AC > Recent Status Updates

My first Crofts. I had expected this to be a slog, but it is anything but! A fine story, well plotted, Crofts has a wonderfully smooth prose style — not at all crabbed like R. Austin Freeman’s

A reread, of course

4.5. Another fine Thorndyke novel. One has to have a taste for this sort of thing, and a certain patience and love of detail. So Freeman is not for everyone. But for those who like it, this is an excellent addition.

‘You look perfectly recovered now.’
‘I suppose I do,’ she answered with a smile. ‘There have been restoratives, you see.’
‘So there have,’ I agreed, and ex abundantia cautelae, as we lawyers say, I added a sort of restorative codicil even as the quick footsteps pattered across the yard.

“Restoratives” & “codicil” here being the Edwardian euphemisms for “smooch”

🤷🏻‍♂️

I do enjoy these books, but the Edwardian romances that he indulges in — and this was not written in 1908 — is a bit thick!

A reread — I’m rereading slowly a set of the late RM’s

What a hoot!

“But after Spinoza he had read Marx—a great deal of Marx, after Marx some of Lenin, and after Lenin a very little Stalin, for by then his appetite for this literature was sated. For his Socialism or Communism (he varied the word according to his company) was not economic in origin, but emotional: his real teachers were Auden, Isherwood, Lewis and Spender…”

“If Superman or John Wayne is the Zeus of American myth, and Marilyn Monroe is Aphrodite, then Marlowe is Prometheus: the noble outsider, sacrificing and enduring for a code he alone upholds.”

A really outstanding book. One of the earliest *true* police procedurals that I’ve run across.