snarp | Entries tagged with a: stout rex

Last night I dreamed my SBURB world was the Land of Grade School and Surgery, and my quest involved performing emergency surgery on Maury Chaykin using only the items which one might find grade schoolers using in art class, in order to save the A&E adaptation of Nero Wolfe.

Chaykin was conscious and fretfully criticizing the way I was handling things in-character. I got Elmers Glue on his lungs.

Nero Wolfe, Baccano!, and Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October all take place within the same continuity. There was a full moon on Halloween in 1944.

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/378447.html

This is not an original observation, but: In terms of worldview, at least, Rex Stout was a way nicer person than Agatha Christie. Archie and Wolfe were both kind of jerks sometimes, and Archie racist, but the sorts of stories he told make it clear that Stout himself was aware that women and black people were, you know, people. (I don't know about other ethnicities; I think there was a Hispanic guy who was skeevy once? Otherwise, non-existent.)

Christie, I don't know! She was pretty okay with women who were, like, virgins. Or old and meddling. The others seem to have presented some kind of problem. I think she thought people who weren't white and English were probably off eating babies and carrying on about something, and should be left to that, elsewhere.

If mysteries are fantasies of justice - I think that that is generally a fair statement - then there's still a lot of room for variation when you get down to the author's idea of what justice is. The Wolfe books are rarely particularly interested in punishment for their villains; that stuff gets, like, one paragraph at the end, if that much. (The major exception I've run into so far being the Arnold Zeck arc, which is about revenge, and feels extremely unlike the rest of the series.) There's the scene where everyone lines up in Wolfe's office and Wolfe verbally takes the villain apart, and then it's on to presents. Because what the books are really interested in is comfort for the victims. Large piles of money, the removal of romantic barriers, the awarding of desired careers and living situations, and emotional validation from authority figures - mainly Wolfe himself, Cramer, and various rich old white businessmen.

(Not really any politicians or lawyers getting to act as the authority figure, I think? Stout kinda treated successful entrepreneur guys with ethics the way some fantasy writers treat Good Kings/Queens - as possessing great moral authority and great potential for being betrayed. - I unfortunately think the female equivalent here is generally the entrepreneur's wife, and I can only think of one instance of that one off-hand. There was a brilliant Machiavellian executive assistant once, who basically pushed every single one of my narrative buttons; but she ended up getting murdered and having to metaphorically come back and haunt everyone to achieve her goals.)

Anyway, I find these books pleasant to read because this aligns closely with my own personal sense of justice. Maybe I would feel differently if anyone had ever messed with me in a really serious way, but while I see the appeal of punishment, I don't see that I have the right to insist upon it. Honestly, I hope someone would stop me from doing so if I were far enough gone to change my mind about that; I don't want to wake up some day with the knowledge that someone's dead because I pushed for the death penalty for them.

Remedy for past harm and prevention of future harm are the goals; if the remedy (say, money) and the prevention (say, jail time, or a large enough sum of money to make anyone else think twice about whatever it was) cause pain to the person who caused the harm in the first case, then as long as that pain is not disproportionate to the harm, then that's fine. But pain for its own sake is revenge rather than justice. It doesn't strike me as a good goal.

(This from someone who's read nearly everything that Anne McCaffrey, master of Inhumane Wish Fulfillment, wrote before 2000. I'm confused myself. Maybe I just overdosed?)

Unrelatedly, I've been back at work two days and am already exhausted. Two days because I had to skip yesterday due to an extremely stupid decision to try to climb a set of stairs up the hill at the park in one go. As of today, upon application of muscle relaxants and heating pads, I can again stand up and sit down without undue difficulty. I even climbed a small set of four stairs today, though I did it sideways and leaning on the banister after the first time. There was a period last fall when I was climbing that hill almost every day. Apparently sitting around doing nothing for three weeks has consequences on your muscles!

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/349537.html

The series basically ends here, but there are three more episodes; I will watch them later.

I consider it possible that the story was originally Nero Wolfe fanfic that got distracted in the process of explaining why Wolfe and Archie are apparently immortal. Unless the last three episodes disabuse me of the notion, I'm going to assume that the process had something to do with the undeniable fact that Vino hired Wolfe to find Chane for him.

Considering the tone of the rest of the show, Czeslaw's Kaori Yuki-colored backstory was a little startling.

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/296700.html

My twelfth or thirteenth Nero Wolfe book (I don't remember the title because all the titles are stupid), by Rex Stout

Is Rex Stout always awesome? How is he always awesome? Did he, like, kill a stegosaurus with his bare hands and eat its heart?

(Is that why the name?)

I mean, he obviously didn't believe in second drafts, but I find this entirely forgivable in light of the steady awesomeness of the first ones.

Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

I'm only half-way through this, but there's one of those guys who exists only to be desirable and ambiguously dangerous and to fall in love with the girl. I guess they're not uncommon, but it's unusually explicit here! She asks him what he's thinking, and he lists nine things having to do with her; we are expected to believe he is being perfectly honest.

It occurs to me that this is basically exactly like...

New Moon, by Stephanie Meyer

...Edward Cullen! Whose idea of talking to Bella is asking her millions of questions about herself. Because the sixteen-year-old girl's opinions are the most interesting thing in the world to a guy who technically died a hundred years ago.

A lot of this book's plot is driven by Bella's attempts to induce hallucinations, which is an odd tack to take. You'd think she'd've thought to try some of the more traditional means of doing this at some point, but no - motorcycles and cliff-jumping it shall be.

I mainly read this because I liked Alice in the first book, and I still liked her here - but I think part of my ability to do so is her habit of being gone most of the time, and being somewhat reticent about what she's been doing when she comes back. It makes it possible to assume that she's got a busy, complicated life outside of rescuing Bella and being her mother figure, like you'd expect of an immortal clairvoyant vampire lady with a demonstrably difficult love life her own. I'm not sure if I should read any more of the series. I fear that I may be disillusioned about this idea.

Pride and Prejudice, by Leopard Solid, re-read number nine or something

Darcy doesn't have any thoughts that aren't about Elizabeth, either. We all realize that, right? He doesn't. He's a viewpoint character with a secret tragedy, and he still only ever thinks about Elizabeth.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by NK Jemisin

And Nahadoth literally exists only in relation to the person he's in love with.

(Note that I'm not really complaining about this in any of these books; I find it somewhat restful.)

(But I’m only talking about the last two, because I’ve been going through them too fast and they’re running together.)

Black Orchids (Nero Wolfe 9) and Not Quite Dead Enough (Nero Wolfe 10), by Rex Stout

These books are both two novellas glued together, but they did not warn me that they were. So Not Quite Dead Enough started and Lily was the prime suspect for the murder, and then Archie framed himself for the murder, and I expected all these dramatic shenanigans between them over this, and then all of a sudden it was over and there was still half the book to go, and Lily wasn’t even in it. Curses upon this book.

And upon the other one, but less so, because it only really stood out to me as an entry in my directory of books containing an Eccentric Rich Woman Who Keeps A Pet Monkey.

Silent Blade, by Ilona Andrews

This is a novella which I guess I should describe as a paranormal romance, though it’s sci-fi, not fantasy. Meli is a mutant cyborg assassin with special martial arts powers! Celino is a mutant cyborg CEO with special hostile takeover powers! They were engaged in an arranged marriage as children, but Celino ruined Meli’s chances of marriage and independence by breaking the engagement in such a way that no one else would ever want to risk marrying her. She is ready to retire as an assassin, until her brother offers her one last job - killing Celino! Exclamation points.

This is okay for what it is - I mean, if Nalini Singh had written it I’d be overjoyed! It’s a romance where it’s the heroine who might kill the hero! But it suffers a lot by comparison to the Kate Daniels books. I appreciate the novelty of a romance in which both leads are, basically, crazy bastards, but would have been more convinced by the premise if we saw more of them being crazy bastards. The genre requirements, however, force Andrews to waste time on sex that could have been more productively spent on violence. I don’t think this is either Andrews’ natural length or her natural subject matter.

Here is the paragraph that shows us why Ilona Andrews should probably not write straight-out romances: “I know the details of every assassination you have ever done. [...] I think the risks you took with Garcia were idiotic.” He knelt beside her. “I also kidnapped your father and your brothers. I would’ve tortured them if I thought they knew where you were.”

I just think this sort of relationship would have been more interesting in a story with a focus wider than the period of time surrounding the removal of garments.

Od Magic, by Patricia A. McKillip

This is definitely one of McKillip’s weaker books, if not her weakest. As is McKillip’s habit, particularly in her city books (this is one), there are several separate plotlines which come together in the end. Brenden is a shy young man with an uncanny ability with plants and animals, who, traumatized by the recent loss of his family, is invited to become gardener at a school of magic by its founder, a huge immortal woman named Od. Yar is a teacher at Od’s school who has recently begun to feel that the paranoid and joyless King’s iron grip over the school is irreversibly damaging its students, and perhaps the entire kingdom. Arneth is a member of the city guard who finds himself falling in love with Mistral, the daughter of and manager for a traveling performer he may have to arrest for illegally using magic without the King’s permission. Sulys is the King’s daughter, who is herself harboring illegal magic, and is being forced to marry Valoren, the humorless and socially awkward young wizard who is her father’s most loyal servant.

So, that’s four plotlines and five POV characters. In general McKillip’s very good about bringing together a lot of different plot strands in a way that feels organic to the story. The ending doesn’t really feel awkward or crowded here - but then it’s not entirely an ending, because one story is left unresolved. I think there just wasn’t any space left for it. It’s not a big enough issue to ruin the book, but for a McKillip book, it’s surprising. Sometimes writers leave threads hanging early on in a book without knowing whether they’re going to pick them up again, and presumably she does it just like everyone else, but she always seems to tidy up them all up before she finishes. This book has some visible loose ends. Example: Brenden repeatedly mistakes Mistral for his lost lover Meryd. Why? Do they have something to do with one another? It’s never explained.

I’m still probably unwarrantedly fond of this book, mainly because of Valoren. I just like dorky villains! McKillip doesn’t do many of them! He and Yar have a conversation in which Valoren can’t decide whether to threaten Yar for his seditious behavior, or ask him for advice about Sulys. “Why did she slam the door like that? What did I do to make her so angry?” Yar tries to explain!

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

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Entries tagged with a: stout rex

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FYI.

Read a bunch of Nero Wolfe again.

Not actually a review of Baccano!, episodes 1-13.

Faintly incendiary thoughts about books.

My books-read list for the past six weeks is like, half Rex Stout.