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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 19, 2023 15:28:19 GMT -8
It seems to me that most modern writers have followed the path that Lee Child chose when he started writing novels. I don't recall exactly how he said it, but basically he observed that the most successful writers had built their success on developing an interesting character and repeatedly using that character in different books. Story and plot were less interesting to the public than a "relationship" with a character.
One can't argue with him. From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade to Philip Marlowe to Bosch to Jack Reacher. Readers like familiarity with those they are reading about. Even faux familiarity. I am sure there are numerous famous writers of popular fiction who didn't repeat their characters, but one doesn't often think of them. At least I don't. Poe didn't, Dickens didn't, Tolstoy didn't, Hesse didn't and a lot of others didn't, but I would not call them writers of "popular" fiction as that term is understood today.
Be that as it may, I have the feeling that too many writers spend too much time on trying to invent a character which will interest the public, and spend too little time on story. I guess it is the literary equivalent of "Vox populi, vox dei."
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 20, 2023 7:56:26 GMT -8
So I'm going through the online library app looking for a book. I run across one (I forget the author or title). And it's listed as "#54 in the series."
Fifty-friggin'-four? What in the world could you have left to say after 53 books? Or 20 books?
It's interesting that writing has suffered enormously from wokeness, feminism, political correctness, and just a lack of young men entering the craft. And men, frankly are always going to be better writers, by and large, than women. Or you might at least concede that men will appeal to other men in their writing styles and subjects better than women will.
Obviously there are exceptions. But they go to prove the rule. But it's ironic that with these factors I play, arguably what has ruined writing more than anything else is the franchise-ification of literature.
Imagine Mark Twain doing his 45th Tom Sawyer book. And not that he couldn't have written a franchise. But back in the day, authors obviously wanted to encounter new ground and not just churn out the same-old same-old.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 20, 2023 8:36:22 GMT -8
Regarding The Anatomist's Apprentice, I finished I last night...but not without a bit of judicious skipping.
I won't read another one. From what I can gather, there are at least six of these "Dr. Silkstone Mysteries." The crucial point is what Mr. Flu said: "Readers like familiarity with those they are reading about."
Thee were no characters in this (perhaps other than Hannah and the boy, Will) who you liked. The rest were insufferable in some way. Silkstone himself often does the most howlingly stupid things. There was one segment where he's fighting the villlain...oh, perhaps read the book just for this bit of botched writing. Even though he's in, for all intents and purposes, a life-or-death struggle, at least twice Silkstone lets up in some gentlemanly fashion when he seems to have the advantage. He offers the villain a hand up. The villain promptly grabs the hand and drags Silkstone off his feet and the proceeds to pummel him. And that this happened at least twice in what is a major concluding fight scene shows you there some some tone deafness there that needed to be addressed by a good editor. When you produce laughable silliness instead of drama, it's time for a rewrite.
I had made some comparison to the Thorndyke books. And it's true that Silkstone plays somewhat second-fiddle at times to a couple senior doctors. But in no way is there the satisfying and dynamic relationship that Christopher Jervis has with Dr. Thorndyke.
Silkstone is a putz and I have zero desire to read a book with him as the main character. That said, this first book does give you a sense of place. It enters into your mind various facts and customs of the time. And what a gritty and dirty time it was. I wonder if, by and large, England was much more a decrepit country compared to (at the time) The Colonies. (Certainly large parts of London must have been an almost unrivaled sewer-of-humanity...perhaps bested only by Calcutta.)
But the author tries to play add-on with the plot at the end. Not all of it was bad but choices needed to be made. Some stuff needed to be cut. And Lady Lydia's inability to say "Leave my house" to the villainous lawyer reveals the most amateurish writing and lack of basic character detail. It made zero sense.
And it's never resolved why the whole enterprise didn't go into the shitter simply because one of the villains had known that Lydia approached Dr. Silkstone on the sly to ask him to investigate the death of her brother. Silkstone then presents himself to the court as an independent agent ready and willing to render his services. As they do state in the book, if it became known that basically Dr. Silkstone was working for Lady Lydia, then his independence would be discarded and he might quite likely lose his license.
But to finally top off what I consider a book that was three drafts away from something better-than-average, there is the scene at the end where Silkstone is chasing the evil lawyer. The evil lawyer crosses a bridge on a flooding river and is swept in. But Silkstone soon sees the lawyer (they are indeed tough to kill) swimming toward the opposite bank.
Somehow Silkstone crosses the river in pursuit. There is a mad chase through the woods on this far bank. But just before he gets to him, the lawyer is bashed in the head by somebody else and killed. Silkstone couldn't see who it was.
So….how did this other person know exactly where to stand in order to kill the lawyer when this was all in the midst of a higgledy-piggledy chase scene where it was obvious that both Silkstone and the lawyer had run out way ahead of everyone else?
One also wonders, Mr. Kung, if there is a lack of good copy editors. Doesn't anyone help to fix this kind of stuff? It really ruins any kind of flow of the narrative.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 20, 2023 10:16:57 GMT -8
I suppose that it has to do with the general deterioration of education in our country. I suspect texting and other aspects of social media have something to do with this as well. I think most historians would agree with that accessment, particularly as regards the cities. Building up to the Revolution, there are indications that the Colonies were probably the most educated country in the world. Newspapers and pamphlets abounded. Science clubs and such were located in many cities across the Seaboard.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 1, 2023 7:18:02 GMT -8
I read about a quarter of this biography of Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley. There's a certain lack of literacy that this reviewer noticed as well: "I love Agatha Christie and I love Lucy Worsley but somehow this doesn’t read well. It’s written as if Lucy is talking to camera and sometimes the sentences just don’t make sense and I have found myself reading and re-reading." This is meant to be a positive profile of Agatha Christie. She's sort of the accidental feminist. Certainly that aspect is never far afield. And, of course, after The Great War, not only did the relationships between the sexes changes, but so did that between the commoner and the aristocracy. Christie's work as a voluntary nurse during the war was a window into what had changed and why. I found this interesting enough in the early going. I read it through the famous eleven-day disappearance. And soon after that the book went into detail on Agatha's relationship with Max Mallowan, who would become her second husband. The book turned into an onerous non-page-turner. I started skipping pages, hoping to get to the good stuff. But I couldn't immediately find any. This isn't Agatha Christie's fault or even that of the author, to some extent. Christie is a famous writer. But being famous in one regard does not mean that an in-depth biography is going to be riveting. Heck, as much as I like John Wayne, I have no desire to read a biography about him. I did read a good one on Frank Sinatra. And it held my interest because here's a guy – like him or hate him – who led an interesting and tumultuous life. Christie, on the other had, seemed a fairly normal person, and one who was quite accomplished. But there isn't anything particularly relatable about her, thus the attempt by the author to emphasize the heroic feminist aspect. As for the missing eleven days, what is bizarre about this is that Hercule Poirot could have solved it in an hour from his armchair. But some of the police were caught grandstanding and hoping to find a murder mystery at the heart of it and did what they could to hype that aspect while ignore blatant clues and/or not interviewing more in depth the people around Christie. She had, for instance, actually written – and posted during her disappearance – a letter to a close relative that generally stated where she would be. It would appear that Christie had a breakdown, including some kind of dissociative memory loss, due to the recent death of her mother and the actions of her wayward husband. But it's sketchy as to the details. Although friends and family had noticed something was wrong that day, or the day before, there apparently was no previous sign of trouble and this seemed to come out of the blue. And for this, and other reasons, this became a public spectacle and apparently ushered in the modern age of the public-obsessed mega-celebrity. Some of the public were angry with her, fed by speculation from the press that Christie was just faking the disappearance for publicity purposes. But the end of the day, it may not surprise you that after this affair, her books began to sell like hotcakes. And this dark episode is said to have spurred her more gothic instincts in writing, that trouble could, and would, erupt out of even the most serene-looking settings.
One interesting aspect of Christie is her elusiveness. I think that author does a credible job of showing that what Christie writes about herself (either inside or outside of semi-autobiographical novels and characters) is unreliable. The impression is not that she's lying but that the emotional aspect of some idea about herself overrides other considerations.
Given that she made her money by writing fiction, I suppose this goes somewhat with the territory. At least it did for her.
We see this in characters such as Obama who entirely made up his own biography, although with Christie it was arguably not with a self-conscious evil attempt to deceive. And it is suggested that after the incident of missing for eleven days that Christie was much more guarded about what she we show of herself to the press. She apparently developed the more matronly image that we have of her today.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 1, 2023 8:53:36 GMT -8
As we have previously noted, Christie's writing is very simple/basic. There is little that is "literary" or sophisticated about her work. I admit I have not read all her novels and short stories, but I have read a number of them and found them to be on an eighth-grade-reading level, at best. That does not mean they are bad. I find many "mystery" writers' books make for better films than novels. Christie falls into this category.
As to Lucy Worsley, I am of two minds about the lady. I have seen a couple of her programs and she reminds me of a good high-school-history teacher. She basically teaches through a sort of show-and-tell method, which can be very entertaining and fun for the students. That said, this method is too often shallow and I found the level of her programs a bit lacking after a while. Nevertheless, I am sure she had a lot of fun making the programs. Excellent observation. Perhaps people conflate those writing literature or making films with the characters they create. One can be sure that the "press" had much to do with the sensationalizing of this episode. The press has always been interested more in a "good story" (even if they have to make it up) than the truth.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 1, 2023 9:07:44 GMT -8
I started reading a Poirot novel a while back and couldn't stay with it. So I went back and watched all the David Suchet dramatizations.
It's interesting that Christie (in the novels) got rid of Captain Hastings by marrying him off to some gal in Argentina or Venezuela. She thought he was a bit of a dullard. Apparently she used Hastings to narrate the first Poirot novel (and perhaps more from there). But she couldn't conceive making it work out where this guy was going to be there to narrate further stories.
Obviously the producers of the Poirot series thought differently. Hugh Fraser appeared in 43 of the 70 episodes. I think he's wonderfully played by Fraser and gives some relief to some stories that were often very dry.
At one point Agatha Christie hires "Carla" (I think that's her name or nickname) to be her typist/secretary/grammarian. Christie herself admitted that she was never quite sure of her colons, semicolons, and full-stops. In this biography, it bugged me no end to come across incomplete sentences and very inadequate use of the comma. You got a lot of this.
My online friend Mr. Kung has voraciously read just about everything worth reading.
Obviously the proper punctuation is: My online friend, Mr. Kung, has voraciously...
I found myself having to reread sentences to makes sense of them. I have nothing against Christie or this biographer. But at least Christie had the good sense to hire a professional to help her.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 1, 2023 9:24:30 GMT -8
The truly remarkable aspect of this story is that she spent most of those eleven days in a luxury hotel near walking distance to a spa where she sought the therapeutic aspects of hot water. The hotel was The Harrogate Hydro (now apparently the Old Swan Hotel).
Christie's face was splashed all over the newspapers. And the staff recognized her almost immediately. But such was the custom (and requirement) of discretion for this upper-class clientele, it was several days until one of the employees there called the police. One article I read said it was the banjo player from the band, suggesting that only he had recognized here. But the boos makes plain that it was an open secret to the staff in the hotel who it was. And they mostly held off for fear of being fired.
Arthur Conan Doyle got involved. He had one of Christie's gloves. He took it to a medium who correctly predicted the outcome. That's one for Arthur.
And the police officer (Kennington?) who was (I think) involved in the Surrey geographic part of the hunt would have made a good character in one of Christie's novels. He pulled out all stops to find the body which he knew had to be there. He had searches the included thousands of people, including many vehicles and even airplanes overhead.
The officer on the other side of the jurisdictional border deduced that Christie was still alive and took a different approach. He spread posters and Christie all over hoping that someone would recognize her.
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