Ten Timid Ghosts

For today’s countdown to Halloween reading suggestion: Ten Timid Ghosts by Jennifer O’Connell. A spooky, children friendly Halloween tale written as a poem and inspired by the (in)famous nursery rhyme that inspired Agatha Christie. Except that the victims are ghosts in a haunted house. The antagonist is an evil witch who uses various disguises (ghoul or vampire masks, mummy’s bandage) and tricks (plastic spiders, skeleton, paper black cats) to scare them off as she wants to move in. Why doesn’t she like ghosts? Why are the ghosts afraid? I mean yes they’re supposed to be timid but they’re ghosts! The book is apparently very good to teach numbers, but the plot doesn’t make much sense and for an adult it’s pretty silly, but Wolfie finds it hilarious when I read it to him. Sometimes four times in a row. Seriously this story never gets old apparently. To fully appreciate it, read it to a young child with a spooky mind.

Evil Sun

And no, I am not talking about the tabloid. I came up with this title today, which sounds a lot like one of Agatha Christie's novels. This was not intentional. I just thought it would be a great title. And now I have to find a post to fit the title, to be worthy of it...

Well, I came to think about it because the sun and heat a lot of people here (including me) have been craving for has nearly giving me sunburns already. I avoided it, I think, but I feel my skin red and dry and it is utterly uncomfortable, either inside or outside. The sun when it is strong is plain evil. Crime fiction is often read during summertime, not only because it is a "light" read, but because it is a bloody one. Plots set during summertime, on sticky hot days show evil men doing evil things. Same thing goes with spaghetti westerns: it's all about lots of sweaty men with skins darkened and roughened by a merciless heat, killing each others in gunfights in the middle of the day. Meursault killed blinded by the sun. The sun can lead to madness, sometimes even to murder. The sun corrupts food, attracts vermin on it, it dries rivers, it can blindly turn entire countries into deserts. Oh and it gives sunburns.

Le Colonel Mustard (et pourquoi)

Ce billet est une inspiré d'un billet précédent. J'ai posé tout récemment une question existentielle (la 139e), où je demandais quel personnage de Clue/Cluedo vous préfériez jouer et pourquoi. J'apporte ma propre réponse ici: le colonel Mustard. Je le choisissais pour plusieurs raisons, certaine sstratégiques, certaines sentimentales. Je sais que les personnages de Clue ont changé radicalement au fil des ans et des différentes versions, Mustard est passé d'une caricature ridicule de colonel anglais de la très vieille école à un militaire à l'allure digne et efficace, bien sûr je place de mon expérience particulière avec le jeu et la version que nous avions (achetée vers la fin des années 80). Je lisais beaucoup d'Agatha Christie à l'époque (ça m'a passé) ainsi que quelques Sherlock Holmes (je regardais beaucoup la série avec Jeremy Brett), alors Clue me permettait de jouer un whodunit sur une base régulière.

 Tout d'abord, parce que j'aimais la couleur du personnage, le jaune moutarde. D'ailleurs j'aimais et j'aime toujours la moutarde, alors il y avait déjà une certaine affinité entre lui et moi. À cause du rang aussi, à l'instar de Prof Solitaire. Un colonel dans l'armée, ça avait un certain statut qu'un Mr Green ou Professeur Plum n'avaient pas. Dans la version que nous avions, le colonel Mustard était celui qui avait l'air le plus présentable (voir l'image): athlétique, un flegmatique tout britannique, etc. Green était vieillissant et obèse et Plum avait l'air d'un universitaire coincé. Mustard pouvait être tant un meurtrier d'envergure (s'il s'avérait coupable) ou un détective compétent (sur l'image de la boîte il tenait une loupe à la main, et puis il était peut-être de la police militaire, voire un espion). Il y avait aussi des raisons stratégiques, enfin une: Mustard est le second pion à se déplacer après Miss Scarlet. On oublie souvent ça quand on joue à Clue: Scarlet est la première à jouer, l'ordre n'est pas déterminé par un tir de dés. Mais c'était surtout pour les raisons sentimentales que je jouais Mustard. La stratégie, sur laquelle vous pouvez lire sur Wikipedia,est venue plus tard.

(Note sur la photo: elle a été prise par mon père, à ma demande et envoyée via Dropbox.)

Why I read crime fiction

Leigh Russell recently blogged about why she writes crime fiction. I don't write any (yet), but I thought that the appeal of crime fiction would be an interesting topic for a post. So why do I read crime fiction?

While I read "serious" literature and even studied it as an academic, I am a genre reader. Crime fiction especially. The first novels I managed to get through as a child was Agatha Christie's. After a few years, I grew out of whodunits and Christie is now a far away memory. But a few years after, when I was a young adult, I started reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and then a string of American crime novelists, I started reading hardboiled novels, romans noirs, etc. And I got hooked again. I am still.

I read crime fiction because it is the genre of modernity, it is the fiction that espouses better our time and because it is also one that often shows a reality that may be far from pretty but that is necessary to see. I say reality, as I think it reveals it, albeit sometimes in the exagerated tones of caricature and escapism, life and civilisation as it is. Crime fiction belongs to realism.

It is also a hell of an entertaining genre. It deals with sex, violence, greed, jealousy, anger, the primitive pulsions of mankind. That is always nice to witness it. Those emotions create such brilliant, beautiful, larger than life characters.There is a cathartic notion, central to crime fiction. There is also a certain notion of solace in it: when in reality (always way to real in comparison to even a realistic genre) urban violence and criminality is helped by endemic corruption, the impotence of the justice system, sometimes a flawed police force, it is nice to see that the good guys can win, at least in fiction.

So that's why I read crime fiction.

Orient Express

Yesterday, I watched this documentary with David Suchet about the Orient Express. It is now of course most famous for Murder on the Orient Express. Fleming also used the Orient Express brilliantly in From Russia With Love. As a child, I used to be a fan of Agatha Christie, but strangely I never read this novel, although I saw one of the movies adaptations. And I really enjoyed the Muppets parody. Anyway, even though I never read the novel, as trains fascinate me since childhood, I have been fascinated by the Orient Express as an icon. I was not the only one: my dad always regretted not buying the LGB Orient Express wagon. He still told me about it in his last visit, while my mum was rolling her eyes.

I am not into Agatha Christie and whodunits anymore. For me, the best crime novel I read that was set in a train was La maldonne des sleepings of Tonino Benacquista. It was in a much less glamorous train than the Orient Express, but it is fast paced, suspenseful, full of character(s) and you can even see Venice. But I do find the glamour of the Orient Express appealing. It is almost a shame that it is now associated with a whodunit (I really grew out of those as you can see). I mean, trains can be great settings for adventure/crime stories: they have character, they can create feelings of both motion and claustrophobia, random meetings among the travellers can lead to drama, even tragedy, danger hides beneath the veneer of civility and civilisation (case in point). The Orient Express emphasises this, its glamour barely hiding how feral humans can be.