Three-Puppet Saluter
Believe it or not, I wasn't able to afford it until just yesterday. Can't finish it as soon as I'd expected, because I've got a weak stomach at the moment and Silkworm isn't built for that, but two notes incidental to the actual murder at this point: I've taken to mentally calling Culpepper "Culpepperspray" (i.e. people repellent) because I can't see Strike's repeated efforts to subtly indicate he should fuck off leading to anything good; and this is the first strained-social-dynamics-through-misunderstanding plot I've actually bought, because Strike is already established as maddeningly unforthcoming on personal matters and frankly, in this instance, I wouldn't come forth either.
edited 6th Jul '14 6:39:48 AM by DomaDoma
Hail Martin Septim!
I have read some critiques according to which Strike is an all-around unpleasant person. Not sure whether I want to read the book in that case. Though I guess it is part of the modern detective novel that there's lots of dark backstory and broken personality and stuff?
Your avatar is awesome, by the way. ;)
Started the summer by reading these and I'd say it's not that Strike is that unpleasant on the scale of socially awkward detectives, but rather that pretty much everyone appearing in the work is some species of a prick. Everybody's either duplicitous, deluded or entitled and pretty much no one is portrayed positively.
Part of this is from the fact that we see the world mostly from Strike's perspective and he views others in rather bleak terms, but it's also that the world justifies that outlook with how everyone acts. This means that the work is critically short on likeable characters.
The characterisation of the main leads wasn't that great in the first book, Strike had just enough personality to cope as the protagonist and Rose felt mostly like a self insert for the housewife crowd, but the second book improved on this somewhat.
The end of the second book was a mess though, felt like it was just thrown together to conclude the case and didn't make all that much sense. Also, at least in the second book, there's a lot of the intentional obfuscation of the identity of the culprit, I had it mostly figured out by the midpoint but couldn't be sure because the book employed a lot of writing tricks, like characters making references designed to cast doubt and being intentionally vague on who they were talking about just to mislead the reader. Keeping you guessing is a good thing but this was just cheap.
To give an example of what I'm talking about, once you figure out the killer you know their gender yet at one point one of the characters who had been doing unspecified snooping says "I think he saw me..." which is confusing since you think it's a she but then it turns out that the character was talking about a co-worker of the killer...
It also bothered me a bit that everyone basically knows everyone involved in both of the cases.
They weren't bad books, but I can't see these becoming best-sellers without an already well-known author.
edited 7th Jun '15 8:57:57 AM by GabrieltheThird
Agh so the second Cormoran Strike book is out in ten days and I'm just now coming awake to the crunch - apparently the first two chapters are already available for viewing
- and guys, I am just so pumped.
JKR is a born mystery writer above all else. Her characterization is much more variable - in Harry Potter it was archetypes like The Hardass Teacher You Really Appreciate In Retrospect, in Casual Vacancy it was sociological boilerplate on cardboard, but in Cormoran Strike basically anyone worth a witness statement is unique, fleshed, just self-contradictory enough to be real. (The cultural significance is limited in that it makes Rochelle Onifade a lot harder to work into an aphorism than say Peter Pettigrew, and I thus can't decide which tack I like more, but they're both extremely awesome and let's leave it at that.)
...You know, when I think of plot threads that continue from the last book, not only do I find myself shipping, but I find it hard to conceive of anyone who isn't shipping Cormoran and Robin. If I'm correct - I don't know because, witness the late date on this thread, today's mystery fans don't exactly break out the pom-poms the way speculative-fiction fans do - then that may be an aberration unknown to all readership. Yet I find it credible.
Anyway, regarding that excerpt, wouldn't it suck if Culpepper ran into Charlotte a bit deeper into that jealous seethe he seems to have going?
Hail Martin Septim!