A measure of that is the amount of lines that amused me or that I thought stylish that I ended up highlighting in my Kindle copy when I reviewed the notes I had made at the end I found I had made more annotations in this one book than I did in all the ones I read in November put together. Tey’s writing style is laced with entertaining commentary and turns of phrase that make it characterful while her descriptions are often quite evocative. While the novel has a slower, more descriptive pace, I found it to be a very engaging and entertaining read. I had a sense as I read that you could never entirely know where the narrative would go next and I think it would be fair to say this novel is as much adventure as it is crime fiction. I rather enjoyed this structural approach as each chapter ends up feeling quite distinct from those around it. Tey breaks down her story into very tightly themed chapters, each focused on an element of the investigation such as an interview or a visit to a location. Inspector Grant is assigned to the case and begins to methodically work through his leads, interviewing the witnesses and working to first identify the corpse and then find a suspect. He cannot be identified and in spite of there being a crush of people near him, no one reports seeing anything suspicious. On the day of the final performance of Didn’t You Know, a popular musical comedy that has run for two years in the West End, a man is stabbed to death in the queue for tickets with a stiletto.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |