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Text of the page (random words):
of the tropes of the serial killer mystery places an emphasis on the panic caused by the seemingly indiscriminate murders committed by the unknown title character having read both it s impossible not to notice striking similarities between many passages in cat which portray the collective reactions of new york city to the serial killings and the beginning of bishop s eighth chapter which details the public s reaction to the newspaper publication of the bishop s letter i don t think that this resemblance was an intentional reference certainly it doesn t come up in the published letters of dannay and lee from when they were writing cat but given the degree to which they were influenced by van dine i think it s safe to say that this passage made an impact on the cousins and was a subconscious influence on their work so much for bishop s historical importance how does it fare as a mystery or as a work of fiction as you ve no doubt gathered from my introduction i don t think very highly of it but it s not without its good points which are what i d rather lead with for one thing it s a consistently entertaining novel as i remarked earlier the premise is excellent and the novel s action never flags with crimes and significant events happening every few chapters and though van dine s style may not be as distinctive as say carr s or innes it was well suited to the story while i was reading the book i never wanted to put it down however while the prose style is good there are some problems with the writing the customary illustration would be to complain about vance being an annoying character perhaps making reference to ogden nash s celebrated witticism but honestly i didn t have a problem with him sure his canonically real but linguistically fake english accent bugged me but that particular character trait only stuck around for a few chapters candidly vance wasn t the annoying part of the novel van dine was to elaborate the conceit of this series is that van dine is a friend of vance s and is writing up these cases after the fact the problem that came from conflating the author with the fictional narrator is that it gave van dine an apparently irresistible temptation to show everyone how smart he was bishop is pack to the gills with displays of often spurious erudition for example in chapter 8 vance reads up on psychology thinking it might help with the case nothing wrong with that but there is something wrong with van dine s decision to list in a single paragraph length run on sentence the titles and authors of all 14 books consulted with the titles in the original french or german there is absolutely no reason for this pedantry its only purpose is to allow van dine to show off this lengthy paragraph disturbs the flow of the narrative but it doesn t have any impact on the plot unfortunately there are other instances of showoffishness that are rather more impactful the upcoming paragraph points out an issue with one of the clues for reasons which will be clear it doesn t actually spoil anything of significance however if you want to read bishop completely blind and have a more frustrating experience when you do feel free to skip it one of the few clues in bishop we ll talk about that later is a scrap of paper with the reimann christoffel curvature tensor written on it which was planted on the body of one of the victims vance uses this to deduce some psychological characteristics of the murderer we ll talk about this later as well the problem is that van dine has little to no clue what the formula he includes actually says when vance explains his reasoning the meaning he gives for the tensor is wrong the clue flat out does not say what vance or rather van dine claims it does the reader has no chance whatsoever to interpret it correctly in a sense someone who s never heard of the riemann tensor is better off than one who has as one who s unfamiliar with it could possibly guess its significance while someone who knows about it even in the most non technical terms certainly could not if van dine had bothered to check his understanding against any general reference on the subject the encyclopedia britannica say this problem could have been avoided but given the overall tone of the book it seems he was just so cocksure of his knowledge that he didn t bother confirming it believe it or not we ll also talk about this later of course even if he had gotten that fact right the reader still wouldn t be able to reach the same solution as vance that s because the conclusion drawn from that piece of evidence is a tortured argument based on a dubious and subjective line of psychological reasoning an alarming number of the deductions in bishop follow the same pattern often they re based on discredited psychological theories and all are based on vance s impressions of things rather than any objective fact of the situation starting from the same information you could just as easily reach an entirely different set of conclusions and they would have at least as much theoretical validity as vance s they could hardly have less these flaws i ve been harping on may seem like separate issues but they all come together culminating in something which is even less than the sum of its parts specifically chapter 21 mathematics and murder which is not to mince words one of the greatest farragos of nonsense that i ve come across in my years of reading mystery fiction little of consequence happens in this chapter as it solely consists of vance monologuing about the psychological characteristics of the criminal don t worry about spoilers nothing of any consequence is ad vanced in this chapter vance says that the murders are the product of a mathematical mind why you ask because the study of mathematics causes one to have an enormous contempt for human life and scoff at all human values one absorbed in these studies becomes a sadist with an infantile complex vance or rather as vance is clearly acting as an author avatar van dine proves this by myriad examples drawn from mathematics physics and astronomy bizarrely he refers to all three subjects as mathematics in fact there are fewer purely mathematical examples than there are scientific that said and in keeping with his use of the tensor nearly all of these examples are completely misunderstood even on their own terms they re meaningless and they re meaningless in the context of the story as well since all of the suspects fit vance s definition of a mathematicia n be they actual mathematician physicist or hobbyist chess player as a student in a physical science and enjoyer of math i could almost take offence at this if it weren t so ludicrously funny it almost seems as if van dine were bitter at scientists perhaps and this is the merest speculation not seriously meant because books by the eminent physicists of the day became bestsellers while few were buying his book s on nietzsche now i m not highlighting this chapter simply because it s deeply and unintentionally hilarious it represents an egregious though subtitle example of a type of reasoning that is utterly impermissible in mystery fiction vance decides that a mathematician very broadly construed committed the crime based on a broad psychological generalization about a class of people you don t immediately notice it because the group is a professional class but imagine that he said it had to have been committed by a woman because the crimes could only have been a product of a feminine mind or if he had singled out a particular ethnic group on a similar line of reasoning then the fallacy would stand out an author cannot impute psychological traits like that to a group of people mathematicians scientists and chess players are people with individual temperaments and habits of mind some may be meticulous while others may be disorganized some may possibly be deranged infantile sadists but most are not it would be one thing to for example say that a criminal was likely a surgeon because they tied a surgical knot in committing a crime it would be quite another however to say that they must be a surgeon because the crime could only have been executed by one with a surgeon s callousness the former is a legitimate deduction the latter is nonsense at this point i ve said a lot about the book but little about the mystery itself could it be that despite the book s many issues there s a satisfying mystery buried within sadly no it could not there are two reasons for this one is that there is an utter dearth of clues oh there are plenty of psychological clues but as we ve seen they lack any semblance of rigor there is only one piece of tangible evidence which is ignored for much of the book simply because the book would be over too soon if it weren t from a structural perspective this is a glaring flaw ideally the detective should solve the crime as soon as they have all the evidence needed to do so when the detective gets that evidence midway through the book and does nothing with it and allows more people to be killed they don t exactly come off looking all that competent the other flaw is that almost all of the suspects get killed off making it fairly trivial to spot the murderer even without the decisive piece of evidence from what i gather this is a problem with many of van dine s novels these flaws are both major on their own but together they combine to form an enormous flaw to wit and this completely spoils the book gur cvrpr bs rivqrapr vf gung bayl gjb crbcyr jrer noyr gb unir pbzzvggrq bar bs gur zheqref bar bs gurfr crbcyr vf yngre xvyyrq bss bar jbhyq guvax gung gur pbapyhqvat fgrc bs guvf flyybtvfz jbhyq or boivbhf ohg inapr tbrf n ybbbbbat gvzr jvgubhg pbafvqrevat gur cbffvovyvgl for all the talk about how this is one of vance s most difficult cases the reader is likely to disagree frankly vance van dine fictional version and d a markham don t exactly seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier of justice for missing that inference also while bishop is the first example of the nursery rhyme killing it is also the first example of the characteristic flaw of that trope specifically there s no reason for the killer to make the crimes resemble nursery rhymes in keeping with the pseudo psychologism of the rest of the novel the reason just boils down to the killer was a deranged mathematician the whole point of the device is that the analogy between the murders and the nursery rhyme signifies something certainly it adds interest to a story regardless of the motivation but the solution will be an anticlimax if there is no reason behind it no meaning to speak of and even ignoring that the culprit was crazy is never a satisfying justification for any aspect of the solution to a mystery thanks to these many and varied flaws i cannot recommend the bishop murder case as a mystery it was entertaining and it says something about van dine s writing that even with the stylistic issues and rampant pedantry it was an entertaining read but if you read it you ll probably wind up disappointed that said anyone with an interest in the history and development of mystery fiction absolutely needs to read it as it had a significant and lasting impact but for everyone else if after all this it still interests you and you can find a cheap copy read it but don t go seeking it out because it s really not worth the effort at saturday july 15 2023 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels mitate mystery novel philo vance s s van dine serial killer syllabus of deductive fiction saturday july 1 2023 the mill house murders 1988 ayatsuji yukito i see the big wheels turnin never endin on and on they go big wheels elo this review marks a milestone for the blog the first full month of regular posts granted that s only three reviews but still it s something to celebrate though characters being familiar with the tropes of mystery fiction is a common er trope of mystery fiction it s painfully obvious that most characters who appear in the genre lack this awareness for example nobody who was so much as remotely familiar with even the basic trappings of the genre would after being seriously injured in a deadly car crash would commission an eccentric architect to build a house in the middle of nowhere and live there in almost complete seclusion surrounded by a collection of eerie paintings yet this is exactly what fujinuma kiichi son of the famous painter fujinuma issei does in ayatsuju yukito s the mill house murders and his dubious decision making doesn t stop there once a year he invites three people to view the paintings the only times he allows anyone to view his father s works in 1985 the annual visit goes awry ending with one guest dead another vanished and a painting stolen next year he invites the same set of people back again even ignoring questions of genre savviness that is clearly not a wise course of action in addition another person shows up unannounced shimada kiyoshi who knew the man who vanished and wants to find out what really happened the guests go over the events that occurred a year previously but without giving anything away it eventually becomes clear just how bad an idea it was to hold one of these gatherings the mill house murders was published earlier this year and its release has been eagerly awaited mill house is the second entry in ayatsuji s yakata series the first entry of which the decagon house murders was published in 2015 eight years is a long time to wait to continue a series so there was much excitement when it was announced that pushkin press would be publishing the next volume i haven t been waiting quite that long to read it since i read decagon in 2019 but that doesn t mean i was any less excited and in my opinion mill house lived up to that excitement though not perhaps for the reasons you would expect though just directly comparing books with one another is not necessarily the best tact to take in a review i think that in this case it s not only warranted but also possibly intended decagon mill house are too similar to one another for the correspondence to be accidental the main similarity lies in the novels structure in both cases two separate but related narratives alternate from chapter to chapter in decagon the separation is geographical most of the cast is on an island getting killed off while a smaller contingent investigates on the mainland mill house uses a different kind of separation one temporal rather than physical an interesting consequence of this is the way all other variables are held constant the time is different but otherwise it s mostly the same people in the same place for the same purpose this allows for another structural point of interest as for much of the book the action alternates between past events and present discussion about those events this allows the characters theorizing to mirror the reader s and gives the characters more facts to reason with there are also similarit...