Powerful evidence that Symons’s notorious attack on the detective story overlooked some of his own most clever contributions.
Forty-two snippets of detective craft from the genre’s most famous apostate.
Long before he came to disavow the detective story as a childish precursor to the crime novel, Symons (1912–94) produced a dizzying volume of short puzzles featuring solid, low-key private detective Francis Quarles for the London Evening Standard between 1950 and 1955. This volume gathers nearly all of them—miniatures from three to eight pages long—and quite a box of bonbons they are. Though none rise to the level of their novel-length counterparts, from The Thirty-First of February (1950) through The Narrowing Circle (1954), they’re all enjoyable and professional. The slightest of them, like “Red Rum Means Murder,” “A Present from Santa Claus,” “Murder in Reverse” and “Final Night Extra,” turn on a single clue or discrepancy reminiscent of the contemporaneous stories Ellery Queen would collect in Q.B.I. (1955). But Symons can weave unusually complex webs in a short space, and “The Barton Hall Dwarf” (a tart echo of a famous G.K. Chesterton story) and “The Vanishing Trick” would do any puzzler proud. Symons’s mastery of varied approaches and tones expertly disguises the fact that three of the most ingenious entries—“A Man with Blue Hair,” “Ghost from the Past,” and “The Whistling Man”—are basically the same tale, but with different trimmings.
Powerful evidence that Symons’s notorious attack on the detective story overlooked some of his own most clever contributions.Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-932009-44-2
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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