery

I'm sure I'm not just one of the 20 people in the world who browse through Google News to catch up on news but I might be. In any case, I zipped through some "Entertainment" stories recently and found one about a new mystery book co-authored comic Joan Rivers.

Writing about what ones knows is safe ground for any writer and Ms. Rivers makes that connection with her new book Murder at the Academy Awards: A Red Carpet Murder Mystery. Working with mystery writer Jerrilyn Farmer--a good match I believe, I read some of her work--Ms. Rivers broadens her writing chops with this genre fiction title. And the book has some genuine interest as it has a wait list for check-outs in library. Additionally, the library system has a few of her earlier books which are mainly biography and humor-themed.

How did the current contestant on NBC-TV's “The Celebrity Apprentice” get her mystery off the ground? She answers that during a recent interview found on "The Improper" website:

IM: Describe the writing process as you worked on “Murder at the Academy Awards: A Red Carpet Murder Mystery.”

Rivers: Well I worked with someone who is a great mystery writer named Jerrilyn Farmer, so it was great because she really brought all the mystery and showed me how to do that because I didn’t have a clue in hell. She didn’t have a clue in hell about what happens on the red carpet, what goes on backstage, what goes on at The Kodak Theatre, and what goes on in the gifting rooms, etc. We worked together.

IM: Which challenges did you come across as you wrote the story?

Rivers: I don’t know, I struggle with everything! (laughs) So many of the characters are composites of real people, and you don’t want to get in too close, but you also want to be able to tell a story that you heard about this person or saw about that person… So that was fun. It was all fun, it really was fun writing the novel- much easier than writing my other book which was such a research project!