I've been trying to read a Martha Grimes novel, "The Blue Last". It's not doing it for me. Slow. A thousand seemingly irrelevant sub-plots (no doubt she'll weave them in sooner or later but I skipped a whole chapter to avoid one sub-plot I thought was stupid and pointless). A main character who seems to be the world's most dithering, inactive policeman, and whose idea of investigation is to put his friend, Lord Something-or-other, on the property (undercover) as a forelock-tugging gardener.
I talk to students about credibility in fiction - the gardener thing was the last straw. Back to the library it goes.
And thank heavens for libraries where you can try out authors before you buy!
Noooooo! Not Martha Grimes. Appalling characterisation and a tin ear for dialogue.
ReplyDeleteOh, and names. She is dreadful at names. Melrose Plant? Vivian Rivington? Marshall Trueblood? Scroggs the publican? They make a fictional policeman called Jury sound vaguely acceptable.
I struggled through 'I am the only running footman'. At first I thought it was a parody. (Have you ever seen 'The Comic Strip Presents ... Detectives on the edge of a nervous breakdown'?) But I think she's deadly serious. Gak! Never again.