Sun 24 Nov 2013
CHARLOTTE MacLEOD – Wrack and Rune. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. Avon, reprint paperback, 1982.
Charlotte MacLeod is a relative newcomer to the field of mystery writing, but in the past two or three years she has certainly shown all the signs of becoming a name to reckon with.
Agatha Christie is no longer with us, but even if she were, she’d have no cause for fear. What makes these adventures of Peter Shandy so highly anticipated, at least in some circles, is hardly the detection involved, though never fear: there is that, too.
But it’s rather the pure laugh-out-loud sort of humor that pervades MacLeod’s stories; that, plus the fact that the large proportion of her characters, many of them old friends to us now, actually like each other. Shandy is a professor of agrology at Balaclava College, up somewhere in nearby Massachusetts, but his fame at becoming involved in cases of murder has spread from the campus clear across Balaclava County, clearly the wildest piece of country this side of Appalachia.
A runestone found in an ancient farmstead may be the harbinger of buried Viking treasure to come. The prospect brings out the worst in some people, and before you can say Thorkjeld Svenson, more than the college experts have quickly overrun the site.
Death by quicklime also results, as well as a few other assorted attempts at murder. There’s never been such excitement in Lumpkin Corners as this.
This particular outing, Shandy’s third appearance now, may be too long by about a third for a constant level of such inspired insanity to be properly maintained, but I doubt you’ll have as much fun with a detective novel as you will with this one.
That is, until the next one.
Rating: C plus.
November 26th, 2013 at 11:36 pm
Being a Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Asey Mayo fan I can never understand why I couldn’t get into McLeod and Peter Shandy. I don’t think I ever got past chapter three in one. The writing wasn’t bad, and the humor was there — I love the screwball mystery genre — but it just didn’t work for me.
Taste is impossible to define. I should have loved these, but evidently I was never in the right mood when I picked one up.
November 27th, 2013 at 12:04 am
And as time went on, the humor in her books seemed to me to become more and more forced, and even though I liked (not loved) this one, I finally abandoned all of MacLeod’s various series, even the Shandy ones.
November 27th, 2013 at 1:08 am
I agree with both of you. This is a writer I should like, but haven’t on my attempts to read her work. It has been awhile but I remember her characters was my biggest complaint. I found them to lack likability or believability and the mysteries not strong enough to keep me interested.