Category Archives: Elizabeth George

Surmounting Series Struggles

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Weekly Geeks poses some series related questions this week. As I mainly read crime fiction series are a part of my reading life whether I like it or not though I’d love to find more standalone novels in my favourite genre (recommendations welcome).

What series do you read where you have had an issue with one of the books in the line-up?

I tend to call it quits once I reach a book (or two) that I don’t enjoy. There’s always another series.

However I have stuck it out with two long running series and both have, this year, rewarded my loyalty.

Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski novels and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone books (also known as the alphabet series) are both long running private detective series that I have been following from their respective beginnings. I haven’t missed a book in either series, despite having misgivings several times along the way. With the alphabet series my ‘issue’ was probably more one of familiarity leading to contempt as the books have tended towards a little repetitiveness over time while with Paretsky’s novels it was the increasingly overt politics that was driving me away. The novel Blacklist was one long diatribe against the evils of the Bush administration and the Patriot Act and which apart from being annoyingly US-centric made for a not very entertaining book. As I have said before it doesn’t matter if I agree or disagree with the politics, I really don’t want to be lectured at.

Happily though both series have recently issued new installments that are terrific reads. Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow is something of a departure of format which refreshed the series for me and Paretsky’s Hardball incorporates the politics into the storytelling as it should always have been.

Do you cut the author loose after one miss, or do you have a limit of failed books in a series before you toss in the towel?

My answer to this question depends quite a bit on how long I’ve been reading the series and how badly the series fails me. With the two series mentioned above I kept going because I’d invested a lot of time with the characters and re-visiting them takes me back to various times in my life when I read earlier books so I used them to feed a largely dormant need for nostalgia along with my reading habit.

Another long running series that I’ve been following since the beginning is Elizabeth George’s Lynley and Havers novels. However I’ve felt increasingly let down by the last four novels in the series. I’ve moved away gradually though from buying each installment on release day to waiting for the paperback version to be on sale somewhere to, in the case of Careless in Red, not forking out a penny and borrowing it from the library. As I found it pretty dreadful I think three second chances is enough and I’m now done with this series and won’t be reading the latest one which was released last month.

I like to think I’m not so fickle that I’ll give up on someone after one bad book so most of the series that I’ve abandoned (for example Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, the Kathy Reichs books, Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series and James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels) have had at least one second chances before I consigned them to my personal scrap heap.

My exception to this rule would be if I’ve only read one book in a series and not liked it. In such cases it would take a fairly powerful recommendation for me to pick up another book in the series.

What’s your suggestion for that book that you struggle with in a series?

Don’t read it.

Seriously.

If you really want to read the book that comes after it seek out some spoiler-containing reviews of the book you’ve abandoned to get the gist of the main plot points and character developments and move on to the new title.

You do not owe anybody anything when it comes to your leisure time.

Anything else you’d like to say about series? (I added this question myself as I geared up for a mini rant)

Yes.

I would like to issue a plea to series authors not to assume I am going to have read every word you’ve ever written.  I know that is your ideal but sometimes reality falls short of our lofty expectations and if I pick up book 1+n in your series I should not be totally and utterly bamboozled by references to things that have happened in prior books. Either provide a bit of repetition between your books or don’t mention it at all.

There is nothing more guaranteed to get me to abandon an author forever than vague references to prior events that need to be understood to make sense of current events.

This practice has been known to lead to the sticking of pins in the eyes of author-shaped dolls.

You’ve been warned.

Review: Careless in Red by Elizabeth George

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Title: Careless in Red (the 15th Inspector Lynley mystery)careless in red

Author: Elizabeth George

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books

ISBN: 978-0-7531-3908-0

Length: 23hours, 15 minutes

A few weeks after the murder of his wife Thomas Lynley is walking the Cornish coast in something of a daze when he stumbles across a body at the base of a cliff. His walk has been a solitary affair but the discovery of the body requires him to engage with society once more and he is drawn, somewhat against his will, into an investigation although it is DI Bea Hannaford who is in charge of it.

I struggled through this book primarily because of its length. At 23hours and 15 minutes it’s a lot longer than the average audio book which in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing but there is not 23 hours and 15 minutes worth of story to be told. The body Lynley finds is that of a young man called Santo and the book reveals not only who killed him and why (eventually), but also the back story of nearly everyone he ever encountered in his short life. The pasts of his parents, sister, acquaintances and lovers are all revealed in rather excruciating detail. I think if George had chosen one or two of the characters to delve into more deeply the book might have been more successful but I felt like she made a rod for her own back by trying to give everyone a ‘windswept and interesting’ story. Because of their quantity and what felt almost like competitiveness to be more quirky or perverse than the next one, these characterisations grew tiresome for me.

The plot’s many tangents accounted for the rest of the word count and, most of them failed to add much value or enjoyment. There were tangents about a mis-identified surfer’s pictures on the Internet and one about a woman wanting to become a nun and more than a few about the sex lives of the various players. Again, a couple of these tangents might have been interesting but their sheer volume made them all a bit like an amorphous, dull blob to me. The main plot was actually resolved quite satisfactorily although, annoyingly, the ever-brilliant Lynley managed to provide the essential clue even with his mind occupied elsewhere.

As always with this series there is much made of the fact that Thomas Lynley is an Earl. I have long thought this element of the series probably reflects the author’s nationality as Americans do seem to have a ‘what-might-have-been’ fascination for the inherited nobility they eschewed when establishing their more egalitarian country. As Maxine remarked in her review of this book the ridiculous levels of gratitude displayed when Lynley speaks to a ‘commoner’ with anything resembling decency becomes increasingly grating and incredible.

I imagine this book would be a completely different reading experience for someone who isn’t familiar with the series (I have read all of the previous books). That reader would, I think, struggle to understand the Lynley character as I thought a lot of prior knowledge of him and his life events was assumed (particularly towards the beginning of the book). However apart from Lynley and a relatively minor role for his faithful sidekick Barbara Havers, none of the regular characters (including my favourite, Simon) make an appearance so a reader new to the series wouldn’t have spent the whole book with the same annoyed anticipation that I did.

I know I would never have finished the print version of this book because I would have felt I was wasting my time. Walls and throwing would have entered into the equation long before the end. Being able to ‘read’ it while doing other things made it, just, bearable. The most irritating thing of all is that George showed she can still tell a story and create characters to care about. Daidre Trahir, the woman whose cottage Lynley breaks into to find a phone to report the body he found, is a charming and interesting character and her story is beautifully unwrapped. Unfortunately though there is so much detritus surrounding these good parts of the book that they tend to look like rubbish by association. I sincerely wish some serious editing had been able to tease out the good book buried inside the one that was published.

My rating 2.5/5

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Reviewed by Maxine at Petrona who is sitting on the fence, Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise who isn’t and Terry at Euro Crime who seems, like me, a little disappointed.

Progress Report: Elizabeth George’s Careless in Red

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I’ll admit I wasn’t brimming with excitement at the prospect of reading the 15th installment of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley mysteries. careless in redPartly this is due to my own disappointment at the previous book (that wasn’t really in the series at all but did relate to a character) and partly this is because reviews by people’s whose opinions tend to coincide with mine haven’t been glowing (see Maxine’s review from earlier this year). But mostly it’s because the damned thing is enormous.

I chose to listen to it rather than read the print version (I’m desperate for audio books and I’m too cheap to buy as many as I need so make do with what’s at the library) but it’s 23 hours and 15 minutes long! I have to assume she was paid by the word. I also have to assume she’s too ‘big’ to warrant an editor these days. I don’t know what else would account for the kind of wandering down rabbit holes and meandering off on tangents that have, so far, filled the book (I’m somewhere in the middle of CD13). No first time author would get away with this.

There’s not a whole lot of story to date and I’m not nearly as interested in the sex lives of a bunch of dreary Cornwall residents as George seems to be (seriously the woman’s obsessed). There have been some decent moments but the book doesn’t have nearly the punch (nor the brevity) of the excellent earlier books in the series like For the sake of Elena and Deception on his Mind. All the regular minor characters are missing (even good old Havers took until CD 11 to make her presence felt) and their replacements haven’t grabbed me much. The DCI investigating the case, Bea Hannaford shows potential but it’s a toss up whether I find out how she finishes up or pour superglue into my own ears to make it all stop.

Weekly Geeks 2009-#10: Worst Movie Adaptations

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This week’s Weekly Geeks question is difficult to answer:

The recent release of Watchmen based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore got me thinking about what I thought were the worst movie adaptations of books. What book or books did a director or directors completely ruin in the adaptation(s) that you wish you could “unsee,” and why in your opinion, what made it or them so bad in contrast to the book or books?

It’s difficult because there are so many bad adaptations of great books. I’m not a slave to the faithful recreation of every detail but  I do mind when movie makers seem to miss the point of the book entirely and you wonder if they’ve ever even read the thing. Like Sari I’ve been very disappointed by adaptations of some of my favourite Stephen King novels, especially The Shining because so much of the psychological nuance is left out and all that remains is blood-filled horror which is never what the books are solely about. And 2005′s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed to ignore entirely the subtle humour of Douglas Adams’ book to the point that I walked out of the screening I was at and only saw it all while held captive on a long flight to Europe.

And because this question asks specifically about film adaptation I won’t rant about what the BBC did to one of my favourite book series when it created the Inspector Lynley Mysteries based, loosely, on Elizabeth George’s series of novels. Instead I’ll talk about The Name of the Rose. The book was written by Umberto Eco in his native Italian in 1980 and translated into English in 1983 and it guides the reader on a journey through some of the most significant events in medieval times using the solving of a whodunit as the major plot device. It tells a fantastic story and is full of rich, historical detail.  The film adaptation, released in 1986 starring Sean Connery and F Murray Abraham, may be a good movie (Connery won a British Academy of Film Award for his role) but it is a lousy adaptation of a book, seeming to go out of its way to depict the places and characters in a way that contradicted Eco’s creation. It doesn’t just gloss over key details it ignores them all together which changes the story completely and the characters are all extreme versions of the originals with none of the subtlety that made the book so interesting and thought provoking. The book uses the murder mystery as a device to enable the reader to ponder a broad range of theological and social issues but the film concentrates only on the mystery and doesn’t even to that very well because many of the motivations and reasons for events and actions are not included so the resolution seems quite inexplicable. In short it’s a film I wish had never been made.