I hope you enjoy the Howard. Publication order is the most satisfying way I’ve read the
Conan stories.
I picked up all the Wandering Star/Del Rey Illustrated paperback editions as they were published and found them very enjoyable. (Within the limitations of pulp fiction. As always, read Howard responsibly.)
Finally bit the bullet and finished first law. Moving onto Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.
I’m going to go back and read the first law stand alones and a little hatred but need a break in between.
I’ve never read a Dresden book but think i’ll Give it a start at some point.
Many recent editions of Gaudy Night and other Sayers introduce new typos. My wife is determinedly hanging on to her old ones.
Oh, I have read all of these before, a number of years ago. I tend to re-read a lot of my books, as it keeps me from buying more books and going steadily broke. So I know they are good!
Be patient with the first couple of books if you do read the Dresden Files. They were his first novels, and it does show a bit.
Cheers for the heads up.
I read all the dark tower books and I had a similar sense of the author improving as they progressed. Knowing that going in helps though.
I’m still waiting for someone to correct the all those original typos in Sayers’ ‘The Five Red Herrings’. For instance, what the hell does this mean?
“Ay, imph’m. The folk at the Borgan seed him pentin’ there shortly after 10 this morning on the wee bit high ground by the brig, and Major Dougal gaed by at 2 o’clock wi’ his rod an’ spied the body liggin’ in the burn … I’m thinking he’ll ha’ climbed doon tae fetch some water for his pentin’, mebbe, and slippit on the stanes.’”
The Five Red Herrings is my least favourite Wimsey, and I suspect Sayers’ too; fans had demanded a “proper” mystery with timetables in it, and she gave it to them good and proper.
There is also the blatant cheat of “(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)” I can see why Sayers did it: if you knew what he was looking for (and could work out its significance) you’d solve the mystery almost at once. But I’d rather have the book without the blatant clue in the first place, and thus without the need to hide it; when I’m playing the mystery-game, I want to have the same information that’s available to the investigator.
I have no idea what “imph’m” means, but the rest is just phonetically spelled Scots dialect.
“The people at the Borgan saw him painting there shortly after 10 this morning on the small stretch of high ground by the bridge, and Major Dougal went by at 2 o’clock with his fishing rod and saw the body lying in the water . . . I think he must have climbed down to get some water for his painting, maybe, and slipped on the stones.”
Unfortunately all our old copies were mass market paperbacks that have started to fall apart after many years. That’s how we came to buy a matched set of the three Vane novels, in an edition that has turned out not to have been proofread carefully.
Imph’m seems to mean aye (yes). So it’s yes, yes.
Man I hate reading Scots. It hurts my head.
I’ve read enough older literature to be accustomed to phonetically spelled dialect. I rather enjoy it when it’s well done, as in Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid”:
“At home in the barton you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’
And ‘thik oon,’ and ‘theäs oon,’ and ‘t’other,’ but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!”—
“Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,” said she.
You obviously have more aptitude for Scots dialect that I do. I guess I could struggle through these parts of the book with the help of the wonderful ‘Dictionar o the Scots Leid’ found here:
Incidentally it defines “imph’m” as ‘an exclamation, used with a variety of intonation to indicate attentiveness, decided or reluctant assent, sarcastic agreement, hesitation or the like’
However when I tried to read it the first time in my teens my brain rebelled shortly after the first few appearances of the Sargent, and even now I’ve never finished it. I do feel bereft for missing out on one of the obvious sources for this piece of greatness.
Appallingly no one had pirated it on YouTube so I’ve had to link to the full show on DailyMotion (yes it still exists). Start at 8:27 minutes in HERE
It’s probably less aptitude that repeated exposure, at least in print (I don’t actually know anyone who speaks Scots). I encountered Burns in childhood, and Dunbar in my teens, and their verse stuck in my brain.
Mysteries are interesting in that they’re often one of the most gamist forms of literature. There’s a big issue of “playing fair” with them, of not presenting challenges that the clever reader can’t meet. Though I hardly ever figure them out; I read for characterization as much as anything, which is why I enjoy Sayers.
Hmm, reminded me that I need to re-read all of Iain M Banks, and that includes “Feersum Endjinn”. (Although the phonetic parts in that sound like dialect but aren’t really)
…Which reminds me that “Player of Games” is one of my favourite books ever, which reminds me that I love invented fictional board games in books (the one in Player of Games is “Azad”), which reminds me that I recently tweeted about maybe reading all of Tad Williams’ “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” again because I found the chunky paperbacks and it has the incredible board game “Shent” in book 2. And then Tad Williams liked my tweet.
I’ve ranted about this at greater length on my blog, but I like a balance between game and story, and I think Sayers gets the balance just about perfect. I find John Dickson Carr to be all about the puzzle at the expense of character, while even the wonderful Allingham sometimes forgets to give all the necessary puzzle pieces because she’s having such fun writing the people, and some American cosies seem to exist principally to bring about a romantic ending. I’m not a purist for the Knox or van Dine rules but I don’t think they go wildly astray.
A separate problem is that once one’s read a few mysteries one starts to notice non-diegetic clues, i.e. ones that aren’t available to the detective – why is this unimportant person getting narrative time? Why has the detective just mentally reviewed the five suspects, while I’m fairly sure there were actually six? A good writer can break these, but not too often: the murderer really was that minor witness we dismissed back in chapter two and have ignored for the rest of the book, or it really was an accidental death, or whatever. But I think most writers just don’t notice that it’s a problem. Agatha Christie is said to have chosen the murderer only at the end of the first draft, and then to have gone back to put in the actual clues.
That said, the puzzles I enjoy most are not the means-and-opportunity-first ones with the timetables and tickets and so on, but the motive-first ones: a big part of them lies in working out which of these people is a murderer. And that’s where good characterisation can serve both puzzle and story.
If you wanted to avoid narrative time giving clues, you could do the “surplus foreshadowing” trick I do in RPGs, I suppose.
My favourite version of this is being able to pick out the murderer in a police procedural because they’re played by an actor you recognise from a different show where they were also the murderer. It’s quite effective 