All that Glitters is not Gold: Reviews by jonbrain

The Egg at Drumstreet, by RainerSalt

Once again, I have to apologize to New Elysium for putting it off some more. I will get to it, this will not become a Jimmy Kimmel vs Matt Damon thing, I want to read it, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

But in the meantime, let's talk about something different.

Long before I became a Sci-Fi fan, long before I even developed an appreciation for Star Trek beyond how fun Q is, I was a mystery fan. I loved mysteries. I was that nerdy kid who's read every single Sherlock Holmes mystery there was; I think by fourth grade, I had read The Hound of the Baskervilles in it's entirety and many of the short stories (that actually might have come later, but still before I watched, say, Deep Space 9). I even went further than that and read as many Hercule Poirot mysteries as I could find; Murder on the Orient Express, Cards on the Table, The ABC Murders, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, oh, the mysteries! I had Encyclopedia Brown two-minute whodunits, about ten Hardy Boys books (they're like Nancy Drew, but even more fifties and formulaic). I loved Monk long before I really appreciated Babylon 5. So, yeah. I love mystery.

But it's been a long time since I've read a mystery from cover to cover. There are a few reasons for this; for one thing, my interest shifted to spies in middle school, and epics in high school. In fact, my current project and my lifetime work (which you have yet to see on here) are an epic and a spy story. But mostly it's because I fell out of love with the mystery genre. I still love Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot; I actually recently reread The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I still love it, even though I know everything that happens. But new mysteries? I've never entirely embraced them.

I've been following Extra Credits on YouTube, and especially their series on Science Fiction (Extra Sci-Fi, if you're curious, go check them out, they're the best). One of the things that they say is that somewhere in the 1920's and 1930's, pulp magazines and economic recession fueled a distinct American style of mystery, distinct from the type that had dominated in Europe prior to that. European mysteries were modeled in a large part on Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker St., intellectual affairs in affluent middle class settings, where no problem couldn't be solved by calm thought and polite conversation. Holmes and Poirot exemplify this kind of mystery.

But in America, a different kind of mystery captured the public imagination. Gritty, grim mysteries, solved not by calm intellectuals but by blue-collar, everyday Private I's who get answers by frequenting seedy bars and beating witnesses to a pulp. American mysteries were about the supreme unpleasantness of crime and the lengths the law, or those outside it, had to go to protect the ones they love. Even today, it's like the difference between BBC's Sherlock and Netflix's Daredevil.

I like the British style mystery. I like wading through all the complexities, the red herrings, the mistaken identities, the odd questions, everything about them is just so fun for me. It's like magic trick to me; you can see it a million times, but if you let yourself get fooled, it's the most amazing thing in the world to watch.

Unfortunately for me, World War 2 happened, and it was followed in short succession by the Cold War. That put America in the seat of power for the world, and with it, our culture and literary tradition. Add to that the emotional devastation that both world wars ravaged upon Europe, and the cultural Zeitgeist that shook the world in the 1960's, and you suddenly see the end of this gem of literature. There were suddenly no more Poirots or Holmeses, except for their frequent reiteration on television. Monk was a callback to that kind of mystery, but it ran for eight seasons; it was bound to jump the shark eventually.

I watched NCIS, but it was a cop show, not a mystery. Daredevil is a superhero show, not a mystery. Stranger Things is an adventure. My parents loved Bones, but to me, it seemed the same as NCIS. Agatha Christie hasn't had a worthy successor yet, in my mind. So, in the absence of new materials, I turned to spy fiction and then to science fiction where I remain now. It was a sad shift, and I do sometimes miss the good old days, when the romance of the mystery was still young, not aged and bitter as it has become.

But when I saw The Egg at Drumstreet pop up on my feed, I wondered if maybe, maybe I had a new mystery to chew on.

It certainly has all the trappings of a classic European mystery. The protagonist, Art Sharpe, is an American working in a vaguely Eastern European country at the university. It's a place with habitually bad weather, when it doesn't rain it fogs, as one might say. Art is a quiet man who keeps to himself primarily; he's a mathematician who works with four dimensional symmetry, a field about which I know nothing, but it implies a highly logical and organized mind, always a plus for a murder mystery. He lives at 9 Drumstreet, a three story apartment complex with a diverse set of tenants, including Art, the janitor Mrs. Meiers, her son Ralph Meiers, a pretty blond named Adriana, Art's elderly and krochity neighbor Mrs. Knooch, a Pakistani taxi driver named Rahid Pathan, and an enigmatic middle-aged waitress called Monica. And everything begins with an egg, broken in the middle of the kitchen floor which nobody bothered to clean up.

Then, the old lady, Mrs. Knooch is strangled in bed. There are no signs of a forced entry, so it's likely that one of the tenants did it. But who had a motive? She didn't threaten any of them, none of them gain by her demise, and although she has her quarrels with many of the characters, it was never enough to murder over. So no one would possibly have a reason to murder her.

And yet, the dead body would seem to indicate otherwise. Ladies and gentlemen, we have all the elements of an Agatha Christie novel.

So what do I think? Is it exactly what I wanted?

Well, here's what I think. I think it was a fine mystery. A thrilling read, a page turner in the best of ways. And what's more, it felt right. I know I often address the prose of a book; I think it's one of the most important elements of writing (who'd have thought that the writing matters in a piece of writing). Here, I don't have much to say, except for this; it was the right prose. It was atmospheric and wonderful. From characters arching their eyebrows when saying "it might have been murder," which just sounds suspicious and suggestive, to the dusty stairs, to Mrs. Knooch's "turtle-like neck," it was a delight to read. It brought me back to my days in grade school as I poured over Lord Edgeware Dies.

There was none of NCIS's forensic bull crap, there were no chase scenes at all. It was a mystery, stripped to just the characters. And that's what I like. And you know, I read it in about an hour and a half, but it was an hour and a half of good, plain fun in which I met old tropes and greeted them like old friends, and it was a joyful reunion. It was an absolute pleasure to read The Egg at Drumstreet. I loved the characters, I loved the way the story built, and I absolutely adored the atmosphere.

But it wasn't quite everything that I wanted. Because, as much fun as I had with this book, two glaring faults jumped out at me besides. The first is the main character. I like him a lot, but he reminds me of Harold in James Howes's sequel to Bunnicula, Howliday Inn. Or for that matter, Captain Hastings in The Big Four; both of these characters, though charming, were in the end incompetent at detective work. That's why they work with their superiors and write what they see. My second complaint follows on the first's heels, and it's the ending. The final resolution, though well thought out, is something of a letdown because it's not one that the character achieves, it's one he stumbles into.

Let me put it to you this way; there's one Agatha Christie trope that's missing. In many of her books, at the end, Poirot gathers all the suspects and investigators together in one room at the end and explains to them exactly how the murderer committed the crime. He sifts through the complexity and picks out the two or three important things that he saw and no one else did, and constructs a narrative so complete that even the murderer couldn't do better. Art Sharpe doesn't do this. And the reason for that is that, in my opinion, there just wasn't enough complexity to warrant it. And even if there was, I'm not sure he could have handled it himself.

Final score for The Egg at Drumstreet is 4.1 out of five European detectives. It's a fun book, and I liked it a lot, but I'm just petty enough to remove about 0.1 points for not being what I hoped and what I felt it advertised. But I highly recommend it if you're looking for a good mystery, or maybe a weapon to murder some...time (arches eyebrow suspiciously).

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments. And again I will get around to New Elysium ASAP. Vote and share if you want to support what I'm doing here. Thanks so much for reading! Sincerely, the real jonbrain.