Fetch Your Copy Unnatural Causes (Adam Dalgliesh, #3) Engineered By P.D. James Shared As Kindle
ADAM DALGLIESH MYSTERY
Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh had been looking forward to a quiet holiday at his aunt's cottage on Monksmere Head, one of the furthestflung spots on the remote Suffolk coast.
With nothing to do other than enjoy long windswept walks, tea in front of the crackling wood fire and hot buttered toast, Dalgliesh was relishing the thought of a wellearned break.
However, all hope of peace is soon shattered by murder, The mutilated body of a local crime writer, Maurice Seaton, floats ashore in a drifting dinghy to drag Adam Dalgliesh into a new and macabre investigation.
Written in the sixties, this mystery is done in the English/Agatha Christie style, A middleclass man is murdered and the police find him surrounded by quirky, irritating characters, all of whom have motive and opportunity, Who did it Who cares
James' strong suit is characters, to the point where it's overkill, In a modern mystery, we might meet the characters, understand them, and move on, Here, we are pounded with scene after scene of characters acting in their peculiar waysis that a clue Not really,
James does a decent job of building a complex mystery, There are plenty of redherringseverybody is a possible suspect, and there's some tension, in spite of endless conversations between weirdos, But in the end the solution is too bizarre to accept: too complicated, too impossible, even if the motives make sense, It turns out the real mystery is 'how' it was done, and the answer is just too far fetched, This is certainly not one of James better mysteries, The premise is wonderful and the opening scenes really grab you into the story, But quickly it just goes flat like a car getting bogged in a muddy swamp, One then feels like they are sinking, with no escape and that pretty much sums up the narrative,
I found the characters a little TOO similar, Really A village that doesnt have any facilities holds that many writers I dont think so, There were the typical comments such as a male not fitting the normal stereotype being a pansy or a queer, There is the derogatory language towards a girl who isnt “pretty” and so on,
What I did like was James eye for the social detail, Each and every one of her earlier novels highlight the poverty that was in Britain in thes amps, Where other countries were spending up big on goods, Britain was this grimy nation that had a huge divide between the very haves and the have nots a divide that crossed the Middle Class, and not at the Lower Class, as would be expected.
The night club scene and dialogue was something out of one of those Rank kitchen sink bampw dramas, “a tart in tights drinking pink gin, with smeared make up” was a phrase that entered my head a lot here it is from a forgottens pulp novel I read decades ago, but which has never left me.
There is also a storm and flood section that is very exciting and well paced, Ultimately, I found the resolution and outing of the killer really unbelievable and too farfetched, How it was all achieved was just plain silly and the motive is so weak, it is almost laughable, It was all very disappointing,
Read this book for the social commentary, for the open chapter, and for the wonderful storm scene, but give that mystery a miss.
This book was published inand was therd book in the Dalgliesh series, Back then a mystery novel was expected to be in thepage range, and this one was atpages less than half as long as the last P.
D. James book I read which was written in thest Century,
I'm pretty sure that my feeling that the book was ended as quickly as the author could arrange it was, in part, due to the fact that she only hadpages available to her.
The explanation of the mystery is made by a taped confession of the murderer which is listened to after she has died attempting to kill an additional two people.
During the confession you discover that the murderer has actually killed more people than you were originally aware of,
Although I can understand why the author needed to end her book this abruptly because of a lack of space, I still am giving the book onlystars.
It truly is not as good a book as her later work, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh can't have a quiet holiday, I like the way he thinks of a murder case and the writing style is nice, I very much enjoyed the quality of the prose but found it difficult to sympathize with any of the characters, Even Dalgliesh and his Auntboth of whom seem to have more dimension that the other flat, insipid, self absorbed residents of Monksmere Headwere provided with so little context and backstory that I felt very little connection.
Aunt Jane seemed to be someone I would like to know better, but James never provides the reader with the chance in this book.
And the revelation of the murderer at the conclusion seemed contrivedhow convenient that the confession tape was in that bag Dalgliesh grabbedand gratuitously ugly.
And even the best language cannot redeem that sort of letdown at the end of a novel, especially a mystery, I'm not writing James off, but I'm certianly not racing out to get another Adam Dalgliesh novelhe's no Peter Wimsey, I rather liked this one, with just one issue,
What I enjoyed was the setting! On the English shore, and among a few cottages and manor estatestyle homes so close to the water you can feel it in every breath.
Yes, I know the sensation! It's also often gloomy and stormy, and the water is edging closer and closer to some of these homes with every high tide.
It's a lovely, secluded, somewhat ominous setting with only a brief foray here or there into the city of London,
In this, Inspector Adam Dalgliesh's third story, he's relegated to a back seat, in that yes, there's been a murder a rather intriguing and gory one but this time he's not the lead investigator.
Dalgliesh's in Monksmere, this seaside area, to visit his elderly, maiden aunt, his only living relative, He does this once or twice a year just to 'get away, ' It gives him the opportunity to just walk and read, sit by a warm fire, eat homecooked meals and forget about anything/everything that's bothering him.
What's bothering him here is whether or not he wants to propose to his longtime love, Unfortunately
Enter the dead body, on a little boat, hands cut off, And the closest neighbors, all of whom are suspects, They're a weird, eccentric lot and I kept notes on each so I wouldn't mix them up, Didn't need the notes, it turned out, Enter Inspector Reckless, local authority in charge of finding out who killed the dead man while Dalgliesh looks on, offers tips, but more or less tries to stay out of the way.
Unfortunately, he can't.
A great and gloomy story with ocean waves, shingled
beaches and storms galore, Large, cozy fireplaces, quaint cottages and overbearing manor houses, Paths through thorny brush and an ocean which even then written in the's was rapidly encroaching on buildings too close to the water's edge.
Loved it!
However, at the end, there was a rather long infodump, I don't disagree with infodumps sometimes they're necessary in books and even in life, Like, why did you do that And you get from your spouse/child/parent/whoever a long and detailed explanation, It happens!
So five for locale and characters, One point off for the long explanation at the end,
Still, I love me some Adam Dalgliesh and am looking forward to No,in this wellwritten series. When Adam goes to visit his aunt, he's hoping for a peaceful stay, but a local writer turning up sans hands means he gets no such thing.
Now he must figure out what's going on before the killer strikes again,
This is my first PD James, and I did not find it half bad, The mystery was convoluted and I was curious enough about the resolution that I read on through a headache, I did wish that the side characters had more development, though, Dame Agatha Christie and Her Peers
Book
If you're looking for blatant homophobic books with stupendously sick violence, this one's for you! And there must be a huge fan base for this loathsome type of novel: the goodreads overall rating is.
! AMAZING! Not really, given the announcement of the goodreads choice awards, always embarrassing!
CAST: The singular, interesting, likable person here is Aunt Jane, Adam Dagliesh's only living relative.
And her meat chopper is missing: she has no alibi! There are a bunch of authors/critics in this one small town: I was hoping for an "And Then There Were None" construct.
Jane doesn't spout a single homophobic term, but everyone else is really into "pansy" and "queer" and "queen" all in one paragraph at one point, James really packs herself into these hateful characters!.
Then more pansies and men in mauve dressing gowns, Some readers might find this ancient, silly type of characterization unreadable, And given this was written in, there is NO excuse for James, other than she really can't stand gay folks, But I liked Aunt Jane,
ATMOSPHERE: Incessant talk about the sea encroaching upon land and pulling houses down, One character, handicapped, has the house nearest the ocean, so you know she's a goner early on, After a couple of pansies, that is, Yes, Mother Nature always wins, James gets that right,
CRIME: Absolutely repulsive and unnecessarily sick and twisted, You'll know what I mean by page, If you like this kind of violence, go for Jo Nesbo perhaps or Elizabeth George, But, oh, they are so much better authors,
INVESTIGATION:Adam is just a jerk, At one point, he's rather proud of himself that he is "ready to try Mahler, " OH! Aren't we just intellectual geniuses to LISTEN to a Mahler symphony! And Adam really likes to talk about the gal's curves! And their physical handicaps! One 'witty' gay character actually says: "You must control these impulses, my dear,or the League of Romantic Novelists will hurl you out of the Club.
" Oh, and Inspector Reckless actually, honestly says, " He's apparently one of those men who don't mind people thinking queer, " I suppose James thinks this is a funny line, so she keeps going, Reckless shortly says, "They're a spiteful lot, queers, " And I'm only talking about words used through page, Relentless, pointless, dated.
RESOLUTION: Hilariously cliched. Inexplicable. Painfully unfunny.
SUMMARY AND worst of all, James actually has a character say: "Ah, yes! Boredom, The intolerable state for any writer, " Now, if there is ONE THING writing isn't, that would be boring, Writing is challenging, frustrating, infuriating, fascinating, enthralling and many other things, But no writer I've ever met has said it was boring, I suppose, if you're a really bad writer churning out homophobic, twisted trash, one might get bored every now and then, This book took me over a week to read, By page, I just didn't care, but was almost finished, I also recently read the,page onesentence "Ducks, Newburyport" in six days, Gave that onestar also, but it reads faster than "Unnatural Causes, " Because this James book is so outdated and silly, it really is time to remove it from publication,
Yep, lots of hurling, but for all the wrong reasons,
An Unnatural James!
"Unnatural Causes" is a classic whodunnit that, no joke, Agatha Christie herself could have written.
Although there are typical James elements, it's not her style at all, It is more a satire on the detective genre and its writers than a "genuine" Dalgliesh mystery,
How so
In addition to the Christiefeel is constant overdescription of the angry Suffolk coast that reads like a farcical take on emotionally hysterical elements in Golden Age crime fiction it was a dark and stormy night when Lord Bigsby was murdered!! BOOM! CRASH! BLOOD!.
There is also nonstop and utterly hilarious depictions of envious, backbiting, egotistical novelists that only a writer surrounded by the scoundrels could portray so well and who are now cast as the bewildered villagers in a typical cozy mystery.
The writers are made into the characters,
Put those all together and you've got not only a highly entertaining whodunnit in its own right but also a fairly good, totally stagey satire on the detective/mystery genre as it stood inwhen "Unnatural Causes" was published.
And okay, I admit, The writer in me loves that stuff, Just like I adore metafiction and this novel opens with a fantastic example of it,
In chapter, the murdered man is described, drifting in a dingy, with his hands hacked off, A few chapters later, one of the writers exclaims that she thought that would be a great opening hook for a mystery novel: a handless corpse in a dingy! That would really capture the reader's attention and make them hungry to read on!
See what PD did there Made a metafictional comment on the writing advice "you've GOT to hook the reader from the first line" while making the reader reflect on if it really did hook theirs.
Gorgeous. .