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“The Pearl of Price”

More travelogue based on what I assume was Christie’s time in Mesopotamia. This time, there are some swaggering Americans and their big money and a missing pearl earring. This is a pretty basic drama that Pyne ferrets out—and if you look at what characters get the spotlight you can figure it out by economy alone—but the N-bomb from the American magnate caught me off-guard.

“The House at Shiraz”

This has more of the makings of a Mr. Quinn story. Pyne discourses with his German pilot while touring and pays a call on an English expatriate who is locally infamous for her behavior. In doing so, he reveals an unfortunate truth and reunites two long-separated lovers. It’s a cute story. I had a pretty good idea of what the twist was the moment the pilot talked about the death.

“The Gate of Baghdad”

More of Pyne abroad, now in Iraq. This time, there’s a murder!

Pyne isn’t very fun to read as a detective, or it’s probably easier to say that the murder mystery in this short of a span of time isn’t very satisfying, especially when the hero is the supremely tidy Parker Pyne. It’s amazing how rushed the end of this feels between discovery, detection, and disclosure.

“Have You Got Everything You Want?”

Swapping up the Pyne formula with him meeting a woman on a train who has some suspicion regarding a note she found on her husband’s blotter. Pyne deduces the mystery behind the note as well as an apparent theft and then goes on to offer some unflattering advice from man to man. “It is a fundamental axiom of married life that you must lie to a woman. She likes it!”

“The Case of the Rich Woman”

A wealthy woman being gaslit into believing that her soul has been swapped with that of a farmhand, which is how she grew up. This twist of fate is exactly what she needed in order to heal from her widow’s ennui. She’s an interesting character and would maybe be more fun to explore in a longer-form Christie story… though that might mean that Death would be involved.

“The Case of the City Clerk”

A mild, unassuming gentleman goes to Geneva. The wrinkle is that Pyne’s customers are typically not in any actual danger. In this case, the clerk—Roberts—is actually a crucial part of a bit of espionage to which there is some danger attached, not that he knows at the time. He gets his own bit of romance, much like Mrs. Packington, on the trip home.

“The Case of the Discontented Husband”

If “Middle-Aged Wife” seemed cynical to you, then try Pyne’s speeches here. This is another twist of the Pyne formula, this time with Pyne exacting jealousy from a wife who is wanting to divorce her bland husband for an intellectual. Christie subverts the situation for some screwball comedy as things go horribly wrong for everyone.

“The Case of the Distressed Lady”

Oho! Now here’s a fun twist! A young woman comes to Pyne in order to get him to discreetly perform a substitution of a real stolen ring for the fake that the ring’s owner is currently wearing. Pyne arranges for a heist and all goes off according to plan. Well, maybe not for ONE of the involved parties. The ending made this a good little piece.

“The Case of the Discontented Soldier”

In this case, Pyne arranges for a soldier and a young woman to fall in love in a thriller adventure that features dashing rescues, hidden treasure, and… the calculated exploitation of racial stereotypes. Today’s adventure was written by none other than Christie’s self-referential Ariadne Oliver.

“The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife”

“Are you happy?”

Parker Pyne is a statistician who gives statistically likely solutions to statistically probable situations. I am mildly repulsed by his character, who comes across as a sort of smug Chat GPT incarnate. In this case, he creates a romance for a woman’s life, something to tide her over during the ungraceful aging of her marriage.

the closing of “beyond the zero” wraps up a wildly poetic and fiercely expansive meditation on fate and death, with a dalliance again to occupied Germany. The beginning of part 2 settles into something that feels, for the moment, more like Pynchon’s screwball antics in V, if only because Slothrop has to fight off a clearly orchestrated octopus attack in what appears to be an experiment regarding his libido.

pynchon’s sprawling tale has not actually moved much in terms of “plot” but each time he twists the frame of reference he reveals so many beautiful as well as terrifying inclusions like looking into a “flawed” crystal and seeing facets revealed deep within the otherwise dense material.

impossibly dense and incredibly uncomfortable, these last 50 pages have now inextricably linked sexual arousal with the anticipation of death. This is Slothrop’s element, as his map marking the women who have caught his eye perfectly overlaps the map where the V-2 rockets have struck. this is further drive home by the bizarre aside in Germany that I am breaking off in the middle of.

Given what little I know Pynchon is writing about I appreciate that this is set in London during WWII during the years of the blitz. I also appreciate how much more focused this feels at the moment, not to say that I didn’t like the long digressions and episodes that made up so much of V. Yes, it’s bricked up with huge, poetic, free-association passages, but I love them.

😬😬😬

I knew that Luke was gonna have to make some sort of a personal sacrifice, but I wasn’t anticipating that he was going to give up his BODY. Also LOL at the reveal that Rachael’s parents must be uber-rich

Percy and Calypso is a great microcosm very much emblematic of fiction. I’m sure the gist of this story is pretty common in folk tales. The most recent one I can remember was Arabian Nights-derived and was a Clark Ashton Smith story. It’s kind of strange as a bit within the story, but Riordan is giving us a grand tour of mythology, lovingly recontextualized for America.

Hera, Hephaestus, Grover running off to meet the Great God Pan… Riordan alters the general timeline of Daedalus to serve the story of his bitterness. Also, it’s a lot harder to build a sympathetic story about Daedalus if the FIRST thing he does is murder his nephew. The nature of Annabeth’s birth is also explained here. The answer was so simple that I’m disappointed that I didn’t think of it.

Lots of fun stuff. Nico as a character is gonna wear on me until he and Percy can lay his vendetta to rest. We are still getting the weird America tour, too, but this time the main byway is through the labyrinth. Because of my time playing Doom and Dr. Sleep’s Inferno series, I completely blanked on the Herculean labor involving Geryon in deference to the Divine Comedy.

The apparent advantage of this book—at least, so far—is that, rather than yet another travelogue through Weird Greek America, we are heading into the labyrinth straightaway. Now, that’s something like 250 pages left for the adventure. I am doubting that they spend their ENTIRE time in the labyrinth. There’s still that R.E.D. sub-plot, which hasn’t moved.

For a brief moment when Percy meets Quintus and he behaves like an instructor with the mysterious monster crates, this feels a little bit like Hogwarts, and I mean this in a good way. I know that the point of these books is the summer camp aspect that always devolves into a quest, but Camp Half-Blood is starting to feel just the slightest bit homey. Also, LOL at Annabeth / R.E.D. conflict.

There are a lot of really bad things that happen over these 50 pages. The biggest reveal is that the three witches that are under the castle are actually Macbeth’s first wife as well as presumably his mother and grandmother, and OF COURSE they are eternally doing his laundry. There is pretty much no stone unturned in Reid’s examination of the subjugation of women.

Lisander the LI is a dRaGoN by curse!!!

This story is a relentless, exhausting, battering of the evils that men do and take for granted as their right, looking at a caricature of 11th century Scotland through the lenses of 2024 eyes. It isn’t exactly clever, and it is dissatisfying that so much of Macbeth is being rewritten to satisfy the point of the narrative, which cannot possibly be the least bit joyous.

this story is so far off the rails as far as “Macbeth retelling” goes. Lady Macbeth has actual witchy powers, momentarily ensorcelling any man she comes into direct eye contact with. There’s a bizarre spicy scene where she thinks that she has ensorcelled Lisander into making love to her (before she murders him), only for him to reveal that he is actually immune to her witch-gaze.

WHOA lol I was wrong about Banquo’s son, she is immediately horny for Lysander. “She imagines Lisander speaking it again: not only what he would say, but the shape his mouth would make when saying it, the flicker of his tongue across his lips, the quick white flash of his teeth. She wants to bathe herself in the clear blue waters of Brezhong diphthongs and vowel sounds, cleaning off the grime of Scotland.”