Not content with Adele Parks' New Wives Tales, our less-than-intrepid reader has been bookending the lawnmowing with some furtive crime reading with Dead Man's Folly
I've already confessed to my shameful reading of New Wives Tales, and it's reasonably accurate description of blokes (so kudos to Adele Parks for her research and the quality of her characterization), but not content with skiving off on Saturday, yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK.
I've just finished Greg Egan's Quarantine, which I'm reviewing for Strange Horizons, but rather than start Terenesia by the same author - which is for the same review -- I wanted something I could read in the sunshine outside. That ruled out F&SF, which I'll be reviewing tomorrow, as that's on my laptop, and contrary to those TV ads where you can read a laptop on the beach, the glare's just too much to cope with.
Instead, I baulked.
After all, it's not every day we get sunshine on a Bank Holiday.
So I snuck - yes, snuck, dear reader- out into the garden with Agatha Christie's Dead Man's Folly.
In many ways, it's an almost archetypal Christie; many of the characters are stock ones -- the rich husband, younger wife who's married him for his money, almost-mad-scientist, xenophobic yokels. And the plot is standard Christie, borrowed from at least two other books. But there are signs that Christie was alert to the changing demographics of Britain in the 1950s, and there is a wry self-pastiche in crime-writer Ariadne Oliver.
Hugely enjoyable. And now it's back to work.
