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So, what are you reading?
I'm finally done with Christie's And Then There Were None. Didn't have much preamble, it just goes straight into it. Seems like a book written to an audience already very familiar with her work. It was enjoyable enough, and the characters worked. I've more or less given up on the desire to figure out who the killer is beforehand in these kinds of books, and I find that it is pleasant to read them like that. I'm afraid that the only other thing which I can say is that my favourite character died.
Going to give another stab at Sayers' Whose Body?
Mysteries are better once you understand they are not homicide investigations, but manners comedies. The solution is unimportant, and is often shoe-horned in to wrap up the real story, which is uncovering all the dastardly details of rich people's lives. The murder is forever in august company, never a drug addict shivved by feral teenagers. The parade of red herrings are inevitably the dirty laundry of the social elite. While pretending to denounce this poor behavior, the focus of the story reinforces to middle-class mass consumers that their social betters are really worse, but also that this is the aspirational life. Working class people are maudlin cartoons no closer to reality than step-n-fetchit blackface is to real black people.
The murder mystery is a middle-class fantasy that rich people are corrupt in the ways that middle class people look down on in the poor. In reality of course, getting rich, famous or powerful means you don't need to murder people to get what you want, and the crime rates bear this out. The corruption of a class is generally invisible to those below, who generate conspiracy theories to explain the obvious dissonance. One of those conspiracy theories is the murder mystery.
I don't think this is a remotely accurate portrayal of Christie's oeuvre. In the most recent Christie novel I read, for example, the killer turns out not to be a member of the landed gentry, but rathera penniless physician who resorted to blackmail to maintain his standard of living.
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