Bones, by Bill Pronzini
Sep. 4th, 2009 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIf you've read any of my commentary on the later Nameless Detective books, you know they tend to go something like this: "I like the setting and the writing mainly stays out of the way, but why in God's name does he insist on locked-door mysteries?"
So the next Nameless Detective story opens with ... a locked-door mystery, with the twist this time being that its 35 years' old. There's actually another twist, which is that the death was ruled a suicide at the time. I had real, real hope that Pronzini realized he'd overdone things and that this time he was going to offer us up a locked-door mystery tricked up to look like a suicide ... that really was a suicide.
No such luck. The second locked-door mystery (in the present-day) reveals how the first one was committed too. Sigh.
Still interesting reading, and I've actually stopped being majorly annoyed at the format, I'm just hopeful that we might get more of what the series used to be before this obsession.
And I still enjoy reading them for the Bay Area color. This one was was particularly interesting because it visited Berkeley. Pronzini describes Berkeley as an absolute cesspool, like a combination of a ghetto and an open-air drug market. That, I had to grin at, because he was writing in 1985, just four years before I moved here. I guarantee you his description was largely inaccurate unless there was an urban renewal of epic scale in those scant years in-between.
Sadly, at the time of the writing of this book, Pronzini was entering his early 40s, and think that the conservative curmudgeonly attitude that sometimes comes with middle age is clearly developing. "If kids these days weren't ruining things ... <hem!> <hem!>" I shouldn't be surprised given the curmudgeonly attitude of Pronzini's Nameless protagonist, who is his altar ego, but 20 (now 10) years older.
So the next Nameless Detective story opens with ... a locked-door mystery, with the twist this time being that its 35 years' old. There's actually another twist, which is that the death was ruled a suicide at the time. I had real, real hope that Pronzini realized he'd overdone things and that this time he was going to offer us up a locked-door mystery tricked up to look like a suicide ... that really was a suicide.
No such luck. The second locked-door mystery (in the present-day) reveals how the first one was committed too. Sigh.
Still interesting reading, and I've actually stopped being majorly annoyed at the format, I'm just hopeful that we might get more of what the series used to be before this obsession.
And I still enjoy reading them for the Bay Area color. This one was was particularly interesting because it visited Berkeley. Pronzini describes Berkeley as an absolute cesspool, like a combination of a ghetto and an open-air drug market. That, I had to grin at, because he was writing in 1985, just four years before I moved here. I guarantee you his description was largely inaccurate unless there was an urban renewal of epic scale in those scant years in-between.
Sadly, at the time of the writing of this book, Pronzini was entering his early 40s, and think that the conservative curmudgeonly attitude that sometimes comes with middle age is clearly developing. "If kids these days weren't ruining things ... <hem!> <hem!>" I shouldn't be surprised given the curmudgeonly attitude of Pronzini's Nameless protagonist, who is his altar ego, but 20 (now 10) years older.
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Date: 2009-09-05 08:53 am (UTC)