melannen | FMK #38: History Mysteries

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FMK #38: History Mysteries

Last week's F winner was the Tiptree, but commenters were unaminous that it is the wrong Tiptree to start with, so now I'm undecided whether to let than win or to fallback to second place ("Empire of Bones"). There was also a tie for K, and I broke it in favor of the one with the less boring title, so Castaways of Tanagar goes away.

Also, I missed that the last poll was the one-year anniversary of FMK! Folks, I have been doing this since last February, and with that in mind, it's not that bad that I only have 18 still in the backlog to read. Right? Right. (It also means that if I'd managed a poll a week, as originally planned, we would now be done! Instead there are about three months' worth left. Oops.)

(I am considering what to do if I finish this. Options include: stop already; start over again with the Ms; poll one section of the Dewey Decimal System a week in my 1200 NF unreads; or read & review all my unread comics, which would probably not require voting because there's only a couple hundred of them and they read fast.)

Anyway, since I finally finished the cat mysteries books, it's time for Mysteries 2: History Mysteries!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #19605 FMK #38: History Mysteries

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

View Respondents

The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby (Republican Athens)

F
9 (69.2%)

M
1 (7.7%)

K
3 (23.1%)

The Pendragon Murders by J. M. C. Blair (Arthurian Britain)

F
9 (75.0%)

M
2 (16.7%)

K
1 (8.3%)

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee by Buti zhuanren trans. Gulik (Tang China)

F
14 (70.0%)

M
6 (30.0%)

K
0 (0.0%)

The Doublet Affair by Fiona Buckley (Elizabethan England)

F
6 (50.0%)

M
1 (8.3%)

K
5 (41.7%)

Consolation for an Exile by Caroline Roe (medieval Spain)

F
8 (66.7%)

M
2 (16.7%)

K
2 (16.7%)

Three Victorian Detective Novels by Wilkie Collins, Israel Zangwill, Everett Bleiler (Victorian England)

F
9 (52.9%)

M
4 (23.5%)

K
4 (23.5%)

The Novel Currently Known As "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie (1930s England)

F
14 (60.9%)

M
6 (26.1%)

K
3 (13.0%)

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy Sayers (1930s England)

F
8 (42.1%)

M
6 (31.6%)

K
5 (26.3%)

The Floating Admiral by Sayers, Christie, Chesterton, etc (this was a round robin, 1930s England)

F
9 (69.2%)

M
1 (7.7%)

K
3 (23.1%)

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1930s USA)

F
5 (38.5%)

M
3 (23.1%)

K
5 (38.5%)

The Black Gloves by Constance and Gwyneth Little (1930s USA)

F
3 (42.9%)

M
2 (28.6%)

K
2 (28.6%)

Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls by Mary Downing Hahn (1950s USA)

F
6 (54.5%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
5 (45.5%)

Rose Gold: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley (1960s USA)

F
7 (53.8%)

M
2 (15.4%)

K
4 (30.8%)

The Dead Man's Brother by Roger Zelazny (1960s Americas) by K. M. O'Donnell (Ace Double)

F
4 (36.4%)

M
2 (18.2%)

K
5 (45.5%)

Queens Full by Ellery Queen (short stories, mid-20th century USA)

F
4 (36.4%)

M
3 (27.3%)

K
4 (36.4%)

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I'm fascinated by the notion of a round robin with Sayers, Christie, Chesterton et al. Why did I not know this exists?

I mean, I don't think it's supposed to be very good, which is probably why! And most of the et. al are people unremembered by history. But apparently the Detection Club they were part of in 1930s London wrote several round robin novels.

I started it and found it boring, but I might have been in a bad mood.

And Then There Were None is wall-to-wall problematic elements even without the title, but as a thriller, it is GREAT. The characters are of varying levels of dimensionality but a number of them are vivid and memorable, and I thought it was pretty scary. It's a great premise that it completely makes good on.

My experience of The Floating Admiral was that the actually enjoyable part was the bit when each writer explained their solution. There's a certain amount of self-awareness to it

I really, really want you to read the round robin. It sounds like it could be sublime art or that sort of pointless randomness that comes with people who have large egos trying to outdo one another. I am guessing that it's option b, but it could be brilliant.

It could even be brilliantly pointless!

Happy anniversary to FMK! I've been really enjoying following along with this project of yours

Same!

Thanks! I am enjoying it too.

I voted M on Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee because it's a fascinating read, not so much for the mystery as for the cultural detail about how criminal investigations worked. This is the same Dee in the two recent movies (Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame and Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon). The character is based on a real person who became a folk hero. The story wasn't written during his lifetime, so it's not clear how much is fiction and how much based on written records. I think that this is (or was at the time of translation) the oldest of the stories about Judge Dee that has provenance as a written story with a known author.

This book sold well enough that the translator wrote several 'sequels' centered on the characters. I enjoyed reading them and still own them, but... He was writing a culture and history not his own for an audience mostly ignorant of both. He was primarily a scholar, but he was European. My recollection is that the books respect what they're drawing on, but it's been at least twenty years since I read one. The Racism Fairy may well have visited. These are the Judge Dee stories best known in English, however, and are still in print. Looking on Amazon, it appears that other people have written Judge Dee stories, and I wouldn't be surprised, given the whole folk hero aspect, if there were a lot of books with him as main or supporting character.

Judge Dee is also a major character in Deception by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri which came out somewhere in the 1990s. That's more historical doorstop in genre than mystery.

My mother really enjoyed most of the Ellery Queen books. I didn't care for the ones I tried. She's more interested in the puzzle side than I am. In the ones I read, the titular detective felt to me like a hole in the story in as much as I didn't get an impression of him as a human being. The people around him had quirks and motivations and secrets. He was more of a space for readers to stand while looking around. There were, in the stories I read, a lot of long sections in which neither Ellery or his father (a police detective of some high rank) appeared even as observers.

The characters getting the most attention and development tended to be the one off characters who were there for one story only.

I think I reacted to the stories as if they were Nero Wolfe mysteries that had met some sort of literary vampire that drained out all of the bits that I enjoyed. You might like these, though. I'm not sure what you read mysteries for.

I remember watching a TV adaptation in the late 1970s with my mother, sister, and stepfather. I liked that, but I can't tell how much of that is that watching TV at all was a huge Event. I think this may have been the first prime time TV show that my mother let us watch (The Muppet Show was the second), and she thought it was important enough for all of us to watch it.

And Then There Were None - I voted M on this, but I have a sentimental attachment to the story because I was in a stage production of it. I had about three lines and played the person who ran the ferry that brought everyone to the island. I was the youngest member of the cast by more than five years (I was in high school. Everyone else in the cast was old enough to have college degrees, kids at least five years old, and often both). I helped with some of the tech work, too, in terms of having props where they needed to be at certain times. The actor who played the first character to die was the stage manager. He and I were the ones with time to do the work, and he was sufficiently older than I to be teaching 5th grade. I'm not sure he'd ever stage managed before.

So I'm voting M for sentimental reasons, for the reasons that make it unlikely that I'll ever cull my copy, none of which have to do with the book being spectacularly good.

I'm kind of fascinated by the differences between the novel and the play script and the various movie adaptations. Those say something about expectations both in terms of what audiences and readers want(ed) and what they were expected to want and how both changed with time.

I vote for the Blair, despite never having read it, because I love arthuriana /shallow

Hey, that's why I own it!(And judging by the voting patterns, you're not the only one.)

Ooh, I would enjoy it if you did FMK with non-fiction.

It would be tricky, because the nature of my non-fiction collection (and DW) is that there would be a lot fewer books, proportionally, that people have heard of. And you don't have to know the book to vote on it, but most people seem to want to!

I'm thinking maybe instead of voting on books, you would vote on a section of the Dewey Decimal System, and then I have to pick one book out of that section to read & respond (and decide if there are any I should get rid of.)

I guess my motivation here is to learn of interesting non-fiction books that I may not have heard of. But yeah, following the discussion about what people think of various books is part of the fun, and I see how there might be less discussion for non-fiction.

Also, a lot of my non-fiction books are not ones that I would certify as "interesting" without having read them first! Most of my fiction is bought based on "I have heard of that somewhere, it must not be awful" and most of my NF is based on "I may want to know more about that topic someday and I bet the library doesn't have anything". So there's that.

I suppose I could pull out the ones that I'm pretty sure people have heard of - more Henrietta Lacks, fewer 19th century monographs about the life cycle of invertebrates - but that would really cut down the number of books in the pool.

Ha, well, I know a lot more about the life cycle of invertebrates (although I guess I don't read 19th century monographs on it) than about Henrietta Lacks, whom I have never heard of. So it would probably be hard to judge people's knowledge/interests!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a popular science book that was on all the recommended reading lists a couple years ago (in the US).

The 19th century monographs are fun as objects but sometimes tough going to read through. (I went to the natural history association's library clean-out sale, I have a BUnch of weird old natural history books.

...I could just limit it to, say books that are owned by more than 500 people on LibraryThing; that would at least up the odds that people would have heard of one or two of them.

I've not read the book Melannen mentions but Henrietta Lacks was the real name of 'Helen Lane', the cervical cancer patient from whose HPV-18 +ve tumour biopsy arose the HeLa cell line.

Thanks! I did check Wikipedia to see who she was.

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