(no subject)

[darchildre]

So. I mentioned that when I asked for mystery recommendations, Mom told me I should read Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley books, right? So I got the first one of those and have just finished it.

It's not a bad book. The mystery was indeed mysterious and I think the two main characters will be interesting once they get the hell over themselves. And writing itself isn't bad (except for some irritating-to-me purple bits during sex scenes).

It's just that mystery novels are one of my comfort genres, as I think they are for a lot of people. And thus, while I do expect murder in a mystery novel, I am pretty much not on board for other horrible things. So I am finding myself a little discomfited by this book.

Guys, the solution to the mystery in the first Inspector Lynley novel is serial incestuous child molestation. Not vividly described or anything, but there is basically a whole chapter of the two mentally ill victims talking about it at length. Which is pretty much not something I really want to encounter anywhere, let alone in a book that's meant to be a fun comfort read. (Also, the book is chock-full of some very unpleasant descriptions of a fat character and there is a totally random drive-by scene of antiziganism right at the beginning.)

I think I am going to retreat back Nero Wolfe.

Comments

[parhelion]

Oh, Elizabeth George: I'm afraid I have more Opinions about her. Mind you, it's just my (and independently arrived at, my spouse's) Opinions but...


Are there such things as meta-spoilers?


...as the series went on, the author seemed to coddle the Inspector while being very rough on the Sergeant in a way that's hard to describe to anyone who hasn't either written fiction or participated in a fiction-writing subculture such as fandom. It felt like whump versus anti-whump to a degree where the Sergeant became almost a reverse-Sue to me. I could never decide if it was because she was female, working-class, both, or the author had something subtler going on involving "realism" and authorial proxies that was not applied evenly enough. In any case, it got to the point where most of the readers seemed to like the secondary protagonist better than the writer did.

Not that George was always easy on the Inspector, but his difficulties and the not-too-subtle expectations of how the reader is supposed to react to them seemed to be fenced off in a way that felt quite different from the the "I'm the character narrating these books so I get to spin what happened" subtleties that Conan Doyle and Stout employed from time to time or Sayer's more across-the-board doting.

[darchildre]

Oh, god. Their relationship throughout this first book felt very much to me like one of those fics where the author's favorite character (Lynley) is Right but Misunderstood and everyone else (or maybe just Havers) who thinks badly of them will be Shown the Error of Their Ways. Which I'm sure can be very satisfying for some people to both read and write but has never been a thing that I've particularly enjoyed. I had hoped that sort of thing would improve, as my mom would really like me to read more of them so we can talk about them together. I'm sad to learn that it apparently doesn't.

Though I'm grateful for the warning. I meant to complain about that as well but the other ickynesses of the plot overshadowed it.

[parhelion]

Well, my spouse liked the British TV series made from the books better than the books themselves, if that helps. And, to be fair, Lynley is eventually subject to a real Tragedy in the course of the series. But it's Tragedy, whereas many of poor Haver's ongoing problems are merely somewhat depressing, occasionally rising to deeply unfair.

Eventually I gave up, in part because I liked Havers quite a lot and Lynley in spite of everything but couldn't stand the author's other pet character. Someday I hope to run into someone who read the entire series after noticing some of this stuff so they can tell me what they thought the author was doing as she wrote. Unfair as it might be, I occasionally wanted to run an intervention: "Really, it's fine to have these urges towards your protagonists, but it's so much better to express them in a way that's safe, sane, and consensual."