Tracey’s Comments (group member since May 20, 2016)

Tracey’s comments from the Reading the Detectives group.

The one Christie reboot I read (the only one I ever will read), Closed Casket, was horrendous - and in my opinion so are all of the JPW "Lord Peter" books. The further she gets from any input from DLS herself, the worse they get - The Late Scholar was positively offensive.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Judy wrote: "It looks as if the long-awaited new Jill Paton Walsh Wimsey book will be out next year!..."

I wish she'd quit ...

I love the Amelia Peabodys too! I'm very far behind, though - I didn't even realize there was one completed by someone else. After what Jill Paton Walsh did to the Lord Peter universe, that's scary.

That sounds like fun - it's been a while since I've read most of these. I'd like to join, if I may!

I'm violently allergic to anachronisms. One "okay" in an 18th century (or medieval!) novel can be enough to make me DNF a book - and, if it's not on my Kindle, possibly throw it against the wall. I'll never understand why someone insists on setting a book in a specific time or place and then can't be bothered to do the research to use the setting properly.

Judy wrote: "The link to your review didn't work for me, Tracey - could you post it again?..."

Thanks - I fixed the link.

Am I the only one that loathed this book? To me, Jill Paton Walsh writes with a tin ear for everything that made Dorothy Sayers's writing wonderful; I felt JPW didn't know Lord Peter, Harriet, or Bunter at all - especially Bunter. The way I put it in my review was that Bunter was as off as a haddock in the noonday sun.

Of course, I still read The Late Scholar, and was duly punished when it was actually much, much worse.

I'd love to see a moratorium on the Castle maneuver, where some fairly average person attaches himself at the hip to a detective and is given completely idiotic levels of access to an investigation. There was some decently logical justification on the show, but I read a book recently that was just a shockingly stupid attempt to use the premise, badly.

Actually, that leads into my opinion on the original question, which is kind of the same as my opinion on abiding by a lot of rules of writing. If you know what you're doing, if you're a smart writer, you can get away with just about anything. If none of that applies, you shouldn't try it. You have to know the rules, really know them, in order to break 'em.

(Whenever I see "jiggery pokery" I think of this:
The Doctor: Yeah, I came first in jiggery pokery, what about you?
Rose Tyler: Nah, I failed hullabaloo.)

Hi, everybody - I'm Tracey; I was looking for a place to talk Sayers, and here the group was! I've been reading Lord Peter almost annually since I was a teenager. I love the Golden Age: Tey, Crispin, Allingham, and Christie of course. Netgalley has been feeding the addiction lately as a few publishers are reissuing books by writers I never heard of before.