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!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
Lee Child, Fiona Veitch Smith, Linda Mather, Sherryl Clark (c) Sherryl Clark 2025 When I knew I was going to Europe, which initially was t... -
Where else would you start a series of posts about Beginnings except Day 1? Seriously though, I'd like to offer a range of ideas, advice...
-
In the way that these things sometimes do, writers who have decided to stop writing has come up as a topic several times in the past few mon...
1 comment:
Noooooo! Not Martha Grimes. Appalling characterisation and a tin ear for dialogue.
Oh, 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.
Post a Comment