Sat 4 Apr 2020
CAROLYN G. HART – Something Wicked. Annie Laurence #3. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1988.
Someone is sabotaging the summer season! One of the reasons mysteries with theatrical settings are so successful is that when all of the suspects are actors, what better way for the true killer to hide himself (or herself) among them? The play in this case is Arsenic and Old Lace; the scene, Broward’s Rock, located on an island off the South Carolina shore.
And Broward’s Rock is also the home of Death on Demand, Annie Laurence’s specialized mystery book shop, in case you missed the first two in the series. The puzzle is in theory a good one, but it’s seriously undermined by a ridiculous figure of a circuit solicitor, and impossibly stupid police procedure.
To explain: The pigheaded Brice Posey despises the idle rich, and what better target to pin the murder on than Max Darling, Annie’s idle rich fiancé? While Max is detached, bemused, and ultimately rather tiresome, the frame is an obvious one to anyone with an ounce of brain matter, but Posey is having none of ot.
As far as police procedure is concerned, Annie takes it upon herself to investigate the victim’s boat, finds all sorts of evidence about the plot he was hatching, “anonymously†tips off the police chief, who hasn’t been investigating the boat himself and can’t even then because Posey won’t issue a search warrant.
It all works out, however, because in the meantime the killer makes an attempt to clear away the evidence, and any killer as sharp as this one is supposed to be would never have left the evidence lying around like this to be found in the first place.
The Death On Demand series –
1. Death on Demand (1987)
2. Design for Murder (1988)
3. Something Wicked (1988)
4. Honeymoon With Murder (1988)
5. A Little Class on Murder (1989)
6. Deadly Valentine (1990)
7. The Christie Caper (1991)
8. Southern Ghost (1992)
9. Mint Julep Murder (1995)
10. Yankee Doodle Dead (1998)
11. White Elephant Dead (1999)
12. Sugarplum Dead (2000)
13. April Fool Dead (2002)
14. Engaged to Die (2003)
15. Murder Walks the Plank (2004)
16. Death of the Party (2005)
17. Dead Days of Summer (2006)
18. Death Walked in (2008)
19. Dare to Die (2009)
20. Laughed ’til He Died (2010)
21. Dead by Midnight (2011)
22. Death Comes Silently (2012)
23. Dead, White, and Blue (2013)
24. Death at the Door (2014)
25. Don’t Go Home (2015)
26. Walking on My Grave (2017)
April 4th, 2020 at 8:02 pm
I read the first three, then at least one of the next three, and that was all there were for me.
The series was extremely popular when it first began. Who can resist mysteries taking place in a mystery bookstore? If a history pf cozy mysteries is ever written, a lot of attention should be paid to this one.
But Hart’s concept of what constitutes a coherent plot for a detective story seemed to me grow farther and farther away from what I thought it should be, and I stopped reading them. The signs were here for me with his one.
April 4th, 2020 at 10:11 pm
Another cozy that is inexplicably a detective story since the writer and her readers don’t really seem to like detective stories.
April 4th, 2020 at 10:55 pm
It is impossible to know for sure, but based on the ones I read, I’d say Hart’s intentions were good, but she just didn’t seem to be able to follow through.
And I think her readers were more interested in the cozimess of the mystery setting and in a pair of crime solvers whom they cared more about than in solving mysteries.
I hope this doesn’t sound as though I’m dumping on anyone. Hart has been very successful, and that speaks for itself.
April 5th, 2020 at 10:42 pm
Honestly I am not dumping on the author or her fans or cozy fans in general. More power to her and her readers, but it does at times feel like someone trying to write a Western about someone who never goes West or a spy novel about a spy who merely sits in his room and trims his toenails. Most cozies would work perfectly well without a real crime and only the kind of mystery a bookstore owner might really solve.
It’s plunging these cozy characters and settings into the quite real world of murder that gives me pause, because at that point the total sense of unreality, the average cozy writers complete unfamiliarity with even television police procedure, and the whole rejection of the game aspect of the classic detective story leaves me drowning in a sea of fantasy and wish fulfillment. It doesn’t come up to what I require of a novel, it’s television plotting, and not much better imagined than television settings.
It’s not that Poirot or Lord Peter were particularly realistic, but their creators created a milieu where we accepted them, and for me that is the great failure of the cozy, they don’t create a milieu I can buy into long enough to be entertained.
Philip Marlowe doesn’t function in the real world either, but he exists in a world Chandler fully creates and Chandler has enough sense not to keep tripping us up by pulling us out of that world by having Marlowe encounter too much of the real world. Marlowe doesn’t act like a policeman, he just keeps asking the right questions of wrong people.
For me too many cozy writers seem to keep tripping over the reality of the murders they set their sleuths to solve. Murder at the manor house or in some exotic cottage named White Roses is one thing and it is comforting for Miss Marple to poke around and notice things the police don’t because it all takes place in a mythical England that didn’t quite really exist with murderers much more clever than real ones, but that world dare not intrude too much into the real one or just how fragile and silly it is becomes obvious.
Too many of the cozies I’ve read create the comfortable milieu, but then thud an all too real corpse and murder into the middle of it and ask us to accept a nosy amateur is going to have an advantage over a modern police department without really selling us the idea. And again it is television plotting that trips them up, the sleuth tripping over a clue the police missed and hiding it from them (and no, Miss Marple doesn’t hide clues, though she sometimes understands what they really mean before the police).
I’ve read several cozies where in even a loosely fabricated reality the amateur sleuth would have been prosecuted for interfering in a police investigation even after solving the crime, because the writer doesn’t bother to think through the plot but rather churns them out like a quota of television episodes where one has to be got in the can on a deadline.
I complain about this sort of plotting in thrillers, suspense novels, and other genres too including the classic detective novel, but it seems rampant in the cozy genre.
I grant it doesn’t matter to the fans, nor should it, but for the life of me I don’t see why any writer wouldn’t want to do what they have chosen to do better if they could, and it isn’t as if there aren’t models for just that in the genre, even among some cozy writers.
I enjoy the work of some fairly careless writers, but they are seldom careless about keeping me in the story, something that defeats me regularly with cozy writers.