Kenneth McMahon

Subtitled “Twenty-Six stories featuring Gervase Fen” though only half of them do. More short (usually 5-6 pages) little puzzles than mystery stories. A fun, diverting read which I've been dipping into occasionally, this kind of thing is always a mixed bag and so not always a satisfying read. “The Pencil”, more of a crime story rather than a whodunnit like most of the stories here, was probably my favourite of the bunch.

Idealistic journalist quits the newspaper after having a story quashed by his boss for financial and political reasons and decides to set up his own magazine to expose the dark underbelly of his city. There are essentially three short stories told in quick succession in the novel - baseball players on the take, a murderous abortionist and a Ku Klux Klan like group. The latter leads to the finale but feels like it gets short shrift, only beginning with about 30 pages remaining.

A solid entertaining read, though one which may end up being fairly forgettable.

This would've been my bible if it existed when I was a teenager and I would've pored over it endlessly. I'm less of a Jackson fan these days, but I had a lot of fun revisiting his music whilst reading along to this over the past few months. While I've given it 5 stars, there are actually a couple of downsides to it. Firstly, it glosses over, and sometimes outright skips, much of the earlier Jackson 5 tracks especially ones where Michael isn't lead, but later on will devote a page to say Quincy Jones' The Dude where Jackson contributed an inaudible backing vocal buried deep in the mix somewhere. Secondly, it's somewhat poorly written sometimes when it comes to descriptions of the songs themselves. There are a lot of meaningless, filler words used.Still, there's a ton of information here that I didn't know, and I appreciate the huge efforts that went into this book. Loved all of the info on various releases, edits and remixes. Instead, that bible was the pocket size The Complete Guide to the Music of Michael Jackson & The Jackson Family by Geoff Brown. Would easily recommend this if wanting bitesize, but musically literate reviews of Jackson's songs up to 1996.

Honestly a bit of a slog at times, particularly in the sections where it's just fact after fact in the form of “In 1243, X invaded Y, followed by an invasion by Z in 1301. Meanwhile U, V and W were at war with each other over T.” etc etc. There are long passages like this where it's hard to keep track of who's who. The book does improve once it gets to the past 300 years or so.

The tagline of “Indispensable for Travellers” (presumably added to the title by the publishers rather than the author) is laughable though. Aside from some interesting talk about ancient sites and cruise ship ports, there's really nothing here for the tourist.

Decent read, good characters and nicely realised atmosphere but most of the stories just end matter-of-factly, with very flat endings. Molly's Aim in particular, the best story in the book, was setting something up nicely and then just ends suddenly.

Started out promising with a lot of the ingredients I like - rural English setting, an antiquarian type character conducting historical research and some well written interesting characters - however the middle section of the book became tedious with the lead character becoming increasingly annoying with her constant lecturing and talking down to the family staying with her. Redeems itself a little with the ending but as another reviewer pointed out it would've made a much better short story.

Wikipedia tells me Nick Carter was originally a gumshoe in the early 20th century but the character was completely rebooted as a spy in the 60s to take advantage of the popularity of the James Bond films. And he very much is a Bond knockoff with him being interrupted by a phone call mid-shag to meet his boss for a new mission (New York and multiple other US cities are going to be blown up with nuclear suitcase bombs by some disaffected Russian baddies who don't like that there's a cold war and would prefer all out mayhem - one character is literally named Warnow). Then he meets the Q knockoff who shows him a few of the new gadgets he's invented and like the Bond films, they all come in handy later on. And like Bond, the womanising is off the charts. In fact, it's so absurd here that it actually just becomes hilarious. He beds 5 women here, all within minutes of meeting them. They're literally gagging for it as soon as they lay eyes on him. It's all very teenage boy wish fulfillment stuff but again it's so over the top that it becomes absurdly funny and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a fun diversionary quick read.

I can never figure out with detective novels whether I should be disappointed that the reveal matched my guess or whether I should be pleased with myself for getting it right. I think I prefer being tricked so to speak so I can have that “Aha, that's a clever twist!” moment.

In truth, I think some of it easily telegraphed here. The sudden jump from Simon and Jacqueline being a couple to Simon and Linnet being married was an immediate eyebrow raiser to me. Then Poirot overhears a conversation “We have to go through with this...” and finally Christie shows her hand a bit too much when neither of the two are present on Race's list of possible suspects. I also did clue in that the shooting managed to give both of them an alibi, though I didn't quite figure out how Simon could then go commit murder with a wounded leg, so the reveal of the second bullet was clever.

Of course, the thought pops up in my head afterwards... why didn't he just “accidentally” push her overboard rather than hatching an overly elaborate plan to generate a murder mystery on a boat with a world famous detective onboard? But obviously that's all part of the fun with these books ;)

One side note: Christie's conservatism comes out here with her ridiculously silly portrayal of the leftist Ferguson as an Angry Young Man railing against the entire world and who is excessively rude and boorish to every single person he meets apparently.

When I was about 12 or 13, my siblings and I became friendly with another family of kids. We'd go to their house, they'd come to ours. The oldest girl was my age and we were both readers so we swapped books. Stig of the Dump is the only one I can recall. I remember enjoying it, but don't even remember if I finished it or not. Likewise I don't remember how this brief friendship ended. I think her family must have moved away but childhood memories tend to be misty.

I didn't think too much about her again until a few years ago when I learned of her suicide after it made national headlines back home in Ireland. I obviously didn't know her well, and only for a brief moment in time, so don't want to eulogise but I've always associated this book with that period of my childhood. Thanks for the loan Dara!

My Financial Career and The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones are the clear highlights here. Absolutely hilarious. I found a lot of truth, personally, in On Collecting Things too. The rest vary in quality, but I'd definitely recommend checking this out.

A decent mystery, but apart from the first chapter, it unfortunately lacks much of the silly humour of previous Fen stories.

Hugely engrossing story, but I'm taking a point off because I didn't find it particularly believable that Dredd would go into so much detail in describing this enormous secret to a group of colleagues.

Mostly this is just ok, but the final accompanying story “For the Man Who Has Everything...” is excellent and brings the rating up.

Just how many words can be written about a single photograph? Felt like a lot of repetitive filler here, like Winchester had a word quota he needed to fill. This is the second of his books I've read and like that one (The Professor and the Madman) there's a ton of random speculation. I'm just not sure I get along with this writer, which is a pity because I tend to like the subject matter he chooses to write about.

As with most short story collections, this is a mixed bag of Christie's curios.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
A nice Christmassy feel to what is a fairly slight, light hearted story.

The Mystery of the Spanish Chest
At the end of the story, Poirot calls this the perfect murder as Jock McLaren was able to remove two rivals - one by murdering him, and the other by framing him for the murder.

A perfect murder how? McLaren drugged Clayton's drink at the club... and then what? He anticipated Clayton sending himself a fake telegram and hiding in the chest during a party at a friend's house? More likely is that Clayton falls asleep in the cab and Mr. Perfect Murderer is left going “Uhhhhh...“

The Under Dog
A somewhat convoluted mystery which is given away by the title of the story. Honestly, I have to say I was lost throughout as to which character was which and who was in what room at what time. There are strange moments too as Poirot invites himself to stay in the house for weeks playing games on the inhabitants which involve him taking their fingerprints and measuring their shoe size. I was reminded of the titular character in Stephen Leacock's hilarious short story The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones who overstays his welcome while everybody else curses his presence.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds
A fun little curiosity involving an imposter.

The Dream
I guessed the resolution here early on probably because, again, it involves an imposter. Not a plot that makes much sense though. If the killers want to plant the seed of suicide, there are plenty of ways to do it without going about it the way they did. If they were intent on following through this plan though, why on earth would you involve one of the world's most famous investigators in your crime? Why not just use one of the newspaper men to get that idea out?

Greenshaw's Folly
Yet another imposter! Actually, this was the most enjoyable story in the collection for me. Unfortunately, it's let down by a slight plot hole. They want to pin the murder on the young gardener, but it's undone when the gardener leaves for lunch ten minutes early and therefore has an alibi. The murderers are aware that he often leaves for lunch early, so why on earth did they plan the murder for around that time? Why not do it an hour or two earlier?

I wanted to like this book so much, but in the end I was annoyed that I had to continue reading it. The author constantly goes off on tangents, some of which are admittedly interesting, but actually have very little to do with the subject matter at hand. At one point, he spends 7 pages telling us the story of Cola di Rienzo only to then say at the end that di Rienzo was safely out of the city when the plague actually hits. So what was the point of telling us about him? I feel like the writer spent a lot of time just telling us somewhat interesting little tidbits about Middle Ages Europe because he came across them on his research.

He constantly applies modern cultural references to the Middle Ages stating that Petrarch wouldn't have been out of place on the cover of People magazine and that loosely clothed women were the Middle Ages equivalent of the Spice Girls. Awful stuff.

Most egregious of all though is his tendency to just make up stuff. Early on, he describes, in great detail, the excruciating last few days of a dying couple Kutluk and Magnu-Kelka. None of this is of course known at all. The only known information about this couple is that their headstone mentions they died of the plague. Kelly uses this “to suggest the following scenario” and spends more than a page making up a story.

I mostly hated this book, but I'm giving it 2 stars because the subject matter itself was interesting.

I had forgotten the novel was going to be a thing, so I was pleasantly surprised to bump into it on a grocery store shelf a couple weeks ago. An appropriate location to find it given the mass market drugstore paperback look of the book.

The book expands on Cliff Booth's backstory and focuses more on Rick Dalton's coming to terms with where his career is heading. There is some substantial re-jigging of the plot so ultimately the Manson family and Sharon Tate stories could've been excised completely and the book would've been better off for it. Some things don't work here either - there are three unnecessary chapters completely set in the world of Lancer, and the precocious child actor didn't work for me in the film. Her role is greatly expanded here.

Overall, a fun read. Not great as a novel. Tarantino digresses too much into asides about B movie directors and TV stars for it to work as a novel, but those digressions were probably my favourite parts of the book. His writing of certain female characters feels much more cringy on the page than on screen (He twice mentions a character's “dirty soiled panties”) and the crudity can get a bit eye-rolling at times, but I would definitely read more from him if he goes down this route.

Excellent artwork but otherwise uninteresting.

I don't usually give up on books but when I got to the scene where one of the Stoker kids is eating saltwater taffy in 1850s Ireland I knew it was time to tap out. There are numerous anachronistic errors throughout, some linguistical, some geographical, some historical but I gritted my teeth and tried to push through. “Saltwater taffy” (a term basically unknown in Ireland, a candy which Wikipedia tells me wasn't even invented in America until the 1880s) was the last straw. I guess I'll never know if Bram Stoker goes on to eat Twinkies and watch baseball.

* Numerous modern words and phrases, along with American spellings in what are supposed to be journal entries and newspaper reports
** Clontarf is described as being “bordered by a park to the east and with views of the ‘harbor' to the west” Any look at a map of Dublin will tell you how wrong that is.
*** Artane Castle was completely demolished in the 1820s; While photography existed in the mid 19th century, it was in its infancy and newspapers certainly weren't printing photographs, let alone of local criminals in what was then rural Ireland.

Dialogue in my head whilst reading this book...

“I'm not sure why this is considered one of the greatest detective novels of all time”

reads last two chapters

“Wow...”

I should probably dock marks for two things that bugged me - one major (are we really supposed to believe that a man had completely forgotten a large, important chunk of his life? Namely, how he made his money) and one minor (the author's laughable depiction of how 25 year olds speak) but I won't because the book itself was exquisitely well written with perfectly created characters. I loved this book and was pleasantly surprised because it was a random pick up at the library in advance of a vacation to Palm Springs (I'm one of those people who likes to read books set in the locale I'm visiting!)

Not as great as my memory told me, but the artwork is still the best part of it, particularly the English countryside scenes.

There's a great story in here, but it was too long drawn out. The opening in Transylvania, the arrival of the Demeter, and the hunt at the end are all memorable, but the entire middle section bogged the whole thing down. Van Helsing, especially, with his clumsy foreigner English was intensely irritating. I began this book almost a year ago and it took a long continuous slog of forcing myself to read a chapter here and there before abandoning the book again for a few weeks. I forced myself to read the last 100 pages this weekend and once I got back into it, it became an enjoyable adventure story again.

Being originally from working class, northside Dublin, I already know that Roddy Doyle writes about places I know, people I know and language I know, but I was stunned by how much this book resonated with me. Parts of it could have been ripped from my childhood. Long forgotten memories suddenly reappeared - wrapping copies in wallpaper, hiding in the hot press, words I hadn't heard in years (“eccer”, “milling” “sap”), trying to say something funny so the other lads would like you better, and unfortunately, listening to the fights.

It brought back to me just how terrible it was lying in bed and hearing shouting and doors slamming. Of course, I hadn't forgotten that my parents had fought, but I had forgotten that feeling of listening to it. Memories came flooding back of trying to cover it with my ears, or saying over and over again to myself “Stop. Please stop. Just stop” as the lump in my throat got harder. My dad didn't do the things mentioned in the book, it was just shouting, but it was awful. Grown up problems suddenly invaded a child's innocence. Patrick trying to make sense of it was just heartbreaking - “I loved him. He was my da. It didn't make sense. She was my ma.” I can't imagine subjecting my son to that. My wife and I tend to give each other the silent treatment. I've never raised my voice to her. I wonder if that's something I subconsciously learned from childhood.

Like others have mentioned, this was a disappointing read. Based on the premise outlined in the blurb on the back I expected there to be some sort of more obvious connection between both narrators. Instead, it felt very disjointed and a lot of the time was difficult to follow who was actually speaking. In the end, the author's narration ended up adding very little to it.

One positive thing I'll say is that the book itself as a physical object is quite a nice thing to hold in your hands. A page at the back describes the paper used and the printing process and it paid off in my opinion.